Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The difficulty with such an apparently simple phrase as ‘objects define us’ is in defining what is simply an object. Jean-Fran?ois Chevrier proposes this useful maxim: ‘Every object is a thing but not every thing is an object’.! Yet if splitting the object from the thing allows the latter to come into view it does not say much about their identities and relationship with one another. The thing in any case is posited as potentially broader than the object but also more essential. For Martin Heidegger perhaps the best known philosopher to have tackled the thing (Ding) it differs from the object in that it is autonomous self-supporting. Taking a jug as an example Heidegger describes the thing as assertive of its independence its presence as well as nearness. Objects on the other hand are everywhere in equal measure neither near nor far. The Heideggerian thing in its self-composure resists appropriation use and representation most notably by science modernity novelty and capitalism. In another register that of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis Ding similarly resists; it stands he says outside of language and consciousness: the Ding ‘is the true secret. (SP)