No Borders Metaphysics

With a moderate fever, I opened my email and was struck by a Quora question (Is Cuba proof that socialism works?). I don't like this questions in general, they seem to come with a pitfall. But I guess my fever made me go on and read one of the answer. It was from a man who apparently have lived in Cuba. He writes that Cuba is all about corruption and controlling their citizens. Then he goes on to present what he called "The KGB method". I went on to give my answer citing his description of the method: It is a proof that over all anything is better than leave-it-to-the-market systems. Of course, to challenge capital has been always like drying a block of ice. It doesn’t work in the long run, and a previous answer to this question provided an insight to the reason why: The Capital method is this: 1. “Create through propaganda a GREAT ENEMY that is about to attack your country and subjugate the people and make them suffer, unless they line up behind you to fight this e...

After finishing Deictic Absolutes , I'm revisiting Autrement qu'être (and Derrida, and Silvia Benso) in my course on Levinas, Heidegger and Derrida. Today we discussed the orientation towards the other - kerygmatic - in the significance of empirical verdicts. What is said is reduced to the saying - because the metaphysics of the subjectivity is not a form of ontologism. That is, when one says anything like S is P, one is predicating and preaching, preaching requires responsibility to the Other who hears one's report. Sensibility is ultimately testimony: my senses are geared towards producing reports to the Other. Now, this is why the senses themselves have no language - no private language - but rather they are led to speak the Other's language so that I can genuinely inform from my senses to the Other that, say, S is P. So, that sensible intuition requires concepts is a consequence of sensibility being geared towards the Other. My senses are put at the service of sayin...

Guida Chambel, Nuno Oliveira and the Ana Lama Gallery folks in Lisbon are planning a long cycle revolving around anarcheology, fake news, artificial norms and post-truth. They want to look at the kidnapping of the iconoclastic practices both by the enthusiasts of capital and by the social conservatives - now that they are clearly placed together at least in practice. Attention to the non-univocity of representation - for example, in terms of the infinite saying that compose what is written according to disconstruction or in terms of the displacement of the force of matters of fact through the concern with versions according to anarcheology - is among the iconoclastic efforts to promote heresy against the dominant project in the last decades. These efforts have been recently not only embraced by the ultimate keepers of the status quo and by the unconditional supporters of capital as the sovereign engine in planetary life but also applied by those groups to (jointly) reach positions of p...

Bataille´s La part maudite is a great book. He writes as if he knew he had gold in his hands. He found something of the enormity of simplicity: excess. To be, at least in the surface of the Earth, is to consume an excess that is always there, always requiring something to be spent. The excess, to be sure, is not a complement, it is not like the extra water the camel carries. It is, rather, a supplement, that needs to be spent somewhere in the surface of the Earth. The Sun throws energy on us all and, bordered by luxurious exhuberance and sheer alergic violence, instills a curse, the accursed part. Bataille talks about death as being a product of excess, a consequence of our having to spend on luxuries. Organisms that reproduce themselves by scissiparity are eternal. There is no need to die, but without death there will soon be no room for the increasing excedents everything has to handle. Death enables the survivors to carry on both growing and engaging in their spending activity. O...

The line going from Marx's Manuscripts (and concepts such as abstract work, alienation, the triumph of movement over immobility) to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (and concepts such as desiring machines and schizo limits) always intrigued me. If we understand what there is in terms of what is being produced (at work, en-ergo, energeia), there could be units and assemblages of producing machines that divide what there is in small, coordinated and yet independent bits. Marx believes abstract work is somehow the route to the emancipation of the proletarian that is forced into working with machines and like them. The machinic transformation is what produces abstract work and the proletarian class. The idea of desiring machines producing an immanent excess mimics the producing couplings of producing units. Marx holds that machines are communal, they bring a lot of people together in a producing assemblage. Because of that, they are part of the emancipation that capitalism has i...

My project on the cosmopolitics of capital is interested in the parallel accounts of a cybernetic history provided by Marx - redemption comes from a revolution that capital and its associate proletarization of humans through abstract work made possible -, by Nietzsche - redemption comes from deepening the nihilistic process by transvalorating all values through an explicit Wille zu Macht - and Heidegger - redemption comes from a Turn away from the growing (nihilistic) exposition of things as objects that is prompted by the way Ge-Stell enables a presence that is tied to a standing reserve and this Turn is maybe leading away from the very idea that being is presence. I wonder whether the cybernetic element in the account Mauss provides in The Gift is another account to be added. The account I have in mind reading Mauss is as following. The prehistory of purely individual contracts - the system achieved by an admirable revolution that brought about commerce, broke with a system of g...

Thinking again with Heidegger about what I called artificial horizons, as in my last post , I was wondering whether metaphysics - the dispensation of being through presence - is actually engendered by the parricide. Severino's claim is that Parmenides made no sense of the intelligibility of nothingness precisely because there being was more than merely appearing. As a consequence, being was more than presence. Presence was brought about by the idea that beyond what is in the horizon there's nothing - and therefore that things dive into nothingness when they are not present. An artificial archive became then an urgency - an archive that will keep things from lapsing into nothingness. The parricide made this archive the central urgency for thought. Severino's claim is that by reclaiming the idea of a horizon as a place of Ereignis , no place would be left for an artificial horizon from an artificial archive. In other words, the urge to capture the intelligence of what exists ...