Nathan Brown - Rationalist Empiricism, Dialectical Materialism - From Althusser to Meillassoux

This series of three lectures will theorize “rationalist empiricism” as a methodological trajectory in modern and contemporary thought, presenting its implications for communist politics, speculative epistemology, and the philosophy of time. The first lecture will uncover the participation of Quentin Meillassoux’s work in the reorientation of dialectical materialism carried out by Louis Althusser. The second lecture will treat the inheritance of Althusserian theory by Théorie Communiste, arguing that the latter fulfill the Spinozist “criterion of immanence” that eluded Althusser through a rationalist empiricist understanding of the relation between communist theory and practice. The final lecture then returns to the ontological implications of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, situating these with respect to Hegel’s speculative idealism and reconstructing the theory of time articulated in Meillassoux’s unpublished doctoral dissertation on this basis.