New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy

235 Pages·2020·3.888 MB·English

by  Gregor Kroupa (editor), Jure Simoniti (editor)

New Realism and Contemporary
Philosophy
i
Also Available from Bloomsbury
Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Th inking, and the Brain ,
Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig
Romanticism and Speculative Realism, ed. by Chris Washington and
Anne C. McCarthy
Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis, Duane Rousselle
Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism,
ed. by Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian
ii
New Realism and Contemporary
Philosophy
Edited by Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti, 2020

Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Editors of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension
of this copyright page.

Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
Cover image: Die Toteninsel (The Island of the Dead) by Arnold Böcklin (1883)
(© Peter Horree / Alamy)

This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial
No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only,
provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any
third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book
were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any
inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can
accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0177-7
ePDF: 978-1-3501-0176-0
eBook: 978-1-3501-0178-4

Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

To fi nd out more about our authors and books visit w ww.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our n ewsletters .
iv
Contents
Preface Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti vi
Acknowledgments ix
1 “Philosophical Snuff ”: Th e Speculative Story of the Mind
Miran Bo ž ovi č 1
2 Leibniz’s Linguistic Realism Gregor Kroupa 19
3 Desert Islands and the Origins of Antirealism Jure Simoniti 41
4 To Make Truth: Ontology, Epistemology, Technology M aurizio Ferraris 73
5 Th e Real Scandal Lee Braver 85
6 Realism with a Straight Face: A Response to Leonard Lawlor
Graham Harman 99
7 A Return to the Pre-critical? On Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism
and a More General Problem Z dravko Kobe 113
8 Meta-transcendentalism and Error-First Ontology: Th e Cases of Gilbert
Simondon and Catherine Malabou A drian Johnston 145
9 On the Essence and Existence of So-called “Fictional Objects”
Markus Gabriel 179
10 Klein Bottle: L e tube de caption , or, the Subject’s Snout S lavoj Ž i ž ek 195
Notes on contributors 211
Index 213
v
Preface
“Realism” is undoubtedly the watchword of twenty-fi rst century continental philosophy.
It seems as if, suddenly, everyone calls herself a realist. Moreover, one might get the
impression that the entire heterogeneous fi eld of contemporary realism—in which the
adjectives “new” and “speculative” combine well with both “realism” and “materialism”—
is approaching the phase of maturity.
At the outset, each doctrine tends to be preoccupied with implementing one
preparatory, methodological “basic” procedure. Th e invention that put speculative
realism on the map was the insight into the necessity of thinking being outside any
correlation with thought; consequently, the fi rst operation to be performed was the
subtraction of the human perspective from the order of being. Th us, Quentin
Meillassoux’s aim was to establish the possibility of making claims about the time prior
to the advent of humanity, a position he proposed to found upon the mathematical
absolute. In Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, the human relation to the
world was methodically leveled down to being only one of the many possible relations
between objects. Iain Hamilton Grant, in his transcendental naturalism, advocated a
reduction of mental, social, and cultural phenomena to the more fundamental level of
the pure productivity of nature preceding all human and individual forms. Furthermore,
Ray Brassier argued for the strict exclusion of every possible human sense from the
world by posing the “transcendental extinction” of humanity as a necessary condition
of thought. In short, the procedures of speculative realists came across as eliminativist
and subtractive, indeed, quite literally so in the cases of Brassier and Meillassoux,
creating the appearance of a somewhat fl attened, leveled representation of being. In
this sense, one could speak of a “reductive phase” of the movement.
However, aft er the fi rst stage of aspiring to overcome the mental constraints and
inhibitions of the past, there usually follows a second, “productive” phase. Just as
Descartes, aft er bringing the aberrations of doubt to the point of certainty and defi ning
the principles of knowledge of clear and distinct ideas, had to venture into the open
terrain of physical ontology, the contemporary realists too are becoming increasingly
engaged in proposing more positive, applied, hands-on, determinate, and substantial
programs of disclosing reality in its anti-humanist dimensions.
Th is volume discusses a range of topics that have proved stimulating since 2007,
when the inaugural speculative realism conference took place in London. It builds
upon the fact that the early phase of the movement succeeded in winning back the
right for philosophy to engage with a range of questions that had been deemed
unworthy of serious contemporary thought. However, this has oft en led to
misunderstandings and simplistic readings of its treatment of the correlation and the
transcendental, to the point that it was sometimes suggested that any critique of
transcendentalism must inevitably fall back into dogmatism. Th e contributions in this
vi
Preface vii
volume, in addition to exhibiting some very original approaches to reality, recognize
the necessity to resume the original premises of speculative realism, both apologetically
and critically.
Graham Harman thus provides a clearly written account of the reasons why
