Gabriel Catren's project (as well as the work of Francois Laruelle) represents a continuation and radicalization of the Kantian/Copernican turn in philosophy that can be called meta-transcendental. “[If we read Laruelle not as a “non-philosopher” but as a meta-transcendental philosopher], [i]t then becomes possible to re-interpret the term ‘decision’ in Laruelle’s work as a synonym for transcendental synthesis [...] In this regard, Laruelle can be interpreted as a kind of renegade Kantian whose internal subversion of transcendental idealism not only rehabilitates the possibility of transcendental realism but also provides Kantianism’s posthumous rejoinder to Hegelian idealism in all its guises [...]” Ray Brassier - Nihil unbound pg 134.If Kantian transcendental philosophy is an account of the conditions by which experience and knowledge are possible, then meta-transcendental philosophy is an account of not just the genesis of the conditions by which experience is possible but the genesis of all possible conditions of experience. Insofar as the practicalist Aristotelian/Fichtean/Kantian orientation subordinates intelligibility to sensibility and roots experience in sensible intuition and apperception (rather than the Hegelian account of the self-determination of normativity, in which sensibility is subordinate to intelligibility), it then follows that possible experience is concomitant with possible sensible intuition, and given that the conditions of sensible intuition cannot be self-determinate, experience can be determined in the last instance by an external entity or unilateral immanence rather than a self-determinate universal totality and thus engender a multiplicity of possible forms of experience in which human experience is but one transcendental perspective among many.
In Catren's rewriting of Christian trinitarianism, the multiplicity of transcendental perspectives or types, what he calls the transcendental landscape, is knit together into a collective patchwork subject by Eros, understood as a force of binding together and integration, which is primary over the force of Thanatos in Catren's inversion of Freud. "... the drive par excellence is no longer the death drive but the drive for life (Eros). The will to remain relegated to the impersonal life, far from taking the form of a death drive that pulls the individual back to the undifferentiated one, manifests as an erotic desire to engender and federate the separated living beings into higher forms of living unity." (Pleromatica -Pg 359) The weak point of Catren's book Pleromatica is that, due to Catren's yolking intelligibility to the sensible, the speculative import of the transcendental landscape is rendered absurd as alien transcendental types become empty abstractions we can know and say nothing about that mirror Hegel's description and critique of the thing in itself as "total emptiness, only described still as an ‘other-world’ the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought".
