Meillassoux, Ancestrality and Flesh
A gorgeous statement from Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude (p.48) - which I mostly agree with:
One caveat: the “grasping” is ultimately not going to happen within “thought”, but through the collapse of thinking upon the foundations set by our visceral intimacy with the world. “Thought” is not the royal road - but a refraction of what comes before it. The way out of the ‘correlationist’ dilemma, then, is attenuation to that which is prior to the correlation itself; namely, the Flesh.
"…we must understand that what distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished (in the strong sense) by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement. The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. ... The arche-fossil enjoins us to track thought by inviting us to discover the 'hidden passage' trodden by the latter in order to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not".
One caveat: the “grasping” is ultimately not going to happen within “thought”, but through the collapse of thinking upon the foundations set by our visceral intimacy with the world. “Thought” is not the royal road - but a refraction of what comes before it. The way out of the ‘correlationist’ dilemma, then, is attenuation to that which is prior to the correlation itself; namely, the Flesh.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).
Thu, Feb 3, 2011 Permanent link
Categories: Philosophy, Materialism, Meillassoux, ancestrality, Flesh, immanence, ontography
Categories: Philosophy, Materialism, Meillassoux, ancestrality, Flesh, immanence, ontography
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