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V. Bühlmann:
"Europe and its two mothers: Impersonal Logos and the Optical Unconscious. A geographical récit of Descartes´ fable, The World.";
Talk: Re-Imagining Europe, Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome (invited); 2019-09-17 - 2019-09-20.

This paper is not really a response to the Crisis in which Europe is said to find itself in, because every critique seeks to save its object by banning it to a geocentric horizon. Critique locks up what it seeks to criticise/save at a projective end-of-the-world that is-not-really-one. Instead, I want to talk about an objective kind of ideation and an impersonal logos at work in such ideation. I want to reach beyond any critical horizon by recalling a particular fable of the world, one authored by René Descartes and told in the impersonal terms of geometric fabulation. I want to demonstrate how the objective ideation of Descartes´ applied method is capable of unlocking ends from within a projective horizon. Objective ideation, then, is ideation capable of unlocking what is banned critically, through depicting it without picturing it. Following Descartes, I will describe those ends that can be unlocked as Meteorite Ends - they are suspended yet not invalidated ends. I will discuss how they can be rendered as panoramas for an a-territorial geography, and how such Panoramas, as the coding-covers of cylindrical solids, can reconnect us with the idea of a Centrifugal Conatus in Descartes´ notion of the Universe as Plenum. By proposing that we might think of those conati of valid tendencies kept in suspension, by cryptically rendering them as massive solids, as manifesting an Optical Unconscious, I will suggest that even so meteorite ends are suspended in cycles, there is reason to the methods that are capable of controlling such ends. It is a Reason capable of providing for an a-territorial geography that might perhaps lend itself for re-imagining Europe today - as a continent that grounds in Abductive Reason.