Fernando Zalamea

Continuity inscribes itself in the heart of almost every system—philosophical, physical, mathematical, vital, perceptual. It is not unusual for both the domain and the "conceptual machinery" crafted to survey that domain to draw explicitly and implicitly upon continuity. But few of these systems have concerned themselves with the provenance of continuity, or evinced much of an appreciation for its (often) destabilizing effects. There might be a reason for this: those who have tried to bring continuity into focus—either by unifying its various instantiations in a single concept or by grounding its different instantiations in a logical or experiential invariant—have foundered on rather caustic shoals. It is no accident that Leibniz identified the composition of the continuum as the principal labyrinth palling philosophical praxis.

(A translation from a polemical article in Italian by Fernando Zalamea published by Il Foglio Quotidiano on 23.12.2015.)  World philosophy has been stuck for decades in a scientific vision that cannot explain reality any more.  Thus we must get beyond Kant and reawaken thought and culture.

Being invited to write in a book that refers to a conference that took place in Stockholm at MDT in 2016 called Postdance I am building a method of how we could look at what comes after dance (post-dance), referring to all the apparatus of contemporary dance (theater, performance practice, theoretical tools), by using the method of alienation, thus regarding this discipline from multiple perspectives outside of it - society, contemporary arts at large, the technological realm. I then propose that through performance skills one can build a necessary "second artworld", a ghost art world, through methods of camouflage or through proposals that expand the domain of the arts and change the way we think about an artwork as "just a product" towards an "artwork as artworld" - which is a hybrid between artistic practice, life, discursive practices, production, education, curating.

Pragmatism, according to Peirce, “is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.” Living facts, like living organisms, are cellular. Interaction in cellular ontologies is not causal, in which objects touch, attract or repel each other, but semiotic, in which subjects communicate with each other across borders defined by coded interfaces or protocols. Peirce-inspired research by Fernando Zalamea suggests that a new pragmatist logic is emerging with the addition of “horosis,” coined from the Greek word for “border,” to the Kantian dualism of analysis and synthesis.

In this paper, I propose to interweave narrativity and aspectuality by focusing on the internal temporality of narrated events. From a phaneroscopical point of view, I construct an aspectual characterization of the notion of event, visualizing the content of what is narrated as a semiotic process of morphologies in becoming. Conceived as a process of morphological semiosis, narrativity involves a schematic and analogic visualization of the flux of narrated events in a situational space. This dynamic of events in becoming is in consonance with a process of aspectual generation of a Peircean character. In it, we go from the one to the multiple—from a germ space to an aspectual topological space — through a constructive process bound to a set of regularities. In accordance with this proposal, every time we have a pair of narrative trajectories that aspectually unfold in our situational space and that converge on the appearance of a single event, we can infer the existence of their corresponding narrative schemas. These schematic entities will make up a synthesis process that will behave, relationally, as a structure of actantial character, an actantiality of events. From a morphodynamical point of view, we will show that this actantial knot can be viewed as a cusp catastrophe. In addition, we will exhibit that this conceptualization coincides with the semiotic paradigm proposed by René Thom.

In this paper, we will try to take the problem of abrupt contingency and radical discontinuity seriously. We will firstly analyze some basic features of two of the best examples of philosophical lawless disruption, one taken from the Analytical tradition and the other from the Continental one. We will not give a complete account of these two thinkers, but we will show how they meet the traumatic and the contingent, the whyless and lawless. We will highlight their style of meeting a conceptual catastrophe and what useful elements we could deduce from their work.

At the end of our work, we will try to propose a possible solution to the problems raised by these two figures. In order to do so, we will analyze Zalamea’s synthetic philosophy and we will try to sketch how it could help us make sense of discontinuity and rupture, preventing us from slipping into absolute despair.

https://www.glass-bead.org/research-platform/my-words-to-saul-kripkenstein-above-the-village-of-milford/?lang=enview

A brief and overall descriptive review of Nubiola and Zalamea's report on the available data concerning Charles S. Peirce's trip to Spain in 1870, as well as Peirce's views on spanish culture and language and his relation with spanish scientists. The book also includes an exhaustive compilation of all the published works on Peirce produced by spanish and latin american scholars.