No Borders Metaphysics

Few months back when I started getting hooked on the idea of hospitality and the project of an infinite hospitality as a stance against that of glorifying what one is (and being in general), I also into thinking about colonization. I was under the spell of a Nick Land's piece where he addresses the issue of the philosophy of colonization that emerged from Kant's take on the outer world and the very idea of a transcendental distinction. Colonization is the opposite of hospitality: it is the imposition of self instead of the opening of spaces in oneself for interruption. To be sure, the opposite of colonization is multiple because the demands for hospitality are infinite - in fact, it is always a cosmic struggle that one between hospitality (the broken self) and colonization (the expanding self). The choice for hospitality is a negative stance: a stance where no affirmation is made, no gesture of affirmation takes place. It is the negativity of availability. To be sure, the amoun...

I copy below part of the recent discussion I'm having with Julio Cabrera on anti-natalism and the ethics of procreation. I'll be saying a bit more on what I thought today about my own branch of negative ethics in the next post. The idea, however, is that one should give opportunities for ethical acts (or maybe for genuinely novel ethical acts). This could lead to self or general annihilation, but it is lead by a love of something else more than what happens to be. Being is not the guide - goodness is. So, the Mexicas opened their doors to Cortez. That was hospitable and self-annihilating - and different both from abdicating being (suicide where no ethical act can ever follow) and from non-procreation (where the possibility of further ethical acts is abolished). The text: O nada ao alcance de ninguém O outro e a resposta em Julio Cabrera a) O não-ser, Meinong e o outrinho Julio Cabrera considera a procriação imoral. Ela tem um caráter muito especial de imoralidade imune à...

I started my talk to the Leibnizians in the ULB last November saying that I was after another coupling of phenomenology and monadology, not like the one Husserl did in the 5th Cartesian mediation which was somehow prompted by former student Mancke and his Leibnizian inclinations. My coupling is one that would bring together not Husserl and Leibniz but rather Levinas and Whitehead. I then proceeded to present the problem with monadology in general: it has no room for genuine interruption, the monad is satisfaction-centered, an aesthetic-driven entity, as Shaviro puts in the end of his "Self-enjoyment and concern", in The Universe of Things . The issue is, in my terms, is there a monadological way out? Or rather, in a somewhat longer format, is there a process philosophy that both keeps the tenets of a (neo-)monadology while making room a genuine hospitality that involves being able to be interrupted as an existent (as a monad, as an actual unit of agency that is separated in i...

This is the draft of the text that evolved from my participation in the ABC+ Process Philosophy conference in Liverpool last year: 1. Introduction: Process, Agency and Contingency Process philosophy is a general name for metaphysical outlooks that focus away from what is stable and take what appears fixed to be what primarily demand explanation. Therefore, the main characters of a process philosophy plot are more likely to be interactions than substances, becomings than the underlying structures of being, constituted movements than constituted things. In the twentieth century, process philosophy was championed by Alfred Whitehead's philosophy of the organism, by Etienne Souriau's claims concerning how existents continuously bring about existence, by Henri Bergson's attention to durations, and by Gilbert Simondon's ideas of meta-stability and of individuals explained away by processes of individuation.1 More recently, process philosophy has been placed in the foregr...

Just uncovered from the layers of web dust the blog Luciana, Leonel and me used to think through our project of rethinking the polemos that ended up in the Heraclitus anarcheology book and in much of what happened philosophically to me afterwards, including Being Up For Grabs , the Diaspora of Agency and my current projects. It was, I believe, my first philosophical blog.