In The Enigma of Realism (published in Collapse vol. ii), Ray Brassier identifies a moment in the polemic between Quentin Meillassoux and his philosophical antagonist, “the correlationist”, in which a crucial distinction arises between lacunae in and of manifestation. First of all there is the correlationist’s initial rebuttal to Meillassoux’s “fossil argument”:

…[T]he arche-fossil is just another example of an unperceived phenomenon and, as with all other examples of unperceived phenomena, it merely exemplifies the inherently lacunary nature of manifestation – the fact that no phenomenon is ever exhaustively or absolutely apprehended by perception or consciousness.

For Kant, Brassier’s correlationist points out, sensible intuition is confronted with the “infinite complexity” of a datum of sensation; while for Husserl, “intentionality proceeds by adumbrations” which are intrinsically partial, in the sense that they carry an “un-apprehended” remainder along with them. Lacunae in perception are part of the baggage of perception itself: “the non-manifest inheres in every manifestation”.

The Kantian and Husserlian counter-arguments are not quite identical here. For sensible intuition to be held at bay by the “infinite complexity” of the datum implies that the datum itself contains an excess of structure, that it just goes on interminably unfolding itself while sensible intuition must find a halting point on which to settle. The problem is one of finitude versus infinitude: human cognition is “intrinsically limited and finite”, such that it is specifically un-limited and in-finite objects that must elude (or succumb only partially to) its grasp. The possibility of a finitely complex object that might nevertheless prove inaccessible to sensible intuition is not raised here; neither is the possibility of an object whose complexity might prove too much even for an infinitely capable cognitive apparatus, an object inconceivable even in the mind of God.

In the Husserlian version of the correlationist’s retort, however, it belongs to the structure of an “adumbration” that it should carry a remainder; it is almost as if the accretion of adumbrations produced a correlative accretion of lacunae in a kind of perceptual chiaroscuro. This process could go on for ever without banishing the “non-manifest”, since it summons the non-manifest to be a kind of mute witness to the very operation of manifestation. There is no particular sense that the more you adumbrate, the smaller the domain of the “non-manifest” becomes, such that it is only the infinite extent of that domain that prevents a finite series of adumbrations from exhausting it. If anything, the reverse might be the case: an infinite series of adumbrations would end up producing an infinitely obscure (as well as infinitely detailed) object.

It should be clear that the arche-fossil is considered by Meillassoux to be antecedent to manifestation neither because it is “infinitely complex”, nor because it partakes of an unapprehended remainder drawn into the ambit of manifestation itself. It is rather utterly outside the ambit of manifestation, and in no sense posed as a challenge to the finitude of perception since it precedes the appearance of any perceptual apparatus with which it might be placed in confrontation. Thus, in Brassier’s account, Meillassoux’s retort to the correlationist’s first objection runs like this:

…[T]he arche-fossil cannot be reduced to an example of the un-perceived because the temporal anteriority involved in the notion of ancestrality remains irreducible to any notion of temporal “distance” concomitant with correlational manifestation…[T]he arche-fossil is not merely a non-manifest gap or lacuna in manifestation; it is the lacuna of manifestation tout court.

It is a matter of time. Temporal “distance” is an interval within “the time of the correlation”, a distance measured against the temporal scope of correlational manifestation itself. The “anteriority” of the arche-fossil is an ex-temporality: it falls altogether outside the time of the correlation, and cannot be measured on the scale constructed within correlational manifestation. Again we must guard against the pathos of finitude: the issue is not that the time of the correlation is finite, and the arche-fossil is infinitely old. (on the contrary, in terms of “cosmic time” the inception of the time of the correlation is extremely recent). What is at stake is rather a diachrony, a difference between two temporal regimes.Meillassoux chooses the names “the ancient” for that which is temporally very distant (measured relative to the span of the correlation) and “the ancestral” for the time of the arche-fossil. It is an interesting choice of terms: the ancestor, the one who “went before”, is nevertheless a relative, albeit a distant one. There is indeed a relationship between the time of the arche-fossil and that of the correlation; but it is one of precedence. This is the fundamental antagonism between the philosophical autism of correlationism, which admits of no precursor, and the objective ancestrality of the arche-fossil, which will have witnessed both the birth and the funeral of “being”.

The polemic between Meillassoux and the correlationist does not end there, of course; the cunning of correlationism is unequalled in philosophy. However, the question of whether the diachrony indicated by Meillassoux belongs to “a non-manifest gap…in manifestation” or “the lacuna of manifestation tout court” is immediately relevant to the question raised in the Lovecraft conference of whether the “transcendental shock” presented in Lovecraft’s horror fiction is a shock registered within the transcendental, or a shock to the transcendental itself. In other words: do the “weird” elements within the fiction appear as a (disruptive, incoherent) projection across the screen of the transcendental, indicating an “outside” that is only ever manifest as a lacuna in manifestation, or do they place the transcendental itself in question, establishing a precedence of the inhuman that the transcendental cannot subdue or reappropriate?

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