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108 5 Phantom of Consistency: Kant Troubles§1 Transcendentalism and Its Discontents: Badiou’s Synthesis of Existentialism and Structuralism The most important aspect of the work of Badiou, as situated at the intersection of the history of post-Kantian European philosophy and contemporary theory, is his sustained project to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between two distinct orientations represented by two twentieth-century figures avowedly influential for him in his youth: Sartre and Althusser. In terms of the topic of subjectivity, a topic Badiou insistently keeps on today’s intellectual agenda despite so much talk of “the death of the subject” surrounding deconstructionism and the various “post” movements (postmodernism, poststructuralism, and so on), the former (i.e., Sartre) represents a notion of the subject as a kinetic negativity of absolute autonomy free from ultimate determination by nature, nurture, or any combination thereof; by contrast, the latter (i.e., Althusser) represents a notion of the subject as the heteronomous, reified by-product of transsubjective sociohistorical mechanisms, namely, the subject as subjected to ideologies, interpellations, and so on. One of the central philosophical matters separating phenomenological existentialism from Marxist structuralism is, obviously, the enigma of freedom. As Badiou remarks, for him, “the decisive philosophical task . . . would be to complete the Sartrean theory of liberty with a careful investigation into the opacity of the signifier.”1 In an interview with Bruno Bosteels, Badiou discusses his interest in finding a way to surmount the apparent antinomy between Sartreanstyle existentialism and Althusserian-style structuralism. He states: I have always been concerned in a privileged way by the question of how something could still be called “subject” within the most rigorous conditions possible of the investigation of structures. This question had an echo for me of an even older question, which I had posed at the time when I was fully Sartrean, namely, the question of how to make Sartre compatible with the intelligibility of mathematics . . . I remember very 109 P H A N T O M O F C O N S I S T E N C Y clearly having raised the question, having formed the project of one day constructing something like a Sartrean thought of mathematics, or of science in general, which Sartre had left aside for the most part. This particular circumstance explains why I nevertheless have always been interested in the question of structural formalism while sustaining a category of the subject.2 A certain question Badiou poses in the introduction to Being and Event should be understood in relation to the above statements—“pure mathematics being the science of being, how is a subject possible?”3 Articulating himself in this fashion, Badiou makes clear that his efforts to figure out how to remain faithful to the insights of existentialism regarding autonomous subjectivity while nonetheless fully embracing the framework of structuralism—Peter Osborne is not without justification in seeing Badiou’s philosophy, especially its recourse to mathematics, as fundamentally structuralist in inspiration4 —are at the very heart of his protracted endeavors across the full range of his many writings. He thus puts himself forward as taking on the task of resolving one of the great unresolved tensions bequeathed to contemporary thought by twentiethcentury continental philosophy; and, like Lacan, he strives to do so by formulating a model of subjectivity compatible with the strictures of structuralism’s emphases on the mediating influences of asubjective configurations and matrices.5 What is required, as Badiou readily admits, is nothing less than a quite novel and unprecedented account of the subject.6 Paul Ricoeur, in reference to Lévi-Strauss, describes classical 1950s French structuralism (a set of which Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the only full member) as involving a “transcendentalism without a subject.”7 Admittedly , neither Lévi-Strauss nor Althusser seems to leave space open in their theoretical systems for anything resembling the subject of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom. Badiou’s theory of the event, arising out of the openings provided by the points of inconsistency embedded within structuring situations and states, allows for avoiding precisely such stifling subject-foreclosing closure. But not only does Badiou seek to delineate what one could characterize as a structuralism with a subject—his most recent philosophical reflections, coming together in the hulking tome Logics of Worlds, labor to construct a reworked conception of the transcendental as decoupled from any sort of transcendental subject (à la Kant). Like Ricoeur’s version of Lévi-Strauss, Badiou indeed pursues, in his latest texts, a transcendentalism without...

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