00:30 – 1:55 Gay Science Book 5 (which we hardly mention)

2:05 - 30:00   the recurring end-of-semester dilemma; applying a policy vs. making a decision; “fairness” as a way to avoid making a decision?; the desire for a calculus; Nate tries to make John feel better; absolving oneself of the responsibility of a decision; the architecture of the teaching situation is messy; accommodations and their discontents

30:30 – 45:20   diff between private and public college demographics and the way it impacts a teacher’s jobs – their real lives are heavy; vs. University’s endowment; sports as the college opiate; smaller teacher/student ratios; we need the policies to offload responsibility (for the sake of health); the calculus is also a leap of faith; probability; why do we do this job? Is it just who we are?; arguing for the nobility of our teaching and writing: to create a different world; attentiveness to alterity might be the same as anxiety?

45:30 – 55:10    Finally turn to Nietzsche? section 327; to prove the prejudice of sincerity wrong – don’t have to be “serious” to be a thinker; why do we connect learning to seriousness? It is not a necessary link; the importance (sic?) of laughter to N’s thinking: “at any master who lacks the grace to laugh at himself, I laugh”; not every teacher is a teacher for us;  the mission as emergent;

55:25 -  1:14:30 section 335-there are many styles to listen to one’s conscience; 334-love itself must be learned, generosity and patience toward what is strange - and you must be willing to change;  not just acceptance; graduate teaching is so much more interesting because it happens over years rather than weeks; responsibility is not a weight but the fun part; the delight of misunderstanding; 339 – life is dissimulation and uncertainty, and if you are patient and generous, it can be wonderful; affirmative Nietzsche vs. nihilist and gloomy; the importance of writing to a posthumous audience

Gay Science – Book 4 continued

00:30-3:30

Quitting tobacco and scotch (or not);

3:38-13:45

Like the stoics; 308 – advice vs. diagnostics (both are actions); 301 and 306 – no blanket advice, it always depends on the style of life involved

14:00-28:45

Amor fati – enduring vs. affirming fate; not acceptance (of being) – the diagnostic move is the advice; just different types of life; 307 – not reason first and then will, we needed our errors; active forces shedding skin – in favor of criticism; negation as shedding; pre-conscious negation in Hegel?; viewing someone negatively as a symptom of a disposition (not what leads you to a disposition); not getting better (not climbing ladder), but different; Our reasons are symptoms not the basis for decisions; Booboo’s prior frustration with Barad and its change; messier than just skin shedding or contradiction; a person is always multiple

29:00-36:30

281, knowing how to end, geologyincluded; not a metaphor?; living in Genoa as a pedagogy; monkeys anticipating storms; Ns fascination with all different modes of life

36:45 – 42:40

312-314 nudging trajectories;footnote to 311, the sweet rapport of stranger; not conflict avoidance or politeness

42:45 – 58:30

341 – eternal return – cosmological principle? existentialtest? Return of the same or difference – ontological “test”?;  related to affirmation? In N, nothing is identical to itself, so… ; what I am willing is the return of difference (or the relation); isn’t time at stake too?; “the autopoiesis of natural laws” – panic attack thought; Dead End’s favorite thought – is thinking the return of the same (as singularity)? Return as the being of becoming. Re-turning, turning again.

Episode 9 – The tone of affirmative thinking

Gay Science Book 4

00:30-12:40

Nietzsche’s affirmative direction; 276; 307; reason is a symptom of a way of life; 278 – how great that we aren’t always honest, esp about death; 289

12:50-

a delight in the prospect of becoming; joy of philosophizing as the production of new ways of living; 324 life as an experiment; not redemption – to see what is necessary as beautiful; not arguing against, but situating your ‘opponent’ within your narrative; concepts have different senses; cultivating the capacity to sense; thinking as therapeutics; life is not endurance for N – some fresh air into philosophy; Ns health

27:30-46:00

295 - Brief habits; Endurance is heavy; amor fati; BooBoo misses disc golf; do different stuff; put onself in situations that can induce dispositional shifts; Deleuze’s refrain; repetition and speeds and slowness; breaking stability vs figuring out how things are ever stable; become suspicious of unity of anything; academic freedom is unprecedented (this was 2024 btw); capitalism and subjectivity; nietzsche vs. marx;

