Tag Archives: AEWCH

Back to the Future: Philosopher Srećko Horvat returns to AEWCH to talk with me about climate, capitalism, and reincarnation.

2 Mar

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor • Patreon
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Srećko’s latest book is available here. To buy his other books, or books mentioned on/related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 143 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too. (And once After the Apocalypse is available via bookshop.org, I’ll add it to the list!)

Friends,

A few conundrums:How do we deal with the fact that we keep envisioning a destructive future, yet so few of us are acting to stop it?

When we talk about systems that (like capitalism and patriarchy, for example) that are oppressing us, do we mean they’re…like…spiritual forces? Invisible vague laws of social nature? What?And how is being separated from so many people we love affecting our notion of space and relationship?

To answer these questions, and in what I hope becomes an annual tradition, I invited philosopher, author, and activist Srećko Horvat back on the show. You might remember out first conversation, about a year ago, was on AEWCH 107, just at the start of the global crisis in 2020. Well, obviously, things haven’t resolved themselves since then, and it’s because we haven’t taken steps bold and miraculous enough.Srećko is not a class reductionist nor an identity politics thinker, but instead, (like Michael Hardt on AEWCH 120) Srećko brings together strands of ,any different aspects of being human – philosophy, art, music, poetry, activism, economics, politics, and more – and tries to survey our current, future, and past predicaments. His new book After The Apocalypse brings his multi-layered perspective to the apocalypse, which, Srećko reminds us, has already happened:

People huddled in tents in their houses in freezing Texas evenings. Empty streets. Lines for groceries at Tesco, where the food is all wrapped in plastic. Borders closed. The threat of disease at every turn. Riots against murder by the authorities. This is what it feels like to be in an apocalypse.

So what about after? Can there be an after?

The answer is yes, but it will take a liberation of time and space and a reinvention of the political, economic, and cultural realms.So… let’s get to it.

PS: After the Apocalypse has a playlist, which I’ve replicated as much as I could on spotify. Here’s the playlist for the book.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • What we mean when we talk about capitalism doing things
  • The destruction and seizing of time
  • Why reincarnation matters
  • How to deal with knowing an end is approaching but still needing to live in the now
  • Does “climate change” help us take action? And how are climate change and failed communism related?
  • Why science can’t save us (and in fact can do a lot of harm)
  • The return of the power of the state, and the public health utopia
  • Silence as a commons
  • The need for mutual aid
  • What the world should have, but refused to learn, from the HIV crisis
  • How to liberate “problematic” thinkers
  • The importance of working with the dead
  • How do we use the tools we have without reinforcing the terrible structures the tools come from

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Srećko, here’s his lecture, “The Virus Mythologies,” where he breaks down the signs and signifiers And for a quick summary of his other work, you can read Subversion!. Here’s Srećko in conversation with Brian Eno about his book, Poetry From The Future. And here’s Srećko more recently (in January 2021) discussing the tangle of issues we’re in with his collaborator, Alfie Brown.

• I wrote about Wittgenstein’s quote – “When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.” – and how it relates to the current crisis for The Irish Times.

• I talk with economics researcher and author Conor McCabe on AEWCH 76 about the entangled relationship between money and time (it’s one of my favorite episodes!). And I talked all about the way the vision of the Earth changed when we landed on the Moon waaaay back on AEWCH 5.

• Some of Günther Anders’s work is available online in translation here.

• Here’s a story on the the Tallaght wetlands. I can’t find the information on the murder investigation there, but I did read it shortly after the wetlands were destroyed. If you find an essay on it, send it along!

• I haven’t yet seen The Midnight Sky, but, okay, Clooney and sci fi. And here’s the trailer for the other movie Srećko mentioned, Space Sweepers.

• Here’s Walter Benjamin’s Theses On A Philosophy Of History. It’s, for me, one of the most influential theoretical works. From the essay: “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”

• Bill Gates’s crazy plan to block the Sun is underway. Steiner’s warning (from 1913, I believe) is a bit complex if you don’t know the anthroposophical lexicon, but: “…the Ahrimanic beings strive to ensoul the living limestone with a kind of astral rain… If the Ahrimanic beings could realize their hopes the whole of humanity would gradually be dissolved into the earth…”

• I still can’t believe I got to speak with Fugazi/Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye on AEWCH 119. Really.

