Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming Page: 62
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the bedrock of its past and subservient to the identity of which it is constructed. By allowing for
the possibility of material freedom at the foundation of personality, a new path becomes revealed
for the trajectory of its becoming. The possibility of radical change is present in potential and the
rudder of identity loses its orienting force. Personality becomes free to break with identity and
abandon that which it has been with amnesiac indifference. It acquires the potential for a radical
becoming and creation anew. The profound contribution of denegation is the reality of a
potential for material freedom as a transcendental property which has been built into its very
existence. Denegation reveals that material agencies have a freedom-for-itself such that they may
become what they are not and are not what they may become.
There is an existential freedom built into the very core of all material agency. It is not that
of the Sartrean subject which he proposes to be purely freedom as a nothingness coiled at the
heart of Being.133 Any posthuman freedom functions at the level of denegation, rather than that
of negation. Agency is not a freedom as nothingness introducing negations into a world of pure
being,134 it a manifestation of identity's habits which is always already threatened by the
possibility for material freedom as a denegation of that contracted structure. Unlike a Sartrean
humanism which is subservient to the nothingness which culminates in a for-itself, material
freedom, as a transcendental possibility, can only ever occur as an accident of surface tension.
A product of tension and chance, material freedom breaks intensities from habits of
systemic organization and renders them open for radical novelty. It is a freedom more radical
than the For-Itself of nothingness, for the material freedom which is embedded as possibilities
within all material agency is one which is fundamentally indifferent. It will not act on the
133 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Trans. Hazel E. Barnes,
New York, Washington Square Press, 1968), 56.
134 Sartre presents the for-itself, agency's conscious freedom, as its own nothingness. Sartre, Being and Nothingness,
125.62
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Grossman, Jacob Wayne. Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming, dissertation, December 2021; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1873811/m1/68/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .