Genealogies of Speculation

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.

• AcknowledgementsContributor BiographiesArmen Avanessian and Suhail Malik – Introduction: Speculative GenealogiesGENEALOGY1. Steven Shaviro – Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism2. Adrian Johnston – Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan and Material Negativity3. Levi R. Bryant – For a Realist Systems Theory: Luhmann, the Correlationist Controversy and Materiality4. Sjoerd van Tuinen -Deleuze: Speculative and Practical Philosophy5. Quentin Meillassoux – Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Materialist Analysis of the Sign Devoid of MeaningGENEALOGY1. Steven Shaviro – Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism2. Adrian Johnston – Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan and Material Negativity3. Levi R. Bryant – For a Realist Systems Theory: Luhmann, the Correlationist Controversy and Materiality4. Sjoerd van Tuinen -Deleuze: Speculative and Practical PhilosophyLANGUAGES OF SPECULATION5. Quentin Meillassoux – Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Materialist Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning6. Armen Avanessian – Language Ontology7. Arne De Boever – The Realist Novel and 'the Great Outdoors': Towards a Literary-Speculative Realism8. Suhail Malik – Materialist Reason and its Languages. Part One: Absolute Reason, Absolute DeconstructionSCIENCE9. Nathan Coombs – Underlabouring for Science: Althusser, Brassier, Bhaskar10. Dorothea Olkowski – Formalism, Materialism and Consciousness11. Myra J. Hird and Kathryn Yusoff – Subtending Relations: Bacteria, Geology and the PossibleIndex

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.