Hello and welcome to episode 23!

Apologies for the delay in this episode. We have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes and are preparing for some really special episodes in the future. More on that soon, but now this:

We offer a reading of another piece of writing by Jacques Derrida, namely his landmark essay: Plato’s Pharmacy. This is one of those essays that if you read at just the right time in your life, you’ll never be the same again. In a few short pages Derrida unwinds and unravels the entire project of western philosophy and reveals what is really at the root of everything. Just as deft as his downward movement is his upward ascendency into a completely new frame of thinking. 

Derrida offers a reading of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and asks us to consider the relationship between philosophy and sophistry and between ideas and language. Most of us have some idea of what the philosophers were up to. The sophists were iconoclastic, gunslinging thinkers that would teach anyone how to argue any point…for a price. Plato’s Socrates looks down on sophists because they don’t love wisdom for the sake of wisdom; they’re too practical. They’re the classic antecedent to the lawyer. But we shouldn’t turn our nose up at the sophists. They played a tremendously democratic function in 5th century Athens. They believed that anyone could learn how to think. Before them knowledge of the good was thought to be a product of bloodlines. Virtue was inherited, not taught.

Derrida ruminates on the tension between philosophy (pure rationality) and sophistry (pure rhetorical instrumentality) through the concept of the “pharmakon” a word that refers to both the cure for a poison and the poison itself. The pharmakon for philosophy is language, specifically sophistry. Sophistry is both the tool that allows one to practice philosophy, but it is also the poison that kills it. While on the one hand Plato’s philosophy seeks to distinguish itself from sophistry, it cannot do so without relying on the vary tactics of sophistry, namely rhetoric. Socrates would like us to believe that his arguments are grounded in pure reason, but the reality is that the arguments are simply expertly argued through his deft use of rhetoric.

This essay offers one way to understand why people like myself, Alex, and Maria chose to study literature instead of philosophy. One of the great discoveries of 20th century thought — a consequence of structuralism — is what’s known as “the linguistic turn,” the realization that thinking cannot be separated from its medium. In most cases this means language or writing or communication. Until you have a robust theory of language, writing, speaking, and communication, you cannot understand the operations of thought, expression, meaning, and intention. This is why philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and others begin to look more like historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists.

We hope you enjoy this discussion and we’re looking forward to launching from this episode into a more accessible and engaging realm of cultural studies and analysis.

Stay beautiful, 

your losers

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi and welcome to episode 22: discussing Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign

Alex is on his annual pilgrimage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but while he’s away our good friend and former colleague Maria joins us. Maria was with us during that fated Shakespeare and Sovereignty seminar that shaped so much of our intellectual formation during graduate school. Maria is another essential member of this mosaic of intellectuals that were in and around Houston a decade ago. In many ways Maria has been a silent partner from this show’s inception. I began talking with Maria about the show in early March and her feedback and perspective has shaped the show in countless ways. Now that we have a new intellectual project and purpose for the show, it’s fitting that we can formally integrate Maria into the fabric of this project.

Having Maria on also provides another vantage point to revisit the intellectual culture that made our Shakespeare seminar so great, and also invites us to reflect on the nature of seminar discussions in general. In many ways this show is our attempt to capture a little bit of the energy that can spark during a great seminar discussion. At their best seminars provide occasion to build knowledge in real time and can train a certain kind of intellectual and rhetorical endurance. When the right pieces come together a seminar can become a crucible to forge a high performance team. This seminar was one such crucible and it is for this reason that we continue to talk about it nearly a decade after it was held. 

It’s fitting that for Maria’s first episode we go back to one of those texts that shaped our thinking back then. This week we discussed Jacques Derrida’s first lecture from his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign.

This lecture comes from the end of Derrida’s career, just months after the September 11 attacks. Derrida is turning the entire arc of his career and his intellectual project to understand the interval between the attack and the response. Today, almost 20 years into wars that seem to have no clear end, the noise of international conflict is merely a nagging hum. For Derrida, the moment provided occasion to ask questions about the nature of politics and war itself. 

This episode provides us an opportunity to introduce the work of Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism more broadly. Derrida is one of the boogey-men of poststructuralist theory. Often read, always misunderstood. The reasons for this are myriad and byzantine. In an effort to demystify some of the aura that surround’s Derrida’s work, we approach Derrida in the same way that he approaches his subjects: slowly, methodically, carefully. Rather than jump to the conclusions, let’s see if we can build the arguments and test them along the way. And so we begin our discussion of post structuralism by outlining a set of questions pertaining to knowledge, the use and purpose of knowledge, and how it relates to language and perception. 

If Derrida’s work broadly belongs to a movement of thought known as post-structuralism, then what was structuralism? And why do we need to move beyond it? Structuralism as an intellectual movement provides a means of interpreting cognition, culture, culture, and behavior based on a system of internal relationships. The word “tree” is a conflux of word and the image that it produces in your mind. Furthermore, the word itself is only meaningful within the context of the English language. Structuralism asserts an essential quality to the system itself, but grants that the specific set of signs is arbitrary. Different languages have different words for tree, and in fact the pronunciation and spelling of words evolves over time into completely new languages. In this way there is nothing “essential” about the word tree.

