What Is Seen as Unseeable

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-object or of the non-object. The non-object is that which lacks objectification because of its excess, or because Saturated Phenomena produce too much intuition or affect to reduce to intentional objectification or conceptualization. The subject of jouissance is also the non-object, which is formed by the Lacanian "non-relation." Binary oppositions such as visible and invisible or darkness and light or enjoyable and unenjoyable constitute each other in a mystical co-arising from their ground in the absolute contradiction of binary opposition, which is the absolute resistance of the Lacanian Real to representation. It is the irresolvablity of this primordial double negation that produces the excess of lack inherent to jouissance.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:39

A relationship that is so primary that such process philosophers as Alfred North Whitehead thought that the relation was before anything else, so it was the sort of ground of everything else that there is. And so he formulated a philosophy as well as a mathematics based on relata rather than on the discrete objects or things that we would find in all other forms of math that require discrete units of measurement in order to make distinctions of number or quantity. But for Whitehead, and for many other process thinkers throughout history, although not directly often labeled as process, but you know, I think the Heraclitean notion of a flow uh without any discrete uh identity or units uh or quantifiable ways of identifying it, so that the flow is the sort of thing that resists uh any absolute or ultimate uh identity uh because it is always a relation of difference. So that the point or the general point of process is that um everything, the world is uh only flow. There are no identities thought of as a substantial, essential um way of um relating to itself or what we might call an uh a thing as an in itself, uh a substantial thing that uh is what it is uh apart from its relation to anything exterior. But sort of where we wound up last time was saying that there is a fundamental relation between the thing in itself and its exterior other, or just its outside, or what you could think of as the relation between the binary opposition between self and other, that is how the self is given to itself uh through or by the other. Uh, an ultimate sort of example for a languaged being, especially human being, Dasein, thrown there into language. And as we know from Heidegger, language is the house of being, this particular kind of being, Dasein. And Dasein uses language to construct itself, but not from within, because language comes from outside of itself. It is the jurisdiction and Lacanian terminology of the big other or Heideggerian terminology, the they. Uh, part of Dasein's thrownness, part of its facticity that is thrown into is a particular language that is situated in a particular uh culture, a particular society, a particular place in time, which as we saw last time, uh it is uh space-time uh that at the most basic level uh allows language to function because uh language is presenting something that is separated from what it is signifying, from what it is presencing uh over space-time. The signifier uh makes present what is absence, so it is sort of a positivization of a negativity or an absence. Uh, the most famous example probably is Sartre's uh going to the cafe where he always visits with his friends, and the chair of one of his friends is empty, and the chair uh acts as a kind of signifier here, which presences the absence of his friend. So it positivizes this negativity uh of the lack of his friend, and this is one more way of thinking of the excess and lack relationship, how uh lack is always coincidental with excess. So that the lack of his friend's presence uh is um the excess of his absence, which is positivized, positivized and experienced effectively uh as oppressive, as sort of like loss is not just like an absence, it is an actual like uh physical uh affective positivized lack that is intuited uh by Sartre when he sees uh the empty chair where his uh friend usually sits. For Jean-Luc Marion, this uh excess uh is called saturation in the saturated phenomenon, this too much aboutness is a way to think about it, too much givenness uh of the situation or uh irreducible affects uh that are intuitive, intuited, but cannot be reduced to intentionality, which would be this conscious conceptualization or objectification or identification of uh what it whatever it is, uh, there is too much to symbolize. And so this is one way to think of the real not as a pure negativity, uh, but the real as positivized in the sense that in this sense the real, that which resists symbolization absolutely uh is too much for symbolization. So it is not uh a lack of symbolization, um, which it is, but it is not just this considered in this negative way, but it is a positivized negativity. The lack is positivized into this too much to symbolize, so that the real is no longer just this negative uh failure, this formal failure uh within the symbolic, which it which it is, it's there's no denying that, but at the same time, this is what you know I mean by the term coincidental, uh at the same time you have um an excess, uh, you have too much uh to symbolize. A lack is always too much to symbolize. This is what object small a is it is a positive a positivization, so it's a virtual object that is uh put in the position uh of the imaginary, and it's so it's imagined uh as that which makes whole and complete, or put in the register of the imaginary rather. So the real may be somehow in itself a pure negativity, uh, in that it is just a failure uh to symbolize uh that is structurally inherent uh to the symbolic itself, but we positivize negativity all the time. When we think of uh lack or not having or open space uh or you know space-time uh as this um lack of determinate being or like the space in between determinate being, we are positivizing a lack. We are identifying a lack, we are naming it just like we name nothing. Uh, and then when we do that, uh and this is what we must do in order to um have a world at all, have a world appear to us, we have to positivize um what is in between. So that we are not saying that you know being is all that there is, but we're doing this very basic philosophical move from at least the pre-Socratics. We are saying that being has inherent to it non-being. So these things are interpenetrating, they are also uh inner um constitutive, they one constitutes the other in this uh sort of mystical co-orising, and you know, that we can't really discern a beginning of unless we just say uncaused cause, or we just say turtles all the way down, or whatever. This relationship that necessarily always had to be uh for there to be anything, so that we can't even imagine uh into the ultimate void uh beyond this relationship because even our imagining into uh the void is only possible because there is the void plus something or the something and nothing dialectic. We don't have any possibility to even imagine uh what the absolute nothing is uh before the dialectic of something and nothing. This is the famous inability to even uh imagine uh our death. Or, you know, we can imagine the dying part, but um uh we can't imagine you know what happens after after that, although there's all kinds of projections of afterlife and stuff like that. Those are all projections from the dialectic of something and nothing into some kind of absolute nothing. This is sort of like the stoical like idea that, like, hey, you know, no need to worry about your death, you won't be there, uh, nor anywhere, and so uh there won't be any, you know, awareness of or there won't be any experience of uh death. This uh sort of thing that people used to do, uh maybe they still do, uh to calm people down uh uh when they're all wound up about their death, which I don't think ever calmed anybody down, where they say, Well, uh, what was it like uh before you were born? And then of course nobody knows, and so they can't even project it, and they say, Well, yeah, that's exactly how it's gonna be after you die. And so clearly there won't be any anxiety or worry uh in whatever that state is, uh, because there isn't anything, there isn't any you, there isn't any self for that uh desire or worry to stick to or emerge from. But as long as we uh are here now, uh we are in the dialectic of something and nothing and being and non-being, and we have some conscious awareness of it that is given to us by the relation of self uh to other. Or uh considered differently, but it's the same thing, the relation of the inside to the outside, uh, which could be thought of as the relationship of the intention, which is your uh subjective screen upon which the world appears, the objects, uh the identifiable objects of the world appear, but also the projection uh onto that screen. So it's the screen and the projection uh of the world that uh appears to you. But how does this world appear? It it appears through something that was given uh by the outside, by in Lacanian terminology, again, the big other, which is the symbolic. So for en languaged being, uh we are um kind of in this uh prison uh, if you will, of the symbolic, so that we are given the world by the uh symbolization of the world, by the signification of the world, by the signifiers uh of the big other. So that the world that is our own is not given to us by ourselves, but is given to us by our others. So our interiority, our inside is given to us uh by what is outside of us. But there is uh the failure that is inherent, just like non-being is inherent to the being that it births, the symbolic also has a failure that is inherent to it and that is also the ground of it, so that the real not only is the ultimate resistance to symbolization, it is the ultimate ground of symbolization as well. Uh again, it is only in this relation. Uh again, this is why relation is primary in process and primary in structuralism, so that this is why structuralism and process are natural partners. Uh the only problem uh with structuralism and why there is this term post-structuralism uh is because structuralism seemed uh to be static because it was this thing, you know, that was given uh as uh the identification of the world, how somebody identifies it, so that there didn't seem to be any possibility of movement in that. And so then