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We continue with Michel Foucault’s “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984) and add Susan Sontag’s “On Style” (1965). After the departure of our guest about halfway through this part, we wrap up with thoughts on all the readings, including Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (1999) p. 1–16, and our guest Shahidha’s book Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes (2020) p. 1–22, 205–217.
For Foucault, we try to clarify the relation between freedom and liberation and bring in the new Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance.
Sontag’s “On Style” is, like Foucault’s account, not directly about clothing. She’s talking about literature, and the misleading style vs. content distinction that she sees rampant in the way critics and the reading public analyze writing. It’s not the case, Sontag says, that we can get rid of style and see right to content. The style is in fact part of the content, and is, on Sontag’s account, a mnemonic device for getting us to internalize the work, e.g., it makes you groove along with the song, remember the rhyme, connect with the colors, or whatever. She’s concerned with us having vital immediate relations with artworks, not trying to strip off their style through analysis, effectively translating them into messages or other content. You should be able to see the parallels.
We conclude with some post-Shahidha further reflection on Derrida: As a few of you commented since we posted part one, while this image of “naked before the cat” was suggestive, it’s not clear that the phenomenology is unequivocal—one can use the experience to feel like the cat, or unlike the cat, or nothing at all—or that we’ve really received any actual argument or otherwise learned anything from Derrida’s image. Should we actually have a full Derrida episode? We will if you demand it!
…Or maybe our impatience with Derrida (and with the descriptions in Shahidha’s book) is a matter of our paradigmatically “masculine” impatience with style, i.e., exactly what Sontag and Shahidha are arguing against.
Sontag’s essay (which we’ll be discussing in full in our next episode) is in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (or read it online). We’ll be covering both this essay and “Against Interpretation” at length in our next episode.
Start with part one or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition.
End song: “Clothe Me in Ashes” by K.C. Clifford, interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #121.
on this question of assembling vs unearthing/recollecting/expressing
“To say with Trilling that the mind is a poetry-making faculty may seem to return us to philosophy, and to the idea of an intrinsic human nature. Specifically, it may seem to return us to a Romantic theory of human nature in which Imagination plays the role which the Greeks assigned to Reason. But it does not. For the Romantics, Imagination was a link with something not ourselves, a proof that we were here as from another world. It was a faculty of expression. But what Freud takes to be shared by all relatively leisured language-users – all of us who have the equipment and the time for fantasy – is a faculty for creating metaphors. On the Davidsonian account, when a metaphor is created it does not express something which previously existed, though of course it is caused by something that previously existed. On Freud’s account, this cause is not the recollection of another world but rather some particular obsession-generating cathexis of some particular person or object or word early in life. By seeing every human being as consciously or unconsciously acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see the distinctively human, as opposed to animal, portion of each human life as the use of every particular person, o ject, situation, event and word encountered in later life for symbolic purposes. This process amounts to redescribing them, thereby saying of them all: ‘thus I willed it.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n08/richard-rorty/the-contingency-of-selfhood
Great Episode