Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Edited by
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
www.bloomsbury.com
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii
Notes 243
Bibliography 263
Contributors 269
Index 271
Acknowledgements
This collection is the outcome of Alain Badiou’s visit to the Antipodes, Australia
and New Zealand, in November 2014. The visit was organized and funded in
the first instance by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, a not-
for-profit, non-university educational collective, committed to philosophical
thought and the means of its transmission. The MSCP, through the offices of
the convenor James Garrett and treasurer Bryan Cooke, having stumped up
the money for airfares, hotels, dinners, room hire, catering and so on, for the
initial Melbourne leg of the journey, also helped to facilitate Badiou’s visit to
Auckland University, the University of New South Wales and Western Sydney
University. The commitment of several individuals within discrete faculties in
these Universities made this co-operation possible: Sigi Jottkandt and William
Balfour at University of NSW, Alex Ling at Western Sydney University and
Campbell Jones and Jai-Bentley Payne at the University of Auckland. It is
to their credit that funding was made available to support these visits and,
moreover, that these visits – which included public lectures, master-classes,
interviews, and many casual and ongoing conversations – were extremely well
attended. The important contribution of several comrades deserves special
mention: Sunday Cullip-Bartlett, Angela Cullip, Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey,
Lauren Bliss, Kim Mereine, Sam Lindsay, Helen Johnson and Trades Hall
in Melbourne. At Bloomsbury, we’d like to thank Liza Thompson and
Frankie Mace. We would also like to thank Joe Gelonesi and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation for permission to use a transcription of Badiou’s
interview with them. Finally, this book has been supported by a Faculty of
Arts Publication Subsidy Scheme from The University of Melbourne, as well
as by the School of Culture and Communication.
Abbreviations
antipodean’. But we must be careful here for the last thing that is appropriate
to Badiou’s work is some form of parochialism, some essentialization of
identity. Indeed, this very reference to specificity, the antipodes, garnered
understandable resistance from the publisher, Bloomsbury, when we
originally proposed the title ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’. They wondered if such
a title reference would make the volume seem too local, too parochial – as
if the collection were about the antipodes as such. So, conscious always of
Plato’s note in the Cratylus that ‘we philosophers begin not with words but
with things’, we agreed to change names, conscious also that in the world
of marketing a parochial globalization makes all the running. Of course,
it is clearly the case that this is a local intervention into the oeuvre of the
philosopher Alain Badiou – no collection can never not be. But the work of
a philosopher – including that which conditions its possibility, that which it
is tasked to think, and the various means of its transmission and reception –
is itself anything but parochial or reducible to nationalist, culturalist,
geographical or natural determinations. Clearly, all or any of these have their
affects but to suppose an empirically indexed reduction – an identity, if you
will – is to suppose already that philosophy does not exist, that, finally, it
is a matter of localized opinion, of ‘dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ as
Deleuze and Guattari ironized. Nowhere in this volume will the reader find
any such reduction nor any gesture towards such parochialism, let alone to
nationalism or identity as conceptual tropes. Rather, precisely because of
the philosophy under consideration and transmission – that it is philosophy
at stake – any local or singular intervention is already inscribed within the
universality proper to any philosophical trajectory: that which it names,
addresses and is oriented by. This volume is clearly an intervention at a site,
local and singular insofar as it is the matter of this place and these scholars
who happen to inhabit this place – which is not ours by definition – but any
such intervention, any such thought at all is conditioned absolutely by the
necessary universality of its address, that it can and must be the thought of
all. To speak philosophically, to speak with and after Badiou, is to suppose
that the addressee of the intervention, always local because always sited, is
anyone at all, here and now, near or far, present and future.
Such a (mis)titling, ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’ would have then at once
reflected a simple fact – Badiou was here! – and a comic turn, making
use of a sort of antiquated phraseology itself derived from a idealizing
exoticism concerning the world down under. Badiou himself makes play
with this antiquation when he tells his New Zealand audience that, from the
perspective of Europeans even today, New Zealand is ‘a paradise’. Many in the
audience begged to put him right on that score. Some of us were also bound
to recall the indelible sarcasm of the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul
Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down 3
Socrates such that in fact this abnormal singularity is seen to be the very
subjective form of the universal which Plato’s avatars will call the ‘just city’ –
nowhere visible but not impossible. Hence, the form of the enquiry, which
is the dialogues, and for which the dialogues act as body – ‘corpus’ –, the
new living and eternal body of the Socratic idea, is to take up this singularity
as the means of a return to the city as it is, to be transformed. The figure of
abnormal singularity is the means of an entirely new orientation to all the
extant knowledge of the city, to everything that conditions that knowledge
and which is also the means of its transmission.
In other words, from within the world of the city, there is an ‘other’
orientation to it and this other orientation, affirmed as such, confirmed as the
mode of an enquiry, itself the means of the orientation, opens up the city of
knowledge to what has been hitherto impossible for it to know. For Plato, this
generic construction is precisely the very truth of this city: that it is not what
he calls sophistic Athens, the world or knowledge of Athens as it exists, but
the not-impossible Republic in which the thought of justice, the true concern
of the philosopher, is its real and manifest orientation. The argument is that
if the Socratic figure could be seen to be there in the city of Athens, even if
marked as anomalous there to the knowledge of that city, then this anomaly,
being at all times what seeks after the truth of this city, could be, indeed must
be, enquired into and if enquired into, then, step by step, demonstrated to be
for all. Hence for Plato, the singularity of Socrates is precisely his universality
tout court. Socrates is what is in Athens more than it knows, to paraphrase
Jacques Lacan; his intervention on the global scene of Athenian knowledge at
its site is the universal truth of its knowledge, which it is not. Plato stages this
retrial of Socrates as singular-universal across the entirety of the dialogues.
Let’s end this introduction to what is and is not Badiou in the Antipodes by
citing one example from Plato of this singular intervention on the global scene,
wherein the universality of what is true is at stake and where it is summed up
in decided and absolute terms by a cosmopolitan and sophisticated man of
the city, a man of knowledge, ‘of sound education’ who for all his ‘cleverness
has failed to grasp the truth’. ‘You have not observed’, Socrates continues,
‘how great a part geometric equality plays in heaven and earth, and because
you neglect the study of geometry you preach the doctrine of unfair shares’
(Grg. 508a). To which Callicles responds: ‘by the gods Socrates… if you are
in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human
life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be
the opposite of what we should do?’ (Grg. 481c). The world upside down, the
injunction not to continue doing the opposite of what we should, a French
philosopher down under.
Part One
Lectures
1
I am very glad to be here with you. You know in France, everybody says
that New Zealand is a paradise. So, for a philosopher it is something very
interesting, to go to a paradise. Naturally, maybe it is the paradise lost. Of
course, you can tell me if it is really a paradise. But this is the legend of New
Zealand, everywhere in the world, and particularly in my country. So, it is a
real joy for me to speak to you, and to be with you in this country. It is my first
time to New Zealand, and it’s always intimidating, the first time you go to a
place and when the place is a paradise, it’s really intimidating.
The second point is that, as very often, I must speak in English. The
question of English is for me a difficult question, as very often for the French.
I want to tell you a story about my English. Some years ago I was in New
York; it’s not a paradise, it’s very different. I was in New York and I had to
give a talk, and to excuse my English I said ‘excuse me, but I must speak in
English, but my English is something between French and Spanish’, and after
that I spoke my English, which in my opinion is somewhere between French
and Spanish. At the end of the talk, a young man comes and says to me, ‘Oh
your English is not at all between French and Spanish, not at all’. I was very
glad, maybe my English is near English, but he continued ‘no, in my opinion
it is much more near German’. I was not glad for very long. So, please excuse
that kind of thought; even in paradise today, we must speak English. So, it’s a
question, maybe God himself speaks English today?
I want to say some words to you today, about the real, the question of
the real. What is (if I can say something like that) really real? And it’s a very
important question, because in the world, which is our world today, even
here, the real is generally confused with economy. The true real of the world
is economy. The knowledge of the real has been reduced, progressively, to
economics. It is economics that knows all the realities, and it is economics
that dictates, literally, the obligations of politics. It seems that in the world
as it is, the economic discourse presents itself as the guardian of the real.
And so long as the laws of the world, of capitalism, are what they are, we will
be submitted to the economic discourse. It is really the economic discourse
8 Badiou and His Interlocutors
which is today our master. In the world, economics as the discourse of the
real has never done anything but confirm the violent nature of this so-called
real, because in the end, we must obey. We must obey the real as it is said by
economics.
Paradoxically, today as you know, economy is in some sense of a
pathological nature. We have crisis, we have devastation; we have bad
consequences for millions of people. Today, the economists themselves
are in some sense totally confused. And paradoxically, the dominance of
the intimidation through the economic real is not only not reduced, but
is actually increased. The economists and their sponsors reign even more
supreme in the face of the disaster that they were unable to forecast.
There is an extremely interesting lesson in all that. Economics as such
in no way teaches how we might escape from that sort of oppressive
conception of the real, the real as something we must obey. This is very
important, because the question of the real is clearly also the question of what
relationship human activity, intellectual as well as practical, has with the real,
and in particular whether the real functions as an imperative of submission
or whether it can, or could, function as an imperative open to the possibility
of human emancipation. Let us say that the philosophical question of the real
– so my question – is always, and perhaps above all the question of whether
given a discourse according to which the real is constraining, we can or
cannot change the world in such a way that a previously invisible opening
would appear, through which we might escape this particular constraint. Not
deny that there is some real, and some constraint, but escape this necessity of
submission to the economic real.
So the question is how we can escape the submission to the real which
is ‘economy’. There is a relationship here with my beloved Plato. I think
Plato would be very happy to discover New Zealand, because of the search
for a country to establish the true politics. He knew that in Greece it was
impossible, and after Plato in the Roman Empire it was impossible, and today
probably it is impossible, but maybe, says Plato, there exists some country we
don’t know where it is, but where it is possible to establish justice. To create
a new politics, a new form of the state, and maybe Plato, in knowing the
legend of New Zealand, that New Zealand is a paradise, would come to the
conclusion that the true Republic can be established here.
But, you know, the idea of the way out, the way out of obedience, the way
out of oppression, and to find a piece of emancipation is an idea, fundamental
to Plato, that you find in the famous allegory of the cave. The allegory of the
cave depicts a world closed on a figure that is a false figure. It’s a figure of some
lies that appears to everyone who is trapped in the cave as a figure of what can
only exist. Maybe that is our world situation; maybe we live in the cave, in
In Search of the Lost Real 9
the cave of economy. Maybe the hegemony of the economic constraint may
ultimately only be pure appearance, and not the true real. Maybe economics
is our cave, our modern cave. What Plato is teaching us, is that in order to
know whether a world is under the rule of appearance and not under the law
of the real, you have to get out of the cave. You have to escape from the place
that, that semblance, that false world organizes, and today in the form of the
discourse of constraint, which is in modernity the discourse of economics.
There is something very instructive about this, namely the function of
scandal in our world. Maybe there is no scandal in New Zealand? If it is
a paradise. But I can say to you that in Europe, there exist many scandals,
practically one a day. But there is a philosophical signification of the scandal.
Scandal is always the revelation of a small bit of the real. One day we learn,
via our preferred media, that somebody, so-and-so, went to so-and-so’s
house and emerged with a briefcase full of cash. We are of the overwhelming
impression that we are dealing with something more really real than what all
these people usually talk about. Generally, they are saying ‘all is good with
progress, we pay our debts’ and so on. But one day, you learn that some of
these politicians, maybe even your president sometimes, in the night, goes
to receive cash for propaganda for his party. When that is all known, it’s a
scandal. And you know the idea is that when we have the scandal, there is
something real. There is a point of the real you see across the scandal, a small
part of the real, which generally is obscured and invisible. But, in fact, the
point is that the scandal is not the revelation of the real of our society, but
a sort of exception to the law of the world, which is finally a sort of excuse.
Because at the end, what is said is that this person is really scandalous, but
everybody is honest, the system is honest but you have bad exceptions which
are of a scandalous nature. And so the scandal is the idea, that when we touch
the real, it’s in the form of an exception, and paradoxically it is the exception
which is the real of the real, and not the general and structural situation. But
it happens that in that sort of situation that the scandal is always, particularly,
a scandal of corruption. So the idea is that, when you are in a scandalous
revelation you know that maybe some corruption exists. But it’s strange that
in our society it will be only when you have a scandal, and a scandalous
situation, that there is a revelation that something is corrupted, something
is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark. But maybe something is rotten in our
world after all. Maybe corruption is not a scandalous exception, but maybe
corruption is the law of the world itself, as it is.
In a society that openly, explicitly, and it must be said largely consensually,
accepts that profit is the only means capable of driving the community, it
is fair to say the corruption is plainly the name of the game itself, and not
an exception. Since, if making the most money possible is the norm, this is
10 Badiou and His Interlocutors
the definition of profit, the most money possible is the norm, of enterprise,
and finally of all society, it will be difficult to dispute the fact that everything
goes in the direction of corruption. Corruption, in some sense, is precisely
the real of our capitalistic world. And so the scandal is something which is
useful to the system because it presents, as an exception, the rule itself. And
when we are terrified by the scandal we are in fact blind to the real. So the
scandal, it is very interesting, the scandal is the use of a small bit of the real,
as an exception to the real itself, and so the scandal is the use of a little piece
of corruption to escape to the idea, the reasonable idea, that corruption is
everywhere.
All that to say, concerning the question of the real, that it’s not from the
perspective of the primacy of economics as scientific knowledge that we can
have free access to the question of the real. But it’s not the sensible experience
of the scandalous exception which can correct the scientific illusion. In some
sense, between the scandalous experience and the illusion, the scientific
illusion of the economist, is the same play, it’s the same game. It’s a game
where finally the real itself is obscure. So concerning the real, we must
begin not by scientific economic knowledge, and we must not begin by the
scandalous exception. So what is the beginning?
You know the question of the beginning is probably the most important
question in philosophy. We are very often in philosophy in a search for the
beginning. But how you can begin the search for the beginning is a delicate
question. The philosopher is a man or woman, in some sense, who begins to
begin. Something like that. It’s because philosophy is the idea to go beyond
opinions, so we cannot begin by opinions, by common opinions, and we
cannot begin by the real itself because we are in search of the real. So the real
is not here at the beginning, so the question of the beginning is very difficult.
I’ll just say, negatively, that in our world today we cannot begin the search
for the real of this world, by either the discourse of economy, which is in fact
not the science of the real, but the science of obedience to the real, nor by the
scandalous exception which finally is a piece of propaganda.
So my choice to begin for you is provisionally, a definition of the real,
an obscure definition of the real. When we begin by something obscure,
you have the chance to clarify. If you begin by something clear, the job is
finished. It’s a definition of one of my masters, the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan was straight to the point, and immediately
proposed a definition of the Real, so it’s a real beginning. The definition of
the Real, a bit of a devious one of course, is as follows: the Real is the impasse
of formalization. So it’s really obscure, as a beginning.
At this point, what can we do with this obscure sentence: the Real is the
impasse of formalization? I don’t want to begin by the pure concept. I shall
In Search of the Lost Real 11
have to begin with an example, a clear example of the definition of Lacan. This
example will be basic arithmetic, arithmetic for children. When you count,
when you multiply or add, which is a common practice, two and two, you
have four, and so on. Let us agree, that when you count you are, practically
speaking, doing arithmetical formalization, in the form of numbers and in
the rules of calculation. Formalization which is very simple, formalization
for children. Your calculation is always finite: note this point, which is very
important in my clarification. So any calculation ends with what is called
its result. You do multiplication between two numbers, you have the result
which is also a number, and your calculation is finished. All that is finite,
naturally. So, when you count, you are doing formalization which has rules,
the rules of addition, the rules of that are taught to children, and it is finite.
And from within this formalization there is a particular activity, which is the
calculation. But, in reality, there is something about this business that is not
completely explicit, which is the following: when you calculate numbers you
are sure the result will be a number, there is not the slightest doubt about that,
if you add numbers you get a number. This obviously assumes that however
long the finite calculation is, you will always come up with a number. If
you make this a very long addition at the end, you have a number, and this
requires that there be no final number. Because if there is a final number, how
can you take this number and do the calculation of this number and one, for
example? If it is the final number it becomes impossible to have a calculation
with this number, which is a final number.
So, you can have the rule of calculation through the formalization, the
elementary formalization, which is arithmetic, and know the condition
that there does not exist a final number. Ok? The existence of the final
number would be absurdly contrary to the freedom of calculation, and to
the formalization itself. Consequently, there is something about this business
that is not finite, but infinite. The sequence of numbers has no end, because
there is no final number. You cannot have calculation, in the hypothesis
of the existence of the final number. But, what is that sort of thing that is
infinite? It cannot be a number, because there are no infinite numbers in
the field of arithmetic. So arithmetic does not accept, in its formalization,
infinite numbers, but without the idea of an infinite sequence of numbers, no
final numbers, you cannot have the calculation and so the formalization is
useless. It is in this sense, that we can affirm that the Real of final numbers of
arithmetic is an underlying infinity. It is in this sense that something which is
an impasse of the calculation, the existence of an infinite number is required
for the formalization itself, and therefore is really an impasse. To assume the
calculation of numbers is absolutely finite, there is no infinite number, there
is no infinite operation, all that is finite, but this finitude is supported by a
12 Badiou and His Interlocutors
is the impossible, not the impossible in general, but the impossible of a given
formalization. So, the Real of formalization is the point of impossibility of
this formalization.
We can give many examples of that, but to simplify, a very striking
example that concerns cinema. Much more amusing than arithmetic. We can
demonstrate this: what is the Real of cinema, of the cinematic images? The
Real is what is off screen, which is not in the image itself. It is all the world
which is outside the image: the image being in relationship to this absence
in the form of the presence. The cinema is the creation of a new possibility
concerning images; the formalization is the film. The film is the formalization
of images, but the strength of the image, what made the image beautiful,
extraordinary, is largely the world which is in the image as outside the image.
The image as something which contains, in some sense, all the world that is
not in the frame of the image. And you can find many examples, when you
take a concrete activity, or a creative one, art, cinema, arithmetic you can
find always the necessity of a formalization, this formalization creates some
possibilities, but finally the strength of the new possibilities are not in the
possibilities themselves. They are the point of impossibility, which is the Real.
In politics it’s really interesting to apply this definition. What is a
formalization in politics? A formalization is in fact on the side of the state;
the constitutional rules, the organization of the party, rights, the law and so
on. So that creates the space of the formalization of politics. Precisely politics
in the sense of the normal possibilities of politics that we can perfectly
define. Go to the Law faculty and you find a definition of the formalization of
politics. But in some sense the conviction of revolutionary politics, the real
of this politics, is not in the rules, is not in the possibility, but it is a real that
is like the underground of all the rules. Maybe, for example, the real of an
economic nature, which is the secret infinity beneath the appearance of the
formalization of politics.
And so, the conclusion of Marx, for example, is that politics as real politics
cannot be to play by the rules, it cannot be to be in the rules, but to access the
latent infinity, and to supress the real which is in this latent infinity, which
is why finally there is two fundamental prescriptions in the strategic, and
maybe impossible, vision of Marx: first, the abolition of private property,
because private property is in fact the secret real of the rules and second, the
dissipation of the rules themselves. That is what Marx names the vanishing of
the state, the disappearing of the state. In all these examples, we find the same
dialectics between possible and impossible.
And what is said by the propaganda of the established world in politics
concerning this sort of vision? The propaganda always says it is impossible.
It’s clear, it’s impossible yes, but it’s precisely because it is impossible that it
14 Badiou and His Interlocutors
is real! You must reverse the objection; we accept that from your point of
view it’s impossible, because you are in your formalization. But we must be,
not in your formalization, but in the Real of your formalization. So, the real
of that formalization is your point of impossibility, and what is the point
of impossibility concerning the formalization of politics today? This point
is equality. The name of the point of impossibility in a world where the
capitalist rules is equality between everybody. Capitalism is totally hostile
and cannot accept the eradication of private property, and it cannot accept
equality, it considers equality to be a utopia and something that is humanly
impossible. This has been clear for a long time, possibly since the French
Revolution. The particular point of impossibility of a capitalist world is
equality and the actual assertion of this point of impossibility, the assertion
that this point, equality, must be the source of any new political sort is what
my friend Jacques Rancière calls the axiom of equality. It’s an axiom because,
precisely, it is not in the rules of the formalization. So it is an assertion which
is outside any result of the political formalization of today.
As a point of impossibility of our world, equality can only be a result if
it is declared a principle. The consequence of this is very, very important.
When you must touch the Real of any game, and I say game as the name of
every sort of human activity from arithmetic to the political construction
of the capitalistic world. When we have a real desire to touch the Real you
must affirm something which is impossible, but when you affirm something
which is impossible we cannot affirm it as a result of the rules. So you cannot
convince a player of the game that what you are saying is possible, so you
must affirm in some sense the possibility of the impossible. That is, a new
principle outside the rules, so the new beginning of new rules by necessity. So
we are in the Real of something only when we find a principle which affirms
the impossibility of something, as a possibility. It is why the argument that it
is impossible is precisely the proof that it is true.
There was a French politician, a good man, not a monster. We have some
monsters today in politics, but it’s not the place to talk about monsters, I
cannot speak of monsters in paradise. He was a good man who said ‘politics
is the art of the possible’. This is saying that politics is always strictly reducible
to formalization, to one formalization. So politics is not emancipation, it’s
not the movement of creation of something new. Politics is to play, correctly,
the game; and it is true that it’s possible to play the contemporary game of
politics, sometimes correctly, and sometimes in a horrible fashion. There is
nuance, sometimes. But if you have the idea that politics is not reducible to
a result of the formalization, a possible result of the formalization, so not
reducible to the possible as it is defined by the formalization itself (and not
outside). If you have the idea that politics is more ambitious, you must affirm
In Search of the Lost Real 15
of the city. So the philosopher is always saying ‘come out from the cave of
possibility’, and so after Socrates, and many others, I say that to you: ‘Come
out from the cave of possibility, today.’
I must speak of cinema and philosophy. But the most important question
for the philosopher, from Plato to today, is the question of justice. Today I
want us to mark and to be part of our thinking the terrible injustice that has
been committed in Ferguson.1 So it is not immediately the relationship to
the question of cinema but the relationship to the question of the profound
destination of philosophy, which is not to be an academic discipline, but if
it is possible it is an attempt to change subjectivity and to change the world
and to go from injustice to justice. So this evening maybe is under the sign of
justice because precisely we have too much injustice. That is my beginning.
Now concerning cinema and philosophy. My talk will be about six questions.
First question – what is cinema? This question is a very difficult one and
probably you can discuss the question ‘what is cinema’ for hours. But why is the
question ‘what is cinema’ necessary, when you must speak about the relationship
between cinema and philosophy? It is because philosophy can think something
only if it is possible to construct inside philosophy itself the definition of this
thing (called cinema). This is why philosophy is not speaking of everything.
There are some philosophical questions and not a sort of discourse about what
exists. Deleuze, who has written two fundamental books concerning cinema
said that these books were not about cinema but about what he named the
concepts in cinema. It was the same idea; finally, philosophy can think really
what philosophy constitutes. And so the question is ‘what is cinema’ from a
philosophical point of view. We must begin with something like that.
Second question: after the definition of cinema ‘what is the relationship
between philosophy and cinema?’ It is not evident after all. It is not evident
because not only must we give a definition of cinema but we must propose
a proof that cinema is an interesting question for philosophy and this is not
evident after all. So it will be my second question.
The third question ‘is cinema an art?’ Is cinema really an art? The last art.
A film really is or can be a work of art. Philosophy is generally interested by
art and so the question of the artistic dimension of cinema is very important
from the point of view of philosophy.
18 Badiou and His Interlocutors
latent infinity in cinema, in the production and the history of cinema there is
in some sense the history of the progressive constitution of this infinity: from
mute to sound, from black and white to colour and so on. And finally, cinema
is the history of complexification of itself, more and more. So my answer
to the first question ‘what is cinema?’ is deceptive. We cannot really know
what cinema is. We have experience and we also have a concrete history of
a new form of complexity. Maybe the complete understanding of what is
cinema is something for the future. Because cinema is not achieved, cinema
is today also transformed. You know that cinema is something essential in
the collective existence of today with its weak form, which is television. But
between the weak form and the strong form, between the vulgarity and the
artistic invention there is a relationship, a strange relationship concerning
cinema, but finally we don’t really know what cinema is. We are inside cinema
without knowing exactly its conceptual signification. So I pass to my second
question in the failure of the first.
Second question: why a relationship between philosophy and cinema?
I think we can propose two hypotheses. First hypothesis, the relationship
between philosophy and cinema is a necessity because there is in fact an
opposition between philosophy and cinema, a contradiction. If cinema is
composed of images, if cinema is a form of imaginary relationship to the
world, cinema is exposed to a fundamental critique from the point of view
of philosophy, a very old critique, which is the suspicion concerning images
and the opposition, in some sense, to the potency of images in the name
of concepts, thinking and rationality. After all, in Plato, we find a critique
of cinema because the famous allegory of the cave is the representation,
the most important representation in the history of philosophy, of cinema,
which did not exist, naturally. The philosophical critique of cinema has been
made many centuries before the existence of cinema. It’s the strangeness of
philosophy: the potency of anticipation of philosophy. In my translation of
Plato’s Republic, I have transformed the cave into a contemporary cinema.4
It was clear. It was the presence of images in the place of the Real and the
humanity in the cave is seeing some images in the conviction that these
images are the unique reality and philosophy is to organize the possibility of
going out of the cave, to escape the dictatorship of images. It is very striking.
In some sense, it’s certainly more true today that we are in the cave than
in the time of Plato because we have now the complexity of the world of
images which is far beyond what Plato could imagine. So the allegory of the
cave is properly a contradiction between philosophy and cinema. And so we
can, after all the hypotheses, know that there is a close relationship between
cinema and philosophy which is the relationship of aid. Philosophy is finally
something that is against the potency of images, against cinema in the end.
20 Badiou and His Interlocutors
It’s the first possibility. It’s not mine. It’s not mine for one fundamental reason,
which is my answer to the first question. I think that we cannot reduce cinema
to images. And so, finally, cinema is not the cave of Plato. It’s an obscurity and
it’s the light of images and so there is something like an illusion. But this
illusion, the illusion of the cinema, is not the negative function of images
in the sense of Plato because for Plato images are something that is a false
reality. But cinema is not a false reality. Cinema is a new relationship to the
real itself. We can demonstrate cinema is composed of complex images but
this composition is not saying ‘I am the truth, I am the true real.’ No! Cinema
is an illusion that says it is an illusion, naturally. And so it’s a completely
different situation from the prisoner in the cave, who has the conviction that
images are the only form of the real. On the contrary, cinema is something
like a didactic of images, something that is saying that images exist not as the
substitute to the real but as something which says something new concerning
the real itself—in the absence of the real, but as a new form of knowledge. So
my hypothesis is that there is no strict contradiction between philosophy and
cinema but that on the contrary today cinema is in some sense a condition of
philosophy. I name condition of philosophy an activity, a form of creation, a
form of thinking which is in some sense the horizon of philosophic activity.
So a condition is what is present in the world and which is really a sort of
new possibility for philosophical thinking. In this direction, my position
is that today we cannot do philosophy without any relationship to cinema.
And we can say that from Bergson to myself, if you accept this narcissistic
consideration, we find a growing interest in cinema for the philosopher with
the books of Deleuze, the books of Rancière, the books of many contemporary
philosophers concerning cinema. And this is because cinema, which is an
essential component of our world, is also something new and something like
a new lesson for the philosophical possibility.
able even to say what cinema is. How are we able to say what is a good film
after all? We don’t know what a film is in some sense. So we cannot exactly
say what is a good film. And you know there are many discussions on this
point. Critiques are confusing and discussions between friends after a film
‘oh it was excellent’ and so on. The difficulty of the pragmatic discussion
concerning film is a symptom of the real difficulty to identify in cinema what
is really a good film, a work of art. And it is clear that in an excellent film you
can always find some part of the film that is without interest. So many images
that are transitions, something like that, precisely because the complexity of
the cinema is of a special nature, concerning its artistic determination. My
position is that cinema is an art, after all, but an art that cannot be pure, an
impure art. It is an art that is always composed with something which is not
of an artistic nature, an art that is inside something which is of a non-artistic
nature but which has the possibility of escaping its proper vulgar nature.
Cinema is a conflict between something noble, something which is really of
an elegant artistic nature, profound vision and something, the material,
something which is material, which is also vulgar, common and sometimes
not at all interesting. And so the artistic definition of the cinema is that the
cinema is the art of the fight between art and non-art. It is my definition of
the cinema. Cinema is an art but the material of this art is precisely the
contradiction between art and non-art and it’s something very of today. After
all the idea that art is finished, that art which is non-art is formulated by
Duchamp at the beginning of the last century. So it’s a long history. Hegel
himself at the beginning of the nineteenth century was saying that ‘art is
something of the past’. That was his formula – ‘art is finished’. Cinema is the
contemporary production of the visibility of the conflict between art and
non-art in the contemporary world. When we have a very good film is when
you have a perception of this fight, it’s like a war, like an image of the war
between good images and false images, something like that, between the
constructions of a visibility which is of great interest, but which immediately
conflicts with a visibility which is without interest. And so cinema is very
interesting – and in relationship to philosophy – because it’s not a peaceful
art. It’s not an art for contemplation. When you are in front of a movie it is
not at all the same thing as being in front of a painting. No! There is a conflict,
a conflict between you and the images but also between images themselves.
There is a conflict because there is a conflict, a fundamental conflict, of
something that is really in the register of thinking, of profoundness and so
on, and something which is vulgar and deceptive. Furthermore, if we examine
the history of cinema we can understand this history precisely at the level of
the successive forms of the fight. The great invention in cinema, maybe the
form of the composition in the films of Orson Welles, is a classic example.
Cinema and Philosophy 23
What is a film of Orson Welles? It is a film where the image is composed with
a sort of immanent violence and this immanent violence of the image is not
to create fear and terror, it’s not bloody, it’s not a gore film. The violence of the
image is the idea that the violence of the image can only be victorious if the
tendency of images is to be common and without interest. If we can recognize
some images of Orson Welles immediately, it is because we recognize that
sort of victory in the war against —what?— against the image itself. So it is
something like an image that is composed against its proper nature, and
really an immanent conflict between images and images. It is same thing at
another level in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. It is not the same means, not
the same violence. There are some images in Godard that are peaceful in
some sense, which are quiet, but strangely quiet, a quietness that is suspicious.
It’s the war against the vulgarity of images, not by violence and the
compactness of the image but more by something, which is not ‘gone’ straight
away, we go slowly, deliberately. A sort of ‘suspect as witness’.
Finally, we see here that the relationship to philosophy is clear. The fight
against the cave of Plato is inside the cinema itself, if cinema is not the
production of images but the war against bad images and to affirm what is a
true image. Not as a substitute to reality but the true image as an image. What
is a true image? As for Godard, what is an image is not a representation of
something but an image as something that by itself is a new thinking of the
real. But to have that sort of true image we must have a fight, a visible fight,
in the image itself. And Godard is saying, for example, a true image is always
an image when we find two things that have no relation between them. The
image is cut in two parts. It is divided because it’s not a peaceful image of a
world unified, but the presence in the image itself of elements that are not
compatible, which cannot go (together). So to conclude all that cinema is an
art that cannot be pure because it’s an art that is defined, in some sense, by
a fight against itself. It’s very interesting because it’s not the end of art, it’s
another way; not the classical affirmation that our modernity is also something
like the equivalence between art and non-art. No! It’s the organization of a
fight between the two and it is why cinema cannot be pure, it cannot be pure
precisely because it must also present what is impure and there is a sort of
necessity of abjection in the cinema as a fight against abjection itself.
So we come to question 4, Cinema’s relationship with all the other arts. Now
this point is very strange in some sense and there is a discussion with Alex
Ling at this point. It is clear that cinema has a relationship to practically all
the other arts. It’s a form of its impurity, precisely: the impossibility to define
cinema as such. It’s evident for theatre, for example, by the mediation of
actors, the play and so on. It is evident for music – music is a composition
24 Badiou and His Interlocutors
of the film images. It’s also evident for the novel because practically all films
have narratives. It’s evident for dance – for all the arts which are in the
visibility it is evident. But it’s also evident by quotation. Inside a film there
are quotations of the other arts. Of painting – by allusion to great paintings;
of architecture – by representation of new constructions; to poetry – because
there are many quotations of poetry, there are a great number of quotations
of poetry in cinema. So cinema is in a relationship with all the other arts
without exception. It’s also a new reason for it to be impossible to define
cinema because cinema is always a definition that is also the definition of the
other arts as a part of cinema itself. So the destiny of cinema is also the destiny
of the totality of art. There is a symbolic function of cinema as a sort of centre
of the generality of artistic activity and it’s also the reason for what there is in
cinema as the true destiny of all arts today. Not because cinema is a substitute
of all art but because the judgement concerning the destiny of art is linked
by necessity to the becoming of cinema itself. We can say that the cinema
is the composition of all arts in the historic trial concerning their existence.
And so Alex Ling was saying on this point that finally cinema and philosophy
do the same thing. Because my definition of philosophy is that philosophy is
composed, a sort of compossibility of all its conditions. And cinema composes
a sort of compossibility of all different artistic creation in some sense. Cinema
is a totalization also and so there is a rivalry between cinema and philosophy
today. And it is clear there is a rivalry because cinema is also a representation,
a global representation of all artistic functions in the contemporary world, a
totalization of music, dance, theatre, narrative, novel, poetry and so on, and
many other invariants. For example, there is the presence of history in many
films. This totalization is enigmatic because we can return to the allegory of the
cave. Finally, the total cave is a cave where all forms of images are present and
it’s a cave as a totalization of the aesthetic experience itself. So we can object
to Plato if Plato was here to see a film (but it will be my conclusion, Plato and
the cinema). If Plato was here his objection will be ‘OK, cinema is exceptional
because it is not the presentation of some images but is the place of totalisation
of all imaginary fictions, all imaginary creations.’ And so we cannot escape
cinema, we cannot find a way out because there really is a presence, the omni-
presence of cinema in all activities of artistic nature. But I think it’s not the
case. We must return to the preceding point and say that when we have music,
painting, theatre and so on in cinema we have also a judgement concerning
these activities. Because precisely cinema must be, when it is really a work
of art, the fight between what is really of value in all that and what is of no-
value. If you take the quotations of great music in cinema, for example, the 5th
symphony of Gustav Mahler in the film of Visconti, it’s also a new evaluation
of the symphony of Mahler. It’s not a little quotation, it’s not only the fact
Cinema and Philosophy 25
that we hear this music, OK ‘it’s magnificent’ and so on, No! It’s something
like a new experience concerning this piece of music. Maybe the experience
is also of the fight concerning the affective value of the music when music is
confronted with something else. Images, precisely! Is music able to resist the
fascination of images or is music the same thing as the fascination of images?
So it’s an experience that is not only a totalization, but is also a critique in some
sense, maybe a positive critique in some sense, finally, a good judgement. It
is the same case when we have the quotation of a painting, or when we have
experimentation concerning something which is in a relationship to theatre
and so on. In some sense, cinema is also a judgement concerning all artistic
activity precisely because their presence in a film is not only ornamental but
active and is the creation of a contradiction between different forms of artistic
creativity which, finally, is also a judgement concerning their value. It’s very
interesting to see if something which is generally considered as very beautiful
and so on resists when it’s in a film. We could call this the filmic resistance
of artistic activity, concerning a piece of music, a poem that is inscribed in a
movie, in the story and so on. It’s not only its pure existence, but also a conflict
between its pure existence and something else. So it’s the experimentation of
the alterity. You know when you are at peace and you have music and so on,
music is easily victorious, but in a film it is something else. It’s something else
because there are extraordinary complexities of judgement.
So we can consider the fifth point. After all that is there a singularity of the
relationship between cinema and philosophy? I was really interested by the
fact that Alex Ling was saying that for me cinema is finally inessential, an
inessential art. So it was the last art but inessential. But inessential has two
possible significations. The first is that cinema has no essence and we have
said something like that. There is no clear definition of cinema; there is
no stable essence of cinema. But there is another more negative sense that
cinema is not essential. That cinema can in-exist: it will not be a disaster if
cinema disappears. Godard, for example, says that cinema is dead, cinema
is finished, except maybe the cinema of Godard because it’s a cinema of
the death of the cinema. It’s always the same with the cinema because we
always have the possibility to inscribe the negativity. Exactly as I said that
cinema is the art where something is said concerning non-art. Why not the
possibility of cinema which is the cinema of the death of the cinema? Or
the cinema of the non-cinema; of the impossibility of the cinema and so on.
Precisely, because we cannot define it as a pure art, it is a sort of possible
scenography of all drama, of all intellectual drama. Inessential can be
understood in its ambiguity. If there is impurity then there is no essence of
the cinema but after all the result is that cinema is not essential in the same
26 Badiou and His Interlocutors
We can conclude with the sixth point. Finally, it’s because of its exceptional
nature that cinema has its relationship with philosophy, because cinema is
probably the most important symptom of our history. It is the fundamental
symptom. It is a place where all the contradictions of the world are really
assumed, for the ‘best of all worlds’. But finally they are assumed. Philosophy
also after all has the function of creating a space of thinking to examine the
contradiction of the contemporary world and to propose an orientation.
Philosophy finally is the search for a true life. That is, a search for an orientation
of life, for something that is not a pure nonsense, something that is not a life
that is absurd or sinister. It’s the task of philosophy from the very beginning.
And Plato was saying to do that we must escape the potency of images, the
allegory of the cave. Today we must say on the contrary, in some sense, we
must go to cinema. So we must go into the cave, in the modern cave where
the spectacle of images is more elaborate. If we say something concerning the
relationship between cinema and philosophy we must say that the cinema is
for philosophy today the new allegory of the cave which is ‘go to the cave, go
to the cave’. It’s only by going to the cave that we can find the new means to go
outside, because precisely the cinema is the immanent conflict between what
is the bad presentation of images, the troubled fascination of images on one
side, but on the other side the possibility of clear vision by images themselves
of the possibility to an orientation in the real. So to go to the cave, which is
today the cinema, is also to participate in the democratic dialectics. And so
it’s a part of our modern education.
Questions
of the word philosophy. Plato proposes, in fact, the word philosophy for its
historical destiny. But the form he gives to his writings is by no means a classical
form. In fact, practically no philosopher after Plato uses the theatrical form
invented by Plato, the form of the dialogues. So, we have the strange situation
that the creation of philosophy, of the contents of philosophy, is made in a
form which has no future. It is an artistic form, and Plato is a writer, but it’s an
artistic form that after Plato has no descendants. I know only two interesting
exceptions. Malebranche, the French philosopher of the seventeenth century,
whose dialogue between a Christian philosopher and a Chinese philosopher,
is a very original text, and Diderot with Jacques the Fatalist and his Master.
But in fact the dominant form of philosophy, all along its history, is not at
all the dialogue, but the academic treatise, and the academic treatise is not
an invention of the first philosopher Plato. The academic treatise is invented
by Aristotle, the second philosopher. But Aristotle is not at all an enemy of
theatre, so you see the enemy of theatre writes dialogues, and the friend of
theatre writes academic treatises. The situation is a really a complex one.
Aristotle, as we can see in his Poetics (an academic treatise) is a good
friend of tragedy, and not at all an enemy. So, we have a complete paradox:
the enemy of theatre creates philosophy in theatrical form and his disciple,
a friend of theatre, imposes on philosophy for many centuries, against the
theatrical form of Plato, the academic dissertation. So, the beginning of
our history concerning the relationship between art and philosophy is very
obscure. I propose an attempt to generalize this story. That philosophy is
against art in its classical form because art pretends to be an imitation of
nature. And why philosophy takes the artistic form of theatre, the dialogue
and not only the dialogue but also the famous Platonic allegories which
pertain to poetry? Noting also, many dramatic references to history in the
style of Thucydides or Tacitus. So when philosophy is against the imitative
nature of art, philosophy takes an artistic form, and when philosophy is on
the side of a quiet relationship to art, philosophy proposes a style without art
at all, the academic style.
In Plato, art is something dangerous. In Aristotle, there is absolute
difference between art and philosophy. It’s not at all the same thing. For
Plato, if the arts are dangerous, it’s because precisely it’s unclear that art and
philosophy are really so different. Maybe the temptation of artistic creation is
inside Platonic philosophy, and in the case of Aristotle there is not that sort
of temptation, and art is absolutely outside the philosophical desire. So, we
have the beginning of the question, which is a divided beginning, and not in
the form of the one. We have, from the very beginning of philosophy, two
tendencies concerning the relationship between art and philosophy, and I see
that paradoxically the position of Plato is more the position of the possible
The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy 33
corrupted world. So, the relationship which is important for Plato is not a
question of the potency of art, and it recognizes absolutely the potency of
art – it’s precisely here that we can find the risk of aesthetics. The question for
Plato is the relationship between theatre and opinions, between theatre and
corruption; between theatre and something that has the form of domination –
the dominant opinion. And we give to dominant opinion the strength of a
strange beauty. And so the arts are dangerous not because they are weak or
without interest but because it’s possible that art is the form of the imposition
of false opinions. The better form to present false opinions as a pleasure.
And we can say that art maybe for Plato (not always, it’s a question) – is the
pleasure of falsity.
Philosophy is also a public action for Plato. Philosophy is not inside the
academic closure, and theatre too is a public action and more ordinarily art is
a public action and cinema is a terrible public action. And I think that Plato
created cinema in the allegory of the cave. Plato in the allegory of the cave
presents the world, the real world, as a very big cinema, where all humanity is
seeing images and these images are confused because nobody can distinguish
between images and the real because there are only images and so we are in
the big cosmic cinema just as where we are now [in this hall] with the big
screen and me as an image – but you can make the distinction between the
two; so it’s a good cave! But for Plato there are bad caves which is precisely the
domination of false opinion, and the domination of corruption. And so the
philosophical effort is to transform the subject by rational means. But rational
means conceived as an act and not as a pure theoretical transmission. The
goal is to go out of the cave, to find the sun and the light, to find the real in
the place of images and this public action, this necessity to educate in how to
come out of the cave is the true definition of philosophy and Plato knows that
theatre and more generally art also transform subjectivity. But, by what sort
of means? That is the question, and finally, the discussion between philosophy
and art is a discussion concerning the different means for transforming
subjectivity. For Plato, the relationship between philosophy and the theatre
cannot be reduced to a quiet difference. So the Aristotelian peace between
art and philosophy is not possible. It is in fact a rivalry. In the public space,
the tragic poet is not immediately a friend of the philosopher because they
have the same goal, to transform subjectivity, to create something new in the
subject but by completely different means.
It’s precisely why Plato writes philosophical dialogues, to be at the heart of
the fight concerning the arts. To assume in the field of reason that philosophy
can also as theatre organize discussions in a vivid manner, dramatically,
but with a completely different goal as an end. In fact the philosopher –
on this point Plato and Aristotle – has distinguished in theatre or in art
The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy 35
the movement of thinking itself oriented by a truth. It’s not the exceptional
violence of concrete history, but the struggle against different forms of refusal
of the movement of orientation to a truth: against the reactionary defence of
false and oppressive opinion. It’s not the strong and dark effect of terror and
pity but luminous affects such as the clear understanding of a problem; joy
when we find a solution, collective enthusiasm for a good change of the world,
new forms of friendship and love and so on. And it’s not identification: there
is much more a sort of positive conversion, the moment when we experiment
with what can be thought and done with what before seemed to us purely
impossible. So the goal of artistic philosophy, or art in philosophy, is to create
a new means to represent the possibility of the impossible, as a goal for new
thinking. And the Platonist theatre is a theatre for progressing the possibility
of the impossible and not the liberation of affects against and in front of the
world as it is. But we can ask why theatre for all this, why dialogues? After
all why not write a treatise on all this? Why not the constructive movement
of a good Aristotelian treatise? Why, finally, the necessity of a new form in
philosophy, to speak of the new form of the relationship between art and
philosophy?
To solve this problem of the necessity of the theatre in philosophy itself,
and more generally the necessity of an artistic presentation in philosophy
itself for Plato, I think we must go to the origin of Greek culture and of
Greek art as the context of the discussion between Plato and Aristotle. You
know that theatre is created from a religious ceremony concerning the God,
Dionysus. It was a religious ceremony, and in the religious ceremony you are
under the law of a unique voice, the voice of a unified community, the voice
of the divine fable, in a sense, the voice of the One. And the theatre is the
invention of a split in the One. You know that the beginning of theatre is the
invention of the second person, speaking on the stage. So it’s the invention
of a ceremony, certainly – the old theatre is a ceremony – which presents
the opposition between two subjects, two opinions and two contradictory
convictions. So in theatre, in relation to the religious ceremony, the two comes
after the One. And so theatre, before philosophy, is the appearing of negation;
the artistic appearing of the potency of division and negation. It’s the way out
of the cave of the One. It’s the invention of dialectics. And maybe the difficult
relationship between philosophy and theatre, properly, but practically all
forms of art concerns the question of dialectics. Because philosophy too is
the invention of dialectics, philosophy too is the examination of the question
of negativity. And this is why we have the presence of theatre in the entire
philosophical history of dialectics. In Hegel – the contradiction between
Antigone and Creon in Sophocles: universality against particularity. Or in
Aeschylus, the opposition of Athena and Erynes: the creation of an objective
The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy 37
trial and political rights against familial revenge and so on. Finally, the
question of the relationship between art and philosophy is the question of
dialectics; the question of the presentation of what is dialectical thinking that
is also a critical thinking, thinking which is able to develop negativity.
So, if we have dialogues in Plato it’s to say philosophy too is the creation
of a new form of dialectics and not only theatre and this is why it is the
creation of something like a philosophical theatre: a quarrel with art over the
legitimacy of dialectics. Is dialectics an invention of philosophy or finally an
invention of art in the form of theatre? For Plato philosophy is a subjective
movement and not a passive reception of a lesson and so we must be in
rivalry with theatre, we must be with theatre and Plato is against theatre
because he is with theatre, in conflict with theatre, properly. So dialegesthai,
it’s a Greek verb to indicate the action of philosophy. Dialegesthai is to speak
across negativity, to speak across difficulties and not to speak under the
authority of the One. So, it’s to speak with contradictions. We have, even
today, two convictions or two positions concerning theatre. That is, two
positions concerning the relationship to theatre, philosophy, dialectics,
negation, contradiction. You have the Aristotelian One, where theatre is
the representation of violent passions as the form of the possible cure for
the passions themselves. I think of the case of great American theatre, for
example, the theatre of Eugene O’Neil or Tennessee Williams, but also of
Ibsen, Chekov or Strindberg. We have violent passions, generally in the
familial context – in a very small and violent context. And the continuity
of the play is to obtain specific redemption, specific salvation by the saying
of what was unsaid, the end of the silence, the birth of new possibilities to
speak, and in some sense, this great Aristotelian tradition of the theatre as a
therapy, finally, is today the background to psychoanalysis.
The other orientation is a Platonist one. That is the idea that theatre is
political and ideological first. This is the case in Germany and in France,
this time with the Marxist background, much more than a psychoanalytic
background, and with Bertolt Brecht, but also with Paul Claudel in France
– Brecht with a revolutionary conviction and Claudel with a reactionary
one, but in any case it’s the theatrical realization of an idea. This is also the
case with the theatre of Sartre. We know from Plato to Sartre we have a
constant relationship between philosophy and theatre: in Sartre we find the
theatre of the pure choice, of the strict moment of decision, the moment the
subject decides to become something else. In any case you see, theatre and
modern art – particularly and in general – are an art of discontinuity. It’s
not the presentation of a unified world but the presentation of discontinuity,
of situational contradictions and contradictions of subjectivity. Maybe the
discussion between theatre and philosophy, between art and philosophy
38 Badiou and His Interlocutors
concerns the ideal of life. Is the ideal of life the good life? In the sense of
subjective peace with the world as it is and with others as they are. Or the
ideal is not the good life but the true life, in the sense of subjective struggle to
change the world and to resolve profound contradictions with some others,
sometimes, by the conflict itself.
All this history, but finally we cannot decide on the relationship between
art and philosophy except by saying that in some sense they pertain to the
same history, the same conflictual history.
The true question, in the end (and it is also my conclusion), concerns
happiness. What is happiness? It is for Plato the most important question.
For Plato, it was very important to demonstrate, to give a proof that the
philosophical life was better than the ordinary life, that the philosopher, the
man or woman of wisdom, the man or woman transformed by the coming
out of the cave, achieved a real happiness, much more than the satisfactions
of the tyrant, the despot or the criminal. So the question of happiness is
central. It is that happiness is a witness to the truth, the subjective witness to
the truth. So the question, but it’s an open question, much more today than
ever: is happiness an acceptation of what exists, is happiness to find your
place in the world as it is, that is, happiness as something like satisfaction? Or
happiness is much more a choice or sort of a will concerning not what exists
but what must exist, and this difference between what exists and what must
exist has been the common preoccupation of art and philosophy for all of our
history and all of this continues.
Thank you.
This lecture was given at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of
the Sydney Seminar for Art and Philosophy, Western Sydney University,
29 November 2014.
Part Two
Presentations
4
the historical regains its rights, tethered in fact not to ‘the political’, but to
politics (not le politique but la politique), and more broadly to the ontological
possibility of events as such. ‘Situations are named historical in which figures
at least one evental site. […] A historical situation is, in at least one of its
points, at the edge of the void’ (EE, 197).
This recasting of the historical as a domain constituted by the intersection
of the sequential and the evental site is one of the most significant moments
in Being and Event, but it is one that risks being taken for granted given
the apparently quotidian nature of the qualifier ‘historical’. Granted, the
distinction between ‘history’ and the ‘historical period’ was operative in
Theory of the Subject, but the latter was underdeveloped as a concept, arguably
a mere placeholder for Badiou’s de-historicized vision of the dialectic as so
many local ‘torsions’. This reconfiguration of the historical as the anti-natural,
serving equivocally as both a descriptive and prescriptive term for situations
in which evental sites may occur, will inform Badiou’s prolific output
throughout the 1990s in which he tracks the potential of his new organon
amongst philosophy’s various conditions: art, science, love and politics.
what is truly subjective in the sequence precisely to the extent that he forsakes
any imaginary identification or investment in it.
Just as Badiou recognizes that any philosophy of consistency must first
traverse the ontological fact of inconsistency if it is to prove compelling, so
too does Lazarus recognize the force of heterogeneous multiplicity lying in
wait to undo any radical, directed, or transformative political sequence. The
entire historiography of the French Revolution is basically a version of this
battle – pluralization, ramification, reinscription and renaming, all mobilized
to undo the singularity of the event as subjective effort pursued under the
‘unnameable name’ of Revolution. White recognizes this too; whatever its
value, historical objectivity often serves to undo historical subjectivity.21 But
the power of Lazarus’s thought – which is also the power of Badiou’s work in
Being and Event and the 1990s – is this: to produce a thinking of the subject
that is immune to dialectical recapture, which is to say, a thinking of the
subject that could be recuperated in, or rendered commensurate with, an
objective schema that then serves as a higher order ground of intelligibility.
It’s important to appreciate the significance of this move against a broad
sector of critical theoretical work from Adorno to Žižek that sees unbridled
subjectivity as a source of horror, and the dialectic as either a prophylactic
or a kind of energy efficient historical engine channelling such terroristic
effects into beneficent ends. What Badiou’s work allows us to see is that it’s
not the dialectic that serves as a salve to violence of unbridled subjectivity,
the Schwäremerei that keeps Kant and his heirs up at night. Rather, the
dialectic is itself tasked with being a source of violence insofar as it is the
philosophical alibi that restores directionality or ‘purpose’ to history, all the
while purporting to account for the heterogeneous multiplicity that is history
in itself. It accounts for it, but takes it as given. The historian can always
disabuse the dialectician of his pretentions by treating it as philosophical
manoeuvre that, far from accounting for or redeeming heterogeneous
multiplicity, simply obscures it. But this move undoes politics in turn,
eliminating not simply the effects of subjective tenacity but their very place.
Between the historian and the dialectic the options are unappealing: political
impossibility or metaphysical alibi. Badiou’s axiomatic formalizes this
impasse, and hence points towards an exit.
support for any politics whatsoever’ (TC 1). We can see where this is going.
Badiou’s ‘aim is not to judge the century as an objective datum, but rather
to ask how it has come to be subjectivated’ (TC 5). This subjectivation is by
no means an unequivocal good. Indeed, the central thesis of this powerful
and strange book concerns ‘the passion for the real’ that resulted in attempts
to master History, ‘to master it politically’. One is tempted to say ‘to master
it politically’ above all, but the central provocation of the book is, to take
an exemplary case, that the will to formalization that obtained in Stalin’s
show trials bears resemblances with the procedure operative in Malevich’s
White on White. The minimal difference is that the former was a matter of
destruction, and the latter a matter of subtraction. Subtraction preserves
minimal difference; destruction obliterates it in the nothingness of the real.
Nota bene that Badiou’s otherwise ludicrous comparison of show trials and
White on White itself performs the subtractive gesture that is the only viable
antidote to destruction in his view. By inviting us to a scene in which the
relation between the two historical events is one of minimal difference,
Badiou introduces us to the minimal difference between formalization and
mastery. The violence of mastery in the twentieth century was, for Badiou,
a matter of course. Speaking of Brecht’s relentlessness, Badiou observes: ‘In
murder, we can make out a metonymy of History’ (TC 46). Again History
writ large warrants murder – each murder finds its alibi in History, such is
its metonymic status. We might say that the ethic Badiou promotes in The
Century, and the lesson it harbours, is the need to subtract formalization
from mastery, again to subtract the historical from history.22 One can gloss
the relation between the terms as minimal difference.
In the interview with Bruno Bosteels titled ‘Can Change Be Thought?’
Badiou offers some remarks on Foucault that illuminate the project of The
Century, and the equivocal significance of history at this moment in his
thinking. In effect, he comes to regard history as a situation in which ‘the
discursive truth of a time comes at the price of stripping this time of its
generic procedures’. More:
first subtracting any hypothesis concerning the way in which this time
has been treated by something other than itself, that is, ultimately by
subtracting the procedures of truth of which this time has occasionally
been the site.23
Deleuze’s Badiou
Jon Roffe
I met a man recently who told me that, so far from believing in the square
root of minus one, he did not even believe in minus one. This is at any rate
a consistent attitude. There are certainly many people who regard √2 as
something perfectly obvious, but jib at √-1. This is because they think they
can visualize the former as something in physical space, but not the latter.
– E.C. Titchmarsh, Mathematics for the General Reader1
claims of What Is Philosophy? There is, that is to say, a logic that guides the
misrecognition. Badiou expresses this well when he writes that ‘I do not
register any incorrectness in this text, only a bizarre torsion, an impracticable
vantage point that makes it impossible to understand what is at stake or what
we are dealing with’ (TW 245). It is precisely such a symptomal torsion that
is apparent in Deleuze’s account of Badiou, a torsion that arises because of the
context of the note itself.
Here, I would simply like to take up this invitation and discuss Deleuze’s
rendering of Being and Event. While Deleuze’s misreading cannot be excused,
we can subject it to a series of interpretive transformations that make it
at least legible. Once this is done, an interesting line of criticism emerges
that has not, to my knowledge, been advanced anywhere else, and which
turns around the structure of the relationship between philosophy and its
conditions in Badiou’s philosophy.
First, though, let’s recall the general context of the Note, What Is Philosophy?
itself. The book is framed by the contention that thought confronts two
combatants. The first is the ancient and original enemy of philosophy, doxa,
what Deleuze here most often calls cliché or opinion. The second combatant
is chaos, a chaos that belongs fundamentally to thinking itself. Chaos here is
absolute speed, what Deleuze sometimes, misleadingly I think, calls infinite
speed. Thought itself, thought as such, takes place without any necessary
concessions to relative positions in thought. Deleuze is informed here by the
work of Raymond Ruyer, and his notion of survol absolu.3
Now, while it is an enemy of thought in one sense – given that, as Deleuze
notes, ‘We require just a little order to protect us from the chaos’ (WP 201) –
chaos is at the same time the ally of thinking in its merciless combat with
doxa. It is only by siding with chaos and the absolute speed of thought that it
becomes possible to engender any genuine break with orthodoxy.
Facing each of these combatants is one face of the Janus, stupidity. Doxa
is itself thought’s degree zero, a non-thought, whether it takes the form of
the discourse of marketing firms, or ‘polite [...] dinner conversations at Mr.
Rorty’s’ (WP 144). On the other hand, Janus’ other face, there is stupidity as
problematic and problematizing, engendered by the encounter with chaos.
This leads us to a second, introductory point. Though it is often overlooked,
What Is Philosophy? insists on the fact that thought never arises without an
encounter with the problem. Of philosophy, for example, Deleuze writes that
‘All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no
Deleuze’s Badiou 57
Philosophy, science and art are, on Deleuze’s account, the three creative acts
in thought engendered through the encounter with the problem, which is to
say the three procedures by which doxa may be overturned and the new enter
into thinking human existence. While they share chaos and the encounter
with the problem, they constitute three different ways of responding to it.
Given the note on Being and Event is concerned above all with
philosophy and science, we will forego a consideration of art. How, though,
do philosophy and science differ? For our purposes, three characteristics are
worth insisting upon.
‘The first difference between science and philosophy’, Deleuze writes, ‘is
their respective attitudes towards chaos’, (WP 118) conceived, as we have
seen, as absolute speed.
For its part, philosophy aims to situate thought on the level of this
speed itself, not in toto (which would be impossible), but by selecting out
certain movements of this pre-subjective and non-human infinite thought.
Philosophy’s first act is therefore a filtering, selecting or sieving of chaos, such
that certain features become capable of appearing as such. Science grasps
chaos in the inverse fashion, by slowing it down. Its first act consists in fixing
a frame or plane of reference, in relation to which chaos becomes capable of
supporting subsequent acts of indexing.
This leads to a second point of difference. What philosophy creates
for Deleuze, as is well known, are concepts. If it begins by selecting, what
it selects for are elements (components) that can be brought together in
concepts themselves. While there is no space to make this as clear as it may
be here, consider for a moment the concept of the Cartesian cogito, one of
Deleuze’s examples. The cogito is constructed out of a variety of components:
doubting, thinking and being, and three concomitant positions of the
58 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Image was being published, Deleuze begins to express the view that between
philosophy on the one hand, and art and science on the other, there exists a
relationship of mutual interference. Here is how he puts the matter in the final
paragraph of The Time-Image:
What Is Philosophy? refines this thesis, arguing that we can identify three
kinds of interference.7 The first is the unlocalizable interference that chaos
itself exercises within philosophy, science and art equally, ‘as if they shared the
same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly
accompanies them’ (WP 218). The second kind of interference is localized
and extrinsic, such that ‘each discipline remains on its own plane and utilizes
its own elements’ (WP 217). Deleuze gives the examples of a philosopher
who would create ‘a concept peculiar to Riemannian space or to irrational
number’. A better example, close to Deleuze himself, would be the role of the
differential calculus in post-Kantian thought, where it appears as a powerful
philosophical topos. On the other side, he invokes the scientist who would
create ‘functions of concepts, as Lautman demonstrates for mathematics
insofar as the latter actualizes virtual concepts’ (WP 217). The third kind of
interference is localized and intrinsic in character. It involves the insertion of
concepts and conceptual components in the space of scientific thought itself or
elements of scientific thought appearing as internal and yet foreign elements
in philosophical construction – think of Leibniz’s use of the infinitesimal.
The latter two forms of interference characterize the nature of the
relationship between philosophy, science and art. While irreducible, they act
as loci of provocation for each other, irritants, like the grains of sand that are
the foreign kernel of the oyster.
We are now in a position to summarize Deleuze’s position in the following
schema.
60 Badiou and His Interlocutors
To draw closer to our main concern, the note on Being and Event appears
in a remarkably critical chapter of What Is Philosophy?, devoted to logic and
phenomenology, which are bound together for Deleuze in an alternative vision of
the relationship between science and philosophy. On Deleuze’s view, it is a capital
error to conceive of either science or philosophy as concerned with language,
whether conceived in terms of democratic conversation (Habermas, Rorty), or
in terms of logical propositions. Concepts are, he argues, unrelated to questions
of reference, being governed instead by the requirement of endo-consistency.
Functions, on the other hand, clearly do involve an exo-referentiality. As we have
seen, however, it is not reference to a reality outside of the function, but concerns
the relationship between constants and variables as the function’s extrinsic parts.
As we well-know, however, a certain logical capture of philosophy is ubiquitous,
in the English-speaking world in particular. This – ruinous – state of affairs
arises, in Deleuze’s view, on the basis of a certain initial admixture of philosophy
and science, under the rule of an extra-philosophical, extra-scientific decision.
This decision is double. On the one hand, the logicist grasps the concept
as a proposition, that is, a formalized statement. On the other hand, the
proposition is subordinated to the requirement that it have a relationship to
Deleuze’s Badiou 61
a referent by which its truth value can be ascertained. This hybrid monster
is what Deleuze will call the prospect, in which a bastardized conception of
science provides both the ideal form (exo-reference) and the initial content
of philosophy (discovery of ‘facts’), provided that we already construe science
as proceeding by way of logical propositions.
We see then the sleight of hand: in order to subordinate itself to science,
philosophy must first construct its own vision of scientific practice that has
no direct reference to this practice itself – here, one only need to consider the
staggering state of the contemporary philosophy of mathematics, more than a
hundred years behind mathematics itself.8 This is not Escher’s two hands, one
drawing the other, but rather a hallucinatory act of grounding. The logicist
is akin to the masochist, who must first actively seduce his punisher into
adopting the position of the master before he can be passively dominated.
In some of the most interesting pages of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze will
show that the logicist concept, the prospect, exposes philosophy to the full force of
Gödel’s undecideability results: by recasting philosophy in logico-propositional
terms, it is eviscerated. But we need not go so far as this here, because it is already
evident that the logicist position vitiates philosophy. By subordinating it to the
finite order of recognition and exo-reference, we have lost the concept. What is
left for philosophy is, of course, the tepid remnants of ‘lived experience’ – which
is nothing other than doxa itself. The order of the everyday is itself the order of
cliché – up to and including the subject of experience (‘the habit of saying “I”’).
To the degree that philosophy is shut up in the tawdry finitude of the lived,
on the presupposition that all the ‘serious’ thinking is already being done by
science and logic, it has two modes available to it. The first involves a simple
generalization or abstraction of the lived – we take the boredom that is felt in
airports, and write a book about it. The sadness of traffic, shifting shopping and
dating habits, how nice classical architecture is, how wretched contemporary
art is, and so on. ‘This is’, as Deleuze says, ‘the Western democratic, popular
conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner
conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ (WP 144). It is no surprise as a result, he adds, that
so many discussions that turn around the abstract features of lived experience
take this form: ‘as a man, I consider all women to be unfaithful…’ (WP 145).
The second course of action is more interesting. Beyond the work of its
worst and most insipid representatives, philosophy has never been content to
adopt the perspective of simple generalization. A powerful alternative approach
emerges which aims to extract what is essential from the lived itself. This is, of
course, the approach called phenomenology. The goal of the phenomenological
reduction is to retrieve those quintessential, authentic modes of being in the
world that underlie and are obscured by veils of inauthenticity: ‘Phenomenology
wanted to renew our concepts by giving us perceptions and affections that
62 Badiou and His Interlocutors
would awaken us to the world, not as babies or hominids, but as beings whose
proto-opinions would be the foundations of this world by right’ (WP 150).
There is for Deleuze an unavoidable reintroduction of transcendence here, of a
kind of transcendence-in-immanence that ruptures with opinion from within.
Earlier in What Is Philosophy?, he invokes some familiar figures of this – for
example, Levinas’ Other – but more generally the claim is that phenomenology,
in attempting to locate the exceptional within the mundane, cannot but
reproduce it on another level after giving it a more intractable claim on reality.
The passage of Maurice Merleau-Ponty from the embodied subject of The
Phenomenology of Perception to the flesh of the world announced in The Visible
and the Invisible is the refinement, rather than the deposition, of the clichés
of human existence. At the same time, Deleuze will insist, this path also leads
nowhere: ‘The distinction between the original and the derivative is not by itself
enough to get us out of the simple domain of opinion, and the Urdoxa does
not raise us to the level of the concept’ (WP 149). Merleau-Ponty was certainly
right to say that the phenomenological epoché could not be completed; this
is not due to the lived reality of the body, but to the fact that the essence of
the lived is itself the essential form of doxa itself, doxa in person, the Urdoxa.
