In this episode, we are joined by Jeff Diamanti to discuss what it looks like to watch the climate change. Our conversation shifts from analytical, aesthetic, and political perspectives, as we turn our attention from critical raw materials to the future cartographies already being carved out. We explore Jeff’s notion of the terminal as the kind of space where capitalism abstracts matter and value becomes concrete. As it turns out, there’s more to see in the logistics than philosophers might think, from indigenous resistance and sabotage to a possible world of sustainable provision.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Jeff Diamanti, “Critical Raw Materials,” in Worlding Ecologies (2024), 135-43.

Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cohen, and Laleh Khalili, “Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Circulation with Logistics,” Society and Space 36(4)(2018): 617-629.

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we discuss essays from throughout G.A. Cohen’s philosophical career. Cohen is known as one of the founders of Analytical Marxism, so we talk about what this tradition in Marxist thinking is about and how it handles the problems of political let-down and disillusionment that affect us all. We also get into his polemics against the libertarians and John Rawls in his essays on exploitation, freedom, and justice.

This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy

References:

G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

G.A. Cohen, “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 8(4)(1979): 338-360.

G.A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(1)(1983): 3-33.

G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Nicholas Vrousalis, The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Alberto Toscano to talk about his analysis of contemporary far-right movement and ideology. We discuss his new book Late Fascism and consider the strategic and rhetorical downsides of analogizing the present moment to past instantiations of fascist politics in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We try to get a grip on what distinguishes contemporary fascism, why liberal discourse’s fixation on ‘totalitarianism’ fails to grasp the specificity of fascism, and ask what Black and third-world scholars can teach us on this score.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Ajay Chaudhary to discuss his book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World and the political, economic, and affective sites of exhaustion reproduced through climate degradation. We examine the expanding colonial relations of what Chaudhary calls the “extractive circuit” between the both the Global South and Global North as well as widening segments of the working classes in the Global North. We dispel fantasies of both the hope that climate change will automatically unify a coherent politics for a just transition and the fear of a human apocalypse. Given this, what would a left-wing climate realism look like as opposed to burgeoning forms of right-wing climate realism that aims to extract and protect as much wealth as possible for a vanishingly small minority? Much of our conversation concerns the role of temporality in our politics and the imperative not to wait for the future to solve our climate crises. Turns out waiting for Greta Thunberg to solve all our problems is a poor strategy!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

thebrooklyninstitute.com | @materialist_jew

References:

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, “We’re Not in This Together,” The Baffler (2020) https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (London: Repeater Books, 2024).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Matt McManus to discuss his research into the history and philosophy of right-wing politics in his book The Political Right and Equality. We discuss the nature of conservatism as an irrationalist reaction to modernist ideas about human egalitarianism, the rhetorical strategies of the right, and the historical conditions under which moderate conservatism turns over into extremist fascist reaction. We pay special attention to Edmund Burke’s aestheticization of politics and Joseph De Maistre’s formula for presenting conservative ideology as punk-rock counterculture rather than the argumentatively weak status-quo apologia it really is. It pays to know your enemy, comrades.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Matt McManus, The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2023).

Matt McManus, “Liberal Socialism Now,” Aeon (2024). https://aeon.co/essays/the-case-for-liberal-socialism-in-the-21st-century

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode we delve into Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, an illuminating book from 2005 that examines subject-formation and the relationship between the self, other people, and the normative social order. We reconstruct Butler’s efforts to ground a philosophical ethics with positive claims in the insights of three theoretical traditions that have generally been understood to frustrate moral philosophy: post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Our core focus is the question of whether Butler’s conceptions of the ‘relationality’ and ‘opacity’ of the human self can do the kind of ethical heavy lifting that they claim.

This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy

References:

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we talk with Manon Garcia about the problem of women’s submissiveness in feminist philosophy. Then we discuss longstanding feminist criticisms of the concept of consent, what we want from consent in the first place, and what it could mean in the future. And we wonder if the reason it’s so hard to talk about sex in philosophy is that we don’t really think about it philosophically enough, which is too bad, since as it turns out, good sex is an integral part of the good life.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Manon Garcia, We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

Manon Garcia, The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we return to the work of Ernst Bloch and his theory concerning “aesthetic genius” and the possibility of the red sublime. Bloch attempts to construct a Marxist account of art that can explain how it is possible for aesthetic objects to provoke experiences of beauty and sublimity long after the historical conditions of their genesis have passed. Bloch thinks certain artworks contain a utopian surplus that beckons for a not-yet existing classless society. In other words, Bloch thinks we can inherit the knowledge of the real possibility of communism from the history of class domination and catastrophe. Join us as we try to make sense of these claims, dunk on the idea of art as “resistance,” and even try (in vain) to get Gil to experience the sublime!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Ernst Bloch, “Ideas as Transformed Material in Human Minds, or Problems of an Ideological Superstructure (Cultural Heritage) (1972)” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 18-71.

Filippo Menozzi, "Inheriting Marx: Daniel Bensaïd, Ernst Bloch and the Discordance of Time” in Historical Materialism 28, 1 (2020): 147-182.

Stuart Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’ [1974]” in Selected Writings on Marxism, ed. Gregor McLennan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 19-62.

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN