Outline of a work in progress

Starting with Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment, Kojin Karatani (in Transcritique: On Kant and Marx) raises the inherent problematic of Kant’s Critiques that stems from the fundamental orientation of critical reason in aesthetic experience, which grants a hermeneutic location that reveals the latent direction of art, that is, to ‘realize the concept.’ Presumably, as Karatani suggests, even as “the transcendental critique is distinct from the faculties discovered by it,” the subject that undertakes the critique is located on a topos that intersects the empirical and transcendental, part and whole, subject and object. Generically, this is the topos or “the proper site of the transcritique,” which is approached by way of aesthetics.

Yet, it could also be a “topos of identification that [erases] differences.” Differences are necessary for individuation; without them, there will only be individuated beings. Differences presuppose an organization according to which individuals undergo phases of becoming. (We can learn this from Gilbert Simondon). When the subject succeeds in escaping a given phenomenal region of existence, it is not always the case that it is left without another local region or indeterminate space of becoming. These spaces are always already a part of a certain regime of modal operations.

In short, the subject is ready to take up any modality, if only to prevent the closure of difference. Note that this subject is neither critical anymore nor transcendental as a subject that utilizes a faculty of reason, but rather, from the perspective of the topos on which it stands, is, strictly speaking, an ‘inexistent’ that, as Alain Badiou would have it, “possesses [a] force of law. In Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou further elaborates on the power of this transcendental/aesthetic subject, namely, as in Kant’s Groundwork, it no longer feels obligated, hence, technically no longer forms a membership in the world of sense, but “turns this border into the stakes of its existence.” The stakes often involve the possibility of being “[refunctionalized]… by the technical process,” which is common in the art industry, for instance, or re-absorbed into the previous world, but also expresses itself, at the same time, counterfactually, as Alexander Wilson, in Aesthesis and Perceptronium, argues, in the Kantian sense of artistic creation, that is to say, “its refusal to be reduced to the function of the tool and the implication of the territory, and hence maintains a paradoxical status.”