I am just re-reading Iain Hamilton Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling which sometimes seem to fall off the radar in speculative realist circles (although this should change thanks to the debate between Harman and Grant in The Speculative Turn). I suspect Grant’s text is less read because unlike Nihil Unbound, After Finitude or Guerrilla Metaphysics it is a book that looks to be about a stodgy old German Idealist – even if that German Idealist happens to be Schelling, by far the most speculatively intense of the bunch. Certainly Grant’s book deals heavily with Schelling (in fact I have not read anyone else who is so deeply familiar with Schelling), but it feels like a book that is trying to tell us something else. I want to move through the text slowly over the next weeks so please excuse the lack of an overall picture. I want to let the picture emerge for me without forcing it since I am longer beholden to any deadlines. Last time I read it I felt somewhat overwhelmed. The book is intimidating it its rich detail and it really needs to be read at a snail’s pace.
The immediate sense that I gained from the text on re-reading the opening is that Grant sees Schelling as a thinker concerned with immanence (in the German Idealist sense, I’ll flesh this out in a moment) or absolute immanence. Within the German Idealist tradition this later manifested in Hegel as a total phenomenalization of all content against the Kantian cut or what is now called the two-aspect thesis. What Hegel and Schelling share is the generalized thesis that there is but one world. The difference is that for Hegel the region of this one world is not nature (as ground or genesis or in any sense at all) whereas in Schelling nature *at times* plays a role suspiciously close to grounding – even if, as Heidegger showed quite well, this involves an interesting play on non-ground, and so on - this being German philosophical obsession with nothingness. In either sense they are both attempting to prefigure the idea that the absolute can be considered as all-enveloping in that even as it creates it surrounds everything. There is no escaping it and nothing to gauge it against. Contra Fichte the object does not come-to-be because it has been gazed at, but is a participant in the absolute flow and creation…of whatever it is that it flowing and creating. For Grant the shades of Deleuzianism that emerge here will help him establish a kind of kindred spirit vibe between the tradition’s outliers: Schelling and Deleuze.
Schelling’s names for the Absolute are, as is well known, somewhat uncoordinated. You get the Absolute, the All, and the unconditioned, but the theme remains the same – the impersonal, unconstrained more-than-us that philosophy is aimed squarely at thinking and it includes all the dizzying implications that drive most sensible people away from this kind of contemplation. What Schelling spotted, and Deleuze is always pushing, is that if you think according to the absolute, in an impersonal non-egoistic, sense then you can engage in that generative flow and *become* creative in your own right. This thesis has meant that both Schelling and Deleuze have found themselves somewhere on the border of philosophy often finding the reception they deserve coming from less austere quarters.
It is on this basis that I will attempt to work my way through the book beginning, as is fitting, on the first day of the New Year where I hope to find my way back to creativity.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
To do, to do
It feels like I need to get my teeth into something again. I just can't quite figure out what that might be. My main project is, of course, to make sure Speculations gets out without a hitch. I'm also itching for Continental Realism to come out soon and I really hope it comes it before I start writing again as it feels I need to move on from it. In my head it remains bound up with my thesis and what I see as step one in developing my thoughts.
Like most people I am finding myself invigorated by The Speculative Turn and I am starting to put together a review of it in my head. I suspect it is something I can write quickly but there is so much material it'll need some heavy editing.
At the moment I'm working through the implications of my encounter with Hegel and my recent discovery of Deleuze. Of course these are almost old hat to most people in these circles but my phenomenologically tinged training always made me suspicious. At the moment Houlgate and Hallward are my guides. I have also decided to reread Grant as the debate between Grant and Harman is perhaps the most striking dialogue in the Speculative Turn.
The other bubbling project is a renewed engagement with the theory of vicarious causation which I am more and more convinced by. I'll need to decide how to tackle it and although Harman has (if I am recalling correctly) expressed some reservations with the Collapse essay on vicarious causation I still think it is a small masterpiece. If I manage to link it up with some of the recent stuff there might be an article in there somewhere. Either way the theory is calling me to address it and you should never say no when that happens.
Like most people I am finding myself invigorated by The Speculative Turn and I am starting to put together a review of it in my head. I suspect it is something I can write quickly but there is so much material it'll need some heavy editing.
At the moment I'm working through the implications of my encounter with Hegel and my recent discovery of Deleuze. Of course these are almost old hat to most people in these circles but my phenomenologically tinged training always made me suspicious. At the moment Houlgate and Hallward are my guides. I have also decided to reread Grant as the debate between Grant and Harman is perhaps the most striking dialogue in the Speculative Turn.
The other bubbling project is a renewed engagement with the theory of vicarious causation which I am more and more convinced by. I'll need to decide how to tackle it and although Harman has (if I am recalling correctly) expressed some reservations with the Collapse essay on vicarious causation I still think it is a small masterpiece. If I manage to link it up with some of the recent stuff there might be an article in there somewhere. Either way the theory is calling me to address it and you should never say no when that happens.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Great Harman line
As a confirmed dubstepper this line gave me a chuckle:
'If the decision were mine alone, not only would the name ‘speculative realism’ be retained, but a logo would be designed for projection on PowerPoint screens, accompanied by a few signature bars of smoky dubstep music.'
(from On the Undermining of Objects in The Speculative Turn, 21).
This can be arranged!
'If the decision were mine alone, not only would the name ‘speculative realism’ be retained, but a logo would be designed for projection on PowerPoint screens, accompanied by a few signature bars of smoky dubstep music.'
(from On the Undermining of Objects in The Speculative Turn, 21).
This can be arranged!
Thursday, December 23, 2010
The Speculative Turn released
Just a quick note that The Speculative Turn has just been published. Graham Harman notes that there should be a free PDF up soon as is the norm with re:press but I think it is well worth picking up a physical copy to show support for what is in my eyes surely the greatest contribution to speculative realism that has happened yet.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
To Freiburg
I'm leaving for Freiburg tomorrow. I am not sure I'll have much chance to blog over the weekend but I have found a lot of books/articles/etc. that I need to catch up on and hopefully they are varied enough to generate some new blog posts. As it stands my reading list if insanely long and I am finding it difficult to know where to begin. But I think the big ones I need to get through are Deleuze, some Badiou, Bergson, and I need to keep up my Hegel adventure (onto the Logic now). Not sure where all this is taking me but I have made a strict rule that I will not try to force a new direction.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Thesis submitted
So I handed in the thesis today. Don't have much to say right now as I'm going out to get blind drunk (or as drunk as you can on Monday before the pub closes). Quite a relief and I already feel some weight has shifted. I must admit the actual experience was a hilarious anticlimax:
Me: 'I'm submitting my thesis - here it is'
Guy at desk: *looks over forms* 'All is in order. Here is your receipt.'
Me: 'Awesome.'
Me: 'I'm submitting my thesis - here it is'
Guy at desk: *looks over forms* 'All is in order. Here is your receipt.'
Me: 'Awesome.'
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Speculations Volume II Reminder
Speculations, a journal for speculative realist thought, invites submissions
for its second volume. Given the intrinsically open and unconstrained nature
of the arena for speculative thought which Speculations aims at embodying —
and in view of the favourable reception of the inaugural issue — our aim in
the second volume is to broaden the range and ambition of the journal. In
accordance with speculative realism’s mandate to open philosophy to the
richness of reality, we particularly encourage scholars to engage with
speculative realism from disciplines beyond philosophy. We therefore welcome
papers discussing speculative realism’s renewed philosophical concern with
the non-human world from a wide array of disciplines.
Speculations is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal that hopes to
provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and
post-continental philosophy. Our aim is to facilitate discussion about
ongoing developments within and around speculative realism. We accept short
position papers, full length articles and book reviews.
