Part 7: What to Do About too much Aboutness

VII: The Irreducible Ambiguity of Symbolic Failure is the Singular Speech of the Divine

Death resists symbolization absolutely, yet it is symbolized all the time. The failure to conceive of death is how death is conceived. The representation of death contains its own negation just like the “Cloud of Unknowing” contains its own negation. The cloud of unknowing is not a cloud, and death is not a concept but the end of concepts. When death is represented as an eternal darkness, it is hard to say how that could be since death must be the end of darkness because it is the end of everything, so darkness is also negated by death. Heidegger wrote that Nonbeing is the horizon for Being because it was the end of Being but also because Nonbeing presented Being as the presence given by Nonbeing’s absence. Therefore, Being contained its own negation, which will be reveled over time in the death of each, ontic being and in the end of ontological Being itself in Nonbeing. Hegel’s dialectic of Becoming is Being negated by Nonbeing as the concretizing contradiction of Being and Nonbeing, which is the double negation held together as becoming. 

Heidegger’s Being-Towards-Death is the horizon of Care, so it is where Care ends and begins. The intention is the product of Care. Objects may care about the world in some Ready-to-Hand sense, but never in the present-at-hand sense of Dasein. Objective failure does not cause objects to ponder things in-themselves because objective failure is not in the register of the Real, but subjective desire is. A subject’s relations to itself and to the outside are mediated through concepts, which are objects. However, conceptual objects produce affects in the bodies of subjects. Subjects care about concepts because they are connected to the affects of their embodiment. When concepts fail, this failure is felt in the subject’s body. The object of the Real is the Object-Cause-of- Anxiety because it is felt. If an object has a sensate body, then that object is also a subject, but it is difficult to say what a sensate body is, except that it is something that it is like to be in one. The strange phenomenology produced by being in a senate body is to have affects and concepts that can feel proximal to one’s sense of self. Marion’s undeterminable affects are objects of desire and of anxiety because they feel both internal and external at the same time. A subject is subject to the affects of its embodiment as if those internal affects were imposed from somewhere else, but which feel innermost to the self at the same time. Object-Cause-of-Anxiety causes subjects to produce new concepts to reduce the over-proximity of its affects, which is a desperate, because impossible, desire to reduce subjectivity into an object. When an object, either a conceptual or an affective object, was ready-to-hand but is now broken, the flow of intention is also broken. It feels a certain way to have the intention broken because intentions are in and about bodies. 

When sensate bodies flow with the Ready-to-Hand intention, the subject / object relation functions so well that it is seamless, and there is no need to question how the world is in-itself. When the intention’s aboutness is counter to one’s intentions, then the intention stops flowing in the Ready-to-Hand manner, and the gap between subject and object returns as the subject considers what exceeds its intentions. However, the in-itself of the world always withdraws. There are always deeper depths to follow it into. The lure is the revelation, but whatever is reveled is never final. So that the enjoyment becomes the chase of what withdraws from the intention. This is the excessive enjoyment of Lacan’s Jouissance because it does not seek a final resolution but the continuation of the chase. Eventually desire becomes the desire for itself. Subjectivity is the excess that desires more than what is objective and which actively breaks objectification when it feels confined to merely objective intentions. The subject enjoys the broken intention of what is against its intentions as the Present-at-Hand intention of being speaking for itself; whereas objects are indifferent. However, when being speaks for itself, it is in the register of the Real, which means that it withdraws as it reveals itself.

When concepts fail to model the world as indented, the Real speaks.  Slavoj Zizek has pointed out that the singularity of the subject is how it fails to be interpolated into the Symbolic, which for Zizek is how the subject itself is the Real to the Symbolic. This singularity is the positivized negativity of the particular manner in which the subject’s desire warps the Symbolic. When objects withdraw from each other, this is not because of a failure to interpolate that warps the Symbolic in the singular manner of a subject, but rather because of the instrumentalization of object relations. Object relations foreground the aspects of objects, or the objective possibility spaces, that are relevant, so that whatever withdraws from the relations are backgrounded because they do not accord with the intentions of those relations. Objects may “Undermine” or “Overmine” each other in Harmon’s sense of those terms according to their intentions for each other, but their intentions are not like the excessive intentions of subjects of desire. What withdraws from the excessive intentions of subjects of desire becomes the Object-Cause-of-Desire for them. Excessive Care cares about what is unintentional is the sense of non-instrumental, or even, and especially, counter to its intention. This withdrawn in-itself of object relations becomes the invaluable object that is beyond the value of use-value to subjects but to objects it is only what is not useful. Objects value what is useful to their intentions. Subjects find invaluable what withdraws from their intentions as the Object-Cause-of-Desire. Love cannot have a value because its value withdraws as what is invaluable, or the beyond of value, about the beloved.

