Of all the different directions Freudian-Marxism took during the twentieth century, Norman O. Brown, the American philosopher, stands out as presenting a particularly compelling version. The first thing to note about Brown is that his project is distinctively American. His thought falls in line with the transcendentalists and with a certain strand of American idealism. He is widely influenced … Continue reading Confessions of a Mystical Freudian
One of the more admirable aspects of Colette Soler's work is her allegiance to theological concepts, which we should remember, Lacan himself took very seriously. In Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan's Thought, theological and philosophical concepts such as sin, guilt, God, and the ethics of virtue--all of which were crucial to Lacan's understanding of … Continue reading Affects and Lacanian Theology
I have a new essay up at Heathwood Press as part of their special series on Crisis Capitalism and Creeping Fascism – Bigotry, Racism, and the Rise of the Right in the Age of Neoliberal Barbarism. Please support Heathwood Press, an important new publisher working to revive the project of critical theory for today. Here … Continue reading Elements of Islamophobia: The State, Class and Capital
As part of the clinical Wednesday series with the DC Lacanian Forum, I gave my third presentation to the group, this time on the theme of identification. I begin with an analysis of identification in Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and look at Borch-Jacobsen's critique of Freud in his controversial The … Continue reading Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Audio Lecture
I have a review essay that explores Deleuze and Islamic philosophy. It focuses on the thought of Mulla Sadrā and his theory of the act of being in relation to Deleuze's theory of immanence. The essay is based on a reading of two new books on Deleuze and theology: Daniel Colucciello Barber's, Deleuze and the Naming … Continue reading New essay on Deleuze and Islamic Philosophy
Political philosophy has considered its project of thinking to be ‘emancipatory’ since the enlightenment. Emancipation is a term that refers to the idea of a total freedom from ignorance, from animality, or from a state of ‘self-imposed tutelage’ – as Kant would say in What is Enlightenment. Today, the question of emancipation has taken new … Continue reading Identification and emancipation: unary trait or unary trace?
The David Foster Wallace movie "The End of the Tour" is generally pretty good. The acting was superb and I like the way the dialogue and the relationship between DFW and the Rolling Stone magazine journalist played out. I read Infinite Jest in my early 20's and funny enough the film noted several times that the prime … Continue reading David Foster Wallace and the Politics of Existential Loneliness
It's widely held that critical theory and left theory more generally is too opaque for a wide audience and that's a bad thing. It's bad for a number of reasons. The more accessible one's writing, the wider your audience will be. The wider your audience, the more potential your thought has to enact change. The premise behind … Continue reading Should Critical Theory Be Accessible?
Sayyid Qutb famously argued that Islam is in a state of jahaliya, or pre-Islamic ignorance in the modern world. This condition was total, extending both within and outside of Islamic majority societies. Qutb is considered a godfather of Islamist intellectuals because his position opened Islam to the political, and the consequence of Qutub’s idea calls … Continue reading Islam as Empty Signifier and the Caliphate as Zero Institution: On Sayyid’s Recalling the Caliphate
My philosophical writing goes through cycles. I experience low points where my exhaustion with philosophy and the project of mastering logos and the Real is made so acute that I fall-back on writing narrative, poetry, or fiction. This fall-back is always confessional in nature. It feels as if I am confessing to the master who has turned away … Continue reading Philosophy as Confession
The #RachelDolezal story has sent social media into a tailspin. The details of the story are covered well in this original article from the local Spokane, WA newspaper where Rachel is based. We learn that Rachel Dolezal, a black woman artist and activist, married to a black man with adopted black babies and leader of an NAACP chapter … Continue reading Is All Identity a Social Construct? Towards a Political Taxonomy of Rachel Dolezal
One of the reasons that religion persists in human civilization is because it is able to incorporate what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls communitas into structure, or normal society. Turner is a philosophical anthropologist, and in his classic study The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, he points out how the liminal or transitional experiences of rituals … Continue reading Religion and Communitas: Structure and Anti-Structure
