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9/21/2014 The ‘Not’ of Speculative Realism | Mute http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/%E2%80%98not%E2%80%99-speculative-realism 1/12 ARTICLES THE ‘NOT’ OF SPECULATIVE REALISM By Giorgio Cesarale , 19 February 2014 Image: Finis Ab Origine Pedet (My End is My Beginning) Is the movement formerly known as Speculative Realism really as weird as it would wish, or is its free floating negativity the index of a different kind of estrangement? Giorgio Cesarale descends into the philosophical interior of the artworld’s favourite brand of theory and discovers a peculiarly inconsistent kind of nothing at its core. The Strange Birth of Speculative Realism To say that something is ‘strange’ or ‘weird’ implies an already established subject, or a subject in the process of being established. To define something in this way it must already have manifested itself, and been judged as incongruent with a standard. However, at the conference at Goldsmiths in 2007 that launched Speculative Realism (SR) as a philosophical movement and gave it its name, Graham Harman was already pointing out the strangeness