• Oh, Snapcase, the hardcore dreamboats. Here’s probably their most famous song, “Caboose,” and here’s their spotify page.

• A short, smart, (and still somewhat objectionable) response to philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s take on the pandemic in the Irish Times.

• Here’s a little on the Human Interference Task Force.

Until next time (get it?)
XO
CH

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Tarot as poetry, anatomy, anxiety. Rachel True and I talk about the cards on AEWCH 142!

23 Feb

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor • Patreon

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Rachel’s book and deck, or other books mentioned on & related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 142 at bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
The state of anxiety is always running, isn’t it? Here in Ireland, just as this is going up, there’s another Covid regulations briefing, and for a week now – as with every week before a briefing – the entire country has been filled with anxious speculation. And beyond the announcement itself, what about AFTER this set of regulations? What about this summer? Holidays? Haircuts? When will I be able to go to a concert? Will this ever end? Are we going to be trapped in neoliberal locked-in hell forever?Anxiety is a relationship to the future. And it’s one that’s felt in our bodies.In other words, anxiety is a form of fortune telling.
That means in a time of high anxiety, most people are ALREADY trying to tell the future. Why not use a system to help?I asked my friend, author, tarot reader, and actress Rachel True onto the show to talk about all this and more.
Many people of course know Rachel from her appearance in the 1996 cult film The Craft, about a coven of teen witches. But now that her book and tarot deck are out — True Heart Intuitive Tarot and Guidebook — she’s become increasingly know for her intense tarot readings and her potent intuition.This episode really goes through tarot on multiple levels – so it’s a great for whatever your level of interest and knowledge is.
We start by talking about tarot in culture. Tarot in politics. Tarot in black communities.Then we discuss what tarot is – so there’s a philosophical level there. How does it work? Rachel has an idea of tarot as a story, and I talk about the deck as a being and the cards as aspects of its anatomy.
Then we move deeper into the specific about her deck and her book. The deck is colorful, beautiful, and filled with people who aren’t just white alabaster figures. I’ve included some pictures of the cards we talk about down below here. She also reads a story from the book that comes with the deck – a book which has a personal story from Rachel’s life relating to each of the major arcana in the deck. And finally, we give some thoughts and tips on reading

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Why is tarot so visible now, again?
  • Tarot readers, psychics, astrologers as a class of workers
  • Anxiety as soothsaying
  • Rachel’s heritage and how that affected her spirituality
  • The folk and magic traditions in my house when I was a kid
  • Nietzsche’s role in Rachel’s tarot deck
  • Why neither Rachel not I use reversals when we read tarot
  • The story that unfolds in each tarot spread
  • Tarot as anatomy, tarot as poetry
  • That time Rachel became the Strength tarot card, complete with lion
  • What times to use which decks and other tips on reading
  • How does one choose images for their own decks at all? And how many symbols are too many?
  • The importance of (non-simplistic!) representation in tarot

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Rachel, support her patreon and get her live streamed readings! Here’s a short video of Rachel doing readings for Jezebel. And here’s a long interview with Rachel (in two parts!) with author Mat Auryn.

• Rachel fully designed her deck, and the illustrator she worked with was the incredible Stephanie Singleton.

• There’s a lot of overlap with the previous episode, AEWCH 141 with religion scholar Jason Josephson Storm on how we don’t need to “re-enchant” the world.

• I remember Miss Cleo. Do you?

• Here’s more on Byron Katie and her life changing path, The Work.

• Do you know our friend Alec Mapa (maybe best known from his role on Ugly Betty)? Here’s his one-man show, Baby Daddy, about adopting a son with his partner. It’s very sweet and funny.

• Apparently the phrase, “I hate to write, but I love having written” is not a Dorothy Parker quote, but probably (so far as this author can find) a Frank Norris quote.

• Also, if your curiosity is piqued about the Juvenalia podcast featuring AEWCH 93 guest (and tarot reader!) Sarah Maria Griffin, please do listen and subscribe and also support their patreon!

Until next time, pals,
CH

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We don’t need to “re-enchant” anything. Religion scholar Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm on Against Everyone With Conner Habib 141!

16 Feb

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • AnchorThis podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Jason’s books or books mentioned on & related to this episode, please go to my book list for AEWCH 141 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
I’ve always hated the term “re-enchantment” because it presupposes that the world lost its enchantment, or that somehow we just have to insert a fairy or into the landscape or talk to trees, or worse yet, see the world in terms of the Neil deGrasse Tyson “wonder of science”: the most banal way of seeing anything. Do that and then – voila! – we have a spiritual world again.But the world doesn’t need to be be re-enchanted or merely populated by astrological symbols in the night sky – instead we need to dissolve the kinds of knowing that obfuscate our understanding of the spiritual nature of existence. We encounter, each day, a tangle of bad notions of perception and concepts which get in the way of, more open, more honest experiences. Materialism is a form of bad enchantment; a kind of hex itself.

On the other hand, the idea that we need to purge spirituality from the left is even worse. Figures viewed as foundational to materialist leftist discourse like Hegel and Adorno are tangled up in hermetic traditions, not to mention even Marx’s works were published by initially by spiritualists.

To talk about all of this, I invited professor, religious studies author, and authorJason Ānanda Josephson Storm onto the show. Jason is the author of three books, including The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, as well as the forthcoming book on how to theorize differently, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.This is an intense episode – my favorite kind – because we don’t hold back at all, we just go as deep as we want into religion, occultism, academic dishonesty, and consciousness.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • How did the tarot, astrology, and more show up in the left
  • Why the occult is not fascism and why we shouldn’t condemn Lutherans
  • The new materialists and neither new nor materialists, discuss
  • The desperate need for dewitchers and new theorists
  • The problem with trying to intervene in language
  • The way academics will develop “a whole vast edifice about the enchant(ment of) nature and it ends with ‘You should buy a Prius’ basically, and ‘Recycle!’ We already know that, we don’t need English professors to tell us that.”
  • My Bugs Bunny politics
  • Dissolving materialism rather than “re-enchanting the world” (and not hiding in dialectical materialism)
  • Why slapping furniture and saying “see, this is the REAL world!” doesn’t work, and also why Quentin Meillassoux is…not good
  • The failure of academia to keep the humanities valid, and why the theosophists (maybe) did it better
  • Why we can live and develop ways of knowing from that, instead of merely developing knowledge to shape and describe how we live

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Jason, here’s his Williams College website (with lots of info). Here he is talking to Vanessa Sinclair on the excellent Rendering Unconscious podcast.

• Here’s me with anti-productivity philosopher Brian O’Connor on AEWCH 89, where we also talk quite a bit (and positively!) about Adorno. And I talked about a lot of these themes from a completely different angle on AEWCH 137 with Mitch Horowitz!

• I have to say I have some hesitations about Jason’s claim that occultism was not central to the Nazi project or Hitler’s mission! I think there’s a very strong link, although I agree that it’s “overplayed” in many ways. See Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster for a counterpoint. Suster’s book also has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get!

• Paranormal America (Second Edition): Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture is an excellent study (with TONS of data) on paranormal beliefs in the US.

• Witchcraft never disappeared in the UK, and I talk about it with Thomas Waters on AEWCH 98. You should also check out his truly excellent book, Cursed Britain. 

• The mountain that is there and is not there comes from Zen teacher Qingyuan Weixin: “Before I had studied Chan / Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers when I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains and rivers once again as rivers.”

Until next time!
CH

“Do not trust those who analyze magic. They are usually magicians in search of revenge.” – Bruno Latour

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Absurd. Unconscious. Dangerous. Blindboy on Against Everyone With Conner Habib 140!

9 Feb

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 140: BLINDBOY BOATCLUB
or ABSURD UNCONSCIOUS CANNIBAL PROCESS

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker• Anchor 

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Blindboy’s books you should order from Amazon. His two short story collections, Boulevard Wrenand The Gospel According To Blindboy as well as the book on Irish-English, A Dictionary of Hiberno English(by Terrence Dolan), which he helped re-release, are all a little bit of a pain to get from bookshop.org in the US, so I am unfortunately directing you to Amazon for them. Still, get them. Get them. For the other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 140 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,

Jacques Lacan once said something like, the only difference between “normal” people and paranoid schizophrenic people is that the latter has their frantic-Charlie-Day-bulletin-board on the surface. We all draw lines between seemingly disparate points, and our connections are ultimately meaningless. It’s just that you can see that process in the paranoid schizophrenic person.

Well, I don’t know that I agree that the points, the pathways, or the reason we select either are meaningless, but I do like this metaphor. Still, my question is why do you draw the lines you draw? Why are they different from the ones I draw?

I asked my pal Blindboy Boatclub – member of The Rubberbandits and host of The Blindboy Podcast (and also one of the most productively absurd people I’ve ever met) – to join me to talk about all of this. 

You might remember Blindboy from my appearance on his show back in March 0f 2019 (and I talk about it in the intro to this ep), when we talked about the occult, ghosts, sex work, and more. This is a continuation of that conversation, and it leads us into weird territory.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Versatile Irish words like “craic,” “ride,” and “horny,”  why we have boners in America, and why we can say cunt in Ireland
  • Drawing lines between seemingly disparate topics
  • Why showing the process in art reveals its livingness
  • “The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.’
  • The connection between themes in our art and healing images in the world; and why birdflight is healing
  • Each problem has a virtue 
  • Autonomous shadows and cartoon duck landlords
  • Anxiety, depression, and the recreation of time in the global crisis
  • Why the Irish never think in rectangles

SHOW NOTES

• For more Blindboy, support his Patreon.
His two short story collections, Boulevard Wrenand The Gospel According To Blindboy as well as the book on Irish-English, A Dictionary of Hiberno English(by Terrence Dolan), which he helped re-release, are all a little bit of a pain to get from bookshop.org, so I am unfortunately directing you to amazon for them. Still, get them. Get them.
One of my favorite Rubberbandits videos is when they go to an aviary. And one of my favorite Rubberbandits songs is “Spastic Hawk.”
Finally, here’s Blindboy talking about mental health.

• Here’s the great Blindboy Podcast Chicken fillet rolls episode. 

• Here’s Jon Ronson’s story about his son saying the worst swear word ever.

• Duncan Trussell and I talked about the oblivion in the signal on his show here.

• Want to learn about the mind parasite of the fungal cordyceps? Yeah, of course you do.

• Here’s a good example of one of Blindboy’s drawings (which you can find in his books).

• AEWCH 40 with poet Zachary Schomburg is one of my favorite episodes of the show!

• My Irish Times essay about the changing nature of time and space is here. And here’s the Wittgenstein quote from it: “When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction,”

• Melancholiais my favorite Lars von Trier movie (maybe the only one I truly like?) and it’s a great comment on the power of depression.

• Here’s a long and thoughtful essay on Witold Gombrowicz.

• Here’s one of the first things I ever published, “Emit Time.” Just deciding that one of your first essays ever written would be a new ontology of time, nbd, Conner.

• Explaining Irish wedding drinking to an American doctor, by Irish comedian Jarlath Regan.

Until next time ye gas cunts,
CH

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Why being able to think about a cat means we can change the world: consciousness, psychoanalysis, and spirituality on AEWCH 139 with Michael Lipson!

26 Jan

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Overcast This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Michael’s books you should order directly from Steiner Books, for the other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 139 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
I sometimes think about the concept of world change, of political and economic change is getting ahead of ourselves. Why? Because we haven’t even begun to consider ourselves, consider what it means to be human, what thought is, what thinking is, and what consciousness is.
If we can’t hold a single thought, how can we create new structures for us to live in and dissolve the old?And it’s not helpful that everyone, from capitalists to communists to anarchists, generally think that questions of consciousness are fine to leap past and into creating theoretical abstractions to change the world.
Everything – everything – is tethered to the experience of thought and thinking.Don’t think so? Well, where did that thought come from? Have a theory about how thinking and thought is not the groundswell of existence? Well, where did that come from? Even the thought that consciousness is an illusion comes from thinking, of course. So there’s no way to get outside of thinking.
My idea has been: let’s start building from that, let’s get into the experience of consciousness and let our political, economic, and cultural work come from there.
I wanted to talk about this, and I wanted to talk about it early in this new year of incredible opportunity and trouble. So I asked therapist and author Michael Lipson on the show. Michael is the author of Stairway of Surprise: Six Steps to a Creative Life and Group Meditation. For nearly a decade, he worked with children with HIV and AIDS in New York City. Now he has his own practice and runs group meditation meetings each week via michaellipson.org.
We discuss so much on this episode, and I’m so excited to share it with you.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • The way belief in materialism destroys freedom
  • Why solipsism is correct, but unrefined
  • Our everyday knowledge as an obstacle to seeing things as they are
  • Dissolving materialism is a spiritual path
  • That time I saw the pizza-being (Um, what?) – but don’t take my word for it!
  • The difference between spiritual substance and spiritual state
  • How to redeem the spiritual over Zoom
  • Why absorption matters
  • How psychoanalysis without spirituality necessitates law, and how its focus on childhood is a description of karma
  • The importance of contained nothingness
  • Certainties, bad and good
  • Creativity as the antidote to angry certainty
  • Psychotherapy in motion (literally)
  • Despair as a sign for hopefulness

SHOW NOTES

• Most of Michael’s work can be found on his website, including his short series of essays/meditation prompts on Simone Weil. And here’s Michael in conversation with author Allison Burnett is here.• The Nature Institute in New York state is where I managed to finally, permanently, alter my thinking from object-thinking to metamorphic-thinking.

• The Work of Byron Katie changed my life, too.

• Emily Dickinson wrote, “A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.” Here’s more on her letters.

• One of my first conversations at the top of the global crisis – and consequently, one of the first I did remotely – was with writer and theorist Mark O’Connell on AEWCH 105 about apocalypse, of course.

• A bit on Śūnyatā, or emptiness, in Buddhism.

• You can learn more about David Spangler’s work of incarnational spirituality and work with elemental beings via his organization, The Lorian Association.

• I talk about the problem of certainty in 2021 on AEWCH 136 and about nothingness on AEWCH 116 with Are Thoressen.

• “Who pours out like a spring, knowing knows him: and leads him delighted through the bright creation, that often ends with the start, and begins with the end.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

• Here’s Rudolf Steiner’s quote on faithfulness:“Let your loyalty to another human being come about in this way:  there will be moments — quickly passing by — when he will seem to you filled and illumined by the true, primal image of his spirit.
Then can come, yes, will come, long stretches of time when your fellow-being seems clouded, even darkened.  But learn at these times to say to yourself:  The spirit will strengthen me; I will remember the true, unchanging image that I once saw.  Nothing at all — neither deception nor disguise — can take it away from me.Struggle again and again for the true picture that you saw.  The struggle itself is your faithfulness.
And in those efforts to be faithful and to trust, a human being will come close to another as if with an angel’s power of protection.” (by the way, I had Duncan Trussell read this waaaay back on AEWCH 16!)

• Want another podcast to listen to? I love the The Fundamentalist Podcast, featuring Peter Rollins and Elliot Morgan from AEWCH 135!

Until next time, friends,
X
C

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There are ghosts.

19 Jan

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Edward’s books, and other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 138 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
Why are we drawn to ghosts but frightened of them? Why do we feel compelled to take them seriously on some level, but on the other hand dismiss them? And why do some places just feel haunted?

In a time of the dead, in a time when dying is so present for so many, what new attitudes towards death and its spectres will arise?

I had a great time traversing this spooky territory with Edward Parnell, author of the haunted and excellent nonfiction travelogue-meets-literary-criticism-meets-memoir Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, and the gothic novel The Listeners.

To give you a little indication of his style, I asked Edward to start the episode with a very brief reading from Ghostland, then we’re into the conversation.And I start with two ghost stories of my own to indicate different ways that ghosts can lead us down strange and mysterious paths both as individuals and culturally.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • What is the aesthetic of the ghost story?
  • The way the Satanic panic severed the connection to ghost stories in the US vs in the UK.
  • How the transparency of history creates the resonance of ghosts.
  • New horror stories reflecting the way spirituality permeates culture.
  • The many ways which we dismiss the existence of ghosts.
  • The presence of fairies in Ireland vs the ghost of ghosts in the UK.
  • The middle class resistance to ghosts.
  • Imperialism vs ghosts.
  • Why do we turn away from grief?
  • The creeping fear of UK short ghost/weird fiction.

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Ed, go to his website (where you can find, among other things, his essay on the fear of falling). And here he is talking about Stephen King’s Pet Semetary on The Constant Reader Podcast. And here’s a short interview with him on the Folk Horror Revival website.

• The PSA announcement “Lonely Water” is…no joke…pretty scary! You can watch it here. And here’s the main figure in it. Watch out kids, if you don’t drown, you’ll live in fear of drowning your entire life.

• Here’s a great list of all the “video nasties” Edward mentioned, including The Driller Killer.• There’s a great book on what was going on in philosophy around the same time as many of the writers mentioned in Ghostland, by Wolfram Eilenberger entitled Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy.

• “Babes in the Woods” by Mary Black is kind of an eerie song!

• We mention Roger Clarke’s thesis about class and ghosts, which you can find in longer form in his book, Ghosts: A Natural History.

• Would you like to learn more about the bone crypt at Holy Trinity Church? Why of course you would.• For another AEWCH episode about changing attitudes towards the spiritual, check out AEWCH 98 with Thomas Waters on which we talk all about witchcraft (it’s one of my favorites).

• Finally, check out Ed’s photo of the rocking horse in author Lucy Boston‘s house. Why are rocking horses this scary? 

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Why self help matters in 2021. I talk with self help scholar and teacher Mitch Horowitz on AEWCH 137!

12 Jan

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast • Souncloud 

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Mitch’s books, and other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 137 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,

As 2021 begins, we’re faced with a simple question which you might not have thought of, and it’s a simple question…what do you want? What do you want the world to look like?

While everyone else is stuck in the crazed call out of news items and resistance to what they’re afraid of, what do we actually want to aim for?

My friend Gordon White has observed that “optimism is a spell,” and I agree. 

And?

I think we need to extend that further — envisioning the world as you want draws optimism into the personal world. It gives you the impetus and even the tools and substances to build with. In that vein, it’s also important to think about how you want your year to go.

It’s an impertinent question, almost, isn’t it? With some pagan-horned douchebag on the Capitol steps and the lockdowns and the conflicts, you might think: How dare you want to improve your life this year!

But how can you be effective if you don’t center your vision and center your desires? And how will you even know what you’re against and what you’re not against if you don’t put your desires first?

To flesh out all of this, I asked my friend Mitch Horowitz, new age/occult/self help scholar & writer, back onto the show. I talked to Mitch waaay back on AEWCH 30, and I was so nervous: he was one of the first guests I had on who I didn’t already know well. We had a great time, even if the episode is mostly just me talking. This conversation goes much deeper – and it’s because both Mitch and I have become more and more involved in the ideas we’re passionate about and the experiences we’ve had since then, and it’s really great.

We end up discussing why self help matters now more than ever; what Mitch’s cosmology is; and (at length) leftist attacks on new age, spirituality, and occultism: bad faith arguments that ultimately reveal a leftist desire to lose the battle.

So proud to share this, the first AEWCH guest episode of 2021, with you to set the tone for the year.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • The need to be right as original sin.
  • “We say we want to be listened to, but actually we want to be obeyed.”
  • How can focus on improving our personal lives in such a crazy polarized time?
  • Developing new habits right the fuck now.
  • The spiritual value of cleaning.
  • Why pleasure and happiness matters in discovering your spiritual and social quest.
  • Is it okay to have personal desires in the face of spiritual necessity?
  • “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” – Augustine
  • Was the Buddha wrong?
  • Get away from cruel people. And don’t be one!
  • Deleting facebook (WHY HAVE YOU NOT DONE THIS).
  • That time Steve Bannon called Mitch.
  • Leftist hit jobs on occultism.
  • Asking yourself: I/We/Cosmos.
  • What’s Mitch’s cosmology, anyway?

