Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology

by Hilan Bensusan

This is a book on the metaphysics of contingency. It looks at what could be otherwise, at what lacks the weight of necessity, at what is up for grabs. Aristotle maintained that there could be no knowledge of the impermanent. Since then, metaphysics has endeavored to find out what really is permanent, non-accidental and resilient - substances that endure, substrata underneath different qualities, fixed principles, necessary connections. In contrast, Bensusan draws on the growing philosophical attention to the contingent. A speculative and anarcheological effort, Being up for Grabs aims to reach a broad and encompassing view of the sensible world while conceiving it as lacking any arché. The book emerges as a remarkable exercise in speculative anarcheology.

238 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2016

About the author

First interested in general thoughts and then on singular thoughts - and singular occurrences in general. Then moved to what escapes principles - anarchaeology. Then to contingency in general. More recently the focus has been proximity and situatedness.

Reviews

[Marcelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although parts of the text elude me (especially when it relies on logics and on what I am probably mistakingly understanding as an analytical overall framework), I find it amazing in its way of turning philosophy’s most technically loaded languages into some kind of drift through the sensible, through language as part of the sensible.

I also like how a seemingly clear writing style insinuates powerful resonances. In discussing three “ontoscopies” of contingency, the book unfolds its “speculative anarcheology”: a monadology of fragments, an ontology of doubts, and a rhythm-oriented ontology. I find the chapter on the latter one of the most pleasant and interesting philosophical readings I’ve ever made, but the vocabularies of the ontoscopies end up being really challenging in their intricacies, sometimes seeming rather technical jargons.

In its broader horizon lies the question of contingency, which in its concluding remarks the book approaches in a very fruitful way: “contingency is the plural of necessity. Or rather, contingency emerges from the plurality of necessities. Whenever there is genuinely more than one necessity and not an ultimate overarching necessity ruling over all others – there is contingency.” (p. 207)

There are many passages to which I plan to go back as I try to process the book’s complexity. What really seems amazing to me is the ways in which the very notion of anarcheology is carefully approached, allowing for such an amazing formulation of some of its meanings:

“Anarcheology can be understood in at least three different ways, in line with three different parsings. Perhaps they are three different but entangled anarcheologies:

1. Anarche-ology: the study of the unruled, the ungoverned, the absence of command or determination and its effects;

2. An-arche-ology: the study of what is groundless and doesn’t have a foundation;

3. An-archeology: the study of versions of the past independently of whether they are considered to be facts.” (p. 67)