5 Star Tossers

With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once.

Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something of a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge?

Andy wishes that the multiverse would remain solely a video game construct, ruing the day when Mickey Mouse and Wolverine show up together in the same movie. He also introduces the Oikodicy, as a way to describe how profits justify all the silly games and narrative tricks we keep getting sold.

Jake links the multiverse to the fantasy of the Internet as a perfectly connected hypertextual universe. He introduces Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this fantasy, and asks whether the void-inducing everything bagel in Everything Everywhere all at Once is an anti-Semitic reference to the way the Jew gets in the way of Christian presence. He also reads from Leibniz's Theodicy.

Jack kicks us off with some heavy-hitting take downs of the quality of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and makes sure we see the capitalist cynicism of both films, at every turn.

Oh boy...

This episode is longer than usual, more contentious, as it addresses the current genocidal violence in Gaza in ways that neither 'the left' nor 'the right,' as they are now called (defined?), would stand behind; except perhaps with a dagger?..

We are both against what Israel is doing in Gaza, and think it ought to stop immediately (which would still be much much too late).

Our discussions, our rhetoric, our frameworks of understanding, however, are neither neutral nor universal. They involve issues that precede "universal categories" of "racism" - on either "side" - to show western eyes what they cannot see about this global problem.

Sagi calls it "metaphysical antisemitism," a term he borrowed from Gershom Scholem, but developed much (too much?) further. Accounts of this problem, here and now, cannot hide behind the tried and true tropes - of 'evil,' 'the right side of history,' etc. - but are viewed in a particular historical lens. Particular, because it presupposes Jewish specificity, but not to justify Israel's actions, or the manner(s) of Palestinian resistance to them. To do that we need a metaphysically sensitive analysis as to what underpins tropes like "anti-zionism," "Islamophobia" and the likes.

Just because "we hate Nazis" does not necessarily mean we're on the right side of history.
Just because Hitler accelerated the evacuation of a Christian, antisemitic Europe of Jews to the ancient land of Kna'an, does not make this land Zion (yet), nor him the Messiah.

What can the present situation teach us, from our, Jewish, perspective, about this knot? How do we explain, without explaining away, the terrible cycle of murderous, genocidal violence that has erupted in Israel/Palestine?

Probing these problems might help shine a light on a tragic impasse, where true things - real facts, real pain, real history - are employed for fallacious reasons, and yet persist (for the inaccessible truths that still burn, silent, within them).

Here we try to understand the situation in a way that does not flatten the discourse to "human rights"; it demands a greater responsibility to difference than that tired (and by now at least faltering, if not highly suspect) 'humanism' that allows Christian mora frameworks to gloss over their own metaphysical assumptions, and violence.
You know, like the idea of the Nation State being a solution -- imposed, by various means, upon the rest of the "civilized world" -- to an intra-Christian problem (that it did not solve). We are not anti-Christian, however, for, as the wise man said, they know not what they do. Instead of platitudes or tired binaries, here we try to think through these phenomena as conflagrations produced by a complex system of violence-erasure, a violence by other means, if you will, a violence delegated, farmed-out, rationally contracted and brutally enforced.
And made invisible.

The 'Colonialism' levelled at Israel hides metaphysical assumptions that need to be spelled out if the sides that truly matter, that truly suffer, in this murderous, brutal impasse - the Israeli and the Palestinian - are to be able to find common ground and a way out of this cycle.

So long as the hatred that fueled the worst atrocities of October 7th, and that chants "from the river to the sea" will not be listened as to its - decidedly non-antisemitic - drive; so long as Israel's claim to self-defense is either accepted as a carte blanche for violence, or dismissed as irrelevant to this issue, the impasse will remain.

We are trying to find a way out of this impasse.

Cancel if you must,
but
listen, if you can.

In a political climate of unbearable urgency, the Tossers ask: "What if we just stopped talking?"

Hello listener,

How's it been? Great, right?
Right?..

This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor that understands only (algorithmic) violence...
It's like being stared in the face by the hard pragmatism of a delusion.

But this delusion is the American delusion. It's just the violence they don't see, that they talk (and walk) around, what had to be paved over to reach that shining destiny, manifest by God Himself (look they don't even have agriculture, lazy savages).

Bannon is a toxin parasite that teaches us where we hide ours, if we care to look. The American "dream" means many underground veins of denial, suppressing historical crimes that undermine the principles 'America' claims to hold.
And while the left is busy ridiculing the right for being religiously intolerant, racist, greedy, or belligerent and insensitive towards the other, they ignore this contradiction of their own complicities with exactly such things.
Those that cannot ignore it -- because they had to enact the religious and racist hatred against the brown Muslim at play when they enlist in the army (to give just one example of Bannon's target audience) -- are left, by the left, for dead.

Hence, these deep veins of denial produce deep veins of resentment rage  that Bannon knows not only how to weaponize, but how to conjoin disparate rages in a metonymous coherence of "(we may hate each other for all we know, but) we all hate X!". It is true, this is an old tactic, but Bannon adapted it to an algorithmic framework of recruitment and propaganda. At the same time, he will exasperate the left's abandonments by fomenting more and more fake controversy like a button to release a tired, long-leaking valve of Christian denial.

This is just one point.
We had many others, but I'm putting it here like a warning label, a basic blueprint, for the Bannon propaganda machine.

Stars tossed in this one: Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD.

In this episode, we look at one of the longest running sitcoms in Televisual history (1987-1998), Married... with Children.

Ostensibly a misogynistic pigpen ripe for retroactive cancelation, we  Tossers find the show delightful and read an unabashed radicality into the relentlessly bitter depiction of the horrors of married life .

