today’s tough call

Today I had to make the final decision as to what sections of Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine most belong in the Appendix to my book.

Probably the most painful part was that the long sections on Heidegger and Hegel can’t make the cut. People will enjoy those, but priority has to go to Meillassoux’s own argumentation, which contains plenty of surprises in this book: many of them about ethics, by the way. I would tend to call it an ethical book more than a political one. There’s politics there too, but not to the same degree that there is politics in Badiou.

The book also contains a number of brief flowerings of short, essay-like asides, many of them remarkably beautiful, but again too peripheral to merit inclusion in a highly constricted appendix containing the main argument of the book.

At present I’m going to try to squeeze in 8 excerpts, on the following themes:

A. eruption of qualities ex nihilo
B. immortality & messianism
c. symbolization (a new technical term for Meillassoux)
d. the superiority of the human (not only to rocks and animals, but in a sense even to God)
e. fatalism and the dice throw
f. incarnation (yes, he actually has a strange concept of the incarnation of God)
g. atheism (he doesn’t like it, actually)
h. conclusion

That concluding section is an eight-page dazzler.