What is Kultur? : the places of God in the age of re-embodiments

• Main Author: Thomas-Pellicer, Ruth
• Published: University of Surrey 2012
• Subjects: 121
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.576128

The present doctoral thesis consists in a study of the conditions of possibility of knowledge for a post-ecocidal age otherwise called Age of Re-Embodiments. The epistemological trajectory largely inaugurated by Socrates's equation of the beautiful with the intelligible is assumed as intrinsically ecocidcil. The figure of a transcendent God that reverts plurality back to one and becoming to being is taken as the operative metaphor that systematizes and provides coherence to the epistemological tradition. In assessing the official project of sustainable development as continuous with the latter, valuable cognitive artillery to proceed with our study is instead found in Nietzsche's work and that of part of his entourage -Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Vattimo, Plotnitsky. Nietzsche's philosophy of the future and Derrida's set of undecidables are reworked as an anaiytics of transposition. The main remit of the transposition is that of reinscribing the solipsist positions -the conditions of possibility of knowledge-of eplsteme in the cultural matrix -the transposition or reconfigurative operator par excellence. Customarily, one finds positions hierarchizing their opposite poles -productivity/sustainable development, realism/constructivism, living organism/inert matter, theism/atheism, anthropocentrism/ecocentrism. Transpositions, subsequently renamed transposements, conform to the third figures of such dichotomous binary pairs. Each chapter revolves around one or a set of related transposements. Conjointly but irreducibly plural, the transposements at issue come to decentre and occupy the objectifying place of God. Within the epistemological trajectory, the project of the Enlightenment is portrayed as initiating an immanent turn further carried out by authors in the post-Kantian tradition. The majority of transposements herein proposed are geared at completing the immanent mobilization. It is claimed that a static immanent plane is a metaphysical farce. Rather, when the impetus of the immanent spatiality is fully released the latter indefectibly manifests itself in concrete degrees within the constrained-engaged immanent continuum.