Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014)

“Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as “first philosophy” and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our allpervasive anthropocentrism which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

This special issue of Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.”

With contributions by Steven Shaviro, Theodor Leiber and Kirsten Voigt Sellars, Matija Jelača, Claire Colebrook, N. Katherine Hayles, Jon Cogburn and Mark Allan Ohm, Miguel Penas López, Graham Harman, Bettina Funcke, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson, Roberto Simanowski, Francis Halsall, Magdalena Wisniowska Disegno, and Sjoerd van Tuinen.

Edited by Ridvan Askin, Paul J Ennis, Andreas Hägler, and Philip Schweighauser
Publisher punctum books, Brooklyn, NY, May 2014
Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA
ISBN 0692203168, 9780692203163
ISSN 2327-803X
474 pages

PDF (single PDF, 9 MB, updated on 2016-12-24)
PDFs (individual essays, updated on 2016-12-24)