Exploring the Craft of Exilic Thinking/Becoming

Nicole Des Bouvrie

doi:10.1515/opphil-2020-0177

Abstract

Abstract Being-at-home in a particular, determined, world is dangerous for thinking. For thinking to be thinking/becoming, one should not get too comfortable. For thinking is to not arrive back home, in the same place one begins. But how to escape the world that has created who you are, gave you purpose and a past? How to make sure the future is not a repetition of the Same? How to break away from something that you need? In this article, my aim is not to give one more solution to this fundamental problem that is in essence an ethical problem. For providing a refuge, a new theory, a new methodology, would be providing a new island for those who realise that a flood is endangering their own island. My aim is to exercise the craft of exilic thinking as a way to deal with the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.” Exilic thinking as a craft of fragilising the self establishes a matrixial borderspace through which the impossible becomes possible.

Highlights

How can we deal with the illusion of change, the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers
After laying out this concept regarding “The Order of Things” – the English title is so much more fitting than the original French “Les Mots et les choses” (1966) – Michel Foucault spent the remainder of his life showing examples of this co-dependency of the world and its thought
Foucault showed us that changes that reach outside of the world we inhabit, radical changes, hardly ever happen

Summary

Introduction

How can we deal with the illusion of change, the contradiction already pointed out by Heraclitus and Parmenides – “We both step and do not step in the same rivers. “There is no special ‘suspicious’ as opposed to a ‘gullible’ method of reading.”[36] And her endeavour is commendable, Moi continues to define reading, “whether I do a postcolonial or a feminist or psychoanalytic reading, methodologically I do the same sort of thing: I look and think in response to particular questions.”[37] So the position from which one is looking is accepted as a given and kept in place She asserts that “the only ‘method’ that imposes itself is the willingness to look and see, to pay maximum attention to the words on the page. There are two aspects that I feel are necessary ingredients for a thinking/becoming, irrespective of one’s starting point

Exilic present

Concluding