Friends, On Thursday, March 28, myself and journalist & organizer UNA MULLALLY, presented the event THE BEGINNING IS NEAR in Dublin, where we talked about the end of the world and what comes after that with frequent AEWCH guests: philosopher and activist SREĆKO HORVAT, and cultural critic and writer MARK O’CONNELL. The event marked Srećko’s first speaking engagement in Ireland, and also my first attempt at creating an “AEWCH event” in Ireland. I’d love to do many more.
The night was broken into halves: first, we talked about apocalypse. Then we had a short break and spoke about renewal.* What arose was a challenging set of indications and prospects, failures and pathways.
Some questions that came up:
Is the apocalypse always happening?
What does the esoteric tell us about how to live beyond apocalypse?
What is the role of art in renewal?
Why is it important to evade the political realm?
What is the use of hope?
I’m so proud to have set up this event with Una and to share it with you!
*We also engaged with the audience via exercises which I may bring to the show down the line, but which are edited out here… So if you want the full experience, come to the next event in person or via online! I’d love to see you there!
Friends, In this deeply personal episode, my friend – journalist, artist, and organizer, Una Mullally – and I look at how proximity to death and collapse in our own lives can renew our commitment to and understanding of truth. It’s especially important now, with the sense of claustrophobia and the real world deaths happening on the screens in front of our eyes. How do we see the image of death, feel the presence of violence against others, and bring that into a project of renewal?
This is, in a way, a partner episode to my upcoming event with Una, Srećko Horvat, and Mark O’Connell, THEBEGINNINGISNEARwhich is an immersive discussion on apocalypse and renewal happening in Dublin AND online. The in-person tickets are basically dold out, but you can still by streaming tickets and be a part of it, as well as watch a recording after if you’d like.
MORE ON UNA Una has a weekly, challenging, column in the Irish Times. Some of Una’a other great appearances on AEWCH include AEWCH 230 on how to stop catastrophizing, and AEWCH 192 which featured us speaking about my novel Hawk Mountain and fiction more broadly.
A BOOK YOU SHOULD READ in conjunction with this episode is Susan Sontag’s excellent Regarding the Pain of Others.
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
• 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.
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 books from Scarlet Imprint, go to their website and buy directly from Peter and Alkistis.
To buy the other books, go to my booklist for AEWCH 127 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends, For a time now, we’ve been walking around with a stone in our shoe – an unavoidable feeling throughout the day. And that feeling is: it’s the end of the world. The end of the world shows up again and again in history, and we’re in one of those end times, it’s risen into public consciousness. That’s why I write it’s the stone in the shoe, we’re aware of it even when we’re not aware of it. How does this new presence change the way we walk, the feeling we have about the day and have about each other? How do we walk with the minor and major imbalances it creates? If something permeates the general consciousness, it has a different effect on us; it becomes a companion. So what does it mean to not just intellectually or creatively entertain ourselves with the apocalypse, but to actually experience it in our daily lives?
And there is, to paraphrase Marx using his own supernatural language, a spectre haunting the end of the world, and that spectre is witchcraft. It’s magic, the occult. Whether it’s the symbols of the political elite, the black magic conspiracy theories of Q Anon, the presence of new thought and new age in the US democratic primary, the resurgence in the interest in tarot and astrology, the aesthetics of witchcraft on Instagram, we see again and again the presence of a new and old version of looking at the world, paired with the constant presence of its end. The end of the world and witchcraft are siblings this time.Maybe it’s not surprising, since the end of the world is always brought by prophecy and oracles, always seen by the knowing in its portents. And the end is always changing the way we relate to time; when we think there’s an end of the road, so many of us move away from linearity and start to think in layers of time. In synchronicities and correspondences. In creative ruptures outside of the normal flow of things.
We think in witchcraft.
So, I needed to discuss all of this, and give it flesh. I invited two people I know working with witchcraft and art in the apocalypse – Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey. They’re also authors, performers, and the founders of the occult/witchcraft publishers Scarlet Imprint.One of the most interesting aspects of this conversation is that Alkistis and Peter and I come from differing traditions – they’re working with Babalon – the being that appears in Revelations, in thelema, in enochian magic and more.Whereas I am working with The Christ and the Archangel Michael via anthroposophy.So there’s a tension between our traditions – almost a sort of antagonism. What’s important to remember here is that through me and through Peter & Alkistis, a conversation takes place between these end of the world and beginning of the world beings – through Christ and Babalon. Conversations – real ones – become sites for the interaction of spirit as well.It is through that that tension found only in friendship that we ask a lot of big questions for our big time.
ON THE EPISODE
The rise of apocalypse in consciousness
The way the spiritual world selects or discards people to give itself life
What to do when we notice what we’ve lost and what we depend on
Why to look for spirits in experience, not books
The way location interacts with spirituality
The nature of spirits, the spirits of nature
How spirits get crowded out by other spirits that live with electronic devices
How do we differentiate between spirits (and which ones to not mess with)
The problematic view of Babalon and Christ versus the ones that creates a real view of humanity
Encountering a Christian sex riddle in Vietnam
The importance of sex in spirituality
SHOW NOTES
• For more Alkistis & Peter: here’s Peter’s talk, “Becoming No-Man” and here’s Alkistis’s talk, “Where the Daimon Dwells,” both from the Trans-States conference in 2017. Here’s Alkistis’s performance, “The decollation of flowers” and another, “Visitation.” Both of them have been on the Rune Soup podcast multiple times, and here’s the latest (and I think greatest, so far).• Scarlet Imprint has published the work of other AEWCH guests, including Phil Legard and Gordon White.
• I talked quite a bit about apocalypse with Mark O’Connell on AEWCH 105.
• Here’s a short article on the style of dance that has influenced Alkistis, butoh. Pictured below is a performance of one of butoh’s most profound elaborators, Tatsumi Hijikata.
• As Peter and Alkistis and I try to define what spirits are, I am reminded by Alkistis’s comment about spirits being “semi-material” of Valentin Tomberg’s passage in Meditations On The Tarot about ghosts: “Ghosts exist. This is not a question of belief; it is a matter of fact. There is an immense literature, without speaking of facts that one can find in the sphere of personal experience, which bears witness to the existence of ghosts. Now it is no longer a matter of believing or denying; now it is a matter only of understanding and explaining. Ghosts exist therefore. Thus it happens from time to time after someone’s death that this person or “something” of him or similar to him manifests in an outward and physical way (noises, movements, etc.) in the guise of an active energy. It is as if a certain quantity of energy, freed through death, but remaining condensed and not dispersed, manifests as an entity or as an individual “body”. … (p. 358)What, then, is a ghost?A ghost is always constituted as a consequence of crystallisation, i.e., crystallisation of a desire, a passion, or a purpose of great intensity, which produces a complex of energy in the human being.”
• I talked about Wilhelm Reich on an “Against Saturdays” episode. And my saying about sex and individuality is “If you ever want to know how someone feels about freedom, start talking about sex.”
Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company in isolation, please give what you can. Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Friends,
Obviously this is the end of the world. Or one of them, anyway. It’s our end of the world, at least, so let’s talk about it before the next one comes along. I needed an apocalyptic thinker to talk about. No, not Jor-El, rather someone who’s examined our apocalyptic fantasies and desires and has thought them through. So, I asked the thoughtful, funny, and insightful Mark O’Connell, onto AEWCH.
Mark lives less than two kilometers away, but we had to find each other remotely. So, sorry about the sound being different. It’s still good. But our lives are mediated by machinery of all sorts now in pronounced ways. Is the singularity near, or did it already happen, and was it extremely normal and somewhat boring? Anyway, this is a great episode, and I’m so happy to share it with you.
Let’s begin to think about this particular End.
ON THIS EPISODE
Why we have fantasies about the end
How to keep the sublime and strangeness when we get back from quarantine
Is mindfulness preferable? Is it a form of anxiety?
The continuity between consciousness, nature, and machines
How all apocalypses are not equally apocalyptic
Being passive spectators of the pandemic while thinking we’re active participants
Why our pandemic anxieties predated the pandemic
How and why to organize in quarantine
Transhumanists as preppers with money
Why doomsday prepping doesn’t work
How apocalyptic thinking is embedded in tech culture
• Now is a great time to listen to AEWCH 67 featuring spiritual teacher and christian esotericist Daniel Joseph. And I still can’t believe that I had Billy Bragg on the show! Here he is on AEWCH 79.
• Here’s a bit on 
Conner Habib 