Failure Is Freedom

So Deep that It’s at an All Time Low In Chicago in the 90’s, I learned about House Music from Derrick Carter. I had first heard House Music on WBMX, Oak Park like most Chicago area youth. My mind was blown in 1987 when I heard Armando Gallop play his song “Land of Confusion” on the radio. I felt strongly that the aliens had landed and that nothing would ever be the same. I already loved Chicago’s Wax Trax “Industrial” music, which was soon to be renamed “Electric Body Music” in the 90’s for its use of dancing drum machines, synth lines, and samples, but Armando’s, and his then partner Mike Dunn’s, “Acid House” took whatever psychedelic escape into alternate sonic textures and dance rhythms I was looking for as a fourteen-year-old to a whole new level.  I grew up on the Northside, a few blocks from the Campus of Northwestern University in the “village” of Wilmette, which was still on the Chicago “grid” of numbered north-south and east-west blocks, and which was the northern-most stop of the “El,” Linden St, but which seemed like a million miles away from the home of House Music in the 80’s on the Southside. House Music had a special home in Southside Catholic school fundraiser dances for reasons that I can’t get into right now, but besides my exposure to it on WBMX, when I went to Catholic youth summer camp in Wisconsin, the Southside campers came equipped with House mixtapes and new ways of dancing. In Chicago in the 90’s, I saw Derrick Carter spinning at a club called “Belin” on the Northside. I had already been to some amazing warehouse parties where I heard House and Techno played at proper volume and on proper sound systems. I was completely obsessed with the sort of ecstatic trance that a 4 on the floor bass kick could evoke completely drug free. Electric body music, indeed. Derrick’s wise shamanism took the whole crossing the threshold of liminal realms-thing to a new level for me that evening. He mixed stuff, as a lot of Chicago Deejay's did, with a lot of disco and funk samples, which got me back in touch with the dreamy disco of my hazy younger years, which made it extra magical, extra liminal, extra ecstatic. I realized then that he was my favorite Deejay, so whenever I went to Gramophone to buy mixtapes, I only bought his from that point on.  His taste is what is reflected in this mix. I learned what was good from him. I probably heard him play each of these tracks over time on various of his mixtapes and outings and events. It has taken many years to track down these tracks, but it has gotten much easier now that I have learned how to cheat by using AI search engines rather than digging through the bins at gramophone.  Sound Stream: Motion: frolicking, 70’s, light jazz organ stutter-stepped and screwed up for the sampled-based collage crowd, perfect bliss Chris Simmonds: Rush N Soul: ohh, the rush of bursting phantasms of alien light grounded in a chugging rhythm of many subtly textured hues  Chris Simmonds: New Old Shit: Wash me in the warm oscillations of the unwinding siren. I think she’s saying, “I'm going get you,” and she’s right, of course. Mood II Swing: Ohh: funky bouncing bass, dreamy synth lines, and the capacious, rhythmic musing of elsewhere. One of my all-time favorites. This is paradise, I want to stay here. Kerri Chandler: Bar a Thym: cowbell and one of the most abundant synth lines of all time from a true master of electric sound manipulations. I want some more. DJ Spen: War Cry: Don’t go into spiritual warfare without this track, guaranteed to defeat demons. Wow! What a banger! You cannot lose when you step to this gospel. Mood II Swing: Do It Your Way: how moving your own way and crisp, crunchy cymbals whipping their tight cycles all around a doppler effect room can show you novel, bodily intensities Eddie Amor: House Music (Robosonic): from “Together Forever” by Exodus, one of the best disco samples ever! Wow, when this thing kicks in, I shiver with delight. Todd Edwards: Wishing I Was Home: wistful and whimsical for your esoteric journey home. This is a Carpenter’s record all cut up and rearranged in a very particular order that makes your body buzz with pleasure. Omar S: Gonna Luv You: This is that uncanny place that they call into being in Detroit somewhere between melancholy and deep joy when they mix up a batch of their hi-tech soul. Julius Knight: Find a Friend: Sylvester from his song “Over and Over” along with the folks at a mythic, underground disco party chanting “Find a Friend” just before the whole scene disappears into a Brigadoon-like mist.  Mark Broom: Jackson Edits: This sample has got to be illegal, but Holy Shit does it jam, and the Fast Eddie acid line that it goes out on is to die for. Le Visiteur: Let the Sunshine in: Herman Kelly’s “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat” has been sampled a lot, most notably by Run DMC, NWA, and Public Enemy, and it is put to very good use here. But when the Fifth Dimension’s love chant “Let the Sunshine in” comes ripping in, every hidden burden that you’ve been carrying will be lifted. Chez Damier: Chez B. Untitled: The sound design on this synth line is unmatched. It just slams into you in euphoric, disco waves.  Jamie 3:26:Funkanova: Ron Hardy used to play the original Jazz-Funk “Wood Brass, and Steel” version from 1977, but this incredibly numinous and gleeful, late 70s Chicago Dance Floor favorite has been sampled, so many times in House Music, and for good reason. Mark Broom: Break 97: I don’t know where these samples are from, but they are the sort of super fun, chanting and clapping, coupled with some wonderful piano house loops, that I love. These are the sounds of the lost, stomping dance floors full of ruckus weirdos that we all long for. Kenny Dope: Tribal Seagulls: I think of this as electronic, Brazilian carnival music. This is the exact carnival parade that I want to march in either when I die and can do whatever I want, or some time before that if the opportunity pops up.  Mood II Swing: Move Me: Barbra Ann Teer spoken word samples appear through Mood II Swing’s catalog but listen to this track and tell me that it doesn’t sound like Basic Channel’s “Dub Techno.” Super psychoactive stuff.  https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

If you ever wanted to know how the alchemical Nigredo sounds, here's your chance. This was mixed by hand, so beat matching isn't perfect and volume shifts may be a little rough because I have the same mixer as I used in the 90s, but hopefully it adds character, or something like that. I had to sign many incomprehensible contracts with the unseen realm to get noetic direction on track selection, so I hope that you enjoy because I'm not sure what I've unleashed on myself and the world. Play it loud on good headphones or large hardwood speakers.Nigredo Studies:  Mark Henning, Jaguar: bouncy rays of twice-negated darkness Mark Broom: Satellite (Alex Bau Repaint): take the line of flight found in the maw of these soft laser beams Luke Slater, O-Ton (Reassembled 1): breathe through this precipitous sound machine, feel your guts tremble in vertiginous ecstasy Juan Atkins, Transport (Carl Craig): the Detroit masters arrive with offerings from the unseen realm of deep, sonorous, rubbery bands as well as skull-smashing four on the floor bass drums Juan Atkins, Starlight (Mike Huckaby): wash in the dub streams of fuzzy, dynamic bliss Parallel 9, Quanan: time for a long swim in the river Styx, bathe in its electric biochemical flows  Parallel 9, Quantico: the warm rushes of nonbeing deterritorialize the determinate biology of being  Blawan, 993: open wide and let the deep resonances of the body without organs fill the air Robert Hood: Higher! (Ben Sims): Praise and worship the capacious love from which you come Terrance Parker, Alarm the Sound: (Tiefschwarz): let all with ears hear, elsewhere’s glorious groove is far-near, already but not yet, and revealed as hidden Mark Henning, Exit Acid: cast out demons so they can wonder in the fatuousness of their own dry places and your daemon will find your house cleaned and hospitable for its gratuitous musings Terrance Parker: Alarm the Sound (Dirty Channels): emergency dance meeting at my house Luigi Madonna, Unconditional Beauty: beauty is a sublime horror, as the Italians well know Truss, Beacon: The radiant, green snake speaks, so listen Randomer, Stupid Things: stupidity is the new wisdom of alchemy’s synchronistic errors, only confusion can save us from clarity https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index via material causality, and the symbol via convention, each of which contains various degrees of freedom relative to the degrees of determination of each’s Peircean “Interpretant.” Peirce formulated the relation of the sign to its signified as a triad that included what he called the “Interpretant,” which was the intermediation of semantic meaning within the semiotic relation of seeing one thing (the signified) in terms of another (the sign). The sign did not directly present the signified in an unmediated way but through a concept, which for Peirce was the Interpretant in the intention of the interpreter.  Paul Ricoeur also formulated semantic meaning in terms of the relative degrees of freedom given to the intention of the interpretant, which for Ricouer was the hermeneutic circle of interpretation itself. The signifier determines its signified incompletely, which leaves room for possible interpretations in the gap between them. The irreducible ambiguity of this gap is generative because new semantics and new concepts can be formed in the clash of interpretations within the conceptual mediation of the intention of the interpretant, which mirrors Ricoeur’s depiction of a metaphor as a clash of meanings that poetically renewed and increased being within the degrees of freedom given by the virtuality of the imagination. The more distantiated the relation between the signifier and its signified, which was the relative level of abstraction of the interpretant, the more degrees of freedom contained in the possibility space actuated by the relation. Even semantic possibility spaces that seemed mostly determined, such as the indexical relation of cause and effect, can be reopened to reinterpretation, or reimagination, through the clash of possible interpretations given by the interpretant of the metaphor. One of Ricoeur’s favorite examples is GM Hopkins’ metaphorical predication, “The mind contains mountains,” which clearly contains sublime degrees of freedom for the poetic imaginations of a community of interpreters. For Ricoeur, as for Giles Deleuze, imaginal virtuality was actual and as ontologically real as a physically actualized possibility space, just as a conceptual realization in this actual possibility space was as ontologically real as a physical realization. Finally, CS Peirce’s “Hypostatic Abstract” has many illuminating overlaps with Ricoeur’s notion of semantic realization in the poetic imagination to be covered in the next episode. https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror: Pagan horror, such as Wicker Man, The Witch, and Midsommer, are the horror of the World-for-Us because pagan techne is for the instrumentalization of the world. In Pagan religious praxis the spiritual realm is studied to transact with according to the intentions of the practitioner. From the perspective of Demonology, which is how the Christian Church viewed pagan praxis, demons were identified by name to bind them for a transactional intention. However, once summoned, demons often were able to trade their binding for the binding of the summoner. The mythological structure of the Faustian Bargain reveals this reversal in which obtaining the demon’s favor exacts a high price. The Horror of the unknowable intention of the Other explored in narrative troupes such as the “Slasher” or demonic possession is the horror of the World-In-Itself. The world of the unknowable other withdraws from us as the enigma of Being-In-Itself. This is the same enigma as that of the Being-for-Itself of Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention, but the Other’s intention withdraws from subjective intention in a sinister manner in the Horror genre because the paradox of intentional ambiguity appears as the threat of desire’s inherent unknowability. It is not just unclear what motivates Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers to kill, it is unknowable. This unknowability is the horror of the “in-itself” of desire’s eternal withdrawal from the intention. When this indeterminacy shifts from the external Other to the internalized Other of the voice from within, the question shifts from “What does the Other want from me?” to “What does the Other who speaks as me want?”. This internalization of unintentional desire is ultimately the reason why the desire of the Other is unknowable i.e.: the Other’s desire is also unknowable to himself. Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers also don’t know why they do what they do, even though the narratives of both include various versions of “Origin Stories.” Origin Stories may go some way to suggesting the Slasher’s intentions but offer no final or definitive account of the ambiguous excess of his desire. The demonic possession narrative simply conveys the unknowability of the desire of the Other to the ambiguity of the desire within. The intention of the Other withdraws from the subjective intention in the same way that the subject withdraws from itself as the subjective unconscious, which is why the unconscious is the fount of all horror. The Cosmic horror of no-intention is most associated with HP Lovecraft. The end of entropy is not the unintentional relations of chaos but the total absence of relations. Cosmic Horror such as Stephen King’s The Mist or Lovecraft’s The Color out of Space present the absence of intention as what cannot be brought into relation with the subjective intention. This is not the unknowability of intention, nor the negation of intention, but the before and beyond of both. https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?“I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.”“When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.”“God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.”“For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.”“My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.”“The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open tofurther interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.”“I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.”“Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.””“Amen.”https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated the shift from knowing being as it is in-itself, or as it is essentially, in the sense of without relation to a knower, to uncovering being as a process of relational interpretation, which might be thought of as the shift from the Husserlian "Eidetic" reduction to the Heideggerian "Hermeneutic Circle." Edmund Husserl hoped to disclose the things-in-themselves of the Kantian noumena without the observers intention, so that what appeared to us could show itself from its own intention without the interference of our projective presuppositions. However, he discovered that without the intentions of our presuppositions, nothing can be known. We know what there is through concepts, concepts that are motivated by our intention, rather than neutral observations. Martin Heidegger then showed that this conundrum, sometimes called the Observer Effect, was the result of our having been thrown into the facticity of a particular body at a particular place and time, which necessitated a particular intention. But the limitations of situated-being's facticity was also the horizon of any possible knowing because knowing is intentional, which is to say that knowing is motivated, motivated in the first place by "Dasein's" thrownness, which is the limit and horizon of its knowing, and then motivated in the second place by the uncertainty reduction of niche construction. Therefore, all knowing is motivated by care about being and not by knowing itself, or rather, knowing itself is care for being. Ontic beings care about the Ontology of the Being from which they were thrown, as well as the particularities of the situation into which they have been thrown. Ricoeur's great contribution to knowing about being was to formulation how an observer's situated intention can contributed to an open circle of other intentional situations. The differences of intentional situations require interpretations of being rather than a closed, determinate identification of being-in-itself. Ricoeur's version of the hermeneutic circle was formulated as the circle of "Self as Another," in which each self knows itself through another, or through the indeterminacy of otherness.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

