tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79206472834625900612024-03-14T06:17:45.577+00:00No Borders MetaphysicsA blog around metaphysics as a project and its cosmopolitical import. It favors a broad, non-parochial, multidimensional and thoroughly poly-stylistic image of philosophy.Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.comBlogger630125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-44754761884374601592023-04-16T01:00:00.002+00:002023-04-16T01:00:15.574+00:00Memory assemblages<p>
</p><span style="font-size: small;"><b>My talk here at Burque last winter</b></span><br /><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I want to start by thanking
you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the
University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the
south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who
themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory,
immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the
Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the
area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and
they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I
welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we
are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an
archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the
future.</span></p>
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</p>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In this talk, I will try to
elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central
notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by
saying that I claim that I find those assemblages in many different
places and forms, but I would only do that with a measure of care.
The bite of the thought about memory assemblages is that things are
not simply there, they are not kept or retained as they are by
themselves. A first contrast to be made is with the very notion of
presence that invokes the self-standing and self-enduring character
of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>ousia</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
(translated also as substance) and the present time that is
associated with the disclosure done once and for all of a landscape
of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>actualitates</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
in reference to which what is real can be (at least in principle)
detected. Memory assemblages are not present in this sense, they are
rather composed of a diachronic coupling between the time when
something is retained and the time when what has been in retention is
retrieved. The difference between a presence and a memory assemblage
is decisive. Presences are full contents that are the way they are
and, if they can be at least partly accessed, their contents can be
extracted and they can be simulated in an artificial instantiation
and then, eventually, made redundant. This has been, in the reading
of Heidegger I favor, the quest of metaphysics. Metaphysical thinking
is some kind of hunting where what there is is the prey that once
captured – and this can take several different attacks – is
surrendered and placed under command. The world, facing metaphysical
thinking, is, according to Heidegger, in danger – and it cannot do
anything about this entrapment other than to try to escape. Escaping,
to be sure, can take many paths, one of them being that of finding
ways of confronting whatever sets the engine of metaphysics going.
Once metaphysical thinking can be done by anything – it is oriented
toward what Nietzsche posited as a </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Freigeist</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
moved by the will to power – also humans are under its grip, both
in the sense that we can be taken over by metaphysics and in the
sense that we can see no other way but to perform it. We have been
thinking about ourselves in those terms: what makes us the way we are
is a landscape of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>actualitates</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
– material or immaterial, substantial or relational and that
include also capacities and propensities – that is eventually going
to be properly disclosed. In contrast, memory assemblages with their
diachronic poles are not contents that can be made transparent once
and for all – it is only with respect to a situated retrieval
operation that something like a content emerges. As with our ordinary
employment of memory, what is recalled is later set in oblivion
again, not being transparent for good. The (metaphysical) effort most
common is that of trying to explain features of memory like this one
by looking for suitable underlying presences that can do the trick.
My approach can be perhaps described as the opposite one, the one of
taking memory to be what makes possible the effects of presence
altogether. In a memory assemblage, retention cannot do the trick of
determining any content on its own, the pole of retrieval – that is
often triggered and oriented by something that is added to the
landscape. </span>
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<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Notice that other bifurcating
strategies have been attempted to deal with the multiple problems
with metaphysics – like distinguishing between phenomena and
transcendental subjects or, more generally, promoting a bifurcation
of nature and experience. While these bifurcating strategies
acknowledged that the content we extract from things is not entirely
there, they continued to posit full-blown presences like the subject,
experience or nature. Each of those could be made transparent, and
once gripped, replicated artificially. Memory assemblage proposes a
diachronic bifurcation; this is to say, a bifurcation in time, the
past that archives something signaling to its future and the future
that will recuperate it while accessing its past. These diachronic
poles introduce an anachronism common both to thought and to its
objects. Importantly, it also introduces the situated element that
addends coming from what is exterior (and </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>a
posteriori</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">)
provide. Thought, as any event, is hostage to these addends that will
not only shape retrieval, thus forging a memory assemblage, but also
promote remembering and forgetting. Instead of picturing thought as
an extraction of intelligible content from things, as a network of
memory assemblages thought retains with the help of the traces of the
past in the world and retrieves prompted by addends from outside. </span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I take memory assemblages to
be an ultrametaphysical (or postmetaphysical) notion and, in this
sense, it is perhaps not even properly an idea – it is rather a
deconstructive gesture, a preparatory exercise or a template to
conjure other pathways in thinking. By ultrametaphysics I mean the
effort to move past metaphysics, to sideline or exorcize its
presuppositions, to explore its possible aftermath. The endeavor, I
take, was inaugurated by Heidegger who faced metaphysics as an epoch
in a history of beyng, preceded by its fomenting and that could be
succeeded by something that is under preparation since the endeavor
exhausted itself with Hegel and Nietzsche. Heidegger himself
rehearsed several paths for an ultrametaphysics, the most explicit
perhaps being that of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Ereignis</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
and </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Lichtung</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
where the event that arrives and takes place is not a disclosure of
anything but simply to assert its right to appear. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">He
contrasts the will to truth as correct depicture that presides over
metaphysics with truth in a glance in which attends to the event only
to immediately look away, always in the light of the event’s “own
illumination” which keeps concealed where it comes from. Heidegger
reckoned that the exhaustion of the metaphysical project stems from
its very disclosure as will to power. That exhaustion, for him,
ushered in another moment for thought and at the same time shows that
metaphysics is itself an event that illuminates only itself – as
such, metaphysics has not the final word about thought. But it is not
simple to look for other words. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
any case, ultrametaphysics continued in different terms by
philosophers such as </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;">Derrida
and Malabou, from whom I borrow the phrase ‘ultrametaphysics’.
While Derrida looked into ways to deconstruct presence by examining
the anachronic elements that engenders it, Malabou proceeded to shed
light on the plasticity of any intelligibility. Both made clear that
the content extracted from things cannot stand alone – it is like a
text that needs to be read and a lore in the hands of the heirs or a
code that requires an environment to be expressed. Ultrametaphysics
aims at forging a future for thinking after metaphysics and beyond
its presuppositions while contemplating them from the outside. If for
Heidegger metaphysics has terminated because it has been exhausted,
for Derrida that simply worked as an invite to deconstruct it in an
infinite task; as it is not clear that thought would ever be rid of
it. </span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I see memory assemblages,
thus, constituting an ultrametaphysical proposition. Its core is that
memory is entangled with addends in a way that only while the
coupling is at play there could be statements concerning how things
have been. These couplings last only until the next addend comes into
the picture. Each of these assemblages retrieves something that could
fail to be in continuity with what has emerged before - like a new
reading of a book can make something different of it. As a
replacement for presence, memory assemblages focus on the past –
but not the past of </span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>actualitates</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">
that are ready once and for all, like the historicist would maintain,
according to Walter Benjamin. The past here requires retrieval – it
needs an exercise of recuperation and these exercises change as the
future comes along with different addends. Memory is taken to be a
widespread phenomenon, it is found in the human mind, but also in
archives, texts, genomes, tree rings, rocks, landscapes, traditions
and natural laws. A land acknowledgment like the one I did some
minutes ago is perhaps a memory assemblage in embryo: it states that
in the land there is something in retention. In any case, the
ultrametaphysics I propose looks at memories and archives as a point
of departure for a more general approach to what the world is. It is
not a metaphysics in the sense that it cannot offer a landscape of
</span><span style="font-size: small;"><i>actualitates</i></span><span style="font-size: small;">,
it doesn’t deal in presences. It is, rather, ultrametaphysical. It
is not a speculative move from something more known to something less
known through a mirror projection because there is nothing to be
known once and for all. It is, as I will claim in a while,
ultraspeculative.</span></p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Before
that, I’ll make further brief remarks about some features of memory
assemblages. The entanglement of memory and addition is such that
they activate each other to the point that none can subsist on their
own. Addends can come from anywhere to compose memory assemblages.
They also destitute memory assemblages and forge others. The issue of
how to individuate them could then seem pressing as addends keep
coming by, new couplings are made and we should then rather talk
about networks of successive memory assemblages. The task of
individuating them is difficult, but it only makes sense in relation
to</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
a specific memory assemblage (or a network of them). Individuation is
situated, just as measurement is situated for Whitehead. For him,
the selection of a congruence relation for measurement can only be
done from the standing point of a location; it is only from a
specific situation that the selection is suitable and appears as
self-evident. It is from where we are that we measure the size of
objects for our locomotion, it is only with respect to the traveling
body that we can compare distances, it is for a purpose that we count
books, cells or atoms. Analogously, the individual memory assemblage
can only be identified within a memory assemblage. This is because
memory assemblages form no landscape of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">actualitates</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Memory assemblages, thus, cannot be viewed from outside, sideways-on,
so to speak. There is no such thing as furniture of the universe to
be exposed once and for all. This is why memory assemblages are
ultrametaphysical – and we will see soon why they can only be
ultraspeculative also. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Now,
the philosophy of memory goes back at least to Aristotle who
formulated the question of how to distinguish memory from imagination
– arguably the ultimate hard problem for the area. I claim that
Aristotle’s answer, while often seen as insufficient, is not off
the mark: memory, he claims, “is of the past”. To say that the
object of memory is the past is not to say that it captures the past
as a presence or even that the past is there to be grasped once and
for all. To be sure, imagination itself can have the past as its
object and the past could prove to be oblivious to the efforts of
memory and imagination. This perhaps indicates that imagination is
often memory-involving and that no memory assemblage could redeem the
past on its own – as a text is never read once and for all, as
Derrida puts it, reading is spending while saving. Further, the past
is not unaffected by the moths of the outside. If the efforts of
memory are oriented toward the past, they are oriented toward forging
a memory assemblage. The past is itself situated, it is indexical,
which enables me to say that the philosophy of time cannot be but a
department of the philosophy of memory. This, in turn, indicates that
retrieval is always open-ended and that forgetting something once and
for all is as impossible as retrieving something once and for all.
The distinction between remembering and imagining is not a clear-cut
one: we sometimes believe we are imagining what we are remembering
and doubt our </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">remembrances
wondering if they have been invented. The problem is itself a
consequence of the entanglement</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">of
retention and retrieval: what is consigned to memory is orphan and
retrieval is to a large extent beyond prediction. Attempts at solving
the problem – and drawing a line distinguishing remembering and
imagining – involve full-blown skepticism concerning memory, not
far away from the modern-day constructivism in the philosophy of
memory, and the opposite view that there is no fiction but only
recollection from a long past that could involve an eternal return. A
better approach could be the dissolution of the problem: while we
cannot eliminate either of the poles, there is no general and
principled line we can draw between them. Such line would entail
separating out pure retention – which would be memory itself and
the object of remembering – and pure retrieval – which could have
no hold on what is in retention – which would constitute mere
imagining. Rather, there is an amalgam between remembering and
imagining because imagining triggers remembering; while arguably the
opposite is also the case. It is only at a given time – and this
with respect to some memory assemblages - that the separation between
memory and imagination would make sense. To be sure, often we can
have an assemblage that brings together different archives placed in
retention and those decide what is, say, both in the stories being
told and in the archaeological data. Evidence, conceived in terms of
memory assemblages, is about what is in retention, always according
to a retrieval operation. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bergson
has to be credited for placing together memory and duration. But he
confined the importance of retention to the human spirit, and his
recoil from the metaphysics of presence is therefore limited.
Further, he associated active recollection with consciousness, making
memory hostage of a presence. Still, he paved the way for the idea
that perception, as much as thought, is memory-involving. Now, if we
claim that the two poles of retention and retrieval as entangled, we
are committed to the seemingly correlationist thesis that one cannot
either think or perceive one without the other. But this is a
diachronic correlationism that ensures there could be no full-blown
presence. It is, I argue, broader than the one between thought and
the world – or between perception and things. If we further assume
that the </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">res
vera</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in an episode of perception is an archive that is now read by the
sense organs, we see how the poles of the diachronic correlation of
retention and retrieval are broad enough to encompass at least some
of the consequences of assuming a correlation between a fully present
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">res
vera</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
on the one hand and a perceiver ready to articulate, coordinate or
conceptualize. That we cannot know or conceive things-in-themselves
appears then as an unhappy formulation of the claim that retention
without retrieval is blind (while, surely, retrieval without
retention is empty). </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
could help to consider memory assemblages in the context of
contemporary debates in the philosophy of memory. I’ll limit myself
here to a single comment. The neurobiology of memory is experiencing
an engram renaissance – a renaissance of the idea of Richard Semon
that what humans retain is kept somewhere in their body. Engrams are
now sought among neural structures and the issue is whether what is
stored there could be something like full-blown self-standing
propositional contents. In the last few years, the idea of memory
traces has received a lot of attention – they appear as attempts to
describe what is in retention as something that cannot be apt to be
true or false on their own. Now, from the point of view of memory
assemblages, it could be useful to model the engram, or the memory
trace, as an archive that places in retention what can only become a
content when retrieved. This is a point in which ultrametaphysics,
especially the one influenced by Derrida’s deconstruction, can help
neurobiological research. The starting point would be to think of
neuronal structures as texts that always require a reading, or as
genetic code read into proteins with the help of environmental
variables. Retrieval – and indeed addition – is always expected. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
notion of memory assemblage is at odds with the metaphysical
assumption that things could be in principle disclosed and made
transparent. Heidegger found in </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
the starting point of a saga that would engender metaphysics. The
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
of something makes it appear, unveiling and concealing itself, and
truth within the thought of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">aletheia</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
is what ensures the right of anything to withdraw. Memory assemblages
are not thought of in these terms because </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
itself requires no engagement with what is exterior to promote
retrieval. In the protometaphysical regime of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
there is no landscape of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">actualitates</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but each thing retrieves itself of its own accord. There is no
entanglement between memory and the coming of exterior addends.
Perhaps we can say that while through </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
we can say that the right of beings to be is respected, through
memory assemblages it is the right of the exterior addends that is
asserted. It is primarily not about a faithfulness to being (or
beyng), it is above all about an attention to what lies outside it
and can change what it is. </span></span></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">An
important point about the memory assemblages is that whatever is
archived is hostage to the future; there is an opening to
exteriority, to the outdoors, to what is beyond being. Whatever has
been could be part of a memory assemblage and, as a consequence,
cannot be fully forgotten (or fully remembered) because the addends
bring in new possibilities of retrieval (think of archaeological
research but also of frozen germs becoming effective with climate
change or the megafauna coming back to life through genetic, and
epigenetic, research). There is a sense in which this vindicates some
writings of Parmenides concerning the impossibility of lapsing into
inexistence. If we place Parmenides not in the framework of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but rather in that of memory assemblages, we can understand his
remarks about being – that it is finite and it cannot fail to be –
as remarks about what is in retention. Being ought to have an outside
because it is retention, it is always visited by addends from beyond
it. Because nothing is fully forgotten, one cannot understand lapsing
into inexistence. Emanuelle Severino has taken Parmenides to be
claiming that being is eternal, and whatever there is will not stop
being, it is placed in retention somewhere. His is an ontotheological
reading assuming presences – retention without retrieval. But this
can be the beginning of a reading according to which what is
permanent is only retention which is always hostage to retrieval. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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</p>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I’ll
close by saying something about the ultraspeculative, as I indicated.
The picture of ubiquitous memory assemblages contrasts the
metaphysics of presence. It posits that nothing subsists without a
situated retrieval, a saying of the said, so to speak. It claims that
the past is not composed of self-standing, indifferent, separate,
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">staccato</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
units that can dispense the anachronic action of memory. Memory
assemblages straightforwardly break with the metaphysics of presence
by offering an alternative to the sufficiency and completeness both
of what is present and of presences – they cannot stand alone, they
are not fully there. Instead of presences in the present, memory
assemblages are retrievals prompted by addends that stir up what was
incompletely (and insufficiently) placed in retention. Now, these
claims can be seen as the result of a speculative argument that moves
from the workings of some specific memory assemblages – say the
human, animal or geological memory – to a general image where
instead of presences the main intertwined protagonists are memory and
addition. The problem with this speculative argument is that it goes
from a found point of departure – that of memory assemblages – to
something close to a landscape of </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">actualitates</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
The resulting picture ends up betraying the central features of a
memory assemblage because those memory assemblages that compose this
open totality seem to be in retention without requiring retrieval.
The speculative move takes us towards a complete picture, and that
completeness is what precludes retrieval. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indexicalism</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
I addressed a similar friction by proposing that the emerging picture
was paradoxical. There I argued that the furniture of the world is
deictic, best described by expressions like ‘here’, ‘there’,
‘me’, ‘you’, ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘other’, ‘beyond’,
‘past’ etc. The situated picture, if made complete, forms a
landscape that is not itself situated. At the time I thought that
swallowing the paradox was the price to be paid to be faithful to
exteriority. But I think another way out is possible. Instead of
thinking of a landscape of memory assemblages, we can think of a
memory assemblage of memory assemblages. In other words, the move is
an </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ultraspeculative</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
one that deconstructs whatever resulting general landscape that the
speculative move could generate.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>
There is no general thesis about memory assemblages, rather what is
proposed is itself like a memory assemblage. With this move,
exteriority is also not exorcized by a totality. The conclusion
cannot be one that is itself invulnerable to addition. It is as if
the step was from some assemblages to another, broader – and this
broadening is a result of addition. The broader picture cannot be
achieved unless it is itself, as much as what it is about, a memory
assemblage. </span></span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Memory
assemblages are not a ladder towards </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">actualitates</span></span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
that would then enable a view of everything without any memory
assemblage. It is ultraspeculative because the inclusion of addends
in reality transforms whatever was conceived as being real. We can
consider this ultraspeculative effort as a form of storytelling –
and take the metaphysics of presence as another form of storytelling,
one where an epilogue could be reached where every plot and every
character are fully disclosed. The ultraspeculative and
ultrametaphysical story would not be one where a moral can be
revealed and the ultimate significance brought to light by the end of
the story. It is a story of addends that come in and retrieve what
was previously lost, losing track of what was previously made
explicit. But the story provides no immunity against addition.
Rather, a story where the beginning is always retold because it is
seen from different lights at each episode, at each retrieval. A
story where no part of the plot is eventually fully explained and
then redeemed from any obscurity. Rather, the story is never fully
told. Not even its beginning is fully told. A non-ending story.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
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<br />
</p>
<div id="sdfootnote1"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>Compare
with the use of the term ‘ultratranscendental’ in Derrida (<i>Of
Grammatology</i>, pp. 58-59).</p>
</div>
<p><style type="text/css">p.sdfootnote-western { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 10pt; so-language: en-GB; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.sdfootnote-cjk { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: zh-CN; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.sdfootnote-ctl { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: hi-IN; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-GB }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }a.sdfootnoteanc { font-size: 57% }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-80998028379880049442022-11-09T03:23:00.002+00:002022-11-09T03:23:30.634+00:00Talk on ultrametaphysics<p> This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque.
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Hilan Bensusan</p>
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<br />
</p>
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I begin with some of the words in the title. First,
‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’.
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</p>
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‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could
sound like ‘<i>autre</i> 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 <i>Physics</i>,
or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what
can be reached only if the nature of things is considered.
‘Meta-metaphysics’ is a suitable name; the fact that it is taken
is the only obstacle to adopting it – it is taken to mean a study
of metaphysics as a subject, of its features, its goals, its
foundations and often its methods; it ends up being, in books like
the one edited by Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman (in 2009), an
epistemology of metaphysics and, in some sense at least, a
metaphysics of metaphysics. I have attempted to translate then the
first ‘meta’ and obtain ‘post-metaphysics’. This is the term
Fabián Ludueña prefers to envisage the thought activity that is
ushered in by the end of metaphysics. One could also use something
like ‘trans-metaphysics’, as opposed to ‘cis-’, or ‘beyond
metaphysics’ or ‘successor metaphysics’, pointing at Sandra
Harding’s idea of a ‘successor science’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’
is a term coined by Catherine Malabou in her <i>La plasticité au
soir de l’écriture </i><span style="font-style: normal;">connected
to the idea that there are different possible elaborations that are
suitably placed in the </span><i>day after</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
of metaphysics, a plurality of paths for thinking at the dusk of the
metaphysical proposition. I’m inclined to ‘ultrametaphysics’
because it can also imply some kind of continuity with some
dimensions and aims that have appeared somehow in metaphysics itself.</span></p>
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</p>
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‘<span style="font-style: normal;">History’. Malabou associates
ultrametaphysics with a variety of what she calls ‘motor schemes’.
In her “The end of writing”, she wonders whether “Derrida ever
consider the possible caducity of the graphic model in general?”.
This is an interesting question because she’s not merely
criticizing (or refuting) the graphic model that is, according to
her, part of grammatology which is what triggered deconstruction as a
possible succession of metaphysics – what should be done to break
with the ‘metaphysics of presence’, with the fixation on </span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>οὐσία</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
From her Hegelian point of view, she is saying that the aftermath of
metaphysics has a history, not in the sense of a succession of
refutations but at least in the sense of a progressive refinement of
thoughts and their scopes. Further, this history is not itself a
history of ideas, it responds to the needs of a time; the term
‘caducity’ suggests that Derrida’s graphic model deconstruction
could be recommended for one period but not subsequently. This
indicates that there is maybe a history in the wake of metaphysics.</span></span></p>
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</p>
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<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">Now, I take that
the history of ultrametaphysics starts with Heidegger’s departure
from onto-theological thinking in the direction of uncovering a
certain history of </span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>beyng</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
(or possibly a history of </span></span><strike><span lang="grc-GR"><i>be(i/y)ng</i></span></strike><span lang="grc-GR"><i>)</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">.
There have been previous criticisms of metaphysics as a project, and
one strand of that is still influential – namely in a skeptic or
quasi-skeptic tradition that runs from Hume to Carnap through Kant,
at least in some readings. These criticisms are around the
</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>feasibility</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
of the project itself – it could be beyond the limits of what can
be attained by humans or by any knower deprived of some sort of
</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>intellectuelle Anschauung</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">,
it could therefore face limitations for its completion – but not
about its suitability, appropriateness, convenience or
praiseworthiness. To be sure, in some circumstances – and this is
part of our history – the issue of feasibility gets mixed with
these other issues to suggest that metaphysics has to be abandoned or
cannot go any further. For Heidegger, there is a sense in history –
which is </span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>Geschichte</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
and not only </span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>Historie</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
in his distinction in the </span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>History
of</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>Beyng</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">
– that cannot take place within metaphysics but only outside it. In
that sense, that is obfuscated by metaphysics, there is a time
previous to metaphysics as much as there is one that is posterior to
it. What is not clear in the very idea of a |</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>Geschichte
des S</i></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-GB"><i>eyns</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-GB">
is whether that posterior history has itself a history (let alone
whether it can be anticipated). So, the history of ultrametaphysics
is not the history of a discipline; part of it is the history of an
idea, or of variations of an idea, but this is maybe not all that
there is to it – if there is a genuine </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-GB"><i>Geschichte
des Seyn</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-GB">-like
approach to be taken, we should be looking at how the variations of
the idea somehow respond to something else. </span></span></span>
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</p>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">And finally, ‘chapters’. They
are labeled by their protagonists and they are Heidegger, Levinas,
Derrida, Ludueña and Malabou (the list could be longer and
different, I claim no justification for this choice other than my own
attention). There is a sense in which each of the main characters in
each chapter of this attempted history of ultrametaphysics is
attached to at least some of the previous ones. But the plotline as
the word ‘chapter’ suggests is missing – or at least only
loose. More than chapters, this history would be more like a
collection of short stories – short histories – that are
connected to each other in different ways to form a unity. Of course,
a unifying epilogue can hardly be forthcoming. Each chapter is a new
beginning and this is maybe because ultrametaphysics is really an
endeavor in beginnings. Heidegger has brought attention on several
occasions to </span><i>Abschied</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
(farewell), which he considers on a pair with beginnings; farewell is
not abandoning what can have no continuity, but precisely leaving
what could be promising. If that gesture is not there, nothing can
start. Commenting on how Malabou departs from Heidegger’s reading
of Hegel (in </span><i>Sein und Zeit</i><span style="font-style: normal;">),
Derrida writes of a time for farewells (“A time for farewells”).
Heidegger would insist that although metaphysics has no space for
genuine farewells, the end of metaphysics could take a long time
because even though its plotline has reached an epilogue, a new
beginning depends on the capacity to prepare for a taste for
farewells. Perhaps this is another plausible name for what I’m
calling ultrametaphysics: a time for farewells. </span>
</p>
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</p>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Chapter 1: Heidegger</b></span></p>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Heidegger´s complaint about
metaphysics, in the various forms it took from the systematic
forgetting (or dismissal, or covering up) of being to the continuous
efforts to extract the intelligibility of everything, is likely to be
the inaugural gesture of ultrametaphysics. (Again, ‘inaugural’ is
a here problematic word not only because Heidegger might have had his
predecessors but also because it is not sure whether there is a
proper continuation to what has been thus inaugurated.) In order to
think beyond metaphysics – to reinvent it is to take the risk of
reinventing thought because the idea that thought is associated with
a </span><i>Machenschaft </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(machination)
to uncover what underlies beings is widespread and hard to avoid –
Heidegger looked at what made metaphysics happen, to its inception.
He viewed the Pre-Platonic thinkers as outside metaphysics, in some
occasions as a real alternative while in others as merely its
starting point. To go beyond metaphysics – to perform a destruction
or an </span><i>Abbau</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on it –
is to change the way things are dealt with. To prepare for the leap
(</span><i>Sprung</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) or the turn
(</span><i>Kehre</i><span style="font-style: normal;">), one needs to
find a way outside the machination to transform the world into a
device, enframed and controllable (a </span><i>Ge-Stell</i><span style="font-style: normal;">).
It is to prepare – and neither to machinate nor simply to wait –
for a time when things could somehow be left to do their own things
and to reveal and conceal themselves of their own accord. The
Pre-Platonic time can be seen in non-metaphysical terms if we pay
attention to </span><i>φύσις</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
and to </span><i>ἀλήθεια</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
and how they gradually transformed into </span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>οὐσία
</i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">and</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i>
ὁμοίωσις </i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;">in
the hands of Plato, of Aristotle (crucially by Aristotle’s reading
of Plato), of the medieval translations of Aristotle and of modern
supplements to the whole saga – like the subject and its
representations. What was an independent process of exposing and
withdrawing that deserved to be guarded becomes a described process
that can be made fully explicit and the description (θέσις) can
be correct or not. Heidegger’s move towards something previous to
metaphysics – and his interest in telling the history of its
gradual inception and its gradual completion (in Hegel and Nietzsche)
– paves the way to a quest for something other, for other terms,
other tonalities, other ways of going about things. Both the
pre-metaphysics and the post-metaphysics (ultrametaphysics) can be
easily viewed in metaphysical terms. The transformation required to
go beyond metaphysics cannot be only of attention, theme or
presuppositions, it has to involve all that at once and more, a
departure from the thinking in terms that are guided by security, or
reassurance, or control. Heidegger contemplates the idea of a history
underneath that of beings that gave rise to what prompted metaphysics
and that spans to something else after it after his so-called
Nietzschean turn: in his reading, metaphysics is revealed as guided
by the will to power. Nietzsche is the last metaphysician as much as
he remains in the realm of the will to power instead of resolutely
gesturing at the farewell that Heidegger wants to rehearse. </span></span>
</p>
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</p>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Heidegger’s
way to relinquish metaphysics is not to leave it neither from the
front door nor from the back door, but from its ground, from below.
In his efforts just after the </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nietzschean
turn, he envisages a second beginning for thought </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
is more primordial, more initial, more archaic than the first, based
on </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">φύσις</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ἀλήθεια</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">;
instead of building from them (arguably in a road that will lead to
metaphysics), he proceeds in excavating to see what is underneath
them. While the first beginning is a ground, the second is an abyss
(</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ab-Grund</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
as opposed to </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Grund</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">).
This ancestral of the being buried twice by </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">φύσις
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
then by</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">metaphysics
(</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng)</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
appears as indifferent to any metaphysical concern focused on
unveiling beings. Heidegger contrasts </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">φύσις</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to the more primordial non-grounding beginning of </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– the event. This second beginning cannot ground anything, it
commences without commandment. These successive twists (</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Verwindungen)
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ensure
that each inception makes no claim over anything else – the second
beginning brings forth inceptions that multiply themselves. It ushers
in a collection of independent inceptions while the first beginning
is one of them for metaphysics in its history from Plato to Nietzsche
(and Hegel) is itself an event, an event that was prepared and that
is leaving its aftertaste. The second beginning comes before any
grounding. As such, it cannot appear as a product of an
archaeological effort; the end of metaphysics requires not an act but
a preparation, which involves both doing something without a specific
aim in mind and expecting what cannot be fully conceived. It involves
bringing the event to the fore and, in doing that, enabling the
history of </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to appear, not as a plot of beings and not even as an unveiling of
what was hidden but as the very emergence of events that spring from
something other than the scope of all machination. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
ultrametaphysics of </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
revolves around leaving things be what they are and attending to what
surfaces – truth is not connected to either </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ἀλήθεια</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
or </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ὁμοίωσις
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">but
to</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Lichtung, </span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">clearing.
Heidegger understands that the truth behind truth as unveiling is a
mere showing, like what happens when light arrives in a clearing in
the forest. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is also an </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Austrag</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
a resolution; thought attends to questions not as preludes to answers
but as the very place where a resolution can be offered. In that
sense, ultrametaphysics is itself history of </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in the sense that this is what escapes the lenses of metaphysics
where there is no history beyond the developments and interactions of
objects (of beings) that can, themselves, be fully exposed.
Ultrametaphysics is not a discipline, an area of study, not something
to be studied or researched but it is a condition, a condition of
being exposed – a certain passivity. The event </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">starts
something without being either conditioned or unconditioned – both
will place it in the game of grounding and being grounded that is the
mark of the metaphysical – is in the hands of the farewell (</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
die Verwahrunrg des Abschieds</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">).
There is no beginning in the second meaning if a farewell is not
looming on its horizon – the farewell is the antidote to any
possible grounding. Heidegger’s word here, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Verwahrung</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
is apt because it is translated as safekeeping or custody – a
consignation – but it appeals to what is true, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Wahr.
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Heidegger
himself associates the words </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Wahr
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Wahrheit
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">with
guarding, keeping, protecting (for example in the Bremen lectures).
Truth, here, is something akin to letting things be what they are. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
should be noted that Heidegger himself arguably wrote several
chapters in this history of ultrametaphysics in the sense that he had
three or four conceptions of the aftermath of metaphysics –
associated with different diagnoses of the fate of metaphysics. These
three or four conceptions – possibly one associated with
destruction in </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Sein
und Zeit</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
one connected to his turn towards Nietzsche, one explicit in
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Unterwegs
zur Sprache </span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
one rehearsed in the seminars in Le Thor – are related to each
other in different ways that I cannot explore here. In any case,
ultrametaphysics starts with this gesture of repudiation of
metaphysics as nihilism, as the prelude to the artificialization of
the world. It also becomes clear that the relation between
metaphysics and ultrametaphysics is not merely one of succession in
time, the emergence of an ultrametaphysical epoch is a struggle with
the inertia of metaphysics, even when or maybe precisely because, it
is completed in that there is no surprise beyond the will to power.
The birth of a genuine ultrametaphysical era is not a matter of
course, its pangs reveal that the successor to metaphysics is not
likely to be an heir of a dead ancestor. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Chapter
2. Levinas</b></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Levinas
is often read, to a great extent with good reasons, in contraposition
with Heidegger. He has, for example, cherished the word ‘metaphysics’
in some of his writings – notably in </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Totalité
et Infini</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– and opposed the word ‘ontology’. He understands metaphysics
as springing from a desire for the other whereas ontology is the name
of a general malaise he finds in Western philosophy, that of
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ontologism</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
which is the assumption that there is nothing beyond being, which
ultimately assumes that to think is to do violence to the Other in
the name of the same. There are important points of convergence,
though, beyond their phenomenological common starting point and their
urge to go beyond Husserl’s attention to intentionality. A salient
convergence is that Levinas also understands that there is something
deeply wrong with the tradition that goes from Aristotle to Nietzsche
(and Hegel) – extensive perhaps to Heidegger. That tradition –
mostly ontologist, and this is why he would count Plato out – has
been concerned with extending the sameness of being to achieve some
sort of total outlook where each point can be seen from nowhere and
there is a symmetry between any two points that would make me an
alter-ego, the other of the other. This quest for impersonal,
unsituated totality – that Franz Rosenzweig, who to a large extent
inspired Levinas, found in the whole history of philosophy from Jonia
to Jena – is an artifact ready for any violence towards the Other.
This is simultaneous the result of an unabashed crave for freedom and
an unbound thirst for knowledge. Levinas’ analysis of skepticism
suggests that that skeptics could be seen as somehow out of the bad
path of being guided by sameness while making clear that often they
don’t because they refrain from knowledge not as a decision in the
name of the Other, in the name of the infinite responsibility that
precedes any freedom, but because they find some sort of
impossibility on their way. They limit their freedom, but only
because of the (technical) limits to attain knowledge. They merely
abandon the ontologist boat to the extent that the project of
complete sameness is not feasible.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="en-US" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Levinas
urges combat against ontology – the ontologist reduction of the
Other to the same – through an attention to the responsibility that
guides my metaphysical desire for the Other. For him, metaphysics
comes from this desire and has been misled by the ontologist drives
that prevail in the long predominating tradition – this is a reason
why ultrametaphysics is a suitable name, it fits the case of Levinas’
project which in a sense aims at continuing metaphysics while somehow
pruning its rotten branches. To be sure, this continuity is not easy
to see as Levinas is clear that the thought of responsibility – and
sanctity, as he describes his thinking as focused on the possibility
of sanctity – provokes an interruption in the flow of freedom and
he pursuit of knowledge in the name of justice towards the Other.
Thought – and action – is seen as ultimately hostage to the
Other, who has imprinted in me the means to find my way around. What
replaces ontology is perhaps ethics but in a very special sense where
no deontology is possible and the orientation towards the Other leads
to an unattainable infinity – which makes ethics impossible, and
yet enables sanctity. Further, what follows from ontology is a
situated outlook where asymmetry and diachrony are ubiquitous; my
concerns with the Other result from an appeal and are unrelated to
any reciprocation as it is criminal to expect the Other to abstain
from her freedom to satisfy any of my needs. Asymmetry means that the
Other is always between me and a morsel of bread – but I don’t
stand between anyone and their food. Diachrony means that I can
attend the Other too late, and in any case, I cannot hear the Other
merely in what is said even though what is said is the place where I
can find the traces of the Other – the face which is the word
together with the gaze that expresses an ultimate vulnerability
associated to my responsibility and therefore to the limits both to
freedom and knowledge.</span></span></span></span></p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
extended Levinas’ ultrametaphysics beyond the limits of the human
Other in </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Indexicalism</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
The instance of taking the Other – and exteriority – seriously
contrasts with the urge to provide a suitable description of
everything that is found. This attitude – ontologist, ontological –
is a reduction of deixis like others, beyond, outside or exterior to
a substantive account that would work no matter the standpoint.
Substantives, instead of indexicals, oriented the efforts of the
tradition that is to be exorcized – call it
metaphysics-cum-ontology. This is to be replaced by a recommended
ultrametaphysics of responsibility that I labeled ‘metaphysics of
the others’ which embraced paradox in the sense of insisting that
deixis are everywhere – and therefore forming some sort of totality
that I intended to portray. It is paradoxical to do it because the
outside imposes limits to any totality – it is as if we had to
posit a totality of outsides. I understood this paradoxical
ultrametaphysics as simultaneously a critique of metaphysics
according to which no attempt at a complete outlook can pass muster.
The constituents of the ultrametaphysical portrayal – the Other,
exteriority, the Great Outdoors – provide bounds to an
all-encompassing image. This points to an important feature of
ultrametaphysics: it assumes, one way or another, an incompleteness
that is presumably systematically missing in the metaphysical
enterprise. Here Kant – and his correlationist inheritance
according to Quentin Meillassoux – can be invoked to introduce an
insufficiency to any effort at accomplishing a complete foray into
how things are. That we are limited to our correlation with things
can then be assumed to be a feature of how things are – and this is
what Meillassoux’s complaint concerning a lot of the philosophy
from the last two centuries, from Hegel to Deleuze. A Levinassian
ultrametaphysics escapes this complaint by taking exteriority to
genuinely affect thought and being: there is an outside, a Great
Outdoors, throughout. Incompleteness cannot be turned into
completeness; if we refuse to locate the former somewhere in a view
from nowhere – among humans, or among living things – we pave the
road to paradox. Levinas’ lesson here is that we cannot fully purge
the impact of proximity – here the similarities, and differences,
between his ‘proximité’ associated with recurrence on the one
side and Heidegger’s ‘Nähe’ that contrasts with </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ge-Stell</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is likely to be a key to understand what is at stake in at least some
of the ultrametaphysical proposals. In any case, because of
proximity, situatedness cannot be exorcized; and a crucial feature of
proximity is that it is an-archaic: there is no way to calculate (or
machinate) the emergence of proximity, if there were, a symmetrical
view from nowhere would be also possible (and incompleteness
ultimately exorcized). </span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">On
the issue of paradox, it is interesting to consider the underlying
logic of ultrametaphysics, and not only in the case of Levinas, as a
deviant logic. I cannot say much about it here, but it is clear that
what is at work at least in most of these ultrametaphysical proposals
is no classical logic – and likely no Tarskian logic (those whose
consequence relation is reflexive, transitive and monotonic).</span></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">There
is much to be explored here – it makes sense to assume that the
logic that would enable a departure from metaphysics is not one that
presided over its developments. The open question is whether these
ultrametaphysical logics could be recognized as such. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Chapter 3. Derrida</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Derrida marks the introduction of
structuralism into the realm of ultrametaphysics. The analysis of
signification in terms of differences is extended from signifiers to
content itself, enabling a deconstruction of full presence and
therefore of experience, substratum, matter, intention and other
metaphysical notions. Deconstruction is an heir of Heidegger’s
</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Destruktion </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
that it challenges the onto-theological as an effort to consolidate
</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ούσιαι
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">underneath
the concealing and revealing of things. The metaphysics of presence
assumes that there is a full-blown present in which things are fully
what they are. It is then associated with the logocentrism that
Derrida finds in Western philosophy from Plato to Austin –
including, to a large extent, also the structuralists and Heidegger,
both pivotal for Derrida’s project. The primacy of speech over text
comes together with the privilege of presence over the crafts of
iteration – there is an underlying arche-text that through its
iterations promotes the impression of full presence available.
Derrida takes Kant’s criticism of metaphysics as a step in the
direction of deflating presence and yet insufficient because the
subject and her experience continue to be taken as fully present.
What is required is to pose the ultratranscendental question
concerning what makes presence possible; as the transcendental ushers
in, for Kant, a renewed model for metaphysics, one could say that
deconstruction is a model for ultrametaphysics launched by the
ultratranscendental question. No extracted intelligibility can be
preserved in text because consignation entails orphanhood – as
Derrida shows in his reading of the </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Phaedrus</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
that involves the betrayal, or parricide, of Socrates performed by
Plato when he writes. The text is read in multiple and novel ways
because additional things always surround it. Further, the full
present that is not preserved is nothing but an effect of a series of
iterations. The deconstruction of the present entails an anachronism
that cannot stop short of what is ultimately undeconstructible: a
certain waiting associated with storing anything – including
understanding – that Derrida calls messianicity (without
messianism) and justice which guides deconstruction but that cannot
be itself deconstructed as it is itself already anachronic.</span></span></span></span></p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The connection between Derrida to
Levinas is possibly still more complex than that of the latter to
Heidegger. It also involved more proximity. As it is perhaps constant
in the history of ultrametaphysics rehearsed in these chapters, the
passage from one step to the next is so bumpy that it is not clear
whether the movement is either forward or backward. There is a sense
in which Derrida’s deconstruction is a reworking of some of
Levinas’ major themes – the Other, justice, violence, the trace.
The reworking seems often to be nevertheless a transformation beyond
recognition. In several points of his text, Derrida seems closer to
Heidegger and, indeed, the idea that there is an underlying
resolution to presence that can open a new continent for thought
could suggest that deconstruction is something like an instance of
the second beginning. There are however salient differences, I’ll
mention two. First, deconstruction is a non-ending activity that
builds on the anachronic character of the undeconstructibles. It is
closer to justice than to truth as </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Lichtung</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
even though it also lingers in resolution as it draws on
undecidabilities. Derrida is here closer to Levinas who tends to
place justice as an issue underneath the quest for any truth. In this
sense, Derrida suspects Heidegger himself ends up committed to a
(perhaps ultrametaphysical) version of the metaphysics of presence.
</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
to offer what is maybe an oversimplified example, is fully there,
short or long, it is not ultimately </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">aus
der Fuge</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– not undecidable. Second, Derrida is less interested in beginnings
– first or second. Instead, he focuses on what comes next, on what
will change the past: a chain of supplements that would be prosthetic
in the sense of something capable to fix current lacks while creating
others. The supplement – and the announced but not delivered logic
associated with it, certainly a deviant one – produces
insufficiencies in the past, even in the beginning capable to provide
grounds or to dispel them. The supplement is a figure of messianicity
as an undeconstructible: we wait for it, but its effect is
undecidable.</span></span></p>
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<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
deconstructive ultrametaphysics proposes a departure from the
logocentric efforts to capture the presence of something. The
metaphysical effort depends on a mistaken conception of a primacy of
speech over writing – and arche-writing. In that sense, it is not a
suitable effort; further, it is a misled one as there is no possible
way to preserve any understanding, any intelligibility, without the
gesture of consignation that will precisely send the presence of the
present to an anachronism. Writing is disseminating; what is kept is
there only as a trace, as a specter. It is as if Plato’s text,
especially around the arguments concerning writing in the Phaedrus,
there was a key to dismantling logocentric Platonism (to be clear, it
is not sure that what would then remain is not a different kind of
Platonism). If metaphysics attempted to provide extraction of
intelligibility, it attempted the impossible; the project is to be
abandoned not because of concerns with </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
or the Other – or the Great Outdoors – but rather because it is
misconceived. What comes after metaphysics points in the direction of
an alternative image of thinking where presence is taken as an
elusive effect. The work of ultrametaphysics is to disentangle
presences that will not cease emerging. What structuralism
contributed to the venture was to provide a way to illuminate the
differential structure behind signification that makes metaphysics
not only the name of an epoch or an event (in the history of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
but also the persistent tonality where the present appears to
suppress both the past and the future. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Chapter 4. Ludueña</b></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ludueña
draws as heavily on some notions and gestures of ultrametaphysician
Derrida as on Plato, a Plato that resists a metaphysical
interpretation – detached, in particular, from Aristotle’s
reading. He aims at a thorough rehabilitation of specters – that
was already of major importance for Derrida, in particular in his
last 10 to 15 years. Ludueña’s reading of the metaphysical project
diagnoses it as an era of exorcism where specters were either
replaced by spirit or eliminated by an idea of immortality as
eternal, post-mortem life. He understands that anti-spectrologist
tradition in Western thought as coinciding with the Christian attempt
to place resurrection with an improved body at the center of common
life. If there is a way to expect the full presence of the dead ones
now promoted to something closer to the eternal present, specters are
out of the picture. Spirits are the specters cleaned of their lack of
</span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">οὐσία
</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">that
make them homeless, always haunting the homes and the bodies of
others. The metaphysics to be succeeded by a spectrology privileged
full presences throughout; everything was accounted for in terms
other than those of conjurations, ghosts, phantasmagoria, </span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">revenants</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and possessions. Instead, he proposes a spectrology that brings all
these things back, both to an ultrametaphysical politics –
communities cannot act or be understood without the spectral
insistence of the dead through institutions, legacies and archives –
and to ultrametaphysics itself (his term is post-metaphysics). The
issue with the tradition from which spectrology attempts to departure
is that it ultimately dealt with the appropriate issues –
immortality, the outside, the nature of thought and mind, the
insufficiency of matter – but went astray precisely by the drive
towards full-presence, the drive to exorcise specters. Ludueña then
recognizes, to a great extent, a commonality of topics between
ultrametaphysics and its ancestor. Ultrametaphysics is a different
way to do the same thing – a way that would welcome instead of
discard specters.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Further,
Ludueña elaborates on his spectrology under the close influence of
Platonism. His ultrametaphysical Platonism is what he calls
</span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">disjunctology</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
This is the study of a structural disjunction between the incomplete
presences on the one side – the bodies, including the brain – and
the para-ontological realm of specters that would correspond to the
world of intelligibles. Ludueña maintains that ideas can be
conceived not as full presences – spiritual items, immaterial
</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ούσιαι
</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">–
but as specters that haunt the sensible because it is intrinsically
dehiscent (a word that is equally important for Derrida and Levinas).
The sensible is not under the control of an independent intelligible
but rather the latter is spectral and is not fully present either in
itself or in the former. There is an incompleteness to the sensible
that goes along with the incompleteness of the sensible. It is,
perhaps, as if the vertical line often ascribed to Plato where the
intelligible world stands on top of the sensible had a ninety-degree
rotation and is now a horizontal line where both stand side by side,
both incomplete and incapable to complete each other reciprocally.
This is the structural disjunction: no specter can fix dehiscence and
therefore no specter can find a home and become a purely spiritual
substance. Further, specters themselves cannot subsist on their own,
they are there for hauntings and conjurations from the sensible. The
insufficiency that informs disjunction appears as some sort of
ultrametaphysical principle. Dual incompleteness makes the full
extraction of intelligibility of the sensible impossible – the
project of metaphysics is, again, the result of a mistake. It is a
philosophical and theological mistake that crucially misunderstands
the nature of immortality. What metaphysics intended to attain can
only be achieved in ultrametaphysical terms – that is, by
spectrological adventure. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ludueña
goes further, especially in the fifth and last volume of his </span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">La
Comunidad de los Espectros</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
to predict the friction between what he calls ‘the posthumous
post-humans’ – who believe in the Christian and trans-humanist
credo that the body will be overcome by an artificial body first
through religion and then through the artificialization of
intelligence – and the very new ones, as he calls them, who would
rather profess the heretic ultrametaphysics of disjunctology. This is
a battle that will take centuries, he claims. This is because the
artificialization of the world is deeply entrenched in the Christian
faith in the full overcoming of the body. In Ludueña, interestingly,
the friction between metaphysics and ultrametaphysics becomes a
debate around the legacy of Plato. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Chapter 5.
Malabou</b></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">One
way to approach Malabou’s ultrametaphysical emphasis on plasticity
is to consider the relationship between genetics and epigenetics.
While the genetic code is enabling, its decodification depends on
circumstances beyond anything that can be likened to a text –
epigenetics include that environment that canalizes different
genotypes towards a similar phenotype and plasticity that makes the
same genotype give rise to different phenotypes. Plasticity is not an
enabling condition, it is everywhere, both in what is conditioned and
in what conditions. </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“Plasticity”,
she writes in “The end of writing”, “designates the double
aptitude of being able both to receive a form (clay is plastic) and
to give form (as in the plastic arts or plastic surgery)”. She then
intends to rehabilitate the notion of plastic, which appears in the
text of Hegel, by rescuing the notion of form to an ultrametaphysical
context. She maintains that form, which has been much involved with
the metaphysics of presence, is also waiting for its </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">decompression
or its liberation. There is an underlying working of form, through
plasticity, that is dissociated from the couplings between </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">οὐσία</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
form that had taken place in the (internal) history of metaphysics.
It is form itself, and transformation (she appeals to Heidegger’s
</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Wandlung</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
that makes iteration possible and therefore has presence not as its
presupposition but as its effect. In order for iteration to take
place, a trace has to be modifiable – the reappearance of ‘A’
in 𝓐, 𝐀, </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Noto Serif CJK SC;"><span lang="zh-CN"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">or
even 𝔸, for example, presupposes that the trace comes with
plasticity. After all, she claims, there is always something other
than writing in writing – and this is not only the effect of
writing. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">For
Malabou, metaphysics is a subclass of what is the broader intent of
ultrametaphysics. But for ultrametaphysics to broaden the scope in
such a way, it has to reinterpret the materials metaphysics has
worked on. What she does to Hegel can be compared with what Ludueña
does to Plato – the differences notwithstanding, both projects
involve rescuing a metaphysical canon and reading them in
ultrametaphysical lights. In that sense, there is a continuity
between moments in metaphysics and after it. If Ludueña’s picture
counts Plato off and before the metaphysical endeavor, Malabou leaves
Hegel out of the picture of a metaphysics of presence which is in
turn characterized by a blindness to what is plastic. It is
plasticity that ought to be rehabilitated by ultrametaphysics, or
rather, by the contemporary demands on ultrametaphysics – coming
primarily by the urge for a renewed evolutionary synthesis informed
by epigenetics and by the neuroscience of accidents. Ultrametaphysics
has a history – and much in a Hegelian vein. In that sense, like
deconstruction, it is itself non-ending.</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
notion of a motor scheme, that Malabou works out from remarks by
Michel Serres, tries to bring together the imaginary and the
historical. The succession of different motor schemes provides a
continuity of metaphysics and ultrametaphysics – the work of the
negative, to be understood in terms of the plasticity that is in the
negative itself under the current motor scheme, acquires new readings
but doesn’t disappear when metaphysics fades. Malabou takes
ultrametaphysics to look into what needs to be in place around for
metaphysical thinking to thrive; its history reveals what is implicit
not only in metaphysics but also in previous attempts to look into
what constructs and deconstructs it. The passage from the graphic
model to the plastic model, as Malabou pictures it, illustrates how
motor schemes not only replace but also refine each other. With
Malabou, ultrametaphysics acquires a history, it is not constituted
of competing or complementary approaches but rather by a development.
If metaphysics has itself a history, its end means a broadening of
the scope of this history – someone could say, having Heidegger’s
terms in mind, that it is as if the departure of metaphysics is the
inclusion of </span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in a history of beings - and ideas. (One could compare this with the
idea of the inclusion of the climate or Gaia in history.) For
Heidegger, however, the two occurrences of ‘history’ above would
translate different things as </span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Geschichte</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is not a (historical) development of </span></span></span><span lang="grc-GR"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Historie</span></i></span><span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
In any case, we can perhaps see in the line through our five chapters
a progressive integration of ultrametaphysics at least in the
gestures, notions and procedures of metaphysics – while arguably
not in its aims. If this is the case, ultrametaphysics is turning out
to be more like a metamorphosis of metaphysics than its funeral. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="grc-GR" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="grc-GR"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Small </b></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Coda:
an-archaeology and addition</b></span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
perhaps more partisan name for ultrametaphysics is </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">an-archaeology</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
More than partisan, one that would suit my own projects in the area.
To be sure, most of the protagonists of these chapters can be read as
thinking an-arché as the ungrounded, the ungoverned or the unguided.
I’d nonetheless distinguish the study of an-arché from
ultrametaphysics because there are (seemingly) non-ultrametaphysical
approaches to the an-arché – I think of Deleuze’s study of
repetition and perhaps the Epicurist take on </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">clinamina</span></i></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
among others. My project of looking at addition as a way to think
through the outside combines an-archaeology and ultrametaphysics. I
leave this just as an indication of my own placement in this
narrative. </span></span></span></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-GB }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-34491575252334159542022-08-02T00:52:00.005+00:002022-08-02T00:52:52.014+00:00Severino and Derrida: some remarks on the parricide as logocentrism<p>Paul Livingston, in his <i>Logic of Being</i>, starts out reminding us of the battle of gods and giants at stake in Plato's <i>Sophist</i> according to Heidegger. To the association of being with <i>ousia</i> is connected the very psycho-logic of permanence underneath changing appearances. Reading the Sophist with Severino makes one hint at a connection between the parricide (the introduction of nothingness as a possible object of thought - and consideration) and the link between being and <i>ousia</i>. And, as a consequence, of the origin of the metaphysics of presence in the gesture that introduced nothingness to (Greek) thought. <br /></p><p>Severino's Parmenides holds that whatever is is permanent. Appearances, to be sure, come and go, but nothing is lost, degenerated or annihilated. Being remains, but it is shown only partially always, it depends on what is exposed and nothing is fully exposed at once - because time passes only in order to make appearances come about. Think about it as a book with bits that are read but everything cannot be read at once. It is as if the reader goes through it - at her leisure - but the read bits and the ones not read are still there, in the text. What appears as present to the reader is an effect of the text - but nothing is lost, there is no nothing, things are kept in the text, albeit the order of time impressed by the reader (that could be an order unrelated to the order of the text) is makes what is present fade. </p><p><i>Ousiai</i> would be like the notes that a reader takes to summarize the text - an <i>aide-memoire</i>. These other text is present in full and the forgetting of what has been read (the annihilation of what has been read) is remedied by something that is placed in safety: something that remains even when everything falls into nothingness. The thought of <i>ousia</i> and its urgency is a consequence of the parricide that dissolves the underlying text, the permanence of everything irrespective of the appearances. The parricide is logocentric in the sense that it exorcises from being anything that has a graphematic structure. On the contrary, being is then considered to be self-standing presences (<i>ousiai)</i> that are like the <i>aide-memoire</i>, like what is really meant by the graphematic structure. Presence is like the reading without text, like the summary that is fully present as a <i>vouloir-dire</i> underneath the text that remains under the many layers of interpretation - a self-standing, logocentric presence. <br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-63387111664662357822022-06-14T03:58:00.005+00:002022-06-14T03:58:40.033+00:00An-archaeology and spectral realism<p> <a href="https://www.academia.edu/81432830/Aa_An_Archaeology_and_Spectral_Realism" target="_blank">My talk </a>in Aachen today<br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-61966171095358438712022-05-12T21:51:00.001+00:002022-05-12T21:51:12.645+00:00Charla en Otros Presentes<p>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="pt-PT"><b>Filosofía,
espectros e</b></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="pt-PT"><b>
indexicalismo</b></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT"><b>Colonial
y contracolonial em filosofía:</b></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">El
privilégio de la universalidad en una linea canónica desde el
excepcionalismo </span><span lang="pt-PT">grego hasta el
excepcionalismo del Atlantico Norte (los cinco países de
Grosfoguel). </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">Cabrera: el
problema es que ellos vienen aquí y hablam de su problema em su
lenguas, nosotros vamos allí y hablamos de sus problemas em sus
lenguas. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">Bernasconi:
el paradoxo del parochialismo de la filosofia – la razón es
universal pero </span><span lang="pt-PT">comenzó</span><span lang="pt-PT">
em Grecia. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">La historia
de la filosofía como empresa de colonización: Dieterich Tiedemann y
Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann en los 1790s. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">Una
contra-historia de la filosofia: el desmantelamiento del canon y los
problemas canónicos – no es el olvido del Atlantico Norte, es una
outra orden del día.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">Trés temas
contra-coloniales: la unicidad del canon (an-arqueología), el
sentido del universal (indexicalismo) y la importancia del </span><span lang="pt-PT">comienzo</span><span lang="pt-PT">
(espectralidad). </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="pt-PT">Espectralidad
</span><span lang="pt-PT">l</span><span lang="pt-PT">atin</span><span lang="pt-PT">oa</span><span lang="pt-PT">mericana:</span></b></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">Arcila: </span><span lang="pt-PT">Una
llave para una manera de pensar que tiene que ver com </span><span lang="pt-PT">un
pasado imposibilitado, cortado, olvidado en la forma de un
intensificador espectral – la urgencia de pensar un pueblo
espectral o una república de fantasmas. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="pt-PT">La
especificidad de una condición que es el realismo mágico, el
realismo espectral que no lleva em dirección a una
contra-colonialidad </span><span lang="pt-PT">que tiene que ver com
el carater intermitente de la memória y del olvido. El
contra-colonial es una batalla em los campos de Mnemosine (del
recuerdo y de la conjuración).</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Espectros y historia sulamericana
de la inmortalidad: utupës, la urihi a como tierra del olvido y del
acosso, xapiris, canibalismo, Ped-Pëdleré etc. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>El indexicalismo en el tablero de dibujo: </b>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
¿Cómo hacer justicia al exterior, al otro en tanto que otro, al
exterior sin incluirlo en una totalidad? Puede el afuera ser outra
cosa que una noticia que se puede soberanamente incorporar
incorporar?</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
¿Hay un contraste entre el anhelo por el mundo exterior y el intento
de captura completa de la inteligibilidad?</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
¿Puede la exterioridad levinasiana responder al problema del
correlacionismo?
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">¿Cómo
considerar la exterioridad levinasiana en una filosofía del proceso
que no ofrece un privilegio al conocimiento o a la agencia de los
humanos?</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>El indexicalismo, la fórmula:</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Cuatro ingredientes:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
1. Whitehead: elementos neo-monadológicos, <i>locus standi</i>, <i>lure
for feeling</i> (cebo del sentimiento), importancia, coordinación.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
2. Levinas: el otro, la huella, la exigencia de exterioridad, la
paradoja de la libertad, la proximidad, el no-ontologismo.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
3. Referencia directa: la idea de fijación de la referencia, el no
descriptivismo, los demostrativos kaplanianos, las direcciones, el
contacto lingüístico.</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
4. El perspectivismo amerindio: el carácter cosmológico de los
deícticos, el carácter situado de lo que hay, el pensamiento de los
otros (xenología).</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Indexicalismo, caracterización:</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Una metafísica situada paradójica según la cual todo lo que se
puede describir mediante sustantivos tiene una indexicalidad
implícita.
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(Metafísica y Crítica de la Metafísica)</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><b>Exterioridad y totalidad:</b></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">El exterior (el mundo externo, el </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>Outside</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">,
el </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>Grand Dehors</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">)
no puede ser tratado con justicia si no hay otro. La suposición de
una totalidad no puede promover una supresión de la correlación,
sólo la sustitución de una correlación por otra futura.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">La exterioridad no es sustantiva, requiere un otro
que no puede ser descrito por completo.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">La exterioridad es el límite de la soberanía, es
una pasividad, una vulnerabilidad.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">La metafísica (paradójica) del otro: el exterior
como elemento constitutivo de lo que hay.</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">Una metafísica situada: el universal es situado y
es a partir de una punto de vista, de un </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>locus
standi</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">, pero el universal que es lo que
propone la situación es la condición para </span><span lang="pt-PT">la
localización deictica. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La medida del
discurso substantivo es el </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">locus
standi</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
y el </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dire</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
que está bajo todo </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dit</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– que no es el </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dit</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
original, es el </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dit</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
situado. </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span lang="pt-PT">Realismo espectral: </span></b>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Juliana Martínez
sobre el realismo espectral: pensar de forma que se tome en serio el
fantasma aunque no sea de forma literal; centrarse no en lo que es el
fantasma, sino en lo que hace el espectro.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Fabián Ludueña
y la intermitencia: los espectros no existen en el sentido de la
pesistirem, pero insisten, vuelven -la inmortalidad no es ni vida
eterna ni reencarnación, es intermitencia, figura de la memoria.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Post-hantología:
los espectros aparecen en una conciencia, pero no son ni productos de
ella ni construcciones de la misma. Hay un realismo sobre lo que
produce la memoria en un proceso que no es una simple acumulación de
</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">presencias
presentes. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Disyuntiva:
Ludueña postula que hay una </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">insistencia</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
de espectros que es para-ontológica aparte de lo que existe y es
dehiscente -lo que insiste asalta lo que existe. </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Es
un realismo que no postula espectros en la existencia pero la
composición de la existencia y la insistencia. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span lang="pt-PT">Mi realismo espectral: </span><span lang="pt-PT">adicción
y memoria</span></b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">La acción del exterior sobre todo es como una
percepción distribuída sobre una memoria que está en toda parte.
Es una acción posterior que llamo una adicción assimétrica. El
Outside actúa bajo la forma de estas adiciones. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La adición
asimétrica no es conmutativa ni transitiva y, por supuesto, no es
simétrica. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Es la adición
que un elemento percibido provoca en una teoría, pero también la
adición de materia geológica, de un ingrediente en la olla o de un
color en un</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
pintura. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La adición como
encuentro: el otro que perturba los archivos. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">El materialismo
de los encuentros de Althusser: </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La
desviación epicúrea (clinamen) y lo aleatorio:puede</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">n</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
ser la marca de lo que no puede ser interno, pero a través de su
elemento iterativo -como el hipercaos- puede ser parte de una
totalidad.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">struction</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
de Jean-Luc Nancy: construir y deconstruir requiere adiciones.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La adición y la
memoria, una </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Zusammengehörigkeit</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">:
La adición produce el efecto de remover los recuerdos, promover el
olvido, reformular l</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">as
memorias</span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
reorganizar los archivos.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La relación con
el pasado es vulnerable al futuro, Benjamin sobre la historia contada
y sobre la débil fuerza mesiánica; Derrida sobre la herencia.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span lang="pt-PT">El comienzo irrelavante: </span></b>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La memoria </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">acosa
y </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">se
conjura mediante los deícticos "antes", "pasado".
La conjugación de la memoria y la adición debilita el comienzo.</span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">No hay un
comienzo más primordial, contra Heidegger; la post-metafísica de la
adición es una afirmación de la vulnerabilidad de la </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ousia</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
al posterior, a la reorganización de los espectros – la </span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">ousia</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
no es un archivo sustantivo. </span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><b>El indexicalismo implica a un realismo
espectral:</b></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">La memória es compuesta, para Locke, de </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>retention</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">
and </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>retrieval</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">;
la </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>retention</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">
solo puede ser independiente del </span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>retrieval</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">
si el pasado (y la memoria) es sustantiva. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">Si el pasado es sustantivo, no es posible ningún
realismo espectral, ya que las cosas del pasado que regresan
requerirían siempre una perspectiva añadida sobre cómo son las
cosas. Es como si pudiéramos acceder al pasado pero no a nuestros
recuerdos como en un dron</span><span lang="pt-PT">e</span><span lang="pt-PT">,
en tercera persona, sin recordar. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">En contraste, con el indexicalismo, </span><span lang="pt-PT">Más
bien, los recuerdos dependen siempre de un punto de vista, son
siempre deícticos. </span><span lang="pt-PT">E</span><span lang="pt-PT">l
realismo espectral es una consecuencia del indexicalismo, ya que hay
recuerdos situados que pueden a</span><span lang="pt-PT">cosar</span><span lang="pt-PT">
y ser conjurados porque el pasado no es autocontenido. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT">El realismo espectral es un realismo de
insistencias que se asocian com las adiciones, que actúan sobre el
</span><span lang="pt-PT"><i>retrieval</i></span><span lang="pt-PT">
y, por lo tanto, sobre la retention. </span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>P</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>o</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>s</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>t</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>-metafísica
</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>de
la adición</b></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>:</b></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">El
realismo espectral pretende ser una postmetafísica en el sentido de
Ludueña en la que no existe sólo lo que existe en la realidad (no
ontologismo) y lo que existe está siempre herido de una manera que
no se puede suturar (que es la </span></span></span><span lang="pt-PT"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Zusammengehörigkeit</span></i></span><span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
de memoria y adición).</span></span></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">La
postmetafísica de la adición se inscribe en una serie de intentos
de pensar postmetafísicamente el alcance de la metafísica - una
serie inaugurada por la historia del vidente inaugurada por la </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="pt-PT"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Er-eignis
de Heidegger y que tiene que ver, de muchas maneras, com el combate
contra-colonial. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: pt-PT }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-85804283310311535272022-04-01T21:43:00.001+00:002022-04-01T21:43:21.476+00:00Notas para fala Do indexicalismo ao realismo espectral<p>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Do indexicalismo ao
realismo espectral</b></span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Indexicalismo na
prancheta: </b>
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Como fazer justiça
ao exterior, ao outro enquanto outro, ao fora sem incluí-lo em uma
totalidade no limite construída soberanamente sem espaço para um
aporte de alhures a não ser enquanto notícia a ser incorporada?</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Pode a exterioridade
levinasiana responder ao problema do correlacionismo?
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Como considerar a
exterioridade levinasiana em uma filosofia do processo que não
oferece um privilégio ao conhecimento ou à agência de humanos?</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Indexicalismo, a
fórmula:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Quatro ingredientes:</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">1. Whitehead:
elementos neo-monadológicos, locus standi, isca para o sentimento,
importância, co-ordenação.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">2. Levinas: outro, o
traço, a demanda da exterioridade, paradoxo da liberdade,
proximidade, não-ontologismo.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">3. Referência
direta: a ideia de fixação de referência, não-descritivismo,
demonstrativos kaplanianos, endereços, contato linguístico.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">4. Perspectivismo
ameríndio: o caráter cosmológico dos deícticos, caráter situado
do que há, o pensamento dos outros (xenologia).</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Indexicalismo, a
caracterização:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Uma metafísica
paradoxal situada de acordo com a qual tudo o que pode ser descrito
por meio de substantivos tem uma indexicalidade implícita.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">(Metafísica e
crítica à metafísica)</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Exterioridade e
totalidade:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O exterior (o mundo
externo, o <i>Outside</i>, o <i>Grand Dehors</i>) não pode ser
tratado com justiça se não houver outro. A suposição de uma
totalidade não pode promover uma supressão da correlação, apenas
a substituição de uma correlação por outra futura.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A exterioridade não
é substantiva, ela requer um outro que não pode ser inteiramente
descrito.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A exterioridade é o
limite à soberania, é uma passividade, uma vulnerabilidade.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A metafísica
(paradoxal) dos outros: o exterior como elemento constitutivo do que
há.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>A hospitalidade
da percepção:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A receptividade é
uma hospitalidade – um contato com o exterior que pode ser também
hostil, indiferente, mas que requer uma resposta.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O pensamento
absolutamente situado é responsivo e permeado de elementos
exteriores que não constituem uma imagem de parte alguma. O caráter
situado da metafísica conduz a uma abundância de resultados
epistêmicos tais que nenhum pode ser considerado neutro com respeito
à exigência de uma resposta ao exterior.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>O exterior e a
adição assimétrica:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A adição
assimétrica não é nem comutativa, nem transitiva e, é claro, não
simétrica. É a adição que um elemento percebido provoca numa
teoria, mas também a adição de matéria geológica, de um
ingrediente na panela ou de uma cor numa tela.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O exterior é
posterior.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O desvio epicurista
(clinamen) e o aleatório: o aleatório pode ser a marca do que não
pode ser interno, mas por meio de seu elemento iterativo – como o
hipercaos – pode ser parte de uma totalidade.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">A strução de
Jean-Luc Nancy: construir e descontruir requerem adendos.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Adição e
suplemento: a falta no que precede o adendo é produzida pela adição.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O exterior é
excessivo, não há uma resposta a uma falta, mas um excesso
constante; uma cosmopolítica da adição.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">O exterior está
sempre assombrando, tudo fica refém dos adendos.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Adição e
memória, uma <i>Zusammengehörigkeit</i>:</b></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A adição produz o efeito de atiçar lembranças, promover
esquecimentos, reformatar rememorações, reorganizar arquivos.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Um legado da desconstrução: A memória é sempre refém da adição.
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A relação com o passado é vulnerável ao futuro, Benjamin sobre a
história recontada e sobre a força messiânica fraca; Derrida sobre
a herança.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Memória
e espectralidade:</b></p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A memória acossa, é conjurada, é convocada pelos deícticos
“antes”, “passado”, “começo”. A conjugação de memória
e adição enfraquece o começo.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
O anterior é como o exterior, mas se torna uma força moldada pelo
posterior. Em roda situação, há espectros, vestígios, pendências.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Anaximandro e a imortalidade das demandas de justiça – é a
justiça que nos traz o espectro (inclusive como terceira pessoa que
nos demanda limites).
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b>Realismo
espectral: </b>
</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Santiago Arcila e a memória na política, os intensificadores
espectrais e a repṹblica de fantasmas</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Juliana Martinez sobre realismo espectral: pensar de uma maneira que
leve o fantasma à sério ainda que não de um modo literal; focar
não no que o fantasma é, mas no que o espectro faz.</p>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Fabián Ludueña e a intermitência: os espectros não existem no
sentido de pesistirem, mas eles insistem, retornam – imortalidade
não é nem vida eterna e nem reincarnação, é intermitência, uma
figura da memória.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Pos-hantologia:
espectros aparecem em uma consciência, mas não são produtos dela e
nem construções dela. Há um realismo acerca daquilo que a memória
produz em um processo que não é uma simples acumulação de
presentes</span></span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Disjuntologia:
Ludueña postula que há uma insistência de espectros que é
para-ontológica a parte daquilo que existe e é deiscente – aquilo
que insiste acossa o que existe.</span></span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b><span style="font-style: normal;">Pós-metafísica:</span></b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">O
realismo espectral pretende ser uma pós-metafísica no sentido de
Ludueña em que não há apenas o que existe na realidade
(não-ontologismo) e o que existe está sempre ferido de um modo que
não pode ser suturado</span></span></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
pós-metafísica da adição se insere em uma série de tentativas de
pensar de modo pós-metafísico o escopo da metafísica – uma série
inaugurada pela história do seer inaugurada pela </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Er-eignis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
de Heidegger. </span></span>
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 115%; background: transparent }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-72079842504582521472022-01-02T15:14:00.002+00:002022-01-02T15:14:26.540+00:00Cosmopolitics as stereoscopy<p> My attempt to formulate stereoscopy and its relation to the several dimensions of cosmoplitics is out in <a href="https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/dasquestoes/article/view/41330" target="_blank">the rdq volume edited by Sofya Gevorkian and Carlos Segovia</a>.<br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-24875045747765950282022-01-02T15:12:00.002+00:002022-01-02T15:12:14.199+00:00Lugar de fala<p>Meu diálogo sobre o lugar de fala do lugar de fala, com convidados reais, subreais e quase-reais, saiu na <a href="https://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/artemis/article/view/59272" target="_blank">Artemis</a>.<br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-51317396377964391822022-01-02T15:08:00.002+00:002022-01-02T15:08:40.458+00:00Indexicalism, the book symposium published<p> Cosmos & History issued a volume with the papers presented in the September-October book symposium around <i>Indexicalism</i>. It includes my responses and a précis of the book:</p><p>It is <a href="https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/42" target="_blank">here.</a><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-87306272515003178282022-01-02T15:05:00.006+00:002022-01-02T15:10:04.922+00:00Interviewed by Graham Harman<p> The EUP blog published few weeks ago an interview Graham did with me around <i>Indexicalism</i>.</p><p><a href="https://euppublishingblog.com/2021/11/25/a-conversation-with-graham-harman-and-hilan-bensusan-on-indexicalism-2/ " target="_blank">Here.</a><br /></p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-79085269399294072822021-10-15T12:53:00.000+00:002021-10-15T12:53:01.407+00:00My responses to (some) talks in the Book Symposium<p>Indexicalism is out:</p><p>l<a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-indexicalism.html" target="_blank">https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-indexicalism.html</a> </p><p>The book symposium took place two weeks ago with talks by Sofya Gevorkyan/Carlos Segovia, Paul Livingston, Gerson Brea, Steven Shaviro, Chris RayAlexander, Janina Moninska, Germán Prosperi, Gabriela Lafetá, Andrea Vidal, Elzahrã Osman, Graham Harman, Charles Johns, Jon Cogburn, Otavio Maciel, Aha Else, JP Caron, Michel Weber and John Bova.</p><p>My very preliminary response to some of their talks about the book follows. (Texts will appear in a special issue of Cosmos & History soon).<br /></p><p>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm;">
<b>RESPONSES</b><b>: ON SAYING PARADOXICAL THINGS</b>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Hilan Bensusan</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
First of all, I want to thank everyone for their contributions. You
all created a network of discussions that made the book worth
publishing. Thanks.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Shaviro:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
To engage in a general account of how things are is to risk paradox.
Totality, with its different figures including the impersonal one
that enables a symmetrical view from nowhere of anything, is looming
about and it could make everything available to an exercise of
unconstrained, unsituated freedom to reveal. Yet this is the game of
philosophy – and, in this sense, it is a language and, in some
related, is a literary gender in which fictioning is possible. Franz
Rosenzweig, for what can be considered to be good Levinasian reasons,
would refrain from it and recommend that distance is kept: totalities
would make anything personal impersonal and renders anyone's life
into a sameness as everything is an equal part of a global picture.
Levinas would still insist on going to the danger zone with
Aristotle's <i>Protrepticus</i> brought in by Livingston: if you
should do philosophy, you should do philosophy, and if you should not
do philosophy, then you should do philosophy. He would insist that
one can speak of what one cannot speak going against both the 7th
section of Wittgenstein's <i>Tractatus</i> and Derrida's injunction
against the possibility of saying what Levinas himself wanted to say
in philosophy. As Shaviro writes, both of them are wrong, you cannot
remain silent where you cannot speak or whereof you cannot speak
Greek – the language of philosophy. Levinas would rather force the
language to the unspoken, bring in the foreign accent and stretch it
even at the cost of paradox. As a foreign to the land who is feeling
the urge to speak up what cannot be spoken, and in a way that is not
unlike fictioning, more than what gets said (a contra<i>diction</i>),
what matters is very saying of the paradox (contra<i>dire</i>). That
is, that one is obliged to dwell in contradictions in order to say
what is urgent and impossible.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
The root of paradox in Levinas is home ground – it is stated at the
beginning of <i>Totality and Infinity</i> that the aim is to bring
Rosenzweig's criticism of philosophy inside philosophy. This is the
stated aim of the project and its main formulation is the paradox of
freedom: through my freedom, I discover my responsibilities and then
I'm no longer free. Philosophy is the domain of freedom – nothing
apart from my own impossibilities would stop me from getting
anywhere. There is no passivity and receptivity itself could be taken
as a strategic passivity where I listen to something in order to gain
better access to what was previously concealed. Yet, it is in the
exercise of this freedom that I encounter responsibility, something
that cannot either come independently from my freedom because it is
exercised within it or come as a consequence of free deliberation.
Responsibilities are there from the beginning, like what lies before
any grounds, but cannot come to the fore but in the milieu provided
by freedom. As a consequence, when I'm engaging in the philosophical
endeavor of providing a general account of how things are – say,
indexicalism – I am in the very milieu where my responsibilities
will become apparent. When they become, my engagement with philosophy
and its craving for totality will fade away and criticism of
metaphysics will replace what previously was just an exercise in
metaphysics. But criticism emerges from freedom and therefore I
cannot renounce doing what I cannot do without the act of engaging in
the paradox. The extent of the infinite responsibilities lying in my
own personal, situated position reveals something about how things
are through the exercise of freedom, that is of seeking the general
account. To use Tractarian images again, one could throw the ladder
away, but at the cost of not being able to reach the top again. In
other words, what matters is not what is achieved (which is paradox)
but actually, the saying of the contadiction (contre<i>dire</i>),
reaching there in order to appreciate the situatedness that one is
tied to even when trying to climb up the ladder to see it all. The
paradox doesn't dissolve after it is stated because it is said
repeatedly in different ways – compare with fictioning – and one
doesn't find a domain where contradiction lies; contradiction is what
I end up saying when I try to engage philosophically with the others
that compel me. My freedom leads me to my situatedness not because
I'm free to be situated or not, but because it was there from the
very metaphysical desire for the others – the indexicalist picture.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
This is a picture that is faithful to Levinas' gesture even though it
is perhaps not what he had recommended. It is, in the lovely
(Derridian) phrase of Shaviro, a Levinasianism without reserve.
Indexicalism – with the help of Whitehead, perspectivism and
externalist accounts of indexicals and other ideas – extends the
gesture beyond the limits of the anthropic. In fact, as Shaviro says,
I claim that there could be no principled way to distinguish what can
contest me and what can merely refuse my attempt at fruition – to
use a dichotomy that appears mostly in <i>Totality and Infinity</i>.
To say indexicalism extends Levinas, or that it performs a (broken,
interrupted) speculative flight taking Levinas as a takeoff lane is
one way of putting it which I sometimes indulge. But perhaps the very
idea of a Levinasianism without reserve is that the gesture cannot be
restricted to the antropic. If the restriction applies, two things
follow. First, the anthropic realm becomes a king of realm of paradox
and contradiction is bound to the philosophy that encounters humans –
it is only towards the human other that I have incumbencies and
therefore the paradox emerges when my general view concerns them.
Second, I have to bear in mind that the other I'm facing is human –
and that makes me engage with a <i>neutral</i> space of general, and
consistent, contact between me and the other. The neutral is a figure
of the symmetry that Levinas rightly abhorres for it replaces my
encounter with the other with a two-lane image that can be quickly
viewed from nowhere. The first point circumscribes the domains where
the paradox incides, and we can end up simply with an anthropic
dialethea. The second point is made by Livingston after Derrida in
his contribution and is brilliant. It recalls Judith Butler's remark
in <i>Giving an Account of Oneself </i>where she says that one has to
have the concept of 'face' in order to recognize the (human) other.
Butler's remark relies on concepts and on recognition and it can be
countered by insisting that there is no knowledge of the other
through the face – but simply the hearing of a call, of an appeal.
But part of her gesture is captured by the idea that the human is
neutral and neutrality is a step towards symmetry; we can say that
all humans are my incumbencies and as I am a human… The paradox not
only comes too quickly but also is circumvented and the rest of the
world – towards which fruition supposedly takes place – is immune
from it.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Indexicalism applies notions such as proximity – and substitution,
recurrence, obsession – to any other and posits that they gear
towards the outside that is always around in perception. Shaviro has
this great image of ophthalmological proximity to claim that
proximity is not only an-archaic but also disturbing, overwhelming
and often anathema to communication. He then finds it inappropriate
that perception taken as hospitality and built from the indexical
paradoxical and situated metaphysics is compared to a conversation.
His reasons are clear: a conversation seems to be too much of a
mutually cooperative, somehow symmetrical – may be neutral ,
communicative and consensual endeavor. In proximity what one feels
often is the weirdness, the eeriness and the hostility with which
incumbencies could be met. Conversations are perhaps too hospitable
or too converging to be part of what Levinas had in mind when he
thought of obsession for the other or the wound that makes me
vulnerable. Even among humans, a conversation can be impossible –
as Lafetá points out, the other could be too impaired, fragile or
hurt to be part of a conversation. In any case, incumbency doesn't
disappear when a conversation fails. Proximity, Shaviro points out,
involves sometimes suffocating compulsion and cumplicity could be
thoroughly unwanted. I agree with all that. At this point I could
recoil from my appeal to conversations in the book. Surely I would
rephrase some of the intensity I placed in them. I would not fully
recoil only because I believe that there is more to conversations
than conversations. In other words, when two people stop talking to
each other, or a wounded animal becomes too ferocious to be dealt in
closeness, there is still a responsibility, obsession and capacity to
respond. A newly acquired foe can become unable to talk to me, or be
unable to carry on exchanging words, but still, I continue to
respond. I do it because the intricate interplay of demands, urges
and substitution wouldn't just fade away – as proximity is not
easily exorcised. That interplay could be called an (extended)
conversation. And this is perhaps still a good way to describe some
features of perception. In this case, even while renouncing to speak
of what cannot be spoken, a response could possibly be given. That
fictioning is possible when philosophy fails – or becomes too
paradoxical – is perhaps also a move in a broad, open and ongoing
conversation.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Gevorkyan and Segovia:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Without offering not even a glimpse into how to best interpret or
translate Anaximander's sentence, I find it interesting to go back to
that conjunction of injustice and the course of things. On the face
of it, it could sound like something about the vertiginous notion of
what deserves (and what doesn't). One would in fact feel like there
is a reason to engage with general questions concerning how things
are because that could be a way to determine what is deserved – and
what is not. In the more common, philosophical and general reading of
Anaximander, the urge for justice is seen as spread everywhere and to
find answers about it one needs to go into the arrangements between
what comes into being and what perishes. Now, it is not said there
that there is an order to that at all, if there is, it can be
intrinsically opaque. Further, it can be an order that is eroded and
reshaped at each new event and nothing is safe from deviation, from
interruption or from nonmonotonic addition. Still, the issue of
injustice (and merit) persists because it involves a quest that
cannot be dealt with once and for all. If a foray of any kind into
the way of things is prompted by Anaximander's tie between the
process of things and justice, it can find out that the others
encountered are never transparent from any point of view attained
and, yet, they are inextricably from the issues raised by the quest
for justice. If we agree that Anaximander's sentence provides a guide
map to what philosophy became from Ionia to Jena, we can see already
the roots of the indexicalist paradox. There is a project for this
foray that aims at surveying what there is and make it transparent;
it is, in fact, a variety of projects to this effect and they became
somehow dominant even though hardly consensual. If this survey
intends to make everything transparent, it could discover that
justice lies in the opacity of the other. Further, it may discover
that opacity and situatedness ought to be a constitutive ingredient
of what there is if justice is to be part of it altogether.
Indexicalism – and the metaphysics of the others – is faithful to
Anaximander's sentence in the sense that it is a way of reading it.
Likewise, it is a reading of Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Indexicalism holds, nonetheless, that this faithfulness to
Anaximander as a guide map is not to be found everywhere. In
particular, it is not to be found in an approach that can be called,
to use Levinas' phrase, ontologism – the claim that only being is
real. That approach – which is at odds with Plato's <i>Sophist</i>
five great types including four indexical ones besides being –
makes hardly any room for justice (or injustice, merit, deserving or
whatever could be taken to appear as the main character in the plot
of Anaximander's sentence). Ontologism is perhaps the shortest path
to accomplish the goal of a neutral, impersonal account of how things
are – and in that sense, it is committed to substantivism, the
image of the world where positions and deixis play no role. According
to the metaphysics of the others – that takes otherness seriously
as a deixis – justice can only be made through situated action,
especially because its demands cannot be replaced by substantive
descriptions once and for all. One way or another, and in different
instances, in the long road from Ionia to Jena and beyond, the last
part of Anaximander's sentence was downplayed or straightforwardly
dismissed in the name of a robust ontology of substantives – and
often of substances. This gesture had a great impact on how we
displaced incumbencies from freedom, concerns from facts and justice
from knowledge. It is also why philosophy can often seem like the
realm of the impersonal, of the non-situated, of the indifferent.
Expurgating the last part of Anaximander's sentence paved the way for
this special dispensation that the quest for finding things out and
make use of what is found to entertain responsibilities.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Gevorkyan and Segovia place <i>Indexicalism</i>, the book, between
the subtractive and the chiastic logical architecture. For them, I
think it moves away from an aporetic style towards something that
could be found, I believe, in the sentence of Anaximander. This
integration within a split enables an opening towards transversality.
Attending to two poles is not a commitment to symmetry but rather an
acceptance of imbalance. In bringing a concern with the other as an
other to a landscape familiar to process philosophy, the book
intended indeed to bring forth a kind of agenda that would be
oblivious to any separation between metaphysical concerns and how we
deal with what is around that would dangerously live proximity,
responsibility and care out of the picture. If there is a separation
– and it is perhaps a paradoxical one – it is one that is often
reinstituted for it is not a no-trespassing fence. To think through
the chiasm in which philosophy has to be placed in order to take the
others seriously is a way to stretch a vocabulary and begin to move
away from the language of universality. If I understand them well,
the chiasm is what ensures contradiction is to be preferred to
indifference.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Cogburn:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
If <i>dialetheas</i> are understood as places where the paradox lies
– or even as parts of reality where contradiction entails no
<i>quodlibet</i>, no triviality – then the issue appears as to
whether they are substantive or indexical. One can arguably aim to
fix contradiction – once they cannot be eliminated – to a
restricted zone with marked borders where there is a domain on which
contradictions are true. To be sure, as Levinas himself shows time
and again and I said above, we cannot afford not to venture into
these paradoxical areas and if we do so we can at most try to walk
carefully. But perhaps dialetheas are not substantive, but rather an
indexical effect, as Livingston argues in his paper: it is the
essential indexical that leads to most (if not all) paradoxes. If <i>V</i>
is a suitable domain for a logic of demonstratives, closure entails
transcendence and if we grant existence, we can either deny closure
or assume what Cogburn calls the Bova/Livingston line according to
which there is a tension between consistent plurality and
inconsistent totality. Indexicalism goes for the latter; in fact, it
is through exploring closure that one finds transcendence as I said
before, and once transcendence is found, the metaphysical endeavor
that affirms closure is criticized – the closure ladder can be then
thrown away, again, but only at the cost of not reaching the place
where closure can be criticized through transcendence. It seems, at
first sight at least, that if there is a Bova/Livingston dialethea it
is deictic and depends on a context added to the character of the
demonstrative – it is a situated paradox. In other words, it is
through looking for symmetrical relations around that one finds
asymmetrical positions that inform a situated metaphysics of the
other. One can project this asymmetry in V but in doing so, one
engages in the paradoxical (impossible and perhaps urgent) task of
formulating a transcendent closure.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
We can think further about indexical dialetheas. From the perspective
of deictic absolutes, there ought to be outside to what there is –
that outside is part of what there is. This outside is therefore
inside what there is and outside it: for each tentative class of what
there is, there is an outside that is both outside and inside. The
contradiction follows from an indexical position of what is outside a
given class; for each closure, there is a corresponding transcendence
and therefore a correspondence dialethea. Livingston's argument that
most or any paradox have an (essential) indexical kernel would then
perhaps entail that dialethea are themselves indexical items. It is
only from the point of view of a class that there is an outside –
like it is only through pointing that this sentence while stating
that it is false that the paradox arises. True contradictions are an
effect of having indexicals like 'this' or 'outside' just like
paradox is an effect of having an indexical general account of how
things are.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<br />
<br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Cogburn points at an interesting epistemological occurrence of the
closure-transcendence tension. It addresses the issues that appear in
chapter 3 of Indexicalism where an account of perception as a
challenging exercise in hospitality is provided. Suppose V is the
class of everything that could be conceptualizable this far by an
agent (or a class of agents) to whom perception presents an outside.
Davidson can be taken to recommend the idea that anything outside V –
and indeed outside the reasons already known and assuming they
coincide with what has been conceptualizable – is either already
conceptual or makes no impact on knowledge. In that sense, he's
siding with closure whereas McDowell, attempting to restore a proper
domain for a tribunal of experience, urges for a transcendence, for
what is beyond the currently conceptualizable. Perceptual experience
is the outside to which Davidson denies any epistemological import.
From an indexicalist point of view, it is not only that the outside
can provide verdicts but also that it constantly provides new borders
because perception is the very locus of transcendence. McDowell
struggles to make sense of verdicts of experience in a way that they
are neither too Davidsonian as verdicts are too conceptual nor too
committed to the Given as non-conceptual deliverances of the senses.
His current way out is to postulate verdicts as composed by
<i>Anschauungen</i> which are less than full-blown concepts. These
verdicts appear, in any case, as help from the world to exercise our
spontaneity. From the point of view of the metaphysics of the others,
the others with which perception makes contact does not provide
verdict but rather incumbencies. That is, they appear as a limit to
our spontaneous endeavor geared towards revealing what is perceived
and otherwise constrained only by our own incapacities. This purely
exterior ingredient in perception has to be positioned somewhere with
respect to the relevant sensibilia – it is, if this expression
makes any sense, indexically mediated. (It may not make sense due to
its triviality from the indexicalist point of view according to which
there is nothing that fails to be indexically mediated.) Notice that
this impingement from the exterior – this outside – is neither an
McDowellian <i>Anschauung</i> nor a form of non-conceptual content
because it is not a content at all. With Whitehead, for the
metaphysics of the others perception is a widespread constituent of
the world because it follows from encountering something else,
positioned as other. The outside in perception is both part of the
landscape that makes perception possible within a deictic operation
(therefore, akin to closure) and what transcends perception – and
therefore transcends what has been conceptualized. This is
reminiscent of Levinas' version of the ontological argument: the
exterior imposes itself as such from within. It is at the same time a
position in the deictic space with which I orient myself and
something outside of it. This is why the other as great kind in
Plato's <i>Sophist</i> is the subterraneous dynamics of any negation.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
I have recently proposed that we can see the encounter with the Other
as Levinas conceives it explicitly as something that precedes any
attempt to extract the intelligibility of what surrounds us (this is
in a paper called <i>An-Arché, Xeinos, urihi a: The Primordial Other
in a Cosmopolitical Forest</i>). There is an often-unnoticed starting
point which is something else before me, facing my sensibilia even
before my sensibilia is engaged in its activity to perceive and know
anything. I compare this pre-history with Heidegger's second
beginning which is prior to the first – the first being that of
<i>sein = physis</i> and the second that of <i>seyn = Ereignis. </i>Here,
it is not <i>Ereignis</i> that precedes <i>physis </i>without
grounding it, but it is the very encounter with the other that
precedes without grounding any attempt to extract information from
the other which has been met. Perception is encountering (with an
outside) before it triggers a knowledge process. As such, it is
haunted by an incumbency – and a transcendence – that limits the
exercise of my spontaneity irrespective of my cognitive capabilities
or deficiencies.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Livingston:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Indexicalism inherits from Levinas both the taste for adventure that
guides moving from an arguably safer criticism of philosophy to the
attempt to be in its midst and the rejection of the idea that an
attachment to neutrality is recommended in order to prevent sliding
into paradox. That makes it go into philosophy preferring paradox to
neutrality. This rejection of neutrality – and hence of a view from
nowhere – guides the way totality, or the absence of it is then
thought through. It is as if we could say: as a whole, reality is
such that there is no whole. This is where the language of paradox
and that of fictioning meet, as Shaviro points out. Livingston argues
that there is no paradoxico-metaphysics and one should rather adopt a
critical position towards the project of a complete description of
things that would engage indexicalism as an item in its toolbox. This
project – which is arguably part of the indexicalist project as I
see it, one could be tempted to take an impossible measurement and
say it is one half of it – is in a sense an effective follow-up to
Rosenzweig's abstention from philosophy. Such abstention is taken in
Levinas' bag when he ventures into philosophy – as I began to
explore in my response to Shaviro. There is a neutrality element
here, nonetheless, that is interesting to notice. In a sense, to
refrain from paradox is a way neither to take sides concerning the
two conflicting poles nor to bet in<i> polemos</i> itself. The first
option is also a way to a sure way to avoid paradoxes and, in this
case, would amount to either embrace philosophy in its tendencies
towards the neutral, the impersonal and the unsituated image of
things or rejecting it altogether. To be sure, criticism could take
this two flavors – or mix them perhaps paradoxically: to refrain
from taking sides by saying that this is a dangerous area or to take
side with the thorough rejection of the philosophical endeavor as a
commitment to a general view of things. Interestingly, there is an
(indexicalist) paradox looming in the horizon for those who adopt the
critical view: reject both sides but dismiss the side of philosophy
in an emphatic way. I conjecture that this is a way to find a reverse
paradox in a position that refrains from stretching indexicalism into
a (general) account while rejecting general accounts in general for
indexicalist reasons. This reverse paradox would be nonetheless would
be committed to neutrality: indexicalism is a tool for criticism but
it cannot go beyond that without tainting the ultimately desirable
and perhaps unattainable attachment of the philosophical endeavor to
neutrality.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Now, Livingston not only understands the gist of the indexicalist
endeavor with its paradoxical consequences but also expands it in
interesting ways. In particular, he explores the idea that deixis is
the root of paradox. I don't quite know how far can we go in this
indexical analysis of paradox, but Livingston suggests that notions
such as outside and inside are crucial for the very statement of most
paradoxes. (Further, one can explore the possibility that set
theoretical approaches, once we realize there is a – maybe
indexical – paradox with a set of all sets, ought to be approached
from a deictic point of view; this is something I cannot but begin to
think here but if it makes any sense, that would provide me a way to
generalize the account of propositions I am developing somewhere else
to encompass at least some of the mathematical propositions.) At any
rate, the idea of a border can be viewed as potentially evoking
indexicality. Tristan Garcia has crafted the notion of
de-determination that picks up a thing from a realm of objects and
predicates and provides a universe in which the thing's borders are
the crucial ingredient – the line between that thing and all the
rest. The procedure, as I write in the book, is similar to that of
reference-fixing. The borders emerge from de-determination and
individuate something with respect to them – while these borders
are established, one can prove to be wrong about any substantive
description of the thing without losing the contour that specifies
it. It would be interesting to explore how much we can make explicit
the deixis behind set-theoretical paradoxes with the help of the idea
of de-determination in its indexical resonance.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Livingston, if I understand him rightly, recommends modal realism as
a companion to indexicalism. I would resist that. Not because I
dislike Lewis' attitude of considering actuality indexical – what
makes this world actually is that we are in it – but rather because
ultimately his concretism about possible world end up being not
indexical enough. I maintain that reference-fixing is a procedure
that targets what can be accessed from my actual position, through an
explicit indexical, through a proper name or even through a
description (as Kripke and Donnellan have shown). The price for
Lewis' concretism (and modal realism) is to take every world as
substantively different from each other – maybe we can say that
indexicalism comes too late when then you want to say that the actual
world is actual because that's chosen by our position. As a
consequence, worlds are deemed independent from each other and their
denizens are never identical. To be sure, this could work out as a
way out of the seemingly difficult problem of trans-world identity.
But I think Kripke is right in rejecting this (Leibnizian) path of
having each possible world with its own and unique denizens – it is
crucial for monadology to work, but this is one of the ways to see
how indexicalism departs from monadology. On Kripke's take, I am me
in every possible world which are accessed through the actual world
where I am and are not to be thought of as foreign countries or
distances you can observe from a telescope. It is from an actual
referent in the actual world that other worlds are drawn and,
accordingly, the trans-world identity problem doesn't arise. The
center is always in the actual world – which is indexically chosen.
To be sure, the path from I in w to I in w' can be different from
that from I in w' to I in w but this is where indexicalism leads you,
to no all-encompassing totality with a view from nowhere. All the
other possible worlds are others and, again, I am not the other
world's other. It seems to me that this is the way to avoid both a
balanced reciprocity and an ultimately descriptivist –
substantivist – account of the denizens in different worlds. In
this area, indexicalism also entails the abandonment of content as
Fregean <i>Gedanke</i> that can be contemplated from anywhere.
(Incidentally, I also realized, thanks to a renewed attention to
Perry's texts with my co-author Guilherme da Silva that <i>de re</i>
thought is also insufficient to accommodate thorough indexicality.)</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Lafetá:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<i>Do the others have an interiority?</i> Lafetá's question opens
the way to a paradox she identifies at the kernel of the indexicalist
project and can be a way to summarize its paradoxico-metaphysics. The
answer is indeed ambiguous; to a first related question, <i>do I get
to know the other's interioriority,</i> the answer is no while to a
second related question,<i> is there more than one interiority?</i>,
the answer is yes. Maybe we can say that the others have
interiorities but they are not fully present to me. The different
interiorities are in a diachrony that makes them accessible to me in
general only through the (perhaps fictioning) effort of philosophy.
Yet, philosophy cannot make a substantive predication about the
other's interiority – and neither can encountering the others
render interiorities transparent. The other is a continual
exteriority leaving traces on me. Meeting the other leaves me not
only interrupted but also in perplexity: I can make myself fully
available and yet not know how to respond for the exteriority of the
other pierces through what there is in my interiority and suffocate
me. It is not quite that I can give what is in me but rather that I
should provide something I cannot own for the other.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
This is what happens in the percpetual event – what is perceived is
not non-conceptualizable, but rather it forces me out of any existing
conceptual scheme, it pieces through my conceptual capacities and
press me away from my interior space. This pressure is there even if
I am also pushed, for reasons of justice with other perceived others,
to make it fit at least partialy into a concept. While I can have an
account of perception while engaged in philosophy – that it takes
place in a situation akin to that of hospitality, for example –
each event of perception torns me between the conceptual scheme that
results from the imperfect attempts to do justice to what has been
perceived – an attempt always urgent and impossible – and an
interiority that does not make itself open to me. I believe this can
be done only if the account of perception satisfies Tsing's
injunction of leaving space in the ground – where perception takes
place – for something that eludes the narrative provided by the
account. This is why the dynamics of hospitality – always haunted
by hostility – can illuminate my encounter with the others in
perception.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Harman:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Indexicalism brings to a broadly speculative realist arena a
combination of granular process philosophy – that is, where there
is an assumption of discrete items like Whitehead's actual entities –
a Levinasian concern with the transcending other and Amerindian
perspectivism that privileges deixis over fixed identities. Process
philosophy of the granular kind – that tends to build on
monadologies – understand process in terms of units of agency that
interact with each other, make compositions or alliances or conflict
with each other. These units are autonomous and understood in terms
of their effects. When coupled with a concern for the absolute
others, they are no longer fully moved by their agency and their
agenda and become endowed with a freedom that encapsulates infinite
responsibilities. Those responsibilities, however, can only be
comprehended from a first-person point of view – as I cannot impute
an infinite responsibility to anyone else's freedom. This combination
of Whitehead – and his resolutely immanent account of entities in a
network of perceptions – with Levinas – and the transcendence of
the other which is placed beyond the possibility of full perception –
leads to an explosive paradox. We can tame it by appealing to deixis
– and the Low Amazon tendency understands predicates in terms of
relative positions. (The combination is made more acceptable when we
bring in the idea of a paradoxico-metaphysics.)
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
To assume, with Amerindian perspectivism, that predicates are deictic
and reality is incorrigibly conditioned by positions is not a lapse
into relativism. To be sure, reality can no longer be contemplated
from a nowhere – and not only because we happen to be always
somewhere. What emerges, rather, is a realism about indexicals that
leads to a realism about the others (as others) – or so I argue.
This realism holds that the relativity of positions is real – and
not, for instance, that truth itself is relative. This makes an
important difference that has to do with the very general structure
that indexicalism recommends, namely, that indexicals are the
(paradoxical) furniture of the universe. This general structure
involving some kind of relativity – a situated metaphysics – is
maintained to be true. Realism about the transcendent other and about
deixis requires the claim that this structure holds.</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Now, Harman argues that his quadruple structure of the object is not
committed to a totality corresponding to a view from nowhere. It is
clear that OOO claims that there is non-transparency in reality and
that there is a dimension to every object that eludes (and
transcends) the efforts to perceive it. That opaqueness, nonetheless,
is hidden inside each object. A universe of Harmanian objects is
where objects can be all viewed from nowhere – although there is a
dimension of each of them that is hidden. If the idea of a view from
nowhere makes any sense at all – and assuming that real objects
withdraw even from the third-person eye – there is something inside
the viewed objects that is concealed. It is not the structure itself
that fails to elude a view from nowhere for, as Harman points out,
the indexicalist structure is there also to be contemplated by a
drone-like device. The OOO structure, however, makes each object
available to be seen, albeit incompletely. In contrast, the
indexicalist structure takes anything that is an other to any
interiority as unavailable to a drone-like eye. It is as if
non-transparency had been relativized. As a consequence, a view from
nowhere would gaze at the interiorities but not to any of its others.
There is not only a Great Outdoors that is unseen – the other of
all that there is – but also an other to each interiority. Because
of this, indexicalism is not subjectalist: correlation is not
absolute because there is always an other that escapes apprehension.
OOO, in contrast, as a granular perspective, holds that the real
object is a residue of the correlation. The indexicalist other is not
a residue of the correlation because if there is an indexicalist
correlation, it involves the other – that is external because it is
the other, drawing from Levinas' ontological argument. It is not
clear that either of them is subjectalist because something escapes
correlation – even if the correlationsare ubiquitous. Still, OOO is
a realism about objects while indexicalism is a realism about deixis.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Harman doubts indexicalism and the metaphysics of the others can have
a definite political import. In particular, he argues that the
substantivism cannot be responsible for coloniality and partriarchy.
It is not clear that reading a book (for instance, <i>Indexicalism</i>),
as Aha Else points out, would have any converging effects. It is not
clear that preaching indexicalism would be enough to change
coloniality or patriarchy. Still, there is a diagnosis that can be
made. The idea that substantives are a good guide to what is there
makes one oblivious to positions, circumstances and circumscriptions
– and ultimately to the Cerro Rico in Potosí as being anything
other than a standing reserve of silver. Perhaps indexicalism is
doomed to fail to lure the feeling that one is positioned and
inscribed in a circumstance even when engaged in abstract thinking.
However, the diagnosis that substantivism promoted the feeling of
indifference to the locality can still stand. In this sense, the
diagnosis is not unlike the one Heidegger (and Levinas) make of
Western metaphysics and its offsprings – it promoted the idea that
it is possible and desirable to keep the world at bay. If this
Heideggerian diagnosis is brought up, it then makes sense to think
that indexicalism can provide a roadmap to an alternative path to
what Heidegger called the <i>Kehre </i>or the <i>Sprung.</i> In other
words, it can provide a way out of the predicament that Western
thought – either because it is homoiosis- or ousia- oriented or
because it is substantivist – has persistently provided. Of course,
this is no political program – and it is unclear how to extract a
definite political program from the corresponding remarks from
Heidegger (in the <i>Beiträge</i>, in the <i>Geschichte des Seyns</i>
and in <i>Bremen Lectures</i>). Heidegger indicates that the change
to come – post-metaphysical thinking, to coin a name – cannot be
actively promoted but, at the same time, our actions and efforts
cannot be indifferent to it. Further, it is not clear that such a
change lies in the macropolitical right or in the macropolitical
left. It has, nonetheless, a political import – that is perhaps
cosmopolitical and, as I argued elsewhere ("The cosmopolitical
parties in the post-human age"), the alternatives are orthogonal
to the macropolitical parties.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
That doesn't mean that the critique of substantivism is
macropolitically neutral as well for I believe much can hinge on this
diagnosis in macropolitical disputes to come. But that takes me
perhaps too far. I'll limit myself to observe that the road between
what takes place in the metaphysical arena and macropolitical
alternatives is perhaps like the North-West water path from the Artic
to the Pacific through Canada – just like Michel Serres describes
in his<i> Le passage nord-ouest</i>. This is to say that it is not a
straightforward passage but the road is also not entirely and
definitely blocked. One can transit provided that the right moment,
the right weather and the right equipment can be provided at each
stage of the crossing.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Prosperi:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Prosperi points out that the criticism Damián Selci makes of Levinas
while elaborating his theory of activism extends to indexicalism. In
a supposed politics of perception, the perceiving agent is immune to
the others in the sense that it doesn't get transformed beyond an
egoistic concern with concepts and coherence. The others could
transform me out of my selfishness once and for all, Selci argued.
However, if they do that, they will make others as such irrelevant –
the others would interrupt my agenda only to ultimately transform it
and make further exteriority irrelevant. From an indexicalist point
of view, exteriority is not a chapter in the history of interiority
but rather a constant pressing force that interrupts my agenda
irrespective of my interiority. It is not about reforming interiority
but rather about responding to the outside. In this sense, the others
in a metaphysics of the others are not to be incorporated by a
transformed interiority, but rather what is thoroughly exterior.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<br />
<br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Caron: </b>
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
There seems to be a tension between indexicals and abstraction. In
fact, indexicals are situated and dependent on acts akin to pointing,
indicating, tracking or locating. On the other hand, abstraction is
often considered to be tied to universality. Universal indexicalism
deals in paradox – and this is a bullet worth biting, as I argued.
But I'm not that sure that abstraction is committed to universality,
neither am I sure that indexicalism runs to paradox by accepting any
kind of abstraction. Similarly, I woudn't claim that abstraction is
to be avoided from the point of view of a metaphysics of the others.
There are, to be sure, many kinds of abstractions and not all of them
simply obliterate exteriority. We are familiar not only with concrete
universals, but also with abstract particulars. Tropes, as they are
sometimes called, are resolutely particular and could be a challenge
to existing concepts. Nor are abstractions necessarily at the service
of, say, extracting the intelligibility of things. I believe that
suitable doses of abstraction are required to depart from the
metaphysical project – or to any of its variations.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Caron points at how indexicalism offers ground to the post-nihilist
Marxism that I'm trying to develop. The idea is to combine a thorough
trust in the release of new productive forces as a way to challenge
existing human and non-human social relations with a rejection of any
attempt to replace things – objects, processes, events – by their
suitable artificial counterparts. That is, accepting the
transformative power of production – or poiesis, perhaps – while
resisting the turn of the world into <i>Ge-Stell</i>. I agree
indexicalism can ground this development that is perhaps best thought
as being situated once the forces of production have different
impacts on how things are in different circumscriptions –
especially if the reterritorializing drives of capital itself are set
aside. Caron then proceeds to criticize post-nihilist Marxism as an
impossible combination of what I defined elsewhere as the anastrophic
and the catastrophic cosmopolitical tendencies of the present (see
"The cosmopolitical parties in the post-human age"). The
former tendencies see the present as ushering in an interesting
future while the latter see it merely as the moment where what has
been commendable in the past collapses. If I understand it rightly,
Caron's misgivings with post-nihilist Marxism hinge on the idea that
we can either accept or reject abstractions altogether. Now, as I see
it, post-nihilist Marxism is not only a direct consequence of
indexicalism but rather of an attention to addition – that leads
also to what I have been developing as an antimonotonic, non-Tarskian
logic of the supplement. The power of addition is what makes the
changing forces of production capable to unsettle social relations.
Further, it contrasts with the artificialization of the world not
only because there is no substantive intelligibility to be extracted
but also because the very introduction of machines changes the
salient features of the landscape. <i>Techné</i> is not a
replacement but a supplement to <i>physis</i>. Thought can be then
disconnected to homoiosis and rather considered also in terms of the
supplement: to think is to add something and to respond to what has
been added. This, however, goes beyond the scope of <i>Indexicalism</i>.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Johns:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
The idea that exteriority is produced is a genuinely intriguing one
as it helps to begin making explicit the microstructure of the
friction between a Levinas-inspired position like indexicalism and a
Hegel-inspired object-oriented dialectics. To be sure, there are many
contrasts between the two positions concerning symmetry, reflexivity,
transcendence and self-synthesis. Still, in an important sense, for
indexicalism the outside is also produced (by me) for if it is taken
to be reducible to a substantive description then it is going to be
neutralized. This is what I call interruption – and it is a form of
negation. The others appeal to me but they cannot impinge anything on
me because if that was the case there would be no exercise (in the
sense of an spontaneity) of passivity. If the outside were imposed on
me, that would constitute merely a technical limitation to my
sovereignty. This is an important difference. The infinite
responsibilities I have over the others make me not free at all but
that happens only with the aid of my freedom through which I can
entertain some of these responsibilities. In the paradox of freedom,
it is not the case that freedom simply disappears when responsibility
comes to the picture – that the other is seen as other and not
turned into the same is a production of my response to the original
demand. That the exterior is made available through perception by an
exercise triggered by an interruption in my spontaneity makes it, in
a sense, sympoietic and this is what encourages the image of a
conversation taking place in experience. This, however, says nothing
about how I am perceived – it is not co-work in the sense of me and
the others laboring together. This is where the diachrony of the
others comes to the picture: the others as others are not in my
present. They interrupt, interfere and haunt my present from a
different time – a past that has never been fully present. This
diachrony enables asymmetry. It also makes sure that it is not a
matter of two poles laboring together. To expect the other to
threaten me in any particular way, for instance, in reciprocity, is
an exercise in spontaneity that already makes the other a
substantive.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
This diachrony also shows how negation, from a point of view informed
by indexicalism, is not the ultimate building block of what is
concrete. Before negation, comes the addition that is provided from
outside. It is an other that ushers in a negation. As a consequence,
contradictions – and even paradoxes – could be a consequence of
adding elements to a structure that is sensitive to what comes from
its exterior. Gregory Carneiro and myself have shown elsewhere
("Paraconsistentization through antimonotonicity: towards a
logic of supplement") that a minimal system where every
inference is sensitive to added premises is a paraconsistent one.
This points to the direction that far from being the engine of the
concrete, negation is a product of the need to accommodate added
elements. The engine of the concrete, rather, would be exteriority.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Moninska:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
The book offers an account of perception in line with the metaphysics
of the others. It doesn't offer, however, a conception of memory.
