Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux, "Metafísica y ficción extracientífica, seguido de "La bola de billar" de I. Asimov. Santiago: Roneo, 2020. Traducción y notas de Meillassoux por Jean-Paul Grasset B. Prólogo de Jean-Paul Grasset B. y Mario Teodoro Ramírez.
Traducción de 'La bola de billar" por Cristóbal Carrasco y Nicolás Vargas.

Speculative Realism (SR) has often been characterised as a heterogeneous group of thinkers, united almost exclusively in their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’ The terms ‘correlationism’ and ‘philosophy of access’ are in turn often treated – at times even by Meillassoux and Harman themselves – as synonymous. In this paper, I seek to analyse these terms to evaluate their similarities, but also possible differences. I shall argue that the difference between the two terms ought to be retained and emphasised, since it hints at important differences between the positions of Harman and Meillassoux.

Este trabalho consiste em apresentar, analisar e criticar, a partir do sistema filosófico de Quentin Meillassoux, apresentado em seu principal livro: Après la finitude: Essais sur nécessité de la contingence, e desenvolvido em seu seminal artigo: Iteração, reiteração, repetição-Uma análise especulativa do signo desprovido de sentido, seu realismo especulativo, colocando-o em direto contraste com o realismo ingênuo, e ao mesmo tempo, abordando seu diagnóstico sobre o esgotamento da filosofia contemporânea, a qual toma a forma do que ele nomeará de Era da Correlação, era em que o conhecimento sobre o absoluto (ou a coisa em si) encontra-se barrada pela correlação entre pensante e pensado, sujeito e objeto; ou o conhecimento do absoluto se dá através de uma hipóstase metafísica da subjetividade. O objetivo principal da apresentação é uma fundamental investigação sobre esses dois modelos de realismo a partir de uma perspectiva com enfoque na função e relação entre ciência, matemática e ontologia. Logo, esse trabalho será compreendido em três partes: A primeira consiste em uma apresentação esquemática do que seria, para Meillassoux, o realismo ingênuo, as formas de correlacionismo e subjetalismo dentro da Era da Correlação, e por fim, o realismo especulativo; Em segundo lugar, será promovida uma análise crítica do movimento teórico ocorrido na passagem entre cada um destes três momentos-realismo ingênuo, Era da Correlação e realismo especulativo-a partir de uma progressiva mudança no emprego da razão, ora na forma de crítica, ora na de especulação; Concluindo, investigar-se-á a função da ciência, matemática, ontologia, e a relação dentre essas três componentes dentro das duas formas de realismo em cheque-ingênuo e especulativo-a fim de esclarecer as diferenças e similaridades entre as duas doutrinas.

Qu’est-ce que le corps humain ? A la fois la plus familière et la plus méconnue des choses, le corps est au centre de l’expérience mais représente également le lieu d’une préhistoire antérieure à toute expérience. Étrange et inconnu, cet autre aspect du corps a bien trop souvent été négligé par la phénoménologie. En se confrontant à cette négligence, The Thing redéfinit la phénoménologie en tant qu’espèce du réalisme, nommée phénoménologie inhumaine. Loin d’être le simple véhicule d’une voix humaine, cette phénoménologie inhumaine permet l’expression d’une matérialité étrangère aux limites de l’expérience. En associant la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et Levinas à l’horreur de John Carpenter, David Cronenberg et H. P. Lovecraft, Trigg explore la manière dont cette phénoménologie inhumaine place le corps hors du temps. Remettant en question les notions traditionnelles de la philosophie, The Thing fait également écho aux philosophies contemporaines du réalisme. Le résultat n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une renaissance de la phénoménologie redéfinie à travers la focale de l’horreur.

From one of his earliest essays and throughout much of his engagements with Heidegger in particular, Derrida had sought to attend to what he once called “the question about the possibility of the question.”  Derrida’s was an attempt to accede, if never totally, to a locus ‘outside’ or anterior to every determinate question and accordingly, affirm the finitude of thought.  Foucault too proceeded by shifting the scope of questioning itself to ask after the conditions forming particular modes of thought.  Yet in Foucault’s work the displacement of what he called ‘the dialectic of the question and answer’ took place through what by the early 1980s he called ‘problematization.’  This essay seeks to compare and contrast the epistemic strategies of the question and the problem that Derrida and Foucault respectively employ in order to produce theory that can affirm its own situatedness or finitude.  It will be claimed that the divergence of these strategies emerges from out of the competing ontological narratives of ‘differance’ and ‘power relations’ that they produce and that it is in these terms that debates between them ought to be articulated.  Finally, it will be shown that in these terms, Derrida and Foucault both reproduce in different ways the Nietzschean aporia that results when one both insists that life is will to power “and nothing besides!” and simultaneously affirm the necessarily perspectival character of that account.  In other words, the works of Derrida and Foucault both reflect the paradox that emerges out of the irresolvable circularity between epistemological strategies and ontological narratives of a thought affirming its own finitude.

In the work of Eduardo Kac, Tissue Culture & Art, Niki Sperou and Pinar Yoldas, bio art appears to participate in a philosophical framework that suggests that the critique of science can only take place outside of science, a position associated with Heidegger. Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier's assertions concerning the philosophical validity of the physical and biological sciences indicate that thought and science must be recalibrated as standing on equal footing before the real. This allows for a reinterpretation of bio art as an important mode of understanding and negotiating the speculative opportunities afforded by art-science interaction.

Understanding the exact nature of Deleuze’s debt to Kant, forms a large part of contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, a project made all the more urgent since the publishing of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism in 2007.  These Kantian readings present Deleuze as someone who continues Kant’s transcendental project by reconsidering the nature of ‘immanent critique’.  Immanent critique is no longer seen here as part of the critical enquiry into the possible conditions of experience, but as a staging of an encounter with the genetic principle constituting these conditions, the real condition common to both the human subject and the world in which he lives.  Such is the implicit demand of genetic recasting: that critique in its immanent form is something we can experience and learn.

Presented with this demand, the following essay addresses the problem of staging this immanent form of critique. It looks to Deleuze’s essay on the work of Samuel Beckett, ‘The Exhausted’, to suggest a possible site for such an encounter with constitutive principle.  Specifically, in Deleuze’s discussion of …but the clouds… it finds a theory of the image, which can be understood in genetic terms, as a theory of the virtual.  Thus the essay puts forward the thesis, that Beckett, in constructing the image through the exhaustive process, recreates the virtual plane, in its openness and flux.

The main thesis of this paper is that the philosophical response to the Anthropocene entails employing rather a transcendental than an empirical or practical approach. In response to new attacks on transcendental philosophy by speculative realists, I defend a certain type of transcendentalism, which can be called transcendental realism. Gilles Deleuze's reading of the ancient Stoics would be the best example of an effort to keep transcendentalism while taking a realist or even a materialist stand. In this regard, I examine the concept of extinction as the central idea of the Anthropocene. I refer to two contemporary philosophers, namely Catherine Malabou and Ray Brassier, who, reacting to the Dipesh Chakrabarty's and Quentin Meillassoux's demands to abandon the transcendental philosophy, direct their analyses towards a unificatory view, which is the core characteristic of the version of the transcendental approach applied in this paper. Malabou's unificatory tool is her notion of "the brain of history", which will be discussed together with Deleuze's idea of the agency of death. Brassier's method to connect ancestrality and the "here and now", or the idea that the absolute extinction has already happened, will be considered as a feature of his transcendentalism. Ultimately, I conclude that as both Malabou and Brassier, despite their materialism, have to incorporate the transcendental approach into their theories, a philosophical response to the Anthropocene must view the transcendental extinction as its problematic.

