CRMEP Research Seminar Middlesex University, London

8 October 2009

Rationalist Empiricism/Dialectical Materialism: from Althusser to Meillassoux Nathan Brown, UC Davis, ntbrown@ucdavis.edu

This paper on Quentin Meillassoux and Louis Althusser is part of a larger project

provisionally titled Rationalist Empiricism, which will also include chapters on Descartes

and Hume, Meillassoux and Badiou, Meillassoux and Peirce, and Badiou and Whitehead.

“Rationalist empiricism” is a somewhat cryptic formulation deployed by Althusser, to which

I’ll return at some length in a moment.

The project emerges in part from a reflection upon the fact that, in After Finitude,

Meillassoux attempts to revive certain pre-critical problems in modern philosophy through a

return to both Descartes and Hume. The question posed by this effort is: how is it possible

to be both a Cartesian and a Humean, without adopting Kant’s transcendental displacement

of the opposition of rationalism and empiricism? From Descartes, Meillassoux attempts to

revive the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible that Locke will later describe

in terms of primary and secondary qualities. And Meillassoux will defend the Cartesian

thesis that “those aspects of an object that can be formulated in mathematical terms [its

primary qualities] can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself.”1 This

is, of a course, a thesis at odds with the post-Kantian dispensation of modern philosophy

that Meillassoux terms “correlationism,” which holds that it is impossible to know “the

properties of the world in-itself, subsisting indifferently of our relation to it” (AF 3). From

Hume, Meillassoux attempts to reassert the problem of induction—what he calls Hume’s

problem—as a crux of contemporary thought. Meillassoux’s thinking of “the necessity of

contingency” attempts to revive and ultimately resolve the problem of induction by

converting the epistemological deficit it entails—that we have neither rational nor empirical

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knowledge of any necessary connection between causes and effects—into an item of

positive knowledge: namely, that we can know, rationally, that there is no such necessary

connection. According to Meillassoux (via a complex argument articulated in Chapter 3 of

After Finitude) what we can know absolutely is that both facts and laws are necessarily

contingent. Meillassoux attempts to consolidate his argument for the necessity of

contingency by relying upon a form of mathematical knowledge that he associates, after

Badiou, with the Cartesian legacy. In Chapter 4 of After Finitude, Meillassoux’s task is to

defend his argument for the absolute contingency of physical law against objections based

upon probabilistic reasoning: that if the laws were contingent it is highly improbable that

they would not undergo frequent alterations—which they evidently do not. He attempts to

refute this probabilistic argument through recourse to Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers

and Russell’s paradox, which prohibit the closure of a set of all possible cases upon which,

according to Meillassoux, any probabilistic reasoning about the stability of physical law

would have to be based. The point is that by “grafting the Humean thesis onto that of

Cantorian intotality,”2 Meillassoux attempts to resolve the central problem of empiricism

with rationalist tools (borrowed from his mentor), and he does so in a manner that rejects—

or attempts to work through—the critical proscription of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

But part of my argument today will be that in order to think the relation of

rationalism and empiricism within Meillassoux’s philosophy, we also have to think through

the precise manner in which After Finitude attempts to intervene in the conflict between

materialism and idealism. So the question now is: how do we think the co-implication of

the position of After Finitude vis-à-vis the two major “oppositions” that structure the

philosophical field: rationalism v. empiricism and materialism v. idealism? I hope to show

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that the best way to approach this question is by thinking through the relation of

Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism” to a certain tradition of “dialectical materialism”

analyzed and practiced by Althusser. Here I also hope to respond to a problem raised by

Peter Hallward in his review of After Finitude. Hallward argues that “to the degree that

Meillassoux insists on the absolute disjunction of an event from existing situations he

deprives himself of any concretely mediated means of thinking, with and after Marx, the

possible ways of changing such situations.” I don’t aim to answer this charge directly today

(with reference to Meillassoux’s theory of absolute contingency), though I’ve attempted to

do so elsewhere.3 Rather, I want to explore a broader sense in which Meillassoux might be

considered to think “with and after Marx.” In fact I want to demonstrate that After Finitude

might feasibly be taken as a contribution to what Althusser calls “Marxist philosophy.” I’ll

try to do that not by positioning Meillassoux directly in relation to Marx, but rather by

thinking through the mediation of that relationship by Althusser’s engagement—in “The

Philosophy Course for Scientists” and in “Lenin and Philosophy” with Lenin’s Materialism

and Empirio-Criticism. For After Finitude not only revisits and recasts Lenin’s attack on

the “correlativist” and “fideist” orientation of post-Kantian philosophy, as Ray Brassier has

noted;4 it also—no doubt unconsciously—routes its modifications of the polemical itinerary

of Lenin’s text through the exigencies of Althusser’s theory of dialectical materialism. It is

the manner in which Meillassoux answers the Leninist/Althusserian injunction to “draw a

line of demarcation” between materialism and idealism that renders Meillassoux’s book an

exemplary instance of what Althusser calls “rationalist empiricism.” That is, it’s the manner

in which Meillassoux determines the relation between materialism and idealism in his text

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that allows us to understand the disjunctive conjunction of rationalism and empiricism that

his work entails.

Althusser deploys the term “rationalist empiricism” in a 1966 text: “The

Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research.”5 Here Althusser lays out

three “elements” in French philosophy that he takes to be constitutive of the theoretical

conjuncture:

1. a religious-spiritualist element with origins in the middle ages (persisting most powerfully in the form of Bergsonism) 2. a rationalist-idealist element deriving from aspects of Cartesian philosophy and developed by the critical idealism of Kant and Husserl (considered by Althusser to be the dominant element in the theoretical conjuncture of French philosophy) 3. a rationalist empiricism

Here is Althusser’s description of this last element:

Alongside these two elements—religious-spiritualist and rationalist-idealist—there

subsists another element, another theoretical layer, whose origins may be traced back

the eighteenth century: rationalist empiricism in its two forms, idealist and

materialist. Materialist rationalist empiricism lives on in the ideology of certain

scientific practices (psycho-physiology, etc.). Idealist rationalist empiricism does

too, and has produced the more interesting results. It was this current which, setting

out from other, materialist aspects of Descartes’ work, spawned the great work of the

Encylopédie, d’Alembert, Diderot, and so on. This tradition was taken up by the

only great French philosopher of the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte. It saved

the honor of French philosophy, if one may use a term from the sports world here,

during the terrible spiritualist reaction of the nineteenth century. It has given us the

only philosophical tradition that we can trace, almost uninterruptedly, from the

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seventeenth century down to our own day: the tradition of the philosophy of the

sciences to which we owe such great names as Comte, Cournot, Couturat, Duhem,

and, closer to our own time, Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, and Canguilhem. (PC, 4)

Note that there are two traditions included under the umbrella of rationalist empiricism:

1. materialist rationalist empiricism 2. idealist rationalist empiricism

The first of these, which Althusser links to the ideology of scientific practices like “psycho-

physiology,” would seem to be a reductionist materialism – or what we might today call

“eliminativist materialism” (referring to neurology and cognitive science rather than

“psycho-physiology”). It is the second form, Althusser feels—idealist rationalist

empiricism—which has “produced the more interesting results.” This is the current—

running from d’Alembert and Diderot through Compte up to Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré,

and Canguilhem—which has “saved the honor of French philosophy,” and this is no doubt

the tradition from which Althusser’s own work on “the philosophy of the sciences” most

immediately emerges. It is also the tradition in which one would have to situate the work of

both Badiou and Meillassoux. The problem, however, is that is that we know that for

Althusser—at least by the time of his 1967/1968 “Lecture Course for Scientists”—the

partisan role of the Marxist philosopher is to intervene in the philosophy of the sciences on

behalf of materialism, and against idealism—not on behalf of “idealist rationalist

empiricism.” If this passage thus productively complicates the schema of the later lecture

course, it would seem that the task of the Marxist philosopher would not be to intervene on

the side of materialist rationalist empiricism (considered by Althusser a reductive

scientism), nor exactly on behalf of idealist rationalist empiricism, but rather to transform

the resources of the latter tradition into a non-reductive materialist orientation. That is, to

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transform the tradition that has saved the honor of French philosophy into a dialectical

materialist rationalist empiricism.

