Afterword: Objects, Objects Everywhere

Abstract

The core of object-oriented-ontology (ooo) developed by Levi Bryant¹ can be summed up by the formula from subject back to substance. And, in so far as subject is correlative with modernity (recall Lacan s thesis about the Cartesian subject as the subject of modern science), we can also say that ooo follows the premise rendered by the title of Bruno Latour’s famous book, We Were Never Modern—it endeavors to bring back the pre-modern enchantment of the world. The Lacanian answer to this should be a paraphrase of his correction of the formula “god is dead” (god was always already dead, he just didn’t know it): we were always already modern (we just didn’t know it). The main target of ooo is thus not transcendental philosophy with its subject/object dualism, but modern science with its vision of “gray” reality reduced to mathematical formalization: ooo tries to supplement modern science with a premodern ontology which describes the “inner life” of things.