Though barely a decade old, Speculative Realism (SR) is already one of the most influential philosophical movements in art, architecture, and the humanities. A number of books have already been written on Speculative Realism in part or as a whole: those of Peter Gratton, Steven Shaviro, and Tom Sparrow come to mind.¹ But there is still plenty of room for additional treatments of the topic, and so far no such book has been written by any of the original Speculative Realists. Thus, when Polity Press asked my advice as to who should write their planned new survey on the theme, I volunteered for the task myself – the second time such a thing has happened.²

Though I relish this assignment, there are two potentially awkward circumstances that should be addressed at the outset. The first is that I am not just the author of this book but also one of its subjects, being one of the four original speakers at the initial SR workshop (along with Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux), as well as one of the authors most closely associated with the movement. The resulting need to speak about myself from time to time creates a Scylla-or-Charybdis predicament: should I insufferably refer to myself in the first person throughout this book, or even more insufferably in the third person? The solution I have chosen is as follows. When recollecting personal actions such as the giving of lectures or the writing of books, then the first person is the only real option, though I have tried to keep such reminders of authorial presence to a minimum. But when referring to my philosophical position more generally, I will refer to it impersonally as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). This entails a certain accidental injustice to my most prominent fellow OOO authors: Ian Bogost, Levi R. Bryant, and Timothy Morton.³ All three have views that diverge sharply from my own on certain points, and by no means do I claim to speak on behalf of them here. However, since this book concerns not OOO but the looser association of figures found in SR, it should be safe to generalize about the basic assumptions of SR’s object-oriented wing as opposed to those of Brassier, Grant, and Meillassoux.⁴

The second awkward question concerns the objectivity of this book. The original SR group did not last very long, and there are sharp philosophical and even personal disagreements between some of its members today. Though a total of two SR workshops were held, Meillassoux did not attend the second; he was replaced capably on that occasion by Alberto Toscano, who had moderated the original Goldsmiths event. As far as I know, the reason for Meillassoux’s absence from the second meeting was that he wished to emphasize the materialism of his position over the realism built into SR’s name. A much bigger issue is that there is a stark opposition between Brassier’s wing of SR and my own, to the point that Brassier today rejects even the name “Speculative Realism,” despite the fact that he coined it himself. His disciple Peter Wolfendale has even published a book of more than 400 pages purporting to demonstrate the intellectual worthlessness of my object-oriented position.⁵ I have documented these disputes at some length and will not expand on that exercise here, since this is meant to be an introductory book on Speculative Realism rather than a personal memoir.⁶ In any case, the present book aims to provide as fair a summary of Brassier’s position as of Grant’s and Meillassoux’s. While it is inevitable that some of Brassier’s devotees will not like my critical presentation of some of his ideas, this is simply a normal occupational hazard of intellectual life.

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On April 27, 2007, an intriguing philosophical workshop was held at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled “Speculative Realism,” it brought together four authors working in the continental (i.e. Franco-German) tradition of philosophy who each gave an hour-long talk, appearing in alphabetical order according to last name.⁷ Ray Brassier of Middlesex University in London went first, followed by Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. After a lunch break I went next myself, unfortunately in terrible pain from a severe throat infection. The fourth and final speaker of the day was Quentin Meillassoux of the École normale supérieure in Paris, the only non-anglophone participant in the workshop. The name Speculative Realism was coined by Brassier shortly before the event as a necessary compromise. I had known him fairly well since our first meeting two years earlier, when he invited me to Middlesex to give a lecture on Heidegger’s notoriously opaque concept of the fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals.⁸ The following year, as I passed briefly through London as a tourist, Brassier was kind enough to host me for a night at his and his wife’s apartment in North London. It was then that he first floated the idea of a joint event involving me and Grant, saying that he found us to be a good intellectual match, though at that point I myself was unfamiliar with Grant’s work. A few months later, after he returned from a brief trip to Paris, Brassier recommended a book he had found on the shelves but not yet read: Meillassoux’s Àpres la finitude, later translated into English by Brassier himself as After Finitude.⁹ Unlike Brassier, I had enough free time to read the book immediately, and on the basis of my positive report Brassier threw Meillassoux’s name into the mix for a joint event as well. Enthusiastic organizer that I am, I quickly emailed both Grant and Meillassoux while on a trip to Iceland, despite knowing neither of them personally; within days I received friendly replies from both. Brassier’s longtime friend Toscano quickly got to work organizing the event for us at Goldsmiths the following year; at some point I learned from Brassier that he had also invited Toscano to join our group, though the latter declined for reasons unknown to me. In need of a name for the event, we first considered Speculative Materialism, Meillassoux’s term for his own philosophy. But given my own ardently anti-materialist positon, Brassier proposed Speculative Realism instead, and obviously that name was eventually adopted.

Is there really such a thing as Speculative Realism, and, if it exists, is it anything new? Various critics have tried to answer “no” to one or both of these questions, though as I see it the answers are clearly “yes” and “yes.” Let’s start with realism. Though this word can mean different things to different people, its usual meaning in philosophy is relatively clear: realists are committed to the existence of a world independent of the human mind. One easy way to reject realism is to adopt the opposite position – idealism – for which reality is not independent of the mind (though we will see that Grant rejects this definition of the term). The most blatant case of idealism can be found in the works of the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1783), for whom “to be” simply means “to be perceived.” Berkeley has few literal followers today, but a more popular contemporary strand of idealism can be found in the so-called German Idealism of J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), F. W. J. von Schelling (1775–1854), and the hugely influential G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). In our own time, the prolific Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a good example of a philosophical idealist, despite his frequent signs of discomfort with this label. Alongside realists who affirm the existence of an independent world, and idealists who deny it, there are those who claim to occupy a sophisticated middle ground “beyond” realism and idealism. Perhaps the clearest examples of this in the continental tradition of philosophy are the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his rebellious star pupil Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For both Husserl and Heidegger, the question of an external world is merely a “pseudoproblem.” As they see it, we are always already outside ourselves directed at objects (Husserl) or always engaged in the world through pre-theoretical practical activity (Heidegger). From either standpoint there is no possibility of considering thought or world in isolation from each other, since they are always treated as a pair existing only in mutual correlation. While analytic philosophy has always considered realism and (to a lesser extent) idealism as live options, continental thought has almost unanimously adopted Husserl and Heidegger’s view that the realism vs. idealism question is a clumsy false conflict unworthy of serious philosophical attention. In my debut book Tool-Being (2002) I called this doctrine “the philosophy of access,” since it is concerned only with our access to the world and never with the world in its own right.¹⁰ Not long thereafter, Meillassoux coined the term “correlationism” for this doctrine and traced it back to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and even earlier to David Hume (1711–1776).¹¹ I prefer Meillassoux’s term to my own because of its superior economy and stronger etymological basis, and thus I have adopted “correlationism” for my own philosophical vocabulary as well.

It is safe to say that the original Speculative Realists were united by their rejection of correlationism, though some critics have claimed – wrongly, in my view – that correlationism does not exist. Largely as a result of this disagreement, Speculative Realism is still a minority current in the continental philosophy establishment as represented in the United States by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), whose annual conference I have not attended since my graduate student days in 1993. In Britain, there is an analogous group called the Society for European Philosophy (SEP), though my impression has been that this group is more open to SR than is its American counterpart. SEP even invited me to give a keynote lecture at their 2011 conference in York.

There are other critics who do not deny the existence of correlationism but merely dispute that opposition to it is sufficient grounds for a unified philosophical movement; this is especially true in Brassier’s circle. Though this attitude strikes me as unjustified, it is a matter of record that the four original philosophical projects of Speculative Realism are so different in kind that they were unable to hold together for more than two years. Žižek has even claimed that the breakup of the band was inevitable: “we can discern the limitation of speculative realism, a limitation signaled in the fact that it immediately split into four orientations … Meillassoux’s ‘speculative realism,’ Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy,’ Grant’s neovitalism, and Brassier’s radical nihilism.”¹² Yet it is far from clear that the split indicates a limitation on SR’s part. Generally speaking, the stronger a genre of thought or art, the more variations it will generate. Such important twentieth-century currents as phenomenology and psychoanalysis have remained influential largely because of the numerous different ways in which they were practiced, not because they remained rigidly governed by the authority of their respective founders, Husserl and Sigmund Freud. What still interests me in Speculative Realism after a decade of reflection is that four philosophical projects with apparently so little in common – not a single philosophical hero is shared by the group as a whole – nonetheless have a fairly obvious unity compared with the correlationist background of continental philosophy from which they emerged. All four philosophies are realisms, though this word means rather different things in each case. And all four are speculative, in the sense that, unlike the commonsensical realisms of yesteryear, all reach conclusions that seem counterintuitive or even downright strange.

As part of my effort to be balanced, I will follow the alphabetical order of speakers used at Goldsmiths in 2007. Furthermore, I will make an effort to devote approximately the same number of pages to each of the three SR orientations other than my own. When it comes to OOO, I will deliberately keep my presentation shorter, in part because I wish to avoid too much repetition of ideas I have already published elsewhere. Despite my goal of being objective, I obviously prefer my own philosophy to the three others under discussion, and will therefore make certain criticisms of the others rather than pretending to speak in the disinterested “voice of God.” Readers of this book deserve what they came for, which is a candid assessment on my part of the various Speculative Realist positions.

Chapter 1 follows Ray Brassier from his book Nihil Unbound (2008) through some more recent articles that hint at a still unpublished new version of his position. At the dawn of SR there was no specific name for the style of thinking pursued by Brassier and his circle, though “Prometheanism” seems to have become their term of choice in recent years, with “Accelerationism” used more often to refer to the strictly political thinking of Brassier’s disciples Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.¹³

Chapter 2 turns to Iain Hamilton Grant, beginning with his dense but innovative book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (2006), which reflects his deep indebtedness to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). An ostensibly surprising turn occurred with Grant’s second book, Idealism, co-authored with his talented younger associates Jeremy Dunham and Sean Watson. Yet we will see that what Grant means by “idealism” is not the opposite of realism but refers simply to the role of ideas in the productive power of nature itself, rather than the usual idealism of the privileged human subject. This does not mean that I accept Grant’s definition of idealism, as will be seen below.

Chapter 3 takes up the theme of Object-Oriented Ontology, which is most easily described as deriving from the joint influence of Heidegger and Bruno Latour (b. 1947). OOO is without question the strand of Speculative Realism that has had the widest interdisciplinary impact across the globe, and this seems to me an obvious strength rather than a weakness of the object-oriented current.

In chapter 4 we turn to the Speculative Materialism of Meillassoux, a lucid and powerful thinker if not – at least so far – a prolific one. It is important to cover the basic ideas of his landmark debut book After Finitude, no doubt the most famous individual work to emerge from Speculative Realism, and hence the one most frequently cited and widely translated. We will also discuss snippets of his strange and important doctoral thesis, The Divine Inexistence.

These chapters will be followed by a brief conclusion concerning how the four Speculative Realist thinkers might be divided into sub-groups among themselves. By way of preview: I will claim that Meillassoux and OOO are opposites and that Brassier and Grant are also opposites. The other combinations all entail agreement on one of the two most fundamental issues of Speculative Realism. For the benefit of students and other readers, useful study questions will be found at the end of each section.