Speculative Realism Pathfinder

This guide was created to help students, faculty, and other interested parties find
materials related to the emerging school of philosophical thought known as Speculative
Realism. I have linked each of the texts listed in the final section to their Google Books
entry in an attempt to make this guide useful to all; Google Books lists the prices of
various book retailers and has a "Find in a Library" link which can be used to find a
freely-available copy near you.

A. Reference Websites
These sites provide useful overviews of the Speculative Realism movement as well as
its many variants and sub-species. While they range in depth from a blog aggregator with
hundreds of posts to a brief encyclopedia entry, all are valuable overviews of the field.

Speculative Realism – Wikipedia: A public-edited introduction to the genre of

philosophy known as Speculative Realism. This is a good starting place for those
unfamiliar with philosophical lexicons. Almost all of the major Speculative
Realists who have published books also have their own separate Wikipedia
entries.

Collapse Vol. II – “Speculative Realism”: The Collapse journal has strong ties to
speculative realism, including this feature issue containing essays by premier
speculative realists Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and
Reza Negarestani.

Speculative Realism Blog Aggregator: A one-stop site for posts by bloggers

associated with the Speculative Realism movement. It might be hard to keep up
 with the quantity of content on the Aggregator but it does give an idea of how
much of the blogosphere participates in Speculative Realism debates.

Eliminative Materialism – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A thorough

overview of what is considered a sub-species of Speculative Realism. Eliminative
Materialism has been published on throughout the 1990s and is much more well-
documented than much of the Speculative Realism school of thought.

What is Actor-Network Theory?: As with Eliminative Materialism, Actor-

Network Theory has been around since the 1990s and is of great interest to the
Speculative Realist theorists. This excellent website provides concise definitions
of the theory from a multitude of scholars while linking to the cited works and
providing further reference sources at the very bottom of the page.

B. Blogs
Speculative Realism promises to be the first philosophy meaningfully engaged with
Web 2.0: several of its primary figures are bloggers. The movement gains momentum
from discussions between graduate students, interested amateurs, and philosophy
professors alike. Many of the bloggers listed here make an effort to respond to intriguing
comments posted on their blogs and welcome public debate.

• Larval Subjects by Levi Bryant: An excellent and accessible blog by Collin

County Community College Professor of Philosophy Levi Bryant. Bryant’s blog
is an especially great starting point for those interested in speculative realism
because on his Blogroll he denotes speculative realist blogs with an asterisk.

• Speculative Heresy by Ben Woodard, Nick Srnicek, and Taylor Adkins: This trio
of graduate student bloggers have created perhaps the most comprehensive
resource of all via a collaborative approach. This blog is notable for its tabs
featuring Resources (a collection of pertinent articles), Events (conferences and
 speeches), Faculty (a list of hyperlinks to speculative realist professors), and
Translations (hard-to-find translations of works by major French theorists).

• Object-Oriented Philosophy by Graham Harman: Harman, Associate Vice Provost

for Research and member of the Philosophy Department at the American
University of Cairo, quickly became one of the most-visited and prolific bloggers
when he started this blog, which addresses not only speculative realism but also
issues of writing style and challenges for would-be philosophers.

• Another Heidegger Blog by Paul John Ennis: This blog houses a multitude of
interviews with speculative realists and related philosophers, including fellow-
bloggers Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Ennis is a graduate
student of philosophy at University College in Dublin, Ireland.

• Naught Thought by Ben Woodard: Like most Wordpress blogs, Naught Thought
features useful tags on each article which can help identify its topic and whether
or not it specifically addresses Speculative Realism. Woodard is a graduate
student in philosophy at the European Graduate School.

• The Accursed Share by Nick Srnicek: As Srnicek’s personal blog, this deals more
with issues of politics and social change using the tools of Speculative Realism
and Actor-Network Theory. However, it also functions as a source of conference
and call for papers information. Nick Srnicek is a PhD student at the London
School of Economics.

• Complete Lies by Michael Austin: A pithy blog which frequently sums up inter-
blog debates and provides the author’s own opinion. Austin is a graduate student
at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and frequently updates the
Wikipedia page for Speculative Realism under the name Zorio.
C. Twitter Accounts
The three philosophers below have been associated with Speculative Realism and
published extensively on the philosophy, in online forums as well as in traditional print
mediums. Though Twitter is too concise for rigorous discussion, it can provide glimpses
into the lives of these theorists as well as useful links.

• onticologist: Levi Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's

Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence.

• doctorzamalek (private profile): Graham Harman, author of Guerrilla

Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things.

• NaughtThought: Ben Woodard, author of the Naught Thought blog.

• nsrnicek (private profile): Nick Srnicek, co-editor of the forthcoming The

Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism.

• zorio: Michael Austin, author of the Complete Lies blog.

D. Fundamental Texts
While Speculative Realism may be the first philosophical movement to fully
benefit from social media and other recent web trends, the most serious work is still done
in the form of dense texts littered with citations from theorists old and new. Here is a list,
far from comprehensive, of the first few speculative realist books which founded the
school of thought and are generally representative of its views. Each text is linked to its
Google Books entry or, if available, the UIUC online catalog record.

• After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin

Meillassoux: Meillassoux’s book is considered the prototypical Speculative
Realist work, introducing the pivotal concept of “correlationism” and setting this
 new realm of philosophy apart from its predecessors. ISBN-13: 9780826496744
(hardcover), 9781441173836 (paperback).

• `Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani:

Cyclonopedia is a fiction novel that engages heavily with the issues at the heart of
this philosophy. While this genre-bending book may not technically be a work of
theory, it is equally ill-placed beside contemporary fiction and many philosophers
have referenced it and consider it part of the emerging Speculative Realist canon.
ISBN-13: 9780980544008 (paperback).

Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things by Graham

Harman: Harman’s use of humor and concrete examples make his writing an
excellent starting place for those usually intimidated by philosophical writing.
Herein, he turns phenomenology on its head, using it as a tool to investigate
“the objects themselves” rather than mere human perception of objects.
ISBN-13: 9780812694567 (paperback).

• Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction by Ray Brassier: In one of the

more difficult works in the field, Brassier draws on the jargon-dense “non-
philosophy” of contemporary François Laurelle, arguing for a nihilistic reduction
of human existence and renewed focus on material reality. ISBN-13:
9780230522046 (hardcover), 9780230522053 (paperback).

• Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory by Bruno

Latour: Latour is one of the most established of the speculative realists, having
published numerous books through the 1980s to present. This book is a good
overview of a certain species of Speculative Realist thought which focuses on
how networks, i.e. the connection between active agents, constitute society.
ISBN-13: 9780199256044 (hardcover), 9780199256051 (paperback).

Philosophies of Nature after Schelling by Iain Hamilton Grant: In his first original
 book, Grant argues for a renewed focus on the inorganic realm, drawing
supporting arguments from 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Schelling
and arguing against the legacy of Immanuel Kant, which is seen as unjustly
privileging the position of humans in existence. ISBN-13: 9780826479020
(hardcover), 9781847064325 (paperback).

The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (forthcoming) edited

by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman: this book promises to be an
excellent introduction to the emerging field of Speculative Realism, featuring a
breadth essays by almost all major theorists associated with the movement. ISBN-
13: 9780980668346.

Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects by Graham Harman:

Harman’s first book is an interesting case study in how Speculative Realists use
the philosophical methods of previous generations to their own ends, as Harman
singles out a specific passage by Heidegger and explores its manifold
consequences, in the process going further than Heidegger dared to venture.
ISBN-13: 9780812694444 (paperback).

E. Terms
Speculative Realism is generally considered “a useful umbrella term, chosen
precisely because it was vague enough to encompass a variety of fundamentally
heterogeneous philosophical research programmes.” (Brassier, 2009) These philosophies,
while at once radically different from one another, could be said to find some coherence
in their opposition to correlationist philosophies; to quote Ray Brassier again, “the only
thing that unites us is antipathy to what Quentin Meillassoux calls ‘correlationism’—the
doctrine, especially prevalent among ‘Continental’ philosophers, that humans and world
cannot be conceived in isolation from one other—a ‘correlationist’ is any philosopher
who insists that the human-world correlate is philosophy’s sole legitimate concern”
(2009). An analogy could be drawn to the term “postmodernism,” which is used to label a
very diverse set of theories which nonetheless could be said to be united in their
opposition to the modernist project of enlightenment.

To the terms themselves! Each is listed alongside theorists whose positions have been (at
one point) identified with the term.
• Actor-Network Theory (Bruno Latour, Michel Callon)
• Assemblage Theory (Manuel DeLanda)
• Eliminative Materialism (Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland)
• Methodological Naturalism (Ray Brassier)
• Neo-Vitalism (Iain Hamilton Grant)
• Object-Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant)
• Revisionary Naturalism (Ray Brassier)
• Spectral Realism (Michael Austin)
• Speculative Materialism (Quentin Meillassoux)
• Speculative Realism (Ray Brassier originally coined this term, but in the
aforementioned interview he dismisses it as having become “singularly unhelpful”
[2009])
• Transcendental Materialism (Iain Hamilton Grant)
• Transcendental Nihilism (Ray Brassier)
• Transcendental Realism (Ray Brassier, Roy Bhaskar)
Any comments or additions are welcome, I don't pretend to know everything about these
labels.

Eric Phetteplace
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Graduate School of Library & Information Science

This views on this website are solely the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the University
of Illinois, GSLIS, the philosophers themselves, or any of the many firebreathing bloggers out there in the
web.

Comments and constructive criticism are welcome: phette23[at]gmail.com.

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