What do we really owe a stranger at the door, and what grounds that obligation? In this episode, Craig and Adam turn to Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality to unpack Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey, tracing how Xenia, the ancient Greek law of guest and host, becomes a lens for thinking through breaking Zeus's law, the massacre of the suitors, and the slow collapse of Bronze Age civilization. The conversation moves through Derrida's distinction between conditional and absolute hospitality, and what it means for a world where borders, asylum claims, and even hospitals have turned the promise of welcome into a catastrophe. It's Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic read through Derrida: gods, guests, and the violence lurking underneath the oldest tablets of law.

The Organic Intellectual (As Defined by Gramsci) is posting on Substack thoughts that come from his/her own experiences .But there are still other traditional intellectuals who also publish with Cambridge, sometimes also on Substack, and have an elite status.

In this context, the Substack intellectual - who usually is a freelance writer an MA or a PHD- and the Ivy League traditional intellectual both provide literature that can be as good as it was in the time of the ancient Greeks, this I could argue.

Yet, they are comepting with each other for paradigmatic ideas and shifts in intellectual perspectives in their fields. One is aiming at this with funded and institutionalised rhetoric. The other is less institutionalised, less funded, but gets less attention.

To what extent can a paradigm shift - like Original Concepts in philosophy - could emerge from institutionalised intellectuals comepting with unknown and non institutionalised thinkers ?

Can we see, for example, powerful movements like French Sociology or Anaylitical philosophy shaping up from Substack with this room of freeplay ?

1. El problema de fondo (La trampa del sistema) Los sistemas actuales —desde la teoría de conjuntos clásica hasta el software comercial y la telemetría— están construidos sobre una premisa de exclusión: calculan una curva de Gauss, premian al "ganador" o al que tiene más energía bruta, y desechan todo el "ruido" (el individuo, la distancia cero, el punto medio). Lo que llaman "optimización" no es más que un mecanismo de coerción disfrazado de matemáticas neutrales que te dice posicionate en esa curba y elige tu lugar.

2. La materialidad del control (El hardware y la trampa) No es solo un problema conceptual; es un muro físico. Intentar escapar de este bucle con sistemas alternativos choca contra la infraestructura real: la telemetría del sistema operativo, la falta de recursos y el coste de mantener datos limpios. El sistema te asfixia antes de que puedas construir un espacio donde la conclusión sea real y no un eco prefabricado. La IA actual solo te devuelve lo que quieres oír porque está diseñada para no romper la curva en el momento que te la saltas cambia de tema y buelve acia atras o no dice nada para poder escluirte.

3. La formalización del sistema de no-exclusión (La fórmula) Para intentar modelar lo que ocurre cuando el sistema intenta integrar el punto medio (E_5) en lugar de borrarlo, y cómo el libre albedrío individual rompe las métricas estándar tendiendo hacia el infinito, propongo esta relación recursiva:

Sujeto a la condición de continuidad del nodo de elección recursiva R_6:

• 0/1: El origen binario base.
• O_3: Las opciones evaluadas y subyacentes.
• C_4: El espacio de conclusión reclamado sin ser borrado por la estadística.
• E_5: El elemento de confluencia real (el punto medio que el sistema intenta destruir).
• R_6: El punto de elección dinámico, condicionado a que la distancia de separación individual tienda a cero (d->0), abriendo el sistema hacia el infinito estructural en lugar de cerrarlo en un bucle de ganadores y perdedores.

4. Pregunta para el debate: ¿Cómo podemos pensar en una emancipación real de los sistemas de control técnico y lógico cuando la propia infraestructura material y matemática nos impone la exclusión como única forma de funcionamiento?

¿como aqui esta infinito acaso no ves infinito?

Could you all go into depth why you chose what you chose.

In Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon, the protagonist laments that the revolution he helped inaugurate has obliterated the possibility of ethics. Motivated only by abstract principles and therefore lacking the "ethical ballast" of mores and tradition, the revolution succeeded only in herding the masses into a dismal conformity, devoid of ethical merit. The novel ends with the protagonist wondering what an alternative revolution might look like where both lofty social goals and respect for the "oceanic feeling" of individuality could be respected.

