the Calvino comparison

No, I’ve never read the Calvino novel referred to below by this reader (whose name I will withhold). It refers to my problem with the printing of the Johnston book. Nice punch line in the p.s. of this message, too:

“Dear Dr Harman,

I’ve been a fan of your work, and a reader of your blog, for a very long time, but till now no post you’ve made has prompted me to venture to write you. But your post on the misprint you found in Johnston’s book on Badiou and Zizek is so like a motif in one of my favorite novels that I decided to try to let you know before someone else inevitably does.

It would seem you have fallen prey to the Organization of Apocryphal Power, an entity –one could say, an object– from Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. To say too much would be to deliver spoilers galore, but I hope that Calvino’s name is enough to persuade you to give this very readable and very, very maddening short novel a try. (I am assuming you don’t already know it only because the comparison fairly leapt at me from the computer screen, and I guessed you would’ve mentioned it). Now that I think of it, this novel of Calvino’s is almost a parable for a certain kind of Object-Oriented aesthetics (I swear I didn’t think of this before I sat down to type this email): the way the novel ‘withdraws.’

Thanks for this post –a beautiful instance of crossover between fiction and life– and for all your work. It is possible that I disagree with you on some deep level, but you’re one of my favorite thinkers to argue with in my head and on the page.

All best,

PS I’ve worked in bookshops off and on for 20 years. My favorite misprint I’ve ever seen was a copy in which every page was blank. The only words were on the cover. The book was (supposed to be) George Steiner’s Language and Silence.”