Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosophy

QUENTIN MEILLASSOUXA NEW FRENCH PHILOSOPHER

Graham Harman

This article is a review of Après la finitude,the remarkable debut book of QuentinMeillassoux.1 In my estimation, this work isone of the most important to appear in conti-nental philosophy in recent years, and de-serves a wide readership at the earliest possibledate. An English translation by Ray Brassierwill be published by Continuum in the near fu-ture.2

Meillassoux’s book is written in a lucid andeconomical style, covering abundant terrain injust 165 pages. It offers bold readings of thehistory of philosophy—Aristotle is not realistenough, Hume not skeptical enough. It showsbursts of scathing wit, as when drawing wryparallels between the anti-Darwinian reveriesof creationism and major schools of present-day philosophy. Most importantly, Après lafinitude offers a ruthless attack on virtually allof post-Kantian philosophy, now labeled as“correlationism,” and proposes an original“speculative” solution (though not in Hegel’ssense) to the Kantian impasse. Meillassouxproposes nothing less than a return of philoso-phy to the absolute, which for him means real-ity in itself apart from any relation to humans.The critical portions of the book strike me asdefinitive: much of what we know as analyticand continental philosophy looks rather differ-ent following his assault on correlationism.Meillassoux’s own ideas, plausibly describedas the mere antechamber to a larger and stillunpublished system, lie open to possible ob-jections. Nonetheless, his appeal to an “ances-tral” realm prior to all human access succeedsin defining an unexpected new battlefield forcontinental thought. Barely forty years old, heseems likely to emerge as one of the importantnames in European philosophy in the decadesto come.

We should begin by situating Meillassouxamong the more established contemporarythinkers. For many years, continental philoso-phy in the Anglophone world was dominated

by Heidegger and Derrida. Neither of thesefigures will soon disappear from radar, andHeidegger is now celebrated as a classic for theages even by mainstream analytic thinkers.But since the mid-1990s, the Heideggero-Derridean brand of continental thought hasfaced increasing competition from new trends:initially from the books of Gilles Deleuze, andmore recently from the heterodox tag team ofAlain Badiou and a resurgent Slavoj ±Zi¡zek.While major works by these “new” authorshave been available for many years, what ismore recent is their increased momentumamong the younger generation of continentalphilosophers. In terms of background and ori-entation, Meillassoux is not difficult to placeamong these currents. He was a student ofBadiou, and the preface to the book is writtenby Badiou himself, who can barely find suffi-cient words to praise it—by fusing absolutelogical necessity with a radical contingency ofthe laws of nature, Meillassoux is said to “openin the history of philosophy . . . a new path for-eign to Kant’s canonical distribution between‘dogmatism,’ ‘scepticism,’ and ‘critique.’”3

Furthermore, despite the absence of set-theorynotation and other known Badiouian flour-ishes, there are obvious points of similarity be-tween teacher and student: the major role formathematics, including the anointment ofGeorg Cantor as a pivotal figure for philoso-phy; the fondness for step-by-step logical ar-gumentation; the absence of any especial in-terest in Heidegger or the phenomenologicaltradition. Both authors also display grand sys-tematic ambitions of a kind that seemed un-thinkable in our field a short time ago. None-theless, Meillassoux’s vision of the world isnot Badiou’s, and certain aspects of the formereven cut against the grain of the latter. Accord-ing to published information, Meillassoux wasborn in 1967 in Paris, son of the economic an-thropologist Claude Meillassoux (1925–2005), an intellectual maverick in his own

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104© DePaul University 2007

right. He is a graduate of the Ecole NormaleSupérieure, and has been employed at that in-stitution for the past decade. Although Aprèsla finitude is Quentin Meillassoux’s first book,anecdotal evidence suggests that he was gener-ally known and highly regarded in Paris wellbeyond Badiou’s circle even before the bookappeared.

The very title After Finitude will be enoughto startle present-day continental thought,since human finitude has been perhaps the cen-tral credo of the field from the time of its birth.The book consists of two opening criticalchapters followed by two longer and more sys-tematic chapters, closing with a short fifthchapter that harks back to the opening critique.Since Meillassoux himself agrees that Chap-ters 1, 2, and 5 can be taken as a unit,4 quiteapart from whether the reader accepts thephilosophical standpoint outlined in Chapters3 and 4, the present review is organized ac-cording to this schema. Beginning withMeillassoux’s onslaught against the Coperni-can Revolution of Kant, I will move to hismore challenging attempt to establish a mathe-matical ontology that abandons the principleof sufficient reason, before closing with a briefassessment of the book as a whole.

Against Correlationism

One of the typical features of recent conti-nental thought is its contempt for so-called“naïve realism.” The human being is nowfirmly established as the point of entry for allserious philosophy, even if redefined as a pureego, linguistic agent, embodied animal, sub-ject of power-plays, or historically rootedDasein. The notion of an objective world-in-it-self seems to elude our grasp. Nonetheless,few authors have faced this predicament withfull-blown absolute idealism à la Berkeley—ifnot quite “naïve,” such extreme idealismstrikes most of us as gratuitous and bizarreamidst the undeniable blows of the world. Thisleaves philosophy in an ambiguous position,neither realist nor idealist. The obvious rootsof this ambiguity lie in the Copernican Revolu-tion of Kant, still the basic philosophical hori-zon of both the analytics and the continentals.Meillassoux’s book ends with the daring claimthat Kant’s Revolution is in fact “a PtolemaicCounter-Revolution (163),”5 one that makes

philosophy revolve around humans at the pre-cise moment when modern science hadplunged into the world itself. In the wake ofKant’s genius, we are too clever to believe indirect access to things in themselves, but alsotoo sober to construct wild solipsistic theoriesthat reduce the world to nothing but our ownproduction. The favored middle-ground posi-t ion for philosophers has been whatMeillassoux calls “correlationism” (18). Thecorrelationist holds that we can neither con-ceive of humans without world, nor of worldwithout humans, but must root all philosophyin a correlation or rapport between the two.

