I mentioned this La Scala Summer Opera Series - tonight’s (and Sunday’s) selection is Verdi’s La Forza del Destino which is not performed very often in the US - this is not from La Scala but still good enough for me (check you local listings here): 

La Forza del Destino Performed at Teatro del Maggio Musicale, Florenceby Giuseppe Verdi directed by Nicolas Joël Sung in Italian with subtitles in English Approximate running time: 3hrs 33min plus one intermission

Great Toscanini after the fold: 

By the end of Chapter Three of Meillassoux’s After Finitude we are left with a rendering of the world reminiscent of Monadology, expect with some rather big differences.  Meillassoux has described a world of chaos wherein each entity is at once self-contained, completely contingent and not connected to any one thing or another vis a vis a principle of reason etc.  Naturally, this leads to a chapter long consideration of Hume, but Meillassoux insists “one unavoidable consequence of the principle of factiality is that it asserts the actual contingency of the laws of nature” (83).   In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume writes:

We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.

…It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance…Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so.

Finally,  Hume concludes:

In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and influence, may change, without any change in their sensible qualities. This happens sometimes, and with regard to some objects: Why may it not happen always, and with regard to all objects?

For Meillassoux, all of the philosophical interlocutors we met in the previous chapter believe in causation, the only difference being that some think that we can’t ever know the sources of the cause. While Meillassoux (for better or for worse) ultimately places Hume on the same side as the other philosophers he is criticizing, his argument rests on a distinction (which is generally conflated) between the necessity of the laws of nature and their stability. Thus, the problem is recast:

…we might ask how we are to explain the manifest stability of physical laws given that we take these to be contingent…if laws are contingent, and not necessary, then how is it that their contingency does not manifest itself in sudden and continual transformations?  How could laws for which there is no permanent foundation give rise to a stable world? (92)

While many would think that the continual consistency of the physical world refutes any claim to contingency, and that if the laws of nature could change, they would have to change quite frequently.  In After Finitude, Meillassoux is only concered with showing that this “frequential implication” is inadequate, especially the version put forth by Rene Vernes.  Vernes defends “frequentilism” and invokes probability to argue that Hume and Kant both believe in the neccessity of laws.  I’m not going to rehash Meillassoux’s account of Vernes argument, but here’s the gist:

The nub of the argument consists in registering the immense numerical gap  between those possibilities that are conceivable and those that are actually experienced, in such a way as to derive from this gap the following probibalistic abberation: if physical laws could actually change for no reason, it would be extrordinarily improbable if they did not change frequentely, not to say frenitcally (99).

Meillassoux’s response to this is quite interesting and creative, and I certainly look forward to reading the fully developed critique of necessity and solution in his future work, but all in all, I found this to be provactive but not nearly as convincing as say, his hammering away at correlationism throughout the book (which is growing on me).  Real “quick and dirty,” Meillassoux locates the underlying assumption that drives “frequenitalism” as a confusion of possibility with the sum total (if not infinite) of conceivable possibilities.  Here’s Meillassoux again:

Thus, this probabilistic reasoning is only valid on condition that what is a priori possible be thinkable in terms of numerical totality (101).

Meillassoux distinquishes contingency from change and draws on Cantor’s principle of the transfinite–e.g. the quanitifable totality of the thinkable is unthinkable–to problematize the notion that talking about a totality of conceivable events at all.  Again, I’m not going to reproduce the argument, so I’ll just let Meillassox speak for himself once again:

We have at our disposal one axiomatic capable of providing us with the necessary resources for thinking that the possible is untotalizable.  However, the mere fact that wer are able to assume the truth of this axiomatic enables us to disqualify the necessitarian inference, and with it every reason for continuing to believe in the existence of the necessity of physical laws–a necessity that is mysteriously superimposed onto the fact of the stability of these same laws (105).

Nice move.  In fact, if we commit ourselves to absolute contingency we cannot necessarily have any recourse to physical laws which means that once this very scaffolding of necessity is taken away, chance is impossible (109f).  So, at bottom, Meillassoux is trying to illustrate that just because the stability of events that occur seems to be stable, it doesn’t imply any form of necessity. Meillassoux qualifies his argument by noting that in order to make such an account of nature more convincing an account of how stability emerges even in face of absolute contingency (110f).  Issues for another book I suppose.  And this doesn’t really minimize the overall argument and really, accomplishment of After Finitude (it’s only 128 pages after all!).

Again, in the closing paragraphs the Cartesian thread returns (and promises to return in future work):

…it is clear that such a resolution of the problem would require that we be in a position to do for mathematical necessity what we tried to do for logical necessity.  We would have to be able to rediscover an in-itself that is Cartesian, and legitimate the absolute bearing of the mathematical–rather than merely logical–restitution of a reality that is construted as independent of the existence of thought (111).

This, says Meillassoux, will form the bridge between the problem of ancestrality and stability emerging from absolute contingency (111).  It should be clear by now that ancestral occurences exist in themselves and not for us.  The insistence of the philosophy of access is a direct result of the “Kantian catastrophe” in philosophy, and we should we jolted out of our “correlational slumber:”

In philosophical jargon “Copernican revolution” means that hte deeper meaning of science’s Copernican revolution is provided by philosophy’s Ptolemaic counter-revolution.  We will henceforth refer to this “reversal of the reversal” as the “schism” of modern philosophy, which expresses the following paradox: it is only since philosophy has attempted to think rigorously the revolution in the realm of knowledge brought about by the advent of modern science that philosophy has renounced the very thing that constituted the essence of this revolution; that is to say, science’s non-correlational mode of knowing, in other words, its eminently speculative character (119).

Ultimately, if we read the two above quotes together, the retrieval of Descartes (from page 3) notion of mathematical necessity and absolutization without any recourse to the principle of reason, but instead the principle of factiality, is deployed in order to translate mathematical statements into necessary conditions of contingency.  His position is an odd one: the absolutizing mathemetical necessity is to be brought to bear or rather, joined with the absolute contingency of the physical world, especially detailed throughout the chapter on Hume and in the final chapter, which verges on a rather damning critique of the Kantian legacy and its effects on both science and philosophy since.

All in all, I’m still evaluating the whole of the book, but it’s absolutly worth reading, if only for the clear and direct presentation (rather than those professors of Derrida Mikhail hates so much) and filled with strikingly original lines of argumentation.  One thing I wonder is if the problem of ancestrality repeats the same mistake as say, a possible critique of Derrida, (I think launched by Zizek) viz., that Derrida generally rests deconstruction on something undeconstructable.  That is to say, as something that persists in-itself and completely free from correlation, is the arch-fossil actually the “undeconstructible kernel” or uncontainable “excess” of the correlate?   I don’t know.  Perhaps the question does too much violence to Meillassoux, but it has been floating around in my head for a while now. Yet, this should not take away from what I thought was a rather novel book.   If I’m not too lazy I’ll post some thoughts about the overall project later on.

For the morbidly curious and completely maschochistic, here are some prior Posts on After Finitude:

Grasping (at) the in-itself: Reading Meillassoux

Philosophical Fanaticism: Reading Meillassoux Part II

More Monotonous Musings on Meillassoux: Factiality

So finishing up Part One of Malabou’s Les Nouveaux blessés - the remaining chapters of this part (3 and 4) deal primarily with an issue that was already set up through the discussion of what constitutes cerebral (and, by extention, psychic) identity - in these chapters we will see the first elements of what constitutes the primary goal of the study that could be roughly presented as following: what does cerebral trauma tell us about the human identity? how does psychoanalysis (and philosophy in general) deal with the new information given to us by neurosciences regarding the physical processes that define who we are? These issues of identity, of course, are not approached naively and without preparation. Carl Dyke posted a link to his essay on the issues that, I think, gives a great summary of the main problems (with philosophy and neuroscience constituting only a part of the big picture) - you can read it here (PDF).

Chapter 3: L’identité sans précédent (Identity without precedent)

This chapter deals with a small but significant confrontation between Freudian idea of plasticity and what Malabou labels “another plasticity” - the basic difference being that while Freud’s understanding of the plastic psyche allows for such terms as “regression” (a return to a previous state), Malabou points out that there exists another type of plastic psychic activity that allows the “person” to create an identity on the ruins of the past identity as in cases of severe cerebral damage. Such person does not return to the previous state, yet is able to maintain some sort of more or less coherent identity.  The fascinating question here is, of course, where does this another identity come from? Who is this “new person”? 

Freud’s idea of plasticity can be exemplified by dreams - Malabou cites Freud (strangely enough, the same passage twice just several pages apart) suggesting that the best example of our psychic plasticity is given to us every night when all kinds of confusing and extravagant combinations of experiences appear to us in our dreams.  Malabou’s “another plasticity,” on the other hand, is exemplified by cases of severe Alzheimer’s - it is not a regression but “retrogenesis” (term from Barry Reisberg), both in terms of the actual neurodegenerative processes of “returning to infancy” and in terms of general degeneration of the psychic activity (”childish but not a child”).  This impossibility to return back to the pre-damaged state, Malabou seems to say, should make us pause and ask questions about the “previous state” - how does one maintain this self that, after a cerebral damage, is not only gone forever, but is paradoxically able to put its very ruins to use in creating a new identity? This seems to be the theme of the whole first part then - what does damaged psyche tell us about the workings of the “normal” psyche? This question, it seems to me, is also that of psychoanalysis, but in this case it is raised with an important neuroscientific corrective in mind.

The change of paradigm here, writes Malabou, is the change from Freudian model to the new plastic model that claims that “in the cerebral economy there is no permanent form that is able to transform itself without breaking… The pathological changes of cerebral connections are the changes of form but precisely without a return to the preceding form.” [117]  This is where the concept of “cerebrality” is useful: “La cérébralité, régime événementiel de l’accident, caractérise précisément le mode de production de ces changements sans mémoire - caractéristiques de l’autoaffection interrompue.” [118]  This new paradigm, Malabou hopes, will produce a new etiological principle. 

Chapter 4: Objection de la psychanalyse: peut-il y avoir destruction sans pulsion de destruction? (Psychoanalytic objection: Can there be destruction without the drive to destruction?)

This chapter addresses some of the possible objections from psychoanalysis - primarily the objection that it is not possible to assume that psychic life could be destroyed singularly by the exterior events like brain damage, how is it possible to think destruction without any reference to a specific drive? Malabou thus claims that it is necessary to contrast at this point in the book Freud’s theory of the “death drive” and the new hypothesis of the plastic formation through destruction. [124]

If “another plasticity” is able to create a new identity ex nihilo, on the ruins of the old pre-traumatic identity, the question then is how does such creation take place? The very basic issue here could be a question like this: if we accept the cerebral autoaffection and its workings as described correctly in terms of cerebral unconscious, then how can we say that this new (post-traumatic) identity that is a result of the plastic transformation was not there all along secretly operating on some level of ordinary processes of cerebrality? In other words, to propose the existence of “another plasticity” that is different from Freud’s understanding of plastic changes that never touch the psychic core of the person, one must show that this plasticity and its ability to create a new identity that is not simply a regression to some sort of indestructible secret core that resists trauma and maintains some sort of the trace of the old “normal” identity.  Another form of this objection refers us to Freud’s “death drive” - what if the cold and indifferent post-traumatic identity that is a result of this new creation of plasticity is not really a new creation but simply a state that only confirms the fragility of the brain, only confirms the tendency to destroy - the state of post-traumatic detachment is not caused by the trauma but is a result of tendency to self-destruct already at work that trauma simply sets off? 

The confrontation between Freud’s “death drive” and Malabou’s discussion of cerebrality is thus inevitable. This is a difficult section of the book and I think I’ll leave it at this for today as I would like to read it again before I move along to Part Two.

Finally my Netflix delivered Žižek! documentary - it’s a nice run through some of Žižek’s main idiosyncratic theoretical points and all.  This viewing also coincided with reading of this essay in The Nation that claims that Žižek finally “gone mad” - a whole lot of Žižek for a weekend. However, my favorite part of the documentary is the rant closer to the very end when some incoherent (and accented) woman “confronts” Žižek about his supposed Lacanian dogmatism. Allow me to reproduce the exchange here (woman’s “question” is subtitled, so I simply reproduce it here):

Woman: …the mis-reading that you are doing where Derrida is concerned I think this is identic to your work. And I wondered whether this is also another form of whether a certain form of belief operating from a distance at your work.

Žižek: [somewhat impatiently] Which belief?

Woman: Dogmatic Lacanian theme working as a belief in your work.

Žižek [interrupting the woman's ramblings] Perfect… perfect question. I defy you with the very empirical (in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition) question, apart from this brief conflict between Gayatri Spivak and Derrida, could you name me one Derridean who made a small critical remark on Derrida? Rodolphe Gasche, Sam Weber - name me one! Why are we dogmatic? Why are they not? [Nervious giggling in the audience] Name me one example where Sam Weber makes one ironical remark on Derrida!

This exchange, taken out of context as it is, I think is right on the money with all of that recent frustration that I have gathered vis-a-vis derridalogy - there’s a smell of dogmatism, of such uncritical admiration that the best essays by young scholars on Derrida are these very cute - Oh I found this really cool place in Derrida, look at me, I am also reading everything there is to read by the Master, please accept me into your club - kinds of work without any clear engagement or critique or even an ironical gesture…

re.press, an open access publishing house in Australia recently published an interesting looking new book by Toula Nicolacopoulos, The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision.  Here’s the blurb:

Despite political theorists’ repeated attempts to demonstrate their incoherence liberal values appear to have withstood the test of time. Indeed, engagement with them has become the meeting point of the different political philosophical traditions. But should radical critique justifiably become a thing of the past? Should political philosophy now be conducted in the light of the triumph of liberalism? These are the wider questions that the book takes up in an attempt to demonstrate the intellectual power of systemic critique in the tradition of Hegel. The author argues that the most ambitious of the communitarian critiques of liberal thought failed due to a fundamental weakness of their philosophical methodology. Moreover, the re-workings of these critiques by feminists, discourse ethicists, postmodern and postcolonial theorists have been equally unsuccessful because they have not traced the individualist commitment of liberal theory back to its source in liberal inquiring practices. Working through the theories of prominent liberal theorists, including John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, Charles Larmore and Will Kymlicka, the book demonstrates that an adequate appreciation of the deep structural flaws of liberal theory presupposes the application of a critical philosophical methodology that has the power to reveal the systemic interconnections within and between the varieties of liberal inquiring practices.

You can buy it for 25US dollars (which would certainly help them continue to make the good work they publish available) or download a pdf for free here.  In addition, I’m particularly interested in another soon to be released book from re.press by Reza Negarestani called Cyclonopedia. 

Here’s the blurb from re.press:

Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.

‘The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil … At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archaeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

My favorite blurb from the reviewers is this one by Graham Harman, who suggests: ‘Reading Negarestani is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali.’

And now another alliteration, anyhow, to continue with my (monotonous) reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, I’ve just now reached the end of Chapter 3, “The Priniciple of Factiality” and have read through Ch 4 “Hume’s Problem,” but I will focus on the former for the most part. There was a section that really caught my attention towards the end of Ch. 3, in which Meillassoux writes:

Philosophy is the invention of strange forms of argumentation, necessarily bordering on sophistry.  To philosophize is always to develop an idea whose elaboration and defense require a novel kind of argumentation, the model for which lies neither in positive science–not even in logic–not in some supposedly innate faculty for proper  reasoning.  Thus it is essential that a philosophy produce internal mechanisms for regulating its own inferences (77)…

This is no more evident than in the middle chapters of After Finitude.

