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adamz24's review against another edition
3.0
Completely. Batshit.
Also the most fun I've had reading theory or philosophy in quite some time. Hyperobjects was similar in its tendency to amuse and inspire just as much as irritate, but that book was held back by Morton's larger ecological project, its sort of impassioned enterprise. Realist Magic finds Morton in stupendous form, free to develop the batshit lunacy of his object-oriented ontology in fuller and clearer terms.
Morton is actually a very good scholar, an intensely intelligent Romanticist at heart, it seems, and a valuable reader of David Lynch (and the shitty Shelley, but I don't like the shitty Shelley). These qualities differentiate him from the merry band of complete asshats and charlatans (mother's-basement-dweller Ian Bogost and bridge troll Levi Bryant, especially) who also work in this general area.
Because Morton is seemingly smart, and utterly insane, his work makes for very good reading. What makes this book especially magnificent is that it appears to be an entirely (or mostly) serious attempt to articulate an ontology that is best described as a description of how things appear to be in the films of David Lynch, minus Lynch's tendency to (as I read it) a sort of somewhat more traditional Eastern-influenced mysticism. You get the sense that Morton actually believes what he's arguing. And because he's charming more than obnoxious, you sometimes come close to getting the sense that he might be right.
Assuming one buries one's head in Bysshe Shelley for a protracted period of time, obsessively consumes and theorizes Lynch films and Doctor Who, indulges in (and this is speculation*) a truly shocking quantity of hallucinogens, and befriends Graham Harman, while reading sprinkles of 18th, 19th, 20th century European philosophy, ancient philosophy, medieval Judaeo-Islamic philosophy, and writings about 20th-century physics, one might have a chance of approximating what Timothy Morton has achieved here.
Until then, one must do with reading Timothy Morton. And that is a pleasure. I love you, Tim. I want to be your friend. I'm sorry for what I said about your friends. Thank you for this book. Honestly.
*Well, substantiated speculation. The guy obviously spends a great deal of time staring at things. His blog has multiple posts on DMT, LSD, dreams about eating huge quantities of magic mushrooms, and so on. So yeah, the OOO turn and psychedelia seem pretty inextricably linked to me.
Also the most fun I've had reading theory or philosophy in quite some time. Hyperobjects was similar in its tendency to amuse and inspire just as much as irritate, but that book was held back by Morton's larger ecological project, its sort of impassioned enterprise. Realist Magic finds Morton in stupendous form, free to develop the batshit lunacy of his object-oriented ontology in fuller and clearer terms.
Morton is actually a very good scholar, an intensely intelligent Romanticist at heart, it seems, and a valuable reader of David Lynch (and the shitty Shelley, but I don't like the shitty Shelley). These qualities differentiate him from the merry band of complete asshats and charlatans (mother's-basement-dweller Ian Bogost and bridge troll Levi Bryant, especially) who also work in this general area.
Because Morton is seemingly smart, and utterly insane, his work makes for very good reading. What makes this book especially magnificent is that it appears to be an entirely (or mostly) serious attempt to articulate an ontology that is best described as a description of how things appear to be in the films of David Lynch, minus Lynch's tendency to (as I read it) a sort of somewhat more traditional Eastern-influenced mysticism. You get the sense that Morton actually believes what he's arguing. And because he's charming more than obnoxious, you sometimes come close to getting the sense that he might be right.
Assuming one buries one's head in Bysshe Shelley for a protracted period of time, obsessively consumes and theorizes Lynch films and Doctor Who, indulges in (and this is speculation*) a truly shocking quantity of hallucinogens, and befriends Graham Harman, while reading sprinkles of 18th, 19th, 20th century European philosophy, ancient philosophy, medieval Judaeo-Islamic philosophy, and writings about 20th-century physics, one might have a chance of approximating what Timothy Morton has achieved here.
Until then, one must do with reading Timothy Morton. And that is a pleasure. I love you, Tim. I want to be your friend. I'm sorry for what I said about your friends. Thank you for this book. Honestly.
*Well, substantiated speculation. The guy obviously spends a great deal of time staring at things. His blog has multiple posts on DMT, LSD, dreams about eating huge quantities of magic mushrooms, and so on. So yeah, the OOO turn and psychedelia seem pretty inextricably linked to me.
gracestuchell's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
embiguity's review
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
suddenflamingword's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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.
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