following up on a point by Stuart Elden

Stuart writes:

“L’inexistence divine was going to be a must-read anyway, but even more so now. But it may be some time before it’s out, so Graham’s translations in his book on Meillassoux may well be the first access we have to it.”

Yes, this will definitely be the first access everyone has to it.

To repeat the story… When I agreed to write the book, I immediately contacted Meillassoux and asked for access to the manuscript. He thought about it for a couple of days, then agreed, under one condition: I should not write about any part of L’Inexistence divine unless it was contained in my own book as an appendix.

Now, it would obviously be silly to put a huge appendix in French in an Edinburgh University Press book (I doubt Edinburgh would have agreed, and doubt even more that the future French publisher of the book would have agreed). So, this book turned into a bit of an unexpected translation project as well. For obvious reasons these are non-exclusive translation rights, since someone else will surely want to translate and publish the whole thing when it comes out.

I had “budgeted” 20,000 of the 100,000 words of the book for excerpts from L’Inexistence divine. In the end, it was painful enough even to cut the total back to 27,000 words, and that’s the amount on which I finally decided.

The first draft of the translation is finished. I chose 13 sections of unequal length, some of them consecutive and others not. My goal, of course, was to choose sections that would provide a reasonably coherent argument when pieced together. I severely cut those sections that repeat what is already said in After Finitude, and also had to be painfully parsimonious with Meillassoux’s many highly original readings of a number of figures from the history of philosophy. His pages comparing Hegel and Heidegger were of especial interest to me, but there was simply no way to fit them into my Edinburgh book.

Along with 27,000 words from L’Inexistence divine, you’ll get around 6,500 words of interview. Taken together, that’s a full third of the length of the book; the other two-thirds will be my own thoughts on all of Meillassoux’s publications in English so far, as well as my thoughts on L’Inexistence divine.

One of numerous pieces of new information that arose during the interview was the fact that Meillassoux has another 4 or 5 manuscripts already written, and the topics of those works will surprise you. He’s a rather perfectionistic character, and endlessly polishes and re-polishes his work before publication. Much evidence for this can already be seen in After Finitude itself; someone —I think it may have been Nick Srnicek— compared Meillassoux to a gem cutter. It’s a good analogy: high-precision work is his trademark.