Realist Magic

by Timothy Morton

Draft copy of Timothy Morton's new book, Realist Magic, to come out later this year from OHP.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Theory, Nonfiction, Nature

Draft Copy

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Timothy Bloxam Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They are the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; and other books.

Reviews

[Cliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like eating ice cream. Delicious.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between manifesto and spelunking, the only thing Realist Magic isn't is uninteresting. There are times when it's unclear whether this is an attempt to explore a new metaphysics or a new aesthetics, when you realize yet again (and there a lot of 'yet agains' - Morton repeats himself a lot) that the book seems to want to kill them into a smelted mix of the two. He does this in the most hook or crook fashion imaginable. Layering metaphor on metaphor, some helpful (the creation/destruction of objects as the reversal of the ancient Greek breakdown of rhetoric), others confusing ("on the surface of the black hole into which I have fallen, you see a rapidly fading photograph of my horrified face"), while drawing on everything from contemporary physics to Romantic literature to German & Buddhist philosophy. Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it.

But that's why it feels like a manifesto and spelunking. This feels like a foray into an exciting idea who's existence is being justified rather than elaborated. That might be because Object-Oriented Ontology is fairly new, but there's also a part of me that feels that this book is heavily overselling it. "OOO is the first and only truly post-Derridean view," Morton says. Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi because he was trapped in the "correlationist circle" (that the post-Kantian tradition has trapped its thinking in anthropocentrism), Morton says. I don't need to believe OOO is wrong to see these as extravagant claims. OOO is passed off as a real solution to roadblocks in thinking, and maybe it is, but this book has you walking away thinking - this was provocative, strange, and worth thinking about, but how does it do anything it claims to do?

TL;DR: within the 200+ pages of Realist Magic are what feels like 20-30 pages of arguments about how objects are fundamentally defined by self-contradiction since there is a "Rift between essence and appearance." Birth (an explosion of many self-contradicting objects from a singular object; a glass shatters, becoming shards), living (these shards continue to be self-contradicting), and death (self-contradiction ends when an opera singers voice matches the glass-shaped pitch that displaces it into shards) are defined by this fact. So is the universe, in which humans are one of many objects, and to which our notions of self are applicable. It's all somehow helpfully explained and unclear, enthusiastic and belabored, original and indebted. It's self-contradicting, I guess. Which, while clever, doesn't help.

[Jake Staples · Rating 5 out of 5]

a difficult book as almost any ontological work is. However I also found this book easier to read than Morton's other works, along with this Morton takes the time to go through ideas clearly, repeatedly and in a functional order. As such I think it makes a good groundwork for understanding Morton's particular OOO in hyperobjects and humankind.
Morton's work is certainly strange though for the most part it is convincing. It has certainly pushed me to read more work within speculative realism and object-orientated ontology.

[Devon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. funny and psychedelic. though at times morton's tone and style can get to be a bit much. reading this made me want to delve deeper into ooo- so i suppose he accomplished something. no sure how seriously i take it (or how much i actually understand) - but was an enjoyable ride.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Morton continues to be wildly great and his texts a wonderful combination of denseness and clarity all wrapped up into one humorous and entertaining and insightful entity.

[Rowan Tepper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has speculative realism already become dogmatic, a Church of Graham, as it were? Or, is this the half-baked work of an epigone, who has understood SR dogmatically as OOO (object-oriented-ontology) and written an entire book to explicate a mediocre pun in the form of philosophy? At any rate, the overly casual and 'cool' presentation makes it difficult to tell the difference. Interesting ideas are insufficiently developed, and the innumerable quasi-scriptural citations of Harman's work continually remind the reader that these ideas are largely unoriginal.

There are many better works of Speculative Realist philosophy (such as Tristan Garcia's Form and Object)

[Zornitsa Dimitrova · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don't know what to think.

[⏺ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To give meaning is to mistranslate."

[Andrew Oda · Rating 5 out of 5]

whoa, this is bonkers! Very thoughtful and fwd thinking.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

My 2nd favorite of Tim's--The Ecological Thought still at the top for me, but this one is wonderful too.