The term “correlationism” strikes me as adevastating summary of post-Kantian thought.On the continental side, we find Husserl plead-ing for objectivity against psychologism whilealso defending ideality against the natural sci-ences; we have Heidegger claiming that realityneither exists nor fails to exist in the absence ofDasein; more recently, we see ±Zi¡zek describethe Real as solely a gap in the world posited bythe mad human subject, even while denyingthat he is an idealist. On the analytic side, thereis the “as if” of Blackburn’s quasi-realism; theinternal exile of Putnam’s internal realism; andDavidson’s refusal to take the realism/anti-re-alism dispute seriously. All these positions,and countless others, join in allegiance to whatMeillassoux calls the “correlational circle”(19). As he wonderfully puts it: “we willhenceforth term correlationism every currentof thought that upholds the uncircumventiblecharacter of the correlation understood in thisway. Thus, we can say that every philosophythat claims not to be a naïve realism has be-come a variant of correlationism” (18). Thecorrelationist argument, often left vague or en-tirely unstated, holds that any attempt to thinkreality-in-itself automatically turns it intosomething not in-itself—since, after all, weare now thinking about it (17). On this basis,there is supposedly no way to reach the worldan sich, but only a global correlation of humanand world. Philosophy has lost whatMeillassoux calls le Grand Dehors, “the GreatOutside.” In its place, we find that “this spaceof the outside is hence only the space of thatwhich faces us, of that which exists only on thebasis of a vis-à-vis with our own existence. . . .We do not transcend very far beyond ourselveswhen diving into such a world: we are content

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to explore the two faces of something that re-mains a face-to-face” (21). This correlate neednot take the form of the old subject/object du-alism. Indeed, most present-day philosophersunite in heaping scorn upon the antiquatedmodel of subject and object. But this does notprevent them from remaining locked in themodern dance-step of correlationism. In par-ticular, Meillassoux cites Heidegger’s suppos-edly “more originary” correlation of being andthought in Ereignis as an example of how therejection of subject and object does not quiteget us off the correlationist hook (22). AsMeillassoux sees it, all postcritical philosophyis correlationism (23)—or else a relapse intometaphysics, as with Whitehead and perhapseven the vitalism of Deleuze.6 Before Kant,philosophers dueled over who had the bestmodel of substance: was it perfect forms, indi-vidual beings, prime matter, atoms, or God?Since Kant, these “naïve” disputes have beenreplaced by combat over who has the bestmodel of the human-world correlate: is it sub-ject-object, noesis-noema, Dasein-Sein, orlanguage-referent? In Meillassoux’s eyes,“co” has become the dominant particle of thephilosopher’s lexicon (19), just as “always al-ready” (21) has become the beloved phrase ofthose who grant extra-human reality onlywhen we ourselves posit it retroactively. Yes,they tell us, the world exists in itself—but onlyfor us (26).

The work of Quentin Meillassoux is meantas a clean break with all forms of correlation-ism, and he approaches the task with unusualboldness. He begins by drawing up a table ofactual scient i fic dates (known toHeideggerians as “mere ontic information”):13.5 billion years since the Big Bang, 4.45 bil-lion since the formation of the earth, 3.5 billionsince life began on our planet, and just two mil-lion years since the appearance of homohabilis (24). He asks us to consider the statusof statements about ancient events predatingthe relatively recent appearance of human be-ings, those pampered tyrants of correlationalphilosophy. For those entities that exist prior toall human life, Meillassoux coins the term“archifossil,” and describes them as having“ancestrality” (24–26). In his view, thecorrelationists will always be at a loss whentrying to deal with the ancestral archifossil.Their likely maneuver is a predictable one: the

correlationist will not admit that a being actu-ally exists prior to being given to humans, butonly that it is given to humans as existing priorto such givenness (32). They will say that “thephysical universe is not really known to pre-cede the existence of humans, or at least the ex-istence of living creatures; the world hasmeaning only as given to a living or thinkingbeing” (33). They will try to reduce scientificstatements about ancestral stellar explosionsand mudslides to the means of scientificgivenness of these events, just as in positivismor verificationism. “We can therefore say thatthe statement is true . . . without naively believ-ing that its truth results from an adequationwith the actual reality of its referent (a worldwithout givenness of world)” (ibid.).

This correlationist attitude toward scienceis at the same time both modest and conde-scending. For on the one hand it leaves natureentirely to the sciences, laying no claim to theobjective world for philosophy at all. But si-multaneously, it holds that there is somethingmore in the world that science cannot grasp (cf.Heidegger’s “science does not think”)—a“logical” priority of statements about theworld over the “chronological” priority of an-cestral events themselves (32). In so doing,correlationists play the game of pretendingthat they do not interfere with the content ofscientific statements. Yet interfere they do. Forif scientific statements about the archifossil arenot taken literally, they lose meaning alto-gether. The statement that the earth wasformed 4.5 billion years ago means exactlywhat i t says. It does mean what thecorrelationists claim, namely that “it is notancestrality that precedes givenness, it is thepresent given that retroactively projects a pastthat seems ancestral” (34). For this is no longerthe same statement as that of the scientists, andits supposedly agnostic attitude toward the realworld cannot hide a form of crypto-idealism,since it tacitly dismisses all forms of realism asnaïve. Although Meillassoux’s book does notopenly equate correlationism with idealism,he does give an important hint along theselines: “faced with the archifossil, all idealismsconverge and become equally extraordinary”(36). Insofar as Berkeley, Hegel, Heidegger,and Derrida all have equally little to tell usabout events on the moon fifty million yearsago, they all look like extreme idealists as soon

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as the archifossil rears its head. Just as somecreationists claim that God planted pseudo-an-cient fossils in the ground to test the Biblicalfaith of scientists, Meillassoux suggests acidlythat his notion of the archifossil may serve to“test the philosopher’s faith in the correlates,even in the presence of data that indicate anabyssal gap between that which exists and thatwhich appears” (ibid.). For this reason, theproblem of ancestrality is capable of overturn-ing everything in philosophy since Kant (37).Moreover, as Meillassoux states at the close ofhis book, this problem would not disappeareven if humans and the world had been createdsimultaneously—for in this case it still mighthave been otherwise, and hence the archifossilcould still be reflected upon as a possibility(156–57). In passing, it should be said that thisreformulation is perhaps too limited. It seemsto me that the correlationist circle would bethreatened not just by archifossils dating to be-fore the emergence of the human species, butequally so by “extrafossils” lying outside cur-rent human access, such as objects locked inhidden vaults or refrigerators, or unknown oilreserves trapped beneath the ocean floor. Afterall, events unfolding right now in the core ofAlpha Centauri actually happen inside thatstar, and not in the core of Alpha Centauri “forus.”

In any case, Meillassoux holds thatcorrelationism and naïve realism are two sepa-rate ways of dodging the question ofancestrality (38). By contrast with his detailedanalysis of correlationism, his argumentsagainst naïve realism are somewhat sketchythroughout the book, though this can perhapsbe explained by the limited number of naïverealists practicing philosophy today.Meillassoux insists that philosophy must seeknothing less than the absolute, abandoning itsfixation on the transcendental conditions ofhuman experience (39). Nonetheless, “we canno longer be metaphysicians, we can no longerbe dogmatists. On this point, we can only bethe heirs of Kantianism” (40).

