No Borders Metaphysics

These are some bits for the coda of The deictic universe: Coda: Metaphysics at the age of epistemic injustice ... I'm writing this book on proximity and against the usual dwelling with totality in metaphysics. For a reason that is only partly hinted by me, I'm writing this in Potosí, Andes, at a more than 5000 meters above the sea level. The mountain I see more often from my doorstep is the Cerro Rico. I look around town for some information about the silver trade. The number – 16 million kilos of silver between 1503 and 1660 sent to Sanlúcar de Barrameda – is repeated often, the details, including images, documents, traces of various kinds, disappeared from town. Some of these material is in Seville, or in a colonia museum in Madrid, the Cristóbal Colón Museum. There are other numbers too, less widespread – and other minerals. In the beginning of the 20th century, a select number of tin magnates became millionaire around Potosí; the lithium fever and other open-air mult...

In Potosí writing a book. Working title: "The Deictic Universe - experience and the metaphysics of the others". After a long introduction presenting the ingredients of the plot, the book will have three chapters and a coda. I copy here the first two paragraphs of the intro for No Borders readers. They are still in the works, but they are the current starting point. Introduction: The Deictic Universe – the ingredients The universe made of this and that When considering what there is around me I can resort to some sort of pointing: this and that, or maybe this hand and that mountain. I can proceed this way because I am in the middle of things, in media res to use the latin phrase; my though is about things around, it is de re, that is, about the specific things around me and dependent on my position around them. Resorting to this sort of pointing – this and that – is often taken to be sufficient to present what is around but not more than a starting point in the busine...

The strong commitment to externality and to exorcise the many forms of totality lead Levinas to a rejection of many forms of archai, especially the ones that take some subjectivity to be a founding identity. He writes about the anarchism and the an-archic elements that are related to substitution (one for the other) and infinite responsibility in Autrement qu'être . The very notion of recurrence as a (perhaps transcendental) structure of psychism takes him to the anarchism of substitution where one is taken by any other and (eventually) returns to oneself through exercises of consciousness of that require freedom. There is no system that is not overhauled by substitution, by the infinite responsibility one has with the other, a responsibility that grows when one accepts it and, by that means, comes closer to the other. I was thinking about this anarchist responsibility in Levinas. Three remarks: 1. The central notion for his an-archism (and in the landscape of the book) is that...