No Borders Metaphysics

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 Difficile Liberté . 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 ins...

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...

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. 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 on...

  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 Ge-Stell . 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 wor...

Draft of a section of a paper on the anarcheology of forests: The endeavor Heidegger called history of beyng ( Geschichte des Seyns ) is at the same time cosmic – and, to a large extent, cosmopolitical 1 – and archeological – and, if it is so, it is an- arche ological. 2 Throughout his contact with the archives of Nietzsche in the mid-1930s, he became persuaded that the metaphysical forgetfulness of being and the corresponding ontological difference between being and beings 3 were a consequence of an arché – a beginning, an Anfang – which is itself to be exorcized. 4 That initial move placed physis – the nature of processes but also the way things unfold by themselves, of their own forces and their own accord – at the center of the effort to think the world through. 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. It is perhaps not clear, or not relevant, whether thi...

Beginning to read Yuk Hui's Recursion and Contingency in our anarchai 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 powerf...

Been reading the beautiful La plasticité au soir de l'écriture , an old book by Malabou. She advocates clearly there that we have witnessed a movement - a transformation - from a graphic to a plastic paradigm. She does that by defending a thoroughly immanent conception of change where there is no outside. It's a clear counterpart (or opposition) to the idea that change - and in fact, negation - comes from addition (from the exterior). She argues that the graphic times are over and the plastic times are considerably different - she does that by pointing at a convincing convergence between the Hegelian post-historical and the Heideggerian ultra-metaphysical, by pointing at the relative capacity of form to be indifferent to traces, by appealing to epigenetics and by looking at the synapses of the brain where there is a transformation that cannot concern only writing. I tend to think that even if the time of the graphic is over, there should be a figure of excess like that of supp...