For the next book I had been toying with the title Being and Difference: An Essay in Object-Oriented Ontology. However, I think this title suffers from three major flaws. First, it’s repetitive with respect to the title of my first book. Second, it’s bland. And third, it’s pompous! Right now I’m toying with the idea of entitling it The Democracy of Objects: Substance, Essence, and Existents. The main part of the title is, of course, indebted to Latour. Latour’s work is thoroughly pervaded by a democracy of objects insofar as all actors (his generic term for objects) are on equal footing, each interacting with and vying with all the others.

Somewhere or other– I believe in The Sublime Object of Ideology –Zizek remarks that metaphysics (in the pejorative sense) consists in elevating a part to the ground of the whole. Thus, for example, certain versions of Marxist thought would remain metaphysical in this pejorative sense in that economics serves as the ground of all other things. Economics becomes that ground to which all other things must be traced. In a manner similar to Anglo-American thought, Continental philosophy since Kant has pitched itself as a critique and overcoming of metaphysics. However, if metaphysics is thematized in terms of Zizek’s definition (really drawn from Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics vis a vis his history of being), then it could be said that Continental thought has been hyper-metaphysical since Kant. In Kant we get the reduction of being to mind, in the sense that mind comes to function as the ground of all phenomena. We get variations of this thesis in Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc. The other option, by contrast, has been to treat language as the ground of all other phenomena. Thus in thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard, and Gadamer, language becomes the part that grounds and determines everything else. In defending a democracy of being, onticology seeks to escape this kind of metaphysics so as to infinitely open up the domain of ontological inquiry and speculation. Where traditional metaphysics from Plato to Derrida treats one kind of being as the ground of all other beings, onticology defends a pluralism of objects, where “pluralism” is not simply to be understood as a plurality of objects belonging to the same kind (material objects, for example), but a pluralism of kinds of objects without one type of object serving as the ground of all others.

If there has been a great merit to object-oriented ontology, I think it is twofold: First, in my view, object-oriented ontology is the first post-non-philosophical philosophy. Laruelle argues that the central gesture of any and all philosophy is to divide the world into a factum and datum, a transcendental and a phenomenon, such that philosophy is perpetually caught in a vicious circle where it assumes the very thing it seeks to account for. In other words, philosophy, according to Laruelle, is auto-positing, and, for this reason, is unable to reach the real. By contrast, non-philosophy begins from the real according to Laruelle. From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, non-philosophy remains too idealist in its tenor, and therefore all too metaphysical in its assumptions. Object-oriented ontology inscribes this very translation of the real into objects themselves, pluralizing it and thereby rendering it ubiquitous, rather than the exclusive domain of philosophy. In this way it is able to formulate a post-non-philosophical philosophy. Likewise, as is amply evident from Harman’s work, object-oriented philosophy is among our first post-ontotheological metaphysics. This is an accomplishment of his own of which Harman himself seems to be unaware in his own work. Hitherto critiques of ontotheology or philosophies of presence have proceeded negatively, showing how human access is necessarily characterized by finitude or limitation, such that presence always already presupposes absence as both its condition of possibility and impossibility. This critique always proceeds by reference to some human phenomenon, whether that phenomenon be the activity of presencing through Dasein, the role of differance in language, the traces of history, etc. Among Harman’s great achievements is a genuine metaphysics, in the non-pejorative sense –in which the primacy of presence is overcome at the level of being itself, regardless of whether humans exist. Zizek famously remarked that we shall be healed by the very spear that smote us or that the wound itself is the solution. Harman’s metaphysics is thoroughly Zizekian in this sense. Rather than seeing the impossibility of presence as the impossibility of metaphysics, he discerns it as the very condition of metaphysics… Of a metaphysics not shackled to the human or the primacy of questions of access. Any Continental realism must meet these requirement, and to do so it must be a democracy of objects, rather than a metaphysics in the pejorative sense of reducing all other beings to one ground or privileged object from which all others issue.

At any rate, I’m rambling now. Any thoughts on the title?