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

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

Did Deleuze and Guattari have a theory of class? A better question: how did the French philosophers reformulate class and the bourgeoisie in anticipation of digital capitalism unfolding on a global scale? In this Patreon-exclusive discussion, we (Emma, Adam, and Craig) set Deleuze and Guattari's theory of class against workerism and the scapegoating of particular categories of worker within contemporary trends of proletarianization.

Working through Anti-Oedipus chapter three, section ten, and Craig's essay "There Is Only One Class," we unpack decoding, deterritorialization, and the axiomatic. Together, we navigate how capitalism has changed through the proliferation of platforms and an ontology of "profiles," and what the devaluation of porn, music, art, and academic labor means for the future of exploitation. Along the way, we ask what class consciousness could mean after the subject, and why cultural experimentation may be one of the most important sites of political production today.

Read the essay: https://splitinfinities.substack.com/p/there-is-only-one-class

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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/

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Adam is joined by Jon Greenaway AKA The Lit Crit Guy and Leon from The Left Page to unpack the grimdark dialectics of Warhammer 40,000. How do we narrativize dystopia when utopian futures have been crushed by neoliberalism? How does the Horus Heresy help us understand Hegelian ideas about tragedy, religion, and the origins of Empire? Why do reactionaries keep making 'God Emperor Trump' memes? Join us as we traverse the perils of the Warp to philosophise our way through the 41st century.

You can find all of Jon's writing on Warhammer over at his Substack, The Haunt: https://thehaunt.substack.com/

Read Leon's work over at https://www.patreon.com/posts/warhammer-40k-to-157369486 and support The Left Page podcast

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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/

Acid Horizon offers affordable online philosophy and humanities courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses

Can you feel homesick for something that hasn't even disappeared yet? This week Craig and Adam sit down with Dr. Ennan Wu, Wenhan Hu, and Tiger Liu to talk about Chinese Dreamcore, an internet aesthetic built from sound images of old classroom bells and the half-remembered echoes of early milennium schoolyards. We get into anticipatory homesickness, tangping 躺平 (lying flat), and runxue 润学 (the "study" of leaving the country), and what Mark Fisher's hauntology looks like filtered through the dreamcore genre.

Read the paper/listen to the tracks: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397762735_Listening_to_hauntological_time_Chinese_Dreamcore_millennial_memories_and_the_temporal_crisis_in_the_Anthropocene

A note on the music: The track in this episode is a remix of Nop by ChenYueLong, a foundational Chinese dreamcore track, used for research purposes alongside the paper "Listening to Hauntological Time: Chinese Dreamcore, Millennial Memories, and the Temporal Crisis in the Anthropocene" by Ennan Wu, Zhe Tang, and Jianhao Xia, with Wenhan Hu assisting on the research team.

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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

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

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizon

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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/

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast/posts/patreon-breaking-168601216?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

What has capital done to us in order to fight off the threat of the oppressed? How can we take a historical materialist approach to understanding the shattering of working class militancy and subjectivity as a political force in the 20th century? What does it mean to be a proletarian in an age when many have much more to lose than their chains?

Adam is joined by Jonas Patrick Marvin to discuss his book "The Breaking of the English Working Class", tracing how the contours of class in England were transformed through the eras of post-war social democracy, towards the ascendency of neoliberalism, and amidst the ruins and hinterlands in which we are organising today.

Links:

Buy The Breaking of the English Working Class (Verso): https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3145-the-breaking-of-the-english-working-class

Book tour announcement: https://substack.com/home/post/p-212692142

Life of the Party podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4dF7hJWkNRWIt7pVyAOwfG?si=54f88502ab8f4ee1

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AHRC

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

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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/

Enroll here: acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses. Use code 3FOR2FALL2026 at checkout for three courses at the price of two.

Were the philosophers of the Kyoto School fascist collaborators, or were they meeting in secret with the Imperial Navy to try to stop a war? Fernando Wirtz and Takeshi Morisato join Craig for a primer on Japan's most influential and most contested philosophical tradition, from Nishida and Tanabe through Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. The conversation covers what "nothingness" actually means in Japanese thought and why it isn't Heidegger's, how Miki tried to collapse reason and unreason into a logic of imagination, and what tenkō, or forced ideological conversion, did to a generation of Marxist intellectuals. It closes on the newly surfaced Ōshima Memo and the question of what it costs to think under fascism.

Books mentioned in this episode

Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination, translated by John W. M. Krummel (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)

Itabashi Yūjin, Nishidian Philosophy of the Body (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)

Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū)

By our guests

Ōhashi Ryōsuke, The Kyoto School and the Japanese Navy, translated by Takeshi Morisato (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies, forthcoming)

Fernando Wirtz, Myth and Ideology: An Essay on Philosophy of Political Action in Japan (2023)

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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/