Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy

Preface

vii Preface After the vehement criticisms of metaphysics in the twentieth century , one might say that “first philosophy” has found its place at the center of continental philosophy once again. Of course, the question of being has never truly left the scene, but serious attempts to return to ontology seem to belong mainly to the last decades. Yet, this does not mean that the way in which first philosophy is understood has not been affected by the criticisms preceding it. In fact, as I aim to show in this book, the themes and concepts of contemporary metaphysics are highly influenced by the different versions of the account of classical metaphysics as ontotheology. In this context, Alain Badiou’s playful description of his own ontology as a “metaphysics without metaphysics” beautifully captures this influence: whereas contemporary thought aims and feels itself compelled to do ontology, and displays—as all metaphysics worthy of the name—a taste for the absolute, the contemporary version of first philosophy might be called an “ontology after ontotheology” and is as such a metaphysics without metaphysics. As I will show in the course of the study that follows, this means that the questions that set the agenda today aim to offer an alternative to what is considered to be the core of ontotheology. More precisely, one may understand this “core” of ontotheology to consist in the metaphysical quest for (or presupposition of) a unifying reason or ground. This core is theological in nature because it concerns first and foremost the metaphysical concept of God. An alternative to this core will question both the unity and the ground of this unifying ground. Therefore, I propose to consider contemporary viii Preface ontology in light of its efforts to offer an alternative to unity as well as to reason or ground. The first leads us to the problematic of plurality and the second to the present-day account of the concept of the event. In particular, as will become clear in the course of this book, in its quest to think being no longer from a unifying ground, contemporary ontology is an ontology of contingency. In fact, to think the concept of contingency is the main challenge for a thought of being today. In addition, such a transformed first philosophy also requires another comportment of thought. Leaving behind theōria as the contemplation of the eternal, necessary, and present entities, contemporary thought offers a number of different ways to account for the ethos of thinking that may attune us to the theme of contingency. The task of this book is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to offer some important markers of the contemporary interest in plurality , event, and contingency, thus painting a picture of the presentday space of ontology and showing how different authors—such as Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Quentin Meillassoux, Claude Romano, and Giorgio Agamben—traverse the same space by different trajectories. On the other hand, it aims to take a position in the debate of which trajectory in this space is most promising in thinking the ontology of contingency. In chapters 3, 6, and 7, my position in this debate will become most clear. First, contingency is a thought of pure potentiality and requires the absolution of all presuppositions, as I will argue with Agamben; moreover, following the striking formulation of Meillassoux, to think contingency means to think being as well as thinking in its potentiality-of-being-otherwise (pouvoir-être-autre). Second, this thought of contingency requires its own form of the absolute. Especially in relation to the speculative thought developed by authors such as Badiou and Meillassoux, I will argue that this absolute can neither consist in the affirmation of certain hypotheses or axioms nor in the discovery of yet another principle—the first is not capable of doing justice to the anupotheton of the absolute, whereas the second remains captive to the logic of the principle and the archē, which still belongs to the realm of the principle of reason that these authors aim to leave behind. Inspired by Agamben’s attention to categories from skepticism and in a reading of Plato’s Preface ix Parmenides guiding me throughout this book, I will argue that the suspension of judgment, the epochē, to which thought is forced by the aporia it encounters, offers its own fortunate passage, its own euporia . This passage does not lead to knowing which of the examined...