Skip to main content

Tomboy's Jeanne vs the adults (or, on decrepitude)

Under the spell of beautiful Tomboy by Céline Sciamma. The kids, specially Jeanne, the sister, negotiate sexual identities in a thoroughly simple way – it is mostly about how you present yourself. Gradually, this realm of appearances is conquered by the world of adults and their registered identities. Identities compose the basic layer of a regime of truth – a framework whereby predications (say, judgments about people and their emotional states) can be grasped because they are capable of being true or false. The regime of appearances – or make belief – is replaced by a hidden order that commands them (je suis obligée, says Jeane and Mikael (Laure)'s mother to explain her making Mikael dress like a girl to see his girlfriend). The empire of adulthood is the empire of a rule who transcends all standing rulers – ultimately, the transcendence of truth, which is, if truth transcends all possible truth-maker, the rule of determination over determiners. In any case, Mikael is stopped by his mother.

Adulthood comes out clearly as a bad idea. Which somehow makes me think that it is always curable, at least through extinction and degeneration. I have sketched an ontology of decrepitude where I claim that things are older than we think, and getting older, older beyond limits. Aging is a nihilism machine – it undoes all the solidity and with it all the integrity and individuality with their cogs and bobs. Degeneration, and further degeneration – to no end, as in a fountain of eternal oldness to be found everywhere, as I suggested somewhere – is more aimed to the target of clean nothingness than extinction or elimination. Let things age and they will become unrecognizable. Surely, different things have different age speeds. But let them carry on occupying their space while changing what they do to the space they occupy. Degeneration is what makes nature an accumulation of sui generis parts.

Comments

  1. Hilan Bensusan12 March 2012 at 02:20

    Meryl Streep, in Iron Lady, does a great job at bringing to the fore some moral elements of decadence and the film suggested to me some politics of decrepitude.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more