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Sigmund Freud died in Hampstead on 23 September 1939, after his physician Max Schur kept a promise made eleven years earlier. Augustus was born in Rome on 23 September 63 BC and died, Suetonius says, the easy death he had prayed for. Two lives that ended on their own terms, and two accounts of those endings argued over ever since.
Sigmund Freud
The claim that platforms expose a society's collective unconscious is unfalsifiable and unnecessary. A smaller claim survives contact with the evidence, and it is the more disturbing one: what billions of small reactions register is not what a society hides, but what its ranking systems can be made to select for.
Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Rancière, Émile Durkheim, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord
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Louis Althusser built the concept of interpellation to protect a scientific reading of 'Capital'. The science was abandoned; the street scene went everywhere. A reckoning with what survives, what does not, and the killing that the profession spent forty years learning how to describe.
Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser
The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.
David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze
Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.
Byung-Chul Han, Nick Land, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze
He is the most visible living philosopher in the world and among the most routinely dismissed, and the same habits explain both. Underneath the jokes there is a theory of belief, a reconstructed Lacan and a Hegel who never reaches reconciliation — and a record of political misjudgement that his defenders too often skip.
Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Alenka Zupančič, Peter Sloterdijk
Seyla Benhabib was born on 9 September 1950 and this year takes both the Johan Skytte Prize and the Karl Jaspers Prize. Jacques Lacan died on the date in 1981, John Passmore was born on it in 1914 and Paul Goodman in 1911 — four thinkers on what a person is made into.
Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Malabou, Alenka Zupančič, Seyla Benhabib
Iulia Nistor's new book treats horror films not as a genre to be catalogued but as a means of philosophical thought. Her question is why anyone should choose to watch the thing that frightens him. The answer runs from Aristotle's catharsis to Kant's sublime and Kristeva's abject.
The Slovenian philosopher's collection of essays on authoritarianism packaged in the language of the free market has been published. The second book arrives on 29 October 2026.
Slavoj Žižek
