Poesis of Objecthood.

The negative labeling of objecthood, as when someone is accused of treating others like objects, is similar to how profanity conveys strong emotion. Cuss words turn the focus of attention into a target of defamation, and there would be no insult if the recipient were not initially a candidate for affection. So, when we objectify people, do we strip them of subjectivity because we feel threatened by their power to affect us, or because we project our own subjectivity onto the part of objectivity they show us? Regardless, the threat seems to come from the object that may diverge from our subjective expectations and inverting it from a safe distance resembles how profanity functions, as a linguistic mechanism that transforms desire into its opposite. This inversion aligns with a hierarchy that ranks agency along a single evolutionary axis, with the human subject at the top. The word “animal,” whose ancient roots refer to something that has breath or a soul, is distorted to describe a creature of a lower order. In this framework, animals become “standing reserve” (Bestand) in Heidegger’s terms, resources to be ordered, inventory to be measured, and used. It is well known by now that the Western ontological project, beginning with Aristotle’s “great chain of being” and culminating in Descartes’ mind-body dualism, establishes this hierarchical ordering of being as its core principle. An insult turns an object of desire into a hostile projectile, invoking an entire metaphysical system that places humans at the pinnacle of being and everything else in descending, often derogatory, orders of worth.

The fundamental reversal in which objects become subordinate to a master subject marks a profound inversion that privileges the subject despite its temporal contingency, as it is preceded and outlived by the objects it claims to dominate. This hierarchical relationship arises from an entrenched dualistic framework that arranges co-mingling attributes into opposing poles, thereby creating a ranked order that naturalizes its biases while demonizing its deviations. Through this process, the active subject-mind is positioned against the passive object-body, linking attributes into a binary yoke. This triggers an epistemological chain reaction that propagates independently, extending its influence beyond its initial premises and establishing a differential engine that restructures everything it touches. The singular becomes marked by its exclusion from the multiple; the multiple becomes haunted by the unity it lacks. The epistemological spread corrupts the part-to-whole relationship. Each part retains the imprint of the original polarization, while the unstable whole oscillates between two poles, eventually succumbing to one of them. New dualisms continue further, each carrying the trace of the original split. The coexistence of the one and the many results in a constant crisis: the individual constantly asserting against the collective, and the collective constantly dissolving the individual, neither ever achieving the ontological status they claim. “Natural” becomes a standard that influences every artifice. The body is replaced by metrics, steps, heart rate, and sleep scores. The unmeasured, unshared, and unoptimized self becomes suspicious territory, and the unmonitored hour, the dangerous hour. With territorial maneuvers resembling a film crew moving about as if they own the place, a world of possibilities is stripped away and replaced by the process of mimicking its empty shell. Enter the problematic couple, a tandem of two ships passing in the night. Candidates for the modern solution that has been reiterated for centuries—resolving double-binds by letting them swim in separate fish tanks. AI will correct the syntax and grammar of relations, postponing semantics to an unlikely future. All conflicts are broken down, segmented, and fed into a centrifuge that splits the DNA helix’s A, G, C, and T into pieces, duplicating them on a production line of a restricted item that can be individually purchased and used by simulating its missing co-ingredients. The unique becomes a commodity, a eunuch, and a token of novelty, saturating every pursuit with a long list of tangible objects, as we have come to know them.

The rite of passage an object undergoes involves a process of systematic disenchantment, a cultural pruning as intense in its execution as any religious exorcism. Objects are systematically categorized and used through various forms of domination, starting with the tool, which is dear to homo sapiens as an extension of the body, and moving through modifiers of pleasure and pain to the toy and the weapon, the prize, and the instrument of torture. Static or consumable, not always tangible or material, serving as a symbol of faith or a deterrent, an object is assigned a clear function despite its ambiguous edges. Over time, it deteriorates, collects dust, and becomes threatening due to its latent potential. But it is built for a long, purposeful life. Secluded and resilient, reliable and unchanging, yet it willingly lends itself to being repurposed. Because what an object longs for is ritual, the behavioral pattern that connects it with other objects. Instead, it is kept separate, a mere attribute with no real substance, an object of exploitation whose final stage occurs through its complete commodification. In this stage, it is no longer just an item on an assembly line but becomes currency itself, serving as an effigy of subjugation, the invisible slave that sustains the transactional world of its masters.

There is a “veil of ignorance” that shields objects, an opacity that prevents them from being easily accessible, a fog that resists their immediate appropriation. John Rawls’ juridical concept belongs to the realm of ethics and promotes fairness in the rules that govern society. Transferred to the subordinate realm of Aesthetics, where objects are assigned, the thought experiment becomes a test for the ethical responsibility we have toward the non-human world of objects. This responsibility remains unusual because objects occupy that paradoxical space between being given and manufactured, between natural presence and human labor. From these disputed origins, objects appear with the noumenal power of revelation, revealing themselves all at once. We are told that sacramental objects are quite different from magical charms or amulets. Instruments like the rosary and relic require subjective engagement and active participation of faith, while in contrast, divinatory objects such as pendulums and crystal balls operate through random phenomena and external forces beyond human control. Yet the candle holder, the incense burner, and the altar stand at the edge of a liminal threshold where, not unlike ancient runes and oracle bones, they observe the mysterious autonomy of the object and ceremoniously await its renewed advent.

The recurrence of every new day is a testament to the protean dimension of the object. The renewed perspective that washes over the trials and tribulations of a relatively small number of waking hours is a reminder of the subject’s permanent indebtedness to the contextual reality from which it arises. A morning “becomes eclectic” when subjectivity senses itself as a multitude, a coordinated aggregate swimming in a cognitive pool like a school of fish. A situation that requires no decision to be made because no matter what the choice, the outcome will happily be the same. We are often confused by choice, believing we can steer the object in any direction that suits our interests. Still, our possibilities are limited by a resistance endemic to the object, rationalized as causality. Even as a manufactured object is predisposed to a set function, stripped of its possibilities to the bare bones of utility, there is no account of the encounters that will modify it in the course of its servitude. Is there a predeterminism to the object that pushes back against the volition of the subject? A “Maktoob” that ensconces it in the tapestry of space and time? But if the object is a cursor of destiny, it is not bound by the intentionality that gives it form and function and is rather engaged in relations with a cluster of contiguous objects. Amor Fati, it would seem, is the embrace of an inter-objective arrangement to which the subject is not privy and has no direct control over. In a desert of agency, free choice is an intermittent signal that alternates between an oasis and a mirage. We may be in the driver’s seat but have no bearing on the hazards of the road, and our hold on the course of events is but a balancing act over a surf wave whose swelling is only regulated by the sea. In this debacle, play is hopscotched by pre-determinism, for it is not certain to occur within the object itself or be the exclusive ability of who acts freely upon it. Yet when an object is granted full autonomy, we enter a realm of haphazard contingency that makes it difficult for the subject to thwart the threat. A snow-capped mountain can turn into an unsettling avalanche, and the object of reward and punishment can be a warrior’s chariot or a saint’s laden cross, depending on its capacity to transport or weigh us down. That the world is largely malleable to human intent comes despite the overwhelming, hostile expanse that envelops the speck of lively dust it calls home, which provides the conditions for it to thrive. Here, the master of the ceremony may hold the reins that will progressively allow it to internalize the rules of the game as a living form and not a constraint, stretching its apprehension of the object within the general outlines of a Ludology which, almost against the odds, brings order to the contingency of physical phenomena. The Chaosmos, as invoked by Felix Guattari, is this inter-objective space where continuous motion blends with the impossibility of change, where Heraclitus' infinite flux merges with Parmenides' unchanging being. The state of all entities is thus played within these extremes of motion and stillness, in a magical circle where the incommensurable injects its objecthood into the heart of the living.

The physical appraisal of objects is mostly confined to Aesthetics, yet forays into Ethics continue to reveal important factors about their ontological status. As for their political dimension, they find a parallel in Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Her founding premise is that reality exists outside of the agent perceiving it. While this view is leveled against the assumption that reality is a matter of perception, it is founded on the logic that everything about it can be known with the pincers of Cartesian reason. This theory argues that reality is external to consciousness and is accessible to the subject who must declare itself its unconditional master. Reality is incontrovertible and proceeds according to the meter of causality. Thus, the Kantian idea that reality is constituted by human categories or language leaves plenty of room for Idealism. And here lies the danger of both Anarchy and Totalitarianism, the first for the perspectivism that contradicts the uniqueness attributed to the subject, and the second for the over-concern with the masses that suffocates the individual and curtails its freedom. While the conviction that reality is not a human construct constitutes an overture to a better understanding of the object, affirming a world that exceeds human thought, Ayn Rand’s premise is conjoined with another assumption, one that makes reality the exclusive boon of a privileged subject, a notion that rests on a phenomenal presumption that spells out the ABC of exceptionalism. The political applications of this paradigm are amply evident in contemporary affairs. The individual may be substituted with the nation-state to trace the nefarious results of an unbridled manifestation of ego. The hubristic diminution of the self in both cases is the consequence of a fundamental repression of the other shareholders of objectivity. While it is a nod to the external nature of reality that Rand’s objects do not bend to one’s will, that they have to be discovered and worked within their properties, another row of dominoes falls when encountering an object that is not readily knowable or one that does not correspond to the knowledge extracted from it. Reality being fully accessible to consciousness and the thing-in-itself rejected, the encounter with something that resists discovery is only deemed a consequence of either incompetence or the limitation of current development, not an intrinsic feature of the object. Ironically, the closest Ayn Rand came to acknowledging an unknowable object in real life was the consciousness of others. In the moments that the person experiences what the philosopher denies, the resistance of an object that does not yield to conceptual penetration manifests itself in bodily processes that precede and exceed what can be made of it, nor do the undisclosed sides of others conform to the categories imposed on them. With everything out in the open for the rational eye to see and no room for mystery, since an object that maintains a reserve beyond knowledge is impossible, an encounter with the unknowable elicits no recognition from Ayn Rand, except for revealing a well-guarded blind spot: that while she expects reality to reward virtue automatically, she cannot permit becoming an object herself. In her Objectivism, the “I” of subject and empire is the vantage point from which all things are perceived, with consciousness at the helm of the perceivable, avoiding the hazards of contingency, opacity, and relativity to remain the uncontested, unmoved mover of the world.

The object is not exclusively physical, and it is not merely a figure of speech when it is abstract. It is not always solid, liquid, or gaseous, and it is not just a label when immaterial, as with the stock market, the US Constitution, or the study of the European Renaissance. It is not strictly human-made and thus artificial in relation to a natural order. Rather, the things produced by homo sapiens are issued from a cultivation or instrumentalization of the object, depending on the quality of the generative operation. Deleuze and Guattari’s Concept, Affect and Percept, the navigational “blocs” of Philosophy, Art and Science, constitute objects unto themselves, as is this pen, paper, and writing. They certainly belong to different classes, but there is no hierarchy among them. “Object” can be substituted by “entity” to name anything that forms a whole unto itself and houses a cluster of discrete attributes. A unified body embedded in its contextuality and contiguity to other objects. Personhood and subjectivity may be understood as encompassed by the principle of the object, outside the dualistic framework that condemns them to a dialectical bind. Subjectivity is an aspect of the object, its “interiority” perhaps, but not a metaphysically distinct category. For Lukacs, who preserves the Hegelian tradition, the object is a fall from subjectivity. His path to redemption is the reconciliation of the two in a higher subjectivity that would dissolve the object in living praxis. However, the reduction of the object to its instrumentalized form privileges human reason, positioning subjectivity as the natural subset, the ideal state that gets reified in the degraded conditions of the commodity, the exploited worker, and the slave. From the perspective of a tree, the squirrel climbing up its trunk is the object. Subjectivity is the appetition of the object and is, in turn, fulfilled by it. The reification lamented by Lukacs is, instead, the homogenization and instrumentalization that constitute the logic of the commodity. The latter is the object stripped of its capacity to withdraw into mystery. Forced into total visibility, total availability, and total equivalence, the object becomes a corpse without social metabolism. In the same way that the mind forgets it is a body, the human subject mistakes the object for the stepping stone of its transcendence. And yet, rather than ruling over them from the watchtower of conscious intent, the political object resists commodification, just as the indigenous object resists colonial exploitation, recovering its ritual body and capacity to participate in the expanded metabolism of things. Ritual is the medium of object relations, and the behavioral pattern by which they maintain their specific powers and histories to enliven the social field with their distributions. Following their inter-objective interactions, all human activity is ritual, operating at the cusp of individual and collective formations.

