Should we have learned indigenous mathematics or, more exactly, should we remember them – for we were all once indigenous peoples – the world would be different and probably better than it is today. For the ontology behind modern mathematics and, more broadly, modern science, is anything but neutral. Put differently, reality is not just…
Author: polymorph
More on Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms
We have written elsewhere on schizophrenia, following Jean Oury, as a “rhythmic distortion.” We would now like to add that such distortion is neither what one presences when one witnesses a schizophrenic delirium nor what one enters when one enters one. For, as Freud stresses, it is at re-building their collapsed worlds that psychotics aim…
When Binary Thought is Not What you Think
A Primal Evolutionary Phenomenon and a Recurrent Social-Cultural Constituent “It is a singular property of the human species,” writes Leroi-Gourhan, “that by confining itself to engendering action, it periodically eludes the organic specialization that would definitively tie it down. If the hand of the earliest anthropoid had become a tool by adaptation, the result would…
What Is Philosophy?
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…
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…
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…
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…
Tenderness, Intimacy, and Care
We are working lately with three Heideggerian concepts: “tenderness” (Zärtlichkeit), “intimacy” (Innigkeit), and “care” (Sorge), which we find important to rethink dwelling in capitalist ruins. Moreover, we take dwelling to be the only possible alternative to today’s fulfilled nihilism; and, more generally, to nihilism in any of its possible forms: those that want to accelerate…