Metanoia. A Speculative Perspective

Abstract

In the context of the early stages of the so-called «speculative realism» (a very recent philosophical trend which only dates back to 2007), the German philosophers and literary critics Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig have developed the concept of «metanoia» in their work Metanoia: Spekulative Ontologie der Sprache. A «metanoia» is a founding experience in which a written work affects our outlook on the world and provides us a new conceptuality, through which the world itself does not remain unaltered. The development of this concept amounts to the attempt to surpass the barriers between language and world, between representation and reality, between concepts and referents, etc. by means of a model based in the metonymy as a fundamental linguistic phenomenon. In this paper, I first analyze the general conceptual frame of the «speculative realism», I then consider what the contribution of the concept of metanoia is, and I finally suggest further elaboration.

Keywords: metanoia, speculative realism, speculation, metonymy, language.