NON-STANDARD RESEARCH PROGRAMME
The blog you are reading, AGENT SWARM, is a digital research project in philosophy which I have maintained for ten years. Its subtitle is « Pluralism and Individuation in a world of becoming ». It is devoted to an analysis epistemological and ontological pluralism in recent and contemporary Continental Philosophy.
Taking these indications together, they constitute a mission statement:
Pluralism and Individuation in a world of becoming, in the framework of epistemological and ontological pluralism.
The title of the blog AGENT SWARM is a play on words that situates it within this mission statement as it can be read as ACTIVE MULTIPLICITY.
With ten years of work on this blog behind me, to my would-be critics and objectors I can reply:
Can you see the research project subtending my posts? Where do I deviate from the mission statement? Who else is discussing these thinkers from this point of view? Are you engaging the person you think me to be – or the mission, the research project, and its posts?
This is not a very demagogic or media-friendly mission, it is quite demanding, of myself and of my readers.
AGAMBEN’S SUFFICIENCY
With my work on Agamben’s recent pieces I am on mission. The main movement of the argument made by my previous posts on his intellectual positioning on the Covid-19 epidemic is to provide an analysis of Agamben’s philosophical sufficiency in both its conceptual and ethical dimensions.
I cannot believe Agamben is simply mistaken, or that it is simply his attachment to his own paradigm that has induced his systematic cognitive and ethical bias. There seems to be at play here both intellectual dishonesty and lack of compassion, in the service of an unknown agenda.
AGAMBEN’S AGENDA
I am also clear as to what lies beyond my purview (until I find a way of connecting it to my research programme).
For example, I say that Agamben’s pieces on the Covi-19 epidemic situate him squarely within the Trumpocene, but I go no further.
There is an agenda here that I am missing. Agamben’s very insistence on the same errors and his utter imperviousness to the mostly polite responses that have been made to his previous contributions suggest a strategy of deliberate provocation. To what end? Cui bono?
AGENT SWARM 