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 is not the idea that reason inheres in the world or the self, as is often claimed, but rather that only that which goes through the dialogic process is rational. Those who refuse dialogue, no matter how deep the truth they may grasp, are irrational. Whether or not the world or the self contains reason in and of itself ultimately counts for nothing; only those who are subjected to dialogue are rational.

This leads Karatani to defend Kant’s use of mathematics in the Critique of Pure Reason against the logical positivist critiques, arguing that Kant’s position radicalizes the notion of mathematics as rational, intersubjective dialogue by inscribing deep within mathematics the problem of alterity in communication. Kant achieves this, according to Karatani, through an introduction of what Karatani calls the “transcendental other,” a secular other who is “everywhere and everytime in front of us,” or in other words, the thing-in-itself.

All of this is very interesting, to my mind, but I think Karatani’s identification of Hegel as a practitioner of “dialogue as monologue” proceeds a bit too smoothly. A particularly revealing quote on this matter comes at the end of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in the section on “Kraft und Verstand, Erscheinung und übersinnliche Welt,” in which he writes:

In dem Erklären ist eben darum so viele Selbstbefriedigung, weil das Bewußtsein dabei, um es so auszudrücken, in unmittelbarem Selbstgespräche mit sich, nur sich selbst genießt, dabei zwar etwas anderes zu treiben scheint, aber in der Tat sich nur mit sich selbst herumtreibt.

In the above passage, Hegel identifies the problem of communication as a reliance on positing a false alterity vis-a-vis the process of dialogue as monologue. In other words, although consciousness appears to be in “communication” (or, alternatively, “pedagogy,” if we are to translate things back into the terminology of Platonic dialogues) with some Other outside of consciousness, consciousness is in actuality communicating only with itself, and it is interesting to note that Hegel uses the language of enjoyment (“Selbstbefriedigung,” which can be rendered more formally as “self-enjoyment,” or more crudely as masturbation, as well as the verb “geniessen,” to enjoy) to describe this activity, as well as that of busyness and the drive, both of which I think ought to be seen in light of Freud.

This, I think, opens up a new set of questions regarding both the particular status of the transcendental other, of mathematics and language as systems of mediation and/or alterity, as well as the more Hegelian trope of the necessity of error in the dialectic. Moreover, we might ask ourselves, when we engage in communication with “the other,” to what extent this other is in fact a genuine marker or placeholder of alterity, or instead only the mere appearance of alterity as posited by a certain “drive” towards dialogue as monologue, in order to realize the subject’s jouissance through this very self-activity.

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 as “atonal,” lack points; these flat, grey reality-systems are devoid of immanently embedded internal catalysts for choices not already covered by these same systems). The concept of the point is one example of Badiou’s efforts to think both senses of the term subject.²

What I take Johnston to be saying here is that, by omitting the subject (again, in both senses of the term), “flat,” “atonal” “reality-systems” lack the proper quilting points which “force” the subject to choose (the condensing and splitting of pure multiplicities into the “either/or” of the Two, a logic which I believe derives from Lacan’s alienation-separation axis). Hence, any ontology or system which supposedly provides an account of being qua being that is flat or atonal can only function as a description of a world or situation in which there exists no subject and no possible appearance of a Truth Event that could radically alter the conditions of that world. This, I think, is a serious error, but now I want to move to Karatani:

I now take up the three main currents of thinking in postwar France: existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism. The existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, stressed freedom, while admitting the structural determinedness of humans. His vantage point might be defined as practical. On the other hand, when the structuralists questioned the concept of subject as a substance and saw it merely as an effect of structure, they took a theoretical stance. In this context it is quite understandable that they returned to Spinoza. As I mentioned earlier, the thesis of Kant’s third antinomy results in Spinoza’s position—that everything is determined by causes, but people think they act freely because the causes are so complex.

…It is meaningless to oppose subject against the structuralist stance, or to seek the subject therein. Because, from the beginning, it is only by bracketing the subject that structural determinism is attained. Conversely, only when structural determination is bracketed can the dimension of subject and responsibility return. Later, when poststructuralism sought to reintroduce morality—it was simply as a matter of course.³

In other words, for Karatani Sartre’s emphasis on “autonomous negativity,” to use Johnston’s phrase (a phrase that, in fact, draws an interesting and perhaps overlooked parallel between Sartre and Žižek) ought to be read above all as a practical standpoint, whereas Althusser’s structural determinism qua “structural causality” and “overdetermination” ought to be read as a theoretical standpoint. Thus, although they appear to be antithetical, they are in fact perfectly reconcilable once we conceive of structure and subject as the unity of theory and practice. This allows Karatani to re-read Kant’s third antinomy as essentially affirming and negating both existentialism and structuralism.

Additionally, Karatani goes one step further by arguing that, outside of the subject-as-freedom and structure-as-determinism antinomy, one already finds an implicit kind of subjectivity lurking behind this opposition. According to Karatani, this is the (Cartesian) subject as void, the subject that carries out the process of bracketing:

In the Saussurean system, and its legacy, a word is the “synthesis” of the signifiant (the sensible) and the signifié (the suprasensible). But the crucial point here is that such a synthesis is established only ex post facto—that it makes sense to me. In the end, when Saussure suggested that form (le signifiant) constitutes a differential, relation system, the architectonic of the system tacitly took as a premise what had already called “transcendental apperception.”⁴

Further along, Karatani writes:

…Cartesian doubt begins from his realization that the truths people believe in are simply determined by the “example and custom” of the community to which they belong, namely, by shared rules and paradigms. That is to say that Descartes had already been observing the world in the manner of a cultural anthropologist. As I pointed out earlier, many postlinguistic-turn philosophers reject methods such as his, motivated as they appear to be in introspection. But the reason Descartes himself tended toward introspection in the first place was because his predecessors of the philosophia scholastica—whether nominalist or realist—had all thought within the frame of the “grammar” of the Indo-European language group. In this respect, the Cartesian cogito is nothing if not the awareness that our thought is always already bound by language. In Kant’s terminology, this is the “transcendental” standpoint toward language. The transcendental position is equivalent to bracketing the imagined self-evidence of the empirical consciousness in order to reveal the (unconscious) conditions that constitute it. What is crucial here is that the transcendental standpoint inexorably accompanies a certain kind of subjectivity.⁵

In my opinion, the strength of Karatani’s position derives from the fact that he is able to reconcile subjectivity and structure by reinterpreting Descartes and Kant as radical thinkers of the unity of theory and practice, which avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of volunteerism and determinism. Yet where Karatani fails, his inability to provide an adequate theory of how to radically reveal and overthrow the “examples and customs” that communities mistake as truths, is precisely where Badiou succeeds: although Badiou’s subject seems to tilt more towards volunteerism in that the subject is forced to choose between a Groundless either/or, which retroactively confers the status upon of subject upon the subject (this leads Badiou toward the problem of “affect” and “will,” as Johnston notes), he nonetheless provides the proper theoretical contours for how to think of change as “transcendence in immanence” (the Event as neither wholly determined by its worldly preconditions, nor as a quas-religious transcendent Beyond lacking any and all preconditions).

Badiou’s theory of the Event, I think, is not only a major improvement over Karatani’s anarchist-communist synthesis, but also entirely compatible with his defense of the Cartesian cogito. I think Žižek’s work is useful here because he provides a kind of metaphorical bridge between Karatani’s Kantianiasm and Badiou’s Platonism. But I want to first let some of this digest and then I’ll try and move on to that topic a bit later.

1. Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 62-63.
2. Ibid., p. 63
3. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 120-21.
4. Ibid., p. 77.
5. Ibid., p. 82.