Quentin Meillassoux and the Ethics of Chance

System and/as Contingency: Quentin Meillassoux and the Ethics of Chance

Kevin Kennedy

It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools.1

What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.2

Introduction: philosophy and contingency

In Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story ‘City of Glass’, the main character Quinn, a writer turned detective, is tasked with investigating a man called Peter Stillman, who is about to arrive at Grand Central Station. Waiting on the platform, Quinn is horrified when two men emerge from the train, who both match the photo of Stillman he was given, each heading in a different direction: ‘[W]hatever choice he made — and he had to make a choice — would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end.’ 3 Quinn’s horror in the face of this absurd encounter is reflective of ______1. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), p. 115. 2. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Bantam Classics, 1986), p. 91. 3. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 68. IJFrS 17 (2017)

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philosophy’s traditional response towards notions of chance and contingency. This response is hardly surprising, given that philosophy’s primary task, it would seem, has always been to construct coherent and stable systems of thought, in which the unruly and unpredictable nature of chance simply has no place. Perhaps the most ingenious attempt to integrate chance within an over-arching philosophical framework is Hegel’s dialectical model of history, in which what at first appears to be chance is retroactively revealed as a necessary step within the unfolding of spirit. 4 Even though chance is acknowledged, it is ultimately shown to be the illusory product of a deeper, coherent reality. Hegel thereby offers a sophisticated version of a specific conception of chance that has dominated Western thought for millennia — from Plato to Einstein to much of contemporary science — in which the contingent is merely the product of our ignorance of an underlying system.5 In this positivistic scenario, the two Stillmans Quinn is faced with in Auster’s story will turn out to be necessary, if initially bewildering clues to solving the case. Post-Hegelian philosophy has been a lot less optimistic towards reason’s ability to systematize the contingencies of life and existence. Thinkers as varied as Nietzsche, Freud and Adorno deny that rational thought could ever penetrate the apparent inconsistencies or accidents of language, thought and history, to discover a system that would lay bare the absolute nature of reality. Emblematic for this stance is Nietzsche’s conception of chance as a negation of purpose, origin and teleology.6 In this system-critical scenario, Auster’s Quinn would have ______4. ‘Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: With Selections from the Philosophy of Right, trans. by Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 58. 5. Einstein’s famous quote ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ neatly encapsulates this idea. 6. ‘That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin’, Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Notes 1873’, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), p. 40.

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to affirm the arbitrariness of his choice concerning the real Stillman, and accept the impossibility of ever getting to the bottom of the mystery, as the contingency of his choice could never be remedied by an underlying system. In recent years, the relationship between contingency and systematic claims to the absolute has again come to play an important role in Continental philosophy, most notably in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux’s thought is based on a quasi-radicalization of Alain Badiou’s conception of the event. For Badiou, chance is ‘la pensée pure de l’événement’, a radical occurrence that breaks with the pre-existing parameters and rules of every system, be it philosophical, political or ethical. 7 Meillassoux takes this idea one step further, arguing that this radical contingency is itself the ultimate ‘ground’ of being, the only possibility we have of rationally establishing the absolute nature of reality. In this reading, chance no longer features as a disruption of systematic aspirations, but becomes itself the foundation of the system. In other words, a systematic, rational approach to understanding the nature of the universe has to be based on the recognition of its absolute contingency. From this angle, returning once more to Auster’s story, the existence of the two Peter Stillmans no longer appears as an obstacle to solving the case, but becomes the solution itself, an illustration of the radical contingency of being. In the following, I want to take a closer look at how the relation between systematicity and the contingent is developed in Meillassoux’s work. I will show that a specific demand for systematic knowledge underlies not only his ontology, but also his ethics, which, as I shall argue, come into conflict with his own systematic aspirations in certain key areas, most notably in his attempt to derive an ethico- political model of subjectivity from his theory of contingency. Furthermore, I want to establish whether Meillassoux’s monism of chance, by systematizing contingency and declaring it a universal ______7. Alain Badiou, L’Aventure de la philosophie française: depuis les années 1960 (Paris: La fabrique, 2012).

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principle, does not in fact deprive the contingent of its contingent character, introducing a reductive stability that condemns the subject to a passive waiting ultimately lacking in ethical significance.

