Daniel Whistler

Most people will recognize his name as part of the due (along with Anthony Paul Smith) responsible for After the Postsecular and Postmodern, but a link post on AUFS today pointed me to his website. Needless to say a website that includes links to articles on an applied reading of Grant's Schelling qua geology of divine names, reviews of Maimon, and translations that include Schelling's early letters to Hegel is, in essence, the best of all possible websites. A mini-treasure trove. The down side is that having discovered Whistler I now feel I should just sit back and watch his career unfold and leave him to it.

SEP-FEP 2011 CFP

This looks pretty good and I am hoping that my academic world is sorted out enough by the deadline that I can submit an abstract.


The Society for European Philosophy and
The Forum for European Philosophy
Joint Conference 2011

York St John University, York, UK
31st August-3rd September 2011


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Joan Copjec (University at Buffalo)

Graham Harman (American University, Cairo)

Michèle Le Doeuff (Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, Paris)


CALL FOR PAPERS/CONTRIBUTIONS
*****
The Society for European Philosophy (SEP) aims to provide a forum for research and teaching in all areas of European philosophy, broadly construed. It provides an opportunity for scholars from any country, and any discipline, to come together and share ideas. The Forum for European Philosophy (FEP) seeks to bring philosophical ideas to the attention of a wider public audience. Since 1997, the SEP-FEP conference has been an important annual event for students and scholars of European philosophy throughout the world.
*****

“PHILOSOPHY &….”


In a year when the UK has seen devastating cuts in the funding of the arts and humanities, it would be easy to be pessimistic about the future of Continental Philosophy. Yet, while reflection on the challenges ahead is certainly necessary, recent events also offer us the opportunity to respond to those who dismiss European Philosophy, not only with a vigorous defense, but also a demonstration and celebration of the profound impact it has had and continues to have on an enormous range of other disciplines.

So, while this year’s conference follows recent tradition in not having a theme, and thereby welcomes proposals from the broadest range of European philosophical thought, we particularly welcome papers and other contributions that explore the limits of what can be placed together with, and within, the category of philosophy.


“PHILOSOPHY &….” is here offered as an opening onto the interdisciplinary terrains upon which European philosophy engages, provokes, interrupts and enriches (as it, in turn, is engaged, provoked, interrupted and enriched by them):


….politics; visual culture; performance art; art practice; architecture; literature; music; film/video; theatre; dance; science; feminism; cultural studies; psychoanalysis; and much more….


Anyone interested in presenting a paper, proposing a themed panel, or offering a different type of contribution, should submit a one page abstract to Gary Peters: g.peters@yorksj.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is May 6th, 2011. Please include your name, affiliation (if any, and please note that we wish to encourage proposals from independent scholars), your email and postal address. Decisions regarding the programme will be made by June 3rd.

Toward a Heideggerean [sic] Eco-Phenomenology

News that Inquiry has a special issue on Naess reminded me of my first published article back from 2007 called Toward a Heideggerean Eco-Phenomenology. It might be of interest to people working on green stuff from a Heidegger angle or it might plain amuse people that I wrote it. I actually used to avoid mentioning it for quite some time espcially as I was seeking to distance myself from a focus on green philosophy but when I was reminded about it today I realized it is likely not as bad as I imagined. You can sign up to read it all or else I can send it to anyone as a PDF by email.

Tallis on Meillassoux's Great Outdoors

The title caught my eye for obvious reasons and lo and behold it is on Meillassoux. Tallis argues that the return to the great ideas is among the top 50 ideas of the century. I'd agree. Tallis is an old realist of course and someone I've always respected for his humanist-realist perspective which is most likely where I fit on the spectrum. His Enemies of Hope had a profound effect on me as an undergrad with its neo-Enlightenment vision. Also it is worth noting that Tallis has also been a medical doctor fitting nicely into Robert Jackson's recent queries concerning non-academic professions and academics stances.

The Warmest Years on Record

Just a pointer to another (brief) post over at Celsias. It is strange how a word can shift its meaning so much depending on context - in the article I use the word correlation a lot and so innocently!

Speculative Turn review

Great review here.

