For those who are interested, here’s my talk at York University in Toronto. It’s a pity they didn’t record the Q&A session after the talk as we really had a wonderful discussion. My talk before the Toronto psychoanalysts should be posted soon.
April 2, 2013
Larval Subjects . 
April 3, 2013 at 5:30 am
I have two questions:
1) what were, in your opinion, the worst moments (thus far) of SR?
2) where does Frantz Fanon fit into this matrix of CT vs. SR?
April 3, 2013 at 1:03 pm
BN,
I don’t really think of there being a rivalry between CT and SR. SR doesn’t reject CT, but broadens our understanding of where sites of the political are to be found. As far as the Borromean knot, thinkers are situated in terms of where they locate sites of the political: the symbolic and discursive or what people believe (symbolic), lived experience for various types of embodied subjects (imaginary), or physical and material infrastructure (real). Where would you place Fanon? SR would aspire to thinking these three orders together at once, rather than focusing on one and largely ignoring the other two.
April 4, 2013 at 7:20 am
Fanon cannot be placed in any one register alone, this is why i asked. if this is the case, it seems as if SR would aspire to do what thinkers like Fanon have already accomplished. my point is that your schema (RSI) only works for characterizing BAD theory and lacks awareness of the more complex critical thoughts that are already available.
April 4, 2013 at 2:59 pm
BN,
I hear that a lot, but I find that critical theorists that describe themselves as materialist often have very little materiality at all in their critical theory. The mere use of the word “materiality” does not a materialism make. If you’re not taking into account the physical in a substantial way and your entire focus is on the ideological, institutions, and the phenomenological, you’re just not working within a materialist framework in any meaningful way. This is not to say that these analyses dominated by the symbolic and the imaginary as theory has been for the last few decades is worthless or wrong. It’s not. It’s just not materialist. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, think of the sort of analysis we find in historians like Braudel or philosphers like DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. Do you find that substantially present in Fanon?
April 5, 2013 at 7:40 am
where is the imaginary in DeLanda?
April 5, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Right, one of my claims is that we find similar problems among the materialists. That’s why we need to think a knot of the three orders. It’s not a question of exclusive disjunctions to the effect that we should abandon someone like Fanon and adopt Delanda instead, but of conjunction or “and”. You find that synthetic or conjunctive thinking objectionable?
April 19, 2013 at 5:19 pm
Fascinating!
June 8, 2013 at 5:29 am
[…] Read “Politics and Speculative Realism” here (warning: pdf). Also related from Levi’s blog: Borromean Critical Theory: here, here, here, and here. […]