The Book I

This chapter argues that medieval and early modern ontological descriptions made use of a new material technology of inscription with the same tensional regime: the book. Without assuming any direct causation, the following two chapters show a clear similarity of kinetic structure in both theological description and its technology of inscription during this time. The new kind of kinography that rose to dominance in the West around the fourth and fifth centuries was called “bibliography”. The rise of bibliography, or book writing, functioned according to two major kinographic operations: the binding of the book, and the comprehension (or kinetic tension between author and the reader) of the book. Between the fifth and eighteenth centuries, two major book technologies were used in theological descriptions: the manuscript codex, from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, and the printed codex, from the fifteenth up to the eighteenth century.

Medieval Theology IV

In this chapter, we turn to an analysis of the coexistence of relational, external, and internal motion in the doctrine of the Trinity. The theological doctrine of the Trinity was by far one of the most important, dominant, and novel descriptions of being during the medieval and early modern periods, beginning around the middle of the fourth century. From the beginning of the Nicene Creed (381 CE), which established an official doctrine of the Trinity, until the emergence of the European Enlightenment in the mid-eighteenth century, Trinitarianism remained the single most pervasive and powerful ontotheological framework in the West—influencing all the natural theologies of force of the previous chapters. To this day it remains the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. This chapter lays out the patterns of tensional motion at work in this important theory.

Ancient Cosmology IV

This chapter argues that after the preceding account of the early Greek philosophers, it is now possible to appreciate the truly incredible but hardly original cosmological synthesis of centrifugal motion and spherology achieved by Plato (with the help of Socrates, who was the contemporary of many early Greek philosophers) and Aristotle. This chapter shows the cosmology of the sphere at work in Plato and Aristotle. In Plato’s work, the single clearest exposition of the kinetics of eternity occurs in his dialogue The Timaeus. Similar accounts are given throughout Plato’s work, but since the focus of The Timaeus is on cosmology, it provides the most robust account.

Ancient Cosmology III

This chapter argues that the fourth and final cosmokinetic description of eternity occurs in the description of the figure of the ex nihilo eternal sky father, the first and only creator of all of being. In this final kinetic operation we reach the ultimate inversion of centripetal motion. Eternity appears not as the product of a theomachy or prior motion, but as the original and immobile process constitutive of all motion as such. Ex nihilo creation does not refer here strictly to the creation of the world by God, but more generally to the ex nihilo creation of motion from immobility.

Speech

This chapter argues that the spatial description of being first emerged as historically dominant in the mythology and mythograms of prehistoric and Neolithic peoples, but at the same time was also inscribed on the body of the speaker of those same mythologies through speech. Therefore, the mythological description of being as space also presupposes a kinetic and historical transformation of the human body into a speaking body. The kinetic structure of this new surface of inscription is the subject of the present chapter. The thesis that follows is that the historical coemergence of spatial mythologies explored in the previous chapter and the new kinographic technology of speech follow the same dominantly centripetal field of motion during this time.

Sensation

This chapter puts forward a kinetic theory of sensation. Sensation occurs at the period where a flow folds back over itself and touches itself. It is the ambiguous kinetic structure of the period itself—the double or split affect of periodicity. Sensation is the kinetic difference between sensibility and the sensed. The two are identical in the period of sensation (the sensed) but differentiated in the continuous movement of the flow across its cycle (sensibility). Sensation is the kinetic differentiation internal to existence that makes possible self-affection or self-sensation. In short, sensation is the sense of the sensed as the kinetic identity of the kinetically different.

Continuum

This chapter argues that being flows if and only if the twin conditions of continuity and motion are satisfied. If being were only continuous it would be a homogeneous totality. Being would be One—a finite or infinite unity—without the possibility of change or motion outside of itself, since there would be no outside to it. In this case, all movement, as Zeno and Parmenides once argued, would be an illusion. However, if being was One total being that contained all of being, the being that contained all of being would have to be different from the being that was contained by it.

Realism and Materialism

This chapter lays out a methodology of transcendental realism and new materialism based on motion. Transcendental realism is the study of the real minimal ontological conditions for the actual emergence of the historical present. The purpose of this method is to give a description of what previous being must at least be like given that it appears as it does today: in motion. The chapter offers critiques of constructivism, empiricism, metaphysics, and transcendental idealism. It also offers a critique of vitalist new materialism, negative materialism, object-oriented ontology, formalism, and all ahistorical methods of thinking about matter and materialism. It concludes with a theory of “process materialism.”

Ontological History

This chapter lays out an original method for the study of the history of ontology. It also critiques two major problems in the study of ontology: stasis and reductionism. Ontological practice is a historical and kinetic activity, and it therefore makes an important intervention into the study of ontology more broadly. What is at stake, therefore, in the development of an ontology of motion is a solution to these two problems. In addition, the chapter develops a theory of ontology as a practice of graphism. Finally, it provides an outline of the plan of the book and the major theses that will be argued herein.

The Age of Motion

The introduction provides a historical motivation for undertaking an ontology of motion. The major historical events of global migration, the digital image, and quantum physics are part of a larger shift taking place toward the increasing importance of motion at the turn of the twenty-first century. The exceptions to the rules of the previous static paradigms have now themselves become the rules in a whole new kinetic paradigm. We have entered a new historical era, defined in large part by the primacy of movement and mobility, and are now in need of a new ontology appropriate to our time.