On Meillassoux's “Transparent Cage”: Speculative Realism and Its Discontents

Author(s): Zahi Zalloua

Source: symplokē , Vol. 23, No. 1-2, Posthumanisms (2015), pp. 393-409
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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ON MEILLASSOUX’S “TRANSPARENT CAGE”:
SPECULATIVE REALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

ZAHI ZALLOUA

In After Finitude (2006), French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux

levels a severe critique of post-Kantian philosophies. From Marxism and
phenomenology to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, continental thought
has suffered the limitations of what Meillassoux calls “correlationism.”
Correlationism—realism’s named antagonist—maintains that “we only
ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never
to either term considered apart from the other” (2008a, 5).1 Since we do not
have a rational access to things-in-themselves, all we have after Kant, all we
are allowed to discuss philosophically, are the transcendental conditions for
knowledge.2 The limits of my epistemology are the limits of my concepts and
categories. Any claims of knowledge must therefore be qualified by “for us,”
that is, for us finite beings. As a result, Meillassoux argues, we have foreclosed
any genuine access to the external world, that is, to an absolute reality, to
what he calls “the great outdoors...that outside which was not relative to us...
existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not” (2008a,
7). In other words, we have confined ourselves to a “‘transparent cage,’”

1
Meillassoux elaborates further on his concept: “Correlationism rests on an argument as
simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without
givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something,
you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you. Consequently, the sentence:
‘X is’, means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of
an affection, or a perception, or a conception, or of any subjective act. To be is to be a correlate,
a term of a correlation. And in particular, when you claim to think any X, you must posit this
X, which cannot then be separated from this special act of positing, of conception. That is why
it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from
a subject. We can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish
between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the
subjective access to the object” (2007, 409).
2
Meillassoux distinguishes between two forms of correlationism: a weak version and a
strong one. Weak correlationism rules out knowledge of the noumenal real, of the in-itself, yet
without dismissing its thinkability. Strong correlationism excludes the possibility of even its
thinkability: “According to Kant, we know a priori that the thing-in-itself is non-contradictory
and that it actually exists. By way of contrast, the strong model of correlationism maintains not
only that it is illegitimate to claim that we can know the in-itself, but also that it is illegitimate to
claim that we can at least think it” (2008a, 35).

© symploke Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2 (2015) ISSN 1069-0697, 393-409.

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394 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

in which we turn endlessly in a linguistic circle, in the old prison-house of

language, trapped by unseen, epistemological falsehoods.3
Meillassoux’s indictment of modern philosophy had an immediate
impact in continental philosophical circles, galvanizing a bold return to
realism—a subject matter long deemed exhausted if not irrelevant to intel-
lectual pursuits.4 Sparked by Meillassoux’s call to go beyond correlationism
(speculative realism’s “mortal enemy” [Harman 2012, 184]), the movement
of speculative realism, and its variant or subset, Object-Oriented Ontology
(OOO), have emerged as corrective philosophical responses to the Kantian
heritage.5 Speculative realists aim to return to the origins of modernity in
the hope of critically adjusting post-Kantian philosophy’s misguided trajec-
tory and reviving its epistemic ambitions. In releasing philosophy from its
“transparent cage” and opening the door to the “great outdoors,” specula-
tive realists aim to cure modern philosophy of its perceived obsession with
mediation (with language and power) and with the human.
In the following pages, I would like to explore what in some ways
appears as a surprising—and surprisingly strong—resurgence of philosophi-
cal questions considered until recently outdated and naïve. The appeal of
speculative realism’s post-linguistic orientation, which captures so well the
aspiration of a new generation of philosophers hungering for a non-human
centered approach to the world, would seem to lie in part in its phantasmatic
function. In its psychoanalytic sense, fantasy is more than a distortion of
reality. The idea of the great outdoors functions, as Alenka Zupančič puts
it, as “a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leak-
ing, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side”
(2011, 33). What Meillassoux’s transparency by-passes or covers up is the
problem of mediation, and the attendant problem of the ethical relation to the
human and non-human alike. In the process of opening access to the great
outdoors, Meillassoux constructs his own idea/l of transparency and imme-
diacy, but one that, in fetishizing the outdoor world as proper philosophical
object, re-inscribes the very boundary between interiority and exteriority
that he ostensibly seeks to dissolve. Practicing his version of a hermeneu-
tics of suspicion, Meillassoux exposes the transparent, discursive cage of the
correlationists as a distortion of the proper philosophical scene. Once we

3
The expression “transparent cage” belongs to Francis Wolff, whom Meillassoux quotes
favorably in After Finitude: “We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage.
Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out” (2008a, 7).
4
Starting with phenomenology, continental philosophy treated the realism/anti-realism
problem as “a pseudo-problem” (Harman 2011a, 7)—a problem that will disappear once we
begin to ask the right kinds of questions.
5
Graham Harman, a leading figure in both speculative realism and object-oriented ontology,
describes the differences between the two in the following ways: “The two central features of
correlationism are (a) the priority of the human-world relation over all others and (b) the finitude
of human knowledge. What is interesting is that Meillassoux rejects (b) but preserves (a), while
object-oriented ontology rejects (a) but preserves (b). That is to say, Meillassoux’s obsession is
with finding some way to bring back absolute knowledge, the ability to know a thing exhaustively”
(2014, 39).