The necessity of systematicity

In his daring reading of Mallarmé’s famous poem Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard, which sets out to excavate the poem’s buried (and previously unrecognized) systematic structure, Meillassoux offers a succinct history of modern philosophy’s attempt to think a systematic absolute, which he divides into three broad phases, each of which produces a specific subjective position.8 The nineteenth century is defined by its belief in overarching meta- narratives, political teleologies and all-encompassing systems of knowledge, such as those of Marx or Hegel, that ‘vectoris[e] de nouveau le sujet par un sens, par une direction libérée de l’ancienne eschatologie’. The twentieth century, in turn, is characterized by a rejection of such absolutizing systems, those ‘Grands Récits morts’, resulting in an all-pervasive disenchantment with the absolute, leaving the subject devoid of hope for the future.9 At the dawn of the twenty- first century, however, Meillassoux detects a return to an ‘époque ensevelie sous nos désabusements’, that is to say, a rediscovery of the nineteenth century’s aspirations to absolute knowledge, by which, it seems, Meillassoux is referring to his own philosophy. Although Meillassoux’s published output to date is compara- tively sparse and does not constitute a completed philosophical system in itself, there has been significant speculation concerning what ______8. ‘La thèse selon laquelle la “démarche du poète” dans le Coup de dés “n’est pas systématique et ne procède pas par calcul” […] trahit une position de principe qui ne tire son évidence que du large consensus avec lequel on récuse désormais cette hypothèse.’ Quentin Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène: un déchiffrage du 'Coup de dés' de Mallarmé (Paris: Fayard, 2011), p. 13. 9. Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène, p. 205.

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Graham Harman calls Meillassoux’s ‘massive, unpublished philosophical system’.10 Regardless of whether this system already exists or not, a system-building tendency is, in any case, apparent in all of Meillassoux’s published works, a tendency that is by no means incidental. For Meillassoux, our current philosophical/political climate is dominated by two seemingly opposed, but in fact interdependent worldviews: scepticism/pluralism and dogmatism/fanaticism, both of which are a direct result of the twentieth century’s rejection of metaphysics and the concurrent relativization of knowledge: ‘Le fanatisme contemporain ne saurait donc être tenu simplement pour la résurgence d’un archaïsme violemment opposé aux acquis de la raison critique occidentale, car il est au contraire l’effet de la rationalité critique.’11 By rejecting the possibility that thought could ever lay bare the fundamental parameters of existence (regardless of whether one calls this fundament god, matter or spirit), twentieth-century philosophy effectively and unwittingly opened the door to a paralyzing relativism, devoid of argumentative leverage in the face of religious dogmatism or new-age obscurantism: ‘la fin de la métaphysique, en chassant la raison de toutes ses prétentions à l’absolu, a pris la forme d’un retour exacerbé du religieux’ (AF 62; italicized in the original). In other words, critical philosophy’s seemingly reasonable rejection of an absolute system facilitated a re-emergence of the absolute, yet devoid of reason and systematicity. Thus, Meillassoux argues, an incontrovertible, binding system of thought is needed, which would re-enable us to ground our claims in absolute certainty, without falling back into the metaphysical/pre- critical dogmas of the past. This call for a resurrection of overarching systems is not mere nostalgia for a bygone world of eternal truths, nor is it a pure statement of fact. It is, first and foremost, an ethical commitment to combat ‘all manner of cynical, despairing, or fanatical ______10. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 2. 11. Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 67. Hereafter AF in the text.

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impulses following in the wake of the so-called Death of God’.12 This ethical stance needs be grounded in a rationally cogent framework, not only to criticize the ‘effets pratiques (ethico-politiques)’ of fanaticism on moral grounds, but primarily to rationally refute ‘l’éventuelle fausseté de ses contenus’ (AF 65). Meillassoux thus calls for the re- establishment of an absolute philosophical normativity, an unambiguous truth, a fundamental ontology, unencumbered by the radical scepticism (hermeneutical, poststructuralist or otherwise) that dominated Continental thought for much of the twentieth century.

Contingency as system

Meillassoux’s groundbreaking work Après la finitude (2006) arguably lays the foundation for precisely such an all-encompassing, unassailable ontological system. It sets out to demonstrate that in order to be truly irrefutable, such a system has to dispense with any notion of human subjectivity, consciousness or cognition, and re-introduce an unambiguous conception of objectivity, the lack of which he identifies as the main flaw of post-Kantian philosophy: ‘l’objectivité se définissait depuis Kant non en référence à l’objet en soi…mais en référence à l’universalité possible de l’énoncé objectif’ (AF 33). Kant argues that thought, in its dependence on the transcendental categories of time and space, is incapable of cognizing reality in itself. Although he posits a reality beyond those parameters (the thing-in-itself), it can never be penetrated by human cognition.13 According to Meillassoux, this fundamental gesture has dominated Continental philosophy ever since. He coins the umbrella term ‘correlationism’ to refer to all philosophies based on the assumption that reason can never think being

______12. Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis, ‘Introduction: From A Speculative Materialism to a Speculative Ethics’, in The Meillassoux Dictionary, ed. by Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 1–18 (p. 4). 13. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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in itself, only the correlation between being and thinking. Given correlationism’s basic premise that being is always mediated (through language, consciousness etc.) and that it is therefore impossible to think anything outside the correlation, it can only ever describe the fact of this correlation, never ground the latter in absolute necessity. Meillassoux calls this the facticity of the correlation: ‘Ces formes sont un “fait premier” qui ne peut faire l’objet que d’une description, et non d’une déduction’ (AF 53). In an ingenious move, Meillassoux converts this seeming obstacle to knowledge (‘there is no way to account for the necessity of why things are as they are’) into a positive ontological feature. This means that ‘ce n’est pas le corrélat mais la facticité du corrélat qui est l’absolu’ (AF 72; italicized in the original). In other words, the facticity of being reveals the absence of any rational necessity for anything (including the correlation) to be the way it is: ‘il faut faire de la facticité la propriété réelle de toute chose et de tout monde d’être sans raison’ (AF 73). Meillassoux’s argument thus hinges on the fundamental distinction between what is a fact and what is a necessity. As Adrian Johnson succinctly puts it: ‘reason’s inability to prove that observed cause-and-effect patterns are expressive of underlying “necessary connections” inhering within material reality apart from the mind of the observer shifts from being a privation of knowledge to becoming a direct positive insight into the real absence of any necessity in absolute objective being an sich’.14 The absence of any form of necessity, revealed through Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, entails a conception of being that is absolutely contingent, ‘governed’ by a virtual power that may create and destroy every law, rule or world at any moment, without an underlying reason or apparent cause.15 As there is no necessity for ______14. Adrian Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), pp. 92–113 (p. 97). 15. It is important to note that Meillassoux’s correlationist thesis, which underpins his entire philosophy, is far from uncontroversial. Despite the praise Meillassoux received for the

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anything to be the way it is, the only necessity is the ‘necessity of contingency’, the ‘pouvoir-être-autre/pouvoir-ne-pas-être de toute chose’ (AF 85). The advantage of creating a philosophical system based on the absoluteness of contingency is that, unlike previous systems of thought, it no longer has to rely on the idealist notion of a higher metaphysical power (such as god or spirit): ‘L’absolu est l’impossibilité absolue d’un étant nécessaire’ (AF 82). Meillassoux’s conception of being as absolute contingency is based on a fundamental separation between the empirical/ontic and the rational/ontological, or between empirical and absolute contingency. For Meillassoux, empirical, or ‘intramondaine’ contingency is predicated on ‘tout ce qui peut être ou ne pas être dans le monde, se produire ou ne pas produire dans le monde, et cela sans contrevenir aux invariants du langage et de la représentation par lesquels m’est donné le monde’ (AF 55). Empirical contingency, in its reliance on experience and representation, is akin to a traditional understanding of chance: even though one does not possess any certainty with regard to what will happen, one can be certain that it will occur within currently existing parameters, derived from experience (such as the laws of physics). For Meillassoux, empirical contingency thus becomes ‘précarité’, as it ultimately reveals the perishability of every being: ‘Ce livre, ce fruit, cet homme, cet astre sont voués tôt ou tard à disparaître, si les lois physiques et organiques demeurent ce qu’elles ont été jusqu’à présent’ (AF 85). Meillassoux’s notion of facticity, however, indicates that it is impossible to rationally prove that there is any necessity to the undeniable regularity of experientially derived knowledge and its law of ‘précarité’. This absence of necessity within empirical contingency is then recast as absolute ontological certainty, as the absolute contingency of the real: in contrast to the necessity of perishability within empirical contingency, this absolute contingency designates ‘un ______originality of Après la finitude, most commentators outside the speculative realist camp, from Žižek to Latour, reject the book’s basic premise. Some of the prevalent criticisms have focused on its problematic conflation of the epistemological and the ontological, its oversimplified rejection of post-Kantian philosophy and, most notably, the obvious paradox of using a correlationist strategy to escape correlationism.

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pur possible: un possible qui peut-être ne s’accomplira jamais’ (AF 85), a radical potentiality ‘impensable par la physique — puisque capable de détruire sans cause ni raison toute loi physique — comme par la métaphysique — puisque capable de détruire tout étant déterminé, fût- il un dieu, fût-il Dieu’ (AF 88). As there is no necessity for anything to be the way it is, everything could potentially change at any given moment, including what we consider to be scientific or epistemic givens. Yet, and this is key, absolute contingency is based on the radical absence of any necessity whatsoever, including the necessity that things will change. Absolute contingency, in other words, becomes a virtual power ‘capable de détruire les choses comme les mondes’ but also ‘de ne jamais passer à l’acte […] de changements frénétiques et sans ordre, ou à l’inverse, capable de produire un univers immobile jusqu’en ses moindres recoins’ (AF 87). Whereas empirical contingency, in its reliance on a factual, non-necessitarian notion of ‘precariousness’, cannot establish an absolute, the radical potentiality of contingency demonstrates ‘l’absolue nécessité de la non-nécessité de toute chose’ (AF 84) and thus achieves, according to Meillassoux, the indisputable certainty from which he can develop his philosophical system. Meillassoux further refines his notion of contingency (contingence) by contrasting it with chance (hasard). He argues that chance is always based on an idea of totality, in which, despite the unpredictability of future events, the number of possible outcomes is limited. Meillassoux uses the example of a throw of a die: whereas we don’t know which of the six sides will emerge on top, we know that it will have to be one of the six. Despite its unpredictability, chance is therefore always determined by a pre-existing totality: ‘Appelons hasard toute actualisation d’une potentialité pour laquelle n’existe aucune instance de détermination univoque à partir de conditions initiales données.’16 Yet, according to Meillassoux, this notion of a fixed totality, however large, is mathematically untenable. Following Badiou, he uses Cantorian set theory to question traditional ______16. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Potentialité et Virtualité’, Failles, 2 (2006), 112–29 (p. 123).

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philosophical notions of totality and infinity. Cantor’s highly influential theory of the transfinite demonstrates that there are different types of infinities for different sets of elements (for instance, the infinity of rational numbers is larger — or ‘more infinite’ — than the infinity of whole numbers). Every set (or totality) of elements contains within itself the possibility of an always larger set or totality, which disqualifies any notion of a pre-conceived totality of elements.17 As a result, the notion of chance as the potential realization of a limited number of possible outcomes has no purchase on the transfinite absolute of untotalizable sets and thus falls short of attaining the rational absolute that Meillassoux seeks. Hence the necessity of the virtual power of contingency, which he defines as ‘la propriété de tout ensemble de cas d’émerger au sein d’un devenir que ne domine aucune totalité pré-constituée de possibles’.18 The virtuality of contingency, unlike probabilities of chance, is not limited by already existing (ontological, epistemological) givens and is therefore capable of transforming the very foundations of reality at any given moment, without reason or necessity. In his quest for a non-metaphysical absolute that would provide his philosophical system with an irrefutable foundation, Meillassoux discovers the absoluteness of contingency, a purely rational (mathematical) yet non-totalizable absolute that would overcome the lack of absolute necessity within empirically observable cause-and- effect patterns, without positing any form of necessary being. From this basic insight, Meillassoux derives a fundamental goal for any progressive contemporary philosophical system: ‘La tâche consiste, pour la philosophie, à réabsolutiser la portée des mathématiques […]

______17. For an excellent analysis of the philosophical implications of Cantorian set theory, see the Appendix in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 323–49. 18. Meillassoux, ‘Potentialité et Virtualité’, p. 123.

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sans reconduire à une nécessité de type métaphysique, en effet périmée’ (AF 175).19

The ethics of contingency

Having established the theoretical parameters of Meillassoux’s system, it now remains to be seen what practical, ethical and political consequences may be derived from it. I concur with Peter Gratton’s assessment that ‘After Finitude has a foundational role in his system, providing a set of ontological commitments in order that we might build an ethics upon them. His belief is that a rational ethics requires an ontological grounding to motivate one to live ethically’. 20 The demand for a coherent ontological system finds its correlate in a call for an equally cogent, rationally-grounded ethical outlook, aspiring towards a radical universality that transcends particular cultural, historical or political formations: ‘L’éthique factuale doit surmonter des catastrophes morales qui lui sont inhérentes comme la spéculation théorique doit surmonter des inconsistances théoriques apparentes qui lui sont propres, pour construire une unité de pensée et de vie capables de légitimer sa cohérence ultime.’21 In other words, for Meillassoux,

______19. An in-depth discussion of Meillassoux’s use of mathematical concepts in his philosophy goes beyond the scope of the present article. It is nonetheless important to bear in mind that Meillassoux occupies a very specific, and by no means exclusive or undisputed, position in the field of mathematical realism, at odds with other brands of philosophical mathematics, such as constructivism or intuitionism, for instance. For a brief but incisive analysis of Meillassoux’s position in relation to the history of philosophical mathematics, see Sean Dudley’s entry ‘Mathematics’, in The Meillassoux Dictionary, pp. 113–17. 20. Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis, ‘Introduction’, in The Meillassoux Dictionary, p. 4. Yet, as I would argue, what Meillassoux has in mind is not merely an ethics, in the sense of a moral code with clearly defined parameters for action, but rather a religion of contingency, replete with a specific theology and sacred rituals. This is most apparent in his interpretation of Mallarmé’s life and work in Le Nombre et la sirène, where infinite chance is presented as a new divinity. See Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène, p. 121. 21. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘L’Immanence d’Outre-Monde’, Ethica, 16.2 (2009), 39–71 (p. 69). Hereafter IOM in the text.