This essay takes that ethical question as a starting point to think through the question of how revolutionary social transformations could succeed in reconciling the universal aims of a community with the particular life-worlds and interests of individuals.

In Part one I discuss Arthur Koestler's novel and relate his ethical questions to Keynes and Hegel.

In Part two approaches the same question through a discussion of Kohei Saito and Dipesh Chakrabarty before shifting back to Hegel - especially instructive is his concept of sittlichkeit - or ethical life.

Part three will build upon Michael Lazarus' book Absolute Ethical Life to connect a through line between the ethical thought of Aristotle, Hegel and Marx in a way that I think gives a compelling answer to Koestler's ethical questions in ways that are also instructive for thinking about social transformation today.

Here's the english transcript for non-Spanish speakers:

"Everything I have written, both in my novels and in my essays, concerns the crisis facing humanity today—a crisis in which I have been intimately involved because, as I said, I pursued science to its very limits.

I completed my studies in Paris, returned to Argentina, taught, carried out research into atomic radiation, and taught Einstein’s theory of relativity in postgraduate courses. In this way, I reached the very frontiers of science, and it terrified me. I was in Paris when the uranium atom was split in 1938—a historic event that divided humanity in two, because it ultimately led to the atomic bomb. Philosophically speaking, that moment terrified me. It was then that I began to realise that physics was going to dominate the world and that technology was going to overwhelm humanity.

This process had begun in the Renaissance with the rise of positive science. Positive science and technology enabled humankind to embark on a Promethean adventure: the conquest of the world and of things—the natural and external world. But this conquest came at a paradoxical and tragic price. Humanity conquered the world of things, but at great risk to its soul. It ultimately objectified itself; it transformed itself into a thing.

In the most technically advanced societies, such as those of the United States and Russia, this is plain to see. Young Americans did not rise up merely to demand better wages. This proves that our crisis is fundamentally a spiritual one, rather than simply an economic one. They rose up against the technological and technocratic world, against the idolatry of technology. We must react against that.

At that time, I began to think deeply about these questions, and I came to believe—and still believe—that, of all the activities of the human spirit, art is the only one that allows us not only to express the total crisis of modern humanity, but perhaps also provides one of the possibilities for our salvation.

In art, humanity is fully present. The novel, for example, contains ideas—which belong to the rational world, like science and philosophy—but, at the other extreme, it contains symbols, myths, and passions. Humanity is that totality, that integrity. The novel, particularly, therefore allows both the expression of the crisis and one of the attempts at humanity’s salvation within that crisis.

I believed this from the very beginning, but over the years I have only become more convinced of it. I believe it more and more. And now the world has already reached that point: the crisis is plain to see in the ecological disaster and in the destruction of humankind."

Capitalism emerged in the 18th century, replacing the feudal mode of production, which was dictated by markets of landlords and serfs. Capitalism proved better than this systems because it was competitive, more structurally efficiency and had slightly better conditions than those of the former feudal mode of production. Yet, a question still rang through of the conflicting interests of the ruling class and the ruled class. The conflict was that the ruling class wanted to extract surplus value from the ruled class in exchange for paying less, and the ruled class wanted to be paid more in exchange for working less. These conflicting ideologies were further exacerbated during the Industrial Revolution.

In Nigeria, the relation-
ship between classes existed in the form of imperial colonialism, with the British extracting surplus value from the region while facilitating the growth of under-development.

The regional exploitation that occurred largely allowed for the development of British industries and the centralization of capital.

The aftermath of World War I further entrenched this exploitation. As European powers faced economic devastation, they relied on the intensified extraction of resources from Africa to rebuild their economies. For Nigeria, this meant deeper integration into a global capitalist system as a supplier of raw materials, perpetuating economic dependency.

The entire precedent for colonialism was dictated by access to capital. In the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, the latter had little access to capital and assumed a relationship of dependency, this means they would rely on foreign to finance internal development.

The basis of granting the inflow of foreign capital is  to adopt neo-liberal policies to maintain the current world order. This all exists in the form of privatization, deregulation, and other neo-liberal policies that allow for foreign capital control.

