Beautiful Losers

Hello and welcome to episode 23!Apologies for the delay in this episode. We have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes and are preparing for some really special episodes in the future. More on that soon, but now this:We offer a reading of another piece of writing by Jacques Derrida, namely his landmark essay: Plato’s Pharmacy. This is one of those essays that if you read at just the right time in your life, you’ll never be the same again. In a few short pages Derrida unwinds and unravels the entire project of western philosophy and reveals what is really at the root of everything. Just as deft as his downward movement is his upward ascendency into a completely new frame of thinking. Derrida offers a reading of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and asks us to consider the relationship between philosophy and sophistry and between ideas and language. Most of us have some idea of what the philosophers were up to. The sophists were iconoclastic, gunslinging thinkers that would teach anyone how to argue any point…for a price. Plato’s Socrates looks down on sophists because they don’t love wisdom for the sake of wisdom; they’re too practical. They’re the classic antecedent to the lawyer. But we shouldn’t turn our nose up at the sophists. They played a tremendously democratic function in 5th century Athens. They believed that anyone could learn how to think. Before them knowledge of the good was thought to be a product of bloodlines. Virtue was inherited, not taught.Derrida ruminates on the tension between philosophy (pure rationality) and sophistry (pure rhetorical instrumentality) through the concept of the “pharmakon” a word that refers to both the cure for a poison and the poison itself. The pharmakon for philosophy is language, specifically sophistry. Sophistry is both the tool that allows one to practice philosophy, but it is also the poison that kills it. While on the one hand Plato’s philosophy seeks to distinguish itself from sophistry, it cannot do so without relying on the vary tactics of sophistry, namely rhetoric. Socrates would like us to believe that his arguments are grounded in pure reason, but the reality is that the arguments are simply expertly argued through his deft use of rhetoric.This essay offers one way to understand why people like myself, Alex, and Maria chose to study literature instead of philosophy. One of the great discoveries of 20th century thought — a consequence of structuralism — is what’s known as “the linguistic turn,” the realization that thinking cannot be separated from its medium. In most cases this means language or writing or communication. Until you have a robust theory of language, writing, speaking, and communication, you cannot understand the operations of thought, expression, meaning, and intention. This is why philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and others begin to look more like historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists. We hope you enjoy this discussion and we’re looking forward to launching from this episode into a more accessible and engaging realm of cultural studies and analysis.Stay beautiful, your losers Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi and welcome to episode 22: discussing Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the SovereignAlex is on his annual pilgrimage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but while he’s away our good friend and former colleague Maria joins us. Maria was with us during that fated Shakespeare and Sovereignty seminar that shaped so much of our intellectual formation during graduate school. Maria is another essential member of this mosaic of intellectuals that were in and around Houston a decade ago. In many ways Maria has been a silent partner from this show’s inception. I began talking with Maria about the show in early March and her feedback and perspective has shaped the show in countless ways. Now that we have a new intellectual project and purpose for the show, it’s fitting that we can formally integrate Maria into the fabric of this project.Having Maria on also provides another vantage point to revisit the intellectual culture that made our Shakespeare seminar so great, and also invites us to reflect on the nature of seminar discussions in general. In many ways this show is our attempt to capture a little bit of the energy that can spark during a great seminar discussion. At their best seminars provide occasion to build knowledge in real time and can train a certain kind of intellectual and rhetorical endurance. When the right pieces come together a seminar can become a crucible to forge a high performance team. This seminar was one such crucible and it is for this reason that we continue to talk about it nearly a decade after it was held. It’s fitting that for Maria’s first episode we go back to one of those texts that shaped our thinking back then. This week we discussed Jacques Derrida’s first lecture from his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign.This lecture comes from the end of Derrida’s career, just months after the September 11 attacks. Derrida is turning the entire arc of his career and his intellectual project to understand the interval between the attack and the response. Today, almost 20 years into wars that seem to have no clear end, the noise of international conflict is merely a nagging hum. For Derrida, the moment provided occasion to ask questions about the nature of politics and war itself. This episode provides us an opportunity to introduce the work of Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism more broadly. Derrida is one of the boogey-men of poststructuralist