But it’s crucial, given the dialectical character of this materialism, that it cannot

itself result from a mere inversion of idealist rationalist empiricism; it would rather have to

be produced through a transformation within it. The model for this sort of transformation is

provided by Althusser himself in “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” through his

treatment of Marx’s “inversion” of Hegel, Marx’s effort to “set Hegel on his feet.”6 What’s

at issue in that essay is Marx’s remark about extracting the “rational kernel” from the

“mystical shell” of Hegel’s thought, and the question is whether we can simply extract the

rational method of dialectical materialism from the mystical teleology of absolute idealism.

Althusser’s theory of structural causality emerges in part from his recognition that we

cannot do so, and that such an extraction would in fact have to involve a real transformation

of the dialectic itself.

On this model, then, it would be necessary to perform not an inversion, but a real

transformation of idealist rationalist empiricism through a modification of its constitutive

elements. What is notable in this regard is Althusser’s curious remark that it is this idealist

orientation of rationalist empiricism that sets out from “materialist aspects of Descartes’s

work.” The project would be to recover and reactivate these Cartesian “materialist aspects”

within idealist rationalist empiricism so as to transform it, from within, into a properly

dialectical form of materialist rationalist empiricism. My argument is that this is precisely

the task carried out in After Finitude, through Meillassoux’s effort—against the conjunctural

dominance of critical idealism, or “correlationism”—to recover and reactivate Descartes’s

claims for the capacity of mathematical physics to index primary qualities of the in-itself,

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but without Descartes’s religious-spiritualist recourse to God as a guarantor of human

reason. This is what Meillassoux attempts through his speculative precipitation of formerly

metaphysical problems. The question is then: How can what Meillassoux terms his

“speculative materialism” be understood as a form of dialectical materialism?

Althusser offers his most detailed and direct definition of “dialectical materialism”

in a 1965 text, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and

Ideological Struggle”:

In dialectical materialism, it can very schematically be said that it is materialism

which represents the aspect of theory, and dialectics which represents the aspect of

method. But each of these terms includes the other. Materialism expresses the

effective conditions of the practice that produces knowledge—specifically: (1) the

distinction between the real and its knowledge (distinction of reality), correlative of

a correspondence (adequacy) between knowledge and its object (correspondence of

knowledge); and (2) the primacy of the real over its knowledge, or the primacy of

being over thought. Nonetheless, these principles themselves are not ‘eternal’

principles, but the principles of the historical nature of the process in which

knowledge is produced. That is why materialism is called dialectical: dialectics,

which expresses the relation that theory maintains with its object, expresses this

relation not as a relation of two simply distinct terms but as a relation within a

process of transformation, thus of real production.7

There are two primary components here: a definition of materialism and a definition of

dialectics. Though I do not mean to forward an argument concerning influence or intention,

I would hold that the philosophical itinerary, the structural articulation, and the

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argumentative method of After Finitude adhere to the determination of dialectical

materialism spelled out here by Althusser—or better, that the text unfolds from the complex

exigencies of the codeterminations constitutive of this form of dialectical materialism.

Althusser’s definition of materialism itself includes two criteria, the first of which is

also internally articulated:

1. a) distinction between the real and its knowledge (criteria of distinction) b) correspondence between knowledge and its object (criteria of

adequacy) 2. primacy of the real over its knowledge, or primacy of being over thought (criteria of primacy)

Note that the first of Althusser’s materialist criteria—itself double—in no way

challenges the program of transcendental idealism: the distinction between the real and its

knowledge is accounted for by the distinction between noumena and phenomena; the

correspondence between knowledge and its object is accounted for by the synthesis of the

manifold by the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. It is the latter

that, for Kant, ensures the transcendental grounding of reliable scientific knowledge of the

phenomena. According to Meillassoux, however—and also according to Lenin and to

Althusser—no “correlationist” or critical idealist philosophy can properly meet the second

criterion: “the primacy of the real over its knowledge, or the primacy of being over

thought.” What does Althusser mean by primacy? He might be taken to refer to a broadly

Marxist foregrounding of “the primacy of practice,” or the structure of social relations in

and through which knowledge is produced. But more fundamentally, “the primacy of the

real over its knowledge, or the primacy of being over thought” refers us to the passage in the

Grundrisse, often cited by Althusser, in which Marx states that the real (or what Althusser

calls “the concrete real” or “the real object”) “survives in its independence, after as before,

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outside the head.”8 That is, it refers us to the chronological primacy of the real—the

anteriority and ulteriority of its exteriority to thought. In Meillassoux’s terms, it refers to

the “temporal discrepancy of thinking and being,” or the “dia-chronicity” of being and

thought (AF 112).

