By Emin Asland Özbek
When we attempt to derive a political understanding from Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophical project, we encounter a pretty obvious problem. As the philosopher stated rather bluntly in his interview with Ravini, when asked what the future promises politically, he replies: “The existing is contingency, and philosophy is unable to speak of contingent things.” [1] Although Meillassoux does offer seemingly distinct eschatological-political critiques in other texts (most explicitly, in The Immanence of the World Beyond: the critique of communism’s sin of moderation, the specter dilemma, and the definition of a politics that would abolish itself [2]), he declares that he prefers not to speak of the political, since he has placed the re-establishment of the thinkability of the absolute at the center of his philosophy (also denounced the philosopher’s efforts on the contingent) and regards the political as extra-absolute, contingent. We will recall this, for now, as the “veil of contingency.”
Yet the veil of contingency cannot resemble a blackout curtain that severs our tie with the outside altogether. For contingency, according to Meillassoux, does not necessarily entail the complete instability described in the Critique of Pure Reason, where things simply fly about and even the existence of a consciousness is impossible. [3] The question that follows is posed consistently, in different forms, in both After Finitude and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction: Why should a world without necessary laws have to be frantically unstable, without exception? [4] This bars us from positing the veil of contingency as a notion that would radically deprive us of knowledge. Nevertheless, why the veil of contingency keeps Meillassoux from speaking on the political can be read through the comparison he draws between extro-science fiction and social regularity: “…natural regularity [in the type-2 extro-science-fiction worlds] would be analogous to social regularity: it would be sufficiently stable to permit daily existence, but too unpredictable to give place to exact predictions or to avoid a sudden catastrophe.” [5] Even if Meillassoux concedes that contingency leaves a certain continuity of life possible without dragging it into complete instability, he meets the social phenomena we experience with a reading that likens them to the natural irregularity of extro-science-fictional worlds (returning to the Type-2 worlds in particular, we must also consider worlds in which the working conditions of science as we know it have disappeared) that stresses that something incalculable may occur at any moment — a reading whose practical motives we can readily see. This is in fact quite consistent: As Shaviro argues, for Meillassoux the value of science derives from mathematical formalizability: “Meillassoux, to the contrary, values science only on the grounds of its recourse to mathematical formalization. He is not concerned with the way that the self-correcting scientific method would allow us to asymptotically approach a nondiscursive reality.” [6] In this context, what status the paradigm(s) of human sciences, which do not admit of formalization — even repeatability — hold for Meillassoux can be discussed separately. But this leads us to an entirely different problem. That will not be the route we will take here.
Yet a diagnosis concerning the present and the future, one that will render this schema stranger still, insistently repeats itself throughout Meillassoux’s project: The return of the religious and contemporary obscurantism. [7] And let us say it at once: What Meillassoux calls the return of the religious cannot be thought apart from the set of social and political phenomena. For among the things he cites as examples of this return are cults, groups of every kind harboring religious hierarchy, which he finds seriously dangerous, even “stupid.” [8] Meillassoux, of course, undertakes no categorization of cults, no theory of religious organization, no sociology of religion; yet he refers explicitly to “cult hierarchy,” even declaring scientific education helpless before this type of fanaticism: “Scientific education and skepticism, however hostile they may be to the absolutist claims of metaphysics, can never struggle against cult-type hierarchy, for they are its inevitable precursors.” [8] Hence, we find Meillassoux, who so carefully refrains from speaking about the political future, making observations on the dynamics of religious organizational structures amply endowed with political power, and on how they cannot be fought. We find him tailoring a new garment for religious obscurantism under the name “the mutation of fanaticism.” [9] Our aim here, however, is not to diagnose an inconsistency in Meillassoux’s thought; we leave that to other people. Our concern is the schema Meillassoux draws, despite the veil of contingency, of the return of the religious and of the structure of contemporary obscurantism — a schema that avoids the trap of teleological reading regimes, or as we will name them, reactionologies — and the new possibilities it brings. For precisely this reason, what interests us is not whether Meillassoux speaks about politics. It is what kind of schema he was able to construct of the structure of the contemporary resuscitation of religiosity without violating the veil of contingency, or by disregarding it.
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By reactionology we mean, in its simplest form, modes of thinking that “evidence” (with the help of some data set or historical/geopolitical reading, though not necessarily) or (at the very least) “put back into circulation and production under a rational guise” a conflict between imaginary civilizational teloi, of the kind: “Young men have turned religious, because liberal progressivism victimized them badly, and these aggrieved boys returned to the values of their fathers.” Another example: The perspective that reads the mushrooming of new cults as “the reaction of a faith-prone classes to the ‘crisis of meaning’ created by secularization & modernization, which has demolished the social codes.” Though not limited to these, the readings reactionology most imposes today can be schematized in two formulas:
Group A, defined by generation, ethnicity, geography, some meta-cultural approach, or class in the broad sense, and endowed with civilizational/national/social representation, has ultimately/inevitably strengthened its bond with the religious in reaction to the liberal/progressive/foreign/modern/secular narrative X and/or to consequence K of globalization.
Group B, owing to the historical/social/economic set Y in which it finds itself, is ultimately/inevitably open, indeed eager, to religious radicalization or to turning toward new kinds of religiosity, as reasons G have also historically shown.
