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 reduce 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.

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

And how the terms of a binary opposition coarise in relation to each other. So they have a causal uh effect on each other. They cause each other. But this relation, the relation itself, is uncaused. It's something that would reflect in classical theology something like an uncaused cause or the unmoved mover. That is the first cause, the original cause that wasn't caused itself, something along these lines. Or the necessary being, you could say, upon which all other beings, plural, arise. But inasmuch as this being could be called a ground, this ground is not a being. And so this is the sort of confusing thing that we get into. So that whatever grounds the relationship between being and non-being is not itself a being, and it's not itself non-being either, because there is no relationality there. It's just a pure relation, perhaps, in a Deleuzian way of thinking about it, and a Whiteheadian way of thinking about it, or it is some kind of pure unrelated substance on the other opposite end of the extreme in any form of substance-oriented ontology, as Whitehead would put it. So this would be the one before there was the many, and then you wind up with this perennial uh confusion, questioning, um, trying to figure out basically how does the one become many? Or if you start in the opposite direction, um, as process thinkers do with the many, then how does the many ever unify and become a one? So, in other words, how are we able to have holes? How are we able to have the phenomenal objects of the world? How are we able to have uh concepts that unify uh various uh differences uh into a one? Where does identity come from? Where do essences come from? Uh do they come from a differentiation, as Deleuze would have it, which is an individuation in which difference relates itself to difference in order to differentiate a new uh temporary individual or objectification that is not uh a one that is uh solid, but one that is uh always uh breaking apart and becoming new? Or do we have you know the Platonic idea of uh whatever there is uh forming itself or conforming itself to some transcendent uh ideal that exists both before and after any instantiation uh or objectification, reification uh of any uh eminent object. My conjecture uh and my emphasis on co-arising uh of two terms, so of the co-arising uh in this instance of the one uh and the many is that they both uh give uh each other to each other uh by being different, uh by being uh in contradiction, by being in opposition to the other. Perhaps the most basic of these self-constituting uh relations uh or binary oppositions or contradictions is presence and absence. So that there is no presence without absence, and you can kind of see how the backgrounding and foregrounding of these things work. So presence is made present uh by what is not there or by what is absent, and vice versa, absence can gain a kind of positivized uh even ontology by being, you know, a reified absence. Uh, the common example would be when an absence uh is present, so that you would have something like Sartre's friend, who normally sits in a chair, uh, but that friend is absent, and his absence is actually um present uh as an even oppressive sort of uh absence, so that it's having these positive uh effects on Sartre's um positive, not it's a negative effect because it's you know depressing for Sartre to be missing his friend or whatever, but it's like a positive effect in that it has these like affects that have an actual uh effect uh on Sartre, and so that they are um they are like they become reified as like actual events uh in Sartre's emotions. You might even call them uh affective objects, um, and so somehow an absence, something that is not there, is producing these positive in the sense of that they're things that are registered in in Sartre's intention uh or intuition uh about this um absence. So if one were to take a full account uh of the aboutness of Sartre's uh intention or intuition, it would have to include something that wasn't there, which is this sort of great paradox of backgrounding and foregrounding, so that the background can be foregrounded, uh, but then the presence, uh the presence of absence uh can actually become a thing, become reified, become positivized uh in some actual presence that um the status ontologically uh becomes you know uh something to think about for sure. Uh but you know, in terms of you know it's um registering in the intention or in the intuition, um, depending how you think about those kind of non-objects, they register, they are taken note of, uh, they are um producers of affect, especially anxiety, because they have the part of them that is objective, that's the part of them that's been positivized and registered, but they also have the part of them that is non-objective, the part of them that is, you could say, in some sense, deformed, uh, the part of them that can't make a complete object, the part of them that has this excessive intuition about them, um, and that excess that cannot be brought into the intention that cannot be made uh into an object uh causes wonderment, perhaps, amazement perhaps, uh awe sometimes. Uh this is the experience of the sublime, but it can also be uh the experience of something that is uh horrific because it cannot be grasped, it cannot be fully uh completed as a concept. And it is my conjecture that all objects are this way, that any whole or anything that is taken as a one, whether it be phenomenal or conceptual, is incomplete. We just don't notice the irreducible ambiguity of any objectification, of