(Hi, I'm Luke Martin. I live in Minneapolis, MN and am a PhD student at University of Minnesota. This is me. Any questions, please get in touch!)
A few things to note:
1. This is a short-run zine on and expanding from Quentin Meillassoux's writing. It has been a central focus for my thought, and I'm hoping this zine can be a source of thinking more about his proposals -- as well as contingency in general, its relation to politics, art, ethics, plus any connected thinkers (Badiou, Brassier, Malabou, Garcia, Negarestani, Grosz, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Pessoa, Cage, Hegel, Hume, Lenin, the Situationists, Wandelweiser, and on and on).
2. Format: I make these as booklets at home by hand, starting with about 40 copies. I'll (happily) make more per request. Contributors can have up to 5 copies to share. Generally it will be B & W, 8.5x11" folded + staple, hot glue binding, number of pages per issue can vary, and the nicest paper I'm able to get my hands on -- usually, card stock cover & standard white paper for inside.
2. I'm figuring this out as I go, so don't hesitate to get in touch with suggestions, ideas, or to say hi.
3. Submissions. It is fairly open-ended. I'm not interested in saying no or gatekeeping, unless it is deeply off-topic. The more the merrier!
4. There's some passages from Meillassoux's writing below that have been in the back of my mind when putting this zine together. Take a look if interested. Here's a short one that I find particularly inspiring (especially as it might connect to artistic practice).
"A treading water that would not be an extinguishing, but the pulsation of the eternal—a hesitation of being. A flickering of the fan, unknotting of hair, whirlwind of muslin, white clothes on the edge of the water that seem fleetingly to be a bird on the wave. So many signs recalling to us, more or less the structure of Chance: to remain in itself alongside its contrary, to contain virtually the absurd, to be the two sides of its own limit."
*****
Incomplete List of Publications (English)
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006/2008)
"Potentiality and Virtuality" (2006/2007)
"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, Matter and Memory" (2007)
"Spectral Dilemma" (2008)
"History and Event in Alain Badiou" (2011)
The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé's Coup de Dés (2012)
"The Coup de Dés, or the Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis" (2012)
"The Immanence of the World Beyond" (2012)
"The Contingency of the Laws of Nature" (2012)
"Badiou and Mallarme: The Event and the Perhaps" (2013)
Time Without Becoming (ed. Anna Longo) (2014)
"Decision and Undecidability of the Event in Being and Event I and II (2014)
Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (2015)
"Excerpts from The Divine Inexistence" in Harman's Philosophy in the Making (2015)
"Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning" (2016)
Four Passages (QM)
1) Excerpt from "Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition"
2) Excerpt from "Materialist Divinization"
3) Excerpt from "Immanence of the World Beyond"
4) Excerpt from The Divine Inexistence (Excerpts)
*any typos below are mine, apologies in advance*
**please read the full essays as these passages are dependent on the arguments in them**
1. Meillassoux, Quentin. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning,” trans. Robin Mackay and Mortiz Gansen, in Genealogies of Speculation, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 30-31.
Our materialism is, on the contrary, an antireductionism. Indeed, it is via antireductionism that we wish to give every chance to the reduction of the physical world to its possible mathematization. Now, rather than concluding from this that everything is reducible to this mathematizing gesture, we conclude from it that, since life and human practices overflow this being mathematizable on every side, there is manifestly an emergence ex nihilo of life from matter, and of thought from life. In this case there would indeed be not creations (taken up in the continuity of the virtual, of the Bergsonian past) but irruptions (pure ruptures with no link to the ripening of a past). So many local destructions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In this way, every time that a domain of being proves irreducible to another - every time that a discipline takes hold of it that cannot be the prey of any other, what we see is the 'scar' on the real left by this emergence ex nihilo.
Speculative materialism thus has as a first consequence, contrary to its metaphysical version:
1. That it does not explain to science what are the true components of matter; of the actual, we say nothing (or almost nothing, as we shall see).
2. That it does not reduce disciplines to a fundamental discipline that would be in a foundational position, or even abolish them in favour of the 'mother-science' that it claims to constitute. Philosophy has its territory - Hyperchaos and its Figures - which in return guarantees for every nonphilosophical discipline that its experience of the actual cannot be dethroned by any philosophy whatsoever.
3. To continually relaunch the inquiry into irreducibilities, for the latter are so many possible irruptive scars fissuring the actual world; inquiries that will never arrive at certain results (the speculative can demonstrate nothing certain about the actual, it is content to track possibilities), but only at more or less faded traces wherein the staunch materialist, with her thirst for an only approximate coherence of being, distributed into broken spheres of beings, indexes the falsity of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It is notably in these inquiries that materialism allows itself to speak - but only just - of the actual: for such inquiries confirm the pertinence of the organigrammatism of knowledges.
These fissures are neither fractures too wide (which would destroy any coherence of the world), nor cracks too fine (which would allow a knowledge to bridge them so as to alone speak the whole of what is): they are fissures, gulfs, but narrow enough not to destroy the terrain upon which they occur: telling us at once of the irreducibility of x to y, and of their coarticulation in fact. In exactly the way in which thought saturated with perceptions, sensations and qualitative affects is coordinated with a body that is determinable in its internal movements by strictly mathematical parameters. A union without unity that would make of us at once more than one and less than two - and this in an arithmetic of whole numbers that does not admit of such intermediaries.
2. Meillassoux, Quentin. “The Coup de dés, or the Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis,” Collapse, vol. 8, 2018 (orig. 2012), p. 846
A New Materialist Gesture
In conclusion, you may be worried by this reading - if not Christian then at least chistological - of Mallarme. But to my eyes, this reading, I repeat, is above all materialist. From Epicurus to Mallarme, the gesture is in truth, I believe, fundamentally the same: the divine exists, but it is not what is essential. For Mallarme succeeded, in a certain way, in assuring the triumph of modernity: that 'religion of art', that immanent replacement for the old religion that our teachers assured us had failed, or had even engendered political crimes, Mallarme did bring it to fruition successfully. There is, thanks to the Coup de des, a divinization of the poem, and the birth of a new cult. But this triumph, this cult, this religion, are not at all what we expected - or that which we mocked or condemned. This new cult is simply the silent reading of a book, the remembering of a hypothesis, a play upon the count of words. It is more and better than Christianity, without being any more than that. It is the reinvention of the divine as being nothing grandiose, nothing transcendent; as not being that which matters most in our lives; and at the same time as that which participates in them with an elegant and very beautiful discretion. It is the most effective way in which to repeat such a materialist gesture. To reinvent otherwise than Epicurus and Mallarme these secondary gods - here, in my opinion, is a task for a philosophy rendered over to its immanentist power.
