Dear Reader,

Object- Please also see my essay on the same topic, entitled Objects of Desire: On the Uses and Abuses of Object-Oriented

originally appearing in Artforum and now available here. Thank you, Andrew Cole Princeton University 6 October 2015

Andrew Cole

!e Call of !ings A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies

Blankly I walked there a double decade after, When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter At the lot of men, and all the vapoury !ings that be.

— !omas Hardy

People have been using, thinking, and writing about things for . . . let’s just say for a long time. Fast forward to some very recent approaches to the philosophical problem of things or objects: vitalism, actor-network theory (ANT), and speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology. !ese new areas seek to dispense with old philosophical dualisms that put a gap between subjects and objects, conferring onto subjects their humanity and relegating inert objects to whatever is useful for us. Instead, according to the new line of thinking, objects should be recognized for their indi"erence to us, for the sorts of things they do behind our backs, and for the ways in which they “are” behind appear-ances. Objects, that is, do not need us to actualize their ontology in their own hidden ways, withdrawn into their dim worlds of non-relation but expressive of their forces and tendencies. Objects are actants, falling in and out of assemblages and entering into collectives of their own making. And we are the posthumans, objects in a world of objects, who in fact have the capacity to describe that which Kant said cannot be described, to think that which cannot be thought: things in themselves. How can we think the unthinkable? How do we write about what cannot be thought?

!ese questions come to mind when reflecting on the new vital-ism, ANT, and object-oriented ontology. I cannot characterize these new fields as a single movement, because they are not one, though it may be fair to call all of them object-oriented ontologies (plural) and recognize accordingly how they are aligned in one particular way, which is the focus of this short essay. While they all work hard not to project the human into the heart of things, in their attempt to respect the indi"erence of objects in themselves, they do so anyway by dint of

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the ancient Logos principle by which things call out to us and speak their being. !is principle is, I will show, a convenient fiction in this new work, enabling the philosopher to hear the call of things and to speak to and for them, despite the new rule that we cannot think of objects as being-for-us and must reject older philosophies smacking of “presence” and traditional ontology or ontotheology. !e contra-dictions within each of these new philosophies — it is and it is not anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism is and is not a bad thing — can be resolved, I suggest, when the idealism and mysticism of these fields are acknowledged rather than disavowed in facile critiques of ersatz idealism and pseudosubjectivism. More crucially, a philosoph-ical Middle Ages, which comes into view when generous attention is paid to the richness of premodern thought, presents an opportunity, if not a challenge, to these areas, enabling them to acknowledge cog-nitive limits that will never be breached by colorful, and sometimes only purple, prose.

PrehumanismLet’s delve within the philosophical tradition that these newer areas overlook and start with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who is relevant to these considerations precisely because of his Kantianism, far more idealist than Kant’s own. To make a long story short, Fichte wants to cross the chasm set in place by transcendental idealism, the Kantian idea that there are noumena and phenomena, things in themselves on the one hand and appearances on the other: you cannot know, see, or experi-ence things in themselves, sealed o" as they are from our own thinking, but you can regard their appearances, thanks to the so-called “forms of possible experience.” Fichte supports this distinction between humans and things, subjects and objects, but there is a crucial di"erence — namely, he tests the distinction, starting with his claim that “both [the subject and the object] are supposed to be unified here; the natures of both object and subject are supposed to be preserved without either being lost” (2000, 31). He continues to collapse the distinction between subject and object by showing how the very thought of an object is indistinguishable from the object’s call or summons to the thinker: “Both are completely unified if we think of the subject’s being-deter-mined as its being-determined to be self-determining, i.e. as a sum-mons (eine Au"orderung) to the subject, calling upon it to resolve to exercise its e#cacy” (31). Fichte is referring to the call of things, the demands objects make upon subjects: “The object is not compre-hended, and cannot be other than as a bare summons calling upon the

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subject to act. !us as surely as the subject comprehends the object, so too does it possess the concept of its own freedom” (32).

