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

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On Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (1999), Michel Foucault’s “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self As A Practice of Freedom” (1984), and our guest’s Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes (2020).

Philosophy devalues appearances, but our changing dominant metaphysics (there is no “underneath” but rather a complex built out of appearance itself) should have changed this. Our guest provided us with readings that elaborate this change, arguing for our continuity with animal nature (Derrida) and the ethical importance of self-care (Foucault).

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Ep. 245: Fashion (Derrida, Foucault, Sontag) w/ Shahidha Bari (Citizen Edition)

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On Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (1999), Michel Foucault’s “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self As A Practice of Freedom” (1984), Susan Sontag’s “On Style” (1965), and our guest Shahidha’s book Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes (2020).

Philosophy devalues appearance in favor of depth and soul, but our changing dominant metaphysics (there is no “underneath” but rather a complex built out of appearance itself) should have changed this. Our guest Shahidha Bari provided us with readings that elaborate this change, arguing for our continuity with animal nature (Derrida), the ethical importance of care of the self including appearance (Foucault), and the illegitimacy of the distinction between style and content (Sontag).

End song: “Clothe Me in Ashes” by K.C. Clifford, interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #121.

Descartes’s Horror?

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Examining Descartes’s Cogito, one can find that rather than philosophy and reason being a shield from horror and madness, the truth might be the opposite.

Episode 75: Lacan & Derrida Criticize Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (Citizens Only)

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On Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter'” (1956), Jacques Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975), and other essays in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model of the psyche, and why we persist in self-destructive patterns. Derrida thought this reading not only imposed a bunch of psychobabble onto the story, but demonstrated that Lacan just didn’t know how to read a text.

PREVIEW-Episode 75: Lacan & Derrida Criticize Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”

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On Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter'” (1956), Jacques Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975), and other essays in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model of the psyche, and why we persist in self-destructive patterns. Derrida thought this reading not only imposed a bunch of psychobabble onto the story, but demonstrated that Lacan just didn’t know how to read a text.

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What is Mystification? A Review of Derrida (2002)

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How strange it is see the banal paired with the almost Talmudic elements of Derrida’s thought. This pairing, this humanizing of Derrida in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s documentary that shares his name is, in an subtle way, the mystification of abstract thoughts.  The idea that one must humanize the philosopher still implies a certain alienation from abstraction that one Continue Reading …

Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Dissection, Part I

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Yesterday I started trying to record a “Close Reading” on the Derrida essay we read for the podcast, and I just couldn’t get more than a few sentences into it before losing patience, so I thought I’d either as a substitution for that effort or possibly a warm-up do a few posts dissecting the essay here. I want this to Continue Reading …

PREVIEW-51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al)

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On Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? With guest C. Derick Varn.

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Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al) (Citizens Only)

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On Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? With guest C. Derick Varn. Learn more.

End song: “Slipped Into Words” by Mark Linsenmayer (1991), released on The MayTricks,

Topic for #51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida)

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We’ve posted our episode (here) on a historical progression in thought that is still responsible for a lot of the hard-to-read parts of continental (mostly French) philosophy today. First, we read Part I and Part II, Chapter IV of Ferdiand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics(read it online here), published posthumously in 1916 (it’s basically lecture notes by his students; Continue Reading …

Sartre’s Legacy

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Our Sartre episode focused on one single, apparently not widely discussed text:The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. I say not very widely discussed because you would expect Sartre and consciousness to have a ton of videos on youtube and lots of scholarly papers when Googled. Instead, most of the things that come up when you search Continue Reading …

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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