Preface

THE Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought is an art/theory collective which was formed in late 2012 by Paul Ennis, Fintan Neylan and Michael O’Rourke. The impetus behind our coming together was a shared emphasis in our work and our thinking on speculative realism and a mutual antipathy towards and marginal position vis-à-vis the academy qua institution. Initially, we could agree that the main things we had a fidelity to were speculative realisms (broadly conceived) and para-academic modes of thinking which could be deployed in a DIY fashion outside the walls of and alongside (even parasitical on) the business as usual operations of the academy. There is very little that theoretically we three have in common. Paul did a dissertation on Heidegger but is now mostly aligned with a bleak theoretical posi-tion. Fintan also began with Heidegger but his work now focuses on the philosophy of Manuel DeLanda. Michael comes from a background in literary theory and his writing is heavily underpinned by Derridean deconstruction. While these are highly reductive accounts – for the sake of shorthand – of our three theoretical and philosophical trajectories they do serve to demonstrate that there is not some unified agenda which DUST was brought about to serve or promulgate. Quite the contrary; it illustrates that DUST is, in fact, a collective (in the truest sense) which has as its mission the ‘opening’ up of speculative realism and of philo-sophical thinking more broadly. From our para-academic (non- and even anti-institutional) position we can afford not to hitch ourselves to any particular strand of speculative realism. As the quotations above (chosen completely at random) attest, DUST interests itself in and opens itself to the widest possible spectrum of thought: continental realism, accelerationism, post-continental thought, weird fiction, Object Oriented Ontology, posthumanism, new mater-ialisms, transcendental materialism, actor network theory, non-philosophy, eliminativism, dark vitalism, assemblage theory, transcen-dental nihilism, dark or xeno-phenomenology (the list could go on...).