Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

My second article in the Encyclopedia just posted, though it’s behind a payment firewall, HERE.

The previously commissioned article, published last year, was on Object-Oriented Ontology. There I dealt with my own work and some of Timothy Morton’s.

The Speculation article deals mostly with two topics: (1) Meillassoux’s fantastic book on Mallarmé, The Number and the Siren; (2) Tom Eyers’s interesting book Speculative Formalism, and in passing with the brilliant and highly relevant Forms by Caroline Levine. Needless to say, I agree with Levine’s position more than Eyers’s, but Eyers is always a smart cookie and worth reading.

discussion with Sylvia Lavin coming up in less than an hour

Tonight at 10 PM EDT (7 PM in Los Angeles) you can hear my discussion with Princeton architectural historian Sylvia Lavin: HERE.

It’s actually only 1 hour, not 2 hours as it says. The Q & A afterward is only by invitation, I suppose for technical reasons.

a clip: Žižek on OOO

This is from Winnipeg in April 2019, but somebody just sent it to me this morning.

I always have time for Žižek. People who merely have the “jester” take on his work aren’t taking him seriously enough. Nonetheless, he’s also the funniest Western philosopher since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.

Žižek’s final remark in this clip refers to OOO as an “arrogant” return to “old realist ontology.” I’ll let readers decide whether it’s arrogant, but there are at least two reasons why OOO is not a return to old realist ontology:

(1) It’s a post-Heideggerian realism. The old realisms to which he refers were obsessed with establishing direct access to reality. OOO takes that to be impossible, which is why indirect approaches to reality are our thing. That’s not old realism.

(2) Most old realism was concerned with how humans can know the real. OOO embeds this concern in the wider question of how objects interact at all, including in purely causal situations that involve nothing resembling what is usually called knowledge.

Žižek still has his own lessons to offer on point #1. He’d give that point a Lacanian rather than a Hegelian spin, and though I disagree with Lacan’s dismissal of an unknowable reality, Lacan was a sage with much to offer.

The problem is with point #2: Žižek has little to offer here, just like Lacan (and Hegel, for that matter). The interaction between two non-human entities is not a topic that flourishes in the post-Kantian era. (Whitehead is the only one daring enough to try it, but he takes the ultra-relationist route.) The usual maneuver is to claim that the hard sciences already handle it just fine. So, philosophy becomes a discourse covering the single meeting-point where subject meets world.

November 9 event

I’ll be engaged in THIS DISCUSSION with Maviita Chirimuuta and Donald Hoffman.

new publication dates

The COVID pandemic has obviously wrought havoc on many fronts. The publication of academic books is no exception. Two of my forthcoming books have delayed publication dates as a result.

Artful Objects was initially scheduled to be published in early November. It was then pushed back to January 5, 2021 and I see now that it has been rescheduled for March 23, 2021. That one is good to go.

Skirmishes still says “Spring 2020” on the punctum website, though we’ve obviously missed that date. But I can report that the proofs are corrected and final editing is underway. Apparently there’s some chance the book might still appear before the end of 2020, though I can’t guarantee it. Fairly soon, at any rate.

The manuscript of Architecture and Objects is also finished, though I’ve been seeking feedback from knowledgeable people and will work on it a bit more. Still, I’d say that 2021 publication is a safe bet. The University of Minnesota Press is the publisher for this one, my first time doing anything with them.

ADDENDUM: Another is almost finished, which I forgot to mention in the original post. It’s a co-authored book with someone in another humanities/social sciences field. We’re going to finish it before shopping it, and I’ll leave it off the list of forthcoming works until we have a publisher. What I can say is that it has something to do with the topic of time.

remembering my weirdest Christmas

For some reason I was just remembering my weirdest Christmas. It was 2010. I wanted to spend the last week of the year in Cyprus, which is close to Egypt but so far I had not yet been.

After surveying the available flight itineraries, I purposely chose the flight out of Cairo on Christmas morning, something I often did due to good deals and empty flights in that slot. I also purposely chose to fly from Cairo to Cyprus via Beirut with an 11-hour layover, just so that I could enjoy Christmas Day in Lebanon.

Unfortunately, this was not too long after the Israeli assassination of the Hamas official in Dubai, with the assassination team sweeping in and out of Dubai Airport rather quickly. The point being, Lebanon was surely on guard against the same sort of thing happening there. And… they wouldn’t let me out of Beirut Airport. That’s right. Though I had quite a number of Lebanon stamps in my passport already, they said if I didn’t have an overnight hotel booking, I would have to stay in the airport until my next flight.

Now, Beirut Airport is not the world’s most boring, but it’s far from the world’s most interesting, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend that anyone hang out there for 11 hours. And you can only look at the gift shops so many times.

Worse yet, the Beirut Airport stereo got stuck on something I never would have predicted– the soundtrack to that Disney animated Robin Hood cartoon where the characters are all animals. Robin Hood himself is a fox, if memory serves. And in particular, the airport stereo got stuck on many consecutive replays of “Robin Hood and Little John walkin’ through the forest, oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day…”

Song HERE.

After hearing it around 20-25 times in a row that Christmas Day, it took a week or so to get it out of my head.

a brief article on flat ontology

Just published, HERE.

new interview in Turkish

For those who can read the language. HERE.

[ADDENDUM: Fixed broken link.]