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Failure Is FreedomThere Is No "Before" of Binary OppositionsThere 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 o...
2026-02-0352 minFailure Is FreedomBeing Finds itself in Nonbeing as BecomingBeing 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...
2026-02-0137 minFailure Is FreedomThe Abyss of the Otherness WithinThe 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...
2026-01-2352 minFailure Is FreedomOtherness in Phenomenology Versus HermeneuticsFormal 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...
2026-01-1534 minFailure Is FreedomWhat is Otherness?The self / other relationship of being's becoming is the center piece of both phenomenology and of hermeneutics and can help explain why there was a general shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics in theory beginning with Heidegger and 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...
2026-01-1248 minFailure Is FreedomA Symbolic, Imaginary Projection into the AbyssThere 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...
2026-01-0942 minFailure Is FreedomTo Imagine in Relation to the VoidWhatever 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...
2026-01-0447 minFailure Is FreedomOur Freedom Is the Interpretation of BeingHermeneutics 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...
2025-12-2837 minFailure Is FreedomThe Indeterminable Hermeneutics of Irreducible AmbiguityJean-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...
2025-12-1733 minFailure Is FreedomThe Self as AnotherThe 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...
2025-12-081h 18Failure Is FreedomThe Semantic Advent of the Becoming of BeingIt 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"...
2025-12-041h 10Failure Is FreedomGod's Love Proceeded God.The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is the self-emptying of oneness, so that through this self-differentiation and self-distantiation there might be the differential relation of continual becoming. Love isn't a being, but the ground of being, which is the playful relation between the finite...
2025-11-301h 24Failure Is FreedomThe Appearance of the Invisible "As" the Non-ObjectAccording 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...
2025-11-261h 10Failure Is FreedomToo Much AboutnessWhen 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...
2025-11-171h 16Failure Is FreedomMystical Vision: When the Invisible AppearsHow 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 o...
2025-11-101h 18Failure Is FreedomHow Does Love Give Itself "As" Itself?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...
2025-11-0859 minFailure Is FreedomHow Is What Is Unknowable Represented?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...
2025-11-021h 10Failure Is FreedomMysticism's Semiological Nature is AnalogyAny 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...
2025-11-011h 00Failure Is FreedomThe Numinous and the Noetic in Religious ExperienceOne 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...
2025-10-261h 00Failure Is FreedomMysterium Tremendum et FascinansRudolph 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...
2025-10-2247 minFailure Is FreedomWould You Prefer the Purity of Piety or the Debasement of Love?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...
2025-10-2241 minFailure Is FreedomWhy Does the Mystic Walk into the Dark Night? Part TwoThis 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...
2025-10-201h 01Failure Is FreedomWhy Do Mystics Walk into the Dark Night?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...
2025-10-1859 minFailure Is FreedomHow Is the Profane made Sacred?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, o...
2025-10-1355 minFailure Is FreedomThe Problem with the Perennial PhilosophyMircea 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 w...
2025-10-1047 minFailure Is FreedomHow Did the Underground, Electronic Music of 80's Conceptualize the Inconceivable?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."...
2025-10-0246 minFailure Is FreedomWere "Underground" Warehouse Parties Religious Experiences?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...
2025-10-0139 minFailure Is FreedomThe Religio-Aesthetic Impulse of Gobekli TepeThere 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...
2025-09-2152 minFailure Is FreedomRad as F**k Archeological Find! Gobekli Tepe!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...
2025-09-1640 minFailure Is FreedomIs Being Digital or Analog?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...
2025-09-1546 minFailure Is FreedomThe Radical Negativity of the Real Versus Desiring-ProductionDeleuze 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...
2025-09-0747 minFailure Is FreedomSomebody Else's Idea of Somebody Else's WorldJune 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...
2025-09-0436 minFailure Is FreedomAn Authentic Performance Rather than Performing AuthenticityWhen authenticity is defined by its opposition to performativity, it ironically becomes a performance. And as much as we in the Generation X loved irony, we preferred to enjoy ironically rather than get caught up in it ourselves. But, when you're reduced to performing your authenticity by calling out phonies and sell-outs, you become an ironic caricature of whatever authenticity you think you represent. In this episode we will explore the positions of the Lacanian "Psychotic, Neurotic, and Pervert" to see if we can uncover any authentic performances, or if we're all just stuck in the ironic performance of...
