Index and nomos

A juridico-political contribution to speculative realism

Abstract

In this article, I seek to make a contribution to speculative realism by adding, to the “imperfect coupling” formed by Hilan Bensusan’s books Indexicalism and Memory Assemblages, a juridico-political dimension centred on a mythical concept of nomos, drawing mainly from Carl Schmitt and ontological turn anthropology. I introduce the concept of nomos at the intersection between the (universal) necessity of contingency defended by Quentin Meillassoux and the contingency of necessity that Markus Gabriel extracts from Schelling’s philosophy of mythology. I propose that it can help accounting for the actuality of contingent necessities in local world-orders. I argue that an open metaphysics is less politically relevant than a good-enough heuristic for mapping out the ways in which local necessities are made and undone. In my reading of Memory Assemblages, I play down the distinction between memory and myth, as well as the parallel one between spectres and spirits. Finally, I seek to show how the nomic indexicalism proposed throughout the paper allows speculative thought to avoid the common charge of “armchair speculation”, inasmuch as it grounds any possibility of metaphysical speculation on a “great outdoors” composed of multiple others.