Object Oriented Blogging

I've started a new blog here. It'll take a couple of days for things to settle but I hope to build up a nice hub for object oriented philosophy over time.

Sunday Thoughts or Why I Fear Husserl

A quick entry because my head is sore.

It is perhaps nothing more than an outgrowth of my amateur astronomical interests but I still cannot find anything to aesthetically outshine the stars. If I were forced to locate the origins of my affinity with speculative realism it begins with that gaze...out in my back garden as a child wondering what cosmic madman was putting on this show and how impressive it was that he could dim the lights at will.

The purest form of speculation must be tied to the gaze. The more I read Husserl the more magical the world seems. When you take time with Husserl and really imagine the method rather than the argument the world takes on a perplexing sheen. It is not easy to report back from the phenomenological reduction but I am sure most readers will have a feeling for what I mean. It is possible, via phenomenology, to render the world weird (again).

Today has been a strange day. I slept little last night and emerged outside for a cigarette at half four which is prime night-gazing time. In fact a couple of days ago I'd intentionally stayed up to catch a glimpse of a man-made space-craft as it hurtled across our skies for a few moments. It is amusing that we live in an age where we can time the exact moment when one of our space craft is visible from Earth. If that is not wonderful then I have no idea what is.

And yet all this week I've been under a kind of fog; an intellectual daze. I've read bits and pieces and even had to resort to Nietzsche as a pick-me-up. Worked a little but overall I'm loitering around the abyss.

Until then I'll promise not to post until I've something interesting to say.

German, English and Philosophy

Graham has a nice piece here on originals and translations.

Anybody who has ever worked on Heidegger has ruminated on what translation means. Why? Because no other thinker is shrouded in such a mythical veil of translatory power. It is not uncommon at a conference or seminar on Heidegger to hear someone break out the German (and sometimes the Greek). How can we translate Ereignis? Cue a fifteen minute discussion on whether it can come alive in English at all.

I've raised this issue before. In that post I relayed the encounter with the Italian student convinced that Heidegger was inaccessible by default to the thought processes of the English speaker. Too far away from the continent...much too far away from Athens.

I absolutely deplore this attitude toward Heidegger (the linguistic variant of Heideggerian mystification tactics). Sure there is a small barrier to translating Da-Sein into English. Being-there or there-being. We lose the connection to existence and how ordinary the word sounds to German ears. However once we understand that the connection is something we might immediately overlook do we not then gain knowledge about it regardless? Oh how many barriers a Heideggerian can raise to defend his/her castle.

I never took German in high-school/secondary school (I did Spanish), never took any language as an undergraduate (I was focused on English Literature) so I came to German quite late. My supervisor, a true gentleman, didn't hold this against me and figured that with a little bit of work I'd be able to get a grip on it pretty fast if I focused on translation. Now that I look back on it it tells me quite a lot about how one should treat newcomers to anything; with encouragement although encouragement followed by a stern warning about the effort involved. The only formal education I have in German was a semester long class on German translation and I was the only student to sign up. Luckily a fellow philosophy grad joined the class albeit in order to use the time to translate a letter by Husserl. We had a pretty informal class going there but it worked and brough me from nothing to a decent standard in a few months (I got a B grade and this is technically the last grade I will ever recieve as opposed to give).

So my entire relationship to German (and Germany) is relatively new. Nowadays I try to read short-stories, pick up vocabulary and tackle a section or two of Being and Time a day. I watch German movies because I like the sound of the language and it reminds me of my German girlfriend who I don't get to see very often. I've wandered around Freiburg and Munich. I've peeped into the Husserl archives and visited Heidegger's hut. I had even planned to live there and I imagine, although I no longer make such definite plans, that I will likely live there at some point in my life.

Nonetheless I do not think there is something distinctly philosophical in the German language or character which makes it the second home of philosophy (after Greece). For none of the normal everyday folk in Freiburg had a clue who Heidegger is. Not even students at the University where he was rector in 1933...a date where knowing the Rector would be obviously important.

OK so when you go into a German library it is not uncommon to see pictures of philosophers adorning the walls. But we have a version of this in Ireland but we put up pictures of writers (Joyce, Wilde, Beckett) and a couple of lines from their work. I know this kind of thing probably tells us about what people value but it is more likely the first thing to come into the head of a civil servant in a meeting looking for something to fill some wall space.

So I suppose there is an issue in here somewhere...and I suspect it has something to do with how English will effect the direction of philosophy. As English becomes more and more the language of academic philosophy how will it limit or open up our approach to ideas? Is it the structure of the English language which makes Graham Harman think in such a pragmatic, object-laden manner (a kind of wild West American approach to metaphysics...guerilla/nuclear metaphysics)? I don't know but its fun to think about!

Or is this to do to English what we are doing to German? Language us the most difficult question in philosophy and perhaps our veneration of it is a kind of repression. Is not language the source of our ideas about correlation and even the ground for the correspondence theory of truth?

It being Saturday and another weekend where I can't afford to go out I think I'll dive into some of the later stuff on language in Heidegger. The real decision is whether I'll try to read it in German or go with the English. The more I think about this decision the more forceful the question of translation appears to me.

Fucking Ontology

I was just reminded, via Philosophy in a Time of Error, of the bit in the Parallax View:

For me, one of Zizek’s best analyses is in the Parallax View. I don’t have it in front of me, but he has this great paragraph on Heidegger’s reading of Fug, which he spends forever on in the Introduction to Metaphysics, as a translation for the Greek dikê. He spends forever on the etymology, on how it means both way and harmony and so on… But as Zizek points out, it’s also the root of the word “fuck.” And so he concludes—and here’s a great shortcut to Zizek’s whole reading of Heidegger as wanting to cut out any notion of desire from ontology—why didn’t Heidegger just write about the “great fuck of being”? (I’m ruining the line.) Or better, the “poetic harmonizing engaged by the thinker in the face of the great fuck of being?”

Parallax View is full of this kind of thing (and even has a bit on Hegel and fist-fucking) and although it is almost impossible to follow the entire argument of the book it is full of striking tidbits. I suspect people will read the Parallax View in the same way people read Being and Time...endless interpretations of the master & so on.

I'm also reminded of the bit in the Derrida movie where his response to what would you ask Heidegger is something like 'What did he think about sex or what his sex life was like?'

Why would this matter today and not say when Heidegger was alive? It is not as if Heidegger was a complete prude. He had a number of affairs and although women are largely absent from his work they are never openly mocked as in Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. In his practical affairs Heidegger did not seem to discriminate between sexes; he was just at home leaping over Husserl as Edith Stein.

Of course things have changed a lot in terms of how sex is discussed since then. We are not shocked to read about fist-fucking in a thinker as smart as Zizek (or say Foucault). Although he often prefaces these references with a 'I don't mean to be vulgar' we all know that nobody really does consider porn vulgar anymore (or at least the audience of academics who make up the average Zizekian audience). Not in that deeply disgusting sense of true vulgarity. Perhaps tasteless or at times inappropriate but not vulgar. The really vulgar person today is the one who refuses to discuss porn openly when questioned on it. Rather than think Oh he/she must dislike porn we instantly think Wow they must be into something really far out!

And now that we are in an age when talk about desire permeates philosophical discourse we find something slightly ridiculous in Heidegger...choosing the ignore the obvious connection with fucking (would he even have seen it? I don't know for sure. Its possible but not certain).

So does Heidegger repress fucking from ontology or might it be something different? Perhaps fucking has nothing to do with ontology. Maybe ontology is desire-less. Is there anything else so deeply separated from flesh than categories, properties, and predicates?

Further as good Heideggerians does not Zizek conflate the ontological difference? Being is not a thing. Fucking means to fuck someone - to be really vulgar one fucks a thing that thinks - and has little to do with Seyn as such so why would Heidegger follow that root unless to show how far it takes us from the overcoming of metaphysics?

3 Quarks Daily Prize for best Blog Post

Linky.

We have to find the perfect post from Larval Subjects to nominate. Any ideas? There are so many rich and full posts I wouldn't know where to begin.

Sunday Thoughts or Why I Fear Žižek

So today I watched the movie 'Examined Life'. It features a bunch of philosophers rambling about and talking. Its pretty good overall and something to show people when you want to explain what it is you do (as I intend to do with the girlfriend). It will come as no surprise that it is Zizek who steals the show. Zizek turns up in a garbage disposal facility dressed in a workman's vest and manages to slip in a joke about porn. It is everything you would expect and more.

I've been reading a few books by Zizek lately. Not exactly reading them in the way I'd read Hegel but in a kind of hazy way. I find it difficult to know precisely what he is up too but it is, of course, always a good way to spend time. I suppose I need some kind of introduction to Zizek.

