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http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/the-hegemonic-fallacy/

There’s been a flurry of fascinating posts over at Larval Subjects recently on the subject of object-oriented philosophy. I found Dr. Sinthome’s post on how to overcome the “Kantian paradox,” as it were, particularly of interest:

We are given the alternative of either living inside a submarine known as mind, tradition, language, culture, or society, where we only ever encounter the world through the mediation of our “sonar machines” (i.e., in a way that fails to represent them as they are, or of directly touching objects either themselves. We are given the stark alternative of mind or world, culture or nature, language or object.

Yet this stark alternative misconstrues the entire problem.

I decided to leave the quote on a cliff-hanger to encourage readers to check out the entire post on the so-called “hegemonic fallacy,” as Sinthome dubs it. But his other posts are also worth checking out.

I don’t really have that good of a grasp of what Sinthome is talking about, as I’m not at all familiar with Laruel or Latour, but it seems that if we accept the premise that “all difference makes a difference” (by reducing all difference to a horizontal “plane of immanence”) against the idea that there exists at least one difference that, to some extent, determines other differences, then this conclusion seems to run perilously close to saying almost nothing about difference itself. Meaning, if we can’t say that some things matter more than others, then at the philosophical level it seems to make difference identical to itself and at the political level to foreclose the possibility of radical politics.

But, again, these thoughts are purely speculative, immediate reactions to the post, and are in no way rigorous critiques or well-thought out to any extent.