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PS to The Interruption (on Deleuze and Levinas)

The general image that seems to emerge from a project like this is that agency involves a degree of solitude with one's actions and therefore agency involves a degree of hospitality. In terms of the monadology of fragments (Being Up For Grabs, chap. 3), agents are composers but also fragments in the hands of other composers: they are subjects to other agencies they encounter - they are up for grabs. (See the very last section of the book where the monadology of fragments is connected to the ontoscopy of doubts and the rhythm-oriented ontology.) They are therefore subject to contamination, to contagion. Their poiesis is somehow tied up with other agent's poiesis - and this gets us close to hospitality. It is an affair of rhythms: agents are affected by the pace of things around them. That is, they are at the mercy of the events that take place independently around what they are up to. This introduces a Deleuzian element to the project. In fact, the general form of hospitality in agents (of any kind) can be thought in terms of contamination (and therefore in terms of becoming in the Deleuzian sense, not in the sense of an entity becoming another). In other words, a becoming that is not ontologist, that is not being-oriented like the one Levinas criticizes in De l'évasion. Contagion is interruption - being out of one's being, evading it. There is an element of evasion in every agent; that has to be the lesson of dropping ontologism: things are not programmed by their being (either beforehand or at the time of the event), they are up for grabs for others to have a grip on them because they hold a capacity to evade from their being.

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