Failure Is Freedom

https://www.martinessig.com
  • 5.0 (10)
  • PHILOSOPHY

I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.  https://www.martinessig.com/ 

  1. FEB 3

    There Is No "Before" of Binary Oppositions

    There is no thing without the dialectic of some-thing and no-thing. Whatever was before the binary opposition of something and nothing, was neither something nor nothing. When this primordial non-thing, perhaps an "inconsistent multiplicity," or an absolutely unified, absolute nothing, was separated into something and nothing, then binary oppositions gave us everything that is, which is just like saying being is a relation to nonbeing and not a thing-in-itself. However, this cut into the primordial void didn't accomplish a complete dichotomization of differential relations because it couldn't entirely eliminate whatever ambiguity was "before" this separation.  The incompletion of this separation reflects the inherent incompletion of the determination of being into either the positivity of presence or the negativity of absence. The irreducible ambiguity of what is, is that it also "isn't," which is reflected in such bizarre quantum phenomena as "interposition" and "non-locality," as well as in macro level phenomena described best by Jean-Luc Marion's adumbration of "Saturated Phenomena." Saturated Phenomena produce indeterminable hermeneutics from this irreducible ambiguity that resists determination because it resists separation into the most basic categories of being and nonbeing. Binary oppositions give whatever there is to being's self-knowing, but the resistance to knowing in the Lacanian register of the Real allows that self-relation to move. Becoming's continual movement through the dialectical relation of difference is without complete separation, so that knowing, like the being it represents, is a flow, rather than a static determination. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    53 min

  2. FEB 1

    Being Finds itself in Nonbeing as Becoming

    Being is birthed by nonbeing, and nonbeing is birthed by being. Whatever is "before" this simultaneous co-arising is a nothing that "proceeded" the dialectic between something and nothing, sometimes called the "absolute" nothing because it is without relation to something, so that it isn't even nothing because nothing needs something to negate to be nothing. Whatever is before "the relation" of Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy isn't even what Alain Badiou called an "inconsistent multiplicity," referencing the work of Quentin Meillassoux, because inconsistency co-arises with consistency just as multiplicity is simultaneous with the One. The ground of knowing is the cut into GWF Hegel's Being-in-itself, which is the dichotomous concurrence of being and nonbeing related without the resolution of synthesis across the cut of difference as a twice negated becoming. Binary oppositions are the necessary ground of knowing because when light is separated from the dark, as it is in Genesis, both the dark and the light retroactively create each other. And while they can never be put entirely back together, so that the "light shines in the darkness without the darkness overcoming it," as the Gospel according to John says, there will always be an irreducible remainder of the ambiguity from before the cut. The darkness is also not overcome, and whatever it is that resist the separation of binaries is both the limit and the ground of their dichotomization. The same is true of the determinate negation of knowing through identification. There is no determination without indeterminacy and no identification without difference. Knowing's limit and horizon is the irreducible ambiguity of what is unknowable, just as the Symbolic co-arrises with the Real.  Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    37 min

  3. JAN 23

    The Abyss of the Otherness Within

    The Symbolic is not at one with itself, which means that knowing through representation is not only mediated through language but also shifty. However, it is the immediacy of this "shiftiness" that allows for knowing to be a dynamic, experimental flow that reflects the dynamism of being as a process of becoming. Hermeneutics is the sort of shifty knowing that reflects the provisional nature of both knowing and the experience of becoming. The shiftiness within is not disingenuous but the abyss from which all hermeneutical ingenuity emerges, and what allows us to become constantly new by becoming other than ourselves. Jean-Luc Marion divides "Saturate Phenomena" into those aspects that can be taken in to ourselves through the intention and those that are intuited. There is a mismatch between intentional, phenomenological representation and immediate, affective intuition. Saturated Phenomena are defined by the too-much-givenness of the intuition that cannot be reduced by the symbolic intention to phenomenal and conceptual objects. The intuition then is a kind of awareness of "over-proximal affects" that can't be symbolize, so that they are in the Lacanian register of the Real, which is the absolute resistance to symbolization. It is this unsymbolizable otherness that connects the abyss within to the abyss without, and which allows being's becoming to be the experimental interpretation of the hermeneutical circle.  The shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics is the shift from intentional identification in the Symbolic register to the provisional, shifty interpretation in the resister of the Real through the Lacanian Imaginary. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    53 min