A quick summation of what’s been done so far. The first two chapters consist of a discussion of correlationism and the history of philosophy, and allow Meillassoux to “clear the air” so to speak, in order to confront the problem of the arche-fossil/ancestrality. Meillassoux then turns to look for the solution to this problem by overcoming correlationism from within.  Here’s Meillassoux:

We have to show that the correlationist circle–and what lies at the heart of it, viz., the distinction between the in-itself and the for-us–is only conceivable insofar as it already presupposes an implicitly admission of the absoluteness of contingency (54).

This chapter begins the “constructive” of the book.  We have seen that the correlationists insist upon the co-dependence of the human and the world expressed through a variety of terms/concepts.  This has the effect of reducing the in-itself to the for-us.  So the problem of ancestrality, as we have seen, is reduced to a for-us, and hence, it is rendered to be unproblematic.  There are a couple of options, according to Meillassoux:

1. The facticity of the correlation generates a new absolute, a new in-itself:

[Various metaphysicians] turned the correlation itself, the instrument of empirico-critical de-absolutization, into a model of the absolute.  In doing so, these metaphysicians did not simply trick correlationism: they were not trying to unearth an absolute that the could than deftly turn against critico-skepticism..they acknowledged correlationism’s discovery of a fundamental constraint…but instead of concluding from this that the in itself is unknowable, they concluded the correlation is the only veritable in-itself.  In doing so, they grasped the ontological truth hidden beneath the sceptical argumentation–they converted radical ignorance into knowledge of a being finally unveiled in its true absoluteness (52).

2. Forget about the correlate, what of the “great outdoors?”

We must show why thought, far from experiencing its intrinsic limits through facticity, experiences rather its knowledge of the absolute through facticity.  We must grasp in factiticy not the inaccessibility of the absolute but the unveiling of the in-itself and the eternal property of what is, as opposed to the mark of the perennial deficiency in the thought of what is (52).

It should be obvious that position 1 (a position close to the bishop’s esse is percipi) is not so good because we’re still not really able to grasp the in-itself, it’s just recast/restructured differently, but we are left with the same problem as in other philosophies of access.  So position 2 is the way to proceed.  On the next page Meillassoux continues:

The supreme necessity ascribed to the correlational circle will appear as the opposite of what it first seemed–facticity will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.

From here Meillassoux attacks and re-inscribes the principle of sufficient reason as the principle of (absolute) unreason, the former fails:

…quite simply, from the falsity of such a principle–for the truth is that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain thus and so rather than otherwise, and this applies as much to the laws that govern the world as to the things of the world (53).

All this in the first four pages of the chapter.  In the next section of the chapter (54ff) Meillassoux playfully (vertigonously) outlines several positions vis a vis a host of philosophical interlocutors, all of whom are concerned about the afterlife.  We first come across a disagreement between two dogmatists, one Christian, the other atheist.  The positoins can be reduced to this: either God maintains the soul after we die, or God does not.  Next we meet the correlationist, who not at all unexpededly, starts prating on about theoretical agnosticism, that is, both dogmatists are wrong, neither can be certain about such knoweldge of this particular thinig-in-itself (live after death) since we are restricted by our access/the conditions of our knowledge about something that lies outside the phenomenal world.  Now, we meet yet another person, the subjective idealist.  This dude thinks that the correlationist is just as silly as both of the dogmatists because “each think there could be an in-itself radically different from our present state…I cannot think of myself as no longer existing without, though that very thought, contradicting myself” (55).  Not surprisingly, the correlationist is the least wrong because he admits life after death is minimally, thinkable, but doesn’t turn such possibilities into mere belief (dogma or not-dogma–as the case may be).  What’s left?  The speculative philosopher, of course.  Correlationism and the two dogmatisms are out because each permits an absolute solution to the problem: the afterlife (Xtian), being wiped off the face of the planet (atheist), and the correlation itself (e.g. esse is percipi).  At this point, Meillassoux gestures to two options:

Either I choose–against idealism–to de-absolutize the correlation, but at the cost of absolutizing facticity. Or I choose, against the speculative philospopher, to de-absolutize factiticy–I submit the latter to the primacy of the correlation by asserting that this facticity is only true for me, not necessarily in-itself…we cannot take the idealist path, which is still beholden to the idea of real necessity, according to which some determinate entity must absolutely be (59-60).

Meillassoux chooses to “follow the path of facticity.”  Again an “absolute that isn’t an absoute entity:”

This is indeed a speculative thesis, since we are thinking an absolute, but it is not metaphysical, since we are not thinking any entity that would be absolute. The absolute is the impossibility of a necessary being (60).

Meillassoux, finally at the end of the chapter, lists some new vocabulary (79ff).  Factiality (the principle of unreason) is put to work in the above quote, and points to the “speculative essence of facticity” or rather, the “non-facticity of facticity.”  Jargon, yes indeed, but it’s actually kind of helpful.

