If we accept Lyotard’s idea that the breaking up of any Grand Narrative is the anti-platonic lesson of our post-modern world then we are left with the problem that the proliferation of singularities and multiplicities, of fluxes and events, which was first conceived and experienced as a liberation, became fairly rapidly the depressingly banal state of affairs in the neo-liberal way of life. The democratisation and quantification of intensity led to the lowering of intensity. The underlying ontology is flat, and has flattened our everyday lives.

Resisting this depressive nihilistic state, diagnosed by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem in his book L’ALGÈBRE DE LA TRAGÉDIE, implies a process of intensification that is both faithful to the heritage of the philosophies of difference in some form of ontology of singularities and that combines it with an ethical seriousness. In Bruno Latour’s work we see such a flat ontology of singularities resulting in a…