On Heidegger’s tool analysis

We have been fortunate here at ANTHEM to be treated a number of times in recent years to Graham Harman’s uncanny ability to abstract and summarise. He has just done it again, this time summarising his own philosophical position on his Object-Oriented Philosophy blog. At the same time in this post Harman also provides a very concise summary of his unorthodox reading of Heidegger’s tool analysis, which first appeared in Tool-Being (2002), and more recently in Heidegger Explained (2008). Harman draws on Whitehead and Leibniz to reinterpret Heidegger’s famous distinction between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, which in a number of ways brings him very close to actor-network theory (although some fundamental differences between his position and that of Bruno Latour remain, as he makes it clear). Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by the rift between (Heideggerian) phenomenology and ANT.

The genealogy of weird realism

Nick over at Speculative Heresy has posted 13 unpublished papers of Graham Harman that span more than a decade, shedding light on the trajectory leading to Harman’s object-orientated philosophy and his forthcoming book on Bruno Latour, The Prince of Networks. ANTHEM readers might be particularly interested in the earlier papers on Heidegger’s equipmentality and the initial assessments of Bruno Latour as a philosopher from 1999. There are also a number of other intriguing contrasts and fusions of philosophers such as Heidegger vs. Whitehead or Leibniz vs. Heidegger. There is even a paper on the resurrection of essence…

Graham Harman’s abstract for Deleuze2008

The abstract for Graham Harman’s keynote address at the Deleuze2008 conference at Stavanger:

Graham Harman
‘The Assemblage Theory of Society’

This lecture considers the interesting ‘assemblage theory’ of society found in Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society (2006), which links up with some of the key issues of classical and present-day metaphysics, not to mention some of the central themes of this conference.

On the Horrors of Realism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The most recent issue of Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy has an interview with Graham Harman “On the Horrors of Realism.” Harman speaks to Tom Sparrow about object-oriented philosophy, phenomenology, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger’s fourfold, Meillassoux’s correlationism, Lingis, Derrida and Foucault, DeLanda’s realism and Latour’s relationism, speculative realism, Whitehead, Leibniz, Zubiri, H.P. Lovecraft and China Miéville, and of course metaphysics. Harman speaks of weird things, about the horror of the real.