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Daniel Wyche, "The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter. And the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code N B N O V I D. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
All right, welcome to this New Books Network podcast with our guest, Daniel Weiss, who is the author of a new book out of Columbia University Press, the Care of the Self and the Care of the Other. From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation. Daniel is most recently a senior Scholar at the Columbia center for Contemporary Critical Thought and has previously taught at Albion College and at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Daniel received his PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2020.
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C
2020.
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B
He is also a translator and an editor of several important philosophical texts, including Levinas and the Night of Being by Raoul Mewadi and Michel Foucault, speaking the truth about oneself. And he works as a musician and a curator in experimental and improvisational music, all of which is pretty awesome and can be found on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your music. So welcome. Daniel, thank you for joining us.
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C
Thanks so much. It's good to see you. And you can hear me okay?
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B
I think I can, yeah.
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C
Great.
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B
So let me. Let me just give, like, a basic snapshot view of what I see the book, the thesis of the book to be, and then we'll kind of get into talk, talking with you, just about some specific topics. So the Care of the Self and the Care of the Other asks the question of what is the relationship between the work that I perform upon myself or that one performs upon oneself, and what Michel Foucault and others call the care of the self, or what. That is what Michel Foucault and others call the care of self and political or social transformation. This may seem like a broad topic, but what Weish is asking is about the connection between oneself and others. And he approaches these topics, a set of topics and very specific and critical analysis, through a reading of Pierre Hadou, who's the famous scholar of Greco Roman religion and philosophy, and the writer, the author of Philosophy as a Way of Life, George Friedman, who is a sociological philosophical journeyman and Marxist that worked between France and. And the USSR in the 30s and has kind of an interesting story to him.
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C
Definitely an interesting story.
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B
And as sort of a commentator and observer on modern industrial society, Michel Foucault, who, in his late work on the hermeneutics of the subject, turns to the practices and the care of the self as a topic for analysis. And then finally, and I think maybe most interestingly and provocatively, Daniel looks at the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, 1956, with Martin Luther King, Howard Thurman in the background and a few others, and looks at this amazing moment, really, in American history, where people came together.
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C
In.
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B
A way that was personal and also socially transformative. And then there's a little final section on the poet and social critic Audre Lorde, which was very powerful, each of these readings. So it's. It's programmatically like. So each. Each chapter takes on one of these thinkers. And as Weish goes through this, he develops a lexicon of concepts and practices that he unfolds with great care about the self and about the other. And. And he's able to kind of draw out a set of concepts that he thinks are critical for what he calls the politics of self overcoming. And some of these concepts are power. He uses the word generative often. Co. Constitutive, counter conduct, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a great book. It's very well written. It's very tight and very critical in the way that it absorbs and adopts and transforms these ideas. And it leaves open a whole lot of questions. So what I. What I want to do today with Daniel is just kind of dig into some of the ideas and then really get your sense for, like, the broader arc of where you see all this going for you personally as a scholar and as a practitioner of these things. So how does that sound as like a general synopsis or what. What was motivating you when you started? I guess that's. I should listen to you first.
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C
Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, no, that's a lot. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, the very broad. You know, start from the very beginning.
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B
Sorry.
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C
The first question is sort of what was motivating me?
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B
Yeah, like how. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
I'm. It's such an interesting question because it's. It's always hard to pin those things down, right. Like where kind of especially not just like an inspiration, but something that you actually want to pursue at a pretty deep level. Where does that initially come from? I think at some point I was talking to somebody about this and these questions, I think for me, come. I mean, the basic question, right. For the. Of the book is what is the relationship between the care of the self and the care of the other? Or what is the relationship between the transformation of the self on the ethical level and the political transformation of the world with those things kind of being understood in different ways? And I think that there's a set of influences that kind of brought these questions to me. Some of them are, you know, scholarly. You know, I think one of the biggest is I was a undergraduate English major at Rutgers, and I had a. A professor who I still talk to who was sort of. One of my greatest influences was an English professor named John McClure. And he was mostly a, you know, professor of. Of 20th century, 19th. 20th century American literature, especially sort of, you know, huge Thomas Pinchon person, you know, someone I read pension or people like that with. But he had this class and I took this course in 2002. So this was a long time ago. Maybe it was. Maybe it was 2001, even on sort of spirituality and politics in American literature. And we were reading people like, you know, Pension, but also figures like Cornel west was really, really important there. And it was in that class that I first sort of encountered Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault sort of put together. I'd read Foucault before, but he gave us parts of the, I still remember the, you know, the, the Hado essay on spiritual exercises, the kind of like eponymous essay, and then put it together with what then was available, I think as the first two lectures from Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject, which, that whole process of publishing these, some of these lectures that Foucault had given in the 70s that hadn't even started yet, so it wasn't really available. And I thought this is really an interesting set of questions because as somebody who I think has, I guess, like, I mean, I was young so sort of could vaguely. My political self was still forming, but had had a very concrete beginning. And I'd always kind of considered myself to be, at least at that time, more vaguely on, on the left and concerned very deeply with sort of material questions and sort of those sorts of structural issues, but also someone I always cared a lot about, ethics and sort of this idea of self transformation. And I think that came from other reading. And it was interesting that reading Foucault and Hado talk about the concept of spirituality did something to me at that time that brought those two questions together in a way. I think also, you know, there's that, there's that sort of intellectual trajectory. But like, one of the things I find sort of refreshing about this literature is that you can be kind of personal with it. You know, all these people are very personal and they talk about this stuff. So for my part, I grew up in a very, very working class world. Everyone around me was in the trades. My, my dad was a roofer, My uncles all worked at, you know, and there were union laborers or worked in factories and things like that. And so, you know, that world of like a very hands on sort of economic existence was really a part of it, but so was the experience of like sort of union, unionization and union organizing. My mom was the school teacher and she was the kind of head of the union in her school. And she was constantly negotiating with, you know, on behalf of teachers, on behalf of the, the cleaning staff and other people. She's also a devout Catholic. So there is this interesting way that some Catholic social teaching kind of intersected there. And so there's just this mess of. Of influences. And then those questions seem to always be present, right? Like people's personal sort of way they related to one another as. As ethical beings. But also how that directly impacted the sort of material reality of people's lives, especially in terms of negotiation, for example. And I think that the. If I can say the third thing, if this is not too long winded, was I've just been always involved in music that's been really important to me my whole life from. From a very young age. I just. My parents had great taste, you know, my uncle's. My one uncle went to Woodstock. So I just grew up around that. And I think in high school and the late middle school, early high school, I just got really into punk rock and so with some friends and there was a really good scene. And I'm from New Jersey and there's a. You know, at a certain time, pocket hardcore was very important and also political in a sense, but it was political in this really interesting sense that has always been a source of reflection for me. And I was talking to Peter Coviello about this, who's a scholar I really admire, teaches at University of Illinois in English, where it was this post, quote unquote, post Cold War moment where the punk scene was very political. But it was also, and I remember it feeling like it was very moralistic in the sense that people were very concerned with each other's personal behavior in a political sense. So being like vegan and straight edge was like a really important thing. And if you weren't one of those things, somebody would probably give you a lecture of some kind. And maybe I did that every now and then, but it was definitely part of it. But there was always something. I don't know, and maybe it was just a nagging political intuition, but it's. It felt overly moralistic to me. Like we're really concerned. I mean, there's a. There's a lot of language around sort of justice and, you know, economics and sort of, you know, materiality and things like that. But in practice, and I think there's a lot of reasons for this partially cultural. Just the moment that we were in, you know, the idea of a retreat into ethics that may have come from the Cold War, you know, and that being something we all grew up with. And it's. And it's like sort of legacy and then, you know, like Clinton era liberalism and stuff like that. And also, you know, just a series of other factors and also just like being helpless teenagers or early 20s people who couldn't really, you know, were struggling to figure out ways of being involved in a political sense that was, that was organized and was material and like drew on these, these social movements and stuff, you know, and the way that, that sort of, that impulse manifested itself in the way that musical community was organized or was trying to organize itself successfully and often unsuccessfully. So I think like, at a certain moment in my life, those things kind of came into confluence and then I started trying to think about them through reading people like, you know, Foucault and, and even, you know, these great activists like King and so on. I mean, that's been a long standing interest. And then once I, you know, I worked in literacy nonprofits and in that area again in this way of trying to like, really concretize this, these concerns before I went to graduate school. And that's when I started studying with people like Marl Davidson and Bernard Harcourt. And that allowed me to kind of funnel the theoretical and the practical into a much more focused sense. So in a way, this has been like a lifelong project and it's come both from intellectual influences, but also personal ones. And I, I again, I enjoy the fact that when you dealing with this literature, you can kind of get personal with it in a way, because that's what it's about.