One of the most important concepts to emerge from structuralism is the binary. Binaries have existed long before structuralism, but in structuralism you have a focused use of the binary as a vehicle for meaning. One trajectory of this binary-based thinking is computing and binary codes. One a seemingly different (although not really) axis you have something like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and all the angels and demons that inhabits his Mythos. 

The most common mistake that casual critics and thinkers make is to assert that the work of post-structuralism exists to undermine or invalidate the arguments of structuralism. If that was the primary task of this work, then we ought to simply become Platonists or religious zealots. The post-structuralists take seriously the arguments of structuralism, but they go deeper into them. What is the true nature of the binary relationship. Are binaries really opposites? What makes a binary, a binary? What is the structure of structure itself? 

Derrida’s writing is so difficult because it’s asking questions that rarely, if ever are asked. In fact, the questions themselves are so foundational to the way that we think that we hardly even recognize them as such. Although Derrida was trained as a philosopher and much of his work engages with philosophical texts, his intellectual work is much more in line with literary critics. Similar to how we framed Heidegger before him, Derrida accepts a premise that a certain tradition of philosophical work has ended and that the labor of intellectual practice must continue within a discourse that considers philosophy, culture, history, literature, expression, political theory, theology, media theory; moreover, Derrida insists through his work that the only method fit to work in this multidiscursive and polysemous landscape is close-reading or textual explication. 

The Beast and Sovereign are two different images of political power. They appear mirrored, in the sense that they are equal and opposite. The sovereign is the king or the head of state; the beast is the rogue state or the terrorist. Derrida observes that these two figures are united in their existence outside of the law. Each acts and moves in a way that no one else in a society can mimic. From this initial Carl Schmidt inspired observation comes a careful reexamination of the binary relationship between sovereigns and beasts. Derrida is careful to point out that the two are not the same, but they each rely on each other in a number of essential ways. You cannot have sovereigns without beasts, you cannot have beasts without sovereigns. 

The Take-Away

Starting with this episode, we’re going to try and highlight one core idea that emerges from the text. 

Our take-away this week comes late in the seminar. Derrida asks:

“How can we tell the difference between a civil war, and a war in general?”

The insight here is that the justification for war is always a mask that hides the fact that every war is a way against man. Or put another way, every act of violence is an act against ourself. 

This observation is both literal and figurative. Literal in the sense that war involves killing people and figurative that the modern concept of the nation state is built upon the metaphor of a living, rational being (according to Hobbes’ Leviathan). If there is a sense of “mankind,” then we can think of every war as a civil war: to wage war is to kill ourselves. The bonds that we use to distinguish ourselves from one another (nation, religion, creed) are arbitrary when cast against this more fundamental truth. 

This core insight strikes at the very beginning of written culture. The Abrahamic religions teach that violence begets violence. If this is true, then isn’t the outcome of every war more war? More contemporary thinkers like Nietzsche drew upon this insight in order to provide a different way of understanding morality, namely as a system of vengeance that one generation or culture enacts on a former oppressor. The cycle of oppressed to oppressor appears endless. 

Against this eternal recurrence Derrida dares to imagine the possible ways that one could break the cycle. However, the cycle cannot be broken until we understand the nature of the cycle itself. The take-away this week is not only about the nature of war, but the about the nature of the mask that hides the truth of violence from us.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

21. Building a better self: Demystifying stoic anthropotechnics with Erik Davis

Welcome to Episode 21! We have a new website: www.beautifulloserspodcast.com Currently the site is a page to direct you to either the substack or your preferred podcast player. More coming soon. We also debuted our new theme song. Written and performed by Zach Nichols. We’ll discuss the theme in greater depth in a future episode. 

Today’s episode revisits the themes from episode 14, where we discussed media, masculinity, and self-help culture in the context of theories of fascism and totalitarianism.

We’re diving into a specific constellation of thinking around stoic philosophy, mindfulness, self-help, and contemporary culture. Why is an ancient philosophy like stoicism suddenly popular today? Why is it often talked about in context with vaguely eastern practices of mindfulness? How do all of these things relate to an emergent industry of self-help and self-care?

We are dissatisfied with the materialist critiques that simply point out the ways that these practices are often schemes to make money—though the critiques themselves are undeniable. These entrepreneurs often have branded and sponsored content, apps, and other pay-to-play lifestyle gear to help you detach yourself from the material world. Occasionally these schemes are especially malicious, like with the example of the MLM-Cult NXIVM, as documented in the HBO documentary series The Vow. Cultish marketing schemes aside, it is more often the case that they’re the intellectual and commercial products of marketing entrepreneurs as amateur philosopher, trying to engage with ancient philosophy in a way to help improve the lives of people today. 

Our dissatisfaction with the straight-line materialist critique stems from our own experiences. These practices are useful. They do yield positive, objective benefits. More important, they are valuable systems of knowledge, these are legitimate systems of thought that merit consideration and deliberation. As is often the case on Beautiful Losers, we find ourselves with a classic baby and bathwater situation. 