But I really just wanted to point out this wonderful line which captures perfectly the experience of moving from correlationism to speculative realism:

After decades of critical engagement with sign, text, discourse and culture, the shift of focus to the real is like switching morphine for adrenaline. - Joshua Mostafa

Yep!

Climate Change and the Intensification of Extreme Weather

This is my first non-academic piece in a while. Although I have often discussed my mostly non-political stance from time to time on here I do take an interest in green/climate change issues. Sadly my thesis meant that writing went on hiatus. I'll be writing one feature a week with celsias if possible and more writing will be popping up elsewhere as I attempt to find my non-academic voice again (not as easy as it sounds - my writing in that piece suffers from jargon but I hope to cut that down over the weeks). Comments are welcome and it would be great to get some discussion going over there.

Continental Realism Cover

In my mind this book was going to be blood red but Zero went for blue. They were right, but you'll need to read to book to see why...

[If anyone has somewhere I can host the full PDF cover do let me know - blogger does not have this option]

Continental Realism to the printers (plus endorsements)

So I just received an email from Zero that Continental Realism is off to the printers. I think those who have read it so far seemed to have enjoyed it and I did manage to secure two endorsements that should give readers some idea of what to expect:

'Paul J. Ennis has given us the first general overview of the theses of After Finitude, and of their reception in the Anglo-American philosophical field. The theses in question - speculative and correlationist - are here exposed with clarity and fidelity. An indispensable introduction to speculative realism.'
- Quentin Meillassoux, Le Département de philosophie, École normale supérieure

'In its brief compass Ennis’s book gives a lively, sympathetic though critical account of a newly emergent movement of thought - speculative realism - that looks set to transform received ideas of what counts as “continental” philosophy.'
- Christopher Norris, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

All that is left now is the cover and so I imagine that the book might be released around March just in time for my viva. From then on I'll finally be in a position to defend something recognizable as my own stance.

Three new blog links

Just added three new blog links that have cropped up on my radar recently. The first is Hilan's No Border Metaphysics, the second is Dark Chemistry and the final one is Being's Poem. These are all impressive blogs and you may lose an hour or two searching through their archives.

On the Undermining of Objects III

Just a brief look at this essay today leading up to the section on Bruno.

Harman sees the difference between his position and Grant’s as hinging on just one disagreement, but it is ‘decisive one’ (ST, 27). Harman claims that Grant has a generalized problem with ‘objects per se’ and this is to say that whatever similarities they might share they disagree on the core issue as far as Harman is concerned (ST, 27). In Grant’s parlance OOO veers too close to somatism (the philosophy of bodies) and so defends, as Harman puts it, a ‘pre-somatic dynamism’ (ST, 27). Again this translates in contemporary terms, and Grant will make the connection explicit himself, with something akin to the Deleuzian virtual (but having a much longer lineage as Harman shows). Much of Grant’s response will hinge on the virtual as anterior and productive or potent. In what is one of Grant’s more striking stances somatism is a form of idealism such that Aristotle and Kant are on the same idealist nexus (since Aristotle defends individual substances or bodies) and in many ways the issue will be that object oriented philosophy, as a stance sympathetic to Aristotelian substance, belongs to that lineage. It boils down to the very positing of objects or of substances. This equates for Grant to the positing of an instance or phenomenal manifestation (hence the ‘idealism') that ought not to serve as the basis of a global physics (of metaphysics).

It is for Grant the never articulated, never manifested dynamic nature that counts and as Harman sees this stance as belonging to the strategy of undermining objects. In Grant’s immanentist account the phenomenal exists along the same plane of nature as its product i.e. the phenomenal sphere is the manifestation of the dynamic virtual nature that is metaphysically potent in the Schellingian-Deleuzian sense. This is worth mentioning because Harman sees Grant’s ‘most crucial metaphysical decision’ as the identification of ‘all specific entities with the phenomenal sphere’ (ST, 30). In other words for Grant there can be no objects, no substances outside the phenomenal or ideal sphere and hence the crunch centres around the status of real objects - so when Harman claims that this single disagreement is decisive he means it!

