Just Two Dudes Reading Theory

This week we're delving into the current political situation in the U.S. We're discussing concepts such as repressive desublimation and class consciousness. Enjoy!

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This week we each chose five of our favorite aphorisms from Romanian philosopher Eil Cioran. Most are only one sentence in length. Enjoy!

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This week we read Walter Benjamin's essay on collecting. We differentiate between collecting proper, and the strange results of commodity fetishism. Enjoy!

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This week, we're discussing how many subjects it takes to enjoy a work of art. You have the spectator, sure, but you also have the author and the "main character." We'd also add that there's a more mysterious figure called "the muses" who experience the whole of the work, knowing that you, being tired and existing from a single vantage point, are incapable of seeing the whole. Enjoy!

Join us this week as we tackle Louis Althusser's seminal essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". We discuss the difference between ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) and RSAs (Repressive State Apparatuses), interpellation, and Althusser's relevance today.

This week, we're finishing up Merleau-Ponty's famous section on The Body. We discuss sexuality, identity, and psychoanalysis, all through the lens of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology

This week, we're discussing the first half of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's famous section on the Body from his Phenomenology of Perception. This is a wide-ranging text that outlines how the body fits into the phenomenology of the world. Enjoy!

Join us this week as we take a hard right turn on our subject matter with a chapter from Walter Terence Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy. Our main goal throughout the episode is to interrogate the term mysticism to come to an agreement on the concept's delineations. Enjoy!

This week we're delving into two short works by George Bataille— "Rotten Sun" and "The Sacred Conspiracy". We also discuss Max Weber's concept of Disenchantment and possible avenues to reenchant the world.

It's a timely episode! We're talking about this week's election results through Guattari's eyes. Enjoy!