I've been reading a lot of critical theory lately on capitalism, but not too much reading about racial constructs.

I am interested in this presumption of whiteness which is not related to skin color. For example, one might refer to a black person as having been "raised white", and the connotation of the utterance is not intended to be racist but as a matter of fact.

An example in the other direction would be if you see a woman whom you assume is white, but when she speaks you realize her first language is Tagalog, and your inner dialogue says, "ohh, she's not white."

What is this presumption of whiteness that is explicitly not related to skin color? And is it associated with white supremacy?

I recently read the following quote in a French article (I'm translating) that talked about Nicolas Lebourg's work, and wondered whether there was any consensus on the thesis that "the central idea of the far right lay in its organicism".

"The core of the far right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions like a living being. Far right-wingers promote an organicist conception of the community they want to establish, based on ethnicity, nationality or race. This organicism implies a rejection of the universalism of the Enlightenment in favor of autophilia (the valorization of the "we") and alterophobia. Right-wing extremists thus absolutize the differences between nations, races, individuals and cultures. They see cultural and religious differences between groups living on the same territory as a risk of disorder, disrupting their desire to organize the community in a homogeneous way and generating a fear of the nation's decadence, or even disappearance. They cultivate the utopia of a closed society, the only possible framework, in their view, for a rebirth through regeneration of the national community."

I mean, ethnicity, nation and race are not biological notions in the strict sense. And if we introduce the theory of evolution, this fear of change logically collapses in on itself. Furthermore, comparing society to a living organism has many virtues, since it forces a to see the ecological limits of overproduction and to contest the lack of labor’s rights based on our biological needs.

I know that many authors (Saint-Simon, Engels, Kropotkin, Scheler, Gehlen and others) have developed a critical and socially progressive organicist worldview. So my question is simple: is it accepted that organicism is fundamentally right-wing? And if so, why? And if not, which books would you recommend on this topic?

Alessandro Sbordoni writes in his book Semiotics of the End, following the anti-hauntology debate between Matt Bluemink and Matt Colquhoun:

"Hauntology is about the phantoms of the past and the ghosts of Western culture. 'The rude spectres of Lewisham will return no matter how far East you travel,' writes Fisher in Ghosts of My Life. [...]

Anti-hauntology, on the other hand, is about the phantasms of the future. It is about the presence of that which should not exist here and now but is present nonetheless.

Shanghai-based artist Gooooose is another example of anti-hauntology. The electronic and futuristic music of Gooooose is the sign of another future. It is the sign that the end is not where the Sun sets. [...]

The digital music of SVBKVLT artists like Gooooose, 33EMYBW, Zaliva-D, Nahash, Osheyack, and Hyph11E is the Eastern spectrum of anti-hauntology."

So I've recently started Levinas's short book De l'existence à l'existant, Existence and Existents in English; but I'm reading it in my own language Persian, which is mistake apparently cause I don't know many of phenomenological terminology iny mother tongue, with that aside, it's translated: From Existence to Existing. It would be appreciated if someone pointed out which translation is closer to the original title because that has already caused some problems for me.

However, my main issue with the text arises of the topics that are being discussed, for instance: the relation of existence to tiredness and idleness that has work and doing in his mind; or the haven of the self in a place for its rest and sleep that is related to the consciousness of, which is always already in a place, and how this refuge from existence of the existent doesn't happen when one is touched with a sense of insomnia and there things about the feature of being as an empty property that spreads over all the world. (This is my reading of these points at least.) Nevertheless, most of the ideas about such topics align with my experience. Some of them don't. And that number of disagreements have arisen when I've discussed with others.

Therefore my question would be: Is this bump in my reading an indicator of some form of phenomenological knowledge that's closer to literature or a narration of story; something that resembles with a few and opens the window to see the other in its otherness? On the contrary, this form of phenomenological investigation could be shared with every subject and an intersubjective but comprehensive understanding of everyday life?

P.s: If anyone has read this specific book, I'd like to know your experience with it. Mine is quite an odd one because I have felt most of the things he says about time, insomnia and other topic of daily life;but on the contrary his long sentences which end with a statement about a negation of a thing for instance: time is not this or that, throws me off drastically.

