Speculative Realism's Transcendental Progeny:

crossbred inheritances in a bastard lineage

Abstract

The paper aims to present, 15 years after the workshop that 'created the movement' of Speculative Realism, a possible inheritor lineage of it: transcendental realism (/materialism/naturalism). The very polyvocity of names already shows its somewhat formless state, yet here we will start from the premise that if natural creatures can give birth to formless monstrosities, so can a philosophical-speculative movement. I begin then with a brief presentation on the question of whether or not Speculative Realism is a contemporary philosophical movement or trend by the debate among some of the participants in Goldsmith's workshop. I then outline this 'inheritor' trend of the movement and attempt to unearth its philosophical antecedents, while arguing that perhaps it is by its ability to generate offspring that Speculative Realism can be retroactively determined as a movement. The excavation begins by recognizing a 'transcendental' proximity between the philosophical projects of Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant, ending by revealing a triple genealogy that passes through the transcendental naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars, the cyber-deleuzianism of the CCRU, and Lacano-Marxist materialism among other 'philosophical characters'. We conclude this genealogical chimera by discussing recent work by Adrian Johnston and Ray Brassier and the growing closeness of this somewhat amorphous lineage to Marxism. Having sketched the heredogram of this contemporary movement, we suggest the elaboration of its ethogram as a future investigative project.