9/21/2014 The Not of Speculative Realism | Mute

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THE NOT OF SPECULATIVE REALISMBy Giorgio Cesarale , 19 February 2014

Image: Finis Ab Origine Pedet (My End is My Beginning)

Is the movement formerly known as Speculative Realism really as weird as it would wish, or is its freefloating negativity the index of a different kind of estrangement? Giorgio Cesarale descends into thephilosophical interior of the artworlds favourite brand of theory and discovers a peculiarly inconsistentkind of nothing at its core.

The Strange Birth of Speculative Realism

To say that something is strange or weird implies an already established subject, or a subject in the process ofbeing established. To define something in this way it must already have manifested itself, and been judged asincongruent with a standard. However, at the conference at Goldsmiths in 2007 that launched Speculative Realism(SR) as a philosophical movement and gave it its name, Graham Harman was already pointing out the strangeness