The Spanish is a tweet that really sums up my description of a show about OOO on BBC Radio 3 (coming soon). Enjoy:
The Knights of St. Hegel are still crusading against the heresy of letting beings that don't think they're the "subject" have any reality, let alone determinacy or agency. The extent to which they call it evil is boringly astounding at this point, especially when the master-slave template that underwrites their religion is so obviously causing the worst damage.
Who are the Knights? Well there is a chapel inside the Church of Marx for true devotees. Marx was seriously gaslighted by Hegel, and if you're a real intense Marxist, you're going to want to genuflect there. You might not even know the long history of the chapel. You might even say that Hegel was a bastard. But you still genuflect to the idea that the subject determines reality.
In that scapegoating way, the BBC Knights of St Hegel accused me of being too anthropocentric, not anthropocentric enough, too centered on white western philosophy, not centered enough...at one point I did need to beg for mercy in the form of my Black Jamaican wife and my uncle-in-law descendant of an enslaved person from the (Elizabeth) Barrett plantation.
My attempts to conceptually hug the Knights despite their swordplay only enraged them further. It was rich, lively exposure of the extent of the gaslighting.
But at least the Knights are in earnest. The true malevolence was a Demon who enabled them with their "who will rid me of this turbulent ontologist." "Ontology is nothing...this is a game" was a truly sinister way of being on a nice little radio show. I had never heard of the Demon before, but they had most assuredly heard of themselves.
Did the Knights and the Demon know they were crusading against a nonbinary intersex person on BBC radio? I got accused of being male quite a lot.
I hope the BBC keeps the bit where one of the Knights of St. Hegel calls me a wanker.
Conclusion: I was kind and polite and enthusiastic and generous and didn't once say "Your straw target versions of OOO are not even wrong." I was so well behaved. I am still alive. I was so triggered the rest of the day I couldn't even move, I could hardly talk, I was totally magnetized. It was intense. I needed to talk to my grief counselor friend. I was shaken to the core. I had to take one of my panic pills.
Most dispiriting perhaps was the extent to which the Knights of St. Hegel sounded so Thatcherite. They had totally absorbed the language of impact, STEM, utility. Which is perhaps why the Demon adventitiously described themselves as a utilitarian, having first announced they were not a philosopher at all.
My main sin appeared to have been to talk with hesitancy, irony, and nonviolent thoughtfulness.
Most sinister was the Knights of St. Hegel agreeing with the Demon that "My use of a thing is what a thing is." That's the justification for slavery, right there, from Aristotle to Hegel.
They picked on the word "object" of course, that dread mirror in which gaslighted "subjects" see the worst possible thing that could happen to them: the enslavement they impose on all other beings.
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