I've mentioned before that I began my studies on Heidegger and ecology. I more or less accepted the total ecological worldview. I shudder to think how uncritical I was then and by extension what I am currently unconsciously uncritical of now. Readers may be amused to note that I once wrote articles for a well-known environmental website. This was my first job where I got paid to write so I remember it fondly.

I'm now about as far away from an ecological viewpoint as can be. I don't mean that I oppose ecology as a movement from some conservative political perspective. What has happened is that I have come to reject the positive content of ecology i.e. that nature is holistic. Further I no longer feel that ecology is equipped to deal with the metaphysical trauma that is our current technological situation.

Zizek, not surprisingly, is already way ahead of us on this issue. He talks in the movie of a new materialism that is able to accept rubbish as what is really the case. He hints at a dark metaphysics that is pure and cold and able...able to face this cosmic knowledge that we are not something special. It is a rather speculative realist position. Another name that springs to mind is the nuclear metaphysics of Graham Harman.

Is this not a more honest approach to our reality? Why is philosophy so disjointed from the 'ancestral' and 'cosmic' knowledge that we have gained? Why is philosophy still micro when all else is so blindingly macro? Have our telescopes revealed nothing?

But no we will protest! Is this not once again that damn anti-humanism creeping in again? Only a madman like Zizek would posit a metaphysics endeared to rubbish. Yet it is us who produces this rubbish, no? Sure there is no mention of mounds of rubbish in Plato. Would Plato feel so easy about spending time on the issues he deals with if he was faced with the ecological mess of contemporary society? Would Socrates listlessly ignore the expansion of scale that our contemporary knowledge has given us?

Philosophy too has its myths or as Zizek would put it; its ideology.

The Blogpost on Humanism

Let us engage in a thought experiment. Imagine in twenty years time someone has written the magnum opus in speculative realism. It is called something like 'Being and Being'. That would not be a bad title. I'd buy that book. Either that or its the worst book title in the world. The point is that 'Being and Being' is such an important book that people don't care about the title. Like how we still read things called 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' or 'The Critique of Pure Reason'.

Then imagine that a disciple in another country had written a similar book influenced by 'Being and Being' called 'Non-Being and Non-Being.' The writer of the latter complains that the author of 'Being and Being' has erased the human from the picture.

This is truly problematic because we are entering an utterly bleak stage in history with lots of technological debasement, ecological catastrophe and so on. What madness is this book 'Being and Being' with its endless discussions of objects interacting with one another.

More and more I feel that this is the question people want answered with regard to speculative realism.

What I cannot understand is why people think speculative realism is out to debase the subject. Or why it is an anti-humanism. 'Being and Being' would be a book populated with humans and other objects. The human would be treated as an especially interesting object among others. In fact maybe 'Being and Being' contains its own existential analytic dedicated to this object which is so complex that we spend an awful lot of time dealing with it. Maybe it loves the subject-object object so much it lavishes 200 pages to a description of how consciousness is an emergent property popping up inside the physical structure of a human body etc. This would be a beautifully apt convergence with the insights of neuroscience.

But alas the author of 'Being and Being' is not the only big name on the scene. His disciple has published another masterpiece of speculative realism known as 'Uncanny Being and Canny Being'. This book argues that the human subject is like the object of the old speculative realists and is pulled in many directions! The human is not the focus of the book but makes for an interesting diversion in chapter three after the 100 page description of how books refuse to talk directly to desks and how printers are damn good at translating the gibberish the computer sends via its operating system.

There is no anti-humanism here but two humanisms. Many humanisms. Just not humanism as a force beyond all forces. Not a flattened humanism. Speculative realism is not a bulldozer.

Alien (1979) and Us

In the Aliens Universe almost all the humans we encounter are employed by one company: Weyland-Yutani. Without the Company the Alien Universe is impossible. It organizes the cargo-transportation, the colonizing trips, and forays into space that make things happen. We are quite fond of the company even though we hiss and boo when they are on-screen.

At heart the Company is a hunting company. It desires Aliens for military reasons. It is a military-industrial machine embodied in an actual machine when it finally makes it appearance in the the third movie. Like the Japanese whalers of our world the Company looks like a bunch of amoral profiteers.


Yet when we meet Bishop it seems that profit is just a cover. The Company chases the Aliens because it can. It has achieved so much that it seeks out the new. The Company is on a nihilistic voyage across space because it has nothing better to do. Amoral ain't got nothing to do with it.

The most striking moment in the Aliens movies comes relatively area. It is the encounter with the Pilot or Space Jockey. This Pilot is never explained. We simply get a look and are abandoned to wonder.

The Pilot is a massive creature with vaguely human characteristics. It lies back in its chair navigating. Its navigating tool looks like a giant harpoon. The Pilot is also a hunter. That is why it looks so familiar. What baffles me is that fans of the film usually cast the Pilot as a benign presence. Certainly the film lends credence to this position when the signal from its ship is discovered to be a warning signal.

What is so casually overlooked is that this warning signal was picked up by the Company before the crew. Therefore I cannot help but read this as one species of hunter aiding another. I cannot otherwise explain the strange affinity with which viewers of the movie identify with the Pilot. Nobody identifies with the aliens – who we must remember are being transported, presumably against their will, across galaxies by another species. That the Aliens appear in the human world is no choice of their own. The Company instigates the close encounter. The Aliens are not the enemies in this film – except at the micro scale. On the macro scale this is an instance of cosmic collusion.

In fact it is only Scott who puts forward a rather aggressive picture of the jockey. Scott felt that the Pilot’s ship was a warship with the aliens as bombs to be dropped onto a planet. This makes the Pilot seem far more human. This is why we truly identify with the Pilot. Not because it is benign, but because it is engaged in the same technical-galactic nightmarish desire for war that the Company is. The Company is really us. Ripley and the Alien Queen - so closely identified throughout the movies -are the strange out-of-place creatures in this world. The futuristic empty, cold world of technical-industrial-military nothingness looks kind of familiar. Even the space-ships are designed to resemble helipcopters and planes from Vietnam (in the second movie in paticular).

Now the first movie remains our only real insight into this alien world. We never get to see the alien home although there were plans to create some pyramid-like structure where the aliens were grown but this was, sadly, abandoned. So the space ship remains, for my money, the most ‘alien’ weird fascinating other place ever depicted on screen. And yet right in the middle what do we find? Little versions of ourselves looking at big versions of ourselves.

What I have never been able to work out is what the aliens are supposed to represent? It took a while for to realize, via the Zombie talk on other blogs, that the aliens are post-humans. The are subject-objects (a Hegelian dream). Bios and techne mixed together. We see it in their design and ability to meld into human structures with ease. They look like our technology but they display signs of life and desire. They never speak or look.

Oh what a terrible beauty is born. Where do we find the gaze that tells us this? In Burke - the company man from the second movie - who sees in the Aliens a perfect blend of killer instinct and amorality.

The Remains of Being by Santiago Zabala

This looks like an interesting book from the Heidegger/speculative realist perspective: The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics. Zabala is clearly one to watch.

You can read an excellent interview with the author here.

In Basic Concepts, Heidegger claims that "Being is the most worn-out" and yet also that Being "remains constantly available." Santiago Zabala radicalizes the consequences of these little known but significant affirmations. Revisiting the work of Jacques Derrida, Reiner Schürmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Tugendhat, and Gianni Vattimo, he finds these remains of Being within which ontological thought can still operate.

Being is an event, Zabala argues, a kind of generosity and gift that generates astonishment in those who experience it. This sense of wonder has fueled questions of meaning for centuries-from Plato to the present day. Postmetaphysical accounts of Being, as exemplified by the thinkers of Zabala's analysis, as well as by Nietzsche, Dewey, and others he encounters, don't abandon Being. Rather, they reject rigid, determined modes of essentialist thought in favor of more fluid, malleable, and adaptable conceptions, redefining the pursuit and meaning of philosophy itself.

Philosophy is a halfway house

I'm not sure but since about Tuesday I've been totally unproductive. I'm sure we all know the experience. It feels like you've been reaching a crescendo. You are ripping through books. Intellectual vistas are opening up everywhere. You start to write and it looks like you might have something worth publishing quite soon.

And then a crash! Total inability. A complete and utter inability to be either passive or active. You are somewhere in between. Fortunately as I get older I know it is only a phrase and I opt for my cure - a couple of days without any real engagement. I listlessly read other blogs and lo and behold something begins to unfold before me. This time its the psychoanalytic trend. As this is not my area I feel happy to step back and watch other people teach me something about an area I don't know much about. I drink tea (I never drink tea. In fact it generally disgusts me!). I watch all those movies (Frost/Nixon), TV shows (Rescue me), and try to locate what it is I am doing or suppose to be doing.

