The Kingless Generation

Fergal Schmudlach
  • 4.5 (27)
  • Social Sciences
  • Updated Weekly

A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 4d ago

    Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42)

    In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the formation of the discipline of Anglophone Japan studies under the influence of Francophone Arabology, we explore this same tale in the nineteenth-century colonial-era British-Indian edition of the now much expanded and more textually baroque version known as Calcutta II. There, we find the first-person narrative interludes removed, or at least refocused away from the process of establishing a secure communication channel between the worker go-betweens, on behalf of the elite patrons. That process also becomes top-down rather than bottom-up, as the negotiation of the connection much more clearly follows an elite commission rather than arising on the initiative of the workers themselves. Meanwhile, textual change has obscured some storytelling choices we saw in the post-1450 version, sometimes strengthening the story but also often leaving loose ends dangling and vestigial inconsistencies that only make sense if we know what the passage used to say. In the way, the text of Calcutta II embodies the growth of oriental despotism or decadence precisely in the time of occidental colonization, both in its form and in its content. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42)

  2. Episode 82

    Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights

    I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this earliest available Arabic manuscript tradition, a meta-narrative device whereby first-person interviews with certain characters—such as would be collected by a prosecutor as evidence for a trial—are interspersed throughout this story of elite parties, exotic drugs, and forbidden obsessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights

  3. Jul 21

    1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance

    One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would be the neglect which the 1,001 Nights has suffered in literary scholarship. Everything I can find in English or Japanese is only interested in the impressions it left in the industrial-era European mind as a long-gone Other, but the fact is that we (finally) have a modern edition (by Muhsin Mahdi) and English translation (by Husain Haddawy) of the surviving (15th-c.) Arabic manuscript lineage which attests to the Nights as they were circulating before the rise of Europe—which modern economic history has shown to have occurred only after 1800. Nevertheless, I with my admittedly limited skills as a West-Asianist can find nary a comparative study of this text of the Nights in their prime with later developments and their European adaptations and distortions: only “post-colonial” (really covertly neo-colonial) navel-gazing exercises that reinscribe and eternalize the European gaze rather than casting it aside for the strange, two-hundred-year dream that it was, to look squarely at the genius of Arabic narrative and subjectivity in story that we see in the real roots and first rumblings of bourgeois revolution in West Eurasia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance

  4. Episode 80

    Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)...

    In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and otherwise psycho-entrepreneurially aufgehoben into various other cultic milieux just as our current moment of cultic conquest of civil society began. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  5. Jun 10

    Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives

  6. Episode 78

    Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists

    More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a rival to many in the Eranos crowd who critiqued their Aryo-heroic, Christian-Kabbalist, and I would say satanic-orientalist project from the outside. He got a professorship at the University of Palermo on sheer merit despite being a high school dropout, but then after moving his family to a country house for their safety after his organizing work got him in some heat during the Years of Lead, he died at age 39 when his water heater suddenly malfunctioned and gave him carbon monoxide poisoning in the night. Join me and Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives Podcast as we discover an important Kingless Generation ancestor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  7. May 20

    Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives

    From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in the yearly gatherings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, known as Eranos and organized by the wealthy socialite and occultist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. Jung disciple Gustav Heyer memorably called their activities there Aetherhurerei “aether whoredom”. I am joined by Scott Ryan of The Dustlight Archives Podcast for the opening episode of a series on this little-known but very important gathering which has deep links both with earlier modern “gnostic” and bourgeois-occult, satanic-orientalist secret society movements, contemporaneous developments like the Nazis as well as the proto-hippie youth movements of which Nazism was the shadow, and also NXIVM and other present-day developments of the same social and spiritual technologies of the ruling-class vanguard, which Scott is covering so brilliantly on his show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives

  8. Episode 76

    (15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England

    We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious, cryptographic, and financial antics in the bazaars and marketplaces of West Eurasia, Africa, and the European Ummah, inspired imitators among the crusaders and (re)conquistadors of Spain and Italy and, through them, a strange little island nation called England. This time we savor the acerbic wit of Thomas Nashe, poet of the continental wanderers known as intelligencers and used to great effect by Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In his iconic depiction of the intelligencer in his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller, we recognise extensive overlap with the fellowship of the Sons of the Silk Road as depicted by the 10th-c travelling Arab poet Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī in his Qaṣīda sāsāniyya. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    (15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England
See All (92)

Trailers

4.5
out of 5
27 Ratings

About

A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Fergal Schmudlach
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    92
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © George Psalmanazar
  • Show Website
    The Kingless Generation

You Might Also Like