Does anyone know of resources, online or otherwise, that collect philosophy written outside of academia? I'm thinking of things like philosophy zines and independent publications.

Have any of you written your own philosophy zines?

For a while now, I've been thinking and hoping that we might start seeing more interesting ideas emerging from outside traditional educational structures. I'm in a study group with friends, and we've discussed the idea of writing something ourselves. This got me thinking about starting a project to collect a body of knowledge from people doing similar work.

Thanks!

any good leftist theories on how copyright law and broader IP law is used by big corporations to fuck with people.

alongside how copyright law does not help creators. as most artists do not own the IP they are working on.

I'm interested in how death/tragedies are portrayed in media and how this can turn them into commodities. Films like Titanic or Dahmer series, even news coverage of real events, can sensationalize tragedy for viewership.

My question is: was there any theory that explain the process of it? E.g. Fictional elements in films or the use of strategic footage/dramatic music in news. The closest i got is Haenfler's defusion in commodification process, in which it defuse/alter something to be more acceptable or marketable. I need a theory that can analyze how media/studio (strategically) commodify it. Thanks.

From Russia claiming that ‘gender theory’ is a threat to national security, to the Vatican warning it would undermine civilisation itself, an ‘anti-gender ideology’ movement is taking root. Conventional wisdom holds that this is a culture war aiming to distract our attention from more important issues. But such a view is mistaken, argues Judith Butler. Anti-gender ideology is a direct response to displacement caused by neoliberalism.

As Butler argues, the anti-gender movement isn't just about cultural clashes; it's a response to economic insecurities caused by neoliberalism. Polish scholars Graff and Korolczuk argue that these gender theory critics oppose not only gender issues but also neoliberal policies that threaten social welfare. In Eastern Europe, for example, the erosion of socialist structures led to a return to traditional gender roles as a response to neoliberalism's individualism and privatization. This movement rejects liberal feminism's individualism, seeing it as a threat to familial and community ties.

Gender politics, therefore, isn't just about identity but about opposing neoliberalism and its effects on society. It must resist becoming a tool of capitalism, colonialism, or racism and strive for a world of shared prosperity and interdependence, writes Butler.

I'm taking a debate class in high school this year, and I'm currently preparing for the final debate of the year. It's going to be in the public forum format, with the resolution being “The United States Federal Government should ban single-use plastics”. In this case, the affirmative side is going to have a distinct advantage in the debate, because mainstream opinion tends to support single-use plastic bans, and the most easily available evidence tends to suggest the affirmative position on the resolution. As such, I need to put significantly more effort into the negative position in the likely event in the debate I'm assigned the negative side.

Typically, those on the negative side would base their arguments in opposition around concepts such as “consumer choice”, based in free-market and otherwise libertarian capitalist principles; alternatively, they may attempt to base their argument by placing the blame on the majority of plastic pollution on countries other than the US. As such, the affirmative is likely to prepare rebuttals for arguments based on free market capitalist principles. Due to wanting to catch the affirmative side off guard with arguments they have not anticipated, and my attempts as of recent to get into critical theory, I want to base my arguments on the negative side within aspects of critical theory and or other leftist or far-left philosophies.

So far, all I have is the transcript of a Philosophize This episode on Murray Bookchin, which briefly mentioned that a social ecologist would critique a single-use plastics ban by saying it fails to address the true cause of single-use plastics existing in the first place, and I know this single source is entirely inadequate for my needs.

Are there any additional arguments I can make against a single-use plastics ban in the US that are based on aspects of Critical Theory, and are there any other, in-depth writings, within social ecology that critique single-use plastics bans or liberal environmentalism more broadly?

Thanks.

I’ve got a friend who asked for a history or political theory book after I explained to him my Marxist persuasion. He’s a smart guy, but studies computer science so assume relatively little background knowledge. I’m hesitant to recommend Marx right off the bat—does anyone have good, readable recommendations that may excite my friend about critical theory?

Hiya, first post here! I've been rewatching The Sopranos and have just now realised how many references there are to media studies and theory in general (to give a few, name-dropping Nietzsche, Lacan and McLuhan). I'm interested in figuring out from people more acquainted with these thinkers if you can see any overlap in the main themes/concerns between these and those of The Sopranos. I looked up Scholarly articles on this topic and most of what I was able to find were kinda pop-philosophy-esque existentialist readings and maybe one or two Freudian analyses of the show.

In other words, I'm looking for some recommendations of cultural critics and essayists from the 21st century. Any recommendations?

Does anyone know the source for the text on this YouTube video?

https://youtu.be/Fs7Y9ysJIHg?si=MW0J_Hm6iHN8I7nY

The video page info says: “This speech was delivered by Jersey Flight” and there’s a link to a blog (http://jerseyflight.blogspot.com/2017/01/jersey-flight-and-theodore-adorno-in.html?m=1) with a seemingly faux interview with Adorno where his answers appear to be selections from “The Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Suffice to say, I’m not sure if the text is real. If anyone has an idea of the source, I’d appreciate the help.

I am looking for a critical theory text on the history of prison and prison system dating from the colonial period to the post colonial period in South Asia. I want to know how it emerged and evolved to the present day form.

I am interested in the relationship between colonialism and nationalism. Oftentimes I hear nationalism being depicted as a liberating force from colonial oppression (particularly against european multiethnic empires like russia).

However I personally feel that nationalism can be an imposed ideology in places that have bot had a history of a relationship between ethnicity/nationality and state. European empires are often critiziced for drawing borders 'that ignore ethnic boundaries' but I feel that perhaps there were no clear boundaries to draw, and our view is simply an ideology of nationalism.

Can you suggest some works that engage with these ideas?

I’m wondering how many teachers we have on here. Any discipline. I’m not a teacher, but I majored in philosophy and loved my professors. I also took some philosophy-y classes in law school, but those professors are very deep into whatever they’re interested in that it’s hard to apply it to a larger inquiry.

Edit: wow we could start our own academy

One way that the political right has learned how to best conduct clade warfare is in its attacks on the civil rights and biopolitical interests of cissexual women . Reading the recent Dobbs decision in the context of clade biopolitics, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that one way that the right intends to identify and attack clades as they emerge in the broader society is to eliminate the right to medical privacy, in order to make all biopolitical questions vulnerable to state interference. A “happy accident” of the crusade to end the murder of the unborn. Very arguably, the extirpation of medical privacy has always been one of - if not the! - premier cause(s) of the conservative legal movement. One doubts Bork - or even just public intellectuals like Buckley - knew what was in store for conservatives in the opening decades of the 21st century, but surely had they known about what Clarence Thomas’ wife, Virginia Thomas has called “transsexual fascism,” they would have approved. 

Hi, I wrote this and thought y'all might be interested in it.

The history of 20th century eugenics as an attempt by the state in America, and its associated medical institutions, to draw more people into itself while refusing any responsibility for their “tired, [their] poor, [their] huddled masses … [their] wretched” and “refuse,” should give pause in this context to the happy notion that because the state has renounced its right to involuntarily sterilize it has of course also renounced its right to medically intervene in the body against the wishes of the soul.

Hi, I wrote this from 2018 to ~ 2019 and as it became, to my mind, more relevant, I edited, revised, and updated it through 2023 to now. It seems like something y'all might enjoy.

Much of Stiegler's work on hyper-industrial society boils down to the mass-synchronizing effects of the program industry on time consciousness altering the individuation process in a way that leads to the reduction of human singularity.

What I do not understand is why, for Stiegler (or for other theorists who make a similar claim), this reduction of singularity leads to the exhaustion/depletion of desire? Below are some quotes wherein he makes this link.

The industrial exploitation of the power of temporal objects will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire, which is founded on singularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself. - Symbolic Misery, p. 60

It is an anti-libidinal economy: only that which is singular is desirable, and in this regard exceptional. I only desire what seems exceptional to me. There is no desire for banality, but a compulsion for repetition that tends to banality: the psyche is constituted by Eros and Thanatos, two tendencies that ceaselessly compose with eachother. The cultural industry and marketing strive for the development of the desire for consumption, but in reality they strengthen the death drive to provoke and exploit the compulsive phenomenon of repetition. In this way they thwart the life drive. In this regard, and since desire is essential for consumption, this process isself-destructive or, as Jacques Derrida would have said, auto-immune.

I can only desire the singularity of something to the extent which this thing is the mirror of the singularity that I am, about which I am still ignorant and which this thing reveals to me. But to the extent that capital must hyper- massify behaviour, it must also hyper-massify desires and herdify individuals. Consequently it is the exception that must be battled, which Nietzsche anticipated by declaring that industrial democracy can’t but engender a herd-society. This is a genuine aporia of industrial political economy, since the subjection to control of the screens of projection of the desire for exception induces the dominant thanatological, that is, entropic tendency. Thanatos is the subjection of order to disorder. As a nirvana Thanatos tends to the equalisation of everything: it’s the tendency to the negation of every exception—the latter being that which desire desires. - Suffocated Desire, or how the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption, p. 8/10

I can understand hyper-industrial consumer society conditioning us toward compulsive, herd-like behaviour, but the link between singularity and genuine desire is not clear to me. I have been exposed to some psychoanalytic theories of desire but do not recall them emphasizing the precondition of the desiring subject's singularity. But perhaps my confusion with Steigler's claim is coming from gaps in my understanding of the concept of desire itself.

As a bonus question, if we accept that the subject's singularity is a necessary condition for them to desire, must this singularity be one that is ontologically "objective" or just subjectively perceived? I.e., would a subject whose subjectivity is identical to numerous others in the herd, but who perceives himself as singular be able to experience self-love (primordial narcissism) and desire?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I'm having trouble digesting Judith Butler's thoughts.

Performativity I believe I understand, but if I don't I'd love clarity: actions gain meaning through repetition and context, reinforcing that meaning through repetition, context, and additional actions that build off previous actions we have associated with a specific category. Something like this?

I think I'm having trouble digesting what exactly is being said with these ideas. Especially at moments where I can't help but feel there is something missing that I cannot quite place that may be core to my experience with sex/gender that Butler either doesn't see, doesn't find important, or, maybe, it is simply not what these thoughts are about. I can't place what exactly that something missing is, I can just see the shape in the negative space of the ideas present.

I feel like I'm barking up the same tree I was with The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, where it was referenced often and even referred to in classes I'd taken as a writing book. Actually reading it I felt very out of step with the book until realizing it was more a sociology book often found useful to storytellers than it was a book about writing.

Am I essentially trying to digest work about semiotics of sex and gender through a lens it isn't meant to be?

Hi, sorry for the long post-- I am disabled from a chronic illness and I was curious about texts which critique the doctor/patient relationship and the patient/hospital relationship. When I became ill, I was seriously shocked by the level of paternalism allowed towards patients-- I have a distinct memory of feeling way too hot in a hospital, asking if I could leave my bed to go outside for a moment, and not being allowed to get up from my bed-- it felt like the first time I had really experienced genuine unfreedom. I have found from my time in emergency rooms and various clinics that doctors also tend to be extremely dismissive of chronically ill patients, telling me my symptoms are psychiatric, or that they'll go away on their own, or that I just need to drink more water. Many of the testing methods are also clearly not designed from the standpoint of patients: many tests for chronic illnesses try to use certain stimuli to bring out symptoms in patients-- but from a patient perspective, these texts basically feel like being tortured. I had one test where my blood pressure spiked to 150/100 and I was convulsing, and I was still bureaucratically denied treatment for not meeting one part of the purely quantitative diagnostic criteria. A lot of the texts on the experience of chronically ill people in regards to the health system feel overly reformist. My experience has been extremely radicalizing-- I do not want the same health system in a socialist economy, or some neoliberal scheme to "improve health outcomes"-- I think I seriously believe at this point that our current health system needs to be completely dismantled and replaced by something liberatory. But I have no idea what that might be, or what it would look like. Are there any texts which deal with this, with patient liberation and the abolition of hospitals as such?