Potential authors should make sure to go through the ‘Submission Checklist’
before submitting which can be found at: http://speculationsjournal.org
Articles should be no longer than 8,000 words and follow the Chicago Manual
of Style (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html).
The deadline for submission is the 8th of January 2011.
Submissions can be sent to speculationsjournal@gmail.com
Editors:
Paul J. Ennis
Michael Austin
Fabio Gironi
Thomas Gokey
for its second volume. Given the intrinsically open and unconstrained nature
of the arena for speculative thought which Speculations aims at embodying —
and in view of the favourable reception of the inaugural issue — our aim in
the second volume is to broaden the range and ambition of the journal. In
accordance with speculative realism’s mandate to open philosophy to the
richness of reality, we particularly encourage scholars to engage with
speculative realism from disciplines beyond philosophy. We therefore welcome
papers discussing speculative realism’s renewed philosophical concern with
the non-human world from a wide array of disciplines.
Speculations is an open-access and peer-reviewed journal that hopes to
provide a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and
post-continental philosophy. Our aim is to facilitate discussion about
ongoing developments within and around speculative realism. We accept short
position papers, full length articles and book reviews.
Potential authors should make sure to go through the ‘Submission Checklist’
before submitting which can be found at: http://speculationsjournal.org
Articles should be no longer than 8,000 words and follow the Chicago Manual
of Style (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html).
The deadline for submission is the 8th of January 2011.
Submissions can be sent to speculationsjournal@gmail.com
Editors:
Paul J. Ennis
Michael Austin
Fabio Gironi
Thomas Gokey
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Spekulativer Realismus
Just came across this interesting German blog post on speculative realism. An off the cuff translation is as follows:
In the recent ‘Anglophone’ research a new philosophical position on epistemological and ontological matters has arisen since 2007 under the name speculative realism. The foundational figures are Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. The movement is characterized with an anti-Kantian tendency, calling for a radical break with anthropocentrism and the subject-oriented philosophical tradition, exemplified by what Meillassoux terms correlationism. In particular Kant represents the central figure of correlationism with his restriction of human knowledge to the range of the phenomena i.e. the interdependence of thinking and Being – the claim that being and thought are [always] correlated. *Against correlationism and subject centred philosophies object oriented philosophy seeks to examine the relation between objects and processes to each other and to penetrate to the things themselves.
*I cannot work this sentence out exactly. Hopefully Graham Harman can take a bash at it since it discusses OOO and his German is exceptionally good.
The rest of it discusses the non-influence of SR in Germany and a suggestion to begin with Meillassoux’s After Finitude as the foundational text of the movement. There are also some nice links there including one to this blog (which is how I found it). Sounds interesting and hopefully it can do something to draw some attention to SR in Germany.
In the recent ‘Anglophone’ research a new philosophical position on epistemological and ontological matters has arisen since 2007 under the name speculative realism. The foundational figures are Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier. The movement is characterized with an anti-Kantian tendency, calling for a radical break with anthropocentrism and the subject-oriented philosophical tradition, exemplified by what Meillassoux terms correlationism. In particular Kant represents the central figure of correlationism with his restriction of human knowledge to the range of the phenomena i.e. the interdependence of thinking and Being – the claim that being and thought are [always] correlated. *Against correlationism and subject centred philosophies object oriented philosophy seeks to examine the relation between objects and processes to each other and to penetrate to the things themselves.
*I cannot work this sentence out exactly. Hopefully Graham Harman can take a bash at it since it discusses OOO and his German is exceptionally good.
The rest of it discusses the non-influence of SR in Germany and a suggestion to begin with Meillassoux’s After Finitude as the foundational text of the movement. There are also some nice links there including one to this blog (which is how I found it). Sounds interesting and hopefully it can do something to draw some attention to SR in Germany.
Stratified Gestell
William Koch has a great post about Heidegger's final topic suggestion to the Heidegger Circle prior to his death.
I must admit that I did not find the choice of topic too surprising:
Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?
