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Young children engage with and discuss diverse childhood realities, including death. Routinely characterised as unknowledgeable based on normative developmentalist assumptions, children’s engagements with death are frequently dismissed as ‘magical’ and irrational, despite their close resemblance to normative cultural and religious narratives of death offered by adults. This work takes children’s wor(l)ds seriously. By showcasing children’s (5–7-year-old) engagements with death – collected using artistic, play-based, child-centred, and video-reflexive methods – this work ‘makes nonsense’ of death. Drawing on a Meillassouxean speculative philosophy, I radically depart from rational meaning-making and foreground death’s contingency. Methodologically, I innovatively draw on improv performance art traditions (e.g. ‘Yes, and … ’) to develop and operationalise improv analysis, attending to children’s dynamic engagements with death as improvisations emerged from their socio-material-relational expertise, instead of concrete representation of reality/-ies. Through this playful yet philosophically sound lens, I argue that children’s intra-actions with death matter philosophically as they afford death to be thinkable in itself – rather than being mere representations – through a speculative lens of contingency. Embodying artistic and philosophical traditions, this work constitutes a multidisciplinary methodological double move that attempts to bring philosophical innovation into existing ways of (un)knowing about death/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores bells, and objects in general, from a philosophical perspective. More specifically, it explores the way objects orient our being, but only partially as aspects of things always remain withdrawn from access. Through an exploration of the elemental forms of bells, this article positions object exploration as a wholly spiritual and pleasurable undertaking. No matter how much we delve into something there will always be unknowable aspects to a thing. Our experience of things is an intensely metaphysical experience that only living in the world (through) time can elucidate. In this case, the long standing object bell, with all its historical and cultural uses and meanings, becomes our gateway to the metaphysical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manuscript, we take up the invitation by the editors of this special issue to contribute to answering the question: "What does it mean to write qualitatively?" Drawing on speculative realism, we describe writing qualitatively as a relational process of becoming through writing and reading creative nonfiction. We reflect on our experiences as researchers, subjects, collaborators, writers, and readers through lens of relational power. By collaborating to craft an immersive true story that revealed larger truths to readers, we were affected by each other, created ourselves out of what we had taken in, and influenced each other and others after being affected by them in our processes of relational becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” However, dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components imply one another and interact. This article shows that systems theory has long asserted the fundamental character of Harman’s dyad, expressing it as the union of internal structure and external function, which correspond exactly to what Levi Bryant, characterizing Harman’s views, refers to as the intra-ontic and the inter-ontic, respectively. After interpreting Harman’s dyad in terms of the ontology of systems theory, the article illustrates his dyad with a variety of examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. The structure–function dyad is a spatial conception of a system as an object. It is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or with an additional orthogonal dyad. Adding a temporal dyad to the structure–function dyad joins the idea of an event and/or process to the idea of an object.

"Speculative Realism in Environmental Education and the Philosophy of Education" was a joint research symposium for the networks on Environmental and Sustainability Education (NW 30) and Philosophy of Education (NW 13), held at the European Conference of Education Research (ECER), 25 August, 2023, in Glasgow, Scotland. The symposium aimed to open up discussion on renewed interest in realisms in the field of philosophy, and what that might mean for education research and the field of environmental education research in particular. As backdrop, environmental education harbours strong democratic traditions as well as recognitions of relationships to a world that is composed by more than human positions and desires. The symposium then forms part of an ongoing discussion of how these positions are understood and intermingle in a rapidly changing world. The expectation of the event was to broaden discussion about the voices present in environmental education, human and otherwise, and sharpen engagement with established traditions within the field. In brief, three paper presentations and discussion by Graham Harman probed questions of: (a) the lightness and darkness of the objects of education, (b) who visibly desires which object in/as education, and (c) the risks of literalisms and correlationalisms in, for example, what is alluring to, and pursued by, educators. In other words, what we care about in and as environmental and sustainability education, what is perceived/treated as peculiar, and what is treated as normal and perverse to the realities of education in the Anthropocene, all matter to the work of speculative realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes speculative science fiction as a genre that helps contemporary literature to address the problem of literary periodization and deal with the ecological crisis properly, that is, as a contemporary issue. The essay further offers garbage as the major problematic that this new genre should focus on, since it is not only the constant reminder of the contemporary ecological crisis but also the potential resource for living in/with that crisis. Garbage tells the story of previous eras' destructive behaviors, but it also helps invent a story of a different present and future when what has been discarded or disparaged might be salvage, thus creating a timeline unforeseen in the previous eras. Drawing upon speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) in particular, the essay imagines what such a salvaging and creative story looks like and calls it the genre of speculative science fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural operations of Zhou Ming's photography (b.1960), which was aimed at exploring the deeper changes that have gripped the unstoppable urban renewal of Shanghai. His photo-essay Shanghai: An Alternative View (2000–2005), showcases the absurd and incongruous organic and inorganic spaces devoted to new points of view about the ruins that lay behind an assortment of high inner-city density residential areas situated in the Zhabei, Huangpu, and Houkou districts. Zhou Ming's drive to de-humanize his apparent humanist photography through everyday objects and other signage found during his walking practices, also reveals multiple surrealist metaphoric representations between the materiality of the city and a slanted exaggeration of reality. His documentary camera sets out an ontological shift vis-à-vis the incidence of the everyday 'found objects', in which the privilege of humans over objects disappears. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the photographer's speculative aesthetics raises the need to redefine Chinese contemporary photography with theories linked to object-oriented ontologies and in general, to new materialism. This can be interpreted as a historical-cultural consolidation of media continuum that also embraces pre-photographic practices that can liberate objects and subjects from 'sensitive' content in a post-socialist reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the pervasive use of journey and traveller metaphors in everyday language, and their applications in philosophical discourse. While these metaphors offer rich insights into abstract concepts such as love and philosophy, they also introduce ambiguities that can impede effective communication. By dissecting the nuances of these metaphorical figures, the paper aims to clarify their meanings and enhance their explanatory power. Divided into three main sections, the paper first discusses different types of metaphors and their general structure, providing a foundation for understanding metaphorical language. The second section delves into the specific metaphor of journey and traveller, analyzing its various connotations and implications with insights from scholars such as Dariusz Kubok and Steven Shaviro. Through this analysis, the distinctions between a traveller and a tourist are explored to deepen our understanding of metaphorical frameworks in philosophical discourse. Finally, the paper examines a specific journey strategy, focusing on Object-Oriented Ontology as an exemplification of a philosophical journey. Building upon prior conclusions, this last section elucidates the meaning and implications of this journey strategy, seeking to shed light on the multifaceted nature of philosophical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to explore the ways in which scholars from Poland and Ukraine engage with Graham Harman’s philosophical work1 . The introductory part briefly describes Harman’s ontology and demonstrates the link connecting Harman with Polish and Ukrainian intellectual environments. Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) states that objects are the fundamental building blocks of reality and cannot be reduced either to what they are made of or to what they do, that is, either to their constituents or to their effects. The connection with Poland and Ukraine goes back to the theory of objects suggested by the Polish philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski, whom Harman names among the predecessors of his ontology and who influenced both Polish and Ukrainian intellectual milieus. The next part of the article examines the history of the reception, identifying its key events and publications. The reception in Poland proves to be much more substantial than in Ukraine. A common tendency is determined: a conflation of Harman’s OOO and speculative realism by mistakenly ascribing the features of the former to the latter (broader concept), which suggests that speculative realism is being received through the lens of Harman’s project. The next part establishes the key discursive points that are used to map Harman’s ideas within the contemporary philosophical landscape. They can be summarised by the terms antianthropocentrism and antireductionism. The final part analyses the strategies for applying Harman’s theory showing that it can become the lens for interpretation and direct our attention to nonhumans and the hidden, inexplicable dimension of things or provide an ontological grounding for semi-literary and literary discourses. The methodology of this application, though, needs further development and clarification. Overall, in Poland, two of Harman’s books and two articles have been translated, and at least two books, one Ph.D. dissertation, and around two dozen articles discuss or apply his ideas. Apart from philosophy, his OOO is used for discussing literature, video games, films, humanities in general, education, management processes, antique studies, and ecocriticism. In Ukraine, one of Harman’s articles has been translated, and around ten articles and one collective monography engage with his philosophical project. Some of the Ukrainian works also apply Harman’s OOO in contexts that are not strictly philosophical, namely, in literary criticism, urban studies, film studies, and humanities in general. This paper can be of use to researchers studying OOO and its reception in different countries. In addition, it can help Ukrainian and Polish scholars who want to discuss or use OOO to familiarize themselves with the previous reception in their countries, thus facilitating domestic philosophical interaction.

