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What if the psychedelic revolution in end-of-life care is less a liberation from the medicalization of death than its most seductive intensification? In this crossover episode of LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon, SEREPTIE and Emma are joined by anthropologist Sujit Thomas, whose research on psychedelic thanatology cuts through therapeutic optimism to ask harder questions about pastoral power, metaphysical belief shift, and the commodification of mystical experience. Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze, and Nietzsche, the conversation moves from authentic dying to the death transcendence scale and Huxley's heroic final dose — asking whether the good death being marketed to us is really a pacification of the excess and irrationality that makes life worth affirming.

Letheby paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-024-09564-3

Sujit Thomas:

https://as.nyu.edu/departments/anthropology/graduate/alumni/doctoral-alumni/thomas-sujit.html?challenge=d06e90d7-4d8f-4b88-9d8c-10b73beb60f1

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Acid Horizon Research Commons is now live: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-main

Can machines imagine, or do they merely recombine the vast archive of images and language we have already produced? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, Emma Stamm and Sereptie speak with Fabian Offert about his forthcoming book Vector Media and the philosophical stakes of machine learning. Together they explore machine vision, the politics of images, and the strange epistemology of vector space, where culture, language, and visual media are flattened into new regimes of abstraction. Along the way, the conversation touches on critical technical practice, AI art, and whether these systems reveal something about human perception or instead confront us with an alien form of thought.

Buy Fabian's book: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921675/vector-media/

Fabian's website: https://zentralwerkstatt.org/

“The Method of Critical AI Studies, A Propaedeutic,” Fabian Offert and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18833

"Generative Digital Humanities," Fabian Offert and Peter Bell: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2723/short23.pdf

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Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHAND

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What happens when love is absent from the stage, yet remains the hidden force driving every act of power and betrayal? In this episode of LEPHT HAND, we sit down with Phil Ford of Weird Studies to explore Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold and the mythic machinery of the Ring Cycle. Moving between politics, metaphysics, and music, we examine the curse of gold, the logic of contracts, and the catastrophic singularity of love. Along the way, we ask whether Wagner’s aesthetic vision can be disentangled from his ideology and what it still reveals about the modern soul.

Enroll in Phil's course on music and the tarot: https://weirdosphere.mn.co/

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Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHAND

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Emma's Substack: https://elftheory.substack.com/

Sereptie (ambient project): https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/

Acid Horizon Research Commons is now live: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-main