Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy 9781350069947, 9781350069978, 9781350069954

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction – The Transmission and Its.Moment
1 Beyond Negative Dialectics
2 Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject
3 Lack and Concept: On Hegelian Motives in Badiou
4 Hegel’s Immanence of Truths
5 The Torsion of Idealism
6 Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? Or Badiou’s Philosophical Politics of Demarcation
7 The Question Concerning Technology: Badiou versus Heidegger
8 Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? What Adorno Has to Say about Badiou
9 Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou: The Negativity of the Subject
10 Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and.Music
11 Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and.Badiou
Index

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Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy

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Badiou and His Interlocutors, Alain Badiou, edited by A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory, Burhanuddin Baki Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nick Hewlett

Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy Edited by Jan Völker

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © to the collection Jan Völker and contributors, 2019   Jan Völker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6994-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6995-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-6996-1   Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Contributors

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Introduction – The Transmission and Its Moment  Jan Völker 1 Beyond Negative Dialectics  Alain Badiou 2 Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject  Rado Riha 3 Lack and Concept: On Hegelian Motives in Badiou  Dominik Finkelde 4 Hegel’s Immanence of Truths  Frank Ruda 5 The Torsion of Idealism  Jan Völker 6 Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? Or Badiou’s Philosophical Politics of Demarcation  Svenja Bromberg 7 The Question Concerning Technology: Badiou versus Heidegger  Justin Clemens 8 Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? What Adorno Has to Say about Badiou  Alexander García Düttmann 9 Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou: The Negativity of the Subject  Christoph Menke 10 Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and Music  Jelica Sumic 11 Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and Badiou  Rok Benčin

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1 9 19 35 51 69 89 113 131 147 171

Acknowledgements It all started with a conference, one of the classical constellations of a philosophical moment, held at the Berlin University of the Arts in January 2016. This book itself forms another constellation of a different philosophical moment, since it is by no means a mere collection of papers delivered at this conference, each text having been fundamentally changed in the interim. Further authors have also joined. Philosophy is marked by the span between a discussion and a book, neither one being reducible to the other, a span that unfolds a real time of philosophy itself. I thank all the contributors for their patience, their strength and their willingness to work on this project up to this intermediary result for what cannot but be a debate to be continued. Special thanks go to Alain Badiou, our generous interlocutor, who was supportive and encouraging from the moment of the first vague plans onwards. I also thank Bloomsbury, especially Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace, for their willingness to publish this book and for their backing throughout the work. The Institute of Art History, Art Theory and Aesthetics at the Berlin University of the Arts also strongly supported the project, for which I am grateful. Finally, I thank Steven Corcoran for his ever-reliable editorial assistance.

Contributors Alain Badiou is a philosopher, playwright, novelist, mathematician and political activist. He is the author most notably of Theory of the Subject (2009), Being and Event (2006), Being and Event II: Logics of Worlds (2009) and L’Immanence des vérités (2018). Rok Benčin is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU). He is the author of the book Monadless Windows:  Aesthetics from Heidegger to Rancière (in Slovenian, 2015) and several articles, including ‘Proustian Developments: The World and Object of Photography’, SubStance, vol. 3 (2017). Svenja Bromberg is Lecturer in social theory and Marxism in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University London. Her publications include Euro Trash (2016, ed. with Birthe Mühlhoff and Danilo Scholz) and several articles, including ‘Badiou’s Recommencement of the Young-Hegelian Purification of Politics:  A Response to Ishay Landa’, International Critical Thought, vol. 4 (2014): 367–83. Justin Clemens is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. His recent publications include Badiou and His Interlocutors (2018) and What Is Education? (2017), both co-edited with A. J. Bartlett. Alexander García Düttmann teaches philosophy at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. His latest publications focus on contemporary art and the question of ideology (Was ist Gegenwartskunst? Zur politischen Ideologie, 2017)  and on the origin of the work of art (Love machine:  Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, 2018). Dominik Finkelde SJ is professor of contemporary philosophy and epistemology at the Munich School of Philosophy. He is the author of Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics (2017) and the editor of Badiou and the State (2017). Christoph Menke is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. Book publications in English include The

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Contributors

Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity after Adorno and Derrida (1998) and Law and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue (2018). Rado Riha is a senior research fellow and currently head of the Institute of Philosophy, Centre for Scientific Research at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His publications include The Second Copernican Turn in Kant’s Philosophy (2012) and Kant in Lacanscher Absicht: Die kopernikanische Wende und das Reale (forthcoming). Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His recent publications include The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (with Rebecca Comay, 2018) and Reading Marx (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza, 2018). Jelica Sumic is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has published a number of philosophical works, including Eternity and Change:  Philosophy in the Worldless Times (2012). Currently she is working on a forthcoming volume entitled Volonté et Désir. Jan Völker is a research associate at the Institute of Fine Arts and Aesthetics at the Berlin University of the Arts and visiting lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Ljubljana and at Bard College Berlin. Recent publications include (as editor) Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy’s German Philosophy: A Dialogue (2018) and an international issue of Filozofski vestnik, edited with Rado Riha and Jelica Sumic, ‘The Issue with Kant’ (2015).

Introduction – The Transmission and Its Moment Jan Völker

Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy  – the title is an indication of a problem. We often speak of ‘German’ or ‘French’ philosophy as if we were talking about something German or something French within philosophy. What we are actually referring to are, of course, certain moments in the history of philosophy, and if we unfold our understanding of ‘German’ or ‘French’ philosophy, we receive a list, a web of names. Not only will some disputes arise about whether certain names belong to the canon or not, but the names will also reveal themselves to be not only ‘German’ or ‘French’ but rather to traverse national identities. The question of the canon is therefore a controversial matter, and adding to it the question of tradition seems to only fuel the debate. The word ‘tradition’ refers back to the Latin tradere, to pass on. Of course there is a whole ‘tradition’ of complications linked to the concept of ‘tradition’, but here I would like to emphasize one thing: something is being passed on in philosophy; philosophy cannot exist if not something is being passed on. Let us enumerate three different, though connected, problems that arise from this point. First, it needs to be specified what it is that is being passed on. Then it is necessary to establish how it is being passed on, and finally we have the question of how it is received. One remarks immediately that to answer such questions a philosophical understanding of philosophy is unavoidable. The apparent line that seems to be indicated within the word ‘tradition’ is itself full of philosophical presuppositions, so to debate a question of tradition in philosophy is itself a philosophical problem. First of all, it is an essential problem to philosophy to describe what it is about. If there is something that is able to continue from one philosophy to another, then this something will not be easy to grasp, perhaps it is not even describable

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in terms of an object. The specific method, then, that might be used to transfer something from an older philosophy into a current one can also only be dubious. Does it not turn anything it grasps into a moment of the philosophy of which it is a part itself? Thus, one might finally doubt whether not anything that is allegedly being transferred actually reveals to be rather a new construction. One might doubt, this is to say, whether a philosophy is actually able to continue moments of other philosophies, or whether it does not rather rewrite them on its own purpose. ‘Tradition’ is here to be understood as a title for these three closely interrelated problems. It is a title that nevertheless is built on the hypothesis that a sort of transmission is at work, and that it would be too easy to read any reference or debate as being only a moment in a new construction. If the hypothesis is that something is being transmitted, then the working question is to examine how different forms of transmission work and how the result can be grasped in its specificity. What are the objects of the transmission? What are the directions? What is the temporality? What is the materiality of that which is transmitted? Besides the problems of transmission, the notion of tradition implies a second aspect, as it indicates that processes of transmission transgress the individual level. There is a peculiar materiality of thought to be recognized here, one connecting different philosophies by lines of continuation, contradiction, junction. Badiou himself has described such a process of inscription in ‘French philosophy’. In the introduction to his The Adventure of French Philosophy, he speaks of the taking place of a ‘French philosophical moment’ in the ‘second half of the twentieth century’,1 and he discerns four ‘intellectual operations common to all [the] thinkers’2 of this moment. The first move is a German one  – or rather, a French move upon German philosophers. All contemporary French philosophy is also, in reality, a discussion of the German heritage. Its formative moments include Kojève’s seminars on Hegel, attended by Lacan and also influential upon Lévi-Strauss, and the discovery of phenomenology in the 1930s and 40s, through the works of Husserl and Heidegger.3

There is a slight shift to be recognized in this quote: the German move is rather a French move upon German philosophers. This slight shift entails a large part 1 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso, 2012), li. 2 Ibid., liv. 3 Ibid.

Introduction

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of the problem that is classically referred to as a problem of influences and reception. As aforementioned, this problem itself demands a philosophical approach and divides itself into a series of serious philosophical questions. But Badiou’s discussion of the ‘German move’ does indicate a further complication, for the established context is situated on a conceptual level that surpasses individual relations. French philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. What was it that they sought? In a phrase:  a new relation between concept and existence. Behind the many names this search adopted – deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics – lies a common goal: that of transforming, or displacing, this relation. The existential transformation of thought, the relation of thought to its living subsoil, was of compelling interest for French thinkers grappling with this central issue of their own heritage. This, then, is the ‘German move’, the search for new ways of handling the relation of concept to existence by recourse to German philosophical traditions. In the process of its translation onto the battleground of French philosophy, moreover, German philosophy was transformed into something completely new. This first operation, then, is effectively a French appropriation of German philosophy.4

If we take this as a starting point for this book – Badiou’s move upon ‘German philosophy’ – then two different but interlinked problems arise: the question of transmission – what is being transmitted, how it occurs and what it results in; and the question that we might call that of the ‘moment’ – a question that implies a notion of the actuality of philosophical constructions beyond individual works. Now, turning to Badiou, neither aspect is fully evident on the first view. At the level of textual evidence, something is clearly being passed on, but it might be wondered how important the role of German philosophy in Badiou’s works actually is. He has written texts and chapters on Kant and Hegel,5 has given a seminar and written a small book on Heidegger,6 a chapter on Adorno,7

4 lbid., v. 5 Let’s refer only to some examples:  the chapter on Kant (‘Kant’s Subtractive Ontology’) in Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence:  A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY:  State University of New  York Press, 2006), 133–41; then the text on Hegel in Alain Badiou, Joël Bellassen and Louis Mossot, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, trans. Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re.press, 2011). 6 A. Badiou and B. Cassin, Heidegger:  His Life and Philosophy, intro. K.  Reinhard, trans. S. Spitzer (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2016); Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire:  Heidegger, L’être 3  – Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015). 7 Alain Badiou, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectics’. In Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (London/ New York: Verso, 2010), 27–54.

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Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy

a small book on Wittgenstein8 and a seminar and texts on Nietzsche.9 While the latter two are given the label ‘antiphilosophers’, on none of the rest do we find any big studies of them as particular philosophers. Badiou’s works function differently: on the one hand, Badiou pours a lot of labour into the seminars (a steady stream of which have been published over the last few years), then, on the other, the results, positions and highly condensed arguments of this labour are implemented in the main works. It is clear that, in terms of a discussion of the inscription of German philosophy into Badiou’s work, the immanence of the references makes things still more complicated. Not only is a certain amount of reconstruction necessary, but this reconstruction also runs the risk of establishing fictitious relations, as if there were a real Kant or a real Hegel beyond Badiou’s interpretations. But any Hegel, Kant, Heidegger or Adorno is both Badiou’s own version and at the same time is irreducible to such a version. Hegel or Kant and all the others are Badiou’s, but in turn they also retain something of their own in Badiou. A specific materiality of these philosophies persists, and this materiality is of course linked to the kernel of their thought.10 Incorporated philosophies change and remain the same, but they also get actualized in this process. They might refer to something new to which they haven’t referred before. This novelty is not simply a fictitious construction by the incorporating philosophy, but rather a retroactive continuation of the true Hegel or Kant. A duality of directions is involved in the process of transmission, which brings us to the second aspect mentioned, that of the ‘moment’. If the first starting point was the question of Badiou’s move upon ‘German philosophy’, the inverse question is German philosophy’s move upon ‘Badiou’. This has to be considered in a broad sense, as it is at this junction of both moves that an actuality of philosophy takes shape. To establish the to-and-fro between Badiou’s philosophy and German philosophy as an actuality of philosophy – such is the aim to which the texts in this book contribute. The different contributions in this book tackle Badiou’s relations to Kant and Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and finally Adorno. They do not cover the full range of Badiou’s relations to German philosophy, nor do all the texts in this book claim to be an exhaustive examination of these particular relations. The book can only be 8 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New York: Verso, 2011). 9 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Nietzsche. L’ Antiphilosophie I (Paris: Fayard, 2015); and Alain Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, Pli, vol. 11 (2001): 1–11. 10 On the question of Badiou’s relation to German philosophy, see also the discussion between Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy that took place during the same conference that provided the occasion for this book. Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, German Philosophy:  A Dialogue, ed. Jan Völker (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

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a starting point for the continuation of the discussion of philosophical junctions, continuations and rejections in Badiou’s works and their relation to the German and other philosophical traditions. All the particular philosophical names that appear in this book actually open the demand for a further examination of their role and their topicality in Badiou’s oeuvre: there is still more that needs to be said on Kant and Hegel in Badiou in a variety of aspects; Heidegger’s role is important and has been underestimated, as Justin Clemens remarks in his contribution. Marx opens the vast problem of the brink between philosophy and antiphilosophy as well as between philosophy and politics, and Adorno is a difficult case in his surprising proximity and blunt contrast. However, the actual beginning begins with Badiou’s own account of his relationship with German philosophy. He unfolds it in the form of an autobiographical narrative:  starting with his early appreciation of Sartre and Husserl, he continues with his reading of Heidegger against Kant and finally of Cantor against Heidegger. The complete path of these relations is crossed by his uninterrupted work on Plato and is also punctuated by the development of specific concepts in the domains of science, art, love and politics. In a nutshell, this text proposes a very personal elaboration of the reality of philosophical thought; it unfolds how a life is structured by establishing the consequences of encounters with philosophical works. That the encounters in this case are encounters with philosophies makes for a very special case of the question of consequences, for we are not dealing with events in the precise sense. A key question that arises here, then, concerns precisely the relation between encounters with philosophical thoughts and the development of concepts in the four realms of science, politics, art and love. Badiou presents a constellation in which the eventual structures are juxtaposed by the differences of the particular encounters and the continuity in the work on Plato. A different notion of the autobiographical account becomes necessary here:  while concepts  – think of political concepts, for e­ xample – are created in relation to a real (political) situation (which then also might be understood as unfolding its truth through different epochs), the examination of philosophical thought and its abilities to transmit moments of the real from one condition to the other is ongoing. This examination itself is split into moments of difference: lines of conflict, on the one hand, and lines of continuity, on the other. It is possible to live in the orientation by ideas, although this does not prescribe the idea to the individual life. The relation of the notion of the idea to the differences of real developments, this persisting structure found one of its peaks in modern philosophy in German Idealism, so it is hardly surprising that, after Plato and Descartes,

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Hegel plays a crucial role in Badiou’s oeuvre. But Kant is there, too, although the first thinker of German Idealism remains an ambivalent figure in Badiou’s work. Often rejected as a thinker of the finite, Badiou nevertheless constantly refers to him throughout his work. Kant is the focus in Rado Riha’s contribution, which follows Badiou’s text. Riha’s article develops an implicit figure of Badiou in Kant, as it can be found when the question of the subject in Kant is read in the light of Badiou. Riha examines each of the three critiques to outline what might be called a Badiouan notion of the Kantian subject. This subject is one that is created in a phenomenal world in which something is constitutively present as lacking, the thing-in-itself or the real, and which is finally constructed in Kant’s third critique on the Power of Judgment. Afterwards, Dominik Finkelde turns the focus to Hegel, who – in contrast with Kant – is treated with more sympathy in Badiou’s works, but nevertheless also rejected as a thinker of the One. In his contribution, Finkelde argues that Hegel might, however, be closer to Badiou than Badiou is willing to admit. Finkelde follows the structure of the excess in which both Hegel and Badiou find the chance for universality to appear. A concrete figure of the possibility of a new subject to arise is then given in the example of Jesus of Nazareth, by cutting across the theories of Hegel, Badiou and Lacan. Frank Ruda then develops the immanence of Hegel to Badiou: after Badiou’s intervention into the history of philosophy, it becomes possible to reread Hegel anew and differently. We find the description of the encounter of an event in the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely as the complete subtraction of all that is, which leads to the impossible form of absolute knowing. Hegel’s Logic can then be understood as unfolding the practical consequences of the affirmation of an event, as creating the form of a new subject that previously seemed impossible. My own contribution then creates a relation between the beginning of philosophy in Badiou’s work and the conception of the beginning of philosophy in Kant and Hegel. The figure of the beginning poses the twofold problem of a distinction between philosophy and something that is not philosophy, on the one hand, and a temporal distinction that allows to think a time before philosophy, on the other. While Kant and Hegel dissimulate the necessary moment of intervention that characterizes the beginning of philosophy, Badiou reiterates and emphasizes this beginning by turning it into an act and by situating this act prior to the possibility of ontology. Leaving German Idealism, we turn to one of its harshest critics, Marx, who famously called for philosophy to be overcome in favour of real political movement. Svenja Bromberg’s contribution analyses whether Badiou’s category