The paper focuses on the repeated and systematic references to the figure of Ulysses in the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, and Reza Negarestani. These are not random occurrences; Ulysses represents a key figure in the mutually interconnected visions and reflections related to the idea of a “world without people” that binds the named authors implicitly and explicitly to the originally Dantean imagery. Through a detailed exposition of the Ulyssean positions of the philosophers in question, the essay demonstrates twofold: first, that the “nihilistic branch” of speculative realism can be read as a specific inversion of the Dantean agenda, and second, that in light of the arguments of “transcendental nihilism” and the logical radicalization of the Ulyssean figure, Dante’s Divine Comedy can be read as an anachronistic speculative project.

Subjective mediation is often treated as an epistemological problem, because it denies the thinker unfettered access to things-in-themselves. This article proposes instead that the sociohistorically sedimented qualities of subjective mediation are a window onto the positional juncture at which the subject ends and things-in-themselves begin. When analyzed together, flamenco letras and medieval troubadour lyric record an expansive experiential account of movement through the world, producing a portrait of the dynamics by which subjects spatiotemporally locate themselves and therefore showing us the conditions underlying the split between subjectivity and things-in-themselves. In troubadour lyric, subjects rely on untraversed positive distance to position themselves in space and time, while subjects in flamenco letras foreground negative distance, which has already been traversed. Exemplars from influential troubadours Guilhem IX of Peitieus and Marcabru elucidate the particularities of positive distance and then illustrate its transition into an uncertainty that bespeaks negativity. Meanwhile, a survey of representative flamenco letras uncovers the historicized spatiotemporal precarity of negative distance. The meshwork of relations that arise from the interplay of positive and negative distance demonstrates how the subject's experience of space and time relies on determinate mixtures and separations that both consolidate its positionality and express the material dynamics that have shaped its mediated aperture onto the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to address the challenge that the current wide-ranging and multifaceted planetary crisis poses to representation and to ways of thinking about it. It focuses on examining the role of illustration and images in selected recent theoretical works, especially in the ones concerned with the relationship between humans and the environment. What is surveyed is the terrain of selected theoretical texts associated with New Materialisms and Speculative Realism (including Object-Oriented Ontology), as both orientations, respectively, argue for a recognition of a vibrant sense-making agency of matter and for thinking that does away with privileging specifically human ways of interacting with reality. More importantly, these discourses often rely on visual arts and artistic projects or interventions as important means to make their point and to illustrate the 'non-representable'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Argumenta Philosophica is the property of Herder Editorial S.L. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses how the Iranian-born philosopher Reza Negarestani has negotiated human distinctiveness in the course of his intellectual journey from speculative realism to inhuman rationalism (Rather than rationalist inhumanism, as some sources have it (Anon 2021)). Moving from challenging the correlationism of post-Kantian Western philosophy, via critiques of the Deleuze and Guattari's war machine, Nick Land's accelerationism, and Ray Brassier's nihilism, Negarestani eventually turns to the neo-pragmatists of the Pittsburgh School and their reflections on reason, normativity, and praxis. The mapping of this trajectory is divided into four parts: Having already discussed the political theology of Reza Negarestani elsewhere (Kersten, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 78(2–4), 256 267, 2022), the first part of this article briefly introduces Reza Negarestani's early theory fiction as an exponent of speculative realism (Negarestani 2008), followed by two sections dedicated to close readings of Negarestani's investigations of the inhuman (Negarestani 2011 and 2014). The examination of these writings will demonstrate how they have served as prolegomena to his next book-length publication, Intelligence and Spirit (2018), a connection that will be briefly assessed in the final part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. In contemporary philosophy there is an emerging interest in space and time in relation to the existential-phenomenological tradition. Theoretical analysis. The article analyses some modern approaches to the problem of space and time in the context of the above-mentioned methodology, as well as those approaches that either