Chapter Title: Before Infinitude: A Levinasian Response to Meillassoux’s Speculative

Realism
Chapter Author(s): Lee Braver

Book Title: Continental Realism and Its Discontents

Book Editor(s): MARIE-EVE MORIN
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

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Chapter 3

Before Infinitude:
A Levinasian Response to
Meillassoux’s Speculative
Realism
Lee Braver

And so, once again, the real. Lacan might be on to something – it does
always return, though, strangely, we never seem to be able to settle the
matter. Never definitively achieved, never left behind – such is the reality
of philosophers.
A number of years ago, a brash young philosopher wrote that the his-
tory of continental philosophy is largely a history of anti-realism.1 Since
its birth, this headstrong go-getter argued, continental philosophy has
been working on and working out its Kantian heritage, in particular, the
notion that our access to the world is always mediated, essentially oblique.
This makes the notion of ‘the world itself’ rather problematic, for what
can we say when we try to address it directly? What, after all, can we say
about this ‘it’ itself if we are always limited to what we can say about
it? That same year, another philosopher, in a far more concise (and far
better-selling) work, wrote that twentieth-century philosophy has been
dominated by what he called ‘correlationism’.2 This view holds that we
can only think about being as it is thought about, that is, in correlation
with consciousness or some variation thereof: Dasein, language, Geist and
so on.
Now, if Derrida is right, any telling of the history of philosophy
(indeed, any text at all, though we will stick with the weaker claim) can
be read in multiple, often (always?) incompatible ways. If he is right,3 this
would mean not that these anti-realist or correlationist readings are wrong,
but neither are they exclusively, definitively, exhaustively correct. Any
telling of the history of philosophy will ignore undercurrents of alternate
histories flowing through the same stream. In this case, it would mean that
continental philosophy can also be told as largely a history of realism (and
analytic philosophy as predominantly anti-realist, but that is a different

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 60 | lee brave r

project). I’d like to spend this paper doing a bit of fishing in one of these
undercurrents, the undercurrent of continental realism.4
There is no question that the shadows of Kant and Hegel, idealists
of one stripe or another, loom large over continental thinkers. But, of
course, one of the ways to deal with an overwhelming influence is to fight
it, and one of their greatest critics is Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas was, like
Quentin Meillassoux, a committed enemy of correlationism, although he
did not believe it to be confined to the twentieth century. No, for Levinas,
correlationism defined philosophy through and through (aside from a very
few exceptions, such as moments in Plato and Descartes). However, his
analysis, and his critique, are quite different from Meillassoux’s, and in
this essay I want to set up a dialogue between these two great opponents
of correlationism.
Meillassoux defines correlationism as the necessary connection between
thought and reality, the idea that ‘we only ever have access to the correla-
tion between thinking and being, and never to either term considered
apart from the other’.5 Conceding the seductiveness of this idea,6 he ulti-
mately finds the notion tremendously limiting as it rules out all contact
with a reality that exceeds our experience, thus deflating the very realness
of reality. For Levinas, beginning as he did from phenomenology and,
in a certain sense, never leaving it, this kind of correlation is inescap-
able. Although he never stops seeking the transcendent, Levinas does not
think of it as something wholly outside our awareness, repeatedly insist-
ing on ‘the interdiction against seeking the beyond as a world behind
our world’,7 rejecting ‘the factitious transcendence of worlds behind the
scenes’.8 Meillassoux does not think of the Absolute this way either, con-
ceiving of it instead as fundamentally independent of human awareness.
Levinas, however, remains loyal to a version of Husserl’s ‘principle of all
principles’ that any evidence for claims must be brought to experience in
some way just for us to speak and think about them.9
Meillassoux lays out two arguments against correlationism in After
Finitude: a quick, easy one and a long, complex one. Here, I will focus on
the former, the so-called, ‘problem of ancestrality’,10 with a few passing
remarks on the latter. Meillassoux’s basic question concerns the time before
humans were around, what he calls ‘ancestral’ reality. The problem follows
from ‘this simple observation: today’s science formulates a certain number
of ancestral statements bearing upon the age of the universe, the forma-
tion of stars, or the accretion of the earth’,11 which, he holds, cannot lie
down peacefully with any form of idealism. Now, this issue has been raised
before, for example, in the question about the age of the sun that A. J. Ayer
purportedly put to Bataille and Merleau-Ponty in 1951 in a bar in Paris in
a conversation that ‘continued until three o’clock in the morning’.12

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 61

The standard correlationist response is that any ‘before-us’ must neces-

sarily ‘be-for-us’. All temporal measurements and relations employ con-
cepts and ways of measuring that are always ours, bringing them within
our ways of thinking, which they can never escape: these matters are, as
Kant put it, transcendentally ideal. There is the sphere of human experi-
ence, outside of which ancestral time takes place, but this outside must in
turn occupy a position inside a larger space of human time – not the time
of actual human lives, but of human understanding. Were we not speaking
of matters that we can in principle comprehend, we could not even make
sense of claims that they transcend our comprehension. This move replaces
all assertions concerning that which precedes us with an anti-realist, scare
quote version of them: evolution happened ‘before’ humans, certainly, but
in a before-us-for-us-and-so-in-a-more-sophisticated-sense-after-us. Given
the way we think about time, date fossils and so forth, stars certainly
existed long before any clearing of human awareness, but this entire process
of establishing and understanding such claims takes place within a clear-
ing, our present scientific one in particular. Thus, as Nelson Goodman and
Heidegger (both early and late13) would have it, various things ‘pre-existed’
our version within our version, what Meillassoux calls ‘a retrojection of the
past on the basis of the present’.14 Talk about the child being father to the
man! Ancestral time gets swallowed up within the larger context of tempo-
ral comprehension; as our progenitor, time remains within our family tree.
Meillassoux fully understands and appreciates the force of this response,
what he calls ‘the apparently unanswerable force of the correlationalist
circle’, yet he rejects it because – in the short argument – of ‘its irre-
mediable incompatibility with ancestrality (contrary to the correlation-
ist)’.15 Whereas the correlationist believes that she accommodates ancestral
statements about reality before humans, and hence before the correlation
between reality and thought was set, Meillassoux finds this highly tempt-
ing attempt a failure.
The correlationist resorts to fancy hermeneutic footwork to assimilate
ancestral claims. Yes, she says, there was a sun before humans, but we must
place scare quotes around that ‘before’ because even radical befores only
occur contemporaneously with us; befores can only get a temporal foot-
hold ‘after’ we come on the scene and establish them. Meillassoux finds it
short work to point out that a before us that must occur after us is not a
genuine before, so the correlationist has not preserved the scientist’s ances-
tral claim but has distorted it, fatally compromised it, leaving out precisely
that which makes it ancestral. In supposedly translating the scientist, the
correlationist has left out her meaning, patronisingly telling us what she
really meant, what she must have meant, what she could only have meant.
This is, quite simply, a mistranslation:

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 62 | lee brave r

An ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense.
If one divides the sense of the statement, if one invents for it a deeper sense
conforming to the correlation but contrary to its realist sense, then far from
deepening its sense, one has simply cancelled it. This is what we shall express
in terms of the ancestral statement’s irremediable realism: either this state-
ment has a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all.16

Despite protests that she fully respects science, the correlationist regresses
into archaic ways of thinking: fideism, Ptolemaic astronomy, even funda-
mentalist creationism.
Now Levinas would agree that twentieth-century philosophy has been
one of correlationism, but only because that is true of the entire his-
tory of philosophy.17 The trend has, perhaps, accelerated since Descartes’s
epistemological turn to subjectivity, German idealism’s emphasis on the
subject’s role in constituting reality, and phenomenology’s refusal to spec-
ulate about reality as it falls outside the purview of our experience (do the
brackets ever truly get removed?), but the basic idea goes back a bit further,
to Plato and Plotinus. ‘The Soul and, in our times, the incarnate Soul,
man, are interpreted as unavoidable moments in the play of Being itself.’18
Indeed, Levinas often uses the very term chosen by Meillassoux: ‘as mani-
festation, consciousness of . . . can be expressed in terms of subjectivity as
well as in terms of being; there is strict correlation here.’19
The reason correlationism can be found throughout philosophy is that
it is embedded in ‘the structure of all thought, which is correlation. . . .
To appear, to seem, is forthwith to resemble terms of an already familiar
order.’20 Expressing the same appreciation of its force as Meillassoux,
Levinas writes that ‘idealism imposes itself like a tautology: what appears
as being – appears, and consequently is found directly or indirectly within
the limits of consciousness. What exceeds the limits of consciousness is
absolutely nothing for that consciousness.’21 It is the nature of thought and
knowledge to bring about a particular kind of relationship between real-
ity and thinking, which differs from the one that Meillassoux diagnoses.
Levinas is worried about an experiential correlation, where the very notion
of reality depends on coming into contact with our awareness, presumably
thinking of comments such as these by Husserl:
It must always be borne in mind here that whatever physical things are – the
only physical things about which we can make statements, the only ones
about the being or non-being, the being-thus or being-otherwise of which
we can disagree and make rational decisions – they are as experienceable physi-
cal things. It is experience alone that prescribes their sense.22

Our very ability to determine what something is, or that it is, depends on
our ability to experience it in some way, making it ‘counter-sense’ to claim

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 63

that something that exceeds or precedes our experiential capacities is real.

Not causally, but conceptually does reality depend on our bestowing the
sense ‘real’ on to it. Having the meaning ‘real’ is, almost tautologically,
what it means to be real, and meaning can only be given by the being who
makes meaning – us. The title of the chapter from which Husserl’s quote
is taken is: ‘The Natural World as a Correlate of Consciousness’.
Levinas began his career as a phenomenologist, studying with Husserl
and Heidegger and writing some of the first works on both in French,
and, while he certainly stretched and strained the school’s precepts, he
never abandoned them. Near the beginning of Totality and Infinity, he
writes that ‘the presentation and the development of the notions employed
owe everything to the phenomenological method’.23 And towards the end
of his other great work, Otherwise than Being, he says that his ‘analyses
claim to be in the spirit of Husserlian philosophy. . . . Our presentation of
notions . . . remains faithful to intentional analysis, insofar as it signifies
the locating of notions in the horizon of their appearing.’24 In particu-
lar, he sticks to the phenomenological commitment to find ‘concrete’
instantiations of abstract notions within actual experiences: ‘This way of
approaching an idea by asserting the concreteness of a situation in which
it originally assumes meaning seems to me essential to phenomenology. It
is presupposed in everything I have just said.’25 For example, if we are to
philosophise about God, as he does, it can only be of the ‘God who comes
to mind’, in the words of the title of one of his books – the holy being as it
enters the clearing – for otherwise how could we speak of such matters?26
Here begins the theological turn in French phenomenology.
Thus, Levinas qualifies as a correlationist in Meillassoux’s sense. His
commitment to the spirit of phenomenology means that he will only
philosophise about the world that we can have some experience of, for
experiences are the only ‘data’ on which we can base analyses. Absent
all awareness, we would not even know that there was something to talk
about, much less what to say about it. But that does not mean that he was
a faithful disciple. It seems a quasi-Hegelian law governing the history of
ideas that those original thinkers who most want obedient followers attract
strong thinkers who end up using the tools given them by their intellec-
tual masters to slay them, a fate that befell Husserl repeatedly. As Derrida,
one of Levinas’s first and best readers, writes, Levinas uses phenomenol-
ogy against itself27 by finding something in experience that overturns or
exceeds experience. This occurs above all in what Levinas calls ‘experience
preeminently’,28 ‘experience par excellence’29 and ‘the great experience’:30
the experience of the face.
This particular concrete encounter is so central to his thought that
Levinas often speaks of a phenomenology of the face somewhat the way

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 64 | lee brave r

Husserl might consider ‘phenomenology of consciousness’ to be a pleo-

nasm. This is the experience that alters the very notion of experience –
along with concomitant concepts such as consciousness, intentionality,
concepts. What makes this experience paradigmatic is that, in a certain
sense, it is not an experience, at least not in any traditional sense, that is,
not in any sense that still clings to making sense. Phenomenology claims
that all experiences in principle must make some kind of sense since they
appear within a horizon, that is, within a collection of concepts that fit it
into an intelligible order, similar to how Newtonian physics and Euclidean
geometry structure and limit the space of possible experience for Kant.
The encounter with the face is certainly an encounter with a phe-
nomenon – it must appear to us in order for us to become aware of it,
in order for it to make any impact upon us whatsoever (‘for the Other
cannot present himself as Other outside of my conscience’31) – but it is a
phenomenon that subverts the structure of phenomenality. The face of the
other, paradoxically, appears as not appearing,32 as infinitely exceeding all
appearances; she is not the aspects that manifest themselves, but neither is
she some further being hiding behind a merely phenomenal façade. The
experience of the other escapes, even violates, the concepts that phenom-
enology deems necessary for experience. We cannot make sense of the
other because the sense of the other is to exceed all sense we make of her,
making any sense we make of her a counter-sense, in Husserl’s sense. Her
sense is to be a counter-sense, which forms the very sense of ethics.

Ethical language, which phenomenology resorts to in order to mark its own

interruption . . . is the very meaning of approach, which contrasts with
knowing. No language other than ethics could be equal to the paradox
which phenomenological description enters when, starting with the disclo-
sure, the appearing of a neighbour, it reads it in its trace, which . . . cannot
be synchronised in representation.33

Whereas idealism, ontology and phenomenology all rest on a tautology,

Levinasian ethics is constructed on a contradiction.
This experience overturns the fundamental structure that has governed
the understanding of knowledge, truth, experience, being and other fun-
damental ideas for millennia. That nearly ubiquitous governing structure
has been correlationist, but in a very different sense than Meillassoux’s.
Instead of viewing it as the bare connection between reality and our
awareness that defines correlationism for Meillassoux – something that,
as we have seen, Levinas, the heretical phenomenologist, still accepts –
­correlationism is for Levinas a more restrictive relationship. He argues
that the West’s relationship between thought and being imposes a homo-
geneity between the two. If we are to think and, even more, know being,

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 65

then being must be thinkable and knowable – a simple tautology (in

Meillassoux’s formulation of what he calls the circle of correlation: ‘if you
think X, then you think X’34). This means that being must be digestible by
our mental processes. The world has to fit into our thought-holes if we are
to think it, and if the world does not, as is the case with Kant’s things-in-
themselves, then we either filter it out or force it in by shearing off all the
knobbly noumenal bits that stick out.
Generally speaking, truth means the adequation between representation and
external reality. . . . The fact that being unveils itself, that it shines forth, that
its being consists in being true, implies that the contours of being fit into the
human scale and the measures of thought.35

On this model, being – the only being that we can say or think that it
is – must be thinkable; it must match up with our capacity to think, or else
we would not know that it was, even to declare it unthinkable. But that
effects a massive reduction in what reality may be, for it is not allowed by
us to exceed us. This ratchets up Kant’s ‘highest principle of all synthetic
judgments . . . that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general
are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’,36 since
his formulation still distinguishes the world-for-us from how it is in-itself,
which behaves very differently. Hegel’s version of Kant’s highest principle
removes this restriction: ‘logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics’.37
The world is as our minds are, for we cannot pull the two apart: the mind
knows not the unminded world. We cannot, in John McDowell’s image,
see mind and world sideways-on to sift them out, but only frontways,
inescapably viewing the world through our mental apparatus. This is why,
for Heidegger, ‘only as phenomenology, is ontology possible’ because ‘our
investigation . . . asks about Being itself in so far as Being enters into the
intelligibility of Dasein’.38
For Levinas, these more overt, sophisticated versions of idealism just
spell out what was implicit in ontology and epistemology from the begin-
ning (despite his admiration for early Heidegger, he ends up seeing him as
extending the tradition rather than escaping or overthrowing it). As soon
as the Greeks conceived of being and knowing in terms of light, presence
and, yes, correlation, Western thought was set on its path; these recent
systems represent merely accelerations, not a change in course. What
Levinas wants is to find something that is correlated in the sense of being
our experience, without being correlated in the sense of fitting into our
ways of understanding, and he finds it in the experience of the face (along
with God).
What we can now see is that correlation divides into two kinds. There
is the weak kind that simply depends upon some form of awareness – let

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 66 | lee brave r

us call this kind correlationa – and the stronger, more restrictive kind con-
sisting in knowing being, which we can call correlationk. Now, Levinas’s
entire philosophical project is to find an experience, broadly conceived,
that exceeds the bounds of knowledge, broadly conceived, and therefore
does not have to be cut down to the scale of what we can comprehend.
It must still be an experience, contra Meillassoux, because of his commit-
ment to one of the fundamental intuitions informing phenomenology:
we must be aware of something in order to talk about it at all. But his
innovation is the claim that not everything that we can become aware of
must play by the rules of understanding or intelligibility. In other words,
Levinas bases his thought on a direct contradiction of Kant’s highest
principle of all synthetic judgements: the conditions of our faculties of
processing experience do not determine the limits of all possible objects
of experience. Impossible experiences, that is, experiences that violate
and rupture our concepts, are possible: we can run across non-Euclidean
shapes, non-Newtonian events. Indeed, we come across them every time
we see another’s face, every time we open the door for another, every time
we say, ‘Bonjour!’, that is, in ‘the extraordinary and everyday event’ of
encountering others.39 These encounters, which he calls infinite because
they cannot be contained, are paradigmatic experiences because they truly
come to us from without; they come upon us by absolute surprise without
the possibility of transcendental anticipation. ‘The idea of infinity exceeds
my powers (not quantitatively, but, we will see later, by calling them into
question); it does not come from our a priori depths – it is consequently
experience par excellence.’40 To put this in my terms, we have an experi-
ence which is hence correlateda, that breaks free of our comprehension,
thus escaping correlationk: ‘The relationship with the Infinite then no
longer has the structure of an intentional correlation.’41 The former cor-
relation is necessary; the latter limiting, distorting, like Procrustes’ bed. An
experience that threads the needle by satisfying the former while avoiding
the latter overturns twenty-five centuries of ontological oppression and
exclusion. ‘Transcendence designates a relation with a reality infinitely dis-
tant from my own reality [that is, violating correlationk – LB], yet without
this distance destroying this relation [that is, preserving correlationa – LB]
and without this relation destroying this distance.’42
What is interesting about this conceptual formation is that it is the
reverse image of Meillassoux’s innovation, for he seeks something that sat-
isfies correlationk while escaping the supposed need for correlationa, that is,
knowledge we can achieve that in no way depends upon the human capac-
ity for awareness. Meillassoux finds this in the evidence for the ‘ancestral’,
what he calls the ‘arche-fossil’: ‘any reality anterior to the emergence of the
human species’.43 Since it wholly precedes awareness, ancestral reality can

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 67

in no way, not even conceptually, depend upon awareness, thus escaping

correlationa. What breaks us out of correlationa, then, for Meillassoux,
is scientific knowledge of the arche-fossil. He insists on ‘mathematical
discourse[’s ability] to describe a world where humanity is absent; a world
crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any mani-
festation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world’.44
Meillassoux’s thought, in a certain sense, inverts Heidegger’s: it is the
search for our not-being-in-the-world, Dasein’s authentically not-being-
there. And it is mathematics, the paradigm of knowledge since Plato, that
lets us peer over the horizon of our own clearing, enabling us to become
aware of that which precedes all awareness. For Meillassoux, mathematical
knowledge exceeds awareness: correlationk gets us out of correlationa.
For Levinas, on the other hand, certain experiences – ethical experiences
of the Other – exceed the possibilities of knowledge, reason, concepts: cor-
relationa breaks us free of correlationk. He’s quite insistent on this contrast:
‘what is produced here is not a reasoning, but the epiphany that occurs as a
face.’45 This is because Levinas sees an incompatibility between knowledge
and otherness: to know something is to reduce it to our ways of knowing,
a horizon of already present concepts, which removes whatever does not
fit them: ‘When the Other enters into the horizon of knowledge, it already
renounces alterity. . . . It infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge.’46
Where Meillassoux’s exteriority only finds expression in mathematical
­science,47 Levinas’s only comes out in ethics.
Meillassoux finds correlationism claustrophobic. For too long, it has
forced us to study being only as it appears to us, ruling out anything else
as conceptually incoherent. This creates
a strange feeling of imprisonment. . . . If this outside seems to us to be a
cloistered outside, an outside in which one may legitimately feel incarcer-
ated, this is because in actuality such an outside is entirely relative, since
it is – and this is precisely the point – relative to us. . . . In actuality, we
do not transcend ourselves very much by plunging into such a world. . . .
Contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside
of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which
was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself
regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not [correlationa]; that outside
which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign
territory – of being entirely elsewhere.48

The external world of the correlationista is not genuinely external, he

says, but merely a projection we carry around with us which we can never
escape, no more than you can see past the edge of your visual field by turn-
ing your head or get to the other side of the rainbow.
Levinas uses many of the same metaphors; one of his first works is

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 68 | lee brave r

titled ‘On Escape’ and the last chapter of Otherwise Than Being is called
‘Outside’. He too spies a false opening actually keeping us locked within
an interior: ‘Focusing on being, [thought] is outside itself, but remains
marvelously within itself, or returns to itself. The exteriority or otherness
of the self is recaptured in immanence. . . . One learns only what one
already knows.’49 The difference is that what Meillassoux uses as the key
to escape – knowledge – is precisely what Levinas casts as the bars keeping
us in. One says that ‘what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a cor-
relate of thought’,50 whereas the other claims that ‘the alleged sovereignty
of objectifying thought . . . in fact imprisons the thinker within himself
and his categories’.51 Levinas, too, seeks ‘the experience of something abso-
lutely foreign’,52 but he thinks that trying to escape the legacy of Kant’s
transcendentalism through mathematics and science, the very disciplines
Kant’s transcendentalism is built to protect and the forms of knowledge
Kant hard-wired into the ways we become aware of anything, is exactly
the wrong solution.53 ‘We are so habituated to the language of knowledge
that we even state that which breaches presence in terms of knowledge.’54
To quote Hume’s dry critique of Descartes’s appeal to the reality of God
in order to legitimate our trust in our senses, such an argument is ‘surely
making a very unexpected circuit’.55
Knowledge is not the solution, for Levinas; it is the problem. It cannot
get us outside of ourselves since it is the beating heart of our homogenis-
ing clearing, as Heidegger also argues: ‘science always encounters only
what its kind of representation has admitted beforehand as an object pos-
sible for science’.56 In Levinas’s words, for this way of thinking, ‘an entity
counts only on the basis of knowing’.57 Meillassoux objects that, for the
correlationist, ‘to be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation’,58 but
Levinas would argue that he retains this formulation, merely changing the
final term to ‘mathematical’, turning the correlationa into a correlationk.
Any prescription of what reality must be in order for it to be is an exam-
ple of correlationk, which does not get free of subjectivity’s assimilation.
The great outdoors Meillassoux plants his flag in, this ‘absolute outside’
is nothing of the kind, for it must speak the language of mathematics
in order to be recognised as such. It still depends on recognition by our
­cognition, our bestowal of sense, just via mathematics.
Continental philosophers are not misologists or haters of science, as
they are sometimes caricatured, but they do frequently express wariness of
reason and science, a concern for what it leaves out and what it represses.
One of the refreshing features of Meillassoux’s work is the way he embraces
them and warns of the dangers involved in their dismissal. Nevertheless,
from a Levinasian perspective, this embrace compromises the very exter-
nality he seeks, since the outside must still conform to our mathematical

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 69

and scientific expectations and requirements in order to count as outside.

