being – Fractal Ontology

All posts filed under: being

Mind

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Where is truth — in knowledge or learning? If truth is processual, it is therefore also non-definitional; if it therefore exceeds classification, it annihilates a priori any possibility of its subtraction or division as such. Hence truth is impossible; yet this “impossible” subtraction of truth from an inconsistency, once postulated, nonetheless functions, it even begins to produce something, the impossible even becomes possible — and so perhaps produces everything. Thus the question remains, like a […]

Ontology and Science

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

by Taylor Adkins

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being / heidegger / ontology / science

We could say that Heidegger’s introduction to Being and Time is rigorous and formalized to the extreme, like any other great (self-satisfied) German philosopher. Yet Heidegger also denounces any smack of self-satisfaction that would creep up in a philosophico-ontological investigation. What I want to do here in this short essay is to illuminate how Heidegger formulates the question of Being through Dasein, what this has to do with the ontological tradition and its destruction, and […]

Laruelle

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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being / communication / Deleuze / immanence / language / Laruelle / naivete / paradox / philosophy

Notes on the Preface of Laruelle’s Critique of Deleuze “There is reason to revolt against the philosophers,” this is where philosophy, in its greatest triumph, only further encourages itself. This is the moment, when philosophy perhaps no longer recognizes the autonomy of science and art, that it denies their autonomy, and with the utmost subtlety. Francois Laruelle, “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Response to Deleuze” Deleuze has discovered a secret — the secret or […]

Special Operators

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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being / cur(s)e / discovery / dust / fold / gift / knowledge / language / map / speed / spirit / Thought

How to begin to understand? Yet what is knowledge but the degeneration of learning? “Knowledgeable” thought waits, jealously, to snatch away our hard-won jewels of real experience — why this false patience, this impatience, this now-congenital haste? Thought and speed: thinking, the very light of speed in which all distinctions are blurred, internalized, folded — made significant again, logicized, facified. As though it lived only upon a vulnerable or delicate surface, in which it consumed […]

Notes on Totality and Infinity

Sunday, June 15, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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being / blanchot / ethics / event / exteriority / future / gleam / Hegel / history / infinity / judgment / levinas / peace / Politics / totality / vision

Does objectivity, whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war, provide the unique and primordial form in which Being, when it is distinguished from image, dream and subjective abstraction, imposes itself on consciousness? Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very moment in which the bonds with truth are woven? Levinas I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant […]

Counter-mythology

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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being / event / face / gift / infinity / lacan / language / levinas / logic / machine / silence / turbulence / violence

Responsibility is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being 123 Beyond the question of being and non-being, language is not the event — but rather a process of assembling unformed and unspecified elements, an abstract machinics which imagines new forms for itself by correlating the various distinct orders of reality with a plane of consistency in which a unified vision becomes possible — in short uncovering […]

Outside

Thursday, May 29, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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alterity / awareness / being / difference / inequality / inhumanity / language / levinas / love / metaphysics / Politics / reason / truth / tyranny / Uncategorized / violence

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, […]

Who’s in Control?

Sunday, February 3, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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being / control / energy / essence / flux / function / ground / heidegger / machine / order / power / revolution / technology

Who’s in Control? Heidegger and Technology We have for a very long time presumed to be in control of machines. We have claimed to be the masters, and pretended to “govern” technology. So Heidegger is more poignant than usual when he reminds us (in the 1969 Der Spiegel interview) that we do not even control that within us which drives us towards technicity. We are not masters of the secret desire which compels us to […]

The Thought of Language

Friday, January 11, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

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alterity / being / difference / expression / harmonics / history / language / memory / post-modern / radiation / science / time / transcendence / writing

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (Karl Marx, from the introduction to Grundrisse) Between being and language there is an interval, a purified difference articulated through individuation, a difference in time or development: language is in such a way that it always is yet to be as a being. Language becomes […]

Literary Machines: Between Drama and Artificial Intelligence

Saturday, December 15, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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actualization / artificial intelligence / behavior / being / cinema / cybernetics / drama / existence / image / interactivity / interface / language / one / reverie / story / theory

Insofar as it tends towards a studied negation (or counter-actualization) of our numb existence, endlessly dramatizing the existential narrative of escape, contemporary cinema conveys an intense and disturbing truth about modern reality. It is not just the easy and everyday dissociation that life is a movie, but more surprisingly, that movies have become indistinguishable from our real lives. Drama is not merely a terrifying absence, simply the dissolution of the synchrony of the One, but […]

Beyond Desire: Remarks on Nietzsche and Becoming

Monday, December 10, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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Anaxagoras / becoming / being / chaos / cosmos / desire / discourse / freedom / infinity / intensity / lacan / morality / morphology / Nietzsche / nous / ontology / phenomenology / psychology / Theory / Philosophy / unconscious

Topos (biocosm) In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order. Anaxagoras [1] What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new […]

Translation: Simondon, Completion of Section I, Chapter 1, The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

Friday, October 19, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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abstract machine / assemblage / autopoeisis / becoming / being / change / communication / complexity / differentiation / Disparation / formalization / French Translation / individuation / information / materiality / metastability / model / modularity / morphogenesis / morphology / ontogenesis / ontology / philosophy of science / production / self-actualization / Simondon / singularities / structure / system / technology / Untranslated Theory

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a […]

A Sketch of Gilbert Simondon

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

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becoming / being / biology / equilibrium / flux / individuation / metastability / ontogenesis / ontology / Simondon / singularities

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary. New York: Zone, 1992. 296-319. At the same time that a quantity of potential energy (the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion of matter is organized and distributed (the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude) into structured individuals of a middle order of magnitude, developing by a mediate process of […]

Nature, Politics, Revolution

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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being / ethics / immanence / love / ontology / revolution / Whitehead

Roger Brown, ‘Talk Show Addicts (1993) Events are named after the prominent objects situated in them, and thus both in language and in thought the event sinks behind the object, and becomes the mere play of its relations. The theory of space is then converted into a theory of the relations of objects instead of a theory of events… If you admit the relativity of space, you must also admit that points are complex entities, […]

Irony and Science

Sunday, August 19, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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being / domination / irony / numbers / Science / Mathematics / Technology / truth / violence

0. Empiricism lives and studies in the future anterior; thus order and number appear, as though already in their most sublime perfection, and involve themsleves in the experiment as though always fully formed from the outside. They are a key to the symbolic universe and thus a virtual island of hope — but survival demands we must be harder than mere forms. Faith in number, the pure form of being, isn’t even ironic; it’s messianic, […]

Living and Being

Saturday, June 30, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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being / infinity / life / music / observer / sense / universe

Fantasio(You can find more of his and other excellent original artwork here.) Life explodes and bursts ontological boundaries in its rampant and chaotic proliferation. But does life transcend being? If so, we must understand such a transcendence in the erasure of the gap between ontological layers, or in the ‘splits’ between, and productive of, generations. Such gaps are ‘magically’ or ‘miraculously’ mended by fecundity. Being, on the other hand, never truly carries multiple names. As […]