any um completion, of any identification when we are in a certain mode of being, uh a certain type of intentionality, uh, which is associated, I guess, mostly with Heidegger's ready-to-hand. This is this kind of flow state where the objects of the world appear to me uh according to my intention, and there is no uh counterintention. I'm just kind of like using the things as they were intended, um, and then uh all of a sudden something comes along and breaks that flow, which usually means something that is counter to my intention, which you can think of as Heidegger's idea of the brokenness, is particularly like the brokenness of the tool, um, so that the world is no longer instrumentalized and I can't transact with it uh according to my intentions any longer. There will be some kind of period of trying to figure things out, how to get back to the flow state, um, how to fix uh whatever is broken, um, and then I can flow again with the world. But as long as things are not going as intended, as long as I encounter the otherness of a counterintention, which is this uh very central uh binary opposition that we've talking about between the intention of the self uh and the external otherness of a counterintention or of a other intention besides our own, then is when we encounter the irreducible ambiguity that was actually always there. We just were blind to it when we're in the flow. It is only in the present-to-hand mode, as Heidegger would put it, uh, that we see that being uh wishes to speak for itself, which means that there is something other than ourself that is speaking. And at first it may appear that there's just like frustration in this encounter, like things aren't working, things aren't going according to my flow. Uh, but what we understand uh through psychoanalysis is no, we actually do want to encounter this otherness. Um, in line with Freud's idea of the death drive, we are not just uh constituted by the uh pleasure principle. We do not just want to be in homeostatic equilibrium, we don't want to just like return ourselves to this kind of like flow uh where we are, you know, entirely um taken care of and everything is in accord uh with our need. We want to encounter something uh that is totally um different than ourselves. We want difference. We don't want our concepts to work, we want our concepts to be broken. We actually want to uh be in the presence of that failure, which is why people uh watch uh horror movies for both, yeah, the comfort of concepts uh uh that have developed in horror uh working, but also to see how those uh familiar tropes and concepts um fail and to see like what cannot be resolved by concepts. Irreducible ambiguity is a fascination for many reasons. One of them uh accords with the prediction machine version uh given to us by uh modern-day anthropology, so that when we encounter something that is irreducibly ambiguous or other than us or not according to our intention, uh we want to learn, we want to understand it so that we can become greater prediction machines and we have dopamine uh systems wired and firing anytime we encounter something that seems novel. And so there's a lot of internal affective incentive to um encounter otherness. However, there is another drive that would not be acknowledged by anybody in the modern material sciences, but which is acknowledged by Freud's death drive or uh Lacan's Jewissance, and that is that we also desire just to have something that resists our desire. We also want something that we cannot make intentional to be on our intentional screen so that if the uh intentional screen could be thought of as the aboutness, uh the aboutness of you know what we're aware of or the consciousness or whatever, we want what is to be given by this uh encounter to be something that we cannot reduce uh to something uh that is purely nameable or identifiable. So we don't want to be in homeostatic equilibrium. We actually want to be thrown out of it. This is the kind of idea of like, if you had um, you know, a rock that you know you can pick up, you know, and that's all there were, that you would want there to be a rock that you couldn't lift so that you could actually encounter something that was beyond you, something that was outside of you. You actually want to encounter the other, something other than you. Uh, in very much the way that Levinas talks about uh with ethics as the first philosophy, it's the first thing that gets you to think. As long as everything is flowing according to your intention, there's really no need to stop and think. They're just everything works. Uh, even though you have concepts for things, labels for things, as long as those concepts and labels work, um, you could say maybe that's a kind of thinking without thinking or unaware thinking. But like once those concepts, uh once those things are no longer ready to hand and you cannot uh work out what's going on, that's when thinking really begins. And so for Levi Nas, it is the encounter with something that is not us, something that is um other than we are. Uh that is when, in some sense, we're actually given ourself, because that uh in turn causes us to consider uh the self versus other binary opposition. So you can see again how this um spontaneous co-arising of a binary opposition uh is self-constituting within that relation, but it doesn't have like a ground uh that is itself uh caused. So uh they cause each other, those two terms, but they are kind of like the limit of causality because what causes the binary opposition is this very open, non-objectifiable, non-positivizable ground that is often thought of in mysticism as this super saturated darkness, or this incontinent void, and uh Samuel Beckett's great way of thinking