Badiou: A Philosophy of the New (Key Contemporary Thinkers)

201 Pages·2010·5.59 MB·English

by  Ed Pluth

Badiou
Published-
Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-1989
Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco
M. J. Cain, Fodor
Filipe Carreira da Silva, G H. Mead
Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West
George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin
Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell
Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze
Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias
Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett
Chris Fleming, Rene Girard
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir
Andrew Gamble, Hayek
Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty
Nigel Gibson, Fanon
Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin
Karen Green, Dummett
Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell
Christina Howells, Derrida
Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz
Simon Jarvis, Adorno
Sarah Kay, Zizek
Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said
Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls
Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler
James McGilvray, Chomsky
Lois McNay, Foucault
Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes
Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak
Harold W. Noonan, Frege
James O'Shea, Wilfrid Sellars
William Outhwaite, Habermas, 2nd Edition
Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner
John Preston, Feyerabend
Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall
William Scheuerman, Morgenthau
Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein
Susan Sellers, Helene Cixous
Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn
David Silverman, Harvey Sacks
Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman
James Smith, Terry Eagleton
Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor
Felix Stalder Manuel Castells
Geoffrey Stokes, Popper
Georgia Warnke, Gadamer
James Williams, Lyotard
Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick
Badiou
A Philosophy of the New
Ed Pluth
polity
Copyright © Ed Pluth 2010
The right of Ed Pluth to be identified as Author of this Work has been
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First published in 2010 by Polity Press
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Contents
Guide to Abbreviations ofBadiou's Publications vi
Introduction 1
1 Badiou's Philosophical Background 17
2 Being and Event 29
3 Situations and Events 48
4 Logics of Worlds 67
5 Infinity and Truth 85
6 Badiou's Theories of the Subject 104
7 Ethics and Affects 128
8 Politics 154
Conclusion 175
Select Bibliography 186
Index 188
Guide to Abbreviations of
Badiou's Publications
AF "The Adventure of French Philosophy"
B Briefings on Existence
BE Being and Event
C The Century
Con Conditions
E Ethics
I De Videologic
IT Infinite Thought
LM Logiques des mondes
M Manifesto for Philosophy
Meta Metapolitics
NN Number and Numbers
NR Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hegelienne
P Polemics
PB "Philosophy as Biography"
Po "Politics: A Non-Expressive Dialectics"
PP Peut-on penser la politique?
S De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?
SA "The Subject of Art"
SP Saint Paul
TC Theorie de la contradiction
TS Theorie du sujet
TW Theoretical Writings
WL "What is to Live?"
Introduction
Ni Dieu ni homme [Neither god nor man]
(C 216n53)
"One is right to revolt against the reactionaries ..."
In a candid moment at a recent conference, Alain Badiou expressed
his frustration and surprise at the fact that so many of his peers -
he had in mind the generation of student and worker activists
known as soixante-huitards, or "68ers" - developed a strong
hostility toward their former militant engagement. Although his
comment was delivered almost as a passing remark, it was more
than that: his dismay about people turning against something they
once believed is directly connected to one of his philosophy's over
arching concerns. Badiou is interested in the conditions of conver
sion, conviction, resolution, persistence, and then, on the other
side, wavering, doubt, and retreat. His philosophy is interested in
describing the conditions under which a militant engagement
changes into a reaction against that engagement itself, and how
someone can suddenly become opposed to the very possibility of
a similar engagement ever happening again. And what are the
conditions under which a militant engagement can continue,
instead of burning out or reversing? Badiou came up with a little
ethical formula once that captures his orientation quite nicely:
"love what you will never believe twice." It is a bit obscure, but it
should mean something like "do not be ashamed about being con
vinced of something that you feel you actually should not be con
vinced of, and have great difficulty justifying ..."
2 Introduction
Badiou asks these kinds of questions not only with respect to
political movements (although these do seem to have pride of
place) but also for all sorts of things that enthuse human beings
