Jordi Vivaldi

The emergence of a new philosophical proposal usually implies a terminological renovation. This process does not necessarily introduce terms ex nihilo; in most cases, it simply centralises expressions with a formerly peripheral presence in the contemporary discourse. Husserl’s emphasis on “intentionality,” Levinas’ insistence on “otherness” and Deleuze’s focus on the “rhizome” are emblematic examples of how neglected terms can be brought to the foreground when new ideas arise. The emergence and consolidation of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in recent years is no exception: under its umbrella, the term “object,” once marginalised by a relational philosophical episteme, has been recovered as a central element in some of the most relevant philosophical debates.

However, the terminological renovation resulting from the rise of a philosophical alternative is hardly reducible to the centralisation of a single term. A plethora of related expressions arises around it, underpinning its conceptual power. New Materialism is a good example: although the notion of “matter” plays a central role, the term is conveniently flanked by expressions such as “entanglement,” “becoming,” “network,” “assemblage” and “process.” Amid this myriad of orbiting bodies, one shines with a particular force: “relation.” Its presence has been theorised by thinkers such as Karen Barad or Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, who invoke “a discursive practice centered on the creation of concepts in their relationality,” i.e. an affirmative relationality that precedes its terms.

OOO advocates for the opposite. An object is “anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces.” This radical withdrawal has led critics to define OOO as a metaphysics of absence, a metaphysics founded on a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things.” However, paradoxically, the centralisation of the notion of “object” has occurred without the systematisation of a term that is underexplored in philosophies associated with Speculative Realism and which seems fundamental to OOO: “limit.”

The term “limit” arises as soon as we think of an object as demarcated from its environment. In the case of OOO, the limit’s role seems even more decisive, since the object’s core is not just individual and separated but also withdrawn and inaccessible. The limit is actually present in OOO’s argumentation through the frequent use of liminal terminology by its thinkers: expressions such as “walled island,” “surface effects” or “encrusted qualities” are regularly employed in order to emphasise the “metaphysical abyss” that separates real objects and sensual objects within the quadruple object. To my knowledge, there is no systematic treatment of the nature of this metaphysical “wall,” “surface” or “crust” in the work of Graham Harman, something that is crucial in order to illuminate the combination of internal difference and unity that we observe in objects. The broadest development in this direction takes shape in Timothy Morton’s notion of rift, whose opening, suspense and closure account for the object’s birth, persistence and death.

The central argument in this article will be that Morton’s rift succeeds in explaining the radical difference that inhabits the core of every object, but that it fails to explain the object’s unification. The article will propose approaching this problem by way of Eugenio Trías’s notion of limit, the conceptualisation of which as differential sameness and autoreferential difference allows for articulating it as a territory of disjunction and conjunction rather than as a dividing Euclidean line.

Section 2  analyses the centrality of Morton’s rift in Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. Section 3  discusses the difficulties of Morton’s rift in accounting for the unified condition of objects in spite of their inner partition. In light of these criticisms, Section 4 briefly presents the philosophical work of Trías and then reconstructs his twofold notion of limit, particularly its territorial constitution and its conjunctive and disjunctive vocation. Section 5  first demonstrates that the core of Trías’s theory can be grafted onto Harman’s ontology with reasonable ease. Then, given this foundation, it proposes an object-oriented approach to the concept of limit, demonstrating that it constitutes an adequate alternative to Morton’s rift.

By way of conclusion, Section 6 discusses how the incorporation of a twofold theory of limits within OOO problematises the logical status of objects argued by Morton on the basis of Graham Priest’s dialetheism.

[Continue Reading]