ahb

Reminder: CFP Aesthetics in the 21st Century (Basel, Sept. 2012)

2011-11-14T18:13:00.000Z

Reminder of the deadline for the Basel conference:

I am pleased to announce the details for the forthcoming Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference taking place in Basel in September 2012. Our confirmed speakers should make it a strong event and I think it presents a real chance for all of us working in this area to come together. Basel is a beautiful place and the campus is the perfect venue for philosophy. Please circulate widely.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Aesthetics in the 21st Century
University of Basel
September 13-15, 2012

Confirmed Speakers: Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, N. Katherine Hayles

Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence as evidenced by recent works by major contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy (Muses II), Jacques Rancière (Dissensus; Aesthetics and its Discontents) and Alain Badiou (Handbook of Inaesthetics). In this vein, aesthetics does not merely designate a discipline concerned with theories of art, but more fundamentally the primacy of sensation and sensual encounter itself.

Even though these recent developments return to the work of the canonical authors, some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology (Baumgarten, Kant) and theorize sensation and the sensual encounter in terms of ontology instead (Harman, Shaviro). It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as ‘first philosophy’ and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism sensual encounter becomes an event that even no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of entities and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

In this speculative realism has several important twentieth-century precursors, most notably Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze and Badiou with their respective concepts of event, (aesthetic) experience and encounter. This conference explores the resonances between these twentieth-century thinkers and their concepts and the recently reawakened interest in aesthetics, especially in its speculative realist guise. Hosted by the University of Basel’s Department of English the conference is particularly interested in the possible implications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics for literary and cultural studies. Thus, the conference aims at staging a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.

Please send your 300-word abstracts and 150-word bios to: aesthetics-englsem@unibas.ch.

The deadline for submissions is December 5, 2011. A selection of the papers given at the conference will be published as a special issue of Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism.

Conference Organizers:
Ridvan Askin, M.A.
Andreas Hägler, M.A.
Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser
Department of English
University of Basel
Nadelberg 6
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
ridvan.askin[at]unibas.ch
andreas.haegler[at]unibas.ch
ph.schweighauser[at]unibas.ch

Paul Ennis
UCD School of Philosophy
Newman Building
Belfield
Dublin 4
Ireland
ennis.paul[at]gmail.com

Website
http://aesthetics.englsem.unibas.ch/conference/

Speculations has a new home at Punctum

2011-11-14T16:51:00.004Z

We'll now be publishing Speculations with Punctum so the journal will be available there rather than on Lulu. Punctum is worth checking out in general and is also the home of O-Zone, the journal of object oriented ontology.

Cosmic Pessimism, Speculation, and the Unhuman part 1

2011-11-08T11:32:00.001Z

I’ve noticed quite a few people are reading Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet at the moment. I gave it a quick download on the Kindle, and read it, more or less, straight through. It’s a wonderful piece of work and quite different from his previous book After Life which I found more difficult to get through if only because the book deals with a lot of material I am unfamiliar with.

His latest is a different beast; it talks about demons, black metal, speculation, a little philosophy, a little theology, and is outright fascinating in general. The book certainly has elements of the pessimistic style of recent continental realisms and the arguments are broadly in line with the less merry strands of 'speculative realism'. But mostly it’s a book about the un-human.

What I really like about the book is how it refuses to defang the weird in order to make appease these very same forms. Thacker’s book also has that cosmological edge that I personally find interesting (and that I see more and more through Land’s vision). This doesn’t mean that Thacker spends his time discussing cosmology, but rather that there is a cosmic pessimism that seems to run throughout his work.

Life, a key word for Thacker of course, comes across in this text as a shared zone of immanent pain, but it’s not a miserable text. What drives his interest in the un-human, as hinted it in his choice of quotations, is more a devotion to nothing, or nothingness in a similar fashion to the ‘un-thinged’ of Schelling (raised from the dead by Grant), the impersonal wills of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Land’s obsession with entropic imagery (that crops up toward the end of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound too).

In all these thinkers, Thacker included, there is an attempt to break the endless variations on philosophy as concerned with the peculiar ‘destiny’ of symbolic thinking. We know that the post-Kantian philosopher-subject has traditionally taken this to necessitate a way of thinking about thinking.

Leaving Thacker aside his book got me thinking a little about the meaning of the various continental realisms, and their almost oedipal relation to Kant. Except to do that one has to ignore all the counter-revolutions to Kant that have already taken place.

On the edges of the tradition one can already find interesting thinkers pondering the nature of thinking-subjects as they exist in their not-quite-at-home situation amidst an indifferent and alien cosmos (the ‘cold world’ as Dominic Fox puts it).

The thinkers attuned to cosmologically-inspired pessimism tend to think about human consciousness as an ‘error,’ or ‘aberration,’ and, to borrow from Žižek, one begins from this perspective with the assumption that when it comes to the human ‘something went terribly wrong.’

In thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Land, what went wrong was the emergence of an entity that quite simply knows too much.

These despondent cosmological visions have a strange lineage, and it’s not just the non-anthropocentric metaphysics revived by thinkers such as Deleuze, but there’s even a bit of the whole grand-error narrative holding over from Heidegger. This is why I tend to characterize continental realists as inverted Hegelians.

They try to think ‘Hegel without hope’ which means to bleed his vision of any theological or onto-theological comfort (the latter being nothing more than comfort within reason). So you still have the problem of the wound of subjectivity, but it’s a cosmic, perhaps even comic, burden in that it ultimately leads nowhere; there’s no answers – just the horrible realization, so wonderfully brought to bear by Land, that philosophy is just plumbing the depths of unknowing.

Whereas thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer found a little solace in art, great figures, or poetry the contemporary cosmological pessimist is hermeneutically doomed to know that everything tends toward dissipation; everything desires to become a zero-sum. It’s a pitiless Universe all the way down, and there’s not even the memory of a receding gift to cling to (not even the Greeks can save us now…)

From the Ripper to M. R. James (and beyond)

2011-10-30T14:28:00.006Z

[Sorry for the lack of links, but Blogger is acting funny]

I just managed to finish my Jack the Ripper paper for the P.E.S.T. event in Dublin (November, 20th), and it has inspired me to get around to a few projects I had put on the back-burner due to my thesis. Writing a thesis is great in many ways; you get into a subject in a way that doesn’t seem possible again until you reach the exalted status of Professor on a sabbatical (or, if you are fortunate, land a research-oriented post-doc).

First among these projects is a piece on M.R. James. The Ripper paper is a work-in-progress. I’m under no illusions that it is a coherent piece as it stands, but I need to test it out to see where the gaps are, and so it’ll require a few conference outings. That said the core of a paper is hidden in there somewhere. I think Helvete are planning on making an issue from the P.E.S.T. event so I’ll have time to do that I am sure.

But for now I am focusing on writing a little something on M.R. James. Dylan Trigg tweeted a nice review of the collected ghost stories of James the other day from the Telegraph, and it reminded me of a long-repressed desire to engage with James in some way. I still can’t figure out what I need to do here. The tales seem to call out for a phenomenological reading, but I suspect this has been attempted before.

What I really want to tackle in James is the how ‘tight’ the atmospheres he creates are. Not just in terms of the locales our protagonists end up in, but how psychologically resistant they tend to be to the other characters. Coupled with the shortness of the tales I’ve always been impressed by how James plays on the solitude of the reader (not that they can’t be read in groups, but they are best approached alone).

The other theme floating around my head with regard to James is his trick of making the invisible, or unimaginable, visible, or imagined. His stories often involve academics, or the academically-minded, with an interest in what we can characterize as ‘invisible’ interests; in the sense of being fascinated by not-quite material phenomena like language, the archaic, or dead cultures (although, in certain cases, our protagonist will find themselves engaging with the remains/ruins of some way of life that no longer exists).

That the moment of fear often corresponds to the making-present of a more tangible alien force is what is so jarring. Our heroes are forced to bear witness to what should not be. They certainly do want to find something, but they find something entirely different.

I often feel that our heroes have arrived at whatever small village they happen to be in precisely because they managed to push past boredom toward some niche interest, and in this way the stories feel like warnings not to be too curious.

In deciding to fulfil some long-held need to seek out a forgotten slice of arcane knowledge they often wind up out of their depth. What they discover is that their psychological defences are usurped by a random find; a seemingly innocent object that nonetheless draws them toward it. By unwisely deciding to be drawn-in they inadvertently evoke forces from the ‘outside.’

It is then only a matter of time, according to the logic of the tales, that the hero will ultimately be intruded upon; at first slowly, but eventually they are enveloped.

There is much for me to do here if I am to make a coherent piece out of all this, but that’s the aim for the moment. After that I intend to write something on the movie Aliens, but in between there is some work on Meillassoux to be done, the Heidegger volume, and Speculations too. So a busy time ahead.

O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies

2011-10-24T18:50:00.001+01:00

I'm sure you've all heard, but O-Zone just landed today. Looks great and a strong editorial board. Link here.

Systems Session: The Prince and the Wolf (Dublin)

2011-10-21T17:17:00.002+01:00

The moment I left Dublin became cool:

Next Systems Session: The Prince and the Wolf

After a shorter first meeting the Systems seminar group will begin in earnest on Nov. 2nd (2011) at the Gradcam building, (just off Thomas St.) and the next sessions this calendar year are Nov. 23rd, Dec 14th.

The general starting point of the seminar was “systems” thought of in connection with phenomenology, technology and the body. This has now expanded to include debates related to Speculative Realism/ Object Orientated Philosophy.

Specifically: as agreed, the key text this year will be the Harman and Latour debate in The Prince and the Wolf.

We’ll begin discussing this text at the next session and take things from there.

My 'Cosmos and History' article...

2011-10-14T16:12:00.005+01:00

...can now be found here alongside a whole bunch of interesting pieces (also worth checking out the back archives of C&H if you never have before). Am currently busy IRL on a trip back to Dublin, but can't wait to dive into the issue when I get back.

Me talking about Meillassoux over at Fractured Politics

2011-10-11T14:17:00.003+01:00

Kris Coffield was kind enough to interview me over at his blog Fractured Politics. I talk a little bit about my background, but it's mostly a discussion about Meillassoux.

Heidegger's Beiträge and Realism

2011-09-23T13:46:00.005+01:00

This post on (the late) Heidegger and his possible interest to speculative realists caught my attention [from the always worth-checking-out After Nature].

Like Leon I consider myself post-Heideggerian. I’m also a realist, and believe speculation has a function in philosophy (but I hold enough weird positions outside those two commitments that speculative realist dosen't quite fit). I actually called my general position ‘phenomenological realism’ for a time. I didn’t invent this, of course, and it was used by a range of less well-known phenomenologists that sought to counter-act the dominant strains of phenomenology. Even in that mainstream there are arguments for realism in Husserl, Heidegger, and even Derrida (Marder most recently, but similar arguments are found in Caputo and, to a lesser extent, Hägglund).

Depending on how one wants to see it phenomenological realism can be secured minimally as when Husserl and the early Heidegger accept transcendent actualities through the Kantian route of affectivity from outside the phenomenal realm – hyle as constraint. Or it can be secured maximally as in the approach exhibited in the later Heidegger and Derrida where some argue they are hyper-realists focused on the excess of the things themselves as indicating toward a donation that is 'in itself' more real than the mere real (here I thank Michael O’Rourke for showing me that such a reading of Derrida exists - a reading he discusses in an upcoming interview).

One has here a realism of the 20’s Heidegger and a realism of the 30’s Heidegger. In the twenties Heidegger is still very much in line with the Husserlian stance on the real, and this stance is, in turn, one faithful to the Kantian transcendental idealist stance on the real (especially as outlined in the anti-sceptical arguments of the‘Refutation of Idealism’ in the B Edition). In the thirties Heidegger has left the Kant of the B edition behind, and Kant becomes nothing more than a figurehead in the history of being, a conduit for the transmission of ontological presuppositions, and one enters the age of his maximal realism or hyper-realism.

I tend not to place too much emphasis on distinctions within the Heidegger literature, and am sometimes a little exasperated by the entire early/late, Kehre/post-Kehre discussions. I do think there is a split, but for me the one that matters is the transcendentalist/not-transcendentalist Heidegger, and he flits between them enough such that a chronological distinction is not quite appropriate. There are later texts of Heidegger that are similar to the overtly transcendentalist period (comprising SZ and the various Marburg lectures up until Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). Then again there are some early texts that show signs of his non-transcendentalist interests.

