new guard old order?

A dialog/interview with Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou, (h/t Goldhammer).

This dialog is not especially substantial, but it does allow me to form an opinion about Finkielkraut. A negative opinion. His strongest objections to Badiou are, first, the smearing of Sarkozy with Pétain and, second, making ‘the enemy’ a central political category, and therefore, according to Finkielkraut, doing away with the concept of legitimate opposition, paving the way for totalitarianism. I am sympathetic with the first. Badiou is, sometimes, guilty of a certain rhetorical brinksmanship in associating Sarko and others with the great and obvious moment of French racism. On the other hand, he’s got a story about how this works, would even claim that it isn’t a rhetorical connection at all, but a conceptual one. What’s more, certainly Finkielkraut is absolutely as guilty of the same rhetorical strategy, this time with the obvious evil of totalitarianism. The second point, that of conceiving politics as struggle against an enemy, bears some thinking about. I’d want to go back and look at what Badiou says. But I think the two are talking entirely past one another. Badiou is talking about the political situation, whereas Finkielkraut is talking about parliamentary politics.

Badiou’s accusation that Finkielkraut is essentially providing a gentile intellectual cover to anti-Muslim racism—comparable to gentile anti-Semitisms of the past—is a strong one. Not knowing particularly well Finkielkraut’s public persona and statements, I can’t be much of a judge. But I am not impressed that the one specific stand Finkielkraut prides himself on taking in the name of abstract justice during this interview is in defense of Roman Polanski. It’s almost as though, according to Finkielkraut, Polanski is a latter-day Dreyfus, and the radical leftists are too blinded by his class to come to his defense in the name of universal justice. Ridiculous.

The dialog is profoundly depressing. It reduces to Finkielkraut accusing Badiou of being a crypto-Stalinist (or, totalitarian), and Badiou accusing Finkielkraut of being a crypto-Nazi (or, racist ideologue). The question becomes who is more likely to one day be held responsible for justifying putting people in camps of one kind or another. It is evidence that, despite the conscious efforts of both these intellectuals to escape the paradigms of 20th century politics, they are, at least when boxed together, totally unable to do so.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.

Incipient (voyeuristic) liberalism

Zizek is generally at least stimulating. He manages to pose problems. Indeed, he has the courage at least to pose the obvious questions and face the obvious objections. As he says in a recent piece (May-June, 2009) in the New Left Review, "if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?" Indeed. In this short essay, “How to Begin from the Beginning”—which is at least half a retelling of Lenin’s ‘last struggle’ with Stalin and bureaucracy—Zizek does briefly suggest the basis on which he thinks that revolutionary politics should now be set. He says, “All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat.”

In the current configuration, there are four principle immanent antagonisms that seem like sources of potential catastrophe “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums.” Zizek doesn’t say this, but I imagine that these four broad categories can be arrived at by a simple content analysis of popular culture. Those things that scare us the most are understood to be somehow related to these immanent antagonisms. Fictions reveal them to us in utopias and distopias, apocalypses and period pieces.

Only the fourth of these four areas of potential catastrophe has the potential for universality, for Rancière’s ‘part of no part.’ In other words, the other forms of antagonism can all be managed in various ways by the many mechanisms developed by liberal democracy—rather than true democracy—and its culture for this very purpose. Zizek says,

“The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”

Such are the last lines of the essay. I know that Zizek’s intention was radical, but it seems to me that, in essence, what he has just said is that it is only the ghettoized, only those most radically excluded by modernity, who are able to hold up to us a mirror of our own possible futures if we do not successfully moderate rampant capitalism through the judicious use of liberal, humanist reformism. The favelas, in this passage, are not a call to revolution, but a reminder that we do indeed have physical, psychological, and intellectual comforts worth defending. The ‘preventative action’ he invokes at the end does not sound like a revolution, it sounds more like a justification for another bailout. “In a way, we are all excluded...” surely this sounds just like the kind of “In a way, we are all different...” mindlessness against which Zizek supposedly stands? I see no relation whatsoever between Lenin’s dilemmas in the first part of the essay, and the (albeit very brief) analysis of the present situation in the last part. Perhaps Lacano-Leninism has in fact finally run out of ideas.