46:00-1:01:01

Existence of embattled humanities has always been the case; whats a worthy enemy?; to criticize is to honor (for some); straw-manning; learning to not have a position on something; teaching as the way to learn – liking what you teach; generosity is more interesting; harold bloom; teaching the cognitivists; Habermas; a method for teaching generous responses to texts; different styles of life

1:01:10-1:17:00

282 the stride of thinking; teaching as installing a speed of thinking and writing; modulating speed; conversations are too fast; writing thinking; slogans; teaching as entertainment; booboo’s pedagogy; teaching strategies; being open but decisive

Episode 8 - The Smell of Thinking

End of Book3

00:30 - 4:00  section 213 cause and effects - cause is added later as an intervention;  

4:00 - 18:15

Reading the short maxims vs. reading aphorisms; teaching. Section 192 on good natured people, Section 193 on Kant, section 195 - distilled. Like kafka short stories; section 152 on different colors; diagnosing styles of life; changing questions - ontology is still a style question; reality-making intervention; ethics v ontology: N solves the Heidegger/Levinas conundrum

18:20 -34:50

Learning to hear religion differently (not as dishonest); transcendence sounds like life-hating; interpretation of the world as bad is what makes the world bad; John believes that nothing is necessarily anything; BooBoo’s resentment is to blame for this podcast; the smell of thinking; education as movement without a telos (not growth but transformation); intelligence is really about the capacity to learn/change, not about knowing; is this just a new learning outcome? Critical thinking; 

34:55 - 53:05

Nietzsche’s perspectivalism; 159-160; a non-human sense of agency/context; 177 laughter as a means of education and 200; this is a book on pedagogy; learning environments are all seriousness: “fuck those fuckers”; BooBoo’s joy; camel, lion, and child from Zarathustra; 324 en media vita; thinking is itself an activity, an experiment; Nietzsche as the teacher of laughter

53:10-end

Asymptotic relations - without any failure/truth; specificity is not on the way to truth but creating more points of contact; “truth” can serve to increase exposure; cutting vs. clarity; “suffering” fools; Cogito, the outside as an intrusion - discovering something other than endurance; sovereignty as promising to make the future; promise as object of affirmation (rather than obligation); compliments as dismissal?; teaching evals;

Book 3 (again)

0- 3:15 Bad intros

3:20 - 16:00

Nietzsche’s materialist comedy; section 124 - the infinite;  panic attacks - cognitive models vs. affective experiential; subjectivity; thinking as terror/comfort; what meaningless means; 

16:00 - 39:20

section 143: advantages of polytheism; vs. monotheism; agonism vs. true/false; section 149 Plato and Pythagoras as failed founders of religions; the conditioning of “the people”; biodiversity; “it wasn’t me. god did it through me”; the alleged fragmentation of contemporary society; multiple monotheisms? polytheism and monarchy/monarchies; John is skittish about all transcendence;  different orientations to difference (pluralism v dogmatism); 

39:30 - 58:20

Rome vs. Judea; imperialism and religion; is science monotheistic?; absolutist responses to COVID; the CDC couldn’t be provisional; polytheism as just a moment without a dominant monotheism; experimental science seems to potentially lead toward overman also - despite piety and fealty

§108-125

0- 3:00 Podcasting and Romance; new intros; 

3:00- 22:40

Book 3 Gay Science §108— The Death of God; theology of atheism; §109 anthropomorphism and will to power; the need for error life v knowledge ; §110

22:42 - 41:55

John’s “famous” saber tooth tiger anecdote; the recurring problem of identification; thinking was/is risky; perceiving complexity dangerous for life; the advantage of unjust and coarse perception (errors); at some historical, slow cautious thoughtful judgment ALSO became advantageous for life, Socrates as inverted instinct; disputation is not conversation

41:55 - 57:00

Nietzsche’s interpretive historicism; section 113 - doctrine of poisons; when will artistic energies join with science; is it like Hegelian history? Multiplicity and negation; Booboo agrees to write the Hegel v Nietzsche book

0:00–14:25

The sections on “woman” are not distinct from the rest of the book; §68 “Will and Willingness” §64 “Skeptics” superficiality of existence ; the feminine operation and the body marked by the feminine operation.