In this paper, I relativize the widespread representation of the generalized relativism of 1970s philosophy. I will show how the group of thinkers of this period often referred to as the 'French Theory' movement is not always defined by the affirmation of a radical relativism, but rather by the obstinate search for an original 'reality' (as thing in itself) capable of competing and denouncing the false 'reality' constructed by reason. To demonstrate this, I will focus on the journey of a philosopher who is emblematic of this period, namely Jean-François Lyotard. I will demonstrate that Lyotard claims a form of realism, which I will qualify as 'tragic realism.' Then, I will compare this 'tragic realism' with the more contemporary forms of realism , in particular speculative realism.
Nous voudrions, dans cet article, relativiser la représentation (aujourd'hui largement répandue) d'un relativisme généralisé de la philosophie des années 70, en montrant comment la constellation formée par les penseurs de cette période ne se définit pas toujours (et pas seulement) par l'affirmation d'un relativisme radical ou conséquent, mais bien plutôt par la recherche obstinée d'un « réel » originaire, susceptible de concurrencer et de dénoncer une « réalité » construite par la raison. Pour le démontrer, nous nous concentrerons sur le parcours d'un philosophe emblématique de la période, à savoir Jean-François Lyotard. Nous nous attacherons à remonter au geste principiel qui, à notre sens, structure toute sa philosophie, par-delà ses apparentes évolutions, à savoir : le nouage qu'il effectue entre l'idée d'une critique de la raison et l'affirmation d'un réel en soi. Ce lien d'implication qui caractérise le premier moment de sa philosophie (I), demeure inchangé dans les années 80, marquées par sa reprise de Kant (II). Ce geste fait de Lyotard le représentant d'un réalisme tragique, que nous pourrons situer, dès lors, par rapport à différentes formes plus contemporaines de réalismes (III), en particulier le réalisme spéculatif.

„Ta pusta moja małżowina / pomnik na łóżku”  – pisał w jednym ze swoich wierszy Białoszewski, opisując odciśniętą w pościeli wklęsłą rzeźbę, jaką pozostawia po sobie każdego poranka. Unieobecnienie samego siebie pozwalało mu uczynić widzialnym to, co stanowiło dla niego oparcie i na czym jednocześnie odciskał swe piętno. Próbą stworzenia takiego wklęsłego pomnika ma być ten tekst, w którym zamierzam dokonać operacji teoretycznego wyjęcia figury Białoszewskiego ze środowiska, w którym funkcjonował i opisania kształtu, w jaki układała się sieć punktów styku pomiędzy nim, a tym, co sobą przysłaniał. Bohaterem tej pracy będzie więc Białoszewski paradoksalnie jedynie w tej mierze, w jakiej opowiedzą o nim jego związki z kryjącymi się zazwyczaj w jego cieniu przyjaciółmi reprezentującymi przeoczoną przez historyków literatury grupę kobyłecką.
Odwrotnie niż w przypadku Białoszewskiego, marginalizacja, której doświadczali kobyłeccy poeci, daje się postrzegać jako prosta konsekwencja ich artystycznych decyzji. Swoją działalność skoncentrowali bowiem na opisywaniu wszystkiego, co zwykle niedostrzegane i pomijane jako z rozmaitych względów wykluczone poza nawias społeczeństw i dziejów. Ponadto by przywrócić temu widzialność, sięgali po środki wyrazu, których dotąd nie uznawano za przynależne sztuce. Twórczość ta podlega więc wykluczeniu niejako podwójnie – z uwagi na treść i na formę, co w terminologii francuskiego socjologa Pierre’a Bourdieu  można określić jako wykluczenie marginalizowanych grup społecznych z pola władzy i marginalizowanych języków z pola produkcji kulturowej. Badacz ten przy pomocy pojęcia pól definiował wzajemnie na siebie wpływające segmenty struktury społecznej, w ramach których toczy się między jednostkami nieustanna walka o dominację. By osiągnąć sukces w dowartościowaniu tego, co w danym polu aktualnie lekceważone, członkowie grupy kobyłeckiej musieliby ogłosić się rewolucjonizującą to pole awangardą, ona jednak ma do siebie to, że krocząc naprzód, zdolna jest zwykle zmieniać jedynie swój własny status (w obrębie pola produkcji kulturowej), zostawiając w tyle to, co chciała reprezentować. Ambicją zaś tamtej grupy, jak się zdaje, nie było autorytatywne wytyczanie nowych ścieżek w charakterze „przedniej straży”, lecz permanentne „wycofywanie się” jako poszukiwanie „linii ujścia”  – dostępnych na wyciągnięcie ręki działań alternatywnych, wynajdywanych wciąż na nowo w ruchomych układach zmieniającej się rzeczywistości.
Tak pojętej twórczości nie sposób oddzielić od życiowej postawy, każe się ona rozpatrywać jako forma działania w rzeczywistości. Znacznie bardziej adekwatne do jej opisu wydają się więc pojęcia wypracowane w polu szeroko pojętych nauk społecznych, którymi w niniejszej pracy proponuję zastąpić niezdolne do uchwycenia fenomenu grupy kobyłeckiej kategorie estetyczne, jakimi posługuje się tradycyjna historia literatury. Tam, gdzie literaturoznawstwo grzęźnie w teoretycznych sprzecznościach, spojrzenie antropologiczno-socjologiczne uczy dostrzegać podyktowane praktyką życiową „tylne wyjście”.

Monografia filosófica onde estabeleço as diretrizes centrais de minha meta-metafísica que orienta minhas pesquisas de doutorado. Ademais, como um primeiro "case study", avaliamos a obra Après la Finitude de Quentin Meillassoux, além de vários comentadores. Em conclusão, postulamos uma taxonomia diferente para estudar o correlacionismo e pleiteamos uma filosofia da complexidade.

In his 2016 work entitled Dante's Broken Hammer, Graham Harman first coins the term "onto-taxonomy", and proclaims it to be the main nemesis of his "object-oriented" approach to philosophy. The term has however rarely appeared in the absolute majority of his subsequent works, and has also been largely overlooked by thinkers broadly working within and around the field of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). In this paper, I propose to make up for this relative neglect in two ways. Firstly, Harman's critique of "onto-taxonomy" is analysed and situated in the context of other prominent critiques, such as those of Martin Heidegger's assessment of "Onto-theology" and Quentin Meillassoux's assessment of "correlationism." Secondly, I shall show how what I believe to be the three fundamental tenets of Harman's philosophical approach are derivable from his critique of "onto-taxonomy."

The purpose of this work is to comprehend the importance and scope of chance in the poetry of Mallarmé. In order to do that, we will proceed according to a three-pronged approach; recompose the political, poetic and philosophical context that made possible the emergence and establishment of chance as an event both revolutionary, creative and conceptual. Since Baudelaire, poetry sings the failed revolutions, but willing to preserve the desire for a different world. Chance in this context is the unpredictable bursts, lightning and transient of a desire that can not find its place within the social life, to keep alive and vivid the dream of a different world, poetry must: provide evidence that its action, even restricted, counts; make last chance doomed to fade, constituting a space where it can remain, multiply itself and thus find the consistency to remain.  Prolonging a contingency that creates novelty is the task that Mallarmé attributes to his poetry.  Philosophically, this approach requires a radical critique of reason and representation. In this context, Mallarmé has not only announced chance, but he sought to discover the logic of what escapes from reason composing a work capable of making real, visible and intelligible, the unpredictable and inexhaustible power that chance grips.

Artigo publicado sobre o simpósio online em homenagem ao lançamento do "Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox", do professor HIlan Bensusan. O volume completo pode ser encontrado aqui: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/42

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present my take on Professor Hilan Bensusan's Indexicalism project. I begin by showing how we might see indexicals emerging from the kenotypes, at least as how they are presented by Quentin Meillassoux, which places them inside a broader Categoreal Matrix. Then, I endeavour to show how a complex take on Realism benefits greatly from kenotypes-indexicals, which are the very root of the possibility of an ontology of communication. I then present a few positive remarks and some critical observations regarding the construction of the Indexicalism project and its limits, while showing how we might create further alliances towards a new kind of formal ontology.

What happens when symbolic and biological meet up? How can mental
and material resonate? What is the transition from synaptic to cultural
and vice versa? Or rather, what does it mean for us—plastic beings—
to arrive at a point where we try to understand the history of the plastics?

Catherine Malabou, interviewed by Kristupas Sabolius, tells about the latest development of her philosophy of plasticity.

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.

Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

One of the developments in recent literature on speculative realism has been Levi Bryant’s
work on MOO (Machine-Oriented ontology), which is a particular type of the more general
Object-Oriented philosophy. Given that in Bryant’s account the ultimate entities of a world
are machines (in Deleuze’s terms) and that, more importantly, machines are defined by their
powers and what he calls “virtual proper being”, I will try to draw some philosophical consequences
about the key notions of virtual, machine, and their relationship to that of attractor.
I’ll try to suggest that these  notions are crucial for a realist and speculative account of what
there is. More specifically, the concept of ‘virtual’ could be explained via that of ‘attractor’. I
will thus conclude that both Bryant’s and DeLanda’s accounts point to the idea of a substance
conceived as something intrinsically dynamic.

El presente artículo examina la recuperación de la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze en los tiempos recientes.
En particular, analiza las continuidades y discontinuidades entre su pensamiento y el denominado
“giro realista” en la filosofía continental actual. Al resaltar la afinidad de Deleuze con el “nuevo realismo” (realismo especulativo o realismo ontológico), el nuevo materialismo, la ontología orientada a
objetos y las filosofías de procesos, pone en perspectiva la presencia y recepción del filósofo francés
en las discusiones en torno a dichos movimientos, los cuales se presentan como una alternativa al
pensamiento moderno y posmoderno, y plantean un giro radical respecto del entero paradigma de la
filosofía del siglo XX. Así pues, el objetivo del presente trabajo es relevar la recepción y relevancia de
Deleuze en las filosofías del “giro realista” en el horizonte de una reflexión sobre el devenir histórico
del pensamiento filosófico. En esta línea, hacemos una presentación del filósofo francés como una
“anomalía salvaje”, es decir, como un pensador que no fue precisamente para su tiempo, sino para el
tiempo por venir: un pensador del porvenir cuya inclinación por la creatividad y lo nuevo facilitaron
su recuperación en un diálogo póstumo pero fructífero con las nuevas generaciones de filósofos.
» Deleuze, realismo especulativo, ontología orientada a objetos


› Abstract
The present article examines the philosophical recovery of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy in recent
times. In particular, it analyzes the continuities and discontinuities between his thinking and the
so-called “realist turn” in current continental philosophy. By stressing Deleuze’s affinity with “new
realism” (speculative realism or ontological realism), new materialism, object-oriented ontology
and the philosophies of process, it puts into perspective his presence and reception in the discussions around these movements, which present themselves as an alternative to modern and
postmodern thought, and propose a radical turn with respect to the entire paradigm of XX century
philosophy. The ultimate aim is to show the significance and relevance of Deleuze in the horizon of
a reflection about the historical becoming of philosophical thought. To this end, the French philosopher is presented as a “savage anomaly”, that is, as a thinker who was not exactly of his time, but
of the times to come: a thinker of tomorrow whose inclination for creativity and the new enabled
his return in a posthumous but constructive dialogue with new generations of philosophers.

Dans "Le Transcendantal : réceptions et mutations d'une notion kantienne", dir. C. Bouriau, A. Feneuil et Y. Meessen, Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2018, p. 151-160.

Est-il possible de revendiquer le réalisme en philosophie sans contradiction ? Cet article envisage la question à partir de la controverse entre Étienne Gilson et les néo-thomistes pendant les années 1930, avec en perspective les débats contemporains autour du "réalisme spéculatif".

The world, as a unifying nexus of significance , is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what precedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of in-commensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future.

Resumen: El mundo, como un nexo de signi-ficado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra compren-sión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que con-dicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de dura-ciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico.