To help us chart a course through this constellation we have Erik Davis, who most recently authored High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Erik is more than deft thinker and superb writer: he is our friend. Although we hail from different discursive traditions, we share certain sensibilities and foundational insights that cut across discipline, genre, and historical period. Erik is another member of this small intellectual enclave that existed in Houston, Texas in the second decade of the aughts. It’s always a pleasure for us to bring members of that community back together, if only to capture a small fragment of the intellectual curiosity and geniality that shaped our advanced degrees. 

For this discussion we read a lot of stuff. Contemporary blogs on stoicism and mindfulness along with ancient stoic texts, we also looked at more popular and contemporary critiques of happiness culture. As a sort of “meta text” to organize all of these ideas we used Peter Sloterdijk’s book You Must Change Your Life. At the risk of becoming the official Sloterdijk podcast, we went to this text because Sloterdijk offers something akin to a “systems theory” account of spiritual practice. He argues that one of the key distinctions for the human is our ability to “have a practice” and he uses the word “anthropotechnic” to define the particular complexes of external and internal actions. A person in prayer may bow his head and fold his hands while he simultaneously directing his internal thoughts toward the divine; a soccer player taking a penalty kick empties her mind of all distractions and becomes completely focused on visualizing her immanent physical actions. These anthropotechnic complexes can result in what Sloterdijk describes as a “vertical tension” a general sense of a higher level of being. In religious contexts this is understood as communion with the divine, in sport this is getting “in the zone.” According to Sloterdijk’s account, it’s the act of the practices themselves that produce the vertical tension, not that the practices themselves reveal a hidden world.

For Sloterdijk, to be a human is to have these practices, we cannot but be a creature that practices. It’s for this reason — our permanent state of having a practice — that something like religion will never go away. On the question of religion, Sloterdijk’s argument comes from two directions: on the one hand he clearly shows how no amount education, enlightenment, “progress” will eliminate religion from culture, while on the other hand he reduces the metaphysics of religious experience to a functionalist relationship between practices and perceptions.

The reason that we lean on Sloterdijk is because we want to produce a very nuanced critique of our subject, but in order to do that we need to be able to distinguish between practices, behaviors, feelings, meanings, interpretations, and metaphysical reality. Often what frustrates us is how one of these terms is mean to justify or explain another term. For some, the feeling of transcendence reveals that a transcendent reality exists. Sloterdijk’s book suggests a much more simple interpretation: what if the complex of activity you practice has as consequence the feeling of transcendence? What stoicism and mindfulness practice reveals is that their functionalist nature doesn’t diminish or invalidate the experience itself. Like Sloterdijk, we don’t make this point in order to dismiss the category of truth, rather our purpose is to reconstitute these ideas within the context of a more grounded understanding of what these experiences actually are.

Stoicism is a powerful discourse. It teaches a set of practices that provide very real and tangible techniques for self-preservation. Principles like the dichotomy of control help you understand the difference between things you can control and things you can’t control. This principle is taken up in myriad therapeutic ways, from the serenity prayer in 12 step programs to founding principles in cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT). 

Techniques like these help buoy the self and help people get through tough times. There’s a reason that the caricature of the stoic is a hard man with a stiff upper lip: these techniques merge nicely within a broader concept of masculinity. But for those of us that are committed to a more porous notion of subjectivity, collective organization, and materialist outcomes, what does stoicism offer? 

The paradox comes into focus when thinking about the self. Stoicism today is inflected with contemporary notions of the self. So the project of boundaries and control become gamefied: rather than passively accepting that which we can’t control, we’re encouraged (incentivized) to expand our domain of control in specific, technical ways. 

It’s from that central tension that our conversation achieved lift-off. As has often been the case with our advanced theory episodes: We seek to offer the critique, and then critique the critique. With someone like Erik on board, we also tried to go one level further: to critique the critique of the critique. Or in other words: can we disassemble the object, put it back together differently, take it apart again in a different way, and put it back together again? We’ll let you be the judge the this heady little experiment. 

Stay beautiful, losers

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

For episode 20 we decided to step back and consider where we are and where we’re going.

We started this show early in the year when we were both adapting to the economic and cultural conditions of the pandemic. The show was born out of our friendship and a decade of conversations about systems of cultural meaning. We wanted to present the experience of being a PhD student and researcher in the humanities in a more accessible format. At the same time, we wanted to contribute a more nuanced and elevated level of discourse into the public sphere.

That project still continues. Over the last twenty episodes we’ve had some great guests, incredible conversations, and captured a few moments of original thinking. We continue to refine our voice and style and we continue to search for that perfect level of complex discourse. Our goal is to push the boundaries of status quo cultural intelligentsia, but not to the point of rupture. In other words, we want our listeners to be engaged, uncomfortable, but not alienated and confused. We hope that our episodes leave the listener with a mental sweat, a rush of endorphins, and a certain level of exhaustion that primes the intellectual muscles for growth. Ours is not an easy listening show; it’s for people that want to push their powers of critical thinking to another level.

