from graham:
“Dear Conferees,
It is with some regret that I have to announce that Quentin Meillassoux will not be able to attend the April event. He will however be sending us his paper which will be circulated to conferees in advance to enable a fuller discussion of its topic than might otherwise have been possible.
We understand and share the disappointment of many at this news.
Despite this, however, the conference will go ahead as planned.
Iain Grant”
Bad news indeed. Not that this event won’t still be wonderful, but as according to the recent classification of SR sub-categories I think I fall into the Meillassoux (badiouian) group, this is a big loss. Hopefully he ends up somewhere in the UK later this year, as I was very impressed last time I got to see him speak and share a meal with him, and would very much like to do it again, this time with some much better questions in mind.
Daily Humiliation 
Two posts in one day? Consider me dumbfounded.
I fall into the neglected Grant (Schelling-Deleuze) position. Though he has no great sympathy for Laruelle nor Bergson, so the reality is that I’m not SR. I am dynamite.
dynamite? awesome. and in all fairness, I think the object oriented crowd and the brassier-nihilist are ‘winning’ right now anyways. if you’re dynamite, I may be ‘half man-half amazing’.
Well if that group is winning it surely means all these philosophers will be banging down the doors of science. They may be disappointed in what they find there though as real science isn’t nearly as fun as the philosophical fantasy of science. For instance, did you know that the heat death, which many are taking as axiomatic, is currently a competing theory and that it too lacks the mathematical proofs to outwit and outlast the other cosmological theories? My God! If science can’t just tell us to be nihilists or not we may have to actually live and deal with art and politics and shit. Snark snark snark.
The dynamite line is Nietzsche’s… I’m not original dynamite.
If they are winning it’s for the lack of a viable alternative. Let an oppositon gather. The Post-Kantian school has merely been taken off guard, principally as they probably (naively) saw no real threat. In time they will get to show that there is no real threat. It’s also generational; the ‘young’ Speculative Realists/Materialists have the advantage of having grown with internet technology. They have taken full advantage of this technology, naturally, in disseminating their message. There will be new young upstarts with a full grasp on net marketing and a desire to challenge the (by then) prevalent trends, who will redress the balance. Not all of Post-Kantian thought is negative, and certainly the SR trend needs an aesthetic/ethical injection:
‘On a Life that Lives’: http://logicalregression.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-life-that-lives.html