Death Drive Radio

Theses: Pure Good and Pure Evil are, in a sense, interchangeable. The "Law" needs its violation as much as the violation needs the "Law".

The usual, dualistic interpretation (Good and Evil) sees Batman and the Joker (Kant and Sade) as opposites whose ethical incompatibility brings them into conflict.

However, Lacan wants us to think about the relation between Kant and Sade dialectically. We use a dialectical framework to expose the lack around which both Batman and the Joker are constituted as subjects. Kant and Sade, like Batman and the Joker, bring each other into being and are stuck in an endless conflict, orbiting the same symbolic void. Batman and the Joker both engage in a Sisyphean struggle, where batman seeks to enact the moral law and the joker seeks expose its non-existence.

We recording this during Trump's first term in office intrigued by Trump's immunity to the vicissitudes of scandal and unsatisfied with the liberal "Trump Bad" critique. While in ways out of date, our analysis still contains plenty of insights into the hyperreal political machine that created and nurtured Donald Trump.

"In this video, we go beyond mainstream liberal critiques of Trump using Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Hyperreality to argue that Trump is not real but is instead hyperreal. We explain how Trump does not exist outside the reproduction and circulation of his image. Trump is emblematic of the postmodern political landscape where politics has become Reality TV."

*Credit to Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) for the thumbnail:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CJuwMzOAlyF/

Our first video with visuals! Sit down, get some popcorn, and watch this feature-length deep dive into US history that lays out the essential function of policing: To Serve and Protect Property.

In this video, we critique police reform from an abolitionist standpoint using a critical history of the police and which explores the police's development within capitalism and the nation-state. We trace the police’s history from the end of Feudalism, through US slavery, Industrialization, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, Neoliberalism, the War on Drugs, and into the present.

*Credit to Santiago Caruso for the sick thumbnail: https://santiagocaruso.com.ar/gallery/portrait-of-crime/

In this video, we contextualize some of Gilles Deleuze’s most important ideas from “Postscripts on the Societies of Control”: Financialization, Corporatization, Digitalization, Consumerism, and the Internet. Thirty years have passed since its publication, yet its predictions and insights remain incredibly relevant and demand to be read by anyone wanting to understand our current moment.

However, not even Deleuze could anticipate the highly rapid and unequal changes over the last twenty years. Having lived through Deleuze’s foreseen and unforeseen futures, we update “Postscripts on the Societies of Control” in light of the Pandemic, Big Data, and the Gig Economy.

What is the looting of a store compared to generations of corporate plunder and systemic looting brought to bear on black communities?

Slavoj Zizek's Violence is a lesson in framing and the reactionary moralization that relies on poor framing.

In this video, we use Slavoj Zizek’s book Violence to analyze and debunk the widely circulated, reactionary discourse on the George Floyd protest. We highlight the false universality of the All Lives Matter Movement and expose the ideological function of the boogeyman, the dangerous other, to obscure systemic violence and material inequality. We then analyze the political-economic conditions of looting and violence to argue that individual violence and “criminality” are a response to an already violent system. In Zizek’s terms, we defend the subjective violence of looting and property destruction as a reaction to the objective violence of American capitalism.

The taker of many a undergrad's Critical Theory virginity, Michel Foucault has armed countless sons and daughters with the intellectual alibi needed to be all the more insufferable at Thanksgiving.

Jokes aside, reading Foucault and understanding his definition of power, its history, relations, and technologies, are essential for developing a systemic critique of modern society. His framework allows us to better "point the finger", not at individuals, but at systems, institutions, economies, etc. Just proceed with caution, the abyss of anarchism is right there.

In this episode, we tackle Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) and use its theoretical insights to understand modern phenomena such as mass incarceration, race, and the prison abolition movement. Of course, we don't hesitate to layout our theoretical beefs with Foucault method of analysis.

Behold! The first video we ever shared. No visuals. No edits. Audio that sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well. Still great content and it only gets better.

We analyze Luis Althusser’s magnum opus, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, giving biographical and philosophical context to Althusser’s important contributions to the study of ideology. We give a few examples of how Althusser's theory may be applied social institutions and cinema. Finally, we give our own critiques of his theory.