Sometime in the next two years I hope to teach a class where the only texts are issues of Speculations. Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler and Philipp Schweighauser did a great job editing Issue V. The introduction by Askin, Hägler, and Schweighauser is worth the price of admission alone.* Anyone interested in all the…

This morning I was rereading this string, where we discussed things not to do at conferences, and I noticed a comment by Neal Hebert: Although I can't speak for Jon on this, I do think this is a good place to point out that some of the above are next to unthinkable at conferences in…

I sometimes get asked why one should bother attending to continental metaphysics.* It's an impossible question to answer in generality, because different people asking it usually have such contradictory presuppositions. If the person is anti-metaphysical, any answer has to be directed to the neo-Kantian presumption that proper philosophy is some form of transcendental epistemology. If…

The interview is online at Edinburgh University Press here.* There are lots of juicy tidbits, for example this from Ohm: The latter half of the 20th century bequeathed the Anglophone world a very one-sided picture of “French Theory.” The soixante-huitards were like our noble savages. Many important voices were silenced, due perhaps to institutional and…

Nice audio of a recent presentation by Gratton here. Harman responds here. Gratton responds to Harman's response here. Given all the blogospheric animus (peaking about five years ago) that accompanied Quentin Meillassoux's critique of correlationism, it's extraordinarily cool that the "turn to metaphysics" in recent continental philosophy* has reached a point where you get this…

Edinburgh University Press has posted the introductions to three books: Tristan Garcia's Form and Object (here), Adrian Johnston's Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (here), and Levi Bryant's Onto-Cartography (here). They are all pretty interesting. I helped Mark Ohm translate Garcia's book,* and our translator's introduction (included in the material EUP posted) is substantive. One of the…

I'm posting this in the hopes that scholars of François Laruelle can add to the list. As people who have tried to read his difficult texts know, Ray Brassier is on to something when he writes (citation below): The truth is that his thought operates at a level of abstraction which some will find debilitating, others…

Imagine for a minute how you might respond if I were to insist that Cornell West can only be understood as a black philosopher and presented my own work in terms of the necessity of overcoming black philosophy. Imagine that my work involved understanding the history of philosophy in terms of a contrast between black…

Lovely bit from the preface to Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: VOLUME ONE The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy: Stuck between capitalist techno-manipulation and its irrationalist discontents, seesawing between the twin big Others of the nature of scientism and the God of superstition within the constraining global space of a neo-liberal economy, humanity is stranded in…