While in residency at the Bellagio Center, I spent almost the entire time reading Astra Taylor's Examined Life. I've written about the film version of this project previously. In short, Astra has complex, accessible conversations with eight of the world's most interesting philosophers (Judith Butler! Martha Nussbaum!) about ethics--all while in various kinds of motion. The second the credits ran, I leaned over to my movie buddy and said, "I really wish I could read all of that."

Oila! The New Press has put out this great book--a compilation of the transcripts of all of these conversations. Everything from ecology to disability to poverty to gender expression to phenomenology show up here. As Astra herself describes it in the introduction: "The salient message maybe be that the multiplicity of perspectives presented here does not lead to a quagmire of moral relativism, as some fear, but instead to an expansive ethic of intellectual inquiry, compassion, and political commitment."

I'll leave you with just a few of my favorite insights:
"Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with."
-Cornel West

"Your destiny is to remain ignorant of your destination."
-Avital Ronell

"Much of what is interesting about what humans do comes not from purity but from contamination."
-Kwame Anthony Appiah

"Unless we are willing to be vulnerable to one another, we will not be capable of love, and the denial of vulnerability is one of the sources of aggression and violence."
-Martha Nussbaum

"You are active all the time just to prevent some traumatic thing, the real thing, from happening."
-Slavoj Zizek

"I sometimes think that the social violence that affects people who look more permeable, who look more dependent, who look less defended, is a way in which impermeability on the side of the people who are violent is managed: you be the permeability of the body, you stand for the vulnerability of the body, and I will be the impermeable."
-Judith Butler

An excerpt from the movie:

2 Comments

August 20, 2009 11:34 AM

[0+]  Gretel said:

I've been dying to see this, so I'm excited that the book has transcripts. Yay! Astra Taylor is amazing. Check out her film Zizek! if you haven't already.

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August 21, 2009 5:29 AM

[0+]  Feminist Review said:

Astra Taylor’s documentary, Examined Life, is fantastically untimely in both its form and content. Formally, the documentary is structured as a series of eight, roughly ten-minute segments in which nine of today’s leading critical thinkers ruminate upon a social and ethical issue. Each thinker (seven have their own segment while Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor share a segment on a discussion gender and disability) is filmed while in movement: Peter Singer, for example, discusses consumer ethics while walking along Fifth Avenue in New York City; Slavoj Zizek rummages though heaps of trash at a landfill while wildly gesticulating about his philosophy of a new ecology for the twenty-first century.More here

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