post-structuralism is basically the introduction of what was already in or already inherent to structuralism, which was the real. So that the real is the movement uh of structure, uh, because it is the failure of structure, and so that really the productivity uh of uh the um structure uh is given to it by its failure. That's what's basically being said here. Uh and that's reflected in being, because being is given to uh itself by its, I call it its failure metaphorically, just to kind of line these things up in some sort of parallel, so that the failure of being uh is its non-being, so that always within us, if we just think about this very um life-centered in a life-centered kind of way, always within us is our death. Um, that is uh inherent, uh, that is the ground from which uh you know we are bore birthed or born, and that is uh the ground to which you know we return, and it is what sustains our life, uh our death is uh during uh our entire uh time as a conscious uh being. So that in our self, our interiority, our intention, um is always in this extimate relation, again, to use that Lacanian term, uh with the outside. And that's again what object small A is. It's always projecting uh into the voice of sp void of space-time. And so that this openness of space-time, this indeterminacy, uh is kind of how uh indeterminate uh openness is related to determinate being. So again, if you just have uh you know being already determined, uh then that you have a Einsteinian block universe where everything is already fixed uh and you're just on one part of that determined universe. Being is already finished, being is already completed, uh it's just sort of like rolled out uh over time, and then you just gotta like, you know, get through the movie or whatever. But the movement uh that so-called post-structuralism brings in, and again, I just think it's structuralism, like inherent to structuralism is uh its end, is its failure, um, so that you have just a further working out of structuralism and what gets called post-structuralism, so that even in Derrida's like famous rejection of the structuralist Claude Levy-Strauss, one of his teachers, there really isn't so much of rejection. I think frankly, some of that is uh Derrida uh and his sort of like killing the father uh sort of a thing, but uh and also other people sort of interpreting that into the situation, although you know Derrida did announce a break and you know make this sort of clear like distinction between himself and structuralism. He never called himself a post-structuralist or a postmodernist or anything like that. But what is inherent to his uh rejection of what he called l the logocentrism of like uh you know, structuralism in which uh the structure of the symbolic names in an A for A kind of way are presences in some sort of perfect way, uh, the absence uh that it refers to, so that the referent is for all intents and purposes uh contained within the its reference or within its uh signification. That was already within saucerian um notions of uh difference. Uh and so it's just a kind of like a working out of you know uh saucer's idea of what a signifier was. Uh it was just this thing that sort of presented um something that was absent, but of course in an incomplete way. Like Saussier certainly did not, you know, claim and was very clear that the signifier is just this arbitrary thing that stands in for in this uh conceptual virtual language space, uh the thing uh in itself or whatever. You might think of Derrida's contribution to that as saying, like, there just is no thing in itself, so that even if that thing is directly present, um there is still like this mediation of its presence through a symbolic system of difference or difference. And so that even when it is directly present, um it is still not uh unmediated, and that if it were unmediated, uh it wouldn't be present to me because it is the mediation that allows it to be present. This is Derrida's idea that you know the text or textuality is probably a better way to put it, uh, is before you know speech or before you know the direct presence of the speaker or whatever. Even when the speaker is directly present, I only have access to the presence and the words and the meanings uh of the speaker uh via the textuality uh of uh language that not only uh is how I speak and how I write, but is also how I uh experience the world uh phenomenologically. So the uh phenomenon of the speaker uh and the speaker uh's presence to me uh is mediated uh through uh my language, through uh the concepts and the signifiers given uh therein. And that's you know my only access to uh the speaker. So here again we have this uh a relation between inside and outside uh because my inside, my experience, my intentionality, my conscious awareness, uh my subjective screen, both the projection uh onto that screen and the screen itself are given to me by this textuality or by the text of the language uh that was given to me uh through my um enculturation, uh through my parents or whatever. Uh and whatever was before that, I mean, I guess we could project a little bit imaginally into that so that you know when Lacan talks about, you know, whatever there is before the baby, you know, swallows its first