Emancipations Podcast

We are joined by scholar Benjamin Fong to discuss his excellent new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. We discuss the history of drug policy, the role of the state in enforcing and distributing drugs, and we focus on the history of alcohol, opioids, psychedelics and marijuana. We conclude with a conversation on how psychoanalytic theory can help explain drug use.

Benjamin Y. Fong is Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College and Associate Director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge (Verso 2023). He is also the co-editor (with Craig Calhoun) of The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (Columbia, 2022) and the author of Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016).

Jacques Lacan frequently discusses religious themes in his work, from rethinking the concept of belief, to the meaning of the return to religion in modern life. In this episode, we are joined by scholar Mark Gerard Murphy to discuss his work on Lacan and theology and to introduce some salient ideas that Lacan introduces in the field of theology and religion. Mark brings both a humility and a love for spirituality to his scholarship on Lacan and I think this conversation really brings that out. We also discuss Dr. Murphy's new book on Lacan and Spiritual Direction. Hope you enjoy it!

Is liberal socialism a contradiction in terms? An oxymoron? Or are liberalism and socialism necessary for the realization of the political objectives that each share and profess? We are joined by Matt McManus, author of the forthcoming book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism to make the case for his vision of a renewed liberal socialism for our time.

What is the legacy of the Enlightenment in political struggles today and how are socialists and Marxists to relate to the Enlightenment? Must we rely on first principles and an a priori theory of knowledge in our understanding of capitalism and exploitation? Or must we proceed on the basis of an appeal to empiricism and experience primarily in our understanding of social struggles? What is the role of philosophy in our political practice? How do we know that the political causes we champion are just or right?

We welcome Marxist thinkers Landon Frim and Max Tomba for a debate on Marxism and the Radical Enlightenment to help us get at the heart of these questions, and much more! For background reading, please see Max Tomba's Introduction to his book Insurgent Universality (download here) and Landon Frim's "Reason is Red" essay (download here).

Max Tomba is Chair and Professor of at the History of Consciousness in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz. His research examines time and temporalities, Marxism, critical theory (especially the first generation of the Frankfurt School), and modern and contemporary political thought. He is the author of several books, and most recently Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, with Oxford University Press, published in 2019, which was the co-winner of the 2021 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory published in 2019. 

Landon Frim is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University and he is a specialist in Spinoza, enlightenment rationalism and he has written in popular outlets including Jacobin Magazine, The New Republic, Salvage Magazine, and Inside Higher Ed. With Harrison Fluss, Landon wrote Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism which is an examination of the ideological positions of Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. You can catch a great interview I conducted with Landon and Harrison Fluss on the Zer0 Books YouTube channel and on the Emancipations podcast.

We are joined by philosopher Terry Pinkard to discuss Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, his second major philosophical work next to Being and Nothingness. Dr. Pinkard is one of the foremost Hegel scholars in the world and he has recently written a book on Sartre's Critique entitled Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx. In this discussion, we review the main concepts developed in the Critique and we ask what this work offers to contemporary politics on the left and how Sartre understands Marx and Hegel. As a special gift to supporters of our program, you can download an unauthorized translation provided by Prof. Pinkard of Sartre's lecture on "The Roots of Ethics" from 1964 at the Gramsci Institute by going here https://www.patreon.com/posts/sartres-marxist-93945414. 

The thumbnail image incorporates Alexander Calder's famous painting of Sartre from 1947.

Palestine and the Actuality of Struggle: A Forum with the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis & Research (BICAR)

Featuring presentations from Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier, Sami Khatib and Maya Andrea Gonzalez. Panel moderated by Daniel Tutt

Read the BICAR statement on Palestine: https://bicarlebanon.org

Our guest Mohammed Sulaiman was raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza strip. He has survived multiple Israeli bombings of Gaza over the last two decades, including a 2013 shelling of his home while he was conducting an interview with CNN. Currently, his entire family is in Gaza as Israel continues to unleash a brutal massacre and bombardment campaign on the people of Gaza, which has already resulted in the killing of over 10,000 Gazans, including 4,000 children.

In this conversation, we discuss the rise of Hamas, how Hamas fits within the wider phenomenon of political Islam and we analyze the brutal genocidal bombardment of Israel on the Gaza strip in response to the Hamas attacks into Israel in October 7th. Mohammed earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of South Australia on political Islam.

If you enjoyed this conversation, please support our work by becoming a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups. 

The purpose of Marxist theory is not only to diagnose the negative forces and effects of capitalist society; emphasis must also be placed on the need for social transformation that would enhance human progress at the social and individual level. But the trends of current critical and Marxist theory have turned away from a more positive vision of critique. In his later work with the Budapest School, Lukács argued that Marxism must develop a comprehensive social ontology to understand how power relations within the society also shape and organize the social totality itself. A social ontology seeks to comprehend the ways that social relations, structures, processes and purposes are shaped or possibly contested.

We welcome Marxist scholar, thinker and writer Michael J. Thompson. Thompson teaches at William Patterson University and is the author of The Domestication of Critical Theory, Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism and several other important works. In this interview we discuss the legacy of western Marxism, the neo-idealist turn in the Frankfurt School, how to think the return of class in out time, and the work of the later Lukács and the project on critical social being. Please join us on Patreon for as much as $1.50 per month to help us continue to bring you interviews and seminars: https://www.patreon.com/torsiongroups 

We are joined by philosopher Anita Zsurzsán and Jamil Khader, the Dean of Research at Bethlehem University in Palestine for a roundtable on the war on Gaza, otherwise known as the "2023 Hamas-Israel war". We discuss the politics of the current war, the status of Islamist politics in Palestine and the region, the role of the media, Islamophobia and Antisemitism, Arab Marxism and the meaning of Palestine liberation today.

Please read Jamil's latest article on Truthout "Media’s Selective Moral Outrage Manufactures Consent for Palestinian Genocide"

https://truthout.org/articles/medias-selective-moral-outrage-manufactures-consent-for-palestinian-genocide/ 

We welcome Tijana Okić back to the show for a discussion on the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch's idea of the warm and cold stream in Marxism. How are we to understand this distinction and which Marxist thinkers fit into these two streams? Can the cold and the warm streams be synthesized?  

Tijana Okić is a philosopher, feminist and translator. She completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. She is one of the editors of the volume The Lost Revolution: AFŽ between Myth and Forgetting (Sarajevo, 2016).