Phenomenology does not transcend opinion – it cannot help but catechize it.
The authentic is essentially inauthentic. Taken together, we get what Deleuze
calls the four orders of the prospect, and a second (logicist) schema:
Deleuze’s Badiou 63
We now arrive at the note itself, which appears immediately after the
discussion of phenomenology. I want to stress that what we have just seen –
the outline of the project of What Is Philosophy? and its critique of logicism
in philosophy – are essential prerequisites for reading the note. It is only from
this point of view that Deleuze’s peculiar way of reassembling the argument
of Being and Event becomes meaningful. We can summarize the content of
the note by saying that, on Deleuze’s view, Badiou is led despite himself into
a certain repetition of the logicist program.
How? Let’s consider the third schema, Deleuze’s Badiou:
The first thing that is clear here is that we are dealing with the question of the
science–philosophy relationship from the very beginning. But let’s consider
64 Badiou and His Interlocutors
The errant line [that Badiou constructs, after Cantor] forms four figures,
four loops as generic functions – scientific, artistic, political or doxic,
and amorous or lived – to which the productions of ‘truths’ correspond.
(WP 152)
Two things are interesting here, first the implication that the truth procedures
are, in Deleuze’s reading, functions. They begin by positing a constant, and
then connect independent variables to this function. This is in fact quite a fair
description of the process of a subjective fidelity, which does precisely this
beginning with the affirmation of an event and its belonging to the situation.
On the other hand, we must pay attention to the terms ‘doxic’ and ‘lived’
here, for they mark quite clearly the fact that, on Deleuze’s reading, the four
generic functions as such remain at the level of the cliché. Given the analysis
of the four prospects we have just seen, it is difficult to overlook now the
conclusion that Badiou’s generic procedures constitute the level of the third
prospect, the regime of the lived.
Deleuze’s Badiou 65
Duplicity of philosophy
But let me first quickly note that the latter half of the note presents not one
but two critiques. The one that does not interest us here is in any case the one that
is most well known. It concerns two incompatible treatments of multiplicity,
and feeds into the more general question of the virtual in Deleuze, and in
Badiou’s reading of Deleuze. For his part, Deleuze argues that Badiou’s starting
point already vitiates the attempt at constructing a philosophy of the multiple.
He writes that ‘It seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support
the hypothesis of an any-multiplicity-whatever [une multiplicité quelconque]
(even mathematics has had enough of set-theoreticism). Multiplicities plural –
from the outset there must be at least two, two types’ (WP 153).
This is what accounts for his insistence on the indefinite article in the
phrase ‘an any-multiplicity-whatever’. Philosophy and science engage two
different multiplicities – whether we call them virtual and actual or not, this
is Deleuze’s point here. But the other critique is in fact the more interesting of
the pair. To see what Deleuze is getting at, consider how the note continues
after the passage cited above:
conditions, and in doing so, it forfeits its claim to necessarily coming after the
truth procedures themselves.
To make this point more concrete, I would like to invoke a case in which
this duplicity of philosophy is particularly clear. The example is drawn from
the near-companion volume to Being and Event, Number and Numbers,
which first appeared in 1991; in question is the status of the complex
number field C.
The goal of Number and Numbers is to produce a philosophical answer to
the question: what is Number? We must insist on the philosophical character
of the project. Throughout his engagement with mathematics, Badiou will
insist that mathematicians, ‘absorbed as they are by the forgetting of the
destiny of their discipline due to the technical necessity of its deployment’
(BE 341), do not grasp mathematics as ontology. Thus, in ‘Philosophy and
Mathematics’, he writes:
This is particularly the case with respect to the question of the being of
Number. On the one hand, there is this functional blindness proper to the
effort of mathematics itself, unconcerned with ontology qua ontology. On
the other hand, there is no question – Badiou argues – of subordinating the
category of Number to intuition or representation, however profound or
refined. Speaking of the various formulations of the nature of number that
have traversed the history of mathematics and mathematical logic since the
nineteenth century, he writes that: ‘none of these concepts can be inferred
from experience, nor do they propose themselves to any intuition, or submit
to any deduction, even a transcendental one’ (NN 212). It is for this very reason
that, in ‘One, Multiple, Multiplicity’, Badiou writes that ‘mathematics shows
itself perfectly capable both of providing schemas adequate to experience,
and of frustrating this experience by way of conceptual inventions that no
intuition could accept’ (TW 73).
68 Badiou and His Interlocutors
However, when we turn to Number and Numbers itself, one finds the very
opposite assertion about complex numbers. In question is another note,
this time a footnote that Badiou appends to a demonstration taken to have
provided ‘a unification of the concept of Number’ (NN 177). I take the liberty
of citing it in full, including as it does a large number of interesting details. A
complete concept of Number is in hand. However, Badiou writes,
One might object at this point that our Numbers do not authorize the
representation either of complex numbers or of quaternions, upon
which physics relies to a considerable extent.
But are complex numbers and quaternions numbers? I think it can be
reasonably maintained that, from the moment we take leave of all ‘linearity’
when we abandon dimension 1, we are dealing with constructions based
on Numbers rather than with Numbers per se. Basically, the innermost
essence of complex numbers is geometrical, it is the ‘complex plane’
which delivers the truth of these ‘numbers’. Around the complex numbers
is organized the profound link between pure algebra (the extension of
fields) and the ontological scheme of space as topological concept. I am
tempted to call complex numbers operators, operators whose function in
thought is to articulate algebra and topology. Hence the simultaneously
combinatorial (a complex number being a pair of real numbers) and
geometrical character of these ‘numbers’. They are in fact numbers which
do not number, but suggest schemes of representation and inscription
which are already, in effect, something very close to a conceptual ‘physics’.
Moreover, it seems to me unreasonable to speak of ‘numbers’ when it is
not even possible, in terms of the operational field considered, to say that
one ‘number’ is larger or smaller than another. In short: a field of numbers
must in my view be an ordered field which neither complex numbers nor
quaternions are. Finally, I restrict the concept of Number, insofar as it is
thought as a form of being, to that which can be deployed according to
the intuition of a line. This is made clear by the decisive part played in the
definition of Number by that fundamental ‘line of being’ constituted by
the ordinals. (NN 228n6)
The fact that complex numbers are not an ordered field, for many decades
seen as an important limitation in the architectonic construction of sets
of numbers, has today come to be seen as a strength (for reasons of
stability) [… ] This is one example, among many others in advanced
mathematics, that forces us to change our philosophical perspective, if
we are really to be in a position to accept the advances of the discipline.13
For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are; and do thou
restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry.
– Plato, Parmenides
Several times during his teachings in the mid-1960s, Lacan makes use of a
paradox, what he calls a ‘logical enigma’, to demonstrate something critical
about the difference between writing and speech. ‘Madame’, he requests his
assistant at one point, ‘take this little piece of chalk, make a rectangle, write
1, 2, 3, 4, on the first line, […] and then write: the smallest whole number
which is not written on the board’. The parenthetical laughter noted on the
seminar’s transcript suggests that his assistant fell for the trap. Lacan was
not asking Madame to chalk up the number 5 (i.e. the next smallest number
once 4 has been notated), but rather to write the sentence ‘the smallest whole
number which is not written on the board’.
In the still unpublished Seminar XIV, Logic of the Fantasy (1966–1967),1
where this little comedy took place, Lacan’s concern is to chart the logical
pathways by which one can arrive at satisfaction. Our relations to jouissance
partake of what he calls a ‘more fundamental’ (principielle) logic than its
modern iterations. Lacan’s immediate target here is mathematical and formal
logic, in particular that of George Boole and Gottlob Frege, as well as the
challenge posed to Frege by Bertrand Russell. Very briefly, since this part
This essay was previously published in Sex and Nothing: From Ljubljana to Elsewhere, ed. A.
C. Rued (London: Karnac Books, 2015).
74 Badiou and His Interlocutors
of the story has been told many times and is consequently very well known,
Frege’s effort to construct a ‘formal language of pure thought modelled upon
that of arithmetic’ was catastrophically ended by his fellow logicist, Bertrand
Russell.2 Russell showed that Frege’s system for defining natural numbers by
means of logical terms was internally inconsistent. Frege, as Martin Davis
explains in a useful summary, sought to define numbers logically by making
them into sets:
Russell’s devastating intervention was to show how Frege’s system was self-
contradictory. If, for Frege, there must always be a set that contains all the
elements that meet the formal criteria for that set, Russell proposed the
paradox which has since borne his name, namely, the paradox of the set
of all sets that do not contain themselves. Including itself would contradict
the set’s formal criterion of sets that do not contain themselves. But not
including it would destroy the set’s claim to comprehensiveness: it would
not be the set of all the sets that do not contain themselves, since this set
of all sets would be missing itself. As Davis relates, this insight was fatal to
Frege’s project.
already written on the board (i.e. in the form of the linguistic statement).
Lacan continues,
You have only to search, then, whether the smallest whole number which
is not written on the board might not, perchance, be the number 6, and
you find yourself with the same difficulty, namely, that from the moment
that you pose the question, the number 6 as the smallest whole number
which is not written on the board, is written on it and so on.
An image of One
Although the suggestion would be that Lacan’s One of sex is a purely arbitrary
starting place, this is not to say that just any point on our slide rule will serve
in this role. Or rather (since in fact any random point can indeed offer itself as
this function of the One), we must ask what turns any-point-whatever into a
One that can serve as the unit of sex? We have already broached this question
above in the discussion of the paradox of Russell’s set where Lacan proposed
that writing provides a way of inscribing a whole or totality without needing
to seek recourse in a metalanguage. We must now look in more detail at
this question of writing, as it plays a decisive role in the choice of where to
position the One of sex as the unit of measure in a signifying system.
When Lacan talks about writing, he invariably has something very specific
in mind. In Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973),11 for example, Lacan discusses
writing or écriture in relation to the signifying effect that occurs in the field
of speech and language. As mentioned earlier, what one hears in speech is the
signifier rather than the signified. The signified, then, is not what we hear (in
the auditory sense) but something that must be read. In order to signify, the
signifier must undergo an act of signification. In ‘The Instance of the Letter’,
Lacan describes this process as the signifier, S, becoming shot through or
‘injected’ with signifieds, s, that have undergone a certain operation: a transfer
occurs whereby a signified crosses over the bar that separates signifier and
signified to become a signifier, S. Lacan writes this as the algorithm:
S
s
Once this first signifier, S, has been constructed, it can slide through the
signifying chain according to operations permitted by the two ‘fundamental
structures’ of metaphor and metonymy. By way of metaphorical or metonymic
substitutions, the ‘signifying function’ generates an effect that is characterized
either by a plus (+) or a minus (−) of sense. While metonymy’s minus of sense
(its famous deferral) oversees the maintenance of the bar as the ‘irreducible
nature of the resistance of signification’,12 metaphor permits further crossings.
Because of this potential for creation (Lacan calls metaphor’s signifying effect
‘poetic or creative’),13 it is the structure of metaphor that will be of primary
importance in Lacan’s discussion of sex in Seminar XIV.
Now, according to Lacan, writing is directly implicated in this act of crossing
the bar. The bar, he says in Seminar XX, ‘is the point at which in every use of
language writing may be produced’.14 However, in Seminar IX, Identification
(1961–1962) Lacan gives a more detailed explanation of what is involved in this
transfer and, in particular, the role that ‘writing’, understood as the inscription
Mathematics in the Bedroom 79
(a slash, a cough, a chalk sign on the board) can serve as the unary trait, as a
mark for an enjoyment that can be repeated. Nevertheless, any signifier or One
that emerges from the repetition of this inscription will be intimately linked to
the trait from which it was generated. Created from a certain repetitive writing
of the trait in the body,16 the One of sex is thus never simply an act of free choice
or decision where the subject says, ‘let’s begin from this point’. But neither is this
One of sex connected in any ‘natural’ kind of way to particular physical organs,
which only come into play afterwards, as imaginary and symbolic receptacles
for a jouissance that we are discovering is mathematical in origin. ‘It is not the
function that makes the organ’, Lacan reminds us, ‘but the organ that makes the
function’.17 Neither a voluntarist nor a biologically determined One, the unit of
sex comes into being through an originary repetition that always precedes it.
The result is that the One of sex is never originarily marked but only re-marked.
The One of sex would be the Symbolic registration of an originary falter, a re-
marking of the absent ‘first’ One but which, in being so re-marked, inaugurates
the universe of discourse and its signifying chain.
A golden number
For Lacan, sex is the relation between the One and the Other. This sounds fairly
uncontentious but as our discussion above should have already alerted us,
this statement conveys far more than the idea of two people coming together
in coitus. Already it seems the sex act involves considerably more entities in
the bedroom than just the two lovers. We have the unary trait, for one, whose
repeated inscriptions in the Other generated the One of sex and which tarry
in the One like tiny pointillist brushstrokes, visible only in extreme close-up.
But we must also make room now for a couple of new personages taking up
precious space on the bed. These are the famous third parties found in any sex
act, the object a, and its stealthy accomplice, the phallus.
In Seminar XIV, Lacan adverts to one of the great marvels of mathematics to
illustrate the a’s fundamental incommensurability of with respect to the One.
In three dense and complex lessons in April of 1967, Lacan recalls the unusual
properties of the golden ratio, which produces a number that can be defined in
terms of itself. The golden ratio produces what is called a ‘continuous fraction’
which is created by dividing 1 with the golden number and then adding 1,
then dividing 1 again by the golden number and adding 1, and so forth to
infinity.18 Lacan assigns the object a the value of the golden number in this
seminar to illustrate the a’s fundamental incommensurability with the One.
The continuous fraction the golden number generates is analogous to how the
object a drops out from the relation of the One and the Other in the sexual
Mathematics in the Bedroom 81
What particularly interests Lacan in the golden ratio is the way it offers an
effective means for illustrating how the phallus comes to assume the positive
(or ‘symbolic’) value of the a. Referring back to our slide rule, the phallus
arises in the zone over to the right of the One of sex (i.e. in the field of the
Other, the Symbolic). There it bears a very exact value: its numerical value
precisely reflects the distance separating the One and the object a on the
left-hand or negative side of the One. Recall how Lacan told us that the One’s
sole function is to enable us to calculate the value of the object a. Now we
learn that we obtain the value of a by counting away from the One to the left
to the value of the inverse golden number, that is, 0.61803…. The phallus is
then assigned the reciprocal amount of this value on the right of One. On
this, positive, side of the One, the value of the phallus is thus 1.61803… As
Lacan explains, ‘the phallus designates… this something which constitutes
precisely the distance between the small a and the unit of sex’.19
We understand how the phallus makes its emergence by referring again to
our discussion of the emergence of the One through writing. For it appears that
in the repetitions by which the a drops away in the relation of the One and
the Other, a similar act of transfer, or ‘metaphor’ occurs. Among all the partial
objects or a’s that are produced and fall away as continuous fractions in the
sexual repetitions, a single one of them – that is, the phallus – acquires the ability
to represent or signify the infinite series of a’s. Once again, Lacan resorts to some
curious attributes of the golden number in order to help us understand this. To
the extent that the golden number can be defined in terms of itself, it also has the
unusual property where, by subtracting the golden number from 1, the result is
the square of the golden number. And reciprocally, by subtracting the square of
the golden number from 1, the result is once again the golden number.20
1 − φ = φ2
1 − φ2 = φ
One or none
that is, not as opposites, but as contraries defined in relation to a third term,
the phallus.24 The consequence of defining the sexes in this way is profound
as it opens up a number of ways that Man and Woman, as propositions,
relate to enjoyment. For if there is anything that intersects the two sexes,
it is jouissance.25 Defined logically, Lacan’s propositions expressing the two
sexes – his famous formulas of sexuation from the Encore Seminar – imply
not one but two forms of jouissance.26 One of these forms is literally ‘ruled’ by
the phallus insofar as the latter provides a universal yardstick for measuring
enjoyment. The Other, or feminine, jouissance famously, is not ruled by the
phallic function.
In his lesson of 24 May 1967, Lacan describes the part played by the
pleasure principle in establishing the phallic economy of desire. In a cunning
reversal, the limit of pleasure paradoxically turns around to become the
negative sign of the possibility and promise of an endless jouissance. Lacan
explains,
‘Detumescence, by being the characteristic of the functioning of the penile
organ, specifically, in the genital act – and precisely in the measure in which
what it supports in terms of jouissance is kept in suspense – is there… to
introduce the fact that there is jouissance beyond.’27 To the extent that Man, in
the sexual act, comes up against the limit of the pleasure principle in the fact of
detumescence, means that sex confronts him over and over again with the fact
of his castration. While this might explain the famous post-coital sadness, what
Man’s sexual melancholy misrecognizes is the instrumental role that castration
plays in generating the prospect that total satisfaction lies somewhere out
there. The inevitable failure of the sexual act is in fact not the consequence
of castration. Rather, as Lacan explains in the same lesson, sex fails because
there is no phallic object. Sex fails because there is no object that would be the
opposite or logical complement of the phallus. In the sex act, we have sex with
the a, not with other. However, insofar as we view our sexual partner through
the perspective of castration, we misperceive the a as the other sex in all its
glorious difference from us. When the sexual relation subsequently fails, as
it always does, we put this failure down to something faulty in this particular
sexual other, rather than in sex itself. Back down the merry path of metonymic
desire we head in our search for the really ‘right’ other next time.
The remarkable side effect of this phallic ‘ruse’ is that jouissance is henceforth
turned into a commodity, something that can be bought and exchanged. To
the extent that it provides a way of symbolically measuring the amount of
jouissance that circulates in the economy of desire, the phallus suggests a
‘bottling’ operation, one that packages the fractions of jouissance that
slipped into the Symbolic beneath the phallic veil. Like a jar of preserves, the
phallus cans the a, enabling it to be handled and put into wider circulation.
Registering this economy, the phallus subsequently becomes something
one can either ‘have’ or ‘be’, for once it has acquired its signification as the
signifier for absent jouissance, the phallus enters into a series of metaphorical
and metonymic substitutions just like any signifier in the signifying chain.
Thus in the metaphorical substitution that Lacan calls copulation, phallic
enjoyment symbolically passes from the male organ to the feminine object
which, signifying phallic value, comes to hold that value; the feminine object
‘is’ the phallus in this sense. By means of a metaphorical transfer of phallic
value, the woman as sexual object comes to represent man’s jouissance:
It is no longer the sexual organ of our bull – use-value – which will serve
for this sort of circulation in which there is established the sexual order.
It is the woman, insofar as she herself has become on this occasion, the
locus of transference of this value subtracted at the level of use-value, in
the form of object of jouissance.29
Metonymic substitutions, on the other hand, take us into the realm of the
fetish. In both cases, jouissance slides effortlessly through metaphorical and
metonymic chains of signification because of the character of the phallic
signifier’s character of ‘easy handling’, as Lacan slyly puts it.30
While sex repeatedly aims at a One, in the economy of desire sex
delivers only in multiple fractions of enjoyment that secrete their way into
the universe of discourse under the cover of the phallus. If there is a One
produced in the repetitions of the sexual act, then, it is as Lacan puts it, a
perforated One, riddled with tiny holes that mark the absence of the little
a’s. From this perspective, sex under the rule of the phallus would be a
paradoxical matter of the void attempting to plug the void. If our earlier brief
foray into Aristotelian logic has been of use to this discussion, it is found in
how Aristotle prompts our recognition that there are two ways by which this
stopping up may be effected. Given that the a logically precedes the phallic
metaphor, it seems there is another means through which sex may ‘plug’
the hole in the universe of discourse. This word, however, is a misnomer,
since it is only the phallus that tropes the absent a’s from the universe of
discourse in terms of a hole. The Other or feminine jouissance is neither the
Mathematics in the Bedroom 85
complement nor the opposite of the phallic solution. Rather than plugging a
hole, the Other jouissance approaches the problem differently: it hollows out
the universe of discourse from the inside.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is by turning to an image Lacan
proposes for feminine jouissance. In the lesson of 7 June 1967 (Sem. XVI),
Lacan calls feminine jouissance the ocean that keeps the ‘ship of Oedipus’
afloat. The Oedipal ship, that is, the desiring subject dreaming of total
satisfaction under the steerage of the phallus, is a leaky vessel that requires
constant plugging with new fantasmatic objects in its metonymy of desire.
But this view regards sex from only the masculine side of the formulas of
sexuation. If one were to completely submerge the ship, the question of its
‘plugging’ is altogether irrelevant. The little barque, that is, no longer ‘leaks’
because the water is both inside and outside the vessel. It no longer makes
sense to speak in terms of leaking, sinking or stopping up at all.
[…] in the sexual act, […] there is a jouissance, that of the other, which
remains in suspense. It is because the inter-crossing, the required
chiasmus – which would make of the bodies, by right, the metaphor, the
signifier of the jouissance of the other – it is because this chiasma is in
suspense, that we cannot but […] see this displacement which, in effect,
makes a jouissance dependent on the body of the other. As a result of
which, the jouissance of the other, as I told you, remains adrift.
86 Badiou and His Interlocutors
The upshot of this is that sex is a logical enigma which repeats. What it repeats
is a surplus in the universe of discourse that was produced in the originary act
of creating the set that makes up the Symbolic system. At the level of the set’s
contents, this surplus is registered in the form of the two sexes of Man and
Woman whose irreducibility with respect to one another is expressed in their
fundamental maxims: ‘there is the sexual act’ and ‘there is no sexual act’. From
the masculine side, there is the sexual act: sex produces the signifier, Man,
insofar as he is defined in terms of phallic enjoyment. On the feminine side,
however, there is no sexual act. The infinite generations of the a fail to coalesce
and produce a signifier for Woman, instead hollowing out the entire universe
of discourse from the inside. Returning to Russell’s paradox, one could say that
from the masculine perspective sex allows that the set of all sets would include
itself: this would be the masculine dream of an exceptional One, the Father
who enjoys all the women. This exceptional One somehow manages to include
itself in the very set that it describes. From the feminine side, however, sex
asserts that the set of all sets does not include itself, and this failure of inclusion
ultimately dissolves the very set itself. From the Woman’s side, that is, the
universe of discourse does not exist – although this by no means implies that
Woman is therefore without some kind of language with which she insists, as a
number of notable Lacanian feminists have devoted themselves to discovering.
Sex presents us on a daily basis with the fundamental enigma that lies
at the heart of the universe of discourse. In our repetitions of the sexual
(non-)act, we repeat again the choice we once must have made: whether to
be a Man or a Woman. Thus if there is something originary about sex, if sex
can produce in us an uncanny sense of being the ‘first’ man or woman, this
derives from sex’s metaphor, the way it produces (or fails to produce) what
Lacan calls the ‘instauration of a signifier in the real’. In its small, quotidian
repetitions, sex thus repeats an earlier repetition. It is the ghosting repetitions
in our everyday lives of the originary signifying Act through which we
created our ‘universe of discourse’. Uniquely in our everyday life, sex thus
presents us with the phenomenal recreation of the logical (but never actually
temporal) moment when we originarily chose to enter language. This is, I
think, also why it is usually some kind of sexual difficulty that finally drives
a subject into analysis, to the talking cure. The sexual act represents us with
our fundamental alienation, laying out before us on the bed the two different
pathways by which a subject may choose to enter language. Faced with the
forced choice of Being or Thinking, the speaking subject by necessity chooses
Thinking. However, the path towards Thinking is doubled between a logic
of the exception and a logic of the not-whole. Invisible from the phallic
viewpoint, this second pathway solely becomes visible when the totality of
our possible relations towards enjoyment is written out in logical form. In
Mathematics in the Bedroom 87
this sense, logic shows us something that cannot be seen from inside the
framework of phallic representation.
To conclude, what is the smallest whole number not written on the board?
The question of Woman poses an unanswerable riddle within the universe
of discourse. Although the signifier of Woman cannot be written (in the
sense of producing a signifier, a ‘One’), the unconscious nevertheless never
ceases to (half-)speak of it. Perhaps in response to Lacan’s demand that day,
Madame, the long-suffering stenographer might simply have said, ‘c’est moi!’
7
Writing philosophy is, to tell the truth, something I find relatively boring.
My aim is, in fact, to give to things that are already formed in my thought
a protocol of transmission that is already satisfactory to me, personally.
[…] When I write theatre, it’s totally different. I don’t know myself exactly
what I’m going to write. The writing process is constitutive here of the
thing itself. I’m no longer concerned with a protocol of transmission. I
don’t believe, on the other hand, that this applies to philosophy. (PE 88)
or a poetics, such artistic prisms are realizable and they offer a range of
fruitful possibilities to the theorist and also to the literary writer. Without
at all dismissing the significance of Badiou’s de-suturing of a protocol of
transmission from a protocol of creation – and, indeed, by building on this
separation – I will argue that despite the Platonic rhetoric of the philosopher’s
putative quarrel with the poet, Badiou’s work offers both a highly astute and
incisive philosophy of art and of literature – which is capable of delivering
one from the inadequacies of contemporary literary theory – and also a
methodology or poetics for the creation of new works of art.
In the course of advancing this argument, I will cite some of the other
concerns with such an endeavour, such as commentaries by critical readers
of Badiou’s philosophy – most notably, Jacques Rancière’s misgivings about
Badiou’s supposedly anti-aesthetic agenda – who have seen his thoughts on
art as unsympathetic to the development of a theory of art for reasons other
than the tension (between the philosopher and the poet) intrinsic to Badiou’s
philosophy. My aim here is to promote a Badiouian understanding of art
through engagements with obstacles for such an understanding found both
within and without Badiou’s writings.
I declare that my argument is irrefutable, that it’s right for us to attack the
poets since they’re nothing but imitators, and that it’s legitimate to lump
them together with the painters. They’re like the latter in that their works
are of scant importance where Truth is concerned. This comparison can
92 Badiou and His Interlocutors
be further substantiated by the fact that it’s with the heteronomous part
of the Subject that they’re associated, not with the part that steers it in
the right direction of the universality of the True. So it’s perfectly right
for us to refuse these kinds of poets admittance to our community ruled
by communist dictates, because they arouse the purely empirical part of
the Subject, encouraging it with imaginary forms, reinvigorating it, and
thereby weakening the rational part, the only one that’s dedicated to the
dialectic of truths. (PR 331)
It is worth noting that, while written in the dramatic voice of the character
of Socrates as conceived by Badiou in an openly inventive retelling of Plato’s
canonical work, the above passage is clearly a manifestation – or, if a pun
may be permitted, an imitation – of Badiou’s own philosophical rhetoric.
‘Our community ruled by communist dictates’ is, as mentioned before,
Badiou’s rephrasing of Plato’s ‘well-ordered State’.5 This rewording is a clear
declaration of Badiou’s own well-known political inclinations; and other
revisions of this passage – such as changing the phrase ‘an inferior part of
the soul’, in Plato’s discourse, to ‘the heteronomous part of the Subject’ –
further identify the speaker of this speech as someone very much like Badiou
himself, i.e. a thinker who is both a materialist – redefining ‘the soul’ as ‘the
Subject’ – and an idealist who, as well as not abandoning the transcendental
category of soul/Subject, views heteronomy – very much à la Kant, the
idealist thinker par excellence – as something ‘inferior’. This characterization
closely matches one recent, rather enthusiastic depiction of Badiou as ‘the
name, in the history of philosophy, of a new synthesis between the rigorous
lucidity of materialism and the invisible hope of idealism’.6 Therefore, if
Badiou’s Socrates can be seen as an articulation of Badiou’s own position
and convictions, can it be said that Badiou is in substantial agreement with
Plato apropos of the philosophical imperative to ‘refuse’ poetry and art in the
pursuit of ‘the universality of the True’?
As observed by a perspicuous reader of Badiou, however, while the
‘resources Badiou derives from Plato are extensive’,7 Badiou’s adherence
to Plato is not simplistic or ‘slavish’; and, importantly, it entails a ‘different
conceptual attitude’ with regard to poetry.8 This divergence is most vigorously
stated and explicated in Badiou’s central book-length writing on art, Petit
manuel d’inesthétique (1998).9 Here, after evoking the Lacanian Master/
Hysteric dyad and, by so doing, somewhat updating and destabilizing
the Platonic philosopher/poet dialectic – concluding that there are three
fundamental existing schemata for investigating the relation between
philosophy and art, and that Plato’s didactic schema is only one, albeit the
most foundational, of these – Badiou poses that these differing schemata
From Prohibition to Affirmation 93
(1988) in which ‘the poem realizes the essence of the event itself ’ (BE 197),
or the ‘labour’ taken on by a grouping or configuration of poets who, in the
intellectual (if not strictly historical) period between Hegel and Heidegger
dubbed the age of poets, ‘assumed certain of philosophy’s functions’ (MP 69).
In his writings since Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou has placed an even
greater emphasis on the capacity of poetry in producing truths. In 2001
(and again in 2002 and in 2005), he put forward versions of ‘A Manifesto
for Affirmationist Art’ which praises ‘an art capable of measuring up to… “a
mathematics of being”’ (P 140). In Le Siècle (2005), the earlier theme of the
age of poets is expanded, via startlingly original readings of poems, theatre
and artworks by Brecht, Saint-John Perse, Malevich, Pessoa, Mandelstam and
Celan, among others, proposing that it has not been the science of history or
the discipline of political theory but the art of poetry which has been ‘put in
charge of naming’ the historico-political events of the twentieth century (TC
88). In a recent lecture titled ‘Poetry and Communism’ (2013, presented at
the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden), Badiou concludes that, despite
‘all kinds of discussions’ about communism from a variety of perspectives –
‘philosophy, sociology, economics, history, political science…’ – it is only ‘by
way of the poem’ that ‘there exists a proof of communism’ (AP 108).
In short, Badiou provides a specific and rigorous view of what art and
its traditionally most philosophically engaged species (the poem) are. If
philosophy of art is, at its most basic, ‘the study of the nature of art’,10 then I
feel that Badiou’s view of art as a condition of thought, according to which
the work of art possesses the capacity to produce truths, supplies us with
precisely such a study. According to him, the poem – or, more specifically, a
certain configuration of artistic production which materializes the inaesthetic
combination of immanence and singularity apropos of the relation between
art and philosophy – is capable of realizing, naming and bringing into
existence proofs of events. (And, if need be, one should be reminded that
in Badiou’s philosophy an event is not an existing, external fact or reality,
but rather a transient, immaterial rupture in the state of things which has
the capacity to instigate subjects capable of transforming knowledge and
forging a new reality.) Furthermore, although what I’ve explored so far does
not specifically outline an aesthetic theory – in so far as aesthetics has been
defined as ‘a philosophical activity concerned not just with the question
of beauty but with the whole nature of experience in terms of perception,
feelings and emotions’11 – it is evident that Badiou’s proposed philosophy
is also a commentary on or a critique of a narrowly defined prism which
sutures perception to emotion, art to beauty and beauty to harmony, as seen
in his naming of his approach inaesthetic, in defiance of dominant classical
aesthetics, which are predicated upon precisely such attachments.
96 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Last but not least, Badiou’s writings on art may also serve as a poetics. His
discussion of the age of poets is based upon a ‘central operation’ according
to which the discussed poets are singularized for their ‘“method” of
disobjectivation’ (MP 76), a method which Badiou has illustrated in a number
of astute close readings of the relevant poets’ works, such as Mallarmé’s
tripartite ‘subtractive’ method in the sonnet ‘À la nue accablante tu’ (C 49–58).
More explicitly, ‘A Manifesto for Affirmationist Art’ is an open call for a new
way of producing art, ‘an art that is just as allergic to obscurantist hypnosis as
it is to the pornographic stupidity of festive performances’ (P 140). This text
performs both a polemical, unashamedly provocative demand for an art that
breaks with dominant modes and styles – of both the pseudo-avant-gardist
‘obscurantist hypnosis’ of today’s supposedly innovative artworks as well
as ‘the pornographic stupidity’ of commercial entertainment and popular
cultural products – and also instructs on how such a radically inaesthetic and
affirmationist art may be conceptualized and indeed practised.
