Listen Up Good, Crusaders

 We’ve been doing this for years. It never gets old. Let’s start with a poem. 

OOO

Still refreshingly deviant 

After thirteen years in the whatever-light

The way out of the master-slave duality is not to make everyone an honorary master, nor to reduce everything to machinic slavishness.

The fact that some Hegelian Marxists still don’t get it (deliberately) and still assault it is such a feature, not a bug.

But their willful misunderstanding is slander adjacent, because it implies something despicable about anyone who is interested in OOO:

Once more with feeling: flat ontology is not flat ethics or flat politics. The fact that something exists in the same way as something else has NOTHING to do with its right to exist. 

It is non-OOO that most frequently ontologizes the world in a toxically normative way, along master-slave lines.

But I think the real reason they’re pissed is, we came up with our own idea rather than steal someone else’s. Simple as that. 

"German idealism." It sounds real bad. You don't say "Taiwanese transcendentalism." You don't say "Jamaican empiricism." Treena: "You don't even say 'Jamaican reggae'." 

What most of you don't know is, we got reported on to our deans and provosts, for saying bottles of milk weren't just bottles of milk, that we should be punished and fired for being all kinds of despicable, and it happened over and over again, and it was Hegelian Marxists who did it to us. We were too confused, and ashamed, and polite, and scared, and new, to point it out. We would've been pilloried even more. 

Some of the original inquisitors are still circling like vultures above my twitter feed, waiting to lunge if one of us makes one tiny little mistake. And probably still talking all kinds of despicable smack that I have happily long been deliberately deaf to, until this last Tuesday on the BBC. 

Take a hike. You've been on at us for 13 years for pointing out and upstaging your religion just by existing. Your religion and its grip on the department lounge.

The first rule of Hegel club is...some of you don't even know you're in it.