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Friends,
The intellect is important, but only serves as a two-dimensional reflective surface without the combined depth of experience. I try to make as much of what I say as possible stem from the ways my life has been shaped by spiritual experience meeting my philosophical and political outlook. I wanted to pull on this thread a bit, and to push the boundaries of what I discuss on AEWCH.
So I invited one of the most frequent (and liked!) guests on AEWCH to meet me in this: my friend the theologian and philosopher Peter Rollins.
This episode is a bit different: Peter and I each tell three short stories about moments of spiritual revelation and formation in our lives. Then we discuss them with each other and try to find the patterns there.
It’s a very personal episode for both Peter and I, but it’s also a picture of friends walking our separate paths, together.
I am so excited to share this with you.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO Though it’s not directly related to the content, I’m recommending AEWCH 81, with theologian and writer (not to mention Peter’s friend)s, Padraig O’Tuama, as a complement to this episode. Padraig and I talk at length about God, but rather than grounding that in experience per se, we ground it in poetry. It’s another way to address revelation.
WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ? Since we’re on the topic of spiritual autobiography and revelation, you may want to read Rudolf Steiner’s Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life, 1861-1907, to look into the life events of a spiritual teacher and how they informed his path forward.
As I approach my 45th birthday, I’m thinking a lot about what it is I want from my life. It’s not yet half over, but it’s heading there, and there’s so much to choose from! To sort through the burden of wanting so much, I invited psychotheapist Charlotte Fox Weber, author of What We Want: A Journey Through Twelve of Our Deepest Desires onto to the show to discuss the many ways desire shows up for us and how to manage it (if it is, indeed, manageable).
PS: No episode next week, as I celebrate my birthday, but keep your eyes open for a FOR-PATRONS-ONLY recording of my event in New York City with Will Menaker of Chapo Traphouse!
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? Another great book about desire (By one of my favorite writers) is On Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Lifeby Adam Phillips. “We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives – lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction – are a self-cure for.”
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? Another long conversation about desire is AEWCH 95 with Maggie Nelson. What a weird conversation, too, in the best way. Desire in literature, in sex, in art.
MORE ON CHARLOTTE The best place to learn more about Charlotte (or to contact her as a therapist!) is via her website. Charlotte’s book isn’t available in the US until April 2023, but you can order it from this link to her publisher – which offers multiple sites to get it from. And here’s a little interview with Charlotte where she says “Paying attention is a form of love.” Well said!
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! 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.
Buy Peter’s books and all the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 167 on bookshop.org! The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
The core of AEWCH is the spiritualization of the material. That is, I want to present a truly non-materialist way of viewing the world, where spirituality is seen as the wellspring of existence, and informs how we talk about ourselves, politics, economy, art, and more. But to that end, I’m not just inspired by spiritual thinkers. Instead, I draw on the work of humanistic philosophers, dialectical materialists, political theorists, atheists, and more.
One of the thinkers I’ve learned the most from is French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901- 1981). I think Lacan’s work has tremendous potential to be leveraged as a spiritual project (despite most Lacanian’s protestations!), particularly in its formulation of its three clinical diagnoses: Neurosis, Perversion, and Psychosis. That’s it. Just three. And they can all be used in radical ways to affect culture/politics/economy. But Lacan is notoriously hard to understand. So I invited my friend, theologian and philosopher Peter Rollins, back on the show to break down Lacanian psychoanalysis in an understandable and clear way.
Peter is the most AEWCH of AEWCH guests, with this being his fifth appearance on the show – we also talked on AEWCH 14, AEWCH 55, and AEWCH 70 (with Todd McGowan), and AEWCH 135 (with Elliot Morgan).
That’s because Peter is one of my most important provocateurs; we agree on so much and so little all at once. For me, talking with Peter is electrifying, fun, and friendly.Of course, Peter and I are friends so we wander out into the jargon-y weeds from time to time, but we always pull it back! This is as good a place as any to get your Lacanian start.