3. Meillassoux, Quentin. “Immanence of the World Beyond,” The Grandeur of Reason, ed. by Cunningham and Chandler, trans. Peter Candler, Adrian Pabst and Aaron Riches, SCM Press, 2010, pp. 460-478 [sections: Not Yet / Divinity and Nihilism / The Unsurpassable Brutality of the Eternal Return]
The 'Not Yet'
First of all we must abolish a misunderstanding. To speak of a God who does not yet exist does not in any way mean to evoke a not yet fully existing but already potentially actualized God: we do not speak here of a God who exists but has not yet been fully revealed, nor a God whose intensity of existence would progress over the course of history. Whether providence concerns a God who is actual or in the process of actualization, either way it is equally incommensurable with every idea of justice, and in this sense unacceptable to the atheist. If God, in order to increase the intensity of his being must pass through the history of human disasters, then his fulfilment is synonymous with a cosmic sacrifice of our destinies that nothing could Justify, apart from a new perverse form of reasoning.
First of all, the statement, God does not yet exist, is therefore meant to signify that God does not exist, not simply that he does not exist in any fashion. We mean this in the same way in which a hardened atheist might mean it (although by modifying the modality of the thesis r terms 'factual' and 'un-necessary'). The proposition of the non-existence of God ought in truth to be paraphrased in this way: God does not exist, but there is no reason that this should remain so, that his non-existence should always remain so.
Let us try to examine the meaning of this statement more closely, beginning with its temporal nature.
To posit that God can exist in the future does not mean with respect to factual ontology, that the emergence of a future' God is necessary. It can only be a matter of an event that is really and truly possible, but essentially contingent: hence eternally eventual. God can either come in the future or not: this possibility will never go away, nor can one ever be certain that this possibility will actually even be realized. Such an event, at first glance, would relate to the emergence of a world whose laws would in fact incorporate the renewal of past human bodies. Therefore it is a matter of an essentially uncontrollable event - for a man and for a God - which cannot be rendered improbable, since it concerns the emergence of physical constants and not of facts subordinated to those constants. It would be pointless to give up hope for this advent under the pretext that many other possibilities could arrive within Surchaos, with no reason to privilege the hoped-for eventuality, since this would be to subject it to a probabilistic logic that does not apply to the present case. The event in question is really possible, eternally contingent, forever uncontrollable and completely improbabilizable.
Therefore to hope that Surchaos might bring this event about is to hope for a possibility which may never arrive, but it will be forever impossible to say that this possibility will never come.
When an event takes place that conforms to the physical laws of a determinate world, we can say that this event was, up until the point of its occurrence, a potentiality of this world. But Surchaos can also give rise to events that do not conform to the physical laws of a world. I call such events virtualities. Virtualities can be considered, very precisely, as advents ex nihilo, since they proceed neither from an actually existing world, nor from its physical potentialities, nor from some totality of possible worlds - for example, from a divine understanding which would contain the sum of all possibilities. Virtualities come from a non-totality of possibles, from the untotalizable abyss of the virtualities of Surchaos. The sign there have been some advents ex nihilo in the past comes from the 'irreducible facts' among several orders of existence. So far there seem to be three of these irreducible facts: matter (reducible to what can theorized in physico-mathematical terms), life (understood more specifically as a set of terms, that is, affections, sensations, qualitative perceptions, etc., which cannot be reduced to material processes) and, finally, thought (understood as a capacity to arrive at the 'intelligible contents' bearers of eternity, and which as such is not reducible to any other terms). These three orders determine the existence of three worlds - matter, life, thought - which are actually coexistent, despite every evident indication that they succeed one another in time.
I believe, therefore, that there are irreducible, improbabilizable supplementations within evolution which are signs not of a transcendence but of a higher chaos. I propose, then, to think the speculative renewal as the possible advent of a fourth world: that of justice. Although this world is without ontological necessity, there is reason to hope in it in a way that is not simply capricious. For only this world could introduce into the future an irreducibility and a novelty as radical as that of life in relationship to matter, or thought in relation to life. In effect, if one grants that facticity is absolute, then the thinking being is the ultimate being, which no novelty can radically surpass, in the precise sense in which thought is defined as intellectual access to the eternal. No being - the more advanced living things, angel or god - can surpass the thinking being in the way in which thought surpasses life or life surpasses matter. If a world which surpasses our third world (thought) can still arrive, just as our third world has surpassed preceding ones, then it can only be the world of the renewal of the ultimate being to be the thinking being, but according to a regime of existence now worthy of its condition: immortality as the guarantor of universal equality.
Nevertheless, in the way we use the term, we are careful not to identify the ultimate with the absolute. The absolute and the eternal have no value in themselves, since they are identified with eternal facticity, that is, when all is said and done, with the stupid contingence of a ll things. But the ultimate - that is, the thinking being ( of which man is one among other possible examples) - is a contingent, fragile, mortal being - at least in our world. The ultimate is a being who, aware of the absoluteness of contingence, knows his own contingency. He thereby acquires all at once both a cognitive and tragic dimension, which gives him his insurmountable worth. This is why the only world which could exceed in novelty the world of the thinking being thought would be the recasting of being according to a specific immortality: not a necessary existence - that is ontologically impossible - but an existence likely to be prolonged indefinitely. It would be a matter of a kind of non-necessary immortality in which death would certainly remain a possibility. But this would be a possibility that might never arrive, because the reinstituted bodies will no longer be subject to a biological law of decay. Bodies would remain contingent (able to perish) but no longer precariously so (being forced to die according to the biological laws of their world). Death would then become what I call a pure possibility: a possibility not destined to be accomplished some day. A real possibility, for the fourth world itself would be able to be destroyed, and 'immortals' along with it - but not an insecure or hazardous possibility, for nothing would entail the abolition of this world and the perishing of its 'inhabitants'.
