Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism, No. 3 (2012)

Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.

“This is a leviathan whale of an issue [510 pages!] comprising articles (by Benjamin Norris, Beatrice Marovich, Levi Bryant, Daniel Whistler, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Christopher Norris, and Michael Haworth), position papers (by Christian Thorne and Peter Wolfendale), translations (Graham Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation” into German, for example), reviews (of Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus, Christopher Watkin’s Difficult Atheism, Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism, and Joseph Nechvatal’s nOise anusmOs installation), and an interview with Stathis Psillos. Those interested in the ongoing struggles to define exactly what Speculative Realism (SR) is, will want to read the translation of Louis Morelle’s comprehensive “Speculative Realism: After Infinitude and Beyond?” also included in this issue.” (publisher)

Editors: Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson
Publisher punctum books, September 2012
Creative Commons license
ISBN 978-0988234017
510 pages

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John Mullarkey: Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (2009)

Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, can create its own philosophy? Indeed many film-philosophers claim that film does more than merely illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophize in direct audio-visual terms. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in cinema, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophizes because it accords with a favoured kind of extant philosophy.

Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film-image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Žižek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Rancière, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moreover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a meta logical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and re-visioning the field of film theory as a whole.

Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philosophy (and theory) always transform film into pre-texts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorise without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can produce philosophical theory?

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN 0230002471, 9780230002470
282 pages

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Ray Brassier: Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter (2001)

“The thesis tries to define and explain the rudiments of a ‘non-philosophical’ or ‘non-decisional’ theory of materialism on the basis of a theoretical framework provided by the ‘non-philosophy’ of François Laruelle. Neither anti-philosophical nor anti-materialist in character, non-materialism tries to construct a rigorously transcendental theory of matter by using certain instances of philosophical materialism as its source material.

The materialist decision to identify the real with matter is seen to retain a structural isomorphy with the phenomenological decision to identify the real with the phenomenon. Both decisions are shown to operate on the basis of a methodological idealism:- materialism on account of its confusion of matter and concept; phenomenology by virtue of its confusion of phenomenon and logos. By dissolving the respectively ‘materiological’ and ‘phenomenological’ amphibolies which are the result of the failure to effect a rigorously transcendental separation between matter and concept on the one hand, and between phenomenon and logos on the other, non-materialist theory proposes to mobilise the non-hybrid or non-decisional concepts of a ‘matter-without-concept’ and of a ‘phenomenon-without-logos’ in order to effect a unified but non-unitary theory of phenomenology and materialism. The result is a materialisation of thinking that operates according to matter’s foreclosure to decision. That is to say, a transcendental theory of the phenomenon, licensing limitless phenomenological plasticity, unconstrained by the apparatus of eidetic intuition or any horizon of apophantic disclosure;- but one which is simultaneously a transcendental theory of matter, uncontaminated by the bounds of empirical perception and free of all phenomenological circumscription.” (Synopsis)

Doctoral Thesis
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, April 2001
241 pages

discussion (Levi R. Bryant)

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