The funny thing is today the first thing anybody says to me is 'What do you think about boredom?' I look at the article she is reading and it announces that someones teenager is bored and that philosophers call this ennui. I offer nothing but confusion. Boredom eh? I mumble something about Heidegger and totality and nothingness although only to myself. Later metafilter links to a University address in which the speaker gives a wry talk on the importance of boredom for inspiration.

The funny thing is that at this stage in my life boredom is not doing philosophy. Without the spark of philosophy my mind feels disconnected. I know the classic notion is that the philosophy disconnects you and well lets be honest...that philosophy is boredom. I am sure there is an element of truth in that but we wouldn't be very good philosophers if we doted on the surface. It all ties up to that sense of homelessness again. What is homelessness for me now? Being severed from the homelessness of philosophy.

Philosophy is a halfway house.

Heidegger and Language

I've been musing on this question for a while now: is it possible to think Heidegger in English.

What do I mean by this? One of my basic pet theories regarding philosophy and language is that all ideas ought to be translatable across all languages. There are two important speculative notions hidden here. (1) the Latourian process of translation (2) flat ontology. The first is not something I feel equipped to talk about. The second however is intriguing. Might it be possible to conceive of a flat ontology that works across languages? In other words is it possible to arrive at precisely the same characterization of objects in say German and English?

Let us take an example. When I say, during a conference paper, that Heidegger conceives of us as Da-Sein and then translate that (as an explanation) to being-there or there-being have I created a new set of relations utterly distinct from the previous one?

This question was brought up to me in Freiburg a number of years back. A fellow student from Italy informed me that English-speakers will never truly grasp Heidegger. The Heideggerian project is a distinctly continental (in the geographical sense) thing. This means that all attempts to render Heidegger into English (and presumably Japanese or Russian) are doomed to failure.

Its a worthy thing to think about even though the initial feeling is that this is precisely the kind of limiting perspective we find in Heidegger himself (who would even exclude the Italian as not belonging to the German-Greek connection).

In my own dissertation I try to avoid Heideggerian 'slang'. I quote Heidegger via my own translation (a translation that is often heavily policed by previous translations, my supervisors, German friends, etc.) and then include the German in brackets. Why do I do this? Is it more authentic to include the German? Is there a feeling that the English might never live up to the German i.e. I implicitly accept that my translation does not capture the true essence of Heidegger's German.

Now there does seem to be evidence that Heidegger can be translated in vastly different ways. Compare the two versions of Being and Time in particular Stambaugh who sometimes omits entire sentences or takes a few liberties for the sake of clarity. Then we have Sheehen who wants to totally re-work the Heidegger translation racket (another example of this trend is Miles Groth...a totally underestimated thinker and translator).

I just needed to get that out of my mind so that I could work today! I'll expand on this topic later.

Sunday thoughts or Why I fear Lacan

So I've been reading some Zizek. I'm probably supposed to read Lacan but they already make me read Kant and Hegel so they can cut me some damn slack.

OK so I don't *get* Lacanian theory. Or for that matter what psychoanalysis is really about. I've even entertained (fleeting) thoughts about taking a night course on psychoanalysis. There is one problem however.

Reading psychoanalysis generates a sense of uneasiness in me. To borrow Zizek's voice for a moment 'I mean it quite literally'. When I'm sitting there reading about gaps and Others and Fathers I feel anxious. What is Metaphysics style anxiety.

There seems to be a direct psychological impulse behind what speculative realism wants to do. If my more informed readers will allow me to make a crude analysis: speculative realism wants to 'allow' the real in. It wants to collapse some symbolic order that we are not supposed to collapse.

One way to counteract this is to state that psychoanalysis is also correlationist and on this basis sets up a truly imaginary barrier in order to avoid reality. This is too lazy however.

I admit these are crude thoughts but they are also, in my opinion, deeply philosophical thoughts (to be momentarily dramatic). I mean more philosophical than the average problem played out in a philosophy class on freedom or determinism.

Zizek has a famous clip on youtube where he talks about love being evil. I'm not so sure about that but I really appreciate his forays into physics. He calls the world a kind of cosmic imbalance. There is something enthralling about that notion. It makes us a very interesting mistake. He plays around with such notions in his books from time to time but I've always wondered about this physics-philosophy dynamic (it plays a key role in my dissertation argument at one point). The philosopher wants to witness the world of the physicist.

Think of us as Harrison Ford in Blade Runner and the physicist as the android who in his dying speech reveals a world unknowable in its sublimeness. I could talk about the film for hours but I'm not up to the kind of analysis that Zizek can do or anyone else for that matter so I'll keep it as a private reservoir for now.

I suppose I'm here in the grip of wonder. Aristotle links knowledge to sight in the first paragraph of the Metaphysics. Hegel talks about philosophers seeking a home. Heidegger calls our state of being a kind of not-being-at-home (and litters his work with calls from some out of reach primal home). Bachelard locates spatial metaphors in the home.

Where is home? They say every philosopher has one question. I think I've come to identify mine. To be cryptic I locate 'home' (a symbol or cypher) somewhere X. When I fill in that X I think I can claim knowledge. I plan on working toward that X although I sometimes feel I am being worked toward that X (Zizek also discusses this weird phenomenon wherein we imagine the real intervenes).

If I were on the couch now I'd probably inform Dr. Freud that I am a keen amateur astronomer.

Interview with Ben Woodard

Today we discuss speculative realism with another speculative heretic. This time we talk to Ben Woodard whose blog Naught Thought is yet another excellent read in the speculative realist web.

Without further ado!


1) The three of you [The Speculative Heretics] are involved, in one way or another, with speculative realism. How did you first come to hear about speculative realism and what was the attraction? Do you still consider yourselves speculative realists or have you moved onto pastures new?

I read about Nihil Unbound and was intrigued after reaching a point of philosophical exhaustion the summer of 2008. For me 2005-2008 was nothing but reading Badiou and Zizek (as an escape from post-modernism) and after three years I felt as if there was something missing. I came across Nick's blog and he seemed to be dealing with similar issues in regards to materialism which lead to an extensive email exchange. At the same time I began to read After Finitude, Guerrilla Metaphysics and then Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (in that order) and started picking up Collapse and read all the related materials I could get my hands on. Speculative Heresy emerged out of those emails and the rest is history.

I wear the speculative realist label proudly and define it as something not positional but somewhere in between a method and an comportment. Speculative Realism names a dissatisfaction with certain dominant trends while also pointing towards fields where we think philosophy should go. Besides this the only commonalities I see are viewing Kant as a legitimate target and a taste for H.P. Lovecraft.


2)A couple of months ago I had never even heard of speculative realism. It has taken me some time to get to grips with the basics. Can you guys provide readers with your (individual) top three books by a speculative realist author?

2-As Nick notes personal preference will most likely take over this question. For myself the texts would be Brassier's Nihil Unbound, Iain Grant's Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, and Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia. The first is an amazing text as it attacks so many of the giants of contemporary thought (Badiou, Zizek, Deleuze, Heidegger, Nancy etc) while introducing new figures such as Meillassoux and Laruelle. Furthermore, Brassier's treatment of nihil is one which is desperately needed in a time of poetic and overly romantic discourses on being, knowledge, ethics and so forth.

Iain's book is a remarkable history and resuscitation of nature philosophy in addition to containing strong critiques of Kant, Fichte, and other German idealists. In addition, P of N a S provides a reading of Schelling in opposition to much of the current readings which are often too Heideggerian and focus on his later texts in place of the earlier ones.

Finally Cyclonopedia is one of my favorites as it is truly incomparable, dealing with a dark Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to geophilosophy, politics and ethics utilizing a torrent of theoretical, mythical and narratological forces. My inability to explain it throughly is indicative of its strength.



3)Graham Harman once wrote on his blog about a future fictional scenario wherein speculative realism is divided up between the factions derived from the four original speculative realists: Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. Might it be time to expand this list and if so what names should be added? More to the point why should they be added?

3-My divisions appear slightly different then Nick's.

The object oriented group (also the most visible) following from Graham's work includes Levi Bryant and Iain Bogost and others as well is applying OOP in different forms and in different areas (ecology, technology etc). Bruno Latour is a driving influence in this praxiological application.

There is definitely what I would say are the more political or Marxist types (with a Brassierian twist) such as Nick Srnicek, Mark Fisher, Reid Kotlas, and Alex Williams but I would say that their use of Laruelle and Brassier (in terms of non-philosophy, eliminativism and nihilism) differ amongst them and I sense that there is more divergence between them then I can see at this point.

Michael Austin and myself would make up the Schellingian/Grantian faction though I'm not so sure I would say the two of us constitute a group of our own and we are less Deleuzian then Graham suggested. If I may, I would place myself closer to Reza Negarestani as his voidal energetics and my dark vitalism (itself a mix of Iain and Ray's work with some psychoanalysis mixed in) are similar projects and both straddle the Grantian and Brassierian factions. We are both interested in a kind of horrorific cosmology following from ancient thought as well as contemporary nihilistic tracts. It is this latter fact that marks my distance from Lacanian psychoanalysis as my emphasis on the centrality of subjectivity has diminished and my emphasis on nature has increased. For most contemporary thought nature is merely something we invented and then learned to control and I don't think we can maintain such thinking any longer.

4)What do you think might happen next with speculative realism? Is it more likely to fizzle out and become yet another continental trend or is it finally having a significant impact on continental philosophy? If so how do you think that impact will play out?

4-I certainly hope it doesn't fizzle out and given the progeny it has already birthed in such a short time I see this as rather unlikely. I have been approached in person, and in the virtuality of the blogosphere, by an equal amount of supporters and naysayers. But what is more remarkable is that non-supporters (or sympathizers) are intrigued if not excited by the fact that something is stirring that is not another post-modernist or deconstructionist adventure. My other inclination is that contemporary science has begun to interact (whether admittedly or not) with metaphysics in a way that begs for metaphysical theories to arise which SR is well positioned to provide.

Even if SR as an identity disappears the factions it has generated will not especially given the infrastructures we have constructed or invaded (Graham and Latour's New Metaphysics Series, Re.press, Zer0 Books, Collapse, Pli and so on). My ultimate hope is that SR will further revitalize metaphysics and make strong continental connections to the sciences.


5)You provide quite the service over at Speculative Heresy. Are we going to see any more articles or translations being put up?

5-I think we are all always hunting for new texts and encounters on blogs that we can catalog. With the rising popularity of SR this has diminished somewhat in that visibility is less a concern than archiving. This is not to discount archiving and the figureheads will continue to write and we will continue to collect.

As far as translations that is Taylor's domain and I will let him speak to the tremendous amount of work he skillfully translates.


6)What are you currently working on?

6-I am currently (in the Alps as I type this!) in my second residency for my masters at the European Graduate School. I am attempting to finish a book project for Zer0 books entitled Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life which is focused on the biological aspect of my dark vitalism (which is short hand for a nihilistic speculative realist philosophy of nature). I combine weird fiction and sci-fi with speculative philosophy and biology to diagnose and explicate the metaphysical and literal sliminess of human existence.

My thesis, which I am just starting, will be the inorganic-focused sequel to Slime Dynamics, which will be a corrupted extension of many of the themes in Negarestani's Cyclonopedia. It will focus on geophilosophy, artifacts and the dimensions of hell.

I also have a project in the works with Michael Austin but details will have to wait for the future. Beyond this I hope to spread SR in the US and hope to get some dialogue going between analytic philosophers, the sciences and SR.

Speculative Capitalists

I am ever so slightly hungover today. Sadly today has seen a flurry of interesting blog activity that I need to address in a clearer mood. I'm going to get to them all, but I'd like to simply acknowledge them for the moment. Even though this post looks long its only a fraction of the ideas generating in my head thanks to the numerous smart people the net has opened up to me. I am grateful for that. It is however Saturday night and in Ireland if they catch me writing on my blog it is quite likely that they will commit me to an asylum.

I've been meaning to relay a small anecdote regarding Germany and I think I'll do it now. When I first went to Germany and was hanging out with Italians and Americans almost all of them tailored their German conversations to two issues (in the class): beer or Irish music! This was amusing, but after a week or so I found myself adopting the stereotype in class. It is amazing how quickly we will acquire a mask for convenience. Perhaps you guys who work in psychoanalysis can explain this to me, but I remain bemused. On a side note Freud is purported to have said the Irish cannot be psychoanalyzed!

The first thing to note is that Critical Animal has posted an interesting explanation of the reasoning behind extending ethics to the domain of animals. I'm notoriously weak in ethics (the subject not personally). If you could add an area of non-specialization to an academic CV I'd put down Ethics in capital letters.


I stubbornly hold the opinion that philosophy has nothing whatsoever to tell the world about ethical issues. I've seen the horror this standpoint has generated in the past. In particular Marxists consider it a betrayal of the contemporary philosophical project. I do not mean to be provocative when I say this, but Marx over-extended philosophy when he thought it could change the world for the better. I agree with Zizek up to a point: the point is to interpret. One of the best things about reading Graham Harman is the absence of the political. I like my metaphysics politically disinterested.

I sometimes felt in classes that I'd stumbled into the local socialist party meeting as opposed to a philosophy class. I don't mean this as a swipe at Marxism or liberalism or whatever. I'm genuinely indifferent. I suppose this is partly the appeal of object oriented philosophy to me. It takes the sting out of the critical standpoint which is sometimes erroneously taken to mean an overall critical standpoint. Here Marx did not so much overturn Hegel as return Hegel back to his squabbles with Kant. Kant, we remember, has one of the most reasonable approaches to politics found in any philosophy.


I'd probably have run away if Socrates came running down the road. I'd grab Gorgias and we'd hit the clubs of Athens and stumble home drunk talking about sport.

HOWEVER I'm more than impressed by Critical Animal (and his readership) for their ability to remain in ethics...nay to dwell in philosophy as an ethics. My own position is that ethics acts as a carrot that is always out of reach. I just can't forget the stick. Depending on their general disposition people have considered this either my greatest weakness or strength. Contemporary ethics is deconstruction par excellence. Deferral at its finest.

This reminds me: is psychoanalysis now a legtimate philosophical tool? I see references to psychoanalysis everywhere now. It gets introduced in the same way words like deconstruction or idealism are. I don't know enough about it to judge but there is something at work here that I am uneasy with. The positive is that it seems to allow various people to examine themselves and how moods/desires/etc afflict philosophical positions. This is to complete the re-inscription of mood Heidegger began in Being and Time into the 'discourse'. The unexamined life is not worth living!

I'm also coming across a lot more Marxism in relation to speculative realism. There is an excellent post here which attempts to show how congenial Marx is to object oriented philosophy. This is a good example of the Re-Construction I talked about over at Levi's blog. I think we will discover immense reservoirs of objects lurking in the texts of the past.

Might I sneakily suggest that object oriented philosophy is the perfect philosophy for capitalism (and I say this not in a negative sense since I am politically neutral). In a way this would be a kind of maturity in that philosophy will have come to terms with the stick. On the other hand for many people it might be seen as too close for comfort, but we're not trying to affirm the critical stance in speculative realism. Quite the opposite. Watch out for speculative capitalists. It's all in the name baby.

There are two major posts I need to address asap. The first is this over at Planomenology and then this over at Working Notes (coincidentally my favourite blog). I urge you to take a look at both of them. I'll just take this opportunity to post a quote from Working Notes. Keep in mind that Mike, the author, is not even a philosophy graduate student but nonetheless manages to read Heidegger, Derrida (and many others) with a level of detail that puts many of us to shame:

But we can get a little deeper into the issue by seeing that, for speculative realism, the Heideggerian analysis of things like tools is less contaminated by a notion of being than just simply incomplete (this is why these realists have little patience for Derrida, who also just seems to repeat the omissions, even though he breaks with Heidegger). The point is to suspend Heidegger's suspension of the problem and get into what, considered rigorously, Heidegger might have to say about things. That means, a lot of the time, revising Heidegger. But we still keep falling back on the basic Heideggerian rubric--not for safety, but because it indeed locates the problem and puts it generally in the most correct and most interesting terms. The talk of bridges swaying isn't as convincing when we're trying to talk about what the bridge is when you walk away from it, or rather when being walks away from it, but it isn't entirely faulty. It sets up a scheme that is useful for indeed talking about the bridge in its being, not to mention other things like the brain and the body.

Mike poses a challenge toward the end of that post that I need to address, but it deserves a post of its own. I would add that he is correct to identify a certain casualness with which we throw Derrida overboard. Surely there is more to it than that. OK Derrida's stock is plummeting in philosophy, but speculative realism needs to come to terms with deconstruction somehow. Our dismissal is too easy, too...something I can't articulate. We haven't put the necessary argument on paper to prove why we have overturned or dismissed Derrida. We are assuming it a little too easy. It seems a little too rhetorical to tip my hat to Mike's discipline and Harman's defense of SR in the Prince of Networks.

So I'm gonna get working on that soon. I do have a general query...where can I learn to write as clearly as Mike in that post! Or Harman in his book. I feel like a murderer of style. I should have paid more attention in English class.

