Part 2: What to Do About too much Aboutness

II: God Is Not, Not a Rock 

The extravagance of the Beautiful is only ever one short parallax shift away from the extravagance of the Horrific. Desire represented in the Symbolic register is the beautiful object, or Slavoj Zizek’s Sublime Object, that Lacan Called, “Object-Small-a.” Desire inversely represented by symbolic failure is the horror of drive. When desire cannot be determined, this failure is inversely defined through symbolic failure as the over-proximal affects of indeterminate drive. Zizek famously has used the figure of the zombie to illustrate the Imaginary’s failure to determine desire. The drive of the zombie is interminable because it cannot be made whole by the Imaginary. The Imaginary determines desire by inversely reify lack into a virtual object that if obtained would fulfill desire, but desire as drive is without such an object. The zombie embodies drive as undead desire, which is undead because the Imaginary has not produced a virtual object to desire, or the Imaginary has not been able to cover-over a Real object with the Imaginary virtual object. The virtual object fails in the same way that symbolization fails in the presence of the absent Real. The undeterminable hermeneutics of Saturated Phenomena are also a failure to make whole through representation. The over-proximity of unresolvable affects feels too close because they lack Imaginary representation, which is the absolute noncoincidence of the of the virtual object with the Real object. 

Marion’s Saturated Phenomena cause experience to “fail” to be determinate because of too much intuition, or positivity, for representation, whereas Lacan’s Real causes the Symbolic to fail to be determinate because of too little interpolation. However, there is a lack of representation in both formulations. For Marion this lack is felt as the positive pressure of undeterminable hermeneutics, so that symbolic failure is the failure to reduce this pressure. For Lacan the negativity of the Real warps the Symbolic like the inverse pressure of a vacuum, so that symbolic failure is the failure to positivize negativity through representation. The vacuum of absence becomes a positive presence in the radicality of its vacuity, so that either way of conceiving symbolic failure, it becomes a sort of “darkness visible” of failed phenomenology, or a sort of “audible silence” of failed speech. Failed speech is not only the parapraxis of the slip, the tick, or the symptom, but it is also the art of the poet and the “counter-speech” of the classical, mystical language of the “Via Negativa,” which is speech about what cannot be said. 

Thomas Aquinas’s formulation for the mystical speech of the Via Negativa was the definite but indeterminate speech of analogy. The double negation at the heart of Aquinas’s analogical speech and of the Hegelian dialectic are produced by the same dialectical structure, as can be seen in the example of Aquinas’s analogical definition of God as a rock. The equivocation of “God is a rock” is negated by the non-equivalence between God and a rock, but Aquinas introduced the additive negativity of the double negation of “not, not a rock” to assert that God was not, not a rock either, which is to say that there is some definite but indeterminate way in which “God is a rock.” The double negation of the Hegelian Dialectic is structured like the additive negativity of the “not, not” in Aquinas’s analogical definition because it arbitrarily orients the Symbolic within the absolute disorientation of the Real. The Real is the non-locality of indeterminacy as open space, or the vertiginous vastness of the sublime. The dialectical double negation holds together a contradiction like the positivized negativity of Milton’s “darkness visible,” or of the abstract particularity of Hegel’s “Concrete Absolute.” Hegel’s most basic dialectic is, the Abstract negated by the Particular “as” the Concrete. The Concrete is the double negation of the Abstract by the Particular, or of the Particular by the Abstract. The Concrete is the dialectical double negation that holds the Abstract near enough to the Particular to produce the refractory patterns of a concrete expression of form through the Particular, or of the Particular through an abstract form, without the resolution of synthesis.  

Lacan’s Symbolic is in the position of Hegel’s Abstract, and what is outside of the Symbolic is in the position of the Particular. When the Symbolic is put into dialectical relation with its outside “as” the phenomenology of the intention, it produces the inner, subjective flow of concrete phenomena. However, aboutness “includes” both symbolic interpolation and what has failed to be interpolated. Unresolved symbolic failure is the inversely defined excess of Saturated Phenomena, which is “incorporated” into the concrete aboutness of the intention as over-proximal because undeterminable affects of the register of the Real. This excessive remainder of failed symbolic interpolation does not lack definition, or aboutness “as” the concrete projection of the intention, it lacks the determination of identity, which is the gift of the Real’s un-interpolated negativity.  

