good food cooking at Levi’s place

He may be “stoked” about Prince of Networks (and I think he’s right that it’s my best book so far, which I suppose is a good sign– I’d hate to be regressing since 2002).

But I’m even more stoked about this word concerning Levi’s new book-in-progress:

“For the part on endo-relations or endo-consistency, I am planning on reworking Deleuze, DeLanda’s, and Protevi’s work on the virtual, manifolds/multiplicities, attractors, and emergent systems in terms of Zubiri’s account of individual essence.”

A Zubirian account of attractors is, I think, worth living another couple of years just to read.

We’ll have to see how far Zubiri goes, but if I were writing good science fiction about continental philosophy in the year 2025, I’d probably put Zubiri at the center of it. Lots of good would come from that. HERE IS A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF HIS WORK.

In case you just walked in on the middle of this Zubiri discussion… I got into Xavier Zubiri purely by accident. I happened to be a huge fan of José Ortega y Gasset even before I was a fan of Heidegger (there are some similarities, but Ortega is a spectacular stylist, indeed a perennial if failed candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature). In that way, I started reading around the fringes of early 20th century Spanish philosophy a bit, and that’s how I came to purchase and (much later) actually read Zubiri’s On Essence.

YOU CAN FIND AFFORDABLE USED COPIES HERE.

The style will take some getting used to for many. Stylistically, it looks less like Deleuze than like Aquinas. But what he does in this book is to re-vivify the concept of essence, which is obviously a pariah in continental philosophy circles these days, and undeservedly so. (Since my biggest objection to DeLanda concerns his dislike for essence –and I am a great DeLanda fan– I was especially happy to see Levi mentioning DeLanda and Zubiri in the same breath.)

The essence of a thing, for Zubiri, is a system of “notes” or real traits. The essence is not how the thing is known, how it becomes, or how it relates to other things, but how it is. If this sounds familiar to readers of my own books, that’s because I got the idea from none other than Zubiri himself. (What I still dislike is his too-close connection between essences and nature. He is too quick to deny an essence to things like farms, hammers, etc., and for this reason falls back into a two-world theory with essences on one side and relations on the other, whereas Latour provides us with the capabilities to envision an infinite regress of black boxes that function simultaneously as shielded units and as actors in networks.)

I’ve said it before, but after five years of ferment, what really let me find my own voice in philosophy was the simultaneous reading of Zubiri and Whitehead during one very important summer in graduate school. (I had read both of them before in fits and starts, but it didn’t click until then. I must not have been ready.)

For someone coming from a heavily Heideggerian background, it was a good combination because both authors address a key weakness in Heidegger: Whitehead explodes his Sein/Dasein correlationism, and Zubiri subtracts the essence of things from all “respectivity” to other things. In other words, my reading of the tool-analysis is arguably more Zubirian than Heideggerian… An entity has a private essence, irreducible to the effects it has on other things. (I simply find Zubiri too restrictive, though not any more so than Aristotle and Leibniz, in limiting the number of things that have essences.)