It is for these reasons that we should not view Badiou as simply a
partisan to Plato apropos of art – or as a Platonic thinker deeply suspicious
and dismissive of art – but as a philosopher who has developed a pertinent
and poignant philosophy of art and poetics. While accepting the basic
situation of Plato’s problematization of art – the radical distinction between
the poem and thought, between art and philosophy – Badiou does not
participate in a denunciation of art and proposes his own novel and incisive
rejoinder to Plato in defence of art, one which is neither pre-Platonic
(romantic) nor anti-Platonic (classical). It is perhaps for this reason that,
in his retelling of The Republic, the highly astute and inquisitive figure of
Amantha (Badiou’s own fictive invention, a female character based on
Adeimantus in Plato’s original) disrupts Socrates’ admonition of artists by
telling the philosopher:
It’s just that you haven’t convinced me, either about poetry or the theatre.
Your target – an art that’s supposed to be the mere reproduction of
external objects and primitive emotions – is very narrow, whereas you
act as if it represented practically the whole field. Neither Pindar, nor
Mallarmé, nor Aeschylus, nor Schiller, nor Sappho, nor Emily Dickinson,
nor Sophocles, nor Pirandello, nor Aesop, nor Federico García Lorca fit
into your scheme. (PR 334)
Being and Event, by providing the philosopher with key features of the theme
of fidelity to the evental site (BE 255–61). The pre-Islamic Arabian poet Abu
Aqil Labīd ibn Rabī’ah is the subject of a substantial comparative analysis
in a chapter of Handbook of Inaesthetics (HB 46–56); and the 2007 lecture
‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction: on Pier Paolo Pasolini’ (AP 83–92)
discusses a poem by a twentieth-century European writer and filmmaker
who is not associated with any form of modernism.
Despite my own concerns with Badiou’s choice of artists – which I shall
articulate in the final part of this piece – I believe Rancière and some others’
designation of Badiou as a modernist30 is, in itself, neither here nor there,
and what concerns me much more is the viability of the criticism of Badiou’s
philosophy of art inaugurated by this designation. As such, my central
difficulty with Rancière’s view of Badiou as a thinker (modernist or not,
Platonic or not) who, despite appearances, ultimately submits both art and
aesthetics to the will and postulates of the Idea (and as such fails to develop
a significant or productive theory of art) is that Rancière both misreads
the dialectics of Badiou’s theory – by rephrasing it, as we have seen, as an
(impossible) reconciliation of ‘the Platonic condemnation of images with
the affirmation of art’s specificity’ – and also presents the relation between
these two (misrepresented) imperatives as a basic contradiction instead of a
dialectical interrelation.
As I have elaborated in the previous section, neither is Badiou’s adaptation
of the basic premise of the Platonic perspective an acquiescence to a
‘condemnation of images’, nor is his rejection of the romantic schema based
on a positioning of art as a specificity vis-à-vis aesthesis; his is an apprehension
of art as the condition which entails configurations of work which posit their
truths as a singularity vis-à-vis the other generic conditions (politics, science
and love). Rancière, the great theorist and indeed champion of an aesthetic
regimentation of art, in his determination to see Badiou as belonging to a
‘great anti-aesthetic consensus’, has perhaps overlooked the pivotal point
that Badiou does not see the artistic as materially different to the sensible.
For Badiou, art is not an Other to the aesthetic but is an operation which
takes places within the aesthetic or, put in his own words, ‘the truth of which
art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible, that is, the
transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea’ (P 144) – and Badiou
sees the truths of art (e.g. the ‘enveloping vision of ephemeral totalizations’
in Woolf ’s fiction (P 141), or ‘revelation of the power of dreams contained in
the juncture of frame and light’ in Murnau’s cinema (P 142)) as producible
only in artistic forms (fiction, cinema, etc.) and not in politics, science or love.
Badiou’s strategy for claiming art as a condition of truth and the
configurations of artworks as truth-procedures depends not on claiming
From Prohibition to Affirmation 101
I’d like to conclude this piece by appraising both the compatibility of Badiou’s
theories on art with a protocol of creation – as a practical poetics – and to
also question the consequences of these in literary-theoretical contexts. After
all, one can be confident that Badiou, both as a self-professed communist
and as a revivalist of Plato, would not wish to have philosophy retreat to
a purely philosophical space – where it is nothing other than arguments
about philosophers, by philosophers and for philosophers – and, based on
the proliferation of his explicitly accessible, non-specialist publications and
lectures (on current issues such as terrorism, globalization and, indeed, the
arts), it would be reasonable to assume that he wishes for his thought to
directly enter and affect non-philosophic milieus.
This desire is perhaps also evident in Badiou’s recent speaking tours around
the world, to places as remote as, yes, Melbourne, where, in the conference
held to mark his 2014 visit to Australia, I presented a version of this piece and
recited a poem titled ‘Evental’.34 ‘Evental’ is but one of my works of creative
writing directly influenced by Badiou’s thoughts, and I have drawn on his
theories in my other writings. The central character in my 2013 story-cycle
novel Transactions35 is constructed à la Badiou’s discernment of a ‘method
of disobjectivation’ in the works of the poets associated with his proposed
age of poets. I have also heavily drawn on Badiou’s writings in devising
frameworks for analysing others’ literary texts, mostly poetry and fiction
by contemporary Australian writers. Badiou’s theory of inaesthetics and his
From Prohibition to Affirmation 103
It should be noted that, despite being set out as though three distinct
processes, these modalities of woman’s relation to the universal are
imbricated in a (quasi-dialectical) variety of ways. As established in the
field of love, for example, woman’s relation to the universal is pre-eminently
in the modality of sublimation: ‘woman’, like ‘man’, exists as a category of
sexuation only as taken up in the process of love, which, passing through and
beyond desire with its finite economy of the object, aims at the ‘being of the
other’ and is of the order of the infinite. Yet, the emergence of a new subject,
the Two of the lovers, involves at the same time a subtraction from sexual
difference since woman and man now relate to something in common that
attests their belonging to a single humanity – their being (in a non-fusional
sense) ‘the same’. Sublimation equally opens onto the modality of sublation
insofar as woman’s being defined (within the amorous procedure) by the
singular symbolic value she gives to love, qua the guarantee of universality
for humanity, simultaneously marks a sexuation, if not altogether of, at least
in respect of the universal, such that it is then but a matter of taking ‘another
step’ to arrive at the sexuation of thought. Whatever the intricacies of these
imbrications, however, the fact that woman’s adventures with the universal
as played out in Badiou’s work should finally lead to woman’s being ‘linked
for the first time to a philosophical gesture’ hailing the sexuation of symbolic
creation (FF 15–16) remains an astonishing reorientation of a philosophical
enterprise hitherto upholding the neutrality of the universal. In turning now
to Badiou’s period of ‘battle’ and, thus, his key ‘subtractive’ moment, we shall
indeed find the categories of woman and the feminine to have a long way to
go before attaining universal signification.
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 109
That Badiou, up until the end of the ‘90s, discerns nothing of any value or
force in positions seeking to promote “woman” as a category capable of
engendering innovation in the fields of politics, art, science or love, is, of
course, completely consistent with what we already know of the tenet of
truths’ trans-particularity. There seems little need to dwell here, then, on
the conjunctural analyses Badiou adduces for his disqualifying ‘woman’ (or
‘feminism’) from functioning as the subject of a truth process.3 Let us rather
attempt to draw out more comprehensively the logic informing Badiou’s
stipulation that identitarian predicates, such as ‘woman’, are subtracted or
transcended by the operation of a truth that only has any real effectivity to the
extent that a ‘de-particularization’ of those adhering to this truth takes place.
For Badiou, the first to have grasped this trans-individual, de-particularizing
force of universalism is, of course, St Paul, whose proclamation that, in
respect to the event (i.e. the event-Christ), ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek,
neither slave nor free, neither male nor female’4 constitutes, in this regard, a
‘fundamental statement’ (SP 104). For this reason, it is instructive for us, in our
turn, to then briefly examine Paul’s pronouncements on sexual difference: our
aim here being to show up the tension already apparent in the conception of
‘indifference to difference’ that Badiou – before the reorientation of his recent
work – would make synonymous with the neutrality of universalizing truths.
Now, one thing that is certainly not to be understood by Badiou’s equating
‘subtraction from sexed particularity’ with the affirmation of a universal,
trans-particular value is any form of conceptual complicity with the thesis
prevalent in contemporary gender studies of a multiplication of sexes, or
gender indistinction. Attempts to deconstruct the man/woman polarity
and replace it with a panoply of possible sexuate or gendered positions are
strenuously dismissed by Badiou as a form of postmodernist sophistry,
fully consonant with the prevailing Capitalist ideology of a generalized
equivalence of values. In diametrical opposition to any and all such claims
for – as Badiou puts it – ‘a quasi-continuous multiple of gender constructions’
(LW 421), subtraction from identitarian sexuate predicates involves nothing
less than the ‘re-marking’ of dyadic sexual difference from the standpoint of
the very universal value in respect of, and by, which this difference is, strictly
speaking, rendered insignificant.
This re-marking of sexual duality is, of course, most explicitly thematized
by Badiou with respect to love, yet a number of his texts show that subtraction
from sexed particularity equally leads – via its dual, constitutive processes of
negation and affirmative incorporation – to a new determination of woman’s
‘sexuate position’ in the fields of politics, science and art. The Incident at
110 Badiou and His Interlocutors
they are women’ (SP 105) or, otherwise put, in order that the indifferentiation
of (an avowed) sexual difference within the universal confirms the very
status of the universal as such. It is, then, of the utmost significance, from
Badiou’s perspective, that Paul addresses a ‘symmetrical’ prescription to men
exhorting them to leave their head uncovered when they manifest their faith
in public so as not to ‘disavow’ their sexed particularity, such as this is (in part)
defined by the customs of Paul’s time. This symmetry of constraints imposed
upon men and women would, in itself, attest to an essential ‘egalitarianism’ of
the universal according to Badiou, who thereby dismisses feminist criticisms
of Paul’s precepts in respect of women as fundamentally skewed. There is,
Badiou stipulates, no disputing the massive sexual inequality of Paul’s epoch
or even Paul’s adhesion to the hierarchical vision of the world then prevalent,
in terms of which Christ rules over man and man rules over woman. Yet,
with respect to his time, Paul proves to be progressive as concerns the status
of women insofar as he conveys the universalizing equality of truth by setting
down constraints that apply symmetrically to men and women alike in lieu
of unilateral ones in respect of women alone (SP 105).
What are we to make, then, of the fact that, contrary to Badiou’s claims,
Paul’s prescriptions on sex and headdress arguably actually constitute a
highly problematic exemplar of universalizing egalitarianism? Indeed,
Paul’s precision – nowhere mentioned by Badiou – that the veil is a sign of
woman’s subservience not only to God but also to man (stipulated to be ‘the
image of God’)7 makes it clear that, underpinning the so-called symmetry
of constraints, there is precisely his hierarchical vision of the world: a
vision Badiou acknowledges Paul to hold but without relating this to the
prescriptions in question. While certainly contingent on the customs or
general opinion of Paul’s time, this hierarchical worldview no less informs
the very ‘truth of the declaration’ insofar as fidelity to the event-Christ also
entails acknowledging Christ to be ‘the head of man’… and, therefore, ‘man
the head of woman’.8 Men and women are, as a result, treated equally by the
law only in the formal sense that both are submitted to constraints, while the
law itself proves to be substantively unequal since it makes man the unmarked
term (wholly in ‘the image of God’) in relation to which woman is marked
(both ‘naturally’ and ‘artificially’) as subservient – which is, of course, also
to say, other or different. That this ‘difference’ bears no significance for one’s
capacity to participate in the process of truth – truth being indifferent to
differences – in no way entails its not being (re-)marked within, and indeed
by, the process as such.
Amounting, all in all, to claiming the inequality – or non-neutrality – of
not only a law supposedly supporting the universal but the very content of a
universalizing truth process itself, this objection to Paul’s precepts obviously
112 Badiou and His Interlocutors
runs contrary to all the claims Badiou makes for the latter in his 1997 book.
This renders it all the more remarkable, then, that, as shown by Badiou’s
2011 paper referred to above, his thinking on the universal has taken a ‘turn’
whereby the non-neutrality of symbolic thought is no longer denounced as
an error entertained by feminists and other postmodernist protagonists of a
contemporary sophism but affirmed as having characterized the history of
‘humanity’ up until today. Turning now to women’s adventures with and/or
in the universal as these are played out in the modality of sublimation, we
shall see that the generic function borne by the feminine in the field of love is
undoubtedly a – and, indeed perhaps, the – crucial key to Badiou’s reorientation
in respect of ‘woman’ and the possibility of sexed truths/universals.
The field of love is precisely singled out in Badiou’s texts of the 1980s and
1990s as the specific, and sole, field in which ‘woman’ (like ‘man’) holds as
a category relative to the universal. Love alone, in other words, furnishes
a universal ground on which sexual difference can be thought. The reason
forms of knowledge such as biology and sociology prove incapable, for their
part, of providing a criterion by which ‘woman’ and ‘man’ can be distributed
universally is that they fail, in the same way as do claims for particularity, to
cross through the configuration of ‘what is given’ – the infinite diversity or
simple facticity of the human animal – to attain the truth of that presented in
an existing situation. Since everything of the order of ‘the sexual’ or sexuality
is, for Badiou, precisely a simple given – or, put more technically, of the order
of being9 – nothing on the level of sexed being itself has, then, any pertinence
for the demarcation of the categories of sexual difference. Not only are bodies
themselves sexually ‘insignificant’, as it were – subsisting solely within the
‘brute opposition’ of animal sexuality – until they are taken up within an
amorous encounter (WL/C 183),10 but it is, as such, a purely nominalist
gesture on Badiou’s behalf to designate the resulting sexuate positions ‘man’
and ‘woman’: as generic positions immanent to love and defined strictly
internally within the amorous process, they could, Badiou states, ‘just as well
be called something else’ (PE 63).
The new subject that emerges within the amorous process – the Two of
the lovers or, as Badiou sometimes puts it, the Two of the sexes – involves, as
already indicated, a subtraction from sexual difference since the individuals
involved are no longer enfolded within the confines of their singular, narcissistic
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 113
experience of the world but now share a common, if unanalysable, term – the
indefinable element at the basis of their love – that, by manifesting the non-
substantial, or non-ontological, nature of the positions’ disjunction, establishes
them as belonging to a single humanity. This in no way abolishes, however,
the disjunction of the sexuate positions since sexual difference is re-marked in
terms of the new (amorous) configuration in which it now operates. Thus, while
love is the scene in which the truth of the disjunction of sexuate positions is
produced, what each of the positions knows about love or the other sex remains
distinct from the knowledge of the other.
What criteria serve, then, to define sexual difference as this is attested to
within the process of love? As set out in the series of axiomatic definitions
Badiou furnishes in his 1992 text ‘What Is Love?’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are
distinguished in terms of how they function in love, the knowledge they hold
in respect of love, and their relation to humanity, understood as ‘that which
provides support’ for the four truth procedures but which, qua ‘the historical
[historial] body of truths’ (WL/C 184), might also be called ‘the Symbolic’.
Hence, first: woman is concerned with ensuring that love is ongoing and re-
affirmed; man considers that, once named, love no longer needs to be proved.
Second: woman professes the Two to endure throughout life’s vicissitudes,
such that what she knows of love is ontological in scope, focused on the
existence of the Two, or being as such; man focuses, to the contrary, on the
split within the Two that re-marks the void of the disjunction, such that his
is an essentially logical knowledge, concerned with the numerical change
between One and Two. Third and most decisively: woman requires love to
exist for the symbolic configuration of truth procedures to hold and to have
value, whereas man views each type of truth procedure to be in itself a gauge
of humanity, such that each is a metaphor for the others (WL/C 192–197).
That these axiomatic definitions fundamentally concur with the most
common of clichés concerning the difference between the sexes – man
ostensibly does nothing for and in the name of love, woman is the being-
for-love; man is silent and violent, woman is garrulous and makes demands;
‘man is always viewed by the woman as [… ] in the process of leaving’ (WL/C
193, 195 & PE 62) – is fully acknowledged by Badiou. Such clichés compose
the ‘empirical material’ love has to work through in order to establish the
truth of the sexual disjunction, he states, specifying that, in this respect,
the ‘staging of sexual roles’ within a dyadic gender system has the merit of
revealing the disjunction to be a ‘law’ of the situation. Not that gender is
an expression of the disjunction per se; it is but an ‘obscure mediation’ or
‘mediating display’ (WL/C 186). Far better, though, such a mediation than a
sexual indifferentiation that, by obnubilating the disjunction, allows this to
operate all the more forcefully, with individuals simply abandoned thereby
114 Badiou and His Interlocutors
to a solipsistic and, all in all, purely animal sexual regime. Gender roles’
rendering sexual disjunction visible aids love to show, in this sense then, not
only that this disjunction is a law of the situation but, more crucially yet, that
it is nothing more than this – namely, not a substantial division in being itself.
At this point of Badiou’s argumentation, one might, however, query the
operation of a certain circularity. His axiomatic definitions of sexuation
ultimately seem to concur with gender stereotypes because the latter would
themselves, in his view, concur (however ‘obscurely’) with the ‘truth’ of sexual
difference revealed by amorous relationships throughout history – especially
as portrayed in literature (PE 62). This being the case, it would appear that
the ‘real’ of sexual difference resides, in the final analysis, in (axiomatically
consecrated) socio-historically determined, subjective positions alone. What,
then, of the universality Badiou claims for the truths revealed by love: would
this prove simply synonymous with a consistent determination, within the
Western tradition, of the form taken by sexed relations in different socio-
historical configurations? And if so – regardless of whether such a consistent
determination even exists in the West, much less in different cultural
spheres,11 – doesn’t such a claim for love’s production of a universal truth
pertaining to the sexes then squarely come up against the objection (such as
would follow from a perspective such as Luce Irigaray’s12) that all identifiable
‘stagings of sexual roles’ in the history of the West reflect the ‘imaginary’ of
one sexuate position alone: the masculine? Or, put another way, wouldn’t
the truth of sexual difference produced by working through the empirical
material comprised of gender stereotypes turn out to be, qua an assertion
emanating from the sole point of view of man, a ‘truth’ still firmly held within
the sexual disjunction?
With these interrogations in mind, it is all the more appropriate to turn
at this juncture to Badiou’s ‘explication’ with Lacanian psychoanalysis since
not only does this constitute the very core of his axiomatics relative to love
and the sexual disjunction but he disqualifies the ‘truth claims’ advanced by
Lacan in respect to sexuation on precisely the same grounds as those just
put forward: namely, that these claims proceed from one sexuate position
alone and therefore fall short of their pretention to universality. Badiou’s
objections to Lacan crucially hinge furthermore on the question of feminine
jouissance, with this proving, in fact, decisive for his argument that sexual
difference – or, as he more usually puts it, the sexual disjunction – exists
solely in the field of love.
There is, effectively, only one tenet of Lacan’s teaching on sexual difference
with which Badiou wholly agrees: ‘there is no sexual relation’. This holds,
for Badiou, even in the field of love since what love founds ‘is the Two and
not a relationship between the Ones in a Two’ (WL/C 191). For Lacan’s
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 115
must be literally dumb or speechless, such that either some part of woman
comprises (despite all) an angelic negation of castration or women, in the
infinite element of their enjoyment, must silently make an axiomatic decision
that something of this enjoyment is inaccessible to the phallic order (SI/C
216–217; 221).
Whatever the twists and turns of Badiou’s argumentation here, however,
the crux of his refutation of an infinite feminine jouissance ultimately consists
in declaring the latter a ‘fiction’ or ‘fantasy’ that attests to a fundamental
misconception of the sexual disjunction. Lacan’s formulae of sexuation are
indeed flawed from the start, in this sense, for Badiou since, defining the
phallic function as having strict universality for the masculine position
alone, they determine sexual difference from within the disjunction itself,
with the phallic function being unsuitable, as such, as a support for the
universal. Indeed, the very supposition of an infinite, inaccessible, feminine
jouissance could only emanate from the masculine position according to
Badiou, for whom Lacan’s formulae thereby uphold ‘the segregative thesis
of sexual difference’ (ST 47). If the disjunction of the sexes is presumed
such that there is no element whatsoever in common to the two, and each
sex accordingly knows nothing of the space occupied by the other, then
it follows, Badiou states, that the masculine position is fantasmatically
predisposed to imagining a mysterious and potentially infinite dilation of
the feminine. While this obviously begs the question of what mechanisms
might, then, underlie (at least some) women’s own claims of a ‘pantheistic,
infinite enjoyment’ – a question Badiou never raises, unless the reference
to women’s silently making an axiomatic decision of this type is to be taken
seriously –, ‘woman’s infinitude’ is in the final analysis for Badiou both the
necessary correlate of any stance maintaining a complete segregation of the
sexes and proof per se that such a stance errs in its conception of the sexual
disjunction (ST 48–50). For, all while agreeing with Lacan that there is no
relation between the sexes, Badiou sets down that there has, nonetheless, to
be at least one term with which both sexuate positions entertain a relation.
This is, of course, the indefinable, unanalysable element brought into play by
love, which establishes man and woman as belonging to a single humanity.
Now, it is critical for the comprehension of Badiou’s axiomatics of love and
sexual difference to grasp that the element operative in love – and thereby in
the ‘humanity function’ replacing Lacan’s phallic function as core criterion
of the sexes’ distribution – consists in a sublimatory transmutation of the
object a. Transposed within a ‘different topology’ by virtue of the amorous
encounter (ST 54), the object a now serves as the point of intersection on
the basis of which the sexes compose an immanent figure of the Two and
is, as such, renamed by Badiou ‘the atom u’ by way of marking (in part)
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 117
the ‘universality’ to which it attests (ST 48). Badiou specifies the ‘atom u’
to animate the non-sexual component of the love relationship, even though
u’s ‘causality’ here must be understood to operate through its ‘internal
excision’ from the two sexuate positions. It is, as such, as ‘an absent centre’,
or sublimatory subsumption of a, that u governs the ‘external expansion’
of the Two of the lovers in their shared investigation of the world from
the perspective no longer of One but of Two. This new experience of truth
concerning what it is to be Two and not One, or, in other words, concerning
the nature of the disjunction or of difference as such, is, then, what properly
defines love, for Badiou, as not only a truth process of universalizing scope
but, beyond this, the ‘very guardian of the universality of the true’. Love quite
simply ‘elucidates the possibility of universality’ (WL/C 190).
Yet, here again, a certain tension or highly condensed point of
problematicity becomes apparent in Badiou’s conceptual apparatus. For
while ‘love’s truth’, for Badiou, is that sexual difference is not a duality or
plurality of situations grounded in a separation in being but simply a law
of one shared situation such that a common humanity is shared by the two
sexes, the fact that the latter nonetheless relate to this ‘common symbolic’
in markedly distinct ways calls into question love’s very capacity to furnish
a universal ground on which sexual difference can be thought. It is crucial
to recall here Badiou’s core axiomatic definition of the sexes’ disjunction in
respect of the humanity function: namely, man views the symbolic sphere as
a composite of the different truth procedures, such that each type of truth can
stand for all the others, whereas woman privileges love as the truth procedure
that would knot all the others together and without which the symbolic
sphere, or humanity, as a whole simply does not exist. Defining ‘woman’
thereby as the position that upholds love as the guarantee of a universality to
humanity – as what ensures that this is indeed shared –, Badiou’s axiomatics
of love end up assigning the universal quantifier to the feminine position
and not, pace Lacan’s sexual formulae premised upon the ‘universality’ of
the phallic function, to man (WL/C 198). Would, though – to recall here
the interrogations of ‘non-universality’ raised above – Badiou’s ‘returning the
universal quantifier to women’ not thereby commit the same error he detects
in Lacan: namely, that of treating the problem of sexual difference from
within the sexual disjunction itself? Of course, Badiou’s whole argument
rests on the claim that, whereas the phallic function – despite its applying
to both sexes – is uni-positional by virtue of its having strict universality in
respect of the masculine position alone, the humanity function introduced
by love is, to the contrary, of trans-positional scope and relative to men and
women equally. Yet the fact remains that it is indeed within the terms of sexual
difference as defined on the ground furnished by love that woman is marked
118 Badiou and His Interlocutors
I’ve outlined here in respect of Badiou’s positions in the 1980s and 1990s on
woman as particularity and the process of political truths or other symbolic
initiatives shows that, during this period, truths always involve for Badiou
subtraction from a particular standpoint. This position is maintained,
moreover, in most of his work published in the early 2000s, be these major
texts such as Logics of Worlds, or more circumstantial writings such as the
‘Manifesto of Affirmationism’, which sets down that art, as the impersonal
production of a truth addressed to all, ‘cannot be the expression of mere
particularity’17 – a maxim that obviously rules out any such entity as ‘women’s
art’. That said, there are sporadic indications from the very end of the 1990s
on that Badiou was open to rethinking the question of truths’ sexuation
and, hence, more largely, the ‘immanence of truths’ insofar as that which is
ultimately involved here is a truth’s relation to its originating site – which is,
of necessity, a particularity.18
In 1999, in a short text entitled ‘Of Woman as a Category of Being’ – serving
as the preface for a book originally written as a thesis under his supervision –,
Badiou notes his ‘having had to be convinced’ that woman can be a concept
before setting down quasi-programmatically that, were one indeed committed
to the ontological enterprise of thinking sexuated being, then this entails taking
‘another step in the universal’.19 That said, it is not until 2008 that Badiou takes
a more decisive stance on the sexuation of truths when, in a discussion of
The Incident at Antioch, he specifies his reasons for making the play’s main
protagonist a woman.20 Interestingly, in the preface to his book on St Paul in
1997, Badiou had explained this ‘feminization’ of the play’s central figure as
simply a means of preventing too explicit an identification. Eleven years later,
however, he sets out a very different motivation for the change of sex. The
gesture of going from Paul to Paula, he now states, signifies that the ‘old vision’
of sexual difference, casting religious or political theory and political action
in masculine terms, is a thing of the past. The question posed today is that of
a new relationship between sexual difference and the political field whereby
women take on a ‘new importance’ insofar as a political subject/subjectivity
no longer organized around power would reflect a feminine perspective on
political thought and action. Of this new relationship, this new importance
of women for the political field, he can, Badiou adds, offer no real proof; it is
rather of the order of an intuition, though one obviously related to the ‘great
feminine movements of the past century’.21
While Badiou claims to have had the intuition of a new relationship
between sexual difference and politics at the time of writing The Incident at
Antioch, it seems clear – for all the reasons just enumerated regarding his work
in the 1980s and 1990s – that such an ‘intuition’ is something new for Badiou
himself: something, that is, he only formulates in 2008 and retrospectively
120 Badiou and His Interlocutors
applies to the play written some twenty-six years earlier. Nothing in the
play, in fact, explicitly signals that the new form of emancipatory politics
advocated by Paula would be intrinsically indexed to a singularly new figure
of the feminine – or, put another way, that it is, indeed, as a figure of the ‘new
woman’ that Paula bears this innovatory form of politics. Rather, the whole
point of the play’s dramatizing ‘the relation between departicularization and
universalization’ is – as indicated earlier – that a woman’s being a subjective
body of truth proffers exemplary proof of universality’s power to cut through
differences, such that Paul’s becoming Paula constitutes, all in all, a dramatic
enactment of Paul’s foundational tenet of truths’ indifference to difference.
That said, Badiou’s intuition or insight concerning the sexuation of symbolic
thought might be said to be found in the play in embryo – as is perhaps clearest
in the ‘second great ideological scene’ in which Paula tries to convince her
son, the then head of the revolutionary party previously co-led by his father,
to give up power and allow the desire for emancipation to be reinstated in
a totally different perspective (IA Act III, Scene 4). As set out in this scene,
Paula’s advocacy of a new form of emancipatory politics could indeed be
understood to follow from her position as a woman: as though the figure
of the mother would emblematically herald a path beyond the discourse of
(paternal) power and the law.
Particularly illuminating in this respect are the three short texts Badiou
published in the 1990s on the fifteenth-century resistance fighter, Joan of
Arc, and two mathematicians working respectively in the early nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, Sophie Germain (whom we have already
mentioned) and Emmy Noether. As seen, the triumph of Germain’s work
on the problem of elastic surfaces – which equally counts as a triumph over
her epoch’s massive sexual inequality – is proffered as proof, by Badiou, of
truths’ indifference to difference: viz. ‘“Woman” names here the dazzling
universality of mathematics.’ In the terms of Badiou’s analyses, Noether and
Joan of Arc perfectly illustrate this exemplarity of ‘woman’, qua paradigmatic
expression of universality’s neutrality, no less than does Germain. Noether’s
accomplishing, despite all the barriers erected by the university of her time,
the ‘Platonic enterprise’ of transforming into more abstract, ideal conditions
and generalities the object-based methods of her predecessors – foremost
amongst whom her father, a specialist of algebraic geometry – is accordingly
situated by Badiou as ‘a significant allegory, almost a chiasm of the sexes,
and, thus, a lesson contra any rigid view of the paths of universality’.22 As
for Joan of Arc, it is precisely the choice ‘not to be reduced to the predicates
of submission her time imposed upon her’ that makes of her, in Badiou’s
terms, a ‘truth of her time’ and, as such, a ‘truth for ever’.23 All three of these
exemplary women are, in this sense, ‘subtractively bound’ to their epoch:24
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 121
the truths that they themselves are, are at once totally immanent to this
epoch and yet subtracted.25 That they should thereby wrest themselves from
the predicates of ‘woman’ imposed upon them and accede to the status of
a subject of symbolic truth ultimately constitutes, for Badiou, not simply a
‘proof ’ but a ‘supplementary proof ’ of the fact that, ‘in the form of such a
subject, humanity encounters itself ’.26
Yet, notwithstanding this glowing, threefold attestation to universality’s
neutrality adduced by Badiou, his analyses of these women’s ‘subtractive
binding’ (nouage substractif) to their time implicitly plead for a very different
understanding of the universal and woman’s relation to it – which, if contrary
to Badiou’s intentions in the 1990s, nonetheless accords with his later
reorientation in respect of sexuation. After all, what he shows, succinctly
put, is that in the case of this trio of exceptional women ‘subtraction
from particularity’ consists in the refusal to be reduced to the ‘predicates
of submission’ a patriarchal social formation would impose upon them.
The victory represented by Noether’s, Germain’s and Joan of Arc’s creative
initiatives is not, in this sense then, first and foremost one of ‘humanity’,
but – qua the very condition underlying this latter – a victory over man’s
monopolization of symbolic processes. Badiou’s analyses here would, as a
result, seem – from the perspective of his philosophical trajectory overall –
to be in the process of assembling, as it were, the elements from which (in
part) will eventually arise the insight he was not to explicitly formulate until
2011: namely, that the organization of symbolic thought has itself historically
depended on the Name of the Father (FF 10).
as this One precisely is not – that governs the formula of feminine sexuation,
Badiou contends, rather than, as Lacan would have it, the negative relation
to the Whole or the not-All (FF 11). Badiou expressly sets out to show, in
this regard moreover, that ‘a formalism dialecticizing the One and the Two
suffices for thinking sexuation’. Whence his specifying the ‘logic of the Two
or passing-between-two’ that defines femininity to consist in ‘the affirmation
of the non-being of the One’ or the ‘process of non-being constitutive of the
whole being of the One’: woman would, in other words, set up alongside
whatever claims to be (of the) One another – a second – term by which the
first is precisely disunified. This dialecticized axiomatics of sexuation then
culminates in Badiou’s ‘speculative’ definition: ‘Woman is the going-beyond
of the One in the form of a passing-between-two’ (FF 12).
‘Woman’ so defined can indeed foster confidence in the becoming of
symbolic truths – which is to say, the universal. For, transposed to the context
of contemporary capitalism – characterized by Badiou as seeking to ‘unify’
woman in the figure of a new One erected on the ruins of the Name of the
Father – this formula of femininity assures that women will pass between
both traditional and contemporary representations of femininity and (in
conformity with their very nature, so to speak) circumvent or undo the
revamped figure of the One proposed to them by ‘passing beyond’ to the
invention of new forms of symbolic creation (FF 16). All that granted, were
the question of women’s creation of truths set aside for the moment, there is
a further aspect of Badiou’s definitions of femininity here that is of no less
consequence for his conception of a ‘sexuated universal’. It is, in fact, striking
that the ‘numericity’ these definitions mobilize remains strictly homologous
with the formalism proposed two decades earlier in ‘What Is Love?’, where
a dialectized relation of the One and Two yields the formula not only of
sexuation – as regards both ‘the Two of the sexes’ (stipulated, of course, to
exist solely within the field of love) and the axiomatic definitions of man and
woman that then ensue – but of love ‘itself ’, qua an evental procedure defined
by the ‘effraction of the One by the Two’. Badiou’s ‘thinking of sexuation’ in
2011 is, in short, still under, or at least ‘compatible with’, the condition of love.
