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Meillassoux's Virtual Future

Chapter of: continent. Year 1: A Selection of Issues 1.1–1.4(pp. 12–31)

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Metadata
TitleMeillassoux's Virtual Future
ContributorGraham Harman(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0016.1.02
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/continent-year-1/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightHarman, Graham
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-12
Long abstractThis article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude. Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meil-lassoux only partly familiar to the reading public, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral disserta-tion L’Inexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative ma-terialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable im-portance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment
Page rangepp. 12–31
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)