So what comes first for Fichte, what stands at the very start of his most important elaboration of idealism, is clear. !ings come first but in a special way: never mute, they emit noise, but not just any noise: they summon and exhibit a desire to be heard by an other that is tentatively a subject. Fichte daringly invites us to look from the point of view of the object, which speaks to us, we not-objects who are not yet even subjects because we have still to answer the call and real-ize our own e#cacy and limits. But soon we do realize those limits, the “external check (Anstoß, 32),” he calls it, which is Fichte’s way not only of reinscribing a Kantian limit in his brand of idealism but also of putting an end to this mode of inquiry. In other words, Fichte is playing games, leading us to believe that this object is a thing (to use the distinction of thing theory between things and objects), when all along it was something else that, again, we ourselves could not yet grasp or understand: that thing is a being — not any being, as we read on, but another “rational being” like us:

!e rational being is to determine itself in consequence of the summons. !us the external being that is posited as the cause of the summons must at the very least presuppose the possibility that the subject is capable of understanding and comprehend-ing; otherwise its summons to the subject would have no pur-pose at all. . . . !erefore the cause of the summons must itself necessarily possess the concept of reason and freedom; thus it must itself be a being capable of having concepts; it must be an intelligence . . . and thus a rational being. (35)

Patently, Fichte has written a phenomenological narrative, with its own formative process (or Bildung), leading us to think one thing and think hard on that thing — on the possibility that things call to us, that they are subjects themselves — before thinking something else. As he says, “Up until now, our analysis . . . has been merely expository” (34).

What lies behind Fichte’s words, and (as I will argue in a moment) what informs the contemporary vitalist and neomateri-alist traditions under discussion here, is a distinct Logos principle. That much is obvious, because Fichte is borrowing ideas about things and the summons from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327/8),1 who in his commentary on Genesis writes:

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I say that he [God] speaks to all things and he speaks all things. Some things hear and answer him according to the property of existence, namely that by which God is existence and the exis-tence of all things is from him. Other things hear him and receive the Word of God insofar as he is the first and true life. !ese are all living beings. !e highest beings hear God not only through and in existence and through and in life, but also through and in understanding. Intellection and utterance are the same here. (1981, 115)

In this lovely passage Eckhart reflects on the Logos principle, God’s formative utterance expressed through all creation. But here he o"ers a crucial elaboration, extending common theories of perception asso-ciated with Aristotle. In short, what Aristotle says of sight — that vision and object are united, each merging their potentialities to pro-duce a single act, a single “concrete being” (1984, 116; see 105, 163) — Eckhart says of hearing. He prescribes mindfulness toward things that, to our ear, will remain “quite dumb” unless we enter into a “face to face” encounter with the object and open ourselves to it. To this aural scenario, Eckhart applies a passage from the Song of Songs: “My beloved speaks to me; . . . my beloved to me and I to him” — with the obvious suggestion that persons and things speak to and hear one another, lovingly.

Eckhart goes so far as to associate the very common notion of sympathies within objects, whose natural properties generate propen-sities and inclinations, with voice, as in the case of the heavy stone:

!e gravitational attraction of a heavy object cannot be checked by time or place in order to be silenced, but “it has no rest day and night in proclaiming and saying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord our God’” (Rv. 4:8; Is. 6:3). “He made us” (Ps. 99.3); “he spoke and we were made” (Ps. 32:9). . . . He commanded and we were created. Even though the external action, such as the fall or downward movement, may be silenced when a heavy object is forcibly held up high so that it does not fall, nevertheless the attraction of gravity that belongs to the form of a stone and by which God addresses, commands, orders and directs it is never silent, but always answers and speaks to God. (1981, 120)

Countermanding the long-standing clichés about mute stones, Eck-hart’s stone speaks while it does what it is. In other words, Eckhart’s idea

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here contrasts with what John Berger reports of his tour in the hills of Sardinia, marveling at the “stones of silence” that are the nuraghi and enjoying their “companionship”: “To place a stone upright so that it stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: !e stone becomes a presence, a dialogue begins” (1998, 3).2 What does it mean, for Eck-hart, but to reflect on the significance of holding up a stone that contin-ues, as opposed to begins, to speak, as we see in Berger? Eckhart’s di"er-ence from Berger is philosophically significant, because for Eckhart, it is as if the stone refuses to be either “ready to hand” or “present at hand” in the Heideggerian sense, its ontological significance at this very moment of contact with the human indicated by an equipmental total-ity mattering only to it but inaccessible to us in our moments of sense certainty. Imprecise as the analogy may be, we are working our way toward asking how the fundamental Heideggerian principles of specu-lative realism (Harman 2005, 76) remain informed by medieval mysti-cism and indeed what a mystical discourse can do for objects deemed mysterious.3

What we have here in Eckhart is, again, a Logos theology, the principle that “God’s speaking is his making” (85; see 40–41) and that what is heard is the voice of God, with objects emerging as transmis-sion devices. !is, too, is a crucial revision of Aristotle, from whose work “On the Soul” (1984) Eckhart intentionally draws and scram-bles, insofar as Aristotle understands “sound” to be “generated by an impact,” with certain objects having “no sound” (667/419b), and “voice” to be a “sound characteristic of what has soul in it” (669/420b). Eckhart puts soul into the soulless and thus definitionally, at least in his relation to Aristotle, emerges as a vitalist (more than a panenthe-ist). For a theologian whose Neoplatonism would strongly encourage him to “turn away from other things” (1981, 115), Eckhart certainly lingers around them, even human products, long enough to hear them out,4 but this dilation perfectly suits a mystic who commends silence as the opening to the noise of the world. !at Eckhart proposes that only contemplative mindfulness can foster a conversation with things and encourage an openness to their calls suggests that Fichte is right. Fichte knew that this initial relationship with objects is a mystical one and requires the mystical discourse of the summons. He understood that our moment of spontaneous receptivity to the call of things is the moment before self-consciousness. It is the moment before self-thematizing, the moment when the self has yet to define itself over and against objects, the moment — in other words — before Kant.5 It is a posthuman move on account of its prehumanism: the thought of objects, their call, before the thought of thought.

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Talk TalkSo, what does this Fichtean view of the mystical origins of subject-object relations have to do with ANT, vitalism, and speculative realism — fields that wish to stand far apart from the Logos principle and the pitfalls of what Derrida (after Heidegger) calls ontotheology? !e answer is a lot, especially if your hermeneutic demands things to make the call.

I begin with Bruno Latour, who has inspired much of the work under consideration here. In Reassembling the Social (2005), he sum-marizes the e"ort to create an “an object-oriented sociology for object-oriented humans” who witness the awakening of noisy objects: “As if a damning curse had been cast unto things, they remain asleep like the servants of some enchanted castle. Yet, as soon as they are freed from the spell, they start shuddering, stretching, and muttering” (73). !is is not an o" moment for Latour, nor is it a mere rhetorical point with a dash of medieval nostalgia. Rather, this is how he seeks to make his method persuasive, as in this passage:

To be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no trace is produced, they o"er no information to the observer and will have no visible e"ect on other agents. !ey remain silent and are no longer actors: they remain, literally, unaccountable. Although the situation is the same for groups and agencies — no trial, no account, no information — it is clearly more di#cult for objects, since carrying their e"ects while becoming silent is what they are so good at as Samuel Butler noted. Once built, the wall of bricks does not utter a word — even though the group of workmen goes on talking and gra#ti may proliferate on its sur-face. . . . !is is why specific tricks have to be invented to make them talk, that is, to o"er descriptions of themselves, to pro-duce scripts of what they are making others — humans or non-humans — do. (79)

If, so the idea goes, we make objects mute owing to our instrumental approach to them, we need to relate to them di"erently so that they will tell stories about themselves. Make them “utter a word.” “Make them talk.” Let’s stop “talking.” Or at least, let’s allow the objects to be heard. For, as Jane Bennett says in Vibrant Matter (2010), we can “give a voice to a thing-power” (2). She elaborates: “I will try to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality” (3). When things actualize this “thing-power” they make a “call”: “Stu" exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying” (4).

