Hi Nance, I don't know you. Hi Benjamin, I used to listen to you when you had a podcast with Aimee Terese and we've exchanged a few emails.
I find this conversation interesting, I am getting something out of it but may also be reading in to your words rather than extracting observations about the world from them.
I'm lacking the discursive context here. You keep talking about "reconstructed" people. I've heard that term before but never from a person I respected so I never bothered to look it up or investigate.
I'll try to find something about it now by googling but just for your info and future podcasts, it would be good to give your listeners some establishing shots, a lay of the land before you attempt to take them down some path. I don't mean a formal introduction (though that might be appropriate), but just a few lines to orient them.
It seems the two of you have spoken before and that this is an ongoing conversation. Perhaps that background might be enough.
Hello Elizabeth, thanks for the feedback! You're right about the importance of clarity! There is a moment where I talk about maturing as a process of subjective destitution and “reconstruction,” - it is this type of reconstruction that is being used to discuss philothea (spelling?) - the robust love of self. It is there, but it's kind of a blink and you'll miss it thing. This process of worldview collapse and reconstruction is what is being discussed when you hear these terms, we are posting that one must be ‘reconstructed’ in order to have the robust love of self, or ‘maturity.’ You're right about the fact that this is part of an ongoing conversation, we do have a shared understanding on some things that might not be immediately clear to an observer, though I believe we both do a decent job at making ourselves legible. If you'd like to see more of the background to this conversation, you can become a subscriber and member at @Theory Underground to see a lot the background to the things we're talking about here! Thank you!
wow, that’s a BIG question! I can’t speak for Benjamin, (he goes all the way back to Plato, so you’d have the best luck starting there) but as for me, it’s probably Hegel and Lacan who inform the idea the most, but then there’s Descartes and Heidegger and even some Marx wrapped up in the idea, as well as some Weber and Bourdieu, and of course I don’t think you can have any ideas without Levinas… I understand the impulse to want to jump straight to the text for clarification, but we actively try to resist that impulse, we are living thinkers attempting to create a living community of thinkers, these ideas are not calcified objects that we can examine as we do artefacts from the past. I hope you understand I’m not trying to brush the question off, you can look to Lacan to read about Subjective Destitution, then take the concept out of the clinic and apply it to the world, via the Hegelian process of “Recognition,” to get an idea of my version of this “Reconstruction,” but it isn’t as simple as all that, it’s all complex and very much a living idea…
I disagree. It’s important to know the genealogy of the concepts and ideas you use, to trace them back to their origins and original context (Foucault style genealogy of ideas). Otherwise your epistemology is inexistent.
I’m familiar with all the thinkers you mention except for Levinas, never read anything by him.
This was good, thanks!
Great conversation! Thank you!
Hi Nance, I don't know you. Hi Benjamin, I used to listen to you when you had a podcast with Aimee Terese and we've exchanged a few emails.
I find this conversation interesting, I am getting something out of it but may also be reading in to your words rather than extracting observations about the world from them.
I'm lacking the discursive context here. You keep talking about "reconstructed" people. I've heard that term before but never from a person I respected so I never bothered to look it up or investigate.
I'll try to find something about it now by googling but just for your info and future podcasts, it would be good to give your listeners some establishing shots, a lay of the land before you attempt to take them down some path. I don't mean a formal introduction (though that might be appropriate), but just a few lines to orient them.
It seems the two of you have spoken before and that this is an ongoing conversation. Perhaps that background might be enough.
Hello Elizabeth, thanks for the feedback! You're right about the importance of clarity! There is a moment where I talk about maturing as a process of subjective destitution and “reconstruction,” - it is this type of reconstruction that is being used to discuss philothea (spelling?) - the robust love of self. It is there, but it's kind of a blink and you'll miss it thing. This process of worldview collapse and reconstruction is what is being discussed when you hear these terms, we are posting that one must be ‘reconstructed’ in order to have the robust love of self, or ‘maturity.’ You're right about the fact that this is part of an ongoing conversation, we do have a shared understanding on some things that might not be immediately clear to an observer, though I believe we both do a decent job at making ourselves legible. If you'd like to see more of the background to this conversation, you can become a subscriber and member at @Theory Underground to see a lot the background to the things we're talking about here! Thank you!
Who and what are your authors and sources for this “reconstruction”?
wow, that’s a BIG question! I can’t speak for Benjamin, (he goes all the way back to Plato, so you’d have the best luck starting there) but as for me, it’s probably Hegel and Lacan who inform the idea the most, but then there’s Descartes and Heidegger and even some Marx wrapped up in the idea, as well as some Weber and Bourdieu, and of course I don’t think you can have any ideas without Levinas… I understand the impulse to want to jump straight to the text for clarification, but we actively try to resist that impulse, we are living thinkers attempting to create a living community of thinkers, these ideas are not calcified objects that we can examine as we do artefacts from the past. I hope you understand I’m not trying to brush the question off, you can look to Lacan to read about Subjective Destitution, then take the concept out of the clinic and apply it to the world, via the Hegelian process of “Recognition,” to get an idea of my version of this “Reconstruction,” but it isn’t as simple as all that, it’s all complex and very much a living idea…
I disagree. It’s important to know the genealogy of the concepts and ideas you use, to trace them back to their origins and original context (Foucault style genealogy of ideas). Otherwise your epistemology is inexistent.
I’m familiar with all the thinkers you mention except for Levinas, never read anything by him.
I can’t wait to give this a listen 😍
Same here