Armen Avanessian.
Metaphysics Today
A New Look at the Main Categories of Metaphysics.
Armen Avanessian is a philosopher, a theorist of art and literature. His works on speculative realism and accelerationism are well known far beyond the academic realm. Avanesyan taught at Columbia and Yale Universities, founded a research project on speculative poetics and is the author of Present Tense: A Poetics (2012) Irony and the Logic of Modernity (2015) and Miamification (2017) and others.
The triumph of technological rationality and science did not provide answers to the most important issues before humanity. In addition, reality presents us with new questions and challenges. To find a solution, we need to take a fresh look at the fundamental philosophical concepts guiding our everyday thinking. In Metaphysics Today, Armen Avanessian reconsiders key metaphysical categories –substance and accident, form and matter, life and death- attempting to understand how the conditions of the modern world affect them giving them a new meaning.
The book was the result of Avanessian’s work as curator in the “General Rehearsal” project, for which he wrote ten texts for the second act.
Substance and accidence have not only been central concepts in metaphysics since antiquity, but also- like so many other philosophical distinctions have found their way entirely unnoticed into our everyday thinking. We constantly think of this or that as substantial, i.e. central and important, and the other as accidental and negligible.