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.
Episodes
58 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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
Detroit Warehouse
I moved back to Chicago after my undergraduate years in Southern Indiana at Indiana University, and my roommate and partner in all things philosophical Scott moved to Detroit where he discovered the Detroit warehouse party scene that I had been...
Out of Darkness: What Is Otherness?
What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hom...
Warehouse Parties: Three Decades Later
In this episode we explore the sort of house music that I and other deejays played at the warehouse parties of the 90s in Chicago. I recently mixed again with my original equipment from way back when in the 90s at a warehouse party for old peop...
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 ...
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 pe...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Do We have Essences?
Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism. In most contemporary philosophy there ar...
Kant's Intuition and the Lacan's Imaginary
Kant's use of the term "intuition" was different than how we might normally think of it. By intuition we usually mean something like having been registered affectively in the body but unanalyzed or without conceptualization. We often intuit a s...
There Is No "Before" of Binary Oppositions
There is no thing without the dialectic of some-thing and no-thing. Whatever was before the binary opposition of something and nothing, was neither something nor nothing. When this primordial non-thing, perhaps an "inconsistent multiplicity," o...
Being Finds itself in Nonbeing as Becoming
Being is birthed by nonbeing, and nonbeing is birthed by being. Whatever is "before" this simultaneous co-arising is a nothing that "proceeded" the dialectic between something and nothing, sometimes called the "absolute" nothing because it is w...
The Abyss of the Otherness Within
The Symbolic is not at one with itself, which means that knowing through representation is not only mediated through language but also shifty. However, it is the immediacy of this "shiftiness" that allows for knowing to be a dynamic, experiment...
Otherness in Phenomenology Versus Hermeneutics
Formal Phenomenology began with Edmund Husserl's attempt to discover the ground of phenomenal appearances and the relations between these appearances and the "things-in-themselves." His "Eidetic Reduction" hoped to reduce the internal intention...
What is Otherness?
The self / other relationship of being's becoming is the center piece of both phenomenology and of hermeneutics and can help explain why there was a general shift from phenomenology to hermeneutics in theory beginning with Heidegger and culmina...
A Symbolic, Imaginary Projection into the Abyss
There may be actual degrees of freedom in the register of Imaginary if it is possible to relate determinate being to the open indeterminacy of the void. Jean-Luc Marion's Saturated Phenomena relate the objective determinations of the intention ...
To Imagine in Relation to the Void
Whatever degrees of freedom we may have, they seem to be "contained" in the Imaginary. The Lacanian Imaginary makes whole and complete what is neither whole nor complete, which is the Real. But it is this "non-relation" between wholeness in the...
Our Freedom Is the Interpretation of Being
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Phenomenology is the study of how things appear. Both studies have had to concede a sort of "perspectivalism" because disclosure, or "unconcealment," is always through the "thrownness," or particular...