Johnston, Adrian. “The World before Worlds: Quentin Meillassoux and Alain Badiou’s Anti-Kantian Transcendentalism” Contemporary French Civilization. 33.1 (2009): 73-99. Print.
idealist dogma according to which objects are phenomenal appearances dependent, for their existence, on a conscious individual human animal or sentient mind to whom they appear. Badiou and Meillassoux both identify Kant’s critical-transcendental framework as an exemplary instance of the idealist faith of what Meillassoux christens “correlationism,” a belief-system insisting upon the primacy of finite epistemological subjectivity as the ubiquitous mediating milieu for all actual and possible knowledge of objects (each and every object supposedly being constituted exclusively in and through this same milieu)
Post-Kantian variants of “correlationism,” share in common an anti-realist, de-ontologized epistemology denying that subjects can and do, as Jacques Lacan would put it, touch the Real (i.e., gain direct, unmediated access to the ontological domain of being in and of itself). 75
In particular, he has in mind such natural scientific disciplines as paleotology, geology, and astrophysics, sciences seemingly able to speak of the earth and the universe as they were and are apart from the mediating experience of microcosmic human minds.
Badiou desires to preserve a distinction between l’être en tant qu’être — i.e., noumenal being an sich knowable through set theory — and être-là — i.e., appearing as phenomenal objects-in-worlds delineable through category/topos theory — without positing a transcendental subject as co-extensive with the latter field/stratum — i.e., the regions of appearances.
But this leads Badiou to talk incomprehensibly about appearances without a who/what to which they appear — with this incomprehensible talk being what purportedly legitimates the idea of a transcendental decoupled from any transcendental subject.
Meillassoux, in contrast, actually provides no support what-soever for this decoupling,given his avoidance of characterizing the material beings-in-themselves referred to by the ancestral utterances of the natural sciences as paradoxical non-manifest manifestations — i.e., appearances appearing to/for nobody and nothing.
For the archi-fossil argument to buttress Badiou’s hypothesis regarding worlds-without-subjects — this hypothesis expresses the essence of his attempt at conceiving a non/anti-Kantian transcendental — the archi-fossil would have to belong to a world.
But although M’s archi-fossil belongs to an asubjective earth-on-its-own, it is not part of a world;
in other (Badiouian) words, this ancestral being is part of a world-less earth, a world, as it were, before worlds. in the absence of this support he claims to find in M’s thought, B is faced with the unappetizing prospects of the collapse of his distinction between being (as l’être en tant qu’être [being qua being]) and appearing as (être-là [being-there]) and/or a failure thoroughly to cleanse a retained transcendentalism of its associated idealism. 80