Potentiality of the Present: Exploring Speculative Realism VIA Spatial Theory

Abstract

In this essay, I propose a new alliance between speculative realism and spatial theory. Whether interpreted as an avant-garde movement or simply as part of an evolution in human thought, the Speculative Turn in continental philosophy has an important link to spatial studies, a field replete with the study of imaginative and speculative texts. By applying various spatial theories to this unique philosophical movement, and thereby implicating ourselves within a space where we become linked in spatial being, we can endeavor to think the absolute from a place of ‘radical contingency’ and spatiality. This analysis, then, historicizes the movement via its academic and para-academic manifestations, as it asserts a mode of remembering that invokes the loss of cultural amnesia. Thus, it demonstrates that speculative realism is a good candidate for further critical inquiry, but also that spatial studies, with its interdisciplinary lens often informing and creating the cultural worlds we inhabit, is a good candidate for speculative realism to cast its exploratory vision.