YouSaid · the spoken record

Lewis Gordon

lines on the record: 41
first: 2022-03-26
most recent: 2022-03-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It was important there, but we have to understand that it's not really about presidents and individuals. That's about the idolatry situation again. It's about radical democracy. It's about what we need to do as the kind of living creatures we are to build something in which power is not functioning as the diminishing of others, as the reduction of people's capacity to be able to build possibility, but to shift power into enabling others to be able to build things and have access to the conditions of doing so that could perhaps make us better than ourselves today.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jane Gordon and I wrote a book called Divine Warning Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, and it was published during Obama's first term. And what we pointed out is unfortunately what many people fail to see is that not only Obama, but it was being done with Mandela was being couched in the language of moralism to disarm the importance of what we need for real social change. Ultimately political change, politics is about power. It's not simply about the moral symbol. And the locking of Mandela or Obama into the language of moral symbols failed to address the infrastructural political realities we need to deal with as we move on.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The short answer is that language, I see language as part of our living communicative performance, but language also has ancestry, and language will have descendants. And when I do work of archolinguistics, what I try to point out is that each term, each word is actually connected, they tell stories of a wider communicating humanity, and for those when they read the book, look closely at the archaeolinguistics, at the etymological exercises I make. I never just show what a word is. I tell a story of its evolution and the communities and what they were up to in bringing it forth and what we could do in our acts of building language.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the better house. The better house is your comfortable. You can live in it. You're affirmed in dignity, respect, and freedom And I think we're doing it at disciplinary levels, but there are many other levels concretely. We need now, and Fanon argued for this in La Dagne de la Tere, but there are many others who have. We also need to rethink the way we think of everything from cities. To how we think of food, to how we think of how we relate to people with technology. We are in the act of doing it, and there are those who would like us to stay trapped in a closed past that blocks the way to deal with this creative spirit. So yeah, do the work. That's what we got to do. Do the work.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are resources of thought, ideas, and that is a false representation of humanity. And so we began to build different disciplinary homes, and as we built them, of course, there was the narcissistic rage people were saying we are not rigorous, we're not this, what are we doing? There's no such thing, but we did the work. And that's what created black studies. That's what created cultural studies. That's what created feminist studies, gender studies, queer studies. And sure, the haters are going to hate. But the point is for the lovers to build love. And when we build those homes, there's a certain point. Let's face it. If a party and the food is better at our house, The masters are going to say, yo, why is nobody coming over? What's going on?”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could go beyond my imagination, in fact. In fact, we have a concrete example of this with the very fact that you and I are speaking right now. There were people who took the position that only discipline, let me use discipline as a metaphor. The only disciplinary home was supposedly white, thought was supposedly white, and the right way to study people who are not white is to apply whiteness to them. But there was a certain critical point in which the response was Wait a minute.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To understand that writing is also an act of study. To be a student of the world and learn and focus on the humanity of those people, in short As Du Bois would put it, don't make the people into problems, examine the problems they face as human beings.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people who are credited with producing that art becomes those who have in fact stolen it. I think there's a distinction between appropriation and theft. And a lot of what we're dealing with is theft, the idea of, I mean John Whiteman being the king of jazz is bizarre movies and all of those things are false, but that's a different issue. Good music, good art belongs to everybody, but the misrepresentation of the history is a form of epistemic injustice. We should fight against it. And when it comes to white, the issue of a white writer having black characters, the thing for that white writer to do is not actually to project his or her or their ego onto black people is to do what any good novelist, any good writer should do.