signifier, and the signifier becomes integrated into its body and into its intentionality. So this would mean like somehow before objects, um, but the baby is actually uh mediating everything through a kind of objectification of its sensorial systems uh through touch, and so that what is touch? It is this system of unification of difference. Again, the idea that the baby before it is born doesn't have an experience of temperature, but then once it's born, because it is a different temperature outside the womb than it is inside the womb, the sensorial system, the skin sensors for temperature, uh unify this difference, and then suddenly there is this um experience of temperature. So you would have these before that is before, like, you know, signification, but it's not before uh binary uh relationality, uh a relationality of difference, which is just you know kind of what the uh symbolic, what the signifier does is it relates uh a kind of difference uh at the most basic level, the difference of presence and absence or self and other or interior and exterior via the signifier. So the signifier is a positivized negativity. You see this sort of like constant way of thinking about unification. Uh it is this um presence of an absence and all this kind of things. That's what you know the signifier does, it presences an absence. And in a human being, in a very kind of unique way, it even can presence something that is not merely absent in the sense that it's just some distance away, but human beings have this subjunctive hypothetical register. Uh, it can presence something that uh a possibility uh that is not even you know. know physically possible like perhaps you might think of a uh a unicorn uh that like shoots rainbows out of its eyeballs or something like that certainly something that can be imagined um but something that probably I mean as far as we know I mean it's possible like in a video game but doesn't seem to be you know possible in like sort of the physical space uh of the universe or maybe that's sort of a misleading example and it's got too many problems but the subjunctive case in general this is uh would could should all that kind of verbal speculation uh about what um you know isn't uh but is hypothetical uh that kind of uh subjunctive uh relationality um imagining into uh a void that sort of a thing uh is only possible as far as we know uh through you know the human symbolic which is what uh objectification in the imaginary register is the objectification that Lacan called uh the object small a so that we have here uh an object that is a projection a subjunctive uh projection but that uh is always uh partial or incomplete even though it appears as if it were whole it's because it's like a positivized negativity in the sense that it's positivizing uh a sense of lack or something that is at least perceived as lacking um as that which would make that lack uh whole and complete in the imaginary register which is also why uh in some sense the symposium Plato's symposium is the ultimate discourse uh about um object small a or about the positivization uh of lack one of the models uh of many but one of the that is proposed is like this mythological story of like having been split in half so that human beings used to have like uh eight limbs and two heads and then you know they were split into male and female and that love is this act of completion in which uh the hats the halves that were you know at one time split uh are reunited and put back together and then you get this sort of completion model and then the other model that's proposed uh by um Plato but I think he attributes it to uh I forget the name of the interlock now she's not even at the symposium but uh he heard it from somebody who I think was like some kind of a female prophetess figure or something. Anyways uh in her idea you know love is like this partial completion that never completes and so that there's this asymptotic uh approach towards completion that like actually lifts you higher and this is what most people remember of the symposium is that love progresses through like it's more basic level like uh Eros which is where we get our word erotic to like filial so that that's where we get our word for like you know uh bl brotherly love like as in Philadelphia so it's like this less um you know uh sexual or lustful kind of like uh transactional love and and more of a um sense of like uh the other's well-being as you know being primary uh to the point where you get um to a more uh perfect love in agape so that there's this perpetual purification of love so that you are being lifted up by love asymptotically never to actually arrive. And so this is uh Lacan's uh sort of notion of love not as a a complete having um so this is his distinction between having and being so it's not something to be possessed uh another famous Lacanian quote uh love is giving what you don't have to somebody you don't want it there's many ways to read that but one is to understand that there's no having uh you don't have what you're giving uh in love and the person who's taking it isn't taking it because it's transactional and it's something that they wanted in that sort of a crass sense but it's unconditional in the sense that uh it is