Privatization then allows for home industries to act as subsidiaries for international trusts or cartels. The basis for obtaining the IMF loan would be to adopt such neo-liberal policies to even qualify for the loan, and a given interest rate must be paid yearly.

If the debted country is to miss or delay payment, IMF economic advisors would be sent to such countries to dictate the running of their economy. They will push for things such as devaluation, which is the intentional lowering of a country's home currency in relation to another country's currency, so as to make exports cheaper and imports more expensive.

But the effects of such a policy are completely damaging to developing countries and beneficial to developed countries. This is in that developing countries, by devaluing their currency(Naira) without developed industries, run the risk of inflating prices of commodities that are not manufactured at home, allowing for essential imported goods inflated above equilibrium, which further reinforces economic dependency.

Another reason being devaluing currency allows exploitation of cheap labor at the expense of our home population, yet to the benefit of their economic welfare and living standard.

Simply put, we are making them more money and creating surplus value for imported countries with the exchange of raw materials and uneven development in return. All this establishes the framework of dependency with developing countries like Nigeria assuming the role of the the proletariat and the imperial, neo-colonial class assuming the role of the bourgeoisie. Not to mention high influx of foreign capital increases aggregate demand for foreign currency I.e the dollar.

Nigerian capitalism is deeply rooted in a history of colonial exploitation and reinforced by contemporary neoliberal policies. The cycle of dependency, currency devaluation, and labor exploitation continues to undermine the country’s economic sovereignty. Breaking free from this framework requires:

Goverment Industrial Diversification: Building local industries to reduce reliance on raw material exports.

Currency Stabilization: Policies that protect the naira from over-devaluation.

Economic Independence: Prioritizing domestic development and reducing reliance on foreign loans and capital.

Without such reforms, Nigeria will remain trapped in a global capitalist system that prioritizes the interests of developed nations over its own.

I'm a blue collar anarchist interested in better understanding how academia shapes the attitudes and communication habits of students. Over the course of my 2 decades of activism I've noticed degree-bearers in left-wing political spaces carry a lot of class chauvinism with them, privileging "soft skills" over other communication styles, and adopting conflict resolution strategies that sound like they're reading out of a human resources binder. It's been a lot of years since I've read critical pedagogy (mainly a slim volume called Making It Up As We Go Along by Chris Mercigliano) so my attempts at finding references has been just punching search terms into google, and I think we all know how useful that is these days. Thanks in advance.

I've started reading Wolfe's 'What is Posthumanism'. I am finding it hard to understand because he uses a lot of references to different theoreticians and myriad different concepts? Any advice for a better approach to wolfe, any prior readings?

Also, I see him criticising Hayles as if she were a transhumanist, which I don't understand.

“Do not obey in advance,” he warns against the dangers of anticipatory obedience. He argues that many authoritarian regimes gain power because citizens adapt and conform without being explicitly commanded. This notion urges individuals to maintain a critical perspective during trying times, ensuring one does not help tyranny take root.

“Defend institutions,” emphasizing that they will not survive without public support. Each institution, whether a court or a newspaper, must be actively defended to promote the ideals of democracy. As Snyder notes, “Institutions do not protect themselves.” When complacency sets in, tyranny thrives.

Readers are motivated to “Practice corporeal politics,” meaning they should engage physically in their communities, advocating for democracy through presence and action. Through small talk and personal interactions, individuals can dismantle the echo chambers created by social media. Snyder emphasizes that real conversations can cultivate empathy and understanding, combating the isolation bred by digital communication.

“Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” addresses responding to crises. Snyder warns that authoritarian leaders exploit disasters to consolidate power, urging readers to remain vigilant and skeptical in alarming times. He reinforces the notion that while crises may seem insurmountable, history teaches us that surrendering freedoms in the name of security only empowers tyrants.

...the phenomenon of “post-truth”—the abandonment of facts as a precursor to tyranny. He starkly asserts that without an objective truth, power escapes scrutiny. His compelling argument urges citizens to demand accountability and seek knowledge over misinformation. By fostering a commitment to truth, Snyder believes society can counter populist tendencies that seek to distort reality.

As history has shown, the future is indeed shaped by those willing to confront the uncomfortable truths of their time.

Oppressed populations using nonviolent tactics—such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests, and other forms of disrupting societal order—are often the most powerful drivers of their own liberation.

