From an article by Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation”:

We are not more critical than animals, but more object-oriented, filling our minds with all present and absent objects, all geographical and astronomical places, all species of animal, all flavors of juice, all players from the history of baseball, all living and dead languages. We do not remain in the holistic prisons of our own lives where things are fully unified by their significance for us, but face outward toward a cosmos speckled with independent campfires and black holes, packed full with objects that generate their own private laws and both welcome and resist our attempts to gain information.

From James Latteier’s blog, Mt Semblant.

Why don’t the planets speak?’ Jacques Lacan asks this question in all earnestness at the beginning of Seminar XIX in which he introduces the concept of the Big Other. He is using the exemplary case of the stars as the founding of the Symbolic order; but for all their reluctance perhaps they can be made to speak—perhaps because the event of founding is one we can never either locate or erase: that at any rate is the puzzle I want to play with. They did speak at one time, as we all know, through astrology. First, here is what Lacan of the Seminars says:

‘…the stars do not speak, planets are dumb, and that’s because they are silenced…We only became absolutely certain that the planets do not speak once they’d been shut up, that is to say once Newtonian theory had produced the theory of the unified field, in a form which has since been completed, a form which was already entirely satisfactory to every thinker…everything which enters in the unified field will never speak again because these are realities which have been totally reduced to language.’

From Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern:

[For the Achaur, an Amazonian tribe, in nature there are a] set of things with which communication cannot be established. Opposite beings endowed with language, of which humans are the most perfect incarnation, stand those things deprived of speech that inhabit parallel, inaccessible worlds. The inability to communicate is often ascribed to the lack of soul that affects certain living species: most insects and fish, poultry, and numerous plants, which thus lead a mechanical, inconsequential existence. But the absence of communication is sometimes due to distance: the souls of stars and meteors, infinitely far away and prodigiously mobile, remain deaf to human words.

Speaking of the Amazon, and of black holes, here is a sad story that involves the last man.