These two formulas rarely circulate in pure form. In practice they stack: The reaction supplies the occasion, the disposition supplies the essence, and both arrive at the same destination, some sort of social/historical inevitability. Even if we leave the evidentiary and causal problems of these two formulas for the social scientists to discuss, we must not close our eyes to their structure, which performs “data curation”, “geopolitics analysis”, “historical reading” or “anecdotal argumentation” in order to legitimate civilizational imaginaries that are groundless and, at the end of the day, all too available to the service of domination. Reactionology, most of the time, selects “data” (whatever we still understand by this word, which has become a kind of magic spell) not to explain it, but to render visible the civilizational narrative it has presupposed. At best, reactionology draws us a line of historical and social sensitivities framed by limited data and historical analysis; and the very manner in which this line is drawn has been carefully selected so as to read the outcomes through a civilizational crisis, much like the manner in which the secular-religious opposition was created. [10] Another problem is reactionology’s insistence on reading its inferences through singular templates. The reactionologist draws giant parallels: giant parallels that read faith-fueled populism from St. Petersburg to Alabama along the same track. The reactionologist will object to this most fiercely: “Not at all. It is my method that makes it possible to read Trumpism’s and Putinism’s relations to the return of the religious differently. I possess the studies to assess these two civilizations’ crises with liberal progressivism separately. And it is precisely this differing relation that distinguishes Russian religionization from American religionization.” Then, we say, return to the character of Russian religionization you have described. Or of American religionization. Is not what you call “X religionization” simply another name for the political character of X you built narratives and arguments from the start? More amusingly, this reading regime also runs in reverse: Was not atheism, an imposition of the Soviet state apparatus, read for decades as an immanent character of all the Soviet peoples? We are not speaking merely of propaganda; were not entire literatures established in this vein? Stranger still: Was not Islamism in Turkey, long assumed to have no purchase in society simply because it could find no place in political life, judged by Western commentators to be the characteristic of the entire Turkish people the moment it began to find its place in the political arena? The absurd consequences of pulling umbrellas stitched from imaginary imperial/post-imperial narratives, narratives left in the past or never even realized, over the heads of peoples are too many to count. [11]
The political effect of reactionology can be exemplified in the reading of the murders committed by jihadist terrorism since the 2000s as the necessary expression of a particular civilization, or in the binding of those murders to the narrative of a “civilizational struggle between Islam and the West.” Such a reading, by converting contingent and temporary historical sequences into “civilizational character”, has lent epistemic support to narratives of domination that were already in place. What reactionology gives us is not a schema of post-dogmatic religiosity but a reading regime frequently resorted to by agents of domination allied, in a certain respect, with obscurantism. Reactionology, of course, has no single method; it does, however, have plenty of playbooks consistent with our two-pronged formula. This is what gives reactionology its insidious, equivocal character, so seemingly of a kind with scientific explanation and with historical relations of cause and effect: it is well known that a given reaction can also be put to use in exalting the features of the civilization in question. Those who do not believe us may watch Fox News and Rossiya 1 side by side: “The glorious Russian/American people, faithful to their traditions, have recoiled in disgust from degenerate progressivism and taken refuge once more in Jesus Christ; our nation has, after all, been a Christian nation since time immemorial, even if satanic liberalism/communism once tried to erase this Christian identity. This taking of refuge has produced a national reconsolidation and awakening, an awakening to reclaim the glory and the victories stolen from Russia/America. An awakening that will legitimate, for the sake of our bright future and our traditions, staying poor, dying in war, exiling many of our own people, cramming them into prisons, occupations.” The examples are many, and they are vile; we will not enumerate them all. We wish only to intimate the purposes for which the reading regime reactionology offers can be used, and why we regard reactionology as an interlocutor. What reactionology cannot see, it cannot see for a structural reason: It looks for the cause of a return where there is only the filling of a void. Showing this requires the schema itself, to which we now turn. We will not deepen our examination of reactionology any further in this essay.
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According to Meillassoux, ever since thought took up the position that what the absolute is cannot be known, imposing the “Limit” upon itself even though nothing religious imposed it, thought has granted belief an unlimited authority to pronounce upon the absolute. [12] The correlationist modes thought adopted in order to defeat metaphysics [13] have left it able to fight absolutist metaphysics yet disarmed against fanaticism. And in fact metaphysics, always imagined arm in arm with religion, is never open to piety: how could that which seeks to wrest from belief the monopoly on speaking of the absolute be pious? To restrict claims to knowledge is to open a comfort zone for belief: Skepticism, then, clears ground for religiosity. [14] The question comes at us from an angle that unsettles what we know by rote; we always imagine the skeptic as an agnostic. Well, some skeptics, in embracing doubt, may accept doubt as a final position. But what prevents the next move of one who accepts doubt from being “If I cannot know, I may believe,” or “Only faith knows; outside it, knowing is impossible,” or “Where thought ends, faith begins”? Where the de-absolutization of thought is accepted, what prevents the turn toward belief, or toward an obscurantism, from beginning there too, sharing, from the standpoint of doubt, the very same legitimacy as the turn toward agnosticism, even if it is not necessary? [15] Yet the outcome Meillassoux sees here is emphatically not a return to conventionally defined religiosity or to archaism: “Contemporary fanaticism cannot therefore simply be attributed to the resurgence of an archaism that is violently opposed to the achievements of Western critical reason…” [16]
Let us schematize:
(1) Since thought took up an anti-speculative position (imposing upon itself that it cannot think the absolute), it has positioned the absolute as an object of belief, if only indirectly. The more claims to knowledge are restricted, the more breadth and comfort the space opened to belief acquires.
(2) What is an object of belief cannot be an object of reason; it excludes rational debate. And where rational debate is excluded, no declaration upon the absolute can be ruled out in favor of another; every belief shares the same legitimacy.
(3) The bankrupting of rational debate over the absolute has produced the possibility of a thought that laughs off questions concerning the absolute, and of a religiosity and obscurantism that generate unlimited declarations upon it.
(4) We are passing through an Era of Correlation composed of subjectalisms and correlationisms, in which all declarations upon the absolute are crammed into belief, and philosophy regards these problems as irrelevant, futile, unspeakable. [17]
(5) The closure of thought upon itself has made possible the circulation of countless statements concerning the absolute.
(6) We are thereby experiencing a contemporary obscurantism and return of the religious, in which the unlimited freedom to believe everything has been won. In contrast, the freedom to know has been taken from our hands.
(7) The religiosity and obscurantism whose return the Era of Correlation has enabled are, however, not the return of an archaism.
Choosing a numerological name for one’s unborn child so that it may determine the child’s fate belongs to this religiosity; believing in an alien invasion falls within it; so does believing that Trump is the guardian of the salvation of the Christian American people. Suppose our examples have raised some eyebrows. Let us answer the question: “What a broad definition of religiosity! You gather many distinct historical phenomena under a single category on account of certain ritualistic or performative features, and then claim that this broad definition covers events resting on many different causes?” What they share lies not in their contents but in the capacity of their truth claims concerning the absolute to enter circulation in the same correlational void; it lies in their modes of access to the absolute. Indeed, we cannot say of any claim that it is or is not religious on the basis of its content alone (its proximity in content to religion Q or R); we can read religiosity only through the mode of access to the absolute. [18] What is central in our examples is the instrumentalization of revelation, inspiration, or testimony, not the ends for which the instrument is used. For this reason, just as we cannot call a metaphysics religious because its implications resemble those of an established religion, we cannot call a belief non-religious because its character stands entirely apart from, even contrary to, the religions we conventionally know. Neo-Islamic influencer-led cults, for instance, seasoned with astrology, yoga, and quantum energy theory (?), which will strike orthodox Islam as heretical in the full sense of the word, are of course not Islamic in any sense we know; but this does not keep them from being religious.
We are not saying that the political or social consequences of these examples are the same. Indeed, we cannot even say that we see a systematicity among our examples. We will return to this claim. Each of these events may be a different event, both in the way it relates to religiosity and in the way it feeds on religiosity / feeds religiosity. We see no monolithic return to the religious on the part of any nation, any country, or any hemisphere. Nor, in our view, was the return of the religious made possible by some giant telos, instituted by correlationism, refortifying public reason and conscience. The correlationism we will encounter when we follow the Meillassouxian argument for the return of the religious is not the source of a single-origin religionization embodied in thousands of mythoi. Though we may have thousands of mythoi related to contemporary religiosity, our task is to read these mythoi within their own contingencies and to identify what is dispersed-given in their heterogeneous structures; not to submit them to interpretive regimes constructed for a single outcome, the reverse legitimation of certain sociological reductionisms.
What we are speaking of is a dispersed-given return of the religious: A resuscitation, and an obscurantism, that we track in the current stabilizations of the mutually discrete, non-necessary causes and effects of events. This is why we propose to think the religiosity and obscurantism produced by the Era of Correlation not as a teleological series of reactions taking on life in the historical, but as an organigrammatic assembly. [19]
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Our work on the organigrammatic assembly will at the same time be a test of certain characteristics of the contemporary resuscitation of religiosity we have enumerated so far. In our view, the most critical burden of proof among these is knotted in the discussion of the “centeredness” of contemporary religiosity, singular or plural. It is time for a close reading of the Meillassouxian argument for the return of the religious and of the Meillassouxian fragments of the history of philosophy. [20]
We have discussed that the condition of the contemporary resuscitation of religiosity is the de-absolutization of thought. When we return to the de-absolutization of thought, we find the constitutive elements of the correlation — the circle above all, since the second argument, correlational facticity, bears on a conflict internal to the Era rather than on the closure whose beginning we are trying to date: “…the correlationist circle and two-step; the replacement of adequation by intersubjectivity in the redefinition of scientific objectivity; the maintaining of the correlation even in the critique of representation; the cloistered outside. These postulates characterize every ‘post-critical’ philosophy, i.e. every philosophy that sees itself as sufficiently faithful to Kantianism not to want to return to pre-critical metaphysics.” [21] Looking at this list of postulates, it is not hard to see that the circle and the two-step are foundational to all of them. That these constitutive elements are registered as an encompassing character, and that Kant is defined as something like a turning point in the history of philosophy, gives us a rough historical point of departure. [22] Indeed, as further evidence, the flourishing of critical philosophy is a genuine rupture for Meillassoux, who highlights that before the initiation of correlationism there was access to the Great Outdoors: “For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers…” [23]
Before critical philosophy there was metaphysical dogmatism, as well as apologetic metaphysics constructed to support some form of belief or other. Frankly, Meillassoux has sung no lament for their death either. [24] Nevertheless, even though the critique of ideologies, which Meillassoux understands “as the rational counterfeit justifications of the social order,” had to pass through “deconstructing the claim of all metaphysics to totalize knowledge,” the outcome has not been bright in the end, however necessary the critique of metaphysics may have been for exposing ideological pseudo-rationality, and whatever its positive consequences: “We destroyed metaphysical dogmatism; but we did so by limiting thought….” [25] Note the past tense here: “we destroyed” marks an event that is completed, and, because completed, in principle datable. From these fragments it is no longer difficult to infer that, for Meillassoux, the closure of thought upon itself has a tentative beginning. Indeed, another historical remark makes this plain: “With the collapse of the great metaphysics of the nineteenth century, a certain type of religiosity seems, on the contrary, to have gained in strength…” [26] What matters to us about the reference to the nineteenth century, more than its meaning for the history of philosophy, is that it points to enumerable, concrete events. Thus, our reading states:
(i) According to Meillassoux, the closure of thought upon itself has a beginning that is tentative yet delineable, even if we cannot state it by day, month, or year. What marks this beginning is the constitutive elements of the correlation that give post-critical philosophy its distinct character.
(ii) Meillassoux determines that the contemporary resuscitation of religiosity has a particular type, and for this type, too, he gives a tentative yet delineable point of departure.
(iii) The beginning of post-critical philosophy and the contemporary resuscitation of religiosity are not simultaneous. Meillassoux’s chronology can be summarized roughly as follows: Correlationism → The collapse of the nineteenth-century metaphysics → The contemporary resuscitation of religiosity
Therefore, what we are discussing is a religiosity of a particular type, emerging from a particular time onward. A process uniform in type, with a beginning that can somehow be determined. It sounds as though it has a center. Yet these features are not capable of proving centeredness and transmission from a center. That a set of religiosities of a particular type is of shared origin, or systematic, could be inferred only from the proof (a) that the correlation which gave rise to them was equi-given, [27] and (b) that this equi-given correlation produced contemporary religiosity / contemporary religiosities under similar systematics.
(a) Yet there is a nuance we must add to our thinking on the Era of Correlation. The Correlation is never a whole. Perpetually struggling within itself, clashing, reversing one another; the Correlation is, in Meillassoux’s phrase, a battlefield: “And it is precisely because the Correlation is a relentless battlefield between its component parts…” And the structure of this war, according to Meillassoux, has compelled the speculative philosopher, too, to take up different weapons against its different camps: “…it can only be a materialism (against both parties); a speculative materialism (specifically against correlationists); and a nonmetaphysical materialism (specifically against subjectalists).” [28] We can almost hear the objection: “The necessity of taking up a different weapon against subjectalism does not stem from the givenness of the correlation; it stems from subjectalism’s hypostatization of selected human traits in nature. What we see here is metaphysics rather than correlation. Which is why a critique by way of the broad definition of the Era of Correlation strikes us as taking the easy way out.” Yes, we see metaphysics; but what we see is a metaphysics embedded in correlation: One in which, although the hypostatization of human final causes into nature has been abolished, traits, above all those of sensation and interaction, are hypostatized; one that may be said not to be anthropocentric, yet from which the charge of anthropomorphism cannot be deflected. [29] Can we imagine this metaphysics outside the correlational circle? The answer is an ice-cold no. [30] For in this metaphysics the measure of everything is still the subject; it debates with what intensity a trait we see in the subject might exist in the other sets of beings in the universe. Subjectalism does not break from the correlational circle; it fixes the circle by hypostatizing it. The circle says “being cannot be thought without the subject”; subjectalism says “then something subject-like is being itself.” The second is not the refusal of the first; it is the first absolutized. But we wish to take one more step: For the correlationist too, the equi-givenness of the correlation must be investigated. The position we wish to take here argues, with respect to its epistemic consequences, that the correlation is not equi-given. The method suited to our procedure will be to test the correlationist modes by way of their replies to the arche-fossil argument. Let us return to the arche-fossil argument, namely to Ancestrality, the opening chapter of After Finitude. We know, of course, that the argument is designed to encompass the correlationist modes wholesale; we know, indeed, that the idea of correlationist modes is not present there in the form we quoted earlier from Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinselliği Yeniden Düşünmek. Ancestrality performs no enumerative classification of correlationist modes. But why should this bar us from the comparison, especially when Meillassoux himself attributes the possible objections to the arche-fossil argument to specific figures, the scientistic thinker, the idealist?
Meillassoux’s generic correlationist, asked what happened 4.56 billion years ago, answers from a particular camp the moment she opens her mouth: “In one sense, yes, the correlationist will reply, because the scientific statements pointing to such an event are objective, in other words, intersubjectively verifiable.” [31] The word choices of this reply are familiar to us. The conversion of objectivity into intersubjective verifiability is nothing other than the appropriation of the second item on the list of postulates we quoted earlier, the replacement of adequation by intersubjectivity in the redefinition of scientific objectivity. The price of this language is heavy. As Meillassoux demonstrates, even if the correlationist meets the arche-fossil with retrojection, retrojection does not deepen the meaning of the statement; it cancels it: “either this statement has a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all.” [32] What evaporates the meaning of the measurement is the scientistic correlationist’s own defensive move. “Science does not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning.” [33] The scientistic correlationist pays for its reply to the arche-fossil argument with the meaning of science.
Now we must work through a part of the text we feared, upon seeing it, would shake our argument. Meillassoux states plainly that before the arche-fossil all varieties of idealism converge: “Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary – every variety of correlationism is exposed as an extreme idealism.” He adds that the line separating Kant from Berkeley grows blurred. [34] Let us be honest: For a reading in search of non-equi-givenness, there is surely no more discouraging sentence than this. But let us look closely. What converges is the verdict, not the defense. All the modes are condemned under the same verdict, yet they do not, and cannot, mount the same defense. Indeed, no sooner has Meillassoux delivered the verdict than he stages two separate replies, ranks them himself, and sets the second apart as “the more incisive objection”: “Here we have a classic defence of Kantian idealism.” [35] Two different lines of reasoning for a single verdict, two different instruments of refutation. It is as though we were watching, on a small scale, a rehearsal of that necessity of different weapons we saw earlier.