This is a lofty goal and our commitment to our own intellectual integrity may mean that the project itself is doomed to fail. But we take our lessons from Samuel Beckett, who built an epistemology of failure across plays and novels: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” His is the kind of radical finitude that your hosts fully endorse.

It’s in the pursuit of this ever-failing project that we discovered a new intellectual project: to rediscover the humanities.

Practically this means that we intend to use the show as an intellectual anchor point for an ecosystem of thinking, writing, speaking, and engaging with the world around us. From here on out, the podcast will be where our most raw ideas begin to work themselves out. Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to refine these ideas in conversations with guests and with each other.

For the casual listener, nothing will really change. We believe that our new approach will bring in more listeners and we look forward to growing our community in a deliberate way. We’re excited to engage with listeners and excited to direct our free form exploration of ideas toward more specific ends.

From a project perspective, two directions emerge from this repositioning. First, there is the project of the humanities as an institutional formation. Our stories are very much bound up with a postwar institutionalization of humanities departments. Today, that institution is in peril, but although many have observed how universities are shuttering their formal engagement with the humanities, the discourse of the humanities has never been more broadly received in culture, business, and politics than it is today. Accounting for these diametrically opposed tendencies is critical to understanding the role and future of the humanities as a discursive formation.

In parallel to this project is what we might call the “applied humanities,” a term that describes our desire to demonstrate the “real world” value of a humanities education. In German these studies are literally called “spirit-sciences” (Geistwissenschaft); in business they are sometimes referred to as “soft skills.” Both terms reveal and obfuscate the truth of these analytical powers. Both terms encompass the idea that the humanities train you to communicate the uncommunicable. Another way to think of this is as a “metadiscourse”—a language that reveals the ways that language and communication work.

The most succinct way to frame our renewed vision for the podcast came in the episode itself: We seek to offer a rich alternative to the algorithmic wasteland.

In a practical sense, what we’re driving at is the ability to make distinctions. For us, the practical foundation of all knowledge is found in the distinction. In a moment of history where quantitative, statistical, and program-based knowledge is prized above all others, we offer an alternative system of knowledge—modes of distinction—that unlock areas of discourse that these other modes can’t access. These are new tools for the analytical toolkit and what we offer is not only a new set of tools to use, it’s also a better and more informed way to know what each tool actually does.

This is all to say that we’ve got big plans for the podcast. Our community today is small, but we believe that over the next 12 months we will add many new fellow travelers to our ranks. We welcome everyone and we’re honored that you want to join us on this journey.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hello and welcome to Beautiful Losers! 

We begin today’s discussion with President Trump’s recent critique of critical race theory. Who is the audience for the President’s attack? When he talks about how the left wants to erase history and indoctrinate children, who is he addressing? 

It’s a criticism that feels pointed toward those that have studied critical race theory. In fact, we’ve discussed the work of Adolph Reed Jr. on this show, a noted critical race theorist. Are we the object of the president’s attack? Are our listeners the subject of indoctrination? The idea is laughable. The reality is that only a small fraction of humanities students and professionals can claim critical-race theory expertise. If you sample a random population of Americans, our guess is would be that 0 could offer an accurate definition of critical race theory. 

On the world of the internet, especially twitter, the story is much different—within a media literate and college-educated population you’ll find a greater concentration of people familiar with the discourse, though even here we’re speaking in terms of small demographic fractions. Our point is simply that this rhetorical attack is largely pointed toward a class of media-savvy professionals who have already decided how they would like to vote. No one of that class cares about Trump’s presentation of critical race theory. In the end it become more fodder for emotion-fueled outcries. New rhetorical ammunition to add into the emotion-filled and idea- poor discourse.

That said, we believe this rhetoric is extremely powerful. Red-scare style tactics from democrats and republicans have been a cornerstone of political discourse for over a century. The bottom line is that fear is a powerful rhetorical tool and it would be naive to think that we must simply educate ourselves out of the problem. Scholarly debates about race and theory are always going to be a losing proposition, from the view of electoral politics. This is a lesson that should have been learned during the culture wars in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. Political debates about the culture serve one purpose: distracting a population from legislation.

This is a good example of one of the traps of a humanities-focused education. As good theorists we want to engage with this debate because we know it’s one we can win on grounds of logic and reason. But the deeper lesson is this: to even have the debate makes you a loser. A better approach is a systems theory approach: don’t use electoralism as the ground to have your theoretical debates; don’t use the academy as a means to practice your electoral politics. Align your purpose with the most efficacious outcomes.

That said, we think these attacks must be taken seriously. Perhaps the best response is to try and jiu-jitsu the argument. The President hails his 1776 Commission, we should welcome it. The years 1776 through 1803 saw some of the most progressive action of any nation during the enlightenment. The founders oversaw a careful and considerate dismantling of aristocratic structures in order to create a more democratic system. History is a slippery thing, often much more radical and challenging than a stump speech.

Our main topic this week is the Terrance Malick film A Hidden Life. You can stream the film on HBO, it was never released widely in theaters because of covid, a real shame because the photography is incredible. If it ever comes to theaters, be sure to see it. 

Martin Heidegger is one of the many ghosts of this show. He haunts us, he haunts the thinkers that we like to read and engage with, and he haunts our work. Malick’s work takes up the work of Heidegger’s philosophy through film. This is in part because Heidegger himself theorized later in his career that the work of traditional philosophy was over and done with. The intellectual project to understand being must fall to the poets. Malick, as a graduate student studying Heidegger, took this call seriously and became a filmmaker.

We think it’s wrong to say that the work of philosophy moves into the work the artists. This formulation gives priority to philosophy, as if the film’s value is primarily as a philosophical text. It’s a fundamentally reductive argument and it fails to fully understand the language and knowledge that the arts possess. Furthermore, if we take Heidegger’s argument seriously, then the reason that intellectual work must be done through the arts is because the arts capture a kind of knowledge that is completely barred from the philosophical. Or put another way, there was a reason that Heidegger himself believed that philosophical work had to move into the arts. Philosophy is no longer sufficient; in fact, philosophy (according to Heidegger) has maintained the lie of being/metaphysics for thousands of years. To say that the arts are “philosophical” is to undermine and ignore the specific language and knowledge that the arts possess. 

We find that the film reveals itself most strongly in small moments. The way the camera holds on hands working in the dirt, the contrast between the alienation of modern life and the communal experience of the farm village.

Most subtle and most striking are the different kinds of time that the film employs. Just a sample of these time scales include the geological time of the mountain valley, which has emerged after millions of years of geological development; the ritual experiences of religion speak to a cyclical experience of the eternal; the seasonal agricultural work reminds us of a connection between the land and the individual; and finally the empty time of modernity where every day is the same until your execution, which speaks to the ways that time can become emptied out of meaning through social forces. 

The film presents its protagonist, the historical figure Franz Jägerstätter as a kind of Bartelby-figure. Bartelby, the Herman Melville protagonist, decides on day to simply say “I would prefer not to” whenever he is asked anything. Franz takes a similar course of action when he is asked to swear fealty to Adolph Hitler as a condition of his conscription. Both his faith and his sense of humanity prevent him from swearing loyalty to any man or woman. As a result he is imprisoned and eventually executed. 

Our discussion identified two central arguments and themes. First: the true antagonists of the film are not the Nazis, they are the villages who submit to the dominant cultural ideology and who betray the communal bonds when Franz decides to resist. The villagers’ actions reveal a disparity and false-identifaction that people make with ideological and political forces. The forces of world history work their way through a society and an individual agent can do nothing in the face of those forces. Where an individual can make a difference is in how she choses to comport herself with her neighbors. This presentation is made all the more stark in the face of increasing political bifurcation and political identification in the United States. This presentation isn’t about some other political order that trumps the partisan (like in an Obama-styled speech about how we’re all Americans), instead this is a more fundamental argument about what it means to “be-with” each other in a communal way.

The second (and related) argument concerns the basis for a politics that the film offers and withholds. What strikes us about the politics of the film is that it shows a political position and resistance that is only possible when one can truly dwell in the Heideggerian sense. At the end of the day, the people of Ragdeburg don’t need the Nazi party or any political organization in order to maintain their life. They know how to farm the land and build the necessary technology to live as a community. This represents a stark difference between the society portrayed in the film and the society we inhabit today. In comparing ourselves and lives with the world of the film, we are much more dependent on the political economy in order to secure basic needs.

We leave you with this fundamental tension: our society is more alienated, but our fate is more intimately connected with each other. This dynamic is felt on all levels of society, from the individual to the political and economic. Any organization therefore must emerge with this fundamental relationship in mind. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to Beautiful Losers!

This week we talk with Professor Judith Roof about her book What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016). Judith has been at the vanguard of feminism, gender, sexuality, and theory since her first book A Lure of Knowledge (1993), but Judith’s history with feminism and theory begins during her time as a student of The Ohio State University in the 1970s. 

Judith brings a first-person, historical perspective to contemporary discussions about gender and identity. While her books work within a specific tradition of poststructuralist, psychoanalytic feminism, she adds to that body of work an innovative, feminist approach to history, law, biology, genetics, quantum physics, and aesthetics. Her landmark study The Poetics of DNA offers one of the most important critiques of science and society in the 20th century.

We invited Judith onto the show to discuss three questions: 1) What is the sex/gender distinction? 2) Why is it so important in the history of feminist identity politics and what does it mean that it has collapsed? And what is identity anyway?

These questions opened up into a rich discussion that covered the contemporary intellectual trajectories of feminism, psychoanalysis, and academically informed political movements.

Although neither of us have formally engaged with questions of gender in our own scholarly work, Judith’s rigorous yet playful and inventive approach to scholarly inquiry impacted our intellectual projects and preoccupations for the better. It is no small thing to say that we would not be the critical thinkers we are today without the mentorship and friendship of Judith Roof.

