Rationalist Empiricism : A Theory of Speculative Critique 9780823290000, 082329000X, 9780823290017, 0823290018

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RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM

RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM A THEORY OF SPECULATIVE CRITIQUE

NATHAN BROWN

Fordham University Press New York 2021

Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for Petar Milat

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Philosophical Conjuncture PART I

1

Rationalist Empiricism

1.

Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions

35

2.

Althusser’s Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism

50

PART II Speculative Critique 3.

Hegel’s Cogito: On the Genetic Epistemology of Critical Metaphysics

73

4.

Hegel’s Apprentice: From Speculative Idealism to Speculative Materialism

90

PART III Science, Art, Structure 5.

Hegel’s Kilogram: Taking the Measure of Metrical Units

125

6.

The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier

141

7.

Where’s Number Four? The Place of Structure in Plato’s Timaeus

166

Coda: Structure and Form

181

PART IV Theory and Praxis 8.

Badiou after Meillassoux: The Politics of the Problem of Induction

9.

The Criterion of Immanence and the Transformation of Structural Causality: From Althusser to Théorie Communiste 204

185

10. The Analytic of Separation: History and Concept in Marx

228

Conclusion: The True, the Good, the Beautiful

249

vii

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

263

Notes

265

Works Cited

291

Index

301

Empiricism and rationalism are bound, in scientific thought, by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain. —Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No

INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONJUNCTURE

Speculative thinking is the soul of philosophy. But insofar as speculation is opposed to critique, it can only give rise to dogmatism. This has recently been made clear, once again, by the fortunes of “the speculative turn” in twenty-first century philosophy. Its most zealous promoters, converting the venerable legacy of speculative thought into the cultural capital of ersatz theoretical movements, have merely repeated the forms of dogmatism Kant and Marx rightly delimited while pretending to move beyond these critical delimitations.1 The lesson to be drawn from this waning episode of intellectual history is that although philosophy cannot allow critical reflection to cancel its speculative powers, speculation can only move forward in concert with critique. The claim of this book is that the mutually reinforcing relationship between speculation and critique, without which philosophy devolves into incoherence or common sense, depends upon sustaining the methodological tension between rationalism and empiricism. One aim of Kantian critique was to displace the opposition between rationalist and empiricist orientations through the invention of transcendental philosophy. Delimiting pure reason and refuting the immediacy of experience, Kant’s philosophy aimed to ground any possible experience in transcendental conditions while invalidating the direct application of reason to knowledge of objects beyond possible experience. The competing claims of rationalist and empiricist thinkers to the priority of either reason or experience would be countered by the priority of the transcendental, which would ground the legitimate extension of both philosophical and scientific knowledge within critical limits.

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In this sense, we could say it was the problem of ground that motivated Kant’s transcendental critique and that formed its horizon. Yet the figure of the transcendental subject could only be grounded by its own spontaneity, and this reflexive limit of cognitive conditions would pose an enduring problem for Kantian critique, since the unity of the subject (of the “I think”) could not itself become subject to critical interrogation. From a methodological perspective, we could say that the transcendental could only displace the opposition of rationalism and empiricism by ungrounding the subject of reason and experience whose knowledge it grounded. Or better: the transcendental deduction exposed, beyond its grounding of knowledge in conditions, the unconditional groundlessness of the subject of knowledge, which had already implicitly afflicted both rationalism and empiricism. Thus Heidegger could show that the internal structure of the transcendental schematism constitutes as temporal the very subject whose atemporal unity (the transcendental unity apperception) would delimit the ontological scope of reflection upon time by treating it as a form of intuition.2 Transcendental critique arrives at the limit of its critical vocation and pushes the speculative vocation of philosophy further not through the “failure” of critique but by ungrounding it, by undermining the very function of the subject as ground it had hoped to establish, and thus implicitly suggesting the methodological problem of (1) how critique can continue to function as ungrounded; and (2) how speculation is related to critique without grounds. The answer to these questions, pursued and modeled in the following chapters, lies in a reengagement of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism— an effort to rethink the apparent contradiction between the priority of reason and the priority of experience without appeal to the priority of the transcendental, and thus in a manner shorn of transcendental guarantee.3 If we criticize the delimitation of knowledge to the field of possible experience—as we must—we thereby reopen the transcendentally displaced question of how the methodological relationship of rationalism and empiricism is to be theorized and practiced. If the transcendental does not suffice to ground the displacement of their opposition, because the subject of transcendental conditions is ungrounded, how can the claims of rationalism and empiricism be brought into a mutually reinforcing dialectic that does not accept or rely upon the priority of either method? I pose this question as the problem of the relationship between speculation and critique. What I call rationalist empiricism involves the delimitation of transcendental philosophy through speculative critique. The methodological trajectory thus designated does not accept the severance of speculation from critique, nor cri-

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tique from speculation. Rather, it aims to marshal the critical power of the tension between rationalism and empiricism to check one another’s claims and to propel those claims further. In order for this movement of critical delimitation and speculative extension to function, rationalism and empiricism can neither be collapsed into one another, nor defended as methodologically autonomous from or superior to the other’s claims. Nor can the tension of their opposition be displaced by appeal to transcendental grounds. Philosophy must sustain a relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism in order to sustain the power of speculative critique. By “rationalist” I mean to denote a philosophical orientation deploying the power of reason to push thought beyond the limits of experience, to explore what has to be thought according to the internal order and consistency of ideas. By empiricism I refer to a philosophical orientation claiming the genesis of ideas in experience and grounding the determination of what is the case on the consistency of thinking with experiential fact. But what are the limits of “experiential fact?” Is what happens in thought itself a form of experience? Does the exploration of the order and consistency of ideas itself yield experiential facts? Are there forms of experience that cannot be subordinated to knowledge gleaned from experience? What is at issue in such questions is how one determines criteria of the a priori and the a posteriori, and how exactly one conceives the relation of rationalism and empiricism to these categories. Rationalist empiricism denotes, one the one hand, a methodological attunement toward the experience of thinking as included in the field of what happens and, on the other hand, an attunement to the power of thought to push the field of facts beyond the presumed synthesis of the past with the future, referring what happens to what has to be thought, rather than to the succession of experience. I refer to “rationalist empiricism” rather than “empiricist rationalism” because it is the advent of reason, intervening in experience, that inaugurates philosophical speculation and that requires critique. Rational speculation cannot be grounded by or limited to experience, but it involves a commitment to empiricism insofar as it cannot violate the critical force of scientific knowledge. A rationalist orientation toward empiricism pushes beyond the limits of experience through the order and connection of ideas, but such an orientation can neither ground nor invalidate the criteria of experience within limits. The delicate task of rationalist empiricism is thus to preserve the distinction and autonomy of its methodological poles while also submitting each to the critical interrogation of the other, acknowledging and accounting for the discrepancy of their criteria. This book limns a recessed history of rationalist empiricism in order to

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demonstrate the importance of this history to the methodological problems of contemporary philosophy. Through an engagement with these contemporary methodological problems, Rationalist Empiricism returns to the tradition from a perspective indifferent to the positioning of speculation against critique, or critique against speculation. What has been missed in debates concerning “the speculative turn,” I would argue, is a certain methodological complexity that often also goes overlooked in the work of Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, or Marx: the refraction of rationalism and empiricism through one another’s criteria— sometimes in the form of methodological exceptions, sometimes in the systematic resonance of a concept absent from a system, sometimes through dialectical movement, sometimes through a non-dialectical encounter between thought and event. The methodological consequences of such refraction have to be reconstructed, have to be read back into the tradition from which they emerge, and my view is that certain texts of recent and contemporary French philosophy suggest the necessity of such reconstruction and offer a guide to its means. One of these is Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. The reception of Meillassoux’s slender tract has focused primarily upon its polemics, its examples, its concepts, and its proofs: the critique of correlationism, the figure of the arche-fossil, the concept of “hyper-chaos,” the proof of the necessity of contingency. What I find striking about the book is its method. By this I do not mean, as has often been emphasized, its style—the clarity of its argumentation and the classical tension between rhetorical concision and explosive conceptual development that it deploys. I mean that Meillassoux is both a rationalist and an empiricist, both a Cartesian and a Humean, and that he shows, perhaps for the first time, precisely how the philosophical itineraries of Descartes and Hume are not only compatible but carry one another toward singular ontological and epistemological consequences when reconstructed from a particular point of view. Obsessed with the relation between Descartes’s Meditations and Hume’s Enquiry as a student—with the theory of primary and secondary qualities, and with the problem of induction—I later recognized in Meillassoux’s book an engagement with questions I had often reflected on, though never formulated with such precision: If the articulation of Hume’s problem is not a specimen of philosophical skepticism, but rather a disavowed token of rationalist confidence, how does it comport with Descartes’s understanding of the distinction between the fragile evidence of sensory phenomena and the formal construction of primary qualities? What bearing does Descartes’s mathematical rationalism have upon the problem of causality articulated by Hume? And if we find Kant’s solution to such questions (transcendental critique) unsatisfac-

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tory, while also finding ourselves unable to settle into speculative assertions that would merely posit the absolute, how can we carry forward the strange and unresolved consequences of Hume’s argument while still holding onto the prospect of what Descartes theorized as knowledge of primary qualities, or what Spinoza would call “adequate ideas?” I could not have articulated these questions in this form before reading Meillassoux’s work, but they had nevertheless pressed upon me since I began to study philosophy. That is why I gravitated toward the issues at stake in After Finitude, despite what also struck me as an increasingly superficial reception of the book, foregrounding slogans and anticritical polemics rather than more subtle dimensions of the methodologically complex way its arguments were made. For me the real consequences of Meillassoux’s book lay in its repositioning of the apparent opposition between rationalism and empiricism, which Kant’s transcendental critique had not quite foreclosed. This repositioning revived not only the speculative vocation of philosophy but also the problem of the relationship between speculation and critique. This latter problem was made all the more pressing by the fact that, unlike some of his contemporaries, Meillassoux proceeded with deep respect for the philosophical questions opened, rather than obviated, by Kantian critique. Meillassoux affirmed that the question posed by “the problem of ancestrality”—“what is the condition that legitimates science’s ancestral statements?”—“seems to be a question of the transcendental type,” but he recognized its peculiarity, “in that its primary condition is the relinquishing of transcendentalism.” He criticized the reduction of knowledge to a subjective correlate imposed by “correlationism,” yet he demanded that “we remain as distant from naïve realism as from correlationist subtlety.” He understood that “the virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing; i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic.”4 The field of this problematic, rather than its summary dismissal by dogmatic fiat, would remain the field of his investigations, and the difficulty of the question accounts for the patience with which he has engaged his philosophical project, having now worked for decades on the problems opened by his doctoral dissertation rather than rushing toward the publication his philosophical system. To recognize that the virtue of transcendentalism lies in its precise formulation of the problem of speculative philosophy, though it did not solve it, necessitates a careful and mature disposition with respect to critique, rather than a simple rejection of its imperatives. In my view, neither “the problem of ancestrality” nor Meillassoux’s anhypothetical argument for the necessity of contingency is the real core of After Fini-

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tude.5 Rather, Meillassoux’s most consequential argument is his reactivation of the problem of induction through refutation of its foreclosure by probabilistic reasoning, a refutation drawing upon Alain Badiou’s ontological mobilization of Cantor’s transfinite detotalization of the infinite. Through the rationalist mobilization of mathematical formalism, Meillassoux reopens a central critique of both rationalism and empiricism: Hume’s demonstration that we have neither rational nor empirical grounds for assuming the constant conjunction of causes and effects, and thus we cannot assume the necessary stability of the laws of nature. Meillassoux resolves this critique in such a way as not only to support the absolute scope of philosophical rationality but also in a manner sustaining consistency with the capacity of the physical sciences to construct adequate knowledge of the properties of objects. Hume’s supposed “skepticism” concerning the constant conjunction of cause and effect was in fact a form of pragmatism; although we cannot affirm the necessity of causal regularities through either reason or experience, we can have confidence (through the synthesis of habit) in the probabilistic regularities of events. It is not Hume’s pragmatism but its covert metaphysical implications that Meillassoux displaces by questioning the application of probabilistic reasoning as a resolution of the problem of induction, and by recognizing Hume’s “skeptical doubts” as true knowledge of the contingency of physical laws and the nullity of the principle of sufficient reason. Deploying this nullity to support the claim of philosophical rationalism to think the in-itself (the necessity of contingency) in a manner consistent with the power of empirical science to establish non-correlational knowledge of objects, Meillassoux reasserts Hume’s central argument toward a revival of both rationalism and empiricism averse to the transcendental displacement of their opposition.

THE TRANSMUTATION OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL VALUES If After Finitude implicitly shows that the critique of the transcendental enables an unexpected alliance of rationalism and empiricism and a repositioning of their tension, rather than a repetition of their pre-critical opposition, its indications on this point hardly fell from the sky. In 1966 Louis Althusser delivered a lecture titled “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Research,” in which he used the term “rationalist empiricism” to name a tradition running, on the one hand, through the vulgar materialist ideology of “certain scientific practices (psycho-physiology, etc.),” and on the other hand from Descartes, to d’Alembert and Diderot, to Auguste Comte, and then through the work of Jean Cavaillès,

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Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Georges Canguilhem.6 It is this second tradition of rationalist empiricism, Althusser claims, that “saved the honour of French philosophy” amid the “religious-spiritualist” reaction of the nineteenth century.7 Knox Peden’s outstanding work of intellectual history Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze has shown how elements of this tradition functioned as a rationalist bulwark, steeped in Spinozism, against the dominance of phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. For my part, I am interested in returning to the riddle of the compound term with which Althusser designates this tradition, and which he never explicitly followed up. How are we to understand the relation between rationalism and empiricism he alludes to but does not fully theorize, and what are its stakes for addressing the philosophical conflict between idealism and materialism? I try to solve this riddle in Chapter 2. Althusser’s term “rationalist empiricism” alludes to a tradition of French thought focused on the epistemology of science, concerned in particular with how the empirical results of experimental scientific practice are constructed as scientific knowledge through the rational power of mathematical formalism. The apparent methodological paradox through which Althusser named this tradition would have been assimilated more readily among an audience intimately familiar with the epistemological writings of Gaston Bachelard, who declared in La philosophie du non (1940) that “rationalism and empiricism are bound, in scientific thought, by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain.”8 In a passage that will be central to the present study, Bachelard argued that the one triumphs by assenting to the other: empiricism needs to be understood; rationalism needs to be applied. An empiricism without clear, coordinated, deductive laws can be neither thought not taught; a rationalism without palpable proofs and without application to immediate reality cannot fully convince. The value of an empirical law is proved by making it the basis for a chain of reasoning. A chain of reasoning becomes legitimate by becoming the basis of an experiment. Science, the sum of proofs and experiments, the sum of rules and laws, the sum of evidences and facts, thus needs a philosophy with a double pole. To be more exact, it needs a dialectical development, since every notion is illuminated in complementary fashion from two different philosophical points of view.9

Because science involves a complementarity of empiricism and rationalism, through which “the one completes the other,” it requires a philosophy that can recognize and situate its dialectical development through an “epistemological polarity,” such that “to think scientifically is to place oneself in the epistemologi-

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cal field intermediate between theory and practice, between mathematics and experiment.”10 Thus, it is not only science that depends upon the mutually critical and constructive relationship between rationalism and empiricism; the relationship between science and philosophy also depends upon such a dialectic. It is only through such a dialectic that the “epistemological obstacles” theorized by Bachelard can be overcome.11 “Only too often,” he writes, the philosophy of science remains corralled in the two extremes of knowledge: in the study by philosophers of principles which are too general and in the study by scientists of results which are too particular. It exhausts itself against these two epistemological obstacles which restrict all thought: the general and the immediate. It stresses first the a priori and then the a posteriori, misrecognizing the transmutation of epistemological values which contemporary scientific thought ceaselessly executes between the a priori and the a posteriori, between experimental values and rational values.12

Note that this “transmutation of epistemological values” has two conditions, one explicit and one implicit. Explicitly, it requires that rationalism and empiricism not be “corralled” as separate methodologies, each unable or unwilling to recognize the consequences of the other for its own practices and its own results. But implicitly, it also requires that rationalism and empiricism be held sufficiently apart that their distinct epistemological values can “transmute” one another. What is called for is not a synthesis or a displacement of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism that would go by some other name (for example, the transcendental). Rather, what is called for is a relational disjunction between methodological orientations with discrepant epistemological values. The transmutation of these values operated by scientific thought occurs “ceaselessly”—not once and for all. It is in this sense that the mutually critical force of rationalism and empiricism, as they encounter one another’s imperatives, is without grounds: it relies upon an absent place between methodological values, across which they can pass, within which they can interfere, through which they can complicate, refute, or propel one another. Reason and experience can say “no” to one another because they have not been synthesized; they can integrate each other because they are not indifferent to the other’s claims. Though they formulate the conditions for a methodological critique of the transcendental, perhaps Bachelard’s claims will not seem particularly revelatory with respect to the epistemology of science. Yes, of course, science relies upon the empirical testing of mathematically formulated theories, and it relies upon the mathematical formalization of experimental results. But the philosophical

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consequences of Bachelard’s methodological dialectic are more curious. For example, following his remarks about the epistemological polarity of rationalism and empiricism, and about the epistemological field mediating between theory and practice, mathematics and experience, he tells us that “to know a natural law scientifically is to know it at once as phenomenon and as noumenon.”13 What is interesting here is that Bachelard retains the distribution of Kant’s categories— wherein phenomena are objects of experience while noumena can only be thought by reason—while rejecting the firm epistemological divide Kant had imposed between them. Natural laws, for Kant, are laws of phenomena, which can in no way be known as noumena themselves, nor applied to knowledge of noumena. Yet Bachelard claims that the methodological dialectic of scientific thought gives us knowledge, “at once” (à la fois), of the same thing (a natural law) as both phenomenon and noumenon. How can we make sense of this thesis? What is at issue here is the status of knowledge per se. What is it to know something? In particular, how does the constitution of knowledge bear upon the distinction between objects of experience and objects of reason? To know a natural law, according to Bachelard, is to know it as both of these at once. In my view, it is the ground of knowledge that is at stake in such a claim. According to Kant, objects of experience can be known because they are grounded by transcendental conditions that determine their presentation as phenomena, as part of “nature” considered as the realm of transcendental laws. Objects of reason cannot be known precisely because they are not grounded by categorial conditions; the categories of the understanding cannot properly be applied to them, and thus they can only be thought. The distribution of objects between experience and reason (phenomena and noumena) and the distribution of mental activity between knowing and thinking are thus correlated to a distinction between the grounded and the ungrounded. According to transcendental philosophy, only that which can be grounded can be known. Bachelard’s epistemology of science depends upon surrendering this distinction: upon a radical acceptance that knowledge is without ground. To surrender the transcendental is to surrender the grounding of knowledge by transcendental conditions; the ground of the transcendental is replaced by the ungrounded dialectic of rationalism and empiricism. This dialectic is ungrounded because it relies upon an alternation between epistemological poles that do not share criteria, yet which counter and inform one another through a transmutation of epistemological values across differential criteria. Because this transmutation is “ceaseless,” it never settles upon a

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ground; its epistemology is genetic, in the sense that what Bachelard calls the “rectification” of knowledge is continuous and recursively transformative. What we know undergoes revision through the differential imbrication of reason and experience, their exposure to one another’s discrepantly constituted fields of coherence, entailment, and legibility. What is at issue in such an epistemology is not so much a distribution of faculties within a subject of knowledge as the distribution of methodological coherence across a historical process open to the perpetual reconstitution of what can only seem to be its grounds. This is why Bachelard says that “the philosophy of physics is perhaps the only philosophy which is applicable even when it decides to overstep its own principles. In short it is the only open-ended philosophy. All other philosophies posit their principles as intangible, their primary truths as total and complete.”14 Scientific thought has to be able to overstep its principles because its principles must remain subject to correction by future developments, and such openness is itself the principle of a method ungrounded by either reason or experience but rather constituted by the perpetual transmutation of their values. How can knowledge of noumena be subject to correction? Or, to put the question the other way around, how can revisable knowledge be knowledge of noumena? This is the epistemological problem with which Bachelard’s formulation confronts us, and we can approach it through the problem of ground if we begin not with noumena but with phenomena. If it is the basis of transcendental grounding that distinguishes objects of experience from objects of reason, and thus knowledge from thinking, then this distinction does not hold; so far as modern science is concerned, objects of experience are not grounded by the transcendental conditions of a cognizing subject. On the contrary, they are accessed through scientific apparatuses, by the technological constitution of givenness, not by that of transcendental categories. And even this technological constitution of givenness itself is not necessarily relayed to or by subjects through the synthesis of intuitions and concepts; scientifically, it is made legible through mathematical formalizations, into whose orders of coherence it is translated. Of course, the categorial structure of cognition is relevant to the interpretation of results (e.g., what sort of causality is at issue in the double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics). But the integration of technological givenness into mathematical formulae, their chains of entailment and their recursive modification, are indifferent to competing interpretations of the formalisms, and they need not obey the formal regularities by which objects of human perception are constituted. This discrepancy between scientific results and perceptual regularities is

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the source of modern science’s formidable evasions of the synthesis of receptive intuition with the categories of the understanding. Technological conditions for the constitution of givenness are not transcendentally grounded insofar as they are themselves historically transformed and transformative. There is a historical technogenesis of “experience” itself, of the conditions of all possible experience, insofar as the field of what becomes technologically available to experimental inquiry undergoes ceaseless alteration, and it does so in concert with transformations of scientific knowledge. We could say that the availability of phenomena to experience is grounded in technological capacities, but the historical transformation of these capacities is itself ungrounded. It is itself subject to the dialectic of reason and experience, experiment and formalization, which generates transformations of scientific knowledge and concretizes the latter in devices, apparatuses, mathematically configured and accountable experimental setups. Since the reconstitution of technological capacities is a historical process that is itself constantly involved in the transmutation of epistemological values theorized by Bachelard, its condition of possibility is precisely that it be shorn of transcendental guarantee. What Kant said of noumena—that knowledge of noumena cannot be grounded, and thus is not knowledge—can be both accepted and transformed with respect to experimental phenomena: the technological conditions by which phenomena are constituted are ungrounded, and scientific knowledge changes on this condition. Since knowledge of phenomena is not only knowledge of what can be observed through regularities of perception but also observation and formalization of what cannot be made accessible through regularities of perception, to know a natural law scientifically is to know it at once as phenomenon and noumenon. The condition of possibility of this “at once” is the surrendering of transcendental ground as the fundamental criterion of knowledge, and the opening of knowledge to the ungroundedness of its historical transformation. This historical transformation works through the non-synthetic, relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism, mathematics and experiment, formalization and technogenesis. To know something as both phenomenon and noumenon is to know it as both empirically and rationally constructed, as neither given nor refractory to determination. A natural law is known as phenomenon insofar as it is determined, as least partly, through experimental observation. It is known as noumenon insofar as it is inaccessible to experimental observation. It must be determined as an object of reason, but this determination is also mediated by

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the experimental constitution of objects of experience. The rationally determined setup of the experiment, the multiplication of modes of technical perception, the filtration of indexical traces through formalization, the routing of mathematical formalizations back through new technological concretions, and so on—these produce and “stratify” regularities of experimental perception in such a way that they cannot simply be understood as given. Such stratification constructs an object of knowledge that is neither given to experience nor separated from its determinations: an object of reason that is not purely thought, but rather constrained by experimental protocols and extrapolated by rational methods. We know something at once as both phenomena and noumena insofar as we know it both through observation and as it could never be observed. We know it in a manner that could never come under the transcendentally constituting conditions of a subject, but rather through the ceaselessly reconstituted conditions of an ungrounded historical process without a subject. That is: a process in which subjective determinations are displaced, refracted, dispersed, and reconstituted in a complex of determinations traversing technical, mathematical, and experimental protocols exceeding the synthesis of subjective faculties. Bachelard transforms Kant’s categories. By phenomenon Bachelard means: constituted by conditions of experimental observation (object of experience). By noumenon he means: formally determined by rational, mathematical extrapolation beyond conditions of possible experience (object of reason). Knowledge of the object of experience and the object of reason co-constitute one another, constrain and recursively refine one another, such that they become the same object (at once phenomenon and noumenon). But by knowledge of “noumenon” he does not mean absolute, direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Bachelard opens an epistemological field in which objects are known as both phenomenon and noumenon insofar as they are constituted as neither “for-us” nor “in-themselves.” This specifies the terrain of what I would call provisional objectivity. Scientific knowledge is “objective” for the same reason it is “provisional”: because it is constrained and enabled by fields of relational formalization and recursively refined experimentation, it is adequate to refutation and correction, and the process of its rectification is unlimited. That process defies subjective synthesis. Properties of an object are known scientifically insofar as it is constructed as an object of knowledge, but if this construction distinguishes the object of knowledge from the thing “in-itself,” it also distinguishes it from knowledge of the thing as it is “for-us.” Science renders objects of knowledge irreducible to either the in-itself or the for-us. Provisional objectivity suspends objects in the medium of construc-

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tion, in a process of rational/empirical constitution that filters the givenness of subjective determination. It would be quite reductive to call this process “intersubjective,” since its transmission, assimilation, and recomposition depends not only upon relations between individual subjects but also upon technical apparatuses, inscriptions, necessary entailments of formal chains—upon the relaying of information irreducible to human observation, human thought, and human communication.15

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE Although Althusser deploys the term “rationalist empiricism” to characterize an epistemological tradition to which Bachelard was central, he does not often characterize his own epistemology in such terms. But we can read the dialectical transmutation of rationalist and empiricist epistemological values back into Althusser’s theory of science. Althusser’s distinction between “science” and “ideology” is more frequently dismissed than defended, but he makes clear in his “Lecture Course for Scientists” (1967) that there is no clean separation between the two.16 Rather, science requires a historical process of critique and clarification that perpetually intervenes in their relationship. Since science is always infiltrated by ideology, it requires forms of theoretical practice capable of subjecting ideology to critical interrogation. The criterion of “science” is the constitution of forms of knowledge capable of overcoming what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles”—ideological impediments to such critique and clarification. A science is a form of knowledge that has arrived at mutually determining concepts and methods making possible a field of recursive, historical self-interrogation. The criteria of scientific knowledge are never fixed and can never be divorced from a practice in process; they are relative to the capacity of a conceptual and methodological field to subject itself to refutation, refinement, and generative conflict, which remains a ceaseless task. For Althusser, Marx’s critique of political economy founds a science because it elaborates a conceptual structure making systematically legible the ideological afflictions of a field of knowledge, thereby rendering its own elaboration open to a history of critique wherein the stakes of theoretical determinations and their application in practice can be recursively interrogated. In “On the Materialist Dialectic,” Althusser schematizes the process of recursive self-critique by which science is constituted and sustained through his theory of the three “Generalities” (see Figure 1). By the term “generality” Althusser means to stress that:

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Figure 1. Althusser’s Three Generalities. Generality II (present scientific theory) works [1] on Generality I (ideological or outdated scientific concepts) in order to generate [2] Generality III (knowledge: new concepts and conceptual relations). Generality III is integrated [3] into Generality II through revision of scientific theory, the production of new experimental apparatuses, the construction of new theoretical problems. Past elements of Generality II requiring revision in relation to present scientific theory become [4] elements of Generality I.

science never works on an existence whose essence is pure immediacy and singularity (“sensations” or “individuals”). It always works on something “general,” even if this has the form of a “fact”. . . . It does not “work” on a purely objective “given,” that of pure and absolute “facts.” On the contrary, its particular labour consists of elaborating its own scientific facts through a critique of the ideological “facts” elaborated by an earlier ideological theoretical practice. To elaborate its own specific “facts” is simultaneously to elaborate its own “theory,” since a scientific fact—and not the self-styled pure phenomenon—can only be identified in the field of a theoretical practice.17

These remarks offer a critique of vulgar empiricism—one that takes the objects of scientific practice to be pure phenomena that have not undergone a process of either ideological or theoretical transformation. Althusser emphasizes that science is continually involved with the discrepancy between theory, as constituted at present, and “facts” promulgated by ideological practices or devolving from earlier stages of science. The “raw material” upon which science works— which he names Generality I—is thus not pure phenomena but rather “ideological concepts” or “scientifically elaborated concepts which belong nevertheless to an earlier phase of science (an ex-Generality III).”18 Generality III denotes knowledge produced by such theoretical labor upon Generality I: new scientific concepts and conceptual relations. Generality II, which works upon Generality I to produce Generality III, is “the corpus of concepts whose more or less contradictory unity constitutes the ‘theory’ of the science at the (historical) moment under consideration, the ‘theory’ that defines the field in which all the problems of the science must necessarily be posed.”19 Note that the present state of scientific theory constitutes for Althusser both a field of knowledge and a field of

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problems: a problematic field through which new questions can be posed to old facts in order to generate new knowledge.20 Importantly, Althusser stresses that “scientific theory” (Generality II) “rarely exists in a science in the reflected form of a unified theoretical system.” Rather, it “includes the whole field of technique, in which the theoretical concepts are in large part invested” and “the explicitly theoretical part proper is very rarely unified in a non-contradictory form.”21 The present state of scientific “theory” is in fact a “theoretico-technical” complex capable of “pos[ing] an existing difficulty in the form of a problem.” We can thus locate in Althusser’s epistemological schema an uneven, complex, non-unified field of rational knowledge, experimental techniques, and technological apparatuses that works upon ossified “facts,” and we can say that what characterizes these ideological or outdated “facts” is that they have either become abstracted from or have yet to enter into the dialectic process of epistemological transmutation between reason and experience theorized by Bachelard. They must be addressed within the “theoreticotechnical” field through which the present state of scientific theory (in all its tension between discrepant findings, regional theories, competing interpretations) works upon both pre-scientific intuitions and ossified formalisms, theories, or data to produce new concepts and empirical findings. The integration of this knowledge into scientific theory will then depend upon the capacity to coordinate rational and empirical values: the testing of speculative theory against experimental outcomes, the consideration of experimental outcomes within the framework of existing formalisms, or the transformation of those formalisms to accommodate empirical findings. From a philosophical perspective, which he gleans from Marx’s methodological considerations in the introduction to the Grundrisse, Althusser stipulates that the ideological opposition between the abstract (theory) and the concrete (reality) should be displaced by a relation between two concretes: “the concrete-in-thought, which is a knowledge, and the concrete-reality which is its object.”22 (See Figure 2.) It is not that the rational is abstract and the empirical concrete. What is merely given is abstract and must undergo a process of elaboration to transform it into concrete knowledge. What has to be theorized is not an opposition between the empirical (supposedly concrete) and the theoretical (supposedly abstract), but rather the transformation of ossified facts into the concrete-in-thought (Generality III) which has the concrete-real as its object of knowledge (we will return to this point shortly). Marx describes the transformation of the abstract into the Gedankenkonkretum as “the working-up of observation and conception into concepts” (der Verarbeitung von Anschau-

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Figure 2. Abstract, Concrete-in-Thought, Concrete-Real. Althusser displaces the association of theoretical knowledge with the abstract, as opposed to the concrete. What is abstract is inadequate knowledge (ideology, ossified fact, the self-evidence of pure phenomena), while theoretical knowledge is the “concrete-in-thought” (a term borrowed from Marx).

ung und Vorstellung in Begriffe).23 Thus, concepts are produced through the dual elaboration of both what is observed (Anschauung) and what is conceived (Vorstellung). The merely given becomes concrete through the integration of observations into conceptual schema and the encounter of rational determinations with empirical facts, their mutual Verarbeitung. In order not to become ideological—not to languish in received ideas or self-evident truisms—knowledge must be continually expelled by and reintegrated into the dialectic of the rational and the empirical, transformed within an operative, never fully unified or totalized theoretico-technical complex. Within the framework of the physical sciences, the recent project to redefine the kilogram unit offers a striking example of this methodological dialectic in action (I treat this example in detail in Chapter 6). The gram was initially defined, in 1795, as the mass of one cubic centimeter of water at the melting point of ice (thus, a kilogram has the mass of one cubic decimeter of water). This definition relies in turn upon the meter unit, which was defined in 1791 as one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant along the Earth’s meridian through Paris. These quantities were established experimentally—in the case of the meter, through the famous surveying project carried out by Delambre and Méchain from 1792 to 1799.24 Platinum reference objects instantiating the length of the meter and the mass of the kilogram were then fabricated and deposited in a vault in Sèvres. When the metric system was adopted internationally in 1889, new reference objects were fabricated, and definitions of the meter and the kilogram were tied directly to these: the meter was defined as the length of the prototype meter bar; the kilogram as the mass of the kilogramme des archives.

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The meter has since undergone several redefinitions, most recently as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. In November 2018, the kilogram was redefined in terms of the Planck constant.25 This means that the physical object which previously instantiated the kilogram unit no longer grounds its definition, just as the meter bar was previously eclipsed by reference to a physical constant (c, the speed of light). The meter bar and the kilogram prototype are concretizations of theoretical knowledge: they instantiated the rational coordination of empirical findings in standards of reference for the ongoing quantitative determinations of scientific practice. Yet the kilogram prototype has been replaced because it had become abstract. No matter how carefully it is preserved, the object gradually accretes irregularities altering its mass, but because its mass is by definition 1 kg, these cannot be accounted for in an operative stipulation of how much its mass has drifted. Redefinition of the kilogram in terms of the Planck constant establishes a fixed quantity (a quantitative determination of the physical constant h), and this required an internationally coordinated effort to measure the Planck value itself with reference to the kilogram as previously defined, through equations correlating electricity to mass. Since 2014, through two fundamentally different experiments, the quantity h has been measured below a particular threshold of uncertainty. The fixing of the Planck number means that this uncertainty migrates to the kilogram unit itself (a far lesser degree of uncertainty than that previously attending the definition of the unit). “The kilogram” (object and unit) thus undergoes what we might think of as a process of reconcretization with respect to scientific knowledge: it is incorporated into a new system of theoretical knowledge coordinated with our best existing technologies, experimental procedures, and formalizations, such that the frame of reference previously grounding the unit is not only displaced but integrated into a new referential context. Meanwhile, what the Planck number designates—the minimal quantum of physical action—is that which is measured in the experimental campaign to redefine the kilogram; it is the concrete-real to which these measurements refer. It cannot be measured with exact accuracy, but it can be measured by experiments with determinate uncertainty and quantified within a margin of 20 parts per billion (2.0 × 10–9). The “real object” (quantum of action) remains exterior to its theoretical determination (it is what is determined by theory). But it has also become a rigorously specifiable object of knowledge, known with a determinate degree of uncertainty within an experimental and theoretical system of reference. The history of measurement recursively refines the very units (kg) upon which it is

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predicated; it does so through the measurements it makes available (h); and it does so through the integration of measured quantities into interrelated formalizations, such as those relating energy to both the Plank number and to mass (e.g., E = hv; E = mc2), coordinating empirical evidence with rational logic and enabling new programs of theoretico-technical research.

THE OBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE REAL OBJECT Having begun to articulate an approach to rationalist empiricism by drawing together Bachelard’s and Althusser’s theories of scientific knowledge, we can now address some of the problems with the relatively thin realist epistemology put forward by Meillassoux in After Finitude. First of all, how can we square Meillassoux’s defense of the Cartesian distinction between primary and secondary qualities with the “non-Cartesian epistemology” formulated by Bachelard?26 We should bear in mind Bachelard’s stipulation that his “non-Cartesian philosophy complements Cartesian philosophy without contradicting it.”27 What he objects to in Cartesian epistemology is its fundamentally analytical method: the grounding of knowledge upon simple ideas according to the principle that “no construction is clear to the mind unless the mind knows how to take it apart.” According to Bachelard, “Descartes never pays heed to the reality of the complex, to the emergence of qualities in the whole not evident in the parts,” whereas “modern science begins with synthesis.”28 Epistemologically, he argues, modern science “relies for clarity on combining ideas rather than on trying to understand individual objects in isolation. In other words, instead of intrinsic clarity it relies on what I shall call operational clarity. Relations do not exemplify objects; objects exemplify relations.”29 Bachelard thus proposes a relational realism according to which there are no simple phenomena; every phenomenon is a fabric of relations. There is no such thing as a simple nature, a simple substance; a substance is a web of attributes. And there is no such thing as a simple idea, for . . . no idea can be understood until it has been incorporated into a complex system of thoughts and experiences.30

These formulations emphasize once again that the relational epistemology of “modern science” cannot be grounded by either rationalism or empiricism in isolation; it depends upon the transmutation of experience and reason, a “complex system of thoughts and experiences.” Such a relational epistemology renders the philosophical expression “in-

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itself ” equivocal, insofar as it is meant to refer to the thing in-itself. On the one hand, the expression designates the independence of the thing from human perception or knowledge, the separability of the object of our knowledge (concrete-real) from our knowledge of the object (the concrete-in-thought). On the other hand, it implies the independence of the thing per se, the separability of objects from relations. In this sense, the “thing in-itself ” would designate the simple nature, or simple substance, whose existence Bachelard rejects (on the grounds that it is incompatible with physical theory). It is this second possible sense of the term from which Meillassoux’s terminology in After Finitude needs to be disentangled, while retaining his emphasis on the first. We can reconstruct Meillassoux’s “Cartesian thesis”—“all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself ”31—in such a way that it retains its Althusserian sense (the concrete-in-thought refers to and establishes knowledge of a concrete-real that “survives in its independence, after as before, outside of thought”) without requiring absolute knowledge of simple natures. That is, we can show that Bachelard’s non-Cartesian epistemology complements Meillassoux’s Cartesian thesis without contradicting it—and we can do so by thinking through the inclusion of that Cartesian thesis within the larger framework of rationalist empiricism. Consider the object of scientific investigation with which Meillassoux is most directly concerned in the first chapter of After Finitude: the earth. The accretion of the earth is an “ancestral” event insofar as its existence pre-dates the emergence of the human species and terrestrial life. From a Cartesian perspective, it is also an event anterior to the existence of those secondary qualities that are specifically modes of relation between a living creature and its environment (e.g. color, heat, scent), such that an ancestral event is only meaningfully described through reference to primary qualities (e.g., wavelength, temperature, chemical reactions).32 Rather than specifically perceptual information, Meillassoux stipulates, all that can be formulated about such an event is what the “measurements,” that is to say, the mathematical data, allow us to determine: for instance, that it began roughly 4.56 billion years ago, that it did not occur in a single instant but took place over millions of years—more precisely, tens of millions of years—that it occupied a certain volume in space, a volume which varied through time, etc.33

These mathematical data are derived from measurements contemporaneous with us and made available within a particular framework of scientific theory,34

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but they specify information about a referent (the accretion of the earth) that preceded our very existence and thus did not itself exist as the correlate of our experimental protocols. Did not itself exist: What is the “itself ” that is referred to here? It is the independence of the physical process under scientific investigation (the accretion of the earth) from our knowledge of that process, the independence of the concrete-real about which we know through the concrete-in-thought. It thus pertains to the “in-itself ” in the first sense of the term elaborated earlier: we know that the object of our knowledge is separable from our knowledge of the object. But is it an object that we know about? The earth is an object (a planet), but the accretion of the earth is a process, and studying it offers an excellent object lesson in the processual, relational constitution of “things in-themselves.” We are studying the temporal constitution of the object, its formation as an object, which implies that the alterations it undergoes to become the object it “is” do not simply cease once it has formed—as if there were a specific instant at which its form were established once and for all.35 Mathematizable properties of the object (the datable duration of its formation) make clear that it is not a simple substance or a simple nature, that it is not a “thing in-itself ” in the sense that it is thinkable as discrete and self-identical. The thing that the earth is exists as a process that reaches a certain threshold of stability, but that also never freezes into unchanging self-identity. This is true of all objects. Part of what is at issue here is the passage of a property Kant understood as relevant only to objects of experience (temporal constitution) over to the designation of things in-themselves—which from the perspective of Kantian philosophy could not be subject to transcendental time determinations. This terminological difficulty drives home that the provenance of the term “thing in-itself ” (Ding an sich) is Kantian rather than Cartesian. In a sense, this is exactly Meillassoux’s point: the correlational reversal of our thinking about the relation between time and objects is so profoundly embedded in the frameworks of Kantian, Hegelian, and Heideggerian philosophy that our philosophical terminology is “itself ” difficult to disentangle from their conceptual schemata. In this respect, however, Meillassoux’s references to the “thing in-itself,” or properties of “objects in-themselves,” are sometimes conceptually equivocal and rhetorically infelicitous. While rejecting Kant’s proscription upon knowledge of the in-itself, Meillassoux does want to retain a Kantian distinction between the “in-itself ” and the “for-us” so as to block the post-Kantian collapse of that distinction in German idealism from Fichte through Hegel. But in doing so, he draws the Cartesian distinction between primary and secondary qualities into a sometimes

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uncomfortable relation to a Kantian terminology difficult to disentangle from the conceptual distributions of transcendental critique. Meillassoux’s Cartesian thesis is that “all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in-itself.” But it is precisely the specifiable uncertainty of quantities determined by measurement that gives the quantitative determination of properties scientific meaning.36 A measurement of the length of my desk (189.2 cm) has scientific value only if I can determine and stipulate the uncertainty of my measurement, which would require a more complex experimental apparatus than my tape measure. Meillassoux acknowledges (of course) that a measurement can be supplanted by one that “exhibits greater empirical accuracy” and that “empirical science is by right revisable.”37 His claim is that the referent of revisable determinations is external to the determinations themselves, and that these determinations constitute revisable knowledge of those referents: “science does not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning.”38 One might ask, however: If it is the specifiable uncertainty of a measurement that makes it scientifically valid, and if the quantitative determination of all measurable properties is attended by uncertainty, can an aspect of the object designated by an uncertain quantity be conceived as a “property of the object in-itself?” After all, it is not the property (or the aspect of the object) that is uncertain “in-itself;” it is the quantity designating it. What do we know about objects or events, through our quantitative knowledge, that is separable from the uncertainty of our quantitative knowledge? Thanks to radioactive dating techniques, we know that the accretion of the earth occurred billions of years prior to the genesis of the human species (and we did not always know this), though our knowledge of the age of the earth is attended by an uncertainty of some fifty million years.39 I could not quantify, exactly, the length of my desk, and measured at certain scales its length would not be a perfectly stable property. But I know that its length is greater than that of the keyboard it supports. Such examples might seem trivial, but they exemplify an interesting fact: although I cannot assign a perfectly accurate quantitative value to a property of the object “in-itself,” I can know something else about the object, which can be abstracted from my relation to it, on the basis of a determinately uncertain quantitative value that I assign to a metrological model of the object (i.e., the object as determined by measurement).40 What poses a problem for the exact assignment of quantities to objects in-themselves (determinate uncertainty) does not necessarily pose a problem for knowledge of quantitative rela-

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tions among objects. If I know that the uncertainty of a measurement is within a certain margin, then I can also know something about the relative properties of different objects that is not compromised by that margin of uncertainty (e.g., my watch has more mass than my ring). Thus Bachelard refers to “the realism of algebra.”41 Mathematical formulations of physical laws formalize relations among quantitative properties that have been, or will be, determined with particular degrees of uncertainty. This is part of what Bachelard means when he claims that “simple ideas are not the ultimate basis of knowledge; after a complete theory is available, it will be apparent that simple ideas are in fact simplifications of more complex truths.”42 The number designating the speed of light in a vacuum (c) has now been fixed exactly, but the uncertainty of its determination has shifted to the unit in which it is expressed (m/s). The scientific meaning of the value depends on this complex sense. The earth, considered as an “object in-itself,” does not have an exact age that is a quantifiable property, since the exact moment of its origin is logically impossible to specify. That is implicit in its existence as a physical, rather than logical, entity. But our knowledge of the relation between well-established quantitative ranges within which the accretion of the earth, the origin of life on earth, and the origin of humankind took place enables relational determinations and logical extrapolations from empirical measurements that are consequential. Moreover, we can say that these are true, and that the knowledge we glean from them about the relative chronology of events refers to events exterior to knowledge. Meillassoux is interested in our scientific knowledge of a physical order of time that is not subsumed by phenomenological time, that is separable from phenomenological time, and that can be known logically on the basis of empirically determined quantities: Science reveals a time that not only does not need conscious time but that allows the latter to arise at a determinate point in its own flux. To think science is to think the status of a becoming which cannot be correlational because the correlate is in it, rather than it being in the correlate. So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness.43

If the empirically determined quantities that enable such thinking can be specified only with respect to metrological models of the processes concerned, knowledge of these models nevertheless enables logical inferences concerning physical, temporal relationships that are separate from the models. That is why the term “provisional objectivity” is appropriate to such knowledge.

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THE DEFAULT OF JUDGMENT Reference to the “in-itself ” in After Finitude is complicated by another difficulty: that the term is used both to denote empirical, scientific knowledge of mind-independent objects or events and to denote speculative, ontological knowledge of being-qua-being. Here we must move beyond the epistemology of science to the question of how the speculative is related to the empirical in an ontological register. If Kant infringed upon the critical limits he had established by (1) assuming that the thing in-itself existed and (2) assuming that it was non-contradictory, Meillassoux asserts, “by way of contrast,” “non-metaphysical speculation proceeds in the first instance by stating that the in-itself is nothing other than the facticity of the transcendental forms of representation. Then, in the second instance, it goes on to deduce from the absoluteness of this facticity those properties of the in-itself which Kant for his part took to be self-evident.”44 Here “properties of the in-itself ” refers not to empirically determinable quantities assignable to properties of objects, but rather to that which is not an object: to the necessity of contingency and to the law of non-contradiction. The ontological scope of speculative rationality goes beyond the empirically determinable properties of objects (beings) to determine absolute properties of being-qua-being. Meillassoux formulates the tension between reason and experience involved in such speculative rationality most clearly in his dissertation: The canonical paradox of rationality is thus given in this form: reason presents itself as universal discursivity, necessary and true, thus as the thought of that which is—but that which is is given as particular and contingent. If reason is not a chimera, then it must resolve this problem: how to disengage, at the heart of the factual beings given in experience, that which, adequate to those beings, is not itself contingent?45

As I argue in Chapter 4, Meillassoux here reformulates the problem of the ontological difference: whereas beings are contingent, the being of beings is the necessity of their contingency, and this is not itself a being (i.e., there is no necessary being; what is necessary is that all beings are contingent). Note that Meillassoux commits himself, in a manner I will later explore in detail, to drawing the rational from the empirical: the problem is “how to disengage, at the heart of the factual beings given in experience,” that which reason can stipulate concerning what is not given in experience. What interests me here is the mutually delimiting purview of the rational and the empirical implicit in the relation between Meillassoux’s speculative and epistemological argumentation. All that we observe is the contingency of beings and

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the regularity of physical laws, yet we can rationally affirm the necessity of that contingency: its absolute rather than factical scope, its insubordination to any law, and thus the ultimate contingency of the regularity of physical law itself.46 The empirical delimits the field of the rational, insofar as absolute contingency is not empirically manifest (but neither is it contradictory to what is empirically manifest); the rational delimits the field of the empirical, insofar as we can know that the regularity of manifestation does not delegitimate the absolute scope of the contingency of being. Absolute contingency is not ontically accessible; empirical contingency does not yield ontological truth. Science and philosophy limn different regimes of knowledge of the “in-itself,” insofar as we take this term to denote that which is independent of our capacity to determine its properties. Thus, on the one hand, we have to think the complicity of reason and experience, rationalism and empiricism, in the establishment of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, we have to distinguish the scope of that complicity from the power of speculative rationality to go beyond the field of scientific knowledge, without thereby invalidating the knowledge that science makes possible. In Chapter 2, I argue that Meillassoux’s speculative ontology is consistent with his scientific epistemology and that the complexity of their consistency obeys and is indeed required by materialist criteria. Here I want to note that the speculative scope of Meillassoux’s argumentation has an important critical function, insofar as it delimits the concealed dogmatism of Kant’s transcendental theory of reflective judgment. Of course, reflective judgment is supposed to be that which, within the framework of transcendental critique, cannot be dogmatic, since it “attributes nothing at all to the object.” But consider the following passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I must quote at length given its centrality as a counterpoint to our theory of speculative critique: we must think of there being in nature, with regard to its merely empirical laws, a possibility of infinitely manifold empirical laws, which as far as our insight goes are nevertheless contingent (cannot be cognized a priori); and with regard to them we judge the unity of nature in accordance with empirical laws and the possibility of the unity of experience (as a system in accordance with empirical laws) as contingent. But since such a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place, because the universal laws of nature yield such an interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature, the power of judgment must thus assume it as an a priori principle for its own use that what is contingent for human insight in the particular (empirical) laws of nature nevertheless contains a lawful unity,

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not fathomable by us but still thinkable, in the combination of its manifold into one experience possible in itself. Consequently, since the lawful unity in a combination that we cognize in accordance with a necessary aim (a need) of the understanding but yet at the same time as contingent in itself is represented as the purposiveness of the objects (in this case, of nature), thus the power of judgment, which with regard to things under possible (still to be discovered) empirical laws is merely reflecting, must think of nature with regard to the latter in accordance with a principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition, which is then expressed in the maxims of the power of judgment given above. Now this transcendental concept of a purposiveness of nature is neither a concept of nature nor of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the object (of nature), but rather represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature with the aim of a thoroughly interconnected experience, consequently it is a subjective principle (maxim) of the power of judgment.47

Kant not only claims to deduce the reflective concept of the purposiveness of nature but also, as he adds following this passage, “the necessity of assuming it as a transcendental principle of cognition” (my emphasis).48 He says his principle “represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature” (my emphasis). This “is neither a concept of nature nor a concept of freedom,” because reflective judgment suspends the application of both understanding and reason and thus suspends the determination of both the realm of nature and the realm of morality. However, what is determined is that the unity of nature “must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place” (my emphasis). Kant stipulates that the necessity of this unity of nature must be thought beyond the determination of nature through the categories of the understanding: The understanding is of course in possession a priori of universal laws of nature, without which nature could not be an object of experience at all; but still it requires in addition a certain order of nature in its particular laws, which can only be known to it empirically and which from its point of view are contingent. These rules, without which there would be no progress from the general analogy of a possible experience in general to the particular, it must think as laws (i.e., as necessary), because otherwise they would not constitute an order of nature, even though it does not and never can cognize their necessity.49

In addition to the universal laws of nature provided by the categories, we must think a unified order of particular laws of nature (beyond the determinations of the understanding), and we must think these laws as necessary, even if we can

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never cognize them as such (they are only known to the understanding empirically, and from its point of view are contingent). What is in evidence here is a dogmatism of subjective rather than objective determination. Again, the transcendental concept of the purposiveness of nature “represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature.” Kant presents this as a “deduction,”50 but in fact the reasoning is covertly inductive: because we know from experience there is a unity of experience, there must be a unity of nature. Because our experience of nature has been unified, nature must necessarily be ordered by laws that unify its order. Because the a priori laws of nature provided by our understanding cannot, on their own, account for the unified interconnection of their determinations, there must be an order of particular laws beyond them, and these must be necessary. The Critique of Pure Reason had set out to resolve the problem of induction by deducing universal, a priori laws of nature belonging to the faculty of understanding, which accounted, on transcendental grounds, for the attribution of constant conjunction to relations of cause and effect that Hume had found wanting on either rational or empirical grounds. But in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, we find that Kant’s purported resolution to the problem of induction requires a supplement, stipulating the reflective necessity of assuming necessary laws (beyond those of the understanding) securing an order of nature which enables a transition from possible experience in general to particular experience. There must be necessary laws ordering the unity of experience because there is a unity of experience. But the ground of such an induction—for it is a disguised induction—is exactly what Hume had demanded. Far from solving the problem Hume had formulated, Kant ends up reproducing its aporia as a “merely reflecting” judgment that is not objectively but subjectively dogmatic. We must be attentive to what, according to Kant, has to be thought. Kant deploys reason not determine the in-itself directly, but to determine the reflective necessity of thinking the laws of the in-itself as necessary, though we can only experience them as contingent. Kant must say that this has to be thought, because otherwise the problem of induction would be unresolved; we would not have a subjective principle securing the unified order of nature for reflective judgment. But the grounds for the rational judgment producing this principle are empirical grounds (x is and has been the case; y is necessary for x to be the case; so y must be the case), which are acknowledged as insufficient for the judgment of necessity. Kant ignores the speculative problem of whether it is in fact necessary to think that the unified order of nature we experience is secured by necessary laws. The persistence of the unified order of nature we experience

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could be contingent; it may be contingent that a unity of laws has obtained— which is exactly the judgment our experience could ground. That is, we do not have to think what Kant says we must think. In fact, there is no reason to think it. And this is exactly what “that acute man,” David Hume, had pointed out in the first place.

SPECULATIVE CRITIQUE Speculation enters into the terrain of what has to be thought and interrogates its determinations. Is it true that we have to think what Kant says we must think? How would the absolute idealist reply? How would the Kantian then have to reply to the absolute idealist? How does the history of thought—the rigorous articulation of its movement between systematic determinations—impose new constraints upon what we have to think? The rationalism of speculative thought implies a critical vocation, which it should not abjure. Hegel refers to his speculative method in the Science of Logic as a “true critique” because it investigates the determinations of reflection on their own ground, in the medium of their self-interrogating movement, thus producing an immanent rather than transcendental method of criticism. Such critique involves a rational reflection upon the experience of thinking, and thus also an empirical investigation of the determinations of reason—observing, cancelling, and developing these as they unfold. In Chapter 3, I develop a rationalist empiricist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic, positioning it as a form of speculative critique. But in Chapter 4, I also attend to the dereliction of Hegel’s own critical method at pivotal moments in the Phenomenology and the Logic, showing how the violation of imminent critique is due to a certain treatment of the relation between time and the whole in Hegel’s philosophy. The critical delimitation of Hegel’s speculative ontology thus requires a transition from speculative idealism to speculative materialism, and I argue that producing precisely this critical delimitation is the burden of Meillassoux’s doctoral dissertation. Here we will see, as in Chapter 2, that the defense of materialism against idealism depends upon an alignment of the relationship between rationalism and empiricism that can preserve the critical function of speculation, rather than sever speculation from critique. The difficulty with Kant’s principle of reflective judgment (the purposiveness of nature) is that he wants to ground philosophical reflection concerning the empirical interconnection of nature upon a rational principle that is supposedly required as a subjective maxim. Thus reflective judgment rationally subordinates the contingency of experience to the necessity of laws that we can never experi-

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ence but that we must think. When Meillassoux shows, through his Cantorian treatment of the statistical resolution of the problem of induction, that it is rationally feasible to sustain a thesis of unsubordinated contingency (to think that the necessity of laws is not required to account for the empirical unity and regularity of laws) he unburdens philosophy of grounding the relation between the empirical and the rational. The rational thesis of absolute contingency does not ground reflection upon the empirical regularity of nature; rather, it distinguishes the ontological order of absolute contingency (thought by philosophy) from the ontic order of empirical regularities (explored by science). The speculative has a critical function, insofar as it preserves the autonomy of science against the pretension of (transcendental) philosophy to ground scientific knowledge. And this critique has a speculative function insofar as it preserves the autonomy of philosophy to think the ontological in a manner that is not delimited by empirical science (this is the very criterion of distinction between the ontological and the ontic). Does this not simply separate the empirical (science) from the rational (philosophy)? Was it not our project to think the productivity of their methodological relation? But what I have tried to show is that science itself involves a mutually critical and productive relationship between reason and experience; Bachelard’s epistemology theorizes science as not simply empiricist but also profoundly rationalist. And philosophical speculation itself, as I try to show in Chapters 2 (Meillassoux) and 3 (Hegel), involves an alternation between the experience of what happens in thought and rational determinations of what has to be said. Indeed, this alternation is not only internal to the speculative arguments of particular thinkers, but also historical in its dynamism. Thus, both “empirical” science and “rational” speculation involve a transmutation of epistemological values between rationalism and empiricism. Part of the burden of speculative critique—against the grounding operations of transcendental critique—is to sustain the autonomy of science and philosophy, according them their own terrain (ontic/ontological) while also thinking their consistency. I hope to show that this distribution of the relation between science and philosophy has important consequences for understanding the relation between idealism and materialism. That is finally the burden of the chapters that follow: to show how materialism relies upon the powers of speculative critique made possible by what I call, after Althusser, rationalist empiricism. I pursue that project across chapters on methodological exceptions in Descartes and Hume (Chapter 1), on the Althusserian criteria of materialism inherited by Meillassoux (Chapter 2), on the ungrounded, genetic epistemology of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Chapter 3), on the

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displacement of Hegel’s speculative idealism by Meillassoux’s speculative materialism (Chapter 4), on the metrological redefinition of the kilogram considered through Hegel’s theory of measure (Chapter 5), on contemporary digital photography considered through Whitehead’s theory of prehensions (Chapter 6), on the recessed concept of “structure” in Plato’s Timaeus (Chapter 7), on the relation of Badiou’s theory of the subject to the problem of induction (Chapter 8), on the criterion of immanence in communist theory (Chapter 9), and on the concept of “separation” (Scheidung) as the crux of the rationalist and empiricist dimensions of Marx’s Capital (Chapter 10). Thus the book develops an account of rationalist empiricism relevant not only to ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy but also to art and political theory. These chapters are organized into four sections focusing primarily upon (I) epistemology; (II) ontology; (III) “structure” in science, art, and philosophy; and (IV ) political theory. Among these, the role of the third section of the book requires further explanation. In these chapters on metrology (Chapter 5), digital photography (Chapter 6), and Plato (Chapter 7), I offer examples of how thinking in terms of rationalist empiricism might illuminate practices in contemporary science and art, and I then pursue a concept of structure latent in the Timaeus that I view as consonant with those examples. What unifies these chapters is their common concern with the codetermination of the material and the ideal. I am interested in how rationally determined quantities and structures both emerge from and are inscribed within material objects and devices, while configurations of experience enabled by the latter give rise to the new possibilities of rational determination. Rather than “apply” the concept of structure I derive from Plato to my engagements with the redefinition of the kilogram and the art practice of Nicolas Baier, I lead with these case studies and then position a reading of Plato within the field of conceptual problems they raise, while offering a Coda at the end of Part III to render legible the retroactive relevance of the concept of structure derived from the Timaeus to the two previous chapters. Indeed, Chapter 7 was composed from the perspective of theoretical questions raised by those previous chapters, and many of the philosophical questions I pursue in this book came into focus not only through my reading of Bachelard, Althusser, Meillassoux, Hegel, or Marx but also and equally from studies of contemporary scientific practice and my encounter with Nicolas Baier’s photography. Thus, I hope Chapters 5 and 6, on science and art, will not be viewed as digressions from the main line of the philosophical argument, but rather as central to its genesis and articulation. The attention of those chapters to concrete practices is integral to my own effort to mediate the claims of reason and experience.

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I want to emphasize that the term “rationalist empiricism” is not intended to promulgate some kind of theoretical brand name or methodological school. Insofar as it relies upon the methodological gap between rationalism and empiricism in order to sustain the critical implications of each for the other, rationalist empiricism is not itself a unified method. Rather, it is an orientation toward philosophical problems that seeks to intervene in and unsettle the methodological unity of the tradition. It is also an orientation toward political problems that seeks to intervene in and unsettle any programmatic unity of theory and praxis. Taking up such problems through their relation to the tradition involves engaging contemporary texts, the history of philosophy, and political theory not only in terms of one’s own “position,” but in terms of certain methodological approaches that do not necessarily cohere into a position or align with a single philosophical school. Relations among genuinely different forms of rationalist empiricism will emerge in the interstices of the chapters that follow, in ways that will often remain implicit. Perhaps there is an important relationship between Hegel’s method and Althusserian epistemology that the latter would come to disavow; perhaps there is an unspoken structuralist materialism in Plato’s Timaeus that is obliquely resonant with the operations of contemporary digital photography and computational modeling; perhaps recent developments in communist theory share more with epistemological debates in contemporary philosophy than one might imagine; perhaps Whitehead’s process philosophy is closer to Bachelard’s “rationalist” philosophy of science than one might have thought. The implications of these possibilities, latent in the constellation of chapters that follows, will not always be directly spelled out. What interests me are the different configurations rationalist empiricism can exhibit and how such an orientation can traverse real discrepancies between philosophical priorities and positions, transforming itself in the process. Of the figures I engage with, it is Whitehead to whom I wish I could have devoted more sustained attention, given his import for my thinking about philosophical speculation. But at least I can close this introduction with the passage from Process and Reality that best formulates the vocation of speculative critique. Indeed, it is the finest definition of philosophy that I know: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and the greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual

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individual of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.51

The individual originates from and embodies the external totality. It “has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality.” Consciousness is a recently evolved element by which the selective character of the individual pursues its own purposes, thus deepening its individual being but obscuring the totality from which it emerges and in which it inheres. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of this excess of subjectivity. The critical dimension of speculative thought is this self-correction, the delimitation of that selective emphasis by which consciousness obscures external totality. The totality is here preserved as external, even though we embody and originate from it. Yet it can be recovered by philosophy, through the self-correction of the excessive subjectivity of consciousness. And we can say that while empiricism engages the experience of the “sheer actuality” through which we are embedded in the external totality, rationalism delimits the selective emphasis by which our consciousness is constrained. Thus both are required, countering and amplifying one another, in order for philosophy to pursue its speculative labor in concert with critique. We should note as well that in his speculative thinking of the “totality,” Whitehead decompletes its conceptualization as the whole, noting that “the community of actual things . . . is an incompletion in process of production.”52 In recovering the totality obscured by the selection, one may recover its incompletion as well, deconstituting the totality as not-all by going beyond the subjective limit that would leave the very question of the whole indeterminate. Self-correction of subjectivity; empirical embeddedness in actuality; rational overcoming of selective consciousness; recovery of totality; decompletion of the whole: Whitehead formulates the essential elements of speculative critique that will be pursued in what follows. I hope to show that the materialism of critique, within and through speculation, depends upon a mutual interruption of reason and experience across a gap that is never resolved into a synthesis or covered by a ground. The perpetual experience of this interruption, and the constantly renewed thinking of its consequences, is the practice of rationalist empiricism.