every so often, such as romances, scientific discoveries, and artistic
innovations. In fact, along with politics, love, science, and art are
the four fields of human practice in which what he calls "truths'7
are possible. And although his experience with lapses in faith may
have been the trigger for much of his philosophical activity, it is
safe to say that he is actually more concerned with describing (and
defending) the possibility of fidelity within all of these domains;
fidelity to those events that can lead human beings to put their
happiness, and sometimes even their livelihood at stake, often
against their better judgment, for what appears to be (and may well
be) nothing more than a stupid idea: something as silly, say, as a
new way of doing mathematics, or a hunch that a new way of
making sound has musical value.
The most common reference in Badiou's work is, as I mentioned,
politics, and most of his key examples, and many of his key con
cepts, come from political theory and political history, with a
strongly Marxist inflection. But not always. Using an unfamiliar
but colorful term, Badiou describes as Thermidorian the type of
reaction he witnessed, and was vexed by, among members of his
generation after 1968. Students of the French Revolution would
recognize the term, since it is usually used to describe the period
just after Robespierre's infamous reign of terror. The Thermidorian
period (named after one of the months of the French Revolutionary
calendar - covering mid-July to mid-August) was characterized by
social and political moderation. Now, Badiou is not saying that
anything about May 1968 and its long aftershocks compares to the
intensity of the French Revolution, as far as its achievements and
actual historical significance goes. Nor does it compare to other
revolutionary events of the twentieth century - the Russian Revo
lution of 1917, and the Cultural Revolution in China, to use two
more of Badiou's standard references. Badiou does want to say,
however, that despite the difficulty in determining the significance
of May 1968, the period that followed can be characterized as
another Thermidorian reaction. And to such a period corresponds
a distinctive form of subjectivity, one based on the cessation of a
previous and also always possible revolutionary fervor. Thus, the
Thermidorian is not just any political conservative, but someone
who is saying no to something he or she once encountered, to
something he or she once was, or to something he or she once
Introduction 3
believed. A Thermidorian is someone who "renounces his revolu
tionary enthusiasm and sells his rallying to the order of proprie
tors" (P 85). A more typical conservative might be opposed to
certain social movements for any number of reasons; but the Ther
midorian is a distinct type who brings a particular sort of passion
to her reaction, one that is motivated by a subjective experience
with the other side.
We see in this discussion of Thermidorian reaction how two
interests are present in Alain Badiou's work, and I will be making
a similar point about Badiou's philosophy throughout this intro
duction. On the one hand, it shows how he is interested in studying
different types of subject-positions, each expressing a different atti
tude about its world: some will be characterized by a fidelity to a
new development (in a situation such as art, think of Cubism, or
twelve-tone music) and some will be reacting against one, like the
Thermidorians of the French Revolution in politics. And, on the
other hand, Badiou is interested in mapping out the resemblances
among different historical periods and discerning something like
the overall structure of such situations. Thus, there are two distinct
interests in Badiou's philosophy: an interest in a theory of the
subject, and a theory that details the structures within which sub
jects appear. It is his study of both that is crucial to his ability to
build a case for fidelity, or faithful subjectivity.
A large part of Badiou's work, then, is interested in pursuing the
formal resemblances among different historical periods. This
results in the production of a conceptual framework, a philosophi
cal system, that can be used to outline the structure of such dispa
rate situations as the living things in a park, the works that make
up a twentieth-century artistic movement, the geology of a moun
tain range millions of years ago, and the love between Abelard and
Heloise in the eleventh century. Yet another significant part of
Badiou's work studies something altogether different from struc
ture - what are called events, truths, and subjects.
This makes Badiou's philosophy rather distinctive on the con
temporary scene. Badiou himself has proposed thinking of
twentieth-century French philosophy in terms of an ongoing debate
between vitalism and formalism. Vitalism could be described as a
philosophy that promotes the centrality of things like life, change,
nature, and becoming (Badiou thinks of the early twentieth-
century philosopher Henri Bergson as well as the more recent
Gilles Deleuze in these terms), while formalism is a philosophical
orientation interested in issues like the organization of objects, their