Emancipations Podcast Daniel Tutt

We welcome the brilliant poet and thinker Ali Benziane. Dr. Benziane is an autodidactic philosopher currently working closely with friend of the show, the famous French actor and philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. We discuss some philosophical and metaphysical perspectives on the post-covid world, looking at Ali's notion of a new mechanism of global power that  he calls "psychopouvoir" (psycho-power) after the late french philosopher Bernard Stiegler. 
We discuss his intellectual influences, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, the meaning of tragedy, parody, Deleuze's work, fascism and philosophy, traditionalism, and Ali's love for the French metaphysician René Guénon.

We welcome writer and Marxist thinker Richard Seymour back onto the show for a spirited discussion on new currents in Marxist thinking. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss the contradictions and tensions between the concept of "degrowth communism", coined by eco-socialist thinker Kohei Saito, to another trend in Marxist and socialist thinking which is encapsulated by the name of "neo-Kautskyism", or the general tendency for a more productivist and working-class organized direction of socialist politics. We also discuss the legacy of Althusserian Marxism, class politics, the PMC debate and quagmire as well as Richard's intellectual trajectory, idealism and materialism and faith and spirituality.
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We are joined by Mary L. Edwards to discuss her new book Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others. We discuss Sartre's concept of bad faith, the in-itself and the for-itself and the challenge that his philosophy poses to psychoanalysis. We also discuss Sartre's psychobiographies on Jean Genet and Gustave Flaubert and what these works have to offer to psychoanalytic practice and theory.
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Link to Mary's book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sartres...
Mary Louise Edwards is a teacher in philosophy at Cardiff University, School of English, Communication and Philosophy. Mary researches and teaches existentialism, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of imagination.

In this episode, I expound on Lukács's later work and the meaning of irrationalism. I analyze Marxist reason in contradistinction to neo-Kantian thought and touch on what is most distinctive about philosophy for Marx and Engels and how Marx breaks with both Kant and Hegel. From a Marxist point of view, the practical aim of philosophy is to bring about human freedom and human freedom in capitalist society requires the activation and the organization of the proletariat to realize and overcome class domination.
 References:
Lukács, Georg The Destruction of Reason Verso Books, 2021 Lukács, Georg History and Class Consciousness MIT Press, 1992 Lukács, Georg "Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics" from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014 Lukács, Georg "Intellectual Workers’ and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership” from Tactics and Ethics Verso Books, 2014 Lenin, Vladimir "What Is to Be Done" https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd Frederick C. Beiser The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 Oxford University Press, 2014 Rockmore, Tom Irrationalism: Lukacs and the Marxist View of Reason Temple University Press, 1991 Check out our symposium on Lukács' The Destruction of Reason (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE03jn2k3GYAWlu20REPquu3-R-_Snbef)
Supplemental reading:
Tutt, Daniel "The Question of Worldview and Class Struggle in Philosophy: On the Relevance of Lukács' The Destruction of Reason" Cosmonaut Magazine February, 2022 https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/02/the-question-of-worldview-and-class-struggle-in-philosophy-on-the-relevance-of-lukacss-worldview-marxism-and-the-destruction-of-reason
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We sit down with Doug Greene to discuss his latest work on Stalinism. In this interview, Greene describes who Stalin was, what his role in the Bolshevik movement was and how he came to power. Greene then provides a compelling analysis of different paradigms of how Stalinism has been conceptualized by intellectuals from Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, to heads of states such as Winston Churchill and writers such as George Orwell. Doug Greene is a Marxist historian based in the Boston area. Our last interview with Greene was about his book on Michael Harrington, A Failure of Vision, which is a biography of Harrington, the liberal-socialist founder of the DSA. We conclude our conversation with a discussion about Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin and its shortcomings. We also discuss the specter of Stalinism on today's left and whether there is a compelling sort of psychological account as to what draws people to Stalinism to this day. Order Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn.

We are back! And we changed our podcast name to Emancipations Podcast! In this episode, we are pleased to welcome Marxist thinker John Bellamy Foster to discuss his recent article The New Irrationalism in the Monthly Review (https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/...). This article started a conversation on the legacy of Lukács's Destruction of Reason and the role of philosophy in times of imperialism and war. You can listen to the video version of this interview where I elaborate on the theme of irrationalism by going here (https://youtu.be/E6H7RfzgyMA). 
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