The Shadow and the Self

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

This episode explores the shadow not as pathology, but as method—a recursive structure of return that challenges what we know about selfhood, truth, and coherence. What happens when we stop fleeing the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled? When we no longer moralise discomfort, but attend to it? The shadow is not a flaw—it is an epistemic threshold. A way of listening to what the psyche does not yet know how to say.

Drawing on thinkers like Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Martha Nussbaum, the episode reframes shadow work as a philosophical commitment to remain—near contradiction, near discomfort, near what cannot be resolved. Through this lens, care becomes structure, silence becomes data, and philosophy returns to its ethical origin: presence.

As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, contradiction is not a threat to meaning, but its condition. And Judith Butler shows that vulnerability is not the end of thought, but its ground. The essay resists closure, avoids performance, and invites something rarer: to think as an act of fidelity, to feel as a form of recognition, to remain—not to resolve.

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