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  • Ecce Homo Sexual: Eros and Ontology in the Age of incompleteness and entanglement

Golding, Johnny, 2014, Conference or Workshop, Ecce Homo Sexual: Eros and Ontology in the Age of incompleteness and entanglement at Inaugural Professorial Address, Birmingham, UK, 19 Feb 2014.

Abstract or Description:

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: (How one becomes what one is) maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media (in fact, all media) from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger (onto-theo-logic metaphysics) or retrieving it via Hegel (speculative idealism) or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way.

Subjects: Other > Historical and Philosophical studies > V500 Philosophy
Creative Arts and Design > W100 Fine Art
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Date Deposited: 10 Dec 2017 19:15
Last Modified: 09 Nov 2018 15:48
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/3024
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