WIPSS: Broken Bottlenecks: The Savage Case against Prevailing - Shajara NéeHilan Bensusan

Work In Progress Seminar Series, Faculty of Arts University of Malta
Convened by Prof. Michael Briguglio, Dr Francois Zammit, Dr Dylan Cassar, Dr Niki Young

Many contrasts exist between the established ways of thinking of the Moderns - including their approach to artificialising the world - and those of the Savages.

While Pierre Clastres diagnosed that the Savage rebels against the State, he suggested they harbor an associated resistance towards the One understanding the task of thought to be the multiplication of the multiple. In this talk, Prof Bensusan introduces some central ideas from his current research on understanding the disquiet concerning the One as a resistance to resolution. Through its bottleneck, something is decided, occurs irreversibly, and prevails.

Prof. Bensusan explores the connection between Martin Heidegger’s remarks about Ereignis and the dynamics of resolution. He then suggests that the savage struggle against the One spells a discomfort towards all that. Partly oriented by some Guarani-Mbya texts the talk explores ways to conceive a world without resolving to one, where prevailing does not guide both being and thought.

Shajara NéeHilan Bensusan is a Full Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Brasília. Recent books include Indexicalism (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Memory Assemblages (Bloomsbury, 2024). Shajara’s recent philosophical interests involve spectrality, speculative realism, deconstruction, decoloniality and indigenous thought.