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Let’s begin with an overview of the basic principles of OOO, since it cannot be assumed that all readers of this book are familiar with these matters. Object-oriented philosophy hinges on two major axes of division, one of which is usually ignored by our critics and sometimes even our supporters. The first and best-known axis concerns the difference between what OOO refers to as the withdrawal or withholding of objects. A hammer or candle is present to us, and yet they are also more than what is present to us. Though it may seem that this simply repeats the unpopular Kantian rift between noumena and phenomena, or the thing-in-itself and appearance, OOO adds the crucial twist that the thing-in-itself does not just haunt human awareness of the world, but is found even in the causal relations of non-human things with each other. While it is true that numerous thinkers since Kant have made room for an excess, surplus, or otherness of the world beyond our perception or theorization of it – Heidegger in particular – none to my knowledge have seen that such unformatted residue also exists in relations that do not involve human beings. The second and often forgotten axis concerns the connection between objects and their qualities, which OOO treats as being unusually loose. This counteracts the widespread empiricist tendency to treat objects as nothing over and above the bundles of their qualities, as if “apple” were merely a joint nickname for a set of tangible features bound together by habit, as in the philosophy of David Hume.¹ Joined together, these two axes yield a fourfold structure that OOO employs as a framework for illuminating everything that happens in the cosmos, whether in art or elsewhere. The best way to clarify these points is to begin with two of the most recent great European philosophers: the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and his deviant heir Heidegger.