about it, or uh for Zizek, the one that fails to be at one with itself. So the one that um is trying to unify the many, but the many are always more excessive than its ability to take it as a one. This is Meister Eckhart's Grund or the ground. Uh so this is God, but not the God that you think of as the dude on the throat, not the god as a being. This is the God beyond being, uh, in Jean-Luc Marion's way of thinking about God as the love that precedes God. So that is Marion's God beyond God, the the ground for Marion being the love that grounds all um uh other intentions or all other uh binary oppositions, so that it is simply uh the intention uh that there be, but it's not quite that simple because the intention that there be includes the intention of non-being, because it has to intend being through non-being. The co-orising uh of both uh is what is um necessary for there to be anything. So something and nothing, uh I'll take both, please. So, in a sense, it is hermeneutics that is the first philosophy, and I'm not gonna hold that position in a very serious way, but just uh I would like to forward that because uh these uh binary oppositions, uh according to you know, kind of a dialectical way of understanding them, do not resolve each other one and the other. They do not create a third thing, they do not create a third object, they do project a third non-object for sure, but they do not resolve. Uh, and so that means that there's always this irreducible ambiguity. This is the interpretation of being that makes being a creative flow. It is uh our ability to um see what is irreducibly ambiguous and project into it uh that makes being um a co-creative project. So it's not just this ground, this ground uh that is before the dialectic of being and non-being that uh somehow uh causes being and non-being, uh, but it is also um the interpretation uh of the openness of being, um, the realization of possibilities that um you know emerge uh from this ground, uh, that it's also a way of participatory creation, so that it's like creating other creators that can be in creative relation uh with otherness, uh, with their own uh intention, but their own intention is not their own because it is given by the exterior other. And I would like to mention that when we think of projection uh into the void, or when we think about uh the realization of an actual choice or an actual possibility uh or the creation of possibility, um, all these things that um you know the intentions uh of you know beings uh can participate in, it can start to sound very masculine as this projection or this penetration of possibility, or rather this penetration of the void. So it's sort of like the masculine principle is always actuating possibility and then realizing possibility uh as a sort of projection uh into this uh void, like filling in of space or something like that. But the feminine principle here then uh would be the void itself, uh if that were as simple as that. But as we know, there is just either both or neither in whatever the void is. Uh both the masculine and the feminine principle are somehow um, I don't know, or the precursors to them are somehow within the void in order for the void to uh give rise to them in the first place. So it can't really be said that the void is feminine. And in this regard, I like to think of Simone uh Wheels uh objection to Heidegger, uh, in which she thinks that all this projecting into the void is uh you know sort of like masculine and such a um covering over that you can sometimes miss the uh speaking of the void as grace. So one is this uh heroic uh responsibility of the existentialist to um face the void and to uh speak uh into it and speak with it and to uh uh actuate new possibilities from it, uh which can be uh realized um as uh human projects and human creativity in that regard. Uh Wheel uh is bothered by this a bit, not that it's like totally wrong, just that um the void needs to be listened to in its own right, so that we're not only projecting into it, so that whatever there is uh before there is anything, um, it's not really masculine nor feminine, uh, but it is the sort of like creative womb. Uh this is what this super saturated uh darkness or nothingness um or oneness or whatever means. So, what could it mean for it to speak? Uh, I think that what it means for it to speak uh is that it is um the voice of love. And so love's desire is just that there be. Um and so that whenever um we are being lured by the speech uh of the uh of the of the void or of this ground of love, um it's speaking, it's luring us to the possibilities that open up more possibilities for being, uh, that open up more otherness, that open up uh more uh inclusion, you could say, of difference. I like Brooke Saporin's idea of intersubsumption, so that there is more um desire to subsume, but also more desire to be subsumed, more ways to include and also more ways to be included, so that this is just the continual increase of difference, of otherness. So subsumption, but subsumption that does not reduce what is subsumed to the same. So this is also thought of as uh something that. Is becomes visible or becomes sensed in some kind of way in the intuition or in the intention, but is not made visible in the sense that it's reduced to the merely visible, so that the invisible becomes visible without being seen. Or you know, you just kind of play with words a little bit here. The object that is objectified without completing itself, so that it's really a non-object, but it appears as if a one. So that the relationship to hermeneutics is just that there's uh all these interpretations, and anytime you have an interpretation or make an interpretation, it's a kind of closure, uh, but