No Longer Being-There: Phenomenology and Death

Abstract

In contemporary Continental philosophy there has been a recent trend toward realism and a rejection of what Quentin Meillassoux names correlationism. However, one of the most significant responses to Meillassoux’s position has come from the contemporary Derridean Martin Hägglund and it brings us indirectly to what this author contends lies at the heart of the phenomenological conception of death. Meillassoux is critical of the correlationist position because it cannot think the time before being, especially as discussed in the natural sciences. To be concise Meillassoux is concerned with whether it is possible to think this time without rendering them through a correlationist, or in a lighter phrase, anti-realist, lens. In After Finitude one example provided of how powerful correlationism is, comes through the excision of mind-independent primary (or mathematical) qualities in the post-Kantian tradition as thinkable in-themselves – a position Meillassoux claims has come to be seen as naïve (realism). What then, for instance, to make of statements about the time before being, indexed by ‘arche-fossils’ referring to ‘the existence of an ancestral reality or event’? The answer Meillassoux notes is usually given as intersubjectivity. This may not, at first, seem contentious.