An Archaeology of Contemporary Speculative Knowledge
Abstract
This dissertation investigates contemporary speculative knowledge grounded in the immanence episteme, which is struggling to emerge as a foundation for a new kind of absolute knowledge. Regarding method, I use Michel Foucault’s concept of archaeology, situating archaeology in the context of deconstruction. In general, by delineating the various differences and genealogies within immanence theory, I show that immanence is neither a monolithic homogeneity nor a schizophrenic multiplicity but a coherent, if troubled, ground for speculative thought.
In Chapter 1, I define deconstruction as a broad philosophical project concerned with the order of knowledge and the University and its disciplines. I claim that deconstruction opposes the idea of universal order premised on equilibrium, complementariness, and discovery while proposing a different order premised on incompossibility, sense, and exteriority.
In Chapter 2, I elaborate on deconstruction’s alternative order of knowledge via Foucault’s archaeological texts and Gilles Deleuze’s early work on Hume. Specifically, I argue that Foucault and Deleuze mark the limits of reflexive, or self-ordering, knowledge, and I describe the twin procedure of simulation-dissimulation that all bodies of knowledge need to develop to achieve epistemological stability.
In Chapter 3, I carry out an archaeological analysis of biopolitics, a contemporary pseudo-discipline that has entered its reflexive phase while attempting to ascend to the status of an established discipline. Although biopolitics runs into the problems of self-ordering that Deleuze and Foucault described, its position as a pseudo-discipline provides biopolitics with speculative advantages and points to the episteme behind contemporary speculative knowledge: immanence.
In Chapter 4, I consider the research programs associated with the immanence episteme. Specifically, I identify three strongly speculative research programs: the “speculative everything” discourse, the “absolute speculation” discourse, and the “subtractive speculation” discourse.
In Chapter 5, I investigate the immanence episteme itself and distinguish two archaeological figures: immanence as plenitude and immanence as surplus. I find that the transition from immanence as plenitude, which is considered to be the dogmatic version of immanence, to immanence as surplus, which is what immanence theory is focused on today, is mediated by the following three stages: absolute immanence, complete immanence, and pure immanence.