The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism

The anthology's spine is the claim that continental philosophy has entered a new period defined by a renewed attention to materialist and realist options, departing from the text-centered hermeneutic models that dominated the deconstructionist and Deleuzian eras. The editors argue that what unites otherwise incompatible thinkers like Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Žižek is not a shared doctrine but a shared departure: all of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results . The volume rejects the assumption that philosophy's primary task is the critique of written texts, proposing instead that speculation about the nature of reality itself is both possible and necessary. This is the 'turn' the title names.

Brassier is generally credited with coining the term 'speculative realism' at the 2007 Goldsmiths conference that launched the movement, alongside Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux . His relationship to the label, however, is one of active disavowal. In a 2011 interview with Kronos magazine, he denied that any such movement exists, describing it as existing 'only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers' and dismissing its signal achievement as 'an online orgy of stupidity' . This makes his appearance as a contributor to The Speculative Turn—and as the author named in this profile—paradoxical. The volume collects the work of a movement he helped name but refused to lead.

Brassier's essay in The Speculative Turn, titled 'Concepts and Objects,' extends the project of Nihil Unbound by engaging with the ontological questions raised by the other contributors . In Nihil Unbound, Brassier defends a 'transcendental nihilism' that embraces the view of the world as inherently devoid of meaning, drawing on Badiou, Laruelle, and eliminative materialism to argue that philosophy is the 'organon of extinction' . The essay in this volume situates that argument within the broader speculative realist conversation, particularly in relation to Harman's object-oriented ontology and Grant's transcendental materialism. The continuity is methodological: Brassier's contribution maintains his commitment to a scientifically informed realism that refuses both correlationist phenomenology and the vitalist affirmation of meaning.

The most pointed criticism comes from Brassier himself, whose 2011 interview describes the movement as a blog-driven phenomenon that exploits graduate students and substitutes online enthusiasm for serious philosophical debate . Beyond Brassier's disavowal, scholarly reviews of the volume note the difficulty of identifying a shared position among the contributors. A review in Human Studies observes that 'there is little agreement to be found amongst these essays as to the specifics of this new speculative philosophy' . The volume's editors acknowledge this in their introduction, presenting the collection not as a unified school but as a snapshot of divergent currents—transcendental materialism, object-oriented ontology, and new revivals of Derrida—that share only a departure from text-centered critique.

The Speculative Turn is a key document for understanding how nihilism shifted from a problem to be overcome to a starting point for philosophical realism. The older continental tradition, particularly in its phenomenological and hermeneutic modes, treated nihilism as a threat to be resisted through the recovery of meaning. The thinkers collected here—especially Brassier, but also Meillassoux and Laruelle—treat the absence of meaning as a structural feature of reality that philosophy must confront rather than compensate for. The volume's publication in 2011 marked the moment this orientation moved from the margins of continental philosophy to its center, establishing the terms of debate for the decade that followed. Its relevance to nihilism is thus historical and programmatic: it names the turn that made nihilism respectable as a realist position.