Proceedings from two Speculative Medievalisms symposia, held at
King's College London (Jan. 2011) and The Graduate Center, City
University of New York (Sep. 2011), and organized by The Petropunk
Collective (Eileen Joy, Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, and
Michael O'Rourke). These interdisciplinary events were dedicated to
dialogue and cross-contamination between traditional concepts of
speculatio, present-minded premodern studies, and contemporary
speculative realist and object-oriented philosophies. In its
medieval formulation, speculatio signifies the essentially
reflective and imaginative operations of the intellect. Here the
world, books, and mind itself are all conceived as specula
(mirrors) through which the hermeneutic gaze can gain access to
what lies beyond it. "To know is to bend over a mirror where the
world is reflected, to descry images reflected from sphere to
sphere: the medieval man was always before a mirror, both when he
looked around himself and when he surrendered to his own
imagination" (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas). Correlatively, speculative
realism, as the term suggests, is characterized by the
self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think
beyond itself - a desire that proceeds, like all philosophy, in a
twisted and productive relation to the phantasm of the word. Aiming
to rise above and tunnel below the thought-being or self-world
correlation, speculative realism "depart s] from the text-centered
hermeneutic models of the past and engage s] in daring speculations
about the nature of reality itself" (The Speculative Turn).
Speculative Medievalisms, like some weird friar-alchemist in an
inexistent romance, plays the erotic go-between for these
text-centered and text-eccentric intellectual domains by trying to
transmute the space between past and present modes of speculation
from shared blindness to love at first sight. Possibly succeeding,
the volume brings together the work of a motley crew of
philosophers and premodernists into prismatic relation. Contents:
Kathleen Biddick, "Toy Stories: Vita Nuda Then and Now?" - Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen, "Sublunary" - Graham Harman, "Aristotle With a Twist"
- Anna Klosowska, "Transmission by Sponge: Aristotle's Poetics" -
J. Allan Mitchell, "Cosmic Eggs, or Events Before Everything" -
Kellie Robertson, "Abusing Aristotle" - Anthony Paul Smith, "The
Speculative Angel" - Nick Srnicek, "Abstraction and Value: The
Medieval Origins of Financial Quantification" - Eugene Thacker,
"Divine Darkness" - Scott Wilson, "Neroplatonism" - Julian Yates,
"Shakespeare's Kitchen Archives." With response and post-script
essays by: Liza Blake, Patricia Clough, Drew Daniel, Eileen A. Joy
and Anna Klosowska, Nicola Masciandaro, Michael O'Rourke, and Ben
Woodard.
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