Sugrue has an amazing sense of humor. I’m addicted to these lectures.

You can tell Sugrue had fun with this one. His enthusiasm is infectious!

Watching this was one of the closest things to tripping on mushrooms without eating mushrooms or seeing visuals. I'd recommend this to anyone who can understand any part of it; A++

So, there was someone who thought like me. Thank you, Mr. Sugrue. Wish you endless pleasure, if that means anything to you.

This saved my head from spinning in circles from reading too many research papers on this topic with a short and well versed presentation of what semiotics is. Timeless, thank you.

"Every limitation on human freedom is ultimately a myth!" As amusing as any of your lectures! Barthes' work seems to sway a fine mood.

0:27 Barthes 2:33 Sensitive reading of Mass Culture, De-Mythologizing 3:38 Lonely Ego Liberation 5:25 Meta-Myth, Unmasking Masks all the way down 6:43 Free Play and Complete Control Morbid Sarcastic Whit 7:48 _Mythologies_ 8:34 _Myth Today_ 9:16 Semiotics, Science of Signs 9:48 Internal Coherence 10:39 Non-Euclidean Geometry 11:24 Mass Culture Dress - Form of Speech, Sign, Signals 12:51 Sense of Humor 13:56 Professional Wrestling; The Joy of The Community Spectacle 14:58 Drama started as Ancient/Classic Popular Art 16:17 Detergents Consumer Goods are Fetishized/Iconized/Myth-Filled 18:48 De-Sexualization 19:26 Knowledge Formula in A Box 19:56 Plastic - Infinite Transformation, Infinite Freedom 20:29 Myth misleads, Disguises message Deception steps in to mess with Signs Level 1: Surface Level 22:10 Level 2: Primary Message 22:52 Rambo - American Invincibility in Battle 25:34 Clarity is Self-Delusion, Myth is Substituted for another Myth 26:47 Politicized Speech, De-Mythology is Re-Mythology The Critic Is A Poet 30:45 "How can I maximize my pleasure with regards to the text?" Will To Pleasure over Will To Power over Will To Truth 32:52 33:36 34:46 Secret Algebra is a Myth, We Negated What Made Criticism Possible Criticism Destroys Itself over time + Free Play - Hopeless attempt to Avoid The External World 36:30 Takes the project as far as it can possibly go 37:06 Breakdown of Reality, Self becomes Fragment, Delusion We end up talking to ourselves 38:36 There is No Out 40:12 WE ARE ALL PROFOUNDLY LONELY, IN OUR OWN INDIVIDUAL WORLDS 40:54 Artist/Critic as Dilettante 42:07 Irony until the end, Indulge Pleasure through Full Freedom 43:03 Descartes

Outstanding presentation from the dynamic Dr Sugrue. Barthes was perhaps the hottest thing in the liberal arts departments when I finished my undergrad philosophy degree in 1979.

Feeling appreciative!! Thanks for uploading.

I had to stop the video at 3:19 cuz my heart was pounding like I was at a rock concert. This man is amazing. He exudes balanced intelligence but also personal warmth, a rare combination. I stopped it also so I can go get paper and pencil to take notes. Wow.

New Sugrue drop. Now...my day just got better!

Thanks again Michael! These are very inspiring

Thank you so much dr sugrue and the team

This just put the final touch on my day as Senica would suggest. Thank you Prof Sugrue.

Very glad to have discovered this channel. Excellent.

It's just brilliant, for both the thoughts of Barthes and the presentation by Sugrue.

Have been reading and actually quite fascinated by Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Professor Sugrue’s explanation and interpretation is a great supplement to the reading.

I’m obsessed with these lectures! Watching one a day !

You make us really enjoy Philosophy. Thanks

Oh..my..my. this guy keep slepping with my mind without a condom, mennn!!!. Specially the harmony of the flow of his points

thanks for posting this - one of my fav sugrue lectures

Great lecture. Also, it's fun to listen to this lecture, and every time he says "Barthes", to imagine that he's talking about Bart Simpson.

Listen sir, what a presenter and orator you are! Thank you for the lesson.

The mastery... you've done it again Sugrue, thank you!

Brilliant Lecture !