theory. Often read, always misunderstood. The reasons for this are myriad and byzantine. In an effort to demystify some of the aura that surround’s Derrida’s work, we approach Derrida in the same way that he approaches his subjects: slowly, methodically, carefully. Rather than jump to the conclusions, let’s see if we can build the arguments and test them along the way. And so we begin our discussion of post structuralism by outlining a set of questions pertaining to knowledge, the use and purpose of knowledge, and how it relates to language and perception. If Derrida’s work broadly belongs to a movement of thought known as post-structuralism, then what was structuralism? And why do we need to move beyond it? Structuralism as an intellectual movement provides a means of interpreting cognition, culture, culture, and behavior based on a system of internal relationships. The word “tree” is a conflux of word and the image that it produces in your mind. Furthermore, the word itself is only meaningful within the context of the English language. Structuralism asserts an essential quality to the system itself, but grants that the specific set of signs is arbitrary. Different languages have different words for tree, and in fact the pronunciation and spelling of words evolves over time into completely new languages. In this way there is nothing “essential” about the word tree.One of the most important concepts to emerge from structuralism is the binary. Binaries have existed long before structuralism, but in structuralism you have a focused use of the binary as a vehicle for meaning. One trajectory of this binary-based thinking is computing and binary codes. One a seemingly different (although not really) axis you have something like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and all the angels and demons that inhabits his Mythos. The most common mistake that casual critics and thinkers make is to assert that the work of post-structuralism exists to undermine or invalidate the arguments of structuralism. If that was the primary task of this work, then we ought to simply become Platonists or religious zealots. The post-structuralists take seriously the arguments of structuralism, but they go deeper into them. What is the true nature of the binary relationship. Are binaries really opposites? What makes a binary, a binary? What is the structure of structure itself? Derrida’s writing is so difficult because it’s asking questions that rarely, if ever are asked. In fact, the questions themselves are so foundational to the way that we think that we hardly even recognize them as such. Although Derrida was trained as a philosopher and much of his work engages with philosophical texts, his intellectual work is much more in line with literary critics. Similar to how we framed Heidegger before him, Derrida accepts a premise that a certain tradition of philosophical work has ended and that the labor of intellectual practice must continue within a discourse that considers philosophy, culture, history, literature, expression, political theory, theology, media theory; moreover, Derrida insists through his work that the only method fit to work in this multidiscursive and polysemous landscape is close-reading or textual explication. The Beast and Sovereign are two different images of political power. They appear mirrored, in the sense that they are equal and opposite. The sovereign is the king or the head of state; the beast is the rogue state or the terrorist. Derrida observes that these two figures are united in their existence outside of the law. Each acts and moves in a way that no one else in a society can mimic. From this initial Carl Schmidt inspired observation comes a careful reexamination of the binary relationship between sovereigns and beasts. Derrida is careful to point out that the two are not the same, but they each rely on each other in a number of essential ways. You cannot have sovereigns without beasts, you cannot have beasts without sovereigns. The Take-AwayStarting with this episode, we’re going to try and highlight one core idea that emerges from the text. Our take-away this week comes late in the seminar. Derrida asks:“How can we tell the difference between a civil war, and a war in general?”The insight here is that the justification for war is always a mask that hides the fact that every war is a way against man. Or put another way, every act of violence is an act against ourself. This observation is both literal and figurative. Literal in the sense that war involves killing people and figurative that the modern concept of the nation state is built upon the metaphor of a living, rational being (according to Hobbes’ Leviathan). If there is a sense of “mankind,” then we can think of every war as a civil war: to wage war is to kill ourselves. The bonds that we use to distinguish ourselves from one another (nation, religion, creed) are arbitrary when cast against this more fundamental truth. This core insight strikes at the very beginning of written culture. The Abrahamic religions teach that violence begets violence. If this is true, then isn’t the outcome of every war more war? More contemporary thinkers like Nietzsche drew upon this insight in order to provide a different way of understanding morality, namely as a system of vengeance that one generation or culture enacts on a former oppressor. The cycle of oppressed to oppressor appears endless. Against this eternal recurrence Derrida dares to imagine the possible ways that one could break the cycle. However, the cycle cannot be broken until we understand the nature of the cycle itself. The take-away this week is not only about the nature of war, but the about the nature of the mask that hides the truth of violence from us. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

