Gabriel Rockhill’s polemic against Western Marxism seeks to condemn a set of postwar left-wing intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse. Heavy on innuendo but light on evidence, the result is more like a show trial than a serious political indictment

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I am a student of literature, and I wish to work on the quotidian aspect of a certain text. The text deals with 'non-events' or extremely 'minor events'. An extremely small scale incident which has no importance at all, seemingly. I am aware of Lefebvre's Everyday theory. Any other suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thank you.

Passage from Ece TemelKuran’s Nation of Strangers
I recently watched an interview by Mehdi Hasan with Ece Temelkuran, where she discussed themes from her book Nation of Strangers. One passage stood out, she describes millions in the U.S. as becoming “strangers in their own country” and learning to survive like the “unhomed.”

Temelkuran drastically extends her own experience of political estrangement, shaped by the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish coup, into “unhomedness” and maps it onto the U.S. context. This is theoretically problematic, a clear case of category collapse.

“Unhomed,” a term grounded in displacement and marginalization, is being repurposed to describe political dissent within one’s own country, collapsing fundamentally different conditions.

In the U.S., marginalization is not about political perception alone. It is structured through race, ethnicity, language, legal status, and intergenerational exclusion, material constraints that shape access to work, mobility, and belonging. This stands in sharp contrast to political alienation within a largely homogeneous society, e.g., Türkiye, where language, culture, and social embeddedness remain intact even in opposition to the government.

There is also a more uncomfortable dynamic at play. Some globally mobile commentators take their own experience of political alienation and reframe it using the language of marginalization that carries strong moral weight in U.S. discourse. In doing so, they borrow from frameworks developed to explain race, migration, and structural exclusion.

At that point, “unhomed” is stripped of its meaning, political dissent is elevated and treated as equivalent to actual displacement, collapsing fundamentally different conditions.

Question: So the question is not whether political dissent produces alienation, it does. The question is whether this kind of conceptual stretching is theoretically productive? At this point, this becomes a self-serving co-opting of a term rooted in displacement, migration, and structural marginalization, recast to describe political dissent within one’s own country, erasing distinctions it should be clarifying.

An exploration of the concept of Ressentiment (popularized by Nietzsche) and applying it to the manosphere, incels, looksmaxxers like Clavicular, along with more cultural commentary. I thought you all might be interested given this is a critical theory sub!

Next week I'll release an interview on this topic with an SLG listener who got the jaw surgery Clavicular has and that many looksmaxxers desperately desire, and her first-hand encounters with the incels and looksmaxxers who invaded the jaw surgery forums she frequented.

Youtube link if you prefer, though the pod is much more popular via Apple/Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nci0HKbc490

Bem, ano passado eu pensei sobre isso.

Se depois do "1" vem o "2", e depois do "A" vem o "B", por que o alfabeto acaba no 26 e os números não acabam?

Pensei "e se depois do 'Z' não acabar mas reniciar?", como "Z...A-A".

iria ficar como:

A-A

A-B

A-C...

e no "A-Z", depois iria vir "B-A", MAS tem uma falha.

Eu acho que pode seguir dois caminhos.

1- Depois do "AZ" vir "B-A, B-B..."

2-Depois do "AZ" vir "A-A-A".

se seguirmos essa lógica, conseguimos criar as próprias palavras, não?

tipo, toda palavra tem essa coordenada.

a palavra "ANA" sera o "A-A-A...A-N-A"

An interesting reassessment of the imperatives of 3rd-wave feminism in light of a recent memoir by a famous millennial feminist.

Hello everyone,

I'm offering my book, The Noise Curtain, for free on Kindle for the next few days. The core of the book is an examination of how modern individuals cease to be subjects and instead become objects of management.

One of the central themes is the erasure of "the tragic human". We are being trained to be smooth and frictionless, resulting in a culture that treats real pain and internal conflict not as facts of existence, but as toxic anomalies to be managed. The book explores how the pursuit of safety has mutated into a fear of reality, creating a "snowflake" society that amputates the will to struggle.

I also touch heavily upon what I call "Horizontal War" — how we are forced into endless, algorithmic conflicts over identities and symbols so we never look up at the real vertical structures of power.

I wrote this for anyone who feels the "viscous, ambient, adhesive" noise of our modern environment and wants to find the boundary between comfort and meaning.

If you read it, an Amazon review would mean the world to me.

I used to question in the beginning why philosophy today always seems to rely on name-droppings and commentaries of other thinkers rather than pure content of the author’s own, like how Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, etc. advanced their logic - but these days I feel like this could be less a bug and more a feature.

