Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 189: Nietzsche and Friendship — with Willow Verkerk
Speakers: Gabriel Alegbeleye, Am Johal, Willow Verkerk
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Gabriel Alegbeleye 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Gabriel with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by philosophy scholar and author, Willow Verkerk. Drawing from her book Nietzsche and Friendship, Willow compares Nietzsche’s more agonistic notion of friendship with other philosophers, and critiques these ideas from a gendered lens. Willow also speaks about her current work on Gendered Mimesis project at KU Leuven. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:50
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. delighted that you could join us again, we have a very special guest with us this week. Willow Verkerk. Welcome, Willow.
Willow Verkerk 1:00
Thanks Am. I'm very happy to be here.
Am Johal 1:02
Yeah, Willow, maybe we can start with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Willow Verkerk 1:07
Okay, well, I actually grew up in Victoria. But I've spent most of my adult life living in first, Quebec, and then Belgium, and then England. And I moved back here in 2019. And since then, I've been teaching philosophy at UBC. And more recently, I became a regular faculty member. I'm now with the title of Lecturer in continental and social philosophy at UBC. And I'm also part of a research project at the University of Leuven in Belgium, called the Gendered Mimesis Project.
Am Johal 1:43
Willow, I'm wondering if we can start with you – you did your doctoral work at the University of Leuven. And wondering if you can talk a little bit about what drew you into philosophy in the first place?
Willow Verkerk 1:55
Well, I grew up with a family where books were really important. My mother was a poet and a filmmaker. And I think I was reading you know, when I was three, so I always love books. And philosophy – I think I was somebody as a young person who was questioning the meaning of life, I was maybe too reflective about things. So I was drawn to philosophy. And actually, when I was about 17, I had a really good friend, a Persian friend, who introduced me to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And I guess that kind of hooked me. I mean, a lot of teenagers read Nietzsche and, you know, he's well known for being a kind of rebel philosopher, very polemical, and inspiring in good and bad ways. And so I got interested in him then, and then I kind of forgot about him. Then when I was at Concordia, during my undergrad - the last year of my undergrad, I had an amazing teacher who was a Plato scholar and a Nietzsche scholar named Horst Hutter. And he writes a lot on Nietzsche therapeutics. And he kind of reintroduced me to Nietzsche in a much more intelligent way than the way I was looking at him as a teenager. And again, I became kind of hooked. And then I kept returning to Nietzsche, I was also very interested in feminist philosophy and queer philosophy, you know, as a young person and continued to be, but Nietzsche was the thinker, and the history of ideas, who really fascinated me. I think, partly because he's quite poetical. And he doesn't write in that whole demonstrative form.
Am Johal 3:23
Your doctoral work included coursework on Nietzsche, and you've referenced a little bit your, your interest in being drawn [in]. And you know, it's quite common, especially to find young university males really getting into Nietzsche and then you're, of course, bringing a feminist perspective into reading his work as well. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to your doctoral work, and then eventually what became your, your book on Nietzsche and in friendship?
Willow Verkerk 3:51
Yeah, I think I was interested in studying in Europe, because in Canada aside from Quebec, there weren't a lot of people working on Nietzsche. So after I worked with this great scholar at Concordia, I wanted to find someone else to work with. And I discovered this professor who was working in both the Netherlands and in Belgium, and he was one of only two people who had written on Nietzsche and friendship. And friendship had become a kind of more increasingly interesting topic to me, I was also really interested in just doing a close reading of Nietzsche and understanding his place and the history of ideas. And so when I had the opportunity to work with this scholar, and I had a scholarship, I thought, why not go to Belgium, at the center of Europe and have an opportunity to study philosophy there. I also thought it would push me more to become fluent in German. Before moving to Belgium, I was already starting to study German at the Goethe-Institut in Montreal, which was great. But I kind of just wanted to have another type of experience, and be around more people who are interested in the history of German philosophy. And so that's one reason why I went there. And then when I was at Leuven, you know, I did learn more about both German and French philosophy.
