Geist, Contingency and the Future of God: Hegel and Meillassoux

Abstract

This paper traces the way Quentin Meillassoux’s metaphysics of the absolute and his thought on contingency and the future coming of God both follows Hegel’s notion of ‘Geist,’ in an unexpected manner, and creates an impasse that only a certain return to Hegel’s ontoanthropology can overcome. The challenge which Hegel accepts and Meillassoux takes up is to make thinkable the possibility for the secular to bring forth absolute newness and the event of the absolute – moreover, for Hegel, anthropologically, we are Geist, we are contingency, the possibility of being-otherwise incarnate