LEPHT HAND

Episódios

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  The Selfie That Wasn't: On Projection, Spirituality, and Knowledge of Other Minds 20.09.2026 1h 28min

  The Lenox Institute for Advanced Study: https://lenoxinstitute.org/ Acid Horizon Research Commons Ongoing Courses: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Can something as ordinary as a selfie crack open a window onto the deepest questions of mind, faith, and mortality? In this episode, Emma and Sereptie sit down with writer Jonathan Malesic to unpack his essay "Unfaithful Reproductions," which begins with a photo taken on his dying father's deathbed, a photo he long assumed was a s...
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  Does Psyche Matter? Jung and the Unconscious in 2026 — AHRC Public Panel (Audio) 01.09.2026 51min

  The fall season of AHRC courses begins next week. Enroll in two classes and get a third free with code 3FOR2FALL2026. Bob Langan's Jung and Spinoza: God, Affect, Destiny, beginning October 4th: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/jung-and-spinoza-god-affect-destiny Is psychology, as we've inherited it, equal to the challenges we now face? A polished, audio-only version of the opening remarks and initial responses from our recent AHRC public panel, hosted by Bob Langan and join...
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  Was Adorno Right (and Wrong) About Astrology? Irrationality, Imagination, and Epistemic Flight from Normalizing Power 18.08.2026 1h 11min

  Is astrology a harmless distraction or a pseudo-science opening a path to fascism? Or can it help us reclaim an imagination lost to the hyper-rationalism of modernity? In this episode, Sereptie and Emma trace the gendered and racialized dynamics behind astrology’s reputation as frivolous, unpacking why interest in the occult so often gets coded as feminine, queer, or "unserious". Drawing on Adorno’s essay “The Stars Down to Earth,” we examine astrology’s function as pseudo-rationality under c...
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  Scandal, Shadow, and the Underworld: Where the Symbolic Meets the Political 07.08.2026 5min

  Listen to the full episode here: Enroll in Bob's class at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/jung-and-spinoza-god-affect-destiny In this Patreon exclusive episode, recurring guest and friend of the podcast Dr. Bob Langan returns to help unpack a scandal unfolding within the community of analytical psychology and Jungian media. It is one that sheds light on an already-perforated boundary between the symbolic and political registers, and more pointedly reveals the limits...
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  AI as Anti-Politics: Daniel Stanley on Technopopulism, Data, and Rebuilding Collective Power 02.08.2026 1h 24min

  Enroll at AHRC: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Is AI really the threat to democracy we've been told it is, or is it just democracy's own rot wearing a new face? Daniel Stanley of the Future Narratives Lab joins us to unpack his essay "AI as Anti-Politics," arguing the technology isn't an external assault on democratic life but the product of decades of shifts that already hollowed out collective political power. We explore technopopulism and ask what it would take to r...
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  *PATREON EXCLUSIVE* Attention Fracking: How Big Tech Steals Your Mind with Henry Kramer 07.07.2026 25min

  Emma's class on anti-civilization thought begins in August 2026: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/anti-civilization-recovering-from-industry-and-progress Are we free to think, or has our attention already been excavated before we can conceive of thinking? In this episode, Serpetie welcomes Henry Kramer of the School of Radical Attention for a wide-ranging conversation on attention fracking, the colonization of the imagination, and what it might mean to re-enchant our relatio...
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  Sacred Science vs. the Machine: Nasr on Nature, Technology & Modernity 22.06.2026 32min

  Find Emma's course here: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What if modernity's greatest crime isn't economic or political, but spiritual, a severing of humanity from the sacred language written into nature itself? In this episode, Serpetie and Emma dig into Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 1993 collection The Need for a Sacred Science, taking a critical look at his perennialist argument that the harmony, symbols, and laws of the natural world carry an ontological reality that modern scient...
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  How Can We Build Solidarity With Children? with Madeline Lane-McKinley 30.05.2026 1h 8min

  AHRC EVENTS: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/previous-courses-1 Buy Madeline's book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2610-solidarity-with-children We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means ass...
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  Logging Off, Opting Out, and Not Texting Back: The Ethics of Non-Response with Jana Bacevic 17.05.2026 1h 35min

  Enroll at AHRC Summer School 2026: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses What if you don't owe anyone anything? Not your attention, not your care, not even a reply to their message? That might sound like the philosophy of a sociopath, but sociologist and philosopher Jana Bacevic argues it's actually the foundation of a more honest and more just ethics. In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Emma sits down with Jana to discuss non-reciprocity, a concept that challenges the Kantian backbone ...
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  Prog Rock, Politics, and the Pathos of Distance: Is Progressive Music Elitist or Revolutionary? 05.05.2026 1h 22min

  AHRC Summer School: www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses Vintagia is back! www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/vintagia-basecamp What does it mean that the music most associated with wizards, capes, and sixteen keyboards also harbored some of the most radical left politics in rock history? In this episode, Emma and Sereptie are joined by writer, bassist, and WFMU radio DJ Dave Mandl for a deep dive into the origins, aesthetics, and political contradictions of progressive rock. From the egalitarian ...
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  The PBS Unconscious: Childhood Wonder, Nostalgia, and the Collapse of Shared American Culture 26.04.2026 1h 42min

  What happens to a generation raised on the civic idealism of public broadcasting when the world it promised never arrives? In this episode, Sereptie is joined by Emma Stamm and Bob Langan to unpack his recent blog post Corduroy Psychedelia: Boards of Canada and the PBS Unconscious — an exploration of nostalgia, childhood wonder, and the shared cultural commons that neoliberalism quietly dismantled. Drawing on Mark Fisher's hauntology and acid communism, Spinoza's theory of affect, and the unc...
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  Deleuze, Drugs, and Death: Psychedelic Thanatology at the End of Life 31.03.2026 1h 9min

  Enroll in classes now: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses 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 questions about pastoral power, metaphysical belief shift, and the ...
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  Can Machines Imagine? Fabian Offert on AI, Images, and 'Vector Media' 08.03.2026 1h 6min

  Can machines imagine, or do they merely recombine the vast archive of images and language we have already produced? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Emma Stamm and Sereptie speak with Fabian Offert about his forthcoming book Vector Media and the philosophical stakes of machine learning. Together they explore machine vision, the politics of images, and the strange epistemology of vector space, where culture, language, and visual media are flattened into new regimes of abstraction. Along the way,...
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  Love Breaks This World: Power and Politics in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (Ring Cycle) with Phil Ford 13.02.2026 1h 13min

  Access Emma's archived course, enroll in Stuart's new course, and discover more: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-main What happens when love is absent from the stage, yet remains the hidden force driving every act of power and betrayal? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, we sit down with Phil Ford of Weird Studies to explore Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold and the mythic machinery of the Ring Cycle. Moving between politics, metaphysics, and music, we examine the curse of gold, the logic of...
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  From Weird Academia to Acid Communism: Meta-Politics, Community, and Holding Space for the Humanities 07.02.2026 1h 15min

  Emma and Sereptie debrief the 'Weird Academia' conference in Bloomington, Indiana, reflecting on what it means to make space for the strange within and beyond the academy. We explore animal consciousness, interdisciplinary research, and the “closet” of weird scholarship, asking how encounters that rupture established methods can open new forms of knowledge. The conversation turns toward meta-politics, examining non-communication, collective retreat, and para-academic practices as forms of res...
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  Deleuze and Simondon on Psychedelic Experience: Individuation and Immanent Spirituality with Aragorn Eloff 13.01.2026 1h 36min

  In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Emma leads a conversation with Aragorn Eloff on psychedelic experience through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, set against contemporary debates in cognitive science and computational theories of mind. Aragorn introduces his theory of the psychedelic, drawing on enactivism, complex systems theory, and theories of individuation and becoming. Together, the discussion explores anxiety, metastability, immanent spirituality, and the risks and ...
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  Philosophy After Academia: Public Thought, Digital Media, and the Attention Economy with Craig and Emma 04.01.2026 1h 25min

  Check out Emma's Substack: https://elftheory.substack.com/ Join Emma for 'Acid Communism: A World That Could Free': https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/2026-classes/p/qny873rafa9ibhcyj2t2x1cwsuvtln In this episode, Craig is joined by Emma Stamm as LEPHT HAND begins a new chapter in 2026. Rather than centering on a single text, the conversation reflects on early encounters with philosophy and how those formative experiences shape the way thinking is pursued today. Together, Craig and Emma begin...
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  AHRC 2026: A Brief Hiatus & A Reflection on Vattimo’s “Beyond the Subject 13.12.2025 34min

  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. 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. As we clos...
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  Socialism, Spirituality and the Forgotten Occult Roots of the Left with Graham Jones 28.11.2025 1h 22min

  Can a genuinely liberatory politics survive without mystery, imagination, or the spiritual experiences that give life its depth? Sereptie speaks with Graham Jones about Jacobin’s article “The Forgotten History of Socialism and the Occult” and why its knee-jerk rationalism gets the history wrong. We explore the intersections of Marxism, mysticism, occult traditions, utopian thought, and the warm stream of revolutionary desire. The discussion moves through materialist spirituality, politi...
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  Why Rationalism Fails: Excess, Variation, and Ontogenesis as First Philosophy (with Timothy Jackson) 16.11.2025 1h 22min

  What happens when the very logic we rely on to understand the world becomes the barrier to understanding it? In this episode, Timothy Jackson joins us to rethink rationalism through the lenses of Darwin, Simondon, Deleuze, and Bataille, challenging inherited frameworks across science and metaphysics. We explore variation, excess, and ontogenesis as the forces that precede and destabilize every closed system of explanation. To explore more of Timothy’s work, visit his Google Scholar prof...