Quentin Meillassoux (; ; born 26 October 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Biography

Quentin Meillassoux is the son of the

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

Claude Meillassoux. He is a former student of the philosophers Bernard Bourgeois and

Alain Badiou Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault ...

. He is married to the

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while other ...

and philosopher Gwenaëlle Aubry.

Philosophical work

Meillassoux's first book is ''After Finitude'' (''Après la finitude'', 2006). Alain Badiou, Meillassoux's former teacher, wrote the foreword''.'' Badiou describes the work as introducing a new possibility for philosophy which is different from

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works ...

's three alternatives of

criticism Criticism is the construction of a judgement about the negative or positive qualities of someone or something. Criticism can range from impromptu comments to a written detailed response. , ''the act of giving your opinion or judgment about the ...

skepticism Skepticism ( US) or scepticism ( UK) is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the p ...

, and

dogmatism Dogma, in its broadest sense, is any belief held definitively and without the possibility of reform. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, or Islam ...

. The book was translated into English by Ray Brassier. Meillassoux is associated with the speculative realism movement. In this book, Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls " correlationism", the theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge. He terms this reality independent of human knowledge as the "ancestral" realm. Following the commitment to mathematics of his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux claims that mathematics describes the primary qualities of things as opposed to their

secondary qualities Secondary may refer to: Science and nature * Secondary emission, of particles ** Secondary electrons, electrons generated as ionization products * The secondary winding, or the electrical or electronic circuit connected to the secondary winding i ...

shown by

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

. Meillassoux argues that in place of the agnostic scepticism about the reality of

cause and effect Causality is an influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, ...

, there should be a radical certainty that there is no causality at all. Following the rejection of causality, Meillassoux says that it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent. The world is a kind of hyper-chaos in which the

principle of sufficient reason The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a Reason (argument), reason or a cause. The principle was articulated and made prominent by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with many antecedents, and was further used and developed by ...

is not necessary although Meillassoux says that the

principle of non-contradiction In logic, the law of noncontradiction (LNC; also known as the law of contradiction, principle of non-contradiction (PNC), or the principle of contradiction) states that for any given proposition, the proposition and its negation cannot both be s ...

is necessary. For these reasons, Meillassoux rejects Kant's

Copernican Revolution The term "Copernican Revolution" was coined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1781 work ''Critique of Pure Reason''. It was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth sta ...

in philosophy. Since Kant makes the world dependent on the conditions by which humans observe it, Meillassoux accuses Kant of a "Ptolemaic Counter-Revolution." Meillassoux clarified and revised some of the views published in ''After Finitude'' during his lectures at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public university, public research university in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in West Berlin in 1948 with American support during the early Cold War period a ...

in 2012. Several of Meillassoux's articles have appeared in English via the British philosophical journal '' Collapse'', helping to spark interest in his work in the Anglophone world. His unpublished dissertation ''L'inexistence divine'' (1997) is noted in ''After Finitude'' to be "forthcoming" in book form; as of 2021, it had not yet been published. In ''

Parrhesia In rhetoric, parrhesia () is candid speech, speaking freely. It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk. Etymology The earliest recorded use of the term ''parrhesia'' ...

'', in 2016, an excerpt from Meillassoux's dissertation was translated by Nathan Brown, who noted in his introduction that "what is striking about the document... is the marked difference of its rhetorical strategies, its order of reasons, and its philosophical style" from ''After Finitude'', counter to the general view that the latter merely constituted "a partial précis" of ''L'inexistence divine''; he notes further that the dissertation presents a "very different articulation of the Principle of Factiality" from that in ''After Finitude''. While Nathan Brown's translation uses the French text of the 1997 dissertation, in 2011 Graham Harman used a 2003 revision to offer a partial translation of Meillassoux's ongoing work of expanding the dissertation into a book. In September 2011, Meillassoux's book on

Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French Symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools o ...

was published in France under the title ''Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du coup de dés de Mallarmé''. In this second book, he offers a detailed reading of Mallarmé's famous poem "

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard The United Nations (UN) is the global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among st ...

" ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"), in which he finds a numerical code at work in the text.

Bibliography

Books

*''After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency'', trans. Ray Brassier (Continuum, 2008). ISBN 978-2-02109-215-8 *''The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarme's Coup De Des'' (Urbanomic, 2012). ISBN 978-0-98321-692-6 *''Time Without Becoming'', edited by Anna Longo (Mimesis International, 2014). ISBN 978-8-85752-386-6 *''Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction'', trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Univocal, 2015). ISBN 978-1-937561-48-2

Articles

*"Potentiality and Virtuality," in ''Collapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume II (Speculative Realism)'', ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 55–81. *"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory," in ''Collapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume III (Unknown Deleuze Speculative Realism'', ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 63–107. *"Presentation by Quentin Meillassoux," in ''Collapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume III (Unknown Deleuze Speculative Realism'', ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 408–449. *"Spectral Dilemma," in ''Collapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume IV (Concept Horror)'', ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2008): 261–275. *"The Immanence of the World Beyond," in ''Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism'', ed. Peter M. Chandler Jr. and Connor Cunningham, trans. Peter M. Chandler Jr., Adrian Pabst, and Aaron Riches (SCM Press, 2010): 444–478. *(with Florian Hecker and Robin Mackay) "Speculative Solution: Quentin Meillassoux and Florian Hecker Talk Hyperchaos," o
Urbanomic
published 2010. *(with Florian Hecker, Robin Mackay, and Elie Ayache) "Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction," in ''Speculative Solution'', ed. and trans. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2010).Republished (and expanded) in 2015 as ''Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction'', trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Univocal, 2015). ISBN 978-1-937561-48-2 *"Metaphysics, Speculation, Correlation," trans. Taylor Adkins, ''Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy'' Vol. 22 (2011): 3–25. *"History and Event in Alain Badiou," trans. Thomas Nail, ''Parrhesia'' Vol. 12 (2011): 1–11. *"The Contingency of the Laws of Nature," trans. Robin Mackay, ''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space'' Vol. 30, No. 2 (2012): 322–334. *"Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps," trans. Alyosha Edlebi, ''Parrhesia'' Vol. 16 (2013): 35–47. *"The Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis," in ''Collapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume VIII (Casino Real)'', ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2014): 813–846. *"Decision and Undecidability of the Event in ''Being and Event I'' and ''II''," trans. Alyosha Edlebi, ''Parrhesia'' Vol. 19 (2014): 22–35. *"Excerpts from ''L'inexistence divine''," in Graham Harman, ''Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2nd Edition)'', trans, Graham Harman (Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 224–287. *"Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning," in ''Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism'', ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, trans, Robin Mackay and Moritz Gansen (Bloomsbury, 2016): 117–197. *"From ''L'inexistence divine''," trans. Nathan Brown, ''Parrhesia'' Vol. 25 (2016): 20–40.

Interviews

* (with Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin) "Interview with Quentin Meillassoux," in ''New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies'', ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, trans. Marie-Pier Boucher (Open Humanities Press, 2012): 71–81. * (with Sinziana Ravini) "'Archeology of the Future': Interview with Quentin Meillassoux," ''Palatten'' Vol. 1/2 (2013): 86–97. * (with Graham Harman) "Interview with Quentin Meillassoux (August 2010)," Graham Harman, ''Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2nd Edition)'', trans, Graham Harman (Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 208–223. * (with Kağan Kahveci and Sercan Çalci) "Founded on Nothing: An Interview with Quentin Meillassoux," trans. Robin Mackay o
Urbanomic
published 2021.

Notes

External links

*, Critique, janvier-février 2006, no 704-705 (revised edition, Éditions Ionas, 2016). *, Failles 2, Printemps 2006 (revised edition, Éditions Ionas, 2016).
Recording of Meillassoux's 2007 lecture in English at the Speculative Realism Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London

Conferences by Meillassoux (in French)

Speculative Heresy blog resources page, which contains articles by Meillassoux
{{DEFAULTSORT:Meillassoux, Quentin 1967 births 21st-century French essayists 21st-century French male writers 21st-century French philosophers Action theorists Deleuze scholars École Normale Supérieure alumni Academic staff of the École Normale Supérieure French epistemologists Existentialists Academic staff of the Free University of Berlin French logicians French male essayists French male non-fiction writers Hermeneutists Kant scholars Living people Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni Materialists Metaphysical realism Ontologists Phenomenologists Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mathematics Philosophers of time Philosophical realism French philosophy academics Syntheism