This being the case, we thus find ourselves directly confronted with the
very question from which this ‘cartography’ of woman’s adventures with/in
the universal over the course of Badiou’s work first set out. For, what indeed
are we to make of the fact that, despite their continued compliance with the
condition of love, Badiou’s 2011 formulae of feminine sexuation support an
inevitable sexuation of truths, whereas twenty years earlier the truth love
produces is precisely that the sexual disjunction has no bearing for the ‘one’
of humanity or the universal, such that not only love’s truth but all truths
are trans-positional… failing which, one might say, they are no truths at
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 123
the contrary, from difference or diversity to the same (PE 41). Yet, as set out
earlier in our analyses of the two sexes’ differential relation to the humanity
function, this internal difference proves problematic to the extent that the
latter function is itself thereby shown to fall short of the trans-positionality –
and, hence, universality – Badiou claims for it since it is always/already
situated within the sexual disjunction, which is to say, constitutively ‘split’
along the axis of sexuation. Badiou himself, moreover, crucially identifies a
problem of this order – the ‘disruption of a truth’s unity’ – as being found ‘at
the core’ of his theorization of love when stipulating, in Philosophy and the
Event, the points of his philosophy he is to focus on in The Immanence of
Truths (PE 118). Given it is impossible to admit that a ‘duality internal’ to the
experience of incorporation disrupts the unity of the subject, it is necessary,
he states, to account for ‘how individual difference function[s] within the
protocol of truth’ without this difference – or indeed, in the case of love,
‘complete separation’ – calling into question universal applicability (PE 117–
118). The third volume of Being and Event is to entail, as a result, a formal
transformation of the category of negation, by the means of which the co-
existence of differences or contradictory perceptions is without consequence
for the unity of the truth in question. Whether the new formalism involved –
the logic of paraconsistent negation – will, in fact, resolve the ‘meta-paradox’
of love’s truth being disrupted by a disjunction claimed to be constitutive,
qua generic multiplicity, of its very core remains, of course, to be seen. What
can be set down here and now, however, is that Badiou’s new focus on the
question of difference – as implicated in all truth procedures, and not solely
love – undoubtedly stems from the problem presented by the Two of the
lovers: that unique subject or un-multiple, which, though specified to be
the ‘smallest possible’ universal singularity, not only displays a disruption of
unity but does so on the very point of the sexes’ supposed ‘intersection’ – viz.
the humanity function, or element u.
It is instructive in this light that the modifications Badiou has made to his
formulations of love over the last two decades effectively testify both to his
rethinking the protocol of this truth through the prism of difference and to
his re-evaluation of the latter concept per se – ‘difference’ being, it must be
recalled, hitherto consistently qualified by Badiou as without any significance
whatsoever for thought. Indeed, in conformity with this assignation to
insignificance, difference is a concept – or, rather, word – that is quasi absent
from ‘What Is Love?’, ‘The Scene of the Two’ and Manifesto for Philosophy,
Badiou’s early texts on love, where the very locution ‘sexual difference’ finds
itself replaced by that of ‘sexual disjunction’. The subsequent shift in Badiou’s
thinking can be indicated by a simple comparison of the ways in which he
defines the Two of the lovers from ‘What Is Love?’ to In Praise of Love,30
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 125
his relatively recent book-length study of the question: In 1992, the Two
of the lovers ‘is specifically the name of the disjunct as apprehended in its
disjunction’ (WL/C 189); Six years later, in ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’,31
this same definition, so to speak, is reformulated as ‘the undivided subjective
experience of absolute difference’ – the amorous scene being ‘the only scene
in which a universal singularity [… ] ultimately pertaining to difference as
such [… ] is proclaimed’ (ET/TW146); In 2009, In Praise of Love stipulates
again that ‘difference as such’ (IP 38) is the content, or experience, of the
truth attested to by the Two of the lovers: ‘All love produces [… ] a new truth
about difference’ (IP 38–39).
Badiou’s conceptualization of love must be understood to shift away, as
such, from an initial emphasis on the unicity proper to the situation whatever
the workings of the disjunction – ‘as if there is a One, and… through this One-
multiple… all truth is assured’ –, to increasingly focus on the co-existence
of differences as that which renders this protocol of truth an ‘experience
of potential universality’ (IP 17). Certainly, this does not mitigate in any
profound sense the primacy his thought of the universal attributes to unicity.
Badiou’s intentions are, as seen, clear: to set out how difference functions
within the protocol of truth without this disrupting truths’ unity, which is
to say, the unicity of universality. Yet the shift in emphasis, or perspective, is
significant: it tallies, in fact, with that, presaged for The Immanence of Truths,
from ‘asking about truths in relation to being’ to asking about ‘being from the
point of view of truths’ (PE 107). What it attests to above all, however, is the
crucially constitutive convergence between Badiou’s rethinking love through
the prism of difference and the reorientation of his thought on the point of
truths’ sexuation. The universal can no longer be indifferent to difference
since, with love’s introduction of sexual disjunction/difference into its very
core, it is, itself, no longer in-different at all.32
9
in the very real of semblance, which is to say, in the reality of artifice; in its
‘thinking appearance as appearance, and thus as that aspect of being which,
by coming to appear, gives itself to thought as a disappointment of seeing’.12
Plainly put, that there can be no transitivity between the thing itself and its
filmic (re)appearance means that cinema truly is a superficial art. We need
not understand this assertion as being pejorative. Rather, it simply means
that cinema is an art of surfaces, not essences. Indeed, this is, in the final
analysis, the very core of the paradoxical relation by which cinema figures as
an onto-logical art: the art that so effectively displays the infinite wealth of
being is precisely the art whose real is nothing but the desert of semblance.
Intraphilosophical effects
We can already see that cinema holds a unique ‘borderline’ position amongst
the arts. Simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘false’, ‘vital’ and ‘parasitic’, cinema is
undoubtedly a most paradoxical art. But what exactly does cinema mean
to art itself? And what, moreover, does art mean for philosophy? Central
to Badiou’s writings on art is his contention that art is not an object for
philosophy, but rather one of its fundamental conditions. Needless to say,
proclaiming art’s ‘conditional’ status is in no way to suggest that art serves, or
is somehow subordinate to, philosophy. To the contrary, art is most assuredly
its own master. In fact, the relationship is, if anything, the other way around,
for while philosophy has a definite need for art, art can happily make do
without philosophy.
This one-sided relationship is moreover one of the principal reasons
behind Badiou’s rejection of traditional aesthetics – which he holds has little
to add outside of establishing various rules and hierarchies of ‘liking’ – in
favour of an approach to art which limits its interest to the manner by which
art effectively thinks for itself, and thus might come to affect philosophy.
Briefly, he calls this approach to art ‘inaesthetics’, and defines it as ‘a relation
of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths,
makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic
speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects
produced by the independent existence of some works of art’ (HB xiv).
Of this definition, we will suffice ourselves for the moment by saying that,
as a philosopher, one of Badiou’s foremost concerns is to examine art – or
rather particular arts; some arts (most notably poetry) – as constitutive of
what he calls universal truths, and, as such, as having something essential to
offer philosophy. And indeed, we have already noted that art constitutes one
of the four generic conditions of his philosophy (alongside politics, science
132 Badiou and His Interlocutors
and love), and that philosophy, as Badiou defines it, operates only inasmuch
as it seizes these independent truths and places them in an immanent relation
to one another.
In point of fact, philosophy according to Badiou is itself fundamentally
truthless, being rather the unique discipline tasked with thinking the
compossibility of the various (artistic, political, amorous and scientific) truths
that litter the world (and that are themselves ultimately forms of thought). Or
again, Badiou tells us that there are truths which exist out there, prior to and
wholly independent of philosophy, and that the latter’s job is precisely that
of grasping these diverse truths and ‘re-thinking’ (or re-articulating) them
in such a way that they can be brought together to cohere in a single system,
which is finally what he calls ‘a philosophy’ (HB 14). Thus, the relationship
between art and philosophy (or indeed between philosophy and any of its
conditions) is for Badiou not an ‘instructive’ but rather a ‘thoughtful’ one,
where philosophy is charged with re-thinking the thought that art first thinks.
To come full circle, it is of course philosophy’s structurally ‘secondary’
nature – its forever coming after truths – that leads Badiou to write off
aesthetics in favour of ‘inaesthetics’, which, as we have already seen, restricts
itself to ‘the intraphilosophical effects produced by the existence of some
works of art’ (HB xiv). In a word, it is truths that prescribe philosophy, and
philosophy doesn’t condescend to its conditions. Returning then to Badiou’s
definition of inaesthetics, it is important to highlight how this term designates
moreover the philosophical recapitulation of a relation between art and truth
that is at once singular and immanent. This relationship is absolutely crucial
for Badiou – as it is for our argument here – and as such it is worth pausing
to consider in some detail.
First, the relationship between art and truth is ‘singular’ inasmuch as
Badiou holds that every artistic truth is peculiar to the art in question. This is
in part a consequence of, on the one hand, his adamant belief that the arts
constitute fundamentally closed systems (no painting is ever going to turn
into music, no poem is ever going to become dance, and so on), and, on
the other, the fact that every truth, while universal in address, is always the
truth of a particular situation, and in art this situation is generally (though
not necessarily) the situation of a particular art. Or as Badiou puts it, every
artistic truth is ‘in a rigorous immanence to the art in question’ (HB 13): it is
always a truth of this art, in this situation (and not another).
Parenthetically, it is at this point that some people may be tempted to write
Badiou off as just another ‘high modernist’. To be sure, every so often it can
appear as though he is recycling a (supposedly discredited) line of thought
generally associated with the modernist project; namely, the idea that it is the
exclusive commitment of each art to its proper medium that will finally allow
An Inessential Art? 133
it to lay bare its ‘pure form’ (or, as Badiou would have it, its ‘generic truth’).
Now, while Badiou may well at times be arguing something not entirely
dissimilar to this, we would be far off the mark were we to reduce his thought
to this kind of Greenbergian ‘autotomizing’ framework. Indeed, while it is
clear that each art is for Badiou entirely differentiated from the other arts
(possessing its own form, its own possibilities, particular content and modes
of expression, and so on), it is important to remember that an artistic truth is
always the truth of a particular (artistic) situation, and a ‘situation’, so far as
Badiou conceives it, is an incredibly plastic concept, inasmuch as it basically
means any grouping whatsoever. So, for example, while Badiou praises
someone like Malevich or Picasso for giving us ‘the generic truth of painting’s
singular situation’,13 he can equally celebrate someone like Duchamp, whose
work – most notably his infamous ‘readymades’ – arguably explodes the
very idea of medium-specificity and exposes something vital in the artistic
situation at large.
There is however another important ‘thread’ to the inaesthetic knot tying
together art, truth and philosophy; namely, the thread of immanence. For
Badiou holds that the relationship between these terms – art, truth and
philosophy – is not only singular but also immanent, insofar as every artistic
work must be wholly present to the truth it fabricates. This is a slightly more
delicate point, and results from Badiou’s materialist conception of truths, the
general idea being that an artistic truth (or any truth for that matter) – despite
its infinite nature – isn’t simply the truth of a situation, but is moreover itself
situated. That is to say, it takes place in a world.
To summarize brutally: Badiou holds that an artistic truth is always embodied
in an identifiable ‘artistic configuration’, the origins of which lie in a vanished
event – which suddenly (and inexplicably) gives form to what was previously
formless – and whose entire body is composed of the manifold artworks that
belong to this configuration. Meaning that each individual artwork serves as
the very fabric from which its truth is gradually woven. Needless to say, this
‘weaving’ can, in principle, go on forever (one can always create another work x
exploring the consequences of artistic event y…). Hence, the infinity of a truth
is in no way confined to a single finite work, but rather comprises an (for all
intents and purposes) infinite – or indeed, ‘eternal’ – sequence of works.
As such, the entire ‘being’ of an artistic truth is located within its works,
works which are, for complex reasons, outside of artistic ‘knowledge’ (or
outside of ‘the state of art’), and as such can proceed solely by chance (this
radical subtraction from knowledge being, incidentally, precisely why they
constitute a mode of thought). Thus, each individual work figures something
like an investigation or an ‘enquiry’ into the truth that it actualizes, piece by
painstaking piece.
134 Badiou and His Interlocutors
declares, is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, operating not with but rather on the
other arts, ‘using them as its starting point, in a movement that subtracts
them from themselves’ (HB 79 emphasis added).
Needless to say, seeing cinema as an inherently ‘impure’ art form is not in
itself anything especially new. To the contrary, this is a thesis that has been
bandied about in various ways throughout the short history of cinema, most
notably in the pioneering works of Ricciotto Canudo (who immediately
recognized that cinema would ‘increasingly serve as Art’s powerful
coadjutor’)14 and André Bazin (whose celebrated What Is Cinema? volumes
spend a considerable amount of his time defending cinema’s impure status).
What Badiou brings to the mix is the way in which he re-situates these well-
established arguments in relation to his own concepts of art and truth and, of
course, philosophy (whose relationship is, as we have seen, at once singular
and immanent).
So, taking cinema’s impurity into account, Badiou’s fundamental contention
regarding film as an art form – and therefore not simply as a medium, but
as a form of art (and thus an agent of truth) – is that whenever an Idea visits
us cinematically – whenever we encounter an effective ‘cinema-Idea’ – it is
always brought forth by way of a kind-of intrafilmic ‘complication’ with the
other arts. So, for example, an ostensibly original cinematic Idea might be
indebted to a certain musical evocation, or an actor’s peculiar theatricality,
a balletic movement or a poetic phrase and so on. As Badiou puts it, what
cinema in effect does is ‘take from the other arts all that is popular, all that
could – once isolated, filtered, separated from their aristocratic requirements –
destine them to the masses’.15
As such, cinema at once ‘democratizes’ the other arts – ‘popularizing’
them by ‘[weakening] their aristocratic, complex and composite quality’16 –
while simultaneously figuring as ‘painting without painting, music without
music, novel without subjects, theatre reduced to the charm of actors’ and
so forth.17 The point being that in Badiou’s model of cinema each and every
‘authentic cinema Idea’ is first taken – stolen – from the other arts. Badiou
is absolutely adamant about this: as he puts it in Handbook of Inaesthetics,
‘whenever a film really does organise the visitation of an Idea… it is always
in a subtractive (or defective) relation to one or several among the other arts’
(HB 86). Or again, cinema’s inessential nature means that its own Ideas – its
truths – must in fact always be first drawn from elsewhere, meaning even a
truly original cinematic release is, in some sense, always-already a re-run.
The paradox however is that this seemingly disreputable impurity is
finally what Badiou holds to be the great power of cinema, inasmuch as its
truly artistic role is ultimately that of ‘impurifying’ Ideas which have first
been given in the other arts, so as to create from this impurity altogether new
136 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Ideas (and thereby, quite literally, ‘bring to light’ new facets of old Ideas). As
Badiou himself puts it, cinema’s ‘force as a contemporary art lies precisely
in turning – for the duration of a passage – the impurity of an idea into an
idea in its own right’ (HB 83). In contradistinction to the other arts, cinema
then figures as the ‘great impurifier’ (HB 88 trans modified), procuring and
amplifying Ideas which do not in truth belong to it.
the infinite’ (CMA 227). To this effect Badiou concludes that ‘cinema’s artistic
operations are incompletable purification operations, bearing on current
non-artistic forms or indistinct imagery’ (IT 111).
Now, while it might seem that cinema’s necessary non-artistry forecloses
from the start any possibility of its attaining true (or ‘pure’) artistic status,
again, the paradox is that, according to Badiou, it is precisely in maintaining
a degree of non-artistic content that cinema is guaranteed a certain
artistic capacity. For as Badiou sees it, an absolute purification of cinema’s
non-artistic content would actually work to suppress its artistic capacity,
inasmuch as it is precisely through its inherent non-artistry that a film is
able to find its ‘mass’ address. Indeed, Badiou actually holds a film to be truly
contemporary – and thus, at least potentially, ‘universal’ – if and only if ‘the
material whose purification is guarantees is identifiable as belonging to the
non-art of its times’ (IT 113). Which, incidentally, is also why cinema is, for
Badiou, intrinsically a mass art. For a film is truly contemporary, he says, only
inasmuch as its principal internal referent is a ‘common imagery’, and ‘not
the artistic past of forms’ (IT 113).
Thus Badiou effectively posits a second impure movement at play in film,
inasmuch as cinema ‘gathers around identifiably non-artistic materials…
[and] transmits their artistic purification, within the medium of an apparent
indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT 113–114). Cinema thus, as
Badiou puts it, ‘democratises the movement by which art drags itself from
non-art by drawing from this movement a border, by making from impurity
the thing itself ’.19 Which is to say that film also serves a kind of artistic
‘filtering’ function, ‘purifying’ non-art and bringing it into art (in a kind of
symmetry with its ‘impurifying’ the other arts). In a word, cinema purifies
non-art at the same time as it impurifies art.
So to sum up, Badiou sees cinema – at least implicitly – as an inessential
art, in the sense that it has no ‘essence’ to speak of, no base material that is
its and its alone. One of the consequences of this is that cinema figures as an
inherently impure art form, inasmuch as it draws all of its material from, on
the one hand, the other arts, and, on the other, non-art. Thus, Badiou holds
that whenever we encounter a true cinema-Idea, it is always brought forth by
way of a kind-of intrafilmic complication with the other arts. Yet at the same
time he sees this as cinema’s proper artistic role, insofar as film’s principal
task is that of impurifying Ideas which have first been given in the other arts
(and thereby creating from this impurity altogether new Ideas). Moreover,
even truly ‘artistic’ cinema is hopelessly complicated with non-art – being,
as he says, a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT
111) – yet at the same time it is precisely its inherent non-artistry that assures
a film’s universality, its ‘mass’ address.
138 Badiou and His Interlocutors
imperative (of impurifying or idealizing Ideas that are first taken from
elsewhere), it would seem that cinema has from the start been hopelessly
entangled with philosophy, or more specifically, with philosophy’s structural
obligations.
Badiou in fact comes close to registering this parallel when, while
discussing the question of philosophical ‘style’ in Philosophy and the Event, he
points to the way in which cinematic and philosophical works are similarly
composed from a range of extraordinarily heterogeneous materials as
testament to the fact that, stylistically speaking, philosophy ‘does the same
thing cinema does. Philosophy is the cinema of thought!’ (PE 91). While
Badiou is explicitly referring here to philosophical expression – that is, its
written as opposed to its structural composition – the formula is nonetheless
remarkably apposite. It is also worth noting that he concludes his paper on
‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ in a similar manner, observing – possibly
in reference to his own as-yet undeveloped ‘feature film’ – that there is today
not only ‘a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema – or of cinema
by philosophy’, but also that ‘after the philosophy of cinema must come –
is already coming – philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the
opportunity of being a mass philosophy’.22
And yet, stylistically or structurally, cinema can of course never be
philosophy. Rather, cinema can only reproduce philosophy (much in the
manner it reproduces the other arts). Moreover, if cinema bears something
of a family resemblance to philosophy – or, for that matter, to antiphilosophy
or sophistry, each of which in some sense mimic philosophy – it must
nevertheless maintain its proper distance. For regardless of its impure nature,
cinema is foremost an art (albeit a singularly complicated art), which is to say
a condition of philosophy, and the absolute separation of philosophy from its
conditions is crucial lest philosophy succumb to the disaster of ‘suture’.
Where exactly this leaves cinema as an art form is difficult to answer, and
I suspect it is this, rather than any inherent distaste for the medium itself, that
causes Badiou to waver in his granting cinema a definite ‘artistic’ position.
Because cinema – that most paradoxical and liminal of arts – is, in the final
analysis, torn between two heterogeneous (and fundamentally, repetitious)
procedures, being at once the reproduction of art, and the reproduction of
philosophy itself.
Part Three
Essays
10
Subjected to Formalization:
Formalization and Method in
the Philosophy of Alain Badiou
John Cleary
the subject and its lack within logics determines it as the oscillation of a
vanishing term because each number is generated by a logically paradoxical
representation.3
That mathematics and logic here have a privileged place with regard to
the real is rooted in Lacan’s understanding of formalization. In the twentieth
century, formalization came to have a rather specific meaning. It refers
firstly to formalized languages where a vocabulary of symbols is fixed as
well as the explicit rules for how to construct the formulas and statements
in the language. In addition, formalization refers to axiomatization whereby
one gives the basic and fundamental premises of that theory from which
theorems are then to be derived in the formalized language. The process of
formalization of a theory is one in which the implicit presuppositions of the
theory are rendered explicit as statements in a formal language.
While the early twentieth century was the grand era in mathematics of
formalization, for Lacan, it is of the essence of mathematics itself. As Jean-
Claude Milner points out, this is because Lacan sees this essence as residing
in the literality of mathematics, that is, the constitution of its symbolic by
what Lacan calls letters.4 Letters in formalization are not, like signifiers in
general, determined in a relational web with other signifiers. Rather, the letter
is qualified by explicit rules that govern its use and its meaning. It is thus
always tied to a pure decision about its function, which means that it can be
displaced and changed.5 This is why the essence of the relationship between
letters and formalization is substitutability. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XX,
‘Formalisation is nothing other than the substitution of a number whatsoever
of ones, for what is called a letter.’6
What this implies then is not simply that letters in mathematics have no
strict meaning, but further that they are ‘contrary to sense’ or ‘counter-to-
sense’.7 It is because mathematical formalization has this extreme and liminal
form of signification that it can deploy itself consistently across categorical
oppositions. In doing so, it inscribes within itself what it cannot say, what is
impossible for it to say, which is why it is for Lacan the science of the real.
II
What Badiou draws from this is that the real of the subject is determined
formally as differences in this excess. A conservative subjectivity will limit
this excess to the smallest possibility (‘trade union’ politics, for Badiou, is
analogous to the affirmation of the continuum hypothesis), whereas a
revolutionary one will force it maximally (TS 271–274). A point to keep in
mind for later is that here the inexistent is identical to the generic set. What
this implies is that the articulation of the empty place and the excess always
involves some form of a decision.
Mathematics thus clarifies the theory of the form of the subject, insofar as
form should be understood as what results from the abstraction of content.
But this correlation only overcomes the original opposition abstractly
because it simply assumes it. Indeed, the difficulty at hand post Theory of
the Subject is to account at once for the materialist theory of the existence of
subjects and the mathematical formalization of it. A last point to note is that,
as opposed to his earlier engagement with mathematical formalization, here
the impossible is not determined through the difference between logic and
mathematics, but as a split articulation within mathematics itself.
The third period of the relationship between the real of mathematics and
the subject in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds is a grounding of the
latter in the former. By grounding I mean the way in which the compatibility
of a theory of the subject and mathematics is reasoned through a principle.
In Being and Event this principle is: ‘mathematics (in its set theoretical
presentation) is ontology but there is what is not being qua being’. The first
thing to note is how this repositions the split in the real of mathematics.
There is the global real of set theory, namely, the inexistence of a whole. The
immediate consequence of this is that being is infinite, or rather limitless,
and moreover that this limitlessness of the Multiple establishes itself as a
fundamental gap in set theory through the continuum problem. But there
is also the cause of the subject as a point of impossibility that subtracts itself
from mathematics locally, namely, the event.
Before discussing the way this principle is deployed, it is worth making
the point that it has its origins in the realization that mathematics itself
is subjective. In Being and Event, Badiou takes the independence of the
continuum hypothesis as proof of the idea that the fundamental problems
of mathematics are bound up with a mathematical (and hence subjective)
decision. Indeed, the very nature and role of this decision vis-à-vis the
continuum determines the scientific ‘epoch’ in which we find ourselves (BE
3). This gestures towards the above principle because if the real as a category
of the subject is also operative in mathematics, then perhaps we do not need
to seek an ontology of the subject external to mathematics. Moreover, a
theory of the subject that took into account the mathematical subject would
150 Badiou and His Interlocutors
have to also theorize the possibility that the cause of this subject is a point of
rupture with mathematics itself.
In terms of the principle, the central point to be emphasized is that it
allows for the grounding of the possibility of a subject in a number of ways
through the way it renders rigorous the relationship to generic sets. Firstly,
the infinity of a situation is a prerequisite for generic sets because they are
necessarily infinite (BE 333). Secondly, since generic subsets in a situation
do not actually belong to the situation itself, but to an extension of it, the
subjective procedure immanent to the situation cannot itself be a generic
subset. Rather, the being of the procedure is a finite subset of the generic set.
However, the subjective procedure is linked to the generic set by the relation
of forcing. This latter relation is the law of the subjective decision because it
shows how in an extended situation some previously undecidable statement
is made to be true or false depending on the elements that one decides to
add to the generic set. Thirdly, while the technique of forcing gives us the
structure of a decision, it does not establish how the decision is determined
one way or the other. This is where the event comes in, since it is that about
which these decisions are made.
At work in this grounding is the displacement of the prior positions of
opposition and abstract correlation. This revolves firstly around the concepts
of the void and the event. The event as the cause of the subject is established
by a foreclosure from mathematics, because its form is determined as a
set that belongs to itself, which is axiomatically banned from existing in
standard set theory. On the other hand, with respect to event, the opposition
is maintained by the fact that the subject is not here sutured onto the void.
The mathematical void is in Badiou’s ontology the ground of his theory of
multiplicity in the sense that every multiple is construed set theoretically as
constructed from the void set. An event is determined also by the fact that
it separates itself from the void. This grounds the correlation in Theory of
the Subject because it explains why mathematical ontology and the theory of
the subject must be correlated in the form of a philosophical compatibility:
because the event cannot appear in ontology.
A fundamental point that needs to be made here is the way this grounding
of the subjective process as an effect of a generic truth re-determines what I
have called the axiom of Badiou’s thought. In particular, it effects a shift in
the primary name of the impossible from ‘subject’ to ‘truth’. The reason for
this ultimately is bound up with the question of universality. Generic subsets
are determined as universal by Badiou in so far as they punch a hole in
knowledge by escaping the language of the situation. Put very basically, there
is no formula of the language of the situation that can determine completely
which elements of the situation do or do not belong to the generic subset. The
Subjected to Formalization 151
III
matter and the set theoretical relations of belonging and inclusion. For
Badiou, the former is determined by an affirmation of the identity of matter
as well as the thesis that matter precedes thought. While the first part affirms
the univocity of being as matter, the second part implies that there is some
kind of difference that is nonetheless annulled by the asymptotic process
whereby thought tends towards matter. What this implies for Badiou is that
the materialist concept of matter is dialectically split between an absolute
notion of matter (matter as matter) and a relative one (matter as thought)
(TS 190–200). This translates into the need to theorize the subject as both an
element in a place and as placed in process. For reasons we can’t go into here,
Badiou moreover deduces from this scission that there is no material whole.
The analogy to set theory is then:
namely, instability (BE 127, 174). Reasoning that any situation can be
formalized by taking a set whose structure is ‘comparable’ to the situation
(BE 130), natural situations are then formalized using the concept of transitive
sets, and historical situations using intransitive sets, that is, a set that belongs
to the situation, but whose elements do not (BE 131, 175).
What is crucial in all this is the way that the analogical mode of
formalization determines the matter of a place, and thus its being as such,
as something external from the matheme of its form. In Theory of the
Subject form is determined via abstraction in relation to a given being as
the purification of its particularities. And it is precisely this exclusion of
particularities from the form that establishes the singular matter of the being
in question as an object external to its mathematical form.
The central consequence of this externality is that it sets up a fundamental
contradiction between the analogical mode of formalization and the axiom
that the real is the impasse of formalization. This is the case for an entirely
general reason: not only can the real not be an object, but its status as a
point of impossibility of mathematical formalization means that it cannot
be straightforwardly determined either as internal or external, since it is
internally excluded with regard to the formalization in question.
This contradiction, concealed in Theory of the Subject, only became
apparent as an impasse in the search for a possible ontology for the subject.
As Badiou notes in the introduction to Being and Event, the analogical mode
of formalization had led him to the idea that that if it was possible to establish
an ontology with respect to logico-mathematical discourse, then its real had
to be determined ‘either as an “object” obtained by abstraction (empiricism),
or as a super-sensible Idea (Platonism)’ (BE 5). In other words, an ontology
premised on the analogical mode of formalization determines the real
of mathematics itself as an (either empirical or ideal) externality. None of
which, Badiou remarks, is consistent with the Lacanian thesis on the real.
Yet the same externality of matter with regard to mathematical form is
reproduced in Being and Event through the analogical concept of historical
situations. Central to historical situations is the notion of a site as the
immanent point of concentration of the ontological difference of a situation
such that its elements ‘inexist’ in the situation and are in this way internally
excluded. Yet if situations are ultimately only structured by a single relation,
namely, belonging, then the elements of the site are not internally excluded in
the situation, they are, as I noted earlier, just straightforwardly excluded from
its mathematical formalization because they do not belong to it. Given that in
the theory of situations they still constitute the matter of the site and ultimately
of the event, the site’s mathematical form as a multiple in the situation then
becomes a mere form. Consequently, the theory of historical situations is
Subjected to Formalization 155
also not consistent with the axiom of the real as impasse, and moreover, the
formalization of the notion of the internally excluded inexistent constitutes a
point of impossibility of the analogical mode.
Mathematical form
The second mode of formalization that runs across Being and Event and
Logics of Worlds overcomes the impasse of the analogical mode through an
internalization of the notions of matter and form to mathematics. Given what
we have said about the real, the first point that needs to be made here is that this
internalization requires the notion of the real to be distinct from that of matter.
In Being and Event the real of mathematics is inconsistent multiplicity – a non-
whole – and this stands in a relationship of internal exclusion to mathematics.
The matter of mathematics is in contrast consistent multiplicity, or the sets
that make up its universe.
However, the two are logically related through the concept of the void. In
fact, as Badiou argues throughout meditations 2–4, it follows from being’s
unlimited and inconsistent nature that at its very foundation it is void or
nothing (BE 36). Any ontology of inconsistent multiplicity must be able
to capture this, and ZFC set theory does so in two ways. Firstly, it ‘sutures’
being to language through the axiomatic decision that a set with no elements
exists. This establishes the void in mathematical language as a proper name
whose symbol – Ø – is a (Lacanian) letter in the sense that strictly speaking it
names nothing, and hence being as such (BE 67).17 The void set thus presents
a Parmenidean identity between thought and being. Secondly, all sets in the
ZFC universe are built up by applying certain operations to the empty set.
Set theoretical ontology is thus ultimately a theory of the void’s ubiquity.
Consequently, the matter of mathematics (i.e. nothing as such) is entirely
internal to it. Moreover, this matter is never presented as an object: not only
is its very foundation void, and hence heterogeneous to the unity of an object,
the existence of the matter of mathematics is invoked by a pure nomination
that cannot be separated as an object from the letter that names it.18
In contrast, Logics of Worlds establishes the internalization to mathematics
of the ontological difference. It does so by determining the form of inconsistent
multiplicity as the mathematical theory of its localization in a world, and
thus as what renders its inconsistency consistent. In particular, the form of
inconsistent multiplicity is the synthetic unity imposed on a multiple such
that it appears as an object, which is defined as a compatible set of ‘real atomic’
functions (LW 251). What such a theory crucially allows is firstly of course a
concept of an inexistent as internally excluded: the inexistent is a multiple in
the world that is excluded from appearing by its zero degree of existence.
156 Badiou and His Interlocutors
What do people hate when they hate (the philosophy of) Alain Badiou?2 If we
start by setting aside everything which can be put down to ignorance,3 malice,4
veiled political scare-mongering;5 or the kind of free-floating indignation
which awaits all those who fail to pronounce whatever shibboleths du jour are
demanded by whichever moralizing clique is currently busy equating its own
discursive mores with Justice per se, it is still possible to notice some recurring
motifs in what remains in the more or less serious criticisms of Badiou’s work.
