by Giorgio Cesarale

Image: Finis Ab Origine Pedet (My End is My Beginning)

Is the movement formerly known as Speculative Realism really as weird as it would wish, or is its free floating negativity the index of a different kind of estrangement? Giorgio Cesarale descends into the philosophical interior of the artworld’s favourite brand of theory and discovers a peculiarly inconsistent kind of nothing at its core.

The Strange Birth of Speculative Realism

To say that something is ‘strange’ or ‘weird’ implies an already established subject, or a subject in the process of being established. To define something in this way it must already have manifested itself, and been judged as incongruent with a standard. However, at the conference at Goldsmiths in 2007 that launched Speculative Realism (SR) as a philosophical movement and gave it its name, Graham Harman was already pointing out the strangeness of the philosophical project of SR’s proponents, Ray Brassier, Ian Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux himself. [i] The realism put forward by the (so-called) Speculative Realists departs from common sense and philosophical realism.[ii] The traditional ‘realist’ thesis that argues for a mind-independent reality is endorsed by all these philosophers, and it constitutes one of their central conceptual objectives (this holds particularly true for Meillassoux and Brassier). However, the way in which they attempt to verify this thesis, and most of all, the philosophical substance of their reasoning, is very different from what in the history of philosophy is labelled as realist. SR proposes that reality is insofar as it is mind-independent. But this proposition is more the consequence of its larger philosophical framework than the object of a determinate theoretical demonstration. SR’s particular form of realism arises from the combination of heterogeneous philosophical materials, and complex and differentiated strategies, from the reductive eliminativism of Brassier to the object-oriented philosophy of Harman, to the metaphysical dynamism of Grant and the Cartesian rationalism of Meillassoux.[iii]

However, what makes SR strange and to some extent idiosyncratic is, we argue, the peculiar relation that it establishes with both the issues of nothingness and negativity. If we look at the history of philosophy, it is in fact difficult to find a realist philosophy that engages as deeply with the issue of nothingness and negativity as SR. It is rather idealism, both in its ancient and modern forms, that has endowed negativity and nothingness with a decisive role. The question, however, is not confined to history – its theoretical dimension immediately arises. Traditional realism, by insisting on the autonomy of being from thought, claims the fully positive nature of the former, and takes being away from negativity. The sole form of negativity that traditional realism can concede is that of external negativity, which is hierarchically articulated: reality determines what represents it, despite never coinciding with it. It is not therefore by accident that the reemergence of the need for a materialist realism within the Marxist debate – we refer here to Lukács’ Ontology of Social Being – has been accompanied by a struggle against the ontologisation of negativity.

To speak of nothingness and negativity means at the same time to speak of nihilism, as Jacobi showed in his denunciation of the dissolving power of the ‘I’ of Fichtean idealism and its elimination of a mind-independent reality. The link between SR and nihilism, and especially with the nihilism of continental philosophy, is rather ambiguous however. If SR is strongly imbued with nihilism, it also tries to ‘domesticate’ it, to constructively relate to it. Such domestication mostly relies on the rediscovery of the absolute, of a being-in-itself which is capable of opposing the annihilating spiral triggered by the different conceptual devices of modern philosophy, ranging from the idealistic ‘I’ to the Hegelian dialectic and the ontological difference postulated by Heidegger. The task is without doubt ambitious, and it has required the accumulation of a vast array of philosophical tools. Nonetheless, we will argue that the philosophical bravura that distinguishes the proponents of SR is not sufficient for them to overcome the historical enmity between realism and nihilism or to relocate it on a different conceptual level.

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