BADIOU AND SPECULATIVE REALISM

This book has identified and described five original, distinct but overlapping conceptions of historical time more or less explicit in the work of five recent and contemporary French philosophers. It has assumed that these conceptions are important in themselves. As should be abundantly clear, however, they cannot be smoothly amalgamated into a consistent whole. The main task of this conclusion is therefore to establish the outlines of a coherent thought of intermittency, isolating a series of propositions from the foregoing material, marshalling them and placing them in relation to one another, whilst also supplementing them. In so short a space, I cannot hope comprehensively to pin down the theoretical structure that emerges. I shall rather raise certain questions and, in addressing them, try to avoid making the answers appear invariable and final, not in the hope of rendering the structure as a whole provisional or indeterminate, but instead by way of admitting that it is open to radical development.

We may take certain bearings from what has been the most significant new development in continental (here Franco-British) philosophy in the past few years, speculative realism, as represented in major books by Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant.