No Borders Metaphysics

This is the first version of what I want to submit to the call of Open Philosophy: Towards an indexical paradoxico-metaphysics 1. Paradoxico-Metaphysics Jon Cogburn introduces the idea of a paradoxico-metaphysics as follows: Metaphysics aims to give a maximally general account of what reality is like such that we encounter the phenomena that we do. But what if we encounter phenomena […] that seem to entail that metaphysics is impossible? Then the task of metaphysics is to give a maximally general account of what reality is like such that metaphysics is impossible. If the project sounds metaphysical, that is because it is.1 The impossibility of metaphysics requires an explanation and if any such explanation cannot stop short of making metaphysical assumptions or providing metaphysical arguments, paradox looms in the horizon. If we bite the bullet, we engage in paradoxico-metaphysics, the endeavor to provide a metaphysical explanation for the impossibility of metaphysics. That...

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...