The Unrendered Self

The Deeper Thinking Podcast 

What happens to the self when even absence becomes a kind of presence? In this episode, we examine the quiet erosion of identity under conditions of constant visibility. This is not about digital detox or offline escape—it’s about the deeper structural shift where reflection becomes performance, privacy becomes signal, and being becomes something that must be rendered to be real.

We explore how the self survives—or doesn’t—amid an economy of attention that cannot tolerate ambiguity. Drawing on Simone Weil’s ethics of attention, Gloria Anzaldúa’s defence of contradiction, and Roland Barthes’s concept of the neutral, the episode traces the contours of presence without performance. We also touch on Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity and Hannah Arendt’s space of appearance to imagine what it means to remain unrendered—felt but uncaptioned, real but unreadable.

This is not an elegy for privacy—it is a meditation on presence without proof. A quiet reclaiming of the unspoken, the unperformed, the unnamed self. The one who listens but does not post, who thinks but does not narrate, who exists in the opacity we are no longer taught to value.

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To be unrendered is not to vanish—but to resist conversion into content.

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