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B
I don't know if that makes a lot of sense. It does. I mean, I also thought it was interesting that you studied with Curtis Evans and on American religious history. And I did want to ask you a bit about the disciplinary, like, framework that you're approaching this with. Is it, are you, are you, are you trying to develop concepts that would, that would work within like a religious studies context? Or is this, like, is this more strictly philosophical or is it some type of like, history of ideas or is it some type of ethics? Where, where do you see yourself fitting into, in that, in that framework, to disciplinary framework?
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C
Well, I think like, and maybe you would agree, I think it's one of the great things about religious studies as a field. It's so hard to pin down sometimes. And there are a lot of very strict sub disciplines in it. But I, I wanted to do this project and I went to graduate school to do a project at least amorphously like this. And that was not something I was going to be able to do in a philosophy department and definitely. And not even, maybe not in political science. But religious studies has this like, capaciousness where we're like so rigorous about text and about the philosophical and ethical sides of things. But there's also A constructive side as well. You have people doing constructive ethics and, and theory and things like that and the historical rigor, which is something I, I love about the field. So in a sense this is, I think this could have only been a religious studies project in the way that I've presented it because it's got this philosophical and philological side and this historical side that engages sort of mass movements and, and also takes the, the, the religious beliefs and practices of many of the people involved very seriously as sort of motivating and operational. And so in that, yeah, I'm sort of concerned and it's my hope and I don't think I've done this as explicitly as I'd like, but sort of in a preparatory way to really start to develop some techniques and methods and concepts that could be useful in other religious studies contexts. So, so definitely within the field. And I, I always, again, I, this is a very half baked idea so far. So it's something I really want to develop. But I've always been, because of, because of the, the influence of figures like Foucault, for example, who has this sort of interdisciplinary methodology that is actually very much grounded in the kind of history and philosophy of science in France. And that being a field that I'm very interested in as well, I've always sort of wanted to try and formulate a kind of interdisciplinary or a history and philosophy of religions. Right. One that takes the philosophical and the intellectual threads, both sort of about religion and from within religion seriously alongside the historical developments and historical movements and methodologies and things like that. So that's what I'm generally hoping to, on a theoretical and methodological level sort of start to attempt to develop, I guess.
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B
Yeah. All right, so let's just start with just like a first step, right. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that what you're suggesting in the beginning of the, of the book is that the practices of the self, however you define those, are not merely inward practices, but they're, it's a, it's a mode or a way or a form of life that is negotiating a relationship with oneself and at the same time with the kind of the external historical situation that somebody finds oneself in. So on the one hand you have like the practices of the self which are maybe ethical in nature. And then. And I think one of the claims that you're making is that that ethical work is always in some ways political. Is that, is that how you would frame it or. Yeah. Reframe it?
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C
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, but but there's this. I mean, I think there's a few ways of clarifying that, if you. That makes sense. Right. There's. There's a sense, you know, you have this sort of the slogan about the personalist political and. And so on, and that. That. I think that's true, but it can be. You know, there's so many different ways that this can be true. And on the one hand, there's an easy way to say that where it's like, well, anything I do is political, so I'm sort of off the hook politically. You know, I'm. And then there's a sense sort of the opposite where, like, look, I'm just doing. I'm just a philosopher. I'm just doing ethics. I've. I've retreated from the world to engage in contemplation. And as somebody who is also very. I guess, coming from a perspective of historical materialism, which is always in the background here, the question is always, how do those activities, no matter what they are and no matter what the person believes they're doing, how do they have, if not material impact, how are they informed by material conditions and historical conditions and so on, and does that make sense?
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B
Yeah, but with regard to the historical materialism, would you say that you have like a. Is it a soft Marxism that you're advancing or. Because there's this whole question around Friedman and just sort of like the orthodoxy there, I guess, that's being negotiated.
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C
It sort of depends on what you mean, I guess. You know, I mean, on. On some level, I probably would, you know.
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B
Is there such a thing, I guess, as soft Marxism?
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C
Yeah, I. I guess that's what I'm struggling with here. There are some very, like, basic sort of fundamental commitments to, like, I guess, what you might call Marxist principles that are. That I think are just obviously true in all cases. And this is one of the places where I think that's the case. And I think it's helpful in that there are ways that people who practice different things, whether they are. Believe, you know, believe themselves to be engaging politically or believe themselves to be simply doing ethics, these kinds of commitments can be very illuminating in terms of what it is that's actually going on.
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B
And could you. Could you just spell out what those commitments are like? I think you already said it, but.
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C
Yeah, yeah. One of the. I mean, there's a few different ways to think about it, but. So how can I put this? There's, I think, maybe one way to think about it is the sort of two sort of, I guess, Threats that I find in the, in the book or one or two. One of them being the idea that the sort of management of personal behavior according to ideal political principles is spur of sufficient. So that is to say our personal interactions, as long as they somehow reflect a certain politics, that, that's, that's sufficient. And I, and I don't think that that's bad or whatever. Right. I think certain views of, you know, gender or ra, things like that, they should inform our, our personal interactions. But I think one of the lessons of a certain historical period is that without engaging on the level of the sort of material and the systemic and so on, there's only so much that, that that will do. It only has so much purchase when you think of it in terms of individual ethics. That isn't simply going to scale up. Right. It needs actual organization on some level. And then the other. And this is sort of the, what a version of what I call the problem of moralism, which is the idea that the sort of the political world is simply the. The aggregation of ethical life just scaled up and in, you know, all added up and, you know, for all just. We all just behave a certain way, that structural and social forces will just change sort of in a. In a causal way. And I don't think that's true. So there's a, that's a very concrete example of what I mean by this. The basic historical materialism that's sort of behind all of this.