SHOW NOTES
• Support Peter’s patreon here. He gives tons of content to patrons. And listen to his great religion & psychoanalysis podcast (with Elliot Morgan), The Fundamentalists; some recommended episodes are “Success,” “Socialism,” “Fascism,” and “New Normal.” But you can really just start anywhere.
• One of the best resources on Lacan is nosubject.com, which is basically a wiki for all things psychoanalysis, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis.
• Some other psychoanalysis-oriented episodes of the show not featuring Peter includeAEWCH 162with Dr. Gwen Adshead, AEWCH 101with Katherine Angel, andAEWCH 47with Todd McGowan.
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! 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.
Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my bookshop.org list for AEWCH 162. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
I’m so honored to have had this conversation with Dr. Gwen Adshead, forensic psychiatrist and co-author of The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. The Devil You Know is an absolutely stunning and heartbreaking book about violent offenders – serial killers, sex offenders, arsonists, and more – and why we should seek to understand and even feel compassion for them.
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.
• 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.
• 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!)
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.
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Friends,
I’ve been writing and giving talks about sex for over a decade now, and I often find it difficult to have truly stimulating conversation about it. I knew that having author and public intellectual Katherine Angel on the show would change that. Katherine is the author of the stunning work of vignettes on sex and fear and domination, Unmastered : A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, and Daddy Issues, which questions patriarchy by looking squarely at women’s relationships with their fathers. Her book, TomorrowSexWillBeGoodAgain, will be out next year, and I’ll definitely have her on then too.
Katherine and I go at sex and especially consent at so many different angles, uncovering all the problems in the way we discuss it. As it turns out, there are quite a few problems there, and I am so happy to have had this challenging conversation, and to share it with you.
(PS: sorry about the popping in the sound. Your contribution is going to pay for a few pop filters!)
ON THIS EPISODE
How not knowing what we want needs to be a part of sexuality
Why psychoanalysis is important for our conversation about consent
Why every sexual encounter between two people is actually a threesome with whoever created the framework of consent
Why consent is not a good foundation for sexual ethics
How nonconsensual labor frameworks (ie needing to have a job) generate harassment and make sex the culprit
How we always place the burden of clear expression on women
How overemphasizing consent denies us our full humanity
Why Katie Roiphie and Laura Kipnis don’t get it
Why listening to people is so important whether or not they were utterly violated, and even whether or not we believe or accept that they were.
Words and pornography
The false assumption that men are having “real” orgasms in porn, whereas the women are having “fake” ones
How arousal is protective and the body doesn’t express the truth anymore than the mind.
Like the show? SupportitonPatreon! The show is funded exclusively by listeners like you, and your contribution is vital and deeply appreciated!
Friends,
Surely self-improvement is not a bad thing, right? Surely we should be doing as much as we can to make ourselves self-actualized beings and get shit done and follow the 7 habits of the 12 secrets of the 4 agreements of highly effective badass people with the secret to living the happiness project of our lives.
Wellllllll…maybe not.
On this episode of AEWCH, I talk author and philosopher Brian O’Connor about idleness, and how – as Brian says in this episode, not having shitty jobs is not enough. Instead, wanting to be and do better might just be part of the capitalist trap we’re all stuck in. Brian is the author of the excellent and short book Idleness:APhilosophicalEssay, a skewering of philosophical arguments against idleness. It’s not a how to be idle book, since that would be pro-self help! Instead, it’s just a good dissolving of all the reasons why we shouldn’t be just kind of lazing around enjoying life.
Since Brian is also a scholar of the great critical theorist Theodor Adorno, we talk a lot about him, too. To supplement our discussion, you should check out Brian’s very very good intro to Adorno called, well, Adorno. Adorno is a key to this discussion about idleness, because he identifies that even in a world without the same wage-labor relationship we have now, we’d still be working our asses off and trapped in the same arrangement we have now.
This episode was a huge challenge to my normal way of thinking, since I am all about self improvement. But it was a friendly challenge, and a powerful one. I learned a lot. Which I guess, um, means I improved.
