The Subject Unbound: Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Revolutionary Consciousness with Andrew Flores, Jr.

What happens when the revolutionary fervor of Marxism meets the probing depths of the psychoanalytic couch? In this intellectually stimulating conversation, Andrew Flores (host of The Parallax Viewer) explores the fascinating and often contentious relationship between psychoanalytic theory and left politics.

The discussion begins with a fundamental question: why should Marxists care about psychoanalysis at all? Flores argues that psychoanalysis doesn't just treat individual symptoms but addresses the "bourgeois subject"—the psychological effects of living within capitalist social relations. As he eloquently explains, "What psychoanalysis does is deal with a bourgeois subject, the effects of bourgeois consciousness... Marx invented the symptom, not Freud." This provocative claim opens a pathway to understanding how our internal psychological conflicts might reflect broader social contradictions.

Delving into Lacanian theory, Flores unpacks the three registers—Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—that structure our experience, showing how they relate to political formation and revolutionary potential. The conversation weaves through structuralism, Althusserian Marxism, and contemporary thinkers like Alain Badiou and Domenico Losurdo, revealing the complex theoretical lineages that continue to shape leftist thought.

Perhaps most relevant to our current moment is the discussion of social fragmentation, paranoia, and what might be called our collective psychosis. As conspiracy theories proliferate and ideological certainties dissolve, psychoanalytic concepts offer valuable tools for understanding how individual and collective delusions form in response to social trauma.

Whether you're a seasoned theoretical traveler or new to these intellectual territories, this conversation offers fresh insights into how we might understand the relationship between our inner lives and the social structures that shape them—and perhaps how we might transform both.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:36 Introducing Andrew Flores, The Parallax Viewer
• 4:13 Psychoanalysis and Marxism's Uneasy Relationship
• 19:03 Structure, Subject, and the Lacanian Registers
• 39:01 Structuralism, Althusser, and Political Economy
• 58:04 Fanon, Decolonization, and Psychoanalytic Theory
• 1:13:09 Badiou, Politics, and Revolutionary Consciousness
• 1:27:20 Psychosis, Narcissism, and Modern Subjectivity
• 1:39:38 Theoretical Tensions and Future Directions

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:49

Hello and welcome to VarmBlog, and today we're talking to Andrew Flores, aka TheBigSignorelli, independent scholar of psychoanalysis and host of the Parallax Viewer not to be confused with the Parallax Views podcast. We'll deal with that later. But today we're talking about the relevance of psychoanalysis to left politics, its relationship to structuralism and where Andrew thinks we are politically right now. But welcome aboard, andrew. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2: 1:21

Good, it's good to be on here. I know a while back I had you on the channel, so it's good to be on the other side of things, it's only been a few times I've been interviewed. I should also plug that I'm also the co-host for another channel called the Vanishing Mediators, where we actually go to the seminars of Lacan and we use the Vanishing Mediators because we don't want to be specifically psychoanalysis oriented. So we've been doing stuff like on Jameson and other Marxist texts as well. But, yeah, it's good to be here. How are you doing Barn?

Speaker 1: 1:58

I'm doing okay. I'm healing up from surgery pretty well. Got a clean beer of health for now. Knock on wood. Just drove through Wyoming this weekend because I needed to get out of Utah, since it was pretty hot here and by hot I mean politically hot, not physically hot. It's actually kind of nice weather-wise. I am about half an hour away from where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So, and I have, I have I'm not the number of people that I know who saw that has gone from four that I knew of the first day to like almost 15, and and they include people under 18. So I've had a lot to deal with in regards to that. But this will come out a few weeks after that and we'll see how that all washes out. But I can tell you it feels weird talking about psychoanalysis in a time that feels so theoretically fraught. So I guess we have to justify that before we even begin. So, like, why do you think the psychoanalytic relationship to Marxism is even interesting now?

Speaker 2: 3:26

Yeah, I mean that's a really good question because I know you've interviewed a fellow friend of the show, daniel Tutt, who's really big on psychoanalysis and I would say, yeah, I like have some interesting relationship theoretically in my own scholarship with psychoanalysis and Marxism and I guess, like it's a problem because I don't think of it as like a harmonious relationship. I don't think of it as like a harmonious relationship and you'll see, like people like Gabriel Tupinamba who are big Marxist and clinical, theoretical, lacanian psychoanalysts and they're able to sort of question the relationship between the two. But I guess, to kind of condense it, I think there is an interesting relationship, not only historically but also theoretically. In a sense that, like the way I like to frame it, is that what psychoanalysis does, not just in the clinic as far as deal with individual patients who suffer from neurotic, psychotic symptoms, but theoretically we're dealing with a bourgeois subject, the effects of bourgeois consciousness. You know, for all the criticisms I do have of Zizek, I think he kind of makes a good point and this comes from, actually, lacan about how Marx invented the symptom, not Freud, right?

Speaker 2: 4:48

What that means is that, like you know, the for lack of a better term the infrastructure or the base and superstructure and the social relations create the consciousness, and it's never just this sort of perfect interpolated consciousness. It's rather like something that's always failing and there's a sort of embedded discontent that comes out in a certain formation, whether it is in neurosis, which Freud discovered, at least as far as a cure, the talking cure and a practice to deal with neurosis, and then Lacan dealing with psychosis and other forms of clinical structures that Freud wasn't able to deal with. But I guess, yeah, to cut a long story short, I think it aims at a sort of what? In psychoanalysis we use the term libidinal economy, libidinal investment, uh, which just goes beyond um the realm of, uh, conscious thought or ideas. There's this sort of relationship that we're embedded in, even when we know what we are doing or we don't know what we're doing, in this social formation, we nonetheless repeat and undermine ourselves.

Speaker 1: 6:02

So I mean that makes a lot of sense to me. But I will say I've thought a lot about this contentious relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and, um, what might be we might call future socialist subjectivity, and the tensions there, um, particularly when you try to get into um other forms of psychology like, uh, some of which are actually still ultimately rooted in some kind of psychoanalytic framework but have moved really beyond that, like cognitive behavioral therapy, which was all the rage for about 15 years and people are now like seeing its limits Some other forms of modified analysis, and I have been very interested in this. I'm a Christopher Lash scholar. You can't deal with middle period Christopher Lash without having a pretty strong background and classical Freudianism. Lacan doesn't come up. He's mentioned once in one footnote in all of Lash's work that I can find, and even there he was picking one of the other French psychotic theorists I think it's that Lacan had a debate with. I can't remember her name right now.

Speaker 2: 7:24

Oh, yeah, tricken Daniel has written a lot about her. She's kind of a sort of conservative classical Freudian. She wrote a text called Freud or Reich which was written around the time of May 68 and the counter-cultural revolution. Right, I remember from what I heard, lash had a strong correspondence with her, if I'm not mistaken and lash good, yeah, seminar 16 um of lakhan. He actually uh mentions uh that in passing and he is actually critical not only her, but even of what she is critical regarding the uh liberate libertine movement.

Speaker 1: 8:08

Um uh smurgle is is her name, yeah smurg, smurgle, it's a very strange name, it doesn't sound French. The Smurgle versus Lacan debates and Lash basically uses Smurgle a lot for his interpretation of Freud because he has a much more classical, even conservative, view of Freud. Even the most say Kleinian or classical Freudians. It's, it's very, um, old school and what that. One of the things that that interested me in regards to Lash and I'll tie it in because I'm not just bringing up the stuff that I know, just because I know it, um, is that that lash doesn't really see another subject beyond the bourgeois subject, even though he's very sympathetic to socialism. Um, and this kind of leads him into weird mythic territory. Eventually, by the end of his life he's getting in the sorrel um and and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 9:10

And I bring this up because it's always seemed to me that there's an interesting but tense relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism, because there is in some psychoanalytic frameworks an attempt to almost trans-historicize what would be a 19th century bourgeois consciousness and then there are attempts to move past that, say, early Frankfurt school, wilhelm Reich, that sort of thing, but it never quite squares back on political economy in the right way. And yet I get where it comes from, because marxist theory of mind is hard to articulate because he basically has an emer like what we would now call an emergentist theory of man from hegel, but it comes from materiality and there's no explanation about why the human consciousness would do that. In marx there's like just not. It's just, you know, it's not I. I don't know if he thought it was beyond him or he wasn't that interested, and I've read like every scrap of marx I've ever been able to find in english and some of it and a lot of it in german, and I don't know exactly what he thought the correspondence was. Because he thought that while class consciousness was super important, it wasn't the thing that actually dominated every bit of your individual consciousness. Because he totally recognized there are people who bucked their class positions, interest in social relations and whatever. But he doesn't have a good explanation for why. He just acknowledges that it happens.

Speaker 1: 10:55

And it's always seemed to me that in the early, in the very early 20th century, there was a realization that this needed to be addressed in marxism. And if in my mind, no one's actually effectively addressed it, um, because a lot of people who try to incorporate the Freudian still either transhistoricize the subject like Lash, or they kind of project, more than you can probably say about a future liberated subject like Reich or maybe the Frankfurt School, although the Frankfurt School kind of gives up like Frankfurt School Libertary thought has kind of gone away by the end of adorno. So, um, you know, what do you see is at work here in that, that uneasy relationship, because I do, I agree with you, I don't think it's an easy relationship to entirely parse yeah, and I think, like, regardless of the the you know, analytic body as a whole, like they're gonna still operate regardless if they take in an account political economy.