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 symplokeˉ 395

tear away the hermeneutic layers of phenomenology and poststructuralism,

once we transcend the limits of subjectivity and finitude, we discover an
indifferent universe, a “glacial world” (2008a, 115). And only then can we
return to a philosophical understanding of objects as they are. After finitude
really means, then, after mediation: an invitation to go beyond the limits of
consciousness, language, and, as we shall see, interpretation.
What this phantasmatic account covers over, I would argue, are the
deeply unsettling effects of the permeability of the human, of the entangle-
ment of the human, and discourse itself, with the non-human and the Real.
In accusing philosophy of rejecting immediacy, of creating a confining cage
separating philosophy from its objects, speculative realism ironically covers
over continental philosophy’s insistence on the messy implications and unset-
tling affective and epistemological consequences of contact, of intersubjectiv-
ity, and of the entanglement with the Real. The philosophical problem of the
prison-house of language is better solved, I contend, through an approach
that embraces mediation, and that traverses the fantasy of immediate access
to a glacial—hard, pure, and clear—world.

Being, Thinking, and the

Critique of Correlationism

With respect to the philosophical tradition, Meillassoux is resolutely

anti-Parmenidean: “being and thinking are not the same.”6 Being—or the
autonomy of things—is irreducible to thinking, to language, to discourse
and the likes. Like Fredric Jameson, who famously critiqued the semiotic
“prison house of language,” Meillassoux expresses his discontent with
what we know as the “linguistic turn,” seeing this emphasis on language—
which, with the birth of structuralism, becomes the new constituting subject,
displacing the humanist subject as the center of discourse—as a debilitat-
ing detour in contemporary philosophy.7 But whereas Jameson sought to
historicize this turn through dialectics, to counter its proponents’ penchant
for abstraction and synchronicity, Meillassoux is after “the relinquishing of

6
Correlationsim is obviously not limited to the thought and being opposition but conditions
a series of binary formulations. It is “the philosopheme according to which the human and
the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally
correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation” (Brassier 2011, 53).
7
This sentiment is shared by the editors of The Speculative Turn, for whom “‘the Speculative
Turn’” functions “as a deliberate counterpoint to the now tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn’” (Bryant,
Srnicek, and Harman 2011, 1). The “activity of ‘speculation’…aims at something ‘beyond’ the
critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a
concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to
the labour of critique. The works collected here are a speculative wager on the possible returns
from a renewed attention to reality itself” (2011, 3).

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396 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

transcendentalism” (2008a, 27), which is synonymous with “waking us from

our correlationist slumber” (2008a, 128).8
To be fair, Meillassoux insists that this return is not a return to pre-Kantian
dogmatism, to naïve realism. He sees himself as completing the correlationist
critique, performing what Alain Badiou describes in the “Preface” to After
Finitude as “a critique of Critique” (2008, xii). Meillassoux does so by absolu-
tizing the contingency of things, by “put[ting] back into the thing itself what we
mistakenly took to be an incapacity of thought” (2008a, 53). The world is mean-
ingless not because it lacks a decipherable reason, but because everything is
contingent, except for contingency itself (the subtitle of After Finitude is: “An
Essay on the Necessity of Contingency”). Contingency itself is absolutely
necessary, non-contingent (Meillassoux refers to this necessity of contingency
as the “principle of factuality” [2008a, 75]). Meillassoux here “turn[s] an
apparent weakness into an opportunity” (Hallward 2011, 136). Refusing to
settle for the correlationists’ avowed ignorance of the things-in-themselves
(the in-itself could be anything), Meillassoux argues for a mind-independent
reality, of which we can have positive knowledge: we know that “the in-itself
could actually be anything whatsoever” (2008a, 65). This knowledge requires
no qualification at all. The correlationist’s lucid—but crippling, lifeless,9
and ultimately erroneous—account of the relation between thought and the
world gives way to the lucid picture of an outside world that is thinkable and
knowable regardless of our conceptions of it.
For Meillassoux, it is especially mathematics that fulfills the epistemic
aims of speculative realism. “Philosophy’s task,” Meillassoux contends,
“consists in re-absolutizing the scope of mathematics,” in acknowledging
“[its] ability to discourse about the great outdoors” (2008a, 126, 26). Mathematics
desubjectivizes the world, giving us access to the world as it is. It allows us to
decide between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities “are the
properties of the thing as it is without me, as much as it is with me—proper-
ties of the in-itself” (2008a, 2). They are absolute and independent of how
we think about them and for this reason they can be mathematized, whereas
secondary qualities are “sensible qualities...not in the things themselves but
in my subjective relation to the latter” (2008a, 2). Secondary qualities are
relative and the matter of subjective life, thus falling under the purview of
the correlationists.10

8
Tom Sparrow calls for a similar intellectual awakening, an escape from the Kantian orbit.
Indeed, “only speculative realism can actually get us out of Kant’s shadow” (2014, 1), and
actually deliver on the phenomenological promise to get us “back to things themselves.”
9
Sparrow characterizes phenomenology—what exemplifies for him most clearly the ills
of correlationism—as “undead”: “[Phenomenology] is extremely active, but at the same time
lacking philosophical vitality and methodologically hollow” (2014, 187).
10
Peter Hallward rightly questions whether Meillassoux’s use of mathematics allows
him to adequately map the great outdoors: “Meillassoux seems to confuse the domains of
pure and applied mathematics. In the spirit of Galileo’s ‘mathematization of nature,’ he relies
on pure mathematics in order to demonstrate the integrity of an objective reality that exists
independently of us—a domain of primary (mathematically measurable) qualities purged of any

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 symplokeˉ 397

Though Kant and post-Kantian thought are the main targets of After
Finitude, Meillassoux does on occasion enlarge the scope of his critique. He
contextualizes further his attack on correlationism with an assessment of
the negative impact of fideistic skepticism on the development of modern
philosophy. Meillassoux credits, or rather blames, the Renaissance human-
ist Michel de Montaigne for such skepticism, whose effects, he maintains,
are still being felt today. Meillassoux even goes as far as to give Montaigne
greater importance than Descartes in the founding of modern philosophy
(Harman 2011a, 17).
In his essay “Of Cripples,” Montaigne ridiculed philosophers who inces-
santly discourse about causes (he called them “plaisants causeurs,” punning
on the double meaning of “causer”—“to talk about something/to someone”
and “to cause something”). Rather than scrutinizing their assumptions and
questions, he asserted, philosophers argue for causal reasoning and put
forward answers that operate more like phantasmatic projections. But for
Meillassoux, this kind of skepticism has been quite poisonous for philosophi-
cal thought. By weakening reason, and discrediting speculative inquiries into
the nature of things, Montaignian fideistic skepticism helped to legitimize
ways of talking about the world that simply suspend rational norms (because
the world is unknowable, faith does not acknowledge reason’s historical
priority, and therefore does not need the justification of reason), doing away
with the fundamental distinction between truth and falsity. Fideism negates
thinking about absolutes, but not the absolutes themselves. The results are
catastrophic for philosophy: “The more thought arms itself against dogma-
tism, the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism” (2008a, 49). In
short, Western philosophy, starting with Montaigne, has crippled itself by
being excessively critical of its cognitive powers. Montaigne and others
helped to downgrade philosophy’s relevance, displacing reason’s authority
and thus creating a space for religion and other irrational discourses to fill.
Meillassoux is clear about this. The critique of speculative thought welcomes
and “legitimates all those discourses that claim to access an absolute, the
only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justifica-
tion of their validity” (2008a, 44-45). Meillassoux insists on a sharp distinction
between speculative (rational) thought and dogmatic (religious) metaphys-
ics: “The assimilation of philosophy to a remainder of the religious ought to be
firmly rejected. Quite the contrary: every position that consists in limiting the
exercise of reason is religious” (2011a, 230).11

merely sensory, subject-dependent secondary qualities. Pure mathematics, however, is arguably

the supreme example of absolutely subject-dependent thought, i.e. a thought that proceeds
without reference to any sort of objective reality ‘outside’ it” (2011, 140).
11
Meillassoux’s reading fails to do justice to Montaigne’s position. The latter’s skepticism
hardly complies with the former’s logic. Montaigne’s mode of inquiry is antithetical to any
talk of absolutes—be they metaphysical or speculative. His skepticism does not translate into
“the religionizing [enreligement] of reason” (2008a, 47); rather, he is critical of dogmatism and
fanaticism alike. Its negativity leaves precisely unfilled the space opened up by the correlationist
critique.

