After Speculative Realism

Building upon the contributions to the movement of Speculative Realism by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, After Speculative Realism broadens and intensifies a number of key arguments in the field, engaging with both major philosophers of the past such as Hegel and Kant, and contemporary thinkers like Badiou and iek. The four original Speculative Realists were united by a seemingly stubborn fidelity towards the real as that which differed from sense experience, reason, the empirical sciences, representation, language and normativity. This volume further explores the ideas and arguments they had given regarding the potency of the real, but also investigates how the correlate between thinking and being may have been misinformed or limited by a specific reading of phenomenology, a motivation to separate appearance from reality, and a desire to revitalise the Kantian notion of noumena. After Speculative Realism charts the gap between the denouement of Speculative Realism and the birth of its contemporary successors such as the new realism of Maurizio Ferraris, the kinetic ontology of Thomas Nail, the transgressive realism of Lee Braver, the real abstraction popularised by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, various spectral realisms, Laruellian realisms, and much more. Lastly, a new and intriguing lineage of female interpreters of Speculative Realism, including Deborah Goldgaber, Valeria Salveterra and Katerina Kolozova, also make this volume a must read for anyone interested in the Speculative Realism canon.