Sunday, October 6, 2013

metaxology: thinking from within the "in-between"

This came up during our "Metaphysics of Individuation" reading group this past summer.  A student from the group recently emailed me these two links to post, for those interested.  We had looked at some of these issues in Stengers, Latour, Whitehead, Tarde, Simondon, Deleuze, Leibniz, and the other usual suspects.

Didier Debaise, "What is Relational Thinking?" from Inflexions (no. 5, 2012) and Didier Debaise, "A Philosophy of Interstices: Thinking Subjects and Societies from Whitehead's Philosophy" from Subjectivity (no. 6, 2013).  The latter article's abstract is worth posting below.  I see resonance with metaxological ontology, e.g. William Desmond, Robert Corrington, Robert Neville, i.e. the American process ontologists. The space or interstice, the space of the "in-between," usually thought of as something empty or secondary with no importance to the identity of things, actually can itself through a negative activity be involved in the process of how "selves" come to be, especially within environments where this "in-between" is said to be absent or "not."  Rather, as Debaise points, it is quite the opposite:
The notion of interstice appears in philosophy as something empty, an in-between, with no importance in the constitution of things. I argue, on the contrary, that the concept can be retaken in a new interpretation of living subjects as a main category to interpret the spatial and temporal dimensions of a subject.