Difficult books, strange histories, patient thought.
Hermitix treats books as problems to think through, not products to score. Across solo reviews and long interviews, it moves from Crowley, Bachelard, Lacan, medieval gesture, and Nick Land toward larger questions about imagination, madness, ritual, biography, and difficult thought.
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Hermitix is a long-form show for listeners who want criticism to think slowly and in public. Its center is the encounter between books and the larger metaphysical, psychological, and historical questions they drag behind them. A review is rarely just a review. A conversation is rarely only an author interview. Recent episodes move through Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, Gaston Bachelard’s intellectual life, Lacanian approaches to psychosis, Benjamin Saltzman’s work on turning away, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy, JT LeRoy’s Sarah, and a birthday Q&A that folds audience questions into the same restless field of inquiry. The show has a particular gift for making difficult material feel consequential without making it neat. Crowley is approached through fiction, reputation, mysticism, and the desire to understand the man rather than merely repeat the legend. Bachelard becomes a problem of biography, technology, imagination, and intellectual inheritance. Psychosis is discussed through Lacan, Freud, Foucault, Joyce, clinical work, and the possibility of speaking about suffering with warmth. A medieval gesture of aversion opens into art, shame, manuscript culture, and the problem of looking away. The Golden Dawn episode follows occult history through figures such as W.B. Yeats, Florence Farr, A.E. Waite, Arthur Macken, Crowley, Pamela Coleman-Smith, Charles Williams, and Dion Fortune. The Nick Land conversation stays with Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism, AI, and the difficulty of separating philosophy from extremity. Even the JT LeRoy review resists simple scandal framing, reading Sarah through mythology, truck-stop culture, sacred feeling, and transgression. Hermitix is best when it lets hesitation do real work. It circles claims, corrects itself, and allows dense vocabulary to sit beside casual aside. The result is not slick literary coverage. It is a serious, sometimes strange, often demanding record of books treated as living intellectual pressure.
Made for: For listeners drawn to philosophy, occult history, psychoanalysis, weird literature, and criticism that prefers depth over quick recommendation. It suits readers who are comfortable with ambiguity, dense references, and long conversations.
What sets it apart: Hermitix stands apart by treating fringe and difficult texts as serious intellectual worlds rather than curiosities. Its interviews and reviews keep returning to the metaphysical stakes beneath biography, literature, madness, technology, and ritual.
Hermitix is a podcast focusing on one-on-one interviews relating to fringe philosophy, obscure theory, weird lit, underappreciated thinkers and movements, and that which historically finds itself 'outside' the academic canon.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jameshermitix/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hermitixContact: [email protected]
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Hermitix turns difficult philosophy into searching conversation, with James testing how abstract ideas bear on technology, knowledge, madness and spiritual life.
Hermitix builds patient conversations around demanding books and the thinkers behind them. James begins by locating a guest's work, then presses on the concepts that make it difficult: Gunther Anders on technological obsolescence, Gaston Bachelard on knowledge and error, Nick…
Bachelard, Nick Land, Lacan, and spiritual autolysis convene the strangest reading group you've wanted to join.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Unknown Lands gives Land's philosophy a clear, chronological map.
The episode uses Unknown Lands to set out Nick Land's accelerationist philosophy in chronological order, moving from the early papers to the Bataille book and then into the later work.
A thoughtful reading of Sarah's truck-stop mythology, sacred-profane tension, and the J.T. Leroy history.
Sarah, J.T. Leroy's 2000 novel, opens here as a passage into a mythologized truck-stop world, where an aspiring teenage lot-lizard moves through fuel stops, diners, and informal markets.
A loose birthday Q&A that turns listener prompts into candid, self-correcting philosophy.
A birthday Q&A opens with James thanking listeners and paying patrons, mentioning the Jung course, and inviting the room into a loose live exchange.
A severe, searching take on McKenna's trilogy for listeners tired of spiritual answers that arrive prepackaged.
