Acid Horizon
Emerging from affinities with post-structuralism, abolitionism, biopolitics, communism, critical metaphysics, critical mysticism, and ontological anarchy, Acid Horizon is a philosophy and theory podcast committed to thought in motion and political struggle. While these are our grounding currents, each episode opens out onto a wider constellation: ethics, politics, phenomenology, decolonial thought, queer theory, post-psychoanalysis, disability/crip theory, anarchism, Marxism, feminism, and analyses of the emergence of the new right.
Comprised of a decentralized collective of friends and comrades, Acid Horizon cultivates a terrain of militant inquiry. From readings that span 20th-century French communism to new perspectives on German idealism, the collective has also undertaken forays into aesthetic experimentation, philosophical heresy, and the history of revolt. We seek the concepts and intensities that gesture toward new forms of life.
Acid Horizon pushes theory beyond the academy through live engagements, collaborative reading groups, and collective interventions.
Acid Horizon
The Kyoto School Explained: Japanese Philosophy, Marxism, and Nothingness
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Were the philosophers of the Kyoto School fascist collaborators, or were they meeting in secret with the Imperial Navy to try to stop a war? Fernando Wirtz and Takeshi Morisato join Craig for a primer on Japan's most influential and most contested philosophical tradition, from Nishida and Tanabe through Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. The conversation covers what "nothingness" actually means in Japanese thought and why it isn't Heidegger's, how Miki tried to collapse reason and unreason into a logic of imagination, and what tenkō, or forced ideological conversion, did to a generation of Marxist intellectuals. It closes on the newly surfaced Ōshima Memo and the question of what it costs to think under fascism.
Books mentioned in this episode
Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination, translated by John W. M. Krummel (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)
Itabashi Yūjin, Nishitani's Philosophy of the Body (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies)
Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū)
By our guests
Ōhashi Ryōsuke, The Kyoto School and the Japanese Navy, translated by Takeshi Morisato (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies, forthcoming)
Fernando Wirtz, Myth and Ideology: An Essay on Philosophy of Political Action in Japan (2023)
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