2nd of 4 Philosophy Today articles now online

My 2007 review, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” HERE.

Occasionally you’ll see the claim (from Robin Mackay) that Brassier’s review of Après la finitude in Collapse was the first of the book in English. Hard to blame Mackay for that, since he’s trying to promote his own journal.

However, though Brassier’s review and mine were published in the same week in March 2007 (it may not be humanly possible to determine which came first; it was like two near-simultaneous explosions), mine was written many months earlier (in July/August 2006), at a time when Brassier had not yet read Meillassoux’s book. (Brassier did tip me off to the existence of the book after a trip to Paris in early 2006, but he was busy for a number of months thereafter and was only able to flip through it at first. I was fairly free at the time and thus dived into the book immediately, and it was on the basis of my glowing email report on the book, from Akureyri, Iceland, that Brassier proposed the first Speculative Realism event. The history is discussed briefly in my book Towards Speculative Realism.)

As an indie publication, Collapse is simply much faster about getting things into print once they’re written than is a mainstream university journal like Philosophy Today, even though David Pellauer did everything humanly possible to push forward the publication of my review (just because reviews are always more valuable the closer in time they are to the initial publication of the book).