5 Star Tossers

We have a really special episode for you today. Sagi has been temporarily banished, and we replaced him with the absolutely brilliant Alicia. Our cultural object this time around looks at the way Zoomers (Gen Z) relate to to sex. Some people claim they are not having enough of it, and some Zoomers claim that sex scenes in movies are non-consensual invasions of their innocence. 

Throughout the episode, we assert the impossibility of treating sex as an act without boundaries, transgression, and intrusion.

Alicia wrote an entire dissertation, or at the very least an entire chapter, on this topic--and she argues that the new moralization around the prevalence of non-consensual sex has created its very own object: sexless sex. According to her, this sexless sex is even more transgressive and violent than the sex being condemned by the moral outrage.

You really need to listen to this episode to catch all the nuances of this discussion!

We are back this week with a barage of Freudian theories and crisp, clean-sounding microphones! We discuss the movie "The Menu "from the vantage point of Freud's structural metapsychology and his diagnostic distinctions between hysteric and obsessive. For those who want a refresher on the relation between Id, Superego, and Ego, speed ahead to about 1:12. Andrew gives a wonderful summary of the obsessive's desire to become pure object and reduce everything to shit. And Sagi, winning for himself the lines of the title, offers a theory on why all the women in the movie decide to eat the suspicious looking foam dish called Man's Folly.

Yes, begrudgingly, there is some Marx here. 

Our outro includes each of our experiences in the service industry. Sagi takes off his shirt.

Hello listener, and welcome!
This episode got a little bit out of hand. Treating of the MCU's metaphysical maneuvering, we had to go deep into the bad air of ressentiment... Availing ourselves to Nietzsche, which sounds reasonable, had unfortunately gone to Sagi's head, who proceeded to channel the poor moustached genius throughout. And then a hammer became involved... Unfortunate.
We are reverse-engineering perhaps the most cathartic moment of the MCU (phase 3 at least) -- where, in Avengers: Endgame, Captain America finally wields Thor's hammer, Mjolnir  -- and hopefully ruin it for everybody.
We see a textbook example of Monotheistic ressentiment/slave-morality, whewre the symbol of pagan power undergoes, like Thor, a systematic humiliation, an infection, as a way  to prepare it to be "aufgehoben" into a Monotheistic value-system.
The disease has two foci of corruption: for one, it is now tied to will rather than only the act; in the myths, Thor's hammer was indeed a boomerang, but could not be "summoned" -- by "force" of will -- like a Jedi does a lightsaber. Second, after Odin strips Thor of his power (for doing exactly what original Thor would do), he infects the hammer, and Thor's power, with  a western category of 'worth,' which then leads Thor on a journey where he learns to think like the weak, to alienate himself from his home and people so as to learn that "all life matters"...
So by the time Captain America -- America's pure-of-heart, a-sexual, fight-for-justice eugenics experiment/prototype (but not a Nazi!) -- wields Mjolnir, the systematic usurpation of pagan power/valuation is complete, with no remainder.
This is not new, but an old tradition, I daresay the 'western' tradition, at least since Thomas Aquinas. And the catharsis of the moment proves this fantasy is still lodged deep in the western psyche.
Of course there's a lot more to unpack here, but I don't want to ruin it for you; tune-in, dear masochist! Hear Jake fail miserably at a Zizek accent! Empathize with Jack's PTSD (after being subjected to an Avengers amusement park)! Be edified by Andrew's lifelong crusade on homophobia! Fun for the whole family!!

The stars that deigned to be tossed this time were, for the most part: What  Would Jesus Do; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; and Beast and Sovereign.

Why can't we all just side with one another in the pain of the signifier?

Hello again listener! From the flu-ish depths comes at you an almost  contagion-free installment of the Tossers, this time dedicated to Merriam-Webster's 2022 'Word of the Year': Gaslighting. We also have a first-time guest, Andrew, a master summarizer of whom we are still in awe.
We introduce the term through a rough semantic history, from its humble beginnings to its humiliating present. We tried to watch the 1944 movie adaptation of  the play 'Gaslighting' (1938), which gave its name to the word. Sagi's delicate sensibilities didn't allow him past the halfway point.
We can't all be heroes.

Appearing both in public and intimate discourse, gaslighting reveals the fragile, not to say spurious role of a postulated interest/advantage by its perpetrator; something towards which the word devolved from its original meaning, which necessitated a lapse of time and precluded a lapse of reason. We see that the sexual relation is in a constant gaslighting state, and that the accusation proceeds to attack that very state... As Jake notes early on: 'gaslighting' in 'The Bachelor'-type miasmas often devolves to the "Let me do me" dancing-partner of the idiocy "you do you."
 
