Part 6: What to Do About too much Aboutness

Part VI: The Clearing of Intention 

The mystic makes a clearing for what is given and not for what she intends to be given. Her clearing is made by the expression of “not this” and “not that” in both the “neti, neti” of the East and the “not, not” of the West. Aquinas’s “not, not a rock” was the sort of simultaneous reveling and hiding that Meister Ekhart, who never claimed either sort of mystical intention, talked about when he preached that God revealed Himself as His withdrawal into His always expanding depths, so that any final revelation is impossible, even to Himself. The mystic’s desire is for this ever-deepening depth that is the lure of the divine’s eternal creation by withdrawing. For the preachers of Negative Theology, God’s creation was through the presence of his withdrawal, which is like saying that God makes by negating Himself. Negative theology is creation by self-emptying, or Kenosis, so that the Real is the present absence that makes present through absenting. For Plotinus the One was too excessive to contain itself, so it absented itself from itself into the void of space as creation. This sort of creation is of God, but not by its design. For Hegel this was creation by the negation of Being-In-Itself with the indeterminacy of open space into Being-for-Itself, which is Self-Relating Negativity. The Counter-Experience is the experience of the irreducibility of the indeterminacy of the Real’s self-relating negativity. This is different from the creation of Deleuze’s Desiring Production and Harmon’s Object Relations because both differentiate new objects by relating objects as defined possibility spaces to each other’s defined possibilities. The Real differentiates the deformed object of symbolic failure as its absolute resistance to symbolization, which is the definition of new possibility, but also of irreducible ambiguity.  
Irreducible ambiguity is also produced in Deleuze's differentiation processes, which was difference’s absolute resistance to resemblance, or transcendence. However, Deleuze would not have accepted negation as integral to the processes of Desiring-Production, or of individuating new objects. This is because he defined whatever was before the differentiation of objects as Difference-In-Itself rather than as Hegel’s Being-In-Itself, so Difference-In-Itself did not require the negation of space to spread out from itself because it was already a relation. Deleuze saw this, like his predecessor Whitehead, as the difference between Substance Ontology and Process Ontology. However, Hegel’s Being-In-Itself was not really a substance either, it was a name for whatever was before there was the processes of differential relations, so that Being-In-Itself was the void of no relations.  Being-In-Itself is the void before the void relates itself to itself through the self-relating negativity of Being-for-Itself, so Hegel’s dialectic is also a negation of Substance Ontology in favor of Process. It is just a question of terminology as whether a relation is a negation or an addition. For Hegel the dialectical relation was a negation that added like the additive negativity previous discussed in the dialectical double negation of Aquinas’s analogy of contradiction for knowing God.  

Irreducible ambiguity is what keeps the dialectical double negation in tension as a contradiction rather than as a resolution of equivalencies. The resolution of equivalencies would be the resolution of contradiction through resemblance when concepts are models. Deleuze’s Repetition of Difference accomplishes the same irresolution of difference by presenting difference as that which cannot be resolved by the repetition, so the Repetition of Difference presents the absence of repetition as difference. The tricky term for Deleuze would be “absence” because he was against negation. However, there is a sense in which the difference of the Repetition of Difference negates the repetition that presents it. Perhaps Deleuze would have been more comfortable thinking of the repetition of the Repetition of Difference as foregrounding the difference, rather than negating the repetition. Regardless, the Repetition of Difference foregrounds difference in the same way that the double negation foregrounds the irresolution of contradiction, and the irresolution of contradiction is the irreducible ambiguity of difference. The dialectical double negation does not resolve into a positive synthesis because of the excess of difference beyond the equivalency of identity. “God is not, not rock” expresses the ways in which God is like a rock plus the irreducible ways in which he is not by holding together the two “not’s” without resolution, so that God’s resemblance to a rock defines his difference according to His irreducible difference from a rock. Whether the new concepts produced by the differentiation of resemblance from difference is a negation of resemblance or a foregrounding of difference is unresolvable.  