This sets ourselves up as the judges of externality, the Ptolemaic centres of
the universe, which has the effect of domesticating any foreignness before
one can even be established. In other words, correlationk stops the trip to
the great outdoors before it can even begin.
Levinas and Meillassoux would both accuse the other of remaining
within a hall of mirrors where one only sees reflections of oneself, employ-
ing criticisms that form mirror images of each other. Meillassoux would
say that, since Levinas anchors his work on experience, no matter how
broadly conceived, he never breaks free of the gravitational field of aware-
ness, never reaches a true outside of human consciousness. Levinas would
respond that Meillassoux tries to get out of human awareness by using
a tool that actually extends humanity’s touch as surely as Kant’s tran-
scendental ego phenomenologises all noumena that it encounters. This
is ‘because of the universality of knowledge . . . and the impossibility
for anything to be on the outside’.59 Just as Meillassoux condemns what
Levinas considers a necessary tool – experience – so Levinas proscribes
Meillassoux’s chosen instrument: ‘knowledge never encounters anything
truly other in the world. This is the profound truth of idealism.’60 Precisely
where Meillassoux finds the gift of realism, Levinas sees the poison of
­idealism, raising the same objection of the false outside:

As knowledge, thought bears upon the thinkable called being; bearing upon
being, it is outside of itself, to be sure, but remains, marvelously, in itself.
The exteriority, alterity, or antiquity, of what is ‘already there’ in the known,
is taken up again into immanence: the known is at once the other and the
property of thought. Nothing pre-exists.61

This mention of the past brings the two thinkers into another interest-
ing proximity, since it is ancestral reality, the time before humans were
around and hence anterior to awareness, givenness, clearing and so on,
that motivates Meillassoux’s argument (the first, simple argument of After
Finitude, as I specified above; I am not discussing here the second, com-
plicated argument about the necessity of contingency). And yet Levinas
seems to be brashly denying the past, just as Meillassoux predicts: any
philosopher wedded to correlationa must deny the past, if she were being
honest or, at any rate, literal. In fact, however, Levinas is not denying a
deep past, but recasting it, as he did with experience.
Levinas’s critique of knowledge as a way out (he is not rejecting knowl-
edge wholesale, of course) is that it works by subsuming new facts or
individual events under familiar, general concepts: ‘The achievement of
knowledge consists of grasping the object. Its strangeness is then con-
quered. Its newness, the opening up of its otherness, is reduced to the

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 70 | lee brave r

‘same’, to what has already been seen, already known.’62 In his oft-repeated
phrasing, it reduces the other to the same because we re-cognise old ideas
in new phenomena: ‘Oh, I see, that’s just another one of that kind of
thing.’ Besides eliminating the unique features of each entity, which is
‘violent’ and unethical when done to people, it is a power play. We tame
the threatening, unsettling wilderness of the unknown by setting ourselves
up in intellectual control of the situation by comprehending it, encom-
passing it within our grasp. Understanding it, we stand over it, ‘lords and
masters’ of the situation intellectually, even if it actually overpowers us:
The detour of ideality leads to a coinciding with oneself, that is, to the
certainty which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual
adventure of Being. That is why the ‘adventure’ is not exactly an adventure.
It is never dangerous. It is always a self-possession, sovereignty, arche. What
arrives of the unknown is already disclosed, open, manifest, cast in the mold
of the known, and can never come as a complete surprise.63

Meillassoux’s daring adventure into the great outdoors, for Levinas, is

merely camping in his parents’ backyard with all the comforts of home
within arm’s reach because he clings to the essentially familiar forms of
mathematics and science as his guide. With their aid, Meillassoux retrojects
his awareness into the ancestral past, à la Berkeley (a low blow, I realise), by
following the trail of our re-cognisable notions of time and causality back
into the past, an understandable anterior and so correlatedk interior. His
ancestral past is transparent to comprehension, thereby pushing the bound-
ary of our clearing back to encompass it rather than getting clear of it.
The only way to get out of this homogenising power grasp of all expe-
rience is to dislocate the self at the centre of the web of knowledge, to
introduce experiences or ‘concepts’ that undermine and disrupt the forms
we use to structure a reassuring, stable system.
Everything depends on the possibility of vibrating with a meaning that is
not synchronised with the speech that captures it and cannot be fitted into
its order; everything depends on the possibility of a signification that would
signify in an irreducible disturbance . . . a time, a plot, and norms that are
not reducible to the understanding of being.64

One of these counter-concepts is, of course, the face: ‘our relation with
the other certainly consists in wanting to comprehend him, but this rela-
tion overflows comprehension . . . because in our relation with the other,
he does not affect us in terms of a concept’.65 Another is the infinite.
Indeed, in an argument that parallels Meillassoux’s complex argument,
which turns our supposed ignorance of reality itself due to our finitude
into a positive knowledge of its chaotic nature,66 Levinas argues that ‘what
was taken as an imperfection of human knowledge measured by a certain

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 71

ideal of self-evidence and certitude becomes a positive characteristic of the

approach of a certain type of reality’.67
Time is another counter-concept. Meillassoux and Levinas are conti-
nental philosophers, so it was inevitable that the issue would come down
to their conceptions of time, which, oddly enough, both call by the same
name: diachrony (Meillassoux inserts a hyphen after ‘dia’). Levinas creates
an innovative account of time to accommodate the infinite experience of
the other. Instead of its traditional definition of a series of now-points
where the past is a moment that previously was a now but is presently gone
and the future is a now that has not yet happened, Levinas speaks of a past
that was never present, which he calls a trace, as well as a future that will
never come (or that, as Derrida puts it, forever remains ‘à venir’, to come).
Once again, he locates a phenomenological basis for this view in an experi-
ence: when the other looks at me, I find myself bound by a responsibility
to her even though I never agreed to it, guilty before her even if I have not
offended her. The moment of contracting responsibility for/to the other,
like the social contract, never actually happened, yet we live in the wake of
this non-event as we find ourselves bound to the other. The sin that makes
us guilty before the other might never have happened but, like original sin,
we are nevertheless tainted by it and responsible for it. We live forever in
the after-effects of moments that never took place, after a before that never
was but which makes the present what it is. The trace is a before-us that
would not be-for-us.
Correlatively, there is a future that is not a present-that-will-arrive, but
the time after my death which, like Heidegger’s being-toward-death (in
this sense, at least), retroactively infuses my present:

The Future for which such an action acts must from the first be posited as
indifferent to my death. As different from play and from computations is the
Work being-for-beyond-my-death. . . . To envisage this triumph in a time
without me, to aim at this world without me . . . to be for a time that would
be without me, for a time after my time, over and beyond the famous ‘being
for death’, is not an ordinary thought which is extrapolating my own dura-
tion; it is the passage to the time of the Other.68

This is the time of my child who both is and is not me, undermining iden-
tity. I will live through my child, loosening Heidegger’s restrictive empha-
sis on Jemeinigkeit and the end of my projects in death, but of course it
will not be me living that life. My identity, my investment, my selfhood,
get spread out in a way that cannot be recovered and re-collected into a
stable, substantial self.
Meillassoux’s dia-chrony – the ancestral past and scientifically pro-
jected future after humans are gone, as well as the time after my own

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 72 | lee brave r

death – employs our familiar notions of time as one damn moment after
another, merely extending them into the distant past or future. This is
well past where we normally trace or project them but these very under-
standable concepts – one of the forms of intelligibility and mathematics
for the original correlationist, Kant69 – illuminate an intelligible path
into this dimming gleam, letting us see past where we would normally
see. Mathematics becomes a chronoscope, so to speak, extending our
awareness instead of pushing past it. This approach obeys what Levinas
calls ‘ontological thought, where the eternal presence to oneself subtends
even its absences in the form of a quest . . . always aris[ing] anew as the
principle of what happens to it’.70 To extend knowledge to the past is
literally to re-present it: ‘it would draw up the temporal disparity into
a present, into a simultaneousness’,71 which means a homogenising cor-
relationk. Meillassoux seeks ‘not the time of consciousness but the time of
science’;72 Levinas does not recognise this distinction. Meillassoux believes
‘that it is science which grants us access to a time that cannot be captured
by any correlation’,73 but we can now see that it remains captured within
correlationk. Whereas Meillassoux thinks that the moral of the Galilean–
Copernican–Cartesian revolution is that ‘what is mathematizable cannot
be reduced to a correlate of thought’,74 Levinas argues that
whatever be the extension of my thoughts, limited by nothing, the Other
cannot be contained by me: he is unthinkable – he is infinite and recognised
as such. This recognition is not produced again as a thought, but is produced
as morality.75

Levinas’s diachrony unsettles the categories we make sense of the world

with – before, after, self, other, free choice, external imposition – in a
slightly similar way to some French readings of Nietzsche’s eternal recur-
rence. Instead of re-establishing our intellectual control over even that
which precedes and exceeds us, the trace unravels our powers, showing us
the inescapable heteronomy lurking beneath all autonomy. Interestingly,
given Meillassoux’s disdain of fideism and in particular of creationism,76
Levinas contrasts continuous, intellectually recuperable time with ‘crea-
tion ex nihilo’. Not that he believes in its literal truth, which he dismisses
as myth or superstition; rather, absolute creation serves as an analogy of ‘a
passivity that does not revert into an assumption’.77 A being created out of
nothing could not have been there to play any role in, nor to have concep-
tual categories to anticipate and make sense of, such an event, inabilities
that mark all of the paradigmatic experiences.
Thus Levinas insists on correlationa, but as a way to resist correlationk: The
Infinite does not enter into a theme like a being to be given in it [correla-
tionk], and thus belie its beyond being. Its transcendence, an exteriority,

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 73

more exterior, more other than any exteriority of being, does not come to
pass save through the subject that confesses or contests it [correlationa].78

Correlational transgressions only happen in the correlation, but they do

not remain within it, similar to Meillassoux’s argumentative strategy: ‘it’s
always from the inside that I try to defeat the correlationist’.79 Experiences
of the Infinite overpower our attempts to comprehend, ‘thus undoing all
the structures of correlation’,80 that is, of correlationk, which inevitably
enforces idealism and compromises realism. ‘The idea of being does not
therefore suffice to sustain the claim of realism, if realism is equivalent
to affirming an alterity outside the Same. Only the idea of the infinite
renders realism possible.’81 Such encounters do not confirm the structures
of knowledge I already possess, but rather unsettle my self. This is how
Levinas gets what Meillassoux wants: ‘to achieve what modern philosophy
has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get
out of ourselves’82 – by cracking open the self’s filtering concepts to allow
in the unthinkable, the genuinely other, the real. ‘For the claim of real-
ism – the recognition of another than I – to be possible, it is necessary that
I myself am not originally what I remain even in my explorations of the
obscure or the unknown.’83
The other than I is not bound by the forms with which I render the
world intelligible; it is what confounds them. That is what makes it other;
that is how I know it is real and not merely my projection. Knowing the
other, on the other hand, compromises her otherness.
Being is immanent in thought and thought does not transcend itself in
knowledge. . . . The transcendent or the absolute, claiming, as it does,
to be unaffected by any relation, can in fact bear no transcendental
sense without immediately losing it: the very fact of its presence to
knowledge signifies the loss of transcendence and of absoluteness. . . .
Intentionality signifies an exteriority in immanence and the immanence
of all exteriority.84

Whereas Meillassoux pursues reality in independence from thought,

Levinas finds it in violations of thought; Meillassoux prizes indifference
whereas Levinas looks for disobedience. Whereas Meillassoux wants ‘to
think a world without thought – a world without the givenness of the
world’,85 Levinas seeks ‘a thought destined to think more than it thinks’
because ‘the paradoxical, formal feature of this idea [of infinity], contain[s]
more than its capacity and . . . break[s] . . . the noetico-noematic cor-
relation’.86 Levinas believes that we break free of correlation ‘only if
thought finds itself faced with an other refractory to categories’87 because
such an experience ‘infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge’.88 It
is only ‘an irreducible otherness [that] is strong enough to “resist” this

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 74 | lee brave r

synchronization of the noetico-noematic correlation’.89 When found, ‘cor-

relation is broken’.90
One reason for Meillassoux’s reliance on mathematics and science is
his need to give content to the Absolute, that is, reality uncorrelateda.91
He argues that the correlationist is forbidden from discussing what the
world might be like outside of our thought of it, except for the basic claim
that it could be radically different.92 ‘If I don’t have a rational procedure
to discover specific properties of the Real, those properties threaten to be
arbitrarily posited.’93 As we have seen, Levinas thinks that no ‘rational
procedure’ can encounter the Real as what is other to reason since it inevi-
tably sifts what it finds through a homogenising rationality, just as Kant’s
transcendental ego cannot but find a spatial, temporal, causal world. But
the strategy I have explained gives Levinas a rejoinder to Meillassoux’s
worry here. Because Levinas grounds his thought in a heretical form of
phenomenology, basing his views on experiences of concrete encounters,
his analyses of the face are rigorous and non-arbitrary, even though they
contravene our ways of making things intelligible. Indeed, his claim would
be that he is being far truer to the spirit of phenomenology than Husserl
since the things themselves are no longer restricted to human intelligibil-
ity. Whereas Meillassoux comes up with what he calls figures of contin-
gency or factuality,94 that is, aspects of absolute reality that we can derive
from the fact that only contingency is necessary (the fundamental conclu-
sion of his complex argument), Levinas is able to determine a number of
features about the other from our encounters with her: our relation with
her is asymmetrical, the other places unsatisfiable ethical demands on us,
she possesses inexhaustible, incomprehensible depth, and so on. It is his
preservation of correlationa, that is, his reliance on experience, that avoids
the mystical hand-waving about true reality that for Meillassoux amounts
to fideism and results in arbitrary characterisations.
In fact, I would argue that Levinas is actually in a stronger position than
Meillassoux. The latter says that

it is because I can conceive the non-being of the correlation [which the

correlationist is forced to admit in order to avoid full-blown idealism, even
though her whole thought prevents her from truly thinking it – LB] that
I can conceive the possibility of an in-itself essentially different from the
world as correlated to human subjectivity.95

As we have seen, Levinas would argue that this uncorrelateda world remains
correlatedk to human subjectivity through Meillassoux’s use of mathemat-
ics to map it, thus never actually getting free of human entanglement. His
in-itself is not ‘essentially different from the world as correlated to human
subjectivity’ since it remains correlated to mathematics. Levinas’s thought,

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 75

on the other hand, avoids the arbitrariness Meillassoux criticises in other

correlationist philosophies while establishing the actuality, not just the
possibility, that reality is essentially different from the one we think. He
achieves both by grounding his thought in experiences, that is, by preserv-
ing Meillassoux’s mortal enemy, correlationa, and showing how it reaches a
truly other reality, a reality we do not return to in familiar recognition, but
rather discover in the wondrous awe before incomprehensible infinitude.

Notes

1. Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 2007).
2. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2007).
3. If Derrida is right, one might be able to read Derrida’s own works this way as well,
such that they are claiming that all works, including his own, can only be read as
making a single, univocal claim, but I am not clever enough to pull off that anti-
deconstructive deconstruction.
4. I have been exploring this undercurrent in other recent works. See Lee Braver, ‘A brief
history of continental realism’, Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 45, no. 2 (2012):
pp. 261–89; ‘On not settling the question of realism’, Speculations IV, 2013, <http://
www.speculations-journal.org/storage/Braver_OnNotSettling_Speculations_IV.
pdf>; ‘Transgressive realism in art’, Methode, vol. 4, no. 5 (2015): pp. 18–29, <http://
www.methode.unito.it/methOJS/index.php/meth/article/view/144>; ‘Thoughts on
the unthinkable’, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, vol. 24 (2015): pp. 1–16,
<http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia24/parrhesia24_braver.pdf>.
5. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 5.
6. Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux,
‘Speculative realism’, Collapse III (2007): pp. 306–449, here p. 409. See also Graham
Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011), pp. 3, 9, 55, 164.
7. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon
Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
p. 60.
8. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), p. 4.
9. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy: First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Kluwer Academic, [1913] 1982),
§24.
10. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 26.
11. Ibid. p. 10.
12. Andreas Vrahimis, Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2013), p. 87.
13. In my view, Heidegger continues to hold this view throughout his writings. See
Braver, A Thing of this World, ch. 6.
14. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 16.
15. Ibid. p. 27.
16. Ibid. p. 17. One wonders what Derrida would have made of Meillassoux’s repeated
insistence on literal meaning, which is also at the heart of his more complicated argu-
ment (see, for instance, Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, pp. 436–7; Meillassoux,

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After Finitude, pp. 51, 121), especially in a text that employs so many metaphors
(ancestral, the great outdoors, etc.). A related objection could be raised concerning
Meillassoux’s embrace of radical contingency, according to which the laws of nature
have ‘no reason, because they are not necessary’ (Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’,
p. 441). This hardly strikes me as what most scientists mean when they speak of physi-
cal laws, despite the fact that just such a violation of the literal meaning of scientific
proclamations, of ‘the scientist’s own conception of her discipline’, is the heart of his
first argument against correlationism (Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 13; see also ibid.
p. 28; Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, pp. 329, 439). Meillassoux very briefly
addresses this point at Harman, Meillassoux, p. 172.
17. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 132: ‘Phenomenality, the exhibition of being’s
essence in truth, is a permanent presupposition of the philosophical tradition of the
West. Being’s esse, through which an entity is an entity, is a matter of thought, gives
something to thought, stands from the first in the open. . . . [Being] has recourse to a
receptivity necessary to its sort of life, if we can put it that way.’
18. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 13. See also Otherwise Than Being, p. 131:
‘That one could think being means, indeed, that the appearing of being belongs
to its very movement of being, that its phenomenality is essential, and that being
cannot do without consciousness, to which manifestation is made.’ See further Basic
Philosophical Writings, pp. 4–5; Otherwise Than Being, pp. 17, 28, 61, 103, 179;
Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 113.
19. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 71.
20. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 67.
21. Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, p. 127. Compare with Kant: ‘that x (the
object) which corresponds to [the manifold of representations] is nothing to us – being,
as it is, something that has to be distinct from all our representations’ (Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, [1781]
1965), A105). And with Hegel: ‘what is not present for consciousness as something
existing in its own right, i.e. what does not appear, is for consciousness nothing at
all’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford
University Press, [1807] 1977), p. 151/§249).
22. Husserl, Ideas I, §47, p. 106.
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 28. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous:
Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 197.
24. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 183.
25. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 227; see also Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind,
trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. xiv.
26. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, pp. 44–5, 68, 156; see also Totality and Infinity, p. 78;
Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 25, 29; Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?
Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), pp. 222, 236. In his long-awaited book The Divine Inexistence,
Meillassoux writes of a God who may come someday. Harman, Meillassoux, ch. 3,
Appendix.
27. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 118, 133, 141, 312 n. 14. See also Braver, A Thing of This
World, pp. 281–2 n. 100. Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p. 271: ‘I almost always begin
with Husserl or in Husserl, but what I say is no longer in Husserl.’
28. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 109.
29. Ibid. p. 196.
30. Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p. 234.
31. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 232; see also p. 26. Note that the French word

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 77

‘conscience’ means both conscience and consciousness, an interesting ambiguity for

Levinas’s thought since he believes that consciousness emerges from conscience.
32. There are considerable similarities here with Heidegger’s notions of appearing as with-
drawing. See Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014);
Heidegger’s Later Writings: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury Books, 2009).
33. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 193 n. 35.
34. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 413.
35. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 13; see also ibid. pp. 36, 67, 74, 99, 154; Entre
Nous, pp. 69, 126, 200.
36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A158/B197.
37. G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
[1830] 1975), p. 36/§24.
38. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), H. 35, 152.
39. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 117; see also Otherwise Than Being, p. 141.
Here we can see the importance of Kant’s ethics, where each act of goodness exempts
us from the phenomenal, deterministic order of self-interested inclinations. One way
to look at Levinas’s work is that he transposes this ethical violation into the broader
order of phenomena, though still for ethical purposes.
40. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 196.
41. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 77.
42. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 41; see also ibid. p. 80; Basic Philosophical Writings,
pp. 19, 55.
43. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 10.
44. Ibid. p. 26.
45. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 196.
46. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 12.
47. Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 11, 26, 113, 117, 131 n. 12; see also Harman,
Meillassoux, p. 53.
48. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 7. Compare Levinas’s description of the face: ‘its wonder
is due to the elsewhere from which it comes and into which it already withdraws’ (Basic
Philosophical Writings, p. 60).
49. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 125; see also Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in
Husserl’s Phenomenology, 2nd edn, trans. Andre Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1995), pp. 43, 88, 125, 150.
50. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 117.
51. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 65. For Husserl, standing in for the entire tra-
dition, ‘there exists no knowing but of oneself. . . . Nothing can enter it, everything
comes from it. . . . In its inner recesses, the subject can account for the universe. . . .
The subject’s coexistence with something other, before being a commerce, is a relation
of intellection’ (Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, p. 82; see also pp. 85, 129).
52. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 73; see also Entre Nous, p. 69.
53. Meillassoux very briefly and, by his own admission, inadequately addresses this point
at Harman, Meillassoux, pp. 167–8.
54. Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p. 269.
55. David Hume, Enquiries, 3rd edn, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
[1748–51] 1975), p. 153.
56. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), p. 170.
57. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 80.
58. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 409; see also Meillassoux, After Finitude,
p. 28.
59. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 65.

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 78 | lee brave r

60. Ibid. p. 68. Compare with Hegel, who describes ‘an otherness which is superseded
in the act of grasping it’, which means that ‘otherness as an intrinsic being vanishes’
(Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 143/§237, 140/§233).
61. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 125.
62. Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, p. 191.
63. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 80; see also Otherwise Than Being, p. 99.
64. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 67–8.
65. Ibid. p. 6.
66. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, pp. 433, 445–6; see also Meillassoux, After
Finitude, p. 82.
67. Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, p. 68; see also pp. 93–4; Is It Righteous to
Be?, p. 252; Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 14, 26; Entre Nous, p. 71. Levinas, Of God
Who Comes to Mind, p. 65: ‘The not-able-to-comprehend-the-Infinite-by-thought is,
in some way, a positive relation with this thought.’ Interestingly, a Cantorian, non-
delimitable infinity plays an important role in Meillassoux’s complex argument.
68. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 50. Meillassoux also directs his thoughts about
time after one’s own death against Heidegger’s analysis: ‘death cannot fight Heidegger
because death is a correlate of being-in-the-world and Dasein. So there is no being-
toward-death, because if you want being-toward-death you have to conceive an event
able to survive you. You have to conceive a time able to survive you’ (Brassier et al.,
‘Speculative realism’, p. 437).
69. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 439.
70. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 113.
71. Ibid. p. 133; see also p. 165.
72. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 21.
73. Ibid. p. 131 n. 12.
74. Ibid. p. 117.
75. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 230.
76. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 18.
77. Levinas’s thought here resembles Meillassoux’s analyses of what he calls advents: events
of absolute novelty being introduced into the universe, such as matter, life, thought
and (perhaps) justice. See Harman, Meillassoux, ch. 3, Appendix. His thoughts on a
divine justice to come are what lead him to make the astonishingly Levinasian claim
that, ‘the essential stakes of both Eastern and Western thought consists entirely in
a single question: how can we think the unity of Jewish religion and Greek reason’
(quoted in Harman, Meillassoux, p. 228), though I don’t see how this is of particular
importance to Eastern thought.
78. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 156.
79. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 439; see also pp. 426, 436; Harman, Meillassoux,
pp. 6, 9.
80. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p. 148.
81. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 21.
82. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 27.
83. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 15.
84. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Beyond intentionality’, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in
France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 106.
85. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 28.
86. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, pp. 67, 184 n. 4; see also pp. 70, 151; Basic
Philosophical Writings, pp. 76, 155.
87. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 40.
88. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 12.
89. Levinas, ‘Beyond intentionality’, p. 108.
90. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 77.
91. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 440.

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 bef ore i nf i ni tude | 79

92. This is the absolute contingency that even the correlationist must admit, which forms
the basis for Meillassoux’s complex argument.
93. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 435; see also Meillassoux, After Finitude,
pp. 44–6.
94. Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 80–1; see also Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’,
p. 435.
95. Brassier et al., ‘Speculative realism’, p. 431.

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