4. “There is contingent being independent of us, and this contingent being has no reason to be of a subjective nature”
Interview with Quentin Meillassoux [3]
Q1: Your debut book After Finitude ([2006] 2008) is considered by many to be one of the fiercest attacks on the history of modern thought, critiquing its humanism, its immanent metaphysics, its anti-materialism. You rigorously develop what you refer to as speculative materialism by means of rewriting this history, or as you refer to it, by rewriting correlationalism. This term is conceptualized throughout the book and has certainly triggered many scholars—sometimes referred to as the speculative realists (see Bryant et al, eds. 2011)—to develop a new philosophy of science and a new view on how move away from Kant. Correlationism, which you refer to as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 5) is severely critiqued by others who use this term. For you, however, the correlationist standpoint deserves great respect, which you do not just critique, but rather “radicalize from within: as an ‘inside job,’” as Harman (2011a, 25) puts it.
In this book, which is mapping what we refer to as a new materialism, we felt no need to include or exclude particular scholars, and thus we also see no reason to count you in (or out). What we do notice is that we outline a similar trajectory to your own, albeit that these trajectories are developed in very different ways. Can you give us a rough sketch of the path you have been taking, giving much attention to this most complex idea of “correlationism”?
Quentin Meillassoux: In my book I frontally oppose two positions: a) “strong correlationism” which, in my opinion, is the most rigorous form of anti-absolutism, and therefore of contemporary anti-metaphysics, and b) a metaphysics I call “subjective,” which, conversely, is nowadays the most widespread philosophy of the absolute, one which consists in posing this or that feature of the subject as essentially necessary—that is, its status as part of a correlate.
Let us specify this distinction. In chapter 1 of After Finitude, I define correlationism in general as an anti-absolutist thesis: one uses the correlate “subject-object” (broadly defined) as an instrument of refutation of all metaphysics to enforce that we would have access to a modality of the in-itself. Instead, for correlationism, we cannot access any form of the in-itself, because we are irremediably confined in our relation-to-the-world, without any means to verify whether the reality that is given to us corresponds to reality taken in itself, independently of our subjective link to it. For me, there are two main forms of correlationism: weak and strong (see chapter 2, p. 42 for the announcement of this difference and p. 48 ff. for its explanation). Weak correlationism is identified with Kant’s transcendental philosophy: it is “weak” in that it still grants too much to the speculative pretension (e.g. absolutory) of thought. Indeed, Kant claims that we know something exists in itself, and that it is thinkable (non-contradictory). “Strong” correlationism does not even admit that we can know that there is an “in-itself” and that it can be thought: for this we are radically confined in our thought, without the possibility of knowing the in-itself, not even its taking place and logicity...continued
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