And I became a member of this group called the Nietzsche Research Group. Which was actually a research center in the Netherlands in name again, had Radboud University, which is a kind of sibling University to move in. And that was about 20 people, more or less master's students, PhD students, postdocs, and professors all working on nature. So that would meet once a month. And they were very tough group. But it really helped me grow a lot. So there would be Nietzsche scholars coming from all over the world, but often more from Europe to present papers, this research group and then we give them criticism. So it's a very different kind of methodology than I had ever experienced. So that was good. That research group is now at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
So because my thesis supervisor has retired, but I think what I became more interested in through that Ph.D. program was looking at how the concept of friendship was understood in the history of philosophy, starting kind of with Aristotle, and then seeing what in particular, Nietzsche had to say, to the canon and how his writings on friendship differed. And that was kind of became really what my dissertation was about what was Nietzsche's interjection into the history of the philosophical notions of friendship, and I specifically looked at, you know, very canonical people like Aristotle and Kant. And then I was also interested in well, how do we understand friendship today? You know, how are these classical understandings of friendship different from the notions of friendship we have today? What might we learn from philosophy about the meaning of friendship? Also, what are some of the limitations or problems with these very sometimes phallic and patriarchal notions of friendship that you do find in the history of what is Western European philosophy? Yeah.
Am Johal 7:05
So how does Nietzsche approach friendship? What's his particular take on friendship through his writing?
Willow Verkerk 7:13
Yeah, well, it's quite interesting because when I started writing about Nietzsche and friendship, people saw Nietzsche as kind of a misanthrope or an individualist, right. Some people think even connect him I think incorrectly to some kind of like libertarianism. So what I learned is that Nietzsche uses the word friends so much, and so many of his texts, right, and he talks about not having friends in his life and wanting to create future friends who this notion of the free spirit and the little work that was done on friendship on Nietzsche, so far, try to pull out what are some kind of comfortable or typical notions of friendship that you find in his work, and this is often in what's known as his free spirit texts of the middle period. So looks like The Gay Science, Daybreak, Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche talks about friends sharing joy. So there's a scholar named Ruth Abbey, who wrote really beautifully about Nietzsche, this notion of friendship in the middle works and said, it's about sharing joy or it's about joyfulness, but what I've noticed because I spent a lot of time reading Nietzsche’s later texts, which are kind of post-Zarathustra, but also looking at Zarathustra, because Nietzsche says it's the center of his oeuvre. And it's his most important book, I saw that Nietzsche had a different kind of friendship that was operative there, and I thought that it extended through his entire oeuvre, and that had been overlooked. So I was really the first one to propose that Nietzsche has an agonistic notion of friendship. And this connects with many of the ideas that are central to thinking like the wheel to power, like the notion of overcoming.
And I also think it connects well to reading him as an existentialist or therapeutic philosopher, which has been quite important for me, especially because of my foundation in reading Nietzsche that way through working with Horst Hutter at Concordia. So I was interested in and looking at Nietzsche, in terms of, what can you teach us about our own lives and the way that we befriend others, as well as looking from a more kind of scholarly perspective and trying to figure out what he had to say about friendship. And you know, his, one of the things Nietzsche is doing in his books, and what he's most well known for is he's diagnosing European modernity with nihilism. And he's saying, after the death of God, a lot of the higher values that we associated with living a good life, which came out of the Christian platonic tradition, no longer have the same hold on us collectively and individually that they used to. So there's a sense of a lack of communal values to structure life. Since God is dead, Nietzsche thought many of the things that we associated with the good, like something being objectively true, any kind of higher values, even aesthetics values, he felt didn't have the same sway, or kind of collective meaning. So he saw people turning towards escapism, becoming apathetic, becoming hopeless, and he thought, modern European society needed to be invigorated needed to have a healthy injection of affirmation brought to culture. And this is why he talks about reevaluation, this is why he talks about overcoming and what I see friendship for Nietzsche as being part of one of these healing opportunities to respond to the problem of nihilism in modern Europe. So this is a kind of more of a big picture of what I think is going on with friendship and his thinking.
Am Johal 10:55
And in terms of the thinkers that you mentioned content Aristotle, who also write about friendship, how do you differentiate sort of Nietzsche approach from their approach and discussions of friendship philosophically?
