more on the Meillassoux book

This book should go very quickly. The intensity of the hours spent on L’objet quadruple since mid-July has simply been due to the fact that I’m speaking about my own ideas in that book, which is an inherently slow and somewhat cautious process. You can’t just try to figure out what someone else wrote about, but need to know if your own ideas work. Here there’s no help to be had, and you’re pretty much on your own, which makes it both rewarding and quite demanding.

Writing about other people’s ideas, by contrast, is much faster. The whole first half of Prince of Networks was written and polished in three weeks, for instance, and the slowdown for the rest was, again, because the second half of that book consists of my own ideas.

The plan is that I’ll return to Paris at the end of January to speak with Meillassoux a bit more, pick up whatever additional materials he wants to share, and maybe speak with a few more of “his people” there, just to get a sense for how they see him and what their dealings with him have been like. A little bit of philosophical journalism.

Most readers of this blog will already be familiar with After Finitude and some of Meillassoux’s published articles, but there’s a much larger iceberg beneath the surface, and I’ll be trying to give a sense of that (and to do so, I’ll also need to learn more than I currently know).

There are several reasons that this project appealed to me. The first and obvious one is that Meillassoux is an unusually fascinating thinker, and it’s always a pleasure to read and think about his work. The second is that I knew I could use this project as leverage to convince him to let me see the manuscript of L’inexistence divine, since discussion of that book will be a major element in the appeal of any book about Meillassoux.

Third and finally, but perhaps of greatest appeal, is that I don’t know if a book like this has ever been attempted before… A real-time study of the emergence of a potentially very significant philosopher. Usually these people either creep up on you gradually over decades, or like Heidegger they explode onto the scene fully-formed: other than Heidegger’s studentish early works, Being and Time was essentially his first book, and at that point he was already the Heidegger we know today.

Meillassoux is a different case… Someone who obviously makes a spectacular impression even with his first short book, widely read and admired internationally, but a book that is obviously not yet his full-blown system (as Badiou even says in the foreword). I strongly doubt that any book has ever been written on a philosopher at that particular stage, and it opens up some pretty unique possibilities that have me really excited as an author.

The original request was for a guide to After Finitude, and while that would have been a worthy project in its own right, I was able to persuade Edinburgh (quite easily) that the situation called for something a bit more than that.

The revised Table of Contents goes like this…

1. Biographical
2. After Finitude
3. Subtraction and Contraction
4. Other Articles and Lectures
5. L’inexistence divine
Appendix with excerpts from L’inexistence divine
Interview, at a position within the book still to be determined

Chapter 5 will be the longest, and perhaps of most interest to the public.

As for Chapter 3… I wanted a whole chapter on “Subtraction and Contraction” simply because that’s my favorite of Meillassoux’s writings, and I rewarded myself for doing this project by allowing myself a chapter-length reflection on it. It’s in Collapse III in English, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading it, and is perhaps the one thing written by someone else that I most wish I had written personally.

Meillassoux insisted on the Appendix with the excerpts from L’inexistence divine, and it’s both a good idea and a fair one… I shouldn’t be the only source of public information about what is in that still unpublished book. The reader deserves direct access to the passages that I will select for comment. You’ll all remember the Deleuze excerpts at the back of Badiou’s book, but in this case it’s even more important, since you won’t be able to get those passages anywhere else– or at least not quite yet.