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.