Willow Verkerk 11:10
Well, Aristotle tends to be the thinker that everyone returns to, even in contemporary writings on friendship and philosophy, because he has these categories, you know, are subtle as someone who puts forwards categories. And so Aristotle has these three categories of friendship, right? Friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue. Quite interestingly, like Aristotle's very broad notion of friendship, he thought, you know, society is based on friendship, contractual relationships are a kind of utility, friendship. Now, these are very practical, give and take relations. Then there's pleasure friendships, which he says are often friendships of young people, but all ages, people who want to have a good time, the kind of friend you go and see a movie with you go and have beers with, both utility and pleasure friendships are part of culture and important for society, and also mental wellbeing for Aristotle. But in these types of friendship, the friends don't love each other for who the friend is, as a person, they love what they get from the friend. So there's a level of instrumentalisation in these so called lower kinds of friendship.
And so for Aristotle, the highest kind of friendship is the virtue friendship. And this is very idealist, because it's related to his ethics, right? It's written about in his Nicomachean, ethics, and ethica in Greek means character. So ethics are about originally in ancient Greek philosophy about the development of character. So you have two friends that come together who practice virtue, and by coming together in that friendship, it allows for a fuller actualization of virtue. So I think that's very important for Nietzsche, in his agonistic notion of friendship. He's very inspired by Aristotle's notion of virtue friendship, but he doesn't hold the same concept of human flourishing or the good that Aristotle does, because Nietzsche still has a basic ontology which is the will to power. So for him, life is continual struggle and competition. Agon means competition or struggle in Greek. So Nietzsche is more interested in the Homeric understanding of life based on struggle, whereas Aristotle would always seek out kind of concourt and peacefulness. But yeah, so Aristotle has these three ideas, utility, pleasure and virtue, and then most people respond to him in one way or another.
Kant has notions of friendship too, he has a notion of moral friendship, which is kind of like a virtue friendship, but he did say like perfect friendship was as rare as a Black Swan. That's one of Kant's most favorite quotes. And he writes more about this in his lectures on ethics, which aren't read as much. I think Kant is a bit more skeptical of friendship than Aristotle is. Although Aristotle also says you're lucky in your life if you have one true friend, which means of course, virtue, friend. The thing is, for Aristotle, not everyone is capable of virtue, friendship, because you have to be a virtuous person to be in a virtuous friendship. But for him, that's not a problem. Also, notably, one who is virtuous also is going to have friendships that are pleasurable and useful. So this higher kind of friendship contains in it, the lower kinds of friendship for Aristotle.
Am Johal 14:44
In terms of more recent sort of writers on friendship, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, others, I'm wondering if any of those both Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have since passed away, but if you found any interesting pieces on friendship through their work.
Willow Verkerk 15:01
Yeah, I mean, Derrida's book The Politics of Friendship was important for me when I was doing my dissertation. It's been a while since I've spent time thinking about it. The one thing that comes to mind when I think of Aristotle and Derrida's reading of Aristotle, is what, because friendship is a kind of love, right? So, friendship, it's a love of friends, it's philia. And so I found it quite interesting to also look at how these different philosophers distinguish friendship from love. And one of the things that Derrida writes about in the politics of friendship has to do with Aristotle. And he notes that what Aristotle says about love is that to love someone is an activity right? an activity of the soul, but to be loved is quite passive. So, Aristotle says and Derrida writes about this, any object or dead thing can receive love, but only something alive can love. Right? So there's this admiration of being the one who does the loving, versus the one who receives love. That's what I remember the most from that time.
Am Johal 16:17
Yeah. And wondering in terms of women writing about friendship through philosophy, who have you found interesting, in that area, there's so many of the in the continental tradition, it tends to be so male dominated in writing of friendship.
Willow Verkerk 16:33
Yeah, I found that very frustrating and difficult, because I mainly work in German and French philosophy. And there weren't the same kind of treaties on friendship or writings on friendship. So I found myself looking to different sources. And I found you know, one philosopher who has made a very significant impact on the history of European philosophy is Luce Irigaray, her most well known texts is probably Speculum of the Other Woman. But she's also written a text called the Ethics of Sexual Difference. And there she criticizes Kant and Plato and Nietzsche, for not recognizing the position of the feminine and not allowing for women to be themselves. So the way that personhood is over identified with a phallic male subject, and what Irigaray also writes about is that, due to the capitalistic system of exchange, in addition, with kinship relationships, historically, women have been objects of exchange between their fathers and their husbands.
