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 order to work through the inadequacies of our conceptual vocabularies and the living content they embody. Derrida shows that our model of democracy and the future for a democracy to come depends in significant ways on the fate of friendship and its ability to expand the sphere of care, citizenry, and community. The history of friendship and democracy is haunted by the apocryphal citation of Aristotle: "O my friends, there is no friend," and the problematic of the performative contradiction it inaugurates. Is true friendship possible? Can the reach of the polis extend beyond an autochthonous community? Is a politics beyond the friend/enemy distinction imaginable? Can the poet and philosopher be friends?

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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's look, the omnipresent possibility of being seen, judged, and evaluated by another consciousness that discloses the objectivity of our being through and for the Other. As soon as the Other enters the scene, a fundamental aspect of our being is alienated from us; captured in the Other's appropriating gaze. The various attempts by the for-itself to retrieve this alienated being and penetrate the Other's essential freedom play a determinate role in shaping the contours of our fundamental projects, that is the immanently revisable set of possibilities, meaning, and value we pro-ject into the world. In the final sections of the book, Sartre sketches an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, asks us to reframe our conception of the autonomous will and the role of giving and asking for reasons, and gestures towards an ethics grounded in criterionless choice.

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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 on the LA triptych of films, Lost Highway(1997), Mulholland Drive(1999), and Inland Empire(2006) as the centerpiece of Lynch's mature moral vision of the political unconscious and metaphysical groundwork of American life.

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Jon's Substack: https://fivegoodhours.substack.com/

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Devin: @DevinGoure
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Email us at: moralminoritypod@gmail.com