No Borders Metaphysics

The idea of a supplement in the Grammatology can be traced back to Levinas in T&I and can be found resonating in the notions of recurrence and substitution in Autrement qu'être . I can be substituted because my subjectivity can be supplemented, something can take my place not because I am incomplete, but because the other can supply a subjectivity to me, the other can be a surrogate which is not someone who takes an established role - not a complement - but an uncontrollable (an-archic) other that replaces, substitutes me. Therefore, my decisions can be taken for the others, I can be substituted and it is only as a recurrent me that I am me - I'm not me all the time, but I come back to myself, I come back to my burden as an existent. Derrida understands the supplement as the exterior that replaces an element in something that is neither complete not faulty - such is Nature for Rousseau: something that can be supplemented, something that can have a replacement that adds ...

Writing about the molecular unconscious in the fourth part of the Anti-Oedipus , Deleuze and Guattari notice clearly that the body without organs and its intensities are matter itself. The unconscious is physical - they intend to give a fully materialistic account of what takes place unconsciously. Matter is not organized in organs, it is pure body - and it transmit intensities. Intensities goes from bodies to bodies - temperature is contagious, as colors in the wet paint, as rhythms is transmitted through different media. The machinic molecular unconscious describes the physical world but also the schizo who is doing no more than (almost) aimless production and therefore decodifying the existing codes of registration and consumption. Decodification of flows is to approach the body without organs in the sense that intensities replace codes and the molecular is made explicit. Such is the flow of capital, such is the movement of the body without organs - of the schizo - that decodifies w...

Sounds from the discussions in Hiperorgânicos including our debate on accelerationism and hyperstition (Erick Felinto, JP Caron and me)

In my course on Whitehead and Deleuze we're discussing the Anti-Oedipus . Discussing accelerationism (it is hard to read the book without seeing it coming from more or less everywhere) lead us to compare Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on the limits to schizophrenization that capital has to maintain - it is not a body without organs and the Oedipus separates it from a full schiza - with the idea, that Land (and others) have defended, that capital is the ultimate decoder of flows and therefore that the limits of capital can only be overcome by capital itself. The main issue is then whether the Oedipus - nuclear family-oriented desire, private life, the individual, reproduction placed outside the socius where production and distribution takes place - is really a limit of capitalism (D&G talk about relative limits...). This is the main contention that separates their position from a full-blown capitalist accelerationism (or unconditional accelerationism) that understands that...

I have been connecting Meillassoux's criticism of the metaphysics of subjectivity (or subjectalism) that takes it to be committed to the absolute character of the correlation with the criticism of the transparency of reality. Under these lights, Harman's outright rejection of transparency (as much as Meillassoux's) would not qualify as a metaphysics of subjectivity for there is a real object that places reality away from what is transparent. On the other hand, I started suspecting that when the bifurcation that Whitehead denounced - the one between experience and nature, between our image of the world built from our experience and what is real - is rejected, one is heading towards assuming reality is transparent and this is enough to lead to a metaphysics of subjectivity. Further, I even suspected that maybe any thorough ontology of events such as Whitehead's - a commitment to the idea that events and not objects and their qualities are the main constituents of everythi...

Totalidade, galáxias e metafísica paradoxal 1. Episódios de medida são ocasiões em que a espontaneidade (de quem mede) e a receptividade (do que fica medido) podem aparecer em fricção. Meço a parede em metros e ela tem exatamente 4 jardas; trata-se de uma parede de 4 jardas apenas se a meço em jardas. Além disso, quando posiciono minha fita métrica nas duas pontas da parede para medir, dependo de se o material da fita é elástico – dependendo do material posso obter o resultado de 10cm. Um instrumento de medida deve ser feito do material apropriado (e Ludwig Wittgenstein, seguindo os passos de Alfred Whitehead em The Concept of Nature, se pergunta em Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics se não é apropriado a um vendedor de tecido a metro usar um medidor de elástico). O material da medição tem um impacto no resultado. Também as suposições associadas a uma geometria métrica alteram as medições – por exemplo, se endossamos ou não as suposições de uma geometria euclidiana. Henri Poi...

In the first part of the Grammatology, Derrida notes at some point that the ultratranscendental resembles the precritical. In other words, the transcendental recoil could go far enough to reach what is beyond the pale. What is deemed inaccessible for some reason can end up being accesses if we dwell too much on the very reason that precludes access. It is as if the plane where the critique of metaphysics takes place is round and what is beyond the pale can be reached by going backwards without ever crossing the pale. Paradoxico-metaphysics as I conceive it is a way to provide a total view according to which no total view is possible. Indexucalism and the metaphysics of the other - see previous posts here - are convenient examples but surely one can think broadly in terms of how Cogburn analyses Garcia's claim that the universe is never an object. So, the critique of the total view - the metaphyisical effort to explain why a total view is impossible - engages in transcedental ende...