| Title | Post-Deconstructive Realism |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | It's About Time |
| Contributor | Peter Gratton (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0032.1.14 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-4-speculative-realism/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ |
| Copyright | Gratton, Peter |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2013-06-05 |
| Long abstract | Speculative realism began in part as a reaction for-mation against structuralist and post-structuralist approaches in Continental philosophy. Foucaultian archaeologies, Derridean deconstruction, and Iri-garay’s decentering of patriarchal discourses, for example, are said to focus so thoroughly on texts as to have given up on the real altogether. As Gra-ham Harman puts it, “Derrida and Foucault would rather die than call themselves realists.”1 Locked in the prison house of language, Derrida’s work in particular—Foucault and Irigaray at least could be said to investigate very real regimes of power—was said to be a “textual idealism” that could see nothing beyond any given text. Thus, Harman and Quentin Meillassoux seek means of driving straight past the “linguistic turn” that had side-tracked, they believe, a previous era of philosophers.2 As such, for them, to discuss a “deconstructive” or a “post-deconstruc-tive realism” would be, for them, an oxymoron, or worse, a rear-guard action defending Derrida et al. as realists avant la lettre.3 But my argument is that this is a dodge: at the heart of this speculative work is a pre-modern (not even just pre-Critical) consid-eration of time, where time is epiphenomenal when thought against the eternal (for Meillassoux, the mathematics of set theory; for Harman the objects in themselves “forever in the present”). And until a certain realism of time opens onto their thought, their interventions will be anything but timely. |
| Page range | pp. 84–90 |
| Print length | 7 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |