Do political subjects have a default obligation to obey the law? In episode 105 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss civil disobedience in the present context of university activism for divestment from genocide in Gaza. They chart the genealogy of the concept of disobedience in political theory, from Thoreau and MLK through to today. Together with guest Noëlle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, they reflect on the relationship between legal protest, civil disobedience, and political dialogue, and think about why activism must be part of any healthy democracy. Focusing on the psychoanalytic concept of ‘breakdown’, McAfee discusses the disproportionate administrative and militarized crackdown on student organizing that we are witnessing across American campuses today.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Noëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis
Noëlle McAfee, Democracy and the Political Unconscious
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government
Donald Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”
Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”

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Website | overthinkpodcast.com
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Email | dearoverthink@gmail.com
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This is one for the books. In episode 104 of Overthink, Ellie and David consider what makes reading so rewarding, and, for many people today, so challenging! How did society shift toward inward silent reading and away from reading aloud in the Middle Ages? How have changes in teaching phonics and factors of classism, accessibility, and educational justice made it harder for the young to read? Why is reading philosophy so hard, and how can we increase our reading stamina?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Marcel Proust, Journée des Lecteurs
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Julie Andrews, Mandy
Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” Slate
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid

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Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | Dearoverthink@gmail.com
YouTube | Overthink podcast

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Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist
Roland Barthes, “Let us dare to be lazy”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Christine Jeske, The Laziness Myth
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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Support the Show.