If there is one educational question that the Anthropocene should evoke, it has to concern the mechanisms through which reality - that is, human-independent objects like the ecological crisis - come to matter for human subjects. This topic lies at the very heart of the discussions generated by speculative realism. After all, Meillassoux (2010) posited overcoming correlationism as an ontological condition for the possibility of engaging with reality as such. Yet this very condition multiplies the difficulties involved in the educational question. If reality is indeed non-correlative with human experiential apparati, it is not immediately obvious how it can become an object of concern for human beings. We aim to explore this ambiguity in the ontological register. The main issue we wish to investigate is the status of the human psyche as one object among others. On the one hand, this concerns the object we call the human psyche - what is this object like, ontologically speaking? On the other hand, it concerns the relations this object has with other objects - how does this object interact with other objects? We seek an ontology capable of making sense both of the irreducibility of objects to human experiential apparati and the fact that some of these objects matter to us. We stage our investigation as a critical encounter between object-oriented-ontology (OOO), as formulated by Graham Harman (2011), and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Lacan 2019). Received wisdom would see these theoretical positions as deeply irreconcilable: Lacan’s theorizing is a paradigm case of correlationism while OOO is one way of overcoming correlationism. However, following recent work by Lucas Pohl (2020), we argue that making the accusation of correlationism stick to Lacan’s theory is not as easy as it might seem. This opens the possibility of a more fruitful encounter between the two positions, which we pursue under Pohl’s Lacanian label “object-disoriented-ontology”. While we cannot hope to resolve the educational question of how objects begin to matter, our analysis does clarify the ontological requirements for answering this question.

Harman, G. (2011). The quadruple object. Zero Books. Lacan, J. (2019). Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VI. Polity. Meillassoux, Q. (2010). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. Bloomsbury Publishing. Pohl, L. (2020). Object-disoriented geographies: the Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the topology of anxiety. cultural geographies, 27(1), 71-84.