63AGAINST EMBODIMENTing, although refusing situational integration through the consistencyrendering one-ification of the structuring count, nonetheless "impresents" itself as (at least potentially) a delineable void capable of being lo cated within the site of a situation: "I term void of a situation this suture to its being. Moreover, I state that every structured presentation unpresents 'its* void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count" (Badiou 2005a, 55). Consequendy, the situated void isn't just symptomatic of a negative, valueless shortcoming or failure on the part of the powers of presentation and representation. Rather, this void marks a coordinate within a situation where that situation retains a link with its foreclosed ontological underside.48 Or, in Lacanian terms, those places where the established order of Imaginary-Symbolic reality breaks down and becomes inconsistent signal points where this reality is disrupted by the intrusion of the impossible Real; reality remains tied to the Real through its own internal gaps and inconsistencies,49 In an analogous way, the subject of the signifier, broken offfrom the be ing of its body, only ever encounters this corpo-Real either as something that disturbs the signifying structures in which this subject circulates (i.e., the jouissance of the drives) or as the void of an unrepresentable absence (i.e., as the origin of birth and the end of death). However, especially as regards the latter, this failure internal to the epistemological dimension of subjectivity and the effects that this negative limitation generate are precisely what signal the ominously silent presence of an indissoluble bond to an ontological dimension: the raw materiality of mortal flesh stripped of its reflective mediators and fantasmatic embellishments. The transcendental materialist subject is the epistemologically finite subject of transcendental philosophy as invisibly anchored to (and, in an often traumatic, "tychic" fashion, continually buffeted by) the eclipsed ground of its ontological-material finitude. The voids that fundamental fantasies rush to fill in demarcate those spots where quasi-dematerialized subjec tivity is unavoidably impacted by the tuche, the vanishing cause, of the transient vital body that it never entirely succeeds in transcending. In this sense, the Zizekian refrain about the relation between the subject and its necessary lack of self-acquaintance takes on a much more exact sense: subjectivity, associated with the pure gaze of the cogito-like subject that Zizek discerns as brought out in stark relief by the fundamental fantasy, is coextensive with its ignorance regarding its own finite being. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes what would happen if the subject could somehow overcome the split within itself by bridging the gap between noumenality and phenomenality in such a fashion that the former is made to appear in its naked, unmediated presence within the frame of the latter. In other words, what would it be like if the nature
