No Borders Metaphysics

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 ousiai among temporary accidents whe

 There will be a book symposium around the launching of Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox . These are the plans: Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox Online Book symposium Schedule (in Edinburgh time – BST): September, 29th Session 1: BST: 16:00 – 19:20 (Starts at: Brasília: 12:00noon, San Francisco: 8:00am, Madrid: 17:00) 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.” 16:50 Paul Livingston ( Professor, Philosophy, University of New Mexico): The Essential Paradoxical 17:40 John Bova (University of New Mexico and New Centre for Research & Practice): The existential indexical 18:30 Gerson Brea (Tecnische Universität München): TBA Session 2: BST: 20:00 – 22:30 (Starts at: Brasília: 16:00, San Francisco: 12:00noon, Madrid: 21:00) 20:00 Steven Shaviro (DeRoy Profe

  [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. Argus Tenório 1. Argus Tenório gentilmente comenta 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 desejamos 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

I'm very much into specters these days. Reading and teaching Ludueña, discussing Derrida's Specters of Marx 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.

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 Totality and Infinity : 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.  The paradox of the infinite is akin to the paradoxico-metaphysics of the others that I elaborate in Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox . There, too, the others are irreduc

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.  This is the link.