The Unrendered Self - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Unrendered Self The Deeper Thinking Podcast  What happens to the self when even absence becomes a kind of presence? In this episode, we examine the quiet erosion of identity under conditions of constant visibility. This is not about digital detox or offline escape—it’s about the deeper structural shift where reflection becomes performance, privacy becomes signal, and being becomes something that must be rendered to be real. We explore how the self survives—or doesn’t—amid an economy of attention that cannot tolerate ambiguity. Drawing on Simone Weil’s ethics of attention, Gloria Anzaldúa’s defence of contradiction, and Roland Barthes’s concept of the neutral, the episode traces the contours of presence without performance. We also touch on Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity and Hannah Arendt’s space of appearance to imagine what it means to remain unrendered—felt but uncaptioned, real but unreadable. This is not an elegy for privacy—it is a meditation on presence without proof. A quiet reclaiming of the unspoken, the unperformed, the unnamed self. The one who listens but does not post, who thinks but does not narrate, who exists in the opacity we are no longer taught to value. Why Listen? Reframe visibility and identity through the lens of attention, fatigue, and erosion Engage with thinkers like Barthes, Glissant, Weil, and de Certeau without academic distance Experience audio as a space of ambient intimacy and structural reflection Consider what it means to exist without translating yourself Listen On: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Bibliography Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2002. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Bibliography Relevance Simone Weil: Offers a sacred attention that does not demand rendering, anchoring presence in stillness. Édouard Glissant: Defends opacity as an ethical right, countering the demand to be always visible, always legible. Roland Barthes: Introduces the neutral as a space of resistance to classification, performance, or capture. Hannah Arendt: Invites reflection on how public identity emerges within a space of appearance, and what it means to disappear from it. Michel de Certeau: Highlights the quiet subversions of everyday life—walking without mapping, speaking without broadcasting. Gloria Anzaldúa: Centres contradiction and multiplicity as modes of authentic, unrendered being. To be unrendered is not to vanish—but to resist conversion into content. #AttentionEconomy #VisibilityFatigue #PhilosophyOfSelf #SimoneWeil #GloriaAnzaldúa #RolandBarthes #EdouardGlissant #HannahArendt #DeCerteau #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Presence #Opacity #ExistenceWithoutPerformance #AmbientIntimacy