Ep. 245: Fashion (Derrida, Foucault) w/ Shahidha Bari (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Due to a shipping error, meaning that the publisher, instead of sending us four promo copies of the book, sent us four copies each, have a dozen books that we want to give away to our supporters, meaning the book Dressed, written by our guest here, Shahidha Bari. So if you're interested in getting one, please listen to the end of the episode and I'll tell you all about it. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some fellows who at one point set on doing philosophy living but thought better of it. Our question for episode 245 is something like what philosophical meaning lies in clothing?

Or maybe can philosophy dispense with studying mere appearance? We read a Susan Sontag's On Style from 1963, a 1984 interview with Michel Foucault, the ethics of the concern of the self as a practice of freedom, and the beginning of a 1997 address by Jacques Derrida called the Animal that therefore I Am. We're also pleased to be joined for this by Shahidha Bari, author of the 2020 book A Philosophy of Clothes. For more information about these texts, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, who tried to make my cat a theorem, but he was having none of it.

1:11 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, stylized, if not with style, in Austin,

1:17 Wes: Texas, this is Wes Alwan.

1:19 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey, contemplating what my preference for flannel and leather boots means about myself.

1:26 Shahidha: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Shahidha Bari in London, and my leg is in a cast because I've ruptured my Achilles heel. It's hard to style it out in a orthopedic boot.

1:41 Mark: Put a giant flag on it. There are many options.

1:45 Wes: It's funny because I just watched Rear Window two nights ago in which his leg is in a cast and he does nothing but look out the window at people and get himself involved in

1:55 Shahidha: a. Yeah, that's been a reference point in my household too, especially during lockdown. But I hope it doesn't end quite as dramatically as that.

2:03 Seth: Right.

2:05 Mark: So I must thank Shahidha for putting up with our format here. This was a confluence of a few things that you're doing kind of a book tour right now and are probably used to just giving more or less the same speech or answering, just being interviewed about your book. But we were already kind of had on our minds after we had done the Simone de Beauvoir episodes. She had a really interesting chapter on fashion then, and so we were looking. Okay, we want to do A survey of what philosophers have written about this. And lo and behold, the email comes to me from your publicist about this.

And you are good enough to pick these readings for us, many of which did not actually mention clothes. So I was interpreting this as a. You know, these were the footnotes from the parts of your. The intro to your book, for the most part. And these are kind of the groundwork for us to philosophically appreciate the. The work that is done in this actually very new area. Right.

2:55 Shahidha: Yeah. Well, I would say that's perhaps the raison d' etre of the book that I trained in literary theory and philosophy, and I was looking for this book and it didn't exist. There were not philosophers who were really writing about clothes. Although sometimes, you know, clothes might be a metaphor or at worst, there would be a really derogatory remark. I think Kant says something about fashion being for females and folly, which isn't particularly encouraging. So I was trying to find resources, trying to find. Well, two things. I was trying to understand why philosophers didn't seem to be interested in clothes, and I tried to answer that in my book.

And then I was trying to think about how you could use existing philosophy to start to think about clothes and why it might be interesting to think about clothes at all. So, yeah, that explains why none of the thinkers I've selected actually talk about what they wear. That I think you can use them to think about what we do wear.

3:50 Mark: And as I got through the readings that you had recommended, I kind of decided the Simone de Beauvoir chapter that I was thinking we'd return to, that chapter from the Second Sex was kind of beside the point that she's addressing. Kind of what you might expect in the Second Sex is how standards of fashion oppress women. And certainly that is still a live issue. And there are all sorts of extensions to body image issues that one could. But that's not really. At least the parts of your book that we read and the essays that we read, that's not really the focus. It's. Yes.

4:18 Wes: Okay.

4:18 Mark: Obviously, if it just a form of oppression, that is something philosophically worth talking about. But that's not all right. That we've got a bunch of distinct issues in here. I'm not sure what the best way is.

4:28 Wes: Well, it was more focused on the emancipatory potential of dress. Right.

4:33 Seth: Mm.

4:34 Mark: The positive.

4:35 Shahidha: I don't think that people should not read Simone de Beauvoir. I think if there's any excuse to read Simone de Beauvoir, we should read her and she's really great at articulating something that I think feels really obvious to us now, but perhaps wasn't when she was writing, which is that there is a difference between the ways that men and women experience their clothes, what she calls the social experience of dress. So she says that a man's clothes should indicate his transcendence and not attract attention, and that his clothes do not set him up as an object.

She uses the word object, whereas a woman, on the contrary, is required by her society to indicate her good looks and her elegance and her clothes set her up as an object. And we're so used to talking about the objectification of women, and I absolutely write about that in my book. And she's really great in the way that she is in passing Insights throughout the Second Sex, where she talks about how young women in particular are torn between the wish and the refusal to display, which I think is acutely right, that women are torn between the desire to show off or to display what they wear and themselves through their clothes.

And also a kind of resistance, that there's a oppression in being forced to objectify yourself. But Simone de Beauvoir can also be extremely cruel about older women. She's rude about the. That older women dress. But the main reason anybody should read Simone de Beauvoir, I think, is because she dresses amazingly. In real life, she used to wear ski clothes in bed to save on heating bills, and she didn't want to wash her hair. So that's why she would wear the turban during the Nazi occupation of France. And so one of my interests is in how philosophers themselves dress.

And so many of the philosophers I've picked today, Foucault, de Beauvoir, Derrida Sontag, were brilliant dressers. And that's interesting in itself. Not in a facetious way. I think it's telling, definitely.

6:29 Seth: I have to say, you offer quite a few interesting theses in a very short period in the sections that we read from your book. But the one that captivated me most and is kind of the anchor for my reading today is what you say in your introduction on page five. I'm going to read just a. I hope it's not embarrassing to you to hear a quote from your own book, but

6:50 Shahidha: I'll try not to blush.

6:52 Seth: Yes, it says we are dressed in all parts of our culture, literature, music, film and art, we find the representation of clothes. They can be ordinary and unremarkable or glamorous and arresting, but they are there. And you go down and you say, essentially, What I have in mind is something more expansive and open than, you know, a discussion of fashion, a kind of philosophy of dress. I want to suggest that in dress we might find a way of apprehending the world, understanding it as it is expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere. If only we care to read.

Made me think of what distinguishes, if we go back to the classical philosophers, what is it that makes human beings different from animals? Because you have a later chapter where you talk about wearing animal clothing. But we're the rational animal, we're the political animal, we're the social animal, we're the animal that uses tools. There's a variety of different ways that we demarcate ourselves in the hierarchy of being from presumably lesser beings. And I thought it was interesting to take the concept of yet another way we demarcate ourselves is that we are the animals that dress, we are the animals that wear clothes.

That it's just as valid and just as interesting a way of demarcating human beings from other animals as any of those other categories.

8:10 Shahidha: That's precisely why I turn to Derrida in the chapter on animals. The book is organized by garment, essentially dresses, suits, I talk about bags. But then the chapter that slightly angles to that is a chapter on animal skins, furs, feathers and skins. Because I think that there's a way in which we can think about exceptionalism or our non exceptionalism as human beings in the animal kingdom through our clothes. And Derrida is the person who starts to do that. Well, he starts to think about, of course, our relationship between human beings and animals.

And he thinks about nudity. And in fact he has this extremely embarrassing and hilarious moment where he's undressing in front of his cat and he's startled at his own embarrassment at being naked in front of his naked cat. And in that instance he recognizes a relationship between the two of them, not just master and cat, but some sort of strange equality and also vulnerability. He's suddenly vulnerable in front of his naked cat and he invokes Montaigne, Montaigne's famous cat conundrum. Montaigne asks, when I play with my cat, who is to say she's not playing with me?

And any self respecting cat owner knows that that's an impossible question to ask. And I was struck by how the post humanist turn in philosophy, the interest in the relationship between animals and humans, and the blurring of the distinction between animals and humans has covered so many topics. It's thought about ecological issues, it's thought about veganism and vegetarianism, but it hasn't, to my mind, really thought about dress. And actually, when we are dressed, one of the very obvious things that happens every day and we rarely think about is that our clothes are the things that are pressed closest to our skin for the largest part of the day.

And we rarely think about the intimacy of that relationship, particularly when it's an animal skin against us. And that doesn't just mean, you know, your glamorous partner in a fur coat. It means, you know, the leather on your shoes or the suede on your jacket or, I don't know, are you in a cold part of America, in Wisconsin, you know, the goose feathers in your jacket. And I thought, well, this has to be part of the post humanist turn as well. If we're thinking about the relationship between animals and human beings, we need to think about the clothes on our bodies as well.

Yeah.

10:29 Mark: I think the Derrida might be a good way into this series of readings, even though it's the one that was sort of last on our list.

10:35 Shahidha: I don't blame you. It's so hard, the Derrida. It was sort of a trick question on my part to set it for you to see how we would navigate it together. But I think it's really rewarding in other ways, even though it's so opaque.

10:47 Mark: The part later in your book that we read, apart from the intro, was. I don't know if it's quite secondary literature on this, but it certainly was the lens through which I was reading this Derrida. Part of an essay. I guess what made this your whole discussion. The intro, well situated in the history of philosophy for me, was just folks like Descartes and Kant that regarded our soul, or back to Plato, as what is important about us and the physical things. You know, this is a very Christian notion. The physical things are all shallow. They'll all fall away.

The true philosopher is not concerned with that. But then once we get to folks like Heidegger, that's a false dichotomy. We need to understand ourselves as embodied. It's been a giant mistake in the history of philosophy to feel like we are disembodied rational souls. And so paying attention, you know, we get Merleau Ponty talking about the phenomenology of the body. This whole talk of close just seems an extension of that. Right. We are embodied not just in our skin, but in these things we wear all the time. So shouldn't philosophy pay attention to that?

