Paul Ennis’s response to Levi Bryant did not take the manic laruellian path, but took a more nostalgic turn. Where OOO is a form of nostalgic return to ontotheology via its watered down version of transcendence, called « withdrawal », Ennis looks affectionately back at anti-realism, obscurely sensing that despite OOOxian propaganda based on the bogus (bogey-man) concept of correlationism, A-R (let’s be trendy and talk acronymically) may still have things to teach us.
(Aside: correlationism is a bogus concept that trades on a confusion between a narrow conceptual sense that would best be designated idealism (or post-kantianism) and an extended notional sense that can cover anything and everything. So it manages to combine the very narrow bad intension of the first and the very large extension of the second)
Ennis solemnly accepts at face value Bryant’s 2D projection of a 3D diagram (which I would have liked to seen inserted in PROMETHEUS as a mystifyng explanation of why the Engineers hate us so: the de-withdrawal of God leading to the death of man), and praises it for its encapsulation of the « recent » trend « that has seen us move away from philosophies of transcendence towards those favouring immanence ». There is no apparent irony as he contemplates a Lacanian who in the first 5 minutes of his talk manages to falsify the historical record of the anti-humanist inspiration (Heidegger) and reception (Althusser) of Lacan and to travesty his thought as a correlationist humanist shell that nevertheless in its most ridiculous content (the graphs of sexuation) « prefigured » (after the event, the Deleuze-event) the move towards not immanence itself, and here Ennis’s suave and subtle style begins to show its acerated teeth, towards « favouring immanence ». Whom the Gods would destroy, they first do favour. And Bryant « favours » Deleuze, with his Lacanian backstabbing; he favours immanence with his Harmanian withdrawal (word that he now wishes to relinquish, withdrawing from « withdrawal »).
Yes, at this point when he began to talk about Bryant « favouring immanence » I began to forgive Ennis for his non-laruellian gambit. Maybe, I thought, he is one-upping Laruelle himself, maybe he is doing non-philosophy disguised as philosophy, and the subtly awry verb « favouring » hinted at this transcendental positing of an immanent datum as a transcendent faktum conditioning the empirical disjunction of that datum by means of its transcendental difference. And Ennis was just getting started!
AGENT SWARM 