This also helps us to think about a different kind of distinction; and one I would call the publication/post-publication Heidegger. Heidegger did not publish many monographs, and the mere two we have are both early texts (and both transcendentalist ones). They are SZ and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the latter Heidegger admitted hinged on a misreading of Kant. It’s actually a fairly blatant misreading and argues nothing less than that we should emphasize the A edition, and try to ignore the B one. Only in the A edition, so the reading goes, is Kant authentic.

Then again, Heidegger published a lot of essay collections, and these are almost always non-transcendentalist texts. This is why Lee Braver’s introduction to the later Heidegger [my review] had to focus on a collection of translated texts. There is no magnum opus to compare to SZ in the later work. There have been attempts to create one, but none of them are convincing.

The Beiträge zur Philosophie or Contributions to Philosophy is one such text, and it was explicitly promoted as a second SZ, but due to its woeful original translation this never quite caught on. I don’t think it would have anyway. It’s not really a book, and it’s a really weird text. One of the weirder ones in a tradition where weird is actually acceptable.

It’s only a ‘book’ in so much as it belongs to the GA, but it is really a selection of Heidegger’s private notes, and a selection not intended for independent publication as a stand-alone text. One of the problems with the English translations of Heidegger is that they make it seem as if one is dealing with just that... It’s a little more complicated than this, but even more so with the Contributions. It’s more complicated because what we have is a workbook for ideas Heidegger was not quite able to articulate properly. It’s a place where he is airing out some of the more intuitive, fringe ideas he was having.

It’s also where he ceases to be a phenomenologist. I really don’t think something like ‘poetic phenomenology’ can exist and I think the ‘post-phenomenological inflection of High-Romantic poetics’ (J. Bate) can simply be called good old-fashioned High-Romantic poetics. I’m not exactly knocking it and I don’t think Heidegger himself presents his fringe thinking as pure phenomenological method after a certain period.

Leon tells us he has been ‘thinking about how much the speculative realist movement is indebted to working through the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and to a lesser extent, Merleau-Ponty.’ This is something, perhaps unsurprisingly, that has been on my mind ever since I first came across speculative realism, and I figured it might be worth posting up my final thoughts on the matter (since I intend to move into different areas of research…)

Leon is right that speculative realism has not really confronted the later Heidegger. I’m not sure it needs to, and I’m also not sure how indebted the non-OOO strands are to Heidegger anyway, or whether they commit themselves to such a confrontation in the first place.

Object-oriented ontology is certainly indebted to both Husserl (sensual objects) and Heidegger (tool-analysis-withdrawal-real objects), but neither Meillassoux nor Grant can be said to lean on phenomenology too much, perhaps at all. Meillassoux, in the SR roundtable, openly calls phenomenology a form of description (contra demonstration) – fine for the phenomenal world, but not quite of interest to him. Nihil Unbound has its Heidegger moment, but the Heidegger of Nihil Unbound is the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and Brassier seems content to find the resources he needs there.

Heidegger actually gets a rough deal in a lot of speculative realism. He emerges in Harman as a highly regarded influence, but one that failed to follow the logic of their own position to its proper end, and Harman has suggested there will likely be less Heidegger (and Husserl) in future books (with the emphasis shifting to the classics). I’ve made the point before that if OOO’s vision of reality is correct it existed with or without Heidegger, and ought to be potentially articulable free from Heidegger’s orientation. If this is the case there is no real obstacle to the development of an OOO that does not rely so heavily on either H or H.

Even if OOO has a phenomenological origin it intentionally violates enough phenomenological principles that I’m not sure what the Heidegger of the Contributions has to offer it. I could be wrong here and there is enough later Heidegger in Harman’s work (the fourfold for instance) to suggest that OOO might explore the later Heidegger in more detail, but I kind of hope it doesn’t go down this path.

For me the most interesting (and liberating) aspect of Harman’s reading of Heidegger is that he resists all the ‘post-phenomenological poetics’ and ambiguities that can be found in Heidegger’s more self-regarding texts – and we have to remember that this means thinking Heidegger free from the world-historical-thinking that the Contributions demands of us (that slight leaning towards Dasein is ever-present…)

So I would support, and I know some people find this sacrilege, Harman’s scorched earth policy on Heidegger – identify the brilliant insights and move on. Otherwise you may find yourself ‘echoing’ the empty apocalypticism that, as Heidegger himself notes, really ought only to be practised by the ‘ones to come’ that may only come in centuries…and you have to gamble that you just so happen to be one of the ones (I'd wager the proper ones are not Gestelling it up online).

Heidegger crops up in Meillassoux as a pretty straightforward correlationist and in After Finitude he stands in as a particularly blatant case of the correlationist’s need for over-explanation in relation to scientific statements (relating to his claims on Newton from his transcendentalist period in SZ and Basic Problems). In Grant Heidegger’s work on Schelling pops up from time to time, but the lineage he is attempting to trace is one that sneaks past Heidegger straight into Deleuze.

Leon points out that the attempt to surpass anthropocentrism in the mid-to-late Heidegger is something close to the speculative realist projects of overcoming finitude, democratic ontologies, thinking outside the correlationist circle (the non-human), and so on.

I’m not sure I *entirely* agree that Heidegger is attempting to ‘”non-humanly” think from within the real.’ I used to think Heidegger was some kind of immanent thinker because a lot of what I read really wanted Heidegger to be one - especially the eco-criticism and eco-phenomenology literature. But one can go all the way back to the earliest sourcebooks on deep ecology including the work of its founder Arne Naess (one of the first real 'broad' advocates of Heidegger's work).

In characterizing the Contributions as concerned with the real or as an immanentist project (to ‘think from within the real’ I suspect must be to think according to immanence?) we read it retroactively; or so I think. Heidegger was never, not even in his most poetic moments, a thinker of either immanence or the real, and I am sure he would consider both as metaphysically inspired approaches (onto-theologies in panpsychist or animist form). I am doubly certain he would dismiss speculative realism as fulfilling his project in any sense, and that it represents just another contribution from the ‘other end’ – the forgetting of being.

This points us to something important that sets the Heidegger of the Contributions in direct conflict with Meillassoux. Heidegger is fideistic thinker i.e. there is a residual theological aspect operative in his work, but it is a specific form of theology that emphasises ambiguity, mystery, or wonder as immanent to our world *as* gift or as donation.

I have no problem with the radical theologies found in thinkers such as Laurelle, process philosophers, and many others, but Heidegger is a different beast. There is good reason why Heidegger’s Contributions is such a foundational text within the postmodern theological turn found in thinkers such as Caputo, Kearney, and Vattimo.

'Beyng' remains in the Contributions a gift, a donation, and the sustaining role of Dasein remains in place (Francois Raffoul is especially good at reminding us how central Dasein remains in the later Heidegger).

The program of ‘being-historical-thinking’ is ours precisely because there is no being before Dasein (there are things, sure, but they were outside the history of being). It is this notion of originary event-as-gift to Dasein that puts Heidegger so much at odds with speculative realism. Heidegger is immune to the ancestral argument because his philosophy begins with that event, and the memory he traces is first registered there – there is no need to go behind it.

Certainly one finds in Heidegger an almost ecological openness emerging here – one that, I admit, is appealing for many reasons, but also one that is ultimately geared not toward the things-themselves, but to the possibility that in sustaining the right relation to them (Gelassenheit) they might shed some indirect light on what we are truly seeking – the ‘it gives.’ Maybe even, for the more dedicated, something of the promised next beginning might be...thought? encountered? glimpsed (in the blink of an eye)? It's hard to know.

There is more to be said on this. Not least on the connection between the last God, the ones to come, and Meillassoux’s own virtual God. But I think I’ll leave those for another post. And to Leon I realize I have not addressed your post in full, but I promise to do so soon.

P.E.S.T. Abstract: On the Internal Pest: Jack the Ripper as a not-so-alien Maniac

2011-09-19T17:52:00.003+01:00

Here is my abstract for the upcoming P.E.S.T. event in Dublin. Excited to attend such an event in my hometown. I'll also be posting a relatively long post on Heidegger in the coming days as I try to reboot the blog.

On the Internal Pest: Jack the Ripper as a not-so-alien Maniac
Paul J. Ennis

In his 1937 oddity ‘Jack the Ripper; or, When London Walked in Terror’ Edwin T. Woodhall claimed to have read a postcard dated September 9th, 1888 from the Ripper (the date, more or less, when people realized that something was up). The postcard likely never existed, but as a fiction (about a real crime consistently fictionalized) it at least resists the temptation to cast Jack as an outsider. The ditty in the postcard runs as follows;

‘I’m not an alien maniac, nor yet a foreign tripper, I’m just your lively, jolly friend, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.’

At the time of the crimes the list of Ripper suspects tended to be comprised of those on the margins: Polish Jews, foreign sailors, American psychopaths, menacing Irish rogues, and a whole host of outsiders. These were the ‘external’ pests of the day, but these suspects were likely designed to shield Londoners from a more startling possibility – the ‘internal pest.’ Jack was, I suspect, one such pest, but so too is the Unabomber, or the Zodiac, or even the early black metal scene and its attack on traditionalist Norwegian Christianity. In this paper I want to demonstrate a simple thesis; that the Ripper was the first contemporary internal pest, the first blip on the modern way of life, and a singular kind of blackening of the consciousness it has given rise to.

Post-Continental Voices and Writing

2011-08-28T19:13:00.002+01:00

Stuart Elden has a short post up on an interview he agreed to do a few years back on the blog that eventually morphed into the larger Post-Continental Voices project. PCV has been doing well and I've only ever had positive feedback on it. The strongpoint of the book is precisely the advice for graduate students when it comes to writing. Also featured in the book are Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv.

CFP Aesthetics in the 21st Century (Basel, Sept. 2012)

2011-08-28T19:04:00.004+01:00

I am pleased to announce the details for the forthcoming Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference taking place in Basel in September 2012. Our confirmed speakers should make it a strong event and I think it presents a real chance for all of us working in this area to come together. Basel is a beautiful place and the campus is the perfect venue for philosophy. Please circulate widely. Note that accepted papers will also appear in a special issue of Speculations.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Aesthetics in the 21st Century
University of Basel
September 13-15, 2012

Confirmed Speakers: Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, N. Katherine Hayles

Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence as evidenced by recent works by major contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy (Muses II), Jacques Rancière (Dissensus; Aesthetics and its Discontents) and Alain Badiou (Handbook of Inaesthetics). In this vein, aesthetics does not merely designate a discipline concerned with theories of art, but more fundamentally the primacy of sensation and sensual encounter itself.

Even though these recent developments return to the work of the canonical authors, some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology (Baumgarten, Kant) and theorize sensation and the sensual encounter in terms of ontology instead (Harman, Shaviro). It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as ‘first philosophy’ and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism sensual encounter becomes an event that even no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of entities and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

In this speculative realism has several important twentieth-century precursors, most notably Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze and Badiou with their respective concepts of event, (aesthetic) experience and encounter. This conference explores the resonances between these twentieth-century thinkers and their concepts and the recently reawakened interest in aesthetics, especially in its speculative realist guise. Hosted by the University of Basel’s Department of English the conference is particularly interested in the possible implications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics for literary and cultural studies. Thus, the conference aims at staging a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.

Please send your 300-word abstracts and 150-word bios to: aesthetics-englsem@unibas.ch.

The deadline for submissions is December 5, 2011. A selection of the papers given at the conference will be published as a special issue of Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism.

Conference Organizers:
Ridvan Askin, M.A.
Andreas Hägler, M.A.
Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser
Department of English
University of Basel
Nadelberg 6
CH-4051 Basel
Switzerland
ridvan.askin[at]unibas.ch
andreas.haegler[at]unibas.ch
ph.schweighauser[at]unibas.ch

Paul Ennis
UCD School of Philosophy
Newman Building
Belfield
Dublin 4
Ireland
ennis.paul[at]gmail.com

Website
http://aesthetics.englsem.unibas.ch/conference/

Viva passed

2011-08-17T17:09:00.002+01:00

So after an intensely stressful session I passed my viva today albeit with minor corrections. Being the type I am I won't be happy until they are done and I see it all wrapped up, but my God that was an experience. Coolest moment: talking this and that with Iain Hamilton Grant on a bus!

PEST – Black Metal Theory Symposium (Dublin)

2011-08-15T16:33:00.001+01:00

Details here. Especially happy it is taking place in my home town. I'll be speaking on Jack the Ripper.

Speculations Volume III CFP

2011-08-09T13:32:00.001+01:00

Speculations, a journal for speculative realist thought, invites submissions for its third volume. Speculations is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal seeking 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 the emerging continental realisms. We accept short position papers, full length articles and book reviews.

Our aim in the third volume is to open up the problem of speculation as it pertains to areas as diverse as theology, politics, and queer theory. Papers addressing any of these three specific topics will be addressed in special sections of issue alongside our more traditional non-thematic articles.

Potential authors should make sure to go through the ‘Submission Checklist’ before submitting which can be found at: http://speculationsjournal.org

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 January, 8th 2012.
Submissions can be sent to speculationsjournal@gmail.com

Editors:
Paul J. Ennis, University College, Dublin
Michael Austin, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Fabio Gironi, Cardiff University
Thomas Gokey, Syracuse University
Robert Jackson, University of Plymouth

Writing Struggles

2011-07-25T19:22:00.006+01:00

I think this has been by far the longest period in a while I have gone without writing. The one thing I will say about being outside an academic institution for a bit is that the writing routine becomes doubly-impossible. I always imagined it would have the opposite effect and that being freed from the thesis would translate into some kind of general writing freedom, but alas that has not been the case. A big factor here has to be the fact that I am no longer reading as much as I used to. Fortunately I don't have many deadlines - in fact I have just the one biggie at the moment (SEP-FEP paper but this will be a riff on the one I've been refining at least since Basel and the other I am not sure what the deal is yet). This leads me to believe I may have reached a kind of philosophical impasse.

Perhaps this is normal after going through a relatively intense phase toward the end of my PhD when I discovered Meillassoux, Harman and from there on so many others. But I feel there won't be much new material coming from me for some time yet. I'm sitting on potentials articles on Heidegger, Hegel and a kind of Badiou/Deleuze piece (and one not-sure-what-it-is-piece that may find a home someday yet I don't think they will see the light of day - perhaps as blog posts?). This is somewhat correlated to discovering what writers have always told me - most articles, even books, disappear into some kind of black hole and you have to ask yourself what was it for? There is the pragmatic job-market answer but I think most of us see this as a bonus (should it work out) and it seems nobody would do it for this reason alone - after all what is the point of getting a job that allows you to teach/write if your heart was not in it anyway?

This coming year I am faced with a choice: whether to zero in on a few key texts and try write something in tandem with the text (a fruitful method I think) or else cease writing and focus on reading until the impulse to write arises again. An interesting offshoot of this is that since I don't have any proper writing deadline I don't need to use conferences papers as a way to help the writing process along. In the upcoming papers I may try work with notes. This is despite the advice, that I have taken on wholeheartedly, that a written paper is a useful shield (this being the lesson my supervisor Joseph Cohen would always mention). But if my brain is closing in on itself in terms of ideas it may be time to let loose a little.

Emmet O'Cuana reviews Continental Realism

2011-07-05T23:00:00.001+01:00

Link here.

I especially like the opening:

'When I saw that the author of this book was based in Dublin I got onto the philosophy student grapevine (translation – I sent a text) and within minutes had the full skinny on Paul J. Ennis. Ireland is a very small place. The social scene of former philosophy students is even smaller.'

True!

Robert Jackson on Eco-Tone

2011-07-03T15:55:00.004+01:00

Robert Jackson has an excellent post up on lessons he picked up at Eco-Tone. Personally I'm finding it impossible to filter the experience since I was exposed to an entire range of worlds that had previously been hidden from me. I'm glad Robert Jackson was there as one could not ask for a better bridge between theory and art. Not surprisingly the event made it clear to me that I need to buck up on my aesthetics asap albeit I am glad to know that those interested in aesthetics are not interested in showing you how much they know so much as how to get into the experience. This makes for a much more amenable experience than I am used to at workshops or conferences. So a few points:

1. I need to add some colour (audio and visual) to my papers such that I can free myself from relying on rhetoric. If you can make a few points and back them up with some experiental examples then the job is done. Plus it seems fairer on the audience. In other words I need to change how I practise philosophy.

2. I need to tone down how I speak about analytic philosophy. I did not mean to give such a harsh impression of it so much as point out that the non-combative nature of the event was in stark constrast to some analytic events I have seen. I think they do good work, but I remain eternally baffled by how harsh they can get with each other. Post-Ecotone that is more apparent to me than ever.

3. It is not fun to be woken up by a smoke alarm at 4am in the Premier Inn a few hours before you are due to give a paper...(!)

There is much more but my brain has been fried for a few days now (too many flights and not enough sleep) so I'll post up some more thoughts as things settle.

Gestell Living

2011-06-26T18:18:00.007+01:00

So I'm just finishing up a brief return trip to Dublin and remain shocked at the rapid pace with which Dublin seems to be disintegrating on some fronts (albeit improving slightly in some others).

It got me thinking a lot about Heidegger (from Freiburg to Dublin is from dwelling to Gestell...) and I managed to write up some notes for a possible Heidegger paper. I'm going to try incorporate it into an upcoming talk for a black metal conference happening in Dublin soon...details as I get 'em.

On that front it is worth noting I finally got to meet Michael O' Rourke and we managed to visit the Tool-Use exhibition exhibition here in Dublin. It was weird to see this happening at all since for a while I felt like the only person in Ireland with any interest in OOO.

Now things are happening quite a bit on that score and certainly on the aesthetics front. However the visit made me quite aware that I need to talk to artists a lot more. That being said it was nice to be able to talk to Michael about all this over a pint of Guinness. Hopefully Dublin can become a hideout for para-academic exiles.

Equally cool is that I will be able to attend the SEP-FEP conference in York (with none other than Graham Harman as a keynote) alongside two Irish academics - Francis Halsall and Tim Scott (even better is that there will also be two excellent continentalists from UCD there too). The panel is called Aesthetic Objects: Art and Object Orientated Philosophy (details here including abstracts) and my own paper is called More than Theory: On Speculative Realism and Aesthetics. It will be a hybrid of my Basel and Ecotone papers so I'm not sure how it will look by September, but I'm getting more relaxed about giving papers these days so I'm going to see how things pan out.

Tomorrow I head off to Nottingham for the Eco-tone event (schedule, abstracts) organized by the ever-helpful and forward-looking David Reid. My paper is called Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects and I am hoping that I can at least fulfil the minor role of discussing some OOO metaphysics before letting the properly interesting people show me what thinking the outside is really like. Since I'm on early in the morning I am going to be in a nice position to sit back and take it all in. I'm also getting to meet Robert Jackson for the first time and I'm certain I'll learn a thing or two from him. I'm also hoping I'll get to meet some of Nottingham theology crew again.

For now I need to relax a litte...my body took a lot of beating this week from all that booze!

Continental Realism out on the Kindle

2011-06-19T17:00:00.005+01:00

Just noticed Continental Realism has just been released for the Kindle. I'm just downloading it now, but as a Kindle convert I am quite happy about this. In a way it feels very much like a Kindle-generation book (it's compact and could feasibly be read on a longish train or plane trip).

Updated Academia.edu Page

2011-06-17T15:03:00.003+01:00

OK I just took a look at my academia.edu page and it seems I have not updated it in quite a while. I've added all the papers I have on file (one from a long time ago seems to have vanished from my hard-drive but is available online) and updated my CV to reflect new papers and articles. Link here.

Another Article - Copernican Metaphysics in 'Continent'

2011-06-17T11:10:00.003+01:00

Another article (these things always seem to happen around the same time) and this time it is on Copernican Metaphysics (PDF link on page). It appears in the second issue of Continent and I am a huge fan of the venture.

My early Heidegger article out in 'Thinking Nature'

2011-06-16T22:36:00.007+01:00

My article on 'What did the early Heidegger think about Nature' for Thinking Nature has just been uploaded. The rest of the issue looks awesome so do check it out.

Update: PDF Version for Download

Difficult Atheism Released

2011-06-09T11:44:00.003+01:00

Order here. Christopher Watkin was kind enough to let me read this a few months back just prior to submitting my thesis. I had wanted to make sure I was not covering too much of the same ground (esp. with Continental Realism which covers quite a bit of Meillassoux). As Graham Harman notes the book deals quite a bit with L’Inexistence divine which was the appeal for me as I had no other way, bar a miracle where suddently I learned French and could afford a research trip to France, to find out too much about it whilst also being able to quote someone on it. Anyway it's an awesome book. Do check it out.

Speculative Realism/OOO Workshop (Cyprus, 2012)

2011-06-01T10:59:00.001+01:00

Apropos the recent call for panel participants our proposal has been accepted for The 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. The SR/OOO panel will be included under Section V: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language. You can see the abstract and call for further participants here. So far we have 8 pledges, but more are welcome especially since the conference takes place in July 2012 and spots may open up again.

London Event: Object Oriented

2011-05-27T22:20:00.002+01:00

If you are in London this looks like an awesome event:

OBJECT ORIENTED

A conversation between art, philosophy and programming

Exhibition 4rd and 5th June
Opening Friday, 3rd June, 18h - 21h
Saturday and Sunday, 11h - 18h

Talks 4th June
11h00 - Introduction
11h10 - 11h50 Mark Sowden
12h00 - 13h00 Philip Jones (+ workshop)
14h30 - 15h10 Gisel Carriconde Azevedo
15h20 - 16h00 Hilan Bensusan
16h10 - 16h50 Tim Weston

Leighton Space
At 3 Leighton Space, Kentish Town, NW5 2QL
http://www.leightonspace.org.uk/

Continental Realism released in the US

2011-05-27T20:17:00.004+01:00

OK so today is the 'official' release date for Continental Realism (Amazon US link) although it has been available on Amazon UK and others sites for a couple of weeks now. It seems there is already only 1 copy left in stock! This is presumably good news, but you can also buy it on sites like The Book Depository aswell which has free worldwide shipping. So far the responses have been good although I have been too scared to read my copy.

You can pick up both Continental Realism and Post-Continental Voices together for a reasonable price. Sales of the latter have been picking up again now that CR is out and again there is not a huge amount of stock on Amazon but it can be picked up in a lot of places at this stage.

Seeing Through Objects event

2011-05-26T13:31:00.002+01:00

Seeing Through Objects: a group discussion in the context of Corban Walker’s exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Organised by MA Art in the Contemporary World, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland and MA: Art and Process, Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. Lead by Francis Halsall, Lucy Dawe Lane and Declan Long

Irish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Sat. June, 4th, 2011, 11am-12.15pm

What kind of object is Corban Walker’s Please Adjust?

For the Irish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Corban Walker has created a large-scale sculpture composed of 160 inter-connected open-framed stainless-steel cubes. As the exhibition statement describes, it is an art object in which many elements ‘combine to form a fragile structure that supports itself, though one alteration could destroy the existing configuration and create a new one’. Whilst appearing fixed, Please Adjust is also precarious, and though physically transparent it is, also, quite deliberately, not ‘clear’.

Using Please Adjust as a context, this discussion will explore multiple theoretical and historical approaches to definitions of, and encounters with, objects. What is at stake here is identifying the focus of aesthetic attention — in other words, how do theories of objects impact on the theories, practices and experiences of art?

The multiple, transient, performative and dematerialized forms that art objects have taken after modernism and since the late 1960’s demonstrate how the problems in defining what an object is are exemplified in the context of art. This historical moment is still with us. At the very least it is now taken for granted that an art object is not definable as a discrete, material thing that is independent from its situational and historical context(s).

However, relatively recent discussions of what Graham Harman has called both Object Orientated Philosophy and Speculative Realism offer the promise of ‘adjusting’ how objects are considered within contemporary art discourse. As Harman has claimed, “the dithering agnosticism of recent philosophy, its obsession with tedious questions of human access to the world, can be replaced by a high rolling metaphysics of objects. The spirit of the archive can be replaced by that of the casino”. (from Towards Speculative Realism, Zero Books, 2010). This means not only to address how art as a practice of object making constructs complex, relational objects but also how such objects might engender and demonstrate certain forms of thinking about the world.