Interview with Nick Srnicek

Today we begin the first of three interviews with the guys from Speculative Heresy or as I like to call them the Speculative Heretics. We start with Nick Srnicek, co-editor of the forthcoming book 'The Speculative Turn' with Levi R. Bryant and Graham Harman. Nick also has a personal blog which I cannot recommend enough.

1) The three of you [The Speculative Heretics] are involved, in one way or another, with speculative realism. How did you first come to hear about speculative realism and what was the attraction? Do you still consider yourselves speculative realists or have you moved onto pastures new?


I first came to hear of speculative realism through the Collapse journal - in particular, the transcript of the original SR conference. I had read Meillassoux and Brassier's work in earlier volumes of Collapse, but it was the conference transcript which made me realize that this was, in fact, a movement, and not just a handful of idiosyncratic thinkers. From there I quickly devoured all the SR-related work I could find - Brassier, Harman, Meillassoux and Grant most notably, but I then moved onto Metzinger, Churchland, Schelling, Latour, Malabou, Johnston, etc. The attraction was simple enough for me - I had always been a very scientifically inclined person, and I had always implicitly read Deleuze (my primary influence) as a realist. Capitalism and Schizophrenia provided the basic coordinates for this belief, but Manuel DeLanda's work quickly solidified this reading. In addition, throughout my academic career I had always despised (a strong word, but suitable here) loose thinking and the excesses of what was popularly known as postmodernism. The Sokal affair may have had many problems, but it did show that too much academic work had become impenetrable and incomprehensible jargon. As a reaction against this loose textual play, which shirked the creation of insight in favour of poetic mysticism, my interest in avoiding a focus on language and culture was strengthened. In light of all these aspects, SR - and Meillassoux's short book, in particular - was the articulation of all the implicit feelings I already had about contemporary philosophy.

That was all over a year ago (my first post on SR was in March 2008), and I still consider myself aligned with SR to this day. While I can completely sympathize with people who refuse to be labelled, I do believe that a significant portion of SR's emerging popularity has to do with its having been labelled as such. There is a power to such a collectivity that goes beyond any of the individual authors, and the term 'speculative realism' has been crucial in raising the issue of realism in continental philosophy again. However, and this has been stated numerous times, it's crucial to remember that SR doesn't label a single set of positions. As is always the case, critics will try to homogenize what they are critiquing - but particularly in the case of SR, this would be a mistake. The 4 main contributors to it are all vastly different, and there really is no common ground.

2)A couple of months ago I had never even heard of speculative realism. It has taken me some time to get to grips with the basics. Can you guys provide readers with your (individual) top three books by a speculative realist author?


Undoubtedly, all three of the books selected will be indicative more of my interests rather than suggestions about what are objectively the 'best' books. There's already a large and increasingly growing collection of SR-related work, and to name all the great books would take some time. With that caveat, the first work one needs to read if one's interested in SR is Meillassoux's After Finitude. It simply is the best diagnosis of the problems with contemporary philosophy, and it's argued with a clarity that proves logic, surprise and wonder don't need to be mutually exclusive. Nearly everyone I've seen write about it, says that it was a shock to their system after years of training had led them to focus on subjective and linguistic structures. The arguments may be debatable (and there's already a small cottage industry in discussing the book), but the sheer force with which they hit you when you first read it makes it the best introduction to SR.

The second book I'd suggest is Brassier's Nihil Unbound. His work is a strikingly original and provocatively argued work that aims to shatter all the comforts of a human-centric worldview. It is an unflinching look at nihilism and the Enlightenment project, and I think as neuroscience continues to progress and exteriorize the interiority of the mind, Brassier's work will be the foundation for the rethinking of ourselves that neuroscience triggers. As such, it's a crucial work that may still be ahead of its time.

The third and final work I'd suggest is Harman's Prince of Networks, which I think is the clearest and most developed exposition of his philosophy yet. Not only is the second half devoted to a highly illuminating defence and explanation of his work, but the first half provides the best philosophical reading of Bruno Latour available. It is my belief that Latour provides the key insights into rescusitating continental philosophy's politics from its indecisive and abstract doldrums, and as such, Harman lays down the path for a debate between them. And with Harman's powerful critiques of Latour in the second half, it's like getting two books for the price of one. Definitely recommended.


3)Graham Harman once wrote on his blog about a future fictional scenario wherein speculative realism is divided up between the factions derived from the four original speculative realists: Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux. Might it be time to expand this list and if so what names should be added? More to the point why should they be added?


I think there are at least 2 splinter groups that can already be discerned - with each of them incorporating major aspects of the original 4, but without any slavish devotion. They both form what I would argue are the centres of creation for the next generation of SR-influenced thinkers. The first would be a vaguely Marxist group. I say 'vaguely' because while they all take great inspiration from Marxist work, they also refuse to commit to many of the main ideas that make Marx, Marx. In this group I'd include myself, Mark Fisher, Reid Kotlas, and Alex Williams. Some of the common themes that unite us are a rethinking of agency in the light of neuroscience, eliminativism and non-philosophy; a focus on the concrete technical and material aspects of political economy (particularly things like financial instruments, computer networks, and economic models); and a desire to move past stale left vs. right, or government vs. free market debates. I'm consistently inspired by the works of the others involved, and I think some of the most interesting and creative political work for the future is likely to come from them.

The second group would be a more psychoanalytically-inclined group. This would include Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou, Ben Woodard and Michael Austin. Each of them are heavily influenced by psychoanalytic understandings of the unconscious, and see it as providing the hinge between the realm of conscious thought and the unground of material reality. Unsurprisingly they also tend to be influenced by Schelling, who provided a sort of proto-psychoanalysis on a cosmic level. Whereas the eliminativist followers of the first group tend to take a more cold and clinical analysis of subjectivity, it's not hard to imagine a more affective take coming from the second group (though no less nihilistic for that). All of them have done some terrifically interesting work already, and it will be fascinating to see where they take it in the future.

Finally, there's the always unique Reza Negarestani, who straddles both the Marxist and psychoanalytic groups. With some of the most creative and affectively powerful writing around, Negarestani's work is definitely something to keep an eye on.


In addition, there's also the uptake of SR by other disciplines - notable animal studies, ecology, and even videogame studies. It isn't hard to imagine SR-inflected collectives emerging within these fields too.

4)What do you think might happen next with speculative realism? Is it more likely to fizzle out and become yet another continental trend or is it finally having a significant impact on continental philosophy? If so how do you think that impact will play out?

Unsurprisingly, I don't see SR fizzling out anytime soon. This isn't a simple trend, but rather something that's been brewing in continental philosophy for some time now. Both Zizek and Badiou - arguably the two most important philosophers right now - share many of the same preoccupations as the SR folk do: a rejection of textual analysis or linguistic structures, a positive ontology and desire to attain the Absolute, and an attempt to shed all anthropocentrism. Going even further back, Deleuze was a highly materialist and (arguably) realist philosopher, with hints of it even in his pre-Guattari phase. And clearly he avoided overly focusing on linguistic or cultural factors (even The Logic of Sense ends up talking about the material genesis of language). That's nearly 50 years of work on these issues. But it's only recently been the case that a name for these ideas has emerged (and a proper name, rather than yet another 'post-'). I think there's also a sense (certainly for myself) that current ideas in continental philosophy have exhausted themselves. Do we really need another analysis of how a cultural representation does symbolic violence to a marginal group? This is not to say that this work has been useless, just that it's become repetitive. In light of all that, SR provides the best means for creative work to be done, and it provides genuine excitement to think that there are new argumentative realms to explore.

As far as the impact of SR goes, it's hard to predict. As with any new idea, it will spark a lot of criticism. I, for one, welcome this as continental philosophy has often been too content to hole up in independent groupings based upon a master. Zizek has been great at stirring up debate (e.g. his critiques of Badiou, Laclau, and Butler), and I tend to think this is a productive thing. So I look forward to the debates that SR can hopefully spark. But I think the most significant impacts of SR may be to reconfigure the institutional divides between disciplines. As it stands, continental philosophy has largely taken shelter in literature and cultural studies departments in North America. But SR is much less amenable to being taken in by these disciplines, and much more friendly to the sciences and technologies departments. In addition, SR is also very open to analytic philosophy (e.g. Churchlands, Dennett, Brandom, Kripke, etc.), which means that there's the distinct possibility that the long divorce between these two schools may come to an end in the next generation or so. That's a more speculative hypothesis, but I think it's an exciting one myself. Like the Cold War, the end of the philosophy war may end with a whimper and not with a bang, as thinkers from both sides just progressively ignore the divide.


5)You provide quite the service over at Speculative Heresy. Are we going to see any more articles or translations being put up?

