The Dip and Tribunal Zero: A New Strategy for Underground Theory

Recently, I’ve found myself wanting more from most of the philosophers and theorists I greatly admire, from the ones who have influenced me the most, e.g., Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, etc. And what is this more I currently desire? I want more argumentation, more evidence, more proof, that is, I want them to provide more reasons to accept the various claims they make (I can just hear some analytic philosopher laughing at me and quoting that famous Bruce Willis line from Die Hard: “Welcome to the party, pal!”). Here’s the thing: every thinker I just named did or does argue for their positions, but my point is that they don’t do it enough, but, rather, often rely on theoretical declarations — a tendency that seemed to take hold in modern philosophy with the rise of Nietzsche.

I suspect the main reason why I’m feeling this way at the moment is because I’ve spent the last three days immersed in the pages of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. I’m having to do some research on Kant’s concept of the sublime for one of the last sections I’m writing for my forthcoming book Capital vs Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. I haven’t sat down and seriously read Kant in a long time and I’ve just been blown away by his ability to argue for the position he holds. The best way to describe it is to say that I feel like I’m reading pre-theory philosophy. Kant’s work overflows with argumentative rigour and you get the sense that he felt honorably burdened to convince others that his views are the objectively true ones.

Now, for context, I have to say that I am one of the biggest defenders of theory you’ll ever come across and that’s the position of enunciation all this is coming from here, that is, I’m speaking as someone who champions theory and as an aspiring theorist myself. Theory has profoundly change my life for the better. To me, however, one way to draw a clarifying distinction between theory and philosophy is to charitably grant theory far more speculative freedom than philosophy would ever permit. Sorry, but there is a lot more what-if allowed to uncritically circulate in theory. To talk like my zoomer coworkers, when it comes to theorists theorizing, we simply say, “Let ’em cook!”, and we do so in a way that traditional philosophy would scoff at. Just imagine Aristotle reading Baudrillard.

For even more context, I am writing this post on the morning of Saturday, November 9, 2024, and it comes out of the philosophico-theoretical contrast I’m perceiving between Kant’s Third Critique and the brand new Substack article by Žižek titled ‘From MAGA to MEGA: After Trump’s Victory’. While I strongly agree with much of what Žižek writes about Trump, the Left, etc., I find myself struggling with parts of it and not because I disagree with what he’s saying but because he relies on certain concepts without supplying the reader with anything that supports them. Just for the record, I’m speaking as a card-carrying Žižekian here (even if Slavoj himself has his reservations about those of us inspired by him calling ourselves “Žižekians” — I have my reasons for doing so, which I’ll provide in an upcoming post). I am saying this as a thinker who thinks that Slavoj Žižek is not only one of the greatest theorists alive, but is also one of the greatest philosophers in the world today. But he definitely has different modes of writing. Let’s take a look at two examples of him using psychoanalytic concepts without argumentative justification — something that I myself am just as guilty of doing (I just have to give a quick shout out to my friend and mentor, Todd McGowan, for always going out of his way to provide Hegelian-Lacanian theory with as much clear argumentation as he possibly can):

The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops into his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners…) tells a lot about our predicament: what kind of world do we live in where bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of a society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? As Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump is not a relic of old moral-majority conservatism; he is to a much greater degree the caricatured inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. Adrian Johnston proposed “a complementary twist on Jacques Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: the return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression.” Is this not also a concise definition of Trump? As Freud said about perversion, in it, everything that was repressed — all repressed content — comes out in all its obscenity, but this return of the repressed only strengthens the repression. This is also why there is nothing liberating in Trump’s obscenities; they merely strengthen social oppression and mystification. Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

Ok, cool, but why is “repression is always the return of the repressed”, but why is “the return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression”, why is it in perversion that “everything that was repressed — all repressed content — comes out in all its obscenity, but this return of the repressed only strengthens the repression”? Why, oh, why? What are the causal mechanisms at play in these libidinal dynamics? Kant would have provided us with reasons that support the assertions being made. The vast majority of people who read the article will not understand the theoretical point Žižek is making precisely because he does not provide any philosophical argumentation for it. Instead, he presupposes that the reader is already familiar with the concepts utilized by his inner circle of Hegelian-Lacanians. Nobody besides Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Russell Sbriglia, Matthew Flisfeder, Duane Rousselle, etc., will truly grasp what he’s referring to. All other readers are left scratching their heads. One more example:

A couple of years ago, Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man who noisily defecates in the corner of a room where a high-class drinking party is going on — but it is easy to see that the same holds for many leading politicians around the globe. Was Erdogan not defecating in public when, in a paranoiac outburst, he dismissed critics of his policy towards the Kurds as traitors and foreign agents? Was Putin not defecating in public when (in a well-calculated public vulgarity aimed at boosting his popularity at home) he threatened a critic of his Chechen politics with medical castration? Not to mention Boris Johnson…
This coming-open of the obscene background of our ideological space (to put it somewhat simply: the fact that we can now more and more openly make racist, sexist… statements which until recently belonged to private space) does not mean that mystification has ended or that ideology now openly displays its cards. On the contrary: when obscenity penetrates the public scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest. The true political, economic, and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. Public obscenity is always sustained by concealed moralism; its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked.

But why is it that “when obscenity penetrates the public scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest”? What fundamentally causes this to be the case? What structurally forces this to be so? Hell, I myself will take a stab at filling in the (philosophical) blank, that is, I will attempt to steel-man Žizek’s point. A Žižekian argument in support of this Žižekian insight could go a little something like this: whenever a politician begins to sever ties with the norms and standards of rhetorical politeness, of respectful etiquette, and starts introducing vulgarity and obscenity, it does not necessarily mean that ideology is breaking down. Instead, it can mean that ideology is intensifying. Why? Because the obscenity can easily give the impression that the politician is not just another puppet of the existing political status quo, but, rather, is cut from a different cloth and will, thus, introduce a radically new form of politics that will profoundly reshape and restructure society. In other words, the impression is a false (ideological) impression, that is, it is just a supplemental layer of ideology, since the vast majority of these vulgarity-oriented politicians aren’t really going to drastically change anything about the economic status quo, i.e., the capitalist mode of production. The usage of obscenity can make a maverick politician appear to be a “no bullshitter”, a trustworthy and no-nonsense straight shooter, and can easily simulate the eruption of truth into an annoyingly ideological situation. The true ideological trick is located in the utilization of vulgarity itself. Alright, that’s the type of simple argument I wish Žižek himself had included in his article.

However, Žižek could reasonably respond to me by saying, “Oh, fuck off, Mikey, you know damn well that I can’t philosophically unpack and justify every bit of Freudian-Lacanian theory I use within the confines of a topical article on Trump’s election — that’s what my books like Less Than Nothing are for”. Fair enough, Slavoj. But I would make the counter-point that it is precisely in such an article like this one on Trump that it is absolutely crucial to provide some support for the concepts being employed. I’m certainly not asking you to launch into an elaborate explanation of repression and perversion, but a single paragraph summarizing the causal mechanisms between them would do wonders. An article of this kind is without a doubt no place go into the complex details of the theory, but one or two summary paragraphs would be of more help to readers than you’ll ever know. It would pivot readers from dismissing the claim outright as totally groundless and unintelligible to thinking about how they themselves need to better understand the arguments that support the claim. I’m saying this to you not as a professional academic, but as a working-class autodidact, as an underground theorist, who had to intellectually fight to comprehend every philosophical and theoretical insight I’ve learned from you over the years.

Look, what I’m really feeling right now is that theorists need to be more philosophical. I mean, not all of the time, but more often than they are. And I think I’m feeling like this because of my growing frustration with the structure of academic philosophy and its silo effect. I’m referring to how professional theory scholarship tends to isolate thinkers into their little circles of specialization. Lacanians only return the message in inverted form to other Lacanians. Deleuzo-Guattarians only trace lines of flight amongst themselves. Heideggerians only shepherd Being with other Heideggerians. And Marxists think that all other philosophers are completely full of shit — including other Marxists. I hate this shit! All this does is allow each theory clan, each conceptual circle jerk, to allow their ownmost presuppositions to remain unchecked. And checking the fuck out of dogmatic presuppositions is what true philosophy is all about! The silo effect is counter-philosophical. The fundamental philosophical gesture is to challenge one’s most precious presumptions or “master signifiers”. As Žižek nicely put it:

This maintaining of a distance with regard to the Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy. It is no accident that Lacan, in his Seminar on Transference, refers to Socrates,”the first philosopher,” as the paradigm of the analyst: in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates refuses to be identified with agalma, the hidden treasure in himself, with the unknown ingredient responsible for the Master’s charisma, and persists in the void filled out by agalma. It is against this background that we have to locate the “amazement” that marks the origins of philosophy: philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given (“It’s like that!”, “Law is law!”, etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this”step back” from actuality into possibility — the attitude best rendered by Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s motto quoted by Fredric Jameson: “Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists.” Nothing is more antiphilosophical than the well-known anecdote about Diogenes the cynic who, when confronted with the Eleatic proofs of the nonexistence and inherent impossibility of movement, answered by simply standing up and taking a walk. (As Hegel points out, the standard version of this anecdote passes over in silence its denouement: Diogenes soundly thrashed his pupil who applauded the Master’s gesture, punishing him for accepting the reference to a pretheoretical factum brutum as a proof.) Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental”conditions of possibility” — theory as such, by definition, requires the suspension of the Master-Signifier.(Tarrying with the Negative, p. 2)

So, what to do about the silo effect? Well, for starters, the internet can be used as a tool to combat this type of “philosophical” echo-chambering. We at Theory Underground champion what we call the converdiction (conversation + contradiction = converdiction). The converdiction is not a debate, since its goal is not to rhetorically one-up and out-wit your opponent, but, rather, to deepen the philosophical contradiction, the conceptual antagonism. Neither of the participants is supposed be the winner — the only winner is the young philosopher who listens to the converdiction and absorbs it, tarries with the negative, even more than the philosophers actually engaged in it.

One of the main goals of Theory Underground is to host a converdiction (again, not a debate) between Slavoj Žižek and Nick Land in 2025. Why? Because Žižek and Land are the figureheads of what we call fault line theory. The two schools of philosophy that emerged in the 1990s right as the internet was taking off were the Ljubljana School and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Žižek spearheading the former and Land cultivating the latter. Both Žižek and Land occupied a special position within their respective philosophical assemblages. This position is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as the “cutting edge of deterritorialization”, that is, the point of contact between an assemblage and the outside (exterior, Other, etc.). In other words, Žižek is the “exceptional individual” through which the Ljubljana School as a group slices into the world of philosophy and Land was that, too, for the collectivity-centered CCRU. Brent Adkins helpfully explains D&G’s concept:

In the second “Memories of a Sorcerer” Deleuze and Guattari complicate the principle of contagion and pack. To it they add the principle that “wherever there is a multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 243). The wolf pack has its alpha-male. Ahab has Moby-Dick. Willard has Ben. Deleuze and Guattari call this exceptional individual “anomalous,” which they note comes from a Greek noun that “designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialization” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 244). They also admit that there is a contradiction here between the exceptional individual and the pack. The contradiction that Deleuze and Guattari find here is the contradiction between border and the pack. The exceptional individual is the place where the pack opens to the outside, the place where the pack makes alliances with the heterogeneous. If we imagine a knife, for example, the same kind of contradiction will exist between the body of the blade and the edge of the blade. By necessity only the edge of the blade cuts. Only the edge of the blade penetrates into new territories and deterritorializes them. Dicing an onion deterritorializes it, but that deterritorialization happens at the cutting edge.
(Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, p. 145)

Even now in late 2024, online theory is dominated by the fault line between the Ljubljana School and the CCRU. This is, in large part, due to the fact that both schools are parts of much bigger philosophical trajectories. The Ljubljana School is primarily rooted in Lacan and Hegel, whereas CCRU were anchored in Deleuze, Bataille, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. The vast majority of young thinkers, especially those who’s thinking is online-oriented, focused on continental philosophy are divided between Lacan and D&G, between Hegel and Deleuze, between Žižek and Land. The point of a Žižek-Land converdiction is not to see one of them fundamentally change their position. We know that neither one of them is going to drastically modify their philosophy. However, what it can do is showcase the contradiction, difference, and incompatibility between their ontologies, between their theories of desire, between their interpretations of capitalism, etc., in such a way as to get young philosophers to think through the issues in new ways. Let’s let the two “cutting edges of deterritorialization” cut into each other. Land can problematize Žižek’s core theoretical presuppositions and Žižek can do the exact same to Land’s. This is what we want to witness! A dialectical critique of cybernetics and a cybernetic attack on dialectics.

The converdiction is meant to dissolve a thinker’s main groundless grounds (foundational presuppositions, precious priors). But perhaps there’s something even more corrosive, even more acidic, than the converdiction. But what is this something more? Last night, I was chillin’ at the crib when I felt the sudden urge to rewatch Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (one of my personal favorites from childhood). It just so happens that this film contains something that would helped me clarify what I mean by this “something more” and that something goes by the name of The Dip. What is The Dip? First things first, this film takes place in a world wherein cartoon characters or simply “toons”, e.g., Daffy Duck and Donald Duck, are actually existing subjects who work and live alongside human beings. However, the toons, while living in the real world, still retain all of their cartoonish attributes, that is, they cannot suffer injury in the typical ways humans can. Toons are, therefore, pretty much invulnerable. You can try drowning them or stabbing them and they’ll be just fine. The one thing that can truly kill a toon is The Dip, which is a chemical concoction comprised of acetone, benzene, and turpentine. The moment you lower or dip a toon into this witch’s brew he or she begins to melt away — not just in their particular features but also in their very form.

I want to lower a philosopher, his or her formal presuppositions or conceptual matrix, into The Dip, into a “substance” that will not leave a single presupposition safe from meltdown. But there is certainly must be a time and a place for this extreme sort of philosophical challenge. We underground theorists must be more philosophical and less theoretical in our very theory. We have to become more argumentative. And, no, I don’t mean we need to be more disagreeable, aggressive, quarrelsome, etc., in an irrational and uncritical manner. I don’t mean “argumentative” in the way people are argumentative in the comment sections of political posts on X (formerly Twitter). That kind of shit helps us in no way. By “argumentative”, I mean the respectful and rigorous scrutinization of groundless grounds. We need to be less philosophically charitable when it comes to theoretical assertions.

Of course, we cannot do this every single time a theorist makes a claim. We want theorists to thrive in their theorizations. We want creative experimentation with new concepts. We want theory-fictions about the future. We want to traffick with what-ifs. But there must be points where we suspend this mode of speculative freedom and actually defend our positions. We all must be lowered into The Dip. We must all pass through the fire of Socrates. If we want our theories to be meaningful to a broader array of people, both academic and nonacademic, then we must refine them through intense philosophical tempering. We have to be able to back up our theories with far more refined philosophical argumentation.

But what exactly is the goal of stepping into Tribunal Zero? It’s certainly not to destroy the passion aspiring thinkers have for philosophy or to discourage them from continuing in the specific work they’re doing. No! It’s to make them better at philosophizing by forcing them to reckon with their most foundational presuppositions. Yes, philosophical destitution can leave one feeling very frustrated with oneself and with one’s abilities as a philosopher, but that’s just motivation to become a more skilled thinker. Remember, philosophizing is a skill — there is a craftsmanship to philosophy. That’s why it’s important to view Tribunal Zero as an extimate (external and intimate) part of oneself, that is, it is an externalized embodiment of one’s own ability to self-critique. We can engage in self-critique, but our egos, desires, fantasies, etc., all too often get in the way. We tend to take it easy on ourselves. Tribunal Zero seeks to cut through this web of narcissistic shortcuts by imposing an unavoidable necessity on the philosopher — the necessity of evidence-based argumentation. Tribunal Zero forces me to become more of the philosopher that I can be but won’t be if I remain unchallenged in this relentless way. Tribunal Zero is the philosopher within me that is more than the philosopher I am.

Tribunal Zero also serves to combat another tendency we must fight against — a tendency I call text fetishism. Marx famously described what he called “commodity fetishism”, which essentially means that we experience commodities as intrinsically possessing value in and of themselves instead of seeing how their value has its source in the human labor that went into their production. It’s as if TVs just spontaneously appear on store shelves when, in fact, they were produced by human beings in factories. Commodity fetishism effaces all of the time and energy that humans poured into the production of commodities and treats commodities as substances that exist independently from social labor. Well, the same tendency is at play in how we perceive great philosophical texts, e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, Phenomenology of Spirit, Being and Time, etc. We act as though these books just magically poofed into existence all on their own. We fail to take into account the decades of philosophical refinement that Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger put in just to be able to write these amazing texts. We never see a philosopher training to be a philosopher. There are no philosophy montages. Tribunal Zero, however, displays a philosopher working to become a greater philosopher, thus, Tribunal Zero counteracts text fetishism. We need a montage (cue the song ‘Montage’ from Team America).

As an aspiring underground theorist of the Lacanian-Žižekian sort, I want to become a living embodiment of this type of intensified philosophical disposition. What do I have in mind? Noam Chomsky is famously a staunch and dismissive critic of Lacan and Žižek, who he has deemed to be mere “charlatans”. I, for one, do not think that these two are charlatans, but instead of ignoring and dismissing Chomsky, I wish I could have the opportunity to sit down and argue with him about core Lacanian concepts. For example, I am truly convinced that human ontology is structured by objet petit a, that is, I hold that this virtual object, the remainder of our “lost” being, truly shapes our mode of existence in the world. I wish I could actually attempt to convince Chomsky of this through rational argumentation. My task, not as a Lacanian-Žižekian theorist, but as a philosopher, would be to get him to understand why I take this concept so seriously. The burden of proof would be on me! I want to argue him into having to say, “Well, shit, maybe there is something to this objet petit a thing after all”. And, yes, I do think that I could get him to warm up a bit to objet petit a and to other Lacanian concepts, but to do so would require me stepping outside the insular circuit of Lacanian terminology and finding less jargony ways of defending the concepts. To do so, the concepts themselves must be forced to stand in the nude, that is, stripped of the clothes made up of all the other Lacanian terms. This is how I’d try to argumentatively convey the ontologico-universal relevance of objet petit a as well as show why it is far from some piece of hyper-niche jargon seductively peddled by a psychoanalytic charlatan.

But if I believe that objet petit a is something true about human beings as such, then I have taken it beyond the confines of Lacanian theory, which means the way I talk about it must, too, transcend the idiosyncratic and specialized vernacular of Lacanian psychoanalysis. If I’m making objet petit a into an ontology category, then I better be able to make it relatable and intelligible to normies, but I also have to be ready to defend it under the unsympathetic scrutiny of Noam Chomsky, Donald Davidson, Alain Badiou, John Searle, Martha Nussbaum, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, F. W. J. Schelling, Carl Jung, Plato, Reza Negarestani, Søren Kierkegaard, Kojin Karatani, Baruch Spinoza, Iain Hamilton Grant, Simone de Beauvoir, Cornel West, Ayn Rand, Pierre Bourdieu, William James, Martin Heidegger, Gottlob Frege, Jean-François Lyotard, John Locke, Richard Rorty, Seneca, Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Edmund Husserl, Marshall McLuhan, Hannah Arendt, Alfred North Whitehead, Hubert Dreyfus, David Hume, Thomas Ligotti, François Laruelle, Anna Greenspan, Frantz Fanon, Yuk Hui, Thomas Aquinas, Judith Butler, F. H. Bradley, Theodor Adorno, George Santayana, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Oswald Spengler, Daniel Dennett, Byung-Chul Han, Melanie Klein, Peter Sloterdijk, Rosa Luxemburg, Heraclitus, Marcus Aurelius, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, etc.