On the one hand, a number of the more inchoate objections to Badiou’s
oeuvre seem to converge upon what might be seen as the philosopher’s
modernism. By modernism, I mean Badiou’s penchant for the apodeictic
mode and the rhythms of the manifesto; his avant-garde (but also Pauline)
preoccupation with rupture and with novelty, with the diagonal line traced
through the known world that is a scandal to the world’s wisdom (SP 19–21);
his penchant for numbered theses;6 for definitions, axioms, scholia and
schemata designed to cut through rather than to merely elucidate – let alone
to ‘save’! – the phenomena under discussion.
However, once we go beyond the realm of objections to Badiou’s style,
some of the most common critiques of the philosopher are, I contend,
almost always to do with what the critic perceives as a tension between the
formal, indeed the formalist underpinnings of Badiou’s philosophy and the
intransigent political commitment which both animates and impels his
corpus. Put differently, we can see this as a tension between the abstraction of
Badiou’s thought (in its form as much as its content) as against what, to the
eyes of many critics, appear to be the ‘concrete’ objects, tropes and figures of
art and science, literature, love and, above all, politics.
160 Badiou and His Interlocutors
In published criticisms on Badiou, this concern about the limits (or more
accurately what Peter Hallward calls the ‘consequences’)7 of abstraction has
often been expressed by way of a demand for a greater degree of mediation
within Badiou’s corpus.8 In speaking of ‘mediation’ (or, more often, ‘relation’)9
many of the philosopher’s critics are, I submit, looking for something in his
philosophy that might more definitively tether the subtractive meta-ontology
of Being and Event (or the equally austere ‘logics of appearing’ [apparaître] of
that book’s sequel) to:
(retroactively) reveals how what is taken to be the rich, singular, that is,
unconceptualized phenomenal plenitude of the world is not the opposite but
the apogee of abstraction.16 The ‘labour of the negative’17 – abstract thought
as a synecdoche for the dissolution, explosion and recreation of all form – is,
in fact, the only route to the genuinely concrete: the ‘speculative’ Good Friday
without which there cannot be any Sunday of Life.18
If we understand abstraction in this manner, we can safely assume that
when Badiou’s critics, exegetes and fellow-travellers call for greater ‘mediation’,
they are calling for precisely this kind of mutual implication of the abstract
and the concrete and not what the young Hegel would have referred to as the
Understanding’s [Verstand] reified or static (in the etymological as well as
the everyday sense of this last word) opposition between the abstract and the
concrete. This is especially important because, as Hegel stresses continually,19 if
thought cannot think the real interconnection between (what passes for) the
abstract and the concrete then any attempt to make a bridge between these
two (artificially separated) registers of reality will be impossible. In the light
of this, Hegel, from very early in his career, will insist that philosophy should
move beyond the limited and limiting perspective of the Understanding –
the faculty which implicitly hypostasizes oppositions by assuming their
reality – so as to better follow Reason (Vernunft) which works through such
oppositions,20 taking them as the material of a thought that is not ultimately
separate from reality, any more than reality is separate from thought.
Now, while Badiou is clearly, in one sense, an avowed Hegelian,21 he also
has a pronounced and lifelong aversion to any vision of dialectics that is tied
to both:
century (TC 88–95); between the state of the situation with its always violent
defence of its own ‘count’ and those uncounted elements on the ‘edge of the
void’ that amount to the evental-site (BE 175–177); between the inexistent
as a minimum degree of appearance and everything else that is ordered
according to the ‘transcendental’ of a given world. But if Badiou is, pace some
of his commentators, always scrupulous about what he calls the kind of ‘leftist
deviation’ which posits some sort of absolute split between an all-corrupting
situation and an ‘angelic’ proletariat (TS 12),32 the accusations of a sort of
Badiouean dualism persist, particularly in the form of a question about the
way Badiou’s Communism (and in particular what he calls the ‘Communist
Invariants’)33 relates to various forms of Marxism.34
Given how often Badiou emphasizes (to quote the title of the forthcoming
third volume of Being and Event) the immanence of truths, it would seem
strange to act as if Badiou had posited some impassable ‘Kantian’ fissure
between the world of the subject and of truth-procedures. Instead, then,
‘mediation’ must ultimately have something to do with some tension or
disparity perceived to hold between Badiou’s ontology and the phenomenal
richness and ‘complexity’ of given situations. In addition, the ‘objective’
phenomenology of Logics of Worlds makes the effort to explain the relationship
between Being, on the one hand, and existence/being-there/appearing on the
other. In the name of this relation, Badiou goes to great lengths to develop
a formalism for how the ‘pure multiple’ ‘can exist (i.e. appear) in multiple
worlds with varying degrees of intensity according to the transcendental of a
given world’ (LW 100–140).
But if Badiou’s deduction of the notion of both transcendentals and what
he calls ‘objects’ which are not dependent on the quirks of human cognition,
is still considered too ‘abstract’ with respect to actual situations, then we are
forced to assume that even if the value of Badiou’s efforts to formally deduce
categories like truth, event and subject is acknowledged, then this work of
theoretical construction nonetheless remains insufficient with respect to
something which Badiou’s work otherwise seems to gesture towards. But in
what sense and in regards to which task? If, as I would suggest, the answer
to this question concerns political praxis then the prior question, namely, is
what is it that drives Badiou towards abstraction?
First, it is clear that Being and Event’s fundamental decision regarding
ontology (the non-existence of the One, which is the basis for the assertion
that mathematics is ontology (BE 23–37)) is ultimately directed towards
the idea that there exists such a thing as a rational demonstration of the
impossible. In particular, when Badiou turns to the theory of subjects, the
indiscernible, and truths, the task he sets himself is nothing less than an
attempt to formalize, that is, to demonstrate the consistency of tasks which are
164 Badiou and His Interlocutors
generic, infinite, as well as beyond the scope of philosophy. Instead such tasks
(and the inquiries that they entail) are, for Badiou, pursued by the collective,
that is, trans-individual and trans-historical subjects, of the truth-procedures
(science, art, love and politics.) The first thing, it seems to me, that is valuable
about this sort of process of theoretical construction is the way in which
it breaks with the thought that politics, art and love are domains in which
reason falters.35 But just as he wishes to show, in a spirit that is simultaneously
Hegelian and Freudian, that the irrational is treatable by rational means,
Badiou also rejects the scientistic conception of philosophy which would
render it only a handmaid to the natural sciences. Instead, philosophy, as the
compossibility of the truth conditions is able to draw from the truths of art,
science, politics and love, to show (as the meaning of Leibniz’s neologism
implies) how they belong to the same world. Badiou’s own philosophy
performs this demonstration of the compossible by attesting to the way
in which the truths which emerge from each of these domains (‘bodies of
truth’ or ‘new presents’) are both infinite and composed of combinations of
things, entities, ideas whose at least minimal presence in the world is given,
but whose conjunction is unthinkable on the basis of the way that things are
separated according to the State laws and knowledge’s of a given situation (BE
331–339/356–371). In attempting to come up with a general theory of generic
truths, Badiou proceeds formally because he is devoted, as a philosopher, to
proceeding rationally. But Badiou also wants to show that ‘reason’ is not a
pre-existing set of norms (and still less a particular set of opinions which
we can clutch to our chest like the pearls of insecure rentiers). Instead, for
Badiou, philosophy requires (despite its inability to produce truths of its own)
a similar mixture of daring and sobriety, of creativity and rigour as we’ d find
in the truth processes. And one of the goals of Badiou’s thought in general, it
seems to me, is to show and not simply to assert (against a dominant doxa of
our own time) the way the rigorous and the creative become indistinct in the
tracing through the consequences of an event which Badiou associates with
truth (a procedure, an infinite set of enquiries unbound from time, place
and language). For Badiou, there is no creation that is not also an exercise in
consistency, no consistency that is not, at the same time, an act of creation.
And yet such creation is not a creation ‘out of nothing’ so much as it is a
creation out of the teeming infinities of a reality whose excess demands
intellectual construction as opposed to pious awe.
In addition, and while this has been less frequently observed, I think
that it is clear that Badiou is also demonstrably loyal to the Hegelian insight
(particularly manifest in the Science of Logic) that we cannot assume a strict
or static separation between the concepts and categories of thought and the
objects which these categories think. By this, I do not of course mean that
Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa) 165
either Badiou or Hegel thinks that minds create worlds (everyone her own
demiurge!). Instead, I mean that Badiou is committed (especially in Logic
of Worlds) to the fundamental principle of Hegel’s Science of Logic whereby
what passes for a clear and distinct opposition between thought, on the one
hand, and the world it is supposed to think, on the other, is itself the product
of a kind of prior movement of thought whose separation from reality’s own
dynamism cannot be assumed without lapsing into pre-Kantian dogmatism.
Again, this is not to deny the existence of the Real or (most importantly
for Badiou’s materialist philosophy) the independence of reality from the
existence of a thinking subject.36 However, what this does mean, for Hegel
and for Badiou, is that a consistent philosophy is also one which should
derive the categories with which it thinks from the material which is the object
of its thought. If politics (or art) can, as Badiou’s 1985 pamphlet maintains,
be thought this is because it is possible to derive from a particular political
(or amorous/artistic/scientific) conjuncture concepts and categories which
are adequate to that conjuncture.37 At the same time, Badiou will maintain
that if thought is to be adequate to the present, it must also be true not only to
what he calls the ‘weak present’ as affirmed by those reactive subjects who are
the often vociferous servants of the status quo – but also to the ‘impossible’,
difficult, yet-to-be-constructed present which exists only in the future anterior,
that is, the present which subjects to truth attempt to bring into being when
they find themselves trying to follow the trace of events: continuing to love,
thinking about how a series of egalitarian political axioms may be applied
in this particular conjuncture and so on. At the heart of Badiou’s corpus,
therefore, we find an attempt to forge a link between something minimal,
dubious and vanishing (the event and the afterglow of its trace) and the
surging infinity of infinities which represents the inconsistent multiplicity of
Being qua Being. Badiou’s philosophy can thus justly be described as a post-
Cantorian Platonism insofar as it attempts to find a new way of identifying the
Real and the Idea, albeit one which neither posits a ‘hyper-Uranian’38 world
of Ideas, nor making the world into an epiphenomena of human cognition
or experience.
In the remainder of this essay, I want to try to (briefly) defend this
orientation of Badiou’s. However, I shall do so not by discussing mathematics
nor politics which, as we have seen, some of Badiou’s critics consider to
be threatened by the abstract-formal-subtractive dimension of Badiou’s
thought. Instead, I want to try and show the benefits of Badiou’s devotion
to abstraction and subtraction by a discussion of another truth-procedure,
specifically, love.
The advantage of doing this, I submit, is that the term ‘love’ is very often
taken (e.g. in Romantic thought and poetry) as the paradigm of that which is
166 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Lacan
In one sense, psychoanalysis can be seen to speak (as Lacan himself says)43
of nothing but love. After all, psychoanalysis begins with Freud’s discovery of
a (non-)relation between truth and sex which, when rigorously investigated,
evacuates all that has previously passed for knowledge of the psyche. In this
Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa) 167
sense, although there is a great tradition that begins with Plato and whose
most fully realized forms are the various forms of religious Neo-Platonism
and their mystical supplements that makes Eros both the indispensable
condition of philosophy and that which undermines its pretensions,
psychoanalysis goes further in elucidating the way in which the force of
desire interrupts – via the protests and stammerings of the Unconscious
in symptoms – the limits of a certain vision of philosophical mastery (for
instance, the undermining of rational discourse in dreams, slippages, the gap
between words and intentions).
At the same time, psychoanalysis seems from its inception to be
marked by a profound scepticism with regard to love, at least if the term is
understood to name either a pure affect (i.e. devoid of any admixture of
hatred or ambivalence)44 or a concern for the other (the beloved) often over-
determined by any number of edifying and/or ethical precepts governing sex,
desire, and amorous relationships more generally.45
First, this is apparent in Freud’s suggestion that love is always tied to an
‘over-valuation of the object’46 (i.e. to idealization). Second, it is manifest in
Freud’s insistence that the loved object ‘takes the place of the ego’ (thereby
suggesting that love is a kind of displaced narcissism).47 In particular, Freud
never ceases to describe the ways in which there is something hallucinatory
about ecstatic, idealized, erotic love that is also often tied to certain forms of
aggression both in the form of a fundamental ambivalence (towards the loved
object) whereby idealizing love turns to devaluing hate48 and finally towards
a kind of displacement whereby the elevation of the beloved to something
sublime is accompanied by a concomitant hatred for either the lover’s ego
(establishing the well-known connection between love and melancholia)
or projected on to an out-group.49 In both cases, Freud describes the ways
in which the harsh or aggressive feelings from which the beloved object is
completely immunized are turned outwards towards those who – at the
aphelion of the lovable – are deemed acceptable objects of detestation.
As such, psychoanalysis has very little time for what both Badiou and
Lacan call ‘oblativity’,50 for a conception of love as an (implicitly) pure
devotion to the other. This thereby extends towards any notion of love which
would pose a connection to Christian agape and love as eros (where the latter
and not the former is the traditional object of both Platonic philosophy and
psychoanalysis).
Even more so than Freud, Lacan is relentlessly withering (witness his
remarks about the utopian desideratum of ‘genital sexuality’)51 about any
notion that psychoanalysis exists to return love or desire to the auspices of
some conception of morality. In particular, Lacan has absolutely no time for
the notion of love as a telos, whether this means some kind of variation of
168 Badiou and His Interlocutors
‘ideal of human love’ (as, for instance, a harmonious meeting via the Greek
and Hebrew roots of Western Culture of philia, agape and eros) or of ‘love
fulfilled’ which Lacan calls ‘genital love that is supposed to be itself alone the
model for the object relation’: doctor love…love as hygiene’.52
At the same time, Lacan is by no means silent on the issue of love. In
Seminar XX, love is held to make up for (suppléer à) or cover over the
‘absence of the sexual relationship’.53 The discussion in this seminar seems,
in one sense, to confirm the impression that, for Lacan, as for Freud, love
is largely a matter of a delusion, a veil over an unthinkable truth, which
hides even as it supplements a kind of void in reality.54 This, for instance,
is manifest in the way that Lacan reprises his discussion of courtly love
(from Seminar VII) describing it as a particularly intricate way of covering
over the sexual non-relationship which the seminar attempts to describe.55
In particular, Lacan’s deflationary or sceptical notion of love seems most
manifest in his account of phallic jouissance – that is, of the way in which
desire, propelled by the (missing/impossible/lost) objet a (the cause of desire)
finds partial satisfaction through a series of objects whose desirability stems
from their having entered into a pre-existing fantasy space through which
the (unconscious/desiring) subject flickers and fades like the shadow of a
candle on the wall of a dimly illuminated room.
Furthermore, Lacan’s remarks about the sexual non-rapport that holds
between the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ positions (and their accompanying
logic) seems, if anything, to emphasize the extent to which love – as shown
for instance in the elaborate liturgies of courtly love – seems largely to be
an ingenious way of covering over the gap that separates Lacan’s ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’ positions as different (and utterly heterogeneous) ways of
sustaining desire in the world.56 The point of Lacan’s insistence on this sexual
non-relation is that while people can and do obviously have sex, sex remains
a kind of mutual masturbation in which each partner in the sexual act
fluctuates between the monadic framing of their partner within the space of
fantasy and a traumatic encounter with the unsymbolizable jouissance which
sets desire into motion.
However, there are moments in which Lacan does seem to speak about
love as something which may be something more than a mask over the
sexual non-relationship. In particular, we can see this in Lacan’s comments
on the relationship between Plato and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. In
his extraordinary account of that dialogue’s celebrated final scene, Lacan
describes a relationship between the two lovers which, while by no means
contradicting his later remark that there ‘is no such thing as a sexual
relation’,57 implies a conception of ‘love’ which seems to be something other
than narcissistic demand or the tendency for a given individual to take the
Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa) 169
the role of the Other in the patients’ fantasy. Like a good analyst (or teacher),
Socrates refuses the role that Alcibiades wishes to assign him as a master,
a beloved or someone who possess a specialized knowledge of Alcibiades’
innermost thoughts or feelings. The result is that Socrates comes to occupy
the role not of the object but of the cause of his lover’s desire.62 Now, of
course, this psychoanalytic sleight of hand manoeuvre does not, at face value,
have much to do with any conventional understanding of love. Instead, it
seems to be a brilliant exemplar of psychoanalytic transference – the process
whereby the analyst refuses the position of the Subject Supposed to Know
and comes to take the place of the Other to whom the analysand addresses
his demands, thereby allowing for the possibility that the analysand forms
a different relationship to the Other. However, and this will be important
for Badiou, Lacan does raise the question of something in love which, by
a kind of emptying out of the ‘state of the subject’ (the lover’s demands,
fantasies, proclivities, self-conception), allows the subject to rediscover – as
it were through love – a lack in her libidinal economy and its investments
with the world. In particular, Lacan associates (here as elsewhere) love with
something that is at once tied to knowledge and to something in the face of
which knowledge must be evacuated. If psychoanalysis therefore ‘comes not
to praise, but to bury love’,63 the psychoanalytic internment also performs
the important function of marking out a lack, that is, of turning lack into
the mark of a nothing. ‘Love’, Lacan says, in the above-mentioned seminar,
consists in ‘giving what one does not have’,64 and that gift is an awakening to
our own lack of being/wanting to be (manque-à-être). At this moment, the
anti-philosophy of psychoanalysis performs a function which Plato (in his
Sophist) makes essential to any philosophy that would distinguish itself from
sophistry, that is, the bringing to bear of a properly analytic seriousness to
that which is not.65
Badiou
the consequences of the amorous event and construct a Two which, for
Badiou, is always precarious for the quite straightforward reason that it is
also impossible (IPL). To understand such prima facie paradoxical (and even
nonsensical) statements, we must pay attention to what Badiou does not
mean by love.
First, Badiou insists that love is not identical to the existence of the loving
couple (C 187). As the portion of the amorous situation that is visible to third
parties (and occasionally even State institutions), the couple is instead simply
love’s state form, the portion of the amorous situation that is discernible
according the transcendentals of a given world (‘Those two seem to hang
out a lot/are they together/married/just friends?’). But if love is, as Badiou
maintains, a truth procedure then it cannot be reduced to that which accords
with the laws of appearing that govern the given set of worlds in which the
lovers’ appear. What is indiscernible to the situation is the work of love, that is,
the decisions and operations by which new connections are made between
every world in which the lovers find themselves.
In addition, Badiou denies that love has anything to do with the
consciousness of the loving subject, that is, with what one or both of the
parties to love feels or thinks (C 182). Following Lacan, Badiou seems to
accept that a focus on the lovers’ own experience of love (embroiled as it
inevitably must be in the particular psychical grammar of the lovers)
is inadequate to love’s essence insofar as it can only speak of each lover
individually as a being with a particular psyche and psychic history (with
her particular sexual predilections, fantasies, etc.). From such an individual
focus, we are thereby counting each lover as one and not as two: in such a
discourse love would come ultimately to refer back to the identity of each
party in the loving relationship as if the amorous-event had never exposed
the possible amorous subject to the wind and rain of an existence beyond
monadic individuality.
However, while Badiou opposes what he calls love to the State-discourse
of love as a kind of shopping trip through the sexual marketplace/New
Age Quest for the Self, his thesis is in no way motivated by any puritanical
depreciation of sex. Instead, sex, for Badiou, is simply what there is, as
ordinary as trees, death, bacteria or infinity. Badiou takes sex (with all its
complications) to be the part of love which has some non-minimal degree
of appearance in a number of worlds, before, after and during the amorous
encounter. There are, in other words, always sexual desires and acts, all of
which can be lamented, obsessed over, problematized, defined, celebrated,
tabooed, instigated etc. But Badiou’s point is not to emphasize that these
things are obstacles to what he calls love. Badiou refuses to see in love a kind
of sentimental Judeo-Christian veil over the truth of sex. As he says: ‘love
172 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Badiou begins In Praise of Love by deploring the ads for a dating agency that
offers its subscribers the possibility of ‘love without chance’ and ‘…perfect
love without suffering’. But if Badiou admits seeing love as threatened by such
fantasies of zero-risk, frictionless fun, or of passionate encounters that would
somehow leave our little worlds fundamentally secure and intact, his defence
of love is in no way motivated by any desire to defend any amorous tradition
or institution. He is as uninterested in defending marriage or monogamy as
he is in defending a Saturday night-club ‘meat market’. At the same time,
would it not be possible to object that nothing is less in need of defence
than the cultural mélange of Messianic hopes, psychological needs, cultural
artefacts and intimate joys which we associate with this all-too-evocative
word? Along these lines, I think that there is a case to be made that we live in
a time where love, far from being the jetsam of a more adventurous epoch,
continues to be praised in exactly the same mawkish, hollow and strangely
liturgical ways that we salute ‘democracy’, ‘education’, ‘values’, ‘ethics’ and
much else whose quantity of pious invocation seems directly proportionate
to the extent to which it seems emptied of all determinate meaning. But while
a certain maudlin banality of love and it’s praise is undeniable, I think that
Badiou is, in the end, motivated by the thought (lurking deep in every human
psyche) that there is still something in the phenomena of love (as well as
in our various lover’s discourses) which allows us a glimpse of a different
logic to that of a world in which sacrifice to a late-capitalist reality principle
is the destiny of everyone. Of course, we must be careful of sentimentality.
We should also take seriously the ‘cynical’ notion that, just as education is
simply a polite name for institutional time spent in preparation for one’s future
174 Badiou and His Interlocutors
wholeness (however much this may be, as both Plato and psychoanalysis
shows us, part of love’s comic, impossible, self-defeating telos). Instead, love
is a dance of light emanating from two distinct sources, tracing and retracing
a constellation across vast reaches of space. It is a movement that brings
previously unrelated points of light into new configurations, new figures
which, for an instant, take shape against the blackness of space following
principles of figuration that seem utterly arcane except for the thought that the
patterns drawn from the lights emanating from each of the two sources seem
(somehow) to be responding to each other. For Deleuze, invoking Proust,
love and the sufferings caused by love are what gives birth to the Idea.67 For
Badiou, love’s movement is already a thinking, not, of course, because love is
primarily (as in a parody of fatuous philosophical intellectualism) cognitive
or devoid of physical passion, but because, like all thought, love starts from
an encounter which then forces us to stand back (abstract) from whatever
hitherto counted as reality, to carry our shattered selves into the interstices of
the world we once knew. In love, we comport ourselves by the ever-dwindling
and ever dubious light of an encounter. In Badiou’s philosophy, this light
cannot be understood as a promise for any kind of a new dispensation, of
a guaranteed transcendence which would tattoo itself on the flesh of the
world. Instead, Badiou’s subtractive vision of love connects to his visions of
love and art by way of the fact that it involves trying to live in the afterglow
of something fundamentally dubitable and evanescent: a Mallarméan siren
on the foam of our lives, which nonetheless impels us to try to draw new
connections between that which the state of our situation (our world of
proliferating differences and fissaprous tribalisms) never ceases to separate.
Love is, in the end, for Badiou, the gateway drug to the other truth-
procedures. It is the only one of the four which we are all guaranteed to have
been seized to the point of our elevated destruction. As such, it is an empirical
universal that opens on to the true universalism which Badiou calls by the
name of the ‘generic’. In making this passage, each of us comes face to face
with the irreparable lack in what passes for reality. And it is this lack which
points to the ‘everything and more’ of the Real, the intelligible but sense-
shattering infinities that we discover when the ways of counting what belongs
to the world start to tremble and break down. That this everything is also a
nothing is, for Badiou, something which can be demonstrated by ontology.
But Badiou’s is an ontology which, in its crystalline abstraction, owes much
to the idea that there is something in the sexual (non-)relationship which
points towards the ways in which each of the four truth procedures belong to
something like a generic humanity. In the end, love is, for Badiou – and to use
a phrase from another thinker with whom he has little in common – a kind
of highest poverty: a way by which, in giving and receiving the nothingness
176 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Against the arid superficiality of our age, Alain Badiou has, over the course
of the past half century, produced one of the most remarkable defences of
thought. This is not a romantic insistence on the importance or honour
of thinking but rather the construction of a quite singular conception of
thought sculpted both in relation to the philosophical tradition and also
directed to intervene in the present. In significant ways, advocacy of thought
is the most classical gesture of philosophy, the gesture by which philosophy
pits itself against its mortal enemy, the sophist. But the sophist does not stand
still, and rather constantly invents new means by which to evade the dangers
presented by thought. Because thought can never be completely suppressed,
the sophist constantly creates new mechanisms for putting thought ‘in its
place’. Philosophy responds, ever anew, to these constant attempts to place
limits on thought.
I seek in this paper to give some specificity to the practices of the opponents
of thought today. This will elaborate and clarify Badiou’s argument that
behind the ostensible end of ideologies is ‘a violent subjective injunction’, the
content of which is to ‘Live without an Idea’ (LW 511). Of interest is how this
maxim seems at first glance to be at odds with a historical juncture at which
thought and ideas are apparently everywhere, in a ‘knowledge economy’ or
‘cognitive capitalism’ in which ideation is the staple fare of daily life and the
world seems to be ruled by little more than ideas.
In a certain sense, the world today is fully populated with and worked over
by ideas. The great idealists today are not philosophers or authors of fiction
but economists and financial analysts, the writers of code, designers and
creatives, brand managers and corporate executives. The present financial
and geopolitical reworking of the world is routinely decided on the finest of
theoretical points and is arranged by action in the name of the purity of the
idea. Thus the wide sense of the inescapability and inevitability that results
from the effort to adjust the world and its populations by force of an idea. The
classic philosophical motif of ‘dying for an idea’ then takes a perverse turn in
which, almost universally, populations have the means of life, or life itself,
178 Badiou and His Interlocutors
the crafting of his conception of thought from Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger
and Lacan. Along with placing emphasis on Badiou’s allies in thought, I
further draw out the pivotal place for Badiou’s understanding of thought of
his critique of finitude and in particular his critique of the finitude of thought
and of the human being. These are intimately linked, and militate against the
widespread celebration today of finitude, limitation and individuality, which
as Badiou so importantly argues, reduces the human being to animality.
The second part of the chapter offers a materialist compliment to Badiou’s
conception of thought by turning to the place of thinking and ideas in business
and economics. Badiou offers a profound and timely critique of the platitudes
that circulate in these areas, clarifying the simultaneous absence of thought in
the midst of frenetic intellectual activity. At the same time, however, concrete
detail of economic life is missing in Badiou’s own writing and in the work
of many of his followers. For all of his professed materialism and emphasis
on the multiplicity of being, Badiou’s own understanding of the capitalist
economy is often formal and abstract. Moreover, Badiou often presents the
capitalist economy as far more unified and consistent than it is, and, perhaps
more importantly, presumes a conception of capital that forestalls political
action in the present. To join Badiou and ‘those who wander on the borders
of evental sites, staking their lives upon the occurrence and the swiftness of
intervention’ (BE 294) involves finding that capitalism is not near so unified
and complete as it is so often taken to be. Refusing the classical image that
sees thought begin when work ends, and against the risk of repeating the
self-understanding of capitalism that is presented by capitalists and their
sycophants, and equally by too many of their critics, will be to recall not only
where thought is not but equally the radical results of finding thought where
there is imagined to be none.
development but has long roots and lies at the heart of the classical and
contemporary liberal conception of the finitude of thought and of the
human being.
This reduction is expressed with particular clarity in Locke’s emphasis on
the finitude of human understanding and his very particular idea of self-
aware and self-possessing individual consciousness.9 Although fully in place
in Locke, this presumption that thought occurs only in a finite thinking being
was deepened in Kant’s emphasis on the limits of reason and the origin of
knowledge in synthetic activity of an individual human consciousness. These
developments Hegel calls ‘the reflective philosophy of subjectivity’, which
Hegel subjected throughout his work to excoriating critique. Hegel attacked
Locke and his school precisely because they ‘transformed philosophy into
an empirical psychology. They raised the standpoint of the subject, the
standpoint of absolutely existing finitude, to the first and highest place’.10
These motifs of finitude and subjectivity have radically accelerated in
contemporary university discourse. This unquestioned motif of the individual
and locus comes to centre stage even among those claiming some relation or
another to what they like to call ‘poststructuralism’, but who have jettisoned
the critique of the subject from which poststructuralism arose. In this form
of the reduction of idea to opinion, the stress falls on the involvement of the
observer in observation, the standpoint or ‘perspective’ of the observer as an
ineliminable restriction on what can be seen, and therefore of the limits of
perception as a result of the demonstration of what returns as the primacy of
the observing subject and of particular individual senses and brains in their
relation to the empirical world.
This extended and renovated reflective philosophy of subjectivity –
whether presented as new or not – is taken in contemporary university
discourse as adding layers of complexity to accounts of the origins of ideas.
Kant had of course stressed the vital stage of intermediation of the subject,
and in the contemporary humanities and social sciences that stress the place
of subjectivity, location and perspective, this Kantian vision reaches its
apotheosis. This is not to say that the Kantian revolution was not a massive
advance, nor is it to suggest that ideas might be transparent or not arrive
from the particularities of a subject. It is rather to stress that what is so often
lost in this emphasis on finitude and particularity is the way that thought at
once touches an individual human being but also exceeds the particularities
of any individual.
This is why Badiou stresses the exceptional nature of truth, such that truth
is exceptional to interest and opinion but moreover is exceptional to the
particularities of any specific, individual, human being. Thought for Badiou
involves being seized and traversed by a truth. Clearly, human beings live
Where Thought Is Not 183
Plato made use of the expression idea in such a way that we can readily
see that he understood by it something that not only could never be
borrowed from the senses, but that even goes far beyond the concepts
of the understanding [die Begriffe des Verstandes] (with which Aristotle
occupied himself), since nothing encountered in experience could ever
be congruent with it.13
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel notes that ‘Only since
Kant’s time has the distinction between reason and understanding become
normal in philosophical usage. This distinction is necessary. Among the
earlier philosophers, on the contrary, the distinction was not drawn in
this way.’14 In the hands of Hegel, this distinction between reason and the
understanding involves a demonstration of their complex interrelation
and a celebration of the capacities of the understanding. While strident in
his critique of empiricism, Hegel also celebrates empiricism because, like
philosophy, empiricism is driven to know what is in actuality, the nature
of things.15 Further, Hegel celebrates empiricism and the capacity of the
understanding in drawing distinctions, in separating out the multiplicity of
what would otherwise appear as flat and undifferentiated being. As he writes
in the Phenomenology: ‘The activity of separating is the force and labor of the
understanding [die Kraft und Arbeit des Verstandes], the most astonishing
and the greatest of all the powers.’16
This celebration of the understanding is a vital moment in Hegel, and
one that is lost if, in the name of thought, one merely reacts negatively
against empirical science as such or against the powers of distinction that
characterize knowledge. The difficulty, to put it simply, is that while the
understanding exceeds opinion, the understanding is in turn exceeded by
reason. Or, to translate this into terms of Lacan and Badiou, while opinion is
exceeded by knowledge, knowledge is in turn exceeded by truth. This is the
limit of knowledge: that knowledge is not-all. Knowledge is a necessary but
not sufficient condition of truth.
Positioning Badiou in relation to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Lacan helps
to situate Badiou’s distinction of knowledge and truth. It can also provide
some barriers against the shallow opposition of thought to knowledge in
Where Thought Is Not 185
world requires great fidelity to what is, but also a refusal of the count of the
objects in that world. We might usefully recall Lacan’s conclusion that it is
‘necessary not to forget that it is a characteristic of our science not to have
introduced a better and more extensive knowledge of the world but to have
brought into existence, in the world, things that did not in any way exist at
the level of our perception’.19
Think!
In terms of what exists in the world, the contemporary scene presents what
seems to be a remarkable efflorescence of ideas. Ideas circulate freely in
politics and the media, and in the worlds of business elites, management
consultants, financiers and computer programmers. Ideas spread wide and
fast, and according to Bill Gates, business takes place, or should take place, ‘at
the speed of thought’.20 All are encouraged to have their own ideas, to have an
opinion rather than regurgitate facts. Meanwhile, the capacities for creation
and destruction that follow from modern science demonstrate that thought
has become a frighteningly practical reality. At the level of the global political
economy, the fact that the fate of billions rests on adjustment to very specific
set of ideas – structural adjustment, austerity, the finite bounded individual –
again clarifies the astonishing depth of what ideas can do.
