Too Much Aboutness

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.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co