PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

All episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

We discuss cannibalism, the communicative value of rioting, and the English news coverage of the French riots.

The paper "Can Riots Represent?" can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12989

Listen to the whole episode on patreon https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

René Girard is known mainly as someone Peter Thiel mentions in between deranged analogies, but he also wrote some books on some typically French topics such as desire, the symbolic, and anthropological historiography. This is his take on the scapegoat mechanism from Violence and the Sacred (https://link.amazon/B0aOFZum7).

René Girard is known mainly as someone Peter Thiel mentions in between deranged analogies, but he also wrote some books on some typically French topics such as desire, the symbolic, and anthropological historiography. This is his take on sacrifice from Violence and the Sacred (https://link.amazon/B0aOFZum7).

We ask Cahal Moran what leftists need to get straight on economics, talking through "orthodox" vs. "heterodox" economics, the labour theory of value, Mark Carney, and the AI Bubble. 

Visit Unlearning Economics on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4V_jMdRbbTrmBVJB6FDzgw

Cahal's Book: https://link.amazon/B0aL5NcCd

All podcast episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Another discourse has hit the timeline. Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills
Is health fascism? Is Ozempic Zyklon-B? Should Gabriel Rockhill have to approve every leftist monograph prior to publication? All this and more, in what what was supposed to be the intro to our episode on collective violence

Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

The business press has pushed the "leftist-outsider-dishevelled-genius" about Palantir's CEO Alex Karp for a decade. This episode we explore Karp's relationship with critical theory and the mythmaking that has produced his significance.  

NYT pushes the mythology of Alex Karp https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html
Adorno and the Palantir Manifesto https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/palantir-flunks-out-of-the-frankfurt
Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/

The Pill Pod debates the academic and ethics perspectives' following the terminal end of the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal.

Ad-free listens (even with no subscription) at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio are calling The Left strange combinatory insults, such as ugly-terrorists and dark-cancers. We review these old signifying chains and Erik introduces Stuart Hall's explanation from last time this happened, when back in the 60s when they said The Left were all gay muggers planning to rob civilized people on their way home from church.

Socialist are to blame for the Forest Fires. Antifa caused Algae to take over the reflecting pool. Conservatives believe that nature has allied with their enemies to undermine their authority and Western vicilization. We discuss many instances of the opposition of culture/nature in recent news, political theory, and most importantly Twitter discourse.

Video essay referenced: https://youtu.be/ZFOSdqhpuaI?si=86JJOjAuxQl7lrhv
Join up for more content https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines by Leif Weatherby (https://amzn.to/4bipjYu)

This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs.

Get this episode and hundreds more https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars?

Link to article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370207001452

All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left.

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg  

Hear our Lasch series at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

After three episodes reading Culture of Narcissism we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.

jk it's just fake news that duped conservatives yet again. This viral lie claimed that a remote Amazon tribe fell apart the instant they discovered internet pornography, but in the end it says a lot more about us than it does about the Marubos.


go to patreon to never miss an episode https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything).

Get hundreds of hours more at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

For hundreds of hours of content like this, it's https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about.

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills.

We read the eminent The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida.
(originally recorded 08/24)

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills.

We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills. In this episode we read Sloterdijk's proposal for how to fix Philosophy from The Critique of Cynical Reason.

This is a preview, find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills.
In this episode we cover Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and why Philosophy needs to incorporate disrespect, sacrilege, and fart jokes if it is ever going to be relevant again.

Find all our episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills

Peter Sloterdijk wrote a philosophy bestseller in 1983 called The Critique of Cynical Reason. In this episode, we try to communicate what he means by cynical reason. 
https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Sloterdijk_Peter_Critique_of_Cynical_Reason.pdf

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills. In this episode we cover the Cynical school of Diogenes and contemporary philosophers in his lineage.

We discuss the proposition of hyperreal fascism as presented in this video essay (https://youtu.be/R9fpm-lorIU) and its relationship to current events and the Trump Administration

Jeffrey Epstein is not primarily known as a philosopher, but his emails illustrate that he had higher ambitions than pedophilia. We explore both the latent and manifest content of Jeffrey Epstein's theorizing, as well as who enabled him, and come to realize that he was the victim of a rare psychotic illness. 

Join our patreon to get the epsidoes not posted here https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Everyone is talking about Canada leading the charge into the New World Order. Are we excited yet? Watch the glorious father of our nation deliver the goods at Davos, or not.

Join us on Patreon to get all our eps ad-free: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Stoicism is on its comeback among dumb 20 year olds, which is too bad because Epicureanism is the superior Athenian philosophy. We discuss hedonism, happiness, and the Swerve™. 

Only half of our episodes are posted here! Find the other half ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

The history of Stoicism is long and complicated, and we didn't want to end with AI alpha male YouTube channels, so here is a rundown focused on Greek Stoicism, some comparisons to Buddhism, and whether or not this philosophy could help in 2026. 

Get all episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

From Zero to hero: Samantha Fulnecky has been honoured by the Oklahoma government and named "an American hero" for her paper submission to her Psych course in which she claimed it is demonic to believe in more than one gender. Still, the Pill Pod heats up over whether she deserved the grade she received…

More Pill Pod: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Read Samantha's essay and the instructors' comments here:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/11/25/ou-oklahoma-samantha-fulnecky-read-essay-gender-bible/87463858007/

It's the bi-yearly event in the ongoing race war between analytic and continental philosophy. Philosophers of all stripes invited themselves to partake in the latest and stupidest skirmish, and so we have undertaken a reading of the match that lit the powder keg: How Continental Philosophers "Argue": On the Unseriousness of the Discipline (https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue)

Access exclusive episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

A Signifying Chain (or symbolic chain, or signifying web) is a structuralist concept developed by Jacques Lacan and others ("The Agency of the Letter"; https://amzn.to/4p6wx6l).

Signifying chains structure discourses and we believe, explain the growing rift in conservative politics.

Have a look at our exclusive content https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

The Pill Pod reads Daniel Kolitz' anthropology of the gooners in Harper's Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ and we find it's all connected man

Other sources cited included Lacan Seminar X, Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Baudrillard Transparency of Evil

Full Ad-free Lacan series: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

We conclude our Lacan series with what Fink says is the desired end of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And, the ends of psychoanalysis coincide with some valuable insights for Lacan's theorizing beyond psychoanalysis. 
Works cited are Fink's Lacanian Subject (ch. 5; https://amzn.to/4qz1Fgx) and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (ch. 10; https://amzn.to/4hAIKh5).

Richard Ledes, director of the films Adieu Lacan and V13, explains his process, namely, adapting French plays about psychoanalysis into English-language films. He connects the seduction of nascent fascism in 1913 Vienna to the present moment a century later.


Find V13 on AppleTV, Prime Video

Find Ledes' catalogue at https://www.richardledes.com/

Always more content at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

The Pill Pod looks at the structure of the perverts in Episode 5 of our series on Lacan. Find the other episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Sources:
Jacques Lacan - Seminar X, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious", Ecrits
Bruce Fink - Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Pill Pod looks at the chatbot psychosis phenomenon and compares it to Lacan's clinical structure of psychosis.


This is Episode 4 of our series on Lacan. Find the other episodes Ad-Free at
https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills


Sources:
Jacques Lacan - Seminar III

Bruce Fink - Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

"People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies" Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

"They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent them Spiraling" New York Times: https://www...

1Dime joins Erik and Victor to discuss Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. We cover the popularity of the book, the term, and then wonder whether left-populist electoral campaigns perform the same cathartic function as anti-capitalist TV shows.

See more from 1Dime: https://www.youtube.com/@1Dimee
All our public episodes are ad-free: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

We wanted to review some Lacan because everybody's still desiring, and Bruce Fink's Lacanian Subject (1995) is quite often touted as the best unofficial intro, and we can see why.

Get this and all our eps at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This is the book: https://amzn.to/4oubPxQ