I moved back to Chicago after my undergraduate years in Southern Indiana at Indiana University, and my roommate and partner in all things philosophical Scott moved to Detroit where he discovered the Detroit warehouse party scene that I had been traveling to since 1991, especially for Richie Hawtin's Packard Plant parties. I even wrote a Cheesy article about going up there for the techno scene for the student newspaper. Hopefully that thing has not been archived somewhere. I was quite proud of how "underground" I was. We left Bloomington, Indiana in 1995 with our totally useless degrees in Religious Studies and Philosophy. Scott had a moment of no return seeing DJ Bone blowing minds at an abandoned building with stolen electricity "somewhere in Detroit," and then visiting Submerge to spend what very little money he had on Underground Resistance records, which explains the heavy presence of UR on this mix. Thankfully, the first time that he went shopping, Mike Banks was there to help him spend his money right. For me, it was DJ Hyperactive showing me what to buy at a record store on the Southside of Chicago that I can't remember the name of right now, but it wasn't Gramophone, which is on the Northside and where fellow IU grad Miles Maeda worked. I first heard Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Juan Atkins, and German techno, mostly Tresor records, from Hyperactive. I once went to a party when I was an undergraduate at IU where Miles Maeda was spinning, and he was playing a lot of Detroit stuff too. I specifically remember hearing Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Aux 88 for the first time at that IU party, and this taught me that whatever beef there supposedly was between Detroit and Chicago, it wasn't very deep. In terms of Chicago house music, my hero was Derrick Carter. I would buy his mix tapes at Gramophone, and then spend the rest of my life trying to find those record. Thirty year later, I've been able to discover quite a few.1. Convextion, Miranda: This one tickles the brain into a remembrance of forgotten dimensions of the body. This was one of the first records that an anonymous member of the UR crew handed to Scott when he politely asked for some help one day at Submerge back in 96.2. Thomas Barrett, Re-synthesized: Pure UR madness. It builds and builds without a breakdown or a break of any kind. We're just marching the f— forward into the post-industrial collapse of the the lost future. Get in line or get lost.3. Psychofuk, Pyschofuk: I really don't know what this is, other than it was one of the records given to Scott at Submerge. Oddly it's on Strictly Rhythm, which is a New York label that isn't associated with this sort of synthesized psychosis. Whatever "Psychofuk" is, it is properly named because it has the correct affect that "Hi-Tek" funk should on one's nuero-biology. These esoteric esoteric sounds call the far near.4. Basic Channel, Phylps Track 11/11: Scott and I had a Hyperactive mixtape with it on it, and we use to call it the "Train Song," until Scott asked Carlos Soulffront what it was when we heard him put it on at a 90Detroit party. German Dub Techno was the perfect combination of groovy and electronic. A synthesizer manipulates and amplifies electricity. Human bodies are run on electro-chemical grooves. German Dub Tech Scientists were able to put electricity into these enchanted kinds of body grooves because of their past experiments with "Electric Body Music" and Dub Reggae. They then ran the whole tincture through an echo chamber, and this is what came out. Play it loudly on a good sound system.5. Sender Berlin, Sendersuchlauf: Trust the Germans with their electronic dub machines. They understand post industrial collapse and the weird, wonderful noises that it makes. They loop these sounds and run them through strange filters, and then they slam a four on the floor bass apocalypse down, which really ties the room together. You'll love it.6. Juan Atkins, Session 1: The Originator! Germany and Detroit have had an uncanny connection from the begging of this electronic music thing. Kraftwerk and Can got electronic noises moving towards body movement in the 70's. And then the Electrifying Mojo introduced Detroiters to both German synth music and Italio-disco in the late 70s / early 80s. Juan Atkins had no idea how his music was being regarded in Europe in the early 80s, but it was regarded and highly so. Germans have enthusiastically followed Detroit's techno output ever since. Juan took a class in high school about "Futurism," and then he bought the proper machinery to create the Future's soundtrack.7. Suburban Knight: Echolocation: What an eerie UR banger. Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay about how we can't really know what it's like to be a bat because we know the world visually rather than through echolocation. Thankfully, James Pennington was able to disclose the "what-its-like-ness" of bat-ness with this track.8. I think this track is called "One Sparkle" by Fumiya Tanaka: I remember it being on a Tresor compilation of some kind, but I can't find it right now. It sounds like a Jeff Mills track to me. The Japanese loved Detroit techno too, and I love this track's hauntological, driving vibe. There's some sort of deformed signal that might be a ship lost at sea in a storm ringing its warped, liquid-metal bell for help. But when you get there, its a massive 1950's fly saucer, and it ripples with the aquiferous music of the raging sea, as if it and the sea had always sung like that to each other, so no emergency after all, I guess.9. Luke Slater (Planetary Assault Systems), Dungeon: I have no idea why Luke Slater called this track "Dungeon," but those are not the vibes that it gives to me, unless we're talking about the famous Tesor club in Berlin that in many ways resembled a dungeon because it was in the basement of what had been a fallout shelter in East Berlin. But Slater is an Englishman from Reading who definitely spun in some pretty dank place, including Tresor. This track sounds like some very esoteric alien creed with those staccato, metallic xylophone loops. And then there are those Kraftwerk Autobahn rushes employing the doppler effect to its proper ends.10. Sender Berlin, Tragerfrequenz: Yes, twice. I'm just now realizing that I don't really know anything about Sender Berlin, except that they're German and on Tresor's record label, which is how I first heard them. This one is like an accidentally overheard, alien chant. When alien's get together for spell casting, it sounds like bouncing fuzz. 11. Octave One, Eniac: The track is named after the world's first electronic, general-purpose digital computer. The Burden Brothers of Octave One are a perfect example of Underground Resistance's combining of funk, jazz, soul, and technology. This track sounds like the sort of trains of the future that we were promised but never materialized. Detroit is famous for having a monorail that runs around its downtown, which very few people ever ride because it really doesn't go anywhere useful. It was a particularly odd sight in the 90s before any of the revitalization efforts began in the downtown area. It just continually ran around a decrepit city scape providing a haunting contrast between the Detroit of the past and its seemingly cancelled future.12. Daniel Bell: Science Fiction. This was a short but very cool phase in Daniel Bell's career in which he made bleep and boop techno. I love the 1960 Sci-fi vibes. Bell takes us to a clandestine laboratory of officially banned but secretly performed experiments with this one. Someone is trying to revivify something awful, and it's working. Just keep turning those knobs and let's see what happens.13: DHS, House of God (Surgeon remix): I heard Hyperactive playing this one a lot. I had, like most people who grew up on sample-based, electronic music, heard the original and loved it. The "Industrial" music on "Waxtrax," sometimes called "Electric Body Music," and the Italo disco that a lot of Chicago DeeJay's played around the time "House" officially became a thing, were much more influential on House than is sometimes admitted. 14. Joey Beltram, Ten Four: Some say that Joey Beltram's "Energy Flash" was the first true techno track. Who can make the final call about such arbitrary things? This track sounds like a cult of clapping monks getting swept up in the enthusiasm of their daily worship service to electrical storms. 15. Jeff Mills, Alarm: The "Wizard" is definitely one of the best to ever do it. This specific warped alarm sound used to make the warehouse dancers giddy with joy. And the shaking tiny metal things got everyone feeling as ecstatic as the Hare Krishna's jumping around with their finger cymbals. I got to see him again a few months ago. He's still the Wizard, but sounds systems aren't what they used to be.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 hominids, "Quest for Fire" and the "Clan of the Cave Bear." Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human.https://youtu.be/AXgrppWd5Vshttps://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19245677https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 people hosted by my friend "Chicago Tommy" at his company's warehouse. We painted, thanks to Tommy's homemade easels and canvases, and danced, and ate, thanks to everyone who brought a dish to share, and it was all over around 9PM because while our spirits are still youthful and in my case more free than when I was in my 20s in the 90s, we're old now.Thanks to James R for helping me to get this posted. He's been getting me acclimated to the world of modern technology for a couple of years now, and much to everyone's chagrin is the main reason that I have a website for my writing and podcasts and stuff like that.I redid the mix to be more to my liking from the party at which I was pretty rusty and didn't hold together some of the tracks as well as I would have liked. I don't have the modern mixing equipment that matches the beat for you, so I had to do it manually, as we did back in the day. This is a continuous mix, so there are no track breaks, but here is what I remember of what I mixed plus some other tracks as well:1. I love this first track so much, it's a remix of the Fleetwood Mac song "Sarah." I think it was done by this dude who calls himself "Doctor Soul." He ran it through all kinds of filters and effects to make Stevie Nicks extra dreamy, and then sped it up and gave it that "four on the floor" house beat that gives the body the universal signal to move.2. I heard this one really early in my warehouse party days because it was very popular in Chicago. It was a "French house filter track," as we used to say, by DJ. Gregory called "Sunshine People," I think the sample is from Chic. This version is from Darrio D Attis.3. This sample, which I always called "Street Life," because that's the name of the Crusaders song that it was taken from, was super popular in Chicago. I think that I first heard Derrick Carter playing the version by Cricco Castelli. Everyone used to go crazy when that organ stab started to play and loop in joyful circles. This version is from Purple Disco Machine who is this Turkish German guy, if I understand correctly.4. This song is called "Soul Power," by Full Intention. It's a good example of "Gospel house." The four on the floor beat of house music is from Gospel music. It's like when people start catching the Holy Ghost, and the organist is slamming all four bass pedals to the floor like she's banging out a bass rhythm, but there's a lot of disco elements in this song too, like the staccato string stabs and bubbly rhythm sounds. Full Intention have been around since the beginning.5. I just call this next track "chucking" because it sounds like the disco chucking on guitar that Nile Rodgers used to do. It's from another Turkish German guy who's been around forever called "Mousse T." 6. This one was called "Ron Hardy's Revenge" after a famous saying by Ron Hardy that house music was disco's revenge. This contains a now very popular sample that Ron Hardy used to play over tracks that he was spinning. It's a Disco Diva, maybe Loleatta Holloway or Evelyn King or Thelma Houston or Norma Jean Wright giving a speech about resilience in the face of adversity. I always forget who this is, and it's hard to figure out a good way to search for it, but Ron Hardy (RIP) definitely invented playing an inspirational a cappella track over a beat.7. I call this one "Jack Chicago," and I know very little about it. But it's full of fun, filter builds and horn stabs and a great sample of someone saying "jack Chicago," and "He's really the only one for me." It like a super badass, radio advertisement for Chicago house music.8. This one is super disco-y. The sample is people saying "Break down the door," I think, which sounds like some super awesome disco emergency in which you have to get into the club to "dance your ass off," as Sal Soul used to say.9. This one is Nick Holder, and it's called "Paradise." I really love the disco dance floor peaks and swells in this one. Holder takes us all to Paradise here, especially with those high pitched synth chirps that sound like the birds of paradise or angels calling us to a tropical heaven.10. I call this one "keep on trucking" because that was a popular saying in the 70s, and this track sounds like a disco trucker rolling down the highway, but then there are these awesome deep strings making it sound like that "Disco Fever" track that I remember from the double album from the movie soundtrack that my parents had, which was called something like "Journey to Disco Mountain." I used to beg my mother to play that disco mountain song because that was one disco peak I yearned to scale over and over again in 1978. Whatever else is going on in this song, it almost sounds kind of country too, like that "Devil Went Down to George" song, which I also begged my mother to play over and over again in 1978. Fiddle battles between the Oakridge Boys and the Devil were pretty epic.11. This is an Ian Pooley track, who is my favorite German producer and deejay. This one feels like a swirling, Latin rumba or something. I saw Ian once at the Detroit Movement festival a long time ago, and he seemed to raise his larger to me as I would lose my mind to each new groove that he mixed into. When Germans raise their steins to you, it means, "Respect, bro, thank you for acting like an out of control loser when play my tunes. It means a lot to me since I've come all the way here to Detroit from the far away land of the German people."12. I only know that this one has a Sister Sledge sample in it, and it might be called "Disco Tools." It's so fun, and what a great build to a tremendous disco eruption! 13. This one is Karizma, and it was a very popular gospel house track maybe a decade ago or so. The sample is from a classic gospel song, which I don't know the name of, but the lead singer and the choir are singing about having bills due and how God is going to "Work It Out." James Baldwin wrote in his classic "Go Tell It on the Mountain," that when the church music hits you, there is no question of doubt, you're just fully ensconced in belief. We all need a few moments of full on religious psychosis on a daily basis, especially when bills are due and there isn't much in the bank, because somebody's got to work that out.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 deal so strongly with the ambiguity of identity, including the ambiguity of the apparently determinate nature of our genetic inheritance. My partner Char and I have a horror podcast in which this episode first appeared that deals with ideas around the vertigo of irreducible ambiguity in the Horror genre. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184  My sister Andrea who works professionally as a scientist joins us for this episode's exploration of the slipperiness of the material reduction to "scientific facts." https://youtu.be/LVgJOT9PXxA and this is the YouTube link to the episode if you'd like a visual of us hashing out Annihilation.We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new."https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_sMy Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure. Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength.If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_shttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 called "Hermeneutics" after the Greek messenger god Hermes. Interpretation can close, but only retroactively since the present is always open to a reinterpretation of the past, which means to change one's relation to the past, and thus, change the relations of the past. Closing on a particular interpretation is to determine or objectify, but every determination or realization of possibility actuates more open possibility. AN Whitehead explained that each "Actual Occasion," which was something like a spatiotemporal slice or droplet of experience was comprised of at least three essential elements: one, an intention for novel experience or for novel affect, which was often embodied in the body of the creature or "Superject" that chose what to ingress into an Actual Occasion; two, the "physical pole," which was the concrescences or concrete forms, whether material or conceptual, that were ingressed from the past; and three, the "mental pole," or open virtuality of actualized possibility that was yet to be fully realized, including the "Eternal Ideas" localized in the Actual Occasion as the transcendent yet imminent "Mind of God." Interpretation is possible because of the incomplete determination of the mental pole. This incomplete determination allowed the Superject access to actual possibility through the process of conceptualization, which might be thought of as making what has already beed determined or concresced less determinate, or as intervening in the causal chain by determining some of the incompletely determined causality. Determination is a retroactive closure that is always reopened in the present by the mental pole's access to virtuality and the Superject's intention for novel affect, concepts, and experience.