Introduction We have written elsewhere that philosophy is about reflecting on how we see things when we see them through such or such ideas, and about reflecting on which ideas allow us to see things in a more rich and complex way. It is also – we would now like to add – about producing…
Author: polymorph
A Post-Anthropocentric Take on the Human Difference
C. Boesch writes that “wild chimpanzees seem to use drumming on buttressed trees to convey information and changes of travel direction.”(*) From this we may infer that at least some animals have symbolic language, i.e. an abstract and agreed-upon type of language. Conversely, iconicity (in terms of the mimicry of visual, sound, and olfactive forms,…
Derrida’s Mistake – or, Why One Should Never Philosophise on the Origins of Things According to What Happens at One’s Home
I In Of Grammatology, Derrida rejects Lévi-Strauss’s account of his encounter with the Nambikwara as naif. Lévi-Strauss, says Derrida, is a victim of the typical Rousseauian nostalgia before an allegedly-egalitarian-and-transparent society in which any attempt on the part of one of its members to concentrate power and turn opaque its transparency is punished by the…
On Nietzsche’s Eternal Return
Nietzsche’s “most difficult thought,” as he himself calls it in a posthumously-edited fragment, is his thought on the “eternal return.” Heidegger interprets it as the eternal recurrence of the “same.” Deleuze, instead, as the eternal recurrence of “difference.” Who is right, Heidegger or Deleuze? We would like to venture that they are both right –…
If God Loves You, It Means He Is Your Enemy: On Savage Thought and Christian Non-Sense
I. On Different Types of Oneness – and Their Danger Christian universalism is epitomised in these two passages extracted from two of Paul’s letters: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal…
Cruelty and Tenderness among Extra-Modern Peoples
Extra-modern peoples are often viewed not only as materially underdeveloped, politically immature, and culturally uneducated, but also as being fundamentally cruel. We cannot discuss here all these accusations, which tell more about those who pronounce them than about anything else. But there is one we would like to examine here: the supposed cruelty of indigenous…
Only We Die: on Immanence
We have never been humans – no human has ever stepped on the surface of the earth. However, since their first symbolic utterance mortals started to walk on the earth, naming (i.e. conferring being to) what lives and what dies. Possessed by symbolic language, humans are the only mortals, the only animals who experience in…
Perceptual Capitalism
As we have written elsewhere, capitalism is not only a mode of economic production based on dissymmetrical relations of production established to ensure the exploitation of the majority by a minority through the extraction of labour force from human bodies and minds alike (in addition to the exploitation of nature through the extraction of energy…
Nature and Culture in Musical Perspective
I Curves, Concavities, and Pottery Bowls The following drawing (which we have adapted from Paul Klee’s notebooks) represents the earth before any name is given to what the earth contains and, consequently too, before any distinction is made about its components (solids, liquids, and gases; obscure and bright things, long and short and hard and…
Dionysos and Apollo
I Dionysos and Apollo Dionysos and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassos mountains overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Krissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysos was worshiped there in the winter, whereas…