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Very well then; just this once let us give [the mind] a completely free rein, so that after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed. —René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy Tho’ the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim. —David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

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ABSENT BLUE WAX: ON THE MINGLING OF METHODOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONS

If philosophy involves the creation of concepts, it is the systematic character of philosophical thought that enables it to function as such. The statement and defense of a philosophical “position” through argumentation does not amount to the articulation of a philosophy, because every philosophy must construct not only arguments but the very concepts through which those arguments may be understood. Such construction requires a systematic determination of concepts, wherein the meaning and the functions any concept acquires relies upon and supports the meaning and functions of the other concepts that, together, constitute the singular thought of a philosopher. The positions of philosophers like Descartes, or Hume, or Spinoza, or Kant, or Hegel are not thereby incommensurable with one another, but their commensurability must itself be constructed through an understanding of each one’s thought which grasps the systematicity of its determinations, thus relating concepts to one another (for example, “idea”) through the specificity they acquire in each system, rather than through the assumption of a common terrain of positions they commonly inhabit. Philosophical systems must be made to communicate not so much at the interface of the common words they deploy, but through a paradoxical subsumption of our own thinking into the interior of their conceptual relationships, from within which we must think toward the interiority of another system that we must also inhabit. Philosophical communication suggests a strange topology wherein the 35

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exteriority of thought—the possibility that we may think one philosopher with another—is encountered within the deepest recesses of systems that would seem to shelter the specificity of their concepts from one another, that would seem to require us to remain within the immanent regulation of their terms in order to think those terms at all. Alfred North Whitehead defines speculative philosophy as “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” Here “coherence,” he stipulates, “means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless.” Thus, “it is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from one another.”1 This ideal involves the invention of concepts in the manner just discussed. It does not mean that they will be definable in terms of one another; “it means that what is indefinable in one such notion cannot be abstracted from its relevance to the other notions.” It is the indetermination haunting all individual words that finds its support, in the case of philosophical concepts, through the inter-determination of concepts that can never be wholly “defined” because they must be thought in their relational coherence. The term “applicable,” in Whitehead’s definition of speculative philosophy, “means that some items of experience are thus interpretable” (through the speculative scheme) while “adequate” means that “there are not items incapable of such interpretation.” So the speculative scope of philosophy is potentially applicable to all items of experience. Whitehead thus makes the important comment that his ideal of speculative philosophy “has its rational side and its empirical side”: The rational side is expressed by the terms “coherent” and “logical.” The empirical side is expressed by the terms “applicable” and “adequate.” But the two sides are bound together by clearing away an ambiguity which remains in the previous explanation of the term ‘adequate.’ The adequacy of the scheme over every item does not mean adequacy over such items as happen to have been considered. It means that the texture of observed experience, as illustrating the philosophic scheme, is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture.2

Thus not only the rational coherence of a scheme of concepts or “fundamental ideas” is at issue in philosophical systematicity; the very interpretation of our experience is bound up, insofar as we enter into the thinking of a philosophical system, with the intra-systemic determination of its concepts. The comparison of philosophical systems is in this sense not only an intellectual historical or

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analytical task; it is also a lived practice. We think and interpret the world that we inhabit through the ideas we have at our disposal, and insofar as these are philosophical they are systematically articulated. Thus our experience of the world enters into philosophical systematicity, and when we think across systems we also attempt to carry out the improbable (impossible?) task of carrying our experience from one system into another. What is the world that we pass through, at the crux of concept and experience, when we do so? Where is the extra-systemic space of philosophical reflection, or of thought, in which we think the compossibility or communication of philosophical systems? Where, and what, is the world we recompose as we do so? Let me step away from what seem to me the vertiginous difficulties of these questions in order to approach the absence of their terrain from another angle, through another question, closely related: What is a philosophical exception? Or better, how are we to think the mutual exteriority of philosophical exceptions? Or at least, what happens when we encounter philosophical exceptions in their mutual exteriority, and when we invite them to encounter one another? Those are the kinds of questions I want to pursue in what follows. For an exception, in philosophy, would be an exception to systematicity: it would exemplify the positive power of a system of thought to intuit its outside from within its own parameters while retaining the sense of that exception as outside its parameters. When a philosophical system encounters and traverses an exception it encounters its own outside within the movement of thought, without thereby either absorbing or collapsing into that outside. What I would call an exemplary exception inhabits an extra-systemic yet intra-philosophical space, a space exterior and open insofar as it is unbounded by an envelope of conceptual systematicity, yet nevertheless determined in its contours by the edges of those philosophical systems that generate exceptions—that produce exteriorities by constituting a field of internal coherence. Such an exception is exemplary insofar as it shows what the system must exclude in order to constitute its own rule, yet it also shows what a system must somehow include by gesturing toward what it cannot. This is not a properly deconstructive analysis, but more simply an effort to show the strange appearance of two exemplary exceptions and to situate them in the structure of their exteriority. It is within such a structured yet exterior space that I want to situate rationalist empiricism. The exemplary exceptions I consider are classic instances: Hume’s missing shade of blue and Descartes’s wax experiment. By linking them in an unfamiliar manner, I will argue that to think these exemplary exceptions together is to think the pre-Kantian chiasmus of rationalism and empiricism—the manner in which

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the representative “rationalist” and “empiricist” systems of Descartes and Hume produce and traverse key counter-methodological instances that can be thought within the space of methodological exteriority they inhabit.

EXEMPLARY EXCEPTIONS In the texts of Descartes and Hume, both the wax experiment and the missing shade of blue are explicitly identified as exemplary exceptions, and both are disavowed as deviations from the main lines of the philosophical programs pursued by these thinkers. “But I see what it is,” writes Descartes, before taking up a piece of wax, “my mind enjoys wandering off and will not yet submit to being restrained within the bounds of truth. Very well then, just this once let us give it a completely free rein, so that after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed.”3 Hume poses the question of whether an observer, confronted with a color progression from which a single shade of blue is missing, would be able to produce an idea of this shade without having seen it. Despite his own avowal that this would violate his epistemology, Hume decides that “the instance is so particular and singular that ’tis scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.”4 Descartes demonstrates the cognition of res extensa by “purely mental scrutiny,”5 but he does so by temporarily indulging his sensory perceptions “just this once.” As a speculative counterfactual to his copy theory of perceptions, a “particular and singular” instance, Hume grants the mind’s capacity to construct the idea of an unperceived shade of blue, and then he immediately dismisses this example of an idea without a corresponding impression as “scarcely worth our observing.” Both these exemplary exceptions effectively suspend the epistemological principles of their authors: Descartes permits himself an empirical method that interrupts the order of reasons; Hume grants himself a rationalist thesis that contradicts his theory of mind. The somewhat tenuous validity of these suspensions is suggested by the rhetorical conduct of both thinkers, who flatly assume the assent of their readers to the major premises of their respective arguments. “But does the same wax remain?” asks Descartes. “It must be admitted that it does,” he replies on our behalf; “no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise.”6 “Now I ask,” writes Hume, “whether ’tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho’ it had never been conveyed to him by his senses?” “I believe,” he answers, “there are few but will be of opinion that he can.”7 So what is it to which we assent, we

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might ask—binding together these exemplary exceptions—when we affirm the identity and coherence of Absent Blue Wax? Hume’s famous text appears toward the end of Book 1 of the Treatise and is reprinted nine years later in the Enquiry without significant alteration: Suppose a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac’d before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; ’tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether ’tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho’ it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions; tho’ the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.8

The secondary literature on this missing shade of blue—let’s call it “Absent Blue”—is dominated in equal parts by efforts at damage control (on the part of orthodox Humeans) and by hindsight (on the part of doctrinaire Kantians).9 The problem for those devoted to sustaining the coherence of Hume’s copy theory of perceptions is that both the Treatise and the Enquiry unambiguously posit our ability to generate an idea of Absent Blue as a “contradictory phenomenon” demonstrative of the position “that it is not absolutely impossible for ideas to go before their correspondent impressions.”10 Why then, the scholars wonder, would Hume include this “proof ” in his text, given that he asserts precisely the opposite immediately before and after? Is it an elaborate instance of Humean irony? A perverse effort to achieve notoriety through the generation of a conceptual scandal? How can it be rendered consistent with the so-called copy theory of perceptions? There can be no recourse to the theory of complex ideas here, since Hume is curiously adamant that not only different colors, but different shades of the same color “each produce a distinct idea, independent of the rest.”11 Within the framework of the Treatise, then, Absent Blue is well and truly a simple idea, as irreducible to a combination of other simple ideas as it is to any impression. According to Hume himself, there is thus no way for his copy theory of perception to accommodate the putative power of the mind to “raise up” such an idea, other than to accord it the status of an “exception.” Hence the satisfaction of the Kantian intellectual historian, for whom this

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exemplary exception encapsulates the difficulties encountered by empiricism pending a theory of synthetic a priori cognition. And indeed, though it is obviously not a mathematical judgment, the cognition of Absent Blue at least approximates the structure of Kant’s 7 + 5 = 12. We are given three terms—two contiguous shades and the perception of a blank between them—and we have to produce a new term on the basis of these relations. We can in no way arrive at Absent Blue by merely combining or analyzing the terms with which we are presented, just as “the concept of twelve is by no means thought merely by my thinking of that unification of seven and five.”12 Rather, we have to go beyond the data we are granted in order to arrive at a real amplification irreducible to either analysis or experience—presumably through intuition. Kant credits Hume as the philosopher who came closest to the problem of synthetic a priori cognition, though he faults Hume for incorrectly believing he had proven the impossibility of such cognition through his analysis of causality. But perhaps the case of Absent Blue does affirm the possibility of such cognition—though, again, it is a possibility that Hume can affirm only as an exception and which he thus remains unable to theorize. For the Kantian, the anomalous status of Absent Blue in Hume’s system betokens the necessity of a transcendental idealism that would obviate the illusory opposition of rationalism and empiricism of which such an anomaly is symptomatic. For anyone who seeks to obviate that opposition in a manner irreducible to transcendental critique, however, Hume’s exemplary exception opens a different opportunity for thought: the possibility of constructing a rapprochement between rationalism and empiricism without recourse to a transcendental subject. How is it possible to think—with Hume—the capacity of the mind to raise up such an idea while still—with Hume—thinking the genesis of the self as a bundle of perceptions (rather than “I think” of transcendental apperception)? This is not to ask how Absent Blue is consistent with Hume’s philosophical system. Rather, it is to ask how we can think such a capacity, such an idea, not as the rule of a subject or a system, but quite precisely as an exception. Before returning to this question, let me take up our other exemplary exception: Descartes’s wax experiment. In the wax experiment, Descartes breaks with the order of reasons guiding his Meditations, as Martial Gueroult argues, in order to “deliver a verification” of the priority of the intellect by provisionally situating it “in the opponent’s point of view.”13 For Gueroult, the wax experiment “constitutes an anticipation of the general verification that the success of physics will bring to the entire set of metaphysical conclusions” arrived at in the Meditations.14 These conclusions are buttressed by the methodological devia-

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tion of the wax experiment, since it is here that “common sense is . . . beaten on its own ground.”15 Via the anomalous empiricism of the wax experiment, “we rediscover here, by another means”—through indirection—“the conclusion obtained directly by following the genetic order of reasons.”16 So as to refute empiricism, we enter into it by way of immanent critique: “Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.”17 And as soon as we attempt to return to the order of reasons—as soon as we reenter rationalism by way of empiricism—we do so through an experience anticipating (in miniature) the default of synthetic imagination theorized by Kant as the sublime. “Let us concentrate,” writes Descartes, take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable. But what is meant here by “flexible” and “changeable”? Is it what I picture in my imagination: that this piece of wax is capable of changing from a round shape to a square shape, or from a square shape to a triangular shape? Not at all; for I can grasp that the wax is capable of countless changes of this kind, yet I am unable to run through this immeasurable number of changes in my imagination, from which it follows that it is not the faculty of imagination that gives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable. And what is meant by “extended”? Is the extension of the wax also unknown? For it increases if the wax melts, increases again if it boils, and is greater still if the heat is increased. I would not be making a correct judgment about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination. I must therefore admit that the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.18

Following a subtractive method, itself following from an empirical demonstration, we arrive at the insufficiency of the imagination to grasp “an immeasurable number of changes” in their temporal unfolding, and we thereby accede to the power of the intellect to determine the supersensible identity of the wax, its nature, as a real idea. “That is sublime,” reads the decisive sentence of Kant’s analysis in the Third Critique, “which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”19 Already, then, just beneath the apparently placid surface of Descartes’s Second Meditation and his domestic piece of wax, we are implicitly embroiled in “the terrible struggle between imagination and reason,” the “tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject” that Deleuze locates in Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime.20 Already we have the “Cogito for a dissolved self ” evoked by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: an “I” fractured by the form of time as the imagination, spurred by a sensible experience of quotidian alteration, filters

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through an immeasurable number of changes before the mind recovers itself in the stability of the intellect.21 “Time,” writes Deleuze, “signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental.”22 Deleuze attributes this discovery to Kant, stating that Descartes could determine the thinking subject “only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of a continuous creation carried out by God.”23 Kant, on the other hand, established through his critique of the Cartesian cogito that “my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive, phenomenal subject appearing within time.”24 But in the Cartesian wax experiment we already encounter such a subject. Via the rationalist empiricism of Descartes’s exemplary exception, we encounter a retroactive genesis of the cogito irreducible to its initial formulation. We attain clear and distinct knowledge of our essence as res cogitans not through the punctual assertion of an act of thinking, but through a temporal experience of the imagination’s insufficiency and a concomitant reemergence of the priority of the intellect. “I see that without any effort I have now finally got back to where I wanted,” writes Descartes as the meditation concludes.25 But in the interim, we have quietly plunged into the “chasm opened up in the subject” that Kant will explore some one hundred and forty years after Descartes, and that Deleuze will excavate nearly two hundred years after Kant.

THE OUTSIDE OF PHENOMENOLOGY Now, why does it matter that this retroactive, temporal genesis of the cogito occurs through an exemplary exception, during the sequence of his Meditations in which Descartes veers from the order of reasons through an empiricist deviation? It matters because the passive genesis of the cogito that unfolds through the wax experiment transpires as an encounter for which nothing in the order of reasons can account. This is what transcendental phenomenology is constitutively unable to grasp, unable to accommodate within its own Cartesian meditations. If the wax experiment is to perform an immanent critique of empiricism, it must really be empirical. And since it must be properly empirical—a true deviation from the order of reasons—it cannot operate within the purview of the phenomenological epoché. The phenomenological bracketing of experience is precisely what is itself bracketed by the “free rein” of Descartes’s exemplary exception. It is the fundamental incapacity of phenomenology to think the encounter that is

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betrayed by Michel Henry’s treatment of the wax experiment in his nevertheless extraordinary essay on Descartes, “Videre Videor”: The entire analysis of the piece of wax or the people passing in the street with their hats circumscribes, characterizes, and elucidates precisely this “knowledge of the body” (as having its foundation in the ek-stasis of seeing as pure seeing, “inspection of the spirit,” the essence of videre): such an analysis, as we know, is precisely not that of the body, of this or that body, of extension, but that of knowledge of the body, that is, precisely of the understanding.26

“As we know,” Henry assures us. According to an uneasy rhetoric of presumed assent, we have already agreed upon a methodological doxa that will guide our reading the text: Despite Descartes’s empirical procedure, the wax experiment does not really involve analysis of a body, but only inspection of the spirit. By the lights of Henry’s rhetoric, we should already have agreed that the phenomenological epoché will secure us against a supposedly naive approach to the analysis of the piece of wax as an empirical experiment. Certainly, as Henry argues, Descartes emphasizes the reduction of perception to thought, insofar as we can only truly affirm that we seem to perceive: “I certainly seem to see [videre videor], to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.”27 But to follow Henry we have to ignore the equally clear establishment of the wax experiment as an exception to the circumscription of experience by this “restricted sense.” We have to ignore Descartes’s admission that the mind will “not yet submit to being restrained within the bounds of truth.” We have to forget that he thus posits the wax experiment as a temporary exception, “just this once,” to those limits, and that he explicitly declares a suspension of the epoché during which the mind will be given “a completely free rein,” so that “after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed.” Regardless of such details, for Henry “the Second Meditation’s problematic develops entirely in an attitude of reduction.”28 Never mind that Descartes emphasizes his consideration “not of bodies in general, but of one body in particular.” Never mind that he takes as his example “this wax.” As we know, according to Henry, the wax experiment is “precisely” not an analysis of “this or that body.”29 Never mind that Descartes concedes, just this once, to “consider the things which people commonly think they understand most distinctly of all”; “that is, the bodies which we touch and see.” According to Henry, it is only “knowledge of the body”30 that is analyzed,

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and thus only the understanding itself. Henry obviates the structure of the wax experiment, its unfolding in time as an alternation between empirical observations and epistemological statements, and he overlooks the particular order of reasons interior to this deviation from the order of reasons: First, we are offered a series of empirical observations (concerning the taste, scent, color, shape, size, consistency, and temperature of a particular body). These empirical observations are followed by a provisional summation of sensory data as possible grounds for distinct knowledge of a body (“In short, it has everything which appears necessary to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible”). During this summation we descend back into empirical observation (“But even as I speak, I put the wax by the fire, and look . . .”), and then we question the grounds of our understanding (“So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness?”). It is through the complex temporal unfolding of this alternating structure that we arrive at a subtraction of the empirical given (“Perhaps the answer lies in the thought which now comes to my mind; namely, the wax was not after all the sweetness of the honey”). And finally, it is after we have traversed this alternating structure, and following this process of subtraction, that we turn entirely inward toward our “knowledge of the body,”31 comparing the relative capacity of the imagination and the intellect to grasp the essence of extension, and thus understanding that we perceive the wax “by the mind alone.” But, according to Henry, we should ignore the dense structural articulation of the inductive process by which we arrive at such knowledge, working back and forth between empirical observations of a body and epistemological questions concerning those observations. “As we know,” after all, the Second Meditation “completely ignores the body and its supposed action on the soul.”32 For Henry, in short, there is no exception. And for phenomenology there cannot be. So long as we abide within Henry’s “as we know”—so long as we do not depart the province of the phenomenological—we cannot follow the complex process through which the Meditations reenter rationalism by way of empiricism. Because phenomenology cannot sanction the encounter of thought and sensation, always-already folding them together, Henry has to fold the imagination and the understanding into a single unremitting “phenomenality” which, in turn, gives way to its essence as primordial auto-affectivity.33 For Henry, nothing happens via the wax experiment, because (“as we know”) “this ‘knowledge of the body’ . . . originally and untiringly refers back to ‘knowledge of the soul,’ whose more original essence was exhibited in the cogito.”34 It matters not at all that we are thus referred back to the cogito by way of an encounter with a particular body, and that it is through this encounter that a retroactive temporal genesis of

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the cogito unfolds. What phenomenology cannot encounter is the encounter itself, which always takes place outside its primary methodological imperative: not in the deepest recesses of the phenomenological epoché, but within its exterior.

RATIONALIST VS. TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM “Something in the world forces us to think,” writes Deleuze in his chapter on “The Image of Thought.”35 Descartes: “Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.” Hume: “’tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting.” Something, wax or blank, forces us to think, and according to the theory of transcendental empiricism, this “something in the world” is “an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”36 Contra phenomenology, Deleuze offers an empiricism insofar as the encounter transpires through an experience of the sensible. But it is a transcendental empiricism insofar as what is encountered by way of the sensible is itself insensible: “not a sensible being but the being of the sensible.”37 Spurred by the sensible mutability of a particular piece of wax, the imagination tests itself against the insensible essence of physical bodies and thereby gives way to the intellect. Activated by a sensible blank between proximate shades, the imagination raises up to the mind the insensible “idea” of Absent Blue. But if the theory of the encounter we find in Difference and Repetition (unlike the theory of primordial auto-affection offered by Henry) enables us to grasp what happens in the case of our two exemplary exceptions, Deleuze himself seems to have failed to encounter their significance as exceptions. Hume’s missing shade of blue goes unmentioned in Empiricism and Subjectivity, wherein the metaphysical concept of ideas as virtual multiplicities is not yet fully operative in Deleuze’s philosophical itinerary.38 In Difference and Repetition, just as Descartes’s expulsion of time from the constitution of the subject marks the subsumption of his philosophy by the figure of identity, his presumption of the identity of the wax over the course of his experiment (“It is of course the same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start”)39 marks the domination of his thought by the model of recognition. Just as Deleuze does not yet (in 1953) locate a transcendental empiricism in the philosophy of Hume, he does not register, in his discussion of Descartes’s Second Meditation, the manner in which the empiricist deviation of the wax experiment gives way to a retroactive temporal genesis of the cogito. Rewriting the First Critique in the wake of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger, Difference and Repetition recasts Kant’s transcendental

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idealism as transcendental empiricism. But what Deleuze misses—insofar as he misses Absent Blue Wax—is the opportunity to grasp the pre-Kantian exception to both rationalism and empiricism, a strange exteriority of these traditions that is not yet the exteriority of the transcendental subject. Absent Blue Wax, encountered through the chiasmus of our exemplary exceptions, incarnates the disavowed specters of an empiricist Descartes and a rationalist Hume within a single insensible idea. Unthinkable within phenomenology, and prior to the program of transcendental idealism, Absent Blue Wax delivers the outside of rationalism to the outside of empiricism and lets them mingle in their mutual exteriority. This exteriority is that of an encounter which never took place, and which has to be constructed. And the exteriority of this encounter to rationalism, to empiricism, and to transcendental critique is also the exteriority of philosophical systematicity itself. We can thus answer, on our own terms, the scholar’s question regarding the mystery of Hume’s motives. Why does Hume include the missing shade of blue as a “contradictory phenomenon” within his theory of perceptions? He does so because the idea of Absent Blue indexes a profound intuition of the future of philosophy: not only a future that passes through Kant, but one that circles back behind him—through the work of such thinkers as Deleuze and Meillassoux—to the pages of Hume’s Treatise itself. And why does Descartes permit the mind “free rein” outside the ambit of his impeccably ordered method? He does so because the wax experiment expresses the radical capacity of the mind—in excess of Cartesian doctrine—to encounter the temporal genesis of the cogito even as it grasps the idea of substance. By including the outside of their philosophical systems within those systems—and thereby rigorously determining the conditions under which that outside is an outside—both Descartes and Hume unknowingly accede to the explosive vocation of philosophy, which perpetually redeploys the power of thought to think beyond its own conditions. But what difference does it make to explore the possibility of a rationalist empiricism through these exemplary exceptions, and thus on the outside of both rationalism and empiricism, rather than through a direct invocation of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? It enables us, for one thing, to explicate certain problems within Deleuze’s system while remaining outside of it. Take, for example, the theme of “overturning Platonism.” How is it possible for an idea to be a simulacrum? Absent Blue provides us with a precise answer. For Plato, the idea is the model, while the impression is the copy; for Hume, of course, the impression is the model, while the idea is the copy. But, considered at once within and outside

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of Hume’s system, Absent Blue is an idea without a corresponding impression, and thus a copy without a model. In other words it is at once a simulacrum and a pure idea. If Hume thus anticipates an “overturning” of Platonism before Nietzsche or Deleuze, it is not through the copy principle of his theory of perceptions, but rather through an exemplary exception to that principle. We can thus think the possibility of overturning Platonism not as a philosophical program but precisely as the possibility of an exception to philosophical systematicity, which would be impossible from within the rule of any philosophical system. This would involve not an inversion of rationalism by empiricism, but rather a real transformation of both empiricism and rationalism introduced by the torque of their exceptional encounter. But more important, rationalist empiricism differs from Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism insofar as it is not primarily concerned with the conditions of experience, whether understood as conditions of possible experience (Kant) or conditions of real experience (Deleuze). It is the interruption of experience by reason, and the extrapolation of reason from and yet beyond experience, that is at issue in the rationalist methodological pole, while it is the experience of reason and also the exposure, by empirical science, of what cannot be experienced that is at issue in our empiricism. Deleuze gives us a theory of the encounter—of what breaks with the synthesis of past and future—and this crucially informs our own thinking. But our account of rationalist empiricism is not oriented toward the construction of conditions as ground, but rather toward the groundless manner in which reason and experience propel one another without achieving synthesis. Deleuze’s theory of “asymmetrical synthesis” produces a concept of disparity as sufficient reason, and thus as the Urground that is deeper [profond] than the ground: disparity is the groundless ground breaking with the figure/ ground distinction, and it constitutes a sufficient reason that rejects the principle of non-contradiction. We are interested, on the contrary, in pursuing an account of the relation between reason and experience that sustains the principle of noncontradiction while rejecting the principle of sufficient reason. Thus, we do not seek an account of the Urground that would be a condition of real experience, but rather the unconditional consequences of non-contradiction as that which overthrows, rather than sustains, the principle of sufficient reason. One works outside the transcendental by removing groundlessness even as condition and pursuing instead a thinking of how any rule of experience or reason, any condition, must be thought according to a displacement of sufficient reason itself. This coordination of the derivation of the principle of non-contradiction from

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groundlessness, and the displacement of the principle of sufficient reason by the principle of non-contradiction, is the burden of Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophical enterprise, addressed in detail in Chapters 2 and 4. For the moment we can say that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism draws the outside of rationalism and empiricism back into the transcendental, as an account of conditions. Rationalist empiricism is concerned with sustaining the relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism without drawing them back into the purview of the transcendental, without a sufficient reason that conditions both their disjunction and their relation.

THE PARADOX OF MANIFESTATION Perhaps we could situate Absent Blue Wax within the “glacial world” evoked by Meillassoux in After Finitude, a world accessed by empirical science, yet refractory to any phenomenal experience, and thus explored through the rational formalization of technically registered indices.40 For Meillassoux, the true Copernican revolution proper to the relation between modern science and modern philosophy resides in the power of mathematical formalization to determine the object as indifferent to givenness: the power to think what there would be if there were no thought. And “it is this capacity,” Meillassoux argues, “whereby mathematized science is able to deploy a world that is separable from man . . . that Descartes theorized in all its power.”41 Descartes’s wax experiment gives way, through the empirical, to that which can only be thought. What Meillassoux calls “the paradox of manifestation”42 is this operation, through which the given makes manifest that which is refractory to givenness, that which could never have been and has never been given to manifestation, though its very subtraction from manifestation has been made manifest. Thus the paradox of manifestation is also the recessed paradox of Descartes’s Second Meditation: to know a thing by the mind alone is also to know that its existence does not depend upon the mind. We can say that the wax experiment makes an exception, that it deviates from the order of reasons, so as to explore this paradox of manifestation, moving through empirical knowledge toward a pure res extensa that is thought by the mind as independent substance. The empiricist deviation within Descartes’s rationalist project matters because it registers the paradoxical nature of manifestation itself. In the wax experiment, givenness gives way to a world without givenness, to the “glacial world” that Meillassoux aligns with “the world of Cartesian extension”:

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a world wherein bodies as well as their movements can be described independently of their sensible qualities, such as flavor, smell, heat, etc. . . . a world that acquires the independence of substance, a world that we can henceforth conceive as indifferent to everything in it that corresponds to the concrete, organic connection that we forge with it—it is this glacial world that is revealed to the moderns, a world in which there is no longer any up or down, center or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans. For the first time, the world manifests itself as capable of subsisting without any of those aspects that constitute its concreteness for us.43

The glacial world is a world that makes manifest its own subtraction from manifestation, but not from rational determination. This is the world into which Descartes’s wax leads us, but do we also enter into it through Hume’s Absent Blue? Here we encounter the paradoxical idea of a secondary quality, the production, by the imagination, of an idea of an insensible shade, one that is not encountered through the senses and thus has to be thought. Perhaps the missing shade we call Absent Blue has a place in the world of Cartesian extension purely as the trace of our capacity to think it, as the trace of its subtraction from the given. Neither exactly a primary quality nor a secondary quality, but an exception—an insensible shade born of an encounter with the lacuna of the sensible— Absent Blue manifests the power of the mind to think the idea of an impression without deriving it from experience. Thus, if Absent Blue participates in the world of Cartesian extension, into which the wax experiment leads us, it does so only as the exposure of primary qualities, those of independent substance, to the hue of thought, to the shade of their subtraction from the given. Absent Blue Wax, this compound exception mingling rationalism and empiricism within the space of its methodological exteriority, discovered disjunctively by Descartes and by Hume, is the curiously tinted substance of the glacial world, encountered at the crux of the paradox of manifestation.

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ALTHUSSER’S DREAM: THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC OF RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM

In exactly what sense is Quentin Meillassoux both a Cartesian and a Humean? Let us address this question more explicitly in order to clarify the manner in which After Finitude might be included within the para-methodological tradition of “rationalist empiricism.” Meillassoux is a Cartesian insofar as he affirms the power of mathematical formalization to separate knowledge of the primary qualities of objects and events from their empirical givenness. His approach to what he calls “the problem of dia-chronicity”—the problem of how to establish knowledge of a time anterior or posterior to human existence—is Cartesian: such knowledge is enabled by the capacity of mathematics to formalize physical properties so as to subtract them from their sensory correlates. Science gleans knowledge of spatio-temporal relations from empirical experimentation, but the mathematization of such knowledge—both prior and subsequent to experimentation—renders it thinkable in a manner indifferent to the existence of human experience. According to Meillassoux, “the world of Cartesian extension is a world that acquires the independence of substance, a world that we can henceforth conceive as indifferent to everything in it that corresponds to the concrete, organic connection that we forge with it.”1 It is this speculative import of modern mathematical science—its capacity “to deploy a world that is separable from man,” that “Descartes theorized in all its power.”2 For Meillassoux, what is properly signified by “the Copernican revolution” is “not so much the astronomical discovery of the 50

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decentering of the terrestrial observer within the solar system, but rather the much more fundamental decentering which presided over the mathematization of nature.” It is Descartes who philosophically affirms the link at issue in this Galilean/Copernican revolution: that “science carried within it the possibility of transforming every datum of our experience into a dia-chronic object—into a component of a world that gives itself to us as indifferent, in being what it is, to whether it is given or not.”3 In terms of his own approach to Descartes, Meillassoux is a Cartesian insofar as he affirms that the Copernican decentering of man relays the Galilean mathematization of nature that renders graspable, at the crux of the empirical and the rational, “a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it.”4 Meillassoux is a Humean insofar as he reactivates Hume’s problem of induction: How can we know that the conjunction of causes and effects we observe will remain constant in the future, as it has in the past? In effect, this is the problem of how we can draw the necessity of constant conjunction from the contingency of the world that we observe: By what right do we think the same “effects” will necessarily continue to follow from the same “causes,” that the regularities linking series of events will continue to function in the future as they have in the past? That is, how do we know that “Relations of Ideas” are and will remain an adequate guide to “Matters of Fact?”5 Hume resolves these “Sceptical Doubts” with a pragmatic solution: we do not know that our reasoning concerning necessary conjunction is valid on the basis of our experience of constant conjunction, but the mechanism of habit provides a non-rational, yet reliable, guide to matters of fact, since it performs a statistical synthesis of regularities precisely (though unconsciously) calibrated to the frequencies of their past occurrence. Belief is thus the probabilistic means by which “a kind of pre-established harmony” is generated “between the course of nature and the succession of ideas”6—we believe in practice, through habit, in the conjunction of causes and effects to the extent that they have been conjoined in the past. However, Hume must still acknowledge that “we only learn by experience the frequent conjunction of objects, without being ever able to comprehend anything like the connexion between them.”7 The laws of nature are known through conjunction, not connection, and thus our belief in the continuity of future events with past experience is gleaned only from the regularity of conjunction, rather than the necessity of connection. “Hume,” notes Meillassoux, “was the first to maintain that from a determinate situation, one can never infer a priori the ensuing situation, an indefinite multiplicity of futures being envisageable without contradiction.”8 Meillassoux affirms the critical import of Hume’s problem against its prag-

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matic resolution. He notes that what is at issue in the epistemological articulation of Hume’s problem is the justification of an assumed ontological principle— the necessity of the uniformity of nature. Hume asks a question concerning the genesis of knowledge: How do we know that the succession of events will obey the same laws in the future as they have in the past? But this epistemological question is intimately linked with an ontological problem, which is precisely what the question puts at issue: Is there a reason the future should continue to resemble the past? The question “how do we know” involves a reference—“how do we know that . . .”—and what is at issue in this reference is the assumption of a state of affairs that could be known: precisely that the future will resemble the past. It is the status of this assumption that raises an ontological problem through an epistemological question: Is there a necessary uniformity of nature that we somehow understand and act upon, though we cannot elucidate either the rational or empirical ground of our understanding? Meillassoux seeks to preserve the ontological scope of this problem: How do we know (epistemological) that there is (ontological) a uniformity of nature, given that we only have our past experience of such uniformity to assure us of its continuity? One question—how do we know this uniformity is necessary?—implies also the question of whether or not there is such a necessary uniformity. Some would say that Meillassoux (1) “ontologizes” Hume’s epistemological problem of induction and that he (2) derives his argument for the necessity of contingency from this gesture.9 The first claim is imprecise, and the second is incorrect. Meillassoux aims to sustain the ontological implications of Hume’s epistemological problem (how do we know that . . .) by intervening against the probabilistic assumption concerning those implications: the assumption that if the uniformity of nature we have observed were not necessary, but rather contingent, the regularities of nature would not be uniform, but rather subject to constant change. Against this probabilistic assumption, Meillassoux mobilizes transfinite set theory and Russell’s paradox to demonstrate that the assumption rests upon a covert concept of the whole that post-Cantorian mathematics challenges: we cannot construct the set of all sets of cases wherein we could apply the laws of probability to the statistical evaluation of the likelihood of events. Considered at the level of a total universe of cases, probability theory is inoperative, because we cannot think a total universe of cases, an absolute set of cases to which probabilities could be applied. Thus we see again the ontological implications of an epistemological problem. Epistemological recourse to probability aims to resolve an ontological problem: if there were not a necessary unity of natural laws, it is highly improbable that we would not have observed their al-

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teration; thus we can assume that there is a necessary unity of nature—or at least we can assume that we need not worry about the question, and can dismiss it as an ontological problem. Meillassoux does not, however, derive his ontological argument for the necessity of contingency from his Cantorian intervention against probabilistic reasoning. On the contrary, he derives the necessity of blocking the probabilistic deflation of Hume’s problem from the principle of factiality itself, which he aims to demonstrate “anhypothetically” (without the ground of a previous principle) in Chapter 3 of After Finitude and in Part 2 of “L’inexistence divine.” I engage the latter version of this anhypothetical demonstration in Chapter 4. For now, it suffices to say that Meillassoux recognizes an implicit ontological question in Hume’s epistemological formulation of the problem of induction, that he thus aims to defend the ontological scope of the question (is there a necessary uniformity of nature that we could know?) against its dismissal, and that he constructs his own approach to answering the ontological question and its epistemological correlate: there is not a necessary uniformity of nature (ontological), yet we can coherently think the contingency of natural constants despite the uniformity that we observe (epistemological). He shows that the deflation of the ontological implications of Hume’s problem on probabilistic grounds is epistemologically incoherent. Meillassoux thus reactivates the problem of induction by “grafting the Humean thesis onto that of Cantorian intotality.”10 This gesture “grafts” the central problem of empiricism (what reason can we find amid the contingency of the given?) onto the mathematical resources of a contemporary philosophical rationalism. It is the philosophical consequences of transfinite mathematics—the delinking of the infinite from the whole—that enables a reengagement of Hume’s problem against its probabilistic deflation. And it is Meillassoux’s method of demonstration without deduction—wherein the necessity of contingency is anhypothetically derived from conflicts among philosophical positions (After Finitude), or from the question of whether the category of contingency can be applied to itself (“L’inexistence divine”)—that enables him to reverse the ontological import of Hume’s problem, exploring the consequences of the position that there is not a necessary uniformity of nature, and thus displacing the principle of sufficient reason as a cornerstone of philosophical rationalism. Importantly, it is the history of philosophical argumentation and the history of mathematics that enables Meillassoux to establish a disjunctive tension between rationalism and empiricism: an empiricist problem (problem of induction) suggests the ontological scope of the problem of the relation between necessity and contingency;

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a rationally derived principle forces an epistemological defense of the coherence of defending the contingency of physical law (rather than the necessity of its regularity); this epistemological defense enables rational speculation upon the ontological consequences of the principle of factiality. To summarize: Meillassoux is an empiricist insofar as 1. he affirms the critical force of the problem of induction, with respect to both epistemology and ontology 2. he affirms the speculative import of the physical sciences, which force us to think a time prior to the existence of thought 3. he attends to the historical conflict of philosophical positions as integral to the experience of thinking: to the import of what happens in philosophy for the determinations of what has to be thought

He is a rationalist insofar as 1. he addresses the ontological implications of the problem of induction through a rationally derived anhypothetical principle (the necessity of contingency) 2. he affirms the power of mathematical formalization to separate knowledge of primary qualities from their phenomenal correlates 3. he affirms the speculative vocation of philosophy beyond the purview of the physical sciences: to think the ontological difference between being and beings

Many of the apparent “problems” with Meillassoux’s philosophical work—for example, the application of the term “in-itself ” to both the (ontic) primary qualities of objects and to the (ontological) necessity of contingency—require an understanding of how the rationalist and empiricist dimensions of his work intersect: the mathematization of the empirical sciences demands a defense of the speculative scope of philosophical reflection on dia-chronicity; the rational demonstration of an anhypothetical principle has consequences for the ontological implications of Hume’s problem; the pure mathematics of transfinite set theory enable a defense of the epistemological coherence of those consequences; the principle of factiality forces philosophical thought to move beyond the theoretical ratification of empirical science to the speculative level of ontological reflection. There is no inconsistency between Meillassoux’s affirmation of the philosophical import of the empirical sciences and the speculative demands of philosophical rationality; they simply pertain to different levels of reflection

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(ontic/ontological). Importantly, Meillassoux is one of the few thinkers to respect both of these levels. He does not denigrate the “merely” empirical, ontic vocation of the sciences, but thinks its philosophical consequences; he does not inveigh against the “merely” speculative problems of ontology, but he recognizes their irrevocable philosophical import and takes them up on their own ground.

SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM, DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM While Chapter 4 returns in detail to the question of the ontological difference, the burden of this chapter is to show that in order to think through the relationship between rationalism and empiricism in Meillassoux’s philosophy, we also have to think through the precise manner in which After Finitude intervenes in the conflict between materialism and idealism. So the question now is: How do we think the position of After Finitude vis-à-vis the two major “oppositions” that structure the philosophical field? 1. rationalism v. empiricism 2. materialism v. idealism

I hope to show 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. Thus, I aim 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.”11 While I do not think Meillassoux’s work has any direct bearing upon concrete political practice, here I want to explore a broader sense in which Meillassoux might nevertheless 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 will do so 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; it also—perhaps unconsciously—routes its substantial modifications of Lenin’s polemical itinerary through the exigen-

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cies 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.” And it is the manner in which Meillassoux determines the relation between materialism and idealism that allows us to understand the relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism his work entails. Let us explore Althusser’s deployment of the term “rationalist empiricism” in greater detail than we could accord it in the Introduction. In his 1966 text: “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research,”12 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 empiricism13

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 Encyclopédie, 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 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.14

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

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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—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 Comte up to Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, and Canguilhem—which has “saved the honor of French philosophy,”15 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 we know for Althusser—at least by the time of his 1967–68 “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 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 transform the tradition that has saved the honor of French philosophy into a dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism. But it is 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.”16 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 have to involve a real transformation of the dialectic itself. On this model, it would be necessary to perform not an inversion, but a

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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.” Perhaps the project would be to recover and reactivate these “materialist aspects” of Descartes’s work within the tradition of idealist rationalist empiricism so as to transform it, internally, 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 separate primary qualities of objects from their sensory correlates, 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.17

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 argumentative method of After Finitude adhere to the determination of dialectical materialism spelled out by Althusser—or better, that Meillassoux’s book unfolds from the complex exigencies of combining the criteria articulated by Althusser.

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Althusser’s definition of materialism itself includes two criteria, the first of which is also internally divided: 1. (a) distinction between the real and its knowledge (criterion of distinction) (b) correspondence between knowledge and its object (criterion of adequacy) 2. primacy of the real over its knowledge, or primacy of being over thought (criterion of primacy)

Note that the first of Althusser’s materialist criteria—itself twofold—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 categories that, for Kant, ground the universality of 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”) “retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before.”18 That is, it refers us to the chronological primacy of the real—the anteriority 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.19

THE ORDER OF REASONS 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”20 performed by the correlationist—by which the act of

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the thought, the transcendental conditions of understanding, the autopositioning 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 transcendental or absolute idealism, only to motivate such a refutation by producing a line of demarcation between materialism and idealism. The method by which Meillassoux performs this refutation over the course of Chapters 2 and 3 of After Finitude is “dialectical” in precisely the sense articulated by Althusser. He first “accounts for the historical nature of the process in which knowledge is produced”21 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 absolute 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, in Althusserian terms, demarcates the stake inherent to that problem. We must understand the order of reasons at issue in After Finitude in order to properly evaluate the relationship between its various arguments and the consequences they are each accorded. (See Figure 3.) Meillassoux notes that the initial response of subjectivist metaphysicians to Kant’s correlational disqualification of thought’s access to the absolute was to absolutize the correlation itself: They acknowledge correlationism’s discovery of a fundamental constraint—viz., that we only have access to the for-us, not the in-itself—but instead of concluding from this

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Figure 3. After Finitude, articulation of the argument according to the order of reasons. The goal is to defend the Copernican revolution (Descartes) against the Ptolemaic counter-revolution (Kant). Strategy: absolutization of mathematics. Tactics: [1] demonstrate a nondogmatic absolute (factiality); [2] motivate demonstration via scientific problem with correlationism (ancestrality); [3] motivate demonstration via ideological problem with correlationism (fideism); [4] defend absolute against one form of mathematical reasoning (probability) with another (transfinite); [5] establish absolute scope of transfinite by deriving it from nondogmatic absolute (factiality). Order of Reasons: A defense of the Copernican revolution against the Ptolemaic counterrevolution (Chapter 5) requires the demonstration of a nondogmatic absolute (Chapter 3) in order to break the correlationist circle (Chapter 1); Chapter 2 sets up the argument of Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 defends that argument against objection; Chapter 4 then suggests the necessity of deriving the absolutization of mathematics from a nondogmatic absolute.

that the in-itself is unknowable, they concluded that the correlation is the only veritable in-itself. In so doing, they grasped the ontological truth hidden behind sceptical argumentation.22

Yet this metaphysical counteroffensive against Kantian correlationism was itself countered by “the second principle of correlationism—the essential facticity of the correlation, which has proven to be its most profound decision—the one which disqualifies idealist as well as realist dogmatism.”23 What Meillassoux tries to show is that this assertion of the facticity of the correlation against its absolutization by the subjective idealist implicitly oversteps the skeptical gesture it had attempted to defend: in order to counter the absolutization of the correlate, the facticity of the correlate must implicitly be thought as an absolute. The absolutization of facticity the correlate involves a claim not only that the regularities of nature we observe are subjective, but also that they are not necessary. As soon as we demur from this assertion, claiming that the contingency of knowledge is only a function of our ignorance, the subjective idealist once again claims the ground we have conceded: we do not know the in-itself because there is no in-itself. In order to sustain the disjunction between the for-us and the in-itself,

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the correlationist must go beyond what they mean to say: they must assert not only that the in-itself could be otherwise (because of our ignorance) but also that we have to think either that laws in-themselves are necessary or that they are contingent. As we noted in the Introduction, the Kant of Third Critique will say we must think they are necessary, in order to account for the regularity of our experience. In doing so, he dogmatically asserts that we must think the necessity of the order of nature. For the subjective idealist, this must think merely indexes the absolute purview of the correlation itself, an implicit extrapolation from the conditions of possible experience to what we must think concerning the modality of regularities beyond experience. Kant encountered the crux of a problem at the limit of his own philosophy: if we are to defend the distinction of the for-us from the in-itself, we must nevertheless think the conditions through which these could be consistent with one another. The only path to such consistency that Kant could recognize was to assert the subjective necessity of thinking the principle of the uniformity of nature. But asserting the contingency of the uniformity of nature opens another path: one that counters both the absolutization of a necessary being (dogmatism) and the absolutization of the correlation (subjective idealism). This is the possibility which the correlationist would have to think in order to defend against both metaphysical and subjective necessity. The necessity of contingency is not metaphysical (since it bars the existence of a necessary being) and it is not subjective (since it has to posit the contingency of subjectivity itself ). In order to secure the contingency of the in-itself against subjective idealism’s claiming of the correlate as the in-itself, the necessity of contingency must be thought as not only subjective, but as an absolute. What interests me about this argument is the methodological gesture its unfolding implies. Meillassoux reconstructs the philosophical Kampfplatz in which the recursive determinations of philosophical argumentation force the adoption of certain position, on pain of either refutation or self-contradiction. The consequences that follow from this reconstruction, 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 relational field of forces therein, as Althusser would put it. Meillassoux works through the intra-systemic consequences of his opponents’ logic and the relations between their positions, marking an acknowledgment that all philosophical hypotheses are already immersed in the conjunctural field within which one establishes a position. The import of this “indirect” method of demonstration is that it does not simply posit philosophical principles in an

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axiomatic fashion and then draw the consequences. Meillassoux establishes a principle that is “anhypothetical” insofar as it 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.”24 In fact, one could choose to be a subjective idealist. Meillassoux’s argument therefore presumes a partisan basis: it requires a rejection of idealism. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more exact demonstration of a materialist 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, subjective 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 thought relative to the world within the process of knowledge,”25 which 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.”26 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.”27 This formulates the condition for the correspondence between knowledge and its object: adequacy 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: “How is empirical knowledge of a world anterior to all experience possible?”28 For Meillassoux, it is mathematical physics that enables us to adequately think what there was before thought: to think the adequation of thought to the distinction of a real which is prior to thought. This 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

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that tradition. Again, Meillassoux holds that “it is this capacity, whereby mathematized science is able to deploy a world that is separable from man . . . that Descartes theorized in all its power.”29 Thus, when Meillassoux claims allegiance to what he calls “an in-itself that is Cartesian, and no longer just Kantian”30—one grasped by mathematical formalism—he does so in the name 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 is on these grounds, 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.31

In his “Lecture Course for Scientists” and in “Lenin and Philosophy,” Althusser positions the defense of such a materialism as a vocation of Marxist philosophy, or of thinking with and after Marx. The defense of dialectical materialism accompanies the articulation of historical materialism by fending off ideological incursions upon materialism per se, and this is why Lenin attempted such a defense by writing Materialism and Empirio- Criticism alongside his political and economic writings.

MEILLASSOUX WITH LENIN One might then turn to the mediated relation of Meillassoux’s work to Lenin’s philosophical project in Materialism and Empirio- Criticism, a relation which runs through Althusser’s engagement with Lenin’s project in the late 1960s. Briefly, for the Althusser of the “Lecture Course” there are two “spontaneous philosophies of the scientists” (SPS) at work in scientific practice. SPS1 is 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 knowledges that permit knowledge of this object.”32 SPS2 is an extra-scientific reflection upon scientific practice by spiritualist or critical-idealist

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“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’).”33 According to Althusser, SPS1 (or materialism) is “massively dominated”34 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.”35 The task of the Marxist philosopher (the practitioner of dialectical materialism) in relation to the sciences is to intervene on the side of SPS1, thus combatting the critical-idealist orientation that works against the spontaneous materialism of scientific practice. 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 Materialism and EmpirioCriticism, 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 practitioners of the sciences: as expressing both practically and theoretically one and the same materialist thesis of existence and objectivity.36

In the terminology we’ve developed, we can say that Lenin’s project is emblematic of the Marxist vocation of that strange compound, “dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism.” To recapitulate the Althusserian schema: Marxist science (historical materialism) intervenes through a critique of political economy, one that 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 against idealist philosophy 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 is mediated by its relation to the critique of political economy (Marxist science). Insofar as one expects a direct relation between philosophy and politics, one will underestimate the importance of the Marxist critique political economy in mediating that relation. It is through their discrepant approaches to the results and operations of

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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 EmpirioCriticism titled “Did Nature Exist Prior to Man?” is precisely that of Meillassoux’s chapter on the problem of ancestrality: a critique of extending a “chain of experience” of possible objects of perception through a time series prior to the genesis of experience itself. This “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.”37 Like Lenin, whose goal in Materialism and Empirio- Criticism was to “liberate the realm of objects from the yoke of the subject,”38 Meillassoux seeks to defend the realist sense of scientific statements 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 the correlationist—against the “for-us” performing a retrojection of the past from the present upon any statement concerning what occurred “before us.” Against this “for us,” which Meillassoux calls the “codicil of modernity” (“event Y occurred X number of years before the emergence of humans—for humans”),39 both he and Lenin hold that “an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense.”40 When we say “event X occurred prior to the emergence of thought for thought,”41 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,”42 but rather as a discourse enabled by mathematical formalization. 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”43—and this is the point of mathematical physics. Meillassoux endorses the “literal sense” of scientific statements as scientific statements (not statements of immediate experience). He recognizes 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.”44 If the virtue of transcendentalism lies in rendering realism astonishing (“i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic”),45 then what Lenin ignores is the paradox of manifestation that renders the literal sense of ancestral statements profound. The problem is not to elide this profun-

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dity, but to think it in a manner traversing the relation of transcendental philosophy to realism without collapsing into correlationism. 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 articulation of the principle of factiality performed through and against transcendental idealism in the book’s central chapter. 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 the absolute contingency of 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 that it is possible to salvage from correlationism without absolutizing the correlation itself—that is, without affirming speculative idealism rather than speculative materialism. Absolute contingency is therefore the sole means of refuting critical idealism’s limitation of reason to make room for faith, without equating reason with absolute subjectivity. In order to sustain the facticity of the correlation against subjective idealism, the critical idealist must covertly 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 (a simple positing that being is absolutely contingent), but rather follows from the dialectical recognition that the effects of philosophical arguments—and of their mutual interpellations—are irreversible, and that they force certain lines of thought. 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.”46 The principle of factiality registers a displacement of the “null trace” dividing materialism and idealism, and Meillassoux’s thinking of absolute contingency, in order to sustain a materialist position, shows that the displacement of this trace has real effects, in philosophy. 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

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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 between Meillassoux’s position and Karl Popper’s anti-inductivist epistemology of science. 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.”47 For 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.”48 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 the abdication of reason only opens the field for assertions of faith. 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 or 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 this uniformity must be thought as contingent. A speculative demonstration of the 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 materialism against idealism.

DREAM AND LAG If there is no contradiction, 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 scientific practice against its domination by idealism and spiritualism), this defense is more complex, more counter-intuitive, and more compelling in After Finitude than in Materialism and Empirio- Criticism. Lenin

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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.”49 Meillassoux, on the other hand, affirms not the immediate evidence of the senses but the evidence of science, allowing for discrepancies between the scientific image and the manifest image, and asserting that it is mathematical physics that provides us with the knowledge of the real 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 Meillassoux’s 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 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?50

Of course, Althusser immediately acknowledges that this philosophical dream 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 shadow of another Althusserian dream: that of dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism.

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HEGEL’S COGITO: ON THE GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY OF CRITICAL METAPHYSICS

If Louis Althusser’s brief reference to “rationalist empiricism” suggests the task of reconstructing the dialectic of reason and experience as the non-transcendental, ungrounded framework of a materialist epistemology, it is G. W. F. Hegel’s response to Kant’s transcendental critique that inaugurates a tradition of speculative critique in modern philosophy. This is what Hegel calls “true critique.” Elucidating the stakes of that designation, the project of the next two chapters is threefold: (1) to properly frame the distinction of Hegel’s speculative critique from Kant’s critical methodology; (2) to show that the movement of speculative critique is a form of rationalist empiricism: Hegel’s immanent interrogation of the determinations of thought in the Science of Logic implicitly relies upon a dialectic of reason and experience that displaces the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori; and (3) in Chapter 4, to situate the epistemological impasse of Hegel’s speculative critique in his commitment to speculative idealism, and thereby to motivate and elucidate an alignment of rationalist empiricism with speculative materialism. Materialism divides itself from idealism by refusing to divide rationalism and empiricism against one another, while nevertheless recognizing the distinct regions of philosophical applicability to which each pertains. In Chapter 4 we will take up the complex relation of Hegel’s speculative critique to this materialist criterion. But in order to pursue this itinerary, we have to orient ourselves by clearly delineating Hegel’s approach to speculative critique in the Science of Logic. 73

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TRUE CRITIQUE The difficulty of constructing a correct approach to the Science of Logic does not lie in grasping Hegel’s intentions. On the contrary, his Introduction to the Logic tells us with perfect clarity how the project of the book is to be understood. Rather, the difficulty lies in respecting and holding together these indications, so as to grasp how the Logic follows them through in a way that is both ontologically and epistemologically coherent. The formulations from the Introduction that I will restate below are as famous as they are explicit; yet they are worth reproducing, concisely, since their clarity is often obscured by conflicting interpretations, as we shall see. In my view, what any valid interpretation of the Logic must affirm are the two primary ways in which Hegel positions his text as a work of critical metaphysics. Its vocation as such is predicated upon (1) a critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics and (2) a critique of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. First, for Hegel, as for Kant, pre-critical metaphysics erroneously applied the pure forms of thought to such figurative substrata as the soul, the world, and god “without previously investigating whether and how they could be the determinations of the thing itself.”1 Hegel thus intends to investigate the forms of thought “free of those substrata,” considering “their nature and value in and for themselves.”2 Addressed directly to the determinations of thought, “the objective logic is therefore the true critique of such determinations—a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content.”3 Let us hold onto this crucial point, to which I will return: “true critique” displaces the opposition of the a priori and the a posteriori. Despite Hegel’s clear indication of this displacement, it has been difficult for commentators to resist the temptation of assimilating Hegel’s method back into standard philosophical oppositions. According to Robert Pippin, “that the Logic is a work of a priori philosophy is hardly controversial.”4 If that is true, it is hardly owing to Hegel’s own position, which is stated forthrightly: his immanent investigation of the determinations of thought is not properly conceived as an a priori investigation. Second, Hegel’s critical metaphysics rejects the transcendental framework of Kantian critique due to its attachment of the determinations of thought to the “I” as the subject of thinking: Now because the interest of the Kantian philosophy was directed at the so-called transcendental nature of the categories, the treatment itself of the categories came up

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empty. What they are in themselves apart from their abstract relation to the “I,” a relation which is the same for all, how they are determined and related to each other, this was not made a subject of consideration, and therefore knowledge of their nature was not in the least advanced by this philosophy.5

Hegel insists that in order to cognize the “infinite form” of thought (the concept), “the finite determinateness in which that form is as ‘I,’ as consciousness, must be shed.”6 So, just as the critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics requires us to shed the figurative substrata of the determinations of thought, the critique of Kant’s transcendental philosophy requires us to shed the form of the “I,” of consciousness, as the subject of thinking. Without clearly recognizing and holding together these two constitutive elements of Hegel’s critical metaphysics, no coherent approach to the Science of Logic is possible. The problem is that the difficulty of reconciling Hegel’s critique of Kant with his critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics has pushed commentators toward an elision of one or the other, and thus toward the affirmation of either a dogmatic or a transcendental Hegel—both readings which the Introduction to the Logic aims to block. In what follows I want to elucidate the stakes of this difficulty and propose an approach to its resolution. I will do so in two steps. First, I locate the implicit site of an unstated formulation I call “Hegel’s cogito.” In order to develop the implicit structure of this cogito, I articulate six features of the philosophical position it entails, contrasting my approach with that of other prominent readers of Hegel, including Hyppolite, Brandom, Pippin, Houlgate, and Deleuze, isolating singular points of disagreement in each instance. My goal is to elucidate and frame the character of Hegel’s critical metaphysics with particular attention to the relation between being and thought at stake in the Logic. Second, I turn to the epistemology of Hegel’s critical metaphysics. I argue that we can understand Hegel’s rejection of the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori through an account of how the methodological relation between rationalism and empiricism functions, implicitly, in the Logic. Foregrounding the relation between what has to be said and what happens in thought as Hegel’s discourse unfolds and focusing on the relation between necessity and contingency this entails, I elucidate the bearing of this relation upon philosophical methodology, situating its consequences in terms of both the ontology and epistemology of the Logic. My claim is that by drawing together, discursively, the necessity of what must be with the contingency of what happens, Hegel displaces both the opposition between rationalism and empiricism and Kant’s transcen-

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dental critique of that opposition, through a form of critique that is not transcendental but imminent and speculative. Thus, I offer a global—if pointed and condensed—approach to Hegel’s ontology, epistemology, and methodology in the Logic. Aside from my elaboration of the dialectic as a form of rationalist empiricism, the issues at stake will be familiar for those engaged with Hegel; the questions I take up have been subject to a dense history of commentary that I do not aim to address in detail. But as I hope to make evident in the first part of this chapter, the stakes of how one distributes particular decisions concerning key points of Hegel’s framework are high indeed. My goal is to arrive at a salient distribution of conceptual determinations that can inform a correct approach to Hegel’s critical metaphysics—one that respects the capacity of his epistemology to be at once ungrounded and coherent. Let me begin with the opening of the Logic’s first chapter.

THINKING BEING Thought is; thought exists. This is Hegel’s cogito. Crucially, however, he never states it directly. Rather, it is recessed within the first clause of the first sentence of the first chapter of the Logic: “Being, pure being” (Sein, reines Sein).7 This statement, indexing the thinking of being, implies the being and existence of thought. I call the implicit relation between being and thinking, recessed in this inaugural statement, Hegel’s cogito. We can write its structure like so: “Being, pure being” (Thought is; thought exists)

Without explicitly presenting it, the thinking of being—indexed by language— makes manifest the being and existence of thought. When we think, when we say, when we write, when we read “Being, pure being,” thought is, thought exists, thought appears. Thought is made actual in language. Thus, it is important to note that while, at the opening of the Logic, being is said as immediate and entirely undetermined (ohne alle weitere Bestimmung), thought has already passed through several stages in the progression of the Logic’s movement. The concept of being is as yet indeterminate, but in articulating the mere category of “pure being” in language, thought has implicitly moved through being to the truth of being (essence), to the truth of essence (appearing), to the truth of appearing (actuality). In its actual articulation as language, the immediacy of being is already mediated by the existence of thought. Though it remains to make this explicit (and thereby to comprehend its significance), we

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can say that if, in the opening clause of the Logic’s first chapter, the thinking of being is made actual in the written articulation of the category, then the concept is implicitly unified with reality in the Idea. The category of pure being—articulated, written, read—recursively inaugurates the movement of the concept, its internalizing self-recollection. The conceptual actuality of being is already lodged in the apparent immediacy of its appearing: its articulation in thought through writing and speech. Let me expand this brief elucidation of Hegel’s cogito by discriminating six closely related determinations of the post-Kantian philosophical position it implies. Each of these, taken independently, might seem like received wisdom; yet they nevertheless turn out to be controversial in the combination I propose here. Hegel’s cogito is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

discursive immanently subjective not transcendental neither a priori nor a posteriori idealist critical

It is the difficulty of holding these determinations together that constitutes the difficulty of recognizing, respecting, and sustaining the integrity of Hegel’s project in the Logic. In the process of trying to do so, I will isolate key points at which other commentators have let go of one or another of these six determinations of Hegel’s position. First, Hegel’s cogito is discursive. As I have noted, it is not explicitly discursive. The accompaniment of the saying of being, “thought is; thought exists,” goes unsaid, but it is implied through discourse. Thought must be articulated in order to be intelligible; language is the material existence of the being of thought. On this point, I agree with the emphasis upon discursive rationality in interpretations of Hegel by both Jean Hyppolite and Robert Brandom.8 Second, insofar as it holds to the immanence of thinking, Hegel’s cogito is immanently subjective, not intentionally or self-consciously so. The Logic begins with a methodological rejection of the “I” in the “I think.” Again, in order to focus on “thought as such”—in order to cognize the “infinite form . . . of the concept”—“the finite determinateness in which that form is as ‘I,’ as consciousness, must be shed.”9 If our goal is to remove the opposition between subjective determinateness and the object of knowledge, then it is “superfluous,” Hegel argues, “to hold onto this subjective attitude by determining pure knowledge

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as ‘I.’ ”10 Thus, Hegel sheds the apodictic “I think” of Descartes in order to set out from the assertoric fact of thinking as it occurs in the objective thinking of being. The objectivity of thought becomes subjective not through an a priori deduction of the “I,” as in Kant, but rather through what Hegel calls an “immanent deduction.”11 This immanent deduction contains, in its movement, the genesis of the unity of apperception. According to Hegel, the unity of apperception is immanent to the genesis of the concept, and the subjective dimension of objective thinking cannot be grasped in a representation of the “I” as that which has concepts or as that which thinks.12 Hegel makes clear that “the concept is not to be considered here as the act of the self-conscious understanding, not as subjective understanding, but as the concept in and for itself.”13 Thus, precisely because the relation of thinking to being is immanently subjective, it cannot be determined a priori through the category of the “I” as res cogitans. On this point, and with these passages in mind, I distinguish my approach to Hegel from that of Hyppolite and Brandom, as well as that of Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin. In Logic and Existence, Hyppolite claims that dialectical discourse “is the authentic unity of that of which one speaks and the one who speaks, of being and of the self, the sense which appears only in the medium of intelligible language.”14 But, as Hegel insists, it is not “the one who speaks” that is at issue. It is not the unity “of being and of the self,” but rather the unity of being and thought (the concept), which is at stake in the discursive rationality of logical ontology. For his part, Brandom claims that “Hegel’s distinctively linguistic version of the social recognitive model of normativity opens up a powerful and original notion of positive expressive freedom and normative selfhood, as the product of the rationality-instituting capacity to constrain oneself by specifically discursive norms.”15 Brandom approaches Hegel primarily through the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is important to note that his understanding of Hegel is not adequate to the account of rational norms developed in the Logic. In the Logic, it is not “normative selfhood” that is at issue, nor is it “oneself ” that is constrained by discursive norms. It is thought itself that is immanently normative in the Logic. Thought—the movement of the concept itself—investigates the rules it must follow in the process of its articulation. Just as it is not concerned with the finite determinateness of the “I,” the Logic is not concerned with how to “distinguish us as rational animals” (Brandom),16 nor is it concerned with the question of “what it is to be a self-interpreting animal” (Terry Pinkard).17 Robert Pippin, whose rhetoric and argumentation has become increasingly influenced by Brandom’s, has recently characterized Hegel’s logical metaphysics as an effort to account “for the complex, rule-governed activities materially embodied

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beings are capable of.”18 But it is of the utmost importance to recognize that the Science of Logic is not concerned with distinguishing “us” as “rational animals” or “self-interpreting animals” or “materially embodied beings.” The Logic is not concerned with thinking beings; it is concerned with thinking being per se. Third, Hegel is not a transcendental philosopher. Just as one must insist that, in the Logic, there is no subject of the experience “of ” thought, insofar as thought remains within the immanence of its unfolding as experience, one must also insist that there can be no determination of conditions of the “possible” experience of thought which would be prior to thinking. Rather, thought is the rational immanence of experiencing thinking. As I noted earlier, Hegel finds that “because the interest of Kantian philosophy was directed to the so-called transcendental nature of the categories, the treatment itself of such categories came up empty.”19 By detaching the categories from “their abstract relation to the ‘I’ ” in order to address “what they are in themselves,”20 Hegel’s Logic eliminates the transcendental standpoint necessary to constitute a priori conditions of possibility. On this point, I agree with Stephen Houlgate’s critique of Robert Pippin.21 Hegel describes the transition from concept to idea as follows: “the concept is essentially this: to be distinguished, as an identity existing for itself, from its implicitly existent objectivity, and thereby to obtain externality, but in this external totality to be the totality’s self-determining identity. So the concept is now the idea.”22 Pippin claims this passage does not mean the concept is “identical with ‘externality’ as such, which is preserved.” Rather, he argues, “conceptual determinations constitute the original moments required by thought for there to be empirical determinations of externality.”23 But however much such an interpretation might appeal to Kantian good sense, we have to insist that what is at stake in the Logic are not “original moments required by thought” for something else (empirical determinations of externality). Rather, it is the movement of thought in-and-for-itself that is at stake, and this is already internal to itself precisely insofar as it is already “external” to any subject. Pippin reads Hegel as concerned with “how thought determines for itself the conditions under which any subject must think in order to think objectively at all.”24 But Hegel does not approach thought as the activity of a (or any) subject. His argument is that thought is its own subject, insofar as it determines, for itself, its own objectivity. In Hegel, the unity of apperception is not transcendental, but immanent. Thought does not determine itself in order to determine conditions of rationality through which “any subject” must think. The Logic is emphatically not a preparatory exercise; its pages are not prolegomena to any future metaphysics. It is the meta-

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physics of thinking being: thought’s objective determination as the subjectivity of substance. Fourth, Hegel’s cogito displaces the opposition of the a priori and the a posteriori. Again, the Logic’s stated aim is to consider the determinations of thought “not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in themselves according to their particular content.”25 The being of thought is its becoming; it is, it exists, only in the manifestation of itself to itself: in its conceptual appearing. There is no thinking of that which is prior to the immanent experience of thought, its movement. And thought is unthinkable as posterior to the movement of such experience. Thought is; thought exists: this fact displaces the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori because it involves the rational experience of thought, as it takes place. Here I want to contrast this position with the “transcendental empiricism” of Gilles Deleuze. Against Kant, Deleuze demands an analysis not of conditions of possible experience but rather conditions of real experience. But this would still be an analysis of conditions. “Something in the world forces us to think” (Il y a dans le monde quelque chose qui force à penser),26 writes Deleuze: what is insensible in experience, the being of sense, agitates thought. What we find in Hegel, on the other hand, is not a description or theory of those conditions determining how we begin thinking; rather, we encounter the real experience of thinking. Deleuze asks for an account of the genesis of real experience; he gives us a theory of the idea, a theory of immanence. Hegel gives us the immanent experience of the genesis of the idea. For all the power and precision of Deleuze’s thought, contrasting his itinerary with Hegel’s Logic makes clear that he remains a theoretician of the plane of immanence, rather than inhabiting it. It is Hegel’s Logic, with Spinoza’s Ethics, which truly displays the immanence of thinking being. If Hegel realizes the metaphysical implications of Kant’s transcendental idealism, it would take another such thinker to properly realize the potential of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. Fifth, Hegel’s cogito is idealist. For Hegel, being cannot be thought independently of thinking, or as external to thinking. This is the import of explicating the implicit assertion of the being and existence of thought in the inaugural articulation of pure being itself. Ontology is a discourse; it cannot detach pure being from its discursive articulation, nor can it detach thinking from its becoming in order to give a transcendental account of its a priori conditions. Ontology does not think conditions for thinking being; it thinks being, such that being is thought. Here I disagree with Stephen Houlgate. Properly asserting Hegel’s ontologi-

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cal commitments against Pippin’s transcendental reading, Houlgate nevertheless errs when he argues that Hegel “is an idealist not merely because he understands our judgments about things to have pure conceptual conditions but because he understands ideality, or ‘being-a-moment-of-a-process,’ to be an ontological structure, or a quality that is exhibited by things themselves independently of our thought or judgments about them.”27 The problem is that the structures or qualities exhibited by things themselves independently of our thoughts about them are never at stake in the Logic, and cannot be. Houlgate is right to criticize Pippin for reducing the subjective objectivity of thinking to an analysis of the conditions under which objectivity can be thought by a subject. But he is wrong to assert the thought-independence of objectivity in the Logic. Hegel’s idealism resides neither in transcendental reflection nor in dogmatic metaphysics. To be precise: Hegel’s idealism resides in thinking the objectivity of thought as the subjectivity of being. The objectivity of thought (“Being, pure being”) entails the subjectivity of being (thought is; thought exists). Sixth, Hegel’s cogito is critical. Hegel argues at the end of the Introduction that the Objective Logic is the “true critique” of metaphysics because it interrogates the determinations of thought, the pure forms of thought, detached from the figurative substrata—such as “the soul, the world, and God”—of precritical metaphysics.28 Yet Hegel also goes further than this. His radicality, vis-àvis Kantian critique, lies in recognizing that the unity of apperception cannot be transcendental, and thus the immanent deduction of the “I,” as the genetic movement of the concept, is also its immanent critique. The “I” emerges in thought only as thought’s self-criticism, the productive process of its negative explication: the dialectic. The critical power of the Logic resides in the combination of the traits enumerated earlier: by displacing the opposition of the a priori and a posteriori, Hegel’s cogito ungrounds thought’s transcendental security and thereby subjects not only the figurative substrata of pre-critical metaphysics but also the transcendental unity of the “I” itself to an immanent critique of its own determination. The immanent construction of the idea through the movement of the concept is thus unmoored from any transcendental guarantee of its coherence. Only the immanent negativity of thought itself determines the consistency of its movement. The question is, how is this consistency determined?

WHAT HAS TO BE SAID, WHAT HAPPENS IN THOUGHT The preceding analysis of Hegel’s cogito is meant to delimit, describe, and differentiate an approach to the specific character of Hegel’s critical metaphysics. But

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how are we to understand the methodology at issue in this species of critique? Like Kant, Hegel displaces the traditional opposition of the a priori and the a posteriori through critical philosophy. Unlike Kant, he does so through immanent critique, rather than transcendental critique. In my view, understanding the methodological stakes of this transformation of critical philosophy requires that we grasp the difference between Kant’s and Hegel’s respective displacements of the pre-critical opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Placing these alongside the methodological innovations of Kant and Hegel, let me schematically define four orientations in modern thought as follows: 1. Rationalism is the a priori determination of what is the case on the basis of what has to be thought. It investigates the determinations of reason according to their order and consistency. 2. Empiricism is the a posteriori determination of what is the case on the basis of what happens. It investigates the determinations of experience according to their order and consistency. 3. Transcendental critique is the a priori determination of what has to be the case for things to happen as they do. It investigates the conditions of possibility for experience to have order and consistency. 4. Immanent critique is the processual explication of what happens in the course of thinking what is the case. It investigates the order and consistency of the experience of thinking being as it determines itself.

Working from these definitions and acknowledging the torque this term exerts on received intellectual history, I argue that Hegel’s critical metaphysics is a species of rationalist empiricism. Descartes offers a rationalist justification for his cogito: it has to be said that “I think, therefore I am.” Reason demands the indubitable affirmation of this principle. As Nietzsche points out, however, it is not rationally necessary that the “I” be appended thinking. It is thought that takes place, while the “I” is presupposed. Kant, on the other hand, shows that although the “I” is necessarily thought a priori, it cannot be asserted directly: the validity of the “I think” requires a transcendental deduction. The “I think” of both Descartes and Kant is arrived at a priori, but Descartes’s rationalism grounds itself upon a dogmatic assertion of the “I,” while Kant’s is neither rationalist nor empiricist, but transcendental. Displacing transcendental philosophy itself, Hegel’s critical metaphysics displaces the opposition between rationalism and empiricism by conjoining them in a relational disjunction. In Hegel’s Logic, the “I” is neither dogmatically asserted nor transcendentally deduced. It cannot be arrived at a priori. Rather,

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it is only thought that first appears on the scene through the thinking of being, while the “I” is only arrived at through the experience of the order and consistency of thinking. In the introduction to the Subjective Logic, Hegel tells us that “the content and determination” of the concept “can be proven solely on the basis of an immanent deduction which contains its genesis, and such a deduction lies behind us.”29 The objective unity of the concept is “the unity of the ‘I’ with itself,”30 and this “I” is only the unity of the concept, only the consistency of thinking being. Again, contra Pippin, Hegel insists that the “I” cannot be understood as “self-conscious understanding” or as “subjective understanding.”31 Hegel’s cogito—thought is, thought exists—attains the consistency of the “I” only as the immanent consistency of the concept: of thinking being. The immanent deduction of this consistency is rationalist, insofar as it is a deduction; it is empiricist, not because it is the experience “of ” a subject, but insofar as the deduction is immanent to a genetic process that can only be posited once it already “lies behind us.” The consistency of reason taking place is the unity of the concept: the coherent experience of rationality as it happens—a rationality which cannot be presupposed but must be traversed. To say that the deduction of this unity is “immanent” is to say that it is not transcendental, precisely insofar as it is both a priori and a posteriori, both rationalist and empiricist. Both a priori and a posteriori: the apparent contradiction at issue here is coherent insofar as it propels the movement of the concept, the immanent negativity of thinking being. But what kind of epistemology is involved in thinking through this moving contradiction, in its immanence? Our primary question is: How can we give an account of the genetic epistemology involved in Hegel’s rationalist empiricism such that his metaphysics, his ontology, can be said to be critical and his critique can be described as immanent? My claim—and Hegel’s, I think—is that it is only insofar as the movement of thought is without transcendental guarantee, insofar as its movement is ungrounded, that it can be rigorously critical. Critique does not consist in grounding, through deduction, conditions of possible experience or possible objects of experience. Rather, a properly immanent critique consists in ungrounding such conditions through the elaboration of the rational experience of actual thinking. So, what is the relation between the ungrounding of thought and the ungrounding of being? How do we situate the critical operation of ungrounding at the intersection of logic and ontology, epistemology and metaphysics? How do we traverse the rift that opens up not between dogmatism and skepticism, but rather between transcendental critique and pre-critical metaphysics? How do we keep our balance as we proceed along the thin ridge of speculative critique, of rationalist empiricism?

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Rationalist empiricism involves at once exposing the necessity of rationality (what has to be thought) to the contingency of what happens (the experience of thought as it takes place) and also, retroactively, deriving the necessity of rationality from its contingent movement. If what has to be thought can be said outside the immanent experience of thought—if it can be posited a priori—then rationalism would be all that is required; it would be the necessary, rather than merely dogmatic, thinking of being. But, for Hegel, the experience of thought in its unfolding is crucial to establishing what has to be said of being. Why? Because of the negativity of thought, which is only manifest, which only becomes apparent, which only exists in the process of thought as it happens. This is the methodological basis of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza. The problem is that Spinoza bars negativity from being, and this is a problem not only for ontological reasons (the claim that there is negativity in being, which would simply be a dogmatic assertion) but also for epistemological reasons. The point is that in order for being to be thought it has to include negativity because thought involves determination—and according to Spinoza’s own principle, all determination is negation. Therefore, thought, in order to be the thinking of being, has to include negativity in the determination of being. We see that this is the case as soon as the movement of the Logic begins: as soon as we think, as soon as we write or say “Being, pure being,” being has already passed over into nothingness. Being’s purported absence of determination, its being “pure” (reine), is in fact identical to its determination as nothing (nichts), and this contradiction already forces us into the movement of becoming. How does this happen, and why? Because to think being is already to determine it, and therefore to include negation within the thought of being, and therefore to think its becoming other. Because “being, pure being” also means “thought is, thought exists,” being is determined as thinking being—and thought is the mediation that, by determining being, makes it negative and thus turns it into the movement of contradiction: becoming.

NECESSITY AND CONTINGENCY This is an example of how drawing what has to be said of being from the immanent experience of what happens in thought constitutes an epistemological framework for thinking being. Ontology is a discourse; insofar as it is a rational discourse, what it can say of being is constrained by what has to be said, and the necessity of what has to be said can only be drawn the rational coherence of the contingent experience of thinking. Hegel’s epistemology is strictly inex-

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tricable from his ontology (logic is metaphysics) because what can be said of being proves inextricable from the immanent determinations of what has to be said: the contingent experience of thinking unfolds through the necessary movements of its structure. But how are we to understand—rationally rather than paradoxically—this codetermination of necessity and contingency, which provides Hegel’s rationalist empiricism with its epistemology? How can the thinking of being be, at once, necessary and contingent? We find the answer to this question in the Logic of Essence—in the relation between the chapter on “Actuality” and the chapter on “Ground.” The task is to arrive at an interpretation of the relation between these chapters that is at once epistemological and ontological. Here I will rely in part upon articles dedicated to Hegel’s chapter on “Actuality” by Stephen Houlgate and Raoni Padui (building on earlier articles by Dieter Henrich, George di Giovanni, and John Burbidge).32 These articles work through the relation between Hegel’s account of necessity and contingency to the categories of actuality and possibility. In order for A to be understood as possible, it must also be the case that not-A is possible. Thus, possibility is itself something actual. It is not only the case that A can or will come to be in the future; rather, both A and not-A are possible at present. We can say that if A comes to be the case, its existence is contingent: it could have been otherwise. Since this “could have been” is predicated upon the actuality of the initial possibility, Hegel defines contingency as the “unity of possibility and actuality.”33 Moreover, there is a sense in which contingency is necessary, since possibility is actual. Because it is possible that either A will be the case or it will not, if A becomes actual its existence is contingent. But if A is determined as possible, then it is necessary that either A will be the case or it will not, and in this sense contingency is necessary. As Hegel writes, “the contingent is therefore necessary because the actual is determined as possible.”34 Thus far we have only considered the relation between contingency and necessity in the case of the formal actuality of formal possibility: whether something will or will not become the case. But we also need to consider what Hegel calls real actuality and real possibility. Real actuality involves the content, rather than merely the form, of the actual; that is, it involves the determinations, the circumstances, and the conditions of what is actually the case. It is not only the fact of existence, but the internal determination of the fact. According to Hegel, real actuality has possibility immediately present in it, and when we investigate real possibility we do not only ask whether A is possible, but also what conditions make it possible. “The real possibility of a fact,” Hegel says, “is therefore the immediately existent manifoldness of circumstances that refer to it.”35 Real

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Figure 4. Formal Possibility, Real Possibility, and Actuality in the Science of Logic. Formal possibility passes to real possibility through the existence of adequate circumstances, and when all the conditions of a fact are completely present, the fact becomes actual. Considered in terms of formal possibility, A is contingent. Considered in terms of real possibility, A is necessary.

possibility “constitutes the totality of conditions” for a fact to be the case, and “whenever all the conditions of a fact are completely present, the fact is actually there; the completeness of the conditions is the totality as in the content, and the fact is itself this content determined as being equally actual as possible.”36 (See Figure 4.) Thus, when something is really possible, it is actual, such that the real possibility of a contingent being makes its existence necessary. As Hegel puts it, “what is really possible can no longer be otherwise; under the given conditions and circumstances, nothing else can follow.” Thus, “real possibility . . . is already itself necessity.”37 This is, then, another register of the unity of contingency and necessity, which Hegel calls “absolute actuality.”38 This dialectic is the basis of Hegel’s claim that contingency becomes in necessity; it is the in-itself of necessity, because it is “necessity’s own becoming.”39 How can we understand this dialectical structure? The coming into existence of a possible fact is determined as necessary when it becomes really possible, on the basis of the totality of its conditions. The actual existence of such a fact then becomes a condition for the possible existence of other facts. Actuality thus mediates the unity of necessity and contingency: a contingent fact that becomes necessary exists, is actual, and thus becomes part of the ground of possibility for the becoming of further contingent facts. Hegel can claim that “it is necessity itself, therefore, that determines itself as contingency.”40 The unity of necessity and contingency is a unity in movement, mediated by the becoming of actuality. “In

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its being,” Hegel writes, necessity “repels itself from itself, in this very repelling has only returned to itself, and in this turning back which is its being has repelled itself from itself.”41 Necessity repels itself into its other, contingency, and returns to itself; in this turning back it is other than itself, and this movement its being. It is at this point that Hegel’s account becomes properly ontological. The self-repelling being of necessity, which Hegel calls “absolute necessity” is the “simple self-identity of being in its negation, or in essence.”42 “This identity of being with itself in its negation is now substance,” he writes, and “it is this unity as in its negation or as in contingency.”43 Let me unpack these claims. Essence, the truth of being, is the self-identity of being in its negation. This negation is the movement of being (being is becoming), the actuality of contingency which is the becoming of necessity—according to the dialectic analyzed above. Necessity is absolute insofar as it repels itself from itself and thus includes contingency, its negation. Essence, determined by Hegel as the self-identity of being in its negation, is the self-repelling movement of the unity of necessity and contingency: actuality. Actuality, in its becoming, is the truth of being: essence. Let me now mobilize this framework toward an interpretation of what I view as Hegel’s fundamental ontological claim: that being is the identity of absolute necessity and absolute contingency. Being is actual, but being itself—as the unconditioned—has no ground. Because it is without ground, unconditioned, being is absolutely contingent: it has no sufficient reason. But because it is unconditioned, without ground, being is absolutely necessary: there is no ground of possibility for it not to be. Thus being is the identity of absolute contingency and absolute necessity. One might point out that this is precisely the sort of reasoning that Kant performs in the cosmological antinomies in order to show that reason, when it exceeds possible experience, arrives at contradictions, and thus a null result. But Hegel’s speculative thinking hinges upon the claim that this identity of apparently opposing terms (contradiction) is dialectically and rationally productive: as the identity of absolute necessity and absolute contingency, being is becoming. The chapter on “Actuality” I have just analyzed offers a theory of how such a claim can be coherently thought. But to further elucidate the dialectical productivity of this ontological contradiction, we need to turn to a crucial passage from Hegel’s chapter on “Ground.” In the final section of that chapter, titled “Procession of the fact into concrete existence,”44 Hegel follows the conditions of a fact’s existence into the groundlessness of being. Here is the relevant passage, the import of which for Hegel’s ontology can hardly be overstated:

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The conditions are the whole content of the fact, because they are the unconditioned in the form of formless being. But because of this form, they also have yet another shape besides the conditions of this content as this is in the fact as such. They appear as a manifold without unity, mingled with extra-essential elements and other circumstances that do not belong to the circle of existence as constituting the conditions of this determinate fact. —For the absolute, unrestricted fact, the sphere of being itself is the condition.45

“The sphere of being” (die Sphäre des Seins) is the condition of those determinate facts that belong to what Hegel calls “the circle of existence” (dem Kreise des Daseins). Facts in the circle of existence refer, through their conditions, to their ground in the sphere of being, but the sphere of being itself is unconditioned: It is the absolute, unrestricted fact. Moreover, within the sphere of being, the conditions of any determinate, existent fact are a “manifold without unity” mingled with “extra-essential elements.” Insofar as “the conditions are the whole content of the fact,” the fact is necessary: within the circle of existence, the fact has to be as it is. But insofar as those conditions are “mingled with extra-essential elements and other circumstances” in the sphere of being, it is contingent that precisely this fact, rather than another, comes to exist. Again, thinking the relation between contingency and necessity requires us to think the mediated relation between being and existence, which Hegel calls actuality. For example, the statement “Being, pure being” exists, and its existence has its condition in the being and existence of thought. As thinking being, it is actual. This is why this statement implies another, unspoken fact: thought is; thought exists. And the existence of thinking being, its actuality, has thought through its ground in the sphere of being itself. Thought has now demonstrated its existence, and it has done so not only by saying indeterminate Being, but by thinking through the determinations of being. Thus we can turn over and modify our earlier figure: “Being, pure being”

Thought is, thought exists

(Thought is, thought exists)

Being, determinate being

In Hegel’s chapter on “Ground,” thinking finds its way from the contingent fact that it exists to the absolute, unrestricted fact that being is: thinking investigates its ground in the groundlessness of being. Of course, in the Logic we are dealing with statements about being: the discourse of ontology. What is the modality of these statements? Are they contingent, or are they necessary? This is an epistemological question, bearing upon

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the relation between logic and ontology. In the chapter on “Ground,” thinking finds that it is groundless because, in its being, it is both absolutely necessary and absolutely contingent. In the chapter on “Actuality,” the becoming of thinking finds its structure. In its becoming, thinking moves between the contingency and necessity of its moments: this is the movement of the dialectic, which we experience over the course of the Logic. What is said about the necessity and contingency of being is, therefore, also said according to the relation between the necessity and contingency of logical discourse, of thinking. It is thinking being that interrogates, at the same time, what can be said of thinking and what can be said of being, and thus elaborates a logical ontology and an ontological logic. I want to emphasize that Hegel’s analysis of contingency and necessity, which is also an analysis of the structural movement of thinking, is both epistemological and ontological. And I want to propose that we understand his genetic epistemology, through the modal relation between necessity and contingency, in terms of the methodological relation of rationalism and empiricism. Insofar as ontology is a rational discourse it is constrained, conditioned, by what has to be said of being. It cannot say just anything. And insofar as it is not a dogmatic discourse, but rather immanently critical, ontology has to unfold across the reflexive experience of what happens in thought. I propose that Hegel’s analysis in the chapter on “Actuality” allows us to understand how the movement between what happens and what has to be can be coherently grasped as both contingent and necessary, and thus requires an approach which is both empiricist and rationalist at the same time. It requires the immanent determination of what has to be said as it happens, as it becomes actual. Because this determination is ungrounded (immanent), it cannot be transcendental. Because it is not transcendental, it has to displace the precritical opposition between rationalism and empiricism by other means: by holding them together, conjoined in the productivity of dialectical contradiction (a moving contradiction), without falling entirely into either one—and therefore without falling entirely into either logical necessity or logical contingency, but rather thinking within their actual complicity. This complicity is without epistemological guarantee, but it is not without epistemological coherence. It articulates what has to be said of being as it is determined by the rationally conditioned becoming of what happens in thought. Such a statement about Hegel’s Logic is not particularly unfamiliar, but I hope to have given it a framework in which it makes particular sense—a framework that uncovers rationalist empiricism as the dialectical movement of Hegel’s speculative critique.

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Time, therefore, appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself. —G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Temporality is the primordial “outside of itself” in and for itself. —Martin Heidegger, Being and Time The principle of non-contradiction says the same thing twice: the object cannot cease to be contingent, time can not abolish itself in time. —Quentin Meillassoux, “Divine Inexistence”

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HEGEL’S APPRENTICE: FROM SPECULATIVE IDEALISM TO SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM

We have seen how Hegel’s understanding of contingency as “necessity’s own becoming” is related to his methodological rejection of the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori: immanent critique pursues what must be said (necessity) of what happens in thought (contingency). The encounter of reason with its own determinations is its becoming, and this becoming is the experience of thought informing itself as to its own imperatives. For Hegel, there is no a priori shortcut. Hegel’s critical metaphysics is a rationalist empiricism insofar as the movement and the labor of the concept is an ungrounded alternation between the contingency and necessity of thinking, through which each exfoliates the consequences of the other. The becoming of the concept is this movement, the rationality of its experience and the experience of its rationality. But if Hegel’s dialectical method in the Science of Logic thus carries out a speculative critique of Kant’s transcendental philosophy through a practice of rationalist empiricism, why not then affirm the program of absolute idealism as the early accomplishment of a methodological trajectory we are following into the twenty-first century? That is, if Hegel (1) reactivates the ontological scope of speculative thinking while (2) absorbing Kant’s critical lessons and (3) displacing the subjective dogmatism of the transcendental, why must we move from speculative idealism to speculative materialism? I will argue that a materialist displacement of Hegel’s speculative method is required in order preserve the movement of immanent critique it had levied against the transcendental, and 90

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that this requirement devolves from Hegel’s treatment of time. In a word: speculative materialism rescues the ontological primacy of becoming from the annulment of time that absolute idealism requires, and it does so through its unprecedented thinking of the relationship between necessity and contingency. We may thus trace a development of rationalist empiricism at two removes from Kant. With Hegel, we retain the displacement of transcendental critique by speculative critique, affirming the movement between the a priori and the a posteriori requisite for the ungrounding of critical epistemology. With Meillassoux, we grasp the import of a materialist position for sustaining the project of “true critique,” displacing the idealism that ultimately leads Hegel’s speculative thinking to annul the very condition of its epistemological rigor.

THE DOUBLE ANNULMENT OF TIME We have argued that the epistemology of the Science of Logic relies upon a perpetual alternation between the contingency and necessity of thinking, but the processual unfolding of immanent critique does arrive at a destination. To traverse and finally comprehend the movement of the concept is indeed to gather its restlessness into resolution. The Idea—“the pure concept conceptually comprehending itself ”1—is the “fulfilled concept,” for which “there is no transition that takes place” since “the simple being to which the idea determines itself remains perfectly transparent to it.”2 This perfect transparency is the obsolescence of the a posteriori: the experience of thought is now so replete with determination that it is complete. Rather than proceeding through its determinations, it now is determinate. The formidable paradox of Hegel’s thought (which should not be obviated through the familiarity of reference to “sublation”) is that we arrive at the a priori by way of the a posteriori. This is the implicit logic of Hegel’s notorious claim that the science of logic is “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of finite spirit.”3 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, we move from finite consciousness to absolute knowing, and thus pure thought. In the Logic, we set out from the point at which the content of science is “thought in so far as this thought is equally the fact as it is in itself; or the fact in itself in so far as this is equally pure thought.”4 Taken as fact, the investigation of pure thought is a posteriori; but insofar as the fact in itself is equally pure thought, it is a priori. This is the contradiction driving the rational experience of pure thought: the movement of the contradiction—its movement from one contradiction into another—is thought’s process. Having been experienced, however, at the end of the Logic this movement becomes entirely rational

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and without movement: “absolutely certain of itself and internally at rest.”5 One could say that this final moment of the Logic is thus entirely a posteriori, except Hegel stipulates that “the pure idea into which the determinateness of the reality of the concept is raised” is “nothing that has become, is not a transition.”6 The concept clears its own genesis, the facticity of its movement, through its selfseizure and absolute auto-inclusion. If its becoming did not previously obey the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori, it now becomes a priori and thus no longer becomes. This does not mean, however, that Hegel’s system is teleological, since it does indeed encounter the contingency of history and of thought. In order to be critical—rather than either arbitrary or teleological—the movement of the concept requires a self-propelling alternation between contingency and necessity, theorized in the previous chapter as the rationalist empiricism of immanent critique. In order to be absolute, the whole cannot be teleological, because it must include contingency. Yet the whole, as such, cannot be contingent. Both contingency and necessity are folded into absolute necessity in a retroactive constitution of the a priori. Hegel’s thought is both non-teleological and absolute because the concept is not a priori at the beginning, but it becomes so at the end. That this methodological paradox is constitutive of the absolute is the point of the Hegel’s post-Kantian enterprise, as well as the point of its impasse: taken as a point of departure, the a priori is insufficiently determinate to constitute its own ground. Yet, as we find in the Logic of Essence, the movement of the a posteriori is also groundless. Thus, the unfolding of thought’s experience must be folded into reason in a retroactive constitution of ground—the movement of recollection.7 In order to constitute its ground, the result of this recollection must not dissolve back into the chain of its determinations; it must be truly new. The mark of this absolute novelty—of the paradoxical absorption of the a posteriori into the a priori—is a new name, the Idea. The question of how such a retroactive constitution of the absolute is to be understood bears upon the problem of time. In the Phenomenology, Hegel tells us that “Spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time as long as it does not grasp its pure concept, which is to say, as long as it does not annul time. . . . Time thus appears as the destiny and necessity of the spirit that is not yet completed within itself.”8 We could say: it is necessary that Spirit undergo contingency, that reason traverse experience, until this experience completes itself in the rational annulment of time, which is absolute knowing. In the Science of Logic, this trajectory repeats itself within the order of pure thought. Despite having attained the presupposition of absolute knowledge (at the end of the

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Phenomenology), pure thought now has to undergo, within itself, the becoming of its determinations (the beginning of the Logic). Spirit falls into time, then ascends to absolute knowing, but now absolute knowing falls once more from the immediacy of being into becoming before completing itself as the absolute idea. This structure—in which a doubling of the absolute is determined by a double movement through the time of intuition and the becoming of pure thought—is required by the problem of the beginning. “Every beginning must be made with the absolute,” writes Hegel, But because the absolute exists at first only implicitly, in itself, it equally is not the absolute nor the posited concept, and also not the idea, for the in-itself is only an abstract, one-sided moment, and this is what they are. The advance is not, therefore, a kind of superfluity; this is what it would be if that which is at the beginning were already absolute; the advance consists rather in this, that the universal determines itself and is the universal for itself, that is, equally a singular [sic] and a subject. Only in its consummation is it the absolute.9

Setting out from mere sense certainty, Spirit becomes absolute knowing, and the Phenomenology unfolds this movement. But this absolute must take itself up upon its own ground, within the determinations of pure thinking (the Science of Logic), so as to know the determinations of absolute knowing. Hegel requires two manifestations of the absolute in order to move from one to the other, a movement through which the absolute comes to know its own knowing. In order that absolute knowing may come to be known as absolute idea, the annulment of time must itself be annulled and then repeated.

ABSOLUTE KNOWING, ABSOLUTE BECOMING, ABSOLUTE IDEA At the center of the Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence thus lies at the midpoint between two annulments of time and between two absolutes—between the absolute in itself (absolute knowing) and the absolute for itself (the idea). And it is at the center of the Doctrine of Essence, in the chapter on “Ground,” that we encounter an analysis of the fact—what we might call Hegel’s analytic of facticity. Here we think the condition of the fact in relation to the problem of its ground. Customarily, Hegel says, to trace the conditions of a fact is to follow “a progression ad infinitum from condition to condition”10 and thus to find the fact ultimately unconditioned. On the other hand, we must therefore think the self-positing of the fact which negates this indeterminate totality, thus determining the ground-connection as the specificity of being-there. Hegel writes, “the

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existence that constitutes the conditions, therefore, is in truth not determined as a condition by an other and is not used by it as material; on the contrary, it itself makes itself, through itself, into the moment of an other.”11 The fact posits its ground in its coming into existence, thus breaking from and negating the infinite sequence of conditioning determinations in the very instance of emerging from them. Between two poles of the absolute, we thus encounter “the truly unconditioned; the fact in itself.”12 It is “truly unconditioned” in a double sense: (1) the chain of its conditions leads into the absolutely unconditioned ground of being itself; (2) in breaking with this chain of conditions by coming into existence as that which it is, the fact is unconditioned in that it posits its own ground.13 Hegel concludes that “the fact is thus the unconditioned and, as such, equally so the groundless; it arises from the ground only insofar as the latter has foundered and is no longer ground: it rises up from the groundless, that is, from its own essential negativity or pure form.”14 What is at stake, again, is the intervention of the absolute upon the progressive unfolding of determination. But in this case, what is at issue is not the absolute being of the absolute itself; rather, it is the “absolute becoming” of the determinate moment, “the absolutely unconditioned” self-positing of the specific fact that is the unity of its contingency and its necessity. This is the very unity, understood as the structure of transition, that will be folded into the pure necessity of the idea by the cessation of transition at the end of the Logic. We thus have three absolutes, rather than two: Absolute Knowing (end of the Phenomenology), Absolute Becoming (center of the Logic), and Absolute Idea (end of the Logic). Let us interpret the relation of these absolutes in terms of their relation to time. We are led, from the end of the Phenomenology through the movement of the Logic and the cessation of that movement, across the following itinerary: 1. As we move from the end of the Phenomenology to the beginning of the Logic, Absolute Knowing produces the thought of pure, indeterminate being. This pure indetermination, through its identity with nothingness, gives way, through the negative transition of this identity, to the movement of becoming. Thus, the relation of Absolute Knowledge to time is that it first annuls its temporal becoming and then, through the pure indetermination of this annulment (thought of pure Being) transitions into the determinate becoming of pure thought. Absolute Knowing is the point of transition through which the time of history (Phenomenology of Spirit) becomes the time of pure thought (Science of Logic).

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2. The movement of pure thought encounters the nullity of its ground—its ungrounding—through the problem of becoming’s conditions: the pure fact expresses, in the ultimate groundlessness of its determinations, the absolute contingency of its being thus and so. Yet the fact is thus and so: its self-positing, upon the foundering of ground, is grasped as absolute becoming, since the conditioning chain of its determinations is itself indeterminate, unconditional. The fact stands forth as the necessary result of just those determinations upon which it is posited, at once negating and emerging from the contingent accumulation and combination of just these conditions. At the intersection of contingency and necessity, Absolute Becoming is the instantiation of time as fact: the pure determination of becoming as an instance. Here becoming becomes itself: the production of determinate being, in time, from the indetermination of temporal regress to the origin. Absolute becoming is the factical synthesis of temporal indeterminacy and temporal determinacy: the determinate becoming of beings, of facts. 3. The determination of being (becoming) completes itself as the Idea—the selftransparency of the Concept and the achievement, through the restlessness of the negative, of internal rest.

To summarize: (1) time becomes; (2) time determines; (3) time negates itself through the saturation of determination. This is the movement of time from Absolute Knowing to Absolute Becoming to Absolute Idea. The problem of time in Hegel—and of its double annulment—thus rests upon the relation between the being of becoming (negation), the becoming of beings (fact), and the becoming of being (the Whole). The impasse of Hegel’s system is how the double annulment of time, from Absolute Spirit to Absolute Idea, is to be thought, given that thought relies upon the movement of negation. To seal the Absolute as the negation of the very movement of negation does not suffice to solve the problem, since it merely declares, by fiat, that the restlessness of the negative which is the becoming of the concept can grasp itself without the very means of its self-comprehension. The problem of time, in Hegel, relays again the inextricability of epistemology and ontology in his thought, but here with untenable consequences. Since the epistemological coherence of “true critique” relies upon the movement between what happens in thought and what it must think, this dialectical coherence annuls itself along with the ontological annulment of time. At the very moment that it seeks to ground its coherence, Hegel’s rationalist empiricism abandons that which it would ground. Finally, we must note that this annulment of the critical dimension of specula-

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tive idealism, in both the Phenomenology and the Logic, is accompanied by the concept’s concluding assumption of the form of the “I.” As we saw in Chapter 3, the Science of Logic sets out by shedding the finite determinateness of the “I” as consciousness in order to cognize the infinite form of thought, subjecting the categories to immanent critique “apart from their abstract relation to the ‘I.’ ”15 This rejection of the “I” as a finite form of thinking is an essential element of Hegel’s critique of the transcendental. But at the conclusion of the Logic, as the concept annuls the temporality of its movement and comprehends itself as Absolute Idea, the “I” returns in the infinite form of “pure self-consciousness.”16 Here the unity of the concept, having traversed the “immanent deduction which contains its genesis,” attains an “objective unity” that is “the unity of the ‘I’ with itself.”17 In order to grasp the relationship between this genesis of the unity of the “I” and the annulment of time, we must consider the following passage from the introduction to the Subjective Logic: True, I have concepts, that is, determinate concepts; but the “I” is the pure concept itself, the concept that has come into determinate existence. It is fair to suppose, therefore, when we think of the fundamental determinations which constitute the nature of the “I,” that we are referring to something familiar, that is, a commonplace of ordinary thinking. But the “I” is in the first place purely self-referring unity, and is this not immediately but by abstracting from all determinateness and content and withdrawing into the freedom of unrestricted equality with itself. As such it is universality, a unity that is unity with itself only by virtue of its negative relating, which appears as abstraction, and because of it contains all determinateness within itself as dissolved. In second place, the “I” is just as immediately self-referring negativity, singularity, absolute determinateness that stands opposed to anything other and excludes it—individual personality. This absolute universality which is just as immediately absolute singularization—a being-in-and-for-itself which is absolute positedness and being-in-and-for-itself only by virtue of its unity with the positedness—this universality constitutes the nature of the “I” and of the concept; neither the one nor the other can be comprehended unless these two just given moments are grasped at the same time, both in their abstraction and their perfect unity.18

Let us work through the key moments of this passage. The “I” is distinguished, as a “purely self-referring unity,” from “a commonplace of ordinary thinking.” The universality of the “I,” considered thus, requires abstraction from determinateness and content through withdrawal into “the freedom of unrestricted equality with itself.” This freedom involves a negativity that dissolves determinateness. But since the “I” is self-referring negativity, it is thus singularity or absolute

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determinateness, such that absolute universality is identical to absolute singularization. This is the being-in-and-for-itself which constitutes the nature of the I and the concept, their “perfect unity,” which will be comprehended as Absolute Idea. And in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well, Absolute Knowing is attained as “the pure being-for-itself of self-consciousness.” “It is the ‘I,’ ” Hegel stipulates, “which is this I and no other, and it is just as much the immediately mediated, or the sublated, universal I” understood as “pure negativity.”19 Again, the particularity of the “I” is sublated by its universal singularity. Conceptually comprehended, the I “is nothing but the very movement” by which this “pure negativity” comes to be, but it is this movement as complete: the existence of the concept as “I” “does not even exist anywhere at all until after it has completed the labor of compelling its incomplete shapes to provide for consciousness the shape of its essence.”20 From the Phenomenology to the Logic, the double annulment of time is accompanied by a double genesis of the unity of the “I,” as the unity of selfconsciousness. This pure unity, its being-in-and-for-itself, requires the annulment of the movement by which it is generated. We see clearly that if we want to retain the movement of speculative critique— the exteriority of its movement to its ground (an exteriority upon which its epistemological power is predicated)—we must reject both the annulment of time and the unity of the “I” that accompanies it. Speculative critique encounters a double condition: we must destroy the unity of the “I” by preserving the movement of time, and we must prevent the annulment of time by preserving the movement of thought against its subsumption by self-consciousness. We must think time as that which displaces the form of the “I.” And we must attain a thinking of time as the impossibility of its annulment through a mode of reflection that neither relies upon nor generates the absolute unity of self-consciousness, its freedom in-and-for-itself. Indeed, we must think time, rather than the “I,” as pure being: that which is in-and-for-itself. Between Absolute Knowing and the Absolute Idea, the movement of thought was the negation of the “I” through which Hegel had arrived at a thinking of Absolute Becoming. We must preserve this negation of the “I” against the I’s negation of the negation, its realization as Idea, as the truth of being. This will be the criterion of a materialist displacement of absolute idealism. Materialism affirms the truth of being that Hegel rejects: “Spirit that were not idea, not the unity of the concept with itself, not the concept that has the concept itself as its reality, would be dead spirit, spiritless spirit, a material object.”21 Speculative materialism affirms thought’s capacity to think its negation through to the end; it affirms that to think the outside of thought, to know the death of spirit, is spirit’s ontological vocation.

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UNSUBORDINATED CONTINGENCY Because the reception of his thought has been dominated by the reception of After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux’s work is primarily understood through his relation to Kant. It is the critique of transcendental critique from which the broader critique of correlationism sets out in After Finitude. There, Meillassoux defended a Kantian thesis (the facticity of the correlational forms that govern our relationship to nature) against a Hegelian thesis (the absolutization of the correlation itself ). But he showed why, in order to sustain this Kantian thesis, the Kantian himself would have to absolutize the facticity of the correlation to defend his assertion of its modality (the correlation is just a fact) against its subsumption into the absolute idea by the Hegelian. But even if the systematic relation between transcendental and absolute idealism plays an important role in After Finitude, Hegel himself, when mentioned at all, is mentioned only briefly. But in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, “L’inexistence divine,” Meillassoux’s project begins with and sustains a conceptual priority that sets it directly against Hegel’s thinking of the whole: to think absolute becoming as the insubordination of contingency to any law. I note immediately that this conceptual priority—to think absolute becoming as unsubordinated contingency—implies a thinking of time. The identity of absolute becoming with unsubordinated contingency would be understood as the ontological identity of both with time, since the movement of becoming, in order to remain unsubordinated, could not be understood within the synthetic determinations or the physical laws of any ontic regime of temporality. The distinction of such an absolute time from physical or phenomenological time would be grasped as the very concept of the ontological difference, and as the subtraction of becoming from any law of becoming. In reconstructing the relation of “L’inexistence divine” to Hegel’s speculative idealism, I will argue that by displacing the annulment of time, Meillassoux carries through Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s failure to think being as time. However, he does so in a manner that rejects Heidegger’s own alignment of time with finitude. This is the fundamental sense in which Meillassoux’s thought situates us “after finitude” and also sets itself against the Hegelian alignment of the infinite with the whole: a double imperative that he inherits from Alain Badiou, yet which he must also sustain against the atemporal ontology of Being and Event. How to undertake such an ontological project? How to begin to think an absolute scope of time that preserves absolute becoming from atemporal being by aligning it with unsubordinated contingency? Here, Meillassoux’s method is crucial to our account of speculative critique: (1) he begins by thinking the relation between empiricism and rationalism, and (2) in asking how reason can

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orient itself toward necessity amid the contingency of experience, he begins with experience. This commitment to setting out from the empirical, rather than positing axioms or rational principles, is at the core of the critical dimension of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. In Chapter 2 we discussed the anhypothetical demonstration of the principle of factiality in After Finitude, noting that it models a conjunctural method of philosophical argumentation—a method attuned to the historically concatenated determination of thought by relationships among philosophical positions that force certain conceptual commitments. “Established ‘refutationally’ rather than deductively,” Meillassoux’s anhypothetical argument functions “by demonstrating that anyone who contests it can do so only by presupposing it to be true, thereby refuting himself.”22 In “L’inexistence divine” the demonstration of the necessity of contingency operates differently. Here we set out from the facts of the world in which we find ourselves, within which “nothing seems to be necessary, since beings, in their determinate and empirical existence, given in their radical contingency, make up our world in its entirety.” Amid the empirical givenness of this world, “I cannot, it seems, give any ultimate reason for the existence not only of this or that thing (every reason requires another reason, all equally contingent, and so on to infinity), but even for the existence of the world in general (the world appears to me as a pure fact).”23 Setting out from the empirical contingency of what exists—of beings and of the world in general— the problem for philosophical rationality is how to establish any necessity at all, anything that is not just a fact, with which the necessary discursivity of reason could begin to think. Confronted with the contingency of the given, what is it that may not be contingent? Meillassoux answers that we cannot think contingency itself as contingent. The contingency of beings cannot be considered one of their contingent predicates, since it is the contingency of their determinations. We cannot, that is, treat contingency as a fact, addressing it as “something” which is contingent. To say that “contingency is contingent” adds nothing to the original attribution; it merely spirals into a reaffirmation of contingency itself, a mise en abyme of contingency all the way down—an absolute contingency. If I affirm, against the principle of factiality, that contingency itself is contingent, I base this argument upon the idea of an irreducible contingency: in the occurrence of the contingency of contingency. But this contingency “squared” is no different than what I tried to refute: it is absolute, ultimate, irreducible.24

If we say it is contingent that a being exists, we mean it could be otherwise: the being may either exist or not exist. If we say it is contingent that a being is red,

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we mean it may either be red or not red (the same leaf might also be green). But the contingency of a being is this “may either be”; it is this “or not.” Thus if we say the contingency of beings may itself be contingent, that they may either be contingent or not contingent, we are saying they are contingent: they may be either this or that, they may be thus or not thus. We cannot “redouble” the sense of contingency itself in the same way we can attribute contingency to the predicates of a being. To say contingency is not contingent is to say it is necessary. But to say that contingency is contingent is to say the same thing: the redoubling of contingency merely returns us to the necessity of contingency. Thus Meillassoux claims that, confronted with the manifest contingency of the world and its beings, it is contingency alone that must be thought as necessary: Necessity is not a mysterious property of beings, alongside other properties that are, themselves, contingent. Necessity designates the very contingency of all determinations of beings, contingency as such. Or more precisely, necessity resides in the impossibility of speaking of the contingency of beings as if this contingency were itself a contingent being, i.e., a being at all, since all beings are contingent. Necessity thus consists in the impossible auto-attribution of contingency, the impossibility of qualifying the contingency of contingency, the fact of the factual—what we have called the impossibility of redoubling the factual. This non-redoubling reveals the origin of every necessary statement: a necessary statement has as its object not a being, but the contingency of beings.25

We see how thinking the distinction between contingency and necessity in this way (only contingency is necessary) bears upon an understanding of the ontological difference: contingency pertains to beings; the necessity of contingency pertains to being-qua-being. But what if we were to reject the contingency of beings in the first instance and set out from the counter-position, the strongest version of which would be Spinozist? We could say: It is simply a matter of ignorance, the limitations of our knowledge, that leads us to understand beings as contingent in the first place. The groundlessness of an infinite chain of causal determinations that we encounter in reflecting upon experience is simply the result of our finitude. Since an omniscient being would know all causes, and thus the necessary determination of what is the case, the contingency of what happens, of the predicates of beings and of their existence, is a figment of the imagination. By setting out from what seems to be the contingency of beings, this demonstration merely pretends to be anhypothetical. It pretends to set out from a “fact” that is actually a presupposition; it has presupposed from the beginning what it cannot justify: that beings are contingent.

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But in order to undermine, as a presupposition, the presuppositionless situation of empirical presentation from which Meillassoux sets out, what must such a counter-argument itself presuppose? Insofar as the claim is merely that the worldly contingency with which we seem to be presented is in fact an artifact of our ignorance, then we are returned to the reasoning that Meillassoux blocks. We are presented with beings that seem to be contingent, and to say we do not know whether they really are contingent is to assert the contingency of contingency: it could be otherwise. The primacy of contingency is thus reasserted, canceling its relativization. Thus, one would have to take a further step to block this regress: it is necessary that beings are as they are, that what is the case is the case. This is precisely the step that Spinoza takes, more rigorously than any other thinker in the history of philosophy. Substance is eternal, univocal, fully determinate, causa sui. The empirical fact of the contingency of beings is merely an ontic illusion, a figment of the imagination, an error of the first kind of knowledge from which no rational principle could possibly be derived. However, in order to justify his ontological determinations—in all the glory of their internal consistency—Spinoza must set out by positing definitions and axioms that must themselves be understood as necessary. But are they necessary? Consider Definition 1, Book 1, of the Ethics: “By cause of itself [causa sui] I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.” What if pure becoming, sheer change, were thought as causa sui, as that alone which is conceived only through itself? Would its “essence involve existence?” Or would its essence be neither existence nor inexistence, but the passage between existence and inexistence? Or consider Definition 3, Book 1: “By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.” But could this definition apply precisely to that which is not substance? Could we not conceive pure becoming in a manner that does not conceive it as a being (something that exists), nor conceive it through another thing which does exist, but rather conceives it through itself, rather than as subordinated to the laws of what exists? For example (an example to which we shall return), Heidegger conceives of temporality as “the primordial ‘outside of itself ’ in and for itself.”26 Such a conception of time would de-substantialize that which is in itself and conceived through itself, through an ek-statical modality of thinking that does not ground the thought of the in-itself in another thing, but rather thinks being as other than a being (as time). According to Heidegger, “temporality temporalizes, and it temporalizes possible ways of itself. These make possible the multiplicity of the modes of being of Dasein.”

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I.e. temporality itself makes possible the modes of understanding through which it may be thought (the ek-stasies) and is thus thought through itself. This is just to say that the philosophical presuppositions from which one would set out to secure the necessity of all that exists would themselves be contingent. In fact, Spinoza’s definitions are historical, canonical—they are not necessary determinations of thinking. We can see this, for example, in the work of Alain Badiou, who sets out from a different set of definitions and axioms to demonstrate a counter-Spinozist proposition: that the infinite cannot be thought as one-all, that being is not substance but inconsistent multiplicity. Badiou knows the axioms from which he sets out are contingent (he could have used others) which is why he grants that his enterprise begins with a decision. For his part, Meillassoux does not set out from axioms. He shows that the proper use of Cantorian mathematics, the thinking of the inconsistency of the infinite, is to show us what we do not have to think, rather than what must be thought. So he asks (implicitly): What is it that we must think, given that we do not have to think the infinite as one, or the multiple as consistent, or being as substance? From whence could we derive a necessity of reason, given the contingency of our ontological axioms (Badiou’s or Spinoza’s) and of the empirical facts that surround us? We cannot derive the necessity of beings from our experience, and to simply posit their necessity will require us to set out from rational principles that will themselves prove contingent. Such positing would set out on a hypothetical basis, thus implicitly beginning with contingency itself. Meillassoux acknowledges this implicit contingency (i.e., the dogmatism of axioms), and thus sets out on an anhypothetical basis: if we cannot set out by positing the necessity of beings without relying upon the contingency of our positing, then our positing is itself contingent, just another fact. But is this contingency itself contingent, or necessary? If I say that contingency itself is contingent, I would be saying that it is either contingent or necessary, which simply returns us to the initial question. There is contingency, but the impossibility of thinking contingency itself as contingent requires me to think the non-contingency of contingency: not that contingency could be necessary (which returns us again to the initial question), but that it is necessary. And here I accede to a necessity of rational reflection: the fact that beings are contingent cannot be thought as a fact; “only the facticity of what is cannot itself be a fact.”27 The rationality of what has to be thought (that beings must be contingent) is derived from the empirical fact of what is the case (that beings are contingent). I have gleaned from an empiricist beginning a rationalist principle. In order for the principle of factiality to be “anhypothetical” (in order for it

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not to presuppose the hypothetical positing of another principle) rationalism must intersect with empiricism. But it must do so precisely in order to distinguish itself from it: to reason about the ontological scope of the absolute, in a manner derived from and consistent with the ontic predicates of empirical existence. To think the absolute scope of contingency, its insubordination to any law, is to think its “auto-limitation.” The non-contingency of contingency gives us to think the necessity of contingency itself: that there cannot be a necessary being. And this requires a mode of speculation that is immanently critical. Far from merely positing the absolute, it returns all dogmatic principles to the contingency of their positing, and it draws from contingency itself both the necessity of its own rationality and the rationality of necessity.

THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE Meillassoux notes a curious relationship between the thought of absolute contingency and the finitude of thought itself (i.e., the contingency of finite thinking). I may assert “that the thought of contingency is merely a contingent thought—a category that only applies for us, not in itself.” Such an assertion of the contingent finitude of thought “always rests upon the postulate that thought can only attain those thoughts which have no meaning considered independently of the thought that thinks them.” Thus, I can assert that “the world to which I have access only exists in these determinations for as long as I am (there is no time, no qualities, no space, etc., without subjective consciousness of time, of qualities, of space).” In this way, I assert the contingency of these determinations, which are restricted to the finitude of my existence and my phenomenal experience. But Meillassoux claims that “this reasoning falters, however, upon one thought, which is precisely that of contingency.” When I think the “contingency of all things, including and above all of myself as subjective thought of all things”— that is, when I think my own contingency as a thinking being—I think the eventual inexistence of my thought. Meillassoux thus holds that “Contingency, including my own as a thinking being, is thus the only object of thought that is given as necessarily independent of the thought that thinks it. The contingency of thought cannot depend upon the thought of contingency.”28 The argument is that when we think the contingency of all that exists, including our own thinking, we must think it as exterior to the condition of our own existence as a thinking being. This is a non-transcendental necessity of the thought of contingency. Speculation, setting out from the empirical contingency of the given, and drawing from it the necessity—for thought—of that contingency which is given, now informs us of the manner in which this necessity must be

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thought: it cannot be thought as restricted to the finitude of my own thinking (since it is the very thought of the negation of that thinking); the necessity of contingency must be thought as exterior to the thinking that touches upon it, that draws its concept from the given. We must note here that Meillassoux does not claim to be able to think anything like the appearance of the world as it would be without the phenomenal determinations of thinking and sensing beings. He claims that thinking the non-contingency of contingency forces a determination of the in-itself with no bearing whatsoever upon the appearance of the world or our existence within it: the very contingency of our own thought must be conceived as a determination of being and not only a determination of thinking. We cannot restrict the thought of contingency to the contingent finitude of our thinking, since to think the contingent finitude of our thinking is to think its disappearance. This is an epistemological rationale for a thinking of the ontological difference. When I recognize that I cannot think contingency as dependent on the contingency of my thought, I think at once the adequation of thinking to being and the separation of being from thinking: “thought is thus presented at once, and for the same reason, as adequate to being and as different than being.”29 The necessary contingency of being can only be thought as including the contingency of thinking, and thus it involves the necessary separability of being from thinking: Thought thus thinks itself as contingent at the same time that it thinks the noncontingency of contingency: that is to say, thought thinks that it may disappear, but that the contingency that it thinks will not disappear with it. . . . That the essence of beings be thinkable as contingency thus excludes that thought be the essence of being: because if that which is must be thought as contingent, thought must be a contingent being among others.30

The specificity of what Meillassoux terms the principle of factiality (“only the facticity of what is cannot itself be a fact”) thus consists in three determinations: 1. It delivers an anhypothetical principle of reason, which involves both an immanent critique and speculative extrapolation from the contingency of hypothetical reasoning (i.e. reasoning from posited principles). 2. It enables us to think “at one stroke, and for the same reason”31 the epistemological adequacy of thinking to being and the ontological distinction between being and thinking. 3. It delivers a concept of the ontological difference, wherein the contingency of beings is the starting point from which the being of beings, the necessity of contingency, is grasped.

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The principle of factiality delivers an anhypothetical, epistemologically necessary concept of the ontological difference that is formulated in both a Heideggerian and non-Heideggerian manner. It thinks the finitude of thinking, insofar as thinking will cease to exist (is contingent); but it also thinks the absolute remit of thinking, since the contingency of thought itself is one aspect of the necessity of contingency which exceeds the finitude of thinking—is thought as an absolute. To think the necessity of contingency detaches the thinking of being from the finitude of thinking. But would it be possible to view this speculative extrapolation of ontology beyond finite thinking as an extension of certain unrealized possibilities in Heidegger’s approach to fundamental ontology? To properly understand how Meillassoux at once extends, radicalizes, and critically delimits Heidegger’s thinking of being, we must first see how the concept of the necessity of contingency deconstructs Hegel’s annulment of time and how it thus participates in a Heideggerian project.

IDENTITY AND DISCRIMINATION In the Science of Logic, the annulment of time by the absolute depends upon an identification of contingency and necessity, which is first grasped as “absolute necessity” and then sublated by the freedom of the concept: the identity of the Idea with the “I” of self-consciousness. Hegel considers the becoming of beings in terms of the determinacy constitutive of their concrete existence—the determinations according to which beings come to be as they are. Typically, he notes, one follows the conditions of such determinacy through a regress of becoming that gives way onto a “progression ad infinitum from condition to condition.”32 In seeking the ground of concrete determinacy through a sequence of conditions, such reflection thus arrives at the whole as the ultimate ground of any particular being, or fact, and thus at the unconditioned whole of being itself. Yet Hegel notes that this regress of conditions requires us to think the particularity of a being as pure positedness, as its own condition and ground, as the immediacy through which it exists as that which it is, rather than that which it is not, and thus repels reduction into a chain of determinations. The unconditioned fact itself comes to constitute its own condition and ground, and thus to be the condition of both: “the condition which is itself absolute.”33 Thus, we think at once the manner in which the conditions of particularity lead us to the whole as unconditioned ground, and the manner in which particular beings must repel this ground-connection, as negative determination, in order to be particular, and thus constitute their own ground. “It is the fact’s own doing that it conditions itself and places itself as ground over against

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its conditions; but in connecting conditions and ground, the fact is a reflective shining in itself; its relation to them is a rejoining itself.”34 The relation of condition and ground is sublated (raised and negated) into the instantiation of the whole in the particular, and the constitution of the whole by the particular. This sublation is the mediated unity of being and existence. Hegel’s approach to the determination of the particular involves thinking the identity of necessity and contingency. Yet this unity is precisely what will be determined by Hegel as “absolute necessity,” and absolute necessity is “equally simple immediacy or pure being and simple immanent reflection or pure essence; it is this, that the two are one and the same.”35 The culmination of the Doctrine of Essence is its unity with the Doctrine of Being, grasped through the culmination of the dialectic of necessity and contingency in the concept of absolute necessity: “Absolute necessity is thus the reflection or form of the absolute, the unity of being and essence, simple immediacy and absolute negativity.”36 Now, when this unity of being and essence is grasped as the unity of self-consciousness—when it is taken up as the identity of the “I” with the idea in the Objective Logic—absolute necessity is sublated by absolute freedom. Why? Because the idea is the self-determination of the concept apprehending itself in its unity. When the concept grasps itself as the whole, “in the relation of divine cognition to nature”—when it realizes itself as “the pure concept conceptually comprehending itself ”—the determinations of the particular that unified contingency and necessity as “absolute necessity” (as the determinacy of the whole in the particular) are folded into the universality of “the pure concept that only relates to itself . . . the simple self-reference which is being.” This concept of being, which is the very concept of the concept (the idea), is “simple self-reference” insofar it has gone beyond the dialectic of the universal and the particular into pure universality, at which level there is no restriction, no constraint upon its self-apprehension. We can recapitulate in three points: (1) contingency gives way to the identity of contingency and necessity; (2) this identity is conceptualized as absolute necessity, the determinacy of the universal in the particular; (3) this determinacy of the universal in the particular is sublated by pure universality, which is the apprehension of the unity of being and essence as freedom, the simple self-reference of the concept as the unity of the “I,” shorn of exteriority. Through this dialectic, contingency is incorporated into the whole (as a moment) and subordinated to the whole (the unity of all moments), conceptualized as the freedom of substance expressed as subject. We see why this involves and requires the annulment of time: because exteriority is the very essence of time, because time is the decompletion of the whole, because time is the deconstitu-

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tion of the unity of the subject, because time conceived as being-qua-being is not a being and thus defies the unity of being and beings that Hegel folds into the absolute through the subsumption of the identity of contingency and necessity into freedom. Time is that which destroys the unity of the “I” as the simple self-reference of being. If Hegel arrives at the sublation of contingency into absolute necessity through an identification of contingency and necessity, Meillassoux sustains the concept of absolute contingency against any such sublation through an irrevocable distinction between contingency and necessity: every fact, every being, every property of beings is contingent; but contingency may not be contingent (la contingence ne peut pas être contingente),37 and this negation, which is not a being, is the only necessity. The distinction between contingency and necessity distinguishes beings (which are contingent) from the being of beings (noncontingency of contingency), and this double distinction can be understood as an immanent differentiation of contingency itself: the differentiation of contingency as such from contingency as a qualification of beings. Meillassoux writes that “necessity declares itself as the negation whereby contingency is characterized by its relation to itself as that alone which may not be contingent (ne peut être contingent).” This negation (non-contingency of contingency) thus defines necessity as “the difference between the contingency of beings and contingent beings: as the auto-differentiation of contingency from itself.”38 We note that this is also a distinction between the particular and the universal: what is particular is the contingency of beings; what is universal is the non-contingency of contingency itself. This differentiation of contingency from itself, which produces a distinction between contingency and necessity, between the particular and the universal, as well as a between beings (contingency) and the being of beings (necessity of contingency), also involves a crucial distinction between two forms of negation, which Meillassoux finds Hegel to have conflated in a manner leading to his eventual identification of contingency and necessity. This is the distinction between nothingness (néant) and nothing (rien).

NÉANT AND RIEN What Meillassoux terms nothingness (néant) is the auto-negation of facticity: the non-contingency of contingency, whereby necessity emerges through the recognition that contingency alone may not be contingent. If the necessity of contingency is thought as the being of beings, it is also thought as nothingness, insofar

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as it is not a being (there cannot be a necessary being), but rather the possible being otherwise of all that exists. Néant is thus an order of negation proper to the ontological scope of the principle of factiality, which subtracts necessity from the ontic order of beings. The ontic is thought through another negation— nothing (rien)—which pertains precisely to the possibility of being otherwise attendant upon the order of existence. Since no determination is necessary, it is contingent (just a fact) that there be this determination rather than some other determination. This “other” determination, which is not a fact, is the “nothing” of that which is; this “factual” negation involves the possible being a fact of what is not a fact, and the possible not being a fact of what is a fact.39 Understood in terms of the absolute, unsubordinated scope of contingency, the level of factual negation signifies that “whatever exists may not exist and whatever does not exist may exist” (que ce qui existe peut ne pas exister et que ce qui n’existe pas peut exister).40 The possible negation of either existence or inexistence is thought as nothing, because it is neither existence nor inexistence, but the pure possibility of the passage between them. It pertains to the order of the ontic (of beings) without itself being part of it: a particular determination can pass between inexistence and existence, but the possibility of this passage cannot itself pass away (i.e., it is impossible that the possibility of this passage could cease to be). Thus, we see that the intricate link between these two orders of negation expresses the distinction between necessity (nothingness) and contingency (nothing): contingency means that whatever exists may not exist and whatever does not exist may exist; necessity means that contingency neither exists nor inexists, since it cannot pass into or out of existence. Contingency is nothing but the passage between existence and inexistence, the possible being otherwise of all determinations. Necessity is nothingness since it is only the non-contingency of contingency, the impossibility that contingency should cease to condition the field of the possible.41 Contingency is not a being but is said of beings. Necessity is said of the being of beings (contingency). Nothing is ontic. Nothingness is ontological. Meillassoux thus argues that Hegel legitimately identifies being and nothingness (néant) at the beginning of the Science of Logic. Here, the dialectical identity of being and nothingness correctly posits nothingness “as the essence of necessitating negation (négation nécessitante): necessitating negation in that it indicates the ‘cannot be’ of being itself.”42 For Hegel, this “cannot be” is the pure indetermination of being-qua-being, which cannot be any determinate being. For Meillassoux, contingency itself cannot be contingent, such that the being of beings is thought as a negation of that which determines all beings (contingency). Like Hegel, Meillassoux affirms the non-being of being as a speculative necessity:

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the non-contingency of contingency itself. And for both Hegel and Meillassoux, this identity of being and nothingness involves the necessity of becoming. However, Hegel fails to distinguish this ontological level of negation (nothingness) from the negation involved in the next moment of the dialectic, which is “engaged with the becoming of being there: that is to say, the negation proper to the passage of a determination of a being to an other determination which it is not.”43 According to Meillassoux, Hegel constructs the negation nothing by setting out from the identity beingnothingness. In effect, he conceives the identity of being and nothingness as the passage, the becoming of being within nothingness and nothingness within being, stabilizing within being-there, the being-there which is the being that exists and is struck with the negativity of nothingness. This being-there is thus revealed as determinate being, thus limited, contingent, and submitted to becoming: becoming which makes the being-there of a determination pass into an other determination, also limited and contingent. The negativity of nothingness is thus identified by the dialectic with the negativity of nothing, that is to say, with the determination of a being that carries within it the non-being of another determination.44

Because the finitude of being-there—the particularity of determination, its contingency and limitation—is thought as determined by the ontological negativity proper to nothingness, Hegel fails to distinguish and thus properly link ontological and ontic negativity. For Meillassoux, “nothing marks the contingency of a determinate becoming, nothingness the necessity that all becoming be contingent.” This distinction breaks down in Hegel’s conflation of nothingness with nothing, whereby “the necessity of a contingent becoming of all determination becomes the necessity of a determinate becoming of a being (of being-there).”45 Meillassoux distinguishes the contingency of becoming from the becoming of contingency: contingency is that which does not become (does not change, is necessary), which is why all becoming is necessarily contingent. Contingency is irrevocably distinguished from necessity, since necessity applies only to contingency, while contingency cannot apply to itself, and this distinction grounds the ontological difference. But for Hegel, the determinacy of particular beings draws together contingency and necessity, since their becoming at once distinguishes them from and includes them within the whole. This distinction and inclusion is another version of the identity of being and nothingness from which Hegel begins the movement of the dialectic, such that the identity of necessity and contingency replicates the identity of being and nothingness: this is the identity of Being and Essence (substance) that inaugurates the Subjective Logic.

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Crucially, Meillassoux attributes this conflation of two distinct negations to a methodological error: because he begins with nothingness—with the identity of being and nothingness—in order to construct the negation proper to determinate being, or being-there, the contingency of nothing is absorbed into the necessity of nothingness. Against this order of reasons, Meillassoux asserts that we must begin with the inverse. One must begin with factual negation (nothing)—what is a fact may not be, what is not a fact may be—in order to obtain a necessary negation (nothingness), which stipulates that the contingency of beings is not a fact. It is because he begins with the empirical (contingency) in order to find therein the rational (necessity of contingency) that Meillassoux is able to sustain the compatibility of the contingency of what happens with the necessity of what has to be thought, whereas in Hegel’s logic, the contingency of becoming is folded into the becoming of necessity: what has to be thought is the identity of contingency and necessary within the whole, and the whole subordinates the contingency of becoming through the annulment of time.

ABSOLUTE TIME Meillassoux credits Hegel with thinking the necessary correlation between a rigorous conceptualization of the whole and the affirmation of real contradiction. Only that which has no outside, and thus includes all contradictions—all of that which is and all of that which is not—can truly be thought as the whole. This speculative concept of the whole, the concept of that which is absolutely contradictory, is realized through the Hegelian dialectic as the affirmation of metaphysical necessity: the whole cannot be other than it is, since it is already the absolute totality of what is and what is not.46 For Meillassoux, the impossibility of the whole is a simple consequence of the principle of factiality, deduced in syllogistic form: —If the Whole is, it must be that which it is not, and thus may not be other than it is: if it is, it can only be necessary. —According to the principle of factiality, nothing that is can be necessary. —Therefore the Whole cannot be.47

The incompatibility of the dialectical concept of the whole with the principle of factiality makes clear the necessary compatibility of the latter with the principle of non-contradiction: if a being were truly contradictory (if it were that which it is not) it could not become otherwise, since the other determination it could become would already determine its being. The non-being of the whole is the

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rational consequence of the rational derivation of the principle of factiality from the empirical contingency of the actual. We note the paradoxical system of conceptual subordinations attendant upon the attainment of the Hegelian concept of the whole: the identity of contingency and necessity is subordinated to absolute necessity, and this becomes the very concept of subjective freedom, the unity of the I as absolute idea; the identity of time and eternity—the becoming of the whole—becomes the absolute eternity that annuls the becoming of time. The whole must include the identity of contingency and necessity, but this identity is subordinated to the necessity of the whole; the whole must include the identity of time and eternity, but this identity is subordinated to the timelessness of the whole. These paradoxical conceptual subordinations index the epistemological incoherence of the whole: the condition of its conceptual coherence is the incoherence of its subordinations, which implicitly violate the absolute contradiction that it must be. And we can thus understand the condition upon which the dialectic sustains its epistemological coherence prior to the annulment of time: the becoming of the process of thinking involves the movement of contradiction, but these contradictions move. That is, contradiction necessitates the non-contradictory transition from one determination to another. This movement of the dialectic means that it does not really violate the principle of non-contradiction until it is completed. Real contradiction is the existence of the whole as the paradoxical subordination of time to eternity and contingency to necessity. These subordinations are the condition of possibility for the absolute existence of a contradictory being: the whole itself. It is the insubordination of contingency and of time that delivers a concept of becoming as that which cannot cease to become. Contingency is absolute because nothing is necessary other than contingency itself. Time is absolute because contingency is absolute: because everything that exists may cease to exist and anything that does not exist may exist; because no necessary being, no law of becoming, can delimit the necessary contingency of becoming itself. Thus it is the absolute distinction of contingency and necessity, rather than their identification, that preserves becoming against the annulment of time by the being of whole: necessity is that which only applies to contingency, while contingency applies to everything except itself—every being is necessarily contingent, while only contingency itself is non-contingent. To think becoming as the necessity of contingency is to think time as the non-being of the whole, rather than the whole as the annulment of time. Time, grasped as the necessity of contingency, is the eternal impossibility of a contradictory being that would not be contingent, that could not pass away, that would not be subject to the possibility of alteration.

