desire

Ep. 72 – Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire

Back from a hiatus in western Massachusetts, B joins John and special guest co-host Alyssa Ruth Mazer to discuss Miguel de Beistegui’s book The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. What is a liberal subject and how does desire open up its discourses and genealogy and governmentalities? Did Beistegui try to out-Foucault…Foucault, the book’s stated intellectual inspiration? The team attempts a reparative reading of the Introduction, Conclusion and Beistegui’s chapters on recognition. But these three self-professed genealogists hit a snag. Critiquing the murky depths of desire and recognition requires more than what the Western canon provides! What happened to queer theory? Is there feminism at all? Could Black and Indigenous theories of personhood have made a more prominent appearance? Is there a “true” kind of resistance? With so much to discuss, you can’t not desire tuning in!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

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Ep. 68 – W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Join Emily, B, Sid, and John for a classic AAP text discussion, this time featuring W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. Our discussion begins (perhaps unsurprisingly!) with knowledge, education, and epistemology, and spans Du Bois’s analysis of racial capitalism, his materialism, aesthetics, canonization as a political theorist, and more. We interrogate Du Bois as a democratic theorist in his own right, analyze his (maybe) humanism and (maybe) universalism, and ask, what does it mean to read DuBois as a prescient diagnostician of our own political moment (and who is the revolutionary subject?)? While we barely scratch the surface of all this book has to offer (what of “work,” whiteness, poetics, and proto-feminism in this text?!), we welcome you to join us for the close reading, and stay for the water puns!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

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Black and white photograph of Du Bois, looking at the camera

W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918; from WikiMedia Commons

 

Blue-on-blue cover of Darkwater

First edition of Darkwater; from WikiMedia Commons

Ep. 15 – Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

In this episode of Always Already, our brilliant guest co-host, Sid Issar, joins B and John to engage with Lyotard’s affective reading of Marx in his Libidinal Economy. Sid breaks down Lyotard’s complex ontological reading of Marx. John points us toward how Lyotard elaborates a practices a unique mode of reading. And B, well, B thinks Lyotard is intellectually dishonest! How shall we proceed? Do we stroke Marx’s beard, as Lyotard requests? Do we avoid critique and rather take from Marx all of Marx’s affects? Or do we listen to ‘little girl Marx’, whose desire for holism and ideality beg us to interpret, critique, and undermine the desires that permeate Capital? The conversation ranges across the meaning of interpretation, the concept libido, the question of what capitalism is, subjectivity, what Lyotard would say about shopping at H&M, and more. Listen in and join our fantastic discussion.

In My Tumblr Friend from Canada, the group advises on proper Grindr/Tinder etiquette for academics and on the all important question of sacrilege.

Thanks to Deniz for the Lyotard request! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions for the show? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B.

Links!

 

Libidinal_Economy_(French_edition)

Episode 1: Deleuze and Guattari; Susan Buck-Morss on history, temporality, secularism, and critical theory

This inaugural episode features a conversation about Chapter 1, Desiring Machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s major work, Anti-Oedipus. Rachel, B, and John tackled the thorny concepts of action and agency, subjectivity, machines, and desire, as well as the connection this reading has with practice(s) of everyday life. Your hosts did their very best to unpack the Marx-Freud doublet that preoccupied this chapter’s brilliant critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis.

We then feature part 1 of our wide-ranging interview with critical theorist/philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, and end by giving advice on setting up one’s dissertation committee and answering an age-old philosophical conundrum.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes.

Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music performed throughout the episode.

Links

Richard Lindner,

“A painting by Richard Lindner, ‘Boy with Machine,’ shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical and social machine – which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does” (Anti-Oedipus, 7)