Ecology, Capitalism and Waste: From Hyperobject to Hyperabject

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Mikkel Krause Frantzen ◽  
Jens Bjering

The article develops the notion of the ‘hyperabject’ – coined by Danish poet Theis Ørntoft – into a proper theoretical concept. The term hyperabject is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and in the article we argue that the concept of the hyperabject entails a necessary critique of and correction to Morton's ecological thought, as well as various other versions of speculative realism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-123
Author(s):  
Russell Sbriglia

Abstract This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”


Author(s):  
Vladimir Iosifovich Potapchuk ◽  
Nikolai Vladimirovich Kshevin

The paper examines the issues included in the range of problems of ontology and philosophy of history, identifies the prospects for further study of the con-cepts of historical development in the philosophy of speculative realism. Such a study seems possible due to the focus of speculative realism on the de-velopment of a method that can explain the move-ment in time of both social and non-social objects. A brief overview of the origin of various models of historical development is given. Some theoretical positions of certain areas of speculative realism are studied. The view of object-oriented ontology and new materialism on the nature of history is substan-tiated. Special attention is paid to the sources of origin of certain concepts of the philosophy of speculative realism and their connection with devel-opment models in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. The outlined differences in the models of historical development in object-oriented ontolo-gy and new materialism reveal the potential of re-search in relation to speculative realism as one of the directions of modern philosophy. Such material makes it possible to better understand the essence of the differences between certain areas of specula-tive realism and forms a new view on the assess-ment of the reasons for such differences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-124
Author(s):  
Justin L. Harmon ◽  

The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to critique Graham Harman’s avowedly nonrelational object-oriented ontology from the shared relational vantage of ethics, social philosophy, and feminist new materialism; and (2) to articulate the metaphysical basis for a materialist ontology that serves at once as a posthumanist metaethic, or, as I call it, proto-ethic. The nascent movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology suggest some fruitful strategies for challenging the anthropocentrism of the post-Kantian philosophical landscape. They do so, however, by simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of thinking with these strategies to address moral and political problems, insofar as they characterize the real as fundamentally nonrelational. I argue that Harman’s adopted noumenalism is ultimately self-undermining, and offer as an alternative a materialist account of reality as intrinsically phenomenal, where phenomenality is unpacked as the excessive, ongoing source of proto-ethical norms to which every human ethical system implicitly appeals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 298-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Braune

AbstractIn her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light.


Author(s):  
Jon Cogburn

The first chapter focuses on Garcia’s arguments against reductionism, with (i) an explanation of Garcia’s affirmation of ontological liberality, and (ii) a discussion of Garcia’s important supplementary arguments against the view that some putative entities are not things. The first few sections of the chapter contain an analysis of Garcia’s argument against what Graham Harman calls overmining and undermining. Both philosophers’ efforts are tied to contemporary work concerning reductionism in analytic philosophy. This discussion motivates (i) a brief presentation of Harman’s account of Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand”, (ii) a discussion of capacity metaphysics, and (iii) Garcia’s differential ontology of objects. In this manner, Garcia’s central motivation and broad picture are situated with respect to recent trends in continental philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.


2018 ◽  
pp. 42-50
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail

This chapter lays out a methodology of transcendental realism and new materialism based on motion. Transcendental realism is the study of the real minimal ontological conditions for the actual emergence of the historical present. The purpose of this method is to give a description of what previous being must at least be like given that it appears as it does today: in motion. The chapter offers critiques of constructivism, empiricism, metaphysics, and transcendental idealism. It also offers a critique of vitalist new materialism, negative materialism, object-oriented ontology, formalism, and all ahistorical methods of thinking about matter and materialism. It concludes with a theory of “process materialism.”


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Artur Żywiołek

The article contains reflections on the “speculative realism”, a direction in 21st century philosophy initiated by Graham Harman, whose books (The Quadruple Object, Object-Oriented Ontology. A New Theory of Everything) continue and process Martin Heidegger’s concept of “the quadruple” (das Geviert), and they also use the ideas of such thinkers as Edmund Husserl and Bruno Latour. The basic problem formulated in this text arises from the following questions: is speculative realism another turn in scientific research, or rather a return to those sources of thinking that take into account the complexity and the irreducibility of reality to any metaphysical instance? What is the role of the “speculative turn” in cultural studies, in various interpretative practices?


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Iain MacKenzie

Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object has been framed primarily as a contribution to object oriented metaphysics. In this article, I shall explicate and defend four claims that bring it closer to the modern critical tradition: 1) that Garcia’s Form and Object can be read, profitably, within the tradition of reflection upon the nature of possessions, self-possession and possessiveness; 2) that to read the book in this way is to see Garcia as the French heir to C. B. McPherson although it will be argued that what this amounts to is that while McPherson was the anti-Locke, so to speak, Garcia is the anti-Rousseau; 3) that this framing has significant consequences for our reception of Form and Object in that it can be understood as a book that not only marks a moment in debates surrounding speculative realism and object oriented ontology but that it also, and primarily, marks an important moment in debates about the encroachment of things and the culture of possession that, in part, defines modernity; 4) that there is a novel ontological position within Form and Object, one that is neither relational nor individualist, that presents a challenging account of ‘the chance and the price’ of living after possession and how to overcome the deleterious effects of contemporary consumer societies.


The article considers speculative posthumanism as an actual approach in researching posthuman being condition. The article examines the influences of critical posthumanism and speculative realism on speculative posthumanism and at the same time, it argues the originality of speculative posthumanism, which consists in becoming divergential life-forms and their events. Trends, which significantly impacted on critical posthumanism and became its component parts of such as deconstruction, deleuzian conception and so on are considered in the article as a background for speculative posthumanism and are naturalizing and vitalizing. For example, rhizome is understood as a biological network of wide human descendants that are appropriate to human and nonhuman traits something like a human centipede. Thus principal excess of living in its immanence is stressed and the living is been considering as a specter or plenum, which resists to any metaphysical bounds. Instead of a metaphysical vitalism is used a strategic vitalism in the context of which multiplicity is been structuring fractally or aleatory, mixing human and non-human, digital or animal and so on, traits. Therefore, the article compares philosophical naturalism and vital realism, which in object-oriented ontology context deals with even non-living entities. Acceleration and singularity in such a case imply the dissipation of intensities in the death drive movement which is understanded as a (w)holeness and plexivity from templexity to teleoplexity. Thus, a living appears as a being-nothing, the form of form, the creation of creation. The article draws a contemporary conception of posthuman in the speculative posthumanism context as an ontogically uncertain one in principal. This article will be useful for developing a theoretical framework the realizing of posthuman being.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Ioan-Cristian Boboescu

"Close: Nearing the Future by Means of Symbiogenesis and Hyperobjectivity. At the beginning of the 21st century we find a call for philosophers to join a new alliance: with artists and architects rather than linguists or physicists. In order to see the ecosystem, we need to switch concepts, look away from “nature” and move towards ambiance and hyperobjects. Along with this rehabilitation of Aristotle (by speculative realism and, more specifically, object-oriented ontology) comes a call for a fresh start as post-humanistic symbionts. These are proposals for alternatives to the catastrophic end of the short-lived drama of the Anthropocene. All this aids the here introduction of near-future hyperobjectivity. Keywords: ambiance, Anthropocene, symbiogenesis, OOO / object-oriented ontology / flat ontology, nature, ecosophy, deep ecology, dark ecology, time and near future "


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