Meillassoux returns to his beginnings as a chapter of the 1997 thesis appears

It is not often in philosophy that a text written twenty years ago is published today. One of the more striking publications of this year is exactly that.

Being and Nothingness, by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, appears in the second number of the nineteenth volume of Derrida Today. It is not an intervention in any current debate. It is the nineteenth chapter of his 1997 doctoral thesis.

The thesis is called L'Inexistence divine — "divine inexistence". Written nine years before Meillassoux acquired an international reputation, it has never been published as a book; only chapters of it have appeared, in scattered translations. The new text is the latest instalment of that piecemeal emergence.

What is in the text?#

Meillassoux takes up the problem of being and nothingness by way of Derrida, Hegel and Heidegger.

The move he makes is technical, but its consequences are broad. Heidegger's ontological difference — the distinction between being and beings — is shifted from its place: the same difference is reconstructed, this time between necessity and contingency.

Negation divides in step with it: a necessary nothingness (le néant) on one side, a contingent nothing (le rien) on the other. That distinction is the first form of what Meillassoux would later call the principle of factiality (principe de factualité).

This is where the value of the text lies. The thesis for which Meillassoux is known through the book of 2006 takes shape here for the first time, in an early text, and in the course of a reckoning with Derrida.

Factiality: what is necessary is contingency itself#

Meillassoux's central claim can be put in a single sentence:

It is necessary that nothing be necessary.

The only necessary thing, in other words, is contingency itself. Everything could be otherwise — and that "could" is not incidental but an absolute principle.

This is the thought on which Après la finitude of 2006 (translated into English in 2008 as After Finitude) was built. There Meillassoux took aim at a stance he took to be dominant in post-Kantian philosophy: correlationism.

Correlationism is, roughly, the view that we have no access to being independently of thought. Most philosophy after Kant confines the knowable to "the relation between the human being and the world".

Meillassoux's objection comes from science. Radiometric dating, cosmology and geology describe events that took place billions of years before the appearance of human beings — indeed before the appearance of life. Meillassoux calls these ancestral (ancestralité) statements, and he asks what they mean. The correlationist has no option but to say that "for human beings, the universe is 13.8 billion years old". For Meillassoux, this amounts to not taking science at its word.

Hyper-chaos#

The most radical consequence of the principle of factiality is the notion of hyper-chaos (hyper-chaos).

The claim is not merely that events are contingent. The laws of nature themselves are not necessary either. They could change at any moment, for no reason whatever.

It is a counter-intuitive position, and Meillassoux knows it. His defence runs like this: the only ground we have for thinking the laws necessary is that they have not so far changed. But that, as Hume showed two and a half centuries ago, is a habit rather than a proof. Meillassoux accepts Hume's conclusion and takes it somewhere else: induction cannot be grounded — because there is no necessity there to ground.

After speculative realism#

Meillassoux's name is associated with speculative realism, a label that emerged from a workshop held at Goldsmiths in London in 2007. With Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman, he stood at the centre of a search for a new realism in the philosophy of the mid-2000s.

The picture has since changed. After Speculative Realism, published in 2025, discusses the directions the movement took once its first phase was over. A study that appeared in the journal Sententiae the same year reassesses Meillassoux in the context of the French spiritualist tradition.

That is a change worth registering. Meillassoux is no longer a "rising young philosopher" but a thinker who shaped the first quarter of twenty-first-century philosophy — and, as such, a subject for the history of philosophy.

Beyond metaphysics: cinema and poetry#

Meillassoux's influence now reaches well outside metaphysical circles.

Frédéric Brayard's Hyperchaos Cinema connects Meillassoux's speculative materialism to contemporary French cinema and to debates about the digital image. The book is being prepared for Bloomsbury's "Thinking Cinema" series.

Poetry, for its part, is on Meillassoux's own agenda. His academic profile at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne lists Mallarmé, chance and poetry among his research interests. That interest took concrete form in 2011 in The Number and the Siren: an analysis, working from Mallarmé's A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, of the relations between number, chance, infinity and meaning.

The detail matters. For Meillassoux contingency is not an abstract metaphysical concept but a problem that bears at once on science, on poetry and on how human beings imagine the future.

Why he is read now#

Meillassoux's currency comes down to a handful of questions.

Are the laws of the universe necessary, or could everything have been otherwise? If everything could have been otherwise, what is the status of the laws science discovers? If we can have knowledge of events that occurred when there were no human beings, should "the relation between the human being and reality" remain at the centre of philosophy?

And the most radical of them: are the things we today take to be impossible really impossible?

These questions make Meillassoux's thought arguable across a wide field, from artificial intelligence to cosmology, from mathematics to film.

A short chronology#

Year	Development
1997	L'Inexistence divine — doctoral thesis (never published as a book)
2006	Après la finitude published in French
2008	After Finitude published in English
2011-2012	The Number and the Siren, on Mallarmé
2025	After Speculative Realism; reassessment in the context of French spiritualism
2026	Being and Nothingness, from the 1997 thesis, published

The table shows that 2026 is not, for Meillassoux, a year of fresh manifestos. It is rather a year in which his early work is being rediscovered and his influence is spreading into other fields.

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Note: Derrida Today appears twice a year, in May and November. Bibliographical details for the text are taken from the PhilPapers record.