Form and Object: A Treatise on Things

The above is the name of a recent book on speculative realism. This link has the contents, translators' introduction, series editor's preface, and author's introduction. Here is Graham Harman's review. The following is an excerpt from the author's introduction:

"This involves the construction of a new model of the division of things. [...] Whoever expects philosophy to teach them something about knowledge, consciousness, or individual and collective subjectivity more broadly, must be forewarned: they may be disappointed. Here we will return as little as possible to this way of thinking" (2).


"The challenge of this book is to be neither determined by a positive content nor structured by an analytic or dialectical method. [...] Every analytic reduces the possibility of being something to some logical, rational, or pragmatic conditions. Every dialectic reduces the possibility of being something to its mediation by another thing. Instead, we demonstrate our commitment to that solitary something in each thing that can never be reduced to anything else. This irreducibility is the 'chance' of each thing, and the ground for dismissing both analytic and dialectical ways of thinking. We reject ways of thinking that reduce things exclusively to natural, social, or historical things" (7-8).