  4. JAN 15

    Otherness in Phenomenology Versus Hermeneutics

    Formal Phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl's attempt to discover the ground of phenomenal appearances and the relations between these appearances and the "things-in-themselves." His "Eidetic Reduction" hoped to reduce the internal intention of the subject to increase the external intention of what shows itself to the subject, so that what is other than the subject might show itself from its own intention without the interference of the subject's presuppositions, which are a reflection of the subject's intention and not of the Other that appears on the subject's intentional screen. The problem with the Eidetic reduction was that it was the subject's presuppositions that allow the Other to appear at all. What is outside and other to the subject must be brought into the subject, or appear to the subject, via an interpretive frame work, starting with Kant's "A Priori Categories" for basic perception and ending with the concepts given to human subjectivity by their collective Imaginary and Symbolic registers for more advanced "understanding." Things-in-themselves aren't things or objects. They must be in relation with an outside or with otherness or with the intention of another because objects are reified by relations of difference according to physical rules, perceptual apparatuses or concepts. The outside co-arrises with the inside as a relation of difference governed by the natural laws, perceptual categories, and by the signifiers of minded things. The internal parts of an object are made whole by the intention of the whole, but the wholeness of an object isn't isolated within its objectification, but rather it is a relational intention or an intention extended into its outside environment. Evolution by natural selection is a principle that relates bodily objectification to "niche" intention, so that the body of an organism reflects its niche in its biome. In phenomenology this co-arising of inside and outside as objectification is articulated as the necessity of consciousness to be about something, or to have an object, so that internal subjectivity is given by the difference of external objectivity, or otherness. Unconscious, or reactive, co-variable arising, or causality, is the physically determined intentionality of material objects. Non-physical, conscious intentionality is awareness-of, which in phenomenology is awareness "of" a different or other intention outside of the internal intention. In psychology the "Theory of Mind" is the awareness of the "mindedness," or of the "subjectivity" of the Other.  However, the psychoanalytic subject does not have an objectifiable intention as other objects do. There will always be a remainder of irreducible ambiguity after an Eidetic reduction is intentionally performed. And this resistance to identity or to intentional conceptualization is what is singular or different or other about the psychoanalytic subject, not only about the outside other but also about the internal other of the subject itself. Psychoanalysis is hermeneutical in natural rather than phenomenological because the irreducible otherness of subjectification requires interpretation rather than phenomenological reduction to objects. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    34 min

  5. JAN 12

    What is Otherness?

    The self / other relationship of being's becoming is the center piece of both phenomenology and of hermeneutics and can help explain why there was a general shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics in theory beginning with Heidegger and culminating in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. This shift was not a total rejection of Phenomenology but an acknowledgement that the goal of Husserlian phenomenology of the "Eidetic Reduction" wasn't possible given the inherent perspectivalism of the showing of being and of the knowing of being. Things may show themselves "from" themselves but they can't appear "as" themselves to another without the other's interpretation of their showing. Any possible appearance of being must appear through an interpretive apparatus or some kind, whether that be a biological mechanism like a sensory system, or a symbolic system of differences like a language.  But mediation doesn't necessarily lessen the immediacy of being. It may be that mediated being is being showing itself to itself as another, but it may simultaneously be true that the interpretation of being is the immediacy of being's becoming through the mediation of perception and conceptualization, a becoming in which some degrees of freedom are actuated by the immediate distantiation of being from itself as an object for itself. This distantiation of being from itself injects indeterminacy into determinate being, which is the space of nonbeing necessary for being to appear to itself and to know itself as itself through otherness. The relation of being to its other, which is nonbeing, is being's becoming as an immediate, dialectical process "for" itself, or "Being-for-itself" rather than "Being-in-itself," as Hegel outlined. In whatever way Being-in-itself is "immediate," it is so immediate that it can't be "for" itself because it is without the relationality of "for-ness" or any other sort of prepositionally given appearance or knowing. The relationality of "otherness" is the ground of any possible appearance of being "to" or "for" itself, so phenomenology must included hermeneutical interpretation without the totalizing reduction that Husserl called "Eidetic," which would mean the identification and defining of an eternal, unchanging essence or substance. Any reduction of an appearance to knowing must include the indeterminacy of otherness's irreducible ambiguity and thus precludes any complete determination of an identity. Every possible identification includes the otherness of misidentification. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    48 min