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B
Yeah. So. So you speak of a politics of self overcoming. So it's like, it's like there's this first moment where it's like an ethical work and there's this, there's this tradition that goes back to the ancients. Of what? Of taking care of oneself. Reflecting on the difference between what you know and what you don't know or trying to figure out, you know, what can I know for sure? You know, like the sort of. The will to truth, you might even say that sort of at work in the history of philosophy. And then the. And the practices of the self that are necessary to. In approaching that truth or the work that one is performing upon oneself in order to come to know the truth that one is seeking. And on the other side you've got this political question which is lingering in part because the historical material conditions preexist the subject. Right. And so we're kind of in a situation where we have to. We have to care about the world around us. Right. In order to. But your point is also that like whatever the ethical work that I'm performing on myself. It has some bearing also on others. And so the politics matters. But then at some point you're talking about a politics of self overcoming or transcendence into revolution is what you call it. So this is like there's this third moment, right, where I don't know if it's a collective moment or some kind of, like you, like. I, like a, like a spiritual breakthrough kind of situation. Like if you look at the Montgomery bus boycott, like things that are hard to explain just based on like the aggregate of, like the, some aggregate of the parks. Right. Is that true? So would you say that there's like kind of a. I don't know if it's a dialectical situation or there's some sort of evolution or some sort of movement in the direction of this third thing that seems relevant?
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C
Yeah, I think that's right. And I, I don't, I'm, I, I don't want to get too into the whole idea of dialectics because I feel like that's a road that's going to get us into some trouble. So. Okay, you know, it's.
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B
Well, that's an interesting question, right, Because I also think that in part, like what the work of the self is the work of imminence. Right. But what you're, what you're calling for is a transcendence into revolution. And so I kind of wonder how we, how you move from the work on the self into that other space in the other world.
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C
I think that that's. So it's it. Thank you for that clarification. That was really, really helpful because. All right, so the work on the self is never just a work on oneself, right. There's always some. And the way that I tend to think about it at least is the first way that you mentioned, which is insofar as the self that we find ourselves with, it's always implicated and it's constituted by like, material relations and relations of power and the things that we are, we find ourselves in and there's no escaping that. There's no. Oh, well, I'll just ignore that and I'll just go off and work on myself. I mean, the very conditions of, of the experience and of the practice are already implicated and all that. And on a, on a certain level, yeah, of course there's a, there's a deeply personal side to that. But if the question you talk about like, so Foucault, this is his language where he talks about resistance transforming into revolution through the sort of strategic alignment of a series of points of Resistance that sort of organize themselves essentially. He doesn't exactly use that term, but I think that's really what it means. And insofar. And in this case. Right, and there's other. Other cases we can talk about, but the one that I'm interested in is that insofar as that's going to happen, and insofar as the selves and the individuals and so on that are involved in those moments of resistance are again, they're already implicated. The subject is already constituted by these relations of power that you find yourselves in. We find ourselves in whether they're economic or cultural or whatever else political. Insofar as the transformation of the self, the individual seeks to somehow have something to do with this transcendence into revolution. There has to be some sort of strategic alignment through an analysis and then action on the relations of power that one finds oneself in. And that insofar as these are material and so on, they already implicate other people. Right. And so this has to be a kind of collective effort. And that's where in a way you can see the idea of like, practices of the self moving from the I to the we. Right. Where it's not just me transforming myself and you transforming yourself, there's some kind of organization there, some kind of collective alignment in terms of the ways that we transform who we are, not just how I do it and how you do it, but how we do it. So like we being, say a unit, but something that is. That is something more than just me plus you. Does that make sense? I think that. That. That's where this sort of amazing and sort of powerful moments that you see in something like Montgomery or other successful social movements of. Or revolutions of various kinds, that's where that happens. Because the. The. The sort of basic foundational. I don't want to say unit. That's a very strange word to use. But the community is what matters. The we is what matters, not not only, but. But in a really substantial way. And it's there that I. I am excited to see. I find it really riveting and exciting to see this focus come off of the individual or are of. Off of a reduction to the individual and into the. The social basis.
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B
It's a pluralism, though, right? I mean, it's not a collect. I mean, is collectivism the right word? I mean.
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C
Oh.
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B
Mamdani got in trouble this past week with some of the Catholic commentators, including Bishop Barron, for. For saying that. That we're. The frigidity of rugged individualism is. Can be replaced by the warmth of collectivism. Is that, is that what you mean by the we, or is it a collection of eyes? It's a collection of independent selves. Right. That aggregate in some kind of mysterious way, but under certain conditions. Historical.
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C
Yeah. I don't know. What's the, what was the, what was the issue with. Can you explain that?
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B
He just. Well, so, so, yeah, so. And Baron, I don't know if you know who Bishop Barron is.
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C
He's the new bishop. That was just.
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B
He. No, he's. He's out of Winona, Minnesota. He's the word on fire kind of guy. And he's got this huge media presence in the Catholic world. And, and what he's basically saying is Mamdani is, is failing to acknowledge the, the historical nature of the idea of the concept of collectivism, which, I mean, it means something very specific. It's not just a warm feeling. I guess that's the point he's trying to make. And so, you know, there's a, There's a question I had just in reading through the text about the logic of the self.
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C
Right.
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B
And what the. And, and so what are we trying to excavate as we work upon ourselves? And how is the work of oneself and the truth that I realize in the work of. That I perform on myself, how is that then translated into the social political world? And I sort of feel like that's a really important point where, And I feel like this is a point where maybe it's not clear that the trajectory of the thought is Marxist in the strict sense. Because I think as a Catholic, I can agree with you. I'm not a Marxist, but like, as a Catholic, I can agree with you that like collective action or like working across the body of the Church. Right. To, to create better social conditions is essential. But the key point there has to do with the nature of the self, I think. Right. What is the self that's being worked and what is the self that's being constituted both individually and then socially?
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C
Yeah, yeah. That's such a good question. I, I, you know, I should be clear. I'm a lapsed Catholic and a Marxist, so.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but this is why. But as a.
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C
No, it's just funny to.
- [29:47]
B
Good idea. Yeah.
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C
No, no, the whole, like, sort of. The whole, like, lapsed Catholic is actually a form of Catholicism.
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B
It is, yeah. It's just good. Is we're all bad Catholics, I think. Right. Those of us that are or aren't. Yeah, yeah. But I think the point of, I think Baron's point is just that there's a historical nature to these, these concepts. Right. And there's a certain precision that's necessary to get clear on what the social action looks like writ large.
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C
Right. I, I find that interesting and I guess this does relate, because one of the things that I'm not doing, and this is something I'm taking from Foucault, is providing a theory of the self and saying there is an actual, here's, here's what the self is like, because I don't know. And I think that, and, and this is something, again, that I take from Foucault and I take it very seriously. I, I think that probably Friedman's conception of the self is quite different from King's. It might be Thurman's conception of the self might be different from kings or lords, for example. And I don't, I, I worry about the, just on a political level of us sort of getting bogged down and like, whether or not we have the same definition, you know, not, not just because the, the values of the left are plagued by, like, in fighting over the precision of concepts. But, you know, it seems like it can be possible that these things can work together ethically and politically, even across different conceptions itself. And so, you know, of course, Hamdani, given who he is, given his unique background and sort of just religious, but, excuse me, personal commitments, they're going to be a bit different probably than how, you know, Bishop Minnesota might, you know, consider it.
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B
Well, he's not a Marxist, right? Bishop wouldn't be.
