my name is luke martin. i'm living in saint paul, mn (usa) and i've been wanting to make a zine that takes philosopher quentin meillassoux's work as a jumping off point for some time now. partially because most of the discussions around his work tend toward academic publications (which are great, but to which the zine is hopefully an alternative) and partially because i would love to see (and support) the thinking and ideas of others also interested in this project. this zine obviously assumes some amount of familiarity with his work. i've included, too, a bibliography of his articles and books (translated into english), as well as various other resources. (please let me know of more and i'll add them!)

the general idea is this: we will take meillassoux's most fundamental claim - the ontological truth of absolute contingency, that for no reason at all things (and laws, worlds) may persist, perish, appear, change - as a given. from here a central question is that of a resulting ethics and, intertwined with this, everyday practice. meillassoux makes some advances on this front in the excerpts available in 'the divine inexistence' and his article 'the immanence of the world beyond' - namely, with regard to the 'vectoral militant'. however, by and large, this rather massive realm is unexplored. i'd like to explore it.

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in 'the divine inexistence' meillassoux calls the consequence of absolute contingency an 'immanent ethics.' the practice of this ethics, our subjectivation with such knowledge, is the divinization of the thinking being (thus the title of the zine). in other places it is called the vectoralization of the subject. in other words, given our current world, how might we cast ourselves toward a radically novel future that may never come to pass, but that nonetheless requires our (the thinking being's) subjective preparation.

so :: what are people doing, thinking, writing, acting, theorizing, creating, etc., that hopes for that truly novel world, in which there is no desire for any other world? what concrete change can be accomplished now with this vigorous hoping? and what world(s) might there be, given absolute contingency? is meillassoux's fourth world of justice and immortality the only and best possibility? and, what seems to be an under-explored area, how does this new ethics of genuine immanence and its divinizations intersect (or not) with feminist thought, the black radical tradition, writings on abolition, anarchist practices & theory, experimental artistic work...? lots more to be said and asked, but i'll leave it at that.

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please see submissions for info on how to send stuff to me.

the short of it is this: if you're interested in this sort of thing, i'll be more than happy to publish your work (and i'd love to chat with you). i'm not interested in gatekeeping. as long as it makes sense with the theme of the zine, i'm game. also: i'm up for any format that is printable on the page -- essays, interviews, drafts, fragments, scores, journaling, doodles, drawings, photos, poems, recipes, lists, and so on.

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four relevant and hopefully helpful excerpts from meillassoux's writings:
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)
*typos below are mine, apologies in advance*
​
1. Meillassoux, Quentin. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign,” trans. Robin Mackay. Free University, Berlin, 2012, p. 14-16

How about me – do I have a hyperphysical theory that I could adjoin to the speculative theory of the factial? To be honest, I try, as far as I am able, not to have one – because the world seems far more interesting to me that way. For, so long as I have no hyperphysics of my own – that I could add to factial philosophy as an advantageous complement to it – I still have at my disposal non-philosophical theories and discourses which tell me very well (in a movement that is continually reprised and recommenced) what is, in that which is. Now, allow me to make this observation: mathematized science tells me that one can give a comprehensive account (in principle, if not in fact) of inorganic matter through mathematics alone. But other discourses tell me (in accordance with my personal experience) that other fields of reality (animal life, human life and mind) add to this field of dead existence (dead not in the sense of static, nondynamic, but non-sentient) worlds of sensations, perceptions, volitions, etc. that are extremely rich and complex. Which implies the intervention of theories and discourses other than physics – biology, ethology, sociology, history, literature, etc.

If we posit that the inorganic real is non-sentient, we thus save ourselves the very complex task of adding to matter a very problematic sentient capacity; but above all, we discover, I believe, a world that is infinitely more interesting than the subjectivized world. For in this world of dead matter, it turns out that there is a radical ex nihilo emergence of realities (sensations, perception, etc.) that absolutely did not exist before, not even potentially (for the potential combinations of inorganic matter yield only physical complexes which never have any reason to supplement themselves with a regime of sensations). Now, here is my major point of rupture with ancient metaphysical materialism – in particular that of Lucretius: this ex nihilo emergence should not be rejected as a trace of superstition, but must be affirmed as the mark of the radical refusal of the Principle of Sufficient Reason – founded on the principle of pure contingency of every thing and of every world. So that what was the basis of ancient religiosity – that the soul cannot be produced by matter – becomes an argument in favor of the superior absurdity of Time, capable of adding to the real that which absolutely does not originate in it. Every ‘miracle’, as I like to say, becomes the experimental proof of the inexistence of God. And the apex of this rational absurdity (rational, but not ‘reasonable’ i.e. submitted to the Principle of Sufficient Reason) is that these levels of reality irreducible one to the other are nevertheless – qua pure supplements – sufficiently coordinated one with another so as not to wholly destroy the relative coherence of our world. This is the enigma of all dualisms – an enigma that remains, and with it all of its religious overtones – unless we understand that only ex nihilo emergence is at once entirely rational and entirely immanent.

