Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sbwVioWlhS0 What happens when we revisit Wilhelm Reich’s journey from Freud’s student to radical theorist of desire, politics, and repression? In this episode, we sit down with Professor Philip Bennett and David Silver, executive director of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, to explore Reich’s groundbreaking ideas on therapy, character armor, and the enduring relevance of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Together we trace his path from psychoanalysis to Marxism to w...
What does Romanticism have to do with communism, enclosure, and the commons today? In this episode we speak with Joseph Albernaz, author of Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community, about the radical lineage running from Blake and Hölderlin to Marx and Bataille. We explore how Romantic literature conceived “groundless community”—a poetic and ecological alternative to enclosure and collective identity—and how those ideas reverberate through scene-shaping thinkers like B...
Can myth itself serve as a material force in struggles for liberation? Federico Campagna joins me to discuss how myth—too often dismissed as escapism or co-opted by reaction—can instead become a practice of imagination, solidarity, and survival. We look at myth’s place in anti-capitalist politics, its tension with materialism, and its role in resisting despair. What emerges is a vision of myth as a politics of possibility against history’s catastrophes. Acid Horizon Research Commons is now li...
What happens when the self we imagine drifts further from the one we actually live? In this episode, philosopher Fredrik Westerlund joins Craig and Nicholas de Warren to explore his concept of “identity on credit,” where our sense of self is built on promises yet to be realized. From Sophocles’ Ajax to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Scheler, we trace how recognition, resentment, and failure shape the modern psyche. Together we ask whether it is possible to live beyond the creditor–debtor logic of id...
What happens when the painter’s hand breaks free from the eye, and chaos reorganizes the entire field of vision? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we join Charles Stivale, translator of On Painting and The Logic of Sense, to explore Gilles Deleuze’s rare 1981 seminar on painting. Together we trace how concepts like catastrophe, diagram, and modulation emerge from Deleuze’s live philosophical “laboratory” and feed into his landmark work Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Along the way, we u...
What if analytic philosophy isn't as politically neutral as it claims to be? In this episode, we explore the hidden ideological scaffolding of analytic philosophy—its deference to science, retreat to common sense, and therapeutic impulse. Christoph Schuringa, author of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso), reveals how analytic thought emerged from institutional, class-based, and geopolitical forces. We also discuss its uneasy relation to continental philosophy, AI ethics, and the e...
What does it mean to become worthy of the event? In this episode, we’re joined by Justin, longtime collaborator and host of our current reading group on Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. Together, we explore Deleuze’s stoic metaphysics, Nietzsche’s ethics of affirmation, and the revolutionary stakes of releasing ourselves from resentment. Along the way, we consider how play, pedagogy, and the dissolution of the self open us to the transformative force of the event. Support the show Support...
What happens when the dialectic between Sartre and Fanon is not one of influence, but of mutual transformation? Today we're live at Webster’s in State College with Tyrique Mack-Georges, who returns to the podcast to discuss his research on seriality, group infusion, and the possibility of a new humanity. Together, we explore how Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason illuminates Fanon’s revolutionary project, and how Fanon, in turn, reorients Sartre’s ethics. This is a conversation about str...
What if the history of feminism wasn’t only a story of liberation—but also one of betrayal, reaction, and complicity? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we speak with Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, authors of Fascism and the Women's Cause, about the forgotten histories of white feminist collaboration with the far right—from the suffrage movement to the Ku Klux Klan and the British Union of Fascists. Together we explore how transphobia, liberalism, and racial capitalism converge in today’s ...
What does it mean to write philosophy in a time of catastrophe? In this episode, we’re joined once again by Stuart Kendall to explore Georges Bataille’s On Nietzsche, a fragmented, intimate, and disorienting text written in the final years of World War II. We examine how Nietzsche becomes not just a philosophical reference but a companion for Bataille—a figure through whom Bataille grapples with sovereignty, death, and the limits of knowledge. From Sartre’s accusations of mysticism to the wil...