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 knowable identities or definitions cannot completely account for or make intentional all of what is given by our experience, which is the "too-much givenness" of phenomenology, to objective or whole phenomena or concepts. The classical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl attempted to eliminate the mediating concepts of perception via the "Eidetic Reduction," so that what appears might appear from its own initiative, or so that phenomena may appear in-themselves, as themselves, and from themselves, stripped of the obscuring mediation of concepts. But this return to some sort of primary naivete has proven elusive because the conceptual mediation of experience seems to be the ground of any possible experience, even though Kantian categories aren't really concepts but the internalization of the natural laws, which ground whatever appears. Raw or unmediated percepts have to be copulated with other percepts to be perceived, which means that at least the categories of relation and difference are necessary mediators of whatever appears as given. The primary relation, or category, of cause to effect is given by the relation of space-time to matter-energy according to the categories of the natural laws. But causes cannot be directly observed, as David Hume famously pointed out, and effects, especially those considered as what appears as the phenomena of the world, cannot be reduced in total to material causality as is demonstrated in the work of Jean-Luc Marion by his concept of "Saturated Phenomena." The too-much givenness of Saturated Phenomena leaves any possible reduction to physical causality or to conceptual reasons constitutively incomplete, and therefore, they produce the non-objects of "Counter-Experience," rather than the objects of the material reduction or to the phenomena of the Eidetic reduction. This incompleteness, which Marion describes as the mismatch between intuition and intention or between what is given as affective, or felt, phenomena and what can be reduced to causes, leaves room for the virtual space of the subjunctive Imaginary in which possibilities can be actuated and realized, but also in which these realizations actualize more open possibility, which Deleuze thought of as the difference given by a repetition without a concept and Meister Eckhart thought of as God's revealing by withdrawing deeper into His infinite depths. This is the infinitely open, constantly multiplying possibility that does not mean a hermeneutics of anything-goes, but rather of a dialectic with the creative processes of being's becoming other than itself in the relation of identity to difference or self to other or interior to exterior or the One to the many, and so on. Hermeneutics is then where we will turn to next in season three because it is how we participate in creation by making being eternally new.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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. 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 concepts, or concepts with concepts, we will never reduce being to either the perceivable nor to the knowable because what being is becoming isn't determined. The indeterminacy of nonbeing cracks open being's becoming in being's procession into the entropic abyss of space-time, while concurrently, the abyss speaks "on" and "in" the matter of determinate being's energetic resistance to it as the binary opposition of the impermanent, material somethings, on the one hand, and the nothing of pure potential, on the other. The One becomes many in a glorious failure to contain itself, like Beckett's "incontinent void" or Paul Valéry's "blemish on the perfection of nonbeing." Perhaps, nonbeing's victory will eventually be absolute in its ultimate, self-defeating, heat death. But until then, the void will speak in the deformations and clumpy configurations wrought in matter's inconsistent dispersal into the abyss that birthed it. For now, being's excess coincides with its lack, which is its lack of oneness, or its inability to unify all of its multiplicity under a single intention. The One that "fails to be at one with itself" is being's intimacy with the nonbeing endemic to it. Let all things be made new in the continual baptism of the dialectic of love, in which the beautiful, sublime, and horrific erotically twist around each other in Blakesque songs of experience.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 objectification or an intentional conceptualization, contained the illusion of wholeness given by the appearance of a repetition, which was the illusion of "resemblance," but there was no true repetition because resemblance was the imposition of a transcendent identity onto what was ultimately immanent difference, which for Deleuze was the differential background that underlay all reality and any possible foregrounding of an objective unification. Lacan saw the projection of the virtual object, which he called "Objet-Petit-a" in a similar manner, as a fantasy projection of wholeness onto what was essentially incomplete, disunified, and ambiguous, like Deleuze's differential background from which any temporary repetition emerged, which Deleuze called, "Difference-in-itself." Lacan's phenomenology can be said to be that of object-small-a because it was a fantasy projection that unified a multiplicity or positivized a lack of oneness as if a one, which was the oneness imagined in Lacan's register of the Imaginary. Badiou, referring to the work of Meillassoux, called this projection of oneness the "take-as-one" function of Set Theory, in which oneness is imposed by defining what belongs in the set and what doesn't. The outside definition of a set, or its externally given intention, functions as a classical substance because it defines what it contains like a substance used to contain its attributes. In Kant's phenomenology, the subjective intention "synthesizes" objective phenomena via intuitive categories, and then projects these objectifications as what appears as the objective, exterior world. This intuitive synthesis accords with the general structure of the take-as-one unification because it synthesizes a one from perceptual difference, as in Whitehead's definition of a perception or a conceptualization as at least two percepts joined together according to a rule. However, this synthesis isn't complete as Hegel showed in his dialectical double negation, which didn't resolve into a synthesis but was always left with an irresolvable remainder, which could be called "irreducible ambiguity." Irreducible ambiguity might be thought of as a contradiction that cannot be resolved into a synthesis, but a nonetheless, productive irresolution. If irreducible ambiguity is what withdraws from any interpretation, then, perhaps, it is a productive withdrawal, just as the Lacanian Real is what resists symbolic identification but is also the ground of the Symbolic, or as the void is the negation whose inability to negate itself produces whatever appears as the world.