Fifth Plateau: Ants in the House and the Forming of Norms

This plateau is my latest reframing of a debate over translational norm-formation, beginning in my 2020 publication of “Reframing Translational Norm Theory Through 4EA Cognition,” this time by way of a continuation of the “teacher memoir” launched in the Second and Third Plateaus, discussing not only norms and risks but (the fear of) death understood rhizomatically as an ant infestation. The Kafka story this time is “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” / “The Housefather’s Sorrow,” one of Kafka’s strangest stories, about a queer little doodad named Odradek. The fear of dying is the counterfactual affect (the intersection with my norm theory) that works in much the same way as the ant-rhizome does for Deleuze and Guattari: it is impossible to rid oneself of an ant infestation, because they always “restratify.”