Interview with Meillassoux
(credit Theological Journeying)
There's an interesting new movement in French philosophy
termed “speculative realism” which attempts to recover a chastened confidence
in reason. There's an interview with one of its leading proponents, Quentin
Meillassoux, over at Idée@Jour. Since, however, it's in French, here's a
translation:
Q. Can metaphysics
speak to these times of crisis?
A. The very fact
of getting back in touch with metaphysical questioning is itself a call to a
refound confidence in the capacities of thought. This confidence certainly
assumes an increased vigilance, bound by the critical heritage of the last
decades, toward the dogmatic illusions which speculative philosophy was able to
haul through the centuries. But we see today that the abandonment of
metaphysical reflection, far from causing the intolerance of thought to
decline, did nothing but exacerbate the desire for a blind faith—as though an
overreaching skepticism towards reason turned into a fanaticism wishing to be
inaccessible to discussion. Resetting ourselves in a metaphysical perspective
permits us to confer anew on the concept—rather than on faith alone or the sole
opportunism of interest—the duty of helping us to construct our existence, to
“vectorise” the concept in its relation to a world both rich and opaque. A
metaphysics instructed by the work of its great adversaries—instructed by its
reversals (Nietzsche), by its destruction (Heidegger), therapeutic dissolution
(Wittgenstein), or deconstruction (Derrida)—sets out both an extraordinary
heritage, a treasure of unique thought towards which we are yet able to
return—and at the same time imposes on us a totally new and exciting task: that
is, how to produce a contemporary metaphysics, able to give a meaning, even a
fragile one, to our lives by the sole force of thought, and one which may be
likely to “pass across” [passer au travers] those tremendous undertakings of
“demolition” which together ran through [traversé] the 20th century.
Q. What are the
paths for metaphysics in 2010?
A. They are
numerous, and the foremost among them bears a relation to the renewed
questioning of its singular: is it still necessary to speak, like Heidegger or
above all Derrida, of metaphysics [“la” métaphysique], or is it better rather
to speak of metaphysics-plural [“des” métaphysiques-pluriel] which echoes the
title of our [new book] series? In effect, this plurality is manifested to us in
at least three ways, which make up three important modalities of contemporary
research:
First of all,
returning to the surface of those metaphysics either forgotten or neglected for
a long time in France, when, that is, they represent alternatives to the grand
classical systems of Aristotle, Descartes or Hegel: a metaphysics no longer of
substance, of the subject, or of the closed system, but of the Open (Bergson),
of the event (Whitehead), of singularity-in-becoming (Simondon), of possession (Tarde),
of the work to be created [l'oeuvre à faire] (Souriau). Many more undertakings
which demonstrate that metaphysics [“la” métaphysique] is not reducible to a
determined collection of concepts which, once disqualified, take with them the
whole of speculative thought.
This power of
the difference [l'altérité] of metaphysics permits us to be comforted in our
hope for its renewal, and that from the heart itself of those currents which
contested it the most radically: Alain Badiou, thinking totally within the
heritage of Lacan's anti-philosophy, takes up in depth the most radical
requirements of Platonism in order to elaborate a system of the undecidable
event and its weak multiplicities; Graham Harman, an American philosopher whose
first work in French we are about to publish, successfully extracts from
Heidegger himself a completely rethought metaphysics of the object.
Finally, this
rediscovery of an “other metaphysics” [autre métaphysique] (according to the
expression of Pierre Montebello) is accompanied by the discovery of a
metaphysics of the other [métaphysique de l'autre]—that is to say, of
“non-Western” peoples. In Métaphysique cannibales, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
establishes that the Amerindians developed a metaphysics of original predation,
a “multinaturalist perspectivism” that philosophy—in particular that of Deleuze
and Guattari—can help us to tackle and understand. Viveiros can then cite, to
support his point, a postface of Lévi-Strauss to a volume of L'Homme, dating
from 2000, which treats of this “metaphysics of original predation” and reveals
to us the gripping evolution of the author of Mythologiques vis-à-vis
philosophy: “...whether one rejoices or worries, philosophy once again occupies
center stage. No longer our philosophy, of which my generation had asked
foreign [exotiques] peoples for help to dismantle [défaire]; but rather, by a
striking turn, theirs.”
One could not
better describe the movement underway: this benefit (bien) from a thirst for
otherness [altérité] and the decentering which metaphysics begins again in the
plural, requiring us to think this profusion in preserving it, as much as we
can, from ancient wanderings.