  6. JAN 9

    A Symbolic, Imaginary Projection into the Abyss

    There may be actual degrees of freedom in the register of Imaginary if it is possible to relate determinate being to the open indeterminacy of the void. Jean-Luc Marion's Saturated Phenomena relate the objective determinations of the intention to the failure to determine of the affective intuition as the indeterminable hermeneutics of too much givenness, or of too much aboutness for the intention to reify into phenomenal or conceptual objects. Is it possible that this affective intuition cannot be fully determined because it intuits the irreducible ambiguity of actual indeterminacy, something like the indeterminacy or superposition of Quantum? If this were the case, then this irreducible ambiguity would contain actual degrees of freedom, particularly the freedom of the non-local, symbolic imagination to project itself into the abyss of meaning to generate new semantic meanings and virtual worlds that have real effects on being, or are ontologically real themselves, as virtuality is for Deleuze.  For Hegel determinate being can step outside of itself, or self-alienate, to imagine itself as an object. It is the lack of total objectification of and in the subjective intention, or the lack of symbolic interpolation, that constitutes the subject's "singularity" in Zizek's formulation, or that allows for some relative degrees of freedom in the register of the Imaginary. The Real is the absolute resistance to the symbolization and the objectification of the intention, but the Imaginary can imagine into, or across, the open spaces of the Real outside of and within determinate being. Lack of interpolation can also be seen as the excess of indeterminate being that allows for an excess of interpretations, which is too much being to determine. There is too much being because being is an indeterminate becoming, which is always becoming more than what the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic can frame, so that there is an ongoing need for concept creation. It is this excess of being beyond objectification that allows for the imaginary freedom of interpretation. The interpretation of determinate being is the freedom of the symbolic imagination given by the indeterminacy of the void. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    42 min

  7. JAN 4

    To Imagine in Relation to the Void

    Whatever degrees of freedom we may have, they seem to be "contained" in the Imaginary. The Lacanian Imaginary makes whole and complete what is neither whole nor complete, which is the Real. But it is this "non-relation" between wholeness in the Register of the Imaginary and "lack" in the Register of the Real that allows our imaginary projections into the void to be somewhat indeterminate, or to contain relative degrees of freedom. These imaginary projections are types of illusions, which might be thought of in terms of the Lacanian virtual object that he called "Object-small-a." Virtual objects appear as if real, even though they are imaginary projections. Lacanian psychoanalysis was to open up whatever degrees of freedom are available to the analysand by "traversing the fantasy" of this virtual projection. The analysand must distantiate from the virtual object enough to realize the difference between the object of desire, which is what the fantasy is projected on to, and the object-cause-of-desire, which is the obstacle that constitutes the imaginary projection as a positivization of lack. The freedom of the Imaginary is given by the realization of this gap because it is the gap of indeterminacy in determinate being that is given by the void of nonbeing. And it is the indeterminacy of desire that allows for a reinterpretation of a determinate symptom. The relation between being and nonbeing gives the open indeterminacy of virtuality, which might be thought of as the relative degrees of freedom contained in "actual possibility." The virtual does have a sort of reality because as Deleuze put it, the virtual is "actualized" but not "realized" possibility. The phenomenological intention works in this same way. It imagines noumenal reality as phenomenal objects. We perceive the world in Gestalt Wholes, not as it is "in-itself." Our freedom is given to us when the wholes given by the concepts of the Symbolic fail to be whole, which is the gap given by the relation of whole objects to what resists objectification completely, which is the Lacanian Real. Zizek formulates this freedom as the failure of the Symbolic to interpolate being in the register of the Real. For example, our personal identity is singular because our "irreducible ambiguity," in Levinas's famous locution, cannot be interpolated into the Symbolic. We are the relation formed at the intersection of the Symbolic and its failure, and this relation is indeterminate. Our freedom is exactly here with this indeterminacy, which Heidegger formulated as determinate being's relation to the void, or the creativity of the imagination. Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics demonstrate how this imaginal freedom is properly employed. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    48 min

  8. 12/28/2025

    Our Freedom Is the Interpretation of Being

    Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Phenomenology is the study of how things appear. Both studies have had to concede a sort of "perspectivalism" because disclosure, or "unconcealment," is always through the "thrownness," or particularity, of a given position that Heidegger called being's "facticity." The sciences have tried to rid first-person observation of perspective by claiming "third-person" objectivity, but intentional objects, including the objects of the sciences, have a remainder of ambiguity, or "difference," that will not be completed or made whole because of the ineluctability of perspective's locatedness. Every identification has at least a bit of misrecognition about it because there is no omniscient position from which to view a situation objectively without aspects of the object "withdrawing" from the observer, like the back sides of three-dimensional objects. Even though the withdrawn aspects of objects can be inferred, there is no meta-position to directly verify that they are there. Because being cannot be seen all at once, there will always be room for interpretation. Hermeneutics is the freedom of the symbolic intention to hold being's indeterminacy differently without closure. It is in the clash of interpretations that new concepts are created and being is renewed.  Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    37 min
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About

I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.  https://www.martinessig.com/ 

Information

  • Creator
    https://www.martinessig.com
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    41
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Failure Is Freedom
  • Show Website
    Failure Is Freedom