Speculative realism, the vanguard of contemporary continental philosophy, in its object-oriented dispositions may help to tie together some of the disparate strands of my research I have been vainly trying to weave together using a collection of ideas that, at times, seem completely at odds.
I have yet to really dig too deeply, but I am fruitfully seeing links between Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things and speculative realism, in a way that makes meaningful sense to me. My problem has thus far been the nagging feeling that there is or are questions and ideas that require address before I dig into my own research. Not mere contextualizing or situating, this feeling of a constant beforehand has been plaguing my writing. Who was it that was always after the First Principles? Well, perhaps my feeling is something like that, with an added sense that I am anthropologist so do I have a business messing about in philosophy? Or perhaps the question is: how can I not do the due-diligence of exploring where the research takes me in philosophy considering my bread-and-butter is the real, the actual, the lived and the practiced? What is more apt than lived life, practiced ritual, or the sensuality of sense of both humans and things, inanimate and animate, technical, vegetable, mineral, and so on, for dipping a toe into the speculative realism pond?
