Speculative Materialism

This chapter critically examines the notion of a limit. It questions whether a putative opposition of philosophical “camps” emphasized in recent years is actually tenable. This opposition is taken to hold between classical approaches in a Kantian spirit, operating with the notion of necessary limits to human cognition and sense-making, and a recent “speculative” turn in philosophy championed by Quentin Meillassoux, looking to overcome such limits. The chapter’s contention against this dichotomy is that the rhetoric of unlimitedness depends on ideas (...) about limits that are rooted in the very Kantian way of thinking it claims to oppose. What is more, these ideas are just as questionable for they, in turn, rely on a notion of “the Absolute” which they claim to undermine. The chapter investigates these foundations of modern thought about limits and finitude in perception and thought, and the consequences these ideas have had. It closes by arguing that the notion of a limit as it has been formative for recent philosophy is inconsistent, and that our focus in philosophy should rather rest on the contextual conditions of thought: on this picture, thoughts articulate a contextually determined grip on reality, which presupposes that reality is used in a certain way. (shrink)

This chapter is a rethinking of my earlier “The Ages of Beauty” which investigated Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values. The argument is placed in a long history of beauty being considered as the middle between extremes. It slowly develops into a structure not merely of aesthetic experience but of existence itself, making it a competitor of Heidegger’s fourfold.

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and other related) fields, which posits her work as an advance over the history of “representationalism” and “social constructivism.” In turn, this one-sided materialism produces a skewed reading of the quantum mechanical phenomena (...) with which she engages. Her attempt to create an ontological (not epistemological) interpretation of quantum mechanics proves deconstructible. Instead, a science of undecidability or science of quant à helps us to understand debates among scientists and philosophers over the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics and its epistemological or ontological status – by demonstrating that these questions will necessarily remain unresolved. (shrink)

Drawing from Arjen Kleinherenbrink's recent book, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism (2019), this paper undertakes a detailed review of Kleinherenbrink's fourfold "externality thesis" vis-à-vis Deleuze's machine ontology. Reading Deleuze as a philosopher of the actual, this paper renders Deleuzean syntheses as passive contemplations, pulling other (passive) entities into an (active) experience and designating relations as expressed through contraction. In addition to reviewing Kleinherenbrink's book (which argues that the machine ontology is a guiding current that emerges in Deleuze's work after (...) Difference and Repetition) alongside much of Deleuze's oeuvre, we relate and juxtapose Deleuze's machine ontology to positions concerning externality held by a host of speculative realists. Arguing that the machine ontology has its own account of interaction, change, and novelty, we ultimately set to prove that positing an ontological "cut" on behalf of the virtual realm is unwarranted because, unlike the realm of actualities, it is extraneous to the structure of becoming-that is, because it cannot be homogenous, any theory of change vis-à-vis the virtual makes it impossible to explain how and why qualitatively different actualities are produced. (shrink)

A review of Tristan Garcia's The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession (2018) unravelling Garcia's process philosophy qua intensity.

Patterns in contemporary conflict highlight the failures of traditional views of the relationship between humanity and technology. This paper proposes that modern conflict is characterized by something called “dissimulation,” referring to numerous phenomena together emphasizing the inadequacies of conceiving man as the overseeing creator of technological advancement. It shows rather that man, particularly man in conflict, is always already implicated and concealed within complex technological networks and mediums, wherein humanity is just another player amongst others. This paper diagnoses and defines (...) the condition of “dissimulation” in drone warfare, modern partisanship and terrorism, raising further the question of the conceptualization of a technological object in doing so. It highlights the danger of an observed technological tendency too, particularly in terms of its shaping of contemporary conflict as well as our relationship to space and time. Having considered dissimulation’s characteristic phenomena and effects, a strategy for dealing with it is then suggested. (shrink)

Cabanis’ enucleation of the notion of instinct in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme articulates through a critique of the use of this notion by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who would not have recognised the founding role of physiology in human perceptive and intellectual activity. An analysis of Cabanis’ criticism to Condillac and an investigation of the meaning attributed to the notion of instinct by both philosophers allow to individuate in this notion the expression of two different (...) types of materialism. The different position of Cabanis and Condillac on this notion, in fact, reflects the divergence on a series of notions – e.g. reflexion, sensitivity, habitus – which can be traced back to the different aims of their investigations. In addition to highlighting this basic divergence, this paper aims to bring out – especially referring to Condillac’s Logique – some points of contact, of which Cabanis seems not to have considered, concerning the conception of the human body as ‘organisation physique’. (shrink)