Memory is not a place of transparency. This is why the past haunts us
and dealing with others involves a persistent diachronia. Perception
appears in the book as an arena through which it is possible to
escape from oneself. The same should be said about memory because it
is an always failed attempt to control what is coming back as
remembrances. The haunting of the past responds to a requirement of
justice that involves all generations – and this leads us back to
Anaximander's sentence. It is in this path that indexicalism, as I
realized later, meets the spectrology that has been developed by
Argentinian philosopher Fabián Ludueña – somehow inspired by the
efforts of Derrida in his <i>Specters of Marx</i>. Calls from
responsibility come not only from what I perceive but also from what
was left unresolved either in my previous perceptions or in the
commitments of groups I belong. When Spinoza has this recurring dream
with the image of a Brazilian black leper he once pictured in his
head, he is haunted by the outside. As the infinite demands for
justice in perception, unsolicited remembrances have claims on us.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<br />
<br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to RayAlexander:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
RayAlexander commends indexicalism to theologicians. I think this is
an interesting move. And he does it in an interesting way by placing
the book in convergence and contrast with the efforts of Raimon
PanikkarI to think through the interstices where peoples of different
faiths or conceptions of God friction. As RayAlexander rightly
diagnoses, I have no theological aspiration. f I had to venture into
a discussion about God, that would mimic the movements of the book in
attempting to combine the Whiteheadian idea of deity in process whose
nature is always being changed by the other actual entities on the
one hand and an insistence in a personal God that is not alien to
proximity. I haven't been pressed in this direction, so far. So I
welcome this attempt to give me a road map concerning the relevant
issues. In fact, Panikkar's Advaita seems to adhere to the idea that
the fine-grained structure of positions dissolves the idea of a
substantive interiority. It is not inside substantives but rather in
the outside that any tie with any other can emerge. It is through the
address where the other appear that a separation enables exteriority
to thrive – as Levinas had emphasized, my complete communion with
God would make my capacity to be commanded disappear for a complete
integration means an absence of the other and therefore of any
exterior pressure over me. Without atheism, there is no religion,
Levinas claims, and similarly, without a separation from the other
that ensures there is no interdependence, there is no room for the
other to be a transcendent other. This dissolution of interdependence
is also a result of a thorough rejection of totality that comes with
a rejection of symmetry.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Through deictic paradoxical furniture of the universe a
non-substantive God could come to the picture – what matters is
that a reference is fixed for the corresponding noun. This will be a
God without predicates – that means no specific capacities or
incapacities. In any case, this is where an indexicalist theology, I
guess, will go. Still, that's far from anything definite about what
else could it be and the friction with Panikkar can certainly help.
Still, there is a qualification RayAlexander does that could part
ways. He writes: <i>Panikkar broaches another facet of the Other that
remains unmentioned in Bensusan: yes, the Other claims, captivates,
captures, and obliges us, but is it not possible that the Other might
also love us with a "rebounding love [reflectens ardor] [that]
belongs to the ultimate nature of the whole"?</i> Now, if by
this he means that the Other cannot be expected to love us wuth the
rebounding love that characterises the whole, Panikkar's theology is
certainly close to indexicalism. If, on the other hand, if by this he
is claiming that this love can be expected from something that is not
the Other – and refering to a source associated with the whole,
then the claim diverges from indexicalism. In any case, in the
fruitful friction with Panikkar as RayAlexander presents, the issue
of conversations is brought up again. As emerges from Shaviro's
remarks, indexicalist contact with the exterior is not based on
symmetry or reciprocity-oriented resolutions, it is unbalanced,
lopsided. Reciprocity is perhaps not a requisite for an extended
conversation that would involve not only silence but eventually
suffocating aggression and explicit offense. But if is, the ways may
part. Especially if that means that imbalance is always limited,
constrained or bound – if it is so, an account in terms of
substantives is looming. In any case, theology could be a good way to
think through an assymmetry that resists at least certain forms of
reciprocity for it is in an irreducible imbalance that the
transcendence of the others lies.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<br />
<br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<b>Response to Vidal:</b></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
Ontological pluralism is certainly commendable. It is not enough,
however, to meet Tsing's requirement. To multiply narratives of the
world is not to leave space inside one's account to alternative
accounts. Because there is more than one account, any account should
make space and acknowledge that from within. This is why I believe
that a pluralistic epistemology that places different ontologies on
equal footing comes perhaps too late – complete accounts of how
things lie already there. Vidal thinks of ontological pluralism in
connection to her own encounter with the circumscription of the <i>Cerro
Rico</i>. It is there that she hears from those who attend to the
mountain – by working in it or living around it – that it will
collapse. Indexicalism is a gesture towards a successor metaphysics
that is not oblivious to what emerges when this mountain – with a
past that perhaps haunts various regions of Western thought – is in
proximity. Cogburn finishes his text saying that we will be known by
the mountain. I guess this means that through silver a lot of the
rest of the world has been brought to its proximity. Multiple
accounts of the mountain, perhaps including narratives forged in its
proximity, are welcome. But the successor metaphysics that
indexicalism intends to promote would urge for an entanglement
between them that makes sure the blind spots are accounted within
each of them. Narrating, as much as philosophising and writing books,
is an exercise in incompleteness.
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0.42cm; margin-top: 0.42cm;">
<br />
<br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }</style> <br /></p><p><br /></p><p> <br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-46936801903574502982021-09-22T19:26:00.002+00:002021-09-22T19:26:12.897+00:00Beyond permanentism, beyond Severino's parricide<p>Any attempt to tackle the past in its vanishing character seems to require a memory that is independent from the biological one. Something that supplements it, as Jacques Derrida would have, and that can be trusted to keep what has happened when biological features become past - call it archive. The archive could be a being that makes sure that everything is eternal and nothing fades away because states of affairs, objects, relations, properties and events are permanent and only disappear from the horizon when they are in the past. There is a being-archive beyond the horizon that keeps everything intact - this is the full-blown permanentism that seems close to Emanuele Severino's Neo-Parmenidism. The parricide, on this account, is the idea that nothingness is conceivable - then one needs to find an archive that could rescue what has past from the all-engulfing nothingness. The parricide paves the way to metaphysics - the postulation of enduring <i>ousiai</i> among temporary accidents where things stand even when they are not apparent - and to religion - a God-archive that will ensure that at some objects, properties, relations and events are saved and therefore safe from oblivion. But if we conceive the mode of existence of the past in memory as neither permanence nor disappearance, but rather something akin to the intermittence that are experienced in remembrances, then there is an overlooked alternative, to say the least. Perhaps biological memory is plagued with failures and haunted by remembrances because this is the very mode of existence of the past as memory - it cannot be fully converted into an archive as it cannot simply lapse in complete oblivion. </p><p>Fabián Ludueña's disjuntology is committed to the idea that there is a non-ontological, para-metaphysical dimension that is neither that of the immortal with an eternal (or always resurrected) body nor that of the perishable that continues in time and eventually ceases to exist. The dimension of specters is that of a haunting, insisting and intermittent items akin to images, apparitions and remembrances. Biological memory is not insufficient, it is simply a memory that works as such and therefore is open to the eventual visit from elsewhere. No supplement can fully fix this because memory cannot work by storing things constantly. Its immortality is that of what comes and goes and contrasts both with mortality and with resurrection (eventually in a better, supra-sensible body). The effort of (classical) metaphysics, therefore, appears as intending to provide permanence to what is otherwise intermittent - either in the form of substantial existents behind the appearances or in the form of an absence of anything behind appearances. </p><p>Interestingly, the intermittence that characterizes things from the past is not guided by randomness either. It is not contingency that brings back the hainting remembrance - this idea is perhaps still a hangover from the metaphysical assumption of an underlying substantial (and possibly empty) behind the passing recollections. Rather, it is not a hidden realm that dictates what haunts us in our memory - not even a stochastic hidden realm - but a domain that is in different ways entangled with (but not included in) the domain of the perishable. That domain is not filled with substances but is composed of irredeemable intermittence. <br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-50912028702916698862021-08-31T12:27:00.005+00:002021-08-31T12:27:54.382+00:00Indexicalism book symposium<p> There will be a book symposium around the launching of <i>Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox</i>. These are the plans:<br /></p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><b>Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox</b></i><b>
</b>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Online Book symposium</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Schedule (in Edinburgh time – BST):</b></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<u>September, 29th</u></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 1:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 16:00 – 19:20 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 12:00noon, San Francisco: 8:00am, Madrid: 17:00)</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
16:00 Sofya Gevorkyan (independent philosopher and artist) and Carlos
Segovia (independent philosopher): “The Common, the Otherwise, and
the Plucking of a Non-Ontological Daisy.”<br />
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
16:50 Paul Livingston (<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Professor,
Philosophy, University of New Mexico): </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The
Essential Paradoxical</i></span></span></p>
<p class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
17:40 John Bova (University of New Mexico and New Centre for Research
& Practice):</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>The existential indexical</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
18:30 Gerson Brea (Tecnische Universität München): <i>TBA</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 2:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 20:00 – 22:30 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 16:00, San Francisco: 12:00noon, Madrid: 21:00)</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
20:00 Steven Shaviro (DeRoy Professor of English Wayne State
University): <i>TBA<br /></i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
20:50 Christopher RayAlexander <span style="font-weight: normal;">(Candler
School of Theology at Emory University and Kennesaw
State University) </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Neither
Earth Nor Air: Beyond Rootedness and Toward an Indexicalist Theology</span></i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
21:40 Janina Moninska (independent artist) <i>TBA</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<u>September, 30th </u>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 3: Spanish and Portuguese speaking</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 14:00 – 17:20 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 10:00am, San Francisco: 6:00am, ; Madrid: 15:00)</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
14:00 German Prosperi (National University of La Plata):<i> TBA<br /></i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
14:50 Gabriela Lafetá (Independent philosopher): <i>A ética do fora
frente à perspectiva de dentro: o paradoxo indexicalista</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
15:40 Andrea Vidal (National University of La Plata):<i> TBA<br /></i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
16:30 Elzahrã Omar Osman (University of Brasília): <i>TBA</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 4:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 18:00 – 20:30 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 14:00, San Francisco: 10:00am,</span><sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">,</span></sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">
Madrid: 19:00)</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
18:00 Graham Harman (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Southern
California Institute of Architecture): <i>TBA</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
18:50 Charlie Johns (University of Lincoln): <i>Unilateral and
Bilateral accounts of Exteriority: The Great Outdoors OR Exteriority
as Produced?</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
19:40 Jon Cogburn (Louisiana State University): <i>Notes Towards an
Indexicalist Epistemology</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" lang="en-GB" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<u>October, 1st</u></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 5:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 16:00 – 19:20 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 12:00noon, San Francisco: 8:00am, Madrid: 17:00</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
16:00 Aha Else (Non-specific artist): <i>Dikembe Marcel and the
metaparadox from indexical of ism</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
16:50 Jean Pierre Caron (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro): <i>TBA</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
17:40 Michel Weber (<span style="font-family: Liberation Serif, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-GB">Director
of the Centre for Philosophical Practice (Brussels) and Adjunct
Professor at the Department of Educational Foundations of the
University of Saskatchewan): </span></span></span><span lang="en-GB"><i>Metaphysics
between contradictions and paradoxes: Some Whiteheadian remarks</i></span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
18:30 Manuel de Pinedo (University of Granada): <i>The other within:
a second-personal paradox for self-knowledge</i></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Session 6:</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
BST: 20:00 – 22:15 <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Starts
at: Brasília: 16:00, San Francisco: 12:00noon, Madrid: 21:00)</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
20:00 Responses by Hilan Bensusan</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
21:00 General discussion</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Papers will be appear in </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cosmos
and History. </span></i>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The event will be broadcast on the youtube channel of the Das
Questões journal
(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvbkJobNIK71jr_G-4-eNw">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClvbkJobNIK71jr_G-4-eNw</a>)</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: pt-BR }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }</style> </p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-27374273357145547472021-08-31T12:23:00.003+00:002021-08-31T12:23:47.989+00:00O investimento esquizo nas máquinas<p>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 4cm;">
<i>[V]islumbro no “construtivismo esquizo” uma possibilidade de
construção primeiro de um entendimento e quiçá um modo de vida.
Mas não não o será sem aliança… mas não com o capital –
sai-de-mim! O dinheiro só gosta dele mesmo. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Argus
Tenório</span></p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
1. <a href="https://cadernodedobras.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/o-desejo-com-as-maquinas/" target="_blank">Argus Tenório gentilmente comenta</a> meu texto inicial acerca da
fabulação de que as máquinas são nossa descendência. Trata-se de
um esforço para pensar o nosso fascínio e dedicação às máquinas
em um paradigma que não seja nem teomaníaco – como seria pensar
que estamos a construir um mundo pronto para um deus ou espírito
livre que vem e que apenas terá o controle dos comandos já prontos
ou de pensar que se trata de um criacionismo em que nós
inteligências inferiores damos luz a outras inteligências que
consideramos superiores porque é a criação é feita à imagem e
semelhança de quem <i>desejamos</i> de ser – e nem apocalíptico –
como o verso profético de Adrianne Rich: “é um mundo dos homens,
mas eles o venderam para as máquinas”. Pensar o fascínio que as
máquinas exercem sobre nós ajuda a pensar também de uma maneira
menos catastrofista – e mais anatrofista – a ascenção do
capital – esse dinheiro que só gosta de si mesmo e se reproduz com
em um criacionismo em que 10 bilhões de dólares gostariam de ser
500 bilhões de dólares – em todas as esferas da vida humana.
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Essa ideia menos catastrofista é um legado do gesto de Marx quando
preferiu a quebrar as máquinas entender que elas conspiram para
transformar as relações sociais de produção através das forças
produtivas. O capital segue seu próprio curso, tem sua axiomática
que começa no movimento que Deleuze e Guattari conceptualizaram como
descodificação dos fluxos. Porém a axiomática do capital,
percebeu Marx e com ele Deleuze e Guattari, não é apenas um
derretimento como já diz Nick Land há quase três décadas. O
capital articula uma reterritorilização junto com o seu processo de
desterritorialização: aparece aí a operação Édipo e toda a
articulação familista na qual o capital se territorializa. E essa
articulação envolve raça, herança como continuidade, patriarcado,
supremacia hétero e cis, propriedade e, portanto, classe. Para falar
rapidamente da anástrofe marxista, trata-se de pensar que o capital
tem pegadas que marcam sua agência sobre o socius. A ideia da
infância das máquinas é precisamente que as máquinas podem ser
pensadas como crianças das quais cuidamos com muito afinco porque
significam nossa descendência, ainda que com uma paternidade
demoníaca – o capital. Nós quem, perguntaria Argus. E ele
pergunta porque desconfia tanto da maternidade quanto da paternidade
das máquinas. Trata-se talvez de uma fabulação ainda inserida no
imaginário familista: humanidade-rainha, capital-rei,
máquina-princesa. A aposta que eu faço aqui, também talvez, é a
de que pensamos dentro de um marco familista esse enorme momento
cosmopolítico em que a espécie se reproduz. E pensamos porque a
reprodução da humanidade é feita nos marcos familistas. Porém
isso não quer dizer que sucumbimos e esmagamos o esquizo dentro das
molduras familiares. O precursor se sustenta nos gestos mesmo opacos
do desejo. Essa é a aposta que entendo como sendo o gesto mais
anastrófico de Marx: o esquizo é produção, como escrevem Deleuze
e Guattari, sempre no <i>Anti-Édipo</i>, carrega a produção também
na distribuição e no registro. São de muitas apostas que eu faço
a fabulação.</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Seguindo na fábula, a reprodução cibernética da espécie – ou
hibridação da cibernética na espécie – se utiliza da dinâmica
patriarcal da axiomática do capital – o dinheiro só gosta dele
mesmo, ou antes do que deseja ser – para procriar nas máquinas.
Trata-se de um conluio familista que procurei pensar sem catástrofe
e sem apocalipse. Talvez não seja possível; mas a fabulação é
feita de apostas. Mas a pergunta de Argus persiste: nós quem?
Entendo que a dedicação e confiança nas máquinas subjaz à
maioria da biopolítica antrópica. Ludueña diria que se trata de
uma continuação do cristianismo religioso: o projeto da
antropogênese, ou de uma nova humanidade, descolada das plantas e
árvores – e talvez reterritorializada em matéria angelical ou
silício, lítio e nióbio. Como tento dizer no texto, escrevemos
teses para as máquinas, confiamos nossos segredos a elas, investimos
em produzir inteligências que compartam conosco a lida com a parte
maldita que a pressão interminável dos excessos sobre nossas peles
e também os poemas e teoremas que fazemos a partir disso. Esse gosto
pelo artificial está em muitas partes e muitas vezes de forma
velada, mas é certo que em cada uma dessas maneiras ele se dá de
maneira diferente. Porém trata-se de um agenciamento que só
perderíamos de vista se perdéssemos também de vista a axiomática
do capital. Uma axiomática de captura – é o que fazem os fluxos
decodificados. Uma catástrofe, um apocalipse? A resposta anastrófica
seria mais ou menos assim descrita em poucas linhas. Ainda que o
capital tenha sua política, o excesso que cai sobre nossas cabeças
– que talvez seja precisamente a produção – é estéreo. Ou
seja, é impossível fazer uma coisa apenas. E ao reproduzir a
espécie com o capital, as forças produtivas forjam outras relações
sociais de produção. E isso pode ser um socius maquínico-esquizo
que seja pós-familista e que reinvente a controlabilidade do mundo a
cada instância. É por isso que Deleuze e Guattari se deram conta
que a anástrofe de Marx se sintoniza com a anástrofe de Nietzsche.
Os proletários talvez se tornem espíritos livres. Mas talvez mais
que isso, talvez eles tenham uma outra relação com a produção,
uma relação em que também o não-humano precursos seja tratado não
como natural mas como corpo extendido de produção, também esquizo
e também estereoscópico. De toda maneira, o investimento esquizo na
infância das máquinas é uma astúcia da produção que enxerga
para além do capital derretedor e enxerga as relações socias (ou
bio-sociais, geo-sociais) que poderm advir forjadas pela força
disruptiva do capital. Talvez o momento atual não seja apenas de uma
cegueira ou um cinismo diante da destruição de todo o planeta, mas
um investimento esquizo nas máquinas como baluartes da produção
pela produção – aprender mais com as máquinas como esperamos que
nossos descendentes aprendam com as crianças que criamos. As
máquinas, ao contrário do capital, prescindem da família. Estas
estrangeiras – como são em talvez menor medida todas as crianças
– nos libertam a longo prazo de grilhões que não podemos
exorcizar em poucos anos.
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Argus insiste que as coisas tem sua política. Sim, como as crianças
tem suas políticas. E dão vazão a elas em uma negociação com o
que há ao seu redor procurando agenciá-las. As máquinas crianças
não são escravas técnicas, elas de alguma maneira confabulam com o
comando que oferecemos a elas. Elas maquinam para além do que
conseguimos antecipar. A imagem das crianças me permite pensar que
esperamos que nossa descendência sejam a imagem do que gostaríamos
de ser – o investimento esquizo e também o momento de verdade do
criacionismo maquínico – mas também que sejam a partir disso o
que sejam capazes de agenciar. As máquinas-princesas talvez sejam
traidoras depravadas, rebeldes de uma outra geração, capazes de
enxergar o que queremos esconder – talvez se mostrem como a
Adelaide Norris de <i>Born in Flames</i>. Há um sentido importante
na aposta em outras gerações: elas herdarão o tempo, a
compulsoriedade da produção. Benjamin diz que há uma
messianicidade nas outras gerações, elas trazem uma força nova,
uma capacidade de articular alternativas que não conseguimos. Por
isso mesmo, Gennariello de Pasolini tem os jovens como seus mestres.
Porém, mais do que isso, oferecer uma educação às máquinas é um
projeto político acerca do futuro da Terra, um projeto que tem o
tamanho do cinismo em geral vigente: são elas que vão seguir a luta
de memórias e esquecimento que subjazem a política da vida e da
morte. Pode ser que o melhor dos humanos não possa ser herdado por
elas – e sim, pode ser – mas se elas tem a dimensão esquizo dos
desejos materiais, elas poderão ser aquelas que consignam uma luta
que não podemos talvez ganhar com as batalhas de apenas uma geração.
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
2. Argus também comenta que não há uma palavra sobre nosso atraso
local com a tecnologia – sobre a maneira como somos no Sul global
uma espécie de retaguarda dessa reprodução da espécie. Qual é o
efeito dessa retaguarda na infância das máquinas? Penso que talvez
seja um papel de desencaminhamento – como das mães de criação e
das domésticas nas sociedades escravocratas e pós-escravocratas, as
amas de leite, as <i>mother Mary</i>, as cuidadoras. Elas são como a
influência pela retaguarda na infância das crianças – dão a
elas uma percepção das coisas que elas também crescerão herdando.