it's a temporary closure. So that uh it appears as a one, but because of irreducible ambiguity, you can shift your perspective there, and then you can see that that one is not actually fully closed, and so that there is opportunity there for a different interpretation. This is not the perspectivalism that people railed against when they railed against postmodernism, because this is not, oh, everything is true, and uh all opinions are you know of equal value, and like whatever somebody says is their truth, so that it's like you can't really argue with them because it's you know a violation of you know their own sense of the world and their own way of being in the world that you just don't have access to. No, there are uh things that are just not true, uh, that are actually wrong. Uh there are things that are more or less correct, um, and we do refer to you know things that we call facts in order to help to um you know make this position. We also refer to facts though that are uh external facts, objective facts, but also we return to uh facts that are internal or perspectival facts or whatever, so that there's this constant dialectic between uh what is um internal and external, uh what is um objective and what is subjective uh in our interpretive uh circles. So, you know, the way we are together uh is the way in which you know we never can fully close, but like we can get close enough to agreement um so that we can be together in a community, so that we don't dominate over one uh or the other. So this is back to Levinas's idea of the ethical obligation to the other, but this is being reinterpreted hermeneutically, um, which is all about uh interpretation and reinterpretation. This is being um reinterpreted as an openness to other interpretations, uh, and even a desire for there to be otherness, so that there be uh other ways of being, other ways of interpreting being that are rhizomatically kind of related to each other without one uh dominating the other. So this is again this oneness that isn't uh, as we normally think of it, as an all or as a totality. Uh back to another one of Levinas's uh most famous works in which he considered the different sorts of infinities, infinity as all, uh, versus infinity as an open incompletion, a continual generative, um creative, innovative um mechanism uh or ground of uh difference. Just as often as Eckhard called God the ground of everything that is, rather than this more primitive idea as God uh as a particular being, uh, but God also as an unground or ungrund, which uh just meant that the ground that is not a ground or the groundless ground, which became a very uh widespread philosophical idea that involves this essential contradictory nature of creativity, uh, where anything that comes into being comes into being through non-being. Or rather through the relation of being to non-being, or of non-being to being, of presence to absence, of absence to presence, of something to nothing, all these kind of binary oppositions. And it is the productive irresolution of these binary oppositions uh that create the processual uh flow of becoming, which is exactly what uh Hegel and Levinas thought of as the good sort of infinity rather than the uh bad sort of infinity, which was just one damn thing or after another. The good sort of infinity is everything all at once at the same time that it is always in process, always becoming, and so it is a complete incompletion in a sense. It is never just a simple completion or a simple incompletion. It is the relation of completeness, of totality, or the oneness of a total, of an all, to multiplicity, to difference, uh, to the productivity of contradiction, of uh incompleteness, uh the relation of the ground to the unground, uh which are internal to each other just as being is internal to non-being. In whatever sense uh there is a before, if there is one, uh, of the relation of binary oppositions to each other, you could say it either way. You could say uh it is a ground, uh, in some sense it is uh all of being, all in one place, or being in itself, as Hegel would put it, uh, that substance kind of oriented way of thinking about things. Um, but then you could also say that it is the absence of substance or the absence of the oneness of essence or the absence of the oneness or the wholeness of an identity, so that it is pure difference, or the way in which Deleuze put it was difference in itself. So it is both or neither, uh, which would be becoming of something that isn't caused, um, but that is the source of all causality. The unintentional ground that is the source of all other intentions. So that you can say that it's intentional, but only in the sense that it intends that there be intentions. Uh, it is being only in the sense that it is intending for there to be uh beings, so that there must be a relationship between being and non-being. Uh, so then you have this one into the many uh of the becoming of being, uh, which is the ground that isn't a ground, uh, the unground, uh, the cause of all other causes that isn't a cause, or wasn't cause, sorry, uh itself. Something like the way in which uh a quantum field uh is thought of in modern physics. So the quantum field is just sort of the uh thing that you can't uh have any explanation beyond. At least now you can say something like people do, like, oh, there's gonna be, you know, some further explanation. But for right now, it's sort of the end of explanation because it's the end of causality. So that you might get a question show up like, well, what is a quantum field in? Uh, you know, what uh substance does it sit in, uh, or whatever. And uh, it sits in nothing, which is just a way of saying that it isn't substantial in that way. So then