Another route we tried to take was that of a purloined letter, the Poe story and Lacan-Derrida debate concerning the role of the "letter" as a medium of meaning, where the meaning remains hidden and yet somehow still acts upon the world by virtue of its marked absence(/lack/castration). The letter in Poe's story, as the signifier in (post-)structural linguistics,  proceeds by detours.
Indeed not sooner does it come up that we take a detour away from it. Luckily, whoever pitched this idea must agree a priori that the letter/discussion arrived at its destination, since it always does that anyway...
There are still some good Lacanian angles on the functioning of language with us desiring animals (the 'primacy of the signifier'  and the 'name of the father' in Lacanese).
We also briefly discuss Trump and his 'gaslighting'; an accusation that collapses under the scrutiny of those that take great pleasure in "exposing" his "gaslighting machinations," and those that not only know, indeed expect him to make brazen, almost proud denials/lies (in the name of a worldview they hold like a middle-finger to the other group).

So much for the uninteresting stuff. If you wanna hear the other stuff then you have to find an excuse to listen. Like a pebble, it loses its luster out of its original context.

Stars on this one: Pervs R' Us and Beast And Sovereign

In this episode we discuss the new horror film Barbarian. Marx Grudge returns as we think about the horrors of private property, specifically the home and real estate. We reference a blog post by the scholar Jason Read to follow this track, while trying our best to tie the thread of property relations to he other thread that runs through the movie: sexual difference and its constituent violence. These threads did not come together so neatly, maybe that's because Freud has a Marx Grudge just like we do. But at some point we hypothesized that the origin story of the private home requires an act of sexual assualt.

Hello faithful listener!
This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide.  Certainly not for the faint of heart, or the trigger-happy.
Now just pop a red pill and listen
We talk about the fantasy of authentic, non-supplemental sex, and how the incel's concentric spirals -- whether psychotic or melancholic (we couldn't decide) -- may be a signal-flare of a lack that bedevils masculinity and intra-masculine networks or discourses. Why is it so important for incels to legalize rape? Why do they never go on raping-sprees?
(Yes, we hold that misogyny is too broad of a term to understand the problem here; the Nietzschean nostril aims to do justice to the variety of toxicities therein).
Is it because powerful men still gatekeep the "Stacys" of the western world?
Our Mister "Rodgers" (the 's' was added so pervasively in the recording, I just decided to rename him) starts by seeking the validation of men, with women being used (resentfully) as the tool of this validation. Why was he not enough for them?
(The bro-code takes a sinister turn here..)
With Rodgres we also (re-)discover that the Capitalist - specifically American - ideology has lied, that the money he had was not enough. Capitalism embodies, in order to consume,  all other value-giving discourses, so that  at the end we are left with the nihilism of death, of the undisputable fact, the psychosis of absolute certainty (Eugenics plays an exorbitant role there).
What else is left when all of us are exploitable whores?

Main Stars in this one are: Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; Pervs R' Us; and some What Would Jesus Do.

They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman.
 
In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete).
Between the sketch(y) comedy and HBO's NDAs, our discussion seems to oscillate from wondering what makes the joke, to who's made the prop. Jake spies Derrida's metaphysics of presence  over-and-above Nathan's own over-and-above; and Sagi pushes Lyotard's distinction between damage and wrong (or plaintiff and victim) as the more nefarious ethical underpinnings of Nathan's gesture. The silenced price of life being made to work.

The Rehearsal was a 6 episode, multilayered fake-shit-show, so forgive us going a bit overboard on running time (2h).

Main stars this time around: Pervs R' Us and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais
...okay, and some WWJD (because Sagi, again)

* Image from Flickr: State Library Victoria Collections

Once again, we had to shove way too many words into our title, but we swear, we touch on all of these figures in our long awaited return from Summer Break. Cutting into David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future," we append ourselves to Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jacques Derrida's Beast and Sovereign: Seminar I. An overarching question we ask is whether this film can be a strident affirmation of Trans Politics if it stages the growth of new  hormones and new organs without studying their relation to gender. We travel back in time (alongside Derrida) to think about the spectacle of the autopsy, specifically as it relates to the establishment of power and knowledge. Honorable mention goes out to the curiosity of the bureaucrat and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, and his late 19th century experimentations with subcutaneous injections of the fluid from dog and guinea pig testicles. We could have gone on much longer.

Databyss Notes Page: https://app.databyss.org/hkmh8nkoqm1lsk/pages/zcdzkf6zwub7gt/crimes-of-the-future

In this episode we discuss the 2011 Quentin Dupieux film Rubber. It's the story of a killer tire. Jake suggested this movie after reading Eugenie Brinkema's affect-breaking book Life-Destroying Diagrams. She is all about the horror of form or the form of horror. The thing is, Sagi and Jack found the movie pointless--but isn't that the point of having a tire (a circle, a hole) be the star of the show? We discuss Brinkema, spectatorship, and general questions about taste on this road trip.

Stars: Il Vaut Mieux Lyotard que Jamais