There is an interesting use of Aristotle’s arguments regarding non-contradition in the Metaphysics (Gamma 4) to show that the principle of unreason, or factiality, is both absolute and anhypothetical, e.g. not needed to be demonstrated 61f) since all is contingent:: “we maintain that the in-itself could actually be anything whatsoever and that we know this” (65).  Given this rather wild absolutization of contingency, the next step is demonstrating the consequences (or conditions for any entity to be contingenty and un-necessary).  Here Meillassoux enters into a provactive discussion and justification (through factiality) of two of Kant’s principles:

1. The thing-in-itself is non-contradictory

2. There is a thing in-itself.

In the following chapter, Meillassoux adds another, viz., 3. “the laws of nature are themselves contingent,” but I’ll just stick to 1 and 2 for now.  The Cartesian aspect of After Finitude is no more visible than here, for what Meillassoux is seeking to accomplish, I think, by “bring back” our ability to “touch” the absolute through math/science.  At the start of the book, Meillassoux writes on page 3:

…all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully be conceived as properties of the object in itself.

Albeit, this is not identifiably “metaphysical,” but this epistemic priviliging of mathematics to the in-itself that is going to end up conforming to some properties that we can deduce, e.g. the statements 1,2 and 3 above, seems to rest on a strange (Kantian) critique/confrontation of both Kant and Descartes (and Hegel).

Ok, onto a brief consideration of 1 and 2–if you’re interested in this move, it’s about 10 pages and I highly reccomend checking it out for it is far more interesting and subtle than I am going to make it seem.  Hell, it’s my reading notes transposed onto a blog, come on!

First, Meillassoux deploys his notion of factiality to prove that the thing-in-itself is not contradictory.  The argument invokes Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel, but cashes out thusly: if things that were contradictory existed, then such things would be necessary.  Yet, such a contradictory thing would have no actual determinacy and in turn, would not butt up against any kind of alterity to make it contingent, so contradictory things are impossible.  Again, here Meillassoux maintains the principle of unreason (factiality) to push the principle of sufficient reason off to the side.

Next, Meillassox defends (2) there is a thing-in-itself, or that the existence of contigency is necessary, without recourse to theology or fideism.  Instead, Meillassoux pursues this by “deflating” Leibniz’s question: “Why something rather than nothing?”  Ultimately:

It is necessary that there be somehting rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else. The necessity of the contingency of the entity imposes the necessary existence of the contingent entity (76).

From Meillassoux’s “non-metaphysical, speculative” position the thing itself becomes “the facticity of the transcendental forms of representation” and from the absoluteness of this facticity, he generates, or rather, deduces, the qualities of the in-itself, which Kant himself rendered self-evident (76).  After finitude, facticity has to be deduced.  So, I think, at least from the perspective of the first 3 (maybe 4) chapters, what Meillasssoux has deduced is far closer to Descartes than Kant, with regards to the deduction and properties of the in-itself.

Anyway, however spotty, this is a reinscription of my reading notes as I work through and evaluate Meillassoux’s book, which has been, for the most part, quite interesting and fruitful.

Some Older Posts on Meillassoux:

Grasping (at) the in-itself: Reading Meillassoux

Philosophical Fanaticism: Reading Meillassoux Part II

Here’s an interesting article in the Scientific American by Adina Roskies and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong:

Cognitive science and moral philosophy might seem like strange bedfellows, but in the past decade they have become partners. In a recent issue of Cognition, the Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene and colleagues extend this trend. Their experiment utilizes conventional behavioral methods, but it was designed to test a hypothesis stemming from previous fMRI investigations into the neural bases of moral judgments (see here and here).

In their study Greene et al. give subjects difficult moral dilemmas in which one alternative leads to better consequences (such as more lives saved) but also violates an intuitive moral restriction (it requires a person to directly or intentionally cause harm to someone else). For example, in the “crying baby” dilemma subjects must judge whether it is wrong to smother their own baby in order to save a large group of people that includes the baby. In this scenario, which was also used by the television show M.A.S.H., enemy soldiers will hear the baby cry unless it is smothered. Sixty percent of people choose to smother the baby in order to save more lives. A judgment that it is appropriate to save the most lives, even if it requires you to suffocate a child, is labeled “utilitarian” by Greene et al., whereas a judgment that it is not appropriate is called “deontological.” These names pay homage to traditional moral philosophies.

The rest is here.

Two things.  Here’s an interesting conversation between Paul Price and Craig Calhoun over at Societas:

In another conversation with Paul Price, Craig Calhoun continues his analysis of supposedly irrational factors at play in electoral politics. This time they focus on charisma: to what extent is Barack Obama’s unique mix of political passion and a cool demeanor the source of his political appeal? Referring to Max Weber’s model of charismatic leadership, Calhoun notes that Obama has the gift of making us see him as someone who stands outside the traditional structures of government-and therefore someone who can help Americans break the “iron cage” of bureaucracy, politics-as-usual and dominant social roles.

Click here to listen to the discussion.  Also, here’s a CFP for the Lighthearted Philosophers Society.