Meillassoux’s strategy is thus to begin with this crux in Chapter 1 of After Finitude,

by showing how the problem of ancestrality exposes the impossibility of properly affirming

the primacy of being over thought from within the framework of correlationism: that is, of

properly affirming the chronological anteriority of being over the logical anteriority of the

act of thinking. The heuristic of the arche-fossil is intended to show that the logical

“retrojection of the past on the basis of the present” (AF 16) performed by the

correlationist—by which the act of the thought, the transcendental conditions of

understanding, the auto-positioning of the subject, primordial auto-affection, or the structure

of signification is posited as logically prior to that which is thought—undermines our

capacity to properly grasp the chronological primacy of the real over its knowledge, or to

accede to the dia-chronicity of being and thinking.

The difficulty for the materialist then becomes how to meet the ontological criterion

of primacy while meeting the double epistemological criteria of distinction and adequacy.

Doing so involves moving from the heuristic of the arche-fossil to a refutation of the

correlationist, who either rejects the order of primacy (absolute idealism) or covertly

undermines its proper sense (transcendental idealism). The crucial point here is to

acknowledge that the problem of ancestrality is not itself intended to produce a refutation of

critical or absolute idealism—only to motivate such a refutation by producing a line of

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demarcation between materialism and idealism. [For a diagram of the structure of

Meillassoux’s argument “according to the order of reasons” see p. 22, below].

The method by which Meillassoux performs this refutation over the course of

Chapters 2 and 3 is “dialectical” in precisely the sense articulated by Althusser. He first

“accounts for the historical nature of the process in which knowledge is produced” (TPTF 9)

by diagnosing the complicity of fideist correlationism with the “postmodern” return of the

religious. He thereby establishes the most pertinent historical condition of his philosophical

practice through an analysis of the theoretical-ideological conjuncture (a conjuncture, for

example, in which so-called “constructivist” epistemologies of science are deployed by the

religious right against evidence of global warming or in favor of creationist “alternatives” to

Darwin’s theory evolution). He then takes up his philosophy’s relation to that conjuncture

as a “process of transformation” by working within the positions of his opponents—the

dogmatist, the correlationist, and the subjective idealist. The argument gauges the

implications of those positions for each other until it locates the weakest link in the system

of their relationships—the problem of the facticity of the correlation itself—and then

demarcates the stake inherent to that problem. The correlationist will have to uphold the

facticity of the correlation itself against the subjective idealist’s absolutization of the

correlation. In doing so, Meillassoux attempts to show, the correlationist will have to

covertly affirm the necessity of contingency itself—the absolute possibility that what is

could be otherwise. The consequences that follow from this argument, first and foremost

the principle of factuality (that to be is necessarily to be a fact, or that everything that is is

necessarily contingent), are thus consequences inherent to the codetermination of

philosophical positions constitutive of the conjuncture, drawn through an assessment of the

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relational field of forces therein, as Althusser would put it. Meillassoux establishes an

“anhypothetical” principle: one that is not deduced from some prior proposition, but is

rather proved by argument—“by demonstrating that anyone who contests it can do so only

by presupposing it to be true, and thereby refuting himself” (AF 61). The import of this

“indirect” method of demonstration is that it does not simply posit philosophical principles

in an axiomatic fashion and then draw the consequences. On this point Meillassoux

deviates markedly from the methodology of his mentor, Badiou. On the contrary,

Meillassoux’s effort to establish his position anhypothetically, by working through the intra-

systemic consequences of his opponents’ logic and the relations between their positions,

marks an acknowledgement that any and all philosophical hypothesis are already immersed

in the conjunctural field within which one establishes a position. Indeed, it would be

difficult to find a more exact demonstration of philosophical practice as it is defined by

Althusser, on the model of Lenin’s polemic against his correlativist and fideist

contemporaries, than the demonstration of the principle of factiality in Chapter 3 of After

Finitude.

We then return, in the final two chapters of After Finitude, to the materialist upshot

of this dialectical procedure. Having demarcated one’s philosophy from dogmatic

metaphysics, absolute idealism, and transcendental idealism by thinking through the relation

between their positions, how is it then possible to affirm, on the side of materialism, both

the distinction of the real from knowledge and the adequacy of knowledge to its object,

while properly recognizing the primacy of the real over its knowledge, or of being over

thought? The answer offered at the end of After Finitude is that we can do so by

reestablishing the absolute scope of mathematical discourse proper to the “decentering of

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thought relative to the world within the process of knowledge” (AF 115) that Meillassoux

takes to have been constitutive of the Copernican revolution, and its Galilean/Cartesian

development. “What is mathematizable” argues Meillassoux, “cannot be reduced to a

correlate of thought” (AF 117). This formulates the condition for the distinction between

the real and its knowledge. Mathematical physics manifests “thought’s capacity to think

what there is whether thought exists or not.”This formulates the condition for the

correspondence between knowledge and its object,ortheadequacy of the object of

knowledge to the real object. In other words, the mathematization of experimental science

enables the adequation of thought to the distinction of the real. And, most pertinently for

the materialist criteria outlined by Althusser, it is the mathematical formalization of

empirical science that answers the question at the root of the paradox of manifestation,

which we might take to be the fundamental question of any rationalist empiricism: “how is

empirical knowledge of a world anterior to all experience possible” (AF 123)? For

Meillassoux it is mathematical physics that enables us to adequately think what there was

before thought: to think the adequation of thought to thedistinction of a real which is prior

to thought.

This, then, is the “materialist aspect” of Descartes’ work that we might hope to

locate at the root of the tradition of idealist rationalist empiricism identified by Althusser,

and which might be mobilized toward a materialist transformation of that tradition. “It is

this capacity,” holds Meillassoux, “whereby mathematized science is able to deploy a world

that is separable from man…that Descartes theorized in all its power” (AF 115). Thus when

Meillassoux claims allegiance to what he calls “an in-itself that is Cartesian, and no longer

just Kantian” (AF 111)—one grasped by mathematical formalism—he does so in the name

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of materialist criteria such as those enumerated by Althusser. And when Meillassoux

arrives at this affirmation through a conjunctural assessment of the consequences of

relations between discrepant philosophical positions and their ideological entailments, he

does so according to Althusser’s criterion for dialectical thought. It’s on these grounds that

I would argue that when Meillassoux elaborates his own criteria of a properly speculative

materialism, he also elaborates the criteria of what we could call, adjusting Althusser, a

dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism:

Every materialism that would be speculative, and hence for which absolute reality is

an entity without thought, must assert both that thought is not necessary (something

can be independently of thought), and that thought can think what there must be

when there is no thought. The materialism that chooses to follow the speculative

path is thereby constrained to believe that it is possible to think a given reality by

abstracting from the fact that we are thinking it (AF 36).

Now, we know how Althusser, in the “Lecture Course for Scientists” and in “Lenin

and Philosophy,” positions the defense of such a materialism as a vocation of Marxist

philosophy, or of thinking with and after Marx. I want to turn then, to the mediated relation

of Meillassoux’s work to Lenin’s philosophical project in Materialism and Empirio-

Criticism—one that runs through Althusser’s engagement with that project in the late 1960s.

Briefly, for the Althusser of the “Lecture Course” there are two “spontaneous philosophies

of the scientists” at work in scientific practice. SPS1, a materialist belief (of intra-scientific

origin) in “the real, external and material existence of the object of the scientific

knowledge”, and in “the existence and objectivity of the scientific knowledge’s that permit

knowledge of this object.” And SPS2, an extra-scientific reflection upon scientific practice

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by spiritualist or critical-idealist “philosophies of science,” which operate by “calling into

question the external material existence of the object (replaced by experience or

experiment)” and “by calling into question the objectivity of scientific knowledges and of

theory (replaced by ‘models’).”9 According to Althusser, SPS1, or materialism, is

“massively dominated” (PSPS 134) by SPS2: by the critical-idealist orientation of post-

Kantian philosophy, which “exploits” scientific-practice by submitting it “to a preliminary

question that already contains the answer which it innocently claims to be seeking in the

sciences” (PSPS 128). In his relations to the sciences, then, the task of the Marxist

philosopher, the practicioner of dialectical materialism, is to intervene on the side of SPS1.

