Guerrilla Metaphysics


Book Description

In Guerrilla Metaphysics, Graham Harman develops further the object-oriented philosophy first proposed in Tool-Being. Today’s fashionable philosophies often treat metaphysics as a petrified relic of the past, and hold that future progress requires an ever further abandonment of all claims to discuss reality in itself. Guerrilla Metaphysics makes the opposite assertion, challenging the dominant "philosophy of access" (both continental and analytic) that remains quarantined in discussions of language, perception, or literary texts. Philosophy needs a fresh resurgence of the things themselves—not merely the words or appearances themselves. Once these themes are adapted to the needs of an object-oriented philosophy, what emerges is a brand new type of metaphysics—a "guerrilla metaphysics."




Tool-Being


Book Description

Tool-Being offers a new assessment of Martin Heidegger's famous tool-analysis, and with it, an audacious reappraisal of Heidegger's legacy to twenty-first-century philosophy. Every reader of Being and Time is familiar with the opposition between readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), but commentators usually follow Heidegger's wishes in giving this distinction a limited scope, as if it applied only to tools in a narrow sense. Graham Harman contests Heidegger's own interpretation of tool-being, arguing that the opposition between tool and broken tool is not merely a provisional stage in his philosophy, but rather its living core. The extended concept of tool-being developed here leads us not to a theory of human practical activity but to an ontology of objects themselves. Tool-Being urges a fresh and concrete research into the secret contours of objects. Written in a lively and colorful style, it will be of great interest to anyone intrigued by Heidegger and anyone open to new trends in present-day philosophy.




Without Criteria


Book Description

A Deleuzian reading of Whitehead and a Whiteheadian reading of Deleuze open the possibility of a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture. In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro proposes and explores a philosophical fantasy: imagine a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” Whitehead asks, “How is it that there is always something new?” In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead's question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro's experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant's thought pave the way for the philosophical “constructivism” embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze. Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices.




Philosophy Outside-In


Book Description

Christopher Norris raises some basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been conducted over the past 25 years. In doing so, he offers an alternative to what he sees as an over-specialisation of a lot of recent academic work. Arguing that analytic philosophy has led to a narrowing of sights to the point where other approaches that might be more productive are blocked from view, he goes against the grain to claim that Continental philosophy holds the resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought.




Alien Phenomenology, Or, What It's Like to be a Thing


Book Description

Examines the author's idea of object-oriented philosophy, wherein things, and how they interact with one another, are the center of philosophical interest.




After the "Speculative Turn": Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism


Book Description

Recent forms of realism in continental philosophy that are habitually subsumed under the category of "speculative realism," a denomination referring to rather heterogeneous strands of philosophy, bringing together object-oriented ontology (OOO), non-standard philosophy (or non-philosophy), the speculative realist ideas of Quentin Meillassoux and Marxism, have provided grounds for the much needed critique of culturalism in gender theory, and the authority with which post-structuralism has dominated feminist theory for decades. This publication aims to bring forth some of the feminist debates prompted by the so-called "speculative turn," while demonstrating that there has never been a niche of "speculative realist feminism." Whereas most of the contributions featured in this collection provide a theoretical approach invoking the necessity of foregrounding new forms of realism for a "feminism beyond gender as culture," some of the essays tackle OOO only to invite a feminist critical challenge to its paradigm, while others refer to some extent to non-philosophy or the new materialisms but are not reducible to either of the two. We have invited essays from intellectual milieus outside the Anglo-Saxon academic center, bringing together authors from Serbia, Slovenia, France, Ireland, the UK, and Canada, aiming to promote feminist internationalism (rather than a "generous act of cultural inclusion"). CONTENTS Katerina Kolozova - Preface: After the "Speculative Turn" Nina Power - Philosophy, Sexism, Emotion, Rationalism Katherine Behar - The Other Woman Anne-Françoise Schmid - Libérer épistémologiquement le féminisme Patricia Ticineto Clough - Notes for "And They Were Dancing" Joan Copjec - No: Foucault Jelisaveta Blagojevic - Thinking WithOut Marina Grzinic - Rearticulating the Speculative Turn Frenchy Lunning - The Crush: The Firey Allure of the Jolted Puppet Nandita Biswas Mellamphy - (W)omen out/of Time: Metis, Medea, Mahakali Michael O'Rourke - "Girls Welcome!!!" Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Queer Theory Katerina Kolozova, PhD, is the director of the Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje, Macedonia and a professor of gender studies at the University American College-Skopje. She is also visiting professor at several universities in Former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar in the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the author of Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststucturalist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (punctum books, 2015). Eileen A. Joy is the Director of punctum books and has published widely on medieval literature, cultural studies, intellectual and literary history, ethics, affects and embodiments, the post/human, and speculative realism. She is the co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007), Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (punctum, 2012), On Style: An Atelier (punctum, 2013), Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (punctum, 2013), Burn After Reading (punctum, 2014), and Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism (Ohio State, 2016).