What does it mean to politicize sex rather than assume its politics? In this episode, we're joined once again by Juliana Gleeson to discuss her new book Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation, a sharp and sardonic retelling of intersex activism from 1990 to today. We trace the expressive politics of sex through protest, medical confrontation, and wit as strategy, asking how humor, style, and clinical resistance shaped a movement. Along the way, we explore the global stakes of i...
Don't miss Vintagia; campaign ending soon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acidhorizon/vintagia-i-ching-oracle-for-psychogeographers-and-creatives Is Black Mirror still speculative fiction—or just a stylized documentary of our present? In this episode, we dive into Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1 ("Common People") with writer and philosopher Emily Herring, who recently explored the show’s themes of platform capitalism and cognitive exploitation in The New World. What does it mean to "su...
In this installment of The Anti-Oedipus Files, we welcome translator and theorist Taylor Adkins for a wide-ranging conversation on Lacan’s “Position of the Unconscious.” Beginning with a historical primer, we trace Lacan’s fraught institutional legacy and his confrontation with psychoanalytic orthodoxy. From the topology of the lamella to the philosophical rift between Guattari and Lacan, we explore the transformations of subjectivity, desire, and analytic practice. Taylor also shares insight...
What does it mean to say that queerness is ontological? In this episode, we’re joined by Billie Cashmore and Xenogothic (Mattie Colquhoun) to explore the philosophical foundations and political tensions surrounding queerness, normativity, and the symbolic order. Drawing on thinkers like Judith Butler, Heidegger, and Lacan, we examine queerness not simply as identity, but as a condition of social and ontological failure—and potential. What happens when queerness claims both radical subversion ...
Support the campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acidhorizon/vintagia-i-ching-oracle-for-psychogeographers-and-creatives "Living Currency" syllabus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OeUT0XSZdIQ9VpgLaqjuw0sP3blJZySG/view?usp=drive_link What happens when queer liberation becomes entangled with the myths of the nation-state? In this episode, we speak with Alexander Stoffel about his new book Eros and Empire, which traces the transnational roots of sexual freedom movements in the U.S....
Support Vintagia: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acidhorizon/vintagia-i-ching-oracle-for-psychogeographers-and-creatives What if communism isn’t a destination, but something already unfolding in everyday acts of resistance, care, and imagination? In this episode, Richard Gilman-Opalsky joins us to discuss the political force of utopian thinking, the ongoing tension between Marxism and anarchism, and the need to move beyond stale demands for “practical” revolution. Drawing from his two ...
Buy the Book: https://www.versobooks.com/products/977-the-future-of-revolution?srsltid=AfmBOopbQABhI9H6efsVC8cJLfIxh2LNXMqxpppbp8xUVVnxNMtAyEPc How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed? Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory, from Marx to C. L. R. James, The Future of Revolution illuminates the possibilities for overcomin...
Follow Vintagia now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acidhorizon/vintagia-i-ching-oracle-for-psychogeographers-and-creatives What if capitalism isn’t just an economic system—but a transcendental structure that configures our very experience? In this episode, philosopher Henry Somers-Hall helps us unravel Deleuze and Guattari’s enigmatic claim that capitalism is an axiomatic system. Drawing from Kant, set theory, and the metaphysics of representation, we explore how capital binds and reb...
In this special 10-minute solo dispatch, Craig reveals what’s brewing behind the scenes. From the unveiling of Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery to a series of live events that blend philosophy, art, and sound—this is your glimpse into the next season of the Acid Horizon project. We talk about the upcoming artist residency in State College, Pennsylvania, where Craig will host live podcast tapings, experimental seminars, and collaborative experiences. Plus, we...
In this episode, Will reads Maurice Blanchot’s essay Friendship, a haunting reflection on the impersonal and ineffable nature of true friendship. Blanchot challenges the idea of friendship as mutual understanding, revealing instead a relation marked by silence, distance, and exposure. This reading anticipates our upcoming "Philosophers and the Friend" reading group beginning May 18, featuring works by Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, and more. Reading group syllabus: https://drive.google.com/fil...
Casper Hernández Cordes
a really succinct walkthrough of a very relevant and important concept, thanks!