Weird Wonder In Merleau Ponty Object Oriented Ontology And New Materialism
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Weird Wonder in Merleau-Ponty, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism
Author: Brian Hisao Onishi
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2023-12-15
This book connects recent developments in speculative realism, new materialism, and eco-phenomenology to articulate an approach to wonder that escapes the connected traps of anthropocentrism and correlationism. Brian Onishi argues that wonder has explanatory power for the constitution of the world and the organization of meaning. To do this, he appeals to both fiction (speculative and Weird fiction in particular) and quantum physics. More specifically, he argues that the focus of Weird fiction on impossible experiences and a feeling of something just beyond the limits of one’s grasp dramatizes the speculative reach beyond the limits of our understanding. But more than a tool for knowledge acquisition, wonder is an organizing property of objects. Like the collapse of superposition in quantum physics, reality is constituted when objects reveal themselves to other objects and thereby organize themselves into complex objects. Since no relation is exhaustive, the capacity to wonder remains at a material level, and the possibility of reorganization is ever present. Ultimately, Onishi argues for a speculative eco-phenomenology with wonder as an engine for a Weird environmental ethics.
The Call of the Eco-Weird in Fiction, Films, and Games
Author: Brian Hisao Onishi
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2025-02-28
This edited volume identifies and analyses the Eco-Weird as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool for engaging in fictional, philosophical, filmic, and ludic texts. It is the first volume to engage in the study of the Eco-Weird, which is a developing field at the intersection of environmental thought and Weird fiction, broadly construed to include literature, games, films, art, and television shows. The Eco-Weird has intersections with other literary and scholarly fields, including horror studies, game studies, phenomenology, literary criticism, and eco-criticism, but provides a unique set of tools to engage both its texts and the ongoing environmental crises of climate change, environmental justice, pollution, and more.
Strange Matter, Strange Objects
Wonder has had a rich and diverse history in the western philosophical tradition. Both Plato and Aristotle claim that philosophy begins in wonder, while Descartes marks it as the first of the passions and Heidegger uses it as a signpost for a new trajectory of philosophy away from idealism and nihilism. Despite such a rich history, wonder is almost always thought to be exhausted by the acquisition of knowledge. That is, wonder is thought of almost exclusively in epistemological terms and is discarded as soon as knowledge has been achieved. In this dissertation, I argue for an ontological reorientation of wonder that values wonder beyond its epistemic uses. To do this, I read the phenomenological and ontological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty through recent developments in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. Much of Merleau-Ponty's work is directed toward dissolving the distinction between subject and object. His insights regarding the mutual constitution of the world lead to the possibility of an operative wonder that occurs between subject and object. Both object-oriented ontology and new materialism radicalize these insights by articulating them in terms of a vibrant or quasi-agential material world. Objects and assemblages of objects are capable of performing the becoming of the world that includes human activity, but is not reduced to it. As such, the world is capable of both self-organization and practice. Ultimately I use the philosophy-physics of Karen Barad to argue that operative wonder acts like a kind of superposition of relations between objects, and thereby accounts for a concept of wonder that is both ontologically significant and acutely generative.