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The necessity of contingency is “the necessity of time as such,” such that only time evades the irrevocable finitude of determinate beings. Thus, “the principle of non-contradiction says the same thing twice: the object cannot cease to be contingent, time cannot be abolished in time.”48 Such a theory of absolute becoming requires a speculative concept of time, subtracted from the determinations of both science and intuition. Since what Meillassoux calls “factial time” is a time that nothing escapes—neither facts nor laws—it involves a thinking of becoming “that would not be contained by any law of experience (the time of physics), nor by any structure of consciousness (phenomenological or transcendental time).”49 Because absolute time submits the laws of becoming to the becoming of laws, it cannot be grasped phenomenologically or experimentally, since both of these approaches submit the becoming of laws to the laws of becoming. It must be grasped by rational speculation, but note that the philosophical necessity of such speculative rationality devolves from a double critique: (1) a critique of the subordination of science to philosophy; (2) a critique of the subordination of philosophy by science. Speculative critique must be adequate to the findings of scientific practice (rather than science being determined by adequation to philosophy) while also recognizing its own responsibility to think that which is beyond the purview of scientific practice. Speculative critique is that approach to philosophy which recognizes that it neither grounds nor is grounded by science. It coordinates its philosophical concepts with the history of science, without delimiting what can be thought according to scientific history. The critique of correlationism mounted by Meillassoux in After Finitude (though the term is never mentioned in “L’inexistence divine”) is a critique of the subordination of science to philosophy. It insists that the time given us to think by the physical sciences—a time extending prior to the givenness of consciousness, and posterior to the extinction of consciousness—cannot be coherently thought in accordance with the time of transcendental or phenomenological reflection. For science presses philosophy to conceptualize a time (not to experience a time) that does not accord with the time of consciousness. Kant tells us in the Critique of Pure Reason: Thus one can say: The real things of past time are given in the transcendental object of experience, but for me they are objects and real in past time only insofar as I represent to myself that, in accordance with empirical laws, or in other words, the course of the world, a regressive series of possible perceptions (whether under the guidance of history or in the footsteps of causes and effects) leads to a time-series that has elapsed as the condition of the present time, which is then represented as real only in connec-

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tion with a possible experience and not in itself; so that all those events which have elapsed from an inconceivably past time prior to my own existence signify nothing but the possibility of prolonging the chain of experience, starting with the present perception, upward to the conditions that determine it in time.50

The time series that has elapsed as a condition of present time is to be represented as real “only in connection with a possible experience and not in itself.” That is, according to Kant, “the real things of past time” and “all those events” of a time prior to our existence “signify nothing but the possibility of prolonging the chain of experience.” But do they not also signify the impossibility of prolonging the chain of experience in a manner that would be adequate to the time in which those events took place? Meillassoux’s simple (though symptomatically controversial) argument is that we cannot only conceive of the events of past time in such a manner that they signify nothing but the extension of a chain of experience, since it is the exteriority of past time to experience that must be conceptualized. Kant tells us that we cannot conceptualize past time as exterior to experience. But is that really the case? Perhaps it is true that if I speak of the age of the known universe in years, I represent it to myself in terms of a vast extension of my experience of temporal duration, correlated to the orbit of the earth around the sun. But what if I convert a determination of that duration to seconds, and determine the second unit in terms of the periodicity of radiation cycles in a cesium atom? Science can then inform me of an empirically determined duration in a manner that signifies something other than the possibility of prolonging a chain of possible experience. And though I cannot grasp such a time through either the inner or outer sense—through the synthesis of concepts with intuition—I do know something about it. Science subordinates what I know through inner and outer sense to the technical determinations of apparatuses that do not rely upon intuition, and these inform my knowledge in a manner that need not be synthesized with the time of intuition (even if my imagination strains after such a synthesis). Of course, the science of cosmological dating did not, when Kant was writing, deliver any determinate knowledge of such time spans, nor definitions of temporal units capable of bypassing the time of intuition. One could only then “represent” to oneself “an inconceivably past time” through the synthesis of the imagination. Yet science informs us this is no longer the case, and the events of past time no longer signify “nothing but” an extension of a chain of experience. Kant demands the subordination of science to transcendental philosophy, but science informs us of its insubordination to that demand. It is perfectly reason-

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able (rather than conceptually naïve or philosophical risible) to glean from the physical science a critique of the subordination of physics to transcendental or phenomenological time consciousness. If we say that the physical sciences demand a conceptualization of time as exterior to transcendental or phenomenological time consciousness, then we register within the philosophical problem of time a critique of the subordination of science to philosophy. That is the critique of correlationism mounted by Meillassoux. One might make the argument differently than he does, but that is the nub of the argument. In my view, it is an important contribution to speculative critique. But speculative critique also requires a complementary critique—not of science—but of the subordination of philosophy to science. Philosophical speculation must not only allow science to push philosophy beyond transcendental critique or phenomenological correlation; it must also go beyond the findings of empirical science without thereby contradicting them. In this respect, rationalism must function as a critique of the delimitation of philosophy by empiricism, even as empiricism functions as a delimitation of certain forms of philosophical critique (“correlationism”). Again, it is the problem of time that suggests the import of such speculative reasoning. For if Kant subordinated science to philosophy precisely through the subordination of time to intuition, Hegel also subordinated science to philosophy through the subordination of time to the eternity of the whole. Ultimately, both subordinated time to the form of the “I”: to the unity of self-consciousness or to the whole of the concept. This operation is the core of the philosophical subordination of science. Heidegger, on the other hand, subordinated the unity of the “I” to temporalization, to the exteriority of ek-stasis, and this is the crux of his critique of both Kant and Hegel. Indeed, in a key passage we have already cited, Heidegger went so far as to think temporality not only as exteriority, but as “the primordial ‘outside of itself ’ in and for itself.”51 This is a thinking of time as pure exteriority: not only as exteriority to the unity of conscious but also as that which is exterior to itself (the “outside of itself ”), in and for itself. This conceptual determination is both the core of Heidegger’s thought and its impasse; given its difficulty, it is not surprising that he had difficulty sustaining it. For how is one to grasp, phenomenologically, such a conceptual determination? Existential phenomenology does indeed lead us, through its finite thinking, to the threshold of a concept of time as pure exteriority. Heidegger tells us that “the ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”52 But because temporality itself “constitutes the horizon for the understanding of being that belongs essentially to the Dasein,” temporality must be thought both within and

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beyond this horizon. “The horizon” is the concept that delimits the thinking of time as pure exteriority by positing it as such while also containing that positing within phenomenological reflection. This delimiting is enabled and necessitated by the concept of ground, the assertion that “the constitution of Dasein’s being is grounded in temporality.” It is because that which is beyond the horizon (the primordial outside of itself in and for itself ) is also the ground of that being that thinks the horizon that we both must and cannot think the pure exteriority of time: horizon determines exteriority as ground. Temporality is absolutely without ground (“outside of itself ”), but it is the ground of our conceptualization of temporality as such. Thus Heidegger, while critiquing Kant and Hegel by thinking time as exteriority, also subordinates the time of science to the time of philosophy. The exteriority of scientific time must be thought on the basis of the exteriority of philosophical time (temporality), and because temporality is the ground of philosophical understanding its exteriority is conditioned as horizonal. Thus temporality is to be thought both as pure exteriority “in and for itself ” and as the exteriority of Dasein to itself. This conceptual paradox is a methodological paradox: “fundamental ontology” conducted as phenomenology demands a thinking of being as time in itself and for itself that it cannot deliver, since it can only think time as the horizon of being.53 In my view the paradox and the potential of Heidegger’s work is that it is conceptually speculative (he thinks the in-itself ) while it is methodologically correlationist (it blocks the possibility of thinking the in-itself ). For speculative critique, the problem it bequeaths is how to think its ontological concept—being qua time as the primordial outside of itself, in and for itself—without thinking it phenomenologically. It is fascinating in this respect that Meillassoux, like Heidegger, begins with facticity. But how does he treat facticity as beginning, as that which may constitute a beginning insofar as it is simply given? Rather than a hermeneutics of facticity, Meillassoux offers an analytic of facticity. The question is: What is there, amid the facticity of the given, that proves irreducible—that cannot give way to another fact? The answer is: the facticity of the given itself. If what is not a fact (if what is not contingent) is facticity, then I have a ground (a necessity) from which to begin thinking: the non-contingency of contingency. And the power of this methodological inauguration is that it produces a concept of facticity which implies a concept of time; it indirectly produces a concept of time that is not gleaned from the phenomenology of time consciousness. Thus, it is the anhypothetical character of the argument for the necessity of contingency, its indirect method of reasoning, that installs it at once in the element of

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exteriority: beginning with the given (contingency), that which is not given (the necessity of contingency) produces a thinking of time that cannot be subsumed by the given, that cannot be subsumed by phenomenology. Because the time I am given to think by the principle of the necessity of contingency is derived by reasoning about phenomenal presentation, but not directly from phenomenal presentation, it not only can but must be thought non-phenomenologically. The time of the necessity of contingency is given to reason as a time exterior to the presentation of the given, as the exterior condition of possibility (not transcendental, not phenomenological) for the laws of givenness. Its concept is simple but consequential: there must be a time of becoming ungoverned by all laws of becoming, because it includes the becoming of all laws. This sole necessity is the necessity of contingency. A particularity of this concept (and the method of its construction) is that it in no way subordinates the time of science to the time of philosophy, nor the time of philosophy to the time of science. The time of science is that of the laws of becoming: science informs us as to its determinations, and philosophy is required to coordinate itself with that information. Philosophy does not ground the scientific determination of temporal structures. But nor is philosophy restricted in its thinking of time by the time of science. Philosophy may think time phenomenologically or transcendentally, so long as it does not impose phenomenological or transcendental criterion for the scientific investigation of non-subjective time. And philosophy may also think a time that is neither phenomenological, nor transcendental, nor scientific: the time of the becoming of physical laws themselves. Since science investigates the laws of becoming, but not the becoming of laws of becoming, the speculative and scientific treatment of time are accorded separate, though complementary, areas of investigation. Moreover, the speculative scope of philosophical rationality in no way suggests that the activities of phenomenology, neurophilosophy, the philosophy of language, or the philosophy of science should surrender the scope of their own investigations; it merely insists that they not pretend to delimit the speculative scope of philosophy on correlational grounds. Philosophy exists to think both with and beyond the determinations of science, and a critique of the subordination of science to philosophy need not entail the subordination of philosophy to science. The time of the necessity of contingency is conceived by Meillassoux as the “eternal temporarity [temporarité] of determinate beings, and not as temporality conditioned in its being by the existence of those beings that we ourselves are.”54 Whereas “temporality” is the temporal determination of determinate beings, insofar as they are what they are, “temporarity” is the indetermination of

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the being of beings, the necessary contingency of being qua being. Moreover, temporarity is the concept of “the non-temporality of time,” of the impossibility of time’s abolition.55 Temporarity is thought as the relay between the nothingness (néant) of being qua being (the being of beings is not a being) and the nothing (rien) of beings themselves, the indeterminate possibility of being otherwise that their contingent determinacy implies. Conceptualized as the distinction and relationship between these two negations, the necessity (néant) of contingency (rien) stipulates that what is not may be, and that what is may not be. And this “temporarity” of determinate being (whether existent or inexistent) is thought through, yet detached from, the finitude of my temporality. It is not the phenomenology of my finitude (the hermeneutics of facticity) that yields a thinking of time beyond the determinations of my finite existence; it is the concept of the finitude of all determinate being (the analytic of facticity) that yields a thinking of the necessity of contingency, that forces me to think that the very temporal determinations by which I know my determinate being could be otherwise, could themselves pass away, but that the time of becoming in which they could change would not pass away with them. The concept of the necessity of such a time of absolute becoming is the ontological concept of time sought, but not delivered, by existential phenomenology: a concept of time as the being of beings that is not itself a being, as the nothingness (néant) in which everything that is may be what it is not (rien). This is not an existential concept of finitude, but the ontological concept of finitude as the non-being of the whole. For Meillassoux, it is Anaximander who inaugurates (as the inauguration of philosophy) this concept of time, not as the infinity of becoming but as the necessity of its eternal indefiniteness. Meillassoux holds that Heraclitus is the thinker of the eternal laws of becoming, but not of the eternal becoming of laws: “Becoming is for Heraclitus Diké, that is to say the harmonious law of becoming, thus that which remains inaccessible to becoming, the contrary itself of becoming.”56 For Heraclitus becoming eternally oscillates between determinations that are themselves eternal, and this oscillation between eternal determinations subordinates the contingency of becoming to the stable laws of its determinate possibilities. But if becoming must be addressed not by setting out from one or another determination, but rather from the indeterminate contingency of all determination, then a properly ontological concept of becoming will have to conceive it as without determinate laws. According to Meillassoux, Anaximander, and not Heraclitus, is “the veritable master of becoming” because he thinks its concept as “without law,” as “an adikia from which nothing that is escapes.”57 He refers here to Anaximander’s fragment, of which I offer the fol-

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lowing translation: “Wherefrom things have their genesis there also they must perish according to necessity; for they render justice and forfeiture to one another for their injustice, according to the order of time.” Following Nietzsche’s interpretation, Meillassoux reads Anaximander’s fragment in conjunction with his concept of the apeiron, linking the indefinite with “injustice,” the adikia of that which comes to be, and with the necessity of a time barring the existence of any necessary being. Thus, he positions the distinction between Anaximander and Heraclitus as follows: It is against the adikia of Anaximander that Heraclitus establishes the harmonious Dike of contraries. Anaximander alone grasped that the indefinite, the apeiron as impossible totalization, devoid of all determination because necessarily in excess of it, was the veritable principle of becoming—that alone which cannot become. This indefinite exceeding all form, all finite series, closure, completion, determination in short, is in effect the very principle of the excess of becoming above its determinations, laws, regularities. Even if Anaximander seems to reify the indefinite, by making it once more a being, rather than the being of beings which is not a being; even if he does not seem, in light of the texts that we have, to clarify precisely the nature of this apeiron and its relation to beings, the Milesian has left us no less grand a Greek version of anti-Heraclitean becoming, of becoming in its chaotic and eternal excess beyond the harmony of law.

The legacy of Anaximander’s thinking of becoming thus requires us to detach it, as well, from Heideggerian temporality, and to align it with a concept of the indefinite adequate to a becoming of laws in excess of the laws of becoming.58

THE MATERIALISM OF THE NOT- ALL For Hegel, the indefinite is merely the bad infinite of repetitious succession, the one-thing-after-another of an indeterminate endlessness. The whole is then the true infinity of the absolute, the one-all of complete determination. The factial concept of time, aligned with the indefinite, requires a detachment of its relation to the infinite considered as either endless succession or as the whole. If the whole is not, if determinacy cannot be absolutely totalized, if time cannot be annulled, and if the time of the necessity of contingency is not the determinate time of temporality, is it possible to think an indefinite time that would not be the time of the bad infinite? What is again required, as in the case of necessity/ contingency, being/beings, néant/rien, is a distinction between the indefinite and the infinite that enables us to think both the rupturing of succession and the non-being of the whole.

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Meillassoux finds the concept of this distinction in the set theoretical axiom of infinity. The operator of succession enables the construction, beginning with the void set, of an infinite series of ordinals. This series is indefinite insofar as, setting out from the operator of succession, there is no possibility of finding an ordinal which no other ordinal would succeed.59 The infinite, in this set theoretical situation, is not conceived as identical to the indefinite, but rather by an axiomatic affirmation of the existence of a non-successor ordinal: of an ordinal that cannot be obtained by setting out from the operator of succession, which succeeds nothing, and which is thus in excess of every order.60 The suite of alephs that follows from this rupture with the previous order of succession is now constructed on the basis of a new operator of succession; this suite is itself indefinite, insofar as one can define an infinite ordinal which no other would succeed. The infinite is thus conceived not as an indefinite series, nor as the whole of such series, but as the punctual, a-successive rupture breaking with the existing order of succession, with the previous rule of succession. The indefinite is now not simply an unending series of finite ordinals, but an indefinite suite of indefinite infinities—an unclosable proliferation of differentially regulated series, perpetually open to a-successive rupture. Meillassoux finds here a properly ontological concept of the difference between the indefinite and the infinite: “the mathematical formulation of insurgence ex nihilo,”61 whereby the infinite is the punctual insurgence of a new series, and the indefinite is the unclosable proliferation of such insurgences. The ontological concept of time thinkable on the basis of this distinction is that of the indefinite yet necessary possibility of a new insurgence of constants, the necessary possibility that every constant order may be “transpierced” by another constant, incommensurable with that which precedes it. “The Cantorian axiom of the infinite is the mathematically defined mark of the insurgence ex nihilo of a new constant—a constant which is not potentially contained by either the preceding constants nor by any Whole whatever.”62 It is crucial to understand that while Meillassoux conceptualizes the punctual immanence of becoming within the proliferation of incommensurable orders through axiomatic set theory, he does not ground the necessity of contingency (the principle of factiality) on these axioms. On the contrary, it is the anhypothetical demonstration of the necessity of contingency which indicates that we must be able to think the non-being of the whole, that we require a concept of the not-all, that we have to think the indefinite as the possibility of ruptural change, that we cannot think the infinite as a set of all sets. The hypotheses of set theory (the axioms) are thus necessitated by the anhypothetical demonstration, as requisites of conceptual coherence. In this way Meillassoux breaks with Ba-

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diou as he follows him, not only by developing an anhypothetical ontology, but also (and from that starting point) by elaborating an ontological concept of time through the hypotheses of set theory. Meillassoux thinks time “after finitude” by subtracting the ek-statical structure of Heideggerian time from temporality and installing its non-phenomenological exteriority in the set theoretical axiomatics of the infinite. Whereas Badiou thinks the event as that which is not being,63 Meillassoux thinks being-qua-being as time, and time as the insurgence of an indefinite proliferation of incommensurable laws of becoming. Speculative idealism is that form of thought which thinks as necessary that which is in fact contingent: thought itself. And it thinks thought as necessary through an annulment of time concurrent with the establishment of the absolute as the whole. I have tried to show how resisting the annulment of time by the whole is possible through Meillassoux’s thinking of the necessity of contingency, and that this thinking is also a matter of time. The materialist content of this concept of time is that it forces us to think not only a time within which thought comes to be, but also to think the being of time as exterior to our laws of reflection and experience. For to think time (thus, to think being) only in terms of the time of science, the time of phenomena, the time of thought, is to think it ontically. This entails a covert idealism, whereby the ontic determinations of existence that we experience, whether scientifically or phenomenally, foreclose the exteriority of the ontological. The time of science forces us to think beyond phenomenality (and in this respect Heidegger was wrong), yet it is also an ontic form of knowledge (and in this respect Heidegger was right). To move beyond both the submission of science to philosophy and the submission of philosophy to science is a materialist project, because it requires us to think at once the adequation of thought to being and the difference of thought from being. If materialists leave aside ontological problems in order to render philosophy an ontic accompaniment to science, we leave aside the problem of contesting idealism (rather than just rejecting it), since it will always claim the speculative scope of rationality that a merely empiricist materialism will have left aside. This is why a rationalist empiricist approach to ontology should be part of a broader materialist orientation. Meillassoux’s speculative rationality asks us to think a time unforeclosed by either thought or experience, yet derived from an analytic of facticity—setting out from the work of reason upon experience—and it develops a complex system of philosophical distinctions and conceptual tools to render such a thinking coherent. Some may find that thinking implausible. Their criteria of plausibility are question begging. But if Meillassoux’s thought is implausible, that is because it

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is indeed infrequent to find so fundamental and delicate a system of conceptual determinations coordinated with such precision and coherence. The criteria by which that system might be rejected cannot be empirical, since precisely what is at issue is the capacity of speculative thought to go beyond empirical laws by thinking ontologically. For Heidegger was correct when he reminded us that the being of beings is not itself a being. It has remained for Quentin Meillassoux to think that stipulation through a non-phenomenological transformation of speculative idealism into speculative materialism, and to do so at the juncture of being and time.

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HEGEL’S KILOGRAM: TAKING THE MEASURE OF METRICAL UNITS

If philosophy speculates ontologically—if it reasons about the in-itself, beyond the purview of empirical science—it also thinks the operations of science that determine, with exquisite rigor, relations among physical properties subtracted from their phenomenal immediacy. Science is indeed ontic—it pertains to the determinacy of beings—but this does not mean that it is “merely” ontic, as if the speculative rationality of ontology were somehow a higher calling than the determination of ontic predicates. The being of beings is not a being, but it is the being of beings. Science thus makes manifest what Hegel calls “the concrete truth of being”1 by delivering, through both theory and practice, the determinations of how being is deployed in concrete worlds, of the regularities that happen to characterize them. That is what ontology can never deliver, just as science cannot inform us of all that may be the case, or even what must be the case. Science is the discourse of what is the case. To understand that distinction, we require not only critique but a speculative critique capable of navigating the ontological difference. To do so while preserving a sense of astonishment at the precision and complexity of science’s ontic operations, and also at the ontological questioning of philosophy, is the double task of rationalist empiricism. Having pursued the ontological horizons of speculative critique in philosophy, let us cultivate an informed appreciation for the ontic operations of science, at the rational rigor of its empirical determinations, by considering a problem that situates us at the reflexive limit of scientific measurement: the 125

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measurement of metrical units themselves. We can approach this limit through a case study: the recent revision of the International System of Units, brought to completion in 2018 by the redefinition of the kilogram unit. We will study the project of that redefinition in some detail, but my interest is not only in the scientific particulars of this liminal case of measurement; I also want to think through its conceptual consequences. We can do so by considering the redefinition of the kilogram in light of Hegel’s theory of measure as “the concrete truth of being,” a theory which accords the ontic its proper respect through a philosophically sophisticated understanding of determination. Hegel’s theory requires us to think the relation between measurement and measure, understanding measure as the unity of quality and quantity that makes any determinate being what it is. Measure is what is measured. It is the concrete determinacy of determinate being that is accorded a quantitative value by measurement. Thus, measurement draws from the ontic determinacy of beings the relation between quantity and quality that makes them what they are, rather than how they appear in any given phenomenal context. In the case study we will pursue, the qualitative aspects of physical properties that are measured are empirical, but they are not phenomenal. Measurement abstracts the concreteness of the object (its measure) from its phenomenal presentation. And it does so precisely through the “transmutation of epistemological values”2 theorized by Bachelard: by imposing a rational framework (mathematically and theoretically determined) upon an empirical inquiry (a technologically mediated experimental process) and then revising, on that basis, the very system of rational-empirical coordination (scientific theory) that enabled such inquiry in the first place. Let us follow the movement of this process, folding Hegel’s speculative theory of measure into the history of metrology and its contemporary practice.

THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL In 1799, two unusual objects were deposited in a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France: a platinum bar and a platinum cylinder that would serve as standard international reference units for the meter and for the kilogram. (See Figure 5.) How were the quantities and the qualities of these objects determined? In 1791, the meter was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as one ten-millionth of the length of the earth’s meridian, passing through Paris between the North Pole and the Equator. The measurement of the meridian itself was carried out through a six-year surveying project, from 1792 to 1798, determining the length of a portion of the meridian

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Figure 5. Le Grand K, The International Prototype Kilogram, Bureau Internationale des Poids et Mesures. The platinum-iridium International Prototype Kilogram replaced the original kilogrammes des archives as the reference mass in 1889, following the international Convention du Mètre in 1875.

running from Dunkirk to Barcelona through a complex system of triangulation between observation points.3 The kilogram was defined as the mass of a cubic decimeter of water at 4 degrees Celsius (the temperature of water’s maximum density). Once these measurements were taken and the reference objects fabricated and archived, the properties of the objects themselves then served to define the meter and the kilogram as units. By definition, a meter was equal to the length of the prototype in Sèvres; a kilogram was equal to the mass of the kilogramme des archives. These objects would serve as reference standards until 1889, when they were replaced with platinum-iridium alloy reference standards following the international adoption of the metric system. The initial determination of these units and the creation of their first reference standards in the late eighteenth century was aligned with the rationalist, universalist political philos-

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ophy of the French Revolution. As the Marquis de Condorcet put it, the metric system was developed as a rational coordination of measurement standards “for all people, for all time.”4 Hegel’s theory of measure, articulated in Book One of the Science of Logic and first published in 1812, was written in the wake of this breakthrough in the history of measurement. It is perhaps due to this context that Hegel develops such a sophisticated approach to the problem of measure, sensitive not only to the assignment of quantities or the consensual development of standards but also to the way in which the possibility of quantitative measurement relies upon the qualitative properties of particular material bodies, as well as the manner in which a series of measure-relations depends upon the inscription of quantitative relations in relative independence of physical units. It is this emphasis on the relation of quality and quantity in particular physical units that I want to approach as crucial to thinking about the distinction between measure and measurement. “Whatever is, has a measure,” Hegel tells us. “Every existence has a magnitude, and this magnitude belongs to the very nature of a thing; it constitutes its determinate nature and its in-itself.”5 Hegel points out that a thing “is not indifferent to its magnitude, as if, were the latter to alter, it would remain the same; rather the alteration of the magnitude alters its quality.”6 Indeed, quantity, Hegel claims, is “quality itself in such a way that outside this determination, quality as such would yet not be anything at all.”7 To grasp this claim, consider Kant’s analysis of sensation in terms of what he calls intensive magnitudes. Every sensation, Kant argues, has a degree—however slight it may be, a sensation has an intensive magnitude that can always be diminished but can never be wholly negated while remaining a sensation. “Every color, e.g. red, has a degree, which, however small it may be, is never the smallest, and it is the same with warmth, with the moment of gravity, etc.”8 Every quality has a quantity, and without some quantity it would not be a quality at all. The quality red exists insofar as it has some intensity, a degree of intensity (or intensive magnitude) that can always be diminished but cannot be diminished entirely without extinguishing that quality, red, altogether. The quality red does not exist without some quantity of intensity. In Hegelian terms we could say (thinking in terms of this relation between quality and quantity): every red has a measure. It is interesting to note that, if we turn to the International Vocabulary of Metrology, a ‘quantity’ is defined as a “property of a phenomenon, body, or substance, where the property has a magnitude that can be expressed as a number and a reference.”9 It is the phrase “can be” that I want to mark. Quantity is not itself numerical, nor is it necessarily expressed as a number; it is a property

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that has a magnitude that can be expressed as a number and a reference (for example, one kilogram), where a “reference” can be a measurement unit, a measurement procedure, a reference material, or a combination of these. We could say that quantity is thus prior to measurement—it is potentially measurable—but it is not prior to measure. It is part of what constitutes something’s “determinate nature” (Hegel). The International Vocabulary tells us that “measurement” is “the process of experimentally obtaining one or more quantity values that can reasonably be attributed to a quantity.”10 So if measurement involves the reasonable expression of a quantity in terms of number and reference, measure, on the other hand, is the immanent determination of a thing by its magnitude, the immanent constitution of its determinate nature as it is in itself. Hegel’s chapter on “Measure” implicitly draws our attention to this crucial distinction between measure and measurement by thinking through the relation between quantity and quality that is constitutive of measure. Whereas our official definition of measurement (the International Vocabulary) makes no reference to quality at all, but only to obtaining quantity values that can be attributed to a quantity, Hegel famously defines measure as the unity of quantity and quality. “Quality and quantity are in measure united,”11 he writes. Thus, we might consider the unity of quantity and quality as crucial to the immanent determination of a thing involved in measure (as opposed to the epistemic determination of a quantity involved in measurement). If measurement bears upon what we can know about something in terms of quantity values, measure refers to the unity of quality and quantity that makes something what it is. The determinate being of a thing is its measure, and this is what leads Hegel to claim that measure “is the concrete truth of being.”12 Let me unpack this claim. Measure is the concrete truth of being because being, initially thought as without measure, can only be thought as absolutely indeterminate. Yet, at the opening of the Logic, Hegel shows that being cannot, in fact, be thought as absolutely indeterminate. He shows that when we attempt to think being as such, without determination, what we are thinking is nothing, and the negation of being by nothingness leads us to think becoming as the movement of this negation. The effort to think being as absolutely indeterminate ends up determining being as becoming. Determinate being is qualitative, and, as both Kant and Hegel show, qualitative being is itself unthinkable without some relation to quantity (magnitude or degree). Quality and quantity thus come to be thought as unified in measure, and measure is the concrete truth of being because measure is the category at which thought arrives as it moves from the impossibility of thinking being as absolutely indeterminate to the possibility of thinking being as a process

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of determination. Like many of the statements in the Logic, a claim like “measure is the concrete truth of being” seems at first to be wildly speculative—and it is speculative, since it involves the complex identity of quantity and quality—but it proves to have a well-determined sense when considered according to the internal argument of the text, its order of reasons. While I want to set out from these central aspects of Hegel’s theory of measure, it is not my goal to systematically reconstruct or interrogate the intricate structure of Hegel’s arguments in this section of the Logic. Rather, beginning with a distinction between measure and measurement, and noting the unity of quantity and quality foregrounded by the concept of measure, I want to ask: Under what conditions does the scientific practice of measurement come into contact with the philosophical concept of measure? Or, if it always does, when and how does this problem come to the fore, become inescapable, in the history of measurement? Note what happens when an object—as in the case of the prototype meter or kilogram—is fabricated and defined as the reference standard for a unit of measure: the qualities of the object—what it is made of, how it is shaped—are determined according to our best efforts at instantiating and preserving certain quantitative properties (the length of a portion of the meridian, the mass of a certain volume of water). Moreover, the quantitative properties of the object are correlated to and determined by a qualitative process—experimental procedures that have to be carried out in a certain way, and that are intended to be reproducible as such. It is the quality of reproducibility that purportedly grounds the unit of measure in a procedure that could, in theory, refute or verify its value as a standard. A reference standard, when it takes the form of a physical artifact like the meter bar or International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), offers a clear example of measure understood as the unity of quality and quantity. The measure of the standard makes measurement possible. Measurement, defined as “the process of experimentally obtaining one or more quantity values that can reasonably be attributed to a quantity,” both produces and depends upon the unity of quantity and quality instantiated in the reference artifact defined as a standard. What happens, then, when measurement standards of change? And how does this scientific process bear upon the philosophical problem of measure?

THE NEW SI In 1960, the meter bar was retired as the operative reference artifact for measurements of length. That year, the Meter Convention of the nineteenth century was

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replaced by the International System of Units (SI), and the meter was redefined: correlated to a certain number of wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of a krypton-86 atom. In 1983, a more elegant redefinition correlated the meter with the speed of light. A meter was defined as “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”13 Consider the consequences of this definition. When it was formulated, the speed of light (c), had been determined as 299,792,458 meters per second with a measurement uncertainty of 4 parts per billion (4 × 10–9). The redefinition of the meter in 1983 sets this number as that fraction of a second during which light in a vacuum travels exactly one meter. This means that the measurement uncertainty previously attending the determination of the speed of light has been eliminated, in the direct determination of the number, and transferred over to the definition of the meter itself. By redefining the meter in terms of the speed of light we have also indirectly fixed the latter as exactly 299,792,458 meters/second, which is now the exact numerical value of the universal constant c, without any specification of measurement uncertainty. The number assigned to the constant c now grounds the definition of the meter, such that we can no longer turn the meter back upon the indeterminacy of the constant. This is an example of how the history of measurement standards performs operations of circular self-grounding—at once displacing and regrounding the framework of our knowledge claims. We could say that our measurement of the speed of light (our quantitative determination of the numerical value of the constant) has come unmoored from its measure: We no longer refer to the possible gap between our knowledge of the speed of light in a vacuum and what that speed actually is. Uncertainty, which is due to qualitative variables affecting measurement procedures, is the qualitative remainder of the assignment of quantitative value. Since this qualitative remainder cannot be eliminated, the redefinition of the meter shifts it from one quantity to another: while uncertainties attending the initial determination of the meter previously factored in our measurement of c, fixing the numerical value of the latter shifted that uncertainty onto our new definition of the meter. c is now absolute, but the previous uncertainty of its quantitative determination has been integrated into the uncertainty budget of the revised metrical unit by which it was previously measured. The redefinition of the meter on the basis of c exemplifies an approach to defining base units that is at the heart of a broader overhaul of the International System of Units. The “New SI,” taking effect in 2019, correlates the definition of each base unit to a fundamental physical constant, improving the efficiency with

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Figure 6. The New International System of Units. In the revised International System of Units, codetermining metrical units are correlated to fundamental physical constants. Clockwise from top, the units are the second, mole, kilogram, candela, kelvin, meter, and ampere. Arrows indicate involvement of one unit definition in others (e.g., the second is included as a unit in definitions of the kilogram, candela, kelvin, meter, and ampere).

which standards can be disseminated and measurements can be traced while eliminating reference to physical artifacts14 (see Figure 6). With the second already correlated to the periodicity of the cesium atom15 and the meter defined in terms of c, the International System of Units now: i. defines the second in terms of the hyperfine transition frequency of the Cesium 133 atom ii. defines the ampere in terms of the elementary charge (e) iii. defines the mole in terms of the Avogadro constant (NA) iv. defines the meter in terms of the speed of light (c) v. defines the kilogram in terms of the Planck constant (h) vi. defines the kelvin in terms of the Boltzmann constant (k) vii. defines the candela in terms of the luminous intensity of monochrome radiation of Frequency 540 × 1012 Hz

The kilogram was the last unit of measure still tied to a physical artifact, and its redefinition was at the center of efforts to complete this revision of the SI.

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Since the Planck constant is the minimal unit of action which relates energy to frequency in quantum mechanics, and since energy is related to mass by a number of fundamental equations (including E = mc 2 ),16 the redefinition project deployed the former kilogram as a reference for measuring the Planck constant in correlation with the unit of mass, then reversed this correlation in order to define the kilogram on the basis of a fixed value for the Planck number. The first step of this redefinition project was to measure the numerical value of the Planck with sufficient accuracy to fix it as an exact value (as the speed of light had been fixed by the meter redefinition). In this context, “sufficient accuracy” means something pragmatic: the degree of uncertainty deemed acceptable by the International Committee for Weights and Measures, which required at least three measurements of the Planck with relative uncertainties below 50 parts per billion (5.0 × 10–9 ), and at least one with a relative uncertainty at or below 20 parts per billion (2.0 × 10–9 ) by 2018.17 In 2010, the official value for the Planck published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was 6.626 069 57 × 10–34 with a relative uncertainty of 44 parts per billion.18 By 2014, the results of two different experiments19 had made it possible to reduce the relative uncertainty of the Planck value to 12 parts per billion, with an official value of 6.626 070 040 × 10–34 Js.20 By July 2017, there were four measurements from different national metrology labs below 20 parts per billion, setting a course for the redefinition of the kilogram to go forward in 2018, with the Planck value now permanently set at 6.626 070 15 × 10–34 Js. The primary experimental procedure for measuring the Planck in correlation with the kilogram relies upon an apparatus previously called the Watt balance, renamed the Kibble balance in 2018 in honor of its inventor (see Figures 7 and 8).21 The principle of Kibble balance experiments is to correlate mechanical and electrical quantities by measuring the amount of electromagnetic force required to balance a test mass against the pull of the earth’s gravity. A kilogram prototype (a national copy of the IPK) is placed on a balance pan that is connected to a coil of copper wire, which surrounds a superconducting electromagnet. When electric current is sent through the coil, electromagnetic forces are produced to balance the weight of the test mass. The apparatus measures both current and force. The apparatus also can move the coil vertically, inducing a voltage which can be measured along with the velocity of the coil’s movement. These four measurements determine the relationship between mechanical and electrical power, which can then be used to relate energy to mass. A measurement of the Planck constant—relating it to a macroscopic mass (1 kg)—can be derived from this experiment through the correlation between

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Figure 7. Schema of the NIST-4 Kibble balance, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Kibble balance experiments correlate mechanical and electrical quantities by measuring the amount of electromagnetic force required to balance a test mass against the pull of the earth’s gravity.

mass and energy in several fundamental equations.22 Crucially, Kibble balance measurements can also be reversed. First, one uses a prototype kilogram as a test mass and measures the electromagnetic force necessary to offset it, indirectly deriving a measurement of the Planck number from this measurement; then, in order to “realize” the kilogram unit from a definition based on the Planck constant, one sets a quantity of electromagnetic force and measures the quantity of mass required to offset it. As the NIST metrology team involved in the redefinition project explains: “If we know h precisely, we can build an electromagnet and measure exactly the amount of electric current it needs to lift a kilogram off the ground, and define the kilogram in terms of the current.”23 A second, quite different, experimental procedure involves calculating the exact number of atoms in a meticulously crafted silicon sphere. The physical constant defining the number of atoms in a particular amount of substance is Avogadro’s number, which can be related to both the Planck constant and to the kilogram through a number of equations.24 The International Avogadro Coordi-

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Figure 8. NIST-4 Kibble Balance, National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST-4 commenced operation in 2015, replacing the older NIST-3.

nation (IAC) project thus aimed to arrive at a measurement of Avogadro’s number with the requisite uncertainty of 20 parts per billion, converting this into a value for the Planck constant which could then be correlated to the kilogram. The determination of a more accurate value for Avogadro’s number requires the crafting of an object even more remarkable than the original prototypes of the meter and the kilogram: a sphere of exceptionally uniform and pure silicon crystal— the “roundest” object in the world as of 2019 (see Figure 9). Its surface is so consistent that if it were blown up to the size of the earth, the distance between the highest and lowest point on its surface would be only 3 to 5 meters.25 Fabricated by a master lens maker, the sphere cost about $3.2 million to manufacture. The materials are highly enriched, consisting of 99.9995 percent silicon-28 (refining away other isotopes found in natural silicon), with a highly regular crystalline structure defining a regular pattern of spacing between atoms. The dimensions of the sphere can be measured to nanometer precision and x-ray crystallography can be used to determine its crystalline structure. This geometrical informa-

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tion, along with the well-known mass of each silicon atom, enables a calculation of the quantity of silicon atoms composing the 1 kg sphere, which in turn enables Avogadro’s number to be determined with unprecedented accuracy. This measurement can then be converted into a value for the Planck constant through the equation for the molar Planck constant, NAh. By 2015, the International Avogadro Project had arrived at a numerical value for NA (convertible to a value for h) with an uncertainty of 20 parts per billion, while the German Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) achieved an uncertainty of 12.0 parts per billion in 2017, both meeting the level of uncertainty recommended for redefinition.26 By August 2017 four different measurement campaigns using these two methods had yielded values of the Planck constant with a relative uncertainty of under 20 parts per billion or less: 6.626 070 404 × 10–34, relative uncertainty 12.0 × 10–9 (PTB 2017, silicon sphere) 6.626 070 147 × 10–34, relative uncertainty 19.6 × 10–9 (IAC 2015, silicon sphere) 6.626 070 133 × 10–34, relative uncertainty 9.1 × 10–9 (NRC 2017, Kibble balance) 6.626 069 934 × 10–34, relative uncertainty 13 × 10–9 (NIST 2017, Kibble balance)

The achievement of the last result, deriving from a 2015 to 2017 measurement campaign at the US NIST using a newly constructed Kibble balance, offers an instructive case study in how shifting qualitative aspects of the experimental process are related to quantitative results in the numerical determination of physical constants. Prior to their construction of a new balance, completed in 2015, the NIST had been working with an apparatus called NIST-3, whose construction dates back to the 1970s. Visiting the NIST in 2013, toward the end of their last measurement campaign with the older balance, I was taken to a region of its 578-acre campus called “Siberia,” where NIST-3 was kept in relative isolation from possible interference by environmental stimuli. Housed in a bunkerlike building with a number of smaller, cluttered rooms containing instruments to measure local gravity, vibration, magnetism, and other variables, the balance itself was a huge and complex apparatus, occupying two stories separated by a false floor. Though simplified diagrams published in scientific papers on the experiment make the balance look relatively pristine, it is in fact a somewhat cobbled together device with thousands of discrete components, networks of crisscrossing wires and jerry-rigged solutions to local problems that have occurred over its years of operation and modification (see Figure 10). NIST-3’s last round of measurements ended in disappointment, achieving a relative uncertainty of 45 parts per billion (rather than a figure under 20) and a value for

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Figure 9. Silicon sphere, International Avogadro Coordination project (IAC). The sphere is the roundest known object; its well-defined dimensions and regular crystal structure enable a highly accurate determination of the quantity of atoms composing the sphere.

the Planck significantly at variance from previous measurements with the same apparatus.27 Despite “more than fifteen years of experience with this apparatus,” the scientists had to “acknowledge that we do not understand the cause of the approximately 70 × 10–9 relative shift.”28 In 2015 the balance was replaced with the newer NIST-4, similar to the apparatus in use at Canada’s National Research Council, which had previously been purchased from the UK. Two years later, and just one day prior to the deadline set by the BIPM for results relevant to the kilogram redefinition, the NIST team was able to publish their new value for the Planck at an uncertainty of 13 parts per billion—a result derived from statistical analysis of 1174 sets of measurements with NIST-4.29 Their result was very closely aligned with the number obtained by both the NRC Kibble balance and the International Avogadro Coordination project, but it was gleaned statistically from a total data set that took two years to accumulate. The authors of the paper acknowledge by way of conclusion: After the revision of the International System of Units, NIST-4 will be used to realize the mass unit. In this case, a mass value has to be measured much more quickly. A conservative estimate gives a statistical uncertainty of 21.8 × 10–9 for a 24 hour-long measurement. This yields a total relative standard uncertainty of 25 × 10–9. Integrating four days of data will reduce the total relative uncertainty to below 20 × 10–9.30

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We see here the pressure of circumstance upon the submission of scientific results. At the eleventh hour, the NIST had arrived at a value for the Planck that is beneath the degree of uncertainty stipulated by the BIPM, but considered in terms of a twenty-four hour measurement cycle that might be practically applicable to realizing the kilogram following redefinition, the relative standard uncertainty for its experiment would be over 20 parts per billion. Thus, after the redefinition was affirmed by a vote of SI member countries on November 16, 2018, and came into effect on May 20, 2019, the mise en practique for a redefined kilogram remained a work in progress. The National Metrology Institute of Germany has developed a new electromechanical balance called the Planck balance, which may become the standard apparatus for realizing the kilogram.31 That there are currently two methods of numerically determining the Planck constant (Kibble balance and silicon sphere) means that qualitatively heterogeneous methods may arrive at nearly identical quantitative measurements. But within any one methodological approach, the replacement of NIST-3 with NIST-4 and the international standardization of balances that is underway indicates that qualitative and quantitative consistency are also closely aligned. The redefinition of the kilogram via the Planck constant is a key example of how measurement approaches measure without ever quite arriving at exact quantitative results: there is always some uncertainty in the determination of the number for the Planck, and that is because the qualitative particularity of experimental procedures remains ineradicable. Measurements of the Planck assigning it quantitative values would always be a little bit different; but now the Planck is fixed at an exact value, statistically determined by the relation between past measurements, and quantitative uncertainties bred by the qualitative particularities of those measurements have shifted into the new definition of the kilogram itself. However, the definitional relation between the Planck and the kilogram unit will include a measurement of those uncertainties, a specification of the range within which we can numerically determine physical properties in this case.

HISTORY AND METHOD The point at which we touch upon the foundations of measurement—upon the measure of metrical units—involves a historical dialectic through which the very systems of measurement that make scientific knowledge possible are revised in accordance with the results of that knowledge. The metric system at once emerges from and re-grounds the work of early modern science. With the metric system at its disposal, the language of mathematical physics becomes empirically

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Figure 10. Upper Level of NIST-3 Kibble Balance, National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST-3 dates back to the 1970s, undergoing several rounds of modification through its decades of use. Including its upper and lower levels, the apparatus occupies two floors of a laboratory. It was replaced by NIST-4 in 2015 (see Figure 8).

expressible with greater clarity and consistency across the international operations of scientific practice. With the redefinition of the SI, the revolutionary results of early twentieth-century physics—the equations of relativity theory and quantum mechanics—enter into the system of units itself, revising that system in accordance with the knowledge it has helped to make possible. That is, the relationship between a certain history of measurement and its results (fundamental physical equations) is inverted: those results now come to ground the system of measurement that was integral to their achievement. This historical dialectic relies for its dynamism upon a methodological dialectic, integral to the movement of science, between formalization and experiment. The equations of relativity theory and quantum mechanics deploy quantities expressing physical constants of nature. And these equations, the theoretical fruits of modern experimental science, make possible further experimental determinations of these quantities themselves. Because equations including h made Watt balance experiments possible, we now have a more accurate determination of h than we did before. The redefinition of the kilogram shows with exemplary clarity how this methodological-historical dialectic also entails the displacement of intuitive selfevidence through the reciprocal critique of experiment and formalization, the

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manner in which each successively refines the other. To ask “how much does this weigh” is to ask for a measurement, for a quantitative determination of a quality that will be given in metrical units: for example, “10 kilograms.” But to ask what a kilogram “is” involves a question about measure: about the determinacy of the unit itself. The International Prototype Kilogram is a charmingly concrete answer to this question. As an object, it instantiates a unity of quality and quantity at which one could point, thus grounding measurement through its measure. The IPK itself was the unity of quality and quantity defining the determinacy of the metrical unit. The qualitative properties of the object were selected according to their capacity to retain its quantitative properties, as were the qualitative conditions of its preservation. As the physical instantiation of a metrical unit, the IPK exemplified something like a limit case of “measure” as the persistence of the “determinate nature” of something over time; the International Prototype Kilogram had to be protected against qualitative change in order to preserve its quantitative properties. This consistency of the unity of quality and quantity, of measure, is what enables the object to serve as a point of reference for measurement: the qualitative stability of the prototype unit ensures the quantitative stability of measurements referring to its standard. However, it is the degree of the prototype object’s quantitative stability that becomes uncertain, given that it is the very standard of measurement through which its mass could be compared. It is precisely the singularity of the object, its status as a unique measure, that make it both authoritative and inopportune as a global standard of measurement. Now that the kilogram has been redefined, it is the quantitative stability of the Planck constant that has displaced the unique role of the prototype object as a reference. The universality of the constant displaces the singularity of the object. “The kilogram” is now nowhere in particular, and the unity of quantity and quality it embodied is dispersed into, and traceable to, a set of procedures mediating between formalization (the Planck, the equations in which it is involved) and experiment (Kibble balance apparatuses for realizing the unit). The “measure” of the kilogram previously inhering in the object has been split between a quantitative value and a qualitative procedure while relying for their recombination upon the mediating framework of a new system of units (including definitions of the meter and the second that were already correlated with the speed of light in a vacuum and the periodicity of radiation cycles from the cesium 133 atom). This displacement of immediacy is an apt synecdoche for the power of abstraction and systematicity characteristic of the dialectical relation between formalization and experiment that propels the history of science, which must be adequate not only to the determinacy of measure but also to the complexity of measurement.

The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? —Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

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THE TECHNICS OF PREHENSION: ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF NICOLAS BAIER

Nicolas Baier is a photographer—by which I mean that he digitally scans the surfaces of antique mirrors, produces lush black ink jet prints of their distressed opacities, and displays them in vast irregular grids, thus replacing the reflection of the viewer with the tenebrous topography of a material surface (see Figure 11). Through a microscope, Baier meticulously photographs a postage stamp–sized slice of meteorite more than four thousand times and then assembles these thousands of photographs into a glossy six-by-eight foot enlargement of impeccably precise resolution and immersive depth (see Figure 12). When a computer crash saturates his monitor with a color field of densely pixilated red lines, receding toward an apparently distant horizon over a crimson sea beneath an incarnadine sky, he renders this image as a chromogenic transparency and displays it in a light box under the title Failed. When he travels to the south of France to view prehistoric cave paintings, Baier photographs the bare stone wall beside these inaugural images, recording the non-representational traces, contours, and fractures of the rock (Figure 13). At Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, Baier photographs a stream of light pouring through to the interior of a man-made cave. The resulting composition, Photons (The World of Ideas), is a digital allegory of the cave in twenty-five carefully arranged ink jet prints. If we look at the composition closely, we can see from the angle of the light that Baier has inverted the image, so that light seems to fall up at a diagonal to stalagmites rather than down through hanging stalac141

Figure 11. Nicolas Baier, Vanitas 01 (2007–2008), inkjet prints, installation view, 345 × 900 cm. Composed of digital scans of forty antique mirrors, Vanitas 01 replaces a reflection of the viewer with the distressed topography of a material surface.

Figure 12. Nicolas Baier, Meteorite 01 (2008), chromogenic print, 183 × 254 cm. Meteorite 01 is a composite of more than four thousand photographs, taken through a microscope, of a postage stamp-sized slice of meteorite.

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Figure 13. Nicolas Baier, Canvas (2010), inkjet print, 295 × 445 cm. Rather than record images of cave paintings in southern France, Baier photographs the stone wall beside these inaugural representations, presenting the bare “canvas” of the stone.

tites (see Figure 14). This image of an inverted Platonism suggests a materialism of the Idea wherein it is the lens, rather than the eye, that turns away from Simulacra toward the Eidos, if only to render a simulacral image of that turning as a portrait of the photographic medium. From this perspective, digital photography might be taken as the state of an art of exteriorization, of mimesis, that took its course on the walls of caves millennia ago and which now returns to render the materialist truth of those simulacral exteriorizations: that the world of ideas is particulate, that light is itself a medium. Across the gallery from Photons, poised on the facing wall behind a pane of plexiglass, hovers a glass replica of Baier’s left eyeball (see Figure 15). It is an eye that does not see, but that presides over the scene as we look at its blind unlooking. Like Lacan’s sardine can glinting in the sea, it localizes the gaze. As we turn our back upon it, toward Photons, we can feel ourselves prehended by the Gaze itself, occupying a specific position within the field of vision of which the photographic apparatus functions as prosthesis. In Baier’s installation, The World of Ideas is both a visual image upon which we look and a relation, which has to be thought, to an eye that does not see, to in-visibility. The field of the Gaze is this mediated relation of the sensible and the intelligible, a field in which we come

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Figure 14. Nicolas Baier, Photons (The World of Ideas) (2010), inkjet print, 152 × 183 cm. Light pours into an artificial cave in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumant, Paris. The image is inverted, disturbing the viewer’s sense of spatial orientation and suggesting the materialist reversal performed by the title.

Figure 15. Nicolas Baier, Photons (left) and Without Title (right) (2010), installation view. Looking toward a cracked mirror at the end of the room, the viewer’s body is situated between an image of light and thought, on the left, and a reproduction of the artist’s eyeball, on the right.

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to feel the factical presence of our body situated not only between looking and being somehow blindly looked at, but also between eye and mind, photons and Ideas. Two mediations then: the corporeal presence of a body and the technical reproduction of an image and an eyeball. In Photons (The World of Ideas) the light of the intelligible is cast as material photons into the cave, and it is the sensible experience of our embodied relation to this image that solicits thinking. If Photons emphasizes the illumination of an obdurate stone surface, in Vanitas, Baier’s monumental assemblage of scanned mirrors, this relation of light to surface to sight to the technics of photography is reversed. Here the reflective surface of the mirror is not transmitted as an image; rather, its surface is rendered opaque by a process of digital recording that devours whatever light the mirror reflects back to the sensor of the scanner. “The scanner captures only the marks or the missing parts,” notes Baier. “In closed circuit, the reflective plane does not receive information (the mirror facing itself ). Once digitized, the avatar is revealed: a somber deep black span.”1 Reflection is subtracted from the surface by an absorptive recording of the light that it reflects, such that “in these images the surface does not reflect the viewers’ likenesses back to them.”2 The viewer’s likeness—my own image, which I would have seen—is subtracted along with the reflective surface: erased. In its place we are confronted with a “somber deep black span” of “marks or missing parts.” It is as if the tain of the mirror, its obverse, had bled through to its hither side. As if these marks and missing parts, seen in lieu of ourselves, were the uncanny residue of this reversal. As if it had become the vocation of photography to transmit the reversal of the obverse of the image (see Figure 16). As if—but this is not what happens. What we see is not a reversal (itself a function of a mirror), but rather the remorseless exposure of a surface shorn of reflection: facticity rather than phantasm. It is the function of the mirror phase, in Lacan’s account, to give way onto an “inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits,” torn as the I is, at the moment of its emergence as imago, by its splitting between identity and alienation, insufficiency and anticipation. And it is the mediation of the image—as exteriorization—that casts the specular “lure of spatial identification” which thus captivates the subject and “turns out fantasies.”3 The effect of Baier’s Vanitas is more on the order of the scene from Lowry’s Under the Volcano analyzed by Clement Rosset in Le réel: Traité de l’idiotie. “Why was he here,” the Consul in Lowry’s novel asks himself: “why was he always more or less, here?” “He would have been glad of a mirror,” Lowry writes, “to ask himself that question. But there was no mirror. Nothing but stone.”4 For Rosset, the substitution of stone for mirror is emblematic of the idiocy of the real

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Figure 16. Nicolas Baier, Vanitas 01 (2007–2008), detail, inkjet print, 62 × 96 cm. The image as subtraction of reflection and reversal of the mirror, as if the tain had bled through onto its facing surface.

by which the Consul is confronted. The problem is not, as for Lacan, that of a spatial capture precipitated by the doubling of the body as an image, but rather the recondite and stupid sufficiency of the real to itself, over and against one’s desire for reflection. Rosset reads Lowry’s passage as follows: To know oneself, to know who one is and why one is there, one must have a mirror; but the world around him offers nothing other than stone. . . . There are, in effect, two great possibilities of contact with the real: rough contact, which runs up against things and draws from them nothing other than the feeling of their silent presence; and smooth contact, polished, in a mirror, which replaces the presence of things with their apparition in images. Rough contact is a contact without double; smooth contact does not exist without the help of the double.5

Whereas Medusa turns to stone when confronted by the mirrored doubling of her own gaze, Baier’s Vanitas draws us into the idiocy of the real by turning the mirror itself to stone, subtracting its doubling function, as a specular apparatus, through the photographic representation of the opacity beneath its surface. To confront Vanitas is to confront a technical doubling of the real put under erasure, cancelled out, as double, by the transmission of an obdurate absorption. In place of a reflection, we see a “somber deep black span” that one cannot see

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through or into. And again: it is the mediation of technics that performs this subtraction of the specular double. It is the mediation of a device (the digital scanner) that traces nothing other than the residue or remainder of a reflective mirage.

FLINT AND CORTEX Mirror and stone. Cave painting and digital scanner. The rock wall beside the primordial inscription of an image and the somber deep black span beneath the surface of a specular double. These are not only the preoccupations of Baier’s work as a photographer but also of Bernard Stiegler’s work as a philosopher of technology. In the first volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler broods upon what he calls “the de-fault of origin” that ungrounds the emergence of both the technical object and the human species. He investigates the coevolutionary process of “the technical inventing the human, the human inventing the technical,” a process occurring through the slow course of a “genetic drift” whereby the development of the who and the what, of the cortex and the tool, take place together.6 Stiegler’s important revision of Heidegger’s existential analytic consists in establishing that both historicality (the already-there) and projective anticipation (the not-yet)—as well as the ruptural temporalizing of their non-coincidence—depend in the first instance upon technics: upon the exteriorization of retention through the tool, the trace, the inscription, the organization of inorganic matter as recording. For Stiegler, the coevolution of technics and the human occurs through a process of “embryonic fabrication” that cannot be localized on either side of the apparent divide between animal and man, inorganic and organic matter, technical object and living being. This coevolution is initially effected in stone, through the carving of inscriptions with flint. What Stiegler calls “a mirror protostage” is this production of a psychic interior through exteriorization, a meeting of “grey matter and mineral matter” whereby the cortex “reflects itself . . . like a mirrored psyche, an archaeo- or paleonotological mode of reflexivity, somber, buried, freeing itself slowly from the shadows like a statue out of a block of marble.”7 Rendered by digital technology, the distressed opacity of Baier’s mirrors returns us to this primal scene: an opaque mise-en-abyme wherein the difference between mirror and stone collapses. Facticity rather than phantasm, I said, by way of opposing Rosset’s stone to Lacan’s mirror. But with Stiegler in mind we might say that it is the coevolution of facticity and phantasm that is legible in Baier’s work. The “somber deep black span” of Vanitas is what Stiegler calls an “archaeo- or paleontological mode of reflexivity, somber, bur-

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ied”: one that has to be located at the surface of contact between gray matter and mineral matter. It is the feeling of such contact that we can call, by way of reference to Alfred North Whitehead, a “prehension.” This modality of feeling cannot be grasped through the opposition of stone and mirror. A prehension entails neither brute contact with the sheer idiocy of the real, which draws from things “nothing other than the feeling of their silent presence.” Nor does it involve the specular lure of the mirror, “which replaces the presence of things with their apparition in images.” A prehension is a determinate bond, insofar as it either excludes or includes another item in the real internal constitution of what Whitehead calls an actual entity or an actual occasion. “Prehension” is a term equally applicable to the inscription by flint and cortex of a “somber, buried” mode of reflexivity, emerging over evolutionary time, or to the movement of a scanner’s sensor over the surface of a mirror, its absorption of a reflected light that will not be reflected back to the viewer’s gaze. Between Photons (The World of Ideas) and Vanitas, it is the technics of prehension that is at stake for Baier: the manner in which contact, recording, and exteriorization grasp, mediate, and transmit any relation to the real.

TRANSFORMATIONS Baier’s Project Star (Black), an installation exhibited in the fall of 2010 as part of the exhibition Transformations, is a stunning demonstration of his commitment to thinking through the capacity of digital art to experiment with the technics of prehension. If we turn away from Photons (The World of Ideas)—from our eerie position between a digital allegory of the cave and an unseeing eyeball—and if we look toward the back wall of the gallery housing Baier’s exhibition, we find our image reflected in a broken mirror, its fractures spiraling outward like a spider’s web from a singular point of impact (see Figures 17 and 18). Its title is a repetition: Vanitas (2010). Arrayed on the walls surrounding this fractured repetition of Baier’s earlier work are several mysterious objects. Immediately to the right, a white ink jet print stretched around a deep frame depicts a caved-in hole at its center. Titled Impact (Figure 19) the piece seems to be a non-reflective double of Vanitas. It appears to be collapsed inward by a collision which the adjacent mirror projects and distributes outward, but in fact it is the image of such a collapse—a somewhat eerily two-dimensional photograph of an unspecified impact sustained by the wall of Baier’s studio. To the right of Impact are photographs of two circular

Figure 17. Nicolas Baier, Project Star (Black) (2010), installation view. An enlarged 3D reproduction of a piece of meteorite from Diablo Canyon is surrounded by traces the object’s existence or effects.

Figure 18. Nicholas Baier, Vanitas (2010), mirror, aluminum, 114 × 81 cm. Baier has reproduced a mirror, broken with his fist, through a painstaking mimetic process. The pieces of the mirror were individually scanned, then corresponding pieces were cut by hand from other mirrors and assembled into a jigsaw replica of the original.

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Figure 19. Nicolas Baier, Impact (2010), inkjet print, 56 × 43 cm. Impact is a photographic reproduction of a hole in the wall of Baier’s studio, made with his fist “acting like a meteorite,” he says.

aluminum paint trays titled Satellite 01 (Figure 20) and Satellite 02 (Figure 21), both of which bear traces of a grainy black substance. Across the room from these photographs is an oval canvas densely covered with what appears to be the same dark substance with which the trays are stained. The trays activate a strange sense of the painting they confront across the room as the residue of its own composition. Its black surface seems to draw all the light of the gallery’s white walls into its own opacity, stabilizing the play of reflections and repetitions by which it is surrounded. The piece is titled Monochrome (black) (Figure 22). At the center of the installation I have been describing, functioning as a point around which it pivots, is a large acrylic, graphite, and steel sculpture titled Star (Black). It appears to be a massive hunk of silver ore extracted from the earth, polished, and displayed on a rectangular stone plinth resembling Kubrick’s black monolith. But in fact, what we are looking at is a replica of another object that is nowhere present, though its traces surround us in one form or another. Star (Black) (Figure 23) is a vastly enlarged reproduction of a palm-sized nugget of graphite meteorite acquired from Diablo Canyon, Arizona (Figure 24). Having held this piece of meteorite in my hand while visiting Baier’s studio in November 2009, having written my name with it on a sheet of paper, having watched its owner toss it in his hand like a magician with something up his sleeve, a simple

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Figure 20. Nicolas Baier, Satellite 01 (2010), inkjet print, 25 × 4 cm.

Figure 21. Baier, Satellite 02 (see Figure 21). Photographs of the trays into which Baier melted the graphite of the meteorite, which he then used to paint Monochrome (black) (see Figure 23).

question concerning this small but curiously heavy object comes to mind when confronted with Baier’s installation: Where is it? In 2009 I hold this object in my hand; I prehend it. It is compact, heavy, uneven but smooth, scored with narrow crevices traversing its surface, dull black speckled with rust-colored patches in its indentations. In September 2010 I see a pitch black material evenly spread across an oval canvas on the wall of a

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Figure 22. Nicolas Baier, Monochrome (black) (2010). Meteorite graphite, acrylic medium on canvas, aluminum, 31 × 41 × 4 cm. Divided from its form, the matter of the meteorite is used to paint a somber monochrome in the shape of an anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background.

Figure 23. Nicolas Baier, Star (Black) (2010), acrylic, graphite, steel, 50 × 40 × 91 cm. Baier used 3D scanning and stereolithography to make an enlarged reproduction of a palm-sized nugget of meteorite from Diablo Canyon, Arizona.

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Figure 24. Nicolas Baier, Project: photo 01, Star (Black) (2010), inkjet print, 43 × 56 cm. A photograph of the “original” piece of meteorite. Melted down after having been digitally scanned, what remains of the object are reproductions of its form, residues of its matter, traces of its transformations.

gallery, fading in places toward an opaque grey, broodingly matte but with glinting speckles distributed across its roughly pebbled surface. And in between this canvas and the residue of its production is a massive reproduction of the object I once held, at once entirely transformed and uncannily faithful to “the original.” At his studio Baier told me what he planned to do with the meteorite I held in my hand (Figure 25). He would digitize its contours using a 3-D scanner, dividing the surface of the object into twenty discrete sections, each functioning as the digital map of a determinate surface area of the object. He would then “print” enlarged three-dimensional models of these discrete units using a stereolithography machine, before assembling them into a compound sculptural replica. Having produced this replica (Figure 26), he would then powder the meteorite and liquefy the graphite of which it is composed, using it to paint an oval canvas whose shape is intended to suggest maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Along with these works, he would exhibit the reproduction of a cracked mirror and of a ruptured gypsum wall, both of which he broke with his fist. His fist, he says, “acting like a meteorite.”8 All of these pieces are what Baier calls “transformations,” and their production is mediated not only by labor and technique— Baier’s manual skill as an artist and the conceptual itinerary of his project—but also by sophisticated digital instruments, by technics.

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Figure 25. Nicolas Baier, Project: splitting, Star (Black).The process of reproducing the meteorite involved dividing a digital model of the scanned object into twenty discrete sections which could then be printed using stereolithography and reassembled as an enlarged replica.

Figure 26. Nicolas Baier, Project: 9 stages, Star (Black). Like many of Baier’s pieces, the reconstruction of the scanned and printed meteorite requires both sophisticated digital technologies and meticulous manual craft.

