Episode #233 ... A philosophy of self-destruc...

Today we talk about Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five. How war stories can distort the reality of war, how trauma can fracture our experience of time and identity, and why Billy Pilgrim becomes attracted to the strange philosophy of the Tralfamadorians. Hope you love it. : ...  Show more

Today we talk more about Peter Sloterdijk’s book You Must Change Your Life. We talk about Heidegger, the subject-object view of the world, how environments form us, symbolic immunity, modern cynicism, vertical tension, base camps, civilizations as collective immune systems, and w ...  Show more

UNLOCKED: Today we're talking Žižek's chapter in his book Absolute Recoil called "The Violence of the Beginning". The reading begins with the notion that there is "nothing prior to the loss" of the sense of lost origins. Žižek then sets into play the idea of the self-alienation o ...  Show more

In this lecture, 11th in the 2017 series, I discuss the giants of existentialism, a philosophically-grounded psychological position positing (1) that psychopathology or mental illness/distress is built into Being itself and (2) that the adoption of responsibility through action i ...  Show more

Today we're discussing Zizek's 2005 book "Interrogating the Real", and his afterword on Lacanian ethics. What does not giving way relative to one's own desire mean? How does Lacan's maxim on desire contrast with Buddhism, and its conception of desire? Join us on our Discord by su ...  Show more

David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays "On the Sufferings of the World" and "The Vanity of Existence," their strikingly modern perspectives on human life and behavior and ...  Show more