Meillassoux-Interview

Quentin Meillassoux Philosophy in the Making

by Graham Harman

162 The thesis of radical contingency

If I take contingency seriously, then I ought to divide the possible into potentialities (which
are submitted to the natural laws of our universe) and virtualities (which are not submitted to
those laws). If potentialities can be probabilized, in my view virtualities cannot, by
reason of the transfinite character of the number of possibles. Thus it is pointless to
ask what the chances are of one virtualities arising rather than another, or to think that
the particular virtuality as an infinitely small chance of arising in view of the immense
number of other possibilities.
On the other hand, I can do to things with respect to the virtual that are able to transform my
subjective relationship with the experience of this world. First of all, I can grant prominence to
the most radical novelties of the past:
the emergence of life understood as a set of qualitative contents by contrast with an
inorganic matter that feels neither sensation nor perception;
then the emergence of rational thought by contrast with the life that cannot attain the
concept of the infinite or eternal truth (of the mathematical or speculative type).
This having been done, I can ask what the next advent would be that is capable of just as
much novelty in comparison with thought as thought compared with life, or life with matter.
For if we grant that thought can attain the absolute (that is to say, contingency
considered as necessary), then nothing can transcend thought except for the re-
emergence of thought in accordance with the reign of rigourously regulated
egalitarian Justice among thinking individuals. We are in the framework of an analogy of
incommensurabilities: if time is still capable of novelty just as radical in comparison
with thought as thought with life, or life with matter, this novelty can only be the
emergence of egalitarian Justice for the living and the dead.
163 Religious messianism all revolutionary radicalism can be rethought within the framework
of an attempt at radical equality for the living and the dead are like - an advent that is
contingent but nonetheless eternally possible, totally improbilizable, and outside the
grasp of our action and even of our Universe insofar as it is subject to its own laws.
The eternal possible frees me from suffering over the appalling misfortune of those who
have experienced atrocious deaths, allows me to escape being paralysed by an impossible
mourning for the atrocities of the twentieth century, and also permits me to invest my energy
in an egalitarian politics that has become conscious of its limits. Indeed, politics is
delivered from all charges of messianism, since escatological awaiting is entirely recuperated
by individual subjectivity. This partition of tasks (individual messianism, political finitude)
allows us to avoid the totalitarian temptation of collective action. We can efficiently expel
the eschatological desire from politics only by allowing this desire to be unfolded
openly in another sphere of existence (such as private life or philosophy).
_______________________________________________________________________

Correlationism:
163 With the invention of this term, I wish to identify a ubiquitous adversary in contemporary
philosophy, one that takes extremely diverse forms. I had to avoid the term idealism, since
it is loaded with ambiguity, and since there are numerous correlationists who refuse to be
recognised as idealists. And in fact, idealism designates to an equal degree the Platonic
realism of ideas, speculative idealism (whether in the subjective form of Berkeley or the
absolute form of Hegel), and that transcendental idealism of Kant or Husserl
I wanted a clean slate freed from the system of evasions in order to localise a decision that
none of these traditions can deny: the uncircumventable correlation between a
subjective pole and an objective pole, both understood in the broadest sense of the
term. In this way I could show how it is possible to break with the decision and the
various currents that took it to be irrefutable.
1
164 I try to give to correlationism its most rigourous form - to isolate the fundamental
argument in it. Ultimately, this argument amounts to a demonstration that every realist is
condemned to a pragmatic contradiction: he claims to be able to think that which is
independent of thought, but from the very fact of his thinking it he makes of it a
correlate of his thought.
This argument is very powerful indeed, and it can lead either to a correlationism in the
strict sense (I don't know what that is outside of what is given to thought)
or to a subjectivist metaphysics (I affirm that being in itself is the hypostatized
correlation).
Henceforth I will use the term Era of the Correlate for this conjunction of correlationism and
metaphysical subjectivism that defines what is essential in modern philosophy since
Berkeley. My concern in After Finitude is to give the rigourous refutation of the standpoint
and thus the refutation of the argument that I shall call the correlational circle(namely, that
there is a vicious pragmatic circle contained in any realist position). To refute it is thus to
affirm that we can very well have access to a reality radically independent of the fact
that we think, and in this way we can escape the reproach of the pragmatic
contradiction.
I make this demonstration in two steps: 1. the contingency of the correlation, which
correlationism needs in order to refute absolutist subjectivism, cannot itself be
thought as a correlate of thought. Thus there is necessarily contingency, whether I think
it or not;
2 contingency can be thought only as the contingency of something that exists (this
is the first Figure of the factial: a demonstration that there ought to be something
rather than nothing). Hence, there are necessarily contingent things, whether I exists
to think them or not.
It is an internal necessity that there be contingent things, whereas thought (like every
being) is contingent with respect to them. We can disappear species, as can all other life
on earth; there will always be contingent beings whether we exist or not. We thus
obtained the first postulate of all materialism (but in a form that is demonstrated rather than
just posited). What we also establish the second postulate (which is rationalist and not
sceptical) of all materialism: thought can think being that is independent of thought.
_______________________________________________________________________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy which defines itself loosely in its
stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy or what it terms
[1]
correlationism. Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College,
[2]
University of London in April, 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano of
Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier of American University of Beirut (then
at Middlesex University), Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England, Graham
Harman of the American University in Cairo, and Quentin Meillassoux of the cole normale suprieure
[3]
in Paris. Credit for the name "speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier, though
[4]
Meillassoux had already used the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position. A
second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at the UWE
[5]
Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths. The line-up
consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place of Meillassoux who
[6]
was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.
While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a
shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant.
[7]
What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both correlationism
as well as philosophies of access.
In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever
have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered
[8]
apart from the other."
Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over other
entities. Both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism.

2
All four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these forms of philosophy
which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the dominant forms of
idealism in much of contemporary philosophy.
Speculative Materialism
In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux finds two principles as the locus of Kant's
philosophy. The first of these is the Principle of Correlation itself, which claims essentially that
we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being, that is to say, that what lies outside that
correlate is unknowable.
The second is termed by Meillassoux the Principle of Factiality, which states that things could be
otherwise than what they are. This principle is upheld by Kant in his defence of the thing-in-
itself as unknowable but imaginable.
We can imagine reality as being fundamentally different even if we never know such a reality.
According to Meillassoux, the defence of both principles leads to weak correlationism (such as
those of Kant and Husserl), while the rejection of the thing-in-itself leads to the strong
correlationism of thinkers such as Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger.
For such strong correlationists, it makes no sense to suppose that there is anything outside of the
correlate of Thought and Being, and so the Principle of Factiality is eliminated in favour of a
strengthened Principle of Correlation.Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the
Principle of Correlation for the sake of a bolstered Principle of Factiality in his post-Kantian return
to Hume. By arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not only
of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws with the exception of the Principle of Non-
Contradiction (since eliminating the Principle of Non-Contradiction would undermine the
Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be otherwise than what they are).
By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason, there can be no justification for the necessity of
physical laws, meaning that while the universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there
is no reason it could not be otherwise.
Meillassoux rejects the Kantian a priori in favour of a Humean a priori, claiming that the lesson to be
learned from Hume on the subject of causality is that "the same cause may actually bring about 'a
[9]
hundred different events' (and even many more)."

http://www.uboeschenstein.ch/texte/meillassoux23.html

___________________________________________________________________

Emergence creation advent

170 I am fascinated above all by question of emergence, creation, advent. This is one of the
reasons why I have never been satisfied by anti-speculative philosophies: critique or
transcendental phenomenology replaces questions of Genesis with questions of
condition or constitution, and for this very reason abandons as senseless or pointless
the side of the real that harbours the most captivating problems. For me, Bergson
represents a great enterprise of the liberation of philosophy in comparison with merely
transcendental problems.
With his intuition of dure, he proposes the most powerful thought on creation that has ever
been produced. This is precisely why it is with him that I sought to understand this question:
because my conception of advent is directly opposed to his conception of novelty.
For Bergson it is because the present and past are part of an unbreakable continuity that
creation is incessant: for me, since the rupture is absolute and incessant between present
and past, there can be pure supplementations in the course of temporality: advents of what
did not even exist in potency before coming into existence (life in comparison with
inorganic matter, thought in comparison with life).

171 Everything is possible. But it is senseless to believe in the rise of a virtual event
(one that does not conform to the laws of our world) in the same fashion in which I await
the rise of a potential event (one that does conform to the laws of our world). I can
justifiably evaluate the probability that a comet will strike the Earth and destroy every form of
life: it is a potential event. On the other hand, a virtual event lies outside probability.
And there we find true strangeness: it is neither probable, nor improbable, nor
impossible. If I have to determine my relationship with this type of possible, it would be in a
3
very different fashion than in relation to potentiality. The question becomes: of what
absolutely remarkable event is virtual becoming capable, and how can this event
modify my subjectivity once it is recognised as possible? And here it is not unicorns that
appeared in the first rank. Instead, it is the end aimed at by all messianisms and all
revolutionism, though in a form that seems to me always defective.

It is universal justice, the equality of everyone, and even the equality of the living with the
dead: Justice guaranteed as eternally possible by the absolute inexistence of God -
that is to say, by the ultimate Non-sense of super-chaos. For if God does not exist,
everything becomes fragile, even death. If God does not exist, things become capable of
anything: whether of the absurd, or of reaching their highest state. Everything is
irreversible, but nothing is definitive.

Boe: Linexistence divine

Absolute contingency:
172 The insightfulness of contingency seems to me rather pertinent to every scientific mind,
for every science ends by stumbling over the facticity of its postulates and its fundamental
laws. Indeed, it is because the facticity of laws of nature is thought as uncircumventible by
scientists that they ultimately ought to be validated by experience and not by a priori
demonstration, the existence of laws and of ultimate constants of the universe. It is because
logicians and mathematicians have a sharp consciousness of the contingency of their axioms
that they are capable of sensing new heterodox logics or interesting new axiomatics. It is
because philosophy is aware of this increasingly obvious role of contingency in science
that it ought to lay hold of it as a new principle: the sole absolutely necessary one.
_____________________________________________________________________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facticity

Facticity (French: facticit, German: Faktizitt) has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and
"contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence. The term is first used by Fichte and
has a variety of meanings. It can refer to facts and factuality, as in nineteenth-century positivism, but
comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism.
The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jrgen Habermas in Between Facts and
Norms (Faktizitt und Geltung). It is a term that takes on a more specialized meaning in 20th century
continental philosophy, especially in phenomenology and existentialism, including Edmund Husserl,
Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Recent philosophers such as
Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Franois Raffoul have taken up the notion of facticity in new
ways. Facticity plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux's philosophical project to challenge the
thought-world relationship of correlationism. It is defined by him as the absence of reason for any
reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of
[1]
any being. Heidegger discusses facticity as the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of individual
existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he is not only referring to a brute
fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical situation, e.g., "born in the '80s." Facticity is something
that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left
unattended. As such, facticity is not something we come across and directly behold. In moods,
for example, facticity has an enigmatic appearance, which involves both turning toward and away from
it.