something that can't be had um so it can't be possessed and it can't be given it can't be transacted um it's like purified of its transactionality it's it's purified of its instrumentality if it's instrument it's purified of its instrumentalization love can't be love if it is for something uh if it is given um transactionally in order to receive um and all gifts are transactional and so we're always kind of in this Deridian sense uh asymptotically approaching the um ultimate gift which is unconditionally love that's what what is that given without uh any sort of like possibility of receiving but the point of an asymptote is you know mathematically these things are always approaching uh but never arriving so they're getting constantly closer um but never um actually completing uh because uh at that point there would be you know no more movement there would be uh a finality uh that would be an end but whatever appears phenomenologically so we'll go with Jean-Luc Marion first so this is the uh self uh the phenomenological self the intention uh whatever appears uh appears uh utterly gratuitously uh for marion so there is this sort of unconditioned love from which whatever uh objects uh of the world appear uh including just the world itself um whatever that might mean um but the appearance of things the uh pure appearance uh is the uh act uh of pure love uh it is grounded it it it arises from uh this unconditioned purity uh of some ultimate horizon uh which is love whatever we could say metaphorically is before being um and this is why for marion uh god's being in whatever way god uh has a being and exists uh as a being uh is actually preceded um by uh God's love. Uh so this is the very strange uh statement in Marion that um love uh is the ground of God uh and not the other way around so that um this pure gratuity uh is what precedes uh even God in as much as God is a being I mean Marion calls love this unconditioned ground the God before God uh or the or the God before being uh the God that preceded being and like this ultimate gratuity uh is uh outside of being so it is also outside of the symbolic so it is the ultimate outside it is the absolute ground the absolute nothing this unspeakable nothing that is not in relation to something because it is before the relation of uh something and nothing and so for Marion uh God's abiding presence and this is going to sound very strange uh in reality is um through the dialectic of something and nothing so that in some sense uh uh God would almost map on to the Lacanian notion of the real or I should say the God before God this unconditioned love uh or the God before being maps on to the real in a sort of interesting sense at least the um abiding presence of God uh which is actually a positivized negativity uh because it's the nothing that is the dialectic between something and nothing um that abides. It's not the nothing that um is the ultimate ground because that is uh so remote and outside in a sense it is so outside because it is this unidentifiable, unsymbolizable uh total gratuity uh which can't be symbolized uh another way in which it's something that can't be had uh it's something that can't be uh registered in the symbolic at all uh because it's not uh a part of the dialectic of something and nothing it's some ultimate uh nothing this ultimate gratuity but this ultimate gratuity survives or abides and is the sustainer uh of being um in the way in which you know many religious people think of God's abiding presence uh as this um presence that sustains uh supports and you know uh allows being to be um it survives as the you know nothing in the uh nothing and something dialectic or it is the non-being um in the uh being non-being dialectic it is the non-being uh that gives the dialectic uh of being and non-being which is you know what we are in now uh which is becoming uh this continual processual sort of being that is not static being or being in itself but is being called out of itself uh via the indeterminacy or determinate being whatever that could possibly mean called out of itself uh via uh space-time via openness uh via um the total gratuity of love which is the non-transactional and ultimately non-uh instrumental or instrumentalizable that means something that can't be you know valued in any um one-for-one uh identity sort of sense so that which is beyond all value or perhaps invaluable which is you know this becoming this dialectic of becoming so it's not really giving uh being in any pure sense because being uh can't stand alone as an in itself it is constantly being given uh through uh non-being so that it would be you know most proper to say what is given uh is the uh becoming and then any particular beings uh ontic beings such as ourselves uh can uh imitate this ultimate gratuity uh in the way we project uh our being um and in the relation of our being to other um in many different ways but in whatever way we imitate this uh or we approach this asymptotically approach this um gratuity, this total unconditionality um this is the sort of getting closer but never arriving um that we sometimes see um as a theology of already but not yet that is kind of like something that was put on some of Jesus' ministry where he talked about the