So this is something Nietzsche also writes about, which is why it's been quite important for feminist thinkers in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in on the friend and then in Gay Science 68—let me quote Gay Science 68. First, he says, "Man forms the image of woman and woman forms herself according to this image." So Nietzsche writes that right? He's very interested in cultural diagnosis. So I read him as a physician of culture, who elucidates and illuminates gender roles, and then in on the friend and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he says, "Well, women are not yet capable of friendship, but what about the meanness of your souls, you're not generous enough men to allow women to be friends and to have friendship." Right? So Nietzsche says things like if you're a tyrant, you cannot have friends. And if you're a slave, you cannot be a friend. Because if the power differentials are too imbalanced, one cannot have the peer relationship necessary for friendship. So part of what Irigaray illuminates in conversation with Misha, who she does this kind of mimetic dialogue with is she shows that gender inequality historically, and we might think about, is this still a problem today and to what extent impacts the capacity of people to be friends, when they have different gender identities. Now, we have more to consider more than just this gender identities today. And I think there's been a lot of liberation. But certainly the hyper sexualization of women, the power disparities that are operative at so many different levels of social and cultural and economic relationships, create difficulties between people being friends, right. So this is something that I think the feminist thinkers in the French tradition illuminate and it's also something that, you know, lesbian feminists have talked and spoken about the importance of lesbian friendship. I think about people like Audre Lorde, I think about Monique Wittig. This is not really something Judith Butler has spoken about. But I think you know, Sara Ahmed maybe has something to say about this, maybe less directly, but certainly the importance of solidarity, right. So we can also think about, well, what's the role of comradeship and friendship and what's the difference between erotic love, friendship, comradeship? Maybe there's more categories that Aristotle leaves out that we need to think about as being especially relevant today, and especially in conversation with gender inequalities?
Am Johal 20:16
Yeah, I was talking to a philosopher recently about writing on friendship and in community and he mentioned one of the questions he brought up to the conversation with somebody else was just around, “How come everyone who writes about friendship and community are such assholes?” That was like, I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting. I didn't really know Derrida or these other people, but it was funny at the time. I'm wondering in terms of your current projects that you're thinking through and working on one of the projects you're working on is related to gendered mimesis. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.
Willow Verkerk 20:51
Yeah. So kind of, in the last two or three years, I wanted to make a connection between a kind of Nietzschean legacy and critical theory and contemporary continental feminist philosophy. Just think about alternative genealogies of the subject. So there are some really interesting, feminist and queer philosophers today who have been recently but even the last 20 years thinking about alternative genealogies of the subject. So one person who does that is Judith Butler, right? Gender Trouble, how to think about gender differently, and how does this impact our notion of subjectivity. So they've done that and then there's another thinker named Adriana Cavarero, who is an amazing Italian feminist philosopher, who in her book, inclinations, a critique of rectitude talks about the way the subject in the history of European philosophy has been framed as upright, autonomous, sovereign, and all the aesthetics of kind of verticality, and its association with masculinity. And she talks about the importance of inclining, the subject, and how that's connected to maternity and caregiving. So this interest in rethinking ontology, right, the ontology of the subject through this kind of genealogical approach led me to, you know, there tends to be a lot more support for research on male philosophers and I wanted to start doing research on women and queer philosophers.
So, we framed this project as an alternative understanding of gendered being by looking to contemporary voices and the voices that we chose were Judith Butler's notion of the performative which is become everyday discourse about gender. Now, Adriana Cavarero’s notion of inclination because it's connected to maternity and interpersonal relationships and challenges the notion of autonomy and sovereignty connected with Kant and Plato, and then Catherine Malabou's notion of plasticity, which, you know, she's been working into increasingly epigenetics and bringing together continental philosophy with different theories and philosophy of biology. And what we thought is to think about gender today, and the gendered subject, we needed to look to these freethinkers and bring together the notion of the performative with Butler, inclination with Cavarero, and plasticity with Malabou, to have a fuller understanding of how we are formed right by so many different constellations of power, and meaning other people who have come into the work now are Sara Ahmed, her notion of queer phenomenology, but she also talks in a really fascinating way about how our philosophical notion of gender shapes the way that sex is understood in binary terms. And there's more and more research coming out about that, looking at even the formation of the concept of gender in gendered medicine, and how that created a disciplinary apparatus for seeing sex in binary terms with child psychologists John Money, who was a pioneer for sex reassignment surgery, but was also the thinker who was unfortunately recommending sex assignment for intersex children, right? So it's about bringing together different genealogies of the subject to think about gender, with the foundation, being kind of contemporary continental feminist and queer thought.
Am Johal 24:54
Willow, you've also had a creative writing practice in the past. I know you've been very busy at work, but wondering if you can speak a little bit to your creative projects as well.
Willow Verkerk 25:04
Yeah, I, you know, I was writing short stories. Actually, the way I became interested in writing short stories was during my PhD and right around the time I started my PhD, my mother became very sick and passed away. And during that time, I was also caretaking for her. And I had a very significant experience where I felt like I couldn't write about the history of philosophy because the gravity of my personal experience was so intense, but there was still this need for me to write. So I started kind of just being you know, free association just kind of writing about ideas freely, and the form of short story felt like a therapeutic outlet when I couldn't really do any anything else and I've heard a lot of people talk about writing or music in that way as being the release of a voice or something, some energy when you're going through a challenging time in your life. So that's how I started writing fiction. And then during my PhD, I would, would be a way to think and communicate that wasn't so locked in a discipline form, because scholarly work is very circumscribed. And sometimes can feel somewhat constrictive. So imaginating characters and having this opportunity to write in a form that was not academic and was sometimes very immature, felt like a release for me from my kind of the demands of academic life. Yeah, I guess I've moved away from it a little bit now. But I was writing and publishing in different Canadian literary magazines. The first thing I think I wrote was in a CBC award, this was a while ago, it won second place in an award. So that was fun. It gave me the opportunity to explore different characters, and to write about people in my life that I love, but I couldn't directly name them. So I think, you know, writing serves different functions for people. And I would like to go back to it again, I keep saying to myself, I have a novel I'd love to write, but where's the time?
Am Johal 27:18
Yeah, and are there other projects that you hope to get involved in in the future? philosophical or otherwise?
Willow Verkerk 27:25
I think the Gendered Mimesis project is really exciting because it's the kind of sibling project to another European Research Council grant funded project called Homo Mimeticus. And that involves a group of people that have been looking at the philosophy of mimesis, which goes all the way back to Plato, but also has a legacy and posts-structuralism through Nietzsche. And yes, the gender mimesis project is focusing on gender and trying to understand alternative genealogy, so the subject in relation to gendered beings. But this other project that's associated with it has people working in classics, has people working on Nietzsche, has people working in new materialisms, all through the problematic of mimesis. So I feel like now that I've learned more about the philosophical concept of mimesis, and how it structures not just human life, individually, but also collectively, that seems to me to be a very rich concept to take forward, as I go on. Also, the Gendered Mimesis project has like a group of researchers working with it. So I just feel very excited about it right now, because I'm learning so much from them. Another project that I'm curious about, and that's part of the Gendered Mimesis project, one kind of, let’s say, trajectory of it is looking at characters in literary history. So the project is philosophical, but it's also considered transdisciplinary. It has people working in philosophy and literature, some people in arts. And the figures and literary history, what I consider to be dissonant exemplars. So who are characters in literary history that people sometimes write about, as being outspoken or as undermining traditional conceptions of subjectivity or challenging them or forcing us to think about ontology differently.
So one person who has been written about a lot by feminists and literary scholars and philosophers is Antigone. So Sophocles, Antigone, I've written about her. Butler has a great book on her called Antigone’s claim, probably going to return to her, and to try and investigate why we have these characters and literary history that we return to over and over again, and they continue to generate new meanings for us. And in particular, Antigone, I mean, this play has been remade, and it's of highly politicized play. And she is a figure for many people of liberation. For some people, she's also a figure that is the monstrous, right? So I think I'm fascinated by these characters in literary history, who are at the border lines of are they a hero? Or are they a monster? And what do they have to teach us about human nature or the human condition? So I just wrote something recently on the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette, and that's coming out soon. And it's exactly that kind of study. So how does her figuration allow for us to think differently about the subject and especially the post enlightenment subject, and this is in conversation with critical theory and Simone de Beauvoir, and the tradition of wanting to prioritize rationality above all, as being the characteristic that makes us human, and that comes out of Immanuel Kant, and people like Horkheimer and Adorno and Dialectic of Enlightenment question that question the way that the rationalized subject comes together with capitalism to create a very bourgeois individual who loses a sense of morality or care for the other. And so I've returned to Juliette, as this dissonant exemplar who undermines the Kantian moral subject, but also has something more to teach us so I kind of want to see how these dissonant exemplars like Antigone, like Juliette. The next person I want to write about is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, how these really kind of complicated and sometimes troublesome figures can teach us about what more we need to learn about the human condition, so that we don't get trapped in these very narrow conceptions of what it means.
