Submission to Academia Letters

Thiago Pinho

Harman and Epistemic Paranoia

In classical Social Theory, from Marx to Durkheim to Bourdieu and Fou-
cault, transcendentalism is not simply an approach, as it is in Philosophy, and
its various Kantian implications, from the most phenomenological to the post-
structuralist ones, but it has always been an inevitable destination, almost as
a condition of possibility for almost everything that have been said and done.
The transcendentalist role with its roots in the modern project is convenient in
Social Theory, since everyone recognizes it as an absolute and even indispens-
able criterion when it comes to the construction of knowledge. If everything
around you escapes the clutches of the arbitrary, if every object is connected
within an obvious and totalizing comprehensive matrix, in an ontotheology,
which can be a system or a structure, you will probably be seen as someone
differentiated, smart, maybe even genius, what we call “critical”. As long as
you have a transcendentalist language at hand, in which empiricism itself dis-
appears amidst a convenient line of reasoning, do not worry because you are
safe, comfortable, and welcomed. And if you have understood that transcen-
dentalism has a roommate called paranoia[1], you will grasp my sarcasm even
more. I call this uncontrolled attitude, where language completely paraphrases
the world in a game of complete simplification of an ontological multiplicity,
epistemic paranoia, where paranoia not only exists as a psychological trait of
scattered individuals, but is also reproduced institutionally as the condition of
critical thinking and of political practice itself. Like any kind of transcenden-
talism that goes beyond the pragmatic boundaries of its function, in paranoia
nothing can be random, strange, or inexplicable, nothing can simply be, but
always needs a name, a connection, a system, and so on, as is to be expected

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

1
from variations of a metaphysics of presence. Objects end up becoming a mere
by-product of a delirium, a great theoretical fiction, a speculative flight that
went too far, without any conditions for a concrete and prudent landing, as
Whitehead would say. The autonomy of things, people and circumstances dis-
appear in the exact measure that language literalizes the world (Harman, 2010).
That is why Freud draws a close link between paranoia and philosophy, at least
the more classical Kantian philosophy: “the delusions of the paranoid have an
[…] internal familiarity with the systems of our philosophers” (Berthold-bond,
1989, p. 285).
However, talking about transcendentalism is a bit vague because it “receives
different forms or names […] eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, (essence, ex-
istence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God […]
and so on” (Derrida, 1978, p. 280), but especially the most famous transcenden-
tal ever created and also the center of this whole essay: the transcendental man.
The human, in Social Theory, is not just a concept, or a word, but a structure
of meaning, a condition of possibility for knowledge itself, an inevitable tran-
scendental structure. If you do not believe me, if what you just read seems so
exaggerated, let’s take a simple example, a quick story about something that
happened to me some years ago. While attending a lecture on the novel The
Trial, at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), the lecturer conducted his
entire talk in a way that was too problematic, although I confess it did not sur-
prise me: he basically said that Kafka was a bourgeois writer and his writings
were nothing more than a reflection of capitalism and its bureaucratic relations.
Now, imagine The Trial as a universe, a huge aesthetic space full of fictional
objects, like tables, people, buildings, chairs, clothes, and so many other things
that walk through its arrangement of words. Imagine that this whole universe
suddenly finds itself trapped within a single chain of interpretation, dominated
by a single signifier, a structure of reasoning that reduces everything around
it. This is the problem with limitless transcendentalism, when its provisional
epistemic arrangement is taken too seriously, turning into an ontological matrix
that stifles the autonomy of everything that exists. Its paranoid tendency lurks
in every imaginable space, waiting for the right moment to take semiotic and
material control of everything it touches. In other words, epistemic paranoia
is basically the instant when epistemological structures, mere comprehensive