we get all the same ontological questions about like in what sense does it exist that you kind of get uh when you have to get away from a substance-oriented uh-oriented ontology, where you're thinking to yourself, like, if things aren't substantial uh as we used to think, if they're completely processual and relational uh relata, then we have to completely rethink what we mean by thing. We have to completely rethink what we mean by essence or substance or something that has an identity, because every identity is given by a relation uh and not by uh a substance or an essence. But it is this um relationality that allows the relation between being, the ground, the unground, the non-being, whatever that is, the void, uh, whatever that is, and the many uh beings. So whatever oneness there is uh is now in relation to the many because the many are as creative and participating in creation uh as much as the one does. So that the many um get to reify, realize presence in this relation between uh presence and absence uh that the small beings, the ontic beings, uh are also participating in. Um, and that the many, these beings, these ontic beings, uh give uh ontology to uh the isness of the ontological uh itself. Uh these relationships work back and forth. So that Simone Wheel's uh concern about projecting into the void in this kind of she doesn't use this terminology, but masculine phallic kind of way that you know makes all the determinations um from some uh position of uh knowing or position of completeness is certainly uh a concern. Uh but there is this um openness, that um openness to grace in exactly Simone Wheels' sense of it um that is kind of built into the experience uh of the many. Uh and it is the grace uh of encountering the other. So that uh when I encounter the other, uh it is I and I know I encounter the other, it is because there is something outside of me that is resisting uh my intention, that there is something that is uh speaking uh from elsewhere, there is something that is addressing me uh from outside of myself, from elsewhere, in John Luke Marion's sense uh of a religious experience, of a revelatory experience, as a invisibility that has become visible but does not reveal uh by becoming um knowable in some real easy way, at any rate, but it's known and it's unknowability is maybe another way to put that. And this uh relates to me to this inner subsumption idea that I get from uh Brooke Saporin. Um, but uh there's also a way in which thinking uh about Eckhart, you can see the same thing because there's been this uh question or confusion around. So, what does Eckhart think our relation to uh the Godhead is? Is it this total subsumption in which you know we disappear as individuals? Um, or is it a uh we somehow retain our individuality so that when we're in the beatific vision, the direct presence or whatever, we still have a kind of like externality uh that we experience across a barrier of some kind so that our self, our sense of self uh and other is somehow preserved. Uh and the actual answer, at least as far as I can tell, and I'm not an Eckhart scholar, but I have listened to Eckhart scholars debate this, and I tend to trust Bernie McGinn on this. He suggests that this goes both ways for Eckhart. That it is, just as Brooks Seporum would put it, although Bernie, Bernard McGuinn and Eckhart don't put it this way, it is a kind of inner subsumption. So that what this means is that in the beatific vision, um you have uh the individuality in some sense preserved, um, but there is also a way in which the individuality, the oneness is broken. Uh, and there's a subsumption into God, but there's also uh a subsumption of God into the individual. So you have this kind of like interpenetration, maybe would be the super masculine way to put it, but it would be the same thing as a sort of like um feminine jouissance and Lacan, which is this kind of um playful relationship uh with, in this case, knowing, so that we are both known uh by the other, uh, in this case the ultimate other uh God, but we also know God. So this uh inner subsumption in which uh we know the beatific vision and also God knows us. And I don't know what you would call God's uh knowing us, uh, but it is uh for Eckhart uh almost like God knowing us through ourselves, um, so that it's very similar to a Hegelian idea of uh the universal uh through the particular. There is nothing but binary oppositions all the way down, inner um subsuming in each other without resolving each other in these productive contradictions. And it is with this thought that we turn to our next series, which is gonna be season three, uh, on the intersubsumption uh of interpretation of hermeneutics. And so we're gonna look at some uh religious texts uh and talk about uh different ways uh in which uh interpretations uh can stand next to each other, including contradictory ones, uh, and how that reveals uh without resolving, or how that makes visible while at the same time keeping uh invisible. This is the sort of mystical knowing uh that is talked about uh throughout the mystics, especially uh in something like the cloud of unknowing, uh, so that we get deeper uh into uh a kind of knowledge by um unlearning this apophatic path that sort of like clears the way, makes a clearing uh for being to speak for itself, is one way to put it. And so I think for um Simone Weal uh this is uh resolvable uh in terms of letting uh the other speak as the other. So, in some sense, in a language that we share, um and so these are gonna be concepts uh that are a part of uh whatever particular symbolic you know we are thrown into in terms of our facticity of a particular time and location in a particular body and these kinds of things, but