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And where we fail to understand is right where we endeavor to know and speak the language of their call.6

Graham Harman, the leading figure of the speculative realist movement and by far its best writer, celebrates another (and, as we will soon see, related) idea in Latour — the idea that “propositions” are “actants”; they are not “‘positions, things, substances, or essences per-taining to a nature made of mute objects for the talkative mind, but occasions given to di"erent entities to enter into contact.’” Harman names this way of thinking “new occasionalism” and describes it as “Latour’s single greatest breakthrough in metaphysics, one that will be associated with his name for centuries to come” (Harman 2009a, 82). It is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves. But it is not just that we view proposi-tions as actants. Rather, as Latour tells it, when we consider that “nei-ther world nor words but propositions di"er from one another,” we reduce the “yawning gap” of Kantianism to a hair’s width of di"er-ence between propositions (1999, 142, fig. 4.4). We suddenly are in a new place, in which nothing is mute and all is abuzz with propositions in close contact with others. Latour is emphatic about the results: “We are allowed to speak interestingly by what we allow to speak interestingly” (144). While Latour aligns the “proposition” with the idea of “articu-lation,” it is hard to see what is significantly di"erent here from the old but forgotten way of understanding propositions in the most ornate and complex of Logos theology in the work of John Duns Scotus, whose contribution to the ontology of propositions, the discovery of the propositional relays between people and things, can be summed up in one choice phrase: the univocity of being. Being is inseparable from propositionality. Voice matters.

My critique so far is not that the Logos principle is all bad. Quite the opposite: to think about the Logos principle requires one to think broadly about the history of philosophy and — more importantly — how our sense of that history reconfigures itself when something new comes along. Here, in such a history, one discovers that at the cen-ter of the new philosophical project to decenter the human and ele-vate things lies the patent human mode of self-presencing — speaking being — that depends not only on the Logos principle, as Derrida long ago established in Of Grammatology (1976), but also, and more pro-foundly, I would suggest, on the languages of mysticism and idealism by which things speak and propose. I do not see that speculative real-ists, or vitalists, are aware of the complicated philosophical history that underlies their project to “make things speak.” Despite their attempts to question Derrida’s criticism of ontotheology, this aspect of

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Logocentrism 101 has not been addressed (Harman 2012, 196–97; Morton 2012, 207, 218–19; Bryant 2011, 40, 86, 276).

Hard Problems!e premodern contributions, the role of mysticism and the summons or call in particular, were not lost to Henri Bergson — a philosopher whom the vitalists, ANTs, and speculative realists hail as a founding and enabling thinker. Bergson, unlike many he inspired, knew that the vitalist tradition must account, conscientiously, for the summons, the soul, and the kinds of mysticism necessary to thinking the vitality of things.

In an essay called “Frenzy, Mechanism, Mysticism” (2002), Bergson writes, “Man will rise above earthly things only if a powerful equipment supplies him with the requisite fulcrum. He must use mat-ter as a support if he wants to get away from matter. In other words, the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical” (1932, 166). As if this point were not big enough, he continues: “So let us not merely say . . . that the mystical summons up (appelle) the mechanical. We must add that the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul, and that mechanism should mean mysticism” (339). !e world has a soul, just as Eckhart thought. But — and this is crucial for Bergson — just because the world is animate with the hubbub of élan vital does not mean that consciousness itself dissolves:

!eories of physical determinism which are rife at the present day are far from displaying the same clearness, the same geo-metrical rigour. !ey point to molecular movements taking place in the brain: consciousness is supposed to arise out of these at times in some mysterious way. . . . [W]e are to think of an invisible musician playing behind the scenes while the actor strikes a keyboard the notes of which yield no sound: conscious-ness must be supposed to come from an unknown region and to be superimposed on the molecular vibrations, just as the melody is on the rhythmical movements of the actor. But, whatever image we fall back upon, we do not prove and we never shall prove by any reasoning that the psychic fact is fatally deter-mined by the molecular movement. For in a movement we may find the reason of another movement, but not the reason of a conscious state. (1910, 147–48)

Here is a reminder for all those “object-oriented humans” who seek to “decenter the human” by equating consciousness with the vitalities