Second manifeste

It is tempting, though I think wrong, to say that Alain Badiou represents the rear-guard of modernism, the last echo of a certain idealist response to modernity that was at full strength in the decade or two before the First World War. In what ways is this wrong? It is right in that Badiou’s basic position is to defend universality/eternity (the Idée) in a radically relativist, because scientistic, world. Hence his turn to Plato. There is also something that smacks of modernism in his attempt to fashion out of his metaphysics not exactly instructions for living in the world, but certainly guidelines for what is good and bad. It is wrong first because these sorts of parallels have got to be stable on both sides, and I am not sure how many people would agree with the definition of ‘modernism’ that I imply here. Second, Badiou is very much a philosopher, very much operating within the institutions and traditions of French academic philosophy. I don’t think, in the end, that this is especially modernist. All in all, though, the comparison is not without its utility.

Badiou has recently published several small books, all in the wake of, in support of, his second ‘big book,’ Logiques des mondes (2006). I have just finished one of these, his Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009), a sequel to the manifeste published after his first ‘big book,’ Etre et evenement (1988). The purpose of these manifestos is to condense and popularize Badiou’s thinking, to introduce the reader to the project of the larger book. I feel, with a certain uneasiness, that the book is aimed almost exactly at me, since I know a little about Badiou already and am trying to decide if I should invest the (considerable) time and energy that would be required to tackle Logiques des mondes.

At the end of his Second manifeste, Badiou commits what we can call the fallacy of the classic. The reasoning goes broadly like this: ‘because I have what I feel to be authentic esthetic experiences of objects that were produced in conditions somehow distant from those in which I experience them, there must be something like eternal beauty.’ That is, if we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is because they are monuments of the universal human spirit. There are more or less vulgar versions of this idea. It has several opposite numbers, going from those who reduce art to pure ‘cultural capital’ and snobbery (an untenable position) to those who root the appreciation of art in tradition (T.S. Eliot, for instance). It would probably be difficult to sort things out at the edges of these various arguments, and my impulse would be to pay more attention to the contextual/political force of each argument (but this gives away where I stand on it myself). My short response to the basic position is that it simply doesn’t follow. At any rate, Badiou’s example is cave-painting. He says that “nous comprenons la puissance artistique de peintures rupestres réalisées il y a 40 000 ans – il faut bien qu’elle soit transtemporelle...La théorie...doit expliquer comment des existences idéales, souvent matérialisées dans des objets, peuvent à la fois être créées en un point précis de l’espace-temps et détenir cette forme d’éternité” (144, see also 36). It seems to me clear enough that any plausible ‘eternity’ here is going to be much more banal than Badiou wants.

Of course, Badiou is arguing about a great deal more than the transtemporality of art. Badiou is interested in truths of four kinds (the famous art, love, politics, science), and also in ontology (mathematics) and phenomenology (logic), which can at least be wrong or not, although I don’t remember my reading of Being and Event well enough to be certain that Badiou believes they can be the scene of events, and therefore give rise to subjects and practices of fidelity. I think they cannot be, since they have to do with the conditions of being, appearance, and the subject, rather than with multiplicities and particular worlds (which it seems means the same thing as ‘situation’ did in his earlier work).

