Radically Withdrawn

“No matter how many times you turned around a coin, you never saw the other side as the other side. The coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible. This irreducibility could easily apply to the ways in which another object, say a speck of dust, interacted with the coin. If you thought this through a little more, you saw that all objects were in some sense irreducibly withdrawn.” — Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects.

A thing or object, proposes Morton—known to many as a figurehead in the school known to some as “Objected Oriented Ontology” (OOO)—cannot be known in its totality. “You can’t know a thing fully by thinking it or by eating it or by measuring it or by painting it . . .” In this way, objects are radically withdrawn, not fully graspable in their totality even by themselves. As such, our project of study cannot only proceed from what a thing is, but also how it is.

In this course, we explore the (1) idea of thingliness: Can object include subject? What is a thing? How does it endure in time? and (2) its inscrutability: If there is a radically withdrawn aspect to all things, how can we think this component of their dark silence? Many contemporary fields of scholarship have proceeded from this question, and what unites them is their redress to questions (1) and (2)—namely how can we consolidate our thinking of thingliness with thingliness itself? As such, we proceed from a variety of points of view, from the philosophy of time to ecological thought to black studies to psychoanalysis, in order to approach this speculative question.