{"id":9595,"date":"2012-10-21T11:36:39","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T16:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9595"},"modified":"2012-10-21T12:16:11","modified_gmt":"2012-10-21T17:16:11","slug":"meillassoux-materialism-non-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/21\/meillassoux-materialism-non-all\/","title":{"rendered":"meillassoux materialism not-all"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek interviewed by Ben Woodard<\/strong> in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism <\/em>edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman.\u00a0 re.press 2011<\/p>\n

Available here<\/a><\/p>\n

It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan\u2019s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion \u2018everything is matter\u2019 (which relies on its constitutive exception \u2014 in the case of Lenin who, in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind \u2018reflects\u2019 matter) and the assertion \u2018there is nothing which is not matter\u2019 (which, with its other side, \u2018not-All is matter\u2019, opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena). What this means is that a truly radical materialism is by definition non-reductionist: far from claiming that \u2018everything is matter\u2019, it confers upon the \u2018immaterial\u2019 phenomena a specific positive non-being.<\/p>\n

When, in his argument against the reductive explanation of consciousness, Chalmers writes that \u2018even if we knew every last detail about the physics of the universe\u2014the configuration, causation, and evolution among all the fields and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold \u2014 that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience\u2019, he commits the standard Kantian mistake: such a total knowledge is strictly nonsensical, epistemologically and<\/em> ontologically. It is the obverse of the vulgar determinist notion, articulated, in Marxism, by Nikolai Bukharin, when he wrote that, if we were to know the entire physical reality, we would also be able to predict precisely the emergence of a revolution. This line of reasoning \u2014 consciousness as an excess, surplus, over the physical totality\u2014is misleading, since it has to evoke a meaningless hyperbole: when we imagine the Whole of reality, there is no longer any place for consciousness (and subjectivity). There are two options here: either subjectivity is an illusion, or reality is in itself<\/em> (not only epistemologically) not-All.\u00a0 407<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

What, however, if we accept the conclusion that, ultimately, \u2018nothing exists\u2019 (a conclusion which, incidentally, is exactly the same as the conclusion of Plato\u2019s Parmenides<\/em>: \u2018Then may we not sum up the argument in a word and say truly: If one is not, then nothing is?\u2019)? Such a move, although rejected by Kant as obvious nonsense, is not as un-Kantian as it may appear: it is here that one should apply yet again the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment. The statement \u2018material reality is all there is\u2019 can be negated in two ways, in the form of<\/p>\n

\u2018material reality isn\u2019t all there is_\u2019 and \u2018material reality is _non-all_\u2019. The first negation (of a predicate) leads to the standard metaphysics: material reality isn\u2019t everything; there is another, higher, spiritual reality\u2026. As such, this negation is, in accordance with Lacan\u2019s formulas of sexuation, inherent to the positive statement \u2018material reality is all there is\u2019: as its constitutive exception, it grounds its universality. If, however, we assert a non-predicate and say \u2018material reality _is non-all_\u2019, this merely asserts the non-All of reality without implying any exception\u2014paradoxically, one should thus claim that \u2018material reality is non-all\u2019, not<\/em> \u2018material reality is all there is\u2019, is the true formula of materialism.<\/p>\n

So, to recapitulate: since materialism is the hegemonic ideology today, the struggle is within materialism, between what Badiou calls \u2018democratic materialism\u2019 and … what? I think Meillassoux\u2019s assertion of radical contingency as the only necessity is not enough\u2014one has to supplement it with the ontological incompleteness of reality. It is Meillassoux who is not \u2018materialist\u2019 enough here, proposing a materialism in which there is again a place for virtual God and the resuscitation of the dead \u2014 this is what happens when contingency is not supplemented by the incompleteness of reality.\u00a0 408<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

What \u2014 as far as I can see\u2014is missing in Laruelle is the Real as a purely formal parallax gap or impossibility: it is supra-discursive, but nonetheless totally immanent to the order of discourses\u2014there is nothing positive about it, it is ultimately just the rupture or gap which makes the order of discourses always and constitutively inconsistent and non-totalizable.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To fully clarify this point, we have to go back to Meillassoux. He is right in opposing contradiction and the movement of evolution, and to reject the standard notion of movement as the deployment of a contradiction. According to this standard notion, non-contradiction equates immovable self-identity, while, for Meillassoux, the universe which would to assert fully the reality of contradiction would be an immovable self-identical universe in which contradictory features would immediately coincide. Things move, change in time, precisely because they cannot be directly A and non-A \u2014 they can only gradually change from A to non-A. There is time because the principle of identity, of non-contradiction, resists the direct assertion of contradiction. This is why, for Meillassoux, Hegel is not a philosopher of evolution, of movement and development: Hegel\u2019s system is \u2018static\u2019, every evolution is contained in the atemporal self-identity of a Notion.<\/p>\n

Again, I agree with this, but I opt against evolution: Hegel\u2019s dialectical movement is not evolutionary. Meillassoux fails to grasp how, for Hegel, \u2018contradiction\u2019 is not opposed to (self-)identity, but its very core. \u2018Contradiction\u2019 is not only the real-impossible on account of which no entity can be fully self-identical; \u2018contradiction\u2019 is pure self-identity as such, the tautological coincidence of form and content, of genus and species\u2014in the assertion of (self-)identity, genus encounters itself as its own \u2018empty\u2019 species. What this means is that the Hegelian contradiction is not a direct motionless \u2018coincidence of the opposites\u2019 (A is non-A): it is identity itself, its assertion, which \u2018destabilizes\u2019 a thing, introducing the crack of an impossibility into its texture. Therein resides already the lesson of the very beginning of Hegel\u2019s logic: how do we pass from the first identity of the opposites, of Being and Nothing, to Becoming (which then stabilizes itself in Something(s))? If Being and Nothing are identical, if they overlap, why move forward at all? Precisely because Being and Nothing are not directly identical: Being is a form, the first formal-notional determination, whose only content is Nothing; the couple Being\/Nothing forms the highest contradiction, and to resolve this impossibility, this deadlock, one passes into Becoming, into oscillation between the two poles.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

[Quoting Meillassoux:]<\/p>\n

How are you able to think<\/em> this \u2018possibility of ignorance\u2019 [\u2026]? The truth is that you are only able to think this possibility of ignorance because you have actually<\/em> thought the absoluteness<\/em> of this possibility, which is to say, its non-correlational character.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Is the dialectical process not the temporal deployment of an eternal set of potentialities, which is why the Hegelian System is a self-enclosed set of necessary passages? However, this mirage of overwhelming evidence dissipates the moment we fully take into account the radical retroactivity<\/em> of the dialectical process: the process of becoming is not in itself necessary, but the becoming (the gradual contingent emergence) of necessity itself<\/em>. This is (also, among other things) what \u2018to conceive substance as subject\u2019 means: subject as the Void, the Nothingness of self-relating negativity, is the very nihil<\/em> out of which every new figure emerges, i.e., every dialectical reversal is a passage in which the new figure emerges ex nihilo<\/em> and retroactively posits\/creates its necessity.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

And this brings me to the great underlying problem: the status of the subject. I think that, in its very anti-transcendentalism, Meillassoux remains caught in the Kantian topic of the accessibility of the thing-in-itself: is what we experience as reality fully determined by our subjective-transcendental horizon, or can we get to know something about the way reality is independently of our subjectivity. Meillassoux\u2019s claim is to achieve the breakthrough into independent \u2018objective\u2019 reality. For me as a Hegelian, there is a third option: the true problem that arises after we perform the basic speculative gesture of Meillassoux (transposing the contingency of our notion of reality into the thing itself) is not so much what more can we say about reality-in-itself, but how does our subjective standpoint, and subjectivity itself, fit into reality. The problem is not \u2018can we penetrate through the veil of subjectively-constituted phenomena to things-inthemselves\u2019, but \u2018how do phenomena themselves arise within the flat stupidity of reality which just is, how does reality redouble itself and start to appear to itself\u2019. For this, we need a theory of subject which is neither that of transcendental subjectivity nor that of reducing the subject to a part of objective reality. This theory is, as far as I can see, still lacking in speculative realism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavoj \u017di\u017eek interviewed by Ben Woodard in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman.\u00a0 re.press 2011 Available here It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan\u2019s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion \u2018everything … Continue reading “meillassoux materialism not-all”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-9595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zizek","tag-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9595"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9606,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions\/9606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}