Is it time to panic? In this episode, we invite rhetorician Ira Allen to the bar to explore the possibility that, yes, it might be—and that panic isn’t just an irrational breakdown but a vital, even necessary, affective response to the ongoing collapse we’re all living through. Allen’s recent book Panic! Now: Tools for Humanizing in an Age of Staggered Collapse challenges the neoliberal injunction to “stay calm” and instead asks what might be made possible if we allowed ourselves to feel—and live with—our panic.

Together with co-hosts Leigh Johnson, Talia Bettcher, and Rick Lee, Allen traces how the overlapping crises of climate change, late capitalism, and colonial legacies (what he dubs the “CaCaCo assemblage”) have produced a collective emotional numbness, even as our world becomes increasingly uninhabitable. The conversation ranges from the epistemic realism of panic, to historical insights on military discipline, to a speculative politics of reorganization rooted in solidarity, care, and a radical openness to the more-than-human world.

Equal parts sober analysis and mischievous wordplay (yes, CaCaCo is a “shit company”), this episode offers listeners a profound reframing of emotional collapse not as weakness, but as a portal to collective possibility. Whether you’re already living in the slow burn of existential dread or just now starting to smell the smoke, you won’t want to miss this disarmingly hopeful invitation to “panic wisely.”

References and Further Reading

• Ira Allen, Panic! Now: Tools for Humanizing in an Age of Staggered Collapse (University of Tennessee Press, 2023)

• Christopher Basgier, “How to Panic Judiciously: An Interview with Ira Allen” (2024)

Key Theoretical Influences

• Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)

• Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (2003)

• Carl Schmidt, The Concept of the Political  (1932)

Collapse, Climate, and CaCaCo

• Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

• Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

• Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021)

• Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021)

Affect, Panic, and Political Emotion

• Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)

• Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, No. 31 (1995): 83–109.

• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Philosophy & Speculative Realism

• Timothy Morton,  Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)

• Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (2015)