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After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

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... The philosophical movements of new realism and-as a closely related predecessor-speculative realism share the tendency of using rhetorics of bringing us, after years of all-too scholarly seclusion in postmodern monasteries, back in touch with good, old reality. Meillassoux (2008) wants us to breathe the fresh air of the Great Outdoors in metaphysics; Benoist (2021) shows us that even after the end of classical metaphysics, we need the concept of reality and its contexts to make philosophical sense of anything from our perception to our politics; Kolozova (2016) urges us to reconsider the predominant culturalism about gender; and the accelerationists ask us to take a hard look at the ever-faster material economy we have created in spite of the ecological-climatic crisis and the vast social problems of global society (Mackay & Avanessian 2014). In this crowded and heterogenic field, Markus Gabriel gives us a realist pluralism in his fields of sense ontology (Gabriel 2015), a neo-existentialism (Gabriel 2018a) in philosophy of mind as well as philosophical anthropology and argues for a new enlightenment (Gabriel 2022). ...
... Scientific practice should here be understood to include: (1) the body of scientific knowledge claims advanced; (2) the experimental, theoretical, and technological resources available to reliably make those scientific knowledge claims; and (3) second-order (methodological-epistemic) principles that can justify the reliability of the scientific knowledge claims so advanced." (Massimi 2022, 5-6) The importance of the situated scientific community as the knowers of nature might lead one to believe, Massimi would present an empirisist and maybe antirealist account of the natural sciences (like for instance van Fraassen 1980, 2002, 2008or Longino 1990. In my view however, this would be a mistake. ...
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This article gives an interpretation of the concepts of nature and the universe as used by Markus Gabriel in his new realist fields of sense ontology and epistemology. I argue that the ontological domain, the field of sense, of the universe is an epistemological fusion, not capable of providing the substantive philosophy of nature Gabriel needs for his philosophical endeavours, while the notion of nature is not developed fully in Gabriel’s published work yet. I give the outlines of an extended concept of nature which Gabriel only hints at. I go on to argue that any route Gabriel might want to take in elaborating his concept of nature involves taking a stance towards the natural sciences and their capabilities. I take Hasok Chang’s and Michela Massimi’s recent proposals for new versions of scientific realism and conclude that Gabriel should side with an optimism concerning the natural sciences’ ability to know about nature. I emphasise that much philosophical work remains to be done by Gabriel in order to develop a sophisticated notion of nature that meets his own demands and requirements.
... That is the idealized version anyway. In harsher light, those same objects and technologies are revealed to have properties outside their intended relations or immediate perception (Harman 2011;Meillassoux 2008). The ability of these objects to vary from their expected entanglements gives them a distributed, and ultimately consequential, "small agency" (Bennett 2010). ...
... After all, there is nothing to manage without "human waste" as a physical substance. Acknowledging the power of matter in the world invites anthropological explanations that include objects as existing beyond just human perception (e.g., Meillassoux 2008;Ingold 2011a). ...
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Human waste management, an academically overlooked yet universal human experience, comprises diverse, unfolding relationships between people, materials, and institutions. This dissertation follows these entanglements through a case study of the Placencia Peninsula, Belize, where rapid tourism development occurs amidst undersized, precarious waste infrastructures. Management arises within a web of negotiations—between pipes and pathogens, citizens and states, past aspirations and imagined futures. Through these tangled relations, waste reveals itself as more than a byproduct of human life; it becomes a measure of care, governance, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines how non-human materialities—like water, soil, and the chemical composition of waste—shape the possibilities for management, how social institutions organize around waste as a collective problem, and how matters of care guide the discourses and decisions surrounding its treatment. In Placencia, tourism’s rapid expansion exposes the fragility of existing infrastructures, generating competing visions for the peninsula’s future: one focused on scaling up to accommodate growth, the other emphasizing local stability and environmental sustainability. By framing waste management as an entangled process rather than a singular problem to solve, this research contributes to a pragmatic anthropology that attends to the material, social, and ethical dimensions of human life. It argues for understanding management practices not as static solutions, but as evolving responses to the ongoing negotiations between people, materials, and the worlds they seek to create. Placencia’s waste, like all waste, insists on being reckoned with—persisting as a reminder of both our shared vulnerabilities and our capacities for care.
