Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Contributor Biographies Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik – Introduction: Speculative Genealogies GENEALOGY 1. Steven Shaviro – Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism 2. Adrian Johnston – Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan and Material Negativity 3. Levi R. Bryant – For a Realist Systems Theory: Luhmann, the Correlationist Controversy and Materiality 4. Sjoerd van Tuinen -Deleuze: Speculative and Practical Philosophy 5. Quentin Meillassoux – Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Materialist Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning GENEALOGY 1. Steven Shaviro – Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism 2. Adrian Johnston – Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan and Material Negativity 3. Levi R. Bryant – For a Realist Systems Theory: Luhmann, the Correlationist Controversy and Materiality 4. Sjoerd van Tuinen -Deleuze: Speculative and Practical Philosophy LANGUAGES OF SPECULATION 5. Quentin Meillassoux – Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Materialist Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning 6. Armen Avanessian – Language Ontology 7. Arne De Boever – The Realist Novel and 'the Great Outdoors': Towards a Literary-Speculative Realism 8. Suhail Malik – Materialist Reason and its Languages. Part One: Absolute Reason, Absolute Deconstruction SCIENCE 9. Nathan Coombs – Underlabouring for Science: Althusser, Brassier, Bhaskar 10. Dorothea Olkowski – Formalism, Materialism and Consciousness 11. Myra J. Hird and Kathryn Yusoff – Subtending Relations: Bacteria, Geology and the Possible Index

Promotional Information

Genealogies of Speculation poses a serious and rigorous intervention in the contemporary theoretical discourse of 'speculative thought', tracing heretofore neglected intersections, continuities and debts with wider 20th century continental philosophy.

About the Author

Dr. Armen Avanessian teaches at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and is co-author of Speculative Drawing (Sternberg Press, 2014) and Present Tense (Bloomsbury, 2015). Dr. Suhail Malik is Reader in Critical Studies in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, London, UK.

Reviews

The philosophies of Speculative Realism come in two basic flavors: rationalist and non-rationalist, both of them largely opposed to the poststrucuralist currents that dominated the late 20th-century. While Avanessian and Malik align themselves firmly with the rationalist camp of SR, they also defend poststructuralism in a manner foreign to their fellow rationalists. In so doing, they have assembled a balanced collection of essays that breaks new ground in relating the thought of Althusser, Cavaillès, Lacan, Luhmann, Novalis, Peirce, Whitehead, analytic philosophy, and poststrucuralist feminism to the ideas of the Speculative Realists. This book should quickly become one of the authoritative anthologies in the field.
*Graham Harman, Distinguished University Professor, American University in Cairo, Egypt*

Clear, incisive, and invariably important, the chapters in this book debate the growing legacy of the new continental realisms for rethinking not just our access to the real, but to subjectivity, politics, and nature. Framed in terms of these realisms' relationship to poststructuralism and other philosophical predecessors, this book refuses the facile "with us or against us" kind of debates often found around discussions of the new realisms, and in this way provides not just insightful essays on this new movement, but ways of rereading major figures of our recent philosophical past. Highly recommended.
*Peter Gratton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada*

Rumors of Speculative Realism's demise have been greatly exaggerated; readers of Genealogies of Speculation will be in a position to marvel at the continuing reverberations of the intellectual revolution started by Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier.
*Jon Cogburn, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Louisiana State University, USA*

This is a stellar collection of papers; each is willing to reinvent the problems of modern philosophy, which is rare and invigorating, and demands an equally creative response.
*Iain Hamilton Grant, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy, University of the West of England, UK*