Controversy and Conscience: The Waste Trade

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This chapter examines the ethical dilemmas and societal implications surrounding the global waste trade, highlighting a former Harvard president's advocacy for toxic waste dumping in low-wage countries. It critiques capitalist responses to environmental crises, intertwining themes of violence, luxury, and ideological propaganda within contemporary politics. Through humor and philosophical reflections, the discussion explores how concepts of waste and excrement symbolize deeper societal alienation and environmental issues.

Alright, we’re back…plumbing the depths of psychoanalytic marxism! This week we discuss Slavoj Žižek’s Scatology through Adrian Johnston’s most recent book Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital.

Jacques Lacan points out that we are born between urine and faeces, and that man is the only animal for whom waste disposal is a problem. What is the relationship between money and waste? Freud points out this strange coincidence of the highest form (gold) and the lowest (shit), so why is shit a gift that keeps on giving? What does all of this have to do with Japanese hamburgers & Marx?

We’re talking the political and libidinal economy of shit from the Scatalogical Rites of Nations & the Interpretation of Dreams to Uncut Gems, Cool Runnings, & Laporte’s History of Shit.

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Up next we have two interviews with Adrian Johnston, & we’ll see you in Paris.

Aufhebung(hole)!