Sometimes we like to go long in these introductions in order to frame out specific arguments or ideas. For this episode, we simply encourage you to listen and enjoy a discussion with one of our favorite people.

Stay Beautiful, Losers!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi and welcome to Episode 17!

Sometimes an essay changes your life. This week we discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s 1999 essay “Rules for the Human Zoo.” We have individually spent a decade in thought with this essay. Its gifts are endless. But before we launch into the essay, we take a small detour to Flavortown:

A recent rewatching of Guy Feiri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives launched Seth through a dizzying reappraisal of Guy’s work. In 2012, back when Seth and Alex were still in grad school, Pete Wells wrote a scathing review of Guy’s Times Square restaurant Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. The review indulged in purple prose in the same vein as Guy’s decadent american fare: “did your mind touch the void…” Wells framed his review as an interrogation, a series of questions aimed at unraveling the gimmicky exuberance of Feri’s NYC vision. The New York Times review became something unto itself. We each remember reading it and howling with laughter. Guy seemed to embody everything wrong with America: an over-the-top, in-your-face style that freely borrows (steals) international fare and haphazardly smashed together in a 10,000 calorie offering; a monstrous form of the idyllic fantasy of the American fantasy.

As 2020 comes to a weary end, all we have to say to Guy is this: forgive us. In a moment fear has gripped our culture and metastasized into violent outbursts and outright rejections of basic scientific facts, Guy represents a vision of a better America, one where local businesses blend cultural techniques and traditions into local staples. His show is a celebration of the best our culture has to offer. Indeed, Diner’s, Drive-Ins, and Dives may represent the 21st century’s most sustainable theory of cosmopolitanism: unpretentious, celebratory, local, and global. We call this inland cosmopolitanism. 

Our conversation moves to our main topic: Peter Sloterdijk’s essay “Rules for the Human Zoo.” Our consideration is framed around the decade we’ve spent thinking about the essay. In many ways the essay speaks to the hopes, dreams, and disappointments that anyone engaged with the humanities is bound to. We take some time to consider how this essay has aged from the time it was written, to when we first encountered it a decade ago, and to how it reads today. 

On the one hand the essay is deeply cynical: the tradition of the humanities is presented as an effort to domesticate human society; in this light the history of humanism is a history of a series of rhetorical one-upmanship where each generation enacts its oedipal revenge on the past through its framing of the future. On the other hand the essay affirms the enlightenment’s deepest and most durable insight: the project of critical thinking is never over and each generation contains the capacity to break the man-forged manacles of the mind. Sloterdijk is right to point out that this process looks more grim today, as the heart of this work is simply archived in some dusty room. It’s easy to slip into the nihilism that the essay invites. While it’s important to be realistic about the state of things, it’s also important to see the greater cycles at work. “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

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Greetings and welcome to episode 16: Reflections on Bernard Stiegler. If you haven’t done so already, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

On 5 August 2020 we lost the French media theorist Bernard Stiegler. For this episode we wanted to introduce a few themes from Stiegler’s work and reflect on his continuing value today. We read the essays “Suffocated Desire, or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: A Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption” and "On the Future of Our Incorporations: Nietzsche, Media, Events." Later in the episode we reference this New York Times article on spiritual consultants.

Stiegler is most notable for his series of books Technics and Time. The first volume is subtitled “The Fault of Epimetheus.” Epimetheus was the brother to Prometheus. We all know the legend of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, such that man might challenge the power of the gods. Prometheus was a visionary and is enshrined within our culture as an emblem of a striving, inventive, and entrepreneurial spirit. Foresight is his domain. His brother Epimetheus has not fared as well in our cultural memory, but for Stiegler it is the lesser known myth that has shaped our contemporary moment. 

Epimetheus’s name means “afterthought” or “hindsight.” For Stiegler, Epimetheus represents the work of the media today. Media operate with two functions: storage and transmission. What is stored is in the past, and therefore our experience with media is always a process of looking backward or behind us. Stiegler’s observation that media technology are not about looking forward, but are actually about looking backward sparked his life’s work. Understanding media is not the domain of visionaries and entrepreneurs, it is the domain of critical thinkers, for whom the owl of minerva flies at dusk. How does our understanding of culture and media look when not written under the gaze of a visionary titan like Prometheus? The consequences of this observation are drawn out in Technics and Time, 1. We’ll save our thoughts on this book for a future episode. 

Stiegler is also notable because he was a felon. He was incarcerated after committing two armed robberies. He was a political revolutionary from 1968, but what inspired his robberies were his debts. It was during his time in prison that he fully committed himself to a life of the mind and to becoming a contributor to the world of thought.  Stiegler often writes about debt, finance, and melancholy. Unlike some of his intellectual peers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Stiegler had an acute understanding of the pressures of late 20th century finance and global capital. His philosophical work intimately understands what it means to become incorporated, or what forms of subjectivity emerge when the educated youth are called to join a corporate workforce. In this sense one can read his work within a long tradition of philosophy—from enlightenment thinkers like David Hume or John Locke and onward—that seeks to frame philosophical inquiry within the mode of middle-class life. The feeling that we get when reading Stiegler today is extremely contemporary. The timelines is all the more refreshing because of his engagement with phenomenological thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. 

