Abstract

This essay develops Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. The first part consists of a discussion of Meillassoux’s ‘principle of factiality’ (which states that only contingency is necessary) and Ray Brassier’s problematization of this principle’s self-referentiality. The second part takes up Žižek’s critique of Meillassoux, which solves the problem of self-reference by dialecticizing the principle of factiality, ending up with the thesis of the contingency of necessity. The third part is an elaboration of Žižek’s critique in which the main lacuna in Meillassoux’s philosophy, i.e. the lack of any account of the genesis of subjectivity, is seen to lead to a disavowal of ‘constitutive mythology’ as theorized by Markus Gabriel. It is argued that Meillassoux’s notion of ‘hyper-Chaos’ is in fact the core of his mythology, which becomes especially clear when contrasted with an alternative mythology, namely Henri Bergson’s vision of ‘creative evolution’. Finally, it is shown how Žižek’s critique of Meillassoux gravitates toward this mythology of creative evolution as his Lacanian version of dialectical materialism is reformulated in the light of the speculative realist problematic