I have mentioned several times now the differences in emphasis and terminology between the work clustered around the earlier big book, and the newer. Badiou is quite clear about this: “En 1988, la question central de l’Etre et l’événement ai été celle de l’être des vérités, pensé dans le concept de multiplicité générique. Tandis qu’en 2006, dans Logiques des mondes, la question est devenue celle de leur apparaître, trouvé dans le concept de corps de vérité, ou de corps subjectivable” (13). In the later 1980s, Badiou felt that he had to defend the existence of philosophy itself against a cresting wave of post-Heideggerians. Now, he says, the problem is not that philosophy is dying, but that it is too present, that it is vulgarized and instrumentalized. Then, Derrida was an opponent, more recently he has been a friend. The 1988 book arrived at ontology through mathematics. The 2006 one arrives at appearance through logic. Certainly, in 1988, Badiou had presented us with a general discussion of the practice of fidelity to an event, and the relation of this fidelity to a situation. Here, he says, the central concept is the body [corps] of the subject to a truth.

Although some interesting material is presented in the earlier chapters of this second manifesto about Badiou’s idea of appearance, I would prefer very much there to have the fully fleshed out version in Logiques. An outline may at least be given, however, of chapters 6 and 7, treating Incorporation and Subjectivation.

“Nous supposons la survenue d’un événement” (97). The event is outside temporality in the sense that it has always either not yet or already occurred. Indeed, generally it has already occurred, since events are by their very nature unpredictable, outside of prediction—so perhaps it would be best to say that either an event has not yet occurred, or the event has already occurred. The immediate indication of this event, that is, of this instantaneous brush with the void, is called an “énoncé primordial.” Thus, “initié par l’énoncé primordial, se forme dans le monde un nouveau corps qui sera le corps de vérité, ou corps subjectivable” (99). This body does exist (is a multiple) as the bearer of the truth of the event in the world (or its trace), and so other multiples are incorporated within it. Badiou says, “s’incorporer au devenir d’une vérité, c’est rapporter au corps qui la support tout ce qui, en vous, est d’intensité comparable à ce qui autorise que vous vous identifiiez à l’énoncé primordial, ce stigmate de l’événement d’où le corps provient.”

It is possible to take three different positions vis-à-vis this body of truth. “La position prise au regard de l’existence de ce corps est le réel, la matérialité de la position prise au regard de l’événement” (105). The first, the position of fidelity, is to be incorporated into the body. The faithful subject accepts the radical innovation of the event, and transcends (not Badiou’s use of this word) itself through this incorporation. Then there is the position of indifference, the simply reactive position. Finally, there is the position of “obscurantisme” (106), which is radically opposed to the event, and attempts to eradicate it. Badiou’s example here is political. The Event is the Bolshevik Revolution. The position of fidelity is evidently that of the communist militant. The advantage of this example is precisely, it seems to me, that it admits how fraught the problem of fidelity really is. What does it mean to be faithful to the event in this case? Clearly not an easy thing to say, yet Badiou thinks it is, for all that, still meaningful. The reactive position in the same example is the new social welfare state (the New Deal, for instance), that recognizes the innovation of the event, but does not entirely accept it, attempting to react and ‘manage’ it (in this case, by offering certain political and social concessions without allowing deeper changes). Finally, the obscurantist position is fascism.

It is interesting, and I think has been pointed out before, that Badiou in a sense adopts Ernst Nolte’s revisionist argument that the Nazis were something like the fault of the Communists. For Badiou, the obscurantists take on the trappings of genuine revolution (that is, of fidelity to an event) because this is necessary in order to marshal the forces required to contest the genuine body of truth. We should note that this suggests fascism is to be thought as essentially an enormous dishonesty, rather than an ideology or religious fanaticism. It is possible to distinguish, Badiou says, between obscurantist non-events and real events in that the first are substantial rather than genuinely evental. Communists practice fidelity to a moment of rupture, to the event of 1917, while Nazis practice fidelity to the non-event, the materiality, of the German Volk. We might extend this into non-political examples: a certain kind of art would practice fidelity to a break or innovation as a logic, rather than as a body of work, attempting to practice the spirit rather than the letter of a text.

