From the preface by Alain Badiou: It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, understood here as the history of what it is to know ... This remarkable "critique of critique" is introduced here without embellishment, cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a particularly clear and logical manner. It allows the destiny of thought to be the absolute once more.
 "This work is one of the most important to appear in continental philosophy in recent years and deserves a wide readership at the earliest possible date ... Après la finitude is an important book of philosophy by an authnted emerging voices in continental thought. Quentin Meillassoux deserves our close attention in the years to come and his book deserves rapid translation and widespread discussion in the English-speaking world. There is nothing like it."
 -Graham Harman in Philosophy Today
 Quentin Meillassoux's remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, After Finitude provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. 
The exceptional lucidity and the centrality of argument in Meillassoux's writing should appeal to analytic as well as continental philosophers, while his critique of fideism will be of interest to anyone preoccupied by the relation between philosophy, theology and religion. 
Meillassoux introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse.

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

Politics & Social Sciences

Meillassoux, Quentin

Philosophy

Continuum

A philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé's poem “Un Coup de Dés.”
A meticulous literary study, a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an adventure novel―such is the register in which can be deciphered the hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, infinity, and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé's poem “Un Coup de Dés,” patiently deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly simple and lucid insight with regard to Mallarmé's “unique Number.”
The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child's game. The Number that “can be no other” can only be revealed to us via a secret code, hidden in the “Coup de dés” like a key that finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama that is still unfolding.
With this bold new interpretation of Mallarmé's work, Meillassoux offers brilliant insights into modernity, poetics, secularism, and religion, and opens a new chapter in his philosophy of radical contingency.
The volume contains the entire text of the “Coup de dés” and three other poems, with new English translations.

The Number and the Siren

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Urbanomic/Sequence Press

In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature. The text is followed by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Billiard Ball.”

Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (Univocal)

Asimov,Isaac

Univocal Publishing

Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence

SEUIL

La critique empiriste des prétentions universelles de la pensée humaine est-elle réellement fondée ? On sait que c'est le problème de Kant. Mais Quentin Meillassoux montre avec une force étonnante qu'une autre compréhension de cette critique, restée en quelque sorte dissimulée, bien que plus " naturelle ", aboutit à un partage des ambitions de la pensée très différent de celui proposé par Kant. Il établit en effet qu'une seule chose est absolument nécessaire : que les lois de la nature soient contingentes. Ce nœud entièrement nouveau entre les modalités contraires installe la pensée dans un tout autre rapport à l'expérience du monde, un rapport qui défait simultanément les prétentions " nécessitantes " de la métaphysique classique, et le partage " critique " entre l'empirique et le transcendantal. Cette remarquable " critique de la Critique " est ici introduite sans fioritures, coupant vers l'essentiel dans un style particulièrement clair et démonstratif Elle autorise à nouveau que le destin de la pensée soit l'Absolu, et non la " finitude " dans laquelle nous nous complaisons en laissant la morale, ou le " retour du religieux ", servir de fictif supplément d'âme.

Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence

Essays & Correspondence

Le nombre et la sirène (Essais) (French Edition)

FAYARD

Métaphysique et fiction des mondes hors-science

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

FORGES VULCAIN

To use Alan Badiou's words, "It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." The present book, Time Without Becoming, is the text of a conference that Meillassoux gave at Middlesex University in London in May 2008. Following his seminal After Finitude, Meillassoux proceeds here to further explore his notion of absolute contingency, which is able to produce and destroy, without a reason, any becoming. In her contribution, Anna Longo challenges this idea by confronting Meillassoux’s speculative materialism with emergentism.

Time Without Becoming (Philosophy)

Mimesis International

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