{"id":17444,"date":"2025-03-26T19:10:35","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T23:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17444"},"modified":"2025-04-08T17:10:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T21:10:19","slug":"episode-631-david-shields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-631-david-shields","title":{"rendered":"Episode 631 – David Shields"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 631:
\nDavid Shields<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_631_-_David_Shields.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“I’m not a sociologist, I’m not a political scientist, I’m not a historian; I’m just a writer and half a thinker.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Author David Shields<\/a> returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE<\/a>, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times \u017di\u017eek squared = Bannon<\/a> (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger<\/a>, how it feels to be a radical with deep skepticism of radicals’ language, his affinity for Werner Herzog’s notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can “build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness” (per DFW), what he’s learned from the collaboration of making documentaries, his fixation on hamartia<\/em> (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin’s notion of pursuing the truth even if we’ll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times \u017di\u017eek squared = Bannon<\/a> and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally<\/a>!<\/p>\n

(And go listen to our 2019a<\/a>, 2019b<\/a>, and 2020<\/a> conversations.)<\/em><\/p>\n

“‘How did we get here?’ is the precondition for the question, ‘How do we get out of here?'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n