kingdom of God on the one hand uh having arrived with him and you know already being there and that kind of a thing and then when he also talked about you know nobody knows when the kingdom of God is coming and there's this sort of like sense of like both kind of it's already here and it's not uh yet arrived so that we're always living in this sort of asymptotic approach to the kingdom uh but you know never quite there on the one hand but like also already there uh on the other so you know the non-being aspect is uh never quite fully uh you know collapsed back in on itself and neither is the being aspect uh quite fully collapsed back in on itself into the singularity or whatever so that there is this dialectical progression this flow uh of being called becoming so in this kind of crazy heretical way of thinking about it when um Jesus preaches that the kingdom of God is within that is to say uh non-being is within being is inherent to being so that you know you might more in a in a more orthodox way be able to say that like your being is because it is being supported uh at all times by God but in this heretical way of thinking of it we might say something like your being is because the is not uh the non-being uh from which it flows is inherent to it and and is its ground that is con is a fertile ground that is constantly overspilling itself uh and producing this excess this uh uh gratuity uh this uh becoming so this is like Plotinus's version of creation that we uh talked about before where the one is unable to contain itself it is so excessive that it's always overspilling itself and this is the dialectic or the uh binary opposition that is productive between the one and the many where uh the one cannot be a one it fails to be a one in Z-Zek's clever way of putting it so that it becomes the many. And it might be useful to think of all binary oppositions uh in this way so that absence fails to be absent to itself uh and it spills over into this positivization of absence which is presence or creation or again that's the same thing as the one into the many structurally speaking it's the same thing as the one failing to be at one with itself and becoming the many. Which is why you know to many people this failure sounds negative. So this podcast is called Failure is freedom. But we can see especially in the Hegelian dialectic the double negation that fails to be negative. I mean we know mathematically for example that there is this basic idea that tune negatives make a positive which is the basis of the Hegelian dialectic. But unlike mathematical double negation uh there is not a complete negation back into a pure positivity. There's always an excess that could be you know considered negatively as lack but could also be considered as a positivity a positive overflow or excess from an unresolved dialectic which is like why when people talk about a synthesis between like two opposing terms in Hegel that's not exactly right and it's not a term used by Hegel. It was used by people who didn't like really understand Hegel later on but this third becoming this active motion flow kind of position is this productive contradiction of the binary opposition. So it's just a holding together of two opposite or opposing terms and in this bringing near in a Deleuze in this bringing these two I guess you could say polar opposites together you get a productive contradiction which gets us back to one more time how the self is given to itself by the other so no otherness no self. And of course the opposite is true as well if there is only otherness then there is also no self. So there is this kind of asymmetry here though so that there is always this irresolution and that's why we have this irresolvable ambiguity that is necessary for being to be a continual flow so that there is not an equality between self and other. We can never reduce the relation to self and other to an A for a identity. We don't say self is other, we say self as other so that we are being true to the metaphorical analogical sense in which the self is given to itself by the other. We know or at least we think we know that the otherness has the upper hand ultimately so it's in the lead in other words it's the thing that's always pulling self out of itself pulling internality into externality and we can kind of see this in the second law of thermodynamics and entropy we think ultimately otherness non-being this term that is both the ground and the sustainer of the other will eventually collapse not back into itself but will spread out so far from itself there will be too much distantiation in some ultimate like massive frame of time to where all the particles of the universe because of the increase of space-time the uh cosmological uh constant that is now thought of as dark energy uh is ultimately larger you know we could just see this constant acceleration uh of the uh space time of the universe uh spreading out uh of the universe uh that is ultimately greater than uh matter's gravitational attraction or gravitational pull so the force that's pulling it apart uh is greater than uh the force that is trying to you know keep it together but like in the in-between time which we are now uh there's uh all kinds of interesting uh clumpy dispersion of entropy that kind of like allows for interesting uh formations but um on the physical level uh any of these formations planets stars black holes whatever uh in large scale time of things are temporary they're not things in themselves uh in the sense that they are um substantial eternal forms they are forms that are going to you know come into being for a time and then dissipate uh over time and the symbolic sort of imitates this in an interesting way so that we have uh the symbolic's relation to the real which is that in whatever way we signify uh whatever we signify or whatever we identify or give a name to um eventually um that naming that um objectification on the phenomenological register those um things will eventually uh fall apart they will eventually be resisted in total uh by the real the real's victory will be ultimate over uh any um attempt to name in any final way in any attempt to like say what something you know actually is or whatever. In the sciences this would be to uh believe in some ultimate natural kind so that this is uh the idea that you know the universe is discrete in a way that can't be pulled apart uh because these eternal forms exist outside of space-time so that something like gender isn't just a temporary uh identification or a way of separating uh it is the eternal feminine and the eternal masculine these sorts of things that exist uh whether or not there are any actual uh males or females uh uh in uh in space-time the uh feminine and masculine forms archetypes will be there uh after the heat death of the universe I don't know where exactly or what they'll be doing uh but they are uh just like you know number for some mathematicians uh in the uh realm of eternal forms uh you know again you know they don't claim to to be any locatable place or anything like that just like but it is you know something that uh is both in space-time like right now instantiated perhaps uh in matter but something that is also uh outside of space-time um in some elsewhere uh that can't be uh directly accessed uh again because it's not in this dialectic between matter uh and uh energy where you know these things can be uh instantiated or expressed uh physically but whatever this realm might be if it is uh it would not be you know totally open potential uh it would not be you know without binary oppositions uh it would already have uh those binary oppositions constructed there so it would be something like you know a mind of God even Whitehead has A notion of uh God's mind as a collection of what he calls eternal objects, which include like categorical things like color and quality and these kinds of things that you would need to construct uh for Whitehead, any possible universe. So the things that you could discover through modal logic, uh what would be, you know, the absolute uh ground uh of a universe would have to exist uh somewhere before, during, and after the universe. So again, we wouldn't be talking now about pure potential because pure potential would just be some kind of absolute nothing. Uh I like Deleuze's term for it, which is difference uh in itself. Um but again, as I mentioned in the last one, difference in itself uh and being in itself, Hegel's notion, uh, would kind of collapse into the same thing uh because they would be both be some kind of absolute nothing. Uh but the idea here is not that there is an absolute ground of unconditioned uh potential uh that you know Marion would call love, but that uh the ground uh includes uh some sort of mindedness, some sort of nos uh in Plato's or the Greek way of thinking out of it, some sort of design, or at least the elements that would allow for there to be uh some kind of a design. And so that would not be the singularity uh of you know being all in one place, uh all compacted into each other, so there's no relationality. If you have forms, then you have relations. You have categories and categories, uh as we saw with uh Kant's categories, they're always relations. Uh quantities are the relations between the one and the many. Uh quality is the relation between the whole and the part. Modality is the relation between necessary and contingent. Relationality is the relation between the discrete and the continuous. And in some sense, they all contain all different kinds of relationality. They are all relations, however, uh light and dark, presence and absence, being and non-being, self and other, inside and outside, foreground and background, uh substance versus relationality itself, uh, the numeral versus the phenomenal, the subjective versus the objective, the uh intentional versus the accidental, which could also be back to the substance versus relation, which could be substance versus uh the accident, or substance versus its attributes, or again, that's also uh holes to parts. You can really start to see how these all flow one into each other uh through the categories of quantity, quality, modality, uh, and relationality. And then you've got you know ambiguity, disambig disambiguation, which is really just this sort of like individuation of individuating an object either through differentiation or identification. Uh then you've got, you know, the logical versus the uh intuitive that you see in Marion's saturated phenomenon, or the intentional versus the intuitive rather is what you see in Marion. Uh symmetrical versus asymmetrical, teleological uh versus the purposelessness or purposeless, um necessary contingent, visible, invisible, kin, alien, that's the inside, outside, the self, and other thing, uh familiarity versus foreign, just another kind of extrapolation of that, um, and the intentional, uh, the unintentional, the playful, the serious, the discreet, the continuous, belief, disbelief. So one always uh implies the other. So you are if you have a formal realm, uh, in whatever sense it's transcendent and eternal, um, it's already relational. It's so it's not it's it's transcendent, but it's not beyond uh relationality because any possible form uh needs this sort of like um relationality to construct the form. So what is this ultimate um realm, uh this ultimate productive space from which everything comes? Uh is it the nothing uh of total non-relationality, whether that be the singularity uh of you know no relation, or whether that be the total difference of difference in itself? Um or on the other hand, is it uh an eternal realm where there are some basic building blocks uh in the mind of God, so to speak, uh that from which like everything that is uh can come. So uh does God determine nature like from some sort of absolute nothing, ex nihilo? Or uh is God determined by his own mind, if we're gonna use that as the metaphor? So these forms are necessary in sort of the modal logic way in which things are necessary, necessary for any possible universe, uh, these things are necessary even for God, so that God is beholden uh to create uh in this kind of a way, so that whatever kinds, whatever natural kinds you might find, uh, whatever forms uh that are kind of already there, ready to be discovered uh within the universe, or even ready uh to be uh instantiated in some kind of self, you've got a kind of like somewhat determined possibility space, which is like what any possibility space is. That's what it means to actuate a possibility space or to have an actual or accessible uh possibility ready to hand possibility, is to put uh potentiality in relation to a limit uh in this mind of God, land of eternal forms kind of uh idea. We're more thinking about the limit of some sort of natural kind, some sort of formal structure that is necessary uh for there to be anything. So that you not only have the necessity that there be categories, uh, but there are certain kinds of categories, like the Kantian categories. They're not just necessary for our perception of the universe, they're necessary uh for a universe. They are the internalization uh of the natural laws. And so we'll end there for today we're trying to discern um, you know, the nature of nothing uh or uh the nature of you know whatever there is before there was the universe, um, because we're trying to understand like, is there anything about the universe presently that is internal? Um and the example that we keep coming back to, or that I keep coming back to uh is the example of male and female because the transposition um is uh such an interesting category uh where you can have this notion of uh continual transformation so that there really is no eternal feminine or eternal masculine or whatever, um, which Whitehead certainly wouldn't have. Like his eternal uh ideas uh are way more basic than that. So they're not you know strictly platonic in that sense, where like every possible thing has its natural kind or has its form just sitting ready to be instantiated. Whiteheads are much more like really basic building blocks, like yeah, quantity, number, you know, the concept of number or quality, you know, these kinds of things, these really modality and relation, these like really basic things, um, you know, uh that you can build things uh, you know, from, but that there's nothing like uh, you know, gender that's already, you know, in the universe or whatever. Uh but in as much as gender, you know, instantiates something that would be necessary, which is the binary opposition, uh, then in that sense perhaps it's eternal and necessary, but it's really more this sort of like construction of whatever there is through this sort of relationality. That's what makes everything uh what it is. So that you could say male and female is necessary in that sense, but not our particular sense of what male and female is. It's just that there needs to be some sort of construction uh of a of gender uh via um some sort of uh you know binary opposition. And a binary opposition, again, in the Hegelian sense, that's never completed, uh, so that one doesn't subsume the other. There's always, or you could say there's intersubsumption uh in Brooke Saporin's great phrase, um, so that you know you get the yin and the yang where you have these two uh figures, and then there's the dot uh in the middle of each one of those figures of the other. So there's this internal otherness to them. So they're both co-arizing, constructing each other at the same time. But whatever we mean by eternal feminine, internal masculine is always subject to change and always uh changing because uh it's necessarily relational. Um so we will uh continue and pick up from there next time.