It is the poststructuralist verbiage that reduces the Kantian subject to the supposed fallacy of an (absolute) sovereignty or autonomy. Kant does not postulate the Subject in such a manner. When the so-called (speculative) realists attack poststructuralism as post-Kantianism, they adopt the poststructuralist framing of Kant: “it’s all in our heads,” reality is but the linguistic mirage we collectively participate in – as “atomised” individuals.
Yet again, Kant never said the outside reality could not be grasped even though “the noumenon” as the thing-in-itself remains ultimately foreclosed. As François Laruelle insists, we do “correlate” with the real, Thought seeks to speak of it, mediate it; however it does so while submitting to the Real’s foreclosure of the last instance. Lacan’s treatment of the concept of the Real is very similar, notwithstanding the poststructuralist misappropriation of everything Lacanian. Laruelle’s solution to the aporia “the real escapes thought, therefore all is just an illusion” is to argue that there is, in fact, nothing aporetic about it at all; aporia exists due to the expectations of philosophy to either grasp the “thing-in-itself,” and its universal (in Marx’s sense) of “the Real,” or declare complete retreat from any pretension to produce an account of the “out there,” or of reality. Instead, similarly to the ascientific posture of thought, Laruelle proposes that the (non-)philosophical approach is to accept that a certain “syntax” of the real could be transcendentally construed. In other words, traces of the noumenon (my phrasing, revisiting Derrida’s “trace”), could be grasped, interpreted, turned into a model of explanation, while submitting to the axiom of the Real’s foreclosure of the last instance.
The fact that “the Real” (or “the-in-itself”) escapes thought has never deterred science, and we are reminded of this by Laruelle and Marx. Similarly, Kant argues against the “nonscientific” (contrary to formal logic) statement that “I think” is a statement at all, and applies Wolff’s logic according to which “is,” or being for that matter, is not even a necessary category in a statement that makes sense (let alone “I think” … therefore I am). In doing so we exit the entrapment of philosophies and the antinomies that plague it. We are closer to the scientific posture of thought and are free from the ambition to penetrate, grasp, and mirror the noumenon. This is a stance easily comparable to a modern Bayesian network, insofar as the copula, in the sense of post-scholastic logic (Wolff, Meier, Kant drew on), corresponds to what contemporary graph theory formalizes as the “directed edge” (the conditional probability link) between nodes;[1] any rationalist insistence on the “simple identity” (purely analytical, to use Kant’s terminology) would commit the category error Gilbert Ryle wrote about in The Concept of Mind (1949).
Here is Kant in his own words:
In all judgements I am the determining subject of that relation which constitutes a judgement. But that the I which thinks, must be considered as in thought always a subject, and as a thing which cannot be a predicate to thought, is an apodeictic and identical proposition. But this proposition does not signify that I, as an object, am, for myself, a self-subsistent being or substance. This latter statement—an ambitious one—requires to be supported by data which are not to be discovered in thought; and are perhaps (in so far as I consider the thinking self merely as such) not to be discovered in the thinking self at all. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B407)
Kant continues to explain that the concept of singe substance (a certain oneness) of the Subject is a viable analytic category. Nonetheless, Kant asserts, “I think” is a synthetic reality, and the certainty or the immediacy of this oneness is compromised, i.e., the foundation of Cartesian rationalism does not hold. In other words, Kant argues both that Subject is not part of “the outside reality,” that it is an analytic postulate but also that the thinking self is necessarily both conditioned and directed toward the “real-out-there,” i.e. it is synthetic. To insist on one’s rationalist realism in contrast to this thesis is to surreptitiously reintroduce the idealist phantasm of thought “becoming one” with the real. The primitive metaphysics of the Parmenidean dream of real and thought becoming One persists in Descartes, Hegel, Badiou and “the speculative realists” (or just Meillassoux). Therefore, to smuggle in the Badiouian fascination with idealism (Hegel) in dismissing the poststructuralists and “the postmodernists” as “post-Kantian” is simply a flawed statement and a retrograde one too.
Below is a lengthier quote from Kant, and it does not strike me as either linguistic and socio-constructivist (“there is no real except the one inhabiting the Subject”) nor as realist in the sense of the naïve Cartesian rationalist metaphysics.
2. That the I or Ego of apperception, and consequently in all thought, is singular or simple, and cannot be resolved into a plurality of subjects, and therefore indicates a logically simple subject—this is self-evident from the very conception of an Ego, and is consequently an analytical proposition. But this is not tantamount to declaring that the thinking Ego is a simple substance—for this would be a synthetical proposition. The conception of substance always relates to intuitions, which with me cannot be other than sensuous, and which consequently lie completely out of the sphere of the understanding and its thought: but to this sphere belongs the affirmation that the Ego is simple in thought. It would indeed be surprising, if the conception of “substance,” which in other cases requires so much labour to distinguish from the other elements presented by intuition—so much trouble, too, to discover whether it can be simple (as in the case of the parts of matter)—should be presented immediately to me, as if by revelation, in the poorest mental representation of all.
3. The proposition of the identity of my Self amidst all the manifold representations of which I am conscious, is likewise a proposition lying in the conceptions themselves, and is consequently analytical. But this identity of the subject, of which I am conscious in all its representations, does not relate to or concern the intuition of the subject, by which it is given as an object. This proposition cannot therefore enounce the identity of the person, by which is understood the consciousness of the identity of its own substance as a thinking being in all change and variation of circumstances. To prove this, we should require not a mere analysis of the proposition, but synthetical judgements based upon a given intuition. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B407–B408K)
Since the premise is flawed, “the speculative turn” never really broke away from poststructuralism but rather remained compatible with it. No serious disruption to the “post-Kantians” has been caused because they have never been Kantian in any way. Both Alain Badiou and Judith Butler are Hegelian – closer to one another than one would imagine – and so is Meillassoux. And all this is supposed to be linked with the techno-utopia and its ontology of singularity? I think these two concepts are better aligned with Kant than with any form of Hegelianism.
Notes
[1] Concha Bielza and Pedro Larrañaga, “Bayesian Networks in Neuroscience: A Survey,” Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 8, no. 131 (2014): 3–5, doi.org.