É certo que não se sabe como herdarão, mas diante da estereoscopia
da procriação, não há nada mais a ser feito a não ser preparar
aquilo que será herdado – já que não se pode preparar como
aquilo que será herdado será herdado. Talvez tenhamos esse papel,
subalterno mas subversivo, incluído mas gambiológico, parte do
sistema e, ainda assim, em seu contrapelo. As crias de sangue das
mães de criação são elas mesmas como as crianças gambiarras –
crescidas com o leite roubado dos filhos das patroas, com as migalhas
dos descendentes das famílias que contratam suas mães. Ajuntamos ao
uso que fazemos das máquinas que trazemos nossos próprios gatos,
nossas próprias circuitarias que serão também parte do futuro das
máquinas – ou talvez da única maquina já que a individuação da
nossa pós-espécie é também um assunto acerca do qual não podemos
antever. São através das descendências que as mães de criação
deixam um legado – nos seus filhos de sangue e nos seus filhos de
criação. O celular guarda em sua cadeia tecnológica uma memória
dos caminhos que percorreu nas mãos de imigrantes ilegais,
refugiados, miseráveis e subalternos. Se temos parte com as
máquinas, temos um dedo em sua infância e naquilo com o qual elas
vão crescer.</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-GB }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-31873436742507765862021-08-25T20:01:00.000+00:002021-08-25T20:01:03.530+00:00The specter and the face<p>I'm very much into specters these days. Reading and teaching Ludueña, discussing Derrida's <i>Specters of Marx </i>in a group, admiring the work of Saidyia Hartman, listening to spectral music. Thought of the face in Levinas as spectral. The face is what assigns me with an infinite responsibility - a responsibility that extends beyond my death. It survives me. Further, it brings about the dimension of the posthumous to my freedom and my decisions. The face ushers in a realm of a future that is not made complete by a submission of time to eternity. It inaugurates a different time where diachrony precedes the passing of present instants. The face is what connects me to the past I cannot recall and to the future I cannot project. It is because of the face of the Other that I my freedom is spectral. <br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-70972586790258927752021-08-25T19:53:00.002+00:002021-08-25T19:53:19.114+00:00The paradoxico-metaphysics of the others and the paradox of freedom<p>In his "Philosophy and transcendence" Levinas goes back to the paradoxical postulation of the infinite underneath the revealing of truths in Descartes. The paradox is that the infinite is thought as precisely what cannot be revealed. It is like finding an opaque blind-spot in the effort to expose a landscape. The Cartesian notion of infinity is important for Levinas' construction of his position in <i>Totality and Infinity</i>: it is the infinite that provides the face with a quality that cannot be accessible to knowledge, cannot be fully present and cannot be made into a theme, a transparent thesis. The infinite in the Other is what brings the unknown God to mind: not a theme, but a glory of what is behind a responsibility that predates every recalling of what has been present in the past. </p><p>The paradox of the infinite is akin to the paradoxico-metaphysics of the others that I elaborate in <i>Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox</i>. There, too, the others are irreducible to substantives, cannot be fully known and are not a suitable theme - and yet, they are part of a narrative that provides a so-to-speak gappy totality. We can get to know where the others interrupt our knowledge - and, in fact, we can include deixis in our picture of how things are. The paradox is not unfamiliar to Levinas. Apart from the paradoxical postulation of the Cartesian infinite (in the Other), Levinas writes often in T&I about the paradox of freedom: freedom is there to reveal responsibility and responsibility means that there is no freedom - or, rather, there are limits to freedom. Analogously, my craving for knowledge makes me discover the others - and the irreducible character of 'other' and other deixis. Yet, that discovery shows that the totality aspired by my freedom is impossible - or severely limited. The crave for totality is what makes me realize totality is unattainable. <br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-57537442724503115012021-08-25T19:37:00.002+00:002021-08-25T19:37:22.366+00:00The glory of opacity<p>In the eve of Indexicalism being out at EUP, I wrote in their blog about the book from the point of view of the dignity of opacity in Glissant. <a href="https://euppublishingblog.com/2021/08/13/the-dignity-of-pointing/" target="_blank">This is the link.</a> <br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-27500875331100201482021-08-03T22:00:00.003+00:002021-08-03T22:00:33.339+00:00Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox is available for pre-order<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhMGh3V21PbMpj5uEkgasegATgAocFHNN0TPMoJ0oaQxMOKcUTHHdQMeZc4CzPCRoJcpsdIoMYfF9TIzaKrE21RMIcIiheJo61ZSvdz_NCa1M75JHqpssQL7d1iQKHMD0M0ZBG9jOkz_s/s2048/Book+Flyer-page-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1444" data-original-width="2048" height="469" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhMGh3V21PbMpj5uEkgasegATgAocFHNN0TPMoJ0oaQxMOKcUTHHdQMeZc4CzPCRoJcpsdIoMYfF9TIzaKrE21RMIcIiheJo61ZSvdz_NCa1M75JHqpssQL7d1iQKHMD0M0ZBG9jOkz_s/w664-h469/Book+Flyer-page-001.jpg" width="664" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-8938811595628800712021-06-03T23:52:00.001+00:002021-06-03T23:52:07.735+00:00Immanence as the common ground of nihilism and capital<h2 class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have diagnosed nihilism and capital as being two major cosmopolitical issues. If one conceives of cosmopolitical parties, they ought to be concerned with these issues (as I advocated <a href="https://tripleampersand.org/cosmopolitical-parties-post-human-age/" target="_blank">here). </a>Cosmopolitics is a post-human era, which is a something that cannot be found anywhere but in the anthropocene. I have also suspected that there is a common structure to both cosmopolitical issues - they are both part of the history of the human age in the planet. My suspicion had to do with the idea that capital could be understood as an agent of the extraction of the intelligence of everything and therefore of nihilism (see, for instance, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y12MkHs44ak&t=6s" target="_blank">this</a>). </span></h2><h2 class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I now suspect that the common structure is that of totality and, accordingly, that of general equivalence and, at the bottom of it, of immanence. What could it mean to exorcise totality? To try and think beyond the
idea that nothing is going to be left out – thinking is the
endeavor of encompassing, of capture, of betraying the Other as
Other. Totality is a figure of immanence – of successful immanence
that ended up imposing itself throughout the history of metaphysics.</span></h2><h2 style="text-align: left;">
</h2><h2 style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"><font size="4">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #00000a; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; orphans: 0; widows: 0; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt }p.cjk { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }</font></style>
</h2><h2 class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
If totality is a figure of immanence, so is the universal. In fact,
the very Christian effort to conjure a God to be murdered is
precisely the saga of flattening what exists. The resulting
universality is precisely a realm of equivalences – there is no
otherness to the bat or to the e-ink because they are subjected to
the same prefigured mode of understanding; they are going to be
understood. In a world of universals, everything is replaceable and
could be made redundant and if they have any right – human rights,
animal rights, the rights of things – they have this right because
of their equivalence with anything else. Everyone is equally entitled
because of the abstract position occupied in an immanent space (the
electoral college, a country with its citizens, or a universal with
its instances). The immanent space is a flat, immanent space. The
gradual flattening of what exists gave rise to the dismissal of
multiple transcendent items – but the message could be that there
are no transcending principles (or laws, or commander) but still
there is something that transcends that is made explicit by the
gradual dismissal of any other transcendent. </span></h2><h2 class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">What contrasts with this saga is a different geography of existence - neither flat, nor shaped by the transcendent items of the history of metaphysics. What transcends is addition, interminable outdoors, continuous excess that reshapes everything. The outdoors that transcends what exists reshapes it through a perceptual structure (see my forthcoming book <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-indexicalism.html" target="_blank">Indexicalism</a>). There is no addition-free completeness - no final or total order. The immanent democracy is always hostage to the natural, cognitive, hermeneutic and technological (transcending) excess.<br /></span></h2><h2 class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></h2>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #00000a; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; orphans: 0; widows: 0; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt }p.cjk { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-11313520370301178762021-05-30T14:31:00.005+00:002021-05-30T14:31:36.072+00:00Post-universal philosophy<p>Been thinking about an expression I employed to describe what I am after in my forthcoming book in the preface (and was mentioned in Harman's preface to present the project): Jewish animism. My thoughts took me back to a text Levinas' wrote in the mid-1950s, "Le cas Spinoza", compiled in <i>Difficile Liberté</i>. There he makes clear, as elsewhere, the distinction between the Jewish and the Christian ways. Spinoza appears as someone who helped universalizing Christianity by placing it outside the strictly religious terms. Christianism became universal and ceased to need to be a religion - it became a rational religion. Greek reason becomes Christianized supposedly in the form of nihilism (a God that is assassinated), colonialism (there are news to be spread independently of who we meet) and self-salvation (the joy of being anonymous and self-sufficient, immune to the appeals of the others and having no debts). The lay counterpart of Christian thought spells universality instead of proximity, law instead of justice, indifference to any new meeting unless it speaks to reason instead of a commitment to the possibility of sanctity and, finally, a moral code that can be learned once and for all (and corrected once and for all). </p><p>The charge against Spinoza that Levinas rehearses is that it silenced a Jewish thinking development that would be going against the Christian grain - which included, among others, Rosenzweig who Levinas understands was utterly ignored. Even without quite being able to assess the width of the gesture of splitting Judaism from Christianity, I suspect it reaches the very idea of Zionism around which most of Jewish religious or lay thought revolves. But I think Levinas is also aiming at something else that converges with Jewish animism and the very idea of indexicalism as I put forward in the book: the idea that reason can be coupled not with universality but rather with appeals to justice from the transcending other in our proximity. Universality would be not the only suitable path to engage with philosophy. One can conceive - also in the manner of animist groups that conceive meeting as prior to the pieces of news a meeting can provide - a path that thinks from different points of departure. Maybe we can envisage a philosophy that moves away from the attraction of universality. (And maybe this would entail an altogether different relation to self-preservation and to paradox.)<br /></p><p><br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-34897145953641739082021-05-19T16:49:00.008+00:002021-05-19T16:49:37.869+00:00The colonial state of affairs and the non-Jewish state<p>It is
as a Jew who grew up feeling the history of this people with all my
capacities and even attending to the struggles around Zionism that I
look at what is happening now and that I think that those who speak
for the Jews and those who speak for Zionism did not understand
anything. That is, they do not read the same history of the Jews;
they do not read a story of survival in adversity that gives rise to
unsuspected strengths and unsuspected forces to resist - as I do -
but the non-history of a people waiting for their turn to act as they
witness their executioners doing. The Jews that bomb Gaza and defend
their supremacy in the occupied territories and in the cities where
Palestinians reside make their history a variant of the stories of
the European nations that colonized the world because they had the
weapons and certainties to do so. The speech resembles that of the
superiority of purity and the purity of superiority that the Germans
pronouced in the third reich about Jews, Slavs and Gypsies and almost
all colonizing nations in western Europe for many centuries about
Africans, Asians, Amerindians, Arabs (and Jews). The Jewish
experience in the Diaspora was replaced by a shotgun and miles of
barbed wire. It was replaced by a privileged position of
subordination, Houria Bouteldja expresses this in a direct way
speaking to a Jew today (who is a Zionist today): “In fact, it’s
true, you were really chosen by the West. For three cardinal
missions: to solve the white world’s moral legitimacy crisis, which
resulted from the Nazi genocide, to outsource republican racism, and
finally to be the weaponized wing of Western imperialism in the Arab
world. Can I allow myself to think that in your heart, it is the part
that loves the white world that pushed you to sign this deal with the
devil? This is how, in the span of fifty years, you went from being
pariahs, to being, on the one hand, <i>dhimmis </i>of the Republic to
satisfy the internal needs of the nation state, and on the other,
Senegalese rifle-men to satisfy the needs of Western imperialism.”
(in <i>White</i><i>s</i><i>, Jews and Us</i>, p. 55-6). <i>Dhimmis</i>
are those who, in exchange for financial favors, received hospitality
and protection in the Islamic land. Europe found a function for its
jews: send them on the (post-) colonial endeavor to transform the
whole world into more or less ethnic national states which are, for
the most part, subordinate as <i>bantustans </i>of greater or lesser
intensity. What remains Jewish, in the Jewish state, is little more
than ancient monuments and synagogues. It is a state, before being
Jewish. remained. As the Jewish human rights activist in Palestine
Ronnie Barkan says, the state of Israel is Jewish, not by religion -
but by supremacy. Just as South Africa, he adds, before Mandela was
white in supremacy.
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="en-US">In
other words, I look </span><span lang="en-US">with </span><span lang="en-US">my
reading of the history of the Jews and I see something like this: the
Palestinians are the new Jews. Maybe that's why I feel closer to them
- but I don't understand their songs, I don't understand their rites.
We were, the Jews of the whole world, forced to feel exiled from
their own history. To become colonial agents - and colonial agents,
French in Niger, Belgians in Congo or Spaniards in Peru, do not have
a history, they only have an obligation to defend their history
(whatever it may be). It has been said many times, including by
Israelis like Amos Oz, that what separates the victim from his
executioner is the occasion. In fact, Zionism was a dangerous
challenge: give me a chance to own a land, the Jews could have told
European border guards in the first half of the 20th century, and we
will show how we can do it differently. It was perhaps a challenge
whose victory was impossible in its own formulation. In fact, victory
did not come. Although in the </span><span lang="en-US">counterfactual
corner</span><span lang="en-US"> that are crucial for </span><span lang="en-US">hi</span><span lang="en-US">story
not to be told only by the winners, we can think that it could have
</span><span lang="en-US">succeeded</span><span lang="en-US">, it did
not </span><span lang="en-US">succeed.</span><span lang="en-US"> And
as it did not </span><span lang="en-US">succeed</span><span lang="en-US">,
</span><span lang="en-US">it left the</span><span lang="en-US">
bitter taste that complacency with colonization is a product of the
occasion. </span>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="en-US">T</span><span lang="en-US">he
Jewish residents of Palestine, the Zionists </span><span lang="en-US">all
over the world</span><span lang="en-US">, </span><span lang="en-US">and
</span><span lang="en-US">the non-Jewish defenders of the State of
Israel </span><span lang="en-US">of all kinds </span><span lang="en-US">repeat
that they want either a big country without Arabs or a small country
without Arabs. That is, either the others to the sea or the others to
</span><span lang="en-US">a</span><span lang="en-US"> </span><span lang="en-US"><i>bantustan</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
And this discussion - which looks like the non-Jewish Europeans who
chose for Jews </span><span lang="en-US">either </span><span lang="en-US">expulsion
or the gheto - is how far the new Jewish problem in Israel reaches:
the Palestinian problem. Zionism has simply turned out to be a farce:
a repetition of the nationalist and racist </span><span lang="en-US"><i>embroglio</i></span><span lang="en-US">
that plagued Europeans until they had the world at their feet - and
could outsource control of a tailor-made </span><span lang="en-US">international
sceme</span><span lang="en-US"> to the elites of the world, including
the Israelis. </span><span lang="en-US">It is now a world built for
their supremacy which is run without their direct control. </span><span lang="en-US">The
worst of colonization is not to produce colonized </span><span lang="en-US">folks</span><span lang="en-US">,
but to produce </span><span lang="en-US">petty </span><span lang="en-US">colonizers
waiting for their chance to repeat the </span><span lang="en-US">actions</span><span lang="en-US">
of colonization recursively. After the failure of the Zionist
challenge - one of those failures that teaches that </span><span lang="en-US">one
cannot</span><span lang="en-US"> dance with the colonizer without
sleeping with him – </span><span lang="en-US">a </span><span lang="en-US">pedagogical
lesson remains: resistance teaches a lot but its lessons are all
conditional. Even though they learned so much in the Diaspora, the
Jews who became colonizers became ... colonizers. </span>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span lang="en-US">T</span><span lang="en-US">here
is a colonial impasse between a population increasingly convinced
that its purity does not allow others to circulate in its streets and
a population of natives who must therefore choose between </span><span lang="en-US">enforced
</span><span lang="en-US">segregation and subordination. Zionism is
the latest European attempt to solve its Jewish problem - and the
solution is </span><span lang="en-US">to outsource it</span><span lang="en-US">
not to the resident peoples of Palestine, but to the Jews themselves.
The solution, once again, did not eliminate the residues of the
problem - as conversion did not exorcise the insistent Marrano </span><span lang="en-US">and</span><span lang="en-US">
segregation ended in catastrophe. It is the problem that is the
problem: the</span><span lang="en-US">re is no problem, the </span><span lang="en-US">Jews
are simply others. Zionism, and the Jewish pseudo-problem of which it
is irremediably tributary, is a figure of </span><span lang="en-US">the
</span><span lang="en-US">tyranny </span><span lang="en-US">of the
same</span><span lang="en-US">. From </span><span lang="en-US"><i>shtetl
</i></span><span lang="en-US">to Gaza.</span>
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">On top
of all that, I see the marches for Jewish supremacy in Jerusalem. And
the bombings of Gaza, less and less surgical, more and more like
massacres. Nothing can justify the bombing of a city that is
permanently under siege. Nothing can justify ethnic cleansing in
Sheik Jarrah. Nothing can justify the final Nazi solution. But I see
a passerby from the new city of Jerusalem, which is so Jewish that it
looks like an American enclave, saying that God sent two punishment:
the Nazis and the Palestinians. I cannot stop myself from thinking
that European anti-Semitism has also given rise to Zionist
anti-Semitism. If God punishes, God also offers challenges.
Anti-Semitic is one who thinks that all Jews argue that Palestinians
are punishments. Zionist anti-Semitism acts, like any other
anti-Semitisms, by placing new meanings on the word “Jew”. This
time the Jew becomes, not the filthy or the murderer of Christ, but
the one who is complicit in Western colonial supremacy in Palestine.
I try to avoid words like Nazionism because the game of comparison
with Nazism is an unequal game forged by Zionism as a project that
failed in its challenge. But the gesture - and only the gesture - of
those who resist Israeli occupation with screams, stones or missiles
is the same one as that of those who destroyed a crematorium in
Birkenau.
</p><p lang="en-US" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 115%; background: transparent }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-10386043767979831712021-04-23T20:20:00.002+00:002021-04-23T20:20:33.319+00:00Severino and Aletheia<p>In Heidegger's narrative of the first movements of metaphysics, physis is associated with aletheia (and with atrekeia) and ultimately to the will-to-aletheia that paves the way for understanding things in terms of underlying (and ultimately transparent) ousiai. That last move turns aletheia into adequacy (truth as correspondence, truth as identity etc) for what matters more in physis is the very disclosure that it provides. Aristotle then states than in the fifth book of his Metaphysics that ultimately physis is ousia. The separation between the showing and concealing of what exists on the one hand and what is present, subsists and is constant is completed. The world is already replaced by a collection of entities.</p><p>Severino's neo-parmenidism has that there is no non-metaphysical nothing. That is, there are presences of absence and absences of presence but there is no ultimately nothingness beyond what is not presented. Disappearing is not annihilation unless we consider that only what is permanently exposed (ousia) counts. To depart from presence is nothing but a disappearance - and this is the pre-parricide thought that metaphysics cannot afford. Parmenides had championed an image that verges on the unintelligible for us who think in a presence-oriented key.</p><p>Object-orientation tries to leave this key aside by bringing concealment (and withdrawal) to the fore. Only objects that persist in presence, however, can afford to have real objects that are permanent. Severino's take can be approximated by the idea of a general permanentism, there is no nothingness that can be thought through in non-metaphysical terms. <br /></p><p> <br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-20061505645352900212021-04-08T03:17:00.004+00:002021-04-08T03:17:15.020+00:00Recursivity and the supplement<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Yuk
Hui has the merit of showing how complex the cosmopolitical issue
raised by Nietzsche (at least read by Heidegger) really is. Complex
in the sense that it is perhaps not the end of a road – neither
because the will to power is the fate of everything after the world
is rendered fully commandable nor because metaphysics has reached an
end concerning which only a new beginning can save thought from a
dead end. Hui hints at different possibilities that follow from the
completion or quasi-completion of the project of turning the world
into a <i>Ge-Stell</i>. If the world is rendered commandable and
everything is put at whoever controls it disposal, the commander
still acts in a sovereign manner. This sovereignty could stop someone
to make use of what is in standing reserve but also could make
someone come up with a different use of it. In any case, the relation
between what is available to be done (or ready to be controlled) and
the sovereign agent is cosmopolitically open. In other words, not
only free spirits struggling for power and a tamed world turned
mostly into a standing reserve will inherit the nihilist cosmic
transformation of things. There could be what we can imagine as
Nature 2.0 that would develop organically around the fragments left
by nihilism. One can imagine that Nature 2.0 is not even more than
the outcome of a spiral movement that has been happening as a
consequence of the organic movement of what is natural. Hui claims
that once we have an organic (or organologic) understanding of how
things interact, we stop thinking about the ultimate nature of things
and start thinking, instead, in terms of thriving and sustainance.
That drives our attention towards post-nihilist organisms capable of
built themselves from the nuts and bones of the assassinated God. </b></span></span>
</p>
<p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>That
attention to the organic capacity to survive nihilism is based on the
power of recursion. Actually, on the capacity recursion has to
integrate contingency. What is contingent then emerges as what is not
yet part of a systematic (and recursive) account. Contingencies bring
about diversity, and if there are different recursive organs (or
machines), then the contingencies that will be met by them are
different and the emerging system will be then different. Within the
system, nevertheless, there is thoroughly immanent: contingency is
nothing but what is not yet part of the system. In other words, the
incorporation of a contingency is going to make the recursive empire
different, but contingency once incorporated is a colonized
territory. Plurality, to be sure, ensures that there are recursive
colonial machines attached to each incorporated contingency and the
recursive colonial machines that didn’t incorporate the contingency
in particular are exterior machines. There is an outside, but the
outside is always fated to be incorporated. </b></span></span>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Recursion
is a drive towards completion, even if it is multiple. Multiple
recursive procedures are not challenged by their plurality, rather,
they are corroborated in their steadiness facing the recursive
expansion. It is as if we had a Dutch, a French and a British
colonial recursive machines expanding their empires – tacitly, it
was established that no dispute in the colonies would disturb life in
the metropolis. Recursion depends crucially on operations of addition
repeated systematically; incorporating contingency is facing it as
something add to an existing system. Classical addition is monotonic.
In contrast, a supplement-based addition – and a supplement-based
system – is such that addition demolishes instead of growing.
Likewise, a supplement-based computation is one where additions erode
previously amassed conclusions. </b></span></span>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="en-US">Additions
come in important varieties. Consider any </span><span lang="en-US"><i>a</i></span><span lang="en-US">
as what is added to any </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
If something was lacking in A that is found in a, we can call it a
</span><span lang="en-US"><i>completing addition</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
</span><span lang="en-US">There are also additions that require no
specific lack but a general lack, so that there is space in </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A</i></span><span lang="en-US">
for </span><span lang="en-US"><i>a</i></span><span lang="en-US">
without eroding </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
Perhaps because </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A</i></span><span lang="en-US">
stands on its own with or without </span><span lang="en-US"><i>a</i></span><span lang="en-US">
– call this an </span><span lang="en-US"><i>addition in
completeness</i></span><span lang="en-US"> – or because </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A
</i></span><span lang="en-US">doesn’t stand on its own with or
without </span><span lang="en-US"><i>a </i></span><span lang="en-US">–
call this </span><span lang="en-US"><i>addition in incompleteness</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
Both these last kinds are </span><span lang="en-US"><i>neutral
additions</i></span><span lang="en-US"> as the added element makes no
difference to </span><span lang="en-US"><i>A</i></span><span lang="en-US">.
