A ZINE ON QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
& SPECULATIVE MATERIALISM
~ Current Call / Deadline August 31 2021 / See Submissions ~
This zine will begin fall 2021. Its impetus is Quentin Meillassoux's writing and its goal is to offer an informal space to publish a wide range of responses to it.
A note on the title, Divinizations*. Within it, I am making two claims which I hope will gently orient the trajectory of the zine - and to which people should feel encouraged to respond. First: divinization is a speculative practice of accessing the absolute, or in our case, absolute contingency as a means of preparation for an ontological change (i.e., a fundamental advent after the 'realities' of matter, life, and thought to, for Meillassoux, the Fourth World of egalitarian and universal justice). This is an evolution of 'divination practices' -- ritualistic activities with a long and diverse history attempting to access, and perhaps feel, uncorrelated knowledge, the unknown. These are currently co-opted, finitized, and exploited in large part by the so-called speculations of global capital and neoliberalism: the political economy of chance versus a politics of (absolute) contingency [Joshua Ramey's Politics of Divination is essential here]. Chance must be wrested back toward the latter, a speculative and revolutionary path, with the addition of Meillassoux's "iz" (divination -> divinization), that is, inclusive of both a thought toward a God-to-come and toward the resurrection of the dead. Any revolutionary movement requires solidarity with the unjustly dead -- Meillassoux offers a path upon which, to me, it appears the dead may have something more: literal (and militant) agency. Second: the access to the absolute called for in divinization practices is of a very particular kind. Yes, absolute contingency, but perhaps more importantly, toward 'may-being' (what Meillassoux calls the final task of philosophy, an ontology grounded in the 'perhaps'). To me, this must have a kind of subterranean history, and may even require a re-definition of history altogether, that we ought to trace. Additionally, it is necessarily non-individualistic: as with Mallarmé's cipher, integration into may-being can only be accomplished by way of 'an indeterminate other' (the anonymous reader uncovering the cipher). At the same time it posits an absolute and the centrality of truth, a collectivism in the 'great outdoors' (or infected by the Outside), something sorely lacking in leftist circles. What secret societies are harbored within the folds of chance? How might they be formed?
What might fit in the zine is intentionally as open-ended as possible. It may make sense to include expansions of ideas he has proposed, translations into English of related writing, artistic work (scores, images, poems, comics, etc.), tangential ideas that connect to theology, revolutionary politics, contingency, critiques of capital, and so on. While I am especially interested in things related to the above remarks, I'm very much looking forward to expanding from these points into realms as vaguely related as contributors would like. If you're not sure if your idea would make sense for the zine, it probably would.
Finally: this is a passion project with the goal of sharing thoughts about a very particular topic among whoever wants to listen, hopefully linking up enthusiasms and labors that might not otherwise have found one another.
Submission Policy + Format: print zine + online download; all mediums welcome (if I can print it, let's do it); all lengths welcome; rolling submissions with the aim of at least 2 issues per year (email to submit, I'll read it).
Order a Zine: email contingentdivinizations@gmail.com with the Issue # and your Address. Zines are pay-what-you-want + shipping costs.
A note on the title, Divinizations*. Within it, I am making two claims which I hope will gently orient the trajectory of the zine - and to which people should feel encouraged to respond. First: divinization is a speculative practice of accessing the absolute, or in our case, absolute contingency as a means of preparation for an ontological change (i.e., a fundamental advent after the 'realities' of matter, life, and thought to, for Meillassoux, the Fourth World of egalitarian and universal justice). This is an evolution of 'divination practices' -- ritualistic activities with a long and diverse history attempting to access, and perhaps feel, uncorrelated knowledge, the unknown. These are currently co-opted, finitized, and exploited in large part by the so-called speculations of global capital and neoliberalism: the political economy of chance versus a politics of (absolute) contingency [Joshua Ramey's Politics of Divination is essential here]. Chance must be wrested back toward the latter, a speculative and revolutionary path, with the addition of Meillassoux's "iz" (divination -> divinization), that is, inclusive of both a thought toward a God-to-come and toward the resurrection of the dead. Any revolutionary movement requires solidarity with the unjustly dead -- Meillassoux offers a path upon which, to me, it appears the dead may have something more: literal (and militant) agency. Second: the access to the absolute called for in divinization practices is of a very particular kind. Yes, absolute contingency, but perhaps more importantly, toward 'may-being' (what Meillassoux calls the final task of philosophy, an ontology grounded in the 'perhaps'). To me, this must have a kind of subterranean history, and may even require a re-definition of history altogether, that we ought to trace. Additionally, it is necessarily non-individualistic: as with Mallarmé's cipher, integration into may-being can only be accomplished by way of 'an indeterminate other' (the anonymous reader uncovering the cipher). At the same time it posits an absolute and the centrality of truth, a collectivism in the 'great outdoors' (or infected by the Outside), something sorely lacking in leftist circles. What secret societies are harbored within the folds of chance? How might they be formed?
What might fit in the zine is intentionally as open-ended as possible. It may make sense to include expansions of ideas he has proposed, translations into English of related writing, artistic work (scores, images, poems, comics, etc.), tangential ideas that connect to theology, revolutionary politics, contingency, critiques of capital, and so on. While I am especially interested in things related to the above remarks, I'm very much looking forward to expanding from these points into realms as vaguely related as contributors would like. If you're not sure if your idea would make sense for the zine, it probably would.
Finally: this is a passion project with the goal of sharing thoughts about a very particular topic among whoever wants to listen, hopefully linking up enthusiasms and labors that might not otherwise have found one another.
Submission Policy + Format: print zine + online download; all mediums welcome (if I can print it, let's do it); all lengths welcome; rolling submissions with the aim of at least 2 issues per year (email to submit, I'll read it).
Order a Zine: email contingentdivinizations@gmail.com with the Issue # and your Address. Zines are pay-what-you-want + shipping costs.
* "The project of rational beings with reason thus consists in enduring together, from generation to generation, by the establishment of a link of fidelity between the living and the dead, in the midst of a world whose knowledge is able to maintain our waiting. It is to endure a totally different historical scale, on a scale of time in which the world assumes a different aspect than the calm indifference of laws. The authentic link of humans with God is thought as a link with the inexistent God of whom humans are the possible ancestor. This link, which makes each of us the possible forerunner of God, I call the divine. The practice of this link in the course of our lives I call the divinization or immortalization of humans; it is the very manner of becoming singular that makes us human. This divinization is not a deification of humans, because it is not a Promethean identification of humans with God. The divine is the affirmation of an uncrossable ontological divide between humans and the omnipotence of the Master, a worthless omnipotence of the revealed God whose happy abandonment inaugurates the philosophical God as justice and as gesture" (Meillassoux, The Divine Inexistence, Philosophy in the Making, p. 232).
