Friday at the ENS

Louis Morelle has written a very fine paper summarizing the present state of speculative realism for a seminar at the École normale supérieure.

It’s been a pleasure to read this paper, and I will be there on Friday to offer a brief response– though all I can really do is provide some minor supplements. Along with the appendices, Morelle’s paper comes to 29 pages. My response will be maybe 6-8 pages at most.

Quite a number of familiar names are mentioned in the paper. It’s fun to read a document in French that refers not only to the original SR group but also to Levi Bryant, Steven Shaviro, and Pete Wolfendale, among others. Lee Braver features in it as well.

During my formative years, Anglophone continental philosophy was for the most part simply reacting to events in France and Germany, with relatively rare exceptions. Now we have reached more of a balance, in which there is dialogue going back and forth, and lots of reading underway in both directions. Speculative realism doesn’t deserve all of the credit for this, of course, but it does deserve some of it.