Am Johal 31:51
Willow, is there anything you'd like to add?
Willow Verkerk 31:55
I guess I would be curious to hear from you. What you think we need to write about more when it comes to the philosophy of friendship, because I know this is something you also think about.
Am Johal 32:05
You know, still in the middle of working on this project with my collaborator, Matt Hern. And it's been interesting, we had an opportunity to interview Jean-Luc Nancy before he passed away, and also had a chance to speak with Leela Gandhi, who wrote a book called Affective Communities. And interestingly, reading that book, we were working on our project and going into a certain zone with it, and we read Leela Gandhi’s book, and she had basically said what we wanted to say, but back in 2006. So that was a—that was an interesting illustration. So we knew we had to go off into a different direction. But you know, I think also reading Julietta Singh, her book on rethinking mastery was interesting in that regard. Leanne Simpson’s work, I think, is really interesting as well, I think Indigenous theorists and thinkers have a lot to say on the matter. And I don't know if we've come to any type of conclusion, per se, but actually, Mbembe’s work is well around movement and other pieces that sort of relate ourselves to the other. I think there's some really interesting things there that have helped illuminate some of our conversations, but it remains a work in progress. And when you do read the literature, it never ever ends in a type of conclusion, it's always left quite open ended from Agamben’s coming community to Blanchot’s work, and otherwise. And so it is interesting to come back to friendship. I almost want to just like the Elena Ferrante’s book, I was like reading those in the summer, around these sorts of friendships between women as well. So I think fiction has a lot to share in this regard, as well.
Willow Verkerk 33:49
Yeah, I mean, I really love Nietzsche’s notion of agonistic friendship, but it is a very— virile one, and masculine one, like friends should struggle against each other in order to help the other overcome. And there are other, you know, notions of friendship that I have seen in Cavarero, especially where she talks about a kind of ethics of vulnerability, right? And the way that we all depend on one another, and in her texts, inclinations, a critique of rectitude, she talks about the mother infant relation, and she's inspired by Hannah Arendt idea that, you know, every time a new life is born, it's an event and anything can happen. But what she also says Arendt overlooks is the role of the mother in the event of birth. And she says a mother is the ethical Actor Par Excellence, because she has the capacity to wound or care. Right, so recognizing our primary vulnerability in the way that we're all dependent upon others, and that we can return to this position of infancy at any point in our lives due to illness, old age, etc. Allows for this more inclined comportment towards the other what she thinks needs to come into the way we understand the very foundations of subjectivity. So I think that's interesting. And also I have been reading more about Indigenous care ethics and the way that all different forms of life, whether it's a tree or the air or source of water, has a dignity or a sense of import to it. So the extension of friendship to other forms of life. And the recognition of a form like a fundamental vulnerability might allow for us to interact with each other in a new way. And I don't think being agonistic prohibits us from being vulnerable, even though Nietzsche has this very kind of like struggling. It kind of reminds me of like two people wrestling when he talks about friendship. But you know, to be open to being wrong in an intellectual discourse requires vulnerability. So there's a return to the ethics of vulnerability. I see it in feminist literature. I've noticed it in some Indigenous literature that I've been reading in Indigenous care ethics, and I think this might be more compatible with someone like Nietzsche than we realized.
Am Johal 36:21
Anne Dufourmantelle’s book on gentleness also, I think, enters into that zone as well. Willow, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. Always wonderful to speak with you and hopefully as the pandemic goes on, we'll get a chance to see you live in person at some point. But thank you so much for joining us.
Willow Verkerk 36:42
My pleasure.
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Gabriel Alegbeleye 36:46
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU VanCity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to this episode, with Willow Verkerk. To learn more about her book Nietzsche and Friendship or Willow’s other work, head to the show notes below. We release episodes every Tuesday, so make sure to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcasting app of choice. And follow us on Twitter @SFU_VOCE to stay updated on our podcast and other events we host, thanks again for tuning in.
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