Despite my disagreements, my at times snarky beef with things that start with "OO" (object oriented), yes, some of what interests me indeed bears resemblance to what has been coralled under that baggy name "speculative realism" (or certain elements of what falls beneath the sign). However, in my case, minus all the science and plus more Artaud. I "am," that's to say, a speculative surrealist. Doubly adrift and with a sneaking suspicion that so many of those figures and tropes of scientific thought employed in the scorched, or scorchable, wake of the manifest image of the human are, above all, predominantly aesthetic figures. The Lovecraft/Ligotti specificity of many of these figures is an initial tip-off, and we need to keep asking what is the dominant case: the figure that lets us think, however fleetingly, the ancestral, the extinctive, the accelerational, the entropic, or the often "unrepresentable" scientific research that underpins and supposedly drives the application of such figures. My money is on the former.
[Note toward a longer exigesis of what the hell I'm trying to do with my thinking in general, even as I'm not interested in developing a set of systemic principles: I push this way in part because I'm invested in a few projects that, for the sake of convenience, start with anti-prefixes: for example, something like a "disenlightenment" project for which turns of thought developed from cultural production and negative, auto-sabotaging political practices (hence my work on ornamental nihilism as a cultural tendency and on misanthropology) can play an analogical role in dismantling "correlationism." Not just as illustrative equivalencies that help us envision things so at odds with our dominant anthropic mode of thought that we just stammer, drool, and bleed from the eyes if we actually take it seriously. It's like reading Sutter Cane's original manuscript: we need the mass-market paperback version, and not just to help spread the bad word. Or so we think, for there is no originary and beyond-the-pale content in the manuscript: we see flashbacks of what has already been seen, in the film, in the novel being written as it goes, and hence it's symbolic, mediated, tamed from the start. There's nothing there that we can't handle other than the ultimately crushing possibility that what we've assumed to be ruptural, unthinkable, and devastating is in fact firmly centered in the sphere of what is comfortable and easily reconcilable with going on as if nothing happened.]
These aesthetic/tropic figures are slippery almost-captures of thought against the interest of the human, indeed. But they're selected not because they give evidential proof of the fallacies of psychological intention, agency, or belief, even if they can do that, but because we prefer a world in which tentacular behemoth worms creep through the belly of a black star than a world in which they do not. (Which is to say, we're perhaps right back where we started, with the image of how we want to be or not be, even if this image is a diagonal slash away, even if the hyperbolic, striving, overleaping distance away from the everyday toward the speculative, necrotic, and virulent is an ultimate index of just how hard it is to think otherwise.)
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