Failure Is Freedom

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 divine referent. Love must be indeterminate because coercion or compulsion isn't love. If there is such a thing as love, it is freely chosen. There must always be an irreducible remainder of indeterminate ambiguity about love so that it doesn't disappear into the equivalency of an identity. If one knows the beloved in full, then one does not love her. The mystic's desire is for the direct apprehension of God, sometimes called the "Beatific Vision." But the mystic's "direct" apprehension of God is in and through the indirection of the "Cloud of Unknowing." The mystic's experience of God is through analogy rather than the equivalencies of identity because analogy is knowing without determination, which is love. 

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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 positivized as too much to articulate. Lacan adumbrated this disjunction as the distinction between "having" in the register of the Symbolic and the failure to have or grasp "being" in the register of the Real. When there is a disjunction between what can be represented and what is, there is a sense of the numinous and of the noetic. The numinous is the uncanny sense of the presence of something that is beyond representation in the sensual or conceptual intention, so it might be thought of as a present absence. The noetic is the uncanny sense of intuiting what can't be intended, but what is fundamentally unintentional, or beyond one's own intentions. However, bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into the realm of the noetic means that this exterior intention of the unintentional is our interior intention for what is beyond us, which he called "Jouissance" and which Freud called "Death Drive."

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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 signifier could contain all of the meaning of whatever it purported to disclose through language, especially the intention of the Other, which was a reflection of our own failure to represent our intention in a complete way. In the "noetic" experience one intuits something that they can't name. Jean-Luc Marion's "Saturated Phenomena" were noetic because he described them as having "more than enough intuition for the intention." One could not intend all that she intuited when there was too much given for aboutness to contain. The symptom-like attempt to contain the divine by representing its intentions is the job of priests and the pious, but the awful wonder of the numinous and the noetic demand the respect of an open sort of representation design to fail.

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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. Unmerited grace is defiled by the economics of "works righteousness" but also by the economy of belief. Whatever is traded for salvation, whether it be outer works or inner faith, vitiates the pure gratuity of what is supposed to be given without conditions. The purity of one's faith cannot purify one's love. Whatever is done in love, is done without expectations, except that love be made immanent, or incarnate, through the "Kenonsis" of self-emptying. The Dark Night of "subjective destitution" is characterized by one's loving willingness to empty oneself of all previous comforts, especially familiar concepts of self, of the world, and of religious piety. And sometimes the Dark Night not only requires this intentional world but also our very lives as well. To enter into the service of the Other is to enter into the Dark Night of the mystic where nothing is pure, except for whatever love brought us there. Piety doesn't purify our love, only self-sacrifice does.

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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 "wealthy." However, the sense in which wholeness connotes being set apart is how it came to be associated with the sacred. Making whole is a semiotic as well as a religious impulse. The most basic religious impulse is to make holy by setting a part and making different. The most basic semiotic impulse is to represent by individuating a conceptual object through the processes of semiotic differentiation. The mystic walks into the Dark Night to differentiate new concepts from the failure of the old.

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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 sacred space, which was set apart by its divergence from the profanity of the same. But marking can be ambiguous as religious history has shown. What is marked is set apart, for better or for worse. Being a "chosen people" can be as much of a blessing as it is a curse. Those who have been foregrounded by the blessing may be different from those backgrounded by it, but this difference curses the blessed to a repetition of the same nonetheless. An identity is a much sought after boon, but once obtained, it reduces difference as it binds its receivers to the same practices and beliefs of the group. Individuation can either be a convergence on an identity or a differentiation of something new. The mystic walks into the Dark Night not for an identity but for the failure of identity that clears the way for something new.

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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 marks that space as different from the rest. But this is also the primary move in phenomenology as well. Maurice Merleau-Ponty noted that the most basic perception foregrounds an object against a background. Perception is the marking of difference. For example, one doesn't perceive temperature until it changes or becomes different. This way of thinking about the sacred aligns Homo Religiosus with humanity's most definitive trait of symbolization. To make holy is to make perceivable through symbolization, and then speakable through a symbolic language. Martin Heidegger called language the "house of being" because our access to being is through the symbolic differences of language, which is the connection between Eliade's Homo Religiosus and Heidegger's "Shepard of Being." 

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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 theme through many religious and cultural traditions. However, the problem with comparison in religious studies, as Johnathan Z Smith famously pointed out is that it tends to flatten real difference. Giles Deleuze perhaps put this problem best when he described the loss of divergence's intensity or vivacity when difference's divergence is flatten in the procrustean bed of a concept acting as mold. Let's explore whether comparative religions is a doomed endeavor, or if there is perhaps some fruit that can be grasped when one experience, mythology, practice, or system is compared to another.

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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 of religious experiences. The first is religion as a binding to the Symbolic order, but the Second is religion as a binding to what breaks our bonds to the Symbolic by breaking the boundaries of the Symbolic, or what Jacques Lacan named "The Real." The first religious impulse is for the uncertainty reduction of prediction machines, in which the Symbolic Order is reinforced by an "automatic" repetition of the same. The second religious impulse is to transcend the Symbolic Order as it touches the Real as a "Repetition of Difference." Let's review the underground, electronic music scene in the wake of the Post Industrial Collapse of the Midwest to give ourselves a concept for how to break concepts.

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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 modern world. When uncovered in the Mid-Eighties by Klaus Schmidt and his team, it didn't fit the categories of how human progress had been previously conceived. And it remains a wonder of liminal ideation and of the enigmatic expressions of human intentions to this day. The illegal warehouse parties that I went to in my early twenties had nothing in common with Gobekli Tepe, except, perhaps, an intention to encounter something novel and unreadable. In the post-industrial collapse of the Midwest, what was available was what was left, which were lots of abandoned industrial spaces. They were left to rot unlike the intentional manner in which Gobekli Tepe was carefully preserved. But was what we encountered in those dark, forgotten places anything like what those tribal nomads found when they descended into the various chambers at Gobekli Tepe? Join me on this highly problematic endeavor of religious comparisons.

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Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.