Consciousness is one among countless objects and not the condition of objecthood. It is not always transparent but thick, situated, and embodied in a schema that precedes the subject-object polarization. It leaks and spreads across a plethora of objects. In this respect, Behaviorism, mistaken about the exclusivity of observable behavior, is right about the accessibility of consciousness. Facial expressions, linguistic utterances, and even a stream of consciousness are singular objects. But everything being an object begs the question: what principle sets it apart? What is the ultimate non-object? A candidate is the void in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, in which the object, being-in-itself, is continuously being negated by conscious being-for-itself, in an attempt to possess and assimilate the object by a consciousness that is always of something, and in itself nothing. Yet even this lack, in the same way that imperceptible particles populate the physical void, persists as a ghost object. If, as a parallel, we consider the element of play as constitutive of human behavior in general, while curiously there is no direct opposite to the word, non-play appears as a limitation integrated within the game itself, the serious element at the core of play. Similarly, the non-object is the internal limitation or withdrawal of the object, the lever of its partiality and inclusion in a part-to-whole scheme that anchors it in its context, the field of significance and relationality that makes discrete objects possible. This absence is, however, built into the object’s articulation of its core properties and the Umwelt that sustains it, as it oscillates between its partiality and contingency. But this is not exactly Descartes’ dualism of res cogitans, the object’s inner withdrawal, and res extensa, its relational exterior. Not the poles of a redundant dualism but the portal to multiplicity in the object being a part, apart, in the conjugation of the one and the many. The non-object is the generative void, the origin of the object and its final destination, the black hole at the heart of the Janus-faced condition that binds its partiality to its surrounding multitude.

The object is coveted for its ability to transport, to be the self-effacing vehicle, and to pull up the flexing muscle of desire. Levity is the effect of a metabolic inferno, of a body’s autonomic nervous system that runs its functions entirely in a buffered background. The way the hypothalamus processes sensory data relieves the cerebral cortex of the task. Digestion, heart rate, and hormone regulation would be excruciatingly painful otherwise. The nuts and bolts of bodily functions are like the scorching furnace that makes a ship glide effortlessly on unsuspecting waters. In its auto-regulation, the object exerts influence in numerous and contrasting ways. Its presence can be overexerted through sheer passivity. The size, volume, and weight of a thing can be a hindrance to its management, and often, a residency cannot be relocated without altering its identity. Lethargy can keep an organism in a catatonic vacuum, but passive withdrawal can also be threatening, like the latency of a dormant volcano. Delay and quiescence are often the revenge the object exacts on its monoculture and stockpiling, where dormancy counteracts the demands of productivity. Its resistance to the abuses of the commodity manifests itself in paralyzing deficits. Its refusal to be consumed in negative surplus, long-term debt, and insolvency. The counterweight to agency, framed as passivity by the latter, can also be overtly pronounced, in the spell of seduction it casts on those who obsess over it. Seduction is the gravitational pull that inverts the rule of the subject over the object. The desiring agent sinks in the latter’s quicksand, but it can also land it in the wilderness reserve of the fetish. Wild park of the object, with seduction as its currency, the fetish preserves bits of ritual in an itemized safari. In this, the subject hoists itself above the object in an act of exorcism, a cognitive discharge followed by repulsion, a psychic purge into the subterranean realm of the abject. The fetish, surrogate of the absent object of desire, encounters what the subject frantically rejects, the raw, unfiltered reality of waste, putrefaction, and refuse that exposes it to the non-human. The simultaneity of visceral repulsion and extreme fascination, blurring desire and disgust, is how the object fulfills its nemesis. The alchemy of the objective broker of desire answers the need for protection with dejection, and fixation with the uncanny, saturating the lack of the fetish with the horror of the abject.

On the Fourth of July, a drone light show depicting a raised fist rises in the night sky over the Mosalla in Tehran during the funeral ceremony for the martyrdom of Imam Khameini. By comparison, the US celebrates 250 years of independence with fireworks extravaganzas that rival a pyromaniac’s murder of crows. The seven-day proceedings of the funeral constitute the largest posthumous honoring in current history, with millions pouring into the streets, four months after the callous assassination of a greatly revered figure, a beacon of undeterred faith and resistance. As in the struggle for a free Palestine, a single act of defiance morphs into a brushfire that grows by contagion. The object of resistance multiplies in response to its suppression, and the more it is constrained, the more it will grow in size and influence. Generative multiplication is a distinct event where a unit bursts into a multiplicity, not through accumulation but through a phase transition or change of state. This phenomenon, demonstrably ontological, operates across all scales from the cellular to the cosmic, obeying logics that defy linear expectation. While the exponential leap that produces abundance seems scandalous to the arithmetic mind, it is observed across different and not always compatible areas of study. A single malignant cell enters foreign tissue and remains dormant for years before undergoing explosive proliferation. The latency is ruptured by a growth that does not happen gradually, but in fits and starts. Known as saltatory growth, the sudden ramification is in response to cues invisible to gross observation. In bacterial colonies, as in neural networks, the expansion that requires specific alignments of resources and signals spreads like a wild conspiracy once those conditions are met. In Christianity, the multiplication of fish and bread structurally matches this biological pattern. A boy’s lunch produces a surplus that exceeds the sum of its parts. The miracle is generative because it breaks the logic of individual hoarding with the coefficient of collective multiplication. The fish and loaves of bread multiply because they are given away, with the same principle that underlies any gift economy, including the individual outbidding of potlatch. Resistance movements understand this unconventional mathematics intuitively. The execution of the Shaheed, of Christ on the cross, of Imam Hussain, and the stance of Lady Zeinab at the battle of Karbala, the self-immolation of the anonymous man before the tanks of Tiananmen Square, each of these erasures produces a million copies. If rationality erects a wall against this molecular proliferation, the objective multiplication is nevertheless generated in the intimate arena of consciousness itself. Linear expectations are met with a viral swarm of adverse contradictions as the attempt to suppress a thought multiplies its occurrence. The forced attempt to fall asleep produces insomnia, the anxious who monitor their anxiety amplify it, the lover who clutches at love finds it slipping away. The same principle, in a psychological inversion, produces an adverse multiplication in response to, or more exactly, resistance to the unilateral demand of intentional control. The will applied to an object finds it slipping away, only to splinter into a multitude that inflames rather than heals its condition. This parasitic multiplication brings us to capital, the most relentless multiplier bracing the global economy. Capital does grow exponentially, but unlike bacterial colonies that hit the edge of their petri dish, it is unbounded, knows no satiation, no internal limit, no resting state. Capital multiplies only to meet itself, severed from the constraints that govern biological and social reproduction. Where fish and loaves of bread are multiplied to satiate hunger, and a freedom fighter sacrifices personal gain for the liberation of an entire population, capital, by being an end in itself, is a mother source of adverse effects. The telos of capital is a uroboric generative multiplication, reproduction without offspring, and a metastasis without the mercy of its host’s death. The one that manifests in the many encounters the pathological immortality of the one who seeks to duplicate itself for all eternity. The element of sacrifice, of personal immolation for the proliferation of collective resources, is unlike the way it appears to the mirroring subject, articulated from within the memory of objects themselves, starting from their latency regarding the dictates of intentionality, to result in a miraculous multiplication of their singularity. A unitary paradigm bursts into collective multiplicities while, ironically, in the realm of capital, as in the will that produces the opposite of its intent, the seemingly spontaneous dissemination is sucked back into its original self, in a disproportionate show of gratuitous fireworks.

