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A RESPONSE TO LEVI BRYANT ON LACAN AND ONTOLOGY

I wish to give a reply to Levi Bryants talk, Posthumanism and Lacans Graph of Sexuation (NB: I refuse to conseve the misleading part of Bryants title, Two Ontologies, as despite Bryant's posturing I can see only one ontology: ontotheology in its naive version on the left, and in its nostalgic version on the right, as withdrawal is a form of transcendence). I was very shocked by this talk right from the beginning. Levi Bryant begins by claiming that it is at first sight surprising to link Lacan with posthumanism and justifies this with a quotation from Lacan: The universe is the flower of rhetoric, which looks like a correlationist, or even linguistic idealist, thesis. Now as to the purported initial surprisingness of juxtaposing Lacan and post-humanism, this itself is rather surprising coming from a lacanian who proclaims loudly that he is very familiar with the tradition of ideological critique. The connection between Lacan and Althusser and structuralist antihumanism is precisely what leaps to mind instantly. Althussers essay on Freud and Lacan was published in the 60s, as was its translation into English, and the Althusserians were an important vector of the promulgation of Lacanian theory. Anti-humanism is one of the strands that now compose posthumanism, so the great "leap" is in fact minuscule. Secondly, the statement quoted from Lacan: The universe is the flower of rhetoric is an antihumanist statement affirming the agency of the signifier and dethroning human agency. This is a conceptual statement and cannot be refuted by Harmanian hand-waving of the style: "that gives agency to language and language is made by humans, so its humanist and correlationist". The OOO style of argument is to bet on historical ignorance, and for the rest to take philosophical statements out of their theoretical context, efface the conceptual meaning and retain only the common sense acception of words, and then englobe it in a big bogus category like correlationism which can be made to include any position at all, including Harmans and Bryants, as Alexander Galloway has shown: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-onradicalthinking/ A Laruellian analysis of the philosophical decision in OOO would be quite interesting. OOO seems a perfect example of Laruelles general analysis: a selection is made in the given of a datum (objects) that is then elevated to the status of a condition of the given. Objects that are present in the immanence of the given are selected out as the transcendent condition of the given and this transcendental gesture imposes a disjuncture in the immanent field between these new transcendent real objects and the merely empirical sensual objects. This would seem to be a perfect example of the transcendental positing of an immanent datum as a transcendent faktum conditioning the empirical disjunction of that datum by means of its transcendental difference. The distinction between the real objects and sensual objects is both intrinsic to their immanent difference and an extrinsic transcendent distinction that constitutes this difference. The various strategies to conjoin (causality, allusion) what has thus been disjoined (withdrawal) constitute the dubious charm of OOO. It would be a mistake to see in OOO a case of the recent trend that has seen us move away from philosophies of transcendence towards those favouring immanence. OOO is in fact a form of nostalgic return to ontotheology via its watered down version of transcendence, called withdrawal, bolstered by a form of critical propaganda based on the bogus (bogey-man) concept of correlationism. Correlationism is a bogus concept that trades on a confusion between a narrow conceptual sense that would best be designated idealism (or post-kantianism) and an extended notional sense that can cover anything and everything. So it manages to combine the very narrow negatively valued intension of the first and the very large, though conceptuously vacuous) extension of the second. It is difficult to take seriously the ideas of a self-styled "Lacanian" who in the first 5 minutes of his talk manages to falsify the historical record of the anti-humanist inspiration

