Boy has he been given one, though. Called the most rapidly ascendant philosopher since Jacques Derrida, Meillassoux, the star pupil of Alain Badiou, has achieved something akin to cultish sainthood since the 2006 publication of his of his first book, After Finitude. And rightly so, given that his ideas inform the basis of speculative realism, one of the most hotly debated theoretical strains of the 21st century.

Yet, Meillassoux's theses—including his critique of 'correlationism', or the post-Kantian notion that being and thought are perpetually and inescapably intertwined—can be difficult to unpack. Helping us do that is Paul Ennis, editor of the journal Speculations and a recently graduated doctor of philosophy, whose explications of Meillassoux have been sanctioned by no less than the thinker himself.  

Q: In Post-Continental Voices, you interview a number of post-Continental theorists about their intellectual and professional development, and their feelings about emergent philosophical strains. So, let me turn your own question back on you: What have been some of the formative influences on your academic maturation, and how did you become involved with speculative realism?

When I started my Ph.D in 2007, I was treading a quite familiar path as far as my department was concerned (University College, Dublin). The plan was to write a thesis on Heidegger and ecological thinking, with a side-line in spatial/topological issues. For roughly two years, I was carrying out this project dutifully and was heavily influenced by the phenomenologists around me. For the most part, I was exposed to the Heideggerian version of phenomenology as ontology, as well as related offshoots of this tradition that stretch into Derrida and the weak theology of Caputo and others. Hermeneutics was also in the background, and I suspect my writing will always have something of this nexus in it. 

The names that grabbed my attention during this time were Ed Casey, Stuart Elden, and Lee Braver. These are the kinds of thinkers I aspire to be like. Ed Casey revealed to me that phenomenology could still be carried out as method, rather than historical exegesis. Elden and Braver are master readers of other thinkers, and they are absolutely meticulous when doing so. I'm trying to get back to that way of writing after undergoing a bout of excitement that came with being released from a mental quagmire; more on this release in a moment.

In a more historical sense, I was fond of reading Dilthey and dipped into (the Heideggerian version of) Schelling. Hegel, due to the great respect he had amongst my peers, became quite important toward the tail end of my thesis. My thesis has its speculative crescendo, but the first two chapters lean heavily on Kant and Hegel. I'm not a Kantian or a Hegelian, but I know that the two form the broad hermeneutical horizon for what I do. 

My exposure to these thinkers pales in comparison to how much I immersed myself in Heidegger. For two years, I did little else but read through the Heidegger section in my library. His influence has left, I suspect, an indelible mark in me, but to make a connection with my current work, I guess I have to go back to before I discovered phenomenology. I should make clear that I have no secret influence behind Heidegger. Heidegger was, without a doubt, the most formative influence on me. The extent of this influence is quite material. I now live in Freiburg, and pass within feet of his lecture hall frequently. Husserl is in the background, too, but like all bad Heideggerians, it took me some time to ground myself in his work.

My first love in philosophy was Nietzsche, but I was never able to write on him. I think it had something to do with the fear of not doing him justice. I sometimes tell myself that writing on Nietzsche is too difficult, but that is an all-too-easy answer. So, Nietzsche came before phenomenology, but once I discovered phenomenology, that was it. I finally found a method, and a modern one, too. It had a connection that ran up into the present, and its pioneers had lived into times I could recognize.

Heidegger died eight years before I was born, and Derrida was my supervisor's supervisor, so I finally felt a connection to a living moment. My supervisor, Joseph Cohen, is a living, breathing example of someone absolutely committed to giving voice to that tradition. So, upon reflection, my choice of phenomenology was a way to address contemporary life, and my aim has always been to understand our times. So, I'm drawn to others that are attempting to do that. I should note that I see myself as a facilitator more than a contributor to these contemporary philosophies.

Turning to speculative realism, I think I must have caught that first wave of enthusiasm before people had to explain how contentious it was, and before the word "movement" was even attached to it. I discovered it by chance. Graham Harman had delivered a paper in Dublin  and although I managed to miss the actual paper, a friend in my department went and his discussion of the paper made me curious enough to Google Graham Harman and find out more.

