Bien des lézardes ont depuis quelques décennies fracturé le monde tel que nous l'habitions, structuré par nos représentations, organisé par nos projets, coloré par nos attentes et nos craintes. La contingence et l'événementialité ont resurgi en bien des domaines, appelant une pensée de l'aléatoire, qui s'accommode de la pluralité de systèmes instaurant leur ordre local et précaire dans un univers en expansion... ou déjà explosé. Dans un monde en perpétuelle recomposition, les hommes se découvrent pris entre la turbulence des (...) flux d'où naissent et en lesquels disparaissent des formes provisoires, et la stabilité de systèmes générateurs d'appuis comme de contraintes. La Nature révèle alors, en son improbable complexité, sa fragilité, tandis que l'Histoire s'écartèle entre la montée en puissance d'une technique planétarisée, associée à une économie sans frontières, et le retour de revendications identitaires opposant aux rêves d'universalité la persistance d'oppositions élémentaires, voire archaïques. A nous de choisir notre route vers un avenir riche en possibles - y compris celui de notre autodestruction - et pauvre en repères. Encore faut-il d'abord prendre conscience de cet horizon nouveau, trop souvent abordé à partir de concepts et de schèmes hérités d'un monde forclos. (shrink)

Dans un intervalle de temps de quatre ans, de 1982 ŕ 1986, Louis Althusser a écrit un nombre d’essais philosophiques, qui étaient tous posthumes édités. Les essais philosophiques sont typiques pour le travail de Louis Althusser, beaucoup plus que toutes autres formes d’écritures, mais la caractéristique principale de son dernier śuvre ne se trouve pas, ni sous sa forme ni dans la méthode, elle ne se situe plutôt dans une approche radicalement nouvelle ŕ la politique. Pendant les années’ 60, Althusser (...) tient un point de vue selon lequel le matérialisme dialectique représente le noyau philosophique du marxisme et le matérialisme historique correspond ŕ sa science. Dans les années’ 80, il change cette approche théorique en faveur d’une « philosophie de la rencontre », qui ŕ son avis reflčte le principe non téléological du matérialisme d’une maničre bien plus exacte, que le matérialisme dialectal qui pour lui et devenu logocentrique et idéaliste. Le matérialisme dialectal sera complčtement rejeté, et une nouvelle notion fera un pas dans son endroit: le matérialisme aléatoire, un matérialisme de contingence et de vide, qui rejette radicalement n’importe quelle priorité du sens sur des phénomčnes. Le texte suivant poursuit ce tour de changement radical dans la pensée althussérienne de la philosophie, et surtout dans sa relation ŕ la politique et ŕ l’idéologie. (shrink)

Le concept d’authenticité sert de base à la valorisation de la thématique de « l’identité » qui domine aujourd’hui. Anish Kapoor présente toutes les garanties de cette « hybridité » actuellement très à la mode. Toutefois, il résiste explicitement à toute tentative de « mise en boîte » qui le cantonnerait à l’expression d’une quelconque « indianité ». Kapoor est connu pour l’aspect sensoriel et aléatoire de son travail. Shooting into the Corner est un excellent exemple d’une œuvre qui (...) évacue l’identification culturelle ; elle trouble par ailleurs les catégories goodmaniennes habituelles d’autographique et d’allographique. Son slogan – « Je n’ai rien à dire » – semble confirmer ce rejet de l’authenticité. Je compte démontrer que même l’aléatoire et l’auto-engendré sont reliés au critère d’authenticité, si cette notion repose sur l’intentionnalité et « l’intensionnalité » de l’œuvre d’art. Redéfini ainsi, le concept d’authenticité deviendrait une « règle constitutive » de notre institution. (shrink)

Dans cet article je propose la double-thèse : du caractère « vague » (tel que défini dans la littérature logico-sémantique contemporaine) de la notion de hasard (chance) par opposition au caractère « non-vague » de celle d’aléatoire (randomness) ; du lien entre la vagueness et le pouvoir explicatif du hasard et la non-vagueness et la capacité descriptive de l’aléatoire, lequel plaide en faveur d’usages distincts de ces deux notions. Pour défendre la première thèse, j’ai recours aux définitions des (...) notions de hasard et d’aléatoire et à un exemple de l’histoire des sciences (la théorie du chaos). Pour appuyer la seconde, je fais appel à des exemples scientifiques : la variation dans la théorie darwinienne de l’évolution, la mutation génétique dans la synthèse moderne et la dérive génétique dans la théorie neutraliste de l’évolution. (shrink)

Ces dernières décennies, la relation entre Spinoza et Marx a été abordée par des auteurs comme Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri et Maximilien Rubel. Néanmoins, bien que l'on puisse établir un lien entre les deux au niveau des affinités théoriques, il manque une analyse du rapport entre ces affinités et les références effectives que Marx fait à Spinoza. Nous ne savons pas davantage, jusqu'à maintenant, comment ces références s'articulent avec les objectifs du militantisme philosophique et politique que Marx s'est fixé tout (...) au long de sa vie. La présente étude cherche donc à parcourir les premières oeuvres de Marx de manière à y étudier la présence de Spinoza, et à démontrer simultanément à quels buts cette présence était subordonnée. (shrink)

Book review of Franck Tinland's L'homme aléatoire, concerning how, in Tinland's view, using a Spinozistic lens humans relate to their environment.

In the last decades, the relationship between Spinoza and Marx has been addressed by authors such as Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, and Maximilien Rubel. That said, if a connection between the two can be made at the level of theoretical affinities, an analysis of the correspondence between these affinities and actual references to Spinoza made by Marx is lacking. At this point, we do not know how these references fit (or not) with the philosophical and political objectives Marx set out (...) to achieve throughout his life. The present study, therefore, will review Marx’s first works to examine Spinoza’s presence and simultaneously demonstrate to which goals this presence was subordinated. (shrink)

The Politics of Gilles Deleuze and the Random Materialism of the Late Althusser A cursory reading of the writings of the late Althusser in which the philosopher attempts to devise a « random materialism » might lead us to regard them as the matrix from which a number of post-structuralist conceptions of politics, including that of Gilles Deleuze, have sprung. Our intention in the present article is to demonstrate the partial nature of such a filiation. To do so, the article (...) focuses on the relationship between the late Althusser and the Deleuzean conception of politics. It will thus examine the refusal, common to both philosophers, to elaborate a totalising theory of the political and their concomitant invocation of a principle of contingency. Such an affinity should not however disguise the differences between Althusser and Deleuze with regard to the manner in which the actualisation of such a programme is to be envisaged. (shrink)

By proposing the notion of aleatory materialism, or Marxism of encounter, Althusser had three goals in mind: to give Marxism, finally in crisis, its philosophy; to identify this philosophy with an underground current starting with Epicure and Democritus; to provide the means to introduce points of heresy from which the crisis would gain intelligibility. This article purports to show that this form of materialism consists less in a new philosophy than in an ontology and a logic of the “not-much”, of (...) the impoverishment of meaning and reason. The encounter is not a thesis on the materiality of the world, but on the conditions of thought of its very being: without origin, without purpose, without meaning, without necessity. By subscribing to such a thesis, one reintegrates within a reflection inhabited by emptiness, gap and difference, its outside, constituted by the singular practices of those who suffer and struggle in the emptiness and delinkage of the world. (shrink)

Les énoncés philosophiques spéculatifs matérialistes de Diderot constituent une ontologie que Diderot expose dans une métaphysique où se nouent trois plans. Le premier est dominé par la catégorie de possible. Diderot pense le possible en termes de possibilité non téléologique : elle concerne le mode de manifestation de l'être. Le deuxième, portant sur la natura naturata et sa connaissance scientifique, s'adosse à la nécessité. Le troisième, s’inscrivant au cœur de la natura naturans et concernant le statut de l'existence des êtres, (...) est l’aléatoire. Comment ces trois plans et ces trois catégories s'articulent-ils rationnellement ? Comment se réalisent-ils dans l’écriture même de la philosophie ?Diderot’s philosophical pronouncements are both speculative and materialist. They make up an ontology and Diderot sets this out in a metaphysics which has three levels. The category of the possible dominates the first level. Diderot thinks the possible in terms of a non-teleological possibiliy, one concerned with the mode in which being manifests itself. The second level, concerned with « natural naturata » and the scientific knowledge that can be had of it, relies on necessity. The third, operating at the very heart of « natura naturans » is concerned with the status of the existence of beings, and is random. How do these three levels and these three categories relate to each other rationally ? How are they realised in the very way that philosophy is written ? (shrink)

L'évêque anglican Joseph Butler proclama, au XVIIIe siècle, que " la probabilité est le guide même de la vie ". Aujourd'hui, probabilités et statistiques ont envahi quasiment tous les domaines de nos vies privées et publiques. Les politiques gardent les yeux rivés sur les sondages, les organismes de retraite nous annoncent des années noires au vu des courbes démographiques, et dans l'intimité de nos salles de bains, perchés sur la balance, nous nous demandons si notre poids est conforme à la (...) moyenne. Dans le domaine scientifique, l'usage de la probabilité semble avoir détrôné un goût de la certitude plus cartésien : l'irruption de la mécanique quantique et de sa fameuse fonction d'onde a fait couler des fleuves d'encre philosophique. Mais une querelle d'interprétation continue à opposer deux conceptions irréductibles : selon l'une, la probabilité est une affaire foncièrement subjective qui relève essentiellement de l'état des croyances de chacun ; selon l'autre, elle est avant tout une question objective relative à la fréquence d'apparition de phénomènes dits aléatoires. De ce concept essentiel et délicat, Ian Hacking tente ici l'archéologie. Comment la probabilité a-t-elle pu devenir aussi envahissante, en politique comme en science, et qu'a-t-elle à voir avec l'opinion? Comment une notion apparemment aussi fugace est-elle devenue l'objet d'un calcul? Quels défis lance-t-elle au raisonnement et à la logique? Dans cette quête aux allures de roman policier, Pascal, Leibniz ou Huygens côtoient des politiques mettant en place un système de rentes à vie, des amateurs tentant de déceler dans des épidémies un ordre sous-jacent, des joueurs impénitents et des inconditionnels de la loterie. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l'écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos. Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s'écarte des riches lieux-communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son (...) attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l'antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L'intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l'opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l'hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d'époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage. (shrink)

