Failure Is Freedom

I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.

https://www.martinessig.com/

Podcasting since 2025 • 58 episodes

Failure Is Freedom

Latest Episodes

Audio File of the Nigredo

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 i...

June 25, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 10 • 1:19:57

What Can CS Peirce Illuminate about Paul Ricoeur?

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 Peirc...

June 20, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 9 • 1:10:20

The Unknowable Intention: Desire Is a Demon

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 instrume...

June 14, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 8 • 39:54

Return of the Gods: the Other's Intention

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. ...

June 13, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 7 • 44:00

Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics.

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 sh...

June 12, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 6 • 1:23:22