Graham Harman Quotes

What really lies beneath our feet at each moment is not a usefulness, but an inaccessible netherworld that we can use because it is there. It is the Empire of the Capital X.

To create something does not mean to see through to its depths; we do not drain our children to the dregs by begetting them, but set them loose in the world like wild dogs, beyond our control and often beyond our knowledge.

In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva as the patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of choice. Since Heidegger’s treatment of Hölderlin resulted mostly in pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literary hero.”44

A philosophical thought is not supposed to be impervious to all criticism; this is the error Whitehead describes of turning philosophy into geometry, and it is useful primarily as a way of gaining short-term triumphs in personal arguments that no one else cares (or even knows) about anyway. A good philosophical thought will always be subject to criticisms (as Heidegger’s or Whitehead’s best insights all are) but they are of such elegance and depth that they change the terms of debate, and function as a sort of “obligatory passage point” (Latour’s term) in the discussions that follow. Or in other words, the reason Being and Time is still such a classic, with hundreds of thousands or millions of readers almost a century later, is not because Heidegger made “fewer mistakes” than others of his generation. Mistakes need to be cleaned up, but that is not the primary engine of personal or collective intellectual progress.

One of the broadest claims of this book is that there will be no further progress in philosophy or the arts without an explicit embrace of the autonomous thing-in-itself.

Zizek's thesis is that 'an epistemological shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.' I believe that Graham Harman is correct to assert that this is most likely the core contribution to philosophy for which Slavoj will be remembered.

To treat an object primarily as part of a network is to assume it can be reduced to that set of qualities and relations that it manifests in this particular network.