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of antiphilosophy  – as a specific philosophical strategy  – can be applied to Marx. Developing the ambivalent position of Marx in Badiou, Bromberg argues that Marx conceives of philosophy as critique; while he is not afraid of losing philosophy altogether, neither does he aim at its destruction. Combining philosophy and politics, Marx finally presents us with a different notion of philosophy, one that reveals a limit-point within Badiou’s philosophy. On a completely different terrain, namely in the relation to Heidegger, such a limit-point is then argued for in Justin Clemens’s paper. Heidegger appears fairly absent from much of Badiou’s work, but, Clemens argues, he nonetheless needs to be understood as one of the most essential philosophers for Badiou, at least from Being and Event on. Badiou’s later work is fundamentally polarized by Heidegger’s philosophy: he takes up the question of ontology, but situates it as external to philosophy; he then proposes an understanding of mathematics that is completely different from Heidegger’s. At the same time, Badiou remains rather silent on the question of technology, although it is omnipresent in the current reception and uses of Heidegger’s philosophy. The volume then continues with an examination of the last large major division, namely the relation between Badiou and Adorno. The chapters in this last part show that there is by far more to say on this relation than seemed possible at first sight, especially given that Badiou’s main debate with Adorno is to be found in a single chapter of his book on Wagner. But in contrast with Heidegger, the rejection of Adorno seems unambiguous, such that certain proximities come as a surprise. The first text on the relation to Adorno is Alexander García Düttmann’s contribution, in which he explores the question of whether a philosopher can or must have ‘bloody hands’. Starting from Sartre’s play and continuing via Heidegger, Düttmann then opposes Badiou’s theory of points and Adorno’s critique of decision making. While in Badiou the question of truth orients the necessity of a decision to take on a point of inexistence in the phenomenal world, for Adorno, then, thought itself reveals to be an always problematic practice, an ambiguous form of practice, an undecidable point of mediation that exceeds the duality of a choice. While the problem of the ‘bloody hands’ indicates the difficulty of praxis in thought, the theoretical problem of negation is discussed as a moment of dialectics in Christoph Menke’s contribution. Menke starts from the notion of freedom and the question of its relation to negativity and affirmation. Comparing Badiou’s and Adorno’s discussion of Hegel, he aligns both on their critique of Hegel’s account of the subject’s self-determination. But going

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beyond self-determination, Badiou insists on the necessity of affirmation, while for Adorno affirmation is not possible without a relation to negativity. This difference leads finally to a distinction of the different types of intervention the subject is ascribed to in Badiou and Adorno, allowing Badiou to bypass the notion of freedom, which, he concedes, is linked to negativity. The last two texts then focus on the question of aesthetics. First, Jelica Sumic’s contribution addresses the topic of music in Adorno and Badiou, framing it in the general relation of music and philosophy. While Adorno takes music to be a sibling of philosophy, for Badiou art forms are one of the conditions of philosophy. But music marks a fairly peculiar point in Badiou’s work, as Sumic argues through examining the role of Schoenberg and Wagner in Badiou. Wagner, especially, is transcribed into a philosophical name for music, an opening for a future of music as a condition of philosophy. This retroactive gesture, as an intervention into existing music, contrasts with Adorno’s intervention for une musique informelle, which also seeks to create a place for music in philosophy. Finally, Rok Benčin focuses on aspects of artistic truth in Badiou and Adorno. Both philosophers insist on the necessity of form as a condition for truth to arise within art, as form has the capacity to be transformed. While, in Adorno, the violent relation of form to its material conditions the artistic truth, Badiou’s focus is on the productive aspect of the process of form. Benčin then argues that it is possible to describe a self-affection of form in both philosophies, and he brings in a Freudian couple of concepts to define a moment of melancholia in Adorno’s forms of art and a moment of mania in Badiou’s forms of art. At this point, our debate finds its preliminary end, but has hopefully already sparked several forms of continuation.

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Beyond Negative Dialectics Alain Badiou

My goal today is to inscribe some German references  – Heidegger, Adorno and some others  – through a long detour, which is the long detour of my personal relationship not only to Heidegger and Adorno, not only to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or Husserl, but to the German world as an intellectual, scientific, artistic, political and philosophical world. So we will have some names, Heidegger, Adorno and others, and the conceptual framework will be dialectics. Dialectics as the name for Germany. Maybe, more precisely, it will be the difficult question of the dialecticité of dialectics, that is, of the contradiction in any dialectical process between affirmation and negation, the question of the exact relationship between the two. In my book Logics of Worlds, I call my philosophy a materialist dialectics. I do not speak of a dialectical materialism but of a materialist dialectics, which means that dialectics is the more important word of the two. A materialist I am, because I affirm that what exists is composed of bodies and languages and of nothing else. A dialectician I am, too, because we must add: all that exists is composed of bodies and languages – except that some truths also exist. These technical questions lie in a very complex context. As a symptom we can observe that in my work Adorno is a reference and is criticized only in relationship to Wagner. And it is so the musical dimension of Germany which is here a piece of my philosophical argumentation. In my words, in my jargon, in my not-Heideggerian jargon, we could say that finally I read Adorno inside the action of the artistic condition of philosophy. There is no big difference between the critics of Adorno in my book Wagner’s Case and, for example, the use of Schoenberg, Berg or Webern in a strategic passage of Logics of Worlds: the scholium titled a ‘Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject’. It is true that in this scholium Germany is really a canonical example. I quote: ‘Let us choose

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as a world German music’, that is, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. So you see, Adorno himself inscribed German music as a world. At a more general level, my whole 1992 seminar devoted to Nietzsche ultimately concerns artistic creation as a condition of philosophy. This seminar is a commentary of Nietzschean texts of 1888, I quote: ‘Art! Nothing else! Only art creates the possibility of life. Art is the only antagonistic strength against all forms of negation of life.’ I know that negativity is not at all the important point for Nietzsche. Negativity is on the side of life’s negation. For Nietzsche the point is the affirmative strength of art over and against the negation of life. This will be the first point of our discussion of today concerning affirmative and negative dialectics. To say something which seems paradoxical:  the history of philosophy and all the magnificent texts of our philosophical tradition, and especially of the German philosophical tradition, all that, is not in themselves a condition for philosophy, because philosophy is an act and not only and not in the first place a text. The idea that the history of philosophy, for example, the German succession Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, is by itself a condition for philosophy is in fact the reduction of philosophy to its pure existence, to what Lacan names the discourse of the university. And, from the beginning, the discourse of the university has always been a terrible enemy of living philosophy. So we must examine not only the evident effects of some great German philosophers on some other philosophers – maybe on some French philosophers – for instance, the couples Leibniz/Deleuze, Husserl/Sartre, Nietzsche/Foucault, Heidegger/ Derrida, Marx/Althusser, Hegel/Lacan and so on, all of which are magnificent French–German couples. But we must determine in what sort of context, in what complex of real conditions for philosophy, this sort of relationship between philosophers is really an active one. That is why I shall begin today by saying that my relationship with Nietzsche became active in the end only in the context of German music, of German music as a world, and also of the German language as a poetical place. That is why my lecture will be autobiographical in nature. It will be something like a novel about a part of my life. In what sort of real circumstances, and by the mediation of what conditions of philosophy, have I  met German philosophy at the very source? That is the question. My first access to German philosophy took place via Sartre, very long ago, alas, when I  was seventeen years old. The true victor, the true successful winner of my passionate reading of Being and Nothingness – Sartre’s big book – in 1954/55 was most certainly neither Heidegger nor Hegel, but Husserl.



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And the question is finally why a young man like me in 1954, reading Being and Nothingness chose Husserl. As Sartre speaks at length about Heidegger, and about Hegel, why do I choose Husserl, who is not a very exciting figure, one that is, like most of the German thinkers, simultaneously long, difficult and obscure. This is the real question of the introduction of my thinking in German territory. And the explanation is: because Sartre for me was not only a philosopher, he was part of a very precise context: the end of the Vietnam war, the total defeat of French colonial troops in Vietnam and the beginning of the Algerian war. The potency of the communist party was also a very important determination in my situation in France. In this context, Sartre for me represented the way of freedom. He was absolutely opposed to the colonial wars – so, in my eyes, on the side of the good negativity – he was close to the French communist party and so on the side of revolt against the state, but he was not inside the party. He was thus, for me, also on the side of the good affirmative position, dialectically linked to negativity and in some sense very conscious. All that fixed my orientation in my reading of Sartre. The central concept was conscience, consciousness, in the real form, in the Husserlian form of intentionality. Intentionality represents an immediate relationship to being as such, inside a form of ontological realism, but this realism is an active operation. Intentionality is not only an immediate link to being as such in the form of experience, but intentionality is also the gift of the meaning of the pure indifference of being. It is the gift of a signification. So, finally, in my reading of Sartre, I  found a general ontological context, indifferent to human existence, absurde, says Sartre, and an intentional relation to this indifference, which is the possible construction of a world. Here we have a sort of a paradoxical relationship between donation, the gift of a meaning – an active operation  – and, on the other side, a complete stupidity of being. The relationship between the gift of the meaning and this stupidity was very appealing to me. At another level, Hegel represented the Sartrean theory of the other. Sartre describes the pessimistic movement of the subject, between masochism and sadism, for him the two only possibilities of the relationship to others – at least for the Sartre of that time. Either I am a pure, passive thing for the other or the other is a passive thing for me. You find this vision underlying the famous conclusion of the play Huis clos (No Exit): ‘L’ enfer, c’est les autres.’ (Hell is other people.) Sartre’s conclusion is a pessimistic one concerning the dialectics between a subject and others. But this terrible affirmation was finally only a dark and romantic translation of the famous Hegelian master–slave dialectic. Hegel explains why the first encounter, the first meeting between two consciousnesses, takes the form of an absolute fight. The master is defined by the

