Death Drive Radio

This is a brief introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s notoriously fuzzy concept, the Body Without Organs. We first discuss D&G's unique version of materialism founded on desire and reproduction. We then outline what the Body without Organs is not: Organism, Signification, and Subjectification. To further elucidate the concept, we provide some helpful examples like Genetic Mutation, the Egg, Chess Boards, and John Carpenter’s The Thing.

We argue that the body without organs is more easily understood as the Body Without Organization, the body as a virtual set of chaotic possibilities and potentials that resists organization.

In this video, we will challenge Deleuze and Guattari's theories of Schizophrenia and the Body without Organs using Baudrillard theories of hyperreality and the code to cultivate a better understanding of the system that David occupies in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

We highlight how cybernetic integration and hyperreality condition David’s schizophrenic process, how David’s acceleration towards cyber-psychosis traces a Deleuzian line of flight, but across Baudrillardian, hyper-curved, space which inflexes any trajectory back into capital’s orbit.

The anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, and the broader Cyberpunk universe, created by Mike Pondsmith, is a prime specimen of the cyberpunk genre. Paying close attention to David, the protagonist, we use Cyberpunk to synthesize the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan into a theory of the present moment. This series explains how fragmentation, addiction, prosthesis, cybernetics, death drive, and acceleration have come to define our experience under late capitalism.

In Part One of this three-part series, we start with the gradual decoding of David's body and end with the volatilization of his subjectivity, following David straight to the schizophrenic limits of his society.

If you want to understand how witch-hunting and patriarchy contribute to the stratification and repression of the working class, listen to this interview where we speak with feminist historian and philosopher, Silvia Federici, focusing on her book, Caliban and The Witch.

Her work focuses on witch-hunting and primitive accumulation as processes that are integral to Capitalism’s historical and continued reproduction. In the interview, we speak about the political and economic significance of the persecutory institution of witch-hunting. We lay out the connection between racial, colonial oppression, and patriarchal oppression and highlight the ways in which witch-hunting traverses political contexts and histories.

She goes on to describe the contemporary political stakes of witch-hunting, highlighting the roles that the IMF, World Bank, and NATO play in reproducing the conditions of primitive accumulation, privatization and the degradation of the commons. Federici explains how witch-hunting and the far-right are on the rise across the globe, especially in Africa and South America.

In this interview, we speak with feminist philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist, Alenka Zupančič, focusing on important ideas from her book, What is Sex? Zupančič theorizes about sexual difference and the social construction of sex using the Lacanian psychoanalytic lens to highlight the complex, always unsettled dimensions of sex and sexual difference.

She discussed the dialectical relationship between feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, adding to the discourse on Judith Butler’s gender performativity by focusing on the contradictions that animate sexual life. Zupančič highlights the similarities and differences between Lacan’s Real and Deleuze’s Multiplicity. She also succinctly explains the very famous Lacanian aphorisms regarding sex: “Woman does not exist” and “There is no sexual relationship”.

We end on the political implications of Lacanian theory for feminism and the left, the “new signifier”, and the potential for a politics of universal struggle.

*Sorry, Alenka, for pronouncing your name incorrectly. We will get it next time.

With Death Drive and Dialectics as our starting point, Zizek takes us on a journey through Hegel, Lacan, Ideology, US Politics, Climate Change, the failures of liberal democracy, leftist politics, data capitalism, neoliberalism, fascism, sexuality and so much more, in classic Zizek fashion

In this video we discuss one of Lacan's most significant contributions to psychoanalysis and the study of ideology: Objet a. Objet a, or the Object Cause of Desire, forces us to rethink the formal status of desire not only as it pertains to our personal lives, but also to those systems of control which have developed to manipulate and exploit our relationship to desire. Understanding Objet a can help us understand how capitalism and ideology shape our subjectivity.

Correction: In the video, we incorrectly defined signifier and signified. We have them reversed.

In this video, we bring on Professor Todd McGowan, Host of Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley, and author of many excellent books, including his most recent one: Enjoyment Right and Left. During the interview, we discuss his new book and theorize with Professor McGowan on contemporary US politics. We touch on events such as the January 6th Insurrection, George Floyd Protests, mass shootings and gun violence, Black Lives Matter, fascism, Qanon, science, social media, hyperreality, Donald Trump, capitalism, liberalism, Brazil, leftist politics, and more!

In this video, we discuss Hegel’s philosophy of dialectics, common misconceptions, and how Hegel’s dialectic can help leftists systemically critique ideology and power.

If you learn one thing from this fucking video it is that dialectics is not thesis, antithesis, and synthesis!!!!!

Part of our series on psychoanalytic concepts, this video outlines the basics of the unconscious, briefly examining Freud and Lacan's contributions to its definition. Short, but sweet.