In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

131 6 The World Before Worlds: The Ancestral and Badiou’s Anti-Kantian Transcendentalism§1 From Badiou to Meillassoux: The Antifinitude Front Badiou describes Logics of Worlds as a phenomenological framework erected specifically on the basis of the ontological foundations laid in Being and Event. He refers to Hegel’s oeuvre in clarifying the position and status of this recent substantial addition to his philosophical apparatus : “Logics of Worlds is to Being and Event what Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is to his Science of Logic.”1 As Badiou explains it, whereas Being and Event deals with “being” as “being qua being” (l’être en tant qu’être), Logics of Worlds addresses “existence” as “being-there” (être-là).2 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, interrelated 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.3 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 codetermining manifestations.4 As examined in the previous chapter, Badiou, in Logics of Worlds, struggles to develop a conception of the transcendental divorced from Kantian transcendental idealism, namely, a, so to speak, de-Kantified transcendental. Such a nonidealist transcendentalism—Badiou aspires toward a transcendentalism compatible with his vehemently avowed (but questionable) materialism (see the fourth and fifth chapters above)— involves the notion that there can be and are appearances in worlds without any corresponding Kantian-style transcendental subject being there as a necessary condition enabling these worldly manifestations to mani- 132 Q U E N T I N M E I L L A S S O U X fest themselves. Put differently, Badiou envisions the possibility of subjectless worlds of appearances that appear to/for no one whomsoever.5 As argued in the preceding chapter, Badiou himself doesn’t provide all of the arguments required to desubjectify transcendentalism (i.e., to forge a non-Kantian conception of the transcendental) in a persuasively complete and exhaustive manner. In fact, he delegates some of this labor to his protégé Meillassoux. At a key juncture in his discussions of decoupling transcendentalism from transcendental idealism and its theory of the subject, Badiou explicitly appeals to lines of thought contained in Meillassoux’s very interesting debut book After Finitude, avowedly relying upon the latter’s materialist critique of the 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.6 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).7 Post-Kantian variants of correlationism share in common an antirealist, deontologized epistemology denying that subjects can and do, as Lacan would put it, touch the Real (i.e., gain direct, unmediated access to the ontological domain of being in and of itself). For correlationists, the smudging fingerprints of knowing subjectivity and its constraining limitations always and necessarily cover over the entities taken up into the grasp of this subject. Badiou, especially as a self-proclaimed materialist deeply indebted to Marxist dialectical materialism, has a number of reasons for being uncompromisingly hostile toward this orientation, an orientation quite prominent in philosophy up through today (along these lines, one wonders whether Engels, Lenin, and Althusser, among others, are absolutely right to maintain that professional academic philosophy exhibits an incorrigible tendency toward antimaterialist idealism).8 But whether Badiou succeeds in entirely stepping out from under Kant’s long shadow arguably depends on whether Meillassoux succeeds in thoroughly debunking Kantian and post-Kantian correlationism. So, appropriately, it is to Meillassoux’s work that I now turn. Before proceeding to a detailed engagement with Meillassoux’s After Finitude, a few words of warning are in order. To be more precise, the reading of this text...

Share