In “Lenin and Philosophy,” Althusser formulates this obligation as follows:

Materialist philosophy…is particularly concerned with what happens in scientific

practice, but in a manner peculiar to itself, because it represents, in its materialist

thesis, the ‘spontaneous’ convictions of scientists about the existence of the objects

of their sciences, and the objectivity of their knowledge. In Materialist and

Empirio-Criticism, Lenin constantly repeats the statement that most specialists in the

sciences of nature are ‘spontaneously’ materialistic, at least in one of the tendencies

of their spontaneous philosophy. While fighting the ideologies of the spontaneism

of scientific practice (empiricism, pragmatism) Lenin recognizes in the experience of

scientific practice a spontaneous materialist tendency of the highest importance for

Marxist philosophy. He thus interrelates the materialist theses required to think the

specificity of scientific knowledge with the spontaneous materialist tendency of the

practicioners of the sciences: as expressing both practically and theoretically one

and the same materialist thesis of existence and objectivity.10

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In the terminology we’ve developed, we can say that Lenin’s project is emblematic, for

Althusser, of the Marxist vocation of dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism. To

recapitulate the Althusserian schema: Marxist science (historical materialism), intervenes

through an analysis of political economy, one which tells us why it is the masses—not men

or philosophers or scientists—who make their own history, though not under conditions of

their own choosing. Marxist philosophy intervenes on behalf of the materialist tendency of

the sciences. According to this model, the relation of Marxist philosophy to politics is thus

not direct, but mediated by its relation to political economy (Marxist science). Thus, insofar

as one expects a direct relation between philosophy and politics, one will underestimate the

importance of political economy in mediating that relation.

It is through their discrepant approaches to the results and operations of science that

we have to think the complex relation of After Finitude to Lenin’s practice of Marxist

philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Meillassoux’s project is closest to

Lenin’s in its unabashed defense of the literalism of scientific statements. Lenin’s target in

the section of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism titled “Did Nature Exist Prior to Man?” is

precisely that of Meillassoux’s chapter on the problem of ancestrality: the problem of how

we can intelligibly extend a “chain of experience” of possible objects of perception through

a time-series prior to the evolution of perception per se. This so-called “idealist sophistry”

is glossed by Lenin as follows: “only if I make the admission (that man could be the

observer of an epoch at which he did not exist),—one absurd and contradictory to natural

science, can I make the ends of my philosophy meet.”11 Like Lenin, whose goal in

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was to “liberate the realm of objects from the yoke of

the subject” (MEC 61), Meillassoux seeks to defend the realist sense of scientific statements

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against the juridical ideology of critical idealism. It is thus the “literal” meaning of

science’s ancestral statements that the first chapter of After Finitude defends against their

inversion by correlationist—against the “for us” that performs a retrojection of the past from

the present upon any statement concerning that which occurred “before us.” Against this

“for us,” which Meillassoux calls the “codicil of modernity” (AF, 13), both he and Lenin

hold that “an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense”

(AF 17). When we say “event X occurred prior to the emergence of thought for thought”

(AF 122) both Lenin and Meillassoux hold that this codicil is irrelevant when it comes to

analyzing the significance of the statement.

Unlike Lenin, however, Meillassoux does not endorse the literal sense of scientific

statements as a “direct connection of the mind with the external world” (MEC 31), but rather

as a discourse enabled by mathematical formalization. That is, Meillassoux accepts

Bachelard’s dictate in The Philosophy of No that “the world in which we think is not the

world in which we live”12—and this is the point of mathematical physics. That is,

Meillassoux endorses the “literal sense” of scientific statements as scientific statements.

And he does so only on the condition that we attend to the fact that their “literal meaning”

carries far more powerful counter-intuitions than the banal retrojection performed by the

codicil of modernity. This is why Meillassoux insists—unlike Lenin—“that we remain as

distant from naïve realism as from correlationist subtlety, which are two ways of refusing to

see ancestrality as a problem.” The virtue of transcendentalism, he argues, “does not lie in

rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i.e., apparently unthinkable, yet

true”—and this is why “what distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this

matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished (in the strong sense), by the

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straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement” (AF 27). What Lenin ignores is

that it is the paradox of manifestation which renders the literal sense of ancestral statements

(rather than their correlational modification) profound. The problem is not to elide this

profundity, but to think it in a manner that adequately traverses the relation of

transcendental philosophy to realism without collapsing into the correlationist circle. This is

why it is crucial to recognize that the problem of ancestrality is by no means intended to

refute transcendental idealism in After Finitude; it merely functions as a heuristic to prepare

the ground for the intra-systemic critique of Kant performed in the book’s central chapter.

[Cf. graph on p. 22, below].

As is probably obvious, the other major difference between the program of

Meillassoux and that of Lenin is that the latter has little to say about an absolute contingency

inherent to absolute time. How are we to consider the relation of this aspect of

Meillassoux’s argument to his defense of scientific materialism? If we are to take this

problem seriously we have to consider it methodologically, via Meillassoux’s dialectical

practice of philosophy. The problem of absolute contingency follows from the logical

consequences of the absolutization of facticity arrived at in the third chapter of After

Finitude, which itself follows from an indirect demonstration based on the competing claims

of discrepant philosophical positions. If we follow Meillassoux’s argumentative itinerary,

absolute contingency emerges as the sole absolute which it is possible to salvage from

correlationism without absolutizing the correlation itself—that is, without affirming

speculative idealism rather than speculative materialism. It is therefore the sole means of

refuting the critical idealism’s limitation of reason to make room for faith, without equating

reason with absolute spirit. In order to sustain the facticity of the correlation itself the

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critical idealist must covertly affirm think contingency itself as an absolute. The rationalist

delineation of absolute contingency’s structural position within a balance of philosophical

forces is not, then, some flight of fancy, but rather follows from the dialectical recognition

that the effects of philosophical arguments—and of their mutual interpellations—are

irreversible. It follows from a commitment, in Althusserian terms, to the fact that “there is a

history in philosophy rather than a history of philosophy: a history of the displacement of

the indefinite repetition of a null trace whose effects are real” (LP, 197). The principle of

factiality registers a displacement of the “null trace” dividing materialism and idealism, and

what Meillassoux registers as the necessity of thinking an absolute contingency inherent to

absolute time registers the fact that the displacement of this trace has real effects, in

philosophy. That is, this displacement and its effects result from an immersion in the

restrictive dialectical exigencies of correctly reinscribing the line of demarcation between

materialism and idealism—a line that is incorrectly drawn by Lenin due to his concessions

to naïve realism.

Meillassoux’s defense of scientific materialism thus inheres precisely where we

might least expect to find it: in his rejection of the principle of the uniformity of nature.

Ray Brassier helps to clarify the relation, on this point, between Meillassoux’s position and

Karl Popper’s anti-inductivist epistemology of science.13 Popper defends the invariance of

natural laws as a methodological rule, but rejects the principle of the uniformity of nature as

a metaphysical interpretation of that rule. According to this position, any absolute

affirmation of the invariance of physical law falls afoul of the problem of induction, and

thus threatens the conceptual validity of the empirical operations of science. Thus Popper

“abstain[s] from arguing for or against faith in the existence of regularities.”14 For

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Meillassoux, however, this abstention would itself constitute a threat to science, insofar as

the limitation upon thought that it imposes would concede that which lies beyond reason to

piety (or “faith” as Popper puts it), and thus tolerate a “see-sawing between metaphysics and

fideism” (AF 82). Even if science must remain indifferent to philosophical legislation

concerning the invariance of physical law, any effort to guard such questions against

rational inquiry remains deleterious insofar as such abdications of reason only serve to

“resuscitate religiosity” (AF 82). Since philosophy cannot absolutely secure the uniformity

of nature for science—and since science has no need of such security—the role of

philosophy is thus to foreclose the metaphysical/theological appropriation of this question

by refuting the basis of that appropriation: by showing, through rational argument, that we

cannot secure the absolute uniformity of nature because it is necessary that such uniformity

is contingent. A speculative demonstration of the absolute contingency of uniformity in

nature would thus function as a bulwark, in philosophy, against idealism and spiritualism:

against the (Kantian) pretense of philosophy to rationally ground the rules of scientific

practice, against the (Cartesian/Leibnizian) assertion of a metaphysical guarantee of natural

uniformity, and against the fideist abdication of the question of uniformity to “faith.”

Science does not need philosophy in order to dispose of its rules or to inform us of their

ground; but philosophy can aid the operations of science by defending it against

“epistemological obstacles”:15 against its subtle exploitation by idealism and against the

predations of religion.

If there is no contradiction, then, but rather a relation of positive reinforcement

between Meillassoux’s defense of absolute contingency and the fundamental role that

Althusser accords to dialectical materialism (the defense of the materialist tendency of

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scientific practice against its domination by idealism and spiritualism) this defense is

certainly more complex, more counter-intuitive, and more compelling in After Finitude than

in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Lenin holds that there is no “inherent

incompatibility between the outer world and our sense perceptions of it,” that “perceptions

give us correct impressions of things” by which “we directly know objects themselves”

(MEC 83). Meillassoux, on the other hand, affirms not the immediate evidence of the

senses, but the self-evidence of science, allowing for discrepancies between the scientific

image and the manifest image, and asserting that it is mathematical physics which provides

us with the knowledge of the real that Lenin accords to the senses. Lenin’s goal is the same

as Meillassoux’s: to defend both the “distinction of reality” and what Althusser terms the

“correspondence of knowledge” while rigorously maintaining the “primacy of being over

thought.” But while Lenin fails to adequately grasp the formidable difficulties that these

exigencies impose upon anyone who would meet them after Kant, it is a more careful

assessment of these difficulties to which the counter-intuitions of After Finitude attest.

It is on these grounds that I would finally align After Finitude with Althusser’s

“philosophical ‘dream’” of a text that could complete and correct the program of Marxist

philosophy undertaken by Lenin:

If it is true, as so many signs indicate, that today the lag of Marxist philosophy can in

part be overcome, doing so will not only cast light on the past, but also perhaps

transform the future. In this transformed future, justice will be done equitably to all

those who had to live in the contradiction of political urgency and philosophical lag.

Justice will be done to one of the greatest: to Lenin. Justice: his philosophical work

will then be perfected. Perfected, i.e. completed and corrected. We surely owe this

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service and this homage to the man who was lucky enough to be born in time for

politics, but unfortunate enough to be born too early for philosophy. After all, who

chooses his own birthdate? (LP, 185)

Of course, Althusser immediately acknowledges that this is just a dream. Regardless of his

own criteria for that judgment, I would posit that it is just a dream because there will never

be a time at which we do not live in the contradiction of political urgency and philosophical

lag. But within the lag that is philosophy, we can say that After Finitude does indeed

“render justice” to Lenin’s philosophical work. In doing so, it also renders justice to a

phantom lineage that was the latent content of another Althusserian dream: that of

dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism.

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Notes

1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008), 3. Cited hereafter in text as AF. 2 Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” in Collapse, V.II (March 2007), 73. 3 Nathan Brown, “The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux,” forthcoming in The Speculative Turn, Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re:press, 2010). 4 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave, 2007), 246-247. 5 Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 1-18. Cited hereafter in text as “PC.” Cf. Althusser Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1970), 87. 6 Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 87-128. 7 Louis Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” trans. James H. Kavanagh, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Sciences, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1990), 9. Cited hereafter in text as “TPTF.” 8 Karl Marx qtd. in Louis Althusser Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1970), 87. 9 Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1990), 132-133. Cited hereafter in text as PSPS. 10 Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 1990), 191. 11 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vol. XIII, Collected Works of V.I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1927), 67. Cited hereafter in text as MEC. 12 Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G.C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 95. 13 See Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 247-248. Cf. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routeledge, 2002), 250-251. As Brassier points out, Meillassoux’s own interpretation of Popper’s position on this matter is contentious. Cf. AF, 133-134, n. 2. 14 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 250. 15 Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen, 2002).