PAUL ENNISS MISSED OCCASION: A NON-LARUELLIAN RESPONSE TO LEVI BRYANT

I must admit that I was disappointed by Enniss 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 squinting and using my 3D spectacles left over from THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN, 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 post-humanism, so the leap is in fact minuscule. Secondly, the statement The universe is the flower of rhetoric is an anti-humanist 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: "Duh, 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-on-radicalthinking/ One reason I was disappointed by Ennis's reply is because I knew he has been working on Laruelle, so I was expecting a powerful Laruellian analysis of the philosophical decision in OOO. 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. 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. But Paul Ennis, who was perfectly capable of giving such an analysis, did not take that path, and we have unfortunately been deprived of the details and unforeseen twists that he could certainly have furnished to surprise and delight us. Paul Enniss response to Levi Bryant did not take the manic laruellian path, but instead took a more nostalgic turn. Where OOO is a form of nostalgic return to ontotheology via its watered down version of transcendence, called withdrawal, Ennis looks affectionately back at anti-realism, obscurely sensing that despite OOOxian propaganda based on the bogus (bogey-man) concept of correlationism, Anti-Realism may still have things to teach us. (Aside: 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 negativelyvalued intension of the first and the very large, though conceptuously vacuous) extension of the second) Ennis solemnly accepts at face value Bryants 2D projection of a 3D diagram (which I would have liked to seen inserted in PROMETHEUS as a mystifyng explanation of why the Engineers hate us so: the de-withdrawal of God enacted in the resurrection of the Engineer leading to the death of man). He goes so far as to praise it for its encapsulation of the recent trend that has seen us move away from philosophies of transcendence towards those favouring immanence. There is no apparent irony as he contemplates a 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) prefigured (after the event, the Deleuze-event) the move towards not immanence itself, and here Enniss suave and subtle style begins to show its acerated teeth, towards favouring immanence. Whom the Gods would destroy, they first do favour. And Bryant favours Deleuze, with his Lacanian backstabbing; he favours immanence with his Harmanian withdrawal (aword that he now wishes to relinquish, withdrawing from withdrawal). 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 synthesis of Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, 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. The idea that Lacans graph (really, kids, theres 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, such as Alexander Galloway, lessons in baby logic (such as:you cannot derive an ought from an is) that was not even applicable to Galloways analysis (for details, see Galloways post, Bryants lesson in the comments, and my pedagogical unpacking of the obvious). But apparently a logical contradiction is OK if it comes from Lacan. However, at this point in his argument when he began to talk about Bryant favouring immanence I began to forgive Ennis for his non-laruellian gambit. I was so disappointed I constructed a fictional Ennis, master of irony and equivocation, who was destroying Bryant's paradigm while feigning to share its preoccupations. Maybe, I thought, Ennis is one-upping Laruelle himself, maybe he is doing non-philosophy disguised as philosophy, and the subtly awry verb favouring hinted at this transcendental positing of an immanent datum as a transcendent faktum conditioning the empirical disjunction of that datum by means of its transcendental difference. It seemed to me potentially a stroke of ironic genius. No doubt, I imagined, fearing that his ironic expression favouring immanence was too explicit and risked revealing the subtle undercurrents of his non-laruellian gambit, Paul Ennis apparently decides to cloud the issue with a cryptic declaration. He affirms: transcendence has a way of generating and sustaining knots. True, he goes on to explain this crypticism with some misdirection about anti-realism aiming to ground knowledge and ending up regretfully (but to whose regret? he does not say, remaining veiled in ambiguity) ungrounding it. But coming straight after a twisted praise of one of Lacans graphs, this phrase seems to refer maliciously to Lacans late obsession with knots, thus implying that Lacan remained totally on the side of transcendence, and that even his mathematical accoutrements of graphs, mathemes and knots, far from undermining his intrinsic transcendent position, reinforced and accomplished this transcendence. Once again, Ennis seemed to insinuate this with a single word, knots, the choice of which could appear to be an innocent gaffe, a mere slip of the tongue. I imagined the audience becoming merely restless, feeling an obscure tension that consciously they discount. He continues to soothe us by rattling off various false stereotypes about anti-realisms aporias and even cites Meillassoux as authority on the failure of anti-realism to ground the sciences (when in fact the major achievement of anti-realism was to persuade everyone, including the realists, that such grounding was impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable). Ennis does not even mention Bachelard, Serres, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Laruelle nor does he cite Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Latour. He lulls his audience with very vague references to post-Kantian anti-realists, the very repetition of this word suggesting subliminally that the real world of intellectual struggle is far off. He refers to Meillassoux whose history of philosophy for dummies captivated a generation of OOxians. Then suddenly when everyone thought that Ennis would never actually say anything he unleashed a lightning bolt: my first question is to what extent you believe that speculative realism remains entangled in the logic of jouissance because the object of desire, which, in some sense, must be the real, cannot actually be captured? Enniss, to my mind, dark humour once again becomes almost too evident at this point. He unshamefacedly accuses the bad guys, the post-Kantian anti-realists, using terminology that in fact applies to the OOOxians, of: somewhat perversely, chasing noumenal ghosts and deriving enjoyment precisely from the fact that they know that they will never catch them; and this generates an all-too-comfortable space to retreat to. This is a direct transposition of Harmans THE THIRD TABLE (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. Yet again, by seeming to agree with the OOOxians self-image as favouring immanence, my fictional ironic Ennis manages to paint a picture of the transcendent philosophers in the very terms

that the OOOxians use to describe themselves. The courage and the finesse necessary to bring off such a manoeuvre left me flabbergasted. This is the force of what I felt could only be called the Ennis gambit. To myself I defined the Ennis Gambit thus: He treacherously paints a picture of the supposed enemies of OOO, the transcendent philosophers, in the very terms that the OOOxians use to describe themselves The key concept here is the perfidious accusation against the post-Kantians of taking a perverse pleasure in chasing uncatchable noumenal ghosts, which THE THIRD TABLE shows to be a very close description of Graham Harmans position enunciated in very nearly the same words, as we have seen. Ennis virtually confirms this reading, but with attenuating qualifications, when he says: if this attitude is explicit for continental thinkers might it not simply be currently implicit within speculative realism?. My quotation from THE THIRD TABLE ("The world is filled primarily with ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access) shows that at least for Harman this attitude of perverse enjoyment in chasing noumenal ghosts is indeed quite explicit, and he even baptises it with the name of erotic model, so the logic of jouissance is explicitly endorsed. Unfortunately, I came to realise that Paul Ennis was not a covert laruellian double agent using his mastery of irony and equivocation to subvert from within OOO in general, and Bryant's strange Lacanian instantiation of it in particular. He seemed to comfortably inhabit the same problematics and references.So my disappointment returned, even stronger than before. Concluding remarks: 1) OOO would be an easy target for a Laruellian critique, but Ennis does not take this path, though he has indicated his intention to do so in the future. I look forward to such a critique as I consider that Deleuze and Feyerabend give us the material for a non-laruellian non-philosophical critique. I have been pursuing my own version of non-philosophy for some time now and am curious to see what people can do with Laruelle. I think that Laruelles ANTI-BADIOU is a truly brilliant book, far superior to Badious badly named book DELEUZE (in fact it should have been called ANTIDELEUZE). In this book Laruelle pulls no punches, and I find myself in harmony with the style as well as the content of that critique. 2) I think that Harmans ontology is one of transcendence, and that Bryants 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). 3) 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 something like 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 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. 4) It is becoming clear to more and more people that the new object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman 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. 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 realist philosophy and some artistic practices escape this demotion to the domain of relative truth about simulacra, and only on the proviso that they allude to the real objects and qualities, and 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. 5) Contrary to what Levi Bryant claims, withdrawal has nothing to do with non-totalisation. Rather, withdrawal is a guarantee of totalisation in the real, of what one could call extra-cognitive, 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, as 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, 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. 6) One could have lots of fun with the notion of self-withdrawn objects and with the surprising idea that ontotheology relies on the idea of a transcendent non-self-withdrawn entity. This is truly a ludicrous notion. Un-self-withdrawnness is in no way a necessary condition of transcendence. This is a surreptitious way of redefining the debate on ontotheology so as to make it true by definition that only OOO is an ontology of immanence.