Žižek on Speculative Realism

Quoted below is Žižek’s main passage on Speculative Realism in Less Than Nothing, taken from page 640.

Let me begin by reminding my readers that I’m generally very happy with the various positive effects Žižek has had on continental philosophy, and have expressed that attitude often enough on this blog.

That said, I don’t think the following passage is as accurate as it ought to be:

“From this paradox of the drive, we can discern the limitation of speculative realism, a limitation signaled in the fact that it immediately split into four orientations which form a kind of Greimasian semiotic square: Meillassoux’s ‘speculative materialism,’ Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy,’ Grant’s neo-vitalism, and Brassier’s radical nihilism. The two axes along which these four positions are placed are divine/secular and scientific/metaphysical. Although both Meillassoux and Brassier advocate a scientific view of reality as radically contingent and apprehensible through formalized science, Brassier also endorses scientific reductionism, while Meillassoux leaves the space open for a non-existent divinity which will redress all past injustices. On the other side, both Harman and Grant advocate a non-scientific metaphysical approach, with Harman opting for a directly religious (or spiritualist, at least) panpsychism, outlining a program of investigating the ‘cosmic layers of psyche’ and ‘ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone,’ while Grant, in Deleuzian fashion, locates the metphysical dimension in nature itself, conceiving the world of objects as the products of a more primordial process of becoming (will, drive, etc.). What stands out in this square are the two positions which unsettle the expected overlapping of the two axes (metaphysical divinity versus secular scientific reductionism): Meillassoux’s scientistic assertion of radical contingency which nonetheless leaves open the space for a non-existing God who may emerge in order to redress past injustices, and Grant’s anti-scientistic vitalist metaphysics which nonetheless remains naturalist/materialist.”

This isn’t Žižek’s first recourse to the “Greimasian semiotic square” in the book. There’s another such reference in the opening pages (pp. 6-7, to be exact), and in both cases he seems to view the Greimasian square as evidence of an intellectual imprisonment– as if four automatic intellectual permutations were blindly generated but the sign of real cleverness would be to grasp the overlooked alternative (which he sees himself as providing in both cases).

Let’s go back to the key sentence in the passage above: “The two axes along which these four positions are placed are divine/secular and scientific/metaphysical.”

This is not correct.

First of all, there is no divine/secular axis anywhere in Speculative Realism. Though I’m certainly less hostile to religion than the scientistic strain of SR, this is only in the sense that I value keeping an open mind, and have an instinctive aversion to Halloweenish caricatures of self-congratulatory enlightenment. My philosophy is thoroughly compatible with the most unremitting secularist atheism, if that’s where you want to take object-oriented philosophy. I simply don’t pound my fist on the table and insist on anti-clerical liquidations while sneering at believers. But there is nothing inherent “religious” about my philosophy per se.

Consider this phrase by Žižek: “with Harman opting for a directly religious (or spiritualist, at least) panpsychism.” In what sense is my theory of withdrawal between all entities “directly religious”? In no sense. Žižek should have been clearer. And as is often the case with qualifying phrases, that is where Žižek shows his hand: “(or spiritualist, at least).”

There have been repeated misunderstandings about my supposed “spiritualism” (Meillassoux does the same in his Berlin lecture). All I’m really doing in extending intentionality beyond the human sphere is saying that there is a neutral metaphysical category of relations that encompasses both animate and inanimate reality, and that the apparently special features of the sentient or the human do not automatically point to an ontological rift between the subject and everything else. The need to explain why this rift should exist creates a serious problem for thinkers such as Žižek and Meillassoux, and since they can’t really explain it (except to speak of an “ontological catastrophe” or to peg it as the inexplicable result of hyper-chaos) their best hope is to peg the alternative as unpalatable. This they do by calling it “spiritualist” or “vitalist” or even, amazingly enough, “directly
religious.” Invective of this sort usually marks an attempt to cover the weak spot in the position of those who utter it. I happen to think that both Žižek and Meillassoux are among the most interesting philosophers working today, but don’t believe that they are their strongest when they merely trudge along the usual post-Kantian path of making thought (no matter how it gets renamed) more and more ontologically central. The more surprising and fertile maneuver, I think, is the one of ending Kant’s fixation, not on finitude (which is inevitable), but on the specially human character of finitude. In short, the fatal flaw in both positions is that they take the correlationist argument far too seriously (it is really not much of an improvement over Meno’s paradox). As a result, they fall into epistemism, a position that needs to be combatted more urgently than ever, and which I will be explaining in an essay in the near future.

