The Story of Real Speculations

The unity of philosophy and literature

Artwork by illustrator/animator and friend Alicia Herbert

To celebrate the launch of Real Speculations I will be offering an introduction and overview of the book at a live session in The Portal on Monday May 5th at 830pm CEST. All members of The Portal will get access to the event. However, non-members of The Portal can get access to the event by sending proof of purchase of the book. You can either send proof of purchase via a direct message on Substack, or via email at cadell.last@gmail.com, and I will create a mailing list for everyone to access our live Portal session on May 5th.

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In one of the year end videos for Philosophy Portal, as well as a guiding theme for our upcoming collaboration at The Portal, Daniel L. Garner of

O.G. Rose

and Pae Veo of the Stygian Society, reflected the important relationship between philosophy and literature: a good philosophy can be developed into a good story; and a good story should contain within itself good philosophy.¹ This idea is thoroughly Hegelian in the sense that, for Hegelian philosophy, we do away with any notional search for a pre-reflexive “Being” and instead reflexively recognise that the very historicity of narrative itself already “does the job of intellectual intuition, of uniting us with Being”.²

In this article, I am going to seek to demonstrate the core of why my most recent book, Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis, represents the unity of good philosophy and literature, and in the process either:

1. Give you insight into why this book is worth reading, or

2. Give you a sense of the core message of the book, and what it offers for our moment

First, in order to understand this text, it is relevant to have a basic understanding of the meta-contradiction at the core of Hegelo-Marxism, and also how this basic understanding is itself a philosophy in the form of a story that is designed to reflexively unite our thought with being. Let us begin with the basic philosophical and phenomenological structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which offers modern subjectivity a story recapitulating the structure of spiritual development and unfolding. The key terms in this story include:

• Consciousness

• Self-Consciousness

• Reason

• Spirit

• Religion

• Absolute Knowing

This phenomenological structure and story has not only been essential for me, but was essential for the Young Hegelians and the intellectual milieu that produced the work of Karl Marx. Here Marx’s inversion of Hegel involves the idea that Hegel’s phenomenology is a type of mystified political-economy. For Marx, we get the following structural analogies, derived from Hegel’s phenomenology, but now with the “rational kernel” stripped of the “mystical shell”:

• Consciousness = Primitive Communism

• Self-Consciousness = Slavery

• Reason = Feudalism

• Spirit = Capitalism

• Religion = Socialism

• Absolute Knowing = World Communism

Understanding these basic structures are necessary to understand the set and setting for what becomes the basic structures of Real Speculations and its attempt to engage with the real historicity of our intellectual moment.

Here starting with Hegel’s phenomenology, I have been working with the hypothesis that the cultural/intellectual discussions or zeitgeist in the 21st century have been attempting to unconsciously re-work/re-process Hegel’s phenomenology. I have taken this as the most useful starting point for dialecticising “New Atheism”. New Atheism was without question the most influential cultural/intellectual thought movement at the start of the 21st century. Moreover, we find in the New Atheist movement the core of an unconscious re-processing of Hegelian phenomenology in the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (the two living members of the original “Four Horsemen”).

Most obviously, we find in the work of Richard Dawkins, without question the most influential spear-head of the New Atheist movement in the early 21st century, the emphasis on “Reason” over “Spirit” and “Religion” (literally his organisation: the “Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason”). For Dawkins, the force of Reason itself is enough to process a civilisational project, with spiritual obscurantism and religious dogmatism doomed to fall away in the dark falsity of unreason.

Sam Harris was the first to break with this spear-head and line of the New Atheist movement, and even in this break, he took distance from the entire label of “New Atheist”. This break was from Reason to Spirit, clearly expressed in his main career arc supported by the book, app and podcast Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. What is most obvious is that this break from Reason to Spirit still included within itself the negation of Religion proper, with a hierarchy of good/bad Spirituality, and Religion seeming to operate on a spectrum, with Buddhism representing the “Good Religion” and Islam/Christianity representing the “Bad Religion”.

In this context, if Sam Harris was the beginning of the negation/end of New Atheism, perhaps the negation of the negation, or the end of the end of New Atheism can be represented in the collision between Sam Harris and Jordan B. Peterson on “Truth”, with Harris hard-lining the “Spirit” as “Truth”, and Peterson introducing the core of “Religion” as “Truth”, in the form of and the centring of mythological stories. Throughout Peterson’s work, and to this day, he centres the mythological story, and for him specifically, the Old and New Testament, as the (Judeo-Christian) “Truth” that our culture needs to revive and reconstitute itself (or socially reproduce itself). When thought all-together, Dawkins, Harris and Peterson form the unconscious recapitulation of Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic on the level of Reason, Spirit and Religion — and this line can be thought of as living and interactive in the sense that all three have been in dialogue with each other, where these tensions constitute their discourse itself.

What is of course missing from this line is the dimension of Absolute Knowing, as the truth of the entire series, but also the Marxist “de-mystification” of the phenomenological dialectic on the level of political-economy (the tensions between feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism). Perhaps we find both dimensions in the performativity of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who not only operates from the standpoint of Absolute Knowing in his philosophical work, but also seeks to bring to us the gaze of Hegel inclusive of an inverted Marxist political-economy and its challenges. We already see, in the one live discussion between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan B. Peterson, that this dimension entirely short-circuits Peterson’s discourse. What this short-circuiting tells us is that the entire line of New Atheism is constituted by liberal democrats who not only reify liberal democracy as the unconscious background of the validity of their own thought about Reason, Spirit and Religion, but also avoid the political struggle for socialism or communism.

This is not a straw-man: in Jordan B. Peterson’s most recent appearance at the Oxford Union, the moderator asks Peterson directly:³ “what is the biggest issue you have been wrong about?” and his response: “I was a socialist when I was 14”.

What this response tells us is very clear: Peterson’s break from Spirit to Religion on the question of Truth represents precisely the threat in the zeitgeist of our current moment: religion as the return of the repressed of a liberal democracy that has failed and cannot yet think how to engage the sublation of a socialist project. What we risk here is precisely falling into a reified identification with religious mythology as a way to “spiritually rationalise” to ourselves life within a political-economy that seeks to reduce us to the excremental remainder (waste) of a capitalist system that no longer functions on the level of liberal democracy. Rather the current system returns us to feudalistic conditions (perhaps the underlying reason why many today are finding solace in pre-capitalist religious/Christian forms like Catholicism and Orthodoxy).

In contrast to this approach, the very core of Real Speculations, informed by the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and the Slovenian School, but also Peter Rollins’ and the Church of Contradiction, opens the historical theopolitical questions that our current zeitgeist has failed to confront. To be specific: in the dimension of Hegelian philosophy we find the the historical truth of Christianity as opening to a transgression of Christianity itself (and the problems of modern secular theopolitics); and the dimension of Marxist political-economy we find the identification of the question and the problems involved in the challenge of sublating liberalism for socialism.

In Real Speculations, as well as in the work of Philosophy Portal itself, we avoid the traps of the current culture war zeitgeist by working from the foundations of modern philosophy and the discourse that it develops. To be specific, I would argue that what unified Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Jordan B. Peterson (unconsciously) is that their philosophical point of view ends with Kant as the pinnacle of “Enlightenment”, as opposed to starting with Kant, and following him through towards the results of “Enlightenment”. In ending as opposed to starting with Kant, all three thinkers lack the resources to engage in a project that would point us towards the sublation of liberal democracy for socialism, and instead lead us backwards in various weird forms. Here the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek is indispensable insofar as his work starts with Kant and points us towards problems “beyond” or “post” “Enlightenment”. This forces us into dimensions of the “Night of the World” and “self-relating negativity”, where madness and war become the excessive and indestructible remainders of rational, spiritual, and religious processes (and clearly visible in the actuality of the post-Enlightenment world which is unable to contain either).

Technically speaking, what we are dealing with in Kant’s project is the limitation of reason (a negativity); whereas Hegel’s project sees the rational limit as the “Thing-in-itself” (Real) which leads us into a “contradictory becoming” which has (in faith) a positive end in-and-for-itself. Today, I would claim, our “contradictory becoming” is on the “Hegelo-Marxist” level of “religion-socialism” and the question of “Absolute Knowing-World Communism”. What opens here are questions and dimensions that comprise the first section of Real Speculations:

1. How to think Absolute Knowing?

2. How to think Hegel’s phenomenology and logic on the level of high theory?

3. What are the challenges we confront in thinking the relationship between the understanding and self-differentiation?

4. Can we think again political right today?

5. What does it mean to think in terms of system and subject?

6. If we live in technofeudal or technocaptalist conditions, is technosocialism possible?

7. And how to think and live out our relations to either the commons or the church as a contradiction as opposed to an identity?

This opening section is connected to the second section by way of the challenge implicit in the mediation of consciousness to Absolute Knowing in that, if we fail this mediation, we are left with the leading edge of thought on the level of mythology (Religion), but unable to actually drive in the Real. This is why the second section of the work starts off with the greatest challenge of Hegelo-Marxist excess, that is the works of Nietzsche, who develops a (paradoxically) “Christian Atheist” insight that the drive precede myth. This idea that drive precedes myth is not only picked up as a key insight for Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as Lacan’s working from the standpoint of death drive, but also in Nietzsche himself, who develops a new myth from his own drive as opposed to offering us a strict identification with a specific historical tradition. In a meta-move, in a move that would hopefully be endorsed by Nietzsche himself, we do not “identify” with Nietzsche or his myths, but rather take on his subjective disposition of drive for our time in the immanent existential excess and mess. In this challenge we find the following key themes emerge:

1. Belonging as not “stable home” but itself a “hard road”

2. Contradictory logic between Game A (liberal capitalism) and Game B (communitarianism)

3. Paradoxes of scaling projects from small to large and the inherent problematics we find therein

4. The dynamics between immediacy and mediation on the level of both psychedelics and philosophy

5. Humanism, trans/post-humanism and the speculative possibility of a hyper-human project

6. New education in a time of transition, critical media theory in the age of artificial intelligence, and the foundations for what would be a School of Thinking

The second section is connected to a third and final section by way of the claim that, in order to remain faithful to the actual drive one has to be capable of mediation, not only on the level of reason, but on the level of desire. Desire is fundamentally libidinal, and fundamentally in search for an impossible object; and if one is only thinking about a reason disconnected from libido, then one’s reason will find itself in service of an unconscious desire, as opposed to the challenge of a qualitative transformation of desire for its impossible object, to desire for desire itself (drive). Of course on this level we encounter the “impossible object” of “God”, but also perhaps the socialist and communist projects themselves. Here we must confront the Lacanian theory of libido and its impossibility, as well as the dimension of philosophy after psychoanalysis, and the role of negativity of desire on the level of universal politics. In this work we centre Lacan, but specifically the Lacan of the Écrits, that is “Lacan for Philosophers”, his writings, and his writings for a “first cause” (one’s own drive). Here we find:

1. The essential distinctions between Das Ding and objet petit a, loss and lack, politics of suffering and joy

2. Timenergy lack as personal and political first principle for singular-universality

3. Challenge of patriarchy in Woke Left/Pop Right culture war dynamics

4. Science as in a crisis of not only replication but thought itself, as well as the struggle of thinking a science after quantum physics/psychoanalysis

5. The revenge of philosophy as underpinning science, as opposed to science overtaking or replacing philosophy

If the introduction of the book introduces the dialectical story of New Atheism towards its necessary overcoming, the conclusion of the book points towards the dialectics of Christian Atheism itself in the double move: Christianity as the Truth of Religion; and Atheism as the Truth of Christianity. We can make sense of the first move, Christianity as the Truth of Religion, in the form of C.S. Lewis’s claim, not that all other religions are false, but that all religions possess an incomplete truth which points towards realisation in Christ (i.e. pre-Christian religions leave God as self-enclosed “Transcendental Ideal” separate from the finite-temporal world). We can make sense of the second move, Atheism as the Truth of Christianity, in the idea that Christianity is fundamentally about opening “Christ as The Way”, that is the unification of God with the human person (place/time) in subjective destitution (cross-resurrection). In the history of Christianity we see the struggle of this double move, in that the institutional structures of Christianity wrestle with its own excessive truth, the tension of the big Other and subjective destitution, as well as the mystery of the Holy Spirit.

Here Real Speculations offers a real extension to the theopolitical project insofar as modern philosophy, and specifically Hegelo-Marxism, offer a rational standpoint to think through the mad truths of subjective destitution opened by Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Here Kant’s transcendental philosophy, its extension through the works of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan, as well as quantum science and its revolutionary and ontologically open stance, point towards the establishment of a thought lineage relevant to the revitalisation of theology and religion from the standpoint of Holy Spirit. Throughout the book, the standpoint of Holy Spirit is expressed in the tension between living community and network dynamics that are part of both Philosophy Portal’s becoming, as well as the becoming of many adjacent and linked philosophical, artistic and theological projects.

To pick up the book:

Art by illustrator/animator and friend Alicia Herbert

1. See: Philosophy and Literature. 2025. In: PHILOSOPHY PORTAL YEAR IN REVIEW 2024/25 (PT 2) (w/ Thomas Hamelryck, Barry Taylor, Slavoj Žižek, +). Philosophy Portal. (link)

2. Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 15.

3. Jordan Peterson on wokeism in public life, cultural Christianity and the trans debate. 2025. Oxford Union. (link) (accessed: April 25, 2025).