the Meillassoux book

Now that the Meillassoux book cover has been designed before the book has even been written, I’m more motivated to start putting it in order.

Brief interlude: the term “cargo cult” is generally used as an adjective of terrible abusiveness (cf. Feynman’s “cargo cult science”). Practicioners of the cargo cult would do things like build primitive airports and runways, thinking that airplanes filled with goods would arrive as a result. It seems like a simple misreading of cause and effect.

However, cargo cult writing is the only way to go, I think. For example, at a time when I was stalled for months on about page 25 of the dissertation, the way I got out of the stall was to write an acknowledgments page, pretending it was already finished and I was thanking all those who helped me finish it. I never used that page, but it was a nice “Zen” method of getting out of the rut.

Likewise, I’m often spurred to write an impending lecture only when I see the completed flyer for it.

If there is an instinctive hostility toward this from some, then I think it comes from the same mistaken idea about writing that I have often criticized. Namely, there seems to be a view that ideas arise in the head through a pristine process of solitary intellection. Those ideas are then placed on paper as an afterthought, submitted to a publisher as an afterthought, and marketed as a (sadly corrupt but necessary) afterthought.

The Latourian side of me rejects this view completely. Do the ideas in a book fully exist apart from the cover design and a sense of who the market is? Absolutely not. You may be the primary author of your book, but you are not the sole one. Your ideas are not inside your head, but somewhere between your head and all the places and people you’ve interacted with. Books have a specific history that shape what they are.

Back to the Meillassoux book… The project history is as follows. One person (who would have done an outstanding job) was too busy to write a critical short book on After Finitude. The project then came my way, and I realized that I didn’t feel like writing a short critical introductory book on After Finitude. That book is clear and short enough that it probably needs no such companion work.

And yet– does a book on Meillassoux make sense, even at this early stage? Sure. His one brief book has stirred up a few storms in its time already. And beyond this book, there is the sense that it’s “the tip of a much larger philosophical iceberg” (as one of the press reviewers aptly put it).

Along with After Finitude, one can write about some of Meillassoux’s more interesting articles. But the sleeping giant in the picture is his unpublished larger work. To be interested in the project, I had to persuade him to let me translate excerpts and write about them. He agreed.

So now we have the makings of an appealing volume, and the press reviewers concurred… A critical treatment of After Finitude and the commentary it has generated (Hallward, Brown, Brassier, Critchley, and others). A few chapters on selected articles (and I’m an especial fan of “Subtraction and Contraction”, one of those pieces it pains me not to have written myself). An early monopoly on treatment of his concealed major book. And, at the suggestion of one the reviewers, an in-depth interview.

There is also a crucial core problem. Meillassoux is both the leading critic and the leading supporter of correlationism in our midst. A lot hinges on whether we accept Meillassoux’s (essentially German Idealist) view that “to think an unthought X turns it into a thought X”, or whether you accept my view that this is a trap for philosophy. Whether you agree with me (and Zubiri and others) or Meillassoux (and Zizek, Badiou, Lacan), it strikes at the very point where several alternative options of present-day continental philosophy begin to diverge. If done correctly, such a book on Meillassoux is exactly what the speculative realist universe needs right now. I can promise you a great read from this book, no matter which side you end up taking.