Hägglund, Succession, Ontology

Chagall, Time is a River without Banks

Martin Hägglund asserts the following four things in his recent interview:

1) “Succession should here not be conflated with the chronology of linear time (which is a recurrent misunderstanding of my argument). Rather, succession accounts for a constitutive delay and a deferral that is inherent in any temporal event.”
2) “the trace is always left for an unpredictable future that gives it both the chance to remain and to be effaced.”
3) “[Hägglund's new notion of] arche-materiality can accommodate the asymmetry between the living and the nonliving that is integral to Darwinian materialism (the animate depends on the inanimate but not the other way around).”
4) “Unlike current versions of neo-realism or neo-materialism, however, the notion of arche-materiality does not authorize its relation to Darwinism by constructing an ontology or appealing to scientific realism but rather by articulating a logical infrastructure that is compatible with its findings.”

I shall address these four in a few upcoming posts. As it's the dön season, however, I shall be rather slow.

The dön (Tibetan, “obstacle”) season occurs just before the lunar new year (March 5 this year). All kinds of emotional explosions and unpleasantness can occur, climaxing on Thursday. Friday is a neutral day. So, I shall, ahem, defer from being too explicit until then.

I'll say for now, however, that Hägglund argues in Radical Atheism that whatever others may think Derrida is saying about God, Derrida is really saying there is no God.

It's fair game, then, to argue that whatever Hägglund thinks he is saying about succession, he may fail to posit anything other than a “chronology of linear time.” Whatever he thinks he is saying about logic, he may fail not to assume an ontology. Whatever he thinks he is saying about materialism, he may fail to grasp a century's thought concerning matter (and time).

For now, this post by Peter Gratton elegantly summarizes some arguments on Hägglund.