SF-TH Inc

Review: Playing Dice with the Universe

Reviewed Work(s): After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin
Meillassoux and Trans. Ray Brassier: The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of
Mallarmé's Coup de Dés by Quentin Meillassoux and Trans. Robin Mackay: Science Fiction
and Extro-Science Fiction (with “The Billiard Ball” by Isaac Asimov) by Quentin Meillassoux
and Trans. Alyosha Edlebi
Review by: Amy Ransom
Source: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 43, No. 3, Indian SF (November 2016), pp. 553-562
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.3.0553

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction
Studies

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE 553

Amy Ransom

Playing Dice with the Universe

Quentin Meillassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency. 2008. Trans. Ray Brassier. Pref. Alain Badiou. London:
Continuum, 2009. 148 pp. $21.95 pbk.
))))). The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s COUP DE
DÉS. Trans. Robin Mackay. New York: Sequence, 2012. 298 pp. $25.95
pbk.
))))). Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (with “The Billiard Ball”
by Isaac Asimov). Trans. Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal,
2015. 93 pp. $19.95 pbk.
Natural laws are the stuff our science is made of. Or rather, Western science’s
primary aim has been to discern natural laws governing the functions of the
universe based on observed phenomena. But what if natural laws are not a
necessary condition for the universe, as “speculative realist” philosopher
Quentin Meillassoux (pronounced: may-ah-soo) posits? Has the core project
of “science” been for nought? Often described as the most important French
philosopher in the Anglophone world since Jacques Derrida, Meillassoux’s life
work aims to disprove the necessity of natural laws. Instead, he argues that the
only universal and necessary constant is contingency. And yet, although he
wishes to restore to philosophy its speculative power, a role it has largely
relinquished to science, he also offers a way back to faith in the mathematical
description of the universe rejected by his own field. His philosophy has
compelling implications not just for science but also for science fiction. This
review, then, introduces his three books available in English, making the case
for more extended discussion of its applications to the study of sf.
Of primary interest here is Meillassoux’s most recent book, Science Fiction
and Extro-Science Fiction (SF and XSF), which explicitly theorizes a new
subgenre with the sexy moniker of “extro-science fiction.” His proposed new
category of “fiction des mondes hors-science”—literally the “fiction of worlds
outside science,” translated as “extro-science fiction” by Alyosha Edlebi and
handily abbreviated as “XSF” in the text—derives its core ideas from
Meillassoux’s acclaimed philosophical treatise, After Finitude. SF and XSF
begins by offering a reasonable definition of sf, based on the genre’s
relationship to science itself: “it is a matter of imagining a fictional future of
science that modifies, and often expands, its possibilities of knowledge and
mastery of the real” (4-5). Proper science fiction may propose and extrapolate
science and technology that may not seem possible today, but its author must
respect the rules of any system he or she puts into place. No matter what, “in
the anticipated future it will still be possible to subject the world to a scientific
knowledge” (5; emphasis in original). Meillassoux thus reiterates the basis for

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
554 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)

long-standing definitions of sf as “plausible extrapolation,” which posits that

the fictional worlds constructed must adhere to the most basic principles of
“science” as a system that, through experiment and observation, derives a set
of constant natural laws governing the universe in question.
In contrast, XSF constructs “worlds where, in principle, experimental
science is impossible” (5; emphasis in original). For Meillassoux, such fictions
represent “a particular regime of the imaginary in which structured—or rather
unstructured—worlds are conceived in such a way that experimental science
cannot deploy its theories or constitute its objects in them” (5-6). Before
providing the reader with an illustrative example, he makes clear the
relationship of such a potentially frivolous question to his work in philosophy,
linking it to “a very classical metaphysical problem”—namely, “the necessity
of the laws of nature” (6). He then offers a summary of Karl Popper’s and
Immanuel Kant’s erroneous responses to David Hume’s assertion that, indeed,
there must be immutable laws of nature (a problem further addressed in the
discussion of After Finitude below). He then provides an illustrative case study
of Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Billiard Ball,” the text of which is handily
reproduced at the end of this slender volume.
First published in the March 1967 issue of If magazine and then collected
in Asimov’s Mysteries (1968), an anthology of science-based detective
enigmas, “The Billiard Ball” introduces an anti-gravity device with an
unfortunately fatal design “flaw.” When a billiard ball is introduced into the
device, instead of hovering weightless in mid-air, it flies out at the speed of
light, slaying its inventor. If the tale ended here—with the apparently random
trajectory of the billiard ball—we might have found an early example of an
XSF text. Because Asimov then implies, however, that a rival scientist had
actually calculated that trajectory (due to “new” laws of physics), we must be
disappointed and admit that this is mere sf. Meillassoux nonetheless uses “the
example of the billiard ball with fantastical trajectories” (18)—that is,
trajectories that do not seem to follow the predictable laws of nature as these
have been outlined by experimental physics (actual or fictional)—in order to
explain the difference between the two types of fiction. He asserts that “in
science fiction we generally inhabit a world where physics … differs from
ours, but in which laws are not … abolished” (23). In contrast, “In extro-
science fiction, … it seems no order of any sort can be constituted and,
therefore, no story can be told. If this were true we would be wrong to speak
of extro-science worlds” (23; emphasis in original). We would instead be
faced with images of chaos with no narrative interest—at least, that is, if we
accept Hume’s notion that any constituted world must necessarily obey a set
of natural laws. In classical philosophy, in the absence of natural laws there
is only chaos, a state that precludes narrative structure; but disproving this
position is precisely the cart to which Meillassoux hitches the metaphorical
horse of XSF.
Careful to distinguish between the amateurish type of narrative in which
a writer might violate the laws of his own premise and a literarily interesting
extro-science narrative that creates a fictional world without natural laws,

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE 555

Meillassoux digs deeper and finds three types of extro-science worlds, two of
which he subsequently disqualifies. True XSF must construct a world in which
“irregularity is sufficient to abolish science, but not consciousness” (36);
random events would occur with a certain amount of frequency, so that “no
eventual sphere would be preserved from a-causal disorder,” but “daily life
could always build on stabilities that are certainly very relative, but still
sufficiently powerful to allow a conscious existence” (36). Finally, genuine
XSF fulfills two requirements: “within it events take place that no real or
imaginary ‘logic’ can explain; … [and] the question of science is present in the
tale, albeit in a negative mode”: it presents “a world in which science
suddenly becomes … impossible” (44) or was never present at all.
Meillassoux then offers three partial examples from the Anglo-American
canon, and claims to have identified one bona fide XFS novel, French sf
writer René Barjavel’s Ravage (1943). The first three, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik
(1969), Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), and Robert
Charles Wilson’s Darwinia (1998), are all “novels that take place within an
uncertain reality, in which the real would go to pieces, progressively ceasing
to be familiar” (48). Unfortunately, though, these novels eventually either
explain their unstable phenomena or, in the case of Hitchhiker’s Guide,
“produce a form of nonsense, verging on the pure joke” (47; emphasis in
original). Only in Barjavel’s Ravage (translated by Damon Knight as Ashes,
Ashes in 1967) does he find a work that so completely “grafts itself on a SF
context that it contaminates with a logic foreign to it” (49-50). According to
Meillassoux, Barjavel denies any restoration of order or logical explanation so
“that the inhabitants of this world have all their time taken up by the vagaries
of an environment that has become unpredictable and unrecognizable” (52-53).
René Barjavel (1911-1985) is one of France’s most respected sf writers,
but his works are also found in mainstream literary imprints. Wikipedia credits
him with being one of the first writers to invoke the grandfather paradox in
time travel, with Le Voyageur imprudent (1944; trans. as Future Times Three
by Margaret Sansone Scouten in 1958). La Nuit des temps (1968; trans. as The
Ice People by C.L. Markham in 1971) is considered an incontournable
[unavoidable; a must-read] classic of French sf. He is a logical choice of
author for Meillassoux as his works, in particular La Faim du tigre [The
Hunger of the Tiger, 1966], question the existence of God. The goal of
Meillassoux’s philosophy is precisely to recover his discipline’s capacity for
speculative thinking in the absence of metaphysics and theism (see Watkin).
One must understand this aspect of Barjavel’s ideology to accept Meillassoux’s
categorization of Ravage as XSF; without this knowledge, aspects of the text
suggest that divine intervention might explain the breakdown of natural laws
that it posits.
Ravage at first appears to be a typical French anticipation [novel of the
future] extrapolating technological developments and their impact on everyday
life in the year 2052. The tale is told with humor and/or a critical bent that
makes its future Paris something of a dystopia, and when that society suddenly
breaks down—the book was written during the Nazi Occupation, as was Albert