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and intensities. For even Bergson in his most mystical moments refuses this equation and formulates his philosophy accordingly: (1) pace Deleuze’s misreading in Bergsonism (1988), Bergson himself talks about consciousness as similar to, but in the last instance distinct from, the élan vital that animates the rest of the world; (2) he pre-sciently poses the “hard problem of consciousness” just in the way David Chalmers has done in !e Conscious Mind (1996) for research and phi-losophy concerning the mind/brain distinction: conscious experience is irreducible to the material and, for that matter, to other “weird” and funny formulations. In short, as Bergson shows us, consciousness can-not be explained away and is rather an ever more pressing topic because of the relevance of vitality.7

!ese newer areas, however, may just as well avoid talking about consciousness, because the term itself is distorted by its history of usage, an accretion of error, and so forth. I can sympathize with the distaste for “consciousness,” because it admits philosophical frustration and forces you into Kantianism. It is a mind bender to take that old Kantian lesson that consciousness is always consciousness of some-thing and write it from the point of view of objects. What would you write? Well, you would write something about “withdrawn objects,” as Harman does, just as Kant would write of things-in-themselves — with the key di"erence being that philosophers who absorb the Kantian lesson know the limits of their discourse, whereas those who flout that lesson take o" into flights of pure reason, speculating about the inte-rior life of objects and getting inside the heads of things. (!e other key di"erence for Harman, of course, is Heidegger, whom Harman needs to revise because he does not help with this one Kantian funda-mental: Heidegger admits that human attention and awareness — that is, what constitutes a subject — are special aspects of human conscious-ness needing philosophical analysis.) !e Kantian problem remains in place: if there is something that cannot be thought, then maybe it cannot be thought. You cannot write your way any closer to the object, circle the wagons of indirection and allusion around it as you may. Until such a time as there is a materialist, realist, or — let us just say — scientific explanation for the necessity of the conscious experience of, say, the color red to accompany the reception of electromagnetic radi-ation in the cones of your eyeball, the problem of consciousness qua consciousness will remain on the table. And until the universe demands that we extend this idea and pose a “hard problem of things” — and I credit Harman for attempting to o"er one in his critique of Chalmers (Harman 2009b, 268–69, 272) — there will always be irreducible consciousness, always be idealism, always be objects and subjects infi-

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nitely variously positioned in relation to one another. Talk of “thingly” consciousness as vitality or voice will not “indicate” much of anything but a philosopher’s love of language, consumer goods, and entertain-ing thing-examples like hailstones and tar, aardvarks and baseball. Nor will objects be seen as they wish to be seen in the more specialized attempts by some speculative realists to suggest that objects perceive their secondary qualities — this being just one result of the critique of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities (Meillassoux 2008). For its refusal to find these problems to be problems at all, then, speculative realism amounts to what Hegel called “dogmatic realism,” which cannot help but posit “the objective as the real ground of the subjective” (1977, 127).

Speculative realists will tell you that after Descartes everything went o" the rails in the history of philosophy, obviously because his res cogitans was the wrong thinking thing! Which makes it all the more strange that they do not focus intensely on philosophy and thought of the period before Descartes but after the Greeks — a focus that would make instantly visible the medieval mystical discourses upon which such an investigation into objects is founded, a discourse that is funda-mentally, even beautifully, logocentric. Could these medieval tradi-tions issue another call, then — a call for the reassessment, if not adjust-ment, of the disciplinary language of speculative realism and the cognate philosophies, their modus procendi et loquendi? Will that call be heard?

My point is not to reassert the importance of Tradition over a glossy and emergent countermovement. It is to say that when any new philosophy proclaims its wholesale departure from prior philosophical explorations, it is always the Middle Ages and medieval thought that take the hardest hit, and — predictably — it is usually medievalists who assume the task of making corrections to the exciting new narrative. In this case, however, critiques of object-oriented ontology and specula-tive realism, of actor-network theory and vitalism, have yet to emerge from the field of medieval studies, apart from the essays collected in this issue of minnesota review. Perhaps when the thrill of object-oriented ontology wanes in this field, some medievalists will not limit them-selves to the “application” of its ideas and the mimicking of its lyricism in the reading of medieval texts and will instead show what it means for a new philosophy to be built almost entirely on the exclusion of the Middle Ages.8 To wit, when these new philosophies exclude the Mid-dle Ages, they foreclose the possibilities of generous reading — the practice of reading-with even the unlikeliest and most unmodern of thinkers — and the opportunities to develop a broader conception of

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what the speculative realist project even is, what it can do, what its limits are. !e deconstructive lesson about the identity of thought and being perhaps now looks pat, but as speculative realists sever this Par-menidean nexus and being is taken as its own category irrespective of thought, there remains consciousness, and the questions of its basis will always be asked, even when you believe you are thinking about something else entirely.