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INDEXICAL EXACTITUDE Why speak of these transformations in terms of the technics of prehension? The process of transformation is technical not only because it involves the mediation of 3D scanners and stereolithography but, more fundamentally (from the perspective of Stiegler’s analytic of technics and time), because it involves recording and transcription. It is a process of prehension for much the same reason. For Whitehead, a prehension is not only “the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things” (“actual entities involve one another by reason of their prehensions of each other”); it is also the activity by which an actual occasion reproduces the “perpetual perishing” of the past and the present. Whitehead specifies two kinds of process or “fluency,” both of which depend upon the function of prehension. First, concrescence is “the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one.’ ”9 Concrescence is the processual composition of one actual entity among others. Second, there is the fluency of transition from particular existent to particular existent. “Transition” (and we might consider Whitehead’s term as analogous to Baier’s title, Transformations) entails a perishing of the process of an actual entity whereby its particular existence is constituted as “an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process.”10 These two kinds of fluency have a precise relation: transition is the process whereby any actual entity becomes the datum for a new concrescence. To speak of “the technics of prehension” is to specify the mutual pertinence of Stiegler’s and Whitehead’s conceptual itineraries as follows. What Stiegler calls the coevolution of technics and the human, a coevolutionary process that emerges from the mutual prehension of hand and flint, depends upon a particular relation of transition and concrescence. The technical exteriorization of memory as recording—what Stiegler calls the tertiary memory of technical retention—constructs the already-there of a contextual historicality from which further technical invention (involving projection, anticipation, planning) can emerge. “It is the process of anticipation itself that becomes refined and complicated with technics,” writes Stiegler. Technics is “the mirror of anticipation, the place of its recording and of its inscription as well as the surface of its reflection, of the reflection that time is, as if the human were reading and linking his future to the technical.”11 Epiphylogenesis is Stiegler’s term for the tracing of time as a process of technical retention and transmission, split between facticity and anticipation: a history of traces in which what develops (process, genesis)

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is conserved (concrescence, epigenesis) and passed on (transition, epiphylogenesis) through the coevolution of the human and the technical. To think this particular coevolution is not to formulate a theory of prehensions in general, but rather to think the specificity of the sort of prehensions made possible by the historicity of technics. If “flint is the first reflective memory, the first mirror,”12 and if this is the coupling from which the coevolutionary history of technics unfolds, what sort of prehensions evolve as epiphylogenesis passes over into technical syntheses of memory made possible by digital technologies—that is to say, “new media”? While the destabilization by digital technologies of the indexical function of photographic recording and of the reliability of the photographic frame has often been emphasized by theorists of new media, it is evidently the indexical exactitude of digital recording that comes to the fore in Baier’s installation. The capacity to precisely record and reproduce subtle contours of an object’s surface—to formalize its surface in three dimensions, to retain that form in a digital medium, and to characterize a precise three-dimensional replica at a larger scale through stereolithography: this is made possible by the superior indexical exactitude of digital technologies. It is made possible by a superior capacity to retain and transmit complex traces of an existent object. Baier’s Project Star (Black) plays with different instantiations of the index as trace, but all of these foreground what Stiegler calls the “orthothetic” precision of digital images.13 Vanitas (2010) is perhaps the clearest emblem of this obsession. The piece that we see in the gallery is not simply the presentation of a cracked mirror; rather, it is an elaborate reproduction of that object. Baier reports that he scanned each of the pieces of a broken mirror, generating a vector document for each of the shards. He then laboriously chiseled out replicas of these fragments from other mirrors, assembling these into a painstaking reproduction of the broken surface.14 This process, which took over three hundred hours, constitutes a glacial homage not only to the fraction of an instant during which fault lines initially spread from the point of contact across the mirror’s surface, but also to the indexical exactitude of scanning the broken pieces and then transferring this digital record into the vector space serving as sculptural model. Baier’s manual “craft” as an artist tests itself against the precision of these digital indices. The “reflective memory” first enabled by the coupling of cortex and flint now mirrors itself in carving of traces of traces, inscribing the time of the work into the materials of its production through a complex coordination of object, thought, eye, hand, tool, and mnemotechnics. Formalization, retention, characterization. The articulated, transversal pro-

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cess of recording and reproduction that we find in Baier’s work—one that Whitehead and Stiegler allow us to describe as a process of concrescence and transition, of epiphylogenesis mediated by tertiary memory—pushes us to reframe debates between important positions in contemporary media theory. What is at issue in Baier’s work is not primarily the affective “framing “of digital mediation by a human body (as for Mark Hansen),15 nor primarily an excision of such a frame by the inhuman transmission of coded information by computational systems (as for Friedrich Kittler),16 nor the middle road of “intermediation” emphasizing emergent processes operative through dynamic feedback loops between humans and computers (as for N. Katherine Hayles).17 What each of these models relies upon, however deconstructed or intermediated it becomes, is an initial distinction between human bodies and computational systems. Reference to the technics of prehension, on the other hand, allows us to shed this provisional distinction and, rather, begin with actual entities/actual occasions relationally constituted by prehensions. Moreover, beginning with Whitehead also enables us to shed the rhetorical entanglements encountered by Stiegler due to his use of the term “the human” to designate the conceptually deconstructed (yet terminologically retained) site of a structural coupling with technics. From this perspective we can see that it is not the phenomenological nor “emergent” encounter of a “human” and a “tool” that is of interest in Baier’s work (nor the “inhuman” processing and transmission of digital code), but rather the manner in which the pertinence of those categories is displaced by the specific particularity of reticulated prehensions instantiated in differential media, constituting and traversing processes of concresence and transition. It is from such a perspective, and through such a terminology, that we can grasp and come to terms with what Stiegler refers to as the “default of origin.” It is within this default (neither “before” nor “after”) that such categories as “human” and “tool” come to make sense in the first place. Yet they neither begin nor end making sense because they have no origin and no telos. It is not that these categories have to be abandoned because they have been superseded; it is their self-evidence that has to be questioned. Thinking through the technics of prehension exposes “the human” and “the tool” to the mutual constitution of an already there, a tertiary memory, that Stiegler unearths within Heidegger’s existential analytic. Such terminological resources, however, do not mitigate the enigmatic situation of the object in Baier’s installation. Let us return to our earlier question: Where is the meteorite that we seem to find everywhere displaced in Project Star (Black)? What counts as the trace of such an object, and where can we find one? The object is nowhere present, but nevertheless larger than ever and right in the

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middle of the room. It has become the coherence of its technical construction, and the coherence of this construction thus circulates throughout the becoming of its traces. The object, existing neither here nor there as a simple location—but rather modulated in and through a series of transformations—has become the differential resonance of what remains of those transformations. It inheres as much within the series of retentional, transcriptive traces as it does within any one term. Discussing the morphological resemblance of the oval canvas of Monochrome (black) to a map of the cosmic microwave background, Baier describes the piece as “an attempt to paint the universe with some star dust.”18 So, in the terms of C. S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, is Monochrome (black) the icon of an anisotropy, a symbol of “the universe,” or an index of the object—of which the black residue composing the surface is a trace? Perhaps this question would be no more pressing than asking if the Mona Lisa is an icon of the woman it depicts or an index of the flax plant from which the linseed oil of its paints was pressed—were it not for the presence in Baier’s installation of an enlarged replica of the object with which Monochrome was painted. Situated precisely where a viewer might stand in order to apprehend the surface of the painting, the presence of the replica suggests that the interrogation of these questions has already been undertaken by the composition of the installation in which the painting is included. A mimetic reproduction of the object in question already occupies the place of the questioner—in front of a broken mirror, between a universe painted with stardust and the mundane satellites deployed in the process of the painting’s production. If, as Baier says, both Vanitas (2010) and Impact record the impact of his fist “acting like a meteorite,” rather than the impact of the meteorite itself, then they record an idea evoked by an object enacted by a body recorded in a substrate. But given that the pieces of the broken mirror are scanned and recut rather than directly exhibited, and given that Impact is an ink jet print of a digital photograph rather than a punctured slab of gypsum, what these pieces have in common is not their immediate presentation of an index but rather the technical mediation of indexical traces shifting through a network of prehensions. If there is a destabilization of the indexical function of technical retention in Baier’s work, it is not due to the malleability of digital media (since, again, it is the retentional exactitude of the latter that is foregrounded). Rather, it is due to the radical expansion of the category of the index to include any and all traces: conceptual, affective, mnemonic, corporeal, technical. We can approach this radicalization of the index in Baier’s work by reading

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Peirce according to Whitehead’s principle of relativity, which asserts that “every item in its universe is involved in each concrescence.”19 According to the principle of relativity, “an actual entity is present in other actual entities” and “in fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.”20 To decide, then, that a sign functions as an icon or a symbol rather than an index is to account for what Whitehead calls “degrees of relevance.” Nevertheless, Whitehead’s principle of relativity entails a recognition of the sense in which every actual entity to some degree functions as an index of every other. Each concrescence, that is, has a real relation, a determinate relation, to every item in its universe, and the actual entity it composes might be taken as a “sign” of such relation. If an index, for Peirce, is “a sign determined by its dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to it,” then a prehension is the vector of that determination, the real relation of an actual entity to an object which it includes within its own constitution as datum, cause, condition. Thus, given this radicalization of the index, what is crucial to Baier’s work as a photographer and conceptual artist is not only to seize but to delimit the play of such indexical traces, to make manifest specific or determinate transformations. He does so by exploring the technical conditions of their recording and transmission. The problem of the relation between object, sign, and interpretant in Baier’s Project is to specify what the installation includes, and this is largely what it means to ask “where” the object apparently motivating its transformations might be. That is, how are we to specify or to think the constitution of that which traverses this series of transformations?

DESCARTES, WHITEHEAD, BACHELARD The problem is proximate to the basic question of Descartes’s wax experiment: Where is the wax, as all of its sensible properties undergo transformations in time when held up to the heat of the fire, and what then is the essence of this body—what does it essentially include? According to Descartes, there are too many modifications of the object for the imagination to follow their unfolding, “an immeasurable number of changes,” he says.21 We have to abstract from the mutability of secondary qualities, from any particular instantiation of the wax as this or that collection of sensible data, and thus, for Descartes, it is the mind alone that is capable of perceiving the intelligible object as extended, flexible, changeable. It is the mind alone which is capable of grasping the primary qualities of the wax as irreducible to the particularity of sensible concrescence.

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We can situate Baier’s exploration of the technics of prehension by considering his approach to this Cartesian problem in relation to two responses to Cartesian epistemology: that of Whitehead and that of Gaston Bachelard. For Whitehead, the conclusions Descartes draws from the wax experiment would be exemplary of the “bifurcation of nature” endemic to modern philosophy and encapsulated by the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead rejects any division of knowledge into those qualities which are apprehended (secondary qualities) and those which are the cause of apprehension (primary qualities)22—what we could call, following Wilfred Sellers, the manifest and scientific image.23 Whitehead subverts the bifurcation of nature by reframing the distinction between “causal” and “apparent” components of an object in terms of the general framework of his theory of prehensions. But Whitehead does not account (in any detail) for the specificity of the technics of prehension in the constitution of scientific knowledge. Doing so will help us to grasp the specificity not only of scientific practice but also, in a different but closely related register, of an art practice like Baier’s. The conclusions drawn by Gaston Bachelard concerning the epistemological implications of non-Euclidean geometry and postclassical physics might seem starkly opposed to those of Whitehead, since Bachelard seems to affirm a distinction between the manifest and the scientific image. For instance, Bachelard asserts that “the world in which we think is not the world in which we live,”24 where the world in which we think is that of scientific representation and the world in which we live is that of “everyday” sensory perception or intuition. What Bachelard calls “the philosophy of no” is charged with the strict monitoring of this distinction. “The philosophy of no,” he writes, “would become a general doctrine if it could coordinate all the examples where thought breaks with the obligations of life.”25 The philosophy of no is Bachelard’s term for a scientific epistemology capable of making the distinction between intuition and scientific knowledge and clearing away the epistemological obstacles of the former as impediments to the latter. “Intuitions are very useful,” he states; “they serve to be destroyed.” For both Whitehead and Bachelard, however, contemporary physics requires us to reject the conditions for the determination of objects laid out by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. It turns out, both argue, that these conditions obtain only for a particular class of objects which is relatively restricted (for example, it can’t account for the objects of non-Euclidean geometry or postclassical physics). And, with Whitehead, Bachelard rejects the vulgar materialist principle that you can determine an object as a simple location: that “you can adequately state

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the relation of a particular material body to space-time by saying that it is just there, in that place.”26 Whitehead calls this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Against this fallacy, both he and Bachelard demand that we account for the dispersed, relational, and processual constitution of objects. As I argued in the Introduction, at the core of Bachelard’s theory of scientific knowledge is an effort to reconcile the opposing claims of rationalist and empiricist epistemologies. He recognizes that if one rejects the Kantian effort to displace the opposition of rationalism and empiricism through transcendental philosophy, then the relation between them will have to be rethought. And this problem will help us to conceptualize the form of mediation that is at stake in Baier’s work. “The philosophy of science,” Bachelard argues, “fails to recognize the transmutation of epistemological values which contemporary scientific thought constantly executes between a priori and a posteriori, between experimental and rational values.”27 For Bachelard, science conjoins experiment and reason by constantly exposing each to the imperatives of the other, and this is what Descartes both suggests and overlooks in his analysis of the wax experiment. More directly than Whitehead, Bachelard attends to the particular mediation of the relation between rationalism and empiricism, theory and practice, which constitutes the “epistemological terrain” of science.28 And this will bring us back to Baier. What we find in this terrain, mediating between empiricism and rationalism, is the conjunction of technics (technique, technology) and formalization (proofs, formulae, inscribed chains of logical entailment). “In order to establish a determinate scientific fact, it is necessary to put a coherent technique to work,” states Bachelard.29 A coherent technique conjoins technics and formalization: an empirical rigor enabled by the disciplined application of procedures and instruments (technics), a rational coherence attested by legible demonstrations (formalization). Extrapolating from Bachelard, we might say that what mediates between technics and formalization are inscriptions. Rationalism and empiricism are conjoined, in their complex complementarity, through retentional traces of technically processed phenomena and relations among mathematical signs. This conjunction could be graphed as follows: EMPIRICISM

→ TECHNICS ↔ FORMALIZATION ←

RATIONALISM

(INSCRIPTION) It is no paradox for either Whitehead or Bachelard to hold that scientific knowledge is both objective and constructed. If “the philosophy of no” is the general doctrine which would “coordinate all the examples where thought breaks with

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the obligations of life,” the term “thought” does not refer us only to “mind” or “reason,” but to the practical, a-subjective mediation of technics and formalization which is the organon of this coordination. The epistemological terrain of science is that of the technics of prehension: of the transformation of technical retentions into formally coordinated chains of signifiers whose relations are subject to correction.

TRACES Perhaps we begin to see how this encounter with the technics of prehension and its bond with formalization—through the detour of scientific epistemology— might inform our understanding of Baier’s photography. A photograph from Baier’s 2006 exhibition, Traces, provides a simple demonstration, an argument as it were. The photograph is titled Prehension (see Figure 27). In another photograph, the invitation card for the exhibition, we see a “realistic” representation of the boundary of a cemetery in winter, marked in particular by the leafless branches of somber trees extending and twisting across a pale grey sky illuminated by a muted sun (see Figure 28). In Prehension, we find the particularly contorted tree on the card inverted, as though growing upside down from the top of the frame. A text at the exhibition explains: “A friend and I were sketching out the premise of a video at the Mont Royal cemetery. While he was struggling to film a few rushes, I spotted this magnificently emaciated tree. It seemed as though it was trying as hard as it could, sick and deformed as it was, to hug the space around it close to itself.” Baier’s description anthropomorphizes the tree, but the photograph itself disorients an anthropocentric perspective. The frame has been cropped and the contrast and color have been adjusted—the sky from gray to a pale white background, the snow standing out more clearly against a rich brown trunk than it might otherwise. The primary gesture of the photograph is a simple one: the spatial inversion of the image in relation to the frame disorients the viewer, more thoroughly involving us with the manner in which the tree is involved with the space around it, as we try to get a grip on the image in the absence of a gravitational foothold. In this case the process of technical mediation performs a reversal. The technical processing of the photograph performs a defamiliarizing, non-anthropocentric mimesis of Baier’s anthropomorphic perception of the tree: of its deformity and its groping after space. Considered through its title, this relatively minor transformation of the digital image might be taken to reflexively encode the manner in which an object becomes a technical object (and an “art” object) through

Figure 27. Nicolas Baier, Prehension (2006), inkjet print, 109 × 127 cm. An inverted digital photograph of a tree at the Mont Royal Cemetery, Montreal.

Figure 28. Nicolas Baier, Invitation Card, Traces Exhibition (2006). The tree reproduced and inverted in Prehension is visible on the left side of the photograph.

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the relation between perception, affect, concept, and technical mediation. As a concrescence of prehensions, the image stresses the capacity of photography to transform an object. But it does so in a manner that draws us eerily close to the object in question, precisely recording its morphology. It transforms an object through an exact inscription of those objective qualities that render its transformation possible. The image is at once objective and constructed, and it is the exactitude of technical formalization which renders this dialectic operative as what Bachelard would call “a coherent technique.” *** A cave painting, a meteorite, an opaque mirror, an unseeing eyeball: the subjects of Baier’s photography are primordial inscriptions, extraterrestrial objects, abyssal surfaces, canceled sensations. His work foregrounds the capacity of technical formalization to transform objects through the retentional exactitude of digital inscriptions, and thereby to render evident, though nowhere apparent, traces of their primary qualities. The constructive power of formalization (in this case, of digitization) renders the properties of an object irreducible to the correlate of a subject, through the complicity of technology with reason. Thinking this complicity of reason and technics (which is also to think the complicity of rationalism and empiricism) allows us to think the manner in which technics and formalization function as the filter not only of phenomenal immediacy but also of the categorical restrictions upon the constitution of objects for which Whitehead and Bachelard reproach Kant’s critical philosophy. We could say that technical formalization is the sieve of the transcendental subject: the means by which the forms of intuition and the categorial constitution of objects are filtered out of retentional traces. This, I think, is what Bachelard means by “the philosophy of no.” The technics of prehension situates thought outside itself because, according to Stiegler, thinking already bears its own outside within the de-fault of its origin, due to its constitutive relation to technics. This technicity of thinking, which throws thought outside itself before it comes into its own, is one among the traces that Nicolas Baier photographs. Perhaps it is the real subject of his work, the non-site of his investigations. When we find ourselves surrounded by the remains of a vanished object, its traces mediated by technical retentions enabling the reproduction of its contours, we find ourselves forced to think beyond the simple location of objects, and beyond their constitution by our consciousness. The impetus to such thinking is what Bachelard calls “a coherent

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technique,” which holds the object together, in its vanished tracing, through the technics of prehension. To encounter such an absent object, at once nowhere and everywhere present, is to recognize it as both objective and constructed: as the mediation of a real existence irreducible to a subjective correlate. For Whitehead, to split the real into two different realities, one of speculative physics and the other of intuition, is to construct “two natures,” where “one is conjecture and the other is dream.” Whitehead rejects this apparent schism, but he does not adequately theorize the manner in which technology mediates the divide between these two sides of the split real thought by modernity. With Stiegler, we can say that technics at once institutes and ungrounds speculative thinking in the first instance. With Bachelard, we can say that the technics of prehension mediates a dialectic of the rational and the empirical, which constitutes and constructs the object as in-itself rather than for-us. With and against Whitehead, we can say that the technics of prehension operates between speculative thinking and intuition, between conjecture and dream. The technics of prehension, projecting thought outside itself from the somber mirror proto-stage of mineral inscription to the monochrome opacity of a black star, is the ek-stasis of thought and perception, the tracing of their différance by an inhuman mediation of rationalism and empiricism. To arrive at such a formulation is not only to think with Whitehead and Bachelard and Stiegler, but also to think through the photography of Nicolas Baier.

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WHERE’S NUMBER FOUR?: THE PLACE OF STRUCTURE IN PLATO’S TIMAEUS

The concept of form is central to the history of Western metaphysics, aesthetics, and critical philosophy. In Plato, it establishes the distinction between metaphysics and physics, differentiating the intelligible from the sensible. In Aristotle, it functions as the primary term in the distinction between form and matter and occupies an important place in the theory of the four causes. In Spinoza, it refers to the essence of individual things actualizing substance.1 In Kant, the categories of the understanding determine the form of objects and of experience in general, while beauty is a purely reflective judgment concerning satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the form of the object thus determined. In Hegel, it is the dialectically integral relation of form and content, displacing the transcendental separation of form and matter, that endows the determinations of thought with their infinite movement. In Marx, value must be understood as a form—as form-determined— insofar as it is predicated not upon the material scarcity or constitution of a commodity, but rather the socially necessary labor time requisite for its production. For Adorno, the historical dimension of the artwork is legible in its law of form, which separates it from what it is not while nevertheless bearing the sedimented content of the social relations from which its autonomy distinguishes it. And in Badiou’s materialist dialectic, form returns to its Platonic identity with the Idea, yet undergoes an inversion insofar as it is the singularity of embodied procedures that generate the eternity of the Idea they incarnate, in the temporal modality of the future anterior. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, 166

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the concept of “form” thus anchors a series of metaphysical, transcendental, and dialectical determinations of relationships between the intelligible and the sensible, traversing movements of opposition, contradiction, or deconstruction involving movement, matter, content, history, process, and finitude. How can we locate the concept of “structure” with respect to the perennial centrality of the concept of “form” in the history of philosophy? A curiosity of the concept of structure is that it occupies a position of latency throughout most of this history. Despite the occasional usage of the term, and despite its prevalence in classical, Renaissance, and modern architectural theory, it does not undergo development as a systematically determined philosophical concept until the twentieth century. Neither Plato nor Aristotle systematically develop a concept of structure. The term “structura” does not appear in Spinoza’s Ethics, though the term “forma” and its cognates occur seventy-three times.2 The concept of structure is nowhere to be found in the glossary of the Cambridge edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and the term is not used with any conceptual precision by either Hegel or Marx. Yet, we might see, from our own vantage point in intellectual history, how Aristotle could have deployed a concept of structure to explain the consistency of the four causes; or how Spinoza might have used such a concept to describe the codetermination of axioms, definitions, and propositions characterizing his geometrical method; or how Kant might have theorized the relational “structure” of the faculties in their formal determination of nature or of aesthetic judgments; we might think that the concept of structure could have played a methodological role for Hegel in his theory of dialectical discursivity, or for Marx in describing the integral relationality of his major categories in Das Kapital. Of course, it was precisely by retroactively drawing a theory of “structure” from Spinoza and then applying it to Marx—a theory of the immanence of relational causality in its effects—that Althusser developed the concept of “structural causality” (a concept that might itself be considered an addition to or intervention upon Aristotle’s theory of causation). The systematic development of the concept of structure in the twentieth century—and the import of that concept across linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory—has probably obscured the position of latency it previously occupied. It now comes naturally to deploy this term in discussions of ancient and modern thinkers, as though the concept always enjoyed the prominent role it has played over the past one hundred years, to the point that even those who supposedly disavowed it are characterized as “poststructuralists.” Consider, for example, the following passage from Bas van Frassen’s 2008 book Scientific Representation. Defending a structuralist epis-

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temology of science, van Frassen turns to Aristotle to exemplify the inaugural philosophical importance of “structure” as what unifies the referential dimension of theories with their methodological coherence. He writes: The insistence on this unity as a hallmark of science has been with us in philosophy since the beginning. In Aristotle we see a remarkable parallel in his views of drama and on physics. The Physics presents us with a view of the structure of nature and natural processes, and also, in conjunction with the Posterior Analytics, of the structure of the science that deals with nature. The Poetics presents the structure of the human condition and of human action as they are depicted in tragedies, but also of the structure of those tragedies, that dramatize human existence, themselves.3

For van Frassen, “structure” holds together what theories describe with how they describe it, and thus plays a crucial epistemological and methodological role in the history of philosophy. I agree with him, and I think that he more or less accurately describes what Aristotle is doing in the texts he mentions. Nevertheless, Aristotle did not have at his disposal a coherently or systematically articulated concept of structure that would have allowed him to describe his project in the same way. The difficulty thus raised is how to articulate the place of “structure” in the philosophical tradition without occluding its relative absence from that tradition. Lacan and Althusser discerned a latent concept of structure in the texts of Freud and Marx, and they reconstructed the work of those thinkers by systematically developing that concept within the field of their theoretical legacy. In what follows, I want to locate the implicit place of structure within Plato’s philosophy—at the very hinge of the intelligible and the sensible—with reference to a single text: the cosmology articulated in the Timaeus. In doing so, I hope to defamiliarize any easy application of this concept to Platonic philosophy, while also theorizing the systematic import of its latency therein.

ONE, T WO, THREE . . . Plato’s cosmological dialogue famously opens with a scene of enumeration. Socrates counts the three interlocutors who are present, and then questions the absence from his count of a missing fourth. In Jowett’s venerable translation: socrates :

One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers today?

timaeus :

He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly have been absent from this gathering.4

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The dialogue thus opens with an incomplete count and a missing number—the presence of one, two, and three, but the absence of the number four from the scene of the dialogue. “Then, if he is not coming,” replies Timaeus, “you and the two others must supply his place.” “Certainly,” Timaeus assures him, “and we will do all that we can.”5 This is a classic instance of Plato’s suggestive scenography, and as is sometimes the case, it is what is absent from the frame of philosophical articulation, rather than what is present, to which our attention is drawn.6 The dialogue begins in incompletion, with the specification of a structural lack, and with a promise to do whatever possible to compensate for an absence. Since four is missing, three will have to supplement its lack. In his exquisitely attentive reading of the Timaeus, titled Chorology, John Sallis draws attention both to the pertinence of the number three in Plato’s dialogue and to the absent fourth with which it begins. Noting that the dialogue opens by putting an absence in question, he suggests that this question of a missing place implicitly turns the dialogue toward the chora, the theory of place, from its outset.7 Yet, as he also knows, the chora occupies the place of the number three in Plato’s text, and, indeed, this is the number with which Sallis will be most concerned. He argues that “the first three words of the Timaeus”—one, two, three—“bespeak the dialogue as a whole,”8 and he says of the number three that “it is this number and the counting numbered by it that will be decisively repeated throughout the Timaeus.”9 Here he is certainly correct: the relationship between the discourses of metaphysics, physics, and that which lies uneasily between them will be consistently articulated as a tripartite structure in Plato’s text, one that traverses ontological, epistemological, and methodological levels of its theoretical development. What I want to argue is that what is missing from this tripartite structure is precisely the place of structure itself, of a concept of structure that might play the role of a fourth term, holding together the uneasy relational placement of the other three. In this vein, Sallis notes a reference in Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus to the suggestion of Iamblicus that the absent fourth bears upon the orientation of the dialogue toward the sensible, natural cosmos—its treatment of physis—and therefore the absence of someone fit to discuss the realm of the intelligible, the metaphysical. But while it is true that metaphysics is not the focus of the dialogue, the place of the intelligible and the metaphysical is nevertheless clearly designated within the three part methodological scheme articulated by Timaeus, and this is precisely the place of the concept of Form.10 His discourse begins with a classic Platonic distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, metaphysics and physics, and a great deal of attention has been paid to the manner in which the theory of the chora—of

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space or what Plato calls the Receptacle—comes to mediate this two part structure through the introduction of a third term. What I think has been missing is a clear account of where the number four intervenes in this dialectical development, precisely as a concept of structure that is implied in the dialogue, but that is not explicitly included in its conceptual scheme, nor in that of Plato’s larger philosophical project. As we will see, the place of structure implicitly opens at the moment when Timaeus turns from the theory of the chora to his geometrical description of the four elements—fire, earth, air, and water. What he describes is the structure of these four elements. And although a consistent terminology to designate this term is lacking, the place that it would occupy were it more precisely articulated does a great deal of work in Plato’s cosmological system.

METAPHYSICS AND PHYSICS While Aristotle devotes distinct courses to Metaphysics and to Physics, it is at the conjunction of these two discourses that Plato’s Timaeus unfolds. As Alfred North Whitehead points out, this hybridity is proper to the philosophical discourse of cosmology. The conceptual tension between metaphysics and physics determines the system of distinctions with which Timaeus introduces his speech: First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.11

Being is distinguished from becoming; intellectual understanding is distinguished from opinion; and reason is distinguished from sensation. These binary distinctions, dividing the double subject matter of the text along the axis of the rational and the empirical, control the development of Timaeus’s discourse through its opening section (28a–48e). The classic question of what mediates the relation between being and existence, intelligible form and sensible likeness (the problem of participation) is exacerbated in this text by the assignment of each to a distinct register of philosophical discourse. Timaeus states that in speaking of the copy and the original we may assume that words (logos) are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable—nothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words (logos). As being is to becoming, so is truth (aletheia) to belief (pistis).12

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The logos of Being is a discourse of immutable rational certainty, whereas becoming is the subject of an eikos logos, a reasoned account that is only likely rather than certain. Several lines later, eikos logos will be terminologically transformed into eikos mythos, a likely story.13 Thus logos and mythos are each tied, in turn, to the merely likely status of speech about becoming. In this application of the term eikos to both the logos and mythos of becoming, we can perceive the asymmetry of a potentially tripartite division of philosophical discourse, with logos assigned to the discourse on being, while the discourse on becoming is split between and synthesized by the categories of eikos logos and eikos mythos, such that eikos, (analogy), mediates the relation between mythos and logos. Being is to becoming as truth is to belief, so mythos is like logos insofar as it is sufficiently convincing to approximate truth. An eikos mythos will be an eikos logos insofar as it is a convincing copy of the rational and the true. Hegel teaches us to be attentive to the four-part structure of distinctions between three terms. There is an opposition between Being and Nothing. Pushed to the point of contradiction, this opposition produces the movement of Becoming. Becoming is the negation of the negation Nothing understood as the negation of Being. Thus we have a double structure of distinction: Being is opposed to Nothing, and Becoming—as the negation of the negation, is opposed to Nothing. In the methodological dialectic of the Timaeus, the structure is the same but the logic is different. Logos is differentiated from eikos logos, whereas eikos mythos is not differentiated from eikos logos. Logos is reason, eikos logos is reasonable, and eikos mythos is convincing insofar as it is reasonable, and thus akin to reason. Whereas the logic of Hegel’s dialectic is negation, the logic of Timaeus’s dialectic is analogy. In both cases, however, the explicit introduction of three terms implicitly entails a four part logical structure. One, two, three—where’s number four? That is the question we always have to ask when we think dialectically. As we move from methodological and epistemological problems toward Timaeus’s story of the physical construction of the cosmos by the Demiurge, the structural role of the number four continues to be important. In order to compose the world soul the Demiurge mixes together three different essences: Being, the Same, and the Different.14 But each of these, in turn, is made of two components: the divisible and the indivisible. The first step is thus to compose three separate mixtures of that which is divisible and indivisible within Being, the Same, and the Different before combining the result: 1. divisible and indivisible components of Being are combined into an intermediate essence of Being

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2. divisible and indivisible components of the Same are combined into an intermediate essence of the Same 3. divisible and indivisible components of the Different are combined into an intermediate essence of the Different

The Demiurge then takes the mixture of the Different and combines it with the mixture of the Same, before combining the result with the mixture of Being in order to produce a single new compound, a fourth essence, the Soul. So, each of three essences is composed of two aspects, which are combined into three mixtures before these are combined to produce a fourth term. The component parts of Soul are then divided into spheres whose movements are proportionate to each other, and these constitute the “symphony of proportion” which is the corporeal world.15 The unity of the Soul and the Body of the cosmos is a fabric of these proportionate relationships, the Soul enveloping and woven together with the body of the cosmos in all directions.16 This interweaving of the soul and the body has epistemological consequences: through the mixtures of the Same and the Different with which it is woven throughout the cosmos, the Soul is capable of sensing similarity or difference—that is, likeness—whenever it comes into contact within anything belonging to either Being or Becoming. True opinions and true convictions come about through the resonance of the Different with statements about the perceptible, while understanding and knowledge derive from the resonance of the Same with statements about the intelligible. The Soul, as a fourth term composed of divisible and indivisible aspects of the Same, the Different, and Being, weaves these throughout the body of the cosmos to render it epistemically resonant, making truth relevant as it applies to both being and becoming. As a cosmological concept, the Soul the functions as a principle of unity drawing together metaphysics, physics, and epistemology. But it is in the cosmological role accorded to the four elements, and in the theory of their physical composition, that the place of structure is at issue most centrally, if only implicitly, in the Timaeus. Timaeus first explains why there are four elements—fire, earth, air, and water—that compose the physical body of the universe. The primary two elements are fire and earth, which respectively account for the visibility and the solidity of the cosmos, and these are joined together through the mediation of air and water. Timaeus explains that “two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them.”17 Yet in the case of the elemental composition of the physical world, we require two mediating elements between fire and earth in order to uphold the three-dimensionality of the cosmos. According to Timaeus:

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If the universal frame had been created a surface only and having no depth, a single mean would have sufficed to bind together itself and the other terms; but now, as the world must be solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible (as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonised by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer.18

The physical solidity, consistency, proportionality, and indissolubility of the cosmos depend upon its quadripartite elemental composition, which endows it with “the spirit of friendship.” Again, four is the number of compositional cohesion in the dialogue. It is following his enumeration of the elements and his account of the genesis of the world soul that Timaeus inaugurates a “second beginning” of his story, and here he develops his theory of the chora as a third kind mediating between Being and Becoming.19 In addition to intelligible model and sensible copy, there is a third kind that he refers to first as hypodoche (Receptacle) and then as chora (space). Moreover, while Being is grasped by reason, and Becoming is perceived by the senses, the chora must be apprehended by a kind of “bastard reasoning” (logos nothos).20 The subject of influential commentaries by Kristeva, Derrida, Sallis, and most recently Emanuela Bianchi, in her outstanding book The Feminine Symptom, Plato’s chorology will not be my focus.21 But here I would question Sallis’s judgment that “the first three words of the Timaeus”—one, two, three—“bespeak the dialogue as a whole.” It is indeed the case that, amid his account of the chora, Timaeus summarizes his discourse thus far by affirming his “verdict” that “there are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things that existed even before the heavens came to be.”22 The chora, space, adds a mediating term to the split between metaphysics and physics from which the cosmology initially sets out. But no sooner does Timaeus thus arrive, again, at the number three than he proceeds, again, to the number four: to the genesis and structure of the four elements.

STRUCTURE AND GENESIS This is Plato’s famous account of the structure of the elements—and also of the cosmos as a whole—as modeled on the geometry of what have come to be called the Platonic solids.23 Fire has the geometry of the tetrahedron, Earth of the cube,

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Air of the Octahedron, and Water of the Icosahedron, while the totality of the cosmos is said to have the geometry of the Dodecahedron. This fifth geometrical figure is curiously mentioned as an afterthought, while Timaeus focuses his account on the geometry of the four elements. Each of these can be constructed on the primary basis of two elementary right-angled triangles—the isosceles halfequilateral and the scalene half-square—both of which in turn obey the structural principle of the Pythagorean theorem. We might say that the theorem is the geometrical Idea or Form grounding the composition of the triangles, while the triangles themselves combine to form the three-dimensional structure of the elements, from which the physical matter of the world is composed. One could devote many pages to the details of Plato’s geometrical construction of the elements and their interrelations, as do A. E. Taylor and Francis Cornford in their important commentaries.24 But here I am interested not in summarizing the geometrical details but in the philosophical concept that should be assigned to the place of this geometry in Plato’s cosmology. As I have suggested, I think this is the place of the concept of “structure” in the dialogue. And I think we can add this term to the other three articulated by Timaeus as the fundamental concepts of his cosmology: in addition to Being, Becoming, and Space, there is Structure, and this is the answer to the question—where’s number four—with which the dialogue opens. What is the significance of this answer for Plato’s philosophy? When Timaeus turns from the chora to his geometrical description of the four elements he says, in Jowett’s translation: “And now I will endeavour to show you the disposition and generation of them by an unaccustomed argument.”25 The key terms here, translated as “disposition” and “generation” are diataxis (διάταξιν) and genesis (γένεσιν). For diataxis, Liddell and Scott’s lexicon also has “disposition” or “arrangement.”26 Cornford translates the term as “formation.” Both Desmond Lee and Donald Zeyl translate it as “structure.”27 Several paragraphs later, as he turns from elementary triangles to their combinations in elementary bodies, Timaeus tells his interlocutors, “I have now to speak of their several kinds, and show out of what combinations of numbers each of them was formed.”28 He then deploys a different term in the same context as he had earlier used diataxis. In Jowett’s translation, he says, “The first will be the simplest and smallest construction,”29 where “construction” translates the term sunistamenon (συνιστάμενον), which Liddell and Scott translate as a verb: “to set together, combine, associate, unite, band together.” Cornford has “First will come the construction of the simplest and smallest figure;”30 Lee follows Cornford’s translation, whereas Zeyl gives us “Leading the way will be the primary

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form, the tiniest structure.” Zeyl thus translates both diataxis and sunistamenon as “structure,” designating both the act of constructing the figures and the geometrical configuration in which they are constructed. This is an apt choice, but it obscures the discrepancy of Plato’s conceptual terminology, a discrepancy due to the fact that he does not have a consistent concept for the consistent referent of his discourse. Interestingly, Zeyl deploys the term “form” in the second passage quoted above as an equivalent term of “structure,” and this indeed Plato’s usage. The Greek is proton eidos kai smikrotaton sunistamenon (πρῶτον εἶδος καὶ σμικρότατον συνιστάμενον), which could be directly translated, hewing as closely as possible to Liddell and Scott, as “primary form and smallest assemblage.” So form and assemblage, or form and construction, or form and structure are here deployed as concepts with the same referent. The problem with this usage, in a Platonic context, is that it is philosophically equivocal. The term eidos, which occurs a number of times in the account of elemental geometry, is either used casually or should be reserved for pure intelligible forms of Being that are not subject to Becoming or transformation—and it is difficult to tell which is the case. But the account of the geometry of the elements is clearly a story of their genesis, of their formation by the Demiurge as physical, rather than metaphysical entities. Indeed, the geometrical foundation of the elemental structures, the shared basis of the two primary triangles, enables several of them (with the exception of the cube) to transform into one another. The three dimensional forms can fragment into their triangles and recombine into different bodies. Since these are bodies, they are not purely ideal Forms. Significantly, though, these are also bodies that are so small (smikrotaton sunistamenon) that they are invisible, which violates the epistemological criterion of visibility that is normally applied by Plato to physical things. These are physical entities that are not sensible entities; they are insensible entities that are not metaphysical forms. In apparent violation of Plato’s carefully articulated relationship between metaphysics, physics, epistemology, and methodology, these are assembled forms, both eidos and sunistamenon, insensible forms that are susceptible to processes of generation and transformation that should be reserved for the realm of the sensible. Both the terms diataxis and sunistamenon encode a suggestion of this ambiguity in their function as either nouns or verbs: a structure is structured, an assemblage is assembled. In the Timaeus, the four elements are liminal beings. Before they were put in order by the Demiurge, there were traces of them scattered throughout the Receptacle, which its movement sorts into regions of like-

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ness and difference according to their inchoate qualities. At this point, “before they were arranged so as to form the universe,” the elements were “without reason and measure”31 (alogos kai ametros) (ἀλόγως καὶ ἀμέτρως). The four elements are thus both prior to and products of creation, of genesis. They exist initially as inchoate qualities, and then as quantitatively determined bodies, once the Demiurge has “fashioned them by form and number”32 (eidesi te kai arithmois) (εἴδεσί τε καὶ ἀριθμοῖς). Diataxis thus inhabits the exact point of coincidence between structure and genesis, the fashioning according to form of the primary constituents of physical bodies. The concept of diataxis either binds together or falls into the rift between metaphysics and physics. In this it is similar to the Receptacle, or chora, which also evades the binary of Being and Becoming, yet, unlike the chora, the formation of the elements is geometrical, ordered, quantitatively determinate. Moreover, the qualities of the elements, and thus the qualities of the entire physical world they compose, are also determined by their quantitative determinations. Fire is hot because the tetrahedron is the sharpest geometrical structure of the Platonic solids; Water is smooth because the icosahedron is the roundest; Earth is solid because the cube is stable. Diataxis or sunistamenon—structure, or disposition, or arrangement—entails a synthesis of quantity and quality, which is precisely how Hegel defines measure. The geometry of the elements is the primary measure of the physical world, and indeed the genesis of their structure is the genesis of measure itself.

THE ARCHI- THEATER OF WRITING My argument is that Plato’s terminology is embroiled in ambiguity because he does not have a concept of structure—a consistently determined sense of such a term that runs throughout his philosophy—and thus he uses a number of different terms to designate its place. But this place is crucial, because both the content of his discourse on the significance of elemental geometry and the ambivalence of his conceptual terminology (shifting between “form” and “structure” or “assemblage”) suggest that structure is the place of participation in the Timaeus. The genesis of the structure of the elements is the genesis of structure itself, and thus of a relationship of likeness between metaphysical forms and physical bodies, between Being and Becoming. The chora, Space, is the medium of this genesis, the medium of participation. But to understand how it is the medium of participation, we need to move from one, to two, to three,

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to four: from Being, to Becoming, to Space, to Structure. As Timaeus says, “for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonised by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship.”33 The spirit of friendship alluded to here is not only the cohesion of physical bodies among one another, but also the participation of their particularity in the universality of the forms, and this spirit is embodied as structure, understood as the unity of form, quantity, and quality. Structure is the minimal physical correlate of metaphysical form. But structure is also a concept with methodological implications. The philosophical discourse of cosmology unfolds at the intersection of the rational and the empirical, and structure is the site at which the rationalist and the empiricist dimensions of science are conjoined as the synthetic coherence of the intelligible and the sensible. This synthetic coherence is epistemologically secured, and methodologically tested, by the mathematical formalization of physical organization. If this was incipiently the case for Plato, as the eikos logos of the Timaeus makes clear, it is entirely the case for modern and contemporary science, in which the consistent relationality of equations is tested by experiment, and in which the empirical findings of the laboratory are vetted by criteria of mathematical consistency within the formalized field of physical theory. It is this relation of dialectical coordination and reciprocal critique between the rational and the empirical, through the mediation of formalization, that was the epistemological framework of the incipiently structuralist theory of science developed by Gaston Bachelard. In The New Scientific Spirit, he argues that we move beyond the primacy of the Cartesian subject in the theory and practice of science by learning “to measure precisely the limits of our thoughts, and to match, in a strict and rigorous manner, thought to experiment, noumenon to phenomenon, rather than allow ourselves to be misled by the deceptive appearance of substances both subjective and objective.”34 We now match thought to experiment through the mediation not only of mathematical formalism but also complex instrumentation, both of which not only filter the immediacy of sensible intuitions but also constrain the generalizations of preexisting mathematical determinations. For Plato, geometry organizes the rational field of application to the thinking of physical qualities through the mediation of plausible (eikos) structural determinations of matter. Consider Whitehead’s evaluation, in 1920, of Plato’s degree of success in attaining this plausibility:

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In the Timaeus Plato asserts that nature is made of fire and earth with air and water as intermediate between them, so that ‘as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth.’ He also suggests a molecular hypothesis for these four elements. In this hypothesis everything depends on the shape of the atoms; for earth it is cubical and for fire it is pyramidal. Today physicists are again discussing the structure of the atom, and its shape is no slight factor in that structure. Plato’s guesses read much more fantastically than does Aristotle’s systematic analysis; but in some ways they are more valuable. The main outline of his ideas is comparable with that of modern science.35

It is the emphasis of Platonic cosmological theory upon structure that renders it comparable, eikos, to twentieth century science. And the “likeliness” of physical theory—its aspiration to the status not just of opinion, but true opinion, if not absolute truth—is vetted by the plausible cohesion of geometrical principles with physical traits and relationships. The latent but not systematically developed concept of that cohesion—provided neither by the rational theory of forms nor the empirical immediacy of the sensible—is structure. But what exactly is the status of these ideal geometrical formalizations which Plato speculatively coordinates with the phenomena of the physical world, as the elementary structure of matter? There is no story of the genesis of geometry itself in the Timaeus; its formalisms are already available to the Demiurge who structures the minimal constituents of material bodies after their model. In the framework of the dialogue, and indeed of Platonic theory more generally, these Forms are eternal. But this will not suffice for a rationalist empiricist approach to the philosophy of scientific knowledge. Geometry does indeed have a material genesis; it has a history. The problem of the genesis of this history, of the possibility of the historical transmission of geometrical idealities, and thus of the relation between structure and genesis within the field of geometry, is precisely the problem addressed by Husserl in his late text, “The Origin of Geometry” (1936) and by Derrida in his early introduction to Husserl’s essay (1961). Indeed, this introduction is Derrida’s most lucid and consequential encounter with the famous problem of “structure and genesis,” through which the histories of structuralism and deconstruction intersect. In his text, Husserl emphasizes the constitutive importance of written signs in the transmission of geometrical knowledge. Without assigning the origin of geometry to the agency of writing, he does note that there is a passive genesis involved in the reception of written signs, whereby what is transmitted and legible as writing “is passively awakened [and] can be transformed back, so to speak, into the corresponding activity.” This “capacity for reactivation,” Husserl argues,

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belongs originally to every human being as a speaking being. Accordingly, then, the writing-down effects a transformation of the original mode of being of the meaningstructure, within the geometrical sphere of self-evidence, of the geometrical structure which is put into words. It becomes sedimented, so to speak. But the reader can make it self-evident again, can reactivate the self-evidence.36

It is not just structure, but written structure, that constitutes the condition of possibility for the sensible transmission and intelligible reactivation of geometrical idealities. In his “Introduction,” Derrida notes that “by absolutely virtualizing dialogue, writing creates a kind of autonomous transcendental field from which every subject can be absent.” He then devotes to Husserl’s remarks on written signs a declarative paragraph that inaugurates the field of grammatological research as an investigation of a transcendental field without a transcendental subject: In connection with the general signification of the epoché, Jean Hyppolite invokes the possibility of a “subjectless transcendental field,” one in which “the conditions of subjectivity would appear and where the subject would be constituted starting from the transcendental field.” Writing, as the place of absolutely permanent ideal objectivities and therefore of absolute Objectivity, certainly constitutes such a transcendental field. And likewise, to be sure, transcendental subjectivity can be fully announced and appear on the basis of this field or its possibility. Thus a subjectless transcendental field is one of the “conditions” of transcendental subjectivity.37

The import of this paragraph is that it displaces the constitutive status of the transcendental subject, in formulating mathematical idealities, into the transcendental field of writing as a condition of possibility for the production and transmission of formalizing thought. We note that if this subjectless field is “transcendental,” insofar as it is a condition of possibility for transcendental subjectivity, it is not ideal. It is a material field of written traces. Therefore, what is at issue is a material genesis of the transcendental, which is exactly the amphiboly Kant’s framework of transcendental critique aims to block. If, for Derrida, writing constitutes a subjectless transcendental field, we can also say that it is a condition of possibility that deconstructs the transcendental, since it ungrounds the ideality of the transcendental through an account of its material genesis. Here we encounter a theme that also marks Badiou’s early work, during the period of his involvement with Cahiers pour l’Analyse. In “Mark and Lack,” he describes science as “the psychosis of no subject, and hence of all: universal by right, shared delirium, one has only to maintain oneself within it in order to be no-one, anonymously dispersed in the hierarchy of orders.”38 Here, science is the

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dispersion of the subject into an anonymous transcendental field that forecloses the unity of consciousness through its ramified stratification of discrepant orders of formalization. At the end of that essay he writes: “Science is the veritable architheatre of writing: traces, erased traces, traces of traces; the movement where we never risk encountering this detestable figure of Man: the sign of nothing.”39 What Derrida and Badiou share in the 1960s is an anti-humanist theory of scriptural formalization as the displacement of the subject of consciousness into the historical movement of rational inscription. At the crux of the structuralist project, and of its discrepant legacies, we thus find a theory of written formalization as the material condition of possibility for the production and reception of mathematical structures, and thus for the subjective consciousness of geometrical idealities. To a degree, this is in accordance with Platonic theory, since the existence of the Forms is certainly anterior to subjective consciousness of their universality. But a theory of the dependency of mathematical ideas on the historical transmission of written signs reinscribes Platonic theory within a materialism of the idea. Derrida displaces the Husserlian question of the origin of geometry, the problem of its singular point of genesis, into a plural genesis of signs through which the capacity for geometrical thought is constructed—as Badiou aptly puts it, an “archi-theatre of writing: traces, erased traces, traces of traces.”40 The place of structure, in Plato’s Timaeus, is the place at which the already-inscribed structure of geometrical idealities is inscribed at the intersection of the rational and the empirical, metaphysics and physics, and at which the capacity of such structures to unite quantity and quality within an eikos mythos, a likely story, is the very condition of plausible rationality: of an eikos logos that is neither relativistic nor absolute, but rigorously coherent and thus subject to revision. The development of a materialist scientific structuralism—which is how I would characterize the agenda of Bachelard’s epistemological writings—has its implicit genesis in Plato’s cosmology. If rationalism and empiricism are joined “by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain,”41 perhaps it requires so strange a text as the Timaeus to indicate the structure of that bond, for which it makes an absent place. One, two, three, four.

CODA: STRUCTURE AND FORM

Form may be considered as ideal, material, or phenomenal, designating mathematical or conceptual abstractions, physical shapes, or exterior appearances. Structure mediates relations between the ideal, the material, and the phenomenal. This concept of structure, drawn from my reading of the Timaeus, is implicit in the preceding studies of the metrological redefinition of the kilogram and of Nicolas Baier’s art practice. The shape of Baier’s meteorite is abstracted from the object as a digital model, and it appears as a sculptural reproduction after the object’s disappearance. Its form may be considered in mineral, digital, or sculptural manifestations; structure passes through and mediates these transformations without quite conforming to any one of them. It pertains to the relation between chains of digital code, or molecular bonds, and the form of the object they sustain. Structure enables the reintegration of form and matter—the retention of the former across transformations of the latter—through these discrepant instantiations. As the mediating relation of ideal, material, and phenomenal form, structure never rests easily within these categories; it is the how of form’s passage between them. The redefinition of the kilogram abstracts a quantity from the qualitative properties of an object constructed as the material instantiation of that quantity; it reinscribes that relation between quantity and quality by transforming it into a distributed apparatus, a procedural system regulating relationships between devices, numbers, and operations. Redefinition shifts the fundamental referent 181

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of a metrical unit from a material object to a number, from the International Prototype Kilogram to the Planck constant; it is the structure of the relation between quality and quantity that makes this transformation possible. Whereas form may be understood to designate the concept “kilogram” (from a Platonic perspective), the physical shape of “the kilogram,” or its phenomenal appearance, structure may be understood to hold these discrepant senses together and also to mediate between radically different relationships between ideal and material form: the difference, for example, between the kilogram understood as the mass of a liter of water or of a platinum cylinder. Structure is the relational coherence of transformations among material and ideal form, and of their relation to phenomenal appearance. The earth, for example, appears as a form. Structure is what makes thinkable, also, the transformation of its form prior to manifestion: its formation. In this sense there is no opposition between “structure and genesis.” In the case of the formation of the earth, structure may be understood as those relations among physical materials, chemical events, temperature, gravitational force, and so on that are requisite for the form of the planet to come into being, to persist, and to change without ceasing to persist. Structure is ideal/material: it is the relational determination of the in-itself. As relation, it does not appear. If form can be thought, and if form can be sensed, structure is the mediation of the thinkable and the sensible. That is why we can conceive of structure as the mediation of the rational and the empirical.

Truth exists only in a process of scission. —Alain Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction

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BADIOU AFTER MEILLASSOUX: THE POLITICS OF THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION

If Alain Badiou’s Being and Event sought to move beyond the “finite thinking” of post-Heideggerian philosophy by unfolding the ontological consequences of transfinite mathematics, the title of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude implicitly credits his mentor’s magnum opus with the achievement of that goal. But Meillassoux’s work extends the consequences of Badiou’s Cantorian ontology through an unexpected maneuver: the contemporary reactivation of Hume’s problem of induction. Meillassoux relies upon the rationalist resources offered by Badiou to disqualify the probabilistic resolution of Hume’s problem that had buttressed Hume’s own theory of habit and that has since been deployed to secure pragmatic rejections of Hume’s skeptical doubts.1 Through this rationalist operation upon the central problem of empiricism, Meillassoux seeks to revive the acuity of Hume’s reason against the complacency of his pragmatism, the profundity of what he had glimpsed (the nullity of sufficient reason) against the rétour à la normale he could not seem to resist (the statistical basis of empirical knowledge). But Hume characterizes his own apparent resolution of his “Sceptical Doubts” through the statistical synthesis of habit as a “Sceptical Solution to These Doubts.” It remains “sceptical” because Hume knows full well that he has not grounded either rational or empirical knowledge of the necessary connection between causes and effects, between the past and the future. He has only offered an account of how we navigate the unavailability of such knowledge, of how we make our way given the default of necessary connection. What entices 185

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in Hume, for a sensitive reader, is not quite the initial presentation of his “sceptical doubts” nor his “sceptical solution of these doubts”—though both are immensely compelling. It is the curious tension between these, the feeling of new philosophical horizons that are not foreclosed by Hume’s theory of habit but that, as he signals in acknowledging the skeptical nature of his solution, stretch out beyond the limits of both the Treatise and the Enquiry. The sufficiently alert reader encounters Hume’s concise expositions of his problem and solution with vertiginous alarm—a feeling only exacerbated by then scaling the philosophical heights of Kant’s effort to reconstruct a transcendental terra firma. For how tenuous a foothold is the uncircumventable ideality of the transcendental, how daunting the fault lines between the faculties . . . Hume is a pragmatist, but he understood that what he first dared to put down in his stillborn book invited more than two trips across the Acheron: “For my part, I shall think it sufficient, if the present hints excite the curiosity of philosophers, and make them sensible to how defective all common theories are in treating such curious and such sublime subjects.”2 Indeed, let us properly register the curious sublimity of the excitation: First Hume asks, “Is there any more intelligible proposition than to affirm, that all the trees will flourish in december and january, and decay in may and june?”3 Later he replies, “It is more probable, in almost every country of europe, that there will be frost sometimes in january, than that the weather will continue open throughout that whole month; though this probability varies according to the different climates, and approaches to a certainty in the more northern kingdoms.”4 Now, if a meteorologist might thus find consolation, what genuine philosopher could be satisfied with the latter formulation, having already thought through the implications of the former? If one could be so satisfied, why begin to think—really to think—at all?5 And if one does prefer the latter, why bother with philosophy in the first place? (Hume gives us a criterion of philosophical vocation). But again, it is not simply the former proposition but rather the torsion between the lucid severity of Hume’s skeptical doubts and the placid consolation of their skeptical solution that is genuinely strange. Even if we can resolve the regularity of statistical existence with the philosophical knowledge that we cannot understand its ground, how does one resolve the two affects attending the ultimate groundlessness of induction and the provisional reassurance of habit? For his own part, Hume was certainly “sensible of the difficulty”6 he had raised. It is not only a conceptual but an existential difficulty: when properly registered, the problem of induction makes it seem rather disappointing to simply go about one’s business, as if being able to adjust means to ends were merely cutting cor-

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ners. If Meillassoux, the Cartesian, returns to the problem of induction to reopen its unsettling lucidity, it is so that his rationalist empiricism can introduce us not to a bearded Hegel and a clean-shaven Marx but to a French Hume and a Scottish Descartes. How alien their improbable progeny. Could we really do without the vaunted Principle of Sufficient Reason? And if we cannot survive without the synthesis of habit, how could we live the default of knowledge it enables us to ignore? What sort of coordination of the rational and the empirical could be effected if we were installed, practically, in the chasm between the past and the future opened by the problem of induction? Badiou enables Meillassoux’s reactivation of Hume’s problem, but if we turn the pupil’s intervention back upon the work of the master, we may see that Being and Event had already been implicitly concerned with the questions we have just posed. For to be what Badiou calls a subject involves tethering oneself, in excess of one’s habits as a human animal, to that rift between the past and the future Badiou calls an event. Indeed, the very existence of the subject depends upon the irreducibility of what happens to the laws of what happens: “The law does not prescribe there being some subjects.” Thus, “there are some subjects,” but “the subject is rare”: subjects are not given by the norm of situations, as “an invariable of presentations,” nor do they constitute the norm of situations in the manner of transcendental determination.7 Subjectivation is an exception to the law of situations, in excess of the norms that govern them, and as such its process depends upon a scission within the order of the given, a rupture between what has been and what will be, an interruption of the rules that had guided the adjustment of means to ends. Such an interruption may be ignored, or denied, or unrecognized—which is normally what happens; but if one not only recognizes this scission but makes it the very criterion of one’s activity, one ties the taking place of an event to a process of subjectivation toward the production of a truth. Of course, what Badiou calls an event does not interrupt the laws of nature, if the concept of nature is considered from the perspective of either science or transcendental philosophy. The regularities of physical action to which falling bodies or colliding billiard balls conform are not suspended by the storming of the Bastille or the advent of analytic cubism. On the contrary, the latter rely upon the former, even if they alter their social significance (a new meaning of universality) or their representational disposition (a new method of organizing the picture plane). But the relation of subject to event nevertheless entails a formidable disruption of habit requiring genuinely new ways of conceiving and practicing relations between causes and effects. If it is indeed the case that

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“custom is the great guide of human life,” the fidelity of a subject to an event is the unbinding of life from its all-too-human habits, from constant conjunctions that were previously observed. That unbinding does not just happen; it is a non-pragmatic practice requiring unreasonable applications of reason and the division of experience from past experience. That is, the practice of the subject requires a new coordination of reason and experience at variance with the coordinates of knowledge.

THE NOTHING THAT HAPPENS But exactly what kind of “experience” is at issue in the production of a truth through the fidelity of a subject to an event? Badiou tells us at the outset of Meditation 35, “Theory of the Subject,” that “a subject is not, in any manner, the organization of a sense of experience” (la sujet n’est en rien l’organisation d’un sens de l’experience).8 Badiou’s primary argument here is with Kant: the subject “is not a transcendental function.”9 The transcendental stipulates conditions of any possible experience, and Badiou advises that “if the word ‘experience’ has any meaning, it is that of designating presentation as such.”10 From a transcendental, phenomenological, or empiricist perspective, “presentation” is the domain of the given, and it obeys constitutive norms determining what is and is not possible. The subject inhabits the world of presentation, but it is constituted, qua subject, by relating to this world in a manner discrepant from the regulation of behavior according to the norms of the given. This is so because “a generic procedure, which stems from an evental ultra-one qualified by a supernumerary name, does not coincide in any way with presentation.”11 That is a strong claim. It means that fidelity to an event, participation in the construction of a truth, may take place in a world that is indeed the world of presentation, but it encounters and organizes terms of this world so as to construct something other than the givens of presentation, something in excess of what is apparently there. The event is in excess of the count-as-one that orders all presentation; a truth is indiscernible within the givens of presentation. The event is constituted, through its name (e.g., the Revolution) as such an excess: not only as one occurrence counted among others presented within the domain of experience, but as that which interrupts and fractures such a domain so as to present it anew under its own sign: When, for example, Saint-Just declares in 1794 “the Revolution is frozen,” he is certainly designating infinite signs of lassitude and general constraint, but he adds to them

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that one-mark that is the Revolution itself, as this signifier of the event which, being qualifiable (the Revolution is ‘frozen’), proves that it is itself a term of the event that it is. Of the French Revolution as event it must be said that it both presents the infinite multiple of the sequence of facts situated between 1789 and 1794, and, moreover, that it presents itself as an immanent résumé and one-mark of its own multiple.12

The name of the event is “supernumerary” in this sense: it is the name of an event that is included in the unfolding of the sequence it presents as that which presents that sequence. It names a term of the situation as the term of the situation, and a subject intervenes in accordance with this nomination, acting within the situation in terms of its relation to the event. But for those who scoff at revolutionary fervor or the enchantment of lovers, or for those removed from the formal breakthroughs of scientific or artistic practice, nothing has taken place at all. According to Bruno Latour, for example, “the revolutionary idea par excellence, the idea that revolution is possible,” is a bygone fantasy that “we” have now gotten over: “today, that very idea strikes us as exaggerated, since revolution is only one resource among many others in histories that have nothing revolutionary, nothing irreversible, about them.”13 “Seen as networks,” Latour continues, “the modern world, like revolutions, permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs.”14 Latour counsels that this “does not mean that I am a reactionary,”15 and for once he is right: he is just a conservative. Deploying the lingo of hybrids and monsters, he claims to speak for “today,” but what he says is the same thing the party of order has always said: don’t you think the very idea that revolution is possible is a little bit exaggerated? Citing François Furet (who was a reactionary) as if Furet were a neutral representative of what “French historians have finally understood,” Latour holds that “the events of 1789 were no more revolutionary than the modern world has been modern;” it was merely the case that “the actors and chroniclers of 1789 used the notion of revolution to understand what was happening to them, and to influence their own fate.”16 Observe the rhetoric to which Latour must resort in order to reduce the subject-language of these “actors and chroniclers” to irrelevance (to the “passing of an illusion,” as Furet would put it with respect to communism in the twentieth century): these actors and chroniclers used the notion of revolution to understand what was happening to them and to influence their own fate. They are positioned between passivity and destiny. Things happen to them, and they have a fate, but they do not determine what happens

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nor influence history. Thus, the Revolution is simply the desperate name of their subjection to the past, the present, and the future, concerning which they were in denial. From this point of view, there is no difference between fate and what happens; the organization of experience in terms of something new, something momentously unexpected, is just an illusory phantasm, the name of the nothing that has happened. But for those enveloped in constructing the consequences of this “nothing,” the name of the event (the Revolution) intervenes between “what was happening” and “fate,” and it does so with consequences. Latour/Furet see clearly that nomination and intervention are what bring the event into existence in the situation, precisely by introducing a term “added to the events of that time”17 (the Revolution). What Latour does not see clearly (or what he intentionally obscures) is that this is not simply a matter of understanding “what was happening” but of constituting a situation in which what happens is a matter of determined activity and commitment that breaks with what merely happens. This intervention is not a passive immersion in what happens, but it does rely upon the constitution of the subject through what has taken place: it marks the fact that something has really happened, something at variance from “small extensions of practices” insofar as it inaugurates and, perhaps, sustains a sequence refractory to the norms of experience. Latour reports the same thing as Badiou: the existence of the event is a matter of partisanship. Yet unlike Badiou, Latour reports this as though it were not a matter of partisanship (that would be too “polemical,” insufficiently urbane), but rather of objective history—of what, since the 1970s, French historians have “finally understood.” Since the 1970s means in the wake of May ’68 and the Maoism of the Red Years. The reaction against that upheaval in French history, which relayed the history of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, consisted in part of a historical project to erase its significance by erasing “the very idea of Revolution.” This project, on the basis of which Latour hails Furet, is the model of Latour’s own epistemology of “relativist relativism”: “the scientific revolutions still await their François Furet.”18 It is this revisionist epistemology Latour mobilizes against Althusser’s theory of the epistemological break: “Every new call to revolution, any epistemological break, any Copernican upheaval, any claim that certain practices have become outdated forever, would be deemed dangerous, or—what is still worse in the eyes of the moderns—outdated!”19 These formulations are useful because they make clear the stakes of Latour’s sociology of knowledge and the commitments of those who endorse it (usually in the name of some supposedly progressive politics): his rejection of the epistemological

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break is of a piece with a politics that reduces revolution to a safety hazard—the same politics the state and the police always call upon to justify their crackdowns. Latour is a conservative sophist, but he shares the key principle of every pragmatic communicator urging rational consensus, or every liberal sycophant urging compromise: the denial that a break between the past and the future can happen. For Latour, the very idea that such a break could happen is just “dangerous.” Latour merely states what Badiou theorizes: that activity stemming from the nomination of an event “does not coincide in any way with presentation.” But unlike Latour, Badiou does not recoil from the consequences of this noncoincidence: everything one encounters in this non-coincidence is encountered as new (otherwise it is not part of such a sequence at all), which is why it goes unrecognized (or deemed too “dangerous”) by those who obey the norms of the situation. Fidelity to an event inaugurates the conditions under which the unprecedented can proceed. To construct the indiscernible is to treat a sequence of encounters according to a rupture with the past, rather than according to knowledge of the past. The subject treats an exception according to the criteria of the indiscernible, constructing the consequences of the exception as the content of the indiscernible in the future anterior: the construction of a truth will have been the result of a procedure conducted as the consequence of an event. “A subject is what deals with the generic indiscernibility of a truth, which it accomplishes amidst discernible finitude, by a nomination whose referent is suspended from the future anterior of a condition.”20 A subject works “amidst discernible finitude” insofar as the situation it inhabits is that of the human animal; but the intervention of a subject in this situation is to treat it according to the taking place of something that cannot be accounted for according to the norms of its order. Thus “a subject always declares meaning in the future anterior.”21 The sense of a subject is what is to come, not what has been. Considered in terms of the problem of induction, the force that a subject accords to an event is to divide the future from the past, thus constructing the becoming of what will be according to this division. The scission of the future from the past, rather than the synthesis of habit, becomes the condition of the subject’s activity.

