By Louise Morelle
A previous version of this text was published anonymously on the website lundimatin in 2015. It is here translated and signed, with light revisions for clarity, and addition of sources. Heartfelt thanks to hyperspekulation for the translation.
It would seem strange to describe Quentin Meillassoux as a philosopher deeply concerned with politics, let alone a political philosopher ; one might even be tempted to say that his ‘speculative materialism’ is aimed at getting us away from earthly concerns and focused on ‘purely conceptual’ matters devoid of any concrete implications : its central thesis of a fundamental contingency of the laws of nature would, in this reading, be nothing more than a thought experiment, leading nowhere and opening onto nothing as far as we are concerned, since absolute contingency does not, for all its ontological might, allow us to think any real transformation of the order of things.
The following, which is intended as a mere exposition of Meillassoux’s views and does not attempt to import my own analyses or divergences (for a partial attempt at both defense and critical revision on the topic, see here), won’t either try to argue that Meillassoux’s thought is directly political, or of any deep political import. Doing otherwise would be either dishonest or deluded. That being said, it still remains that his work, overtly metaphysical as it stands, has an ethical dimension which has at times been unfairly overlooked. For instance, the second chapter of After Finitude insists on a link, admittedly contentious in character, between on the one hand contemporary philosophy’s critique of the absolute, which he sees as bound up with a primacy of faith over reason (fideism), and on the other hand a sociological “return of the religious.” Because Meillassoux’s position aims at a strictly rationalist construction of the absolute qua absolute necessity of contingency, it presents itself, at least implicitly, as an “irreligious”[1] alternative in this context, insofar as it allows us to grasp the absolute not as a transcendent divine reality but, on the contrary, as the absence of transcendence.
It is thus no coincidence that the only passages in his published books (After Finitude, and The Number and the Siren) that wrestle with concrete matters are concerned with religion. Indeed, if Meillassoux’s thought has an ethical and political aim, it is concentrated on questions regarding salvation and the final ends of humanity, which have, traditionally, been defined as laying beyond politics. Meillassoux’s positions in the political domain must be understood as of one piece with this grandiose aim: that of a rational and metaphysical thinking of secular salvation. For Meillassoux, the religious form of thought (and, more broadly, the field of belief) constitutes a fundamental obstacle to human emancipation, because it imposes a radical limit on what human beings are capable of thinking and understanding.
The core of Meillassoux’s project consists, then, in a philosophical appropriation of ethical and eschatological questions, that is, in treating these questions on an exclusively metaphysical plane. In this sense, the speculative nature of his work should not be written off, as for Meillassoux, it appears cleanly that existential and ethical commitments cannot be separated from a commitment on the strictly ontological level: “one cannot transform a body, invent a new subjectivity, without a proposition about the world deployed in a resolutely speculative form.”[2] Such a hyper-theoretical orientation explains why, for him, problems must be posed at their highest level of generality and intensity, that is, on a metaphysical register. Although he presents himself as a materialist, his is a very strange materialism, one that while not strictly speaking incompatible with traditional materialisms at the level of descriptions of the physical and social world, rather seeks to justify and reinforce them through original philosophical propositions. Thus, in passing during one of his seminars, he briefly explains the link between his version of contingency and the Marxian critique of ideology:
Marx critiques capitalist ideology in order to show that this state of the market (bourgeois society) is contingent. There is no necessary trans-historical order. Ideologies all assert that what is must be. The critique of ideology always consists in revealing as contingent what was believed to be necessary. But critiques of ideology have never gone so far as to reject physical necessity. We must call into question this idea of necessity internal to history, to society, but also to nature itself.[3]
Therefore the political implications of Meillassoux’s thought cannot be presented autonomously, but only insofar as they follow from his overall approach, grounded in speculative propositions, contentious as they are in form as in content, about thought’s power to grasp the absolute. Meillassoux’s distinctly political thought[4], thus framed, can be summed up in terms of themes as follows : at the intersection of the notions of rational hope, of a renewed definition of justice, and of a reflection on the figure of the militant.
Meillassoux’s proposal of a purely rational hope, one that would bring together philosophical wonder and messianic expectation, stems directly from his metaphysics: if the Absolute is not a thing, a transcendent principle guiding our existence, and if the world as we know it is open to radical transformations, then hope should not rest on a guaranteed future but on the very real possibility that the unjust order of the world might be overturned. This is the main argument of Divine Inexistence. In the construction of this line of thought, Meillassoux points to a perverse effect of belief in a transcendent Absolute, even a secularized one: to posit Universal Spirit, History, or the Revolution as the Absolute is to cast outside the world itself the goal toward which hope is directed, which results in pushing people to accept present injustice in the name of future justice (communist justice, for example).