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fact that he or she does not fear the risk of death, while the slave does. But after that Hegel explains that the slave, who works, and creates, becomes the master of the master – is the new kingdom of culture. Husserl represented for me the idea of a free relationship to the indifference of being. The free gift of a meaning against the massive stupidity of being, the Hegelian dialectics of the other was the drama of the dissymmetry of power. All that composed finally with the mixture, the German mixture of Hegel and Husserl, a very romantic vision. The proposition of a life as a tragic theatre. And a political one with the drama of the Algerian war, and also an amorous one with the ontological impossibility of pure reciprocity between two subjects. All that represented the tragedy of existence and I began my life as teenager in this context. I saw myself as a dramatic character of life, as playing the dangerous fight against the colonial war, engaging in impossible loves, in the stupidity of being . . . all that under the sensual potency of Wagnerian music. In fact, all that was really my German part. The beginning of my life was under the signifier of the German part. To complete this part, I  read Thomas Mann, Musil, and Hermann Broch night and day. I progressively became something like a FrenchGerman young man. But my German romantic part did not reign over the totality of the young Badiou. This domination of my spirit by Germany lasted many years – but never reigned completely. First, in those same years, I had to prepare to take the very difficult exam to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure; I was, for instance, obliged to learn ancient Greek. Certainly, as a sort of a French-German individual, I  was prepared for a magnificent revelation. The Greek revelation through the revelation of the German word. Being sort of German, I was able to think that I was also sort of Greek. The reading of Heidegger was the horizon of this spectacular metamorphosis of a provincial Frenchman into a Greek person, in the modern form of a German. Once more, theatre was the most intense mediation (and not directly Heidegger) thanks to my reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. And, as a synthesis, I  discovered the frenetic use of Greek theatre in German music, notably with the parodist opera of Richard Strauss, Elektra, which was a passion of my young days. Elektra was for me a good mixture: Greek tragedy, post-Wagnerian music, a Germanistic vision, the Sartrean impossibility of reciprocity, solitude in the construction of meaning and ontological stupidity of all that, reflected by the violent and sometimes very vulgar music of Strauss. But beyond this romantic feeling I  also started my reading of Plato. From 1956 to today, I  have read Plato uninterruptedly. And this reading has been something essential, naturally, but it was also something secret, for quite a while. It was something indifferent to the other components of my singularity. For a



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long time, Plato has been a sort of secret (bad) part of my existence. Plato was something like my immanent exception. And probably the profound origin of this long reading of Plato has created a most important conviction of mine: universal truths exist. Certainly, being is indifferent. Politics is often a desperate resistance. The others are obscure. Freedom is without any rule. History is a tale told by an idiot. And the sensual nihilism of Wagner is the only musical pleasure. And theatre is the law of the world. All that was certainly the final description of my romanticism – but here Plato was like a sort of super-ego for me, which is to say: we can have access to something universal. And behind Plato I discovered the magic existence of mathematics. During the last part of the fifties, between 1955 and 1960, I constructed the third part of myself. At a purely scientific level, I  introduced myself into the labyrinth of set theory, of mathematical logics, of the fundamental concepts of topology and of the clear and very beautiful structure of modern algebra. This was also a French–German journey. Riemann and Galois, Cantor and Bourbaki, Emmy Noether and Lebesgue, Hilbert and Poincaré . . . It is possible that mathematics, more so than philosophy, has been a French–German paradise for the last two centuries. And through the mediation of mathematics I  entered the structuralism of the 1960s. Finally, it is another example of my access to philosophy not directly, but by its conditions. Music, theatre, love  – in romanticism  – and now science. I  discovered Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, but in some sense also Bourdieu and even Marx, under the law of pure mathematics. As you see, at the beginning of the glorious sixties I was not at all unified; I was made of four different pieces. First, a romantic interpretation of German phenomenology. Second, a mathematical interpretation of French structuralism. Third, a Marxist engagement into the political fight against colonial worlds. And fourth, Plato, as a super-ego, as a guarantee for the existence of universal truths. I can declare before you, for the first time – this is a confession – that my philosophical work has been to construct a conceptual place for my unification. At the level of the thinking of being, at the ontological level, I propose a very German story. First, in some sense  – we discussed it yesterday with Jean-Luc Nancy  – first Heidegger against Kant. Let’s say:  Heidegger, as I  understand Heidegger against Kant, as I  understand Kant. Heidegger against Kant in the sense that we can construct a thinking of being as such and that there is no limit in this direction. To have access to this thinking we must, against all religious forms, separate being and the one. And this double separation, of being from the one and then of the infinite from the one, represents for me very important steps. In the big book on Nietzsche, Heidegger is very clear about the necessity

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to free the thinking of being from the dictatorship of the one. First, Heidegger against Kant. My second separation concerns Cantor against Heidegger. This is a German story: a story of Cantor against Heidegger written by a Frenchman. This is the question of being as a complete and clear answer in mathematics. Mathematics as the science of all possible forms of multiplicity. I  agree with Heidegger in saying that we must free being from the form of the one. First, I  affirm that the true form of being is pure multiplicity and, against Heidegger, that the science of being as such is of a mathematical nature. So, in the end I came up with this sentence: ontology is mathematics. Second, at the level of existence, of singularity, I maintain that for a multiplicity to exist means only to be localized in a world. Existence is being-there. Existence is Sein as Dasein. Heidegger once more, but reduced to topology. Localization of all forms of multiplicities is precisely the form of existence of the multiplicity, the Dasein beyond the pure Sein. Third, at the level of truths I propose to say that the truth is the process inside a definite world of an immanent exception. That is, under the condition of a local rupture of the laws of the world – which I name an event – a truth is a process of construction of a multiplicity, which is not determined inside the world by the law of this world. A truth is a generic multiplicity – which is also a mathematical name, one proposed by Paul Cohen. A generic multiplicity is a multiplicity that cannot be thought from the unique point of view of its particular situation. It is a multiplicity that is in some sense inside a definite world, but in another sense cannot be thought or reduced to the laws of this particular world. So, a truth is a universal, immanent exception to its particular context. It is a synthesis between the necessity to observe the construction of a truth in a world – a truth is not something in another world or in the sky or in the paradise. A truth is a construction in a world, but this construction as a universal exception inside the world cannot be reduced to its context and can have a value in another context or in a completely different world. Four, at the level of the general laws of the process of a truth, of a subjective creation, I must fight against Adorno. Why? I agree with Adorno – and it has been explained with great clarity before me – when he says that dialectics, Hegelian dialectics, for example, must escape the risk of totalization. True dialectical thinking cannot be imprisoned in a figure of totality or of absolute and final knowledge. But dialectics for me is always affirmative dialectics and not at all negative dialectics. I must explain why. The question for me is that the beginning of a truth, that is the beginning of the productive subjectivity, always occurs in the form of an event. At the beginning of a universality, of a truth, something like



