PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

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While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

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People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg  

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After three episodes reading Culture of Narcissism we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.

jk it's just fake news that duped conservatives yet again. This viral lie claimed that a remote Amazon tribe fell apart the instant they discovered internet pornography, but in the end it says a lot more about us than it does about the Marubos.


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This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything).

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This week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about.

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We read the eminent The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida.
(originally recorded 08/24)

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We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills. In this episode we read Sloterdijk's proposal for how to fix Philosophy from The Critique of Cynical Reason.