This is the title of the talk I’ll be giving at ANU in four weeks time. The Humanities Research Centre theme for this year is ‘The World and World-Making in Humanities and the Arts’. The draft abstract follows:-
What do fossils have to do with the world? This talk tries to outline their importance in two registers. The first concerns debates on the implications of fossils for understanding the creation, and the age, of the world—from Aristotle to Leibniz, Voltaire and Chateaubriand. The second part of the talk takes up the challenge posed by Quentin Meillassoux in his book After Finitude. For Meillassoux, post-Kantian philosophy has been characterised by correlationism – that we have no access to the world except as it exists through our relation to it. Meillassoux articulates a radical problem with this: how to understand the problem of the arche-fossil, those radioactive traces that predate any life on earth. Correlationism is flawed, Meillassoux suggests, because arche-fossils show that there is a world of which we can have objective knowledge without there being any mediation between that and the observer. While the dating is meditated, the existence of these phenomena is not. Meillassoux suggests that correlationism, in all its variants, is a convenient way to avoid having to account for the world as it is, outside of human access. Meillassoux is problematic because he ends up returning to a mathematical foundation for the ontology of the world—based in large part on the work of Alain Badiou. But the arche-fossil poses a fundamental challenge to accounts of the world and its relations.