Schellingian genesis

In a crucial point of connection Grant sides (albeit not explicitly) with Meillassoux’s ancestral argument claiming that ‘deep, geological time defeats a priori the prospect of its appearance for any finite phenomenologizing consciousness’ (PNS, 6). In fact Grant locates the impetus behind Schelling’s need to overcome the Critical project precisely on this point: ‘…Schelling’s postkantian confrontation with nature itself begins with the overthrow of the Copernican revolution’ (PNS, 6). This geological connection between Grant and Meillassoux hinges on the uncomfortable fact of the Critical philosophy which is not simply that there were things before consciousness, but that we insist on the sense of what comes before as arising with us – that is the Critical philosophies elision of the genesis problem.

Hegel, as I argue in my thesis, was actually aware of this problem in his own way. The outstanding problem at the finale of the Phänomenologie is the passage of the Notion into consciousness and although this does not correspond precisely with the genesis problem as Schelling conceived it Hegel was at least aware that the genealogy of consciousness has its impersonal, not-I (not-Fichtean) species basis i.e. that geologically speaking the Notion was once autonomous or was Subject. Consider that for Hegel nature is the ‘last becoming [letzteres Werden]’ of Geist, ‘its living immediate Becoming [lebendiges unmittelbares Werden]’ and ‘externalized Geist [entäußerte Geist]’ (PDG, 563). The crucial, and admittedly mind-bending, twist occurs right in the final precarious moments prior to the emergence of history is that nature 'reinstates the Subject [das Subjekt herstellt]' (PDG, 563). This is the closing of the circle in Hegel’s phenomenologizing of consciousness that Grant in his own work attributes to Kant. Unlike the Žižekean reading for Grant it is not German Idealism per se that needs to be re-actualized but the logic of Schellingian genesis.

Speculations Reminder

Just a reminder that the Speculations Volume II deadline is tomorrow (Jan. 8th).

Speculations, a journal for speculative realist thought, invites submissions for its second issue. Given the intrinsically open and unconstrained nature of the arena for speculative thought which Speculations aims at embodying—and in view of the favorable reception of the inaugural issue—our aim is to broaden the range and ambition of the Journal. In accordance with speculative realism’s mandate to open philosophy to the richness of reality, we particularly encourage scholars to engage with speculative realism from disciplinary perspectives beyond philosophy. We therefore welcome papers discussing speculative realism’s renewed philosophical concern with the non-human world from a wide array of disciplines.

Speculations is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal that hopes to provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and ‘post-continental’ philosophy. Our aim is to facilitate discussion about ongoing developments within and around speculative realism. We accept short position papers, full length articles and book reviews.

Potential authors should make sure to go through the ‘Submission Checklist’ before submitting. Articles should be no longer than 8,000 words and follow the Chicago Manual of Style (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html).

The deadline for submission is the 8th of January 2011.

Submissions can be sent to speculationsjournal@gmail.com

Speculative Realist Culture

I'm just posting a few pages from a brief orphaned article I put together last year that was due to appear in Deleuze International but things fizzled out and I decided to pull the article as it was going stale. The reason it was going stale is that the article was a direct reaction to the Dundee speculative realism conference last year and makes little sense this far down the line with so many new publications and the coalescing of speculative realism around a general community that I was attempting to predict in the article. In the article I make the case for a speculative realist culture rather than a movement in order to offset the common accusation that speculative realism does not exist. I also discuss something of a generational shift between the original speculative realists and the graduate followers but this is a part of the argument I would rescind upon reflection.

I have just posted the first part of the article introducing SR and cut out the Deleuze part as I may get around to putting together an article on the topic at some future date. I had planned on making it a blog post but the best bits are in the footnotes and a PDF seemed the way to go.

Link here.

Contra Kant...

One of the great ironies of the Kantian Critical project is that it was so successful that it failed its main task i.e. to ground metaphysics. Is it not exactly the great heritage of the postkantian age that metaphysics is impossible? And how long before we stop trying to break through the great Kantian barrier? Even Deleuze felt the need to settle scores with his ‘enemy’ Kant even if he does so in a remarkably short and to the point overview.

