Best <a href="https://www.martinessig.com">https://www.martinessig.com</a> Podcasts (2025)

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The Self as Another 1:18:02

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4d ago1:18:02

1:18:02

The connection between Jean-Luc Marion (1946-present) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), besides both being French, Catholic philosophers who each taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "indeterminable hermeneutics." Ricoeur's work at the University of Chicago preceded Marion's, and they were certainly aware of each other but neither di…

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The Semantic Advent of the Becoming of Being 1:10:11

9d ago1:10:11

1:10:11

It has long been noticed that there is a similarity between how the mind knows the world and how the physical world appears. For those in the Idealist camp this similarity is because our minds reflect the mind-like structures of reality. But modern physical sciences are based on the total rejection of any subjective interference with "objective" kn…

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God's Love Proceeded God. 1:24:45

12d ago1:24:45

1:24:45

The Epistle of John famously states that "God is Love." For Jean-Luc Marion this means that God's love came before God. Love is "God without Being." Love intends existence, but it doesn't exist in the way that things exist. Love "as" God-without-being isn't a unified intention because it is the intention not to be one, but rather, to be many. It is…

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The Appearance of the Invisible "As" the Non-Object 1:10:41

16d ago1:10:41

1:10:41

According to Acts, Paul went to the Aeropagus in Athens to preach to the Greek philosophers who apparently just sort of hung out there talking shit all day. He conveniently found a placard to an unknown god to illustrate the main point that he wanted to make to them about how the God that he worshipped was beyond their fancy Greek philosophical kno…

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Too Much Aboutness 1:16:26

25d ago1:16:26

1:16:26

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…

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Mystical Vision: When the Invisible Appears 1:18:32

1M ago1:18:32

1:18:32

How does the mystic see ultimate reality? She sees it through analogy, as we have been discussing. Analogy is an indirect way of knowing through the prepositional "as," which connects something known to something unknown without making an equality or an eidetic identification. It is analogy's productive failure to identify in a complete or total wa…

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How Does Love Give Itself "As" Itself? 59:28

1M ago59:28

59:28

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché" would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through …

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How Is What Is Unknowable Represented? 1:10:05

1M ago1:10:05

1:10:05

The mystic uses analogy to have a direct experience of the divine, which is, of course, a paradoxical, if not an altogether nonsensical thing to say. Nonetheless, Analogy is a sort of immediate mediation of God's ultimate nature as love itself for the mystic. Love like God is not good because it is the ground of whatever there is including goodness…

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Mysticism's Semiological Nature is Analogy 1:00:49

1M ago1:00:49

1:00:49

Any predication that is made of God, such as "God is a rock," both discloses and hides God. As Meister Eckhart preached, "As God reveals Himself, he hides more deeply in His mystery. The central tenet of mysticism is, as Epistolary John wrote, "God is love," and it is this predication that requires any description of God to be inadequate to its div…

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The Numinous and the Noetic in Religious Experience 1:00:11

2M ago1:00:11

1:00:11

One of Jacques Lacan's most important discoveries was the relation between the desire to articulate in the register of the Symbolic and the failure of articulation in the Register of the Real. The Real is that which resists symbolization absolutely. This resistance can be construed negatively as a lack of articulation. Or this negativity can be pos…

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Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans 47:03

2M ago47:03

47:03

Rudolph Otto explained that the "numinous" was an experience of something that was not reducible to rational explanation. These uncanny experiences were both terrifying and compelling. For Jacques Lacan the effect of the Real on the Symbolic also produced an uncanny mismatch between what could be known and what resisted semiotic revelation. No sign…

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Would You Prefer the Purity of Piety or the Debasement of Love? 41:32

2M ago41:32

41:32

The concept of unconditional love is a non-transaction that nonetheless transfers what is valueless, or perhaps, invaluable to the Other without any countable worth, and without any guarantees or rewards. Unmerited grace has been a stumbling block not only for Catholics, but also for the Protestants who claim it as the cornerstone of their faith. U…

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Why Does the Mystic Walk into the Dark Night? Part Two 1:01:49

2M ago1:01:49

1:01:49

This is the episode in which I finally get to use the word "Mereology," which is the study of part-whole relationships. The word "holy" came into English through the Proto-Germanic root "haling," which meant whole, but it can be traced even further back to its Proto-Indo-European root "Kailo," which also meant whole but also "uninjured" and even "w…

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Why Do Mystics Walk into the Dark Night? 59:53

2M ago59:53

59:53

Mircea Eliade believed that the religious impulse was to foreground the sacred against the background of the profane, which for him meant to differentiate an object from within a continuous homogeneity. He gave the example of someone drawing a circle in the midst of the endless repetition of a desert landscape. The circle was a sort of marking of a…

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How Is the Profane made Sacred? 55:58

2M ago55:58

55:58

Homo Religiosus's intention is that the profane world be made sacred. But how is this accomplished? Mircea Eliade's answer in his The Sacred and the Profane was that she marks it as different. For Eliade what is homogeneous is profane and what is heterogeneous is holy. Eliade's prime example was drawing a circle amid a homogenous landscape, which m…

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The Problem with the Perennial Philosophy 47:12

2M ago47:12

47:12

Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and James George Frazer's The Golden Bough have been profoundly criticized for being Perennialist. The Perennial Philosophy sought unity among religious experiences, mythologies, practices, and systems. For example, the concept of the "dying god" and its "eternal return" seems to be found as a repeated the…

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How Did the Underground, Electronic Music of 80's Conceptualize the Inconceivable? 46:38

2M ago46:38

46:38

Here it is, the original sin of comparative religions. I recklessly compare my "religious" experience at underground warehouse parties in the early 90's to the religious experiences of those participants at the festivals and religious rites at Gobekli Tepe over 10,000 years ago. This comparison is a part of my effort to outline two different types …

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Were "Underground" Warehouse Parties Religious Experiences? 39:22

2M ago39:22

39:22

Gobekli Tepe was closed up around 10,000 years ago. It was mysteriously, perhaps lovingly, preserved by filling in each of its otherworldly chambers with sediment. And after it was closed around 8,000 BC, it lay hidden just beneath the surface like an unconscious fantasy for millennia waiting for its uncovering and subsequent reintroduction to the …

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The Religio-Aesthetic Impulse of Gobekli Tepe 52:08

3M ago52:08

52:08

There are two basic religious impulses. One is for control and the other is to lose it. Most religious expressions of modern times are to subordinate the other and elevate the chosen ones. Marx believed that "religion is the opiate" of the masses because our lives were so terrible that only the promises of a better world after you die could get us …

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Rad as F**k Archeological Find! Gobekli Tepe! 40:57

3M ago40:57

40:57

Yes, Gobekli Tepe! This one really rocked the anthropology and religious studies worlds. I'm so psyched to get to tell you about it. And I'm glad to be getting into some proper history of religions stuff. I love using music examples because they're what I've really felt in terms of my own spiritual experiences. But the main thrust of all of my life…

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Is Being Digital or Analog? 46:32

3M ago46:32

46:32

In philosophy being just is whatever there is, which is sometimes called the "Universe." But there is only one way for being to know itself, and that is to stand outside itself, so that it can get a good look at itself. If there is such a thing as being directly knowing itself without mediate, enlanguaged beings, such as ourselves, have mostly lost…

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The Radical Negativity of the Real Versus Desiring-Production 47:03

3M ago47:03

47:03

Deleuze and Lacan are incompatible, but I use them both to imagine how renewal occurs. Deleuze's "Desiring-Production" makes the world new by the purely positive desire for difference. However, Lacan's notion of ingressing difference into the world is through the negativity of the Real. The Real's absolute resistance to symbolization is the irreduc…

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Somebody Else's Idea of Somebody Else's World 36:10

3M ago36:10

36:10

June Tyson chanting "Somebody else's idea of somebody else's world, it's not my idea of things as they are," is a sacred mantra, which functions as a divine "no" hovering above the futuristic vibrations of Sa Ra's Arkestra. This divine "no" opened a D&G style "line of flight" for new flows of melodic intensities upon which astral projections were s…

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An Authentic Performance Rather than Performing Authenticity 47:11

3M ago47:11

47:11

When authenticity is defined by its opposition to performativity, it ironically becomes a performance. And as much as we in the Generation X loved irony, we preferred to enjoy ironically rather than get caught up in it ourselves. But, when you're reduced to performing your authenticity by calling out phonies and sell-outs, you become an ironic cari…

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Sh*t on Your Whole Imaginary and Symbolic Theater! Giles Deleuze 39:39

3M ago39:39

39:39

I am continuing to try to develop the concept of an "authentic performance." My generation set up a false opposition between authenticity and performance, and the resulting failure didn't lead to freedom but to a regular-ass failure. I go on a not-to-be-missed rant about this failure to get free in this episode whose target is Generation X in gener…

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Performative Male Competitions 45:06

3M ago45:06

45:06

A much younger friend of mine told me about a social media phenomena called "Performative Male Competitions," which unfortunately I called "men's performative competitions" throughout the podcast. Apparently these are competitions held unbeknownst to the participants in which the most "performative" male wins. The joke of these events is that men a…

