follow-up on Subtraction and Contraction

Meillassoux wrote yesterday and mentioned that he actually does like “Subtraction and Contraction” a lot. I was apparently reading too much into our conversation about it a few years ago, in which he seemed to distance himself slightly from the article. Apparently he is just mystified that some have taken it as an expression of his own views, when it’s really a “philosophy fiction” exercise. As I’ve said before, it’s a genre that deserves to catch on. The proliferation of reasonably plausible philosophical systems by a single author who doesn’t believe most of them ought to be a fertile field of work.

But it would also be quite tiring. There’s a reason why systematic philosophers are so repetitive. It’s hard to convince oneself even of one’s own philosophy, and so from time to time it is necessary to go back and cover everything from the start, work your way back to where you were last time, and then go a bit further, maybe just 10% further with each book. Over time, you learn to compress your earlier ideas; in The Quadruple Object I managed to compress all the Tool-Being ideas into less than 30% of the book. And then, you try to go a little bit further. But you can’t do a book like that with purely new material, because that’s not how systematic philosophy works. The previous ideas have to be incorporated into their offshoots, and that requires repetition.

With Meillassoux it’s much the same. In the book manuscript the metaphor I came up with was this… Imagine that Meillassoux is trying to cross from western to eastern France on foot, but that he is forced to use the technique of a long jumper. Every time he wants to make another jump, he has to go all the way back to western France and make a running start. Then, when he gets to the chalk line of where he last stopped, he leaps into the air again and lands in a new place we never expected, but a place that much closer to the eastern border of France. He’ll get there eventually; his jumps are pretty long.