We bring up the Marxist tradition of family abolition to help think about the show's "study" of a starving lower middle-class family stuck together by  money they don't even have.

Alongside the capitalist reproduction of labor, we think about the reproduction of gender norms. Whether it is the stupidity of the "hot blonde," the goober patheticness of the young man, Al's refusal to have sex with his wife, and Peggy's shameless desire to watch TV all day.

Andy helps us read Peggy's refusal to feed her children, i.e., her refusal to be a good mother, as the most radical political action in the series.

Jake keeps telling us that he identified, identifies, with Bud, and that nobody ever recognizes how violent everyone on the show is to him (Bud that is): mocking his (Bud's) inability to woo ladies.

Jack takes us to  Ed O'Neil's future in Modern Family, helping us think of how different this future is form Ed's young, bitter pre-woke days.

Sagi, our resident scholar on all things Pride, helps us understand the hardboiled confidence that resides beneath all the misfortune.  He also thinks about the show's tone in relation to the new Network Fox, and calls the show prophetic in the wake of a woke era that would never let this show air.

Marx Grudge, Pervs R' Us are the main stars. 

In this episode, we discuss the thought-provoking 2019 New Inquiry essay by Asa Seresin "On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem."

Andy defends the future of heterosexuality from the sidelines so to say.

Jake introduces Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," gets personal, digs his own holes, holds back his tears, and offers the formula "the penis lies too" as a way for men and women to discuss the terror of their mutual performativity.

Our guest Anaís steals the show, offering up her own personal stories, parsing very subtle lines between the actual material vulnerability of women and the condescending failures of men occupying positions of allyship or sexual castration. She advocates throughout for a  near impossible conversation about mutual vulnerability and mutual desire.

Sagi wonders whether it is right to demand a certain emotional labor from man when there is a kind of instilled lack of awareness thwarting this capacity. He also makes sure throughout that we distinguish between resentment and ressentiment. Perhaps for the first time introducing his antipathological method, he describes how an initial resentment towards the failure of desire can ultimately lead to a new discourse or orientation.

Jack remains silent.

Greetings, audient!

Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy.

This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche. A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a more Frankfurt School angle, and helped reign-in Sagi by riposting some of his cheaper jabs at our buddy Karlo.

So, as you can imagine, it was a grudge-bath. (Yep. Me no native English.)

At their best, our discussions turned, and tossed, the treacherous soils and soilings of ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept used against the working class to repress any uprising (for it will be ridiculed as a "slave rebellion" I imagine). Tutt lays this at Nietzsche's feet, the more general claim being that Nietzsche's philosophy is a status-quo machine, and/or an anti-revolutionary one, in the sense that it puts the kaibosh on any universal equality, ideational and/or actual, as some kind of (secret, cunning) axiom.
All this time we thought it was Reason -- turns out it was Nietzsche who was cunning.

We also admittedly devolve to devote some uneasy attention to Tutt's notion of the parasite vis-a-vis the act of reading/interpreting Nietzsche, which, if we're lucky, seems to only stumble over its own feet (the identity of the parasite shifting constantly, something narrated but never engaged with). If we're not, then Tutt's bulldozers will show those parasites 'how a real parasite does it,' becoming tone-deaf to the metaphysical critique that underwrites Nietzsche's contempt towards humanist ideas of equality in the process.

We will get into that. And so much more...
Stay tuned, won't you, audient?

Stars: Marx Grudge; WWJD

Sagi has recently learned about the Internet and relations that  people have on it. We discuss.

Parasocial relations lead us to think about a plague of narcissistic personality disorder that capitalism breeds.

Welcome back, listener!

No joke with the title, some real Hunter Thompson, Bazooko Circus vibes in here

And it seems to be spreading beyond the wrestlers, converting everyone in sight.
All are engrossed in a spectacle that permits no shadow and emits the meaning of the 'manifest' in all its glory. It is meaning that must be immediate, spectacular, the kind that bypasses judgment and obviates Law (and thought). The kind that can be used to justify shit like violence, or, in this case - as Sagi seems to argue - the ritualistic, and nihilistic, enactment of Sin.

Manifest is the best.

A surprise guest in our topics turned out to be the thing that is Donald Trump, which, we realize, becomes much more understandable once seen in the light of a WWE character (particularly his signature Pussy-Grab move, which I am sure he lifted from women's wrestling (pun? intended?))

We also tackle Greek Tragedy and the pagan rituals of 'carnival,' to mark similarities and differences with the WWE, with Sagi stamping every difference with metaphysical antisemitism, as usual.

There's a lot there. Even Roland Barthes!

Stars: WWJD (naturally); Pervs R' Us; Beast and Sovereign

PS
Despite the title, we had fun making this one.

The Tossers gave themselves  a rather impossible task: prove that  Barbie and Oppenheimer are the same movie. In typical Tosser fashion, we try to turn our failure into charm.  

Our sometimes quiet podcaster Jack comes out of the woodwork to take some heavy hits at Christopher Nolan's directorial chops and to educate Sagi on the reason why teenage girls hate their mothers. 

Jake is really out to lunch in this one, he tries to talk about the phallus, he quotes other podcasts, and forgets Margot Robbie's name.

Andy develops a  theory of the position of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real in Barbie. Ultimately concluding that cellulite is the Real. 

Sagi gives the most convincing praise of Barbie (which we all seemed to like better than Oppenheimer), explaining how this movie managed to survive all the possible insults that could have been hurled at it.

We discuss various critiques from the left, we ask whether Oppenheimer is a Zionist, and we wonder what was going on with Emily Blunt and Ben Safdie.

I would call this a light and enjoyable affair.