From this lengthy introduction, we try to tease out how Stiegler’s insight into media and subjectivity can help us frame our own thoughts about the media today. Our wide-ranging discussion considers cultural practices like exercise, mass marketing and modern consumption practices, and an examination of the literary canon—or as Stiegler calls it, the “pre-individual fund.” In the second half of the episode we explore Stiegler’s complex defense and critique of the enlightenment. Similar to last week’s episode on nature, we want to establish both the critique of the concept as well as the critique of the critique in order to establish a better foundation for explaining the virtues of enlightenment thinking. 

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Hi and welcome to episode 15 of Beautiful Losers!

Some housekeeping: Please rate and review us on the Apple Podcasts. We’re pushing to become one of Apple’s top philosophy podcasts and we need your help. Did you know that becoming a top philosophy podcast is one of the greatest intellectual achievements in the 21st century?? Neither did we! Help us achieve greatness by subscribing, rating, and reviewing your Beautiful Losers.

Our topic this week is nature, red in tooth and claw. Joining us is friend and former colleague Professor Derek Woods.

Derek is a professor of media and culture at The University of British Columbia and his work focuses on questions of nature, ecology, and technology. He recently edited a special issue of Diacritics called Terraforming with professor Karen Pinkus. 

The critique of nature is an intellectual cornerstone for this podcast. Listeners will recall how themes of nature emerged throughout the show in our discussion of biopolitics, humanism, and political responses to SARS COV-2. In all cases we seek to challenge ways that “the natural” is deployed as a metaphysical cover for more practical agendas and interests. 

We asked Derek to join us in order to lay out a two fold critique of nature: first there is the critique of nature, then there is the critique of the critique. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess, but Derek offers a few frameworks on how to reconstitute the original idea of nature without the same sort of ideological baggage that inspired the first critique.

A gloss of the critique goes like this: Our idea of nature exists in relationship with our idea of culture, but that relationship is arbitrary and imaginary. Sometimes this is referred to as society (as in nature vs. culture or nature vs. society). In high school many of us learn about narrative conflict in English classes as man vs. nature. Odysseus battles against gods and the seas and relies on his craftiness in order to escape peril. 

The categories of nature and culture do not exist as such. There is no “outside” of nature because the very idea of nature relies on some kind of cultural distinction that defines what constitutes “the natural.” The borders between these distinctions change over time, revealing that nature is nothing more than an idea of culture.

At this level of critique, something like systems theory is helpful. Rather than thinking in terms of categories, we can frame things in terms of complex systems that operate on different levels of observation. Derek’s essay uses systems theory ideas to frame what an ideology of “terraforming the earth” reveals about our ideas of nature. 

Why is this critique important? Well, a lot of cultural ideas are promoted and propagated based off of ideas of a primordial, pre-historic nature. Often these ideas come with a morality and an ethics and they are used to enforce or justify policy or economic behaviors. Consider the barefoot running fad or the paleo-diet. These trends suppose that there was a pre-historic cultural moment that was pure and unscathed by culture and that the peoples of those time periods lead superior lives. The fact that these paleo-21st century lifestyles are only enabled through modern technology is quietly erased from the argument. These practices are rather benign (who really cares how one justifies their footwear), but when it comes to ideas of race-science or gender the use of “nature” as a way to justify harmful policy bares its teeth. The value of the critique of nature is that it shows that there is no “essential” and unassailable notion of the human. Notions like “the human” or “the natural” are fields of interpretation, experiment, and transformation.

Our story does not simply end with the critique of nature. In fact, the critique of nature can be used as justification for exploitative practices. We took up this line of reasoning in our episode on Bruno Latour’s essay “Has Critique Run Out of Steam” and we make reference to the essay again in this conversation. The purpose of the critique of nature is not to simply justify the brutal extraction of energy for the purpose of human expansion, though there are versions of the critique that lead toward that end. 

The critique of the critique seeks to reconstitute an idea of nature without it having to rely on an arbitrary distinction between it and culture. In one sense the critique of the critique seeks to have its cake and eat it too. Can we hold onto the good parts of nature — the sense of ecological interconnectedness, an appreciation for the resources afforded to us from the natural world, a field of possibility and experimentation for creative exploration — without over-determining this idea within a metaphysical system morality? 

Derek’s work offers some possible answers to this question. In our conversation Derek outlines two strategies. First, a cultural aesthetics that seeks to reimagine nature in our daily lives. Rather than a primordial, prehistoric, and ephemeral concept this cultural aesthetics gives voice to the various ways that our lives intersect with nature on a daily basis. Second, a cultural  education in the natural world. This is a bit like the old 19th century natural philosophers. Like Linnaeus, Darwin, and Curie the scientific understanding of nature can have a re-enchanting effect. This enchantment doesn’t need to be metaphysical in order to be wonderful.

This was one of our favorite episodes to date, and we can’t wait to bring Derek back to throw him a bunch of impossible questions about nature, culture, and technology. 

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Hi! And Welcome to Beautiful Losers Episode 14: Fascism! 

But first some housekeeping. Please rate and review us on Apple’s Podcast App. We’re making a push to become a top 15 philosophy podcast, but we need your help. Rate, review, and tell your friends to rate and review us as well. We can beat the algorithm together!

And now: Fascism!

We offer this as a more relaxed and extemporaneous episode. We wanted to bring to the pod some of our regular, off-mic conversations. 

In this episode we try to answer the time-honored question, “why should you punch a Nazi?” In typical Beautiful Losers fashion, we approach the question circuitously. Our question is not so much about the efficacy of punching Nazis, but instead we interrogate the foundational concepts of self, other, and community that would even allow one to answer the question as such. In other words: What is fascism, why should one resist it, and how should one resist it?

Helping us throughout this episode is Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” and selections from Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. Eco and Arendt are interested in the cultural and philosophical ground that allows for something like fascism to emerge.

We frame their inquiries by considering the current state of masculine-oriented media, namely the constellation of podcasts that include figures like Joe Rogan and Aubrey Marcus. This media figures market themselves toward 18-35 year old males and although they are not fascists as such, we consider how the cultural values they uphold - self-discipline, personal optimization, and individualism - fit within an ethos of loneliness and isolation. Are they making the best of a lonely world, or is their worldview in some way responsible for the loneliness that pervades modernity? The truth, it seems to us, is a mix of the two. But what is really pernicious is the way that the very values the celebrate are defense-mechanisms for accommodating a lonely form of machismo. 

Arendt’s  words on the relationship between loneliness and political terror speak to this complexity:

“It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, “acting in concert” (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition.

Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all, have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact. We know that the iron band of total terror leaves no space for such private life and that the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action.”

Arendt’s evocation of impotence is all the more intriguing when placed within this specific, male-oriented media landscape. For us the important distinction concerns types of power (and types of impotence). So much self-help discourse is built around a logic of empowerment; it follows that empowerment emerges as a cross-cultural contemporary value. But what is the whence and whither of empowerment? Arendt might frame the question like this: can one achieve empowerment when once exists in a state of isolation?

Arendt, the political philosopher and professor, takes time in her study to think through the life of the mind. Academics often live lonely lives, but she is quick to point out that this form of solitude is a solitude-with ideas, people, community, shared values. One might say a similar operation is at work in the self-help community, where there is a general and unfocused pursuit toward being at one with the universe. It certainly seems rhetorically strategic for self-help discourse to rely on a language of new-age metaphysics in order to ground its truth claims: an ahistoric re-grounding of metaphysics.

The difference in telos between the kind of discourse that Arendt’s “thinker in solitude” practices and the gig-worker on a mindfulness retreat may reveal the fundamental distinction. For Arendt, the good is measured through public works and community development. For the self-help guru, success is measured through the ability to market and sell products and lifestyle to a private community. Philosopher’s aren’t influencers; they’re architects of public works.

That’s all well and good, but is it fascist? In true Beautiful Loser fashion we have left our original premise behind. Arendt and Eco provide ways of understanding violent and oppressive political formations. Their analysis is welcome because it shows what these formations look like, rather than simply telling readers what they are. The terms we use to describe these formations often distract from actual engagement with the formation itself. Eco describes the relationship between the discourse of the ideology and the practice of the politics in an almost psychoanalytic frame: “ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.” 

As a means of providing some conclusion, the last part of our discussion considers the role of morality, norms, and values. How should one ground one’s case against a violent or oppressive political formation? Arendt’s historical analysis is stirring because she demonstrates how two antagonistic conservative traditions (the petit bourgeois and the imperial) dissolve their differences and emerge in the German context as a totalitarian state. But in order to make the case for her moral political philosophy, she must appeal to an idea of the individual that is oppressed and diminished as a result of this strategic alignment. 

Similarly, Eco invokes the spirit of 1776 and 1789 — an appeal to the enlightenment — to ground his normative critique of ur-fascism. Both authors are keenly aware of the dangers, risks, and violence produced by the enlightenment and modernity, but both rely on that intellectual tradition in order to ground their ethical arguments. 

A bad-faith beautiful loser would point to this apparent inconsistency as a reason to dismiss the entire argument and it holds critical thinking and inquiry to an impossible standard. This is the kind of purity discourse that we strongly reject. The question of how to redeem and build upon the legacy of the enlightenment is critical and it ought to be done carefully and with an acute understanding of its wrecks and errors; those wrecks and errors don’t mean that the entire project is doomed or a necessary failure.

As thinkers committed to the project of understanding the relationship between thinking and feeling (what we call the beautiful loser), we arrive at the rather emotionally unsatisfying conclusion that resisting fascism is good, but doing so in a way that merely satisfies a fleeting emotional desire (punching) is counter-productive. The difficult work of study, analysis, engagement, and non-violent action provides the only rational and efficacious path forward.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit beautifullosers.substack.com