Graham Harman. Black Holes. 2014

www.egs.edu Graham Harman, Philosopher, talking about the thing-in-itself, black holes, withdrawn objects, Speculative Realism, Heidegger, correlationism, essence, Object Oriented Philosophy, the History of Philosophy, materialism. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2014. Graham Harman.
Graham Harman is Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo, where he has worked since 2000. He is a founding member of the well-known Speculative Realism movement, and the chief exponent (since the late 1990’s) of object-oriented philosophy. In 2013 he was ranked by ArtReview, along with his Speculative Realist colleagues, as one of the 100 most powerful influences in the contemporary art world.
His career as an author being with Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (2002). This path-breaking interpretation offered a re-reading of Heidegger’s famous tool-analysis, showing that this analysis encapsulates the whole of Heidegger’s philosophical advance. The prominent distinction between Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) and Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) gives us an opposition not between praxis and theory, but between objects and relations more generally. Entities do not simply withdraw from human access, as in Immanuel Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself, but withdraw from each other as well.