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