The failure of abstract representation is the excessive particularity of the Real. When object relations focus on particular aspects of objects, other aspects withdraw according to the particular intentions of those relations. However, the particularity of the subject’s desire is the excess of intention beyond object relations for the particularity that withdraws from them. Hegel made the distinction between the Abstract Universal and the Concrete Universal to demonstrate how the failure of the Abstract Universal to negate the Particular was the Concrete. For Hegel the Abstract was negated by the Particular to form the Concrete out of the unresolved double negation of the Abstract with the particularity of what could not be resolved by form as the Concrete form. Hegel’s Concrete Form, or Concrete Universal, held together the repetition of form plus the difference that the form presented as its particularity. The subject desires the particularity of this difference as what is invaluable about the Concrete Form beyond what is valuable in the reproducible Abstract Form of the object. The deviation from the Abstract Universal is the ambiguous excess of object relations that makes their form particular, but it is only for subjects that unusable ambiguity becomes an object of desire in-itself. Plato saw the material world as an erroneous deviation from the perfection of the eternal forms of Abstract Universality. But Hegel’s Concrete Universal was the on-going, dialectical process of negating the Abstract with the Determine Negation of the Particular. Hegel’s Concrete was the ongoing process of the individuation of objects. However, these objects were not individuated according to the logic of the model, or mold, they were individuated according to the logic of differentiation. Differentiation individuates new objects from form plus what does not conform held together as a new object. What does not conform is the ambiguous difference that exceeds the form.  In object relations this ambiguity is either made useful or it withdraws as unusable. Subjects can also relate to ambiguity as unusable difference from their intentions; however, subjects of desire enjoy the obstacle of unusable ambiguity as that which withdraws from their intentions. When subjects directly desire unusable, or even detrimental, ambiguity, they are in the mode of desire that Freud called, “Death Drive.” If an object has a Death Drive, it is a subject.

Deleuze described the differentiation of new objects as difference differentiating itself from itself without the negation of transcendent identity, which was his famous “Plane of Immanence.” The Repetition of Difference is “repetition without a concept” because repetition does not negate or reduce difference with the equivalency of a concept, but rather it actualized difference by defining, or actualizing, without determining new possibilities through differential relations with difference itself without transcending the Plane of Immanence. Virtuality is the withdrawn, or inner, aspect of any object that differentiates an object according to its defined, or actualized, relational possibilities within itself and with other objects. Deleuze thought of differentiation in contrast to the classical individuation of objects, because differentiation was without the governing, or molding, identity of classical essence. The Repetition of Difference is individuation without a concept of identity to reduce ambiguity. Counter-Experience is also individuation without the concept of identity, which produces the counter object of the Real as the unidentifiable, ambiguous, Object-Cause-of-Desire. Object-Cause-of-Desire differentiates new affective and conceptual objects from the inexhaustible ambiguity of difference from concepts.

This sort of individuation makes concrete identity singular, or particular, rather than equivalent because it does not force difference to converge on an absence or on a transcendent identity, like an eternal form, but highlights ambiguities in the divergence of difference’s non-resemblance to concepts. The Repetition of Difference contrasts the resemblance of repetition to the counter-resemblance of difference without reducing the divergence of difference to the repetition that actualizes it. The ambiguous divergence of difference from itself and other objects is individuation through differentiation. The differential relation of repetition to difference structures and intensifies the divergence of difference by way of contrast between objective resemblance, or a concept as a model, and the counter-objective, non-resemblance of difference, or unresolved ambiguity. The relation of the abstract concept to the irreducible ambiguity of the Repetition of Difference is the singular, or particular, difference beyond abstract resemblance.

The mystic’s dilemma is how to conceive the divine within herself without reducing the divine to a conception that resembles her intention. There is a differentiating loop between Julian of Norwich’s “de-creation” of herself, not as the rejection of creation, but as the affirmation of creation. De-creation made her intention differ from itself in order that creation could speak in her for itself, which is to say that she cleared her intentions so that she could become a vessel for the divine. However, the divine speaks through its creation for the Christian mystic, so that when creation spoke for itself in Julien, it spoke in her voice as God intended. The differentiating loop between divine speech and Julian’s intention used the Non-Relation, or the differential relation, of her cleared intention for God’s speech. This is how the divine renews creation through de-creation according to Julien because de-creation is the clearing away of intentions to make the intention a vessel for the divine to speak. God spoke through the particularity of Julien’s vessel because the Creator speaks through a particular concretization of its abstraction presented by a particular creature. Julien spoke of how the extreme precarity of creatures revealed the transcendent as imminent when she affirmed both the “Wheel and the Woe” of creation. The imminent contingency of Julien’s hazelnut spoke the transcendent, necessity of God to her. The divine voice in the hazelnut was audible to Julien because the hazelnut’s Ready-to-Hand, use-value was cleared away from her intention. However, the hazelnut still used the contours of Julien’s intention to annunciate its message, which was indented for her and for those to whom she preached. 

The unintentional intention of the mystic is not without intention or without the vessel of the mystic. The mystic does not make herself a vessel by clearing herself away; although, this is how it is sometimes articulated. What is cleared away is the particular intention of transactional object relations, so that there is neither the economy of undermining nor overmining but rather the ambiguity of the useless. Irreducible ambiguity cannot be transacted in object relations because it is the excess of particularity which withdraws from object relations in the register of the Real. Excessive particularity is what cannot be objectified by abstract representation, but which is presented by it as the unresolved double negation of the abstract particular, so that it is what can be represented plus the failure of its articulation. The failure of its articulation is how the excessive particularity of excessive aboutness speaks through the mystic in ambiguous but not entirely meaningless phrases such as the “Cloud of Unknowing,” and “radiating darkness,” and “God is not, not a rock,” and crucified messiah, and “Real Presence” in the Eucharist, and Paul’s account in Philippians of God’s creation through the self-emptying of Kenosis, and so on. 

