A review by suddenflamingword
Realist Magic by Timothy Morton
3.0
Somewhere between manifesto and spelunking, the only thing Realist Magic isn't is uninteresting. There are times when it's unclear whether this is an attempt to explore a new metaphysics or a new aesthetics, when you realize yet again (and there a lot of 'yet agains' - Morton repeats himself a lot) that the book seems to want to kill them into a smelted mix of the two. He does this in the most hook or crook fashion imaginable. Layering metaphor on metaphor, some helpful (the creation/destruction of objects as the reversal of the ancient Greek breakdown of rhetoric), others confusing ("on the surface of the black hole into which I have fallen, you see a rapidly fading photograph of my horrified face"), while drawing on everything from contemporary physics to Romantic literature to German & Buddhist philosophy. Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it.
But that's why it feels like a manifesto and spelunking. This feels like a foray into an exciting idea who's existence is being justified rather than elaborated. That might be because Object-Oriented Ontology is fairly new, but there's also a part of me that feels that this book is heavily overselling it. "OOO is the first and only truly post-Derridean view," Morton says. Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi because he was trapped in the "correlationist circle" (that the post-Kantian tradition has trapped its thinking in anthropocentrism), Morton says. I don't need to believe OOO is wrong to see these as extravagant claims. OOO is passed off as a real solution to roadblocks in thinking, and maybe it is, but this book has you walking away thinking - this was provocative, strange, and worth thinking about, but how does it do anything it claims to do?
TL;DR: within the 200+ pages of Realist Magic are what feels like 20-30 pages of arguments about how objects are fundamentally defined by self-contradiction since there is a "Rift between essence and appearance." Birth (an explosion of many self-contradicting objects from a singular object; a glass shatters, becoming shards), living (these shards continue to be self-contradicting), and death (self-contradiction ends when an opera singers voice matches the glass-shaped pitch that displaces it into shards) are defined by this fact. So is the universe, in which humans are one of many objects, and to which our notions of self are applicable. It's all somehow helpfully explained and unclear, enthusiastic and belabored, original and indebted. It's self-contradicting, I guess. Which, while clever, doesn't help.
But that's why it feels like a manifesto and spelunking. This feels like a foray into an exciting idea who's existence is being justified rather than elaborated. That might be because Object-Oriented Ontology is fairly new, but there's also a part of me that feels that this book is heavily overselling it. "OOO is the first and only truly post-Derridean view," Morton says. Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi because he was trapped in the "correlationist circle" (that the post-Kantian tradition has trapped its thinking in anthropocentrism), Morton says. I don't need to believe OOO is wrong to see these as extravagant claims. OOO is passed off as a real solution to roadblocks in thinking, and maybe it is, but this book has you walking away thinking - this was provocative, strange, and worth thinking about, but how does it do anything it claims to do?
TL;DR: within the 200+ pages of Realist Magic are what feels like 20-30 pages of arguments about how objects are fundamentally defined by self-contradiction since there is a "Rift between essence and appearance." Birth (an explosion of many self-contradicting objects from a singular object; a glass shatters, becoming shards), living (these shards continue to be self-contradicting), and death (self-contradiction ends when an opera singers voice matches the glass-shaped pitch that displaces it into shards) are defined by this fact. So is the universe, in which humans are one of many objects, and to which our notions of self are applicable. It's all somehow helpfully explained and unclear, enthusiastic and belabored, original and indebted. It's self-contradicting, I guess. Which, while clever, doesn't help.