Taylor has been the one responsible for all the remarkable translations. It is quite amazing what he has been able to do, and I of course selfishly hope for more! I do know that Anthony Paul Smith is translating some Laruelle, and Taylor I believe is also translating some for publication. So we have those to look forward to.

As far as articles, we've been lucky enough to have a number of authors submit essays to us, and we're always accepting more. We also keep a close eye on what becomes available online, and are constantly updating our collection of essays. So there's definitely more to come!

6)What are you currently working on?

I am currently getting set to start a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. The general outline of my dissertation is going to be to use actor-network theory to map out the relations between global governance institutions and the local effects and resistances to these - a sort of map of the conduits through which these institutions affect individuals, in an attempt to overcome the global/local divide, and to shed light on how they can be made more effective and how resistance functions to reciprocally affect the institutions. Along with Graham and Levi, I'm working on finishing up The Speculative Turn - doing some editing and writing for it. It will be out early 2010, with both an open-access version and a paperback version. I'm also working on a book that will attempt to analyze contemporary economies from the perspective of actor-network theory, while working within the constraints of non-philosophy and eliminativism. It's in the early stages, but I'm quite excited about it, and hope to have it out late next year. Finally, I'm working on another major project with a group of people, but it will have to remain secret for the moment! That being said, I'm really excited about the potential within that project. If all goes well, there should be an announcement about it in early 2010.

The Abbau

Levi invites the Heideggerian ghost to feast.

Can one be a Heideggerian AND a speculative realist?

In a comment to a recent post rather brashly entitled 'A Philosophical Breakthrough' Gary Williams asks a number of important questions. What is an unorthodox Heideggerian and can one be a speculative realist and a Heideggerian at the same time?

First of all I've always considered myself an unusual reader of Heidegger. Yeah I read Heidegger every day. And sure I'm writing my thesis on him, but nonetheless I disagree with an awful lot of what he has to say. Generally the disagreement is about HOW Heidegger sees the world as opposed to HOW Heidegger arrived at that insight. Heidegger is a great teacher of philosophy. And yet there are times when I wish Heidegger had just kept circling the insights from part 1 of Being and Time.

What do I like about Heidegger? The tool-analysis, the teasing out of the world *a masterstroke*, the introduction of mood, the relentless active things that occur in his later work (bridges, artworks, temples, marble statues ), and in particular the re-inscription of place into philosophy as such. Heidegger's topological credentials are impeccable.

The problems? The savage tunnel vision regarding the Greeks and Germans (whether language, people or philosophy), the flights of fancy into a history of being comprised of mini-epochs contained within one metaphysical epoch in which beings are given in different ways with Seyn as a backdrop of a backdrop BUT...

the greatest problem? The reduced philosophical appetite Heidegger induces in his most devoted readers. Ever watched a Heideggerian try to tell a newcomer what Heidegger is about? Can it be done in less than 5 minutes, a half hour, or perhaps two hours? Every Heideggerian becomes a sage muttering in a half-cryptic language of quasi-German philosophical terminology. Kantians sound clearer! Now dialogue is here difficult when you are essentially enveloping your opponent's arguments under some Heideggerian pre-set pejorative: ontic, substance-focused, metaphysical, calculative, etc.


Now I say this with love because I am still a Heideggerian. How? I want to do the same kinds of things Heidegger does BUT without orbiting Heidegger's own preoccupations endlessly. I want to be free of Heidegger circa 1935 or 1973 talking about Rilke or the moon-landings or earth-strife. I don't want to spend a career riding the Heideggerian wave or falling into the Heideggerian black hole as my supervisor so vividly put it way back when.

I don't want to endlessly apply Heidegger to new issues. The critical theorists are free to map the Ge-Stell onto Pac-Man but I will have no part!

Now it might seem that I have nothing to take from Heidegger, but that is incorrect. I read Heidegger in order to get that spark. You know the spark that Heidegger gives from time to time. Pick up Being and Time and just open some page. Read the paragraph. Then look outside into your garden. There will be something in there you can connect up. I am sure of it. That to me is Heidegger.

Now as to the issue of speculative realism. My argument for retaining an element of both is pretty straight-forward (and perhaps unacceptable to a classic Heideggerian). You state:

It seems to me though that a Heideggerian could never be a speculative realist because according to Heidegger, we don't need to speculate on what reality is in theoretical terms; we already have an intimate understanding of actuality and what exists, although this understanding has been disastrously articulated in various metaphysical guises throughout the history of human civilization. The pre-reflective understanding though arises out of a pretty firm contact between ourselves and the extant world. You can't live life existingly as an anti-realist.

Speculative realists don't want to speculate on reality in theoretical terms. It is not a return to metaphysics in that regard i.e. missing Heidegger's insight regarding readiness to hand and presence at hand. That would be naive realism. Think of speculative realism as pulling the breaks half-way into the existential analytic. While Heidegger speeds on past the speculative realist stops and wonders about the objects. It lets the existential analytic carry on. They do not cancel one another out. The world is too big for this kind of effacing. Bachelard once said that two half-philosophers do not one philosopher make. Let us then be two.


You can see it as Heidegger rushing in one direction. As a correlationist his prime concern is the correlation as it had been for Husserl. Heidegger boiled down to a sentence is nothing more than 'remember the ontological difference'. That is the task of thinking and there are plenty of Heideggerians willing to carry on that task. I therefore do not spend my days worrying about the forgetting of being.

If anything I see speculative realism as paving over a crack left in Heidegger...back to the things themselves.

I simply intend to bypass Heidegger here and enter the objects he leaves behind. I have to finish this post for now as I've been called out, but I'll add more later.

Graham Harman's upcoming books

In Ireland we call this kind of output 'hardcore'.

I'm personally interested in reading 'Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures' which must be the first general and explicit book on speculative realism (or have I missed another?).

I'm currently very busy with my own mini-mass-output moment (two journal articles in the mix, a couple of book reviews, and something potentially bigger).

However we have a new round of interviews to look forward to with Graham Parkes and the guys over at Speculative Heresy.

Interview with Jeffrey Malpas

Today AHB interviews Jeffrey Malpas author of Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World and Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography among others. I am very pleased to have had the chance to ask these questions since Jeffrey's work has had a profound effect on the direction on my own.

Without further ado!



It now seems likely that your book ‘Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World’ will remain the definitive work on topological issues in Heidegger for the foreseeable future. What lead you to write a book on an area previously considered peripheral by other Heidegger scholars?

I should say, first of all, that it hasn’t been considered peripheral by all other Heidegger scholars. While Joe Fell’s 1979 book, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, doesn’t have the same aim as Heidegger’s Topology, it does treat place as a key concept in Heidegger’s thinking. Joe’s book was an important touchstone for me when I was writing Heidegger’s Topology. More directly to your question, I would say that the obvious reason for writing a book on topology in Heidegger (and I should say, by way of clarification, that I refer to topography in relation to my own work, but use topology with more specific reference to Heidegger) is that, although many other scholars may have thought place to be peripheral in Heidegger’s thinking, Heidegger did not. Not only does Heidegger take up and deploy topological ideas and images throughout his work, but it is Heidegger himself who characterises his thinking as a “topology of being”. The fact that the centrality of place in Heidegger’s thinking has been generally overlooked is partly a result of the concentration of attention on Being and Time – a work in which both place and space figure in a highly problematic fashion. If one begins with the later writings, then the topological elements in Heidegger’s thinking are impossible to avoid, and Being and Time itself appears in a different light. Moroever, it is not just that place is important to the reading of Heidegger’s own work, but that Heidegger is a critical figure in the philosophical engagement with place. Essays such as “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “Art and Space” explicitly address issues of place in a way that is not matched by any previous thinker (with the possible exception of Kant). Consequently, if one wishes to address the question of place philosophically, one has no choice but to take up Heidegger’s own topological mode of thought.

I’ve noticed that in ‘Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography’ you mention important influences such as Edward Casey. Can you tell us a little bit about other formative influences on your intellectual development? Further can you tell us what attracted you to the relatively underdeveloped field of ‘philosophical topography’?

I think it was David Wood who suggested I look at Ed’s work when I gave a paper that was the beginning of Place and Experience (‘A Taste of Madeleine: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Place’) at the University of Warwick around 1992. Ed’s work was very important in giving me the sense that I wasn’t alone in what I wanted to do, and, along with a number of other close colleagues (from geography and other disciplines as well as philosophy), he has been a constant source of support and stimulation ever since. Prior to Place and Experience, however, I was already developing a set of topographic ideas through notions of horizontality and locality. I made use of both these ideas in my first book, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, which was itself a development out of my graduate work, while some of the connections between place, limit, and unity that have also been important in my recent work were present in my writing as an undergraduate (mainly through work on Kant and Aristotle). But my interest in place and topography also goes back much further than this. I grew up in New Zealand, a place in which there is always a strong sense of the natural environment.

