“This Question of Language”

Derrida on September 11

In October, 2001, Giovanna Borradori conducted an interview with Jacques Derrida about the 9/11 attacks. The result was paired with a similar conversation with Jurgen Habermas, and published as Philosophy in a Time of Terror. You can read exerpts of both interviews online. I happened to read the interview only recently, right around the same time that the supposed “Derrida… read more

The Magic Carpet

Notes on Glamour

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, the Academy Awards were still being held at the Shrine Auditorium, which is located just north of Jefferson, directly across the street from campus. It’s quite a structure, built in the Moorish Revival style and opened in 1926. At that time, the surrounding neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles… read more

Speculations I

A new journal of speculative realism

If you follow the speculative realism blogs you know this already, but many readers here who don’t might be interested in this anyway: the first issue of the new journal Speculations has been released. The mission: “a journal of speculative realism that hopes to provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.” Paul Ennis is the… read more

On Coming Out as a Realist

Morton Joins the OOO Mafia

Tim Morton has just announced his “coming out” as an object-oriented ontologist. For those of you haven’t been following Morton, he’s the author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature, and his views on an interconnected “mesh” of life forms is one you should know about. There is something both wonderful and horrifying about having to “come out” as… read more

Weird Media and Tiny Ontology

Two Teasers

I’m behind in keeping up with my corner of the philosophy blogosphere. In part I’ve been distracted by cow clickery, but more so I’ve been spending as much time as possible writing Alien Phenomenology, which I fully intend to complete before the end of August. I’m thus offering two teasers today, in lieu of earnest content. The first is related… read more

Website Updates

New stuff and new ways to get it

A few housekeeping notes this weekend. First, I’ve updated the Speculative Realism Aggregator to include the blogs of Jeff Bell (“Aberrant Monism) and Tim Morton (“The Ecological Thought”). If there are any other blogs that belong in the system that I’m missing, let me know. Second, you may not know it, but you can access a mobile version of this… read more

Cow Clicker

The Making of Obsession

I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here’s the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games,… read more

Letting Go

The Realist Invitation and the Correlationist Imperative

A lively discussion erupted from my post on philosophy and politics of a few days ago. Among other things, commenters revisited the relationship between ontology and politics, issues OOO proponents in particular have attempted to disentangle. Among the many lengthy comments from David Rylance comes this snippet, which may have finally helped me understand something fundamental about the whole ontology/politics… read more

I am not a Marxist

More on Politics and Philosophy

In recent days there’s been a flare-up of discussion about speculative realism and politics. It’s a more mild and reasoned one than previous debates, with contributions well worth reading. First read Chris Vitale’s post Queering Speculative Realism. Then read Diversifying Speculative Realisms on Archive Fire. After that go read Levi Bryant’s post, which responds to the first two. The argument… read more

Objects and Videogames

Why I Am Interested in Both

Like every sane person who does anything in public, I egosearch to see how people are reacting to things I’m doing. I use a few tools, but mostly Icerocket, which offers a condensed view of blog, Twitter, news, and Facebook reactions to search terms. The latter results are new, thanks to Facebook’s recent privacy “upgrades” that allow wall posts to… read more