Chapter 1: The Speculative Turn

Towards larger realismsAccording to French philosopher Catherine Malabou, one of the key challenges for thought today consists in freeing it from the logic of blind and automatic reproduction, which reinstates the same reality in different guises in a neverending loop.In order to interrupt this mechanism, she argues, it becomes necessary to undertake the task of "clearing a point of void, nothingness, and dispossession."69 Her elaboration of this position is framed in cartographical terms as she defines "the most urgent ethical and political task" to involve "opening the unassignable place in a global world, where every place is assigned."70 Mapmaking indeed provides vivid illustration of this problem insofar as Malabou's goal is not to seek a transcendental solution where a structure disengaged from Earth would regulate the life of the planet and its inhabitants.In the cartographical convention, any such gesture would entail closing gaps in order to iron out a smooth image of the world from a divine perspective.What Malabou proposes is different: a cartography that does not fill white spaces using the standard palette of nation states or physical geography, but scrapes all colorings or dispossesses them by relinquishing any symbolic hold over reality.This reverse cartography would have the purpose of reminding that "waves of ownership, appropriation, reproduction are constantly and repeatedly covering up the originary deprivation of ontological wealth."71 To paraphrase, new possible formsways of thinking and lifestylesare suppressed behind the veil of reality construed as a capitalist spectacle of progress.Malabou calls these forms "open fields" after Louis Althusser, a phrase that agrees with the blank spaces on maps, whose allure is rooted in the possibilities teeming within thema force that 69 Catherine Malabou, "Whither Materialism?Althusser/Darwin," in Plastic Materialities.