a more general consideration

It was interesting to see that Parikka’s comments thread, which seems to be populated largely by Deleuzian types, was nearly as rancorous as the sorts of remarks that OOO gets from Brassier’s sour-faced crew.

It’s obvious that the theme of objects really bothers certain people, and it bothers them at many different points of the philosophical compass.

What this helps illuminate, yet again, is that so much of the business of philosophers these days is to attack individual objects. Either you pulverize them and turn them into something accessible only to the sciences or treat them as sterile surface encrustations (these are both “undermining” maneuvers) or else you claim that objects represent a reactionary positing of hidden essences lying beneath networks or events or happenings or performances (these are “overmining” maneuvers). As I have tried to show at least twice in print, these two opposite strategies always team up together in the end, and this is why I’ve referred to them recently as “the beast with two backs.”

This is why Aristotle (along with Husserl) is the most maltreated of all great philosophers in today’s cutting-edge continental philosophy. Notice that what Aristotle and Husserl have in common is precisely their focus on individuals.

For Aristotle individuals are the primary substances, and his tradition has developed this idea whenever it has enjoyed a resurgence, as happens from time to time across the centuries.

As for Husserl, idealist though he is, the root of phenomenology is the notion of objects within the realm of experience, which is precisely what one does not find in British Empiricism, which treats experienced objects as arbitrary or habitual bundlings of qualities. (As far as I can see, one doesn’t even find it in Brentano, which is why people are going way overboard when they say that Husserl simply pirated everything from Brentano. Husserl’s own central idea is nowhere to be found in Brentano, for example. And I say this as a great admirer of Brentano.)