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The Weird and the Absurd

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This article considers the key differences between the weird (as exemplified in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the absurd (with the art of Salvador Dalí as its clearest mascot). Object-Oriented Ontology's concept of “ontography” is introduced in order to show how it accounts for the weird. Dalí is discussed by way of recent scholarly work by Roger Rothman, Simon Weird, and Anthony Dibbs. The unsettling result of this discussion is that the absurd, as found especially in surrealism, bears an unsettling resemblance to knowledge itself.

Keywords: Anthony Dibbs ; Franz Kafka ; H.P. Lovecraft ; Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) ; ontography ; Roger Rothman ; Salvador Dalí ; Simon Weir ; the absurd ; the weird

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The Weird and the Absurd
Intellect , 142 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781789389067_10
/content/books/9781789389067.c08
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References

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References

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  2. Dalí, Salvador (1942), The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York: Dial Press.
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  3. Dalí, Salvador (1998), ‘The object as revealed in surrealist experiment’, in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (ed. and trans. H. Finkelstein), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 234–44.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Derrida, Jacques (2016), Of Grammatology (trans. G. Chakravorty Spivak), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Dosse, François (1997), History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, Vol. 1 (trans. D. Glassman), Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Fried, Michael (1988), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.159
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     [Google Scholar]
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     [Google Scholar]
  9. Fried, Michael (1990), Manet's Modernism: Or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Greenberg, Clement (1986), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Greenberg, Clement (2003), Late Writings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Harman, Graham (2002), Tool-Being, Chicago: Open Court.
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     [Google Scholar]
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     [Google Scholar]
  16. Harman, Graham (2011), The Quadruple Object, Winchester: Zero Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Harman, Graham (2012), ‘The well-wrought broken hammer: Object-oriented literary criticism’, New Literary History, 43, 183–203.
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  18. Harman, Graham (2012), Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Winchester: Zero Books.
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  23. Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson), New York: Harper & Row.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Heidegger, Martin (1998), ‘What is metaphysics?’ in W. McNeill (ed.), Pathmarks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 82–96.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Heidegger, Martin (2002), ‘The origin of the work of art’, in Off the Beaten Track (trans. J. Young and K. Haynes), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–56.
     [Google Scholar]
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     [Google Scholar]
  27. Hume, David (1978), A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  28. Husserl, Edmund (1970), Logical Investigations (trans. J. N. Findlay), London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. James, M. R. (1987), ‘Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad’, in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Kafka, Franz (2015), The Trial (trans. B. Mitchell), London: Penguin.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry (1949), The Rise of Cubism, New York: Wittenborn, Schulz, Inc.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Kant, Immanuel (1965), Critique of Pure Reason (trans. N. Kemp Smith), New York: St. Martin's Press.160
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  33. Leibniz, G. W. (1989), ‘The principles of philosophy, or, the monadology’, in Philosophical Essays (trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber), Indianapolis: Hackett, pp. 213–25.
     [Google Scholar]
  34. Lovecraft, H. P. (2005), Tales, New York: Library of America.
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  35. McLuhan, Marshall (1994), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge: MIT Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Morton, Timothy (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  37. Graham Priest, Graham (2002), Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  38. Rothman, Roger (2016), ‘Object-oriented surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the poetic autonomy of things’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 57:2, pp. 176–96.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Vaillo, Gonzalo (2021), ‘Superficiality and representation: Adding aesthetics to “Knowledge Without Truth”’, Open Philosophy, n.pag., https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2020-0150.
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  40. Weir, Simon (2020), ‘Art and ontography’, Open Philosophy, 3, pp. 400–12.
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Weir, Simon and Dibbs, Jason Anthony (2019), ‘The ontographic turn: From cubism to the surrealist object’, Open Philosophy, 2, pp. 384–98, https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2020-0116.
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