... 'Nature' (materiality) is indifferent to our existence, yet we must generate relations with such 'indifference' for our own well-being necessitating a rather different pedagogical relationship (jagodzinski, 2021a). Historically, this relationship between nature and culture has been described as hylomorphic where object-subject correlation defines agency, now widely understood as 'correlationism' as articulated by Quentin Meillassoux (2010). The reorientation to hybridic naturecultures defines the cosmic orientation of artistscientists and scientistartists. ...
... He offers an understanding of artistic-design processes which dispels correlationist ontology deeply Kantian in its modernist roots. The intricacies of correlationism, in both its weak and strong forms, has been credited to Quentin Meillassoux (2010) where, in a nutshell, "the idea [being that] we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" (p. 5). ...
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This essay attempts to shift the ontological ground for art education to think along a cosmology that is adequate for the Anthropocene era. The cosmic-eco-artisan (without authority) is forwarded as an exemplar of what Deleuze and Guattari would call ‘conceptual personae’. Their cosmic geo-philosophy plays a dominant role in this essay. The point is made that each eco-cosmic project is a singularity and context bound. There is no art education or procedural ‘methodology’ per se. Rather, what is necessary is for art pedagogy to address the Anthropocene problematic through artistic cosmic ‘forcework’ via a techné; that is, through apparatuses which bring art and science together. I call this artscience or scienceart depending on where the emphasis is placed. I end this essay with several paradigmatic examples to vivify this thesis.
... Posthumanism addresses the shortcomings of this ethos. Posthuman approaches, include different frameworks such as new materialism, actor-network theory (ANT), object-oriented ontology (OOO), assemblage theory, speculative realism, and more, reject subject-object dualism and the belief in a stable, autonomous self, instead acknowledging the entanglement of reality and the embodied, local, historical, cultural and, importantly, the technological (Braidotti, 2013;Hayles, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology (2008 aims explicitly to move beyond human-centric perspectives, drawing from OOO (Harman, 2005) and speculative realism (Meillassoux, 2008), but ends up adopting a decidedly Cartesian perspective (as will become clear later in the article). Bogost (2012) critiques the Kantian idea of correlationism, which posits we can only understand reality through human cognition, leaving the true thing-in-itself unknowable. ...
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This article traverses from humanist to posthumanist philosophies to analyse videogame ontology. It challenges Cartesian dualism, understood as emblematic of humanist thinking, by bringing the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō in conversation with posthumanist thought. Nishida’s rejection of the subject-object split and his concepts of ‘pure experience’, ‘basho’ and ‘action-intuition’ provide a framework for understanding games as dynamic events in a relational matrix of nothingness rather than as discrete entities. The game Jetpack Joyride is analyzed through this lens, illustrating how gameplay is a co-creative experience within a complex interplay of technology and human agency. This approach promotes an inclusive and global understanding of the interconnected nature of videogames and player identities, challenging entrenched Western paradigms in game studies and posthumanist thought.
... İnsanlığın özünün ve doğası gereği sabit özelliklerinin olduğu iddiasıyla kurulan sosyal bilimlerin temeli Foucault ve Latour'un kuramları ortaklaştığında, insanı antropolojik düşüncenin getirdiği entelektüel bagaj olmadan inceleme olanağı sağlamaktadır. Her ikisi de insanın, bir öze başvurularak veya herhangi bir zihinsel yapı, kişilik veya kimlik fikrine başvurularak tanımlanamayacağını vurgulamaktadır (Meillassoux, 2008;Michael, 2000). ...
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This theoretical study aims to elaborate on an alternative approach, proposing that social relations are made possible by inanimate objects. For example, the means of production, which are used as a category of analysis in social theory, have been tried to be understood by investigating only their social projections, without mentioning these tools themselves. The main aim of this study is to reconsider this theoretical attitude, which results from sociology's view of lonely people as a category of analysis and which creates a deficiency in making sense of historical and social dynamics. In this context, by combining knowledge archaeology and Actor Network Theory, it is aimed to explain things as tools that make the social possible and to present the thesis that gender-based dynamics and/or social class, can also be investigated with this method.
... Quem pode determinar se o invisível existe ou não?(VANDENBERGHE, 2002).A obra Após a finitude,de Quentin Meillassoux (2008 [2006), tornou-se um pilar da virada especulativa e não-correlacionista, que, por sua vez, são bases da corrente filosófica do realismo especulativo. Meillassoux argumenta na obra em questão que a "revolução transcendental consistiu não só em desqualificar o realismo ingênuo da metafísica dogmática, mas também em redefinir a objetividade fora do contexto dogmático"(MEILLASSOUX, 2008 ...