The CFP:

Lighthearted Philosophers Society: 2nd Annual Conference

Call For Papers

Date: October 17 - 18, 2008

Location: St. Petersburg College, St. Petersburg FL

Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2008

The Lighthearted Philosophers Society (LPS) is an organization for philosophers who approach their work with a sense of humor. In an effort to make philosophy more engaging, we are interested in original philosophical work that is presented in a humorous fashion. We are also interested in exploring serious philosophical questions about humor. Please join us in our merry ruminations!

We welcome witty papers from any area of philosophy, and we’d especially enjoy papers on the philosophy of humor. Papers that are funny will be given preference over those that aren’t, so brush up on your bad philosophical wisecracks.

Submission Requirements: Prepare submissions for blind review (separate cover sheet w/ contact info, affiliation, etc.) and include an abstract of less than 350 words (yes, we will be hand-counting them to the exact word). Be prepared to limit your time on stage (3,000 words is best); longer papers risk getting the hook or some thrown tomatoes, depending on whichever is handier at the time. We will have commentators, so please indicate whether you would be interested in heckling someone
else on the program. Those selected will be notified by Sept. 5th.

Please submit your papers electronically to the following email
address: Monroe.david@spcollege.edu

In his famous pronouncement against the future professors who will inevitably take interest in his journals, Kierkegaard writes:

MY POSSIBLE FAME

That I shall acquire a certain renown, surely not even my bitterest enemy will deny. But I begin now to wonder whether I shan’t become famous in a genre quite different from the one I had envisaged, whether I shan’t become famous as a naturalist, in that I have made discoveries or at least delivered a very considerable contribution to the natural history of parasites. The parasites I have in mind are priests and professors, these greedy and virulently self-reproductive parasites which even have the shamelessness (which is more than other parasites have) to want to be of service to those they live off. (XI 2 A 277)

Not very nice, yet ultimately a prophetic observation that is cited by professors as a proof of the greatness of their subject, cited sometimes with a kind of self-depreciation that is considered to be a good enough penance for the thankless job of studying such an ungrateful thinker - here we are editing, collecting, and publishing his multiple journals, essays and books, and yet he dares to accuse us of being parasites and useless idlers! However abusive Kierkegaard is, especially at the end of his life, the image of a parasite is hard to dismiss in light of all the secondary literature on Kierkegaard…  Take the old discussion of the status of the secondary literature - is it really fair to the thinker to write a commentary after commentary when he himself explicitly mocks the idea and takes it to be a gross misrepresentation of his work? On one hand, one could claim that the very title of an “expert” on Kierkegaard should be so ironic and disconcerting that various reports of suicides among Kierkegaard professors should be a norm in the news. On the other hand, so what if Kierkegaard ridiculed his future experts - we don’t have to listen to his judgments, because he clearly wanted to be studied, wanted to be the object of future admiration and here is the proof from his writings etc etc. Think about someone closer to our time, someone like Derrida - can we think of his “disciples” as betraying the thought of the Master by producing a stream of secondary literature I have previously described as “derridalogy”?

Having continuously expressed my frustration with the present state of derridalogy, I have thought about the strange (even if expected) failure of Derrida’s writings to produce any sort of considerable change in the established philosophical landscape - a rather ambitious and possibly groundless generalization on my part - despite the mantras of derridalogists about how “it will never be the same” after the great Master’s brave challenge to the philosophical establishment. Having read Derrida for some considerable time now, I am ready to at least raise the question: Why is it that Derrida’s philosophy, after a quick and eventful love affair with American English departments and a rather scandalous world tour and a series of “live albums” (excuse my music analogy here), have ultimately failed to make its essential points stick? Is there “Derrida to come” as the new generation of those who will read him as yet another “dead white male” will come to discover his truly thought-provoking observations? I am aware of the great temptation of being extremely serious and pretentious here with these questions and I am even not going to pretend to resist this temptation.

The basic question, I think, is the following: was it ultimately Derrida’s own fault that his very best commentators today are people like John Caputo who, being a great scholar and summarizer that he is, in the end lacks his own take on philosophy (have you read his books like Against Ethics - boring is a word too weak to describe the experience) and can only pride himself at knowing all that Derrida said, wrote and even thought? The great encyclopedists like Caputo and Lawlor are the gods of the graduate students precisely because, despite the obvious fact that they could have become the summarizers of any other philosopher, but have chosen this one, they give us a model of a scholastic expert in the texts of Derrida, in the developments and turns of his thought, without the awareness of the fact that Derrida himself, at least one of the infinite number of Derridas, with all his raging about the “author” and the “archive” would probably not approve of such orthodoxy. But then again who really cares about what Derrida would and would not approve of? That is the crux of the matter for me, and that is what is making me ask all these somewhat silly questions - did Derrida ultimately fail to take himself, his very self, out of the picture in order to allow his thought to move in various directions he thought it was suppose to be moving? is he not guilty of being too consistent, too continuous, too organizing (”despite the appearances, I have always thought about X as being my only concern” kind of expressions)?