When Deleuze said that concepts were not to be models, he meant that concepts were not to determine experience through the equivalency of identity. He defined the Repetition of Difference as “difference without a concept,” or “Pure Difference.” The concept that difference is without is identity. Marion’s Counter-Experience is experience with an unidentifiable remainder, which is affect without a concept. However, affect without a concept is a concept, even though it is a concept formed relationally by the failure to be a concept. The counter-concept is the object formed in relation to the concept of resemblance, which is the concept of difference. The Repetition of Difference the process of differentiation new concepts in relation between the concept of resemblance and the and the concept of difference. This is the defining relation of Counter-Experience's resemblance to experience and its difference from experience. Its resemblance is what can be determined about it, its difference is what cannot. This remainder of unconceivable difference is conceptualized nonetheless as that which cannot be conceived, or the felt counter-conceptual objects of undeterminable affects. When a conceptual model is put into relationship with what it cannot mold, new conceptual and affective objects are differentiated. This is the relationship of the concepts of resemblance in the register of the Symbolic to the counter-concepts of difference in the register of the Real.  

The dialectic of Counter-Experience creates an analogical relation between positive representation and the negativity of symbolic failure, which might be called “counter-representation.” The dialectic names in the register of the Symbolic, which is the abstract register of concepts. It then un-names in the register of the Real, which is the imminent register of the particularity of difference, or of difference’s divergence from its abstract representation, and it negates the un-naming, Hegel’s “Determinate Negation,” in the concrete register of the Imaginary. The Imaginary expresses the desire for completion through the synthesis that complete interpolation of the Real’s un-namable particularity represents. However, the Imaginary’s desire is continually thwarted by the Real’s absolute resistance to interpolation into the Symbolic, which is the failure of the Determinate Negation to determine the excessive divergence of the Real’s difference from abstract representation. The Concrete “contains” the failure of its Determinate Negation “as” the irresolution of its refusal of synthesis, which is the concretizing “as” of the dialectical double negation. The Imaginary’s wholeness in this sort of excessive, or saturated, concrete, which is the whole held together with its failure to be whole to make the counter-whole of Counter-Experience. 

William James described the “numinous” as the experience of something greater than oneself, which was truly “other” than oneself, or the hard “outside” of inner experience, much like Marion’s Counter-Experience. James described the “noetic” as knowing the “ineffable,” which does not mean revealing its mystery but knowing the ineffable as a mystery. The numinous can then be thought of as experiences of more unresolved negativity than “normal” experiences “contain” as aboutness, and the noetic can be thought of as experiences of excessive knowing about the “counter-knowledge” of the numinous. Noetic experience is the definite but indeterminate Counter-Experience of the numinous, and the definition of the noetic increases as its determination decrease. The beautiful and the sublime are examples of noetic experiences of the numinous, but so is horror. The numinous and the noetic are ways of describing the general structure of Counter-Experience. The numinous is the Counter-Experience of the excessive negativity of too much “numina,” and the noetic is knowing about that excessive negativity as the aboutness of counter-knowledge. Milton’s “Darkness Visible,” shows how the parallax shifts of the numinous and the noetic occur. Mystics call darkness visible, “the Dark Night,” and alchemists call it, “the Black Sun,” and Lacanians call it, “subjective destitution.” But it is lack that defines all three of them as the excessive differentiation of new affective and conceptual objects of experience. 

In the analogies of the numinous, the undeterminable hermeneutics of Beauty’s excessive intensities may become sublime or even horrific because the relation-making of the preposition “as” creates a sort of knowing through poetics that allows for the parallax shifts of the excessive aboutness of Counter-Experience. An “undeterminable” aboutness is an excessive aboutness, which is a fount of definite counter-speech about indeterminate Counter-Experience. However, this “definition” is the indeterminate, inverse definition of symbolic failure, which is the excessive negativity of the Real that cannot be interpolated into the Symbolic. The double negation in the analogy of contradiction positivizes negativity by inversely defining the absence of symbolic determinacy “as” the excess of negativity that does not allow the double negation to resolve into a synthesis, as mathematical double negations do. This expressive irresolution is enabled by the remainder of excessive negativity that cannot be interpolated into the positivity of representation, but which is expressed nonetheless in the definite but indeterminate “counter-representation” of the excessive intuition that haunts experience “as” the Counter-Experience of hermeneutic dissonance. But it is this lack of consonance that makes the world new through the extravagance of beauty, sublimity, and horror.