| Long abstract |
“Frank Auerbach’s career says little about the ‘art world,’ except that it may not matter much to a real artist’s growth.” So begins what is likely Robert Hughes’ best book on the work of a single artist, with the possible exception of the brilliant if patchy Goya. The sentiment, it seems to me, is equally applicable to the Frankenstein’s monster called speculative realism. Insofar as the various acts of this genre are philosophical, they remain within Plato’s ambit, and must be considered on the same grounds. This means, first (a first patently obvious claim), that whatever the novel new content of philosophy, its form is what it has always been. In other words, to paraphrase a famous sentiment about music, there are still only two types of philosophy: good and bad. That someone nominates themselves as a Platonist, an empiricist, or as engaged in object oriented phi-losophy is of absolutely zero philosophical import. What matters is the philosophical work that they engage in, what they manage to construct and support in this effort. Philosophy is not a game of proper names, despite the profoundly boring role played in the contemporary culture of thought. Patronymy is to philosophy a facsimile of Zarathustra’s ape. Here is one of the key differences between philosophy and psychoanalysis: in the former, the proper name, despite its ubiquity, has no essential significance. Or, to be more precise, the proper name does not function patronymically, but rather to index a problem or problematic conceptual nexus. That beautiful figment in the Foucauldian imaginarium, the “year without a name,”1 is—or at least, should be—the rule for philosophy, an irreducible com-ponent of the philosophical gambit. Philosophy is anonymous a priori, and the proper name operates within it as a mask.
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