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Speculations IV
lives is at present extremely short: the owl of Minerva now flies seconds after the saving of a pdf. If
there is a backlash in the academy in response to
this hydra-headed beast speculative realismand of
course there isit would be foolish to say that this
is entirely motivated by stupidity or various forms of
theoretical nostalgia. For there is a real conjunction
between the popularity of certain modes of discourse
(though not necessarily those modes themselves)
and the deeply buffoonish and horrifying forms of
undead self-reflection at play in contemporary life.
No effort in philosophical transmission is a priori
innocent of this creeping taint. I think that there
has been a particularly poor attempt to reflect on
a kind of speedy entrepreneurialism that flavours
the mode of discourse of some partisans of speculative realism.
Third: the fact that what we are concerned with in
this issue of Speculations is ultimately anything and
everything that is presumed to belong to the name
speculative realism means that praise as much as
blame will always be provisional and partial. Consequentially, the praise and blame (mostly blame) that
follows here will seem warranted to the extent that
the points made come to bear on particular cases.
There may be thoseand there always arewho
are well and truly interpolated, who turn around
quickly every time the word object or correlation
is uttered, and who will as a consequence find what
follows to be patently false. Again: such a subject-position, motivated by a fideism as fierce as any other,
is of zero philosophical interest.
The more interesting way of putting the matter,
fourth, is that in publishing a divergent range pro
and contra positions, this issue of Speculations is
itself fabricating a definition that will retroactively
give shape to what has already been written. This is
a philosophical project, this retroactive character of
definition; it is of eminent philosophical interest.
Every new concept refracts the fabric of concepts
littered behind it, somewhat in the fashion of the
Leibnizian monad. Everything which follows here,
moreover, adopts this taskto fabricate a definition
(here, in negative outline), in order to constitute
conceptual features of its referent.
There are, that is to say, two kinds of illusions that
arise on the basis of this definitional project. The
first kind are methodological illusions of a founding
moment, an essential claim, the instantiation of a new
and absolute law of thought. Speculative realism is
particularly prey to this form of illusion, in part due
to the tenor of the times (the entrepreneurialism of
which I have already spoken) and in part because its
speculative character exposes it to dogmatism. The
Jon Roffe
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Speculations IV
Earlier, I proposed that there are two forms of illusion or fantasia attendant to the task of defining
speculative realism, and that these two turn on a
third dimension, which I attributed to Kant. The
Kantian notion of transcendental illusion is another of the great riches of the critical tradition;
modified versions of the concept mark out the
Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, 102.
Ibid., 107.
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Jon Roffe
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Philosophythe stranger in every time, the inhuman housed in human existenceconfronts the
same situation when it catches itself in the mirror.
It can either, like Lovecrafts outsider flee into nepenthe, flee the mirror to ride with the mocking
and friendly ghouls on the night-wind. Or it can
take this peculiar situation of reflectionthoughts
horrifying capacity to adopt a perspective on itselfas one (though certainly not the only one) of
its faculties, and turn the mirror into a weapon.17
The looming tyranny of an entrepreneurial patronymy, a contradictory conception of temporality
and an absent reflection on the nature of thought:
such would be the triple spectre haunting speculative realism today.
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Speculations IV