at the same time uh remaining um elsewhere. Uh its speech is coming from outside of us nonetheless, even though we've got to put it within our interpretive framework. Uh, we allow that thing to speak from elsewhere because we allow it to let speech uh become broken, to let speech uh fail, to let speech become contradictory. But it is in that brokenness, it is in that failure that we have this uh present-to-hand being speaking for itself uh in the failure of the symbolic, uh, so that we have this excessive kind of speech of the mystics, this hyperbolic speech of the mystics, uh, this contradictory, paradoxical speech of the mystics, which is uh saying something uh but we don't know what, because it's not a thing, it's not an objective thing that it's saying, uh, it's a non-object. It is this thing that you could think of uh as two parts, as Zizek does, which I really like, which is a one plus its failure to be one. Um and so you know you can think of this speech as being composed of words plus the failure of words, or plus what's conceptualized, but then the concept is a kind of like you know, grouping together of difference, but that highlights all the ambiguity that cannot, you know, be captured by this concept. So the concept uh highlights uh the failure. Uh uh, you could also think of it, and this will uh be the last way, and then we'll uh move on to season three, but uh uh a repetition uh Deleuze notes, you know, uh is never actually possible. So that a repetition without a concept to frame it um isn't is um you know just pure difference. Uh it's the concept that makes it appear to us uh as if it were a repetition, as if it were a unifiable object. But when we do this, uh when we nonetheless, you know uh see or group together in a repetition, take as one, uh uh make something whole, um, we are actually highlighting uh the difference uh in the same way that a backgrounding and foregrounding between a repetition and a difference uh would work according to this entire logic that we've been talking about in terms of binary oppositions. But these are binary oppositions that are not exactly like the Kantian antinomies, uh things that constitute each other in a determinate realization. Uh, every realization, every determination uh has all of this extra excessive irresolution about it. So that the ultimate uh binary opposition uh here is something like lack and uh excess. Uh they kind of spill into each other. So it's this lack of oneness, it's Zizek's idea of a one that fails to be a one that um is responsible uh causally for the other, which is the multitudinous, the the failure is the many. Um but again, the many can't just you know be pure difference or whatever, because these constitute each other. So the so the many um is going to you know need oneness uh in order for there to be things. Um so it's any possible uh oneness that can be made from the many is because of this binary opposition, this relation. If this were a totally uh determined relation, um in other words, they resolved each other, uh then there would be no becoming. Uh but uh because uh they do not resolve each other, uh they do uh give each other to each other uh in this very erotic way. The the one um opens itself in order that there be many, um, but the many also uh submits uh to um wholeness, or whenever it allows its difference uh to appear as if a one, or its difference to appear as if um a repetition. The Hegelian dialectic um doesn't resolve. So it's like a double negation that doesn't uh result in a zero. Uh it's a double negation, um, I like the way Zizek puts it, is a less than nothing. Um and so you're always starting uh from this negative position um that doesn't resolve uh in a in a in a nothing. Or at least uh in the sort of nothing that we would think of as zero, which would be being canceled out by non-being. Or the other way around, non-being cancelled out by being. What you get is both uh in relation, uh I would even say loving, creative, uh open relation with each other, in a relation of intersubsumption uh rather than in a relation of domination. So that beings uh are able to participate in creation just as the being of beings, uh the ontological concern of Heidegger uh is able to get its voice or expression uh through the many, through the beings. And so this for me uh is the joy of hermeneutics, so that things can be taken uh in many different ways, uh, but there are limits on the ways in which they can be taken, um, but it is limitless at the same time uh because it is those limits that allow for there to be any uh interpretation at all. You can think about a possibility space uh as potential, put in a relationship uh with a limit, uh then you get actualized possibility. So that there are choices uh that you have access to. Um and so that can be chosen, that can be realized. Um and so this is how uh uh the creative uh uh relation uh of being works. Uh and so um we are going to be getting into uh um uh hermeneutics and uh the hermeneutic circles of uh uh Paul Record, uh of course, uh for me, uh John Lutheran, um and Hans Gautamer, uh obviously we'll be thinking about uh uh Heidegger still. Uh but what we're gonna really focus on is um uh interpretation uh of uh scripture and we're gonna see how not just Christian scripture but uh scripture is uh uh holy uh in as much as it opens up uh room, as it as it as it actuates more possibility that can be realized. Um that's what makes uh the interpretation uh of not just text but of being itself, uh either imaginally or physically or some relation of the two, uh this is what makes uh virtuality um this uh aspect of being, the openness of being that um allows this to be a creative process of intersection. So that we obviously