11:48 Shahidha: I think that's right in one particular way. That's very evident in my book, which is that my interests are in contemporary continental philosophy. So Derrida, particularly people like Sontag, Foucault. But the one thing I realized, and the reason that is precisely as you say, that those people become interested in the body, they become interested in phenomenology. Gaston Bachelard is the person I don't mention in the book, but who I think is the blueprint for the book. In many ways, the Poetics of space in the 60s is a kind of experiential, evocative account of how we inhabit space and what architecture does to our lived experience.

And then in a way, I was trying to think about clothes in that way too. And so I absolutely belong to that contemporary tradition. But the one thing I would say is that during my investigations I found so many things that surprised me so about very many of those early philosophers that you mentioned. So Kant is extremely rude about clothes and he says clothes are a folly and we ought not to be interested in them. And I talk a little bit about Kantian ideas of appearance, which are not appearance in the sense that we think of in fashion. But I try to think about the way that that idea of appearance might overlap with appearance.

But Kant, I found out, was extremely well dressed. He was very interested in his own dress. And the thing about Descartes, I mean, this is the thing that was most startling and funny almost is that there's an apocryphal story about Descartes coming up with the Cartesian coordinate system, the x and Y axes, that he did it while he was lying in bed because he was extremely lazy and would not get up very early. And he was watching a spider weaving a web in the corner of his bedroom. And he was thinking about how you map three dimensional space into a two dimensional coordinate system, and that's the Cartesian coordinate system.

And all of dressmaking relies on the Cartesian coordinate system. It relies on the way that you map a 3D body onto a 2D flat surface. So even Descartes in some peculiar way yields something about the way that we dress and the way that we think about our three dimensional bodies. Isn't that surprising? I mean, I found that really surprising.

13:58 Dylan: I never heard that story before. Yeah, I've read the geometry two or three times, but obviously I haven't read anything about the making of the geometry.

14:06 Shahidha: Yeah, I think it's an apocryphal story, but a really good one.

14:09 Dylan: You know, you want to believe it.

14:11 Mark: Am I right in thinking that this Derrida essay lies most clearly on that line of talking about embodiment, that it seems like the direction that Derrida is going to take. And here he again looks at the history of philosophy, and instead of saying, you know, some of these past people are too spiritual. I want to be more bodily, he asks it in the form of. There are some philosophers who you get the feeling that they've never been looked at naked by an animal, or that they've never acknowledged the meaningfulness of that encounter. And then there's other philosophers that, you know are something that he's gonna lay out. And it wasn't clear to me sort of what his whole agenda was gonna be going forward in the rest of it. But clearly it was something along the Heideggerian lines.

14:49 Shahidha: Heideggerian is right, I think. I mean, I think body is one of those words that you don't normally associate with Derrida. You would think of someone like Judith Butler, and you might even think of someone like Foucault in Biopolitics. I think he can feel so difficult and opaque, but I never find him abstract. I think he's always thinking about relations, about how one category or concept is related to another. He's always disrupting the distinctions between writing and speech. For instance, right very early on in Writing and Difference. And in dissemination.

Or in the book about friendship, he's disrupting the distinction between friendship and enmity. And in this book, he's disrupting the distinction between human and animal. And he says this is a continuum. And when we start to think about the ways that we're connected to animals, when we start to think about the ways we are animals, I am like my cat, naked in front of it, just as it is naked in front of me. Then that has to put some burden on the way that we behave with each other. Ethics. Derrida is, I think, an ethical thinker, and I'm really interested in the ethics of dress because we are human beings who wear clothes not just for ourselves, but in relation to each other.

And it's the. To each other that I'm most interested in. And that has repercussions beyond, you know, just the idea that you're wearing your plaid shirt, Dylan, and I'm wearing a bobbled black jumper with a sequined necklace. It's more than the fact that we're related through our clothes. It's about the people who make our clothes as well. I mean, that's a big part of my book that we have to start to think seriously about the nature of our clothes and care about our clothes as objects of serious inquiry if we are to start to care about the people who make our clothes.

So it's about relation. Derrida is always thinking about the ethics of relation and in this case, how we relate to animals.

16:39 Dylan: I like that you're pointing out that Derrida is focused on the relation and the questions of it. And it did make me clarify an observation that I've had unconsciously when reading Derrida that his constant interest in relation, I think, adds to a little bit of. It's not exactly distractedness, but because he can't help himself from pointing out there's sometimes the relations that he has in his writing are pointing to things that he's going to take up later or whatever. There's a little bit of a squirrel quality, like I'm looking at something and I can't help but talk about this thing because there's a kind of, I don't know, linearity in writing. Inevitably, then he wants to talk about so many things.

17:20 Shahidha: That's right. That's my experience of reading him. He feels like a series of non sequiturs, but they're all tangentially connected and they all come back to some point. The only time I ever saw him in real life was in the early Noughties, and he was giving a lecture in London, and I went along, and he was very old and frail, and I was quite dazzled and exhausted by how connective his thinking was. And he was making precisely those connective, related leaps that are exhausting to follow. But the thing that I remember is that afterwards a colleague said to me that Derrida looked exactly as he imagined him, which was like a very handsome, tanned ski instructor. And I remember that really vividly that there was a kind of exotic, I don't know, glamorous otherness to him.

18:08 Dylan: Sure, I was reading the Derrida. I was trying to sort of sort out that continuum that you referred to. He's clearly trying to point to a kind of continuum between animals and us and maybe bring them together. But there's also maintaining this distinction, which seems to signal a kind of borderline, which is we wear clothes and they don't. Getting into it had this, you know, the story of his being naked in front of his cat and then realizing that he was naked in front of his cat, and in particular that he was embarrassed about being naked in front of his cat.

And that leads to a very fruitful reflection, like, why the heck would I be embarrassed about being naked in front of My cat, but I am. And so there's a kind of self realization. And I guess what I wondered is that that whole direction, to me, made a lot of sense. And in articulating how we are very fruitful about clothing and modesty and the ethics of why we dress and I mean, there's a whole bunch of fruitful things, but it doesn't, to me, give me much insight into animals. I wonder about that. It just bringing us closer to them. Because to me, in this whole thinking, there's no sense in which the cat is doing anything different than what cats do.

It really is a reflection on how we understand ourselves, and it's very fruitful, but it's about us.

19:33 Shahidha: I think that's a really good point. Isn't that always the fatal flaw in our attempts to try and write the philosophy of the animal, that we cannot but write it from our own position? But that's also the modesty of the gesture, isn't it? To try and unwrite ourselves out of that? But I would say that moment that you described where he is embarrassed in front of his cat and he thinks, why the hell should I be embarrassed in front of my cat? Well, you realize that you are normally not. You are embarrassed in front of other human beings because they possess a subjectivity that can be judgmental.

And you are not embarrassed in front of your cat because you do not believe your cat possesses a subjectivity that can be judgmental. And in that moment, Derrida is thinking, what if my cat possesses a subjectivity that could be judgmental? And if I start to think of animals in that way possessing subjectivities that could be judgmental in their own value systems, then perhaps that alters the way that I relate to them. And I think in the end, it isn't just about how we relate to the cat. It must, for Derrida, produce an ethics at the end. Right.

If we believe that animals have a subjectivity that is somehow close to the one that we dignify ourselves with, then the way that we treat them has to alter. So I think that's where the subsequent work on this study, the animal that therefore I am, has developed into a kind of animal ethics, which is about things like vivisection, it's things like vegetarian. What is the respect that we dignify ourselves with which we have not been able to extend to our animals? And will that alter if we start to attribute to animals a subjectivity of their own?

21:10 Dylan: It makes me think about the distinction between the kind of reaction an animal will have on the podcast we've a number of times talked about things like the capability of animals to have something like reason. They clearly, there's lots and lots of examples of animals where you just say, well, they're clearly figuring something out. They're making judgments of judgments that are the sort of. I'll call it reasonable judgments, cause and effect kinds of judgments, that kind of thing. And what you're pointing out is that when you think about this, especially in the context of Derrida, of an ethical judgment like shame, is that you begin to wonder, well, what would it mean to have that kind of subjectivity on an animal where the animal in, say, just to pick an example, the human being cruel to the animal, besides the animal being scared or wanting to run away or all other kinds of sort of instinctual things, could there be something like them recognizing us as bad and a distinction between that and just being afraid?

22:08 Shahidha: I think your first point is right, that in the end you return to a. Not a paradox, but a dilemma. That in your attempts to understand the animal, it is almost impossible for you not to understand it within the terms of your own reference. It's impossible to understand the animal in its own language or in its own values. And that the philosophical writing about the animal will always fall into that trap. And one of the things I try to write about in my book, when I explore the relationship between human beings who wear animal skins is to try and think about strangeness.

That when I think about leopard print dresses, a design, a dress by Jean Paul Gaultier which is. It's in sequins, but it's trying to imitate a kind of the look of fur, if not the touch of fur, it's the look of fur. And it has a tiger's head, I think it is, or it might be a cheetah's head at the bodice, looking up at the woman who's wearing it. And it's a kind of. It's a trompe l'oeil, a trick of the eye, that it looks like a cat, but it's made of sequins. And so what is it that we're doing when we're trying to imitate animals? And actually, we can't imitate animals.

There's a limit to how far we can mimic animals. And why are we trying to pretend to be them? Animals are different to us. And actually, one of the things that happens when we wear animal skins is that we realize how different a fox fur feels next to our own bare flesh. Right? That suede has a particular kind of grain. And it is entirely different to the grain of my arm. One of the things that we will never be able to overcome and we have to acknowledge is our difference that the animal is not me. And I'm wearing it and trying to imitate it. I'm trying to steal its properties and its qualities because I lack them myself.

I can't heat myself in the way that a fur coat will or that a woollen jacket will. So there is a kind of insurmountable difference between me and the animal, which I think we have to accept too.

24:08 Seth: When you start speaking in that kind of vocabulary about inhabiting and adopting qualities and so forth, it's framing it in a certain context that ignores or misses a relationship for certain other kinds of societies, non Western societies or perhaps pre industrial. I don't want to go too far in this because I'm not an expert, but we did an episode on Native American philosophy and there's definitely a sense of animism and there's a sense in which you can inhabit the spirit or take on the spirit of the animals. So there's a sense in which, aside from the feeling of the texture next to your skin or the difference, there's, you know, a sense in which an identification with what the animals represent or the powers that they have, and that by physically inhabiting the skins, you also take on that spiritual aspect.

I don't think that's something you're particularly interested in, but I think it's also something to acknowledge that there's an originary.

25:07 Shahidha: Yeah, that's fascinating. I don't write about it, and I don't know enough about it, but it is totally fascinating. The one thing I do write about is about feathers and women. Because one of the things, the historical things I discovered in my research is that exactly as the women's suffrage movement is developing in Britain at the turn of the 19th century, the later part of the 19th century, there is this enormous trade in birds. Because one of the things we forget is that women wore enormous numbers of feathers, feathers in hats, largely. And so it was this incredible trade.

And there are trade ledgers from South America and Africa talking about the trade in exotic birds. And women realize this is happening and they start a campaign for the preservation of birds. In fact, they formally found in Britain. It's called the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the rspb. I don't know if there's an equivalent in America, but it's basically an animal welfare organization with great history. And there's a lot of fondness for it, but nobody realizes that it was founded by women because women were identifying with these endangered birds.

And there is a kind of writing. Mary Wollstonecraft writes about this, about why women are like birds. She thinks that there is a kind of relationship between the entrapment of birds and their capacity for flight. They're different, that women somehow channel. And so I try to write about. It's not quite animism in the way that you're describing, Seth, which sounds completely wonderful and amazing to me, but there is a kind of sympathy and a relationship that manifests in a. In a political form at the turn of the 19th century or the later part of the 19th century.

26:46 Seth: Yeah, I really appreciated that mention. I actually read through to that chapter on feathers, because as soon as I saw it, I was put in mind. I like opera, and there are uncountable arias associating. And of course, even the way in which the parts for sopranos and so forth are written that imitate birdsong. And to associate women with birds.

27:11 Shahidha: Have you got something in mind? I'd love to know.

27:14 Seth: Well, there's L'amour est un oiseau rebelle. Love is a rebellious bird, which is not specifically associating with women, but of course, it's sung by Carmen. And then not so much bird, but also with the same kind of concept, is La donna è mobile. So women are like butterflies. And it's the flip side of the caged bird. It's the notion that birds represent a certain kind of. If you watch birds, which I do, we have many birds. I'm a birder. But if you watch birds, you can perceive their actions as being. They seem skittish. You know, their attention is focused here and there, and they flit from place to place.

And there's not the same sense of, you know, they're not a rooting animal like a rodent or something like that, that you. And so this association with women and feathers and birds representing a certain kind of flightiness that doesn't carry the weight. It can't be responsible, can't be rational, can't carry on those kinds of things. I think there's a long tradition of that in literature and especially in opera.

28:19 Mark: It's fascinating, Seth, what you brought up about the Native American episode that we did, it made me think of. So this quote on page 208 in Shahidha's book, this idea that animal skins are worn as the mark of our privilege and poise vividly contrasts with the more atavistic habits of the primitive man as we Imagine first wearing fur. But is the fur clad countess in a novel by Tolstoy really so far removed from the image of the caveman crudely draped in hide? Doesn't the same impulse linger beneath the surface of both? The simple fact is that human beings dress in skins of other animals.

We command the life of other creatures in order to make sense of our own. It seems like Derrida's complaint here, and maybe your complaint here is that we are alienated, right? That there really is in pre industrial peoples who are, you know, maybe having to kill the animal themselves or someone. You. You've seen the animal, you have some relationship to when it actually had its skin on it, and then you put on that skin that there really does seem something fundamentally different between that and this. You know, the kind of people that you criticize who don't acknowledge the people who make their clothes their origins.

Whereas there's something authentic about using. Not necessarily that we want to go back to this attitude, but there's something more authentic about that original way of wearing hides than just purchasing it. Something like that.

29:36 Shahidha: That's so interesting that you picked up on that section. I think that we are alienated in safaris. It's not so much that there is something authentic about the caveman in the crudely draped in the hide, but rather there is an illusion in the countess wearing the fur. Right? That's what I'm interested in. The illusion of a civility or a civilization that is blood free, that is without savagery, because that's what we attribute to the caveman. But there is savagery in the countess wearing the fur too. That's why a few paragraphs later, I cite Walter Benjamin.

When Walter Benjamin is writing about, he's looking at a pair of leather gloves, and he thinks that these gloves provoke a horror, he says, a horror that stirs deep in man an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. And he's writing at this terrible moment in European history during the Second World War, where we're really seeing the savagery of human beings. And he's feeling it very particularly as a German Jew who's being forced to flee his home. And in that moment when he's looking at the leather gloves, he's thinking about how when we wear animal skins like leather against our own skin, we have mastered the animal.

But our mastery involves a savagery that we do not always want to acknowledge. And that's what we're alienated from, that original savagery that is involved in the way that we fashion our clothes. And in a different way, we're also alienated, I think, from the savage conditions in which our clothes are made now, Right. That there is a kind of alienation that happens in the ways that we buy things that come to us without. They come to us clean without a trace of the hands through which they've passed. Right? So when you buy whatever you buy in a shop, you buy a shirt, if it has the slightest crease or smear on it, you will return it to the shop because what you want to buy is something pure and untouched by human hands, except that what you are buying has been made.

It's been probably been made. The great likelihood is that it's been made by a garment worker who's working in conditions that are deeply unhappy and poorly paid. And so we are absolutely alienated from the things that we wear in the way that. In the sense that we are not conscious of those things too. But, yeah, we're alienated from a certain kind of savagery.

31:58 Mark: I think I'm seeing clear parallels in this between the Kristeva style. We are horrified by these things that are ultimately getting at our origins. Right. We don't like to think that we came from a mother. So we discussed this also in our more recent Butler episode versus this similar take. But that we don't want to acknowledge our own animality. That's why we're like this Benjamin example. That's why we're somehow revolted by the, you know, just the sheer physicality and animality of the gloves. Or maybe that's the same explanation for seeing ourselves face to face with the naked cat when we're naked. That there's something that reminds us of our animal nature and that shocks us, but there's no clear connection between that and, say, the developmental stuff that the psychotherapist wants to pick up on. Are those just totally different kinds of explanations for you, Wes?

32:51 Wes: I'm a little unclear on what you're

32:52 Mark: asking, what you thought of this whole idea of psychological explanation of there's a fundamental alienation between us and our animal nature, and that's why things like leather gloves freak us out.

33:04 Wes: Things like leather gloves freak us out.

33:06 Shahidha: Well, they don't freak us out, but they freak out, Benjamin, in a very particular moment of history. And I think that's the thing about the point you made about alienation, Mark, is that we're not freaked out by our fur coats and our leather jackets, but we ought to be freaked out because our civilization is an illusion. And Being dressed for this world, for our society, is part of that illusion.

33:26 Dylan: I mean, part of what I think we're struggling with is this question of both alienation and distance that we have and a version of facing up to the truth of the history of the things, in this case that we wear. And I feel a real parallel with other kinds of pristineness that we engage in. You know, ugly veg is one, right? So you go to the supermarket and every bell pepper and every carrot is perfectly shaped. But if anybody who's grown anything or farmed anything knows that that's just not. And in fact, there's a tremendous amount of food that's perfectly edible in the sense that it tastes just the same, but it's just inconvenient, right?

It's carrots with three legs, and it's, you know, the green pepper with a divot on the side. And that morphological difference actually doesn't have anything to do with the taste. It doesn't reveal anything about it. It might be that it makes it more inconvenient to chop. My son, the other day, he was over and we were cooking, and we had this funny moment where he cooks for himself and he is chopping. And he described routinely wishing, just being irritated about onions being round and not being square. He said, why aren't there square onions?

Because it's just so inconvenient to have a round onion. And I almost. I laughed for, I don't know, a good solid minute. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever. And. But this is with animals. And it's like saying, getting sort of freaked out, Benjamin getting freaked out about the leather gloves and stuff like, that part of it, I end up thinking about, well, there is something important about the distance that we have with the things that we make and consume and interact with in our lives. And there is something to be said for maintaining that closeness and acknowledging it.

So when we talk about, for me, like, the distinction between something like fur and something typically like leather is that, you know, I have the disposition of, well, look, I eat animals and I eat cows less than I used to, but I eat animals. And I don't have a lot of problem with it. But I also think that it's part of sort of the ethical decision regarding that is using as much of the animal as possible makes a lot of sense. And so that's different to me than slaughtering a fox for the fox's fur, as opposed to taking these, well, if I'm going to consume this animal, then I Should make sure that I consume it.

35:55 Shahidha: Well, I absolutely agree in the sense that I feel like there is a kind of dignity in acknowledging that the goose is able to heat you and keep you warm in a way that you're not capable of on your own terms. I'm interested in that. That there are things that animals can do, and we admire and aspire to it, and we incorporate them into our clothes as a result. And there is a kind of dignity to that. It's not that we should. I don't know. I feel sort of agnostic about fur, and I feel certainly about leather. The thing that I'm interested in is the illusion of our distance, that we are not like our animals, because I think we are.

36:31 Dylan: I guess I'm thinking that that illusion of distance is exemplified with our clothes, but as a kind of exemplification of a general kind of distance that we have either with ourselves and our location in the world, our placement in the world, our embodiment as physical beings. And that's why, again, I think about things like, again, ugly veg.

36:57 Mark: Right.

36:57 Dylan: Or other kinds of things that are not perfect. Right. To me, it takes me down that road of our preoccupation with something like perfection, which ends up being idealized right out of the world. And that this thread of thinking is one pulling us back into the world, back into our embodiment, back into our blood and our dirt and our context.

37:19 Mark: Can I interpret your comment, Dylan, as a transition to get Foucault on the table here? Because it sounds like the way. So, again, the name of his essay was the Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom. This is an interview with three different people, and it's kind of rambling over a few different subjects. But definitely the relevance for us was, I think, just the main point of. He has a whole book, the History of Sexuality, Volume 3, the Care of the Self. And what that means in terms of. We can see how that's reflected in why we might care about that for defending fashion as legitimate thing to talk about philosophically.

Because it sounds like someone could, along the lines of what you were just saying, Dylan, say all this concern about physical appearance, physical perfection, that's just alienating. That's false. That's actually the kind of thing that Simone de Beauvoir is complaining about. It's a way of being inauthentic. But Foucault, you can interpret maybe as responding to that by saying, no, no. In fact, look at ancient philosophy from Plato through the Stoics and Epicureans. Very much their approach. Right. The whole ancient virtue ethics approach is self care, is make yourself into a person that you can be proud of, that has all the virtues and that includes your presentation to other people.

There's something inherently outward facing in that self construction, in that pursuit of virtue that you end up, Foucault says, according to these philosophies, and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, of course, goes into great detail about this, that even if you're trying to just walk around the world with the appropriate poise, the appropriate attitude, the appropriate deliberate approach, the appropriate lack of fear of death, whatever the thing that you're trying to argue is part of that ethic, then you end up sort of by definition, in proper comportment regarding other people.

So that there really is nothing problematic then, per se about caring about your virtue and your appearance being part of that shade. Am I characterizing the connection to your book correctly here?

39:24 Shahidha: Yeah, beautifully, Mark. Thank you. And it's the ethics that makes it important. It's the caring for yourself so that you can engage with others to the fullest and most careful ways, to the best of your capacity. Caring for yourself so that you can enable that relationship to others that redeems self care. For me, I always have question marks over the term self care. And some people have, I think some readers of Foucault, this version of Foucault towards the end of his career, where he writes about the technology of the self and the care of the self.

Sometimes people have taken it as a kind of aesthetics of the self, where you curate the self. You go to the gym and you develop a gym body. And, you know, it's a kind of defense of a certain kind of narcissism. And I don't think that's right, actually. I think what he's doing is thinking exactly as you delineate, Mark, that you shape the self so that you can be a productive member. Productive isn't the right word, but like a considerate and capacious member of a society that engages with others, ethos for him is about being with others. And the interesting thing about this essay for me is that it comes so late in his life.

It's an interview, as you say. And I think he's always wonderfully urbane and witty in interviews, more so than in his writing generally. And this interview happens in, I think, the January of 1984, and he dies in the June of 1984. So it's very close to the end for him where he. I'm imagining that his body is ravaged by aids, and he's thinking about his own mortality. It must be impossible for him not to be thinking about that. He's writing and thinking about the body at precisely this moment where his own body is failing him. He's thinking about caring for the self, how you take care of yourself, your body, your subjectivity, your being precise at the moment that he's vulnerable.

And it's such a surprising essay for many people, because this interview is surprising, because the first question the interviewer asks him whether he's suddenly become interested in subjectivity, because to all intents and purposes, Foucault has not been interested in subjectivity. Foucault has been interested in prisons. Foucault has been interested in asylums. He's been interested in the discourses of the medical and legal profession. But at this stage of his career, he's talking about subjectivity. And at this moment in this interview, he says, I have always been interested in subjectivity, that there is no point thinking about structures and systems of power without subjectivity.

The subject is shaped by structures of power. It's shaped by the prison system. It's shaped by discipline. It's shaped by history of hospitals. It's shaped by all the things that Foucault has investigated. But he has always been interested in the subject. And it comes to me like a revelation when I read this interview that Foucault has always been interested in subjectivity. And I find it just immensely moving that he is returning to the body at this moment in his own life, in his own death.

42:08 Dylan: You remind me of this section where he frames this in terms of the practices of freedom over the processes of liberation.

42:14 Wes: Let's say what care of the self means. Let's just back up a little bit. There's a specific meaning to this which has to do with self mastery. Right. And individual freedom. This is the sort of thing that he's taking from ancient ethics, the idea of surpassing oneself, mastering one's appetites, being a good ruler over oneself. So there's a transition from that to an ethos as a way of being or a certain type of behavior. So this is an extension of virtue ethics. Right. It's kind of reminiscent of Nietzsche. From particular habits, which we might typically associate with virtue, like magnanimity or temperance, to one's style of being.

It has something in common with the traditional concept of virtue in that it's behavioral and in some sense formal, but it gets us closer to the connection between the aesthetic and the ethical. So clothing, for instance, and this is really the one place in the essay that this connection is made. The bulk of the essay is about self care as a practice of freedom. And then we get this one little reference to ethos, into clothing and appearance and to gait, because they are meant to be signifiers of something. They're meant to be manifestations of character.

So, for instance, the example he brings up is calmness in response to events, although that's explicitly a part of one's ethos, but it's part of a list in which clothing is included. But I think the ethical dimension to dress in Foucault has to have something to do with. He calls it a concrete form of freedom. It has to do with the expression of freedom or the expression of certain kind of virtue, broadly speaking, a certain kind of style of being, which he gives a long list of adjectives which you might call beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable, exemplary, that sort of thing.

That, for me, is the really interesting connection between here one's appearance, which we might typically think of as superficial or unrelated to deeper substance of character and to the ethical, when in fact there's kind of connection.

44:36 Shahidha: There's an earlier essay called Technologies of the Self. I think where he uses the phrase. He doesn't quite use self care. He says care of the self means. This is the quote, taking pains with one's health and holdings alike, which I think would speak to that classical notion of virtue ethics. And you're right that there's something almost nostalgic about this essay, that he is revisiting or tracing what he regards as a shift from a Greek model of the care of the self to a modern notion of philosophy, which is. Which entails knowing yourself. And he thinks knowing yourself is a kind of falsehood, that ourselves are shaped by power.

And that the pursuit of knowing oneself is somehow a kind of misjudged effort. Whereas caring for the self is the thing that could produce ethos, the ethical relationship to others. But the other thing I would say is that when you think about it, of course, he's been concerned with how we think about our health and our holdings alike in all of his work. When you think about the ways he writes about the penal system, the ways that a disciplinary society works upon the human body. In schools, in armies, in prisons. He's always been thinking about the way that the body is marshaled.

And in this later part of his career, he calls it biopolitics. The way that a state, it administers the body and biopolitics is something that we should be Wary of. It's the way in which a population is governed and controlled through health and safety and obedience. We're in lockdown right now. We're in a moment of biopolitics where our governments are telling us to stay indoors, but our bodies are being controlled. And Foucault cautions us to be anxious and cautious of it. But he also thinks, I think, in this essay, and certainly in the history of sexuality, that there is a kind of agency that we can.

There is some sort of possibility that might be enabled by our care of the self, and that that is the job of philosophy proper, to return to the care of the self rather than the foolishness of knowing yourself. And I'm sympathetic to that.

46:43 Wes: Yeah. This is a type of freedom that, you know, he wants, as Dylan was pointing out, to make a distinction between power and domination. Right. And freedom and liberation. So domination might include some of these unjust social systems, for instance, or systemic inequalities that limit our possibilities. And in some cases, if domination is total, then freedom in the sense that he's been talking about is a non starter. But liberation doesn't guarantee freedom. So for instance, sexual liberation doesn't guarantee sexual vitality or good sexual relationships.

The other interesting thing for me that he emphasizes in this essay is the fact that he's often misinterpreted to say that because power suffuses the social and human relationships, that we ought to abandon the concept of freedom when that's clearly not the case. And in fact, he says it's only because freedom suffuses the human relationships that power can suffuse human relationships. Once domination is total, the concept of power actually disappears.

47:50 Shahidha: Yes. And he's really clear eyed about the fantasies of progress. Right. That he does throughout his work. Right. The idea that a modern penal system is somehow more humane than previous ones, or that suddenly we are more sexually liberated than the Victorians were. He's always interrogating the idea that we are progressive, that we are progressing. And freedom for him is always a question, are we as free as we think in the history of sexuality? He is asking, are we as sexually liberated as we think? Were the Victorians as repressed as we thought, or was this a manifestation of power?

And my question in my book is, are we as free as we think we are in our dress? Dress historians talk about corsets and crinolines and Chinese foot binding, and we think there's a history of being oppressed in our dress. And somehow we are now magically liberated or free in the fact that we are able to avail ourselves of so many choices. But are we as free as we think in the ways that we dress? That's a question that recurs for me throughout my book, partly because Foucault is the person that asks you to question that narrative of a kind of progressive model of freedom.

49:02 Wes: I think clothing is one of the cases in which our freedom is obviously typically limited. Right. Why does the choice for me in a given day come down to jeans versus khakis? Let's say. Not to say that that's what I'm limited to. I also have sweatpants, but

49:18 Shahidha: I'm learning so much about you, Wes.

49:22 Wes: Or a button down shirt. And actually style for me, it's something that I paid more attention to as I got older. So I was much more casual about dress when I was younger, but I paid a lot more attention to it as I got older and as I was actually encouraged to by my psychoanalyst. I find that psychoanalysts, because they have to show up and you can't look bad. So psychoanalysts pay attention to their dress and it's just sort of. It's part of the community. And so you start to pick up on that. But what I was meaning to say was that even then, even if you start paying attention, you're paying attention to, for instance, you might buy a style guide.

You're looking for certain norms. The fashions are the fashions. The fashions are something bigger than you. And what counts as an expression of freedom is it that now that I've moved to button down shirts and that feels liberating. And I actually personally, it does feel liberating sometimes. Or is it that I'm going to wear something funky, I'm going to dye my hair, I'm going to do this or that. But just getting back to the distinction I wanted us to keep in mind was that the freedom versus liberation. So I think they're two different questions.

Whether wearing certain types of dress might lend themselves to liberation at a political level and whether they lend themselves to freedom and care of the self at this more personal virtue ethics sounding level that Foucault was getting at in this essay. I think those are two different things and they don't necessarily go together.

50:44 Shahidha: Agree. But I have a million questions about what you wear to analysis.

50:48 Wes: Well, right now I don't have to wear anything because I'm zoom.

50:54 Dylan: Because this psychoanalyst is a cat.

50:56 Wes: It's me and my cat both. Yeah.

51:01 Mark: What else do we still have to cover here? That's Relevant in Foucault. Before we want to get on. It's on tag.

51:06 Seth: I want to say something about this concept of freedom and liberation. And dress or style, if you will. So Wes mentioned that Foucault talks about freedom being the condition for resistance. That in essence, the structures of power, of domination exist at all levels. It's not just you're talking about government, you're talking about interpersonal relationships, but that they're fluid. And insofar as there's room for reversing or changing those power dynamics, that's what constitutes freedom.

51:37 Wes: Liberation and freedom are two different things. Right, Sorry.

51:40 Seth: Resistance. Should I say the possibility of resistance is predicated by freedom. How's that?

51:46 Wes: That relationship is a little. Is complicated and unclear to me, but I think he's saying that liberation doesn't guarantee freedom.

51:52 Seth: Absolutely.

51:53 Wes: Although it is. Total domination would make freedom a non starter in his sense, which is why resistance requires freedom.

52:00 Seth: Yeah. Freedom is not the result. Freedom is the precondition for the possibility of resistance. And total domination would mean there's no possibility for resistance, so no freedom.

52:09 Wes: So one thing does not follow from the other. But go ahead and say what you're going to say.

52:13 Seth: I wanted to say two things. One about my own personal experience and one about this Michael Jordan documentary that I've been watching recently, which is all the rage over here.

52:23 Shahidha: I've been watching it too. It's remarkable. And I write about Air Jordans in the book too.

52:27 Seth: Okay, so good, then you'll totally get this reference. So the first four episodes focus on individual characters that play a role. There's Michael, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson and Dennis Rodman. And I don't know if you were attending to this, but the theme of freedom comes up over and over again, particularly for Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. For anybody who's. I don't know how old you are. We are all of an age where we remember this happening in real time.

52:56 Dylan: Some of us lived in Chicago

53:00 Seth: when Rodman would start wearing makeup and dyeing his hair and came out wearing a wedding dress with Madonna and all this. His articulation of it, which comes up again in this. In the documentary, is I just wanted the freedom to do what I wanted, to be who I wanted to be. And that the way he dressed was for him. It was absolutely him exercising his freedom. And he saw it as particularly against the constraints of the very establishment NBA, but also just conventions at the time. It was. Resistance was a rebellion. But he certainly leveraged the way he looked, which included clothes and Then also piercings and tattoos and other sorts of things, and makeup, all of which I think function in the.

The broader concept of style beyond just clothes. But thematically, I mean, as I was watching this just over the last week, I thought, oh, my gosh, this is completely tied into what we're about to talk about this weekend. It's an absolute living embodiment of somebody seeing that there's a structure of domination or of power, and then exploring and pushing the limits of what freedom constitutes within that and seeing what the outcomes of that are, potentially reframing the conversation. I think after Rodman, you see more people getting tattoos.

You see all. You know, there's a bunch of different things that happen. And it made me think about my own experience in my primary work life, which is technology. So I'm sure there are many industries that are as style deficient and style starved as technology. But what marks off, I think, technology more than others is this sense that clothes are utility, you know, as exemplified by jobs who wore. You know, he just said, I'm just going to wear a turtleneck and blue jeans every single day because I don't want to waste brain cycles on having to figure out what to wear.

And it comes down to there's a kind of uniform for both the men and women I have found myself as. I've just like Wes, I've become more interested and more caring about the way I'm dressed as I get older. You can't tell it from this Zoom interview, but I thought about what I should wear and should I put on some sort of sparkly jacket and something to impress you? But I just figured I'd wear it.

55:14 Shahidha: You look amazing, Seth. You're wearing. It looks like a dragon on your T shirt.

55:17 Seth: It's an octopus playing the drums.

55:19 Shahidha: Yes, well, see, I mean, I'm dazzled by it and I'm touched that you made the effort.

55:25 Seth: I thought very carefully about doing something else, but I think all the time about how I can push the boundaries and use dress to mark myself out as different from everybody else, but not transgress in a way where it takes away from my credibility or becomes a thing in itself. What I want people to do is look at me and say, God, Seth always looks, you know, he's dressed well. He looks sharp. He's not wearing the standard stuff. But not think that somehow that makes me, you know, that I'm somehow like the Rip torn of our executive leadership meeting, you know, or something like that. Rip torn. Another terrible over 50 reference. I apologize for that.

56:02 Mark: Did you mean Rip Taylor?

56:05 Seth: Oh, Rip Taylor, yes, I'm sorry, Rip Taylor. That's who I meant.

56:08 Shahidha: I think you meant Rip Torn, which would also have made sense to me. I don't believe you about tech professionals being poorly dressed because I was reading about a guy called is it Vitalik Buterin who invented a cryptocurrency called Ethereum.

56:23 Seth: Ethereum.

56:24 Shahidha: And he's 25 years old and he has an IQ of 257 and he religiously wears tie dyed T shirts that are festooned with spaceships, rainbows and wolves. So I don't believe you about techs, but I do think there is a kind of disregard for business stress that is seen as a mark of the contrary creative or the dangerously deregulated innovator. Yeah, yep.

56:51 Wes: Yeah.

56:52 Dylan: So you would be disruptive in tech, especially like as a software engineer, if what you did is you showed up in a three piece suit every day because you would be violating the unwritten ethics of that. I work in a Medtech now. I had been a professor for a little over a decade before that and then before I was a graduate student. So this conversation that Seth's bringing up makes me think of the eras of different kinds of communities that had different standards of dress that I lived in. So going from being a postdoc or a graduate student where it was basically jeans and a T shirt, to being a professor, where it mattered in my relationships with my students, if I looked like I had authority in the room and stuff like that, and then being in a business environment where interacting with customers or interacting with executives and stuff like that, and there's a kind of signaling going on.

But I guess in the context of our conversation here has to do with the ethics, the interactions that we have with other people, how we successfully make that connection or communicate our regard for both ourselves as well as for the relationships involved and that it's sort of constantly invoked.

58:09 Shahidha: I wrote a little piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education in the. In the States, which is an academic magazine. And I was writing about how academics dress and I was delineating certain archetypes, as it were. You know, there is. I remember I studied at Cambridge, which was very Austere, the late 90s, early noughties. And. And I remember there being a professor of modernist literature who was a T.S. eliot expert and he would stand at the door of the lecture theatre holding a briefcase and wearing a homburg hat as though rations had just ended yesterday.

And he had a kind of post war look. And part of the Severity was his sort of commitment to that period, and the absolute resistance to anything contemporary. And then I had lecturers, and I still have colleagues now, for whom to betray an interest in dress is to betray a certain kind of vanity or a frivolousness. And there's an embarrassment. And this is the old prejudice about dress, that dress is a form of deception, it's a disguise, it's about style over substance. And so there is a kind of academic suspicion of the person who tends to the details of their extravagant tie or their stupidly high heels or their expensive handbags.

There's a vanity to it that betrays a lack of real intellectual seriousness or gravity, which I constantly wanted to dispel and contest. I mean, I think it's a mistake to think that Sontag's essay on style is about style in the sense of fashion. But I don't pretend to do that. But it seemed to me that there are ways in which what she's describing, how style is beleaguered style as a certain set of aesthetic decisions about the form of a work of art or in particular piece of writing that map onto the ways that we might think about dress. And one of the things she says is that there is no such thing as no style.

So the idea that you could dress for work or you could be a professor speaking at a lectern in a way that dressed in such a way that says nothing at all about how you think or how you are is a fiction. Style is not a quantitative thing. She says there is no such thing as no style. And I was really fascinated by that, because I think it does apply to the ways that we think about dress. There is no such thing as not dressing. In a way, whatever you're wearing is meaningful and significant and substantial. It is both stylish and substantial.

1:00:32 Mark: I want to throw the word authenticity in here as well, because I feel like we're looking back to this fundamental mind, body, distinction mistake, where you might think that someone is being truly authentic, their real self, if it's their soul that's coming through. And it's just the appearances, the body and fact. Nakedness is, if we have to be physical at all, is going to have to be the authentic style. It's the only thing that's not just covering us up. And the traditional philosophy, through Heidegger, culminating in post structuralism, is saying, no, actually, there is no true self that's under there.

