D. Vance Smith, “Death and Texts: Finitude Before Form”

Smith’s article is also enjoyable to read. Though it’s mostly about the theme of death in Chaucer, it starts off with a discussion of Speculative Realism. And it’s a good discussion, though I would make a few comments:

*Smith holds that my treatment of objects as “substantial forms” marks a retraction of my earlier views on the withdrawal of objects. I don’t see how. Here’s the key passage: “…but it rests on a seeming retraction of what he also says about the incommensurable depth of objects, for form is precisely the designation of the limit and inseparable from finitude.”

Here, Smith seems to be identifying finitude with human finitude, whereas I push Kant in a different direction so that finitude belongs to all objects.

Along the same lines, Smith says that I tend to flatten out death in my own work so that it becomes just one kind of finitude among other. But in fact, I’ve had nothing to say about death in my own voice so far. I’ve only discussed death in the context of my reading of Heidegger, and in that context I try to argue that it’s Heidegger who tries to speak about death (just like time) in its concrete specificity, but really gives us nothing more that wasn’t already available in the tool-analysis. My strategy for reading Heidegger is a flattening strategy, one that I think is warranted by the facts, but does not imply that I don’t think human death is any different from anything else (I’m just not in agreement that it should lie at the very foundation of ontology).

*One historical point, since this comes up a lot: “Quentin Meillassoux, the other philosopher usually identified along with Harman as a founder of speculative realism (which Harman later reshaped as object-oriented philosophy)…”

Object-oriented philosophy dates to the late 1990’s, at a time when I had never even heard of the other three original Speculative Realists (unless I knew of Iain Grant from his translations of Baudrillard and Lyotard, but even then he would only have been a name to me). So, it’s not true that object-oriented thought was a later offshoot of Speculative Realism. Nor is the converse true. Speculative Realism was a fairly big tent for four completely different philosophical orientations that diverge more and more as time goes by, as must always happen.

But it’s a nice essay, Smith’s, and reminds me that I wish I spent more time reading literary criticism.

I’ll get to Cole’s article as soon as I can.