Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism by Christopher Peterson

Author:Christopher Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Philosophy, Movements, Deconstruction
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2017-11-07T01:26:54+00:00

The Next Big Thing

While OOO’s nonrelational melancholy disavows the loss of an unmediated relation to the world, it also betrays many of the characteristics that Freud associates with mania, a condition whose histrionics and triumphalism are symptomatologically opposed to melancholia but that nevertheless, he maintains, belongs to the same malady: “In melancholia the ego has succumbed to the complex whereas in mania it has mastered it or pushed it aside. . . . The manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of his suffering” by hunting “like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexes.”43 In an effort to manage the loss of the thing-in-itself, OOO grasps indiscriminately at new objects whose equal ontological status is declared by obeying an entirely arbitrary, unmotivated classificatory procedure.44 Harman suggests that philosophy ought to recover “its original character as Eros” by adopting an “erotic model” as “the basic aspiration of object-oriented philosophy: the only way, in the present philosophical climate, to do justice to the love of wisdom that makes no claim to be an actual wisdom.”45 OOO makes no claim to produce wisdom because “the real is something that cannot be known, only loved.”46 Yet beneath this professed love of objects subsists an utter indifference to them. As Christopher Norris remarks, “there is not much point in continually reeling off great lists of wildly assorted objects if the upshot is merely to remark on their extreme diversity, or irreducible thinginess, without (as it seems) much interest in just what makes them the way they are.”47 Indeed, to love every object equally is to love no object, save for the Kantian thing-in-itself, which is the only object to which OOO can openly declare its love, the object that Big Bad Kant, the “common enemy” of speculative realism, has refused us.48 Whereas Freud observes that in mania “what the ego has surmounted and what it is triumphing over remain hidden from it,” here it seems that the object is hiding in plain sight on the pages of every book and article written by an object-oriented ontologist or a speculative realist.49 Freud suggests that the manic subject “must have got over the loss of the object (or its mourning over the loss, or perhaps the object itself),” which releases an abundance of psychic energy “available for numerous applications and possibilities of discharge.”50 Yet if the voracious appetite for new objects characteristic of mania belongs to the same complex as melancholia, then it remains doubtful that this enthusiasm can be read as heralding the relinquishment of the object.

OOO exhibits its hunger for novelty not only by expressing boredom and impatience with correlationism, but also by euphorically declaring its own innovative promise. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has suggested that boredom shares with melancholia a sense of unnamable loss; boredom amounts to a “defense against waiting” that results in two contradictory attitudes: “There is something I desire, and there is nothing I desire. . . . In boredom there is the lure of a possible object of desire, and the lure of the escape from desire, of its meaninglessness.

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