Name: Tenet by Why Theory
Duration: 1 h 18 min 9 s
Description: In this episode, Ryan and Todd analyze the new Christopher Nolan film Tenet. They discuss the film in terms of the concept of Nachtraglickeit or retroactivity, as well as exploring the conflicted politics that Nolan proposes in the film.

Great episode as always! I have two requests. First one is "Psychoanalysis and Translation". I would like to hear you guys talk about this topic, which I think is not a popular area of theoretical analysis. Secondly, can you mention the topic of the next week's episode in the previous week's episode? Even if you don't mention it during the episode itself, maybe put it in the description? Thank you for the great episode!

For me the thoretical crux of the film turns around non-transparency or opacity and the question of whether or not opacity itself can be used 'for the good' or calculated with. The part of the protagonist is needful in this sense precisely because it draws our attention and focus and thereby surreptitiously inserts negativity which leaves space for entropy or other possible futures/pasts through the repression of other alternatives in the linear diagetic progression. In this sense the action occurs in the foreground in order to open up the dimension of a background. There is genuine sincerity here insofar as the protagonist really is dissasociated from himself - we see him being rendered literally a stranger to himself at a few points in the film. On the other side, I wonder if there is a way in which entropy (read jouissance?) could be seen as being used in a perverse way- buying into opaque network effects becomes another way of trying to convert the subject into knowledge.

@ufuk-karata-924888438: We will put that in our queue. But we can't mention the next episode because we often don't know it until a few days before recording. Sorry about that. Best, Todd

Reinterpreting /re-imagining the past to create the future; allowing a different understanding and a different experience of the situation to shape our futures. Love this 

Great episode. Nice reference to Badiou on the event. 2 other connections: Augustine on time as a distention of the soul in _Confessions_ XI; Charles Péguy’s dictum “in order for an event to happen it must happen twice.” 

re-listening to this after watching the move...wasn't the whole point that the algorithm would reverse global time (instead of the local times of objects) so that the future civilization would be able to expand into the past and basically "overwrite" the present?

I thought maybe them moving through the past was a metaphor for us searching through the past for our lost object. So the future people are being reactionary in the face of contradiction. It also wasn't clear to me that there was supposed to be a

villain once the future people's motives were revealed, because then you have to sympathize with their position which reveals the contradiction.

Pointillism for sine wave No.12

some sort of tonal metaldrum made by pinging the haible tau phaser and sending it through a) a dual bp filter b) a frequencyshifter and c) a convolution unit.

pm_metaldrum

SenSen - SnowBoy

synthesisers played by Ken Ikeda
trombone & feedback played by Edward Lucas

recording, mix & photographs by E.Lucas
mastered by Rupert Clervaux
design by Earshots

recorded in 2018 at Lock Down Studios in the lost tower hamlet of Ratcliff

EAR014 - Ken Ikeda / Edward Lucas - Lost & Found [sample]

NTR070 - Live in Accord [sample]

wouuuuhhh

Ryan and Todd consider the concept of symbolic castration as it develops in psychoanalysis and as it bears on both politics and culture. They relate symbolic castration to some of the key concepts in psychoanalytic theory, including fetishistic disavowal and the phallus.

Symbolic Castration

what is going on?

Ryan and Todd unpack Jacques Lacan's most well-known seminar--Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In doing so, they focus on Lacan's own exclusion as a starting point and then delve into two concepts that Lacan does not list among the fundamental ones--subjectivity and the objet a.

Seminar 11

In this episode, Ryan and Todd analyze the new Christopher Nolan film Tenet. They discuss the film in terms of the concept of Nachtraglickeit or retroactivity, as well as exploring the conflicted politics that Nolan proposes in the film.

Tenet

Why Theory brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena.

Tenet

Why Theory

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