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a local rupture occurs with the laws of the world. Without this rupture, nothing can be created which can be an immanent exception. We have a deterministic vision of the world. So we must have an event. I will not insist here on the details of the theory of the event, but we can say that an event is always something that happens, something that is not in the situation, but that happens to the situation and something that precisely is not reducible to, or calculable by, the laws of the situation itself. That is the condition of possibility of the new process of a truth, the condition of the possibility of something new. But, naturally, an event will be a condition of something new, if there are some effects of the event inside the situation. The event as such is not the creation of a new reality. The event as such is only the creation of a new possibility inside the world. This point is really very important. We have with an event, the creation, the apparition, somewhere in the world, of a new possibility and the consequences of the event inside the situation come to constitute the process of a truth. This is what I call a truth procedure. So, the beginning of subjectivation, that is the beginning of the transformation of individuals in general into subjects, consists in saying ‘yes’ to the event. That is the point. The first gesture for a truth is to say ‘yes’, not to say ‘no’. In fact, this is something everyone knows because everyone has had some experience of love. And in love the event is a very small and clear thing. You meet somebody somewhere in the world. You know very well that the decisive moment of the transformation of this pure meeting into love is the moment when somebody says ‘yes’, in the classical form of ‘I love you’. What is ‘I love you’? ‘I love you’ is only a way of saying ‘yes’. You cannot begin a love by saying ‘no’. You will have many occasions to say ‘no’ afterwards. Negativity comes afterwards, alas. To be faithful, faithful in an ontological sense, is not a simple question of sexuality. To be faithful to love means to have the possibility to repeat the fundamental ‘yes’ that is at the beginning, and the difficulty, as Nietzsche says, is to fight against negation. It is the same in all forms of universal truths. The difficulty always lies in the fight against negation, not in the fight against affirmation. It is much more difficult truly to say ‘yes’ than to say ‘no’. The experience of love is a matrix on this point, as everyone is able to have this sort of experience. In love, the difficulty always bears on repeating the ‘yes’, and on being suspicious as regards all forms of negativity. We can have some different forms of ‘yes’ in the same direction in science or in artistic creation. For example, artistic creation is always to say ‘yes’ to a new displacement of the limit between what is informal and form. It always consists in accepting the new form. It is a way to say yes to the new form. That is the potency of art. Art is by no means a negative action; it is an action where you must say ‘yes’. And

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we know perfectly that conservative, academic visions always say ‘no’ or ‘that is not art’ or ‘that is non-art’ . . . The same goes for politics. When you simply say ‘no’, you do not do anything. It explains why the idea of resistance is such a weak vision of politics. Because the true determination of a political gesture is that after the negation comes a fundamental ‘yes’ to a new vision of the collectivity, a new vision of the relationship between men. In the field of affirmative dialectics, a truth is a positive immanent exception and the negative part of its dialectical nature is reduced to what I can name a subtraction. The truth is an affirmative creation, not reducible to the laws of its situation. It is not a negation of the laws of its situation; it is the impossibility to reduce the truth process to the laws of the situation and that is why I name that form of a negative existence a subtraction. The truth, finally, the very essence of a truth, is to affirm the possibility of a positive existence inside a subtraction to the common laws. It can be a new love, the discovery of a very strange mathematical structure, the invention of a completely new form of political organization, the strong displacement in arts of admitted limits between form and inform. With all that I  can assume today, to be French, German and Greek. I  can propose to the Germans a new Plato’s Republic in French, one directly coming from the Greek language. This is a new alliance, a new figure. Generally, to have access to Greece, we must take the mediation of German. I have written a book, the Republic, and it is very difficult to say who is its real author. Perhaps Plato is, perhaps I am, perhaps someone else is, I don’t know. But this book is a French creation of a Greek nature that has been translated into German. And that is a victory of the new form of relationship between Germany and France, under the law, the final common law of a Greek universe. I can also, in this new context, like Socrates, try to corrupt the youth. As you know it has been the most important accusation against Socrates, the corruption of the youth. To measure up to Socrates we must corrupt the youth as much as possible. What does it mean to say ‘corrupt the youth’ from a philosophical point of view, a simultaneously French, German and Greek one? We must say that in English, there are not many attempts to corrupt the youth. It is paradoxical to formulate that in English. Maybe it is a corruption of the corruption. To corrupt the youth is to say – this is not of a directly philosophical nature – ‘With your experience, your new experiences of love, art, science, politics, go to the true life. Search in your situation, which is not always my situation, seek the way, be attentive to the event, to small events. Accept to say “yes”. And you shall open an access to the true life.’ To corrupt the youth is to become a part of an immanent exception. The judges of Socrates were absolutely of the same opinion, because



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for them Socrates was somebody who said to the youth something like:  ‘The old formulation, the old laws, maybe the old Gods, examine them, maybe you must say “yes” to something else, to something different.’ We can also say to the youth: do not worry too much about laws, necessities, the market, good places, money and so on. Set up your life under the universal power of some new truths. When you are in the process of a truth, you have, in some sense, access to all the possible worlds, because of the universality of the truth. And your particular world is reduced to nothing really important, because you become an inhabitant of the world, the total world, every country, every world, now and in the future. Sometimes, with a new ‘yes’, you really do become a citizen of the world. A very strong and profound love is something everybody understands in the world, and when we are really in the profound love, we become a citizen of the world. It is the same thing if you create a picture, a new movie, if you enter in the labyrinth of mathematics. There is a sentence of Samuel Beckett, in the small book on love, the title of which is Enough. Samuel Beckett writes something like that: ‘Love is when we can say that we have the sky, and that the sky has nothing.’ So, my last sentence will be: take the sky! If you are faithful to your project, the sky will be without any possibility to act against you. Thank you.

2

Badiou, Kant and the Question of the Subject Rado Riha

Kant is certainly not one of Badiou’s key philosophers, in the manner of Plato, Descartes or Hegel, that is, those philosophers whose problematics he would, directly or indirectly, affirmatively or critically, appropriate, rephrase and further develop in his own philosophy. At the same time, Kant does not represent one more or less obligatory yet less crucial scholarly reference. For the most part, one could say, Kant is in fact the object of an independent and quite detailed critical analysis.1 The aim of this essay, however, is not to present in detail Badiou’s rather complex, tense and sometimes quite ambiguous relation to Kant. Besides, this relation has already been quite exhaustively presented elsewhere.2 What I propose to do instead is to extract and elaborate in some detail a figure of Kant’s philosophy, such as can be viewed precisely from the perspective of Badiou’s rather singular reception of Kant, despite the fact that Badiou himself never took on such an endeavour. In his fascinating book Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, Gérard Lebrun advances a thought-provoking thesis according to which Kant, or, to be even more precise, his Critique of the Power of Judgement, ‘teaches us to think differently’.3 In the context of the present essay, his claim can be rephrased as follows: Badiou’s reading of Kant presents and ‘teaches us to think’ a different Kant than the one that Badiou’s rather critical comments present. In this respect, it could be said that this figure of a different Kant is closer to Badiou than he is willing to admit. It is this figure of a different Kant – which is to be extracted from Badiou’s various readings and comments on Kant  – that I  propose to present in more 1 Here I can only note Badiou’s seminar in 1983–4: L’Un. Descartes, Platon, Kant (Paris: Fayard, 2016). 2 See, e.g., the ‘Kant’ entry by Christopher Norris in The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 3 Gérard Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la Métaphysique:  essai sur la critique de la faculté de juger (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970), 13.

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detail below. In particular, I will attempt to expound on it in the context of the Kantian concept of the subject. I  will therefore draw on, inter alia, Badiou’s seminar on Kant from 1984, already mentioned above, the chapter titled ‘Kant’s Subtractive Ontology’ in A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology4 and, finally, on one of Badiou’s early texts Can Politics Be Thought?5 I have taken as a point of departure three remarks by Badiou that refer to the status of the subject in Kant’s philosophy. We can find the first relevant remark in Badiou’s early booklet Can Politics Be Thought? The other two are from the above-mentioned seminar on Kant from 1984. Let me quote the first remark: An evacuation of the thing-in-itself in fact equals a dissolution of the subjective constitution of experience, and not, as Hegel believed, its passage to the limit. This is because experience is the Subject only by virtue of being linked (topologically) to a real [un réel] which it lacks.6

Two reasons have determined the choice of this quotation as my point of departure. The first reason is that in this passage Badiou establishes a link between the notion of the subject and the moment of the real. The second, on the other hand, is that in these two short sentences Badiou succeeds in succinctly presenting the kernel of Kant’s philosophical project, that is to say Kant’s controversial ‘ontological difference’ between appearance and the thingin-itself, that is, between phenomenon and noumenon. In order to unravel this kernel it should be noted that, according to Kant, the only objective reality to which the human being as a finite rational being has access is phenomenal reality, the reality of appearances, a reality constituted by means of the joined activity of the two powers of cognition: understanding and sensibility. And yet Kant stubbornly insists that our phenomenal world is not the world as it is in itself. True, the constituted phenomenal world is the only world we have and, as such, it is all we have, but it is never all there is since it always already contains something that does not belong to it, or better still, it is always already supplemented by something that is not-constituted, das Ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, which I propose to call the instance of the real. Put differently, the excess of the present absence of the thing-in-itself is inseparable from the phenomenal world.

4 Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence:  A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans., ed. and introduction by Norman Madarasz (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006; hereinafter Briefings). 5 Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985; hereinafter Politique). 6 Ibid., 80 (my translation).