Therefore, I propose (but I am content merely to propose it, since in this matter there is no definitive argument) that we have done with replaying over and over always the same subjectalist argument (that there is a ‘subject’, or ‘will’, or ‘perception’ in all things, since we can conceive nothing outside of subjectivity), so as to render the world much richer than such models would have it. For these models are monist, even when they seek to be pluralist: in them, everything is uniformly subject, will, creative becoming, image-movement, etc. – and nothing can be distinguished except through differences of degree (sometimes rebaptised ‘intensive differences’) that tie together all things with the same, sempiternal identity of nature. I believe that we must, on the contrary, accede to the pure heterogeneity that breaks down all differences of degree or intensity in favor of differences of nature – the only authentic differences, those that do not surreptitiously reduce identity (of nature) to alterity (of degree). We do not need a monism – or a Deleuzian mono-pluralism, a ‘monism=pluralism’ that ultimately comes down to a ‘pluralism=monism’. On the contrary, we need dualisms everywhere – pure differences in nature, without any continuity whatsoever between that which they differentiate, between numerous regimes of the real – matter, life, mind, society, etc. – whose possible co-ordination does not at all allow us to think their reconciliation, unless in the brute mode of blind facts. Not a mono-pluralism, but a poly-dualism. We need breaks that render impossible the reductionism of one regime of beings to another (life reduced to matter, mind to life, etc.), and permitting the entities of our world to escape magnificently every attempt to reduce the existents of our world to one unique nature (whether or not it is admitted as such matters little – the idea will still be the same whatever    the denials). The heterogeneous turned against the intensive, difference in nature turned against difference of degree; the eternally possible poly-dualism of   Hyperchaos against the pseudo-necessary mono-pluralism of Chaosmos.

But we must remark on a dissymmetry here: Chaosmos, and all the other monist and subjectivized worlds, are not excluded from the really possible effectuations of Hyperchaos – whereas Hyperchaos is categorically excluded as impossible by Chaosmos and other metaphysical subjectivizations. For, let us again insist, it is really possible that a world should come about that is as lacking in heterogeneity as the mono-pluralist world. It is even possible – why not? – that our world should be as unified in its diversity as the subjectalists think it is (one same subjectivity, indefinitely ramified, attenuated, diluted). We never claim, let us repeat, to have categorically refuted this hypothesis concerning what is. We leave to metaphysicians the belief that such a refutation could ever take place regarding worldly existents. But it could be (and speculative materialism gives us the right to hope for this) that the world is infinitely richer, more absurd, more cracked and dualized everywhere, than is dreamt of in the philosophies of subjectalist hyperphysicists or metaphysicians. And it is indeed in this way that I intend to understand our world, armed with the arguments that permit me to do so: in particular, the argument that the heterogeneous discourses, irreducible one to the other, that describe our world, need not fall under the general explanation of one among them. And I believe that these discourses (or those who hold to them) are quite right: they are right to refuse to think that there could exist a principal nature-being that would allow a determinate (meta/hyperphysical) discourse to have the final and general word on the beings of our world. For, luckily, the pure heterogeneity that, doubtless, governs these beings may quite plausibly explode, again and again, all unifying systems that concern themselves with things, rather then with the contingency of things alone. The extraordinary unforeseeability of sciences and arts will very probably always put an end to the substantial or processual syntheses of metaphysicians, by unearthing some devastating counterexample that destroys every overgeneralized picture of the real. Such is the work of the heterogeneous, smashing into a thousand pieces the smooth intensity that seeks to become too all- encompassing. The intensive is in truth only ever ontic, secondary: it governs domains of determinate beings in which something can be what it is to a greater or lesser extent – higher or lower temperatures, more or less creative geniuses – but not necessarily the whole of the real, which, one suspects, is on the contrary fissured magnificently by differences in nature, abysses of discontinuity wherein we find vertiginous hints – scandalous for the old models of rationality that bowed to the Principle of Sufficient Reason – of emergence ex nihilo.


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.
  
Divinity and Nihilism

We seek to think of a God who is not only the agent of eschatology, but also its result: a God who is no longer the first and necessary cause, but rather the last contingent effect - a God who is no longer absolute (only contingency is absolute), but who is nevertheless ultimate ( the value of which is indispensable, but the advent of which is without necessity). Thus my idea of 'eschatology' is based on chaos, as it may be termed according to a word game: we have an eschaology. What kind of God do we have for this 'eschaology' which is no longer an 'eschatology' in the strict sense? This is what must now be examined.

I said that I intended to explore the transformations of subjectiv­ity resulting from a true adherence to a dense sense of the possible. It is a question of constituting the stages of a likely trajectory of unchaining the subject from what, according to the logic of the absurd or the transcendence, separates it from what it can be, thus corroding it of the hidden sickness of spiritual misfortune inherent in both of these options: (i) the irremediable injustice of a world without God, or (ii) a God whose alleged justice manifests itself to us as an irremediable injustice.

This third way which is neither religious nor atheist but philosophical, and more precisely speculative, which finds its interest in a double movement:
(a) It is initially a question of breaking what I call, in a  precise sense, despair. Despair is that which results from the  irreducible separation of justice and being which is operative in  all atheisms and through every transcendence, within the framework of a spec­tral dilemma. Against this effect which  dominates (more or less openly) the present epoch, the task requires we overcome the spec­tral dilemma through the invocation of a possible reality configured through speculation on the factual, the possibility of a vocation that exceeds the possibility of the death, 'simply theoretical', and thus a possibility that becomes an  intimate and vital hope: an effective factor of transformation and emancipation of subjectivity.

In a sense, this first movement of the emancipation of the subject resolves in its way the moral aporia undone by the postulates of Kantian practical reason, for whom the end is to make life simply livable, coherent for the subject, subordinated to universal practices in spite of the phenomenal disjunction of the moral law and the given society (the injustice everywhere presents in this world world indifferent to the moral value of the individuals). But our way is speculative and not transcendental: it seeks to show that the moral aporia of humanity lies in illimitation - and not in the limita­tion - of the capacities of reason. It thus equally avoids the major Kantian dead end which claims to reconcile the idea of universal morals with the eternal existence of God, that which the atheist has shown to be an impossibility.