21. Building a better self: Demystifying stoic anthropotechnics with Erik DavisWelcome to Episode 21! We have a new website: www.beautifulloserspodcast.com Currently the site is a page to direct you to either the substack or your preferred podcast player. More coming soon. We also debuted our new theme song. Written and performed by Zach Nichols. We’ll discuss the theme in greater depth in a future episode. Today’s episode revisits the themes from episode 14, where we discussed media, masculinity, and self-help culture in the context of theories of fascism and totalitarianism.We’re diving into a specific constellation of thinking around stoic philosophy, mindfulness, self-help, and contemporary culture. Why is an ancient philosophy like stoicism suddenly popular today? Why is it often talked about in context with vaguely eastern practices of mindfulness? How do all of these things relate to an emergent industry of self-help and self-care?We are dissatisfied with the materialist critiques that simply point out the ways that these practices are often schemes to make money—though the critiques themselves are undeniable. These entrepreneurs often have branded and sponsored content, apps, and other pay-to-play lifestyle gear to help you detach yourself from the material world. Occasionally these schemes are especially malicious, like with the example of the MLM-Cult NXIVM, as documented in the HBO documentary series The Vow. Cultish marketing schemes aside, it is more often the case that they’re the intellectual and commercial products of marketing entrepreneurs as amateur philosopher, trying to engage with ancient philosophy in a way to help improve the lives of people today. Our dissatisfaction with the straight-line materialist critique stems from our own experiences. These practices are useful. They do yield positive, objective benefits. More important, they are valuable systems of knowledge, these are legitimate systems of thought that merit consideration and deliberation. As is often the case on Beautiful Losers, we find ourselves with a classic baby and bathwater situation. To help us chart a course through this constellation we have Erik Davis, who most recently authored High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Erik is more than deft thinker and superb writer: he is our friend. Although we hail from different discursive traditions, we share certain sensibilities and foundational insights that cut across discipline, genre, and historical period. Erik is another member of this small intellectual enclave that existed in Houston, Texas in the second decade of the aughts. It’s always a pleasure for us to bring members of that community back together, if only to capture a small fragment of the intellectual curiosity and geniality that shaped our advanced degrees. For this discussion we read a lot of stuff. Contemporary blogs on stoicism and mindfulness along with ancient stoic texts, we also looked at more popular and contemporary critiques of happiness culture. As a sort of “meta text” to organize all of these ideas we used Peter Sloterdijk’s book You Must Change Your Life. At the risk of becoming the official Sloterdijk podcast, we went to this text because Sloterdijk offers something akin to a “systems theory” account of spiritual practice. He argues that one of the key distinctions for the human is our ability to “have a practice” and he uses the word “anthropotechnic” to define the particular complexes of external and internal actions. A person in prayer may bow his head and fold his hands while he simultaneously directing his internal thoughts toward the divine; a soccer player taking a penalty kick empties her mind of all distractions and becomes completely focused on visualizing her immanent physical actions. These anthropotechnic complexes can result in what Sloterdijk describes as a “vertical tension” a general sense of a higher level of being. In religious contexts this is understood as communion with the divine, in sport this is getting “in the zone.” According to Sloterdijk’s account, it’s the act of the practices themselves that produce the vertical tension, not that the practices themselves reveal a hidden world.For Sloterdijk, to be a human is to have these practices, we cannot but be a creature that practices. It’s for this reason — our permanent state of having a practice — that something like religion will never go away. On the question of religion, Sloterdijk’s argument comes from two directions: on the one hand he clearly shows how no amount education, enlightenment, “progress” will eliminate religion from culture, while on the other hand he reduces the metaphysics of religious experience to a functionalist relationship between practices and perceptions.The reason that we lean on Sloterdijk is because we want to produce a very nuanced critique of our subject, but in order to do that we need to be able to distinguish between practices, behaviors, feelings, meanings, interpretations, and metaphysical reality. Often what frustrates us is how one of these terms is mean to justify or explain another term. For some, the feeling of transcendence reveals that a transcendent reality exists. Sloterdijk’s book suggests a much more simple interpretation: what if the complex of activity you practice has as consequence the feeling of transcendence? What stoicism and mindfulness practice reveals is that their functionalist nature doesn’t diminish or invalidate the experience itself. Like Sloterdijk, we don’t make this point in order to dismiss the category of truth, rather our purpose is to