In this two-part article, I propose a new materialist understanding of behavior. The term “mattering” in the title refers to sense-making behavior that matters, that is, to significant habits and materialized behaviors. By significant habits I mean protocols, practices and routines that generate ways of reading material signs and fixed accounts of movement. I advance a notion of behaving that stresses its materiality and sensory shaping, and I provide select examples from music. I note that current definitions of behavior do (...) not capture its material dimension. This is because behavioral science has mostly viewed matter as passive, and not as an active agency. Such an approach has metaphysically framed behavior as a phenomenon of presence that is external from its environment. The approach of behavioral science to matter where there are fixed borders between the internal and external is lacking, since it does not account for agential cuts as conceptualized by Karen Barad. Instead, I consider behavior performatively; as an ongoing iterative practice and as integral to the growth of immanently self-caused matter that spawns metastable relational formations that produce different possibilities for successive formations. In this regard, behavior matters, and matter behaves. One key aspect of my article advances Bernard Stiegler as a critical new materialist thinker. This advancement concerns the technical doings of artworks, which include the material activity that is generative of sensitivity: feelings and beliefs associated with a sense or meaning. I outline an example of the materiality of habits as constitutive of music. After that, I coin the transformative doings of matter on the artist as a “caripulation,” which is a desired movement or motion that transforms the mover and the moved. Finally, I raise “pharmacological” considerations in terms of the Stieglerian aspects of organic and inorganic organized matter. (shrink)

Artikkeli käy läpi Quentin Meillassoux’n Äärellisyyden jälkeen -teoksessa esittelemiä spekulatiivisen materialismin lähtökohtia: ajatuksen Kantin jälkeistä filosofiasta hallinneesta korrelationismista ja sen ”heikosta” ja ”vahvasta” muodosta sekä Meillassoux’n perusargumentin, jolla hän pyrkii osoittamaan vahvan korrelationismin pyrkimyksen absoluuttisista viitepiisteistä luopumiseen sisäisesti ristiriitaiseksi. Tarkastelun pääpaino on Meillassoux’n väitteessä, että ajattelun riisuminen kaikista absoluuttisista näkökohdista johtaa vahvan korrelationismin omaksumaan ”fideistisen”, uskon ja järjen erillisyyttä ja keskinäistä riippumattomuutta korostavan suhtautumisen uskonnolliseen uskoon. Tällainen fideismi voi Meillassoux’n mukaan suojella tai jopa palvella ”nykypäivän fanatismia”. Artikkeli esittää joukon kriittisiä (...) huomioita Meillassoux’n fideismin ja uskon, uskonnollisten absoluuttien sekä fanatismin käsitteistä. Hänen klassiseen valistusmoderniin nojaava fideismikritiikkinsä osoittautuu toistaiseksi puutteellisesti perustelluksi ja ongelmallisesti muotoilluksi. (shrink)

Among those speaking in the name of materialism, whether speculative, dialectical, or "new," it is commonplace to dismiss with a single gesture a vast field of theoretical and philosophical endeavor, indicated as the last 50 or 250 years of theory and philosophy. Self-styled "speculative" writers who would surpass all philosophy since Kant, and various New Materialists who sequester decades of thought under the heading of "constructivism," manufacture the avant-garde status of their own work by claiming to delineate a simple break (...) with the past. We would be at a loss, and perhaps at risk of missing the point, if we sought to uncover the common essence underlying this "new" work, either by looking for an agreement... (shrink)

The Guggenheim’s spring retrospective of the seminal Swedish painter, Hilma Af Klint, has, naturally, evoked a multitude of art critics and visual culture scholars who laud her radical abstraction which, at the beginning of the 20th century, preceded Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. Yet, where much attention has been given to the symbology and motifs riddling Klint’s work – bold, private, untethered and nonrepresentational as they are – there has been a modicum of nuanced thought on how, exactly, esotericism and theology fomented (...) Klint’s pedagogical projects. Jillian Steinhauer, for instance, has underscored Klint’s naturalistic watercolors; featuring flowers and lifelike drawings of women; Summer Landscape (1888) suggests Klint’s technical aptitude for rendering light. Jadranka Ryle, in a clever article titled “Reinventing the Yggdrasil,” invokes Klint’s motif of the Yggdrasil, or the holy tree of Norse mythology, as a political axle for Nordic romanticism. Ryle makes the claim that by redirecting the Yggdrasil towards androgynous abstraction, Klint’s engagement with Norse mythology subverts the nationalist and patriarchal romanticism that previously characterized the nineteenth century’s use of the Yggdrasil. Others have adroitly uncovered biographical fragments from Klint’s life, detailing how she and four friends formed De Fem (“the Five”), an exclusively female coven that met weekly, praying, meditating, and holding seances to commune with spiritual guides. Rather than poise the Swedish maverick within the cannon of abstraction qua a political praxis, feminist subject-being, or historiography – projects that have been exhaustively overwrought, to the point of rendering Klint’s work both mute and reductively technical– I would like to take this time to closely examine simply one of Klint’s paintings and foreground it as an axiomatic modernist injunction between metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

Laruelle's version of Marxism is termed "non-Marxism" whereby the "non-" is stated to stand for bracketing out Marxism's "philosophical sufficiency" and seeking to radicalise Marxism. It stands for the Laruellian non-philosophical variant of Marxism. It is precisely the non-philosophical use of Marx that has enabled the analysis at hand, demonstrating that at the heart of patriarchy and capitalism stands philosophical reason and its treatment of the Animal (both human and non-human). Women are de-realised even as use value and what is (...) exchanged in patriarchy is abstraction or the commodified femininity, which serves the multiplication of the surplus value or rather the pure value of masculinity. Just as the “C” in the M-C-M formula can be expunged as it is a mere relay for the endless repetition of the M-M automaton, so, to paraphrase Marx, because not an atom of matter enters the composition of woman as commodity, the material woman can be excluded from the equation P(hallus)-P(hallus). The less physicality in the pure value of femininity the more perfect the finite automaton of patriarchy. The fetishised femininity, as any form of commodity, is reified abstraction. The token of femininity is exchanged only in order for masculinity to engender itself. Masculinity (or the pure value of the Phallus), speculative reason, and rationalism are endowed with the same contempt for the physical, narcissistic circularity of thought and disgust for the woman outside the signifying automaton of fetishisation. (shrink)

Translated into Turkish by Mustafa Yalçınkaya.

Misreadings of Derrida's Of Grammatology were prevalent from the time of its debut, up to the present day. For fifty years, Derrida's generalised textuality has been misread as though he meant there was nothing outside text in the traditional sense. This misreading always serves to re-institute notions of linear temporal progress, either among self-styled avant-garde authors who would like to break with past traditions, or among self-styled conservatives who hope to repeat them. If the binaries that divide these works from (...) past texts are undecidable, the ground for such temporal progress disappears, along with the divisions by which we create linear narratives of history. The misreading of Derrida is an attempt to exorcise this undecidability and regain the intellectual and market value of novelty or repetition. (shrink)

The foundational gesture of New Materialism and Speculative Realism dismisses vast swaths of past philosophy and theory in order to signify their own avant-garde status. The violence of this gesture, which tries to corral difference within past texts in order to feign its own purity, can be considered as a theoretical quarantine. Examples of medical and spiritual quarantine, the 2014 ebola epidemic and Jesus’ temptation, are analyzed to show that the figure is inherently compromised – the harder one fights to (...) keep the other away, the more one becomes inseparable from it. Derrida's reflections on the reactions against deconstruction show that this desire for progress is always inherently conservative; Meillassoux and Jane Bennett are considered as contemporary examples. A deconstruction of corralation and the academico-capitalist forces driving these ‘innovations’ might open us to reading the never-simply-past text, and to the possibility of the event. (shrink)

In the 17th century the dissemination of philosophical ideas relied also on the critical summaries and reviews published by the journals. The focus of this paper is the reactions of two of these journals – the Journal de Trévoux, edited by the Jesuits of the Parisian Collège Louis Le Grand, and the Journal des Sçavans – to Condillac’s works. The Jesuit journal, under the direction of pére Berthier – probably himself the author of the reviews – had a precise plan (...) in presenting Condillac’s philosophy as an anti-empiricist and anti-materialist doctrine, sometime giving a misrepresentation of the author’s thought, which is also criticized on some points. The decision of the Journal de Trévoux to review the main works of Condillac is anyway worthy of attention, and probably betrays a certain interest toward the more up to date philosophical enquiry. The Journal des Sçavans was on the other hand more faithful in presenting Condillac’s works. (shrink)

Enter Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.Eschewing the verbose and often obscurantist tendencies of other philosopher-authors, Harman tackles what might otherwise be a complicated, controversial and counter-intuitive philosophical stance with accessible and easy-to-follow prose. OOO has never been so clear nor so convincingly presented as it is here. Covered in seven chapters, the book gives a genealogical account of OOO, chronicling the reason for its emergence, comparing it to both the past and current philosophical traditions and arguing for its (...) potency over the competing ontologies, almost all of which are post-Kantian. (shrink)

Book review of Quentin Meillassoux, Äärellisyyden jälkeen: tutkielma kontingenssin välttämättömyydestä [Après la finitude: essai sur la nécessité de la contingence], translated into Finnish by Ari Korhonen (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2017).

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a teleological notion of (...) the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense. (shrink)

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)

The publication of Form and Object: A Treatise on Things by Tristan Garcia, Prix de Flore-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, and screenwriter is a genuine event in the history of philosophy. Situating this event within classical, modern, and contemporary dialectical space, Jon Cogburn evaluates Garcia's metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions concerning: substance and process, analysis and dialectic, simple and whole, and discovery and creation. Cogburn also includes a critical assessment of the consequences of (...) Garcia's philosophy, the various unresolved problems in his treatise, and the future prospects of speculative metaphysics. (shrink)

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage (...) the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction. (shrink)

This book introduces the underlying ideas which have created the constellation of thought commonly referred to as Speculative Realism (SR). In a non-technical style Speculative Realism: An Epitome explores the thought of three contemporary philosophers: Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant. The book characterizes the milieu in which SR was born and charts how the tendencies of thought created from its birth have diverged into contemporary metaphysics. Readers will gain from the book an understanding how the evolving motion (...) of concepts created by the brief life of SR continue to change speculative philosophy in the contemporary Continental philosophical landscape today. (shrink)

A new book by Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, The Rise of Realism, is reviewed. The Rise of Realism is an introductory text that aims to clarify the difficulties that surround the philosophical concepts of realism and materialism (as well as their antitheses). This primer intended to introduce students and interested scholars to the concepts and literature on realism and its place in the continental tradition of philosophy and related social theory. The book’s core methodology is to outline the various (...) appropriations of the terms realism and materialism currently discussed in different sub-disciplines of philosophy as well as provide the reader with the authors’ own unique positions on realism. The book dialogue prose is stylistically engaging, lucid and academically current, providing both novice readers and seasoned scholars with an easy-to-read exploration of current continental thought that also has far-reaching implications for other disciplines such as critical theory, social theory and science and technology studies. (shrink)

The paper analyzes Quentin Meillassoux’s conception of the fideistic approach to religious faith intrinsic to the “strong correlationism” that he considers pervasive in contemporary thought. Backman presents the basic elements of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism and especially the thesis according to which strong correlationism involves a “fideistic” approach to religiosity. In doing so, Backman critically examines Meillassoux’s notions of post-metaphysical faith, religious absolutes, and contemporary fanaticism, especially against the background of Heidegger’s philosophy. According to Backman, Meillassoux’s logical and conceptual critique of (...) strong correlationism is innovative, and it may remain legitimate if its presuppositions are accepted. And yet, Backman argues that Meillassoux’s allegations of fideism seem to rely on the questionable application of Enlightenment conceptions to the contemporary situation. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s call for realism is a call for a new interest in the Earth as un-correlated being in philosophy. Unlike Meillassoux, Martin Heidegger has not been criticized for being a correlationist. To the contrary, his concept of the Earth has to be understood as un-correlated being, as it is opposed to the world as correlated being. First, this interpreta­tion of Heidegger’s concept of the Earth solves various problems of interpretation that are present in the secondary literature. Second, Heidegger’s characterization (...) of the Earth in the end remains unthought in his work. Third, in the age of global warming Meillassoux’s call for realism can help to conceive planet Earth as the ontic-ontological origin of the Heideggerian strife between Earth and world. (shrink)

Contemporary French philosophy is laying fresh claim to the human. Through a series of independent, simultaneous initiatives, arising in the writing of diverse current French thinkers, the figured of the human is being transformed and reworked. -/- Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils inherent in these attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our own brains. This (...) comparative assessment makes visible for the first time one of the most important trends in French thought today. (shrink)

Phenomenology has recently come under attack from proponents of speculative realism. In this paper, I present and assess the criticism, and argue that it is either superficial and simplistic or lacks novelty.

Realism Materialism Art (RMA) introduces a diverse selection of new realist and materialist philosophies and examines their ramifications in the arts. Encompassing neo-materialist theories, object-oriented ontologies, and neo-rationalist philosophies, RMA serves as a primer on “speculative realism,” considering its conceptual innovations as spurs to artistic thinking and practice and beyond. Despite their differences, these philosophical positions propose that thought can and does think outside itself, and that reality can be known without its being shaped by and for human comprehension. Today’s (...) realisms and materialisms explicitly challenge many of the dominant assumptions of cultural practice and theoretical inquiry, opening up new domains of research and artistic inquiry. -/- Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the 35 essays in RMA offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms. The book demonstrates the broad challenge of realist and materialist approaches to received disciplinary categories and forms of practice, capturing their nascent reworking of art, philosophy, culture, theory, and science, among other fields. As such, RMA expands beyond the primarily philosophical context in which realism and materialism have developed. (shrink)

This article offers an account of the philosophy of language expounded in the Cogitata de interpretatione (1692) of the Dutch philosopher Johannes De Raey (1620-1702). In this work, De Raey provided a theory of the formation and meaning language based on the metaphysics of René Descartes. De Raey distinguished between words signifying passions and sensations, ideas of the intellect, or external things. The aim of this article is to shift away the discussion of De Raey’s critique on the application of (...) the language of practical matters by Lodewijk Meijer and Spinoza, and to redirect modern interpretations to the originality of De Raey’s own reflections on the uses of language. In his linguistic thought, De Raey criticized philosophers such as Hobbes, who supposedly deprived Aristotelian terminology of any reference and meaningful use. The analysis of De Raey testifies to the emergence of the philosophy of language out of the double traditions of logic and metaphysics. It is to be interpreted as an effect of the emergence of an alternative worldview to Aristotelianism. This called for an update of the semantic catalogue of philosophy and practical disciplines. (shrink)

The chapter discusses Quentin Meillassoux's recent interpretation and critique of Heidegger's philosophical position, which he describes as "strong correlationism." It emphasizes the fact that Meillassoux situates Heidegger in the post-Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism that he defines in terms of a focus on the correlation between being and thinking. It is argued that Meillassoux's "speculative" attempt to overcome the Kantian philosophical framework in the name of absolute contingency should be understood as a further development and dialectical overcoming of its ultimate (...) contemporary form, the Heideggerian philosophy of finitude. (shrink)

In his book After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux criticizes post-Kantian philosophy for its inability to explain how science is able to describe a world without human beings. This paper addresses that challenge through a consideration of Heidegger’s thought and his thinking about science. It is argued that the disagreement between Meillassoux and Heidegger comes down to a question of first philosophy and the priority of logic or ontology in philosophy. Ultimately, Heidegger’s emphasis on ontology in philosophy is superior in its ability (...) to give a more comprehensive account of science and thinking about things themselves. (shrink)

The first dictionary dedicated to Quentin Meillassoux and the controversies surrounding his thought Perfect for philosophers just starting to read his work and for those looking to deepen their engagement, this dictionary defines all of the major terms of Meillassoux's work, prefaced by an introduction explaining his importance for the Continental philosophy scene. A-Z entries explain the influence of key figures, from Kant to Heidegger to Derrida, and define the complex terms that Meillassoux uses. The entries are written by the (...) top scholars in the field of speculative realism, often by those that highlight their own disagreements with him. This is more than a dictionary; this is your invitation into one of the liveliest debates in current philosophy. (shrink)

The current literature on Henricus Regius mainly focuses on his connections with the relevant context of the Utrecht crisis, on his relations with Descartes, on his views in medicine and natural philosophy, as well as on his notion of human being. Being these a weighty source of the analysis of Regius’s thought, I will focus on a still overlooked topic: namely, the logical and metaphysical arguments employed by Regius with regards to dualism. In fact, in the light of such arguments (...) one can ascertain that his positions present some inconsistencies to be explained through the dualistic assumptions underlying his metaphysics, making his positions more close to Descartes’s than it appears at first glance. Accordingly, my aim is to demonstrate that Regius’s metaphysics was ultimately dualistic, as he refused to accept the materialist entailments of his positions. Such ascertainment is to be provided, actually, by means of an analysis of Regius’s positions as these have been developed through his debate with Descartes. (shrink)