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Mitch, support his patreon. He gets posts so much stuff for his patrons, including his 10 Day Miracle Challenge. And visit the bookshop.org list; he’s edited and introduced countless books, but I’ve included the ones that he’s authored and the ones in which his voice is most prominent. 

• I was so excited to talk with anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks on AEWCH 123. What an honor!

• Such a shame that Franz Bardon’s major works aren’t as readily available as they used to be. That said, you can learn about this important, lesser-known occultist here.

• The New Life Foundation is dedicated to the work of Vernon Howard, and there’s plenty on their site about him.

• Byron Katie’s system, The Work, has been instrumental in making me a better person.

• “There can be no doubt that the follower of anthroposophy is by definition an opponent of National Socialism, or at the very least, must remain an outsider to National Socialism.” – Heinrich Himmler

• Here’s a little article on Annie Besant and Gandhi.

• And here’ s Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster. Suster’s book has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get! 

• ON THE OTHER HAND, here’s Shane Burley’s detailing of the opposite of all this…what happens when a rightwing movement hijacks new age/self help tropes.

• Camphill communities are some of the most beautiful and loving organizations for people with disabilities and the elderly. If you don’t know much about them, check them out.

Until next time, friends: Do what you want!
CH

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Looking back to 2020, ahead to 2021.

9 Jan

Well, friends,

What an incredible and intense year 2020 was. I’m grateful for it and my circumstances in many ways, but I’m also looking forward to this year and what it will bring.

I’m sure for many of you, your thoughts and feelings are running wild, even as your actions are still mostly constrained to the home. But fears of political unrest, excitement (and dread!) about vaccines, about continuing conflicts over masks, about the environment, about neoliberal governments and fascist governments, about resources, about your job, and more, are all showing up. So what to do?

I’m trying my best to see into all of this and offer some grounding and love and assistance in navigating the year that’s unfolding.

To that end, I’ve compiled a spotify playlist of my most notable recent podcast appearances. To access the playlist, just click here or search for “Conner Habib guides for 2021” on your spotify app.

The conversations include the latest episode of my own podcast, which is spookily entitled “The Year of the Revelation of the Blood” (don’t worry, it’s good spooky!) in which I discuss the coming year from an esoteric Christian perspective.

But the playlist also includes:

• My appearance on internationally-renowned fitness and health professional Paul Chek’s podcast, Living 4D, where I talk about sexuality and God.

• My conversation and audience Q&A with Gordon White on Rune Soup (there’s also video available here) about the challenges of changing from a materialistic to a spiritual worldview in 2021 and why that is absolutely needed.

• My discussion about the war on sex and dissolving old world views with media analyst Doug Rushkoff on his consistently excellent podcast, Team Human.

• My long chat with Duncan Trussell – in which I lead him through a bunch of spiritual exercises, and he calls me a “living psychedelic substance” – about the ongoing changes in human consciousness.

Want to be in conversation with me and other patreon patrons about this year, how to achieve your goals amidst the order (AKA “chaos”) and to discuss how to make it a great year instead of an oh-shit-how-am-I-going-to-manage one? Join us for the Against Everyone Salon on the new year.
Sign up for or boost your pledge to the Against Everyone Salon tier, which is $10/month. To do that, go here, and support at the $10 level or higher.

Anyway, dear friends, it’s going to be a great year for all you who can stay steady and get your sea legs for the journey across this year long oceanic gulf of what came before and what will be in the future!

LOVE

CH

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Navigating 2021: An occult Christian perspective on the year ahead.

5 Jan

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast 

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Friends,

What a year behind, but also: what a year ahead! I know a lot of you are anxous, so I’ve decided to help give a picture of what’s to come and how to deal with it.

In this solo episode, I talk about the hidden poison of “community,” vaccines, the proximity of the spiritual, hw we all create each other’s sins, and why blood matters.

Love,
CH

(PS: If you’d like to learn more about the painting for the title card of this episode, it’s Mano Poderosa (The All-Powerful Hand), or Las Cinco Personas (The Five Persons). Click here to  see its page at the Brooklyn Museum.)

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How do we believe in things without killing each other? I talk to Peter Rollins & Elliott Morgan of The Fundamentalists podcast on AEWCH 135!

