Meillassoux (Quentin) Archives

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From OOO to P(OO)

December 5, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

I have been reading the work of Timothy Morton with pleasure for many years now. Originally a scholar of English romantic poetry, I find his work reads best as poetry, or perhaps a poetics, as a singular Mortonian vision of the world – or in this case, a vision of ...

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Benjamedia

August 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...

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Zizek and me

June 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

It is illuminating to have comrade Zizek write about one’s work. I think his comments on Molecular Red highlight two paths among which theory can choose to move at the moment: the high road of philosophy, or the low road of something else, as yet unknown. It is less about the wrong or right ...

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Notes on Zizek’s Absolute Recoil

November 28, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Perhaps the first thing to know about Zizek is that his work entails a certain interpretive strategy, which in his new book Absolute Recoil he calls brachylogia, (41) which refers to statements of excessive brevity, with words left out. This can be coupled with Zizek’s insistence that authors misrecognize their more ...

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The Nothingness That Speaks French

November 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren (published by Urbanomic and Sequence Press, and elegantly translated by Robin Mackay) is quite simply the most beautiful book by a philosopher that I have read for many years. It is a highly original reading of Stéphane Mallarmé's Coup De Dés. If the objective of Meillassoux’s ...

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Althusserians Anonymous (2)

October 13, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has been revised, here: https://publicseminar.org/2016/02/aa/ The thing about being a recovering Althusserian is that one can’t help remembering the good times. Being on Althusser really does feel great. It makes certain problems disappear. For example, one is no longer trapped in the oppressive reality of Hegelian Marxism, and yet nor does ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate and inertia

October 5, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Thinking historically and systematically would appear to be something of an urgent requirement for critical theory in the Anthropocene. Yet there was a great allergic reaction to all such lines of thought in the late twentieth century from which social thought never really recovered. Recently, there has been some attempt to ...