79 Speculatng on the Absolute: on Hegel and Meillassoux 1 Bart Zantvoort University College Dublin “To reconcile thought and absolute” - this is the enjoinder with which Meillassoux closes Ater Finitude. 2 The Hegelian tenor of this statement is impossible to miss, as is Meillassoux’s reference to the most famous speculative philosopher of the absolute in his own use of these terms. Is Meillassoux being ironic? Is Hegel not the ‘correlationist’ philosopher pur sang? In fact, Hegel’s role in Ater Finitude is not very clear. 3 To the casual reader it may appear that Meillassoux’s atitude towards Hegel is generally dismissive. The scatered refer- 1  I am grateful to Fintan Neylan and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier drat of this essay. 2  Quentin Meillassoux, Ater Finitude: An Essay on the Necessiy of Contin- geny, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 128 (henceforth quoted as AF). 3  In order to focus on the relation between Hegel and Meillassoux I am going to presume the reader’s familiarity with Ater Finitude. Many excellent summaries, commentaries and criticisms of this work have already been writen. To name a few: Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 49–94; Adrian Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?’, in he Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 91-113, htp://www.re-press. org/book-iles/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf; Peter Hallward, ‘Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillas- soux’s Ater Finitude’, in he Speculative Turn, 131–41; Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 6–53.