Skip to main content

Verlassenheit and Exigentia Essentiae

The image of nature as akin to abandonment that follows from Heidegger´s analysis of Rilke´s Muzot poem in Wozu Dichter brings to mind the idea that to make something exist is not yet to care for it. Nature is careless, Rilke says, and our Natura is also such that it throws us in risk. Nature is no museum and has no preservatives. Our essences are such that they throw us towards existence and, with no attachment, take no special care of our fate. The centre of all beings are like epicentres, explosive and centrifugal sources. This friction between existence as springing from Natura - an exigentia essentiae - and the Verlassenheit that is hosted in the very dettachment of what makes things happen points at an interia of existence: it survives its sponsors. Not that whatever promotes an instauration cares to keep sponsoring what was brought to the world. It leaves things to their own devices (up for grabs).

Nature is no museum, and yet it is another kind of assemblage (of floor made of left-overs). These left-over character is what makes nature open - it produces raw material while throwing elements to existence. This assemblage is not of what has been equally intesively being sponsored - it is composed of what is left, thrown away, left in the open. No Oikos where things take care of each other and of themselves. (One can then choose between a centrifugal and a centripetal ethical stance: that of spreading and spending and that of care and preservation - but this is somehow a later moment, it is not in itself in the exigentia essentiae if it is plagued with Verlassenheit.) Surely, Leibniz´s exigentia essentiae, in contrast, comes with the stamp of care (through the effectiveness of intraworld compossibility). Leibniz admits of no junk worlds (where all things are part of something else). His internal relations point at some kind of priority of the whole.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more