This discussion will build on the recent series of presentations on the subject of ‘What is an object?’ lead by the MA Art in the Contemporary World in response to Richard Tuttle’s exhibition Triumphs at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Spring 2011. It also follows from a previous MA ACW session at the Irish Pavilion at Venice in 2009.

All are welcome to attend this discussion. Please get in touch if you would like to participate.

Contact: Francis Halsall (halsallf@ncad.ie); Lucy Dawe Lane (lucy.dawe-lane@cit.ie); Declan Long (longd@ncad.ie; twitter: @declanlong).

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of Corban Walker, Eamon Maxwell, and Jennifer Marshall in the staging of this event.

The Irish Pavilion at Venice is located at the Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà, 3703 Calle della Pietà, Castello. Calle della Pietà is mid-way between Piazza San Marco and the Arsenale, off Via Riva degli Schiavoni.

http://www.acw.ie ; http://media.cit.ie/maap/; http://www.irelandvenice.ie/

Some more details about the Eco-Tone event

2011-05-25T16:17:00.001+01:00

from the page:

We are pleased to announce participants for Eco-tone 1. Main day is 28 June. The live exhibition Calendar Variations happens the evening before. Venues for both events will be at Nottingham Trent University City site...[list of participants at the link]

Call for SR/OOO Panel Participants

2011-05-24T18:09:00.008+01:00

I was just put on to, via Tziovanis Georgakis and Christos Hadjioannou, this conference being organized by Marianna Papastephanou and Ezra Talmor called The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy. The keynote speaker is none other than Irish philosopher Richard Kearney.

I've been told that if we manage to get a panel proposal in before the deadline before May 31st it will be possible to have a speculative realism/object oriented/new realism workshop. We would need roughly 8-10 people who would be broadly interested (abstracts welcome, but not expected so close to the deadline). If you are interested you can either comment here, email me, or drop a line on twitter/facebook and I'll see what I can arrange. There are no travel funds sadly.

EcoTone 1: Object, Space and Entanglements

2011-05-14T20:44:00.003+01:00

Robert Jackson has just posted up the details of an event I'm very excited to be attending. I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and being exposed to some properly creative people. Here is the abstract for my own paper:

Melancholic Coexistence amongst Objects

Paul J. Ennis

Timothy Morton, in his recent article ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,’ has set in motion a discussion of the implications for humans once the object-oriented perspective is taken into account. Against the ‘aesthetics of dejection,’ to borrow a phrase from Dominic Fox, the melancholia in question is to be differentiated from the humbling of the human one finds in other strands of speculative realism. This melancholia arises precisely because one gains a glimpse of a reality that churns below – this being the reality described in the metaphysics of Graham Harman. In this paper my intention is to demonstrate how the melancholia exhibited in object-oriented ontology, and this melancholia remains always in tension with the object-oriented celebration of objects, is better suited to addressing ecological crisis than the standpoint of dejection offered to us by the other variants of speculative realism.

Continental Realism back in stock (Amazon UK)

2011-05-14T16:30:00.004+01:00

Just an update that there are now more copies of Continental Realism on Amazon UK - at the moment there are 9. You can get the book elsewhere but I know a lot of people tend to stick with Amazon for various reasons. I'm in the odd situation where a number of my friends have copies before I do. This is not to say that I looking forward to it arriving. It may be a while before I will be able to summon up the courage to read it.

Speculations II Out

2011-05-05T09:50:00.005+01:00

Speculations II has just gone live. It is available in a bunch of formats thanks to our wonderful designer Thomas Gokey. I think the journal speaks for itself so do go and check it out. I want to extend a big thanks to the team - Thomas again and also Michael Austin and Fabio Gironi.

Basel Talk 'Speculative Realism and Aesthetics'

2011-05-03T17:00:00.008+01:00

Here is a link to the details for a talk I will be giving in Basel on the topic of Speculative Realism and Aesthetics.

It takes place on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 at 12:15 – 13:00 at Dept. of English, Room 111 at Universität Basel. I'd like to extend a thanks to Ridvan Askin for setting this up. If you are in the area do come along.

The abstract is as follows:

The noted speculative realist Graham Harman has called aesthetics ‘first philosophy.’ But speculative realism is not concerned with a new aesthetic theory gifted from philosophers to artists. Rather speculative realists see aesthetics as a practical aid in getting their point across – they see themselves almost as artists in the craft of metaphysics. In this precise sense aesthetics becomes for speculative realism the practise of philosophical argumentation itself whether that manifests as Harman’s willingness to use wit in the service of expression or Ray Brassier inviting readers to imagine the end of the Universe in order to drive home the blunt fact of extinction.

This talk introduces the audience to the relatively young philosophical field of speculative realism using the aesthetic and literary practises of the four original speculative realists (Harman, Brassier, Meillassoux, Grant) as a linchpin, but it will also take time to explore a world inhabited with colourful characters ranging from transcendental nihilists, neo-vitalist quasi-Deleuzians, object oriented ontologists, speculative materialists, Lovecraftian weird realists, and other assorted continental realists on the fringe not only of mainstream philosophy but even on the fringe of continental philosophy.

Why does speculative realism matter? Part 1

2011-05-03T11:24:00.003+01:00

The next few posts are notes based on a series of questions Richard Burt was kind enough to ask me on Facebook that expanded into something a bit unwieldy for that format. So I have transferred them to the blog. This is part 1 of 2. Richard was inquiring about what it is that I feel I have gained from being exposed to speculative realism and since we are both people with an interest and background in the world of Heidegger/Derrida that forms much of the sub-text here (and should explain the abundance of Heidegger-Derrida references).

The first thing to register about speculative realism is that it is not entirely a clean break from tradition and that, in many ways, it is often quite traditionalist – which I count as a positive for the most part. Like all radical philosophies there is an attachment to what came before, but it is an attachment akin to that between siblings that tips between bouts of mutual dependence and petty simmering dislikes. Most breaks with tradition, including those undertaken by Heidegger and Derrida, were once considered extraordinarily radical and yet, in hindsight, we can now see how utterly indebted to the tradition they are.

The second thing to register then is that the anti-traditionalist strain in speculative realism is precisely its realist or, as is more often the case, its anti-antirealism since it is difficult to say whether Meillassoux, for instance, counts as a realist, but it is less controversial to claim that he opposes the ‘naive’ default antirealism of traditional continental philosophy. But this anti-traditionalist strain is also clearly determined by the traditional debate between realism and antirealism that remains for (a lot of) us utterly Kantian.

This is quite explicit in Meillassoux, Grant, and in Brassier’s latest work. Object-oriented ontology is the form of speculative realism that is the least bogged down in the Kantian paradigm and this is why I find it so liberating to read OOO from time to time. When I first read Tool-Being toward the end of my thesis the bit that grabbed my attention was precisely the lack of anxiety concerning transcendental questions.

In this sense I think those who come to OOO from outside philosophy are perhaps luckiest because there is nothing harder than overcoming the paradigm you are trained in and for me that is a broadly Kantian one and no matter how far I stray from this to me the unfulfilled promise of modern philosophy is precisely the possibility of a ‘Copernican’ or Kantian metaphysics.

This is why I firmly believe there will need to be some fence-mending in the future, but the first thing we have to dispel is the idea that there is a fundamental opposition between transcendentalists and metaphysicians. I think there is enough content in our world for both.

I’ll try to explain how this might happen, but in a basic sense I believe our world is complicated enough that a ‘division of labour’ (Peter Gratton) between aspects of our world is not only welcome, but necessary given the fractured nature of contemporary human existence and the overflow of information.

The question I get asked the most from fellow continentalists is how does one get from continental idealism or antirealism to continental realism? To understand this question it is helpful to look not at speculative realism, but at some of accusations often thrown at them from continental philosophers.

Those who oppose speculative realism often claim that it paints many philosophers in a naïve light. According to this critique it is simply not true that Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are idealists. I agree, but here we have a blind-spot arising (often) from an unwillingness to engage in the nuance of the speculative realist arguments on the matter – ironic given most defences against the idealist charge as it relates to Husserl, Heidegger or Derrida depend on the idea that their positions are more nuanced than the simplistic SR reading.

This is not to say that there are moments of rhetorical excess where speculative realists lapse into shorthand by calling certain thinkers idealists as when continentalists caricature analytics are language obsessed or science as cold-hearted objectivism.

Leaving that aside the point being made by speculative realism here is that thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are so entrenched in an antirealist nexus that their qualifications concerning knowledge of the real renders them idealists for all intents and purposes. Or, putting it the other way, whatever form of realism one might claim for them is so compromised as to render their realism inert.

Ripper Nerdology

2011-04-25T11:50:00.003+01:00

A friend of mine pointed me to the following post about book recommendations concerning the Ripper case. I figured it might be best to just post it up here as well since it offered me one of the few chances I've had in a while to discuss Ripper-related stuff (hence it reads as if directed at one person as it was and the tone/feel/whatnot is a bit informal). I've been toying with adding some Ripper-related discussion into an upcoming article (for Helvete), but it is not easy task given that ripper studies can be so sensationalist and I don't want to make light of the material as some have done in the past. After owning my own book store I count being a proper ripperologist (tour-guide or author or whatever) as the job I'd most like to have.

Ripper books can be either atrocious or endlessly fascinating. There is no in-between. The golden rule in rooting out the good stuff is to avoid suspect-driven studies (or narratives) since these often give a skewed version of events with obvious Ripper murders pushed aside or witness testimony downplayed or exaggerated. The more dispassionate the better and anything that even mentions members of the Royal Family, freemasons and other assorted fairy tales are best avoided. They belong strictly to the Ripper-industry which, in much the same way putting Hitler on the cover of a book will generate sales, leads to publishers simply paying some quack to piece together Ripper romps to coincide with television screenings by relatively famous ripperologists such as Jeremy Beadle (who is actually himself quite decent on the topic believe it or not).

I do not want to offer too many suggestions since half the fun is making one’s way through the voluminous ripper output and you can do this fairly cheaply. Second-hand paperbooks of even the hardest to find classics in the genre can be found on Amazon and ebay for next to nothing.

Now to get started you should begin with the following authors and these are all non-controversial, non-sensationalist fact-driven ripperologists. If ripperology was a proper academic subject then they would be the Professors making sure the young upstarts don’t get too wild. Paul Begg is a wonderfully forensic student of the case and his various books all attempt to act as guidebooks for other rippologists. The tone is professional and objective: see his The Complete Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History, and then later to his broader works on Scotland Yard and the history of East End crime.

In the same genre is Steward Evans and Donald Rumblebow’s Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates – a modern classic and there is more to come from these guys who often participate on many ripper forums. My absolute favourite book on the ripper is Philip Sugden’s The Complete History Jack the Ripper – as close as I have found to a learned, fact-based reading of the case that offers some tentative conclusions as to the possible identity of the ripper focusing not on personalities or names, but on what we can discern about the *kind* of person the ripper might have been – to me this is a much better use of our time since we will not likely find the suspect we should focus on the sheer significance of the emergence of the world’s first serial killer – why it happened, why he had so much hatred for women, whether social conditions had a role, or whether it was a purely anomalous event.

That is quite a lot for now perhaps, but if you grab these texts you will gain a foundation from which you can launch into the scene according to your own interests. Just as in academic texts you will find in most decent ripper books bibliographies emphasizing different aspects of the case. Some people prefer social histories that anchor themselves in the case, some prefer psychologically dense readings and so on.

I have been fascinated with this case since I was roughly 13 years old and the shock of reading about these events has never left me – especially the final murder of Mary Kelly. Kelly was an Irishwoman who, from what we can gather, lived a (very!) difficult life in dire conditions.

What is perhaps even sadder is how she has earned such a disreputable place in history as one of the first photographed murder victims to be gaped at forever and in our internet age these images are easily found [not for the faint of heart to say the least] – and perhaps the final sting in the tail is that we do not have a single picture of her alive. To me this is an astoundingly tragic life and afterlife to lead.

There are a million and one different avenues I could bring up, but I think it will prove much more fascinating for you to immerse yourself in the topic free from outside influence at first and then start to engage with other ripper nerds.

