Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism and the emergence of new futures

Abstract

Quentin Meillassoux (1967) is a French philosopher who has become well-known in the field of contemporary philosophical production for his book Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (2006). The most remarkable aim of his philosophy, which he labels speculative materialism, has been to draw attention to the logical and material effects of philosophy’s desertion of the task of thinking about the Absolute. For Meillassoux, the genuine possibility of contemplating a new future - one which is not the novel repetition of the past- lays in the exploration of the realm of the Absolute which, from Kant on, has been abandoned by philosophy and is currently lined by fanatisms and religious beliefs devoid of a rational link with transcendence.

Taking these considerations as a starting point, this article dwells on the following questions: How can the link between the Absolute and the emergence of the new be conceived? What formal mechanisms grounded on speculation’s logical operations might actualize potentials that enable unanticipated ways of establishing logical connections to worlds that lie beyond our current understanding? Based on Meillassoux’s Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (2006), Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science (2015), Le Nombre Et La Sirene Un Dechiffrage Du Coup de Des de Mallarme (2011), “L’immanence d’outre monde” (2009), “Potentialité et virtualité” (2006), and “Soustraction et contraction. À propos d'une remarque de Deleuze sur Matière et mémoire” (2007), this paper offers some answers to the questions above, focusing on the value of speculative materialism for the creation and actualization of new potentials for a human future beyond the imaginable.