| Long abstract | Presented as the first signifi-cant movement in continental philosophy since structuralism, speculative realism (SR) vociferously announces the end of correlationism and anthropocentrism in philosophy in favor of a “speculative turn.” By accommodating things, matter, sci-ence, and the real qua objects as important as (if not more so than) language, thought, the phenomenal, and the social, SR has garnered attention and criticism from all sides these past few years. “Speculative Realism” was originally the title of a conference in 2007 that brought together four lesser-known but promising philosophers, and then it subsequently spread like wildfire via the Internet through blogs and open-access publishers, in addition to the traditional journal articles, books, colloquia, conferences and other official channels of academia. It has now become a “legitimate” subject of scholarship, taught in certain departments of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics and acquiring a section on the website Phil-papers. And yet, what is SR? For SR seems to have become, in Anglo-Saxon “continental” circles, a buzzword, one of these fashionable terms whose meaning is obscured the more it spreads. Originally naming a philosophically diverse core of young philosophers seeking to emphasize themes that have become relatively marginal in continental philosophy such as metaphysical speculation, the inorganic, or the absolute, and united by a common refusal to attend solely to textual objects or phenomenal experience, this vague designation has sparked a diffuse desire among continental intellectuals to break with some presuppositions inherited from previous generations. Crystallizing a Zeitgeist, the term has lost its specificity, becoming the generic name for all those among the philosophical “young guard” who are laying claim to a “new metaphysics.” |
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