The great failing of metaphysics, for Meill-assoux, is that it always seeks some particularnecessary being; in this respect, he seems inaccord with the Heidegger/Derrida critique ofontotheology. As can be seen from the historyof ontological proofs for the existence of God,metaphysics holds that at least one being must

be necessary. The Leibnizian principle of suf-ficient reason goes even further, entailing thatall beings are necessary. But for Meillassoux,“the rejection of dogmatic metaphysics meansthe rejection of all real necessity: and a fortiorithe rejection of the principle of reason, as wellas the ontological proof” (46). What disap-pears in his argument is the Heideggerian ap-peal to the limits of finitude, or thepostmodernist’s agnostic uncertainty as towhether there is any necessity out there or not.As we will see below, Meillassoux holds thatthe laws of nature must be absolutely contin-gent. In this manner, without relapsing into thedogmatic tradition he loathes, Meillassoux re-stores a style of absolutist argument tocontinental philosophy that has been absentfor decades, if not centuries.

Setting the table for his own position,Meillassoux draws a convincing distinctionbetween “weak” and “strong” versions ofcorrelationism. A good example of a weakcorrelationist is Kant, for whom the thingsthemselves cannot be known, but can at leastbe thought. Kant’s critical position “does notforbid all connection of thought with the abso-lute” (48). By contrast, strong correlationism(which includes most continental thinkers ofthe present day), holds that “it is equally ille-gitimate to claim that we are able, at least, tothink [the in-itself]” (ibid.). The strongcorrelationist and the full-blown idealist agreethat things themselves are not even thinkable.But whereas the hyper-idealist holds that wegain the absolute through the very conditionsof all human thought, the strong correlationistrefuses to follow, and is resigned to thefacticity or finitude of human experience, de-void of all reference to the absolute. In otherwords, strong correlationism abandons Kantby holding that “just as we can only describethe a priori forms of sensibility and under-standing, we can only describe the logicalprinciples inherent in any thinkable proposi-tion, but not deduce their absolute truth” (53).The result is a philosophy of facticity, which“is concerned with the supposed structuralinvariants of the world—invariants that candiffer from one correlationism to another, butwhich play in each case the role of a minimalprescriptive order for thought: the principle ofcausality, the forms of perception, logicallaws” (54). These invariant forms are taken as



a purely given fact of which no change is everexperienced, but they are not thereby taken assomething absolute. They are merely foundand described—the basic Kantian method stillused by strong correlationism in our own time,as in Heidegger’s existential analytic ofDasein. Breaking with this tradition of facticaldescription, Meillassoux wants to turnfacticity into absolute contingency: “contin-gency signifies the fact that physical lawsindifferently permit an event either to occur ornot to occur—permit a being to arise, endure,or perish” (ibid.).

Meillassoux notes a close link betweenfacticity and the postmodern brand of philo-sophical religiosity. Stripped of all access tothe absolute, the philosophy of finitude seemsimpeccably modest in its claims about theworld. But this attitude is by no means harm-less, since it really allows us to make any state-ments about the absolute that we please. As heputs it, “the end of metaphysics conceived as a‘de-absolutization of thought’ thus consists inthe legitimation by reason of any religious (or‘poetico-religious’) belief in the absolutewhatever” (64), on the sole condition that noone claim to give rational grounds for such be-lief. The end of metaphysics, in banishing alltraces of the absolute from philosophy, has infact opened philosophy to the dominance of anexacerbated form of religiosity—in which phi-losophy becomes the handmaid of acorrelationist theology of the shapeless Be-yond, unfettered by even the barest logicalconstraints. Whereas a Christian disciple ofKant at least needed to demonstrate that theTrinity is not logically contradictory (60), eventhis minimal obligation has now vanished.Strong correlationism’s apparent modesty to-ward the absolute has in fact opened the gatesto every possible form of arbitrary belief. AsMeillassoux puts it, in what may prove to bethe most popular phrase of his book: “thebetter armed thought is against dogmatism, themore powerless it seems to be against fanati-cism” (67). Stripped of all logical armamentthanks to the strong correlationists, we are leftwith nothing but meager critiques of fanati-cism in purely moral terms, reduced tocomplaining about the arrogance or badpractical effects of whichever fanatics wehappen to dislike (65).

Against this empty fideism (which is foundeven in self-proclaimed atheists), and againstviolent fanaticism as its key historical symp-tom, “it is important to rediscover in philoso-phy a touch of the absolute” (68). This appealto the absolute has not been heard in continen-tal philosophy for a good long time, butMeillassoux is serious. Despite his obvious ad-miration for Kant, he refers to “the Kantian ca-tastrophe” (171) in philosophy, by which hemeans the correlationist catastrophe. The greathope of Meillassoux’s book, as proclaimed inits final sentences, is that the theme of ances-tral things themselves might awaken us fromour “correlational slumber” (178). Against thepost-Kantian assumption that philosophersmust “content [themselves] with showing thegeneral conditions of givenness of phenom-ena” (174), ancestral events must be regardedas existing in themselves, not just as events forus. Instead of the transcendental idealism thatsilently dominates philosophy in our time,Meillassoux advocates a “speculative materi-alism” (169). While this phrase is little devel-oped in the present book, it is sufficiently aptas a description of his standpoint that I wouldexpect it to return in force in his future works.

But Meillassoux does not leave us hangingwith these critical arguments againstcorrelationism. He also gives us a considerabletaste of his own philosophy, in which “it is amatter of holding firmly to the Cartesian thesisthat whatever can be mathematized can beabsolutized, without reviving the principle ofreason. And this strikes us as a task that is notonly possible, but urgent” (175). The essentialcriteria of all mathematical statements will betransformed into necessary conditions of thecontingency of every being. This notion harksback to the opening words of Meillassoux’sbook, deliberately unmentioned until now:“The theory of primary and secondary quali-ties seems to belong to a hopelessly out-of-date philosophical past. It is time to rehabili-tate it” (13). Secondary qualities, of course, arethose held to exist only in relation to aperceiver, whereas primary qualities are thosethat exist outside of all perception. Whilestrong correlationism gives a de facto endorse-ment of Berkeley’s view that all qualities existonly in their relation to a perceiver,Meillassoux restores to the world “a touch ofthe absolute” by arguing that “for anything in

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the object that can be formulated in mathemat-ical terms, it is meaningful to speak of it as aproperty of the object in-itself” (16). In short,Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is an at-tempt to fuse absolute mathematical necessitywith an equally absolute contingency ofbeings in the natural world. We will nowexamine the way that he reaches this strangehybrid position.

