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Fragile
Metaphysics
August 24, 2023
In this seminar Tarvo and Samantha develop their forged concept of fragile metaphysics, an intervention into the logic of the everyday by way of post-conceptual art and post-structural metaphysics. The boundary between what is and is not, what could be and will have been, is drawn by fragile temporal lines, vanishing arrangements susceptible to instantaneous collapse and creation. Samantha will situate the notion of fragile metaphysics within contemporary aesthetic ontology, as seen in the works of Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Bergson, focusing on the recent publications of Deleuze’s audio-recorded lectures from the University of Paris-VIII. Delineating the immanent temporal processes in Deleuzian metaphysics, we will explore the extra-logical by drawing from connected concepts in Agamben, Deleuze, Blanchot, Tiqqun, and Žižek. Unbound by propositional thinking, fragile time destabilizes pre-existing forms without resorting to opposition through identity. In this sense, the fragile is non-productive strength that operates in the silent alleyways between individuated forms, states, and institutions. The positivistic, instrumental rationality critically theorized by Marcuse continues to hollow out Being via the technocratic deification of data, outcomes, and algorithms, while the abandonment of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good in postmodernity has lapsed into relativistic recursions—another reality is possible! Our response is not a return to the dogmas of the past, but the construction of an extra-logical, fragile aesthetics that metaphysically destitutes everyday time, beyond good and evil. Tarvo will discuss samples of his works in post-conceptual art, touching upon notions of non-self, non-linear time, the limit experience among others; bringing up temporal and aesthetic features found in thinkers such as Bachelard, Weil and Lispector as they reenforce the concept of the fragile. The unfolding of fragile metaphysics at the intersection of art and philosophy generates new modes of thought and sensation in everyday life.
(Samantha Bankston and Tarvo Varres)