Imagine being able to assemble all of the greatest philosophers who ever lived into one court, a board of judges, a thousand-headed interlocutor, against which you all by yourself would have to defend your philosophical positions. I refer to this anxiety-provoking judicature as Tribunal Zero (I also call it the Concept Colosseum and the Pit of Socrates). The ultimate aim of Tribunal Zero is to drop a philosopher straight into The Dip, that is, to strip the philosopher of every formal presupposition his or her thinking relies on as a groundless ground. All metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, logical, linguistic, aesthetic, religious, and cultural presuppositions will be dipped before the “surgical” analyses of Tribunal Zero. The point is to force the philosopher to undergo a conceptual version of what Lacan called “subjective destitution”, which, in part, entails a person coming to see that the particular authority, the big Other, he or she relies on is not perfectly authoritative after all. Tribunal Zero is The Dip, is the “chemical” concoction, that melts the philosopher all the way down to the zero point of philosophical destitution.

Obviously, this idealized version of Tribunal Zero is impossible to form, but we could very easily organize actual-but-imperfect embodiments of it. Consider what it would be like to observe a well known Deleuzo-Guattarian, say Brian Massumi, be dipped into a Tribunal Zero consisting of the most respected Lacanians and Hegelians, i.e., Slavoj Žižek, Todd McGowan, Alenka Zupančič, Adrian Johnston, Duane Rousselle, Agon Hamza, Frank Ruda, Helen Rollins, Matthew Flisfeder, Daniel Tutt, Bruce Fink, Jennifer Friedlander, etc. Picture Massumi having to defend Deleuzo-Guattarian theory against all of them. And, just to be fair, now imagine Todd McGowan having to argue in favor of Hegelian-Lacanian theory against all of the famous Deleuzo-Guattarians, i.e., Nick Land, Brian Massumi, Manuel DeLanda, Henry Somers-Hall, Brent Adkins, Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, Eugene Holland, Keith Ansell Person, John Protevi, James Williams, Ronald Bogue, Michael Hardt, etc. Now, I am very confident in assuming that no one I just named would ever be willing to step into Tribunal Zero, to be lowered into The Dip, for professional reasons. Part of the unspoken agreement between professional Lacanians, Deleuzians, Hegelians, Heideggerians, Marxists, and so on, is this: “Don’t encroach on my corner of the theory world and I won’t encroach on yours”. This way they can all maintain their niche reputations and I totally understand why this is the case. When your theorizing and your income are dependent on maintaining your status in academia, then it’s in your best interest to avoid rigorous critique from different philosophical camps.

We underground theorists, on the other hand, do not have this problem. We are free to pursue the philosopher’s jouissance, to tap into the death drive of philosophy itself, by freely stepping into Tribunal Zero, by purposely jumping into The Dip, which can be beamed to the world in live streams and videos on Youtube. This is an original and radical strategy for underground theory, which will enabled us to become a new type of philosopher. Repeated visits to Tribunal Zero will accelerate our developments into the Über-Philosoph, the over-philosopher. Since I am the one who came up with this idea, I feel it’s only right that I am the first one of us that enters Tribunal Zero. It will take some work to organize this (Dave, I’m talking to you), but it is a real goal of mine. Fuck it! Let’s find out how dangerous The Dangerous Maybe can be. Let’s do a 1 v 20! Mikey Downs vs. The World

About Author

Michael Downs is a working class intellectual based in Raytown, Missouri. Mikey teaches Žižek, Land, Baudrillard, general philosophy at Theory Underground. Downs has studied the history of philosophy, as well as continental theory independently for over 20 years. Michael is the creator of a popular online blog, The Dangerous Maybe. There he has written articles on topics such as Lacan’s concepts of the phallus and objet petit a as well as ‘An American Translation of Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital’, and many more. These are shared amongst academics, graduate students, and independent working class intellectuals across the world. Mikey used to have his time and energy, but he now is forced to work in a warehouse to support himself and his mom. When not working he spends additional hours each day writing at a coffee shop, working on new blog posts, manuscripts, and books. You can support the #FreeMikey movement my becoming a paid subscriber here on Medium, at his Patreon, or, to get more involved, Mikey gives a monthly seminar at Theory Underground that you can subscribe to here. Doing so unlocks access to Mikey’s past courses at TU, which include Introduction to Žižek, Introduction to Nick Land, Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do, as well as upcoming courses such as Introduction to Baudrillard and Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. All of these ways of supporting and getting involved work to free up Michael’s time and energy so that he may continue to produce important contributions to the theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis communities.