So Foucault specifically, this is why what Foucault's arguing against when he says liberation does not constitute freedom. Because if it was just a matter of removing all the constraints, then the true you would come through. And that's just not the way the self is built. The self is something that needs to be cultivated. Cultivated, that needs to be cared for, that needs to be constructed. And so there are two Nietzsche quotes. One is become who you are, which is often interpreted as just that same. Figure out what your authentic self is. Maybe it wasn't there.

Certainly at birth it's something that has to be grown, but still there is something that is truly your soul. And then make of your life an art. Which sounds. If you interpret those two quotes as meaning the same thing, that does seem that there's no. There's just the cultural materials that we have lying about us that we can put together in various ways. And that's how we create not just a presentation, but create ourselves. That, you know, that's what we have to work with. And so, you know, if Sontag likewise is arguing, the people she's arguing against are saying, style in a literary work is a distraction.

It's just. You're putting extra poetry in there. Just strip it away. This is like me in our earlier episodes reading philosophical fiction, saying, I don't want to hear all this. Don't construct a narrative. Just give me an index card with the philosophical points on it. That's what I want. I want the substance, I want the truth. But there's something deeply just as misguided approach to literature. It's a misguided approach to thinking of the self to say that the presentation is just a shallow something. That's beside the point. No, no, this actually is.

I see that as a question. You know, when Scottie Pippen says, I'm expressing my freedom, well, what is he doing there? Is he trying to be more authentic? Or is he just, in a more postmodern way, playing with the, oh, I can put makeup on. Just because people say, don't put makeup on. It's not that I am trans or, you know, feel fundamentally that makeup is the true me. It's just I want to do something that. That messes with conventions just for our listeners.

1:03:09 Dylan: Mark meant Dennis Rodman, not Scottie Pippen.

1:03:12 Shahidha: I'm following because I've been gripped by the documentary. Well, just to say that I think Sontag is responding to a couple of things. One, she's responding to a certain quite tedious form of literary criticism which is content driven, which is almost utility driven. What is the use of this? What does this mean? But she's Also to my distress, also resistant to what she calls Marxian and Freudian readings, too, which she sees as similarly employing a kind of interpretive tyranny. Right? You go at the object or the work to understand its Marxist significance, or you extract from it a psychoanalytical meaning.

And she thinks that is also misguided and that there must be a way in which we read what we see and we understand that recognizes style as more than just an embellishment or an accessory to content, a way in which we read and see and understand style as something serious and meaningful in itself as well as in relation to content. I'm sold on that. I find that really persuasive, the strength

1:04:11 Seth: in her position and for our listeners. You definitely want to read this essay. It's a solid and amazing piece of writing as well as argument. She frames it in terms of epistemology and says this persistence of the content versus form or content versus style distinction is predicated on this epistemological understanding of the work of art as having to be a statement. So the question is, what is it trying to say? What is it trying to prove? What is it telling us? And then you can dispense with the extravagances of the way in which it does it, right?

The how versus the what. And she makes a really interesting move where she says, the interpretive relationship of the perceiver, the experiencer, with the work of art itself. It takes the form of knowledge, but it's not knowledge in the traditional sense of truth, like knowing a truth and what you get knowledge of is some kind of experience. It's interactive, and it requires the interplay of the perceiver as well as the work of art. In other words, it's much more relational as opposed to the intentional structure of subject and object epistemology.

And I thought that was really interesting, particularly in the context, trying to relate it back to the notion of dressing in style, where the idea that you dress a certain way or that you present yourself in clothing a certain way is not necessarily a statement, which is kind of the facile way of, you know, like saying, like, I wear my retro black flag T shirt to kind of like, ironically to refer back to this, you know, or whatever, you're not making a statement with your clothes. It's a creative act, and you're inviting people to interact with you in an interpretive framework around that.

And I thought that was really, really beautiful.

1:06:00 Shahidha: The term she uses. She says, style is a plan or a mode of sensory imprinting, sensory imprinting, the vehicle for the transaction between immediate sensuous impression and memory. And I find that compelling, this idea of a sensory imprinting. And I find it speaks to this, the folly of believing that there could be a true or authentic or an interpretive truth inside human beings that is distinct and separable from the ways that they dress. Not that the ways that they dress are expressive of that interiority necessarily, but that there is a more complicated relationship between the putative inside and the outside. There could be this way of sensory imprinting, and that means we have to read in all sorts of sensitive and alert ways. And that's what I take the essay on style to be. It's an injunction, it's an exhortation to read sensitively and thoughtfully and responsively.

1:06:59 Mark: I think it was Foucault that Judith Butler, in our Gender Trouble discussion, was quoting in saying that it's not that there's an inner self, but that the outside is sketched in such a way that it points to an inside. In other words, the inside is a function of the outside. So even though clothes don't express the inner self, the symbology of clothes is such that it points to. It's like creating inner self, or part of what is creating an inner self that is this fictive social thing that we each assume that everybody else has an inner self that it's then pointing to. So it's actually a function of style to have this illusion of style, free content inside it.

1:07:42 Dylan: There's a relationship here for me between saying and reading an inner and outer that's going on and the communication that we have. So. So part of the content of the tradition of not wanting our clothing to be authentic to ourselves is that it is utilitarian or it's a kind of mere manifestation. And now we're talking about how Shahida used the word to read like, so that you can read somebody in their appearances. And I think that's absolutely true. But there's also the consciousness that we have in our own style of dress, that we realize that we're saying something.

And sometimes, in fact, people are deeply inarticulate in how they speak, even in language with words. And I suspect that the same thing is true with dress. They are different sorts of articulation, and the articulation of that relation between how they're dressing and how they're adorning themselves and to what they're saying about themselves. And even if we were to say, okay, there's going to be a relationship of some sort of. It's also, I think there's a Judgment about the relative articulateness of that, which goes directly to the question of how we read it and how much we read into it and whether we over read into it.

I don't know if there's much more for me than that makes it very complicated, right? Because it makes it complicated in I don't know what it is that I'm figuring out because my reading has the problem of interpretation and it has the added problem that it's not clear that what they're saying is a reflection, the relationship of what they're saying to what they are or could be, or trying to be or not.

1:09:26 Shahidha: I find all of that so interesting, Dylan. I try to edge towards that, towards the end of the introduction on page 19. And one of the things I observe, 19 to 20. If you love language, you might find that you love clothes too, because I detect that they share something in common, which is both a capacity for exactitude. You can be very precise in your language and just as you can in your dress, and also a capacity for evasion. You can hide in the ways that you speak in the same ways that you can hide in your clothes. And in the book I'm trying to investigate both of those possibilities.

Our clothes are ways that we hide as well as ways that we speak, and also that we may speak out of turn. Our clothes may speak against our will. That's up my psychoanalytical the section on page 19. One of the things I say, perhaps I'll read it to you, is that when we choose to read our clothes, our task is to find their precise and equitable translation in language. This is a challenge because dress in its fullest range intimates something of the diversity and delicacy of the lived experience to which words only falteringly reach. In dress, we impart some mysterious thought, quality, mood or aspect, only inadequately conveyed by any other means.

And then I go on to say there are other moments when language seems to be our clothes seem to be awaiting our clothes. So I talk about the color turquoise and how exact and precise that color is, and it is conjured only by that word. And there are particular garments. Similarly, when I describe a beige jacket of mid length, it is only and exactly a trench coat and nothing else. And so our clothes are sometimes waiting for a certain language. And I think there is a kind of relationship, not always precise, but a relationship, between what we're trying to do in language and what we're trying to do in clothes, and what we do against our will in language and what we do against Our will in our clothes too.

1:11:12 Dylan: You say at the end of the next paragraph, which I had marked. Maybe this is why I was thinking about language in particular. You say this book comes only from the conviction that there may be in clothes that which language cannot contain, and something else in language, too, that might realize the life of clothes that is otherwise left unspoken.

1:11:29 Shahidha: Yes, and I think that speaks to Mark's sense of the philosophers I'm reaching towards who are similarly interested in something almost intangible but precisely tangible, which is phenomena, the experience of our life which is constantly eluding language, but is also our great gift and challenge to try and capture.

1:11:47 Mark: Well, I know you have to go soon. Any last points you want to make? Shahidha before you do?

1:11:51 Shahidha: Yeah, just because Seth mentioned the Netflix series about Michael Jordan, which I've been voraciously watching. I write about Michael Jordan's Air Jordans, and this is the paragraph in a section called Shoes. So let me read it to you, Seth, and see if it speaks to you. And remember, I'm British, so I'm at arm's length to American basketball. But I, too, was seduced by Jordan. So this is Jordan. His distinctive splayed jump pose was captured in a dramatic photo shoot for Life magazine in the run up to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Both the US men and women's teams won the gold medals that year.

Nike or Nike seized upon Jordan's remarkable physique, gave him a silhouette, turned it into a graphic, and gave it a name, Jumpman. Strikingly, the pose combined a balletic grand jete with a slam dunk. Not true to Jordan's habitual jumping style on court, but visually arresting. Legs spread in flight, the high top sneakers unmistakable, their laces visibly lifted by his enormous elevation. His torso taut, an arm outstretched to its farthest reach, a hand seamlessly conjoined to a ball upheld like a sun. It is an enlivened kinetic animation of Leonardo's Vitruvian man.