I have come to realize that the part of Heidegger I find most productive* these days is the technics angle. I actually find the question as it is stated here by Heidegger a little too formal. One of the odd things about the later Heidegger, and Stiegler is great on this, is that Heidegger sometimes can't own up to when he makes some good old fashioned concrete analyses. His analysis of technics is a wonderful example of phenomenological seeing but Heidegger cannot *let it be*. He must subsume it under his historical procession of being.
This need to integrate, his unconscious sublation, manifests quite clearly to us today because we have access to his private letters and to his notes. For instance I can pick a random quote from the Contributions ('36-8), page 9: 'In the age of total lack of questioning anything, it is sufficient as a start to inquire into the question of all questions.'
This begins like SZ begins and like they all begin no? It does not matter whether it is his notebooks or his two monographs or the huge lecture course material there is the relentless trundle of catching up with being. What I like about the technics lectures, and the four seminars that Koch alludes to, is that they contain some almost Husserlian epoche-esque gems that can be lifted from the decline of being narrative without too much damage. More importantly it is so markedly formal that it resists the classic Heideggerian scholar tactic of stating that: 'Heidegger was really interested in technics (or place or nature or God or etc.)' No! It is about being and nothing else - almost mundanely so.
But I really do think we need to lift technics from Heidegger as with a crane. In fact I'd wager that the final lines that he really hopes people might leap past him on this score:
But it would be already sufficient and beneficial if each of the participants gave attention, each in his own way, to this question and took it up as a suggestion for his area of research.
I presume that Heidegger was aware that technics was increasing at an exponential rate and that thinkers would need to think through it - perhaps even at the expense of thinking being. After all the question of technics ends on a cryptic note suggesting that in an age when even human freedom is absent our job is something like the sustaining of being through the prelude of Gestell to something that may come (enter Derrida)...Heidegger mentions that (in my own translation so open to question here): 'In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself i.e. his essence [Indessen begegnet der Mensch heute in Wahrheit gerade nirgends mehr sich selber, d.h. seinem Wesen]' (DFT, 28). I read this as the conclusion he has drawn from the Schelling lectures in the 30's right as he is stepping outside transcendentalism.
OK but I do not think Heidegger would want us to stop there. After all this is Gestell in the '50's. Gestell in the 21st Century is almost incomprehensible and remains as such even within the form of ontological questioning qua Heidegger. Take a look again at how he frames (!) the question:
Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?
These are utterly, radically, and hopelessly impossible questions in the age of, as Zabala puts it, the remains of being. I think there are good reasons that it is so difficult to translate Heidegger to new readers, to get people to look into his work...he asks things that strike us as so desiring-after grounding that the whole thing appears groundless (and this is what he is after but try expressing that too soon and you'll get sore looks!).
My honest feelings on this are that if we are to use phenomenological method in terms of technics then it would need to be the surface reading that ignores the supra-meta-wide-ranging-temporal vibe that Heidegger is after in his later work. Rather the concrete analysis of technics, as Stiegler's seeks out in Technics and Time, can't spend too much time asking what e-mail was all about when technics throws Wikileaks in your face. The pace will need to be swift.
Nimbleness might be a virtue in the age of the stratification of Gestell.
* To use precisely the word he would avoid since producing or presenting is on his no-no list quite explicitly by the time of the technics lectures in '53 [Her- und Dar-Stellen].
I must admit that I did not find the choice of topic too surprising:
Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?
I have come to realize that the part of Heidegger I find most productive* these days is the technics angle. I actually find the question as it is stated here by Heidegger a little too formal. One of the odd things about the later Heidegger, and Stiegler is great on this, is that Heidegger sometimes can't own up to when he makes some good old fashioned concrete analyses. His analysis of technics is a wonderful example of phenomenological seeing but Heidegger cannot *let it be*. He must subsume it under his historical procession of being.
This need to integrate, his unconscious sublation, manifests quite clearly to us today because we have access to his private letters and to his notes. For instance I can pick a random quote from the Contributions ('36-8), page 9: 'In the age of total lack of questioning anything, it is sufficient as a start to inquire into the question of all questions.'
This begins like SZ begins and like they all begin no? It does not matter whether it is his notebooks or his two monographs or the huge lecture course material there is the relentless trundle of catching up with being. What I like about the technics lectures, and the four seminars that Koch alludes to, is that they contain some almost Husserlian epoche-esque gems that can be lifted from the decline of being narrative without too much damage. More importantly it is so markedly formal that it resists the classic Heideggerian scholar tactic of stating that: 'Heidegger was really interested in technics (or place or nature or God or etc.)' No! It is about being and nothing else - almost mundanely so.
But I really do think we need to lift technics from Heidegger as with a crane. In fact I'd wager that the final lines that he really hopes people might leap past him on this score:
But it would be already sufficient and beneficial if each of the participants gave attention, each in his own way, to this question and took it up as a suggestion for his area of research.
I presume that Heidegger was aware that technics was increasing at an exponential rate and that thinkers would need to think through it - perhaps even at the expense of thinking being. After all the question of technics ends on a cryptic note suggesting that in an age when even human freedom is absent our job is something like the sustaining of being through the prelude of Gestell to something that may come (enter Derrida)...Heidegger mentions that (in my own translation so open to question here): 'In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself i.e. his essence [Indessen begegnet der Mensch heute in Wahrheit gerade nirgends mehr sich selber, d.h. seinem Wesen]' (DFT, 28). I read this as the conclusion he has drawn from the Schelling lectures in the 30's right as he is stepping outside transcendentalism.
OK but I do not think Heidegger would want us to stop there. After all this is Gestell in the '50's. Gestell in the 21st Century is almost incomprehensible and remains as such even within the form of ontological questioning qua Heidegger. Take a look again at how he frames (!) the question:
Is modern natural science - as it is maintained - the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological representing and its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and establishing machination of modern technicity?
These are utterly, radically, and hopelessly impossible questions in the age of, as Zabala puts it, the remains of being. I think there are good reasons that it is so difficult to translate Heidegger to new readers, to get people to look into his work...he asks things that strike us as so desiring-after grounding that the whole thing appears groundless (and this is what he is after but try expressing that too soon and you'll get sore looks!).
My honest feelings on this are that if we are to use phenomenological method in terms of technics then it would need to be the surface reading that ignores the supra-meta-wide-ranging-temporal vibe that Heidegger is after in his later work. Rather the concrete analysis of technics, as Stiegler's seeks out in Technics and Time, can't spend too much time asking what e-mail was all about when technics throws Wikileaks in your face. The pace will need to be swift.
Nimbleness might be a virtue in the age of the stratification of Gestell.
* To use precisely the word he would avoid since producing or presenting is on his no-no list quite explicitly by the time of the technics lectures in '53 [Her- und Dar-Stellen].
Friday, December 3, 2010
Updated Links
So I really need to update my links. The first obvious ones are Robert Jackson's Algorithm and Contingency, Tim Morton's Ecology without Nature and Mike Burns' Daily Humiliation but I am sure there must be more. If you can think of any obvious absences or would like a link let me know.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
And so it is done...
...or is it beginning?
So I have finished my PhD but the campus is closed so I cannot submit it just yet. Ireland is in a kind of snow-crisis. It looks like I won't get to submit it personally but it has been arranged that someone can submit it for me. That is somewhat of a let down but I don't mind too much. The reason I cannot do it personally is that I am heading to Freiburg next Monday (the 6th). I hope to stay there as long as possible. As anyone with an interest in finance knows Ireland is officially a deadzone when it comes to jobs. I suppose it is a sort of irony to have completed my education right through the boom years (the so-called Celtic Tiger) and emerged just as it collapses. My thesis title is named Speculative Intensity and the Ruins of Being. The latter bit seems more apt now than my original more mundane title. I think I am not just positing these ruins. I see them all around me - from the tired people to the abandoned estates. A ruined landscape scarred by a burst of capitalist realism. If you want to see the havoc that capitalism can wreck on a population come to Dublin (the plus side is that people seem to be talking to each other more - money had made us mutes).
