#object-oriented ontology

Object-extraordinaire of a new-materialist microphysics of the subject, biocapitalist frameworks, and the micrologizing drives of ontological orientations, the molecular names a theoretical conjuncture and conceptual abstraction that calls out to be understood in historical context. What I am calling the molecularization of sexuality is my entry point into that project. In what follows, I wish to focus attention on the molecular’s intersection with queerness, and ask a very simple question: what might queer studies have to illuminate about the ontological turn? My approach … is animated by what the theorist Joel Olson has called a “fanatical approach.” In his unfinished manuscript, American Zealot, Olson poses fanaticism as a tradition of engaged radicalism that occupies a structural position “outside the realm of respectable politics.” Fanaticism, that is, functions as that denigrated location that, as Alberto Toscano has argued, is coded as an “excess of politics,” and thus external to the sphere conceived as legitimately political. I want to suggest that current ontological thought has made its home in this interstice: the space between what is considered properly political and that which is derided as fanatical. What do I mean by a “home in this interstice?” The separation of radicalism from rationality—or the separation of a genuinely emancipatory fanaticism from realpolitik—took place long ago, is constitutive of Enlightenment rationality and liberal governmentality, and is not in need of review here. The point, rather, has to do with the ways in which the ontological turn borrows from a long tradition of radical bewilderment, but unlike the kinds of committed, engaged fervor traditionally linked to fanaticism, substitutes a kind of sheer bewilderment that depoliticizes and obscures the fissure between fanaticism and what has been authorized as recognizably political. The ontological turn, in other words, equips itself with the fanatical character of radicalism, but only as a kind of technical sheen. What I am saying is that, central to ontological thought is a flourishing of the limit to that thought, a limit that becomes internal to and constitutive of that thought. That limit is politics.

...there was something else going on here: a radical enchantment of the mundane.  As the creators of the superheroes pitched their nets ever wider in search of fresh and original gimmicks, they touched more and more of the everyday world with childlike wonder dust.  Bees could be special, just as they were in medieval illuminated texts and mysteries.  Boring gym equipment could become the lethal arsenal of the criminal known as Sportsmaster.  A discarded railroad lantern could be a mystic artifact capable of bestowing immense power.  In the world of superheroes.... any person, thing or object could be drafted into service in the struggle against darkness and evil - remade as a weapon or a warrior or a superhero.  Even a little bee named Michael - named after God's own avenging angel - could pitch in to win the battle against wickedness.

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there, in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given. But I cannot see it directly. There is a weird crack in my world. Perhaps there is only one crack—the one between subject and non-subject: this is how Kantians (and others including Heidegger) police the gap, by putting some kind of copyright control on it. Or perhaps there are as many gaps as there are things, and relations between things. This is what object-oriented ontology has begun to think about the phenomenon–thing gap.

Thinking Things with Graham Harman: Whitehead's Way Beyond Philosophies of Human Access

The Withdrawal of Objects

Towards the End of the Global Capitalism