My family also travelled a lot (my father and grandfather sold gadgets and toys at exhibitions, country shows, markets and suchlike – they were ‘grafters’ according to the Northern English term my grandfather used), and by the time I was 13 we had been back and forth between the UK, Australia and NZ a number of times. I am sure that the New Zealand environment and the experience of travel between places contributed significantly to my topographical interests. At School I focussed on History and English, writing on Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake for my University scholarship exam (although none of these figures were actually taught in the formal curriculum). My undergraduate studies at the University of Auckland were in both Philosophy and History (I take History as itself connecting to place, not only because I view place as encompassing the temporal as well as the spatial, but also through the concept of memory as well as of site). I also read a great deal of literature – especially poetry. Place and Experience more or less begins with Wordsworth and Heaney, and in many ways that book is an attempt to articulate the sense of place that has usually only been addressed in art and literature. New Zealand writers were also important in my thinking at the time (and still are) – writers such as Witi Ihimaera (who I have since been lucky enough to get to know), and poets from James K. Baxter to Sam Hunt. At Auckland I had some very influential teachers. One was Clive Pearson, an inspiring and provocative figure who introduced me to Heidegger; another was Krister Segerberg, who insisted I go on to graduate work in philosophy when I was not at all inclined to do so, and although a logician, also supported my developing interest in hermeneutics; yet another was Martin Tweedale, who schooled me in Aristotle and Aquinas; and a fourth was Julian Young, with whom I have maintained a long and close association.

One of the things that characterised my undergraduate training, and for which I am very grateful, was the fact that it was strongly focussed on the history of philosophy (including the history of the analytic tradition), and on the reading of primary texts – something much less common in philosophy departments nowadays. In addition, I was very lucky to be part of a small group of fellow students with similar or overlapping interests, including, most notably, Carl Page (a philosopher who is now at St Johns in Annapolis). I was an undergraduate, and then a Masters student, at Auckland during the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties, and that time also had its impact. 1977 was my first year at University, and it coincided with the appearance of punk (as well as the rise of ska and reggae), which should be viewed, I think, as the late ‘seventies analogue to the protest and alternative movements (merging into psychedelia) of the ‘sixties. In both cases political concerns merged with musical and artistic forms – albeit very different ones. For all that punk may have been viewed as musically and artistically crude, it also had roots in a strong political and cultural sensibility that actually thematized issues of commitment and community, participation and action, belonging and alienation, and even place and identity. Music, including jazz, blues, rock and folk, as well as classical (especially late-19th and early 20th C) continues to be an important to me – and also connects up, often quite directly, with my interest in place, not only through the influence and expression of place in music (consider, in classical music, some of Vaughan Williams’ work), but also through the way sound provides an often over-looked aspect of our engagement with place (here the work of experimental sound artists from John Cage to Brian Eno is especially relevant).

From Auckland, I went on to do graduate work at the ANU in Canberra, where Phillip Pettit and Jack Smart were my main advisors. Also at the ANU, as a Research Fellow, was Fred D’Agostino (with whom I later worked in my first academic job at the University of New England). He was extremely supportive, and my early ideas were very much developed in conversation with him (Fred’s work, which is largely at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of science, overlaps in interesting ways with my own). Richard Rorty was also at the ANU during part of my time there, and his work was extremely important, not because it had any direct relevance to place, but because of the way he combined analytic and continental thinking. At that stage I was already trying to read Gadamer and Heidegger alongside Davidson (as well as von Wright, Collingwood and Wittgenstein), but Rorty gave that reading a new sense and direction. Aside from Heidegger (to whom I stand, in any case, in a somewhat different relation), it is Davidson and Gadamer who are probably the two most important philosophical influences on my work, and I feel very privileged to have known both of them – Gadamer, while I was a Humboldt fellow in Heidelberg towards the end of his long life, and Davidson, from the early 1990s onwards (which is when I first visited Berkeley, and also, of course, when I first got to know Bert Dreyfus).

There are two other names that I should mention as having a significant impact on my thinking, although only through their writing: one is Albert Camus, and the other is Hannah Arendt. Arendt is someone I have come to fairly late, but her work has become more important as I have engaged more directly with issues of politics and the public realm. Camus has always been a favourite of mine, and not because of any existentialist connection. I am not especially sympathetic to existentialism (even though I have written on it, have often taught it, and would probably be viewed as drawing on existentialist ideas), and that partly reflects my discomfort with Sartre, as well as a more general concern with what I take to be subjectivist and voluntarist elements in certain existentialist thinking. Camus is, for me, a lyrical thinker, whose politics connects up with much of what I find valuable in Arendt, and whose sense of place, as well as of human finitude as that is worked out in place, comes across very clearly in his writing, especially his essays. Just as music and poetry have had an important influence on my thinking, so too do I find the visual arts to be significant also. From a New Zealand perspective, the painter Colin McCahon presents an especially salient example of an artist for whom issues of place and identity loom large, and for whom those issues are also connected to ideas concerning language and the sign, the latter understood both in their meaning and materiality, as well as of the spirit. You will notice that McCahon works appear on the covers of both Place and Experience and Heidegger’s Topology, and I hope also to use two other McCahon works for the monographs on which I am now working: Ethos and Topos and Triangulating Davidson. Among other artists who I find of particular interest are Turner (not least because of the obviously topographic nature of much of his work), Cezanne (an obvious point of connection for a Heideggerian), Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Joseph Beuys, Robert Morris (partly because of his own work with Davidson, but for much more besides), the 19th C Tasmanian landscape artist John Glover, contemporary Aboriginal painters such as Kathleen Petyarre, land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy (although this is something that Ed Casey has been exploring much more than I have), and also digital artists such as Char Davies (whose work I have only recently discovered).

The engagement with creative artists has, in fact, become quite an important part of my own work. I have supervised students in the area, and have also been closely involved with a number of exhibitions, writing catalogues essays and being involved with aspects of curation. This engagement has itself had a significant impact on my thinking, partly through the way in which it has required me to consider how one can and should engage philosophically with artworks, but also through drawing attention to the interplay between work and place (in both its temporal and spatial aspects).

You’ve made inroads into the ethical demands of a philosophical topography i.e. the link between ethos and topos. Did you find it particularly grilling to address the questions of place and ethics in Heidegger or did you find, as many deep ecologists have, that the idea outstrip the thinker at the level of ethics?

One of the main projects in I am currently working is a book on just this topic – the ethics and politics of place. One reason for doing so is that there is a widespread view, one that probably has its classic philosophical statement in Levinas’ work, that place is inevitably connected with exclusion and violence, and with reactionary and conservative forms of politics. Heidegger is often taken to exemplify just this connection. That there is a different potential in Heidegger’s work, however, seems to me to be demonstrated by the way aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy are developed and deployed in thinkers such as Arendt and Gadamer. But I also think that paying closer attention to the topographical elements of Heidegger’s thought itself shows a very different political and ethical potential from that which is usually assumed. Far from being exclusionary, I would argue that place both gathers and enables engagement at the same time as it opens up plurality and difference. It is place that allows the encounter with the other, at the same time as it allows the demand of the other to be made real. Of course, ideas always outstrip the thinker in the sense that those ideas that have real significance always retain a richness that goes beyond the particular way in which they are taken up on any specific occasion – this is partly what I refer to in Heidegger’s Topology as the iridescence that attaches to key philosophical terms and concepts – and I see no reason to suppose that Heidegger should be an exception here, although neither do I think this makes his work especially problematic in this regard.

You’ve published a massive amount of articles, edited a whole bunch of collections, written a few books, and a whole lot more. How do you manage to remain so prolific and can you give us a little bit of advice about writing good philosophy today?

I don’t regard myself as very prolific – in fact, I constantly feel that there is too much that I have not yet written or properly worked out. I do think that there is a discipline to writing. Writing is a task, a piece of work, to which one has to set oneself. Too often, we seem to expect writing to come easily, but, at least when it is philosophical writing that is at issue, it is very seldom that it happens that way. If I do have a reasonably steady rate of production, that is partly because I often find it hard to turn down invitations – and a lot of my writing now is a response to requests to produce pieces for specific occasions or publications I keep resolving to say ‘no’ more often, but it doesn’t always happen. As a result, however, I am probably often pressed to produce work more quickly than I would like, although I have almost come to accept the fact that this may be unavoidable. I am a bit wary of offering advice of how to write ‘good’ philosophy. What I would say, however, is that I do think the best philosophical writing comes out of a real sense of engagement with the subject matter that also attends closely to the concepts and texts at issue, and through having a passion and commitment to understand (and most often genuine understanding comes through doing the actual work of writing) and to communicate that understanding. Unfortunately, there is a lot of published work that doesn’t engage in this fashion, that simply works the machinery, as it were, or else just remains at too superficial or simplistic a level.

You’ve got a number of papers available online. Do you think the internet is drastically changing the academic world? Have you had any thoughts on the peculiar public space that the internet has come to occupy in our collective minds?

There is no doubt that the Internet is having an impact on academia, although the exact nature of that impact, beyond the most immediate effects, is not easy to discern. Certainly it has changed, among other things, the way we communicate, the way we gain access to journals, and the way we undertake research. I am very cautious, however, about claims regarding the supposedly radical impact of new technology. We have a tendency to misidentify the exact nature of that impact and often, I think, to exaggerate it. The claims of many so-called ‘trans-humanists’, for instance, seem to me to exhibit a failure to attend to the nature and limits of the technologies at issue as well as to the character of human existence. Arendt says in The Human Condition that “it is still probable that the enormous changes of the industrial revolution behind us and the even greater changes of the atomic revolution before us will remain changes of the world, and not changes in the basic condition of human life on earth”. Like Arendt, I do not think that the changes wrought by technology, including the Internet, represent changes in the basic ontological condition of human life, although they certainly result in major changes in the way those conditions are realized. The Internet, and associated issues regarding information and communication technologies more generally, is something I have written about in a few places (for instance, in the essay I published in 2000 titled ‘Acting at a Distance And Knowing from Afar: Agency and Knowledge on the World Wide Web’, and also in some of my recent work on cultural heritage). Given the possible implications of new technologies for thinking about place, this is an area of inquiry into which I am constantly being drawn.

One final comment: so far as contemporary changes in the academic world are concerned, it seems to me that the changes being wrought, at least in Australasia, the United Kingdom, and in much of Europe, are probably less directly to do with the Internet as with the subordination of the academy to the interests and directions of government. Previously this was something we were only familiar with from the centrally-planned regimes of the communist world. But now thinking (along with teaching) has itself become an industry, regulated, not by the requirements of thinking as such, but by contemporary audit and assurance practice, and according to national research priorities and party political interest. The effect this is having on contemporary academic work is pretty disastrous, and it is amazing that, as academics, we have generally been fairly passive in the face of these changes. Indeed, in many ways, we have ourselves assisted in the undermining of the qualities and structures (including the values and modes of conduct) that have shaped the academic professions, that have formed us as researchers, thinkers and teachers, and that have been essential in enabling and fostering to the pursuit of knowledge (especially qualities such as dissent, diversity, independence, and self-directness). For many of us who are committed to what Arendt calls ‘the life of the mind’, this is an enormously dangerous and depressing development.

Your philosophical topography manages to take the best from both the analytic and continental traditions. Do you think we tend to overplay the division to the detriment of philosophy outside of the academy?

I am not sure if the division is very much noticed outside of the Academy, and it certainly doesn’t seem to figure very much (if at all) in the popular philosophy books that abound nowadays. Is the distinction overplayed? I am not sure that it is, and in fact, it seems to me that the tendency to downplay the division that also crops up increasingly now is often associated with the privileging of analytic philosophy – thus good continental philosophy comes to be the continental philosophy that is done by analytic philosophers. In fact, whatever the real philosophical differences that underpin the division, the most salient fact about it is probably the way in which it works out or is expressed politically. The division between analytic and continental often has a very real and direct impact in terms of hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, in funding allocations, in the ranking of departments and schools, and in Faculty, University and sometimes Government policy frameworks. I think this is extremely unfortunate, especially given the vigour with which so many of our colleagues seem to pursue the goal of what often seems to be little more than a form of philosophical Puritanism. Moreover, from my own experience on grants bodies and elsewhere, the antagonism that exists between different modes of philosophising, while not often noticed outside the Academy, is frequently a source of significant damage to the discipline from within. Philosophers are thus sometimes seen as incapable of getting their own house in order, and as more concerned to preserve their own sense of the rigour of the discipline (no matter how partial that may be), than to protect and further the interests of the discipline as a whole. I think this is a most distressing situation, and one that doesn’t show any obvious signs of changing (in spite of the rhetoric of inclusion and diversity that occasionally rises to prominence).

You have three works forthcoming, but I’d like to focus on ‘The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies’. What can we expect from this work and does it represent a kind of culmination of a ‘topological turn’ in contemporary philosophy i.e. that as an edited collection there are now enough topological thinkers to warrant such a project?

I have had a longstanding interest in the issue of landscape and was especially taken by Ed Casey’s 2002 book on the subject, Representing Place. I certainly wouldn’t say that The Place of Landscape is the culmination of a topological turn, but it might constitute one expression of that turn. There can be no doubt that there are now a number of thinkers across a range of disciplines who are taking up the notion of place in various ways. Not just Ed Casey or myself, nor even pioneers such as Edward Relph and David Seaman, but many others (some of whom have themselves been working in the area for a very long time) including, to cite just a few examples, scholars like Nick Entrikin, Philip Sheldrake, Keith Basso, Stuart Elden, Anna Godlewska, David Morris, and Deborah Bird Rose. Unfortunately, not too many of them are in philosophy – or at least, not in mainstream English-speaking philosophy, where place, if it is addressed at all, is too often treated as an almost entirely secondary phenomenon of little or no interest in its own right. The aim of The Place of Landscape is to address the connection between place and landscape. It brings together a number of writers from quite different disciplinary backgrounds (the range of disciplines represented includes philosophy, geography, art history and theory, environmentalism, anthropology, film theory, garden history, landscape studies, literature, and theology) in order to explore the idea of landscape in its positive as well as its more negative aspects, and to set out a way of viewing landscape as itself one of the ways in which place is formed, and also, therefore, one of the modes of our own self-formation.

The other two edited works that I have currently in press – Consequences of Hermeneutics (with Santiago Zabala) and Dialogues with Davidson – are not topographical in their primary orientation, as your own focus on The Place of Landscape might indicate, but they do represent two important areas that, at least as I see matters, connect closely with matters of place and topography. Hermeneutics is itself essentially attuned to a topographical perspective and mode of approach (something evident in both Heidegger and Gadamer’s emphasis on hermeneutic situatedness), while I view Davidson as, like Heidegger, a thinker whose work should also be understood as constituting a form of topology or topography in its own right (a reading that I have of course developed in books like Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, as well as in a number of subsequent essays – it is also one of the themes of Triangulating Davidson). I might mention two other directions in which my work is also moving. One is the engagement with ethics that I briefly discussed earlier, which not only takes issue with certain ethical critiques of place-oriented thinking, but which also looks to understand ethics in a topographic fashion, and so also in terms of our concrete ethical engagement. The other focuses around something I am staring to refer to as ‘romantic materialism’, and that is concerned to explore and articulate the conjunction between certain themes evident in romanticism (broadly construed) and the emphasis on the material placedness that is also part of topographic thinking, This conjunction is evident, in a particularly intriguing way, it seems to me, in the work of people like Peter Akroyd and Ian Sinclair, as well as in the thinkers, writers and artists to whom their work is related (Machen, Blake, Nash and others), or that are part of the same contemporary constellation (Moorcock, for instance, or Patrick Keiller), although it also extends to a much wider body of material, including writers such as W. G. Sebald and also Walter Benjamin, Proust as well as Heidegger, and that is often more artistic and literary than explicitly philosophical (Benjamin is an especially interesting figure in this regard). This work is very much geared to issues concerning the connections between narrativity, memory and place, and the realisation of memory and identity in concretised, material forms.

Although there are people working in cultural theory, cultural geography, and at the edges of philosophy on some of these themes – mostly around notions of collective memory, nostalgia and loss, objects and identity – much of this work tends to be weak in terms of its conceptual articulation or its philosophical or theoretical foundation (sometimes explicitly eschewing such foundations), or else assumes (often in ill-defined ways) a constructionist or even subjectivist perspective. Part of what motivates me here is to find a way of integrating an otherwise disparate range of materials concerning issues of landscape, the materialised forms of memory, the role of story (often understood in terms of movement and journey) in the formation of self, the interconnection of the poetic and the placed, the role of the image and the working of art, the embeddedness of mythic, religious and imaginative forms in sites and pathways (both urban and non-urban, in the indigenous thinking of country, and in European folk traditions and stories, and even in fairy-tales – Marina Warner’s work comes to mind here). My aim, in short, is to explore the interplay between the ‘romantic’ (in the sense that this might be applied even to Benjamin’s work) and the ‘material’ (where this refers us to an emphasis on the concrete actuality of the things around us, and to our own embodied, situated mode of existence). Place, of course, is the term that draws this together, since, on my account, place is the materialisation of the romantic and the romanticized form of the material.