Educational Videos

Join me as we delve into the fascinating world of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, exploring the concepts of sovereignty, biopolitics, and the relationship between power and identity. In this video, we’ll examine Agamben’s ideas on the state of exception, Homo Sacer, and the ways in which power operates on the body and life of individuals.

A closer look at philosophical history indicates it is not Nietzsche’s thought itself, but rather Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who is to blame for Nazi usurpation of Nietzsche’s ideas. “On the Half-Baked Relationship Between Fascism & Friedrich Nietzsche” unpacks why the Nazis were wrong to appropriate Nietzsche’s ideas or to believe that he would have supported the Third Reich, primarily by way of deploying an exegesis of his concepts of “Master” and “Slave” morality. If you are into that sort of thing. Soundtrack is all Rachmaninoff, all the way down.

“Active Love and Love in Dreams: the Virtue of the Virtual” is an hour-long deep dive into phenomenology and the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as it can help us answer questions about fantasy and reality in sexual ethics—the question of how we can know the truth of our desires. Let a dominatrix teach you the difference between fantasy and reality in sex. We read Aristotle, Hegel, Levinas, Nabokov, and Woodruff while discussing theater, pornography, persona, taboo fantasy, the ethics of friendship, and how we can know that the consciousness of the other person is real.

“I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov