House of Sheaves: The Asymptotic Horror of Nested Nature

BRACKETING the taxonomic controversies surrounding Speculative Realism (is it a species of thought, how many subclasses are there, does it cohere at all?) one can assert that the rhetorical if not argumenta-tive core of Quentin Meillassoux’s reopening of the ‘great outdoors’ has been, and continues to be, a pervasive trajectory in contemporary thinking. This wilderness is differently carved according to varying rubrics: the proliferation of entities (Harman), the unbinding of the tran-scendental power of thought (Brassier), the absolutisation of facticity (Meillassoux), and the precedence of being-as-nature prior to thinking (Grant). I wish to argue, unsurprisingly, for the importance of Grant’s model for speculatively navigating the spaces of nature. Grant’s position is fortified, I would argue, by the utilisation of Peirce’s continuum and the numerous thinkers of the geometric-cognitive (geo-cog) turn who cast alliances, however obliquely at times, with Schelling and the project of Naturphilosophie.