Levi on the Shaviro dispute

A typically treatise-length POST BY LEVI weighs in on the Whitehead dispute (Levi sides with Shaviro on this issue). I can’t stop the things I’m doing right now to give a detailed response, but this is probably worth an article fairly soon, because a number of people have protested that Whitehead is not as thoroughly relationist as I make him out to be.

Regardless of my disagreement with Bryant and Shaviro on this particular point, I see a more general issue here. It seems to me that the real strength of any philosophy is to be found in its method of exaggeration. Since I just wrote a book on Latour, let’s take him as our example. What is so wonderful about Irreductions is the way that it goes so completely overboard in saying “an actor is nothing more than the effects it has on other actors.” This is a wonderful thought experiment with such interesting results. It is also one-sided, and I have criticized as such.

The problem, of course, is that just as any important philosophy makes a brilliant initial exaggeration, it also wants to claim to be describing the world as it is, and to that end the exaggeration never works. And so there is always a rush, by both author and fans, to imply that the author doesn’t really mean the exaggeration. The author is perfectly capable of balancing both sides of the problem, and so forth. But in fact, any important philosopher tends to place the emphasis on one of the two sides of the problem, and it is this initial exaggeration that is where the philosophical force lies. The other half is just a supplement added by the thinker or the thinker’s followers in order not to look crazy.

Some examples:

*Husserl does, in fact vaporize real objects in his philosophy. They aren’t there. But since this sounds solipsistic, and no one wants to defend solipsism, you can find a few minor pirouettes where Husserl tries to show that he does in fact account adequately for them.

*Every page of Badiou is as subject-oriented as possible. He has nothing at all to do with realism. Yet you can find one or two minor throwaway remarks where Badiou says “a world without a subject is possible,” and somehow Badiouians are satisfied to use these remarks as evidence that Badiou is not an idealist, even after hundreds of pages to the contrary.

*Ontological multiplicity in Spinoza is really quite feeble. Yet everyone seems to delight in claiming that Spinoza leaves as much room for individuals as Leibniz (he doesn’t).

In other words, there is a recurring counter-critical strategy in philosophy that consists in saying “only a fool would take that part literally,” when in fact the literal, initial exaggeration in any philosophy is always its greatest strength, and it must be required to pay the price for that strength.

Same too with Whitehead. Actual entities are analyzable into their prehensions, period. The attempts of my friends Bryant and Shaviro (it’s also in Toscano’s book briefly, and in Rorty, and in others) are attempts to soften Whitehead’s brilliant exaggeration rather than to follow its consequences and see where they lead. (I also think they are equivocating between several senses of relation.)