continental philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman were on record as advocating metaphysics and realism, and it was only in 2007 that a more unified showing of such commitments became discernible. A small conference at Goldsmiths’s College, London, in April 2007, featuring Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman, was the venue at which continental realism cohered and where a title under which it might subsequently operate was agreed: speculative realism.[1] These philosophers were not joined in their methods, philosophical sources or even attitudes to the title of speculative realism, but they did agree on their main adversary: correlationism.
In 2006 Meillassoux had published After Finitude,[2] an intense and
uncompromising work in which he defined and critiqued contradictions in
the post-Kantian philosophical tradition and then proceeded to engineer an
escape from them. Meillassoux’s target encompassed transcendentalism,
phenomenology, post-phenomenology and the many contemporary critical
theories that rested on them. His ability to draw these together was
founded on what he termed their shared commitment to correlationism,
the proposal ‘that there are no objects, no events, no laws, no beings
which are not always-already correlated with a point of view, with a
subjective access.’[3] The crux of this claim is that thinking and being are only
accessible in their co-relation, never in their own right. Kant’s
transcendental argument is exemplary of this, but it informs, with several
variations, the whole of contemporary continental philosophy. It is also
notable that, for Meillassoux, correlationism is synonymous with
antirealism. What follows from this? Following Kant, epistemology was
enthroned as first philosophy, and its primary concern became, where to
begin in thought. It is this focus which the speculative realists oppose.
One might question the motives of these continental and
speculative realists; they certainly differ. I offer three possibilities that may
promote some understanding. First, it does not seem too controversial to
suggest that the global ecological and economic crises, the ever-increasing
- ↑ Representative works include Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London: Continuum 2009; I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, London: Continuum 2008; R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010; G. Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Chicago: Open Court 2002.
- ↑ Or rather the French edition, Après la Finitude, was published in 2006; the English edition did not first appear until 2008.
- ↑ This is derived from an introductory paper to his work, given by Meillassoux, and cited in P. J. Ennis, Continental Realism, Winchester: Zer0 Books 2011, 4.
