Pedro Brea

I will read the genealogy of the concept of energy through Bergson's Creative Evolution to argue that, historically, energy and its proto-concepts are grounded in spatialized notions of time. Bergson's work not only demands that we rethink energy and its relation to time, it also allows us to see that the concept of energy as we know it depicts time and materiality as a numerical multiplicity, which effaces the differences in kind which are characteristic of energy transformations and real duration. To make this case, I first provide an analysis of Bergson’s concept of the cinematographical mechanism of thought, which splits duration into a composition of distinct states strung together by the idea of an impersonal becoming. Bergson claimed that this is the epistemological model for both ancient philosophy and modern science, meaning that it is also the epistemological ground within which energy concepts in western philosophy and science have been theorized. I then show how Bergson offers a way to overcome this model of theorizing through his method of intuition, and how these conclusions might be extended to future energy concepts. Thus, I argue that 1) Bergson’s work on duration allow us to interpret the genealogy of energy as the history of attempts to provide an account of change in terms of spatialized notions of time; 2) that his work offers a way of incorporating historicity into our understanding of energy; and 3) that thinking energy in the context of duration offers the possibility of conceptualizing energy as change itself rather than what remains constant through time.

The following paper puts the history of race and colonialism in conversation with the history of the concept of energy. The objective is to understand what a critical decolonial perspective can teach us about the central role that energy plays in western culture, materially and epistemologically. I am interested in how this approach to political, epistemological, and ontological questions demands that we reconceptualize energy to account for the historical particularity of the concept and the phenomena of history and intersubjectivity, which are eschewed in a purely materialistic and quantitative conception of energy. We will see how energy has been complicit in the racialization of black and indigenous bodies, and how the privileged place that the concept of energy has occupied in the canon of western physics has served to obscure the theological, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that constitute it.

What effect has finding the Archimedean point in ourselves had on how we look at ethics? The modern era of philosophy began with Descartes finding within himself an unshakable point from which to pursue knowledge of the world and himself. This intellectual alienation from the world into the universal mathematical structures of the human mind has led to a reversal where, henceforth, production, rather than contemplation, of knowledge became epistemologically superior. Guided by Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the Archimedean point and Earth alienation in the Human Condition, I will argue that this scientific form of thinking made its way into ethical investigation in the age of modern philosophy. Furthermore, I will provide an analysis of Kant’s categorical imperative and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism to show that despite modern science’s success in elucidating universal laws of nature, a scientific approach to ethics has not universalized our judgments of good and evil.

(Manuscript draft accepted for publication in 2024 by 'Research in Phenomenology') The purpose of this essay is to diffract ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To this end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment. The second experiment is to diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism. Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology, this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment becoming-Amerindian perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and an Amerindian perspective can reveal.