close
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110110023440/http://itself.wordpress.com:80/category/meillassoux/

On Meillassoux’s style

Thursday, September 2, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

One of the things that makes Meillassoux’s After Finitude so compelling is its genuine argumentative rigor. I have in the past disputed with analytically-trained philosophers who seem to me to be overly fixated on a very narrow idea of what an “argument” is, so I should say up front that I have found a wide range of philosophical styles as compelling as Meillassoux’s. What I like about Meillassoux’s approach in specific, though, is the way it carried me along, almost made me feel like a participant — I could anticipate where he was going and felt confident in saying what was left to be done by the end of the book.

A turn toward this type of style seems to be characteristic of younger “continental” philosophers. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Meillassoux, philosophy. 1 Comment »

Meillassoux and German Idealism, with incidental thoughts on “blog philosophy”

Wednesday, September 1, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

I have finally read Meillassoux’s After Finitude, and I am deeply impressed. At the same time, I am distressed by the ways I see him being received in blog circles, because I have almost never experienced such a yawning gap between the way a thinker is presented and the way he seems to be “in himself.” It seems to me, however, that this gap is rooted in Meillassoux himself — it corresponds to the gap between his actual argumentation and his rhetorical positioning. The blog reception seems to be dominated by his more programmatic statements, which in my mind are often overblown and actually obscure what’s going on in his argumentation.

It seems to me that there is a kind of serendepity linking together the main “theoretical” works I’ve read in the last few months — the Gabriel/Zizek book, Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology, and Meillassoux’s After Finitude. Though I read them all for different reasons, all of them obviously deal with the aftermath of Kant, and despite Meillassoux’s programmatic statements, he seems to take things in a very similar direction to Rose (whose refrain that the Hegelian step beyond Kant requires the absolute to be thinkable) or Gabriel (whose inclusion of Meillassoux in a discussion of the consequences of German Idealism seems much more appropriate and even obvious after actually reading Meillassoux rather than relying on second-hand accounts).

Drawing on Rose, I would claim that Meillassoux’s “correlationism” is essentially neo-Kantianism and that Meillassoux’s own work is an attempt to go back behind neo-Kantianism and recover the “missed opportunity” encapsulated in post-Kantian Idealism. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gillian Rose, Hegel, Kant, Markus Gabriel, Meillassoux, Zizek. 26 Comments »