Perfectly proportioned, everlastingly striving. It is what we long to be, even when we are small, sluggish and imperfect. It is the promise of the human form realized. And I wanted to read it to you because I think that's the other thing that our clothes do. We've been talking about freedom and liberation, but the other thing they do is that they enable our human being, what Marx would call our species being the diversity of our capacities. Our clothes can do that. They're works of art and objects of engineering, and they facilitate our flourishing Particularly when they're worn by someone like Michael Jordan.

1:13:45 Seth: Very nice. Yes. Well said.

1:13:47 Mark: Very nice. And really nice to hear you read some of that in your voice. So we can kind of. Of project that onto the rest of the text.

1:13:55 Dylan: Do you have an audiobook version of your book?

1:13:57 Shahidha: Yeah, I recorded it over, like, three days. You can download it somewhere. I don't know if it's out yet, the audiobook, but it is available. Yeah.

1:14:05 Dylan: Because you just made me want to listen to it, so.

1:14:07 Shahidha: Oh, great.

Yes, well, you'll hear exactly that. But I stumbled terribly with. Because in England we call Nikes. Nikes.

1:14:18 Seth: Yeah.

1:14:18 Shahidha: Which is rather funny. But, yeah. Thank you. It was really great. Really enjoyed that.

1:14:23 Mark: Yeah. Thank you for coming and for hooking us up with these readings. This is certainly a lot of familiar stuff, as I've tried to voice that I feel like this is coming out of a history philosophy, but we're getting not just a subject matter that maybe has not been treated specifically like this before. But also, I was a little. As maybe my comment about philosophical novels earlier indicated, I'm a little impatient of style in philosophy. I'm a little impatient about Derrida and folks like this. And so your book reads very poetically. And I was kind of like, I'm not sure what I think of this.

And I showed it to my wife and she just like, oh, this is so fun. This is great. It was like, exactly that quote that you read about toward the end of the intro. And I know in listening to some of your other lectures and things, we can't avoid the topic entirely of sort of sexism in philosophy and in who, we're presuming are the readers of philosophy and what topics they're interested in? Am I overstating that this seems like this is perhaps going to be of general interest to a lot of women that would not otherwise read philosophy. Have you found that so far?

1:15:27 Shahidha: I wanted it to be for everybody, but it's true that my constituency in writing, as in life, are women and gay men, and I embrace that. But I would just say that I remember giving a version of the book or a kind of precis of the book at a philosophy event. And I remember a rather graying and severe philosophy professor putting his hand up and asked. Asking the first question, insisting on asking the first question. And he said, Dr. Bari, this is all very interesting, but I'm not sure that any of the thinkers I admire care about their clothes. And I remember my heart sank, but then I was talking to him and I said, look, you're wearing jeans, and your jeans are connected to 50s Americana.

They're connected to a region in France called Nimes, from which we get the word denim. From Genoa in Italy, most jeans are made in a region of India. It's impossible that you could think that these very ordinary jeans that you've not given a second thought, philosopher jeans, they connect you to so many people in the world and that we should all care about our clothes. Once we care about our clothes, we'll care about the people who make them. And that's the most important thing. And can I just say, from those of you I can see on my zoom screen, you're all very snappily dressed.

And so the idea that philosophers are not interested in dress seems to me an important misunderstanding that we should correct. And what you're doing, public philosophy for general audiences, is really important. I do it, too. At the London School of Economics in Britain, we run a forum for public philosophy. And it's the same kind of endeavor as you guys to try and make sense of things and to open up philosophy for broader audiences. And I can't think of more noble work.

1:17:01 Mark: Well, thanks.

1:17:01 Dylan: Yeah, thank you for that. Before you left, I wanted to comment on one of the things that I really like about the book. As we mentioned earlier, there's something, and you just mentioned just now, that thinking seriously about fashion or about dressing, taking it seriously, is its own kind of audacity. But as you, I think, persuasive about, it's something that's so in front of us everywhere, it's kind of amazing that we wouldn't take it seriously.

1:17:28 Shahidha: Yeah.

1:17:29 Dylan: And one of the consequences I think, of that is that there's a kind of a full dose of a kind of phenomenology. I know that's a kind of overloaded word in philosophy. I don't mean it in a technical way, but I mean in sort of looking out at the world and as you did, having specific kinds of dress or kinds of fashion, tackling each one of them in turn and focusing on them. And I think that that process, you end up sort of articulating a set of questions more than coming up with a bunch of different answers. And I think that's one of the things that I was enjoying about the sections that I read was really seeing more threads to pursue.

1:18:11 Shahidha: Yeah. What a perfect metaphor with which to end as well. You're gonna pull on my frayed jumper and completely unravel me. But yes, but also, that is what philosophy does, isn't it? It seems to me One of the things I try to say in the book that is that clothes are about being responsive to the world. That is how I understand ethics. And the job of philosophers is to be responsive, to be susceptible to the world. And clothes do that. Philosophy does that, too.

1:18:39 Seth: Definitely.

1:18:40 Shahidha: Lovely talking to you all. Thank you for having me.

1:18:43 Mark: So we want to continue a little more after Professor Bari's departure, I guess. First, the Sontag article. Are we agreed that we want to next episode? This was so good that we want to treat it with our normal care. And also it was the second in a collection, Against Interpretation. In other Essays, I looked at a little bit of Against Interpretation.

1:19:03 Wes: Good, because it would be nice to go into the argument in this essay in detail. And I'd like to sketch that out for listeners because I think it's really important. And then we could read the other essay On Interpretation.

1:19:16 Dylan: So it would be two essays by Sontag, Against Interpretation and On Style. I like that idea.

1:19:21 Mark: All right, so we don't have to deal with On Style anymore here then, because we'll be doing that quite a bit next time. But what in the Foucault and the Derrida and just our overall discussion of clothes, other things we were seeing in her book. What else jumped out at you? We want to go into a little more detail on.

1:19:38 Seth: I want to circle back to just this notion. I felt like the idea that there's a way of demarcating our human exceptionalism by virtue of clothing and even raising the issue, sort of spurred by Derrida, that, you know, the concept of being naked only exists. Nakedness only exists if you have a concept of covering nakedness. Right. It's almost as if you need to have a notion of being clothed in order to have a notion of being naked. And that there's implicitly or immediately the question of why would you want to be clothed? In terms of sheltering from the elements is one thing, but the idea of shame, I found that really interesting that it seems to be just so immediately present in there.

And maybe it's also because I'm, you know, I have a young child in the house, and there's constant questions of nakedness for the clothing that are constantly going on. Whether it's a fight to make her put on clothes and wear a shirt or if she get in the pool or, you know, should we be clothed in front of her? Like, at what point are children too old where they're not supposed to see their parents naked? You know, that kind of stuff. It's just all of this is very present to me. So I thought that was funny and interesting.

1:20:55 Dylan: I mean, Derrida goes down a bit of the road of Genesis, which I think is pretty standard and explicit in interpreting the Garden of Eden episode, of that our being clothed is directly related to our knowledge, particularly our ethical knowledge of good and evil. And that would be directly related to our shame. And so that our human exceptionalism is reflected in the fact that we are closed and that we feel that we ought to be. But that is there. The link is made to our knowledge of good and evil, our knowledge of ourselves as ethical beings. I didn't see him disagreeing with that.

1:21:32 Shahidha: Yeah.

1:21:33 Mark: Is there anything to be gotten further out of the Derrida essay? It was definitely an introduction to a longer thing. And I still am not really clear on what his point is going to be, but the lens through which I was interpreting it is this, you know, basically Heideggerian thing. And I guess adding in the animal does add an element. I think the Buber, who's very much into this face to face confrontation with the other, the Levinas as well. I think animals did come up in Buber. You know, when you have that, in fact, it's much easier to lock eyes with my dog.

Like, I love doing that. Like, and dogs love doing it, too. Like, I can't just do that with people. Like, I can't even with my wife, like, just stare at each other in the eyes. Like, that's weird. You can't do that for so long without it raising questions. But with your pet, you can do it as long as you want. And it's very freeing for me that, you know, there's sort of quasi personhood that you get to have that interaction, but yet not have the judgment in the social interaction. And, yes, I can. You know, as long as I'm not afraid of my cat scratching my exposed parts, that I can jump around naked in front of my cat.

I don't feel ashamed about that. Derrida asks, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene? And he says, you know, looking at this animal, it makes me think of this absolute alterity of the neighbor. Nothing makes him think more of that than when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of the cat. What did you guys make of that? Was there anything philosophically pungent about those quotes?

1:23:06 Seth: I feel like that's the same point too, though. Did Shahidha mention when she was talking about. Was it Buber was talking about the horse? I think she mentions talking about Buber, who when he's petting a horse. He has the experience of radical alterity where he says, like, you know, just this horse is so radically other. It brings forth the reckoning with the thou and thou.

1:23:27 Mark: Right, yeah. This is page 211. 212. I doubt he got the opportunity to see an octopus at the zoo, but that's what I totally get. Like that it has an eyes, but it's not.

1:23:39 Seth: It has eyes, but it is not something like me. And. And then it forces you to confront that radical alterity. And, Wes, you were very silent on the Derrida portion.

1:23:49 Mark: Did you get anything that you enjoyed out of this essay at all?

1:23:52 Wes: I mean, it's not productive for me to talk about this since I think it's so bad.

1:23:56 Mark: It was interesting to me as another foray. We've long talked about having a Derrida episode, and reading this made me think, I don't want to do that. I want to learn what deconstruction is. But I would rather read a secondary source that may be kind of like our first foray into Lacan. We've read some Derrida stuff. Maybe I would read another 10 pages, but there's no goddamn way I'm going to read 50 pages of Derrida. Da. I would rather read somebody else with an analytics training or just who's not such a pleased with his own poetic style that it seems like a bunch of non sequiturs is what Shahidha was saying.

