Todd McGowan, "Enjoyment Right & Left" (Sublation Media, 2022)

Summary

Today I talked to Todd McGowan about his book Enjoyment Right & Left (Sublation Media, 2022).

While understanding the psychic structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to grasping our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of enjoyment is critically important to this effort. In a world that appears completely divided between right and left, McGowan calls for a universal form of enjoyment that unites people in an egalitarian project. Todd McGowan's previous books include Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and The Impossible David Lynch, among others. He teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. 

Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime studies, and applying theory through praxis. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures available wherever you get podcasts and has a blog at where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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Cody Skahan

Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a graduate of the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow and will be starting his DPhil at the University of Oxford in the fall of 2024. His work focuses on environmentalism in the Arctic, especially amidst conflicting and interrelated sociotechnical imaginaries originating from different sources such as youth environmentalists. Cody co-hosts a social theory and anthropology podcast with two of his friends called Un/livable Cultures (https://unlivablecultures.wordpress.com/) available wherever you get podcasts.
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