My new article out in Zygon, “Object?Oriented Ontology and the Other of We in Anthropocentric Posthumanism” is a philosophical takedown of a misguided notion: that difference that make a difference should be deliberately overlooked or ignored for the sake of respecting the individuality of objects.
While this seems like an extreme form of politically correct identity politics, it’s not. It’s advanced metaphysical gymnastics. Attempting to place being out of grasp while describing it in excruciating detail has been a pasttime of nominalists for generations. Plato, Kant, and others had bad habits of describing the very things they claimed were indescribable, beyond the access of mere mortals. Such privileged access begs the question: either these object whisperers know more than we do, and are able to reach through the veil where mere mortals cannot, or they are speculating without any grounding in reality.
If you’re bicurious about OOO, posthumanism, new materialism, and the bevy of other ungrounded and often non-relational theories de jour that get served up to university students as the new gospel, you might enjoy reading this paper.