Take, for example, a phrase like “deconstruction is justice” in “Force of Law” - what is your traditional derradalogical approach to such a “strange” thought? Well, first we need to contextualize this phrase and make sure we understand what Derrida meant to say here and compare this meaning with meanings from other essays, books, personal communications etc etc. Second, on the basis of such contextualization we will propose a “correct reading” and will write about how this phrase should not be read. Third, we will launch into some sort of performative derridalogical demonstration of how such statement could be applied and where Derrida would want us to take it. This scheme is not different from any traditional approach to interpretation - it goes about its interpretative business as if no questions of authorial intention, the role of the author and the context, the play of signification and many other questions were ever raised, as if reading Derrida is the same as reading Plato. Now this is the story of Derrida’s “controversial statements” - people accuse him of being either non-sensical or irresponsible, he (or his lieutenants) comes out and explains what he “meant” to say and how his meaning should be considered the authoritative source of interpretation in this case because, after all, he said this and that etc etc… In the end, it’s the same desire for consistency and respectability that is the virtue of the professors - was Derrida just an “assistant professor” as Kierkegaard called the illustrious Hegelians of his time? I don’t think so, but there’s a certain tendency in the recent derridalogy to create a scholastic version of “philosophy of Derrida”…

What does it mean to be a good Derridean scholar these days? Mostly, it involves being familiar with Derrida’s corpus, being aware of all the small and insignificant essays he published here and there, being aware of all the places where he addressed this or that idea - this is an old rant of mine and I keep coming back to it because I feel as if there’s something unresolved here: it is considered a good sign if a scholar knows his subject well, yet the complete lack of interesting new books on Derrida’s thought is puzzling and confusing. Where is the kind of book that would create even a resemblance of the effect of Of Grammatology? Why am I not excited to see Michael Naas’s new book on Derrida or even slightly intrigued by the title of Martin Hagglund’s book? Well, because I heard Hagglund speak and he’s a bore, so I don’t expect the book to be an exciting read, and because I’ve been disappointed in books on Derrida for some time now and I wonder if the professors took a firm hold of him and would not let go until some new sexier figure comes to their attention?

To end this rant with a citation from “early” Lawlor:

Even if the type of deconstruction popularized by Derrida ultimately subverts many if not all of the principles of traditional hermeneutics, the first issue in any reading is understanding. To understand a text, especially a text as complex as that of Derrida, one must pay careful attention to context, to authorial intention; one must be sensitive to allusion and images used in concept development. (Philosophy Today, 42:2 [Summer 1998], 207)

There you go then, professors are firmly in charge…

There is a strange little section in The Star of Redemption where Rosenzweig talks a bit about the fanatic and the pagan.  Here’s Rosenzweig:

The fanatic, the sectarian, in short all the tyrants of the kingdom of heaven, far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it…The ground prematurely cultivated by the fanatic yields no fruit. It does that only when its time has come. And its time too, will come. But then all the work of cultivation will have to be undertaken afresh. The first seeding has by then rotted, and to assert that these rotten remnants are “already” or “in reality” the same as that which later ripens into fruit is but the willful foolishness of pedants. Time and the hour are the mightier the less man knows them (Star of Redemption,  272)

In the closing section of the second chapter of After Finitude, “Metaphysics, Fideism, Speculation,” Meillassoux comments:

We are trying to grasp the sense of the following paradox: the more thought arms itself against dogmatism, the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism. Even as it forces metaphysical dogmatism to retreat, sceptico-fideism reinforces religious obscurantism (48-emphasis mine-SO).

This is quite a statement, and I do like reading the Rosenzweig and Meillassoux quotes side by side, but as well shall see, Meillassoux has a good deal to say about the rotted out seeds of metaphysics. Anyway, here’s some more reading notes and thoughts about After Finitude. At the start of this chapter we are reminded that “our task..consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given…this is just to say we must grasp how thought is able to access an absolute” (28).  So, of course, in this chapter Meillassoux continues to work through the problem of ancestrality–clearing the brush so to speak. One of Meillassoux’s problems with metaphysics, or rather, the reason he thinks metaphysics has failed, is that it has continually sought/seeks to locate some sort of necessary being.  And here Meillassoux even falls in line with the well-worn critique of onto-theology.

So, rather aptly, the second chapter opens with a consideration of the ontological proof for the existence of God found in Descartes’ Meditations to illustrate the quest for necessary being which then dovetails into a brief consideration of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, which of course, aims at showing the necessity of not just one being, but all beings.  Yet, while such “pre-critical” philosophers, or the “early moderns” like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz offer us a solution to the problem of ancestrality/arche-fossil because they do admit we can know a mind-independent world that harbors its own truths.  Yet, ultimately, such pre-critical attempts fail given their reliance on the principle of sufficient reason.  To this end, It is well know that Kant attacked ontological argument for the existence of God vis a vis the problem of existential import (”existence is not a predicate”).  Kant argues that the use of predicates alone does not necessarily imply the existence of their referents. At best, we can only assume the existence of entities named by our words/predicates; we cannot prove “existence” by means of the use of language alone.  The ontological argument does nothing less than identify God’s essence with existence. Kant then, leaves us with the impossibility of real necessity, but at the same time real necessity shows itself condition of every metaphysics. So, what is to be done? Throw it out of course!  Here’s Meillassoux:

…to reject dogmatic metaphysiscs means to reject all real necessity and a fortiori to reject the priniciple of sufficient reason, as well as the ontological argument, which is the keystone that allows the system of real necessity to close in upon itself.  Such a refusal enjoins us to maintain that there is no legitimate demonstration that a determinate entity should exist unconditionally (33).