End of Phenomenology


Book Description

Shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary Continental philosophy.




Philosophy of Marketing


Book Description

How can we overcome the rapidly ageing postmodernist paradigm, which has become sterile orthodoxy in marketing? This book answers this crucial question using fresh philosophical tools developed by New Realism. It indicates the opportunities missed by marketing due to the pervasive postmodernist ideology and proposes a new and fruitful approach pivoting on the significance of reality to marketing analyses and models. Intensifying reference to reality will boost marketing research and practice, rather than impair them; conversely, neglecting such a reference will prevent marketing from realising its full potential, in several contexts. The aim of the book is foundational: its purpose is not a return to traditional realism but to break new ground and overcome theoretical obstacles in marketing and management by revising some of their assumptions and enriching their categories, thereby paving the way to fresh approaches and methodological innovations. In that sense, the book encourages theoretical innovation and experimentation and introduces new concepts, like invitation and attrition, which can find fruitful applications in marketing theory and practice. That is meant to be conductive to the solution of important difficulties and to the uncovering of new phenomena. The last chapter of the book applies the new approach to eight case studies from business contexts. This book will be of interest to philosophers interested in New Realism and to researchers, scholars and marketing professionals sensitive to the importance and fruitfulness of reference to reality, for their own purposes.




Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy of Perception


Book Description

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to develop new and promising solutions to contemporary debates about perception. In providing an extension and defense of Merleau-Ponty's account of perceptual content and of the relation between perception and the world, it demonstrates the value of Merleau-Ponty's insights for philosophy of perception today. The author focuses on two main topics: the contents and the nature of perception. In the first half of this book, the author tackles debates about the content of perception, namely, what sorts of properties or features of the world reveal themselves to us in perception and in what modes. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s description of perceptual “sense,” the author argues that perception has a unique kind of content, which cannot be adequately described in terms of sensations or concepts. He then shows how this account of perceptual sense can clarify debates about the richness of perceptual content, including whether we can perceive moral properties. In the second half, he turns to the nature of perception. Here he argues that Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual intentionality makes available a powerful combination of the core insights of two main contemporary approaches to this question: realism and intentionalism. The author shows how this combination can be developed, defends it from objections, and explains how it is equipped to deal with problems posed by the existence of illusions and hallucinations. Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy of Perception will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on phenomenology and the philosophy of perception.




Object-Oriented Philosophy


Book Description

A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today. How does the patience and rigour of philosophical explanation fare when confronted with an irrepressible desire to commune with the object and to escape the subjective perplexities of reference, meaning, and sense? Moving beyond the hype and the inflated claims made for “Object-Oriented” thought, Peter Wolfendale considers its emergence in the light of the intertwined legacies of twentieth-century analytic and Continental traditions. Both a remarkably clear explication of the tenets of OOP and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today, Object-Oriented Philosophy is a major engagement with one of the most prevalent trends in recent philosophy.