Failure Is Freedom
I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.
Episodes
52 episodes
Out of Darkness: What Is Otherness?
What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hom...
Warehouse Parties: Three Decades Later
In this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old peop...
Hermeneutic Circles: Annihilation
Here is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both ...
Hermeneutic Circles: Jesus is Tested
I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to pe...
Season 3: Making All Things New
This season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is ca...
Season 2 Final
We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowab...
Too Much Givenness
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 reduc...
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...
What Withdraws from Identity?
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 ab...
Do We have Essences?
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 ar...
Kant's Intuition and the Lacan's Imaginary
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 s...
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," o...
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 w...
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, experiment...
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...
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 culmina...
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 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...
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 particular...
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-obje...
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 ...
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 mo...
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-withou...
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 ...
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...