Skip to main content

Arché: contingency, agency. (and a note on the an-arché of Spinoza)

I realize a lot of what has worried me recently really revolves around the idea of arché - as commandment and commencement. Absence of arché is a possible understanding of contingency (lack of command, lack of a starting point that starts anything) and a world without agency is arguably a world where chaos reigns - of Meillassouxian hyperchaos. Agency and contingency are two sides of the issue of arché. This is why Leibniz was adamant in exorcizing Epicurean indetermination by random swerves in order to make sure real agents were ubiquitous. This is also why there is no agency in Meillassoux, fragile space for it in Hume (which is dependent, as in Kant, of a duality or realms, a realm of subjective autonomy and a realm of objective anomy) and a limited space for it in a cosmology of swerves - something is slightly out of control because otherwise there is no novelty, which means that the ordinary fabric of being is not laden with novelties. In general, I've been trying to thing the an-arché: the absence of government that could be considered in terms of a lack of agency or as a proliferation of agents each of them in friction with the others - contingency not as anomy but as plurinomy or polynomy. The general task is maybe to think beyond the old western link between onto and arché and try to figure out whether there is an ontology where no arché (or absence of it) plays a central role. This still puzzles me.

When considering a world without agency, I thought of a Meillassouxian hyperchaos but also of Spinoza's immanent substance. His is not an acting substance - not anything with purpose, with sense of fulfillment, with creative capacity or placed in a commanding position. Immanence when complete is very close to necessary contingency: in both cases there is no starting point and nothing follows anything. Spinoza's one-substance system has no place for contingency (no place for plurality) because it has no place for agency - Leibniz's God, in contrast, is an agent because it could have done differently. Yet, the consequence is that things take place without any foothold other than sheer existence.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more