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Part of a talk given by Viktor Frankl to students in Toronto -- fabulous and amazingly delivered ! -- let me know what you think in the comments

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Treating people as they ought to be - Viktor Frankl

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A classic sci-fi adventure that follows Meg Murry as she travels through space and time to save her father. This Newbery Medal-winning novel introduces complex scientific concepts in an accessible way for young readers.

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Arthur Dent, an ordinary Earthling, is unexpectedly whisked away from his home just before it's demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. As Arthur travels through space with Ford, he encounters bizarre creatures, planets, and learns more about life, the universe and everything.

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A scientist become romantic finding adventure in Hisory and time!

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So so nice!

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Exclusive documentary film screening 'Outsider. Freud' with an introduction & discussion by director Yair Qedar.

Hi GCAS Community,

Did you already hear about the new documentary called Outsider. Freud?
It’s a journey into the life and work of Sigmund Freud in four acts, combining animation, dreams, and insights from leading psychoanalysts. It explores Freud’s experiences of marginalization as a Jew in Vienna. Through an intimate lens, the film reveals new dimensions of Freud’s legacy, focusing on being an outsider.

The documentary is currently not available for general online viewing and is only screened in certain places. But the director, Yair Qedar, offered the GCAS community an exclusive opportunity to watch and discuss the documentary Outsider. Freud together with him.

When: Wednesday, 25th June 2025 at 3:00 PM CEST (Paris) / 9:00 AM EDT (New York)

Structure:

Introduction of the film by Yair Qedar

Viewing of the documentary

Discussion & Q&A with Yair Qedar

Altogether, the event will last around 1.5 to 1.75 hours, including the screening.

Links: We will use the Zoom link below for the introduction and discussion; a separate link will be provided shortly before the event to watch the documentary. https://gcas-ie.zoom.us/j/84936537984?pwd=vh39IdRaIvT0VkbzIlYLna9Sk5PV7Z.1

Trailer: If you haven’t seen the trailer, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkK_IyqIoK8

About the director:
Yair Qedar is a filmmaker and social activist, specializing in literary biographies. In his project named the "Hebrews", he produced and directed in the last 12 years 19 documentary films on Jewish writers and poets, creating a cinematic language that uses archives, animation and music, winning over 30 International and Israeli awards, his work screened in ZDF, ARTE, SVT, KAN, ERT and others. His latest film is "OUTSIDER. FREUD" about the life and work of Freud, supported ny RBB, ARTE, ORR, KAN, coming out mid 2025.

Preparation: Please feel free to bring your questions for the director, so that we can have an interesting conversation.

This is an amazing opportunity, and I hope many of you can join.

Thanks to @Tanzil Ahmed for bringing the documentary to my attention.

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Critical theory, Music, and Philosophy event

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Critical theory, Music, and Philosophy event

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Hey everyone!
If you're near Antwerp in August, I'm organizing with a colleague a series of talks, concerts and exhibitions throughout the whole month.
We'll have Mladen Dolar and other amazing thinkers! :)

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Here's a freshly published Blog piece written by @Tanzil Ahmed https://gcas.ie/blog/2025/6/19/marxism-without-reading-marx

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Marxism Without Reading Marx — GCAS College Dublin

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This blog entry explores how contemporary elites enact Marxist principles—particularly class struggle—without acknowledging them, as noted by thinkers like Noam Chomsky. It draws on Freud’s concept of disavowal to explain how workers internalize exploitation, often mistaking precarity for freedom. B

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In case any of you have idle time, a colleague and I have started a podcast: The Great Dangerous Books Podcast. https://open.spotify.com/show/5TDFBlrSbgl47PfJEDWIMI?si=da473ac7f5b14bb9

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Very helpful advice from Filippo on writing your master's thesis !

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MA thesis writing workshop, March 12, 2025

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Do not expect too much from the end of the world - by Rado Jude - film trailer

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Do not expect too much from the end of the world - by Rado Jude - film trailer

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A film that has something to say about our modern, post-modern, maybe post-(post?)-modern fate condition situation.

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Filme si scurt metraje romanesti - 4ProofFilm

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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Trailer EN)

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Another very helpful video on doing your master's thesis! -- by Jamie Davies

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MA Writing Workshop Talk  with Jamie Davies, PhD candidate

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Slavoj Žižek on Greece: The Courage of Hopelessness

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Slavoj Žižek on Greece: The Courage of Hopelessness

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Some reflections on 'hopelessness' in the political -- connects to some of Berardi's concept of a political response to the current situation. This was 10years ago during the Greek referendum.

This kind of says a lot about the situation most of us are in - helpless non-existence of some entity that has so much power over us:

"For about five to ten minutes the meeting stopped; clerks, officials were talking to one another on their phones; and eventually some official, some legal expert addressed me, and said the following words: ‘Well, the Eurogroup does not exist in law; there is no treaty which has convened this group.’ So what we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. So no citizen ever knows what is said within . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”: (from the text by Zižek)

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Slavoj Žižek on Greece: The Courage of Hopelessness

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The people of Greece are not being asked to swallow many bitter pills in exchange for a realistic plan of economic revival: they are asked to suffer so that others in the European Union can go on dreaming their dream undisturbed.…

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Shouldn't we indulge in questions that mean the 'quest-fullness'? Let me know what you think about it?

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‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child | Aeon Videos

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‘Can girls be robots?’ ‘Do worms cry?’ ‘Why are some things special?’ A mother collects questions from her curious child

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Fantastic 4-session course on Christian Apocalytic thinking / experience

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Before The Walking Dead, before The Omen, and even before the Book of Revelation, there were prophecies, songs, and stories about the end of the world—tales of fire and renewal, deceivers and saviors, chaos and cosmic judgment.

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A book review of a memoir of one of the most innovative and explosive times in NYC that oscillated beyond the concrete Big Apple jungle of yore!

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Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde-Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
J. Hoberman
Verso Books, 2025

The sixties were a time of seismic revolutions in US society and culture. The particular issues at stake in the sixties remain: extreme racism, increased awareness of humanity's impact on the environment, feminism, gay and trans visibility, censorship, nuclear war-a highly fraught time, then and now. These issues galvanized a myriad of artists to create new forms, new visions. Capitalism, certainly an enemy of sixties counterculture, has only exploded in the decades since, impacting the ability of radical artists to live and speak truth to power. But in the sixties artists could, albeit barely, afford to live as artists. Maybe because of that, artists in the sixties were more effective at confronting their times. This premise guides the history of a sixties US renaissance laid out by J. Hoberman in his expertly researched and gripping historical account Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde-Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.

In the book's introduction, Hoberman writes:

Written in my seventies, Everything is Now is an act of remembrance, underscored by a sense of belatedness. Although too young to have participated in most of these events I evoke, I am old enough to have experienced what might be termed the normalization of cultural craziness that characterized the 1960s. ... Everything is Now is divided into two sections ("Subcultures" and "Counterculture") and organized in eleven more-or-less chronological chapters. Each chapter is broken down into a dozen or so delineated narratives.

The sheer amount of information packed into Everything Is Now can be overwhelming. That's not to say that the experience of reading the book is necessarily unpleasant-rather, Hoberman's book is so dense with facts that it could induce a sort of overstimulation. I noticed on the back cover that a Guardian critic's blurb for The Dream Life, one of Hoberman's previous books, mentioned that it was so "invigorating" that the reader "had to ration [themselves] to a chapter a week." I had a similar experience reading Everything Is Now.

More an intermediate guide to the sixties than a handbook for beginners, the commitment to specifics on display in Everything Is Now is quite commendable. Hoberman intends for the book to be considered as a map: "Paris is filled with plaques marking the former dwelling places of distinguished artists and writers. New York is not, hence my emphasis on specific addresses and locations, often marking buildings that (New York being New York) no longer exist." Hoberman, who was the film critic for the Village Voice from the 1970s until 2012, covers the period of 1958-71 by relying heavily on reportage from the legendary paper, as well as the New York Times, and coverage from critic contemporaries such as Jill Johnston. Just as Cynthia Carr's 2012 biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz told the life story of one artist while also creating a masterful history of 1980s Downtown New York, Hoberman's book paints an all-encompassing picture of a time and place. Each page is its own history lesson, a testament to the ferocity of the era's creative ferment, filled with the ever-evolving goings-on of New York figures like Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and Ornette Coleman. Not only did each of their scenes-cinema, poetry, music-take giant strides into experimentation, but there was also a large confluence of mediums and movements.

Hoberman goes into detail about the folk and jazz scenes of the day, but focuses rather sharply on the rock and roll careers of Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. He writes of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home (1965)that it "not only invented what would be known as folk rock, it out-stoned the Stones, beat the Beatles to put the beat in Beat poetry and, with songs like 'Maggie's Farm' and 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),' took protest into the realm of pataphysics." He later states (in my opinion, somewhat preposterously) regarding Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls and Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, both released the following year, "Warhol would never make a comparable film, nor Dylan a greater album." As for the Velvets, Hoberman recounts that "their set was a form of aesthetic blitzkrieg. The poet John Ashbery ... responded exactly as if someone spiked his martini with LSD: 'I don't understand this at all,' he is said to have cried, bursting into tears." There were rumblings and transformations across genres; jazz groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra took inspiration from the cosmos and consequently sent their listeners on astral trips. But what took place in the realm of rock and roll in the sixties-the deep, confrontational experimentation and its direct impact on audiences and music for generations to come-was unlike anything else. The violin and pounding drums of the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" still gives one chills today.

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J. Hoberman's Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde-Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop | The Brooklyn Rail

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Everything Is Now succeeds in reminding us that although many of the people written about may no longer be around, their work and their actual spirits live on in a real and gratifying way.

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Just ran across this little delicious tidbit by Andy Stapleton - who by the way, as fellow researchers is wonderful at culling and condensing and reviewing a lot of helpful research toold ! -- This video is on Scite which is very helpful it seems for citations!

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Scite AI Just Changed How I Trust Research - And It’s Free (Scite AI Tutorial)

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Amazing online tool for research! : SciSpace

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Another plug for GCAS! -- take a look at Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges's comments on GCAS -

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Pulitzer Prize Recipient, Chris Hedges on GCAS

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This blog post helps clarify the reasons for GCAS and for studying at GCAS if you're thinking about it !

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In a time when billionaires fantasize about immortality, colonizing Mars, and uploading their minds into the cloud, we are witnessing something far more immediate and dangerous: the rise of the nihilistic "tech bro." Cloaked in libertarian rhetoric and venture capital sheen, this figure is not just building apps or founding start-ups-he is reengineering our collective reality, often with reckless disregard for democracy, ethics, or truth. When paired with the exponential development of AI systems, this anti-human ideology is not just reshaping markets; it is undermining the very conditions for critical thinking and human freedom.

AI is not inherently destructive. Like any tool, its impact depends on the intentions and ideologies of those who wield it (and design it). Yet in the hands of a class of Silicon Valley elites-figures who increasingly see themselves as post-political, post-ethical, and even post-human-AI is becoming a weapon, not of mass liberation, but of mass manipulation. These technocrats, wrapped in the language of disruption and efficiency, are using artificial intelligence not to deepen human understanding, but to automate decision-making, exploit behavioral data, and centralize power. Surveillance becomes seamless, nudges replace deliberation, and predictive modeling begins to shape our desires before we can even name them. Their worldview is one of engineered nihilism: reality is reduced to a computational problem to be solved, language is dismissed as statistical noise to be mined and mimicked, and the richness of human subjectivity is flattened into a set of marketable preferences. In this schema, there is no room for ambiguity, contradiction, or the irreducible mystery. It is no accident, then, that these same voices are growing increasingly hostile to philosophy, the humanities, and public institutions. They deride critical thinking as obsolete, view nuance as inefficiency, and interpret dialogue not as a democratic necessity but as a bug in the system. In the name of optimization, they are quietly dismantling the very foundations of a reflective and pluralistic society.