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398 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

An heir to Montaigne, and one the latest figures of correlationism, Jacques

Derrida seems even more compromised than your typical correlationist. In
an interview, Meillassoux describes Derridean deconstruction as a “sickened
correlationism” (2011b, 166). What makes it “sick” is its attempt—though
ultimately inadequate—to get outside the circle of correlationism, to break
free from its “transparent cage.” I want to look at this brief assessment of
Derrida, who is, interestingly, never mentioned in After Finitude, by question-
ing more precisely what makes Derrida’s correlationism “sick”—or better
yet “autoimmune.” For Meillassoux and other speculative realists, Derrida
exemplifies the limits of the linguistic turn. His now infamous claim that
“there is nothing outside the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte] (Derrida 1976, 158)
attests to his alleged textual idealism. Speculative realists emphatically reject
this type of statement, seeing it as neglecting the autonomy of objects, and
reflecting a lack of concern for exteriority as such. Harman captures their
sentiment with his assertion that “being is deeper than every logos” (2012,
196).

Exteriority, Relation, and Openings

If the linguistic turn has been met with deep suspicion on the part of
speculative realists, the ethical turn, in its focus on exteriority, has received
a warmer reception. In The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Steven
Shaviro singles out and praises Emmanuel Levinas’ account of the face of
the Other (mostly taken from Totality and Infinity), as that which—in its
radical exteriority—exceeds any pre-existing interpretive horizon or total-
ity. Reinterpreting the “ethical turn” in the humanities spurred by Levinas
through the lenses of speculative realism, Shaviro shows how Levinas’
critique of epistemology as first philosophy12 (philosophy after Kant) reorients
our focus to the world outside of us. Like Meillassoux, Shaviro is attentive to
moments of breach in the correlationist circle. For Levinas, phenomenology
accounts only partially for the ways the self dwells in and enjoys his or her
world. In the beginning, there was enjoyment: the self’s appropriation of his or
her surroundings (“the transmutation of the other into the same…an energy
that is other…becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, me” [1969, 111; qtd.
in Shaviro 2014, 20]) for the purposes of nourishment, comfort, and familiar-
ity. Then, the exposure to the other—to the face of the other—changes all of
this. The self’s experience of sufficiency gives way to an experience of the

12
Levinas himself contrasts his approach with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In “Is
Ontology Fundamental?” (an inquiry into the question, Is Heideggerian fundamental ontology
first philosophy?) Levinas answers the question with a categorical no, showing how Heidegger’s
approach is still one of power and mastery (reducing alterity to the Same—ignoring that “the
face signifies otherwise” [1998, 10]), and thus continuous with philosophical tradition rather than
a radical break from it.

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 symplokeˉ 399

other unexplainable within the strict parameters of phenomenology. Ethics

is always in excess of any correlationism, of any economy of the Same. The
transparency of the face disturbs the self’s state of immanence, calling into
question his or her enjoyment and “egoist spontaneity” (1969, 43).13 The face
of the other jolts the self out of his or her hermeneutic comfort. Speculative
realists and object-oriented ontologists, though, find Levinas’ account lacking
to the extent that he limits the excesses of the face to humans, which is typical
of the anthropocentric bias of the Western tradition.14 For them, all beings are
agential objects—actants as Bruno Latour puts it (1988, 159)—objects whose
ontology is more than its epistemological rendering, and thus recalcitrant to
our hermeneutic habits. Objects, for Graham Harman, are “entities…quite
apart from any relations with or effects upon other entities in the world”
(2012, 187).
Ironically, Levinas’ model of pure heterology, characterized by the face-
to-face encounter, underwent significant reformulation in light of Derrida’s
critique of it in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Here Derrida exposed the
fantasy of absolute alterity as opposed to relative alterity. In his later Otherwise
than Being, Levinas gives more attention to what might be considered corre-
lationist concerns. While still insisting on the pre-discursive desire to speak
(the Saying, the respect for the Other as exteriority and mystery), Levinas
becomes more attentive to the grammar of philosophy and to the possibility
of ethical figuring. The language of ontology (the Said) does not preclude nor
exhaust the “ethical Saying.” In other words, the ethical can signify within
the realm of representation. It is no longer a question of simply choosing
between the Saying (the dialogic impulse toward the other) and the Said (the
thematized meaning, or death, of any Saying). After Derrida’s “Violence and
Metaphysics,” Levinas is more cognizant of the paradox that as soon as one
utters something, once meaning happens, one enters into the domain of the
Said. Yet he does not stop there: “The otherwise than being is stated in a saying
that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from
the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise” (1981, 7).
Refusing now the false choice between Saying and the Said, opening and
totality, respect and violence, Levinas advocates a kind of skepticism, an
“endless critique” (1981, 44), or “an incessant unsaying”—and the necessary
resaying—of the Said (1981, 181). The unruliness of the Saying, then, invari-
ably passes through the compromised and compromising scene of language;
its anarchic character is not annihilated but preserved and rearticulated
through the endless activity of interpretation.