There is a brief discussion of the critique of ideology refashioned as a critique of the necessity of the world/state of affairs etc that strikes me as rather interesting, but I’ll just leave it at that.  Anyway, so what’s left?  Well, Meillassoux plans to proceed in a rather interesting way: “we must uncover an absolute necessity that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary entity” (34) or put differently, rejecting dogmatism for speculation, the impetus is to locate “an absolutizing thought that not is not absolutist.”  In order to clear the space for this move, Meillassoux makes a (interesting, but I’m not sure how convincing just yet) distinction between weak correlationism and strong correlationism. The former is exemplified by Kant’s well known move in the fist Critique: we can think the things-in-themselves, but we can’t know them.  Such a position insists upon the finite nature of reason and the conditional nature of our access to being, e.g. the pure forms of intution (space and time) and the categories apply only to the phenomenal realm.  The latter, according to Meillassoux, best exemplified by Heidegger and Wittgenstein (41ff), insists we can’t even think the things-in-themselves, let alone know them.  The strong correlationist leaves behind Kant’s weak correlationism and limits him/herself to the facticity of our experience without any reference to the noumena or absolute.  Here’s Meillassoux:

When I maintain that this or that entity or event is contingent, I know something positive about them–I know that it would have been physically possible for this person to act differently, etc. Contingency expresses the fact that physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not–they allow an entity to emerge, subsist, or to perish.  But facticity, by way of contrast, pertains to those structural invariants that supposedly govern the world–invariants which may differe from one variant of correlationism to another, but whose function in every case is to provide the minimal organization of representation: principle of causality, forms of perception, logical laws, etc.  These structures are fixed…(39).

So, strong correlationism gives birth to/is a philosophy of facticity.  Meillassoux’s project, so to speak, is to open up a way to think the thing-in-itself without absolutizing correlation or reverting to the principle of sufficient reason.  Put differently, facticity must become (absolute) contingency.

The last part of the chapter is rather contentious and made me chuckle.

For all this talk about the “religious” turn in Continental Philosophy and whatnot, Meillassoux suggests that “by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious” (45) and in turn he discerns a connection between a certain form of religiosity inherent in “postmodern” philosophy and facticity:

[Strong Correlationism's] contemporary predominance seems to us to be intimately connected to the immunity from the constraints of conceptual rationality which religious belief currently seems to enjoy…Religious belief is considered to be beyond the reach of rational refutation by many contemporary philosophers to be conceptually illegitimate to undertake such a refutation (44).

This gap between Kant (weak correlationism) and the philosophers that adhere to strong correlationism is far from harmless, however:

It points to a major shift that has occured in our conception of thought from Kant’s time to ours.  This shift, from the unknowability of the thing-in-itself to its unthinkability, indciates that thought has reached the stage where it legitimates by its own development that fact that being has become so opaque for it that thought supposes the latter to be capable of transgressin the most elementary principles of the logos (44).

That’s right, we can say whatever we want to about the in-itself, the absolute etc.  And here we return to the initial (remarkable!) quote I stuck in at the start of this post.  The state of philosophy?  Lots of capricious belief, correlational theologists of alterity, the beyond, the Other, all enabled by those strong philosophical correlationists.  Restricting ourselves to finitude had the opposite results Kant aimed at in the Critique, it would seem what we are left with is a “becoming-religious of thought” (46).  What’s left?  Here’s Meillassoux again describing the surrendering of the philosopher to the person of faith:

Having continuously upped the anty with scepticism and criticisms of the pretensions of all metaphysics, we have ended up according all legitimacy in matters of veracity to professions of faith–and this no matter how extravagant their content.  As a result, the struggle against what the Enlightenment called “fanaticism” has been converted into a project of moralization: the condemnation of fanaticism is carried out solely in the name of its practical (ethico-political) consequences, never in the name of the ultimate falsity of its contents (47).

From Rosenzweig’s view, both the pagan and the fanatic fundamentally misunderstand their ethical self-constitution, which as a result, causes them to fetishize themselves. However, whereas the pagan remains open to revelation, to becoming a witness, the fanatic does not. The pagan is still completely self-centered, but recognizes his finitude, while the fanatic completely disavows his finitude. Rosenzweig inverts the relationship between the pagan’s awareness of finitude with the fanatic’s religious pre-occupation with the otherworldly.  So for Meillassoux, what are we do to faced with the fideism and fanaticism he describes?   Well, here’s the final sentence of Chapter 2: “we have to rediscover in thought a modicum of absoluteness–enough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present themselves in its priviliged trustees, slloely by virtue of some revelation” (49).

All of this is interesting. I’m not sure whether or not his insistence of correlationism tends to overstate the case, for we could certainly find counter-examples, perhaps even in the thinkers he names as correlationists throughout.  Yet, I’m not sure what good this would do, for Meillassoux’s whole project here is effectively pre-critical and he is tackling a problem that itself has been pushed to the wayside, not to mention he is recovering and using concepts that have also fallen out of favor in the last century or two.  After all, the first page begins with a discussion of primary and secondary qualities…