Larval Subjects writes in about my previous post below:
The issue isn’t whether one speaks about language, but rather whether or not one thinks we must always refer to some human phenomena whenever discussing being. Within the framework of my ontology, languages, signifiers, signs, etc., are also objects. In other words, it’s an absolutely flat realism. One of the features I find most attractive about OOO is that, to paraphrase the old expression, it allows you to have your neurology and your semiotics too. So although you have to modify Derrida, Foucault, Barthes’, etc., nonetheless you get to retain many of their concepts. There’s a delicate balancing act going on here. On the one hand, it’s necessary to avoid the reductive or eliminative materialism of other realist approaches that would only treat particles and neurons as real. On the other hand, it’s necessary to avoid the eliminative idealism of the linguistic and semiotic turn that would only treat signifiers and signs as real. The ontology must show how both things like quarks and neurons are real and things like signs, signifiers, and power are real, while also arguing against any sort of reductivism whether from the materialist side or the idealist side.
This is a point LS has rightly made before, and I should have noted that. I pulled out the quote linking language to access since I wanted to emphasize a point about langugage. And one must love the ambition of SL’s last sentence here, since it is, I take it, the ultimate ambition of SR (a term I’m sticking with at least through the spring—I’m not going to tell my students the title of the course is wrong.)
PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF ERROR 