The next few posts are notes based on a series of questions Richard Burt was kind enough to ask me on Facebook that expanded into something a bit unwieldy for that format. So I have transferred them to the blog. This is part 1 of 2. Richard was inquiring about what it is that I feel I have gained from being exposed to speculative realism and since we are both people with an interest and background in the world of Heidegger/Derrida that forms much of the sub-text here (and should explain the abundance of Heidegger-Derrida references).
The first thing to register about speculative realism is that it is not entirely a clean break from tradition and that, in many ways, it is often quite traditionalist – which I count as a positive for the most part. Like all radical philosophies there is an attachment to what came before, but it is an attachment akin to that between siblings that tips between bouts of mutual dependence and petty simmering dislikes. Most breaks with tradition, including those undertaken by Heidegger and Derrida, were once considered extraordinarily radical and yet, in hindsight, we can now see how utterly indebted to the tradition they are.
The second thing to register then is that the anti-traditionalist strain in speculative realism is precisely its realist or, as is more often the case, its anti-antirealism since it is difficult to say whether Meillassoux, for instance, counts as a realist, but it is less controversial to claim that he opposes the ‘naive’ default antirealism of traditional continental philosophy. But this anti-traditionalist strain is also clearly determined by the traditional debate between realism and antirealism that remains for (a lot of) us utterly Kantian.
This is quite explicit in Meillassoux, Grant, and in Brassier’s latest work. Object-oriented ontology is the form of speculative realism that is the least bogged down in the Kantian paradigm and this is why I find it so liberating to read OOO from time to time. When I first read Tool-Being toward the end of my thesis the bit that grabbed my attention was precisely the lack of anxiety concerning transcendental questions.
In this sense I think those who come to OOO from outside philosophy are perhaps luckiest because there is nothing harder than overcoming the paradigm you are trained in and for me that is a broadly Kantian one and no matter how far I stray from this to me the unfulfilled promise of modern philosophy is precisely the possibility of a ‘Copernican’ or Kantian metaphysics.
This is why I firmly believe there will need to be some fence-mending in the future, but the first thing we have to dispel is the idea that there is a fundamental opposition between transcendentalists and metaphysicians. I think there is enough content in our world for both.
I’ll try to explain how this might happen, but in a basic sense I believe our world is complicated enough that a ‘division of labour’ (Peter Gratton) between aspects of our world is not only welcome, but necessary given the fractured nature of contemporary human existence and the overflow of information.
The question I get asked the most from fellow continentalists is how does one get from continental idealism or antirealism to continental realism? To understand this question it is helpful to look not at speculative realism, but at some of accusations often thrown at them from continental philosophers.
Those who oppose speculative realism often claim that it paints many philosophers in a naïve light. According to this critique it is simply not true that Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are idealists. I agree, but here we have a blind-spot arising (often) from an unwillingness to engage in the nuance of the speculative realist arguments on the matter – ironic given most defences against the idealist charge as it relates to Husserl, Heidegger or Derrida depend on the idea that their positions are more nuanced than the simplistic SR reading.
This is not to say that there are moments of rhetorical excess where speculative realists lapse into shorthand by calling certain thinkers idealists as when continentalists caricature analytics are language obsessed or science as cold-hearted objectivism.
Leaving that aside the point being made by speculative realism here is that thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are so entrenched in an antirealist nexus that their qualifications concerning knowledge of the real renders them idealists for all intents and purposes. Or, putting it the other way, whatever form of realism one might claim for them is so compromised as to render their realism inert.
Back in the day I used to read many, many deconstructive accounts that took apart every last recourse to what was patently the intended meaning of a text. Then, towards the end, the writer would toss off a caveat -- "of course, all of this is not to say that anything goes". At this point your truly would tear his thinning hair and mutter, "Well then, what is to keep "anything" from "going"? The oft-cited demurral of Derrida in Limited Inc to the effect that reading him as a pure relativist was a bad reading is, I believe, an important clue, and I actually do take Derrida to be not a simple relativist or idealist. But the effect of deconstruction as a movement was to give cover to an impulse of relativism that was able to take for granted that realism was in some way sort of ridiculous; the details of how, then, we were able to ask for the salt to be passed (and get salt) were often shrugged off with an "oh well, we just do." Which, needless to say, is not philosophy. I think of SR as a family of responses that is aimed at trying to do better, to render the professed realism not inert, while giving due credit to all those freeplaying signifiers.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for your pellucid post. Forgive me for putting a little pressure on some you’re your thoughts. In a future post, would you expand on your concluding point? "thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are so entrenched in an antirealist nexus that their qualifications concerning knowledge of the real renders them idealists for all intents and purposes. Or, putting it the other way, whatever form of realism one might claim for them is so compromised as to render their realism inert."
ReplyDeleteI don't follow you here. It would help if you would clarify what you mean by "an antirealist nexus"; if you would then clarify how EH, MH, and JD are “entrenched” in it; why they are idealists given that none of them thought they were idealists. As you know, Derrida wrote critically about Hegel in "Outwork" and MH wrote critically about Kant. Could you some provide some references to texts by the writers who inform your notion of realism (and its superiority to idealism)? And could you refer to particular texts in which we can see how EH, MH, and JD are idealists, as you define it? Also, what does "knowledge of the real" mean? What does knowledge mean here and what does real mean here?
Also, your conclusion appears to contradict your earlier point that "According to this critique it is simply not true that Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida are idealists. I agree "
You then state "but here we have a blind-spot arising (often) from an unwillingness to engage in the nuance of the speculative realist arguments on the matter."
Would you say more about what are these nuances, in your view? Again, concrete references to spec real texts would help me. (I think we do not share the same bibliographies.) Btw—rhetorical question coming at you—isn’t there a comparable blind spot among spec realists to the nuances of MH and JD? I can't imagine more subtle, nuanced writers than Heidegger and Derrida. They confront going in circles, questioning the question, and impasses (aporias) in very different ways without ever saying that they are post-metaphysical or post-philosophy or post logo-centrism or post anything. Both MH and Derrida are poet philosophers, in my view. Or they are philosopher writers who often wrote about writers (poets, novelists) or philosophers like Plato who exiled literature and loathed writing in the everyday sense. Speculative realists, in my perhaps misinformed view, think they are post-(idealism, metaphysics, whatever) whether they say they say so or not. I draw this conclusion because QM (if he counts) implies that there is really no need to read MH or JD now (or, more precisely, it’s OK if you never read them. Because you don’t need to have done). QM does not read JD the way JD reads Plato or Rousseau. Unlike work by spec realists whom I have read, MH and JD keep reading and rereading the tradition / history of Western philosophy in very original, creative, detailed, close, and for some people disturbing ways while putting into question the limits of interpretation or reading. Paul de Man would be another close reader of German Idealism (essays on Kant and Hegel in Aesthetic Ideology); he was also a thinker of he blindspot—Blindess and Insight--as was Derrida—“White Mythology”). Though de Man identified as a philologist, not a philosopher, his criticism focused on what he called “material inscription.” Freud might be considered a fellow traveler (he and MH both write about the uncanny, for example).
One final question: is the history of Western philosophy (some the Pre-Socratics on) for you the history of Idealism, German Idealism being a kind of subset which eventually encloses even people who try to think critically about it, as MH and JD have done? In other words, what Derrida calls metaphysics, or what MH tries to redefine as metaphysics in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics for you Idealism? Does Anglo-analytic philosophy inform spec realism? Does Wittgenstein drop out?
(I ran out of space so I am posting this part separately.) Sorry to ask these very basic questions. Just trying to see the big picture and get a better sense of the bibliography that informs your thinking.
ReplyDeleteAgain, thanks very much for your post and for taking the time to write it.
Here is one last VERY basic question: What is the matter with (German) Idealism, apart from criticisms of Kant by Hegel, say, or of both by MH and Derrida? "Idealism" sometimes sounds like a four letter word when I hear spec realists use it.
ReplyDelete‘I think of SR as a family of responses that is aimed at trying to do better, to render the professed realism not inert, while giving due credit to all those freeplaying signifiers.’
ReplyDeleteIt seems to be almost necessary for philosophers (and humans more broadly) to head for miles in one direction before realizing it is the wrong route or perhaps just not the right route for where we need to be going *at the moment.*
I think SR is not so much set against the older forms of Continental philosophy so much as finds it not quite suitable for the sheer weirdness of current reality. So to me at least one must give credit to the thinking of the time but also try to come up with a thinking appropriate to one’s own time.
