Materialism and Realism in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Abstract

In Chapter 1, I consider how deconstruction has been interpreted by contemporary realists and materialists. I offer an account of the reasons why the anti- realist and - materialist readings of grammatology have seemed so intuitively obvious, particularly to the speculative realists who have typically taken grammatology as the sort of correlationist philosophical programme to be overcome. In resisting these anti- realist readings of Derrida and deconstruction, I am equally following and extending the work of important theorists working today on novel forms of philosophical materialism who do not necessarily identify as speculative realists. Like speculative realists, new materialists such as Catherine Malabou, Karen Barad and Vicki Kirby critique correlationism with the aim of bringing the body, its substance and matter, powers and relations back into view. Working with the various materialisms inherited from the continental tradition, new materialists radicalise the ‘critique of Representationalism’ undertaken by twentieth- century continental and feminist philosophy. This proposed ‘radicalisation’ would show that the sort of entanglement between representation and reality to which theorists of ‘discursive construction’ have attested is ontologically original and foundational. I suggest that grammatology offers an account of generalised entanglement in the figure of arche- writing that new materialists seek.