Todtnauberg Tales

2011-04-13T11:56:00.013+01:00

Graham Harman relays a nice anecdote from Lingis about Heidegger's hut. I can certainly understand how Lingis might have missed the hut back in the 60s because even though it is technically staring you in the face once you reach Todtnau its obviousness almost makes you second guess that it is the right one. These days if you get the bus to Todtnau the bus drops you off right beside the (super-tiny) tourist office (comprising some maps, a few Heidegger books, and rarely any humans). Once there a quick look around the landscape will reveal the hut is not so far away albeit there is no direct route to it without cutting through some small fields.

I've relayed my experience a couple of times on this blog about going there so I won't go over this again, but I figure it is worth posting up my pics from time. These days it is hard to imagine missing the hut because there is a nice Heidegger trail (the famous Rundweg that people know from the sign albeit don't expect it to be anything more than a handful of random quotes with scraps of info). I think the panoramic pic ought to give an idea just how small the village is and when Heidegger was speaking to locals he really must have been speaking to rural folk drawn from random farms in the surrounding area.

Punctum books forthcoming titles

2011-04-02T09:53:00.002+01:00

Woodard, O'Rourke, and others plus the most diverse editorial board I have ever seen. Looks promising to say the least!

What is Speculative Realism?

2011-03-22T11:26:00.004Z

Over at Object Oriented Philosophy Harman talks a little bit about speculative realism riffing off the blurbs for Continental Realism. Like Harman I also think that despite the wide net that speculative realism casts it is by no means beyond definition – after all continental philosophy casts a much wider net and yet we still manage to recognize what it signals (consider how different Deleuze and Heidegger are and how we still consider them both continentals). I talk about this a little in the orphaned article that I posted up as ‘The Speculative Terrain’ and there I emphasize that what we have here is a community.

I don’t think that any community is necessarily bound to the opinions of its founders and so the distance that Ray Brassier has established between himself and the label is not enough to dispel the fact that some kind of speculative realism has spilled beyond its original remit (become something in its own right). And even then when it boils down to it the basis remains, as Harman notes, broadly the same : opposition to correlationism, realist in orientation, a little weird, a little bit speculative (sometimes very much so), and so on.

This is where I was going with post-continental philosophy: philosophies rooted in continental philosophy, but not beholden to it (what I would call progress). In the editorial to Speculations II the team will also attempt to synthesize some of the recent developments we’ve seen in the past year or so and, of course, what else is Speculations if not a home for a wild mesh of speculative realists, post-continental philosophers, and theorists of/on the fringe? You can call it a movement or a community or whatever else you want, but it exists – that much is crystal clear.

As for Continental Realism I admit I have been somewhat silent on the argument but on reflection the book is an ode (of sorts) to speculative thinkers charting my own liberation from antirealism, traditional continentalism, and what I like to now call the fog... I do think the final point will be slightly unusual and hopefully raise some eyebrows, but leaving the argument aside it will, as the blurbs point out, be a kind of sprint through as many ideas from as many speculative realists as I could squash into as few pages as possible (it comes in at less than 100 pages). Here is the table of contents which should give an idea about what to expect:

Preface: The Hermeneutics of the Real

1.1. The Ancestral Realm

1.2. The Correlationist Nexus
a. The Transcendentalist Response I: Husserl, Perception, and Adumbrations
b. The Transcendentalist Response II: Kant, Transcendental Subjectivity and Embodiment

1.3. The Thought of the ‘In-Itself’
a. Intellectual Intuition
b. The Transcendentalist Response III: Hägglund, Gabriel, and Žižek
c. The Speculative Response: Gratton and Harman

1.4. Thinking le grand dehors
a. ‘Nature’ and the Out-side
b. Wohin haben wir uns verirrt?

1.5. Hegel without Hope

Dermot Moran Interview

2011-03-18T08:02:00.003Z

Via Graham, an interview with Dermot Moran from my own department at University College, Dublin. Moran is a walking phenomenology encyclopedia. This interview gives some nice insight into how things have changed in academia over the years. I'm not sure which martial art he is an expert in, but he is indeed a martial arts expert.

Writing Again

2011-03-14T21:16:00.004Z

I just spent the last few hours mocking up some material I had from my thesis for an article that I am writing for Continent (provisional title: Ptolemaic metaphysics and the ruins of being). Alongside an article on Dunkelheit promised for Helvete I finally found the courage to open up the thesis in order to extract material. I haven't looked at it since submission, but enough time has passed that I felt able to chop out potential articles without getting too bogged down in it.

So far it looks like I should be able to get three more articles from the thesis: a Hegel one (maybe two since I have about 10,000 words on Hegel), another Heidegger one and one based on material I have on Deleuze, Badiou and Meillassoux. I am not sure when I'll get around to them, but it is nice to have material in advance just in case. There are a few journals I quite like that would be great to submit to, but the entire process is time-consuming and so I'll wait and see how things plan out in the next few months before tackling all that.

Continent CFP

2011-03-06T19:02:00.003Z

The CFP for continent issue 2 has just gone up. The first issue was really innovative and worth checking out. For the second issue I'm writing an article on 'Ptolemaic metaphysics amidst the ruins of being' (provisional title but you get the drift).

Speculations Volume II Table of Contents

2011-03-02T11:53:00.003Z

This is a provisional table of contents for the upcoming issue of Speculations. Things are moving along fast so we should have it rolled out pretty quickly once the design phase kicks in. There are no less than 9 articles, 2 position papers, an interview, and 3 book reviews. Contributors range from Badiou scholars, object oriented ontologists, and at least one theoretical physicist. I think it is a strong issue and will help set some new debates in motion.

Speculations Volume II

Articles

Tractatus Mathematico-Politicus - Christopher Norris

The Philosopher, the Sophist, the Undercurrent and Alain Badiou - Marianna Papastefanou

On the Reality and Construction of Hyperobjects with reference to Class - Levi Bryant

Structure, Sense, and Territory – Michael Austin

The Anxiousness of Objects - Robert Jackson

The Cubist Object - Hilan Bensusan

On the possibility of ignorance in Meillassoux - Josef Moshe

Sublime Objects – Tim Morton

Unknowing Animals - Nicola Masciandaro

Positions Papers and Interview

Networkologies II – Christopher Vitale

‘Girls Welcome!!!’ – Michael O’Rourke

‘Science and Philosophy’ Interview with Sean Carroll – Fabio Gironi

Book Reviews

Review of Eugene Thacker’s After Life – Anthony Paul Smith

Review of Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media – Beatrice Marovich

Review of Graham Harman’s Towards Speculative Realism – Fintan Neylan

Helvete: Journal of Black Metal Theory

2011-03-02T09:18:00.003Z

This looks like a great addition to the expanding world of open access journals that is developing these days. I'll be writing a piece on Burzum's Dunkelheit. The journal has been put together by Zachary Price, Aspasia Stephanou, and Ben Woodard.

Caputo in Dublin on Meillassoux

2011-02-25T08:56:00.002Z

I've been missing all the Caputo Dublin talks (the semester I leave he, Hallward and Dennett come and there is an OOO workshop - go figure!). I just got word from Fintan Neylan (who will be writing a review of Towards Speculative Realism in volume II of Speculations) that Caputo's talk for the Philosophy Society at UCD was on Meillassoux. Not sure of the exact details yet, but a good sign.

What is an Object? (Dublin Event)

2011-02-21T12:17:00.001Z

[Sadly I can't attend, but from what I can gather OOO is gaining ground in the Dublin aesthetics world - this looks like a great event for anyone in Dublin]

Public Discussion and Seminar: What is an Object?

The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

Please join us for discussions which look at how the question, “What is an Object?” might be answered from different artistic, philosophical and theoretical perspectives.

Public Discussion: 4.30pm. Thursday 24th Feb. 2011
Participants will include:

Noel Fitzpatrick
Hermeneutics, phenomenology and intentional objects
(Noel is Research Coordinator, Fine Art, D.I.T)

Tim Stott
Systems, play and objects
(Tim is a writer and lecturer, D.I.T)

Isabel Nolan
What does it mean to try and make a new thing?
(Isabel is an artist represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin)

Seminar, 11.00am, Friday 25th Feb.

On Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus; Object Orientated Philosophy and the occult strangeness of things, lead by Francis Halsall and Declan Long (both NCAD). Reading for the seminar will be provided on Thursday.

What is an Object? is the third in a series of public events staged, by MA ACW (www.acw.ie), in the context of the current Richard Tuttle exhibition, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

Theory Exposure

2011-02-20T12:01:00.003Z

I have started to piece together little bits of writing and it seems that a trend is emerging. My post-PhD efforts are all slightly disordered and fragmentary. Whereas the past four years have been spent thinking constantly of the big picture - how it hangs together - I'm finding that although my core ideas remain my style is shifting somewhere else entirely. The format that these ideas have been constrained in is no longer needed. Time to let the ideas lead. One place it is leading is theory. This is not where I expected to be at all.

21st Century Idealism

2011-02-16T11:41:00.002Z

The schedule for the 21st Century Idealism conference in Dundee has just been posted. There are lots of good conferences coming up this year, but this is the one most want to attend - if all my viva stars align I will be there.

Speculative Realism book series

2011-02-15T11:49:00.003Z

Big news from Graham Harman. Edinburgh University Press is launching a speculative realism series (a good sign for sure!). This is certainly welcome:

'I’m also pleased to note that all books in the series will be released simultaneously in paperback as well as hardcover, so there won’t be any $100 books that tantalize impoverished graduate students while remaining financially out of reach.'

If you were toying with the idea of writing an SR related book, but worried about whether you could find a publisher well that problem has just disappeared.

Also Graham reminds us that Levi's book will be coming out soon via the Open Humanities Press 'New Metaphysics' series too.

Cascades of Contingencies

2011-02-07T17:28:00.001Z

Hopefully that'll catch the attention of the philosophers...a new article I put together for Celsias has just gone up. This time they let me put in a little bit of theory. Comments welcome!

Daniel Whistler

2011-01-29T17:40:00.004Z

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

2011-01-26T09:02:00.001Z

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

2011-01-21T10:37:00.002Z

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

2011-01-20T17:30:00.003Z

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

2011-01-20T16:11:00.004Z

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

2011-01-19T09:11:00.004Z

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

2011-01-17T16:19:00.003Z

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

2011-01-17T12:38:00.002Z

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)

2011-01-11T14:42:00.005Z

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

2011-01-08T12:54:00.003Z

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

2011-01-07T14:51:00.005Z

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

2011-01-07T13:23:00.004Z

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

2011-01-07T09:02:00.001Z

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

2011-01-06T16:06:00.005Z

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...

2011-01-03T19:43:00.006Z

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

2011-01-03T16:00:00.003Z

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

2011-01-02T14:59:00.003Z

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

2011-01-02T13:23:00.002Z

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

2011-01-01T13:58:00.002Z

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.

Iain Hamilton Grant's Philosophies of nature after Schelling

2010-12-31T16:51:00.002Z

I am just re-reading Iain Hamilton Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling which sometimes seem to fall off the radar in speculative realist circles (although this should change thanks to the debate between Harman and Grant in The Speculative Turn). I suspect Grant’s text is less read because unlike Nihil Unbound, After Finitude or Guerrilla Metaphysics it is a book that looks to be about a stodgy old German Idealist – even if that German Idealist happens to be Schelling, by far the most speculatively intense of the bunch. Certainly Grant’s book deals heavily with Schelling (in fact I have not read anyone else who is so deeply familiar with Schelling), but it feels like a book that is trying to tell us something else. I want to move through the text slowly over the next weeks so please excuse the lack of an overall picture. I want to let the picture emerge for me without forcing it since I am longer beholden to any deadlines. Last time I read it I felt somewhat overwhelmed. The book is intimidating it its rich detail and it really needs to be read at a snail’s pace.