The remarkable thesis of Grant’s book is that every time philosophy counteracts Kant it always has the exemplary project of Schelling to look back upon for inspiration – Schelling is the original ally or the first great antikantian. Each time the two-world thesis, and even the two-aspect thesis, is rejected, whether it is rejected in favour of immanence or a myriad of other standpoints, we follow in a Schellingesque lineage of dissent that rallies under the banner – contra Kant!

To undo the Kantian Critical project we find ourselves with many knots to untie. The Kantian corpus is nothing trivial.

On the Undermining of Objects II

So today I wanted to get onto the core of Harman’s essay which is the undermining-overmining distinction, and I should note that I think I may have made too much of the meaning of the radical-philosophy/radical-politics connections in the last post – see Graham’s remarks here. Once again my giving-up-smoking-and-feeling-disoriented caveat remains in place today.

That aside I think the biggest draw for me in this essay is how the relatively new OOO conceptual distinction between the two strategies deployed against objects emerges. We get a nice distinction between those strategies emphasizing the ‘something deeper’ thesis and those that seek what is happening in anything but the object itself – in ‘qualities, events, actions, effects, or givenness to human access’ (ST, 24). The former position has emerged in a lot of the recent continental realisms, but Harman will have more to say later on whether these purported realisms necessarily treat objects well or not. The latter position is good old fashioned anti-realism and corresponds to the big-C Continental philosophy we all know and love so well...


The first strategy of undermining objects, associated for the most part with contemporary continental realisms, is linked up in this article with Grant (& Bruno), and would include, I would wager, most of the Deleuzian-inspired neo-metaphysics that dominates the contemporary terrain (the virtual being an un-named example?). Overmining for its part encompasses a wide group from correlationists, idealists, relationists, Humeans, and to some extent even Meillassoux My general feeling is that Harman’s sympathies lie with the underminers rather than the overminers even if he does not subscribe to the basic ‘deeper primal whole’ thesis that underminers posit – and this is perhaps surprising since Harman’s object oriented philosophy is an attempt to rescue individual objects from their slow displacement within the tradition. But when you consider that he is attempting to rescue not some trade-off that looks to include the ‘power’ or ‘force’ of objects, but rather the objects themselves - the real deal with substances and all - then it becomes clear that overmining is actually a little more problematic in that it occludes objects and makes it seem as if there is no problem at all - the oversimplification process raised earlier (cf., ST, 24).

Harman sees Grant’s position and his own as the two most closely-aligned speculative realist stances in that both ‘have a tendency to treat the inanimate world as a philosophical protagonist, but not in a form that would be remotely acceptable to mainstream natural science’ (ST, 25). I take it that the first thesis could be said to hold for Brassier and Meillassoux and that what Harman sees as truly differentiating his and Grant’s positions is that they are both capital M Metaphysicians in the old style (where metaphysics is neither handmaiden nor non-rigorous speculation). In other words the weirdness that Harman wants to evoke as arbiter of philosophical merit will emerge from within metaphysics rather than appeal to the natural sciences or mathematics to gain some speculative intensity as Brassier and Meillassoux arguably do. The specific, less thematic points of philosophical agreement are their ‘uncompromising realism’ (and in a sense their antiKantianism) and their resistance to eliminitivism (scientific or otherwise). This boils down, I reckon, to what I would call their shared desire to revive the autonomy of metaphysics (global physics in Grant’s parlance). This leads us up to page 27 where Harman introduces his minor, but decisive disagreement with Grant’s project and so we will leave things here for the moment.

On the Undermining of Objects

I’ve started to make my way through The Speculative Turn and have so far managed to read the introduction and the opening of Graham Harman’s article ‘On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy.’ Again I am moving in slow motion these days so these are just my feelings up to page 24 or so. I hope to do small updates each day. I am trying to give up the ciggies too so please excuse the somewhat formal tone as these are just notes that might be of use to someone.

