Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast

0:00-8:50 – Intro; §2 “Intellectual Conscience” ; My questioning, my certainty, my injustice.

8:50-28:30 – The instinct to evaluate; The art of questioning; The mystical allure of authorial intention; the inadequacy of quantification, the absurdity of grading, and other equivalences

28:40-39:45 – Back to the intellectual conscience; reading for understanding? lol; teaching bad (?) movies; §3 “Noble and Common” ; Tyranny of the instrumental; Wait, was it a bad movie?

39:50-46:30 – Diagnostic of dispositions; §14 “The Things People Call Love” ; Common desire for possession; Noble desire for transformation; Nathaniel makes it about Phaedrus again; the eternal injustice of the noble

46:30–55:15 – Varieties of elitism: Joe Rogan  

55:25–1:10:50 – No evil can harm the species; test case: Jordan Peterson; teachers of purpose and corrective laughter; the perspective of life; the future of laughter: the gay science

0:00–5:20 – Pedagogical query: “Why can’t white dudes follow simple instructions?” 

5:20–18:50 – Intro to the new season; Structure of the book, tone, question of completeness, title: gay, joy, queer? 

19:00–34:55 – Philosophy’s blind pursuit of truth, value of the veil with nothing behind it, philosophy and health, the careful art of not knowing – Serena Williams example: the context is not separable from the content – Nate’s angry dissertation 

35:00–36:40 – Distance and Superficiality “The Greeks were superficial out of profundity.” 

37:50–47:40 – Different kinds of superficiality; Fighting to win? Sisyphus’s new rock.

47:45–1:01:25 – Pedagogy, distance, middle ground. Is this philosophy or art? Bad question. Is teaching a matter of speed and proximity? 

1:01:30–1:11:10 – Method for engaging The Gay Science this season. Reading, content, text. Who knows where it will take you? You can’t know – except maybe Hegel, somehow.

In this ep, we discuss Derrida's "White Mythology." 

Some themes and talking points: 

- metaphor as an organizing principle of philosophy

- how to ground or "unground" a philosophical system

- catachresis vs metaphor

- Hegel vs Derrida 

- Heidegger's nostalgia 

In this ep, we talk through Derrida's essay, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Much of this episode is dedicated to teasing the orientational differences between Hegel and Derrida, as well as the difficulties and affordances, generally, of the post-Hegelian project. 

In this episode, we discuss Derrida's essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play." 

Topics covered include: 

- the relationship between ethnocentrism and metaphysics

- our culpability in metaphysical structures of engagement

- Derrida’s version of rigor in critical theory

- Derrida’s treatment of Levi Strauss

- the limits of deconstruction

- the bricoleur vs engineer

- the relation between contingency and universality

In this episode, we talk through Derrida's "Signature Event Context," which is primarily a reading and extension of J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words. Our conversation covers, among other things, Derrida's notion of iterability, Austin's concepts of performativity and illocutionary force, the Searle vs. Derrida exchange, and the desire for truth and certainty in philosophy. 

First ep of 2023! We took a lil break for the holidays. In this ep, we're talking about Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" again, among other things. Good episode -- no effort in the episode description.

In this episode, Nathaniel, John, and Nate talk through the first half of Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy." 

In this episode, we talk through the first 25 pages of Derrida's Of Grammatology: 

- the primacy of writing 

- embeddedness of metaphysics 

- who needs Saussure anymore? 

- signifiers, signifieds, and signifier/signifieds 

- writing instruction as constitutively theological