“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Elsewhere Cat


Il y a un chat. Levinas and Derrida eat your heart out: OOO's pilot has a cat. In Egypt. This was meant to be.

Graham also posted on
my parsing of what Meillassoux calls the “rich elsewhere.” Funnily enough I was just figuring out how the very thing that Meillassoux emphasizes, which is to follow correlationism to the end, is the very thing that one could drop (I think, as an OOO-ist).

In other words, what we are left with even by page 21 of After Finitude is the uncomfortably intense “ontological problem of the coming into being of givenness as such.”

Well yes--but only if you still think that humans are uniquely skilled at disclosing givenness (wash rinse repeat). If neutron stars and RNA also do it, no problem.

If, in other words, the given and givenness aren't all they're cracked up to be, then what's the fuss? This is the one big reason why I think OOO is something “truly new in the world” as I say at the start of my Speculations essay.

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