2025-09-0347 minFailure Is FreedomSh*t on Your Whole Imaginary and Symbolic Theater! Giles DeleuzeI am continuing to try to develop the concept of an "authentic performance." My generation set up a false opposition between authenticity and performance, and the resulting failure didn't lead to freedom but to a regular-ass failure. I go on a not-to-be-missed rant about this failure to get free in this episode whose target is Generation X in general, but also me specifically. The generation that was defined by its quest for authenticity, mostly just collapsed into a bunch of sell-outs calling out sell-outs until it was undeniable that our whole generation had sold-out. It was more fun when...
2025-09-0239 minFailure Is FreedomPerformative Male CompetitionsA much younger friend of mine told me about a social media phenomena called "Performative Male Competitions," which unfortunately I called "men's performative competitions" throughout the podcast. Apparently these are competitions held unbeknownst to the participants in which the most "performative" male wins. The joke of these events is that men are clandestinely filmed as they are transparently performing what they imagine would be impressive to women, such as adopting feminist positions that they don't really understand or staging "quirky" character traits such as visibly reading books that are clearly not of interest to them. This sounded exactly like...
2025-08-3045 minFailure Is FreedomLove Is Evil - Slavoj ZizekHow do I know what I like? This is the question at the center of this podcast. Do I like what I like because it's what others like, or do I like it because I like it. Another form of this central question is, is it even possible to be authentic? The language that you speak, the concepts that you think, and the desires of your heart, all came from outside of you. So, what can authenticity even mean to a self that has been determined by outside forces since before it came into being? Let's try to get...
2025-08-1741 minFailure Is FreedomThe Concept of the RemixThe sorts of collage art that we in the Generation X made at school involved cutting up magazine pictures and gluing them in bizarre configurations on a piece of paper. Sometimes they were just random, but sometimes we tried to make a statement, like when we were supposed to make collages about "what it means to be an American," as I had to do multiple times in Social Studies Class. The collage shares a lot in common with the concept of the remix. The remix allows one to put different pieces in different places to different effects as well...
2025-08-1640 minFailure Is FreedomF**k These Reactionaries!Generation Jones may have been cynical because they came of age during the 70's economic downturn and after the failure of the Hippies to produce a revolution, but they weren't reactionaries. Their most enduring musical productions, Glam Rock, Punk, Disco, and Hip Hop were testaments to openness, inclusivity, and exuberance. It was the reactionary Boomers of the Love Generation who tried to squelch their high spirits by proclaiming, "Disco Sucks!" The "Disco Demolition" at Comiskey park in Chicago witnessed the destruction of records that had little to do with Disco per se, and more to do with a barely...
2025-08-1635 minFailure Is FreedomPost Industrial, Rust Belt Collapse Sets the Stage for New Flows of IntensitiesGeneration X includes those folks born between 65 and 80. But the stage was set for the new forms of art and music that defined us in the 70's. Particularly by the "deterritorialization" of cities affected by the death of manufacturing jobs and "White Flight" to the suburbs. Punk, Disco, Hip Hop, and Electro were all birthed in the 70, and not by Generation X. It was the generation in between X and the Boomers, called "Generation Jones (54-65)," that made something beautiful and new out of the urban squalor and general failure of Hippy Culture that they inherited. The famous economic...
2025-08-1535 minFailure Is FreedomThe TB-303 Failed to Sound Like a Bass, and Was a Psychedelic Mind-Trip Because of It.Sometimes the things that don't work right, work perfectly. Artificiality used to be the measure of inauthenticity, but "synthetic" sounds became the currency of Generation X's triumphant failure to repeat the music of the past. Electronic equipment at the beginning of the 70s did not do well at replicating "real" musical instruments, and it cost a shit-ton of money, just ask Rick Wakeman. But by the early 80's there was cheap and readily available electronic equipment a plenty at the local pawn shop, "readily available" because it sounded artificial, and "real" musicians didn't want it. How did artifice become...
2025-08-1434 minFailure Is FreedomWe Wanted Authenticity!How did Generation X's obsession with authenticity turn us into a bunch of posers? The 50 year old dude who demands that a 20 year old wearing a Nirvana teeshirt name three songs is a poser, and he has been made such by his obsession with authenticity. The trick about "being-real" is that it can't be too intentional; otherwise, it looks like the "trying-too-much" of a "phony." Unfortunately, Holden Caulfield's ability to pick out phonies became essential to Generation X's definition of itself, and we suffered for it. Come with me on a journey to find out how Generation X's desire...
2025-08-1433 min