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
556 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)

Camus’s The Plague (1947)—one is also tempted to read it as a political

allegory. Indeed, Meillassoux suggests that Barjavel meant to critique the
collaborationist Vichy régime in southern France, with its ideology of
conservative “family” values and a return to the land. The breakdown of the
highly technologized society makes this novel extremely interesting today, in
light of the omnipresence of the post-apocalyptic genre, and there are aspects
of the protagonist’s activities that make him a precursor to Rick Grimes of The
Walking Dead television series (2010-). Civilization’s breakdown results
precisely from a sudden, worldwide change in the laws of physics previously
held to be immutable: in an instant, all forms of electric machinery cease to
function.
Barjavel makes Meillassoux’s job easy, in that he explicitly engages the
problems of science and natural laws. (Interestingly, Meillassoux does not
provide his readers with the following analysis, perhaps presuming they
already know the novel.) When all machinery stops, including food factories
and water processing plants, the public gathers, hoping that the eminent
scientist, Professor Paul Portin, can explain. Yet he is completely at a loss:
My good friends, I can tell you nothing. I don’t know anything. Such a thing
has never happened before. Our science is an experimental science. Well, the
phenomenon which has occurred does not correspond to anything we know. In
disappearing, electricity has violated all the laws of nature and logic. And,
electricity having disappeared, it’s even more incredible that we’re still living.
The whole thing is crazy. It’s an antiscientific, irrational nightmare. All our
theories, all our laws have been overturned. (86; emphasis added)
Later, as a corollary effect (and here one senses Barjavel’s satirical, Voltairean
bent), virgins worldwide swoon into unconsciousness. Thus, although the
electricity needed for the human body to function has not generally been
affected, this inexplicable side effect of the catastrophe is taken as
confirmation of the significance placed on virginity as a cultural universal.
This time, a medical doctor is asked if the protagonist’s fiancée’s condition is
linked to “the disappearance of electricity” (106). Once again the man of
science is perplexed:
“But the electricity hasn’t disappeared, my young friend. If it had disappeared,
we wouldn’t be in existence, we would have gone back to nothingness,
ourselves and the universe. We, and that table, and this stone, we’re all
nothing more than marvelous combinations of energy. Matter and energy are
the same. No part of them can disappear or the whole thing would disappear.
What’s happened is a change in the manifestations of the electric flux. A
change that bowls us over, that demolishes the whole edifice of science we’ve
constructed, but which surely has neither more nor less importance to the
universe than the beating of a butterfly’s wing.” (106; emphasis added)
Not only does Barjavel invoke a fundamental law of physics and Lao Tzu in
the same paragraph, he provides Meillassoux with an apparently perfect
example of XSF since the change in electricity’s behavior itself is not
universal but appears random. Furthermore, despite the apparent abolition of

