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Can wasting better solve the biggest planetary challenges?

In his keynote lecture from the two-day event The Excesses of Georges Bataille at Penn State University, Stuart Kendall traces Bataille’s lifelong obsession with time, expenditure, and what he calls “the privileged instant.” The lecture moves from Bataille’s early psychoanalytic writings, through his encounter with the work of Søren Kierkegaard in wartime France, to his late meditations on sustainability and the fate of humanity and all species. Amid his extensive investigations, Bataille reads Nietzsche against Hegel, affirming what the former calls “the ignorance of the future” and transforming that affirmation into the anguished cry that emerges from the abyss of non-knowledge.

This lecture was part of a two-day series of discussions at Penn State featuring other members of the Acid Horizon Research Commons and the broader community of supporters and independent scholars.

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What is the relationship between music and radical social change? This book explores their confounding and exciting interrelations in original and engaging ways. Beginning with how capitalism and empire have progressively twisted and atomised our aurally aesthetic experiences over the past century, Alexander Billet examines how social struggles and mass protests challenge the isolation and commodification of music, a challenge which can, in turn, suggest visions of a life lived collectively and on our own terms. Part manifesto, part theoretical exegesis, part love letter to human creativity, Shake the City is a rigorous and poetic plea for our world to be as musical as we deserve it to be.

Explore further Shake the City: https://substack.com/home/post/p-216391053

Adam's discussion of Shake the City: https://substack.com/@newfleshvirologies/p-219344690

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AHRC

Current classes at Acid Horizon Research Commons (AHRC): acidhorizonresearchcommons.com

AHRC Course Archive: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-course-archives

Submit your course proposal: acidhorizonresearchcommons@gmail.com

More Links

Website: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizon

Acid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast

Boycott Watkins Media: https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/

Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438

Merch: http://www.crit-drip.com

Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438

LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHAND

Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

Current courses at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses

What if the way we think about everything from gender, race, and class to the very idea of a "thing," rests on a transcendental illusion that mistakes the representation of thought for thinking itself? Henry Somers-Hall joins us to discuss Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, a kind of remix of Deleuze and Guattari that works through the problem of judgment, asks what happens to predicates and measure outside the state form, and turns to Woolf's The Waves and the metallurgist as figures who think below the assemblage. We also take up the claim that the state and the war machine are equiprimordial, what that means for Marxism and anarchism, and why hierarchy has to be constantly warded off rather than overthrown once and for all.

Get the book: Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, Edinburgh University Press

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AHRC

Current classes at Acid Horizon Research Commons (AHRC): acidhorizonresearchcommons.com

AHRC Course Archive: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-course-archives

Submit your course proposal: acidhorizonresearchcommons@gmail.com

More Links

Website: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizon

Acid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast

Boycott Watkins Media: https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/

Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438

Merch: http://www.crit-drip.com

Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438

LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHAND

Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/