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The Kingless Generation

The Kingless Generation

Fergal Schmudlach 89 Episodes Aug 18, 2026

A podcast exploring the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. It delves into the hidden narratives of power and resistance throughout human history.

Episodes

Dethrone the Dictaphone
Dethrone the Dictaphone Aug 18, 2026 1:42:41 A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as performed in Japanese in air-conditioned chambers surrounded by hordes of shrink-wrapped Teslas on reclaimed land developed Tel Aviv–style in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
An Infant ‘West’ meets a Middle-Aged ‘East’ [PREVIEW]: Galland’s retelling of Shams-al-Nahār & Ibn Bakkār (1704–1717)
An Infant ‘West’ meets a Middle-Aged ‘East’ [PREVIEW]: Galland’s retelling of Shams-al-Nahār & Ibn Bakkār (1704–1717) Aug 11, 2026 33:39 In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nearest Afro-Asiatic merchant-capitalist great power as a different , “eastern” civilization whose cultural products must be held at arm’s length and ethnographically explained—rather than adopted wholesale without comment, as storie
Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42)
Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42) Aug 4, 2026 1:29:48 In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the formation of the discipline of Anglophone Japan studies under the influence of Francophone Arabology, we explore this same tale in the nineteenth-century colonial-era British-Indian edition of the now much expanded and more textually ba
Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights
Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights Jul 28, 2026 46:08 I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this earliest available Arabic manuscript tradition, a meta-narrative device whereby first-person interviews wit
1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance
1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance Jul 21, 2026 1:05:29 One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would be the neglect which the 1,001 Nights has suffered in literary scholarship. Everything I can find in E
Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)...
Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)... Jun 24, 2026 47:31 In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and otherwise psycho-entrepreneurially aufgehoben into various other cultic milieux just as our current mom
Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives
Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives Jun 10, 2026 1:20:23 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists
Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists May 29, 2026 35:12 More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a rival to many in the Eranos crowd who critiqued their Aryo-heroic, Christian-Kabbalist, and I would say satanic-orientalist project from the outside. He got a professorship at the University of Palermo on sheer merit despite bein
Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives
Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives May 20, 2026 1:12:11 From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in the yearly gatherings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem, known as Eranos and organized by the wealthy socialite and occultist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn at a lakeside res
(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England
(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England May 7, 2026 44:27 We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious, cryptographic, and financial antics in the bazaars and marketplaces of West Eurasia, Africa, and the European Ummah,
(15)90s Kids Know: Lizzie’s bois, overture
(15)90s Kids Know: Lizzie’s bois, overture Apr 10, 2026 1:05:01 Building on our discussion of the Water Margin (the most important surviving versions dating to the 1590s), we go “back”—notice the scare quotes!—to what is usually at least passively assumed to be the source of the culture of capitalist modernity, merry aul England. What we will find, of course, is that we need to re-orient our view of the birth of modern capitalism along the lines long establish
Casual chat, core content [PREVIEW]
Casual chat, core content [PREVIEW] Apr 10, 2026 40:22 I swore I wasn’t going to do a chatty one but rather a hard core cultural-historical content for the next premium episode, but I just gave myself podcaster’s block again as I have several irons in the fire none of which feels quite ready. But so much has been happening in the world that I just had to sit down and catch up, so here’s a good old podcast hug, and in fact I feel like it turned out to

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