Realist Magic Objects, Ontology, Causality Timothy Morton Realist Magic Objects, Ontology ...

234 Pages·2013·5.71 MB·English

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In this book Timothy Morton, the prominent
ecologist, literary theorist, and object-oriented
philosopher, lures us into a magical night of objects.
If things are intrinsically withdrawn, irreducible to
their perception or relations or uses, they can only
affect each other in a strange region of traces and
footprints: the aesthetic dimension. Every object
sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies
to the disappearance of objects. Doesn’t this tell
us something about the aesthetic dimension, why
philosophers have often found it to be a realm
of evil?
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu

Realist Magic:
Objects, Ontology, Causality
New Metaphysics
Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour
The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys-
ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution
and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic-
continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the
continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel-
lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like
an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’
from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical
classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter-
est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy.
Timothy Morton
Realist Magic:
Objects, Ontology, Causality
OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS
An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2013
First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2013
Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13106496.0001.001
Copyright © 2013 Timothy Morton
This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share
Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify,
distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting
derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required
from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected
by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
Design by Katherine Gillieson
Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu
The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2011, used under a
Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY).
ISBN-13 978-1-60785-202-5
Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective
whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available
worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are
produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University
of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support
infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form.
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Contents
Acknowledgments 9
List of Figures 11
Introduction 15
1. Like an Illusion 40
2. Magic Birth 110
3. Magic Life 152
4. Magic Death 188
Conclusion 222
Permissions 231

For Simon