Romanticism and Speculative Realism ed. by Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanticism and Speculative Realism ed. by Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington Joshua David Gonsalves (bio) Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington, eds. Romanticism and Speculative Realism. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 290. $125 hardcover. Romanticism and Speculative Realism reconceptualizes Romanticism via recent innovations in philosophy: renovated ontologies, new materialisms, speculations on relations between (non)humans, ecology, and social infrastructures. The results take the form of practical criticism, as the collection subjects Romanticist preconceptions of imagination, nature, and language to advances in theoretical thinking. It is one more welcome attempt to keep literary criticism on the cutting edge of things. Essays in the collection cover a wide range of subjects, including readings of familiar canonical Romantic writers, such as Blake (Allison Dushane), Byron (Aaron Ottinger), Keats (Greg Ellermann), Scott (Evan Gottlieb), and Wordsworth (Joel Faflak); some concern less usual suspects, such as John Clare (David Collings), Rousseau (Chris Washington), Poe (Graham Harman), and Equiano (Alexander Dick); other chapters take on some broader categories of Romantic-period writing such as Nature (Mary Jacobus), The Spirit of the Age (Michele Speitz), Feminisms (Kate Singer), and Cookery Books (Brian Rejack). As the introduction announces, the volume attempts to demonstrate “the necessity of romanticism for understanding the world revealed by speculative realism” (1). A bit of context, however, before approaching this encounter between philosophy and literary studies, since there is always a risk that the philosophy becomes diluted as it comes into contact with literary reading practices. This happened with deconstruction, in which Paul de Man’s ruthless close reading found a receptive soil in New Criticism-enriched literature departments in contradistinction to the English-language reductions imposed on a very different Derridean deconstruction. Similar reductions are currently [End Page 240] happening to “Speculative Realism,” as is exemplified by its identification with Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO) and New Materialism. It will be helpful then to distinguish Speculative Realism (associated with Meillassoux, Brassier, and, to a lesser extent, Iain Hamilton Grant), OOO (associated with Graham Harman)—which believes it can access Kant’s things-in-themselves via “allusion,” or a figurative language replete with anecdotal objects (220)—, and the misnamed New Materialism, which insists, alongside Latour, on the non-human agency of objects. One succinct way of addressing these distinctions would be to suggest that what OOO and New Materialism leave out, unlike the speculative realism of Meillassoux and Brassier, is historical materialism. Similarly, the influence of Badiou, a staunch believer in History (with a capital H, as in Hegel, Marx, and other dialectical thinkers who invest in history rather than the object in order to escape Kant), is powerfully felt in Meillassoux and Brassier’s writings, but falls by the wayside in OOO and New Materialism. How, then, can the fate of these theoretical-historical contexts in Romanticism and Speculative Realism help us evaluate the way it deals with these differences? The term “Speculative Realism” offers a clue, since Harman, who contributes an essay to this volume, continues to use it despite Brassier and Meillassoux insisting that he stop associating his project with theirs. Both of these writers, who resist the exploitation of the term, take Badiou seriously (one being his student, the other his translator-explicator), in part because historical materialism is central to their versions of Speculative Realism. Two contributors to this volume, Faflak and Washington, register the contextual importance of historical materialism by engaging our contemporary capitalist horizon (59, 141) even as Faflak brackets a historicism-cum-materialism in favor of what this volume requires—close reading—, a bracketing of philosophy that Harman likewise enacts via his reading of Poe’s “The Black Cat.” The point is that the philosophical horizon that Brassier-Meillassoux-Badiou occupy is ultimately foreign to Harman, who also writes literary criticism per se, while Meillassoux’s book on Mallarmé concerns mathematical number, which is both liberatory and capitalism-as-usual in Badiou. Support for the difference between Speculative Realism of the Brassier-Meillassoux variety and OOO can be found in Nathan Brown’s succinct demolition of Harman, a critique that has garnered much commentary for allegedly being uncollegial, yet Peter Wolfendale’s book has demonstrated the same with relentless philosophical rigor (see Brown, “The Nadir...