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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, which seem to reflect "real" divisions of types of things. However, these "clear" borders between types are growing confused as the intrusions of the Lacanian "Real" cause the identities of things to fail. It is hard to ignore how traditional categories no longer work, as the particularly predominate example of gender shows. In the US a nostalgic longing for the return of easily identifiable types has played no small part in the return of authoritarian populism. The desire for the "Big Other" to tell us what we are is strong here, which is the desire for repression and control that is imagined as the return of the lost Eden of a once great America.But this Eden in which "men were men and women and minorities knew there place," like all other fantasy, lost objects never really was. There has never been a time when the categories of the "Big Other" didn't encounter their failure in the Real. It is just that the repression of this failure has been more or less successful, and with the distance of time, it becomes easier to imagine through the lens of nostalgia that there was a halcyon time when the world knew what it was. But what about the a priori categories that Kant taught were necessary to have even our most basic perceptions? Do those internalizations of the natural laws also fail? Harmon shows that something is lost in what he calls the "overmining" of Structuralism and Process Philosophy, which is for him the withdrawal of the "thing-in-itself" from the relations of symbolic difference so essential for language users to make a world through the copulation of the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic with percepts. The thing-in-itself also famously withdrew from the pre-conceptual, or intuitive, perceptions of Kant's phenomenal representation in the subjective intention, which he saw as the synthesis of the things that appear to us from the intuitive relations of the categories and the noumenal things-in-themselves. This "withdrawal" at the level of the natural laws had been the focus of much of Zizek's recent work on Quantum indeterminacy in which the causal categories of perception fail to determine the things-in-themselves. This failure at the level of the internalized natural laws is mostly due to the unavoidability of the most basic category of cause and effect and its basis in space-time for perception, which is sometimes described as the "observer effect." Quantum fields do not seem to be determined by causes in the same way that the macro level of reality is, which means that they do not seem to be in space-time in the same way either. How can observers totally dependent on causality to either perceive or conceive, know anything about a thing-in-itself that withdraws beyond the a priori categories of quantity, quality, mode, and relation? Let's get into it.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 mediation of his a priori categories. Kantian intuition and phenomenological intention in general, are the largely unconscious processes of consciousness, or of how phenomena appear as the world to us by "filtering" the "noumenal" realm, or what Kant called the "things-in-themselves," through the physical laws often lumped together under the general groupings of quantity, quality, relation, and mode. This filter is not learned but given as the "transcendental subjectivity," or evolutionary interface, that allows us to learn about and construct ourselves and the world through the binary opposition of an internal self to an external other, or the world of phenomenal objectifications. The interface of the subjective screen is the natural laws, or at least those that are relevant to our instrumental interactions with the Universe, internalized as the categories by which the world appears to us.The Lacanian Imaginary register does something similar because it is what makes the whole and complete objects of the phenomenological world that appear on our intentional screen. However, the perceptual or conceptual unity of a "natural" category according to the physical laws or of a virtual category according to the dictates of the concepts of a given Symbolic are projected into the noumenal realm in the Imaginary register, this unification covers over a fundamental lack of oneness constitutive of the "inconsistent multiplicity" of whatever is "before" this imaginary projection, which is how the fundamental binary opposition of indeterminacy, or space, and the determinations of the physical laws on matter / energy "synthesize" whatever there is, or the Universe as a whole. However, there is no complete synthesis, or determination, of being because being isn't a one, except in the imaginary "take as one" function of Set Theory. The Lacanian Real is the inconsistent multiplicity, or the deferential background, of any possible foregrounding of an objective whole in the Imaginary register. The Real exposes that both the wholes of the Kantian intuition as well as the Lacanian Imaginary and the signifiers of the Symbolic are incomplete, which means that the noumenal is the differential background that is always breaking through and warping the foregrounded phenomenal "world." Joan Copjec calls the warped phenomenal objects of the subjective intuition "object-small-a's" because they are the incomplete "wholes" that Lacan outlined as his "abject-petite-a."https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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. https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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. https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.  https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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? https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

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 mystic claims?Edmund Husserl invented the phenomenological "Epoché" to reduce prior assumptions about what appears to us on our subjective screens, so that whatever appears might appear "as" itself. Prior assumptions can block what appears from appearing as itself because they filter out what doesn't appear according to a given conceptual schema. Giles Deleuze pointed out how concepts can mold reality in such a way as to reduce difference or block it out entirely. But is it even possible to bracket our given concepts in such a way as to encounter what appears in a state of utter Naiveté? For Jean-Luc Marion when something appears from "elsewhere," it appears as invisible, or it is visible as invisible. This is not what appears as visible because of the phenomenological epoché. Reducing or eliminating prior assumptions doesn't reveal its invisible content, so that its "Primary Naiveté," in the words of Paul Ricoeur, is built into its phenomenological structure or way of appearing. It is revealed as unseeable. In order to get a grasp on this apparent contradiction, we'll have to review Marion's phenomenology, especially his great addition to the phenomenological tradition, "Saturated Phenomena." https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché"  would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through an intercourse that does not reduce the "otherness" of the "Other," which is to unify without the equivalences of identification or of objectification. One of the worst and most persistent misunderstandings about Hegel's dialectical synthesis is that it reduces the positive and the negative terms of the dialectic to a unity in which one becomes the other without remainder. No! it is a holding together of a contradiction in which the otherness of each opposing term makes a third thing appear, which is the failure of synthesis, or the productive contradiction of love. The "refractory zone (Deleuze)" of Lacanian "non-rapport" between lovers that forms when these two terms are "brought near (Deleuze)" in the dialectic is a third non-object, which is unable to become an object, or a conceptual object of knowledge, because there is too much about it to objectively unify. The failure of symbolization at the heart of the Lacanian Real's "absolute resistance" to symbolic unification is the too-much indeterminacy of being "as" a becoming to determine through the equalities of identification. Knowing what is indeterminable through the intercourse of love must be done analogically with the phenomenological "as," which is knowing the beloved "as" it shows itself. The "as" of analogy is what allows being to become in relation to knowing without being determined by that knowing, so that love is always a revelation that makes "visible the invisible in its invisibility" without reduction to what intentionally appears, as Jean-Luc Marion would have it.