The Contortions and Convolutions of the “Speculative Turn”

Focusing principally on the once-feted philosophical movement of object-oriented ontology (OOO), this article examines how this movement fits into a broader “speculative turn,” which seeks to reverse the purportedly wrongheaded emphasis of post-Kantian critical philosophy on the finitude of the subject, and once again unleash the fecund potentialities of speculative thought. Identifying several incongruities and tensions that traverse this project, it is argued that OOO exemplifies the difficulties faced when attempting to articulate a decidedly pre-critical metaphysics without accounting for the question of subjectivity.