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COLLAPSE II
Editorial Introduction
Robin Mackay
This volume comprises a selection of texts, some of
which would not have existed, others of which may not
have been published, and none of which would have ended
up in such odd company, were it not for the underlying
vision of
C
OLLAPSE
, which seeks to generate and to bring
together philosophical writing from varying perspectives
with work drawn from other fields, in order to challenge
institutional and disciplinary orthodoxies and to set in
motion new syntheses. This second volume has emerged,
as did its predecessor, from the combination of this overall
vision, a collaborative process with the authors, and a set
of happy coincidences. The result is, we hope you will
agree, a rich and rewarding set of conceptual conjunctions.
The first part of the volume coalesced into a ‘dossier’
centring on the work of Q
UENTIN
M
EILLASSOUX
, whose
3
COLLAPSE II, ed. R. Mackay (Oxford: Urbanomic, March 2007)
ISBN 978-0-9553087-1-2
http://www.urbanomic.com
COLLAPSE II
recent book
After Finitude
1
is a work designed to fundamen-
tally disrupt that dubious consensus within continental
philosophy which emphasises the primacy of the relation
of consciousness to the world – however that may be
construed – over any supposed objectivity of ‘things
themselves’. It may seem that, in the wake of Kant’s
Copernican Revolution, this ‘correlationist’ credo – the
injunction that, unable to know things ‘in themselves’,
philosophy must limit itself to the adumbration of
‘conditions of experience’ – is unassailable, something that
only the most unsophisticated, ‘pre-critical’ thinker would
seek to challenge. And yet, once this consensus is broken,
the consequences are startling.
In ‘The Enigma of Realism’ R
AY
B
RASSIER
gives a lucid
exposition of this transvaluation of the stakes of contempo-
rary philosophical thought. However, questioning whether
Meillassoux is right to single out the ‘arche-fossil’ as the
privileged site of this contestation, Brassier ultimately
suggests that the curse of correlationism runs deeper still,
and intimates that an even more thoroughgoing ‘deconta-
mination’ of the tools used to critique the current
doxa
might yet be necessary. Brassier’s text already takes us
beyond the scope of Meillassoux’s book, identifying a
number of serious problems which he identifies as issuing
from a ‘fundamental dilemma’ relating to Meillassoux’s
proposal to reinstate some form of intellectual or mathe-
matical intuition. Brassier’s text almost tends toward a
dialogic form, as Meillassoux responds to subsequent
objections with further refinements of his own position.
1.
Après la Finitude: Essai sur la necessité de la contingence
(Paris: Seuil, 2006). English
translation
After Finitude
(trans. R. Brassier) (London: Continuum, forthcoming
2008).
4
Editorial Introduction
Meillassoux’s
audacious
countermanding
of
philosophy’s historical abjuration of speculative
rationalism proceeds via the positing of the ‘necessity of
contingency’ indexed to an absolute time. In ‘Potentiality
and Virtuality’ he sketches a route to this principle via a
discussion of Hume’s problem of causality. With
admirable panache, Meillassoux rescues this perennially
abandoned problem from its alleged epistemological
dissolution and restores it to its most potent ontological
form. This is a question of resisting the pragmatist referral
of ontological problematics to heuristic solutions rooted in
empirical consensus: the apparent necessity of a recourse
to an empirical
genesis
of the law rather than a metaphysi-
cal
grounding
for it, Meillassoux suggests, results from sup-
plementing the terms of the problem with a ‘common-
sense’ judgement that is in turn rooted in an inappropriate
application of probabilistic thinking. Conversely, a philo-
sophical enterprise with the courage of its conviction in
rationality would refuse to concede this ‘defeat of reason’,
daring to affirm on the contrary that there is in fact no
reason to postulate the constancy of natural laws.
Thus Meillassoux sketches the contours of a bold
reclamation of rationalism issuing from the refusal of
particular forms of (probabilistic) reasoning embedded in
‘common-sense’. Rather than seeking a ‘meta-law’ to
subtend the laws of reality, Meillassoux instead loosely
binds reality within the singular rational principle of an
‘absolute contingency’.
It is perhaps owing in part to his relative independence
from the philosophical issues at stake here that our
interview with theoretical cosmologist R
OBERTO
T
ROTTA
5
COLLAPSE II
serves in many ways as the centrepiece of this discussion.
Following as it does upon the more abstractly philosophi-
cal discussions of the previous two papers, and yet circling
around essentially the same issues, this interview serves to
lend instructive insight into the transformation which
ostensibly purely
a priori
philosophical problems undergo
when transposed into the concrete contexts of scientific
research programmes. It would be impossible here to
provide more than the barest sense of the content of this
lengthy conversation, which we feel sure will repay
repeated reading. Fully confirming our faith in the
potential of the interview as a (sadly under-exploited) form
of contemporary intellectual engagement, this conversation
provides an invaluable perspective upon the problems
surrounding the determination of ‘ancestral phenomena’
(Meillassoux’s ‘arche-fossil’) from the privileged ‘insider’
vantage-point of someone immersed in their empirical
study and scientific interpretation on a daily basis.
Touching as it does upon everything from the evidence for
and ontological status of ‘dark matter’ through string
theory, anthropic reasoning, inflationary cosmology and
the meaning of concepts of time and space in cosmological
contexts, this interview not only lends a much-needed
sense of concreteness and specificity to the problems
introduced by Brassier and Meillassoux, but also provides
a helpful and readable introduction to the most up-to-date
problems and findings of contemporary cosmology.
If Meillassoux’s neo-rationalism draws upon the
resources of transfinite mathematics and set-theory in order
to precisely locate the fundamental parameters of rational
thought itself, G
RAHAM
H
ARMAN
’s contribution aims at a
6
Editorial Introduction
different kind of precision, one which perhaps has more
affinity with Bergson’s critique of dialectical concepts as
being ‘too large’, ‘not tailored to the measurements of the
reality in which we live’
2 –
‘baggy clothes’
3
which, covering
everything, reveal little and stifle movement. If Harman,
no less than Meillassoux, seeks to escape the prevailing
doxa
which would see in the relation between conscious-
ness and world the primary hinge of any philosophy
worthy of the name, and if both thinkers are equally intent
on resuscitating a ‘speculative realism’ long-since left for
dead by the philosophical mainstream, it would yet be
difficult to find two more starkly contrasting styles of
philosophizing.
Harman’s inquiry bears no less than Meillassoux’s
upon the problem of ‘correlationism’, however. Against
Meillassoux’s positive desertion of a philosophical demon-
stration of causality, in ‘On Vicarious Causation’ Harman
seeks to revive the problem of causation itself in all its
specificity, beyond the question of whether it can be
known or justified, and claims that the revival of this
problem entails the rejection of Kant’s Copernican turn
‘and its single lonely rift between people and everything
else’. Whereas for Meillassoux the problem is the apparent
facticity of the ‘correlationist gap’, Harman sets out to
generalise this gap, shattering the cosmos into absolutely
disjunct
objects.
Through
his
generalisation
of Heidegger’s famous tool-analysis in
Being and
Time,
Harman attempts to maintain a recognisably
phenomenological commitment to the ontological
2. H. Bergson
Oeuvres
(La
Pensée et le Mouvant)
(Paris: PUF, 1963), 1/1254.
3. G. Deleuze
Bergsonism,
trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), 44.
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