In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization (...) of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light. (shrink)

There has been a backlash against academic writing in the humanities that can be found in popular culture at least since the 1990s. By considering a selection of arguments from critics of academic writing in the humanities, I then defend a certain kind of ‘obscurity’ or ‘difficulty’ in scholarly prose by developing a concise genealogy of obscure academic writing. This paper develops the notion that an ‘uncommon sense’ should be situated against ‘common sense’ to unveil an assumed ‘world’ or ‘reality’ (...) alongside the structural formations of that which is considered ‘useful’ language. Often, complicated academic language grapples with the intrinsic complexity that is hidden behind ‘simple’ ideas. (shrink)