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Dialogue as Monologue
In his discussion of the problematic of Kantian synthetic judgment and the “paradox of pedagogy” found in Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, as put forward in the Meno, Kojin Karatani makes the following intriguing remarks:
In many courts of law, both opponents must obey a common rule that technically allows the prosecutor and the defense attorney to exchange roles at any time. Those who do not acknowledge and adhere to the legal language game are either ordered out of court or ruled incompetent by the court. In this sort of game, no matter how forcefully or enthusiastically they might oppose one another, neither opponent occupies the position of “the other.” As Rescher notes, this dialogue always has the potential to become a monologue. Indeed, in the works of Aristotle and Hegel, dialectics did become a monologue. And though Plato’s dialogues were written in the form of conversation, finally they, too, must be considered dramatic monologues—as Bahktin pointed out in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Western philosophy thus began as an introspective—that is, monologic—dialogue, or, alternatively, dialogic monologue.
Karatani then goes on to assert that mathematics is privileged because its knowledge goes beyond that of the subjective I of dialogic monologue, a characteristic that finds its expression Plato’s and Euclid’s notion that “only that which survives the process of legal argumentation can be deemed mathematics.”
In this manner, mathematical proof is presumed to be produced by intersubjectivity, that is, by that which lies beyond individual cognition. The true Socratic/Platonic invention
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Uniting Subject and Structure
Last night, as I was reading Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, I noticed an interesting isomorphism between Badiou and Kojin Karatani (Žižek fits here as well, I’m just too lazy to pull out efficacious quotes):
In Logiques des mondes, further evidence surfaces of Badiou tending (at least temporally) to prioritize names over affects in the process of forcing [forçage]. Therein, he characterizes courage as a capacity to face “points.” One of the conceptual coordinates added to Badiouian philosophy by this sequel to Being and Event is this concept of the point. In several contexts, Badiou, avowedly influenced in his youth by both Sartre (proponent of a philosophy of freedom celebrating the powers of subjectivity as an autonomous negativity) and Althusser (advocate of a structuralist Marxism denigrating Sartrean-style subjectivity as an ideological illusion secreted by trans-individual sociohistorical mechanisms), confesses that one of his deepest-seated philosophical ambitions has always been and continues to be to succeed at combining these two seemingly antithetical influences as indispensable parts of a single philosophical orientation.1
Although not entirely related, I believe that the polyvalence of subject here (between “subject” as radical Sartrean-style “autonomous negativity” and “subject” as Althusserian-style “structural subjection”) figures directly into a critique of certain flat or object-oriented ontologies. Quoting Johnston:
According to Logiques des mondes, some worlds (although not all worlds), as onto-logical situations…contain within themselves points qua nodes which, when confronted, force an either/or choice between mutually exclusive alternatives (some other worlds, designated
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