Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2016. 200 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-9982375-3-4. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0152.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $21.00 in print: paperbound/5 X 8 in.
After the “Speculative Turn” is so far the first systematic attempt to disrupt Speculative Realism’s (SR) predominantly gender-free modus operandi. This book will be vital for scholars and readers from speculative/new realisms through new materialisms, posthumanism/posthumanist feminisms, object-oriented philosophy and ontology (hereafter OOP/OOO), down to the speculative turn’s related contemporary gestures (non-human/affect/ontological turns). … This volume is not merely a cultural revisionist critique, but an infrastructural expansion of SR in the wake of its intrinsic contradictions, produced by its self-aware indifference to “cultural specificity.”
~ Stanimir Panayotov
Recent forms of realism in continental philosophy that are habitually subsumed under the category of “speculative realism,” a denomination referring to rather heterogeneous strands of philosophy, bringing together object-oriented ontology (OOO), non-standard philosophy (or non-philosophy), the speculative realist ideas of Quentin Meillassoux and Marxism, have provided grounds for the much needed critique of culturalism in gender theory, and the authority with which post-structuralism has dominated feminist theory for decades. This publication aims to bring forth some of the feminist debates prompted by the so-called “speculative turn,” while demonstrating that there has never been a niche of “speculative realist feminism.”
Whereas most of the contributions featured in this collection provide a theoretical approach invoking the necessity of foregrounding new forms of realism for a “feminism beyond gender as culture,” some of the essays tackle OOO only to invite a feminist critical challenge to its paradigm, while others refer to some extent to non-philosophy or the new materialisms but are not reducible to either of the two. We have invited essays from intellectual milieus outside the Anglo-Saxon academic center, bringing together authors from Serbia, Slovenia, France, Ireland, the UK, and Canada, aiming to promote feminist internationalism (rather than a “generous act of cultural inclusion”).
CONTENTS
- Katerina Kolozova – Preface: After the “Speculative Turn”
- Nina Power – Philosophy, Sexism, Emotion, Rationalism
- Katherine Behar – The Other Woman
- Anne-Françoise Schmid – Libérer épistémologiquement le féminisme
- Patricia Ticineto Clough – Notes for “And They Were Dancing”
- Joan Copjec – No: Foucault
- Jelisaveta Blagojević – Thinking WithOut
- Marina Gržinić – Rearticulating the Speculative Turn
- Frenchy Lunning – The Crush: The Firey Allure of the Jolted Puppet
- Nandita Biswas Mellamphy – (W)omen out/of Time: Metis, Medea, Mahakali
- Michael O’Rourke – “Girls Welcome!!!”: Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Queer Theory
About the Editors
Katerina Kolozova, PhD, is the director of the Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje, Macedonia and a professor of gender studies at the University American College-Skopje. She is also visiting professor at several universities in Former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar in the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the author of Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststucturalist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (punctum books, 2015).
Eileen A. Joy is the Director of punctum books and has published widely on medieval literature, cultural studies, intellectual and literary history, ethics, affects and embodiments, the post/human, and speculative realism. She is the co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007), Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (punctum, 2012), On Style: An Atelier (punctum, 2013), Speculative Medievalisms: Discography (punctum, 2013), Burn After Reading (punctum, 2014), and Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism (Ohio State, 2016).
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