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.
THE BEGINNING IS NEAR: An immersive discussion on apocalypse and renewal Dean Arts Studio, Dublin 2, Thursday March 28th, 7pm – 9.30pm + Streaming Online €15-€35 (pay what you can afford, ticket includes a complimentary refreshment) + ONLINE STREAMING TICKETS
Feel like everything is collapsing and decaying? What would it feel like to consider everything is about to begin and flourish?
Join me and a host of AEWCH guests – Croatian philosopher and organizerSrećko Horvat, journalist and activist Una Mullally, and Mark O’Connell, for a unique opportunity to dissect and create new pathways amidst both global turmoil and solidarity-building!
War, and the nihilism of over-consumption, are in a fever-pitch struggle with visions of peace, contentment, and connection. In THE BEGINNING IS NEAR, our four speakers will explore the polar opposites of disaster and renewal, inviting the audience into the discussion to create a broader vision for Dublin, Ireland, and the world at large.
THE BEGINNING IS NEAR marks Srećko Horvat’s first speaking engagement in Ireland. His knowledge in philosophy, school-building, and political organizing, conjures a spirit of resonance, which reveals what feels like ‘the end’, across so many fronts, can also mark a real beginning.
TICKETS are available on a sliding scale: pay what you can at €15, €25, or €35. Space is limited, buy your tickets early! Complimentary beverages provided.
LIVESTREAM TICKETS ARE ALSO AVAILABLE to watch the event remotely for a flat fee of €15 (about $16.50 USD), and comes with limited-time access to a recording of the event. When you buy a livestream ticket, you will receive the link 12-24 hours ahead of the event via the email you supply at point of purchase.
All ticket holders will receive access to a recording of the event for a limited time.
Join us at the edge of death and birth, truth and love.
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Friends, We are always in a dance of what is happening in our time and the work of deepening our capacity for life and moving forward and offering what we can offer. There are plenty of questions and considerations of how to approach the political climate. But in the midst of war and the appearances of madness, there are other pressing questions, too. How do we live? How do we have a good life, in all this? How do we approach each day with a sense of curiosity and involvement? After all, without examining that, without thinking about the quality of each day, we have already lost ourselves to the violence and fear.
That doesn’t mean ignoring the world to focus on being happy – that’s just illusory, anyway. But it could mean looking not just into how to resist, but into the creation of good itself. Spending time in proximity to truth, love, wisdom, kindness, as well as righteousness.
I recently got a chance to do this on a short trip to create a few episode of this show. The journey ended in a cold place, the snow covered south of Norway, where I recorded AEWCH 243 with occut practitioner and writer Are Thoresen, and it began in the sun-warmed island of Vís in Croatia, talking to my friend. the philosopher, visionary thinker, and writer, Srećko Horvat.
I am struck, looking back at this short trip, where I encountered completely different views of the world – completely different possibilities of viewing life. These differences were in the landscape, the temperature, the quality of light, the plants and animals, and of course in the conversations. These experiences were not just different from each other – not just warmth and Srećko vs cold and Are – I don’t mean that at all, I mean I saw completely different worlds than the one we normally occupy. More and more, we need to do this, to see and live into new worlds, since the one that is clinging to us, holding on, is creating a tantrum of chaos as we pull away from it.
It isn’t just another school. Yes, the content of the school’s efforts are different – they’re about radical philosophy, deep contemplation, openness to complexity and interdependence of disciplines. But it’s also a space and inspiration for a new way of learning altogether; learning by encounter, learning by meeting others, learning by paying attention to new impulses, through teachers that radiate wisdom through being.
We talk about the school, synchronicity, the strength card in the tarot, and how to learn without academic education.
I’n so excited to share this episode with you. It’s one of my favorite conversations – not just on the show, but in my everyday life as well. It indicates how much is available to us in a time of repression, both illusory and real.
MORE ON SREĆKO Srećko has been on the show twice before, and they are among my favorite episodes. First on AEWCH 107 on which we mostly discussed the mythologies in our world views and language. On AEWCH 143, we talked about liberating time!
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.
Thank you for your support in this time, friends.Thispodcastisonlypossiblebecauselistenerslikeyousupportit. If the show is keeping you company in isolation, pleasegivewhatyoucan. Contribute to my mission by supporting AgainstEveryoneWithConnerHabibonPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy books mention on this ep?Go to my list for AEWCH 107 on Bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
We’re surrounded by terms that sound new, but that aren’t new. “Social distancing.” “The new normal.” And actions that seem new but are not new. Elevated police presence. Government overreach. Pandemic.
But these are old narratives that have been changed slightly to seem new. They’re mythic. So I invited one of the most important thinkers of our time to sort through what is new, what is old, and what is
needed in our moment.
SrećkoHorvat is an author, political organizer, and philosopher. Of his many profound and politically potent books, my favorite (and the one you should start with) is PoetryFromTheFuture:WhyaGlobalLiberationMovementIsOurCivilisation‘sLastChance. It’s a hopeful but evenhanded book about the possibility of interconnected movements in a world where neoliberal capitalism has won
.
He’s one of the cofounders of the DemocracyInEuropeMovement2025,orDiEM2025 – a broad-based coalition of thinkers, rebels, and political theorists committed to creating a true leftist alternative in European politics, particularly in response to the disintegration of the EU.
Srećko is also currently giving live mini lectures, Q&As through the DiEM25 channel, and hosting conversations with luminaries as diverse as Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, and Seinfeld co-creator Larry Charles. (And on the 24th, he’ll be speaking with FrancoBifoBerardi!)
I’m so excited to share this conversation with you. It’s one that combines the political, the spiritual, and the philosophical, with activism. It identifies and creates new directions for us to move in during this crisis, and after.
ON THIS EPISODE
How and why we were dreaming about the global pandemic before it happened, and how we assisted it in happening
Why the esoteric, the occult, and border science matter now; and how the right seizes on them because the left is ignorant
the “libidinal” economy and why the left needs to take it up instead of opting for class reductionism
Why a leftist project needs to include a reappraisal of time and space (and why it matters now more than ever)
The fundamental fantasies of the left, the right, and the center
The generation of political will through meditation, poetry, reading, creating, gardening, and more
Why people are turning to plants in the global crisis
The possibility of money losing value over time
How to think about the value of laziness
The difference between mythic art and occult art
Why we should and should not applaud healthcare workers
The importance of using your own language
The necessity of new and strange directions for our activism
Meeting the stranger and loving the Other (and dating the Other, too)
• Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters, which is filled with misinformation and (willful?) misinterpretation. The main issue is that Kurlander, like many “historians” of the occult, although Kurlander certainly knows exoteric history, he does not understand the occult. That said, I can recommend a better book on the same subject, Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster. 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! At the very least, read them both.
• If you’d like to hear more about psychologist and border science inventor Wilhelm Reich, and his challenging relationship with the left, check out AEWCH 59, where I talk with Reich scholar James Strick. And if you do want to hear about me talking Wilhelm Reich, hereyougo.
• Marx uses the vampire metaphor a few times in his work, but none more famously than, ““Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” (In Capital)
• 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.”
• And Srećko mentions Carlo Rovelli, whose work I have yet to read. But I think I’ll start with the one he suggests, The Order Of Time.
• To hear more about the problem with doomsday preppers, check out AEWCH 105 with Mark O’Connell.
• The prayer of Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy; O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
• So much about the theorist Roland Barthes on this show. Including, here, 
Conner Habib 