No Borders Metaphysics

Pace Cabrera. Been thinking about strategies for mad dog optimism in philosophy - around Severino´s rehabilitation of Parmenides, Leibniz´s best of possible worlds and a bit on the interruption of being in Levinas. The combination of the first two reads like this: the past was best and lasts. In other words, the past was the best result of the action of all agents in the world and it became eternal. It is the contingent past, determined or not, that is perpetual - and not the intelligible, the perfect, the rationally conceived. The Leibnizian element is, I believe, monadological in the sense that it ought to be present in other monadologies (thinking of Latour or Whitehead). The agents in the past did their best because they acted according to their best reasons and did the best alliances with other agents they could do. They could not have done worse than the best because they are guided by reasons and never act at random. They never abstain from any alliance, the alliances are part...

Thinking about a way to think through the metaphysical tradition that goes through Levinas and Deleuze in the 20th century, it occurred to me that one can describe their project as a metaphysics without speculation where the sense of totality is fully replaced by an commitment to exteriority and infinity (in the sense Levinas ascribes to Descartes). It is a metaphysics of contact, and not of speculative gestures. Interestingly, if we think of the four possibilities of presence and absence of metaphysics and speculation, the other three quadrants are occupied by metaphysicians like Whitehead but also by Leibniz and Spinoza (the quadrant on Metaphysics with Speculation) as much as the quadrant that rejects both metaphysics and speculation is occupied by the traditional forms of correlationism. Finally, speculation without metaphysics is what Meillassoux want to pursue. The fourth quadrant, metaphysics without speculation, is almost completely absent in the current discussion on metaphysi...

This is a text on desire and proximity (and trust) that I just wrote. It connects Levinas' anarchic character of proximity to Deleuze and Guattari's schizo approach on desires. A Sagrada Família: a apropriação da confiança, do desejo e da proximidade Hilan Bensusan Sue Nhamandu, a pornoklasta, me encomenda um texto grelo duro. Meu grelo faz trancinha. Nem tenho anatomia, nem tenho destino. Eu seria desorganizada numa coleção de grelos em riste. Ou então eu seria aquela parte inorgânica, o sal fora da terra, o estanho ao pé do Cerro Rico. Sem órgãos. Uma mina de lata e de dildo ou de ferrolho, um grelo de aço. Leio uma entrevista de Maria Galindo com Pedro Lemebel. Ela quer falar sobre machos, varones y maricones e ele: ¡Yo no soy hombre niña! ¡Hasta quando! ¡He estado hasta ahí com eso…! Pedro desconversa Maria. Ela lhe interpela e ele pode virar a cara – ela lhe pede uma fala de um lugar, ele recusa o lugar e a fala. Ninguém é obrigado a ser fiel a sua anatomia; tudo, até...

The paper I read in Porto Alegre earlier today. A non-metaphysical step towards a metaphysical indexicalism. O de re e o empírico: uma noção indexical de experiência Hilan Bensusan 1. Desde os gregos há uma interessante (e, eu diria, fértil) ambiguidade entre o sensível e o concreto. Aquilo que co-existe no espaço e no tempo com qualquer forma de sensibilia pode ser descrito como acessível à sensibilidade. Os gregos usavam αισθητ- para se referir ao que hoje entendemos como o concreto – aquilo que está posto no espaço e no tempo. Assim, Platão fala do mundo sensível – composto pelo que pode ser captado pelos sentidos, e não pelo que é de fato captado por uma sensibilia – e Aristóteles critica os heracliteanos defendendo que há substancialidade no sensível, naquilo que é concreto – ainda que a substância sensível não seja acessível aos nossos sentidos desprovidos de outras faculdades. De uma maneira ou de outra, o concreto sempre esteve entrelaçado no sensível. É comum que se ent...

Thinking a bit farther on this idea of the de re as the sensible beyond awareness. The idea is to place experience resolutely away from the Cartesian theatre, from the Cartesian conception of a mind that accesses itself in a privileged way entailing a self-envelopping actual entity that has a degree of metaphysical independence. Awareness is rather to be thought as no more than the tip of the iceberg of perceptual experience. Levinas' model of recurrence can help further. We can posit that experience itself has a recurrent structure. It is not about risking one's existence in a zone of risk, a foray into the dangerous area of uncertainties - the dangerous areas of exteriority, where things can go astray at any moment. This zone is a metaphysically defined space (and it cannot be done unless indexicals are supposed to be some sort of ultimate furniture). Experience makes one be replaced by something other; as a foray, as a trip to the outside, it assumes no coming back. When ...

On the wake of the book I thought I could give a talk on the empirical and the de re . It is promised for early March in Porto Alegre. The idea would be to develop a positional or indexical account of experience where sensibility is tied to what is around something, to a position, and not to a sensibilia. Sensible experience is a variety of experience, which is broader and is as far-reaching as in the pan-psychist image of Galen Stawson or in the pamn-perceptualist image of Whitehead. So, in the Lockean image of perception embraced by Whitehead, one experiences a res vera before one´s eyes no matter whether it appears to one´s senses as a dagger or as a stick. Say there is a dagger before one´s eyes, this will have effects apart from the sensible effects on one´s eyes. Experience has to do with where you are, or rather, what fills your deictic variables. There is far more experience than what the senses register, awareness through conceptual capacities is no more than the tip of the...

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...