King’s Research Portal DOI: 9780980668353 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Srnicek, N., Bryant, L., & Harman, G. (2011). Towards a Speculative Philosophy. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (pp. 1-19). Re.press. https://doi.org/9780980668353 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognize and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. •Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. •You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain •You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 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 2010 re.press PO Box 40, Prahran, 3181, Melbourne, Australia http://www.re-press.org © re.press 2010 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 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 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. 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 publica- tions in English and his enjoyable public persona. To an increasing degree, Žižek be- came closely linked in the public mind with his confederate Alain Badiou, whose ma- jor works were increasingly available in English during the first decade of the century, with a key assist from Peter Hallward’s encyclopaedic survey, Badiou: A Subject to Truth.1 It is probable that Badiou and Žižek are the most widely read living thinkers in An- glophone continental philosophy today. But others of their approximate age group have entered the mix as well, championed initially by smaller groups of readers. Bruno Latour, already a giant in anthropology, sociology, and science studies, was smuggled into continental philosophy by way of the ‘object-oriented ontology’ of Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman. Somewhat ironically, Latour’s longtime intellec- tual friend Isabelle Stengers followed a rather different path into the Anglophone de- bate, by impressing the younger Deleuzians with her work on Deleuze and Whitehe- ad, and with her own series of books known as Cosmopolitiques.2 The ‘non-philosophy’ of François Laruelle has captured the imagination of many younger readers, despite rela- tively little of his work being available in English so far. This rising generation of Laru- ellians has also tended to show great interest in cognitive science and the various prac- titioners of ‘neurophilosophy’. Another important year 2002, when Manuel DeLanda in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy3 and Graham Harman in Tool-Being4 both open- ly proclaimed their realism, perhaps the first time this had been done with a straight face in the recent continental tradition.5 A half-decade later, this explicit call for real- ism was reinforced by what is so far the best-organized movement of the next genera- tion. Inspired by the publication of Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude6 (After Finitude) in early 2006, the first Speculative Realism event was held in April 2007 at Goldsmiths College, London. The original group included Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Harman, and Meillassoux; Alberto Toscano was moderator in 2007 and Meillassoux’s replacement at the follow-up event at Bristol in 2009. But while the group has already begun to break into various fragments, it remains a key rallying point for the rising generation of graduate students. Thanks to the recent importance of the blogosphere, and the aggressive acquisitions policies of new publishers such as zerO Books, many of these students are already surprisingly well known. The editors of this volume are pleased to have Nick Srnicek on board as a fitting representative of this group. AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTINENTAL MATERIALISM & REALISM It has long been commonplace within continental philosophy to focus on discourse, text, culture, consciousness, power, or ideas as what constitutes reality. But despite 1. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 2. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, 2 vols., Paris, La Découverte, 2003. 3. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, London, Continuum, 2002.