Object-oriented philosophy and deconstruction : realism in the work of Graham Harman and Jacques Derrida

Abstract

Twenty-first century continental philosophy has witnessed a rising interest in rekindling questions related to philosophical realism after a long period of being chastised as a dogmatic and outmoded philosophical position. This interest can be largely attributed to the emergence of a relatively recent and broad philosophical movement known as “Speculative Realism,” which includes Graham Harman’s “Object-Oriented Philosophy.” One of the principal targets of Harman’s philosophy is the work of Jacques Derrida, who he criticises for propagating a staunch antirealism framed in terms of a “linguistic idealism” which holds that there can be no possible access to extra-linguistic reality. In this dissertation, I analyse the issue of realism in the work of Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy and Derridean deconstruction, in order to offer the following twofold contribution to knowledge; first, I provide a novel analysis and reassessment of Harman’s philosophy framed in terms of two pairs of “negative” and “positive” theses pertaining to the nature of “objects” broadly construed. Second, I offer a Derridean rejoinder to the Harman’s anti-realist critique of deconstruction, and I argue for the claim that by using the resources internal to deconstruction, the former’s thought can be reconstituted as a novel and dynamic speculative form of realism. This dissertation is the first full-length work to analyse Jacques Derrida’s work in relation to Graham Harman’s, and calls for the revaluation of both philosophies.