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1. The Genealogy of Ideas and the validity of its Question

Amongst the endless conjectures the philosopher brings forth, one of great relevance is surely the question of ideas; ideas as object of true knowledge, say the platonists, or perhaps ideas as product of intellectual labor, as marxists think.

When one enters this boundless forest of speculation, the very notion of “idea” shines as both a beacon and a mirage. For the platonists, ideas represent the supreme objects of cognition, the immutable realities that stand beyond the flux of becoming: they are not born, they do not wither, but rather inhabit a metaphysical realm which grants stability to our thought and, by reflection, to our world. For the marxists, on the contrary, ideas do not precede history; they are not eternal forms but the sediment of labor, of toil, of the ceaseless struggle between classes and material conditions. In this sense, they are children of praxis, destined to transform as the world itself transforms under the hammer of production.

There exist, then, numerous hypotheses on the matter, each one carving its own path through the density of metaphysical speculation. And these hypotheses are everything other than the sterile fruits of a meaningless brainstorming aimed at solving a “stupid problem.” On the contrary, the very multiplicity of approaches signals the depth of the issue: the problem of ideas is not an ornament of idle thought but the hinge on which philosophy has, time and again, turned.

It is precisely in light of this multiplicity that a doubt begins to press upon me, a doubt already encountered when retracing Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence. That doubt, at once simple and vertiginous, may be formulated thus: Is the genealogy of ideas a thing? In other words, can we think of a lineage, a descent, a history of forms themselves? And if we admit such a possibility, how may we acknowledge it, how may we deduce such a problem without dissolving into paradox or into the sterile play of words?

Already here the atmosphere thickens, for to speak of the “genealogy of ideas” is to approach the threshold where philosophy risks self-annihilation: if ideas are eternal, how can they have a genealogy? If they are historical, what secures their intelligibility? The tension between these alternatives constitutes not merely a scholastic curiosity but the tremor of thought as it questions the foundations of its own edifice.


2. Dialectics

If we are to take for granted that the question  introduced above is effectively a problem, i.e., something more than a simple sophism, then we can take two distinct paths: that of dialectics and that of production.

Let us first pause upon the dialectical path, the path which, from Plato to Hegel, from Heraclitus to Marx, has sought to think reality as a movement of opposites, a rhythm of affirmation and negation. To tread such a path is to confront not a simple play of words but a fundamental structure of thought, one that presupposes tension, resolution, and the ceaseless spiral of becoming.

In order to follow this dialectical train of thought we may consider the Aristotelian concept of οὐσία (substance). Aristotle, striving to overcome the Platonic separation between ideas and sensible things, conceived substance as the synthesis of form and matter. Form, in his view, gives shape and actuality; matter, conversely, offers the indeterminate potential, the substratum awaiting articulation. To think of substance is therefore to think of a union, a marriage between two opposed yet complementary principles.

In a dialectical light, this very notion seems to presuppose a structure akin to thesis and antithesis: form as the thesis, matter as its opposing antithesis, and their unity as the living synthesis. Yet such a reading immediately reveals its own fragility. For each thesis, when scrutinized, is never a pure beginning but already a synthesis of anterior processes. What presents itself as an origin is itself layered, the product of prior tensions.

Thus, the dialectician, attempting to trace a genealogy of ideas, soon finds themselves caught in a vertiginous regress. Each form, in order to be posited, requires an anterior dialectical labor, a previous synthesis that generated it. But if every form presupposes another, then we are drawn backward into an infinite anteriority, an abyss without foundation.

It is precisely this paradox that Aristotle himself attempted to solve through his doctrine of the Immovable Mover. To halt the regress, he posited a principle that itself is unmoved, a pure actuality that sets the cosmos into motion without itself being moved. Summed up in brief: it is impossible to think of a dialectical genealogy without, at some point, oxymoronically supposing non-being as a thesis to be negated. And to grant non-being the dignity of a thesis would plunge us into metaphysical absurdities, contradictions that corrode the very logic on which dialectics rests.

Therefore, the dialectical path, fascinating though it may be, seems to collapse under the weight of its own demand for an origin. The desire to think the genealogy of forms dialectically ends in either infinite regress or absurd contradiction. At this juncture, the mind, weary of paradox, must turn its gaze elsewhere.

