the current state of things

Levi, with typical candor, reveals his initial lack of interest in my work (and in fact I did sense this faintly at the time in Levi’s case, and Nick has never really been on board):

“The most fundamental encounter of 2009 was certainly my encounter with Graham Harman. When rumblings about Speculative Realism began, I was inclined to find Harman’s work the least interesting among the big four. This was not out of any familiarity with that work. I hadn’t yet read it. What I had heard about it through Nick Srnicek did not strike me as particularly interesting or far reaching. He was working on Heidegger. He was a phenomenologist. His work did not resonate with what I took to be the most important trends in contemporary Continental thought: Lacan, Zizek, Badiou, and Deleuze and Guattari. Nor was my confidence in his work inspired when I came online papers of his on Latour. ‘Latour?!? Really? Latour? Does this man have any philosophical taste? Doesn’t he know that the real philosophy is taking place with figures like Badiou, Lacan, and Zizek? Isn’t he interested in formalization and mathematics? Isn’t Latour a sort of crank or the worst sort of ’90s’ postmodern sophist?'”

“Then I read the manuscript for Prince of Networks (I’m not sure why I read it really) and everything changed. Where before I thought Harman was saying little of philosophical interest and that he lacked philosophical taste, I now saw that this initial impression was due to my inability to understand the concepts, problems, and questions he was working with and just how radical they are in revising our inherited philosophical problematics and questions, how deeply they required a revision of our basic ontological and epistemological assumptions, and just how fecund this ontological framework was for concrete research programs in other disciplines.”

Yes, I’m up against these sorts of preconceptions a lot. The names to conjure with in contemporary continental philosophy are still Deleuze, Badiou, Lacan, Laruelle, Zizek, some Malabou, etc. And what that means is that (very good) people like Adrian Johnston and Quentin Meillassoux have a much better chance of obtaining a quick fair hearing than I do. Their work is so much better aligned with the stars at the moment than mine is.

When you come over to visit my place, what you get instead is Husserl and Heidegger (viewed as passé in avant garde circles, though my reading of them is too avant garde for their traditional supporters, so the readership has had to be built from scratch, and slowly). You also get calls for a return to traditional realism and full-blown metaphysics, both still unpopular. And you get a lot of Latour, who isn’t even seen as a philosopher outside of the Netherlands, and the minds of a few others scattered across the globe such as Lucas Introna.

However, I’m still pretty comfortable with how things are going in contemporary philosophy. For one thing, I certainly prefer the Badiou/Deleuze fiesta to the deconstruction amidst which I was educated, though I still think there are serious philosophical problems with the current discourse, and that these problems are going to start staring people in the face. And when that happens, I’ll be there with a completely different option. (And the Neurology Death Cult is not going to be a feasible option, for reasons that will become clearer by the year.)