Yeah, it just annoys me too much. I don't find when I delve into it. This seems like an interesting point, but it's a point that I already feel was totally made by other things I've read. When I peel away the layers of the onion that I can peel away here, I'm not getting anything that adds to the world. He's just dressing up in a different way of presenting other things. But maybe I just am ignorant. Have we already bashed on Derrida's style enough in other episodes that you guys don't want to?

1:25:01 Dylan: I surfed along until I found the nuggets that I could grab ahold of and didn't really worry too much about the stuff that seemed to be the

1:25:09 Seth: this that is not a this that is also a this.

1:25:12 Dylan: I didn't worry about it.

1:25:13 Mark: I just am wondering if my intolerance of that is effectively countered by Susan Sontag's On Style essay. And I guess the same goes for Bari's own style. It is very. You know, there's a lot of literary devices. The very beginning of the book before the introduction is just a series of kind of case studies which seems like how she does the. And in fact, case studies makes it sound way more legalistic than it is. It's just as somebody would write in a novel, describing the dress of somebody in a certain movie describing Madonna's clothes in her early videos.

I think she was making a positive case why this sort of presentation that is more imagistic, that is getting literary in the sense of it's getting at the edges of what words can convey, that there actually is something, some advantage to that kind of thing and that my preference for more boiled down, less overtly stylized prose is actually making me miss something in phenomenology that is very important. That is just part of this old time philosophical mistake that I keep referring to in various ways that boils down to the mind body distinction.

1:26:29 Seth: Think about mapping that insight, Marc, onto your experience of seeing people. So part of the book she talks about just experiencing, seeing people in clothes or hearing the sound of denim swish against this and just walking amongst a crowd. Mind you, she's from London, so she's probably used to being surrounded by a wide variety of people in a density that people in Madison you're not used to. But what would be your experience of walking along the street if everybody was just wearing the same thing and the fabrics didn't make any sort of noise? That's the type of impression I think she's trying to give is like a recognition that this diversity and this invitation to engagement and interpretation is out there constantly surrounding us.

1:27:19 Dylan: But I think also that Mark is articulating the difference between the kind of phenomenology where you're engaging in articulating, say in one instance the sensory experience or other kinds of experiences and then the boiling it down to what your conclusions are out of that. And I hear him saying that he feels like he has been impatient with the former in preference for the latter. That don't give me the 25 pages of articulation and exploration of the lived experience and then follow up with the conclusions of that. Just give me the freaking conclusions. Because that's where the meat is. And the question is how important it is the relationship between those conclusions and the articulation of the lived experience.

1:28:05 Mark: Yeah, if you think of Husserl's phenomenology, that's all about getting into the essences. You know, he really doesn't talk. He's very far removed from Sartre or somebody like that. And I really have over the years really come to appreciate the More descriptive type of phenomenology, to the extent that I'm concerned in these pretty much pop episodes with just like, oh, what are these weird conceptions I have about gender roles in cinema or the function of comedy or. I don't know. There's just so much room for getting at your every. As part of the know thyself, you know.

And also, phenomenology is not just about knowing thyself. It's about knowing the essences of things, but just, you know, the cultural world of. There's just so many nooks and crannies to explore that I think I'm much more tolerant of. Yet I still was grateful at this point that we didn't read more of Shahidha's book, because it is not a style. It's not like Derrida, where it's like pulling teeth. In fact, it's a very nice style. And maybe the audiobook is the solution, the way to get into this. I don't know. Did you guys read a lot farther into this book?

Did you find yourselves seduced by. Captivated by the style that you wanted to keep pouring through and read what she had to say about all these different types of clothing?

1:29:22 Dylan: I picked up different sections of it and I was enjoying it. Yes.

1:29:26 Seth: Yeah, same here. And in fact, I have people, including my wife, in my life with whom I'm gonna share it. One of my Reid cohorts. She's like a personal style person. She works with people to help them define style. And I'm desperate to get this book into her hands. Cause I think it would be the perfect fit, you know, and it's exactly the kind of thing that I was very energized doing these readings. I don't have the same kind of, like, visceral reaction to Derrida that some of you, AKA Wes, have, but it annoys me. But I also think that there's probably some meat on the bone.

I try to give him some credit because there are certain. You know, I did have a run in with him, so to speak, in my past, where I felt that there was a really fruitful interchange. So I do find him very tedious and hard to read at times. And I did not feel the same way. Sontag's amazing. I did not feel the same way about her, about. About Bari's book, although it felt like it was suggesting, suggesting, suggesting, suggesting, suggesting. And, you know, our implicit motivation as philosophers is we want the argument and the conclusion. That's the content piece.

If you talk about philosophy and this Is something that. It came up in the conversation. We didn't pursue it, but we've had numerous conversations over the past decade about, is this person a good philosopher or are they just a good writer? And do you have to be a good writer to be a good philosopher? We've talked about that numerous times where we've struggled. Is it worth fighting through somebody's obscure prose and convoluted arguments to get to some brilliant insight? Or is there an obligation? Or at least, if not an obligation, it makes good sense to try to write in a clear and consumable way if you're trying to get your point across.

You mentioned Husserl, who I think is such a horrible writer. I have no interest. I don't want to read Husserl. I don't care if he was the smartest guy ever. I just can't take it. Like, just coming close to his prose is toxic to me. And yet I don't have that experience with Hegel, who's an obscurantist of a different color, so to speak. And there's just recently a friend of mine was posting on Facebook about how the Miller translation. There really aren't any good translations of Hegel. And even if there were, it's like Hegel is Hegel. And so thinking about the way people write and style versus content, if you're just thinking about philosophy, not literature, but what we consider the great philosophers, Kant, Descartes, Sartre, Hume, whoever.

Do we distinguish that? Do we think because philosophy is about arguments, that you can extract the arguments out of the text and just dispense? Could we summarize critique of pure reason?

1:32:20 Dylan: I don't know exactly what Wes thinks, but I think that we've talked about the challenges of Kant as a writer, but I mean, all of those philosophers, I think we regularly comment on both the quality and the ease of reading them and the different experiences of reading them. So reading Nietzsche is a completely different experience than reading Kant. And I think that reading Nietzsche is different than just getting the Cliff Notes from him. And I think that's actually true of all the philosophers. You get something extra indifferent out of their writing itself. And part of it is the way they write and how well they write. And some of them, it's just the conclusion that they are just terrible writers. And so you're having to sort of overcome that. And some of them are great writers. And maybe there's something to be overcome about that.

1:33:11 Mark: I'm just wondering, is Derrida an acquired taste? If I spoke French, would it be more lovely. To me, I think Hegel is an acquired taste. Definitely the acquisition is that as hard as it is, you can drill into it and really by carefully doing a close reading you can decode it and then it becomes oh, okay, now this is fun. I'm getting the enjoyment of good philosophy out of it. Whereas for when I tried to do a close reading with Derrida a while ago on something we covered on the podcast in our Saussure Etc episode on a line by line basis, I just couldn't do it.

I felt like I could do it on this. I actually like this essay quite a bit better than the other Derrida we read. Maybe it was just a better translator. Maybe the fact that it was a lecture had something to do with it. If we had chosen this for our reading, I would have gotten through it and it would have been okay if we had read more than the 12 pages or whatever we assigned ourselves. But I have not acquired the taste yet. Let me just put it that way.

1:34:10 Dylan: Well, I look forward to talking more about the Sontag.

1:34:13 Mark: Yes. Come back next time and hear us talk about that. We'd love to hear your feedback on this. You can comment@PartiallyExaminedLife.com, you can go to our Facebook page or Facebook group. You can tweet at us. Our closing song is called Clothe Me in Ashes by Casey Clifford, whom I interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music Episode 121. Get that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com if you're interested in reading or gifting Shahidha's book yourself. We are doing some drawings to give away 12 extra copies of it we happen to have. The main thing you want to do is make sure your Partially examined life citizenship is updated that you are paying actively now.

Do that by Monday, June 22nd when the drawing will be and if you support us on Patreon, Even at the $1 level, you will be included in at least some of those drawings. You can increase your odds or get into the pool by sharing the Public Part one version of this episode with people over Facebook or leaving us a brand new iTunes store review. But in those cases you're also going to have to email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com and point what you actually did because otherwise we're just not going to know. So lots of ways to win and we're very grateful to Shahidha for allowing us to do this giveaway.

Thanks so much and good night.

1:35:24 Seth: Good night.

1:35:24 Dylan: Good night.

1:35:25 Wes: Good night.

1:35:52 Shahidha: I am afraid of the silence and

what I might find there.

I am afraid of the light and what I might see. You say don't know oh I'm Tight's a thing I can't grasp and I cannot hold.

I've searched for explanation the reason reason escapes me and so I jump in

the FL of tears and go where it takes me I know you say you don't know oh and tight the thing I can't grasp and I cannot hold. Even though it means everything to me Nakedness as far as I can see. I close myself in these actions it.

Distance between your flesh and might is

it is waging a war and my soul is digging its toll. Oh, you say don't know oh and time is a thing I can't grasp and I cannot hold. Even though it means everything to me Nakedness as far as I can see. I close myself in these ashes I'll close myself in these ashes. Cause I see your eyes in the fire your touch disappears in the flame. Ashes to test ashes again. I lay down my burns offering Even though it means everything to me Nakedness as far as I can see. Close my eyes myself in these ashes oh I lay down my burnt offering Even though it means everything to me Nakedness as far as I can see I close myself in these ashes. I close myself in these ashes.

It.