Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/4

Rh continental philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman were on record as advocating metaphysics and realism, and it was only in 2007 that a more unified showing of such commitments became discernible. A small conference at Goldsmiths’s College, London, in April 2007, featuring Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman, was the venue at which continental realism cohered and where a title under which it might subsequently operate was agreed: speculative realism. These philosophers were not joined in their methods, philosophical sources or even attitudes to the title of speculative realism, but they did agree on their main adversary: correlationism.

In 2006 Meillassoux had published After Finitude, an intense and uncompromising work in which he defined and critiqued contradictions in the post-Kantian philosophical tradition and then proceeded to engineer an escape from them. Meillassoux’s target encompassed transcendentalism, phenomenology, post-phenomenology and the many contemporary critical theories that rested on them. His ability to draw these together was founded on what he termed their shared commitment to correlationism, the proposal ‘that there are no objects, no events, no laws, no beings which are not always-already correlated with a point of view, with a subjective access.’ The crux of this claim is that thinking and being are only accessible in their co-relation, never in their own right. Kant’s transcendental argument is exemplary of this, but it informs, with several variations, the whole of contemporary continental philosophy. It is also notable that, for Meillassoux, correlationism is synonymous with antirealism. What follows from this? Following Kant, epistemology was enthroned as first philosophy, and its primary concern became, where to begin in thought. It is this focus which the speculative realists oppose.

One might question the motives of these continental and speculative realists; they certainly differ. I offer three possibilities that may promote some understanding. First, it does not seem too controversial to suggest that the global ecological and economic crises, the ever-increasing 47