today’s activity: writing a response to Louis Morelle for tomorrow

Louis Morelle did his M.A. thesis recently at the Sorbonne, with a focus on Speculative Realism. He’ll be doing his doctorate somewhere soon. We met for lunch in the Latin Quarter a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow he’ll be presenting his paper in a seminar at the ENS, and I will attend and respond. His paper is entitled “Le réalisme spéculatif: après la finitude, et au-delà?” (Speculative realism: after finitude, and beyond?”)

It’s one of the best things written on speculative realism so far, in my opinion. With a bit of expansion, I would hope to see it appear in an English journal. The reason expansion is needed is because he mostly left out Meillassoux, since Meillassoux has already been dealt with in this seminar by Martin Fortier, an outstanding young interpreter of Meillassoux and already of Tristan Garcia as well.

It’s hard to situate Morelle’s allegiance among the various currents of SR (or RS, as it is amusingly reversed in French, of course). He treats my position and Brassier’s as mutually refuting (I don’t agree with that, of course, but his argument is interesting).

A few of the numerous strong points of Morelle’s paper:

*He convincingly argues that, despite Meillassoux’s role in the movement, it is best understood as provoked by certain conditions present in Anglophone philosophy. Specifically, continental philosophy remains fairly marginalized in the Anglophone world, and SR is a minority within a minority, since the continental majority is, in fact, correlationist in spirit. Hence, SR can be viewed as having arisen from a disaffected minority within an already minority position in Anglophone philosophical academia. I hadn’t thought if it in exactly those terms before, but it’s absolutely correct.

*His link between Brassier and Laruelle is clearer to me than Brassier’s own presentation of it was. He also links Hägglund with Brassier in a way that makes some sense and which hadn’t occurred to me before.

*Morelle makes an even clearer case than I did in my Edinburgh book that the four original strands of SR can all be viewed in terms of the differences in what they see as the genuine problems of correlationism and what they see as the proper solutions.

So, of his three sections (to repeat, Meillassoux is omitted since there was already an earlier seminar on him), he lists the major background sources and a few variants for each of the types of SR.

For object-oriented philosophy, which Morelle chooses to abbreviate simply OO, he correctly has “Latour/Heidegger” listed as the chief background influences, and then lists Latour and Levi Bryant as variant approaches, which also seems accurate. If I’m a Heideggerian version of OOO, then Latour can be seen as a Whiteheadian version and Levi as a Deleuzian version.

For Brassier’s position, he lists Churchland, Brandom, and Laruelle as the chief background influences. I’d probably replace Brandom with Sellars there, but Brandom is close enough. Hägglund and Wolfendale are listed as variants.

For Grant, he has Schelling, Deleuze, and Whitehead down as the chief background influences, which seems close enough, with DeLanda and Shaviro as possible variants. Of course, DeLanda’s position was no more shaped by Grant than Latour’s position was shaped by mine or Hägglund’s by Brassier (as far as I know) but it’s not inaccurate to see some connections in these cases.

Morelle might also have listed Jane Bennett’s position as a variant in the vicinity of Grant’s, since Bennett is quoted a fair amount at the end of the Grant section. But of course Bennett, like Latour and DeLanda, was already professionally formed before SR even existed. But they are all good dialogue partners for us, and all are among my favorite contemporary authors.

I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’m definitely going to try to persuade Morelle to publish this in English. His English is very good and he can probably just translate it himself if he wants. Morelle spent some time in Philosophy at NYU, so he is also very capable in his understanding of analytic philosophy. That is evident both from conversation with him and from some of the content of the paper itself.