I
Marx once famously wrote that a spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of communism. It can be affirmed that, today, a very different spectre, coming from northern Europe, haunts contemporary thought – and that, along the way, it has encountered another, older ghost – and that, together, like Typhon and Echidna, they have brought forth a new Chimera.
As we shall see, this metaphor is anything but casual. For one of such monster-ghosts is, like Typhon, surrounded by darkness, whereas the other one crawls like Echidna, and their child (an admixture of lion, goat, and snake in the original myth) is an undefined creature about which only one thing can be assured with certainty, to wit, that it is radically inhuman.
We have several enigmas to begin with, then. But since philosophy began, as Giorgio Colli saw very well, as the continuation of enigma by other means (shortly after Homer died due to his inability to solve a riddle, or so the legend has it), I guess this should be fine.
Two monster-ghosts, then: one as dark as Typhon, the other one as snaky as Echidna, and their chimeric child – or, the two main trends of thought in contemporary philosophy. (Or should we rather say post-philosophy?)
Interestingly, the two are the penultimate offshoots of a self-declared “post-metaphysical” thought which, however, metaphysics nurtures. So, in addition to several enigmas, we also have a paradox. Borges would have been delighted with it.
II
Let’s go with monster (or ghost) no. 1: Speculative Realism.
It is born (or so the legend has it) to counter the view, in Quentin Meillassoux’s words, that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term [being and thinking] considered apart from the other” – especially, one suspects the Speculative Realists mean given object-oriented pathos, we have no access to being beyond thought. But wasn’t this already, in a way Schopenhauer’s suspicion, and, in an altogether different context, Bataille’s? Perceptibly, André Masson’s Acéphale (which Bataille used as the cover of his short-lived but influent journal) lurks behind the Speculative Realist Typhon – as it lurks behind Meillassoux’s proposal to accept that “chaos” is “omnipotent.” (I shall leave for another day the distortion of Hesiod’s Theogony that is implicit in all this, and how it echoes what Evelyne Grossman calls the fascination with “disfigurement” which is characteristic, if not exclusive, of early-20th-century French literature: Artaud, Michaux, etc.)
Now, just like Heraclitus is reported to have invited some visitors to enter his humble home by telling them: “do come in, for the immortal gods also dwell here” – or, to be precise, exactly in the opposite sense – today’s Speculative Realists invite us to step into their inferno of universal unrelatedness, in which the world (or what is left of it) appears (but perhaps they’re right that our early-21st-century un-world looks more and more like it) as a collection of incommensurable if not necessarily mutually repellent realities; and they invite us to step into it as obligingly as one would indulgently breath, say, atmospheric sulphur-dioxide nearby a damaged chemical factory (the example, by the way, is Timothy Morton’s).
How much does the Speculative Realist inferno, in which all things are exterior to one another and interaction between them limited to experiencing their mutual elusiveness, resemble Lovecraft’s horror world? So much that they’re indiscernible, which is surely why Graham Harman has dedicated a book to the latter from the perspective of the former. Lovecraft’s The Thing is the other head of this contemporary two-headed Typhon: its Anglo-American head.
III
Time to turn to monster (or ghost) no. 2: New Materialism.
Here we are no longer inside an inferno of universal unrelatedness, but inside a regained paradise (or so we are told) made of random connections between heterogeneous elements that turn the world (or, again, what is left of it) into an infinite series of disjunctive synthesis to avoid the totalisation and enclosure of its reversible components under any a priori law. A generalised machinism informs this view, in which the logics of modern engineering on the one hand, and the politics of negotiation on the other hand, substitute for what was once called thought; and in which all parts of the universal machine are simultaneously agents and patients, for the machine, as such, lacks any centre.
One just wonders if this is new – as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost pretend – or indeed old materialism: La Mettrie’s, with a moderate Marxist touch on top of it that makes productiveness the goal and diplomacy the means to attain it. What seems clear to me is that, while the Speculative Realist landscape is made of fog (like a Dickens’s tale, minus its humanity), the New Materialist landscape is made of cables, switches, and plugs (like Chaplin’s Modern Times, minus its humanity), and that, upon close examination, such landscape is but the sinuous body of a huge crawling snake: the body of a new Echidna dressed in vinyl and sequins.
IV
And so one comes to realise that the fresh new Chimera that Speculative Realism (today’s new Typhon) and New Materialism (today’s new Echidna) have given birth to is as inhuman as the old one was; or rather it is, this time, post-human, for instead of being an extra-human revery, it aims at dismantling the human. Why? Because it suspects that there is a risk in the human, when the human becomes self-referential and imposes itself over everything else thus securing its availability and manipulability. (Heidegger called it the modern “enframing” or “positioning” of all things, the modern Ge-stell; but to this, and on the oft-overlooked different ways out of it that he ventured, I shall return another day.)
Employing Schelling’s terms in his 1795 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, one could argue that the imposition of the human above everything else amounts to an imposition of the Subject upon the Object. Speculative Realism merely reverses this by imposing the Object upon the Subject. For its part, New Materialism attempts to put both on equal standing; yet insofar as connectiveness is a distinctive feature of the res extensa, it, too, ends up imposing the Object upon the Subject.
Plus, curiously, for all their anti-metaphysical and post-metaphysical rhetoric (for they take metaphysics to name the imposition of any Subject’s ideals upon any Object’s materiality), both New Materialism and Speculative Realism fall into the metaphysical trap inasmuch as, in one way or another, they suppress φύσις.
What do I mean by the word φύσις? Very simple. Φύσις is the oldest, i.e., Pre-Socratic, word we (Westerners) have for what we (now) call “being.” It denotes the self-propelled emergence of all that breaks through the veil of non being and into the region of being and remains in it for a while supported by the earth’s ever-living forces. Now, to this notion of being a notion of thought that responds to φύσις with awe and care corresponds in turn.
Here, Subject and Object no longer oppose one another, nor are their differences erased. They relate in terms of “intimacy,” to use Hölderlin’s beautiful expression in his Essays on Tragedy.