UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Being up for grabs: On speculative anarcheology Author(s) Bensusan, Hilan Publication date 2017 Original citation Bensusan, H. (2016). Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology. London: Open Humanities Press. Type of publication Book Link to publisher's https://openhumanitiespress.org/ version Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2016, Hilan Bensusan. This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/5669 from Downloaded on 2021-10-05T06:32:10Z Being Up For Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology Hilan Bensusan Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Hilan Bensusan Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London, 2016 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016 Copyright © 2016 Hilan Bensusan Freely available at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/being-up-for-grabs/ This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2016, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). Interior images copyright Gisel Carriconde Azevedo used with permission. PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-028-3 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-029-0 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 11 1. Being up for grabs – the preliminaries 15 2. Anarcheologies 61 3. Fragments 95 4. Doubts 137 5. Rhythms 163 6. Contingency and its galaxies 195 Notes 209 References 223 To Denise Paiva Agustinho and Devrim Acknowledgements The gestation of this book took pretty close to nine months. Its conception, to be sure, took much longer. Both processes were collective and I’m grateful to a large number of people, places and institutions for ideas, inspiration and support. The idea came up in a bus ride with Fabiane Borges somewhere close to Arba Minch, Ethiopia, in January 2012. It was first sketched in a talk at the American University of Beirut, organized by Ray Brassier in June 2012. Parts of the book have nonetheless had previous lives. Anarcheology is an older endeavor I have been pursuing with Leonel Antunes and Luciana Ferreira since 2009. The chapter on fragments is much indebted to the course I taught at Paris 8 in 2011, and I’m thankful to many students and colleagues there, especially Eric Lecerf, Stéphane Douailler, Zouzi Chebbi, Marie Bardet, Andres Vahos, Jean-Sébastien Laberge, Romain Flizot and Julie Alfonsi. While in Paris I also had important conversations with Lise Lacoste and Quentin Meillassoux. The chapter on doubts was developed in parallel with my interactions with the Neo-Pyrrhonism work group in Brazil and its meetings around 2012 and 2013 where the argument of the chapter took form. It benefited from discussions particularly with Oswaldo Porchat, Eros Carvalho, Alexandre Noronha, Michael Williams, Luiz Eva and Plinio Junqueira Smith. The chapter on rhythms was bred in my courses in Brasilia in 2012 and 2013, the conference on Performance Philosophy at Guilford, the one on Diverse Bodies in Rio, both in 2013 and in exchanges I had in events about ontology and speculation around this time. I’m thankful to 12 Hilan Bensusan André Arnaut, Barbara de Barros, Tomás Ribeiro, Guilherme Moura, Lucas Kaeté, Jéssica Franco, Rômulo Fontinelle, Gena Pulino, Juliana Bramatti, Marcos Chagas, Gabriela Lafetá, Bernardo Tavares, Otavio Maciel, Gerson Brea, Herivelto Souza, Ana Miriam Altmayer Wünsch, Wanderson Flor, Loraine Oliveira, Agatha Bacelar, Agnaldo Portugal, Cecília Almeida, Laura Cull, Ana Cristina Chiara, Johnny Kemp, Marcus Gabriel, Graham Harman, Cesar dos Santos, Rodrigo Nunes, Steven Shaviro, John Protevi, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Déborah Danowski, Alexandre Nodari, Erick Felinto, Erick Lima, Paulo Abrantes, Julio Cabrera and Eclair Filho. Work on galaxies has been carried out together with Alexandre Costa-Leite (and more recently with Edelcio Souza and Rodrigo Freire). Furthermore, I’ve rehearsed some of the ideas in the book on my blog (No Borders Metaphysics) and I’m grateful to comments and suggestions I received. The writing season started early in 2014 in Xalapa where Juliana Merçon and her house in Zoncloantla, close to the Pixquiac river, provided the right environment for the embryonic book. Its birth also owes much to her. From Veracruz, I moved to Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck, Granada, Paris, Brighton, Berlin, Lisbon and back to Brasilia. During these nine months I was helped in many ways by my sister Nurit and my nephew Ariê, Alfonso de Pablos, Flor Rothschild, the Coatepec organic market, Grego Queiroz, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (for hosting my course on ontographies and modes of existence and the invitation to talk in Tajin), Helio Garcia, Eckhart Boege, Irlanda Villegas, Luisa Paré, Adriana Menassé and our great conversations at Parochia and Chiquito, the Universidad Veracruzana (where I ultra-sounded parts of the book), the Biblioteca Carlos Fuentes and the adjacent street Ursulo Galván, Carol Sobreiro, Edla Eggert, Gerardo Alatorre, Shantal Mesenguer, Crisanto Bautista, Roberto Penedo, Ignacio Marcué, Barbara Hardcore,Witek Jacorzinsky who helped me with the Sahagún Colloquia and invited me to talk at CIESAS, Daniel Paiva, the Österreiches Nationalbibliothek, Cristina Borgoni, Marian David, Guido Melchior, the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (where I talked on the ontology of doubts), Manuel de Pinedo and his friends and colleagues at the Universidad de Granada (where I talked about logical galaxies), Mar Muriana, the Genil river, Filipe Chipe, Monica Udler, Aurèle Crasson, the Paris 8 library, the Buttes Chaumont park, Aharon Amir, Olga Shaumyan, Acknowledgements 13 the North Laines Library in Brighton, Katie Bailey, Oli Sharpe, Tom Beament, Benjamim Noys, Dariush Sokolov, Claudia Freire, Guida Chambel, Caroline Marin, Nuno Oliveira, Aia Hipácia, Joana Barata, Filipe Ceppas, Kelly Heitor, Laura Ovidio, Poncho and everyone from the community where I live: Gisel Carriconde Azevedo, Phil Jones, Laura Virginia, Judith Zuquim, Hannah Prado, Tina Nunes and Treps. During these (roughly) forty weeks Denise Paiva Agustinho was very much by my side, gestating Devrim. The book is dedicated to them both. The text was much improved by conversations with Jadson Alves, especially concerning monadologies in general. I also thank Stephanie Mitchell and Kaio Rabelo for their careful help in preparing the final manuscript. To conclude, I would like to thank my Department at the University of Brasilia, which made it possible for me to go on leave to write this book, the two grants that supported the investigation: one from CNPq, Brazil (CNPq/486635/2013-9) and one from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2010-19455), as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Open Humanities Press. I’m happy that this book is appearing in the New Metaphysics Series – reading its mission statement was a key factor in my decision to write this book. Wrapped-up Gisel Carriconde Azevedo, Digital photography, 2011 Chapter 1 Being up for grabs – the preliminaries Up for grabs This is a book about what ain’t necessarily so. It is about how we can grasp, assimilate or come to terms with what could have been otherwise – or might not be at all. Aristotle claims that we cannot know the impermanent.1 It can be argued, from that perspective, that thought itself requires a measure of fixity. After all, if thought has a format akin to predication, it requires a subject for that predication. Indeed, metaphysics has classically been associated with necessities of some sort. It has typically resorted to substances (which endure modifications and provide reality to what is perceived), to substrata (hypokeimena underneath different qualities and predications) and to fixed principles and necessary connections: in a word, to one kind of arché or another.