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Politics of predication - a project

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 object seems to be the locus of the distinction between whos and whats. There is a politics to predication - that could be an ontology of predication but it is rather what makes politics and ontology possible. And, of course, the issue of what is thinking emerges: is it all about predication?

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  1. H. Arendt: Marz 1955, XXI, 15.
    Denktagebuch, 1930 bis 1973
    Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich 2002

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