Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast

Nate DeProspo, John Muckelbauer, and Nathaniel Street
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“Thinking With..." is a pedagogical experiment that serves as an invitation to think along with the text, with us, and with each other. We are three academics who specialize in Rhetorical Theory: Nate DeProspo (Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College), John Muckelbauer (Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina), and Nathaniel Street (Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Vincent University).

  1. 11/17/2025

    S5 EP 12 - Plant Sex Everywhere

    Episode 12 – Plant Sex Everywhere! Gay Science Book 5 continued 0:30 – 1:50 – How to Lose Listeners 1:55 – 19:45 Nathaniel went on strike: normally likes complexity but sees the allure of dogmatic anger, though that is exhausting. Hard to find joy again; Booboo’s physical unhealth; reading N as therapy for both; section 348/9; 370 – every philosophy as suffering through either excess or poverty of life; Needing rest and calm; The poison of ressentiment. Disgust with capitalism infects everything; anger and judgment isolates and individuates; the metaphorics of dancing 19:50-30:15 Scholar vs. experimentalist; the form of the essay vs “vignettes”; the professional risk; stylistic experimentation; postmodern vs. “posthuman” 30:20-47:00 “overcoming the human” as the goal; Foucault’s “human” is a recent invention; thinking v “the concept”; 351 thinking not detached and bloodless; 372 idealists as cold and bloodless, but can be from overfullness of senses (in Plato); will to power drives all philosophy regardless; what kind of life asks “what kind of life?”; philosophy ignores its inability to transcend. Always an expression of a way of life; needs a mask (of religion, for example); masking of contingency is irreducible – concepts abstract and so do sensations; 47:10-55:00 The will to truth becomes suspicious; 346 turning “unbelief” into a faith (“we” are not simply atheists), “abolish your veneration”; camel, lion, child in Zarathustra – we recognize the constructedness of things and yet entirely necessary for creation; do you have to allow yourself to be duped? Abolish your reverence, including to irreverence 55:10- 1:04:50 Speed of thinking vs. affect (body); the body is too slow; biology is still angry; the only way to act from overabundance is if you’re not aware its an overabundance; reconfigure the coordinates of consciousness – not privilege it, but don’t despise it either; consciousness is expression; “I” as a burp; co compensation or not? If you start from survival, you miss everything – crazy overabundance of nature; plant sex! Allergies!

    1h 5m

  2. 10/13/2025

    S5 EP 11 - The Gravity of Teaching (and its overcoming)

    00:30 – 1:55 Gay Science Book 5 (which we hardly mention) 2:05 - 30:00   the recurring end-of-semester dilemma; applying a policy vs. making a decision; “fairness” as a way to avoid making a decision?; the desire for a calculus; Nate tries to make John feel better; absolving oneself of the responsibility of a decision; the architecture of the teaching situation is messy; accommodations and their discontents 30:30 – 45:20   diff between private and public college demographics and the way it impacts a teacher’s jobs – their real lives are heavy; vs. University’s endowment; sports as the college opiate; smaller teacher/student ratios; we need the policies to offload responsibility (for the sake of health); the calculus is also a leap of faith; probability; why do we do this job? Is it just who we are?; arguing for the nobility of our teaching and writing: to create a different world; attentiveness to alterity might be the same as anxiety? 45:30 – 55:10    Finally turn to Nietzsche? section 327; to prove the prejudice of sincerity wrong – don’t have to be “serious” to be a thinker; why do we connect learning to seriousness? It is not a necessary link; the importance (sic?) of laughter to N’s thinking: “at any master who lacks the grace to laugh at himself, I laugh”; not every teacher is a teacher for us;  the mission as emergent; 55:25 -  1:14:30 section 335-there are many styles to listen to one’s conscience; 334-love itself must be learned, generosity and patience toward what is strange - and you must be willing to change;  not just acceptance; graduate teaching is so much more interesting because it happens over years rather than weeks; responsibility is not a weight but the fun part; the delight of misunderstanding; 339 – life is dissimulation and uncertainty, and if you are patient and generous, it can be wonderful; affirmative Nietzsche vs. nihilist and gloomy; the importance of writing to a posthumous audience

    1h 15m

  3. 09/29/2025

    S5 EP 10 - Endings and Eternal Re-turnings

    Gay Science – Book 4 continued 00:30-3:30 Quitting tobacco and scotch (or not); 3:38-13:45 Like the stoics; 308 – advice vs. diagnostics (both are actions); 301 and 306 – no blanket advice, it always depends on the style of life involved 14:00-28:45 Amor fati – enduring vs. affirming fate; not acceptance (of being) – the diagnostic move is the advice; just different types of life; 307 – not reason first and then will, we needed our errors; active forces shedding skin – in favor of criticism; negation as shedding; pre-conscious negation in Hegel?; viewing someone negatively as a symptom of a disposition (not what leads you to a disposition); not getting better (not climbing ladder), but different; Our reasons are symptoms not the basis for decisions; Booboo’s prior frustration with Barad and its change; messier than just skin shedding or contradiction; a person is always multiple 29:00-36:30 281, knowing how to end, geologyincluded; not a metaphor?; living in Genoa as a pedagogy; monkeys anticipating storms; Ns fascination with all different modes of life 36:45 – 42:40 312-314 nudging trajectories;footnote to 311, the sweet rapport of stranger; not conflict avoidance or politeness 42:45 – 58:30 341 – eternal return – cosmological principle? existentialtest? Return of the same or difference – ontological “test”?;  related to affirmation? In N, nothing is identical to itself, so… ; what I am willing is the return of difference (or the relation); isn’t time at stake too?; “the autopoiesis of natural laws” – panic attack thought; Dead End’s favorite thought – is thinking the return of the same (as singularity)? Return as the being of becoming. Re-turning, turning again.

    59 min

  4. 09/22/2025

    S5 EP 9 - The Tone of Affirmative Thinking

    Episode 9 – The tone of affirmative thinking Gay Science Book 4 00:30-12:40 Nietzsche’s affirmative direction; 276; 307; reason is a symptom of a way of life; 278 – how great that we aren’t always honest, esp about death; 289 12:50- a delight in the prospect of becoming; joy of philosophizing as the production of new ways of living; 324 life as an experiment; not redemption – to see what is necessary as beautiful; not arguing against, but situating your ‘opponent’ within your narrative; concepts have different senses; cultivating the capacity to sense; thinking as therapeutics; life is not endurance for N – some fresh air into philosophy; Ns health 27:30-46:00 295 - Brief habits; Endurance is heavy; amor fati; BooBoo misses disc golf; do different stuff; put onself in situations that can induce dispositional shifts; Deleuze’s refrain; repetition and speeds and slowness; breaking stability vs figuring out how things are ever stable; become suspicious of unity of anything; academic freedom is unprecedented (this was 2024 btw); capitalism and subjectivity; nietzsche vs. marx; 46:00-1:01:01 Existence of embattled humanities has always been the case; whats a worthy enemy?; to criticize is to honor (for some); straw-manning; learning to not have a position on something; teaching as the way to learn – liking what you teach; generosity is more interesting; harold bloom; teaching the cognitivists; Habermas; a method for teaching generous responses to texts; different styles of life 1:01:10-1:17:00 282 the stride of thinking; teaching as installing a speed of thinking and writing; modulating speed; conversations are too fast; writing thinking; slogans; teaching as entertainment; booboo’s pedagogy; teaching strategies; being open but decisive