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So we have to be quite precise about this point: our phenomenal world is not only marked by a negative reference to the absent World. It is also marked by this negative reference in its affirmative form. In other words, it is marked by the present absence of the thing-in-itself. It is the present absence of the Worldin-itself that confers consistency on the phenomenal world. In this way, it also ensures that our world is not merely, to borrow Kant’s words, ‘a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream’,7 but something that exists independently of cognition. Badiou’s remaining two remarks concerning Kant are more concise. The first reads: Kant presents us with a genuine doctrine of the real.

And the second: With respect to the subject, the transcendental subject is a point of the real.8

The real referred to in these two remarks is to be taken in the sense elaborated by Lacanian psychoanalysis. To put it succinctly, the real is what belongs to the symbolic as that which remains external to it, more precisely, as a moment of externality within the symbolic itself. Taking a cue from these two quotations from Badiou, I can announce more precisely the aim of the present essay. It could be rephrased in terms of the following question: which figure of the subject is suitable for an understanding of the phenomenal world in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, an understanding of a world in which something that does not belong to it, since it is absent from it, but is nevertheless present in it, namely, the thing-in-itself or the real? Or, better phrased, perhaps: which figure of the subject, in Kant’s philosophy, befits the connectedness between the subject and the point of the real? And to the extent that Kant is, as is well known, a thinker of the system, this question must therefore be tackled from the perspective of the systematicity of Kant’s three Critiques. To be sure, setting out from systematicity in Kant’s philosophy, the figure of the subject can only be brought into play retroactively, that is, from the point of view of the closed, finalized system, which is to say, from the point of view of the third Critique. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the Critique of Judgement stands for the point of the system’s closure simply because Kant

7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A  112, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; hereinafter CpR). 8 Badiou, L’Un. Descartes, Platon, Kant, 184, 185.

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did not write another, say, ‘Fourth Critique’. It is the final Critique because Kant himself claimed that in it his critical project was completed. This claim could therefore be read as stating that his critical philosophy approached as near as possible to the idea of the system. It should be noted, however, that the retroactive construction of the figure of the subject does not imply that a kind of a germinal form of the figure of the subject of Kant’s philosophy can already be found in the first Critique. The retroactive reading of the subject only signifies that the closure of the system allows us to see and to grasp that question of the subject to which each figure of the subject elaborated in Kant’s three Critiques provides an always singular answer. This is the question of knowing how and by means of which logical operation it is possible, in and for the phenomenal world, to articulate that which is its inherent exception, the presence in it of the absence of the thing-in-itself. In brief: its impossible-real. Namely, that thing which – through its materially present inherent exception – provides the world with its consistency. One way of determining the subject as such a logical operation would be to rephrase one of the clauses from Badiou’s Saint Paul by stating that, considered from the point of view of such a logical operation, ‘the subject is subjectivation’.9 * Let us now have a brief look at the figure of the subject in Kant’s three Critiques. I will start with the first one. As noted by Badiou in A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology (2006), there are two moments at which the first Critique approaches the void as the point of Being. In one case, this happens via the concept of the transcendental subject. Kant regards it as the site, empty in itself, of the original unity of the inconsistent multiplicity; or, in Badiou’s terminology, as the nonexisting operation of the count-as-one of the inconsistent multiplicity. In the second case, Kant approaches the void via the concept of the transcendental object, that is, the concept of the objectivity of the phenomenal object.10 Kant’s transcendental object is ‘something in general = x’, but that ‘something’ remains absolutely undetermined, empty, the ‘x’ itself never presented. Yet in the first Critique, both cases of void are subordinated to the representable structure of the object. To quote Badiou: Kant ‘forces the power of the count-as-one to have representable objects as a result’.11 In the first Critique, Kant thinks the 9 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 81. 10 Badiou, Briefings, 139. 11 Ibid.



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void of the transcendental subject and the void of the transcendental object as a symmetrical relationship of two voids, as their correlation; what he does not succeed in is counting these two voids as one and the same. Having summed up Badiou’s remarks on the matter, I would like to follow up with a hypothesis of my own: counting the two voids as one would bring us to the figure of the subject that is sketched out in my opening quotation from Badiou. It would bring us, to alter the quotation slightly, to a figure of the subject that is linked (topologically) to a real that it lacks. But if Badiou is correct in his analysis of Kant’s subtractive ontology, and I think he is, then it has to be at least possible to ferret out, in the first Critique – obviously if read within the system of the three Critiques – at least a trace of that figure of the subject that corresponds to the conceptual radicalism of Kant when he recognized the crucial meaning of the void for both the transcendental subject and the transcendental object. Thus, claims Badiou, Kant was the first ‘to shed light on the avenues of a subtractive ontology, far from any negative theology’.12 Let me try briefly to demonstrate the trace of the figure of the subject that can be found in the first Critique. My starting point will be the well-known remark in the section ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’.13 The proposition ‘I think’, which opens Kant’s rebuttal of Descartes’s attempt to directly infer existence from the cogito, is an empirical proposition. It already contains an existence, the existence of me as a thinking being and this existence is identical with the proposition itself. Yet, as Kant goes on to argue, this existence is not my empirical existence, it is not the empirical representation of the I. ‘For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition “I think” an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general.’14 As soon as the empirical I exists at the point of the ‘I think’ of the transcendental subject, its existence is no longer the existence of an empirically existing, thinking being. The empirical existence of the I, inseparable from the point ‘I think’, is an empiricity of a very particular kind. The particularity of this empirical existence lies in that it is, as Kant would say, ‘a transcendental predicate’.15 The empiricity of the empirical I associated with the ‘I think’ of the transcendental subject is not simply an external feature of the transcendental order, but a moment internal to it. It is, so to speak, the paradoxical empirical condition of the possibility of its 12 Ibid. 13 Kant, CpR, B 422–3. 14 Ibid., B 423. 15 Ibid., B 401/A 343.

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own transcendental condition of possibility. At least this is my understanding of the claim Kant made in my quotation – the claim that my existence which is already contained in the proposition ‘I think’ is not a categorial existence, but merely ‘an indeterminate perception’, which ‘signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition “I think” ’.16 The moment of the empirical, which is interior to the transcendental, can be elucidated using the example of Kant’s notion of the two I’s. These are ‘the I that I think’ and ‘the I that intuits itself ’, or in other words, ‘the I as intelligence and thinking subject’ and I myself insofar as I am a ‘thought object’,17 that is, an I that is an object of inner sense. It is true that Kant managed to show, in his theory of inner sense, that the I as a thinking being is subject to the conditions of the possibility of knowledge prescribed by the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic – just like everything else that exists in the world. I know myself as I appear to myself and not as I am in myself. However, Kant seems to leave open a vital question. What is given to me in my inner sense is my subjectivity as object and not my subjectivity as an I, as subject. What, in fact, is the being of the I as object, of the I that is no more than an object? How can the I – and precisely as the I – be an object? In short: How are we to understand this complete objectivation of the I? The answer to this question is contained in the aspect of Kant’s philosophy that I  referred to above in reference to Badiou. I  will call it the precedence of the object. It manifests in the fact that, despite Kant’s announcement that he would be turning his attention to the subject, the only thing present in the field of knowledge is a massive theory of the object, in which the subject is relegated to the role of supporting the order of objectivity. Yet I think that the precedence of the object is less a sign of a failure of Kant’s revolution in thinking than an indication of a weakness in Kant’s objectivistic transcendentalism. In my opinion, the figure of the empirical I as a bare object can be understood as the precedence of the object brought to its extreme limit. The extreme limit of this precedence is the point where that which appears as a perfect objectivation of the empirical I, its mere empiricity, directly corresponds to the complete voiding of the transcendental subject. In a way, this point is a mistake in Kant’s

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., B 155.



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transcendentalism because it is where an empirical externality is reinvaded by an empty transcendental subject. At the same time as the external world is admitted to inner sense, inner sense is externalized, the extreme point of this externalization being the I as an object among objects. Nothing of what belongs to inner sense truly belongs to the order of the internal; in inner sense, even the ‘subject’ is given through the receptivity of the power of knowledge as a bare object. In other words, inner sense becomes ‘inner’ only when it is filled with ‘externality’. It is a place of internality, entirely made up of externality. It is literally the place of the internal externality of the transcendental subject, the place of its inner exile. While the transcendental subject has no being, the voidness of the transcendental subject does not mean that the transcendental subject itself is nothing. On the contrary, it is Nothing that came to appear in the transcendental subject, Nothing appearing as Something. In the context of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, appearing as Something necessarily means that it is something empirical, since that which does not exist empirically is nothing. But the empirical givenness associated with the transcendental subject is not the empirical of some objectively existent thing. The empirical existence that always already accompanies the transcendental subject in the form of the empirical I is an empirical that does not belong to the empirical world of the objective despite being contained in it. It is contained, however, as the internal surplus of the transcendental subject. The precedence of the object as an aspect of the Kantian transcendental is complete when the transcendental subject is associated with a moment of some transcendental empirical that belongs to the transcendental subject but is not subject to its constituting power. This is an empirical that is the unabolishable inner opposite (Dawider) of the transcendental subject. It is an empirical that is both something more and something other than the usual, categorially ordered empirical  – without being actually, that is, categorially, something other and something more. It can be designated as a moment of the trans-empirical. This is where I  will stop treating this point. As I  will attempt to show in the last part of my article, the third Critique will elevate what I call the transempirical to the status of a concept; and this will happen via the notion of a case of reflective aesthetic judgement. Up to this point, my aim has been simply to see whether I can find, in the first Critique, a trace of a figure of the subject that is not merely the subject of an object. I think I have found such a trace in the figure of the transcendental subject that I have outlined: the transcendental subject that is void in itself, yet its very voidness appears in the form of a surplus

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of the trans-empirical empirical. Furthermore, this is the figure of the subject wherein the two voids are counted as one; the figure of the subject that is linked (topologically) with the real that it lacks. * I will now move on to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.18 At the core of Kant’s practical philosophy is the idea that will is determined through pure reason; this determination forms the basis of a specific mode of man’s practical action. Positively, even if purely formally for now, this mode of practical action can be defined as an act or process of subjectivation. Subjectivation is a two-sided process. On the one hand, it involves the subjectivation of the empirical individual by entering the process of the constitution of a practical subject. On the other hand, it is only in this process that the elements necessary for the practical subject, that is, the rationally determined will to acquire his existence are brought together. The two sides of one and the same process of subjectivation can be expressed with the formula ‘the subject is subjectivation’.19 This act of subjectivation in practical philosophy is the first step towards an articulation of that trans-empiricity that accompanies the transcendental subject; this will be my central thesis in what follows. I will take as my starting point the passage from the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals20 in which Kant gives a brief summary of the difference between the hypothetical and the categorical imperative. The hypothetical imperative, according to Kant, states that I  ought to do something ‘because I wish for something else’. In contrast, the categorical imperative states: ‘I ought to do so and so, even though I should not wish for anything else.’ For Kant’s practical philosophy, acting even if I do not wish for anything else means that my action, guided by my will, is not determined by any object that the will tried to attain – and yet not only do I wish to act, but I really do act in accordance with this volition. The question here, of course, is: how can I act based on the complete dissolution of any object of action? How can I act when ‘I do not wish for anything else’; when, strictly speaking, I wish for Nothing itself, that is, when I wish for that Nothing as if it were Something? It is in the form of precisely such a volition that the principle of autonomy of will is actualized; it is the only 18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; hereinafter CprR). 19 Badiou, Saint Paul, 84. 20 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; hereinafter GMM).



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law ‘which the will of every rational being imposes on itself, without needing to assume any spring or interest as a foundation’.21 Autonomy, as we know, refers to the ‘capability of the maxims of every good will to make themselves a universal law’.22 But as the individual discovers his autonomous will, he not only discovers that submitting to his self-imposed law makes him free, but he also discovers that in his freedom he is already subject to a law which holds for him only insofar as it can hold for all rational beings as a categorical, unconditional imperative. This is an imperative that demands that everyone consider himself with perfect disinterest, as a Same among the Same. The problem this poses is the problem of how to justify the reality of freedom, or in other words, it is the problem of the categorical imperative as a synthetic a priori proposition. On the level of an individual’s practical action, this problem manifests in a simple question: Why would I wish for freedom at all, why would I wish for the autonomy of my will, which demands that my maxims have universal validity? Alternatively, we can reformulate the question as follows: how can I recognize (my proper) ‘volition’ in the ‘ought’, in the ‘enforcing’ of the categorical imperative on my will?23 An answer to this question can be found in the second Critique, where Kant invented the concept of the factum of reason. Thereafter, Kant presented moral law and awareness thereof as a fact, whereas for us pure reason manifests as practical reason; it is, as Kant emphasized, an unempirical fact of reason – in fact, the sole fact of reason. The question how I can act based on ‘not wishing for anything else’, that is, based on wishing for the ‘nothing else’ itself, is answered by the command of reason that demands and permits exclusively its own causeless givenness:  the ‘Nothing as Something’, which is the only thing I  can wish for when I act morally and which is the determining cause of the free, autonomous will – that Nothing is reason in the form of its own factuality. In brief, the basic achievement of Kant’s concept of the factum of reason is this:  it turns the incomprehensibility of moral law, the closing idea of his Groundwork, into its fundamental causelessness. It is precisely for being causeless that it allows the process of the subjectivation of the empirical individual to begin. To explain this in more detail, the categorical imperative is always accompanied by a moment of the not-known. And in the factum of reason,

21 Ibid., BA 96. 22 Ibid., BA 95 23 Ibid., BA 102.

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this not-known is transformed from a lack, a negativity, into a positive, framing condition for the possibility of practical action. I  say ‘framing condition’ because the not-known is excluded from practical action, this exclusion being precisely what forms a framework for practical action. Practical action is based, on the one hand, on absolute certainty that I have to act in this and no other way, that I unconditionally have to actualize a certain idea. On the other hand, this factual certainty is not based on any positive, objective norm of action. The only justification for action is the demand of the agent that the causeless factuality of his subjective maxim of action must, after all, contain something real, something meaningful; and it must contain that to the extent that it can be shown, in each individual case, that the maxim holds for none if it does not unconditionally hold for all. And no predicative determination can enclose this ‘all’ into a segregated, sealed-off All. Thus, the causelessness of the factum of reason functions as an endless repetition of the irreducibly subjective act that ceaselessly excludes the question: ‘why should I want that which I desire?’ This question is replaced by action which constitutes its own meaning. However, constituting such a meaning depends on the action endlessly inventing a mode of unconditional, non-exclusionary addressing of all. The endless repetition of an irreducibly subjective act is the One of a multiplicity that is endlessly diverse in itself. Hence, it exists as a One that is missing. To conclude:  the subject of a practical act, that is to say, Kant’s rationally determined will, is not given in advance; it can only be in the process of becoming, which occurs in the course of the subjectivation of an empirical individual. However, in the context of Kant’s practical philosophy we can only talk about the process of subjectivation when the empirical individual is ready to recognize his ‘proper self ’,24 in other words, to recognize himself as a practical subject in the factum of moral law. That is to say, where there is nothing that is recognizable, at a point where there is no individual and where there are no others, at the site of a radical interruption of the given situational order. What I have called ‘recognition’ is simply the irreducibly subjective maxim of action, which is, first, causeless and aimless from the point of view of empirical reality, which is, furthermore, constituted exclusively by the not-known with regard to its final justification and, finally, which only exists in the form of the demand that it holds as something real for no one if it does not, as such, hold unconditionally for all. This mode of action also serves to introduce a minimal distance between the empirical individual and the meaningless point of the factum of reason, 24 Ibid., BA 119.



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where he exists as a ‘proper self ’, that is, as a practical subject, as a rationally determined will. This minimal distance can also be formulated as follows: the empirical subject subjectivates himself so that he actually desires that which he wishes as a practical subject. The subject of Kant’s philosophy is a practical act wherein the empirical individual establishes a minimal distance to that point at which he himself exists as a subject – as I will attempt to demonstrate below, this act of the subject is structured as a reflecting judgement. * Now on to the Critique of the Power of Judgement.25 To refresh our memories: I am interested in the question of what figure of the subject might correspond to the understanding of the phenomenal world in Kant’s philosophy  – to the understanding of the world which contains something that does not belong to it, that is, the thing-in-itself, or more precisely, the absence of the thing-in-itself. Based on my remarks concerning the first two Critiques, I  can now state two key traits of this figure of the subject. First, the subject is a logical operation, a thought operation, which is empty in itself: in the case of the first Critique, it is an operation of a synthetic unity of the multiple; in the case of the second Critique, it is an operation of the rational determination of will. And second, the subject-thought, to borrow a term coined by Badiou, is inseparably associated with the moment of the real, which is present in it by not being there. In the case of both Critiques, I have labelled this moment of the real as a moment of the trans-empirical. Now I can add a third trait of this figure of the subject. It results from connecting the first two traits and it reads as follows: the subject is subjectivation, more precisely, it is an act of subjectivation. This connection was only established in the third Critique. It is only the third Critique, therefore, that offers the completed structure of the subject of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Among the complex themes of the third Critique, three stand out as vital for a possible meeting between Badiou’s philosophy and that of Kant. First, there is the expansion of the notion of the transcendental aesthetic as defined in the first Critique: as the science of all principles of a priori sensibility.26 In reality, in the first Critique, a priori sensibility is treated only as a sensibility of objective sense, the Sinn. That is, it is treated simply as a function and an element of cognition. The third Critique supplements the notion of a priori sensibility by

25 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000; hereinafter CJdg). 26 Kant, CprP, B 35/A 21.