reconstitute these ideas within the context of a more grounded understanding of what these experiences actually are.Stoicism is a powerful discourse. It teaches a set of practices that provide very real and tangible techniques for self-preservation. Principles like the dichotomy of control help you understand the difference between things you can control and things you can’t control. This principle is taken up in myriad therapeutic ways, from the serenity prayer in 12 step programs to founding principles in cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT). Techniques like these help buoy the self and help people get through tough times. There’s a reason that the caricature of the stoic is a hard man with a stiff upper lip: these techniques merge nicely within a broader concept of masculinity. But for those of us that are committed to a more porous notion of subjectivity, collective organization, and materialist outcomes, what does stoicism offer? The paradox comes into focus when thinking about the self. Stoicism today is inflected with contemporary notions of the self. So the project of boundaries and control become gamefied: rather than passively accepting that which we can’t control, we’re encouraged (incentivized) to expand our domain of control in specific, technical ways. It’s from that central tension that our conversation achieved lift-off. As has often been the case with our advanced theory episodes: We seek to offer the critique, and then critique the critique. With someone like Erik on board, we also tried to go one level further: to critique the critique of the critique. Or in other words: can we disassemble the object, put it back together differently, take it apart again in a different way, and put it back together again? We’ll let you be the judge the this heady little experiment. Stay beautiful, losers Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

For episode 20 we decided to step back and consider where we are and where we’re going. We started this show early in the year when we were both adapting to the economic and cultural conditions of the pandemic. The show was born out of our friendship and a decade of conversations about systems of cultural meaning. We wanted to present the experience of being a PhD student and researcher in the humanities in a more accessible format. At the same time, we wanted to contribute a more nuanced and elevated level of discourse into the public sphere. That project still continues. Over the last twenty episodes we’ve had some great guests, incredible conversations, and captured a few moments of original thinking. We continue to refine our voice and style and we continue to search for that perfect level of complex discourse. Our goal is to push the boundaries of status quo cultural intelligentsia, but not to the point of rupture. In other words, we want our listeners to be engaged, uncomfortable, but not alienated and confused. We hope that our episodes leave the listener with a mental sweat, a rush of endorphins, and a certain level of exhaustion that primes the intellectual muscles for growth. Ours is not an easy listening show; it’s for people that want to push their powers of critical thinking to another level. This is a lofty goal and our commitment to our own intellectual integrity may mean that the project itself is doomed to fail. But we take our lessons from Samuel Beckett, who built an epistemology of failure across plays and novels: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” His is the kind of radical finitude that your hosts fully endorse. It’s in the pursuit of this ever-failing project that we discovered a new intellectual project: to rediscover the humanities. Practically this means that we intend to use the show as an intellectual anchor point for an ecosystem of thinking, writing, speaking, and engaging with the world around us. From here on out, the podcast will be where our most raw ideas begin to work themselves out. Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to refine these ideas in conversations with guests and with each other. For the casual listener, nothing will really change. We believe that our new approach will bring in more listeners and we look forward to growing our community in a deliberate way. We’re excited to engage with listeners and excited to direct our free form exploration of ideas toward more specific ends.From a project perspective, two directions emerge from this repositioning. First, there is the project of the humanities as an institutional formation. Our stories are very much bound up with a postwar institutionalization of humanities departments. Today, that institution is in peril, but although many have observed how universities are shuttering their formal engagement with the humanities, the discourse of the humanities has never been more broadly received in culture, business, and politics than it is today. Accounting for these diametrically opposed tendencies is critical to understanding the role and future of the humanities as a discursive formation. In parallel to this project is what we might call the “applied humanities,” a term that describes our desire to demonstrate the “real world” value of a humanities education. In German these studies are literally called “spirit-sciences” (Geistwissenschaft); in business they are sometimes referred to as “soft skills.” Both terms reveal and obfuscate the truth of these analytical powers. Both terms encompass the idea that the humanities train you to communicate the uncommunicable. Another way to think of this is as a “metadiscourse”—a language that reveals the ways that language and communication work. The most succinct way to frame our renewed vision