Metaphor
Metaphor as relationality, as exclusion. There is always more reality than one can bear. Beyond, within, parallel, behind — penduling between impotence and creativity, where are we led to, making worlds conform to what we learn from them? Metaphor as a method for boundary undulation, bringing things together beyond touch. Operation and movement — “as if.”
Plan
📍Ilsenhof 7, 12053 Berlin - Doorbell "Rios"
📆 Wed. 20.05.2026
⏰ 18:30 - 20:30
Some reflections after the session
At the philosophy café, thinking, sharing, and mapping are our primary operations. Our concept for session 6 being metaphor, our primary operation being mapping—a form of conceptual drawing— we engaged, throughout the session, with the questions: what exactly happens when a metaphor is drawn? Is metaphor primarily a creative description, an imaginative gesture that voluntarily links disparate things together? Or is it better understood as a technical operation, a procedure through which relations are discovered rather than invented? In other words, does metaphor express a desire to assimilate one thing to another, or does it reveal connections that were already latent, waiting to be traced? This question leads one to consider the scope and limits of metaphor itself. If anything can become a metaphor for anything else, does the concept lose its specificity? Can a metaphor do everything? And if so, does it eventually cease to mean anything at all?
Perhaps metaphor encounters its limits not in what it can connect, but in whether those connections can be understood, whether they can make sense for someone, somewhere, somewhen. This immediately raises another question: for whom must a metaphor make sense? For the one who creates it, for the one who receives it, or for a community that shares certain experiences and references? What is the nature of commitment that we make to each other, in order for metaphor to make sense, in order to allow and be allowed to take the flights of connection, disconnection, connection in disconnection that metaphor makes for us? At the horizon of this problem lies a paradox: if everything is potentially metaphorical, then there is no outside to metaphor. But if there is no outside, metaphor ceases to distinguish itself from the whole of experience. In that case, metaphor would implode into itself, becoming indistinguishable from reality as such.
From here, the possibility of understanding metaphor as a heterogeneous assemblage of embodied experiences arises. A metaphor may never be purely linguistic. Its force seems inseparable from the personal and collective histories carried by those who participate in its creation and interpretation. What allows a metaphor to resonate may not be a formal similarity between terms, but the convergence of lived experiences that make a connection suddenly feel meaningful. This applies also to the most embedded, ensconced, and canonical of humanities attempts to collate and render meaning concrete: mathematical formulae, religious texts, the foundational concepts that we live on top of—i.e., time, space, causality… How do we trace these experiences through words, as they, at the same time, appear on our bodies and readable on the bodies of others?
This could lead us toward a more dynamic conception of metaphor. Rather than occupying a fixed position, metaphor may consist in a continual oscillation between openness and literality. Total openness would dissolve every distinction: everything could mean everything else, until meaning itself disappears. Excessive literality would produce the opposite effect: nothing could ever become otherwise than it already is. Metaphor seems to inhabit the unstable interval between these two extremes–to inhabit it and to create it, to preserve it too…–. Such oscillation may require a certain innocence, a willingness to remain perplexed before the world, reminiscent of the childlike disposition celebrated by Nietzsche.
Metaphors do not simply exist; they require encounters. They emerge among people capable of sustaining this shared movement, communities that function as resonant chambers in which meanings can be collectively explored and amplified. In this context, we might be reminded of the rhizomatic principle that everything can connect with everything else. Yet, this possibility should not be confused with immediacy or arbitrariness. Connections do not pre-exist their tracing. Nor are they drawn in just any way. Every connection emerges through a situated process that seems to obey certain rules–perhaps invisible, perhaps unsayable–which become discernible only in the act of connecting itself.
Finally, our conversation turned toward the relationship between metaphor and language. Is language a limitation imposed upon metaphor, or its very condition of possibility? Can metaphor be thought beyond language, or perhaps before it? The classical distinction between tenor, vehicle, and ground appeared here as something more than a linguistic mechanism. It suggested an encounter between heterogeneous elements, a kind of “unnatural alliance” reminiscent of the becomings described by Deleuze and Guattari. Such encounters are possible, but they do not pre-exist their realization. They must be made to happen.
Perhaps this is one of the enduring lessons of metaphor: relations are not simply given. They are produced. A metaphor does not merely describe a connection; it performs it. And in doing so, it opens a space where meaning is neither fully determined nor entirely arbitrary, but continuously negotiated between experience, language, and the communities that bring them together.