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Showing posts from June, 2014

Ceci n'est pas un humain

This is the action we're putting up to figure out how to use the word "human" these days. Can it ever had any meaning apart "those we have chosen"?

Aharon on search and rhythms

I'm working on my chapter about rhythms in Aharon's house and I'm doing a rhythmic piece with him about rhythmic transduction. It is about how knowledge can be understood in terms of entrainement, of the kind that makes the heater in his room produce patterned marks in the wall. More about all this soon. Meanwhile, two links from Aharon. The first is his piece on search art with Phil Jones: Search Art The second is his reflections on rhythms and gravity that illustrate beautifully his ideas about search: Gravity In

Agamben on Esti and Esto: the two ontologies

In his beautiful and inspiring "Che cos'è il commando?" Agamben deals with archeological excavation as the source of all discovery: it is a Foucauldian thought, but he puts it in a way that makes me think that it can be extended to what has no starting point, no ground but layers of floors. In this sense, the excavation his on about is present both in archeological and in anarcheological endeavours. Agamben investigates these starting points - the question of ground. He starts out with archés , that are both commencement and commandment (commencer, commander, in French); the original element and the commanding force. He conjectures that to command is to start something out. Western philosophy, he says, never considered power in terms of command. Obedience has attracted more attention and indeed it is crucial, but authority really disappears only when commands are no longer given - there is likely always someone to obey any command provided that it is actually issued. He t

Being up for grabs in the making

I've been writing Being Up for Grabs, the book, steadily since February. My plan is to have it ready by the end of July. I've finished chapter 4 today and this makes me feel that my plan is still feasible. Last Saturday, walking in Buttes Chaumont, Paris, I restructured the book quite dramatically and got rid of two chapter. Its structure now looks like this: 1. Being up for grabs - the preliminaries 2. Anarcheologies 3. Fragments 4. Doubts 5. Rhythms 6. Contingencies and their galaxies The idea is to develop another sense of priority, closer to Aristotle's "proton to onton" than to Schaffer's. In this renewed sense, accident is prior. It is widespread and crucial for what is sensible, but it is not its ultimate component, nor what comes first ever. Such other priority can be seen in several different ways, as accident presents itself in different ways too. It is part of its widespread character to present itself with diff

The day-after of negativity

Been reading the very exciting Society of Tiredness of Byung Chul-Han. He diagnoses that the immunological time has been replaced by a neuronal time - a time of otherness and negativity was replaced by a time of excessive positivity, with open potentialities with scarce limitations. The contrast between the two eras - that of a disciplinary society and that of a society of achievement (or of performance) - is expressed in the prototypical diseases of the two times: in a society of discipline, borders are to be preserved - as is otherness, negativity, duties - and people go down with immunological diseases, infections of all sorts while in a society of achievement, borders spell defeat - people are rather guided by potentiality than duty, by what they can do than by what they should do - and illnesses are depression, deficit of attention, burn-out syndrome. A society of achievement - in a name that he considers fitter than Deleuze's "society of control" which is still too