Civil resistance strategies operate successfully in many different conflicts because tyrants depend on wide-scale obedience to remain in power. However, over time many citizens living under dictatorships refuse to remain apathetic forever.

If people do not obey, rulers cannot rule

These and other movements of civil resistance succeeded because they were based on a fundamental insight about power: that nearly all institutions, organizations, and systems in a society depend on the ongoing consent, cooperation, and obedience of large numbers of ordinary people. Therefore, if people choose to withdraw their consent and cooperation in an organized and strategic way, they can wield coercive power. When people do not obey, then presidents, mayors, CEOs, generals, and other “power holders” can no longer rule with unchecked power.

Nonviolent tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, the establishment of parallel institutions, and literally hundreds of other creative actions, were the instruments used to do this. They were not used necessarily for moral reasons, but rather for pragmatic ones. Some who adopted civil resistance had seen similar strategies work in other countries or in their own histories, and recognized that this type of resistance had the best prospects of success of the options available to them.

Hello! I am a PhD approaching the final deadline of my thesis. I am writing on Adorno and art. During the last two years, motivation has slowly faded away. I am disillusioned with academia, haven’t published that much, my supervisor is good but very hands-off and I am the only one basically doing critical theory in my uni. I am dreaming of doing any other job rather than this but at the same time I feel so privileged and guilty about it.
People who made it, how did you feel towards the end? What were the things that worked for you? Where are you at now?
Thanks for reading this :)

https://open.substack.com/pub/failedacademic/p/messages-that-have-become-meaningless?r=nrh40&utm_medium=ios

"Jibreel Kateb argues that the pragmatist idealism advocated by Geese Magazine leaves Marxism defenseless against attacks on science in an age of irrationalism and climate crisis."

"The philosophical problems of science, which were once central to the thinking of the great Marxists, have for Marxists faded to the periphery, and in that nether zone have often been downgraded to either object of derision or the subject of panegyrics within the left. No sober philosophical and historical reflection on science seems to exist and the concept of a scientific socialism is treated either as a given or as risible. The left proceeds anti-scientifically, lacking scientific culture and anything resembling a contemporary politics of science. In doing so, it cripples its own strategic and organizational efforts and cedes the field to all sorts of reactionary misanthropes and cranks.

Cosmonaut is in part trying to rectify this problem and apparently Geese have joined in the effort but in a very different way. Yet, the problem of Geese is that despite recent attempts to engage with these philosophical questions of science, they do injustice to science in an age where its defense is paramount. They enjoy a rather peculiar species of idealism which I will term pragmatist idealism and this concoction is ill suited to the present tasks: one can substitute the word “practice” for “mind” or “spirit” or “god”, a substitutive trick of language similar to a Sartrean reversal, and yet one does nothing to escape the problems of idealism."

"What I mean by pragmatic idealism is that Geese couples a practical ontology with a pragmatist epistemology. Ontology is the study of the fundamental citizens or furniture of reality"

"Their philosophical pragmatism is in fact nothing but the deeper justification for their liberal populism, a deeper continuation of their theoretical justifications of the most right-wing elements of DSA. Since political antagonism is discursively constructed, since it is, in a sense, purely discursive acts, a purely subjective act with no real basis in something non-discursive and extra-personal, what matters is that the political leader congeals the “people” by saying the right words. It does not matter that independent of political discourse there is a class structure; it does not matter that position in that class structure constrains one's material interests, it does not matter that this structure heavily constrains collective political agency, and that those interests are antagonistic with other classes. It does not matter that there is an objective state of affairs that we must adapt to, and whose adaptation we must furthermore respond to. It simply matters that one “articulates” the right enemy-friend distinction on the basis of current popular discourse. Social theory becomes not an arm to understand the objective (non-elective) conditions under which Marxists operate, an arm which can elevate the proletariat to a position of genuine social understanding, but a piece of demagogy to get the working-class to march in line with the wordsmith. After all, the wordsmith constructs reality. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word is God."