The completion of my PhD opens me up to an entirely new world. I am no longer bound to my project. I can start projects anew. This is sort of scary and liberating at the same time. I can't work out if I want to pursue the realism angle more or whether I need to ground myself in German idealism a little more. I suppose I can try both. Either way I have some projects to tide me over. I intend to submit an article on Heidegger and nature to Thinking Nature. I feel I ought to write on this topic because I have found both Ben Woodard and Tim Morton amongst the most interesting minds I have come across recently.* This realization didn't hit me until recently when I noted their subtle footnote presence in the thesis (I should mention that SR wise my thesis also references a whole range of SR and OOO people and I feel pretty good about that!). This article is essentially the core of my thoughts on Heidegger as I make my break with him. If there is one thing I have learned over the past year it is that Heidegger no longer speaks to me even though he is likely to remain forever the thinker I have engaged with the most (I think I could do a freelance riff on whole chunks of his thinking at this stage and I suppose this is what a PhD is really about). The thinker I did not expect to find playing such a big role was Hegel. Toward the end Hegel was jostling for prime spot alongside Heidegger. Kant too remains an abiding influence but that is such a normal situation for a philosophy student it is almost not worth mentioning.
The article on Meillassoux for Cosmos and History should also come out soon (Jan. I think) and it will, of course, perhaps be the one that will interest people here. The article has a simple aim i.e. to argue that Meillassoux really has transcendentalism in mind when he says correlationism. I argue this against Meillassoux's own claim that the real menace is the fideistic strong correlationism of 'postmodern piety' (as he calls it in Immanence and the World Beyond). I was also given a chance to say some words on what the new realism might entail but that is best left until it comes out. I am not sure what happened to the article for Deleuze International on Meillassoux and SR but we'll see.
As to Continental Realism well that is coming along nicely. It should be entering the next step pretty soon judging from the last time around. It has received positive vibes so far from people I respect (in one case someone I respect a lot!) so I am looking forward to it coming out as a statement of where I stand. I know understand how people must feel about the delay between submission and release dates but it a pretty direct little argument so I don't think I'll end up rejecting too much of it. The essential idea is that we must become despirited Hegelians...not sure how much to reveal on that score but the argument aside it is designed to introduce people to as many SR thinkers as I could fit in (emphasis being on Meillassoux and Harman with nods to Brassier throughout).
Incidentally Post-Continental Voices has been doing well as far as I can work out and even has a nice review on the US Amazon so far. It came out just at a time when I was snowed under thesis wise but I have had time to look at it and be cheered by it. I think it really should help some people out.
This brings me to Speculations which is getting close to the deadline for Volume II on Jan. 8th. The issue is more or less full and the list of names should surprise a lot of people. It covers everything from OOO, Badiou, aesthetics, theoretical physics, theology, queer theory, and...even some philosophy! I think we will have a blast with putting this one together as it should set up the debates for a bunch of issues to come (we have some themed issue lined up with submissions arranged already...so I am pleased that the journal should have its release dates speeded up now that I am freer to work on it and as the team gets bigger).
The final thing to mention...I am now back to blogging so expect a barrage of stuff as my brain realizes it can freelance again.
*I also have an overview article on Heidegger and technology coming out, but this is a more general exegesis and not aimed at the readership I think I have here. I should also have a review of Zabala's The Remains of Being out soon too.
So I have finished my PhD but the campus is closed so I cannot submit it just yet. Ireland is in a kind of snow-crisis. It looks like I won't get to submit it personally but it has been arranged that someone can submit it for me. That is somewhat of a let down but I don't mind too much. The reason I cannot do it personally is that I am heading to Freiburg next Monday (the 6th). I hope to stay there as long as possible. As anyone with an interest in finance knows Ireland is officially a deadzone when it comes to jobs. I suppose it is a sort of irony to have completed my education right through the boom years (the so-called Celtic Tiger) and emerged just as it collapses. My thesis title is named Speculative Intensity and the Ruins of Being. The latter bit seems more apt now than my original more mundane title. I think I am not just positing these ruins. I see them all around me - from the tired people to the abandoned estates. A ruined landscape scarred by a burst of capitalist realism. If you want to see the havoc that capitalism can wreck on a population come to Dublin (the plus side is that people seem to be talking to each other more - money had made us mutes).
The completion of my PhD opens me up to an entirely new world. I am no longer bound to my project. I can start projects anew. This is sort of scary and liberating at the same time. I can't work out if I want to pursue the realism angle more or whether I need to ground myself in German idealism a little more. I suppose I can try both. Either way I have some projects to tide me over. I intend to submit an article on Heidegger and nature to Thinking Nature. I feel I ought to write on this topic because I have found both Ben Woodard and Tim Morton amongst the most interesting minds I have come across recently.* This realization didn't hit me until recently when I noted their subtle footnote presence in the thesis (I should mention that SR wise my thesis also references a whole range of SR and OOO people and I feel pretty good about that!). This article is essentially the core of my thoughts on Heidegger as I make my break with him. If there is one thing I have learned over the past year it is that Heidegger no longer speaks to me even though he is likely to remain forever the thinker I have engaged with the most (I think I could do a freelance riff on whole chunks of his thinking at this stage and I suppose this is what a PhD is really about). The thinker I did not expect to find playing such a big role was Hegel. Toward the end Hegel was jostling for prime spot alongside Heidegger. Kant too remains an abiding influence but that is such a normal situation for a philosophy student it is almost not worth mentioning.
The article on Meillassoux for Cosmos and History should also come out soon (Jan. I think) and it will, of course, perhaps be the one that will interest people here. The article has a simple aim i.e. to argue that Meillassoux really has transcendentalism in mind when he says correlationism. I argue this against Meillassoux's own claim that the real menace is the fideistic strong correlationism of 'postmodern piety' (as he calls it in Immanence and the World Beyond). I was also given a chance to say some words on what the new realism might entail but that is best left until it comes out. I am not sure what happened to the article for Deleuze International on Meillassoux and SR but we'll see.
As to Continental Realism well that is coming along nicely. It should be entering the next step pretty soon judging from the last time around. It has received positive vibes so far from people I respect (in one case someone I respect a lot!) so I am looking forward to it coming out as a statement of where I stand. I know understand how people must feel about the delay between submission and release dates but it a pretty direct little argument so I don't think I'll end up rejecting too much of it. The essential idea is that we must become despirited Hegelians...not sure how much to reveal on that score but the argument aside it is designed to introduce people to as many SR thinkers as I could fit in (emphasis being on Meillassoux and Harman with nods to Brassier throughout).
Incidentally Post-Continental Voices has been doing well as far as I can work out and even has a nice review on the US Amazon so far. It came out just at a time when I was snowed under thesis wise but I have had time to look at it and be cheered by it. I think it really should help some people out.
This brings me to Speculations which is getting close to the deadline for Volume II on Jan. 8th. The issue is more or less full and the list of names should surprise a lot of people. It covers everything from OOO, Badiou, aesthetics, theoretical physics, theology, queer theory, and...even some philosophy! I think we will have a blast with putting this one together as it should set up the debates for a bunch of issues to come (we have some themed issue lined up with submissions arranged already...so I am pleased that the journal should have its release dates speeded up now that I am freer to work on it and as the team gets bigger).
The final thing to mention...I am now back to blogging so expect a barrage of stuff as my brain realizes it can freelance again.
*I also have an overview article on Heidegger and technology coming out, but this is a more general exegesis and not aimed at the readership I think I have here. I should also have a review of Zabala's The Remains of Being out soon too.
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