Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi
Philosopher
Matrixiality & complexity overlap in her philosophical commitment.
Vita
From 2000 to 2004, she studied philosophy under Andrés Ortiz Osés at the University of Deusto in Bilbao. He was a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer and a member of the Eranos Circle, which developed hermeneutic thought toward a philosophy of meaning. In 2008, she completed her master’s thesis on “The Mothers in Goethe’s Faust II”, supervised by the philosopher Eugenio Trías Sagnier. In 2018, she earned her PhD under the supervision of Peter Sloterdijk with the dissertation “A Systematic Introduction to a Matrixial Philosophy. Mother–World–Womb. Toward a Multivalent Ontology.”
From 2019 to 2021, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna within the project “Contemporary Prehistories. The Dissident Goddesses’ Network.” In 2023, she received a Marie Curie Fellowship at FRIAS for the project “An Epistemology of Complexity Based on a Discourse Analysis of the Concept of Entropy.” This project will result in her forthcoming habilitation thesis, “Entropy and the Threshold of Order: Asymmetry, Irreversibility, and Contingency – An Epistemology of Complexity.” In 2024, she was awarded a fellowship by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 2025 onward, she will be a research postdoctoral fellow in the Excellence Group AMIDEX (𝜏-co.re@AMU) “Transdisciplinary and Complexity Research” at the University of Marseille.
An epistemology of complex systems as a theory of operational closure, together with matrixial philosophy (an environmentally embedded philosophy), constitute the main focus of her work. Complexity and matrixiality intersect in her upcoming writing project “Milieu/Matrix/Pattern: The Principle of Embedding of the Hollow Form.”
Why German?
One wonders why she, who was born into a Basque-speaking environment and later schooled in Spanish, writes in German, especially as she only learnt the language latter a decade ago. According to Heidegger, language is the “house of being”, unless one allows oneself the luxury of being housed inhaving several houses and thus being or becoming mere several times. One has no dominion over a language in view of the power of the language into which one is incorporated. On the other hand, the boundary of the dominant language defines the boundary of the well-protected housewalls pretecting the dwelling. If you one approaches the language from a distance, you one steps beyond the its boundaries of the language in a gesture of thoughtlessness. The writing of a foreign language speaker is dedicated to the world that seems boundless beyond the limits of the dominant language. The scenario of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary (Whitehead) forms the smooth plateau of true philosophizsing. To philosophzise is to move within infinite spacey, to create points of orientation, to form words, to draw lines of flight further out and to enter again and again into the darkness of murky uncertainty. For those who have not mastered the limits of language, the limits of the world are not limited.
Seminar SS 2025
Philosophies of Complexity
Faculty of Philosophy, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg.
Post-Doc
AMIDEX
t -co.re@AMU
“Transdisciplinarity and Complexity Research“
Aix-Marseille University
Complexity research investigates, across disciplinary boundaries, how patterns and structures emerge from a multiplicity of unpredictable elements and from the interactions of heterogeneous components. Nonlinearity, self-organization, and emergence are widely regarded as the defining characteristics of complex systems.
My philosophical–epistemological approach to complexity, however, begins at a more fundamental level: with the metaphysical paradigm shift from static assumptions of being toward process-oriented ontologies. This shift radically calls into question classical notions of stability, predictability, and necessity, and compels a reorganization of scientific and epistemological thought.
This perspective unfolds along three lines of inquiry: first, a history-of-science genealogy of the concept of the complex; second, a discourse-analytical investigation of epistemic shifts shaped by nonlinearity, contingency, and uncertainty; and third, an analysis of the close historical and epistemic–operational relationship between complexity and cybernetics—particularly second-order cybernetics—with regard to theories of complex organization and disorganization.
Sektion
Research Topics
- History of Complexity
- System Thinking
- Discourse Analysis of Order/Disorder.
- Contingency of Order
- Chaosmosis
- Entropy & neg-entropy.
- Algorithms & complexity.
The concept of the matrix (μήτρα) derives, in terms of its meaning, from the Greek word for mother, womb, and origin. Genealogically, it refers to the maternal as the source and enabling condition of emergence and production.
The matrixial, as a philosophical category, refers to the incomplete set of all types of mothers (genus proximum), understood as Mother-Xₙ, such as mother-animal, mother-human, mother-plant, mother-cell, mother-language, and so forth. The respective specific difference (differentia specifica) lies in the formative instinct, which becomes operative within distinct mother-environments. This environmental difference is determined within the matrixial as an ontological difference.
The matrixial thus designates the embedding relation of every process of individuation, insofar as morphogenesis and ontogenesis must be understood as processes embedded in environmental relations while simultaneously operating inwardly.
From the matrixial, a multi-valued environmental ontology can therefore be derived: there are as many (en-)worlds as there are operative matrices.
Research Topics
- Mother-Xn Archive: mother-plant, mother-animal, mother-human, mother-earth, mother-language, mother-X
- (Allo-)Maternal Societies
- Endomilieu & Ecological Niches
- Principle of Embedding
- Pattern/Matrix: “the matrix which embeds” (Bateson)
- Nisus Formativus & Negative Entropy
- Generative Gestalt Research
- Bringing to Light: Emergence & Matrixiality
Matrixiale Philosophie: Mutter- Welt- Gebärmutter. Zu einer dreiwertigen Ontologie
“Entropie und die Schwelle der Ordnung”.
Asymmetrie, Irreversibilität und Kontingenz-
Eine Epistemologie der Komplexität
(Entropy and the Threshold of Order
Asymmetry, Irreversibility, and Contingency — An Epistemology of Complexity)
.
Eine Enführung: Operative Theorien.
