the Rubicon has been crossed

Today’s special event is the emailing, from Australia, of the first set of book contracts for OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS. Thanks to Sigi Jöttkandt and her colleagues for dreaming up this marvelous experiment. As most of you know by now, it will be a fully open access publisher, with print-on-demand paper copies available from the University of Michigan (already the most “electrified” of the traditional brick-and-mortar university presses).

I’m proud to say that the first set of contracts are all from the NEW METAPHYSICS series that I co-edit with Latour.

With the two of us as editors, it should come as no surprise that the series will have a heavily object-oriented flavor at the start (though submissions showing other new metaphysical approaches are welcome, and some are already under consideration).

We will start with Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects. Both Ian and Levi are engaging writers and “known quantities,” with readership bases already in place. These should be important books.

My own The Quadruple Object was set for simultaneous release with those, but as already explained on this blog, PUF’s claim of global electronic rights in all languages makes that book ineligible for open access publication in English. (zerO Books gets it instead, in print format only, and you will see my Treatise on Objects appear with OHP.)

Here’s the series description again, in case it moves anyone to take a shot at launching a new metaphysics:

“The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy.”

I don’t believe in small goals. The goal for this series is that it eventually achieve “legendary” status as the cradle of much of the best speculative philosophy to emerge in the next half-century. We’ll be publishing people I haven’t even heard of yet.

So get to work, everyone… There’s a series to live up to now!