Dark Chemistry on Realism, Materialism and Speculation

Below is an outstanding new post from S.C. Hickman of the brilliant Dark Chemistry weblog. If you are at all interesting in Speculative Realism, philosophy or theory in general I suggest you go visit Dark Chemistry as soon as possible.

Alien Manifesto: The Interrogation of the Real - Speculations on Realism and Materialism

By S.C. Hickman

"What we witness in this time is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World turning into Rave New World. A world in which the well known and the so called lines between mind and body, fantasy and reality, nature and culture, organic and inorganic, life and death, are not just blurred, but have completely disappeared. And yet, at the same time, these lines are in the process of reappearance." -Cengiz Erdem

In a time when all boundaries between the real and unreal begin to fade, mutate, wander or waver and blur under the pressure of thought's duplicitous force, when the rendering of the human turns unhuman, - and we begin to see beyond all thought of the human a dark horizon glimmering on the edge of the great frontier of Being, portending a return of that which for so long has lain hidden in the excluded, reviled, tormented Umwelt of the absolute real - we once again renew the struggle within the life/death drives stirring within and without us, moving beyond the threshold of our own surrounding world, discovering in those monstrous entities emerging from their thick lairs inside and outside: a strangeness, a fecundity of incommensurable forces surging through all things, preying upon the very fabric of the real like bottom feeders from some hyperdimensional realm of chaos. These alien parasites seek in the bright jewel of our universe a consummation to their nihilistic life, burrowing into and permeating our dark chemistry, entering into our fleshly existence through genetic mutations exterior to all relation except that of objects connected and connecting only in the moment of relation, co-evolving with us in a terrible enthronement of that principle of mastery that resolves itself as sheer nihil.

In the face of such monstrous pressures from within and without we struggle to free ourselves, turning the very weapons of thought against these dark intrusions, reforging the links to a speculative philosophy that might help us emerge from our zombied existence, and once again walk in the gardens of Being - if not like gods, then like alien ambassadors of a new order of the real who have seen for the first time the truth of our alienness. For being alien is not what you think it is, it is not an invasion from without by those forces that seek to take from us the very subsistence of our hard work, our labour; no, instead the alien is the immanent pressure within us all to regain that affective paradise of the real against which all thought flees: the monstrous truth at the core of our own nothingness - that we have already-always been alien; it is the very life of being as Being.

"I am happy that it is not merely a continuation of classical metaphysics nor an end of it. In this sense I am in agreement with the word realism. We are beyond the end of metaphysics and classical metaphysics with the term realism. The question of realism as opposed to materialism is not a crucial question today. What is important is that it is not correlationist or idealist. It is a new space for philosophy, one with many internal differences but this is a positive symptom." - Alain Badiou

"The problem is not ‘can we penetrate through the veil of subjectively-constituted phenomena to things-in themselves’, but ‘how do phenomena themselves arise within the flat stupidity of reality which just is, how does reality redouble itself and start to appear to itself’. For this, we need a theory of subject which is neither that of transcendental subjectivity nor that of reducing the subject to a part of objective reality. This theory is, as far as I can see, still lacking in speculative realism." - Slavoj Zizek

But which speculative path to follow? Do we go the way of the realists or the materialists in our speculative philosophy, both of whom find in speculation a profound remedy against all correlationist, for whom anti-realism of the post-Kantian self-world axis qualifies as a sovereign humanism; or, shall we discover an alternate path: one more attuned to the deliberations of a thought free of both deliriums? Or, is this, too, a vanity?

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