The surmounting of despair aims at the liberation of the power of action present in the subject, and thus not at the satisfaction of what he desires in his dreams. By destroying in him the idea of the irremediable absurdity of the world, the militant universalist can concentrate on the urgency of his task while aiming at the higher end which guides his action in terms, not of an inaccessible ideal, but of a possibility which is real even if it has not materialized. There is thus nothing here of a 'fatalistic argument': for the fourth world, universal justice cannot be conceived as independent of our acts and thus should not be passively awaited. Because this justice can just as well not arrive (it is a possibility and not a necessity), it thus imposes upon us an injunction to act in the present in order to hasten its approach and to make some live in its existence, in such a way as to be worthy of this hypothesis that exceeds our capacities but gives meaning to our aspiration.

(b) But the second moment of the emancipation of the subject is just as decisive; it is what I designate by the term nihilism.

I name 'desperate' the subject who regards the advent of universal justice as an impossibility for the living and dead (an atheistic­ religious moment). But I call 'nihilistic' that subject who, regarding this justice as a thinkable and real possibility - convinced therefore by the dense speculative potency that can renew the dead - con­siders this sudden arrival of the future as non-desirable, and in truth an appalling possibility.

The heart of the eschatological trajectory is constituted in truth by the trial not of despair but of nihilism - a term which does not correspond, in my nomenclature, with what is usually indicated by the term, since the nihilist is, in my understanding, someone gener­ated by the potentiality of a dense speculative renewal. The nihilist is thus a new figure, a· subjective type who never before existed until now, who is produced by the conceptual possibility present in the hypothetical renewal. One of his chief interests, as we shall see, is to project the internal tensions inherent in certain already pre­-existing options of thought. My idea here is primarily to show how speculative philosophy is not only the conceptual measurement, as it is in Hegel, which seizes our spiritual configurations exhibiting inconsistency in dialectically exceeding through an absolving recap­itulation. Rather, speculative philosophy, in its factual authority, is able to generate much more: of itself it produces catastrophic configurations of existence which would not have existed without this philosophy, and  which  it  is now  responsible  for  overcoming in order to arrive at the wisdom at which it aims. Factual ethics likewise must overcome the  moral  catastrophes which are inher­ent in it, just as theoretical speculation must overcome its internal theoretical inconsistencies in order to build a unity of thought and life capable of legitimizing its ultimate coherence.

To explain this last point, I must start by making a detour through Nietzsche. As much as the first phase of the speculative subjectivization can be thought within the framework of a 'polemi­cal heritage' with a practical Kantianism, so the second phase must be brought into intimacy with the Nietzschean Eternal Return. Let us see why.
 
The Unsurpassable Brutality of the Eternal Return

I am interested in the Eternal Return insofar as it is generally scorned by contemporary philosophers and commentators. The Eternal Return indeed seems to constitute a challenge to the readers of Nietzsche who are convicted to see in him a thinker who is ana­leptically both anti-metaphysical and postmodern. Taken at face value, however, the Eternal Return is a classically metaphysical thesis, concerned finally with the ultimate nature of the world and its components (the ceaseless becoming of wills for power). One can summarize the Eternal Return under a rather crude formulation: all things, yourself included, return eternally to the same. One has the impression that contemporary readers of Nietzsche are given to require that one not understand the Eternal Return in terms of the simple and brutal form given by Nietzsche. Even when the thesis of Nietzsche is actually understood like a philosophy of becoming and not a postmodern criticism of every form of truth - as is done by Deleuze - one hastens to give it a more elaborate sense which emphasizes difference such that the 'return' is transformed into 'becoming' and therefore is not the return of same.

I reject all these subtle reinterpretations of Nietzsche; the most interesting interpretation of the Eternal Return is, on the contrary, that which gives it the most immediate and direct interpretation, as it has just been stated: everything returns eternally to the same, yourself included. It is often said that Nietzsche's pronouncements are 'traps', so much so that it is impossible to give them a univocal meaning: the trap of the Eternal Return is thus apparently the precise fact that here Nietzsche does not conform with his own logic, that he says simply what he wants to say and thus he leads astray all those who want to play with him. He leads them astray and tests them: because from a Nietzschean point of view it is by the incapacity to support the appalling possibility that its obvious direction causes the reader who is more susceptible to 'weakness' to hasten to discover therein a more elaborate significance. The first test that the Return  imposes upon its reader consists in determining if this one is able not to skew what is said to him, to face the Eternal Return instead of vainly circumventing it.

Why is this claim interesting in itself ? For at least two reasons.

The first reason is that this statement shows that Nietzsche is clear that one cannot transform a body, invent a new subjectivity, without a speculative proposition about the world. One has really to think that one returns eternally, that becoming is made in its intimate truth, in order to face the experience of the Ubermensch [surhomme]. Any reading that dilutes the violence of this thesis by the use of diverse paradoxes transforms this experience, this ordeal as we have said, into a simple object of study, a matter for hermen­eutics and hypertextuality. To the contrary, one must embrace the ontological (even the strongly realist) 'rudeness' of this statement, that is to say, embrace the real possibility of an incessant recom­mencement of bodies - if one consents to let the Eternal Return function for what it is: an instrument of selection which reinforces the body of those who are active and destroys the body of those who are reactive. If I really believe that I will come back eternally according to the same path of life, then I transform myself. For Nietzsche, generally I die - because that is a thought which is unbearable for the ordinary man, who is committed to the reactive hatred of life - but sometimes, rarely, I intensify actively my exist­ence because I embrace infinitely what I am. If, however, I do not think that things are so simple, then I will write and say learned things about life without being more affected it.