La cognition algorithmique joue un rôle central dans le capitalisme contemporain. Depuis la rationalisation du travail industriel et des relations sociales jusqu’à la finance, les algorithmes fondent un nouveau mode de pensée et de contrôle. Dans cette phase du tout-machinique dans l’évolution du capitalisme numérique, il ne suffit plus de se mettre du côté de la théorie critique pour accuser la computation de réduire la pensée humaine à des opérations mécaniques. Comme le théoricien de l’information Gregory Chaitin l’a démontré ; (...) l’incomputabilité et l’aléatoire doivent être conçus comme les conditions de bases de la computation. Si le technocapitalisme est contaminé par l’aléatoire computationnel et le chaos, la critique traditionnelle de la rationalité instrumentale doit elle aussi être remise en question : l’incomputable ne pleut plus être réduit au statut de contraire de la raison. (shrink)

Hugh V. Mclachlan Cet article est une réponse à la critique de Saunders de ma proposition de politique non conséquentialiste publiée précédemment concernant l’utilisation d’une loterie pour la distribution de vaccins rares par l’État face à une pandémie de grippe. J’y ai soutenu que, pour des raisons de justice, l’État devrait distribuer une partie du vaccin rare qu’il pourrait détenir à certains de ses employés de la santé et le reste aux citoyens de manière aléatoire et égale sur le (...) principe d’une loterie. Au coeur de la critique de Saunders se trouve l’affirmation selon laquelle j’ai omis à tort de prendre en compte les différences moralement pertinentes dans les besoins et la capacité de production entre les receveurs potentiels du vaccin. Le point central de ma réponse ici est que le fait que le besoin et la capacité de production soient ou non des facteurs moralement pertinents dépend de qui ou de quoi distribue le vaccin, à qui ils le distribuent et pourquoi ils le font. Par exemple, la discrimination entre les personnes dans la distribution de vaccins publics distribués à titre prophylactique sur la base de leur âge est injuste, qu’elle soit ou non moralement justifiable pour d’autres motifs. (shrink)

La poésie de Barbara Guest s’inscrit à l’encontre des attentes de lecture habituelles, les événements du poème ayant la priorité sur le contenu : le sujet du poème s’efface en faveur de la plasticité à l’œuvre. Les poèmes- événements requièrent la participation imaginative du lecteur. Plusieurs événements et procédés se croisent : peinture et musique se côtoient en empruntant des processus humains comme le cinéma, le jeu sur la plasticité de l’œuvre d’art, la collaboration artistique, tissage et dé-tissage, mais aussi (...) des phénomènes naturels tels que l’iridescence, l’osmose et la symbiose. L’événement toutefois insaisissable qui a lieu au sein du poème devient le point de rencontre aléatoire entre différents moyens artistiques et des occurrences naturelles. C’est ainsi que la corrélation mystérieuse et miraculeuse peut s’établir entre le poème et son lecteur. Le poème polysémique ouvre des probabilités. Le texte se livre tel un événement de mots et de mondes dans une œuvre mouvante aux couleurs iridescentes et aux subtiles variations. (shrink)

Dans cet article sont identifiés les principaux défis que la théorie darwinienne de l'évolution pose à la théologie chrétienne: défi à la théologie naturelle, l'action divine n'étant plus nécessaire pour rendre compte de l'origine des vivants; défi à la théodicée, le prix exorbitant payé par des individus et des espèces au fil de l'évolution rendant difficilement pensables la bienveillance et la toute-puissance de Dieu; défi à l'omniscience divine, puisque le processus évolutif obéit à un mécanisme aléatoire apparemment dépourvu de (...) toute finalité. Les ressources de la théologie contemporaine pour relever ces défis au coeur d'une conversation avec le récit scientifique sont ensuite explorées. (shrink)

