The Speculative Turn Continental Materialism and Realism Edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman Open Access Statement – Please Read This book is Open Access. This work is not simply an electronic book; it is the open access version of a work that exists in a number of forms, the traditional printed form being one of them. Copyright Notice This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal aca- demic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. Furthermore, for any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more information see the details of the creative commons licence at this website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ This means that you can: • read and store this document free of charge • distribute it for personal use free of charge • print sections of the work for personal use • read or perform parts of the work in a context where no financial transactions take place However, you cannot: • gain financially from the work in anyway • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution of the work • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception of academic usage within educational institutions such as schools and universities) • reproduce, distribute or store the cover image outside of its function as a cover of this work • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship Cover Art The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions and thus cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work; however, the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. Support re.press / Purchasing Books The PDF you are reading is an electronic version of a physical book that can be purchased through any bookseller (including on-line stores), through the normal book supply channels, or re.press directly. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your uni- versity purchase a physical printed copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions please contact the publisher: re.press PO Box 40 Prahran, 3181 Victoria Australia [email protected] www.re-press.org The Speculative Turn Anamnesis Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re- collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis. a re.press series The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, editors re.press Melbourne 2011 re.press PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia http://www.re-press.org © the individual contributors and re.press 2011 This work is ‘Open Access’, published under a creative commons license which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatsoever and that you in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribu- tion, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more information see the details of the creative commons licence at this website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Title: The speculative turn : continental materialism and realism / edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. ISBN: 9780980668346 (pbk.) ISBN: 9780980668353 (ebook) Series: Anamnesis. Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Continental philosophy. Other Authors/Contributors: Bryant, Levi. Srnicek, Nick. Harman, Graham, 1968- Dewey Number: 190 Designed and Typeset by A&R Typeset in Baskerville Printed on-demand in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. This book is produced sustainably using plantation timber, and printed in the destination market on demand reducing wastage and excess transport. Contents 1 Towards a Speculative Philosophy 1 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman 2 Interview 19 Alain Badiou and Ben Woodard 3 On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy 21 Graham Harman 4 Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman 41 Iain Hamilton Grant 5 Concepts and Objects 47 Ray Brassier 6 Does Nature Stay What-it-is?: Dynamics and the Antecendence Criterion 66 Iain Hamilton Grant 7 Against Speculation, or, A Critique of the Critique of Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (After Colletti) 84 Alberto Toscano 8 Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux? 92 Adrian Johnston 9 Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux 114 Martin Hägglund 10 Anything is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude 130 Peter Hallward 11 The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux 142 Nathan Brown v vi Contents 12 Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject 164 Nick Srnicek 13 Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy 182 Reza Negarestani 14 Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today? 202 Slavoj Žižek 15 Potentiality and Virtuality 224 Quentin Meillassoux, translated by Robin Mackay 16 The Generic as Predicate and Constant: Non-Philosophy and Materialism 237 François Laruelle, translated by Taylor Adkins 17 The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology 261 Levi R. Bryant 18 The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations 279 Steven Shaviro 19 Response to Shaviro 291 Graham Harman 20 Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence 304 Bruno Latour, translated by Stephen Muecke 21 Outland Empire: Prolegomena to Speculative Absolutism 334 Gabriel Catren, translated by Taylor Adkins 22 Wondering about Materialism 368 Isabelle Stengers 23 Emergence, Causality and Realism 381 Manuel DeLanda 24 Ontology, Biology, and History of Affect 393 John Protevi 25 Interview 406 Slavoj Žižek and Ben Woodard Bibliography 416 1 Towards a Speculative Philosophy Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman This anthology assembles more than two dozen essays by many of the key figures in present-day continental philosophy. They hail from thirteen countries, speak sev- en different native languages, and are separated from eldest to youngest by a range of more than forty years. (The collection would have been even more diverse, if not that several additional key authors were prevented by circumstance from contrib- uting.) A number of well-established authors can be found in the pages that follow, joined by various emerging figures of the younger generation. These are exciting times in our field. No dominant hero now strides along the beach, as the phase of subservient commentary on the history of philosophy seems to have ended. Genu- ine attempts at full-blown systematic thought are no longer rare in our circles; in- creasingly, they are even expected. And whatever the possible drawbacks of globali- zation, the new global networks have worked very much in our favour: enhanced technologies have made the blogosphere and online booksellers major contributors to a new ‘primordial soup’ of continental philosophy. Though it is too early to know what strange life forms might evolve from this mixture, it seems clear enough that something important is happening. In our profession, there has never been a bet- ter time to be young. The first wave of twentieth century continental thought in the Anglophone world was dominated by phenomenology, with Martin Heidegger generally the most influential figure of the group. By the late 1970s, the influence of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault had started to gain the upper hand, reaching its zenith a dec- ade or so later. It was towards the mid-1990s that Gilles Deleuze entered the ascend- ant, shortly before his death in November 1995, and his star remains perfectly visi- ble today. But since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a more chaotic and in some ways more promising situation has taken shape. Various intriguing philosophi- cal trends, their bastions scattered across the globe, have gained adherents and start- ed to produce a critical mass of emblematic works. While it is difficult to find a single adequate name to cover all of these trends, we propose ‘The Speculative Turn’, as a deliberate counterpoint to the now tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn’. The words ‘material- 1 2 Towards a Speculative Philosophy ism’ and ‘realism’ in our subtitle clarify further the nature of the new trends, but also preserve a possible distinction between the material and the real. Following the death of Derrida in October 2004, Slavoj Žižek became perhaps the most visible celebrity in our midst, eased into this role by his numerous publications in English and his enjoyable public persona.