Epilogue

Summary

How does one close a thought experiment that revolves around becoming? What kind of full stop requires inventing for becoming not to be foreclosed and locked down? What sort of epilogue does becoming demand as its proper due, so that the differences on which it thrives are not betrayed? In the introduction, I suggested that becoming is betrayed every time we attempt to pin it down to a few fundamentals or principles that purport to explain the phenomenon under consideration; whether this is kinship, the state, religion, the person, etc., in this or that part of the world makes very little difference. The attempts that betray becoming do so for they ultimately explain it away, conflating the provision of explanation with what still demands our full attention. If, on the contrary, knowledge is to be taken as provisional and forever deferred, this is because there is always something that remains, something that never gets absolutely solved, something that cannot be subsumed by the categories and the measures we have invented for the world. This ever-unfolding and evercirculating ‘something’ is definitely not, my argument has been, a fundamental or an essence but an excessive and elusive figure that assumes many shapes and forms, passing through all of them.

In the thirteen years I have known the inhabitants of Alas Niser and Probolinggo, many things have undeniably changed. Yet things have also remained recognisably familiar: a habituated pattern of present expectations and future anticipations interspersed with few surprises and innovations.