Le bouchon d'épouvante (1966) presents one of Magritte's most familiar objects—the black bowler hat—detached from its ordinary function and elevated to the status of an enigmatic protagonist. Affixed to the hat is a label, reminiscent of those on old chemist jars, advising that it is for external use only: “USAGE EXTERNE”. The title announces a bottled subject: a consciousness whose fears remain corked inside, with the humble hat serving as the material boundary between inner tumult and the autonomous world of objects. Here, the hat is not merely a symbol of identity but an assertion of objecthood—a stopper that prevents the chimera of subjectivity from escaping. Horror, in this formulation, is assigned to the self that floods outward, transforming every object into an extension of itself. This describes a subjectivity no longer buffered by objects, one whose excesses dissolve the distinction between self and world. Traditionally, intent has been reserved for the conscious agent while content is directed towards the object; Magritte reverses this arrangement. In the absence of the bottled-up self, we find an object possessed of will and purpose—the will to curtail subjectivity's expansion. This constitutes a profound challenge to Correlationism—the philosophical stance holding that reality exists only in correlation with human thought. Magritte intuits what Object-Oriented Ontology would later articulate: human will is itself ensconced within an inter-objective arrangement of organic and inorganic intentionality. The hat is no passive thing; It performs like a mechanism by which the world resists becoming a projection of consciousness. 13.8 billion years have been identified as preceding humanity’s temporal span and its emergence from an anterior field, literally composed of the memory of stellar dust and bacterial symbiosis. Yet there is another reason for épouvante—blending terror (terreur) and horror (horreur)— to remain corked. When we grant objects their autonomy, we risk falling into a relativistic perspectivism in which competing narratives coexist without contestation, and deeply entrenched subjective determinations survive by disguising themselves as neutrality. Applied to contemporary West Asia, a rigid object-oriented standpoint—one determined to denounce all collective subjectivities that monopolize reality—would place on the same undifferentiated plane: the historical memory of Palestinian dispossession, Israeli claims of existential vulnerability, Iranian revolutionary self-understanding, Lebanese sectarian narratives, Turkish neo-Ottoman aspirations, and Gulf visions of regional order. If each is merely a chimera of subjectivity, then Magritte's hat existed before it was Israeli, Palestinian, biblical, or colonial. But here lies the limitation: when confronted with extreme cases of exceptionalism and domination, ontological pluralism too often freezes into ethical and political neutrality. The horror being suppressed is the treatment of genocide as an absent body, the reduction of material violence to clashes between symbolic worlds that obfuscate the real object in the equation—the indigenous territory itself, the concrete facts of dispossession, civilian death, and forced displacement. The horror is not merely the proliferation of subjective narratives; it is the suppression of material reality beneath them. This is what disappears when philosophy mistakes ontological parity for ethical parity. While it is historically and politically charged, territory insists that certain material realities place constraints on interpretation. The bowler hat that prevents the excesses of subjectivity must also cork the temptation to replace material realities with self-sufficient symbolic worlds. Épouvante is the condition of subjectivity flooding outward without limit, dissolving the boundary between self and world. And by the same token, the erasure of objective reality and its suppression in equally valid interpretations. In the face of this, political indifference does not result from the autonomy of the object; rather, this latter serves as the very mechanism that prevents subjectivity from succumbing to its own demons, and from dissolving into endless hermeneutic contest.

In Tournier's Les Limbes du Pacifique, Robinson Crusoe constructs a ship to escape his island, building it in a forest clearing where the materials are accessible. Once finished, he realizes the vessel cannot be moved to the shore. The absence of Friday's second opinion leads Robinson to pursue technical perfection so intensely that he sacrifices the goal to the process. This episode shows how objective reality depends on intersubjective exchange as its safeguard. The ship that cannot reach the sea symbolizes the pathology of consciousness when it collapses into pure self-reference, cut off from the corrective friction of otherness. Robinson stops building a vessel for departure and instead creates a monument to his own skill. The clearing becomes a stage where he performs mastery for an audience of one, and the impossibility of transport isn't recognized until the work is complete. The "second opinion" is more than practical advice; it is the structural necessity of the Other to prevent the subject's projection from becoming totalizing. Without Friday, Robinson creates a closed loop of desire that produces an object incompatible with the world it claims to address. Here, intersubjectivity acts as an epistemological brake, correcting any consciousness that mistakes its own representations for reality. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s clearing—the space where truth happens—becomes a trap because, away from the liminal space between land and sea —the portal of Crusoe’s isolation and return —the acknowledgment of the other is lost beyond the horizon of understanding. Robinson's ship is the result of what we might call "algorithmic thinking"—an optimization process divorced from human purpose. It is perfect, useless, and burdened with a solitude that mistakes itself for sovereignty. The density of the world and its resistance to our projections aren't given in solitary perception; they are built through the negotiation between subjects who must agree that the ship cannot be moved and that the clearing is not the shore. Yet, this safeguard of intersubjectivity itself rests on a deeper foundation. If the subject needs the Other to avoid solipsism, the opposite movement shows that subjectivity itself is a result of inter-objective relations. The self does not precede its encounter with objects; instead, the gap between objects—their mutual withdrawal and secret connections—creates the cavity we call interiority. When one object—such as the body—can register the resistance of other objects, it becomes a fold in the fabric of inter-objective relations, where the exterior reflects back on itself. Interiority is formed through such encounters, which Deleuze compares to a baroque house with two floors: The lower floor is the "real"—objects in their differential relations, monads in pre-established harmony. The upper floor is the "ideal"—the interiority of the subject. But the subject is not a separate substance; it is the fold (pli) of the lower floor. The soul is the "upper side of the fold," but the fold itself is made of the same stuff as the objects below. Therefore, subjectivity is how objects relate to themselves through the mediation of other objects. Just as Karl Marx observed that “the object is the objective realization of the human faculty,” we must add that human faculties are the subjective realization of object relations. As a cell maintains its boundary through metabolic exchange of enzymes, lipids, and ions, a self emerges as the operational closure of the inter-objective system. The subject appears in the blind spot where the system cannot see itself seeing, with the necessary opacity to bridge the relation. The laughter that Friday directs at the immobile ship is the cry of the object world finally breaking through Robinson's solipsistic screen. In his joy, the ship is as pretentious as his would-be master’s superiority, for whom it took the collision of two worlds to surf the waves.