L'imaginaire est-il un moyen aléatoire d'un dire sur les Fins dernières ? L'auteur commence par donner quelques caractéristiques de l'imaginaire reconnaissable dans ce domaine et dont la dominante est la nécessité d'un consensus social. Mais la relativité du langage en la matière le contraint à remonter aux sources bibliques des représentations. Le langage apocalypti­que et plus particulièrement l'Apocalypse de S. Jean étant incontestable­ment à l'origine de nombre de représentations, son examen révèle une fonction et une utilisation de l'imaginaire qui (...) contestent les soupçons portés à son encontre. Langage nécessaire pour une réalité présente considérée comme indicible parce qu'inouîe, l'imaginaire traite d'abord l'expérience humaine en ce qu'elle a de plus tragique. Dès lors, le glissement effectué sur les Fins dernières permet de distinguer entre une application légitime de l'imaginaire et les dérives dont celui-ci devient tout autant la victime qu'il peut en être dit responsable.Is the imaginary a haphazard way of expressing the Last Things ? The author begins by giving some characteristics of the imaginary that are recognizable in this domain and of which the most important is the need of a social consensus. But the relativity of language in this matter constrains us to go back to representations in biblical sources. Since apocalyptic language, and especially the Apocalypse of St. John, is without doubt at the origin of a number of representations, its study reveals a function and use of the imaginary that counters the suspicions that are held against it. The imaginary, a language necessary for a present reality considered as inexpressible because unheard-of first treats of human experience in its most tragic aspect. From there the deviations effecting the Last Things allow us to distinguish between a legitimate application of the imaginary and its derivations, the latter of which become just as much the victim, and thus can be called responsible. (shrink)

Cet ensemble ne cherche pas à gommer par des ponts et des raccords le disparate des préoccupations, l'aléatoire des sollicitations. Il forme toutefois un ouvrage qui a ses obsessions, ses retours, ses insistances. Le cours de l'Histoire et les philosophies qui ont cherché à le comprendre, la place dominante prise aujourd'hui par le discours économique, les quêtes extrêmes de sens, aux limites de la raison, la fidélité à des causes qui ont pu passer pour utopiques, voilà quelques tracés qui (...) se rendent visibles. Quoi de commun entre l'espoir fou d'Antonin Artaud de "guérir la vie" en transgressant les frontières de la rationalité occidentale, et la tentative d'Emmanuel Lévinas de fonder l'éthique sur le visage de l'autre pour subvertir la tyrannie de l'universel et de l'impersonnel? Quoi de commun entre la temporalité anhistorique de l'Islam et l'espoir militant d'une libération des femmes qui ouvre une autre Histoire? Dans le choc des réflexions aux prises avec l'inattendu, dans l'irruption des conjonctures inquiétantes, ces effets de brisures, ces fractures du temps, ne contredisent pourtant pas un souffle d'irréversible, qui confirme ce que les pensées de l'Histoire et leur foi dans l'avenir ont pressenti. J.J.G. (shrink)

Etienne Balibar, Olivier Bloch, Jean-Claude Bourdin, Isabelle Garo, Alain Gigandet, Pascale Gillot, Annie Ibrahim, Irène Pereira et André Tosel se penchent dans cet ouvrage sur les problèmes et les perpectives induites par le matérialisme althusserien. " Jamais un coup de dés n'abolira le hasard ". Althusser fait un bref commentaire de cette célèbre sentence mallarméenne dans un texte de 1982 - Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre. II y conclut que l'histoire n'est que la révocation permanente du fait (...) accompli par le "fait à accomplir" sans qu'on sache à l'avance ni jamais, ni où, ni comment. Affaire de jeu de dés à jeter sur la table vide... Ainsi est déterminée une position en philosophie et en politique, assiette inédite qui en appelle à l'aléatoire et se donne comme un " chantier " ouvert à nos explorations. De fait, les catégories du sujet, de l'aliénation, de la dialectique, de l'idéologie, sont bradées ou ébranlées au profit du processus hasardeux et de la vicissitude des formes. Pourtant, ni le primat de la lutte des classes ni la thèse de la matérialité objective du monde ne sont sacrifiés au nouvel horizon de la conjoncture. Il se peut qu'il y ait deux voies du matérialisme, aussi légitimes l'une que l'autre - matérialisme de la nécessité et matérialisme de la rencontre. Gageons que ce dernier puisse faire que les éléments vivants d'un ensemble politique"s'accrochent " entre eux et au tout de telle sorte que ce qui est vrai en théorie le soit aussi en pratique. (shrink)

Le Christ récusait toute tentation d'exercice du pouvoir, mais cela n'empêcha pas la théocratie pontificale ; religion de paix et d'amour, le christianisme persécuta les païens et brûla les "hérétiques" qui reproduisaient eux-mêmes ce qu'ils dénonçaient. Quant au marxisme matérialiste, "scientifique", il engendra une "mystique religieuse", avec ses hérétiques, ses procès, ses mises à l'Index. Comment expliquer de tels paradoxes? Comment comprendre les troublantes ressemblances, tant dans leurs discours que dans leurs conséquences, entre des doctrines, des idéologies, des religions, éloignées (...) dans le temps et/ou l'espace, souvent aux antipodes les unes des autres, se combattant violemment, et engendrant pourtant les mêmes conséquences une fois le pouvoir conquis en leur nom? Pour Jean-Louis Martres, la réponse à ces interrogations ne pouvait se trouver dans l'approche par des "courants" qui traversèrent les siècles. La luxuriance des idées politiques ne saurait masquer l'identité profonde qui les unit. C'est dans le raisonnement, non dans le sujet, que réside l'explication fondée sur le concept de structure, sans écarter le changement, donnant à l'analyse politique une dimension originale et stimulante. La pensée martrienne conjugue nécessité et hasard, déterminisme et aléatoire, modèles et complexité. Elle ne manque pas de nous interroger sur le regard que nous pouvons porter sur la conquête et l'exercice du pouvoir. Jean-Louis Martres (1937-2013), agrégé de droit public (1964), professeur émérite des Universités, développa une approche inédite des idées politiques et enseigna les relations internationales (au sens de la science politique) à l'Université de Bordeaux. Il enseigna aussi à l'Université Beida de Pékin. (shrink)