When Karl Rove mobilized the Evangelical vote in the 2000 election, he opened a Pandora's Box that everyone would subsequently try to close -- or master. Evangelicals didn't know they had such power politically, and it scared them. This fear has led them to retreat from politics -- on a large scale -- over the last eight years. … Continue reading The Infantilization of Evangelicals in American Politics
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud says that “each individual taken independently is a constitutive part of different crowds." I understand this in two ways: the individual is a part of different crowds in the abstract sense that the crowd is a part of the subjective process in some way. The … Continue reading The Crowd and the Collective: Some Speculative Points
How do we situate the film Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy both in terms of its social commentary and genre? At a certain level, it's like American Psycho for the post 2008 economic downturn and late finance capitalism period. Both films are ostensibly about how capitalist competition creates an intense sociopathy when subjects identify with the explicit demands … Continue reading Becoming Your Own Boss. On Nightcrawler
I have a new essay on Wael Hallaq's book, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament at the very excellent publication Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (http://sctiw.org/sctiw_review) coming out on February 10th. My main interest in this essay, in addition to reviewing the book, is to start a dialogue with Islam and continental philosophy … Continue reading Excerpt: Thinking Islamic Governance with Continental Philosophy
With Agamben's recent invoking of Kojève's idea of the Latin empire against the German dominance in Europe, and with the recent translation of the short manifesto on authority Kojève wrote amidst the Second World War, it is worth revisiting exactly what sort of theory of revolution Kojève was concerned with. My review of The Notion of Authority: … Continue reading The Amputated Father: Kojève’s Theory of Revolution and Authority
My review of Remzig Keucheyan's, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today is up at the Huffington Post. As you can see from my review, I found the book to be a tremendous contribution to the field of left politics and organization and to the academic field of critical theory. Has critical theory begun to shrug off the … Continue reading My Book Review of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today
I'm hosting a public series for GCAS on the topic of Resistance, Protest and Social Struggles. This free and open to the public series will feature weekly lectures from philosophers, theorists and activists. We will meet weekly on Saturday’s starting February 7th to May 2nd. To register for this free series go here. The series is free and … Continue reading Public Series of Lectures on Resistance, Protest and Social Struggles
Here is an interview with the Global Center for Advanced Studies.
GCAS Interview with Daniel Tutt on Badiou and Philosophy–To register and study with Alain Badiou & Daniel Tutt please follow this link: https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/gcas-badiou-and-philosophy-series/
Daniel Tutt, PhD
January 11, 2015
Q: What is your relationship with Alain Badiou?
Daniel Tutt: I am a student of Alain Badiou. After attending a couple of his seminars at the European Graduate School, I asked if he would advise my dissertation and he agreed. During the process of working on my dissertation, which looked at the question of community and subjectivity in contemporary thought, I put together the idea of making a film about philosophy, inspired largely by Badiou’s thought. Film is a really long and often-brutal process of discovery, and this film is still ongoing, but Badiou agreed early on to be interviewed for the film. This film is looking at what philosophers have to say about the return of massive social struggles…
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An experimentation in various brands of public political expression, of an exceptionally dramatic nature.
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Pluralism and Individuation in a World of Becoming
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From Bauhaus to Beinhaus
bat020 = Anindya Bhattacharyya, writer/activist based in London. philosophy, revolutionary socialism, mathematics, technology, dance music. bat020.tumblr.com | @bat020 | facebook.com/bat020 | obvious gmail address
Philosophical Writings
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Cosmism, Prometheanism, New Enlightenment
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"It’s always with another key that you unlock the house—inside: the snowdrifts of what’s never spoken." —Paul Celan
researcher, lecturer and author in Contemporary European Thought: Atheism and Religion
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It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian
Rising Above Limitations, Expectations & Conditions
to make a system out of delusions
Asymmetrical critique
“A man with one theory is lost. He must have several, four, many! " —Bertold Brecht