But let’s say that I really were a “spiritualist,” in the sense of believing firmly that all rocks and atoms have thinking souls. Even if this were the case, in what sense would this justify Žižek’s claim of a “religious” philosophy on my part? There would still be no God and no eternal life for these tiny souls found in rocks and water droplets, and no reincarnation for them, and this doesn’t sound like much of a “religious” philosophy to me. Meanwhile, you have Meillassoux talking about a virtual God and a Christ-like mediator paving the way for that God, so although highly unorthodox in religious terms, it would at least make some sense to describe Meillassoux’s philosophy as “religious,” though it would make no sense at all in my own case.

In short, divine/secular is not a relevant axis of division within Speculative Realism. Žižek is wrong here. The fact that he doesn’t like placing all animate and inanimate things on the same footing does not justify his pigeonholing that gesture as “directly religious” (and “directly” here functions as one of those adjectives that is added to mask the weakness of the noun, just as in the phrase “naive realism”).

Žižek’s other proposed axis, “scientific/metaphysical” is a bit closer to the mark, though still needs some polishing. What Meillassoux genuinely does have in common with Brassier (and Meillassoux notes this in his Berlin lecture), is a trust in the capacity of human knowledge to make contact with the real.

The term I’ve coined for this (since Meillassoux has now coined the –inaccurate– term “subjectalism” to refer to me and Grant) is “epistemism,” already mentioned briefly a few paragraphs above. Whereas for me the real withdraws beyond all knowledge, and for Grant human knowledge is produced as a new stage in a chain of productions of nature without having any special ontological weight, Meillassoux thinks we can get at the primary qualities of things through mathematizing them, and Brassier is notorious for his scientism. (That’s what Žižek misses in assigning both of them to the “scientific” side of his proposed “scientific/metaphysical” axis: Meillassoux’s philosophy is a mathematism, not a scientism. Despite his invocation of the sciences in his discussion of ancestrality, Meillassoux is not especially influenced by the recent course of the natural sciences, whereas at times that’s the only thing Brassier seems to care about.)

So, while Žižek is on to something reasonably true with his second axis, I would call it epistemism vs. non-epistemism rather than scientific vs. metaphysical. For me and Grant, there’s nothing so ontologically special about knowledge.

So, I can sort of agree with Žižek about this axis, but am not so sure there’s another of equal obviousness. I mean, I’m not sure there really is a privileged second axis that sheds much light on Speculative Realism (and certainly no Greimasian square). As I said in 2007, I think you can pair up the four members of the group in different permutations of two vs. two and even three vs. one, depending on the issue chosen for consideration.

For instance, if you were to try “divine vs. non-divine,” then despite Žižek’s claim that Meillassoux and I both belong on the “divine” side, Meillassoux actually stands alone on this question. My philosophy doesn’t rule out the existence of God, but for me, if God exists then God is still just a very powerful and knowledgeable object, one still governed by the requirements of vicarious causation. God would have no special ontological status for me, where Meillassoux’s God has a very special ontological status (though arguably no more special than the status possessed by matter, life, and thought, three other very important dimensions of the universe for Meillassoux).

If we’re hunting for a second axis, then here’s another candidate. Both Brassier and Grant come from Warwick, and like quite a number of Warwickians over the years, they both have Deleuze deep down in their bones (you can see traces of this even in Brassier’s new, ultra-scientistic phase). By contrast, I think you could say that Meillassoux and I both like Deleuze but aren’t especially influenced by him in any deep sense. And there are certain philosophical consequences of that, which I will leave to blog readers to work out for themselves, because I’ve already spent too much time on this post, and don’t feel in the mood for a flame war with angry Deleuzians today. (But here’s one small flame to whet your appetite: I don’t think Deleuze is one of the really great philosophers. I think his stock is still a bit overpriced at the moment.)

It’s nice that Žižek put some time into Speculative Realism, but the account on page 640 of his new book doesn’t quite pin the tail on the donkey. Perhaps this dialogue is a work in progress, or perhaps this was a one-time encounter. We’ll see. But it’s pretty clear that Žižek recognizes how close Meillassoux is to his terrain, and so we’re likely to see the most engagement between those two specifically.