Introduction: What to Do About too much Aboutness

The Numinous Lacan, or the Real as Marion’s Counter-Experience 

Words often fail to disclose the full nature of our experiences, but the Beautiful and the Sublime are special cases of this general failure of representation. However, there is a queer way in which the failure of words conveys the “full nature” of our experiences of beauty and sublimity better than an exhaustive description could. Part of this odd phenomenon of expressing the “whole” of beauty and sublimity through the failure to be whole is that what is meant by “full” in the phrase “full nature,” is a different sort of “full” than is normally meant as “exhaustive.” The fullness of our experiences of beauty and sublimity includes our failure to grasp them conceptually, so that part of the experience of them is to not be able to say exactly what they are. When full or complete articulation of the beauty of the beloved is a list of determinable attributes like a marketable formula, the beloved’s beauty becomes an “un-beautiful” commodity. Determining beauty and sublimity entirely fails to grasp them. A scientific account of beauty is complete when it discovers its necessary and sufficient reasons, but this sort of exhaustive, scientific reduction of beauty to its evolutionary biological functions, wholly loses what makes beauty beautiful, which is how it exceeds its necessary and sufficient reasons by failing to be either necessary or sufficient. This unnecessary excess is beauty’s constitutive extravagance that is the beyond of sufficiency and which is also the extravagant beyond of determination.  

The full nature of beauty and sublimity includes their extravagant failure to be determined according to their necessary and sufficient reasons. The excessive beyond of determinacy is the over-saturation that defines beauty and sublimity as kinds of Jean-Luc Marion’s “Saturated Phenomena.” The phenomenology of Saturated Phenomena is defined by the failure of representation, or what Marion called “undeterminable hermeneutics.” The undeterminable hermeneutics of Saturated Phenomena are the definite affects of beauty, sublimity, and horror, but because these affects are defined by their indeterminate extravagance, they often bleed one into the other. It is the lack of determination that defines all three affects, which can clearly be seen when horror fails to be horrific upon its determination. As is well-known, horror is ruined when the monster finally appears. Horror lives in the definition of its darkness and dies in its determination because just like beauty and sublimity, its full nature is only revealed in the articulation of its indeterminacy as definite but indeterminate. 

The interpretation of meaning is called “hermeneutics” after the messenger god Hermes because he mediated the communications among the gods and between the gods and human beings. Famously communications among the gods and between the gods and human beings were always getting screwed up, so the failure of representation to be determinate has long been one of its features. Jean-Luc Marion defined Saturated Phenomena as a type of representation articulated by its excess of “undeterminable hermeneutics.” Marion saw the characteristic saturation of these phenomena as an excess of intuition about what cannot be determined, so that “saturation” referred to too much positive presence. William James had a similar notion of too much to be determined that he dubbed the “Numinous” after Immanuel Kant’s “Numina.” Immanuel Kant thought of the Beautiful and the Sublime as indeterminate concepts because they had too much “raw” numina about them to experience as the phenomena of the intention.  

The “Intention” is a term from Phenomenology that can be understood as the “aboutness” of consciousness. Conscious awareness is always about something, and this something is both the internal, subjective screen and the internal, phenomenal projections onto the screen that together comprise the intention. When there is too much Kantian numina to determine as phenomena, it means that the phenomena of the intentional screen are about the failure to make determinate phenomena, which is not a lack of aboutness but a failure of representation. When representation fails in this phenomenological way, it fails to take in what is outside of representation, i.e., Kant’s numina, into the interiority of the intention’s concepts and phenomena, so that the intention’s aboutness “includes” its outside as the failure to take in through representation. William James thought of religious experience in much the same way as Kant thought about indeterminate concepts as having too much positive presence to determine through representation because James thought of the failure of representation as a sort of excessive aboutness that he called “Noetic.” Noetic aboutness is the numinous knowing given by the excessive beyond of representation. This is the sort of strange knowing through excess of Marion’s Saturated Phenomena, which he also called “Counter-Experience,” because Counter-Experience, like James’s noetic experience, was the extravagant experience of too much knowing.  

Jacques Lacan’s register of the “Symbolic” is the system of representation that codes, and in so doing, reifies and represents, reality to us as our intentional aboutness. For Lacan what caused representation to fail was what he called the register of the “Real,” which he defined simply as that which “resists symbolization absolutely.” He saw this failure to represent as an inbuild, formal failure within representation itself, so that the Real was pure negativity because it was just the absence of representation. The Real is the inversion of Marion’s too much to represent with Lacan’s too little representation. The Lacanian Real is the excessive absence of the inside afterward-ness of representation, and Marion’s undeterminable hermeneutics is the excessive presence of the outside before-ness of representation. Both are a lack of representational localization, which is the disorientation of symbolic failure. Symbolic disorientation is excessive aboutness because too little representation is too much aboutness to locate. 

The history of philosophy can be roughly divided into those thinkers who thought of the Universe as an imbalance of positivity over negativity and those who thought of it as the reverse. The Third Century, Neo-Platonist, Plotinus exemplified the position of the former in his teaching that the Universe was the result of the One’s inability to contain its excessive positivity, which is roughly in line with the Biblical story and other mythological accounts of creation in which creation is a surplus of the One. However, the irony of this excess, as a pure positivity, was evident to Plotinus since it was only an excess of the One’s positivity because the One lacked the negativity of space in which to expand, which is to say that excessive positivity is a lack of negativity. Much of Christianity’s Negative Theology came from Plotinus’s presentation of this irony of the One’s excessive positivity as the One’s self-negation into the multiplicity of creation. The idea that the Universe is an excess of negativity has been expressed in various forms, from Heraclitus and the Process Tradition in general, to Gnosticism, to the Negative Theology of many religious traditions, to German Idealism, to Existentialism, and it has even infiltrated the sciences in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Indeterminacy.  