This trend is not occurring in a vacuum. In the United States, the resurgence of authoritarianism-especially under figures like Donald Trump-has accelerated the dismantling of higher education as a space for critical inquiry. The Trump administration's attacks on academic freedom, diversity programs, and critical theory are not isolated moves; they are part of a coordinated campaign to recast education as mere obedience. Imagination, dissent, and depth are being stripped away. Universities are increasingly corporatized, defunded, and transformed into ideological factories, where accreditation serves not as a marker of intellectual rigor but as a rubber stamp for conformity.

And yet, in the face of these converging crises-AI-powered epistemic collapse, anti-intellectual authoritarianism, and the neoliberal colonization of learning-there is another path.

This is where The Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS) enters the frame.

Founded on the principles of debt-free, rigorous, and community-owned education, GCAS offers a radically different vision. We are not beholden to corporate donors, investors, government censorship, or profit motives. Instead, we are a global cooperative of scholars, artists, students, and thinkers committed to fostering the very skills that tech billionaires and strongmen fear most: critical reflection, collective reasoning, and the ability to imagine alternatives.

GCAS is not simply resisting the tides of authoritarianism and technocracy-we are building lifeboats, crafting spaces of refuge, thought, and transformation amidst a rising flood of anti-intellectualism not to mention digital commodification. We are cultivating the kind of accredited education that not only survives under siege but grows stronger through solidarity, mutual aid, and an unwavering commitment to truth. This is not easy, but it is our way. At a time when the neoliberal university is collapsing under its own contradictions-beholden to market metrics, riddled with debt, and stripped of imagination-GCAS offers a bold alternative: a community-owned, debt-free, accredited, and globally accessible institution grounded in the ethics of care and the rigors of critique. Our model protects the humanities not as nostalgic relics, but as the living heartbeat of civilization; it nourishes philosophy not for ornamentation, but as a vital practice of questioning, resisting, and reimagining. We teach psychoanalysis and radical theory not as abstract luxuries, but as essential tools for understanding desire, power, trauma, and the unconscious structures that shape both personal and collective life. In a world increasingly defined by polarization and algorithmic control, we believe that thinking deeply, together, is not a privilege-it is a revolutionary act. GCAS exists not only to endure the storm, but to train a generation capable of reading the weather, building new vessels, and charting new courses toward a freer, more humane future.

If we want to defend truth, justice, and freedom, we must do more than critique the system-we must build institutions that can outlast it.

GCAS is one of those institutions. And in this moment, it matters more than ever.

In a time when billionaires fantasize about immortality, colonizing Mars, and uploading their minds into the cloud, we are witnessing something far more immediate and dangerous: the rise of the nihilistic "tech bro." Cloaked in libertarian rhetoric and venture capital sheen, this figure is not just building apps or founding start-ups-he is reengineering our collective reality, often with reckless disregard for democracy, ethics, or truth. When paired with the exponential development of AI systems, this anti-human ideology is not just reshaping markets; it is undermining the very conditions for critical thinking and human freedom.