At the same time, the thing that seems most lacking today is anything
that could seriously be called an Idea. Popular culture reduces thought to
soundbites. In schools and the university, there is a generalized thoughtlessness
and a relentless assault on the humanities. New areas of inquiry pop up
celebrating their absence of intellection – whether in the business school
and the capitalist techno-sciences or in the flourishing of ‘new materialisms’
in which the history of the world is found in objects. From this apparent
omnipresence of thought issues the merciless annihilation of thought.
Hence, Badiou’s claim that the injunction today is that we must live
without an idea. He describes this injunction as ‘inconsistent’ (LW 511).21
This inconsistence plays out in its very contradictory character, and in spite
of this is vigorously effective and insistent.22 So while Badiou earlier asserted
that ‘philosophy today is deserted’ (TS xxxviii), later, in his Second Manifesto
for Philosophy, he emphasized that thought is not so much lost as a false
version of thought has become generalized. The point is that an account of
where thought is and is not today will necessitate going deep into the places
in which thought is claimed to be.
Of all of the places in which thought has become worldly, this is no more
so than in the nitty-gritty practical world of capitalism. The stakes of thought
Where Thought Is Not 187
refuse to make the sign more specific. If a man just sees THINK, he’ll find
out what I mean. We’re not interested in a logic course.’27
If Watson here, like Badiou in Logics of Worlds, puts ‘lesser logic’ in its
place in search for a greater logic, elsewhere he offers considerably more
clarity. He is reported to have said in 1914:
Cut forward a century, and a 2015 advertisement for IBM presents Watson as
the author of oracular wisdom. Constructing a high speed montage reflecting
the apparent plurality of our age, this advertisement confidently announces
that:
All of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only
willing to think. All of the problems of the world, all of the inefficiencies,
complexity, bad information, bad decisions, could be settled easily. All of
the opportunities could be realised if we were only willing to see patterns
in data that we could never see before, put analytics in our hands,
reinvent businesses in the cloud, fight cybercrime with math, design
a machine that thinks like we do. If we were only willing to use data,
and science, and curiosity to track epidemics, clear traffic, clear the air,
predict breakdowns, blockbusters, injuries, blackouts, so that everybody
and everything becomes smarter every day, all of the problems of the
world could be settled easily if men, women, students, leaders, citizens
and machines were only willing to think.29
better idea, but the reconfiguring and reclaiming of the idea of the idea. This
reaction certainly operated through the violence of the crushing of the Paris
Commune and through the imposition of other ideas. But it also involved
advocating what can be called, to paraphrase Frank Ruda, a set of ‘ideas
without idea’.30 Capitalist reaction is not opposed to ideas as such, but rather
to a specific idea of the idea. This struggle over the idea of the idea is a key
stake at the present moment, and one with important historical antecedents.
In the closing pages of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money, John Maynard Keynes posed the question of whether the ideas
advanced in his book were merely visionary hopes that might be thwarted
by political interests. Writing seven years after the 1929 crash, he called on
a spirit of openness for ‘fundamental analysis’ and for experimentation with
alternatives. He wrote, famously:
But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and
political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the
world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves quite
exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist.31
approval from the remarks by Keynes we have cited here.34 Hayek offers
an extreme sanctification of the individual which involves not only singing
the praise of possessive individualism but a defence of what he called ‘true
individualism’ from its pretenders. Further, and beyond Keynes, in Hayek,
the very categories of experience and thought are translated into the register
of the individual.
Hayek’s ‘true individualism’ as he conceives it, ‘began its modern
development with John Locke’.35 In a tradition that was earlier identified as
the reflective philosophy of subjectivity, which runs from Locke through
Hayek to the present, the finitude of thought and of the human being are
taken, paradoxically, as unshakeable grounds. Such inconsistencies, along
with other troubling issues regarding the intellectual probity of this tradition
might induce the temptation to dismiss it out of hand. But what is important
is the social and political impact of this line of thought, down to the question
of ultimately what in this tradition and its derivatives is taken as thought.
In this tradition, ideas ultimately result from the experience of individuals.
Subjectivism or individualism thus draws thought back to the coordination
of the various sense experiences. Thought here is a business matter, involving
little more than the administration of sense experience. This involves a
radical delimitation of the idea and its consequences. Locke is a great critic of
opinion, to be sure, but against it the idea is given a very narrow and reduced
sense. As Hegel explains:
Locke goes on to say that all people are conscious of what they think, and
what the mind occupies itself with is ideas. People have different ‘ideas’.
These are really ‘representations’, for by ‘idea’ we understand something
different. In Locke’s case ‘ideas’ are such things as the ideas of elephant,
white, hardness, softness, rest, motion and so forth.36
This Lockean conception of ideation and the finite individual runs through the
history of English and other empiricisms and is subsequently taken up in the late
nineteenth century as the presumedly solid ground of what becomes modern
economics. In the process, ideation is principally taken as the integrative act
of a finite individual consciousness. Oscillating between Lockean empiricism
and Kantian synthetic apperception, Hayek concludes, with confidence:
‘It is not only those mental entities, such as “concepts” or “ideas”, which are
commonly recognized as “abstractions”, but all mental phenomenon, sense
perceptions and images as well as the more abstract “concepts” and “ideas”
must be regarded as acts of classification performed by the brain.’37
The business world and its repetition in politics is not a battlefield
of thought or even a ‘marketplace of ideas’. It might then be tempting to
Where Thought Is Not 191
conclude that capitalist business and the capitalist state are the key sites today
where thought is not. Still, just as capitalism rests on constant change – or at
least modification – while being terrified by genuine change, capitalism in its
practical instantiation requires that the transindividual thought and action
that it rests on be misrepresented as the action of individuals. Whatever
happens in the process of appropriation and ownership, thought remains a
transindividual act in which particular bodies are traversed and seized by
truths. There is a dual and contradictory process here in which the history of
capitalism rests on the expansion of transindividuality and its representation
in terms of individuals. In the transindividual creation of novelties, there is
a constant reactive effort to put these novelties in their place. Not to obscure
them, because the powers unleashed by these novelties is so blindingly
obvious, but rather to put them in their place, to locate transindividual
capacities in the individual, to reduce thought to the finitude of the human
beings that are its bearers.
Against this effort at placement, thought always arises from the concrete
location of a particular, mortal human individual but at the same time is
radically exceptional to that or indeed any other place. Thought is the
human capacity to be seized by the truths that arise out of knowledge and
against opinion, and moreover, thought is the human capacity to be more
than a particular, finite, limited individual. Thought, which is here as always
something that disrupts interest, confronts opinion and exceeds knowledge,
involves contact with a truth that is uncontainable in place. As Lacan puts it,
‘what is frightening about truth is what it puts in its place’.38
Thought and sophistry bear a fundamentally different relation to finitude,
location and the human body. Sophistry embraces particularity while
thought arises out of particularity and mortal finitude but exceeds it. It makes
sense to recognize that thought requires assigning the sophist to their place
(C 18) because the sophist has only their place, their desires, their interests
and opinion and a little bit of knowledge. The effort or even the idea that it
would be possible to ‘put thought in its place’ is destined to failure because
thought has on the one hand a place, a bearer, a representative in a mortal
body. On the other hand, thought is also generic, placeless, dislocated or
decentred with respect to the body of ‘the thinker’. Where thought is not is
in this finite, restricted mortal body. Thought exists in the transit out of this
and all restrictions to limitation, finitude and the individual human being.
13
For Badiou, philosophy follows two universal rules. The first is that it must
construct a coherent concept of truth that renders what he calls the four
generic procedures compossible: art, science, politics and love. Philosophy
only exists, then, if there already exist truth procedures occurring in these four
domains. The second is that it must re-think the intra-philosophical effects of
certain generic procedures it is contemporaneous with. The reason this duty
needs to be constantly taken up anew is that philosophy not only depends
upon the extra-philosophical existence of these four generic procedures;
it must also be engaged in a constant dialogue with them, opening itself
up to the possibility of having to reconsider and re-work its own internal
operations under the pressure of their unprecedented constructions. Badiou
names this second rule conditioning. In his magnum opus Being and Event
(1998), the two conditions of mathematics and poetry play a crucial role
over the course of the book. Mathematics thinks ontology and the poetry
of Stéphane Mallarmé is called upon to think the event. We ask how and in
what way Badiou renews philosophy by focusing on the relation between
the conditions of poetry and mathematics – of Mallarmé and set theory,
respectively – in Badiou’s work, as well as by examining the methodological
presuppositions that underwrite his doctrine of conditions.
The first step is to determine what conditioning minimally consists of by
identifying what it is not. The doctrine of conditioning in no way implies a
pure submission of the philosopher to the autonomous mode of thinking
at work in the conditions. Regarding the artistic condition, this would see
the philosopher attempt to first reconstruct the intrinsic particularities of
the poem or artwork in question, and only then transpose it as such into
their philosophical apparatus. As Badiou has remarked, ‘I think that
literary events are indeed operative for philosophy, but when philosophy
puts them as conditions for its own development, it nonetheless proceeds
194 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Mallarmé therefore plays a twofold role in Being and Event. On the one
hand, he is an example of a postevental truth procedure, which produced
‘the truth of French poetry after Hugo’ (BE 404). But on the other, the truth
procedure he was engaged in involved a poetic thinking of the event: ‘Un
Coup de dés [is] the greatest theoretical text that exists on the conditions
for thinking the event.’9 This is what makes Mallarmé, properly speaking,
a condition for the philosopher. In fact, Badiou generalizes this thesis to
the whole of poetry tout court. In the essay ‘What Is a Poem?’, he writes
‘philosophy will recognize that, in summoning the retention of what
disappears, every naming of an event or of the evental presence is in its
essence poetic’ (HB 26).10 What allows this to take place is modern poetry’s
most crucial philosophical achievement, as Badiou conceives it, namely its
dissolution of the category of the object.11 As he states, modern poets such as
Mallarmé and Rimbaud were engaged in an unprecedented poetic procedure
that lead to ‘the destitution of the category of the object, and of objectivity,
as necessary forms of presentation’ (MP 72). If an object is what can be
rigorously discerned by the knowledge of a situation, then the event, which
poetry is supposed to name, cannot in any way take the form of an object:
‘This is what Mallarmé tells us: Whoever restores the category of the object,
which the event always revokes, is led back to abolition, pure and simple’
(HB 136). Following Mallarmé, in his reading of Un Coup de dés, Badiou
therefore distinguishes between a use of language that ‘employs language
for commercial tasks alone’ – that is, language that continues to circulate
linguistic values already recognized in a situation – and poetry, which folds
language ‘to the paradoxical function of maintaining that which, being
radically singular, pure action, would without it have fallen back into the
nullity of the place’ (BE 192 – modified trans.). The possibility of capturing
the event in a signifier is dependent upon poetry – not mathematics.
Nevertheless, in examining and assessing the capacity of poetry to think
and name the event, what we hope to show is that it is necessarily mediated by
the mathematical condition and its meta-ontological consequences. In other
words, in terms of their philosophical distribution, the conditions do not exist
on an equal plane. To establish this, we shall first turn to the relation between
poetry and the three orientations of thought outlined in Being and Event,
namely the generic, the constructivist and the transcendental. Succinctly
put, we will show that without a generic philosophical and mathematical
mediation, the role poetry plays in naming the event will always threaten
to lead thought either down a constructivist or transcendental path. After
which, we shall examine the mathematical procedure of forcing and the way
it retrospectively determines the contours of the event. Finally, we shall turn
to Badiou’s reading of Un Coup de dés in ‘Meditation Nineteen’, as well as his
The Priority of Conditions 197
II
that is evoked at the opening of Un Coup de dés, he can never establish the
ontological correlate of this poetic metaphor. In fact, all his intra-poetic
indexes of what exists ‘beyond all structure’ (BE 26) can always be positioned
against the backdrop of a theological horizon where the only conceivable
beyond is God himself. Without inscribing his reading of Mallarmé within
the framework of his generic mathematical ontology, Badiou’s claims about
the poet would be guilty of erring towards constructivist or transcendent
modes of thought. Simply put, mathematics must have philosophical priority
in the doctrine of conditions.
III
This passage makes the following two things clear. Firstly, the matheme of
the event is not an analytical consequence of the transliteration of the axioms
of ZFC set theory into ontology. Secondly, the event must nonetheless remain
intelligible with respect to set theory, both in terms of its actual conceptual
contours and the language in which it is inscribed: it cannot be established
on the basis of mystical insight, sense-perception, or an ineffable experience
of the Divine. In other words, the event falls outside of the domain of
mathematics, yet its concept must be transmissible in its terms. What, then,
are the respective contributions made to the construction of the matheme of
the event by mathematics and Mallarmé’s poetry?
200 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Let’s begin with the mathematics. In the following passage, Badiou clarifies
what the relation of the multiple of the event to mathematical set theory is: ‘With
the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology.
Here, as always, ontology decides by means of a special axiom, the axiom of
foundation’ (BE 184). The axiom of foundation states that for all multiples α –
with α not being the empty set – there also exists another multiple β, which
belongs to α but which itself shares no multiples with α. More technically, the
intersection of α and β is the empty set, or what Badiou calls the proper name
of the void. This is written as such: α ∩ β = Ø. No multiple that belongs to
β also belongs to α. Regarding the multiple of the event, Badiou writes that
‘[c]onsidered as a multiple, the event contains, in addition to the elements of
its site, itself, which is thus presented by the presentation that it is’ (BE 189 –
modified trans.). Breaking with the axiom of foundation, the multiple of the
event does contain itself as an element. As a matheme, it is written as follows:
ex = {x ∈ X, ex}
the event is transmissible in the language of set theory and if it has an intelligible,
albeit negative, link to the axioms, then what irreplaceable contribution does
Mallarmé make to its formulation? Before we turn to Badiou’s reading of Un
Coup de dés, it is worth noting that the matheme of the event also anticipates the
procedure of forcing, which is identified as the ontological substructure for the
law of the subject and the being of a truth. Very schematically, the procedure of
forcing involves the construction of a generic extension to an initial situation.
Crucially, a statement that is undecidable in this situation will have been decided
in the generic extension. In Badiou’s meta-ontological transliteration, this
procedure constitutes the intra-mathematical inscription – or the ontological
substructure – of a truth procedure. He thus constructs the event in a manner
minimally consistent with what the procedure of forcing makes thinkable: that
is, the event will be an undecidable supplement that will have been decided
in its evental status over the infinite course of a truth procedure. In short, the
matheme of the event cannot be divorced from the procedure of forcing.
Turning to Un Coup de dés, Badiou begins by stating that ‘[t]he metaphor
of all evental-sites being on the edge of the void is edified on the basis
of a deserted horizon and a stormy sea’. He continues: ‘The term with
which Mallarmé always designates a multiple presented in the vicinity of
unpresentation is the Abyss’ (BE 192). The poet stages a metaphor that gives
the topology of the concept of the evental site, from which the multiples of
the event will be drawn.14 In the matheme of the event, the evental site is
designated by the term X:
ex = {X ∈X, ex}
An evental site has the singular property of being a multiple that belongs
to a situation while none of the multiples that belong to it also belong to this
same situation. As Badiou writes: ‘I will term evental site an entirely abnormal
multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in
the situation’ (BE 175). Insofar as nothing can be differentiated within it, the
image of the Abyss metaphorically corresponds to the concept of the evental
site: like a completely abnormal multiple, nothing that is within the Abyss
can be counted by the situation in which the Abyss is itself counted in its
indivisible massivity. This is the meaning of the topological metaphor Badiou
draws on to describe the Abyss as being ‘in the vicinity of unpresentation’
(BE 192): that is, the multiples that belong to it are unpresented or void with
respect to the situation that presents the Abyss.
Badiou claims that Mallarmé stages a particular paradox associated with
the evental site, namely that ‘it can only be recognized on the basis of what it
does not present in the situation in which it is presented’. He states: ‘Mallarmé
brilliantly presents this paradox by composing, on the basis of the site – the
202 Badiou and His Interlocutors
The event will thus not only happen within the site, but on the basis of
the provocation of whatever unpresentability is contained in the site: the
ship ‘buried in the depths’, and whose plenitude – since the Ocean alone
is presented – authorizes the announcement that the action will take
place ‘from the bottom of a shipwreck’ […]. Consequently, the name
of the event – whose entire problem, as I have said, lies in thinking its
belonging to the event itself – will be placed on the basis of one piece
of this debris: the captain of the shipwrecked vessel, the ‘master’ whose
arm is raised above the waves, whose fingers tighten around the two dice
whose casting upon the surface of the sea is at stake. (BE 192–193)
Almost all of the elements of the poem that Badiou transliterates into the
matheme of the event have now been established: the topology of the evental
site, the unpresented or void multiples that belong to it, and finally the name
or signifier of the event itself, which Badiou insists is undecidable.
We shall now turn to the most crucial moment in his reading, which
opens with a question: ‘Why is the event – such that it occurs in one of the
site on the basis of “shipwrecked” multiples that this one solely presents
in their one-result – a cast of dice here?’ The answer Badiou gives is ‘[b]
ecause this gesture symbolizes the event in general; that is, that which
is purely hazardous, and which cannot be inferred from the situation,
yet which is nevertheless a fixed multiple, a number, that nothing can
modify once it has laid out the sum – “refolded the division” – of its visible
faces’ (BE 193). Like the result of a throw of dice, the event is absolutely
contingent. Once it has occurred, however, it is named as an event and
henceforth exists as a fixed multiple. That said, insofar as Badiou believes
Mallarmé is set upon producing an absolute symbol of the event in Un
Coup de dés – of the event in its essential undecidability – he argues that
The Priority of Conditions 203
the poet knows he is conceptually required to never show the dice actually
being cast:
Badiou will argue that the constellation emerges at the close of the poem
as a kind of reward for the conceptual precision Mallarmé demonstrates
here.15 Before continuing, it is worth clarifying exactly what the event being
undecidable with respect to its belonging to the situation of its upsurge
actually means. Recall the matheme of the event:
ex = {x ∈ X, ex}
subject of an event will wager they will have constructed in the course of
a generic procedure. Undecidability is therefore a property meaningfully
attached to the event only insofar as the procedure of forcing establishes the
thinkable possibility that an undecidable statement will have been decided
in a generic extension. The undecidability of the event means that it hovers
precariously, like the feather in Un Coup de dés, between one situation –
which definitively excludes it – and another situation – which will, perhaps,
have been constructed and in which the event will, again perhaps, have been
decided. In other words, undecidability must be given this precise meta-
ontological meaning, which is first grounded in the mathematics and only
then deciphered within the poetry.
IV
In the final section, we shall critically assess this reading by focusing on the
question of interpretation. When we began this chapter, we spoke about how the
doctrine of conditions implied a complex distribution of activity and passivity
on the part of the philosopher. This distribution, we argued, is weighted in
the favour of the mathematical condition for essential reasons. Having always
to mediate the poetry by way of mathematical and meta-ontological results
established prior to the fact, the philosopher necessarily engages in a highly
active interpretative and appropriative procedure with respect to it. Our final
argument will not, however, involve saying that Badiou’s analysis of Mallarmé
misses the mark. On the contrary, we agree with Lyotard when he says that his
reading in Being and Event is ‘a very beautiful reading, perhaps the best that has
ever been made of the Coup de dés’.16 Rather, our aim is to demonstrate, given
the de facto existence of other possible interpretations, that Badiou can be seen
to systematically fix the meaning of Mallarmé’s texts within a predetermined
mathematical horizon. To do this, we will briefly invoke Jacques Rancière’s
interpretation of Mallarmé in The Politics of the Siren (1996). By putting
Rancière and Badiou in parallel, we shall bring out the way Badiou selectively
interprets Mallarmé so as to make the poetic operations he identifies interlock
with the results his mathematical ontology has already grounded.
Mallarmé’s late sonnet A la nue accablante tu has often been considered as
a miniature counterpart to Un Coup de dés:
À la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu
The Priority of Conditions 205
Of A la nue accablante tu, Badiou writes that the poet stages two successive
vanishing terms in order to inscribe the essential undecidability of the event:
‘That which took place, the ship, must fail in its having-taken-place’ – which
is to say be annulled by the vanishing siren – ‘if the poem is the thought of
the event as such’ (C 53). Badiou concludes: ‘This is the only way in which the
poem can give us the gift of the event with its undecidability. Annulment is
finally that which adds to the vanishing subtraction of the event the necessity
of deciding on its name’ (C 53 – modified trans.). The syntactical structure
of the poem is determined by the conceptual requirement of presenting the
essential undecidability of the event, which consequently makes it necessary
206 Badiou and His Interlocutors
to proceed to its nomination. This decision would be the first step in a truth
procedure. So far, this is consistent with what the mathematical procedure of
forcing retroactively makes necessary in thinking about the event.
But does this reading exhaust the interpretative possibilities of the poem?
Is there, in other words, another reading that could frame its undecidability
in a conflicting manner? The poem gives an explicit reason as to why one
vanishing term follows another: it is in fact ‘for lack/Of some high perdition’,
such as the shipwreck might have provided, that the Abyss – which is here
personified – ‘will avariciously have drowned/The child-like flank of a siren’.
While Badiou recognizes that the furious Abyss is ‘guilty of having drowned
the young siren’ (C 50), he does not ask why the lack of a shipwreck would
provoke the Abyss to do this or if the logic of such an enigmatic drama could
be mapped onto the relation between the event and its site. In addition, how
is it possible to drown a fictitious marine creature?
As Rancière has argued, the Abyss is an ambivalent figuration of the
audience Mallarmé aimed to address with his poetry. According to Rancière,
Mallarmé believed that this audience desired a grand drama that would reflect
its collective grandeur. Yet this audience was denied such a drama due to the
mediocrity of the time and the swarm of artistic simulacra it was otherwise
seduced by. In its blind fury, the Abyss drowns the child-like siren; a siren
that stands for the fragile poem Mallarmé would have offered the Abyss but
which, in its violent vulgarity, it abolishes. In a tragic paradox, this vulgarity
is in fact caused by the lack of the poem in the first place. Nevertheless, as
Rancière remarks, ‘sirens, in contrast to boats, do not drown in water. On
the contrary, they dive down in its depths to escape danger’.18 The ‘furibond’
Abyss – an adjective that describes a state of undignified agitation or fury – is
mistaken when it supposes it has drowned the siren, for the fragile siren-
poem has simply dived beneath the waves and returned to its natural aquatic
element. While Badiou argues that a specifically conceptual necessity is at
work in the poem, Rancière alternatively reads the poem as the figuration of
a complex poetico-political problematic Mallarmé encountered. If the poem
moves from shipwreck to siren, or rather from a shipwreck to a siren-poem
that has managed to avoid the impotent fury of the Abyss, then it is insofar
as it stages Mallarmé’s choice of poetic ideal: that of the poem as a vanishing
siren. Badiou’s reading, then, is predicated on a suppression of the semantics
of the poem. If, however, the semantics of the two vanishing terms are taken
into account, the syntax that is crucial for inscribing the undecidability of the
event is fundamentally transformed.
In presenting Rancière’s alternative reading, our aim has not been to judge
or assess the relative validity of either Badiou or Rancière’s accounts of the
poem. Rather it is to bring out the following two points. Firstly, the relation
The Priority of Conditions 207
between the event or the vanishing term and the Abyss, characterized by a
complex play of desire and repulsion, attraction and avoidance, cannot be
mapped onto the ontological distinction between unpresented multiples
and the site without suppressing its complex semantics. Secondly, the
two hypotheses as to the provenance of the foam on the surface of the sea
cannot be unequivocally considered as undecidable without a prior concept
of undecidability organizing the reading. Indeed, it could be argued that
Mallarmé decides on the siren over the shipwreck since the former incarnates
his poetic ideal.
Both Rancière and Badiou argue that the Abyss from A la nue accablante
tu is the same encountered in Un Coup de dés. The shipwreck and the Master
therefore have the same ambivalent relation to the Abyss as the siren-poem – a
relation that equally need not be reduced to the relation between unpresented
multiples and the site. Consequently, if the throw of dice is never seen to
occur, then, by Rancière’s reading, it is because it cannot be certain whether
the poem, like the song of the siren, will ever be heard. Hence the hypothetical
nature of the constellation that – perhaps – emerges on the glorious second-
last page of the poem. The constellation need not be considered a reward
for successfully carrying out a conceptual program as Badiou, following the
Australian critic Gardner Davies, takes it to be. Just like A la nue accablante
tu, Un Coup de dés can also be read as pursuing an entirely different program,
one which need not necessarily correspond to ‘the production of an absolute
symbol of the event’ (BE 193) but could instead involve the dramatization of
a specifically nineteenth century poetico-political problematic.
To close, it is worth mentioning that one of the most important claims
Badiou makes about Mallarmé is that his concept of undecidability compels –
perhaps forces – a decision. Recall the following passage: ‘Annulment is finally
that which adds to the vanishing subtraction of the event the necessity of
deciding on its name’ (C 53 – modified trans.). Further on in the same essay,
Badiou repeats this claim, writing that ‘the terms issuing from annulment
(siren, constellation) point to undecidability, and engage victorious thinking:
truth’ (C 57 – modified trans.). As we have already said, the specific concept
of undecidability at work in the matheme of the event is related to the fact
that one is required to decide on an event in order to begin constructing a
generic multiple – that is, a truth – within which the event will have been
decided. In the above passages, Badiou declares that the practical injunction
tied to this singular sense of undecidability – that of having to decide at the
point of the undecidable – is found in Mallarmé’s poetry. With respect to
the hypothetical appearance of the constellation that closes Un Coup de dés,
Badiou avers that ‘the constellation is subtractively equivalent, “on some
vacant superior surface”, to any being which what-happens shows itself to
208 Badiou and His Interlocutors
be capable of, and fixes for us the task of interpreting it’ (BE 197). In other
words, its undecidability is a spur to a truth procedure that will have decided
it. Badiou’s young student, Quentin Meillassoux, however, notes that in
the poem, the emergence of the constellation is qualified by the adverb
‘PERHAPS’. As he writes:
Joe Gelonesi interview with Alain Badiou for The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio National
(RN), 30 November 2014.
212 Badiou and His Interlocutors
this is why we have the third necessity, which is in some sense the
mediation between the two, the mediation between the strategic
idea and the strength of the movement, which is the question of
organization. It’s always the most obscure question in the field of
politics, it’s central but it’s a very difficult question. Because it’s the
question of the relationship between action and thinking, and the
relationship between action and thinking is the very heart of true
politics, and organization is theoretically the place where something
like that is active, is real. It is why during one century, the Leninist
party has been dominant. It has been dominant because it has been
victorious in Russia and so on. It was a proposition, a concrete
proposition concerning the relationship between theory and
practice, between the strategic idea and the tactic of revolution.
And now this paradigm is out, and so we must invent a new
paradigm, that is a new conception of organization which is in
some sense, less military, less under the law of strict discipline,
centralization and so on, which is much more near the movement.
But to be near the movement is not to be confused with the
movement, the political organization cannot disappear in the
movement, we know that. We know also, that if the organization is
without the movement, finally the organization and the state are the
same thing, it’s the history of the socialist state. So we have the state,
we have the movement, we have the strategic idea, and we have the
political organization: this is our problem. If I have a solution to this
problem, I shall give it to you immediately … I have not!
15
JC: Alain, thank you for agreeing to this interview – or being forced to
agree (laughter). We have a few questions for you, both general and
specific about your most recent work. You said earlier that there is a
triplet of philosophy: first, the leaving of the cave, a kind of mystical
moment; second moment, the moment of return; and then the
third, how the light of the absolute can be practised in the cave as a
work of philosophy. Can you say something more specifically about
Immanence of Truths, the book you are working on at the moment,
in this regard?
AB: I think that the Immanence of Truths has, at first, a synthetic
function, as always for the third book. In Being and Event, the
fundamental question was to propose an ontological framework
where it is possible to identify what is a truth, and how we can
identify what is a truth neither in a purely formal context – to say
that truth is something like judgment, universal judgement with
some given form – nor in the ontological way which affirms the
existence of transcendence, God and so on … But the question
was to create an ontological framework where being as such is
pure multiplicity and nothing else, but how is it possible to identify
something like a truth in this framework. The conclusion is in some
sense that we cannot. Because we must introduce the form of being
that is not reducible, not exactly to pure multiplicity, but to the
system of pure multiplicity which is included in given situations. So
something comes from outside in some sense, but I would say this is
a metaphor: something happens and so, finally, it is the disposition
of Being and Event and with this disposition we can identify a truth
as a generic multiplicity.
exist for a generic multiplicity, that is, the synthesis between the two
definitions of truth, finally, in the two first books and I have explicitly
said that I ‘don’t take care of this question’ [laughter]. So it’s for my
‘descendants’. But it’s the true question … probably not simple.
My question in Immanence of Truths is in some sense at another
level. It’s neither the question of being nor of existence. It’s much
more the question of the particularity of truths from another point
of view than its ontological nature, generic multiplicity, first, and
the conditions of its appearing, like in Logics of World. But it’s much
more a descriptive theory of what is a truth in relationship to its
proper absoluteness. So it’s a theory in some sense much more
logical – like a general logic of all that. By the explanation of the
very nature of a truth from the point of view of its relationship
to finitude and the infinite, and some positive description of
truths in the different forms of truths. This is why at the end of
the book we have – or we will have [laughter] – some precise
descriptions concerning the qualitative difference of truths. And
the first qualitative descriptions of what is a truth procedure in the
framework of politics and so on. I have said something about this
question but not systematically.
So the most important categories in this book are the absolute,
first, which is not a category of the two previous books. So not
the question of the universality of judgment but the question of
the absoluteness of truths – they are not the same thing. It’s a
question of the infinite, naturally, and the question of finitude. So
it’s also the possibility to distinguish the different polemics in the
different books. Being and Event is, frankly, against the idea of the
poetical nature of ontology – something like that. So it’s a book
against Heidegger, in fact. It’s possible to read Being and Event as
a book against Heidegger. … Now the text of my 1986 seminar on
Heidegger, my habilitation, is coming out in spring and so I re-read
my seminar with many surprises [laughter].
My most important surprise was that all that, subjectively, was in
fact an explanation with Heidegger, and so an explanation not only
with Heidegger but across Heidegger with the French Heideggerian
current. So also with my good friends, Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe and my good enemies Derrida … and all that.
And you know that during practically thirty years from Being
and Nothingness of Sartre to Nancy, French philosophy has been
Heideggerian, largely. And retrospectively, it was clear for me that I
was also Heideggerian in some sense, because of Sartre and so on.
222 Badiou and His Interlocutors
AL: On that note actually I’d like to ask you … a question about something
you raised earlier today … namely the question of the interplay
between generic procedures. Specifically, I’d like you to elaborate on
it if possible. For example, are you talking about an interplay between
discrete conditions, i.e. possible connections between politics and
love, or are you talking about an inter-conditional connection; say for
example the various artistic truths, and so I suppose how that relates to
the question of a truths singularity?
AB: Yes. You know that to pose the question of the relationship between
two different procedures, we must apprehend what the situation is of
this connection. In my opinion, there is no easy beginning, no easy
abstract theory of the connection because if we think the procedure
at the too-general level, you find the same concerns, so it’s very
difficult to return to the clear understanding of the connection itself.
But for example, concerning the question this morning on ‘climate
change’, it’s clearly a situation between science and politics … for
sure, it’s a clear example and the difficulty is here: the difficulty is
that the scientific affirmations are not by itself the solution to the
problem of something which is between science and politics. And
this is why, finally, you have a mixture between scientific conviction
and political activism. So the creation of a new subjectivation that
is not of one procedure, but the intersection of two procedures.
Another example is in art. Very often, art organizes the thinking
of the interplay between two different procedures. It’s clear, for
example, that classical tragedy is the creation of a space, an artistic
space, to dispose the relationship between love and politics. And
certainly we must understand why it’s the third procedure, art, which
is the point of view for the examination of the relationship between
love and politics. Is it possible to have a general theory? I explore this
point in my ‘future book’ (laughter). But for the moment, I have no
clear vision explaining this point. I clearly understand that we have
situations where the problem is precisely the correlation between
two or more procedures. It has been clear of tragedy from the
beginning. Tragedy is always some form of the relationship between
love and politics. And the theory of the interplay between social
transformation – which is the classical field of politics – and the
science of the becoming of nature is also a typical example.
