LEPHT HAND

Sacred Science vs. the Machine: Nasr on Nature, Technology & Modernity 22.06.2026 32мин

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...

How Can We Build Solidarity With Children? with Madeline Lane-McKinley 30.05.2026 1ч 8мин

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...

Logging Off, Opting Out, and Not Texting Back: The Ethics of Non-Response with Jana Bacevic 17.05.2026 1ч 35мин

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 ...

Prog Rock, Politics, and the Pathos of Distance: Is Progressive Music Elitist or Revolutionary? 05.05.2026 1ч 22мин

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 ...

The PBS Unconscious: Childhood Wonder, Nostalgia, and the Collapse of Shared American Culture 26.04.2026 1ч 42мин

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...

Deleuze, Drugs, and Death: Psychedelic Thanatology at the End of Life 31.03.2026 1ч 9мин

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 ...

Can Machines Imagine? Fabian Offert on AI, Images, and 'Vector Media' 08.03.2026 1ч 6мин

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,...

Love Breaks This World: Power and Politics in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (Ring Cycle) with Phil Ford 13.02.2026 1ч 13мин

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...

From Weird Academia to Acid Communism: Meta-Politics, Community, and Holding Space for the Humanities 07.02.2026 1ч 15мин

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...

Deleuze and Simondon on Psychedelic Experience: Individuation and Immanent Spirituality with Aragorn Eloff 13.01.2026 1ч 36мин

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 ...

Philosophy After Academia: Public Thought, Digital Media, and the Attention Economy with Craig and Emma 04.01.2026 1ч 25мин

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...

AHRC 2026: A Brief Hiatus & A Reflection on Vattimo’s “Beyond the Subject 13.12.2025 34мин

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...

Socialism, Spirituality and the Forgotten Occult Roots of the Left with Graham Jones 28.11.2025 1ч 22мин

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...

Why Rationalism Fails: Excess, Variation, and Ontogenesis as First Philosophy (with Timothy Jackson) 16.11.2025 1ч 22мин

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...

Bergson and Weird Philosophy: JF Martel on Time, Subjectivity, and Weirding Realism 02.11.2025 1ч 21мин

Have you ever felt reality glitch, as though the weird was peeking through the cracks of time or the Real? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, JF Martel joins to explore how Henri Bergson’s concept of duration and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming invite a radically weird subjectivity, one that consumes rhythms, intensities, and habits across time. We discuss how this non-linear conception of time doesn’t just solve problems but also introduces new ones: what does it mean to be a subject in ...

Writing as Exorcism: Dreams and Dissolution in the Work of Henri Michaux (with Garett Strickland) 19.10.2025 1ч 6мин

Subscribe to LEPHT HAND for early access to episodes! Henri Michaux wrote as if to exorcise himself from existence. His poetry and prose traverse dream, delirium, and the slow undoing of identity, where language becomes both scalpel and spell. In this episode, Garett Strickland joins Sereptie to explore A Certain Plume, Darkness Moves (anthology), and Michaux’s hallucinatory experiments as acts of metaphysical revolt. Together they consider how writing, for Michaux, becomes an art of disappe...

The Body Without Organs: Artaud’s Last Writings with Stephen Barber 26.09.2025 1ч 6мин

What does it mean to imagine a body freed from its organs, its history, and its limits? In his final writings, Antonin Artaud turned against Christ, psychiatry, sexuality, and language itself, while elaborating the concept of the “body without organs.” Translator and scholar Stephen Barber joins us to discuss A Sinister Assassin, a collection that gathers together these visionary late texts. Together we explore Artaud’s last visions of theater, delirium, and radical corporeal transformation. ...

Myth, Nostalgia, and Liberation: Federico Campagna’s 'Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History' 23.08.2025 1ч 8мин

Can myth itself serve as a material force in struggles for liberation? Federico Campagna joins me to discuss how myth—too often dismissed as escapism or co-opted by reaction—can instead become a practice of imagination, solidarity, and survival. We look at myth’s place in anti-capitalist politics, its tension with materialism, and its role in resisting despair. What emerges is a vision of myth as a politics of possibility against history’s catastrophes. Acid Horizon Research Commons is now li...

Gilgamesh: The Oldest Story Ever Told and Why It Still Haunts Us Today (with Stuart Kendall) 10.08.2025 1ч 34мин

What ancient tale speaks of gods, grief, and the fall of heroes? In this episode, we descend into the dream-temple of Gilgamesh, guided by translator Stuart Kendall. We explore the epic’s broken verses, divine laments, and its resistance to modern humanist smoothing. What emerges is not just a story—but a fragmentary vision of mythic time and cosmic mourning. Stuart Kendall's "Gilgamesh": https://www.contramundumpress.com/gilgamesh Support LEPHT HAND: Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.c...

Undoing the Myth of the Father: Freud, Feminism, and the Symbolic Violence of Western Thought 02.08.2025 1ч 17мин

What do ancient myths reveal about our unconscious fantasies of power, gender, and identity? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Jessica Elbert Decker, author of Motherless Daughters and Female Monsters, joins us to explore the myths of Athena, Aphrodite, Pandora, and Ariadne through the lens of psychoanalysis and queer feminist theory. We examine the lingering grip of masculine mastery in culture, the dangers of symbolic amnesia, and the creative potential of mythic counter-fantasies. Together, w...