Becky Vartabedian

Jane Bennett’s vital materialism develops positive ontological commitments to lively matter and resistant vitality, articulated using notions of actant and assemblage, thing-power and the out-side. I show that these ontological commitments reveal a limit for traditional modes of human knowing, favoring an emergent epistemology that attends to the ways actants and assemblages express themselves. I then argue for an account of acting that positions humans as guests of vibrant matter. Compacts of guest-friendship in Plato’s Crito and Kant’s To Perpetual Peace indicate that to be a guest is to be embedded in an asymmetrical system. The compact that binds the guest in a world of vibrant matter is the prospect of friendship with nonhuman others, a prospect I discuss following the work of Nick Bingham. I conclude by addressing Axelle Karera’s recent critique of Anthropocenean discourses, explaining the role guest-friendship can play in addressing certain of the weaknesses Karera identifies.

This Collision discusses the cyanotypes produced by photographer Meghann Riepenhoff, in particular those in the Littoral Drift project; these cyanotypes are direct positive prints produced from the action of sea water washing over photo-sensitive paper placed at shorelines in the United States. I discuss these images and the cyanotype process Riepenhoff uses to produce these. I then discuss philosopher Fred Evans's concept of "voice" and its contemporary extension to nonhuman others. Arguing that an intermediate aesthetic intervention would assist Evans's affordance of voice to nonhuman others, I position Riepenhoff as a facilitator of the sounding of wind, water, salt, sand, and chemicals expressed in the cyanotype process. I conclude by linking the Littoral Drift series and Riepenhoff's prospective position of facilitator to recent aesthetic and ontological meditations on the Anthropocene, that epoch of geologic time in which human activity is the primary shaping force on the earth; I situate Riepenhoff's work in conversation with insights from Joanna Zylinska's account of nonhuman photography and Jane Bennett's vital materialism.

In this article, I discuss Alain Badiou’s 2008 address titled “The Three Negations.” Though the text was originally presented in a symposium concerning the relationship of law to Badiou’s theory of the event, I discuss the way this brief address offers an introduction to the broad sweep of Badiou’s metaphysics, outlining his accounts of being, appearing, and transformation. To do so, Badiou calls on the resources of three paradigms of negation: from classical Aristotelian logic, from Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, and in paraconsistent logics developed by DaCosta. I explain Badiou’s use of negation in the three primary areas of his metaphysics, as well as to diagnose the degrees of transformation that may have occurred in a situation. My analysis of Badiou’s use of negation in this text is aided by examples from his broader ontological oeuvre. I also explain the underlying requirement in Badiou’s work that formal considerations - mathematical or logical - get their sense by being tethered to readily-identifiable political, aesthetic, scientific, or interpersonal concerns. I conclude by addressing the foundation Badiou’s work establishes for pursuing a new metaphysics, and by discussing certain of the liabilities that remain in the wake of his account.

This book approaches work by Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou through their shared commitment to multiplicity, a novel approach to addressing one of the oldest philosophical questions: is being one or many? Becky Vartabedian examines major statements of multiplicity by Deleuze and Badiou to assess the structure of multiplicity as ontological ground or foundation, and the mathematical procedures these accounts prescribe for understanding one in relation to multiplicity. Written in a clear, engaging style, Vartabedian introduces readers to Deleuze and Badiou's key ontological commitments, including the mathematical resources underpinning their accounts of multiplicity and one, and situates these as a conversation unfolding amid political and intellectual transformations.

This paper develops a notion of allowances, a designation for speech-acts indicative of the collaborative behaviour I engage in with others. Such behaviour marks a facet of my individual identity that I could not create on my own. I ground this notion of allowance in the view of the self as intentional body-consciousness developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Russon. I explain the relation of this self to others on their phenomenological paradigm, and then explain the functions of speech and gesture Merleau-Ponty offers in the _Phenomenology of Perception_. In order to present my concept of allowances, I turn to J.J. Gibson's concept of affordances. Gibson's concept provides an analogue for the notion of allowance. I then explain two examples of allowances in action: gossip and truth-telling. I conclude by drawing attention to the ways these allowances are markers of the collaborative constitution of identity.