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 • 48 episodes

Failure Is Freedom

Latest Episodes

Season 3: Making All Things New

This season will be focussed on how we can reinterpret our inheritance to make it new through the practice of interpretation. Nothing that is given to us from the past can be received without interpretation. The practice of interpretation is ca...

May 05, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 1 • 1:09:18

Season 2 Final

We have been working through the idea that the unresolved contradiction of binary oppositions is a structural description of how the world appears to us and, perhaps, is also how it is in-itself. Every possible reduction of experience to knowab...

April 16, 2026 • Season 2 • Episode 15 • 46:33

Too Much Givenness

The Hegelian dialectical, double negation does not resolve into a synthesis. There is always a remainder of irreducible ambiguity, so that all phenomena are saturated in Jean-Luc Marion's sense that too much has been given to intuition to reduc...

March 31, 2026 • Season 2 • Episode 14 • 1:00:15

What Is Seen as Unseeable

Lacanian excessive enjoyment, or "jouissance," is enjoying what is unenjoyable. The excessive part of excessive enjoyment refers to the irreducibility of jouissace to mere enjoyment or pleasure. The ground of whatever there is...

March 27, 2026 • Season 2 • Episode 13 • 55:03

What Withdraws from Identity?

An identity is a type of interpretation. An interpretation is a type of closer. Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous obsession with the duck / rabbit figure was how he demonstrated that there was no solid ground from which to render a final judgment ab...

March 23, 2026 • Season 2 • Episode 12 • 56:13

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