Failure Is Freedom
https://www.martinessig.com
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About This Podcast
I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.
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Recent Episodes
S3E6 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…
S3E5 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…
S3E5 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,…
S3E4 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…
S3E3 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…
S3E2 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…
S3E1 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…
S2E15 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.…
S2E14 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…
S2E13 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…
S2E12 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…
S2E11 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. …
S2E10 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…
S2E9 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…
S2E8 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…
S2E7 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…
S2E6 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…
S2E5 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…
S2E4 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…
S2E3 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…
Frequently Asked Questions
Failure Is Freedom has published 54 episodes since August 2025, covering topics in Music, Music History.
Failure Is Freedom is currently highly active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 54m.
