Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou

  By irremediably distinguishing primordial and derived temporality without ever being able to erase this move, without ever seeking to reconcile it in the development of the concept of a temporality of the world including both the ontological and the physical, by instead searching for a way out from the question of time itself in the mystery of a “there is” with no empirical status, Heidegger made it impossible to think together time as the pure iconic production of horizon and the time of nature. Yet this is what was begging to be done.

  By splitting that which Kant presents as intimately linked, namely the dual schematic and empirical dimension of time, Heidegger had already amputated the Critique of its objectivity and captured the first edition in the narcissistic bubble of the pure image while classifying the second edition in the register of the chronicles of derived time. Heidegger never envisaged for a moment that, as a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul,” the schematism could have had a biological given as its foundation,38 that there could have been in its structure an articulation between primordial temporality and naturality. The directions of later thought did not go beyond the split between the two ontological levels. The calling into question of the first finitude never produced a true reconciliation of time with itself.

  And so, if I did not conclude my inquiry with Heidegger, if I did not grant him the last word on the subject of epigenesis, it is not because the accusation of correlationism would have prevented me from doing so. We have seen that this does not amount to a truly relevant objection. It is because Heidegger’s thought never goes beyond the dualism of the authentic and the inauthentic that it is problematic. Today’s time must be a time that, without going back to the time of metaphysics, is equally natural and ontological.

  Tracking the motif of epigenesis thus allows us to conclude that the Heideggerian interpretation of Kant is at once unsurpassable and insufficient. It is unsurpassable in that it constitutes time as the principal problem in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is insufficient insofar as it has not really given post-Kantian philosophy the future promised by the bringing to light of this problem. Since Heidegger, time has remained quartered and torn between its insensibility and its materiality.

  Assigned to the unceasing devalorization of beingness, continental philosophy has cut itself off from any scientific concerns, justifying Meillassoux’s assertion that “by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious.”39 However, as I have also shown, it is not certain that the violence of the return to mathematics adequately interrupts this post-deconstructive religiosity. Rather, it appears that it is only its flipside. The schism continues, since we are now confronted with the spectacle of a balancing between messianic time (hyperbole for primordial time) and glacial and ancestral time (hyperbole for vulgar time). Between the two, the urgent need for an epigenetic thinking of time emerges.

  Meillassoux to Heidegger: Alterity and the Critique of Property

  We must continue by now asking why Meillassoux’s approach, in dialogue with Heidegger above, also fails to render entirely convincing the relinquishing of the transcendental that it tries to implement.

  The conclusion drawn above must certainly be nuanced somewhat by recognizing that, to its credit, After Finitude obviously succeeds in identifying the idea of a true post-deconstructive perspective, a philosophy liberated from self-obsession, freed from the fear of going back beyond the symbolic-transcendental line, of transgressing the forbidden. A thinking that is freed from infinite self-reflection and sent back to a time when it did not exist.

  The two greatest promises of Meillassoux’s book are connected first to a unique undertaking to disappropriate thinking, and second to the elaboration of the concept of another alterity than that of the now well-known “wholly other.” We must therefore ask why we hesitate to consider these as promises kept. Let’s start by examining them more closely.

  On philosophy as disappropriation and as dis-propriation

  The call for a radical disappropriation and dis-propriation of philosophical thought has surely never been heard as radically as in Meillassoux. Of course, in Heidegger the movement of the constitutive appropriation of Ereignis – eigen, das Eigene, appropriates for itself, the proper – is not separable from its apparent opposite – Enteignis, often translated as “dis-propriation.”40 Nevertheless, appropriation remains . . .

  Meillassoux’s critique of correlation clearly aligns with a critique of property. The term “disappropriation” means the fact of relinquishing a good. By extension, “disappropriation” implies a renunciation of individuality and thus becomes synonymous with depersonalization. The term “dis-propriation” is a neologism that refers to the extinction of the right of property over a thing when it ceases to exist. For Meillassoux, the relinquishing of the transcendental involves the two operations conjointly.

  It is therefore first a matter of ridding oneself of a conception of thinking defined as a strategy of circumscribing and taking possession of a space. This strategy is, for instance, the one that led Kant, in the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, to distinguish between the three notions of “field,” “territory,” and “domain” in order to define that which belongs properly to us in the geography of cognition and thought.

