No Borders Metaphysics

 My short talk tomorrow in the cosmopolitical spring .

 My piece on cosmopolitical parties, anastrophe and catastrophe is just out in  &&& .

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...

In his study of the Yawalapíti cosmology (see The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul , chapter 1), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes spirits (specters), animals and humans as being perspectives. They are different ways in which things can be seen and recognized. They are not fixed, one can have different perspectives depending on the body one finds oneself in a circumstance, on the surroundings one is - whether in the forest or outside it because in the forest one is easily an animal and sometimes a spirit - and on the degree of shamanic intensity one is on. They are not a substantive taxonomy, they are indexicals. Further, he writes that from the point of view of spirits, humans and animals are alike while from the point of view of humans there are similarities between animals and spirits and finally from the point of view of animals, humans and spirit are perhaps the same.  Now, a cosmopolitical moment is like a cosmic epoch with its goals, its fears, its defenses, its dreams and ...

I'm getting closer to a more solid connection between what a post-nihilist thinking can do and what indexicalism provides. While substantives could have an intelligibility that can be extracted, captured, followed or persecuted - with different degrees of success, with different degrees of approximation - because their correction is given by something independent of any situation, indexicals can only be understood in a context. A situated metaphysics is one where the effort of intelligence is a production that is not consummated in a product, in an idea or a thesis that is general and could expose and replace its object - situated thought is not about replacing what is thought but attempts to produce what is not geared towards a further distribution or registration. At the same time, I understand how the indexicality of conceptual thinking is an example and not an exception to how things are. Indexicalism conceives concepts as being inextricably connected to the position from wh...

Wrote on four cosmopolitical parties and how to forge cosmopolitical coalitions. It closes with a bit on post-nihilist Marxism, sketched in Geist and Ge-Stell out last week in C&H (see post above). The new text is here.

Perspectivism, according to Valentim, hosts two kinds of wisdom. The first has to do with what is known inside the a perspective and the second has to do with the supernatural, xamanic where knowledge is inter-perspective, is about transitions and metamorphic. It is like an empirical knowledge and non-empirical, transcendental knowledge - knowledge inside and knowledge of what makes this inside possible. The transcendental knowledge could involve me being a jaguar, a pig and a human. The formula could be something like this: empirical anthropocentrism and transcendental anthropomorphism. Valentim quotes Tania Stolze Lima in her comparison of the Wari' and the Youdjá. For the Wari', I see a wasp as a wasp and me as human and a wasp sees me as wasp and her as human. For the Youdjá, animals see humans and animals as humans while humans sees animals as animals and humans as humans. But there is a limit for the Youdjá to hold that animals are at their disposal: they know that they t...