The second reason which leads me to be interested in the common version of this claim is even more interesting. This reason concerns the very concept of immanence. I believe that with the Eternal Return, Nietzsche reveals a formidable paradox of immanence, one he is undoubtedly the only one to grasp with such acuity. I think we can state this paradox as follows: immanence is not of this world. It is this thesis which I infer from Nietzsche which we can oppose to the diverse contemporary conceptions of immanence and essen­tially to that of Deleuze. To these conceptions we can respond by saying that 'we are all in favour of immanence but as Nietzsche understood well, immanence is not of this world'.

Let me explain. What Nietzsche grasped via the Eternal Return is its unforgiving experience which only lets those survive who have renounced all forms of transcendence. But in what does this ex­perience consist? Is it the case that we embrace our infinite being, our looming and unavoidable death, that is to say, our immedi­ate phenomenal existence which is ours and which is suspended between two events - the event of our birth and the unknown but certain event of our death? Absolutely not: the experience of Eternal Return consists in embracing an existence in which death is not at all a definite interruption of our existence but a stage of our becom­ing which is cancelled out by our ulterior rebirth. We can say that by this, Nietzsche enjoins us to embrace eternally the recommence­ment of our death, but we are here in some way playing on words: death, in Eternal Return, is always cancelled out by the return of life, and it is precisely in this that the frightening experience which it imposes upon us consists.

In other words, the experience of Eternal Return is not the ex­perience of death but of immortality, that is to say, of life without any other: neither the transcendent other of the believer (or the supposed Saviour) nor the ultimate nothingness of the atheist. The Eternal Return is life closed upon its own unlimited potency which has become totally incapable of extracting itself from itself in order to destroy or transcend itself. The violence which is hereby inflicted on the subject does not consist in the annihilation of the subject's existence ( which would be too beautiful), but its unforgiving repeti­tion: and this is so because the subject has to mourn the All-Other of  life, whether this All-Other  be God or Nothingness.

There is no longer anything like the All-Other - the coat-of-arms of religiosity and transcendence. And there is no longer anything like the More, the more and always, the coat-of arms of all immanentist philosophy. If the two great accounts of immanence - Nietzsche's and Spinoza's - are conceptions, not of finitude, but of immortality conceived as the endless perpetuation of existing life (or some aspect of existing life), then this is so because  the only genuine meaning of  the  immanent  [l'ici-bas ]  consists  in upholding its continuation to infinity. Only he who can bear the idea of this one and only life which is constantly recast in its 'prosaic-ness' without any hope of escaping via the transcendent [ /'au-de/a ] or nothingness, experi­ences radical  immanence.

The genuine experience of immanence is therefore not available in our immediate world. For this world which gives itself immediately to our perception is only real, but not immanent. This world in fact offers us not its All-Other (this of course would  be contradictory), but the possibility of its All-Other, since our life is today destined to a death that is foundational of a hope for a future escape from the current forms of existence. To the contrary, the experience of immanence requires us to think a future becoming in which life is no longer open onto itself, without  any  hope of  escaping from  it for another 'place' [ lieu] which will be incommensurable. In order to have access to genuine immanence, we have thus to think a world that is no longer our phenomenal world wedded to biologic­al mortality. Immanence is not 'the real', together with mortality. Immanence  is transcendence  which  has  become  impossible  in the absence of finitude.

And once we are projected mentally in this world of immanence (mentally, because we cannot experience it immediately), we will be confronted with the nature of our desire and our will: do we want life infinitely, or do we only want life insofar as it is bordered by death, by the promise that all this - sooner or later - will end, in one way or another? Nietzsche's conviction was that human beings are very rarely able to desire life without desiring the end of life. It is wrong to say that death is that which we fear most. Much rather, what we fear most is to substitute for our 'death sentence' a sen­tence of perpetual imprisonment in our present life - this existence without glory that is our life in the 'here and now'. It is only via this experience that our will has access to its proper nature - love or hatred of life - and the body suffers the consequences - strengthen­ing or destruction.

The philosophy of eternal contingency enables  us  to construct this Nietzschean type of experience in the framework of speculative renewal, even if the latter differs from Eternal Return in more than one respect. The main difference is that we are dealing with the real possibility of bodily recommencement which is not open to an eter­nal cycle of the same but to a non-defined linearity: a life open to the novelty of its recommencement and not always and evermore a life that is identical down to the smallest details. But the function of renewal, as we will see, converges with that of Eternal Return: the experience of its fundamental link to existence. As I have already indicated, he who lives according to the Eternal Return experiences the active or reactive nature of his will. The Eternal Return frag­ments the will of human beings and dissociates them dramatically from one another. Its function is selective. It is precisely this kind of experience which we aim for in relation to the speculative renewal, even if we do not believe less in a unique 'nature' of the will and more in a multiplicity of orientations mixed in a single will and among which we have to choose. It is a matter of transforming our present existence not with the help of a necessary 'truth' - the Nietzschean Return - but with the help of an absolute hypothesis - the fourth world.

In order to understand this last point, we have to return to the question of nihilism: with the disgust for universal justice out of which one manages to intensify the possibility of its advent. Let us understand the meaning of what is at stake. If someone announced to a unbelieving positivist who was not much concerned by justice (a kind of Monsieur Homais), that his rebirth was possible in the form of an undefined  life that  is not  subject  to the repetition  of the Same, that someone would  most certainly be mocked - and he would be all the more so if he were told that the present situation was a terrible one he had to overcome. For if one asks someone who is indifferent about justice what he thinks about the possible advent of a fourth world - in other words, about the renewal of bodies - he would laugh it off, but he wouldn't be terrified. Our man would see it rather as a soothing dream and would find the possibility of being anxious about such a life totally abstract or twisted. Presumably he would understand the fright involved in the Eternal Return - finding over and over again the mediocre boredom and tragedies of one's existence, but the idea of a new life which was not affected by the gravest worries of life (death, destructive sickness, etc.) would seem more like a nice fairytale.

It is the case that the experience of renewal only has meaning for he who would have been crushed by the worry of ultimate justice and universal equality - he for whom the grief of terrible deaths would have been an experience which would have overwhelmed him with despair, to the point of depriving him of life. The mock­ing of the atheist vis-a-vis the hope of renewal is the product of him who hasn't experienced the spectral dilemma or who is still mired in his metaphysical belief in the necessity of natural laws. This is therefore irrelevant for our concerns here.

The subject which, however, traverses the spectral dilemma and manages to liberate himself from it, that is the only one who can seize the liberating power of factual ontology and of the as yet non­existing God. Such a subject will therefore transform his incapacity to live and to act into a sort of eschatological vectorization. He will get to know the ardour of an emancipatory orientation inso­far as this orientation distinguishes itself from both cynicism and fanaticism; that is to say, he will know a violent form of hope that is linked to an authentic kind of rationality, a sort of reason emancip­ated from the principle of reason. However, it is to such a subject that the second test is addressed: not the test of despair, but the test of nihilism. Not the test of a dissociation between being and justice, since the link between the two has been restored, but the test of disgust with universal justice as such. It is only for such a subject that nihilism becomes a danger. Why might this be the case and in what sense?

The experience of despair - that is to say, the factual overcom­ing of the spectral dilemma - constitutes for the vectoral subject an experience of ardent jubilation which is very difficult not to posit as the very meaning of existence. As such, in a speculative kind of hope, we discover ourselves as the repository of an overriding aim which, like a real and cosmic eventuality, gives direction to our most generous actions. Ardour is thus the affect which dominates us and by which we are the heirs of all the emancipatory and escha­tological movements of the past. What is more, we are the heirs who possess an unprecedented coherence which all these movement lacked.

Henceforth, the subject will confront a second inconsistency  in his desire, a second  existential  aporia, perhaps  more  dangerous than the previous one, though also more difficult to conceive: it is no longer the inconsistency involved in desiring an impossible uni­versalism - an atheist-religious inconsistency of a desperate desire - but rather the inconsistency involved in desiring the suppression of the ardour which gave rise to ardour in the first place. As such, ardour discovers itself to be in a process of desiring the suppression of ardour or the suppression of the escha(t)ological [sic] vector. For the renewal seeks the accomplishment of justice, hence the end of the struggle and the vectorization towards such a justice. In other words, the end of eschatological life which sets alight the existence of the subject after the dilemma. But what would a world (the fourth world) be like that was stripped of the escha(t)ological [sic] vector, if not a world of egotism and disengagement in which life would no longer find the meaning of its existence in the generous gift of itself in political or individual engagement in favour of emancipation? Many people would easily find the answer to this question - which would seem to them to be idle - but  this  would  not  be the case for the vectoral subjects who would have experienced the spectral dilemma and its overcoming in a kind of speculative hope. This experience is only available to them because they are charged with the task of experiencing  the  ultimate  destiny  of  existence  - once the latter has been thought outside the ordinary categories of satis­fied egotism. However, the formula for this final test is as follows: how to believe that justice for the spectres is possible if this justice consists in bringing about their rebirth in a world where the most noble and most beautiful sense of existence has disappeared - the one which in  our world  allows us to live according to the vector of an emancipation that is still to come? If the terrible death can only be 'repaired' by a renaissance in a dismal world made of sat­isfied life without any superior directedness and without any aim other than the self-centred perpetuation of the self, then the fourth world will only be a 'paradise' for mediocre souls and will remain hell for those subjects dedicated to the ardour of the struggle. This is to say that the vectoral subject would no longer find in such a world a place where the brutally interrupted lives would find the means of a dignified return among  men. To wish for renewal is therefore to wish for the opposite of that which we wish for ( hell for the spectres, not their 'salvation') and to face the temptation of nihilism, that is to say, the hatred of universal justice insofar as it is accomplished. To overcome nihilism  would  therefore  signify to be able to overcome our violent desire for a life entirely dedicated to the perilous, and sometimes mortal, struggle for justice. For this desire risks, when taken to the extremity of its potency, the intimate assuming of hatred into its hypothesis of victorious justice.

We get here to a kind 'inverse' relation, compared with the usual parameters of the desire for immortality: what needs to be over­come is no longer the selfish and childish desire for immortality by bravely accepting our mortal and finite being but rather the ardent desire of a mortal struggle, a struggle bordered by death which lends all its force to the political war for what is just and true. We discover therefore that finitude and being-for-death is the ultimate temptation of the vectoral subject in which this subject risks facing its irremediable demise: this subject can once more desire death as the ultimate condition of man and thus eschew the idea of a world without vectoral politics. One could also say that the experience of nihilism consists in facing what Kojeve called the end of history, that is to say, an immanent end of time. Wouldn't there be only space, like for Kojeve, for disengagement and a kind of snobbism which he thought he had discovered in traditional Japan? What shall we then do - we who have so much loved that which transfixed our gaze towards a future time, when there will be no beatitude, no vision of a glorious God? What will we do when we will have become forever what the Middle Ages called a traveller - a viator - a man of the earth and not the blessed in heaven, a viator forever condemned to his living condition, a kind of prosaic immortal without any transcendence or struggle to give meaning to the undefined pursuit of his being?

To my mind, the answer to this strange crisis can only take the fol­lowing form. I believe that what remains once the advent of justice has occurred is precisely what Marx had promised - and perhaps this is in truth his most extraordinary promise, even if today it is held in contempt even by his most inventive heirs: there will be a communist life, that is to say, life finally without politics. In other words, life without the balance of power, ruse, war, bloody sacri­fice for the sake of a universal and also life without the unspeakable enthusiasm which proceeds from all these things in those generous souls. To love life beyond war, violence and sacrifice - and this even in a world of war, violence and sacrifice - that is what is at stake in the ultimate transformation of the eschatological subject.

Only the eschatological subject can understand nihilism and the meaning of a future mourning about politics, that is to say, the meaning of a politics operated with a view to suppressing politics, thereby rediscovering communism as the promise and experience of the end of politics, the end of vectorization, the end of eschatol­ogy and the beginning of an existence dedicated to its own proper experience. And if it is our task to work towards embracing this last world, then it is the case - as I have already indicated - that this world is posed in a way to hope that there will be a recom­mencement for the terrible deaths: if the fourth world were posed as unliveable and sinister because apolitical and peaceful, then we would not hope for anything new or good for these deaths, destined to return in a world that has become disengaged and stripped of any meaning. All human beings - and not only those who suffer a terrible death - have therefore to participate in thought and in action in the universal community of the fourth world. All must in the final instance want to return: the desire for immortality whose basic characteristics we initially refuse (as an anthropological fact) is founded in this instance upon the universal law, in its post-nihilist constitution.

In order better to convey the meaning of this thesis, we have to consider the distinction between three types of  human  pain and misfortune: misery, disquiet and suffering. I call 'misery' the quasi-animal pains of man ('quasi' in this sense that man always humanizes everything in him including the most biological): hun­ger, illness, violent death and all that concerns the immediate and radical reach of the body. I call 'disquiet' all the pains limited to those human beings who are materially free from these obstacles and in any case sufficiently so in order to experience in all plenitude the throes of love, friendship and creation. Finally, I call 'suffering' the concrete pain experienced by concrete human beings, oscillating incessantly between misery and disquiet, and above all facing the radical inequality between those who have the means to struggle against misery - in short, the privileged classes - and those who do not cease to suffer this inequality - the exploited, the miserable. Each and every miserable person has access to a fundamental suffering which summarizes the consciousness of this inequality and which is humiliation - the suffering by which we know that we are excluded from the torments of disquiet and reduced to the sufferings of misery. Humiliation is neither of the order of disquiet nor of the order of misery, but their articulation in a world which encom­passes both: the painful consciousness of belittlement of the self to the pains which are not dignified of our nature of thinking beings.

On my account, a politics of emancipation aims to fight in a fully egalitarian manner against all forms of misery and humiliation. However, a politics of emancipation does not seek the happiness of people but rather seek s universal disquiet. In other words, a life emancipated from misery is not necessarily a happy life because it has to be embraced with its own proper part of negativity, whether we call that part distrust, death instinct, mediocrity, torment, etc. To embrace the possibility of an emancipated life dedicated to love, friendship and thought is to embrace the full possibility of betrayal in love, poor and sordid human relationships, inventive sterility, etc. The fourth world is nothing other than the affirmation of the real possibility of emancipation so conceived, yet at the same time uplifted to a life that has become undefined and therefore dedicated to the risks of extreme disquiet. The infinite possibility of a medi­ocrity whose death is no longer an escape route, only insofar as this would be voluntary: for if death were to remain desirable even in this ultimate, hoped-for world, it would be only as a possibility of a lucid suicide, unique to a life that is incapable of embracing infin­itely its essential disquiet. We have to hope that all human beings are offered sufficient material conditions in order to experience a life that is given its most interesting and most disquieting possibil­ities. According to the alternative of an inventive life or a suicide without return, to face the final disquiet is the speculative version of the ordeal of Eternal Return.

However, I can have at present this experience of life by explor­ing the nature of my desire met by learning to act accordingly. Experience is a matter which is first of all between the 'I' and the 'I', an examination which I conduct of the essence of my will: what is it exactly that I want, justice or a struggle with a view to jus­tice? But this essence influences the nature of my actions insofar as it keeps me from lapsing into the reactive practice of liberating struggles. This 'spiritual exercise' seems to me to be an essential part of every militant who is engaged in his or her struggles. Two types of militants can in fact be quasi-indistinguishable,  and this in-distinction is one of the sources of the historical  catastrophes which have characterized the history of militancy: those militants who fight in virtue of the love of fighting and those who do not love fighting with all its cruel aspects but who nonetheless fight in virtue of love for justice. Certain militants portray their existence as made up of sacrifice, but in truth they do not sacrifice anything at all: they are nihilists who love the war, ruse and violence which are intrinsic to political struggle. The others do not love it, but they do not flee this existence if it is necessary.