I first landed on the ANTHEM blog and found the recording, but what really interested me was the links. It looked as if Harman was doing something I had never seen before, namely catching the attention of people in fairly (or relatively) pragmatic disciplines, like information studies, sociology, and so on. So, from there, i found a link to his blog and tried to find out more. It's difficult to remember how things panned out from there, but I do know it was a particularly intense intellectual period for me.

A lot changed for me upon discovering speculative realism. I did some interviews and this became a book (Post-Continental Voices), I took a gamble and set up a journal (Speculations), and I found myself attending conferences that I no longer dreaded sitting through. Mostly though, it made me love reading philosophy again. Everything else is a bonus.

The pragmatic positive in all this was that Harman broke me out of my thesis rut. I finally found the courage to express my concerns about Heidegger. But it is in discovering Meillassoux that my thesis was irrevocably altered. The first chapter of my thesis, "Speculative Intensity and the Ruins of Being," has the discussion of Meillassoux that appears in Continental Realism as its opening gambit. So, it went from being a thesis on Heidegger to one that's a bit of a mix.

I think that should express just how formative speculative realism has been for me. It's also put me in contact with a range of people from all kinds of disciplines. There is no way I could have found them otherwise. So, I'm grateful it happened.

Q: With regard to your work on Quentin Meillassoux and After Finitude, you explain that Meillassoux attempts to displace post-Kantian transcendentalism from its position of philosophical privilege. How does he accomplish this, with respect to both correlationism and related antirealist positions?

I see transcendentalism as forming the 'core' of correlationism for Meillassoux. Or, at least, it represents for him the most difficult obstacle to the development of what he calls speculative materialism. He considers transcendentalism an exceptionally sophisticated form of antirealism. He also makes clear that in its profound simplicity—in, for example, the hands of a thinker like FIchte—it is difficult to undermine without considerable effort. 

The first half of After Finitude is an attempt to expand that effort. Although some see him as casually dismissing Kant, he clearly has immense respect for transcendental argumentation. The displacement here is not abandonment. It is a quite precise de-privileging that is designed to open up the possibility of thinking the 'in-itself' within, and according to, the phenomenal-nournmeal distinction. Meillassoux is no pre-critical rationalist out to reject the Kantian Copernican Turn. In an acutely unfaithful way, he is part of the Kantian lineage. So, it is not surprising that he decides to escape correlationism through immanent critique. 

How does he accomplish the de-privileging? The basic move evolves from his claim that correlationism is fundamentally anti-absolutist. The fault is not in antirealism, and there is a space for antirealism in Meillassoux. He considers antirealism as the thinking appropriate to the phenomenal realm, where description takes place. But that's work for phenomenologists, whereas Meillassoux wants to make demonstrations, and specifically demonstrations concerning what is absolute. Correlationism is for him problematic because its anti-absolutism serves to disbar speculative reasoning, and so block the path to absolutizing thoughts. 

Fortunately, the anti-absolutism of correlationism is shown to be internally contradictory. In After Finitude, the strong correlationist is said to be opposed to all absolutisms. In opposing realist absolutism, she uses the argument from the circle (one cannot get outside one's head...). In opposing idealist absolutism, she is forced to argue, because the idealist absolutist posits that the correlationist circle is itself absolute, that the circle is contingent or, put differently, is not a necessary aspect of all reality. 

What this points to is the fact that the circle is not implicated in all situations. So, this explodes, one might feel, nothing more than what all correlationists know: The subject is finite and can't get outside her head.

In Meillassoux's hands, it points out that from within the phenomenal-noumenal distinction, comprised of two-aspects within one world, we do entertain thoughts about what is absolutely not dependent, for their meaning, on us, or the correlation. They are thoughts that are more than the correlation, not for-it, and yet they are thoughts that can coherently be cognized by us. Such absolutizing thoughts, once integrated into our schema, explode the neat correlation between thinking and being. Correlationism doesn't just collapse here. We just realize that there is more to think about in reality than is found in our correlationist philosophies.

Knowing this, we should aim to supplement the phenomenal picture of reality with what exceeds it. He names this the great outdoors. It's not nature, or a transcendent actuality of things-in-themselves, but names all that truly exceeds us. It's much stronger than an argument for the real, but this only becomes clear with the 'principle of factiality'. 

Q: Can you explain Meillassoux's 'principle of factiality', along with how this concept impacts and/or critiques Continental ideas of contingency and temporality?

The 'principle of factiality' states the non-facticity of facticity or, as the subtitle of After Finitude suggests, the absolute necessity of contingency. For Meillassoux, it is only contingency that can be considered as absolutely necessary. Everything else is ultimately at the mercy of what he calls surcontingence or hyper-chaos. Surcontingence is characterized as an eternal force that deals in facts. It is not itself a fact, but a possibilizing region. Factial speculation is portrayed as a form of thinking capable of attuning itself toward futural potentialities, and then making apparent the most desirable ones. 

This is the ethical side of Meillassoux. Readers of Derrida will no doubt see the connections. In a way, factial speculation is inverse deconstruction. Rather than engaging in intentional hesitancy in order to remind ourselves of certain (quasi-regulaitve) ideals, Meillassoux tries to think through what might happen with their coming-into-being. 

This leads into strange territory—the rising of the dead, the coming of an innocent God, and so on. An article such as "Spectral Dilemma" is a strange kind of homily to postmodern theologians such as Caputo, Vattimo, or Kearney—unfaithful, but well-intentioned.

When it comes to contingency, I don't know how it will impact Continental thinking. The notion of events that come as if from nowhere is not a radically new one in the tradition. Where his ideas here might have some impact is in helping us think through the source of these events. 

But the demonstration of surcontingence is difficult to assess in terms of impact. How many people are likely to be converted to it as an actuality? Where contingency really tends to count, in politics especially, one always has recourse to Badiou's more tempered account of radically contingent events.

It all comes down to whether his ideas can shift from 'original' to 'compelling', and so gain traction amongst a wider audience. The startling nature of his arguments means this may never happen (though I think it will), but since his commitment is to where reason takes him, I suspect Meillassoux's work will become increasingly surprising. In the end, this is what makes him such an appealing, but puzzling thinker. It's like reading Leibniz; you just give yourself over to the brilliance of the thinker and see where he takes you. 

Q: More generally, how, in your view, did philosophy come to embrace transcendentalist accounts of finitude and why should this be abandoned? Relatedly, how do you view the differing trajectories of speculative realism with regard to finitude, with some thinkers rejecting finitude altogether and others anthrodecentrizing it to place all forms of being on equal ontological footing?

Well, that's a long story, and it's arguable whether finitude really is as central a notion to transcendental idealism as speculative realism tends to make out. Certainly, transcendental argumentation has put pre-critical notions of intellectual intuition, the traditional means of thinking the infinite, to bed. Getting outside our heads is no longer so simple.

Infinitude is, in the pre-critical rationalist sense, a mathematical notion, but it is also a quasi-sacred one. It frees us from our finite selves such that we can engage in pure, unconditioned contemplation. Kant has a lot of positive things to say about mathematical infinity, but he certainly tempers where it can take us. We can grasp something like the descent into infinity and keep pushing further into it, but we will never truly know it. This is the whole point of the antinomies after all; a warning that reason can take you out into infinite planes, but once you are out there, what is to stop you from going one way or another?

The important limitation, in so much as finitude becomes important for speculative realism, is the stricture upon infinities beyond experience. Within experience, infinity is for Kant necessarily indeterminate in that we know we could conceivably count (or think) forever in some direction, but actually reach it. It's never infinity in the pure, almost sacred sense that Descartes or Leibniz wanted—what Meillassoux would consider an absolutizing thought that is in no way relative to us. 