THE DOUBLE SCISSION The schema that follows (see Figure 29) formalizes the practice of a generic procedure as Badiou theorizes it in Meditation 35 of Being and Event. In his early Théorie de la contradiction, Badiou tells us that “the truth exists only as

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Figure 29. Badiou’s Truth Procedure—Between the Rational and the Empirical. Constituted by fidelity to an event, a subject constructs the indiscernible multiplicity of a truth through the practice of a generic procedure. The generic procedure consists of finite enquiries into terms of the situation, which are encountered and evaluated concerning their positive or negative relation to the event. Encounters with the terms of the situation are empirical, but not guided by knowledge; their trajectory is aleatory, and terms are treated according to their relation to a truth in the future anterior, not according to their relation with past experience. Empirical encounters with existing multiples are submitted to the formal rule of binary decision, producing statements concerning a truth that remain undecidable from the perspective of knowledge.

the process of a scission.” The schema displays subjectivization as the process of two scissions: 1. the scission between event and truth that is the process of the subject, working at the border of the evental site to construct its consequences within the situation 2. the scission between a rational procedure and empirical enquiries, whereby finite terms of the situation are encountered and evaluated according to their relation to the event

The temporality of a subject is situated between fidelity to an event and the future anterior of a truth. The activity of a subject consists in the evaluation of

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encounters according to the rule of a procedure. The temporality of this activity is the process of the subject (subjectivization). Thus, “A subject is . . . taken up in fidelity to the event and suspended from truth.”22 This is what the spatial layout of the schema attempts to display. Let us work through the series of concepts it configures in terms of two scissions, shuttling the process of the subject between event and truth (vertical axis) and between the rational and the empirical (horizontal axis), before considering more closely how the politics of Badiou’s theory of the subject might be understood in relation to the problem of induction.

1. EVENT/ TRUTH “The opening of a generic procedure founds, on its horizon, the assemblage of a truth. As such, subjectivization is that through which a truth is possible. It turns the event towards the truth of the situation for which the event is an event. It allows the evental ultra-one to be placed according to the indiscernible multiplicity . . . that a truth is.”23

Fidelity consists in a nomination of the event—an affirmation of its taking place—and an intervention in the situation on this basis. These inaugurate the process of a subject as the opening of a generic procedure, intervening at the site of an event within the situation. A procedure consists of a finite series of enquiries—investigations of terms within the situation according to whether or not they belong to the construction of a truth in the future anterior. Truth is an indiscernible multiplicity because it is indiscernible within the situation from which it is constructed. Confidence is the subjective belief that there is a truth that is being constructed.

2. SUBJECT “I term subjectivization the emergence of an operator, consecutive to an interventional nomination . . . If we consider the local status of a generic procedure, we notice that it depends on a simple encounter . . . The procedure is ruled in its effects and aleatory in its trajectory.”24

The process of a subject unfolds as an aleatory trajectory between finite terms of the situation, evaluated in terms of whether or not they belong to the truth of an event. The operator (☐) formalizes the connection between an event (ex) and a term ( y) of the situation, according to whether or not the term belongs to the truth of an event. A positive evaluation can thus be formalized (ex☐y), while a negative evaluation can be formalized (~(ex☐y)). On the right side of the schema (empirical enquiries), we can see that the subject is constituted by

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a series of encounters with finite terms of the situation. These terms are existing multiples belonging to the presentation of the situation in which they are counted-as-one. Aleatory encounters with these multiples constitute the matter of the subject. On the left side of the schema (rational procedure), we can see that the evaluation of each encounter performs an operation upon that which is presented. The procedure is “ruled in its effects” insofar as it submits the matter of the encounter to the form of a special count: rather than the count-as-one by which discrete terms of a situation are empirically presented, these terms are counted according to whether or not they belong to a truth. The real being of these existing multiples—insofar as they pertain to the subject—thus consists in their relation to the event rather than their existence in the situation. The subject produces statements that are qualified according to the relation eventtruth but unqualifiable according to the count-as-one (i.e. they are not counted by the norms of the situation). What the schema shows is that the process of the subject is both the scission of the rational and the empirical (the rational operation of the procedure is invisible within the empirical presentation of the situation) and the synthesis of their separation. The subject is both the separation and the relay of the rational and the empirical, just as the subject is both the separation and the relay of event and truth. As such, the subject submits its activity to the rule of fidelity rather than the habit-forms of past experience, yet the rationality of the form of the subject’s activity cannot control the empirical trajectory of its encounters, which are aleatory in their sequence. A subject is also “forever separated by chance” from a truth because the aleatory character of the composition of a truth is not legible in its result; the subject “does not coincide with its result”25 because it is precisely subjected to the chance of the encounters through which it constructs a truth that will have been the result not only of those encounters, but of their evaluation. “The subject is constituted by encountering its matter (the terms of the enquiry) without anything of its form (the name of the event and the operator of fidelity) prescribing such matter.”26 A subject is a being that treats its empirical encounters not according to the synthesis of the past with the future, but according to that peculiar rationality which directs the encounter toward a new composition. These concepts are formidably abstract. Indeed, they testify to the degree of abstraction requisite to describe the construction of what does not appear in a situation from the perspective of its norms. What must be recognized is that Badiou’s theory of the subject is not a prescriptive guide to political practice. Those who find this theory “idealist” should recall Badiou’s commitment to the

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position that philosophy does not condition politics but is conditioned by politics. The primacy of practice is installed at a fundamental methodological level in Badiou’s thought. He does not think that political subjects should go about their activity by deciding whether or not such and such a significant occurrence is “an event” and then decide how to properly apply “the operator of fidelity.” Such an orientation toward practice would constitute a theoreticist reverie that would destroy a relationship, obscure the specificity of political situations, distract from the immediate technical exigencies of scientific work, or reduce one’s art practice to theoretical demonstration. Badiou’s theory is a description of what subjects do in sequences that are not guided by any theory of the subject, but rather by the immediate import of inaugurating a break with the past norms of a situation. Badiou does not offer a theory of how to intervene in political situations; he offers a theory of how subjects do intervene in political situations.

OSCAR GRANT PLAZA/ OAKLAND COMMUNE Consider a concrete example, the sequence called “Occupy Oakland” (October 10, 2011–January 28, 2012). “Occupy Wall Street” had been inaugurated at Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, following which meetings ensued in Oakland, and many other cities, to initiate similar encampments in occupied public squares. When Frank H. Ogawa plaza, in front of Oakland City Hall, was occupied on October 10, the beginning of Occupy Oakland was marked by the renaming of the public space as Oscar Grant Plaza. Immediately, this nomination marked a double claim: that the terms encountered in the situation (Frank Ogawa Plaza) could only be misrecognized within the sequence initiated (Occupy Oakland) if they were not recognized as new terms of the situation (Oscar Grant Plaza). Thus the statement “this is Oscar Grant Plaza” reconstitutes a term presented by the count-as-one of the situation, Frank Ogawa Plaza, as a statement of a new subjectlanguage that performs the operation of including it within a special count: Oscar Grant Plaza now belongs to what has been produced by the political activity of Occupy Oakland, whereas Frank Ogawa Plaza does not. This distinction is practically legible within the situation. According to the encyclopedia, to civic authorities, and to those either against or indifferent to the political sequence called “Occupy Oakland,” the square is still named Frank Ogawa Plaza. Thus to refer to the plaza according to this prior name, still operative according to the law of the situation but not the political sequence operative within it, is to imply that one is not a partisan of that sequence. Moreover, this partisan renaming of the plaza has nothing in particular to do with the specificity of its previous name;

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it was not intended as a gesture against Frank Ogawa, but rather for (1) the recognition of a new sequence; (2) the binding of that sequence to another recent political sequence: Justice for Oscar Grant. The name “Oscar Grant Plaza” not only ties “Occupy Oakland” to the memory of Oscar Grant, killed by police in the Fruitvale BART station early on New Year’s Day, 2009; it also ties the occupation to the eruption of week-long riots in downtown Oakland in the wake of that killing, and to struggles against anti-black police brutality that followed from those riots. Retrospectively, one might thus view Occupy Oakland as a mediating sequence between Justice for Oscar Grant and the Black Lives Matter movement, between rebellion in the streets of Oakland following the killing of Oscar Grant and similar rebellions in the city following the acquittal of George Zimmerman (2013) and the shooting of Michael Brown (2014). But within the context of Occupy Oakland, the link to the police murder of Oscar Grant also had practically immediate consequences: police were barred entirely from the Plaza, and there was no compromise with civic authorities regarding the regulations of the Occupation itself. These inaugural decisions against any police presence and against compromise with civic laws marked both a difference between Occupy Oakland and other occupations (taking a stronger anti-reformist position) and a difference from the legal norms that had previously governed the plaza. Thus new norms would have to be enforced: to allow police within the plaza, or to compromise with authorities on civic regulations, would be to compromise one’s commitment to the statements of the sequence itself (no cops, no compromise with civic regulations, no collaboration with elected officials). The autonomy of the Plaza from the legal framework of civil society was marked by its attachment to the name of Oscar Grant and the negation of the legal order that killed him. Names are important, statements within a political sequence matter, because they designate the terrain of inclusion/exclusion according to which the sequence will proceed, and they formalize what it means to proceed within that terrain. Crucially, the renaming of the Plaza was then sutured to a second renaming, in this case of the occupation itself. The encampment of Occupy Oakland would come to be named “The Oakland Commune.” This was the name not only of a place (Oscar Grant Plaza) or of mutual aid through which the inhabitants of that place cared for one another and met basic needs, but also of the subject of the political sequence unfolding in and around that place. This was a collective subject, irreducible to any one individual or group of individuals participating in a political process. Indeed, the collective subject “Oakland Commune” could and did change at any time depending upon who was living there, who was

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making food or powering generators on stationary bicycles, who was participating in the general assembly, who was taking part in marches, rebuffing police, or organizing future actions. That collective came to include a heterogeneous multiplicity of people of divergent class positions—homeless lumpenproletarians, proletarians in low-wage service jobs, students, community organizes, professionals—and a discrepant variety of political orientations (liberal reformist, anarchist, communist, socialist, etc.). There was not necessarily any agreement among these people concerning exactly how things should proceed, but rather a constant process of disagreement and determination, sometimes mediated by the procedures of general assembly, sometimes worked out among subcommittees, frequently improvised on the spot. While any one or several or many individuals might disagree with any particular determination, nevertheless, the Oakland Commune did determine what it would or could, would not or could not do. Frequently it could not do much about the contradictions it encountered.27 Yet these limits, too, were added to the collectively constituted unfolding of its sequence. It is precisely the fact that no individual controls or even knows the totality of what is being determined that renders “indiscernible” what such a sequence produces: there is a collective subject (the Oakland Commune), but its activity is irreducible not only to the encyclopedia but also to the individual knowledge of those who produce it. After the Plaza was first violently cleared by police on the night of October 25, more than a thousand people gathered at the Oakland Public Library the following evening for a march to reestablish the occupation. But when the march arrived at its destination, having first wound through the streets of downtown, it stalled at the point of breaking through lines of police guarding Oscar Grant Plaza. The march had approached parallel to police lines, rather than confronting them directly, and self-appointed marshals—surrendering the collectively articulated goal of retaking the Plaza—directed marchers to continue, while radicals attempted to rally a push toward the former encampment. Thus what Badiou calls a “point” of the political sequence hung in the balance: Would or would not the Oakland Commune retake Oscar Grant Plaza to reestablish Occupy Oakland? The stalled march lingered in front of police lines, spreading out at the intersection of Fourteenth and Broadway, and a long standoff held until the police eventually fired teargas and flash-bang grenades into the crowd. An Iraq War veteran, who had been waving an American flag some ten feet from police lines, was struck in the head by a teargas canister, suffering brain injuries from which he would nearly die. Although the march eventually dispersed, the brutality of the police had temporarily undermined their backing by civic of-

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ficials, and the Plaza was taken unchallenged the next evening by some three thousand people, tearing down fences and reestablishing the camp and general assembly. One point had been resolved in unexpected fashion, but another was now tested: A call for a general strike on November 2 was put to the assembly and massively affirmed. On the day of the strike some forty thousand people would march on the Port of Oakland, shutting it down for two days. This segment of the longer sequence exemplifies the unpredictable shuttling between collective decision—both spontaneous and deliberative—and contingent encounters characteristic of radical political action. There is no “program” that can secure the unity of a collective during such sequences, as divisions abruptly spring from or are resolved by unexpected circumstances. A plan of action can be suddenly abandoned and then able to succeed the following day precisely because of its dramatic failure. The determination to carry out a mass action on the scale of a “general strike” can be mobilized by the brutal circumstance of a near fatality. A dispute among occupiers over whether or not to tear down a police fence can be resolved, an hour later, by the absence of those who resisted its dismantling. A port blockade with truly mass participation, the sort of thing that seemed practically impossible during the student movements in California two years previous, suddenly seemed inevitable. Occupations across the country would eventually be destroyed by federally coordinated crackdowns, but those occupations nevertheless demonstrated that a class-based political movement could spread through nearly every city in the United States and sustain itself over weeks or months through forms of directly organized mutual aid. The immanent articulation of such a sequence, unprecedented in its combination of organizational forms and mass mobilization across the country, is indifferent to both “failure” and “success.” That does not mean it lacks strategy, but that it must ultimately proceed according to what it can make possible as it happens, point by point. While Badiou’s algebraic formalisms and terms like “operator of fidelity” or “special count” may seem preposterously distant from the real difficulties and dilemmas of mass political action, they might be taken to register the degree of defamiliarization necessary to conceptually grasp and adequately theorize what is actually happening when decisions come to be made by no one in particular in the name of a collective called the Oakland Commune in Oscar Grant Plaza. The name “Oakland Commune” situates itself in a concatenated history, relaying the significance of the Paris Commune (perhaps implausibly) and fusing it with local insurrections following the killing of Oscar Grant. Even among these minimal indications, one sees the collective production of consequences irreducible to empirical givens of the situation, constructed from elements of the past yet irrevo-

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cably torqueing their history, propelling them into the emergence of a sequence whose endpoint is as yet indiscernible yet ardently pursued, the substance of a compound body articulated point by point among individuals who cannot entirely control which point is encountered next, yet who stake their actions on commitment to decisions shaping the very possibilities and limits of what is composed (e.g., no cops, no compromise with civic regulations, no collaboration with elected officials). The theoretical problem is how to coherently register and conceptualize the rift between the past and future such sequences are, and how to conceive action within them in terms of that rift. Terms like “event” and “truth” seem to smack of a certain romanticism the more hard-headed comrades find cloying. Yet one can and should give a deflationary account of their sense, without deflating their consequences. “Fidelity to an event” means: acting within a new sequence as if it is new, as if its terms are not those of the past situation, but terms one must evaluate according to the possibilities and impasses of what is unfolding as it happens, not within that public square (Frank Ogawa Plaza) but within this one (Oscar Grant Plaza), though they seem to others “the same” place. “Production of a truth” means the construction of a sequence of decisions, of actions, of statements that are irreducible to incorporation into the world as it was before, that force an alteration of the situation as it had existed. The term “truth” signifies the irreducibility of what is produced to knowledge. In 2013 I met with a friend in New York whom I hadn’t seen since before the occupations. She said, “Everything is different now; we live in a new world.” Despite my solidarity with her politics and sympathy for her perspective, I couldn’t quite agree, insisting that the real conditions in which people lived were not really any different than before—which was indeed the case. But I was wrong and she was right. Because the truth, irreducible to the empiricism of what is the case, is that recognition of an irrevocable alteration of the world is a partisan question of affirming what is indiscernible: that something really took place that was new and that therefore makes a cut in the continuum of history which can be carried forward. The world is not all that is the case, since there is no all, and since it is one’s orientation toward the indiscernible that situates the givenness of what is the case within an untotalizable movement irreducible to a set of cases.

HUME’S ARROW Considered in terms of Hume’s problem of induction, Badiou limns a strange terrain that can become legible only through a theory of the subject. The division between the past and the future that the subject affirms, and in accordance with

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which the subject acts, is not necessarily legible to everyone within the situation, nor is it necessarily legible afterwards. If all the trees were indeed to flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June, this alteration of the norms of the seasons would be legible without the militant affirmation of a subject. And this is the sort of contingency with which Meillassoux is concerned: that the laws of nature could really change, that the stability of the laws we observe is contingent rather than necessary, that the laws of becoming may be traversed by the becoming of laws. Badiou, on the other hand, is concerned with the contingency of what happens in another respect: that exceptions to the rule of situations can and do take place that do not necessarily alter the norms of situations for everyone, yet inaugurate a sequence for a subject, a sequence characterized by radical transformations of activity in accordance with the affirmation of a rupture with the past. We could say that Badiou’s theory of the event is not necessarily related to the problem of induction, since one could very well go on in conformity with one’s habits regardless of whether or not an event has taken place. But Badiou’s theory of the subject may indeed be usefully approached through the problem of induction, since it involves a form of life for which custom is not the great guide. Badiou theorizes the activity of a subject detached from Hume’s pragmatic resolution of his own skeptical doubts and installed in the aleatory process of a series of encounters whose adequate treatment depends upon subtracting them from the rules of experience. Badiou’s theory of the subject is both an empiricism of the encounter and an aleatory rationalism.28 If, according to Hume, we have neither rational nor empirical grounds for inferring the necessary connection of events, in Badiou’s theory of the subject we have a groundless synthesis of encounter and decision shorn of those statistical regularities which fill in the default of our understanding that Hume had exposed. Hence, the fragility of the subject in Badiou’s account; it has nothing to fall back on but its own commitment. Specifically, we can say that this fragility bears upon the distinction between truth and knowledge. Knowledge is a synthetic coordination of reason and experience that either denies or ignores the problem of induction; it at least implies that past experience offers sufficient reason for future expectation. Such knowledge may concede that it is statistical, rather than absolute, but it still assumes the rationality of its empirical claims. What Badiou calls truth, on the other hand, is divided from knowledge insofar as it affirms that past experience is not adequate to our relation to the future. Thus truth is not verifiable by knowledge, but it does not contradict it either.29 Truth is undecidable according to the criteria of knowledge and indifferent to those criteria in the process of its construction. Knowledge can only retrospectively recognize the terms of the construction:

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Knowledge can quite easily enumerate the constituents of the enquiries afterwards, because they come in finite number. Yet just as it cannot anticipate, in the moment itself, any meaning to their singular regrouping, knowledge cannot coincide with the subject, whose entire being is to encounter terms in a militant and aleatoric trajectory. Knowledge, in its encyclopaedic disposition, never encounters anything. . . . If the subject does not have any other being-in-situation than the term-multiples it encounters and evaluates, its essence, since it has to include the chance of these encounters, is rather the trajectory that links them. However, this trajectory, being incalculable, does not fall under any determinant of the encyclopedia.30

Crucially, then, we must recognize that the subject is divided from both truth and knowledge. It is divided from knowledge because “knowledge never encounters anything,” and the compendium of knowledge (what Badiou terms “the encyclopedia”) cannot account for the aleatory trajectory constituting the very process the subject is. Yet this aleatory constitution of the subject also divides it from truth, insofar the chance of the subject’s encounters is not legible in its result (the sum of its enquiries). This is why a subject does not “know the truth”; it is only the process of a finite practice. It inhabits a situation, but it does so as the void of the gulf between knowledge and truth. Finally, we must note the theoretical status of the coordination of the rational and the empirical in the construction of this account itself (rather than the practice of subjects of which it is an account). If Badiou’s theoretical framework is marked by an abstract formalism, it nevertheless has its genesis in Badiou’s practical experience of May ’68, and in the effort to account for what was at stake in the meaning of that event during the Red Years that followed from it. How could it be that what had transpired could be reduced, by those who either reacted against its consequences or consigned them to the encyclopedia of linear history, to the nullity of a brief episode to be either memorialized or eradicated? The strange quality of empirical participation in such ruptures is that they are not amenable to empirical description. But nor does that mean they are only describable through poetic language or quasi-mystical evocation. For what is at issue in such ruptures is not only the enthusiasm they produce, or the intensities of their phenomenal texture, as if it were only the singularity of their affective experience that rendered them refractory to simple empiricism. It is not only that affective singularity but also the form of reason involved in love, or art, or politics, or scientific breakthroughs that render their ruptural force at once compelling and nearly incommunicable. It is the fact that the experience of certain sequences both produces and requires heightened forms of rationality (often collective) precisely because they are subtracted from the norms of everyday knowledge that renders such experience irreducible to fact.

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For those who are willing to think, formalization is not merely the reduction of the “messiness” of reality to the “clean” requisites of a conceptual vocabulary. It is, on the contrary, the mark of recognizing that it is precisely the chaos of contingent encounters and profoundly unassimilable states of affairs that generates forms of rational discernment to which our habits offer no adequate guide, such that they must be rendered in terms that vary from ordinary language. For what Hume shows is that we never experience any instance of necessary connection between causes and effects, between the past and the future. Habit obscures this fact by creating an expectation of conjunction, the obedience of the future to the past, at the level of behavior. The enthusiasm of political action is easily dismissed as irrational by those who do not partake of it, but it is actually the rationality of that enthusiasm that is more deeply unsettling: the manner in which it cuts through the fallacies of official negotiations or reformist compromise. Such rationality stems from a lucid recognition: we do not know that the way things will be cannot be detached from the way they have been. Since this recognition is refractory to the language of the encyclopedia, the bracing experience of political rationality requires formal tools sufficiently subtractive to remove its description from the givens of empirical history. “Without the influence of custom,” writes Hume, “we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact, beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be at once an end of all action, as well as the chief part of speculation.”31 That is no doubt true, and it remains the case in those unprecedented sequences proper to politics, science, art, or love. But the utility of custom in those sequences—which has taught us how to use a paintbrush, to publicize a march, to use a technology, or how to talk with someone—also obscures the singularity of their unfolding. To address a lover’s body as unprecedented, and also one’s own body as unprecedented in relation to that lover, is to recognize that there is no sexual relation, and thereby to experience sex as something other than codifiable technique or the mimesis of pornography. To pursue political action not only on the basis of what one has learned from previous practice, but also according to singularities with which one has no experience, is to bring new forms of politics into being. Custom is not only a condition of possibility for action and speculation, but also the condition of impossibility for certain kinds of action and speculation; it impedes their ruptural transformation. Like laws, habits are made to be broken. Thus they have to be supplemented by an orientation toward the unprecedented, which is precisely what the problem of induction contemplates.

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Perhaps the antagonism proper to Hume’s philosophy is not so much between skepticism and pragmatism as between an empiricism of custom and an empiricism of the encounter—which would have to meet the demands of reason (what must we do?) without recourse to the givenness of past experience. That is why the subject is positioned as the conjunction of an aleatory rationalism and an empiricism of the encounter on the schema presented earlier. The subject collapses Hume’s fork into an arrow, the trajectory of which is irreducible to the calculus of probabilities or the principle of sufficient reason, and which splits the difference between the discourse of reason and the unfolding of experience. To be the flight of such an arrow is not to be either an empiricist or a rationalist but to traverse their disjunction as the antagonist of two gravities: that of the earth and that of the sun.

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Everything you say about the conjuncture is very valid; but isn’t to know the conjuncture precisely to know it insofar as it is a lack? —Pierre Macherey to Louis Althusser, May 10, 1965 Immediate struggles, practically and in their own discourse, produce unfalteringly, within themselves, an internal distance. —Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment,” 2008

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THE CRITERION OF IMMANENCE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF STRUCTURAL CAUSALITY: FROM ALTHUSSER TO THÉORIE COMMUNISTE

Louis Althusser’s central concept—structural causality—is the key term in his effort to theorize the immanence of historical process: “the immanence of a cause in its effects.”1 Althusser refers this concept of immanent cause to “Spinoza’s sense of the term,” namely “that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.”2 But the problem of structural causality in Althusser’s work—that is, the manner in which this term continues to name a problem and not just a concept—devolves from the difficulty of transforming Spinoza’s metaphysical theory of substance into a theory of history, of the structural causality of capital. As Warren Montag has shown—working from indications in Pierre Macherey’s correspondence with Althusser—a key marker of the tension between Althusser’s and Spinoza’s understandings of “the immanence of a cause in its effects” is the status of the “whole” in Althusser’s thinking of structural causality. Troubled by Althusser’s references to “the idea of the structured whole,”3 Macherey writes: I understand all that you have said about the nature and the efficacy of structure and about the relations between structures. But it seems to me that when you speak of a set (ensemble) or of a whole, you thereby add a concept that is absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration.4 204

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Althusser agrees, conceding that he has “a tendency to take refuge in certain of Marx’s texts where there is a reference to the ‘organic whole,’ ”5 lacking a more precise concept to remove this epistemological obstacle. Montag notes that this difficulty results in two discrepant concepts of structure in Althusser’s thought, one of “the whole whose causal significance lies in its assigning to its parts their place and function” and another conceiving of structure “as the conjunction of singular entities in a larger singular entity that persists in its conjoined state for a specific period of time.”6 Given the rift between these discrepant concepts, the question posed by Montag’s account is “why preserve the notion of structure at all if, even in Althusser’s work, it appears destined to transmit, as if by contagion, the ideology of a whole superior to and greater than its parts?”7 One might answer that it is precisely the contradiction between conceiving of structure as a whole acting upon its elements and conceiving it as immanent in its effects that both propels and limits Althusser’s theoretical enterprise, such that the problem is not so much how to secure a thinking of structure adequate to the second of Althusser’s discrepant concepts (the properly Spinozist one), but rather how to think the dislocation (décalage) of the two concepts as the immanence of structure. From this perspective, the way to meet the criterion of immanence is not to think it as a non-totalizable infinity, rather than the totality of the whole, but rather to think it as a rift (écart) perpetually detotalizing structure through an immanent process of division, the scission of unity through the movement of contradiction. This is the transformation of structural causality I want to explore in the post-Althusserian work of the Marseilles-based group Théorie Communiste. What will be at issue in this transformation is not only an adequate understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy, but also an understanding of the relation between theory and praxis adequate to the shifting structure of the class relation. But before we explore this transformation of structural causality, we need to attend more closely to how the criterion of immanence functions in Althusser, and how it is related to his equivocal reliance upon the concept of the whole.

FORCING ADEQUACY The criterion of immanence is crucial to Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism insofar as it is aligned with Spinoza’s critique of voluntarist freedom. Althusser’s critiques of the concepts of alienation and species-being in the early Marx, of Sartrean freedom, of proletarian revolt as expressive of human essence, all con-

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cur with Spinoza’s principle that free action cannot emerge from any origin or essence proper to human individuals, stated most directly in Ethics II.35.Sch: “Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Therefore the idea of their freedom is simply the ignorance of the cause of their actions.”8 Note that belief in individual freedom is an epistemological problem for Spinoza; it stems from ignorance of causes. For Althusser this epistemological problem is bound up with our understanding of history. The false problem of the “role of the individual in history” indexes a true problem, which is to understand the historical forms of existence of individuality and particularly the place of individuals with respect to forms of production. This problem demands not simply an empiricist treatment—a description of history— but rather a conceptual articulation capable of grasping the structural production of forms of individuality, as well as the structural production of collective revolutionary activity. As the effect of structure qua imminent cause, “the ‘subject’ plays, not the part it believes it is playing, but the part which is assigned to it by the mechanism of the process.”9 This is the Spinozist ground of the claim that history is a process without a subject. But understanding the assignment of parts by this “mechanism of the process” requires situating agency at a different level than that theorized by Spinoza. “For Marx,” Althusser writes, “the social relations of production do not bring men alone onto the stage, but the agents of the production process and the material conditions of the production process in specific ‘combinations.’ ”10 Here forms of agency are situated not as effects of individual freedom, but rather as historical effects of the process of production. But whereas Spinoza rejects belief in individual freedom as the effect of ignorance, he can nevertheless conceive determination itself as a form of freedom, through the alignment of desire and understanding with the infinite causality of substance. To “understand all things as governed by necessity,” within Spinoza’s ontological framework, is “to be determined to exist and to act by an infinite chain of causes.” It is through this understanding, which aligns the mind with the infinite through the understanding of causes, that “the mind succeeds in becoming less passive to the emotions that arise from things.”11 Because “the immanence of a cause in its effects” is theorized by Spinoza as a relation between the infinite and the finite (substance and modes), to understand this causal immanence is to grasp one’s being as aligned with the infinite itself (God), and thus to understand that the only adequate form of desire aligns thinking and acting with infinite causes rather than finite things. The power of reason to arrange affections of the body

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according to the order of the intellect is a power that stems from and is aligned with such infinite causes.12 But the theory of capital as structural cause (rather than God or Nature) allows for no direct alignment, through reason, of desire with determination. Rather, insofar as capital could be understood as a self-undermining structure (the revolutionary subject of capital is capital itself ), its peculiar form of structural causality is a “moving contradiction” that divides agents into antagonistic classes. To understand revolutionary class action within this framework (rather than in terms of individual voluntarism), one must theorize a form of structural causality split against itself, rather than as an infinite chain of causes with which one could align one’s desire. For if “The idea of God, from which infinite things follow in infinite ways, must be one, and one only,”13 the causality of capital must be understood such that the one divides into two. Unlike Spinozist substance, capital is a historically finite structure of domination—which is precisely why it can structurally undermine itself, and why its structural causality can be displaced from within its determinations. Properly grasping this, however (without seeking shelter in humanist voluntarism), requires a theory of capitalist causality as immanent detotalization, rather than as totalizing whole. In my view, it is the tension of transforming a theory of the causality of infinite substance into a causal theory of “the material process of production in specific ‘combinations’ ” that leads Althusser to take refuge in the concept of the whole. If this concept offers a sense of security, it may be because it promises the theory of structural causality a certain built-in epistemological adequacy, in the manner suggested by Spinoza: “Those things that are common to all things and are equally in the part as in the whole, can be conceived only adequately.”14 In Althusserian terms, it is understanding all elements of capital as equally in the part as in the whole—as an “organic whole”—that forces epistemological adequacy and exposes ideological error. Indeed, one might conceive of various deviations from Marx’s historical materialism (humanism, historicism, economism) as forms of investment in one or another element of historical process which fail to relate it equally to all other elements and to the structure of their relations. “It is the peculiarity of every ideological conception,” Althusser writes, “especially if it has conquered a scientific conception by diverting it from its true meaning, that it is governed by ‘interests’ beyond the necessity of knowledge alone.”15 The particularity of these “interests” detaches certain concepts or functions from the complex relations in which they are embedded, prioritizing part over whole. To the opportunistic response of ideology to historical circumstance, Althusser opposes the synchronic dimension of theoretical analysis itself, the capacity of

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such analysis to grasp a conjuncture in relation to the systematic determinations of complex whole: “The synchronic is then nothing but the conception of the specific relations that exist between the different elements and the different structures of the structure of the whole, it is the knowledge of the relations of dependence and articulation which make it an organic whole, a system.”16 This is the apogee of Althusser’s epistemological reliance upon Marx’s organic metaphor, where structure and whole are joined by the concept of system— even though the distinction between structure and system is never theoretically elaborated. Following that passage, Althusser declares that “The synchronic is eternity in Spinoza’s sense, or the adequate knowledge of a complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexity.”17 But here Althusser is quite wide of the mark, since Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge may be conceived as eternity because it is knowledge of eternity, grasped through the eternal essence of thought. Intellectual love of God, or the third kind of knowledge, “follows necessarily from the nature of the mind insofar as that is considered as an eternal truth through God’s nature.”18 Knowledge of capital, on the other hand, does not follow necessarily from the nature of the mind, and the synchronic theory of its structure is precisely not, according to Althusser, derived from the eternity of that which it understands. In his enthusiasm, Althusser would like to promote adequate knowledge of structural causality to the level of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge; but such knowledge can only be ontological. Understood in Spinoza’s terms, the adequacy of Marxist science is that of the second kind of knowledge: the rational understanding of finite things through their complex causal determinations. Even this concession, however, presses upon the coherence of understanding historical materialism in terms of Spinozist epistemology, since even the second kind of knowledge (according to Spinoza) relies upon the capacity of reason to grasp the necessity rather than the contingency of what is the case. Adequate knowledge of capital is precisely knowledge of its historical contingency, even as we work to understand the determinations of its structural effectivity.19 If Althusser’s tendency to situate the concept of structural causality as knowledge of the whole is not only a tendency to take refuge in Marx’s organicist metaphors, but also an effort to sustain a strained homology with Spinoza’s epistemology, this effort also bears on the determination of knowledge itself. If, for Spinoza, we attain the third kind of knowledge by thinking according to the eternal essence of substance, for Althusser the kind of “sighting” at issue in Marx’s theoretical revolution is “no longer the act of an individual subject, endowed

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with the faculty of ‘vision’ which he exercises either attentively or distractedly; the sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is the relation of immanent reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its problems.”20 Here we come full circle to the criterion of immanence, as knowledge of capital is produced by historical process, as “the act of its structural conditions” and through a relation of “immanent reflection.” Althusser tells us in a footnote that this concept of “reflection” poses a theoretical problem to which he will have to return. But when he does return to this problem in the promised section of his introduction, we learn that what is at issue between “the existence of the system” (a theoretical construction) and “the existence of the forms of order of the discourse” (hierarchy of theoretical concepts) is “the unity of dislocation of the system and of the discourse.”21 It seems that what the immanent reflection of the social totality within a theoretical system produces is a dislocation internal to the system, whereby the very existence of systematic knowledge is disjoined from the conceptual order that articulates it. The concept Althusser borrows from Marx to designate the hierarchy of concepts within a theoretical system is the “Gliederung,” the articulated combination of the elements of a structure— the same term he borrows from Marx to designate the structural articulation of the mode of production and social relations of capitalism. So, knowledge of the Gliederung of historical process produces, within that knowledge, the Gliederung of concepts constituting a theoretical system, and this articulated combination of concepts is held in a unity of dislocation with the existence of the system itself. Is this (theoretical) unity of dislocation also the “immanent reflection” of a unity of dislocation proper to the existence of the historical process in relation to its structural articulation? If so, could this unity of dislocation be the site, within Althusser’s thought, of a potential break with his own effort to make historical materialism homologous to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge? Rather than aligning theoretical knowledge with “eternity in Spinoza’s sense” (the unity of the infinite), one aligns it instead with a dislocation, within the theoretical field, that is the “immanent reflection” of a dislocation within the social and historical field. In this case, one would require an understanding of theory and practice adequate to a concept of immanence as dislocation itself.

THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZATION The practical double of the theoretical tension attending Althusser’s concept of structural causality is his commitment to the French Communist Party (PCF)

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and, more broadly, to the Party as an organizational form. This practical error also has to do with the difficulty of sustaining the criterion of immanence, of how to situate the “immanent reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its problems.” Gilles Deleuze tells us that Spinoza “is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape,” that Spinoza was the only philosopher “never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere.”22 If “the whole” is the theoretical site of Althusser’s compromise with transcendence,23 the Party is its practical site. Althusser’s commitment to the Party is articulated most symptomatically in opposition to left communism.24 He sees left communism as a “historicisthumanist interpretation of Marxism” that “came to birth in the portents and in the wake of the 1917 Revolution” as a “violent protest against the mechanism and opportunism of the Second International.” He claims that “this ‘left-wing’ humanism designated the proletariat as the site and missionary of the human essence,” and that it “appealed directly to the consciousness and will of men to reject the War, overthrow capitalism and make the revolution.”25 On this basis, he argues, “Kautsky’s and Lenin’s thesis that Marxist theory is produced by a specific theoretical practice, outside the proletariat, and that Marxist theory must be ‘imported’ into the proletariat, was absolutely rejected—and all the themes of spontaneism rushed into Marxism through this open breach: the humanist universalism of the proletariat.”26 We can see how this defense of the exteriority of Party intellectuals to the proletariat, against the “humanist universalism of the proletariat,” might be aligned with Althusser’s conception of theory as “knowledge of the complex articulation that makes a whole a whole.”27 The exteriority of theoretical practice to the class on behalf of which it works enables it to sustain a structural perspective exterior to the structural position of the proletariat, considered as an element within the whole. The transmission of theoretical production from the Party to the proletariat would make the Party the organon of a totalizing structural knowledge necessary to counter the supposed humanist essentialism of left communism. It is quite reductive, however, to characterize left communism as a direct appeal to the consciousness and will of men. Rather, it is best understood as a critical analysis of the relation between the categories of party, class, and masses within the communist movement. For example, Anton Pannekoek’s critique of the Party as a form of organization does not appeal directly to the will of men but rather to a different organizational form than the party—that of the worker’s council—as a means of developing the intelligence and practical strength of the masses, an organizational form that was more distributed and horizontal than

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centralized and hierarchical.28 For Pannekoek, the proper role of the Party was to promulgate and support the distributed action of such organizations, rather than bringing them under centralized control, so as to draw the masses into struggle as broadly as possible. This was not a direct appeal to the human essence of the proletariat or to the will of men; it was an argument that reliance upon party leaders reinforces bourgeois norms of political organization and encourages proletarian passivity. Thus, distributed rather than centralized organizational bodies should play the primary role in constituting the masses as a class. Pannekoek’s position does not rely upon the voluntaristic spontaneism of workers; it situates the dialectical production of theory within the movement as it is organized, articulated, and subjected to criticism by the distribution of councils or soviets.29 The weakness of Althusser’s critique of left communism corresponds to the weakness of his Kautskyist position on theoretical production, approaching both as if there were no organizational alternative to either humanist spontaneism or the exteriority of intellectuals to the proletariat.30 We find one side of this critique articulated by Jacques Rancière in Althusser’s Lesson.31 If it was not so before, it became very clear during and after May ’68 that the PCF functioned as a counter-revolutionary obstacle to the dynamism of class struggle, and Rancière is right to denounce Althusser for his defense of its ossified form. The problem, however, is that by the time he comes to write his scathing critique of his former master, Rancière has positively adopted the caricature of left communism promulgated by Althusser; he identifies councilism with a humanist appeal to “the man workers,”32 in this case affirming rather than denouncing this identification. Against Althusser’s anti-humanism, Rancière’s primary example of workers’ capacity for autonomous self-organization and self-determination is the Lip watch factory occupation of 1973, in Besançon. Revolting against planned layoffs, Lip workers took over their factory and continued production under their own self-management. Rancière identifies their autonomous production with the appropriation of instruments of production by textile workers in 1833, arguing that “the new chain initiated there leads straight to our present. Lip 1973: workers are not people one can separate and displace how one pleases.” As “a weapon to remember this by,” Rancière offers the song of the Lip workers: “It is possible: we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves.” It is possible, Rancière repeats, “the whole ideological struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is played out there.”33 But what is “it?” Isn’t the whole ideological struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat played out over what is possible? The problem is that it was not the destruction of wage labor or capital that was said to

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be possible at Besançon, but rather the preservation of wage labor and selfmanaged participation in the capitalist market. What the Lip workers found out, however, was that it was not in fact possible to sustain the firm’s capital through expanded cycles of reproduction without the layoffs that were planned, and their self-management of production collapsed under market forces. As a major crux of post–May ’68 communist politics in France, the Lip affair does indeed exemplify the problem with the humanist orientation toward councilism that Althusser incorrectly attributed to left communism in general: the self-affirmation of “men” as autonomous producers does not suffice to break the structural hold of capitalist social relations upon production.34 It is practically and historically useless, however, to assign theoretical failure to proper names in such instances. The discrepant trajectories of “Althusser” and “Rancière,” the impasses they encounter in the relation between theory and practice, exemplify the problem of organization as it manifests itself in class struggle. We can grasp the difficulty of this problem by turning to two texts by left communist Paul Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organization” and “New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle.”35 In these texts, Mattick considers the simple but crucial point that the organizational forms of communist struggle derive from the organizational forms of capital. Thus, any organizational form bears its counter-revolutionary incorporation within it. Capital produces the class which organizes itself against capital, and the organizational forms available to proletarian struggle are those made available by capital: the bureaucratic structure of the Party, unions organized by trade, councils organized by workplace, selforganized production in factories, the parliamentary formalism of the general assembly, the distributed information networks of late capitalist accumulation. The dialectical problem is that in order to function within capitalism, forms of organization emerge from and adapt themselves to its structures and imperatives. In order to do something socially significant, actions must be organized. But insofar as they are organized, actions to tend to accommodate themselves to capitalist channels. Within capitalism, no organization can be consistently anticapitalist, and organizations that do not disturb prevailing social relationships grow and persist more easily than those which do.36 We see this in the historical accommodation of unions and parties, in the “self-management” of collective capitalism at Lip, or in the tendency of an organizational form like the general assembly toward reformist consensus. Any organizational form is at once a means of class struggle and an obstacle it must overcome. This dialectical analysis obviously does not involve taking a position “against” organization, but rather an acknowledgment of the constitutive contradiction with which anti-capitalist orga-

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nization is bound up. It is a contradiction that applies equally to the council, the self-organized workplace, or the Communist Party. While the errors of Althusser and Rancière seem diametrically opposed, both fail to grapple adequately with the problem of organization as it presents itself through both communist parties and self-organized councils. To analyze the dialectical problem of organization as Mattick does is to submit it to the immanence of structural causality, rather than either exempting theoretical production from immersion in proletarian struggle or putting one’s faith in the autonomy of workers themselves. Situated neither as an “element” of the structural causality of capital, nor in opposition to it as a “whole,” the problem of organization appears as something like the dynamic of the structure—its “moving contradiction”—and also as the limit of that dynamic, the manner in which the contradictory character of capital, manifest in anti-capitalist struggle, is folded back into its structural reproduction. In order for an analysis of class struggle attuned to the structural dialectic of dynamic and limit to be an analysis of the moving contradiction, it would have to understand struggle not as fully incorporated into a cycle of reproduction but also as the production of a rift, a structural gap, or decomposition within that cycle—one that threatens, at times, its recomposition as a cycle. To approach the movement of class struggle in this way, as the movement of history, would be “to know the conjuncture . . . insofar as it is a lack,” as Macherey suggests. This would involve understanding the relation between theory and practice in terms of the production of a lack, rather as the attainment of adequate knowledge of the whole, or as the autonomy of workers within the whole. It would involve thinking structural causality not as the immanence of structure in its elements (where elements are conceived as parts of a whole immanent “in” them), but as the immanent movement of a rift that both constitutes and threatens the reproduction of structure.

DOUBLE DISJUNCTION It is in terms of such an approach to structural causality that we can situate the work of the group Théorie Communiste (TC). Formed in Marseille in 1975, TC began publishing their journal (Théorie Communiste) in 1977; its twenty-fifth iteration appeared in 2018. Having contributed to the journal Intervention Communiste (1972, 1973) and to Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils (1968–73), the group emerged from debates in the wake of May ’68 concerning the legacy of left communism, the limits of self-organization, and the impasses of the council form. Their primary contribution, along with Gilles Dauvé and François Martin,37

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has been to theorize the concept of “communization” as the manner in which the problem of revolution has come to be presented. Rather than conceive communism as the goal of revolution—approached through a seizure of state power moving through proletarian dictatorship and transitional socialism—the very process of revolution itself becomes the production of communism, sustained through the taking of “communist measures” that displace capitalist social relations and enable the reproduction of social individuals otherwise than as classes: In the course of revolutionary struggle, the abolition of the state, of exchange, of the division of labor, of any kind of property, the extension of free-giving as the unification of human activity—in a word, the abolition of classes—are “measures” that abolish capital, imposed by the very necessities of struggle against the capitalist class. Revolution is communization; it does not have communism as a project and result, but as its very content.38

In the period of capitalist accumulation since the 1970s—this is TC’s wager—the problem of revolution presents itself as the problem of how these “necessities of struggle” can be met as the very measures that abolish capital, without requiring the prior seizure of the state or consolidation of worker’s autonomy within capital to carry out such measures. Fundamentally, the theory of communization is a reformulated approach to an old problem: the self-abolition of the proletariat. The problem of revolution is conceived as that of how the proletariat, acting as a class, can reproduce itself as something other than a class. The self-abolition of the proletariat is thus conceived as immanent to the process of revolution: those measures required to sustain revolution are precisely those enabling proletarians to reproduce their existence without reproducing the class relation. If this seems like a daunting prospect, it should be recognized that Théorie Communiste does not think otherwise. The theory of communization is not a celebratory, predictive, or prescriptive theory; it is not a normative assessment of communist horizons. Rather, it is a descriptive analysis of how the problem of revolution has been altered by historical, structural transformations of the class relation. Its upshot is that, if the production of communism confronts proletarians more directly in than in the past, that is because the forms of revolutionary mediation proper to the history of the worker’s movement have been hollowed out by the restructuring of capital since the 1970s. The restructuring of capital during the 1970s and 1980s analyzed by TC is perhaps most familiar through such terms as “post-Fordism,” “neoliberalism,” “globalization,” and “financialization”—terms they steer clear of, the better to

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foreground structural transformations of the class relation to which these terms refer. The disaggregation of the working class by offshoring and globally tendential deindustrialization; the undermining of social welfare programs and socialist economic policies by austerity measures and the enforcement of structural adjustment programs; the expansion of both financial speculation and credit markets that temporarily detach forms of valorization from the direct process of production and that unfix consumer from direct correlation with wages: how to understand the significance of this restructuring, both in terms of the structure of the capitalist class relation and the structure of anti-capitalist class struggle? According to TC, “In restructured capitalism, the reproduction of labor power was subjected to a dual disconnection. One the one hand, disconnection between valorization of capital and reproduction of labor power and, on the other, disconnection between consumption and wage as income.”39 TC understands the detachment of the valorization of capital from the reproduction of labor power first of all as an effect of the geographic zoning of capitalist production into capitalist hypercenters grouping together the higher functions in the hierarchy of business organization (finance, high technology, research centers, etc.); secondary zones with activities requiring intermediate technologies, encompassing logistics and commercial distribution, ill-defined zones with peripheral areas devoted to assembly activities, often outsourced; last, crisis zones and “social dustbins” in which a whole informal economy involving legal or illegal products prospers.40

This global reorganization and segmentation of the process of production, coordinated by logistics, is by now familiar. TC’s crucial analytical point is that “although the valorization of capital is unified through this zoning, the same is not true for the reproduction of labor power.”41 What is at issue here is precisely a dislocation between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of labor. If logistics unifies the process of valorization across regional zones, Reproduction occurs in different ways in each of these zones. In the first world: highwage strata where social risks are privatized intermeshed with fractions of the labor force where certain aspects of Fordism have been preserved and others, increasingly numerous, subjected to a new “compromise.” In the second world: regulation through low wages, imposed by strong internal migratory pressure and precarious employment, islands of more or less stable international subcontracting, little or no guarantee for social risks and labor migrations. In the third world: humanitarian aid, all kinds of illicit trade, agricultural survival, regulation by all various mafias and wars on a more or less restricted scale, but also by the revival of local and ethnic solidarities.42

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On the one hand, we have regionally discrepant modalities of capitalist production; on the other, regionally discrepant modalities of the reproduction of labor. But if these discrepancies were previously (and still are) recognizable in terms of uneven development, what they come to have in common is their necessity for the reproduction of capital. To be precise, both capitalist production and the reproduction of labor are fragmented in the service of the reproduction of capital, but labor itself is not unified by the fragmentation of its modes of reproduction. Capital is fragmented in production but unified in reproduction; labor is simply fragmented. If the discrepant reproduction of labor is unified for capital, the unified reproduction of capital does not unify the discrepant reproduction of labor. TC concludes that “the disjunction between the unified global valorization of capital and the reproduction of labor power adequate for that valorization is total. Between the two, the strictly equivalent reciprocal relationship between mass production and the modalities of reproduction of labor power, which used to define Fordism, has disappeared.”43 The “social compact” of Fordism and Keynesian regulation, whereby surging profit rates predicated upon rising extraction of relative surplus value enabled exploitation to correspond with relatively high wages and reasonable hours, is replaced by a separation: “the strictly equivalent reciprocal relationship between mass production and the modalities of reproduction of labor power.” A relative return to absolute surplus value extraction through off-shoring (low wages/long hours) corresponds with a fragmentation of proletarian reproduction. At the same time, a second disjunction—in this case between consumption and wage—involves wage stagnation accompanied by increased levels of debt. Here we find financial speculation buoyed by credit markets that unfix spending from direct correlation with income. The 2008 economic crisis was the coming home to roost of this disjunction, whereby speculation on subprime mortgages encountered the insolvency of household economies, crushed by discrepancies between spending (debt) and income. TC notes that In the succession of financial crises which for the last twenty years or so have regulated the current mode of valorization of capital, the subprime crisis is the first to have taken as its point of departure not the financial assets that refer to capital investments, but household consumption, and more precisely that of the poorest households. In this respect it is a crisis specifically of the “wage” relation of restructured capitalism.44

Here the stagnation of wages “catches up” with the disjunction of wages from consumption: “the current crisis broke out because proletarians could no longer repay their loans. It broke out due to the wage relation itself.”45 But if wage

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demands thus seem like an obvious response to this crisis, they also appear structurally incoherent at the level of class struggle, precisely because the disconnection between wages and consumption is accompanied by a disconnection between valorization of capital and reproduction of labor power. It is largely because of the zoning of capitalist production that wages stagnate, and that consumption must be untethered from wages by credit, since the reproduction of labor is now globally fragmented, and since a vast pool of surplus populations (thrown outside the wage relation altogether) obviates the necessity of meeting wage demands. Capitalist production and proletarian reproduction are no longer directly linked and coordinated as they were from the late nineteenth century through the Fordist system of regulation during the postwar boom. The place of struggle no longer necessarily corresponds with the place of production, since the zoning of the reproduction of labor does not correspond with the zoning of capitalist production.

PERIODIZING CLASS STRUGGLE TC’s contribution to revolutionary theory is to analyze this double disjunction as concomitant with the emergence of a new “cycle of struggles” subsequent to “programmatism” (the modality of struggle proper to the history of the workers’ movement). Programmatism specifies a theory and practice of struggle for which revolution is a program to be realized, predicated upon the affirmation of working-class power. For programmatism, TC argues, “revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalized self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers.’ ”46 They emphasize that programmatism is not simply a theory—it is above all the practice of the proletariat, in which the rising strength of the class (in unions and parliaments, organizationally, in terms of the relations of social forces or of a certain level of consciousness regarding the ‘lessons of history’) is positively conceived of as a stepping-stone toward revolution and communism.47

Programmatism identifies revolution with the rising strength of the proletariat and its process with the organizational mediations of the workers’ movement. TC periodizes the history of programmatism in two phases.48 During the first of these phases (ca. 1830–1920), capital is posed as an external force in its relation to labor, while the working class affirms its own capacity to liberate produc-

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tive labor from capital. Yet through its mediations (unions, parties, cooperatives, societies, parliaments), TC argues, “the proletariat’s rising strength is confused with the development of capital, and comes to contradict that which was nevertheless its own specific purpose: its autonomous affirmation.”49 This contradiction is legible above all in the left communist analysis of the revolutionary period following World War I (especially the Russian and German revolutions): the revolution as affirmation of class power confronts counter-revolution in the form of its own mediations. This is an objective contradiction, not the result of an “error” on the part of one faction or another. The “infantile disorder” Lenin attributes to left communism, or the “betrayals” and “compromises” with which communist parties are charged by left communists, are expressions of an impasse of the revolutionary process: organizing itself against capital, the proletariat confronts itself as a class of the capitalist mode of production, now affirming its domination of production. If Lenin is correct that the compromises with which democratic centralism is charged by left communists are necessary for the revolution to continue, left communists are correct in charging that they are nevertheless counter-revolutionary. “From this point on,” TC argues, “the worker’s parties become the content of the counter-revolution closest to the revolution.”50 This is what we see during May ’68, for example, in the PCF’s polemics against student insurrection and its reformist encouragement of a return to work. The second period of programmatism (ca. 1920–80) is also that of its decomposition. During this phase, corresponding with intensified extraction of relative surplus value, working class identity is stabilized and confirmed within the reproduction of capital: worker’s identity is founded on all the characteristics of the immediate process of production (i.e. assembly-line work, cooperation, the collective worker, the continuity of the process of production, sub-contracting, the segmentation of labor power) and all those of reproduction (work, unemployment, training, and welfare). As such it is an identity founded on all the elements which make of the class a determination of the reproduction of capital itself (i.e. public services, the national delimitation of accumulation, creeping inflation, and “the sharing of productivity gains”); all these elements which positioned the proletariat, socially and politically, as a national interlocutor formed a worker’s identity which challenged the hegemonic control and management of the whole society.51

The workers’ movement is integrated into capital, “even integrating ‘really existing socialism’ within the global division of accumulation,”52 since this integration also structures conflictual class struggle.53 We see the impasse of this period, at

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its historical limit, precisely in such self-organized struggles as the occupation of the Lip watch factory: the council form, previously touted by left communists against the centralization of the Bolshevik party or the parliamentary socialdemocratic compromises of the SPD, finds itself affirming working-class identity as autonomy within the system of capitalist production. TC situates the restructuring of capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s—understood as counter-revolution in the wake of the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s—as the end not only of the second period programmatism, but of programmatism in general: There is no restructuring of the capitalist mode of production without a worker’s defeat. This defeat was that of worker’s identity, of communist parties, of unionism; of self-management, self-organization, and autonomy. The restructuring is essentially counter-revolution. Through the defeat of a particular cycle of struggle—the one which opened in the aftermath of World War I—it is the whole programmatic cycle which reached its conclusion.54

One sees clearly, then, that recognizing a new cycle of struggle—in which the problem of revolution presents itself not as transition or autonomy, but as communization—is far from a celebratory analysis. If communization is a theory and practice of revolutionary struggle situated as the “overcoming” of programmatism, this only means that it is the theory and practice of a cycle of struggle recognized as subsequent to the latest counter-revolutionary restructuring of capital (rather than attempting to revive conditions prior to it). Nor is it a “determinist” theory—as if to recognize and articulate a new cycle of struggle were to claim the inevitability of the production of communism. To speak of “communism in the present tense,” as TC does, is to situate the current form of the contradiction between proletariat and capital, as it manifests in struggle, as the problem of communization; it is not to guarantee that problem will be solved or to laud the end of programmatism as a desirable outcome. It is merely to situate programmatism within its limits, the historical limits of its impasses, and thus to theorize a new dynamic that encounters new limits. The wager of TC is not that the production of communism is “now” inevitable, or that it has taken on its “final” form. Their wager is that the contemporary cycle of struggles has the following structure: the dynamic of struggle encounters its limit as communization—the self-abolition of the proletariat through communizing measures displacing the reproduction of the class as a class. This is the way the problem of revolution presents itself today. Théorie Communiste’s accomplishment is the production of a theory of class struggle at once structural and historical: it mobilizes Marx’s

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categories toward a rigorous history of cycles of struggle linking the transformation of the class relation with transformations of capitalist accumulation. The problem posed by the end of programmatism is this: How can revolution proceed otherwise than through the self-affirmation of the working class? TC situates this problem directly at the level of reproduction. Capital, on the one hand, confronts a nearly fifty-year tendential decline in profit rates, offset by a series of speculative bubbles that pop with increasingly disastrous results.55 The proletariat, on the other, finds the process of production not only separated by the division of labor but dispersed across the globe, while the “class” of proletarians is increasingly composed of surplus populations without access to the wage.56 Working-class identity, previously beneath the professional aspirations of first-world college graduates, is now scarcely attainable, whereas mountains of debt and contingent labor are the norm. TC’s judgment that “the capitalist mode of production itself has run out of future”57 is not a prediction of its imminent demise but rather an assessment of its strange contemporary temporality: it promises nothing other than the uncertainty of its reproduction. Proletarians in struggle—whether factory workers, peripheral migrant laborers, displaced refugees, students, homeless people, communities of racialized minorities brutalized by police violence—cannot dream with any coherence of seizing the means of production or self-organizing the labor process. Struggles find the very ground of class solidarity bound up with the negation of class itself; as TC argues, class belonging (tenuous as it is) is manifest as an external constraint imposed by capital, rather than an affirmation of worker’s power.

THÉORIE DE L’ÉCART Under these conditions, the dynamic of class action is the same as its limit: the negation of class. The analysis of this relation between dynamic and limit is articulated in TC’s major text, “Théorie de l’écart.”58 The combination of this title with the name of their group and journal constitutes a condensed formula of their theoretical perspective: communist theory is a theory of rift.59 This returns us to the problem posed by Macherey’s question to Althusser, pressuring his understanding of structural causality in terms of the “whole”: What does it mean to know the conjuncture insofar as it is lack? This question revolves in TC’s work around a dialectical analysis of the relation between dynamic, limit, and rift. Defined within the categories of capital, the very existence of the proletariat becomes the limit of its own struggle as a class, “an internal limit which defines it and anchors it in categories born of the

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division of social and manufacturing labor, of the segmentation of labor power, of forms of life and of consumption.” Yet these are categories “no longer accompanied by an identity confirmed in the reproduction of capital, including a specific project for the reorganization of society.” In this situation, TC argues, “it is the reproduction of capital that the proletariat finds in the interior of its own action as a class as the limit inherent to this action.” This limit is situated directly at the level of reproduction, insofar as the proletariat confronts its own existence as a reproduction of capital within which the reproduction of labor is contingent. This limit is then also “the dynamic of this cycle of struggles,” since the abolition of its own reproduction as a class is precisely the content of revolutionary struggle against capital. “In the course of this contradiction,” TC argues, “in this cycle of struggles, the proletariat is brought to pose its own definition (its own existence) as a class as being an exterior constraint imposed by capital.” Without the self-affirmation of the proletariat as a horizon, but rather confronting its class existence as a constraint imposed by capital, the question posed as the contradiction between dynamic and limit is the fundamental revolutionary problem: “How can the proletariat, acting as a class, abolish capital, abolish classes, and thus itself?”60 This identity of dynamic and limit, however, “is not immediate,” since “in the course of actual struggles, there are certain practices which are the production of a rift interior to action as a class. This rift interior to the limit is the very existence of the dynamic.”61 Should this seem metaphysical, consider an example from the previous chapter. There we discussed a crucial sequence of “Occupy Oakland” which clearly illustrates this structure. Proletarians are expelled by the police from Oscar Grant Plaza, where they had been attempting to constitute conditions through which a struggle, predicated on class belonging, could reproduce its conditions of possibility through sustained solidarity and mutual aid. The encampment is a site that hovers upon the disjunction between acting as a class and acting against being a class: while it cannot, in isolation, reproduce the existence of proletarians as other than a class within capital, it poses the question of such reproduction; it explores the limits of this problem. Yet this dynamic—the constitution of such encampments around the country as a basis for class struggle—constantly threatens to ossify into a limit of that struggle: perpetuating the formalism of the general assembly for its own sake, accommodating the relative safety of reformist horizons, collaborating with civic authorities, and so forth. Insofar as the struggle works against this ossification, it puts itself in greater danger of police repression. Such repression, as an external constraint, would reinstitute simply being a class rather than acting as a class. Thus, when

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the plaza is cleared, the question becomes whether the dynamic of the struggle will have encountered its limit: class belonging. Guarding the cleared plaza, the police were the physical instantiation of this limit, of a return to normal. Yet, following an initial failure to reclaim the plaza, the very violence of police repression and subsequently renewed determination opens a rift within the limit of this struggle. The plaza is taken back, the general assembly votes for a general strike, the strike culminates in a march of forty thousand proletarians on the port, shutting it down for two days through blockade. Yet here again, this rift, which radically expands the struggle beyond previously anticipated horizons, and which mobilizes it (nationally) on a new front (coordinated blockades of shipping ports) itself encounters its own limits. Operating outside a strike or the self-organization of workers, the dynamic of this rift itself is the action of proletarians exterior to the loading docks (they are not dock workers) upon the functioning of the shipping port. Yet without the resources of the encampment from which they have marched, this blockade cannot be sustained over the long term, and a return to encampments after blockades eventually gives way to the reclearing of squares across the country by federally coordinated crackdowns. To encounter one’s class belonging as an exterior constraint imposed by capital, rather than as the self-affirmation of proletarian power, takes this form: there is nothing to affirm beyond the continuation of the camps themselves, which reproduce the existence of proletarian struggle within capital. Yet, the very form of this struggle involves an encounter with and exploration of proletarian capacities directly concerned with the problem of reproduction. How can the reproduction of capital be broken through mass blockades? How can the reproduction of proletarians be effected as something other than the reproduction of a class within capital? TC analyzes numerous examples of “practices of the rift” over the course of their theoretical production, among them the 1990s movement of Argentine piqueteros, the 2005 anti-CPE struggle in France, the insurrectionary riots of 2008 in Greece. Consider the latter in relation to the programmatist nostalgia evident in the European left’s enthusiasm for Syriza’s rise to parliamentary power in 2015. In TC’s analysis, the principle contribution of the riots of students, young immigrants, and precarious workers in Athens was to confront the coercion of class reproduction not only as police repression, but through “all the social processes and institutions through which the proletariat is constantly put in a position in which it valorizes capital.”62 The riots, TC argues, confronted these institutions of reproduction without being able to break through “the glass floor” of capitalist production in order to generalize the struggle through blockades or attacks upon the process of production itself. This will, of course, be criticized

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as the limit of the struggle by those who view the riots as merely a disorganized effusion of discontent (and it is indeed analyzed as the limit of the struggle by TC). Yet we can see the clear distinction between the dynamic of this struggle and the programmatist activity of Syriza as direct participation in class coercion. Immediately following its electoral triumph, Syriza takes up the management of restructured capital, renouncing its campaign promises and reinstituting austerity measures demanded by the EU. Within two months, Syriza is itself overseeing the deployment of riot police to clear demonstrators from Syntagma Square. While programmatism, in the current cycle of struggles, appears to some as a horizonal solution to the problem of organization, it manifests itself directly as counter-revolution, without encountering the problem or posing the question of communization at the level of practical activity. Practices of the rift are those which confront this problem through action as a class against being a class. Programmatism, on the other hand, functions today as a form of the coercion such action confronts. I would argue that a theory of structural causality as a theory of rift (écart) runs not only through TC’s analysis of the present cycle of struggles, but throughout their structural historical account of the relation between capitalist accumulation and class struggle. Historically, the present cycle of struggles is produced through (1) the splitting and decline of programmatism between party form and workers’ autonomy; (2) the decline of programmatism through the integration of working-class identity into the reproduction of capital; (3) the division of that integration through the restructuring of the economy; (4) the double disjunction within that restructuring between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the proletariat; (5) the posing of the problem of revolution directly at the level of reproduction, within the terms of this double disjunction. Within the present cycle of struggles, the problem of communization is posed through the opening of a rift within the identity of dynamic and limit, within the contradiction that struggles encounter in the very form of acting as a class against being a class, within the problem of reproducing, through communist measures, the class as other than a class within capital. TC’s theory integrates an analysis of the history of the class relation with an analysis of the history of class struggle, but it consistently performs this integration through a theory of division, disjunction, separation—of rift. This theory of rift is a properly historical theory of communism: The historical character of the contradiction between proletariat and capital signifies a relation in each case specific between the course of the cycle of struggles, constituted by quotidian struggles, and the revolution. This signifies as well the historicity of the

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content of communism. Communism is historical and it is in relation to the immediate course of each cycle of struggles . . . the communism of 1795 is not that of 1848, nor of 1871 or 1917, and still less of 1968 or our present.63

But this historical theory is not a historicism: it does not merely situate the problem of communism within particular “historical conditions,” according to the empirical course of events or political determinations. Rather, TC offers a structurally articulated history, in which distinctions between cycles of struggle are correlated with transformations of the class structure, analyzed through Marx’s categories. Moreover, this structural history of capital, of class struggle, and of the content of communism is an anti-humanist theory. Like Althusser, TC rejects any conceptual reliance upon the “essence” of the proletariat and any reference “to some kind of humanity underneath the proletarian or to human activity underneath work.” Such a reference, they maintain, “not only traps itself in a philosophical quagmire, but always returns to the consideration that the class struggle of the proletariat can only go beyond itself insofar as it already expresses something which exceeds and affirms itself. The sweaty laborer has been replaced by Man, but the problem has not changed.”64 TC develops this critique of humanism at length in their exchange with Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic,65 whose analysis of “failures” of past revolutionary struggles renders communism a normative, ahistorical invariant and endows the proletariat with a communal human essence that will either be realized as communism, or not, in any given instance. TC’s critique of such humanism is a critique of an expressive, rather than structural, thinking of historical causality. Like Althusser, TC offers a structural, anti-humanist, anti-expressivist theory of historical causality: one generated through the integral relation of the categories Marx constructs to analyze the history of capital. Unlike Althusser, however, they situate the production of this theory within the immanence of proletarian struggle: “Immediate struggles, practically and in their own discourse, produce unfalteringly, within themselves, an internal distance. This distance is the communizing perspective as concrete, objective theoretical articulation of the theorizing character of struggles.”66 This “theorizing character of struggles” is then formalized in theoretical texts responding to its exigencies and coordinating them with Marxist concepts. But it is produced, TC argues, by the “internal distance” opened within struggles themselves, by the rift which they open within the internal contradiction between dynamic and limit. Thus, “theoretical production belongs to a practice which is not ‘ours’ and to a theory which is likewise not

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‘ours.’ We are referring to the practice of all those who through their activities create a rift within action as a class and posit it as a limit to be overcome. This is theory in the broad sense, practical class struggle reflecting on itself.”67 Whereas Althusser defends “Kautsky’s and Lenin’s thesis that Marxist theory is produced by a specific theoretical practice, outside the proletariat, and that Marxist theory must be ‘imported’ into the proletariat,” for Théorie Communiste theory is produced by the concrete practice of struggle and taken up within a structural, conceptual synthesis. However, even the ground of this structural synthesis itself is produced by the contemporary structure of the class relation and its corresponding cycle of struggles. By periodizing the structure of accumulation, of class, and of struggle, TC periodizes as well their own theoretical production; it accords with the production of theory by practice in this period of capitalism, during which the problem of revolution presents itself as communization. The ground of communist theory is thus radically empirical. TC argues that “the negation by the proletariat in its existence as a class is interior to its action as a class,” and this negation is “empirically discernible” during this cycle of struggles. It is this kind of conjunctural empirical discernment that Althusser was able to apply to the Russian revolution, in the pages of “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” but which he was unable to glean from new forms of struggle articulated during May ’68. Because he lodged theoretical production in the exteriority of party intellectuals to the proletarian class, he was unable to transform his theory by learning from practices taking place around him. For Théorie Communiste, on the other hand, the transformation of theory by history depends upon empirical attention to the structural implications of what happens in practice, which must then be formalized by theory. That the problem of revolution is posed in a new way is something that “we can recognize empirically, such that we can say ‘there is something new.’ It is this newness that we claim to formalize in the theory of rift.”68 The dialectic at issue here is twofold: (1) between the structural transformation of history and the structural transformation of practice; (2) between the empirical manifestations of struggle and the rational formalization of theory. The “theorizing character of struggles” produces, empirically, both the historical ground and the structural demand for rational formalization. We are now in a position to understand how such theoretical production transforms an understanding of the conjuncture as a “whole” into an understanding of the conjuncture as “lack,” and how it meets the criterion of immanence in doing so. For Althusser, the criterion of immanence must be secured by knowledge of the structural whole. Since he draws his understanding of this

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criterion from Spinoza, it involves him in a confusion of historical and ontological levels of understanding, a confusion that embroils his understanding of structural causality in an epistemological contradiction between the second and third kinds of knowledge (the former of which is applicable to historical materialism, the latter of which is not). Like Althusser, Théorie Communiste certainly does refer at times to the “whole” and to “totality.” For example, they understand the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the proletariat as unified by the “capitalist mode of production as a whole.” However, they develop a theory of that “whole” as a theory of rift: of the double disjunction through which the reproduction of capital and proletariat must be understood in the present, and of the rift within the limits of contemporary struggles opened by their dynamic. Moreover, they make theoretical production itself immanent to the production of that rift. The criterion of immanence within the work of Théorie Communiste thus does not rely upon an analogy with something like the third kind of knowledge, in which knowledge of “the whole” would be akin to knowledge of substance. On the contrary, knowledge of the capitalist mode of production, in the present, and of its interior contradiction, called communism, is immanent to the rift opened by that contradiction, produced by the structure of practice and formalized by a theory of structure: a theory of structural causality as a theory of rift. In a 2006 interview published in an issue of the journal Riff Raff, titled “Communist Theory Beyond the Ultra-Left,” Roland Simon of Théorie Communiste acknowledges, “with a lot of precautions,” the group’s debt to “Althusser in his critique of Hegelian Marxism, and his critique of humanism.” He continues, “I think that there Althusser, Balibar and sometimes Rancière, are essential. It’s not for all that that we are going to take up his theory of the epistemological break, or treat Marxism as a science. But there is a lot to be learnt in the critique of humanism.”69 What TC learns from the critique of humanism and Hegelian Marxism in the pages of Reading Capital (not only from Althusser, but also Balibar and early Rancière), is to develop a theory of structural, rather than a normative or expressive causality. If Simon advises “a lot of precautions” in acknowledging this debt, it is in part because TC transforms that theory of structural causality by stripping it of its untenable epistemological alignment with a metaphysics of substance, turning instead to the immanent production of theory by practice for the criterion of their epistemology. Simon also distances himself from Althusser’s theory of the epistemological break and the treatment of Marxism as science. In my view, however, TC’s transformation of the theory of structural causality is an excellent example of why the theory of the epistemological break matters. Simon

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likely sees in Althusser’s understanding of the epistemological break a separation of theory from practice—in which case he would be correct to take his distance from it. However, TC’s work is exemplary of the epistemological break, of the “scientific” character of Marxism, insofar as they do not separate theoretical production from proletarian practice. Rather, they coordinate the formalization of concepts with the theorizing character of struggles in such a way as to show that Marxist theory (and Althusserian theory) retains the coherence of its conceptual articulation through the history of its revision by practice. Science is the coordination of the rational and the empirical in the medium of written formalization, but it is a coordination that must also respect the interruption of the rational and the empirical by one another: the manner in which history interrupts theory, while theory intervenes in practice, because neither ever separates itself from the other. TC shows that Marxist theory, communist theory, is not simply ideology, because it articulates and periodizes the structural transformation of communist practice that must be recognized so as not to reproduce ideology. It is by making the concept of structural causality adequate to the present cycle of struggles that the theory of rift enacts an epistemological break: it renews Marxist theory by revising it—against a programmatism that has become ideological, and against a humanism that always will be—so as to sustain Marxist theory as adequate knowledge of the problem of revolution.

