Graham Harman and Slavoj Žižek’s conversation on March 1, 2017 raised issues among students which Harman and Jeffrey Kipnis began addressing on March 2, and continued at this discussion. Kipnis and Harman begin by addressing a specific question about the idea of the enchantment or re-enchantment of the world. They proceed to a discussion of formalism, Kant’s aesthetics, Greenberg and Fried’s application of Kant’s aesthetics, Max Scheler’s critique of Kant’s aesthetics. Harman and Kipnis discuss metaphor, and Leibniz’s Monadology through the lens of speculative realism. Harman and Kipnis discuss Newton’s alchemical studies as a symptom of gaps in the worldview defined by his physics and optics. They respond to a question about the identity of the work in the case of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Kipnis screens excerpts from an episode of How the Universe Works on dark matter, describing it as the scaffolding of the universe, responsible for large scale structures (galaxies) and small (the evolution of humans).
