Tag Archives: Michael Taussig

New Course! Banishing the World: Postmodern Philosophy & the Occult + Updates!

23 Sep
Gayternity

Me & Eternity

I’m teaching a new online course called BANISHING THE WORLD: POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY & THE OCCULT. One session, 2 hours, live, online, with a Q&A at the end.  It’s only 15.00 for a standard ticket. And it’s going to be awesome.

I’ve been studying both postmodern philosophy and the occult for decades now, and you know? They’re not easy! They’re difficult to read and understand, even as you sense the deep value in them.

But put them together and, whoa, alchemical reaction. Gold.

Below is the course description; click through to the Eventbrite page to sign up! (Oh, and, if you sign up for a Gold ticket, you get an occult-meets-postmodern t-shirt designed by me and customized to your size!)

Below that are a bunch of podcasts I’ve been on, interviews I’ve given (including one super in-depth interview with a literary magazine). Busy fella; thanks for hanging out with me!

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aBANISHING THE WORLD: POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY & THE OCCULT

Like the two snakes that twine around Hermes’s staff, the occult and postmodern philosophy embrace the same deep revelation:

The world is not as it seems.

But while the occult has been pushed out of serious academic study, postmodern philosophy remains much-discussed and influential. Of course, philosophy’s roots are in the occult: initiates in classical cultures discussing the meanings and substances of the universe. Then, as religion rose to new heights of power, philosophy rebelled against the magical, supernatural, and mystical. Now, after the distractions of the modern era, philosophers – as much as they may deny it – have once again found themselves at the altar with the occultists, the witches, and the mystics.

The postmodern philosophers are in many ways the mystics and maguses of our time. They speak in strange languages, presenting uncanny riddles, and exiling the old world by revealing the new. They’re renaming the gods, influencing cultures, changing medicine and science, and more.

With writer, radical thinker, and activist Conner Habib you’ll explore:

jl– How the theories of postmodern thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour, Donna Harraway, Michael Taussig, Michel Serres, and more, overlap with occult ideologies and practices.

– Why it’s all so complicated, anyway, and how using the occult to approach postmodern philosophy and vice versa can make both easier to understand.

– How to use both occult and postmodern ideas to reenvision the world you live in.

– How occult ideas have found their way into academia, science, and activism through the conduit of postmodernism.

dhConner will guide you through the complex ideas of the occult and postmodern philosophy in plain, easy-to-understand language in this live, online course. It’s for the beginner and the adept alike.

The one-session one-hour lecture will be followed by a Q&A, so you’ll be part of the mind-expanding discussion.

If you can’t attend the day of, or if you want to watch the lecture again, you’ll have exclusive access to a recording of the course for 90 days. SIGN UP HERE!

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UPDATES

PODCASTS! 

dtI’ve returned to the great, mystical, dangerous, raspy clutches of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour! It’s my fourth appearance on the comedy-meets-sprituality-meets-tech-craziness podcast. I seriously love doing Duncan’s podcast. We go deep, and Duncan is one of the best conversationalists out there. Also, we invoke the god Pan together at the end. So, um, there’s that.

I also kicked it with sex positive power generator Dawn Serra on the Sex Gets Real podcast. We go deep there. I diss feminism. But in a non-diss feminism-is-also-good way. And I talk about why consent is a bit of a Trojan Horse when it comes to sexual ethics.

saI was on writer/comedian/adult film witch priestess Sovereign Syre’s podcast, Observations. We talk about being (and not being) nice to other people, identity politics, and more. It’s a good one. Her podcast in general is pretty great. Listen to it.

The guys at Bateworld – a solo-sexual website (look it up, folks) – created a playlist inspired by me, which is kind of awesome. So if you need music to listen to while you’re, *ahem*, thinking fondly of me, it’s there. The site is not SFW, so if you have a horrible job that thinks looking at parts of the human body is wicked, don’t go there at work. Wait till you get home and you can blast it out. The music, I mean.

PRINT! I was featured in the rebel lit magazine, The Matador Review. It’s a good interview, and I’m proud of it. I like that I got to compare making porn to what César Aira must feel when he writes his novels.

Here’s an excerpt:  “…style is a mood. In other words, style is really this unique mood that you’ve created out of yourself. No one else has that mood, no one else has access to it. When you’re actually in your style, you experience a mood that you don’t experience in any other space, a mood that no one else can experience. That’s how you know you’re doing it. It’s this feeling of some emergence from you…”

Hurray that I got to be in Hot Press, which is basically the Irish Rolling Stone. I was interviewed by Olaf Tyaransen, who is the resident outlaw reporter there. Full disclosure, some of the facts are wrong in the interview. But that reflects an even deeper truth: that Olaf and I drank too much Guinness when we spoke.

2015: The Best Stuff

3 Jan

Happy new everything, everyone!

Here’s a list of my best stuff from 2015.

I do this every year, and it’s just my best stuff. It doesn’t have to be anyone else’s, but I’d love to hear your stuff too. So feel free to comment with your favorite stuff at the end here.

Music:

DA.jpg

Blur’s Damon Albarn, praying to sound.

The album I enjoyed the most that actually came out in 2015 was Magic Whip by Blur; and I got to see them play this year too – something I though would never happen again since seeing them in the late 90s. No band creates such diversity of sound from album to album, while still maintaining the “oh-that’s-them” recognizability as Blur. Watching Damon Albarn laze across the stage, then pounce up with energy, only to stumble toward the crowd smiling and handsome in the atonal guitar grind…It’s still powerful, still amazing.

If you’d like to know what song was most blasted out my car windows this year, while like a moron I was singing at the top of my lungs, it was “This Is Not A Party” by The Wombats.

Other noteworthy albums – The Beauty Pill’s amazing and layered Describes Things as They Are, a John Zorn-worthy pop rock record. +Exit Verse’s self-titled debut left me wondering why I never felt so connected to guitar riffs before. I found myself singing, not just the choruses and verses, but the parts without words, too.  + Faith No More created a metal album, Sol Invictus, that rivaled the brilliance Angel Dust. + I listened to a whole lot of Death Grips this year.

SW

from Slow West

Movies:

Carol

Tangerine

Where to Invade Next

Slow West

In a sea (“sea” is a generous word) of mediocre LGBT-themed movies, obsessed with struggle or snark and not humanity, Carol and Tangerine are brilliant, powerful and lead the way forward, albeit on two very different paths. Real works of art. + Michael Moore’s excellent new documentary Where to Invade Next is an even rarer thing, perhaps: a work of optimism. + Slow West was not a perfect film, but it was a beautJBDiful one. I was excited by it and even more excited to see what writer/director John Maclean (this was his debut) does next.

Also, extra shout outs to: A forgotten slasher film from 1981 – Just Before Dawn screened at Los Angeles’s amazing vintage film house New Beverly Cinema. It’s a weird, unsettling, and gender-conscious horror movie. + The crazy, nonstop real-actual-blood fest of Roar, also from 1981 (what a year!) – a reality-meets-fiction movie about lots and lots of big cats. It’s fun and horrible.

Books:

Taussig

Michael Taussig

As usual, I didn’t mostly read books that came out this year, so these are the favorites of what I read, not of new releases. This year, I also lived out a lifelong dream of reading a book a day, every day. I lasted about six weeks. It was amazing; my mind felt like it was on speed, even as I’d slowed everything down to sit in silence and scan the symbols on the paper.

The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira and The Hare by César Aira

Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems by Traci Brimhall

Campus Sex, Campus Security by Jennifer Doyle

Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy

The Joy of Revolution by Ken Knabb

The Corn Wolf by Michaeil Taussig

TB

Traci Brimhall

From top to bottom here: Discovering César Aira’s novels was a huge highlight for me – their insistence on the magic of thought is intoxicating and playful.+Berardi’s great book on why so many mass shootings are taking place as our society is translated into a spectacle. + Brimhall’s book of rich and terrifying poems, a cold light that will turn in you a truth you might not have wanted to feel. + Doyle has written the bravest book on sexual culture in the US I’ve read in a long time, with particular emphasis on how our views of sexual assault are intertwined with dependence on the state. + Eltahawy’s book uncovered the hidden corners of my own misogyny and challenged them with a body of work so powerful, I could not help but surrender. +Ken Knabb enlivened my sense of what is possible and why I would enjoy engaging. + Finally, Michael Taussig bonds together myth, magic, theory, and Walter Benjamin in a stunning exercise of style.

Two books I need to give special mention to – Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been SOTLPublicly Shamed and Dr. Chris Donaghue’s Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture. I make small appearances in both. The former is a book on the reemergence (and pitfalls) of shame as a social strategy. It is funny, light, and still profound. + Chris Donaghue is one of my closest colleagues and best friend. His book is a stirring look at sex in our personal lives. He utilizes his years of clinical experience with a radical outlook. It’s the perfect book to change your life.

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All right, folks, that’s it for now. Let’s hold hands into this new year. Much love,

CH