No Borders Metaphysics

I made a first amendment to what I presented last Monday about the three concomitant narratives concerning the other. Instead of three narratives, I'm thinking in terms of two poles where representation lies in the borderline. The composer that performs a representation of the world is a composition and a fragment; the monadological narrative deals in compositions or fragments and brings about ( instaure ) fragmented compositions that can be interrupted. Composing enables interruption - it emerges from a tension between compositions and fragments. Compositions are fragments because they are incomplete and therefore make room for further composing. Composing is perceiving, the ethical endeavor of attending to one's agenda and being interrupted by it. Perception is therefore dual, it aims at building a nexus and it attends to interruptions. Hence, perception is the meeting point between monadology and what it inscribes, a hauntology. Monadology features the agency of each unit ...

Hand-out of my presentation in Anarchai today: A metafísica paradoxal dos outros Hilan Bensusan Metafísica e os outros: o mundo externo, a fundamentação de alguma coisa em outra, as relações de dependência e inter-dependência, a interação, a transcendência, a heteronomia. Existir e co-existir: aquilo que existe tem lugar entre outros que existem. Anna Tsing e a dupla tarefa: a) oferecer uma abordagem maximamente geral da realidade com as melhores habilidades disponíveis e b) deixar espaço para outros – e outros relatos – que são parte da realidade. Totalidade e transcendência: satisfazer a tarefa a) apenas produz uma totalidade fechada (e consistente nela mesma), satisfazer b) apenas é recusar uma abordagem englobante em nome da transcendência dos outros (e dos outros relatos). Diaphonía e paradoxo: A diaphonía exerce uma pressão desde fora sobre a espontaneidade (a soberania) de qualquer abordagem. A tarefa paradoxal: oferecer uma abordagem maximamente geral da realidade tal ...

Levinas' endeavor in Totalité et Infini is to consider the first-person encounter with the absolute Other, not as a representation (or of fruition) but as an exercise of transcendence. His exercise in transcendence inaugurates a métaphysics where the ethical demand plays a crucial role. However, transcendence itself is not thematized and, as a consequence, does not compose a totality. Levinas aims to avoid totality for a plurality of reasons (to be examined …). As a consequence, there can be no maximally general account of how things are. In fact, Levinas rejects the possibility of a maximally general and consistent account of how things are such that transcendence is possible. There can be no consistent account of any other as the other is not a neutralized alter-ego – another me that turns me into something impersonal - but precisely what I am not. No consistent account is possible because a consistent account would turn the other into something immanent and void it of any tran...

Harman's Immaterialism sets out to contrast his object-oriented approach to social and historical explanation to what is loosely labeled "new materialism" and to actor-network theory in particular. After a quick presentation of his ontology of objects stressing the speculative move from objects of human knowledge endowed with a withdrawn element that eludes every sensorial contact to an image of everything as objects enjoying a secret in-itself dimension and a quicker presentation of the adversaries of the object-oriented approach, Harman illustrates the strengths of finding objects behind events with a historical narrative of the Dutch VOC. Following a provocation from Leibniz, for whom it would be outrageous to treat the Dutch East India Company as a real substance, Harman sets out to present the history of the company as the history of an object - that supposedly would explain more than accounts that rather undermine it in terms of its components (fleets, trips, emplo...

Getting acquainted with Salanskis reading of Levinas and thinking of how, in perception, there are always traces of the still others in perceiving the others (language brings in the images of the masters when we look at anything but also every mediation is a trace in perception - think of the notion of importance in Whitehead's Modes of Thought , for instance) I've been elaborating on the account of three modes of existence I gave on Being Up For Grabs . There, each unit (which was a monad) was at the same time a composition, a fragment and a composer. There they relate to the others in a monadology. But this strikes me now as only part of the story. There is a monadology but on top of it and at the same time there is a phenomenology and a hauntology associated to the interiority of each unit. The paradoxico-metaphysics of these units is the (incoherent) juxtaposition of these three arrangements of units in each of their mode of existence. In each mode they enjoy a connection...