Abstract
This article offers a reading of the “transcendental” character of Alain Badiou’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ontologies. While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals. Not unlike how pre-modern philosophers conceived of oneness, truth and goodness as transcendental properties of all things, both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies present various structures which can be universally predicated of all being. However, as opposed to the essentialist or even theological tendencies of traditional metaphysics, Badiou’s and Agamben’s ontologies are committedly “inessential” and atheistic at their very core. By replacing the divine names of the one, the true and the good in traditional metaphysics with a new yet quasi-classical transcendental notion of “the void” as a universal predicate of all beings, Badiou’s and Agamben’s works may be regarded as projects that go beyond both the pre-Kantian “theological” and the post-Kantian “subjective” conceptions of transcendental philosophy, thereby marking a new development in the history of western metaphysics.
Highlights
By his very own description, Alain Badiou’s philosophy is “resolutely classical” in the sense that it “does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant.” For Badiou, to be a “classical” philosopher is to see “the Kantian indictment of metaphysics as null and void” and to hold that it is “possible to think Being” once again.1 Such an attempt to “think Being” is found in the works of Giorgio Agamben, who shares with Badiou a certain hostility towards Kant’s critical injunctions on ontology
While neither Badiou nor Agamben are “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover aspects of the “classical” conception of the transcendentals
Badiou and Agamben are by no means “transcendental” philosophers in the Kantian sense, this article argues that their respective projects of ontology both recover a pre-modern or pre-Kantian classical sense of “transcendentality” as the essential properties of being which can be universally found in any and every particular thing insofar as it exists
Summary
The notion of the “transcendental” is often associated with Kant’s influential account of the transcendental ideality of time and space as conditions for human cognition. All things can be said to be “true”—or, so to speak, “truthful” (“that is a true chair,” “a true sentence,” “a true number”): There is some level of truth in all things insofar as they (“truly”) exist and are intelligible—that they contain some sense of “truth.” According to Scholastic metaphysics, the oneness, truth, and goodness we find in each and every being in the world are reflections of God’s divine perfections: For God is the original and exemplary definition of oneness, truth and goodness—the transcendent measure by which we measure the oneness, truth and goodness of all created things.
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