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ONTOLOGICAL DEVIATION

by Marcus Steinweg

“To be a philosopher, to be a mummy,” writes Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. The philosophers — ancient and present-day philosophers, which he distinguishes from the future or coming or new philosophers — operate with “conceptual mummies”, they “kill, they stuff”..Their morality lies in the flight from becoming, from diversity, from the sensuous, from history, from change, from life, which eludes being incarcerated in concepts and systems. It is a morality of flight. It flees what represents an overtaxation of it: what is non-representable, nameless, incommensurable. This is what makes these philosophers weak so that they do not have the courage to squander themselves by touching the untouchable, so that they prefer to measure out the space of possibility rather than making contact with the impossible. “What constitutes the style of philosophy is that in it the relation to an exterior is always mediated and weakened by an interior, within an interior. In contrast to this, Nietzsche founds thinking and writing on a direct relation with the exterior” (Gilles Deleuze). The coming philosophers are philosophers who give up the metaphysics of interiority in favour of touching chaos, i.e. truth, in order “to risk contact with a pure exterior” (G.D.). The subject of this contact is the subject of self-transgression and self-surpassing into the dimension of an otherness that undermines a priori every concept of self and identity. It is a subject without any fixed identity, a subject that constitutes itself in the act of (re-)contacting its own essential abyss as ontological deviation, as originary disturbance of the world of facts, of the positive order of being.

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