This is a contribution to the debate on speculative realism deriving from the book The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. It is also in part a response to Fabio Gironi’s review article on the subject, ‘Between naturalism and rationalism: a new realist landscape’ 2012: 361–87).

Dana Ward’s 2013 poem Crisis of Infinite Worlds opens up a confrontation between recent critical articulations of infinity as it appears in, on one hand, eco-criticism, speculative realist philosophy, and object-oriented ontology and, on the other, totality as it appears in Marxian thought and, on Christopher Nealon’s account, in Ward’s poem. Infinity discourse is fundamentally anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist, while Crisis of Infinite Worldsdemonstrates that there is no necessary division between interpretation, human experience, and the infinite.