From the perspective of logical positivism and all other material analyses of object relations these locutions are the pure nonsense of mysticism. Whatever particularity cannot be transacted in the causal matrix is simply extraneous noise. Ambiguity, and certainly the ambiguity produced by contradiction, does not have anything meaningful to say in object relations because without an identity, it cannot have an economic value. When the mystic’s aboutness clears the intention of use-value, it is the excessive intention of the subject of desire. Her desire is excessive because it is not for an object, but for what resists objectification absolutely, which is the object of the Real: Object-Small-a. The divine voice in her more than her speaks through the Symbolic that has been given to her as her intention, but it speaks in the register of the Real, which is the speech that the Real produces as its absolute resistance to the Symbolic. The Real speaks in the ambiguous speech of symbolic failure. The particular way that this sacred voice causes the Symbolic to fail is the mystic’s singular, unexchangeable subjectivity, which is the excessive particularity of ontic beings when their intentions do not intent object relations. 

This invaluable speech is the dialectic of love that is in object relations more than their transactional economic value. Lacan expressed this economy of the invaluable in his aphorism, “Love is giving something that you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” The mystic’s intention is about love when it is cleared of transactional value because love must be the unintentional giving and receiving of the invaluable Object-Small-a as the excess beyond use-value in object relations. Lacan gave the example of mother’s milk, the baby is given the mother’s love in her milk, which is what is in the milk more than the milk and in the mother more than the mother. The milk is something that the mother has and can give to the baby, but love is something that she doesn’t have because love is not like an object that can be had but more like the counter-object of a clearing. The baby’s wants and receives milk. The baby also wants the mother’s love, but again the baby can only have the milk because it is an object, so this is the sense in which the baby does not want what the mother has because it does not want this object, it wants what is in the object more than the object. The mother’s love is what is in the milk more than the milk, and it is what the baby cries for even after it is satiated by the milk. However, the baby cannot directly ask for the mother’s love, so it cries for milk. The baby’s cry is not for what it is for, which is how its intention is unintended. Neither the mother nor the baby knows what it is crying for after it has been well-fed and clothed because the cry is from its excessive lack in the register of the Real. Therefore, it can only be answered by what is excessive about the milk, which is the counter-object of the Real formed out of the excess of object relations of a mother feeding her baby, which is the mother’s love. What is in the mother more than the mother and in the baby more that the baby is an excessive lack that is a lack that cannot be filled by an object, but only by the excessive particularity or what cannot be objectified.

The person of Jesus did not resemble concepts of God, nor does a piece of bread, resemble a divine body, and so on. However, the Messiah who fails to come in power is the differentiation of a new form of the weakness of power, or the power of weakness. The broken bread that is also God’s broken body continually differentiates the body of Christ as an eternally new object for the renewal and transformation of Christ’s body, which is the community of believers. When an analogy of unresolved contradiction is made between the mundane, or the “Fallen,” and the sacred, concrete creation is affirmed in its radical particularity rather than as an eternal, Abstract Form. The sacred is the symbolic failure of too much immanence for transcendence to lift into its far away realms, so by necessity the mystic finds herself in the “Near-Far.” The mysticism of symbolic failure is the differentiation of new sacred objects, which includes the differentiation of the mystic herself and of her speech. Julian of Norwich's hazelnut’s extreme precarity was in her intention as the contingency of ontic beings. However, it is through the contingency of ontic beings that necessary Being becomes through the differentiation of new possibilities for beings. 

Becoming is the dialectic of Being and Nonbeing that is the becoming possible of Deleuze’s “Actual Possibility.” Abstract potential becomes particular or Actual Possibility when it is defined by relating necessity to contingency and the imminent to the transcendent dialectically. It is the unresolved double negation of this dialectic that holds together abstract concepts with the excessive particularity of difference as the concrete. The concrete is the resemblance of concepts that can be form into an object plus the counter-object formed by the difference of what is new. The novel is the irreducible ambiguity produced by the dialectic of the Abstract and the Particular. Jesus said, “see how I make all things new,” about his failure to come in power as the sort of messiah that had been expected. He was the Messiah plus his failure to be the Messiah, which was either a total failure to be the Messiah or was the differentiation of a new concept of the Messiah from the difference between his ambiguous messiahship and the given concept of a messiah. Christ’s individuation into a particular body is not the classical individuation of an object according to is resemblance to a form, but rather, this is the individuation of the irreducibly ambiguous, non-resemblance of difference. The mystic imitates the self-emptying of the divine of its abstract resemblance, which is the resemblance of concepts necessary for object relations, so that the divine can speak through the non-resemblance of their intentions’ excessive particularity.