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Love Is Evil - Slavoj Zizek 41:42

4M ago41:42

41:42

How do I know what I like? This is the question at the center of this podcast. Do I like what I like because it's what others like, or do I like it because I like it. Another form of this central question is, is it even possible to be authentic? The language that you speak, the concepts that you think, and the desires of your heart, all came from o…

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The Concept of the Remix 40:55

4M ago40:55

40:55

The sorts of collage art that we in the Generation X made at school involved cutting up magazine pictures and gluing them in bizarre configurations on a piece of paper. Sometimes they were just random, but sometimes we tried to make a statement, like when we were supposed to make collages about "what it means to be an American," as I had to do mult…

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F**k These Reactionaries! 35:50

4M ago35:50

35:50

Generation Jones may have been cynical because they came of age during the 70's economic downturn and after the failure of the Hippies to produce a revolution, but they weren't reactionaries. Their most enduring musical productions, Glam Rock, Punk, Disco, and Hip Hop were testaments to openness, inclusivity, and exuberance. It was the reactionary …

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Post Industrial, Rust Belt Collapse Sets the Stage for New Flows of Intensities 35:29

4M ago35:29

35:29

Generation X includes those folks born between 65 and 80. But the stage was set for the new forms of art and music that defined us in the 70's. Particularly by the "deterritorialization" of cities affected by the death of manufacturing jobs and "White Flight" to the suburbs. Punk, Disco, Hip Hop, and Electro were all birthed in the 70, and not by G…

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The TB-303 Failed to Sound Like a Bass, and Was a Psychedelic Mind-Trip Because of It. 34:52

4M ago34:52

34:52

Sometimes the things that don't work right, work perfectly. Artificiality used to be the measure of inauthenticity, but "synthetic" sounds became the currency of Generation X's triumphant failure to repeat the music of the past. Electronic equipment at the beginning of the 70s did not do well at replicating "real" musical instruments, and it cost a…

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We Wanted Authenticity! 33:18

4M ago33:18

33:18

How did Generation X's obsession with authenticity turn us into a bunch of posers? The 50 year old dude who demands that a 20 year old wearing a Nirvana teeshirt name three songs is a poser, and he has been made such by his obsession with authenticity. The trick about "being-real" is that it can't be too intentional; otherwise, it looks like the "t…

<a Href="https://www.martinessig.com">https://www.martinessig.com</a> Podcasts

1
Failure Is Freedom

https://www.martinessig.com

1
The Self as Another 1:18:02

1
The Semantic Advent of the Becoming of Being 1:10:11

1
God's Love Proceeded God. 1:24:45

1
The Appearance of the Invisible "As" the Non-Object 1:10:41

1
Too Much Aboutness 1:16:26

1
Mystical Vision: When the Invisible Appears 1:18:32

1
How Does Love Give Itself "As" Itself? 59:28

1
How Is What Is Unknowable Represented? 1:10:05

1
Mysticism's Semiological Nature is Analogy 1:00:49

1
The Numinous and the Noetic in Religious Experience 1:00:11

1
Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans 47:03

1
Would You Prefer the Purity of Piety or the Debasement of Love? 41:32

1
Why Does the Mystic Walk into the Dark Night? Part Two 1:01:49

1
Why Do Mystics Walk into the Dark Night? 59:53

1
How Is the Profane made Sacred? 55:58

1
The Problem with the Perennial Philosophy 47:12

1
How Did the Underground, Electronic Music of 80's Conceptualize the Inconceivable? 46:38

1
Were "Underground" Warehouse Parties Religious Experiences? 39:22

1
The Religio-Aesthetic Impulse of Gobekli Tepe 52:08

1
Rad as F**k Archeological Find! Gobekli Tepe! 40:57

1
Is Being Digital or Analog? 46:32

1
The Radical Negativity of the Real Versus Desiring-Production 47:03

1
Somebody Else's Idea of Somebody Else's World 36:10

1
An Authentic Performance Rather than Performing Authenticity 47:11

1
Sh*t on Your Whole Imaginary and Symbolic Theater! Giles Deleuze 39:39

1
Performative Male Competitions 45:06

1
Love Is Evil - Slavoj Zizek 41:42

1
The Concept of the Remix 40:55

1
F**k These Reactionaries! 35:50

1
Post Industrial, Rust Belt Collapse Sets the Stage for New Flows of Intensities 35:29

1
The TB-303 Failed to Sound Like a Bass, and Was a Psychedelic Mind-Trip Because of It. 34:52

1
We Wanted Authenticity! 33:18