“God is not, not a rock” presents God's irreducible ambiguity through the failure of the Symbolic to contain God’s difference. The Repetition of Difference applied to the double negation would be the resemblance contained by the repetition in the register of the Symbolic plus the difference that the repetition defines as difference from the repetition in the register of the Real. The concept of God is the repetition contained in the concept plus the concept’s failure to contain God’s extravagance, which is how concepts fail as models but succeed to differentiate new concepts is the relation of resemblance to difference expressed by the Repetition of Difference. The Repetition of Difference is the non-relation between resemblance and difference that bares resemblance to Lacan’s Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real because when the Real warps the Symbolic, it presents difference as the warping of the irreducible ambiguity of symbolic failure. The Real presented as lack in the Symbolic is the excess of irreducible difference presented by the Repetition of Difference, which is how the excessive negativity of Lacan’s Real as an absence of representation becomes the excessive positivity of Marion’s too much intuition to represent in the intention. The ambiguity of the affects of Counter-Experience cannot be reduced because of the excess of their givenness, which is the excess of their difference from determinate concepts. The ambiguity of Object-Small-a also cannot be reduced whether this is because of the formal failure of the Symbolic, as Lacan would have it, or because of the excess of irreducible ambiguity that forms the counter-object as over-proximal, undeterminable affects, as Marion would have it. Therefore, Lacan’s object of the Real is the counter-object of Marion’s Counter-Experience. 

Hegel made the negation of substance the beginning of his process ontology and Whitehead and Deleuze started in media res after the “no relations” of substance has already been negated by The Relation, which is an odd sort of relation because it is a relation without relata. Deleuze thought of this original relation as Difference-in-Itself to give ontological primacy to The Relation over the relata, so that Difference-in-Itself was not a negation of substance ontology, but an affirmation of process ontology. However, the question returns as to whether this affirmation of relation as primary is a negation of substance as secondary, or if it is a foregrounding of relation, without the absenting of relata. The classical definition of substance was that which required no relations. Much of modern philosophy holds that only absolute nothing is without relations, but that the nothing that is in relation with something is the nothing from which all other relations emerge. The Real is a way of talking about how the absolute nothing came to be in relation with something, so that the Real is the relation of this relational nothing to the something of the differential relations between something and nothing, which is the relation that Heidegger described as that of Nonbeing to Being as Being’s horizon.  

Process Ontology holds that relations differentiate the relata of defined objects, which is to say that relations precede and define the objects they relate. For Hegel the first term of the dialectic, the Abstract, is not an object, it is nothing until it is negated by the Particular, which is the difference given by differential relations. Hegel’s dialectical process is the abstraction of the void of Being-in-Itself differentiating itself from itself by the relation of self-relating negativity, which is Zizek’s “Less Than Nothing” producing the world by negating abstract negativity with the Particular as the determinate negation. Less than Nothing is an excess of ambiguous difference, or difference without Ready-to-Hand intention. From the Deleuzean perspective this would be the excess of difference beyond the resemblance of concepts that makes every repetition a Repetition of Difference. 

Objects may withdraw from each other’s intentions, but not into the excessive intention of the subject of desire, which is a withdrawal into the irreducible ambiguity of Deleuze’s Difference-for-Itself, or Hegel’s Being-for-Itself, which Heidegger thought of as the Present-at-Hand intention in which being speaks for itself.  Deleuze thought of Difference-for-Itself as object relations when objects related to each other according to difference rather than resemblance. Those are the sorts of object relations of the Repetition of Difference rather than of concepts as models, which would be repetitions of the same if they were able to reduce difference to concepts. However, the failure of concepts to reduce difference to objects unified by identities is what enabled objects to differentiate new objects. So, there is a kind of hidden negativity in the object relations of the kind that produced new concepts. However, Deleuze would not have seen the subjective intention as the failure of the objective intention. The failure of concepts to resemble the intention could produce new concepts because it was not a failure but a successful presentation of the excess beyond resemblance, which is the irreducible difference of Difference-for-Itself. New objects were differentiated from the irreducible ambiguity of the differential relations between resemblance and difference. Lacan’s Non-Relation is that same differential relation but articulated as the Non-Relation between the Symbolic, or the concepts that resemble the intention, and the Real, or the difference that resists conceptualization absolutely.  

