No Borders Metaphysics

In April 11-13, there will be a conference on Performance Philosophy . I'm in the programme. It will be on heterochrony and urges. Urges shape the flesh, bend the flow of the elements and bring about states of affairs. The political biology of our bodies witnesses the layers of urges christalized in the folds concocted in the past. It is a tectonics. It acts as an ontological trigger: in it, the actual arises from the entrails of what is virtual, potential or merely possible. Urges emerge always in pre-existing landscapes. Actualisation always meets the marks of what contingently happened in the past. The geological structure of contingency – as it is pointed out by Hamilton Grant in his analysis of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie – is such that whatever happens bends the board that future urges will shape. These folds are indeed carved by the events of the past - see Deleuze’s interpretation of the predicate as an event in his interpretation of Leibniz’s principle of reason. In...

Nice small group to discuss Blanchot's L'Écriture du Désastre. Blanchot thinks of disaster in connection with whereabouts of thought and with death and passivity. He also talks about desire. We were talking about sidus and astrum , latin words for star. Desire leads to the first - desideratum, desiderio - while disaster point at the second. If the future is the repeated (as Deleuze considers in the third synthesis in D&R), desire and disasters occupy the future while never really lodging there. They are, in a sense, like messianity in Derrida, an opening for a future that doesn't go through. It is also like a drift, a deviation, a clinamen in the orbit of the stars who set up the calendar - always an astrography . Something that disturbs the course, there is something in a disaster and in a desire that is not in the astrography, not in the stars, not in the future, not in the calendar. (Think of the connection between the empty future and the idea of destiny in contras...

"I realize that I might be missing my final chance by leaving the phone off the hook, now I only phone out for an ambulance, the firemen or the police [...] I keep it off the hook. I am not the one for whom the bell tolls" Charles Bukowski, Perfect Silence Thinking of the common usage of the word "intuition" as a way to ditch certain receptions. In this usage, intuition is taken to be doubtful or disputable reception, due to its origin that cannot be traced to proper, dedicated sense organs. Its reliability is deemed low because it is not a product of a fixed receptor but rather a sensibility that is taken to be diffuse and producing signals that cannot be traced to well-reputed cognitive source. The epistemic contempt for intuition is part of a device to discard and put aside some receptors while favoring others - it is a chapter of the ongoing epistemicide, one that could be labeled antennacide . In fact, the plurality and unaccountability of antennas is part ...

Been discussing repetition in my class on Deleuze and Delanda. Deleuze argues that repetition constitutes time because it provokes a modification in whoever contemplates it - the contraction of a habit. All things contemplate and, as a result, all things acquire habits. It is the first passive synthesis of time: the present is configured by a vector of habits. He is then ready to introduce rhythms into process philosophy. Because things have habits, they are entrainable throughout. Entrainement requires preexisting habits. No new habit can be impressed on whoever has no rhythm, no habit, no responsiveness to previous repetitions - responsiveness meaning compressed repetitions. The future is unveiled as what is repeated, what is scheduled by habits, what is induced. There is no future without induction. There is no tomorrow without an calendar induction. Future disasters find spaces in empty slots in our scheme for the future, but they cannot constitute the future - disasters in the sen...

"Les formules sélon lesquelles "la chose nie ce qu'elle n'est pas" ou "se distingue de tout ce qu'elle n'est pas" sont de monstres logiques (le Tout de ce que n'est pas la chose) au service de l'identité." Deleuze, DR, 70. Aharon Link suggests that we shall take reflections about capture instead of clausure, heterochrony, accelerationism, drift repetition and entrainement to be heading towards a rhythm-oriented ontology. If we take rhythm to underlie being and nothingness, we consider that irreversible time underlies the discussion about origins, wholes and emptiness. Silence, if complete, is a rhythm. The extensive continuum is a rhythm. The apeiron and Anaxagoras' assembled whole are rhythms. Also, mereological considerations would have to be rethought in terms of rhythm. For instance, maybe it will make no sense to make assumptions (that are at the service of identity, as Deleuze reminds us) concerning a whole such that we ...

I spent the last 10 days of the year in Juchitan, Oaxaca, and its surroundings. It is some sort of queer capital of Latin America. But its queerness is inherited and popular, less than urban and post-industrial I went to many parties of the so-called muxes. Muxes are not really gay man, not really cross-dressers, not really transvestite, not really trans-women. With my co-author Luanna Barbosa we claim that sexual and gender identities form alphabets (like LGBTTTIGA...) that are incomensurable with each other. We call this thesis `Queer Babel`: muxes (or hijras in India etc) are not translatable to any other identity in the Westernized alphabet. Muxes are mostly not operated, they take little hormons, some of them cross-dress, typically they desire man (but not always). They are quite accepted by their families and community in general (their counterparts, nguiu's, women socially taken as men, mostly married to women, are traditionally less celebrated). They are treated as women an...