Monday, October 24, 2011

Object Oriented Sallis?

Is John Sallis a speculative realist? His talk at SPEP seemed curiously object oriented.

The gist is as follows:

There are some decisive turns which thinking cannot refuse without falling back into nostalgia or irrelevance, and one such is what Sallis calls "the cosmological turn." Cosmological discoveries over the ages have shown the limitedness of terrestrial thinking. (Sallis dismissed as myopic those who might argue that scientific discoveries express a pre-given theoretical projection, insisting "There really are billions of galaxies" etc. )

Phenomenology studies manifestation to the point where it recoils on itself and displays the unmanifest, i.e. the various adumbrations of a thing that form its horizon but are not actually seen in any view of the object. But there is a new kind of object (or at least relatively new), a black hole, which displays a new kind of unmanifestness, one that is not partial or temporally conditioned but absolute. Light cannot escape from a black hole, it is invisible as such and absolutely.

This (relatively) new kind of object demands a new ontology, the old kinds are inadequate. Such a new ontology will break with the roots of ontology in Plato because a black hole, being absolutely invisible, has no eidos.

The upshot of it all, philosophically, is kind of vague and uncertain just on the basis of Saturday's talk, and I'm not sure that it's adequate for an ontology not to be eidetic to be new, or that there aren't non-eidetic ontologies already, or that the eidos can't be extended to pure intelligibility without reference to the literal "look" of something. But I did find the talk remarkable in that it wasn't what I expected to hear from Sallis.

2 comments:

  1. He has always been an unorthodox phenomenologist and his sort-of realist perspective predates speculative realism by quite a bit. That being said he still has tends toward anthropocentrism when placed side by side with SR (I don't think one could consider him a flat ontologist). Books like Topographies mark the distance between him and Meillassoux/Brassier. He is perhaps closest to Harman; especially in their respect for poetry/rhetoric.

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  2. It looks like I can only respond when logged in as my wife, for some glitchy reason.

    I was more impressed by the tone and emphasis than the content, which was kind of vague.

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