Le 13 juillet 1907, les femmes mariées obtiennent le droit de disposer librement de leur salaire. Sont concernés les 95 % de couples qui, au tournant du siècle, délaissent les possibilités de contrat pour adopter, par défaut, le régime de la communauté des biens. La nouvelle loi entend corriger les effets pervers de ce régime matrimonial qui fait du mari l’unique gestionnaire - y compris des produits du travail de son épouse. L’application de la loi se révèle pourtant très (...) class='Hi'>aléatoire, comme en... (shrink)

La modélisation financière moderne instrumente massivement des lois d'échelle pour la formalisation des fluctuations des marchés, à travers l'usage des processus aléatoires dans les équations de comportement des cours boursiers. D'abord implicites, présentes dans le mouvement brownien mais non perçues en tant que telles, les lois d'échelle sont réapparues explicitement comme enjeu de la modélisation depuis que les autorités de tutelle des marchés financiers ont attiré l'attention des établissements bancaires sur le problème du contrôle des risques, mal quantifiés par les (...) distributions gaussiennes classiques. On présente les éléments de ce débat, en adoptant comme fil conducteur la postérité des modèles fractals de Mandelbrot dans le sillage desquels s'inscrivent les principaux conflits de modélisation des variations boursières depuis les quarante dernières années. On montre que la question de l'existence de lois d'échelle renvoie à la question plus fondamentale de la nature du temps des marchés. (shrink)

La réparation du dommage corporel est omniprésente dans le projet de réforme du droit de la responsabilité civile présenté par la Chancellerie le 13 mars 2017, manifestant ainsi nettement la volonté de ses auteurs de conférer un statut juridique particulier à cette catégorie de dommage. Un tel souci se manifeste de deux manières. Il s’agit d’une part d’infléchir, dans un sens généralement plus favorable aux victimes, les règles de la responsabilité civile, pour assurer une indemnisation moins aléatoire et plus (...) large des préjudices consécutifs à une atteinte à la personne. Ainsi en est-il notamment de la dérogation au droit commun de la preuve, s’agissant d’établir la causalité en cas de dommage occasionné par le membre indéterminé d’un groupe. Ainsi en est-il également de la soustraction du dommage corporel de l’obligation faite à la victime dans le projet, de minimiser son préjudice. Il s’agit d’autre part de préciser les modalités de la réparation du dommage corporel. Le projet reprend à son compte certaines innovations intervenues ces dernières années (mise en place d’une nomenclature, d’un barème médical unique), et consacre aussi des solutions inédites, telles que le recours de principe à la rente (plutôt qu’à une indemnisation en capital) pour certains chefs de préjudices comme le besoin en tierce personne ou les pertes de gains professionnels) ou l’affirmation du principe de libre disposition des dommages et intérêts. (shrink)

I. Dans un texte récent, le compositeur français Jean-Luc Hervé expose ainsi son projet d’une œuvre conçue pour un espace public, notamment un jardin : (…) une génération totalement aléatoire de son, si elle permet de varier continuellement le matériau sonore, interdit par définition toute construction musicale. Il est impossible par cette méthode de façonner des formes et de proposer à l’auditeur une écoute détaillée. Il ne peut reconnaître aucune forme, aucun objet musical (geste, phrase)....

« L’ordre de la chambre reproduit l’ordre du monde dont elle est la particule élémentaire », écrit Michelle Perrot en conclusion du bel essai qu’elle vient de consacrer à l’histoire de la chambre comme lieu de vie. Mais son livre dément ou du moins déborde cette proposition trop générale par la complexité sinueuse et aléatoire des transformations dont il reconstitue le cheminement. Dans l’histoire de l’habitat, la chambre individuelle ou conjugale constitue moins une particule élémentaire qu...

RésuméCe travail présente l'axiomatique comme la définition d'un système mathématique par rapport à toutes ses extensions possibles. L'ensemble de ces extensions pouvant être infini, il en résulte qu'il n'est pas impossible qu'à la base de tout système mathématique il y ait une infinité d'axiomes. Ce point de vue est appuyé de divers exemples tirés de la géométrie. L'auteur donne un énoncé de topologie qui lui paraît avoir la valeur d'un axiome et qui sépare les mathéniatiques du certain des mathématiques de (...) l'aléatoire. (shrink)

Dans la théorie contemporaine de l’évolution, trois sens classiques de la notion de hasard interviennent : la notion ordinaire de chance, la notion probabiliste de l’aléatoire, et la notion épistémologique de contingence relativement à un système théorique. Ces trois notions suffisent à définir le statut du hasard aux principaux niveaux du processus évolutif où l’on invoque communément des effets fortuits : mutations, dérive génétique, révolutions génétiques, changements écologiques, macroévolution. On se demande enfin si les divers sens du hasard rencontrés (...) dans cette étude peuvent être ramenés à l’unité, et s’ils renvoient à un hasard subjectif ou à un hasard objectif. In the contemporary theory of evolution, three classical meanings of the notion of chance come into play : the ordinary meaning of chance, the probabilistic notion of randomness, and the epistemological notion of contingency with reference to a theoretical system. These three notions are sufficient in order to define the status of chance on the principal levels of the evolutive process where fortuitous effects are commonly invoked : mutations, genetic deviations, genetic revolutions, ecological changes, macroevolution. The question is raised, finally, whether the diverse meanings of chance considered in the present study may be brought to one, and whether they refer to a subjective form of chance or to an objective chance. (shrink)

Cette notule signale un parallèle probable pour l'une des restitutions proposées par F. Salviat. Elle rappelle également que l'établissement du texte est incertain (lecture), et que les compléments envisagés par F. S. pour les dernières lignes demeurent aléatoires. L'interprétation technique et historique que celui-ci en tire, démentie par le reste de la documentation disponible, suscite donc de fortes réserves.

Hobbes établit une distinction entre signes certains et signes incertains, qui correspond à la distinction entre science et prudence. Mais il précise toutefois que les signes de la science ne sont pas tous certains, ni infaillibles. Cette recommandation n’est pas tant une critique de la science, qu’une mise en garde adressée à ceux qui renoncent à leur jugement naturel et s’en remettent aveuglément à l’autorité des livres. La certitude dépend donc d’un bon usage des signes de la part du sujet (...) qui connaît ou interprète. Hobbes affirme ainsi le primat du sujet ou de l’esprit dans la constitution du signe et sa manipulation. La différence entre signes certains et signes incertains ne dépend pas seulement du type de signes, mais également des conditions de l’interprétation. Cette solution s’impose si l’on comprend la définition de Hobbes selon laquelle il n’y a de signe que pour et par un sujet, comme une définition générale s’appliquant à tout type de signe. On pourra alors rendre compte de la certitude ou de l’incertitude des signes à partir de la manière dont le sujet fait usage des signes dans le calcul des conséquences. À cet égard, la distinction entre consécutions de l’imagination et consécutions de la raison joue un rôle au moins aussi essentiel que la distinction entre signes naturels et signes d’institution : s’il est vrai que l’imagination dépend de l’ordre aléatoire des perceptions, alors que les calculs de la raison se fondent sur des signes arbitraires, la notion de consécution apparaît comme le fondement de toute activité portant sur les signes, puisque tout signe, qu’il soit naturel ou conventionnel, suppose un rapport posé ou effectué par l’esprit. L’originalité de Hobbes consiste notamment à envisager le signe comme un rapport entre deux événements, entre un conséquent et un antécédent : plutôt que le rapport entre une présence et une absence, c’est la notion d’ordre qui est au cœur de la pensée hobbesienne du signe. (shrink)

Avec la Révolution, le système de représentation politique est proportionnel au territoire et non plus à la population. Cet ordre territorial fait d’encastrements d’échelles et d’imbrications entre territoires politiques et administratifs (dont les matrices sont le département et la commune) a été approprié par les habitants et a légitimé des milliers de notables, ce qui explique sa résistance à l’heure de l’explosion des frontières, de la métropolisation, de la géographie aléatoire des mobilités. Pour répondre à ces mutations, plus qu’une (...) guerre de gabarits substituant au couple commune-département le couple intercommunalités-régions (ou grande région), des innovations institutionnelles sont à inventer, telles la différenciation territoriale et la coopération interterritoriale. (shrink)

La 4ème de couv. indique : "Issu d'un colloque de Cerisy consacré en 2015 à Gilles Deleuze, cet ouvrage expose les efforts joints de la jeune génération de chercheurs et ceux de ses aînés pour tenter, à partir d'une multitude de points de vue, de rendre compte de la fascination qu'exerce cette pensée, et de l'importance qu'y prend aussi, parallèlement aux personnalités de Deleuze et de Guattari, ce personnage créé entre eux comme un tiers, une "fonction" : D&G. Attaché, dès (...) avant 1953, à restituer des processus, des actes, des mouvements, des transformations, pour remplacer les substances, arrêts sur image, interprétations et représentations, Deleuze n'a cessé de suivre deux lignes qui, échappant au "transcendant" et répondant à une nouvelle théorie du signe, ne cessent de "bifurquer" tout en conservant leur mouvement infini : 1) la ligne de vie et de pensée, qui expérimente les multiplicités, c'est-à-dire manifeste et prend en compte librement l'éclair issu de la rencontre aléatoire entre singularités chargées d'une différence de potentiel ; 2) la ligne de l'art, qui agence les multiplicités, c'est-à-dire produit, "involontairement" et "à côté", des blocs de vie indépendants, à la fois créateurs et propageant un esprit et un acte de résistance. Cette double direction de recherche s'est afirmée dans la rencontre avec Guattari. Elle inspire aujourd'hui cet ouvrage.". (shrink)

Dès 1678, Leibniz, dans plusieurs manuscrits, propose la fondation d’une caisse d’assurance. Il évoque également un fonds de réserve et un mont-de-piété. Selon une approche à la fois théorique et pratique, le philosophe pose et explicite les deux principes fondateurs de l’assurance : précaution et équité. Il recommande par ailleurs la constitution de rentes viagères. Afin de déterminer leur taux, il approfondit la notion d’espérance de vie, elle-même dépendante d’une estimation des probabilités ou risques de décéder. Leibniz conçoit l’ordre de (...) la mortalité comme un processus aléatoire. Il fournit des indications qualitatives et quantitatives sur le risque de décéder pour des grands groupes d’âge, puis entreprend, au moyen d’un modèle simplificateur, de trouver une durée probable de la vie humaine. En présentant le processus d’extinction d’une population comme une combinatoire de risques, ces recherches donnent l’occasion d’établir un dialogue entre le certain et le possible, entre la nécessité et la contingence. (shrink)

Dans le prolongement de sa thèse sur les enfants abandonnés en Bretagne, soutenue en 2010 à l’université de Rennes, Isabelle Le Boulanger esquisse dans ce volume, en relisant ses notes d’archives, une étude des agressions sexuelles commises sur des enfants dans la Bretagne du xixe siècle. Son corpus est constitué d’un échantillon aléatoire d’archives judiciaires (dépouillement d’une année de dossiers de procédure par décennie), au demeurant inégalement conservées dans les cinq départements qu...

Si le hasard est, dès 1913, un acteur à part entière de la production de Duchamp, il semble difficile d’en parler de manière générale, indépendamment des mécaniques ingénieuses inventées par l’auteur pour le « mettre en conserve ». Car le hasard, loin d’être un symbole de la chance ou de l’irrationnel, est avant tout une opération de pensée, qui se réinvente dans chaque œuvre à travers des méthodes différentes. Ainsi l’ Erratum musical permet-il de questionner la notion d’empreinte mémorielle, les (...) formes aléatoires des 3 stoppages étalon érodent la norme du mètre par excès de précision, et l’ Obligation pour la roulette de Monte-Carlo transforme la martingale en jeu de patience. En portant une attention précise aux opérations de hasard spécifiques à chaque œuvre ainsi qu’aux mouvements de pensée qui les accompagnent, nous verrons comment ces objets se font écho en élaborant, chacun à leur manière, une esthétique suspensive. (shrink)

La philosophie économique, dont le développement implique un accroissement accéléré de complexité (ce qui est la définition même de la complexité). Les prémices en ont été le second théorème sur l’équilibre général, et les théorèmes d’impossibilité sur le choix collectif, ou le dilemme des biens publics. Certes, il est possible d’utiliser certains facteurs de complexité, comme des mutations aléatoires, pour définir par exemple des équilibres évolutionnaires, mais ces facteurs sont aussi une source d’instabilité. L’économie expérimentale a mis en lumière la (...) dépendance de nos choix par rapport à leurs évolutions et références antérieures, ce qui est une autre source de complexité. Une exploration rationnelle de ces dépendances met elle-même en jeu la complexité de leurs processus, et implique d’incessantes révisions. Il semble inévitable, puisqu’on ne peut pas réduire les complexités qui tiennent à ces réajustements, qui impliquent un bayésianisme multi-niveaux généralisé, d’admettre que ces révisions n’aient qu’une portée limitée (« minimiser l’énergie libre »). On peut réinterpréter en ce sens les expériences sur des incohérences temporelles dans nos choix, une fois pris en compte l’application de cette minimisation aux processus mêmes d’évaluation des situations de choix. D’autres limitations pourraient être définies en combinant les contraintes neurologiques, psychologiques et économiques. Là encore, une telle combinaison est aussi une source de complexités. Mais dans un autre sens, développer ces relations complexes peut permettre de dépasser les circularités de l’inférence inverse (du neurologique à l’économie expérimentale et inversement). Enfin les simulations computationnelles nous révèlent que des évolutions que l’on croyait asymptotiques sont capables de plus lointaines divergences. Compliquer les modèles computationnels peut limiter leur généralité. Inversement les simplifier n’est utile que si cela révèle aussi quelles simplifications nous font manquer quelle complexité des interactions économiques. L’exploration de ces relations entre cette croissance accélérée de complexité liée non seulement à ces interactions mais à l’entreprise même de leur rationalisation est d’abord la tâche de l’économie dans ses différents champs, mais la philosophie de l’économie peut avoir un rôle dans l’élucidation des rapports entre ces différentes sources de complexité et leurs modalités de limitation les plus raisonnablesCode JEL : B490. (shrink)