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In Capital we find a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrangement of concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis. What is the provenance of this “analysis,” which Marx must have regarded as pre-existent since he only demanded its application to political economy? We pose this question as one indispensable to an understanding of Marx, and one which we are not yet in a position to give an exhaustive answer. —Louis Althusser, Reading Capital

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THE ANALYTIC OF SEPARATION: HISTORY AND CONCEPT IN MARX

In Chapter 3 of Capital, Marx makes the striking claim that “the division of labor converts the product of labor into a commodity, and thereby makes necessary its conversion into money.”1 Here we find a crystallization of the historical and theoretical dimensions of Marx’s critique, of the concrete and the abstract, the genetic and the structural. In order to understand this claim, the reader will have to traverse the historical chapters (13–15) at the center of Capital, which theorize the capitalist division of labor as a “process of separation” (Scheidungsprozess). Having done so, one can then retroactively recognize this process of separation as that which determines the specifically capitalist form of the product of labor, the commodity, and makes necessary the conversion of commodities into money, a process of exchange (Austauschprozess). Emphasizing the centrality of this claim to Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, the approach to Capital for which I shall argue situates the constitutive relation between the process of separation and the commodity form as the key to sustaining a reading of Marx situated at the processual level of his theory. This approach foregrounds the Scheidungsprozess of the division of labor as the crux of the empirically descriptive and rationally constructive dimensions of Marx’s theory as these run through four intertwining processes: the exchange process (Austauschprozess), the labor process (Arbeitsprozess), the valorization process (Verwerthungsprozess), and the process of accumulation (Accumulationsprozess). Further, I 228

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aim to show that “separation” is the non-reifiable, dialectical concept traversing the construction of all Marx’s major categories: commodity, money, labor power, value, surplus value, capital, constant and variable capital, absolute and relative surplus value, simple and expanded reproduction, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the production of surplus populations, and primitive accumulation. Conjoining the discrepant empirical and rationalist elements of Marx’s method of “analysis,” the concept of separation is the key to understanding the genesis of capital, its subsumption of social relations, and the tendential decline of its historical dynamism.

VALUE, ALIENATION, SEPARATION Unlike the category of value, so often (and so persuasively) situated as the “basic foundation of capitalist production,”2 separation cannot be conceived as a thing, as a substance. Of course, value is properly understood “as a category of the fundamental social relations that constitute capitalism.”3 That is, value is not to be fetishized as a substance but understood as a social relation, in accordance with Marx’s critique of reification. But the problem with situating value as the “basic foundation” of Marx’s critical theory is that value is situated by that theory as one side of a double process (labor process/valorization process), which must at all times be grasped in both its unity and its separation. It is precisely this unity-in-separation that enables the valorization process to predominate as the logic of capitalist accumulation, to subsume the labor process under its requirements. But the question of how it does so is to some extent obscured, or at least rhetorically subordinated, by the interpretation of Capital as “value theory.” If value is to be understood as a social relation, what is the social relation through which it is to be understood? Would not a concept expressing this relation (the social foundation of value itself ) be a more suitable candidate to designate the “foundation” of capitalist production? Our answer to this question must be affirmative in one sense and negative in another. I will argue that “separation” is indeed Marx’s name for the social relation that must be understood as the foundation of value; yet separation, qua social relation, is not itself a foundation at all. It is a process. This matters because it enables us to properly express our understanding of “capitalism” as a constitutively historical configuration of social relations, one that never secures a foundation, though it certainly does achieve a system of presuppositions amounting to social domination. Foregrounding the centrality and pervasive theoretical significance of Marx’s concept of separa-

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tion pushes us to understand and challenge capitalism as a non-foundational system of social relations predicated upon and sustained by power, not (directly) upon the production of value. This is a crucial element of the critique of ideology. I make no claim to originality in recognizing the importance of the concept of separation in Marx’s mature theory. Its significance has recently been stressed by Fredric Jameson, Michael Lebowitz, Howard Engelskirchen, and the journal Endnotes.4 It is nevertheless notable that it remains a somewhat recessed concept in Marx’s work, and usually in commentaries upon it. There is no section or chapter explicitly devoted to the concept of separation in Capital. Neither the term Scheidung nor Scheidungsprozess appear in the table of contents, in which so many other major categories make their first entrance into Marx’s text. Recently, influential introductions by David Harvey or Michael Heinrich grant the concept no major role—which would be unthinkable for such categories as labor power, surplus value, or accumulation. Indeed, we could say that although separation is a concept in Marx’s theory it is not a category. But even compared to other terms with a similar status, such as reification, it has garnered relatively little direct theoretical attention. In Representing Capital, Jameson treats separation as a “figure” and a “trope,” arguing that “what the figure of externalization and the return or taking back into self is for Hegel, the trope of separation and its various cognates and synonyms is for Marx.”5 Jameson has in mind the Hegelian term Entäusserung, and among Marx’s “various cognates and synonyms” for “separation” he includes the term alienation (Entäusserung, Entfremdung), arguing that “the resources of the term ‘separation’ are already richly exploited in the 1844 manuscripts—the theory of alienation is explicitly articulated by way of the fourfold “separation” of the worker from tools, from object, from other workers, and from species-being as such, or in other words from that productive activity that makes the human animal human.”6 Certainly Jameson is right to note the theoretical proximity of the terms separation and alienation, since Marx himself sometimes deploys them in a manner suggesting their interchangeability (particularly in a key passage of the Grundrisse to which we shall return). However, in the 1844 Manuscripts the sense of the term “separation,” deployed occasionally by Marx, is dominated by his more frequent and philosophically substantive use of the terms “alienation” and “estrangement.” In Capital this relationship of terminological overdetermination is reversed, as “separation” takes on the more systematic significance—signaled in particular by technical usage of the term Scheidungsprozess—making analytically

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possible an important conceptual distinction between “alienation” and “separation,” rather than their treatment as synonyms. Aiming to stake out “a different position on the well-known alienation debate” which “avoids the Althusserian repudiation of its allegedly Hegelian idealism at the same time that it eschews the humanism of the Marxist defenders of the early manuscripts,”7 Jameson argues that “the concept of alienation—in its most Hegelian form, as the way in which I alienate my own production by producing it as separate from myself in the first place, so that it comes before me as a properly alien object and force—is very much built into the very structure of Capital.”8 But I would point out that the condition of possibility for this reading, situating the concept of alienation as built into the very structure of Capital, is predicated upon a treatment of the term as synonymous with the concept of separation, since it is the latter that more systematically traverses the mature articulation of Marx’s categories and, in my view, secures the passage between historical and theoretical sections of the text. Yet the concept of separation is able to achieve this systematic integration within the categorial structure and expository itinerary of Capital precisely because of its difference from alienation and estrangement—terms that rely upon a logic of exteriorization, of a distinction between interior and exterior, which separation does not imply. This is why the term “alienation” remains tethered to the humanism of the early manuscripts, to a rhetoric of human essence and “human self-estrangement”9 relatively absent from Capital, whereas the term “separation” enables conceptual transformations that would not have been possible through primary reliance upon the exteriorizing logic of alienation. Separation occurs between that which is separated, not necessarily from an inside to an outside. Though it may imply a prior unity, it does not necessarily imply the objectification of an essence or interior which then confronts one from without. When this latter sense is required, Marx continues to deploy the term alienation. But when it is not, new theoretical extensions of the term “separation” enable the exposition of different dialectical structures traversing different layers of theoretical articulation. I would position the analytic of separation I aim to elucidate as both aligned with and supplementary to Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism and his theory of the epistemological break. It is in large part the difference between “alienation” and “separation” that enables the systematic, structural development of Marx’s mature critique of political economy. Thus, I would point to “separation” as the concept Althusser requires, but doesn’t quite put his finger on, in order to answer the question he formulates in the passage I have taken as an epigraph: “In Capital we find a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrange-

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ment of concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis. What is the provenance of this ‘analysis,’ which Marx must have regarded as pre-existent since he only demanded its application to political economy?” Althusser’s question presents us with a riddle: From whence did Marx derive his method of analysis, given that it is both pre-existent and genuinely new? The riddle is best approached through the paradox of immanent critique. Marx discovers his method (it is thus new) through an empirical study of what is already there (it is thus pre-existent): the history and the structure of the capitalist mode of production. In this sense his method is at once original and derived: he applies a new understanding of the structure of capital itself to a critique of political economy, which had failed to grasp that structure. But what does it mean to apply an understanding of “the structure of capital itself ” to a critique of political economy? In order to grasp the logic of this formulation, and its methodological conditions of possibility, one has to understand that there is an analytical method to be gleaned from the structure of capitalism; it is this analytical method that I call “the analytic of separation.” That is, separation is both the phenomenon empirically studied and the dialectical method rationally applied by Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production. It is a Scheidungsprozess in this double sense that drives the immanent critique of Capital.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR, RELATIVE SURPLUS VALUE We see this conversion of an empirically studied process into a method of systematic dialectical analysis come into focus most clearly in Part IV of Capital, the center of Marx’s book. Here we find historical chapters on “Co-operation,” the “Division of Labor and Manufacture,” and “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry.” Yet the title of Part IV, in which the history and consequences of the division of labor are studied, is “The Production of Relative Surplus Value,” and these historical chapters are preceded in Part IV by a chapter devoted to “The Concept of Relative Surplus Value.” That is, the exposition of a historical process amounts to the exposition of a theoretical concept. So, when we find the division of labor described as a “process of separation” in Chapter 14, we should understand this process as the historical and structural core of both capitalist production and the critical concept of relative surplus value. Here is the relevant passage: What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them. It is a result of the division of labor in manufacture that the worker is brought

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face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production [materiellen Producktionsprozesses] as the property of another [als fremdes Eigenthum] and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation [Scheidungsprozess] starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labor. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labor [von der Arbeit trennt] and presses it into the service of capital.10

Here, the temporal sense of the term Scheidungsprozess enables Marx to synthesize the three historical chapters of Part IV in a narrative arc delineated by the last three sentences of this passage, tracing the division of labor from its beginning in simple cooperation through its development in manufacture and toward its completion in large-scale industry. Moreover, the temporal dimension of the term Scheidungsprozess constitutes a historical exposition of the confrontation between the specialized worker (Theilarbeiter) and the intellectual potentialities embedded in the material process of production. At any given time, the capitalist Produktionsprozess is the synchronic instantiation of a diachronic Scheidungsprozess. “Intellectual potentialities” (geistigen Potenzen) are embedded in the “material” process of production as a result of the division of labor, such that the relation between the spiritual (geistigen) and material is mediated and produced by the relation between a diachronic process of separation and its inscription in any given synchronic state of the process of production. The Scheidungsprocess that constitutes the division of labor is thus at once immaterial and material; it is immaterial insofar as, qua process of separation, it is not at all a material thing. It is material insofar as it involves the temporal inscription of those intellectual potentialities that are separated from the specialized worker into the machinery of the process of production. This process of separation does indeed involve “estrangement” in a sense proximate to that detailed by the early Marx. Intellectual potentialities become fremdes Eigenthum, “estranged property,” and they do so through a process of separation. But if the process of separation analyzed here includes phenomena that may be described in terms of estrangement or alienation, it is also irreducible to those concepts. Why? Because it not only separates intellectual potentialities from the worker as estranged property, it also designates separation within the labor process itself, separation between its material components, between commodity lines, between productive tasks and activities. That is to say, the process of production is a process of separation which not only involves the

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separation of unitary powers from the worker but also the articulated distribution of these powers within “the whole body of social labor.” Put otherwise, we must consider the process of separation not only from the side of labor but also from the side of capital, not only in terms of the labor process but also in terms of the valorization process. It is only insofar as we do so that we can understand Marx’s historical analysis of the division of labor on the terms suggested by the title of Part IV of Capital: as an account of the production of relative surplus value. That is a level of theoretical abstraction that the conceptual affordances of “estrangement” and “alienation” can never attain, and it is at the core of the practice of immanent critique developed by Marx. To conceive the division of labor as a process of separation not only alienating workers from their own powers but also enabling the production of relative surplus value is emblematic of the conceptual leap, the epistemological break, between the level of analysis we find in the 1844 manuscripts and the mature critical theory we find in Capital. Conceptualizing the production of relative surplus value is particularly central to Marx’s systematic analysis in Capital for several reasons: 1. It overcomes (or at least historically displaces) the contradiction between the expanding extraction of absolute surplus value and the lived requirements for the reproduction of labor power that is characteristic of the early period capitalist development. 2. It encompasses the theoretical transition between formal and real subsumption, which is fundamental to understanding the history of capitalism (and thus of modernity). 3. It links a history of the development of modern technology with a theory of the extraction of surplus value. 4. It implies a determination of necessary labor time specific to the capitalist mode of production. 5. It prepares the ground for an account of the structural limits of rising profit rates, by establishing a conceptual basis for understanding the rising organic composition of capital.

In correspondence with each of these components of the theory of relative surplus value, we may note it is the Scheidungsprozess of the division of labor that (1) enables limits upon the length of the working day to be overcome by rising productivity; (2) transforms the labor process in accordance with the competitive demands of capitalist valorization; (3) requires the development of new technologies and managerial techniques concentrating the “intellectual potentialities” surrendered by the specialized worker; (4) reconstitutes the temporal

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determination of the labor process as a function of technological capacity, managerial innovation, and supervisory discipline, thus transforming the lived experience of the labor process in accordance with the subsumption of its organization by the requirements of valorization; (5) involves tendentially rising investment in constant capital relative to variable capital, and thus a secular contradiction within the process of accumulation between the production of surplus value drawn from variable capital and the competitive necessity of proportionally declining allocation of variable capital. It is the temporal, processual character of the Scheidungsprozess theorized by Marx that enables the concentration of necessary labor time at the level of the working day to be linked—within a single concept—to a historical dynamic enfolding the contradictions of capital into the movement of subsumption and, eventually, declining profit rates. The fact that the capitalist mode of production, considered as a globally distributed system, must produce relative surplus value from that part of capital—its variable component—which the production of relative surplus value also tends to proportionally diminish is the fundamental contradiction which may itself be conceived as a process of separation. Capital is itself tendentially separated from the conditions of possibility for its increasing rate of accumulation (through its concentration in constant capital). The division of labor (the transformation of the labor process requisite for the production of relative surplus value) is thus the historical mediation between the process of separation that begins with “primitive accumulation” and the process of separation following from structural impasses encountered by capitalism subsequent to the dynamism of real subsumption.

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION In a particularly famous passage, Marx defines primitive accumulation, like the division of labor, as a process of separation: The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation (Scheidung) between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labor. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation (Scheidung), but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces (Scheidungsprozess) the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage laborers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else

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than the historical process of divorcing (historische Scheidungsprozess) the producer from the means of production.11

Familiar as this passage may be, the Fowkes translation partially obscures Marx’s terminological consistency—particularly insofar as Scheidungsprozess is translated in Chapter 14 as “process of separation” and here as “process which divorces” or “process of divorcing.” That is, the English translation does not treat the term as a technical concept, whereas the German offers a basis for doing so. Primitive accumulation is defined as a historical process of separation between producer and means of production, labor and property, which produces capital, on the one hand, and wage laborers, on the other. Again, we see that it is the concept of separation that mediates between the initial conditions of possibility for the capitalist labor process (wage laborers) and for the capitalist valorization process (capital). Marx’s technical usage of the term Scheidungsprozess becomes crucial if we consider that a historical process of separation first distinguishes Verwertungsprozess (valorization process) from Arbeitsprozess (labor process) and then—as we learn in the chapter on the division of labor—transforms the Arbeitsprozess in accordance with the exigencies of the Verwertungsprozess. The Scheidungsprozess is (1) the empirically studied history through which this double mediation takes place and (2) the rationally determined concept formalizing the dialectical logic of this double mediation: the relation of distinction and unity upon which the capitalist integration of the labor process with the valorization process relies. In the German text, the two uses of Scheidung in the first half of the preceding passage are thus not only conceptually but also terminologically consistent with the Scheidungsprozess described in the second half. The capital-relation presupposes a separation that it maintains and reproduces on a constantly expanding scale. The term Scheidungsprozess offers a temporal concept through which to grasp, in its unity, this historical movement from presupposition to maintenance and expanding reproduction. And it is only when we link the Scheidungprozess of primitive accumulation with the Scheidungsprozess of the division of labor—and thus the production of relative surplus value—that we can understand how separation is not only maintained but expanded through the subsumption of Arbeitsprozess by Verwertungsprozess. Conceptually, this may be familiar territory: we know that the separation of workers from the means of production is redoubled and amplified by the division of labor. What I want to emphasize is the terminological consistency of Marx’s vocabulary in theorizing the relation between a process of separation, a labor process, and a valorization process. My point is that this terminological consistency confers a dialectical unity of history and concept that is other-

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wise recessed in Marx’s exposition: the technical status of the term “separation” goes missing when its processual and thus historical usage is inconsistently translated. The technical status of this term, as it bears upon the theory of primitive accumulation, is also at issue in differences between editions of Das Kapital. The original 1867 and the revised 1872 editions both include a passage (immediately following the one analyzed above) in which Marx twice deploys the term Scheidungsprozess to characterize “a double-sided series” that “encompasses the entire developmental history of modern bourgeois society.” This passage is absent from the 1890 edition, revised by Engels (which is the edition translated by Fowkes): Man sieht auf den ersten Blick, dass dieser Scheidungsprozess eine ganze Reihe historischer Prozesse einschliesst, und eine doppelseitige Reihe, einerseits Auflösung der Verhältnisse, die den Arbeiter selbst zum Eigenthum dritter Personen machen und zu einem selbst angeeigneten Produktionsmittel, andererseits Auflösung des Eigenthums der unmittelbaren Produzenten an ihren Produktionsmitteln. Der Scheidungsprozess umfasst also in der That die ganze Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen bürgerlichen Gesellschaft . . .12

This might be translated as follows: We see at first glance that this process of separation includes a whole series of historical processes, and a double-sided series: on the one hand, the dissolution of those circumstances in which the worker himself was made property of a third party and appropriated for himself the means of production; and on the other hand, the dissolution of the property held by direct producers in their means of production. Indeed, the process of separation thus includes the whole developmental history of modern bourgeois society . . .13

We can see here that the technical usage of the term Scheidungsprozess is central to Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation as a double-sided series of historical processes. This is a double-sided series that will produce the ironic “double freedom” of the proletariat (freedom from ownership of the means of production and thus freedom to sell their labor), as well as the double-sided system coordinating labor process and valorization process.

COMMODITY AND MONEY Bearing in mind that the same processual vocabulary is used by Marx to theorize “the whole developmental history of modern bourgeois society” and to theorize the division of labor that transforms the labor process within that society,

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we can emphasize that the term Scheidungsprozess conceptually specifies both the constitution of capitalist relations of production and the transformation of the process of production (the division of labor). We can then return to Marx’s assertion that “The division of labor converts the product of labor into a commodity, and thereby makes necessary its conversion into money.”14 It is not only the case that “not an atom of matter” is contained in the value of a commodity because its value is constituted by average socially necessary labor time, but also because socially necessary labor is itself constituted, as a measure of value, by a process of separation. That is, the commodity form is immaterial not only because the substance of its value is time, but because the specifically historical form of time particular to capital is determined not as a substance, but rather as a process of separation. Form and history are here conjoined by a single term, Scheidungsprocess, that “converts the product of labor into a commodity and thereby makes necessary its conversion into money.” Moreover, the capitalist constitution of the money commodity is itself conceptualized by Marx as a Scheidungsprozess in his first usage of that term in Capital (the only usage prior to the passage on the division of labor in Chapter 14): The only difference, therefore, between coin and bullion lies in their physical configuration, and gold can at any time pass from one form to the other. For a coin, the road from the mint is also the path to the melting pot. In the course of circulation, coins wear down, some to a greater extent, some to a lesser. The denomination of the gold and its substance, the nominal content and the real content, begin to move apart [beginnen ihren Scheidungsprozess].15

Whereas Marx earlier makes the historically contingent assumption “that gold is the money commodity, for the sake of simplicity,” the process of separation by which the denomination of the gold and its substance become distinct presages the potential abstraction of the money commodity from any particular substance. More important, we can relate the process of separation by which the nominal value of money is separated from its substance to the process of separation that lies behind the immateriality of the commodity form itself, the immaterial determination of its value. Marx tells us that “Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labor-time.”16 This immanence of labor-time in commodities, as the measure of their value whose form of appearance is money, has for its own immanent determination the process of separation that both inaugurates relations of production in which the products of labor are separated from direct producers and a process of production in which the division of labor separates productive capacities and commodity lines that must be exchanged for money.

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It is this double process of separation that both constitutes the social conditions for the determination of value by socially necessary labor time and the social capacities of production that determine the socially necessary labor time for the production of any given commodity. Labor-time is the measure of value immanent in commodities, but at the core of that measure we find not the only the immateriality of time, but of history: a process of separation moving from primitive accumulation through the division of labor and immanent to the commodity form and the symbolic value of money through which commodities are exchanged. Yet this immateriality of separation—a non-reifiable process—is also woven through every fiber of the material texture of the history of modernity. What is separated is material; separation is immaterial: the dialectical unity of this distinction is a process of separation. The process of separation is the material, historical genesis and reproduction of the abstract forms of value, commodity, and exchange.

IMMANENT CRITIQUE: FROM PROCESS TO DIALECTIC In a key passage of the Grundrisse, we find the terminology of separation conjoined with that of alienation in a vertiginous dialectic passing through many of Marx’s major categories in the space of two sentences: The independent, for-itself existence of value vis-à-vis living labor capacity—hence its existence as capital—the objective, self-sufficient indifference, the alien quality [Fremdheit] of the objective conditions of labor vis-à-vis living labor capacity, which goes so far that these conditions confront the person of the worker in the person of the capitalist—as personification with its own will and interest—this absolute divorce, separation [Scheidung, Trennung] of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labor from living labor capacity—that they confront him as alien property [fremdes Eigentum], as the reality of other juridical persons, as the absolute realm of their will—and that labor therefore, on the other side, appears as alien labor [fremde Arbeit] opposed to the value personified in the capitalist, or the conditions of labor—this absolute separation [Trennung] between property and labor, between living labor capacity and the conditions of its realization, between objectified and living labor, between value and value creating-activity—hence also the alien quality [fremdheit] of the content of labor for the worker himself—this divorce [Scheidung] now likewise appears as a product of labor itself, as objectification of its own moments. For, in the new act of production itself—which merely confirmed the exchange between capital and living labor which preceded it—surplus labor, and hence the surplus product, the total product of labor in general (of surplus labor as well as necessary labor), has now been posited as capital, as independent and indifferent towards living labor capacity, or as exchange value which confronts its mere use value.17

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Here we find the language of alienation or estrangement used to describe the “alien quality” ( fremdheit) of property ( fremdes Eigentum) and of labor ( fremde Arbeit) as the result of their separation. That which is alienated appears on both sides of an “absolute separation” between property and labor, labor power and the conditions of its realization, objectified and living labor (thus constant and variable capital), value and value creating activity. This separation is both presupposition and product of labor, positing capital as independent of labor power or as exchange value which confronts use value. In this passage, the terms Scheidung and Trennung are used interchangeably to denote the same concept, translated as “divorce” and “separation,” passing through the categories of the analysis so fluently as to constitute something of a meta-concept signifying the historical/methodological dialectic mobilized by Marx to move perpetually between the abstract and concrete registers of his theory, fusing them into an immanent critique adequate to both an understanding of the labor process and the valorization process. In a passage like this, it becomes clear that the process of separation is both what is studied and the way in which it is studied. It is both an empirical discovery and a rational method. However closely related the terms may be, the same cannot be said of “alienation.” As the result of a process of separation, alienation is an aspect of what is analyzed, but it cannot become a method of analysis. The process of separation is what Marx discovers in the history of modernity and it is the method of critique he applies to his discovery: it is historical dialectic mobilized as immanent critique, history seized as techne. To recapitulate our progress thus far in terms of Marx’s processual vocabulary: the Scheidungsprozess through which capitalist relations of production are constituted distinguishes the labor process (Arbeitsprozess) from the valorization process (Verwertungsprozess). This split requires a division of labor that can sustain the valorization process, and this division of labor constitutes the product of labor as a commodity requiring a process of exchange (Austauschprozess) mediated by money. The realization through exchange of the surplus value embedded in commodities by surplus labor time re-enters the process of production (Produktionsprozess) as capital, and the expanding reproduction of this valorization of capital is a process of accumulation (Accumulationsprozess). Considered as together, the system of these processes may be taken as an overall process of separation passing through intertwining levels of its articulation: separation of labor from property separation of producer from product

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separation of process of production (division of labor as Scheidungsprozess) separation of use value from exchange value separation of value of commodity from its material constitution separation of value from value-creating activity separation of objectified labor from living labor separation of capital from labor

The articulated system of these separations is integrated into a social process of production, but it is their integration as separate that renders this “a system of all-round material dependence.”18 However, in order to understand why we should consider this system, overall, as a process of separation rather than a process of integration we have to understand not only its genesis and development but also its historical trajectory. This is a trajectory through which both capital and labor will come to be separated not only from each other but also from themselves—through which the each will become separated from the conditions of possibility for their separated integration. That is, each will be tendentially separated from the conditions of possibility for their reproduction within a “system of all-round material dependence.” We can say that the division of labor is the historical crux through which the process of separation becomes a dialectic of separation. The separation of property and labor establishes the conditions of possibility for the development of the commodity form. The division of labor realizes those conditions of possibility, integrating the separation of exchange value and use value into a social system of all-round material dependence. In doing so, it displaces the contradictions attendant upon the extraction of absolute surplus value through the tendentially increasing extraction of relative surplus value. But, again, this movement produces new contradictions within the history of the capitalist mode of production, as it requires a redistribution of capital from investment in its variable component to proportionally increasing investment in its constant component. This tendential redistribution of capital, as it continually reenters the production process, transforming it in accordance with competitive exigencies, results in the massive growth of productivity and profits from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, yet it also results in two long-term tendencies that will only bear themselves out after the dynamic phase of real subsumption has run its course: the tendency of capital to throw off labor and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This movement—from primitive accumulation, through the division of labor, and toward declining profit rates and the production of surplus populations—is a dialectic of separation insofar as it entails a reversal of its process:

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from the integration of labor and property into the capitalist mode of production through their initial separation and mutual dependency, we move toward a separation of this integration itself, such that proletarians are tendentially separated from labor, while capital is tendentially separated from valorization. Marx’s analysis of this dialectic of separation, the movements of negation and contradiction bound up with its process, is at the core of his work as both a historical and a speculative thinker. In Capital, the mediation of the relationship between history and speculation is critique: an exposure of the incapacity of political economy to understand the contradictory character of capitalist accumulation, and of capitalism itself to manage the contradictions of its dynamism. Marx’s analysis is a speculative critique insofar as the critical dimension of his thought—its dialectical reckoning with contradiction—propels its speculative conclusions. That is, these speculative conclusions are not dogmatic but critical, and what I am arguing here is that the techne of this conjunction of critique and speculation is the analytic of separation, an analysis of the process of separation that is capable of following its progression through the reversal of its dynamism, capable of unifying the conceptual structure of this reversal with its historical consequences. This is a practice of what I call rationalist empiricism: the development of a system of concepts rationally adequate to the empirical study not only of historical phenomena, but of the non-phenomenal abstractions with which they are entwined. What I am calling the analytic of separation is what draws together these empirical and rational, concrete and abstract dimensions of Marx’s theory in a manner traversing not only his major concepts, but also the major phases of the historical trajectory he analyzes through its formidable indirections, its dialectical reversals.

THE PROLETARIAT We can trace the development of the category of the proletariat as a key example of such reversal—and also of how the analytic of separation enables the critique of political economy to go beyond Marx’s own articulation of its parameters, allowing Marxism to develop an internal critique of its own methodological and political history.19 In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx offers the following definition of the proletariat: “the proletariat is the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”20 This apparently static definition of the proletariat as “the class of modern wage laborers” also implies a processual dimension evi-

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dent in its closing phrase, “in order to live.” This phrase entails a basic relation between production and reproduction that is at the core of modern wage labor: because proletarians cannot directly produce their own means of subsistence, they must sell their labor power in order to reproduce their existence. But if this relation between production and reproduction serves to define wage labor (the wage mediates the relation), it also unsettles the stability and self-sufficiency of the definition of the proletariat as “the class of modern wage laborers.” On the one hand, it will turn out that in reproducing its own existence as a class of wage laborers the proletariat also produces a tendency toward the non-reproduction of wage labor. And, on the other hand, it will turn out that the reproduction of the proletariat as a class is not only dependent on wage labor itself, but also on unwaged labor, paid and unpaid work, and thus upon divisions within the constitution of the “working class” at the very inception of its determination as “the proletariat.” Emphasizing the processual dimension of reproduction at the core of Marx’s theory of class, Aaron Benanav and John Clegg refer to the proletariat as “a class in transition,” highlighting this element of Marx’s definition in Chapter 25 of Capital: “Proletariat,” Marx writes, “Must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-laborer,’ the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital,’ and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization.”21 Here the wage laborer is defined not as he who reproduces his own existence through the wage but as he who produces and valorizes capital, and it is precisely this which renders his existence potentially disposable for capital: as soon as his labor is not required for valorization, he is thrown into the street. Understood in terms of the tendential shift bound up with the dynamic of real subsumption—from absolute to relative surplus value, and thus from investment in variable to constant capital—the proletariat is grasped here as a class in historical contradiction with its own existence: as a class that, by working, tends to produce its own exclusion from work. What Marx calls “the general law of capitalist accumulation”22 is that “the working population . . . produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous, and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”23 The history of the proletariat is the transformation of the working class into a class which is not working, the auto-separation of the proletariat, through its own productive activity, from its reproduction as the “working class.” To conceptualize the proletariat as “a class in transition” is to understand it as this transformation: not as a synchronically stable social group, but as a diachronic, dialectical transition from class constitution to deconstitution. What

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Théorie Communiste calls a “crisis of reproduction” is proper to the late stage of this transition, in which the technological and managerial innovations requisite for real subsumption have rendered living labor relatively superfluous (relative, that is, to the dynamic expansion of the working class circa 1850–1950). That is, the non-reproduction of the proletariat looms as both an impossibility for capital and as a historical tendency of capital. Much earlier, however, in the very process of its initial constitution, the category of the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions that divide “the working class” from its determination by the wage even as it is determined as “the class of wage laborers.” Marx theorizes primitive accumulation as a process of separation dividing the worker from the means of production, such that “immediate producers are turned into wage laborers.”24 Yet Sylvia Federici notes that “primitive accumulation . . . was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.”25 Such an account requires us to complicate further the Scheidungsprozess of primitive accumulation theorized by Marx. If Marx theorizes capitalist class constitution as a double process of separation in which owners of the means of production are separated from production, and producers are separated from ownership of the means of production, then Federici presses us to recognize, as concomitant with the development of wage labor, a separation of workers from the wage that is constitutive of “the formation of the modern proletariat.” While Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production of landless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditions of possibility for the production and reproduction of labor power itself, and thus upon the subjugation of women’s labor and women’s reproductive function that was essential to the formation and maintenance of the “working class.” This subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and thus the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the mediation of access to the wage through men. In particular, Federici argues that the construction of this new patriarchy was predicated upon the violent disciplining of women’s bodies and forms of collective life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to enforce a new sexual division of labor and confine women to reproductive work.26 Thus, Federici treats gender as a specification of class relations, arguing that the term “women” “signifies not just a hidden history that needs to be made visible; but a particular form of exploitation and, there-

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fore, a unique perspective from which to reconsider the history of capitalist relations.”27 The point I want to hold onto here is that the process of primitive accumulation produces different forms of exploitation, in a technical sense: not only exploitation through the direct extraction of surplus value from wage labor, but also the dependency of wage labor in general upon the unwaged exploitation of reproductive labor in the home, as well as the unwaged exploitation of slave labor. What this means is that the proletariat is internally separated from itself, in the first instance: the very process of its class constitution—separation from the means of production—is also the process of its internal separation, such that the creation of the contradiction between capital and labor is also the creation of internal contradictions and inequalities within the proletariat itself, corresponding to different forms of exploitation structuring the relation of different laboring bodies to capitalist accumulation. In The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue that “the emphasis in modern labor history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.”28 This proletariat, they argue, was anonymous, nameless, female and male, of all ages, mobile, transatlantic, motley and multiethnic, planetary in its origins, motions, and consciousness. It was often unwaged, forced to perform the unpaid labors of capitalism, and indeed, the unpaid labors of the process of primitive accumulation itself. This last point is crucial: the proletarian class is not only constituted as a result of expropriation; rather, the labor of expropriation itself is already performed by unwaged or precarious workers upon whom capitalism will continue to rely, who are intrinsic to the constitution of the proletariat. Referring to those who were known as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” Linebaugh and Rediker highlight the often forgotten labor of primitive accumulation: Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself, for example, is treated as a given: the field is there before the plowing starts; the city is there before the laborer begins the working day. Likewise for long-distance trade: the port is there before the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is there before the slave cultivates its land. The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally, reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The result is that the hewers of wood and drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous, and forgotten,

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even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building the infrastructure of “civilization.”29

The implication of this argument is that the conditions of possibility for the constitution of a capitalist “working class” are themselves the product of labor by those often excluded from the ranks of “proletarians” (excluded from the wage). But if we consider the proletariat, in the first instance, as a class in transition rather than a class with a stable historical identity, then accounts like those offered by Caliban and the Witch and The Many-Headed Hydra enable us to develop an expanded understanding of the proletariat as that class which is always defined by the reproduction of a separation between waged and unwaged labor. The working class tendentially produces its own superfluity to the wage; it is itself produced by the (often) unwaged labor of expropriation and reproduction. The proletariat is this moving contradiction: this production, reproduction, and delimitation of wage labor by unwaged labor. To consider the category of the proletariat from this perspective is to consider the division of labor as a Scheidungsprozess both internal and external to the formal account of real subsumption (i.e., the tendentially increasing extraction of relative surplus value) offered by Marx—a process including separation within the wage as well as from the wage. This process relies upon forms of reproductive and unwaged labor which Marx’s analytic of separation implicitly presumes but does not systematically include. Thus, an expanded analytic of separation would attend to the division of labor as a process that not only consolidates a working-class movement as an unintended side-effect of the capitalist factory system but also divides proletarians from such a working-class movement. The genesis of the worker’s movement, and of working-class identity, is concomitant with the exclusion of those who perform unwaged work from that movement, with the fragmentation and negation of that identity. An expanded analytic of separation—considering the internal differentiation and division of the proletariat by different forms of exploitation—thus has important consequences for the theory of class struggle. For these different forms of exploitation, partially aligned with the modern constitution of such categories as “woman” and “slave,” with gender and with race, return within the workers movement as the problem of what and whom it does not include. Of course, decades of theoretical production at the intersection of Marxism, feminism, and critical race theory have made this argument. The point of restating it here is to position this problematic within the terms of an analytic of separation, as a theoretically necessary expansion of the Scheidungsprozess analyzed by Marx.

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And this belongs as well to an expansion of the “théorie de l’écart,” the theory of rift, developed by Théorie Communiste and discussed in the previous chapter.30 If state repression functions as an external limit imposed upon proletarian struggles, the internal limits of those struggles often involve fragmentations of class cohesion along lines of race and gender. Such fragmentation may be bemoaned and wished away, or affirmed and insisted upon, in polemics against or positive articulations of “identity politics,” but from the perspective of the analytic of separation such fragmentation requires a descriptive rather than normative treatment. That is, such fragmentation is a fact of class struggle because it is a fact of class constitution—part and parcel of the production and reproduction of class cohesion and of working class identity itself. Thus, communist theory requires an analytic approach to such fragmentation situating it not as exterior or supplementary to class, but as part of the historical dialectic through which class struggle is articulated in contradiction with capitalism. “The proletariat” only remains an adequate concept for the articulation of class struggle if that concept includes differential forms of exploitation, and if it is capable of incorporating and accounting for internal divisions by which struggles are thus riven. My suggestion is that the contradictions implicit in such a perspective on class struggle might be integrated into the analytic of separation developed by Marx, which would thus be expanded beyond the purview of Capital. The decompositions and recompositions to which proletarian struggles are prone are conjunctural, contextually specific. Yet they may also be considered from the perspective of—and thus also reflect back upon and revise—a structural theory, rationally articulated, such as the analytic of separation.

RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM The analytic of separation I have tried to theorize and situate within and beyond Marx’s Capital might be understood as a form of rationalist empiricism insofar as it cannot set out from the priority of either theory or history. At one and the same time, it must grasp history theoretically and theory historically. This was the riddle provoking Althusser’s question: How can Marx’s method of analysis be both pre-existent and new? It is because Marx’s theory bears its historical development within the very framework of its rational articulation that it is always subject to historical rearticulation and revision. This is the theoretical peculiarity of historical materialism, through which it both grounds its structural theory and perpetually exposes it to ungrounding. Such a dialectic of un-grounding requires that continual movement between the rational and the empirical we have been

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studying in different forms. Without any appeal to dogmatism, but rather with an appeal to immanent critique, we may call Marx’s practice of the analytic of separation by the name both he and Althusser also gave to the critique of political economy: “science.” Why should we? Because science is not the name of orthodoxy, of certainty, or of conceptual sufficiency—though it does name the constitution of a conceptual field adequate for systematic investigation. It is the name of that transformation of knowledge that is unanticipated yet systematically adequate, historically contingent yet formally necessary, gradually ungrounded and punctually regrounded, at once open to exceptions and rigorously coherent.

CONCLUSION: THE TRUE, THE GOOD, THE BEAUTIFUL —for Rob Lehman

First and foremost, this is a book about the relation between reason and experience. My fundamental questions have been: How does each constrain and propel the other? How do the differing claims of reason and experience expose the limits of each and open those limits to the possibility of transformation? What are the distinct domains proper to reason and experience, and how can we respect their boundaries at the same time that we respect the critique of those boundaries, lest they ossify into the very dogmatism which the delimitation of speculation was intended to overcome? These are Kantian questions, and also questions that press us to consider the limits of Kant’s own answers. As I make clear in Chapter 3, I respect Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendental solution to the conflicting claims of reason and experience, and I follow Hegel’s effort to expose cognition to an immanent critique of its categories—a critique that must traverse the experience of reason’s unfolding in order to avoid taking shelter in the transcendental a priori. Hegel’s dialectic is a process of perpetual exposure and recomposition, which might best be encapsulated by his thinking of the limit as that which exposes its own outside, and thus already sublates its own delimitation. Kant’s transcendental philosophy constructs an epistemology of legislation through limits. Rationalist empiricism is concerned with the limits of legislation: with those exceptions to the rule that arise from encounters of reason and experience displacing the framework of their previous limits. 249

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THE TRUE Hegel identifies the true with the whole. But the whole is the limit of that movement of thought which, through disjunctive encounters of reason and experience, opens what we know to the movement of what can become true. The whole is the limit of Hegel’s encounter with limits—those formidable encounters traversed by the stunning and beautiful movements of the Logic of Essence. The whole gathers the encounter into the totality of contradiction, by which the exteriority of the encounter to what was already there is tamed, by which its contingency is subordinated to necessity. The whole of becoming—qua whole—is that which does not become, just as the transcendental must methodologically refuse an account of its own genesis. We do traverse the genesis of the whole in the Science of Logic, which is the splendor of that book. But the becoming of the whole clears its own genesis in the Idea, and the annulment of time overturns the very engine of dialectical reflection: the power of time to perpetually transform the order the knowledge. It is a central claim of this book that speculation and critique cannot be parceled out according to the division of reason and experience. Metaphysics, science, politics: each of these fields relies integrally upon the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience, their “epistemological polarity.”1 Yes, ontology must press the power of reason beyond the limits of experience; there is no other means of respecting the ontological difference: that the being of beings is not a being, and thus cannot be an object of experience. Yet both Heidegger’s existential analytic and Meillassoux’s factial reasoning draw ontological claims from a philosophical reckoning with facticity, from an examination of experience that presses beyond its limits through its givenness. Heidegger’s fundamental ontological claim—“temporality is the primordial ‘outside of itself ’ in and for itself ”—thinks the exteriority of time beyond all experience, yet this claim is forced by an analysis of the phenomenality of thrown-projection, by the hermeneutics of facticity. The enunciation of such a proposition is an assent by reason to an unsurpassable datum of experience which has been thought through: the phenomenality of my existence exposes me irremediably to the exteriority of time. Likewise, Meillassoux’s assertion that “to be is to be a fact” is drawn from the givenness of facticity as that which presents itself, and from a rational reflection upon the contingency of facts, a reflection upon whether it is possible to apply to concept of contingency to contingency itself. It is not, and an assent to this datum of rational reflection produces an inscription of the ontological difference through the relation between necessity and contingency: being is the necessity

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of contingency (ontological), beings are necessarily contingent (ontic). Contingency itself, and only contingency itself, is non-contingent, is not a fact; facts are contingent, they cannot be necessary. Ontology here goes beyond fact, and therefore beyond the order of scientific law, through an encounter with what experience cannot say, though it shapes, delimits, and presses reason toward structures of reflection that draw from facticity the enunciation of its implications for metaphysics. This complex and delicate configuration of ontological reflection is common to Heidegger and to Meillassoux, despite manifest differences of method and position. In the physical sciences, the mutual claims of “theoretical” and “experimental” science instantiate those of reason and experience. But experiment is itself saturated, in its technical affordances and empirical procedures, by the integration of reason and experience. The “transmutation of epistemological values” theorized by Bachelard, whereby rationalism and empiricism encounter each other’s imperatives in the ceaseless recomposition of scientific knowledge, traverses both theory and experiment, since experiments work within the mathematical frame of physical theory and computational affordances, while physical theory derives from and reenters the experimental field—is conditioned by the anomalies and possibilities that constitute problems of and for empirical testing. The ontic knowledge of which science is productive is thus not the empirical and critical pole on one side of an opposition to the rationalist, speculative determinations of philosophy. Just as the relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism traverses the distinction between theory and experiment in science, it also traverses the distinction between science and philosophy. By the same token, we would do well to avoid distributing the categories of knowledge and truth according to the distinction between science and philosophy. Rather than hold that science is concerned with knowledge while philosophy is concerned with truth, it would be better to think the problem of the true through the relational constitution of science and philosophy. The effort to respect the discrepant domain of each field while also working through and respecting their consequences for one another is vital to grappling not only with the question—what do we know?—but also with the question—what is true? The first is a question about the present state of our understanding; the second is a question that opens onto the problem of what has to be thought, and onto the recomposition of knowledge: What will we know, in light of what will have become true? In order to remain responsive to the historical, processual constitution of knowledge and truth, philosophy and science must remain attentive to the implications of each for the other, without thereby allowing philosophy to

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become the arbiter of science or science the arbiter of philosophy. This double exigency is the epistemological criterion of the capacity for the production of truth, of the capacity of both science and philosophy to go beyond what we presently know (speculation) while remaining responsive to the parameters of that knowledge (critique). Both within and between philosophy and science, the transmutation of epistemological values between rationalism and empiricism is central to sustaining an open relation between speculation and critique. Which is to sustain, as well, the openness of the true within the decompletion of the whole.

THE GOOD Rationalist empiricism is not a unified method, but a theory of and attunement toward methodological exteriority. This much is suggested by its characterization as “speculative critique,” an apparent oxymoron that casts supposedly opposing philosophical orientations into the complicity of mutually supportive amplification. The relation between reason and experience is not one of harmony but of contradiction: each contradicts the other, yet, in doing so, propels the other further. Their relation is in this sense dialectical, but we should understand that the dialectic itself, as a method, derives from this relation. Within the history of philosophy, Hegel’s construction of a dialectical method derives from a critique of Kant’s transcendental displacement of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, which itself responds to Hume’s critique of both rational and empirical theories of causality. Hegel’s speculative philosophy is spurred by his critique of transcendental critique. He is a practitioner of speculative critique— doubtless the greatest such practitioner in the history of philosophy. Marx will develop a historical materialist approach to dialectical reflection through a critique of Hegelian idealism. He will inherit the problem of how to navigate the conflicting claims of reason and experience through dialectical thinking, but he will take up this methodological problem and pursue its theoretical and practical consequences on a far more concrete level than Hegel’s historical philosophy could approach. The historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production becomes an object of analytical attention that will produce an analytical method specific to its parameters: what I call the analytic of separation. Dialectical method is thus exposed to its transformation by the exigencies of concrete history. It has to learn from its enemy (capitalism) the parameters of an immanent critique that accepts and takes up the nearly impossible labor of

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thinking through not only the formidable abstractions of capital but also their subsumption of our concrete activities and social relationships. This extraordinary methodological labor—whose only parallels are Spinoza’s more geometrico, Kant’s invention of the transcendental, and Badiou’s ontological appropriation of set theory—this methodological breakthrough has the effect of displacing the relevance of “moral philosophy.” If it is not to function as ideology, moral philosophy must become the critique of capitalism, since the exigencies of capitalist competition (the exigencies of the extraction of surplus value) dominate the ethos of modernity. One might say that any “good” which is possible within the capitalist mode of production is always either compromised by or predicated upon the “evil” of exploitation and production according to profit rather than need. But the diagnosis is more harrowing yet: the terms “good” and “evil” themselves cast a moral haze over the structural ills and impasses of capitalism. Though they may be superficially relevant, moral categories applicable to actions attributable to individual agents are not rigorously applicable to the exigencies of capitalist production, which renders structurally irrelevant the intentions, for good or evil, of individual agents, so long as the latter operate within its terms. One might say that a theory of the good is thus held in suspension by Marx’s critique of political economy. What is required, in the first instance, is not a denunciation of evil or a theory of the good but, quite precisely, a critique of political economy. This is what distinguishes Marx’s mature work from utopian socialism, and his theoretical reserve is in this respect remarkable. Like others, Marx will inveigh, imagine, and propagandize, but he will also set himself to work on understanding the fundamental lineaments of that which must be displaced. Never has the Machiavellian injunction to keep your enemies closer than your friends been so consequentially and counter-intuitively obeyed. Marx writes in the thick of the formation of the workers’ movement. He gives it its manifesto and then he gives it its critical theory. What I have tried to consider here are the stakes of the historical waning of that movement for the relation between theory and praxis. Théorie Communiste—in my view the authors of the most important rethinking of the relation between theory and praxis since Lenin—have made it their project to historicize and theorize anew the problem of class struggle, beyond the tendential eclipse of the workers’ movement as the dominant figure of communist politics. They link a historical analysis of this tendential decomposition to a critique of what they call “programmatism” as a political orientation toward the present. It must be emphasized, because the point is often misunderstood, that this is not a normative critique. It is not “good”

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that the conditions of possibility for the triumph of the workers’ movement have waned with the counter-revolutionary restructuring of the global economy; it would have been “better” if that movement had succeeded in overcoming capitalism on a global scale. But that was not to be. What the theory of communization opens is a perspective on class struggle subsequent to the givenness of programmatism as an orientation toward politics. And that is why communization theory is so disconcerting. The ground of unity that had secured an image of working-class politics is shaken by the genuine problem of a class in contradiction with its own existence, not only at a practical but at a theoretical level. This is why I find the work of Théorie Communiste particularly open to the difficult questions posed by contemporary struggles. They do not suppose that the articulation of a political program will be adequate to the historical, geographical, and subjective specificity of particular struggles or their differential articulation at the level of global totality. They do not respond to the decompositions struggles undergo by simply crying out for a better program. Rather, they analyze, historicize, and theorize the determinations of class struggle in the present moment, and they offer a framework for confronting the problem of “the self-abolition of the proletariat” that is open to a process of communization. Because they do not ground their Marxist approach to class struggle in “working-class politics,” but rather in a conjunctural analysis of dynamic and limit amid the tendential waning of such politics, their perspective remains open to revision by critiques of traditional Marxism (of the orthodox category of “the proletariat”) by feminist and critical race theory. The critique of programmatism offers a speculative space, within Marxist and communist theory, wherein theory is genuinely open to the recomposition of class struggle by what happens in practice. Alain Badiou has foregrounded “the idea of communism” in a manner suggesting its political displacement of the normative ideal of “the good.”2 For more than a century, the Party was the organizational bearer and practical organon of that idea; for Badiou, unlike his teacher Althusser, it is necessary to acknowledge that “the party form has had its day.” Badiou thus addresses himself to the open question of “politics without a party” and thus to the genuine problem of the composition of a “we” without a pre-given form: “how are we to move from the fraternal ‘we’ of the epic to the disparate ‘we’ of togetherness, of the set (ensemble), without ever giving up on the demand that there be a ‘we.’ I, too, exist within this question.”3 The idea of communism would orient a disparate collective toward a normative ideal in the absence of a given political form (the Party) so as to sustain the question of communism (rather than some other question)

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while holding that question open to the necessary and arduous recomposition of a politics without a party. Yet, if we acknowledge that not only the Party but also the workers’ movement, as the dominant dynamic of communist struggle, has suffered a counterrevolutionary decomposition and that the historical-economic conditions of possibility are not in place for its global recomposition, then we must also open the question of how communist struggle is possible on this terrain. And it is an open question. The theory of “communist measures” as the very process of revolutionary activity—the theory of communization—attempts to open a framework within which to think and to practice that question. It is a difficult theory of class contradiction, for which “self-organization is the first act of revolution; it is then an obstacle to be overcome,” since “abolishing capital is also the self-negation of the worker, and not the worker’s self-organisation as such.”4 This manner of posing the problem of the “self-abolition of the proletariat”—not through the seizure of state power and its gradual withering away, but through the taking of communist measures that enable the reproduction of concrete individuals as something other than a capitalist class—does not forward “the idea of communism” as a regulative ideal to be struggled toward, but rather the process of communization as the concrete practice of proletarians in and as “the crisis of reproduction” of capital. Again, this theory is not a normative celebration of political immediacy, but rather an effort to grapple with, and thereby reformulate communist theory in light of, the structural conditions of the present cycle of struggles. It is an effort to engage once more, under new conditions, Marx and Engels’s difficult injunction that “communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself ” but rather “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”5 If there is a political displacement of “the good” to be drawn from contemporary communist theory, it is thus not an alternative regulative ideal. It is not a state of affairs to be attained but rather an orientation toward struggle itself. The decompositions and recompositions of struggles are unpredictable, wrenching, and consequential—they are conjuncturally specific—and they require an awareness of the disorientation of those involved and the unforeseeable paths political sequences may take. A devotion to “program” is ill suited to these difficulties. There is no question that theoretical acuity is necessary to the navigate revolutionary struggle: it is necessary for resistance to reformism and for an articulation of revolutionary horizons. Yet one finds out the hard way that we must learn “each day as it comes” the impediments to and possibilities of collective political action. No program will suffice, nor will any theoretical orthodoxy.

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Political experience requires forms of relation to theoretical reason that are sufficiently flexible to admit modification while nevertheless remaining mediated by theory. Rationalist empiricism involves an attunement toward political theory and praxis that works toward this mutual reciprocity of political reason and political experience as the open question of, rather than the programmatic solution to, class composition.

THE BEAUTIFUL The glory of transcendental philosophy is the theory of the beautiful. For here thought discovers what may be its strangest and most gratuitous vocation: to stumble upon a singular unity of matter, life, and thought, in the element of feeling, and to experience this feeling as the implicit inscription of a statement— “This is beautiful.” To stumble upon. Even if we have seen Boy Leading a Horse many times and walk straight to it, even if we hike up to the nearly abandoned village of Gornje Stoliv on the Bay of Kotor understanding the lineaments of the scene we are likely to encounter, the singularity of the beautiful is that it transpires as if by surprise, since it derives not directly from an object, but from “a feeling of free play of the powers of representation”—a feeling of harmony, but also of the suspension of categorical application, of lingering within the default of cognitive determination. Even if the pleasure of the beautiful requires historical knowledge and technical understanding to come into being, as in a complex case such as the final section of Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City; even if the circumstances a composition records lend the advent of this feeling a brutal torque, such that one may want to suppress it—as in the case of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis or Basquiat’s 50 Cent Piece—there it is nevertheless, reducing what we are to itself: watch me vanish watch me vanish watch me watch me watch6

Beauty is the singular genesis of singularity, the feeling of that genesis, and nothing else, regardless of its object.7 The very singularity of this feeling is that, in and of itself, it is always the same, regardless of the conditions of its coming to

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be. That is why it provokes such suspicion, and rightly so: the beautiful is wildly inappropriate to the historical circumstances in which we live. Yet it persists. The transcendental is the element of the beautiful, and this is the point of highest tension in transcendental critique. The Lebensgefühl of phenomenal singularity would seem to anchor it in the body even as the dawning of a judgment (“how beautiful”) renders it irreducible to any particular corporeality: universal. The transcendental is the medium of this irreducibility, the condition of possibility for the unity of feeling (free play, harmony) and judgment. Yet, even if it differs constitutively from the agreeable or the charming, and even if the harmony of the faculties that occasions our aesthetic judgment precedes our pleasure in the beautiful, nevertheless the feeling of free play (even if among the powers of cognition) would seem to call us back to the body as that which feels, and thus to call us outside the transcendental. For how is it that I possess this this power of feeling? How is it that my powers of cognition should produce an affective correlate? How do we account for the genesis of this capacity to feel that enables the genesis of the feeling of the beautiful? How could a scientific account of this capacity, grounded in transcendental conditions of possible experience, ever be adequate not only to the genesis of those conditions (the exteriority of that genesis to its transcendental framing), but also to the experience of feeling, the experience that feeling is? Can empiricism really be adequate to experience? That is a version of Hume’s question (how can we justify learning from experience?) which Kant aimed to answer through the invention of the transcendental. Yet it seems the transcendental returns us, relentlessly, to a modified version of the earlier question: Can the transcendental really be adequate to the possibility of experience? For if the transcendental is that condition of possibility, what is its condition? For those who learn to experience the beautiful as if fringed with the theory of that experience, the beautiful itself comes to pose this question. Grasped philosophically, the beautiful is the feeling of this question. Is not my capacity to feel the free play of powers of cognition exterior to the transcendental? This question attains its most lucid formulation in the radical phenomenology of Michel Henry.8 In his major work, The Essence of Manifestation, and in his brilliant reconstruction of modern philosophy, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, Henry relentlessly demonstrates that every form of thought, representation, perception, ek-statis—each and every possible access to exteriority—is based on and conditioned by sensation. He shows that “the crux of Kantian thought and its aporia” is the impossibility of producing any representation whatever (given

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the emptiness of concepts and the pure formalism of intuition) without the fundamental capacity for receptivity called sensation. “The fact that sensation is representation’s other and that representation is incapable of production,” he argues, “means the being of sensation, the being of impression, is not, nor can it be, reduced to representivity as such.”9 On this basis Henry asks, “What, then, is the being of impression as irreducible to representivity if not the original selfimpression in which every impression impresses itself and is thus possible as what it is, if not life’s radically immanent essence, exclusive of all ek-stasis.”10 For Henry this is the “aporia” of Kantian thought because sensation, within the structure of Kant’s transcendental critique, must be intuited by the inner sense, yet the very capacity for sensation would seem to go beyond the formalism of space and time, such that affectivity would be the a priori condition of receptivity per se. As Henry puts it in The Essence of Manifestation, “auto-affection is the constitutive structure of the original essence of receptivity.”11 The working out of this argument vis-à vis Kant’s First Critique is complex, and readers may pursue it in Henry’s chapter, “Empty Subjectivity and Life Lost.”12 But for our purposes its import is that, despite its “extraordinary analytical apparatus” and its “conceptual splendor,” transcendental critique may be un-grounded as a theory of the unity of self-consciousness by referring it to its prior condition: life conceived as primordial auto-affectivity. With rare analytical precision, Henry pursues this prior condition of thinking, intentionality, and temporality through engagements with the Cartesian cogito,13 Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of consciousness,14 and Heidegger’s existential analytic.15 We might say that Henry turns the Third Critique back upon the First; he theorizes Lebensgefühl as the condition of possibility for intuitive receptivity. The singularity, universality, and necessity of the feeling of pleasure attending a judgment of the beautiful returns us to the immanence of this condition at the core of all reception. Some may dismiss Henry as a Christian phenomenologist,16 but such dismissals will not change the fact that he has developed one of the most coherent and meticulously articulated philosophical concepts of life in the tradition. This concept of life—the immanence of auto-affection—cannot be grasped by science, because its phenomenality is irreducible to physical organization. In modified Kantian fashion, Henry would also argue that life is the a priori condition of possibility for any empirical analysis of phenomena, since it is the condition of possibility for any access to exteriority whatever. On these grounds, Henry goes so far—throughout his oeuvre, but most insistently in The Essence of Manifestation—to think the immanence of auto-affection as being-qua-being, since it is the ground of all ontological reflection. According to Henry, auto-affection is not

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only “the unique ontological dimension by which to approach and grasp the original reality of the essence, namely of Being itself,”17 it is Being itself, because “ontological reality is not dissociable from the form it which it shows itself, since it is itself this form as such.”18 If Kant holds that being cannot be cognized as independent of thought, and if Hegel identifies thinking and being, Henry identifies life and being. He does so not in the mode of vitalist metaphysics, but in the mode of a new transcendental philosophy: being-qua-being is not dissociable from the condition of its manifestation, and the essence of manifestation is life, the immanence of auto-affection. Although Quentin Meillassoux does not engage with Henry, we see from this perspective why a philosophical treatment of the “paradox of manifestation” is important. If life is the condition of possibility for thought, and if what thought thinks is not dissociable from its manifestation to thought, then life will be the ground and the essence of all that we think. It will subsume the thinking of being so thoroughly that being will be identified with life. Henry’s radical phenomenology may be the strictest, and perhaps the most profound, form of correlationist epistemology. He shows that if thought cannot think what is outside the condition of its opening upon exteriority, it will have to ground not only thinking but also what it thinks in feeling, and this is the case even for Kant’s transcendental idealism. Thus, if modern philosophy is not to give way to the identity of life and being, then thought must be able to think that which is prior to manifestation. We must be able to think, within manifestation, a world without manifestation. Henry’s boundless hostility to modern science19 is no doubt predicated upon its enmity to his philosophical position on this point. Henry displaces the ek-stasis of temporality from the eternity of auto-affection’s pure immanence, situating all scientific chronology on the ground of this phenomenal eternity, just as Heidegger situated all scientific chronology upon the ground of ek-statical temporalization. Meanwhile, science demonstrates more and more rigorously our capacity to empirically determine the irreducibility of time to phenomenality and to situate the genesis of phenomenality in time. Science thus demands the unbinding of thought from manifestation, and it suggests the ground of this unbinding is our capacity to understand the exteriority of time. That is the speculative import of modern science. Thus, one must submit the essence of manifestation to speculative critique. Henry disdains science because it banishes phenomenality, but this should be recognized and lauded as its specific power. In bracketing phenomenality, science does not bracket manifestation, but rather the essence of manifestation (receptivity as auto-affection). It does so through the relay between technologi-

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cal apparatuses and mathematical formalization, in a manner we have already theorized and illustrated. And this peculiar power of science—its negation of immediacy—is the historical and indexical trace of a crucial difference between thought and life: the former is enabled by technics. As Bernard Stiegler shows most powerfully in the first volume of Technics and Time, the coordination of reason and experience we might feasibly call “thought” coevolves with technology, such that thought and technics are indissociable. Yet this indissociability (“the de-fault of origin”) does not render being indissociable from either thought or technics. On the contrary, the integral relation between thought and technics becomes the organon by which we may think the dissociation of being from thought. For just as reason and technics are bound up in their development, so too does the new form of experience called “science” develop through their binding, and one of the most profound historical tendencies of science—made possible by coordinating reason, experience, and technics in the negation of immediacy—is to throw us outside of ourselves, to expose us to that which is prior to our origin and subsequent to our extinction. Indeed, to expose us, through a mode of demonstration irreducible to phenomenality, to that which is exterior to manifestation. There is a retroaction of thought upon life which is bound up with thought’s coevolution with technology. The new configurations of experience technology enables—through recording, for example—project thought outside of its synthesis with lived immediacy. This is what allows reason to think the dissociation of being from life and from thought. This capacity of reason is not only rational but also empirical, just as new modes of empirical investigation rely for their efficacy and their speculative sense upon reason. This binding of reason and experience, through their mutual bond with technology . . . does the answer to Bachelard’s riddle lie herein? “Empiricism and rationalism are bound, in scientific thought, by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain.” That which unites pleasure and pain: Is this not life? If rationalism and empiricism are bound, in scientific thought, by a bond as strong as this, could it be precisely that which is not life: technics? This is indeed “a strange bond,” for technics separates reason and experience, the better to enable the non-immediacy of their coordination. Yet it also embodies reason and experience: technology is the material instantiation and the record of their historical transformation, just as it becomes a condition of possibility for the historical transformation of their relationship: for what can be thought, for what can be experienced. What distinguishes “science” from “life” (technics) is

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what constitutes the strange bond of rationalism and empiricism in “scientific thought.” If this bond is as strong as “that which unites pleasure and pain”—life, the immediacy of auto-affection—that is because it is capable of displacing it, of propelling scientific thought beyond the determinations and indeed the existence of life. As a philosophical theory of life, Henry’s radical phenomenology is unparalleled. As a theory of being, it is immensely impoverished. It does not account for the power of the retroaction of thought upon life, the ungrounding of thought from life through its technical constitution, which enables the relational disjunction of reason and experience to defy their enframing by auto-affection. Yet the access to exteriority granted by science is also insufficient to enable a thinking of being irreducible not only to life but to thought itself. For that, one requires a mode of speculation that can think the consequences of the paradox of manifestation beyond that which makes this paradox manifest (science). One requires a speculative mode of rationality that can extrapolate from the exteriorizing force of science, without being reducible to its forms of experience. That is what Meillassoux introduces through his “factial” mode of reasoning. This reasoning is intimately bound up with the conceptual problems we have outlined above, because it extends the exteriorizing force of science through the thought of exteriority par excellence: the necessity of contingency. This is the thought of exteriority because what it thinks is the possible being-otherwise of each and every being, and also of the laws of ontic becoming. It thinks becoming per se, outside of every determination other than itself, as the exteriority of everything to itself—the impossibility of grounding any essence in what anything is, rather than what may be. And what Meillassoux aims to show is that this is not simply a speculative hypothesis concerning being, but rather that it has to be thought. If the speculative scope of this thinking must indeed be indifferent to the ontic determinations of science, that is not because it is indifferent to science: it is because it obeys the exteriorizing force of science, which, in pushing us to think beyond the limits of thought itself, also pushes us to think beyond the limits of scientific thought. As the techne of exteriority, science exteriorizes even itself by pushing reason to think exteriority in a manner exterior to science, just as it forces us to confront what is before and after the existence of reason. It is in this sense that rationalist empiricism is at once the speculative critique of philosophy (science) and the speculative critique of science (philosophy). Rationalist empiricism is an orientation toward the outside of experience and the outside of thought, and it unfolds on the outside of method.