For Meillassoux, then, the task is, rather, to reject the deceptive forms of hope founded on unjustified absolutes, but equally to fight against the opposite and symmetrical consequence, which is to sink into despair because of the absence of said absolutes (see the end of “The Immanence of the World Beyond”). The aim is to simultaneously accept the absolute contingency of all things, and to show that, contrary to an existentialist point of view for instance, this contingency in no way leads to a fundamental absurdity that would result in the rejection of all grounds for action. “The overcoming of despair aims to free the subject’s present power to act, not to satisfy its desire for reverie. By destroying within themselves the idea of an irremediable absurdity of the world, the universalist militant can concentrate on the urgency of their task, while aiming at the higher end that guides their action, not in the manner of an inaccessible ideal, but as a real, though unmasterable, possibility.”[5] If contemporary nihilism is merely the image of our collective inability to conceive of anything other than a transcendent goal as the end of political action, this nihilism can be overcome through the introduction of a rational hope, grounded on the revelation, through the absolute character of contingency, of the ever-present possibility of a real, fundamental transformation of the world from its current state. The intellectual aim here is to grasp “a real possibility elaborated by factial speculation, a possibility destined not to remain a dead possibility, ‘merely theoretical,’ but to become an intimate and vital hope: an effective and emancipatory factor in the transformation of subjectivity.”[6]
This hope has a determinate object: universal justice. Knowledge of ontological contingency, here acquired through a purely intellectual effort, gives us access to an eternal idea of justice, one independent of all present conditions : the eternal truth of contingency “gives access to the strict equality of every human being from the standpoint of what makes them human. The eternal truths to which their condition gives them access are indeed indifferent to differences, the innumerable and necessary differences between thinking individuals.”[7]
This justice itself is conceived as the possibility of a terminal abolition of politics, with hope leading to “a politics pursued with a view to the abolition of politics, rediscovering communism as the promise and the trial of the end of politics, the end of vectorization, the end of eschatology, and the beginning of an existence devoted to its own trials.”[8]
It should be noted here that Meillassoux pushes the advent of such justice, the condition of any real communism, to a point of radicality that breaks with any notion of human achievement as to strain credulity. Indeed, for him, the first injustice to be corrected, the most fundamental one, is that of unjust death, which generates what he calls specters, which, he clarifies, point towards the injustice of Death as such: “of all injustices, the most extreme remains death: absurd death, premature death, natural death, or death inflicted by one who cares nothing for equality.”[9] Universal resurrection is, for Meillassoux, the initial condition for justice to come about, absorbing the incalculable sum of past injustices and opening the possibility of the complete realization of the Good in the form of a “just community.” Moreover, such an eschatological proposition is indispensable to prevent the advent of a Revolution from resulting in a tragic rupture in history, one that would radically separate the human beings born before the Revolution from those who came after it, producing “an absolute inequality between the people before emancipation and those after.”[10]
Such a hope, at once absurd in the immensity of its demand and necessary as the object of a complete and absolute justice, is, according to Meillassoux, a necessary precondition for attaining a form of subjectivity that would be fully aware of all the concrete limits on the establishment of justice and yet, for all that, would not give it up. For Meillassoux, it is in a sense a matter of altering what he calls the figure of the Militant, so that the Militant acts in full knowledge of the facts while being guarded against radical despair. For Meillassoux, “an emancipatory politics is a politics that aims at its own abolition in the accomplishment of the end it pursues, so as to render useless the violence and cunning that inevitably accompany its course. But beware: it would be ruinous to believe that politics could achieve this abolition by itself, that the end of politics could be a politics. For this is obviously false: a world without politics is beyond our reach.”[11] It is in this sense that the boundless hope for universal justice finds its raison d’être: in the binding the necessary pursuit of emancipation with an end located radically beyond itself, a salvation that only messianic hope previously promised (that of an absolute end of all politics) now taken up and threaded within the fabric of universal Reason.
[1] “Irreligiosity” here indexes a metaphysical and rationalist approach towards matters of ultimate concerns that does not leave room for fideist ungrounding : “The God of [classical] metaphysics is religion’s only threatening adversary : it is in the God of Spinoza of of Hegel that true western irreligiosity can be found, and not, for instance, in the declarations of philosophical atheism of that antimetaphysician, Heidegger” (L’inexistence divine, p. 300, tr. mine).
[2] “The Immanence of the World Beyond” (I only consulted the French version of the article, and translated it directly ; the published English translation might differ in some places)
[3] Seminar on “Necessity and Contingency”, ENS Ulm, 2007
[4] The main sources here are the Unpublished and Untranslated Divine Inexistence, and the articles “Mourning to come, God to come” and “The Immanence of the World Beyond”. Since the original publication of this piece, several texts or interviews from Meillassoux have expanded on the perspective exposed in the texts here quoted, without in my estimation modifying the general aim ; his article “Conspiracy and Suspicion : Marx, Nietzsche and historico-political discourse”, published in French in Nietzsche versus Marx ? (Fischbach, Binoche, Eds) is however of note and should be considered his first published text regarding political philosophy.
[5] “Immanence of the World Beyond”.
[6] ibid.
[7] L’inexistence Divine, p. 323
[8] “Immanence of the World Beyond”
[9] “Mourning to come, God to come”.
[10] “Immanence of the World Beyond”
[11] ibid.
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