In the previous chapter we saw that, while Badiou maintains the dichotomy of theism and atheism in his axiomatic approach, Nancy moves beyond the dichotomy, exploring how the two positions share a common structure and how, to be ‘without God’, it is this structure that must be rejected, though we concluded that neither Nancy nor Badiou succeed in rejecting it. In this chapter we explore what such an atheological move might look like in an idiom closer to, but by no means identical with, Badiou's own, by turning to the thought of Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux's Après la finitude (2006) is an expanded treatment of part of his thèse de doctorat ‘L'Inexistence divine: Essai sur le dieu virtuel’, covering only the first 150 pages of a proposed 600 or 700 pages of work developing the whole of ‘L'Inexistence divine’. This latter work is broader in its scope though less developed than Après la finitude, and we shall be moving between the two works in our discussion of Meillassoux in this chapter.

The ‘finitude’ to which Meillassoux is referring in Après la finitude is both the temporal boundedness of a human reason for which ‘what is’ correlates to ‘what is thought’, and the Pascalian wretchedness of a humanity incessantly humbled by the boundedness of its will and capacities.