The immediate sense that I gained from the text on re-reading the opening is that Grant sees Schelling as a thinker concerned with immanence (in the German Idealist sense, I’ll flesh this out in a moment) or absolute immanence. Within the German Idealist tradition this later manifested in Hegel as a total phenomenalization of all content against the Kantian cut or what is now called the two-aspect thesis. What Hegel and Schelling share is the generalized thesis that there is but one world. The difference is that for Hegel the region of this one world is not nature (as ground or genesis or in any sense at all) whereas in Schelling nature *at times* plays a role suspiciously close to grounding – even if, as Heidegger showed quite well, this involves an interesting play on non-ground, and so on - this being German philosophical obsession with nothingness. In either sense they are both attempting to prefigure the idea that the absolute can be considered as all-enveloping in that even as it creates it surrounds everything. There is no escaping it and nothing to gauge it against. Contra Fichte the object does not come-to-be because it has been gazed at, but is a participant in the absolute flow and creation…of whatever it is that it flowing and creating. For Grant the shades of Deleuzianism that emerge here will help him establish a kind of kindred spirit vibe between the tradition’s outliers: Schelling and Deleuze.

Schelling’s names for the Absolute are, as is well known, somewhat uncoordinated. You get the Absolute, the All, and the unconditioned, but the theme remains the same – the impersonal, unconstrained more-than-us that philosophy is aimed squarely at thinking and it includes all the dizzying implications that drive most sensible people away from this kind of contemplation. What Schelling spotted, and Deleuze is always pushing, is that if you think according to the absolute, in an impersonal non-egoistic, sense then you can engage in that generative flow and *become* creative in your own right. This thesis has meant that both Schelling and Deleuze have found themselves somewhere on the border of philosophy often finding the reception they deserve coming from less austere quarters.

It is on this basis that I will attempt to work my way through the book beginning, as is fitting, on the first day of the New Year where I hope to find my way back to creativity.

To do, to do

2010-12-28T20:00:00.003Z

It feels like I need to get my teeth into something again. I just can't quite figure out what that might be. My main project is, of course, to make sure Speculations gets out without a hitch. I'm also itching for Continental Realism to come out soon and I really hope it comes it before I start writing again as it feels I need to move on from it. In my head it remains bound up with my thesis and what I see as step one in developing my thoughts.

Like most people I am finding myself invigorated by The Speculative Turn and I am starting to put together a review of it in my head. I suspect it is something I can write quickly but there is so much material it'll need some heavy editing.

At the moment I'm working through the implications of my encounter with Hegel and my recent discovery of Deleuze. Of course these are almost old hat to most people in these circles but my phenomenologically tinged training always made me suspicious. At the moment Houlgate and Hallward are my guides. I have also decided to reread Grant as the debate between Grant and Harman is perhaps the most striking dialogue in the Speculative Turn.

The other bubbling project is a renewed engagement with the theory of vicarious causation which I am more and more convinced by. I'll need to decide how to tackle it and although Harman has (if I am recalling correctly) expressed some reservations with the Collapse essay on vicarious causation I still think it is a small masterpiece. If I manage to link it up with some of the recent stuff there might be an article in there somewhere. Either way the theory is calling me to address it and you should never say no when that happens.

Great Harman line

2010-12-27T14:26:00.002Z

As a confirmed dubstepper this line gave me a chuckle:

'If the decision were mine alone, not only would the name ‘speculative realism’ be retained, but a logo would be designed for projection on PowerPoint screens, accompanied by a few signature bars of smoky dubstep music.'

(from On the Undermining of Objects in The Speculative Turn, 21).

This can be arranged!

The Speculative Turn released

2010-12-23T17:44:00.002Z

Just a quick note that The Speculative Turn has just been published. Graham Harman notes that there should be a free PDF up soon as is the norm with re:press but I think it is well worth picking up a physical copy to show support for what is in my eyes surely the greatest contribution to speculative realism that has happened yet.

To Freiburg

2010-12-09T22:26:00.003Z

I'm leaving for Freiburg tomorrow. I am not sure I'll have much chance to blog over the weekend but I have found a lot of books/articles/etc. that I need to catch up on and hopefully they are varied enough to generate some new blog posts. As it stands my reading list if insanely long and I am finding it difficult to know where to begin. But I think the big ones I need to get through are Deleuze, some Badiou, Bergson, and I need to keep up my Hegel adventure (onto the Logic now). Not sure where all this is taking me but I have made a strict rule that I will not try to force a new direction.

Thesis submitted

2010-12-06T18:38:00.003Z

So I handed in the thesis today. Don't have much to say right now as I'm going out to get blind drunk (or as drunk as you can on Monday before the pub closes). Quite a relief and I already feel some weight has shifted. I must admit the actual experience was a hilarious anticlimax:

Me: 'I'm submitting my thesis - here it is'
Guy at desk: *looks over forms* 'All is in order. Here is your receipt.'
Me: 'Awesome.'

Speculations Volume II Reminder

2010-12-05T14:22:00.001Z

Speculations, a journal for speculative realist thought, invites submissions
for its second volume. Given the intrinsically open and unconstrained nature
of the arena for speculative thought which Speculations aims at embodying —
and in view of the favourable reception of the inaugural issue — our aim in
the second volume 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 disciplines 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 which can be found at: http://speculationsjournal.org
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

Editors:

Paul J. Ennis
Michael Austin
Fabio Gironi
Thomas Gokey

Spekulativer Realismus

2010-12-04T22:23:00.001Z

Just came across this interesting German blog post on speculative realism. An off the cuff translation is as follows:

In the recent ‘Anglophone’ research a new philosophical position on epistemological and ontological matters has arisen since 2007 under the name speculative realism. The foundational figures are Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. The movement is characterized with an anti-Kantian tendency, calling for a radical break with anthropocentrism and the subject-oriented philosophical tradition, exemplified by what Meillassoux terms correlationism. In particular Kant represents the central figure of correlationism with his restriction of human knowledge to the range of the phenomena i.e. the interdependence of thinking and Being – the claim that being and thought are [always] correlated. *Against correlationism and subject centred philosophies object oriented philosophy seeks to examine the relation between objects and processes to each other and to penetrate to the things themselves.

*I cannot work this sentence out exactly. Hopefully Graham Harman can take a bash at it since it discusses OOO and his German is exceptionally good.

The rest of it discusses the non-influence of SR in Germany and a suggestion to begin with Meillassoux’s After Finitude as the foundational text of the movement. There are also some nice links there including one to this blog (which is how I found it). Sounds interesting and hopefully it can do something to draw some attention to SR in Germany.

Stratified Gestell

2010-12-04T01:12:00.001Z

William Koch has a great post about Heidegger's final topic suggestion to the Heidegger Circle prior to his death.

I must admit that I did not find the choice of topic too surprising:

Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?

I have come to realize that the part of Heidegger I find most productive* these days is the technics angle. I actually find the question as it is stated here by Heidegger a little too formal. One of the odd things about the later Heidegger, and Stiegler is great on this, is that Heidegger sometimes can't own up to when he makes some good old fashioned concrete analyses. His analysis of technics is a wonderful example of phenomenological seeing but Heidegger cannot *let it be*. He must subsume it under his historical procession of being.

This need to integrate, his unconscious sublation, manifests quite clearly to us today because we have access to his private letters and to his notes. For instance I can pick a random quote from the Contributions ('36-8), page 9: 'In the age of total lack of questioning anything, it is sufficient as a start to inquire into the question of all questions.'

This begins like SZ begins and like they all begin no? It does not matter whether it is his notebooks or his two monographs or the huge lecture course material there is the relentless trundle of catching up with being. What I like about the technics lectures, and the four seminars that Koch alludes to, is that they contain some almost Husserlian epoche-esque gems that can be lifted from the decline of being narrative without too much damage. More importantly it is so markedly formal that it resists the classic Heideggerian scholar tactic of stating that: 'Heidegger was really interested in technics (or place or nature or God or etc.)' No! It is about being and nothing else - almost mundanely so.

But I really do think we need to lift technics from Heidegger as with a crane. In fact I'd wager that the final lines that he really hopes people might leap past him on this score:

But it would be already sufficient and beneficial if each of the participants gave attention, each in his own way, to this question and took it up as a suggestion for his area of research.

I presume that Heidegger was aware that technics was increasing at an exponential rate and that thinkers would need to think through it - perhaps even at the expense of thinking being. After all the question of technics ends on a cryptic note suggesting that in an age when even human freedom is absent our job is something like the sustaining of being through the prelude of Gestell to something that may come (enter Derrida)...Heidegger mentions that (in my own translation so open to question here): 'In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself i.e. his essence [Indessen begegnet der Mensch heute in Wahrheit gerade nirgends mehr sich selber, d.h. seinem Wesen]' (DFT, 28). I read this as the conclusion he has drawn from the Schelling lectures in the 30's right as he is stepping outside transcendentalism.

OK but I do not think Heidegger would want us to stop there. After all this is Gestell in the '50's. Gestell in the 21st Century is almost incomprehensible and remains as such even within the form of ontological questioning qua Heidegger. Take a look again at how he frames (!) the question:

Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?

These are utterly, radically, and hopelessly impossible questions in the age of, as Zabala puts it, the remains of being. I think there are good reasons that it is so difficult to translate Heidegger to new readers, to get people to look into his work...he asks things that strike us as so desiring-after grounding that the whole thing appears groundless (and this is what he is after but try expressing that too soon and you'll get sore looks!).

My honest feelings on this are that if we are to use phenomenological method in terms of technics then it would need to be the surface reading that ignores the supra-meta-wide-ranging-temporal vibe that Heidegger is after in his later work. Rather the concrete analysis of technics, as Stiegler's seeks out in Technics and Time, can't spend too much time asking what e-mail was all about when technics throws Wikileaks in your face. The pace will need to be swift.

Nimbleness might be a virtue in the age of the stratification of Gestell.

* To use precisely the word he would avoid since producing or presenting is on his no-no list quite explicitly by the time of the technics lectures in '53 [Her- und Dar-Stellen].

Updated Links

2010-12-03T02:06:00.003Z

So I really need to update my links. The first obvious ones are Robert Jackson's Algorithm and Contingency, Tim Morton's Ecology without Nature and Mike Burns' Daily Humiliation but I am sure there must be more. If you can think of any obvious absences or would like a link let me know.

And so it is done...

2010-12-02T18:04:00.004Z

...or is it beginning?

So I have finished my PhD but the campus is closed so I cannot submit it just yet. Ireland is in a kind of snow-crisis. It looks like I won't get to submit it personally but it has been arranged that someone can submit it for me. That is somewhat of a let down but I don't mind too much. The reason I cannot do it personally is that I am heading to Freiburg next Monday (the 6th). I hope to stay there as long as possible. As anyone with an interest in finance knows Ireland is officially a deadzone when it comes to jobs. I suppose it is a sort of irony to have completed my education right through the boom years (the so-called Celtic Tiger) and emerged just as it collapses. My thesis title is named Speculative Intensity and the Ruins of Being. The latter bit seems more apt now than my original more mundane title. I think I am not just positing these ruins. I see them all around me - from the tired people to the abandoned estates. A ruined landscape scarred by a burst of capitalist realism. If you want to see the havoc that capitalism can wreck on a population come to Dublin (the plus side is that people seem to be talking to each other more - money had made us mutes).

The completion of my PhD opens me up to an entirely new world. I am no longer bound to my project. I can start projects anew. This is sort of scary and liberating at the same time. I can't work out if I want to pursue the realism angle more or whether I need to ground myself in German idealism a little more. I suppose I can try both. Either way I have some projects to tide me over. I intend to submit an article on Heidegger and nature to Thinking Nature. I feel I ought to write on this topic because I have found both Ben Woodard and Tim Morton amongst the most interesting minds I have come across recently.* This realization didn't hit me until recently when I noted their subtle footnote presence in the thesis (I should mention that SR wise my thesis also references a whole range of SR and OOO people and I feel pretty good about that!). This article is essentially the core of my thoughts on Heidegger as I make my break with him. If there is one thing I have learned over the past year it is that Heidegger no longer speaks to me even though he is likely to remain forever the thinker I have engaged with the most (I think I could do a freelance riff on whole chunks of his thinking at this stage and I suppose this is what a PhD is really about). The thinker I did not expect to find playing such a big role was Hegel. Toward the end Hegel was jostling for prime spot alongside Heidegger. Kant too remains an abiding influence but that is such a normal situation for a philosophy student it is almost not worth mentioning.

