Objects (without subjects?)

[jottings at Melb airport]

Don’t really get the notion of objects without subjects. How can you think object and subject separately? They form a logical pair. Just saying that there are only objects without subjects does not solve anything. You end up describing how one object takes shape for another object, which is instantly to reintroduce the subject/object relation. An object is inevitably only constituted for a subject, whether conceived in anthropomorphic terms or not. In fact object oriented philosophy (oop) seems to produce a massive escalation of subjects alongside all it’s apparent objects. A dangerous slippage is apparent. In an effort to acknowledge the independent nature of real things, things are posited as objects – as things that are constituted without any need for any relation whatsoever. But this is precisely to force some notion of subjectively constituted coherence on to the alterity of the real, which is never a set of objects as such, which exceeds the category of ‘object’.

To recognize the limits of the human is to give up the notion of objects – rather than denying the alterity of the real, it is to acknowledge that reality exceeds whatever schema we invent to make sense of it. Despite protestations to the contrary (Harman), oop fails to do this. The notion of ‘object’ assumes that we can speak of what we cannot speak, whereas, in contrast, the concept of alterity posits very clearly the problematic character of this external field (a field that is also never simply exterior, that affects inferiority as well – the positing of interiority itself as a coherent field). What oop seems to miss is the relationship to the alienation of the object within thought itself. Thought is never simply thought. As the work of Derrida suggests, it is always an opening on to an elsewhere that exceeds the human and in which the human (and the subject/object pair) is constituted. The subject is never simply a subject as such. If there is any means of thinking around the subject/object relation it is in terms of this work of deconstruction, not in terms of a crude attempt to dump the subject and keep the object.

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