On our episode this week we discuss The Visible and the Invisible (1968) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing specifically on “The Intertwining–The Chiasm” (whaaa! How do I pronounce that word?!). We first read salacious quotations peppered throughout this text, then explore what questions about objectivity, sensation and experience Merleau-Ponty attempts to answer throughout. We delve into what […]

Coming to you from Las Vegas (!), John interviews Joanna Tice, a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY on her dissertation project, “Power of the Spirit: The Political Thought of Contemporary Evangelicalism.” They talk about secularism and the academy, shifts in the political and theoretical orientation of US evangelicalism over the […]

In this episode of Always Already, John and B explore the meaning (and afterlife) of the deaths of trans women of color at home and abroad through through “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife” by C. Riley Snorton and Jim Haritaworn. In tackling the larger conceptual framework […]

Welcome back Rachel to the podcast by joining us for our reading of Walter Benjamin’s theses on The Concept of History. Moved by our joint out loud reading at the start and end of the podcast, Rachel, John, and B explore the ways that history, for Benjamin, has become a tool of conquerors–a condition that […]

John interviews Kasina Entzi (Germanic Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington) on the life and thought of Ernst Jünger. Jünger is a controversial – and as Entzi argues, misunderstood – WWI war hero, memoirist, fiction writer, entomologist and, from her perspective, philosopher. In this episode, Kasina discusses his philosophy of technology, technology as it interacts progress and humanity, Jünger’s relation […]

Guest co-host Amy Schiller joins John (and B, kind of) to discuss essays from This Sex Which is Not one by Luce Irigaray, as well as a short passage from her Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. The conversations open with Amy’s ‘vagina park’ overview of Irigaray’s project, seamlessly segueing into discussing Irigaray’s feminist critique of phallogocentrism in […]

Guest co-host Amy Schiller joins John (and B, kind of) to discuss essays from This Sex Which is Not one by Luce Irigaray, as well as a short passage from her Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. The conversations open with Amy’s ‘vagina park’ overview of Irigaray’s project, seamlessly segueing into discussing Irigaray’s feminist critique of phallogocentrism in […]

In this episode of Always Already, our brilliant guest co-host, Sid Issar, joins B and John to engage with Lyotard’s affective reading of Marx in his Libidinal Economy. Sid breaks down Lyotard’s complex ontological reading of Marx. John points us toward how Lyotard elaborates a practices a unique mode of reading. And B, well, B […]

In this episode of Always Already, our brilliant guest co-host, Sid Issar, joins B and John to engage with Lyotard’s affective reading of Marx in his Libidinal Economy. Sid breaks down Lyotard’s complex ontological reading of Marx. John points us toward how Lyotard elaborates a practices a unique mode of reading. And B, well, B […]

John is without Rachel and B, so he brings in some very special guests for this Václav Havel bonanza. First, Jeff Graves – a former co-host with John on a podcast of yore – joins to discuss Havel’s essay Power of the Powerless and play The Garden Party. They discuss ideology as it relates to performativity, […]