This single-episode review frames Jed McKenna's The Enlightenment Trilogy as a hard test of certainty rather than a source of comfort. The episode begins with McKenna's demand to sit down, shut up, and ask what is true until the answer is known, then treats Spiritual…
A patient conversation about technology, obsolescence, and the uneasy limits of the human.
Gunther Anders's The Obsolescence of the Human arrives as a difficult, idiosyncratic work organized around one sharp problem: technology can make the human being, as a thinking and feeling self, seem practically obsolete.
Bachelard's biography becomes a study of knowledge as inward struggle, with the university waiting at the edge of the argument.
Gaston Bachelard's unease with biography gives this Hermetics Podcast conversation its real pressure. The host speaks with Stephen Connor, whose 2025 book Gaston Bachelard, An Intellectual Biography is presented as the first English biography of Bachelard, and the discussion…
A humane, demanding conversation about psychosis, language, and meanings that can fail under pressure.
Psychosis is framed here as a confrontation with what Lacan calls the real, where ordinary meanings, language, and familiar signifiers can lose their grip.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
Stijn Vanheule discusses his 2024 book 'Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy', which aims to humanize psychosis for families and caregivers.
This episode features an interview with Paul Bishop discussing his book on Jungian analysis of Goethe's Faust as a text of transformation.
This episode features an interview with Bogna Konior about her book 'The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,' which explores theories of intelligence, secrecy, and silence in relation to human and artificial intelligence, drawing inspiration from Liu Xinxin's Three-Body Problem trilogy.
An interview with Christoph Schuringa about his book 'A Social History of Analytic Philosophy', exploring the origins and misconceptions of analytic philosophy beyond traditional figures like Russell and Wittgenstein.
This episode discusses David Lloyd Dusenbury's co-authored piece 'The Era of Recivilization,' exploring the West's choice between liberal de-civilization and re-civilization, drawing on thinkers like Kojève, Hegel, and Fukuyama.
This episode reviews Dennis Cooper's 2004 novel 'The Sluts', focusing on its transgressive themes and an excerpt involving a street hustler named Brad.
Stephen Connor discusses his 2025 book, the first English intellectual biography of Gaston Bachelard.
This episode reviews Aleister Crowley's 1929 novel 'Moonchild', exploring its themes of mysticism and the enigmatic character of the protagonist.
This episode features an interview with Steven Connor about his 2025 book 'Gaston Bachelard: An Intellectual Biography', exploring Bachelard's work, his connection to Michel Serres, and the challenges of writing his biography.
This episode features an interview with Stijn Vanheule about his accessible 2024 book 'Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy', which humanizes psychosis using Lacanian psychoanalysis and offers hope for families and caregivers.
This episode features an interview with Benjamin Saltzman about his book 'Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture', exploring the philosophical and historical dimensions of why humans turn away from suffering and shame.
This episode features an interview with author Felix John Taylor about his new book that provides a narrative history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn through key figures like W.B.
The episode digs into Nick Land's accelerationist philosophy through Vincent Leigh's Unknown Lands, Decoding Nick Land's Accelerationist Philosophy, with the host treating it as a chronological route from the early papers to Land's only book on Bataille and then into the later work.
Hermitix's review of J.T.
James opens on the eve of his birthday.
["Hermitix reviews Jed McKenna's Enlightenment Trilogy, centered on *Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing*, *Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment*, and *Spiritual Warfare*.", "The unnamed host treats McKenna as a pseudonymous anti-guru and argues that the trilogy is aimed at people who have already burned through occultism, dogmatic religion, yoga, and meditation.", "He describes McKenna's method as spiritual autolysis: write down what you know, attack each belief, and keep going until only consciousness remains.", "The review also covers McKenna's dream-state theory, his reading of *Moby-Dick*, and his claim that death, love, and social life look different once the self is seen as fiction."]
It begins with volume one of The Obsolescence of the Human, presented as Anders's magnum opus.