Chronicle of Higher Education article

I didn’t realize I was mentioned in the October 18, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. So is Ray Brassier, and so are our respective employers: the American Universities located in Cairo and Beirut.

Incidentally, hard as it may be to believe, there is no connection between any of the “American Universities” located in foreign countries (Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Paris, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bulgaria, etc.). They are actually even rivals to some extent. The phrase “American University” simply means an American style of university– major field combined with shared core courses, grades of A B C D & F, accreditation in the United States, etc. American higher education is just about the only American thing that continues to receive resounding shouts of approval in public opinion polls in the Middle East.

Nor is there any connection between any of us abroad and American University in Washington, D.C.

But back to the point… Click the following paragraph for Jennifer Howard’s whole article. (However, Brassier will not be pleased to find himself described as an “object-oriented philosopher.” That part is simply wrong.)

“Even in philosophy, though, the climate for such investigations is warming. Calarco has noted a new tendency within both the analytic and the Continental traditions, the two big strands of the field, ‘to start questioning a certain anthropocentric bias.’ In the past five or six years, for instance, people including Graham Harman, a professor of philosophy at the American University in Cairo, and Ray Brassier, a professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut, have gotten interested in object-oriented philosophy and what Calarco calls object-object relationships. Harman, for instance, is engaged in what is sometimes referred to as speculative realism. In his book Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (re.press, 2009), he writes that he ‘would even propose a new philosophical discipline called ‘speculative psychology’ devoted to ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone.’ Such thinking (or rethinking) is congenial to animal-studies scholars who want to break apart the idea of the human subject as the center of things.”

And as for “speculative psychology,” I can’t claim to have been working on it full steam ahead, but a few more cornerstones for it will probably appear in the extended English language edition of L’objet quadruple. The English version will be double the length of the French. (Necessary because the Anglophone readership already knows my work much better than in France, and needs extra novelties compared with the French, who can still be regaled with my take on the tool-analysis, etc.)