Our intention then is to make the fourth world a possibility which can enhance, in our own world, the subjectivity of human beings living in our day by profoundly transforming the private lives of those who take seriously such a hypothesis. Such a possibility, posed as real and liable to have effects within oneself here and now, I call a dense possibility, or still a may-be, so as to distinguish it from a simple, formal or 'simply' theoretical possibility (in which one does not manage to believe even if one conceives it in its proper strength). As such, I think that the most important task for philosophy - its final challenge - is not being, but 'may-being'. For the may-be unites within itself the true heart of every ontology (the absoluteness of factual possibility) and the deepest aspirations of ethics (the universal fulfilment of justice).
Finally, it is important not to lose sight of the following point. If the fourth world can have an effect upon present existence, it can do so only in the case of an eschatological subject, moved by the desire for universal justice. I call such a subject a vectoral subject - that is to say one magnetically attracted by the vector of the emancipation to come. For in such a subject divine non-existence undoes those elements which partake of the despair of justice, or of the spectral dilemma. The whole challenge consists in that the spectral dilemma itself liberates the subject from that which more or less silently eats away at it, and from the 'visible' consequences produced by this interior erosion: arbitrary violence and or disillusionment. This aspect of the problem is decisive and will become clearer in what follows.
4. Meillassoux, Quentin & (ed.) Graham Harman. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 2nd Edition, "The Divine Inexistence: Conclusion [Excerpt M]," Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p. 228-238
Excerpt M: Conclusion
I. The essential stakes of both Eastern and Western thought consist entirely in a single question: how can we think the unity of Jewish religion and Greek reason? How can we think the unity of the egalitarian messianism of the Jews that breaks with the cyclical time of the pagans (a time that is inegalitarian since it is devoid of promise) and the rational, mathematical, and philosophical eternity of the Greeks? It is a search for the unity of religion and philosophy without there being a third term to unify them. All the richness of the problem consists in the fact that East and West have received these two heterogeneous ‘truths’, and no others. The response, in general fashion, thus obeys the following strict (Hegelian) alternative: we will have either a religious unity of religion and philosophy, or a philosophical unity of religion and philosophy. In both cases the unity obtained is all the more powerful, since it achieves a maximal conservation of the subordinated term: the most rational religion, the most egalitarian and messianic reason. The Middle Ages are entirely consecrated to the elaboration of the religious unity of philosophy and religion. But the factial, for its part, proposes a new means of achieving philosophical unity. Namely, Jewish messianism no longer thwarts the eternity of mathematical truths, since the latter cease to designate the real eternity (which is thus without a future) of this world order and refers instead to the eternal contingency of this world (which is thus full of promise). The hope of justice supplied by the promise of Jewish time can be nourished on the mathematical eternity provided by the immanence of Greek reason. In this context the term ‘God’ does not designate one of the camps, that of religion, but names the battlefield where the two camps confront one another. The word presses together the two truths that are to be combined, since as a Latinized Greek term that designates the God of the Jews it symbolizes their historical unity. The Greco-Roman ‘Dies’ is translated as ‘day’ rather than ‘sky’, the day that fuses light and warmth, meaning knowledge and hope.
The atheist, in reserving such a name for the object of faith, shows that he has already confirmed his own defeat. For him the struggle against religion has to occur through the expulsion of any divine remainder; nothing that resembles the divine should be allowed to reside in the homeland of the rational. Philosophy thus appears to him to be nourished by religion, as a form of reason that preserves in inertial fashion an irrational and archaic remainder of which a consistent atheism ought to be able to rid itself. But in this way the atheist remains blind to the fact that the very borders of his own territory are religious. For the atheist claims that all that exists is the world inherited from the priest: a finite and limited world, submitted to fixed laws, appalling once left to its own devices. The philosopher speaks of God because he refuses these borders, because he does not confirm the partition between immanence and transcendence to which the atheist fully and truly submits.
‘God’ is the name given to the stakes of the struggle between immanence and transcendence: either the revealed God of religion, or the God of the philosophers. This latter God is despised, and violently rejected by the priests as well as by those who have renounced the struggle. It is indeed philosophers and they alone who always confront transcendence, while the atheist merely barricades himself against it. The atheist stands outside the field of battle, and confuses the philosopher and the priest just as one confuses two combatants in a hand-to-hand struggle viewed from afar. For if philosophy is, as the atheist thinks, a reason nourished by religion, it is in the same manner that the predator is nourished by her prey: the philosophical struggle against transcendence that transpires not through a logic of expulsion (removing all religious content from the rational) but a logic of devouring (removing all desirable content from the religious). For the atheist, God is a matter for the priest; for the philosopher, God is too serious a matter for the priests.
The assimilation of philosophy to a remainder of the religious ought to be firmly rejected. Quite the contrary: every position that consists in limiting the exercise of reason is religious. Antiphilosophers will always be the procurers of the priest; whether or not they are religious in their hearts changes nothing, since the very essence of their enterprise consists in limiting meaning, and for this very reason they inaugurate an inexpungable field of nonsense that tacitly legitimates the revelation of a transcendence exceeding all logos. And this world inaugurated by the anti-philosopher, a world of unchanging and absurd structures, impassable and incomprehensible, gives us such despair in our need for justice that the religious can only be reinforced by such an enterprise, whose destiny is finally to render this world too unlivable to be fully satisfactory.
All anti-philosophy, all positivism, all scientism, and all logicism thus have a mystical, religious essence, following the brilliant example of the logicism of Wittgenstein. In declaring that rationality is illegitimate outside the scientific framework, these theories condemn reason to being unable to account for the facticity of the laws in the midst of which science always already unfolds, or to respond to the essential questions of existence. This space of nonsense dominates thought today, across diverse enterprises of the ruin of metaphysics with a power perhaps unequalled in history. For no one dares even now to defend philosophy in the full scope of its ambitions: the absolute intelligibility of being qua being and the conceptual apprehension of our immortality.
Contra the views of contemporary atheism, philosophy ever since its metaphysical period can be viewed as the sole historical enterprise that was not religious in its very project. Philosophy certainly resembles the religious enterprise in its claim to reach the ultimate principle of being, but it resembles religion in the manner of a rival, not that of a servant. For the very model of immanence is to produce a comprehensible discourse on the world in its ultimate essence. It is the sole model in which revelation no longer has any reason for being. Thus philosophy is always atheist in act, if not always in speech. This makes it the very opposite of anti-philosophy, which is always religious in act even if frequently atheist in its speech. The authentic tradition of immanence resides in the Platonic divine, and in the gods of Spinoza and Hegel, not in the ‘philosophical atheism’ of a Heidegger.
The factial is a philosophy, because the factial is a thought of immanence. Yet it is distinguished from all previous metaphysics through the fact that previous systems retain a religious postulate in their enterprise, if not in their project: the postulate that a necessary existence is possible. The factial claims to accomplish the immanent thought of a world through its denial of necessary existence, which is another name for the revealed God. The historical systems of metaphysics all seek a referent that exists in rational discourse, and which is necessary by definition. Thus they maintain by rather diverse routes the notion of necessary existence, which at bottom is perfectly incomprehensible since it is irrational (religious). This failure is the ultimate reason for the configuration of the present world: an illusory and complicitous opposition between sophistry and religion; a disappearance of the opposition between religion and philosophy, thanks to the quasi-total disappearance of the latter.
The project of metaphysics ought to be restored in its legitimacy. As rational beings, humans have access to the essence of the world: an advent without limit, where anything conceivable can actually arise in the form of a new constancy. The ultimate aim of the human project thus becomes determinable: an aim that is not reasonable because it is fully rational. That towards which humans aspire, that which they desire, that which has made them suffer for millennia through strange labor even as it confers upon them an energy of rare violence, is to give birth to God just as matter gives birth to life and life to thought. We are the possible ancestors of God rather than his creatures, and we suffer because, unlike the animal, which does not know the possible humanity of its becoming, we know the possible divinity of our own. We bear God in our wombs, and our essential disquietude is nothing other than the convulsions of a child yet to come.
There is no necessity for this sudden advent of the divine, since it is only rendered possible by the absolute contingency of all things. Hope exchanges guarantee for possibility, and aims at rupturing the law by a lawless becoming in excess of all mastery. God will be the last-born of humans: the advent whose ultimate novelty will be the recommencement of the human, its rebirth, its renewed struggles and enjoyments. 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.
Present in each relation, infans is the third term by which the unborn intrude into the existence of the living and the dead. It is the focal point where ancestors converge with descendants. It is the promise made to the unborn to refuse the death of those who died too early: the death of those who had nothing to do with death. It is also the promise to refuse its own death. The desire for a child does not break the link between lovers, but transfixes desire to the point of instituting an amorous rupture, by this other being, in a spirit of expectation. Infans is such an other through which living and dead humans resonate with the same desire. We wish once more to ‘drink with the dead’, without a revealed God returning to spoil the party and trouble our intimacy with tombstones. But we also want the living to come drink one day with us ourselves, who are the deferred dead. Together we hope for the birth of infans, in view of the rebirth of forerunners, and that is why we seal this promise of desiring again and always living this one sole life.
Nothing guarantees this rebirth. For that reason, hope is not a flight outside the world, since it is born of the knowledge that there is no other. Hope is less a comfort than a difficult requirement. For certainly, only the renunciation of hope is soothing; it is the renunciation of hope which knows how to build me a carcass, soft as a coffin, which assures me till the moment of death of not thinking of death. What is never said is that the harshest mourning is that of the atheist, who knows how to harden himself to the thought of the unavoidable end, to the point of repressing it from his daily preoccupations. It could be that the most intense mourning should in truth be immortal mourning which confronts possible rebirth, which forbids itself the temptation of faith, in order to conserve and transform day after day the original violence of separation. For, hope being also our torment with respect to a possibility that nothing necessitates, to maintain this hope imposes the acceptance of a possible failure to accomplish what is hoped for. And to envisage that perhaps nothing will happen anyway leads to sadness, to a nostalgia for which it is hard to lose our fondness. But the memory of the dead remains a gift to the living. It is a memory at which we grasp so as to delight ourselves with the contingency of all things, with the eternal nonsense that necessarily makes it possible to hold reunions beyond the grave. Social and political activity, amorous and parental life: all these practices have a possible immortalization in which the process of an encounter can be modified.
The memory of the dead is manifested in giving assistance to the living. In the memory of the dead, there is fidelity to the divine. In the fidelity to the divine, there is the amorous knowledge of the promise of the world.
[...]
III. Humans can establish four different links with God, of which only three have been explored so far:
1. Not believing in God because he does not exist. This is the atheist link, which occurs in countless variations that all lead to the same impasse: sadness, tepidity, cynicism, and the disparagement of what makes us human. It is the immanent form of despair.
2. Believing in God because he exists. This is the religious link, in countless variations, all leading to the same impasse: fanaticism, flight from the world, the confusion of sanctity and mysticism and of God as love and God as power. It is the religious form of hope.
3. Not believing in God because he exists. This link, which is not confined to a specific doctrine, expresses all the various forms of revolt toward the existent God. It is the Luciferian position of rebellion against the Creator which expresses a reactive need to hold someone responsible for the evils of this world. This demoniacal revolt in the face of all the disasters of existence would rather hate God than declare him inexistent. This vision of the world encompasses the position of subtlest indifference toward God: ‘even if God exists, he does not interest me; he is of no interest as regards the pleasures and struggles that occupy all finite existence.’ It is a superb indifference that mixes apathy towards God (and all displays of indifference are nothing but hatred trying to be as hurtful as possible) with classical atheism, whose impasse it aggravates to the limit: cynicism, sarcasm toward every aspiration, hatred of self.
