a few thoughts on Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s long open letter to Tristan Garcia

I mentioned this piece a few days ago. It doesn’t seem to be on the web, but can be found in La revue littéraire, 52, pp. 111-165. The title of the piece is simple “Lettre à Tristan Garcia,” and that’s exactly what it is. At times, Belhaj Kacem makes too many oblique references to his own philosophy, but for the most part it is a readable and invigorating piece that will be intelligible to anyone who has read Garcia’s book.

The basic premise of the article is that 1965-70 was a great period in philosophy from which we are only now beginning to emerge, thanks to the work of a new generation of philosophers. He means the speculative realists, naming me and Meillassoux very often while referring as well to “others whose work is not yet available in French.” Garcia’s wonderful big book is then depicted as further progress beyond speculative realism.

In short, the picture painted by Belhaj Kacem of contemporary philosophy is highly flattering to me and to others whose fortunes I care about. In that sense, I can hardly complain about it, and I did enjoy reading it quite aside from that aspect of it.

But there are a few critical responses I want to make to his piece anyway.

1. At least twice, and arguably three times, Belhaj Kacem claims that I believe the primary qualities of things can be directly known by mathematics. Absolutely not! That’s Meillassoux, not me. I disagree with that claim completely. It could not be further from my views. At one point Belhaj Kacem seems to have gotten that interpretation of my work from my remarks on Husserl in L’Objet quadruple. But I was very clear in that book that while I do make room for the Husserlian eidos in my fourfold model, I do not by any means accept Husserl’s claim that the eidos can be directly intuited by the mind. This is the part of Husserl that I openly contest, and that I identify with his idealism.

So, how can someone as smart as Belhaj Kacem get me so wrong on this point? I think it’s because he’s overcommitted to the next point to the list, and this leads him to efface the differences between me and Meillassoux, which were always pronounced but are growing even more so.

2. Belhaj Kacem sees Badiou as the dominant elder godfather of the new generation of thinkers, including Meillassoux, Garcia, and me.

One could argue for this, just as one could argue for almost any such claim. The problem with making this claim in such sweeping fashion is that Meillassoux, Garcia, and I have vastly different intellectual relations to Badiou. Vastly.

For instance, imagine that someone were to say: “Meillassoux’s philosophy can be viewed as a further development of Badiou’s,” this statement has an obvious surface plausibility. Meillassoux has direct personal contact with Badiou, admires him a lot, and they share a number of obvious points in common. One could debate this or that aspect of the influence. One could claim that some of Badiou’s new ideas in Logics of Worlds ironically show the influence of the younger Meillassoux. And Meillassoux might even downplay the influence of his Badiou on his philosophy, because that’s what we all tend to do when people try to tie us too closely to our mentors. (It can feel like they’re trying to downplay the originality of our own ideas.) But all that aside, there’s nothing remotely controversial about saying “Meillassoux’s philosophy can be viewed as a further development of Badiou’s.” Easy point for Belhaj Kacem to make.

Now, imagine someone were to say “Garcia’s philosophy can be viewed as a further development of Badiou’s.” This is more problematic, but it’s precisely what Belhaj Kacem tries to argue for most of his essay. He comes up with more points in common between Badiou and Garcia than I would have anticipated. Not all of them are equally convincing, but I’m convinced that a tenable thesis can be put forth that reads Garcia as a reaction to the Badiouian climate in Paris in which he came of age. There was some personal contact there as well, so it’s not entirely ridiculous, and Belhaj Kacem (whose own admiration for Badiou is obvious throughout the piece) does a lot of work to show the link.

But now try this: “Harman’s philosophy can be viewed as a further development of Badiou’s.” There’s nothing a priori ridiculous about it (it’s been tried at least twice already). But it’s also a little bit weird, or at least counterintuitive. I’ve written little about Badiou, like but don’t love his books, and anyway, Latour is the much more obvious contemporary French influence on my work. The problem is that Belhaj Kacem makes no detailed case that I too can be viewed as a distant echo of Badiou. And given that he completely misreads my views on whether mathematics enables us to know the primary qualities of things, it seems that he’s not all that clear on how my position differs from Meillassoux’s.

3. Further evidence of this comes when he calls me a “post-Meillassouxian” at one point in the article. I have great admiration for Meillassoux talents as a thinker, but I first heard his name in early 2006, at which time I had already published Tool-Being and Guerrilla Meaphysics and finished writing Heidegger Explained (which took almost two years to get on the shelf after it was completed). I love the polemical force of the term “correlationism,” but there isn’t too much else in common between me and Meillassoux other than that.

4. Though Belhaj Kacem mostly treats me quite well in his article, there’s a rather overwrought footnote (#1 on page 118) in which he can’t believe the supposed stupidity of something I said– namely, my statement in The Quadruple Object about how I can certainly endorse the fourfold structure of Badiou’s events. Belhaj Kacem expresses exasperation at my supposed insistence on this supposedly superficial similarity between my model and Badiou’s.

But first of all, that was a largely tongue in cheek reference, which is why it ends with an exclamation point.

Second of all, I’m the one who keeps on insisting that not all fourfold structures in the history of philosophy are the same (which doesn’t stop people from lecturing me several times per year in print about how Heidegger’s Geviert isn’t the same as someone else’s fourfold; well, no kidding). What does link fourfold structures throughout the history of philosophy, however, is that they always result from the overlap of two distinct dualisms. And this is the more overarching sense in which Badiou’s fourfold typology of events can be read in terms of my theory, simply because all fourfold structures work that way. For this reason it was a bit odd to read Belhaj Kacem saying such negative things about that particular claim about Badiou.

And here’s the wider irony. Belhaj Kacem makes what seems to be a grossly exaggerated claim about my philosophcial debt to Badiou (he never argues it, and it would be a much tougher case to make than for Meillassoux or Garcia). And then he flips around and accuses me of claiming greater closeness to Badiou than I actually have.

5. In my opinion, Belhaj Kacem also misses the point about speculative realism’s relation to Kant, a point that was settled here in the Anglophone blogosphere back in about 2009.

Kant is a giant on the stage of philosophy, and it’s safe to say that every great philosophy since 1781 is in some sense in Kant’s shadow. In that sense, you can’t really say that any philosophy as a whole is “anti-Kant.” But what you can say is that this or that philosophy is anti-Kant on one or more specific issues.

And in that respect, there’s nothing at all wrong if the speculative realists say (or at least said, once upon a time) that they are anti-Kant on the issue of correlationism.

The problem is that not all speculative realists dislike Kantian correlationism for the same reason. As shown in my Edinburgh book on Meillassoux (HERE), Meillassoux dislikes the commitment to finitude in Kant’s position, which is what I most love about Kant. What I dislike about Kant is the part that Meillassoux likes– his focus on the couplet of human and world, and his assumption that we can talk about this relation in a way that we cannot talk about cotton-fire or stone-stone relations.

But the point here is Belhaj Kacem, and at one point he accuses me of a “gimmick” for claiming to be “anti-Kantian” even though my heroes Husserl and Heidegger could never have existed without Kant. Sure enough, Kant was a great one, and I agree that Husserl and Heidegger are unthinkable figures in a world where Kant was never born. But how, exactly, does that mean that I’m not allowed to oppose Kant on specific points?

And Belhaj Kacem gets it wrong in this context yet again when he says that Meillassoux and I agree with Badiou that you can solve the problem of the Kantian noumena by accessing them directly via mathematics. As said, that is simply false as a description of my position, and makes sense only if an interpreter is overcommitted to the notion that I am similar to Meillassoux and an heir of Badiou, both of which are more false than they are true.

Belhaj Kacem also expresses agreement with this supposedly shared view of Badiou, Meillassoux, and me. He says he agrees that Kant’s completely unknowable things in themselves are bad, and also that they are contradicted by the apodictic certainty that Kant grants to mathematics. But I don’t agree with any of this, and wish that Belhaj Kacem hadn’t associated me with Badiou and Meillassoux on one of the points where I disagree with them most explicitly and vehemently.

But again, the main topic of the article is Garcia, and Belhaj Kacem’s article should be judged primarily on how much light it sheds on Garcia. And I’d have to say that I learned a number of things about Garcia by reading the piece, simply because Belhaj Kacem seems to know Garcia well, and seems to have put a lot of thought into Garcia’s similarities with and differences from Badiou.