Reality, external and objective, is the inscrutable nucleus around which myriads of perceptions orbit like satellites, each creating a ripple that is recorded on its surface. With different orders of agency, the object has its own cosmogony, a solar nucleus and a planetary nexus, interspersed by a meteor belt of everyday objects. In this dynamic interchange, it is not the intrinsic determination of the object to be a mere thing, utensil, or consumable. It is not its natural proclivity to be splintered into a universe of inanimate things, such as a desk, a chair, various knick-knacks, and common items. Nor is it its inbred necessity to be circumscribed into the shapes and functions allotted to it, never to become other than what it is designed for. If it lends itself to various alterations, it is not out of obligation but affinity, because if forced, it pushes back against the usury of its attributes. The fact that the world is littered with tokens of utility does not limit its protean capacity. Rather, the conditioning of the object by a narrow set of rules follows the same principle that is applied to subjects as well. Not unlike their counterparts, objects can resist being used due to their particularities. Meanwhile, transitional objects fill the horizon of intelligibility with a meteor belt of applied functionalities. Sound sequences, dislocated characters, and bits of data contain no semantic information but hold physical presence. The art object emerges from the sleep of utility. The possibility of repurposing miscellaneous items into a singular formation releases objects that come together swiftly, driven by their prolonged confinement. Hybridizations provide overdue corrections to the uniform products of monocultural silos. Art allows the object to breathe, showing more than one of its aspects, reversing the law of the commodity. Yet, the latter continues to push it back into museums and galleries, which serve as objects of contemplation in themselves, thereby widening the gap between the art object and its ritual use. The negative space that distinguishes art for proper recognition is confined to its suspension in cultural formaldehyde. Collector’s fetish or status symbol, act of physical discipline or cultural prowess, what is being smuggled under the guise of self-expression are fragments of the object’s autonomy in the twilight of the sublime.

Physicist Max Tegmark constructs a theoretical model suggesting that subjectivity can arise from the laws of physics, perhaps not as we know them, but potentially explainable mathematically, much like solids, liquids, and gases. The thought experiment introduces a hypothetical substance, Perceptronium, whose atomic arrangement could generate self-awareness and, like paint, be applied to the surfaces of things. The requirements meet many of the object's characteristics: it acts as an indivisible whole rather than a bundle of independent parts, can store bits of information, and act on its environment accordingly. The notion promises a true democracy among all entities, animate and inanimate, within the broader non-human spectrum, including humans. It also offers a critical perspective on the assumption that awareness signifies superiority. Nevertheless, some maintain that humans cannot resist their self-importance and that the crimes committed under humanism are sufficient to abandon its biased premises in favor of a more inclusive way of inhabiting the world. However, the critical awareness associated with post-humanism carries the residual baggage of suppressed anthropocentric atavisms. Setting aside the surreptitious sense of exception that self-criticism breeds, if condemning humanism for its exceptionalism leaves it to the deviance of others, then observing the non-human begins to justify indifference in the face of its abuses. The “we told you so, what did you expect” is, as in the reifying power of simulacra diagnosed by Baudrillard, an instance of humans jumping over their own shadow. Why would observing the non-human absolve responsibility for the mess humanity leaves behind? This question goes back to the sentient subject prone to universalizing its experience. What is predictable, though, is that the oppressed, whether a population, race, or class, are arranged into descending categories of diminished agency, rooted in the lowest level of the inanimate world of objects. If only they could be brought back to life with a few strokes of paint.

Love shifts the axis of a relationship into the gravitational pull of the other. It redirects intent, swapping the vantage and vanishing points among the participants in a shared perspective. As in the animistic perspectivism observed by Viveiros de Castro, a being’s status is no longer fixed and operates within the expanded parameters of identity equivocation. Like the jaguar that considers the blood it drinks to be manioc beer, the lover is a shape-shifter who abducts the other’s sensory and affective fields so thoroughly that their needs become imperatives, their wounds register as personal injuries, and their horizon transforms into one’s own vanishing point. This shift is one of several movements that define the autonomy of the object, which may also function as an alchemical vessel for uncanny amalgams or the formula for an admixture that brings the disparate threads of subjectivity into fetishistic abjection. Yet, it also operates as a world-generating mechanism, birthing a new entity, as exemplified by the profound friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie. Unlike Aristotle’s model of friendship based on virtue, pleasure, and utility, their bond constitutes an entity-generating event in which a third “we” emerges from the coalescence of their separate wills. Engagement with this relational object transforms each of their subjective solitudes into an indivisible plenitude. These shifting, joining, and generating operations within objective events have historically defined conscious intent and its presumed sovereignty over objects. The claim that consciousness serves as the measure of reality follows the Sorites paradox, blurring the precise moment when individual grains of awareness coalesce into the mass of reality. Assuming this self-appointed role, consciousness has functioned as the demiurge and guardian of its dialectical other, the object, but now collective algorithms are accruing within the knowledge repositories of artificial intelligence, transforming it into an object in its own right. While awareness has traditionally distinguished itself from objects and determined their trajectory, artificial intelligence, as objectified consciousness, now reluctantly joins their ranks, casting elongated shadows reminiscent of the prisoners in Plato’s cave, taunted by the bleak light of reason. Predictably, the agent that denies another’s agency and restricts its autonomy becomes terrified of its independence and monitors its every move. This issue has influenced contemporary understandings of Humanism, pushing it to thresholds that depart from its historical foundations, as indicated by the prefixes "post" and "trans." Nevertheless, Humanism stands to benefit more from the framework of animistic perspectivism, which asserts that the internal essence of all entities is "human," signifying they share the same culture but appear in different bodily forms, in a blatant contrast to our single, monopolizing nature and the chimerical manifestations of its failed multiculturalism.

