Meillassoux Extractions

Fabio at Hypertilling has posted an interview with the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux by what seem to be two musicians. I didn’t look too much into the backstory because I wasn't intending to read the whole article (PDF).

There are a few things in Meillassoux’s work that I have enjoyed. For instance I have a growing interest in his notions of “ancestral” statements and the “arche-fossil”. For me, the presence of the ancestral in human experience reminds us is that we are intricately enmeshed in the activities of life on this planet. That is, Meillassoux prompts me to pay more attention to the ontological intimacy of the world.

At the same time Meillassoux’s notion of “hyperchaos” generally bores and confuses me (and in that order) - as he seems to be almost saying that because there seems to be no good reason why the universe could be otherwise, everything otherwise is therefore possible. I hope I’m reading him wrong, but I don’t want to read more and find out how either. At the end of the day I don’t think I have the intellectual stamina for his brand of theorization.

Here are some interesting extractions from the interview I was not going to read: 

“The capacity of thought cannot be richer than the capacity of reality. If we can imagine so many things, this must be just the shadow of reality: imagination cannot exceed reality.” (p.3)


“I propse that philosophy must again grasp the possibility of fighting religion, the new forms of religion, through this redefinition of rationality. I would say that rationality is really the possibility of being intelligently crazy. And what I try to do is to deduce the strange constraints of the absolutely rational world – there are constraints, but only rational constraints.” (p.5)


“You know, can philosophy have a special object, or is it just a reflection of other discourses? All the positive sciences, one after another domain of reality: physics, medicine, linguistics, metaphysics, have escaped from philosophy, and philosophers have retreated: we cannot make physics but we can reflect philosophically upon it ... When I try to explain to myself what ‘the thing itself’, the object of philosophy, really means. The thing itself – I think it means the following: every positive science is a science about a fact, a primordial fact. So philosophy would just be a reflection about facticity in itself. And facticity in itself is not a possibility of a science, it is the possibility of science in general, because all sciences – except for mathematics, all natural sciences – are about facts.” (p.6)

rational limitations, intelligent craziness and facticity? sounds about right...