Speculations IV

Speculations IV is out. Looks like some good articles. This one looks particularly interesting to me, given my severe lashing of a certain kind of math in this thread, though while finding some consonance with Badiou's math: "Realsim, mathematics and the thresholds of difference." Therein you'll see similarities to arguments in this thread for differance as the withdrawn core of the actual. From the conclusion:

"Every determinate phenomena is inseparable from an intensive field of differential relations and gradient-thresholds that remain hidden within the explicated, determinate differences but nevertheless allow for the corporeal and explicated transformations."

However also in the thread above we see how Bryant views the withdrawn in distinction from both Deleuze and DeLanda. Also see this thread for some of that discussion.


Also see DeLanda's contribution to the new Speculations IV. We see many of this themes reiterated: transparency of one's ontological commitments; the virtual as well as the actual; experimental interventions to elicit the virtual into actuality; immanence instead of aprioi essence; emergence with semi-autonomous levels/layers which thus require they own methodologies; know-that and know-how; signification and significance. A good brief overview if one is not familiar with his work.

And Gratton's article is nice. He takes Meillassoux and Harman to task as being pre-critical Platonists adhering to timeless essences!* He uses many of the same arguments against his targets as Bryant uses about time from Derrida in "Time of the object". Of note is that he doesn't go after Bryant on this because Bryant, as I said, has already made a similar case for time, but he didn't use it to denounce his brethren speculative realists like Gratton.

* For Meillassoux and Badiou he goes after set theory in a similar way that I went after the MHC. Recall my explicit evidence from Common's own pen as to its Platonic roots.