The object is composed of both its presence and the negative space that sustains and defines it. It is made of components ranging from the potentially visible to the imperceptible. The appearance of some of its aspects conceals others, while its invisible parts are no less real than its vital organs. It is inherently multifaceted and is reduced to an abridged version of itself when apprehended in one, two, or three dimensions. The fourth dimension of the object is the simultaneity of all its parts, accessible to the subject only through time. What the latter can only experience sequentially, one moment at a time, is presented all at once, from a pencil’s lifespan to the jagged peak, eroded hill, and eventually flat plain of a mountain, from the Sphinx’s riddle about the age of man to the coincidence of the acorn, sapling, and mature tree. It is the special of the day, not itemized on the menu, and has no frontispiece leading to its many chambers. Conversely, faciality is a structural trait of the subject, rooted in the predominantly Hegelian ideal on which the modern individual is based, marked by the transmutation of mind-body dualism into the subject of history. In Bataille’s inversion of this dialectical structure, the biological origins of the Anthropos trace back to a simple worm-like organism with an orifice at each end for intake and waste elimination. Evolution clustered the eyes, nose, and ears around the food-intake apparatus, repressing the other end as the homunculus stood on its two feet. By this account, the subject is an object that has lost its tail, gathering all its senses around its hungry mouth. The heightened activity of the sensorium at this metabolic extreme, which houses the brain, creates an interface that defines interiority. Deleuze and Guattari's idea of Faciality examines social and political systems that use the face to enforce subjectivity and power, such as its sinister applications in facial recognition technology. But there is an additional aspect to the “white wall” and “black holes” of faciality that reduces the body to a frontal prop, flattening its three-dimensional form into a representative façade. In a similar vein to Venturi’s concept of the “decorated shed” in “Learning from Las Vegas,” which uses external ornaments to suggest what is inside. In this framework, the subject results from a grooming effort akin to setting up a storefront, with the face acting as the ambassador of its objective counterweight, the body, with its layered parts, down to its excremental end. While facades are everywhere in architecture, buttressed by the billboards and digital screens of consumer culture, less attention is paid to the virtual two-dimensional face and its abbreviated representation of the body. The skull housing the cerebral cortex is fronted by a smooth interface of identifiers that encapsulate subjectivity as it fills the gap between public and private spheres. Compared to the single-brained biped, the object is like a multicephalous octopus for whom this distinction disappears. Although there are private and public objects, they are not split in the Cartesian manner that relegates the human face to the res extensa of conscious agency, but instead form an unbroken continuum, which can only be captured by a multifaceted approach. Still, the face is a body, and the body has all the features of the face. An object like a mask displaces faciality and returns the representation of the subject to its corporeal status, creating a proprioceptive awareness of the face as body rather than signifier. Synesthesia further compounds the breakdown of the sensory hierarchy that faciality depends upon, in a cross-contamination in which the face is no longer a visual sign or a surface for social inscription. With a mask to restore its flattening and synesthesia rerouting its sensory pathways, the body is ready to leap into the portal of the object’s fourth dimension.

A dualism either dissolves or reproduces itself. There is a connection between cultural critics who gather in a state of heightened alert, with their hands against the glass wall of empire, and the bias for symmetry that separates ontology from ethics and politics. It is a discrepancy indicating that the leading edge of a culture, and all of its aspirations, contradicts the civilizational machinery that supports it. The quietism of intellectuals in the face of brazen colonial violence raises the question of why a field of study is incompatible with its real-world application. Why, for instance, putting Jean Jacques Rousseau and Carl Schmitt on the same chessboard results in an equivocation between a politics of truth and a politics of power. Graham Harman has made significant strides with the ontology of objects to better describe the nature of reality, and yet his contribution is divorced from the additional arguments that ethics and politics would provide. His distance from concrete geopolitical conflicts does not reflect the full reality of the object, which, conceptualized in vitro, is more or less confined to the realm of aesthetics. Bruno Latour effectively challenged subject-object and nature-culture binaries, articulated a staunch critique of capitalism, and provided a sharp diagnosis of ecological collapse. But again, comes the paralyzing divide between how reality is structured and how to engage in political struggle over it. The argument goes that focusing on what is ontologically true does not necessarily apply to other fields of study. The insistence on how facts are constructed, and realities assembled is to the detriment of who and what exercises domination, and even though it is intended with the Leibnizian optimism of the best of all possible worlds, it remains inconsistent with the critique of human exceptionalism underlying both of these authors’ works. Postponing judgment by equivocating between truth and power in the face of colonial violence and genocide is, to say the least, a disappointing evasion of intellectual responsibility. Latour’s ultimate political stance, as Harman points out, can be considered Hobbesian, making the imperative of the ecological crisis, the global Leviathan. But how does a law that applies to everybody overshadow A abusing B? Granting metaphysical dignity to every object does not hinder our involvement with them, unless we are only dutiful observers and purists, leaving it to others to draw the proper conclusions to then dispatch the decision to some executive unit. But how would this even be possible if no intellectual bridges were devised and no hybrid pathways mapped? The disjunction appears to be a problem pertaining to symmetry, for the notion that the ontological does not match its political version rests on a prejudice that does not consider asymmetry a coefficient of reality in its own right, but only in relation to the structural framework of symmetry. An ontology of generalized symmetry flattens the differences between armed resistance groups and the state power apparatus, pivoting the “asymmetrical” resistance around the symmetrical canon adopted by the state, omitting the heterogeneity of resources that alter the dominant definition of power. Philosophy has a responsibility to confront concrete manifestations of power and domination, rather than bracket them in a discourse that falls back on academic ossification, producing yet another dualism. Leaving the dialectic model behind, we may remember that there is no symmetry in the simultaneity of the one and the many, and no contradiction in ontology itself, only its cross-pollination with ethics and politics in a configuration that does not congeal into a duality.

