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. 4H AGO

    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 appears 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 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. The relation between being and nonbeing gives the 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. Zizek formulates this freedom as the failure of the Symbolic to interpolate being in the register of the Real. For example, our person 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

  2. 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

  3. 12/17/2025

    The Indeterminable Hermeneutics of Irreducible Ambiguity

    Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon" produce "indeterminable hermeneutics." Indeterminable hermeneutics can either be a blessing or a curse because they are counter to our intention. What we cannot intend is what Marion called the "non-object," which is the "object" of all saturated phenomena. Soren Kierkegaard was perhaps the first to articulate the anxiety produced by the non-object of the void. Sigmund Freud defined fear as having an object and anxiety as without one. Jacques Lacan then positivized this negativity with his formulation that "anxiety is not without an object." Because the hermeneutics of the non-object can't be determined, no one interpretation can become totalizing. The gift of the negativity of non-closure is that interpretations can be put in relation with each other without one becoming dominant. The "clash" of interpretations, as Paul Ricoeur might have put it, produce "semantic innovations" in the irresolution of their relations. But how does one avoid the "lazy relativism" of intellectual tolerance that David Tracy warned about. In the patronizing acceptance of all interpretations, including indefensible ones, one loses sight of the truth. If the public relating of interpretations are to make a community of interpreters, then they must offer public reasons for these interpretations? The disjunction between the intention and the intuition in Saturated Phenomena are not so much a disjunction as a relation, in particular, the relation that Lacan outlined as that between the Symbolic and the Real. Every attempt at an interpretation is an attempt to symbolize the Real, but the Real's resistance to symbolization is absolute. But the gift of the Real is the constant renewal of the interpretive intention. Paul Ricoeur thought of this relation as that of the dialectic between language's universality and the particularity of difference that allowed for  imaginal creativity. Much like the Lacanian Imaginary, Ricoeur's imaginal creativity makes whole, but by bringing difference into relation without the resolution of completion, which is the non-completion of the Lacanian "Non-Relation." For both thinkers this wholeness can be the relation between wholeness and its failure, which might be thought of as wholeness without completion or intention without oneness, which would be the necessary ground of the multiplicity of a possible hermeneutic community. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    33 min

  4. 12/08/2025

    The Self as Another

    The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither directly referred to each other's work in majorly significant ways. Ricoeur developed a sort of theology of hermeneutics by changing the project of Husserlian phenomenology from the "eidetic reduction," which identified the objective essence of a phenomenon, to the hermeneutic interplay of multiple, irreducible interpretations or meanings. For Ricoeur what a things was, was indeterminable accept through the clash of multiple semantic meanings that produced a sort of revelation of the "things in themselves" as not in themselves but in the clash of interpretations of them, which bares some resemblance to Husserl's technic of "eidetic variation," but without out any reduction to a single intentional stance towards the essence or identity of a thing. Marion also changed the end goal of the "eidetic reduction" but he kept the language of "letting things show themselves as themselves." However, what showed itself was from elsewhere and therefore invited an interminable play of contrary hermeneutic variations. For both Marion and Ricoeur, the too-much-givenness of elsewhere, which might be thought of as the too-much otherness of the Other, results in the failure to reduce otherness to a single intention or identity. But otherness is both the failure of identity and the ground of it, or put in a more Levinasian formulation, as Ricoeur did, the ground of becoming of "self as Other," in which the interior intention and exterior other become in dialectical relation to each other's unknowable intention, like Meister Eckhart's God beyond God who reveals and hides in the same movement. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    1h 18m

  5. 12/03/2025

    The Semantic Advent of the Becoming of Being

    It has long been noticed that there is a similarity between how the mind knows the world and how the physical world appears. For those in the Idealist camp this similarity is because our minds reflect the mind-like structures of reality. But modern physical sciences are based on the total rejection of any subjective interference with "objective" knowledge. And so those in the Realist camp base knowing about the Universe on the purification of observations from any taint of subjective or perspectival bias, in which a sort of direct knowing of reality is sought in an "a" equals "a" identification of the Universe as it is in-itself. And these scientific materialists just take the miracle that the mind corresponds to reality in such as way as to know anything about it as a given.  But the mystical knowing of Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomenon" involves putting the unknowable in relation to the knowable to produce a kind of knowing about what can't be known that he calls "Counter-Experience." Counter-Experience is the experience that is given by the failure to know. The failure to know in Marion's Counter-Experience is not because too little information has been given but rather because too much affect has been given to the intuition for the intention to reduce to conceptual or phenomenal objects. The gratuity of this givenness reflects the ultimate gratuity that gives whatever appears to the intention, which is the ground of both what can be known about the Universe and what can't. The unknowable ground of whatever there is, is the gratuity of the love that proceeds even God, which is the love that Marion calls "God without being." The excess of God's Love precedes Him, and this gratuitous love shows itself as the beyond of the intention, or of what proceeded any possible knowledge, as Counter-Experience. This too-much-givenness then becomes the gift of endless opportunities for interpretations, which are endless opportunities to consider the gratuity that proceeded both being and the knowing of being. The first gift is the appearance of what can't be determined, the second gift is the ingression of this indeterminate excess into the intention via Interpretation. Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics outlined how what can't be determined must be interpreted. Ricoeur showed how the failure to know gave raise to communities of interpretation, in which God's indeterminate love becomes not only the basis for an indeterminate creation but also the basis for communities of interpretation of the too-much-givenness of being.   Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    1h 10m

  6. 11/30/2025

    God's Love Proceeded God.

    The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is the self-emptying of oneness, so that through this self-differentiation and self-distantiation there might be the differential relation of continual becoming. Love isn't a being, but the ground of being, which is the playful relation between the finite and the infinite; the universal and the particular; and potential and its material impressions. Love desires being, or more accurately, it desires the interplay of being and nonbeing as a becoming without end, which means without a unified intention, as all "good" and "true" play should be without intention and without end.  But as the ground of the dialectic of being-at-play, it must continually love whatever there is into existence by desiring existence in such a way as not to have a final intention for it, so that becoming might have its own intentions, and as many of them as possible. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because love makes a clearing for being to play according to its own multitudinous intentions, which are the purposeless excesses of the many given by the unbecoming of the one. Love's desire for being is abundance, which is the excessive abundance of love's too-much givenness for one intention to contain. The love that grounds being's play is the utter gratuity of the ambiguity that it gives, which is being to itself as an endless becoming without the conditions of purpose.  All lack in being is a lack of oneness, which is the lack of an end given by the without-purpose of unconditional love. Whatever there is: every beauty, sublimity, or horror is the excess given by love's uncontrolled becoming, so that love's counter-intention is indistinguishable from an unintended accident. The experience of love is Marion's "Counter-Experience," so saturated with ambiguous affect that the intuition cannot be reduced by the intention. The Counter-Experience's aboutness is the super-saturated non-object. The self-sacrificial love that grounds becoming is the sacrifice of intention to the counter-intention of the without-objectification of the intuition. Love's excessive becoming is unconditioned, unintended, and endless, but not without any of them. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    1h 25m

  7. 11/26/2025

    The Appearance of the Invisible "As" the Non-Object

    According to Acts, Paul went to the Aeropagus in Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers who apparently just sort of hung out there talking shit all day. He conveniently found a placard to an unknown god to illustrate the main point that he wanted to make to them about how the God that he worshipped was beyond their fancy Greek philosophical knowledge. They were mostly true to their sophistic reputations, but they at least condescended to converse with him before rejecting his Gospel, especially the bit about the resurrection of the dead. However, there were a couple of standouts who believed him and joined him, Damaris and Dionysius. Dionysius the Aeropagite would have his name ripped off but nonetheless honored by the Pseudo-Dionysius 500 years later. Pseudo-Dionysius is widely regarded as the founding figure of Christian Mysticism. For whatever reason he borrowed Dionysius's name, the anonymous writer shared a strong affinity with Dionysius for the unknowability of God. Jean-Luc Marion has outlined how this unknowable God is properly represented in the Icon, which is as the invisible made visible without reducing invisibility, or reducing unknowability. When the invisible appears from elsewhere, it is the sort of "Saturated Phenomenon" that Marion called "Revelation," but how does one stay true this sort of incomprehensible event, in which the unknowable makes itself know "as" an irreducible mystery?  Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    1h 11m

  8. 11/17/2025

    Too Much Aboutness

    When too much is given to the intention, there is too much aboutness, which is what Jean-Luc Marion calls a Saturated Phenomenon. Saturated Phenomena overwhelm us with too much aboutness to reduce to either a visible object or to the conceptual understanding, so that there is a mismatch between what intentionally appears and what we intuit about an experience. Marion breaks this too-much-ness into the four categories of Kant's a priori experiential necessity. Too much quantitative aboutness is the excessive information of the Event. Too much qualitative aboutness is the too much affective qualia of the artistic masterpiece. Too much relational aboutness is the over-proximity of sensation in the flesh or the body. Too much modal aboutness is the too many possibilities to be reduced to the possible. And Marion's Revelation is a fifth category that encompasses the other four as that which exceeds any possible reduction to material causality. The irreducible reminder of intuitive ambiguity that cannot be reduced by the intention as an objective representation, produces the "indeterminable hermeneutics" that characterizes a mismatch between what is intuited and what is represented. The gap, which is the same gap of the Lacanian Real between symbolization and what resists symbolization absolutely, is an opportunity for multiple interpretations of whatever it is that has appeared. Paul Ricoeur offered an interpretation of the endless production of interpretations as a possible ground of hermeneutical communities of interpretation, such as those of Midrash in the Rabbinic tradition. An interpretation is an imaginary projection into an indeterminable gap in the mode of Lacan's "abject petite a."  This gap can allow for the play of imagination that is the indeterminable beauty and horror of the sublime  and of the religious experience. Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

    1h 16m
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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
    35
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Failure Is Freedom
  • Show Website
    Failure Is Freedom