Acid Horizon

In this end-of-year installment, we’re sharing a conversation originally released on LEPHT HAND as we take a rare and well-earned brief hiatus from regular publishing or episodes. This pause marks a moment of transition rather than retreat, as both LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon continue to evolve beyond the podcast form! Closing out the episode is a reflection on Gianni Vattimo’s essay “Beyond the Subject,” engaging questions of weak...

Why does the figure of the devil keep returning in moments of political panic, social anxiety, and cultural decay? In this episode, we sit down with author Grafton Tanner about exorcism, possession, moral panic, and the strange new life of demonology in contemporary America. We trace how neoliberal collapse, social media, and ideological confusion reanimate the satanic imaginary across the political spectrum. The conversation also ...

Craig and Adam are joined by Idris Robinson to ask the question of destituent revolt in a murderous and counter-revolutionary world. We discussed Idris' work on the nature of martyrdom, the relation of the insurgent to death, and the political meaning of duty, both to the dead and within the confines of an intolerable life. Reading from Idris latest book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World has to Offer, out this November f...

Adam is joined by comrades Abigail Susik (@abigailsusik7), Ben Morea (@ben_morea), and Breanne Fahs to discuss the synthesis of art and activism, as exemplified by Ben’s central role within such collectives as Up Against the Wall Motherfucker! Black Mask, and The Rat during the 60s and 70s in New York. We spoke about Ben’s life and work, from the “redistribution” of garbage to New York’s freshly gentrified Lincoln Centre, breaking ...

In this Halloween episode, Meredith Graves joins Acid Horizon to explore the occulted correspondences between philosophy, ritual, and the practice of magic. Together we trace the tangled histories of witchcraft, labor, and belief—from Aleister Crowley and Sylvia Federici to Gilles Deleuze, GWF Hegel, and the haunted legacies of modern materialism. A conversation on mysticism, matter, and the insurgent imagination, recorded in the s...

What if depression isn’t an illness to cure but a collective mood that reveals the soul of a broken world? In this episode, Mark Fisher meets James Hillman in a conversation that bridges depth psychology and cultural theory, asking how melancholy and mania shape life under late capitalism. Joined by Emma Stamm, we explore the intersections of acid communism and archetypal psychology—from Fisher’s politics of despair to Hillman’s vi...

In this episode, we present the work of Wasim Said, a comrade from Gaza who has documented the atrocities they and their people have experienced during the ongoing intensification of Israel's genocidal war on Palestine in his first book "Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide". The logistics and safety of an interview being made near impossible amidst the horrors, we instead read out a text sent to us by Wasim, and talk...

What happens when Deleuze and Hegel are set in violent philosophical encounter over the ruins of Kantian representation? In this episode, we explore how both thinkers attempt to move beyond the categories of judgment and identity to recover the genesis of sense itself. Henry Somers-Hall joins us to trace Deleuze’s path through Kant, Sartre, and Bergson toward a field of pre-individual difference and immanent synthesis. What emerges...

What does it mean to live in a world where relationships can vanish overnight, without explanation or closure? In this episode, Acid Horizon speaks with cultural theorist Dominic Pettman about his new book Ghosting: On Disappearance (Polity Press). Together we explore how ghosting unsettles intimacy, accountability, and narrative finality, reaching beyond dating apps into friendships, families, workplaces, and politics. Along the w...

What if the very idea of Western Marxism has less to do with geography than with defeat? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we dive into Domenico Losurdo’s controversial use of the term and ask what’s at stake in his defense of actually existing socialism against its critics. With our guest Ross Wolfe, we explore the tangled afterlives of Western Marxism—from the Frankfurt School to structuralism, from Stalinism to contemporary China...

Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sbwVioWlhS0

What happens when we revisit Wilhelm Reich’s journey from Freud’s student to radical theorist of desire, politics, and repression? In this episode, we sit down with Professor Philip Bennett and David Silver, executive director of the Wilhelm Reich Museum, to explore Reich’s groundbreaking ideas on therapy, character armor, and the enduring relevance of The Mass Psychology of F...

What does Romanticism have to do with communism, enclosure, and the commons today? In this episode we speak with Joseph Albernaz, author of Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community, about the radical lineage running from Blake and Hölderlin to Marx and Bataille. We explore how Romantic literature conceived “groundless community”—a poetic and ecological alternative to enclosure and collective identity—and how...

Can myth itself serve as a material force in struggles for liberation? Federico Campagna joins me to discuss how myth—too often dismissed as escapism or co-opted by reaction—can instead become a practice of imagination, solidarity, and survival. We look at myth’s place in anti-capitalist politics, its tension with materialism, and its role in resisting despair. What emerges is a vision of myth as a politics of possibility against h...

What happens when the self we imagine drifts further from the one we actually live? In this episode, philosopher Fredrik Westerlund joins Craig and Nicholas de Warren to explore his concept of “identity on credit,” where our sense of self is built on promises yet to be realized. From Sophocles’ Ajax to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Scheler, we trace how recognition, resentment, and failure shape the modern psyche. Together we ask whether...

What happens when the painter’s hand breaks free from the eye, and chaos reorganizes the entire field of vision? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we join Charles Stivale, translator of On Painting and The Logic of Sense, to explore Gilles Deleuze’s rare 1981 seminar on painting. Together we trace how concepts like catastrophe, diagram, and modulation emerge from Deleuze’s live philosophical “laboratory” and feed into his landmark w...

What if analytic philosophy isn't as politically neutral as it claims to be? In this episode, we explore the hidden ideological scaffolding of analytic philosophy—its deference to science, retreat to common sense, and therapeutic impulse. Christoph Schuringa, author of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso), reveals how analytic thought emerged from institutional, class-based, and geopolitical forces. We also discuss ...

What does it mean to become worthy of the event? In this episode, we’re joined by Justin, longtime collaborator and host of our current reading group on Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. Together, we explore Deleuze’s stoic metaphysics, Nietzsche’s ethics of affirmation, and the revolutionary stakes of releasing ourselves from resentment. Along the way, we consider how play, pedagogy, and the dissolution of the self open us to t...

What happens when the dialectic between Sartre and Fanon is not one of influence, but of mutual transformation? Today we're live at Webster’s in State College with Tyrique Mack-Georges, who returns to the podcast to discuss his research on seriality, group infusion, and the possibility of a new humanity. Together, we explore how Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason illuminates Fanon’s revolutionary project, and how Fanon, i...

What if the history of feminism wasn’t only a story of liberation—but also one of betrayal, reaction, and complicity? In this episode of Acid Horizon, we speak with Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, authors of Fascism and the Women's Cause, about the forgotten histories of white feminist collaboration with the far right—from the suffrage movement to the Ku Klux Klan and the British Union of Fascists. Together we explore how ...