Hey Michael, been listening on TTC for years. Glad it's up on KZfaq. I am a fellow lecturer and I have always been impressed at how tight all of your lectures are. Anyways the point....... I am a philosophical historian, maybe I dunno......... I also studied a lot of aikido, zen, tai chi, Taoism, western mysticism to the extent that I know that guys used to sit on poles for years at a time ,blah, blah, blah. Anything I have experienced since Nietzsche always sounds like an echo. Modernism, structuralism, post modernism, meta modernism...... It all reminds me of 500BC when their was a Hindu fundamentalist they came along an said identical stuff about the internal and external experience, the nature of reality and gave us our first intellectual mind map for quantum physics. Every hundred years, someone comes along and takes big shots at the old structures and we have to clap and pretend we hadn't heard it before. Who was Buddha ripping off, there was someone

This reading is a description of a true artist-one that is beyond cultural constructions, commodifications and myths and focuses on a radical personal aesthetic.

Amazing lecture so much intelligent sustenance

He is truly a brilliant teacher. One of the specific aspects of his talks that I love is his frequent allusions to the influence of Kant.

At times, the main point being come to feels almost like a punchline grounded in truth. I can laugh at the epiphanies. Damn I love these lectures. Thanks again, Dr. Sugrue.

Very interesting - always enjoy his insightful lectures - powerful energy

Brilliant. This puts a lot of Postmodernism in perspective for me.

What an interesting lecture! 😮 TY

Thank you.

Thanks 👍 mucho. Lovely lecture....everytime I listen to this - I gain more - one more "mask" or myth dissolved - loved the idea of Pleasure Aesthete and the living in the labyrinth...THIS IS IT...stuggled for years to locate Barthes and this one hour - liberated my mind - thanks again...totally de-mythologised

Thank You!

Fascinating 🌹

This man is doing the lord's work 🙏🏾 thank you for this video, thank you Barthes, and THANK you Dr. Sugrue

I really enjoyed it. I will watch more of his. When I stumble across some lectures.. I watch one i know a lot about (Roldand Baths) , see if they are on the money ..If they are, I watch more. This guy is on the money

insightful at it's core

Superbe as always.

thank you. i love this lecture.

Thank you

If the pleasure principle replaces the reality principle, then we are ultimately talking about narcissistic personality disorder (me, me, me, and my freedom to pleasure myself with all the activities that I find pleasurable). And whenever a narcissist withdraws from the external world, he quickly learns that there is no "me, myself, and I", that without the external and the social, the human being is empty, fragmented. And right after that, he is reminded that you can't wish reality away, no matter how good you are at criticizing it.

Such a great lecture! Now I’ve got to read all of Roland Barthes’ books

I just cannot believe that he did this without notes. Rest in peace.

I can tell he really likes Barthes. It's great to see

Thank you! Such an amazing lecture it really helped me understand deconstructionism

Incredible

Barthes in brief- Everything has too many meanings to be interpreted with clarity. In fact clarity is non-existent. So, I choose to create my own meaning. If I wish to see black as white, so I will. That makes me happy! Therefore, to be happy, one must be free- free to define and interpret sadness as happiness, criminal as a victim, solid as liquid, science as myth, reason as superstition, love as hate, death as birth, end as beginning, anything. How does it matter so long as it makes oneself happy?

I believe it was Daedalus that designed the Labyrinth & Theseus who found his way out of it guided by Ariadne's thread.

“Time is the moving picture of reality “

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

Is it weird that I totally hear Jeff Goldblum's voice sometimes while listening to these?

One might with good cause refer the introductory phrase “The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition” to Dr. Sugrue.

This reminded me of my Bachelor Project as a student photographer. I made photographs of basically everything that interested me and made me point my camera to it: plastic, advertising, snapshots from being on the road, textures,... It became a visual diary without a clear narrative. My teachers would ask me why I took a cropped picture of a tree trunk, or a facade, why they were all so greyish, and at the time I felt very nihilistic, depressed, and I answered I really didn't care because they would adhere their own meaning to them anyways, regardless of what I had to say. Even more, I had nothing to say. It was an acceptance of defeat that I couldn't understand the world through art, because art is merely a representation of my reflection upon the world. They didn't accept that, because nowadays (2010-...), art is romantic again. So I failed and never got a degree. However, I was taught by those same teachers that Barthes was someone very important to art theory, so seeing this makes me wonder if they failed themselves, by failing me.

Barthes who wrote about laundry detergent was hit by a laundry truck while walking home and later dying from his injuries.