Speaker 2: 12:05

But I think, like, if you know certain analysts who consider themselves leftist which there are a bunch, but they're not necessarily marxist uh, and and so, like, they try to overreach and be like psychoanalysis is political, well, okay, like what does that even mean? Like what, what is politics? And it becomes a historical, um, I think you know it becomes epistemologically arrogant to think that they could latch on any form of psychoanalytic concept onto. You know, historical mediated relations, social relations, and you know kind of conceal you know, in a sense, having a marxian political economy, uh, framework could assist with understanding, like, the distinction between like, okay, how does you know these symptoms arise in sort of more, uh, you know capitalist developed nations that you know, uh, have a strong consumer base versus those in the global South, you know, or those that are under colonial domination.

Speaker 2: 13:16

I think someone like Frantz Fanon who, I will admit, I'm not as well read, but I know that there is a lot of literature regarding the conjunction of Frantz Fanon and Freud or Frantz Fanon and Lacan with psychoanalysis and colonialism. The name I'm thinking of is I think his name is Jose Gaston Bide. He has a work called Putting Freud on Fanon's Couch and he talks about a lot of the distinctions between, you know, like more Anglo or American or European societies, versus those that have suffered from the apartheid or like those that are in the periphery. But one of the things I wanted to touch on regarding the subject, because I think it is important that you pointed out the fact that's like well, I think you said it was Lash who kind of transhistoricized it to make it think, like you know, Isn't that the only one, though?

Speaker 1: 14:07

I mean to be fair.

Speaker 2: 14:09

Yeah, yeah, there's tons, but I think it's important and we don't necessarily get it from Freud himself, we get it from Lacan and it's reiterated by another French thinker who I'm influenced by probably as much as Lacan, and he's a sort of like the effect of the structuralist school. But he's not a structuralist, he's actually one of these weird figures. His name's Jean-Claude Milner. He studied under Lacan. There was this journal that they started called Cahir por Annalise. It's called Concept and Form, where they try to murder Marxism, structuralist thought and questions of what is epistemology, what is science and psychoanalysis. And he's also studied under Chomsky. So he was one of the reasons why he brought, like Lacan, and someone else brought Lacan to MIT and he merged, like Lacan's form of linguistics and semiotics with Chomsky.

Speaker 2: 15:06

But he makes this important distinction in his work called In Search of Clarity. It's about Lacan and science and that psychoanalysis, insofar as it deals with the subject, it's only the modern subject, which is the effects of modern science. And so he traces back the subject that psychoanalysis will eventually deal with with the advent of what's called the subject of science, which is the cogito, which is by Descartes. Now for Lacan, descartes almost gets at the subject because it has to deal with this fact that science, for him, modern science, which connects with Galileo, is predicated off of, like this sort of world of deception, right, and the sort of negation of oneself, fundamental doubt, and that sort of gets lost in translation with the emergences of different sciences and et cetera. But it manifests in Freud's discovery of the unconscious, which is different from consciousness.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Now, freud never really had a sort of coherent theory of consciousness. Despite being a neurologist, he was never like a psychologist, he was a physician in neurology and it was focused on the nervous system and he even developed his own theory of the neuron. But it was the unconscious that he discovered and he tries to create like certain topology or topographies to talk about what the hell this thing, the unconscious, is. And for him consciousness is more like a system that depends on perception but also external reality and the external excitation that comes with it as very vague but like in some ways that the material body and the relationship to the organs of the eye, the nervous system, create a sort of buffer field, um, in which, like external reality, um, you know, sort of created for the organism. But he recognizes that what causes, uh, these psychopathologies, uh, that psychology can account for.

Speaker 2: 17:17

Um is predicated off of a primary process that uh takes more um precedence than the what he calls a secondary process, which would be conscious life. And that is the pleasure principle, it's the ability to be able to discharge nervous excitation that's built up upon a memory process of trauma. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is that you know, the word subject, the word consciousness are so convoluted because everybody means something different. It's like what the fuck does the subject mean? Everybody talks about subject, this subject that structuralists want to destroy, the subject. Um, you know, for althusser the subject is ideological, but the subject, for lakhan at least, is related to this unconscious um that is sort of split by its like own symptom in the world, um. So some kind of ground works right there for lakhan, and we could probably even get into, like the relationship of structuralism, since I brought it up as well.

Speaker 1: 18:16

Well, that's a good point. I mean subjectivity and subjectness is difficult to talk about because a lot of people do what amounts to basic logical equivocations between what we might call subject 1 and subject 2, or subject 3 and subject two, or subject three and subject four, which is like subject as a subject of history, as a, as a collective movement that becomes conscious of itself, coming from an aggregate into a collective, a la marx and hinkle. That's one definition of subject and that doesn't have that much to do with subject, as in the subject of therapy, or subject of this or that, and and psychoanalysis, except that they both at some level have to interact with an individual mind. Um, but you know, there's a lot of like, very facile critiques of Marxism are, like you know, value is blah, blah, blah and subject is blah, blah, blah and I'm like, but you're talking about something very different than what Marx is talking about. And what makes this, but what makes this particularly salient, is this kind of tension comes up with Althusser, it comes up with the Lacanian Marxist and it also comes up with the existentialist Marxist, because it's important to Sartre and a lot of them, fanon too, because you have that lineage there. So I guess this actually does.

Speaker 1: 19:46

I have to ask you a question that's come up on my show, but we can't assume that everyone on my show knows all these deep dives. What do you? How do you define structuralism in this marxist context? Because another thing is, people will look up structuralism and like I'll say, for example, I'm a functional structuralist, but that's not what. That's not like what altus air, are laconia marxists are talking about. So, um, what is the structure and how is structuralism related to what you're talking about?

Speaker 2: 20:16

yeah, okay. So I guess, like in case, like your audience isn't aware, I know you had, uh, what's his name? Uh, cool dude, uh, nicholas villarreal, he's big in the, you know semiotic stuff as well, uh, and althusserian, uh. So, like for someone like levy strauss and mouse, like they're anthropologists, so for them, I would say, given my like sort of low res understanding, only because it relates to lakhan structures deal with how these sort of tribes or societies or clans and kinships are formulated. And I guess, for, like Levi Strauss at least, structure has to do with like elements of a given society, like what makes a society, and so like for him, he creates the sort of algebraic formula regarding the myths of all the different tribes that he's dealing with, and so I guess, like for structure, it bridges upon this sort of french, uh, understanding of science regarding around like axioms and formalisms, like to sort of create a not only an epistemology but a sort of science, whatever that may be, upon certain formal, consistent definitions and axioms or conclusions, and in some ways that does translate into Lacan, and Lacan was friends with and is in some sense indebted to, structural anthropology, which deals with, um, you know, the elementary formations of a given tribe or different clan or or human society.

Speaker 2: 22:00

But for lakhan, um structure deals, um, I guess you could say, and this is where it might even get a little crazy too between uh language, on the one hand, um, and discourse, right, which that term already opens up a can of worms, because then you have Foucault and many other people that talk about this term. Discourse, um, but in Lacanianese, uh structure deals with how language and discourse are formulated around what he'll call his three registers or his three structural functions the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. And so why he chooses to do this is because, um, well, he thinks that it's implicit in Freud. Freud just didn't voice it, um, but he wants to get away from this sort of hyper symbolized structuralism, uh, that can account for what he calls the subject, uh, and get away from existentialist notions of subjectivity, because at least for him, existentialism deals with like, even though they use the term subject, it's more not only phenomenological in the sense that it's dealing with experience, but conscious experience, and he wants to get away from any sort of philosophy of consciousness. And so the imaginary, for him, in a theoretical way, deals with what is sensible, what is intuitive and that echoes Kant. And then the symbolic is more along the lines of what we are sort of used to as a sort of a bond, a pact, a social relation, but it has a registering effect upon language.

Speaker 2: 24:02

Now, the symbolic for him is not language, but there is a symbolic aspect to language, meaning that he'll use this term in seminar two when he defines the symbolic. The symbolic is like a computating machine and in this, in this seminar, he's really big on cybernetics, because he thinks that cybernetics almost gets at to what he thinks the unconscious and freud gets at, and that the formal system of the symbolic is merely just a bunch of ones and zeros. It's a computation process in which, when you have a certain combination, an effect comes out right, something emerges and something is produced. And he thinks that in some ways, the subject which is equivocal to the unconscious in Freud that's what he means by the subject is the subject of the unconscious, which is structured like a language, and we'll get into that more sort of has this combinatory mathematical effect of it's only by combining certain things that you could get a causal effect, and because it's structured like a language, bruce Fink, a popular American Lacanian, says this combinatory mathematics, it's only when a language.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Bruce Fink, a popular American Lacanian, says this combinatorial mathematics is only when you combine certain things that an effect creates, so like, for instance, it's different from a priori law because it's not something that is, like, you could preconceive without experience, but it's not, you know, empirical or posterior. What it is is that it's a rule that could only be generated by a combinatory effect, meaning we only know, in the English language, I before E, except after C, because we combine all these letters and elements and rules to create this sort of linguistic effect. And so something emerges in this combinatory factor, symbolically. And now the real, and real. This one is more complicated, because even it's a debate and lakayans as far as like, what that even means.

