Editor's Column: A Passion for Being

Abstract

Editor's ColumnA Passion for Being Zahi Zalloua To say that ontology has replaced or dethroned epistemology in the humanities and social sciences would not be an overstatement. The turn to ontology both reflects and shapes a certain passion for being—a hunger for the "real thing," for something that is more than socially constructed. Against the purported hegemony of the linguistic turn, the ontological turn announces a return, in Quentin Meillassoux's words, to "the great outdoors [le grand dehors],"1 that is, a renewed cognitive attachment to the external world. Meillassoux is often credited for reviving a hunger for realism, triggering this philosophical rebellion against the idealism of the linguistic turn and the theorists of the '68 generation. In his 2006 After Finitude, Meillassoux takes aim at post-Kantian philosophies, lamenting the unmitigated "Kantian catastrophe" that brought into existence a dreadful "Ptolemaic counterrevolution."2 From Marxism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, continental thought has suffered the limitations of what Meillassoux calls "correlationism." "The thesis of the correlationist … is that I can't know what reality would be without me."3 Since we do not have a rational access to the noumena, to things-in-themselves, all we have after Kant, all we are really allowed to consider philosophically, are the transcendental conditions for human knowledge. Consequently, all knowledge claims must be immediately qualified by "for us," that is, for us finite beings. Deconstruction and psychoanalysis are, in this respect, the latest avatars of correlationism. Plagued by Kantian preoccupations, they are blamed for their "attack on reality,"4 for removing us further and further away from the autonomous world of objects. Meillassoux evokes Jacques Derrida's infectious impact on philosophy and the materialist tradition: Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken the form of a "sickened correlationism": it refuses both the return to a naïve pre-critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the "circle of the subject" from harmoniously closing in on itself. Whether it be the Freudian unconscious, Marxist ideology, Derridean dissemination, the undecidability of the event, the Lacanian Real considered as the impossible, etc., these are all supposed [End Page 1] to detect the trace of an impossible coincidence of the subject with itself, and thus of an extracorrelational residue in which one could localize a "materialist moment" of thought. But in fact, such misfires are only further correlations among others: it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification.5 For many, what informs, and follows from, an overcoming of correlationism is a subject-free posthumanist sensibility and attitude, an embrace of what Manuel De-Landa names a "flat ontology."6 Flat ontology is an ontology of immanence. It clearly favors Spinozist monism over Cartesian dualism: there is only one kind of being, which in turn rules out the elevation and privileging of one being—the Human—over all others. Accordingly, flat ontology annuls humanism's solipsistic and narcissistic belief in transcendence, declining to engage in philosophy as usual, to indulge, for instance, in the "timeless" question of what is proper to the Human. Flat ontology is suspicious of the ontological singularity of the Human, what makes him (for the idea/l of the Human is always coded as male) distinct from the nonhuman: language, thinking, trickery, laughter, awareness of death, tool-use, mourning, the face, and so on. And yet immanence's relation to transcendence may not be so cut and dried. Rereading Derrida's "sickened correlationism" might point us in a different, and more nuanced, direction. For the partisans of the ontological turn, what sickens theory (psychoanalysis or deconstruction) is its attempt—though ultimately an inadequate one—to get outside the circle of correlationism, to break free from its "transparent cage"7: "it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification." The subject of humanism lives on—compromised, to be sure, but still viable. It is still about the subject. Enthusiasts of the ontological turn assure us that there is only one way to exit the orbit of humanism, that one can only truly break with humanism...