It is at this point, then, that we follow the second path: the path of production. Yet it will soon become clear that this production cannot be understood in the crude machinic sense, as if ideas were assembled like artifacts upon a conveyor belt. No, the production of which we speak belongs to a different order: an emanative descent-, a flow, a radiation of thought itself.


3. Emanation

It is at this point that we follow the path of production, production that is although not machinic but, on the contrary, emanative.

When I speak of production here, I do not cater to an industrial metaphor – the whirring gears and chains of assembly, the rigid order of mechanical reproduction. That sphere belongs to the economic order, not to the genealogy of ideas. The kind of production relevant to our inquiry is of another essence, closer to what the Neoplatonists evoked when they spoke of emanation: the overflowing of a principle that, being too full, cannot help but give of itself. Just as the sun does not deliberate before casting its rays but radiates simply by being what it is, so too do ideas descend into the human sphere, bestowing thought upon us not through manufacture but through effusion.

Ideas, in this sense, are not produced as a craftsman produces an object; they descend. They flow downward like a melody that suddenly overtakes us, filling our mind not with the labor of its composition but with the immediacy of its presence. Possessing thought, they return us to contemplation. We do not seize them; rather, they seize us. Just as the song of the siren calls the sailor irresistibly back to the sea, so the arrival of an idea draws the soul back toward its own depth.

In this moment of descent, the customary distinctions that govern our rational lives begin to dissolve. The rigid line separating subject from object falters; perception and perceived coalesce. The apparatus of rational control is suspended, and in its place arises what I call wokeness: not a shallow awareness, but an awakening so profound that it unsettles the very categories through which we usually perceive the world.

Within such a state, art itself undergoes a metamorphosis. It loses its adjectives, it ceases to be “classical” or “romantic,” “modern” or “postmodern.” Art becomes sheer presence, pure act, freed from the critical scaffolding that tradition sought to impose upon it. Language, too, collapses into silence, for words are revealed as provisional signs unable to capture the plenitude of this awakening. The museums crumble in imagination: those temples that sought to enclose beauty behind glass can no longer contain it. The glass shatters, and what was once an object of contemplation becomes flesh, body, lived reality. The canvas is no longer confined to linen stretched upon a frame—it is our own skin, our own corporeality that is transformed into art.

Take, for instance, the téchne of make-up. What might appear, at first glance, as a trivial adornment or as the commodified plaything of fashion, reveals itself as a field where the drama of ideas and capital unfolds with rare intensity. The coding of this art by the tendrils of capital is evident: the cosmetic industry, a multibillion-dollar empire, disciplines bodies and desires, selling not pigments but identities, promising fulfillment through purchase. Its liberation from heterosexist logics appears, at first, impossible. Every brushstroke, every shade seems already inscribed within the grammar of gender norms and the dictates of the market.

And yet, wokeness pierces this apparent impossibility. Woke make-up becomes not an extension of capital’s command but its undoing. It enacts a radical devaluation both of the body as commodity and of the commodity as fetish. In its gestures, the body ceases to be the stage for an imposed identity; it undergoes instead what I call entasis—a stretching beyond itself, a movement of disalienation. The mask, once beloved and hated by fascism for its ambiguous power to conceal and to perform, is shattered. Make-up ceases to “mask” and begins to reveal: not a fixed identity but the fluid process of becoming itself.

Here art enters a new register. It becomes a poiesis of transsexuality, a creative force that pushes beyond schizophrenia’s fragmentation and toward a desubjectivation both physical and structural. This movement dislodges Spinoza from the realm of transcendence and re-situates him within an immanent virtuality. In this space, those of Spinoza and Plotinus appear not as distant systems but as reciprocal necessities, two poles joined by the current of Deleuze who flows spontaneously between (and through) them.

Under this light, relationships themselves cease to be stable bonds; they become relations in motion, events of intensity rather than fixed effects. Bodies, stripped of preordained determination, emerge as undetermined, potential canvases upon which new worlds may be inscribed.

Thus, a body becomes a canvas; and wokeness, in its radical dissolution, destroys the old trinity of mind, body, and soul. What is left is not nihilism but a new possibility, an opening toward forms of life unimagined by the metaphysics of identity.


4. Retrospect in Trans-poiesis

With a quick look at the history of cosmetics, one can individuate three different “phases” characterizing this téchne: a first phase that I would call communal, a second one that I define bourgeois, and finally, a third, the woke phase.

Despite their diversity, the first two phases share an underlying essence. In both cases, we are speaking not so much of make-up in the modern sense but rather of cosmesis (κοσμητική), an art whose function is inseparable from the execution of identity. The difference lies not in the act itself but in the identity that gets executed upon the body.

When we speak of communal cosmesis, we speak of a cosmetic reality shaped by multiplicity, by relativism, by the absolute absence of universals. This was not an art of conformity but of differentiation, an art that manifested belonging through variety. One might think here of the téchne of metaphysics in its ancient guise: cosmesis executed not as an abstract category but as a “being-Greek” or a “being-Egyptian”, an inscription of communal identity upon the body.

In classical Greece, for example, the striving for perfection manifested itself not only in the proportions of temples or the harmony of sculpture but also in the adornment of the body. Cosmetics became an expression of cultural ideals: symmetry, proportion, moderation. In Egypt, by contrast, cosmesis had a more overtly religious character: the kohl applied around the eyes was not mere ornament but a ritual gesture, a way of aligning oneself with the gods, of protecting the soul against malevolent forces. Among the ancient Normans or other early European communities, similar gestures emerged, often linked to rites of passage, war, or fertility.

In all such cases, the body itself had no potency of its own. It was a vessel, a surface upon which contingent identities were executed. Cosmetics did not empower the body; they territorialized it, binding it to the community’s metaphysics. It is precisely because of this subordinated role that medieval Catholic prohibitionism could later emerge with such force: the body, stripped of any intrinsic power, became the stage upon which its own lack, its own damnation, was executed. To adorn oneself was to flirt with sin, to deny the fallen condition of flesh.

And yet, within this relativist painting, one figure appears as a vanishing point: Sappho. She transcended cosmesis not by rejecting it but by architecting a stylistic model of unprecedented vitality. In her verses, one glimpses a blooming art plunged in eternal becoming, a joyous palette that dared to endure beyond the death of the gods. In Sappho, cosmesis finds its poetic transfiguration, a movement toward what I would call a proto-woke sensibility: a refusal to reduce the body to vessel, an embrace of becoming-woman as a form of art itself.

With the sunset of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, the landscape of cosmesis did not undergo radical technical transformations, but it did execute a new identity. Here, the subject moved to the transcendental, and the bourgeois woman, as object, began to subject herself to the ideal image of “the perfect and pure woman.” The body, once a vessel of communal identity, now became the site of cultural synthesis. Cosmetics no longer marked belonging to a tribe or religion but sought to embody the universalized figure of womanhood demanded by bourgeois society.

The aim of this art was transparent: to distance the bourgeois subject from the turmoil of social problems by projecting an image of purity. Make-up, in this sense, was not frivolity but ideology incarnate. The classist ontology of the Renaissance displayed itself not only in architecture, painting, and music but also in cosmetics. Just as indulgences were sold to fund the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica—materializing salvation as commodity—so too was the image of the perfect woman commodified, made into an aesthetic project that reinforced existing hierarchies.

This téchne of subjectivation endured, stretching into the modern age. Yet with the advent of capitalism’s total coding of reality, a transition occurred: from cosmesis to make-up. The word itself tells the story. In Italian trucco, derived from the French troque, signifies trickery, deceit. Make-up ceased to be an execution of identity and became a mask concealing the absence of fulfillment. The ideal of the perfect woman, once achievable in its historical context, had drifted so far from material reality that its realization became impossible. What remained was desire—desire mediated by commodities, endlessly deferred.

Make-up was thus born not to reveal but to conceal, not to execute but to disguise. It promised to cover the gap between reality and ideal, to hide the very impossibility of fulfillment. Every layer of powder, every stroke of paint whispered not authenticity but artifice: a false plenitude, a borrowed perfection.

It is precisely against this false fulfillment that the space of woke make-up opens. Here, there is nothing left to execute outside the act itself. The universals of “man” and “woman,” already hollow in their foundations, lose even the appearance of utility. The brush, the pigment, the gesture no longer serve to approximate an ideal; they serve to undo the very notion of ideals as such.

This is what I mean by transpoietics: the deconstruction of what was before, the vandalism of what is now, the violent and incommunicable actualization of what will be.

5. Post-gender Art

Such practice, i.e., transpoietics, is observable not just in the field of make-up but in each of the numerous and diverse faces of art in our times—the times of capital’s total colonialism of our lives. Capital has extended its reach so profoundly that even the most intimate gestures, the most fragile expressions of individuality, risk being coded, commodified, and resold as lifestyle. Yet it is precisely within this suffocating totality that cracks appear, fissures through which new practices of resistance emerge. Transpoietics names one of these cracks: an art of undoing, of unmaking, of tearing down the inherited structures of identity so that something unpredicted, unnameable, may take form.

The living proof of this ongoing shift takes a human shape: that of a non-binary Irish artist and poet, as well as a long-distance friend of mine, Jamie Cahill (@jamiecahillart on Instagram). Their trajectory, their works, their reflections embody the transition from the personal act of art-making to the communal creation of a new language. For what transpoietics seeks is not simply to produce individual artworks but to give rise to a horizon where art itself becomes the generative ground of transness.

In a conversation we once had, Jamie offered words that capture this process with striking clarity. I reproduce here a fragment, not as evidence but as testimony, as a glimpse into the heart of what transpoietics aspires to:

“I’m thinking the way I like, ‘change my form’ through painting, as a form of transness too, like make-up, or dressing up and performing that femininity; or, i.e., playing a different role/identity. And like, when I paint myself in different scenes, my one body is taking on these different ‘forms’ of—you know, Dionysus or Leucippus or even Hermaphroditus-Salmacis (etc.). It’s like making my body undergo a transition to a new identity in each painting.”



These words resonate with the very genealogy of ideas we traced earlier. The body, in Jamie’s practice, is no longer a fixed vessel or a passive surface. It becomes the locus of transformation, a canvas upon which myth and identity interweave. Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and dissolution; Hermaphroditus-Salmacis, the figure of fusion and ambiguity: these ancient archetypes reappear not as relics of the past but as living figures reclaimed into the present. The genealogy of ideas thus folds back upon itself—what was once myth returns as contemporary practice, re-signified through trans experience.

Jamie continues, deepening the scope of this vision:

“If, as an artist, you have to make a language to truly create, then I want to make a language of transness, a language that not only I speak & feel, but one which, hopefully, many people can speak and feel too. A communal language, to create a culture of trans art & literature, as there is currently within music (SOPHIE, Dorian Electra, etc.), that is more permanent and emotive than just the style of a painting or use of language of a text. If Derrida spoke of language as the universal signifier, then I want to create a language in which trans people can engage in, and be outside of, simultaneously; not as an individual trans person, but as a collective body of intensity.”



Here the ambition becomes unmistakable: art as a communal language, a space where the solitude of identity dissolves into shared intensity. Derrida spoke of the endless play of signifiers, of language as a universal medium. Jamie seeks to go further: to invent a language of transness that is both inside and outside, both communal and individual, a paradoxical space where one can be simultaneously participant and exile.

This schizo creation, as they describe it, is not mere aesthetics but myth-making:

> “This schizo creation of a new mythos, decoding boundaries and claiming ancient history and art as our own, (the Rebis, the Hermaphrodite, Janus) and embedding it on our skin in paint, a cannibalistic act of becoming-trans which will set the entire world into a state of flux—in this language, that anyone who can recognize the heart within it can speak, and create from it, imbuing the anonymity and structure & order to the art as in Greek antiquity, but also dealing with the democratization of art after impressionism. This is not the impression of transness, but a very language of transness itself.”



The Rebis, alchemical symbol of unity; Janus, god of thresholds and dual vision: these ancient figures are not cited as ornaments but reclaimed, cannibalized, digested into a new mythology of transness. The act of painting one’s skin, of inscribing history onto the body, becomes an act of becoming that unsettles the entire symbolic order. The world itself, through such practices, is thrown into flux, destabilized, made to tremble before new possibilities.

It is from Jamie’s words that this text itself has drawn breath. Their testimony reveals not a mere intellectual need but a desire—active, urgent, alive. It is the desire we see in our streets, in our classrooms, in our lives: the desire to break the hegemony of meaning, to refuse the old partitions, to embrace transness as the locus of a new téchne.

To speak of transsexuality, then, is not to speak of a pathology or a social role but of a deconstructive art that exists in itself, an absolute téchne, a new sapphic art. And as such, it offers the final blow to the metaphysics of order: the hegemony of meaning is long overdue, there is nothing left that cannot crumble.