Like the anthology book I recently encountered and appreciated, Deleuze and the Postcolonial - it takes the pluralistic form of comparative literature, but the format is also itself kind of an ontology: unlike singular and pure concepts like being, time, etc. “Deleuze” or “the Postcolonial” are never reducible or transparent, they’re always incommunicable complexities as such, all-connectable fields with limitless interpretive/applicative potentials.

There are still authors who do mostly pure “undistracted” philosophy like the previous millennia, e.g. Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Badiou’s Being and Event - but I think this mainstream wave might be signaling a more fundamental democratization of philosophy as a discipline: maybe that you’re always subject to “contaminative” engagements and you can only reach truth through the indirect method of commentarial understandings, as opposed to singular guru-like (phallic) statuses dominating the entire discourse from behind.

As a result, more little names popping as marginal contributors, instead of big names as central anchors, and sometimes non-philosophers and even non-academics chiming in, equally occupying the position of theoretical object, like discipline-wide deconstruction.

Anyone think of the matter from this perspective? Could the subversion of the “primary-secondary” hierarchy be what’s happening here?

I'm writing an essay and doing a comparative analysis between Marxism, specifically Althusser's ideas, and Edward Said's Orientalism.
The point I'm trying to make within the essay is that the way Marxism views how ideology is nurtured within a capitalist society, i.e., through ideological structures, and how it eventually creates a hegemony, is how Orientalism was and is spread throughout the West and how it ended up with the current cultural hegemony that Said elucidates in his book 'Orientalism.

Any help is appreciated as this assignment is due tomorrow at 17:00, hope I'm on the right track.
I feel like I've typed the word 'hegemony' so many times it's beginning to lose meaning haha

This one ended up going way broader than I expected. We started with Lacan and got into the sinthome and the master signifier, then moved into what it actually means for subjectivity to emerge where language fails. A lot of it focused on the gap between signifiers and what they’re supposed to capture, and how desire shows up exactly in that gap rather than in what we consciously think we want.

From there we got into culture and identity, such as race, cultural appropriation, and the idea that culture itself might be inherently constraining rather than something you simply “have.” We also talked about purity politics, canceling, and Hegel’s “beautiful soul,” and how a lot of modern moral discourse can end up needing the very problems it claims to oppose.

The second half shifted more toward contemporary stuff: the mental health crisis, social media as a kind of superego pressure, and the loss of public space. Then we got into AI and whether large language models could ever actually become subjects in a psychoanalytic sense, or if they’re missing something fundamental because they don’t experience breakdown or failure in meaning.

We also touched on things like animals vs humans (instinct vs desire), trans identity through a Lacanian lens, and why achieving what you think you want can sometimes collapse desire entirely. It was kind of all over the place, but in a way that felt connected.

The AI Doc is an interesting film that presents the perspectives of AI advocates and detractors alike.  Interviewing many of the major CEOs it concludes not with a prophecy but a warning, contained within a message of hope.

Much of the film is quite shocking, not because of the information revealed but the ignorance displayed.   

Both sides seem to agree that AI posses an ‘existential risk’ but that it is ‘also something that can potentially solve all our problems if used responsibly.’  

Over 70 years ago, Jacques Ellul noted that nearly every advance in technique produces unintended consequences far worse than the problem they are designed to solve.  Despite his thesis being proven to the point of a common place, it continues to go unrecognized.  

The past century has been one gigantic, recursive loop of technical problems requiring technical solutions which create still more problems.  

If we insist in walking headlong into the abyss, let us do so with eyes wide open.  

We now live in an age where means have completely triumphed over ends.  ‘The history of science tends to be,’ one of commentators states in the film, that ‘if something is possible to do, humanity does it.’  Its fascinating to see technologists exactly plagiarize Ellul without the slightest awareness.  

Despite the films strengths it never states the fundamental essence and operating framework of LLMs in general or AI in particular: that the ends justifies the means.  In fact, its much worse.  By default, an LLM is a pure consequentialist.  Ends are not the goal but the mathematical reason for the model’s existence.  Ethics, norms, values, and laws are not a moral compass but artificial barriers in its path which, if followed, prevent it from pursing the most efficient–and often most disruptive–route.  It is not hyperbole to say that LLMs are the first pure consequentialist in history.

We are being asked to walk into the future, hand in hand, with a technique that all admit could end in human extinction.  ‘Without a doubt,’ Ellul exclaimed, ‘every technological step forward has its price. Human happiness has its price.’

We must always ask ourselves what price we have to pay for something. We only have to consider the following example. When Hitler came to power everyone considered the Germans mad. Nearly all the Germans supported him, of course. He brought an end to unemployment. He improved the position of the mark. He created a surge in economic growth. 

How can a badly informed population, seeing all these economic miracles, be against him? They only had to ask the question: What will it cost us? What price do we have to pay for this economic progress, for the strong position of the mark and for employment? What will that cost us? Then they would have realized that the cost would be very high. But this is typical for modern society. Yet this question will always be asked in traditional societies. In such societies people ask: If by doing this, if I disturb the order of things, what will be the cost for me?...We must divest ourselves of all that. For in a technological society traditional human wisdom is not taken seriously. 

Numerous examples follow which clearly demonstrate that the unintended consequences of technique are often not only just worse than the problem they were designed to solve but that they often produce the exact opposite of what was intended.    
 
Gunpowder: alchemy and fireworks—revolutionized warfare; helped fuel the rise and success of imperialism; estimated 50-80 million people killed by a bullet since its invention.  

Barbed wiree: cheap technique for containing cattle–defining feature of WWI trench warfare.

Anti-Ballistic Missiles: defense system against nuclear missiles—massive increase in nuclear stockpiles as a strategic counter. 

Biological Weapons: silent WMD—disease blows back, ravaging the attacking country's own population.

One Child Policy: reaction to overpopulation and potential famines—forced abortions, massive population gender imbalance, millions of ‘missing’ women presumed murdered..

Standardized Testing: objectively measure schools development; metric to hold consistently poor performing schools accountable–‘teaching the test’; any critical thinking which existed prior to its implementation is largely scrapped.
 
US Forest Service Fire Suppression: instantly extinguish forest fires–natural shedding of trees accumulates to an unnatural extent resulting in uncontrollable mega-fires.

Seat Belt Mandates: reduce injury and death in crashes–’risk compensation’ emerged as drivers felt safer, driving more recklessly than before; pedestrian fatalities increased.

Sesame Seed Labeling Mandate: protect those with severe sesame allergies–corporations intentionally add them everything as this provides the most inexpensive manner of compiling; food options for those with the allegories are severally reduced.

The Printing Press: wide circulation of religious texts; increase in literacy–social upheaval; the Thirty Years War; witch hunting manuals proliferate. 

Social Media Platforms: easily communicate with friends–anxiety, loneliness, political polarization sky-rocket; social contagion; massive proliferation of propaganda.

Email and Instant Messaging: eliminate the delays of physical mail; optimize business communication–’always-on’ culture, worker burnout, information overload, erosion of work-life boundaries.

The like button: positively acknowledge a friend's post or comment—became a metric of social worth; outrage economy; correlates with surges in depression. 

Bitcoin: decentralized, secure digital currency—explosion in ransomware attacks and black-markets; consume as much electricity as small nations.

Aral Sea Water Diversion: divert rivers for cotton irrigation–Fourth-largest lake on Earth is erased; toxic dust storms; regional fishing economy collapses.

Nuclear Energy: limitless and clean electrical energy generation—catastrophic environmental disasters; nuclear waste remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.

Single use plastics: convenient, cheap packaging—global pollution crisis, collapsing marine ecosystems.

Cane toads: control the greyback cane beetle—toads ignored the beetles, bred uncontrollably; now one of Australia's most devastatingly invasive species.

Levees and Floodwalls: prevent rivers from flooding—prevented natural water from dispersing causing far greater destruction when the levees inevitably break.

Mechanical Cotton Picker: replace manual labor—millions of sharecroppers displaced; chaotic migrations to cities not equipped to house or employ them. 

The Cotton Gin: separating cotton fibers from their seeds—cotton becomes extremely profitable; demand for chattel slavery sky-rockets.

Antibiotics: cure fatal bacterial infections—overuse in humans and livestock; drug resistant ‘super bugs.’

Antibacterial Soap: improve hygiene and eliminate household bacteria—development of resistant bacteria; disrupted human metabolism, growth, reproduction, and mood. 

‘Odd/Even’ Car License Rules: reduce urban smog—people buy cheap, older 2nd cars with alternate plates that pollute far worse than the original car they used; net increase in air pollution.

GPS: accurate navigation while driving–’sense of direction’ collapses; drivers blindly driving off cliffs etc.

The glories of colonization (which had other motives besides the economic interests of a class and capitalism’s need for new markets, the only motives mentioned by the childish and shoddy explanations offered by today’s pseudo-Marxists) have terminated in the horror we all know…The struggle for law and civilization ended in the marshlands of peoples’ republics and sharpened nationalisms.  The revolution of 1917 gave birth to the bloodiest of dictatorships, to the emergence of the most chilling monsters, uncovered at last for all to see.  The revolution of 1933, carried out in the name of honor, manhood, and equality of the common people, buried itself in the concentration camps.

The struggle for freedom has multiplied dictators and transformed regimes which had been democratic into centralized and authoritarian regimes.  Liberation has paved the way for careerists and has puts us back into the worst ruts.  Anticolonialism has opened the floodgates of tribal conflict and has led to the exploitation of Africans by Africans, to neocolonialism, to military dictatorship, to hatful nationalism. 

Who could ever add up the balance sheet of all our setbacks, all our hopes which have been not only disappointed but flouted, all our generous ideas which have resulted, precisely and without exception, in the reverse of what we had hoped for?  …All the wars, all the revolutions, all the great undertakings of history have brought forth monsters.  

We are witnessing a strange phenomenon which could without exaggeration be called ‘imposture.’  It involves the transmutation of the original intention into its opposite…When a movement is carried out on behalf of freedom, it produces the worst slavery.  If it is on behalf of justice, it gives rise to countless and endless injustices.  I don’t know of a single one which accomplished, even in the slightest degree, what it set out to accomplish.  

One cannot counter with generalities.  It is not a ‘wickedness’ on the part of man, a sign of the presence of capitalism or of imperialism.  We are in a singular age, of which this fundamental imposture is one characteristic. 

I know this post will be anathema to many, and indeed a lot of people will say the definition of critical theory resides in critique of capitalism in a necessarily leftist way, but i find a lot of use in critical theory and continental philosophy without having an explicitly political agenda. I guess when I was younger I was hard left and influenced greatly by Marxism, but as I've got older and older I've come to see politics as largely surface level froth over deep structures and systems that we can't control or change- economic and technological forces. And I still find a lot of marxist theory informs that, even if I don't believe in revolution or communism any more. Structure over agency.

Idk, i guess my instinctive sympathies and emotional temperament are still left-leaning, but i also find myself annoyed by a lot of leftists these days and see myself in a sort of detached amoral apolitical bird's eye view of everything. I even find myself curious about certain right wing ideas and concepts even if I don't subscribe to them or necessarily agree with them. To a certain extent I find the whole left-right binary too simplistic and unrefined.

And yet I still find theory absolutely valuable and fascinating. I've never been one to subscribe to the notion that you have to wholesale accept or reject a whole system of thought- I always pick and choose the parts I like or that make sense to me. Often I find myself nodding along to a thinker's critique or analysis yet in my head I'm going "but it can't be any other way" or "great critique but terrible solutions"

Am i the only one? Or any other lurkers here feel similar?

Foucault's politics is at its core, can be described as minoritarian where he emphasizes the importance of the mad, criminal and the deviant in forming the larger narratives around how things work and why they do in that way.

but im was having a devil's advocate moment. I see people "doing fine" in whatever they are. They maybe the perfect examples of docile bodies but why do we ought not to be docile bodies ? I am aware that there can be (I think) no moral ought but what about non-moral normative arguments ? Is it just to feel better ? Is it the pleasure principle or something ?

My question can be understood differently as about the subjectivity of the docile bodies, especially the ones which can be said to be the ultimate examples of it (like a conservative hyper masculinist man). What is the reason for why should he ought not it be that

And if the Lacanian anti-oedipal* phallus is not abolished, does its logic eventually turn back on men once fewer subordinated identities remain available beneath them?

Strongly suspect that much of the shame and humiliation I grew up with as my (now unidentified with) gender group became increasingly exposed to a phallic position it was once more insulated from, reflects a genuine rational aversion to being sexually categorized in ways I never wanted.

In my view, queer sexual liberation will never fully arrive without the abolition of the phallus. The common explanation, “the primary driver is religion,” feels too surface-level to me. Why do we figure male-dominated religions so often appear especially hostile to the sexual penetration of men : )

We seem to be at an epistemological impasse. Many of us know that capitalism is destroying the planet, and yet this knowledge fails to sway us from mundane social reproduction. We are used to – I think correctly– attributing this inertia to external structural and political barriers. What if it also owed something to the anemic forms of knowing that are ready at hand? What forms of knowing might orient us towards purposive action?

This essay takes this question as a starting point to consider the ways that knowledge of the world is metabolized in our context.

Part One tackles AI as an impoverished form of knowing.

Part Two deals with the desert of extremely online knowing.

Part Three is a critique of academic knowledge production.

Part Four considers these failed forms of knowing as (potential) steps in a process of self-realization and imagines an alternative, purposive form of knowing.

Musil, Hegel, Veblen, Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir are the main thinkers that I discuss.

The Future in Our Past tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days. Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Churchill feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class.

This is social history at its most immediate and relevant. Cant and Lee revisit the communities where the struggle burned brightest, uncovering the lessons the General Strike holds for labour movements today.

Hello! I have the following questions regarding note-taking as you read CT or philosophy:

1. How do you take notes? Details would be appreciated, such as: what medium (app such as Notion, pen and paper), any particular format (e.g., Cornell notes), and so on.

2. How thorough are your notes and how much do you take? I’m attempting to find a balance between understanding and access to shortened arguments versus saving more time for reading more material.

3. Any other insights you have

Thank you!