The question of the relation between the one and the many has shaped Western philosophy from its beginnings. ‘One’ or ‘many’? may sound like a simple question but it touches on two profound puzzles: how can unity and multiplicity coexist in a single (unified or multiple) reality? And, what is more fundamental – the one […]

In The Accursed Share, George Bataille asks: ‘Why would classical economy have thought that in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to acquire, but rather the contrary, the need to lose or squander’? He goes on to suggest that excess and transgression are not aberrations but rather […]

Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstruction is regularly understood as depicting a world of forces in conflict, in which all entities and identities emerge from the play of the tensions between force and counter-force, power and counter-power. Much more rarely, however, have any attempts been made to explain Derrida’s ‘ontology’ or his ‘physics,’ if you can […]

In war-ravaged Japan, the post-WW II years were riddled with existentialist concerns. The call for concreteness, voiced by the Osaka-based Gutai Group, was concerned with the reconstruction of the basic notion of human existence in a way that was different from the wartime notion of the national body or kokutai and ‘its hundred million hearts […]

Allergies are commonly encountered through their symptoms—sneezing, wheezing, itching, dripping, swelling—bodily responses that may be mild, debilitating or sometimes life threating. But what is an allergy? And what strange energies does this term set in circulation? An allergy is often described as the body’s overreaction to a substance – dust, pollen, spores, nuts, milk, seafood […]

In the Western philosophical and scientific tradition, theorists have endlessly tried to determine what separates life from non-life. Does life contain some special or enigmatic vital principle that other inanimate natural and artificial objects do not? Is it the fact that life can reproduce itself, evolve and set its own goals that distinguish it from, […]

When energy is ‘potential’ where or when is it? If potential energy is not also already in some sense ‘actual,’ existing in the world somewhere as energy, for example, as a lump of coal that might be burnt, then does it only come into existence when it becomes actualized, as Aristotle might write? A quick […]