Volume 29, Issue 57, July 2021
María J. Binetti
Pages 53-67
Philosophy and the Speculative Turn in the 21st Century
New Materialisms and Realisms
The second part of the 20th century has been dominated by a nominalist, anti-realistic and post-metaphysical trend, focused on the performativity of languages, texts, discourses, power structures, economic relationships, etc., and involved in any kind of sociolinguistic, hermeneutical, structural and deconstructive analysis. By contrast, the first part of the 21st century seems to emerge from the exhaustion of that nominalist paradigm, and the drive of a new realistic impulse defined by the irreducibility of the real to mere cultural discourses or power’s relationships. In this new speculative context, several materialisms and realisms spread out their strands, with the certainty of grasping the real in and by the real itself. The following lines aim at looking over the main authors and ideas of the newest philosophical stream.