Speaker 2: 25:57

But there's a real of the imaginary, um, in which, like, there is a sort of inconsistent hole, and I should rewind back, because why he likes, why he talks about the imaginary, even though he's critical of consciousness, is that for, for, for Lacan, he has this experiment called the uh, inverted bouquet, an optical schema in which you have a vase in which, like the, the vase is upside down and the flowers are sticking up, and this rotating mirror, if it's in a certain geometrical location, you're able to see an upright vase with flowers sticking out. It's an optical illusion, and then, in order for that image to stay, that you have to have another mirror in place from your vantage point of scene. And he says that from the field of consciousness in which we're already emerged with, in material reality, the ego comes about. And this ego is this optical function that is predicated off of what Freud called narcissism. Right, and narcissism is a libidinal thing in which we have this sort of investment in our body, like the baby is helpless, it's fragmented. Unlike animals, we don't really have instincts, we are sort of developed, weird, in which sort of you know, like freud's just saying, like you know, we depend on caregivers more than animals do. And so for lakhan, the ego, this imaginary function, this narcissistic, is to create a sort of inverted totality or illusion of unity. And then the symbolic comes in and embeds prohibition, it embeds edifice, it embeds laws and machinic-like functions of these ones, and zeros, via structural linguistics, the signifier, which we'll get into more.

Speaker 2: 27:52

But now, going back, the real is what escapes these two processes. The real has to do with trauma, it has to do with one's pathological symptom, and it manifests in both these registers of the ego, which the ego tries to protect against the unconscious and even is at prey to the super ego, which is a term I know I think the lash uses as well which is very popular, to freud. Um, it's like, in the sense in which we sort of internalize this um societal law that is handed down from our parents in a sort of pernicious way that produces guilt, um, and there's more sort of context in which we could break that down for Lacan compared to Freud or Lash. But the real, to put a succinct definition, is what escapes symbolization or returns to its place, meaning that in Freud we have this concept that he discovers later on in his career, called the death drive, and the death drive is what makes us repeat our traumatic experience In childhood development. It's our way of symbolizing, using the symbolic order to recreate that scene of trauma, and we repeat it unconsciously. And so the real is tied into this way in which we do it within these other two registers. But what makes it real is that it cannot process symbolically and the imaginary sort of is flawed in protecting against that. Our imaginary ego, our ego, that sort of, you know, allows us to maintain this sort of illusion of unity and individuality. So that's pretty much for him how structure operates with these three registers.

Speaker 2: 29:34

But then he'll later say on that his structure deals with discourse, and what he means by that is that discourse for him is what's caused by the subject of the unconscious and manifest in the clinic. Because one of the rules in the clinic, in psychoanalytic clinic, is that when you go in you lay on the couch. The one thing that you are granted is to say whatever's on your mind. You can't say everything, but you say what you at least can try to say. You're articulating, you're suffering your entire life into one uncensored free association, your entire life into one uncensored free association.

Speaker 2: 30:18

And the subject of the unconscious is creating a discourse based upon symbolic processes to try to reimagine, remember all these traumatic events that are repressed. And so that's in another way where he will talk about discourse. And then he has this whole other theory of discourse which we don't have to get into, at least right now. But I mean that's in a long winded way, the distinction between structural or structuralism in Lacan versus in like Levi Strauss and even like Althusser. Althusser, that's a debate too, because like there's like Althusser of like what he'll call the conjuncture and then Althusser. That's a debate too, because there's Althusser of what he'll call the conjuncture and then Althusser of overdetermination and contradiction. It's another thing.

Speaker 1: 31:02

One of the issues with Althusser is the way he uses certain terms. He borrows a lot of terms from Sussur and the con, but he completely defines them differently. Um, and that can be somewhat maddening. Like he does it with diachronic and synchronic for him Don't mean what they mean in uh so sore, you know. Uh, the way he uses uh what con in my mind is somewhat uh, idiosyncratic, um, and so you know. I say this as a person, if anyone who knows the lore of my academic uh exposure to Marxism is I was exposed to, I guess I was like 22, um, or no 21. Cause I was a senior in college and asked to teach a section of Althusser to the class and I got asked again in grad school and I hated it because I wasn't given the context for how he was using terminology and how it was different from other standards. Like, even overdetermination has relationship to the way it's used in general philosophy, but it doesn't mean the same thing. And, and also, sarah, has a more, both specific and broader meaning kind of the way that, like, reification has a more specific and broader meeting than Marxism than it does in like general analytic philosophy. Right, and so I have.

Speaker 1: 32:32

I have always struggled with Alcicera A lot of people. You know my jokes about both Alcicera and Lacan and you might not like this, but it's like I understand individuals Alcicera and Lacan so I understand, like Fink's Lacan and Zizek's Lacan, but I don't understand Lacan. And with Althusser I kind of feel the same way, like I understand Nico Villareal's Althusser and I understand some of the way the British structuralists were using Althusser and I understand how Althusser kind of inspired Foucault, but I don't actually know that I really get what Althusser himself was getting at in his own context. And I find this very, very frustrating because so many of the debates of academic Marxism in the 70s and 80s in particular are rooted in how you interpret the fight between Autistarians and Lukashians. Are Autistarians in, let's say, British historical Marxists like EP Thompson and and RH Hilton and stuff, uh, rh hilton and stuff like that? Um and uh that.

Speaker 1: 33:57

And unfortunately, when I came about, uh, in this world, um, both in my conservative period and in my radical period in my late, when I radicalized in my mid to late 20s um, that was marxism, that's the mark, that's the only marxism people in america were really exposed to they.

Speaker 1: 34:15

We knew that china and vietnam and cuba had marxists, but we had no idea really what that meant, and our marxism was the fight between academics in the 80s. So, uh, it's interesting, and the reason why I bring that up is because these debates really defined a lot of people's exposure to Marxism 10, 15 years ago, even when Zizek was becoming super popular in the late aughts, um, but they don't so much define Marxism now, and so I was going to ask you like, how have you translated that into engagements with other Marxists? Because this is, this seems like a debate that meant a lot to some very nerdy graduate students, but hasn't meant a lot to people reading Lacerdo today, or whatever, or left communists or anything like that. So what's the intersection between the structuralism you're talking about and an actual, practical Marxism as experienced by most people? Yeah, no, that's that's.

Speaker 2: 35:18

That's a good question. I mean, like it's something that I'm sort of tethered with too, because I I think, like when you point it out about, like you know, you understand certain individuals use of alfusser or lakhan, but like it's hard for you to understand, um, you know them on their own terms. I think it is interesting because, like, when you look at althusser, for instance, and uh, you know, I did the uh for marks, uh reading group with daniel and conrad hamilton, who you had on the show recently for the flowers for marks project, um, he, he, uh, co, uh taught that that reading group and one of the things he says is that like, uh, you know, alfusser was so like, like treading, treading on water, trying to like bring uh psychoanalysis into the paris communist party. Uh, and he would hide it under terms like overdetermination, like that comes from freud, and and I think there's a footnote to which he says that, but he attributes it to, I want to say, mao Zedong in that essay on contradiction over determination, and he'll actually continue to use it and is more explicit about the psychoanalytic component in the Reading Capital Project. And then he has that whole essay on uh psychoanalysis, freud and lacan, in which he like talks about their relationship between freud and and marx.

Speaker 2: 36:41

And it is interesting, thinking about even his relationship to psychoanalysis because, like he was very close to lacan at a certain point and and I think there was a strong distance uh towards the end, especially after, you know, murdering his wife Uh, and but before that, like he actually brought Lacan into his own um group because Lacan was kicked out of the uh uh, the, the reigning body uh of psychoanalysis during the time, the uh international psychoanalytic association, ipa, and then he founded his own school in the process.

Speaker 2: 37:17

So it's like his 11th seminar is where, like he becomes this big celebrity intellectual, not just like a, a psychiatrist turned psychoanalyst that's having these sort of like low-key, esoteric seminars with analysts only, like now he's, you know, talking to a bigger audience at the École Normale, but, like for Althusser, like he'll use the term imaginary, which comes from Lacan, but he says that like imaginary is like our ideological relation, or ideology is an imaginary relation to reality or the social relations, and that becomes a huge debate with the sort of Locano Marxists that you're referring to, which are Zizek and I don't want to even say like Dolar that comes out of the Ljubljana school, but then even a middle figure that's influenced heavily by Althusser and you could say is like the sort of post-Althusserians and influencer to Zizek, is Ernesto Laclau, who's huge on psychoanalysis, uses a lot of the sort of for lack of a better term Lacanian semiotics, like signifier, to talk about, like, how populist groups sort of entangle with one another based upon this idea of like floating signifier, um and and the way in which, like an antagonism is built upon that.

Speaker 2: 38:38

And we know that the problems of, of let the populism has led to, and I think, like for for all zizek's you know, like contributions to, I guess, quote-unquote marxism and and lacanianism. I think that he's never really abandoned his Lacanianism. I think he still is embedded into some sort of populism as like a sort of emancipatory project. But I really think that Zizek's use of Lacan is way different from Lacan himself, because he tries to make this homology between Lacan and Hegel.

Speaker 2: 39:10

Yeah, which I just don't get homology between lakhan and hegel, uh, yeah, which I just don't get. Yeah, yeah, and, and zizek has some good stuff when he talks about lakhan on his own terms, but as soon as he brings up like the hegelian dialectic, I think it's like this is very much of a far stretch and it's only a zizek thing. Um, so, like I guess, like when it comes to psychoanalysis and like practical Marxism because you even mentioned Lacerda it's like Lacerda was somebody that like I'm pretty influenced by, like I wouldn't say like I'm a hardcore diet, like diehard, like Lacerda in, but I would say like his class struggle work, his work on liberalism, bonapartism, have been very like.

Speaker 1: 39:47

I really I will say as much as I have been a critic of the Western Marxism book and I am mixed on the Stalin and Nietzsche books. I think his Bonapartism book is excellent, yeah, and, and you know, just before people come at me, I also think his book on Stalin has some Stalin apologia in there. But it's basic point that don't use Stalin as just a way to avoid dealing with the problematics of, of communism and anti-communism. Is, sam, you know whether or not I agree with him on what you know on softening what Stalin did. But I I say that because Listerda is like really big right now and he's theoretically well.

