This article addresses how the Iranian-born philosopher Reza Negarestani has negotiated human distinctiveness in the course of his intellectual journey from speculative realism to inhuman rationalism (Rather than rationalist inhumanism, as some sources have it (Anon 2021)). Moving from challenging the correlationism of post-Kantian Western philosophy, via critiques of the Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine, Nick Land’s accelerationism, and Ray Brassier’s nihilism, Negarestani eventually turns to the neo-pragmatists of the Pittsburgh School and their reflections on reason, normativity, and praxis. The (...) mapping of this trajectory is divided into four parts: Having already discussed the political theology of Reza Negarestani elsewhere (Kersten, World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 78(2–4), 256 267, 2022), the first part of this article briefly introduces Reza Negarestani’s early theory fiction as an exponent of speculative realism (Negarestani 2008), followed by two sections dedicated to close readings of Negarestani’s investigations of the inhuman (Negarestani 2011 and 2014). The examination of these writings will demonstrate how they have served as prolegomena to his next book-length publication, Intelligence and Spirit (2018), a connection that will be briefly assessed in the final part. (shrink)

In the early twenty-first century, philosophy stemming from the continental tradition has become overtly realist. This does not mean it abandons the sophisticated structures of reflection for a givenness on the refutation of which its earliest moments, in Kant, was premised. Nor does it entail a rediscovered faith in the adequacy of intellect to thing. Rather, we might say, new realisms have issued from a critique of transcendental dogmas. In this paper I will provisionally characterise the most salient of these (...) transcendental dogmas before characterizing some of the experiments in removing them. (shrink)

Je considère la relation entre le « Tournant » (die Kehre) de Heidegger et le réalisme. Je commence par décrire comment la critique heideggerienne du problème du monde extérieur anticipe le nouveau réalisme. J’élabore une reconstruction de l’auto-critique heideggerienne d’Être et temps en montrant comment cette œuvre manifeste un anti-réalisme de plus haut niveau. Ensuite, je montre comment le Tournant heideggerien est motivé par l’inadéquation de ce premier anti-réalisme. Dans sa philosophie de l’événement, Heidegger va vers une ontologie réaliste en (...) développant des concepts tels que celui de destin (Geschick), qu’il comprend comme indépendant de toute attitude humaine. Heidegger en dernier lieu retombe cependant dans un anti-réalisme, parce que l’être reste dépendant de l’implication des êtres humains. Je conclue donc cet essai en exposant brièvement ma propre conception du nouveau réalisme, selon laquelle les objets sont remplis de signification d’une manière qui est indépendante de nos attitudes vis-à-vis d’eux. (shrink)

In his ambitious Schelling's Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel, Peter Dews sets out to reconstruct the fundamental difference between Schelling and Hegel on the basis of two related claims. The first, historical claim is that both are dealing with ‘our current historical situation’, which Dews identifies with ‘modernity’ (Dews 2023: 10). The second, systematic claim is that their mature systematic thinking is characterized by what he calls throughout the book, with reference to a canonical paper by Dieter Henrich (Henrich (...) 1976), their respective Grundoperationen (‘basic operations’). He then walks the reader through major positions that Schelling developed over the course of his philosophical career in order to demonstrate how Schelling arrives at a specific genealogical account of modernity. On this account, modernity is understood as a formation of consciousness, which is supposedly not subject to the Hegelian type of dialectic which, according to Dews, is driven by a rationalism so comprehensive that the very notion of unwarranted constraints on the agency of human beings or of the oppressive shaping of their consciousness has no place. (Dews 2023: 16). (shrink)