u/DeleuzoHegelian

What do we really owe a stranger at the door, and what grounds that obligation? In this episode, Craig and Adam turn to Jacques Derrida's writing on hospitality to unpack Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey, tracing how Xenia, the ancient Greek law of guest and host, becomes a lens for thinking through breaking Zeus's law, the massacre of the suitors, and the slow collapse of Bronze Age civilization. The conversation moves through Derrida's distinction between conditional and absolute hospitality, and what it means for a world where borders, asylum claims, and even hospitals have turned the promise of welcome into a catastrophe. It's Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic read through Derrida: gods, guests, and the violence lurking underneath the oldest tablets of law.

What if the revolution isn't dead but instead was co-opted by reaction or technological progress itself? In this AHRC Public Panel, Nicolas de Warren and Tyrique Mack-Georges put Günther Anders and Frantz Fanon into unlikely dialogue, asking whether Fanon's vision of a new, liberated humanity can survive a world Anders diagnosed as saturated by media technology to the point of human obsolescence. Together we trace how colonial logics of extraction and violence reappear in AI, data centers, and algorithmic warfare, and explore the thesis that today's most effective "revolutionaries" may be the political right, who've mastered spectacle and disinformation while the left clings to outdated 19th-century models of praxis. The conversation ranges from Promethean shame and the collapse of truth/falsity to drone warfare, dividuated digital tribes, and whether class struggle still makes sense in a fully mediated world.

What does it mean when even compliance with the demands of the neoliberal university no longer guarantees institutional legitimacy or security? As universities become increasingly governed through financial imperatives, visa regimes, managerial restructurings, and strategic repositioning, what forms of university life become impossible? What survives beyond them? If the university increasingly appears unable to sustain the conditions for collective intellectual life, where does study go? What forms of inquiry exceed the university, and what kinds of institutions – or anti-institutions – might emerge in its wake? To discuss the capitalisation of the university and the future of study, Adam C. Jones of Acid Horizon Research Commons hosts a panel alongside theorists Stevphen Shukaitis, John Preston, Angela McRobbie, and Giovanni Mormont.

In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojève, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Kojève was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojève drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights.

Groys reveals a Kojève with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.

Who owns your dignity, and what does it cost to get it back? Craig, Adam, and Emma work through Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence, finding beneath its alleged radicalism a familiar liberal kernel: private property, mediated class relations, and a conspicuous absence of anything resembling class struggle. The launch event, staged with cardinals, worldly scholars, and an Anthropic representative, is a mise en scène of the double pincer, simultaneously legitimating AI as an inevitable apparatus of capture while reinstalling a figure of human dignity just fragile enough to need the Church's oversight. The second half of this conversation is available exclusively to patrons at patreon.com/acidhorizon.

If you could go back in time, would you change the past, even if it meant changing who you are? Is existing in time itself traumatic? Is power over time a cinematic endeavour, and what makes a good director an even better time traveller? This week on Acid Horizon we're joined by Kwasu D. Tembo to talk about his latest book Trauma in 21st-Century Time Travel Cinema, discussing the philosophy of time travel in films such as Primer, Timecrimes, and Predestination; as well as how the experience of time transcendentally conditions the structure of the psyche.

How do we connect collective struggle with the search for justice? Adam is joined by historian Hazel Croft and theorist David Renton to discuss the concept of forgiveness and its strategic role in revolutionary struggles against structural and interpersonal harms. In doing so, we draw on our previous episode on the Comrade Delta scandal earlier this year, and the failure of Marxist organisations to develop new principles and procedures of justice and reparation. David's book "Revolutionary Forgiveness" is out now via Haymarket Books.

What does Georges Bataille’s Guilty reveal about war, time, and the unstable ground of thought itself? In this episode, Craig and Adam speak with Stuart Kendall about Bataille’s confrontation with catastrophe, the “privileged instant,” and the strange oscillation between order and excess in his writing. The conversation explores how Guilty stages a meditation on war, nonknowledge, and the limits of philosophy at the edge of historical disaster. We also discuss Kendall’s essay “The Exacerbation of Instabilities,” featured in the Acéphalous Compendium, and preview his upcoming course on Bataille through the Acid Horizon Research Commons.

The definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.