Quentin Meillassoux

Meillassoux clarified and revised some of the views exposed in After Finitude during his lectures at the Free University of Berlin in 2012.

In September 2011, Meillassoux's book on Stéphane Mallarmé was published in France under the title Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du coup de dés de Mallarmé. In this second book, he offers a detailed reading of Mallarmé's famous poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" ("A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"), in which he finds a numerical code at work in the text.

Meillassoux is a former student of the philosophers Bernard Bourgeois [fr] and Alain Badiou. Badiou, who wrote the foreword for Meillassoux's first book After Finitude (Après la finitude, 2006), describes the work as introducing an entirely new option into modern philosophy, one that differs from Immanuel Kant's three alternatives of criticism, skepticism, and dogmatism. The book was translated into English by philosopher Ray Brassier. Meillassoux is associated with the speculative realism movement.

Several of Meillassoux's articles have appeared in English via the British philosophical journal Collapse, helping to spark interest in his work in the Anglophone world. His unpublished dissertation L'inexistence divine (1997) is noted in After Finitude to be "forthcoming" in book form; as of 2016, it had not yet been published. In Parrhesia, in 2016, an excerpt from Meillassoux's dissertation was translated by Nathan Brown, who noted in his introduction that "what is striking about the document... is the marked difference of its rhetorical strategies, its order of reasons, and its philosophical style" from After Finitude, counter to the general view that the latter merely constituted "a partial précis" of L'inexistence divine; he notes further that the dissertation presents a "very different articulation of the Principle of Factiality" from that in After Finitude.

Quentin Meillassoux (/ˌ m eɪ ə ˈ s uː / ; French: [mɛjasu] ; born 1967) is a French philosopher. He teaches at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and is the son of the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux.