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 Žižek.

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.

Charles William Johns is a Research Assistant at University of Lincoln, UK. His research focuses on discourses that combine or challenge the distinctions between philosophy and literature.

Hilan Bensusan is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy, University of Brasilia, Brazil.