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as many people know, I'm a critic of the Cultural Appropriation Argument. I actually argue that art, excellent art belongs to everybody, period. The big confusion is that there have been people, this is where racism comes in. What racism does is to impose upon the production of a particular group of people the idea that it's impossible for them to produce art, and it rewrites the history in such a way that they”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I see that in a lot of black music, but also see in black music a lack of sugar coating of life. And I'm talking about all the way back to 19th century black music. And again, this is not to valorize it because there are other kinds of music that do this. I see this also when I'm in India and I check out Punjabi music. But the thing about music. That's so profound is that music is always bringing possibility. Music can make you dance. Music can also make you consider what your relationship to it and also music dears. It dears. to make you not ashamed of joy And think about it. I could go on. You could probably”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't mind because you know when I'm playing my drums and somebody's smoking, that's my moment to give accents to make that person play better. And lo and behold, what do they do? They stop and they permit me to Do something to communicate with the audience. And I've often wondered what would a society be like if it's really committed not to who is going to be superior to whom But a commitment for people to bring out the best in themselves, whatever that may be. It's a very different thing. Yeah, and so”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know this not only in improvisation, but we also know something else that happens, and there are many examples I could give, but I'll give one briefly with jazz. One of the things I know as a jazz musician is I could show up somewhere where we've never had a rehearsal. We've never even chosen what we're going to play. In fact, we may even have a set at all. And someone could just count off in any meter, whether it's an eleven eighths, four, whatever it is, and we could start playing, and we could play music. And the reason this can happen is because each of us in order to play must listen to each other. And I see this as a profound allegory about democracy. Because you see, not only do we listen to each other, but in the listening my obligation as a musician?”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then she says, and the Denumont, but she was a forty five packing mamma, so I ain't going to do that no more. And she's being humorous and ironic with herself. But the thing about the music is not just at the level of lyrics. The thing about music that I often bring up, I also see it as an allegory. And what I mean by that is that in music there is constantly the capacity to bring to it something that makes it intelligible yet different at the same time.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joy can also be our suffering. In fact, a lot of the whole planet right now is dealing with blues. But if we think also at the level of lyrics, if we look at blues lyrics, blues lyrics often present a problem but sneak in a kind of self-reference to the singer or the songwriter as having a form of complicity in the problem. And the complicity is not to blame the victim, it's to bring to the forefront the afflicted's capacity to act, in other words, agency. One of my favorite blues is when Dinah Washington said I got drunk and took my man to his wife's front door.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I mean, the first thing is, and this is something Phenon noticed as well. You see There's a tendency to want for some critics to want to impose a form of Manicheanism enclosure onto black music. They're looking for their projected notion of authenticity. So there's some who think black music should just be entertainment. Some people think black music should just be about suffering. There's a long list of what people think black music should be. However, one of the things that I point out about the blues, and you brought up irony earlier, the blues is a wonderfully meta reflective form of performance. Because in the blues, if we look at blue structure, blue structure not only repeats but it brings dissonance in, and the dissonance in life is part of maturation. It's part of understanding that in the midst of our”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“capacity to be thinking beings into a slur. And so this is part of an effort to rally the base for the next elections in the United States because they know this is what has happened. You know, ironically in the last election, the presidential element of it, it was actually increasing white male voters that put Biden into office. This is an effort to bring those voters back into line, and it's a familiar tactic. I mean, there's so many examples of it. But the thing for us to do is not be defensive. The fact is we as custodians of the truth as best as we can understand it have an obligation to continue that struggle.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Critical race theory is not being taught in elementary schools, secondary schools, etc. But here's the thing. To respond that way is like the problem with the loaded question. You don't get to answer, wait a minute, it might be a very good thing for critical race theory to be taught in elementary schools, etc., because critical race theory is about truth. And we know bad faith is about avoiding displeasing truths. The fact of the matter is young people can handle a lot of young black people deal with truth all the time when it's hitting us. Young white kids are far less fragile than these parents present them to be. But the thing is you could imagine how absurd it would be if people are saying, would you believe they're teaching children mathematics in elementary school and secondary school, etc. You could turn anything that is connected to increase our capacity.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, what we're witnessing is something called lawfare. This is something developed by the right. There are lawfare institutes. There are all kinds of ways of studying this. And it basically uses a technique that goes all the way back from practitioners of fascism. And basically what it is, it uses the fallacy of the loaded question. And for those who don't know the loaded question, it's when somebody walks up and says something like, so if you start beating your wife, of course, how do you answer that? The answer is, well, I've never been beating my wife, or I don't even have a wife. What are you talking about? Well, what they do is transform a concept, a very progressive concept, a very important concept, into a slur. And it puts you on the defensive by ultimately responding to the slur when in fact the phenomenon they are talking about doesn't exist.