Notes1. What I cover here, however, is not discussed in Ernst von Bracken’s Meis-

ter Eckhart und Fichte (1943). 2. For an essay that asks, “If stone could speak, what would it say about

us?,” see Cohen.3. On Heidegger and Eckhart, see Caputo.4. See Eckhart 1981, 134; more generally, 134–35; see also 131, 142–43,

145. Elsewhere, Eckhart speaks of fire that “sees” (172).5. Clearly, one could turn next to Emmanuel Lévinas’s “summons” in

Totality and Infinity (1969).6. For a di"erent example of this critical approach, see Daston’s collection

of essays entitled !ings !at Talk, and the editor’s discussion about talkative things (11–15).

7. Here is one way to object to my (and Bergson’s) point:If a sentient being is like a wind harp, and if, moreover, sensation and think-ing are ontologically similar to one another, then we can invert the image. Wind harps are like sentient beings. We are approaching territory into which the new philosophy speculative realism has burst, in particular, the insights of object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerning regions of nonhuman “sen-tience.” . . . We OOO philosophers can sound as if we are saying that nonsen-tient objects are conscious. !is is not exactly what is being said. Rather, what OOO claims is that consciousness isn’t all that di"erent from what a tree does when it “translates” the wind. (Morton 2012, 205, 206–7)

!is “Rather” assumes a false identity — it is not even an analogy — between wind activity and human consciousness, taking consciousness to be equal to, and delim-ited by, anthropomorphic activity: “!e strings of the wind harp stringpomor-phize the wind” (207) just as the tree presumably treeopomorphizes the wind.

8. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology have garnered interest in some quarters of medieval studies as well as in art and architecture, as Harman notes (2012, 183). But one starting point for medievalists, I believe, can be the mys-tical and idealist texts discussed here, because they open up a line of inquiry that anticipates speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, in turn facilitating an encounter between the medieval and the modern that reveals — and this is key — the philosophical depth of the former and the conceptual limits of the latter. To my mind, any glance at these texts shows the weaknesses and occlusions of this new philoso-phy, and I am not sanguine that taking what works while ignoring what doesn’t is the way to go.

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Works CitedAristotle. 1984. “On the Soul.” In !e Complete Works of Aristotle: !e Revised Oxford

Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 641–92. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of !ings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berger, John. 1998. “An Open Letter to Subcommandante Marcos in the Moun-tains of Southeast Mexico: How to Live with Stones.” Los Angeles Times, 4 January.

Bergson, Henri. 1910. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Con-sciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin.

———. 1932. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: F. Alcan.———. 2002. “Frenzy, Mechanism, Mysticism.” In Key Writings, edited by Keith

Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, 329–44. New York: Continuum. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities.Caputo, John D. 1990. !e Mystical Element in Heidegger’s !ought. New York:

Fordham University Press.Chalmers, David J. 1996. !e Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental !eory.

New York: Oxford University Press.Cohen, Je"rey Jerome. 2010. “Stories of Stone.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval

cultural studies 1: 56–63. Daston, Lorraine, ed. 2004. !ings !at Talk. Cambridge, MA: Zone.Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam. New York: Zone.Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Eckhart, Meister. 1981. Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Trea-

tises, and Defense. Translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right. Edited by Frederick Neuhouser. Translated by Michael Baur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of !ings. Chicago: Open Court.

———. 2009a. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.

———. 2009b. “Zero-Person and the Psyche.” In Mind !at Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium, edited by David Skrbina, 253–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

———. 2012. “!e Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43: 183–203.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. !e Di"erence between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Phi-losophy. Translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: State Univer-sity of New York Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-!eory. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contin-gency. Translated by Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum.

Morton, Timothy. 2012. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43: 205–24.

von Bracken, Ernst. 1943. Meister Eckhart und Fichte. Würzburg: Triltsch.