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the demand for total rational consistency is synonymous with an efficacious moral outlook: to be ethical is to be systematic. The question that inevitably arises is: how can an ontology based on radical contingency give rise to an ethical outlook, given that worlds and laws can change at any moment, regardless of the subject’s stance or intervention? Isn’t the contingent, by definition, a negation of ethics, understood as a coherent set of reasoned principles that enable the subject to navigate and intervene in a world that is sufficiently stable and predictable? Meillassoux’s ethics set out on the basic premise that a world of ‘précarité’, i.e., a godless world of inevitable, meaningless death (as revealed by scientific empiricism), generates a profound sense of disenchantment and despair. The contemporary subject is powerless in the face of the laws of nature, whose ultimate lesson is that everything (bodies, communities, ideas) will inevitably perish. Bereft of hope for a better world — which had hitherto characterized human subjectivity, whether it be the hope for an afterlife or for a future utopia — the subject is thrown into a deep crisis of faith and meaning, which in turn leads to inertia, cynicism, despair and, in the worst case, fanaticism. This crisis, according to Meillassoux, gives rise to a set of key ethical questions: how can we transcend the pessimism generated by the realm of empirical contingency? How can we establish a legitimate foundation for hope, beyond the present disenchantment? How can we find a meaningful basis for action in a world in which meaning is seemingly denied? Meillassoux argues that the only satisfying response is a specific form of radical justice. Like Kant, he wants to establish an ethical position that is systematic and universally binding. Yet, whereas Kant locates the universal ethical moment in the tension between freedom and determinism (limiting it to the sphere of the living), Meillassoux’s ethical universality is based on a form of justice that would apply to both the living and the dead:

Mon exigence n’est rien d’autre que celle d’une égalité réellement universelle entre les hommes, entre tous les hommes, indépendamment de leur condition biologique…

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qu’ils soient morts ou vivants, ce qui n’est toujours qu’une différence biologique sans portée morale — j’exige la justice pour tous. (IOM 48)

This strange demand can only be understood with reference to Meillassoux’s notion of the necessity of contingency. According to Meillassoux, as we have seen above, reason shows us that there is no necessity for things to be the way they are, that they could change in unexpected and hitherto impossible ways, transgressing intuition and common sense. Meillassoux uses this basic hypothesis to argue that although god does not exist at present, the radically contingent nature of the universe implies that at some point in the future, something resembling a god could indeed come into existence. Such a future god, unlike the god of monotheistic religions, would be in a unique position to create real justice, as she was not yet ‘alive’ when the horrors and crimes of history were committed and thus bears no responsibility for them. This future god, a real possibility in a world of radical contingency, could resurrect and redeem the dead along with the living and thereby overcome both the disenchantment of atheist materialism and the contradictions of theology, most notably theodicy:

Ce dieu futur et immanent doit-il être personnel, ou consister en une ‘harmonie’, une communauté apaisée des vivants, des morts, et des renaissants? Nous croyons que des réponses précises à ces questions sont envisageables, et qu’elles déterminent un régime original de pensée, en rupture avec l’athéisme comme avec la théologie.22

The crucial point here, it seems to me, is not the plausibility of such a proposition, of whether this contingent god will eventually materialize or not, but rather the impact that such a belief in the possibility of a just future has on the present world. Meillassoux’s proposition is based on ______22. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Deuil à venir, dieu à venir’, Critique, 704/705 (2006), 105–15 (p. 115).

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the Nietzschean idea that ‘on ne peut transformer un corps, inventer une subjectivité nouvelle, sans une proposition sur le monde déployée sous une forme résolument spéculative’ (IOM 61). His primary aim is to create a new form of subjectivity, which, due to the rational insight into the contingency of physical laws and the concomitant and now justified hope in a radically different future, would enable us to act in this world with renewed urgency, beyond the despair and disenchantment of the present condition. This is what Meillassoux calls the possibility of the ‘fourth world’: ‘Notre projet est alors de faire du quatrième Monde un possible susceptible de supplémenter, en notre propre Monde, la subjectivité des hommes actuels, en transformant en profondeur la vie intime de ceux qui prendraient au sérieux une telle hypothèse’ (IOM 57).23 Meillassoux’s ethics of contingency call for the creation of an eschatological subject, whose rational access to the truth (of contingency) would allow for a systematic, and therefore universally applicable, elaboration of the potential justice of a future world, whose primary goal, however, would be the transformation of life in the here and now: ‘Un militant préserve ainsi en lui l’espoir que les spectres puissent vivre à l’avenir une vie digne de notre humanité́ […] Son désir peut travailler à forger son ultime cohérence, et donner sens à une existence vouée à accomplir notre condition’ (IOM 70).

______23. Meillassoux names the world of radical justice the fourth world, as it will proceed from three previous worlds, which he calls matter, life and thought, and which roughly correspond to the evolution of life on earth. Yet, in contrast to biological accounts of this development, Meillassoux’s theory of contingency does not posit any causal connections between these worlds. In accordance with the principle of facticity, there is no underlying reason for this development. Their emergence, like the possible arrival of a just world, is purely contingent.

