en The Speculative Turn, Continental Materialism and Realism, Bryant, Srnicek, Harman (eds), re.press Melbourne, 2011
Disponible online en re-press.org
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 decade or so later. It was towards the mid-1990s that Gilles Deleuze entered the ascendant, shortly before his death in November 1995, and his star remains perfectly visible 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 philosophical trends, their bastions scattered across the globe, have gained adherents and started 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 ‘materialism’ 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.