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C
Yeah, yeah, but so, so it's interesting to me to think, like, I, I do think certain things are true, like certain claims are true. I think that no matter what.
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B
The.
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C
Self, who, who and what we are are constituted, I agree with Foucault here, by relations of power that we find ourselves in. And some of those are things we simply don't have any control over, at least at first, though we might. And so to the extent to which who or what I am or take myself to be has some fundamental implication within these social forces on some level, transforming myself will then have some effect on those social forces or those relations of power. So I, I, I don't, Again, I don't know if I'm exactly answering the question, but I, I think this is an important point.
- [32:14]
B
Well, yeah, yeah, go ahead. No, please, please, no, no, please. Yeah, I want to hear what you're gonna say.
- [32:20]
C
I, I, I sort of ref, here's what I think the self is because there's Just going to be different conceptions. And I think that for the way that, like the analytics of power, again, Foucault talks about an analytics of power rather than a theory of power, for it to, to work and have this sort of interpretive and I think political efficacy that I think it does. I think getting into normative questions about what is the nature of the self.
- [32:49]
B
Well, so what, what does Foucault talk about mean when he talked about the, the telos of the practices himself in that context? So, so.
- [32:55]
C
And this is. Yeah, and that's. This is great. So Foucault uses this term. He talks about practice itself having these, these multiple features. They're different than the features that Hado talks about. The tilas is essentially the thing that these exercise whatever spiritual exercises aim to produce. And in the ancient context, like in the people that Hadot talks about, they're very different. Right. A self that has a certain relationship to pleasure. Right. A self that is able to really live by the Stoic distinction between what we can control and what we can't, you know, et cetera. There are these different conceptions. And so. And that is often based very strictly on. And this is in Hado, but I think it applies to some understanding of. Of what's wrong. Right. Of what ails us and what would it be like for those features to be ameliorated for us and spiritual exercises that, you know, lead us from one to the other.
- [33:56]
B
So the problem of suffering is. Activates the practices of the self because there's certain strategies that we can deploy in certain forms of life that can help us deal with the problem of suffering. Right.
- [34:06]
C
What I find. Yeah, precisely. But I think, and I think what's interesting about the idea of the telos is like, depending on who you ask, it doesn't even need to be attainable. Right. So there is this perfectionist side to it. Like there may be some, some ideal. And I think you see this in certain. Obviously, you know, might be in Cavell and others and certainly in different religious conceptions. Right. You're never really going to reach that perfection. But it's the movement toward it that.
- [34:35]
B
Or to Nietzsche's point, you wouldn't want to, because then it would just become an Apollonian form and it would freeze over and the, the energy would be like the, the, the fecundity would be lost in that and it would be, it would become a problem and.
- [34:48]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:51]
B
But so, so, so we have. There's A. There's like. There's a problem on the ground that needs to be solved. It starts with my experience of suffering or, or of oppression or of some type of, you know, like the sorts of disenfranchised. What the disinheritance that Howard Thurman talks about, like where people are subjugated and they're put in. They're just basically mistreated and maltreated. And so I have to perform, I have to figure out what I'm going to do in the face of that situation. And the direction of that work is freedom in some ways. Right. But so can you explain that and then. And what's the relationship between the capacities, the capabilities that I'm developing and that freedom that I seek? Is it, is it a. It's not a positive notion of freedom, is it? Or is what is the, what is the meaning of freedom, I guess, in this context?
- [35:38]
C
Again, so, so for the different people in the book, and I think this is something that is, like, important to me in this book, there are different conceptions of what that's like, of what, you know, and I think for someone like, I think Thurman has some pretty rich. I mean, he's such an amazing thing.
- [35:52]
B
Yeah.
- [35:52]
C
If you haven't, if anybody should think, please go read Jesus and disinherited. It's amazing. It's so profound and rich and bears out so much reading and rereading. There's a very simple conception of political freedom, for sure, where I'm simply not subject to harmful laws and practices and things like that. And then I think things get deeper depending on if you take the sort of ancient philosophical context or even certain religious contexts, there's a transcendent freedom. It's a sort of freedom in, in the soul or something. Freedom in the next life, things like that, you know, and those can look very, very different. Right. Freedom from desire, freedom from the various, the passions that hold me, you know, enthrall in this, in this life, you know, or could be anything. Right. I, I think that in a political sense, my own view, and I think this is Foucault's view. And it, it. And I, I, I don't know to what extent this is like a Kantian view is we are always bound by rules. We're always bound. I don't say constrained in some way or not constrained, informed, whatever you want to call it. And there's a question of the extent to which we are able to participate in the constitution of the rules that, that govern us. Right. And so Foucault often talks of governance, and there's a. A moment where he makes us. Or in an interview where. Which has caused a lot of confusion, Reese's House. And the goal is to be governed less. And that's like, well, what does that even mean? Again, given some of his own other commitments and things like that. Honestly, I always take that as a. Just sort of a flub in an interview. But I think what that means is to be governed less governed more in a more participatory way. Right. So the extent to which we have anything from personal ethics to social rules to the way that goods are distributed or something like that, um, there's an ongoing drive for democratization there. Right. So the more. The more people who are impacted, the more those people are participate in whatever that those rules might be, whatever those relations might be. And I tend to operate according to that sense of that idea of freedom. And maybe that's a subtext here, and maybe I import it into some of these other people who might not share it, but I. I think that makes sense.
- [38:12]
B
Yeah.
- [38:12]
C
Compelling, right? It's a compelling. Because if you look at what Thurman is talking about, or lord, or even anybody, any of these folks, so much of the problem is simply being told who you are and not having the ability, in a political sense, to fashion oneself even in relation to others, in terms of ethics, in terms of love, in terms of what you do with your time, um, and you subjected to all of these different constraints that are. That are external and cruel and dehumanizing and arbitrary and so on. So I. I tend to go with that notion of freedom myself.
- [38:54]
B
Yeah, Well, I think it's interesting because you. Each step that you take, there's a reevaluation. Right. So with Hado, are you taking care of yourself? Like, he's going back to the ancient exemplary forms of the philosophical life. Socrates, the Cynics, the Stoics. And he's basically saying, like, the philosopher must abandon a partial view of reality and come to some more universal view of this reality. And so there's like, there's this. Like you said, there's like this idealized philosophical vision, right. That's being promoted. And then when we move into Friedman, like, he's like. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. Like, we are in unprecedented times with, like, incredible technological changes. Were incapable of managing that situation without some type of new spiritual. For. What does he say? Like, it's called interior something or other.
- [39:48]
C
And new interior efforts. Yeah. And he says. I mean, he says, look, at the bodies, look at the death and destruction in front of us. We cannot mat. We're. It's out of our control. It's controlling us.
- [39:59]
B
Yeah, yeah. And then we move into Foucault and he's, he's. And, and like, my first question around freedom is it sounds like a theological concept to a certain extent. So if you're, you know, depending on how critical you want to be about the inheritance on the theological, the theological tradition. And I did have some questions just around the, the traditions that are at work here, but.
- [40:14]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [40:15]
B
But he, he's advancing, and as far as I read it, he's advancing a negative view of freedom, which is to say that, like, my, my freedom is my ability to resist the, the, to resist the situation that I, to, to. How do you put it? To apply resistance wherever I am. Um, I, but maybe you said it slightly different when you're talking about rules. Um, so I guess maybe there's a semantic field that needs to be negotiated and it's, it's more technical somehow. But.
- [40:43]
C
Yeah, I mean, do you want to, Should I, do you want me to say something about this?
- [40:46]
B
Yeah, I want you to speak into this.
- [40:47]
C
Yes, please. So, for Foucault, at least. Right. I do think that there's a history of reading Foucault in this negative sense. Right. A kind of negative freedom. It's just resistance. And I think that there are some textual reasons for that. Yeah. Counter conduct and these ideas. And, and I say at one point, you know, he has all these other conceptions that he never actually writes about. So the notion of political spirituality, which kind of gets invoked in this very brief context when he's talking about Iran and then this, this idea of revolutionary subjectivity, which is. Or I have a short article about that coming out soon, which I'm excited about. I, I, My thing is, I just wish Foucault had written, written the book about revolutionary subjectivity he mentions, like, twice in his entire. Because I think that would have given us a little bit of a better sense of what he means freedom and, and power, because he is concerned with relations of power in an. I guess we would say in a negative sense, in a, in a sense of something that we find ourselves implicated within and that makes us who we are. And to some extent. Yeah. I don't know if agency is the right word, but we, we don't have as much of a. You know, he talks. I mean, one of the things Foucault's famous for is sort of talking about how we participate in our own oppression and our own subjection and so on. But you do have these, you. It's almost like he's a victim of, of his political and ethical concerns which are with, you know, people who are, who are being, who are subjected in this sense. Right. Whether it's the medical patient or, you know, he himself is a queer person and other cases. Right. People who are political minorities of various kinds. But so he's a kind of. I. My view on Foucault and this maybe not be others, is that he's a sort of victim of his own examples. But I do think that there is a positive conception there and it's the other side of power, which is that, you know, power is exerted by, by every point in the network and that means every individual, every sort of collective, you know, node or whatever you want to call it. And so that means that he certainly when he talks about power, he's talking about power from the position or the perspective of the subjected and those who then produce resistance. Right. But there's another side of that where if the, so I don't, to put it crudely like the balance of power is different. One can engage in acts of freedom and sort of creativity and so on. And that's also always happening within, within relations of power. It's never just sort of a one sided, top down sort of thing. It's a, it's a complex network, it's capillary, as he says. And so I do think there's an implicit notion of freedom in there. And the thing for Foucault that I think is important is he, he has this famous phrase, I don't think everything is bad, I think everything is dangerous. And so say, you know, the revolution wins, right? We have, we make this better world, we make a different world. And maybe it is a more just world from our own perspectives. I think for Foucault there's always a, it's not, I don't think it's a fatalism, I just think it's a. That that may produce its own problems. We will have new problems that we personally can't imagine that. And it's like it's because the kinds of people that we are so constituted by the world we find ourselves in, the problems that we'll find over the horizon may be un, just completely unrecognizable to us, you know, and we can think about that historically. Right? I mean, the, the kinds of. I, I think that's something that Friedman is, is quite concerned about as well, because he, you know, the. He's saying, look, yeah, war and death. We've always had those. This kind of war and death that you see in. In the first. In mustard gas, in the Second World War, in. These are. These are historically unique and the details here matter.
- [44:35]
B
Sure.
- [44:35]
C
We can simply assimilate them back to these broader concepts, but in practice, in experience, they are unimaginable. There he's. And he's in the middle of the Second World War and he's saying, the things I'm looking at right now are unimaginable. So. And does that, does that help? Does that make sense? I. I think that for Foucault, there is an implicit positive notion of freedom that is sort of liberatory and digentive and. And so on. Is it. Is it the.
- [44:59]
B
Is it the capacity to reflect upon oneself? Is that it? And to take, as part of that reflection, to take, like, to take stock of all the things that you're a part of. Like, each. You know what I mean? Like, we're imp. We're implicated in this field of. Yeah. Power. And we need to act on the basis of what we are a part of.
- [45:19]
C
Right.
- [45:20]
B
Like, we are. And so the. And so when we get to the. When we get to the boycott.
- [45:25]
C
Right.
- [45:25]
B
This notion of self purification comes into play, which I think has clear Christian balances. Oh, sure, there's like. I mean, there's like. There's like language around sacrifice. There's language around even martyrdom to a certain extent, which I. I know you want to distance yourself from, but.
- [45:40]
C
Do I. I don't know.
- [45:42]
B
Well, you. Yeah, at some point you say, like, you know, like, if. If we're, if we're talking about giving oneself for the sake of a greater cause, like to the point where we are. Where we are failing to take care, like that there's a problem there. And. Yeah. And. But like the notion of walking in another man's shoes, the idea of not giving up, so to speak. We don't mind going to jail, giving our lives. All we want is to make this contribution to you and to yours.
- [46:14]
C
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
- [46:15]
B
Yeah, no, no, yeah, no, please, go ahead.
- [46:19]
C
Well, I mean, we can. I know you had a previous question. We can't talk about this issue of martyrdom. I think it's interesting. Did you want to go back to the freedom thing first, or should we.
- [46:27]
B
Yeah, let's. Let's do that first. Yeah, sounds good.
- [46:29]
C
Yeah. No, but I do, I. I see what you're saying, but I do think again. Just. Just yeah. Within that space of. Because I think for all these people. Right. And I think this goes back to Hado, and I think you find it. And this something I try to emphasize for people like King and Thurman and Lord, there is a sense that an analysis does matter. Right. Of understanding what is, like what are the situations that we find ourselves in. Yeah. To some extent. I'm not saying there isn't sort of an unreflective instinctual response. This is not okay. I don't like this. You know, I do not want to be. I don't want to live this way. I don't want to be treated this way. There is something that's very powerfully pre reflective about that, and I don't want to take anything away from that. But in order for sort of real organization to happen and for it to be successful, I do think some amount of that kind of reflection on the place that we're in, how we got there and so on. Obviously, if you, you know, think about the history of various social movements and stuff, you don't want to get too bogged down in the analysis because then that's all you do, you know, for a long time and the action maybe takes a second secondary place. But I do, I do think that.
- [47:39]
B
Would be a part of it. Yeah.
- [47:40]
C
That sort of like the analytical freedom, I guess you might, I'd say, for sure.
- [47:45]
B
So you talk about the limits of the analysis, and I can see there's like the movement from Hadota to Foucault with Friedman in between, to kind of situate the historical material context makes a lot of sense. When you get into the bus boycott, I feel like we're on the other side of. We're into some deeper waters.
- [48:03]
C
Right.
- [48:04]
B
I mean, like.
- [48:04]
C
Absolutely.
- [48:06]
B
The very fact that. And I didn't realize this, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, the very fact that 50,000 people showed up in these churches to undergo these workshops is a fact I did not know. Right. Martin Luther King is 25 years old. It's in the mid-50s. Right. So, and, and, and, and, and there are these concepts that are floating around that are just different.
- [48:27]
C
Right.
- [48:27]
B
Than what you would find in the, in the philosophical tradition.
- [48:30]
C
Absolutely.
- [48:30]
B
And there's a certain personalism, I would even say, that's at work. So. Yeah. So the question of religion and of the religions and of religious value and of the danger of religious rhetoric versus the kind of the cold, the sobriety of philosophical reflection, how does that all play out?
- [48:49]
C
What's a huge question. There's a, I want to put a pin in the martyrdom thing too, so we can get back to that. But that probably relates to this. It's so interesting, right, because one of the things you point out, right, is this is genuinely a mass movement. This is the watershed of the civil rights era. So at this moment, it's the, it's the, the largest mass movement in American history by far, unless you count the Civil War. I, I don't know if you want to, you know, but as far as, but I, I find, and I love the question about the religiosity of it because it's very religiously diverse. It's very religiously plural. So you have, of course, King and others are members of certain sort of historical black churches, and that's vital. There are very much Catholic influences in, in various places. There are certainly Jewish influences. And you know, Bayard Rustin, who is a absolutely fundamental figure in this, in this history is a Quaker and Quakerism and its long history back into abolition. He's also part of this. And I, we can kind of like collapse a lot of these. Oh, it's all just Christianity. But you, you know, like, I, no.
- [49:59]
B
Yeah, this sort of, to be specific, right.
- [50:01]
C
You have to be. And so we can think about it in sort of an ecumenical sense. There's also a huge influence from the Indian struggle. And if people walking around the streets of Montgomery using terms like satyagraha and so this is, and already that's itself an interreligious. I mean, there's a, there's a major place that sort of Hindu traditions and Buddhist traditions play in the struggle in India. But also there's a Christian influence there as well, through the colonial experience and so on. And you know, even things like theosophy somehow end up in there. But so, so I, I, one of the things that I think is so profoundly important, and this may be obvious, but I, I, I keep going back to it, is the presence of like, religious infrastructure and not just in a physical sense, in a community sense. Right. You have community organizations built and there are different churches. I mean, there are different denominations in Montgomery. It's not all, you know, Amy, Zionist or whatever it happens to be. You know, there's, there's different in, within what an outsider might think of as being closely related denominations. They're, they're rather different, at least some dark, maybe not in ways that matter in this particular case. But you, you know what I mean? As you said. And so the fact that the churches, just to start, have an infrastructure a they have buildings, actual physical churches. They have networks of communication in networks of sociality and they have political and theological and ethical diversity within them. But they're able to, to marshal those things in a way that is so profoundly effective. And one of the things I find really interesting and it's something I'd like to think about a little bit more is the way that, you know, you, you mentioned king is 26 when he arrives there is the way that sort of leadership and democracy work and the way that the. Because so many of the organizations that are created, they are, if they're not church based organizations, they're at least mediated through the churches and their initial realization that there, there has to be an organization of organizations, a kind of. Might even call it an ecumenical approach. Right. We need to create the Montgomery Improvement association so that no one group sort of ends up being a leadership just by default. And then we have this sort of collective thing. And I, I always find that really interesting and I still, I don't. It's brilliant. It's the right move, it's the smart move. And you can see that having a religious origin and also having. And being very different in other religious contexts, not, not going in that way. And so that is one of the first places that I like to think about the role of religion there. And again it's, it's so, it's so complex because you also have so many of the people, you know, Rosa Parks herself, Ed Nixon, they're deeply involved with the naacp. They're also sort of involved churches. They're also involved in these organizations. People like Rustin, he's not only a Quaker, but he's also worked for a Philip Randolph. So the role of union, like the labor unions and things like that. And so there is this. It's not just a religiously ecumenical thing, it's a politically ecumenical. Right. You have unionization, you have pacifism obviously and so on. So yeah, I, that's one of the moments where I'm still sort of in awe of this movement. And there's. Yeah, it is pre all to explore. Explore. Yeah. The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot what do you.
- [53:52]
B
Make of Friedman's claim that, like, given the situation we're in today, like, the existing traditions don't give us what we need exactly, to be able to respond most effectively to the challenges. Like, he calls it the problem of resourcing. Which. It's interesting because in the Catholic tradition in the 20th century, we have this. There's this notion of resourcement, which essentially means back to the sources. And the idea that if we can go far enough back, right, to the. Closer to the quote, unquote, origins of the thing, or at the very least, excavate the historical tradition more robustly, like we're going to find all kinds of new practices and new forms of the self and new concept. New concepts, right. That would help us in the formation of our identity as Catholics. Friedman is a lot. A lot more pessimistic, right, about the. The. The capacity of existing. Of the historical. You might say the historical archive as giving us the. The things that we need to actually be most effective. And I was thinking about you, actually, while I read that section, because you have your. Of your music, which is very. I don't know what the right word is.
- [54:59]
C
It's.
- [54:59]
B
It's experimental. It's improvisational. It's. It's different, right. And. But also it's beautiful. And so I just, you know. But then you get into Montgomery, right, And you're talking about the very thing, the sort of. The. The ecumenical nature of that and then the. The political side of it. So I just wonder where you fall on that. On that spectrum of question about the inheritance of tradition, the resources that are contained within these traditions. You mentioned the Indian tradition, right. Like, it seems like there's probably a lot of ideas that you could unpack, right, from that that would help fill in some of your perspective.
- [55:36]
C
But, yeah, I think this is a huge question, and I think that Friedman's. I kind of relate to Friedman on this. You know what I mean? If you read.
- [55:44]
B
Yeah, I do too, a little bit.
- [55:45]
C
Yeah. And you just really see what he's trying to do in that book, which is very beautiful, and I hope at some point have the time to translate it. I've translated a lot of it for this project, and because it's so powerful, because he's wrestling with exactly this question, right. How to resource myself. And actually, it's fascinating. There's a few things to say here, and I want to try and get to all of them. Hado sort of misreads Friedman. You know, Hado says, well, Friedman didn't. He thinks that these traditions have Nothing to offer, you know, but he didn't look at the ancients and things like that. And first of all, Hado does or Friedman does look at the ancients. He's. He's reading Marcus Aurelius in the damn trenches when the Germans are coming, you know, like they're right in front of him, you know, and he's, he's Jewish, he's a Marxist, and he's, he's in the middle of this, this chaos. And as somebody who is attentive to the, the, not just the political, but the technological transformations of, of that period and was prescient about where they were going to lead, and I think he's has some prophetic things to say about the digital age in that book. You can't blame him for thinking, as great as these resources from the past were, I'm worried that they're not going to be sufficient to handle all of these new challenges. You know, I, I think that's a, That's a relatable thing. But at the same time, he doesn't dismiss it as out of hand. I mean, he goes through and says, you know, in this, in this one chapter about where can we resource ourselves? And it may well be that he's making a reference to the, this, this theological claim.
- [57:25]
B
What does he mean by that? Resource ourselves? Like, where can we go to find something different? Or what's the.
- [57:31]
C
Yeah, like, one of the things I, I love about that book is that it's very poetic and it's very open. And so he's throwing at a lot of things where I think he's sort of invoking them in a way that is meant to be sort of up for interpretation. And I think this is one of them. But I do think he means how can we ground ourselves? What resources do we have to in fact, um, ground ourselves, but specifically in a way that is, in fact grounding is, is gives us something firm but is also dynamic and is also adaptable and adaptable in a way that maybe they involve finding what is sources.
- [58:04]
B
What does he mean by wisdom and power, the book title?
- [58:07]
C
I have no idea.
- [58:08]
B
Okay. Yeah. I hope you.
- [58:10]
C
Yeah. No, but no, it's, it's interesting. Right. I think it's. Again, I, and this is why I love this book. It's so poetic in this sense because it really does it. He talks about. And actually I can try and find the passage he talks about the, the wisdom that he's seeking being a new wisdom and one that's audacious and that other people will maybe Mock. And I think that wisdom in this case is a forward looking concept, whereas historically it's kind of a, you know, it's looking to the past, it's looking to the sources. Like, where do we get our wisdom from? I think he's thinking like the future has to have something to do with this. And I can't just rely on the past and the present itself. It's sort of being audacious and being. Seeking this wisdom in all kinds of places has to be, including the places that are right in front of us, not just these, these traditions and within the changes that we're seeing and the way that people adapt to them or don't. Power. Well, that's a tough one. I don't, you know, the wisp part I think I get, but I mean, certainly he means political power, I think on some level. Right. And, and it's not just like, oh, power, that's good. He's, he's very cautious of it. I mean, he has this, he has this very intimate and unique relationship with the Soviet Union and is present in the 1930s when the show trials are going on. And it's really, really, it has what I think of as a, as a crisis of faith because of Stalinism, especially with the, the sort of pact with Hitler and so on and because of the show trials and stuff. So, so he's, he's, he's wary of that kind of power, for sure. But I think he's also concerned with, you know, mobilizing political power. I mean, very strictly. Again, a lot of the reflections he's doing in his war journals are the, the power of the Nazis approaching and how, how can that be countered? You know, it's not just wisdom that's going to do that. Right. So we need to have some kind of efficacy, something efficacious in terms of. And that can be, you know, organizing and so on.
- [60:10]
B
Yeah. You know, it's interesting that you translated a book previously about Levinas. I mean, levinas for Levinas, like liturgy is the approach of the other. And yeah. The phenomenological tradition is noticeably lacking in the book. Yeah, I know. Husserl's Crisis, for instance, is. There's, there's a lot to be said. There's, there's. I mean, I would encourage you to take, to take a look at the crisis again. Like this whole notion that, that like we achieve a certain foundation or a certain, we realize something new about ourselves and then the, but then the work has to keep happening like that. That seems to be part of what sparks this crisis. Right. Is that the technology is so far beyond our capacity to manage to it that it provokes a radical reflection on, on oneself in, in the world. And the notion of the, the Lebens Belt and of the sort of the revaluation that takes place through the work of philosophical reflection is, is there. But I mean Levinas like. And maybe Levinas just isn't political enough, but yeah, maybe.
- [61:20]
C
I don't know. There is some, there is some invocation of Levinas. There's a, there's a little quote from a piece of his that I, I kind of love in regard, with regard to Hado, which is this really short article about Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who I talk about a little.
- [61:40]
B
Yeah.
- [61:40]
C
And he says, you know, it's, it's called Heidegger Gagarin and Us because for him Yuri Gagarin is sort of the anti Heidegger. You know, he's the, he's the sort of Soviet sort of technologically laden, I don't know or informed human who inhabits the sky, you know, who like is able to do this, literally detach himself from the earth in this profound way that no one else has been able to do before. And that. And again it's such a short piece that there's more to say about it. But there's something really, really appealing about that. Especially if you do think of Heidegger's sort of obsession with, with the sort of technological obsession and this concerned with the earth as having fascist overtones, which I do think it does. You know, I think there is something in there that is, that is troubling. And, and so one of the reasons that you know, we bring that up and I think Levinas brings that up and I think that someone like Friedman is excited is that like technology has this, this possibility of being liberatory for human beings in a way that sort of grounding ourselves, you know. And it's forward looking in this sense that just sort of keep, you know, this, this constant reference back to the past is in fact limiting and possibly oppressive in certain cases. And so that's where the resourcing I think to go back to that point becomes complicated because there are, you know, obvious as, you know, there are things in the distant past and I think Hado and would tell you that are profoundly liberatory and there are things in this past or the way that the past is used.
- [63:16]
B
Yeah.
- [63:16]
C
Are at the service of fascism. You know, we see that often at the moment I think as well.
- [63:22]
B
Yeah. Or just like having A critical historical perspective on the past and just understand those are the. Everything is responding to some material situation. Right, right. I love that quote. Yeah, go ahead, please.
- [63:34]
C
Oh, no, no, please, please. No. I think that's really important for Hado especially. He's. He's so concerned with not being anachronistic. And I think it's to his credit that he's so rigorous about. He reads these ancient texts, and this is true of ancient religious texts as well as philosophical texts. You know, he. He's very steeped in the. In the Christian, you know, Christian theological tradition as well. We have to understand what were the. What's the literary genre on the level of like the. The textuality, but also the materiality. How are these. And that's doesn't mean, oh, we can't use these things and they can't be good for us. It actually means that when we engage them, we have more work to do. But we're going to get so much more out of them, actually when we take them seriously on their own terms, or at least we try to. And so there's a liberatoriness to that, that. That kind of attention to analytical attention.
- [64:18]
B
A critical appropriation, if anything. Maybe. I mean, and I think that's one of the things you do so well, is that everything that you, you. You bring into the conversation is critically absorbed and evaluated and. And parsed out and tested. I actually love that quote that you mentioned. So if I could just read it real fast. So the cosmonaut goes up and he goes above the space station, right above the Earth, and he says, witnessing the beauty, the absolute beauty of this planet that we've been given from this perspective is a deeply moving experience. But as I look down at this stunning, fragile ocean, this island that protects all life from the harshness of space, a sadness came over me and I was struck by an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In contrast to the indus. Indescribable beauty of the scene that I was witnessing, I couldn't help but think of the inequity that exists on our apparent paradise. So, like, I think, you know, when we get into Lord and we start talking about limit situations, we start talking about the other, we start talking about a new. The, you know, difference and plurality and all the things like. I think that contradiction starts to become more. I don't know. For me, that's something that I found motivating in my reading was just an acknowledgement of the challenge, I guess.
- [65:34]
C
Yeah.
- [65:35]
B
But even. And even at that global perspective.
- [65:40]
C
Yeah, I love that Quote that's from Ron Garon, who is an American astronaut. And it's in this book called the Overview Effect by. I'm forgetting the author's name right now, but it's kind of collection of reflections from astronauts who actually get to have the view from above and what that does to them. And I find it so amazing because you have Marcus Aurelius and these other ancient practices of like imagining the view from above. And there's an amazing resonance with those ancient practices with what people actually experience when they, they see the Earth. But then there's some other crucial differences. Right. Like the sense of, oh, the small things are not as important in the grand scheme of things. Quite the opposite. Right. He sees so much to be done on the planet. Right. And how fragile it all is. It gives it an even greater urgency even on a, On a political level.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah. And then when we move into Lorde, which, you know, that is a very short section and I don't know if our listeners. I did not know who Audre Lorde was before reading this book. Maybe I'm just slow on the uptake.
- [66:41]
C
But that's okay. There's only so much. I mean, God, there's so many things I wish more about.
- [66:46]
B
But it really struck me because she's dying of liver cancer and we, I, we. My wife is a, is a liver donor and there is a. Yeah, yeah. Her sister had a similar situation as Audre Lorde and this notion of dying to live.
- [66:59]
C
Right.
