Emancipations Podcast

I'm joined by Gabriel Delacoste to discuss the history of socialist and populist movements across Latin America, and what lessons they offer to the American left as we experience a resurgence of socialism. We analyze the history of Peronism and the thought of Ernesto Laclau, the rise and fall of the recent Chilean left movement led by Gabriel Boric, and we discuss how international solidarity can be forged to address the belligerent imperialism of the Trump administration across Latin America.

Gabriel Delacoste is a political scientist, researcher, author, and journalist. He is a prominent left-wing intellectual voice in Uruguay. He has written for a range of press outlets and worked extensively with the renowned Uruguayan weekly Semanario Brecha. He is also a frequent contributor to la diaria, where he writes on politics and contemporary affairs. Delacoste is the author of El misterio de Alberto Methol Ferré, a book examining the complex and influential intellectual trajectory of the Uruguayan political figure Alberto Methol Ferré. He also co-authored Uruguay en el siglo incierto with Amparo Menéndez-Carrión and Rodrigo Alonso, a book that considers global geopolitical trends and their implications for Uruguay’s possible futures.

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A discussion on the new book The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism by Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn featuring guests Lisa McKenzie, Benjamin Studebaker and Mike Macnair.

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Order the book now: https://www.revolpress.com/people-not-one 

Guest Bios:

Lisa McKenzie is a senior lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire whose work relates to class inequality, social justice, and British working class culture.

Mike Macnair is a British Marxist and the author of the book Revolutionary Strategy (2008) and is currently working on a second edition.

Benjamin Studebaker is an American political theorist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave, 2023) and Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh University Press).

I'm joined by Nathan Gorelick to discuss his new book, The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious. In this discussion we explore how eighteenth-century literature discloses a dimension of subjectivity that exceeds the political and philosophical categories of the Enlightenment, opening a space where the unconscious resists ideological closure. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Gorelick argues that the great literary works of the period are not simply reflections of Enlightenment thought but sites where its contradictions and limits become legible.

Our discussion ranges across Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau's Emile, de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, examining the relation between literature and the Borromean knot of the unconscious, ideology and the enlightenment. We also discuss the idea of the "literary absolute," and why literature offers a unique vantage point for understanding the relationship between ideology, desire, and the unconscious.

Purchase The Unwritten Enlightenment with promo code NUP2024 for a 25% discount: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810146761/the-unwritten-enlightenment 

Nathan Gorelick teaches in the Department of English and the First-Year Experience Program at Barnard College. His research focuses on the intersections of eighteenth-century literature, Enlightenment philosophy, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique. He is the author of The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which argues that eighteenth-century literature persistently subverts the dominant philosophical and political formations of its age. His current projects include Semiotics of Ruination, a study of literary and philosophical responses to catastrophe from colonialism to the present, and a long-term investigation into the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the Freudian tradition.

Gorelick has also published widely on Continental philosophy, the Haitian Revolution, Islamophobia, ecological collapse, and psychoanalysis. He is editor of Provocations Journal, has completed the six-year Training Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Gifric in Quebec City, and is a Candidate in the Licensed Psychoanalysis Certificate Program at the Pulsion Institute. He also serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association's Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature.

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Was Atlantic slavery a capitalist system or a pre-capitalist system? If we understand Atlantic slavery (16th - 19th centuries) as a distinct capitalist system of domination, what does this tell us about capitalism as such, and what does it tell us bout how slavery was overthrown and eventually abolished? My guest, David McNally has written a provocative and important new book entitled Slavery and Capitalism that argues enslaved people formed a modern working class whose resistance was a form of labor struggle.

We discuss the concepts of slavery as imposing a form of "social death," and how McNally understands enslaved workers as a category of labor power responsible for generating surplus value. We also revisit the legacy of Eugene Genovese, the prominent neo-Gramscian historian and the debates he raised over rebellion and cultural resistance among the enslaved in the Antebellum South. We address the importance of the historical field known as "history from below" to understand slave rebellions and the wider historical period of slavery as well as the work of WEB Du Bois and CLR James and what they contribute to our wider understanding of the history of slavery. The main thematic areas we address in this discussion include:

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David McNally is an activist and the NEH Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston. He was a professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario from 1983 to 2018, and was chair of the university's Department of Political Science for several years. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles and the winner of the 2012 Deutscher Memorial Award and the 2012 Paul Sweezy Award. -

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#juneteenth #emancipationspodcast

I'm joined by Marxist philosopher Kaveh Boveiri to discuss the concept of totality in Hegel and Marx. The center of our conversation is Dr. Boveiri's new book Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters. We also address the war on Iran and how the Iranian left is responding to US and Israel imperialism.

We begin by addressing the misconceptions of totality in atomistic rationalism and organicist conceptions before moving to a discussion on Hegel's concept of totality from the Science of Logic, Lukács's idea of totality in History and Class Consciousness, and we introduce the thought of Karel Kosík and his concept of concrete totality. We also discuss how Marx and Engels theorize totality from The German Ideology, Capital to the Grundrisse.

To learn more about getting a copy of Marxian Totality, please visit https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2685-marxian-totality 

Kaveh Boveiri is an instructor and researcher in the Sociology department at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), where he previously earned his PhD in philosophy. He is also a researcher for the UNESCO Chair in the Philosophical Foundations of Justice and Democratic Society at UQAM. 

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I am joined by Andrew Flores, a Lacanian psychoanalyst in formation and host of The Parallax Viewer to discuss the psychoanalytic concept of the drive. In this wide-ranging discussion, we introduce the four key elements that make up the drive, we discuss its pre-history before Freud, and we elaborate on its importance in psychoanalytic thought more generally.

SUGGESTED READINGS:

Works by Freud

Works by Lacan:

Other Work Mentioned:

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Alexandre Kojève's influence on intellectual life has been massive. His ideas have shaped major 20th century thinkers from Leo Strauss, Jacques Lacan to Georges Bataille. Today, most of us are familiar with Kojève's thought through his widely commented upon lectures delivered in Paris, 1933 - 1937 and subsequently published as the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is the text that Francis Fukuyama re-interpreted in his infamous End of History and the Last Man essay and book. But Kojève seldom published his works and this has resulted in a partial and limited understanding of what Kojève really thought.

I am joined by philosopher Igor Shoikhedbrod for a discussion on a missing, albeit recently translated, text by Kojève entitled Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. This is Kojève's most sustained vision of the universal and homogenous state and in this text he addresses the question of legal right, justice and indeed, of his vision for the communist society. We discuss how Kojève defines the political in contradistinction to Carl Schmitt, what his theory of anthropogenic desire and recognition truly is, and we address Fukuyama’s misreading of Kojève. We also explore why Kojève defines communism as the era of individualism and how his legal thought differs from other Marxist philosophers.

In part two, we will dive deeper into Igor's essay, "Alternative Futures of Right in Pashukanis, Kojève, and Bloch" which is included in the book Kojève and Law: A Critical Examination, edited by Igor Shoikhedbrod.

Igor Shoikhedbrod is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2018, his M.A in Political Science from York University in 2011, and he also holds a B.A from the University of Toronto with a concentration in Ethics, Society, and Law. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation award in 2019 "for an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the American Political Science Association Meeting which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle for a better world." In 2021, Igor won the Domenico Losurdo International Prize for his essay, "From Hegel to Nietzsche: Domenico Losurdo's Complex Relationship with Liberalism." Prior to his appointment at St. Francis Xavier University, Igor taught courses in political theory, legal theory, ethics, law, and political economy at Dalhousie University, as well as at the University of Toronto, where he won two awards for teaching excellence. Igor is the author of Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (2019) with Palgrave Macmillan.

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Thank you for your continued support of our work which allows me to bring you these discussions on seminal works in the history of Marxist thought and philosophy. If you find my work valuable, please become a Patron to gain early access to all of my interviews and videos and discounts on my public courses: https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations 

We begin a new three-part series on the history of materialism in Marxist thought by examining the 19th-century materialism controversy and the broader philosophical debates surrounding materialism at the moment Marx and Engels entered the intellectual scene. To set the social and political context to these debates, we focus on two important books on materialism from the mid to late 19th century: the neo-Kantian philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange's The History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance (1865) and the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov's The Development of the Monist View of History (1895).

In Lange's three volume encyclopedic study we find a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic, account of materialism in the history of philosophy from the ancient Greek atomists up to Kant and beyond. Plekhanov's study focuses more on the materialist roots of historical materialism and thus looks at how issues of society and history are construed by philosophers from the time of Descartes, the early French materialists up to the 'modern materialism' of Marx and Engels.

Readings:

Stay tuned for episode two where we dig into Marx's dissertation on Greek atomism and how Marxists define and debate materialism up to the Second International. Episode three will look at the materialism debates in Lenin up to the modern period including recent movements in philosophy such as 'speculative realism.'

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This series was voted on by our supporters on Patreon after our first series on The Problems of Intellectuals (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE03jn2k3GYBf8pPIshZfM4wDYUTL8594&si=LgWBIRDyhFKL2Lk7)

Thank you for your continued support of our work which allows us to bring you these discussions on seminal works in the history of Marxist thought and philosophy.

If you find my work valuable, please become a Patron to gain early access to all of my interviews and videos and discounts on my public courses: https://www.patreon.com/c/emancipations 

Please support the ‪@VarnVlog‬ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/varnvlog 

My guest Anton Jäger is the author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, a provocative new polemic on the impasses of our political moment. In this conversation, we discuss the core thesis of the book and its implications for socialist politics. We also address the critics to the book and Jäger articulates his vision for an alternative direction for leftwing politics in a hyperpolitical age. Get a copy of Hyperpolitics: https://bit.ly/4tQMhx6

Anton Jäger is a Lecturer in Politics at Oxford and an opinion writer for the New York Times. He is the co-author (with Arthur Borriello) of The Populist Moment and (with Daniel Zamora) Welfare for Markets.

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I'm very pleased to welcome the philosopher Oliver Marchart to discuss the thought of Ernesto Laclau and his book Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology After Laclau. In this work, Marchart proposes that Laclau's thought be supplemented and expanded with a robust account of political ontology. Marchart is known for his incisive studies on contemporary political philosophers and for developing the concept of "post-foundational political thought."

We begin with a discussion on Laclau's thought and the philosophers that influenced him, from Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, Heidegger, Schmitt to Gramsci. Deeply shaped by the experience of the populist leader Juan Perón in Argentina, Laclau's career is marked by the development of a sophisticated system of political thought which completely re-theorized Marxism. We then turn to a discussion of Marchart's book Thinking Antagonism, which is interested in expanding Laclau's rhetorical foundation of society towards a post-foundational social and political ontology that is no longer purely grounded in language.

He argues that Laclau reinvents and re-defines the concept of antagonism in the Marxist tradition and that this concept, even more than hegemony, stands as Laclau's most important contribution. We also address the limits of Laclau's thought, the legacy of post-Marxism in practice and the challenges with left-populism. Please learn more about Marchart's book Thinking Antagonism: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/thinking-antagonism/FBE1DFCBA99C8BF948AC8110730B1340 

Oliver Marchart is Professor of Sociology at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He is author of Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and co-editor (with Simon Critchley) of Laclau: A Critical Reader (2004).

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