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The limits of a systematic ethics

Meillassoux’s anti-metaphysical notion of contingency is manifestly political, in that it demonstrates that no political or religious entity is ever necessary. Thus, as he argues in Après la finitude, the first step in a politics of contingency would consist in ‘démontrer qu’une situation sociale présentée comme inévitable est en vérité contingente’ (AF 46). Meillassoux thereby continues a long tradition of unmasking or denaturalizing the status quo, from Marx to Badiou, which at present seems particularly relevant, considering the ‘politics of no alternative’ that have dominated Western mainstream politics for the past decade. The contingency of being reveals the contingency of politics, and the possibility that things can always be different. Still, how can we reconcile a critique of ideology with Meillassoux’s central claim that the contingent is necessarily trans- anthropocentric, that it does not rely on human thought or agency, and spreads its virtual power with complete disregard for subjective aspirations and desires? On one level, Meillassoux is trying to ground human agency and the possibility of political intervention in the recognition and acceptance of human impotence in the face of indifferent contingent being: ‘Le quatrième Monde n’est rien d’autre que l’affirmation de la possibilité réelle de l’émancipation ainsi conçue’ (IOM 68; my italics). Even though, according to Meillassoux, we cannot actively bring about the fourth world, we can find comfort in the realization that change (ontological, epistemological, ethical, political) may be possible. Meillassoux’s contingency of being (être) thus gives rise to an ethics of may-being (peut-être), of hope for justice in a world to come.24 Nevertheless, even if one accepts Meillassoux’s conception of the contingency of being, the question of how one should respond to this

______24. See Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Time without Becoming’ (Middlesex University, London, 2008), p. 11. [accessed 11 January 2017].

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insight, how one should use this knowledge and how it could actively influence our political choices, remains unclear. Meillassoux himself seems to be in two minds. On the one hand, he advocates the indispensability of human agency in the creation of a just society: ‘Il n’y a donc pas à craindre, ici, un “argumentaire fataliste” du quatrième Monde, selon lequel la Justice universelle, parce qu’indépendante de nos actes, devrait être passivement attendue’ (IOM 59). On the other hand, he asserts that true emancipation ‘est ce qui procède d’un surgissement ontologique indépendant de notre action’ (IOM 70). This equivocation evidently stands in stark contradiction to the systematic aspirations of Meillassoux’s philosophy, whose main ambition, as we have seen, is to create a system of thought based on coherent, universal parameters for thought and action, ‘une unité de pensée et de vie capables de légitimer sa cohérence ultime’ (IOM 60). To be fair, Meillassoux circumnavigates this problem by asserting that the very hypothesis of a rational hope for future justice will transform individual subjects and hence the political decisions they make. It is this ‘hypothèse (qui) contribue, au présent, à façonner la subjectivité du militant vectoriel’ (IOM 70). However, even though Meillassoux aligns his project of an eschatological subject with ‘ce que Marx avait promis […] une vie communiste’ (IOM 67), it remains unclear how the belief in a future ontological revolution could bring about real political change, without a concrete theory of social evolution/revolution that would mobilize this belief. As Peter Hallward points out:

Meillassoux’s acausal ontology […] includes no account of an actual process of transformation or development. There is no account here of any positive ontological or historical force […] He deprives himself of any concretely mediated means of thinking, with and after Marx, the possible ways of changing such situations.25

______25. Peter Hallward, ‘Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude’, The Speculative Turn, pp. 130–40 (p. 139).

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Meillassoux’s ethics of contingency encounter their limit at the exact point at which their systematic aspirations, their demand for complete coherence, are thwarted. Despite itself, the system of trans- human contingency is unable to accommodate an ethics or a politics, which, by definition, require subjective mediation, and is ipso facto forced to relegate human activity to a passive waiting for a future messiah. The absoluteness at the basis of Meillassoux’s philosophy fundamentally jars with the fickleness and relativity of human volition and agency, which always seem to eschew any attempt at an overly neat conceptual or systematic determination. This basic tension surfaces every time Meillassoux attempts to reveal the ethico-political implications of his speculative ontology, not least towards the beginning of Après la finitude, the foundational text of his philosophical system: ‘Contre le dogmatisme, il importe de maintenir le refus de tout absolu métaphysique; mais contre la violence argumentée des fanatismes divers, il importe de retrouver dans la pensée un peu d’absolu’ (AF 68; italicized in the original). ‘Un peu d’absolu’ is a contradiction in terms; the absolute is either total or it is not absolute. A system that aspires towards complete coherence, as Hegel already demonstrated, needs to account for the relationship, the interplay and interdependence, between the whole and every one of its parts, or in Meillassoux’s case the relation between contingency and subjective agency, the ‘unité de pensée et de vie’ (IOM 60). Meillassoux’s ethico- political theory, however, lacks a convincing account of subjectivity, beyond the idea that knowledge of the facticity of being will somehow politicize the subject.26 His pure ontology, untainted by correlationist anthropocentrism, therefore struggles to convincingly demonstrate how it can have any bearing on human affairs, and why we should take

______26. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point, albeit in a different context: ‘The problem is not “can we penetrate through the veil of subjectively-constituted phenomena to things-in- themselves”, but “how do phenomena themselves arise within the flat stupidity of reality which just is, how does reality redouble itself and start to appear to itself”. For this, we need a theory of subject […] This theory is, as far as I can see, still lacking in speculative realism.’ ‘Interview: Slavoj Žižek and Ben Woodard’, in The Speculative Turn, pp. 406– 15 (p. 415).

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it seriously, if all it does is condemn us to a Beckettian waiting, passive and impotent.

Conclusion: beyond the ethics of contingency

The preceding analysis has shown that Meillassoux’s aspiration to create a systematic ethics based on the necessity of contingency suffers from two interconnected problems: firstly, the lack of an account of political transformation and, secondly, of a mediating/mediated form of subjectivity. However, despite these shortcomings, Meillassoux’s thought raises important questions concerning the possibility of a progressive contemporary philosophy. For example, in a world dominated by identity politics (with its extreme focus on subjectivity and experience) and a prevalent scepticism towards ultimate truths, his call for return of a systematic, universal, trans-individual form of truth is refreshing, if not vital. One of the basic problems with this demand, however, is that it sidesteps the issue concerning the possibility of formulating such a truth, of comprehending something that, according to Meillassoux, is distinct from human comprehension. This is, maybe unsurprisingly, one of the main criticisms leveled at Meillassoux’s theory, which David Golumbia expresses thus: ‘to think being without considering thinking, is made logically and conceptually problematic by the same issue that dogs Meillassoux, namely, the unavoidable use of cognition in any statement of it: how do we think being apart from thinking, without thinking as we do it?’27 Every system inevitably relies on language, which renders it possible, but also extremely unstable, as there is no straightforward, unambiguous relation between the signifiers it employs and the concepts and objects they signify. Although Meillassoux argues that mathematics represent precisely such a pure language, beyond the vicissitudes of a ‘merely’ human ______27. David Golumbia, ‘“Correlationism”: The Dogma That Never Was’, Boundary 2, 43.2 (2016), 1–25 (p. 6).

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form of communication, his own reflections on the philosophical implications of this language nonetheless rely on linguistic signs, on concepts that are fundamentally differential and thus, as Jacques Derrida has convincingly demonstrated, far from absolute.28 The absence of any notion of conceptual mediation is also reflected in Meillassoux’s understanding of systematicity. In a sense, Meillassoux’s system of contingency fails to think the systematicity of systems per se, the underlying factors that make systematic thought possible in the first place. As Georges Bataille shows in L’Expérience intérieure, homogeneous systems always operate according to a logic of exclusion, in which what is negated, excluded or denied, enables the system to become coherent and stable in the first place.29 In Meillas- soux’s system of contingency, what is excluded and dismissed is the notion of causality. As we have seen, the facticity of being reveals the absence of underlying cause-and-effect patterns, whereby absolute contingency becomes the defining feature of being itself. However, to posit the contingent as absolute is, in a sense, to deprive it of its contingent character. That is to say, in order for any conception of contingency to have an intelligible meaning, we need an understanding of what it negates, of what lies beyond it, which in this case, is the stability and predictability of non-contingent laws. A system that posits radical contingency as the ultimate and only feature of objective being turns the contingent into something extremely static and incon-sequential, ultimately resulting in a denial of its anarchic irregularity. As Bataille succinctly puts it: ‘La chance est toujours à la merci d’elle-même. Elle est toujours à la merci du jeu, toujours en jeu. Définitive, la chance ne serait pas plus la chance.’30 Chance can only be understood as the negation of its other: foreseeability, reason, logic and control, which ______28. See Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 29. Georges Bataille, ‘Le savoir absolu, circulaire, est non-savoir définitif […] dans le système, il ne peut, même en Dieu, y avoir de connaissance allant au-delà du savoir absolu.’ Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, in Œuvres complètes, V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 7–189 (p. 127). 30. Georges Bataille, Le Coupable, in Œuvres complètes, V, 235–392 (pp. 319–20).

