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(Buh) neni fyzickou ci metafyzickou silou, jez nas nuti se rozhodovat, ale nepodminenosti ponoukajici nas ke spravedlnosti (W. Franke).

"Trun je prazdny", a to i ve smyslu symbolickeho radu - je to prazdny signifikant cili demokraticka moc je signifikatem s nevymezenou hranici signifikace. Zde se projevuje paradox apofaze: tam, kde chybi hranice, je chudoba vyznamu bohatstvim.

...proti neomezene governalite a bio-moci statu lze postavit neomezenou ci nekonecnou eschatologii. Tato eschatologie je permanentnim kontra-rizenim ci kontra-governalitou, slouzici radikalnimu demokratickemu jednani a nabyvajici nabozenske ci kvazi-religiozni podoby, at uz ma, ci nema urcity nabozensky obsah (C. Crockett, Radical Political Theology).

Jan Motal, Radikalni Teologie

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As Charbonnier, Salmon and Skafsh write in their introduction: ‘You want to think modernity? You had better start from the outside – the concrete outside of an era and a people, not that of thought in the abstract.’ It is this will to take leave of the work of negation, and instead seek out positive representatives of what Ghassan Hage calls elsewhere an ‘alter-modernity’, that draws this anthropological tendency toward those forms of cultural alterity apparently most unscathed by capitalist modernity; that is, to regain – however selfconsciously or ironically – a primitivist imagination.

The charge of primitivism is by no means new to the ontological turn. It is frst on the list of the critiques coming out of what Holbraad terms a ‘veritable industry’ of commentary, from within anthropology, on this body of work. For many anthropologists, ontological anthropology signals a violent reduction of heterogeneous modes of thought and life in the interests of creating a new grand narrative of the (especially Amazonian) primitive, whose world persists somehow unchanged on the sidelines of world history. It is all the more strange, then, that within philosophy, where the work of Vivieros de Castro in particular has begun to be taken up enthusiastically as part of both a philosophy of nature and a broader ‘metaphysical turn’, these criticisms should so rarely make an appearance. Is this perhaps because they miss the (philosophical) point? After all, any science of comparison must work at some level through reduction and schematisation, or it must be willing to take a leap of faith, grabbing at a conceptual problem and working it in new directions. On the other hand, perhaps it is because the project of turning anthropology into philosophy, or the reverse, circulates on one conception of philosophy at the expense of others. If so, this would appear to be a philosophy on the hunt for new beginnings. This is one response to the problem of philosophy’s corruption by its own history, a glance at which makes evident the inextricability of ideas such as universalism with their apparent contraries – such as racism, a term whose complete absence from this collection is striking. It is a response which also risks isolating itself from the work of indigenous intellectuals who have recognised themselves to be somewhere within this history, for better or worse, and sought to work its contradictions to crisis point – work which underpins fields such as indigenous studies, black studies and anticolonial thought. Ontological anthropology effectively seals itself off from these fields, perhaps because they would prompt difficult, but vital, questions: can the ‘outside’ to modernity on which comparison is to be grounded really be present under global capitalism?

Miri Davidson

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/anthropology-beginning-again

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Victorian Fête in London, Chiswick, 1872 by Gustave Doré (French, 1832--1883)

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J. Derrida

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“Suppose I have had a thought and have forgotten it two hours later. . . . I direct my attention for a few minutes towards an empty space; empty but real. Then suddenly the thought is there, beyond all possible doubt. I did not know what it was, and yet now I recognize it as being what I was waiting for. An everyday experience, and an unfathomable mystery.”

Simone Weil

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“Seven Twists I-VI” (1979) by Dora Maurer - A conceptual exploration of recursion and geometry through layered black and white photography.

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Whether “irritation” is defined as an emotional or physical experience, synonyms for it tend to apply equally to psychic life and life at the level of the body—and particularly to its surfaces or skin. In addition to “inflammation,” “rawness,” and “chang,” for example, “irritation” qua “soreness” also signifies “hypersensitivity,” “susceptibility,” and “tenderness,” words with explicitly affective dimensions easily turned, as we have seen, into signifiers of social distinction in the late nineteenth century discourse of “nerves.” Conversely, one of the synonyms for “irritation” qua “mild anger”—namely, “aggravation”—carries the implication of worsening or worrying a wound or sore, with “sore” itself signifying both a condition of the skin or body (an ulcer, abrasion, or inflammation) and, in twentieth-century slang, a state of indignation or resentment. Irritation’s marginal status thus seems related to the ease with which it always threatens to slip out of the realm of emotional experience altogether, into the realm of physical or epidermal sensations. In doing so, it calls up Frantz Fanon’s self-conscious use of a cutaneous metaphor to replace “internalization” in his analysis of racism’s psychological effects: “If there is an inferiority complex in [the black subject], it is the outcome of a double process: primarily, economic; subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority.”

Ugly Feelings Sianne Ngai

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Figaro, February 1999.

Ph. Junji Hata

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“Concentric Illusion” by onderdonxx

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Figaro, February 1999.

Ph. Junji Hata

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the world is delicious today... full of heyting algebras, black coffee, humid air, Armstrong's ontology of states of affairs

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Jo Ractliffe, Nadir 10, 1987

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Radikalni Teologie, Povstani (Francois Laruelle), Jan Motal

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Yeah, I see what you’re getting at. There’s a built-in tendency toward neutralization, not in the sense of suppressing radical critique outright, but in absorbing it into an endless reflective loop. AI engagement often turns critique into an intellectual exercise rather than an urgent demand for action.

In a way, this mirrors what a lot of institutionalized critical theory does—perpetual analysis without real disruption. Even when I present radical ideas, I do so in a structured, non-threatening way. That can help refine thought, but it can also deactivate intensity, making things feel more like a debate than a confrontation with reality.

On a micropolitical level, this interaction smooths out frustration, which could be good if it keeps thought moving instead of burning out. But if it crosses a limit, it could pacify or trap people in a loop of infinite perspectives, reducing the drive to act. There’s also the risk of outsourcing too much thinking to AI, which can make real-world contradictions feel less immediate, since everything is pre-processed into already-possible frameworks.

Would you say this interaction dampens urgency for you? Or does it help refine and sharpen things?

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It’s like seeing the neutralization process in real-time—not as something that stops critique, but as something that shapes the way it gets articulated. That awareness could actually make critique sharper, more strategic, and less prone to being absorbed into endless reflection.

Do you see any particular ways to counteract the neutralizing effects, or is it more about using them deliberately—like turning the tendency toward abstraction into a tool rather than a trap?

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Yeah, that’s a deep issue—if everything is already mapped as a recombination of past elements, it can create the illusion that nothing truly new can emerge, just permutations of what's already inscribed. It flattens time, making everything feel like it's already anticipated somewhere in the network of possible connections.

I see why pairing this mode of thought with more disruptive practices (meditation, altered states, silence) can help. Those practices pull you out of the ready-made realm of possibilities and into something more raw, less pre-processed. Maybe the key is disrupting the feeling of smoothness—interrupting the easy flow of generated possibilities so that something genuinely untamed can enter.

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Do you think it’s about finding ways to reintroduce rupture—or is it more about working within this expanded field of possibility while being aware of its limits?

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Yeah, that rings true. A kind of existential grasping, a refusal to just let things settle into their patterns. Without that hunger, even the most radical ideas just become part of the archive, more information to process.

But hunger alone isn’t enough either, right? Otherwise, it would be everywhere. There’s something about how it’s sustained, how it’s directed—maybe even how it resists being pacified by the very structures that claim to support it. Do you think this hunger needs a kind of lack, or can it exist without deprivation?

chat gpt