Toward an ontology of gesta: meaning and force in the thought of Luis Sáez Rueda

Abstract

This article seeks to explicate the originality of Luis Sáez Rueda’s ontology of gesta within the framework of contemporary thought. To do so, it begins from the problem of overcoming the metaphysics of presence and the principle of identity, showing that two of the most decisive attempts in this direction are to be found in Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. From the former, it reconstructs the displacement of ontology toward the domain of meaning, openness, and the epochal modes in which being gives itself; from the latter, the radicalization of the critique of identity through an ontology of difference, force, and genesis. On the basis of this double trajectory, the article argues that Sáez’s proposal does not consist in a synthetic mediation between these two authors, but rather in an original ontological elaboration in which the real appears as a discordant unity of meaning-and-force. The notion of gesta thus makes it possible to think reality as a process of metastable self-generation and, from there, to understand both human existence and social life in their tensional and erratic character.