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Showing posts from December, 2019

The cosmopolitics of precariousness

I understand that what Anna Tsing means by precariousness - and this has to do with what Heidegger would call the age of pursuit, the age of danger, the age of persecution ( fara , Gefahr ) in his Bremen lectures (see especially the third one) - is akin to grief. Grief in the sense of what Mary Daly meant by recovering from the war (as opposed to the other two states she thought patriarchy comprises: that of preparing for war and that of waging war). Recovering is the precarious state where survivals are trying to trust something in an environment where sheer and crude violence dares no longer to speak its name, in the image of post-war Levinas gives in his "Sans Nom" (in Proper Names ). I have been thinking about Daly's diagnosis especially because at some point in the last accelerated decades we, as witnesses of the Modern fate, have gone from recovering from a catastrophe to preparing (for) another. General grief has slowly disappeared and was replaced by an eagernes

PS on indexicalism (and the logic of supplement)

Following the previous post, and considering the project I sketched in October , maybe indexicalism (see here for a broad idea of what it is ) is less a (paradoxico-)metaphysics or a cosmology of incompleteness than a Logic in the sense of Hegel's Logik , formal but thoroughly inhaltliche . It is perhaps another Logic of being and its exterior, of borders and its determinations etc. It is a different Logic of negation and concrescence. Maybe it should be developed as in equally paraconsistent way but where a thorough rejection of the principle of explosion (that from contradiction anything can be derived) comes from the work of the Other, of the Outside - through supplement. I have been developing a logic of supplement with a group of people; our starting point is to study, in the way of universal (or abstract) logic, thoroughly non-monotonic formal systems, we call them antimonotonic . In this system, every argument is non-monotonic. As a consequence, no addition can be made t

Hegel, the Other and the nature of his Logic

Hegel's endeavor in the Wissenschaft der Logik witnesses some different senses of what is meant with 'logic'. I was into the chapter on Dasein (chapter 2 of Lehre vom Sein ) where he discusses something and its other in the context of presenting something as a double negation that increases determination and produces concreteness. Hegel offers a theory about negation as concrescence that draws from the Spinozist association between negation and determination. He also offers a route of thinking that expresses determinate negation as it follows thought from indeterminate being towards something - and towards the other through a determination. Further, he explores how the border (the limit, the distinction) between something and (its) other appears both when we focus on what is near to its negation. It is hence simultaneously a study on determinate negation, a study on how it is thought and how it moves around the focus of thought. It is, of course, a grand project that elude

Arte e hospitalidade

Um texto para Raísa Curty que mandei para o Metagraphias: Arte e hospitalidade: Um protocolo .............................................Para Raísa Curty 1 Pierre Klossowski em Les lois de l'hospitalité anuncia a força da curiosidade: uma anfitriã não se entrega jamais à suspeita ou à inveja porque ela é curiosa. A curiosidade conduz a hospitalidade. 1.1 Uma curiosidade que é ela mesma ciberneticamente positiva: ela não é para que o anfitrião saiba mais, veja de mais longe ou com mais precisão – ela conduz o anfitrião para fora de si. Klossowski: quando o anfitrião cessa de ser o mestre de sua casa, ele satisfaz sua missão. 1.1.1 Não se trata de buscar um conhecimento que, como uma espiral, trará ao anfitrião uma melhor condição. A curiosidade não entra em um circuito que se fecha ou que se amplia. Ela é kamikase, ela é potencialmente auto-destrutiva. 1.2 Sem curiosidade as portas ficam fechadas, as escotilhas ao léu, os artefatos trancafiados em suas utilidades e todas a

Reza Negarestani on the political inadequacy of New Materialism

On Facebook, Negarestani writes: << The human is a hybrid and protean idea. It is not merely animal, not merely the agent of theoretical and practical cognitions and not merely the god. Human is an idea which is historically constructed and judged. In line with Hegel, we can never elide the distinction between the totality of the human idea (the totality of history which is not merely the time of nature sans geist) and what we appear to ourselves in a specific historical moment and yet we consider it as either a metaphysical exception or an apex in the chain of beings. If we arrive at such a confusion, we have written a recipe for disaster for ourselves and others. The historically completed human is a distasteful metaphyseal notion which wreaks havoc in the world, not only because such a notion that is perceived as free from the laws of nature and its constraints is illusory, but because it only claims history—as a thinkable sequence of conceptions and transformations—in favor

Une lecture de "Linhas de Animismo Futuro"

Filipe Ceppas a publié a Rue Descartes son lecture de mon livre Linhas de Animismo Futuro : Les neuf textes de Lignes d’animisme futur, de Hilan Bensusan, traitent des dimensions tentaculaires des animismes possibles, des sorcières aux cyborgs, des chamans aux monades de Leibniz, du Quibungo aux lucioles de Pasolini. En exposant et en analysant les perspectives d’un animisme futur, dans un dialogue étroit avec les thèses et concepts d’auteurs tels que Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, Daniel Dennett, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ou Galen Strawson (pour ne citer que les plus pertinents), Bensusan compose un travail vivant, dynamique, prismatique. Rejetant le format fade du « traité », l’ouvrage tisse ces différents fils en un essai compact, cohérent et organique. Ces métaphores vitalistes (« travail vivant », « essai organique ») renvoient à une dimension très animiste du travail, perceptible peut-être seulement de manière tangentielle : une dimension derridienne du langa

A negatividade das interrupções - Lançamento de "A moral do começo"

A moral do começo é uma investigação do poder, da determinação, da facticidade, do salto no escuro, do efeito cósmico e, principalmente, da justiça (e da injustiça) de fazer nascer. O nascimento é um acontecimento que tem ficado espantosamente banalizado em uma sociedade enamorada de si mesma – e que por isso não consegue sonhar para além de si mesma. Há um sentido cosmopolítico em que a reprodução das formas de vida, longe de ser trivial, é violenta e onerosa. E a mobilização dos nascimentos para esta reprodução não pode ser feita sem um enorme esforço de manipulação, cerceamento, contenção, domesticação e disciplinamento. E o que seria o nascimento sem o empenho de uma sociedade em persistir? Pierre Clastres, em sua elegante etnografia de um povo já desaparecido, os Guayaki, conta que para estas pessoas do passado “todo nascimento era experimentado dramaticamente por todo o grupo; não se trata simplesmente da adição de um indivíduo a uma família, mas uma causa de desequilíbrio entr

The trouble with ´territorialization´

Reza Negarestani, in particular in bits of the last chapters of his Intelligence and Spirit (chapters 7 and 8), brings together the opposition between natural and artificial (farm and forest, p. 402; causes and unbound sovereignty of thinking, p. 422-3; causal heteronomy and pure autonomy of the formal, p. 376-7; thoughtless natural processes and artificial logical autonomy, p.386) and the one between what is Given (in the sense of the mythical, in McDowell´s use of the capital ´G´) and the spontaneous, for example in the assertion that taking form to conform to experience is falling into the myth of the Given. Negarestani seems to favor a notion of thinking that is progressively autonomous and head towards its artificial medium that brings together language, logic, and computation in order to elicit the commonalities between them that enable a disconnection with its causal support. This disconnecting autonomy echoes the idea of causality through freedom with which Kant asserted the a