Frequently mixed in the same struggle, there are militants who - without ever exploring the question (under the pretext of fac­ing other urgent matters) - have very different relations to politics: some love politics because politics is a milieu of struggle and they love struggle. Others, and here I choose my words carefully, do not love politics - they'd prefer spending their time differently, but they practise politics because it is necessary in order to respond to the iniquity and urgency of the situation. These are of course arche­types, models more than individuals: in reality our wills are mixed and hardly ever pure. But I suggest that it is important to stress something else in between these two types of volition, in order not to revel in war-making, in controlling warfare and in preserving one's advantages by faking it - in short, not to become a bureaucrat who loves his files, a party secretary who adores administration, a leader who loves purges, an agent who worships intelligence, etc. In summary, the issue is not to become a militant who in the struggle for justice only likes the intrinsically negative benefits of social con­frontation, that is to say, the sacralized right to hate and to destroy the enemy by managing never to complete this task.
There is therefore a relation to politics which the militant has to clarify for himself and which has to accompany and determine his most concrete actions. An emancipatory politics is a politics that seeks its own proper abolition in the accomplishment of the end that is sought, in a manner that renders useless the violence and ruse which inevitably accompany the trajectory. But here one must be careful: it would be ruinous to believe that politics could by itself achieve this abolition - that the end of politics could be a politics. For this is obviously wrong: a world without politics is beyond the reach of our actions because it does not belong to our world. To deny this and to affirm - as was the case in the Soviet Union - that politics has no place left because it has dissolved itself in the accom­plishment of Socialism is in truth to conduct a totalitarian politics that prohibits any politics of opposition.

Two things need therefore to be said about politics: the suppres­sion of politics is the finality of a politics of emancipation because politics seeks justice and not politics itself. But the finality of politics - the 'other-politics' - cannot be the product of a politics, except that of a totalitarian fantasy. The end of politics is that which pro­ceeds from an ontological uprising that is independent of our action, an uprising whose hypothesis contributes at present to the shaping of the subjectivity of the vectoral militant. The end of politics is the finality of politics, but the end of politics is not a politics.

In summary, militants must love life and know that life is not entirely in politics - that life itself seeks to accomplish itself else­where than in politics: in love, friendship, art, thinking. But militants also know that in this world there are no subjects worth this name who are not 'vectorized' by the desire of universal equality whose form in our world can only be political. Militants ardently seek to be 'vectorized' - because they know that universal justice is really possible - and they know that they are ready to live without vector­ization - for life and not for war - if the renewal occurs. Militants preserve the hope that the spectres could live in the future a life that is worth our humanity, whose violence and eschatology is not an essential part. Their desire can operate towards forging their ulti­mate coherence and give meaning to an existence that is dedicated to accomplishing our nature.

The articulation of these two experiences - despair and nihilism -allows us therefore to give a precise definition of immanence: immanence is a deceptive immortality. In this manner, we have not as yet obtained a full clarification of the meaning which we ascribe to the word 'God' in the statement: God does not as yet exist, but we have begun to understand an essential aspect of it. The deification of humanity can in fact be understood as a trajectory which in the present world enables the vectoral subject to overcome the double experience of dilemma and of nihilism in order to turn him­self into a 'bridge' between the third and the fourth world. To be deified is to turn oneself into a demon: a metaxu, an intermediary, a living passage between the thinking of this world and the justice of the ultimate world. To turn oneself into a human being who is neither only 'here' (world 3) nor already 'there' (world 4) but who is already between here and there - this in-between for which the English language has a beautiful world: yonder. To turn oneself and the universal people into a yonder self and a yonder people, between here and now, that is the coming task of eschatological becoming.


4. Meillassoux, Quentin & (ed.) Graham Harman. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, "The Divine Inexistence: Conclusion [Excerpt M]," Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 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.
 
II. The philosophical divine is not a religion: has anyone ever seen a believer deny the existence of God? Nor is it an atheism: has anyone ever seen an atheist believe in God? The divine carries both atheism and religion to their ultimate consequences so as to unveil their truth: God does not exist, and it is necessary to believe in God. More deeply, the divine links these two assertions, which attain their truth only through this link.

To the atheist who rightly affirms the inexistence of God, the divine responds  that it is necessary to believe in God because he does not exist. Only the inexistence of God guarantees his possible advent, since only immanence thought in absolute form permits an advent without limit. The divine pushes the immanentism of the atheist to the limit, by getting rid of what remains to him of the religious: namely, it gets rid of his belief in laws that are necessary and none the less inexplicable in their necessity, and thus properly irrational. This belief of the atheist institutes the field of an unyielding transcendence that the divine, for its part, simply discards.

Henceforth, to believe no longer means to have faith, and no longer to believe in the law. It is to hope for a justice worthy of the name. The divine ceases to alienate the human from what it can do, unlike atheism which always separates the human from what remains its living work. Atheism diminishes humans and humiliates their projects, by deposing what it believes to be a simple myth. But this ‘myth’, the belief  in  God,  is  nothing  other  than the trace in humans of the madness of the world without God: capable of everything and thus capable of God. The divine, on the other hand, is opposed to the great temptation of the atheist, this Prometheanism that appeals to the debased deification of humans. Separated forever from all omnipotence, humans can learn to love life to a sufficient degree as to assume its possible victory.

Unlike the divine and its anti-Promethean glorification of humans, all the contemporary enterprises of ‘demystification’ are religious projects that debase humans and their claims to exceed finitude. It is a mocking enterprise of demystification that only allows our species a few mediocre projects compared with what we are capable of envisaging. It is a sarcasm of humans toward humans, and thus a hatred of oneself. But the project of humans has to be worthy of humans, and if the philosopher conceives God as this project, it is because he knows that one cannot limit what humans want, because one cannot limit what a world can do. The divine thus shares neither the superstition of the atheists toward the laws of the world, nor their devaluation of the human, which is always imprinted with pious humility.

The divine desires infinitely, but he does not desire the Infinite in the manner of the believer: the Infinite as an omnipotent extrapolated God, alienated from the strength of the human. The divine infinitely desires this incarnated finite being, the child of humans through which there comes to pass the sole deed worthy of humans: justice. Philosophy knows very well that, whatever might be the strength of the mockery from unbelievers and even from the religious, one can never extinguish the splendid desire that makes of humans something other than a clever beast or a lukewarm, mediocre individual. And he also knows that even in those who refuse God to humans, despairing of their world in the weakness of the ends they propose, one can be very sure of discovering those who are too often heard praying at the altar, fleeing this world that is so overwhelming because it is so false, which the atheist thus means to impose on them. Religion is the undercurrent of a world that is not infinitely desired: a world not seized in its infinite power of advent and loved for the eternal promise of which its madness is the guarantor.

To the believer who rightly affirms that it is necessary to believe in God, the divine responds that to believe in the existence of God is not to believe in God but to believe in existence. It is because he believes in the existence of God that the priest does not believe in God. For to believe that God exists is to make of him a God who is not only love, but also and especially omnipotence. It is the God who created this world with all its injustices, the God-master that one must fear as much as love. To believe in the existence of God is inevitably to venerate his existence as master and as incomprehensible power. If love for the existing God is effectively always ‘sinful’, it is because it always remains burdened with the love that is also accorded to the impenetrable designs of the one who governs. To believe in the existence of God is not just an error, but a mistake that forbids all authentic belief in God. To this mistake, which the virtuous atheist has always intuitively guessed without grasping its essence, and which ruins all religion to the core, we will give the double name of blasphemy and idolatry. In this way we send such condemnations back to the place from which they came, so as to annul their oppressive power.

It is blasphemy. To say that God exists is the worst of blasphemies, for this amounts to saying that God reigns over the world in a sort of grand politics, without ever having been weak enough to modify his designs to prevent the atrocities that have taken place on earth. It is to say that this world is as God has willed it, in projects impenetrable to just humans, through a cruelty that cannot be understood. It is to turn the divine hope of humans into an object of fear, and to insult the very essence of the goodness by means of the most worrisome sophisms. It is an attempt, in the terrible style of the theologian, to prove to Dostoevsky’s unbeliever that there is in fact a certain divine goodness in allowing a child to be devoured by dogs.

To say that God exists is to make him the worst of masters. All these analyses of alienation, of the inexpungable reactivity of all religion,  are  perfectly  fitting  on  this  point.  Religion  invents a master worthy of the name in order to confound it with the Good  itself.  It  is  religion,  and  religion  alone, which  reverses values; illness, murder, and extermination become mysterious and destinal manifestations of a Good that is disfigured by such theogonies.

Blasphemy towards God consists in identifying him with the creator of this world, fusing the veridical God which is only love with the religious God who is only power. It is for this reason that the best of believers have always attempted, through reasoning of the most tragic subtlety (and subtlety is always the management of an impasse), to remove God from existence and make him a being of such transcendence that he is outside being, beyond being, indifferent to being. In short, they have tried to avoid the blasphemous expression that God exists, even while attempting to avoid the immanent expression that God does not exist. But the divine has no need of such virtuosity, knowing that the belief in God is the responsibility taken by humans towards the child not yet born, and that the words ‘the divine inexistence’, clear and pure as moonlight, guarantee hope for as long as a just person remains in existence. The God worthy of hoping for is the one who has the excuse of not existing.

It is idolatry. From the blasphemy of belief in the existence of God we can immediately infer the essential idolatry of all religion. For we know that if God is indeed the horrifying and incomprehensible being, he ought to be loved as such by the believer. Whatever the sincerity of the love carried to God, this love is always cross- bred with deference for the mighty and cunning master who by holding back his strength is all the more threatening in his strange supposed affection for us. If God is amoral omnipotence, inaccessible to all moral comprehension, he is also the one through whom such a strength can arise: the strength of the illuminated, of the prophet, of the fanatic, of he who manifests the amoral force of the  creator God  in his  own behavior by  his condemnations, his anathemas, his bestowals of fate, his threatening cries of rage: in short, by a behavior adequate to the manifest violence of the hidden  God.
All religion is thus parcelled out between two basic attitudes. There is the sanctity of those who follow Elder Zossima and see in God only love because they believe in him. And there is the superstitious mysticism of the ascetic Father Ferapont, who sees in God only power because they believe in his existence. And where the first God is only a violent good, the second God is nothing but  maledictions,  threats,  and  obscurantist  magic. We  should not be astonished that even a religion founded on benevolence and forgiveness continually turns into hateful fanaticism. For if religion is both love and hate, this is because it believes simultaneously in God as the amorous promise of the rebirth of the dead, and in the existence of God through the servile and malicious desire for an omnipotent master.

If the cynic is a bigot who does not know it, the fanatic is a blasphemer who has forgotten it. At bottom both are united. For the cynic, if God does not exist  then  everything  is  permitted;  for the fanatic, if God exists then everything is permitted to him. But the rational believers who believe due to their love of the Good, and the virtuous atheists who do not believe due to their love of the True, are themselves neither believers nor atheists. Lost in the false oppositions of our time, they are and remain the stateless people of philosophy.

If the divine is not an atheism, this is because atheism remains burdened with superstitious belief in the perennial character of laws. If the divine is not a religion, this is because religion remains burdened with cynical submission to the power of a master. If the divine is not atheism, it is because atheism devalues the desire for justice that makes humans into beings of such singular worth. If the divine is not a religion, it is because religion dismisses what is most noble in humans, by making earthly horror the sign of a divine goodness that is thereby travestied. The philosophical divine thus faces two catastrophic and constitutive illusions of contemporary history: the first being that God exists, the second being that one can do without Him. 

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.

It has now been done.
The four possible links of humans with God are henceforth known.
One must choose.