Ray Brassier’s work combines a militant enthusiasm for the Enlightenment with a theoretical position that drastically limits the presumptions of thought in its ability to grasp the nature of reality. Cutting across a number of closely-held human conceits— including our usual self-esteem as a species and our aspiration towards harmony with nature—Brassier’s work aims at eliminating anything that might falsely make us feel at home in the world. The result is a position that might be called an eliminativist nihilism that takes the destruction of meaning as a positive result of the Enlightenment project: something to be pushed to its ultimate end, despite all protests to the contrary.

• Concepts and Objects

A stark contrast is provided by Iain Hamilton Grant’s return to the naturephilosophy of Schelling, which aims to construct a transcendental naturalism capable of providing an ontological foundation for science. Grappling fully with the implications of Kant’s critical turn even while constructively opposing it, Grant tries to move the transcendental project beyond its idealist tendencies so as to connect it with a dark and rumbling field of pure ‘productivity’ lying beneath all phenomenal products. It is from these very depths that nature, mind, society, and culture are all produced. Grant also aims to provide a consistent metaphysical foundation for contemporary science.

• Mining Conditions, (response to Harman’s critique)
• Does Nature Stay What It Is?

A different approach to the non-human world is found in the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. Like many of the Austrian philosophers of the late nineteenth century, Harman pursues a general theory of objects ranging from quarks to solar systems to dragons to insurgencies, but he also adds several weird twists to the theory. From one side he treats objects according to the Heideggerian insight that objects withdraw into depths inaccessible to all access. And from another side he follows Whitehead’s model, in which the relation between human and world is merely a special case of any relation at all: when fire burns cotton, this is different only by degree from the human perception of cotton. Whereas the phenomenological method bracketed the natural world out of consideration, Harman treats the phenomenological and the natural, or the perceptual and the causal, as neighbours in a drama in which objects can only make indirect contact with one another.

• On the Undermining of Objects

Quentin Meillassoux, whose 2006 debut book might be called the trigger for the Speculative Realist movement, argues for a mathematical absolute capable of making sense of scientific claims to have knowledge of a time prior to humanity. These ‘ancestral’ statements pose a problem for philosophies that refuse any knowledge of a realm independent of empirical access to it. If we are to understand these ancestral statements literally, however, it must be shown that we already have knowledge of the absolute. Meillassoux’s uniqueness lies in showing how correlationism (the idea that being and thought are only accessible in their co-relation) is self-refuting—that if we take it seriously, it already presupposes a knowledge of the absolute. Yet unlike the other Speculative Realists, Meillassoux is not dismissive of correlationism, but seeks to radicalize it from within. From the facticity of our particular correlation, Meillassoux derives the necessity of contingency or ‘hyperchaos’: the apparently counterintuitive result that anything is possible from one moment to the next.

• TOSCANO, Alberto, “Against Speculation, Or, A Critique of the Critique of Critique” raises the question of whether materialism and speculation are possible, by way of a careful analysis of Meillassoux’s After Finitude and the work of the Italian anti-Hegelian Marxist Lucio Colletti

Reacciones a After Finitude

• Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?”
• Martin Hägglund, “Radical Atheist Materialism”
• Peter Hallward, “Anything is Possible”
• Nathan Brown, “The Speculative and the Specific”

• In ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, Quentin Meillassoux returns to the classic Humean problem of grounding causal connections.
• François Laruelle undertakes an investigation into the generic in his contribution, entitled ‘The Generic as Predicate and Constant (Non-Philosophy and Materialism)’. Setting ‘genericity’ apart from philosophical universality, Laruelle produces genericity as a means through which disciplines and epistemologies can be equalized in light of the generic’s power of unilateral intervention.
• In ‘The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Philosophy’, Levi Bryant proposes a thought experiment in the spirit of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Noting philosophy’s epistemological obsession with the questions of where to begin, Bryant argues that the project of critique has become sterile, and invites the reader to imagine instead a new ontological beginning with what he calls ‘the ontic principle’. The ontic principle proposes that prior even to questions of epistemology, all questions of ontology presuppose difference and, more specifically, the production of difference. From the thesis that to be is to make a difference, Bryant develops a critique of correlationist philosophy, along with a host of theses about the being of objects, by way of proposing an object-oriented ontology he refers to as ‘onticology’.
• Steven Shaviro’s contribution to this volume is entitled ‘The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations’. Shaviro notes that of all the Speculative Realist philosophies, Harman’s is the one most closely allied with the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.
• Harman, in his ‘Response to Shaviro’, disputes these criticisms.
• Bruno Latour’s contribution to the volume, ‘Reflections on Étienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence’, gives us a foretaste of Latour’s own coming major book. While the early Latour of Irréductions22 followed the principle that all physical, mental, animal, and fictional actors are on the same philosophical footing, the later Latour (following the largely forgotten Souriau) insists on drawing distinctions between the many different modes of being.

  Ciencia
• In ‘Outland Empire’, Gabriel Catren proposes to weave together four strands of modern philosophy: the absolute, the system, phenomenology, and knowledge.
• In her essay ‘Wondering about Materialism’, Isabelle Stengers takes issue with the eliminativist understanding of nature, in which all knowledge except that of physics must ultimately be eliminated. This eliminativist materialism acts to lay the groundwork not just for an understanding of human reality, but for a transformation of it. It is a question of power and control. Against this reductive naturalism, Stengers proposes a messier and more complex materialism, one based on struggle among multiple entities and levels and not upon reducing the diversity of the world to a single plane.
• In ‘Emergence, Causality, and Realism’, Manuel DeLanda wades into debates surrounding emergence, proposing a non-mystical account of emergent systems based on singularities, attractors, and the virtual. Contesting the classical causal thesis that ‘one cause implies one effect, always’, DeLanda shows how sensitivity to initial conditions, coupled with interrelations between singularities, generate a host of non-linear phenomena and emergent properties.
• The collection concludes with Ben Woodard’s interview with Slavoj Žižek, in which Žižek articulates his own materialist position by contrasting it with a series of other materialisms—naturalist, democratic, discursive, and speculative. For Žižek, contrary to all these positions, only the assertion of the nature of reality as ‘non-All’ can sustain a truly materialist position. Responding to various criticisms of his materialism, Žižek tries to show how Hegel’s dialectical movement can resolve some of the paradoxes involved in causal determinism, evolutionary reformism and Meillassoux’s hyperchaos.