Posted on August 21, 2009 by Ben Woodard
Badiou was kind enough to have 30min one-on-one sessions
with students who requested them. I decided to conduct a short interview of
sorts following from his celebratory comments regarding Speculative Realism and
some of the themes presented in the course thus far which has centered on the
theme of negation.
Q: In class the other day you positively mentioned what you
called the new Speculative Philosophy. How do you see your work in relation to
the work of the Speculative Realists (Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain
Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman). Meillassoux sees himself as a materialist
and not a realist, is this distinction pivotal for the future of metaphysics
and affirmation as you see it?
A: The work of Speculative Realists, from the beginning is
very interesting for me, and they refer to me sometimes too. The rupture with
the idealist tradition in the field of philosophic study is of great necessity
today. We return to the question of realism and materialism later. Its a very
complex question. The Speculative Realist position is the position where
the point of departure of philosophy is not the relationship between the
subject and object or the subject and the world and so on or what Quentin
Meillassoux names correlationism. I have known Quentin Meillassoux for a long
time I was in his doctoral dissertation and so on and from the very beginning
Ive thought this description of correlationism and the critique of
correlationism is a very important point. Its not the classical distinction
between realism and materialism like in the Marxist tradition like with
Althusser and so on. It was something else. It is very interesting to see that
the point of departure of Meillassoux is finally the relationship between Hume
and Kant. The idea of Quentin Meillassoux is practically that all philosophical
tradition is in the space of Kant, the sense that correlationism is the only
clear answer to the question of Hume. The idea of Quentin Meillassoux is that
there is another possibility. We are not committed to the choice between Kant
and Hume.
My project is different in that it investigates different
forms of knowing and action outside empirical and transcendental norms. My
vision, however, is also that we must escape two correlationisms and it is a
question of the destiny of philosophy itself. In the last century we had two
ends of philosophy the analytic (focusing on logic, sense and science) as a
kind of new positivism. The other end was phenomenological with Heidegger.
There is a strange alliance between the two in France particularly in terms of
religious phenomenology (Marion, Ricour [sic], Henry) and cognitivist
analytics. They join together against French Philosophy since, as they say, the
enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Against this the fundamental affirmation of SR is an
ambitious point of view, a new possibility for philosophy. A new vision.
Philosophy can continue. In this sense I am happy that it is not merely a
continuation of classical metaphysics nor an end of it. In this sense I am in
agreement with the word realism. We are beyond the end of metaphysics and
classical metaphysics with the term realism. The question of realism as opposed
to materialism is not a crucial question today. What is important is that it is
not correlationist or idealist. It is a new space for philosophy, one with many
internal differences but this is a positive symptom.
Q: In class you also spoke of Time and the importance of a
present that is not solely determined by the future. Does the speculative
dimension of Speculative Realism not act on a certain futurity, does
speculative thinking some how negate or at least avoid the present, the
possibility of a present of a real present, a true life?
A: This is an important question. My answer will be an
improvisation and not a meditation. There is a detachment from the present in
SR, a kind of stoicism of the present. There is no clear presentation or vision
of the present. This is very different from me. There is no theory of the event
in SR. They need a vision of the becoming of the world which is lacking but it
can be realist in a sense but as of yet they do not say what we need to do. For
Meillassoux the future decides, the future and perhaps the dead will make the
final judgment. This is a political weakness. The question is how is the Real
of the present deployed for the future?
Q: Do you see any use in Laruelle’s project of
non-philosophy? Does his concept of the Real (as undecidable) not have some
worth?
A: I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs]
especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is
its decisions in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like
Heidegger, in critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp
of decision, what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a
thinker only by his earliest work, his most recent work has a religious
dimension. When you say something is purely in the historical existence of
philosophy the proposition is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a
logical constraint when you say we most [sic] go beyond philosophy. This is
why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us.
Ultimately, I do not see an opposition between being qua
being (as multiplicity) and the Real, not at all. The Real can be decided
except for the event which is always in relation to a particular world.
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