Skip to main content

Indexicalism as post-bifurcation thinking

I've been thinking, mostly due to my classes on Whitehead, that the rejection of bifurcation is a crucial component of my indexicalism (see the Open Philosophy recent paper). In a nutshell, indexicalism is the thesis that reality is fundamentally indexical and exteriority as the Great Outdoors cannot be exorcised from the picture. More than trying to respond to the idea that indexicalism is a metaphysics of subjectivity in Meillassoux's terms - it is not, because it endorses the version of the ontological argument that Levinas formulated: by conceiving its exteriority, a subjectivity ensures its existence - it should actually be placed in the Whiteheadian context that by exorcising bifurcation avoids the path towards the age of the correlate altogether. Through this exorcism, there is no longer room for a realm of experience which can be fully mistaken about how things are and provide no absolutes because it is correlational. If we have a firm grip on the idea that experience is all that there is to reality - together with the realist idea that reality is more than one's own experience - one can perhaps feel not tempted by the correlationist conundrums.

I guess indexicalism has to be placed in this post-bifurcation context and endorse the idea that indexicals (and the others, and exteriority) is to be thought within experience. To be sure, indexicalism brings to the picture a transcendence that is missing in the field of experience portrayed by Whitehead - with Levinas, indexicalism brings in the transcendence of the other and a thorough rejection of totality, which includes a rejection of the totality of experience. It draws from Jean Wahl's lesson that exteriority is part of what reality is - and of what we experience. Experience is therefore intrinsically incomplete and dealing within supplements. It pictures a different image of experience, not as what is completed by other experienced, but rather as a realm of interruptions where the experience of the others loom about without ever being fully present.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Me...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more