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No contexto das abordagens relacionais, muitas das quais baseadas em inspirações e pressupostos advindos da teoria ator-rede, destaca-se uma forma de pensamento que tem como base reflexiva a existência de arranjos relacionais heterogêneos, que entrelaçam humanos e não-humanos. Por meio destas relações em rede são aflorados significados a partir da irrupção de afetos que estimulam a performance dos atores enovelados, o que estimula a base teórica deste pensamento ser chamada de geografia do que acontece. Tais arranjos relacionais são comumente referidos como assemblages na literatura acadêmica, e tem servido como referência importante para as pesquisas mais-que-representacionais na geografia. Todavia, algumas questões relacionadas ao seu uso exigem atenção: as consequências advindas dos planos entrecruzados das assemblages, a assimetria que envolve os actantes partícipes das redes e a ascensão do pensamento não-correlacional que tem se disseminado a partir da consolidação do realismo especulativo. Apesar destes pontos de atenção, concluímos que as questões levantadas não invalidam o uso das assemblages na pesquisa mais-que-representacional no âmbito da geografia, mas possibilitam a qualificação do discurso que se apropria dos arranjos relacionais heterogêneos aplicados à leitura espacial. ABSTRACT In the context of relational approaches, many of which are based on inspirations and assumptions arising from actor-network theory, a form of thinking that has as its reflexive basis the existence of heterogeneous relational arrangements, which woven humans and non-humans. Through these network relationships, meanings emerge from the irruption of affections that stimulates the performance of the involved actors, which encourages the theoretical basis of this thought to be called the geography of what happens. Such relational arrangements are
... Training can only be based on knowledge, and knowledge is not an obstacle to psychotic framing. However, if we assume that the basic structure of our scientific knowledge is indeed the indeterminate, as Meillassoux (2008) argues, for example, then computers in their current paradigmatic setup are not foundations on which to base our science, they remain tools to be wielded by experts in the field in which they are used. But this is where things shift, because if the expertise to wield this tool in its current iteration as LLM-AI requires a deep knowledge of language, metaphor, and metonymy, then scientists using LLMs should include the humanities in their core curriculum, because in the very near future, even coding may require them to read GitHub with the methodology of a Kafka expert reading Kafka's work, tracing the contextual knowledge that words carry and metaphors influence, to understand what they are doing and to do it more efficiently. ...
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This paper delves into the striking parallels between the linguistic patterns of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the concepts of psychosis in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacanian theory, with its focus on the formal and logical underpinnings of psychosis, provides a compelling lens to juxtapose human cognition and AI mechanisms. LLMs, such as GPT-4, appear to replicate the intricate metaphorical and metonymical frameworks inherent in human language. Although grounded in mathematical logic and probabilistic analysis, the outputs of LLMs echo the nuanced linguistic associations found in metaphor and metonymy, suggesting a mirroring of human linguistic structures. A pivotal point in this discourse is the exploration of “absolute metaphors”—core gaps in reasoning discernible in both AI models and human thought processes and central to the Lacanian conceptualization of psychosis. Despite the traditional divide between AI research and continental philosophy, this analysis embarks on an innovative journey, utilizing Lacanian philosophy to unravel the logic of AI, using concepts established in the continental discourse on logic, rather than the analytical tradition.
... Correlationism refers to an axiomatic starting point in much thinking about education, namely, we always already have to assume a mutual correlation of thought/practice/experience/discursivity and world (Meillassoux 2008). In blunt terms, when we think of the world in education, it is routinely reduced to a world of human thought. ...
... See for instanceBarad (2007),Meillassoux (2009), Bennett (2010), or the essays collected in Alaimo and Hekman (2008); Coole and Frost (2010); Bryant, Srnicek and Harman (2011); Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012). ...
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This article constitutes a substantial introduction to the thematic issue “Matters.” After introducing briefly the scattered constellation described by some as “new materialism” or “the material turn,” as well as its main concepts and methods, I offer a deconstructive reflection on “the turn” by challenging a series of theoretical gestures meant to coalesce the turn to materiality in contemporary continental philosophy—starting with the exclusion of the much maligned “linguistic turn” and the opposition to an “old” concept of matter presented as passive, inert, and mechanistic. I analyze how these two exclusions—precarious as they may be—allow for a relative coalescence of the new “scene” while betraying its essential heterogeneity and self-inadequacy. I thus interrogate the conditions that make the position of a “new” materialism possible, giving it force and necessity, while questioning what the production of this so-called novelty potentially obfuscates. After raising a series of questions related to new materialism’s conceptuality, I introduce the contributions that make up the thematic issue. I also provide a substantial bibliography to help the reader navigate the material turn as well as its various critiques from the perspectives of philosophical history, object-oriented ontology, social and ethico-political theory, deconstruction, critical race studies, or other perspectives on materialist theory.
... If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 238; oddly, the edition of the French text I have, printed in 2016, does not have italics in this passage, perhaps more traditional than it lets on, Margulis argues that her opponents' scientism has proven false because it imposed unnatural concepts on nature (such as competition), concepts derived from "anthropocentric" cultural relations, whereas she hopes to produce a universally and transhistorically valid theory. In this, her argumentation is the perfect mirror of, for example, Meillassoux's (2009) anti-"correlational" realism, which pretends to oppose philosophy by positing the most traditional ideal of universalizing scientific thought such as could be derived from the philosophical tradition itself. 6 The drive for ontology (the desire to suppress "epistemological" questions of knowledge's fallibility) that is recognizable in many fields today is continuous with this tendency. ...
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Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and evolution of species, yet it is impossible to speak of symbiosis (cross-species association) unless species-boundaries have been posited in advance. Thus, a tension is legible throughout Margulis’s work between the drive to surpass the limits of species-definitions as they have been traditionally understood, and a need to maintain them in order that there can be “symbiosis” at all. Margulis criticized neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution in part because she saw symbiogenesis as debunking the theory that life was defined by individualistic competition. More recently, Myra Hird has suggested that the gift, such as it has been theorized by certain anthropologists and philosophers, could adequately figure symbiosis and the ethical relations founded on it. I turn to Derrida’s writing on the gift to suggest that, if a gift worthy of the name chances to happen, it necessarily exceeds scientific, theoretical, and philosophical knowledge.
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The article examines the concept of utopia in its post-Marxist context. Since the 1970s—against the backdrop of the failures of May 68, the self-exposures of the USSR, and the decline of the workers’ movement, as well as in accordance with the immanent history of the logic of the history of philosophy itself—the concept of utopia has been running through new areas of meaning and is extremely dialectical in two modes: temporal and ontological. The first transforms utopia from never-being into “past”, the second provides two inversions, considering it as 1) a dystopia, the other of utopia, which is declared to be the hidden truth of utopia; and — when it is fundamentally possible according to its own concept — 2) as impossible, in connection with which utopia and its concept return to the discourse as a kind of empty place around which modern pessimism circles, correctly believing that the future is unimaginable. The time of ends, from the end of the grand narratives of disappointed radicals (Lyotard) to the end of politics (see Rancière’s analysis), is, however, picked up by Marcuse, who suggests considering utopia as ahistorical. The author introduces this strange ahistorical or even anti-historicalism as historical, relying on the conceptualized phenomenon of the desynchronization of the “base” (the development of productive forces to the degree necessary for social revolution) and the “superstructure”, which runs into a limit, since it cannot represent the restrained base, which has broken out of the formational “scientific” logic. When Marcuse writes that a utopia in the strict sense can now be called a project that violates the laws of nature, he means the “impossible” into which utopia turns after the catastrophes of the 20th century, betraying the truth of its concept contained in the simple possibility of another world. More than 50 years after “The End of Utopia” and almost 30 years after the ontological turn in philosophy, we can say that utopia is still unimaginable — in the strict sense is what violates the laws of logic. This thesis opens up the possibilities of a new dialectic and its alliance with transcendentalism, which the author considers as a critique of plastic reason in the spirit of Malabou, constructing time and time again the assumptions-concepts that it needs and which are “practically necessary” according to Kant.
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This is a conversation with Ghislain Deslandes, author of a dozen books addressing various issues in the field of the philosophy of management. Our dialogue traces his intellectual journey, starting with the interpretation of antiphilosophy and further exploring how it is applied in organizations and management practice. The conversation concludes with a discussion of his latest book about postcritical management studies.
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This chapter engages in a non-philosophical (Laruellian) discussion of the question of subjectivity and the status it holds in contemporary philosophy, in ontological, epistemic and political sense combined with the method of “exit from philosophy” as conceived and applied by Karl Marx. It is centered on problematization of the notion of “subjectivity” in line with the theses put forward by Marx in both his early and some of the later works: its status of the organizing principle, of the structural law of philosophical thought tout court displays naïve anthropocentrism but also anthropomorphism of thought. The organizing principle at hand renders all philosophy idealist, including the one that strives to be materialist and objective, argues Marx. The paper mobilizes the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and Markus Gabriel in an attempt to revisit Marx’s proposal through a contemporary lens.
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How to tell “good” critique from “bad” critique, meaningful encounter from opinionated tokenism, or a genuine investment in political emancipation from the cartoonish contrivances of a recuperated emancipatory gesture refolded as empty pastiche? This paper begins with the assumption that we can no longer make any such distinctions. What if all critique nowadays is a spectacle, or perhaps better described, not as critique at all, but merely the proliferation of opinion and criticism? Merely the “unreflective to-and-fro of claim and counter-claim” (MacKenzie, 2004: 6), the “anarchic debris of [already] circulated knowledge” (Badiou, 2001: 50), mere “propositions ... defined by their reference” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 22), by the relationships with what has been said before and what will be inevitably said after. What if the pertinent question is not whether we can tell “good” critique from “bad” critique, but in the wake of all contemporary communication becoming repetitive and impotent, why do we insist on talking at all? And what if, in light of all this, the only potentially radical response is to remain silent? To find “little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say” (Deleuze, 1997: 129). A conjuring of the gentleness, the quiet solemnity and the right to have nothing to say is perhaps the condition that has a “chance of framing the rare, or even rarer, thing that might be worth saying” (Deleuze, 1997: 129).
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This publication is a Russian translation of F. Gironi’s paper devoted to a panoramic survey of attempts to relativize Kantian ideas about a priori knowledge. Gironi reconstructs various approaches and interpretations, focusing on the ideas of C. I. Lewis, H. Reichenbach, W. Sellars, and M. Friedman within the context of scientific realism, and relates such forms of dynamic Kantianism to recent speculative projects based on a critique or rejection of Kant’s legacy. In doing so, the author argues that Kant’s ideas on a priori conceptual structures form the core of debates about the role of philosophy vis-a-vis science, as opposed to variants of metaphysics and philosophy of science, which replace the so-called correlationist paradigm of transcendental critique with unconstrained speculation that falls out of step with the realities of modern science. The naturalized Kantianism of W. Sellars appears to be the most promising starting point for subsequent speculative – and transcendental – endeavours in the field of conceptualizing meta-conceptual frameworks that would meet the need to regulate and systematize the reality of scientific discourse. This is precisely what speculative realism, consistent with what we owe to Kant’s philosophy, is supposed to be.
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In our journey through the topology of pattern formation, we find ourselves returning to where we began: the nature of historical becoming. The historiographysics I first conceived - with its sharp quantum transitions and discrete state spaces - now reveals itself as merely the first approximation of something far deeper.
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In his 2016 essay “The Weird and the Eerie,” Mark Fisher argued that contemporary aesthetic media established new modes of the strange that could no longer be described in terms of Freud’s concept of the unheimlich: While the unheimlich remains within the opposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the weird and the eerie represent experiences of radical strangeness that are beyond the familiar. This chapter focuses on these new types of radical strangeness. It examines the systematic differences between the unfamiliar and the defamiliarized and reflects on the social functions of the different historical aesthetics of the strange.
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In this paper, I consider the pedagogical transformations generated by walking. From the perspectives of semiotics and realism, I focus on the entanglement of being while walking and argue that walking is an activity that produces ontological knowledge in rhizomatic practices. I will first explain the entanglement of being while walking. Walking is a mapping practice as an act of walking creates relations with the surrounding environment. Here, I show that walking is a movement in a qualitative field where symbols and reality inextricably influence one another. Next, I describe the activity of knowledge creation from a neutral standpoint of symbols and realities with the idea of creating a fiction. The idea of fiction here is that by creating it, one makes a ‘world’ and forms a subject at the same time. The conclusion is that walking is a form of making fiction, a process of creating differences from fixed meanings and a heuristic way of creating and imagining new relationships. Through this process, one is constantly generating the world as a new living inquiry.
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O presente texto é a tradução para o português brasileiro do artigo “Algorithmic Catastrophe — The Revenge of Contingency”, do filósofo chinês Yuk Hui (2015), professor na City University of Hong Kong, criador dos conceitos de “tecnodiversidade” e “cosmotécnica” e autor de livros como The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016) e Recursivity and Contingency (2019). O presente artigo, cedido generosamente pelo autor para tradução sob licença CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, originalmente fazia parte de uma edição especial da revista Parrhesia dedicada ao filósofo francês Bernard Stiegler (in memoriam), antigo orientador de doutorado do autor e uma das peças centrais na composição deste texto.
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