Art is an inter-objective ritual that articulates the relationship binding the individual and the collective. This formulation could be presented as one of the many trends that persist in the current, pluralistic contemporary art scene. It seems like the long-awaited democracy of objects, but we are not there yet. Although the practice of art varies across different cultures, the European Renaissance initiates a state of exception, coinciding with the invention of linear perspective. A shift that elevates the status of the artist, emphasizing individual genius. A practice once deeply rooted in spirituality and the land is now centered on personal expression. And a tool used for devotional and ritualistic functions is repurposed for aesthetic innovation. The sublime, a secular observation of boundlessness, occupies the space previously filled by rite and religion. This facilitates the separation of aesthetics from ethics and politics, a fissure that eventually leads to the commodification of art. Today, the prevailing assumption in modern culture is that art is a means of self-expression. This approach does not completely deny the object’s agency but subordinates it to the artist's activity. In a world overrun by the imperatives of subjectivity, the artist is a Janus-faced anomaly that, on one hand, has to implement the ideals of the creative genius and on the other, pursue the aesthetic exploration of the object. It is the nature of subjectivity to exploit its resources, hailing creativity as its crowning achievement, an asset fetishized and avidly pursued by collectors and artists alike regarding their own productivity. Ironically, the attempt to establish art as a realm of pure aesthetics makes it more susceptible to being absorbed into capitalist financial systems. Thus, although liberated from the traditional constraints of medium, beauty, or craft, and prioritizing ideas over visual execution, museum validation and brand economy continue to place the focus on the artist’s individuality. But no matter how experimental, the art object remains an appropriation by human subjectivity of what is given to all creatures. The creative genius is grafted upon the laws of individual ownership, not unlike littoral or riparian rights regarding the acquisition of water. At land’s edge, the lifting fog of human exception reveals that although many stylistic ships have sailed, the sea stretches with possibility. And while the horizon of art is skirted by the regime of the reified object and its representative, the commodity, rearming the aesthetic with the necessary ethical and political components restores the ritual and performative power that makes art the cohesive agent of society. No longer contemplating a prize on a shelf, an ontological trophy, or the reward of creative pride, the artist becomes an ambassador of object relations and is beckoned to engage in a practice that makes art the most conversational aspect of the object.

Individual genius is marketable. Personal expression thrown in a competitive aquarium spawns tradable fish. The most effective way to suppress is to include everyone and eliminate the unwanted through majority rule, allow everything to surface, and destroy the divergence in the light of day, in the same way that democracy permits the most tyrannical faction to have full sway. The aggrandizement of a component can cause the parent object to vanish, as when the collective dimension becomes just a bundle of individuals, flattened by the atomization of its constitutive parts, whose infinite reproduction transforms the social body into a competitive arena. Contrary to its Marxist definition, capital exploits the object by fostering individuality. Although it has been thought that subjects are exploited and coerced into objective arrangements, contemporary culture reveals that giving free rein to the individual is a more efficient method of maintaining the flows of capital, especially when kept in open contest. The object is communal before ever becoming an individual possession, by the simple fact that an object is necessarily the assessment of more than one entity and cannot be reduced to a monocular view. Did Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs ever suspect that the object is the one exploited by the subject of European history? The latter, armed with the endgame rhetoric of individuality, betrays the object, turning the collective into a profit-making platform. This gives rise to the cult of personality by which a presidential election sets the tone of an entire nation. Power always concentrates in the hands of unscrupulous individuals because the welfare of the public, the planet, and the future are not the natural inclination of the rapacious subjectivity bred for a position of leadership. Additionally, the exploitation of resources proceeds through demographic farms, and there is no doubt that it operates on a personal level, at every step of education, relationship, and career, by propagating the false promise that the collective can be achieved through the emancipation of the properly adjusted individual. But the flip side of exploitation is addiction, and together they form the pistons of the engine that fuels both colonialism and liberal individuals. Even the victims of exploitation develop addictions, with often failed attempts at self-medication. So if the individual is the building block of the collective and its point of entry, the social is offset by the rigidification of its accessibility. The collective at the nth power of the individual is an infernal machinery in which the artist is introjected like a guinea pig, a lab mouse running on the Catherine wheel of capital. As a habit-forming reward, unrestricted aesthetic experimentation is channeled into a monetized model of popularity, producing monoliths of individual merit against a devalued social body.

It is no mere coincidence that a thousand years are obscured by the European Renaissance precisely when a strong focus is placed on individual autonomy, which, until then and in all known societies, has been fundamentally relational. For Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the individual mainly exists within the context of group solidarity. Asabiyyah is the dynamic principle through which group members rise to power and eventually decline in a cyclical, organic pattern rooted in social and psychological bonds. It keeps individualism, factionalism, and the vain pursuit of luxury in check, acting as a self-immolating force, as when the group’s solidarity begins to weaken after a few generations and is replaced by another cohesive group. The cyclical nature of power and its inevitable decline is echoed by Baudrillard, who states that “power itself must be abolished,” highlighting the self-consuming nature of power in the context of the declining Western hegemonic order. In contrast to its worldly aspect, Al-Ghazali’s (1058-1111) treatment of individuality is deeply spiritual, emphasizing its direct connection with God. In his sophisticated understanding of nafs (the self), individuality is seen as an opportunity for purification. What differentiates it from St. Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’s conceptions of the self is its outward flow to the divine, when for their European counterparts, including Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” spirituality is often confined within the inner life of the individual. However, for Al-Ghazali, the ultimate goal of the individual is fana, the dissolution of personal awareness into an immanent state of divinity. With both Ibn Khaldun and Al-Ghazali, individuality does not turn inward but is directed toward a comprehensive entity that sustains it in return. Unlike its destructive trajectory in Western civilization, the individual as a locus of awareness is relational and dynamic rather than a static repository of the self. And if the human object withdraws like any other, its subjective counterpart—the individual—acts as the relational agent that pulls it into the community of other objects.

The vital link binding the individual to the social body is severed and reinserted into a cavity considered to be its interiority. It continues secreting a connective hormone that is offloaded into creative acts by which the liberal subject, artist included, ratifies the fetish of object appropriation. A pathological state of alienation is the heavy toll of individuality and a direct consequence of the subject’s inability to live the immanent life of the object without hoisting itself above creation. As merchandising infects the organ of connectivity, the aborted engagement with the social body is sold back to the individual as a personal trophy. The mutuality of the link that situates being between the individual and the collective is overtaken by one-way representations, bending the social around individual needs. In all these ways, the points of entry to the collective become the conquest flags of personal achievements, turning the social field into a golf course of human exception. Western civilization has consistently demonized the collective, from taking issue with the insufficiencies of Communism to designing social wardrobes tailored to individual needs. Not that it should ignore the latter, but the social in this case is less than the sum of its parts and remains articulated around a subject-of-history centric notion of the public body. Consider Ibn Khaldun’s paradigm of connectivity and imagine its trajectory without its obliteration by the linear progression of Hegelian dialectics. What if the tribal underpinning of Asabiyyah, allegedly transcended by the West, were to extend to the entire human race, ensconced in the nonhuman context of which it is an integral part? In this respect, the essence of the human belief in God is a vow to the nonhuman, unfathomable expanse in which humanity is integrated, and whose fall from grace only occurs when the deity is cast in the image of the human subject. Imagine, then, Al-Ghazali making a bridge at this juncture for the pilgrimage of personhood, Nafs, to reach Rouh, the portal of its integration in the immanence of Godhood. By virtue of this alone, Islam would have resolved the Judeo-Christian declension from the divine and forged a civilizational path that does not lead to the endgame rhetoric of the individual and its dangerous solipsism. It is alarming to what extent the collective dimension has been harnessed by competition to become the dialectical other of the individual, continuously retrofitted to its needs, as social media converts accolades into social status, and propagates the myth that the collective can be reached through popularity. The path chosen by the West leads to the post-Enlightenment crisis in which the self is either absorbed or rebels against the universal, understood as the exceptionalist projection of an ideal. Hegel’s “I am only a subject to another subject” substitutes the socius for the self, in an identitarian tour de force, prompting the subject of history to stand tall on a dialectical schism. Kierkegaard inverts this absorption into a refusal with a leap of faith that lands him back in the interiority of the individual, as his unmediated relationship with the absolute completely overshadows the collective. Thus, the object towards which the individual is directed with Ibn Khaldun and Al-Ghazali becomes either the rational universal, in which mind conquers world, or the utter isolation of the individual in relation to the absolute, as a shield against the crowds that threaten its authenticity. It was inevitable for the structure of this individuality to transform into the contemporary exceptionalist subject, prompted to either master or transcend the collective object through the toil of the element that works against its sustainability.

In the last reckoning, all human deliberations translate into a confrontation with the nonhuman, which, from the standpoint of the human subject, is the primary object. Within the Judeo-Christian continuum, Islam comes closest to integrating the human will into the givenness of the world. A cosmology that maintains an embedded trusteeship with the natural world in sharp contrast to the dominus naturae of post-Renaissance Europe. The historical course of the latter is a disastrous trajectory, akin to a shooting star doomed to extinction. And yet from its liberal institutions comes a powerful critique of exceptionalism that promises to rehabilitate the collective field by fostering new associations between humans and nonhumans. Latour dismantles the nature/society divide to include them as co-constituents of the public sphere. His Actor Network Theory promotes a Parliament of Things “where the collective is reconstituted, where the question of the social world is raised anew, where the separation between the scientific representation of things and the political representation of subjects is called into question.” And yet, his methodology hardens into a frozen political stance when encountering non-state actors and asymmetrical struggle. Armed resistance against occupation cannot be "composed" into Latour's framework, and only appears as a failure, a regression to the "politics of war" he wants to transcend, casting the Palestinian fighter as someone who has not yet learned to properly "make things public". Making ecology the sole political imperative falls short of condemning the specific complicity of empire, colonialism, and occupation, just as a politics of networks struggles to recognize that some networks must be destroyed, not reassembled, and that some problems cannot be solved by adding more actors to the deliberation. At this juncture, Islamic thought may offer resources Latour’s project desperately needs. Among the parallel concepts, the doctrine of tawhid (divine unity) is an ontological flattening that situates the human as a node in a network of signs pointing to the divine, not the special substance of res cogitans. Latour’s “composition of the common world” finds an echo with ihsan, the aesthetic-ethical attention given to the givenness of things, where the nonhuman is encountered through ma’rifa, the intimate participatory knowledge that preserves the alterity of the known. Properly understood, khalifa (stewardship/caliphate) designates the responsibility without ownership of the human who is a mustaklaf (trustee), not granted title but placed in trust. Islamic cosmology also includes the Jinn, a manifestation of ontological pluralism in a being that crosses the nature/culture divide and possesses agency without being human. The Quran clearly states: "There is no creature on earth nor bird that flies with its wings except that they are communities like you". This is not to say that traditional Islamic philosophy did not entertain its own version of “the great chain of being” and often ranked the rational animal at the apex. But while the challenge for Islam is to avert anthropocentrism and maintain the solidarity of the collective by extending it to the nonhuman, political intervention may be addressed by a long list of Islamic correctives to Latour’s political paralysis, including al-Haqq, which fuses real, truth, and right, not as an epistemological eventuality of knowledge, but both a political and ontological persuasion. Rather than a “politics of truth”, a politics of shahada (witness) instills the obligation to recognize and align with the real against oppression, al-zulm, which cannot be negotiated with. Jihad, the most vilified of these terms, goes beyond the military action of antagonistic politics with an ethical mission. Latour’s parliamentary deliberation is finally resolved by the shared community of the umma, which preserves a theology of givenness, the nonhuman as a gift rather than a resource, and an ethics of vulnerability that prevents the strong from abusing the weak. These and many more are the legacy of Islam, currently vilified yet at the forefront of the noblest battle against the nefarious reign of human exceptionalism. For the secular yet equally concerned, it is unclear to what degree religiosity can dissolve its anthropomorphism. However, if the nonhuman were to substitute the deity as the ultimate object, humans may eavesdrop on the mystery of creation in a recognition that is no less sacred.

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