The asymmetry between the fates of the two replies is the evidence we are after. The first reply tries to reduce the arche-fossil to the argument from the un-witnessed. The event in a distant galaxy and the event that is terrestrial yet remote and ancient, it says, raise the same difficulty. Meillassoux brings this defense down with a single conceptual distinction: what is ancestral is not what is ancient, it is prior to givenness: “The ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence of givenness as such.” [36] The second reply deserves an altogether different treatment. The transcendental defense says that a condition is not an object, and, since it does not exist, can neither be born nor die: “a condition does not exist – precisely because it conditions.” [37] To bring this defense down, Meillassoux is compelled to assemble one of his heaviest machineries. He goes as far as the distinction between exemplification and instantiation, the subject as a point of view, and the body as a “retro-transcendental” condition. [38] That one closure collapses under a single distinction while the other forces Meillassoux to construct an entire apparatus is, in our view, the textual record of the fact that the closures are not equally armed. Would an equi-given closure not have produced homogeneous defensive resources, at least on any plane that requires a necessary mechanism?
Also the missing member of our triad. The scientistic thinker takes the stage in the opening dialogue, the critical one in the second reply; the skeptic does not appear in this passage at all. The skeptic’s defense is structurally deferred, to the discussion of facticity in the second chapter of After Finitude, that is, to the very threshold of fideism. That each mode is called to the stage at a different point in the apparatus is itself a symptom of non-equi-givenness for us. We do not conceal that this mapping is our own reconstruction.
The passage holds one more gift, and it flows directly into our main thesis. Meillassoux places the correlationist who resists the arche-fossil in dangerous proximity to contemporary creationists, and names the trial a trial of faith: “might not the meaning of the arche-fossil be to test the philosopher’s faith in correlation.” [39] That attachment to correlation is described in the vocabulary of belief is not an imposition of ours; it is the wording of the text. And the cost of this trial of faith is not distributed equally among the modes either. For the scientistic thinker, whose identity is built upon opposition to creationism, the comparison is devastating. For the skeptic, long since reconciled with belief, it is almost costless. The skeptic’s cheap exit here is the very door we showed earlier, the door of “if I cannot know, I may believe.” Confrontation with the arche-fossil demonstrates the structural non-equi-givenness of the closures of thought upon itself; as for our claim concerning their historical distribution, it supports it without proving it on its own. We have dealt with reactionology too long to extract history from a thought experiment. We proceed while preserving this distinction.
At this point we meet the reactionologist’s (un)expected return: “Bingo! If even the epistemic constructions of correlationism are not equi-given, then you are speaking of local correlationisms that varied with circumstances? Do you not say yourself that thought closes upon different groups in different ways, according to its correlationist mode? You are merely conducting reactionology’s own work, resting on different details and more abstract characters.” No. You distribute historical differentiation among particular imaginaries of groups; we say that the closure of thought has never constituted such a totality. Reactionology’s presupposition is that religionization is distributed, at whatever scale, across a given social totality according to reaction. What we say is the exact opposite. The construction of correlationism is not equi-distributed at the scale of a society, nor of a civilization, nor of any other collective subject whatsoever. In the same city, in the same institution, indeed within the thought of the same subject, different de-absolutizations of thought may reside together. Does not Meillassoux’s own correlationist, after all, speak several dialects from a single mouth in the dialogue, answering the question of 4.56 billion years with intersubjective verifiability and the question of the arche-fossil with the transcendental condition?
(b) Let us suppose that the correlation is equi-given. Imagine a dome that closes in the same manner upon the scientistic thinker and the skeptic alike, upon all the modes, upon all thought. We now have correlational voids derived in the same manner by rigidly determined correlational structures: Equi-given voids, dictated in the same way by thought as we have supposed it. Can we then say that the correlation also makes it necessary that these voids be filled in the same way, by virtue of the evenness of its givenness? For this, let us return to the schema of our Meillassouxian argument. We have no need of the parts concerning the construction of the correlation; look at what happens once the correlation has been established:
“The closure of thought upon itself has made possible the circulation of countless statements concerning the absolute.”
(i) We are not saying that the closure of thought upon itself required the circulation of countless statements concerning the absolute; we are saying that it made it possible. We should note that Meillassoux himself occasionally reaches for the language of inevitability, as when he calls scientific education and skepticism the inevitable precursors of cult-type hierarchy. We read such formulations as emphasis rather than as claims of argumentative necessity; the modality of our own reading is not that one. On the horizon of contingency we might well not have encountered such a circulation of statements concerning the absolute. What the schema indicates to us is that the circulation of these statements, and their filling of the correlational void, is contingent. The correlational structure institutes a void, but what fills that void is not the correlation itself, nor is it a notion required by the correlation; it is contingency. Here we must draw attention to a silence in the Meillassouxian argument. Does Meillassoux really speak about who produces the unlimited declarations upon the absolute? Do we hear a word from the philosopher about who issues these declarations, who disseminates them, what conditions put them into circulation? When we try to make sense of this silence by way of the veil of contingency, the picture before us grows clearer. Of a philosopher who forbids himself to speak of the contingent, we may ask about the relation to contingency of a set of contents he explicitly refrains from discussing. Let it be noted: Meillassoux does not refrain from giving examples of the contents of contemporary religiosity; we have seen him speak openly of cults, of hierarchies, of the mutation of fanaticism. What he passes over in silence is not the content itself but where the content comes from. He constructs not a single causal proposition about the social agents of these declarations, their sources, the conditions of their entry into circulation. He gives examples, not origins. We read this as a Meillassoux who draws the veil of contingency across the formation of the contents of the return of the religious.