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE 557

a formerly maintained law of physics, the world goes on; life becomes
increasingly contingent, however, and a good portion of the novel narrates the
protagonist’s struggle to survive with a small group of followers. It eventually
concludes with their installation on a farm (a fortunate throwback still in
existence thanks to stubborn peasants’ refusal to embrace modernity) and the
constitution of a new, peaceful, agrarian society with an oral tradition of its
origin and a new religion. All seems to be for the best in the best of possible
worlds—until, one day, a curious boy constructs a machine.…
Meillassoux senses the critical potential that such fiction holds for
speculative thought, and I cannot help but be swept away by his rhetoric. Yet
some unresolved issues plague the text. First, Meillassoux waffles in his
terminology, referring variously to extro-science fiction as a “genre within the
genre” (4), but later arguing that it “can become a full-fledged genre” of its
own (56). This may be simply splitting hairs. Of more substantial difficulty
is Meillassoux’s lack of engagement with other theories of sf. My impression
is that his differentiation of what we might call “classic” sf from “extro-sf”
may not be a completely original insight, although his manner of arriving at
it is. I would welcome a deeper interrogation of this short book in relation to
existing genre theory. Finally, his understanding of the term “science” is an
uncomplicated one, taking for granted that all science is Western-style science,
thus leaving him open to critiques from alternative perspectives. I would like
to see how XSF might be related to indigenous futurism, postcolonial sf, and
other forms of speculative fiction outside the Anglo-American canon.
Meillassoux’s example of Barjavel’s Ravage does suggest the potential
application of the term XSF to any number of Western texts today, beginning
with certain zombie-apocalypse narratives, from Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
(2011) to the recent French series (not really about zombies per se) Les
Revenants [The Returned, 2012-2015]. The latter presents a world in which
the dead return for no apparent reason, and why these dead in particular is
never fully explained (although this may be due to the pressures to wrap up
a series before it has run its course in its creators’ minds). Indeed, in most
zombie texts, although a pseudo-scientific explanation may be given (an
epidemic), no current laws of physics or biology can explain the walking
dead, nor are any new ones rationally extrapolated. But are we then in the
realm of true extro-science fiction, or merely poorly conceived sf, or perhaps
the supernatural fantastic?
Which brings us back to Meillassoux’s interest in metaphysics. With its
intriguing title and cover illustration (a manipulated image of stars scintillating
in what appears to be deep space), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency may at first glance appear to be more directly related to the
problems of space and time at the core of science fiction than it actually is.
Although its conclusions do have significant bearing on our field, and one of
its particular goals is to legitimate the scientific study of the distant past and
far future, Meillassoux’s most serious book may prove a bit much for the non-
philosopher. Meillassoux himself admits that “[p]hilosophy is the invention of
strange forms of argumentation, necessarily bordering on sophistry, which

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
558 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)

remains its dark structural double” (76). This book is a proof in point.
Whereas his goal is to refute Kant’s and Hume’s positions on the necessity of
the laws of nature, concluding instead that the only absolute necessity is
contingency, the path he takes to get there—admittedly, in keeping with his
profession as a philosopher and a teacher at one of France’s most prestigious
universities, the École Normale Supérieure—is a series of seemingly
convoluted arguments, as well as refutations of potential objections to those
arguments, deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition. Although I frequently
felt in above my head, I will attempt to summarize here the main points of
relevance to the study of sf.
Chapters 1, “Ancestrality,” and 2, “Metaphysics, Fideism, Speculation,”
introduce two key concepts in Meillassoux’s overall project: ancestrality and
correlationism (see Harman). Correlationism is Meillassoux’s term for the type
of philosophy in effect since Kant and codified by twentieth-century
phenomenologists—that, in the absence of an absolute necessity (God),
knowledge cannot be absolute but must be based on human observation. All
knowledge (and thus reality) is based on the co-relation between human
observer and observed; this philosophical position introduces a form of anti-
realist relativism that ultimately denies the independent existence of the
universe outside of human intelligence/reason. The problem for science is that
we now have scientifically observed and/or extrapolated phenomena that
predate and outdistance actual human perception. Ancestrality refers to
scientific facts that pose a problem for correlationist thought—for example,
archeological knowledge of the earth’s development before the evolution of
human intelligence or astronomical data about the distant past taken from stars
hundreds of thousands of light years away from earth. Meillassoux’s goal is
to resolve this conundrum, effectively rejecting correlationism as a tenable
epistemology; he has to justify “the possibility of thinking what there is when
there is no thought” (36).
Traveling through Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (from the 1637 Discourse
on Method), which was put into the service of metaphysics by also being used
to prove the existence of God (fideism), moving on to Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (1781), which allows the refutation of Descartes and becomes the basis
of contemporary correlationism, Meillassoux argues that in order to escape the
traps of both the necessity of God and correlationism, “we must uncover an
absolute necessity that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary
entity” (34; emphasis in original). Since it seems generally agreed that neither
God nor any other ultimate cause for the universe exists to explain why things
are the way they are, we must find some other type of final cause, or perhaps
not even a cause per se.
In chapter 3, “The Principle of Factiality,” Meillassoux takes on Kant and
Hegel, borrowing the Heideggerian term “facticity” (see Harman 21-22), and
works toward “demonstrating the thesis which states that the thing-in-itself
actually exists, and there is a realm of the in-itself” (71)—that is, that the real
does exist independently of human perceptions of it, thus refuting the
correlationist position. Through facticity, he arrives at an absolute, “the one

