Acid Horizon

AHRC Courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Acid Horizon at DURATIONS Festival 2026: https://dice.fm/event/yodw72-durations-acid-horizon-presents-civilization-is-over-with-emma-stamm-stuart-kendall-essentialsalts-12th-nov-public-records-new-york-tickets Buy the book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9798999793072/depose/ Contributing patrons to the podcast receive a discount on Depose! Subscribe to the Acid Horizon Patreon to unlock the discount code attached to this episode on o...

AHRC courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Attend DURATIONS Festival 2026 with Acid Horizon: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/events/durations-festival-2026 Can wasting better solve the biggest planetary challenges? In his keynote lecture from the two-day event The Excesses of Georges Bataille at Penn State University, Stuart Kendall traces Bataille’s lifelong obsession with time, expenditure, and what he calls “the privileged instant.” The lecture moves from Bataille’s...

Full episode is here: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast/posts/patreon-acid-and-172245661?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link What is the relationship between music and radical social change? This book explores their confounding and exciting interrelations in original and engaging ways. Beginning with how capitalism and empire have progressively twisted and atomised our aurally aesthetic experiences over the p...

Current courses at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What if the way we think about everything from gender, race, and class to the very idea of a "thing," rests on a transcendental illusion that mistakes the representation of thought for thinking itself? Henry Somers-Hall joins us to discuss Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, a kind of remix of Deleuze and Guattari that works through the problem of judgment, asks what happens to predicates and measur...

Did Deleuze and Guattari have a theory of class? A better question: how did the French philosophers reformulate class and the bourgeoisie in anticipation of digital capitalism unfolding on a global scale? In this Patreon-exclusive discussion, we (Emma, Adam, and Craig) set Deleuze and Guattari's theory of class against workerism and the scapegoating of particular categories of worker within contemporary trends of proletarianization. Working through Anti-Oedipus chapter three, section te...

Acid Horizon Events: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/events Acid Horizon Research Commons (Ongoing Course Series): https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Adam is joined by Jon Greenaway AKA The Lit Crit Guy and Leon from The Left Page to unpack the grimdark dialectics of Warhammer 40,000. How do we narrativize dystopia when utopian futures have been crushed by neoliberalism? How does the Horus Heresy help us understand Hegelian ideas about tragedy, religion, and the origins of E...

Acid Horizon offers affordable online philosophy and humanities courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Can you feel homesick for something that hasn't even disappeared yet? This week Craig and Adam sit down with Dr. Ennan Wu, Wenhan Hu, and Tiger Liu to talk about Chinese Dreamcore, an internet aesthetic built from sound images of old classroom bells and the half-remembered echoes of early milennium schoolyards. We get into anticipatory homesickness, tangping 躺平 (lying flat...

Listen to the full interview here: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast/posts/patreon-breaking-168601216?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link What has capital done to us in order to fight off the threat of the oppressed? How can we take a historical materialist approach to understanding the shattering of working class militancy and subjectivity as a political force in the 20th century? What does it mean to be a p...

Enroll here: acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses. Use code 3FOR2FALL2026 at checkout for three courses at the price of two. Were the philosophers of the Kyoto School fascist collaborators, or were they meeting in secret with the Imperial Navy to try to stop a war? Fernando Wirtz and Takeshi Morisato join Craig for a primer on Japan's most influential and most contested philosophical tradition, from Nishida and Tanabe through Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. The conversation covers what "nothingn...

Fall/Autumn 2026 Courses at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What do we really owe a stranger at the door, and what grounds that obligation? In this episode, Craig and Adam turn to Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality to unpack Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey, tracing how xenia, the ancient Greek law of guest and host, becomes a lens for thinking through breaking Zeus's law, the massacre of the suitors, and the slow collapse of Bronze Age civilizati...

Enroll in Bob's class coming soon: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/jung-and-spinoza-god-affect-destiny How does "heat" in Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat relate to concepts in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense? Craig is joined by Bob Langan, and Jay Conway to read Michael Mann's film through The Logic of Sense, tracing how cop and criminal, attachment and discipline, hot and cold, resonate across the film's Los Angeles backdrop. Along the way we touch on the professional monastici...

Watch the full discussion here: https://youtu.be/MwUJGWWFOSU Join us for 'Fanon & Anders: On Revolution': https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast/posts/final-summer-on-164624401?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share What does it mean when even compliance with the demands of the neoliberal university no longer guarantees institutional legitimacy or security? As universities become increasingly governed through financ...

AHRC Classes are enrolling now: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Can a theory be so complete, so magistral, that it is dead on arrival? That's the charge Baudrillard levels at Foucault in 'Forget Foucault', the 1977 book review that got him blacklisted from French theory and earned him the title "shame of the profession" from Deleuze. Cooper Cherry of Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour joins us to work through reversibility, seduction, the potlatch, and what Baudrillard thinks th...

Enroll now at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Attend 'University of Excess' free: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast/posts/new-panel-of-and-163158129?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link Buy the Book: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3232-alexandre-kojeve?srsltid=AfmBOorrKB0ugBN0vBNZjBdT9aeqMWBFGCK5bOl9l8sOeWm7nmKwWQtp In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys ...

Become a patron today and listen to all of our exclusive recordings: https://www.patreon.com/c/acidhorizonpodcast Final AHRC Summer Series Courses enrolling now: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What if fascism isn't a break from capitalism but just capitalism finally being honest about itself? Craig sits down with the podcast's very own Adam C. Jones to unpack his essay "The Promise of Cruelty: Fascism and Social Murder," tracing Engels' concept of social murder through Nietz...

Emma's anti-civ class: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/anti-civilization-recovering-from-industry-and-progress Watch this panel discussion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/epvd2MT04OM Should we all live in communes? AHRC Panel Host Emma Stamm is joined by sociocultural anthropologist Fern Thompsett and environmental humanities scholar Henry Kramer to dig into the commune form, anti-civilization thinking, the reclamation of imagination, and what radical world-building actually ...

AHRC Summer Mini-Bundle: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Who owns your dignity, and what does it cost to get it back? Craig, Adam, and Emma work through Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence, finding beneath its alleged radicalism a familiar liberal kernel: private property, mediated class relations, and a conspicuous absence of anything resembling class struggle. The launch event, staged with card...

Latest courses at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses If you could go back in time, would you change the past, even if it meant changing who you are? Is existing in time itself traumatic? Is power over time a cinematic endeavour, and what makes a good director an even better time traveller? This week on Acid Horizon we're joined by Kwasu D. Tembo to talk about his latest book Trauma in 21st-Century Time Travel Cinema, discussing the philosophy of time travel in films such a...

Vintagia: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/vintagia-basecamp Acid Horizon Research Commons summer courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Jack and Tonx on Instagram: @jack.chuter, @tonx Craig's review in 'The Quietus': https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/boards-of-canada-inferno/ "Solidarity with Children" discussion on LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-can-we-build-159633309?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan...

How do we connect collective struggle with the search for justice? Adam is joined by historian Hazel Croft and theorist David Renton to discuss the concept of forgiveness and its strategic role in revolutionary struggles against structural and interpersonal harms. In doing so, we draw on our previous episode on the Comrade Delta scandal earlier this year, and the failure of Marxist organisations to develop new principles and procedures of justice and reparation. David's book "Revolutionary Fo...

AHRC Courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What does Georges Bataille’s Guilty reveal about war, time, and the unstable ground of thought itself? In this episode, Craig and Adam speak with Stuart Kendall about Bataille’s confrontation with catastrophe, the “privileged instant,” and the strange oscillation between order and excess in his writing. The conversation explores how Guilty stages a meditation on war, nonknowledge, and the limits of philosophy at the edge of histor...

Vintagia Second Run: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/vintagia-basecamp AHRC Summer School 2026: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Buy A.J.'s book: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3239-the-cultural-marxism-conspiracy?srsltid=AfmBOopb7nUxKpzOmh6_QpxdBOvbaHwusliMo8ukxi8i1iCy29Ui1i5_ The definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory “Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the te...

Enroll now for AHRC Summer School — https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Is sincerity even possible when the medium is rigged against it? In this episode, Hannah Smart, fiction writer, critic, and author of the debut novel Meat Puppets, joins Craig, Adam, and Emma to think through the legacy of David Foster Wallace and Mark Fisher, tracing the connections between Wallace's call for a new sincerity and Fisher's hauntological vision of a culture that forgot how to imagine its own fut...

What does it mean to inhabit a communion of atmospheres? And what happens when that communion, after thirteen years of silence, suddenly has something new to say? Craig is joined by musician, mastering engineer, writer, and label head Jack Chuter for an episode that traces the mythology, philosophy, and sensory world of Boards of Canada, from the bleached Kodachrome of Music Has the Right to Children through the apocalyptic fog of Tomorrow's Harvest and into the just-dropped "Tape 05". Drawin...

Enroll in our new courses at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ 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 lab...

What would it mean to experience philosophy not as a body of knowledge to be transmitted, but as a sensation to be felt? Craig is joined by Charles J. Stivale, author of Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars 1970-1987 and co-director of the Deleuze Seminars Archive at Purdue, and Dr. Bob Langan to reconstruct the atmosphere of Deleuze's legendary classroom: the overcrowded rooms, the student contestations, and the radical pedagogical experiment that post-68 French university life made possible. This...

Enroll in classes now: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Subcribe to LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHAND What if the psychedelic revolution in end-of-life care is less a liberation from the medicalization of death than its most seductive intensification? In this crossover episode of LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon, SEREPTIE and Emma are joined by anthropologist Sujit Thomas, whose research on psychedelic thanatology cuts through therapeutic optimism to ask harder question...

Enroll at the AHRC today: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-main Buy 'CERFI Analysis Everywhere': https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1661 Between the radical energies of the 1960s and the shifting terrains of the 1980s, a group in France quietly detonated the boundaries of politics, psychiatry, and collective life. CERFI – the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training – wasn’t your typical think tank. Co-founded by Félix Guattari, it set out to bring the disruptive insi...

Enroll in Timothy Jackson's latest course: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/ontogenesis-is-impossible-anarchic-origins-in-science-life-and-art-with-simondon-bataille-schrmann-and-friends What is the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century? Today more than ever, in the face of disinformation, memetic plagues, and neuroactive media, if we are to resist not just the continual solicitation of our cognitive reflexes, but also the unearned authority of endless everyman rationali...

What does it mean to feel outclassed by your own creations? In this episode, host Craig is joined by Christopher John Müller, translator and co-editor of the new University of Minnesota Press edition of Günther Anders' The Obsolescence of the Human, and Penn State Philosophy Professor Nicholas de Warren, to explore the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most prescient and overlooked thinkers. Together, we unpack Anders' core concepts, including Promethean shame, the phantom world...

*Patreon Preview* To access the rest of this discussion, becoming paid subscriber on our Patreon page, or enroll in 'Formless', which begins March 11th. Links are below. What does Georges Bataille’s Guilty reveal about war, time, and the unstable ground of thought itself? In this episode, Craig and Adam speak with Stuart Kendall about Bataille’s confrontation with catastrophe, the “privileged instant,” and the strange oscillation between order and excess in his writing. The conversation explo...

Adam is joined by Massimiliano Tomba, O.L. Silverman, and Loren Goldman to discuss the biggest series of uprisings in Europe before the French Revolution, the German Peasants' War, which had its 500th anniversary in 2025. In this discussion, we considered what it meant for everyday people to engage in insurrectionary struggle against Pope and Prince alike, the influence of the conflict on Marxist conceptions of history, the apocalyptic communism of Thomas Müntzer in his allegiance with the pe...

In this free public panel hosted by the Acid Horizon Research Commons, we discuss Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press) with contributors Alexander R. Galloway, M. Beatrice Fazi, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby. The conversation reframes the digital not as consumer technology but as a fundamental mode of mediation grounded in discreteness. We explore the provocative claim that theory itself is digital, and that digitality precedes contemporary computation. The panel revisits st...

What does it mean to think communism philosophically, and how can a political rupture be understood as an ontological transformation of the conditions of everyday life? Adam is joined by Bruno Gulli and Richard Gilman-Opalsky to discuss their book of dialogues "Communist Ontologies: An Inquiry into the Construction of New Forms of Life" out now with our comrades over at Minor Compositions. They discuss the nature of identity and difference, insurgent ontologies, and how to think of communism ...

Adam's intensive Kant course now enrolling: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/2026-classes In this episode, we revisit Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a text that diagnosed the emergence of war as media event, non-event, and managed spectacle. Joining us is friend and returning guest Cameron Carsten, a graduate student in continental philosophy whose work explores the state, power, and the production of reality across Baudrillard and Deleuze. Rather than treating Baudrill...

Join Adam's class here: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/2026-classes/p/cause-category-and-command-an-introduction-to-kants-1st-and-2nd-critiques Adam is joined by Ciara Cremin to discuss the libidinal economy of femininity in her latest book "The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender" out now from Pluto Press. Drawing from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist theory, we discuss how Ciara's book articulates a vision of communism, abolitionism, and femininity against t...

Amidst the unceasing murderous march of capitalist imperialism and its transformation into new fascisms, the mantra of the revolutionary is to become organised, either by founding or joining a revolutionary organisation such a party, in order to establish a political organ for the proliferation of capitalism's overthrow. In this episode, Adam is joined by Elane Heffernan and David Renton to discuss a case of revolutionary organisation and its failure which still shapes the ecosystem of revolu...

Join our new The Logic of Sense reading group on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast Reading Group Syllabus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a6vx8efg0BFCPVm6mdpfeNAvDobx0_Tn/view?usp=sharing Enroll now in AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/2026-classes Craig and Adam are joined by Jay Conway for a deep dive into Gilles Deleuze’s essay "Plato and the Simulacrum", a pivotal text for understanding Deleuze’s project of reversing Platonism. The conversation explores The Log...

Enroll at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/2026-classes YouTube Version of the interview: https://youtu.be/Rh9URa_txGU In this on-the-road episode of Acid Horizon, Craig is joined by Devin Gouré of the Moral Minority podcast for a wide-ranging conversation dismantling common misconceptions about Friedrich Nietzsche, including the will to power, slave morality, the Übermensch, fascism, race, and the myths surrounding his madness. Drawing on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of M...

In this end-of-year installment, we’re sharing a conversation originally released on LEPHT HAND as we take a rare and well-earned brief hiatus from regular publishing or episodes. This pause marks a moment of transition rather than retreat, as both LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon continue to evolve beyond the podcast form! Closing out the episode is a reflection on Gianni Vattimo’s essay “Beyond the Subject,” engaging questions of weak thought, interpretation, and the limits of the sovereign self...

Why does the figure of the devil keep returning in moments of political panic, social anxiety, and cultural decay? In this episode, we sit down with author Grafton Tanner about exorcism, possession, moral panic, and the strange new life of demonology in contemporary America. We trace how neoliberal collapse, social media, and ideological confusion reanimate the satanic imaginary across the political spectrum. The conversation also explores fear, fantasy, and why authoritarian movements rely o...

Craig and Adam are joined by Idris Robinson to ask the question of destituent revolt in a murderous and counter-revolutionary world. We discussed Idris' work on the nature of martyrdom, the relation of the insurgent to death, and the political meaning of duty, both to the dead and within the confines of an intolerable life. Reading from Idris latest book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World has to Offer, out this November from Semiotext(e), we unpack the meaning of destituent or "de-instit...

Adam is joined by comrades Abigail Susik (@abigailsusik7), Ben Morea (@ben_morea), and Breanne Fahs to discuss the synthesis of art and activism, as exemplified by Ben’s central role within such collectives as Up Against the Wall Motherfucker! Black Mask, and The Rat during the 60s and 70s in New York. We spoke about Ben’s life and work, from the “redistribution” of garbage to New York’s freshly gentrified Lincoln Centre, breaking into the Pentagon, and helping to inspire the current tactics ...

In this Halloween episode, Meredith Graves joins Acid Horizon to explore the occulted correspondences between philosophy, ritual, and the practice of magic. Together we trace the tangled histories of witchcraft, labor, and belief—from Aleister Crowley and Sylvia Federici to Gilles Deleuze, GWF Hegel, and the haunted legacies of modern materialism. A conversation on mysticism, matter, and the insurgent imagination, recorded in the spirit of the season. Come see Meredith and Acid Horizon at Du...

What if depression isn’t an illness to cure but a collective mood that reveals the soul of a broken world? In this episode, Mark Fisher meets James Hillman in a conversation that bridges depth psychology and cultural theory, asking how melancholy and mania shape life under late capitalism. Joined by Emma Stamm, we explore the intersections of acid communism and archetypal psychology—from Fisher’s politics of despair to Hillman’s vision of a polytheistic psyche. Together we ask what happens wh...

In this episode, we present the work of Wasim Said, a comrade from Gaza who has documented the atrocities they and their people have experienced during the ongoing intensification of Israel's genocidal war on Palestine in his first book "Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide". The logistics and safety of an interview being made near impossible amidst the horrors, we instead read out a text sent to us by Wasim, and talk to Louis Allday from Liberated Texts who helped bring the book to publicatio...

What happens when Deleuze and Hegel are set in violent philosophical encounter over the ruins of Kantian representation? In this episode, we explore how both thinkers attempt to move beyond the categories of judgment and identity to recover the genesis of sense itself. Henry Somers-Hall joins us to trace Deleuze’s path through Kant, Sartre, and Bergson toward a field of pre-individual difference and immanent synthesis. What emerges is a portrait of thought that no longer begins with the subje...

What does it mean to live in a world where relationships can vanish overnight, without explanation or closure? In this episode, Acid Horizon speaks with cultural theorist Dominic Pettman about his new book Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity Press). Together we explore how ghosting unsettles intimacy, accountability, and narrative finality, reaching beyond dating apps into friendships, families, workplaces, and politics. Along the way we trace ghosting as both a form of psychic violence and a ...

What if the very idea of Western Marxism has less to do with geography than with defeat? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we dive into Domenico Losurdo’s controversial use of the term and ask what’s at stake in his defense of actually existing socialism against its critics. With our guest Ross Wolfe, we explore the tangled afterlives of Western Marxism—from the Frankfurt School to structuralism, from Stalinism to contemporary China. Along the way we confront the uncomfortable question: do tod...

Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sbwVioWlhS0 What happens when we revisit Wilhelm Reich’s journey from Freud’s student to radical theorist of desire, politics, and repression? In this episode, we sit down with Professor Philip Bennett and David Silver, executive director of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, to explore Reich’s groundbreaking ideas on therapy, character armor, and the enduring relevance of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Together we trace his path from psychoanalysis to Marxism to w...