(ii) Quite apart from our own proposition, neither the correlational two-step nor the correlational circle has access to any instrument whatsoever capable of determining the content of the religious. Yes, the correlation has made moves that render believing in anything legitimate; but does it offer the slightest indication as to what is to be believed? How are we to relate to the givenness of the correlation the fact that the correlational moves produce people who believe that faith-fueled fitness, by furnishing them with a sufficient level of testosterone, will make them instruments of divine justice, people who are not even Christian yet get under the bar listening to Catholic hymns, and yet do not produce Terrestrial Sith Eternalists who believe that Star Wars is indeed a story of real events and that Darth Sidious will return with his armada once again as savior, this time for Earth? Or what proves to us that Terrestrial Sith Eternalists will not appear tomorrow? Between us and the knowledge of what will fill the correlational void stands the veil of contingency. What gives modern religiosity its widely varied character follows from the non-intervention of the condition of contemporary religiosity in the varieties of contemporary religionization. Here we must underline that what we mean by “religiosity of a particular type” is in no way determinative with respect to content. This is why, even though its typology can be drawn out, the content of contemporary religiosity feeds, independently of the correlation, on the contingent character of the statements produced concerning the absolute.
To illustrate this, we would like to draw inspiration from architectural theory. Imagine buildings that share the same Structure: The same load-bearing skeleton, the same compartmentalization, even the same building materials; Structures alike to the point of perfection. Can we infer that the Spaces these Structures will carry will be identical? Will these Structures be able to impose the same Space everywhere? Even in a choice as thoroughly formal as a comprehensive government housing scheme, we come away with a no. Yes, the Structure can determine the geometry of the void and some of its inner contours, but not the elements that give the Space its identity. In our view, the correlational void, too, is capable of arranging only what the Structure is capable of arranging. As the Structure is for the Space, so the correlation is a condition of contemporary obscurantism; but what fills the void it leaves behind is not some arranging correlational telos or logos, it is contingency itself. Even when we assume the same Structure, what confronts us is a set of abruptly singular spaces. The variety of contemporary religionization comes from here as well: The countless different things believed by those who have won the freedom to believe everything.
Let us look a little more closely at the resemblances the Structure imposes, for we know where the objection will come from: “The same skeleton, the same compartmentalization; with this much determination in place, is what you call the contingency of the Space anything more than decoration, climate-control fixtures, lighting, and any number of other easily installed items? You think you have granted contingency an entire void, when what you have granted is an interior-design budget. After identical correlational structures, content amounts to no more than what you concede to rhetoric.” Actually, we do not belittle what the Structure determines: Geometry, load capacity, the lines along which light will enter, the routes of circulation, the plumbing. A step further: A given Structure also renders certain Spaces impossible. We cannot imagine a courtyard running through the middle of a load-bearing wall. Just as, within the contemporary return of the religious, we cannot imagine the return of an archaism integrated with the support of dogmatic metaphysics; that load-bearing wall has been demolished. Should such a return nonetheless occur, we would no longer be speaking of this void: The Structure would have changed, and with it the Space we have described. But what the objection overlooks is the negative operation of determination. The Structure tells the Space what it cannot be, not what it will be. The same reinforced-concrete skeleton carries an infirmary as readily as a detention house; it becomes a house of worship as readily as a gambling house. What is more, these transformations require no touching of the Structure at all: The Space changes hands without the Structure’s knowledge, account, or intervention. Consider the apartments in Eastern European housing blocks that became, in one case, a clinic, in another an underground congregation house, in a third a set of clandestine gyms. The Structure is the same in all three, and ignorant of all three. The identity of the Space is established by those who speak where the Structure falls silent: Usage, dedication, habit, dispute. And note that none of these can be derived from the Structure; all of them come to the Space from outside, contingently, some of them all but making the Structure look comic or irrelevant. We find the same negative determination in the case of the correlational void. The correlation has told the void what it cannot be: there can be no knowledge concerning the absolute, it cannot be an object of rational debate, it cannot be the terrain of philosophy. These prohibitions are the geometry of the void, its inner contours. But as to what will settle in the void, the correlation has not a single word to say. Numerology settles there, so does political messianism, so does faith-fueled fitness… All of them fit within the same geometry; none of them can be derived from that geometry. That they are of a particular type comes from the Structure; that they are abruptly different comes from the contingency of the Space.
Let us close the second proof as we closed the first. The centeredness of contemporary religiosity could have been inferred only from two things together: That the correlation was equi-given, and that this equi-given correlation produced its religiosities under a similar systematics. The first premise fell in the reading: The closures of thought are not equally armed, and we can conclude that what is not equally armed is not equally given. The second falls respectively, and the premise falls even if the first had been justified. A structure that opens a void does not thereby furnish it. The correlation legislates the geometry of the void: It says what cannot enter, never what will. Between the prohibition and the filling there is no inference, only contingency — and contingency, as Meillassoux demonstrates us, is not a factual deficiency in our knowledge of the cause but the absence of the cause itself. What settles in the void therefore owes the void nothing but its shape. This is why the religiosities we observe can be of one type and of no common origin at once: The type is what the prohibition leaves standing, the origin is what contingency withholds. With both proofs gone, the center goes with them. Not because we have found a different center, nor because we have found many, but because what we are looking at was never assembled around one.
We have used Structure and Space in this essay as a scaffold, not as a permanent pair of concepts. Let us also distinguish them from their relatives in architectural theory: The interior that the critique of modern architecture has shown us is the residue of modernization, its product even if unplanned. [40] Our Spaces, on the other hand, are not products of the Structure but at most carried by it; what fills the void does not derive from what opens it. Here we dismantle the scaffold. As for the picture it has shown us, the time has come to call it by its own name.
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Organigrammatic assembly is the coexistence of the religiosities that arise as a consequence of the freedom to generate unlimited claims concerning the absolute, a freedom granted by the void the Era of Correlation has opened: A coexistence that is irreducible, that cannot be derived from a single source, and that cannot be totalized on any plane whatsoever. Claims upon the absolute are contingent, because the correlation opens the void but does not fill it. It has access to no instrument that could determine the content. They are irreducible to one another, because the closures are not equi-given. They cannot be derived from a single source, because even when we assume equi-givenness, the givenness does not require what the declaration upon the absolute will be. And they cannot be totalized, because the relations among them are not the relations of a system.
Let us unfold this last claim, since we said we would return to the question of systematicity. The religiosities we observe clash with one another: one declares the other a heresy; the other counts the first an abomination, or a perversion, or a mere lack of conviction. Some collaborate and feed each other without meaning to: Political messianism and numerological determination of fate can operate side by side within the same base, within the same mind, without a word of awareness of one another. Others are entirely unaware of one another; they are neighbors settled in the same void who have never registered each other’s existence. A system requires the functional connection of its parts; the parts recognize one another, complete one another, or at least answer one another. What we see here is a connectionless being-together: Even the conflict and the connection are not the engagement of a system, since those who clash do so on no common ground, having merely met in the same void. This is what it is to be non-systematic: Not a defective system, but an amorphous unity that is not a system.
What, then, is the contingency that brings the countless declarations upon the absolute? Just here we owe a warning. What we call contingency is not the sum of digitalization, of the collapse of ideologies, of the bankruptcy of systems, of the current aspects of politics; still less is it a completable inventory that could be extracted from these factors. The very idea of such an inventory would amount to reconstituting reactionology one story higher: We would put factors in the place of groups and summon the telos back in the form of an inventory. The conditions that bring statements upon the absolute are of course historical and can of course be studied; but their anthology is impossible, because the list closes at no moment. Between us and the knowledge of which new declaration upon the absolute will arrive tomorrow stands the veil of contingency, and the veil hangs for those who draw up inventories as well.
This is why the contemporary return of the religious is not a static tableau but an organigramme that goes on growing more complicated. Each new filling is added to the existing ramifications but is not derived from them; each addition renders knowledge of the total a little more impossible. From this follows a conclusion concerning the knowledge of contemporary religiosity, and we want to state it plainly: there is not, and cannot be, a meta-knowledge of contemporary religiosity, a total knowledge to be reached by unifying the disciplines. What can be identified is the type, in other words the commonality of the mode of access. The content, on the other hand, arrives contingently each time anew, and no meta-discipline can institute a systematic knowledge of it. Let us recall the function Meillassoux attributes to the organigramme: A defense against the phantasm of total knowledge. In the form we have extended it, the organigrammatic lens is the reading practice of that defense: To read the cracks without totalizing them, to follow the ramifications without binding them to a single consolidatory entity, to content oneself with identifying the type and to situate the study of the contingency of content separately. The effort of studying contemporary religionization can be conducted with this lens: Every reading that tries to extract a system from the cracks will sooner or later become stuck in a phantasm of the system.
Finally, how should we answer the criticism that has perhaps been on everyone’s mind since the beginning of this essay, namely that “it is naive to try to interpret in philosophical, and rather general, terms a phenomenon that can only be resolved concretely, by the history and sociology of beliefs”? [41] Our answer has to do directly with the veil of contingency. The study of contemporary religiosity is not a matter of dismissing the social sciences from the subject and instrumentalizing a general philosophical understanding in order to prove that contemporary religiosity is an unintelligible phenomenon for scientific study. Like Meillassoux, we too have “no claim to take the place of these studies.” [41] If anything, we have tried to say why that place must be held by someone. If we recall where we began: Meillassoux meets social phenomena with the irregularity of the extro-science-fictional world, stable enough to live in, too unpredictable to be formalized, and this is the reason why he does not speak of them. What cannot be formalized is not thereby unknowable — it is knowable otherwise, by disciplines whose object is precisely the unformalizable. The veil of contingency, read this way, is not a prohibition on knowledge of the void’s contents but a division of labor concerning it. Philosophy can say what the void permits and forbids. What has in fact settled there, who carried it, and by what routes, is a question for those who study the contingent, and we have no intention of taking it from them. The study of post-dogmatic religiosity was an attempt to constitute a new instrument of knowledge for philosophy to speak about the absolute, by exposing the contemporary disconnection of the metaphysical and the religious. We have no attempt so compact, or so complex. What we have tried to do is to ask, plainly, some rather simple questions that occurred to us concerning contemporary obscurantism and return of religious, to try to answer them with the same plainness, and to derive from those answers, at most, the proposal of a reading practice. Whether, in searching for the answers to these questions, we have torn the veil of contingency is not, today at least, what concerns us. This is certainly not because we regard the question of tearing or not tearing the veil of contingency as unimportant: It is because of the political nature of the simple questions we have asked, and the confusion we have not yet dispelled concerning the relation between politics and philosophy in the Meillassouxian or more broadly speculative materialist sense.
References
[1] Sinziana Ravini and Quentin Meillassoux, “Archeology of the Future: Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” Paletten 291/292 (2013): 86–97.
[2] Quentin Meillassoux, The Immanence of the World Beyond, p. 451–478.
[3] Quentin Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015), p. 24. For the Kantian description of instability that Meillassoux discusses, see also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 235.
[4] For extensive discussions of this question, see “The Possibility of Non-Kantian Worlds” in Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction and the section of “Hume’s Problem” in After Finitude.
[5] Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, p. 38.
[6] Steven Shaviro, “Foreign Territory: The Promises and Perils of Speculative Realism,” in Genealogies of Speculation, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 33.
[7] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 49 and 82. Meillassoux uses the two terms almost interchangeably, drawing no explicit line between them. We read the return of the religious as the positive filling of the correlational void and contemporary obscurantism as the negative loss it entails, a distinction our schema will presuppose.
