Lee Braver on Transgressive Realism

[MTC]

A free PDF of Lee Braver’s article HERE

http://speculations.squarespace.com/storage/Braver_On%20Not%20Settling_Speculations_IV.pdf

Braver charts the territory between the Anti-Realists and the Speculative Realists and explains his own concept of a Transgressive Realism, interestingly connected to writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick.

This passage in particular caught my attention:

"In horror, there is a definite horrible thing that is threatening me but it resists attempts to understand it, exceeding laws of nature that we had taken to be inviolable. It isn’t just fear of harm befalling me, though it has more of that than the wholly inchoate anxiety; it’s ontological horror of what this incomprehensible thing is and what unimaginable things it can do to me beyond just inflicting pain and death. I can’t exactly fear it because I cannot get a grip on what it is threatening, and this uncertainty makes it all the more horrifying. I may fear an axe-wielding maniac who is trying to kill me, but I recoil in horror from an axe-wielding maniac who keeps getting up after I’ve put knitting needles through his neck."

[teguififthzeal]

This is an enjoyable article--chiefly because of all the idealists and non-realists he discusses.

The guys he's trying to mold into "Transgressive Realists" weren't realists of any kind.

Lovecraft, Kant, The German Idealists? Dick, yeah, maybe, but even that's a bit doubtful..realists are people who traffic in the everyday, everyone knows a realist who has lived amongst people; they are air traffickers of the mundane and don't think or bother with, usually, an iota of what someone like Immanuel Kant was thinking about on any give day. Heidegger? Being and Time? The Reichstag? Most people aren't thinking about these things on any given day. He might as well have thrown Novalis in there.

This is why the following revolution occurred:

Surrealism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Surrealism

[MTC]

T, I am sure Braver would agree with you that these writers weren't realists in any ordinary sense. Realism according to SR isn't naive realism or pre-critical realism but what Quentin Meillassoux calls, after Keats, "the great outdoors", the non-correlated world, a genuinely mind-independent reality. This is why HPL's cosmic indifference and Philip K. Dicks contigent worlds are so important for Speculative/Transgressive Realists.

[MTC]

Anyway, if you liked his discussions of continentalist idealism/anti-realism you might also enjoy his first book A Thing of This World (2007). It reads as a synoptic vision of philosophy's attempts to think reality in the wake of the rejection of realism.