like a construction site

This comes from an email from a French reader who finished my Meillassoux book a few days ago. Here he is commenting on the appendix that contains portions of L’Inexistence divine. I think his metaphor is a nice one:

“L’inexistence divine is a very strange text, since the lack of space means only the bare bones of the conceptual effort are presented, and one is warned in advance that Meillassoux has abandoned this version of his text due to unspoken difficulties ; as a result, it feels like visiting a construction building, with foundations and various elements intact but stripped of any decorations or usual pathways, the general project clearly visible, but without being able to tell precisely what made the architect unsatisfied, and what the next building will be like.”

Yes, there’s something about it (in the truncated form in which I had to present it) that’s reminiscent of visiting a temporarily abandoned construction site.

The portions found in my appendix are approximately one-sixth of the total French manuscript as of 2003.

Fun fact: the word “correlationism” does not appear anywhere in the manuscript. He coined that term shortly afterward. There are a few references to words such as “correlate,” but not as many as you’d think.

Badiou’s statement that After Finitude is just a smaller part of a larger work called L’Inexistence divine is somewhat misleading, in fact. The two works were obviously written by the same person, but there’s a lot less overlap than I would have expected based on what he said.

I only had space to incorporate that much of the manuscript. The most painful deletions were Meillassoux’s readings of other philosophers; I seem to recall the Hegel and Heidegger sections as being the most interesting of those, but there were others. Once the decision was made to sacrifice all the “commentary” passages, it wasn’t actually that hard to decide which sections most deserved translation.