morning wrap-up

Since relatives sometimes check this blog to see what I’m up to during trips, let me start with the things that would interest them most, and then move on to the shop talk.

It’s a beautifully sunny but cool day in Paris. I’ve only worked outdoors today (in the “Great Outdoors,” so to speak), and as long as the weather is this nice I will continue to do it. The stagnant air problem is not yet solved in this otherwise fine apartment. The main drawback to working outdoors is that paper is meant for the indoors. If someone were to write a book about the dependence of certain technologies on other technologies, I would hope for a whole chapter on how paper, as opposed to papyrus, requires indoor use. Pages blow all over the place when you’re outside unless you are very careful.

I worked in the Jardin du Luxembourg (very close to home) and the Cimetière du Montparnasse (not too far). I had lunch at a Syrian place in between. When you enter the cemetery you can’t miss the joint grave of Jean-Paul and Simone, since they are right inside the front gate. And then I always turn right and go to pay my respects to Baudelaire, not too far away. I found a bench near Baudelaire’s grave and worked some more. It was a pleasure to see that bees aren’t entirely extinct yet. It was also strangely pleasant to have a few ants walk across me. Nothing challenges the “disembodied cogito” view of our own lives more, I find, then having our bodies touched by non-human living organisms. (Physical contact with humans is always socially coded in some way or other that removes the brute philosophical shock value of it.) It was weird to think of my left arm as part of the landscape of an ant, whose perceptions and ancestral history are so different form my own. There’s a big difference between me and that ant, but it didn’t prevent physical contact from occurring.

What I’ve been doing is trying to decide which passages of Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine would be most important to include in the appendix to my book for Edinburgh University Press. It is already contractually agreed that there will be such an appendix. Partly it was that Meillassoux preferred that I not be talking about his still unpublished book without his own words (or rather, my own rendering of them into English) being visible to the reader, and partly it makes the book even more marketable if people can get 40 or so pages worth of the mysterious L’inexistence divine along with my own treatment of Meillassoux.

One part of his book that I think will be very important to include in the appendix is the section on Heidegger’s ontological difference. We haven’t seen anything quite like it elsewhere in Meillassoux. He makes a clever reversal of Heidegger’s argument about being and beings. There’s another new aspect to this part of his book… Whereas After Finitude treats the Leibnizo-Heideggerian question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” in somewhat cursory fashion (“there is no reason”), in L’inexistence divine he actually attempts a proof of why there must be something. (Hint: it’s similar to his proof of the law of non-contradiction.)

From there Meillassoux also attempts a proof of the eternity of time, again for similar reasons. Given that After Finitude already attacks the concept of a necessary being, this is Meillassoux’s second assault on one of the Kantian Antinomies.

All readers of Meillassoux know that one of his most admirable traits is his ability to foresee and answer possible subtle objections to his own philosophy. But there’s a bit more to it than that. Plenty of people in philosophy do this, but they do it in steamroller fashion: “Take that! And that! And that!”

The tone is quite different in Meillassoux’s case. He truly relishes possible objections to his philosophy. And it’s not just for the reason he himself gives: that objections make his own philosophy stronger. No, beyond that, he takes genuine pleasure in letting his imaginary objectors speak as fictional characters for several pages before showing why he thinks they are wrong.

In short, we find a dramaturgical vocation in Meillassoux, despite his being so non-theatrical in his self-presentation. (Shakespeare was also said to be non-theatrical in person.)

I asked him about this in an email in June, and he said the observation was correct. He said that his head is filled with all sorts of alternative philosophical systems. He surmised (probably correctly) that Plato was of a similar psychology, and that this was the true root of the dialogue form in Plato’s case.

The most extreme example with Meillassoux is surely “Subtraction and Contraction.” Even at a first glance, it’s his “wildest” piece of work (it also happens to be my favorite of everything he’s written, and is at the top of the list of “things I wish I had written myself”). However, Meillassoux points out that people are wrong who think that this is a presentation of his own views. It’s simply the presentation of a fictional system of philosophy that differs from his own.

This latter digression was made because, as you will see whenever L’inexistence divine appears in print, Meillassoux has not lost his taste for presenting the objections of possible adversaries. And he’s still having fun with it.

What makes it so enjoyable to work on Meillassoux is that his thoughts are always so fresh. Almost never, perhaps absolutely never, do you hear yourself exhaling loudly and saying: “Oh, not that old trench war again.” He invents his own battles as he goes along. And yes, he has fun with it.