Moral Minority

Hannah Smart, the noted David Foster Wallace scholar, returns to the show to discuss her debut novel, Meat Puppets. Smart writes metafictions anchored in the anxieties of the human heart. Meat Puppets is an ambitious first novel that, like the work of the late David Foster Wallace, is alternately uproarious, absurdist, and sad. In this discussion, we talk through some key themes of her novel, incl...

In honor of the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, novelist Hannah Smart once again joins us for a discussion of the ethical limits and critical revaluation of this maximally ambitious and chronically misunderstood novel.  A polygenetic and polyphonic novel, Infinite Jest's interlocking themes and characters circle back to the urgent need and paradoxical impossibil...

On September 7, 1945, only a few months after the Allies accepted the Nazis’ unconditional surrender, the Deutches Theater in Berlin reopened its doors with a very deliberate choice of performance. Like many theaters across the country reopening in the wake of the Second World War, Deutches Theater began its new run with a production of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s comic drama about religious tolera...

David Foster Wallace, the loquacious novelist behind Infinite Jest, seemingly predicted much of our culture moment from AI avatars to the hypnotic and addictive temptation of the infinite scroll. In his fiction and essays, he agonized over the ways in which advertisers and mass media have coopted techniques of subversion and rebellion like irony to make products that are more entertaining, more fl...

Eleanor Russell joins us to discuss the mystical writings of French philosopher, Simone Weil. Published posthumously and edited by Gustave Thibon, Gravity and Grace is a collection of fragments from Weil's notebooks that sketch the core themes of her Christian mysticism in crisp, compact aphorisms. Weil did not set out to find God; instead, she was overwhelmed by a mystical experience of Chri...

Susan Sontag for almost forty years was the most recognisable public intellectual in America. She inspired an entire generation of critics to read more widely, think and feel more deeply, and stay attuned to the transformative power of art. In her numerous critical essays on art, politics, and our technologically mediated ways of seeing, Sontag built up her own distinctive aesthetic and moral sens...

“Content of the Form” is a new interview series excavating the moral and political meshwork implicit in the use of certain artistic forms and genres. If every form or genre-exercise entails a repertoire of expected tropes with their own often unconscious social history and political function, conversely we can read within the framework of a form a network of concerns and anxieties voiced by the ch...

“ Moral of the Story ” is a new interview series in which we talk to contemporary novelists and poets about the ethical content of their work, the role of the imaginative writer in making sense of competing moral discourses, and what, if anything, aesthetics has to do with morality and politics in our moment of full-blown neo-fascism. To kick us off, we sit down with the writer Sebastian Castillo...

Is the legacy of 20th century Marxism one of victory or defeat? On a certain reading, the defeat of the international proletarian revolution has been the distinctive preoccupation of a variegated tradition of thought that has come to be known as Western Marxism. For critics, Western Marxism represents a turn away from historical materialism’s proper focus on forces of production, class struggle, a...

The poet, Alina Stefanescu, joins us for a freewheeling discussion of Jacques Derrida's classic work of politico-ethical deconstruction, The Politics of Friendship, and her new poetry collection, My Heresies. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida ruminates on the interrelationship between our inherited concepts of friendship, fraternity, and democracy, and the distance we have yet to travel...

In Part 2, we wrap up our consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's midcentury magnum opus by exploring how we move from the inaccessible interiority of consciousness to our concrete relations with others. The latter half of Being & Nothingness takes up the question of what aspects of our being are revealed to us in confrontation with the Other. Sartre famously argues here that it is the Other&...

Note Bene is a series of off the cuff episodes that delve more into our personal experiences with broader topics with relevance to normativity and the ethical life. In this episode, Charles is joined by the writer and critic, Jon Repetti, to reflect on the art and philosophy of the late American avant-garde filmmaker, David Lynch. While touching upon his entire filmography, the discussion focuses...

Matt McManus joins us to help excavate the common origins of liberalism and socialism within the revolutionary republican tradition and illuminate shared political and normative principles rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism and expressive individualism. His new work, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. functions as an survey of key figures within the tradition of political liberalism...

In a far-reaching conversation with the critic Ryan Ruby, we unpack the legacy and impact of Fredric Jameson's landmark work of Marxist literary criticism, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson's text argues for the explanatory richness and coherency of a Marxist hermeutical approach to interpreting the social function of the literary text. The guiding...

In Part 1, we explicate Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to build a total existential system hinges on an unusual account of the evanescent character of consciousness at the heart of the meaning of existence. In this episode, we cover the first half of Sartre's monumental work, Being and Nothingness, explaining core concepts derived from his philosophical progenitors found in Husserlian phenom...

Repetititon(1843) is a difficult and, for many, a baffling work by Søren Kierkegaard. It is equal parts psychological study, literary riddle, and philosophical problematic. In this discussion, we attempt to shed light on its central concept of repetition, how its interior dialectic differs from the Hegelian concept of mediation, and what the possibility of repetition means for the peculiarly moder...

In this lively interview with philosopher Vanessa Wills, we discuss her recently published book, Marx's Ethical Vision, which argues that Marx's historical materialism contains a coherent and consistent moral picture of social transformation grounded in a view of human nature and the conditions of human flourishing. Contra the amoralist reading of Marx, Wills critically reconstructs, dra...

This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of fait...

To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno an...

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 2, we focus on the final completed fragment, "Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,' which analyzes the...

In this multi-part series, we examine the legacy of critical theory and the prospects of a recuperation of Marxist theory in the face of rising fascism by delving into the dense and fragmentary landmark text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Part 1, we discuss the meaning of Enlightenment as the advancement of thought and ask how we square the traditional narratives of histor...

This episode discusses the German sociologist Max Weber's Vocation Lectures. In these lectures, Weber outlines a secular conception of the meaning of a vocation, the role of passion in politics and scholarship, and the kind of ethically responsibility that confronts us given the unavoidably violent nature of modern politics. Weber characterises modernity as the instrumentalization of reason a...

In Shame and Necessity,  Bernard Williams interrogates what we can still glean about the universal character of human action and the notion of responsibility from a study of the Ancient Greeks. William provides a philosophical interpretation of the historical circumstances of the Greek understanding, expressed in the tragedies, of agency, responsibility, and the role of luck in human affairs.  His...

This episode turns to Christine Korsgaard's Tanner lectures, "The Sources of Normativity," to explore how morality might be rationally vindicated from within the nature of practical rationality. Korsgaard's project is an iteration of the Enlightenment's attempt to ground morality in human nature. Korsgaard suggests that the correct moral theory will not merely provide an e...

This episode examines Alasdair MacIntyre's attempt to explain the existence of interminable moral and political disagreement as a symptom of the disarray of our inherited moral concepts.  MacIntyre contends that the best way to unify our disparate and competing concepts of right, obligation, and virtue is to understand them as emerging from determinate social conditions. What modernity lacks...