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12:43

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

Meillassoux bases his philosophical system on four concepts: potentiality, contingency, virtuality and chance. These constitute two spheres of being. At the local level, potentiality is pitted against chance; at the global level virtuality is pitted against contingency. His Syntheos is justice, where justice consummates a history that runs via existence, life and thinking as the previous immanent miracles. Note that according to Meillassoux, a miracle is to be understood as proof that God does not exist. Rather, miracles open up the possibility of the Universe being God – a universe as a god that expresses itself to itself. But as the radical indeterminist that Meillassoux is, he opens the way for the possibility that justice never occurs (a reminder of the neutral position of Badiouian ethics). And above all, Meillassoux claims that justice can never occur unless it is first desired. His god is thereby the Marxist god par excellence. But it is a contingent Marxist god in an indeterministic world with a wide-open future, a singularity that Karl Marx himself would scarcely have understood.







Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58