Speculative Realism and Religion: Irreduction, Objects, Forms, and Intensities

Abstract

This article uses the philosophy of Tristan Garcia to theorize about religion and to identify religion as an object without essentializing it (scientistic reduction) or reducing it to culture (as in critical theory). It proposes a radical speculative ontology for analyzing religion in opposition to late-liberalism’s determining effects on the study of religion. In juxtaposition with Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative philosophy, Garcia’s philosophy offers a unique perspective about the irreduction of religion and classification within religious studies, especially through his philosophy of intensities. His perspective on the concatenation of human and nonhuman objects and their assemblages compliments and builds upon the current scholarship in material religion. In particular, his philosophy of intensities enables religion and religions to be dispersed into countless temporal instances and evaluated in limitless levels of intensity in a classificatory system set to avoid reductionism and neoliberalism.