front page of the NY Times on the Japanese reactor

The photo caption says this:

“The worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986 is unfolding in northern Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Three reactors have been critically damaged and one caught fire.”

Garcia interview in French

Looks like there was an original French version of the interview. As will be seen even from the English, Dr. Garcia positions himself as follows:

“…les thèses que je défends en métaphysique (qui sont proches du courant qu’on appelle le « réalisme spéculatif » de Quentin Meillassoux ou Graham Harman) font partie du même univers mental que les romans que j’ai écrits ou que j’aimerais écrire.”

On a related note, here’s another way to contrast Meillassoux’s conception of the thing-in-itself with my own.

It must always be remembered that Meillassoux admires the correlationist starting point in a way that I don’t. For Meillassoux, any realism that doesn’t survive the test-by-fire of the correlational circle is just a naive realism that hasn’t risen to the correlationist challenge. Meillassoux sees himself as having given a proof that the thing-in-itself exists rather than simply asserting it as the naive realists do.

Someone wrote in a few months ago and claimed that I can’t say that Meillassoux remains committed to the correlational circle, since he ends up proving the thing-in-itself. And true enough, this is what Meillassoux would also say in his own defense; as you’ll see in the interview I did with him in the Edinburgh book, he’s not at all happy with my claim that his position towards the thing-in-itself is not significantly different from that of German Idealism.

But it needs to be noted that Meillassoux’s concept of the thing-in-itself is already a post-Kantian version of it. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exceeds, not human access, but only the human lifespan. Mt. Everest exists in itself because it was there before humans were alive and will still be there even if all humans are exterminated.

But remember, that’s not all that “thing-in-itself” means. The thing-in-itself, in Kant’s conception of it, doesn’t just exist before we are born and after we die. The point is that even while we are alive, indeed even while we are staring directly at it, it is more than our knowledge of it.

However, that’s the side of Kant that I like, not the side that Meillassoux likes. Meillassoux is committed to immanence and absolute knowledge and opposed to finitude, which he sees as the breeding ground of superstition and mysterious hidden reasons.

One consequence is that Meillassoux focuses too heavily on temporality in his examples of the in-itself. He has to point to the pre-human age (ancestrality) or pre- & post-human ages together (diachronicity) to try to shock the reader into seeing the limits of the correlate, even as he downplays the spatial remoteness of a vase falling in a lonely country house. He also has no interest in the part-whole relations within a single instant as studied by mereology; there is no layered universe in Meillassoux as you find in someone like DeLanda with his multitude of scales– for Meillassoux, what is immanent in the field of awareness is what there is, with the simple bonus that it might continue to be that way even after you’re dead.

In short, I think Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself is a concept of the thing-in-itself that remains fatally tainted by its origin in the human-world correlate. It’s simply not an in-itself at all, even if it outlasts my lifespan and that of all humans. The fact that absolute knowledge of mathematized primary qualities strikes some as epistemologically and politically desirable does not mean that it’s possible. (One of the interesting things about Meillassoux, Badiou, and Žižek is that all are great admirers of Heidegger, yet Heidegger’s central ideas leave virtually no trace on any of them, not even by way of reaction. It’s an interesting problem, in fact, how they can all admire Heidegger so much yet make so little use of him. Admiration plus relative indifference is not the most common thing in the history of philosophy, as far as I can recall at the moment, on the fly.)

One other point about After Finitude… I think people are making too much of the point that Meillassoux jumps too quickly from the conceivability of my death to the contingency of everything else. The “conceivable mortality of the idealist subject” part of the book is more just a rhetorical device, not the main line of Meillassoux’s proof. The main line of the proof is that something might exist outside the correlate no matter how contradictory this might sound. And this means that both sides of the correlate are contingent, not just the “subject” side.

However, I think this proof fails for a different reason, as explained in my book. The in-itself is first reduced to meaninglessness by Meillassoux, but then it needs to have meaning in order to undercut subjective idealism. But the problem with this is that you can’t first say “the notion of an unthought tree is meaningless, because that very notion is already a thought” (Meillassoux supports the correlationist at this stage and opposes naive realism) and then say “but maybe there’s an unthought tree anyway.” Because on Meillassoux’s own terms, the latter phrase is only speaking about a tree that is thought, not about an unthought tree. He’s already broken that sword, and can’t now bring it back into the battle.

In short, once you concede the correlational circle’s ability to suck all statements into its vortex and turn them into statements about thoughts, you can’t then use one of those very statements to escape the circle.

I conclude that Meillassoux’s “strong correlationism” is an impossible position, and therefore so is the “speculative materialism” that he generates by reversing it. In my view you have to choose between naive realism, (Kantian) weak correlationism, and subjective idealism. I choose the second option, for reasons drawn from Heidegger’s tool-analysis, and simply expand it so that the finitude of reality governs inanimate beings no less than it does humans.

Stated differently, I try to radicalize weak correlationism, while Meillassoux tries to radicalize strong correlationism. He tacitly holds that I can’t do the former because weak correlationism is inconsistent; I explicitly hold that he can’t do the latter because strong correlationism does not exist: it is merely idealism in sheep’s clothing.

If people still don’t think there’s a real difference between OOO’s approach to the thing-in-itself and Meillassoux’s, consider the following piece of anecdotal evidence. When asked to name the most underrated thinker in the history of philosophy, Meillassoux answered “Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon.” This tells you something further about his attitude toward the Kantian an sich. I suppose my own current vote would for most underrated would be Brentano, who has many influences but is in many ways basically a modernizer of Aristotle. I admire Aristotle more than Hegel, while for Meillassoux it is clearly the reverse. (Both are great, of course, but you’re going to prefer one or the other, and that’s going to have consequences).

worst since Chernobyl

And in Japan, of all places, already the only country to be bombed with atomic weapons:

“The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago…

‘We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,’ said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University…

‘It’s way past Three Mile Island already,’ said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. ‘The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.'”

Tristan Garcia interviewed

In The Varsity. It’s mostly about his first novel, but there’s a bit about philosophy. CLICK HERE.

His philosophical work Forme et objet. Traité des choses was supposed to be published by PUF in January, but apparently it will be somewhat later. It’s not published yet, in any case.

first good news from Libya for awhile

“Rebels appear to slow government forces’ advance in Libya”

Good.

The Arab League voted to support a no-fly zone, and the rebels seem to want it. So, should there be one?

I suppose that depends on what is of paramount importance for you here. Is “the West should not be involved in any way, because that’s imperialism” the #1 priority on your list here? I suppose it’s #3 or #4 for me: not negligible by any means, but nowhere near #1.

#1 on my list is: “the rebel stronghold at Benghazi must be protected at all costs.” If Qaddafi reaches and crushes Benghazi, not only will it be a horrific scene, but then we will all be left sitting here not only watching Qaddafi continue to rule a country, we will also be left to watch our governments cut petro-deals with him after a face-saving amount of time has passed, or even before. And that would be sickening. How could we live with ourselves if we were to let the opposition in Benghazi be pulverized?

#2 on my list is probably: “Qaddafi must be thrown out.” I do very much want to see him thrown out, but not “at all costs.” Namely, I don’t think there should ever be any invasion by Western ground forces. Cheer on the opposition, and perhaps even arm them and protect them from the air, but that’s the limit of what I’d be willing to support right now. Also, I suppose we can live with Qaddafi for awhile as long as there’s a solid opposition chunk of Libya still in existence.

We also can’t pretend neutrality here. A no-fly zone means committing to pushing Qaddafi out eventually (sooner rather than later, one hopes), and living with the inconvenience to petro-supplies that this will entail.

In short, I suppose we can live with Qaddafi still in Tripoli for awhile, if the costs of doing otherwise seem too high. But I think any cost short of Western ground intervention is worth paying to protect Benghazi. I don’t want to spend a brutal week watching that city retaken by the government.

The Arab League support of a no-fly zone is politically very big.

Japan nuclear situation

It looks worse every time I check the news, and doubtless the current situation is worse than the news media has been able to discover. Normally one would say “multiple heads are sure to roll after this,” but that will be trivial when it happens compared to the damage that has apparently been done by not designing plants to withstand huge earthquakes and tsunamis in a part of the world regularly hammered by huge earthquakes and tsunamis. For all I know, maybe there’s no way to construct plants to that level of durability, but if that’s the case, then Japan shouldn’t have them anyway.

As for the death toll, I’m hearing 5,000 unaccounted for in one place, and a town of 20,000 where half are unaccounted for. So, it still seems likely that the dead will be in the tens of thousands.

book review coming on Tahrir tweets

I’ve been asked to write a lengthy review of a possibly very interesting new book: a selection of tweets from Tahrir Square. If done well, it could be a fascinating work. They’re trying to put it out quickly, it seems, while events are still fresh in memory.

Heidegger/Leibniz article

My article was just published online in Cultural Studies Review. It’s available HERE.

It’s based on a lecture of a similar title that I gave at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh quite awhile ago: April 2005.