quick thought based on a Google result

Word received that I was a Google result for the following question: “Who did Xavier Zubiri influence?”

Yes, Zubiri did influence me. I picked up On Essence very cheaply through a book catalog as an undergraduate, then didn’t get around to reading it for 9 years. He is what I would call a “weird realist”. Despite some residues of traditional realism that are unfortunate, Zubiri shows why essence (so decried even now) is an unavoidable concept, and is far stricter than Aristotle in subtracting essence from any functional or relational model of it. A thing is what it is, not what it can do.

While reading through Debaise yesterday (he’s an excellent young Belgian, a specialist in Whitehead) I was reminded of the fact that most members of my generation are still heading in the opposite direction. This is important because I think philosophy often begins negatively, with a sense that certain ideas are boring, used up, or out of date. And it is still often the case that people think substance, essence, the subject-predicate sentence structure, etc., are what need to be attacked. I can’t go there, however, because I think the attacks on these notions are now used up and hollow, and it’s time to retrieve what is of value in them. This is one of the reasons I’m so fond of Suárez– his works are practically a parade of concepts that look banal and middle-aged when viewed from an orthodox avant garde position (and Deleuze perhaps defines the current orthodox avant garde better than anyone else), but they are also a treasure house of ideas that, in my view, are now ripe for retrieval.

This is one of the most important ideas to be found in McLuhan: the notion that everything is retrievable. The history of philosophy, like the history of everything else, does not work according to linear modernization or improvement, but according to reversals and retrievals. “My wager”, as the Badiouians like to say, is that realism, essence, substance, individual entities, are now ripe for retrieval. They’ve simply been dumped on for too long.

Incidentally, my favorite part of Debaise’s book is his section on Simondon. At first it looks as though it’s going to be just another case of lumping all the “process” people together, but Debaise sees very clearly that there is a major point of incompatibility between Simondon and Whitehead: the former gives individuals a subordinate position, while the latter makes individuals primary. Latour is the same as Whitehead here, and I think this is the primary reason that those reviewers are completely wrong who want to read Latour as a sort of Deleuzian. I do think that Latour’s version of ANT was partly inspired by Anti-Oedipus, but the real historical debt for Latour is to Whitehead, and people tend to vastly overstate the Whitehead/Deleuze compatibility. (There is a tendency to take Deleuze too much at his word when he declares his alliances. His “alliance” with Leibniz is another such case. Deleuze’s Leibniz is simply Leibniz wearing a Spinoza mask as if on Halloween night: Leibniz’s face is unrecognizable except through a few minimal traces of body language.)