The Lacanian Real is the absolute resistance to symbolization because it is the beyond of representation that forms the horizon of representation. However, the beyond of representation as the excessive negativity of absence, and the beyond of representation as the excessive positivity of presence relate presence to absence and positivity to negativity “as” an analogy of contradiction.  The analogy of contradiction has been a historically productive method of representing the beyond of representation in religious and artistic expressions. This analogy takes the general form of the presence of absence, or the absence of presence. This analogy has many concrete expressions but generally it is used in poetry, art, and mysticism to represent the excessive negativity of the presence of absence, or its inverse, the negativity of positivity, which is the excessive positivity of an absence of absence. Some expressions of contradiction have become cliched, such as “wise fool,” “old news,” “deafening silence,” or “organized chaos;” however, these oxymorons demonstrate how contradictions can be held together without resolution. The oppositional meanings of the terms define without determining each other through their refractory, hermeneutic interactions across the space given by the negativity of irresolution.  

In mathematics a positive and negative reduce to a negative, and a negative and negative reduce to a positive, but a positive and a positive cannot reduce, so the relation becomes additive. The dialectical double negation is additive negation because it is negation without resolution. When contradiction puts the negativity of its opposition into the positive relation of “as,” the excess of its negativity is positivized in the sense excess is an addition of something extra. This is the addition by subtraction of analogy’s representation of additive negativity without reduction. Analogy reduces the localizing particularity of determination to increase the numinosity of definition, which is to add irreducible negativity to representation through symbolic failure.  

The analogy of contradiction relates the positivity of representation to the negativity of symbolic failure to produce the counter-representation of symbolic failure, which is to positivize negativity without resolving its negativity. Definition localizes by the process of differentiation, which is more particularity, or phenomenological “this-ness” than abstraction. Determination localizes by identification, which is more abstraction, or phenomenological “what-ness,” than particularity. When particularly is excessive, it is indeterminate and disorienting. However, it is the excessive particularity of symbolic failure that differentiates one location and one moment from the next, so lack of determination is the singularity of this-ness as opposed to the identity of what-ness. Excessive particularity is what saturates Marion’s Saturated Phenomena. 

Marion defined Saturated Phenomena as “more than enough intuition for the intention,” which is an excess of presence “as” undeterminable affects. Lacan defined the Real through inversion as an excess of absence, made audible “as” the warping of the Symbolic. In psychoanalysis the warping of the Symbolic becomes audible in the parapraxis of Freudian slips and ticks, and the failed repetitions of symptoms. When representation fails, the Real is present “as” a present absence that positivizes its negativity through unresolved symbolic failure. Within the defined relations of the analogy of contradiction, the inverse definition of symbolic failure as absence is positivized as a present absence without the reduction of its defining negativity.  

For Lacan the incompletion built into representation reflected the incompletion build into desire, which is the undeterminable hermeneutics of desire as what constitutes desire. These undeterminable hermeneutics inversely define desire in the register of the Real as that which resists symbolization absolutely. The psychoanalytic symptom demonstrates this constitutional lack in both representation and desire as the noncoincidence between representation and desire but also between desire and itself. However, this failure to represent paradoxically creates more speech, as in psychoanalysis when the failed speech of the symptom spurs one on to “better” words. For Lacan lack of representation was the obstacle that caused the desire to speak, even though this speech required the castrating mediation of the Symbolic.  

Marion’s Counter-Experiences are also abundant producers of failed speech. Marion thought of the failed speech around illness as its constitutive excess of Saturated Phenomena, and this excess is in the register of the Real because it lacks determinate representation. The intention represents excess in the same way, whether it is excessive presence or excessive absence, as the presence of irreducible negativity, which is the excessive positivity of too much aboutness. For Marion illness was defined by the negative excess of undeterminable affects that persist even after a positive determination of its medical identity has been pronounced. Undeterminable affects are an excess of aboutness, represented by the noncoincidence of aboutness and its determination, which is the noncoincidence between Hegel’s Being and Knowing, and between Lacan’s Real and Symbolic registers. It is left to the Lacanian register of the Imaginary to image how to make this noncoincidence whole. 

Marion’s Counter-Experiences contain a dissatisfaction within them that he put as “too much doubt.” Too much doubt creates a desire to determine through representation to reduce the anxious unknowing of too much to grasp. The desire to lessen the intensities of the “over-proximal” affects of Saturated Phenomena corresponds to the psychoanalytical desire to represent the over-proximal affects of desire. The analogical relation of contradiction between the excessive negativity of symbolic failure to the excessive positivity of too much affect to determine, inversely defines what it cannot determine through the unresolved double negation of positivized negativity. Unresolved double negation is the additive not, not of dialectical negativity. GFW Hegel’s most basic formula of the dialectic is the dialectic of the Concrete, which is abstract indeterminacy negated by determinate particularity, which he called, the “Determinate Negation.” The Concrete is then held together by the tension of the unresolved double negation expressed as abstract particularity, so that the two “nots” of not abstract, and not particular are additive negativity because they do not collapse into positivity without remainder as mathematical double negatives do.