    1h 18m

  5. 09/15/2025

    S5 EP 8 - The Smell of Thinking

    Episode 8 - The Smell of Thinking End of Book3 00:30 - 4:00  section 213 cause and effects - cause is added later as an intervention;   4:00 - 18:15 Reading the short maxims vs. reading aphorisms; teaching. Section 192 on good natured people, Section 193 on Kant, section 195 - distilled. Like kafka short stories; section 152 on different colors; diagnosing styles of life; changing questions - ontology is still a style question; reality-making intervention; ethics v ontology: N solves the Heidegger/Levinas conundrum 18:20 -34:50 Learning to hear religion differently (not as dishonest); transcendence sounds like life-hating; interpretation of the world as bad is what makes the world bad; John believes that nothing is necessarily anything; BooBoo’s resentment is to blame for this podcast; the smell of thinking; education as movement without a telos (not growth but transformation); intelligence is really about the capacity to learn/change, not about knowing; is this just a new learning outcome? Critical thinking;  34:55 - 53:05 Nietzsche’s perspectivalism; 159-160; a non-human sense of agency/context; 177 laughter as a means of education and 200; this is a book on pedagogy; learning environments are all seriousness: “f**k those f*****s”; BooBoo’s joy; camel, lion, and child from Zarathustra; 324 en media vita; thinking is itself an activity, an experiment; Nietzsche as the teacher of laughter 53:10-end Asymptotic relations - without any failure/truth; specificity is not on the way to truth but creating more points of contact; “truth” can serve to increase exposure; cutting vs. clarity; “suffering” fools; Cogito, the outside as an intrusion - discovering something other than endurance; sovereignty as promising to make the future; promise as object of affirmation (rather than obligation); compliments as dismissal?; teaching evals;

    1h 12m

  6. 09/01/2025

    S5 EP 7 - Poly and Mono Theism

    Book 3 (again) 0- 3:15 Bad intros 3:20 - 16:00 Nietzsche’s materialist comedy; section 124 - the infinite;  panic attacks - cognitive models vs. affective experiential; subjectivity; thinking as terror/comfort; what meaningless means;  16:00 - 39:20 section 143: advantages of polytheism; vs. monotheism; agonism vs. true/false; section 149 Plato and Pythagoras as failed founders of religions; the conditioning of “the people”; biodiversity; “it wasn’t me. god did it through me”; the alleged fragmentation of contemporary society; multiple monotheisms? polytheism and monarchy/monarchies; John is skittish about all transcendence;  different orientations to difference (pluralism v dogmatism);  39:30 - 58:20 Rome vs. Judea; imperialism and religion; is science monotheistic?; absolutist responses to COVID; the CDC couldn’t be provisional; polytheism as just a moment without a dominant monotheism; experimental science seems to potentially lead toward overman also - despite piety and fealty

    59 min

  7. 08/25/2025

    S5 EP 6 - Shadows of God

    §108-125 0- 3:00 Podcasting and Romance; new intros;  3:00- 22:40 Book 3 Gay Science §108— The Death of God; theology of atheism; §109 anthropomorphism and will to power; the need for error life v knowledge ; §110 22:42 - 41:55 John’s “famous” saber tooth tiger anecdote; the recurring problem of identification; thinking was/is risky; perceiving complexity dangerous for life; the advantage of unjust and coarse perception (errors); at some historical, slow cautious thoughtful judgment ALSO became advantageous for life, Socrates as inverted instinct; disputation is not conversation 41:55 - 57:00 Nietzsche’s interpretive historicism; section 113 - doctrine of poisons; when will artistic energies join with science; is it like Hegelian history? Multiplicity and negation; Booboo agrees to write the Hegel v Nietzsche book

    57 min

  8. 08/18/2025

    S5 EP 5 - Responding to Nietzsche's "Woman"

    0:00–14:25 The sections on “woman” are not distinct from the rest of the book; §68 “Will and Willingness” §64 “Skeptics” superficiality of existence ; the feminine operation and the body marked by the feminine operation. 14:30–36:20 John’s writing project ; maybe these aphorisms are more interesting now? §74 “The Unsuccessful” and §75 “The Third Sex” ; Kaufman can’t handle it anymore ;  §80 “Art and Nature” the fantasy of good speech and the self-controlled cogito ; are we talking about Platonic ideals when we talk about woman as a “ship at a distance”? ; the prospect of metaphysics ; coordinating these aphorisms “on woman” with the rest of the book ; §59 “We Artists,” woman, god, and property. 36:20–60:00 The multiplicity of misogyny ; Nietzsche is a strange pathway by which to engage feminism;  Beyond surfaces and depths (or between them); why gender is impossible to think and why that’s important; politics vs. metaphysics; deconstructive feminism; the political conditions for thinking; the #FigureItOut movement; exceptions and institutions; honoring Sinèad.

    1h 45m
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“Thinking With..." is a pedagogical experiment that serves as an invitation to think along with the text, with us, and with each other. We are three academics who specialize in Rhetorical Theory: Nate DeProspo (Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College), John Muckelbauer (Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina), and Nathaniel Street (Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Vincent University).

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