4. Only the fourth link, the philosophical link and immanent form of hope – believing in God because he does not exist – has never been systematically defended.
A few things to note:
1. This is a short-run zine on and expanding from Quentin Meillassoux's writing. It has been a central focus for my thought, and I'm hoping this zine can be a source of thinking more about his proposals -- as well as contingency in general, its relation to politics, art, ethics, plus any connected thinkers (Badiou, Brassier, Malabou, Garcia, Negarestani, Grosz, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Pessoa, Cage, Hegel, Hume, Lenin, the Situationists, Wandelweiser, and on and on).
2. Format: I make these as booklets at home by hand, starting with about 40 copies. I'll (happily) make more per request. Contributors can have up to 5 copies to share. Generally it will be B & W, 8.5x11" folded + staple, hot glue binding, number of pages per issue can vary, and the nicest paper I'm able to get my hands on -- usually, card stock cover & standard white paper for inside.
2. I'm figuring this out as I go, so don't hesitate to get in touch with suggestions, ideas, or to say hi.
3. Submissions. It is fairly open-ended. I'm not interested in saying no or gatekeeping, unless it is deeply off-topic. The more the merrier!
4. There's some passages from Meillassoux's writing below that have been in the back of my mind when putting this zine together. Take a look if interested. Here's a short one that I find particularly inspiring (especially as it might connect to artistic practice).
"A treading water that would not be an extinguishing, but the pulsation of the eternal—a hesitation of being. A flickering of the fan, unknotting of hair, whirlwind of muslin, white clothes on the edge of the water that seem fleetingly to be a bird on the wave. So many signs recalling to us, more or less the structure of Chance: to remain in itself alongside its contrary, to contain virtually the absurd, to be the two sides of its own limit."
*****
Incomplete List of Publications (English)
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006/2008)
"Potentiality and Virtuality" (2006/2007)
"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, Matter and Memory" (2007)
"Spectral Dilemma" (2008)
"History and Event in Alain Badiou" (2011)
The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé's Coup de Dés (2012)
"The Coup de Dés, or the Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis" (2012)
"The Immanence of the World Beyond" (2012)
"The Contingency of the Laws of Nature" (2012)
"Badiou and Mallarme: The Event and the Perhaps" (2013)
Time Without Becoming (ed. Anna Longo) (2014)
"Decision and Undecidability of the Event in Being and Event I and II (2014)
Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (2015)
"Excerpts from The Divine Inexistence" in Harman's Philosophy in the Making (2015)
"Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning" (2016)
Four Passages (QM)
1) Excerpt from "Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition"
2) Excerpt from "Materialist Divinization"
3) Excerpt from "Immanence of the World Beyond"
4) Excerpt from The Divine Inexistence (Excerpts)
*any typos below are mine, apologies in advance*
**please read the full essays as these passages are dependent on the arguments in them**
1. Meillassoux, Quentin. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning,” trans. Robin Mackay and Mortiz Gansen, in Genealogies of Speculation, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 30-31.
Our materialism is, on the contrary, an antireductionism. Indeed, it is via antireductionism that we wish to give every chance to the reduction of the physical world to its possible mathematization. Now, rather than concluding from this that everything is reducible to this mathematizing gesture, we conclude from it that, since life and human practices overflow this being mathematizable on every side, there is manifestly an emergence ex nihilo of life from matter, and of thought from life. In this case there would indeed be not creations (taken up in the continuity of the virtual, of the Bergsonian past) but irruptions (pure ruptures with no link to the ripening of a past). So many local destructions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In this way, every time that a domain of being proves irreducible to another - every time that a discipline takes hold of it that cannot be the prey of any other, what we see is the 'scar' on the real left by this emergence ex nihilo.
Speculative materialism thus has as a first consequence, contrary to its metaphysical version:
1. That it does not explain to science what are the true components of matter; of the actual, we say nothing (or almost nothing, as we shall see).
2. That it does not reduce disciplines to a fundamental discipline that would be in a foundational position, or even abolish them in favour of the 'mother-science' that it claims to constitute. Philosophy has its territory - Hyperchaos and its Figures - which in return guarantees for every nonphilosophical discipline that its experience of the actual cannot be dethroned by any philosophy whatsoever.
3. To continually relaunch the inquiry into irreducibilities, for the latter are so many possible irruptive scars fissuring the actual world; inquiries that will never arrive at certain results (the speculative can demonstrate nothing certain about the actual, it is content to track possibilities), but only at more or less faded traces wherein the staunch materialist, with her thirst for an only approximate coherence of being, distributed into broken spheres of beings, indexes the falsity of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It is notably in these inquiries that materialism allows itself to speak - but only just - of the actual: for such inquiries confirm the pertinence of the organigrammatism of knowledges.
These fissures are neither fractures too wide (which would destroy any coherence of the world), nor cracks too fine (which would allow a knowledge to bridge them so as to alone speak the whole of what is): they are fissures, gulfs, but narrow enough not to destroy the terrain upon which they occur: telling us at once of the irreducibility of x to y, and of their coarticulation in fact. In exactly the way in which thought saturated with perceptions, sensations and qualitative affects is coordinated with a body that is determinable in its internal movements by strictly mathematical parameters. A union without unity that would make of us at once more than one and less than two - and this in an arithmetic of whole numbers that does not admit of such intermediaries.
2. Meillassoux, Quentin. “The Coup de dés, or the Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis,” Collapse, vol. 8, 2018 (orig. 2012), p. 846
A New Materialist Gesture
In conclusion, you may be worried by this reading - if not Christian then at least chistological - of Mallarme. But to my eyes, this reading, I repeat, is above all materialist. From Epicurus to Mallarme, the gesture is in truth, I believe, fundamentally the same: the divine exists, but it is not what is essential. For Mallarme succeeded, in a certain way, in assuring the triumph of modernity: that 'religion of art', that immanent replacement for the old religion that our teachers assured us had failed, or had even engendered political crimes, Mallarme did bring it to fruition successfully. There is, thanks to the Coup de des, a divinization of the poem, and the birth of a new cult. But this triumph, this cult, this religion, are not at all what we expected - or that which we mocked or condemned. This new cult is simply the silent reading of a book, the remembering of a hypothesis, a play upon the count of words. It is more and better than Christianity, without being any more than that. It is the reinvention of the divine as being nothing grandiose, nothing transcendent; as not being that which matters most in our lives; and at the same time as that which participates in them with an elegant and very beautiful discretion. It is the most effective way in which to repeat such a materialist gesture. To reinvent otherwise than Epicurus and Mallarme these secondary gods - here, in my opinion, is a task for a philosophy rendered over to its immanentist power.
3. Meillassoux, Quentin. “Immanence of the World Beyond,” The Grandeur of Reason, ed. by Cunningham and Chandler, trans. Peter Candler, Adrian Pabst and Aaron Riches, SCM Press, 2010, pp. 460-478 [sections: Not Yet / Divinity and Nihilism / The Unsurpassable Brutality of the Eternal Return]
The 'Not Yet'
First of all we must abolish a misunderstanding. To speak of a God who does not yet exist does not in any way mean to evoke a not yet fully existing but already potentially actualized God: we do not speak here of a God who exists but has not yet been fully revealed, nor a God whose intensity of existence would progress over the course of history. Whether providence concerns a God who is actual or in the process of actualization, either way it is equally incommensurable with every idea of justice, and in this sense unacceptable to the atheist. If God, in order to increase the intensity of his being must pass through the history of human disasters, then his fulfilment is synonymous with a cosmic sacrifice of our destinies that nothing could Justify, apart from a new perverse form of reasoning.
First of all, the statement, God does not yet exist, is therefore meant to signify that God does not exist, not simply that he does not exist in any fashion. We mean this in the same way in which a hardened atheist might mean it (although by modifying the modality of the thesis r terms 'factual' and 'un-necessary'). The proposition of the non-existence of God ought in truth to be paraphrased in this way: God does not exist, but there is no reason that this should remain so, that his non-existence should always remain so.
Let us try to examine the meaning of this statement more closely, beginning with its temporal nature.
To posit that God can exist in the future does not mean with respect to factual ontology, that the emergence of a future' God is necessary. It can only be a matter of an event that is really and truly possible, but essentially contingent: hence eternally eventual. God can either come in the future or not: this possibility will never go away, nor can one ever be certain that this possibility will actually even be realized. Such an event, at first glance, would relate to the emergence of a world whose laws would in fact incorporate the renewal of past human bodies. Therefore it is a matter of an essentially uncontrollable event - for a man and for a God - which cannot be rendered improbable, since it concerns the emergence of physical constants and not of facts subordinated to those constants. It would be pointless to give up hope for this advent under the pretext that many other possibilities could arrive within Surchaos, with no reason to privilege the hoped-for eventuality, since this would be to subject it to a probabilistic logic that does not apply to the present case. The event in question is really possible, eternally contingent, forever uncontrollable and completely improbabilizable.
Therefore to hope that Surchaos might bring this event about is to hope for a possibility which may never arrive, but it will be forever impossible to say that this possibility will never come.
When an event takes place that conforms to the physical laws of a determinate world, we can say that this event was, up until the point of its occurrence, a potentiality of this world. But Surchaos can also give rise to events that do not conform to the physical laws of a world. I call such events virtualities. Virtualities can be considered, very precisely, as advents ex nihilo, since they proceed neither from an actually existing world, nor from its physical potentialities, nor from some totality of possible worlds - for example, from a divine understanding which would contain the sum of all possibilities. Virtualities come from a non-totality of possibles, from the untotalizable abyss of the virtualities of Surchaos. The sign there have been some advents ex nihilo in the past comes from the 'irreducible facts' among several orders of existence. So far there seem to be three of these irreducible facts: matter (reducible to what can theorized in physico-mathematical terms), life (understood more specifically as a set of terms, that is, affections, sensations, qualitative perceptions, etc., which cannot be reduced to material processes) and, finally, thought (understood as a capacity to arrive at the 'intelligible contents' bearers of eternity, and which as such is not reducible to any other terms). These three orders determine the existence of three worlds - matter, life, thought - which are actually coexistent, despite every evident indication that they succeed one another in time.
I believe, therefore, that there are irreducible, improbabilizable supplementations within evolution which are signs not of a transcendence but of a higher chaos. I propose, then, to think the speculative renewal as the possible advent of a fourth world: that of justice. Although this world is without ontological necessity, there is reason to hope in it in a way that is not simply capricious. For only this world could introduce into the future an irreducibility and a novelty as radical as that of life in relationship to matter, or thought in relation to life. In effect, if one grants that facticity is absolute, then the thinking being is the ultimate being, which no novelty can radically surpass, in the precise sense in which thought is defined as intellectual access to the eternal. No being - the more advanced living things, angel or god - can surpass the thinking being in the way in which thought surpasses life or life surpasses matter. If a world which surpasses our third world (thought) can still arrive, just as our third world has surpassed preceding ones, then it can only be the world of the renewal of the ultimate being to be the thinking being, but according to a regime of existence now worthy of its condition: immortality as the guarantor of universal equality.
Nevertheless, in the way we use the term, we are careful not to identify the ultimate with the absolute. The absolute and the eternal have no value in themselves, since they are identified with eternal facticity, that is, when all is said and done, with the stupid contingence of a ll things. But the ultimate - that is, the thinking being ( of which man is one among other possible examples) - is a contingent, fragile, mortal being - at least in our world. The ultimate is a being who, aware of the absoluteness of contingence, knows his own contingency. He thereby acquires all at once both a cognitive and tragic dimension, which gives him his insurmountable worth. This is why the only world which could exceed in novelty the world of the thinking being thought would be the recasting of being according to a specific immortality: not a necessary existence - that is ontologically impossible - but an existence likely to be prolonged indefinitely. It would be a matter of a kind of non-necessary immortality in which death would certainly remain a possibility. But this would be a possibility that might never arrive, because the reinstituted bodies will no longer be subject to a biological law of decay. Bodies would remain contingent (able to perish) but no longer precariously so (being forced to die according to the biological laws of their world). Death would then become what I call a pure possibility: a possibility not destined to be accomplished some day. A real possibility, for the fourth world itself would be able to be destroyed, and 'immortals' along with it - but not an insecure or hazardous possibility, for nothing would entail the abolition of this world and the perishing of its 'inhabitants'.
Our intention then is to make the fourth world a possibility which can enhance, in our own world, the subjectivity of human beings living in our day by profoundly transforming the private lives of those who take seriously such a hypothesis. Such a possibility, posed as real and liable to have effects within oneself here and now, I call a dense possibility, or still a may-be, so as to distinguish it from a simple, formal or 'simply' theoretical possibility (in which one does not manage to believe even if one conceives it in its proper strength). As such, I think that the most important task for philosophy - its final challenge - is not being, but 'may-being'. For the may-be unites within itself the true heart of every ontology (the absoluteness of factual possibility) and the deepest aspirations of ethics (the universal fulfilment of justice).
Finally, it is important not to lose sight of the following point. If the fourth world can have an effect upon present existence, it can do so only in the case of an eschatological subject, moved by the desire for universal justice. I call such a subject a vectoral subject - that is to say one magnetically attracted by the vector of the emancipation to come. For in such a subject divine non-existence undoes those elements which partake of the despair of justice, or of the spectral dilemma. The whole challenge consists in that the spectral dilemma itself liberates the subject from that which more or less silently eats away at it, and from the 'visible' consequences produced by this interior erosion: arbitrary violence and or disillusionment. This aspect of the problem is decisive and will become clearer in what follows.
4. Meillassoux, Quentin & (ed.) Graham Harman. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 2nd Edition, "The Divine Inexistence: Conclusion [Excerpt M]," Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p. 228-238
Excerpt M: Conclusion
I. The essential stakes of both Eastern and Western thought consist entirely in a single question: how can we think the unity of Jewish religion and Greek reason? How can we think the unity of the egalitarian messianism of the Jews that breaks with the cyclical time of the pagans (a time that is inegalitarian since it is devoid of promise) and the rational, mathematical, and philosophical eternity of the Greeks? It is a search for the unity of religion and philosophy without there being a third term to unify them. All the richness of the problem consists in the fact that East and West have received these two heterogeneous ‘truths’, and no others. The response, in general fashion, thus obeys the following strict (Hegelian) alternative: we will have either a religious unity of religion and philosophy, or a philosophical unity of religion and philosophy. In both cases the unity obtained is all the more powerful, since it achieves a maximal conservation of the subordinated term: the most rational religion, the most egalitarian and messianic reason. The Middle Ages are entirely consecrated to the elaboration of the religious unity of philosophy and religion. But the factial, for its part, proposes a new means of achieving philosophical unity. Namely, Jewish messianism no longer thwarts the eternity of mathematical truths, since the latter cease to designate the real eternity (which is thus without a future) of this world order and refers instead to the eternal contingency of this world (which is thus full of promise). The hope of justice supplied by the promise of Jewish time can be nourished on the mathematical eternity provided by the immanence of Greek reason. In this context the term ‘God’ does not designate one of the camps, that of religion, but names the battlefield where the two camps confront one another. The word presses together the two truths that are to be combined, since as a Latinized Greek term that designates the God of the Jews it symbolizes their historical unity. The Greco-Roman ‘Dies’ is translated as ‘day’ rather than ‘sky’, the day that fuses light and warmth, meaning knowledge and hope.
The atheist, in reserving such a name for the object of faith, shows that he has already confirmed his own defeat. For him the struggle against religion has to occur through the expulsion of any divine remainder; nothing that resembles the divine should be allowed to reside in the homeland of the rational. Philosophy thus appears to him to be nourished by religion, as a form of reason that preserves in inertial fashion an irrational and archaic remainder of which a consistent atheism ought to be able to rid itself. But in this way the atheist remains blind to the fact that the very borders of his own territory are religious. For the atheist claims that all that exists is the world inherited from the priest: a finite and limited world, submitted to fixed laws, appalling once left to its own devices. The philosopher speaks of God because he refuses these borders, because he does not confirm the partition between immanence and transcendence to which the atheist fully and truly submits.
‘God’ is the name given to the stakes of the struggle between immanence and transcendence: either the revealed God of religion, or the God of the philosophers. This latter God is despised, and violently rejected by the priests as well as by those who have renounced the struggle. It is indeed philosophers and they alone who always confront transcendence, while the atheist merely barricades himself against it. The atheist stands outside the field of battle, and confuses the philosopher and the priest just as one confuses two combatants in a hand-to-hand struggle viewed from afar. For if philosophy is, as the atheist thinks, a reason nourished by religion, it is in the same manner that the predator is nourished by her prey: the philosophical struggle against transcendence that transpires not through a logic of expulsion (removing all religious content from the rational) but a logic of devouring (removing all desirable content from the religious). For the atheist, God is a matter for the priest; for the philosopher, God is too serious a matter for the priests.
The assimilation of philosophy to a remainder of the religious ought to be firmly rejected. Quite the contrary: every position that consists in limiting the exercise of reason is religious. Antiphilosophers will always be the procurers of the priest; whether or not they are religious in their hearts changes nothing, since the very essence of their enterprise consists in limiting meaning, and for this very reason they inaugurate an inexpungable field of nonsense that tacitly legitimates the revelation of a transcendence exceeding all logos. And this world inaugurated by the anti-philosopher, a world of unchanging and absurd structures, impassable and incomprehensible, gives us such despair in our need for justice that the religious can only be reinforced by such an enterprise, whose destiny is finally to render this world too unlivable to be fully satisfactory.
All anti-philosophy, all positivism, all scientism, and all logicism thus have a mystical, religious essence, following the brilliant example of the logicism of Wittgenstein. In declaring that rationality is illegitimate outside the scientific framework, these theories condemn reason to being unable to account for the facticity of the laws in the midst of which science always already unfolds, or to respond to the essential questions of existence. This space of nonsense dominates thought today, across diverse enterprises of the ruin of metaphysics with a power perhaps unequalled in history. For no one dares even now to defend philosophy in the full scope of its ambitions: the absolute intelligibility of being qua being and the conceptual apprehension of our immortality.
Contra the views of contemporary atheism, philosophy ever since its metaphysical period can be viewed as the sole historical enterprise that was not religious in its very project. Philosophy certainly resembles the religious enterprise in its claim to reach the ultimate principle of being, but it resembles religion in the manner of a rival, not that of a servant. For the very model of immanence is to produce a comprehensible discourse on the world in its ultimate essence. It is the sole model in which revelation no longer has any reason for being. Thus philosophy is always atheist in act, if not always in speech. This makes it the very opposite of anti-philosophy, which is always religious in act even if frequently atheist in its speech. The authentic tradition of immanence resides in the Platonic divine, and in the gods of Spinoza and Hegel, not in the ‘philosophical atheism’ of a Heidegger.
The factial is a philosophy, because the factial is a thought of immanence. Yet it is distinguished from all previous metaphysics through the fact that previous systems retain a religious postulate in their enterprise, if not in their project: the postulate that a necessary existence is possible. The factial claims to accomplish the immanent thought of a world through its denial of necessary existence, which is another name for the revealed God. The historical systems of metaphysics all seek a referent that exists in rational discourse, and which is necessary by definition. Thus they maintain by rather diverse routes the notion of necessary existence, which at bottom is perfectly incomprehensible since it is irrational (religious). This failure is the ultimate reason for the configuration of the present world: an illusory and complicitous opposition between sophistry and religion; a disappearance of the opposition between religion and philosophy, thanks to the quasi-total disappearance of the latter.
The project of metaphysics ought to be restored in its legitimacy. As rational beings, humans have access to the essence of the world: an advent without limit, where anything conceivable can actually arise in the form of a new constancy. The ultimate aim of the human project thus becomes determinable: an aim that is not reasonable because it is fully rational. That towards which humans aspire, that which they desire, that which has made them suffer for millennia through strange labor even as it confers upon them an energy of rare violence, is to give birth to God just as matter gives birth to life and life to thought. We are the possible ancestors of God rather than his creatures, and we suffer because, unlike the animal, which does not know the possible humanity of its becoming, we know the possible divinity of our own. We bear God in our wombs, and our essential disquietude is nothing other than the convulsions of a child yet to come.
There is no necessity for this sudden advent of the divine, since it is only rendered possible by the absolute contingency of all things. Hope exchanges guarantee for possibility, and aims at rupturing the law by a lawless becoming in excess of all mastery. God will be the last-born of humans: the advent whose ultimate novelty will be the recommencement of the human, its rebirth, its renewed struggles and enjoyments. 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.
Present in each relation, infans is the third term by which the unborn intrude into the existence of the living and the dead. It is the focal point where ancestors converge with descendants. It is the promise made to the unborn to refuse the death of those who died too early: the death of those who had nothing to do with death. It is also the promise to refuse its own death. The desire for a child does not break the link between lovers, but transfixes desire to the point of instituting an amorous rupture, by this other being, in a spirit of expectation. Infans is such an other through which living and dead humans resonate with the same desire. We wish once more to ‘drink with the dead’, without a revealed God returning to spoil the party and trouble our intimacy with tombstones. But we also want the living to come drink one day with us ourselves, who are the deferred dead. Together we hope for the birth of infans, in view of the rebirth of forerunners, and that is why we seal this promise of desiring again and always living this one sole life.
Nothing guarantees this rebirth. For that reason, hope is not a flight outside the world, since it is born of the knowledge that there is no other. Hope is less a comfort than a difficult requirement. For certainly, only the renunciation of hope is soothing; it is the renunciation of hope which knows how to build me a carcass, soft as a coffin, which assures me till the moment of death of not thinking of death. What is never said is that the harshest mourning is that of the atheist, who knows how to harden himself to the thought of the unavoidable end, to the point of repressing it from his daily preoccupations. It could be that the most intense mourning should in truth be immortal mourning which confronts possible rebirth, which forbids itself the temptation of faith, in order to conserve and transform day after day the original violence of separation. For, hope being also our torment with respect to a possibility that nothing necessitates, to maintain this hope imposes the acceptance of a possible failure to accomplish what is hoped for. And to envisage that perhaps nothing will happen anyway leads to sadness, to a nostalgia for which it is hard to lose our fondness. But the memory of the dead remains a gift to the living. It is a memory at which we grasp so as to delight ourselves with the contingency of all things, with the eternal nonsense that necessarily makes it possible to hold reunions beyond the grave. Social and political activity, amorous and parental life: all these practices have a possible immortalization in which the process of an encounter can be modified.
The memory of the dead is manifested in giving assistance to the living. In the memory of the dead, there is fidelity to the divine. In the fidelity to the divine, there is the amorous knowledge of the promise of the world.
[...]
III. Humans can establish four different links with God, of which only three have been explored so far:
1. Not believing in God because he does not exist. This is the atheist link, which occurs in countless variations that all lead to the same impasse: sadness, tepidity, cynicism, and the disparagement of what makes us human. It is the immanent form of despair.
2. Believing in God because he exists. This is the religious link, in countless variations, all leading to the same impasse: fanaticism, flight from the world, the confusion of sanctity and mysticism and of God as love and God as power. It is the religious form of hope.
3. Not believing in God because he exists. This link, which is not confined to a specific doctrine, expresses all the various forms of revolt toward the existent God. It is the Luciferian position of rebellion against the Creator which expresses a reactive need to hold someone responsible for the evils of this world. This demoniacal revolt in the face of all the disasters of existence would rather hate God than declare him inexistent. This vision of the world encompasses the position of subtlest indifference toward God: ‘even if God exists, he does not interest me; he is of no interest as regards the pleasures and struggles that occupy all finite existence.’ It is a superb indifference that mixes apathy towards God (and all displays of indifference are nothing but hatred trying to be as hurtful as possible) with classical atheism, whose impasse it aggravates to the limit: cynicism, sarcasm toward every aspiration, hatred of self.
4. Only the fourth link, the philosophical link and immanent form of hope – believing in God because he does not exist – has never been systematically defended.
