No Borders Metaphysics

I´ve been watching documentaries about the Palestinian Nakhba ( like the one by Al Jazeera ) which is always enlightening for me due to my pro-zionist upbringing. Being back to Abya Yala after some months away, I´ve been thinking about my position in a colón ial order: white but not wasp, national of a country but not of a metropolitan one, raised to feel part of a group (Sepharadic, Jewish) with a history of being persecuted, placed on the side of the urbans in the regime of peasant disempowering, raised to be male but with heavy doses of heterogynefilia and a great deal of autogynefilia, cushioned by the middle class entitlements, surrponded by wanna-be whites that love African stuff provided that it doesn´t bear too much of an afro name. I guess I am in the middle of a scale that I once called the Güero-Indigenous scale , güero for the moderns, indigenous for the locals (both terms turned out to be complicated and I would rather refrain from using them again, but they served my pur...

In Coimbra, during the Epistemologies of the South conference I met Hugo Abalos, an archeologist working in Spain, somewhere in the Pyrenees if I remember correctly. His group excavate the land looking for what the local communities want to find - their issues orient the research. It is a kind of a local archeology, disconnected from national projects and not submitted to a big picture single narrative about human history or how did it all happened since the origins. He calls it anarco-archeology because, I believe, it is not about researching into an arché but rather excavating the floor for what is underneath the exercises of orientation, location and imagination of those who daily step on it. It is indeed something that is much missing in places like Mexico and here in central Brazil where archeological sites are found and then abandoned for they could unveil inconvenient narratives for the official history; something closer to a do-it-yourself, empowering, distributed and plural ...

Coming back from a long trip that involved writing a book, preparing a person and changing my soul (and most of my soles ), I'm thinking about navigation. This was one of the main characters of the accelerationist plot brought up in the HKW summer school in Berlin early this month. Navigation is what we are enabled to do when we acquire concepts and become able to traffic in reasons. Navigation is also what habits give us for rhythms entrain so that we find paths in time and space. Reasons and habits have these in common: modulation, antennas, broadcasting and receiving signals. The space of reasons is a space of navigation - and as such, concepts make us see what they make us see, the rest i blind. Concepts are like compasses, they provide maps, grammars, they leave paths ready as they offer ready-made thoughts. Everything has to navigate around, it is a way to negotiate their spacing and their timing - their territories and their rhythms - with everything else they find. It is a ...

Yesterday, walking up and down my jet leg towards the El Capote waterfall in deep Veracruz I thought of my next project. It brings together few elements. First, the idea that there is a crucial separation between collections and collectives; that can be found in Latour's two-chambers model in Politics of Nature or in the eco-theology of Thomas Barry and is ultimately formulated by Arendt's formulation of the main question of politics: why is there someone instead of no one?. Second, the partial who-ification of whats (or someone-ification of things) that is common to both process philosophy and Descola's animism - how these positions compare with standard non-process philosophy and naturalism but also with other alternatives that fully exorcise the separation between something and someone (between the question of politics and the question of ontology). Third, the work on predication - placing subject and object together where someone is the subject and something is the obj...

At Coimbra last week I presented some ideas about tourism as I've been traveling almost nonstop for the last six months. The slides are too heavy to upload (with my present devices) as it is packed with images of refugees traveling and Ai Weiwei's images. I've started out with Hakim Bey's Overcoming Tourism and moved to an economic analysis of the construction of the tourist object that precedes the actual tourists. They want to see things already prepared for them. Then I finished up with Byung-Chul Han's remarks on transparency applied to tourism. Tourism is a central locus for the friction between the locals and the globals - this is why I'm interested in the tourist guide, in the tourist interfaces that builds up the attraction from behind the scene. Presentation was at the Epistemologies of the South conference organized by Boaventura Sousa Santos and his group.

Last week, on my flight from London to Lisbon I finished writing Being Up For Grabs. I've actually finished on the plane one hour before landing, so I had one hour to rest and cheer before arriving at Mouraria. There's still work to be done, revision, writing the short sixth chapter that concludes the book and organizing bibliography etc. But the bulk of it is done. This is the (almost final) table of contents: Being up for grabs – the preliminaries Up for grabs Turning ontologically towards contingency The dismissal of necessary connections Three speculative accounts of contingency Communitas and immunization Being up in the air Automaton The parricide Sumbebeka prota ton onton Contingentism and haecceitism Transcendent and immanent contingency Anarcheologies and ontoscopies Anarcheologies Being out of the blue Arché Three anarcheologies Exercises in anarcheology Idersal Selassie and the pile of Muja New fragments of Heraclitus and the polemos Apocrifa f...