Review of Simon O'Sullivan On the Production of Subjectivity

Simon O’Sullivan’s excellent book sets out to do two important things. First, O’Sullivan swims upstream against a dominant current in contemporary continental thought by allowing for a key role for subjectiv-ity. With the shift away from the phenomenological subject in recent decades, along with more recent developments in speculative realism where the effort is to move beyond correlationism and thus the relationship between reality as it is in itself and as given to a subject, the result has been a general turn away from the subject. O’Sullivan agrees with most of the concerns that one finds expressed regarding the phenomenological subject, and his interests also bears strong affinities with the work of the speculative realists (O’Sullivan’s conclusion compares his project to the work of the leading speculative realists); however, and this is the second impor-tant thing O’Sullivan sets out to do, what is often missing in discussions of subjectivity is processual nature of the subject as a finite-infinite relation.