That tension is what seems to generate a lot of the debates we see (in my opinion at least since this is a quite meta-discussion on very diverse thinkers).
@Richard: I don’t think of these as basic questions at all. They cut right into the middle where the hard questions are. Part II is the Hegel/German Idealism bit. I just need to edit it a little, but it should be up in the next few days.
“I think of SR as a family of responses that is aimed at trying to do better, to render the professed realism not inert, while giving due credit to all those freeplaying signifiers.”
ReplyDeleteThis is probably the best description of what SR could be, in my opinion. And all philosophical thinking would do well to aspire to exactly that: a humility of signification which inspires towards achievements of human praxis.
Well done sir.
@Richard: Your long post was originally marked as spam by the site, but I will try tackle these questions too (maybe in a part 3).
ReplyDeletePaul,
ReplyDeleteI am currently a student of Richard's and we just finished a week or two ago reading After Finitude. Burt mentioned this blog and I just found it by chance after typing in "Derrida and Speculative Realism," spurred on by recent texts (I had just finished skimming intensley Eugene Thacker's After Life, which mentions QM's notion of Correlationist and then ends on an interesting reading of Bataille's a-theology).
I would love it if you would re-engage some of Burt's questions and post part 2 and part 3 of your response.
But if this would take too much time (and who has enough time?), could you answer for me if you think QM would see Derrida as a "correlationist"? QM seems concerned with the kind of "wonder" that many philosopher's have at why there is "something rather than nothing" and sees being as a "gift," which I have always interpreted as a kind of good thing, since this has implications for ethics. Derrida certainly uses metaphors of "gift" (although the 'gift' may be impossible)--does this correspond to what QM says about "givenness"? In other words, my question is--is Derrida guilty of correlationism just as much as Heidegger, according to QM?
Perhaps I have just read too much late Derrida inspired by Levinas and maybe QM is working on this as we speak (and will it simply follow Badiou?), but After Finitude didn't really explore the ethical consequences of his ontology. Despite my admiration for such a rigorous logical "proof" (for indeed it is a proof--says Badiou) of the necessity of contingency such that this contingency cannot be "anything at all" but most contain conditions--what does this imply about how one might live? Or are such questions irrelevant for QM since he seems to want to get over a humancentric view of existence?
Admittedly, my knowledge of Speculative Realism stems primarily from a close reading of After Finitude and a lack of engagement with Harman, et. al. I have also looked at Steven Shaviro’s blog and his engagement with OOO/Speculative realism in terms of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Kant. So perhaps by collapsing SR with QM I am doing a disservice to all of these thinkers.
By the way though, I do like your formulation of the task of SR: “I think of SR as a family of responses that is aimed at trying to do better, to render the professed realism not inert, while giving due credit to all those freeplaying signifiers.”
Still, I am not sure that I would agree that Derrida is a thinker of “freeplaying signifiers” and I believe Burt would agree with me on this. Your comment to not render “realism inert” recalls QM’s assertion (and perhaps this assertion is not maintained throughout the book) in the chapter on “Ancestrality” that the sort of scientific dating of events either has a realist meaning or is a non-sense. I’m not sure why I mention this, though.
Another issue I brought up to Burt is a disciplinary one. I suggested that as philosophy as OOO and speculative realism moves away from the so-called “linguistic turn” in continental philosophy, perhaps the (albeit, diverse) discipline of what we call “English” (or, Theory, or Rhetoric and Composition) may have less to do with continental thought? That is, without the “poetic philosophy” of Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Serres, and to some extend D&G, continental philosophy is taking itself away from the English departments and trying to legitimate itself as a discipline that (perhaps in the future) can be re-institutionalized and legitimized as an alternative to trend of American philosophy departments as primarily analytic.
In no way am I saying this is “bad,” but it is something that as an “English” student, whose primary way of dealing with the world is “textual” (despite my engagement in college with the range of philosophy from Aristotle to Avicenna to Descartes to Spinoza to Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Husserl, etc.) my ability to engage in these philosophical debates are getting away from me.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I hope that I have raised some interesting questions that you will find worthwhile to respond to. Thank you for such insightful blogposts.