No Borders Metaphysics

I ended up in this improbable adventure of translating Heidegger's Die Gefahr into Portuguese. First because I was interested in what is there said about the Lager and about death in general and then because I'm taken by the power of this text and of all of the Einblick lectures. Translating it is very difficult - the first sentence is already a big problem: Das Ge-stell beslellt den Bestand, and different translations render it very differently. We consider doing more than one parallel translation (what the de Campos brothers called a tridução , for three translations). While doing this I was involved with reading Emmanuel Faye's well-researched and somehow claustrophobic "Heidegger et l'introduction du nazisme en philosophie" together with a book by Eugenio Trías, La Dispersión . Both turned out to be good companions to my immersion in Heidegger's Einblick . Faye holds that Heidegger created an ontological negationism in his Bremen lectures, especial...

For those (like me) waiting to see BUG (my book Being Up For Grabs out, I post the last paragraph included in the book. It is not the last one in the book, but will appear almost towards the end. The second round of proofs is done so it looks like September will be its season. In order to deal with the plurality akin to contingency, I have introduced three ontoscopies. The idea in each case is to show that, because not everything is up for grabs and sumbebeka prota ton onton, there is a structure around contingency either making it possible or following from it. Each ontoscopy is a way to view contingency – it can be described as point of view about what is up for grabs. It is interesting to pursue this line for a moment now that we are coming towards the close of the book. We can then find, at least, three points of view: that of the agents, that of the resulting action and a transversal point of view where the effects of agents on actions are considered in a pair with the effects...

In order to make clear the Levinasian character of Derrida's deconstruction today I started my class today on the inscription face/trace. Then I went on saying that there is an infinite in the trace, and therefore an infinite in the text that cannot be fully absorbed and appeals not to be turned into a concept. A text is there to be encountered, and each of these encounter occasions spell its infinity, its openness, its character as Other. To make a text say something specific - and we can turn to papers in a scientific tradition - it has to come with a curatorial device, a orientation that enforces one reading by trying to make sure only readers from a common set of practices will approach the text and read it. The set of practices brings about a canonic reading and text itself can collaborate in strengthening these practices. It would be like taking someone's face to belong somewhere - to be a natural woman, a member of an ethnic group, someone from a subculture - and then ma...

Whitehead understands creativity to be inherent to perception. Also, he sees perception as tied to an indirect object, an (broadly speaking) intentionally developed subjective form. If we see perception as a kind of reading, we can take it as always part of building a nexus, making sense of what is in front of one in terms of what is important, of what makes difference, of what one is prepared to read out. Reading has an ethics perhaps because it requires some kind of nearness that contrasts with what just stands, in the terms of Heidegger, in a position ( Ge-Stell ) and acquires a standing reserve that indicate an equal distance from everything - a position in a topology where everything is placed in a map that could be conceptual, geographical or like a B-series in time. Things placed there don't thing (as Heidegger says), they just stand in a distance, in the equal distance of eveything like what in a de dicto expression for something. Reading - and at least in some circumstanc...