  Concepts, insofar as they are related to others, regardless of whether a cognition of the latter is possible or not, have their field, which is determined merely in accordance with the relation which their object has to our faculty of cognition in general. – The part of this field within which cognition is possible for us is a territory (territorium) for these concepts and the requisite faculty of cognition. The part of the territory in which these are legislative is the domain (ditio) of these concepts and of the corresponding faculty of cognition.41

  The legal vocabulary of property serves to reinforce these borders conceptually. We recall the distinction Kant draws between derived acquisition and originary acquisition. We should remember that originary acquisition refers to the first acquisition of a good which until then belonged to no one. The fact that for Kant appropriation is cut off from all essentialization and that the proper is not a substance changes nothing in the fact that the appropriating relation between being and thinking remains first in transcendental philosophy. It has been demonstrated on several occasions that the epigenesis of the relation between categories and objects is inseparable from a reflection on the way in which the elements of thinking become ours, the way that the subject must take ownership of the transcendental structures of truth.

  In After Finitude, by contrast, the thinking to come is presented as the returning of a loan. It is no longer an inquiry into the acquisition of a good that until now belonged to no one, but the anonymous return of a good that we believed until now belonged only to us. A good that by the same token of dis-propriation is no longer one, and thereby ceases to exist as such. The world is not “ours.”

  Themes of radical contingency, the absolute, and “ancestrality” are the privileged expressions of the philosophical relinquishing at work here. Starting with “us,” correlationism undertook a “disabsolutization” of philosophical thought, which, after Kant, had tightened up around the unsurpassable character of its limits. To break with this state of affairs implies “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.”42 To get out of ourselves is to get out of the ourselves, out of the proper. The thought of ancestrality is not even “human.” “I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species,” declares Meillassoux, and he adds, “or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.”43 And this “anterior” reality is equally well “posterior”: the ancestral achrony and indifference are also the projections of a post-human real.44 The existence of a “non-human” time without consciousness corresponds to the age of the earth “anterior vis-à-vis manifestation,”45 but also concerns a reality to come, capable of
subsisting in the absence of all consciousness.

  The “in-itself” which must be “grasped” is therefore not Kant’s in-itself, since that, by definition, cannot exist without us. Likewise, “absolute” does not mean “unconditioned” (unbedingt). I have already explained that the vocabulary of the condition is the chosen lexicon of the transcendental. Here, the in-itself ceases to be the other side of finitude, and becomes instead pure separation:

  Our task [. . .] consists in trying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given. But to say this is just to say that we must grasp how thought is able to access an absolute, i.e. a being whose severance (the original meaning of absolutus), and whose separateness from thought is such that it presents itself to us as non-relative to us, and hence as capable of existing whether we exist or not.46

  The recourse to the concept of an absolute here in no way implies a return to the ontological guarantee of a foundation – whether it be the existence of God or the principle of reason – but should instead be understood as the necessity of unreason, in other words, here again, as radical contingency.

  We are thinking an absolute, but it is not metaphysical, since we are not thinking any thing, any (entity) that would be absolute. The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.47

  Speculative thinking of just such an absolute, which asserts that “contingency alone is necessary”48 – “alone” being understood here as simultaneously an exclusivity clause, an acknowledgement of solitude (the absolute is without anyone), and disappropriation – allows us to bring to light the relation between the mathematics of the transfinite and this kind of exclusivity of emptying. Hasn’t mathematics always established the ontological principles of “a world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not correlates of any manifestation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world”?49

  Responding to Heidegger, Meillassoux asserts that in the end “time” no longer refers to anything but the impossibility of the synthesis, its absolute destructibility or destructuration, the definitive erasure of all traces. The time of radical contingency, dispropriated time, is confounded with its own irregularity, disobedience to its own schemata. A time outside the law, “not just a time whose capacity for destroying everything is a function of laws, but a time which is capable of the lawless destruction of every physical law.”50 And so, “only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute.”51

  Evidently, in this strange timeline, epigenesis appears unable to find its place anywhere. Indeed, Meillassoux continues, “to speak of ‘the emergence of life’ is to evoke the emergence of manifestation amidst a world that pre-existed it.”52 From then on, the attempt to situate transcendental epigenesis in Kantian thought would be only one way to grasp the birth of correlation and meaning in general. As if generation and meaning coincided and left in the shadow the thickness of the preceding inanimate and unappropriable presence. According to Meillassoux, the emergence of life in general, and the beginning of one epigenesis in particular, are nothing but events like any other in the indifferent dating of nature, in its numbers and ages. And so they lose their transcendental status.

  The other alterity

  The discourse of radical contingency is not apocalyptic but rather a rigorous, rational (still mathematics) attempt to reframe the question of absolute alterity posed ceaselessly by twentieth-century philosophy. A question that it also constantly missed since it was shut away in an artistic, poetic, or religious alternative to traditional philosophy. So long as the base structure of thought is not transformed, is not envisaged as completely transformable (non-correlational), the wholly other depends only on the fantasy or whims of messianic grace. The destruction and deconstruction of metaphysics did not go far enough in the theory and practice of dispossession, a dispossession that would forever deprive thought of a mirror and thus make it impossible for everything to come back to it one way or another, for everything to continue to come back to it.

  The arrival of the wholly other is that which twentieth-century philosophy prophesied constantly from the prospect of its own demise. After so many disappointing announcements, can the wholly other finally come to pass? Can it come to pass in reality, without delegating the thought of its indefinite wait? To a certain degree, the speculative urgency of the question of radical contingency was prepared for negatively by Kant, who, in closing it down no sooner that it was formulated, only made its actual reopening possible. Doesn’t contingency, understood as “the destruction of every form of a priori knowledge of why the world is as it is,”53 in fact surface again today as the major problem, which, although it is repressed in the Transcendental Deduction, right in the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason, was ultimately never resolved? The problem, precisely, of the wholly other?

  In the twenty-first century, it is therefore necessary to ask the question again, tirelessly but differently: can something other finally happen? Meillassoux reminds us that

  [t]he term “contingency” refers back to the Latin contingere, meaning “to touch, to befall,” which is to say, that which happens [. . .]. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens – something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable. When something happens to us, when novelty grabs us by the throat, then no more calculation and no more play – it is finally time to be serious.54

  “Serious” things are real things. The real – the fundamental question of the current movement called “speculative realism” – is that which remains when the imaginary (transcendental) and the symbolic (hermeneutic) have disappeared, in other words, when being is really no longer anything. Not just finished, nor even historical, just nothing. Nothing is (not) real. The nothing as the absolute undoing of the principle of reason. Nothing would have to have no reason, there would have to be no reason at all for one thing to happen rather than another, so that the wholly other might happen.

  Yet nothing changes

  And yet, how can we stop “conced[ing] that physical processes are indeed possessed of ultimate necessity”?55 How can radical contingency and the lack of necessity of the laws of nature be brought to light? How can we prove that the world can change at any moment and thereby call into question Kant’s famous comment on the always heavy and always red nature of cinnabar? How can we justify the wholly other understood as a set of modifiable laws?

  Strangely, it is at this crucial point that Meillassoux’s reasoning falls short. Indeed, against all expectation, the argument of the wholly other becomes a paradoxical defense of the stability of the world. In the end, nothing changes.

  Clearly, it is not easy to rigorously rule out the “necessitarian”56 or transcendental argument that says that if laws were in fact contingent, they would modify or would constantly be on the point of modifying. How can their necessity be contested since they do not experience modifications?57 In the same way, if our representations were not organized by categories, our experience of the world would be pure chaos. But it’s not. The unity of consciousness endures.

  On the other hand, against the transcendental solution to the problem of identity and stability of the world, Meillassoux refuses to adopt a theory of chaos (“chaos can do anything whatsoever”).58 Such a theory is not satisfying. If chaos were absolutized (it can do everythin
g), then it would become necessary and would cease to be chaos.59

  How then can the contingency of the world be proven? This point in the reasoning is the least convincing moment in the book, for, after having enjoyed the thrill, it ultimately amounts to being content with the stability of the world. No necessity, Meillassoux says, but no chaos either. His argument is as follows:

  The only necessity proper to chaos is that it remain chaos, and hence that there be nothing capable of resisting it – that what is always remain contingent, and that what is never be necessary. However – and here we come to the crux of the matter – our conviction is that in order for an entity to be contingent and un-necessary in this way, it cannot be anything whatsoever.60

  Further on he writes: “To be is necessarily to be a fact, but to be a fact is not just to be anything whatsoever.”61

  To defend this thesis, Meillassoux presents an incomprehensible argument about “certain determinate conditions”:

  [I]n order to be contingent and un-necessary, the entity must confirm to certain determinate conditions, which can then be construed as so many absolute proprieties of what is. We then begin to understand what the rational discourse about unreason – an unreason which is not irrational – would consist in: it would be discourse that aims to establish the constraints to which the entity must submit in order to exercise its capacity-not-to-be and its capacity-to-be-other.62