Having picked up Brassier’s dissertation once again, I find myself thoroughly delighted and exhilarated by the hymn he sings to modern science in contrast to reactionary correlationism and phenomenology. This remark by Husserl sums up the entire problem and underlines just why phenomenology is so reactionary: “The existence of Nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness since Nature itself turns out to be a correlate of consciousness: Nature is only as being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness” (Ideas I, 116). Such, in a nutshell is the entire problem with correlationism. Read pages 10 – 22 of Ray’s dissertation (after the chronically obscure discussion of Laruelle; drop the language guys, it doesn’t advance the argument and doesn’t seem necessary to what’s being articulated) and see if you don’t find yourself electrified.
February 17, 2009
Larval Subjects . 
February 17, 2009 at 8:18 pm
What do you (and Graham, or any other object-oriented philosophers out there) think of Brassier’s concept of the xenotype or non-rabbit? It seems like an interesting way to save ‘objects’, albeit discontinuous and non-identical ones, without simply taking them at their phenomenal face value or as ‘naively’ conceived through the manifest image. It also seems to avoid both the Scylla of pre-individual fields (the object always-already given, even if not as a ‘unified’ object) and the Charybdis of an equivocal monism. I don’t think it can be easily reduced to any of the radicalizing options Graham summarized in this post either:
http://doctorzamalek.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/radical-philosophy/
Or am I horribly misguided here?
February 17, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Will,
I honestly haven’t read enough Brassier yet to know what the xenotype is. Care to explain? I tend to have a different take on what pre-individual fields are about. In my view, a pre-individual field does not amount to the claim that an object is always-already given, but refers to singularities of a field that preside over the emergence of an object. These singularities would themselves be embodied by other objects (it’s objects all the way down), and would be something like intensive difference that stimulate the production of new objects. For example, temperatures and pressures in the case of physical objects. These singularities do not themselves determine what the final object will be or “give” it as in the case of Aristotle’s concept of the acorn potentially containing an oak tree. Rather they are spurs to development. The object, by contrast, will be a navigation of this field producing a more or less unique result.
February 17, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Is that Will McNeill, by chance?
February 17, 2009 at 9:41 pm
There’s something about Laruelle’s language (in translation) that I find philosophically repulsive, undigestible, in poor taste. I have no desire whatsoever to master that jargon (and that’s unusual, for me). But I think this is deliberate, that having a tin ear for philosophical euphony is a large part of what Laruelle’s about, performatively speaking. Not to say that serious discussion is pointless, that it’s all a sort of clown act, but that Laruelle is involved in a quite serious effort to “tympanize” philosophy, and one shouldn’t be at all surprised that the language grates, confuses and repulses.
February 17, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Btw, I totally claim dibs on that connection of Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” to Derrida’s “Tympan”. There should be some sort of prize, and I should totally be awarded it.
February 18, 2009 at 1:53 am
Dominic,
Absolutely, I have a similar reaction. I find this unusual because I don’t have a similar reaction– and I realize it’s a reaction –to the language of thinkers like Deleuze, Heidegger, Lacan, Hegel, etc. However, for some reason when I’m reading Laruelle or those who have taken on his style of prose, my eyes glaze over and nothing sticks.
February 18, 2009 at 6:55 pm
“Behold, The Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle,” by Ray Brassier
Click to access 12_5_Brassier.pdf
February 18, 2009 at 7:05 pm
It reads to me like he’s absorbed the worst stylistic elements of both the continental and analytic traditions. I’m slightly curious about what he’s up to but when it’s put in that form I feel comfortable simply maintaining my vague assumptions about his project. If I find any value in it, it’s as you say LS, that I can begin to empathize with people who react to most continental stuff in this fashion.
February 20, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Maybe its just that I’m a practioner of a dsicpline which is in some sense scientific, but when I that “it is necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension of the image of the world derived from perceptual intuition,” I just think that ain’t gonna happen. There may well be dangers, perhaps especially for philosophy, in the myth of subjective interiority. But there are certainly dangers in the dream of a language transparent to nature.
February 20, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I don’t see how Brassier is calling for a language transparent to nature. Indeed, it seems to me he’s making exactly the opposite point; that the findings of modern science can’t be understood in terms of our ordinary intuitions about the world, but are nonetheless real for all that. The real target here are those forms of philosophy that shackle all knowledge and discourses about what is to “mid level” objects of our common sense, day to day life.
February 20, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I was a little offended by this at first, and then I remembered you really like Lacan. So there must be something else than a distaste for jargon that brought about this reaction.
February 20, 2009 at 8:21 pm
My question was, what is that?
February 20, 2009 at 8:30 pm
This reaction to Laruelle? I just find him impenetrable, that’s all. It’s likely that would change were I to spend a significant amount of time with him, but nothing I’ve read so far convinces me that would be time well spent.
February 20, 2009 at 11:31 pm
I don’t get that Levi. He seems to me to be wrong about what scientists do, which is not to achieve a complete theoretical suspension (whatever that might be) but rather to reimagine the image of the world.
February 21, 2009 at 12:20 am
I’m not sure I follow, Jerry. I don’t think Brassier is suggesting a complete theoretical suspension, but rather that science is a substantial challenge to our common sense understanding of the world and the folk metaphysic underlying that conception of the world.
February 21, 2009 at 1:56 pm
He writes “to attain an adequate conceptual grasp…it is necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension.” I take your reading to be very charitable, or probably just a great deal clearer understanding of scientists and their activities. At the same time I don’t think what he’s saying (and I read him in a way I think is pretty literal) is possible. I think what we’re learning from the neurologists like Edelman runs entirely counter to his view; the workings of our nervous systems do not allow for the suspension of the image of the world. Further what I know of Copernicus and Darwin would be consistent with the operations and processes of intuition given certain connundrums, in Copernicus’s case about the movements of the planets and the increasing difficulties making an accurate calculation for Easter and in Darwin’s case of variation within and between species in a circumstance of ongoing struggle over great long periods of time. In both these cases I sense greater attention to the image of the world not lesser attention. I gather that he’s so seduced by the existence of the world that he wishes to avoid the very realities that we work with images of that world, constantly changing images but images nonetheless because of the ways in which our nervous systems work. Thus science may pose a challenge to certain systems of common sense and to certain folk metaphysics but not to others and further the activities of science generate other systems of common sense and metaphysics.
February 21, 2009 at 5:39 pm
[…] Materialism, Metaphysics, Object-Oriented Philosophy, Ontic, Ontology In response to my post expressing enthusiasm for Brassier’s hymn to science, Jerry the Anthropologists has expressed […]