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was initially the very character was actually based on Jewish mythology. But then I point out that Jewish mythology is based on East African mythology. But what I argue is the true superhero in the film is not the Black Panther individual. It's not any of that stuff. It's about ultimately the idea of what would it mean for there to be a political community that could actually raise certain challenges. And so I actually argued that films real superheroes were conda, but now we can get into some real political debates about what kind of polis, what kind of polity is that. And I think that's a healthy thing. I think it's healthy for black people to be arguing, disagreeing. Some could even hate it. But I think it's very important for us to begin to have that critical consciousness.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transform. There's this wish people have, the art could immediately transform people's lives. And I see art as part of how people use imagination. But one of the things some people would be shocked by is how I talk about these films. For instance, I talk about Get Out less about whether the film is great and more about how the film has an insight that some people who claim they don't like the way black people look, smell, etc may actually desire black people. I argue against the idea that people hate black bodies. Actually, there are a lot of people who love black bodies. They just hate the idea of a black consciousness behind their body. The other thing is if we get into, there are lots of things. I talk about the mythopoetics of Black Panther, and I point out things that some people may overlook. They don't even realize that.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the The big issues today when one is Arguing or making a point is increasingly people lack shared texts. And you may notice when I talk about each of the films, I offer my criticisms of them, but it's actually not, I tried to pick films that it's highly likely people have seen because then they can engage me, they could disagree with me, they could say, oh, I didn't think of it that way. So it was, I see them more as an opportunity to carry the conversation further. I don't think these films”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their weakness. Sometimes power is in our ability to not fetishize power. The irony is sometimes that somebody who may appear the weakest in the room may actually be the person who embodies the most strength. And so that is this is part of human reality. We have ironic relationship with ourselves.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Irony is at the heart of philosophical anthropology. I mean, when I go, because I could read ancient languages, humanity has been struggling with irony throughout. This is one of the reasons why we have myths and tragedies where the winner loses and the loser wins. This is one of the reasons why there is this not only Nietzsche but Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, we see irony also in Anna Julia Cooper. Fenon was full of irony. Irony is one of these ways in which human beings have also dealt with the majesty of power because sometimes the people who can beat their chest with the biggest strength in the room ultimately deal with the irony that no matter how much they accumulate no matter how much force as we know we've seen it with all great dictators, leaders and all of that. All those things come down to is the manifestation.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've done something really good. And so this is a subtext in the book, and you're right, it is in the book. There are people who want to have these closures And I had to probe throughout even in my own discourse this question of openness, and that is one of and I see that also as what political work is about because I argue political work ultimately reaches to those we'll never know. We may even never be able to understand, but the human being has the capacity to love that which is radically different.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then went to the next move because you see, you can perfunctorily support someone. I didn't want it to be about me. It became important to me to learn from that exercise. Let me see what happens if I engage her project, not simply support it. And I found this whole world of connections at what I think about disciplinarily, politically, many other levels, and you know, in my writings I always point out, you know, we're not the last statement on intelligence and possibility of life on our planet. And so if we do what needs to be done and by what needs to be done, I mean where subsequent generations, whoever they are, with the freedom to live as how they are, if they're able to look back at us and say thank you”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, gee, if I received that paper, I would have recommended it get published, so I wrote the author and said, And please share my email, and I went on Facebook and just publicly supported her. And from there”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are people who are, as we know, there are ways in which any category of openness can slide into a closure. So there are people who would like to have closed trans discourses. But I actually defend open trans discourses, and this is one of the reasons why I bring it up in the book. I got into a certain controversy not out of anything other than I don't believe in supporting people privately. And so when there was a young woman who was being attacked for raising the question of transraciality, I did not want to be one of those I found out about it when I was coming back from South Africa from giving a series of lectures. Ironically, I was just in a conversation with someone around that very issue, and I heard about this weird controversy. And I read through it and I thought,”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in not only my writings on the philosophical anthropology of how we talk about human beings, but also the disciplinary levels. In my books, I talk about bad faith at the level of disciplinarity. I call it disciplinary decadence. And I actually argue even beyond interdisciplinarity. I argue because interdisciplinarity could have different disciplines like ships in the night. You know what I mean? They're all treating themselves as holes as complete. But I argue for transdisciplinarity, but I go beyond that. I actually am a defender of us to have forms of trans thinking, because it reminds us of how much we are complicit in closing, closing our communicative relationship with others. And there are many ways in ordinary language.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dehumanization are built upon lies. The lies they are built upon require identifying a human being and then denying her his or their humanity. You have to say that's not really a human being after you have identified. And so once we understand this, what is it that you're trying to run away from in that identifying, which is different from identity? And what is being submerged, repressed, or dissociated is the openness, the openness, the possibility, the freedom.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I totally follow you. I totally get it. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things to remember, and I'm glad you brought up bad faith earlier, because, you know, there are many ways I talk about it, but bad faith is fundamentally a lie. And we already know that if you're going to build colonialism, if you're going to build all kinds of the forms of violence to restrict or discipline the behaviors of people, you would have to use so many material resources to maintain it. It will fail. So it is far more efficient to get the people to police themselves, to get the people to be as Gogiwatiungo points out, to have the colonization of the mind. It's much more easy to get people to believe these pleasing falsehoods, and for the most part you're a modern colonialism, racisms of all kinds.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Background When I'm in Southern Africa, I love that. I know my Sephardic and my Misrocky Jewish background. I love all those things. But my point is, it's not a zero sum game. And so if we come into this question of politics, you may notice I've really tried to distinguish the tendency today to sell moralism. You know, this kind of snake and oil stuff and get down to the question of getting things done. And the thing we have to understand about the political work of getting things done. We have to take that moment and say, it's not about me. You know, I got to work out my crap. You know, if I'm going to be dealing with my family and analysts and stuff. But it's always, it really is always on a planetary level. It's always about us.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the book, I make a distinction between small B black consciousness and uppercase B black consciousness. The small B black consciousness is the bad faith one. The one that's imposed upon us that locks us into the notion of ourselves as abject and pure negation, as if we're just nothing but things. And I make this quip in the book, you know. To my knowledge, most people who are designated black don't get up in the morning and when we brush our teeth, we look in the mirror and sigh, oh God still black. We just brush our teeth and go around our day. And there's also this way of talking about our lives as if they're not things that are beautiful in our lives. I mean, I love black music. I love reading the poetry we have. I love our foods. I love all these things, but I don't love it in a way that makes me have to degrade other people's way of living in order for the way I live to be special. I love when I get to travel. I'm one of those black people from multiple backgrounds. When I'm India, I'm among my Tomo communities. When I'm from Ethiopia,”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That element is what the people who are commodifying and using, reducing themselves to spirits of seriousness and bad faith, that is what they're looking for. It's just easier for them. They like to say things like, burn it all down, but the question is, okay, then everybody's homeless. I mean, we need to find a way to build livable homes. There are people who would cite Audrey Lorde, I'd say Master Stools, you know, and kind of tear down the master's house. And I have to remind people, you know, most masters don't have tools. It's the enslaved people. It's the everyday people who have tools and build things. We built those houses. And if we can build those houses, we can take on the task of building better houses, or at least more livable ones, which is another way of defining the better.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the things about politics, political life, is its hard work. Ironically, there's been a commodification of politics. There are people who are able to sell their identities as political, but if you scratch the surface, you'll find out that they're confusing moralism with politics. It's easier to be moralistic because you just divide the world into good guys and bad guys, good women and bad women, you know, us and them. But that reductive view basically elides the fact that if one is trying to build a world that human beings can actually live in, it means always as you are creating something, you're always losing something. And this complicated responsibility.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. In fact, an ongoing critical relationship, as we say. There are many ways to talk about bad faith. You may notice whenever I define a term in the book, I never do it in a singular definition, because human reality, as I argue, is very rich. And we have orientations, we have multidimensions, but I could begin by just saying one way of looking at bad faith is that bad faith is a flight from a displeasing truth into the arms of a pleasing falsehood. And one of the reasons pleasing falsehoods are so seductive is because they're easier, they are more manipulable, they're predictable, etc. We talked about Bellhooks earlier. One of the things Bell thinks Bell understood about radical love is its hard work.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for those who don't know who she is, that's the point. Because Harriet Bailey was Frederick Douglass's mother, and this woman committed an act of radical love that played a crucial role in trying to understand what it is to be a human being who understands dear things greater than yourself. She didn't know she was producing a Frederick Douglass, but the fact of the matter is in what I bring up the political significance of the book is that for a Frederick Douglass to understand what it is to value the love offered by that enslaved woman in a world that says her love is worthless, and that understanding of love is what brings us in the critique of the lofty, into the understanding of what it is, to do what among the Zulus, when they say hello, which simply means I see you, I see you.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is our home, and we're jeopardizing the fact that despite all of these conflicts and hatred, at the end of the day, Any extraterrestrial is going to say, What's up with this family squabble? You know what I mean? And she understood that You can critically love. I see this. Book you may notice I write poetry in the book, and I also, although There is this world of the textual for me Not this boundary between what happens in films. in music and kitchen conversation, and you may notice in the book there are Many examples of moments of just talking with everybody from a local community activist to my grandmother. Way through to also think about other people speak what people they love. For those who would get to the chapter on the The political dimensions of black consciousness They may be surprised to find that Harriet Bailey pops up.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have people with humor, we talk about our grandmother, our uncle, our aunts, but we're also never, I don't know any black family that's ever exclusively a black family. We've always been Today's language cosmopolitan, but the fact of the matter is there's almost this world in which we're almost bullied, to conceal, to hide. Many dimensions. of what we are And when we do this, we are committing a form of Affective violence on our families, our relatives, our friends or communities, and ultimately if we bear We're forgetting that just as in our families there is always somebody we don't like. There's always somebody, though. We love, and this view about love permeates the text because I have to deal with in the end of the day this little blue dot, as Carl Sagan puts it.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's absolutely on point, Paul. Yes, I'm among those who loved Miss Bell Dearly. And one of the things I tweeted Bell passed was, you know, there are many things people are going to say about Bell. There's something that the three of us have in common. And Bell exemplified that which is she had a lifelong search and understanding of the complexity, profundity, and value of love. And in fact, she was a proponent of radical love. And I thank you also for bringing up the fact that, yeah, even though we can talk in many ways. Using specialized language. I am very critical of the lofty. This book opens up with talking about being a child in Jamaica, and also it throughout resists the tendency to look at. What's called black life in reductive ways, where relational? Are people from the poorest of the poor to the wealthy?”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difficulties of our relationship with reality is that we have many creative ways of avoiding it. Now, in terms of the text itself then, if one is going to raise this question, it means one has to raise it not only critically but self-critically. In other words, there must be always a moment in which even the author, the thinker, must bring herself hisself or their self into question. And this is an act of humility that also exemplifies the ethics and the responsibility to truth.”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really interesting. And provocative book, it's an intervention, it seems to me to be a position book, if I could call it that, which draws on large and significant body of work. So I want to ask you to begin our conversation, what kind of a philosophical intervention is involved in this book, and how would you distill and articulate what you might think of as theodicy of this text? That's always been one of my favorite of your concepts. So how do you read your own intervention here with that idea in mind? Well, first, thank you, Paul. It's wonderful to see you. In terms of this book, the first thing I'd like to say is there are many ways people talk about theory, philosophy, ideas, but they often talk about them in ways that make them lose sight that ultimately we're talking about human beings relationship with reality, and one of the difficulties”
2022-03-26 · Intelligence Squared · Reflections on Black Consciousness: Lewis Gordon and Paul Gilroy in conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT