Everything and Nothing: How do Matters Stand with Nothingness in Object-Oriented Ontology?

This article poses a question for Object-Oriented Ontology in general and Harman’s position in particular. It is Heidegger’s question: “How do matters stand with nothingness?” First, I present the basic outline of Harman’s OOO which is presented as a theory of everything. In order to pin down the question of nothing, I begin by asking about “something”: what is an object? And what does it mean that objects exist? Then I pursue by identifying two notions of nothing in OOO: the withdrawal of objects and the in-between of two objects. The first, I call infrastructural nothing. The second, I call interrelational nothing. The latter is derived from the former. I argue that OOO is very close to Kierkegaard’s account of nothing as the space of possibility of possibilities, since an object is defined as its own interior space which must hold something in reserve in order to allow for change and emergence. Nothing is not merely nothing but something – a bounded openness.