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself for the mystic. Love like God is not good because it is the ground of whatever there is including goodness. Love is what makes any other intention appear, so love's intention is that being be an indeterminate becoming, which is a becoming without the determination of a completely unified intention. Love is the intention that undoes itself because its nature is to be self-sacrificial, or an unintentional intention that grounds other intentions, which is what is meant by the "unconditional" or "non-transactional" nature of "Real" love. If love were determinate, it wouldn't be loving because love requires a free choice, so love as the ground of whatever there is, is a dialectical relation between the determinations of being and indeterminacy of nonbeing. But a free choice also requires the relation of the indeterminacy of pure potential to the determinations of the limits of form or structure, which is what Deleuze called, "an actual possibility." Analogy is this relation between potential and limit that determines without complete determination, which is to make present through absence, or through the failure of representation in the distortion of the intention as the failure to unify the phenomenal and the conceptual objects that appear on the subjective screen. Intentional representation gives us our first-person, subjective experience of a world by unifying whatever there is into the objects that appear to us as the world. But what happens when too much aboutness has been given for our intention to unify into phenomenological or conceptual objects, as is the case when the object of our intention is the ground of intention itself. The subject of mystical experience can only be known in its unknowability as the distortion of the intentional field that Lacan called the "Real."https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Any predication that is made of God, such as "God is a rock," both discloses and hides God. As Meister Eckhart preached, "As God reveals Himself, he hides more deeply in His mystery. The central tenet of mysticism is, as Epistolary John wrote, "God is love," and it is this predication that requires any description of God to be inadequate to its divine referent. Love must be indeterminate because coercion or compulsion isn't love. If there is such a thing as love, it is freely chosen. There must always be an irreducible remainder of indeterminate ambiguity about love so that it doesn't disappear into the equivalency of an identity. If one knows the beloved in full, then one does not love her. The mystic's desire is for the direct apprehension of God, sometimes called the "Beatific Vision." But the mystic's "direct" apprehension of God is in and through the indirection of the "Cloud of Unknowing." The mystic's experience of God is through analogy rather than the equivalencies of identity because analogy is knowing without determination, which is love. https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolutely. This resistance can be construed negatively as a lack of articulation. Or this negativity can be positivized as too much to articulate. Lacan adumbrated this disjunction as the distinction between "having" in the register of the Symbolic and the failure to have or grasp "being" in the register of the Real. When there is a disjunction between what can be represented and what is, there is a sense of the numinous and of the noetic. The numinous is the uncanny sense of the presence of something that is beyond representation in the sensual or conceptual intention, so it might be thought of as a present absence. The noetic is the uncanny sense of intuiting what can't be intended, but what is fundamentally unintentional, or beyond one's own intentions. However, bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into the realm of the noetic means that this exterior intention of the unintentional is our interior intention for what is beyond us, which he called "Jouissance" and which Freud called "Death Drive."https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic also produced an uncanny mismatch between what could be known and what resisted semiotic revelation. No signifier could contain all of the meaning of whatever it purported to disclose through language, especially the intention of the Other, which was a reflection of our own failure to represent our intention in a complete way. In the "noetic" experience one intuits something that they can't name. Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomena" were noetic because he described them as having "more than enough intuition for the intention." One could not intend all that she intuited when there was too much given for aboutness to contain. The symptom-like attempt to contain the divine by representing its intentions is the job of priests and the pious, but the awful wonder of the numinous and the noetic demand the respect of an open sort of representation design to fail.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling block not only for Catholics, but also for the Protestants who claim it as the cornerstone of their faith. Unmerited grace is defiled by the economics of "works righteousness" but also by the economy of belief. Whatever is traded for salvation, whether it be outer works or inner faith, vitiates the pure gratuity of what is supposed to be given without conditions. The purity of one's faith cannot purify one's love. Whatever is done in love, is done without expectations, except that love be made immanent, or incarnate, through the "Kenonsis" of self-emptying. The Dark Night of "subjective destitution" is characterized by one's loving willingness to empty oneself of all previous comforts, especially familiar concepts of self, of the world, and of religious piety. And sometimes the Dark Night not only requires this intentional world but also our very lives as well. To enter into the service of the Other is to enter into the Dark Night of the mystic where nothing is pure, except for whatever love brought us there. Piety doesn't purify our love, only self-sacrifice does.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even further back to its Proto-Indo-European root "Kailo," which also meant whole but also "uninjured" and even "wealthy." However, the sense in which wholeness connotes being set apart is how it came to be associated with the sacred. Making whole is a semiotic as well as a religious impulse. The most basic religious impulse is to make holy by setting a part and making different. The most basic semiotic impulse is to represent by individuating a conceptual object through the processes of semiotic differentiation. The mystic walks into the Dark Night to differentiate new concepts from the failure of the old.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a circle in the midst of the endless repetition of a desert landscape. The circle was a sort of marking of a sacred space, which was set apart by its divergence from the profanity of the same. But marking can be ambiguous as religious history has shown. What is marked is set apart, for better or for worse. Being a "chosen people" can be as much of a blessing as it is a curse. Those who have been foregrounded by the blessing may be different from those backgrounded by it, but this difference curses the blessed to a repetition of the same nonetheless. An identity is a much sought after boon, but once obtained, it reduces difference as it binds its receivers to the same practices and beliefs of the group. Individuation can either be a convergence on an identity or a differentiation of something new. The mystic walks into the Dark Night not for an identity but for the failure of identity that clears the way for something new.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneous is profane and what is heterogeneous is holy. Eliade's prime example was drawing a circle amid a homogenous landscape, which marks that space as different from the rest. But this is also the primary move in phenomenology as well. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that the most basic perception foregrounds an object against a background. Perception is the marking of difference. For example, one doesn't perceive temperature until it changes or becomes different. This way of thinking about the sacred aligns Homo Religiosus with humanity's most definitive trait of symbolization. To make holy is to make perceivable through symbolization, and then speakable through a symbolic language. Martin Heidegger called language the "house of being" because our access to being is through the symbolic differences of language, which is the connection between Eliade's Homo Religiosus and Heidegger's "Shepard of Being." https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies, practices, and systems. For example, the concept of the "dying god" and its "eternal return" seems to be found as a repeated theme through many religious and cultural traditions. However, the problem with comparison in religious studies, as Johnathan Z Smith famously pointed out is that it tends to flatten real difference. Giles Deleuze perhaps put this problem best when he described the loss of divergence's intensity or vivacity when difference's divergence is flatten in the procrustean bed of a concept acting as mold. Let's explore whether comparative religions is a doomed endeavor, or if there is perhaps some fruit that can be grasped when one experience, mythology, practice, or system is compared to another.