Skip to main content

PS to The Interruption (on Deleuze and Levinas)

The general image that seems to emerge from a project like this is that agency involves a degree of solitude with one's actions and therefore agency involves a degree of hospitality. In terms of the monadology of fragments (Being Up For Grabs, chap. 3), agents are composers but also fragments in the hands of other composers: they are subjects to other agencies they encounter - they are up for grabs. (See the very last section of the book where the monadology of fragments is connected to the ontoscopy of doubts and the rhythm-oriented ontology.) They are therefore subject to contamination, to contagion. Their poiesis is somehow tied up with other agent's poiesis - and this gets us close to hospitality. It is an affair of rhythms: agents are affected by the pace of things around them. That is, they are at the mercy of the events that take place independently around what they are up to. This introduces a Deleuzian element to the project. In fact, the general form of hospitality in agents (of any kind) can be thought in terms of contamination (and therefore in terms of becoming in the Deleuzian sense, not in the sense of an entity becoming another). In other words, a becoming that is not ontologist, that is not being-oriented like the one Levinas criticizes in De l'évasion. Contagion is interruption - being out of one's being, evading it. There is an element of evasion in every agent; that has to be the lesson of dropping ontologism: things are not programmed by their being (either beforehand or at the time of the event), they are up for grabs for others to have a grip on them because they hold a capacity to evade from their being.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cathedral and the axiomatics of capital

Today in my Cosmopolitics of Capital class, instead of discussing Lyotard´s evil book in connection to Moldbug and Land´s ideas, as planned, we spent hours considering bits of The Anti-Oedipus under the light of Neo-cameralist ideas and some remarks Land makes about the horror that is often triggered as an emotional response to (Neo-cameralist) statements about the Cathedral. We concentrated on the bit of chapter 3, section 10 where Deleuze and Guattari talk about class struggle and the bourgeoisie as a class eroder. There they describe how capitalism decodes the flows of castes, orders, and classes in the sense of feudal aristocracy, serfdom and peasantry. The erosion affects also the proletariat that is never associated with a specific job or type of service but rather a decoded abstract worker. This decoding is precisely what makes the proletariat universal and directly linked with the productive forces - which means, for Deleuze and Guattari, that they are potentially the schizo, ...
Post a Comment
Read more