Why Theory

Latest Episodes:

Top Ten TV Series of the 21st Century Aug 04, 2025

Show notes

In episode 201, Ryan and Todd work their lists of the Top 10 Television Series of the 21st Century. The hosts operated by the following rules:

1. Only completed series. No currently in production series.

2. No series could be included, even if completed, if there is pre-production or production being done on a continuation to the original series. (Not a total spoiler but spoiler-adjacent comment: one of Todd's selections just about clears this on the basis of a related reboot rather than continuation being in production.)

3. At least 51 percent of the series had to take place in the 21st century. (Again, Todd just about gets away with one.)

4. No limited series or single seasons. (So, Todd also...)

Thanks everybody for tuning in to the first episode of hopefully the next 200!

Top Ten Films of the 21st Century Jul 20, 2025

Show notes

In Why Theory's 200th episode, Todd and Ryan work through their own respective lists of the Top Ten films of the past 25 years not know what the other person's picks are. No spoilers in the episode description. Thanks to everyone who has listened over the previous 199. You mean the world to us.

The Musical Jul 07, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Ryan and Todd return to their film genre series to discuss the musical through interlocked analyses of The Jazz Singer, Top Hat, The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain, and Carmen Jones. The hosts' theoretical intervention focuses on the musical as vehicle for technological innovation in Hollywood history, as well as how the genre operates as a site for excess becoming integrated into seeming normality.

Common Sense Jun 22, 2025

Show notes

On this episode, Ryan and Todd put the idea of common sense through the theoretical wringer. Working through examples both banal and world threateningly serious, the hosts present the argument that changes in what we often refer to as common sense fundamentally alter one's relationship to the everyday and that this is vital terrain for articulating a politics of liberation.

On Narcissism Jun 08, 2025

Show notes

In this episode (recorded prior to such events as the Trump - Musk breakup and the National Guard being sent to L.A.), Ryan and Todd discuss Sigmund Freud's essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction." Freud's notion of narcissism clashes with the increasingly commonplace idea of narcissism that is largely informed by a pop-psychology importation of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Freud's notion of narcissism can appear, at times, to be a difficult to make relevant relic of an earlier age. Nonetheless, the hosts attempt to draw out the consequences of Freud's theorization in order to unlock a novel way of currently understanding the present day conversation on narcissism.

Val Rohy's book mentioned in the episode.

Group Psychology May 26, 2025

Show notes

On this episode, Ryan and Todd work through Sigmund Freud's under discussed Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The hosts first lay out how Freud establishes the group, rather than the individual, as the psyche's primary formation. They then devote time to teasing out the consequences of group dynamics as Freud writes about them in the figures of the Church and the Military, while spending much time talking about the "destructive" character of the couple. Finally, the pair discuss a matter of translation and where the drive (first theorized the year previous to Group Psychology's publication) appears in this short book.

Racecraft May 11, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Ryan and Todd dedicate a full-length treatment to one of the podcast's most frequently referenced works: Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The hosts move from engaging the term racecraft itself (which, not for nothing, both gets a red squiggle when I write it and the computer keeps separating the two words from each other like it's an error after I insist that it's not) to discussing how and why the book has not had as much mainstream discursive success as others. The hosts tease out the uncomfortable and vital challenge the book puts to readers before finally highlighting the areas in which the Fields' project overlaps with psychoanalytic concepts.

Note the below is referenced in the episode:

Jacobin interview with Karen and Barbara Fields

A.I. Apr 28, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the effect artificial intelligence is having on higher education, primarily through commentary on ChatGPT. They first discuss how immediacy and the elimination of labor are key to ChatGPT's appeal before moving to discuss how it produces an idea of what Lacan would term the Big Other and how its ruling logic is one of emergent consensus. They end by arguing that ChatGPT inverts Rick Boothby's axiom that "the Big Other doesn't know" and how that introduces a damaging psychic dilemma.

Slavoj Žižek: An Overview Apr 13, 2025

Show notes

Kicking off a new Overview sub series of podcasts, Ryan and Todd discuss the influential ideas of Hegelian-Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. After discussing Žižek's defining contribution in bringing the study of Hegel and the study of Lacan together, the two hosts move through three ideas apiece that each influenced their own work and their own thinking.

Euphemism Mar 30, 2025

Show notes

Ryan and Todd discuss the political implications of the societal tendency toward euphemism. They theorize euphemism ultimately as a tool of the reactionary forces and as a way of blunting the necessity of critique. Euphemisms make the people employing them feel better while furthering the very structure of oppression that the euphemism claims to ameliorate.

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