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PODCAST

Failure Is Freedom

https://www.martinessig.com

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/

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

60:15

Too Much Givenness

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/03/31

The Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to reduce to the phenomenal and conceptual objects of the intention. It seems that being is too excessive to be reduced to intentional phenomena and conceptualizations. No matter how many intentional percepts we may copulate with percepts, or percepts with conc...

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55:03

What Is Seen as Unseeable

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/03/27

Lacanian excessive enjoyment, or "jouissance," is enjoying what is unenjoyable. The excessive part of excessive enjoyment refers to the irreducibility of jouissace to mere enjoyment or pleasure. The ground of whatever there is, is contradiction. The contradiction of dialectical, binary opposition doesn't resolve into a third thing or object, but into a third non-object. Jean-Luc Marion wrote that the subject of "Counter-Experience" was the irresolvable ambiguity of the counter-objec...

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56:13

What Withdraws from Identity?

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/03/23

An identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment about what something was because any possible ground for a judgement was itself incomplete, which Lacan put as "There is no metalanguage," and Leotard put as "There is no meta-narrative." For Deleuze, any interpretive closure, like a phenomenological obje...

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56:37

Do We have Essences?

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/03/19

Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism. In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because the "natural stance" of our subjective experience categorizes the world, or divides it up into discreet objects...

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46:44

Kant's Intuition and the Lacan's Imaginary

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/02/18

Kant's use of the term "intuition" was different than how we might normally think of it. By intuition we usually mean something like having been registered affectively in the body but unanalyzed or without conceptualization. We often intuit a situation as an affective whole before we have analyzed it rationally. However, Kant meant the synthesis of whatever is "before" our perception of the world that makes the world appear as if given in immediacy, even though this immediacy is given by the ...

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52:58

There Is No "Before" of Binary Oppositions

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/02/03

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 prim...

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37:01

Being Finds itself in Nonbeing as Becoming

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/02/01

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 mu...

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52:42

The Abyss of the Otherness Within

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/01/23

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...

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34:06

Otherness in Phenomenology Versus Hermeneutics

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/01/15

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 ...

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48:11

What is Otherness?

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/01/12

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...

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42:21

A Symbolic, Imaginary Projection into the Abyss

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/01/09

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 cann...

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47:48

To Imagine in Relation to the Void

Failure Is Freedom ·

2026/01/04

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 migh...

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37:22

Our Freedom Is the Interpretation of Being

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/12/28

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 rem...

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33:02

The Indeterminable Hermeneutics of Irreducible Ambiguity

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/12/17

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 the...

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78:02

The Self as Another

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/12/08

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 H...

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70:11

The Semantic Advent of the Becoming of Being

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/12/03

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 persp...

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84:45

God's Love Proceeded God.

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/11/30

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 continu...

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70:41

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

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/11/26

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, espe...

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76:26

Too Much Aboutness

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/11/17

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 i...

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78:32

Mystical Vision: When the Invisible Appears

Failure Is Freedom ·

2025/11/10

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equality or an eidetic identification. It is analogy's productive failure to identify in a complete or total way that makes analogy the proper approach to the divine. But how might analogical knowing give one a direct experience of the unknowable as the myst...

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