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at Gobekli Tepe over 10,000 years ago. This comparison is a part of my effort to outline two different types of religious experiences. The first is religion as a binding to the Symbolic order, but the Second is religion as a binding to what breaks our bonds to the Symbolic by breaking the boundaries of the Symbolic, or what Jacques Lacan named "The Real." The first religious impulse is for the uncertainty reduction of prediction machines, in which the Symbolic Order is reinforced by an "automatic" repetition of the same. The second religious impulse is to transcend the Symbolic Order as it touches the Real as a "Repetition of Difference." Let's review the underground, electronic music scene in the wake of the Post Industrial Collapse of the Midwest to give ourselves a concept for how to break concepts.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface like an unconscious fantasy for millennia waiting for its uncovering and subsequent reintroduction to the modern world. When uncovered in the Mid-Eighties by Klaus Schmidt and his team, it didn't fit the categories of how human progress had been previously conceived. And it remains a wonder of liminal ideation and of the enigmatic expressions of human intentions to this day. The illegal warehouse parties that I went to in my early twenties had nothing in common with Gobekli Tepe, except, perhaps, an intention to encounter something novel and unreadable. In the post-industrial collapse of the Midwest, what was available was what was left, which were lots of abandoned industrial spaces. They were left to rot unlike the intentional manner in which Gobekli Tepe was carefully preserved. But was what we encountered in those dark, forgotten places anything like what those tribal nomads found when they descended into the various chambers at Gobekli Tepe? Join me on this highly problematic endeavor of religious comparisons.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the masses because our lives were so terrible that only the promises of a better world after you die could get us through this one. Nietzsche wrote that the Judeo-Christian tradition was a reactionary revenge narrative in which those on the bottom got to fantasized about being on top. Freud thought of religion as a kind of illusion about a perfect father figure who would make everything right. And Emile Durkheim taught that religion was to create a shared sense of identity that would hold together a society. But the mystic seeks a different sort of religious experience altogether. She seeks the wonder and awe of the transcendent or the sublime. A further analysis of the religious impulses behind Gobekli Tepe may help to clarify what we seek when we seek the liminal, uncertain, and dangerous.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because they're what I've really felt in terms of my own spiritual experiences. But the main thrust of all of my life's work has been to develop a theology of a sort of religious experience that is about encountering what cannot be known. I've found this in my life mostly in the mystical service of the unknowable Other. The most simple reason for this is that I can forget myself for a while when I serve others. I can use some of what I "know" in this service, but the outcomes always surprise me. Grace abounds when knowing is left behind. Service purifies my intention for specific outcomes and opens me to mystery. This has been the meaning of my 31 year career as a public school teacher in situations of "high need." I've always been in over my head in the sense of not knowing what to do but having to do something anyways. Gobekli Tepe was a place where our ancestors voluntarily went to be with the liminal and celebrate the tricky company of others. This is my first attempt to differentiate an impulse for the holy that isn't about ordering the Universe according to our own intentions.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.cohttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as being directly knowing itself without mediate, enlanguaged beings, such as ourselves, have mostly lost access to it, which is why Jacques Lacan thought of our entrance into the Symbolic as infants rather grimly as "Symbolic Castration." Being that has been alienated from itself by language will always experience a gap between the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan this is a lack inherent to the Symbolic itself. It simply isn't capable of representing all of being to itself. But in a further bizarre twist currently being studied by Slavoi Zizek at least part of the failure of the Symbolic to know all is inherent to being itself. The relation of the Symbolic to being reflects being's own incompletion. This incompletion within being can't be completely represented because it hasn't been determined yet. This is the direct challenge to Einstein's Block Universe that was leveled against it by the Copenhagen Interpretation of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and by Henri Bergson in his famous Debate with the stubborn genius. We do not live in a finished Universe, part of what is, has not yet become.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.cohttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Deleuze and Lacan are incompatible, but I use them both to imagine how renewal occurs. Deleuze's "Desiring-Production" makes the world new by the purely positive desire for difference. However, Lacan's notion of ingressing difference into the world is through the negativity of the Real. The Real's absolute resistance to symbolization is the irreducible gap between "being" in the register of the Real and "having" in the register of the Symbolic. The failure that the Real causes in the Symbolic allows for the constant movement of the Symbolic into new concepts from the failure of old ones. Lacan's notion of renewal is through the lack that the Real forms in the Symbolic while Deleuze's notion of concept creation is from the excess of desire for new flows of intensities that is intrinsic to being's foundational "Difference-for-itself." Let's see if I can explain why I think that Deleuze's excess and Lacan's lack form the contradiction that makes the world always new.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coMixed and reverberated tracks may include: MMMD - Egoism, Biosphere - Houses, Basic Channel - Radiance, Heathered Pearls - Beach Shelterhttps://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

June Tyson chanting "Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world, it's not my idea of things as they are," is a sacred mantra, which functions as a divine "no" hovering above the futuristic vibrations of Sa Ra's Arkestra. This divine "no" opened a D&G style "line of flight" for new flows of melodic intensities upon which astral projections were streamed and communique with other worlds were reopened. When James Baldwin wrote about getting caught up with the music of the Black Church as a child in Go Tell It on the Mountain, he described his entrance into a different reality that had been closed until the Holy Spirit came riding into the congregation on the hallowed sounds of the church organ, the drums, and the voices of a people set apart. Let's explore how renewal works by considering the root of the word "radical," which reveals the hidden route back to our roots. But let's keep ourselves from the mistake of a reactionary nostalgia that fantasies a lost object that never existed, which is a weaponized nostalgia decrying the decadence of the modern age.Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.coElements of Ghost Dubs - Chemical, Pole - Berlin, MMMD - Egoismo, Biosphere - Houses on the Hill, and Basic Channel - Radiance decelerated and run through the mystical midnight echo chamber.https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.