Speaker 1: 40:30

I mean he's interesting because I've associated most european marxist leninist with structuralism for a long time or with euro communism. That's always been the two predominant, you know, marxist leninist traditions out of europe. I mean there's others elsewhere that I have seen and lacerto has become super popular, I think partly for obvious like uh, you know um, polemic reasons, but I also think partly because he's a way outerto doesn't have a whole lot of truck with lakhan or or uh, or altus air really like no well, actually they're, uh, so conrad, uh, to refer to him again, actually it was in the middle of translating a very early essay on Marx and the state from Lacerdo and, frankly enough, lacerdo was actually an Althusserian in his past.

Speaker 2: 41:40

Yeah, and it's quite funny because I think it's because he bounced from two different Italian parties back in his younger years, back in his younger years, and he was more, even though he's always, like, accused of being a neo-Stalinist for whatever reason. I think it's mainly because of the Stalin book that you referenced, but he was more of a committed Maoist. And so now, correct me if I'm wrong, because I know you have a stronger-.

Speaker 1: 42:08

And today I think he's a Dungist, which is still kind of Maoist, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:13

And so correct me if I'm wrong, because I know you have a stronger historical background in like Italian communism, but like from what I heard, that the Italian party, the Maoist party that he was a part of in his younger years, didn't really have a lot of, let's say, theoretical philosophical figures to ground their praxis let's say theoretical philosophical figures to ground their praxis.

Speaker 2: 42:36

And so for him, althusser became a sort of figure in which he could ground some sort of theoretical binding to the movement at the time, and so Althusser became a huge influence on him theoretically.

Speaker 2: 42:47

And even though he sort of distances himself from Althusser in the Western Marxism book, but even as early in the class struggle book, when he's criticizing Althusser for his humanism, his anti-humanism, he, I think, still maintains that fidelity with understanding, contradiction and overdetermination, with his idea that, like class struggle, or a multiplicity of struggles that could be at least categorized into two processes, you have the uh workers and proletariat, uh, or sorry, the uh capitalists and the you know, classical proletariat as far as a worker goes, uh, in marxism. And then you have struggles for recognition that take the form of like the colonized, the slaves and the slaver votes, from like Haiti up until now, to the women's and sexual oppression that were talked about, with, like Marx and Engels, national liberation movements and even have the trans oppression, and the list goes on. That, like these struggles for recognition, while they're not inherently, let's say, marxist, they can't help but manifest at a certain overdetermined juncture as a class struggle in the form of recognition, is like a human struggle.

Speaker 1: 44:02

And so I think, right, there is his implicit Althusserianism that still remains, regardless of his distance because of anti-humanism, remains regardless of his distance because of anti-humanism because, because, even if we read him as a Marxist and the socialism and Chinese characteristics like Deng Xiaobai, there is a humanism implicit in that and that's hard to square without Tusserianism.

Speaker 1: 44:31

And yet it did seem that most of the humanists in the Euro communist parties the British are different, I'm going to bracket them out ended up as euro-communists. They didn't like, they didn't stay like a normal, you know, marxist center, marxist-leninist of the like 1950s, 1960s variety, and they also seem to be kind of baffled about how they should respond to anti-colonial movements. Um, uh, and I say that because, I mean, fanon has become increasingly important in light of Gaza. The colonialism that Fanon is dealing with in Africa is settler, but it is not of the same kind of settler colonialism that you're dealing with in Israel, where you basically have an entire displaced population without a clear homeland to return to, and that actually changes some of the dynamics of of what fanon is talking about. Um, and yeah, I do think there's a lot to be learned from fanon. I also think he's also quoted very piss poorly by both his critics and his fans.

Speaker 2: 46:07

Yeah, yeah, and, like you know, I'm not as heavy in fanon scholarship but like what I've noticed in a lot of the sort of psycho, psychoanalytic psychology, um, you know, um camps that like want to focus on a sort of decolonial liberation aspect, is that they mention fanon but they don't mention his marxism or like how he was indebted to some sort of right political emancipation and they only focus on race.

Speaker 2: 46:34

Um, it's not a problem, but it's just like it almost, it almost sort of like waters down the radicality, um uh of fanon and uh, one of our mutual friends, uh comrade, uh Bodale, is really big on the sort of militant influence of Fanon, you know, in light of like also his Marx, marx or not as Marxism, his psychoanalytic practice as well, which there's like a huge text that's referenced the least, but it's titled freedom and alienation, where he actually goes over a lot of his case studies, you know, and I think some of the things that he concludes and sort of political strategies regarding, like you know, institutions that handle psychiatry and psychoanalysis and sort of like Marxian sense.

Speaker 1: 47:26

I would agree with that. I mean, fanon's an interesting figure because he's not. He's definitely a Marxist, he's definitely a fairly orthodox Marxist in some ways, in other ways he's not. But he's bridging so many different traditions because he's bridging existentialism with Lacanian psychoanalysis, encouraging Marxism with those two things which had already been attempted, frankly, before Fernand came around. But then he's wetting it all into anti-colonialism and decoloniality, to make up a word. That's terrible. But yet you can't see him in the same way that you can see other decolonial thinkers, like, I don't know, like Chinua, achebe are some of the more radical ones, who even wanted to throw out, like European languages and the concept of nation state because they were too European Right.

Speaker 1: 48:16

Samir Amin right is like another yeah well, samir Amin is interesting because he's a diehard Marxist but man, does he not like Islamist like at all? He not like islamist like at all? Um, and it's weird to for people to miss that, because he wrote a whole book like arguing with till el assad and some other people um, and then during the egyptian revolution he did not support the brotherhood um kind of famously, and then went to, I believe, senegal so, and didn't come back. So it's, and I say that because he was very old at the time, but that was during my lifetime.

Speaker 1: 49:01

I also, I mean, personally, people heard me critique his late texts that he didn't finish because I was like I don't even understand what this has to do with Marxism, all that much. But he was a third world as marxist. But I always bring that up too that because fanon and smear mean don't fit a lot of the other third worldist marxist theories at all, um, you know, I mean you got um rodney would be another example, like walter rodney, who's like someone was more classical to the marxist, leninist project right and not like one of those, uh, marxist, leninist malice who thought there was no such thing as a as a proletariat in the developed world or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 49:40

Like samir mean would not say that, um, and so it's. Uh, it creates an interesting space to kind of deal with, because you are trying to deal with these to bring it back to the Cyclone Lake notion very different subjectivities that have very different contexts and thus their relationship to neurosis and psychosis in a Freudian context, if you believe that that is going to be different than a european or post-european settler state um, yeah and relationship to those things go ahead.

Speaker 2: 50:16

I think one of the so there's two thinkers that I think that have like, because your initial question, uh, was about, like, bridging the gap between sort of structuralism and sort of a political marxist practice, and I would say the person that kind of well, there's two people, but the first one that between sort of structuralism and sort of a political Marxist practice, and I would say the person that kind of well, there's two people, but the first one that deals with more of the French structuralism, or at least the aftermath of that scene, would be Alain Badiou, and Alain Badiou slash his counterpart, who I think I find more, no, sylvan Lazarus, I don't know if you.

Speaker 1: 50:51

Oh yeah, lazarus, okay, got it yeah so where else? Not a marxist at all, but go no, no, he has that anti or non-bad, do or anti-baidu, and uh like yeah yeah, um, and he also is very critical of alfusser as well, if I'm not mistaken, um extremely

Speaker 2: 51:06

yeah, but like I think, like, for all the criticisms of Badu's like I guess you could say Marxism or like in some sense like from like a Orthodox Marxist where they'll say, well, he doesn't really talk about political economy, fair enough. But I do think that, like, what I like about Badu is that, like well in his early work, like theory of the subject, he is that, like well in his early work, like theory of the subject, he's able to use sort of lacanian terms like um impasse at the side of formalization, uh, which is like another definition of the real, um, and then, uh, the understanding of the subject as like scission mean. Like he's using the, the sort of maoist dialectic of like, uh, the one always comes into two or divides into two right Unity of opposites ends up dividing in itself, to show like that, like politics happens with the people or with the masses, off of like a structurally embedded exclusion. And I think during that time he's dealing with, like the problem of immigration, um, which, like he thinks, like the immigrants, the migrants, uh, etc. Like are these sort of excluded people or like just in general, the state, um, no matter what, what, no matter how much the bourgeois state tries to encompass a totality of things, that there's always something left out. And I think that's his example of like what the possibility of the proletariat is based upon, like the excluded thing in the dialectic. But another example would be like his way of like categorizing philosophy off of the four conditions and that's like, uh, what's he say? Science, art, politics and love. Now I like the politics one and I've more, a lot like read more of badu's uh, meta politics than majority of his other works and I find that like surprisingly, really clear and meta politics he actually gets from ron sierra, which is another jacques.

Speaker 2: 53:06

Ron sierra is one of the students of al but like he opens the book with like a critique of of hannah arents and hannah rents lectures on kant, by, you know, privileging kant as the philosopher for political philosophy, and he's talking about how, like, we need to disassociate philosophy from politics because politics is its own unique thought and its own unique system. Uh, and how all philosophy does and the history of modern philosophy and politics is that it creates this sort of division between, uh, the spectator and the actors of history, into which, that, you know, politics is only viable for those spectators who deem it worthy of debate, because Hannah Arendt's sort of politics is that politics is useful because it stimulates debate. And so, like going back to Lacerdo, I think one of her, one of his criticisms of Hannah Arendt, is that like, oh yeah, politics is good for uh, because it produces debate.

Speaker 1: 54:08

So in her logic, you know, she appreciated the Jim Crow laws because it stimulated debate, which is not actually that unfair of a characterization of some of her positions, particularly when she's like, writes about discourse and Aristotelianism and ignoring that like that's all based on having a class of slaves. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 54:33

And even in Lucero's class struggle book he criticizes her for saying that exploitation because this is where she's really critical of Marxism that exploitation are not these economic, social categories, but if there's any form of exploitation, it's by the forces of nature, to which only some of us are exploited based upon some natural reason and therefore, like the masses that consider themselves exploited, are only that I'm kind of paraphrasing are only that way because of just natural law. It was just nature's destiny. And at the same time, these oppressed people, these slaves, are not free thinkers, so therefore they're not the sole source of a revolution. We need free thinkers that are, you know, able-bodied and not bound by the natural law. It's this weird sort of right.

Speaker 1: 55:22

I mean it's. It's a bourgeois, revolutionary argument. That's actually just straight up argument. That's actually just straight up Aristotle. Like it's straight up Aristotle's Politica, like, but like in a really like you're, I mean, like I'm like it took a long time for people to notice it. I'm like she's arguing that there's such a thing as a natural slave, if you actually pay attention.

Speaker 2: 55:43

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 55:45

Yeah. Which I'm actually like that's sub-liberal really.

Speaker 2: 55:51

Right, yeah, so, um, but like I'm actually like that's sub-liberal really, right, yeah, so, so I mean, that's a bit of a digression, but like, back to the meta politics, that's like he says that, like you know, in some cases, like hannah oran, who, in privileging her reading of kant, like pretty much like he's arguing that like political philosophy is like fallen, fallen into this sort of way in which they don't understand politics, what they do is they politicize the ethical and make certain ethical demands regarding what is to be done.

Speaker 2: 56:16

And so, by this division of the spectator versus the actors of history, you can, in his words, you can make ethical demands and judgments of taste based upon your reaction of the jacobins, by thinking that the french revolution, in and of itself to spectate was beautiful, but the actors of that historical event, the jacobins, are, uh, you could condemn them, they're, they're contestable, um, and so like.

Speaker 2: 56:46

And then also, in her mind, she's she, like she says, uh, politics produces debate, and that means that we have to, like, have a judgment of what is politics. So, for her, nazis aren't political, so they don't need to be debated for uh, in in her logic, and that's what the do says. But meta politics, uh, for him is like okay, politics is a specific thought, and so he relies on that other figure, sylvan Lazarus, to talk about how politics is rare and when it happens, it's spontaneous by the people. So he uses the term people because he thinks that the term masses, which comes from Mao, the class of the proletariat, which comes from Lenin and Marx, is overly saturated and it's hard to even use today, because what does that even mean?

Speaker 2: 57:34

but I feel that way about people though, yeah yeah, well, he says it like this like you know, in his sort of two, two statements of the anthropology of the name, which is sylvan lazarus text, he says people think and thought is a like relation of the real, and so what he wants to do is create like a sort of political thought in which, like how, thought has a relation to politics, because he says that, like, okay, politics, you know, in the modern sense and in the way which is oriented by people, um, you know, san just is like the first political figure. Then he attributes it to Marx. I forget specifically how he labels Saint-Just as like a figure, I think because of the way in which he's able to separate the sort of the ruling elites in France at the time from the people that want liberty, equality and egalitarianism or liberty equality. And then marx, because marx is able to understand the political uh aspect of the workers movement. And then he says lenin makes a major break and has his own political thought because of, um, the way in which he, in his what is to be done, formulates a new understanding of politics. And then for him, mao is sort of the last like periodization of a political thought, with the masses right, and so for him, he's trying to think, like Batu, what would a political thought look like?

Speaker 2: 59:01

Because, for them, politics, and politics as a thought, is interior and it has to be sort of emerging its own sort of particular position in conjuncture. It does not need to rely on the state. It's because he says, state, uh, state does not produce political thought, right? Um, and then even this is crazy he's criticizing the party as well.

Speaker 2: 59:26

So, like, the vanguard are another form of exteriority in which no matter what end up sort of relying on the state, and so that's the sort of way in which, like you know, like maybe their prescriptions are not totally a hundred percent, like something I would necessarily agree with, but I do think it allows me to think all right, are we thinking in terms of, maybe, some type of mass movement or people that are organized organically, or are we relying on the state? Are we relying on workers' demands in so far as that they appeal to some sort of state policy, right? Or is it something organic sort of state policy, right, or is it something organic? Go ahead, finish your thought, though. So the last? Well, I'll let you, I'll just say it, but the last thing I want to get into regarding the psychoanalytic side, because I do only focuses on like a small bit of psychoanalysis, but there is an argentinian thinker named leon rosichner that I'll get into later on.

Speaker 2: 1:00:25

uh, regarding his explicit use of psychoanalysis, uh, talk about how his power and military power subjugate us, but go ahead.

Speaker 1: 1:00:35

No, I was about to say, because one of the interesting things, if we both take Lacerdo and Badu as two ways, like post-Athusarian, goes on, you have Lacerdo with a humanist view that also departs from, frankly, all other Marxism. I think Lacerda knows this. This is not an unknown revision where he says we're not going to get rid of the state, we shouldn't even try to. Hegel gives us a good reason, philosophy of right, not to do that. A good reason, philosophy of right not to do that, um, and whereas badu, because it's a marxist. But when I first would have metapolitics, I'm like how's this guy not an anarchist, just straight up, like it's not just said he wants to get rid of the state, like we don't want to rely on the state even now, um, and that's a big jump from um.

Speaker 1: 1:01:28

You know traditional Leninism of any variety, but they both seem to come out of like how we view assumptions in relationship to Hegel and how we view this subjectivity. So I was going to ask you like what is the intersection between you're thinking about the state and you're thinking about psychoanalysis? Because one thing you can say about both Freud and Lacan is like there's some implicit relationship to the thought that leads to two states, like in the Big Other, the Great Father, you know those kind of things, symbolic castration, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. That has a tie to development of state forms in psychoanalysis, but it's really underdeveloped. And so what is the intersection of psychoanalysis in the state for you, particularly when you look at these post-psychoanalytic Marxists, to take this and radically oppose directions from some of the same theories?

Speaker 2: 1:02:33

Yeah, and so this is going to bring me into the Leon Rezichner point who, I think, as far as psychoanalysis explicitly goes, he has a really convincing way to, you know, support the, I guess, the need for a sort of psychoanalytic theory for Marxism. So, I guess, like for the state, I would like to also add in, like the family as a sort of institution, because one of the biggest things that psychoanalysis talks about is the family and in the way in which, like you could say, the family is a sort of nucleus of that and of culture and of the law which you know we are imbued with, it's the first social relation we have. And of course we could bring in Lash with the problem with family, because, you know, the nuclear family isn't as stable, you know, these days, as it was in the sort of Victorian era that Freud was talking about these days, as it was in the sort of Victorian era that Freud was talking about. But Freud has this underappreciated book called, you know, group Psychology and the Ego, in which he kind of critiques Gustave Le Bon and his understanding of group psychology, because, like group psychology in Gustave Le Bon, which also is influenced by nicha, like niche or like as far as, like nicha goes, he's a form of group psychologist, um, even uh, alexis de toqueville, with pathologizing the groups, pathologizing the masses, as like, inherently herdist, like a herd mentality, so, like uh, freud and Rosichner, specifically in his book called Freud and the limits of bourgeois individualism, tackles this text of Freud's group psychology.

Speaker 2: 1:04:16

And so Freud talks about, uh, this notion of artificial groups and artificial groups or any group that are formed by the uh state church and the army, and any sort of ancillary group of the state church and the army, and any sort of ancillary group of the state, and so I guess the family would also be part of that. And in the way in which, like group identifications come about, in which of course there is a sort of pathology, there's a sort of paternal identification that we see from group leadership, bureaucrats et cetera, that bind these groups together and create this sort of hypnotic trance. And this is also the text where he develops, in German, this term Einzigazug, which is called, you know, a trait of identification, and for Lacan he'll call it the unary trait, and this is something that's passed down from, you know, the law, the law of the father, the big other, symbolically, and it doesn't have to be a literal father. It's just like whoever you know passes down the symbolic law that marks you. But in the way in which there is this logic of identification and we could see how, like you know, the, the artificial groups operate today with, like you know, maga in America, like the MAGA groups and the MAGA communists with Dugan today, in which there's this weird identification with Charlie Kirk, in which that's caused a sort of group mentality and it doesn't have to be necessarily an identification based upon loving the person. It's one of their equivalents.

Speaker 2: 1:06:00

But Freud has this one notion that he never really touches upon, that Leon Rosichner talks about, and that is the spontaneous group. So Freud has this idea of the spontaneous group that comes about and he does, I think, liken it to the revolutionaries. But we know how Freud was always hesitant to give any sort of love and, you know, prospect to revolutionary groups and his sort of wishy waswashy feelings towards communism and other, you know, anti-capitalist groups. But you know, despite some of those like sort of criticisms of Freud's personal life, as I think he's just more of a sort of like centrist liberal, I don't think he's a conservative at all, nor is he really progressive, and I think the same thing about Lacan. Lacan was really well read in Lukács and other Marxist texts, but I don't think he was like a great Marxist reader. I would just say that he never stopped reading Marxism but he wasn't definitely a friend or foe of the revolutionary groups.

Speaker 2: 1:07:05

Leonid Dichner, again, he was an Argentinian Marxist. He studied under merleau-ponty and one of the things that he gained from phenomenology was like understanding schiller or scheller, I think it's, it's the, the german max schiller. Uh, he talked a lot about affect and guilt and the military group of the dictatorship around, uh, at the time of in argentina that he was living in, were reading that stuff to understand terror, terrorism and to be able to create an affect of guilt and servitude. Uh, within the um, within the, the atmosphere of argentina. So, like, a lot of his polemics in using psychoanalysis are against the dictatorship that he was living under and even the Peronismo.

Speaker 2: 1:07:56

I think there's like another group that he's very kind of ambivalent of, and then also Althusserianism, like Laclau, who's critical of populism, like Laclau who was critical of populism.

Speaker 2: 1:08:11

But he uses psychoanalysis to pretty much understand how one's subjectivity, for lack of, he doesn't really use the term subjectivity, he uses the term corporality, how one's corporality and how we, you know, are immersed in the social formation, how these sorts of traumatic symptoms, under terror, under dictatorship, form these identifications.

Speaker 2: 1:08:34

And he thinks that you know bourgeois subjectivity, and this is why in the beginning I said, you know, psychoanalysis deals with the bourgeois subjectivity that's a Rosichner line because he thinks that there's a limit to bourgeois subjectivity and its quest for individualism, because he thinks that the capitalist mode of production and the social relations are something that Freud implicitly tracks by showing that it's techniques of discharging suffering or dealing with suffering, whether it's, you know, the appropriation of art, of science and of religion, only do so much, and that neurosis comes about as a last resort.

Speaker 2: 1:09:24

And so psychoanalysis identifies with that. But he thinks that it's not enough that we deal with neurosis, that there is another form of thing that emerges and that's a sort of revolutionary consciousness. And he thinks that in the spontaneous fruit that Che Guevara fits the role of a leadership of a non-paternalistic or imaginary identification of a revolutionary group during the close of the book. Identification of a revolutionary group during the close of the book. But I think he's ultimately a really interesting figure that's able to use an exegesis of Freud's specific text on civilization, discontent group psychology and some of his introductory lectures to talk about the unconscious subjectivity, the superego in which he's. He aligns as this sort of personalization of the artificial groups of the state and the way that it's passed down in the family to keep one in this sort of trapped relationship of you know, the ideological rule, for lack of better term. Okay.

Speaker 1: 1:10:31

Well, I mean, you actually did something that I was hoping you'd do but I was going to ask you if you didn't which is to tie some of this into actual practical concerns today. So it seems like you think that the subject formation has gone awry. You know, one of the reasons I got fascinated with Christopher Lash is I find his early books to be sort of standard socialist historiography of an imminent critique of the American left, the beginnings of the new left, the progressive movement, etc. But by the time you get into his middle period, freud becomes so crucial to to him, but it and by the you you go through that and um haven in a heartless world spoke of family. And then the response to that gets into deeper in this freud in the next two subsequent books, which is culture of narcissism, and then the minimal self, which clarifies what he means in cultural narcissism. Um, and he's one and one of the.

Speaker 1: 1:11:34

One of the reasons I bring that up is he is innovative in this sense, even though he doesn't really get past the bourgeois subjectivity of freud is that he does tie freudian um concepts to periods of political economy. So, for example, narcissism is the cultural narcissism is about a secondary narcissistic attachment to institutions that he sees developing in Fordism in specific, which is why a lot of people misread that book because they don't get that. They think it applies like it's like a general cultural critique. It's not misread that book because they don't get that. They think it applies like it's like a general cultural critique. It's not. He's saying that, like, the reason why this is a culture of narcissism is there's an over-identification with groupings and identities and it started with an over-identification with the firm and not being able to tell your, your separation as an individual from your separation from the firm. And then it goes on to other identities and it spans out and by the time you get to the minimal self in the beginnings of neoliberalism, which he was later called that, uh, he thinks that, like, you're in primary narcissism so you can no longer tell yourself from anything like um, so, and those are classical freud categories, right, but he ties them to political economy and that's kind of unique. So you know he's he's talking about political economy, with Fordism and cultural narcissism and the way it's winding down. And as new liberalism is beginning to get amp up to that crisis, he starts talking about, you know, a shift from the social modality, not like the clinical modality, but from the social modality, from secondary narcissism to primary narcissism.

Speaker 1: 1:13:17

Um, now again for those, for those of my audience who don't know all these distinctions, these are not distinctions recognized by the dsm. No, no right, like these are like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, these are freud, these are not modern, uh, modern psychology. So a lot of people like, oh, you know, his narcissism doesn't meet narcissistic personality disorder. I'm like, narcissistic personality disorder as defined in the dsm didn't exist when flash started writing about this stuff, um, he was going off of freud.

Speaker 1: 1:13:50

But, uh, the reason why I find that so, so interesting today is and this is gonna, I am asking you to speculate, and that is always dangerous, but you brought this up and like people over identifying with tertiary figures like, uh, charlie kirk or charlie hebdo are, um, I mean, mean various forms of terrorists which Charlie Kirk obviously isn't, you know are right now life actually, uh, uh, taylor robinson, who comes from my state, uh, is his. His politics seem inscrutable and if you go into right-wing world he's a leftist. If you go into left-wing world, everyone's claiming he's a griper. There is only circumstantial evidence for either um and it. It doesn't really seem to be clear, but it does seem like you're dealing with fragmented selves that other people want to attach to parts of, and the reason why I bring that up.

Speaker 1: 1:15:03

As to what you just said, is that, okay, so you have this idea of the revolutionary leader who you don't have a paternalistic relationship to, but it does seem like we're living in an age of projected paternalism, that it isn't upon leaders really, it's. It's people being made into like a social, symbolic imaginary or something. So how would you apply? Would you apply Lacanian psychoanalysis to that? Do you think it's dangerous to apply Leuconian cycle analysis to that? Like, is there a way in which the stuff we've talked about today could help people come to terms with what they're seeing?

Speaker 2: 1:15:40

Yeah, and like, like I think you pointed out one thing that these, if you could call them because, like, in the clinical aspect, we would call them diagnostic structures, not categories, because it's not a one-size-fits-all, and the radical take about the structures of neurosis, hysteria, perversion, psychosis, is that they're a sort of ethical choice to make to guide the treatment. But I do think that they do kind of help out in a way to talk about again what we were reiterating with, like paternalistic identification. Now, you know, like my reading of Lash is very low. I actually just started reading the Culture of Narcissism but I had to put it down a while back just because it's like, look on, uh, um, you know commitments.

Speaker 2: 1:16:30

But it's interesting that you mentioned how, like he says that you know, uh, you know at least what is it, uh, the culture of narcissism in the forties period. We have the secondary narcissism and then the minimal self and then the more neoliberal thing. We have a more primary narcissism, which I think is interesting because, well, one, even though he does use a lot of freud I've heard from daniel that, uh, a lot of his uh readings of psychoanalysis come from also otto kernberg, who's more yeah, more kernberg than probably is radically different, um than the lacanian tradition, but I find it interesting how he makes this leap between secondary and primary.

Speaker 2: 1:17:16

So let's rewind before we even get into that. Like what do those terms mean? I mentioned narcissism earlier with the imaginary, and so for anyone who has at least some vague familiarization with Lacan, you'll probably hear of the more infamous Mirror Stage. The Mirror Stage essay deals with the Freudian notion of primary narcissism, with his research into psychotic disturbances, paranoia and what was called dementia precox back then, now called schizophrenia. And it was also a debate between Jung, because Jung thought that the theory of libido was psychical, and it goes into his weird theory of the archetypes versus sexual in Freud. And so in Freud's 1905 and constantly revised uh essay, uh, three, three essays on sexuality, he only has two structures of sexuality he has the autoerotic, um, and then he has the object love, which gets read in like so many different ways in non-lacanian freudianism, and object relations, um. But autoerotic has to do with the fact that, like this goes to what like he calls like the fact, like infantile sexuality, that the child has a form of sexuality, but it's not like they are imbued with it, like it's like there's sort of like philosophical, like essence, like it's not their essentialist thing, it's the fact that, like way that child children develop the autoerotic is like this sort of way in which they're trying to form a body, so like they're like this, like temporary erogenous zones, and he will liken it to a feature of a masturbation because it's sort of self-satisfactory meaning, like children suck the thumb or babies suck the thumb because you know it's just the Raja's zone of constant satisfaction. They don't, they're, they don't. The breast is not enough for oral satisfaction or hunger. There's something driven like that needs some sort of, some sort of satiation. And then you'll apply other parts of the body and use weird biological metaphors. But then you have object love and that aligns with what you'll later talk about, with how sexuality sort of interferes with puberty and how sexuality should be aligned with puberty. But something that sort of is residual and maintained even in the puberty aspect of biological maturation. And object love deals with something that we see in the Oedipal complex of the rivalry with the father for the mother's love and the prohibition of incest. But narcissism is that middle period.

Speaker 2: 1:20:06

Narcissism is when the image of the body or the body as an object as a whole is taken into account. But it seems like for look for freud, it's very transitional, but for lacan, uh, this is a structural moment that inaugurates the ego right, the ego which does for freud, creates a conflict between, uh, libidinal instinct of satisfaction and the ego's drive for self-preservation, and the way in which these two sort of systems are at odds with one another. And so narcissism is this moment in which, like, libido then finds a new route via the ego. Now, secondary narcissism comes from something traumatic and that's where psychosis comes in. So I find it interesting how Lash will say that there's a secondary narcissism in the fortis, but then, in the sort of neoliberal, it's a primary narcissism, because I would say that in our social fragmentation, if you can call it such, that these moments like Charlie Kirk or whatever we see happening in America that causes a schism, seems to have a paranoia with it in a sort of persecutory function that resembles secondary narcissism, that resembles a form of psychosis in which there's a threat from the other right.

Speaker 2: 1:21:23

And so, like, I feel like, because secondary narcissism is like this way, in which, like, like, it creates a delusion, it creates a narcissistic reality that's only interior to that subject suffering from psychosis, and it's a sort of embodied delusion, a paranoia, erotomania, this like this sort of knowing everything that I know, that the government has all these secrets to you know, try to spy on me, but I only tell a selected few.

Speaker 2: 1:21:51

And like thing that I know that the government has all these secrets to you know, try to spy on me, but I only tell a selected few. And like I create this sort of schism for anybody that I think is working for the government. These sort of paranoiac delusions, like there's aliens that are trying to, you know, hack into my nerves, like these sorts of delusions. But I think, collectively there is something in which like that mimics conspiratorial, like lism, like where it's like now, for some reason, active shooters are now being uh, homologized with trans people. Right, how trans people are somehow you know active shooters now and we should worry about trans people trying to shoot us up to then, like the person that's killing charlie kirk somehow works for the democrats, but now we just realize who it was and he's somehow some sort of conservative person. And so like these sorts of schisms in which create a projection in a paranoia, I think are more secondary, narcissistic, that bridge psychosis, compared to like a primary narcissism in which was more dealing with this sort of bodily investment.

Speaker 1: 1:22:54

Well, yeah, I think. I think he was really focused on the way that early neoliberal libertinism seemed to be totally embedded in the body.

Speaker 2: 1:23:02

Oh, absolutely so, like the. Yeah that those movements like a, like a, like a Wilhelm Reich or like a delusional Guattari definitely like romanticism of the pre-edible. They think that like there's something unique about, like you know, the pre-edible sexuality of a child.

Speaker 1: 1:23:19

But it's funny what you bring up, because one of the things I've said to people about lash whether or not we agree with his, his understanding of Freud through Kirchner is that the implication of both Lacan and lashash today would be we are no longer in a social phase of narcissism, we're in a social phase of psychosis.

Speaker 2: 1:23:39

Yeah, and that's yeah, go ahead. And it's funny because that debate of psychoanalysis, to be able to sort of prescribe a sort of state of affairs of the political climate and the social climate, is huge between the floating schools. So like zizek, alenka, dolar, versus uh, the school, uh, the clinical school, uh, developed by lakhan's uh son-in-law, jacqueline miller, where the the malarians will say in their fancy lacanian jargon that we lived in a sort of generalized foreclosure where, like the symbolic law, the name of the father, the paternalistic function is rejected and foreclosed. So we live in a sort of psychotic state. Versus Zizek who will say like no, I think like capitalism has brought about a more perverse society of like, like in a super egoic injunction to enjoy, not to renounce. So there's like an interesting debate between the two and I think I don't like the debate because I think it's sort of like a false dichotomy that could like conflict, like that conceals a lot of like the bigger, broader aspects, like economy and other things.

Speaker 2: 1:24:50

But I will say I do find that in these instances of like the charlie kirk thing, um, and even like with conspiracies that still go on um, I think there is more of a psychosis, uh and a loss of narrativization to be able to cognitively map. I know frederick jameson is the one that uses that term cognitive mapping. You'll say that conspiracy theory is the cognitive mapping for the working class. But I think, because of the way in which social fragmentation occurs in bourgeois society, I do think that secondary narcissism or paranoia or like some side, some sort of psychosis, seems to be like the default, uh, modus operandi. If anything, if I were to psychoanalyze things today, that's just my take yeah, well, you know, I find it interesting.

Speaker 2: 1:25:46

One of the things that I always like to point out, to like particularly when I want to antagonize Conrad Hamilton and Daniel Tutt simultaneously is to just say that, like, ultimately, the Althusserians and Lukashians, for all their disagreements, actually come to the same damn conclusion about the destruction of region, like um, it's actually interesting reading Althusserus there, like um, you know, one of the one of the things like for, regardless of, like his sort of abandonment of hegel, I do think that, like in his polemics, like he does make some good points about, like um, you know, if there is a sort of uh concern of a destruction of reason in alfuser, in which he diagnoses empiricism as like the dominant mode of, like politicizing or creating some sort of epistemology and he think that's, he thinks that's problematic and I think that is pretty, I think that's pretty valid to be able to, like you know, say, like you know, we need to kind of step away from this sort of empiricism of trying to abstract some sort of essence or or notion from empirical reality.

Speaker 2: 1:26:54

Uh, and it, because it kind of and it ends up conforming to some sort of idealism. For me he talks about that since, like um, the four marks project, um, which I think like that, that althusser, because I think, like the althusser of the four marks, the reading capital and the um, the, the isa project, are legit althusser, I think that's good althusser. I think he does become problematic when he gets into his alatorre metaphysics um yeah, all that weird spinozian non-certainty stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:27:26

But yeah, yeah, and because he, I think he's very much uncertain about the epistemological break where, to like, the generalities are like a way in which notions and theoretical practices could come about From the fact that, like, okay, unlike you know, science and its sort of empirical fidelities, we're not dealing in a world or a field of raw material. Everything is already embedded in the conceptual and the ideological. So to become scientific is to create something that is not only consistent in its axioms but it could be able to account for its own origin within the ideological field. So that's what he's trying to think Marxism anew as a theoretical practice and as a sort of supposed science.

Speaker 2: 1:28:29

And of course, course, oh, the other one, um, the spontaneous philosophy and the lectures on science are pretty good, um, and I think, like that is good out that. That to me that's a pretty good althusser right there, because he's consistent. He's working through a lot of uh, the, the problematics, uh of marx, but, like you're right, once he gets into this weird, like uncertainty thing, uh and and spinozistic thing that's, it's like well, I, yeah, I don't know what you're doing over there, buddy yeah, I know, I know nico gets a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:29:01

Uh, friend of the show, nico villalga gets a lot out of that period of altis air and that's the period where I'm like it seems like he's responding to real science. But then I, but then I go in and I'm like, but not really though I mean go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:29:18

I was just going to say the last thing is like I think I made it that distinction earlier, but it's like the bandwidth of science ends up becoming smaller. And I get this from Conrad. Conrad was mentioning this. It's like, you know, he privileges science as something distinct from ideology.

Speaker 2: 1:29:33

But then in the ideology the ISA essay he will say that all subjects are subject of ideology. Well then it's like okay then, if that's the case, how do you account for the subject of Marx, or a subject of Galileo or whatever, if all subjects are subject of ideology, when does Marx? Why is there change? Ever? Why is there change?

Speaker 2: 1:29:52

And so I think he's trying to rework that to to realize well, no matter what, I could tell you that something is the case, but why the case and why the need to change is something else, and that we will have to rely on an ideology of some sort. And so this is where we get into the distinction which there's always an untalked about essay, because he has, at the end of the for mark's book, a question concerning concerning humanism. And so there is the distinction between theoretical humanism, which is critical of um for various political reasons, but practical humanism is something that he will advocate for. As far as, like, that is the sort of ideological thing that we may have to use from that uh large bandwidth. If our science is a small bandwidth, we will have to extract some ideology or some humanism to be able to uh fight for um. So that would say that's like the untalked about alfie serre yeah, this is his.

Speaker 1: 1:30:47

We need to do conceptual humanism. But I mean, I will say that that was my other problem with Alcicera. If I took his ideological critique as totalizing, then his allotor materialism seems like a way out of that, until you think about it. But then you're saying that change is just random. Yeah, and what's the purpose of a revolutionary subject or any of that, if change is just stochastic? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:31:09

It's like very autcratic, like right contingency right.

Speaker 1: 1:31:14

So it's, it's, it's like. It's like he thought himself into a corner, did he kind of? The way he got out of that corner was in some ways worse than how he got there. Um, but I'm sure I'm sure nick will be around, will come on and tell me I'm wrong about this, but this has been my reading since I was like 25.

Speaker 1: 1:31:33

But I do think it's important to like play up these theoretical debates actually do sort of matter. I mean, and when people talk about I was bringing this up, for example I would say both, both Lacerdo and Althusser are malice, malice, right, for example, and and badu's explicitly a malice. But I'll just say, I'll just say are like was a crypto mouse because he didn't really want to leave the french communist party, uh, after the, after the sign of soviet split, but he clearly was taking mouth side on a bunch of stuff and like admitted it late in life that he was. And I find that interesting because people will try to use this ideological genealogy to to like discern what people's stances are going to be. It doesn't work Like you cannot, like I'm not, and I not saying this, and just because this is all personalist, I'm also saying this I'm like there's enough ambivalence and ambiguity in most of these theories that you can take them in radically different directions legitimately, with citing the original source legitimately. So textual analysis will never settle the problem for you. You need something else, and for me it is like a mixture of psychology, maybe a little bit of psychoanalysis. I'm not as into it as you are, but in historical materialism and historical situationism, not just a bourgeois society, but the way Marxism, just a bourgeois society, but the way Marxism responds to bourgeois society, to be able to deal with all this stuff. Because if you're just like, oh, you have the right ideology, I'm like, well, all these people actually had similar ideological presuppositions, philosophical motivations, et cetera. And in just those three cases, cases and we're not even talking about all the people you brought up today yeah, we haven't even dealt with the freikler school, like they all went in radically different directions. Yeah, right, um, and then when you bring in like, okay, non-maccadian, freudian, marxist are, so that's going to be the Frank for school lash.

Speaker 1: 1:33:52

There's probably some of the value theory school, I think, touches into this stuff. Or no, value critique, not by work critique in German, but a book critique in German. But there's all these kinds of divisions and I think a lot of people right now are coming to Marxism with a very new, radicalized understanding. But it's also in some ways and I don't mean this as a criticism actually it is always going to be true when you're dealing with large scale, newly radicalized groups that they're not going to have a very nuanced view of the history of the material, because why would they? They haven't been, like, steeped in it for 20 years of their life and have it drive them slowly and safe, yeah, yeah. So, like you know, I do sometimes find that, like, some of these nuances like fly over people, but it is important to understand and I don't think it's easily reconciled.

Speaker 1: 1:35:03

I mean, we brought up all kinds of people today. A lot of them have been on my show and a lot of them are all Marxism and psychoanalyst people. But, like, gabriel probably doesn't agree with Daniel, doesn't agree with Conrad, doesn't agree with you, and yet they're all kind of allies too, like, and they all deeply respect each other, and I think that's one of the things you kind of have to deal with in this space. So I wanted to have you speak to that. You've been studying with a lot of these people. I mean you participate in workshops with Daniel and Conrad, and I think you've been in some sessions that Gabriel has participated in. So how have you addressed this kind like productive tensions between these thinkers?

Speaker 2: 1:35:55

Yeah, I actually haven't personally worked with Gabriel, but I do like his work on the desire psychoanalysis because I think it's a strong intervention against, like, against, like the sort of disavowed politics of the clinic and the institution as a whole, sort of disavowed politics of of the clinic and the institution as a whole, and, uh, that sort of class dimension of it, uh, in which, like in some cases, like there is a sort of charity aspect of the analytic institute because, like, unlike you know psychology, like there's this interesting relationship of psychoanalysis in which, like, the fee can be negotiated but like, the last dimension is that like, okay, those kind of that could afford it, get the sort of luxuries of being able to be clinicians one day, which is, those that can afford it.

Speaker 2: 1:36:40

Yeah, they get their prizes negotiated but they're still barred from that extra, you know luxury access of participating as clinicians. And he just talks about the history of lacanian psychoanalysis. But, yeah, like I participate with daniel a lot, um, I would say I agree with a lot of daniel's takes. I would say you know, uh, you know textual now, even though he's a lacostean yeah like, yeah, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:37:05

So, like it's funny, like I wouldn't even consider myself an althusserian. I've read a lot more Althusser than Lukács. But I would say, like you know, I do find Lukács kind of fascinating and, you know, trying to reread History and Class Consciousness again, as well as Destruction of Reason, which I know is like the most, like underrated one and always like dismissed as Stalinistic, you know by Adorno, under read one and always like, dismissed as stalinistic, you know, by adorno.

Speaker 1: 1:37:34

I would say, yeah, it's pretty under read although honestly, some of the late, the late, a lot of late lukash not just destruction of reason is not read. It's like people pretty much stop at and maybe read his on tailism but like that's usually where people start, like I read his stuff on Gerda, like it's and, and, and frankly, if I'm honest with you, I don't like history and class consciousness all that much. I think the final essay is bad, like his version of reification is actually is just as totalizing as anything out of all to say. But I did not read, I did not read destruction of reason for a very long time because it was quote, stalinistic and not worth reading. And then when I finally did read you know it's incredibly long, so I will not say that I've read all of it and I disagree with him on a few things, like I disagree with him on on wittgenstein, um, but uh, uh, I do think it's a. I do think like that book is much better than people give it credit for and uh, it does have a critique of of rote marxist leninism in it, like even even that book does, um, and there's a critique of rote marxist leninism and altus air, which probably doesn't make lutherdians happy, for example.

Speaker 1: 1:39:00

But um, I do find that uh very helpful and I have just really lately been thinking about where we are with so many of these uh thinkers, um, and how we have we, we have kind of uh underserved them and that we have just sort of accepted like the end of the new left or end of the new communist movement, like conclusions about them, uh, and then not really gone back to them until very recently, and particularly I mean, I think that's true for both altersare and um and lukash like there's not been a thorough going through of what one really needs to do to deal with everything you should deal with, to be able to use them today, because we're stuck on particular text or we're stuck in a particular moment of time, are we read this person like in a flash flame of like where they're at at one moment, and we leave it there.

Speaker 1: 1:40:20

Um, now, and I I say this I'm not one of these people who thinks that we should always, like everybody needs to know everything about every critical theorist. If you're going to be a marxist in fact, I think most marxists really kind of don't, but, um, some of us need to figure that out and not just accept that. Uh, where we were at in the past, um, we have been going for a while. I want to let you go and finish your night, but do you have any concluding thoughts in that?

Speaker 2: 1:40:43

in that vein, yeah, I mean, I think like going back to like the, the one like, yeah, like, regardless like of the differences between like those lists of people that you mentioned that I participate with, like I think, like as a young, uh thinker in theories, because I'm only like 28, so like, uh, you know, I maybe I'm coming, yeah, I'm coming. Yeah, like I'm like coming to this stuff like brand new, like well, I got into like philosophy when I was like 16 17, but like political theory wasn't like into like COVID psychoanalysis around the same time I was still doing my service in the military and so, like I got radicalized around that time and so, like you know, not being in the university, I'm like relying like a lot of like you know, you know people that have been participating with like online and stuff like that, but like being able to develop my own thought. I think it was helpful from psychoanalysis because it's like being able to limit myself to one thinker and not feeling like I had to read every single thing that everybody was reading to be able to be like, okay, now I'm finally on the same plane as everybody else. It's like, no, you're never gonna be.

Speaker 2: 1:41:44

But I think like limiting myself to just being like mainly not only, but just mainly a lacanian has, I guess, granted me the sort of discipline to be able to be like, okay, what think you're going to read next? And I think, like, regardless of like the amount of marxist literature I've read, and thinkers, um, that I would align with, like you know, I mentioned, yeah, I like lacerto, yeah, I like althusser, yeah, I'm slowly getting to lukash. I wouldn't consider myself, you know, a Lacerbian as much as I would even consider myself an Althusserian, but I guess, because of the Lacanian baggage I carry, althusser is sort of going to be there. So, like Althusser would be somebody that I'd grapple with. But I would say B Badu is someone that like mentioned enough and someone who I really align with this idea of like world history and world system stuff, and so, like, I am working on some. I have some projects formulated around those specific thinkers that I listed, like you know, bidu and Karatani in the forefront.

Speaker 2: 1:42:53

But I mean, I really don't have anything else to say but just like, yeah, like psychoanalysis, you know, because our whole conversation was like on psychoanalysis and Marxism Like it's not a happy marriage, it's not like sort of like two systems that we could just be like, okay, they fit together like hand in glove, but I do think that they do offer a sort of insight to one another which each field lacks, and I do think that, yeah, at the end of the day, marxism does, you know, have a primacy because of the critique of political economy. Right, that, unfortunately, psychoanalysis doesn't. But the way in which we talked about, like group formations, identifications and these schisms, I do think psychoanalysis has a bit more nuanced and does have a better theory of subjectivity that Marx really didn't really talk about.

Speaker 1: 1:43:57

Yeah, yeah, this is. I know that it's going to be orthodox Marxists who get mad at me for saying this, but there's a theory of mind shaped hole in Marxism. That's kind of implied but it's never worked out in Marx and it's not really in Engels either. I've really tried to look. There is kind of an emergenceist theory of consciousness. Like things exist in the world and they emerge because they're most likely used for that.

Speaker 1: 1:44:22

But like and I think EP Thompson kind of works this out but unfortunately like and I know we have our critiques of empiricism, but empirical studies do not bear that out as a way. People actually think so it's and more so it's just underbaked. It's not really fleshed out how it would, how the individual works versus how they relate to class consciousness, versus how they relate to ideological imposition. It's just not worked out. I mean, that's one thing that balabar is clear on and altasir is clear on and even badu is clear on. Yeah, um, from what I've read I haven't read everything bad by doing english, but like I've read a lot of it- yeah, um, I would say.

Speaker 2: 1:45:06

I don't know if you follow him on twitter, but I would say, like the badu guy that you need to interview if you haven't already, is chris manor. I don't know if you follow him on Twitter, but I would say, like the Badu guy that you need to interview, if you haven't already, is Chris Manor. I don't know if you follow him.

Speaker 1: 1:45:13

He's known as Logic. I do not follow him, but I have seen some of his stuff and been impressed by it. But go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:45:18

Yeah, logic's the world. Yeah, I would recommend talking with him and I think he could really give a good argument on, like, the relevance of Badu, more than I could.

Speaker 1: 1:45:26

Oh awesome, All right, Very quickly. Where can people find your stuff, Andrew?

Speaker 2: 1:45:31

Yeah, so I on YouTube. I have two channels the Parallax Viewer, which you reference, the Vanishing Mediators. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at the Big Signorelli, and I also have the Medium blog in which I write about Lacan. I did write one thing on Lazarus and Badiou, but it was just like a sort of like my own like thoughts. But yeah, I'm working on like my own blog to develop more of my writing, so you could find me on there, on the name the big Signorelli as well and Substack, but yeah, that's where you could find me. Um and uh, yeah, feel free to if you can't hit me up on Instagram or Twitter and I can link you. Uh, that in the DMS, but yeah, All right, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 1:46:24

Have a great rest of your evening. Thank you as well, com.