The article is, of course, a defence of objects which Harman defines as follows: ‘By ‘objects’ I mean unified entities with specific qualities that are autonomous from us and from each other’ (ST, 22). Also useful is the list of positions opposing this definition of objects ranging from correlationism, idealism, relationism, monism, and many others – the list is impressive and is evidence that Harman has really managed to think through the opposing theses to his own position. What unites them all is that the object always emerges from these positions as ‘nothing more than’ so and so (ST, 22-3). This ‘nothing more than’ Harman sees as the generalized method of discrediting objects and the list suggests that it is all-pervasive. Harman’s positive thesis is that a ‘counter-movement’ to this generalized method is ‘both possible and necessary’ and the counter-movement is directed against the opposition’s assumption that to think about individual objects is the very embodiment of antiphilosophy (ST, 24).

For Harman most of the opposing standpoints can be seen as positions beholden to the quality of radicalness. The quality of radicalness is the arbiter of what counts as the properly philosophical and what falls outside this is antiphilosophy. I have the utmost sympathy for this position although I suspect it will prove unpopular especially among those unwilling to allow for apolitical philosophies. But more than this I imagine the attack on 'radical' will be seen as an attack on the 'Left'* rather than what I suspect it is - the radical conflation of the Critical philosophy with Philosophy as such. This is how I read it when Harman suggests that we should aim to swap our most desired quality of radicalism for weirdness. What then becomes striking about radical philosophy is its radical un-weirdness, or, in my own eyes, its modest-all-too-modest stance qua the theoretical sciences or even other humanities disciplines regarding the range of the real that it is allowed to speculate on.

*to be clear I suspect this is the opinion that will be arrived at by a small cadre of readers intent on seeing OOO as a fad/too market-esque/etc. and not by most readers.

This modesty is bound up with an entire nexus comprising epistemological constraints stemming from the Kantian Critical project but bleeding into all areas wherein epistemological stalling is king and the spell of the normative never far off. Harman's critique of radicalism begins when he notes that all radical philosophy can be considered as ‘reductionist in character’ (ST, 24). This leads Harman to neatly signal that he means by this the manner with which reducing objects in some way or another is an oversimplification of the problem at hand - 'oversimplifying our work' (ST, 24). In other words the rigour that all stern epistemological stances seem to wear as evidence that theirs is the hard work covers over the fact that none of it takes the time to address the difficult metaphysical work of understanding objects which Harman takes as core but the point can be taken by anyone who accepts that objects have been neglected in some sense or another (whether under- or overmined).

I’ll stop here as it is at this point that Harman introduces these two crucial terms of under- and overmining objects and neatly allows us to think through the difference between the realist contemporary reaction to objects and the more traditional antirealist response with the latter being more common, but the former more pressing in SR circles.

Nature as Subject

One of the key insights of Iain Hamilton Grant’s book is that in the Kantian attempt to condition all that reason faces, objects in particular, one misses that all conditioning, all reasoning, is possible only through nature’s grounding – the precise nature of such grounding comprising a large chunk of what is to follow in his text. Schelling’s thesis, as Grant is keen is stress, is that mind and nature synchronize so well not by chance or coincidence, but because nature reveals itself in (or manifests) in thought along just the same lines as it reveals itself in other natural processes. It is a correspondence of the same impersonal universals ‘self-generated’ in nature. Mind and natural processes, to speak in the traditional disjunction, do not cross swords, but are boiled in the same pot. Schelling’s thesis, a thesis contra Kant and Fichte, is that there is no need for an ‘I’ to explain the construction of universals so long as one accepts that nature or the physical can do the same job. To rub salt into the wound Schelling will stress that if one thinks this process according to the strict impersonal passage that brought it to light it is best thought of as the accomplishment of the species (i.e. not-I).

This leads to the elephant in the room – to what extent is Schelling positing a naturalist or physicalist stance as they are now understood? This would seem to lead to an inverted conditioning albeit now rather than the subject conditioning objects, nature, or the outside the subject would be internally sutured and so conditioned according to its neurophysiology. According to Grant Schelling’s position is distinguished from contemporary naturalism or physicalism because, in keeping with the logic of the consistent un-conditioning, nature can itself be considered a subject. According to the logic of German Idealism to be a subject is to be autonomous. Nature is for Schelling autonomous, Subject.

Twenty-First Century Heidegger Photos

Just noticed that the photos of the Heidegger conference by Babette Babich are now online. Features a whole bunch of Heideggerians in various states of debate!

Here.