(Heidegger) and reception (Althusser) of Lacan and to travesty his thought as a correlationist humanist shell, that nevertheless in its most ridiculous content (the graphs of sexuation) is affirmed to have prefigured (after the event, the Deleuze-event) the move towards not immanence in recent Continental Philosophy. I say that Lacans graph of sexuation prefigures Deleuzoguattarian ideas after the event because it was first expounded in his seminar in 1973, and represented a very weak and watered down appropriation of insights that Deleuze and Guattari had elaborated over the preceding four years. Guattari tells us: When I was put in touch with Deleuze in 1969, I grabbed the opportunity. I progressed in my contestation of lacanism on two points: oedipal triangulation and the reductionism of his doctrine of the signifier (Dosse, GILLES DELEUZE ET FELIX GUATTARI, p13, my translation). Machine et structure was a conference given also in 1969, using the concept of the machine to break through the purported omnipresence of the signifier. So we have in 1969 the abandonment of Freudian psychoanalysis and its Lacanian variant, the critique of oedipal triangulation, the definite exit from a preoccupation with discursive formations, and the transition from the hegemony of the signifier to a machine ontology. There is no attempted synthesis of Lacan's and Deleuze and Guattari's own ideas, but a conceptual revolution, a radical paradigm change, an incommensurable leap. Bryant's paper ignores all this, falsifies the historical record, and quietly tries to annex Deleuzian and Guattarian insights into a paradigm whose fundaments they rejected. This strategy of tacit annexation and adulteration was one of Lacans preferred modes of erudition and creativity. Levi Bryant even claims that Lacan was the first anti-oedipus because in his system men dont have the phallus and the place of the sovereign can never be occupied. But such language retains the language of the psychoanalyst-priest and his vision of anarchy as somehow the negation of the negation, as that which does not fall under the function of castration. Bryant involuntarily confirms my thesis that there is no synthesis of Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari, and that all attemps at such a synthesis void Deleuze and Guattari of their conceptual singularity and amount to a curious neo-lacanian hodge-podge masquerading in deleuzian vocabularies voided of their sense. The idea that Lacans graph (with arrows and quantifiers and even a dummy function that can stand in for virtually anything: castration, language, or even withdrawal as is claimed in THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS, p265), the idea that this "graph of sexuation" expresses anything interesting about ontologies of immanence is ludicrous. Bryants onticology may be an ontology of immanence, I am willing to reserve judgement on that. However, Graham Harmans object-oriented ontology is certainly not one of immanence, but of a totally anemic transcendence, as we shall see. Besides, even Deleuze and Guattari always maintained that immanence is not enough, and that it must be associated with positivity and abundance (this is their Nietzschean engagement). The graph of annexation as interpreted by Bryant contains the statement that not all xes are subject to the language function this timid not all xes is a very ascetic and impoverished form of immanence, especially as it is accompanied by another assertion in logical contradiction to it: there is no x that is not subject to The Function (take your pick). This is quite astonishing from someone who regularly presumes to give others, for example as Alexander Galloway, lessons in baby logic (such as: you cannot derive an ought from an is). But apparently a logical contradiction is OK if it comes from Lacan. I have argued elsewhere (in IS ONTOLOGY MAKING US STUPID?) that Harmans ontology is one of transcendence, and I think that Bryants onticology insofar as it concords with Harmans meta-categories is one of transcendence too, even if he fills these meta-categories with immanent categoreal content. Laruelle, once again, is quite good on these mixes of transcendence and

immanence that give themselves out as philosophies of immanence. Harman himself is obliged to mix together and persuade us to conflate a set of transcendent meta-categories and another set of immanent categories meant to instantiate them. He is obliged to create these mixtures whenever he gives an example of his supposedly unknowable objects. My point of view is, however, purely Feyerabendian: these ontologies are far too constraining on matters that only empirical, though not necessarily scientific, research can decide. In this light Bryants post festum Lacanian lessons on immanence seem unjustified in content, and comic in form (Lacans graph of sexuation as a lesson in immanence). I am appalled by the impoverished account of the history of philosophy that Meillassoux promotes via his bogus concept of correlationism. Harman repeats his illiterate idea that epistemology is all about access without feeling the need to cite one major, or even minor, epistemologist. Does Karl Popper, or Thomas Kuhn, or Richard Rorty propose an epistemology of access? The idea is ridiculous. Popper's philosophy begins with a critique of the very notion of a philosophy of access that he calls the bucket theory of knowledge. Bryant tries to enrich this discussion by talking about many more continental figures. But he seems to think that Roy Bhaskar is an important epistemologist, and he glibly proposes Lacan as a thinker of immanence while at the same time elaborating a Deleuzian machinic ontology. So he is a very unreliable narrator indeed. It is becoming clear to more and more people that the new object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman and of his acolytes, including Bryant, is not as advertised a joyful return to the rich and variegated texture of the concrete after all these decades of dusty textual obsession and confinement. My thesis is clear: OOO is a philosophy based on ghostly bloodless merely intelligible real objects that transcend any of the rgimes and practices that give us qualitatively differentiated objects in any recognisable sense. In Harmans THE THIRD TABLE we read (p12): We can only be hunters of objects, and must even be non-lethal hunters since objects can never be caught. The world is filled primarily with ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access. What Harman misleadingly calls sensual objects and qualities are utter shams in his system (cf. THE THIRD TABLE, p6, where we see that not only sensual objects and qualities in the ordinary sense are shams, but also the objects and qualities of virtually any other truth-rgime (the sciences, the humanities, common sense). Only his own realist philosophy and some artistic practices escape this demotion to the domain of relative truth about simulacra, and only on the proviso that they must content themselves with merely alluding to the real objects and qualities, and that they do not try to present them directly or to represent them veridically. Objects withdraw from these truth-rgimes, i.e. etymologically they abstract themselves: real objects are abstractions, indeed they are abstraction itself. This is not a revolutionary new weird realism, this is regressive transcendent realism, cynically packaged as its opposite. Thus, contrary to what Levi Bryant claims, withdrawal has nothing to do with non-totalisation. Rather, withdrawal is a guarantee of totalisation in the real, or of what one could call extracognitive, or noumenal, totalisation. It is the correlate of a synchronic ontology, one that has no place for constitutive temporality. It is no use arguing that the real is infinite, since an infinite set can be welldefined, and as such totalised. Infinity is no guarantee against totalisation, nor is withdrawal. Abundance, however, does prevent totalisation. A set may be so abundant, so qualitatively diverse, without necessarily being infinite, that it cannot be defined absolutely, but only relatively, pragmatically, empirically such is the set of all beings, as Feyerabend understands Being, such is the set of all possible (in the sense of sustainable-by-Being) worldviews.

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