I was left, at the end of this little text, with the no doubt illegitimate question, why? Why should an individual practice fidelity to an event? Why go through the dangerous and perhaps traumatic incorporation it requires? It has been suggested to me that anyone who puts forward a political program and claims to have a good reason why any given individual should commit themselves to it is at base dishonest. There is no reason, exactly, for any particular person to do a particular thing; there are only conditions and chances, there is only our throwness in the world and the commitments we undertake here. It is dishonest to say that there is a reason for this kind of thing beyond our impulse (not, I think, our desire) toward it. So I am a bit uncomfortable with the hints Badiou gives of why he things this is a good idea. Essentially, it is the old desire to be more than one ‘is,’ to go beyond one’s self. Badiou puts it this way both regarding the militant (103) and the lover (114). I am unhappy with the idea that it is basically a desire to inject meaning into a meaningless life that should propel a person (in Badiou’s system) into incorporation into the body of a truth. I suppose the answer would be that it will always be difficult to distinguish a genuine fidelity to an event from a false fidelity to the substantial practice called ‘fidelity to an event.’ This seems overly psychological. The question is perhaps enough to get me to buy and throw myself at the larger Logiques.

Badiou interview

On Tuesday, Libération published an interview with Alain Badiou, which can be read on their website. Badiou is cast as one of Sarkozy’s three “adversaires”—he fits nicely into the prefab role of “radicalité.” So although the occasion of the interview is really only to continue the anti-Sarko circus, Badiou does manage to articulate some broad political points.

The mode in which the newspaper introduces Badiou is worth pointing out: he is a philosopher, who stands apart both from Derrida and from the nouveaux philosophes, “Il a préféré se lancer dans l’élaboration d’un système philosophique sophistiqué, d’inspiration platonicienne, où les mathématiques jouent un rôle important, et qui lui vaut une certaine renommée dans le monde universitaire anglosaxon.” Then he is also politically engaged, a practicing Maoist. The two are quite separate, and it is his philosophy, not his politics, that interests the English-speaking world; which, in my experience, is quite false. Of course, to begin with, the sectors of the US academy that are interested in Badiou would reject most formulations of a distinction between philosophy and politics. But also, anecdotally, it seems to me that the philosophy is worked through in order to get to the politics, or at least something that is supposed to be critique and therefore political.

(As an aside: I am amazed, though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, that the French press still says ‘anglosaxon,’ when what it means is Britain and the US—the ethnic identification leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

In the interview itself, Badiou indulges in anti-Sarko banter, which is the whole reason they asked him to do the thing in the first place. I think all that is beside the point (conjunctural?). Badiou reaffirms his commitment to the idea of changing the ‘motor’ of society to something other than self-interest, or profit. He argues that so-called democratic societies (the wealthy west) have not in fact reduced violence, but only externalized it. Although the form of this claim is compelling, and I am convinced that ‘we’ export rather than solve a great many of the problems that we solve, Badiou’s specific claim about violence is, as they says, fortement contestable. Also, perhaps, it is subject to empirical verification. The rhetorical reason for this specific claim was to contrast capitalist society with the Soviet Union and other socialist ‘experiments’ (a terrible way to refer to half the world). The capitalists export their systemic violence (one assumes from the capitalist core to the capitalist periphery, although, again, I think the spatialization of capital distribution implied here is, to be short, wrong), while the socialists fully assume it, which is to say, turn the apparatus of the state against the people it is supposed to serve.

Mostly, Badiou states (as probably he has said before) that in his opinion the major theoretical problem of our time is to arrive at an effective form of political mobilization that is not the military-party model. He says,

Le problème d’une discipline politique qui ne soit pas calqée sur le militaire est un problème ouvert, expérimental. Gardons-nous des approches théorique de la question, qui ramènent toujours à l’opposition entre le léninisme (l’organisation) et l’anarchisme (la mobilisation informelle). C’est-à-dire à l’opposition entre Etat et mouvement, qui est une impasse.

