Introducing Alain Badiou E-Book

Michael J. Kelly

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

The works of French philosopher Alain Badiou range from novels, poems, 'romanopéras' and popular political treatises to elaborate philosophical arguments engaging with mathematical theory. Badiou suggests that 'philosophy is always a biography of the philosopher', and throughout all of his writing there is a staunch commitment to emancipatory politics and a radical yet faithful subjectivity. His famous, or infamous, philosophy of emancipation is firmly grounded in his fidelity to the universal idea of a collective life. Introducing Alain Badiou is an elegantly written and crisply illustrated guide to an essential contemporary thinker.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-665-2

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introducing Alain Badiou

Badiou in the world

The writing event

A Sartrean interrupted

The seductiveness of philosophy

Badiou’s philosophy

Event, subject, truth

The event, or, being and event

The event and its response

The subject

The mathemes

Reactive subject

The analogy of love

Chance and the subject

Truth(s)

The trajectory of a truth

The gamma diagram

The subtractive process

What is the generic?

Forcing

The unnameable

The return of Plato

The conditions for philosophy

The four truth procedures

Art

The example of the horses

Inaesthetics: defence of art as truth procedure

A brief interlude: Samuel Beckett

Love

Love and the infinite

What is love?

Love without risk

To hell with others

Love and the Christ event

Badiou and Tupac

Love versus desire

Political truths

Scientific/mathematical truths

The example of prime numbers

The value of numbers

In defence of the universal and the infinite

The question of scientism

Badiou’s ethics

Ethics and the act of thinking

No general ethics, no universal rights

A radical ethics

Circumstancing Badiou

Shattering comforts and anomalies

The communist idea

Beyond the individual

Where is the communist idea today?

Terror and disaster

Separating communism from politics

The role of the philosopher

Sarkozy: the man, the figure

Badiou on the barricades

“The red years”

Views of an event: variations on May ’68

Mao ’69?

Mao and egalitarianism

Khmer Rouge: “Je le regrette”

“What does a Jew want?”

The party and the state

Democracy: a “weak negation”

Global radical events

A revolutionary vs. a state revolutionary

Green is the new red, but really green

The novel philosopher

Constant questioning of reality

The rebirth of history

Select Bibliography of Alain Badiou

Author’s acknowledgements

Author biography

Index

Introducing Alain Badiou

French philosopher Alain Badiou has now been publishing for 50 years. His works range from novels, poems, “romanopéras” and popular political treatises to elaborate philosophical arguments engaging with mathematical theory.

Although the specific topics and characters differ between the texts, one can see throughout all of his writings, lectures and interviews an endless commitment to emancipatory politics and radical change through a fidelity to what he terms the event and its truth.

THIS FORMAL PHILOSOPHY OF EMANCIPATION IS FAITHFUL TO THE COMMUNIST TRUTH, THE UNIVERSAL IDEA OF COLLECTIVE LIFE.

Badiou is most recognized internationally for his collection of three books on subjectivity (theories about the ways, or forms, in which a body enters into a relationship with reality, and truths) and the role of the event and truth in ontology (theory of being, in and of itself): Theory of the Subject (Théorie du Sujet, 1982), Being and Event (L’Être et l’événement, 1988) and Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II (L’Être et l’événement Tome 2, Logiques des mondes, 2006).

It was with the translation of Being and Event in 2005 that Badiou’s fame spread into the English-speaking world, though it can be argued that Theory of the Subject is the most important work of the three.

I AM FAMOUS, OR INFAMOUS, FOR MY RADICAL EMANCIPATORY POLITICS, INCLUDING MY STAUNCH DEFENCE OF THE COMMUNIST IDEA AS THE ETHICAL POSITION, FORMALLY SPEAKING.

Badiou in the world

In his short article “Philosophy as Biography”, as a pun on Nietzsche’s dictum that “philosophy is always a biography of the philosopher”, Badiou suggests that his philosophy is his autobiography. This is in many ways quite clear.

A self-defined “provincial boy”, Badiou was born on 17 January 1937 in Rabat, French-occupied Morocco, the son of a well-educated, upper-middle-class family. His mother attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris.

MY MOTHER STUDIED FRENCH LITERATURE. MY FATHER FOUGHT IN THE FRENCH RESISTANCE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, AND LATER WAS THE SOCIALIST MAYOR OF TOULOUSE BEFORE BECOMING A PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS.

Following his parents, Badiou graduated from the ENS. Unlike their work in literature and mathematics, though, Badiou studied philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY ALWAYS CONSTRUCTS ITS OWN SPACE AMID THE MATHEME – A SYMBOLIC, OR FORMULAIC, REPRESENTATION OF AN IDEA MEANT TO PROVIDE IT WITH STABILITY – AND THE POEM, BETWEEN THE MOTHER AND FATHER AFTER ALL.

Some philosophers have criticized Badiou for supposedly jolting back and forth between maths and literature too easily; but regardless, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see the family’s intellectual trinity wrapped up in the figure of Badiou, the embodied mediation between his parents.

The family connection to the École Normale Supérieure does not end for Badiou with his time as a student there. In 1999 he became chair of Philosophy at ENS, after 30 years teaching Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-St Denis) and two years in Reims from 1966–7. Currently he is the René Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School, a small, private college on top of the Alps in the resort town of Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

The writing event

Badiou began his writing career in the early 1960s when he was affiliated with the “epistemology circle” (epistemology is the study of knowledge), a group of ENS students who published the journal Les cahiers pour l’analyse. It was in this journal that Badiou would publish some of his earliest philosophical texts. The first was called “Infinitesimal Subversion” in 1968, and a year later “Mark and Lack: On Zero”.

In 1964 Badiou published his first book, Almagestes.

THIS REFERS TO PTOLEMY AND HIS VIEWS ON ASTRONOMY, REFLECTING BADIOU’S LIFELONG INTEREST IN THE THOUGHTS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD, ESPECIALLY THOSE OF ST PAUL.

His first book of philosophy is The Concept of Model (Le Concept de modèle) published in 1969.

A Sartrean interrupted

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was essentially his total intellectual master during the whole of Badiou’s early life as a philosopher, he tells us. The first theoretical text that sparked Badiou’s interest in philosophy, and one relatively contemporary to him, was Sartre’s Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions (1939).

I WAS WRAPPED UP COMPLETELY IN SARTRE … SO MUCH SO THAT DURING MY PREPARATION FOR THE ENTRY EXAM TO THE ENS MY PROFESSOR WAS DISMAYED AT THE AMOUNT OF TIME I SPENT ON PASTICHES OF SARTRE’S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS (1943).

With two committed Sartreans, Emmanuel Terry and Pierre Verstraeten, he also interrogated Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).

The seductiveness of philosophy

Badiou turned away from Sartre, but he remained confident in his desire to become a philosopher. The deeper reason is likely that his family situation and education led him to it, but there is another more tangible one too, perhaps.

THERE IS SOMETHING SEXUALLY SEDUCTIVE ABOUT BEING A PHILOSOPHER. WHY? SIMPLY SPEAKING, IT IS INTERESTING. PHILOSOPHY PREPARES ONE TO BE UNIQUE, TO HAVE THE CONFIDENCE TO SPEAK, TO BE ABLE TO MAKE COMPLICATED ARGUMENTS AS OPPOSED TO SIMPLY PROPOSING TO A GIRL OR GUY.

What better reason can there be for becoming a philosopher, he jokingly asks. More seriously, he believes that the role of the philosopher is to challenge society simply because it is the way it is. To never give up. Finally, to always corrupt the youth!

Badiou’s philosophy

Badiou’s philosophy is a defence of metaphysics – the study of being in the world (as opposed to ontology, the examination of being in and of itself) – and also an expression of his politics.

MY PHILOSOPHY IS A LONG RESPONSE TO JACQUES DERRIDA, PHILIPPE LACOUE LABARTHE, JEAN-LUC NANCY, AND JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD.

All these thinkers accept, following on from Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the end of philosophy in its metaphysical form, and the elevating of places outside of philosophy as the appropriate spaces for serious thought, such as art, psychoanalysis, politics, etc.

AS A RESULT, PHILOSOPHY NO LONGER KNOWS IT PROPER PLACE. IT IS LOST. IT EITHER FINDS FULFILMENT IN MAKING A MUSEUM OF ITSELF (I.E. HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY), OR SEEKS TO FIND EXPRESSION THROUGH THESE ALTERNATIVE SITES.

Against this line of thinking Badiou claims that philosophy is not only possible today, but that it is necessary, that we should return to it in its classical sense, which means not only a strict separation between philosophy and all that is subject-dependent (reality, the world), but also the individual articulation of being (event), subject and truth.

Event, subject, truth

Badiou’s philosophy thus revolves around three main ideas: the event, subject and truth, supplemented by a host of concepts including: situation, void, knowledges, world, and appearing. These will be covered at the appropriate points later on, but what is most imperative to keep in mind throughout is that philosophy is for Badiou a way of thinking, of seizing a truth.

PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT PRODUCE ANY TRUTHS WHATSOEVER THERE ARE NO PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTHS. WHENEVER PHILOSOPHY PRESENTS ITSELF AS A TRUTH WE HAVE A DISASTER IN PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT.

Philosophy is an operation that of itself produces nothing; it operates on the basis of truths subtracted from the event.

The event, or, being and event

Badiou’s most famous works of philosophy are without doubt his Being and Event and its sequel Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. In these he claims that being is tied fundamentally to events, and that being-in-the-world – a body’s relationship to the present – changes only upon the chance occurrence of an event and its announcement by subjects faithful to it.

What is the event, then?

THE EVENT (A REAL CHANGE, ONE THAT ACTUALLY ALTERS THE INTENSITY OF EXISTENCE) IS WHAT MAKES PHILOSOPHY POSSIBLE, AND NECESSARY.

The event is a condition for philosophy in that it brings into existence (through the subsequent evental truth procedures, explained below) truths that are prior-existent, or inexistent (in the world but not active, i.e. latent truths), but that need an event to make them appear.

THE EVENT IS THUS THE INITIAL SPARK FOR A NEW SUBJECTIVE PROCESS (A NEW RELATIONSHIP OF BODIES TO THE WORLD, TO REALITY). IT IS A RADICAL BREAK FROM THE REPETITION OF A PRESENT EXISTENCE, AN ACCEPTED SITUATION OF BODIES AND LANGUAGES (WHICH I CALL “A SET” WITHIN A WORLD).

The event and its response

The event originates within a situation, not external to it, occurring at the site in which the possibility of an alternative truth exists, the point of excess within the situation, or in other words, with what cannot be brought into the ideological, linguistic norm of that world. An example would be those outside of capitalism today.

THIS SITE/POINT, THEN, IS THE PLACE WHERE A TRUTH THAT DOESN’T FIT WITHIN THE CURRENT STATUS QUO OF THE WORLD CONFRONTS THAT STATUS QUO. IT IS FROM THERE THAT THIS INEXISTENT TRUTH CAN BE ACTUALIZED VIA THE EVENT.

The event is then defined by its capacity to make this latent truth appear in the world, or as Badiou formulates it:

IT IS BUT A FLEETING INSTANT LEAVING ONLY A TRACE OF ITSELF (THE EVENT-TRACE), YET IT HAS MADE APPEAR A NEW TRUTH THAT BY ITS VERY PRESENCE DEMANDS A RESPONSE.

This response by the subject, this subjective choice, can take one of three forms in relation to the event and the new truth that has emerged: acceptance, or, fidelity; denial/reaction against; or the occulting of the pre-evental situation (that is, the fetishizing of the previous status quo: “Things used to be so wonderful back when …”).

The subject

Okay, so what exactly is the subject?

THE SUBJECT REPRESENTS NOT THE INDIVIDUAL, BUT WHAT THE INDIVIDUAL IS ULTIMATELY CAPABLE OF BECOMING.

For Badiou, the subject is a mode by which “a body enters into a subjective formalism with regard to the production of a present”. Subjective formalism is the form chosen for the body’s relationship to the present (particularly in light of the event and new truth).

A subject is born not simply from the event – which brings forth truth via one of four conditions (explained below) – but is dependent on its own affective conditions that include its relationship not only to the event and new truth but to a body.