Podcast appearances and mentions of Alexander R Galloway

In this free public panel hosted by the Acid Horizon Research Commons, we discuss Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press) with contributors Alexander R. Galloway, M. Beatrice Fazi, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby. The conversation reframes the digital not as consumer technology but as a fundamental mode of mediation grounded in discreteness. We explore the provocative claim that theory itself is digital, and that digitality precedes contemporary computation. The panel revisits structuralism, number, abstraction, and dialectics to rethink the relationship between logic and representation. Throughout, the discussion challenges nostalgic appeals to the analog and asks what it means to think from within a digital ontological condition.Buy the book: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/Current offerings at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-coursesSupport the showSupport the podcast:Current classes at Acid Horizon Research Commons (AHRC): https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-mainWebsite: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Boycott Watkins Media: https://xenogothic.com/2025/03/17/boycott-watkins-statement/ Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438Merch: http://www.crit-drip.comSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438 LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHANDHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto). The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next. A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought. REFERENCES:*Digital Theory* (In Search of Media series), University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/M. Beatrice Fazi - *Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics*, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606082/Contingent-Computation-Abstraction-Experience-and-Indeterminacy-in-Computational-AestheticsAlexander R. Galloway - *Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age*, Verso, 2021 https://www.versobooks.com/products/2656-uncomputable - "Golden Age of Analog," *Critical Inquiry* 48, no. 2 (2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717324 - Galloway's website and blog https://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/Matthew Handelman - *The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory*, Fordham University Press, 2019 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823283842/the-mathematical-imagination/Leif Weatherby - *Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism*, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/language-machines (our book of the year, for what it's worth) - *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, Fordham University Press, 2016 - Digital Theory Lab at NYU https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/leif-allison-reid-weatherby.htmlSome References Discussed:Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1992)Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*Euclid, *Elements*, Book V (on analog/logos)Jacques Lacan, *Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis* (on cybernetics)François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, on the genericEve Tuck, "Breaking Up with Deleuze"Hito Steyerl, "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013)

Alexander R. Galloway and Andrew Culp join Acid Horizon to discuss their new podcast series on Alain Badiou's 1988 work Being and Event. We discuss Badiou's mathematical ontology and its roots in Cantor's Set Theory and Cohen's theory of the Generic. We also trace the roots of his militant arithmetic in philosophers of the French Resistance such as Cavailles, and his revolutionary Marxist Anti-Statism.There will be an online launch event for their new podcast series where people can learn more here http://cultureandcommunication.org/BeingAndEvent/And you can listen to the first two episodes now! On Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many more platforms! https://open.spotify.com/show/7skR7GRkElz3crZlQYHjhRSupport the podcast:Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastZer0 Books and Repeater Media Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zer0repeaterMerch: http://www.crit-drip.comOrder 'The Philosopher's Tarot': https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-philosophers-tarot/Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/169wvvhiHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com​Revolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.com​Split Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/Support the show

Join Andrew Culp and Alexander R. Galloway for a deep dive into Alain Badiou's 1988 book Being and Event. Pairing close readings of the text with special guests, it promises to enlighten both those new to Badiou as well as those already familiar with his work. Episodes released weekly through Spring 2023.

“The chief aim of [philosopher Francois Laruelle’s] life’s work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so.” What is non-philosophy, what would it look like to practice it, and what are the implications of doing so? Alexander R. Galloway introduces and explores these questions in a vibrant and thoughtful new book. Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) uses Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a foundation for considering the philosophical concept of digitality. In a series of ten chapters (plus intro and conclusion) and 14 theses, Galloway offers an exceptionally clear and provocative treatment of digitality as a way of thinking about and with difference. In addition to offering a critical encounter with some of the most fundamental aspects of Laruelle’s work as they open up ways of thinking about identity, distinction, and exchange, the book also contains some wonderful discussions of brightness and obscurity, representation and aesthetics, computation, photography, music, ethics, and capitalism, while putting the work of Laruelle into dialogue with Deleuze, Badiou, Marx, Althusser, and others. It’s an exciting work, and I will be re-reading and thinking with it for some time to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The chief aim of [philosopher Francois Laruelle’s] life’s work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so.” What is non-philosophy, what would it look like to practice it, and what are the implications of doing so? Alexander R. Galloway introduces and explores these questions in a vibrant and thoughtful new book. Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) uses Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a foundation for considering the philosophical concept of digitality. In a series of ten chapters (plus intro and conclusion) and 14 theses, Galloway offers an exceptionally clear and provocative treatment of digitality as a way of thinking about and with difference. In addition to offering a critical encounter with some of the most fundamental aspects of Laruelle’s work as they open up ways of thinking about identity, distinction, and exchange, the book also contains some wonderful discussions of brightness and obscurity, representation and aesthetics, computation, photography, music, ethics, and capitalism, while putting the work of Laruelle into dialogue with Deleuze, Badiou, Marx, Althusser, and others. It’s an exciting work, and I will be re-reading and thinking with it for some time to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode (77 mins) features Andrew Dilts talking about his recent book Punishment and Inclusion, how he ended up in political theory, and the relationship between activism and academy. I highly recommend Andrew’s book to anyone interested in understanding American democracy, both historically and where we are at now. At the top of the show I give a rundown on some issues with a recent review of Alexander R. Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital. You can find that review at Review31. Feel free to skip ahead to the discussion with Andrew. The music in today’s episode is again “Farewell to Floss” by The Blue Ducks. Head over to Records on Ribs to support them and other great artists.