like fire burning cotton

This may be the least expected reference to my philosophy so far (even weirder is that it was forwarded to me by a colleague here in Egypt). In the POLICE BLOTTER OF A SEATTLE ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER.

“My other point has to do with the burning paper bag. It recalls an image that an American philosopher, Graham Harman, loves to present and consider in his lectures and essays—the image of fire burning cotton. This beautiful image, which has its roots in ancient Arabic philosophy, shows how the fire essentially focuses on one thing about cotton: how it burns. The fire is indifferent to or ignores other aspects of cotton: its whiteness, softness, roundness. The fire uses up only a single aspect of the cotton, its flammability. Similarly, the fire on the paper bag only focused on a single aspect of it: that it burns. Nevertheless—and this is Harman’s point, the heart of his philosophy, which is called speculative realism—the fire, even if it consumed the whole bag, did not exhaust all of the things that the bag could be: a shopping bag, a garbage bag, an obstacle to an ant. The paper bag is inexhaustible.”