lunch with Meillassoux

Good time at lunch today catching up with Quentin Meillassoux’s latest news for a few hours, and there’s always plenty of it. One thing to report is that there are many new translations of Après la finitude coming out in various languages. I believe a half-dozen, though I won’t name them from fear of forgetting one or more and thus causing offense to one or more particular language groups.

This was the first time Meillassoux and I had met since my Edinburgh University Press book came out. Somewhat to my surprise, he was largely in agreement with the interpretation it contains of his philosophy– in particular, he agreed with the point that his philosophy can be viewed as a radicalization of strong correlationism and mine as a radicalization of weak correlationism.

We also discussed Garcia’s Forme et objet, which he liked as much as I do (I’m still in the second half of it but should be finished soon). We are also in agreeement that the second half is a much easier read than the first half, though I suppose pretty much anyone would agree with that point. Although wonderfully written, the first half of Garcia’s book is somewhat reminiscent of Hegel’s Science of Logic in its pursuit of the subtlest variations on a number of conceptual oppositions; much of it is also printed in a remarkably small font. That first part of the book takes 160 pages and is perfectly impressive in its own right. But then the floodgates open and suddenly there is a rushing wave of concrete topics, on all of which Garcia has interesting and unusual views– human rights, time, animals, tragedy, nostalgia for the past as one grows older, and so forth.

Unless he goes through some sort of Rimbaud-like burnout at some point, Garcia is surely going to be the most prolific author we’ve seen in this part of the intellectual world, making those of us who now seem to write a lot look like drugged tortoises by the time he’s done. Along with his novels, he also has an unpublished thesis on aesthetics that is apparently just as long as Forme et objet, and which according to Meillassoux shows nearly encyclopedic reading on the topic. That doesn’t surprise me too much, since I was startled by Garcia’s bibliographical versatility on the topic of time, where he seems just as familiar with the analytic philosophy literature as with the views of Bergson and Whitehead. (That’s becoming more common in France, of course, but was still a bit surprising at this stage.)

Meillassoux also says that Garcia is the only person he’s met in France so far who has actually read Zubíri, or is at least on the verge of reading him. Good.