One of the things I said to Žižek during Tuesday’s discussion

At the end of Tuesday’s discussion, I told Žižek that he takes Meillassoux’s use of the word “realism” in the wrong sense. For Žižek, Meillassoux makes an illegitimate leap outside the correlational circle, and should realize that this is impossible. Instead, the distinction between the real and the thought is internal to thought itself. Standard German Idealist move, and Žižek seems to think that Meillassoux falls short of it.

But this is based on an overemphasis on Meillassoux’s talk of ancestrality and the arche-fossil. Some people take these passages to mean that Meillassoux is saying: “See how wrong the correlationist is! Science proves that the correlationist is wrong!”, and assume that Meillassoux is therefore making a direct appeal to ancestrality against the correlationst.

Hardly. Meillassoux remains an admirer of the correlational circle to the bitter end. Indeed, Meillassoux is almost as Hegelian as Žižek himself, and certainly agrees with Žižek that the distinction between the real and the thought is internal to thought itself. It’s just that Meillassoux thinks that among all that is accessible to thought, some of it is mathematizable, and thus it could have existed before all humans existed and might exist after all humans are extinct. But I doubt even Žižek would deny that things can continue to exist after all humans are extinct. He is not an idealist in the rather strange definition proposed by Meillassoux in After Finitude, according to which idealism means that the existence of the subject is necessary. Presumably even Žižek thinks that humans and all other possible thinking creatures might someday vanish.

Hence, there isn’t really that big a difference between Meillassoux and Žižek on ontology, they they both (wrongly) insist that there is. Žižek falsely thinks that Meillassoux is making a bona fide leap beyond the correlational circle, and Meillassoux accuses Žižek by saying (in the interview in my book) that just as a wobbly table is still a table, a wobbly subject is still a subject. Meillasssoux thinks that he himself gets outside the subject but that Žižek never does.

My answer is that neither of them ever gets outside the subject. Both Meillassoux and Žižek assume that Meillassoux does, with Meillassoux simply asserting that this is good and innovative and Žižek apparently viewing it as a sort of pre-Hegelian relapse. But in fact, Meillassoux never gets outside the correlational circle in the first place, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.

Now, Meillassoux would disagree with this whole characterization quite intensely, for the following reason. For Meillassoux what is most characteristic and most toxic about the correlational circle is its skeptical finitude. We are trapped in the human-world correlate and can never gain absolute knowledge. But by purportedly obtaining absolute knowledge through mathematization, Meillassoux calls an end to the finitude of the correlational circle, and therefore an end to the circle itself.

I counter that finitude was never the problem with the human-world correlate. The problem, instead, is that it’s a human-world correlate (I’m using “human” here to prove a point; Meillassoux would probably say thought-world instead, so let’s switch to that terminology now). And Meillassoux does not escape the thought-world correlate any more than does Žižek or any other Hegelian. Meillassoux thinks he has a non-idealist position that stems from a radicalization of strong correlationism. But I have argued (in my book on Meillassoux) that strong correlationism is not a possible position to begin with, that it immediately implodes into idealism. A nonexistent position cannot be radicalized, and hence Meillassoux’s “speculative” position is impossible.

What was truly grievous in correlationism was the human-world part, not the finitude part. The finitude part is inevitable, for the simple reason that knowledge of a thing is never the same as the thing itself, and hence some translation must occur from one to the other. I take this to be Kant’s most formidable and most lasting insight.

Žižek didn’t really have a response to my point, though he can hardly be blamed for that, having just finished 6 hours of a typical James Brown-like performance. He can hardly be expected to answer an ontology objection off-the-cuff like that. However, he did briefly revert to the “you’re just trapped in the transcendental standpoint” maneuver, which is what I always expect from Hegelians, and in fact Žižek may never offer a different answer from that. (Even Meillassoux hasn’t answered me much better than that so far.)

Ironically, for Meillassoux it is I who am the ally of Hegel, since I’m classified (along with Nietzsche, Deleuze, Bergson, and Whitehead) as a “vitalist,” and vitalists have everything in common with Hegel. This is entirely wrong, but I’ll explain why in a longer publication rather than in a blog post.