Failure Is Freedom

Hermeneutic Circles: Annihilation

Here is another example of Hermeneutic circles in action. Annihilation, both the book and the movie, are like David Tracy's "Classics" to me because they provide an inexhaustible wealth of possible interpretations, especially because they both 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://www.buzzsprout.com/2565712 This is the link to my podcast "Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together," which explores the possibilities for hermeneutic circles more thoroughly. https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q 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 [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Hermeneutic Circles: Jesus is Tested

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to 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_s My 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_s https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Season 3: Making All Things New

This season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is 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 [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Season 2 Final

We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to 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 [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Too Much Givenness

The Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to 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 [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]