14:30–36:20

John’s writing project ; maybe these aphorisms are more interesting now? §74 “The Unsuccessful” and §75 “The Third Sex” ; Kaufman can’t handle it anymore ;  §80 “Art and Nature” the fantasy of good speech and the self-controlled cogito ; are we talking about Platonic ideals when we talk about woman as a “ship at a distance”? ; the prospect of metaphysics ; coordinating these aphorisms “on woman” with the rest of the book ; §59 “We Artists,” woman, god, and property.

36:20–60:00

The multiplicity of misogyny ; Nietzsche is a strange pathway by which to engage feminism;  Beyond surfaces and depths (or between them); why gender is impossible to think and why that’s important; politics vs. metaphysics; deconstructive feminism; the political conditions for thinking; the #FigureItOut movement; exceptions and institutions; honoring Sinèad. 

0:00–22:30

What does The Gay Science have to do with rhetoric? ; §57 “To the Realists”, §58 “Only as Creators”, §59 “We Artists” ; our drunken passion for reality and reason ; our ridiculous desire to transcend reality ; creation, destruction, and the insanity of maintenance ; is there a political valiance to this dynamic? §76 “The Greatest Danger” ; the dangers of the exception and the rule ; what happens when “the exception” wears tin foil hats and joins the tea party? ; Is this dichotomy too clumsy?  

22:30–31:50

Complicating Nietzsche’s argument about “truth and lying in a nonmoral sense” ; the active power of rhetoric to “make equal,” which is always a verb and never a noun ; constructivism is an “ism,” not a thing – always the activity of formation ; John wonders why Nathaniel’s brain is in the 12th century ; repetition of difference ; the fascism of territorialization ; dragons are real now ; the repetition of a name builds alliances

31:50–36:35

Rhetoric doesn’t communicate, it builds alliances, associations, the socius communus ; the social and the production of desire ; the production of the social is the production of desire is the production of persuasion ; rhetorical intervention is not parasitic on the social, psychological, or the real – it is the production of their production ; Nathaniel’s been reading Deleuze again. 

36:35–40:45

Nate asks the question: is this shit also destructive? ; communities of exclusion, Joe Rogan and the Pope

40:45–End

Why does Nietzsche think our stupidity has been valuable for the species? ; Nietzsche is a symptomtologist: take the perspective of life ; evolution without telos, without reaction ;  evolution of the exception, not the herd.

0:00–18:30

Intro; Approach for a second read; Nate gratuitously makes it about Hegel; §26 “What is Life?” ; the positivity of becoming; §23 “The Signs of Corruption” and §24 “Different Forms of Dissatisfaction” ; §39 “Changed Taste.” The active power of taste & decay; the non-linearity of futurity; taste vs opinion; §11 “Consciousness” the body doesn’t trust consciousness – it’s still in beta testing ; Napoleon & Decay; the individual

18:40–31:15

The value of consciousness; not your baseliner’s materialism; structure of the aphorisms; intellectual irritability; do I contradict myself? : invention and resolution; contradictions are bodies

31:20–41:20

What is a body? Is the intellect in the business of forming bodies? ; the taste of concepts; what does the “equal sign” of the concept do? ; § 37 “Owing to Three Errors” ; What can take up and animate the production of scientific knowledge?

41:25–51:10

Back to the structure of the aphorisms; modalities of life’s violence; a very different sense of the individual; punk-rock-Nietzsche: it’s only one tune; perpetual variation

51:15–58:10

Is reduction avoidable? ; reduction as a style of inflection; how do you teach this stuff? ; teaching vs. writing: the production of theory-bodies; shout out to Marco’s Provocations series

58:15–End 

Teaching theory; John’s old age let’s us all learn; John’s dating profile; parting provocations

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

We cover a lot of ground in this episode, but not a lot of this ground is tied directly to Derrida. In the beginning of the episode, we talk about the dynamics of appropriation, math, physics, the terminology of becoming, and Heraclitus. Towards the middle and end, we discuss the brevity of history, how Hollywood must save us, and the genius of the Matrix.