One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolu...

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic al...

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling bl...

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even fur...

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a ...

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneo...

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies,...

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at ...

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface ...

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the mass...

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because the...

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing...

Deleuze and Lacan are incompatible, but I use them both to imagine how renewal occurs. Deleuze's "Desiring-Production" makes the world new by the purely positive desire for difference. However, Lacan's notion of ingressing difference into the w...

June Tyson chanting "Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world, it's not my idea of things as they are," is a sacred mantra, which functions as a divine "no" hovering above the futuristic vibrations of Sa Ra's Arkestra. This divine "no" ope...

When authenticity is defined by its opposition to performativity, it ironically becomes a performance. And as much as we in the Generation X loved irony, we preferred to enjoy ironically rather than get caught up in it ourselves. But, when you'...

I am continuing to try to develop the concept of an "authentic performance." My generation set up a false opposition between authenticity and performance, and the resulting failure didn't lead to freedom but to a regular-ass failure. I go on a ...

A much younger friend of mine told me about a social media phenomena called "Performative Male Competitions," which unfortunately I called "men's performative competitions" throughout the podcast. Apparently these are competitions held unbeknow...

How do I know what I like? This is the question at the center of this podcast. Do I like what I like because it's what others like, or do I like it because I like it. Another form of this central question is, is it even possible to be authentic...

The sorts of collage art that we in the Generation X made at school involved cutting up magazine pictures and gluing them in bizarre configurations on a piece of paper. Sometimes they were just random, but sometimes we tried to make a statement...

Generation Jones may have been cynical because they came of age during the 70's economic downturn and after the failure of the Hippies to produce a revolution, but they weren't reactionaries. Their most enduring musical productions, Glam Rock, ...

Generation X includes those folks born between 65 and 80. But the stage was set for the new forms of art and music that defined us in the 70's. Particularly by the "deterritorialization" of cities affected by the death of manufacturing jobs and...

Sometimes the things that don't work right, work perfectly. Artificiality used to be the measure of inauthenticity, but "synthetic" sounds became the currency of Generation X's triumphant failure to repeat the music of the past. Electronic equi...

How did Generation X's obsession with authenticity turn us into a bunch of posers? The 50 year old dude who demands that a 20 year old wearing a Nirvana teeshirt name three songs is a poser, and he has been made such by his obsession with authe...