Future Metaphysics

Theory Redux (Polity)

by Armen Avanessian, James Wagner (Translator)

The triumph of technological rationality and of the sciences as a whole has by no means provided answers to humanity’s great questions. Instead, it has raised new and old questions and problems. To orient ourselves in the twenty-first century, we must take a new look at the central categories of philosophy that, often unbeknownst to us, continue to shape our everyday thinking.

Future Metaphysics is an attempt at restating the importance of the great metaphysical categories for the how our contemporary predicament forces us both to reclaim them and to give them a radically new twist. Armen Avanessian re-examines and displaces categories like substance and accident, form and matter, life and death, giving them an unexpected twist. What if the idea of accident, for instance, had to take into account the many new kinds of glitches, crashes and crises – from finance to ecology, from technological catastrophes to social collapses – that permeate our culture and make everyday news? Can we keep on using this concept as it was traditionally meant to be used when risk and chance have become part of the very substance of our world, so rendering the distinction between substance and accident meaningless? The other concepts and distinctions require a similar interrogation, giving birth to a new metaphysical landscape, where the most urgent realities of the twenty-first century impinge on the most fundamental categories of thought.

Genres: Philosophy

140 pages, Hardcover

Published December 16, 2019

About the author

Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, literary theorist, and political theorist. He has taught at the Free University of Berlin, among other institutions, and held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia University and Yale University. His work on Speculative Realism and Accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia.

Reviews

[Andrew Fahey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bold new vision of metaphysics and an equally bold argument for its relevance.

One need not agree with all of Avanessian’s positions outlined throughout the book (what Meillasoux in his review termed “skylights of thought”), but books like this within the emerging movement of speculative realism undeniably shift the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. Avanessian set himself the ambitious task of outlining some aspects of a metaphysics of and for the future, and in a good deal of respects he delivers.

Interesting and essential reading for anyone interested in the the thrust of continental philosophy, the future of politics, technology, the environment and our relation to the cosmos.

[Philip Mlonyeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skal si mer om den her, må bare lese den en gang til

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anything, a general snapshot of where philosophy was at first term Trump