The New Orleans Free School is doing a course on speculative realism and object oriented ontology. The blog for the course meetings is HERE. It's anarchic and fun and interesting in equal measure.
Point e in the overview of March 7th meeting is the following:
e) no e.
And there are some real philosophical gems in there. What should an object oriented ontologist say about death? This is actually a huge issue. Does the substance that you are change when your body is destroyed? Most OOO folks are committed to actually existing possibilia in just as strong a sense as Graham Priest's recent work. Is death merely a radical form of dormancy, not different in kind from what happens to you when you sleep? This would actually be a case of Graham Harman's metaphysics providing a service to Quentin Meillassoux's theology.
I'm not saying that OOO must answer these question (perhaps they are unknowable to creatures like us right now). But OOO raises these questions in a particular kind of way.
I love sleeping, and have always hated the bit in Zarathustra where Nietzsche mocks the cult who try to sleep as much as possible. Harman's last essay in Towards Speculative Realism is the only interesting philosophical account of sleep that I've read. Which is weird. We spend 1/3 of our time in that state, you'd think it would get more philosophical coverage. I guess J.L. Austin's brief remarks on the phenomenology of dreams are pretty important as are Dennett's meditations on a possible indeterminacy between memory and experience. . .
If death really were like sleep then that would be pretty cool in my book.
In any case there's all sorts of other Speculative Realism filtered through New Orleans fun on the blog. I've added a link to it on my roll at right. It will be a blast to follow this.



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