stand in opposition to the phenomenological tradition or try to form the related understanding of the problem. The problematisation of space within the framework of the approach we are interested in has only been outlined in Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein. Since the emergence of speculative realism, with its inherent questioning of the possibility of thinking reality (space and time) beyond the horizon of cognitive and sensory features of human presence, the question of the relationship between being and thinking, especially in the aspect of the possibility of constructing new ontologies, sounds new in philosophy. Conclusion. The analysis of modern approaches to the problem of space and time in the context of the existential-phenomenological tradition shows that in modern philosophy the problematisation of space qualitatively complements human philosophy and develops some of its aspects.

This article considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into ‘thinking’: one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also essential to art and film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis – to regard film as a form of AI.

This essay confronts Ray Brassier’s vindication of nihilism with other two important but frequently underexamined philosophical attempts to overcome nihilism: Hans Jonas’ and Keiji Nishitani’s. By putting these different takes on nihilism into dialogue, it explores some blind spots in Brassier’s position, as well as some of the practical consequences, for our current planetary situation, of undertaking a radical divorce between the normative and the natural that results from his radical nihilism. The article opts for a more moderate acceptance and eventual self-overcoming of nihilism, according to which, even if natural entities are indifferent to human reasons and meanings, this does not entail that nature is bereft of a human-independent normative dimension. In other words, the essay argues that care must be taken not to confuse criticisms of an anthropocentric conception of reasons and meanings with the belief that meaning is completely absent from the natural world. Thus, the central contention of the article is that, given our current climate and ecological catastrophe, one of the most pressing tasks of contemporary philosophy is to understand normativity in non-anthropocentric ways, so that humans are no longer considered as the only entities that respond to normativity. Such an attitude conceives humans as estranged normative creatures amidst a meaningless, indifferent natural world, toward which they would have no ethical responsibilities. The essay finishes by suggesting ways in which to develop an account that does not fall into this ethical vacuum.

Verstörung—often considered a minor work by Bernhard—is a somewhat overlooked example of ecologically oriented fiction in the German language. In this novel, Bernhard examines the implications of a darkly ecological concept of the environment (as this article characterizes it with reference to Timothy Morton), confronting it with epistemological questions and placing it in the context of psychoanalysis and Schopenhauerian metaphysics. The novel anticipates some important aspects of the Anthropocene thesis in its critique of the nature/culture divide, its widening of the concept of agency, its insistence on viewing individual human history in the context of natural history, its problematization of the natural/synthetic distinction and its consistent utilization of geological imagery. Verstörung is suffused with a remarkable, dark, and twisted proto‐Anthropocene aesthetics. It is a post‐mortem examination of the world after nature, a Gefühls‐ und Gesteinsgeschichte that carries the reader into the dark heart of the Austrian countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the theme of nihilism from the perspective of post-continental philosophy by focusing on semiotics and information theory and the question of “meaning” at stake between them. Nihilism is characterised here as an avatar of the counter-Enlightenment tradition. Post-continental philosophy is defined by a positive revaluation of reason, science, and technology, which were critiqued for their nihilistic effects by key continental philosophers. Rather than critiquing nihilism, then, post-continental philosophers have tended to affirm it. This article argues that, despite appearances, such developments in fact allow a deepened response to nihilism, considered as an existential problem. It does so by using Lyotard’s critique of semiotics to show how the kind of linguistic and cultural meaning associated with continental philosophy is itself a kind of nihilism. It then examines Meillassoux’s theory of the meaningless sign and Laruelle’s idea of the secret truth of Hermes to argue that this new paradigm of post-continental philosophy allows a response to nihilism by offering an alternative to semiotic meaning. Thus freed, this new paradigm allows the embrace of information theory as a plural articulation of meanings grounded in meaningless data, which enables a superior response to nihilism in the information age.

