BOOK REVIEW OF SPECULATIVE GRACE This is a very interesting book, and a pleasure to read.

It is very well-written, presents very interesting ideas, and contains a very useful introduction Bruno Latours work. So I can wholeheartedly recommend it. It gives an excellent account of Latour's pluralist ontology, one that is far superior, because more faithful, to that given in Graham Harman's book "PRINCE OF NETWORKS: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics". Unfortunately Miller relies too much on Harman's "object-oriented" terminology, which gives a static, passive, and reductionist cast to an ontology that is the very opposite. I am very sympathetic to the book's project of explicating grace in terms of a non-theistic pluralist ontology, and also to the heuristic intermingling of theology (in the widest sense), philosophy, science, the arts etc that this involves. Miller presents his book as an experiment in porting a concept from a theistic plane of monism and transcendence to a speculative and object-oriented plane of pluralism and immanence. This is a very worthwhile project, but I think that Miller is only partially successful. We are all aware of the risks of porting, dramatised in David Cronenbergs film THE FLY. A scientist develops a working prototype of a porting machine, and tries it out on a human subject, himself. He does not notice that a fly enters with him and though the teleportation is successful he has been reassembled with the flys DNA combined with his own. At first all seems well, but then begins his slow transformation into a giant fly-thing. I think something like this happens in the course of Millers book. The first two thirds of SPECULATIVE GRACE are truly excellent, and consist in a radical pluralist reading of Bruno Latours oeuvre. But beginning with Chapter 31 (the book contains 41 short chapters, mostly 3 or 4 pages long) the tone changes and a very unsatisfying comparison of science and religion is expounded, following Latours more recent pronouncements on the different modes of existence of science and religion. In a striking rhetorical inversion, science is declared to be concerned with the distant and transcendent, while religion is supposedly an affair of the close and the immanent. This is where I feel that a transcendent framework has been subtly reintroduced. Bruno Latour himself has argued convincingly that questions of scale (big and small, macro and micro, and so far and close) are framework dependent (see REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL, pages 183-186). Millers initial re-framing of grace in a pluralist non-theistic ontology is here considerably weakened by his resorting to a religion-oriented framing of science and religion where science reveals cold, distant, transcendent objects and religion relates us to engaging, close, immanent objects. The DNA of ontotheology was surreptitiously ported along with the concept of grace and reaffirms its hegemonic power as the book progresses through its last 40 pages. In fact, the book's whole tendency is Latourian, and not at all "object-oriented", despite Miller's choice of an ontological vocabulary that treats everything as objects. Latour's preferred theoretical terms are "actors" and "networks". He calls his account "actor-network theory", to keep his ontology as open as possible. Miller quotes Latour's slogan "we do not know in advance what the world is made of", but then proceeds to use Graham Harman's all-purpose term of "objects", which does pre-decide on the basic components of the universe. "Actor" is a verbal term, as Latour approaches elements in terms of what they do, and he situates them in "networks" as he considers them also in terms of their relations. Harman's preferred term "objects" is far more static, and he considers objects as "withdrawn" from relations. It is to be regretted that Miller chose to express his Latourian (dynamic, pluralist, relational) theology in the language of Harmanian (static, dualist, withdrawn) ontology. The context into which Miller "ports" the notion of grace , insofar as it is immanent, pluralist, dynamic, and atheological, transforms the meaning and gives it heightened relevance. The interest of this sort of experiment in translation points both ways. It shows that if one is willing to be supple on the doctrine, theological concerns can be translated into more up to date language. Conversely, it

shows that seemingly "non-religious" language has spiritual and theological overtones that may go unnoticed without that sort of juxtaposition. On this point Miller's book is an unqualified success.