Harman vs Cole (Round 2)

The philosopher Graham Harman is nothing if not amusing. Here he's responding to this letters thread, which was a follow up to an article by Andrew Cole in the summer issue of Artforum. There are a number of 4526_Langland-dreamerhowlers in there, but I'll just correct the obvious mistakes:

-- No, I've never collaborated with Andrew Cole, as claimed by Harman (twice). I didn't co-edit a book called The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman. Although I can say that Andrew is a fine fellow who I first met during graduate school fifteen years ago and have recently gotten back in touch with over email. Why would Harman claim something that anyone can check with a simple click? He has since apologized.

-- No, my article on the relationship between philosophy and postfordism is not an “attempted refutation” of Badiou, but rather, as the ending of the article indicates, an endorsement of Badiou.

-- No one ever denied that Marx believed in the existence of physical objects. That's a red herring. And even if Marx and Harman share this single trait (who doesn't?), it does not indemnify Harman and his philosophy of objectification in which “everything is an object.”

Harman is often an inattentive and clumsy reader of others. In his much maligned review of Laruelle in the NDPR journal, Harman mixed up even the most basic principles in Laruelle, before reducing his evaluation of the French thinker to a kind of high-school popularity contest.

Or often just tone deaf. Like the time when Harman wrote that he wished Heidegger had died at the age of 40. That way, Harman mused, we'd have the ontology from Being and Time without any of Heidegger's distasteful political shortcomings that came later in life. But as numerous authors from Derrida on down have indicated -- and the recent appearance of the Black Notebooks has definitively proven -- it's difficult if not impossible to separate Heidegger's ontology from his views on society and politics.

Thankfully, Harman has since deleted that post from his blog.