Humanities Underground

Countless Transcendentals: Kant on Discourse and Quantity

Debajyoti Mondal “Always quantify writing.” – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus This essay is a mad enterprise in dismantling Kant’s philosophy, particularly his project of ‘transcendental critique’, developed as the trial of reason’s own capacity to enquire after its limits and expected to lay the ground for philosophical cognition itself, along and around the idea that there was a more originary drive in the said ground-laying that estimated an augmentative rather than limitative outcome. The fancy goes that this will amount to an awakening or reawakening of Kant, this time not from the dogmatic slumber but an all-too-skeptical reality, which means this would be a reawakening to the dream, or softly, to some dream. In travestying the Cartesian shudder, the effort will be made to look into what is still living and adventurous in Kantian philosophy. We may begin by asking a rather vague question: What does a literature-lover have to learn from Kant? The figures of the beautiful and the sublime are what immediately comes to one’s mind. People are indeed, to some extent, interested in the Third Critique. But what about the critical project as such? What about the First Critique? Should one not try to understand, while reading about aesthetic judgment, how it is related to the project of an immanent critique of reason? Literature departments would not encourage such questions and will in all probability relegate the task to the discipline of philosophy. What’s more, they will find Kant himself standing on their side, endorsing the avoidance. He would like to keep philosophy innocent of the murky business called “writing”. Such a divisive denomination is no doubt intended and instituted by the critique. Kant steadfastly guards against what he terms “subreption”, by which we are to understand any confusion of the transcendental with the empirical. Such confusions, as evidenced in the Critique of Pure Reason, results, moreover, from the rhetorical situation of speech. Subreption, in Kant’s own words, is a sophisma figurae dictionis. However, Kant cannot simply correlate this form of sophism (a transcendental condition) with the bad intent of the sophist (empirical), because that would be reinstating the subreption itself, the algorithm whereof is inherent to discourse. Philosophy, if it must avert this danger, has to withdraw from the figurative resource of language and thus observe to its “discipline”, i.e. fashion for its use a model of scrupulously literal presentation.  The self-disciplining of philosophy apparently rules out any possible correspondence with literature and its stylized diction. It will have certain consequences for the critical project itself. This time we will have to frame the questions from an obverse orientation: Why did Kant have to humble the project after beginning with a superlative ambition? Why did he arrive at the point of noumenal inaccessibility? Would we still have to see the declaration (of non-access) as absolutely necessary? If so, then, indeed, what efficacy is left to the critique, which was conceived with the aim of augmenting knowledge and was justified, originally, by this claim?  Perhaps, in order to save the critique, one will have to read it a little lightly? Let’s say, a little figuratively? Or one may take what it says with grave seriousness, maybe only to discover, who knows, that at the end the critique reveals itself to have all along been literary. Which one is the case for what follows is left to the readers’ discretion. I.  The Surreptitious Supplement There is an unbending tendency in the Critical project, arising from its dream of legislation, that can be correlated with a thoroughgoing distrust of the oblique. Much of the validity of the cognitive processes, and of the critique consequently, depends on their straightness, understood in both the senses of rectitude and literality. Kant’s temperament is such that only the upright and literal is taken for the lawful: whatever moves straight follows the path of truth, everything else is just metaphor, false ascription, unfortunate suggestio falsi. To falsities of such type he gives the name of “subreption”, as we know well by now. One might verily wonder, although, if that naming is not sullied with a metaphorical residue. Subreption (Subreption), compounded with quite the suggestive qualifier “surreptitious” (Erschleicht) [1], points to the movements of creeping and crawling, maybe in direct contrast to the stride of homo erectus. The question has been appropriately raised by Paul de Man: cannot the arbiter who judges on and prohibits subreption be found himself guilty of first having committed it?[2] One need not even rely on a rhetorical device to corroborate the point; the weakness is betrayed in what constitutes the veritative strength of the critique: the transcendental.  It is the transcendental which desists the pure concepts of understanding from falling victim to incautious use. Standing at the divide between “canon” and “organon”, the transcendental is the self-reflexive awareness of limit on part of a-priori forms in general and of the faculty of logical explication in particular. Of course, the word “transcendental” was not new to philosophy. What Kant did was turn it into the differentiator between the empirical and the pure reflexive (alias conceptual) elements of knowledge. In short, it was cleverly devised in order to guard against the various internal errors of reason that issued from the confusion of the conceptual with the empirical. As Malabou recapitulates in her book on Kant, the transcendental has since been handed down to the philosophical posterity as an indispensable critical advance. However (and this she also points out), one must have to be able to see that the methodological nuance added by the transcendental thrives on the a-priori separation of the logical from the empirical, of pure thought from experience, to question which would be the condition enough to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the transcendental. What happens if we come to see that there is no such systematic separation between thought and experience? Wouldn’t it expose the transcendental itself as the site of a prior subreption? If a false ascription can results from the error of