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Mehdi Belhaj Kacem On Quentin Meillassou
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem On Quentin Meillassou
I will be commenting on a very interesting excerpt from Belhak Kacem's forthcoming book L'effet
Meillassoux (The Meillassoux Effect) published on the blog Les apports de Mehdi Belhaj Kacem.
Kacem situates Quentin Meillassoux (QM) in the context of the post-Badiousian generation, that is
trying to inherit not only from Badiou but also from Deleuze. In my language, they are trying to
combine elements of a synchronic ontology with those of a diachronic ontology.
Belhaj Kacem: " Cest une mode des philosophes de ma gnration, qui ma agac chez beaucoup:
comment compossibiliser Deleuze et Badiou? Parce que son talent est incommensurable la
concurrence, QM est all bien plus loin, et sa lecture on se dit souvent quil est bien prs dy
parvenir. Et pourtant la fin non. Le prsent livre voudrait contribuer, au-del des critiques, ce
quil russisse quand mme".
"It's a fashion amongst philosophers of my generation which has annoyed me a lot: how to
"compossibilise" Deleuze and Badiou? Because his talent is incommensurable to the competition,
QM has gone further than most, and reading him one tends to think that he is very close to
succeeding. And yet finally he doesn't. The present book would like to contribute, beyond its
critiques, to him succeeding after all" (my translation).
For Belhaj Kacem this opposition of incompossibles and the attempt to overcome it can be seen in
QM's implicit loyalty to Deleuze in his concept of "super-Chaos" and his vacillating loyalty to
Badiou in the notion that "mathematics=ontology":
"Je vais plus loin dans lhypothse de travail: QM nous cache et se cache son deleuzisme foncier
par un badiousisme schizophrnique"
"I go further in my "working hypothesis": QM hides, from us and from himself, his basic
Deleuzism under a schizophrenic Badiouism".
In Belhaj Kacem's analysis there is a contradiction at the heart of Meillassoux's system: QM's superChaos is the negation of the factial eternity of logic and mathematics, and logic and mathematics
are the "factial negation" of any form of super-Chaos. Thus Meillassoux is torn between two
absolutes, each of which is the negation of the other.
calls his Pyrrhic stroke, which consists in the bluff that the demonstration has already been given.
This bluff allows him to maintain, while denying it, Deleuzes Chaos, and even to radicalise it by
subtracting the One-All that englobed it. The bluff allows QM to remain Deleuzian while
pretending to be faithful to Badiou.