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

2
tools directed at the world, lose this pragmatic foundation and monopolize the
contours of reality itself, nothing more than a renewed version of Heideggerian
ontotheology. We can say that epistemic paranoia is the ontologization of episte-
mological structures, at least thought of here at the borders of a Social Theory.
Within a transcendentalist (paranoid) structure, especially human transcenden-
talism, meaning is reduced to a single denominator, a single signifier. Because
of this, there is no excess of objects, or even of the world, nothing that can
surprise or seduce us (Harman,2010).
The fact that this paranoia is not individual, much less clinical, but insti-
tutionalized, makes it difficult to track or even to fight against it. As Freud
showed in his “Civilization and its discontents” (Freud, 2010) about neurosis,
there are both an individual modality, specific to psychologists and their com-
prehensive apparatus, as well as there is also its institutionalized face, proper
to the universe of social theorists, as is typical of Freud in the last years of his
career. The difference between the two levels of neurosis, as with the structure
of paranoia itself, is only in the level of acceptance, nothing more than a sec-
ondary difference. The former is seen as a problem, a deviation, while the latter
is embraced as part of institutions and their cultural by-products, that is, em-
bedded in the language structure as a whole. When we follow up to psychosis,
such as paranoia, we can see something equivalent. In an essay called “Claims
of psycho-analysis to scientific interest” (Holowchak, 2013), Freud compares
the transcendental structure of philosophers to paranoia, although we can also
expand the reasoning to the more empirical lands of Social Theory.
Many share, and wish to share, this paranoid (transcendental) atmosphere as
a kind of surplus enjoyment (Ẑiẑek, 2006), so to speak. In other words, paranoia,
disguised astranscendentalism, and especially transcendental man, is not just an
epistemic element, but a concrete form that materializes in the structure of the
world itself, organizing varied instances, such as universities, courts, schools,
and congresses. Fighting against it is not only fighting concepts and proposi-
tions, it is not simply invading the space of philosophical theories surrounding
the 19th century, but it is also an onslaught against experiences, expectations,
and beliefs. As already stated at the beginning of our essay journey, transcen-
dentalism is useful, convenient, and even fundamental, but its exaggeration,
its “monification”[2] (Savransky, 2021), thus not recognizing its own epistemic

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

3
limits, leads us into a dangerous space on every imaginable level, from the po-
litical to the scientific. Despite all this reductionist atmosphere, perhaps there
is still a way to escape the paranoid cage that has trapped Social Theory for
so many decades, by recognizing theontological merit of other species, objects,
and circumstances, while decentering the limits of the “transcendental man.”
Harman’s posthumanism not only invades epistemology and compromises
its transcendental man, or the ethics associated with it, but also delves into
aesthetics, being aplace where OOO shines most brightly. “This means that
aesthetics becomes the first philosophy” (Harman, 2007, p. 221).

Now humanism, that is, the passionate study of man’s nature, is

essential to all literature and art; and good art and good literature
are humanistic in that they not only investigate man and the true
essence of his nature with passion, but also and simultaneously pas-
sionately defend human integrity against all attacks, degradation
and distortion (Lukács, 1970, p. 69).

So, is that all we need to know? Is a work of art nothing more than a
reflection of human relations and underlying historical conditions? Perhaps
something is missing here, something in art itself as such, what we could call
its mode of existence, its autonomy. Harold Bloom, an American critic and
very much aligned with OOO formalism, presents very well what this missing
element would be when he analyzes Shakespeare’s works, synthesizing at the
same time what Harman, OOO, and the posthumanists are trying to say:
Aesthetics in OOO is not just an important detail, but its fundamental
core. Philosophy follows the path of art as a way of understanding the world,
mainly by not simplifying the contours of what happens, by guaranteeing its
autonomy, its capacity for rupture and surprise. Moreover, aesthetics ceases to
be just a pretext within some well-defined theoretical arrangement or any kind
of transcendental structure and becomes an extension of philosophical doing
itself, which resembles approaches such as those of Badiou and Deleuze.

