Science Forums 2

[Michaelangelica]

I don't normally stray into this forum.
But I thought this might interest a few.
The audio will only be there for a few weeks unless someone wants to work out how to attach it to this thread
Philosophers Zone - 29 March 2008 - Buffy the Concept Slayer
An interview with James B. South.
He's Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and much of his research has concentrated on questions about cognition in later mediaeval philosophy, and Descartes' indebtedness to late scholastic thought.
But he's also the editor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale

A few random quotes

Alan Saunders: Yes, and it is interesting, as you've just mentioned, that the figure of the vampire figures quite often in Karl Marx's book Kapital, in fact a recent writer on the subject, Francis Wheen, has said that you could see Kapital as a sort of Gothic horror story.

James B. South: I think it's very much that way from the children working in mines, and in these horrible factory conditions and so on, and there's actually an episode written by Jos Weeden of Buffy that actually has Buffy working at a fast food restaurant and discovering these teenagers who get taken in off the street, and then the next day show back up in they're old people who don't remember anything about their lives. And she finds out that there is this demon, who is basically just using people up and taking their entire lives overnight, in this sort of hellish dimension, and Buffy has to put an end to it.

Priests: Glorificus wait. Kill the key now and all will be lost. We'll be stuck on this mortal plane forever.

Allright, You're right. Let's go. I'm just a little emotional right now. How do they do it?

Dawn: Do what?

People. How do they function here like this in the world with all this bile running through them. Every day it's Whoo, you have no control, they're not even animals, there's these meat-baggy slaves to hormones and pheromones and their feelings. Hate 'em. I mean really is this what the poets go on about? This? Call me crazy but as hardcore drugs go, human emotions are just useless. People are puppets, everyone getting jerked around by what they're feeling. Am I wrong? Really, I want to know

Alan Saunders: Now tell us about Plato's cave, and how Plato's cave relates to the Hell Mouth?

James B. South: This refers back then to my thesis about evil, and the Buffyverse.
A platonic conception of the good is one in which everything is contained under the good, either as some attribute of goodness or as some privation of goodness.
And what we see I think as Season 7 develops explicitly, is an account of the good in which the good is dialectally entwined with evil and that the only way to overcome the evil is also to overcome the sort of teleological notion of good that the Buffyverse has set up.
That is, in some ways I see the ending of the series as a way of sort of not just blowing up Sunnydale, but blowing up the cave, right, is blowing up the entire structure of a hierarchically ordered set of goods.

Alan Saunders: People might not be familiar with the metaphor of Plato's cave, so just explain briefly what that is.

James B. South: There are two major features of it. One is that as Plato imagines this group of people stuck in a cave, chained to it, chained by their desires as it were, to watching these shadows as opposed to the reality that awaits, if we could only get out of the cave. So the way I see Plato's cave is a way of showing that people are infected by or directed by their desires in such a way that they're unable to see reality for what it is. And the other side of the cave is that it posits, at least in Plato's case, the idea of a good that if we could only get out of the cave by having our desires align up correctly with reason, and move up into the sun, into the presence of the sun, we would be able to see reality for what it is, know the good for what it is. And we would be free of our desire-induced fantasies.