Meillassoux’s Speculative Position

Chapters 3 and 4 give us the heart ofMeillassoux’s argument, and presumably theseeds of his future work as well. We have seenthat correlationist philosophy undercuts naïverealism by holding that humans and the world(or their more sophisticated variants) makesense only as codependent terms. Yet by re-ducing ancestral reality to reality-for-us,correlationism fails to do it justice. One ap-proach to this impasse would be a kind of sub-jective idealism. Namely, we could decide thatthe facticity of the human/world correlategives us a new kind of absolute, one that com-prises a novel form of the an sich. We wouldthen have an actual new form of knowledge,not just a limitation on knowledge; the an sichwould no longer lie in some inaccessible be-yond, but would be unveiled from thestructural features of the correlate itself (72).

Meillassoux rejects this option, since it isno better suited than strong correlationism todescribing the ancestral independence of theworld. Instead, in the key maneuver of thebook, he shifts our focus from the conditionsof the correlate back to the things of the world:“the supreme necessity of the correlational cir-cle is going to appear to us as the contrary ofwhat it seems: facticity will be revealed as aknowledge of the absolute, because we are go-ing to put back into the things that which wehave mistaken for an incapacity of thought”(72). What Meillassoux intends is to transformthe disavowal of sufficient reason from a poi-gnant limitation on finite human knowledgeinto a positive principle of contingency in thethings themselves. As he boldly puts it: “thefailure of the principle of reason, from this per-spective, thus results quite simply from the fal-sity (the absolute falsity, even) of such a princi-ple. For in truth, nothing has a reason for beingand for remaining as it is rather than other-

wise” (73). In place of the famous Leibnizianprinciple, Meillassoux offers a new principleof absolute unreason in the things. Thecorrelationist will respond, of course, that wecannot be sure that things themselves are con-tingent, but only that they are contingent inso-far as we know them. Against this predictableobjection, Meillassoux demonstrates thatcorrelationism itself already presupposes thevery principle that he advocates. “To oppose[the correlationist], there is only one way toproceed: we need to show that the correlationalcircle . . . if it is thinkable, itself presupposesthe tacit concession that contingency isabsolute” (74).

Throughout the book, Meillassoux displaysan almost Hegelian gift for counterposing mul-tiple arguments, turning them around fromvarious dizzying angles, and finally selecting awinner for the clearest and subtlest of reasons.Hence, it is no wonder that the central argu-ment of his book hinges on an imaginary dis-cussion between five separate philosophicalcharacters. As if he were setting up a dirty jokeor a Brunoesque dialogue between philoso-phers and clowns, Meillassoux relates the fol-lowing scenario: two dogmatists—a Christianand an atheist—are arguing about the afterlife,and along comes a correlationist. Each of thedogmatists (I like to imagine them as wearing,respectively, a bishop’s outfit and a Jacobinliberty cap) is absolutely sure of his views. Ei-ther there is a God who preserves the soul afterdeath, or there is not. The correlationist nowwalks up and counters both dogmatists with astrict form of agnosticism: for how can eithercharacter be so sure of reality-in-itself, giventhat we are limited to our own human access tothe world, unable to penetrate to a world-in-it-self lying beyond (75)? But along comes yetanother character: a “subjective idealist,” who“declares that [the correlationist] upholds aposition just as inconsistent as those of the[dogmatists]. For all three think that therecould be an in-itself radically different fromour present state: a God inaccessible to naturalreason, or a pure nothingness” (ibid., my ital-ics). Since the subjective idealist makes the hu-man-world correlate utterly absolute, he re-gards it as impossible even to conceive of itsdestruction by death: “since an in-itself differ-ent from the for-us is unthinkable, the idealistproclaims it to be impossible” (ibid.). Of all



four characters, Meillassoux holds that the ag-nostic correlationist is closest to the truth,since it is only he who realizes that thingsmight well be otherwise than we think. Afterall, each of the dogmatists is trapped in a par-ticular positive doctrine, and the subjectiveidealist is trapped in an undogmatic but stillprison-like correlate. Only the agnostic ac-knowledges that death and the afterlife areboth thinkable without turning them into dog-matic proclamations.

With the field reduced to a sole survivor, anew rival appears: the speculative philosopher(i.e., Meillassoux himself). This novel figureproceeds to dethrone the correlationist byshowing that our possible destruction by deathreflects not just the agnostic’s limited knowl-edge, but rather an absolute possibility. Howso? The argument runs as follows. Note thatthe correlationist’s agnosticism has to allowfor the possibility that one of the twodogmatisms may well be correct. For if he dis-allows the possible truth of any dogmatism,then he is effectively stating that the correlateis an absolutely unsurpassable horizon—andthe subjective idealist wins. Put differently,each of the three other characters allows foronly one absolute solution: for the Christian itis the afterlife; for the atheist it is annihilation;for the subject ive ideal is t i t i s theunsurpassable correlate itself. Initially, it isonly the agnostic correlationist who leavesopen the possibility that any of these three ab-solutes may be correct. The speculative philos-opher merely adds an additional twist: namely,if the correlationist is to avoid becoming a sub-jective idealist, he cannot allow the opennessof possibilities to be just one possible optionamong others. The agnostic correlationist’sentire argument hinges on replacing absoluteChristianity, atheism, or subjective idealismwith an absolute openness. And for this reason,he is forced to throw in his lot withMeillassoux’s speculative position. After all,the very possibility of distinguishing betweena for-us and an in-itself at all requires that it beabsolutely possible that there is more to realitythan is currently visible in the correlational cir-cle. In short, the agnostic is not an agnosticwhen it comes to agnosticism, but must be ab-solutely agnostic.

Another way to view the situation is thatthere are really only two options. Either we

emphasize the contingent facticity of the cor-relate and thereby remove its absolute status,or we disavow this contingent facticity in orderto turn the correlate itself into absolute reality,and thereby become subjective idealists. Nomiddle ground is possible. Meillassouxchooses the former path, arriving at his specu-lative position by simply radicalizing what thecorrelationists already presuppose—namely,the possibility that there might be somethingin-itself different from what appears to us. Ifwe fail to accept this possible difference, thenwe either absolutize subjective experience(like the subjective idealist) or plunge into ourpreferred dogma (like the Christian and theatheist). The irony is that Meillassoux goes be-yond correlationism by radicalizing its own in-ternal conditions; this has possible implica-tions worth considering at the end of thisreview. But for anyone who concludes tooquickly that this leads him to a metaphysicsprivileging human being, Meillassoux has aready counterargument: “we do not contendthat it is necessary that some specific being ex-ist, but rather that it is absolutely necessarythat any being is capable of not exisiting” (82,my italics). If it were otherwise, we wouldhave metaphysics in the bad sense, a human-ized ontotheology, whereas “[my] thesis israther speculative—one thinks an absolute—without being metaphysical—one thinks noth-ing (no specific being) which would be abso-lute. The absolute is the absolute impossibilityof a necessary being” (ibid). The principle ofsufficient reason is replaced by a global unrea-son, an inherently negative term later replacedby the more positive “factuality.” Whereas thefacticity of a situation points to its sheercontingency, the very structure of facticity isnot itself contingent, and this non-facticity offacticity itself is what is given the name“factual” (107).

Since everything is contingent, it is only theprinciple of unreason that can be regarded aseternal, absolute, and “anhypothetical” in Ar-istotle’s sense (i.e., one of those things forwhich no demonstration can or needs to beprovided) (84).7 Absolute contingency doesnot mean that “all must perish,” since thiswould entail a metaphysics of permanent flux,whereas Meillassoux’s principle remains neu-tral on the question of flux versus stasis. Hisnotion of contingency applies equally well to a

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Heraclitean universe of fiery flow and an icyParmenidean cosmos locked in a single perma-nent form. What his position rejects is thestrong correlationist’s lingering belief in acryptic, unknown ground of things: “This be-lief in the ultimate Reason reveals the true na-ture of strong correlationism: it is not an aban-donment of the principle of reason, but ratherthe apology for a belief in this very principle, abelief that has [simply] become disconnectedfrom reason.” By contrast, “speculation con-sists . . . in accentuating the extraction ofthought from the principle of reason, even tothe point of conferring upon this extraction aprincipial form, the sole form permitting us tograsp that that there is absolutely no ultimateReason—whether thinkable or unthinkable.”And even more succinctly, “there is nothingbeneath or beyond the manifest gratuity of thegiven—nothing, except for the limitless andlawless power of its destruction, emergence,and preservation” (86).

Many readers will at first reject this menac-ing vision of hyper-chaos, with its apparentlymonstrous consequences. Compared to ourusual model of nature, it seems to be such a di-saster as to leave no hope of approaching theancestra l realm of science. Indeed,Meillassoux is aware of the possible objectionthat he has achieved very little—whereas theskeptic already says that the in-itself might beanything at all without our knowing it, specu-lative thought merely adds that we do know it(88). But this apparently meager addition con-tains the germ of Meillassoux’s entire philoso-phy. Since he knows that contingency is neces-sary and eternal, and that only contingency issuch, his basic philosophical method will con-sist in deducing all those conditions that athing must fulfill in order to be contingent(90). As a first step, Meillassoux tries to use hisprinciple of unreason to verify Kant’s viewsthat: (a) the in-itself is never contradictory, and(b) that there must be an in-itself. He does thisover the course of fifteen subtle pages whichare a pleasure to read, but whose exact argu-mentation cannot be reproduced in a short re-view like this one. A brief summary of his re-sults will have to suffice. Meillassoux first triesto establish that the in-itself can never be con-tradictory. He makes the fascinating claim thatthis goes even beyond Aristotle’s principle ofnon-contradiction, since the Aristotelian prin-

ciple refers only to the unthinkability of con-tradiction, whereas the contradictionMeillassoux is thinking of should be truly im-possible in its own right. He follows an intrigu-ing line of argument to the effect that if contra-dictory beings existed, they would benecessary—after all, a contradictory beingwould lack true determinacy, and hence wouldface no alterity that would render it contingentand limited. Hence they must be impossible,since we have already established an absolutecontingency of beings, such that necessary be-ings are ipso facto impossible (92ff.). At thispoint Meillassoux offers a useful historicalcomparison that situates his views moreclearly. Leibniz upheld the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. On theother side of the coin, we could say thatHeidegger and Wittgenstein rejected bothprinciples, since both are strong correlationistswho reject any absolute statements about thebeyond. Then there is Hegel, who kept theprinciple of sufficient reason while abandon-ing non-contradiction. Finally, Meillassouxemerges as a kind of inverse Hegel: defendingnon-contradiction while abolishing sufficientreason (97).

The second step is to justify Kant’s otherprinciple: namely, that there must be an in-it-self. This hinges for Meillassoux on the real-ization that our facticity is not itself just a fact,but is something necessary. To doubt the ne-cessity of my facticity and thereby turn it intosomething merely contingent and susceptibleof mere description, I have to presuppose thatmy facticity might be otherwise, but this state-ment contradicts itself. “In order to doubt thenecessity of something, I ought in fact to ad-mit, as we have seen, that its facticity is think-able as absolute. For in order that the world inits entirety should be capable of being thoughtas not being, or not being such as it is, I oughtto admit that its possible non-being, itsfacticity, is thinkable for me as an absolute (insuch a way that it is more than a correlate ofthought)” (100). In short, while everything inthe world has an absolute facticity, this is nottrue of facticity itself, which cannot merely besomething given and described. Instead,facticity is something that must be deduced,something with a logical necessity that I see noreason not to call a priori. This step into asphere of logical deductions beyond the con-



tingent finitude of Kantian or phenomeno-logical description, “far from leading to some-thing irrational, allows for the constitution of aspace of rather precise problems, in which a lo-gos is progressively able to unfold the axes ofits argumentation” (107). With the downfall offinitude, we enter a space where philosophygains renewed confidence in the power of rea-son and the logical deducibility of numeroustruths. Meillassoux, ostensibly an advocate ofunreason, is in fact a champion of mathemati-cal reason in the high Cartesian style. Indeed,he seeks a “passage of truth from the Kantianin-itself to a Cartesian in-itself” that wouldtake us beyond the logical principle of non-contradiction to an absolutization of mathe-matical discourse (109). With a tantalizinghint at his future work, Meillassoux concedesthat he “cannot present here the full solution tothis problem” (ibid.).