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means that it derives its contingent value precisely from not being necessary, from not lending itself to systemization, a point already made by Wittgenstein: ‘Logical research means the investigation of all regularity. And outside logic, all is chance.’31 Against Meillassoux’s monism of contingency, I would suggest that what we need is a productive tension, a dialectical dualism between contingency (chaos) and causality (system), which would allow us to recognize the reality of indomitable contingency (unlike traditional metaphysics), while positing a domain untouched by the former, exempt from its arbitrary force. And the latter, as I would suggest, is precisely the realm of ethics and politics, which needs to be governed by a sense of predictability and stability, underpinned if not a by a rational, then at least by a reasonable system. A true ethics of contingency would therefore have to be a renunciation of the possibility that one can build a coherent ethics from contingency, if one wants to avoid the pitfalls of Meillassoux’s stance, in which everything boils down to a passive waiting, akin to the hope for an afterlife in Christianity. What, in effect, is the difference between Meillassoux’s and Christianity’s respective eschatologies, when both depend on a form of static, eternal knowledge (the insight into the absoluteness of contingency in Meillassoux, the belief in the existence of an eternal god in the Christianity)?32 Meillassoux’s hope for a contingent god suggests that the desire to create systems (philosophical, political, etc.) is always a product of our anxiety in the face of the uncontrollable aspects of life and existence, such as mortality, violence, madness or the risk of meaninglessness. For traditional philosophy (and religion) the idea that the world is governed by chance is a scandal that needs to be rebuffed, using an armoury of concepts, systems and structures. For Meillassoux, on the other hand, it is our only source of hope and redemption, as it shows us the possibility that a different world is possible. In both cases, ______31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998), p. 100. 32. Meillassoux would obviously object that his theory, unlike Christian eschatology, is completely immanent and rational.

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however, it is a question of achieving a measure of control over the uncontrollable, even if, in Meillassoux’s case, this ultimately comes down to the control over one’s ability to access truth. This need for control indicates that there is always a modicum of subjective desire or fear underlying the creation of every system, problematizing the idea that reason has access to an order of being that is simply there, objective and timeless. While Meillassoux’s demand for a rationally grounded form of hope (and its implicit question as to whether a progressive politics is even possible without the knowledge that things can fundamentally change) seems pertinent, the hope that his theory offers is, on the face of it, not very inspiring: his eschatological theory focuses on one specific event from a transfinite pool of possibilities, with no guarantee or likelihood that it will ever come to pass. It is highly doubtful that this infinitely remote possibility is enough to create a new form of subjectivity, freed from past disenchantments and invigorated to bring about justice in this world. Even if one were to entertain the prospect that such a god could materialize at some point in the future, that is, if one were to subscribe to Meillassoux’s vision of radical justice, this belief, in its complete disregard for the material conditions and existing power relations within the political status quo, could never become a blueprint for our ethical and/or political decisions. What a true ethics requires is a theory of practice, supported by a materialist, non- contingent understanding of political developments, not a new belief or eschatology (not even a rational one). Meillassoux wants to align his project with Marx’s critique of capitalism, specifically with the latter’s vaguely eschatological dimension (the possibility of a Communist utopia), yet without considering that any form of hope for future salvation (whether by a Christian or a contingent god) always significantly limits the scope, as well as the need for political/ethical agency: ‘The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.’33

______33. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. by Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 72.

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For Marx, hope (religious or otherwise) for future change is always an expression of currently existing social ills, such as material injustices, inequality and economic exploitation, which implies that it is the latter not the former that should be the focus of any progressive, systematic politics. As Martin Hägglund rightly remarks vis-à-vis Meillassoux’s propositions: ‘If we argue that social struggles are not in fact concerned with the religious end they profess but rather with material injustice — that is, if we politicize social struggles — we presuppose [that] struggles for justice are not concerned with transcending the world but rather with survival.’34 While I sympathize with Meillassoux’s demand for a rational absolute to attack political and/or religious dogmatism, I am not convinced of its political efficacy. A correlationist refutation of the very possibility of laying bare the ultimate truth about life and existence (à la Derrida or Bataille) is not synonymous with a surrender of the absolute to religious fanaticism, as he would have it, but precisely a commitment to a radical groundlessness, in which it is not a matter of choosing one’s preferred belief system or accepting any belief whatsoever, but of rationally acknowledging the impossibility of ever attaining any form of absoluteness. The latter is not a facile pluralism in response to questions of faith or politics, but rather an effective weapon against any form of obscurantism, more effective, it would seem, than an appeal to the absolute mathematizability of reality. To put this in terms of Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ and its quandary of chance, discussed at the beginning of this article: we might have to accept that there is no way of deciding who the real Stillman is, or even that both are equally the real Stillman, yet this does not mean that we should wait and hope for some future event (some god/deus ex machina/ontological revolution) to make the choice for us. The decision is ours, and the fact that there is no ultimate level of reality, or ground of being, no final system that can validate our action is precisely ______34. Martin Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux’, The Speculative Turn, pp. 114–29 (p. 129).

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what makes it ethical and meaningful: ‘Is this not the lesson of Kierkegaard — that every translation of ethics into some positive universal frame already betrays the fundamental ethical Call, and thus necessarily gets entangled in inconsistencies? Is the only true ethical stance, therefore, acceptance of this paradox and its challenge?’35 To accept this challenge, however, means to approach the task at hand in a reasonable and systematic fashion, based on the laws of experience and probability, even if reason tells us that they are ultimately contingent.

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle — Paris 3

______35. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 87.