For Deleuze Objects’ intentions could be the excessive intentions that psychoanalysis associates exclusively with subjects of desire. For Lacan it is only subjects of desire who can register the Real’s resistance to intention because the Real is the gap of Non-Relation the makes differential relations possible by resisting intentional objectification. However, for Deleuze the same distinction between objects and subjects can be made between the objective intention of symbolic resemblance and the objective intention of real difference. In psychoanalysis objects that intend the conceptual failure of difference in the register of the Real are subjects, but Deleuze thought that the human subject was a sort of object, so it was an example of a particular kind of object that had the capacity to break with its objective intentions. Both Deleuze and Whitehead thought that there was no “in-principle” reason that there could not be other objects that could form subject-like intentions besides Dasein. 

For Deleuze the non-resemblance, or non-relation, between concepts and ambiguity was the difference, that contained the objective possibility of new objects through the process of differentiation. Object relations were not supposed to reduce ambiguity through concepts but produce more ambiguous objects. Deleuze saw the subject as an object that brought ambiguous series of difference near to differentiate new ambiguous objects. However, there seems a necessary distinction between objects that intend for ambiguity and those that intend for relevance, or resemblance, to their intentions. The human subject intends both, but mostly the latter until its intentions fail. There may be other objects that wonder about ambiguity enough for ambiguity to become an Object-Cause-of-Desire, but if they do, they are the sort of objects that psychoanalysis calls “subjects of desire.”  

Irreducible ambiguity withdraws from object relations as the irrelevant possibilities of the “relevance realization” of modern object relations. If ambiguity is seen as withdrawn possibility, it is within the realm of object relations. However, when ambiguity is cultivated for itself, then this is a different sort of object relations that has traditionally been called subjectivity. However, the distinction between Deleuze’s Desiring-Production and the psychoanalytical subject of desire may require that the clear distinction between subjective intention, as excessive intention, and objective intention be kept because while both desire the “deterritorialization” of concepts as models to differentiate new concepts, but only the subject of desire also contains the “for-itself” of deterritorialization, which is the direct desire of Death Drive for the Non-Relation without whatever new concepts its differential relations may produce. For Deleuze there could be no direct desire for destruction, without a “for” a relation, because the relation was primary for his essentially positive Metaphysics. For Deleuze the universe was fundamentally a guided by Desiring-Production. 

Subjective withdrawal has to do with desire’s withdrawal from itself by becoming its own obstacle. Withdrawal into an objective, virtual interiority is different than the sort of withdrawal that occurs in the subjective intention because of the presence of desire, which is present as the impossible object of the Real. The object of the Real is not a withdrawn, virtual object, it is an insistent counter-object. To encounter the Real is to encounter the impossibility of an absolute exteriority, so that this encounter is not a withdrawn possibility space but a recoil from an exterior, hard limit to interiority that is at the same time inmost within oneself as one’s “own” desire. This is the experience of something that used to speak in you as you, shifting to something in you speaking as if from outside, which is the exact reverse of Julien Jayne’s "The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” For Jaynes consciousness emerges when one comes to hear the external voices of the gods speaking from within the intention instead of as external voices directing one’s actions from outside of the intention. For Jaynes this is the shift from Achille’s being directed by the gods in the Ennead, as the man of aristae, to Odysseus directing himself from his own internal intentions, as the man of “many devices,” or of deceit. The Modern Man of many devices is capable of his deceit because of the hiddenness of what used to be exterior, but this hiddenness is not just the withdrawal of the voices of the gods from the external world, but also of the withdrawal of their internalized voices from themselves into the internal void of desire’s withdrawal into the impossible in-itself of the void. 

For Lacan the external voices of the gods are internalized as the Voice of the Big Other through the Symbolic in the unconscious. In extreme instances, the experience is of something in you that is not of you, which is the shift of desire in the register of the Imaginary to drive in the register of the Real. The Imaginary is where we imagine that our desire is ours. The Real is an encounter with desire’s otherness, or the impossible as the undeterminable interminability of drive. The internalized voices of the gods are an encounter with the external Other, but for Lacan there was “no Other of the Other,” which was just another way of saying that there was “no metalanguage” beyond the Symbolic given by the nonexistent Big Other. The voices of the gods are how the Symbolic speaks within the subject and the Real is how that speech withdraws from desire as drive. The Real’s resistance to the internalized Symbolic forms a kind of internal outside to the Big Other’s speech. This internal outside forms the gap between the subject and the Symbolic, which is the gap between the subject’s desire and its symbolic interpolation. When the voices of the gods were internalized in the history of consciousness, the Real was internalized along with them as the internalized outside of the outside. The outside of the outside is what Zizek has called the “Real of the Real” or the “hardcore kernel of the Real.”  

It is the Real of the Real that speaks as its withdrawal into its depths that the mystic desires to speak for itself in the negation of the Via Negativa. The incoherent speech of symbolic failure is produced by the Real’s withdrawal into its in-itself, which is the void and not the in-itself of withdrawn, objective possibility. The Real’s withdrawal into its in-itself is not like an object’s withdrawal into its in-itself because the former is a withdrawal into nothingness and the latter is a withdrawal into the virtual, defined possibility space of an object. However, the Real is present as an absence of objective possibilities, whether they are withdrawn or engaged, as the impossible itself.  

Deleuze’s Desiring-Production activates relational possibilities of difference, which he called “Becoming-Active.” Becoming Active is like Heidegger’s Ready-to-Hand intention in that both are modes of thinking and doing that activate object relations by instrumentalizing intentions. For both Deleuze and Heidegger inactive, objective possibilities withdrew. For Heidegger withdrawal was a negation of the inactive possibilities not involved in active object relations. However, for Deleuze the virtual, as a withdrawn possibility space, was not a negation because withdrawn objects are still actual even if they are not active. The Real is the warping of Ready-to-Hand intention that makes Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention possible by making the intention unintentional, or unproductive. Present-at-Hand intention allows being to speak for itself by presenting the absence of instrumental object relations, which is the presence of Object-Small-a as the absence of a relation, or the Non-Relation, between production and intention.  

Deleuze also acknowledged an absence of object relations but as Difference-in-Itself, which was the most basic level of difference before difference was defined through the differential relations of Difference-for-Itself. Difference-in-Itself was the relation itself before it defined its relata through the relation of difference. Difference-in-Itself was his Real because it was the difference that did not resemble concepts, whether in virtual or in active object relations. When concepts failed as models, they failed because of excessive difference much like how the Real warped the Symbolic as the excess of what could not be interpolated into it. Excessive difference is the lack of resemblance to concepts as the equivalencies of identity. When concepts cannot be reduced to the equivalencies of identity, they presence the irreducible ambiguity of difference that cannot be instrumentalized for transactional purposes, much like Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention. This excessive difference was the irreducibly ambiguous difference that the Repetition of Difference presented. 

The unconscious is the Real to the subject, and the subject is the Real to the Symbolic because the Real is the objective, outside of the intention as the undeterminable hermeneutics of drive. However, the Real is also what appears to the subject as its inmost desire until in the parallax shift of the failure to determine desire, desire becomes the internal enigma of an irreducibly ambiguous drive. The object of the Real’s counter-resemblance to the subject’s familiar concepts about itself reveals the foreign nature of the drive within one’s familiar desires. The Real is what cannot be intended, so it is like having an interior awareness of what is exterior about oneself, which usually appears to the subject as a lack of control over oneself and of one’s environment. This lack of control is the psychoanalytic experience of castration, or of impotency, that the Object-Small-a presents as the Non-Relation and the Imaginary absences in fantasy.  