13
“A calling into question of the same—which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of
the same—is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity
by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of he Other, his irreducibility to the I, to
my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my
spontaneity, as ethics” (Levinas 1969, 43).
14
As Shaviro puts it, “We cannot escape the pervasive sense, endemic to Western culture,
that we are alone in our aliveness: trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter” (2014,
46).

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400 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

This Derridean Levinas invalidates him as a proto-speculative realist

or object-oriented ontologist. We might even say it makes him more of a
theorist than a philosopher. I draw here on Jameson’s distinction between
philosophy and theory in Valences of the Dialectic. For Jameson, philosophy is
about transparent, non-ideological, and absolute knowledge. Philosophy “is
always haunted by the dream of some foolproof, self-sufficient, autonomous
system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause” (2009, 59).
Theory, for its part, “has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim
to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its ‘truths’”
(2009, 59). Now Meillassoux, I think, would very much welcome remov-
ing Derrida (and Montaigne) from the category of philosophers, seeing no
distinction between postmodern/poststructuralist philosophy and theory.
For Meillassoux, philosophers would be wholly invested in objective reality
and its truths, devoted to restoring our commitment to absolute knowledge,
whereas theorists would be anti-realists, skeptical of any truth about a world-
without-us.15 In particular, speculative realists would be purified philoso-
phers, freed from what Simon Critchley describes as “the messier, subjective
life of secondary qualities” (2009, 28).
Despite Derrida’s and others’ numerous rebuttals to the reading of
Derrida as anti-realist (anti-philosophy), this account still persists. I would
only point out that Derrida himself described his deconstructive work as “a
protest against” the linguist turn (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 76). The “prison
house of language,” or self-enclosed correlationism, is precisely what Derrida
was writing against. While Derrida in his earlier works clearly privileged the
shift of attention from consciousness to structure, he never endorsed a rejec-
tion of the in-itself or referentiality as such. In Limited Inc., he makes as clear
as possible that “[the concept of text] does not suspend reference—to history,
to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say
of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience,
hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according
to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to
recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible” (1988, 137). Derrida complicates
rather than rules out reference. There is never an unmediated account of the
given. The self has never been transparent to itself. Like the statement “there
is nothing outside the text,” the claims “perception does not exist” and “there
never was any ‘perception’” (Derrida 1973, 45n4, 103) were also highly prone
to misreading. Derrida’s point is not actually so controversial. Experience
is never pure. It is always inscribed in a “movement of interpretation,” but
the primacy of interpretation does not exclude a concern for reality. Quite
the opposite: any discussion of the other, of the event of the other, “always

15
Harman puts the matter in disparaging terms: “Derrida and Foucault would rather die
than call themselves realists” (2011b, 171). Likewise, Lee Braver situates Derrida firmly with the
antirealist camp (2007, 431-96). For a more generous account of Derrida’s realism, see Gratton
(2013).

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 symplokeˉ 401

come[s] forward in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real”
(2005a, 96).
Meillassoux might retort that he is acknowledging Derrida’s differ-
ence by qualifying his correlationism as unusual, as “sickened.” Indeed, he
believes Derrida’s type of correlationism has been infectious, touching even
materialists like Badiou and Žižek (two authors typically seen as hostile to
Derrida): “Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken
the form of a ‘sickened correlationism’: it refuses both the return to a naïve
pre-critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the ‘circle
of the subject’ from harmoniously closing in on itself” (Meillassoux 2011b,
166). Derrida does flatly reject the pre-Kantian mode of analysis, but it is
hardly the case that he ignores any investigation of the latter. Rather, Derrida
deploys the notion of autoimmunity—the self’s tendency to destroy its own
immune system, its protective barriers against the “outside”—in order to
undermine from within the prison house of subjectivity, arguing that man
is far from being the measure all of things. Derrida exposes the phantasmatic
character of the sovereign self, the self for whom the “circle of the subject”
closes harmoniously in on itself. Autoimmunity makes a break from the
correlationist semiotic prison house axiomatic: “Without autoimmunity,
with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would
no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one another, or expect any
event” (Derrida 2005b, 152).
If Derrida’s illogical logic of autoimmunity troubles Meillassoux’s meta-
phor of the transparent cage, it is equally resistant to Slavoj Žižek’s designa-
tion of Derrida as a philosopher of the exception, as a “masculine” thinker.
In a footnote of his 2012 Less than Nothing, Žižek writes:

What makes Derrida “masculine” is the persistence, throughout

his work, of totalization-with-exception: the search for a post-
metaphysical way of thinking for an escape from metaphysical
closure, presupposes the violent gesture of universalization, of a
leveling-equalization-unification of the whole field of intra-meta-
physical struggles (“all attempts to break out of metaphysics, from
Kierkegaard to Marx, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Levinas
to Lévi-Strauss, ultimately remain within the horizon of the meta-
physics of presence”). (2012, 742n.7)

Here by “masculine” Žižek is relying on Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. To

recall, Lacan’s graph appears as follows in Seminar XX, Encore (1998, 78):

Masculine Feminine
__ __ __
∃x Φx ∃x Φx
__
∀x Φx ∀x Φx

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402 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

There is at least one x that is There is not one x that

not submitted to the phallic is not submitted to the
function phallic function
All x’s are submitted to the Not all x is submitted
phallic function to the phallic function

Žižek frames Lacan’s graph in terms of ontology rather than sexuation,16

harnessing the feminine logic of the non-all for a Leftist politics. Less than
Nothing, for example, makes the case for an understanding of materialism
through Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. Žižek points out that there are two
ways of negating the statement that “material reality is all there is.” Drawing
on Kant’s distinction between “negative judgment” and “infinite judgment,”
we could say that “material reality is not all there is” and “material reality is
non-all.” The former is a negative judgment in that it negates the predicate
(implying some transcendent spiritual reality), whereas the latter is an infi-
nite judgment that expresses the non-all of reality without suggesting any
exception. We can see how Žižek aligns the Kantian infinite judgment with
the feminine side of the formulas of sexuation. The feminine logic of the non-
all reframes materialism, troubles its transparent, if not vulgar, metaphysics,
captured by the simple slogan “material reality is all there is.” Using the
feminine formulas of sexuation, we get a less transparent, a less complete
materialism: there is nothing which is not material reality and material reality
is non-all.17
Drawing on Žižek’s ontologization of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, Levi
Bryant argues that traditional philosophy (dominated by logocentric aspira-
tions) aligns itself with the masculine logic while OOO is on the side of the
feminine (Bryant 2010):

Philosophies of Presence Object-Oriented Ontologies

There is at least one x There is not one x that

that is not submitted to is not submitted to
withdrawal withdrawal

All x’s are submitted to Not all x is submitted

withdrawal to withdrawal

The dream of full presence and transparency is masculine in nature, whereas

the feminine points to the split nature of beings:

16
Žižek credits Joan Copjec (1994) for his interpretation of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation.
17
Žižek finds the Lacanian non-all more productive than Meillassoux’s principle of factuality
for thinking about material reality: “I think Meillassoux’s assertion of radical contingency as the
only necessity is not enough—one has to supplement it with the ontological incompleteness of
reality” (2011, 408).

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 symplokeˉ 403

While it belongs to all beings to withdraw, something of beings does

not withdraw. Beings manifest themselves even as they withdraw.
In The Democracy of Objects I have characterized this dual nature of
objects as the thesis that objects are such that they simultaneously
withdraw and are self-othering in and through their manifestations.
Something of objects escapes withdrawal. (Bryant 2010)

This is however precisely what Žižek warned against when conceiving of the
feminine.

According to the standard version of the Lacanian theory, the non-

all (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of a woman is caught up
in the phallic jouissance: She is always split between a part of her
which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinat-
ing the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which
resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious
jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said. (Žižek
1999, 29)

For Žižek, it is erroneous to translate the non-all of the feminine as “the

surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function” (“Woman is One of the
Names-of-the-Father”). Likewise, the non-all of an object does not pertain
to its outsideness of the symbolic order, nor to a part of it (something) that
remains immune from the phallus/withdrawal.18
Here it might be useful to give Lacan’s graph a further Derridean twist.
If Žižek and Bryant read Lacan’s formulas of sexuation in terms of ontology,
I propose to reread them in terms of hermeneutics, in terms of the ethico-
interpretive questions that they raise. Returning to Derrida’s saying “There
is nothing outside the text,” we can see how one might be tempted to trans-
late “There is nothing outside the text” as “mediation is all there is.” But as
we saw with the case of material reality, the statement can be negated in two
ways: “mediation is not all there is” (mediation is not everything: there is
something outside our hermeneutic grasp, a God, a soul, a face, and so forth
[this is the masculine side of the formulas of sexuation; a designation more
appropriate to the likes of the early Levinas than Derrida]) and “mediation
is non-all” (it is open, incomplete; so for this reason there is nothing outside
mediation). So it is not simply enough to evoke the traditional poststruc-
turalist or constructivist view (the view, that is, that “mediation is all there
is”). Reading Derrida with Žižek we might say: there is nothing which is

18
According to Žižek, feminine jouissance is not something mysterious that exceeds the
masculinist symbolic order: “The problem is that all answers…can again be discredited as male
clichés” (“Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father”). Isolating this jouissance ironically repeats
the phallic logic it sought: “the very notion of a ‘feminine secret,’ of some mysterious jouissance
which eludes the male gaze, is constitutive of the phallic spectacle of seduction: inherent to
phallic economy is the reference to some mysterious X which remains forever out of its reach”
(1999, 29).

