Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast

Nate DeProspo, John Muckelbauer, and Nathaniel Street

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/29d. Total Eps: 61

“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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S5 EP 12 - Plant Sex Everywhere

Season 5 · Episode 12

Monday, November 17, 2025 • Duration 01:04:50

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!

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

Season 5 · Episode 11

Monday, October 13, 2025 • Duration 01:14:55

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

S5 EP 10 - Endings and Eternal Re-turnings

Season 5 · Episode 10

Monday, September 29, 2025 • Duration 58:52

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.

S5 EP 9 - The Tone of Affirmative Thinking

Season 5 · Episode 9

Monday, September 22, 2025 • Duration 01:17:49

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

S5 EP 8 - The Smell of Thinking

Season 8 · Episode 8

Monday, September 15, 2025 • Duration 01:12:01

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: “fuck those fuckers”; 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;

S5 EP 7 - Poly and Mono Theism

Monday, September 1, 2025 • Duration 58:34

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

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S5 EP 6 - Shadows of God

Monday, August 25, 2025 • Duration 57:15

§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

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

Season 5 · Episode 5

Monday, August 18, 2025 • Duration 01:44:44

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.

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S5 EP 4 - The Truth of Social Formation

Season 5 · Episode 4

Monday, August 11, 2025 • Duration 47:51

0:00–22:30

What does The Gay Science have to do with rhetoric? ; §57 “To the Realists”, §58 “Only as Creators”, §59 “We Artists” ; our drunken passion for reality and reason ; our ridiculous desire to transcend reality ; creation, destruction, and the insanity of maintenance ; is there a political valiance to this dynamic? §76 “The Greatest Danger” ; the dangers of the exception and the rule ; what happens when “the exception” wears tin foil hats and joins the tea party? ; Is this dichotomy too clumsy?

22:30–31:50

Complicating Nietzsche’s argument about “truth and lying in a nonmoral sense” ; the active power of rhetoric to “make equal,” which is always a verb and never a noun ; constructivism is an “ism,” not a thing – always the activity of formation ; John wonders why Nathaniel’s brain is in the 12th century ; repetition of difference ; the fascism of territorialization ; dragons are real now ; the repetition of a name builds alliances

31:50–36:35

Rhetoric doesn’t communicate, it builds alliances, associations, the socius communus ; the social and the production of desire ; the production of the social is the production of desire is the production of persuasion ; rhetorical intervention is not parasitic on the social, psychological, or the real – it is the production of their production ; Nathaniel’s been reading Deleuze again.

36:35–40:45

Nate asks the question: is this shit also destructive? ; communities of exclusion, Joe Rogan and the Pope

40:45–End

Why does Nietzsche think our stupidity has been valuable for the species? ; Nietzsche is a symptomtologist: take the perspective of life ; evolution without telos, without reaction ; evolution of the exception, not the herd.

S5 EP 3 - A Taste for Thinking

Season 5 · Episode 3

Monday, August 4, 2025 • Duration 01:03:51

0:00–18:30

Intro; Approach for a second read; Nate gratuitously makes it about Hegel; §26 “What is Life?” ; the positivity of becoming; §23 “The Signs of Corruption” and §24 “Different Forms of Dissatisfaction” ; §39 “Changed Taste.” The active power of taste & decay; the non-linearity of futurity; taste vs opinion; §11 “Consciousness” the body doesn’t trust consciousness – it’s still in beta testing ; Napoleon & Decay; the individual

18:40–31:15

The value of consciousness; not your baseliner’s materialism; structure of the aphorisms; intellectual irritability; do I contradict myself? : invention and resolution; contradictions are bodies

31:20–41:20

What is a body? Is the intellect in the business of forming bodies? ; the taste of concepts; what does the “equal sign” of the concept do? ; § 37 “Owing to Three Errors” ; What can take up and animate the production of scientific knowledge?

41:25–51:10

Back to the structure of the aphorisms; modalities of life’s violence; a very different sense of the individual; punk-rock-Nietzsche: it’s only one tune; perpetual variation

51:15–58:10

Is reduction avoidable? ; reduction as a style of inflection; how do you teach this stuff? ; teaching vs. writing: the production of theory-bodies; shout out to Marco’s Provocations series

58:15–End

Teaching theory; John’s old age let’s us all learn; John’s dating profile; parting provocations

Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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