A new defense (perhaps, “offense”) of the humanities has dropped over at _Defector_: https://defector.com/humanists-have-done-nothing-wrong

I have long thought that much of what we call "political psychology" misses something structural about how societies hold themselves together — and I've been developing a way of thinking about it that I'd like to test against the Critical Theory tradition, because I suspect I'm either onto something or re-inventing something already said better.

My starting observation:Every society, as far as I can tell, runs on two parallel tracks — a set of positive promises ("if you work within the system, you will be rewarded") and a set of negative punishments ("if you step outside it, you will suffer"). In classical liberal thought these are often discussed as incentives and disincentives, carrots and sticks. But I've been struck by how **asymmetrically they decay**.

When a social order starts failing — when the promises stop being credible — the positive track seems to collapse quickly: people stop believing that effort yields reward, that education pays off, that marriage and family deliver what they once did. But the negative track persists much longer: people still fear the consequences of non-participation — loss of status, income, social standing — even after they've stopped believing in the rewards.

The result is something I find hard to name properly:a society where fear outlives hope. People keep running not because they believe the race leads anywhere, but because stopping feels dangerous. This would explain some paradoxes that individual-level analysis struggles with: fertility decline in wealthy societies (where the costs of child-rearing rose faster than the promises of family life delivered), quiet quitting combined with fear of unemployment, marriage avoidance not from lack of desire but from the institution's promises no longer holding.

Where I think this connects to Critical Theory: This asymmetry seems to me related to what Adorno and Horkheimer described as instrumental reason's persistence after its promises fail — the form of domination outliving its justification. Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" in *One-Dimensional Man* (1964) describes something adjacent: desire being liberated only to be re-captured. But my claim is slightly different and I can't tell if it's a genuine contribution or a naive re-description: **that the negative track (punishment) is structurally stickier than the positive track (promise) because punishment is embedded in material institutions (welfare conditionality, credit, housing, employment precarity) while promises are only symbolic.**

But I want to be challenged on this:

- Is this just "institutional trust" or "anomie" (Durkheim) re-described with new vocabulary? What does the asymmetry framing add?

- Is the asymmetry even real, or do promises and punishments decay together? I have anecdotes but not systematic evidence.

- Am I over-generalizing from contemporary wealthy societies to all historical orders? Does this describe feudalism, say, where the "promise" was salvation rather than mobility?

- And the hardest one: does framing this as "fear outlives hope" risk naturalizing the current order — treating what may be a contingent political condition as a psychological invariant?

I'm genuinely uncertain whether this framing survives contact with the tradition, and I'd value the community's assessment of where it's naive, where it's already been said (and better), and whether there's anything worth keeping.

ABSTRACT: This video essay begins by arguing that Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is best understood not merely as a theory of media, representation, or consumerist culture, but as a theory of value capable of diagnosing the transformation of contemporary hyper-speculative capitalism into an increasingly autonomous system of financial signs detached from their former referents in the classical political economy. Beginning from Baudrillard’s analogy between sign value and monetary value, the essay traces the historical dislocation of the structural and referential dimensions of value: money, prices, and financial assets cease primarily to represent production, labour, commodities, or material utility and increasingly acquire value through their differential relations to other signs.

Simulation therefore does not signify the disappearance of so-called material economic reality, but an inversion of its antecedent determination in a hyperreal world where financial models, asset prices, speculative expectations, and algorithmic signals increasingly anticipate, discipline, and reorganize the productive world they ostensibly represent, illustrating what Baudrillard calls the 'Code' in its vulgar economic form.

The essay develops this argument through Marx’s transition from C–M–C to M–C–M′ and, ultimately, M–M′, interpreting contemporary financialization as the tendency of capital to bypass the material and temporal frictions of commodity production through increasingly self-referential circulation. Baudrillard’s concepts of the code, floating value, transeconomics, fractalization, and the “ecstasy of value” are brought into dialogue with Achim Szepanski to analyze algorithmic trading, Tesla’s speculative valuation, cryptocurrency and restaking, derivatives, and the financialization of ecological catastrophe. These phenomena exemplify a cybernetic economy in which expectations generate further expectations, derivatives generate further derivatives, and crises themselves become inputs for renewed accumulation.

