Part 1: What to Do About too much Aboutness
I: The Refractory Hermeneutics of Extravagance
The undeterminable hermeneutics of Marion’s Saturated Phenomena are felt as over-proximal affects because they are defined but not determined as “too-much-givenness.” Over-proximal affects are the characteristic extravagance of beauty, sublimity and horror. Extravagance is how all three are determined to be Saturated Phenomena according to Marion’s definition. However, this determination does not determine them without remainder because it does not reduce their irreducible extravagance to a determination. This is the sort of determination without reduction to equivalency that the additive negativity of the dialectical double negation creates. Extravagance is an excess, and excess can be defined negatively as a lack of determination or positively as too much to determine.
The inversion of positive definition and negative definition is just to switch the terms of the defining double negation of excess, which defines excess as a lack of lack. The dialectical process of excess is the whole, as complete determination, negated by the failure to be whole of lack of determination. Lack of wholeness, as lack of determination, is then held together without resolution by the final determinate negation, which is the additive doubling of a lack of a lack as the excess of determination. The excess of determination is not too much determination, but too little. The excess of determination is the beyond of determination because twice negated lack is the beyond of wholeness that is called “excess.” Excess is the inverse gap in determinacy of indeterminacy, or to put it in Lacanian terms, excess is the gap of the Real in the Symbolic.
For Lacan the register of the Imaginary perceives this excess as a lack, and it imagines how to complete the lack with determinate representation. However, the dialectical double negation holds negativity and positivity together without resolution, which keeps the gap of indeterminacy open, so that the lack of determination is absolute. The negativity of an absence of determination and the positivity of too much to determine form a zone of indeterminacy out of each’s failure to resolve the other. However, a sort of hermeneutic resonance forms in the zone of indeterminacy between the oppositional terms of the unresolved double negation. This zone of hermeneutical interaction defines without determination the melodies of the wave-like relations of hermeneutic consonance and of dissonance. It is said of oxymoron’s that they are not nonsense because the meanings of the two terms interact with each other to form a third area of meaning. A Wise Fool is neither wise nor a fool, but a third thing. His foolishness defines and intensifies his wisdom, and his wisdom defines and intensifies his foolishness, even if his wisdom and his foolishness cannot be determined.
In the undeterminable hermeneutics of Saturated Phenomena, the positivity of presence and the negativity of absence convergence and divergence in a similar manner as the wise fool’s foolishness and wisdom. The over-proximity of undeterminable affects in sickness is the horror of their paradoxical non-location within representation but is sublimity in art and beauty in the beloved. The paradox of over-proximity and non-location is the same paradox found between the two terms of the oxymoron, or the two terms of the dialectical double negation, which is the zone of undeterminable hermeneutics that defines and intensifies the conceptual objects within it. The irresolution of this zone of non-local interactions is the virtual possibility space that differentiates new objects by putting concepts in relations with each other and with their failures to locate. Locatable beauty is not beautiful, it is a generic abstraction without its particularity. If the beloved’s beauty is interpolated into the Symbolic without remainder, then it is perfectly locatable within representation and is therefore abstract beauty. Abstract beauty is not beautiful because it lacks particularity, which is the difference between the resemblance of identity and the singularity of difference. The zone of this difference between resemblance and difference is the zone of differentiation that defines the beloved’s beauty as “unlocatable.” Unlocatable beauty is “Real” beauty because it is the Real’s absolute resistance to representation that gives Real beauty its indeterminacy. Marion’s undeterminable hermeneutics is the virtual object of the Real that Lacan called “The Thing,” or “Das Ding,” in direct reference to Freud. Lacan said that The Thing “is what is in the beloved that is more than the beloved.” It is the object that refuses to be a reified into an object. Love is not Real until it is purified by the unknowability of the beloved’s Real beauty, which is the sublime beauty of indeterminate locality, and which is also at the same time the sublime horror of the over-proximal affects of sickness. Real Love is a beautiful sickness of excessive affects.
Undeterminable hermeneutics is the differential between the determinate object of identity and the indeterminate object of difference, which is the zone of non-coincidence between the abstract and the particular. This zone is the object of the Real’s resistance to representation. Absolute abstraction is the non-locality of the without-relations of absolute identity, which is the perfect coincidence of a thing with itself. The classical definition of substance was that which requires nothing to exist. This notion of substance as complete self-containment, is so abstract in its total indeterminacy that it becomes nothing, which is the same nothing of Hegel’s Being-In-Itself. Whatever the ontological status of the non-relational in-itself is, it does not become anything until it is brought out of itself by the relationality of particularity.
Becoming particular is becoming local through the objective differentiation of relational difference, which can be thought of as Hegel’s Being-In-Itself becoming Being-For-Itself by spreading out into the space of Self-Relation-Negativity. However, spreading out too far becomes the absolute particularity of absolute localization, which is the without-relation of absolute determination. Absolute determinacy is the total loss of relationality because all relations are relations between abstract indeterminacy and determinate particularity, which is why Hegel’s Concrete is the relation between the Abstract and the Particular. The heat death of the Universe is the total loss of indeterminacy because it is the total loss of entropy, which is the possibility space of any possible interaction with between objects. Entropy the relation between energy-matter and space as time. Energy is the possibility space of matter, and matter is the possibility space of energy, which is how the abstract relates to the particular in representation. The Abstract is the indeterminacy that creates the possibility space for determinate particularity to become abstract particularity. The Particular is the determinacy of Hegel’s Determinate Negation that creates the possibility space for “Abstract Universality” to become the “Concrete Universal.”
Representation is the virtual possibility space of relations between abstract resemblance and particular difference. Its possibilities are the hermeneutics of abstract determination, which form in the relations of the consonance of resemblance and the dissonance of difference. The relations of hermeneutical consonance are those in which representation makes meaning through positive interpolation into the Symbolic. The areas of hermeneutical dissonance are those in which the positivity of representation is overcome by the negativity of symbolic failure. However, the dissonance of symbolic failure is made meaningful without becoming a determinate failure in the context of the dialectical movement of the double negation, just as dissonance is made resonant without harmonic resolution in the context of musical movements. The resolution of consonance and dissonance in musical movements is never complete because consonance and dissonance linger in the harmonic refractory space of interaction between the two modes. In music theory it is said that harmony resolves the tension of disharmony, but it is also said that the tension of dissonance remains a negative presence within the resolution of harmony and vice versa. This later formulation is the definition without determination of the negativity of symbolic failure. Saturated Phenomena are both the harmonic positivity of symbolic interpolation, and the disharmonic, negative remainder of undeterminable hermeneutics brought near as the refractory aboutness of the intention.
Giles Deleuze thought of the irresolution of concepts as the refractory interactions between repetition and difference. Concepts were not meant to be models, or equivalencies, for Deleuze, they were meant to be active. To activate concepts, they had to be structured by difference rather than by resemblance, which Deleuze called “Difference-For-Itself" as opposed to “Different-In-Itself,” in a direct reference to Hegel’s Being-For-Itself and Being-In-Itself. The Repetition of Difference is the loose structure of an active concept because it is a relational concept. Relational concepts define difference with repetition rather than resemblance because repetition is the process of differentiation and resemblance is the making equivalent of identity. Concepts are actualized virtual objects because they are relationally defined series of differences. Concepts are like sets that define their properties through their relational differences, so that the substance that holds these properties together is a possibility space. Substance as a possibility space is the definition of the set, which is nothing like the classical substance of self-identity because the identity of definition is a network of related differences. The surface of concepts is a possibility space that actualizes new relational possibilities when brought near to other possibility surfaces.
When the possibility surfaces of objects are brought near to each other, they interact like waves converging and diverging with each other in new patterns of relational possibilities. The areas of convergence are the areas in which concepts “striate,” or define, through repetition, and the areas of divergence are the areas in which concepts become smooth through difference. Becoming smooth meant becoming indeterminate to Deleuze, but difference can only become smooth through the differentiation of difference, which is to relate difference to itself as the Repetition of Difference. To become possible, indeterminacy must be structured by the process of relational differentiation, which is like Soren Kierkegard’s definition of the self as a self-relation relating itself to other relations. The refractory zone between concepts is a possibility space for actualizing new relations, which in turn actualizing new relation possibility spaces. Repetitions of Difference define the possibilities of new Repetitions of Deference in the refractory zone of their interactions with themselves and with other objects. Relational possibilities converge through repetition and particularize, or are made “divergent,” by difference. Repetition’s convergence is not like the convergence of resemblance because its convergence is the striation or structuring of difference’s divergence, which is a concept as a refraction rather than as a model or mold. Repetition defines difference without determining it because it is imminent to, rather than transcendent from, the difference it structures. There is an excessive remainder of difference that is not resolved by the consonance, or convergence, of the repetition of the Repetition of Difference, so that the dissonance of its unresolved difference sustains the Repetition of Difference from collapsing into the resolution of determination.
Lack of determination resonates as a pleasurable dissonance within beauty’s general consonance, but it starts to switch over to a more direct enjoyment of excess, or “excessive enjoyment,” that Lacan called “Jouissance” in the extravagance of the sublime’s excessive indeterminacy. The extravagant unresolved indeterminacy of the excessively open or the excessively vast is the characteristic vertigo of the Sublime. Counter-Experiences are on an affective continuum, so that beauty can switch into the excessive enjoyment of Marion’s “undeterminable hermeneutics” that inversely define the affects of sublimity as vertigo. The Sublime is the Counter-Experience of lack of symbolic orientation, so it can easily cross over into the horrors of the Real. Counter-Experience is comprised of both the positivity of representation through symbolic interpolation and the excess of negativity that cannot be positivized through representation. Symbolic failure is the inverse, but nonetheless positivized, impression of the negativity of the Real’s radical absence. This inverse impression of the Real’s absence can be beautiful, or sublime, or horrific, or some combination of all three in the possibility space of hermeneutic interactions structured by the counter-structure of the refractory relations of the Repetition of Difference.