- [67:00]
B
And I, and I've done some work on Maurice Blanche show and the question of just the, you know, the question of the impossible and just like, so if, and so that's what I took to be like, kind of like the punctuation mark on the book, right. Is that we move through these historical and contingent situations and then we move into this sort of like absolute situation, right. Which is that we're facing our own demise or.
- [67:24]
C
Right.
- [67:24]
B
The, the fin, the question of finitude, essentially. And, and then there's this, there's this, there's this part of this quote that you make about that you cite on the. The function of cancer in a profit economy. And I don't know, like, I read that as like the function of fear in the world today. The function of misfortune in a world of, you know, of. In a capitalist money making system. Right. Like, I don't know. I don't, I don't really have a very well formulated question other than that. Like, I really feel like at that point you're, you're treading on some new ground. And it's kind of exciting and, and also extremely challenging and heartbreaking.
- [68:00]
C
Yeah, so I thought. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, this, the, the, the Lord stuff is again, I, I don't claim to be an expert on her. She's amazing and somebody I've been familiar with for a long time. I, I, I read her, her sort of her autobiography, her. So I had a course when I was an undergrad and spiritual political autobiographies. And we read Zami, which is her biomythography, which she calls it, which is amazing. And then getting more into the cancer journals and then the burst of light, these works on having cancer. And obviously her poetry, her main outlet is that she's a poet but an activist as well. And you read those, the passages about cancer and I think this is maybe what you're picking up on. And it's a. Themed. In the, in the book that I sort of like, I find like overwhelming, right, of this sort of moments where this universality meets this like such deep specificity. Right. Not just having cancer, not just, not just facing death, this universal thing, but the specificity of cancer as an experience. But then the specificity of navigating cancer in the 1980s in the United States, given the nature of the healthcare system, given the fact that she is a queer black woman and of a certain class and of a certain political persuasion. It's so overwhelming. It's so moving. And I'm left a bit speechless in those moments. I feel like my, my, the only thing I can do is to sort of just try and reflect it and sort of passed on that feeling of speechlessness because I, and I think that it's almost a, it's a philosophical, but it's also an ethical and political, like, aporia. Right. It's almost a Socratic moment of like, I'm, I'm, I'm quiet again. I have nothing to say. And I need to, I need to spend a lot of time thinking about where I, where I'm even supposed to go from here in this. That I, I mean that it's, it's sort of like, what can I say?
- [69:54]
B
That she has.
- [69:55]
C
And that, and that that experience is worth reflecting on. Sorry, go ahead.
- [69:59]
B
Absolutely. No, I mean, the, the poet, Andrea Gibbs, I think that's her name, is her poetry. Is she, she passed, I think, this last year and is. I would, I would commend her, her poetry to the listeners. I mean, she's, you know, it's like, yeah, you either just, like, you either just enter into that Silence.
- [70:16]
C
Or you.
- [70:17]
B
You. You know, you.
- [70:18]
C
You write poetry?
- [70:19]
B
I don't know, but I mean. Yeah. And just. But this notion of the one self and the other at that moment.
- [70:25]
C
Right.
- [70:25]
B
Where I'm becoming another to myself.
- [70:27]
C
Right.
- [70:28]
B
And. And that's why I think that the. That being a donor is such a powerful picture too, because then, yeah, like, my wife's liver is in my sister's body, in her sister's body. And then she gives, you know, she has two beautiful children and, you know, so it's just like. And I just feel like it really gets to the. To the core of what you're saying. So if I. If you don't mind, I can. I have a passage here, unless you want to comment first, and I'll read the passage.
- [70:52]
C
I do want to say the. The organ donation thing is not something I thought of. I've done medical ethics and stuff before, and we've talked about the. The sort of ethics and politics of it, but, like, the spirituality of organ donation is something I. I really would love to think about a bit more again, because it reminds me of, again, a freedom. A. Friedman. Right. It's a relationship between oneself and another that is sort of historically unique, that is new and still something we maybe don't understand the meaning of or the way that it implicates the self and. And the relationship to the other. And it's. It's incredibly beautiful. And God, you know, God bless your wife for doing that.
- [71:31]
B
It's incredible. You know, it's just amazing. It's. And also, just like medicine, you know, and the, and the, and the. The good uses of technology and thinking of our body as both gift and as a form of technology.
- [71:45]
C
Right, right, right, exactly. And this is. Again, this is precisely why I follow Friedman. And this is the. This is a deep. I think this is, you know, it doesn't have to be, but it is a Marxist commitment, the idea that technology is, in fact, liberatory and it has so much promise, and it's simply not about whether it is or isn't sort of technologically new. It's always. And some forms of technology are fundamentally harmful. I mean, and this is the thing that scares Friedman. The mustard gas and the tanks and the bombs and other things that we're seeing now, but that there's so many other things that are. Are so. Hold so much possibility for us to flourish and to be better to one another and. And. And so on. And this seems like absolutely one of them.
- [72:26]
B
Yeah. I mean, and so there's a scene where she. She Refuses to put on her prosthetic. And it's because she wants to be. She wants to live joyfully, I think. And she also wants to represent something to other people in a way that's liberatory. And, you know, I was just reminded of a passage from First John, where that love drives out fear. And. And I think that's when she talks about the function of cancer in a profit economy. Like, I. I just hear fear, like, underlined right there. And just the fear and the fear of being a marginalized person. The fear of our. You know, our finitude and all the things. Yeah, go ahead.
- [73:07]
C
Sorry, go ahead.
- [73:08]
B
No, no, please.
- [73:08]
C
Just the. The fear that, given one's sort of subject position, that one's life is sort of not valued equally the kind of world that we live in.
- [73:19]
B
Right. Or that somebody else is making money off of my suffering.
- [73:23]
C
Right, right. And a lot of it.
- [73:25]
B
Yeah, and a lot of it. So she writes for other women of all ages, colors, and sexual identities who recognize that impose silence about any area of our lives for separation, powerlessness, like, impose silence about any area of our lives. And it kind of brings back to mind, Howard Friedman, the notion of conduct, of conducts that, like, if we're being told like. So he writes, if a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what he can say to you in order to make you lose your temper, you're cool. He will always keep you under his subject. Subjection. It's a man's reaction to things that determine their ability to exercise power over him and I presume, also over oneself. But, yeah, just this. Yeah, just this. You know that the sum effect of all this could just be imposed silence. And if you look at some of the stuff happening right now.
- [74:16]
C
Right. That.
- [74:17]
B
That seems to be probably the goal to a certain extent, even though it's having the. The opposite effect.
- [74:21]
C
Right. Which is. Which is really interesting thing to say about resistance and the way it works, but I. There is so many. There are so many political and economic resources being marshaled at the moment to have people not talk about certain things. And rhetorical resources as well, which are kind of fascinating, the way that. The way that what it means to make a legitimate statement is sort of transformed in the moment and for the sake of policing, like other statements and so on. But, yeah, absolutely.
- [74:49]
B
Well, Daniel, thank you very much. I feel like there's a lot here to work with. It's just. It's almost like a bunch of raw material.
- [74:58]
C
There's so many things we. We started on, too. Love to talk to you. More about if we get some time.
- [75:02]
B
Well, I really encourage I encourage our listeners to please pick up the book and read it. Columbia University Press, 2025 Daniel Weiss. Also, please check out his music on Spotify or Bandcamp.
- [75:22]
C
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- [75:55]
B
Experian.