thoughts on Meillassoux from Irving, Texas

This comes from EFFERVESCENT CRUCIBLES, a blog previously unknown to me, which has an apparent theological bent (to judge from the closing remarks).

If anyone still doubts my point that Meillassoux’s position is basically pro-correlationist, just have a look at his Goldsmiths talk in the Collapse volume where all our talks are contained. His defense of Fichte couldn’t possibly be clearer than it is there.

Somehow, I think the rest of us Speculative Realists initially read right past that aspect of After Finitude. (Though I haven’t read my Philosophy Today review of the book in awhile, I think I fretted about some troubling hints of lingering correlationism in Meillassoux’s position– but they aren’t “hints” at all; they are instead an explicit championing of the basic correlationist argument.)

But the “ancestrality” point sounds at first so much like a typical argument in favor of realism that we took it literally and gladly to be such. But as Meillassoux put it in Maastricht in October 2007 (he was speaking to the Lacanians there; I was present in the audience) he views ancestrality as merely an interesting aporia for correlationism, not a full-fledged argument against it.

Someone who did not miss that aspect of After Finitude on the first reading was Didier Debaise (who is also a friend and critical admirer of Meillassoux, not an angry opponent).