French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 2 - Meillassoux

This is the second in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here.

Chapter 2 continues exploring the contemporary permutations of the host capacity account of humanity with a close reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s transformation of the human. The place of the human in Meillassoux’s thought is complex. On the one hand, he maintains a strong and consistent rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism, and his fundamental philosophical project can be summarised as an attempt to break free from what he sees as the anthropocentric straitjacket of Kantian and post- Kantian ‘correlationist’ thought. On the other hand, however, Meillassoux evinces (especially in his work subsequent to After Finitude and nowhere more strikingly than in ‘The Divine Inexistence’) a very high view of the human indeed, not hesitating to call his philosophy a ‘humanism’ and asserting the value of the human as ultimate.

I seek to show, in the first half of the chapter, that Meillassoux’s humanism is less humanist than he thinks and, in the second part, that his attempt to disengage from anthropocentrism is more anthropocentric than he thinks.

As in the case of Badiou, it is Meillassoux’s insistence on tethering the value of humanity to its capacity for thought that lies at the root of many of the problems of his anthropology. This leads me to move beyond the host capacity approach as I turn, in Chapter 3, to the thought of Catherine Malabou.