Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345\u2013366.<\/p>\n
There are three fundamental reasons why Kant functions as one of the main nemeses for Badiouian philosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n First<\/span>, Badiou blames him for having invented the motif of finitude, a motif present nowadays in various guises.\u00a0Badiou\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Second<\/span>, Badiou balks at Kant\u2019s invocation of the ostensible \u2018\u2018limits of possible experience\u2019\u2019 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\u2019s post-Heideggerian ontological ambitions, is a position that must be eradicated.<\/p>\n Third<\/span>, for Badiou as a committed materialist, the idealism of Kantian transcendental idealism is simply unacceptable. Badiou\u2019s 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.\u00a0 348<\/p>\n With implicit reference to the Kantian<\/span> gesture of enclosing subjects within the prison-houses and shadow-theaters of their own cognition<\/span>, Badiou sneeringly dubs Kant \u2018\u2018our first professor,\u2019\u2019 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n What accounts for the genesis of the relative coherence and organization of “worlds”<\/span> (i.e., structured domains of relations between presentable entities) out of the incoherence and disorganization of pure being an sich<\/em>?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s transcendental is co-extensive with what he calls “worlds”.<\/p>\n 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”.<\/p>\n Additionally, he contends that there are indefinite numbers of worlds both possible and actual. Hence, the Badiouian transcendental isn\u2019t 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<\/em> being (as distinct from any and every phenomenology).<\/strong><\/p>\n To the extent that Badiou\u2019s transcendental is internal to and entirely entangled with the circumscribed domain of \u00eatre-la<\/em> it cannot simultaneously operate in a mediating transitional role between this domain and l’\u00eatre en tant qu\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s organizing state\/regime). In isolation from Kant\u2019s idealism, the broadest sense of his notion of the transcendental has to do with conditions of possibility. In this sense, Badiou\u2019s transcendental begs the question of the conditions of possibility for its own surfacing out of the Real of being.<\/p>\n Who or what catalyzes the coming into existence of the being-there of appearances?<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n Again and again, Badiou opposes the crucial move<\/strong> at the heart of the Kantian critical “Copernican revolution,”<\/span> 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).<\/span><\/p>\n As regards the former (i.e., a direct knowledge of l\u2019\u00eatre en tant qu\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>), he claims, against Kant\u2019s maintenance of the limits of possible experience, that cognition indeed can transgress these purported limits so as to seize being qua<\/em> being in an unmediated fashion.<\/span><\/p>\n For Badiou, being-in-itself, unlike das Ding an sich<\/em>, 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\u2019s realm of noumena.\u00a0 In Logiques des mondes<\/em>, he speaks of thought\u2019s ability to operate “beyond the limits of sensibility” so as to “synthetically think the noumenal and the phenomenal” (Hegel\u2019s post-Kantian aspirations are mentioned here too)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0Compter pour Un\u00a0 Counting For One<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n One of the core concepts entangled with the ontology elaborated inBeing and Event is that of \u2018\u2018counting-for-one\u2019\u2019 (compter-pour-un).<\/p>\n This unifying operation, as an operation, isn\u2019t itself a being in the strict ontological sense (i.e., something inhering within l\u2019\u00eatre en tant qu\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>).<\/p>\n Instead, Badiou defines this \u2018\u2018count\u2019\u2019 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”).<\/p>\n Any “situation,”<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n This leads Badiou to propose a distinction between “inconsistent multiplicity”<\/strong> and “consistent multiplicity”<\/strong>; 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> being, strictly speaking, is neither one nor multiple” \u2014 with “multiple” here meaning many unified ones).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With respect to this matter, Badiou oscillates between two incompatible stances:<\/span> 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<\/em> indeed can be grasped cognitively in ways forbidden by Kant\u2019s de-ontologizing epistemology;<\/span><\/p>\n 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<\/span> inaccessible to all discourse and thought (even that of pure mathematics).<\/strong> 353<\/p>\n The phenomenal appearances of being-there (i.e., existence at the phenomenological level) are said to be constituted by virtue of the transcendental regime\u201d of a \u201cworld\u201d (monde<\/em>) 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 \u201cvisibility\u201d across the multiplicities of which a particular situation consists.\u00a0 (W)<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345\u2013366. 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.\u00a0Badiou\u2019s tirades against this … Continue reading “adrian johnston meillassoux badiou”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-dia-mat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10363"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10369,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10363\/revisions\/10369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}