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…
Category: Thought
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…
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…
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…
Seeing Is an Act of Insight
Balthus’s “pictures—like dreams—are journeys unto themselves,” writes Lance Esplung in The Art of Looking. “Balthus does not capture on canvas a scene already lived. He cultivates life within the breathing skin of the canvas, allowing his forms to play out their lives, independently and unpredictably, in relationship to and through the viewer’s experience. . ….
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…
How Does an Indigenous Concept Look Like?
In what follows, we render all indigenous terms in curly brackets to remind the reader that indigenous languages were, originally, non-written languages. This does not mean they were simpler, though. The fact that many indigenous languages are polysynthetic, for instance, makes them complex to an extreme which is hard for us to even fancy; thus…