Levi’s response to Ivakhiv

I’m afraid I agree WITH LEVI on both counts here.

1. There’s no point responding to Vitale’s bizarre post that OOO is a mystical cult, nor is he really in a position to “throw down the gauntlet” as Ivakhiv put it. Vitale is still missing the point of most of OOO’s arguments.

2. After Ivakhiv’s latest post, I’m no longer convinced that we’re stuck in an accidentally frustrating cycle. I now conclude that Ivakhiv actually enjoys pushing things back to Square One while also claiming an intellectual high ground that he simply doesn’t possess. I have nothing to add to Levi’s arguments on this score. Nor will I link to either of these posts. Anyone interested can scrounge through Google.

Saying that you disagree with my arguments is fine. No matter what I do, if I live to be 90 and write 50 extremely successful books, there will always be people who disagree. Not everyone agrees with Plato or Aristotle, for Pete’s sake. It is mission impossible to think that you will ever convince everyone; that’s not a reasonable criterion of success.

But it’s quite another thing to say that I haven’t made any arguments at all. Even Ivakhiv and Vitale don’t really believe that; they’re just trying to play king of the hill and make pretenses to occupying high ground, when I’m afraid the vision of process-relational thought they defend is simply riddled with banalities.

If anyone wants to review my “arguments” in favor of objects, they can do what Levi says and read Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics. He doesn’t mention L’Objet quadruple, which is already out in French and will be available in English most likely in April. And then there’s the second half of Prince of Networks, which some readers have found the best account of my position so far. (Personally, I would say that L’Objet quadruple is probably the most concentrated and thorough presentation of my own version of OOO.)

If you go to my FACULTY PAGE at the American University in Cairo, the red link at the very bottom of the page contains an up-to-date list of all of my publications, most of which make arguments in favor of objects as the basic persona of philosophy. Disagree with them if you please, but they are certainly rational arguments.

But again, Ivakhiv is fully aware that they are arguments. He has simply demonstrated, to me at least, that his tendency to keep coming around in a circle to the same point in the argument is probably deliberate. This is not something I ever encounter with Bruno Latour or Steven Shaviro, two relational thinkers with whom it is always possible to move the ball forward, because they are fundamentally not of an obstructionist character. That is to say, it is their goal to have energetic disputes, not to suck the energy out of all dispute.

Other than some of the foul-mothed trollish posts we’ve seen in the last two years, I’m not sure I’ve ever been as dismayed by posts the way I was by the latest from these two people. It is now clearly hopeless to try to argue with them.

Unlike Levi, I cannot now sleep, because it is 1:45 PM where I am. What I will get back to, instead, is revising a couple of articles, both of which contain further arguments on behalf of objects.