Ontological Act
What is called an Ontological Act here is neither an inaugural moment nor a foundational affirmation. It is the name of the internal functioning of the current, its epistemological consistency and its way of thinking as a reorganisation of matter in instability. It is not a foundation, but an active tensional structure that makes it possible to inscribe thought as a material process.
This structure is based on three fundamental tensions, not resolvable, but operative. They are what allow knowledge to happen without resorting to an external truth, a finished form or a transcendent instance.
1. Knowledge Does Not Require a Transcendent Foundation
Reason knows it exists because it operates - and this operation is real.
The first tension states that thought does not need an ultimate guarantee to be legitimate. Its validity does not come from transcendence, but from its ability to function within the real, to produce symbolic reorganisation based on situated material conditions.
Knowledge is not a copy of the world, nor a reflection of the absolute. It is a material operation inscribed in a tense body, the result of interactions, reorganisations and differentiations.
This tension rejects both dissolving relativism and foundationalist dogmatism. Reason does not derive from an origin, but from a functional excess: it happens because it operates, and because it reorganises.
2. Knowledge is Partial, but Not Arbitrary
Knowledge does not fail because it is partial - it is legitimate precisely because it is not totalized.
The second tension states that partiality is not a failure, but a condition of situated symbolic production. Knowledge is valuable in its finiteness, in its local articulation with the body and the world.
Totality is rejected here not as a technical impossibility, but as a false philosophical promise. Thinking requires limits, friction and cutting, not encyclopedia or synthesis.
The thought that claims to say everything denies emergence. Thought that recognizes its partiality creates space for symbolic reorganisation - it is a crossing, not a system.
3. There is no Outside the Real - Meaning is Immanent
There is no outside the real. Meaning is what is real thinking about itself.
The third tension dissolves any dualism between matter and meaning, between body and consciousness, between real and symbolic. There is no external instance that legitimizes knowledge: it is reality itself that symbolically reorganises itself.
Meaning does not come from beyond, but from an internal operative difference. It is the body itself, in a state of instability, that produces inscription, gesture and thought.
This tension rejects the classical division between nature and culture, between physical and spiritual. Thought is no exception in reality - it is one of its most complex forms of self-inscription.
4. Tension as a Condition, Not an Obstacle
These three tensions are not intended to be resolved - they are the operative field where thought lives and acts. They do not block epistemology: they make it possible without the need for foundation, totality or transcendence.
The Ontological Act is the name we give to this tensional regime where knowledge is inscribed as a material symbolic gesture. A gesture that does not seek certainties, but conditions for operational reorganisation.
The Ontological Act is the tensional regime where knowledge is inscribed as a material symbolic gesture - without certainties, but with conditions for operational reorganisation.