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It is thus bound up with the beautiful. For if the advent of the beautiful is indeed a feeling resulting from our finitude, it is also the sense of that which is beyond our finitude: of encountering what is singular within a particular world where we may think the universal, yet in which there is no sufficient reason for us to exist, and in which nothing must be as it is. How strange it is to be anything at all.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the two teachers with whom I first read Descartes and Hume, Rachel Fern and Deborah Knight. Working carefully through the Meditations and the Enquiry under their instruction oriented me, incipiently, toward the philosophical problems pursued here. I also want to thank Kenneth Reinhard, whose efforts to sustain a productive tension between speculative and critical philosophy in the context of the American academy have been an inspiration. This book has its genesis in a series of conferences organized by the Theory Reading Group of Cornell University that I attended from 2008 to 2010. Those events were marked by what now seems a rare unity of intellectual commitment: a collective effort to determine the stakes of the relationship between contemporary French thought and post-Kantian German philosophy. I hope these pages contribute to that effort. I am grateful to Audrey Wasser, Robert Lehman, and Aaron Hodges for convening those occasions and for many subsequent conversations. Likewise, discussions with Knox Peden were essential to the development of my ideas about epistemology and method. When I first presented a paper on what I called “rationalist empiricism,” it was Knox who pointed me to Althusser’s use of the same term, of which I had been unaware. The subsequent task of understanding that usage in relation to the problems I had in mind spurred me to conceive my project on the scale of a book. I am indebted to many friends and interlocutors who have encouraged and challenged me, including Vera Bühlmann, Martin Hägglund, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Anna Kornbluh, Kate Marshall, Brian Rajski, Marty Rayburn, Daniel Sacilotto, Aaron Schuster, Jason Smith, Stephanie Wakefield, Joshua Wiebe, and Evan Calder Williams. Nora Collen Fulton, Devin Wangert, Audrey Wasser, Tom Eyers, and Manish Sharma read and commented on the entire manuscript, contributing to the clarity of my prose and the coherence of my arguments. At Fordham University Press, I am grateful for the support and editorial intelligence of Jacques Lezra, Paul North, and Tom Lay. I have been able to test many of these ideas, and encounter many others, 263

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through symposia at MaMa Multimedia Center in Zagreb that I have been co-organizing with its directors since 2009. My thanks to those who work to keep MaMa alive as an independent hub of theoretical, artistic, and political activity, against all odds, twenty years after it was founded: Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Domes, Marjana Rimini´c, Igor Markovi´c, Igor Cˇoli´c, Ante Jeri´c, Ivana Peji´c, Lina Gonin, and Tihana Pupuvac. My engagement with the philosophical tradition has also been sustained through a series of seminars on major works, offered annually at UC Davis and Concordia University since 2009. My thanks to all of the students who participated in these; their commitment and their insights have enriched my thinking. Metrologists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology generously gave me a tour of their laboratories and discussed their work on the redefinition of the kilogram. Nicolas Baier was kind enough to host me for a studio visit after I first encountered an exhibition of his photography in 2008. I have appreciated his openness to subsequent conversations about the technical details and conceptual background of his practice. My work on this book has proceeded alongside the growth of my friendship and intellectual engagement with Alexi Kukuljevic, whose inimitable style of ontological questioning marks and accompanies my disposition toward philosophy. Annual reading groups by the Adriatic and constant discussion with Alexi, Amanda Holmes, and Cynthia Mitchell have become the core of my intellectual life, indispensible to the sharpening of reason and the deepening of experience. Amanda’s incisive readings of Kant, Freud, and Lacan have been an inspiration. Cynthia’s deep intelligence and singular wit make our daily conversations about psychoanalysis, art, politics, and philosophy a perpetual incitement to think anew. Her love and support have carried me through so much, including the doubts and difficulties of writing. This book is dedicated to Petar Milat, a “former philosopher” whose friendship, generosity, and brilliance have kept me moving forward. The sincerity of his commitment to everything that lies outside of method demonstrates that inhabiting such exteriority is not only a matter of philosophy, it is also a form of life.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONJUNCTURE 1. Here I refer to the purveyors of both “object-oriented ontology” (in philosophy) and “accelerationism” (in politics), whose anti-critical gestures I have assessed in several reviews. For a critique of the incoherence resulting from a detachment of speculation from critique in the work of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, see Nathan Brown, “The Nadir of OOO,” Parrhesia 17 (2013): 62–71. On the opposition of speculation to critique in Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, see Nathan Brown, “Speculation at the Crossroads,” Radical Philosophy 188 (November– December 2014): 47–50. On the accelerationist detachment of a retro-futurist utopian socialism from the Marxist critique of political economy, see Nathan Brown, “Avoiding Communism: A Critique of Inventing the Future,” Parrhesia 25 (2016): 155–171. 2. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 137–142. Heidegger’s question (answered in the affirmative) is: “Should time as pure sensibility stand in an original unity with the ‘I think’ of pure apperception? Should the pure I, which according to the generally prevailing interpretation Kant placed outside of all temporality and all time, be taken as ‘temporal’?” (121). 3. Here I want to acknowledge the importance of Catherine Malabou’s book Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality for grappling with the ungrounding of the transcendental. While my encounter with Before Tomorrow has come too late for a detailed engagement with Malabou’s reading of Kant, I consider her project akin to my own, though pursued on different grounds. Malabou’s approach is to displace the opposition between the a priori and the a posteriori through the concept of epigenesis to which Kant refers in Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason and which Malabou elucidates and reframes through the resources of contemporary neuroscience and biology. My own approach is methodological: to reopen the problem of the relationship between rationalism and empiricism that would attend the ungrounding of transcendental critique—an approach I see first taken up, implicitly, by Hegel’s speculative critique of Kant in the Science of Logic (see Chapter 3). I look forward to offering an account—for now beyond the scope of this book—of the relation between 265

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my own rationalist empiricist approach and the epigenetic relay between reason and experience implicitly at issue in Malabou’s work. See Malabou, Before Tomorrow, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). 4. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 27. 5. Ibid., 60–62. For a translation of the very different version of this argument in Meillassoux’s dissertation “L’inexistence divine,” see Quentin Meillassoux, “The Factial,” trans. Nathan Brown, Parrhesia 25 (2016): 20–40. 6. Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 6. I have occasionally altered the translation for accuracy. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. See Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002). 12. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 5. 13. Ibid., 6. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. The theory of writing developed by Jacques Derrida, the techno-genetic deconstruction of the Husserlian epoché further developed by Bernard Stiegler, and the anti-humanist theory of discourse networks elaborated by Friedrich Kittler are all relevant to this brief account of the displacement of the centrality of the transcendental subject by mathematical inscriptions, technical apparatuses, and communication systems. I pursue this line of theoretical inquiry further in Chapter 6. See Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962), trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), and Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994), trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 16. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990), 70–165. 17. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 183–184. 18. Ibid., 184. 19. Ibid., 184–185.

NOTES TO PAGES 15–21

20. Gaston Bachelard develops a theory of “the problematic” along these lines in Le rationalisme appliqué (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). See Gaston Bachelard, “Corrationalism and the Problematic,” trans. Mary Tiles, Radical Philosophy 173 (May–June 2012): 27–32. 21. Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 184–185 (note). 22. Ibid., 186. 23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 101. 24. See Ken Adler, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York: Free Press, 2002). 25. See Bureau Internationale des Poids et Mesures, “Draft Resolution A—26th Meeting of the CGPM (13–16 November 2018),” https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf /CGPM/Draft-Resolution-A-EN.pdf (accessed July 16, 2018). 26. See Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 135–177. 27. Ibid., 163. 28. Ibid., 142. 29. Ibid.,143. 30. Ibid., 147–148. 31. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 3. 32. Ibid., 11–12. 33. Ibid., 11. 34. The application of the unit year to the dating of the earth may seem somewhat unsatisfactory, since it is a unit dependent upon the orbit of the very planet whose accretion is under consideration. If one likes, the quantities could be expressed using seconds as the metrical unit, since the definition of the second has been detached from the mean solar day and correlated, since 1967, to the periodicity of radiation in a caesium atom. See NIST, “Historical Context of the SI: Unit of Time (second)” in NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty, https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units /second.html (accessed July 17, 2018). 35. According to Hubert Krevine, “it is generally held that the whole process that forms a planet like Earth lasted more than a hundred million years.” See The Earth: From Myths to Knowledge (2011), trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 41. 36. The authoritative reference on the uncertainty of measurement is the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM), Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, 2008. The first paragraph of the GUM states: “When reporting the result of a measurement of a physical quantity, it is obligatory that some quantitative indication of the quality of the result be given so that those who use it can assess its reliability. Without such an indication, measurement results cannot be compared, either among themselves or with reference values given in a specification or standard. It is therefore necessary that there be a readily implemented, easily understood, and generally accepted procedure for character-

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izing the quality of a result of a measurement, that is, for evaluating and expressing its uncertainty” (viii). 37. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 12. 38. Ibid., 17. 39. Hubert Krevine, The Earth, 43. 40. See Eran Tal, “The Epistemology of Measurement: A Model-Based Account,” PhD dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2012. 41. Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 139. 42. Ibid., 148. 43. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 22. 44. Ibid., 76. 45. Meillassoux, “The Factial,” 23. 46. Meillassoux calls this “unsubordinated contingency”—a contingency that is not subordinated to any law implies the contingency of the laws themselves. 47. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:183–184. 48. Ibid., 5:184. 49. Ibid., 5:184–185. 50. “In order to be convinced of the correctness of this deduction of the concept that is before us and of the necessity of assuming it as a transcendental principle of cognition, one need only consider the magnitude of the task of making an interconnected experience out of given perceptions of a nature that in the worst case contains an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws, a task that lies in our understanding a priori.” Ibid., 5:184. 51. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 15. 52. Ibid., 214–215. 1. ABSENT BLUE WAX: ON THE MINGLING OF METHODOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONS 1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 3. 2. Ibid., 3–4. 3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:20. 4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6. 5. Descartes, Meditations, 21. 6. Ibid., 20. 7. Hume, Treatise, 6. 8. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 39–44

9. Articles that review various responses to Hume’s missing shade of blue include Robert Cummins, “The Missing Shade of Blue,” Philosophical Review 87 (October 1978): 548–565; Robert J. Fogelin, “Hume and the Missing Shade of Blue,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45.2 (1984): 263–271; John O. Nelson, “Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue Re-Viewed,” Hume Studies 15.2 (1989): 353–364; and William H. Williams, “Is Hume’s Shade of Blue a Red Herring?” Synthese 92 (1992): 83–99. 10. Hume, Treatise, 5. 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144, B15. 13. Martial Gueroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans. Roger Ariew (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1:75. 14. Ibid., 1:76. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Descartes, Meditations, 20. 18. Ibid., 20–21. 19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134, 5:250. 20. Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xii. 21. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), xix. 22. Ibid., 109. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 108. 25. Descartes, Meditations, 22. 26. Michel Henry, “Videre Videor,” in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 33. 27. Descartes, Meditations, 19. 28. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 34. 29. Ibid., 33. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. “This means that the problem is and must be posed and resolved at the level of phenomena, excluding the hypocritical constructions of science and dogmatic philosophy. Therefore, only by taking the modes of sensation and imagination as they are posed and advanced by the power of their own phenomenality can they be exhibited as pertaining to thought, and in turn this ‘thought’ signifies nothing but that very

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phenomenality” (ibid., 35). “As thought’s ultimate possibility, affectivity reigns over and secretly determines all its modes” (ibid., 29). 34. Ibid., 33. 35. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 176. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boudas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 39. Descartes quoted in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 169. 40. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 115. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 123. 43. Ibid., 115. 2. ALTHUSSER’S DREAM: THE MATERIALIST DIALECTIC OF RATIONALIST EMPIRICISM 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 115. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 116. 4. Ibid. 5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977, 15. 6. Ibid., 36. 7. Ibid., 46. 8. Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” Collapse 2 (2007): 73. 9. Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 189. See also Johnston, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 158. 10. Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 73. 11. Peter Hallward, “Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude” in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 139. For a critique of Hallward’s response to Meillassoux’s work, see Nathan Brown, “The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux” in ibid., 142–163. 12. Louis Althusser, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical

NOTES TO PAGES 56–66

Research” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 1–18. 13. Ibid., 3–4. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid. 16. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 87–128. 17. 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. 18. Karl Marx quoted in Louis Althusser, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 232. 19. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 112. 20. Ibid., 16. 21. Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation,” 9. 22. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 52. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 61. 25. Ibid., 115. 26. Ibid., 117. 27. Ibid., 116. 28. Ibid., 123. 29. Ibid., 115. 30. Ibid., 111. 31. Ibid., 36. 32. Louis Althusser, “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” trans. Warren Montag, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, 132–133. 33. Ibid.,133. 34. Ibid.,134. 35. Ibid., 128. 36. Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, 191. 37. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism (New York: International Publishers, 1927), 61. 38. Ibid., 67. 39. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 13. 40. Ibid., 17. 41. Ibid., 122. 42. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism, 31.

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43. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterson (New York: Orion, 1968), 106. 44. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27. 45. Ibid., 27. 46. Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” 197. 47. See Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 247–248. See also Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002), 250–251. As Brassier points out, Meillassoux’s own interpretation of Popper’s position on this matter is contentious. See After Finitude, 133–134 n. 2. 48. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 82. 49. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio- Criticism, 83. 50. Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” 185. 3. HEGEL’S COGITO: ON THE GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY OF CRITICAL METAPHYSICS 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 42. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4–5. Pippin’s book sets out by specifying the first component of Hegel’s idealism as “the claim that a prior knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatio-temporal world, is possible—knowledge about that world, but achieved independently of empirical experience” (5). But this is the starting point that Hegel explicitly rejects. 5. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41. 6. Ibid., 42. 7. Ibid., 59. 8. See Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); and Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Hyppolite’s and Brandom’s accounts of Hegel are obviously very different and thus exemplify discrepant registers of the manner in which discursivity may be foregrounded in Hegel. For Hyppolite, “the open system of language and speech is thought in itself (Gedächtnis = Denken), the thought that turns itself into a thing, a sensible being, a sound, while the thing itself is negated, interiorized into thought. Language’s memory, with all its complex articulation, is the identity of being and thought” (29). For Brandom, it is the intersubjective dimension of rational normativity that requires discursive commitment. Brandom suggests that his account of intersubjective

NOTES TO PAGES 77–85

responsibility “makes sense if we think about the paradigm of discursive (conceptually contentful) norms as linguistic norms” (79). Thus Hyppolite emphasizes the ontological import of rational discursivity in Hegel, while for Brandom its import is pragmatic. 9. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41, 42. 10. Ibid., 54. 11. Ibid., 514. 12. Ibid., 515. 13. Ibid., 517. 14. Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, 37. 15. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 77. 16. Ibid., 1. 17. Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9. 18. Robert Pippin, “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26.2 (Summer 2012), www .mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel. 19. Hegel, Science of Logic, 41. 20. Ibid. 21. See Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity ( West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 137–143, 436–438. 22. Hegel, Science of Logic, 669. 23. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self- Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 246. I have amended the term “notional,” in Pippin’s text, to “conceptual” in order to retain consistency with my use of di Giovanni’s translation of the Logic. 24. Ibid., 246. 25. Hegel, Science of Logic, 42. 26. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139. 27. Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 431. 28. Hegel, Science of Logic, 42. 29. Ibid., 514. 30. Ibid., 515. 31. Ibid., 517. 32. Stephen Houlgate, “Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” The Owl of Minerva 27.1 (Fall 1995): 37–49; Raoni Padui, “The Necessity of Contingency and the Powerlessness of Nature: Hegel’s Two Senses of Contingency,” Idealist Studies 40.3 (2010): 243–255. On necessity and contingency in Hegel’s Logic, see also Dieter Henrich, “Hegel’s Theorie über den Zufall,” Kant-Studien 50 (1958–59): 131– 148; George di Giovanni, “The Category of Contingency in the Hegelian Logic,” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus and Kenneth L. Schmitz (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 179–200; and John Burbidge, “The

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Necessity of Contingency: An Analysis of Hegel’s Chapter on ‘Actuality’ in the Science of Logic,” Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, 201–217. 33. Hegel, Science of Logic, 480. 34. Ibid., 481. 35. Ibid., 482. 36. Ibid., 483. 37. Ibid., 484. 38. Ibid., 485. 39. Ibid., 486. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 488. 44. Ibid., 414. 45. Ibid., 415. 4. HEGEL’S APPRENTICE: FROM SPECULATIVE IDEALISM TO SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 753. 2. Ibid., 752. 3. Ibid., 29. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 753. 6. Ibid., 752. 7. Ibid., 751. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 461–462. Translation altered: I have followed the translation of “tilgt” as “annul,” as in Pinkard’s draft dual-language translation and in A. V. Miller’s earlier version. The complete clause in German is, “deswegen erscheint der Geist notwendig in der Zeit, und er erscheint so lange in der Zeit, als er nicht seinen reinen Begriff erfasst, das heisst, nicht die Zeit tilgt.” See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive /hegel/works/ph/pinkard-translation-of-phenomenology.pdf (accessed July 24, 2018). 9. Hegel, Science of Logic, 740. 10. Ibid., 413. 11. Ibid., 415. 12. Ibid., 413. 13. Hegel stipulates: “The fact proceeds from its own ground. It is not grounded or posited by it in such a manner that the ground would still stay underneath, as a

NOTES TO PAGES 94–110

substrate; on the contrary, the positing is the outward movement of ground to itself and the simple disappearing of it.” Ibid., 417. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 41. 16. Ibid., 514. 17. Ibid., 515. 18. Ibid., 514–515. 19. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 460. 20. Ibid., 461. 21. Hegel, Science of Logic, 672. 22. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 61. 23. Quentin Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” PhD dissertation, Université de Paris I, Department of Philosophy (1996), 43. For a translation of this section of Meillassoux’s dissertation, see Quentin Meillassoux, “The Factial,” trans. Nathan Brown, Parrhesia 25 (2016): 20–40. I will cite the pagination of the French text for consistency with quotations from untranslated sections of the dissertation. 24. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 47. 25. Ibid. 26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 314. 27. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 44. 28. Ibid., 57–58. 29. Ibid., 59. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. Ibid. 32. Hegel, Science of Logic, 413. 33. Ibid., 414. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 487. 36. Ibid. 37. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 185. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 245–246. 40. Ibid., 87. 41. Ibid., 86–90. 42. Ibid., 245. 43. Ibid., 244. 44. Ibid., 246. 45. Ibid. 46. See ibid., 140.

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47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 101. 49. Ibid., 76. 50. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A495; B523. My emphasis. 51. Heidegger, Being and Time, 314. 52. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 53. Heidegger, Being and Time, 415. 54. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 232. 55. Ibid., 158. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 160. 58. See Martin Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–281. 59. Meillassoux, “L’inexistence divine,” 144–145. 60. Ibid., 145. 61. Ibid., 146. 62. Ibid. 63. See Meditation 18, “Being’s Prohibition of the Event,” in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 184–190. 5. HEGEL’S KILOGRAM: TAKING THE MEASURE OF METRICAL UNITS 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 285. 2. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 5. 3. For a concise account, see R. A. Nelson, “Foundations of the International System of Units,” The Physics Teacher 19.9 (December 1981): 596–613. For a narrative account, see Ken Adler’s classic The Measure of All Things (New York: Free Press, 2002). See also H. A. Klein, The Science of Measurement: A Historical Survey (New York: Dover, 2011), 105–119. 4. Adler, The Measure of All Things, 1. 5. Hegel, Science of Logic, 288. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 279. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 292.

NOTES TO PAGES 128–133

9. Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology ( JCGM), International Vocabulary of Metrology: Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms, 3rd ed. (2008), 2. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. Hegel, Science of Logic, 282. 12. Ibid., 285. 13. 17th General Conference on Weights and Measures (1983). On the definition of metrical units in terms of physical constants, see Bureau Internationale de Poids et Mesures, “The ‘Explicit-Constant’ Definition,” http://www.bipm.org/en/measurement -units/rev-si/explicit-constant.html (accessed August 5, 2017). 14. See W. Nawrocki, “The Quantum SI: Towards the New System of Units,” Metrology and Measurement Systems XVII (2010): 139–150, and Peter Mohr, “Defining Units in the Quantum Based SI,” Metrologia 45 (2008): 129–133. For a layman’s introduction to physical constants, see the NIST’s “Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty,” Introduction to Constants for Nonexperts, https://physics.nist.gov/cuu /Constants/introduction.html (accessed August 5, 2017). 15. On the definition and accuracy of the standard second, see E. Tal, “The Epistemology of Measurement: A Model-Based Account,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto (2012), 26–48, 93–138. For an excellent account of the philosophy of measurement more generally, see Eran Tal, “Old and New Problems in Philosophy of Measurement,” Philosophy Compass VIII (2013): 1159–1173. 16. The Planck constant h is linked to mass by two fundamental equations: E = hv and E = mc2. In the first equation, the energy of a photon (E) is proportional to its frequency (v) by a constant factor (h). The second equation means that energy (E) is proportional to mass (m) by a constant factor (c2). Since h is related to E by the first equation and E is related to m through the second equation, one can establish a relation between h and m, relating the Planck constant to mass. See NIST, “Redefining the Kilogram, Planck’s Constant,” https://www.nist.gov/physical-measurement -laboratory/plancks-constant (accessed August 5, 2017). The numerical value of h can be expressed in the unit J.s ( Joules/second), which is equivalent to kg.m2.s–1. Thus, h can be linked to the unit of mass (kg) through the definitions of the meter (m) and the second (s). On the more complicated system of equations through which this relationship is established in experimental practice through the use of a kibble balance, see D. Haddad et al., “Bridging Classical and Quantum Mechanics,” Metrologia 53 (2016): A83–A85. 17. P. Richard, H. Fang, and R. Davis, “Foundation for the Redefinition of the Kilogram,” Metrologia 53 (2016): A6–A11. The recommendation of twenty parts per billion as the level of uncertainty requisite for redefinition was arrived at in 2010 by the BIPM’s Consultative Committee for Mass and Related Quantities (CCM). See its “Report of the 12th Meeting (March 26, 2010),” http://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/mass /avogadro/ (accessed August 5, 2017).

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18. NIST, “Older Values of the Constants,” https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants /archive2010.html (accessed August 5, 2017). 19. A. G. Steele et al., “Reconciling Planck Constant Determinations via Watt Balance and Enriched-Silicon Measurements at NRC Canada,” Metrologia 49 (2012): L8–L10. 20. NIST, “Fundamental Physical Constants,” https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu /Value?h (accessed August 5, 2017). 21. Bryan Kibble invented the Watt balance in 1975. See B. P Kibble, “A Measurement of the Gyromagnetic Ratio of the Proton by the Strong Field Method,” in Atomic Masses and Fundamental Constants, ed. J. H. Sanders and A. H. Wapstra (New York: Plenum, 1976), 5:545–551. The Watt balance was renamed following Kibble’s death in 2016. 22. For details, see Richard Steiner’s excellent article on the history of approaches to measuring the Planck constant, “History and Progress on Accurate Measurements of the Planck Constant,” Reports on Progress in Physics LXXVI (2013): 15–17. See also J. R. Pratt, “How to Weigh Everything from Atoms to Apples Using the Revised SI,” Measure IX (2014): 26–38. 23. NIST, “NIST’s Newest Watt Balance Brings World One Step Closer to New Kilogram” (2016), https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/06/nists-newest-watt -balance-brings-world-one-step-closer-new-kilogram (accessed August 5, 2017). 24. As Andreas et al. note, “Although a forthcoming new definition of the kilogram will be based on the Planck constant, h, the value of h can be calculated from that of NAwithout losing accuracy using the molar Planck constant, NAh. See “Counting the Atoms in a 28Si Crystal for a New Kilogram Definition,” Metrologia 48.2 (March 2011): S1–S13. For general information on the Avogadro Project, see BIPM, “International Avogadro Project,” http://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/mass/avogadro (accessed August 5, 2017). For technical information and experimental results up to 2011, see Metrologia 48.2 (April 2011), a special issue devoted to the International Avogadro Project. For more recent results, see I. Azuma et al., “Improved Measurement Results for the Avogadro Constant Using a 28Si-Enriched Crystal,” Metrologia 52.2 (March 2015): 360–375. 25. Devin Powell, “Roundest Objects in the World Created,” New Scientist ( July 1, 2008), https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14229-roundest-objects-in-the-worldcreated (accessed August 5, 2017). 26. I. Azuma et al., “Improved Measurement Results.” 27. S. Schlamminger et al., “Determination of the Planck Constant Using a Watt Balance with a Superconducting Magnet System at the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” Metrologia 51 (2014): S15–S24. 28. S. Schlamminger et al., “A Summary of the Planck Constant Measurements Using a Watt Balance with a Superconducting Solenoid at NIST,” Metrologia 52 (2015): L5-L8. Over the whole course of its operation, the total uncertainty of the measurements taken with NIST amounted to 57 parts per billion.

NOTES TO PAGES 137–159

29. D. Haddad et al., “Measurement of the Planck Constant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from 2015–2017,” accepted manuscript, Metrologia (2017). 30. Ibid. 31. Technische Universität Ilmenau, “Researchers Developing a New Balance for the New Kilogram” ( June 20, 2017), https://phys.org/news/2017-06-kilogram.html (accessed August 5, 2017). 6. THE TECHNICS OF PREHENSION: ON THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF NICOLAS BAIER 1. Nicolas Baier, “Vanitas,” trans. Kathe Roth in Paréidolies/Pareidolias (Musée Regional de Rimouski, 2009), 29. 2. Ibid. 3. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 78. 4. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 306. Quoted in Clément Rosset, Le réel: Traité de l’idiotie (Paris: Minuit, 1997), 43. 5. Ibid.; my translation. 6. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137. 7. Ibid., 141. 8. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010. 9. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 211. 10. Ibid., 210. 11. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 153. 12. Ibid., 142. 13. On “orthotheticity”—the retentional exactitude of inscriptions—and for an investigation of the situation of contemporary technics within the theoretical framework developed by Stiegler in Technics and Time, 1, see Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 14. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010. 15. See Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 16. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 17. See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 18. Email communication with Nicolas Baier, November 3, 2010. 19. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 22.

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20. Ibid., 148. 21. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:21. 22. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 31. 23. Wilfred Sellers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), ed. Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 24. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion, 1968), 95. 25. Ibid. 26. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 49. 27. Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, 5. 28. See, however, Chapter IX of Adventures of Ideas, on “Science and Philosophy.” Here Whitehead offers an account of how “science and philosophy mutually criticize each other” through the reciprocal relation of concrete fact and conceptual abstraction. His model of this dialectic is the relation between Aristotelian empiricism (observation, classification) and Platonic rationalism (the primacy of mathematics). Bachelard’s epistemology is thus compatible with Whitehead’s account of the relation between science and philosophy, though Bachelard attends in more detail to the relation between rationalism and empiricism within science and devotes considerably more attention to this problem over the course of his epistemological writings. 29. Gaston Bachelard, The New Spirit of Science, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon, 1985). 7. WHERE’S NUMBER FOUR? THE PLACE OF STRUCTURE IN PLATO’S TIMAEUS 1. On the modern specificity of Spinoza’s concept of form, see Yahouda Ofrath, “Le concept de forme dans la philosophie de Spinoza,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 139.2 (April–June 2014): 147–173. 2. Ibid., 147. 3. Bas C. van Frassen, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 265. 4. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1871), 17a. In addition to Jowett’s translation, I will refer to the translation by Donald J. Zeyl (New York: Hackett, 2000). 5. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 17b. 6. For a reading of the banishment of Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, from the scene of the Phaedo, see Julie Beth Napolin, “On Banishing Socrates’ Wife: The Interiority

NOTES TO PAGES 169–174

of the Ear in Phaedo,” in Poiesis, eds. Nathan Brown and Petar Milat (Zagreb: MaMa Multimedia Institute, 2017), 156–175. 7. John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 9–10. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. See, in particular, 51d. 11. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 28a. 12. Ibid., 29b–c. 13. Ibid., 29d. 14. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 35a–b. 15. Ibid., 32c. 16. Ibid., 36e. 17. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 31c. 18. Ibid., 32b–c. 19. See Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 48e–53a. 20. Ibid., 52b. 21. In his major essay on the Timaeus, “Khora,” Derrida declares his intention to foreground the concept of “structure” in the tropology of the dialogue. In a suggestive passage, he writes: “Tropology and anachronism are inevitable. And all we would like to show is that it is structure which makes them thus inevitable, makes of them something other than accidents, weakness, or provisional moments. It is this structural law which seems to me never to have been approached as such by the whole history of interpretations of the Timaeus. It would be a matter of a structure and not of some essence of the khora, since the question of essence no longer has any meaning with regard to it” (94). It may well be that Derrida’s larger theoretical itinerary does indeed show that it is structure that makes tropology and anachrony inevitable. However, in his essay on the Timaeus, he does not develop a concept of structure as it applies to Plato’s text with any rigor. Indeed, he more frequently deploys the term “form” where he might have considered “structure” with greater precision, and he usually seems more concerned with the former. In the closing paragraph, for example: “In what is formal about it, precisely, the analogy is declared: a concern for architectural, textual (histological) and even organic composition is presented a little further on” (126– 127). Jacques Derrida, “Khora,” trans. Ian McLeod in On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 22. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 52d. 23. Ibid., 53c–56c. 24. See A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928); Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1937). 25. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 53c.

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26. See The Online Liddell-Scott- Jones Greek-English Lexicon, dir. Maria Pantelia, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1&context=lsj (accessed August 15, 2018). 27. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Zeyl, 53b. See also Plato, Timaeus, trans. Desmond Lee, rev. T. K. Johansen (New York: Penguin, 1965), 53b. 28. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 54d. 29. Ibid. 30. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 216, 54d. 31. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Jowett, 53a. 32. Ibid., 53b. 33. Ibid., 32c. 34. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (1934), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 167. 35. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 17–18. 36. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” translated by John P. Leavey in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 164. 37. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 88. 38. Alain Badiou, “Mark and Lack” (1967), trans. Zachary Luke Fraser with Ray Brassier, in Concept and Form, Vol. 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012), 172. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Ibid. 41. Gaston Bachelard, La philosophie du non (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), 5; my translation. 8. BADIOU AFTER MEILLASSOUX: THE POLITICS OF THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION 1. Meillassoux engages in particular with Nelson Goodman’s pragmatic deflation of Hume’s problem in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” Collapse II (2007): 55–81. 2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 39. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid., 39. 5. See Quentin Meillassoux, “Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory,” Collapse III (2012): 107. 6. Hume, Enquiry, 39.

NOTES TO PAGES 187–204

7. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 392. 8. Ibid., 391. See also Alain Badiou, L’être et l’evenement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988), 429. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 180. 13. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47–48. 14. Ibid., 48. 15. Ibid., 47. 16. Ibid., 34. 17. Ibid., 40. 18. Ibid., 113, 40. 19. Ibid., 141. 20. Badiou, Being and Event, 399. 21. Ibid., 400. 22. Ibid., 406. 23. Ibid., 393. 24. Ibid., 393–394. 25. Ibid.,406. 26. Ibid.,395. 27. For a lucid account of the limits of the encampment and the general assembly as forms of organization, see Jasper Bernes, “Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy,” The New Inquiry (September 17, 2012), https://thenewinquiry.com/square-and-circle -the-logic-of-occupy (accessed August 19, 2018). 28. See Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, “Aleatory Rationalism” in Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 253–278. 29. Badiou, Being and Event, 406. 30. Ibid., 395. 31. Hume, Enquiry, 29. 9. THE CRITERION OF IMMANENCE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF STRUCTURAL CAUSALITY: FROM ALTHUSSER TO THÉORIE COMMUNISTE 1. Louis Althusser, et al, Reading Capital (1965), trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), 344. 2. Ibid.

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3. For an exposition of Macherey’s questioning of Althusser on the relation between “whole” and “lack” vis-à-vis “structure,” see Warren Montag’s chapter “Between Spinozists,” from which I quote here. Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 73–100. 4. Macherey quoted in ibid., 74. 5. Althusser quoted in ibid. 6. Ibid., 90. 7. Montag, “Between Spinozists,” 84. 8. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 86. 9. Althusser, Reading Capital, 26. 10. Ibid., 328. 11. Spinoza, Ethics, 206, V.6.P. 12. See ibid., 207, V.10.Sch. 13. Ibid., 65, II.4. 14. Ibid., 87, II.38. 15. Althusser, Reading Capital, 293. 16. Ibid., 255. 17. Ibid. 18. Spinoza, Ethics, 220, V.37.P 19. On the conceptual and tensions attending Althusser’s adoption of Spinoza’s epistemology, see Knox Peden, “Recuperating Science: The Sources of Althusser’s Spinozism,” in Spinoza Contra Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 127–148, esp. 148. 20. Althusser, Reading Capital, 24. 21. Ibid., 71. 22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 48. 23. Whereas Spinoza’s references to “the whole” have their ground in the ontological unity of substance, the epistemological criterion of the whole functions in his thought as a criterion of immanence, forcing thought to conceive things through their infinite essence. In Althusser’s work, on the other hand, references to “the whole” are located at the level of the structural unity of an historical process, such that this process cannot be thought according to the criterion of ontological immanence (which would erase its specificity). Transcendence is introduced by treating structural knowledge of finite things as if it were the third kind of knowledge. 24. The most lucid articulation of theoretical debates and practical positions constituting the history of left communism is Paul Mattick’s Anti-Bolshevik Communism (London: Merlin Press, 1978). 25. Althusser, Reading Capital, 291–292. 26. Ibid., 292.

NOTES TO PAGES 210–212

27. Ibid., 255. 28. See Anton Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class” (1936), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-working-class.htm. Pannekoek’s major texts are World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920), trans. D. A. Smart, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/ tactics/index.htm (accessed August 25, 2018) and Worker’s Councils (1946), trans. J. A. Dawson (1950), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe /1947/workers-councils.htm#h17 (accessed August 25, 2018). 29. Pannekoek thus supports the system of workers soviets against both parliamentarianism and trade unions, as well as the centralization of the Party form. See Parts IV, V, and VII of his 1920 text World Revolution and Communist Tactics. 30. Even when the left communist Paul Mattick, in “Humanism and Socialism” (1965), affirms that “the resumption of the struggle for socialism would also be the rebirth of humanist socialism” (168), he also sharply distinguishes what he means by the latter from the essentialism critiqued by Althusser: “Humanism can thus neither be related to, nor derived from, the essence of man. It refers to the social conditions and relation which determine the behavior of men” (162). See Anti-Bolshevik Communism, 157–168. 31. For an extended treatment of Rancière’s critique in Althusser’s Lesson, see Nathan Brown, “Red Years: Althusser’s Lesson and Rancière’s Error,” Radical Philosophy 170 (November–December 2011): 16–24. 32. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Continuum, 2011), 92. 33. Ibid., 92. 34. While Rancière heralded the Lip struggle as a triumph of worker’s selfmanagement and self-organization, the post-councilist group Négation wrote a text titled Lip and the Self- Organized Counter-Revolution (1974), trans. Petar Rachleff and Alan Wallach (Detroit: Black & Red, 1975). Available at https://libcom.org/library /lip-and-the-self-managed-counter-revolution-negation (accessed August 27, 2018). Noting that “in the absence of any real solidarity movement the workerist character of the struggle prevailed overs it proletarian origin as the conflict developed,” Négation argues that the Lip struggle demonstrates the counterrevolutionary character of affirming self-management within capitalist social relations. They conclude that the affair “reflects the end of the workers’ movement as a progressive historical force,” insofar as it exemplifies the objective limits of affirming working-class identity as a revolutionary position. 35. See Paul Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organization” (1949), in Anti-Bolshevik Communism, 117–137, and “The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle” (1976) available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm (accessed August 27, 2018). 36. Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organization,” 120.

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37. See Gilles Dauvé and François Martin, Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (Oakland: PM Press, 2015). 38. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment,” Libcom, https://libcom.org /library/present-moment-theorie-communiste (accessed August 27, 2018). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” translated by Endnotes, Endnotes 1 (October 2008): 155. 47. Ibid., 155–156. 48. Though I cannot present the historical and analytical details of this periodization with the thoroughness they deserve, this aspect of TC’s work has been discussed and criticized in widely available texts. See “Afterword,” Endnotes 1 (October 2008): 208–216, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/endnotes-afterword; “The History of Subsumption,” Endnotes II (April 2010): 130–153, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues /2/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption; Screamin’ Alice, “On the Periodization of the Capitalist Class Relation,” Sic. 1 (November 2011), https://libcom.org/files/Sic -1-periodisation.pdf. I offer a closely related but modified periodization of the history of modernity through phrases of formal and real subsumption in my article “Postmodernity, Not Yet: Toward a New Periodization,” Radical Philosophy 2.01 (February 2018): 11–27. 49. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” 156. 50. Ibid., 157. 51. Ibid., 159. 52. Ibid. 53. If this second period of programmatism is structured by the reinforcement of proletarian identity as the reproduction of capital, in the United States we now see electoral politics pivot around opposing forms of nostalgia for this period: rejections of the post-1970s economic restructuring (“neoliberalism,” “financialization”) take the form of either the reaffirmation of Made in America working class identity (accompanied by tax breaks, tariffs, and xenophobic hostility), or the reaffirmation of social welfare as the sharing productivity gains (i.e., Fordism). While the first form of nostalgia is consolidated in Trump’s Make America Great Again ethos, the second is legible as the “progressive” wing of Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. A related form of nostalgia is evident in “left accelerationism” as a theoretical tendency; the purported futurism of this tendency resembles an ahistorical synthesis of the proletkult, Soviet constructivism, and the Jetsons, routed through a contem-

NOTES TO PAGES 218–225

porary utopian socialist fantasy of postcapitalist transition enabled by automation and universal basic income. See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (London: Verso, 2015); for an extended critique, see Nathan Brown, “Avoiding Communism: A Critique of Inventing the Future,” Parrhesia 25 (2016): 155–171. Against neoliberal “globalism” (incarnate in the figure of Hillary Clinton), the reactionary right (Trump) stirs up nativist rage, while the reformist left (Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez) promotes pluralist redistribution. Meanwhile, utopian futurists promulgate an unholy alliance of Edward Bellamy and Elon Musk. What all of these have in common is a normative rejection of the counterrevolutionary economic restructuring since the 1970s without a serious recognition of its irreversible effects. Against neofascist nostalgia, the reformist left offers social democratic and programmatist nostalgia. 54. Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado About Nothing,” 159. 55. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (London: Verso, 2006); Robert Brenner, “What’s Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America” (April 2009), http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009 .pdf (accessed September 1, 2018). 56. Aaron Benanav and John Clegg, “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20–51. 57. Théorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor” (2009), Libcom, http://libcom.org /library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste (accessed Sept 1, 2018). 58. “Théorie de l’écart,” as yet untranslated into English, was initially published as Théorie Communiste no. 20 (September 2005). I will refer to the pagination of the pdf file available online through TC’s webpage, https://sites.google.com/site/theorie communiste/la-revue/tc-20 (accessed Sept 2, 2018). All translations are my own. 59. The term écart could also be translated as “gap” or “swerve.” I translate the term as “rift” in order to convey not only a space or absence, and not only a sudden shift in direction, but to connote an antagonist tearing or uneven fracture within the cycle of reproduction, produced by proletarian action. 60. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 8. 61. Ibid. 62. Théorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor.” 63. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 69. 64. Théorie Communiste, “Qui sommes nous,” https://sites.google.com/site/theorie communiste/la-revue (accessed September 2, 2018). 65. TC’s exchange with Dauvé and Nesic is collected in Endnotes 1 (Oct. 2008). See, in particular, “Normative History and the Communist Essence of the Proletariat,” 76–89. 66. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment.” 67. Ibid. 68. Théorie Communiste, “Théorie de l’écart,” 10.

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69. Roland Simon, “Interview with Roland Simon,” Riff Raff 8 (Autumn 2008): https://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/interview_roland.php (accessed September 2, 2018). 10. THE ANALYTIC OF SEPARATION: HISTORY AND CONCEPT IN MARX 1. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 203. 2. Moise Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25. 3. Ibid. 4. See Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2011), 81–85 and 109–110; Michael Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis (Boston: Brill, 2009), 248–258; Howard Engelskirchen, “The Concept of Capital in the Grundrisse,” in In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, ed. Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta, and Peter D. Thomas (Boston: Brill, 2013), 177–194, esp. 186–194; Endnotes, “A History of Separation” in Endnotes 4 (October 2015): 70–192. 5. Jameson, Representing Capital, 81. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. Ibid., 130. 8. Ibid., 130–131. 9. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 104. 10. Marx, Capital, 482. 11. Ibid., 874–875. 12. See Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867), 1:700–701 and Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1987), 1:645. 13. It may be the somewhat faulty logic of opposition in this passage that results in its excision by Engels: the second dissolution (of ownership by direct producers of the means of production) would seem also to be included in the first dissolution (of the circumstances in which direct producers were another’s property and owned the means of production). 14. Marx, Capital, 203. 15. Marx, Das Kapital (1987), 148. 16. Marx, Capital, 188. 17. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 452. 18. Marx, Capital, 202–203. 19. For a more detailed and conjuncturally specific version of the argument that follows (though not a version focused on the concept of separation), see Nathan Brown, “The Proletariat,” Trans-Scripts 3 (2013): 61–75.

NOTES TO PAGES 242–256

20. Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 33. 21. Aaron Benanav and John Clegg, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20–51. Italics are added to the quotation from Marx in the Endnotes article. 22. Marx, Capital, 764. 23. Ibid., 798. 24. Ibid., 875. 25. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63–64. 26. Ibid., 12. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332. 29. Ibid., 42. 30. In recent years, Théorie Communiste has devoted its attention to integrating an analysis of gender into its analysis of class constitution and cycles of struggle. See Roland Simon, “Gender Distinction, Programmatism, and Communisation,” Théorie Communiste 23 (May 2010), http://libcom.org/library/gender-distinction -programmatism-communisation. For communist approaches to gender and race loosely aligned with communization theory see Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013): 56–90, and Chris Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism,” Endnotes 3 (September 2013): 202–223. CONCLUSION: THE TRUE, THE GOOD, THE BEAUTIFUL 1. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1968), 6. 2. See Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steven Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010). See also Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010). 3. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Polity, 2007), 97. 4. Théorie Communiste, “The Present Moment,” https://libcom.org/library/present -moment-theorie-communiste. 5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Laurence Wishart (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 57. 6. Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001). 7. For this manner of approaching Kant’s theory, I am indebted to conversations with Robert Lehman.

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8. See Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), and Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 9. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 107. 10. Ibid. Italics in original. 11. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 233. 12. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 103–129. 13. Ibid., 11–40. 14. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 15. Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, 70–102. 16. See Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 17. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 243. 18. Ibid., 241. 19. See Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (London: Continuum, 2012).

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299

INDEX

Anaximander, 117–118 anti-humanism, 180, 205, 211, 224, 231, 266n15 Adorno, Theodor, 166 Althusser, Louis, 6–7, 13–16, 19, 28–30, 55–69, 73, 167–168, 190, 204–213, 220, 224–232, 247–248, 254, 284nn3,19; abstract and concrete, 16; Lenin’s philosophy, completion of, 69; materialist criteria, 59; position on left communism, 209–213; rationalist empiricism, description of, 56; Spinoza, relation to, 205–209; spontaneous materialism of science, 65; structural causality, 204–205; three generalities, 14 Aristotle, 166–168, 170, 178, 280n28 Badiou, Alain, 6, 29, 57, 98, 102, 166, 179– 180, 185–203, 253–254; archi-theatre of writing, 179–180; contingency of axioms, 102; experience and truth, 188; reason and formalization, 202; structure of truth procedure, 192–194; truth and knowledge, 200–201 Baier, Nicholas, 29, 141–165, 181 Bachelard, Gaston, 7–15, 18–19, 22, 28–30, 56–57, 66, 126, 159–165, 177, 180, 251, 260–261, 267n20, 280n28; non-Cartesian philosophy, 18–19, 22; phenomena and noumena, 9–13; solution to Bachelard’s riddle, 260–261; strange bond of rationalism and empiricism, 7; transmutation of epistemological values, 8; and Whitehead, 160–162 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 256 beauty, 166, 250, 256–262 becoming, 22, 80, 84, 86–89, 90–121, 129, 158, 170–177, 191, 200, 250, 261 Benanav, Aaron, 243 Bergson, Henri, 45, 56

Bianchi, Emanuela, 173 Brandom, Robert, 75, 77–79, 272–273n8 Brassier, Ray, 55, 68, 272n47 Burbidge, John, 85 Canguilhem, Georges, 7, 56–57 Cantor, Georg, 28, 52–53, 119, 185 causality, 4, 10, 40, 57, 160, 167, 204–227, 252 Cavaillès, Jean, 6–7, 56–57 Clegg, John, 243 communization, 213–214, 219, 223, 225, 254– 255, 289n30 Comte, Auguste, 6, 56 contingency, 5–6, 23–28, 52–54, 61–63, 67–68, 75, 84–89, 90–92, 94–95, 98–112, 115–121, 198, 200, 202, 208, 220–221, 238, 248, 250–251, 261, 268n46, 273n32. See also necessity; necessity of contingency Copernicus, Nicolaus, 50–51, 61, 63, 190 correlationism, 5–6, 18–22, 58–62, 66–67, 98, 112–116 critique, 1–6, 8, 13–31, 40–42, 46, 55–59, 65– 68, 73–84, 89, 90–92, 95–99, 103–105, 112, 114–116, 125, 139, 164, 177, 178, 205, 210– 211, 224–227, 228–232, 234, 239–240, 242, 248, 249–254, 257–261. See also speculation; speculative critique Dauvé, Gilles, 213–214, 224 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 41–42, 46–48, 75, 80, 210 Derrida, Jacques, 178–180, 266n15, 281n21 Descartes, René, 4–6, 18–22, 28, 35, 37–38, 40–49, 50–51, 56, 58, 61, 63–64, 78, 82, 159–161, 177, 187, 258; Bachelard’s critique of, 18–19; Henry’s appropriation of, 42–45; and paradox of manifestation, 48–49; a Scottish Descartes, 187; wax experiment, 40–42, 159

301

302

INDEX

dialectic, 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 13, 15–16, 27, 55–58, 63–69, 73–89, 90, 95, 106–111, 138–140, 164–165, 166–167, 170–171, 177, 211–213, 220, 225, 229, 231–232, 236, 239–243, 247, 249–252, 280n28 Diderot, Denis, 6, 56–57 di Giovanni, George, 85 disjunction, 3, 8, 48–49, 53, 55–56, 61, 82, 203, 209, 213–217, 221, 223, 226, 250–251. See also synthesis dogmatism, 1, 24–26, 60–63, 82–84, 89–90, 102–103, 242, 248, 249, 269n33. See also skepticism Ellermann, Greg, 256. See also Gornje Stoliv empiricism (definition of ), 3, 82. See also rationalism (definition of ); rationalist empiricism encounter, 4, 8, 16, 36–37, 42–49, 80, 90–97, 162, 165, 186, 188, 191–203, 219, 222–223, 249–251, 256. See also exception; methodological exteriority Engelskirchen, Howard, 230 epistemological break, 190, 226–227, 231, 234. See also ideology; science epistemology, 4–30, 38, 44, 52–55, 60, 68, 73– 76, 83–85, 88–89, 91, 95, 104–105, 111, 126, 129, 160–162, 168–172, 175, 177–180, 190, 205–209, 226–227, 231–232, 234, 249–252, 259, 280n28, 284nn19,23. See also ontology exception, 4, 28, 35–49, 187, 191, 200, 248, 249. See also encounter; methodological exteriority experiment, 7–21, 37–49, 50, 63, 65, 112, 129–140, 148, 159–161, 177, 251, 277n16, 278n24. See also formalization; inscription; science; technology/technics Federici, Silvia, 244–245 form, 3, 20, 23, 41, 74–75, 81, 85, 88, 94, 98, 130, 152–153, 156, 166–167, 169–170, 174–178, 180, 181–182, 194, 198, 206, 210, 212, 219, 222–223, 225, 228, 238–239, 241, 244–248, 254, 258–260, 281n21, 283n27. See also matter; structure formalization, 8, 10, 12, 17, 48, 63, 66, 139–140, 156, 161–162, 164, 177–180, 202, 225, 227, 260. See also experiment; inscription; science; technology/technics

Freud, Sigmund, 168 Furet, François, 189–190 Gornje Stoliv, 256 ground/unground, 1–3, 6, 8–12, 17–18, 26–28, 31, 44, 47–48, 52–53, 59, 68, 73, 76, 81–83, 85–89, 90–97, 101, 105–106, 109, 112, 115–116, 119, 130–131, 138–140, 147, 165, 174, 179, 185–186, 200, 206, 225, 247–248, 254, 258–262, 265n3, 274–275n13, 284n23. see also transcendental Gueroult, Martial, 40–41 Hallward, Peter, 55 Hansen, Mark, 157 Harvey, David, 230 Hayles, N. Katherine, 157 Hegel, G. W. F., 4, 20, 27–30, 35, 59, 73–89, 90–98, 105–111, 114–115, 118–120, 125–126, 128–130, 140, 166–167, 171, 187, 226, 230–231, 249–250, 252, 272n4, 272n8; circle of existence, sphere of being, 88; contingency and the whole, 106–107, 110–111; dialectic as rationalist empiricism, 81–84; double annulment of time, 91–93; Entäusserung, 230; Hegel’s cogito, 76–81; identification of being and nothingness, 108–110; necessity, contingency, possibility, actuality, 84–89; theory of measure, 126, 129–130; time and the absolute, 93–97; true critique, 73–76 Heinrich, Michael, 230 Henrich, Dieter, 85 Henry, Michel, 43–45, 257–261 Heraclitus, 117–118 Houlgate, Stephen, 75, 79–81, 85 Hume, David, 4–6, 26–28, 35, 37–40, 45–47, 49, 50–53, 185–188, 199–203, 252, 257; a French Hume, 187; Hume’s arrow, 203; the influence of custom, 202; intuition of the future of philosophy, 46; and Kant’s subjective dogmatism, 26–27; between Meillassoux and Badiou, 185–188; Meillassoux as Humean, 51–54; missing shade of blue, 39–40; skepticism, pragmatism, rationalism, 6 Husserl, Edmund, 56, 178–180, 258, 266n15 Hyppolite, Jean, 77–78, 179, 272n8

303

INDEX

idealism, 20, 27–29, 40, 46, 55–68, 73, 77, 80– 81, 90–91, 96–98, 120–121, 231, 252, 259. See also materialism ideology, 13, 58, 66, 205, 207, 227, 230 inscription, 13, 128, 147–148, 155, 161, 164– 165, 180, 233, 256, 266, 279n13. See also experiment; formalization; science; technology/technics International Avogadro Project, 134–137. See also kibble balance International System of Units, 130–133. See also measure/measurement; metric system Jameson, Fredric, 230–231 judgment, 23–27, 40–41, 69, 81, 166–167, 257–258 Kane, Sarah, 256 Kant, Immanuel, 1–2, 4–5, 9–13, 20, 23–27, 35, 39–42, 45–47, 56, 59–65, 68–69, 73–82, 87, 90–92, 98, 112–115, 128–129, 160–161, 164, 166–167, 179, 186, 188, 249, 252– 253, 257–259, 265nn2,3; and Descartes’s wax experiment, 41–42; displacement of rationalism vs. empiricism, 1; Hegel’s critique of, 73–76; intensive magnitudes, 128; legislation through limits, limits of legislation, 249; problem of ground, 2; real things of past time, 112–113; subjective dogmatism of teleological judgment, 24–27 Kautsky, Karl, 210–211, 225 kibble balance, 133–138. See also International Avogadro Project kilogram, 16–18, 125–140, 181–182 Kittler, Friedrich, 157, 266n15 Koyré, Alexandre, 7, 56–57 Kristeva, Julia, 173 Lacan, Jacques, 143–147, 168 Latour, Bruno, 189–191 laws of nature, 6–13, 22, 24–28, 51–52, 62, 68, 98–103, 110–118, 121, 187, 200, 261, 268n46 Lebowitz, Michael, 230 Lenin, Vladimir, 55–56, 59, 64–69, 220, 218, 225, 253 Levine, Naomi, 256. See also Gornje Stoliv life, 19, 22, 160, 162, 188, 200, 221, 256–261

Linebaugh, Peter, 245 Lowry, Malcolm, 145 Macherey, Pierre, 204, 213, 220, 284n3 Malabou, Catherine, 265n3 Martin, François, 213–214 Marx, Karl, 1, 4, 15–16, 29, 55–59, 64–66, 69, 166–168, 187, 205–210, 219–220, 224–227, 228–248, 252–256; alienation vs. separation, 230–232, 239–240; and Althusser’s epistemology, 15–16; division of labor as Scheidungsprozess, 232–233; primitive accumulation as Scheidungsprozess, 235–237; processual terminology, 228; proletariat as separated class, 246–247; relative surplus value, 234–235; separation, process and dialectic, 241; value theory, 229–230 materialism, 24, 27–31, 55–60, 63–69, 73, 90– 91, 97, 99, 118–121, 143, 160, 166, 180, 207–209, 247. See also idealism mathematics, 4, 6–12, 19–22, 40, 48–49, 50–54, 58, 61, 63–64, 66, 69, 119, 126, 138–139, 161, 177–180, 185, 260, 266 matter, 147–148, 152–153, 166–167, 174, 177– 178, 181, 192–194, 238, 256. See also form; structure Mattick, Paul, 212–213, 284n24, 285n30 measure/measurement, 17–22, 29, 41, 125– 140, 176–177, 238–239, 267n36, 277n15. See also International System of Units, metric system Meillassoux, Quentin, 4–6, 18–24, 27–29, 46, 48–49, 50–69, 90–91, 98–121, 185–187, 200, 250, 259–262, 268n46, 272n47; on Anaximander, 117–118; anhypothetical principle, 62–63, 99–105; contingency and time, 110–118, 120–121; method, 4, 50–55, 62– 63, 98–103; nothingness and nothing, 107– 110; order of reasons in After Finitude, 61; paradox of manifestation, 48–49; problem of the “in-itself,” 18–22; relation to Hegel, 98; relation to Henry, 259–260; relation to Lenin, 64–68; respect for Kantian critique, 5 methodological exteriority, 35–38 42–46, 49, 97, 120, 177, 210–211, 225, 231, 247, 252, 257, 261–262, 264 metric system, 126–128, 138. See also International System of Units; measure/measurement

304

INDEX

Mitchell, Cynthia, 256. See also Gornje Stoliv Montag, Warren, 204–205

quality, 81, 126–130, 140, 176–177, 180–182. See also primary and secondary qualities

necessity, 6, 13, 23–28, 36, 51–54, 61–64, 75, 82, 84–89, 90–95, 99–112, 115–120, 185, 200–202, 206–210, 214, 216–218, 228, 235, 238, 239, 248, 250–251, 258, 261, 268n50, 273n32. See also contingency; necessity of contingency necessity of contingency, 5–6, 23, 52–54, 62, 98–107, 111–112, 116–121, 261. See also contingency; necessity negation, 81, 84, 87, 93–97, 104–110, 117, 128– 129, 171, 192–193, 220, 225, 242, 246, 255, 260, 272n8 Nesic, Karl, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 45, 47, 82, 118

Rancière, Jacques, 211–213, 226 285n34 rationalism (definition of ), 3, 82. See also empiricism (definition of ); rationalist empiricism rationalist empiricism, 2–4, 6–7, 13, 18–19, 28–31, 37, 40, 42, 46–48, 50, 56–58, 64–65, 69, 73, 76, 82–85, 89, 90–92, 95, 125, 187, 203, 242, 247, 251–252, 256, 261. See also empiricism (definition of ); rationalism (definition of ) Rediker, Marcus, 245 Rosset, Clément, 145–147

Occupy Oakland, 195–199; 221–222 ontological difference, 23, 54–55, 103–109, 117–118, 121, 125, 250. See also ontology ontology, 4, 6, 23–31, 52–55, 61, 74–89, 91– 121, 125, 169–173, 176–177, 185, 206, 208, 250–253, 257–262, 273n8, 284n23. See also epistemology; ontological difference Padui, Raoni, 85 Pannekoek, Anton, 210–211, 285n29 Peden, Knox, 7 Peirce, C. S., 158–159 Picasso, Pablo, 256 Pinkard, Terry, 78 Pippin, Robert, 74–75, 78–79, 81, 83, 272n4 Plato, 4, 29–30, 48–49, 143, 166–182, 281n21; diataxis, 174–176; eikos logos, 170–171, 177–178, 180; materialist scientific structuralism, 180; method, 177; opening of the Timaeus, 168–170; structure as place of participation, 176; structure of the elements, 172–176 Popper, Karl, 68, 272n47 Postone, Moishe, 229 pragmatism, 6, 51, 133, 185, 188, 191, 200, 203, 272–273n8 primary and secondary qualities, 4–5, 18–22, 49, 50, 54, 58, 159–160, 164–165. See also quality problem of induction, 4–6, 26–29, 52–54, 68, 185–188, 191, 193, 199–203

Sallis, John, 169–170, 173 science, 5–30, 47–48, 50–69, 112–116, 120– 121, 125–140, 160–162, 168, 177–180, 187, 202, 208, 226–227, 233, 248, 251–252, 258–261. See also experiment; formalization; inscription; technology/technics Simon, Roland, 226–227. See also Théorie Communiste singularity, 14, 35, 38–39, 96–97, 140, 166, 180, 201–202, 205, 256–262. See also universality skepticism, 4, 6, 61, 83, 185–186, 200, 203. See also dogmatism speculation, 1–5, 15, 23–31, 35–38, 50, 54–55, 58, 64, 67–68, 73–121, 125–126, 130, 165, 178, 202, 216, 220, 242, 250–254, 259–262, 265n1. See also speculative critique speculative critique, 2–3, 24, 27–28, 31, 73, 83, 89, 90, 97–98, 112, 114–115, 125, 242, 252, 259, 261, 265n3. See also critique; speculation Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 35, 80, 84, 101–102, 166– 167, 204–210, 226, 253 Stiegler, Bernard, 147–148, 155–157, 164–165, 260, 266n15 structure, 10, 14–13, 29, 37, 44, 55, 59–60, 75–76, 81, 85–86, 93–94, 112, 120, 135, 166–180, 181–182, 204–209, 212–215, 219, 221, 223–226, 231–232, 242, 258, 281n21, 284n3, 286n53. See also form; matter synthesis, 3, 8, 11–12, 18, 31, 40–41, 47, 51, 59, 95, 98, 113, 156, 171, 176–177, 185– 187, 191, 194, 200, 225, 233, 260. See also disjunction

305

INDEX

technology/technics, 12–13, 16–18, 48, 113 133–138, 141–165, 234, 251, 260–261. See also experiment; formalization; inscription; science temporality, 2, 20–22, 41–46, 50, 59, 90, 95–96, 98, 101–102, 113–120, 147, 166, 192–193, 220, 233–236, 250, 258–259, 265n2, 272n4. See also time Théorie Communiste, 204–205, 213–227, 244, 247, 253, 286nn48,53; communist measures, 214; criterion of immanence, 226; dynamic, limit, rift, 220–224; history of programmatism, 217–220; restructuring of capital, 214–217; structuralist antihumanism, 224–227 time, 20, 22, 27, 41–45, 50, 54, 56, 66–69, 90–121, 148, 155–156, 159, 161, 166, 233, 235, 238–240, 250, 258–260. See also temporality; trace, 49, 67, 93, 132, 140, 141, 147–165, 175, 180, 260

transcendental, 1–6, 8–12, 20–28, 40, 42, 45–48, 59–63, 66–67, 73–75, 77, 79–83, 89, 90–91, 96, 98, 103, 112–116, 161, 164, 166–167, 179, 186–188, 249–250, 252–253, 256–259, 265n3, 268n50. See also ground/ unground universality, 21, 23–26, 93, 96–97, 106–107, 126–130, 140, 177–180, 187, 210, 257–258. See also singularity van Frassen, Bas, 167–168 Wang, Shanxing, 256 Whitehead, Alfred North, 29–31, 36–37, 141, 148, 155–161, 164–165, 170, 177–178, 280n28; bifurcation of nature, 160, 165; concrescence, 155–156, 159; definition of philosophy, 30–31; prehension, 148, 155– 156, 158; on speculative philosophy, 36–37; on the Timaeus, 177–178

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montréal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics.