Hilan Bensusan - Böcker

Building upon the contributions to the movement of Speculative Realism by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, After Speculative Realism broadens and intensifies a number of key arguments in the field, engaging with both major philosophers of the past such as Hegel and Kant, and contemporary thinkers like Badiou and Žižek.The four original Speculative Realists were united by a seemingly stubborn fidelity towards ‘the real’ as that which differed from sense experience, reason, the empirical sciences, representation, language and normativity. This volume further explores the ideas and arguments they had given regarding the potency of the real, but also investigates how the ‘correlate’ between thinking and being may have been misinformed or limited by a specific reading of phenomenology, a motivation to separate appearance from reality, and a desire to revitalise the Kantian notion of ‘noumena’.After Speculative Realism charts the gap between the denouement of Speculative Realism and the birth of its contemporary successors such as the ‘new realism’ of Maurizio Ferraris, the kinetic ontology of Thomas Nail, the ‘transgressive realism’ of Lee Braver, the ‘real abstraction’ popularised by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, various spectral realisms, Laruellian realisms, and much more.

Building upon the contributions to the movement of Speculative Realism by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, After Speculative Realism broadens and intensifies a number of key arguments in the field, engaging with both major philosophers of the past such as Hegel and Kant, and contemporary thinkers like Badiou and Žižek.The four original Speculative Realists were united by a seemingly stubborn fidelity towards ‘the real’ as that which differed from sense experience, reason, the empirical sciences, representation, language and normativity. This volume further explores the ideas and arguments they had given regarding the potency of the real, but also investigates how the ‘correlate’ between thinking and being may have been misinformed or limited by a specific reading of phenomenology, a motivation to separate appearance from reality, and a desire to revitalise the Kantian notion of ‘noumena’.After Speculative Realism charts the gap between the denouement of Speculative Realism and the birth of its contemporary successors such as the ‘new realism’ of Maurizio Ferraris, the kinetic ontology of Thomas Nail, the ‘transgressive realism’ of Lee Braver, the ‘real abstraction’ popularised by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, various spectral realisms, Laruellian realisms, and much more.

Making the claim that reality is more like memory than a permanent substance, this original work draws on Derrida and Malabou to suggest a picture of the world as an assemblage of spectral resonances and disseminations.In Memory Assemblages, Hilan Bensusan combines elements of continental and analytic philosophy to advance a theory of realism which insists on the reality of spectres, an ultrametaphysical approach departing from metaphysics while attending to the problems that triggered metaphysical investigation. In doing so, Bensusan builds on the reception of Derrida’s hauntology, particularly by Latin American scholars in disciplines such as media studies, history, and political theory, and engages with currents of speculative realism as well as contemporary work on idealism and logic.Challenging the correlationist view in which being and time cannot be considered independently of subjectivity, Bensusan gives an account of exteriority where thought and reality share a common logic of addition. Central to the book is this philosophy of addition, where addition structures the insufficiency and incompleteness of whatever seems to be present: it is an operation that dismantles what has been before in a way that depends on that past consigned to memory. Addition is explored in light of the Derridian supplement, the Epicurean Swerve, Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of struction and the Marxist notion of forces of production. A coda further elaborates the notion of production in this context, arguing for a spectral Marxism and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Making the claim that reality is more like memory than a permanent substance, this original work draws on Derrida and Malabou to suggest a picture of the world as an assemblage of spectral resonances and disseminations.In Memory Assemblages, Hilan Bensusan combines elements of continental and analytic philosophy to advance a theory of realism which insists on the reality of spectres, an ultrametaphysical approach departing from metaphysics while attending to the problems that triggered metaphysical investigation. In doing so, Bensusan builds on the reception of Derrida’s hauntology, particularly by Latin American scholars in disciplines such as media studies, history, and political theory, and engages with currents of speculative realism as well as contemporary work on idealism and logic.Challenging the correlationist view in which being and time cannot be considered independently of subjectivity, Bensusan gives an account of exteriority where thought and reality share a common logic of addition. Central to the book is this philosophy of addition, where addition structures the insufficiency and incompleteness of whatever seems to be present: it is an operation that dismantles what has been before in a way that depends on that past consigned to memory. Addition is explored in light of the Derridian supplement, the Epicurean Swerve, Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of struction and the Marxist notion of forces of production. A coda further elaborates the notion of production in this context, arguing for a spectral Marxism and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that adds a paradoxical new chapter to the critique of metaphysics.The book articulates a metaphysical view of the other, both human and non-human (or the Great Outdoors as Meillassoux called it), that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. An innovative account of perception is developed, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable Outdoors. A coda then underscores the social-political implications of the critical position of this radical metaphysics through a post-colonial meditation on the sites of Potosi and Yasuni National Park.Engaging with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway, in such a way that proves to be transformative for both crucial aspects of their work, as well as for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world and to reckon with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.

Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that adds a paradoxical new chapter to the critique of metaphysics.The book articulates a metaphysical view of the other, both human and non-human (or the Great Outdoors as Meillassoux called it), that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. An innovative account of perception is developed, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable Outdoors. A coda then underscores the social-political implications of the critical position of this radical metaphysics through a post-colonial meditation on the sites of Potosi and Yasuni National Park.Engaging with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway, in such a way that proves to be transformative for both crucial aspects of their work, as well as for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world and to reckon with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.