a brief thought on Badiou and Meillassoux

Someday someone should (and probably will) write a good essay on the differences between Badiou and Meillassoux.

One simple but important difference that comes to mind is that Meillassoux is even more a thinker of novelty and rupture than Badiou is. For Badiou there is always at least the banal, normal underpinning of the “state of the situation,” and the various truth events are like lightning flashes against that crushing background of banality.

For Meillassoux, by contrast, there really is no state of the situation. The mere fact that my computer is sitting on this desk rather than falling straight through it, flying into the air, or shooting flames at me, is purely contingent since it is set free from the now destroyed principle of sufficient reason. (More generally, I can’t imagine Badiou going as far as throwing the principle of sufficient reason in the trash can.) However, Meillassoux does view several moments of novelty as of privileged importance: the emergence of matter (addendum-g.h.), life, perception, thought, and justice (the latter hasn’t happened yet).

It is still fashionable to think in terms of continuity, process, becoming, but we should remember that the world also consists of breaks, stasis, and endurance, and to make one of these the primary fundament to which the other is reducible means to be stuck in a trench war that has lasted for centuries if not millennia. This is especially unfortunate given that Aristotle was already aware that both were equally primary (though he didn’t formulate it quite that way). I’m speaking of the fact that he realizes in the Physics that various continua (time, space, number, motion, and a few others I’m forgetting) cannot be composed of actual individuals, but that primary substances must be individuals. In fact, that’s one good way to read that pair of Aristotelian masterpieces, the Physics and the Metaphysics: the former deals with the continuous and the latter with the discrete. They aren’t segregated quite that cleanly, but each book is dominated by one of the two.

But to get back to the main point… While working on L’inexistence divine I’m happier than ever with my initial judgment (expressed in the early Philosophy Today review) that Meillassoux inherits much from the occasionalist tradition. But the route through which he did so is presumably Hume, not Malebranche directly.

And back to the initial topic of this post… Meillassoux could definitely be described as a sort of Humean. Could the same be said about Badiou? I’ll leave that question to the Badiou specialists, but personally I don’t sense an especially close intellectual kinship between Badiou and Hume. That may be the key to understanding the differences between Badiou and Meillassoux.