Ces cours d'Althusser sur le Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité ont été prononcés en 1972 à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm dans le cadre de la préparation à l'agrégation de philosophie. Ils sont intéressants à double titre: ils ont engendré une génération nouvelle de rousseauistes, attentifs non seulement aux idées de Rousseau mais aussi à ses concepts enfouis sous des métaphores, sous des personnages, sous des situations romanesques. Une nouvelle façon d'aborder la rigueur théorique de Rousseau au-dessous de (...) ses apparentes rêveries et élans sentimentaux a été ainsi mise en oeuvre. En second lieu, on découvre à présent que les thèses du " dernier Althusser " sur le matérialisme aléatoire, sur la nécessité de rompre avec le déterminisme strict des théories de l'histoire afin d'apporter une nouvelle philosophie " pour " Marx, étaient en chantier bien avant 1985, dans cette lecture de Rousseau treize ans auparavant, qui introduit sous le texte rousseauiste les notions de vide, d'accident, de contingence nécessaire, de reprise. (shrink)

"Réfléchir sur la science, mais aussi sur les relations humaines et sur des engagements politiques et militants, tout en faisant référence à des textes anciens et à des enseignements "traditionnaires", n'est-ce pas un peu provocateur? Pourtant, la présente évocation aspire à surmonter les parcellisations et l'éclatement de la pensée - telle, en particulier, que l'Occident la conçoit trop souvent - en traitant aussi bien du raisonnable que de l'affectif, du cognitif que du ressenti et de l'intime, du communautaire que du (...) politique. Il s'agit donc de trouver les voies, les canaux, d'une correspondance des singularités personnelles, visant les relations qu'elles peuvent et doivent élaborer et entretenir, afin de signifier le dégagement d'un sens : le projet d'une humanité. Expression d'une nécessité, d'une rationalité en quelque sorte et aussi, au moins, d'une expérience. Je trouve précieux et émouvant que tradition ésotérique juive et expérience militante gauchiste puissent s'apporter, s'échanger, s'entendre pour une perspective de mise en oeuvre envisageant de devenir commune, sans pour autant mélanger abusivement ce qui doit demeurer séparé, jusqu'à ce que l'alliance conclue entre des protagonistes dûment identifiés et authentifiés soit en mesure de reprendre en termes de compatibilités et de convergence ce qui s'est présenté trop souvent dans l'histoire en termes d'irréductibilités et d'aléatoire." Extrait et adapté de Francis Bailly, Avant-Propos. (shrink)

Résumé François Morellet parle de « hasard programmé » pour traduire la manière selon laquelle la production de l’œuvre est cadrée : l’artiste accueille ou enregistre les produits d’un processus aléatoire qu’il a suscité. La forme d’automatisme que ce mode de fabrication suppose invite à établir une analogie entre la réalisation de ces objets et certains des principes de la prise photographique, à interroger la portée du « hasard programmé » quand c’est la production d’une photographie qui est en (...) jeu. (shrink)

La finance a été contaminée par un virus de la pensée qui l’a rendue immunodéficiente face au risque réel : l’idée que l’on pouvait modéliser l’incertitude par des probabilités au moyen d’un processus aléatoire appelé le mouvement brownien. Cette représentation mentale de la manière de comprendre les fluctuations économiques et financières, de les décrire, puis de les..

Résumé Dans cet article, il s’agit de montrer que si la machine (co)crée, elle ne (co)énonce pas, si l’on entend par « énonciation » l’acte métadiscursif de définir les conditions de possibilité de la production d’un texte verbal ou visuel, la gestion des modalités qui conduisent des virtualités et potentialités au stade de la réalisation ainsi que l’évaluation du processus a posteriori. D’une part, nous attardant sur la génération texte-image par DALL•E 3, mais aussi analysant des glitches, nous cherchons à (...) montrer que, grâce à l’indétermination inhérente au code, grâce à une dose d’aléatoire, voire grâce à une certaine « organicité » qui n’exclut pas le vague et le flou, la créativité n’est pas seulement humaine: au-delà de l’accident, la machine peut produire du nouveau en « faisant ce qu’elle a à faire ». D’autre part, en ce qui concerne la « (co)énonciation machinique », nous dégageons une séquence énonciative qui atteste la responsabilité de l’humain dans les phases initiale et finale, la phase médiane voyant se multiplier des instances machiniques sous-tendues par des forces anonymes et impersonnelles. (shrink)