what can you do?

Was just alerted to this sentence in a paper being circulated:

“Harman’s is a bitter critique of Realism and advocates the complete obsolescence of Realism in times to come.”

Not even sure what to say to this. The context suggests no paradoxical reversal such as: “While Harman consistently claims to be a realist, I will argue that in fact…” (Those sorts of moves are always possible when enough work is done, and occasionally they even succeed.) No, it’s simply made as a perfunctory statement of the obvious: “As everyone knows…”

I doubt anyone will be led astray by the words at the top of this post, but just for the record…

*my position has been an uncompromising realism since 1997, and given that I’ve published nothing dating before that time (the first few chapters of Towards Speculative Realism are from ’97) one cannot point to a single publication by me that says otherwise.

*I published Tool-Being in 2002, and DeLanda published his Intensive Science… in the same year. Both of our books openly and unironically proclaim realism. And while no one can claim an exhaustive familiarity with all writings among the tens of thousands of authors working in the continental tradition in the past century or so, I’m aware of no authors in that tradition who explicitly proclaimed themselves realists prior to 2002. Remember, one of the articles of faith in continental thought (openly stated in Husserl and Heidegger, the two main ancestors of that tradition) was that the realism/anti-realism dispute was a “pseudo-problem.” DeLanda and I in 2002 both said emphatically that it is not a pseudo-problem, and that realism must be defended. There may be earlier cases, but I doubt it. Please send me the references if you know of any. (Latour called himself a realist in 1999 in Pandora’s Hope, but only by way of a clever rhetorical reversal of the very meaning of the term “realism.”)

*Lee Braver is another author who realized that the realism/anti-realism dispute was ignored by continental thought. He takes the anti-realist side, of course, but it was an innovation for him even to raise the topic in his excellent book, A Thing of This World. And if you read my review of Braver in Philosophy Today, “A Festival of Anti-Realism”… well, I’m not sure how anyone could read my review as agreeing with Braver’s anti-realist conclusions.

The paper in question may as well have said: “Harman is the leading female Brazilian philosopher over age 70.” It wouldn’t have been any more inaccurate.