The subject is the failure to make an object of oneself in the register of the Imaginary primarily because of the irreducibly excess of one’s desire in the register of the Real. Object relations are not warped by desire. Objects withdraw from each other according to the intentions of their relations in the manner of the Ready-to-Hand intention. The Present-to-Hand intention is the deformation of the Subject-of-Desire's excessive intention to let being speak for itself. The intention evolved as an interface for object relations, so it cares nothing for how things are in-themselves. Unintentional intention causes the excessive care of the subject of desire, but not of objects. When objective intentions are thwarted, they may reformulate their intentions, but they do theorize about how things are in-themselves, so they do not become beings for whom being is a question. Objects to do not register the Real at all because the Real is an absence that must be presented by the excessive intention of the subject of desire. Absence can only be absence to the intentions of object relations, but an absence can be a present absence when intention is the excessive intention of the subject of desire. The absence of a relation between the Symbolic and the Real is presented by the counter-object that causes objectivity to fail to be completely objective in the register of the Imaginary. The counter-object is the object of the Real that Lacan called, “Object-Small-a,” or “Object-Cause-of-Desire.” The failure to be whole, or objective, does not cause desire in object relations, but it warps the intentions of subjects of desire so that their intentions become excessive in the sense of unintentional and useless for the transactional economies of object relations. 

The Real appears as the outside of intention within intention as symbolic failure, so the mystic’s cultivates symbolic failure as indirect means to her impossible desire for Real. The non-resemblance of Difference-in-Itself to concepts presents itself as the irreducible ambiguity of the Repetition of Difference. Irreducible ambiguity is the undeterminable hermeneutics of the uncanny affects that haunt Marion’s Saturated Phenomena. The Real’s warping of the Symbolic, which is also the warping of the intention, produces the irreducible ambiguity of an ambiguous, or unintentional, intention. The unintentional intention cannot be instrumentalized and is therefore useless for productive object relations. Productive object relations are those object relations that can be understood within the general, transactional framework of economics, in which difference is reducible to equivalencies, something like the differential relations made through the equations of difference in differential calculus and in the differential relation of economic transactions. Economic transactions relate difference according to the transactional equivalencies of identity to make what is related, which is the relata, economically equivalent. Economical equivalencies reduce the relata’s difference to determinable, exchangeable identities. This is the economic mode of object relations as opposed to the non-exchangeable mode of subjectivities irreducible ambiguity. Transactional object relations may produce irreducible ambiguity, but it is only the subject of desire that can see it, as the Object-Small-a, in the register of the Real. Objects “experience” irreducible ambiguity as withdrawal possibility and not as the Non-Relation between the Symbolic and the Real. 

Unintentional intention for a subject of desire is the irreducible ambiguity of difference to the equivalencies of intentional determination. Asceticism is often a part of mystical practice because it produces the over-proximity of undeterminable affects that define Counter-Experience as unintentional, or ambiguous. Mortification of the flesh de-instrumentalizes the flesh by producing unproductive affects that force the failure of intentional representation, so that the intention for the Real can be realized indirectly. This sort of deliberate symbolic failure can make a clearing of sorts in the intention for the Real to emerge. However, asceticism fails, just like any other intention for the Real, or intention for Existential “authenticity,” fails because the Real only comes when unintended. Some mystics pray for or induce physical inflictions upon their body to withdraw themselves from the instrumental intentions of this fallen world. However, there are less extreme, and perhaps, more effective, ways to break the instrumental intention given by the Symbolic of “The World.” Marion saw in the History of Religions that the development of the theology and practice of iconography was one such method of presenting the Real through intentional symbolic failure.