AI is not inherently destructive. Like any tool, its impact depends on the intentions and ideologies of those who wield it (and design it). Yet in the hands of a class of Silicon Valley elites-figures who increasingly see themselves as post-political, post-ethical, and even post-human-AI is becoming a weapon, not of mass liberation, but of mass manipulation. These technocrats, wrapped in the language of disruption and efficiency, are using artificial intelligence not to deepen human understanding, but to automate decision-making, exploit behavioral data, and centralize power. Surveillance becomes seamless, nudges replace deliberation, and predictive modeling begins to shape our desires before we can even name them. Their worldview is one of engineered nihilism: reality is reduced to a computational problem to be solved, language is dismissed as statistical noise to be mined and mimicked, and the richness of human subjectivity is flattened into a set of marketable preferences. In this schema, there is no room for ambiguity, contradiction, or the irreducible mystery. It is no accident, then, that these same voices are growing increasingly hostile to philosophy, the humanities, and public institutions. They deride critical thinking as obsolete, view nuance as inefficiency, and interpret dialogue not as a democratic necessity but as a bug in the system. In the name of optimization, they are quietly dismantling the very foundations of a reflective and pluralistic society.

This trend is not occurring in a vacuum. In the United States, the resurgence of authoritarianism-especially under figures like Donald Trump-has accelerated the dismantling of higher education as a space for critical inquiry. The Trump administration's attacks on academic freedom, diversity programs, and critical theory are not isolated moves; they are part of a coordinated campaign to recast education as mere obedience. Imagination, dissent, and depth are being stripped away. Universities are increasingly corporatized, defunded, and transformed into ideological factories, where accreditation serves not as a marker of intellectual rigor but as a rubber stamp for conformity.

And yet, in the face of these converging crises-AI-powered epistemic collapse, anti-intellectual authoritarianism, and the neoliberal colonization of learning-there is another path.

This is where The Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS) enters the frame.

Founded on the principles of debt-free, rigorous, and community-owned education, GCAS offers a radically different vision. We are not beholden to corporate donors, investors, government censorship, or profit motives. Instead, we are a global cooperative of scholars, artists, students, and thinkers committed to fostering the very skills that tech billionaires and strongmen fear most: critical reflection, collective reasoning, and the ability to imagine alternatives.

GCAS is not simply resisting the tides of authoritarianism and technocracy-we are building lifeboats, crafting spaces of refuge, thought, and transformation amidst a rising flood of anti-intellectualism not to mention digital commodification. We are cultivating the kind of accredited education that not only survives under siege but grows stronger through solidarity, mutual aid, and an unwavering commitment to truth. This is not easy, but it is our way. At a time when the neoliberal university is collapsing under its own contradictions-beholden to market metrics, riddled with debt, and stripped of imagination-GCAS offers a bold alternative: a community-owned, debt-free, accredited, and globally accessible institution grounded in the ethics of care and the rigors of critique. Our model protects the humanities not as nostalgic relics, but as the living heartbeat of civilization; it nourishes philosophy not for ornamentation, but as a vital practice of questioning, resisting, and reimagining. We teach psychoanalysis and radical theory not as abstract luxuries, but as essential tools for understanding desire, power, trauma, and the unconscious structures that shape both personal and collective life. In a world increasingly defined by polarization and algorithmic control, we believe that thinking deeply, together, is not a privilege-it is a revolutionary act. GCAS exists not only to endure the storm, but to train a generation capable of reading the weather, building new vessels, and charting new courses toward a freer, more humane future.

If we want to defend truth, justice, and freedom, we must do more than critique the system-we must build institutions that can outlast it.

GCAS is one of those institutions. And in this moment, it matters more than ever.

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How Tech Bro Nihilism and Authoritarianism Threaten Education-and Why GCAS Offers Hope - GCAS College Dublin

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As AI-driven nihilism and authoritarian regimes erode higher education and critical thinking, GCAS offers a bold, cooperative model rooted in human freedom, radical philosophy, and resistance. Learn why institutions like GCAS are essential in defending truth and building a just future.

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Frederic Jameson B-day and books!

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Fredric Jameson | April 14, 1934 - September 22, 2024

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Fredric Jameson contributed some of the most important Marxist cultural criticism of the twentieth century. To honor the great writer’s life, we’ve discounted his titles and encourage everyone to read the works he produced in his 90 years. [book-strip index=“1” style=“buy”]