Skip to main content

Il-eté

I somehow went slightly back to the topics of my book Excesses and Exceptions in the last few days. There I put forward ideas related to how direct reference that makes no appeal to description could be a way out of the Lévinas' challenge: to find ways to avoid the violence that thought does to what is being thought. Lévinas, in Autrement que l'être, talks about il-eté, something that could be translated as he-ity. Notice the indexical (he) - Lévinas thinks that the other is not someone I relate and know, not someone I'm engaged with but rather someone I make some sort of contact short of the type of contact that would enable me to present a description. The other, in his terms, is an indexical other - someone who is connected to a place, there, and not to a plot or to a landscape. The other is someone I bump into, not someone I prefigure in my thought or predict from my concepts. The indexical is elusive and surrounded by sameness around, but it is not (yet) concept. Concrete space, what is not beyond the horizon of concretude, is where there is a plane where things escape their descriptions. There is an idleness to things that indexicals somehow hint: a thing we meet is not merely a business, it is partially idle, open to new alliances, available, exposed to the elements. This idleness is related to the messianicity of all things: they can be referred by the means we use to point at an expected He that has no form or shape. The face, in Lévinas, has the idleness and the messianicity of infinity. The face hosts the incompleteness in which indexicals dwell.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more