I present an account of nihilism, following Foucault and Nietzsche, as a sort of colonization of our thinking by a religious form of normativity, grounded in our submission to truth as correspondence, in the idea that the facts themselves could be binding upon us. I then present Brassier’s radicalization of nihilism and showed how it both remained subservient to this religious ideal of truth. I argue, further, that far than showing how a commitment to Enlightenment reason and science demands a cold metaphysics of death, in dismissing the irreducibly plural ways in which what is determines thought, Brassier’s attempt to secure a fit between thought and disenchanted world suggests that the view is an expression of the unliveable condition of nihilism, rather than its proof. Finally, I present a form of naturalism that makes legitimate claim to the legacy of Enlightenment, drawing from French historical epistemology, and dispenses with the problems animating Brassier’s nihilism by radically transforming the concept of truth and how we relate to it.

Can there be a "resumption" of modernity? After Jürgen Habermas famously qualified modernity as an "unfinished project", after Jean-François Lyotard declared it "liquidated", should we now attempt to "go back" to it? 1 Obviously not. Even if some of us estimated such a resumption was desirable, there is no going back in historical times. Always forward--towards a glorious future or closer to the cliff -- but always forward. Here is a tale about future reckonings of Bruno Latour's AIME project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into 'thinking': one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also essential to art and film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis - to regard film as a form of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anadolu University Journal of Art & Design / Sanat & Tasarım is the property of Anadolu University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In opposition to individualist readings of the novel, this essay explores the roles of collective psychology and narrative method in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Beginning with a survey of the critical claim that Whitehead’s text fails to explore the texture of enslaved life under white supremacy, it proceeds into an analysis of TUR’s place within Whitehead’s oeuvre and in terms of the neo-slave narrative and speculative realist genres. Having unpacked the differences and continuities between the style of TUR and the author’s earlier works, the essay then advances its larger claim that Whitehead’s attention to group psychology and intermental focalization creates a narrative style to match the “racial logic” of the American slave system. With the ideological and social valences of that “logic” among the novel’s white characters in place, the essay then tracks the counterpart representations among the black communities of The Underground Railroad and provides an account of how Whitehead employs various forms of irony to anatomize individual and collective life under a white-supremacist system. The piece concludes with a discussion of how this mode of reading bears on the wider genre of speculative realism overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Viveiros de Castro, comparison as ontology defines the ontological turn in anthropology. It presents a necessity for philosophy to approach the matter with comparative strategy. Morten Pedersen claims that ontological turn should be interpreted as a fulfillment of an anthropological version of Husserl’s method. Thus, phenomenology enters the field of interest along with its critique in Speculative Realism. In this article, we will see clearly why this selection is not accidental but rather unavoidable. Amerindian perspectivism necessitates the philosophical reconceptualization of perspective in general, which is to be taken as a challenge for the established discourses. The need arises to rethink the problematic of Kantian perspectivism and its offspring. Amerindian perspectivism proposes cosmological deictics that hold a spatiality of the perspective of the other, of the in-itself, thus it comes into an opposition to Kant’s system. Phenomenological perspective, as one of the Kantian offspring, faces a predicament that is interwoven with the critique of correlationism arriving from Speculative Realisms. The synthetic character of phenomenology allows enough flexibility for it to traverse these recent charges. We will draw a comparative picture of dynamic co-evolution of strains of recent thought, striving for a synthetic multiplicity, permeated by a common perspectival thread.

This paper deals with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the death drive from the perspective of speculative philosophy. For this purpose, three philosophers have been chosen: Nick Land, Ray Brassier, and Reza Negarestani. I claim that they gradually radicalised the Freudian thought: Land expanded it to capitalist economy and terrestrial geotrauma; Brassier shifted it towards a solar catastrophe and the prospect of extinction; Negarestani incorporated it into the exteriority of cosmic contingency. This way, Freud’s legacy emerges as a transcendental, epistemological and speculative instrument to tackle Meillassoux’s problem of correlation. I consider why this trajectory has ceased: I suggest a hypothesis that Bataille’s influence has not been overcome, especially in the case of Negarestani. I offer several vectors, according to which, Bataille could serve as an opportunity for openness to the Outside and a chance to continue the trajectory of the speculative death drive. I suggest that it is possible to reconsider Bataille as one of the precursors to the contemporary speculative thought.

This article uses the philosophy of Tristan Garcia to theorize about religion and to identify religion as an object without essentializing it (scientistic reduction) or reducing it to culture (as in critical theory). It proposes a radical speculative ontology for analyzing religion in opposition to late-liberalism's determining effects on the study of religion. In juxtaposition with Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology and Quentin Meillassoux's speculative philosophy, Garcia's philosophy offers a unique perspective about the irreduction of religion and classification within religious studies, especially through his philosophy of intensities. His perspective on the concatenation of human and nonhuman objects and their assemblages compliments and builds upon the current scholarship in material religion. In particular, his philosophy of intensities enables religion and religions to be dispersed into countless temporal instances and evaluated in limitless levels of intensity in a classificatory system set to avoid reductionism and neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy is the property of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The rise of Symmetrical Archaeology has subtly recast archaeology as the study of things and not the study of the past or past peoples. This new description of the archaeological endeavour is often met with criticism. This paper continues in the critical vein but embraces a different strategy of engagement. Here, second-wave Symmetrical Archaeology is brought to the fore: its historical development explored, its methodology outlined, its current theoretical basis assessed. Part critique, part defence, I consider the logical underpinning of the second-wave, focusing on ontology and agency. Utilizing Levi Bryant's ontic principle, I attend to these two issues and frame this style of archaeology as Pre-critical Archaeology. A caveat seems necessary: whilst I spend time with Symmetrical Archaeology in this paper, that does not mean I am a convert. Rather, my ambition here is to see things from the point of view of a Symmetrical archaeologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent political critique of Speculative Realism by Catherine Malabou finds fault with this loosely arranged movement for its focus on reality in its own right, apart from the subject. Malabou responds with a radical ontological claim, holding effectively – if not always explicitly – that subject and object mutually generate one another amidst a primal void. After criticizing this idea, I point to some of the difficult political consequences of such a position, though Malabou defines it positively as an anarchic awakening that generates new collectivities unconstrained by any thing-in-itself. By contrast, I contend that nonhuman constraints and collaborators are an intimate part of the human political sphere. More generally, it is shown that there are consequences for which sorts of relations are taken to be the primary political relations.

This article insists that solidarity with nonhumans is not only a fundamental aspect of symbiotic existence, but a key aspect of resistance to global imperialism. Whilst Indigenous communities have long nurtured and maintained a rich symbiosis and solidarity with nonhumans, modern western thought and social theory must seriously expand its collective concepts, if it wants to remain relevant for life in the ruins of pandemics, pollution, and production. Drawing from the work of ecological philosopher Timothy Morton and speculative realisms, this article draws attention to the 'spectral' or inexhaustible quality of things that is often masked by capitalism and anthropocentrism. The trajectory of this article is dependent on the inspiring ontological creativity of Hardt and Negri's Empire, specifically how it has provided a rich context for the lacunae of politics and education. Social theory movements, such as (neo)marxisms and poststructuralisms, may very well be viable... if they include nonhumans. The idea that solidarity is a fundamental aspect of reality means that students and teachers acting in the common interest are not just politically conscious, but more in-tune with our entirely codependent world(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Josiah Royce is remembered mainly as an absolute idealist. Through his confrontation with "Bradley's regress", this paper will show that he was actually trying to combine a bold form of monism with a pluralism of real, discrete individuals. His commitment to the actual infinite is used both to turn Bradley's regress into the generative mechanism of individuality within the Absolute, and to abolish the ontological difference between the Absolute itself and the individuals it contains. The "flat absolutism" resulting from this operation will be compared to the contemporary "flat ontologies" of Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, whose pluralism and commitment to "external" relations are shown to be just some of the ways in which a robust sense of individuality can be defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophical manifestos of the past few decades involving attempts to go beyond constructs, discourses, and structures to the things themselves and a return to ontology and materialism often address the problems of the Anthropocene. Criticism of anthropocentrism and the introduction of the nonhuman into the focus of philosophy opened up new perspectives in solving the problems of idealism. This escape from the discursive aspect and the human factor, which is intended to break out philosophical projects to the outside, to what is on the other side of culture and language, to the planet, to matter, is accompanied by sequences of negations. Exploring the outer edge of philosophy, the periphery of culture, dark and marginal subjects, these authors try to construct a kind of anti-discourse, a nonphilosophy. In order to unlock the nonthinkable, what is being proposed to us is an exploration of objects that philosophical thought has heretofore ignored. The path to the nonhuman and nonthinkable lies through nonphilosophy. This article attempts to analyze such negations. It analyzes the function of negation by turning to psychoanalytic theory, in which the examination and modification of negation is one of the key themes. The principal mechanism of analysis is the modified logic of the psychoanalyst Jean Michel Vappereau. But the classical modifications of negation of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are also considered. The article's central question—how does one interpret the negation in a human's turning to the nonhuman, of philosophy to nonphilosophy, of an act of thought to the nonthinkable—is resolved in two ways, which constitute the two sections of the article. The results of the analysis open up obscure ways of interpreting such philosophical manifestos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of speculative realism for more-than-human ethnography. Particularly relevant is Graham Harman's notion of 'vicarious causation', which denotes how things located outside thought can be accessed vicariously and partially, for example, through allusion. My contention is that this concept may be productively adapted for ethnographic inquiry if repurposed to fit with an open-ended and relational understanding of the outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the speculative turn in posthumanism and indicates its world)building role. Marzec reflects on the shape, role, and impact of philosophical notions on reality change. To that end, the text employs categories of Nick Land’s hyperstition and Armen Avanessian’s metanoia. Then, Marzec distinguishes between postmodern fictions and speculative stories, which he considers a necessary component of realistic thinking. He presents specific speculative proposals, namely Donna Haraway’s take on science fiction compared to Quentin Meillassoux’s bold extro-science fiction project. Finally, Marzec proves that stories that employ speculation stem from the premonition that realistic thinking must be weird (Graham Harman) or even magical (Federico Campagna). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Posthumanism; deconstruction; new materialism; speculative realism; object-oriented ontology EN Posthumanism deconstruction new materialism speculative realism object-oriented ontology 105 114 10 05/10/22 20220501 NES 220501 Posthumanism is not one. 17 Derrida, Jacques (1989), Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. 21 Derrida, Jacques (2011), Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 14 Derrida, Jacques (1978) 'Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 79-153. [Extracted from the article]