With Kant, you always have to tug reason back to its senses. That doesn't mean infinity can't be a regulative ideal, and in terms of practical reason it has a definite function. This distinction between theoretical and practical reason is itself a bit of an unexamined area within speculative realism. I think this is one of the things that irk Kantians, the sense that speculative realists overlook his awareness of the problems speculative realism raises. 

This can be pointed out in a quite mundane sense in that we don't hear much about the details of the refutation of idealism in those critiques, or the fact that keeping a 'little room for faith' is an explicit intention of the Kritik and not some overlooked implication, or Kant's openness to what exceeds us as addressed by practical reason. On the other hand, Meillassoux can be read, in articles like "Spectral Dilemma," as thinking practical concerns using theoretical reason, and specifically intellectual intuition. There is more to talk about here, not least Hegel's critique of Kantian infinity (and his own simple infinity of life), or how the emergence of Cantor affects all this, but I should turn now to how all this pertains to the varieties of speculative realism.

Now, when you ask what comes after finitude, you admit the stricture it places on thinking certain content. What is denied to thinkers of finitude is thinking that extends beyond the phenomenal horizon. What is beyond all horizons are absolutizing thoughts relating to that aspect of reality forever receding beyond all horizons. Meillassoux, for his part, considers this horizon not to be the be-all-and-end-all of what humans can cognize (and not just that we can think it, since this was already admitted in Kant).

Cantor gives him the means to make demonstrations about what lies beyond human finitude, but these demonstrations do not undercut phenomenal descrptions. They complement them. If there is one-world, but one with two-aspects, then Meillassoux intends to let phenomenal thinkers describe one aspect and speculation address the other. 

This allows him to retain, within the Kantian split, what extends beyond finitude within the remit of theoretical reason, rather than rely on practical reason to take up the slack. So, in Meillassoux, finitude is not abandoned, but it is de-privileged as the absolute horizon of human knowledge. You might say that once he does this finitude loses all meaning, but I think it is sustainable, so long as one does not mix up what description and demonstration can and cannot be applied to.

The object-oriented move is similar. Only there the challenge is thinking about the life of objects in-and-of themselves. There is a more tempered approach in this, since object-oriented ontology recognizes that one will never be able to hold the object as an absolutizing thought. Rather, one is asked to engage them sincerely.

Object-oriented ontology becomes, then, a continuous process of attempting to follow the clues objects give us as to their inner lives. You have to build your case from a few principles: withdrawal, a democratic ontological plane, and, as you put it, 'anthrodecentrizing' finitude. Within my own schema, I see object-oriented ontology as description, as I believe Meillassoux sees it (in the speculative realism roundtable discussion).

Merging Meillassoux's perspective and the object-oriented one, I think you can get a pretty good picture of reality, one where we attempt to think after finitude (Meillassoux), and one where we attempt to think finitude in all its wealth (object-oriented ontology). 

Q: Finally, as a graduate student who has published two books and serves as co-editor of the journal Speculations, what advice do you have for students with similar goals, as well as professors working with ambitious students? 

This is a tough question, but something that worked for me was engaging with people outside my own department. It's easy to get sucked into the departmental life-world, but the opportunities to reach the audience you want to reach are limited. You essentially end up attending events where you more or less know what will happen (X will diss Continental philosophy, and Y will defend it...).

But the real issue is that it's only when you 'travel' about a bit, be it online or for real, that opportunities emerge, and ones infused with some real enthusiasm. These days, long-distance projects are sustainable, and Speculations, for instance, is entirely run through nothing more than e-mail correspondence. To get this process in motion, you can just start e-mailing people you respect. I guarantee more of them will respond than you imagine.

Paul Ennis received his doctorate from University College, Dublin in 2011. He is the author of Post-Continental Voices (2010) and Continental Realism (2011), as well as the editor of Speculations, a journal of speculative realism. Follow his blog at Another Heidegger Blog and on Twitter at twitter.com/lordwhatever.