The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of

32 Pages·2007·0.21 MB·English

by  Adrian Johnston

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ISSN 17551-8229
Volume One, Number Two - Žižek and Badiou
The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and
the Split Speeds of Transformation
Adrian Johnston - Department of Philosophy, University of
New Mexico at Albuquerque
In Being and Event, Alain Badiou links his theory of the event to the thesis that
“there is some newness in being.”(Badiou 2005a: 209) And, in a recently published
interview, entitled “Can Change be Thought?,” he declares that all of his philosophical
endeavors are ultimately animated by a desire to theorize how it’s possible for novelty to
surface within situations. (Bosteels 2002:205) He explains himself thus:
Really, in the end, I have only one question: what is the new in a
situation? My unique philosophical question, I would say, is the
following: can we think that there is something new in the situation, not
outside the situation nor the new somewhere else, but can we really
think through novelty and treat it in the situation? The system of
philosophical answers that I elaborate, whatever its complexity may be,
is subordinated to that question and to no other. Even when there is
event, structure, formalism, mathematics, multiplicity, and so on, this is
exclusively destined, in my eyes, to think through the new in terms of
the situation. (Badiou 2005b: 252)
The most important feature to note in this statement is the constraint Badiou places upon
himself in relation to this task of philosophically grasping newness in its strongest sense:
The new must be conceived as immanently arising out of specific “situations,” rather
than as swooping in from some unspecified transcendent other place in order externally
to modify the coordinates of a particular status quo reality as an agent of alteration
essentially foreign to the given site of change. (Bosteels 2004a: 152) However, certain
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of what might be described as Badiou’s “aesthetic” preferences in his political vocabulary
are in danger of preventing him from taking into consideration possible types of
transformation that exemplify precisely the sort of change he claims to be most
interested in thinking through—namely, transformations immanently generated from
within the internal parameters of a specific situation and/or a given world.
One striking feature of both the aesthetics of Badiou’s political discourse as well
as this discourse’s conceptual-argumentative content is the recurrent emphasis on
figures of abrupt discontinuity. Here are just a few examples: An authentic intervention
in politics involves a “cut” establishing a separation from communitarian links and
relationships (Badiou 1985: 18); any genuine event establishing a political sequence
marks a moment of “rupture” in relation to the socio-historical contextual terrain within
which this evental detonation occurs (Badiou 2005c: 7 and Badiou 2004a: 18); political
pronouncements “spring up” in spaces left uncounted and uncovered by existing
configurations of society or state (Badiou 2005c: 101); singular events of declaration
creating the stratified histories of politics each amount to an “eruption” exploding (out of)
the continuum of the status quo (Badiou 2005c: 117); politics as such requires a decisive
“break” with that which exists in the current state of affairs (Badiou 2003a: 126) … and
so on. In his 1998 text on “metapolitics,” Badiou speaks of “the suddenly emergent
materiality of a universalisable collective.” (Badiou 2005c: 146-147) He repeatedly
invokes the evocative figures of “rupture” (Badiou 2003b: 63) and “sudden emergence.”
(Badiou 2003b: 71) In so doing, Badiou endorses a sharp contrast between “repetition”
(i.e. the static inertia of what is) and “interruption” (i.e. the kinetic gesture of separating
from what is). (Badiou 2004b: 112 and Badiou 2000: 64) Various thinkers engaged with
Badiou, including both commentators and critics, have picked up on this thematic thread
appearing to entail that the initiation of real political trajectories is to be pinpointed in an
irruptive happening that emerges with a surprising, shocking, and stunning degree of
rapidity. (Lazarus 1996: 50,102,152 and Lecercle 1999:8) Similarly, the same set of
motifs operates throughout Sylvain Lazarus’ Anthropologie du nom, in which Lazarus (a
theoretical and political ally of Badiou) describes the event of politics as a “caesura”
(Lazarus 1996: 20) and “irruption” (Lazarus 1996: 156); he maintains that, politically
speaking, “The subjective is not continuous. It arises suddenly, then ceases to be.”
(Lazarus 1996: 59)
Despite the general thrust of these images and metaphors portraying true
change as shining new light on the world through brief, intermittent flashes blinking on-
and-off in an unconditioned, unpredictable fashion, Badiou, in the 1998 essay “Of an
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Obscure Disaster,” articulates a crucial qualification to be kept in mind apropos the
issues at stake in this discussion. He clarifies that:
…an abrupt and complete change in a situation does not at all mean that
the grace of an event has happened to it… In the serenity of the concept,
let’s say that everything that changes is not an event, and that surprise,
velocity, disorder, may only be simulacra of the event, not its promise
of truth. (Badiou 2003c: 61)
Or, as he succinctly puts it in his Ethics, “not every ‘novelty’ is an event.” (Badiou 2001:
72) So, it would seem to be safe simply to say that, although every event has the power
to lead to changes exhibiting “surprise, velocity, disorder,” not everything that exhibits
these features qualifies as an event. Furthermore, Badiou’s above caveat indicates that
both events and their simulacra can and do involve change. Hence, the question to pose
now is: What general account of change is to be found in Badiouian philosophy?
Such an account sits at the center of some of Badiou’s most recent work. In the
interview “Beyond Formalisation,” conducted in 2002, Badiou delineates four distinct
categories of change:
…I distinguish between four types of change: modifications (which are consistent
with the existing transcendental regime), weak singularities (or novelties with no
strong existential consequences), strong singularities (which imply an important
existential change but whose consequences remain measurable) and, finally,
events (strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite). (Badiou
2003a: 132)
This fourfold typology of transformation, succinctly sketched in the course of a rapidly
moving conversation, clearly foreshadows the much more detailed and sustained
treatment of this topic four years later in “Book V” (entitled “The Four Forms of Change”)
of Logiques des mondes. Therein, as visually encapsulated and summarized by a
helpful graph, (Badiou 2006a: 395) Badiou begins with the general category of
“becoming” (devenir), which initially is sub-divided into “modification,” qua becoming
without real change, and “site,” qua a locus/place with the potential to give rise to real
change. The category of site is then further sub-divided into “deed/occurrence” (noting
that the term “fait” can be translated either way - it could even be rendered in English as
“act”), qua site lacking a maximal degree of existential intensity in a given
situation/world, and “singularity,” qua site endowed with a maximal degree of existential
intensity in a given situation/world. Finally, the category of singularity is itself sub-
divided into “weak singularity,” qua maximally existent singularity whose ensuing
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situational/worldly consequences aren’t maximal (although such a singularity, while not
[yet] an effective change in the authentic sense of evental transformation, retains the
possibility of eventually becoming stronger (Badiou 2006a: 415-416)), and “event,” qua
maximally existent singularity whose ensuing situational/worldly consequences are
indeed maximal. Simply put, an event doesn’t just happen within a world as one
occurrence among others in this world’s history. Rather, an event changes a world so
radically that, at one and the same time, an old world is destroyed and a new one is
assembled in the clearing opened up by the demolition of what was. (Badiou 2006a:
400, 417- 418, 601)
Obviously, the greatest contrast exists between, on the one hand, modification
(as simple becoming comfortably and compatibly going with the flow of the run of things
as regulated by an already-existent “state-of-the-situation” or “transcendental regime”
ordering a particular “world” (Badiou 2006a:379)), and, on the other hand, event (as a
genuine transformation of what exists dictated by the unforeseen and unanticipated
upsurge of an “x” that, before the event, didn’t exist for the situation’s state or the world’s
transcendental regime, while, after the event, the implications of this upsurge are so
potent and powerful as to force the situation or world to be razed and rebuilt as a place
wherein the previously inexistent is accorded the most intense degree of existence—with
Badiou claiming that the strongest existential-transcendental consequence is to make
what was before an invisible inexistent be the most visible of existents (Badiou 2006a:
397-398, 416, 600-601). Highlighting this stark contrast between modification and event,
the title of the first section of “Book V” of Logiques des mondes is “Simple Becoming and
True Change.” This axis of tension between “simple becoming” (i.e. modification) and
“true change” (i.e. event) is an enduring theoretical motif in Badiou’s work, a motif
present in some of his earliest writings. As regards the problem of philosophically
grasping change, the novel, innovative contribution of Logiques des mondes consists
primarily in the nuance added to the Badiouian account of processes of transformation
by his admission that there are intermediary forms of change between modifications and
events. (Badiou 2006a: 389, 393)
In an interview broadcast on French radio in April 2006 to mark the publication of
Logiques des mondes, Badiou, when asked about his relationship to Deleuze - the latter
allegedly is enthralled by a Bergsonian variety of vitalist becoming which amounts to, in
Badiou’s language, nothing more than mere modification - maintains that the question of
continuity versus discontinuity, of a philosophical choice between models favoring
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images of transformation as fluid dynamics of uninterrupted movement (i.e. gradual
becoming) or as staccato rhythms of abrupt shifts (i.e. punctuated change), is an
absolutely central thematic in contemporary philosophy (Badiou 2006b: unpaginated)
(perhaps this choice could be said to be “axiomatic” in Badiou’s sense - namely, the
decision to bet on one or the other model is an un-derivable, un-deducible ground for
any and every philosophical system today). In this radio interview, he again confirms,
during a discussion of the various categories of change outlined in Logiques des
mondes, that his focus is on figures of rupture, going so far as to affirm the occurrence of
instances of “radical discontinuity” (Badiou 2006b: unpaginated) (i.e. events). Indeed,
“Book V” of Logiques des mondes departs from the assertion that “real change,” as a
happening that isn’t authorized either by the mathematical-ontological order of “being
qua being” (l’être en tant qu’être) or by the logical system of transcendental structures
regulating the play of appearances within situations in a given world, (Badiou 2006a:
380) necessarily includes the imposition of discontinuity upon a world. (Badiou 2006a:
377) For Badiou, faced with the challenge of conceptualizing change, “It is necessary to
think discontinuity as such, as that which nothing reabsorbs into any creative univocity,
however indistinct, or chaotic, the concept of it would be.” (Badiou 2006a: 382) But,
what would be involved in this thinking of “discontinuity as such?” And, what are its
implications specifically for thinking through politics, especially in terms of questions
concerning the conditions and consequences of processes of socio-political
transformation? Answering these important queries requires outlining Badiou’s inter-
linked philosophical constructions of history and temporality.
In the 1982 volume Théorie du sujet, Badiou issues a declaration whose
foundational status and various ramifications he has adhered to ever since: “history
does not exist.” (Badiou 1982: 110 and Badiou 2006a: 531) Broadly speaking, this
means (invoking Badiou’s later identification of the four “generic procedures” producing
the truths handled by philosophy (Badiou 1999:35)) that the sequences of humanity’s
amorous, artistic, political, and scientific activities do not unfold in the all-encompassing
medium of a neutral, homogenous, and single historical time, the chronological
continuum of a unified temporal One-All. What alternative vision of historical temporality
does Badiou propose? By tying his account of real change to events, Badiou is
prompted to argue that, as he nicely summarizes this particular point from Being and
Event during an interview, (Badiou 2005a: 210) “Every event constitutes its own time.
Consequently, every truth also involves the constitution of a time. So, there are times,
not one time.” (Badiou 1994: 118) As he puts it more recently, “An event establishes a
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singular time… the event outlines in the situation—in the ‘there is’—both a before and
an after. A time starts to exist.” (Badiou 2005d: 61) Peter Hallward christens this “the
beginning of a new time.” (Hallward, 2003:158) Similarly, “history” is non-existent
precisely because what exists instead are histories-in-the-plural, namely, multiple strata
of temporalized truth-trajectories (in the realms of love, art, politics, and science) that
cannot be compared and integrated with each other on the basis of reference to an
overarching historical totality as a standard yardstick of mutual measurement. Badiou
fragments both history and time into a heterogeneous jumble of incomparable,
autonomous sequences. (Hallward, 2003: 157 and Strathausen 2005: 279) For him,
truths-that-have-appeared form a non-temporal (“temporal” being understood here as an
enveloping homogenous chronology) meta-history (as the succession of singular flashes
in which eternal truths burst forth into the temporal defiles of banal, hum-drum historical
becoming (Badiou 2006a: 532)).