He seems to have some specific examples in mind when he rejects the ‘movement’ as a model of political activity. I’m not sure exactly what they are. But I agree that the fetishization of the state/non-state distinction is to be avoided, especially in France, where the line is sometimes hard to find.

I am off to the grève générale, where perhaps I will find some alternative to capitalism.

Du contrat social and Badiou

I put Du contrat social down, and needed a little distance. For whatever reason, I turned to Badiou’s chapter on Rousseau in L’être et l’événement for a second understanding, a second voice. Badiou, it seems to me, is remarkably effective in re-reading Rousseau in his own language. Perhaps, though, the chapter is more about Badiou than Rousseau. It reminds me the extent to which Badiou’s project is to found politics (and philosophy) in a post-foundationalist environment. I wonder if Rousseau’s original problem was not formulated in the opposite context: that is, in an environment of over-many competing and plausible foundational claims. Still, the quick reformulation is worth reciting here. The decisive observation, which makes the rest possible, seems to me to be that Rousseau does indeed see the formation of the general will, of the people, as taking place at a particular moment, but curiously out of history, since the will cannot be represented, and cannot be changed or even, in a sense, destroyed. Badiou has three points to make to begin the movement of the little essay.

First, “Le pact”—that is, the contrat social—“est l’événement qui supplémente au hasard l’état de nature.” Now, Badiou is obviously correct to point to the temporal and yet a-historical dimension of the formation of a people. I am not so certain about the rest of this clause.

Second, “le corps politique, ou peuple, est l’ultra-un événementiel qui s’interpose entre le vide (car, pour la politique, la nature est le vide) et lui-même.” Du contrat social is the only book to date, so far as I can recall, that induced me to draw diagrams in an attempt to understand just what was being said. The Souverain ended up always on the outside of my diagrams, with arrows to and from (one arrow to, and a symbolic three from, actually). The sovereign general will has a number of odd properties, and is easy to understand as ‘next to the void’ in Badiou’s sense.

Third, “la volonté générale est l’opérateur de fidélité qui commande une procédure générique.”

Badiou says that the last point is the difficult one. In fact, given my understanding what all these technical terms mean here, I do not think there is any real problem. There are some striking resemblances between the way Rousseau discusses how to follow or know the general will and Badiou’s ethics of fidelity. If we could stage one of those inane intro-level ‘conversations’ between political thinkers, it seems to me that Rousseau would, within limits, agree with Badiou’s descriptions.

My problem is not with the third, but with the first ‘translation’ of Rousseau into Badiou. For Rousseau, I would say that the ‘event’ of the social contract has a historical beginning that is not open to later re-interpretation in the same way that I understand the Badiou-ian event to be. For Rousseau, the event is not “au hasard.” Badiou’s fidelities give us a way of understanding certain forms of human action that would otherwise appear groundless, but they are not, themselves, exactly a reason for these programs. Badiou, and it is understandable, is not so much interested in why we pursue politics, love, science, art. But Rousseau is; according to Rousseau, all individuals strive to preserve themselves. This is the nature of the individual, and it is replicated in the ‘moral individuals’ of the government on one level, and the state on a higher level. Indeed, Rousseau even suggests that it is important that the government have a limited drive to self-preservation qua government. So it seems to me that if the volonté générale can be an object of the practice of fidelity, the formation of people always takes the form of the creation of a self-preserving entity, which is not at all the same thing as Badiou’s politics. There is a broader objective structure—an anthropology, however peculiar—behind Rousseau’s instantiation of politics.

At any rate, Badiou helped me to think a bit about Rousseau. Next, perhaps, I will look at what Althusser has written. The pile of books is too large not to have a principle, and Marxian readings are more sensible at the moment than other ones.

Badiou's Ethics

Perhaps reading Being and Event before any of Alain Badiou’s other books means that I read his smaller essays more sympathetically. Certainly, I would have taken a different attitude to the (quite lucid) sketches and condensations of his larger philosophy that Badiou gives here and there in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, if I did not know in what detail he worked them out earlier.

