No Borders Metaphysics

Today I started a course on Heidegger's History of Beyng (and on his Meditation ). Reflecting on the precedence of Beying over being and beings (and the very ontological difference) while having in mind the contrast between presencing and Ereignis in Time and Being , I explored the idea of the metaphysics of presence in terms of the present, of the es gibt , of the gift. The economy of the gift is the circle of gratitude: in order to show that I'm thankful to the giver, I keep the gift, preserve it and make sure it is no annihilated. My endeavor (the metaphysical or onto-theological endeavor) is to make sure a durable form of the gift is always available, at my disposal. This economic status - a certain restricted economy of being and beings, of what presents itself through beings - presides over the era of persecution (or preservation), of representation, of thesis (as opposed to physis) and maybe of machination. This era is inagurated by a dispensation of being (of Beying)...

In "The trace of the Other", Levinas describes the movement without return towards the other as requiring "a radical generosity of the same who [...] goes unto the other" and also " but also "requires an ingratitude of the other". He adds that "[g]ratitude would be in fact the return of the movement to its origin". The return of the movement to its origin is pŕecisely the Maussian circle - the circle of perpetual gratitude, described by Mauss, that makes everyone tied to a social structure by a state of contunuous debt. The Maussian circle is hard to escape because it involves every social act in a scheme of debts and gratitude - it is a total social fact that reaches beyond any supposedly defined economic realm. A gift of any kind brings in itself the poison of a possible hostility because it produces a burden upon whoever receives it. The gift is tied to an often vague but enforced norm of retribution that is always in the brink of pav...

Perhaps negativity is an indexical operation - without being what makes indexicality possible. Determinate negation is an operation of bringing about concreteness through a specific denial of the abstract - abstract space determinately denied by a point. The operation is one of specifying something, making something concrete by bringing about an address in the space where indexicals directly point at (see Indexical Propositions below in this blog). To deny something is itself pointing at something and making it determinate, concrete. To make something concrete is to detach it from anything else - 'dedetermine' in the words of Tristan Garcia; that is, specify a thing out of the assemblage of objects. Just a thought.

The economy of reciprocity requires, in Derrida's Circumfession , that he offers ingratitude to Bennington so that Bennington can take him as the Other that will offer no reciprocity. Ingratitude - as much as sanctity, or other forms of positive cybernetics - is part of the Maussian circle. Derrida, I think, is juggling to escape from that circle while realizing it eats everything up. Sanctity, to be sure, do exist in its own right - but has to enforce ingratitude (Levinas says this explicitly in "The Trace of the Other", p. 349). Derrida deconstructs (and trusts) this idea by asking how ingratitude is forged. The absolute Other is not alien to the economy of reciprocity because sanctity comes about in a background of reciprocity (gratitude, ingratitude, the law of hospitality, hostility). In my discussion with Ahanon and Janina today we talked about offspring - parenting is a handy example for Levinas struggle to establish the possibility of sanctity. Offspring are enfor...

Had a great and long conversation with Phil about the childhood of the machines. The childhood I have in mind is one where kids are part of a unit of production, we entrust them with responsibility according to their capacity. Maybe we don’t need children to mix eggs in the kitchen anymore because we have machines – the childhood of the machines have already brought about some Edenism in human childhood: play, play, play, this is what children are here for. In that context, we can see how children are trained not as the main objective, but as side effect of having them inside the production chain. The same with machines. We are in the cosmic age where the species is being reproduced and we put most of our collective effort into that. That image of our cosmopolitic moment brings together the struggle for Edenism – the idea that we have always pursued a life without effort – and the idea that the future of humanity is to become guards of machine process they don’t understand, humans will...

With Guilherme da Silva, we wrote a draft about how to conceive propositions as indexical objects . In a sense, indexicalism with deferralism lead to an account of propositions that is in line with the idea of deictic absolutes and the main ideas in the book Indexicalism coming out soon at Edinburgh University Press.

Em 10 episódios, uma introdução ao indexicalismo . Mais ou menos, de memória, os temas episódio por episódio: 1. Totalidade, niilismo e crítica à metafísica: uma metafísica paradoxal indexicalista 2. Levinas, a exterioridade e o indexicalismo 3. Indexicalismo e realismo especulativo 4. Suplemento, excesso e horizonte 5. Whitehead e o pan-perceptualismo abrem caminho para o indexicalismo 6. Perspectivismo ameríndio e indexicalismo 7. Referência direta e intencionalidade indexical 8. Percepção, mito do dado e mediação indexical 9. Indexicalismo e pós-colonialidade - o ch'ixi . 10. Pensar o niilismo de modo indexicalista

A língua do futuro em Hegel

Another version of Geist and Ge-Stell , arriving at a post-nihilist Marxism .