No Borders Metaphysics

Beckett predicates questions of life and death as three-penny issues. They invite, as Hegel has shown in detail especially when read under Bataille's eyes, a focus on servitude, on being mastered (or master), on restrictions - in the sense of Bataille's restricted economy. Bataille summarizes the connection by holding that death and pain are agents of servitude - and therefore he urges a greater generality than the one that could be attained by Hegel's Phenomenology . The Phenomenology is stack in the restricted imaginary of life and death, reaching or not reaching what mediation (some kind of servitude) enables, taking commonsense to absolute knowledge or failing to do so. There is a route, a guide - and a single-track guide oriented towards survival (success is measured thereafter). There is no general cartography provided - no general economy. In the Anarchai group we've been discussing Derrida's piece on Bataille in L'écriture et la difference . Derrida m...

Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wonder, in the best part of a chapter of their Há mundo por vir (Rio: Cultura e Barbárie, 2014), who would compose the two poles of the Humans and Earth-bound in the war to be declared according to Latour (in the Gifford Lectures). One difficulty is the grey zone between victims and perpetrators; like in Primo Levi´s grey zone (in The drawn and the saved ) those who don´t collaborate with the perpetrators - the nazi or the destruction of the Earth (and of one´s future) - are unlikely to survive. There are increasingly less complete victims - or rather, there is incresingly less testimonies of the complete victims. To be sure, there are clear-cut culprits and drawned, but there is a big violence in pushing people into the grey zone (which is the grey zone of the society of geocontrol where we are forced into a specific fuelpolitics that makes us part of the depletion of the planet no matter how much we feel attached to it. In the sense t...

The last centuries might have produced interesting mid-house alternatives to the debate between the believer pole (either in the religious, theist, deist or a variation thereafter) and the atheist pole. These alternatives explore the mid-way between positions that carried a great deal of emotional content. The issue then will be what kind of emotional content could be carried by these alternatives. God is often conceived at least as existent, having an essence and having a substance (in the sense of being self-standing). God exists because otherwise there could be no difference God could make on the course of things (apart from differences in our thoughts, as somehow explored by Pascal´s wager). God has an essence for it is this essence that is in question when we wonder whether God exists(necessarily or contingently) or not. God is self-standing because otherwise it would be too dependent to be either omniscient or omnipotent. God is therefore taken to be at least an existing self-s...

Been discussing Violence et Métaphysique in the anarchai research group these weeks, I've been growingly convinced that Levinas major (and radical) break with Husserl's phenomenology is somehow recapitulated in Meillassoux's twin rejection of correlationism and subjectalism. Derrida is hard on Levinas when he brings in the notion of alter ego such as it appears in the fifth Cartesian Meditation . Now, that is particularly interesting for me because the fifth Meditation is the official address of Husserl's monadology. He there presents subjects as monads intentionally connected in a way that each monad reaches the others and brings them in while maintaining them away - they are heard because they are egos , they are away because they are alter . An intentional act brings the intended other in by making it possible for the subject to register in thinking the presence of the other. The monadological relation makes up for a structure of intersubjectivity - the other app...

The Festschrift for the 80 years of Oswaldo Porchat is now out. Porchat is a very inspiring philosopher who knows how to agree and disagree in the same welcoming tonality. The book is organized by Plinio Smith and carries an essay of mine on Neopyrrhonism and the ontology of doubts.

Em breve, em Porto Alegre, na Universidade Explosiva Desescolarizada, começaremos um movimento de animismo político. O convite é de Guisch Sch e Manoela Cavalinho Branco a partir desta minha postagem de ontem no facebook: To na pilha de fazer uma série de videos expondo a ideia de um animismo político. Quero recomendar um animismo/perspectivismo contemporâneo e político, inspirado pelo animismo de algumas comunidades não-modernas mas adequado a alguns propósitos e valores modernos (com o mesmo tipo de atenção aos modernos que oferece Latour na Enquête (Sur les modes d'existence). No caminho, refletir sobre as conexões entre crise ecológica e os conceitos teológico-políticos de humanidade e de natureza, sobre as dificuldades de construir agendas políticas verde-e-vermelhas, sobre as demandas de uma política do não-humano, sobre alteridade como comunidade, sobre diplomacia, política e técnica contra o estado, sobre sociedades em geral, sobre monadologias contemporâneas, sobre inter...