This zine will begin fall 2021. Its impetus is Quentin Meillassoux's writing and its goal is to offer an informal space to publish a wide range of responses to it.

Please see the website for information: https://divinizations.weebly.com/

Contact Luke Martin at contingentdivinizations@gmail.com with questions and/or ideas for submisison.

A note on the title, Divinizations. Within it, I am making two claims which I hope will gently orient the trajectory of the zine - and to which people should feel encouraged to respond. First: divinization is a speculative practice of accessing the absolute, or in our case, absolute contingency as a means of preparation for an ontological change (i.e., a fundamental advent after the 'realities' of matter, life, and thought to, for Meillassoux, the Fourth World of egalitarian and universal justice). This is an evolution of 'divination practices' -- ritualistic activities with a long and diverse history attempting to access, and perhaps feel, uncorrelated knowledge, the unknown. These are currently co-opted, finitized, and exploited in large part by the so-called speculations of global capital and neoliberalism: the political economy of chance versus a politics of (absolute) contingency [Joshua Ramey's Politics of Divination is essential here]. Chance must be wrested back toward the latter, a speculative and revolutionary path, with the addition of Meillassoux's "iz" (divination -> divinization), that is, inclusive of both a thought toward a God-to-come and toward the resurrection of the dead. Any revolutionary movement requires solidarity with the unjustly dead -- Meillassoux offers a path upon which, to me, it appears the dead may have something more: literal (and militant) agency. Second: the access to the absolute called for in divinization practices is of a very particular kind. Yes, absolute contingency, but perhaps more importantly, toward 'may-being' (what Meillassoux calls the final task of philosophy, an ontology grounded in the 'perhaps'). To me, this must have a kind of subterranean history, and may even require a re-definition of history altogether, that we ought to trace. Additionally, it is necessarily non-individualistic: as with Mallarmé's cipher, integration into may-being can only be accomplished by way of 'an indeterminate other' (the anonymous reader uncovering the cipher). At the same time it posits an absolute and the centrality of truth, a collectivism in the 'great outdoors' (or infected by the Outside), something sorely lacking in leftist circles. What secret societies are harbored within the folds of chance? How might they be formed?

What might fit in the zine is intentionally as open-ended as possible. It may make sense to include expansions of ideas he has proposed, translations into English of related writing, artistic work (scores, images, poems, comics, etc.), tangential ideas that connect to theology, revolutionary politics, contingency, critiques of capital, and so on. While I am especially interested in things related to the above remarks, I'm very much looking forward to expanding from these points into realms as vaguely related as contributors would like.