Ep. 48 – Calvin Warren and Frank Wilderson III on Antiblackness, Nihilism, and Politics

This episode features James, John, and newly-christened Always Already Correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou in a discussion drawn from a cross-reading of Calvin L. Warren’s “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope” (2015) with Frank Wilderson III’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003). The spirited conversation covers the relation of (anti)Blackness to the constitution of the p/Political, its structuring logics of linear progressive time and rational civic engagement, and how the Political ultimately fails to achieve emancipation. We interrogate whether Western metaphysics is constitutively anti-black (spoiler alert: yes), and position Black Nihilism alongside Afropessimism, Black Optimism, and Afro-Futurism (all with their due™) to think through their various genealogies of production, the deeply affective labor asked of Black scholars who work on Black suffering. The episode concludes with an ode to the ever-needed wisdom of Black feminism. Is all hope lost? Take a listen and find out.

Thanks to the anonymous listener who requested this episode. Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment. 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. Thanks to Leah Dion for the intro music, to B for the outro music, and to Bad Infinity for the music between segments. Get the mp3 of the episode here.

 

 

 

Ep. 38 – Annemarie Mol on Ontology, Science, and Politics

Join John, Emily, and the lamp specter of B for this week’s discussion of some of the work of Dutch anthropologist and philosopher of medicine, Annemarie Mol. In this episode, we read several essays of Mol’s spanning three decades, and grappling with such questions as: who know what a woman is and how do the sciences both create and obscure her? What does Actor Network Theory (ANT) make of such terms as “coordination” and “order,” and can ANT make good on the promise of “theory” more generally? How are the “real” and “political” implicated in and through one another, and what is the ontological turn in Science and Technology Studies?

Our conversation asks about the relationship between epistemology and ontology, about the consequences of these views for democratic theory and democracy more broadly, and we even try our hand at engaging in a little Rawlsian thought experiment! We’ll leave it up to you to decide how well it plays out. The episode closes with a My Tumblr Friend from Canada question regarding some recents comments made by Bill Nye the Science Guy about the relevance of philosophy to science and in general.

We would also like to announce the launch of our new Patreon account. The first few minutes of the episode are replete with details regarding donating to the podcast, and rewards for our patrons. Please give it a listen, check out the site here, and consider sponsoring us if you are a fan! We are greatly appreciative and (we hope) appropriately humbled and reflexive by/about our neoliberal subjectivity. Thank you for your support!

Thanks to listener dmf of Synthetic Zero for suggesting we read these texts.  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. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

 

Links!

• Mol’s homepage
• Essays we read: “Ontological Politics“; “Actor-Network Theory“;  “A reader’s guide to the ‘ontological turn’“; “Who knows what a woman is…“
• Mol’s book The Body Multiple
• Mol lectures on YouTube: “Feeling, wording, eating” (2013) and “What methods do” (2009)
• Bill Nye’s BigThink video on philosophy; “Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy” by Olivia Goldhill on qz.com

 

Ep. 26 – Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism

***Update 1/17/18: Transcript available here (transcribed by Scott McLellan)***

Special guest co-host James Padilioni, Jr. joins B and John to discuss several works in the vital, burgeoning discourses of Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism. Join us as we talk about texts from Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Frank B. Wilderson III. After overviewing major arguments and stakes of these discourses, we discuss black social life and black social death, ‘the political’ and whether lived experience remains a valid category, the relationship between blackness and critical theory, resistance and performance, and more.  Not to mention dream analysis about a labyrinthian journey and its obstacles, and advice about a potentially-racist office mate.

Thanks to James and to Eric T. for suggesting these readings. 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. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by Jordan Cass and by B.

As of a couple weeks ago, we’re now on Twitter, so send a follow our way.

Links!

• James Padilioni Jr.’s previous visit to the show, discussing his work on St. Martin de Porres; find James on academia.edu on Twitter @ApontesGhost
• Websites: Hartman; Wilderson III; Sexton; Spillers; Moten
• Many relevant books: Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Moten, In the Break; Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black – which we will be discussing in an upcoming episode
• An overview and bibliography of Afro-Pessimism from Wilderson III
• Jared Sexton lecture, “People-of-Color-Blindness”
• Hortense Spillers lecture, “The Idea of Black Culture”
• Video conversation between Robin DG Kelley and Fred Moten, “Do Black Lives Matter”
• Wilderson III gives a talk on afro-pessimism
• Moten’s curated playlist for a special issue of the journal Women & Performance

 

James Padilioni, Jr.

 

Hartman

 

Wilderson

 

 

Sexton

 

Spillers

 

Moten

 

 

 

 

Interview: Joanna Tice on Evangelicalism and Political Thought

Coming to you from Las Vegas (!), John interviews Joanna Tice, a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY on her dissertation project, “Power of the Spirit: The Political Thought of Contemporary Evangelicalism.” They talk about secularism and the academy, shifts in the political and theoretical orientation of US evangelicalism over the past decade-plus, evangelical temporality, the importance of “creative tensions” in evangelical thought, the production of the ambivalent evangelical subject, the concept of “the political” at work in her project, and more.

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:

• Always Already episode on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, with Joanna Tice guest co-hosting
• Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the Evangelical Relationship with God
• Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
• Public Religion Research Institute’s 2015 survey, “How Race and Religion Shape Millennial Attitudes on Sexuality and Reproductive Health”

Interview with Kasina Entzi on Ernst Jünger

John interviews Kasina Entzi (Germanic Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington) on the life and thought of Ernst Jünger. Jünger is a controversial – and as Entzi argues, misunderstood – WWI war hero, memoirist, fiction writer, entomologist and, from her perspective, philosopher. In this episode, Kasina discusses his philosophy of technology, technology as it interacts progress and humanity, Jünger’s relation to and differences from Heidegger and German National Socialism, his concept of the political, and his account of pain and the body.

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.

Ernst Jünger