Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox

• Puts forward a new theory of metaphysics where the furniture of the universe is deictic and substantives are conceived as thoroughly situate
• Extends the idea of metaphysics as transcendence, proposed by Levinas, to a process philosophy where the Other is not only human but ultimately the Great Outdoors
• Presents an approach to perception that makes it close to a conversation which portrays conceptual mediation as a special case of the Whiteheadian notion of importance

Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that adds a paradoxical new chapter to the critique of metaphysics. Bensusan articulates a metaphysical view of the other, both human and non-human (or the Great Outdoors as Meillassoux called it), that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. An innovative account of perception is developed, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable Outdoors.

In the book's coda, Bensusan underscores the social-political implications of this radical metaphysics in a postcolonial context in a meditation on the sites of Potosi in the Andes and Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Engaging with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway. He does so in such a way that proves to be transformative both for crucial aspects of their work and for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world and to reckon with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.