No Borders Metaphysics

On the 11th of April, in the afternoon, I'll be in Guilford presenting Rhythm-Oriented Ontology for the first time. A world-première. Everyone is welcome. The conference is Performance Philosophy and I guess the context couldn't be more appropriate. The text, as it is now, is here: Beats and being Towards a rhythm-oriented ontology Hilan Bensusan Tic. Right now. Tac. Something irrupts. At this moment. Something takes place. Something occupies the place. Something takes over the place. The place where things happen. The land of what happens. Something arises there. Something is brought about: a tic. Something unfolds. The tic. It unfolds for those who are in the place – in the land where things happen. From the point of view of those who are not in such a place, it doesn’t unfold. It carries on well folded. One has to be in this place to see what is taking place. What is this land? Etienne Souriau had a name for it – one of his efforts to convey the idea of a surexisten...

Hume's attack on necessary connections is strongly dependent on his attachment to what he was ready to posit as information provided by the senses alone. In particular, his idea that the distinction of all things is evident - we see things, but we don't see the hidden links between them (forces, causes, power). McDowell, for example, pointed out (in "Functionalism and anomalous monism") that Humean causality is hostage to the dualism of scheme and content - why distinctness would be pure content while connectedness would depend on a scheme (built by our second creation)? Still, one could put aside for a while the troubles with the Given and try to appreciate the intuition behind Hume's idea that distinctness is self-evident from our sense experience. Surely, one has also to bear in mind that substances (particulars that remain the same over time) and substrata (particular that remains the same over trans-world travels) should not be self-evident from our sense exp...

Being thinking about necessity and immunity and trying to organize ideas around substances, substrata and relations. The idea of necessary connections is part of the idea that something subsist unaffected by whatever else takes place. Something is necessary if it is independent of all the others. It is the thus and so comes what may. The virtual, in contrast, as Deleuze understands it in in Difference et Répétition and up to Le Pli, is something that depends on the whole world to become actual. The necessary is independent from anything else, somehow protected from anything else – it is immune. It is not open to whatever else exists. Immunity can be understood to have four different kinds: With respect to things they can be: 1. The immunity of something over its qualities. This is the immunity that makes a substratum capable of keeping its identity in different worlds. A particular is the same no matter the different (universal) qualities attributed to it. A substractum is preser...

Our (Alexandre Costa-Leite and me) first paper on galaxy theory has been accepted in Logica Universalis. I've been thinking of the idea of up for grabs in connection not to non-necessity but rather to infection, contagion or repetition - that is in terms of lack of immunity to the concrete surroundings. In different galaxies (different classes of possible world), different swings are immune to entrainement by other rhythms - different galaxies would have different matrixes of necessity and immunity and therefore would have different things up for grabs. Immunity is not quite the same as necessity - but it has something to do with having an essence that makes sure that something is not taken astray by what is around it. The issue about the nature of necessary connections relate to the issue of having immunity (and community, to use Esposito opposition). Being up for grabs is also to be in a community, to be open to the other rhythms as opposed to being hostage of an essence, of an...

I'm enjoying Jabès writings in the Little Book of Subversion Out of Suspicion and in the opening volume of the Livre des Questions. He builds a mosaic of words and images, topics and atmospheres that seem to set thought going in many directions. There is a tonality of skirting around things so that all sorts of meetings are possible - and maybe none is really in the roadmap: thought lives of what it meets, it dies in solitude, he writes. Soon after this bit a dialogue: what is the book about, asks the master, and the writer: I don't know. The book does. The knowledge of the book is what is taken seriously - an agency of the words, that can inspire, rebel, conflate, manipulate, open the way. This agency and this autonomy is also what moves Blanchot's books and, I suppose, carries weight towards Derrida's praise of the écriture. One of Jabès artifices is to present the sayings of a Rebs. Rebs are folkloric sages, and sages carry authority in their names and folly in the...

This week I finished my course on Deleuze's D&R. We closed the reading with the contrast between representation and repetition - and how the privilege of the latter ushers in an ontology of the concrete. This contrasts with Leibniz' manoeuvre to make indiscernibility the ultimate criterion for identity in concreta - which amounts to taking concrete items in the same vein as abstract ones. Dressed repetitions (répétition vetue) is taken to be prior to naked ones (répétition nue). Representation bears on a repetition that exorcises deviation because it is not based on a genuine succession but on a masked simultaneity: that is, there is no diversity of media between the repetans and the repetanda. Naked repetition - that supports representation - doesn't really happen in concrete media; among concreta, where representation is secondary, repetition is always dressed because it wears the clothes of all sorts of other events that take place among concrete things. There is alw...