The article on Meillassoux for Cosmos and History should also come out soon (Jan. I think) and it will, of course, perhaps be the one that will interest people here. The article has a simple aim i.e. to argue that Meillassoux really has transcendentalism in mind when he says correlationism. I argue this against Meillassoux's own claim that the real menace is the fideistic strong correlationism of 'postmodern piety' (as he calls it in Immanence and the World Beyond). I was also given a chance to say some words on what the new realism might entail but that is best left until it comes out. I am not sure what happened to the article for Deleuze International on Meillassoux and SR but we'll see.

As to Continental Realism well that is coming along nicely. It should be entering the next step pretty soon judging from the last time around. It has received positive vibes so far from people I respect (in one case someone I respect a lot!) so I am looking forward to it coming out as a statement of where I stand. I know understand how people must feel about the delay between submission and release dates but it a pretty direct little argument so I don't think I'll end up rejecting too much of it. The essential idea is that we must become despirited Hegelians...not sure how much to reveal on that score but the argument aside it is designed to introduce people to as many SR thinkers as I could fit in (emphasis being on Meillassoux and Harman with nods to Brassier throughout).

Incidentally Post-Continental Voices has been doing well as far as I can work out and even has a nice review on the US Amazon so far. It came out just at a time when I was snowed under thesis wise but I have had time to look at it and be cheered by it. I think it really should help some people out.

This brings me to Speculations which is getting close to the deadline for Volume II on Jan. 8th. The issue is more or less full and the list of names should surprise a lot of people. It covers everything from OOO, Badiou, aesthetics, theoretical physics, theology, queer theory, and...even some philosophy! I think we will have a blast with putting this one together as it should set up the debates for a bunch of issues to come (we have some themed issue lined up with submissions arranged already...so I am pleased that the journal should have its release dates speeded up now that I am freer to work on it and as the team gets bigger).

The final thing to mention...I am now back to blogging so expect a barrage of stuff as my brain realizes it can freelance again.

*I also have an overview article on Heidegger and technology coming out, but this is a more general exegesis and not aimed at the readership I think I have here. I should also have a review of Zabala's The Remains of Being out soon too.

The Return of Metaphysics CFP

2010-11-30T17:47:00.002Z

Just received an email about this conference which looks right up the street of this corner of the blogosphere. Sadly any US conferences are currently out of bounds for me financially:

Villanova University
16th Annual Conference in Philosophy

“The Return of Metaphysics”
April 8-9, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Graham Harman
Department of Philosophy, American University in Cairo

The “end of metaphysics” is a perennial theme in contemporary
Continental philosophy, which has taken many forms, including the
critiques of onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence, and
(phallo)logocentrism, with consequent emphases on philosophical
practices such as textual interpretation, cultural criticism, and
socio-political interventionism. Recently, however, a “return to
metaphysics” has been initiated by movements such as speculative
realism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, non-
philosophy, and others who re-affirm the possibility and even
necessity of (speculative) metaphysical thought.

We invite critical papers on the status of metaphysics in contemporary
philosophy (for example, concerning the possibility of its “end” or
“return”), including its relationship to its precursors in the
philosophical tradition, mathematics, the contemporary natural
sciences, ecological thought, and literature.

Submission Guidelines:
We encourage submissions from faculty and graduate students of
abstracts (300-500 words) or papers (3,000 to 4,000 words). Please
format these for blind review—personal information, such as name,
institutional affiliation, and contact information, should be either
in the body of your email or on a page separate from the rest of your
paper, and not in the paper itself.
Please email your submissions (and any questions you may have) to
villanovaphilosophy@gmail.com by February 1, 2011.

Post-Continental Voices Out Tomorrow

2010-10-28T23:14:00.002+01:00

Just a heads up!

My collection of interviews with seven 'post-continental' thinkers is released tomorrow (Oct. 29th). The book contains interviews with Jeffrey Malpas,Graham Harman, Stuart Elden, Lee Braver, Ian Bogost, Levi R. Byrant, and Adrian Ivakhiv. The book deals with some pretty universal issues in academic philosophy such as graduate school, the job market, and where philosophy might go in the coming years. (There is also a short introduction that explains my reasoning behind the title 'post-continental'). But readers of this blog will hopefully be excited enough by the names involved to grab a copy!

You can order the book on Amazon here.

Sunday Thoughts: Thesis Stuff

2010-10-03T21:53:00.004+01:00

So I am currently very close to finishing my thesis and have perhaps not been this 'inside my head' in my life. The sheer amount of things to keep track of is mind-blowing but things are falling into place. I think it cuts a nice path from Kant right up into the contemporary debates and I hope that it tells a story as much as hits all the right notes in terms of argumentation. It will likely surprise people just how little my thesis work chimes in with my interests on here but I quite enjoy having these separate worlds.

This does mean that I have been missing all the blog stuff. It is 10pm here on a Sunday nite and I have just finished working so that should give some idea just how little time I have for myself at the moment. The weird thing about all this is that when you are putting everything into the thesis you find that you have nothing to put into anything else. Tonite is the first time in a long time when I've felt like writing on here and I think I'm going to try get back into the blogging spirit as much as possible.

The next step in my world is to finalize the thesis. I'm likely submitting either at month's end or early November. After that I have no idea what will happen but I look forward to tackling my Amazon wish list which has grown to an unwieldy number of pages.

CFP: Speculations Volume II

2010-09-25T22:27:00.003+01:00

Do check out the CFP for Speculations: Volume II. It is already looking like a decent issue even without the CFP going up so I admit to being pretty excited about this one. Please spread the word far and wide if you can.

Incidentally my lack of blogging is down to me coming close to submitting my thesis. I hope to start picking things up again soon enough.

Heidegger Conference

2010-09-14T12:59:00.004+01:00

So the 21st Century Heidegger conference is now over and I am happy to say that it was a success. I managed to meet a whole range of people I've spent years reading and discovered a bunch of approaches to Heidegger I never knew existed! It turns out there are about 9-10 Heideggers. Encountering these varied approaches has certainly sparked my interest again. Things are a lot clearer once you engage in some dialogue. I got to meet people who see no contradiction in using Heidegger to discuss proto-Dasein, non-anthropocentric readings of technical instruments, evolution/biology, neuroscience Heidegger applications, mirror-neuron worldhood and all kinds of things. Plus all the traditional stuff. The session on Heidegger and theology has sharpened my beliefs somewhat and it is there that I discovered the opening line of my thesis...

All in all a great success! I am sure I will have more to say but for the moment I need to get all my thoughts down before they slip away.

21st Century Heidegger Session Programme

2010-09-01T16:37:00.002+01:00

Here is a relatively finalized link to the session programme for the 21st Century Heidegger conference.

Sponsored by:
UCD School of Philosophy
UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Goethe-Institut, Dublin

To register, contact: heidegger2010@gmail.com

Date/Venue: Friday 10th & Saturday 11th September 2010
UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, Ireland

Our keynotes speakers are: Professor Martin Gessmann, Professor Babette E. Babich, Professor Miguel de Beistegui, Dr. Andrew Haas, and Dr. Francois Raffoul.

My review of Braver's 'Heidegger's Later Writings'

2010-08-30T15:30:00.003+01:00

Just appeared today in Kritike. Like many in these circles I am a big fan of Braver and his crystal clear style. The review is generally quite positive. I've been meaning to get this finished for quite some time so I am really pleased to see it appear today. I cannot recommend Braver's work enough. For a book on the later Heidegger this is astonishingly straight forward. When I first read it I realized I can actually recommend a book on the later Heidegger to people without worrying that I'd scare them off it forever.

“The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion” CFP

2010-08-27T19:09:00.003+01:00

This conference looks particularly appealing to those working on the intersection of post-continental philosophy and theology.

Caputo's upcoming course on also makes mention of Meillassoux (with an emphasis on Spectral Dilemma). The syllabus is here but seems to be currently down. Hopefully it will reappear later.

Phenomenological Realism

2010-08-27T00:26:00.004+01:00

Here is a tentative outline of a paper I will be giving at a pre-conference workshop here in Dublin. It should be of interest to both Heideggerians and speculative realists in that it is my first attempt to join together phenomenological investigation and Meillassouxian intellectual intuition. In the paper I attempt to put together the first piece of the puzzle. Most readers here will be familiar with the other side and this will be developed in Continental Realism which is moving fast along through the editing process at Zero. In essence it is my first public attempt at setting out my position: phenomenological realism. I always struggle with the final lines of an abstract so they will likely be changed into something safer in a weeks time. I'll post details about the event when it is comfirmed. Incidentally what follows can also pass for a pretty good summary of my thesis which is now running at 63,000 words which hopefully explains the lack of posts here. The (somewhat polemical) abstract is as follows:

In this paper my aim is to demonstrate that no philosophical account of our situation as the beings that are here (Da-)- alone amongst others - can be considered complete unless it is a phenomenological realism. Phenomenological realism has two tasks: to describe the structure of what Heidegger calls a priori cognition in the ontological sphere and to demonstrate the absolute necessity of contingency or, for the purposes of this paper, the radical contingency of natural laws. I claim, in line with Meillassoux, that ‘what is the case’ is absolutely contingent as it is ‘in-itself.’ I further hold that in so much as it is contingent it does not appear that way to us in phenomenal experience. Natural laws, in the appearances, are habitually ordered for us. The phenomenologist is a closeted Humean.

I am hoping to add a second part (if time permits) that would go roughly as follows but this part is still too 'floaty' for me to commit to at this point:

Because this is the case with what is the case one needs two methods for a complete account of our situation: phenomenology and ontological realism. Here I will attend to one-half of phenomenological realism: phenomenological investigation in its descriptive essence. Since description is such a misleading word in phenomenological terms that is where I will begin - in particular with what I will call Husserl's nomological phenomenology. We will then turn to Heidegger's ontological radicalization of phenomenology. I claim that there is a deep paradox in Heidegger's thinking between his account of Dasein, who corrupts the later texts, and Heidegger's historiographical account of an Occidental destining that culminates in Dasein’s fragmentation within an indifferent technical Framework supposedly inhabited, somewhere on the fringes, by the withering ‘remains of Being.’ I will conclude with a simple proposition: is it possible that what remains after Being is nothing more than the entities themselves?

On Reading Nietzsche Reading Heidegger

2010-08-27T00:19:00.002+01:00

Peter Gratton posted an interesting link to a review of a collection of essays on Foucault that struck me.

The reviewer talks a little about Babich and Zabala:

''In “A philosophical shock: Foucault reading Nietzsche, reading Heidegger,” Babette Babich argues that any reading of Foucault must incorporate readings of both Nietzsche and (a “very French”) Heidegger, rather than one at the expense of the other. The meanders of this essay take us through Nietzsche and Heidegger via an analysis of The Birth of the Clinic and reflections on philosophy of science to make the case. Remaining with Heidegger, later in the volume Santiago Zabala examines Foucault’s influence on the living Italian philosopher Vattimo. Foucault’s implicitly Heideggerian ontology is made explicit in Vattimo’s philosophy, Zabala argues. Foucault’s “ontology of actuality” (or “historical ontology of ourselves”) is his rejection of transcendental critique in favour of a historically situated analysis of the conditions of possibility of human being. This move, which engages Kant’s legacy while rejecting key aspects of his thought, has been key for Vattimo. The latter’s “weak thought” abandons “philosophy’s traditional claim to global descriptions of the world because after those masters’ demystifications . . . thought is much more aware of its own restrictions, limits, and boundaries” (115-116). Zabala goes on to make the connection between Vattimo’s referencing of Foucault’s ontology and Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and his hermeneutic alternative.

All four of these essays (which are scattered through the volume) suffer from the same difficulty: no doubt the authors found it hard to compress such complex philosophical ideas and inheritances into a chapter-length essay, and they are all broad-ranging and allusive rather than focused on a closely argued issue''

It is interesting that both Babich and Zabala are Heidegger scholars (I’m reviewing Zabala’s wonderful The Remains of Being at the moment and Babich is giving a talk at the Heidegger conference I’m organizing so I am pretty familiar with both of them apropos Heidegger scholarship).

Judging by Zabala’s concise Remains of Being (roughly 150 words) I’m not sure he has a problem with compressing his ideas. In fact one of the perks of his book, which is a deeply faithful ‘Heideggerian’ style book in the best possible sense, is that he manages to condense the entire post-Heidegger response into a single chapter without it being too busy. He talks a little about Foucault in the RoB too and perhaps the issue here is that attempts to develop a new logic of remains jars against this kind of exegesis (I suspect his interest in Foucault is not broad enough to appeal in this collection to those interested in Foucault sans the ‘hidden’ Heidegger influence).

Babich’s style is unique enough that I would give her a pass on the basis that her work tends to be richly rather than frustratingly allusive. But here we are probably stumbling into questions of style - I have a high tolerance for this kind of thing beginning as I did with Nietzsche and moving onto the later (and then earlier!) Heidegger.

Updates: Records on Ribs and some Meillassoux

2010-08-16T13:13:00.002+01:00

I've recently been browsing Records on Ribs - a kind of open-access record label after my own heart. Without trying to pigeon hole the music on offer I think it really suits the writing vibe. I find it hard to locate this kind of music or else I can find it but it costs a bomb. So do check it out.

Also worth checking out is this recent post by William Koch on Meillassoux's arche-fossil.

That is all for now. I'm currently located in a twilight zone where organization is outwinning philosophy itself.

Interview at Major Philosophy

2010-08-13T21:30:00.001+01:00

Brent at Major Philosophy was kind enough to include me in his series of interviews with graduate students called Reflections on Philosophy. Take a look!

Quick Update on Speculations and OOO news

2010-08-07T17:13:00.007+01:00

Graham Harman has informed us that articles from Speculations are now starting to appear on google scholar. A good sign although I now have to watch out for the Big Other!

Tim Morton is the latest convert to OOO. His passionate post is well worth a read. A lot of happening in the world of OOO and I expect the next year to really kick things up a gear or two.

Finally Pete Wolfendale has posted his thought on Ereignis which is worth checking out like all Pete's post. It is also worth noting that Pete will be delivering a paper at the 21st Century Heidegger conference and I admit his is among the main papers I am looking forward to attending.

Speculations discount

2010-08-06T17:11:00.004+01:00

Thanks to Lulu's 'New Read' Discount. That is a 15% discount so it is now even more affordable than we had hoped.

The code is NEWREAD305 and the offer ends on the 15th of September so if you plan on picking it up keep that deadline in mind.

I'm also happy to note that we are already starting to receive submissions from outside the traditional SR blog circle so I think the journal has started to achieve what I hope it keeps on doing: getting more people interested in the area.

On 'Ereignis'

2010-08-05T20:27:00.001+01:00

What do we know about Ereignis? From what I can gather, and I mean gather, is that we do not know much. There is a growing body of literature out there, but I suspect the definitive investigation of Ereignis has not yet come to be. I am not a fan of the later Heidegger especially when he begins to speak the language of destining though I admire the attempt as perhaps the last uncomplicated attempt to think this truth. Our current situation seems to forbid it (too ironic as Haas argues). It has been made impossible as Zabala puts it in The Remains of Being (a little masterpiece, and I mean masterpiece, I have the pleasure of reviewing at the moment). Heidegger’s thought has been doubled for us – no longer the thought of Being, but of the remains of Being too. I am happy to note that no less a reader of Heidegger than Derrida considers it (in Positions) “the most continuous and most difficult thread of Heidegger's thought.” Why continuous? Well as far as I can ascertain it first appears in the 1919 Kriegsnotsemester (according to Kisiel) and we find it, of course, all over the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) where we find such wonderfully dense sentences that almost feel like scripture: “In enowning, enowning itself resonates in counter-resonance.” This week I face the daunting task of writing my dissertation section dealing with Ereignis. Expect increasingly cryptic dispatches from inside the Ge-Stell…

The New Being and Time translation

2010-08-02T13:40:00.003+01:00

Just a note that the updated translation of Being and Time is out. I'm actually quite fond of using this one. Stambaugh did make some errors but nothing that anyone who takes Heidegger seriously won't pick up themselves. The translation is far better if you are trying to get someone to read Heidegger. It 'feels' far less stuffy and is just more readable. I'm pretty sure Heidegger scholarship is one of the few areas where this is seen as a bad thing because it doesn't capture Heidegger's austere tone well enough. Well I for one don't find Heidegger all that austere - pedantic, humourless, and repetitive for long sections sure, but can he set your mind racing when he needs to? For sure and Stambaugh gets the electric Heidegger way better than M&Q. And the electric Heidegger is the one that has captured us. It'll be great to see what Schmidt has done. If he manages to add all the bits needed to make it more scholarly without losing Stambaugh's tone then we may very well see it replace the M&Q translation as the standard.

Hat tip: enowning.

Speculations Volume I

2010-08-01T18:14:00.007+01:00

The first volume of Speculations is now online. It can be accessed in a number of ways:

You can buy a physical copy on Lulu.

You can download the full PDF version for free.

And you can access all the individual PDF's on our wordpress blog.

This has been a lot of hard work, but hopefully we have managed to bring about what I originally promised – a venue to discuss ‘fringe’ continental philosophy no matter what its guise. This would have been a very different process if not for Thomas Gokey whose dedication to the project is the reason the issue is coming out now and not in two months time. If you are interested in submitting something for volume II drop me a line.

Enjoy and please spread the word!

Paul

[Technical note]: Users who have browsed the original website will have noticed a lot of stray code cropping up whenever users tried to navigate the site. This has already led to the delay of Speculations by a few weeks and should we continue along that path it might be another month yet. Hence the shift to wordpress.

21st Century Heidegger Call for Registration and full list of Speakers

2010-08-01T12:22:00.002+01:00

Open Call for Registration

21st Century Heidegger Conference

Date: Friday 10th & Saturday 11th September 2010

Venue: UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, Ireland

Keynote Speakers:

Miguel de Beistegui (The University of Warwick, UK)

Martin Gessmann (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

François Raffoul (Louisiana State University, USA)

Session Speakers:

Trish Glazebrook (Dalhousie University, Canada)

Ullrich Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Mark Sinclair (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Andrew Haas (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Dermot Moran (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Georgia Warnke (University of California, Riverside, USA)

Raphael Zagury-Orly (University of Tel-Aviv and Bezalel School of Fine Arts, Israel)

Joseph Cohen (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Gregor Noll (University of Lund, Sweden)

Erick Valdes (Georgetown University, USA)

Georg Friedrich Simet (Neuss University for International Business, Germany)

Thomas Arnold (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

Jeff Kochan (University of Konstanz, Germany)

Matthew Shockey (Indiana University - South Bend, USA)

Christophe Perrin (A.T.E.R., Paris-Sorbonne University, France)

Sacha Y. J. Golob (University of Cambridge, UK)

Phillip Tonner (University of Glasgow and University of Oxford, UK)

Marko Goran Bosnić (University of Freiburg, Germany)

Sinead Hogan (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Peter Wolfendale (The University of Warwick, UK)

Niall Keane (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland)

Branko Klun (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Justin Laleh (The University of Warwick, UK)

Stephen Reynolds (New College, University of Oxford, UK)

Michael Purcell (The University of Edinburgh, UK)

Jill Coffin (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

Bert van den Bergh (The Hague University, The Netherlands)

Shaun May (University of London, UK)

Hans W. Gruenig (Tulane University, USA)

Christian Pinawin (Northwestern University, USA)

Sylvain Camilleri (Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)

Jana Elsen (University of Sussex, UK)

Evi Haggipavlu (Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus)

Mark Titmarsh (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)

Cameron Tonkinwise (The New School of Design, New York City, USA)

Özge Ejder (Yeditepe University Istanbul, Turkey)

David Storey (Fordham University, USA)

Sponsored by:

UCD School of Philosophy

UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Goethe-Institut, Dublin

To register, contact:

The Organizing Committee

Paul J. Ennis

Dr Tziovanis Georgakis

heidegger2010@gmail.com

Harman, Heidegger, and Time

2010-07-31T18:09:00.001+01:00

Since I am gearing up for the 21st Heidegger conference I’ve been leafing through Sein und Zeit and noticed Graham’s post on encountering SZ for the first time. I can’t really remember how that felt since our undergraduate program has plenty of Heidegger and it is likely I just leafed through the introduction in our ‘Introduction to Existentialism’ course. Heidegger didn’t strike me until my final year when I came across his monumental Nietzsche lectures.

Graham raises an important question about the status of ‘time’ in Heidegger:

‘*”Time” in Heidegger isn’t actually time at all. This took me several years to figure out, and in my opinion too many people have never figured it out. Time in Heidegger is simply his usual threefold ambiguity: we are thrown into a situation, we interpret it in a certain way according to our own potentiality for being, and these two moments combined give us a present that is not simply present, but torn in two directions. But this has absolutely no connection with time in the sense wonderfully dealt with by Bergson: time as irreducible to a series of cinematic frames. In Heidegger, the “temporal” analysis would work perfectly well for a cinematic frame. There is no flux or becoming in Heidegger, there is simply a trembling ambiguity in each individual instant.’

This is a really significant albeit probably quite shocking thing for non-Heideggerians to hear. ‘Time’ is a strangely underdeveloped notion in Heidegger scholarship. Despite the blunt fact that Heidegger dangles time before us as the horizon (or solution) to the fundamental question his readers rarely accept this. One finds any number of counter-intuitive explanations that go ‘What Heidegger really meant to emphasize was…[insert theme here].’ This also holds for the anti-technological motif that Graham rose in an earlier thread. Not only is Heidegger’s position on technology transparent it is almost mundane. I say this as someone who is consistently astounded by the depth of his analysis of technics (hence the subtitle of this blog), but I am impressed with it in its immediacy. I find nothing subtle about it. That is its singular force.

When you have this wonderful epochal explanation of the entire history of philosophy at hand why the desire to out-do it? There is no point trying to bring it back down to earth. It belongs precisely in its beautifully ambiguous state – a poem on ‘Being’ as Heidegger himself would put it. Our job, as Zabala in the Remains of Being is arguing, is to deal with the remnants of ‘Being’ and not to re-imagine a profounder Heidegger than the one that actually existed. When it comes to exegesis on Heidegger surely the job is help make him more accessible? If ever someone didn’t need any help to think great thoughts…

Turning back to Harman’s explanation of time in Heidegger it really is something ‘not quite figured out’ because it is, in its very bones as I like to say, obscure. The ecstases of temporality are mind-blowingly hard to follow in Division II corresponding to this strange dialectic of Dasein’s ‘fissuring’ and being ‘displaced’ and held in a Moment (Augenblick) - the blink of an eye. I like the idea of the non-present present torn in two directions and here one should take Graham’s advice to read The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic as a key to SZ. I suspect, though I cannot be sure, that Graham’s views here are drawn from that text rather than SZ and it is the right choice since time/temporality is not SZ’s strong point. Rather one ought to look at MFL or Basic Problems.

Heidegger’s, admittedly somewhat convoluted, way to express how Dasein evolves out of itself from out of that initial thrownness is the locus of ‘time’ for him. If you follow the thread in Division II you get a real sense of Heidegger’s theological impulses: a desire to set alight in your mind a state of rapture [ἔκστασις]. But this is all well and good for Dasein but what role does ‘time’ play except a subordinate or ‘grounding’ role in providing a crack into ‘Being’ (the horizon in the sense of a passage/bridge as Heidegger puts it at times). Certainly we get those difficult passages on temporality temporalizing or temporality temporalizes but this is not Time per se but a distinctly temporality in that transcendental sense *time as transcendentally ideal a la Kant.* It is odd, but this all feeds nicely into the correlationist critique. Consider, for example, Blattner’s intervention into the realism/antirealism debate apropos Heidegger:

“To the question whether entities will continue to be, even if we (Dasein) cease to exist, we may develop two different answers, depending upon whether we are asking the question ‘now’ or ‘then’. If we ask the question ‘now’, while we do exist, the answer is that entities will continue to exist. But if we ask the question ‘then’, when we no longer exist, the question has no answer.”

In Blattner, William(2004) 'Heidegger's Kantian idealism revisited', Inquiry, 47: 4, 322.
Food for thought, but for now I really must head out. Blog posting on Heidegger on a Saturday evening is frowned upon.

Heidegger on the prior existence of the Cosmos

2010-07-29T18:27:00.002+01:00

Worth quoting apropos correlationism and the ancestral argument. From GA 26, 216/
169 [The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic]:

“...the cosmos can be without humans inhabiting the earth, and the cosmos was long before humans ever existed.”