Critique of the Podcast Form

Esther joins Mac to perform a dialectic between Sappho and Diotima and look at the relationship between the account of desire given in Sappho's poems and the mysteric figure of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. Along the way, they get into the thorny questions of Platonic authorship, whether Diotima is meant to recuperate Sapphic desire for a patriarchal philosophical project, what effects this might have had on the history of thought, and much more.

Episode readings:

If not, winter : fragments of Sappho translated by Ann Carson https://archive.org/details/ifnotwinterfragm0000sapp

Plato, The Symposium https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm

Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato's Symposium, Diotima's Speech

Luce Irigaray and Eleanor H. Kuykendall https://www.jstor.org/stable/3809786

Graze M. Janzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty

‘All human beings are pregnant’

The bisexual imaginary in Plato’s Symposium

Stella Sandford https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/all-human-beings-are-pregnant

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In this episode, our islamogauchist subset discusses Ernst Bloch's gripping work Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. On Bloch's account, the history of materialism inherits a problem from Aristotle out of which two opposing lineages emerge: a clerical right-wing that weaponizes the afterlife against feudal European class-society, and a left-wing inaugurated by Islamic Enlightenment figures Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. Why should Marxists care? Does naturalism make us better communists? How can historical materialism account for hope? Let us leave you with a Maoist proverb: There's chaos under the heavens, the situation is excellent!

Episode reading:

Ernst Bloch. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. Translated by Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson. Columbia University Press, 2019.

Recommend readings:

Cat Moir. Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics. Historical Materialism Book Series 202. Brill, 2019.

Charles T Wolfe., and John Symons. The History and Philosophy of Materialism. Rewriting the History of Philosophy. Routledge, 2025.

Henk de Berg and Cat Moir, eds. Rethinking Ernst Bloch. Historical Materialism Book Series, volume 300. Brill, 2024.

Karam AbuSehly. “Avicenna on Matter: Implications for Ernst Bloch’s Marxist Aesthetics.” ReOrient 3, no. 1 (2017): 4–22.

Tapji Garba. 2020. “Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, by Ernest Bloch, Trans. Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson”. Arc: The Journal of the School of Religious Studies 48 (December):149–152

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Critics & theorists, this is a bonus episode containing a recording of the presentation and discussion of “Excavations,” the second volume of our E-Journal Margin Notes: A Journal of Critical Theory, which took place on zoom on the 19th of September, 2026.

The link to the journal: https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/projects/3_project/

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The CTWG Marxist science subcommittee returns! In this episode, we discuss Pietro Daniel Omodeo’s Political Epistemology, which develops the Berlin school of historical epistemology (discussed in episode 19!). We examine Omodeo’s enlarged conception of ideology as the dialectic of identity and position as applied to science studies broadly construed, what political epistemology even is, and how action, understood as the unity of praxis and poiesis, mediates history, the middle term between the polis and episteme.

Episode reading:

• Pietro Daniel Omodeo. Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies. Springer, 2019.

Recommend readings:

• Lukas Meisner and Pietro Daniel Omodeo. “Beyond Facticity and Post-Truth: Towards a Marxist Political Epistemology.” Historical Materialism 33, no. 1 (2025): 88–118.
• Helen Eleonora. “On the Falsity of Prevailing Ideas: The Concept of Ideology in Early Critical Theory.” Margin Notes 1 (2024), 84–126.
• Wolfgang Lefèvre. Theory of Nature and Mode of Production: The Genesis of Modern Science in Materialist Perspective. Political Epistemology. Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025.
• Jürgen Renn. The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press, 2020.
• Peter Osborne. “The Planet as Political Subject?” New Left Review, no. 145 (March 2024): 103–16.
• For a good constructive critique of Boris Hessen, see: Ioannis Trisokkas. “Boris Hessen and Newton’s God.” Society and Politics 13, no. 1 (2019): 64–86.

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Nora and Imogen are joined by Billie to discuss her forthcoming essay 'Charaktermasken: Value, Relation and Performance in Marx's Critique of Political Economy' in which she traces the history of Marx's concept of the Charaktermasken.. With excursions into Goethe's Faust, the critique of Marx brought to bear by Black radical thinkers (namely Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten), the antinomies of the structuralist reading of Capital and the comedy of the Rosean recovery of speculative thought, the three consider the Charaktermaske first as tragedy and again as farce.

Donate to Billie's FFS fund! https://gofund.me/0a72791c1

Billie's Acid Horizon Course on the Commodity, starting September 8: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/the-commodity-appearance-reification-and-practice-from-karl-marx-to-sylvia-wynter

Texts mentioned:

• Louis Althusser (1963) 'The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht - Notes on a Materialist Theatre' in: For Marx

•Theodor S. Adorno (1966) 'Negative Dialectics'

•Gillian Rose (1978) 'The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno'

• Fred Moten (2003) 'The Resistance of the Object' I&II in: 'In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition'

•Sylvia Wynter (unpublished) 'Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World'

Resident CTWG Infantiles Morrain and Cam meet CTWGs resident Marxist Unity Group member Mac, with backup from NYCDSA MUG member Ben, to get to the bottom of what the heck this renegade Kautsky guy is all about and why today's hot TV stars such as Bill Maher can't get enough of him. In play is Lars Lih's book Lenin Rediscovered, as well as

• Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) by Eric Blanc
• Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the challenge of left unity by Mike Macnair
• https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/07/29/a-short-course-on-the-history-of-the-marxist-unity-group-part-one-background-and-foundation/
• https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/07/30/a-short-course-on-the-history-of-the-marxist-unity-group-part-two-partyism-in-practice/
• https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/nov/13.htm

Nora, Imogen, and Helen are joined by friend of the pod Ashley to discuss two articles from the new volume of Mediations: Emma Heaney's "On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie" and Amy De'Ath's "Two Substantialisms: On Value and Sexual Difference." Together, they answer a burning question of our movement: are trans women bourgeois?

For episode 24 and part 2 in our Schelling series, James is joined by Imogen and Nora to discuss one of Schelling's unfinished works: Clara, or On Nature's Connection to the Spirit World. After situating the text within Schelling's wider oeuvre and patiently clearing the author from accusations of dark magic, we ruminate on its themes of resurrection, transmigration, the singularity of the soul and the magnificence of beavers. Putting Schelling in discussion with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Freud, Mao, Bordiga and Kazuo Ishiguro we ask the ultimate question: can Naturphilosophie mourn?

In this episode, Anatarah, Bile, and Crane discuss the introduction to Schelling’s 1797 Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature and the introduction to Schelling’s 1799 First Outline. Working up to Schelling’s ambitious declaration that philosophy is a “natural history of our mind,” the hosts discuss some of the fundamental concepts—like force, equilibrium, and organism—in Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the difference between Schelling’s earlier philosophy of nature and his “identity system,” and the relationship between Schelling’s project and those of his contemporaries in philosophy and natural science. In conclusion, we debate whether and, if so, how Schelling’s early philosophy of nature might provide us with a basis for a critical theory of nature and natural science.

Recommend readings:

• Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science, 1797. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. State University of New York Press, 2004.

• The Schelling Reader. 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

• The Palgrave Schelling Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.

Imogen, Helen, and Nora kvetch about "The Logic of Gender" from Endnotes 3. Topics include whether capital is a totality (it is), whether Butler reduces gender to the value-form (they don't), and whether this article gets into enough detail regarding the history of the family (absolutely not.)

Texts:

The Logic of Gender in Endnotes Vol 3: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-3/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender

In this episode, Crane is joined by Julian Assele to discuss Max Horkheimer’s long-running critical engagement with contemporary Neo-Thomism, the history of Catholic thought, and the social content of theological controversies dating back to the early Christian church. Starting from Horkheimer’s 1930s short-form polemics on the church and fascism, the hosts turn to his extensive criticism of Neo-Thomism in “Conflicting Panaceas” from Eclipse of Reason (1947)—as well as the earlier version of the text, the unpublished “The Revival of Dogmatism” (1943)—and conclude with a critical look at the late Horkheimer’s neo-conservative instrumentalization of religion in “Theism and Atheism” (1963), posing the question: what might a “critical theory of religion” look like today?

