5 Star Tossers

Today we shared 4 of our favorite quotations and discussed them on their own and in relation to each other. We quoted Dorothy Parker, Lex Luthor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Marvel Comics, Richard Rorty, Moby Dick, Ru Paul, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. 

Greetings, audient!This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal.The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before contemporary dictators started slamming it down more forcefully (bullies invariably go for the weaker targets). In this episode we try to think of the university through the prisms of  democracy, political economy and, not least, metaphysics. The university today is seeing more and more threats to its relevance (and a fortriori, funding). The younger generations see this establishment as a "waste of taxpayer money," as something best left alone or left to Automated Intelligence (AI) devices, or left in the past. We try and trace this scarcity of the university as the stronghold of learning and teaching as a value in itself, one facing towards the future with hope and pride. Sagi takes the university to task for their theological roots and the Christian, metaphysically anti-Judaic ethos of Truth that has come to pervade (and pervert) it, for being anti-Judaic compels us, foundationally and methodologically, to value truth over justice (which comes, as Nietzsche had already pointed out, to a radical devaluation of value as such). Andy shares with us his bittersweet travels through ivy-league woke Humanities departments, the various petty egoisms that animate it in a kind of pathetic posturing and grandiloquence that settles for crumbs of value and importance. He brings up wokeism as a kind of rot that has taken over the Humanities. Andy's dog shared his sentiments.Addressing these issues requires, as Jake reminds us, being slow and careful. For, though it may look like the academic jobifications and woke-rots that proliferate today mark the closure, the end of the university's horizons (especially when "debated" on 'social media'), the need for critical thinking, for creating and enriching discourse and understanding of life and experience, are still at the core of this institution. Jacques Derrida, that many see as supporting an oblivious gutting of the university's functions and ideals, is actually an example of responsibility; to trace our current experience to where the university's original, however fantastic, ethos still holds sway, power, pride, and can still nourish value.Jack, out proud representative of the STEM disciplines, points out the lack of co-authorships in the Humanities, following a capitalist logic of branding that turns the scholar humble. Jack calls it a humiliation ritual, and Sagi was quick to interject Max Weber's critiques of the professionalization and "rationalization" of scholarship, and the Bildung they inflict on the scholar: the latter trains the scholar for hopeless work, churning publications as a vehicle for promoting one's brand, making scholarly experts follow a logic of monopoly and "cornering a market (of ideas)" rather than enriching the understanding or cross-pollinating with other university discourses in order to think differently about life, the universe, and everything...There's much more, of course. Dare a listen.Stars: WWJD, Pervs 'R Us; Marx Grudge 

Jake can't stop cursing in this episode. We discuss the terribly obnoxious, punch-deserving, smirk that refuses to listen to the Other. Though prevalent especially in the world of Maga punditry, whether it be Zionists smirking at the word genocide, or Michael Knowles donning smarm as his personality, the shit-eating grin is a weaponized rejection of thought. It also reveals the shame and guilt of the would be cocky grinner. Andy thinks about how despairing it is to see this contagious proliferation overtake our culture, especially with the crying laughing emoji face. Sagi sees it has an abuse of shifting contexts, a way to escape any contextuality, and retreat into a hollow shell of superiority. We also took this opportunity to introduce Freud's idea of the defense mechanism, specifically the conversion symptoms of hysterics.

Audient!This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why?We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins.  We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading this exact critique of that exact attitude, that time between Analytic philosopher John Searle and the evil Continentalist Jacques Derrida and his essay Signature, Event, Cuntext. There, Derrida shows how each utterance, of necessity, breaches whatever context is assigned to it, thus always opening the way for what Holmes keeps pretending to have had already hermetically closed: the other possibility. Sherlock Holmes is shown to play out a fantasy of control, one that professionalizes thinking in much the same way an AI does. Holmes' "method of logical deduction" is explored in this vein to reveal a logical abduction, where Truth is nowhere acknowledged, and the process simply arrives at the least improbable outcome. Alas, since the entire context, the full "One", will always be breachable - we were thinking also of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem here - the probability will forever be dangling, insecure; or worse, open to various biases of 'normativity.'Jake, once again, recalls Jack Bauer, as a distilled version, a sublimated Sherlock Holmes; one that stopped bothering about that (quite flimsy) justification, along with the 'method' Holmes uses to construct it. If it was always bullshit, why not go right to the point?Our perverts also hone in on the obvious closeted Homosexuality that emanates from this dynamic duo, and all the libidinal affirmations and denials that move this - many times unspoken, but always quite present - sexually-tense relationship. 'No Homo,' this time operating as a literary device...Stars:IL VAUT MIEUX LYOTARD QUE JAMAIS; Pervs 'R Us; Beast & Sovereign.

You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out all the laughter.

Greetings, audient!David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod.Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, difference between the two directors, each using the literary device of the double in his own film, but in each director's own unique way, unique language. Jake saw this difference in the light of Nietzsche's old distinction, from The Birth of Tragedy, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian; Sagi suggests that Lynch to Cronenberg is like dream to trauma.We unpack this huge set of knots, and toss many more strands into the air besides.And there's a beautiful Nietzsche quote at the end! So......have a listen.Stars: Beast & Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais.

Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one who "does their own research," but never rereads. Are algorithims and social media inducing us all to live as socially awkward nerds? And what about Trump, the famous nerd hater? Why and how does he use the broligarch tech nerds to fuel his spiteful reign? From the appropriation of Black Liberation to the fantasy of a justified rape, the revenge of the nerd hits several pressure points of our culture today. Special thanks to Jack for recommending this topic!

Hello, audient,We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame...Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoeroticism, which becomes particularly resonant with the fantasies of the white man towards the black man's body - othered, mystified and "supercharged." It's a fantasy with a long history.This leads to a discussion of the meaning of competition and team efforts, as well as more homoerotic identifications that, unlike the repressed, kept coming back(!)Sagi will call it all a Protestant conspiracy, a fracking-hollow of the competition signifier. But it might be another homophobic deflection...We left a couple of spicy nuggets in there as well. Can you find them?Stars: Marx Grudge; Pervs 'R Us; WWJD; Beast & Sovereign

Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of  pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic yet virginal daughter.

Dear, stubborn, listener,Are you still there?For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with.We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it 'libtardation;' we think it is a new socio-political category. Were they ever an alternative? Trump's campaign (among others) exposed long-standing hypocrisies surrounding all the things they care about. The people of America were faced with an alternative between a fake solution that has proven itself to be ineffectual, and a visceral expression of rage that had not been seen before.Woke leftism plays a role we will discuss at length in this episode; both an agent and a symptom of said hypocrisies. A kind of Wittgensteinian language game, as Jack puts it, which rewards further vivisections of ressentiment in the 'soul' of the individual, as Sagi sees it. We show this in cancel culture and how social media discourses become toxic and destructive to discourse (where words and signs of value are being cancelled left and right, pun intended). Not to mention stuff like 'DEI'  and its policing of "diversity" "equity" and "inclusion" -- three values abused by the left, mined hollow by woke discourse until it is too toxic to consider, and left ripe for the Bannons of America to prove that these values were always inherently empty.This emptiness, of course, is the point of the Democratic-Republican dance in a United States that has never seriously dealt with its 'spirit', that is, the contradictions that are haunting this 'manifest destiny' crowd form the first. One says 'Justice' and the other says 'Power'; and so long as Justice keeps ridiculing and denying the role of power in Justice -- what Derrida called the force of Law -- they leave the values to rot from within until it's the other partner's turn to say "hey this value is defunct, so let's give up on it altogether."As Andy put it, Americans were given a choice between two right wing parties...There's a lot more we talked about there. Have a listen, dear audient (and despair..)Stars: WWJD; Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge....*Thumbnail courtesy of Arash Akhgari (and Sagi).

In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited.To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural appropriation, we introduce theories of language.Jack introduces Wittgenstein's theory of language games and the impossibility of a private language.Jake introduces Derrida's theory of language in Monolingualism of the Other and the Prosthesis of Origin.Sagi makes sure that we do not simply define the ubiquity of cultural appropriation but study exactly why there is an attempt at re-appropriation that then bans certain people (always the original colonizer) from taking back again. By now, we hope you know what would Sagi do.We read some gorgeous passages by Jacques Derrida, and discuss why the N-word and blackness are limit cases, especially in America, for thinking about cultural appropriation.

We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it.This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infantile position that clamors for the good breast while being persecuted by the bad one. Andy discusses the metonymic qualities of the beautiful ideal object, the way the body tries to merge with the sign itself. Sagi, on his new "tender is the heart" kick, speaks about how the absence of the mother or motherhood creates a lack that explains the monstrous psychic desires and impersonality that destroys Elizabeth and Sue.Jake works with Andy on the Pervs R' Us ride, and then ends with a hypothesis via Marx Grudge that the Young Beautiful Woman is an ideal object that stalks us all.Enjoy. 

With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once.Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge?Andy wishes that the multiverse would remain solely a video game construct, ruing the day when Mickey Mouse and Wolverine show up together in the same movie. He also introduces the Oikodicy, as a way to describe how profits justify all the silly games and narrative tricks we keep getting sold.Jake links the multiverse to the fantasy of the Internet as a perfectly connected hypertextual universe. He introduces Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this fantasy, and asks whether the void-inducing everything bagel in Everything Everywhere all at Once is an anti-Semitic reference to the way the Jew gets in the way of Christian presence. He also reads from Leibniz's Theodicy.Jack kicks us off with some heavy-hitting take downs of the quality of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and makes sure we see the capitalist cynicism of both films, at every turn.

Oh boy...This episode is longer than usual, more contentious, as it addresses the current genocidal violence in Gaza in ways that neither 'the left' nor 'the right,' as they are now called (defined?), would stand behind; except perhaps with a dagger?..We are both against what Israel is doing in Gaza, and think it ought to stop immediately (which would still be much much too late).Our discussions, our rhetoric, our frameworks of understanding, however, are neither neutral nor universal. They involve issues that precede "universal categories" of "racism" - on either "side" - to show western eyes what they cannot see about this global problem.Sagi calls it "metaphysical antisemitism," a term he borrowed from Gershom Scholem, but developed much (too much?) further. Accounts of this problem, here and now, cannot hide behind the tried and true tropes - of 'evil,' 'the right side of history,' etc. - but are viewed in a particular historical lens. Particular, because it presupposes Jewish specificity, but not to justify Israel's actions, or the manner(s) of Palestinian resistance to them. To do that we need a metaphysically sensitive analysis as to what underpins tropes like "anti-zionism," "Islamophobia" and the likes. Just because "we hate Nazis" does not necessarily mean we're on the right side of history.Just because Hitler accelerated the evacuation of a Christian, antisemitic Europe of Jews to the ancient land of Kna'an, does not make this land Zion (yet), nor him the Messiah.What can the present situation teach us, from our, Jewish, perspective, about this knot? How do we explain, without explaining away, the terrible cycle of murderous, genocidal violence that has erupted in Israel/Palestine? Probing these problems might help shine a light on a tragic impasse, where true things - real facts, real pain, real history - are employed for fallacious reasons, and yet persist (for the inaccessible truths that still burn, silent, within them). Here we try to understand the situation in a way that does not flatten the discourse to "human rights"; it demands a greater responsibility to difference than that tired (and by now at least faltering, if not highly suspect) 'humanism' that allows Christian mora frameworks to gloss over their own metaphysical assumptions, and violence. You know, like the idea of the Nation State being a solution -- imposed, by various means, upon the rest of the "civilized world" -- to an intra-Christian problem (that it did not solve). We are not anti-Christian, however, for, as the wise man said, they know not what they do. Instead of platitudes or tired binaries, here we try to think through these phenomena as conflagrations produced by a complex system of violence-erasure, a violence by other means, if you will, a violence delegated, farmed-out, rationally contracted and brutally enforced. And made invisible.The 'Colonialism' levelled at Israel hides metaphysical assumptions that need to be spelled out if the sides that truly matter, that truly suffer, in this murderous, brutal impasse - the Israeli and the Palestinian - are to be able to find common ground and a way out of this cycle. So long as the hatred that fueled the worst atrocities of October 7th, and that chants "from the river to the sea" will not be listened as to its - decidedly non-antisemitic - drive; so long as Israel's claim to self-defense is either accepted as a carte blanche for violence, or dismissed as irrelevant to this issue, the impasse will remain.We are trying to find a way out of this impasse.Cancel if you must,butlisten, if you can.

In a political climate of unbearable urgency, the Tossers ask: "What if we just stopped talking?"

Hello listener,How's it been? Great, right?Right?..This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor that understands only (algorithmic) violence... It's like being stared in the face by the hard pragmatism of a delusion.But this delusion is the American delusion. It's just the violence they don't see, that they talk (and walk) around, what had to be paved over to reach that shining destiny, manifest by God Himself (look they don't even have agriculture, lazy savages).Bannon is a toxin parasite that teaches us where we hide ours, if we care to look. The American "dream" means many underground veins of denial, suppressing historical crimes that undermine the principles 'America' claims to hold. And while the left is busy ridiculing the right for being religiously intolerant, racist, greedy, or belligerent and insensitive towards the other, they ignore this contradiction of their own complicities with exactly such things. Those that cannot ignore it -- because they had to enact the religious and racist hatred against the brown Muslim at play when they enlist in the army (to give just one example of Bannon's target audience) -- are left, by the left, for dead. Hence, these deep veins of denial produce deep veins of resentment rage  that Bannon knows not only how to weaponize, but how to conjoin disparate rages in a metonymous coherence of "(we may hate each other for all we know, but) we all hate X!". It is true, this is an old tactic, but Bannon adapted it to an algorithmic framework of recruitment and propaganda. At the same time, he will exasperate the left's abandonments by fomenting more and more fake controversy like a button to release a tired, long-leaking valve of Christian denial.This is just one point. We had many others, but I'm putting it here like a warning label, a basic blueprint, for the Bannon propaganda machine.Stars tossed in this one: Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD.

In this episode, we look at one of the longest running sitcoms in Televisual history (1987-1998), Married... with Children.Ostensibly a misogynistic pigpen ripe for retroactive cancelation, we  Tossers find the show delightful and read an unabashed radicality into the relentlessly bitter depiction of the horrors of married life .We bring up the Marxist tradition of family abolition to help think about the show's "study" of a starving lower middle-class family stuck together by  money they don't even have. Alongside the capitalist reproduction of labor, we think about the reproduction of gender norms. Whether it is the stupidity of the "hot blonde," the goober patheticness of the young man, Al's refusal to have sex with his wife, and Peggy's shameless desire to watch TV all day.Andy helps us read Peggy's refusal to feed her children, i.e., her refusal to be a good mother, as the most radical political action in the series.Jake keeps telling us that he identified, identifies, with Bud, and that nobody ever recognizes how violent everyone on the show is to him (Bud that is): mocking his (Bud's) inability to woo ladies.Jack takes us to  Ed O'Neil's future in Modern Family, helping us think of how different this future is form Ed's young, bitter pre-woke days.Sagi, our resident scholar on all things Pride, helps us understand the hardboiled confidence that resides beneath all the misfortune.  He also thinks about the show's tone in relation to the new Network Fox, and calls the show prophetic in the wake of a woke era that would never let this show air.Marx Grudge, Pervs R' Us are the main stars. 

In this episode, we discuss the thought-provoking 2019 New Inquiry essay by Asa Seresin "On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody's personal problem."Andy defends the future of heterosexuality from the sidelines so to say.Jake introduces Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," gets personal, digs his own holes, holds back his tears, and offers the formula "the penis lies too" as a way for men and women to discuss the terror of their mutual performativity.Our guest Anaís steals the show, offering up her own personal stories, parsing very subtle lines between the actual material vulnerability of women and the condescending failures of men occupying positions of allyship or sexual castration. She advocates throughout for a  near impossible conversation about mutual vulnerability and mutual desire.Sagi wonders whether it is right to demand a certain emotional labor from man when there is a kind of instilled lack of awareness thwarting this capacity. He also makes sure throughout that we distinguish between resentment and ressentiment. Perhaps for the first time introducing his antipathological method, he describes how an initial resentment towards the failure of desire can ultimately lead to a new discourse or orientation.Jack remains silent.

Greetings, audient!Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy.This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche. A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a more Frankfurt School angle, and helped reign-in Sagi by riposting some of his cheaper jabs at our buddy Karlo.So, as you can imagine, it was a grudge-bath. (Yep. Me no native English.)At their best, our discussions turned, and tossed, the treacherous soils and soilings of ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept used against the working class to repress any uprising (for it will be ridiculed as a "slave rebellion" I imagine). Tutt lays this at Nietzsche's feet, the more general claim being that Nietzsche's philosophy is a status-quo machine, and/or an anti-revolutionary one, in the sense that it puts the kaibosh on any universal equality, ideational and/or actual, as some kind of (secret, cunning) axiom.All this time we thought it was Reason -- turns out it was Nietzsche who was cunning.We also admittedly devolve to devote some uneasy attention to Tutt's notion of the parasite vis-a-vis the act of reading/interpreting Nietzsche, which, if we're lucky, seems to only stumble over its own feet (the identity of the parasite shifting constantly, something narrated but never engaged with). If we're not, then Tutt's bulldozers will show those parasites 'how a real parasite does it,' becoming tone-deaf to the metaphysical critique that underwrites Nietzsche's contempt towards humanist ideas of equality in the process.We will get into that. And so much more...Stay tuned, won't you, audient?Stars: Marx Grudge; WWJD

Sagi has recently learned about the Internet and relations that  people have on it. We discuss.Parasocial relations lead us to think about a plague of narcissistic personality disorder that capitalism breeds.

Welcome back, listener!No joke with the title, some real Hunter Thompson, Bazooko Circus vibes in hereAnd it seems to be spreading beyond the wrestlers, converting everyone in sight.All are engrossed in a spectacle that permits no shadow and emits the meaning of the 'manifest' in all its glory. It is meaning that must be immediate, spectacular, the kind that bypasses judgment and obviates Law (and thought). The kind that can be used to justify shit like violence, or, in this case - as Sagi seems to argue - the ritualistic, and nihilistic, enactment of Sin.Manifest is the best. A surprise guest in our topics turned out to be the thing that is Donald Trump, which, we realize, becomes much more understandable once seen in the light of a WWE character (particularly his signature Pussy-Grab move, which I am sure he lifted from women's wrestling (pun? intended?))We also tackle Greek Tragedy and the pagan rituals of 'carnival,' to mark similarities and differences with the WWE, with Sagi stamping every difference with metaphysical antisemitism, as usual.There's a lot there. Even Roland Barthes!Stars: WWJD (naturally); Pervs R' Us; Beast and SovereignPSDespite the title, we had fun making this one.

The Tossers gave themselves  a rather impossible task: prove that  Barbie and Oppenheimer are the same movie. In typical Tosser fashion, we try to turn our failure into charm.  Our sometimes quiet podcaster Jack comes out of the woodwork to take some heavy hits at Christopher Nolan's directorial chops and to educate Sagi on the reason why teenage girls hate their mothers. Jake is really out to lunch in this one, he tries to talk about the phallus, he quotes other podcasts, and forgets Margot Robbie's name.Andy develops a  theory of the position of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real in Barbie. Ultimately concluding that cellulite is the Real. Sagi gives the most convincing praise of Barbie (which we all seemed to like better than Oppenheimer), explaining how this movie managed to survive all the possible insults that could have been hurled at it.We discuss various critiques from the left, we ask whether Oppenheimer is a Zionist, and we wonder what was going on with Emily Blunt and Ben Safdie.I would call this a light and enjoyable affair.

(*) I refuse to check whether this is/was a porn title. It's finally out, dear listener!Our new episode, long time coming, will take a whack at the concept -- and the social/sexual/political/racial/economic/religious phenomenon (did I miss anything?) -- of cuckoldry. Though Sagi originally suggested it for the obvious purpose of exploring the alt-Right and their repeated "Cuck" accusations towards the left in the United States, Jake had the ludicrous idea that  a Shakespeare play that deals with cuckoldry was the way to go. Is it something about the virtual - and homo-social/sexual - nature of paternity (and ownership) that makes the "cuck" spread so corrosively, not just in societal gossip, but in an ego? The woman's flesh and sexuality seem to get in the way of an inter-masculine relationship here...Is it something about the invisible hand of "the market" that - like in the example of Blackwater (and other PMCs used by "the good guys" to "do the bad things") - that permits layers of separation from, thus allowing deniability of, the seat of power? The hand invisibilizes (sue me) itself from view so that it can continue this, its imperial violence by other means"...Andy will chime in with Franz Fanon's analyses of the white man's "negrophobia"; it is the manifestation of guilt that is the result of having repressed carnality itself to the black body (the body of the non-Christian and the non-Jew). The jealousy and feelings of insecurity that result are part of this, the white man's, fantasy. It often appears in the modality of a cuckoldry: the essentially-sinful woman is satiated (or, on the flipside, "must not be satiated") with the essentially-sinful man, while the pure (and sexless - all he cares about is work!) white man remains outside the picture, but firmly holding on to its frame.Naturally, the air will be full of tossed salads, cookies, and other half-baked projectiles.Join the funMain Stars: Beast and Sovereign; Pervs R' Us; WWJD

Though absent from the title,  we watched Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" for this episode. Mainly as an excuse to discuss whether lying is something like the fundamental human factor.Jake bundled the stars Beast and Sovereign, Pervs 'R Us, and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais together to study Jacques Lacan's famous idea that animals cannot feign a feint, or falsify a falsification. The main idea here being that humans fundamentally lie at their core and animals never do. Jacques Derrida has a famous deconstruction of Lacan's idea, somewhat in defense of the capacity of the animal, and also in defense of the always feigning, effacing nature of a trace. Sagi helped us consider the possible Christian nature of Lacan's position, and Andy is a proud liar.We ended up trying to defend both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which was an impressive feat.

Hello listener, This is a "retoss"  of a January 6th (no relation) episode, where we discussed 'From Software' games, particularly Elden Ring, particularly how  Sagi sucked at it, which led to his radicalization,  with him expressing Souls-phobic, extremist positions..It's not the first time.In the meantime Sagi went on a journey -- of self-discovery and community discovery -- through the 'Souls-Borne' gamer community, in its Twitch, YouTube and dedicated websites (stayed out of Reddit).He came back to talk about it with a gleam in his eye. The games received new meaning through their mediation with a community of other gamers, a new understanding of their purpose. Apparently his search for fellow disdainers of Elden Ring led him down a deep rabbit hole  of addiction (to YouTube Souls-Borne videos). He knew it. Elden Ring WAS bad.But  is was all a scam, a gateway drug; before long he was actively enjoying Dark Souls 1. Surely we have a powerful cult here.The ideas tossed here will take us through Monotheism's various versions of the Father: Dark Souls 1 features the father who is a present-yet-untouchable persona of death, conditioning the player/son through a survival-focused care/education, where the logic is as binary as life and death and the boy learns a value of overcoming adversity; an overcoming whose value can be shared with others (other Miyazaki "sons" - the Souls-borne community).Elden Ring, on the other hand, lets the player simmer in the vacuum of the father, where the height of achievement has been flattened for the sake of a freedom of possibility; an absent father since now success is idiosyncratic, it's not shared, it circulates (like money, whose value has no singularity by definition). Like in Protestant 'Predestination,' the only  thing you can share with others is that the meaning of your "works" in the world are, as far as the living are concerned, without spiritual consequence. The 'Elden Lord,' like the protestant "Salvation," is an empty signifier of a success that is indifferent to the manner of achieving it. Finding possibilities, like in Elden Ring, is lateral and disjointed; overcoming a challenge, like in Dark Souls, is more direct and cohesive. (Do we really  need to ask which is the better phallus?)When the community screams 'Git Gud,' more than a mere adolescent brag -- which Jake represented oh-so-well in this retoss -- they are referring back to the father that was still present in the Dark Souls games, in Bloodborne and Sekiro.This also brings up the angle of these games' relation to the father as rituals of masculinity, which  we use to make fair sense of the Souls-borne community, understanding them rather than judging them. Some gratitude is, in fact, in order.Ok ok no more rant.The stars here were: Beast & Sovereign; WWJD; Pervs R' Us (and maybe, begrudgingly, Marx).

Tossers are back. We always come back. This time we compare the "comedy" stylings of Larry David and Louis C.K. The frame for this comparison is that they are both assholes, but they are assholes of a different color: one is Jewish and the other is Catholic. This introduces a discussion on the different way that they interact with the law and also the different way that they make us (or fail to make us) laugh. Jake dangles throughout the episode a complex thesis inspired by the work of Alenka Zupancic: the thesis, still undeveloped, is that because the Jew and the Catholic have a different relation to enjoyment (jouissance), they also have a different relation to comedy. Zupancic makes an interesting distinction between the joke and the comic sequence. The difference  is one of temporality. But it is not essential that the comic sequence be longer than the joke (thought it usually is). The temporal distinction concerns the time of satisfaction. A comic sequence carries satisfaction through its whole duration whereas the joke always comes to an end with satisfaction. This distinction allows us to consider  why Curb Your Enthusiasm is a much funnier show than Louie, whereas Louis C.K. is a better standup comedian than Larry David.  The idea here is that there is something about the humiliating Catholic position towards jouissance that ensures that Louis can only ever experience satisfaction as an end. Larry the Jew, on the other hand, can keep satisfaction alive.Sagi distinguishes Larry and Louis at the level of the law by describing Larry's relation as that of a wall, and Louis's as that of a hook. Sagi also helps us think about Louis C.K.'s cancel-worthy transgressions as behaviors that are deeply imbedded in the confessional exposure of Louie the show.Perhaps the most exciting element of this episode is the number of jokes we have to tell to get our point across.

Oh boy... Well Sagi found this obscure blog written by some academic dropout that had an interesting take on Mansplaining (but after listening to this podcast you will have gotten everything of substance in that ode to desperation this guy calls a blog)...Again it's a hard nose dive into the shit, in the hopes of finding a golden shovel.Did we? Time (and death threats) will tell.We discuss mansplaining as an outdated social function of masculinity, and try to affirm it without pandering to its "glory days" of lethargic oblivion. The oblivion was enabled by a world where only a man was considered as fully "adult," the resulting dynamics with women - much like children - allowed reassurance  for its own sake; a reassurance that relies on man's superior status and capacity (persisting for many generations, it is secure in its own power). It's not about talent, but power/position: Even if he doesn't know what he is saying, he has the power to act on it, and maybe change it. Women did not, for a very long time. Andy and Sagi make a point that, because the political power of the patriarchy is not the same as it was, that status, that power that was lost, should be grieved by men (and men alone). Current "manosphere" phenomena - like Incels or MGTOW or Jordan Peterson-Tate - can then be seen as initial stages of denial and anger at this loss; a legitimate stage in mourning, but a temporary one. The reaction is childish and emotionally simple but is genuine, in the sense that it has some truth to it. They, at least, recognize and address the crisis of masculinity; but they, and we, need to man up and move on.Mansplaining can be seen also as an inner monologue of the man as such, the way he talks to himself; it also shows this monologue as succor for an anxiety that haunts the man(splainer). While men can bond with other men on this basis - the formal necessity of the man(splainer)'s "air of confidence" - with women, when the relation is mediated through sexual difference/desire, it is becoming clear that the bond is more knotted, and this air is not something women naturally breathe. But as this is the visceral realm of desire - seduction, corruption, in-toxic-ation - perhaps mansplaining can be indulged sparingly, like a cigarette. We also speak in praise of "games" in the sexual-based relation, where mansplaining can indeed find a role that does not necessarily reproduce  the patriarchy that attended past mansplainings.There's much more, since once you let the stupidities fly they soar on their own.In other words, as the saying goes, it's trigger warnings all the way down.Stars? Beast and Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; Marx Grudge(!)

In this episode, about Stanley Kubrick's classic movie The Shining, we divide our interests neatly between sexual trauma and racism. Well, we attempt to divide them neatly. Andy and Alicia on the side of sex, Jake and Sagi on the side of Race. Andy starts us off by hypothesizing, in intricate detail, the possibility that the movie is about the actual sexual assault of young Danny by Jack Torrance. He also brackets everything with a comment about how endless the interpretations of this movie can be, and that we the "critical readers" end up trapped in the snowy labyrinth that awaits Jack outside. Sagi is all about this word Overlook, and the way it is tied to the manifest destiny of the white man. He also thinks about the way the white man goes into trance or self-hypnosis in order to Overlook the violence he commits.Jake introduces us to Frank Wilderson's theory about the difference between the grammar of violence committed against Native Americans and that committed against Black people. Jake reads this into the movie, since there is a famous interpretation that the Shining's violence represents the violent genocide of Native Americans, but few people have discussed the gratuitous murder of the Black man Dick.Alicia brings it home for us, thinking about the traumatic sexual encounter that occurs in room 237, where Jack meets a gorgeous naked women who decays into a corpse. What does this say about the male gaze? What does this say about our objects of desire? And how does the trauma of sex relate to racist violence?Jake and Sagi go Beast & Sovereign for the most part, and Alicia and Andy give us some good 'ole Pervs 'R Us.

Dear, patient listener..We meet again, 2 weeks late, we know.. no creative endeavor is ever an assembly line and we had to drop a dud podcast  by the wayside. Maybe it will be unearthed one day by a particularly desperate AI bot.Maybe we'll sell it for a million dollars as a collector's item.Until then, may it rest in peace.This week's episode asked after the origin of identifying prostitution (typically female prostitution) as "the oldest profession." One such delightful source can be found in the equally delightful short story by the British Subject Rudyard Kipling named 'On the City Wall' (1888). There we find Lalun, the whore grand-daughter of the whore demoness Lilith. She's a wealthy prostitute living on the city wall, manipulating the men around her, including the narrator. Any Said or Fanon fan would find many of these discussions a blast (in one way or another), as the colonizer laments the hopelessness of the task to civilize the savage so as to deserve their freedom/independence - as is evidenced by there still being prostitutes there. There, means colonial India.Did I say British?I meant he was British in India.There's more to this than can or would be covered here...  Professionalism, the book of Genesis, Lilith the cowgirl and so much more! The stars reflect this eclectic debate: Beast and Sovereign; Marx Grudge, WWJD; and of course Pervs R' Us!

This week we discuss the movie version of John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Alicia leads us in a séance of sorts, asking us to consider why the main character, Alec Leamas (played by Richard Burton) is such an effective protagonist. To make sure the ghosts are summoned, she does not offer us any definition of effective. We float around the following themes: the questionable distinction between political methods and political policies, the difference between betrayal and the traitor, the hardboiled qualities of a spy who believes nothing can rock his world, and, as always, the question of gender (in this case, we bring up Nietzsche's "Suppose truth was a woman."). Beast & Sovereign is there, and Alicia's thesis regarding Leamas' total lack of negation brings us face to face with the unconscious, and thus Pervs 'R Us. We also try to identify other handsome men Richard Burton looks like.

Oh it's you again.. welcome back!So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008). Jake found  in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda.The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic reference, identified by the European colonist, before mushrooming into a particularly nasty (and suspiciously useful) metonym of the  good ol' 'savage.' With them good ol' Christians rushing to bring civilizing  light to the darkest continent, humbly accepting the enormous gains in Real Estate that such a charity mission necessitates (but only until such times as it can be re-entrusted to the reformed savages). In short, ripping land away from the savage mirrors itself in the limb-tearing savage, where one ripoff claims superiority over another: the cannibal becomes the "modern" foil to the andro-euro-fantasy  that underwrites modernity."We" also discuss the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, where we find Minski, the wholly-depraved "white cannibal," who holds on to the virtue of hospitality so tightly that he squeezes out its vicious underbelly. What is absolute hospitality in the case of the cannibal?  What does it mean to be a "white cannibal" (i.e. a cannibal who legitimately owns Real Estate)? Is it ok to play with your food? Serious stuff over here.Another theme that came up and refused to go down was  how cannibalism originally seems to be a homo-social activity, a transaction between men that carries meaning (like the incorporation of a defeated enemy). We left this strand hanging because we noticed that placing the burden of a civilizing foil on a taboo against maneating, begs to question what happened to the (supposedly central) taboo of 'civilization,' namely the sexual one (incest). Next time we plan to come back to this strand.Stars abused this time around: Beast and Sovereign; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD (a bit, something about the Eucharist and why the real Jesus didn't ask to be eaten after death).

Welcome back dear listener!5 Star Tossers grudgingly presents: Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice! And boy do the grudges flow in this one: Marx, Jew, Woman, Lacan... even Peggy Kamuf and Beyoncé were pretty miffed by the end there. Capitalism is of course (grudgingly) on the table, since both place and time are almost unanimously hailed as the cradle of global capitalism. But Christianity too, insofar as the play deals in the lives, loves, hatreds and pains of those that lived-out these realities in the context of Renaissance Europe (that just recently discovered Protestantism). The Jew -- by a necessity not of his making -- occupies an important structural support for the entire edifice as a money lender for expensive,  trust-unto-God's-mercy Capitalist ventures that involve Europe's colonial plundering of the rest of the world. The need for usury, for someone to bear the actual burden of risk, is prevalent, but no less "spiritually" reviled for it; perhaps even more.As you can see (notwithstanding Andrew's totally phoning-in the summary) this one was less dumb than the  last one!(you should really ask yourselves who is writing these blurbs at this point)..Jake shows how Shakespeare, in his subtle brilliance, calls upon the agency of the merchant and muses about the spirit of mercy, and how -- not coincidentally, if near-obliviously -- the two words come from a single etymological source. Alicia for her part spies a pervert in Shylock's insistence on the Letter of the Law (refusing the fantasy of "mercantile mercy"). Sagi wants to ossify everything, as per usual, in Jewish Law, and foreground how Christianity is only able to sustain its fantasy through foreclosing upon it, a denial of real-world stakes (and suffering) that underwrites Shylock's insistence on the flesh. We all agreed that the flesh in this case represents the real, a remainder of the  Christian-Capitalist "mercy-fantasy" that sticks in its throat ; something irreversible, that, unlike money, cannot be redeemed or reconciled.Put your flesh where your mouth is, mothafucka'! Then you'll see how easy you had it when it was just "money"...There were many more strands that our attentive listener can pull on, like the place and role of women in the play (and in masculine structures of property and power, like Dowry and Marriage); the use of "fair" and its white-Christian "implications" (or, as Sagi puts it, an axiom), where the Jew's demand for fairness is never as "fair" (or as felicitous) as the Christian man's; or the vagaries of Christian "fraternity," as the love between Antonio and Bassanio is shown -- again with subtle brilliance -- to be the strongest love in the play (and the world it takes place in). And there's also the origin story for this podcast, and our podcast in general...So we hope you forgive the length of this one which is almost 2 hours long.Stars that were tossed include: Marx Grudge; Beast and Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; and of course WWJD. Plus tard, Lyotard...

We have a really special episode for you today. Sagi has been temporarily banished, and we replaced him with the absolutely brilliant Alicia. Our cultural object this time around looks at the way Zoomers (Gen Z) relate to to sex. Some people claim they are not having enough of it, and some Zoomers claim that sex scenes in movies are non-consensual invasions of their innocence. Throughout the episode, we assert the impossibility of treating sex as an act without boundaries, transgression, and intrusion.Alicia wrote an entire dissertation, or at the very least an entire chapter, on this topic--and she argues that the new moralization around the prevalence of non-consensual sex has created its very own object: sexless sex. According to her, this sexless sex is even more transgressive and violent than the sex being condemned by the moral outrage.You really need to listen to this episode to catch all the nuances of this discussion!

We are back this week with a barage of Freudian theories and crisp, clean-sounding microphones! We discuss the movie "The Menu "from the vantage point of Freud's structural metapsychology and his diagnostic distinctions between hysteric and obsessive. For those who want a refresher on the relation between Id, Superego, and Ego, speed ahead to about 1:12. Andrew gives a wonderful summary of the obsessive's desire to become pure object and reduce everything to shit. And Sagi, winning for himself the lines of the title, offers a theory on why all the women in the movie decide to eat the suspicious looking foam dish called Man's Folly.Yes, begrudgingly, there is some Marx here. Our outro includes each of our experiences in the service industry. Sagi takes off his shirt.

Hello listener, and welcome!This episode got a little bit out of hand. Treating of the MCU's metaphysical maneuvering, we had to go deep into the bad air of ressentiment... Availing ourselves to Nietzsche, which sounds reasonable, had unfortunately gone to Sagi's head, who proceeded to channel the poor moustached genius throughout. And then a hammer became involved... Unfortunate.We are reverse-engineering perhaps the most cathartic moment of the MCU (phase 3 at least) -- where, in Avengers: Endgame, Captain America finally wields Thor's hammer, Mjolnir  -- and hopefully ruin it for everybody. We see a textbook example of Monotheistic ressentiment/slave-morality, whewre the symbol of pagan power undergoes, like Thor, a systematic humiliation, an infection, as a way  to prepare it to be "aufgehoben" into a Monotheistic value-system. The disease has two foci of corruption: for one, it is now tied to will rather than only the act; in the myths, Thor's hammer was indeed a boomerang, but could not be "summoned" -- by "force" of will -- like a Jedi does a lightsaber. Second, after Odin strips Thor of his power (for doing exactly what original Thor would do), he infects the hammer, and Thor's power, with  a western category of 'worth,' which then leads Thor on a journey where he learns to think like the weak, to alienate himself from his home and people so as to learn that "all life matters"...So by the time Captain America -- America's pure-of-heart, a-sexual, fight-for-justice eugenics experiment/prototype (but not a Nazi!) -- wields Mjolnir, the systematic usurpation of pagan power/valuation is complete, with no remainder. This is not new, but an old tradition, I daresay the 'western' tradition, at least since Thomas Aquinas. And the catharsis of the moment proves this fantasy is still lodged deep in the western psyche.Of course there's a lot more to unpack here, but I don't want to ruin it for you; tune-in, dear masochist! Hear Jake fail miserably at a Zizek accent! Empathize with Jack's PTSD (after being subjected to an Avengers amusement park)! Be edified by Andrew's lifelong crusade on homophobia! Fun for the whole family!!The stars that deigned to be tossed this time were, for the most part: What  Would Jesus Do; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; and Beast and Sovereign.

Perhaps geared to the most niche part of our listener, in this episode we discuss the bruising and celebrated video game stylings of the company From Software and its auteur creative designer Hidetaka Miyazaki. Jesus returns for the proceedings! Specifically, we discuss the moral imperative YouTubers praise in games such as Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls I, II, III. These games are fucking hard, and there is no way to change the difficulty level. But that's just the kind of pedagogy that turns you into a real man, the superego of death, so to speak. We do have one hardcore gamer amongst us, Jake. Is he a pervert or a Christian slave in his semi-joyous frustration with these games? Yes, Pervs R' Us never travels far. And in this episode we talk about the way desire exists not in spite of but because of prohibition. La parole du père est absolue. Andrew is back, and he's a regular now. Enjoy!!

Why can't we all just side with one another in the pain of the signifier?Hello again listener! From the flu-ish depths comes at you an almost  contagion-free installment of the Tossers, this time dedicated to Merriam-Webster's 2022 'Word of the Year': Gaslighting. We also have a first-time guest, Andrew, a master summarizer of whom we are still in awe.We introduce the term through a rough semantic history, from its humble beginnings to its humiliating present. We tried to watch the 1944 movie adaptation of  the play 'Gaslighting' (1938), which gave its name to the word. Sagi's delicate sensibilities didn't allow him past the halfway point. We can't all be heroes.Appearing both in public and intimate discourse, gaslighting reveals the fragile, not to say spurious role of a postulated interest/advantage by its perpetrator; something towards which the word devolved from its original meaning, which necessitated a lapse of time and precluded a lapse of reason. We see that the sexual relation is in a constant gaslighting state, and that the accusation proceeds to attack that very state... As Jake notes early on: 'gaslighting' in 'The Bachelor'-type miasmas often devolves to the "Let me do me" dancing-partner of the idiocy "you do you." Another route we tried to take was that of a purloined letter, the Poe story and Lacan-Derrida debate concerning the role of the "letter" as a medium of meaning, where the meaning remains hidden and yet somehow still acts upon the world by virtue of its marked absence(/lack/castration). The letter in Poe's story, as the signifier in (post-)structural linguistics,  proceeds by detours. Indeed not sooner does it come up that we take a detour away from it. Luckily, whoever pitched this idea must agree a priori that the letter/discussion arrived at its destination, since it always does that anyway... There are still some good Lacanian angles on the functioning of language with us desiring animals (the 'primacy of the signifier'  and the 'name of the father' in Lacanese).We also briefly discuss Trump and his 'gaslighting'; an accusation that collapses under the scrutiny of those that take great pleasure in "exposing" his "gaslighting machinations," and those that not only know, indeed expect him to make brazen, almost proud denials/lies (in the name of a worldview they hold like a middle-finger to the other group).So much for the uninteresting stuff. If you wanna hear the other stuff then you have to find an excuse to listen. Like a pebble, it loses its luster out of its original context.Stars on this one: Pervs R' Us and Beast And Sovereign

In this episode we discuss the new horror film Barbarian. Marx Grudge returns as we think about the horrors of private property, specifically the home and real estate. We reference a blog post by the scholar Jason Read to follow this track, while trying our best to tie the thread of property relations to he other thread that runs through the movie: sexual difference and its constituent violence. These threads did not come together so neatly, maybe that's because Freud has a Marx Grudge just like we do. But at some point we hypothesized that the origin story of the private home requires an act of sexual assualt.

Hello faithful listener! This Tossers episode tries to air-out the particularly pungent elements in the bad-air Ressentiment of 'Inceldom.' The incel, in our approach, may indicate the site of real pain and therefore allow insight for the very real crisis of heterosexual masculinity, its burning need of transvaluing behaviors that society can no longer abide.  Certainly not for the faint of heart, or the trigger-happy. Now just pop a red pill and listenWe talk about the fantasy of authentic, non-supplemental sex, and how the incel's concentric spirals -- whether psychotic or melancholic (we couldn't decide) -- may be a signal-flare of a lack that bedevils masculinity and intra-masculine networks or discourses. Why is it so important for incels to legalize rape? Why do they never go on raping-sprees? (Yes, we hold that misogyny is too broad of a term to understand the problem here; the Nietzschean nostril aims to do justice to the variety of toxicities therein). Is it because powerful men still gatekeep the "Stacys" of the western world?Our Mister "Rodgers" (the 's' was added so pervasively in the recording, I just decided to rename him) starts by seeking the validation of men, with women being used (resentfully) as the tool of this validation. Why was he not enough for them? (The bro-code takes a sinister turn here..) With Rodgres we also (re-)discover that the Capitalist - specifically American - ideology has lied, that the money he had was not enough. Capitalism embodies, in order to consume,  all other value-giving discourses, so that  at the end we are left with the nihilism of death, of the undisputable fact, the psychosis of absolute certainty (Eugenics plays an exorbitant role there). What else is left when all of us are exploitable whores?Main Stars in this one are: Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; Pervs R' Us; and some What Would Jesus Do.

They say that one of the high-society ladies that was familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his character) said, after he died, that he was an intriguing madman. In this episode, we delve head first into Nathan Fielder's foldy-folds, whether torture chambers, traps, or some choice slices of life (if you look there you can see Nathan's symptom holding the machete).Between the sketch(y) comedy and HBO's NDAs, our discussion seems to oscillate from wondering what makes the joke, to who's made the prop. Jake spies Derrida's metaphysics of presence  over-and-above Nathan's own over-and-above; and Sagi pushes Lyotard's distinction between damage and wrong (or plaintiff and victim) as the more nefarious ethical underpinnings of Nathan's gesture. The silenced price of life being made to work.The Rehearsal was a 6 episode, multilayered fake-shit-show, so forgive us going a bit overboard on running time (2h).Main stars this time around: Pervs R' Us and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais ...okay, and some WWJD (because Sagi, again)* Image from Flickr: State Library Victoria Collections

Once again, we had to shove way too many words into our title, but we swear, we touch on all of these figures in our long awaited return from Summer Break. Cutting into David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future," we append ourselves to Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jacques Derrida's Beast and Sovereign: Seminar I. An overarching question we ask is whether this film can be a strident affirmation of Trans Politics if it stages the growth of new  hormones and new organs without studying their relation to gender. We travel back in time (alongside Derrida) to think about the spectacle of the autopsy, specifically as it relates to the establishment of power and knowledge. Honorable mention goes out to the curiosity of the bureaucrat and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, and his late 19th century experimentations with subcutaneous injections of the fluid from dog and guinea pig testicles. We could have gone on much longer.Databyss Notes Page: https://app.databyss.org/hkmh8nkoqm1lsk/pages/zcdzkf6zwub7gt/crimes-of-the-future

In this episode we discuss the 2011 Quentin Dupieux film Rubber. It's the story of a killer tire. Jake suggested this movie after reading Eugenie Brinkema's affect-breaking book Life-Destroying Diagrams. She is all about the horror of form or the form of horror. The thing is, Sagi and Jack found the movie pointless--but isn't that the point of having a tire (a circle, a hole) be the star of the show? We discuss Brinkema, spectatorship, and general questions about taste on this road trip.Stars: Il Vaut Mieux Lyotard que Jamais

Hello everyone! You're still here?!This podcast we're discussing and dissecting Tiger, a 2021 HBO mini-series about the rise and Fall of Tiger Phallus.. sorry, I mean Tiger Woods. Tiger's superhuman abilities are analyzed from an Oedipus Complex angle, leading us to speculate about how Earl (and his wife) had tweaked its mechanism to create the perfect golfing machine; the kind that plays golf in a manner closer to that of a machine or a person in the throes of a PTSD symptom. Something similar can be said of his "womanizing," another repetition of the/his father (but Jake disagrees, the nerve). The golf club appears as the ultimate magic wand in this unholy alchemy, as we likened it to the phallic wedge which, in one of Lacan's analogies, keeps open the jaws of the crocodile (symbolizing the mother's desire). Of course, in his symptomatic identification with the club, with the game, with the drive(r), Tiger achieves both security and emptiness/alienation.We tried to keep this one civilized, but you know how it is, someone says Freud and then it's just a penis joke away from the Patriarchy swamp...The Stars that were tossed this time were Pervs 'R Us and Beast and Sovereign.

Oh boy. Jack introduced us to To Catch A Predator. So we try to define Perverted Justice, which is the name of the STING company that catches the predators. Jesus makes a cameo, there's some Derrida, and a whole bunch of Americana sanctimony.  We try not to spend too much time imitating Chris Hansen's voice. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

In this slightly longer episode we tackle Gillian Flynn's and David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), as a heteronormative woman's violent breakaway from a 'type' that she feels pulled towards in her marriage - unusual, impolite, homicidal, spectacular. Channeling Valerie Solanas' Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) - allowing this monstrosity to unfold on its own terms - reveals an inversion to existing 'types' and power dynamics in modern western heteronormative marriages. The male's distance-fantasy, when literally traversed by Amy's monstrosity, exposes many of Solanas' tropes in Amy's "husband" Nick: the masculine flirtation with death, hetero-men's shallow stake in life and experience, their deep-seated yearning for passivity, and, not least, the way all these find encouragement, indeed a "home," in the 'married couple.' Also note Sagi's performative (and constative!) stupidity (in a rare shitshow of a disclaimer that we hope you survive).This episode features the Beast and Sovereign and Pervs R' Us Stars, with some grudging Marx in the margins.https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

We thought to explore various kill-shots in the video arena. Come one come all and listen as serious discussions of Freud's death-drive and Japanese Orientalism devolve into a mayhem of body parts and Semen. We tried to go beyond the pleasure principle, where no man had gone before, but some of us gripped firmly unto the edge and would not release. It all spun out of control Pervs R' Us style. Jake had a blast though. Pun?.. What pun?! https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

Sagi introduces us to the world of scambaiting, where YouTube content creators scam scammers. We discuss the dubious ethics of these scambaiters and compare it to the Hacker Ethos of free information. We defend the honor of the Indian scammers who get scammed and the Grandmas who these scambaiters often pretend to be.  We also fess up about some scams we have fallen for.  There's lots of Marx Grudge and Beast and Sovereign here, Enjoy!https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

In this glorious installment we will be continuing our actor/acting thematic, this time thinking of Franz Kafka's 1922 short story Ein Hungerkünstler. Slog along as we  tarry a bit over the slim, somewhat Marxist contribution of the character's Pathos with regards to the reactionary-soporific functions of the Theater.  But then, rejoice with the tragic overabundance of life, as we  broach the fracking of Mount Sinai, interrogate false prophets of Dionysian intoxication, and Babel the shiznit out of trickless magicians and their monological art. The two stars being tossed (upon) today are "What Would Jesus Do" and "Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais".https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

The Tossers obsess over the final scene of a Seinfeld episode (Season 6, Episode 23), where an actor bombs on stage and begs the audience to let her start again. Why, we wonder, is it impossible for her to start again? Why is the audience so cruel? Maybe she can start again? Along the way, we discuss Shakespeare, Hannah Gadsby, Aristotle's Catharsis, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Nietzsche's fear that actors now rule the world. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

5 Star Tossers throw up their first video game toss, focusing on Bioshock Infinite, the 3rd installation of the Bioshock series. They debate whether there's racism in the way the Black uprising is portrayed. They also get lost in the pleasure they take in gameplay, wondering whether a video game's story is all that important. https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9

Tossers turn to Julia Kristeva's abject to think about how repellant Megan Fox actually is in the 2009 film Jennifer's Body. Does she upset the hipster male gaze of the band Low Shoulder, or does she confirm its innermost secret? We also reference the SNL clip called The Librarian with Margot Robbie.https://app.databyss.org/5-star-tossers-bj5h8glrb4wnlt/pages/i7bflkbyk2dmg9