[-empyre-] Meillassoux

[Michael O'Rourke]

Thanks
to Zach for mentioning my article “Girls Welcome!!!” which made an initial
attempt to sketch the potential affinities between speculative realism, object
oriented ontology and queer theory. My forthcoming book with Punctum called
simply Queering Speculative Realism will be a more ambitious sortie in this
general direction. Zach correctly recalls that I say (in this interview: http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke/Papers/1272839/X_Welcome_A_Conversation_with_Michael_ORourke_by_Stanimir_Panayotov) that there is a possible argument to be
made for linking up Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of “hyperchaos” and “gender”.
I admit in the interview that I really haven’t fully worked that through. And I
still haven’t although I find what Zach has to say about the necessity of
contingency and queerness really helpful in getting me moving. The impression
that Meillassoux’s hyperchaos might help us to think about gender struck me
upon reading an interview he gave with Robin Mackay and Florian Hecker (http://www.urbanomic.com/archives/Documents-1.pdf). I guess I will return to that to help me
formulate what it is that I think is going on there.

 

Both
Zizek and Badiou anticipated Galloway’s recent invective against the
apoliticality of Object Oriented philosophy and Speculative Realism (see the
interviews in The Speculative Turn) but I’m not so sure they are right.  To take just a few examples: How could Tim
Morton’s work on ecology be considered apolitical? Or Levi Bryant’s
democratization of objects? It is even harder to argue that Jane Bennett’s
writing on vibrant materiality which emerges directly out of political theory
fails to advance an ethics or a politics. 
The challenge as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been telling us is to extend
the notion of the biopolitical in our work. What, Jeffrey would ask, would a more
generously envisioned zoepolitics (or zoeethics or zoeontology) look like? And
why would or wouldn’t we desire it?

 

 

 









 

 

 

 

 
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