No Borders Metaphysics

Finally back to Deictic Absolutes . This is a piece that contrasts indexicalism and the metaphysics of the others on the one hand to monadology and OOO on the other. It is about transparency and what escapes any system. I compare the contrast to that between Kiekegaard and Levinas. The bit goes like this: To take interruption metaphysically seriously is also to take metaphysics to be driven by the capacity of what is outdoors to interfere. Metaphysics is itself vulnerable to interruption. In any case, the interrupted nexus of each actual entity by the Other is what makes each agent's agenda hostage to what is exterior. The interruption coming from the Other drives the agent away from an agenda. If monadological agents are driven towards satisfaction, agents in a metaphysics of the others are subject to interruption. The metaphysics of the others can be described as an interruption in the metaphysics of subjectivity – an interruption in transparence but also in the agenda formed b...

A neo-Klugean take on this. Subtitles still missing.

The history of nihilism, prometheism and capitalism are in many ways intertwined and recent debates around accelerationism have made this clear (see work by Nick Land, Ray Brassier and Reza Nigarestani for example). These processes are mutually illuminating in many respects. First, they all draw on lack of bounds: capital closes no cycle and is always seeking room for expansion while the limitless technological advances defended by prometheism requires no circumventing authority from anything that could be grounded in nature and nihilism paves the way for groundlessness. Second, they have rich connections to the history of Western metaphysics in its effort to make universal principles explicit and in its endeavor to present reality as something that admits fully exposure. Third, they all somehow connect to artificial devices capable of control – nihilism severs the connection between controlling stances and their scopes, prometheism promises to turn intelligence into artifact and capit...

This blog was silent and me absent for the whole of last month. I was too shocked with the local elections in Brazil and too sad for the terrible fate of Abya Yala in the coming years. We live terrible days were capitalist realism seems to be the only reasonable explanation - that will run in terms of how collective intelligence works these days when there is no culture beyond the dogma of capital - for the increasing choice for more control and greater misery and for the boosted stupidity that is making this continent give up anything that was communal, interesting, creative or inspiring. There is a cyclic historic scheme that I believe is Mary Daly's (didn't read the end of Gyn/Ecology yet, but Robin Morgan in Demon Lover quotes Berit Äs as the author of the scheme and Berit tells me is all Daly's). The cycle has that patriarchy is a system with three stages, it is successively preparing for the war, waging war and recovering from the war. The third phase, surely, i...

The inhumanists claim that reason which is autonomous can be automated; that humans can be redefined by a navigation in the space of norms where institution and application is always simultaneous. Nigarestani gets from Brandom the idea that we are norms and in that sense we are open to modification while we apply the very norms by which we recognize ourselves. He intensifies the political element in Brandom´s construction by pressing autonomy towards automation. (It is a move that makes the space of norms similar to the space of desires where human practices are changes and reshaped.) The question here concerning AI is whether capital is already a norm-mongering which institutes and applies - maintains and modifies - directly or indirectly the existing (human but not all too human) norms. Does the Nigarestanied Brandom us include already the prothetic capital?

In two recently published articles I sketched two elements of the book - indexicalism as a paradoxico-metaphysics and the problem with speculation .

Another part - the bit on Proximity. Proximity is about what is almost the same but not quite. It could be a species of the genre 'almost' if the latter is a genre of the order of the other. When we depart from sameness, proximity is the sole guide and in that sense it is a projection of sameness into the other. Friendship is often thought as a figure of proximity: Aristotle thought friends were one soul in two bodies and Montaigne thought friends have everything in common and responsibilities between them are no longer felt as such. Bojana Kunst understands friendship as a departure of the sameness of my identity – of the idiocy of my own endeavors. An interruption. It is through those who are in proximity that I find my neighborhood I can only cease to be an idiot if I find somebody who is like me, who is almost the same. What we have here is a kind of a paradox: I cannot find who I am only with myself, yet I can find who I am with somebody who is almost like me [...]1 ...