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After Finitude contains a number of challenging as well as controversial ideas which we cannot
elaborate on here. I will not, for instance, discuss Meillassouxs notion of hyper-chaos or his
principle of factiality. I will narrow the discussion to his account of ancestrality and the problem it
poses to correlationism.
2
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier
(Continuum, 2008), 5.
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necessary to insist that we never grasp an object 'in itself, in isolation from its relation to
the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject
that would not always-already be related to an object.3
Ibid.
Although Schopenhauer is not mentioned by Meillassoux, his repeated assertion regarding the
primacy of the relation between subject and object distills the essence of correlationism. At the
very beginning of The World as Will and Representation he writes: While each of these forms,
which we have recognized as so many particular modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is
valid only for a particular class of representation, of whatever kind it be, abstract or intuitive, pure
or empirical, is generally possible and conceivable. Therefore no truth is more certain, more
independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for
knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception
of the perceiver, in a word, representation. The World as Will and Representation: Vol. I, trans.
E.F.J. Payne (Dover, 1956), 3.
5
Ibid., 7-8.
4
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correlationist. If the relation between thought and being is insurmountable, then how does
the correlationist account for such facts? In other words, if the correlationist is right
regarding the notion that knowledge of the world always implies some form of givenness,
then how does he or she explain the meaning of scientific facts or events that occurred
prior to the advent of givenness itself?
According to Meillassoux, correlationism implies a commitment to a pernicious form
of anti-realism. The correlationist is ultimately forced to deny that the scientific statements
concerning arche-fossils are to be construed in a literal sense. In other words, the
correlationist is obliged to conclude that the literal meaning of an ancestral statement
describing an event that occurred prior to the advent of givenness can be considered true or
objective only in a qualified manner. For the correlationist, the statement The universe
is roughly 13.5 billion years old can be accepted as true in the sense that it is
intersubjectively verifiable. But to completely accept its literal meaning would be nave
according to the correlationist. It must ultimately be posited as a datum for us, i.e., the
true meaning of an ancestral statement can only be reached if we admit that what appears
to describe an event which occurred before the arrival of givenness can only make sense if
it involves a concealed relation to givenness itself.
Meillassoux explains the correlationist's predicament by highlighting the discrepancy
between ancestral time and the time of correlationism:
[F]or the correlationist, in order to grasp the profound meaning of the fossil datum, one
should not proceed from the ancestral past, but from the correlational present. This means
that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present. What is
given to us, in effect, is not something that is anterior to givenness, but merely something
that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. The logical
(constitutive, originary) anteriority of givenness over the being of the given therefore
enjoins us to subordinate the apparent sense of the ancestral statement to a more profound
counter-sense, which is alone capable of delivering its meaning: it is not ancestrality
which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present which retrojects a
seemingly ancestral past. To understand the fossil, it is necessary to proceed from the
present to the past, following a logical order, rather than from the past to the present,
following a chronological order.6
This retrojection of the past on the basis of the present7 carried out by the correlationist
is tantamount to the complete undermining of the irremediable realism of the ancestral
statement. To try and reconcile the literal or apparent sense of the ancestral statement with
its more profound sense grounded in the commitment to correlationism is impossible
according to Meillassoux. Either an ancestral statement has a realist sense, and only a
Ibid., 16.
Once again, Schopenhauer is a good example of this retrojection with his paradoxical account
of the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer accepts that the inorganic preceded the emergence of
organic life. However, his commitment to Kantian idealism forces him to claim that the entire
phenomenal world, including the inorganic, is a product of one's cognitive faculties. The end result
is a situation in which both the mind conditions the world and the world conditions the mind, a
paradox grounded in his commitment to both transcendental idealism and materialism. See, for
instance, The World as Will and Representation: Vol. I (30-31).
7
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realist sense, or it has no sense at all.8 The solution to this contradictory state of affairs in
which the two incompatible levels of meaning are held together, of course, is to reject
correlationism as an untenable philosophical position. If the correlationist insists on
interpreting ancestral statements as consisting of both senses, then, according to
Meillassoux, he or she must resemble the creationist who maintains that the earth is 6,000
years old, and that God created evidence to the contrary (the arche-fossil) in order to test
his or her faith.
I now wish to discuss two possible rejoinders the correlationist can make in response to
the objection from ancestrality mentioned by Meillassoux because they reveal what Paul J.
Ennis calls the transcendental core of correlationism.9 I will not be concerned with
examining Meillassouxs counter-arguments against the correlationist. I present them here
simply because they help reinforce Meillassouxs hostility towards transcendentalism.
The first rejoinder is a version of an anti-idealist argument which compares the
ancestral objections emphasis on temporal priority to spatial distance, while the second
accuses the critic of correlationism of overlooking the transcendental-empirical distinction.
In regards to the first, the correlationist formulates the objection from ancestrality as
concerned with events devoid of a possible witness. One can, according to the
correlationist, extend to space an argument which has hitherto been restricted to time, and
adjoin the question of the distant to the question of the ancient.10 For example, craters
observed on the moon are closer to us in terms of perception, than a falling vase where
there is no one present to witness its falling. The anti-idealist objection raised by the critic
of correlationism involves a commitment to the notion that what is un-witnessed is unthinkable unless one upholds realism. But, the correlationist insists, this underestimates
idealisms ability to account for the lacunary nature of what is given. For instance, it has
been well known since Husserl that what is given is not perceived all at once; rather, it
implies something non-given, i.e., it must present itself within a possible horizon that
sustains every possible adumbration (Abschattung), a horizon which is an intrinsic feature
of perceptual experience. In a similar manner, the critic of correlationism simply overlooks
the fact that had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in
such and such a fashion.11 More specifically, had there been a witness to an arche-fossil,
he or she would have witnessed its occurrence according to the laws of science.
Meillassoux responds to this rejoinder by pointing out that the correlationist ignores the
distinction between what is ancestral and what is ancient (or what is distant in the
case of space). The argument involves construing what is strictly anterior to givenness
itself as an ancient event which already presupposes givenness, i.e., it is, although unwitnessed, contemporaneous with consciousness. In contrast, an arche-fossil refers to an
ancestral time which does not refer to occurrences which a lacunary givenness cannot
8
Ibid., 17.
See Paul J. Ennis, The Transcendental Core of Correlationism, in Cosmos and History, vol. 7,
no. 1, 2011, 37-48. I agree with Ennis claim that the core of correlationism involves the
commitment to the transcendental method as it is espoused by thinkers such as Kant and Husserl.
However, Meillassouxs critique of correlationism does not necessarily lead to a complete rejection
of transcendentalism as such provided one does not overlook the possibility of a transcendental
realism. I hope to show how this is the case when discussing Brassiers account of extinction.
10
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 18.
11
Ibid., 19.
9
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apprehend, but to occurrences which are not contemporaneous with any givenness,
whether lacunary or not.12
The second rejoinder is far more explicit regarding the transcendentalism underlying
correlationism. Meillassoux examines the correlationists claim that the critic of
correlationism is guilty of overlooking the difference between the empirical time of bodies
and that which transcendentally conditions our knowledge of the empirical world. The
latter is, according to the correlationist, not an object of empirical observation. It is argued
that it is important to clearly distinguish between the two in order to avoid any possible
paradoxes associated with their intersection. Granted, the physical organ which supports
the transcendental conditions of knowledge has a beginning and end in time. However, the
critic of correlationism treats the transcendental conditions governing knowledge of the
empirical world in the same manner. In other words, he or she construes the transcendental
register as if it also has a temporal beginning and end. But this will not do because such
conditions necessarily lie outside time. This is not to say that they are eternal, but it is to
say that what is transcendental cannot be accounted for in terms of the time described by
science. Therefore, the objection from ancestrality does not have any effect on the status of
the transcendental insofar as it is properly understood.
The problem with this approach, as Meillassoux points out, is that the transcendental
conditions underlying knowledge of the empirical world presupposes a finite point-ofview. This must be the case if the correlationist wishes to avoid turning transcendental
subjectivity (however it is conceived) into an eternal or metaphysical principle. In other
words, what is transcendental must be related in some manner to a body situated within the
empirical world. Given that such is the case, it remains inexplicable how to account for the
origin of the transcendental. If the two are inseparable, then how does one account for the
fact that the transcendental must emerge from the empirical time of bodies?
Correlationism, according to Meillassoux cannot account for the sudden appearance of the
transcendental. Indeed, it appears as though there is an unbridgeable "gap" or discrepancy
between the cosmological time of material bodies and the time that begins with the advent
of the transcendental. Meillassoux writes:
We thereby discover that the time of science temporalizes and spatializes the emergence
of living bodies; that is to say, the emergence of the conditions for the taking place of the
transcendental. What effectively emerged with living bodies were the instantiations of
the subject, its character as point-of-view-on-the-world. The fact that subjects emerged
here on this earth or existed elsewhere is a purely empirical matter. But the fact that
subjects appeared ~ simply appeared - in time and space, instantiated by bodies, is a
matter that pertains indissociably both to objective bodies and to transcendental subjects.
And we realize that this problem simply cannot be thought from the transcendental
viewpoint because it concerns the space-time in which transcendental subjects went from
not-taking-place to taking-place - and hence concerns the space-time anterior to the
spatio-temporal forms of representation. To think this ancestral space-time is thus to
think the conditions of science and also to revoke the transcendental as essentially
inadequate to this task.13
In other words, the transcendental viewpoint cannot explain its own origin without the aid
12
13
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 25-26.
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of the scientific description of time.14 The closest one can come to an explanation
regarding the emergence of both the transcendental dimension and the bodies that
undeniably condition it is to accept the notion that it is possible to describe the in itself
without positing a prior relation between the world and finitude.
As I have already indicated above, Brassier confronts the problem of correlationism
from a very different standpoint, namely through a non-correlational account of extinction.
Moreover, this account of extinction plays a transcendental role, albeit one which is not of
the Kantian or phenomenological variety Meillassoux seeks to critique. Although Brassier
himself is critical of Meillassouxs concept of ancestrality, his attempt to refute
correlationism from the perspective of extinction does not involve a complete rejection of
Meillassouxs primary concerns. Indeed, Brassier (as well as others) regard After Finitude
as an impressive work due to its originality as well as argumentative rigor.15 A great deal
of what appears in Brassiers own nihilistic project should be construed as a much needed
supplement to the basic core of Meillassouxs primary concern, i.e., the attempt to get
outside of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.16
However, before turning to Brassier it is necessary to take a brief detour involving a
discussion concerning Laruelles non-philosophy. For Brassier, it is Laruelles nonphilosophy which provides the conceptual resources needed for developing a
transcendental realism capable of bypassing the transcendental idealism behind
correlationism.
Sartre mentions this paradoxical emergence of the for-itself (consciousness) from the in-itself
in his discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, metaphysical
questions regarding the sudden appearance of the for-itself are to be ignored because they concern
a past which does not exist apart from the ecstatic structure of the for-itself. Indeed, he simply
explains the origin of consciousness in terms of a primordial nihilation of the in-itself. See JeanPaul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. (Washington Square Press, 1956), 197-199.
15
Regarding the novelty of Meillassouxs critique, Alain Badiou in the preface to After Finitude
writes: It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in
the history of philosophy, hitherto conceived as the history of what it is to know; a path that
circumvents Kants canonical distinction between dogmatism, skepticism and critique. (AF,
vii). Martin Hagglund offers a more sober approach when he writes that Meillassouxs work
invites philosophical argumentation rather than reverence or dismissal. Radical Atheist
Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux, in The Speculative Turn, ed. L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G.
Harman (Melbourne, 2011), 114.
16
Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27.
14
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Non-philosophy is not a negation of philosophy or a deconstructive procedure.21 NonTo present a simplified model of non-philosophy implies that I will not be overly concerned
with distinguishing between the different phases of Laruelles work, i.e., the various distinctions
between Philosophies I, II, and III.
18
The idea of non-philosophy being a science of philosophy comes from Philosophy II. Laruelle
will later on choose to describe non-philosophy as a unified theory of philosophy and science in
Principles of Non-Philosophy, a crucial text outlining the basis of Philosophy III.
19
Nick Srnicek, in a footnote, points out (correctly, I believe) the similarity between Laruelles
transcendental project of non-philosophy and Husserls transcendental phenomenology: In some
sense, Laruelles project can be seen as a radical continuation of Husserls project to begin with
ultimate immanence. But whereas Husserl and every phenomenologist afterwards have
characterized immanence in relation to some other basic term, Laruelle is suspending the selfsufficiency of all these determinations. Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject, in The
Speculative Turn, ed. L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Melbourne, 2011), 167.
17
Francois Laruelle, A Summary of Non-Philosophy, trans. R. Brassier, in Pli, vol. 8, 1999, 138139.
21
Laruelle prefers to compare his use of the prefix non to the use of non in the sense of nonEuclidean geometry. Non-philosophy would then be equivalent to a mutation of philosophy as
20
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26
Ibid., 48-52.
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This concern with the Enlightenment places Brassier within the vicinity of Meillassouxs
project. However, he believes Meillassouxs critique of correlationism on the basis of
ancestrality is not strong enough to refute the correlationist's arguments. According to
Brassier, it is always possible for the correlationist to reinscribe the anteriority of the
arche-fossil as a postulate "for us" within a chronological framework. In contrast, Brassier,
in order to avoid this possibility, adds a more radical dimension to Meillassoux's critique of
correlationism, namely the reality of extinction. For Brassier, a proper understanding of
extinction leads to the provocative revelation that we are already dead.
Brassier adopts Lyotard's challenge to philosophy in his "Can Thought go on without a
Body" concerning the inevitability of a future solar catastrophe.28 The fact that we know
that the sun will die in roughly 4.5 billion years from now proves to be devastating to
every terrestrial, i.e., finite, horizon. The death of the sun entails the complete annihilation
of every form of human-orientation with which philosophy would attempt to position
itself, regardless of whether the finite horizon in question is Husserl's "Ur-earth,"
Heidegger's "Being," or Deleuzes "deterritorialisation." It obliterates even the conceptual
negativity underlying Hegelian subjectivity. In any case, the inevitable death of the sun
already unravels every possible modality of finite transcendence. Not only is the sun set on
the path of dissolution, matter itself will be disintegrated. Indeed, "Every star in the
universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and
27
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leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter."29 According to Brassier:
Everything is dead already. Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological
temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questionings constitutive horizonal
relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait in for us in the far distant future, on
the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as
something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of
terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. Terrestrial history
occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the
birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last
multicellular animal.30
The future demise of the sun, as well as of all matter, entails the truth of extinction with
respect to all present life. The fact that death is "before" as well as "after" life means that
extinction itself is to be characterized as an "anterior posteriority" that subsumes (or
swallows) every possible finite point-of-view. The reality of extinction is the absolute
endpoint which overwhelms the present of human finitude, not in an indifferent manner,
but as internally destroying its legitimacy as the fulcrum upon which correlationism rests.
The time of extinction represents the death of thought, a time which, through its
incapacitation of thought, turns thought itself into an object by disentangling all forms of
interior exteriority or transcendence in immanence. He writes further on:
Extinction portends a physical annihilation which negates the difference between mind
and world, but which can no longer be construed as a limit internal to the transcendence
of mind an internalized exteriority, as death is for Geist or Dasein because it implies
an exteriority which unfolds or externalizes the internalization of exteriority concomitant
with consciousness and its surrogates, whether Geist or Dasein. Extinction turns thinking
inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other (and no longer
the imperishable condition of perishing).31
Extinction causes the collapse of transcendence in such a way that there results a nondialectical identity between thought and object. The non-dialectical identity between
thought and object is based on a radical immanence which is anterior as well as posterior
with respect to the advent of givenness. Brassier, in order to elucidate the idea of a
coincidence between thought and the real, conjoins Lyotards notion of stellar death with
Freud's account of the death-drive as it is presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He
adopts Freud's controversial claim, derived from the phenomenon of traumatic repetition,
that the ultimate aim of all life is death, or the notion that the organic has the originary
tendency to return to the inorganic. The death-drive carries out a binding of extinction
through which thought coincides with the real.
Having presented a basic account of Brassiers notion of extinction, it is now possible
to further elucidate its transcendental role with the aid of Laruelles non-philosophy. To
begin with, Brassier replaces Laruelles transcendental immanence of vision-in-One with a
transcendental nihilism grounded in the real as being-nothing. But this transcendental
29
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Ibid., 147.
Ibid., 139.
34
Ibid., 147.
33
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V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Before concluding, it is worthwhile to return to the correlationists second rejoinder
discussed by Meillassoux because it helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the kind of
transcendental realism presented above. We saw how, according to the correlationist, the
critic of correlationism is guilty of overlooking the transcendental-empirical distinction.
The correlationist wishes to situate the transcendental conditions of knowledge apart from
the empirical time of bodies, and that the attempt to conceive of the transcendental realm in
intra-worldly terms ends in paradox. However, according to Meillassoux, the correlationist
cannot maintain a strong separation between the transcendental and the empirical because
the former must be instantiated with respect to a finite point-of-view, i.e., a body. The
fact that the transcendental conditions of knowledge cannot be described in empirical
terms, even though such conditions must be instantiated within a body, leaves the problem
concerning the origin of the transcendental a mystery, a mystery which transcendental
philosophy (idealism) cannot solve on its own. If the transcendental is conceived on the
basis of subjectivity, whether it is construed in terms of cognition or Being-in-the-world,
no account can be given of how the transcendental emerges from within the material
world. The transcendental realism behind Brassiers account of extinction sidesteps this
problem by separating the transcendental realm from the conventional transcendentalempirical distinction which governs philosophical idealism. Following Laruelle, Brassier
grants the real with a transcendental capacity. Moreover, the relation between thought and
the real is non-reciprocal; the real conditions thought without thought conditioning the real
in turn (Laruelles unilateral duality). But this is simply another way of rejecting the
standard transcendental-empirical distinction. Once the transcendental conditions of
manifestation (or givenness) are located outside the circle of correlationism, it becomes
possible to escape idealism in all its forms.
However much Brassiers transcendental realism avoids the conceptual pitfalls of
correlationism, there is a significant problem worth considering. It is not really clear how
extinction is supposed to play a transcendental role if it is meant to incapacitate thought.
The claim that we are already dead implies that life (construed in terms of
transcendence) is an illusion of sorts. To be more specific, it implies that both life and
death are unreal. The question arises how the positive negativity of extinction can function
on a transcendental level if it simultaneously destroys what it conditions. This makes
Brassiers account of extinction appear similar in many ways to Derridas notion of
diffrance. A further question concerning whether or not Brassiers nihilism is compatible
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The most famous presentation of Sellars distinction between the manifest image and the
scientific image can be found in his crucial paper Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, in
In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. K. Scharp & R. Brandom (Harvard
University Press, 2007).
35
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