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404 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

not subjected to mediation and mediation is non-all. Mediation entails a

negative hermeneutics; it is unfinalizable, non-totalizable. This account of
Derridean mediation aligns it as well with the feminine side of the formulas
of sexuation.19
Contrary to Meillassoux and Žižek, Derrida rejects the correlationalist
prison house of language without positing an outside of discourse, the excep-
tion that grounds the universality of the discourse. For Derrida, language is
not a closed system; language is non-all. An effective critique of correlationist
mediation is not to transcend mediation (the fantasy of a world-without-me)
but to affirm that mediation is non-all, that language is never static nor whole
but constantly supplemented by “the movement of interpretation.” Indeed,
Derrida sets the demands of interpretation, of relating to alterity, against the
mechanical and the transparent:

When there is a determinable rule, I know what must be done,

and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows
knowledge as a calculable consequence: one knows what path to
take, one no longer hesitates, the decision then no longer decides
anything but simply gets deployed with the automatism attributed
to machines. (Derrida 2003, 134)

By contrast, Meillassoux’s transparent account of the other is one made from

the perspective of a world “without me.” It makes available “an access to
an eternal reality independent of our specific point of view” (Meillassoux
2008b, 7).20 This other’s eternal reality entails traversing mediation, suspend-
ing relationality, and breaking free from “the correlationist circle...which
separated thought from the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being
is indifferent to whether or not it is thought” (2008a, 63).21 Such an account

19
Derrida’s anti-masculine logic can also be seen in his discussion of God’s sacrificial
command to Abraham. The demand to sacrifice Isaac place Abraham in an asymmetrical relation
to God: “What can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without
relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other [tout autre comme tout autre], in particular my relation
to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent
as Jahweh” (1995, 78). J. Hillis Miller rightly points to the exemplary character of Derrida’s
example: “The radical strength of Derrida’s argument here is to say no to this copout. No, he
says, each one of us, every instant of every day, is in exactly the same situation as Abraham on
Mount Moriah with his knife raised over Isaac. Abraham’s situation is exemplary, paradigmatic,
not exceptional” (2009, 219). The ethical must pass through the less than transparent feminine
logic of sexuation.
20
To be clear, Meillassoux’s world-without-me should not be conflated with what Thomas
Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” His speculative realism complicates all hierarchical positions
(including God’s): “The successive upheavals brought about by the mathematization of nature
are better understood as resulting from the loss of every privileged point of view and from the
dissolution of the ontological hierarchization of places” (2008a, 136).
21
Harman also advocates a retreat from relational ontology, preferring instead to attend to
individual substances, but ones that are rehabilitated and no longer conceived as timeless entities:
“The wager of object-oriented philosophy is that th[e] programmatic movement towards holistic
interaction is an idea once but no longer liberating, and that the real discoveries now lie on
the other side of the yard. The problem with individual substances was never that they were

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 symplokeˉ 405

affirms the value of objectivity and flatly rules out the “easy relativisms”22 of
correlationists, but also makes no room for hesitation, removing others from
the frictions and messiness of intersubjective life. But in what way could this
“describe” the other—be it human or not? What would a speculative realist
make of Simone de Beauvoir’s project in The Second Sex to write a book about
“feminine reality” as opposed to “human reality”23? Does her gendering
of finitude merely compound Heidegger’s original error, since he was not
describing “eternal reality”?24

autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple,
or directly accessible by certain privileged observers. By contrast, the objects of object-oriented
philosophy are mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible
only through oblique allusion. This is not the oft-lamented ’naïve realism’ of oppressive and
benighted patriarchs, but a weird realism in which real individual objects resist all forms of causal
or cognitive mastery” (2012, 187-88). While Harman does not share Meillassoux’s aspiration
for cognitive mastery of the great outdoors, his suggestive notion of a “weird realism” does
little to overcome the latter’s fantasy of transparency: by excluding any relationality with the
objects, Harman can only speak of the existence of positive objects in the world that are formally
transparent in their ontological recalcitrance or withdrawnness.
22
I am using Donna Haraway’s formulation of “easy relativisms” an expression she deploys
in her attempt to go beyond the false choice between relativism and totalization: “Relativism
and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally
and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science. But it is precisely in the politics and
epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry
rests” (Haraway 1988, 584). Haraway insists on a model of the knower, a demoted cogito, if
you will: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and
original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with
another, to see together without claiming to be another” (1988, 586). This incomplete knower,
however, also resists the lure of “easy relativisms” and is still committed to the goals of objectivity,
to giving an account of the referential world: “I want to argue for a doctrine and practice of
objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed
connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing. But not
just any partial perspective will do; we must be hostile to easy relativisms and holisms built out of
summing and subsuming parts” (1988, 585). Haraway’s “situated knowledges”—which can be
characterized as a self-critical correlationist stance—supports Meillassoux’s critique of reductive
constructivism but also offers an alternative to his call for a world-without-me epistemology. For a
fruitful discussion of the ways a feminist critique of correlationism converges and diverges with
those of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, see Sheldon.
23
Beauvoir relies on Henri Corbin’s mistranslation of Heidegger’s Dasein (literally Being-
there) as “réalité-humaine” (“human reality”). Derrida describes Corbin’s rendering as a
“monstrous translation” (1982, 115) in “The Ends of Man,” but in the hands of Beauvoir this
mistranslation arguably takes an innovative turn in its juxtaposition with “feminine reality.”
24
Monique Wittig has been critical of feminisms that fetishize, by naturalizing/de-
historicizing, the condition of women. “What does ‘feminist’ mean? Feminist is formed with
the word ‘femme,’ ‘woman,’ and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it
means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For
many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense—for the myth, then, and
its reinforcement…. Our task…is to always thoroughly dissociate ‘women’ (the class within
which we fight) and ‘woman,’ the myth” (1992, 14-15). In light of Wittig’s materialist feminist
critique, Meillassoux’s emphasis on the eternal risks contributing further to the ideological myth
of Woman—the eternal other of Man.

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406 Zahi Zalloua On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage“

Doing justice to human and non-human others informs much of Derrida’s

ethical thinking.25 Derrida’s formulation of the “relation without relation,”
which prefigures his reflections on autoimmunity, offers us an alternative
way of breaking free from the transparent cage, of stepping outside the
correlationist circle, without, at the same time, reintroducing another form
of phantasmatic transparency—the other as transparent only in isolation,
absent any distorting relations or textual mediation (a “deeply non-relational
conception of the reality of things is the heart of object-oriented philosophy,”
writes Harman [2012, 187]).26 Derrida’s “relation without relation” avoids
the pitfalls and shortcomings of speculative realism. It does not fetishize
the other/object as an autonomous and self-contained entity with a “definite
character” and “subterranean reality” (“The Well-Wrought” 195, 186). Indeed,
it foregrounds the encounter with others, that is, the exposure to the other’s
alterity and affectivity (I am not only affecting but also being affected by
the other27). It answers the external call of the other, my interpellation by
the other. It readily confronts the aporetic demands of the other, where the
other is neither fully subdued nor withdrawn, but unruly and hospitable: to
be understood (to be engaged with) and yet not be reduced to an object of
comprehension (to be reduced to its relations, to any schemes of thought), to
never dissolve the “without” of the “relation without relation” that interrupts
any fixed correlation and attends to the alterity of the real other.

WHITMAN COLLEGE

25
For instance, Derrida raises the status of his cat to the level of humans: his cat’s singularity
exposes the inadequacies of language: “If I say ‘it is a real cat’ that sees me naked, this is in order
to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name…it doesn’t do so as the
exemplar of a species called ‘cat,’ even less so of an ‘animal’ genus or kingdom. It is true that
I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identification, it comes to me as this
irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter
me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have
here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized [rebelle à tout concept]” (Derrida 2008, 9).
Derrida follows here in the footsteps of the pre-Cartesian or anti-Cartesian Montaigne, who also
muses on his cat’s affectivity: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to
her more than she is to me?” (“The Apology for Raymond Sebond” 331; cf. Derrida 2008, 6).
Agentiality—enacted in the cat’s “capacity to respond” (2008, 163n8)—is on the cat’s side as
much as on Montaigne’s.
26
Bryant’s object-oriented ontology allows for more contact or friction among things than
Harman’s: “For Harman objects are withdrawn from all relations and we are to think of objects
independent of their relations. As he argues, objects never touch. While I hold that objects can
be severed from the relations they currently entertain—though in many instances this can lead to
death or destruction—it seems to me that what is most important is what happens when entities
encounter one another” (Bryant 2013).
27
Gilles Deleuze’s thinking on affect is obviously informing my reading of Derrida: “If you
define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change.
You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its functions, and
not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable” (Deleuze 1988, 124).

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 symplokeˉ 407

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