What is Speculative Realism?

Over at Object Oriented Philosophy Harman talks a little bit about speculative realism riffing off the blurbs for Continental Realism. Like Harman I also think that despite the wide net that speculative realism casts it is by no means beyond definition – after all continental philosophy casts a much wider net and yet we still manage to recognize what it signals (consider how different Deleuze and Heidegger are and how we still consider them both continentals). I talk about this a little in the orphaned article that I posted up as ‘The Speculative Terrain’ and there I emphasize that what we have here is a community.

I don’t think that any community is necessarily bound to the opinions of its founders and so the distance that Ray Brassier has established between himself and the label is not enough to dispel the fact that some kind of speculative realism has spilled beyond its original remit (become something in its own right). And even then when it boils down to it the basis remains, as Harman notes, broadly the same : opposition to correlationism, realist in orientation, a little weird, a little bit speculative (sometimes very much so), and so on.

This is where I was going with post-continental philosophy: philosophies rooted in continental philosophy, but not beholden to it (what I would call progress). In the editorial to Speculations II the team will also attempt to synthesize some of the recent developments we’ve seen in the past year or so and, of course, what else is Speculations if not a home for a wild mesh of speculative realists, post-continental philosophers, and theorists of/on the fringe? You can call it a movement or a community or whatever else you want, but it exists – that much is crystal clear.

As for Continental Realism I admit I have been somewhat silent on the argument but on reflection the book is an ode (of sorts) to speculative thinkers charting my own liberation from antirealism, traditional continentalism, and what I like to now call the fog... I do think the final point will be slightly unusual and hopefully raise some eyebrows, but leaving the argument aside it will, as the blurbs point out, be a kind of sprint through as many ideas from as many speculative realists as I could squash into as few pages as possible (it comes in at less than 100 pages). Here is the table of contents which should give an idea about what to expect:

Preface: The Hermeneutics of the Real

1.1. The Ancestral Realm

1.2. The Correlationist Nexus
a. The Transcendentalist Response I: Husserl, Perception, and Adumbrations
b. The Transcendentalist Response II: Kant, Transcendental Subjectivity and Embodiment

1.3. The Thought of the ‘In-Itself’
a. Intellectual Intuition
b. The Transcendentalist Response III: Hägglund, Gabriel, and Žižek
c. The Speculative Response: Gratton and Harman

1.4. Thinking le grand dehors
a. ‘Nature’ and the Out-side
b. Wohin haben wir uns verirrt?

1.5. Hegel without Hope