Skip to main content

PS to The Interruption (on Deleuze and Levinas)

The general image that seems to emerge from a project like this is that agency involves a degree of solitude with one's actions and therefore agency involves a degree of hospitality. In terms of the monadology of fragments (Being Up For Grabs, chap. 3), agents are composers but also fragments in the hands of other composers: they are subjects to other agencies they encounter - they are up for grabs. (See the very last section of the book where the monadology of fragments is connected to the ontoscopy of doubts and the rhythm-oriented ontology.) They are therefore subject to contamination, to contagion. Their poiesis is somehow tied up with other agent's poiesis - and this gets us close to hospitality. It is an affair of rhythms: agents are affected by the pace of things around them. That is, they are at the mercy of the events that take place independently around what they are up to. This introduces a Deleuzian element to the project. In fact, the general form of hospitality in agents (of any kind) can be thought in terms of contamination (and therefore in terms of becoming in the Deleuzian sense, not in the sense of an entity becoming another). In other words, a becoming that is not ontologist, that is not being-oriented like the one Levinas criticizes in De l'évasion. Contagion is interruption - being out of one's being, evading it. There is an element of evasion in every agent; that has to be the lesson of dropping ontologism: things are not programmed by their being (either beforehand or at the time of the event), they are up for grabs for others to have a grip on them because they hold a capacity to evade from their being.

Comments

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

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. ‘Meta-m

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