1. The context: The speculative realist challenge

The context for the present comparative study of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy is provided by the challenge that the speculative realist movement addressed to post-Kantian Continental thought in general, and phenomenology in particular. While the popularity of speculative realism as a movement might have waned since its inception in 2007, the challenge it raised against Continental thinkers remains important. Not only do Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, I will seek to argue, have the means to take up this challenge, but doing so allows us to bring to the fore the originality of their respective thinking.

As is well known by now, the speculative realist movement sprang out of a one-day workshop held at Goldsmiths College in April 2007, a little more than a year after the publication of Quentin Meillassoux's book Après la finitude. The impetus for the original event was, as Brassier describes it, ‘to revive questions about realism, materialism, science, representation, and objectivity, that were dismissed as otiose by each of the main pillars of Continental orthodoxy: phenomenology, critical theory, and deconstruction’. ‘Speculative realism’ thus became, at least for a while, the name of a movement toward a revival of realist and materialist metaphysics as an attempt to counter what was seen as the dominance of a certain legacy of transcendental idealism in Continental philosophy, reflected above all in its focus on the subject, its critical limitation of knowledge to the phenomenal world, and its rejection of speculative metaphysics.

The various projects grouped under the banner of ‘speculative realism’ might not have as much in common as was first thought, except for their call to revive some form of realist metaphysics or another. What interests me in the present study is not so much the positive philosophical programmes developed by the various thinkers grouped under this banner but rather the way in which they describe and challenge their common enemy: post-Kantian thought. Almost without exception, speculative realists maintain that ‘things went grossly awry when Kant, having been roused from his dogmatic slumbers by the challenge of Humean scepticism, responded by announcing his “Copernican revolution” in epistemology’.