Meillassoux's first book isAfter Finitude (Après la finitude, 2006). Alain Badiou, Meillassoux's former teacher, wrote the foreword.[5] Badiou describes the work as introducing a new possibility for philosophy which is different fromImmanuel Kant's three alternatives ofcriticism,skepticism, anddogmatism.[6] The book was translated into English byRay Brassier. Meillassoux is associated with thespeculative realism movement.
In this book, Meillassoux argues thatpost-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls "correlationism", the theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans.[7] In Meillassoux's view, this theory allows philosophy to avoid the problem of how to describe the world as it really is independent of human knowledge. He terms this reality independent of human knowledge as the "ancestral" realm.[8] Following the commitment to mathematics of his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux claims that mathematics describes the primary qualities of things as opposed to theirsecondary qualities shown byperception.
Meillassoux argues that in place of the agnostic scepticism about the reality ofcause and effect, there should be a radical certainty that there is nocausality at all. Following the rejection of causality, Meillassoux says that it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent. The world is a kind of hyper-chaos in which theprinciple of sufficient reason is not necessary although Meillassoux says that theprinciple of non-contradiction is necessary.
For these reasons, Meillassoux rejects Kant'sCopernican Revolution in philosophy. Since Kant makes the world dependent on the conditions by which humans observe it, Meillassoux accuses Kant of a "Ptolemaic Counter-Revolution." Meillassoux clarified and revised some of the views published inAfter Finitude during his lectures at theFree University of Berlin in 2012.[9]
Several of Meillassoux's articles have appeared in English via the British philosophical journalCollapse, helping to spark interest in his work in the Anglophone world.
His unpublished dissertationL'inexistence divine (1997) is noted inAfter Finitude to be "forthcoming" in book form;[10] as of 2021, it had not yet been published. InParrhesia, in 2016, an excerpt from Meillassoux's dissertation was translated by Nathan Brown, who noted in his introduction that "what is striking about the document... is the marked difference of its rhetorical strategies, its order of reasons, and its philosophical style" fromAfter Finitude, counter to the general view that the latter merely constituted "a partial précis" ofL'inexistence divine; he notes further that the dissertation presents a "very different articulation of the Principle of Factiality" from that inAfter Finitude.[11]While Nathan Brown's translation uses the French text of the 1997 dissertation, in 2011 Graham Harman used a 2003 revision to offer a partial translation of Meillassoux's ongoing work of expanding the dissertation into a book.
In September 2011, Meillassoux's book onStéphane Mallarmé was published in France under the titleLe nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du coup de dés de Mallarmé.[12] In this second book, he offers a detailed reading of Mallarmé's famous poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"), in which he finds a numerical code at work in the text.[13]
"Potentiality and Virtuality," inCollapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume II (Speculative Realism), ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 55–81.
"Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory," inCollapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume III (Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism]), ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 63–107.
"Presentation by Quentin Meillassoux," inCollapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume III (Unknown Deleuze [+Speculative Realism]), ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2007): 408–449.
"Spectral Dilemma," inCollapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume IV (Concept Horror), ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2008): 261–275.
"The Immanence of the World Beyond," inGrandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, ed. Peter M. Chandler Jr. and Connor Cunningham, trans. Peter M. Chandler Jr.,Adrian Pabst, and Aaron Riches (SCM Press, 2010): 444–478.
(with Florian Hecker and Robin Mackay) "Speculative Solution: Quentin Meillassoux and Florian Hecker Talk Hyperchaos," onUrbanomic, published 2010.
(with Florian Hecker, Robin Mackay, and Elie Ayache) "Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction," inSpeculative Solution, ed. and trans. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2010).[14]
"Metaphysics, Speculation, Correlation," trans. Taylor Adkins,Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 22 (2011): 3–25.
"History and Event in Alain Badiou," trans. Thomas Nail,Parrhesia Vol. 12 (2011): 1–11.
"The Contingency of the Laws of Nature," trans. Robin Mackay,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Vol. 30, No. 2 (2012): 322–334.
"Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps," trans. Alyosha Edlebi,Parrhesia Vol. 16 (2013): 35–47.
"The Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis," inCollapse: Philosophical Research and Investigations, Volume VIII (Casino Real), ed. Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, 2014): 813–846.
"Decision and Undecidability of the Event inBeing and Event I andII," trans. Alyosha Edlebi,Parrhesia Vol. 19 (2014): 22–35.
"Excerpts fromL'inexistence divine," in Graham Harman,Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2nd Edition), trans, Graham Harman (Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 224–287.
"Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning," inGenealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism, ed. Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, trans, Robin Mackay and Moritz Gansen (Bloomsbury, 2016): 117–197.
(with Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin) "Interview with Quentin Meillassoux," inNew Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, trans. Marie-Pier Boucher (Open Humanities Press, 2012): 71–81.
(with Sinziana Ravini) "'Archeology of the Future': Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,"Palatten Vol. 1/2 (2013): 86–97.
(with Graham Harman) "Interview with Quentin Meillassoux (August 2010)," Graham Harman,Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2nd Edition), trans, Graham Harman (Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 208–223.
(with Kağan Kahveci and Sercan Çalci) "Founded on Nothing: An Interview with Quentin Meillassoux," trans. Robin Mackay onUrbanomic, published 2021.
Pierre-Alexandre Fradet, « Sortir du cercle corrélationnel : un examen critique de la tentative de Quentin Meillassoux »,Cahiers Critiques de philosophie, num. 19, dec. 2017, p. 103-119,online.