16 Dec

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Peter’s books, and other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 135 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
As the year comes to an end, we find ourselves surrounded by people holding seemingly incommensurable sets of beliefs and ideas – and those sets of beliefs and ideas are being held onto more tightly, not less, as the ship seems to be aimless. While some of you might be finding a sense of relief in the changing of the guard in the US, and the presence of a vaccine, many others feel agitated by both.
2020 was the year that one community, one group of people trying to dominate and humiliate the other, seemed to rule.At the same time, we’ve seen these amazing outpourings of mutual aid, of togetherness, of new demands for the structures that are supposed to be serving us. I wanted to understand all of this, I wanted to have a conversation about belief and politics, and the unknown.
So I invited my friends Peter Rollins and Elliott Morgan to the show. You might know Elliott as part of the YouTube comedy group The Valleyfolk, or from his standup; and Peter from his work as a psychoanalytic theologian, or his previous appearances on AEWCH 14, AEWCH 55, and AEWCH 70 (with Todd McGowan); but I was interested in having them on together because they’re cohosts of the philosophy and psychoanalysis chat show, The Fundamentalists. On each episode, Elliott brings his everyday but perceptive concerns about the world, and Peter pulls them apart with psychoanalysis.
This is, I think a special conversation because of that belief piece, that ideology piece – because we all have different pathways through belief in our lives, from Peter’s sport of strange revelation upon seeing an exorcism take place after leaving the theater – he’d just seen Gremlins 2 – with his friend, to Elliott’s church experiences with something called the Holy Laughter Revival, to mine growing up without much religion and then finding my life infused with occult philosophy.We also each have different psychological structures, which we discuss on this show.And we each have different intellectual mentors and perspectives. Lately, Elliott has taken up Jungian psychology, which stands in some opposition to Peter’s Lacanian/Hegelian view, and both in some opposition to my occult view deeply informed by Rudolf Steiner.
So we spend a lot of this episode fleshing out some of those differences and nuances – how current events, how thinking, how the unconscious, and more, can be seen from each perspective.Gradually, throughout the episode, you get a sense of a sort of peace process. Not because Peter and Elliott and I were i some sort of deep conflict to begin with, but because the ideas and ways of living and structures of psyche meet each other and rest with each other without violent disagreement. The show presents three people, not trying to resolve contradictions and certainly not trying to win out, but rather simply taking an interest in one another.

In some ways, it offers an antidote to clinging to belief on the mast of the sinking ship of our politics, economy, and culture.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Our journeys through belief
  • Different sorts of exorcisms and possessions
  • The interpretations of the concept of the lack in psychoanalysis
  • Why didn’t going to school for science make Elliott an atheist?
  • What the unconscious looks like for Freud, Jung, and Steiner
  • How each of – Peter, Elliott, and I – us fall into a psychoanalytic structure, and what those structures are
  • How to avoid turning anxiety into violence
  • How communism and liberalism have dovetailed with each other into a big mess
  • Comedy creating stability
  • The way love and knowledge meet to become violence in our time

SHOW NOTES

• For more on The Fundamentalists, my recommended episodes are “Success,” “Socialism,” “Fascism,” and “New Normal.” But you can really just start anywhere.

• Right off the bat we get Gremlins 2 and Alabama Snake references, which I feel like is a call to watch both.

• John E.L. Tenney went to a Catholic exorcism and we talked about it on AEWCH 133.

• Here’s a short video on the Holy Laughter Revival, and it is…well…funny!

• Jodorowsky’s Dune is one of my favorite movies about magic and art. (Below are character sketches for the film by Moebius.)

• I love AEWCH 116 with Are Thoresen about nothingness and Christ.

• Here’s a brisk intro to Franz Mesmer.

• Here’s the episode of The Fundamentalists about hot takes and the global pandemic.

• The Duncan Trussell Family Hour I talk about re: my prediction of the occluding force is here. And the other episode I mention is here.

• Slavoj Žižek comes up a bit, and if you’re looking for a good book to start with that relates to the topics here, I would say The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity is as good as any.

Until next time, friends,
XO
CH

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