Shaviro’s quick response

Shaviro did have enough time TO RESPOND TO THE KANT PART OF MY CRITIQUE.

His response shows a way in which we agree rather than disagree. Shaviro says he takes the side of Kant when considered against Hegel. I’d make that choice too, and that’s a way in which Shaviro and I would both agree against Meillassoux, for instance. Though I agree with Meillassoux’s condemnation of Kant’s “Ptolemaic Counter-Revolution,” I am of course cheering for Kant by the end of After Finitude, because I think Meillassoux takes it a little too far in his elimination of finitude. I can endorse the principle of “after correlationism,” but not “after finitude.”

You can also see SPOONERIZED ALLITERATIONS weigh in on the debate. But I’m reluctant even to link to it because the last thing I have the time for at the moment is a multiple-interlocutor debate on this issue. I link to it in case my readers find it interesting. [ADDENDUM: All I want to say here is that I don’t agree with his tactical point that “praising Kant will help get Kantians on board.” Not so, as long as they insist on the human-world duopoly of Kant, as virtually all mainstream continental philosophers do. Good luck trying to get Kantians hooked on Whitehead. I don’t see it happening. Despite my disagreement with the Whitehead/Deleuze pairing, there’s a good reason why most converts to Whitehead come from the Deleuze camp, not from Kantians, Husserlians, or Heideggerians. Despite Shaviro’s “constructivism” points, I see Kant as even three steps further from Whitehead than Deleuze is.]

Same goes for Levi’s disappointing RELAPSE into saying that dark matter is like phlogiston and my objects are like dark matter, therefore implying that they are like phlogiston. I could see why one might compare Kant’s things-in-themselves to dark matter, but both those of those are defined insofar as they are unknowable by humans. I’ve not seen any account of dark matter which turns it into an ontology in which the world is articulated into parts, each of which is partly dark for anything else it encounters, not just for humans. That would be a closer analogy to my position. Levi’s “we only know things insofar as they produce differences” would be harmless if only taken epistemologically, but he actually seems to be pushing it toward a correlationist argument in his current post.

No, Levi! Don’t drink from that bottle!