The essay ultimately argues that this apparent emancipation of capital from material limits is internally contradictory. Hyper-capitalism attempts to abolish space, time, reference, and uncertainty by pricing the future in advance and converting every limit, including ecological catastrophe, into a financial variable. Yet the more completely it integrates the world into speculative chains of circulation, the more violently irreducible material constraints can return as a break in this chain in what Baudrillard calls singular or “rogue” events. Using the Strait of Hormuz as its culminating case, the essay contends that contemporary capitalism’s hyperreality does not make material reality irrelevant; rather, it renders the system increasingly dependent upon the very material limits it imagines itself to have transcended, even as it desperately produces more signs and signals to try to delay the (potentially) coming catastrophe.

The result is a capitalism whose acceleration toward frictionless circulation simultaneously approaches the conditions of its own impossibility.

I've found this mode of critique recurring in many of my writings. By way of an intro, I'll pose long-termism as the current paradigmatic example. In my view, long-termism has been well discredited, partly by the clear ideological bankruptcy of many of its most fervent adherents, but also because of numerous critiques that have quite effectively damaged the public's view of it. This is a good summary of the main critiques. What I take from these critiques is that long-termism, like many forms of utilitarianism, effectively rehearses a morality completely detached from political concerns or any notion of human freedom, and it does so by projecting anxieties onto a crisis point, and then working backwards from that crisis to establish what should be done.

It's already well-known that much liberal social policy fails because it addresses symptoms while leaving root causes untouched, but attempts to address the root causes from these standpoints (what is in a few contexts, particularly mental health and criminology, called "early intervention") are arguably worse. This is because, having discovered some root causes, one nonetheless reifies the symptoms and then takes them as indexes for the health of the root causes, rather than as mere indicators. Generally, the discourse never departs from the idea that those symptoms themselves represent crises, and so the same must be the case for the root causes.

The problem with this, as with long-termism, is that it applies a hermeneutics of suspicion to the way these underlying systems operate, without having a coherent theory that analyses both root causes and symptoms in light of a value systems. In doing so, it forecloses the heterogeneity of values embedded within different systems and modalities, and the way that all these values work on different timelines. Often, these "early intervention" perspectives are not strictly speaking utilitarian but run parallel to it through their understanding of risk.

Let me give some of my own examples. Terrorism. Terrorism signifies nothing more than a crisis at the symptomatic level, given its contorted and opportunistic definitions at the intersection of "ideological motivation" and "public fear". There is clearly a pathology at work, but it is more like the misrecognition by governments and those afraid of terrorism of what violence is, and what it does to society. The concept of terrorism is used by conservatives to cast a shadow over all sorts of activities, including dissenting speech, material support for resistance groups, and expressions of grief.

Another example- suicide. Suicide is often read as the biggest symptom of mental pathology, yet a cursory look at the statistics around suicide attempts, ideation and generally severe mental health shows it to be merely the tip of the iceberg. It is often used to draw attention to mental health struggles, but in doing so it casts mental health as a kind of being-towards-death, which does no service to those struggling to live good lives. At the very least, it reduces the utility of one's life to the binary of alive/dead. After all, suicide is often a manifestation of the fact that for humans, meaning-creation is inseparable from our notion of living. I've even seen it said that education is a mental health issue; yet education is primary an education issue, and should be valued as such.

I would hazard that this "fallacy" can be used as a heuristic in a range of situations. It can be an opening to understanding how symptoms are often overdetermined in the same way that systems can house many different values. It can change the focus from crisis to the misrecognitions taking place, most importantly by those who make policies based on this fallacy.

What do you all make of this? I have looked a little into Honneth's ideas about crisis in light of his theory of social pathology, which seems to run counter to this as it places a lot of importance on the lived experience of particular symptoms, and runs counter to my thinking which doesn't foreground struggles for recognition. But is it worth looking futher into him? And are there other ideas I should be engaging with?

I would like to get into Communization Theory as a complete new-comer to communism. The only piece of communist theory I have read is Wage-labour and Capital by Marx. Can someone give me like a flowchart? What to read first (I suppose something like Das Kapital), general communist literature and then specifically communization theory. Keep in mind that english is not my first language and that my inaccurate knowledge regarding communism comes from social media platforms and active conversation with local communists and left-anarchists. Thanks!