whatmakespistachionuts:

His ontology, outlined in After Finitude, maintains the necessity of contingency. Essentially, for Meillassoux, all beings are contingent, there is no such thing as a necessary being, the only thing necessary being contingency itself. Consequently, there is no possibility of an eternal God as creator and provider. Everything that occurs (including the physical laws that would normally govern occurrences) is susceptible to becoming other for no reason whatsoever. In place of an ordered universe we have what he has recently been calling a ‘superchaos’. Nonetheless, he is a rationalist and believes that such a universe is conceivable and describable in rationalistic terms and will even support certain logical norms. For example, he shows that even within this chaos, indeed because of it, the principle of non-contradiction still holds. A contradictory being (one capable of being both itself and other than itself) would be a necessary being (because its being already contains the non-being that would depose it) and therefore impossible. Furthermore, such a universe allows the rational conceivability of certain possibilities, not described within After Finitude but suggested in some essays currently available and apparently outlined more fully in the forthcoming L’Inexistence Divine. The most surprising of these, given his irreligious ontology, and, we expect, the most galling to his current readership, is the idea of ‘a God to come’. Superchaos enables the emergence ex nihilo of absolutely unpredictable occurrences. He has isolated three successive historical eruptions of this type – matter, life and thought. Meillassoux speculates on a fourth, justice, essentially the bestowal of near-immortality (only near since no being can be eternal) on every thinking being, living or dead. His ethics consists in the never assured hope for this event, which takes the form of a peculiar messianism – the subject awaits a being of such unconstrained power that its appearance drags the human race into a new state. The waiting is not intended as passive, however. The subject who experiences this hope is invigorated by it, released from the weight of the terrible injustices of history and of the last century in particular, from eternal grief and inaction, and is given renewed political impetus to anticipate this new world in her actions and thought.

—‘Ex Nihilo’, Michael Reid