In a striking interlude on the nature of phi-losophy, he states that “philosophy is the in-vention of strange arguments, necessarily bor-dering on sophistry—which remains its darkstructural double. In fact, philosophizing al-ways consists in deploying an idea that im-poses an original argumentative regime in or-der to be defended or explored” (103). Thebackbone of Meillassoux’s new way of think-ing appears earlier on the same page, in the fol-lowing lucid summary: “non-metaphysicalspeculation consists, in the first place, in stat-ing that the thing in itself is nothing other thanthe facticity of transcendental forms of repre-sentation. It consists, in the second place, indeducing from the absolute status of thisfacticity the properties that Kant himself wascontent to accept as evident” (ibid.). In thisway, Meillassoux sketches a world in whicheach thing is contingent and self-contained,capable of being utterly different from what itis, and absolutely unconnected to anythingelse by any ground or reason. This leads himinto a confrontation with David Hume inChapter 4, since Meillassoux like Hume seemsfaced with a world of chaos-without-cause.But whereas Hume was concerned only withour inability to know any causal sources ofthings, Meillassoux faces a more difficultpredicament—for he has gone so far as todeclare absolutely that there is, in reality itself,no reason.

If we gaze through the crack that is therebyopened on the absolute, we discover a rathermenacing power . . . able to destroy both thingsand worlds; able to give rise to monsters ofillogicism; able just as well never to come aboutat all; surely able to produce every dream, butevery nightmare as well; able to undergo fre-netic and disordered changes or, alternatively,to produce a universe immobile down to its in-nermost recesses. Like a cloud bearing the mostfearful tempests, the most unfamiliar lightning-flashes. . . . An Omnipotence equal to that ofDescartes’ God, capable of everything, includ-ing the inconceivable. But an Omnipotence thatwould be disordered, blind, divorced from otherdivine perfections, and rendered autonomous.A power with neither goodness nor wisdom, un-able to guarantee to thought that its distinctideas are true. (87–88)

In other words, the quickest objection toMeillassoux’s position would be that he al-lows the laws of nature to change wildly andwithout notice. Many readers will continue toinsist that the laws of nature must be neces-sary—but in a mysterious physical sense thatundercuts Meillassoux’s absolute contin-gency, since he dares to speak of an absoluteunreason in the world rather than just a limita-tion on knowledge. But Meillassoux counters“that we can sincerely accept that objects arecapable, actually and without any reason, ofdisplaying the most capricious behavior, with-out thereby modifying the usual everyday rela-tion that we have with things” (114–15). As hesees it, dogmatists, skeptics, and transcenden-tal philosophers all share a belief in causation,with some of them merely doubting that thecausal sources of things can be known. Hestates that the same is true of Hume, who con-tinues to “[believe] blindly in the world thatthe metaphysicians believed themselves capa-ble of demonstrating” (124). Whether or notone accepts this reading of Hume, it is cer-tainly true that he did not advocate a flat-outabsolute contingency of the kind found in thebook now being reviewed.

For Meillassoux, the real problem is not thenecessity of laws of nature, but their stability,two themes that are easily confused. He refor-mulate Hume’s problem as follows: “if lawsare regarded as contingent and not necessary,

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how does it happen that their contingency isnot manifest in the form of radical and continu-ous change?” (125). It is often believed that theapparent constancy of the physical world re-futes contingency. After all, if the laws of na-ture could change, it is assumed that theywould have to change frequently. Evidently,they do not; hence, the laws of nature must notbe contingent (128–29). To fully overturn thisusual line of reasoning, which Meillassouxcalls “the frequential implication,” he willneed to show how stability emerges from outof chaos. In the present book, he confines him-self to the negative first step of showing thatthe frequentialist argument does not work. Hetakes as his target a book that he greatly ad-mires, written in the early 1980s by one Jean-René Vernes.8

Vernes’ book, “written in a concise mannerworthy of the philosophers of the seventeenthcentury” (130) (as is equally true ofMeillassoux’s own book) tries to render moreexplicit the reasons that Hume and Kant be-lieve in necessary laws. Vernes himself de-fends the frequentialist argument, but by mak-ing it more explicit than his forerunners,Meillassoux thinks he exposes its weaknessesall the more. As Vernes sees it, we are able topass from the apparent stability of physicallaws to their necessity by following a probabil-istic line of reasoning. If we imagine the colli-sion of Hume’s proverbial billiard balls, wenotice a contrast between the countless a prioripossibilities of things that could occur whenthe balls strike one another, and the limitednumber of repeated deflections that do in factseem to occur. Posing a strange but fascinatingquestion, Vernes asks why we trust our sensesin this case, rather than dismissing the repeti-tion as illusory and trusting instead in the infi-nite possibilities offered by our reason. The an-swer, as he sees it, lies in the same principle“which . . . allows a dice-player to suspect . . .that a die that always lands on the same face ismost probably loaded” (131). We begin byimagining a perfectly fair set of gambler’sdice, symmetrical and homogeneous, with noevident reason for one side to turn up more of-ten than any other. We now calculate the prob-abilities of various dice-throws by means ofthe following principle: “that which is equallythinkable is equally possible. It is this quanti-tative equality of the thinkable and the possi-

ble that permits us to establish a calculus orprobability or frequency of an event when weplay a game of chance” (132). But if we find toour surprise that a die continues to fall on thesame face after an hour’s worth of throws, wewill surely begin to suspect a secret cause forthis result—perhaps a piece of lead hidden in-side it. Our suspicions will surely increase ifwe learn that the die has fallen on the same facefor our entire lifetimes, or in all of humanmemory: especially if we are playing with adie having millions or trillions of faces ratherthan the usual six. What impels our belief in asecret cause is the apparent contrast betweenthe countless possible results of the dice-throwand the single outcome that recurs repeatedly.Like our imaginary gambler, Hume and Kantassume that if there were true contingency inthe dice-throw, it ought to be manifest in theform of wildly varying results. Essentially,they take the probabilistic reasoning withwhich a gambler concludes that a die is loaded,and transfer it to the universe as a whole. Out ofan immense total of thinkable (i.e., non-con-tradictory) universes, the familiar conditionsof our own universe always seem to be re-peated. Even when cutting-edge physics un-covers some bizarre new phenomenon, thismerely gives unexpected insight into our exist-ing universe; no one thinks that it marks a cha-otic transformation in the very laws of our uni-verse. From all of this, one concludes that theremust be some extra-logical, extra-mathemati-cal force governing the “universe-die” so as togive it the constant conditions that we witness.Vernes calls this secret force “matter,” butMeillassoux finds it so vague and mysteriousthat we might just as well call it “providence”(134). In any case, the inference of Hume andKant runs as follows: “if the laws are actuallycapable of being modified without reason, itwould be ‘infinitely’ improbable that they arenot modified frequently” (ibid.).

Meillassoux’s critique of this inference ishighly inventive, though not as immediatelyconvincing (to me, at least) as some of theother arguments in his book. As he sees it, thebasic presupposition of the “frequentialist”standpoint is that it equates the being of thepossible with the being of a total conceivablenumerical sum of possibilities—even if thissum is regarded as infinite. And “this line ofprobabilist reasoning is valid only on the con-



dition that what is possible a priori is thinkablein the manner of a numerical totality” (139). Inorder for Vernes’defense of Hume and Kant towork, he needs to assume that the sum total ofconceivable events is greater than the totalstock of experimental results. The larger thetotal of possible events, or the larger the num-ber of faces on the universe-die, all the greateris the probability that the stable universe of ourexperience results from a cryptic physical ne-cessity lying hidden from view. It is here thatMeillassoux invokes Cantor, and Badiou’sphilosophical appropriation of him, in an ef-fort to undercut the supposition that we canspeak of a totality of possible events at all(139–42). The quantity of quantities is not justtoo big to think about—it actually does not ex-ist in light of the endless series of transfinitenumbers, none of them ever the greatest possi-ble one (144). In other words, there is no sumof possibilities, and hence the basically statis-tical argument of the frequentialists collapses.Or at least this is true under at least one axiom-atic system (Meillassoux, like Badiou, citesZermelo-Fraenkel [142]), and this is enough tosuspend any overwhelming discrepancy be-tween a limited pattern of recurring physicalevents and a mighty ocean of total possibleconceivable events. Moreover, any theory ofchance always relies on the deeper assumptionof an underlying physical law within whichchance plays out:

an aleatory series can be constituted only oncondition that the die preserves its structurefrom one throw to the next, and that the laws thatpermit the throws to take place are not modifiedfrom one roll to the next. If the die were to im-plode, become spherical or flat, multiply itsfaces by a thousandfold, etc., from one throw tothe next; or if gravity ceased to act and the dieflew off into the air, or were projected insteadbeneath the surface of the earth, etc., from onethrow to the next; if this were so, no aleatory se-ries, no calculus of probabilities, could evertake place. (135–56)

That is to say, even the wildest games ofchance unfold only within a field defined bycertain unvarying laws. But Meillassoux’sviews on absolute contingency prevent usfrom taking refuge in any final ground of nec-essary physical laws, since this would presup-

pose the very issue under dispute. In this way,stripped of its framework of necessity, truechance even becomes impossible.

As I read it, Meillassoux’s present bookmerely tries to show that the apparent stabilityof physical events in no way implies their ne-cessity. As he himself admits, what is neededto make his unorthodox stance on nature fullyconvincing is to show a way for stability toarise despite absolute contingency. This wouldthen allow us to apply Ockham’s Razor to anyfruitless appeal to cryptic physical mecha-nisms (148). But Après la finitude only lays thegroundwork for such a tactic, since it does notfirmly establish the needed resolution toHume’s problem: “for a . . . proposed resolu-tion of Hume’s problem would be obliged toderive the non-totalizability of the possiblefrom the principle of factuality itself” (152).Yet there is little cause for complaint, since thisshort book already achieves so much that mostreaders will gladly wait a few more years for afuller treatment of contingency.

In closing these middle sections of the book(we have dealt with the final chapter above),Meillassoux insists that the famous problemsof metaphysics are real, and deserve to betreated with respect. It is no longer a true philo-sophical attitude to smirk ironically at ques-tions from beginners such as “who are we?” or“where do we come from?” (151). In his view(as in my own), the recent tendency by philos-ophers to smirk at supposed “pseudo-prob-lems” is merely a result of the correlational cir-cle—which confines itself to an increasinglydecrepit citadel of human access to the world,and regards as “naïve” any attempt to ventureinto a supposed wasteland-in-itself beyond thefortress. But while Meillassoux does not findmetaphysical questions naïve or meaningless,he also does not find them mysterious: “thereis no longer any mystery, not because there isno longer any problem, but because there is nolonger any reason” (152). In his eyes, what phi-losophy most needs is an absolute andmathematized Cartesian version of the an sich,not just a mysteriously withdrawn Kantianone: a “mathematical and not merely logicalrestoration of a reality regarded as independentof the existence of thought” (153). Thismathematized absolute will provide the keyfor bridging what Meillassoux regards as thetwo central themes of his book, and perhaps of

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his thinking in general: (1) the ancestralarchifossil, and (2) the problem of howstability emerges from absolute contingency(ibid.).

Hyper-Occasionalism

Anyone familiar with recent continentalphilosophy is likely to find Meillassoux’s bookrefreshing. He abandons the more or less cau-tious hermeneutics of human finitude thatHeidegger established as a basic philosophicalmethod, replacing it with remorseless logicaldeduction. Stylistically, he prefers rational ar-gumentation to the “close reading” exegesis ofclassic texts, and in this respect he has much incommon with mainstream analytic thought.He captures the reader’s attention by minutelydescribing the contours of any philosophicalposition, depicting it from numerous angles bymeans of variant and contrary positions, em-ploying a wealth of brilliant counterargumentsthat often flood the reader’s mind even beforethe initial position has been mastered. In thissense, Meillassoux shows both a Hegelian tal-ent for dialectical variation and a Cartesian giftfor lucid, step-by-step inference. And whilehis faith in reason and contempt for obscuran-tism may strike some readers as too confidentin our power to fathom the depths of the world,this style of thinking is a badly needed counter-point to the dominant music of infinite other-ness and withdrawn grounds beneath groundsthat has become the near-ubiquitous sound-track of continental philosophy. Best of all,Meillassoux never passes the buck to deadmentors or hedges his bets behind meanderingprose; he sticks his neck out in every section ofthe book, and most available knives are toodull to place him in any danger. For this readerat least, Après la finitude opens unheard-ofpossibilities for the future of French philoso-phy, and tends to restore a good deal ofoptimism concerning the power of humanreason to know the world. Challenges of thisorder come only from works of the highestintellectual caliber.

Meillassoux is an explicit champion ofwhat he calls hyper-chaos, or perhaps hyper-contingency. Only while writing this reviewdid it occur to me that this actually makes him ahyper-occasionalist, perhaps the most extremeoccasionalist who has ever lived. Since this

claim will sound as strange to the reader as toMeillassoux himself, it calls for a bit ofexplanation.

Occasionalism is generally remembered asa minor, dusty, and gratuitous theological doc-trine in which God intervenes at every momentto link mind and body, and more generally tolink any objects at all. It is often restricted toMalebranche and a small number of his intel-lectual cousins. Indeed, specialists in modernphilosophy often strike down all efforts to ap-ply this term even to Descartes, let alone toSpinoza, Leibniz, and Berkeley. In my view,this restriction is unjustified, and the termshould be given a far broader scope than is nor-mally the case. For what is most pivotal aboutoccasionalism is not any particular theology,but rather the idea that entities in the world ex-ist only side by side, without any connectionwith one another. This model is obviouslyfound not only in Islamic figures such as al-Ash‘ari and al-Ghazali, and full-blown Chris-tian occasionalists such as Malebranche, but ina broad range of modern philosophers. As Ste-ven Nadler has shown,9 precisely the same ar-gument about the side-by-side character ofthings is even what guides Hume and his medi-eval forerunner Nicolas d’Autrécourt. Strictlyspeaking, occasionalism in its purest formwould be impossible, since we would be leftwith a multitude of side-by-side micro-uni-verses, none of them communicating with theothers in even the least fashion. This is whyeach form of occasionalism has had to allow it-self a single hypocritical exception to the usualban on interaction. For the theological occa-sionalists, this exception is obviously God,who is granted the unique ability to affect thethings in the world: even fire cannot burn cot-ton, but God can make it burn. In “skeptical oc-casionalists” such as Hume, the hypocriticalexception is found in the human mind, whichlinks fire and cotton through the force ofcustom (even if nothing in the outside worldcorresponds to such a link).

Meillassoux’s philosophy can be read as amore extreme form of occasionalism than ei-ther of these schools. In his system there is noGod able to do what inherent causal powercannot accomplish, since he excludes all nec-essary beings. Nor does he merely say, withHume, that we “cannot know” whether causalpowers exist—after all, Meillassoux states ab-



solutely that there is no reason, no cause foranything to happen. His occasionalism is notmerely a de-linking of distinct entities viewedfrom the standpoint of human knowledge, butan explicit decree about the ancestral thingsthemselves. He leaves us with a cosmos of ut-terly isolated entities, none capable of exertingdeterminative forces against the others.

It remains to be seen how Meillassoux’s fu-ture work will explain the emergence of appar-ent stability in nature from the hyper-contin-gency to which he feels bound. For themoment, however, there is a possible objectionto his manner of stating the problem. He arguesconvincingly that philosophy is capable of ab-solute statements about things themselves, andis in no way confined to the correlationist’sthings themselves “for us.” Even so, the ances-tral realm in his work still functions solely as amechanism for absolutizing the correlationalcircle; indeed, his method of obtaining the ab-solute arises directly from a radicalization ofthe correlational predicament itself. In this re-spect, he seems more concerned with the abso-lute status of scientific knowledge of the thingsthemselves than with the ontological structureof these things apart from all knowledge. If thisobjection seems too subtle, it becomes morevivid if we ask about the relation of ancestralthings with each other rather than just their in-ability to be reduced to a human-world corre-late. Nowhere in the present book do we find adiscussion of how the ancestral structure of fireexceeds its relation to cotton; for Meillassouxit is only human knowledge, not relationalityin general, that finds itself perplexed by thearchifossil. Stated differently, the problem isnot just why it seems to us that fire alwaysburns cotton even though there is absolutely noreason for this to happen. The real problem iswhy fire and cotton themselves are able to giverise to an event even though there is no longer

any connection between these two entities. Inother words, causation is not just an apparentphenomenon that arises in human awarenesswithout reason, but something that actuallyunfolds between entities themselves withoutreason. In the current version of Meillassoux’sproject, there remains the possible objectionthat, even though the archifossil is somethingexisting entirely in itself, independently of allcorrelation or rapport, it is still invoked only asthe dark excess or underbelly of the correlateitself. An analogous problem is found inBadiou’s “inconsistent multiplicity,”10 whichseems to do nothing other than constantly un-dercut the human count-as-one and occasion-ally surprise us in various novel truth-events. Ifinconsistent multiplicity merely remains be-yond all counts as a non-totalizable excess,and no part of it ever acts against any otherpart, it thereby effectively functions as a onedespite Badiou’s claims to the contrary. Moreimportantly, it will have no structure in its ownright, and we will find ourselves saying almostnothing about the nature of the world itself. Atrue hyper-occasionalism would have to avoidrelapse into human knowledge as the single ul-timate arbiter of a world without sufficient rea-son. This can happen only if we deal explicitlywith the interaction of separate inanimate enti-ties outside the scope of human awareness—including ancestral scientific knowledge.

Although I would not call this difficulty“minor,” it is still a specific and limited issue,and one fully open to debate. Après la finitudeis an important book of philosophy by an au-thor who is clearly one of the most talentedemerging voices in continental thought.Quentin Meillassoux deserves our close atten-tion in the years to come, and his book de-serves rapid translation and widespread dis-cussion in the English-speaking world. Thereis nothing quite like it.

ENDNOTES

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116

1. Quentin, Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur lanécessité de la contingence, with a Preface by AlainBadiou (Paris: Seuil, 2006.) All translations fromthe French are my own. Thanks are due to RayBrassier of Middlesex University for numerousstimulating discussions of the book, and for drawing

my attention to Meillassoux in the first place.2. This information comes from Brassier himself, e-

mail to the author on August 21, 2006.3. From page 11 of Badiou’s Preface. Meillassoux also

receives five respectful citations in Badiou’s newmajor work Logiques des mondes (Paris: Editions de

© DePaul University 2007

American University in Cairo, Egypt


117

Seuil, 2006), on pages 129, 534, 577, 589, and 624.4. “I propose one path, but the interest of Après la fini-

tude is that the reader can agree with the three criti-cal chapters on correlationism (1, 2, 5) without be-ing obliged to accept my own solution for escapingit. It remains for each reader to see if he can experi-ment with other paths.” From Meillassoux’s e-mailto the author on June 9, 2006.

5. Analogous sentiments can be found throughoutBruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, trans.C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1993).

6. From an e-mail to the author on July 6, 2006.7. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Gamma, section 4.8. Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou

Descartes contra Kant, with a Preface by PaulRicoeur (Paris: Aubier, 1982).

9. Steven Nadler, “‘No Necessary Connection’: TheMedieval Roots of the Occasionalist Roots ofHume,” The Monist 79 (1996): 448–66.

10. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. OliverFeltham (London: Continuum, 2005).

© DePaul University 2007

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Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosophy