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Then we have Position (3), which is Non-essentialism minus the meta- physics of presence. At least here you are refraining from saying anything at all, since you hold that what comes out of your mouth will end up being ontotheology. Position (3) is deconstruction, and it has the virtue of refraining from harm. And of course it’s my continuing lineage. But it has the vice of allowing scientism (and other toxic forms of metaphysics) to continue unchecked, by abstaining from saying anything about reality.

Which leaves us with Position (4), which is weird essentialism, or Essentialism minus the metaphysics of presence. Existing means not being constantly present, as in deconstruction, where the process of meaning making is subject to différance and so on. Yet unlike deconstruction, I can say that things do exist, yet they exist insofar as they are shot through with nothingness. In a sense, Position (2) puts the nothingness of modernity in the wrong place—it believes that nothingness means there are no things as such, only processes or discourses or History or Geist and so on. Position (3) puts nothingness at the core of meaning, which is promising, since now at any rate I have decided that I can’t make a definitive pronouncement—I have done a judo move on my modernity tendency to want to achieve perfect geostationary orbit outside of reality, my satellite cameras positioned to capture everything. But Position (4) goes further. Position (4) puts the nothingness at the core of things—toothbrushes, lizards, smears of protein and bubbles.

There are things, says Position (4), but I can’t specify in advance what they are, so they are strange strangers, irreducibly uncanny. Since I can’t put them in advance into a box called life or non-life, for instance, what appears is a kind of spectral playground, a sort of charnel ground possibility space in which all kinds of necessarily partial objects float around. There is no top thing, such as History or God or the subject, and there is no bottom thing, such as matter, and there is no middle thing, such as environment or world. Since there are no top, bottom or middle things, there is no whole of which things are all components. Thus things are necessarily partial. There is another sense in which they are partial, which is that things are fragile—more on this in a moment. Position (4) is the position advocated in object-oriented ontology (OOO), and it is also resonant with some positions within French feminism and ecofeminism.

There are things, but they don’t come with a handy little dotted line that says “Cut Here” to separate the essence from the appearance. Yet the appearance is not the essence. So there is a weird essence that is and is not its appearance. A thing is strangely physical and semiotic at the same time. Thus weird essentialism is fully up to speed with Kant, for whom a raindrop is a raindrop, not a gumdrop (alas), but for whom the raindroppy phenomena I feel as wet droplets on my head, or even raindrop-ideas I can think about, are not the raindrop itself. Yet we have also decided that I am not the referee of realness, the adjudicator who gets allowed into the realness equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To do so would be to fall into Position (2), since for (2) there is an underlying metaphysics of presence, a presence that resides in the adjudicator. In a way, Position (2) is desperately trying to contain the explosion of things in the Anthropocene—fossils, evolution, geological time, biosphere, climate, capital, lifeforms without species or genus. It is trying to contain this explosion by restricting realness to some kind of magical adjudicator, or to some kind of underlying flux. Position (4) is not reactive against modernity.

I cannot assert that there just are things and that these things are truly constantly there, like Position (1). Lubricated by Position (3), I can instead say that there are things, and yet there is no top thing, no reality adjudicator. Another way of saying this is that every entity has what Heidegger calls Dasein, which means that an entity does not occupy time or space, but rather “times” and “spaces” in such a way that it is weirdly strung out, as in the case of a tiny yet visible tuning fork in a state of quantum coherence, both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time. The fork is both here and not here at once—it is not metaphysically present, since it is “breathing,” yet it is not just a processual blob that only looks like a tuning fork to me or to History: it is its own weird little vortex, its own weird little loop, a weirdly essentialist thing whose realness is precisely its trickster-like ability to be here and not here at the very same time.