contemporary realism does not simply amount to a return to pre-critical realism; along
with it, his chapter provides a summary of the notable diff erences between his own
object-oriented ontology and Meillassoux’s project of speculative materialism. On the
other hand, Zdravko Kobe off ers an in-depth critique of the main premises of
Meillassoux’s project and argues that the relations between the so-called ancestral,
correlationist, and speculative theses are incompatible.
Th e contributions of Gregor Kroupa and Miran Bo ž ovi č build on the topics inspired
by Meillassoux while deliberately placing them in the context of pre-critical philosophy.
Kroupa outlines the opposition between linguistic realism and determinism in the
history of modern philosophy; on this basis, he portrays Leibniz as someone who
uniquely combines both approaches in the framework of a non-subjective idealist
ontology that is very diff erent from the one criticized by contemporary realists. In the
same vein, Bo ž ovi č reverses the de-humanizing perspective of contemporary realism.
Instead of pursuing the narrative of ancestrality and extinction, in which the earth is
contemplated without human minds, he makes recourse to the thought experiments
and the literary imagination of early-modern spiritualism in order to explore the pre-
Kantian visions of human minds existing beyond this earth. By contrast, Jure Simoniti
endeavors to track down the origins of Western antirealism and, for this purpose,
examines the relation between the emergence of a surplus-truth and the subsequent
disclosure of an inhuman, non-conceptual reality. Simoniti argues for a strict separation
of the regime of t ruth from the regime of reality , the two philosophical concepts that
benefi t from their newly acquired dignity in contemporary realism.
Another take on the issue of truth and reality is then presented by Maurizio Ferraris
and, to some extent, Markus Gabriel, the two advocates of new realism. Ferraris
proposes the concept of “mesotruth” as mediating between ontology and epistemology,
and argues that it only emerges from reality as a product of technology, i.e., a set of
practical, sometimes pre-conceptual actions and skills. Gabriel, on the other hand,
further develops his distinction between existing and fi ctional entities and explains
that interpretations of works of art rely on so-called meta-fi ctional objects (fi ctional
characters, musical scores, etc.), which require imagination or aesthetic experience to
be completed. Gabriel then makes a case for realism of fi ctional entities by providing
them with his fi elds-of-sense ontology in which objects are bundles of truths belonging
to a specifi c domain.
In his chapter, Lee Braver takes a diff erent stance toward realism. He sees the point
of contact between reality and the subject not in terms of truth or intelligibility, both
being comprised within a transcendental framework, but rather in experience. It is
precisely the experiences of failure to know the world, ones that baffl e us and unsettle
our lives, that witness the disclosure of reality beyond the constraints of intelligible
forms. For Adrian Johnston, however, transcendentality is not to be viewed as
incompatible with realism. On the contrary, he argues, there is nothing inherently
idealist in transcendentality that would prohibit the move beyond subjectivity. In this
viii Preface
sense, Johnston’s “critical-dialectical naturalism” starts from the point of spontaneous
subjectivity and, on this basis, dialectically retrogresses toward an ontology of pre-
subjective nature which, in turn, serves as the foundation of every epistemology.
Finally, Slavoj Ž i ž ek maintains that only the excess of the Real, the place of inscription
of the subject, can make the incomplete whole of reality consistent; using a number of
examples, including the Klein bottle, the Real is shown to be the stain, the gap, the
torsion within reality itself.
When all is said and done, it is this element of excess that represents a common
feature that unites many of the otherwise diverse thinkers both of this volume and of
contemporary realism in general. Aft er the fi rst swing of speculative realism left us
with nothing but an image of a dull, indiscriminate, fl atly unmanned outside world,
now, in an attempt to elaborate and justify a more viable and robust realist stance, a
quest to defi ne the point of surplus over the mere subsistence of reality has begun. Many
contributions are on track to catch in the act a transcendent factor, an irruption, an
emergent product, i.e., an entity not simply derivable from the sensual, given aspects
of our quotidian world. Ži že k insists on the Real as the subjective condition of a
consistent reality establishing itself in the fi rst place; Harman maintains the
irreducibility of the excessive “thing-in-itself” to any relation between the objects of
reality; Ferraris professes the concept of “mesotruth” as emerging from reality by way
of technology; Braver pins great hopes on the possibility of intellectually transcendent
experiences; and Simoniti poses the surplus-truth as an indispensable condition of
realism. It seems as if, for some of the contributors, an excessive element is needed
from where any kind of methodology of disclosing the world can be applied at all,
thereby enabling a new outlook on reality, one no longer constrained by the twentieth-
century totalitarianism of phenomenological perspectives, hermeneutic interpretations,
language games, metaphorical and metonymical transfers, and common sense. And
there is probably no reason not to name this surplus simply “truth.”
Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti
Ljubljana, February 2020
Acknowledgments
Th e editors wish to thank the Slovenian Research Agency for the fi nancial support.
Th is book could not have been published in open access form without the generous
funding of the research project “Language and Science: the Possibility of Realism in
Modern Philosophy” (no. J6-7364) conducted at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty
of Arts.
ix