Wiersze Choińskiego składają się na jedno wielkie międzygatunkowe powstanie przedmiotów, organicznych i nieorganicznych resztek, kamieni, zwierząt, roślin i grzybów, które występują nie tyle przeciw stosowanej przez człowieka przemocy, ile przeciwko jego egoistycznej tendencji do zawłaszczania tego, co wspólne. Wszelkie tworzenie (gr. poiesis) jest zawsze współtworzeniem (sympoiesis), nie powstaje w sposób autonomiczny, ale jako efekt komunikacji w ramach gęstej sieci rozlicznych zależności. „Kolacja”, do której zasiada się u Choińskiego, polega na kolacjonowaniu wszystkiego ze wszystkim w zbiorowym układzie współodczuwania. Ten powszechny „sympozjon” jest polem działań dla magii sympatycznej, rozumianej  jako ustanawianie relacji wzajemności pomiędzy wszystkim tym, co w danym momencie uznane może być za – pod jakimkolwiek względem – podobne. Liczba zawiązywanych równocześnie relacji jest niczym nie ograniczona, a człowiek funkcjonuje w nich jedynie jako część składowa złożonego systemu.

W tej perspektywie pleśnienie nie oznacza przestarzałości ani zamierania na skutek rozwijającego się zakażenia, a wręcz odwrotnie, okazuje się otwarciem na nowe konfiguracje. Dręczone przez suszę jałowe, popękane lądy w królestwie Rogera, dopiero dzięki grzybom będą miały szansę odzyskać żyzność. Na uzdatnionej przez nie ziemi wyrosną nowe drzewa, których korzenie będą się wymieniać niezbędnymi do wzrostu mikroskładnikami z oplatającą je grzybnią. To właśnie gotowość do jednoczenia się we współpracy, a nie gatunkowa konkurencja odpowiada za możliwość rozwoju życia na ziemi. Ostateczną wymową Króla Rogera okazuje się więc zastąpienie wszelkich tendencji do dominacji ideą efektywnej kooperacji.

This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism. This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments in the life sciences pose a challenge to the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level, I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos.

Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new materialism's goal to come to terms with the non-living origin of life? Or is it rather to recognize that seemingly dead materials are always in some sense incipiently alive? For convenience , we can think of two neomaterialist perspectives: the rationalist or elim-inative neomaterialism, and the vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism. I explore some of the conceptual problems faced by both camps and, drawing from the recently developed theory of consciousness as integrated information (Tononi), as well as its quantum physical construal by Max Tegmark, I suggest some provisional ways to address those issues.

Resumen: En este artículo se cuestiona si el arte, y el objeto estético en general (lo bello), puede ser pensado desde la perspectiva de la nueva corriente filosófica del realismo especulativo. El asunto es enfocado bajo una doble perspectiva: lo que sería una concepción ontológica de lo estética y lo que sería una concepción estética de la ontología. Sólo bajo este doble enfoque es posible responder al desafío que lo estético plantea al pensamiento ontológico en general.
Palabras clave: bello, ontología, estética, realismo especulativo, Meillassoux.
Abstract: In this article, it is questioned whether art, and the aesthetic object in general (the beautiful), can be thought from the perspective of the new philosophical current of speculative realism. The subject is approached from a double perspective: what would be an ontological conception of aesthetics and what would be an aesthetic conception of ontology.

This thesis discusses the philosophical foundations of the Laws of Form, a work by George Spencer-Brown, and its relevance in systems theory, as well as its understanding by the re-nowned sociologist Niklas Luhmann and explores its relevance in his work. The paper answers several key questions about the Laws of Form, including their purpose, relevance, and applica-bility. The Laws of Form is a philosophy of language that is similar to Wittgenstein's work in structure and content. The Laws of Form propose that objects come into existence only through the form, and that distinctions are consequences of commands. The distinction be-tween the signifier and the signified is the semiotic component of the Laws of Form, and mathematical formalism is derived from this semiotics. The article also explains the concept of re-entry and the interpretation of the calculus of indications. Although the Laws of Form were mentioned in systems theory, this thesis found that Spencer-Brown had little to do with the field, neither in content nor in history. Moreover, this thesis argues that Luhmann misunder-stood Spencer-Brown, mainly due to his confusion between the concepts of distinction and observation. It critically discusses Luhmann's misunderstandings of the Laws of Form and his attempt to link the work with his theory of social systems. From this different understanding an attempt is made to create a different sociological reading of the Laws of Form and create a sociological interpretation of the calculus of indications.


PS: The single goal of this publication is to start a discussion. Feel free to email me at
jansimner@gmail.com and to give me a comment.

This article introduces the question of algorithmic catastrophe by reinterpreting Paul Virilio's concept of the original accident. Virilio finds Aristotle’s conflation of the  double meaning of accident—as 1) predicate of substance and 2) contingent event—to be fully realized in the time of technological catastrophe. Departing from Virilio, this article goes further in distinguishing the contingency of the “second nature” (a natural-technological organic structure, illustrated in the Fukushima catastrophe) from the contingency of the laws of nature elaborated by Émile Boutroux. The second nature results from the constant exteriorization of reason in its effort to overcome contingency—something already proposed in Plato's Protagoras, where reason was the measure for preventing the arrival of contingency (τὐχη, also meaning “luck”) in his anti-tragic theater. After Plato, Aristotle distinguishes between τὐχη and τὸ αὐτόματον as two forms of chance in the Physics; however, today we can observe that the automaton as automation is creating a new form of tuché or contingency, leading to the algorithmic catastrophe. These catastrophes are demonstrated by the “flash crash” of the financial market, the design principle of Amazon’s cloud computing (“everything fails”), and indeed were already warned about by Norbert Wiener in 1960 and more recently by Stephen Hawking in his commentary on AI. The article concludes by suggesting a way to understand the speculative aesthetics of algorithmic catastrophes through a reading of Quentin Meillassoux's absolutization of contingency.

Divulgo a versão depositada de minha tese de doutoramento no PPGFIL/UnB. O título completo é "Primeiro esboço de um tratado de metametafísica: introdução ao realismo complexo", trabalho orientado pelo professor Hilan Bensusan.

Esta tese de doutoramento se trata de uma introdução ao Realismo Complexo como metametafísica. A proposta é pagar o preço de abertura de espírito necessário para se pensar a ecologização da metafísica como tarefa de nossos dias. Isso é exercitado através de uma orientação de valores da libertação, da sofisticação, da sutileza e do pertencimento. Introduzindo a discussão na crítica decolonial ao correlacionismo filosófico, chegamos no materialismo especulativo de Quentin Meillassoux. Esta será a orientação basal para traçarmos estratégias para rejeitarmos as metafísicas da supressão da complexidade. Com um conceito operativo de filosofia e uma sucessão sequencial e entrelaçada de métodos, mapeamos como fazer filosofia num território filosófico do realismo complexo. Esta cartografia nos leva à proposição de um Esboço Categorial sobre categorias ontológicas para uma complexificação da pesquisa em metafísica. Aplicamos previamente este Esboço Categorial no estudo da ontologia da comunicação e no desenvolvimento de uma infralinguagem metametafísica. Com todo este aparato, avaliamos brevemente o estado disciplinar e institucional da metametafísica de até então, mapeando falácias, erros e provendo horizontes propositivos para pensar o fazer-se da metafísica na contemporaneidade global.

O link para o repositório da UnB é https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/41938

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we examine the Sellarsian concept of the (myth of the) categorial Given, focus on its wide application and suggest that it can be applied to those post-Kantian philosophical views, currently fashionable in Continental philosophical circles, for which Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s protégé and a rising star in French philosophy -although, unfortunately, not well known outside continental philosophical circles-, coins the term ‘correlationism’: the view that mind and world are primordially or ‘always already’ given to us as essentially related to one another, and only subsequently can they be ‘objectified’, i.e. thought of as being independently existing and meaningful ‘entities’. Second, it is pointed out that Sellars uses an argument against the explanatory adequacy of the manifest image (an image with essential ‘Givenist’ elements in its descriptive and explanatory dimension) which is exactly of the same form as Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism, but, which, when combined with other crucial Sellarsian views concerning the transcendental/empirical distinction, can avoid a problematic feature of Meillassoux’s argument, and, in this way, constitute a better philosophical weapon against correlationism. Finally, it is suggested that by not drawing the transcendental/empirical distinction in the right (i.e. Sellarsian) way, Meillassoux himself is exposed and, in the constructive (‘speculative realist’) part of his work, indeed succumbs to a version of the myth of the categorial Given.