Texts:

“On the Concept of God” [or: “Thoughts on Religion”] (1935): https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-horkheimers-fragments

“On Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte [The Christian and History]” (1936): https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-the-materialist-as-polemicist

“The Revival of Dogmatism” (1943): https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-society-and-reason-1944

“Conflicting Panaceas,” in Eclipse of Reason (1947)

“Theism and Atheism” (1963), in Critique of Instrumental Reason (1974)

Follow Julian on Substack https://substack.com/@julesnotes

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Mac and Re are joined by Shreya from the Center for Struggling Trade Unions (CSTU) to discuss the recent workers strikes in various industries of North India. Since March, workers in the automobile and garment industry were joined by domestic service workers to mobilize against low wages, unpaid overtime and deteriorating labor conditions. We also discuss the history of the workers mobilization in North India and raise some questions of the problems of labor organizing today.

History of the Manesar automobile workers struggle: https://class-notes.org/2025/06/04/maruti-story-book/

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Anatarah, Mac, and Re return once more to the realm of science studies. This time it is to discuss the indomitable Peter Damerow and the Max Planck history of science’s program of historical epistemology via their book Abstraction and Representation: Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking. We discuss the usage and development of (reflective) abstractions, the similarities between Piaget and Hegel, and finally the genesis of the number concept. Along the way, we discuss Damerow's theory of writing and language as well as his concept of historiogenesis.

Recommend readings:

The new Damerow translation by the Marxism & Science Journal

The Creation of Numbers from Clay by McLaughlin & Schlaudt

Eye of the Master by Pasquinelli

Material Engagement Theory by Malafouris

J. E., Cam, and Mac are joined by Cam West of Negation Magazine to discuss his essay "Rupture Theory" and the possibility of politics at a distance from the state. We discuss the status of the party-form, the dialectic of spontaneity and organization, and so on, especially as they pertain to the last 10 years in the US.

Cam West's article = https://www.negationmag.com/articles/rupture-theory

By popular demand, J. E. and Crane unite in a two-part episode (of which this is the second part) to, uh... review? critique? lampoon? Gabriel Rockhill's book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism Inter alia, they answer pressing questions like, who controls the academic world? (Probably not annoying "idealist" grad students) Did the Frankfurt School destroy the American labor movement? (No, lol) And, what does it mean to use wissenschaftlich DHM hermeneutics to dialectically situate subjective agency with the objective totality of material conditions? (Hell if we know!)

By popular demand, J. E. and Crane unite in a two-part episode to, uh... review? critique? lampoon? Gabriel Rockhill's book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. Inter alia, they answer pressing questions like, who controls the academic world? (Probably not annoying "idealist" grad students) Did the Frankfurt School destroy the American labor movement? (No, lol) And, what does it mean to use wissenschaftlich DHM hermeneutics to dialectically situate subjective agency with the objective totality of material conditions? (Hell if we know!)

The description: JE, Cam and Re interrogate Foucault's mid 1970s lectures at the Collège de France, Society Must be Defended. They discuss Foucault's method, his genealogy from Race Wars to Racism and modern conspiratorial thinking among other things.

J. E. and Anatarah discuss Johan Huizinga's classic book Homo Ludens, a foundational work for game studies.

Helen, Esther, and Crane tackle the first book of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, reading Machiavelli as a precursor to historical materialism and a radical republican. In the process, they pose the question: what can the critical theory of society learn from Machiavelli today?

Crane and Helen talk about Horkheimer's 1938 essay "Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism," which sees Horkheimer both show the skeptical core of both religious dogmatism and philosophical skepticism, as well as its changing valence throughout the development of the capitalist mode of production.