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.
