210 - 2010

[Kierkegaard taught me to be wary of systems, especially (in Kierkegaard’s case) “Hegelian” systems (although I am not certain that Hegel himself was a “Hegelian”). Influential Books: AUFS For the Uninitiated 5

from An und für sich by Thomas J Bridges]

[Despite the valiant effort of Harman to crown Latour with the crown of philosopher– a philosopher, no less, capable of sustaining us for the next 100 years – we suspect that Latour the philosopher is more Harman’s creation than the work of Latour. This is a compliment to Harman’s creativity and humility. Moreover, Harman himself senses that perhaps there is something problematic in this thesis and that it is necessary to distinguish between those relations that are genuinely “object-generative” and those relations, as the tradition would say, that are merely “external”.

Nonetheless, in the radicality of this thesis a new space is opened for ethical, political, and aesthetic deliberation for we can no longer be sure of what we are saying when we refer to the human…

The point is that the smooth divisions that would allow us to distinguish domains of facts and values now, with Latour’s thesis, break down. And as a consequence, the domain of the axiological finds that it overflows the dikes and dams that previously, though illusorily, hemmed it in to an ideological space where some alleged entity called the human was able to decree all value. Yet all of this must be rigorously posed, articulated, at theontological level to even begin formulating these axiological questions. Inhuman Ethics

from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects]

Plotinus must have started thinking about the same cosmological questions in 210 what Levi and Harman, the twin towers of philosophy blogosphere, are wrestling with in a friendly tournament in 2010. The intervening 18 centuries, it seems, have solved nothing. [TNM]