Is this an early incarnation of critical theory which honors the critic as equal to the artist or doer? Teddy Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whos face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

11:35 semiotic analysis 19:52 postmodernism

Clifford geertz, Lou's althusser, Stuart hall, Birmingham school...please

“We are all under influence by a sort of disguised coercion.” 100% accurate This concept it actually hilarious at surface level, yet very stimulating intellectually with a lot of truth at its core. Talk about thinking outside of the box.. wait a minute 🤔 what does that *mean* ?

Actually helped me figure out where Derrida was coming from

I would like to know, in which year was this lecture given?

Does Sugrue have any lectures on Derrida?

17:39 this *

Dr. Sugrue does a beautiful job, very smart, well organized, engaging. I will indulge myself here, nevertheless, and suggest that pretty much all these thinkers are triumphing over very stupid opponents, i.e, Organized Religion, The Patriotic State, Mass Ideologies, Status Hierarchies, Capitalism and Advertising, and so forth. Most intelligent and honest people can see the truth without the discourse of philosophy. And yet stupidity wins in the long run, doesn't it?

Is there a part two or do all the videos end abruptly?

I understand Badiou better now, because it's clear what problem he's trying to solve. The author is dead, there are bodies and languages and texts, but still there is truth which erupts in the real world and determines the validity of interpretations

I think a part of us always considers a deeper meaning but we’ve learned to ignore it and go with the advertising.

"No French intellectual would leave a clique except to join another clique" - Mary McCarthy

Any object, any idea, anything, can mean absolutely anything else. That sentence changed my life. That's all you to know about philosophy.

I could watch a whole video of him saying “mmkay, *sips water*, alright, noww..” 😂 Thank you so much Mr.Sugrue, you ARE a great man, may you rest in peace. 🙏🏼

Professor Sugrues passing is a tragedy. I feel now that the world has become a lesser place.

This reminds me of the show Mad Men

Wheres the lecture on Deleuze

In the end, it's just Me and My Shadow.

13:37 "from surface structure to deep structure..." Golly, I would have never taken Barthes for a covert Chomskyan (esp. given Chomsky's hostility to structuralism and also semiotics)!

“Plastic is infinite freedom, infinite transformation”.

This being a lecture on Semiotics with a Gryffindor prominently displayed, I really want to know what year this is from.

It’s crazy how un-revolutionary and familiar this whole lecture sounds today

What does he mean when he says "Cartesian principle"?

Reasoning

These comments on Plastic are pretty much identical to Advaita Vedanta analogies like gold being able to be made in to anything but still being gold or a wave still being part of the ocean.

Are these back to back lectures or does Sugrue only have one outfit?

Technically, America did not "lose" the Vietnam War, in the sense of suffering decisive defeat in the field; rather, the intuition of Ho Chi Minh and his followers was vindicated: once enough blood had been exacted, the American will to fight was broken, and she gave up.

The laundry van is the key.

who is this "gotomer" referred to at 25:16 ??

Maybe.

42:00

❤

35 minutes into this talk, when I realized I own that same jacket.

30:01

Nietzsche was not ‘anti-semite’; instead, he was a strong ‘anti-anti-semite’ to the extent that he severed his ties and friendship with the composer Richard Wagner who was a fervent anti-semite. With Schopenhauer, Wagner was one the ‘idols’ of Nietzsche, but because of the antisemitism of Wagner, Nietzsche moved away from Wagner, and this painful ending of his relationship with Wagner would become one of the pillars of the foundations of the existential turmoil that underlines his philosophical theory. The accusation of Nietzsche as antisemite stems from the unfortunate handling of his entire work after his death by his sister Elizabeth, a German nationalist and antisemite who edited and manipulated most of Nietzsche’s texts and made them available to the Nazis ( see Sue Prideaux’s book “I Am Dynamite: A life of Nietzsche” and “Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Rudiger Safranski). Hence, ironically Nietzsche became victim of one of the fundamental concept and idea of his own theory: “the fundamental power of ‘interpretation’.”

18:36 big don drap energy here

19:52 "Destroy the brain and break the box, that's postmodernism".. what a terrifying observation!

To be superficial, when were these videos made?

11:26 MTV is extremely powerful semiotics system

Good lectures and very informative, but I'm guessing they were made no later than the early Nineties. His pop culture references are quite dated.

Daedalus constructed the labyrinth, Ariadne + Theseus found a way out.

37.51 , dr sugrue paused and looked for a word 😂