[8] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek [Thinking Post-Dogmatic Religious Fanaticism], in Spekülatif Materyalizm: Varlık, Zaman, Adalet, Din, Bilim [Speculative Materialism: Existence, Time, Justice, Religion, Science], ed. and trans. Kağan Kahveci, p. 102. We were unable to locate a publicly available English translation of the original text during the course of our research; the quotations that appear within the text were translated into English by the author.
[9] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 106.
[10] For a broader treatment, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
[11] We believe the study of the post-imperial has an important role to play in identifying and analyzing reactionology. The relation between post-imperial identity formations and identity narratives, on the one hand, and modern authoritarianisms and the reactionologies with which they are so closely entangled, on the other, seems to us undeniable. For thinking the post-imperial through this lens we recommend Karen Barkey’s exceptional work, “Thinking About Consequences of Empire.”
[12] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 101.
[13] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 101. In this passage the correlationist modes are listed as “skeptical, scientistic, or critical.” In other places in Meillassoux’s work, however, positions such as phenomenology or analytic philosophy are added to these modes, or discussed in the same context even when not listed. See After Finitude, p. 41.
[14] After Finitude, pp. 43–44.
[15] Although this crucial passage does not appear in our main text, we think it worth sharing with the reader: “Thought that limits itself may wish to be agnostic; or it may wish, in favor of some content or other, to be fanatical and obscurantist — both from the standpoint of the thought of the Limit, and with exactly the same legitimacy.” Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 101.
[16] After Finitude, p. 49.
[17] “Era of Correlation” is Meillassoux’s own term, adopted in place of After Finitude’s “correlation in the broad sense”: It names the post-Berkeleyan era that encloses us within correlation either through an anti-speculative gesture, which he now calls correlationism alone, or through a speculative one, for which he replaces “subjectivist metaphysics” with “subjectalism,” the earlier term carrying a misleading connotation of relativism. Our two-winged use of the term follows this revision.
[18] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 100.
[19] Although we will elaborate on it in what follows, we would like to offer an immediate clarification concerning the confusion the expression “organigrammatic” may create. In its first sense it will evoke the schemas of institutional organization or arrangement, whether multi-centered or single-centered. We, however, borrow the concept in order to extend Meillassoux’s use of it in Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: “The organigramme is a mode of assembly without fusion of knowledges, which endows it with an original mode of unity different from the system, whose function is the faultless unity of a particular doctrine. Distinct from systematics, ‘organigrammatics’ is, beneath its dull administrative appearance, an original ontological fact that defends against every phantasm of total knowledge,” pp. 144–145. We think this conceptualization, formulated to describe a cracked reality, can be extended to explain a centerless and dispersed-given schema for the mode of organization of the return of the religious. We must underline, however, that what we mean is not an organizational schema, whether multi-centered or single-centered, even if it is divided into different ramifications.
[20] A note on terminology. Fixing the vocabulary of correlation has proved harder than we expected, and the difficulty is not ours alone. Meillassoux’s own usage shifts across the span of texts we draw on: In the Berlin lecture he calls the terminology of After Finitude a source of “regrettable confusion” and revises it, replacing “correlation in the broad sense” with the “Era of Correlation” and “subjectivist metaphysics” with “subjectalism.” The translations compound this, rendering the same argument now as the correlational, now as the correlationist circle, sometimes on the same page, very notably in After Finitude. The secondary literature unfortunately offers little guidance, largely reproducing whichever variant its source happened to use. We have therefore fixed our own usage: Correlational for the structure, correlationist for the position that puts it to anti-speculative use.
[21] After Finitude, p. 8. In the Berlin lecture, Meillassoux reduces correlationism to two arguments, the correlational circle and correlational facticity. Our concern here is only with the first: Facticity is correlationism’s second move, directed against the subjectalist absolute rather than the materialist one, and it bears on a conflict internal to the Era of Correlation rather than on the closure of thought whose beginning we are trying to date.
[22] The debate over whether After Finitude is itself post-Kantian is, in our view, highly relevant for this picture.
[23] After Finitude, p. 7.
[24] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 100.
[25] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, pp. 105–106.
[26] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 98.
[27] We say “equi-given” rather than “co-given” deliberately. In phenomenology, co-givenness (Mitgegebenheit) names the way the unseen profiles of an object are given along with the seen ones; our concern is not the simultaneity of what is given but the evenness of its distribution. “Equi-” carries that sense of evenness.
[28] Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition, p. 123. Citations to this text follow the published English translation in Genealogies of Speculation, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); the pagination differs from the freely circulating conference transcript.
[29] Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition, p. 126.
[30] Meillassoux introduces the argument as the correlational circle and pairs it with correlational facticity, reserving the adjective “correlationist” for a particular use of it: Hume’s sceptical, anti-speculative deployment is called the properly correlationist form of the “correlational circle,” whereas Berkeley, who invented the circle, is identified as a subjectalist and not a correlationist. See Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition, p. 132 and Note 18. We therefore keep to “correlational circle” in our own prose: The circle is structural, and subjectalism inhabits it without being correlationist. Where the term appears in quotation, the translator’s wording is preserved.
[31] After Finitude, p. 16.
[32] After Finitude, p. 17.
[33] After Finitude, p. 17.
[34] After Finitude, p. 18.
[35] After Finitude, p. 24.
[36] After Finitude, p. 21.
[37] After Finitude, p. 23.
[38] After Finitude, p. 25.
[39] After Finitude, p. 18.
[40] Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (2002): 175–190. The distinction matters: For Koolhaas, the interior is what modernization leaves behind, its unplanned by-product, and thus still causally its issue; our Spaces are not issued by the Structure at all but merely housed by it.
[41] Dogmatizm-Sonrası Dinsel Fanatizmi Düşünmek, p. 98.
Hyperspekulation 
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