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE 559

that would allow mathematical science to describe the in-itself” (64): Chaos.
Along the way, Meillassoux acknowledges the skeptic’s questions, such as
“How could such a disaster provide the foundation for scientific knowledge?
How could Chaos possibly legitimate knowledge of the ancestral?” (65) He
asserts that only “an extreme form of Chaos, a hyper-chaos, for which nothing
is or would seem to be impossible, not even the unthinkable” (64) offers
philosophy “an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable
of anything, even the inconceivable” (64; emphasis in original). This hyper-
chaos is “Contingency [that] expresses the fact that physical laws remain
indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not—they allow an entity to
emerge, to subsist, or to perish” (39; emphasis in original). This, and this
alone, of all natural laws is necessary; thus, contingency is the absolute
necessity. He then develops another apparently original concept, mentioned in
the chapter’s title: “factuality,” that “exerts the actual contingency of the laws
of nature” (83; see Harman 30).
Chapter 4, “Hume’s problem,” refers not just to the fact that Meillassoux
“has a problem” with Hume’s philosophy, but also to the “familiar
philosophical problem” of cause and effect, predictability, and returning again
to the necessity of natural laws governing the universe (85-86). Essentially,
Hume argues that, since we can predict the workings of the universe via
science and can repeat experiments to verify results, we have predictability,
which means there must be natural laws organizing the universe. Here is
where After Finitude is most closely linked to Science Fiction and Extro-
Science Fiction, because once Meillassoux demolishes Hume he opens the way
for XSF and restores to philosophy a speculative power that it had
relinquished to science. He asserts that: “Hume’s problem raises the question
of whether … physics as such … will continue to be possible in the future.…
[C]an we demonstrate that the experimental science which is possible today
will still be possible tomorrow?” (86; emphasis in original). Concluding that
we cannot, he confronts his imaginary objectors, at the same time describing
before the fact the task of XSF narratives. His argument posits, first, that, if
we accept that there is no reason for things to be the way they are (there is no
absolute necessity, either God or natural laws), then we must embrace
unreason (82-83). But if we do admit that “not only things but also physical
laws are really contingent, … we would have to admit that these laws could
actually change at any moment for no reason whatsoever” (83; emphasis in
original). Such a world, “a world without physical necessity[,] would be riven
at each instant and in each of its points by an immense multiplicity of
disconnected possibilities” (84); this possibility very clearly points to
imaginary worlds found in a wide array of texts that we now label sf but may
now want to reconsider as XSF. A further passage, in which Meillassoux
answers his objectors, bears citing because of its literary applications:
Those of us who endorse this claim [that natural laws are contingent] would
have to spend our time fearing that familiar objects could at any moment
behave in the most unexpected ways, congratulating ourselves every evening
on having made it through the day without a hitch…. Such a conception of

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
560 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)

reality or relation-to-the-world seems so absurd that no one could sincerely

maintain it. (83-84)
While this might appear absurd to the average philosopher, for the regular
reader of speculative fiction the idea is hardly extraordinary at all. Rather, this
description fits not only the fictional realities of Kafka and perhaps Dino
Buzzatti and Italo Calvino, and a number of Québécois writers such as Louis-
Philippe Hébert and Jacques Brossard, but it also seems to describe our
everyday lives in hypermodernity.
Meillassoux concludes this chapter with the mathematical discussions
necessary to support his claim and explaining his title: After Finitude. He
invokes Georg Cantor’s theorem, which asserts: “take any set, count its
elements, then compare this number to the number of possible groupings of
these elements…. You will always obtain the same result: the set B of possible
groupings (or parts) of a set A is always bigger than A—even if A is infinite”
(104; emphasis in original). This theorem, which mathematically proves that
there is something after infinity, allows Meillassoux—after a reflection on
chance and the aleatory, both of which etymologically derive from the game
of dice (a notion to which we will return in a moment)—to conclude that: “It
is by way of mathematics that we will finally succeed in thinking that which,
through its power and beauty, vanquishes quantities and sounds the end of
play” (108; emphasis in original).
A final chapter, “Ptolemy’s Revenge,” may be the most fruitful for those
interested in the culture of science and philosophy, for in it Meillassoux comes
back to trace the origins of the break between science and philosophy. He
argues that the Galilean-Copernican revolution in science, which overturned
Ptolemy’s geocentric solar system, actually forced philosophy into the false
position in which correlationism has placed it. Ptolemy’s revenge lies in the
fact that, at the very moment when science had decentered man from its
conception of the universe, philosophy put him right back at the center with
the ergo. Whereas Galileo’s revolution was to allow the world to become
“exhaustively mathematizable” (115; emphasis in original) and thus henceforth
autonomous from divine necessity or human perception, “the Critical
revolution [of Kant] makes the object conform to our knowledge” (118).
Meillassoux scathingly accuses his profession of relinquishing the “speculative
import” (120; emphasis in original) of philosophy:
While the Copernican revolution has revealed its own extent, philosophers have
accentuated their own pseudo-Copernican counter-revolution, remorselessly
exposing the metaphysical naivety of their predecessors by contracting the
bounds of knowledge ever more stringently within the bounds of humanity’s
present situation. (121)
Ironically, as science became capable of knowing what lay outside the
temporal and spatial scope of immediate human perception and experience (the
distant past, remote outer space, the microscopic and even sub-particulate),
philosophy limited itself to the immediately knowable. He concludes this
powerful chapter with a three-stage account of what he calls the “Kantian

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PLAYING DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE 561

catastrophe” (124), and a call for a new school of philosophy, “speculative

materialism” (121; emphasis in original), which will seek answers to “the
most urgent question”: “how is thought able to think what there can be when
there is no thought?” (121; emphasis in original).
Given Meillassoux’s investment in contingency and the etymology of the
related terms chance and the aleatory, we can understand his motivation for
taking on the role of literary private detective in his second book translated
into English, The Number and the Siren. In contrast with the somewhat sloppy
literary methodology that Meillassoux applies in SF and XSF, he engages here
a much more systematic and masterful approach to a canonical work of French
literature, symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés n’abolira
jamais le hasard” [A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, 1898]. This
study proposes a controversial but compelling reversal of established readings
of Mallarmé’s stunning, revolutionary masterpiece. At first glance, this book
may appear only marginally related to the study of sf, yet its connection to
Meillassoux’s overall project regarding the necessity of contingency and even
the theme of the poem itself can be linked back to our field.
As Meillassoux reminds us, “Edgar Allan Poe [was] Mallarmé’s
acknowledged master” (195), as illustrated by his homage sonnet, “Le
Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” (1887). And Meillassoux’s quest to crack the
numerical code hidden by Mallarmé in “Un coup de dés” reads something like
a detective story, a genre pioneered by Poe. The poem contains references to
a mysterious “Number,” and the poet evidenced his cabbalistic obsession with
esoteric calculations in the notes for his unfinished masterpiece, known only
as “the Book,” meant to be not just a total literature but also perhaps a
modern ritual to unite the French Republic in the absence of Christianity.
Nonetheless, conventional criticism rejected out of hand the notion that such
a canonical poet might be pursuing such a mad project as to embed into his
masterpiece a carefully designed code. (Clearly, they hadn’t yet read Dan
Brown.) The most compelling work of literary criticism I have ever read
(perhaps it helped that since graduate school Mallarmé’s hermetic works have
fascinated me), Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren explains this
enigmatic and formally innovative poem line by line.
Above all, it flies in the face of literary convention and finds clues within
the poem itself and in other works by Mallarmé in order to deduce an actual
magic Number, 707, laden with symbolic meaning. It also concludes that this
minutely structured, highly formalistic poem (it is one of the first works to
experiment with a graphic layout on the page reflective of its contents,
predating Guillaume Apollinaire’s better-known collection Calligrammes
[1918] by two decades) represents an intervention into the ongoing debate over
free verse occurring in France at the time.
All along, something like the narrator of Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843),
my reading of Meillassoux has been intuitively haunted by the image of
another cat, used in one of the most famous analogies in all of science to
describe aspects of quantum mechanics. Additionally, I have always heard an
echo of Mallarmé’s “Coup de dés” in Einstein’s famous dictum, “God does

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
562 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)

not play dice with the universe” (although this may be a merely personal
connection; it seems unlikely that Einstein spent his free time reading French
symbolist poetry). Of course, Einstein was not reaffirming Divine Providence
but rather addressing the strangeness of quantum mechanics and attempting to
refute Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (see Dickerson). The cat in the
metaphorical box, in Schrödinger’s telling, is both alive and dead at the same
time. This is precisely the position taken by the protagonist of Mallarmé’s
poem, a figure for the poet himself. In Meillassoux’s account, Mallarmé
achieves the perfect ambiguity, a moment of hesitation frozen forever in the
poem’s telling (a technique that could be linked to the Todorovian fantastic),
in which the ship’s captain has either thrown or not thrown the dice as his ship
(in another clear homage to Poe) descends into the maelstrom. Meillassoux’s
fascination with this poem and his desire to crack its code derives as well from
his own search to find an absolute necessity in the absence of God.
To return to the question asked in the introduction of this review-essay: by
reducing the necessity for natural laws to the single law of contingency, has
Meillassoux rendered the scientific project to discover such laws useless? I
hope it has been clear that, instead, his philosophical project actually seeks to
rescue science by removing the barrier that contemporary philosophy has
placed on scientific knowledge by limiting it to the scope of human reason.
More important for Meillassoux, though, is his call to philosophy to once
again engage in speculative theorization, a function it lost when it abandoned
metaphysics as a valid pursuit. Most importantly for us, his work invites the
question: has science fiction (with or without its corollary of extro-science
fiction) been performing all along the speculative work that philosophy has for
so long abjured?
WORKS CITED
Barjavel, René. Ashes, Ashes. 1943 (as Ravage). Trans. Damon Knight. New York:
Doubleday, 1967.
Dickerson, Kelly. “One of Einstein’s Most Famous Quotes Is Often Completely
Misinterpreted.” Tech Insider. 19 Nov. 2015. Online.
Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2011.
“René Barjavel.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Online.
Watkin, Christopher. “Beyond A/theism? Quentin Meillassoux.” Difficult Atheism:
Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin
Meillassoux. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. 132-67.

This content downloaded from

192.155.86.67 on Mon, 12 Dec 2022 02:53:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms