Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/5

Rh incursions of technology into the human life world, or the escalating awareness of existential dangers, such as meteors, pandemics, resource depletion and supervolcanoes, have placed the ascendency of the human subject in question. This has led some to claim that ‘the dominant antirealist strain of continental philosophy has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time.’ The focus on the human-world correlate – consciousness, discourse, language, power, text and so on – now seems signally inappropriate for wrestling with the problems at hand. There is a pressing demand for ‘turning once more toward reality itself.’ Similarly, one may be of the view that the many children of Kant’s Copernican Revolution have now reached an impasse. That is, everywhere one looks, there is a ‘conflict of critiques’. Whether Kantians, Marxists, Husserlians, Heideggerians, Foucauldians, Derrideans, Lacanians, Gadamerians or Wittgensteinians, all propose their favoured critiques and points of epistemological access. But there is no means to choose between them. Finally, as many speculative realists propose, correlationism itself may be overcome. The Copernican Revolution need never have been accepted in the first place. How, then, to proceed?

Speculative realism is taken as the point of entry into continental realism. By way of definition, the movement is realist in its opposition to correlationism and speculative in that the models of reality it produces might be contrary to common sense, counter-intuitive, or even weird. As a supplement to this, one might also think of the speculative realist as asking, ‘[w]hat if we were to “bracket” the project of critique and questions of access, and proceed in our speculations as the beginning student of philosophy might begin?’ The speculative wager here is that, ‘such a naive and pre-critical beginning might give us the resources to pose differently the philosophical questions we have inherited, thereby opening up new possibilities of thought and a line of flight from a framework that has largely exhausted itself and become rote.’ What, though, might the 48