Despite Badiou’s general systematic consistency on these issues (as with his
rigorous handling of other issues too), subtle differences in his various wordings of these
points regarding history and time signal the lurking presence of serious theoretical
difficulties. In his 1998 text Metapolitics, he insists that, “singularity… has no relation as
such to historical time, for it constitutes its own time through and through.” (Badiou
2005c: 117) In other words, evental singularities utterly break with history’s temporalities;
these tears in the fabric of historical time suddenly rip into this fabric in an abrupt,
discontinuous manner. However, in Logiques des mondes, Badiou words this line of
thought somewhat differently—“the event extracts from one time the possibility of
another time.” (Badiou 2006a: 407) The latter formulation clearly is more consistent with
the previously mentioned constraint Badiou places on any theory of change (articulated
in the interview “Can Change be Thought?”): Such a theory must succeed at envisioning
processes of transformation as immanently arising from a given situation, rather than
being imposed upon “what is” from a mysterious external Elsewhere. As per the latter
formulation from Logiques des mondes, evental time emerges out of (and then
separates itself off from) other historical-temporal currents (this could be described as an
immanent genesis of the thereafter-transcendent qua subsequently independent in
relation to its evental site as a situational point of origin). And yet, Badiou’s other above-
cited insistence that one must think “discontinuity as such” appears to pull him away
from stressing the immanence to broader stretches of historical time of the event’s
engendering of another time, perhaps based on the worry that this would amount to a
concession to the “cult of genealogies” (Badiou 2006a: 531) (i.e. historicist orientations
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in post-modernism that compulsively re-inscribe all occurring phenomena back within
overdetermining streams of historical continuity) resulting in the inability to think genuine
newness per se due to the implicit denial that utter and complete ruptures with what
comes before are possible.
But, obviously, Badiou could embed aspects of evental times within larger
temporal cross-sections of a given historical period without thereby positing, as he
wishes to avoid doing, a single, monolithic history or time, a stifling historical-temporal
closure within which it’s impossible to affirm that there is or can be anything new under
the proverbial sun. Along these same lines, it’s well worth remembering Schelling’s
1809 warning, apropos Spinoza’s substance metaphysics, that identifying all attributes
and modes to be part-and-parcel of substance is not, regardless of whatever one might
think, to succeed at reducing these attributes and modes to the status of mere
epiphenomenal resides of a unified substantial substratum. (Schelling 1936: 16-17)
What’s important in this Schellingian stipulation for Badiouian philosophy is the notion
that, as Schelling himself puts it in his Freiheitschrift:
…dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom.
Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent, and
merely declares that the dependent entity, whatever else it may be,
can only be as a consequence of that upon which it is dependent;
it does not declare what this dependent entity is or is not. (Schelling 1936: 18)
Schelling’s statements, if taken seriously by Badiouian philosophy, would permit
proposing, without fear of this proposal pushing one into conceding there being the One-
All of an ultimate historical-genealogical consistency qua temporal continuity, that
specifically evental times immanently arise within and out of broader, longer currents of
non-evental times (as will soon be seen, Hallward’s crafting of a distinction between the
“specified” and the “specific” similarly permits Badiou the option of admitting that
something could be related to a situation or world without, for all that, being entirely
determined and dominated by such relations). Although evental time is produced on the
basis of the materials of non-evental time, the former nonetheless achieves a self-
defining, auto-constituting autonomy that distances and separates it from the preceding
background of temporal currents from which it branched off as what might initially have
appeared to be a tributary.
The issues and problems at stake in the preceding discussion can be rendered
clearer and more concrete through turning attention to the reverberations in Badiou’s
political thought of these ways of conceiving history and time. As early as Peut-on
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penser la politique?, Badiou proposes that one of the main tasks of authentic politics in
his sense is the “re-punctuation of the chronique” (Badiou 1985: 69); it should be noted
that “la chronique” could be rendered in English as either “the chronic” and/or “the
chronicle,” with Badiou likely intending to condense both of these meanings (that is to
say, the events of political interventions interrupt, displace, and reorganize the chronic
constancy of chronicles à la continuous, liner socio-historical narratives—echoing this
point, Lazarus describes this re-punctuation as a “de-historicization” essential to any and
every real political gesture, with history here understood as the homogenizing
chronologies of extant socio-political narratives (Lazarus 1996: 48). Badiou goes on to
describe this re-punctuating as a distribution of “other accents” and an isolation of “other
sequences” (Badiou 1985: 69) (i.e. truth-trajectories irreducible to and incompatible with
the current state-of-the-situation’s stories about its political history - Lazarus, without
directly citing Badiou, links this Badiouian assertion about the political re-punctuation of,
so to speak, the chronic-logical to the thesis that time itself only exists as a dispersed,
heterogeneous multiplicity of constructed and constructible times (Lazarus 1996: 141-
142)).
The thread of these remarks from 1985 is picked up again in the 2005 study Le
siècle, in which Badiou goes so far as to describe time itself as a political construction;
and, he complains that, today, there is no real thinking of time. (Baduiou 2005e: 151-
152) The roughly contemporaneous second installment of Circonstances further
develops this weaving together of the political and the temporal. Therein, Badiou claims
that, “there is no common measure, no common chronology, between power on one side
and truths on the other—truths as creation.” (Baduiou 2005b: 13) A few pages later,
insisting again upon this gap by invoking “the distance between thought and power, the
distance between the State and truths,” he assigns to philosophy the task of measuring
this distance and knowing whether or not the chasm dividing the history of statist power
from the history of events giving rise to real political truths can be bridged. (Baduiou
2005b: 16) In fulfilling the role of assessor and potential sealer of this rift (with this rift
being a particular instance of the foundational parallax split between stasis and kinesis
arguably posited by Badiou at the level of his overarching theory of change), philosophy
supposedly assists in changing existence itself. (Baduiou 2005b: 17) However, all of this
raises a set of troubling questions: If there is an abyss of incommensurability separating
history-power-state from politics-thought-truth - this abyss reflects the in-eliminable time-
lag that Badiou repeatedly insists leaves the dynamic movements of political events and
their subjects always and necessarily out-of-synch with the sluggish inertia of an
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inherently conservative and essentially homogenous status quo (Baduiou 2005c: 105
and Baduiou 2005e: 155) - then what does it mean to charge philosophy with the
mandate of crossing this boundary line of division so as to negotiate a link between
otherwise foreign territories? How, if at all, can this apparently absolute split be sutured?
The strangeness of Badiou’s position here is promptly signaled on the page of
Circonstances, 2 immediately following his claim that philosophy transforms political
situations by bridging the gap between history-power-state and politics-thought-truth. He
contends that philosophy concerns itself with “paradoxical relations” that are “relations
which are not relations” (Baduiou 2005b: 18) (maybe these could be conceived of, in
vaguely Schellingian parlance, as instances of transcendence-in-immanence). Along
related and relevant lines, in Le siècle, he refers to another paradox, one at the heart of
his mode of conceptualizing temporality - “Time… is an inaccessible mix of agitation
and sterility; it is the paradox of a stagnant feverishness.” (Baduiou 2005e: 152) Is
there (as will subsequently be asserted here) a subtle rapport between these two
paradoxical structures (i.e. non-relational relations and the blending of stasis with
kinesis)? This precise juncture marks the point of entry into a tangled thicket of
difficulties. Moreover, this is a point where various thinkers’ critical-interpretive paths
diverge - for instance, the paths of two particularly articulate experts on Badiouian
philosophy: Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward.
Bosteels departs from the conviction that Badiou’s 1988 “mathematical turn” in
Being and Event, rather than functioning as a sudden shift in a totally new and different
direction, is a continuous and consequent extension of his earlier work as culminating in
the 1982 philosophical treatise Théorie du sujet. (Bosteels 2004a: 150-151 and Bosteels
2005: 578) He argues that the “and” in the title of Badiou’s magnum opus indicates that,
instead of inflexibly partitioning the trans-ontological realm of the event from the
ontological domain of being qua being, Badiou is interested in formally articulating the
paradoxical conjunction-in-disjunction, the tension-ridden relation-that-is-not-a-relation,
operative between being and event (Bosteels 2004a: 153-154); for Bosteels, the title of
Badiou’s 1988 tome shouldn’t be heard as announcing yet another rigid dualism to be
added to the long list of philosophy’s dichotomies accumulated over the course of its
history. (Bosteels 2004a: 103)
Hallward, by contrast, views Being and Event as a fault line demarcating a
pronounced distinction between early and late periods in Badiou’s thought. He contends
that “his books up to and including Théorie du sujet (1982), the summa of his early work,
have become partially obsolete by his own subsequent criteria,” (Hallward 2003: 29) and
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he denies that these pre-1988 writings can be read as a “hesitant, embryonic version of
a subsequently finished product.” (Hallward 2003: 30) In terms of the knot (and
knottiness) of the positioning of politics and temporality with respect to each other in
Badiouian philosophy, Hallward, contra the implications of the position defended by
Bosteels, maintains that the post-1988 Badiou, with his emphases on event-prompted
subtraction and separation, is pushed into promoting “a politics of the ‘flash,’ a politics
grounded in the revolutionary but ephemeral moment in which a serial inertia can be
suspended with only minimal recourse to an institutional stability of any kind.” (Hallward
2003: 43) What Hallward is picking up on here is Badiou’s frequently reiterated
characterization of events as fleeting moments of extraordinarily rare dysfunctionality -
for Badiou, an event, including a political event, amounts to a dysfunctioning of the
representational state-of-the-situation and/or the transcendental regime of a world
(Badiou 1985: 77, Badiou 2005c: 72, Badiou 2003a: 131 and Badiou 2006a: 408)—
surfacing within the run of things ever-so-briefly. Throughout Logiques des mondes, for
example, Badiou repeatedly emphasizes that the temporality of the event (as issuing
forth from the evental site) consists of an instantaneous appearing-and-then-
disappearing, a “brusque,” “evanescent,” and self-consuming conflagration that
immolates itself into non-being as soon as it strikes the surface of being. (Badiou 2006a:
389, 391, 399, 413))
Badiou and Bosteels would both respond to Hallward’s comments on Badiou’s
“flash politics” by contrasting the abrupt, irruptive temporality of the instantaneity of the
event with the protracted, enduring labor, engaged in by a militant subject-of-the-event,
of both drawing out the consequent truths following from this event as well as faithfully
“forcing” the situation and its state to change by inscribing these truths back into the
textured being of the world. According to Badiou, whereas the time of the event is an
immeasurably fast coming-and-going, the unique time this specific event creates in its
wake, a time forged through the fidelity of this event’s subject(s), can be (and often is) an
extended, sustained period or path spanning lengthy stretches of the becoming of
chronological-historical time, (Badiou 2006a: 389 and Badiou 1990: 23) a post-evental
time tied to the enduring, eternal “trace” left behind by the vanished event (Badiou
2006a: 399), as early as 1976, Badiou characterizes revolutionary political sequences as
long, extenuated processes always capable of being interrupted (Badiou 1976: 75).
Such is the reply of Badiou, Bosteels, (Bosteels 2002: 198-199 and Bosteels
2005: 603) and certain others (for instance, Carsten Strathausen (Strathausen 2005:
279) to lines of criticism departing from the apparent link between the rapid-fire