Last year—two years ago?—Cássia Siqueira tweeted: “Better Call Saul S06E07.” I was mystified, but didn’t ask her what it was about. I’d never watched the TV show. But anything Cássia wrote, wherever she wrote it, however cryptic, deserved investigation. So I watched the whole show, knowing I was looking for the meaning of her tweet. I arrived upon it not knowing that I was actually watching the sixth season’s seventh episode, but I knew it when it hit me: it starts with a repetitive monologue by a person pushing shopping carts around a parking lot, claiming ad nauseam “I Am A Philosopher.” Some months earlier we were discussing “how and when can one claim to be a philosopher?.” Cássia—with all her skill and briskness and curiosity, beyond the technical credentials she’d been gathering in the last four years or more—doubted she could claim this of herself. I offered her my suggestion: I think that when one actively engages with philosophy, one is being a philosopher. Quite broad, quite narrow. But in tandem with a universalist stance we both share. In that sense, I do think a 4-year old can be a philosopher, maybe even more so than those who add ‘PhD’ to their Twitter handle. It’s not like “my 4-year old could’ve painted this”—more like a 4-year old will ask a question when many will content themselves with an answer.
This will be, I think, an eulogy for my late friend Cássia Siqueira. As I write this line I am not yet sure of the shape this will take. I am aware it was possibly suggested by reading a transcription of her friend J.-P. Caron’s words to the same effect, read at the beginning of the latest meeting of the CPC (Circuito de Pesquisas Contemporâneas—Contemporary Research Circuit), an online, transdisciplinary cohort of persons interested in accelerationism, philosophy, transfeminism (and much more!) mostly based in Brazil. Cássia was an important participant in this group. I will not compete with those physically or geographically closer to her in terms of the intensity of coping with her absence or comparatively measuring the sense of loss and the number of memories. This, because I think these are simply qualitative—myriad determinate instances of interacting with a friend who is present, in some way or another, in our lives. In that sense, incomparable. In another, beautiful, wealthy way, the same. With this in mind, I retained J.-P.’s words as more of a program than the sort of discombobulating eulogy I am enacting:
From the question Who is Cássia Siqueira?, I want to proceed to the question What is Cássia Siqueira?. The question is not an objectification. I’d say it is exactly the contrary. (. . .) That Cássia becomes to us an event and a mission seems self-evident to me. (my translation)1
I met Cássia soon after enrolling at the New Centre for Research and Practice, fascinated with neo-rationalism and xenofeminism. More or less around then we started following each other on Twitter. I quickly realized that Cássia actively, persistently posed those questions to herself. The affinity was instantaneous: in the Platonic framework, here was a soul-mate in the World Soul; someone who, in the broadest and narrowest possible senses, was set out to ask how things—selves included—hung together, in the broadest and narrowest possible senses. I borrowed Wilfrid Sellars’s idiom about the aim of philosophy in order to claim just that: I had met someone performing the aim of philosophy. Earlier today I recombined some aphorisms of mine to further claim that “a philosopher should become a system,” then that “a person should become a philosopher should become a system,” then—more narrowly and broadly—that “a system should become a philosopher if it should become a person.” The first time we collaborated, if I remember well, was more or less about questions surrounding this theme—a joint presentation for Mattin’s seminar on alienation. Right now, I just realized that this is not quite—it should really be stressed—about remembering Cássia, about holding myself captive to the joy of the cool stuff we did together. I want it to be yet another turn to our mentor J.-P.’s questions: pursuing his investigations of Nelson Goodman on art, of interest to us three as artists as well, perhaps it may be more appropriate to ask “When is Cássia Siqueira?,” in order to emancipate Cássia out of ordered time and recognize her project—her—as diachronic, returning to us from the future. A further remembrance may platform this: after reading her essay on Mattin’s My First 30 Min. On TikTok, I asked her to let me publish a portuguese translation in print. The very same essay touches upon what we were doing: meeting online halfway across the world, transforming our determinate sorts of disenfranchisement into something we could make further intelligible, alienating ourselves in the process, no matter if it was responding to each other on Twitter, providing supportive enthusiasm for each other’s endeavours, collaborating in a diagram for class, trying to grasp computer science among friends late into the night. In this specific regard—bootstrapping alienation—Cássia is coming back from the future right now: many times, her love for intelligibility took her many to exquisitely uncharted corners of the form of the inhuman. The core of my admiration for her mainly revolves around the realization that in these instances I asked myself “Is she really going to fuss around with that?” and then recognized that such doubt in myself can only come from fear. One affinity we share is the interest in the emancipatory potential of Reza Negarestani’s infantile schematism, the autodidactic plasticity required for ever revising the categories of the rational, for revising reason itself. For this one requires an absolute rejection of fear. How can one ask questions if still negatively constrained by timidity? How can one ask questions if not enacting radical honesty? If and whenever I emulate the circumstances in which Cássia realized herself in this fashion, Cássia is alienated from the future into such deed. It won’t be me. There and then is the event, in the space of possibilities made intelligible through Cássia’s questions. She is, to my mind, a very brave person. Just today I named someone else as model for me, in the sense of “a philosopher is their systematising” (in the infinitive, yes). It becomes helpful again, when I claim Cássia is a model to me. While perfectly aware I cannot generalize that everyone is a model to me, I can take it somewhat universally. First, in order to avoid any appearance of elitism. Then, to buttress the suggestion that models are for breaking—sometimes the models (kill yr idols, your Self among them), sometimes what they model. Once I wrote an essay titled “Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Emulators.” A juvenile attempt at a sort of Carnapian/Malaspinian pedagogy—something which Cássia did activate with methodological brilliance in her essay “Towards the subversion of the rough ground.” I am still fond of my essay’s title, though, because it compresses a bit of what I see in cherishing a model and using it for profound, bipolar, transformations: as opposed to simulation, emulation is open to contingency. In the former, there is no room for the intelligibility of error; whereas in the latter, error is the catalyst for determinately negating the model. The model breaks in its newfound limit; the modeled breaks—was Frankenstein’s chimaera a whole or the sum of its parts?—in its novel intelligibility. Beauty lies in this thin membrane where and when agency is reclaimed, when and where one proceeds beyond simulation and activates universality in oneself—necessarily activating the possibility of not being oneself. The Form of Abolition: this is what and when Cássia is, which, as she would observe, amounts to a radical—discrete in continuity, continuous in discreteness—subversion of heracliteanism.
The early demise of Cássia’s embodied personhood—but not her lifeforming (in the infinitive, yes)—leaves me with a new formulation of a question I ask of myself and every one; a question I think is the one asked proleptically by and to intelligence, out of love: When I model you, when is the error?
September 24, 2024
I Am A Philosopher
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