one other point about Austin

I should also have mentioned that I liked this part of his post, where he tried to distinguish a new position alongside the various correlationisms:

“The structuralist holds a different position: there are things-in-themselves, that is, there exist things outside of thought/rationality/language/culture, but they exist as traumatic pseudo-entities, things which break our womb of culture/etc and which must be dealt with. This is the underlying metaphysics of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Badiou and Zizek (and possibly Heidegger and Derrida, but we’ll leave them alone for now). I talk about this specific structure in Lacan and Zizek in a forthcoming essay for the International Journal of Zizek Studies. (Badiou appears prominently in the essay as well, though after reading Logics of Worlds this past Fall, I’m not sure if he can be read entirely in this way anymore. He seems to be focusing more on the structural aspect rather than the traumatic. I certainly think this is the structure at work in Being and Event though.)”

I’m perhaps a bit less willing to be generous to Badiou, Lacan, and Žižek than Mike is on this point. I see this focus on the trauma as just a disingenuous form of idealism, and in fact I really don’t see how Badiou, Lacan, or Žižek can be read as anything other than flat-out, full-blown idealists.