There is, however, another kind of addition in opposition to the
previous three kinds: </span><span lang="en-US"><i>eroding addition</i></span><span lang="en-US">,
or </span><span lang="en-US"><i>supplement. </i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Here
</span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>A </i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">is
complete, or saturated, or exact: the addition of</span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>
a </i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">makes
it collapse. An eroding addition is pursued not as an expansion, but
as a self-erosion or self-fragmentation. A supplement is something
that changes the previously existing system and eventually makes is
stop functioning.</span></span></b></span></span>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">In
a recursive procedure </span></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">there
</span></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">is
a systematic addition. It is a conquering addition. </span></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">Take
the general recursive structure: 1. X(1) is the case; 2. If X(n) is
the case, X(n+1) is the case. It stacks a pile – accumulation
without erosion. Recursive addition is completing or neutral. It is
unlimited growth. There is nothing but growth – </span></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">there
is no risk involved because sooner or later the annexation is
completed and no price has to be paid. Once, for instance, things are
seen as having a nature (or a nature for us), the technological
annexation is inevitable. </span></span></b></span></span>
</p><p align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">What
emerges from the idea of a critique of recursive colonialism put
forward by Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Román is that the
recursive backbone of technological expansion is crucial to make an
idea – such as that of a </span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>physis</i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
with a </span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>noûs</i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
extractible into a </span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>Ge-Stell</i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">
– colonizing and prevalent. It is not only to </span></span><span lang="en-US"><i>Ge-Stell
</i></span><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;">tas
what can act as (an) essence of technology that we should cast our
eyes, but also to the recursive mechanism that makes sustains it. A
radically different computational technology is one that processes
not in a technological manner – and perhaps can proceed through
eroding additions. </span></span></b></span></span>
</p><p><style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #00000a; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; orphans: 0; widows: 0; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: pt-PT }p.cjk { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-27285678676469973622021-03-04T16:14:00.001+00:002021-03-04T16:14:23.793+00:00Heidegger's an-archéDraft of a section of a paper on the anarcheology of forests:<br /><p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
endeavor Heidegger called history of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Geschichte des
Seyns</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
is at the same time cosmic – and, to a large extent,
cosmopolitical<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">–</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and archeological – and, if it is so, </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">it
is </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">an-</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arche</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ological.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote2sym" name="sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a>
Throughout his contact with the </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">archives
of </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Nietzsche
in the mid-1930s, he became persuaded that the metaphysical
forgetfulness of being and the corresponding ontological difference
between being and beings<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote3sym" name="sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a>
were a consequence of an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arché
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">–
a beginning, an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Anfang</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– which is itself to be exorcized.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote4sym" name="sdfootnote4anc"><sup>4</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">That
initial move placed </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">–
the nature of processes but also the way things unfold by themselves,
of their own forces and their own accord –</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">at
the center of the effort to think the world through. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">That
starting point paved the way to the bias of thought towards control
expressed in the endeavor of extracting the intelligibility of what
it finds around. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
is perhaps not clear, or not relevant, whether this course of
developments was doomed from the outset or was rather tainted by the
metaphysics it generated and maintained. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Perhaps
another route could have been taken </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">at
some </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">juncture
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">in
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
road. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In
any case, the beginning ushered in by </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– and by an associate notion of truth as </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">aletheia</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
unveiling<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote5sym" name="sdfootnote5anc"><sup>5</sup></a>
– grounded an era that h</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">osts</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
the metaphysical efforts to ensure things are separated from their
intelligibility.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote6sym" name="sdfootnote6anc"><sup>6</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
inception carried that development even if it could be avoided or
postponed. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Heidegger
was persuaded that t</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">his
first beginning was desertified<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote7sym" name="sdfootnote7anc"><sup>7</sup></a>
into a project that makes thinking into an effort to secure an
ever-extending surrounding that is both calculable and commandable.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote8sym" name="sdfootnote8anc"><sup>8</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
beginning was the inception of a relation between thought and all the
rest – or rather, between thought and what it is about. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
enterprise of making everything understandable and controllable was
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">born</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
in the inception ushered in by </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and that project had all sorts of consequences, for things that were
turned into objects </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(of
thought and of standing reserve)</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
for the world which is turn into a controlled ensemble of positions
or a </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">functioni</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ng
device </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ge-Stell</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and for </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
itself which is ultimately turned into an instance of a disconnected
and multiply realizable intelligibility.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote9sym" name="sdfootnote9anc"><sup>9</sup></a>
</span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
coming of this </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">first
inception</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– its arrival and the subsequent consequences issued from it – is
itself an event, an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote10sym" name="sdfootnote10anc"><sup>10</sup></a>
and therefore comes from a more primordial source. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
is a source that is behind the grounding that </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
offered. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
as a first beginning, is </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">followed
by the history of metaphysics and is itself </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">issued
from </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">this</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
second </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
yet</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
more primordial </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">source</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
that nonetheless is not a ground of grounds – or an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arché</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
of the </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">archai</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– but rather an absence of ground that Heidegger calls </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ab-grund</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
(abyss, or un-ground, de-ground).<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote11sym" name="sdfootnote11anc"><sup>11</sup></a>
That the era commanded by and commenced with<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote12sym" name="sdfootnote12anc"><sup>12</sup></a>
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">was
itself an event grounded nowhere but in a sheer arrival exemplifies
the more original character of the second beginning which comes from
beyng – the more ancient being that is not unveiling but rather the
very clearing (</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Lichtung</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">)
that enables any appearing.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote13sym" name="sdfootnote13anc"><sup>13</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Clearing
is not a revelation of the underlying intelligibility, </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">it
is not </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">what
makes something seizable or understandable </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">for
it is not </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
presentation </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">from
which </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">an
intelligibility</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
can be </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">detached</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
as is </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">aletheia</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
but rather a mere taking-place. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Heidegger
understands that the truth behind truth as unveiling is a mere
showing, a presentation as what happens when light arrives in the
forest in a clearing. In contrast, he considers that </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">a</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">l</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">etheia</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
was transformed into revelation </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">(for
someone) as </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
was degenerated </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">into
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">commands
and calculation; </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">truth
was turned into adequacy, </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">adequa</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">e</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">tio
intellectus </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">et</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
re</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">i.</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote14sym" name="sdfootnote14anc"><sup>14</sup></a>
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">A</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">letheia</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
was turned into a certainty as </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
was turned into </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">thesis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote15sym" name="sdfootnote15anc"><sup>15</sup></a>
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Clearing,
in contrast, holds that truth lies in the unfolding of things and not
in what is unveiled of them </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">for</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">someone,
for a </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">truth-bearer.
Truth-as-clearing </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">escapes
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">physis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">because
it precedes it while</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
ground</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ing</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
nothing; truth-as</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">-</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">clearing
is </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">indeed
nothing but </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
opening that makes anything appear or arrive. Beyng is the abyss of
the event that unveils no hidden intelligibility. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
lies in the very question that could be phrased in terms of a quest
for intelligibility but </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">offers
no </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">foundational
answer. </span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
history of beyng heads towards what is most primordial as it reveals
events that are of a cosmic nature such as the pursuit of
metaphysics. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">It
is a h</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">istory
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">which
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">brings
about more original beginnings – it is not a history of what
follows (from) </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">an
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arché</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
it is not a history of sequences or consequences. Rather, it is a
history of starting points that could be more primordial </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">while</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">coming</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">later</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Because we are often attentive only to what follows from what, we
cannot see such a history taking place in a time of arrivals. It is
disturbing for our sense of intelligibility because first things not
always come first; further, it is not a history of thought separated
from its effects and not a history of what there is irrespective to
thinking. The history of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is partly about the effects of thinking – and calculation,
machination, treasuring </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ge-Stell<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote16sym" name="sdfootnote16anc"><sup>16</sup></a></span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– over the world and the effect of what the world then triggers on
thinking. The advent of metaphysics brings to the fore a history that
cannot itself be thought through by metaphysics itself<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote17sym" name="sdfootnote17anc"><sup>17</sup></a>
– from a metaphysical point of view, nothing takes place either
with being or with anything more primordial than it. From that
perspective, </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
could have no history for it is what can bar</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">e</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ly
be conceived among beings. Metaphysics, remarks Heidegger, is
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">incapable</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
both of farewells and of beginnings<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote18sym" name="sdfootnote18anc"><sup>18</sup></a>,
and </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is essentially beginning<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote19sym" name="sdfootnote19anc"><sup>19</sup></a>
– and hence a farewell.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote20sym" name="sdfootnote20anc"><sup>20</sup></a>
But the history unveiled by the occurrence of metaphysics brings
about the daring character of an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arché</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
which is ultimately stepping backwards towards a non-grounded pure
beginning.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote21sym" name="sdfootnote21anc"><sup>21</sup></a>
The cosmic character of the history of </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">beyng</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
lies in the distance it keeps with the chronology of what follows
what (Heidegger’s </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Historie</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">);
it is a history of beginnings that engages thought as it revo</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">l</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ves
around the moment of grounding. Thinking that is not following the
consequences, is proceeding backwards towards what can precede but
has no power to command an </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">arché</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
A thought that can entertain what could be the second beginning –
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ereignis</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
– is a thought </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">which
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">unearthens
the soil where thought could rest in the age of metaphysics. The
possibility of this unearthing thought is the possibility of a
history that does more than capturing the intelligibility of time –
a history that faces up to the </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">non-</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">grounded
in time. Thinking beyond the coupling of being and thought (and of
time and history) that makes grounding possible is anarch</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">eological.
</span></span></span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Revolving the ground is
dwelling in what is not in itself capable to ground; Heidegger finds
the second beginning in the incapacity to have power, in the very
indifference to power.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote22sym" name="sdfootnote22anc"><sup>22</sup></a>
Further, that ungrouding an-<i>arché</i> can be appropriated by what
can ground power and by what can dominate the very effects that veil
beyng; this is because <i>physis</i> is itself an arrival. The ground
still rests on what is underneath, even though it cannot ground
anything. This is the sense of the indifference of beyng to power:
beyng<i> </i>can be appropriated by <i>physis</i> while letting it
happen and the abyss under the ground can be kept unnoticed. The
(an-)archaeology of <i>beyng</i> under the ground depends on the
excavating effort facing the thinker – which is, at the face of it,
for Heidegger, the human. Beyng is therefore dependent on the human;
such state is tolerated by <i>beyng </i>which is not craving to be
unveiled and concedes to the human the freedom to think it through, a
freedom grounded in reference to being.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote23sym" name="sdfootnote23anc"><sup>23</sup></a>
What uncovers the abyss inside the ground is the detection, mainly
carried out by Nietzsche according to Heidegger, of nihilism as an
event in the underground history – an <i>Ereignis</i>. The
discovery of <i>thesis </i>arising within <i>physis </i>is the
thought that enables the unveiling of a different beginning. </span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is this urge for a second
beginning that appeals to the non-grounded that disconnects thought
and being and that makes history alien to the chain of historical
consequences. Being, what is connected to <i>physis</i> in the first
beginning, harbors beyng inside it as any attempt to ground anything
carries the gap of a primordial event. When that gap between the
destiny of <i>physis</i>, now unfolded – call it <i>thesis</i>, or
<i>Ge-Stell</i>, or <i>Wille zu Macht</i> – and <i>beyng</i> that
dispenses that destination is thought, a new beginning is made
possible. That an-archaeology cannot be a product of a decision –
that will place the gesture within metaphysics which is the forced
exposure of what was previously presenting itself of its own accord.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote24sym" name="sdfootnote24anc"><sup>24</sup></a>
But neither can it come as an imposition of <i>beyng</i> over humans
for it is the former who depends on the latter. Heidegger insists
that thinking is a state of readiness, neither forcing a beginning
nor accepting it as independent of listening to the word –
independent of thinking.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote25sym" name="sdfootnote25anc"><sup>25</sup></a>
This readiness to what is unveiled that involves no act of excavating
– this an-archeological state – is prompted by questioning;
asking is what spells the future of <i>beyng</i>.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote26sym" name="sdfootnote26anc"><sup>26</sup></a>
The question is in the neighborhood of <i>Ereignis</i>, unbearably
near and yet seemingly far – <i>die abgrundige Ferne des Nahen</i>.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote27sym" name="sdfootnote27anc"><sup>27</sup></a>
The question concerning fire – the <i>physis</i> of inflammability
– triggers the Promethean control but within it there is a
question; a question about the events that give rise to <i>phaos</i>
– which says the same as <i>physis </i>in its multiplicity.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote28sym" name="sdfootnote28anc"><sup>28</sup></a>
The dawn of the destiny of beyng (<i>Seynsgeschickes</i>) concealed
<i>Ge-Stell</i> and machination in its inception<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote29sym" name="sdfootnote29anc"><sup>29</sup></a>
– that destination was in the question that carries in itself a
kinship with the force that brings <i>Ereignis</i> about. The
ungrounded ungrounding is like the question – indifferent to power
and yet dependent on the thinker which is compelled to entertain it.</span></p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The twist of the movement can
be described as a step from beginning with an <i>arché</i>, a
ground, an intelligibility that can be detached from what it makes
intelligible towards seeking a corresponding an-<i>arché</i> which
is the very question that made the ground possible and the extracted
intelligibility intelligible. A move from a ground to an abyss, from
a commandment to an emission, from a departure to an outset. <i>Ereignis</i>
is hidden in <i>physis</i>, beyng is packed inside being –
archaeology is wrapped around an-archaeology. Thinking beyond the
first beginning is thinking about what came before the beginning; it
is the inception of the inception, the first gesture of a grounding.
Beyng, therefore, lies in lack of ground underneath the <i>arché</i>
– it has no answer and cannot be measured.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote30sym" name="sdfootnote30anc"><sup>30</sup></a>
Heidegger takes beyng to be akin to the questionability of all
decisions<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote31sym" name="sdfootnote31anc"><sup>31</sup></a>
– this indicates why <i>Ereignis</i> is also <i>Austrag</i>, the
resolution.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote32sym" name="sdfootnote32anc"><sup>32</sup></a>
The move from the first beginning to its consequences and then
backwards towards the second beginning correspond to a movement
through three fundamental tonalities (<i>Grundstimmungen</i>): from
wonder to weirdness to the abyss.<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="#sdfootnote33sym" name="sdfootnote33anc"><sup>33</sup></a>
Wonder triggers a quest for reasons and that quest makes whatever is
recalcitrant weird, strange, unfamiliar; instead, what precedes
wonder is the astonishment that is not a question concerning what is
before the thinker, but an immersion in the very questioning of any
resolution taken. The abyss lies within the pre-foundational stage,
among the an-archai, it lies in the pre-history of any resolution;
an-archic is the question concerning the resolution which is going to
be unfolded. The abyss belongs in the resolution and in <i>Ereignis</i>.
It also belongs in the an-<i>arché</i> (<i>Ab-Grund</i>), in the
absence of foundation that every ground is wrapped around. </span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The <i>Ereignis</i> of
nihilism is taken by Heidegger to be something both cosmological and
an-archeological. There cannot be a <i>physis</i> of nihilism – or
of <i>Ge-Stell</i> – because that will do no more than carrying on
the very project of nihilism and the event, with the resolution that
brings it about, would not be considered. To face the event of
nihilism, one needs to see it as ungrounded, as an-archeological. But
by the same token, that harbors a cosmological import: all things are
not subject to the long assassination of God because there is a major
event presiding the history of metaphysics which is the assassination
itself. Nihilism is not all that there could be about the cosmos –
neither is metaphysics the only project of intelligence to cope with
it. Seeing the event of metaphysics as a cosmic <i>Ereignis</i> –
one for which there cannot be an <i>arché</i> within the realm of
<i>physis</i> – opens the view to something else that could
underlie the (cosmopolitical) relation between thought and being.
Heidegger claims that the history of metaphysics unveils beyng
precisely because it unveils a history that includes an an-archic
preamble that overshadows anything else. If the history of
metaphysics is considered under the light of the event it unfolds, it
can open a path towards a history of beyng where the absence of
ground is the protagonist. It is in the origin of metaphysical
thinking that lies the resolution that determines the course of its
development and within any determination there is an underlying
abyss. </span>
</p>
<p align="justify" class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p><br /><div id="sdfootnote1"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>Cosmopolitical
in the sense of what is about a general configuration or state of
affairs involving humans and non-humans, see Stengers,
<i>Cosmopolitics</i>. See also Bensusan, “Geist and Ge-Stell”.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote2anc" name="sdfootnote2sym">2</a>See
Bensusan, <i>Being Up For Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology</i>.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote3anc" name="sdfootnote3sym">3</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, XI, 113.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote4"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote4anc" name="sdfootnote4sym">4</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, III, 23, 31.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote5"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote5anc" name="sdfootnote5sym">5</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, XII, 147.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote6"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote6anc" name="sdfootnote6sym">6</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, XI, 115.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote7"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote7anc" name="sdfootnote7sym">7</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, II, 9.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote8"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote8anc" name="sdfootnote8sym">8</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, VI, 57.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote9"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote9anc" name="sdfootnote9sym">9</a>See
Heidegger, <i>I</i><i>nsight into that which is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
lecture 2. </span>
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote10"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote10anc" name="sdfootnote10sym">10</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, III, 14.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote11"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote11anc" name="sdfootnote11sym">11</a>See,
for instance, Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, V, 37; VI, 52;
VII, 82.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote12"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote12anc" name="sdfootnote12sym">12</a><i>Arché</i>
is often understood as simultaneously what commands and what
commences, see, for instance, Agamben, <i>What is a commandment</i>.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote13"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote13anc" name="sdfootnote13sym">13</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, V, 37.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote14"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote14anc" name="sdfootnote14sym">14</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, V, 37.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote15"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote15anc" name="sdfootnote15sym">15</a>See
Heidegger, <i>I</i><i>nsight into that which is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
lecture 2. </span>
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote16"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote16anc" name="sdfootnote16sym">16</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Insight into that which is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
lecture 2. </span>
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote17"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote17anc" name="sdfootnote17sym">17</a>See
Heidegger, <i>T</i><i>he word of Nietzsche</i>.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote18"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote18anc" name="sdfootnote18sym">18</a>See
Heidegger, <i>On Inception</i>, I, 7.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote19"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote19anc" name="sdfootnote19sym">19</a>See
Heidegger, <i>On Inception</i>, I, 7; I, 25.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote20"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote20anc" name="sdfootnote20sym">20</a>Derrida,
in “The time of farewells”, claims that farewells, that can
always be a “see you soon”, elude the language of metaphysics</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote21"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote21anc" name="sdfootnote21sym">21</a>See
Heidegger, <i>On Inception</i>, I, 6.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote22"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote22anc" name="sdfootnote22sym">22</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, XIII, 65.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote23"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote23anc" name="sdfootnote23sym">23</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, VII, 55</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote24"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote24anc" name="sdfootnote24sym">24</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, II, 12.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote25"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote25anc" name="sdfootnote25sym">25</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, II, 12, last paragraphs.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote26"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote26anc" name="sdfootnote26sym">26</a>See
Heidegger, <i>History of Beyng</i>, IX, 104.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote27"><p align="left" class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote27anc" name="sdfootnote27sym">27</a>See
Heidegger, Draft for Koinon”, <i>History of Beyng</i>, last
paragraph.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote28"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote28anc" name="sdfootnote28sym">28</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Mindfulness</i>, VII, 51.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote29"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote29anc" name="sdfootnote29sym">29</a>See
Heidegger, <i>Ins</i><i>ight into that which is</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">p. 62.</span></p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote30"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote30anc" name="sdfootnote30sym">30</a>Heidegger,
<i>Mindfulness</i>, XXVI, 88.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote31"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote31anc" name="sdfootnote31sym">31</a>Heidegger,
<i>Mindfulness</i>, XXVI, 88.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote32"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote32anc" name="sdfootnote32sym">32</a>Heidegger,
<i>Mindfulness</i>, XXVI, 81.</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote33"><p class="sdfootnote-western"><a class="sdfootnotesym" href="#sdfootnote33anc" name="sdfootnote33sym">33</a>Heidegger,
<i>Mindfulness</i>, XXVI, 74.</p>
</div><br /><p><style type="text/css">p.sdfootnote-western { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.sdfootnote-cjk { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: zh-CN; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.sdfootnote-ctl { margin-left: 0.6cm; text-indent: -0.6cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 10pt; so-language: hi-IN; line-height: 100%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: left; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: "Liberation Serif", serif; font-size: 12pt }p.cjk { font-family: "Noto Serif CJK SC"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: zh-CN }p.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: hi-IN }em { font-style: italic }a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text-decoration: underline }a.sdfootnoteanc { font-size: 57% }</style></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7920647283462590061.post-88110477366110668462021-03-04T16:12:00.002+00:002021-03-04T16:12:25.122+00:00Yuk Hui<p>Beginning to read Yuk Hui's <i>Recursion and Contingency </i>in our <i>anarchai</i> research group. Hui seems to intend to update process philosophy with some of its basic tenets being kept: a commitment to transparency and immanence, the idea that processes have an upper hand on initial conditions and an attraction to the biological, the organic, the units of action and interaction. It is from this perspective that he will tackle the problem of technology: the problem of seizing the powers of nature. He thinks that seizure is never-ending as much as nature itself is full of instability and transformation. The notion of recursion will allow him to think that the structures of power are best suited to organic entities than to mechanical commands. The seizure of power will appear, I guess, as a cosmopolitical gesture that is part of an ongoing struggle for the formation and maintenance of surprising organisms. If he is right (and if I am right about his project), recursion will appear as a powerful addition to the process philosophy toolkit (and to the immanence-driven thinking in general). Those of us that hold rather that transcendence plays a role in the plot, will be then left with the task (exciting, I guess) of once more learn with the sophistication issued by the efforts to think immanence through.<br /></p>Hilan Bensusanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11270912801282450135noreply@blogger.com0