Episode notes
On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the recently concluded first season of Apple's Pluribus . Taking on the ideas of duration, repetition, alienation, and isolation presented by the show, the hosts analyze how Pluribus delivers a fascinating treatment of life under contemporary capitalism. The hosts foreground how Pluribus dramatizes the tension between the group and the individual, a deftly staged dynamic that recalls a fundamental psychical torsion that psychoanalysis has long concerned itself with.
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Why Theory
Why Theory · Film & TV · English
Why Theory brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena.
More from Why Theory All episodes →
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15 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 28 min
Rob Reiner: An Overview
On this episode, Ryan and Todd take a short break from their Kant Odyssey to discuss one of the podcast's most admired filmmakers: Rob Reiner. Coincidentally being released on Oscar's Sunday, the hosts dedicate their time to Reiner's first seven films-- This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, and A Few Good Men. While discussing each film individually, the pair articulate and build upon the following claim: the same things that made Reiner unique as a filmmaker were the exact same things that made him easy to overlook as an auteur.
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2 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
Transcendental Deduction (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason)
On this episode, Ryan and Todd cover the next major idea in Kant's first critique: the transcendental deduction. While explicating the trajectory of Kant's argument, the pair continue to track the latent and manifest influence of this section on Fichte, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and Lacan. Later, they try to bring film examples to bear on this section of Kant--including the stark difference between the A and B sections of the text.
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15 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 14 min
Transcendental Aesthetic (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason)
On this episode, Ryan and Todd return to Kant and discuss the Transcendental Aesthetic from his Critique of Pure Reason. The hosts work through a sketch of Kant's idea, why he's proposing it, and why even the form of its argumentation is significant for the history of philosophy. The hosts also work over the influence of this section on Heidegger and propose a possible influence on Freud. Later the pair try to mobilize Kant's conception of time and space through pop culture example which is often seen in psychoanalytic treatments of Freud and Lacan (and even some with Hegel) but much less…
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1 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
Superegoic Enjoyment
On this episode, Ryan and Todd return to the topic of the superego to discuss--for the first time at length--the enjoyment particular to it. Superegoic enjoyment is an idea that first appears in Freud though it is not fully developed as a concept until Lacan (briefly) and Žižek (massively). For Žižek, transgression of the written law enables the group identification with a suspension of the law. This is crucial to the superegoic enjoyment we see in, for example, the banality of breaking the speed limit and the horror of militarized police brutally suppressing a protest movement under special…
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19 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 16 min
Structural Violence
On this episode, Ryan and Todd cover the topic of structural violence in both U.S. and global contexts. Beginning with an implicit debt to Slavoj Žižek's influential book Violence, the hosts move to clarify the idea as how unwritten dictates of oppression sustain themselves through their being unwritten Where it is easier to see the violence of a thrown punch, for example, structural violence is the invisibility structuring why the punch was thrown. Visible violence often hides its less visible structuring force. For this reason, the hosts discuss the difficulty of depicting structural…
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21 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 21 min
Millennium Christmas
On this year’s exploration of the Christmas film genre, Ryan and Todd look to three films from the early-2000s: The Family Stone , Love Actually , and The Family Man (but not Elf , to one host’s disappointment). The hosts theorize two core concepts across these films and, by extension, the Christmas films they have covered in general: deepening the cut in the family dynamic to integrate an antagonism and a Christmas articulation of Shakespeare’s Green World (a concept famously developed by Northrop Frye). The hosts layer these new ideas atop prior Christmas film genre concepts such as the…
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7 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 12 min
The Episode
On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the episode--a fading television art. Beginning with a brief history of what early American Broadcasting aestheticized about television as form (e.g., its liveness), the hosts theorize the unique cut of the television episode, an analysis typically reserved for film media. The cut has been aesthetically mobilized by television (as seen in the banal yet artistically fruitful breaks for commercials), though it is precisely this cut dimension of television that is currently being lost in favor of cliffhanger heavy models of recent streaming television…
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23 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 15 min
Lacan's Seminar 19: ...or Worse
In this episode, Ryan and Todd continue their commentaries on Jacques Lacan's seminars by turning their attention to Seminar XIX: ...or Worse. Lacan deepens his consideration of the non-relation in this seminar, further breaking from the signifying chain that had defined much of his earlier and middle work. Lacan also turns more toward mathematics and set theory to ground his discursive inquiry, which requires him to articulate a seemingly new notion of the real. Ultimately, the hosts try to draw out the consequences and coordinates of these dynamic moves in Lacan's late work. Relevant…
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9 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 16 min
Lacan's Seminar 18: On a Discourse...
On this episode, Ryan and Todd continue their series of commentaries on Lacan's Seminars, this time bringing their attention to Seminar XVIII: On a Discourse that Might not Be a Semblance , which was recently published in an official English translation by Bruce Fink for Polity . The hosts work through the stakes and questions of this "morning after" seminar for Lacan's toward the quadratic formulation of the Four Discourses that will define his late work. Ultimately, the hosts see a stark break in the non-relation developed and insisted upon in XVIII from the signifying chain that had…
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26 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 12 min
Voice
In this episode, Ryan and Todd complete their Gaze & Voice duology. While gaze & voice both enter into psychoanalytic theory as objects through Lacan's work at the same time, voice has received less critical attention since. The hosts put voice through a theoretical wringer, analyzing it at the levels of everyday life, aesthetics, and politics. Ultimately, the episode takes up the question of whether and to what extent voice can be mobilized as an emancipatory political concept.
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