Verso has bundled together with the essay on ethics a long interview with translator and Badiou scholar/interpreter Peter Hallward. The interview is in some ways quite a different thing, and at first appears tacked-on; however, it answered, or tried to answer, questions about politics that the main essay left me asking. There is also an introduction from Hallward, which on principle I did not read. Judging by the questions that he asks of Badiou in the interview, it’s probably a good introduction. However, since this book already seems to be a kind of introduction to Badiou, I would strongly recommend that new readers go directly to the beginning of the main text.

Badiou writes against the ideology of human rights, in particular the discourse that takes as its organizing point Nazism and the Holocaust. According to this facile way of thinking, he says, evil is self-evident, and the great ethical task is to intervene in the world to stop these evident evils (which tend to be genocides). This whole ‘ethical turn,’ he argues in the first chapter, is a regression from the anti-humanist and specific engagement of the 1960s.

The second chapter is devoted to a critique not so much of Levinas, but of the distortions, simplifications, and misunderstandings of his work that circulate. Interestingly, Badiou takes as fairly obvious that Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy rests on an essentially theological foundation—this is a matter of some debate, and arrived at only painfully in other circles. Badiou argues that it is in fact impossible to attach any permanent rights to humans-as-animals. That is, against Levinas (or a version of him), there are no rights or obligations for others tattooed on our human faces.

For Badiou ethics as a struggle to avoid radical evil, which is how it is usually posed, is a “figure” of nihilism. He makes a series of arguments here, especially having to do with the repeated invocation of the Holocaust as both that which is absolutely singular and also something constantly to be struggled against. In the end, though, his real problem is with ethics as negative. It is not an ethical position, in his view, to simply try to mitigate cases of the most massive human suffering (never mind the enormous potential for self-serving, hypocrisy, and voyeurism inherent in the current way of thinking about this—I wonder what he thinks about Myanmar, about this specific case of ‘human rights interventionism’?). For Badiou, it is only meaningful to understand ethics as somehow a positive imperative, and it is only from this perspective that it is possible to understand Evil.

Now, I myself have run across the argument, which Badiou must always brush aside, that Evil occurs when people try to change the world in radical or utopian ways. This is Arendt; this is any number of less worthy lights from the postwar period. It is either a liberal or a conservative, and in any case a deeply anti-Marxian position. Although I’m not exactly convinced by most of Badiou’s brief comments on historical specifics—for instance: the Terror was really the result of the pressure of external war on the Revolutionary situation—I appreciate the search for a positive ethics, and his courageous acceptance of the principle that with positive ethical imperatives comes positive evil. How does this work?

Only subjects are able to reach (up to) Good, and so also Evil. A subject is not the same as an individual human organism, though they sometimes overlap. A subject is formed always and only through fidelity to an event via a truth-procedure. The fourth chapter of Ethics sets this out in terms of an ethics of this truth-bearing subject—which is infinite in its variety, but may take one of Badiou’s four famous forms of truth: political, scientific, amorous, artistic. Of course all this, and its relation to the event, is central to Badiou’s thinking. The chapter seems to me like a good way in, though I won’t pretend to have grasped things so well as to be able to make such a judgment. At any rate, people who want to know more are referred to Being and Event and other books.

If the Good is thought of in terms of successful fidelity to an event through the bearing of a truth-procedure, ethics will always be specific to the situation of the fidelity. So, again, there is no universal principle, except perhaps that of specificity. For me, there are some problems hooking this into any meaningful analysis of global capitalism—I suspect that for Badiou these analyses would be scientific, and no doubt very important, but would not have the kind of radical meaning that Marxists of an older stripe would give them. This is discussed in the interview, and is something for which (the incorrigible) Zizek has criticized him. Badiou does not privilege economics. The emancipatory struggle must be political. Capital, despite the empirical power that it wields today, should not be granted any metaphysical status. I haven’t decided quite what I think about this yet.

Evil, then, which is related to the Good of the truth-process, is to be understood in terms of a typology of failures of fidelity to the event. This is all set out in the long fifth chapter, and I won’t try to recap it here. Suffice to say that this is where Badiou’s own philosophy does the most work. We end up with three names, or kinds, of Evil. The first is “to believe that an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude” (71). Badiou here discusses the Nazis, who are after all the inescapable point of reference. It is crucially important for Badiou that Nazism was not fidelity to a real event, but rather was real fidelity to the simulacrum of an event. Rather than practice fidelity to the name of the void of the event (which seems to be 1917—shades of Ernst Nolte?), which is always emancipatory because empty, Nazis were faithful to a plenitude (Aryan-ness) and were therefore obliged to exteriorize the void, especially around the name ‘Jew.’ If one does not embrace and practice fidelity to the void as possibility, then it becomes necessary to eject this void and enforce it around one’s self. In this way, the Evil Nazi subject contained in its essence the genocidal impulse, enforcing the void.

I’m playing a bit fast and loose with Badiou’s vocabulary here, which is dangerous, but this is an excellent example of something that Hallward presses him on in the interview: the void is a concept taken from set theory, and is crucial for Badiou’s ontology. Here it slides very quickly from the ontological to the ontic and goes from being a name for the constitutively nameless to a sort of neologism for killing human animals. Badiou’s answer to Hallward was not, for me, entirely satisfactory.

The next form of Evil—or, rather, name of Evil—is betrayal. This is less well developed than the other names of Evil, and seems to me in fact the most salient one. It can occur when one convinces one’s self that the truth one is practicing is in fact a terror. That is, you betray the fidelity you have been practicing, and, crucially, deny the very possibility of subject-hood associated with it. This is understood as a failure of courage, but it seems to me just as easy to read as an empirically-based decision. This is a major problem, I think, for Badiou—there is no way to know, or test, a truth, since it exists only as it is born by a subject. So how is a well-meaning person to be certain that they are not a Nazi, practicing what appears to be fidelity to the universalizable void of a situation (as, he says, Heidegger briefly and foolishly thought), while in fact they are externalizing the void in order to give place to the particular plenitude? In short, how do we know what is a universalizable and an immortal truth-procedure, and what is a scam? Badiou’s answer seems to be a kind of secular faith, or courage. At a certain point, one must decide.

There’s more to say here, but I want to pause and point out my problem with two sorts of words that Badiou uses that bother me. The first is his mobilization of the universal/particular. This, I think, is justified by, or at least connected to, math. Many systems and modes are universalizable, he suggests. Politics, further, is always about the universal. I’m not certain what the import of these claims are, and especially how one thinks about this universalist impulse within the situation, which is always where his ethics stays. The answer, I suppose, is a kind of ontological proceduralism? It’s the fidelity that is universal, and the subject that is immortal, rather than their content? What does he mean by Immortal? Plato, I think, is the reference point here, but I’m not familiar enough with all that to know what he might be making of it. It seems to me that Immortal is what we in fact are, as subjects, according to Badiou. Humans are different from other animals because they can be subjects of truth, and therefore immortal. Fine, but again I’d like to hear more about—though it sounds ridiculous—the content of this immortality.

The last name of Evil is the disaster—or, the temptation of totality. Again, it seems that this has to do with the void and the nature of the situation. It is an ontological rule that descriptions of situations are not co-extensive with the situation. A disaster is when fidelity to the truth-procedure attempts to name every element of the situation, which in principle cannot be totally named by any language. I believe it is here that Badiou mentions Gödel’s theorem. It is Evil, then, to take one’s fidelity to a truth-procedure, and march it into every corner of the situation. This is to say, no truth is total, and so no one fidelity may be used to organize the entire world. The distinction here is between what Badiou calls ‘opinion,’ which is what we normally use to operate in the world, and the truth-procedure. The first is incoherent and messy, the later is totally consistent. Evil happens with this consistency is enforced.

Especially here at the end, I’m simplifying considerably and stripping away most of Badiou’s language. I’ve signaled most of the places where there seem things left out to me, where gaps or failures seem especially clear. Some of this no doubt comes from my unfamiliarity with the larger body of his work, some no doubt from failure to read well enough. As to whether I think this is a good way of understanding the world...well, this is another question.

Badiou in NLR

I have read a little about Badiou’s new book, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, mostly not good things. I’m not going to read the whole thing in the near future—certainly not in the next month—so I was pleased to see the New Left Review print a translated selection.

After Being and Event, I wanted to know a great deal more about the kind of philosophy of history that might come out of Badiou’s ideas. Metapolitics didn’t exactly answer the question. This little selection has, I think. For Badiou, history is a resolutely presentist and cyclical. This is easy to swallow (hard to avoid) speaking about the Revolution, but the ‘transcendental Pétainism’ of Sarkozy is a good example (Badiou cites 1815 as the first modern example of this political form). Match this to the cycles of ‘the communist hypothesis,’ in modern times—from 1792 to 1871, then again from 1917 to 1976, putting us, hopefully, at the beginning of a new period—and you’ve got a nice, weaving, repeating history, structured always by the regulative power of courageous fidelity, or, in the case of Pétanism, by fear.

Badiou is here advocating something he calls performative unity. I’m not convinced that this is a terribly useful idea. It does have a trifle more content than Zizek’s politics of refusal, but it seems to me born of the same kind of critical despair.

Most of what I read about this little book talked about Badiou calling various people rats. No doubt the whole book is different, perhaps more aggressive in tone. But from this selection, accusations of crypto-exterminationist leftism were greatly exaggerated.

inside Badiou

Meditation Nine of Being and Event breaks sharply from the mathematical/ontological (and philosophical) elaboration that takes up the previous eight meditations. We turn from the state—as metastructure of situation, as, in fact, a set-theoretical notation—to the State, historically, as Marxist theory has understood it. The ontological categories normality, singularity, excrescence, are used to analyze Engel’s analysis of the State. The bourgeoisie is singular [i meant: normal], because it is presented (to step out of Badiou’s vocabulary, ‘really there’) and also re-presented by the State. The proletariat is singular, because it is presented (again, an objectively existing social group), but not re-presented in the State. The state itself, Badiou says that Engels says, is excrescence. This is wrong, though “formally correct”—I’m not sure how this works out yet. Perhaps Meditation Ten will bring enlightenment.

At the moment, it just sounds like Badiou is applying these ontological categories willy-nilly to historical situations. There has not always been a State, bourgeois or otherwise, and there isn’t one everyplace at the moment. What can he possibly mean? Surely ontology isn’t supposed to work differently if the means of production change?

outside Badiou

Having once posted about the cover of a book, rather than the inside, it is hard not to continue doing so. In this case, the next book I’m reading for the theory class: the 2005 English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (since it’s a nice indication of a book’s popularity: it is currently priced to sell at just under $15 on Amazon.com). I’m only 60 pages through this thing, so there’s not even that space to judge yet. I find Badiou’s tone in the new preface incredibly self-important and off-putting at best. Still, I’m already a bit in awe. We’ll see if it lasts.

The back cover, then. It is full of ‘significance.’ The word is used three times. Badiou is described in the 4-line bio as “one of France’s most important contemporary philosophers.” From the four blurbs, it is “most significant,” or “a significant book” which speaks to “philosophical and political debates that matter most to us.” Everywhere, it is important, significant, “tackling the whole.”

Is the insistence on significance and ‘mattering to us’ symptomatic? At the least, of extreme uncertainty on the part of the design folks over at continuum press? (which, from a brief perusal of their catalog, looks pretty interesting)