In this episode:
Brian’s struggle with being idle
Why Kant got idleness wrong and right
Psychoanalysis and ending the perpetual cycle of productivity
That time I pissed off my friend when all I wanted to do was compliment her on being so chill
Why we lionize our own pain and struggle
Whether or not boredom is productive
How the military exploits idleness to kill people
How mental work and physical labor mirror mental illness and physical pain
How Bugs Bunny cartoons should inform our politics
Why good jobs are not enough
How sex workers can see how their jobs erode work
Why everything small thing deserves attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s all good. Also, why object oriented ontology sucks.
I nervously present Brian with my theory of phenomenology and occult critical response. But he was very very nice about it.
Why libertarians get individualism wrong
PS: Sorry for the breathing into the mic! I think I had Brian’s mic turned up a little too high. Anyway, just imagine him relaxing.
Want to check out the books we talk about and more? Go to the SHOW NOTES.
Like the show? SupportitonPatreon! The show is funded exclusively by listeners like you, and your contribution is vital and deeply appreciated!
Hello friends!
Re-upping this past episode of AEWCH because I’m starting to reinvestigate these ideas about how environmentalism is flawed at its foundation: nature. Nature is a concept that we must destroy if we ever want to see and engage with our planet.
To express the point, I pull in my pals Patricia Highsmith, Sigmund Freud, Paracelsus, and more.
This episode is becoming part of a larger project called Occult Philosophy Now!, a book and a set of courses and lectures coming your way in 2020. There’s a new intro to the episode, and I hope we see it with new eyes.
IN THIS EPISODE
Why “nature” is a poorly defined but totally accepted concept.
Why our main environmental narratives – going green/sustainability, neo-primitivism, deep ecology – depend on the flawed concept of nature.
“Nature is the word we use for the feeling we have of separation with other aspects of the world.”
“The concept of nature is the external exhibition of the death drive.”
Who are we if we’re imaging mass death to “save the planet?”
Have you ever fought just to feel?
Erasing the lines between the living and the dead.
The world is consciousness states, not objects.
Putting ourselves at the center of the world is the only way to encounter it, much less “save” it.
Pay for yourpodcast is the new “pay for your porn.” At least in my case. Your support youlove,is crucialtokeep my workgoing.Ifyou finds omethingofvalueonmyshow,givebackandsupportthemany hours offreecontentIoffereverymonthforthepriceofalatteor cocktailor lunch or, you know, a month of Only Fans.
On my first ever Against Everyone live event, I talk about psychoanalysis, leftism, and identity politics with two of my favorite AEWCH guests, Todd McGowan and Peter Rollins! The event was part of the theology-meets-psychoanalysis conference Wake, in Belfast, in North of Ireland.
Peter Rollins is a philosopher and theologian who’s been on the show before (way back on AEWCH 14, and more recently on AEWCH 55). Todd McGowan is a psychoanalytic theorist and film studies professor; he’s also the host of the great podcast, Why Theory, and author of many amazing books. He originally appeared on AEWCH 47.
We talk about ID politics, Lacan vs Deleuze, Peterson vs Zizek, psychoanalysis and the left, and more!
This episode is very different than others, not the least of which because there’s a Q&A after – which I always long for with my epsiodes! and not just because it was in front of an audience. It’s different because there is some tension and conflict (though not any animosity, of course! I love Peter and Todd). It was even a bit difficult for me, for reasons I lay out in the introduction. That said, I also think it turned out great.
In fact, I’d love to do more live events, as this one was a bit of a test run for me. So if you’d like to organize an AEWCH event in your city (or a city nearby) with a locally-situated guest, give me a shout out, and we’ll see what we can do. Email me: againsteveryonewithconnerhabib[at]gmail[dot]com
(No show notes this week; the ep is pretty self explanatory, but back to them next week!)
RT @ConnerHabib: Every time it seems like things are getting worse, remember that feeling comes from your inner knowing of what is better,… 3 hours ago
Friends,
• Here’s a quick review of 
Conner Habib 