Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345–366.
There are three fundamental reasons why Kant functions as one of the main nemeses for Badiouian philosophy.
First, Badiou blames him for having invented the motif of finitude, a motif present nowadays in various guises. Badiou’s tirades against this motif recur throughout his writings in the form of attacks upon not only epistemologies of finite subjective knowledge, but also upon promotions of mortality, of death-bound being, as philosophically foundational and ultimate.
Second, Badiou balks at Kant’s invocation of the ostensible ‘‘limits of possible experience’’ insofar as this boundary-line partitioning noumena from phenomena entails the prohibition of constructing a rational ontology. The Kantian critical-transcendental apparatus insists that only a de-ontologized epistemology is philosophically valid and defensible, which, in light of Badiou’s post-Heideggerian ontological ambitions, is a position that must be eradicated.
Third, for Badiou as a committed materialist, the idealism of Kantian transcendental idealism is simply unacceptable. Badiou’s transcendental is both asubjective and (materially) immanent to the world of which it is, at one and the same time, both a structuring scaffolding as well as an internal component. 348
With implicit reference to the Kantian gesture of enclosing subjects within the prison-houses and shadow-theaters of their own cognition, Badiou sneeringly dubs Kant ‘‘our first professor,’’ the initiator of a sterile academic orientation in philosophy whose very theoretical content reflects the alleged practical fact of its lack of substantial connections to any sort of (so to speak) real world.
What accounts for the genesis of the relative coherence and organization of “worlds” (i.e., structured domains of relations between presentable entities) out of the incoherence and disorganization of pure being an sich?
One might anticipate that it is in response to precisely this query that Badiou re-deploys the notion of the transcendental. However, such is not the case. Badiou’s transcendental is co-extensive with what he calls “worlds”.
More specifically, each Badiouian world, as a regional sphere within which multiple-being is made to appear in the form of localized/situated existences according to the relational logic of this same sphere, is ordered by its own “transcendental regime”.
Additionally, he contends that there are indefinite numbers of worlds both possible and actual. Hence, the Badiouian transcendental isn’t a concept-term denoting delineable (pre)conditions for the emergence of phenomenal being-there (i.e., the appearances and presentations of transcendentally structured worlds) out of ontological being qua being (as distinct from any and every phenomenology).
To the extent that Badiou’s transcendental is internal to and entirely entangled with the circumscribed domain of être-la it cannot simultaneously operate in a mediating transitional role between this domain and l’être en tant qu’être.
Badiou seems to be left with the unanswered questions of how and why being(s) give rise to worlds (the latter involving the transcendental as each world’s organizing state/regime). In isolation from Kant’s idealism, the broadest sense of his notion of the transcendental has to do with conditions of possibility. In this sense, Badiou’s transcendental begs the question of the conditions of possibility for its own surfacing out of the Real of being.
Who or what catalyzes the coming into existence of the being-there of appearances? Badiouian transcendentalism, if there is such a thing, would thus require supplementation by a meta-transcendentalism, an explanation of that which makes possible this very catalyzing.
Again and again, Badiou opposes the crucial move at the heart of the Kantian critical “Copernican revolution,” namely, the insistence that knowable reality conforms to the mediating templates of subjective cognition (rather than this cognition directly apprehending real being in and of itself).
As regards the former (i.e., a direct knowledge of l’être en tant qu’être), he claims, against Kant’s maintenance of the limits of possible experience, that cognition indeed can transgress these purported limits so as to seize being qua being in an unmediated fashion.
For Badiou, being-in-itself, unlike das Ding an sich, is “entirely knowable” (for this same reason, he disagrees with readings of Lacan in which the register of the Real is treated as akin or equivalent to Kant’s realm of noumena. In Logiques des mondes, he speaks of thought’s ability to operate “beyond the limits of sensibility” so as to “synthetically think the noumenal and the phenomenal” (Hegel’s post-Kantian aspirations are mentioned here too)
Compter pour Un Counting For One
One of the core concepts entangled with the ontology elaborated inBeing and Event is that of ‘‘counting-for-one’’ (compter-pour-un).
This unifying operation, as an operation, isn’t itself a being in the strict ontological sense (i.e., something inhering within l’être en tant qu’être).
Instead, Badiou defines this ‘‘count’’ as distinct from being, although (supposedly) always-already having acted upon it so as to render being-in-itself presentable (as Fabien Tarby explains, “the unity of something is operational and not substantial”, and, “Unity is transitory, evanescent, operational”).
Any “situation,” as a locality within which unified entities can and do appear, is structured by a situation-specific operation of counting-for-one. Furthermore, from within any situation arising as an outcome of such a count, one can, after-the-fact of this operation, infer something (i.e., being qua being as pure multiplicities-without-one) retroactively presupposed as prior to this process of counting.
This leads Badiou to propose a distinction between “inconsistent multiplicity” and “consistent multiplicity”; the former is what presumably precedes the consistency-producing intervention of counting-for-one and the latter is what is created as a result of this unifying operation.
A situation structured by a count contains many ones (i.e., consistent multiplicities), while being as such, posited as anterior to this situational structuring and organization, “in-consists” of multiplicities without one-ness or unity (hence, “being qua being, strictly speaking, is neither one nor multiple” — with “multiple” here meaning many unified ones).
With respect to this matter, Badiou oscillates between two incompatible stances: On the one hand, when railing against Kantian epistemological finitude with its limits of possible experience denying direct access to noumena, he claims that the noumenal realm of Real being an sich indeed can be grasped cognitively in ways forbidden by Kant’s de-ontologizing epistemology;
On the other hand, he sometimes seems to reinstate essential features of the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal when speaking of unsayble being-in-itself as inconsistent multiplicities-without-one inaccessible to all discourse and thought (even that of pure mathematics). 353
The phenomenal appearances of being-there (i.e., existence at the phenomenological level) are said to be constituted by virtue of the transcendental regime” of a “world” (monde) configuring given multiplicities (i.e., being at the ontological level). Real beings appear in a world, a domain of organized, inter-related phenomena, thanks to the structuring intervention of a transcendental architecture responsible for distributing varying degrees of “visibility” across the multiplicities of which a particular situation consists. (W)
The “logics of worlds” spoken of by the title of this 2006 book are none other than the ordering networks and webs allegedly making possible the localized appearings that compose the tableaus of varying phenomenological regions of situated, differentially co-determining manifestations. (W)