for the podcast came in the episode itself: We seek to offer a rich alternative to the algorithmic wasteland. In a practical sense, what we’re driving at is the ability to make distinctions. For us, the practical foundation of all knowledge is found in the distinction. In a moment of history where quantitative, statistical, and program-based knowledge is prized above all others, we offer an alternative system of knowledge—modes of distinction—that unlock areas of discourse that these other modes can’t access. These are new tools for the analytical toolkit and what we offer is not only a new set of tools to use, it’s also a better and more informed way to know what each tool actually does. This is all to say that we’ve got big plans for the podcast. Our community today is small, but we believe that over the next 12 months we will add many new fellow travelers to our ranks. We welcome everyone and we’re honored that you want to join us on this journey. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Our discussion this week is the film A Hidden Life. Enjoy the show and please rate and review us on Apple podcasts :) Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to Beautiful Losers!This week we talk with Professor Judith Roof about her book What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016). Judith has been at the vanguard of feminism, gender, sexuality, and theory since her first book A Lure of Knowledge (1993), but Judith’s history with feminism and theory begins during her time as a student of The Ohio State University in the 1970s. Judith brings a first-person, historical perspective to contemporary discussions about gender and identity. While her books work within a specific tradition of poststructuralist, psychoanalytic feminism, she adds to that body of work an innovative, feminist approach to history, law, biology, genetics, quantum physics, and aesthetics. Her landmark study The Poetics of DNA offers one of the most important critiques of science and society in the 20th century. We invited Judith onto the show to discuss three questions: 1) What is the sex/gender distinction? 2) Why is it so important in the history of feminist identity politics and what does it mean that it has collapsed? And what is identity anyway?These questions opened up into a rich discussion that covered the contemporary intellectual trajectories of feminism, psychoanalysis, and academically informed political movements.Although neither of us have formally engaged with questions of gender in our own scholarly work, Judith’s rigorous yet playful and inventive approach to scholarly inquiry impacted our intellectual projects and preoccupations for the better. It is no small thing to say that we would not be the critical thinkers we are today without the mentorship and friendship of Judith Roof.Sometimes we like to go long in these introductions in order to frame out specific arguments or ideas. For this episode, we simply encourage you to listen and enjoy a discussion with one of our favorite people.Stay Beautiful, Losers! Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Hi and welcome to Episode 17! Sometimes an essay changes your life. This week we discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s 1999 essay “Rules for the Human Zoo.” We have individually spent a decade in thought with this essay. Its gifts are endless. But before we launch into the essay, we take a small detour to Flavortown. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

On 5 August 2020 we lost the French media theorist Bernard Stiegler. For this episode we wanted to introduce a few themes from Stiegler’s work and reflect on his continuing value today.  Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Hi and welcome to episode 15 of Beautiful Losers! This week we discuss NATURE with guest Professor Derek Woods. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Hi! And Welcome to Beautiful Losers Episode 14: Fascism! But first some housekeeping. Please rate and review us on Apple’s Podcast App. We’re making a push to become a top 15 philosophy podcast, but we need your help. Rate, review, and tell your friends to rate and review us as well. We can beat the algorithm together! Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Episode 13 is in conversation with the poet Roger Reeves. We discuss many topics, including his recent essay in the Yale Review called "The Uses of Memory." Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Hi, and Welcome to Episode 12 of Beautiful Losers: Melancholy! This episode was delayed slightly due to technical issues, apologies. A small bit of housekeeping: Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. High ratings help raise the profile of the show. We’re making a push to crack into the upper echelons of the philosophy podcast community, but we need your help. And now back to our episode…“One pristine example of the philosophical struggle for presentation is melancholy, a word whose presence can be traced to the inauguration of thought. Melancholy’s meanings extend from the personal to the collective, from body to soul, and from pathology to inclination. Melancholy has always been marked by acute contradictions in its depiction, invoking an expansive array of meanings: it encompasses positive, creative facets— such as depth, creativity, and bursts of genius—as well as negative qualities—including gloominess, despondency, and isolation. The history of the term is saturated with different and at times conflicting articulations that, paradoxically, seem to consistently point to more or less the same set of features. Notions of closure, contemplation, loss, passivity, sloth, and genius have always been linked to melancholy in one version or another, referring to body or soul and vice versa.” -Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy The most dogged question that follows melancholia is “what is melancholy?” Sigmund Freud framed the concept as a perverse form of mourning. Whereas the mourner mourns something lost - like a loved one - as part of a healthy grieving process, the melancholic mourns something that she never possessed to begin with. The distinction between mourning a lost object versus mourning an imaginary object is the key difference. The mourner can eventually learn to let go. The melancholic cannot let go, because there was nothing to hold on to in the first place; in fact, the melancholic holds onto this loss to the point of internalization. The imaginary loss becomes a part of them. The melancholic thus exists in a permanent state of loss, a kind of loss that itself becomes its own kind of object or obsession. Imagine a person who desperately holds onto a memory or an idealized memory of the past they can’t let go of the past because the idealized memory never existed—a popular person from High School, 20 years after graduation, still trying to relive the old glory days. It’s a fantasy structure.We begin with this psychoanalytic perspective because it distills some of melancholy’s key themes: loss and memory, reality and fantasy, knowledge and nostalgia.Walter Benjamin’s work on melancholy is conceptually difficult and situated within a deep study of Baroque-era German plays. These barriers to entry ward off many readers, but intrepid readers get to enjoy one of modernity’s greatest meditations on the nature of melancholy. Benjamin’s work speaks to our present moment in a very profound way. The Baroque era that he wrote about was in a period of recovery from the 30-Years War. A world-historic event of violence and suffering on the same level as the American Civil War and WWI. Benjamin, writing in the wake of WWI, explores the baroque period in an effort to understand his own post-war moment. For readers today, in the wake of endless wars overseas, financial collapse, and global pandemics, Benjamin’s study appears especially relevant.One key distinction for Benjamin is between forms of knowledge: knowledge from the world and knowledge from books: “The brooder’s knowing and the scholar’s learning are as intimately blended in it as in the men of the Baroque. The Renaissance explores the wide world; the Baroque explores libraries.” The Baroque, as an avatar for melancholy, only gains access to knowledge through texts, whereas earlier ages gained knowledge through empirical exploration. Benjamin observes that our idea of what counts and knowledge and the knowable changes when the primary metaphor for knowledge becomes the text itself. It’s no accident that his period of study follows in the wake of the reformation, a time when protestants championed the value of the literary to empower people to read the Bible, as opposed to the Catholic tradition of having the Bible read aloud (in Latin) to largely illiterate masses. Benjamin’s point is not that we ought to return to a pre-literate society, instead he offers a pointed account of how the scope of knowledge, language, literature, society, and politics change in this moment. These are the changes that define modernity: the discourse of knowledge becomes the discourse of risk management and power brokering. The “heroic” figures that arise from this age are either melancholic scholars (not sages) or political advisors (not kings) or military strategists (not warriors)—it’s in this moment that Benjamin reveals that the primary dramatic subjects are no longer kings and queens, but instead advisors who manipulate the systems of power offstage. The age of melancholy delivers unto the world A Game of Thrones.Benjamin’s melancholic subject is burdened with knowledge. Their knowledge is twofold. First, they learn of the world and its problems, and then they learn that they and the systems of power are not up to the task of fixing the world. The gap between these two domains of knowledge creates the emblematic form of sadness that colors the melancholic. This melancholic subject is also more committed to ideas than to people or individuals. In this sense the melancholic is another version of The Beautiful Loser. The advisors to the king are not loyal to the king, they are loyal to an idea of the “the kingdom.”“For those who dug deeper saw themselves interposed in existence as in a rubble field of half-completed, inauthentic actions. Life itself lashed out against this. Deeply it feels that it is not there merely to be devalued by faith.” Benjamin, writing in a time of national socialism, would have observed the early stirrings of nationalism, but this was a form of nationalism that refused to recognize the people of Germany, instead preferring an idealized form of the “the Aryan.” This is the irony and the tragedy of the melancholic subject. Their idealism can be committed toward some kind of utopian future, but it comes at the cost of actual people. It sees the nation as an unrealized potential, but remains blind to the fact that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individual actors, all with diverse and disparate interests.We also look at Wendy Brown, whose essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” offers a sharp critique of the left under the aegis of melancholy. For Brown, the left has become too enamored with its own past. The halcyon days of pre-WWI workers movements and social organization that brought about important reforms and protections for people are now long gone. Those on the left who continue to trumpet these visions of an idealized past that never was fail to understand that the visions of total revolution that drove the New and Old Left can only restrict contemporary and future political imaginaries. Brown’s work partakes of a Foucaultian tradition that wants to dispense with the Marxist theories of power that are top (bourgeoisie) vs down (proletariat). This theory of power envisioned a teleological form of resistance and triumph (the communist revolution) that is incommensurate with the way that power actually works—that is, as the diffuse, micro-level force that Foucault is famous for articulating. The more we hold onto the mottos and visions of total revolution that mobilized the Old and New Lefts, the more we remain behind the ball politically and theoretically. In this way, Brown’s challenge is equal parts unsettling and damning: can any progressive movement call itself progressive if it remains mired in its own past commitments, visions, and slogans? Brown encourages a more imaginary, forward thinking program. Our interest in concepts like melancholy, cynicism, and the beautiful soul betrays our commitment to a phenomenological project, as opposed to an idealistic project. For us, the import of perspective and experience cannot be disentangled from any form of inquiry - be it philosophical, economic, political, or cultural. And so terms and concepts, like melancholy, help us understand and color what it means to be in the world. An idealist approach would focus more on the categories of experience. For example, a utilitarian will develop models on how to maximize human happiness, but the condition of happiness itself is treated as a given. Just as Plato himself treated eudaemonia as the given ideal of human experience. In a very basic sense, the study of melancholy requires own to acknowledge that what drives human action is not simply “the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of displeasure.” If one takes the claim that desire and drive and action are themselves complex subjects, then one must engage more directly and personally with the various dynamics that shape these experiences. Thus, phenomenology.To our listeners committed to idealism: we hear you, we see you. But we find that the most persuasive version of idealism emerges from a pragmatic study of power, interest, and systems. Language philosophy’s ability to separate word from action from meaning from usage is an invaluable tool, especially when it comes to a topic like understanding how the system of media operate. But even so, as the sign of Saturn rises in the west, we ponder these parting words from Walter Benjamin: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But its persevering absorption takes the dead things up into its contemplation in order to save them. The writer concerning whom the following has been transmitted speaks from out of the spirit of melancholy.” Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Hi and welcome to episode 11. This week we continue our engagement with Peter Sloterdijk’s book The Critique of Cynical Reason. We begin the discussion by thinking about cynicism as a comedic practice. What is the role of comedy in political discourse?  Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Hi! Welcome to episode 10. This week we're in conversation with Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.  Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Welcome to episode 9! This week we discuss Peter Sloterdijk’s 1983 opus, The Critique of Cynical Reason.In order to do some justice to the breadth and depth of this work, we are offering two episodes dedicated to this text and its ideas. This first discussion focuses on its big picture themes and intellectual genealogy. Next week, we’ll dive into a more nuanced understanding of cynicism and its sister concept, kynicism. This discussion begins with the intellectual tradition that Sloterdijk is writing within. How does a theory of cynicism engage with the long history of enlightenment thought? We offer a couple of ways to think about how this book speaks to some of its intellectual forbearers, namely Immanuel Kant and Theodore Adorno. Sloterdijk argues that even from the beginning, the enlightenment was a mixed bag of goods and bads. Yes, the scientific method ushered in a new world of commerce, creativity, and class mobility, but it also facilitated systems of alienation and exploitation through logics of quantification and statistical analysis. Cynicism, defined as “enlightened false consciousness,” attends to the ways that this tradition of enlightenment-style thinking has failed. According to a Marxist tradition, ideology operates as a camera obscura that inverts our experience and perception of reality in ways that benefit the most powerful sectors of society. The primary “benefit” is the simple belief that the hierarchical structure of individuals and wealth is “natural.” The purpose of ideology critique is to shine a light on this distortion, offering the benighted (those occupied with “false consciousness”) an opportunity to understand the nature of their oppression and social reality, namely that it is merely the reification of an otherwise arbitrary distribution of capital. This moment of revelation, so the promise goes, is supposed to catalyze social revolution.But what happens when we all understand that we are being duped, but all the same do nothing about it because we are convinced of our powerlessness? This is the figure and condition that Sloterdijk terms “enlightened false consciousness.” Sloterdijk suggests that this is the primary form of thinking and subjectivity today—that is, that we all know we are pawns in a game we cannot control, but have resigned ourselves to this depressing reality. The primary evidence for his position is fact that despite generations of ideological critique, political economy is still largely organized around systems of inequality. His goal is to figure out how to replace this form of cynicism with another, one that is more deeply rooted in the rebellious strain of cynicism found in the Greek figure Diogenes, who Sloterdijk calls a “kynic.”Our initial discussion offers distinctions about different levels of cynicism and cynical reason. On the level of the individual, cynicism may provide a powerful tool of critique and an analysis of power; however, on the level of the institutional, cynicism may reify or justify staid power relationships and systems of injustice. How does a philosophical attitude like cynicism transform under different scales of social organization (from the individual to the institutional)?We also point to ways that cynicism can help us understand some of the major discussions of our particular political moment. This conversation was recorded just as organizations began promoting police policy reforms like “8 Can’t Wait.” We take up these policy suggestions within the context of Sloterdijk’s cynicism in order to show how cynical reason can reveal blindspots in contemporary politics. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now (108 min) | This week we ready Roger Reeves' poem "Domestic Violence." We present the critical methodology of close reading, and ask ourselves how the discipline of literary studies distinguishes itself from other humanities disciplines. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Your beautiful losers consider three articles that either exemplify or interrogate the limit of critical thinking. This discussion continues our examination of the value of the humanities as a mode of critical thought, as well as our foray into contemporary critical race theory.  Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

We decided to take a break from our usual format and offer a more extemporaneous episode. With only a handful of notes and a couple random articles, your beautiful losers examined their intellectual scars from graduate school, considered how “genius” is a word that should be returned (especially as it relates to Elon Musk), and mused about some of the empty rhetoric of comfort provided by both corporations and politicians. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | In this very special episode we talk with Zachary D. Carter about his new book The Price of Peace. We had so much fun talking with Zach about his book and after the interview we work out some of our own ideas based off of Zach's work. We think this book is an instant-classic and will be talked about and studied for years to come. It's also a story with great moments of drama and intrigue. Order your copy and listen to our talk in the meantime.  Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now (102 min) | This week we consider the hit Netlfix TV show Never Have I Ever and then later launch into an examination of race, class, and neoliberalism, with help from some essays by Walter Benn Michaels. As with many of these early episodes, we’re laying a groundwork for future thinking. We hope you enjoy the episode. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to our substack (beautifullosers.substack.com) and join in on the conversation. Rate us on Apple Podcasts (or elsewhere) and share the show with your friends. We’re looking forward to building the community with you. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

This week we consider what it means to be a humanist, at least according to Edward Said’s 1978 classic Orientalism. Our discussion lays out some of Said’s key methodological concepts: history, rationality, hegemony, consent, and knowledge-formation. We present these concepts through critique, which is to say that we seek to challenge Said’s assumptions, raising questions about their efficacy today. The last part of the episode utilizes a humanist framework to consider the stakes and forces that are shaping the nation’s response to Covid-19. Questions of censorship and the factors that legitimate knowledge are acutely felt in an era where corporate media and government action are seeking to silence what they claim as bad-faith actors. Does a humanist methodology shed meaningful light on the stakes of such actions? Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now | Our discussion begins with observations about isolation. The beautiful losers consider how oddly comfortable life is under quarantine for those who haven’t had to struggle, but deeper existential fears draw them back into the every day. Can we measure our lives simply by the number of sourdough loaves we bake? Does virtue ethics run out of gas when excellence is achieved and no great revelation appears? How does time dilate during the lockdown? We turn these opening thoughts toward two different takes on how to respond to Covid-19 from two different well-known philosophers, Peter Singer and Giorgio Agamben. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com

Listen now (73 min) | Your boys, Seth and Alex, begin their intrepid journey into the world of podcasting! Initial observations about the false dichotomies that are emerging around Covid-19 evolves into a broader discussion about the purpose of the show. We make an initial case for the “beautiful loser” as a primary archetype to understand culture today. Later we dig into an awful piece of writing by David Brooks and then cleanse our palate with a wonderful poem by Louise Glück. Get on the email list at beautifullosers.substack.com