Ontological Act Page
Ontological Act — The Three Foundational Tensions of Emergent Epistemology
What is designated here as the Ontological Act is neither an inaugural instant nor a foundational assertion. It is the name of the internal functioning of the current, of its epistemological consistency, and of its way of thinking as the reorganization of matter in instability. It is not a foundation, but an active tension structure that makes possible the inscription of thought as a material process.
This structure rests on three fundamental tensions, which are not resolvable, but operative. They are what allow knowledge to occur without resorting to an external truth, a finished form, or a transcendent instance.
1. Knowledge Does Not Require Transcendent Foundation
“Reason knows it exists because it operates — and that operation is real.”
The first tension asserts that thought does not need an ultimate guarantee to be legitimate. Its validity does not come from transcendence, but from its capacity to function within the real, to produce symbolic reorganization 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, reorganizations, 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 reorganizes.
2. Knowledge is Partial, but Not Arbitrary
“Knowledge does not fail because it is partial — it is legitimate precisely because it does not totalize itself.”
The second tension asserts that partiality is not a flaw, but a condition for situated symbolic production. Knowledge is valuable in its finitude, 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 limit, friction, and cut, not encyclopedia or synthesis.
Thought that claims to say everything denies emergence. Thought that recognizes its partiality creates space for symbolic reorganization — it is traversal, and not system.
3. There Is No Outside the Real — Meaning is Immanent
“There is no outside the real. Meaning is the real thinking itself within 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 the real itself that reorganizes itself symbolically from within itself.
Meaning does not come from an beyond, but from an operative internal difference. It is the body itself, in a state of instability, that produces inscription, gesture, and thought.
This tension rejects the classic division between nature and culture, between physical and spiritual. Thought is not an exception in the real — it is one of its most complex forms of self-inscription.
Conclusion: Tension As Condition, Not As 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 operative reorganization.