With tragedy we know, it’s an invention to say something about
this relationship: for climate change, we don’t know really, because
there is a juxtaposition between political activism and scientific
determination. But science as such is always very cautious, and an
230 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Grothendieck, thought that it was not true, finally, it was not so;
mathematics continued. And so it was uninteresting for him. And
so he went to the country with ‘le moutons’ (sheep) (laughter).
So the fable of renegation, in science. It is possible also in
science … and for clear reasons, exactly the same: the project
was too big to support the possibility. From the very beginning
in some forms of ultra-leftism of May 1968, I have understood
myself that the project was too big; it was imaginary; it was false,
in fact. And there was impatience because, progressively, they see
that in regard to this big project, which they participate in, which
is something correct and interesting, is really small. The time
was not right for the destruction of the French state, not at all
and finally they said ‘the country is calm’. And it was true; it was
true in one sense. But even in big revolutions, in some sense the
country is calm. The majority of the country is always calm.
And so, coincidentally, it was the same thing: the idea was too
big for the process. And it’s also the impossibility of the romantic
conception of love – Tristan and Isolde and so on – whose unique
destiny is death. Because the absolute love is too big for the
situation. Finally, they must negotiate with King Mark and King
Mark is a difficult negotiator (laughter). And so it’s not renegation
but it’s the same in the form of absolutization – but absolutization
is death. There is nothing else. And so this question of renegation,
different forms of renegation, why renegation, of communication
between different truth procedures, concerning this point, I agree
absolutely with you it’s a very interesting theory, a very interesting
theory. And to be faithful is fundamental … because it’s the price to
pay for truth. And renegation is destructive, only destructive. And
you know the consequence of renegation; finally you go far away, far
away (laughter). You return to the old world, quickly.
AJB: John, Lauren you have a question?
JC1: I have a question.
My question is about the absolute and mathematics. At the
beginning of Immanence of Truths, you argue for an absolute
place, a singular place of mathematics – a single set theoretical
universe. So first question is ‘what’s at stake in the singularity of an
ontological place’? And secondly, ‘what are the consequences of that
singularity for truths, for instance, in particular, of mathematics’?
If mathematics is a truth procedure and truth procedures are made
up of generic extensions, what are the consequences of the idea that
mathematics is a truth in an absolute place?
‘The Movement of Emancipation’ 233
AB: You know, I don’t say that mathematics is absolute. I say that
mathematics is, for the moment, the only way we know to propose
a concept of the absolute. Exactly as I say when, very often, people
say to me, ‘oh, well, you think that being is mathematics’. But not
at all! It’s not at all. Being is being. We can say that the mediation
is that being is pure multiplicity, maybe, and after that you say that
mathematics is the way we know. Maybe there exists some other
ways that we don’t know, it’s a possibility, but it’s the only way we
know to have an idea of what is, effectively, pure multiplicity and
so Being as such. So it’s question of truth procedures, concerning
this specific knowledge which is ontology, precisely. It is a means,
mathematics is the means we have, to understand something
concerning being as such. And so it’s limited. Concerning the
absolute, it’s an ontological category. That is the idea of a place
where we suppose that there exists the totality of the possible form
of the multiple as such. So it’s a fiction of the class of all sets. It’s a
fiction because the set of all sets is a contradiction. Therefore we
have this fiction, which is something purely normative in some
sense, because we cannot have a complete concept of the class of all
sets. But I name that the absolute because if something is absolute,
it is designated by the fiction. Not thought by the fiction. It is the
designation of the mathematical fiction. And mathematicians
themselves, mathematicians whose job concerns the theory of sets,
proceed by some form of the manipulation of the fiction: that is they
use classes – it’s necessary to be cautious, because quickly we have
contradictions but they are just this side of contradiction – and all
that is the work to determine as absolutely referential the fiction
of the class of all forms of multiplicity. That is the place where in
some sense, mathematics produces some new truths of ontological
destination, and that is why there is no real problem. It is not
because mathematics is the way to understand something with the
help of some fiction concerning what is the place where all forms of
being can be understood, that there is something different from the
other truth procedures. It’s only that the ontological part of all forms
of reality can be thought in the form of multiplicity as such. If we
want to absolutely have some knowledge of all that, it’s mathematics.
But in many circumstances, for many forms of creation, for many
other truth procedures, the ontological level is useless: it’s not
necessary to be at that level, it’s not always the case. For example, in
architecture, there is a part of geometry, in physics – which is also
a truth procedure, a truth procedure of our specific world – the
234 Badiou and His Interlocutors
Encomium
16
The Beginner
Lia Hills
Logic dictates that you wear a red dress to a Trades Hall to listen to an old
Marxist give a lecture. A red dress that once belonged to someone else, though
you don’t know who – maybe a lover, maybe a poet, a tosser of cobblestones,
a free-wheeling mathematician, a proclaimer of the impossible. People are
nervous, excited. The ‘greatest living philosopher’ has come to town. Alain
Badiou sits on the stage, watches the gathering crowd, a mic placed before
him. He must speak in English. It is the language of this place, albeit not
the queen’s version. For the next few days, he must largely leave behind his
native French; talk, as the idiom would have it, like a ‘vache espagnole’. It is
part of philosophy’s inscription in the world as it is – though by no means
a metaphysical necessity – to converse in the language of globalization, of
capitalism, whose ideological power rests, he tells us, on the belief that it is
not possible to imagine living any other system. Later, in another lecture, he
will jest, ‘Maybe God himself speaks English today’.
II
The philosophical act is to corrupt the youth. ‘It’s my business’, says Badiou
with his characteristic cough-snort. He likes to play – to seek the impasse in
the rules of the game. And he’s looking for others to join him. A revolution is a
collective act. This he learned in May ’68, where it was written on the walls: ‘The
most important thing is to desire what is impossible’. But France is a paradise
lost. The monsters returned. ‘Plato would be happy to discover New Zealand’,
he says ironically. The Antipodeans smile to themselves at the notion that Plato
might have even given them thought – bugger anachronisms. The arse-end of
the world finally on the philosophical map! ‘The true republic established here’.
But there is something of the utopian in all this. A man who speaks of
affirming the impossible – its name: equality – against the violent dictates of
240 Badiou and His Interlocutors
an economic discourse that poses as the Real. Does the Real function as ‘an
imperative of submission’ or one of emancipation?, he postulates. Can we
escape – step out of Plato’s cave – and, if so, how? The crowd leans forward.
Some hold their breath. There is new theory here, but also a call. Alain Badiou,
septuagenarian, soixante-huitard – the first to show that all philosophers
before him eventually fall back on a theory of the One – is not just describing
his vision of the Real, but is launching an appeal through academic halls, so
often places of inaction. ‘Come out of the cave of possibility’, he says. ‘The
true desire is the desire of a real life’. When the painter dips a finger in red
acrylic, searches for a new principle amidst the uneven surface of the gesso;
the lover falls to arise in a new world, one of duel construction, forever driven
to affirm the moment of the falling, remain faithful to it; the student pitches
a ripped-up cobblestone against the limits of a discourse, breaching it with a
call, Soyez réaliste, demandez l’impossible!; the scientist, hand paused beside
the blackboard, the formula not yet complete but writing itself as chalk dust
collates at her feet; the poet, fist poised above the page.
But what of the philosopher? There are some in the audience, fully fledged,
half-baked, students of, aspirants. Among them, there too is the desire for
subjectivity, regardless of how that sits within the theory. You can see it in their
faces, hear it in the hallways after every one of Badiou’s lectures or master classes.
For some of them it is the reason why, if truth be told, that they have journeyed
through the night, across a sea or a border, left behind unfinished papers. If
‘happiness is the arrival, in an individual, of the Subject that he discovers himself
capable of becoming’,1 is their happiness to be had by those who work not only
within the conditions of philosophy, but within philosophy itself?
III
To time, a time.
To finitude.
The possible.
If you’re not careful, he’ll make you feel you’re twice his age.
The Beginner 241
IV
VI
Melbourne wakes to another November dawn. The city feels empty, flatter
than it actually is. The philosopher has flown. We grapple in messages to
understand what happened. To pinpoint, articulate, maintain fidelity. There
is a sense of rupture. Of living in the wake. Of the morning after.
‘To walk, then, under the imperative of a true Idea, destines us to
happiness’,2 Badiou writes in a new work, still in the throes of translation.
A call to action.
A warning.
A parting gift.
Notes
Introduction
1 The lectures and interviews were transcribed from Badiou’s English by Jai
Bentley-Payne, Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey and A. J. Bartlett.
2 Keating also described Darwin, Australia’s most northern city, as best seen
from a plane headed to Europe. This confident, intelligent irreverence is all
but gone out of what passes for public life in Australia today.
3 In order to serve a (re)newed will to classification, determination and
circumscription of peoples, Australia runs an offshore ‘archipelago’ of
indefinite detention for would be seekers of asylum, specifically those
who arrive by boat and from countries Australia is actively involved in
rendering uninhabitable one way or another: military and surveillance
support of the Sri-Lankan state against the Tamils; wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, etc., and the usual ‘run of the mill’ exploitation and corruption of
resources and peoples a functioning ‘democracy’ requires. The status and
treatment of these people are subject to periodic, formulaic and ineffective
criticism. Internal dissension, including that of medical professionals,
has been subject to corporate style laws against ‘disclosure’. External
and international agencies including the United Nations have made the
usual noises. These latter have no effect, not because Australia is deaf to
them necessarily, but because the logic of classification, determination
and circumscription used to effect these police actions is impeccably
contemporary and global, and would-be critiques only serve to repeat it
after their own fashion. Hence, the critical (liberalist) posture, including
empirical ‘data’ and hermeneutic nuance, is its own repetition, lacking the
capacity or the knowledge to break with its own form. This is why certain
‘good Europeans’ are now (re)turning an admiring gaze on Australia’s
efforts at ‘on water matters’. As noted, the irony of Australia’s terror of
arrivals by sea should be lost on no one familiar with its short history; that
this irony affects a symptom in Lacan’s clinical sense, would bear an analysis
that continues to not be forthcoming.
Chapter 2
1 Badiou is referring here to the shooting death of a black teenager in
Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer, which sparked off massive street
protests across the United States. [Ed.]
2 See A. Ling’s contribution to this volume. [Ed.]
244 Notes
Chapter 4
1 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2014), p. 109.
2 See Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds.), Concept and Form, 2 vols.
(London: Verso, 2012).
3 Cf. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘History and Event in Alain Badiou’, trans.
Thomas Nail, Parrhesia 12 (2011), pp. 1–11.
4 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), p. 331.
5 For discussions of these works, see Emily Apter, ‘Laws of the 70s: Badiou’s
Revolutionary Untimeliness’, Cardozo Law Review 29:5 (2008), pp.
1885–1904. See as well Oliver Feltham, Badiou: Live Theory (London:
Continuum, 2008). The passage from Almagestes is cited on p. 134.
6 Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form, vol. 1, p. 206.
7 Sylvain Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom (Paris: Seuil, 1996), pp. 16–18.
8 A. Badiou, Jean-Paul Sartre (Editions Potemkine, 1980), p. 8. Adventure of
French Philosophy, trans. B. Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), p. convert.
9 Cf. BE convert p. 196.
10 Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), p. 18.
11 Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? p. 84.
12 Peter Hallward, ‘Order and Event’, New Left Review 53 (2008), p. 100.
13 See Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom, p. 119 (M 29–30).
14 Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom, p. 52; cf. (M 48).
15 Compare Althusser’s famous remark from Reading Capital: ‘The knowledge
of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet.’ Louis
Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 106. Knowing is opposed to identification, not continuous with
it, even when that knowing takes place between two subjects – the subject of
knowledge (the philosopher/historian) and the historical subject/actor.
16 His examples are not unfamiliar, and amount to classical revolutionary
sequences. The particular gain of Lazarus’s vision is that it decouples
significant sequences from the broader periods in which the subjective
element is rendered inscrutable. Key dates include 1792–1794; 1907–1917.
17 Robert Blanché, L’Axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1955), p. 46.
18 Despite their apparent similarity in effect, the conceptual distinction
between the isomorphism (which results from the symbolic work of the
axiomatic) and identification (which occurs within the imaginary) is crucial.
Notes 245
Chapter 5
1 E. C. Titchmarsh, Mathematics for the General Reader (New York: Dover,
1981).
2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and
G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); cited hereafter
in text as WP; I have modified the translation throughout, particularly the
note on Badiou.
3 R. Ruyer, Néo-Finalisme (Paris: PUF, 1952) and in particular Chapter Nine,
which is devoted to ‘“Absolute Surfaces” and Absolute Domains of Survey’,
pp. 95–109.
246 Notes
Chapter 6
1 Translated by C. Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts.
2 G. Frege, Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache
des reinen Denkens (Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert, 1897). Translated as
Concept Script, A Formal Language of Pure Thought Modeled upon That of
Arithmetic, by S. Bauer-Mengelberg in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book
in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, ed. J. van Heijenoort (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967).
3 M. Davis, Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer
(New York: Norton, 2000), p. 55.
4 Davis, Engines of Logic… p. 56.
5 van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel… p. 125.
6 J. Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since
Freud’, in Écrits: the First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink (New
York: Norton, 2006), 412–441. See also his discussion in chapter 3 of The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and
Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 26–38.
7 Lacan qualifies this statement by recalling the concept of buttoning points,
points de capiton, which function as paradoxical immanent points of
guarantee within the world of discourse.
8 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV, Lesson of 24.4.67, XVIII 2. All
further references to Seminar XIV are to this translation.
9 Plato, Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Complete Works,
ed. J. M. Cooper and ass. ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1997), pp. 457–505.
10 Lacan, Seminar XVIII 3, lesson of 24.4.67.
11 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality,
The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 1999).
12 Lacan, Écrits, p. 428.
13 Lacan, Écrits, p. 429.
14 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 34.
15 Although he does not conceptualize it in this way, Freud’s account of
primary identification follows this same trajectory. As the child copies and
repeats a certain trait possessed by its parents (usually the father; Freud’s
examples are a cough or a certain look) a meaning begins to be attached
to it. The trait, that is, starts to represent something the child wishes to
248 Notes
emulate and, like Dora’s father’s cough, this feature becomes incorporated
into the subject’s behaviour. Formed around the repetitions of the Einziger
Zug, an image of the self as a whole or One emerges.
16 In the lesson of 24.5.67, Lacan asserts that there is no jouissance except of
one’s own body. The examples Lacan gives of this repetitive bodily ‘writing’
are largely mechanical, unthinking actions such as walking (and, one
would assume, sex). But since we are dealing at this point with the pre-
lingual, pre-castrated subject-to-be, the division between its own body and
the Other has not yet occurred. For this reason, Lacan can also say without
contradicting himself that ‘The body itself, is, from the origin, this locus of
the Other, insofar as it is there that, from the origin, there is inscribed the
mark qua signifier.’ See the lesson of 31 May 1967.
17 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 4.
18 1.61803… = 1 + 1/1.61803….
19 Lacan, Seminar XIV, lesson of 19.4.67.
20 An irrational number, the golden ratio approximates to 1.6180340….
As noted anonymously in the margins of the French transcription of the
seminar, Lacan actually uses the mathematical ‘inverse’ of the golden
number in his demonstrations, that is, 0.6180340…. The square of this
number is 0.38196602515. Hence 1 – 0.6180340 = 0.38196602515, and 1 –
0.38196602515… = 0.6180340.…
21 See ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Ecrits, p. 429.
22 ‘…the small a is the metaphorical child of the One and the Other, insofar as
it is born as a piece of refuse from the inaugural repetition, which, in order
to be repetition, requires this relation of the One to the Other’. Seminar
XIV, lesson of 24.4.67.
23 In addition, unlike in formal logic, in Aristotelian logic we are still dealing
with questions of Being. See P.S. Popov:
In the last analysis, the diversity of Aristotle’s categories rests on the
concept of being and is of fundamental importance for logic since
the root of the categories lie in Aristotle’s theory of the concept.
For formal logicians, logic essentially not a way of obtaining
knowledge, but only a group of rules of thought. Where Aristotle
sees a problem of knowledge, the formalists find only a question of
observing certain simple rules of thought.
P. S. Popov, ‘The Logic of Aristotle and Formal Logic’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 8:1 (September, 1947), pp. 1–22, 16.
24 For an excellent account of the history of the square of opposition and
contemporary geometric challenges to it (including a brief description of
Lacan’s revision), see A. Moretti, ‘The Geometry of Logical Opposition’,
PhD thesis, Faculty of Humanities Institute of Philosophy, University of
Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2009) @ http://alessiomoretti.perso.sfr.fr
/NOTMorettiPhD2009GeometryLogicalOpposition.pdf (accessed 25
November 2013).
Notes 249
Chapter 7
1 Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels, ‘Introduction’, in Alain Badiou, The Age of
the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-century Poetry and Prose, ed. &
trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), p. xx.
2 Elie During, ‘Art’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen, 2010),
p. 92.
3 Jan Jagodzinski, ‘Badiou’s Challenge to Art and Its Education: Or “art
cannot be taught – it can however educate!”’ Educational Philosophy and
Theory 42:2 (2010), p. 177.
4 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 70.
250 Notes
Chapter 8
1 The two crucial references here are: E 25–28 & SP 5–15.
2 ‘Figures de la féminité dans le monde contemporain’, unpublished paper
delivered in Athens (2011), p. 10. Hereafter in-text as FF.
3 I’ve dealt with this subject in my entry on ‘Feminism’ in The Badiou
Dictionary, ed. S. Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
4 Galatians, 3:28–29.
5 The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts/
Tragédie en trois actes, trans. S. Spitzer (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013), Act I, Scene 4. Hereafter referred to in-text as IA.
6 ‘Sophie Germain’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, Paris, no. 10, June (1993), p. 12.
7 1 Corinthians 11: 7–10.
8 1 Corinthians 11: 3.
9 ‘The Scene of Two’, trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21 (2003), p. 42.
Hereafter referred to in-text as ST.
10 ‘What Is Love’. Hereafter referred to in-text as WL/C.
11 In Logics of Worlds, Badiou succinctly dismisses arguments ‘reducing’
the form of sexed relations to distinct cultural configurations: ‘Love is
an experience of truth and as such is always identifiable whatever the
historical context may be’ (LW 131).
12 I’ve undertaken a comparison of Badiou and Irigaray on questions such
as this in: ‘Life-giving Sex versus Mere Animal Existence: Irigaray’s and
Badiou’s Paradoxically Chiasmatic Conceptions of “Woman” and Sexual
Pleasure’, forthcoming in an edited volume of papers from the Irigaray
Circle 2011 conference.
252 Notes
Chapter 9
1 A. Badiou and L. Sedofsky, ‘Matters of Appearance: An Interview with
Alain Badiou’, Artforum 45:3 (2006), p. 322.
2 See: A. Ling, Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011); A. Badiou, Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Hereafter CMA.
Notes 253
Chapter 10
1 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 91. All translations by the author.
2 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the signifier)’, in
Concept and Form, Volume 1, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London:
Verso, 2012), pp. 91–101.
3 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture’, p. 99.
4 Jean-Claude Milner, L’Oeuvre Claire (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 128.
5 Milner, L’Oeuvre Claire, p. 129.
6 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 130.
7 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 92.
254 Notes
Chapter 11
1 A. Badiou, ‘What Is Love’ (C 183).
2 Cf. Augustine’s Confessions, VI, p. 8, ‘…But what do I love when I love my
God?’ [quid autem amo, cum te amo? What do I love when I love you?]
in St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London:
Penguin Books, 1961), p. 211.
3 See C. Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
4 M. B. Kacem, Après Badiou: Ni Badiou, Ni Maître (Paris: Grasset, 2011) is,
even on a cursory reading, a masterpiece of the genre of the angry Oedipal
break-up-letter-as-a-warning-to-posterity.
5 While it does possess the (by no means negligible) virtues of both actually
supposing to engage with Badiou’s mathematics and a certain conceptual
and literary sophistication, this appears to be the ultimate motivation
of R. L. Nirenberg and D. Nirenberg, ‘Badiou’s Number: A Critique of
Mathematics as Ontology’, Critical Inquiry 37:4 (2011), pp. 583–614.
6 See for example ‘Seven Variations on the Century’, Parallax 9:2 (2003), pp.
72–80, 72.
7 P. Hallward, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy
(London: Continuum, 2004), p. 1.
Notes 255
Chapter 12
1 Lacan, Book XX, p. 3.
2 See M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974);
Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. M. J. O’Connell et al. (London:
Verso, 2012); J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. J.
Shapiro (Oxford: Polity, 1987).
3 A. Badiou, ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato!’, trans. A. Toscano, Angelaki 2:3 (2006),
p. 40.
4 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992),
p. 303.
5 M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in M. Foucault,
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans.
D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
Notes 259
serves to remind of the way that Badiou evokes and draws on the important
place in Lacan of the active sense of inconsistency. See for example Lacan,
Seminar XVI, pp. 29–103.
22 See Lacan ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, in Ecrits, p. 419.
23 Cf. Y. M. Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Oxford: Polity,
2011), p. 57.
24 C. Jones, ‘Think Big’, New Zealand Sociology 27:1 (2012), pp. 88–103.
25 C. Jones, ‘The Embers of Truth in the Ashes of Finance’, in M. Peters, J.
Paraskeva and T. Besley (eds.), The Global Financial Crisis and Educational
Restructuring (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
26 IBM, ‘A Culture of Think’. Online at: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history
/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_culture/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
27 T. Watson, quoted in T. Belden and M. Belden, The Lengthening Shadow:
The Life of Thomas J. Watson (New York: Little Brown, 1962), p. 158.
28 IBM, ‘Thomas Watson comments on “think”’. Online at http://www-03.
ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/index.html (accessed 7 January 2016).
29 IBM, ‘IBM: Think’. Online at http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en
/think/stories/ibm-today (accessed 7 January 2016).
30 F. Ruda, For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2015).
31 J. M. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London:
Macmillan, 1936, reprinted 1967), p. 383.
32 Keynes, General Theory, p. 384.
33 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 383–384.
34 F. A. Hayek, ‘“Free” enterprise and competitive order’, in Individualism and
Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
35 F. A. Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False’, in Individualism and Economic
Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 4. In Hayek, the list
of names in this tradition is typically Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Tucker,
Ferguson, Smith, de Toqueville, Acton, Burke, Bentham. See Individualism
and Economic Order, pp. 4ff and The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies
in the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, IL: Liberty Press, 1952), p. 360n.
36 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, Volume III, p. 136.
37 Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, pp. 82–83.
38 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 187.
Chapter 13
1 Alain Badiou, Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels, ‘Can Change be
Thought?’, in Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
pp. 312–313.
2 While Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are emblematic of this orientation,
Badiou extends his diagnosis to French philosophical scene in the late 80s:
Notes 261
‘how should we interpret the fact that Lyotard can only evoke the destiny of
Presence in commentaries on painters, that Gilles Deleuze’s last great book
had cinema as its topic, that Lacoue-Labarthe (like Gadamer in Germany)
devotes his energies to Celan’s poetic anticipation, or that Jacques Derrida
calls upon Genet?’ (MP 28).
3 ‘For a long time, philosophical speculation has fostered a sacralisation of
the limit. What I have called elsewhere the suture of philosophy to the
poem rests largely upon this sacralisation […] This horizon-effect is only
captured, so it seems, by the poem’ (NN 81).
4 See BE, 123–129, MP, 61–67, C, 35–48, HB, 3–5. For discussion, see J.
Clemens, ‘Conditions’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (London: Acumen,
2010), pp. 25–37 and M. Hewson, ‘Heidegger’, in Alain Badiou: Key
Concepts, pp. 151–153.
5 A. Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 21.
6 J.-P. Sartre, Mallarmé: La lucidité et sa face d’ombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),
p. 92.
7 Quoted in A. Badiou, ‘Philosophy as Biography’, http://www.lacan.com
/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html (accessed August 2015).
8 A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens and J. Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 159.
9 A. Badiou, ‘Is It Exact That All Thought Emits a Throw of Dice?’, trans.
Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder, Hyperion: On the Future of
Aesthetics IX:3 (Winter 2015), p. 74.
10 See also ‘The Philosophical Recourse to the Poem’ (C 35–48): ‘Because
naming an event in the sense I give to the latter, that is, that which, being
an undecidable supplementation, must be named for a being-faithful, and
therefore a truth, to occur – this naming is always poetic’ (C 41–42).
11 This notion of the object precedes the philosophical theory of the subject-
less object in Logics of Worlds. See Book III of LW, pp. 191–242.
12
The goal [of the forcing procedure] is to show that in a generic
extension S(♀) – which we will fabricate – there are at least
as many parts of ω0 as there are elements in the cardinal δ.
Consequently, for an inhabitant of S(♀), we have: | p(ω0) | ≥
δ. Since δ is an indeterminate cardinal superior to ω0, we will
have thereby demonstrated the errancy of statist excess, it being
quantitatively as large as one wishes. (BE 420 – our emphasis)
13 On the one hand, constructivism rejects all self-belonging multiples, such
as the multiple of the event. As Badiou states,
[c]onstructivism has no need to decide upon the non-being of the
event, because it does not have to know anything of the latter’s
undecidability. Nothing requires a decision with respect to a
paradoxical multiple here […] If you can name the multiple, it
is because you discern it according to its elements. But if it is an
262 Notes
Chapter 15
1 See L. Burchill’s contribution to this volume: ‘Woman’s Adventures With/in
the Universal’.
2 A reference to Francois Hollande’s ‘amour fou’.
Chapter 16
1 ‘Le bonheur est la venue, dans un individu, du Sujet qu’il découvre pouvoir
devenir.’ A. Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur reel (Paris: PUF Collection,
2015), p. 41.
2 ‘Marcher, alors, sous l’impératif d’une Idée vraie, nous destine au bonheur.’
Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur reel, p. 27.
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Bibliography 267
sexed, 106, 107, 112, 118, 119 139, 143, 162, 164, 166, 167,
thought and, 155, 189 172, 174, 184, 193–208, 215,
of truth, 201, 220 229, 231, 240, 241. See also
Belonging, 54, 64, 148, 151, 153, 154, Generic
202, 203 Constructivist(vism), 194, 196, 197,
self, 200, 203, 261 n.13 199, 261 n.13
Benjamin, Walter, 98, 129 Continuum Hypothesis, 58, 148, 149
Bergson, Henri, 20 Contradiction, 19, 20, 22, 25–8, 33,
Blanché, Robert, 48 36–8, 74, 82, 100, 154, 185,
Boole, George, 73 211–15, 223, 233, 234
Borromean knots, 148 performative, 198
Bosteels, Bruno, 42, 51, 54, 162, Conway, John, 69, 70, 246 n.10
255 n.8 Corruption, 3, 9, 10, 33, 34, 180. See
Bourdieu, Pierre, 174 also capitalism
Bouveresse, Jacques, 195 and Australia, 243 n.3
Brecht, Bertolt, 37, 51, 95 and theatre, 34
of youth, 33, 239
Cahiers pour l’Analyse, 44, 48, 259 n.11 Curtis, Ian, 174
Callicles, 4
Canguilhem, Georges, 41 Dante, 173. See also Beatrice
Cantor, Georg, 54, 64, 71, 165, 195 Davies, Gardner, 207
Canudo, Ricciotto, 135 Davis, Martin, 74
Capitalism, 7, 14, 122, 162, 177, 179, Dedekind, Julius Wilhelm Richard,
186, 187, 191, 211–14, 217, 69, 246 n.10
223, 239 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 18, 20, 55–66,
Cauchy, Augustin-Louis, 70 69–72, 90, 134, 175, 181, 225,
Cavaillès, Jean, 48, 231 246 n.4, 246 n.5, 246 n.7,
Celan, Paul, 95, 261 n.2 261 n.2
Chaos, 56–9, 64. See also Deleuze and Guattari, 2
Chekov, Anton, 37 Democracy(cratic), 26, 27, 30, 60,
Christ(ianity), 32, 109–11, 166, 167, 61, 98, 101, 138, 173, 178, 181,
171, 223 211, 213, 224, 230, 243 n.3. See
Cinema, 13, 17–30, 34, 35, 59, 100, also materialism
127–39, 216, 234, 261 n.1 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 221, 225, 261
Claudel, Paul, 37 n.2
Clemens, Justin, 195 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 162, 245
Cogito, 57, 58 n.24
Cohen, Paul, 148, 198 Descartes, Rene, 58, 256 n.21
Communism, 91, 95, 127, 163, 188, Detective novels, 28
211–15, 256 n.34 Dialectic(al), 12, 13, 26, 27, 36,
Compossibility, 24, 132, 164, 231 37, 42–54, 92, 94, 98, 100,
Condition(s), 12, 20, 24, 42, 46, 49, 108, 122, 143, 151, 153, 160,
52, 56, 65, 66, 69, 72, 89, 90, 161, 183, 214–16, 223, 224,
93–8, 100, 104, 107, 108, 121, 245 n.22
122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 138, Dialegesthai, 37
Index 273
Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 240 Socrates, 3, 15, 16, 33, 92, 96, 97, 136,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 98, 196, 215 169, 170, 226
Robinson, Abraham, 146 Sophist(ic)(ry), 4, 106, 109, 139, 170,
Roffe, Jon, 1, 55, 195 173, 177–81, 191, 194
Romantic, 93–100, 104, 165, 172, Sophisticates, 3
177, 224, 232, 258 n.66 Sophocles, 31, 36, 96
Rorty, Richard, 2, 56, 60, 61 Spitzer, Susan, 31, 252 N.32
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 4, 54 Stalin, Joseph, 51, 212
Ruda, Frank, 162, 189 State, 8, 13, 47, 55, 60, 61, 64, 92,
Russell, Bertrand, 73, 74, 75, 78, 86 95, 133, 160, 163, 164, 170–5,
Ruyer, Raymond, 56 187, 189, 191, 194, 206, 211,
214, 216, 218, 226, 230, 232,
Saint Paul, 109, 110, 119 255 n.14
Sappho, 96 States of affairs, 58
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 37, 44, 217, 221, Strindberg, August, 37
224, 225, 231 Sublation, 108
Schiller, 96 Sublimation, 108
Schwärmerei, 50 Subtraction, 51–3, 70, 85, 105–9, 112,
Sequence, 11, 15, 18, 42, 44, 45, 47, 119, 121, 133, 165, 176, 180,
49, 50, 52, 53, 105, 133, 211, 205, 207
214, 225, 231, 235 Symbolic, 24, 53, 77, 80–6, 106–23,
Set Theory, 58, 64, 65, 148–50, 153, 144, 145, 148, 162, 225, 227,
155–7, 193, 195, 199–201, 245 228, 244 n.18
n.24. See also mathematics
Sex, 73–87, 111–15, 119, 166, 167– Tacitus, 32
71, 174, 248 n. 16, 249 n.31 Terra nullius, 3
Signified, 75, 78, 79 Theatre, 18, 21–5, 31–7, 90, 95, 96,
Signifier, 44, 70, 73, 75, 78–80, 82, 128, 135, 216, 217, 230
84–7, 103, 115, 121, 144, 196, Thucydides, 32
202, 248 n.16, 249 n.31 Titchmarsh, E.C., 55
Singular, 2, 4, 18, 42, 47, 94, 101, 102, Topological, 68, 148, 201, 220, 222,
108, 112, 127, 132–8, 154, 168, 225, 259 n.11
177, 180, 196, 201, 207, 232 Torsion, 45–7, 56, 76, 99
Site, 1, 2, 4, 46, 48, 52, 55, 65, 100, Toussaint L’ouverture, François-
119, 134, 138, 143, 151, 154, Dominique, 160
163, 200–3, 206, 207, 226, 262 Tragedy, 31–3, 216, 227, 229, 230
n.14, 262 n.15 Transcendental, 67, 92, 143, 151,
Situation, 8, 9, 15, 20, 32, 41, 45–7, 156, 163, 171, 196, 199, 220,
51, 55, 64, 65, 90, 96, 112–14, 262 n.13
117, 123, 125, 128, 129, Transference, 35, 84, 107
132, 133, 150, 151, 154, 160, Transmission, 2, 4, 34, 90, 91,
162–4, 171–5, 180, 185, 196, 234
198, 201–4, 211, 215, 217, Treatise, 32, 36. See also Aristotle
220, 223, 228–35, 245 n.24, Treaty of Waitangi, 3
255 n.14, 262 n.15 Two, 108, 112–17, 121–5, 171, 172
278 Index