This, in fact, is my biggest reservation about everything in post-’45 Paris: despite everyone’s best efforts, I don’t think Husserl and Heidegger have truly been digested and overcome. And that’s why I stick with these people for now.
Bingo. That has been my greatest pleasure to have discovered since I figured out I was OOO.
4 comments:
Tim -- Here's what I would have posted at Harman's joint if he'd been accepting comments:
FWIW, here's what I think.
For the next couple of decades we (of the human sciences) take the best of, that is, the work that's still fluid & not rigidified, the best of the newer psychologies (cog, evo, neuro), the digital humanities, throw in a pile of description (as Latour emphasizes*), and OOO/SR. We hook it all up, but loosely. Then shake it down over an intellectual generation or three.
I think of it as conceptual shrink wrapping. When you shrink wrap a package, the first thing you do is put it into a loose plastic bag. The bag is a made of a kind of plastic that shrinks when heated. You seal the bag. And then you heat the bag with a blow dryer. The heat shrinks the plastic until it’s tight around the package.
That's going to take awhile. Will H & H still be in the mix? I suspect not, but I really don't know. Nor do I much care. Right now I just want to get on with it. After all, it's not up to me, or you, or Tim Morton, or Levi Bryant, or Ian Bogost or any of a dozen or three others. It's going to take 100s or 1000s of scholars over a half century to get this sorted out.
Bill B
Yikes, Tim! I forgot to put up the link for the Latour reference. It's to a post in my 'Reading Latour' series, one on description and graffiti. BTW, that series is going very well, thank you. Though not the very next post, I've got one coming up on the conceptual equipment Latour has for literary studies. He's really quite a remarkable thinker. And . . . there's more to his lists than the so-called 'Latour Litanies'.
I'm tempted to think that people in Paris in 1945 had other issues which probably seemed more pressing than digesting Husserl and Heidegger. Those other issues, which are probably pretty obvious - tho it seems to me that recent criticisms of the "linguistic turn" have give short shrift to the Shoah - led them down a different track. Philosophy and philosophers take place within history. Which is only to tell you what you already know, right? But which is also meant to suggest that Dr Benzon's paragraph beginning "For the next couple decades ..." might only be possible if nothing "interesting" takes place over those decades ...
Ah, history. No telling how things will unfold. But one way or another, something INTERESTING will happen.
Even without a global fighting war there's this: A thousand years ago Western intellectual life was centered in the church. But the intellectual initiative passed to new institutions 500 years ago. What new institutions will arise over the next 50 years or so? If the answer is 'none' then perhaps all that'll happen is scholastic quibbling.
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