Works of art […] are misunderstood if we reduce them downward to

their physical components [undermining] or upward to their socio-
political effects [overmining], despite occasional attempts within these

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

4
 disciplines to do just that. There is something about these works
that resists reduction in either direction, opposing the literal para-
phrase of which knowledge always consists (Harman, 2017, p. 12).

Badiou always rescues the curious aroma of an anti-philosophy, whether in

books or lectures, at least when he considers along the way authors who do not
defend truth as knowledge, as a systematic body of concepts, some kind of linear
reasoning. Badiou thinks of Lacan and Nietzsche when he offers this definition,
but no doubt it could also be Graham Harman and his Object-Oriented On-
tology (OOO). The implications here are enormous, especially in the contours
of scientific propositions. According to Harman, philosophy was never directed
to knowledge, but to the love of knowledge, which indicates a certain distant
relation to something that cannot be properly represented. Socrates never de-
fined concepts in his dialogues, even when he encountered sophists like Gorgias
and Protagoras along the way, reinforcing the idea that philosophy was born
not as a form of knowledge, but as something beyond, a more slippery kind
of element. Would an approach be possible in which truth is not knowledge,
not a systematic set of definitions and concepts, but something deeper, though
also undefined? What would be an approach that gave up a simple and naive
criterion of validity, of pure epistemology, in favor of a more aesthetic criterion,
almost as if following the Kafkaesque path or that of directors like Hitchcock?
Contrary to the suspicions of the first Wittgenstein, at the end of his Tractatus,
in one of the most read aphorisms, would it be possible to talk about some-
thing that cannot be named? About what cannot be talked about, should one
really be silent? Is Social Theory possible without its classical transcendental
man and his convenient transcendentals? There are many questions hovering
in the air,although answers are still beginning to appear on the horizon. The
important thing is that new challenges are springing up in Contemporary Social
Theory, new ways not only of organizing ideas, but of understanding the world
itself beyond the arrogance of the transcendental man and his dangerous para-
noia. As Harman once said, “The object-oriented model holds great promise
for many fields of knowledge, but especially for the various disciplines of the
human sciences” (Harman, 2010, p. 138).
[1] Many of the limitations to TAR presented by Harman had already been

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

5
suggested by Latour himself in his AIME (An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence)
in 2011, at which point he reevaluates many of the postings of his earlier works,
in particular “We were never modern” (1991).
[1] As I said at the beginning of this essay, transcendental reasoning is in-
evitable, and even important, within Social Theory or any other arrangement of
relations. What is being criticized is the exaggeration, when this transcenden-
talism goes over the edge, becomes “ontologizing”, monopolizing and suffocating
the possibilities of meaning in the world and even in other human groupings.
[2]”monification of the world: the disqualification and devastation of differ-
ences […]” (Savransky, 2021 p. 6).
[3]The last Durkheim, the more Kantian and author of Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (Durkheim, 1912), changed so much his approach that reminds us
of Wittgenstein’s path and his two great phases. If Wittgenstein oscillated from
a more logical approach to a more pragmatic path in maturity, Durkheim started
as a materialist and ended his career diving into more Kantian approaches,
being, therefore, a profound change of direction.

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

6
References

References
ADORNO, Theodor. Introduction to Sociology. California: Stanford University
Press, 2002.

BERTHOLD-BOND, DANIEL. “FREUD’S CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY.”

Metaphilosophy, vol. 20, no. 3/4, Wiley, 1989, pp. 274-94,

BLOOM, Harold. The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages.
Florida:

Harcourt Brace

BOURDIEU, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press,

1991.

BRYANT, Levi R. Democracy of Objects. London: Open Humanities Press,

2011.

BUTLER, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York:

Routledged, 1999

CASSIRER, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Prince-

ton University Press, 2009.

DELANDA, M., & Harman, G. The Rise of Realism. Cambridge: Polity Press,
2017.

DELANDA, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and

Social Complexity. Fareham: Ashford Colour Press Ltd, 2012.

DERRIDA, Jacques. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences. In:

Derrida,

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

7
Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago, pp. 278-294,
1978.

DURKHEIM, Emile. The rules of the sociological method. New York: Free
Press, 1982. FOUCAULT, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

FREUD, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton

& Company, 2010.

FREUNDO, Julien. The Sociology of Marx Weber. New York: Penguin Ran-
dom House Inc, 1968.

GARFINKEL, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Rio Sela Superior: Pren-

tice Hall, 1967.

GIDDENS, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of

Structure.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

GASSET, Ortega Y. Man and People. New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1963.

HABERMAS, Jürgen. Truth and Justification. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

HARAWAY, Donna. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2008.

HARMAN, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2017.

HARMAN, Graham. “On Vicarious Causation.” In: Robin Mackay (ed.),

Collapse: Research

Philosophical. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007, v.2, p. 187-221.

HARMAN, Graham. The Quadruple Object. United Kingdom: Zero Press,

2010.

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

8
HARMAN, Graham. Weird realism: Lovecraft and philosophy. United King-
dom: Zero Press, 2012.

HOLBRAAD, Martin; PEDERSEN, Morten Axel. The Ontological Turn: An

Exposition

Anthropology. Cambridge: University Press, 2017.

HOLOWCHAK, M. Andrew. Freud on philosophy and philosophers: Filling

in the gaps of the universe with nightcaps and rags of robes. International
Forum of Psychoanalysis, London, 2013 v. 22, n. 3, p.149-160.

INGOLD, Tim. Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description.

Abingdon:

Routledge, 2011.

LATOUR, Bruno. An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the

moderns;

Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2013.

LATOUR, Bruno. To Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Cambridge:

Polity Press. 2017

LATOUR, Bruno. We were never modern. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1991.

LATOUR, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network

Theory.

Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005.

LATOUR, Bruno. The pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1984.

LATOUR, Bruno. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.

Princeton:

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

9
Princeton University Press, 1986.

LATOUR, Bruno; Harman, Graham; Erdélyi, Peter. The Prince and the Wolf:
Latour and Harman on

LSE. United Kingdom: Zero Press, 2011.

LUKÁCS, Georg. Writer and Critic: Other Essays. London: Merlin Press,
1970. MASSUMI,

Brian. What Can Animals Teach Us About Politics? USA: Duke University
Press. 2014.

MARX, Karl & Engels, Friedrich. Communist Manifesto. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, Inc. 1955.

MEILLASSOUX, Quentin. Time Without Becoming. London, Middlesex Uni-

versity, 2013. MEILLASSOUX, Quentin. After Finitude. London: Con-
tinuum, 2008. MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception.
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

MOL, Annemarie; LAW, John. “Regions. Networks and Fluids: Anemia and
Social Topology.”

Social Studies of Science, London, 24 (1994), 641-71.

PINHO, Thiago de Araujo. Decentering a language: Deleuze, Latour and the

Third Copernican Revolution in the Social Sciences, 2018.

RORTY, Richard. Pragmatism: the philosophy of creation and change. Porto

Alegre: Editora

Pocket: 2000, p. 57.

SAVRANSKY, Martin. Around the day in Eighty Worlds. Durham and Lon-
don: 2021.

SPARROW, Tom. The end of phenomenology. Cambridge: University Press,

2014.

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

10
STENGERS, Isabelle. The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000.

MORTON, Timothy. Hyperobjectives: Philosophy and Ecology after the End

of the World.

London:

University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

WHITEHEAD, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay In Cosmology.

New York: The Free Press, 1978.

VANDENDERGUE, Fréderic. What’s decisive about Critical Realism? Abing-

don:

Routledge, 2013.

ẐIẐEK, Slavoj. Enjoy your symptom. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1992.

ẐIẐEK, Slavoj. How to read Lacan? New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2006.

Academia Letters preprint.

©2022 by the author – Open Access – Distributed under CC BY 4.0

11