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adding the notion of a sensible feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The feeling of pleasure or displeasure is that element in the representation of the object that is, first, only subjective, and second, devoid of any cognitive, objective function, that is, of any function that is constitutive of the object. The sensible feeling of pleasure or displeasure is that ‘by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation’.27 Under the designation of a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, ‘the representation is related entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life’.28 The second crucial theme of the third Critique is the elaboration on the notion of a case: the notion for that which, in a given particularity, is irreducibly particular, that is, singular. The third central theme is the main conceptual innovation of the third Critique, its central issue and primary conceptual tool: the concept of reflective power as an independent faculty of cognition, that is, the concept of the reflecting power of judgement. The expansion of the notion of a priori sensibility with sensible feeling constitutes the ontological foundation of the reflecting power of judgement, but I  will disregard the issues this raises in order to focus on the notions of singularity and reflecting judgement. We are dealing with the reflecting power of judgement when we only have available the representation of something, but no universal whereby that something might be determined. This is precisely what the reflecting power of judgement is about: its task is to invent, in its own process of judging, a universal concept for something for which no cognitive category is available. The reason that the universal is not available in the act of the reflecting power of judgement does not lie in our inability to find the universal or in our simple ignorance thereof. The universal is not available to us because, strictly speaking, there simply is no universal for what we see before us. The universal of the reflecting power of judgement is predicatively undeterminable, in a word, it is generic. It can only be clearly established in the act of determining what it refers to in each specific case. As for the referent of a reflecting judgement, it is what Kant calls ‘a case’, der Fall. A case of an aesthetic judgement, of a judgement of taste or of the sublime, is that which represents the irreducible particularity of each particular instance of such a judgement:  a singularity. Hence, it corresponds to this particularity 27 Kant, CJdg, § 1. 28 Ibid.



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itself in its irreducible singularity. The singular is that which, in a particularity, is more than that particularity itself  – without being truly, empirically or objectively something more. On the one hand, the singular is inseparable from the particularity in which it is embodied. On the other hand, this singular only becomes a case due to its immediate connection to the generic universal, to the universal of the idea of reason. It is something that can be immediately universalized, something that could hold, as Kant would have put it, ‘for all times and all peoples’.29 The singularity of a case corresponds to that element of the particularity that only exists as a Sameness in the multiplicity of its possible transtemporal and transhistorical consequences. Hence, it only exists in the form of a decision ceaselessly renewed. ‘This is a case of the generic Idea of Reason.’ Thus, it could be said that the universal too exists only to the extent that it is possible to affirm the singular in the potentially infinite multiplicity of its universally valid consequences. And conversely, a true multiplicity of some particular givens of the world is only contained in that which is a case of Sameness. Like Badiou’s Idea, Kant’s Idea of Reason is not a thought to be realized, but one that arises and exists only in the process of being realized. What we are dealing with here is the Idea as the inseparability of thought and act. This inseparability is the point of the specific materialism of both Kantian and Badiouan Ideas. In short, what we are dealing with here is a materialism that characterizes all truth processes. It is the materialism of a world that, to borrow Badiou’s words, has no ‘beneath’ that would be external to it, no pre-world matter, so to speak. Neither does it have any heterogeneous ‘above’.30 In Kant’s philosophy, the point of the materialism of the idea is found in each specific case of the idea. This is a case declared via the following statement of reflecting judgement: ‘this is a case of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure’, that is, ‘a case of the Idea of Reason’. In this sense, an aesthetic reflecting judgment is built as a statement of existence. Ideas of Reason are not elements of objective reality; they are the non-existent of that reality, while the act of the reflecting power of judgement is a decision about the existence of the non-existent. It is structured as an existential proposition stating what of that which is actually exists, even if it does not possess an objective existence. The presence of cases of ideas in experience thus requires an altogether special ontological status: ideas are not elements of objective reality, but neither are they 29 Ibid., §17. 30 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 307.

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purely hallucinatory realizations of the subjective desire of reason. Thus, we could say that such an idea exists in the form of a given particularity of the world – but a given particularity that, at the same time, is derealized in its immediate givenness, so that it only counts as a point of absolute singularity which, as such, directly participates in the universal. That is because derealization is nothing but the operation by which the givens of objective reality are transformed into potential material for the Idea – in short, an operation by which they enter the pool of cases of the Idea. From the perspective of reflective judgement, the world of experience appears as something objective only to the extent that it has already lost its objectivity, or in other words, to the extent that it can be transformed into a world in which reflecting judgement realizes its consequences. A case of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is neither an object constituted by reason, nor is it a sublime suprasensible object of pre-critical reason. Its materiality is the product of this double negation. It is a derealization of objects of experiential reality and a desublimation of the Ideas of Reason, which signifies the transcendence of the world. But as such it is a materiality of a particular kind, existing in the midst of constituted objective reality. The idea of reason only exists in the world in the form of its specific cases. A case of the idea itself is simply the minimal difference between what a case is and what each specific case embodies in reality. It is a particular given of the world whose particularity is subject to that in it which points towards its proper singularity – that is, towards the singularity of the case of the Idea. This is the universal singularity implied in the elementary formula of the reflective power of judgment: ‘This is a case.’ This formula opens up the possibility of articulating the multiplicity of the world in the creation of its specific materiality. A ‘case’ of reflective judgment is reason materialized in something that belongs to the world without being contained in it. It is an excess of the given world itself. Thus, under the appearance of the singular universality of a case, reason participates in the constitution of reality by derealizing it at the same time. Strictly speaking, reflective judgement is not a logical operation. It is a practical process of the non-objective constitution of objective reality. It is a process of the derealization of reality in the sense that a particular given of the world is transformed into a body or a case of the Idea. The formal structure of the reflecting power of judgement, then, has three components. First, the thought-subject:  this role is fulfilled by the aesthetic reflective power of judgement, which functions as the generic universal. The thought



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that is at work in reflecting judgement is a thought embodied in particular spatiotemporally determined objects of the empirical world. Second, the empirical world includes the thought-subject as its inner exception, as its excess:  as such an inner exception, however, the thought-subject only becomes visible on the condition that someone, anyone, is willing to tie his subjective existence to a groundless act of reflecting judgement and to its elementary proposition ‘this is a case of the Idea’. Thus, by tying his thinking and action to that which eludes the laws of a given situation, that which is its impossible, its real, this someone is subjectivated. Third, the impossible of a given situation:  a singular case of reflecting judgement, which is also a mode of existence of the universal. It is true that a case of the generic universality of the idea is always embodied in a particular object or a particular event of the empirical world. Yet by itself, that particular event or object is not the same thing as a case. A case of the universal is that which never corresponds to what embodies it, nor does it ever correspond to the something more which it itself embodies. A case is universal precisely in the sense that it is a predicateless sameness, persisting in various spatiotemporally determined worlds as a lacuna of their non-existent, in their real. Let me conclude with a provisional answer to my opening question, which asked what figure of the subject in Kant’s philosophy might correspond to his understanding of the phenomenal world as a world containing something that does not belong to it. Such a figure of the subject should be sought in the threefold tangle delineated in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement: in the interlacing of concepts of the thought-subject, subjectivation and a singular case of the universal.

3

Lack and Concept: On Hegelian Motives in Badiou Dominik Finkelde

Badiou versus Hegel? Badiou’s relationship with Hegel is a tense one. He asserts that ‘the essential Hegel, the one feverishly annotated by Lenin’1 belongs next to ‘Plato and Descartes’ to the ‘only three crucial philosophers’2 in the history of philosophy. And yet Badiou repeatedly distances himself from the German idealist. The latter’s conviction of the identity of being and thinking is, according to Badiou, ‘a totalized result’ of perceiving the basic structure of reality as one totality and not – as Badiou claims with respect to his own philosophy – as ‘a local occurrence’ within a world of multiple multiplicities.3 He interprets Hegel’s monism therefore repeatedly as belonging to classical metaphysics despite materialist potentials in it that even Sartre and Althusser undervalued, according to Badiou, in debates on Hegel of the 1960s and 1970s in France.4 Badiou calls Hegel in Logics of Worlds explicitly a thinker of the ‘Whole’ and writes: ‘One could argue that whereas we [Badiou and his school] launch a transcendental theory of worlds by saying “There is no Whole”, Hegel guarantees the inception of the dialectical odyssey by positing that, “There is nothing but the Whole”.’5 This means that within this classical view of metaphysics the multiplicity of beings (Seiende) is time and again tied back to a holistic structure of reality (Sein) that encompasses reality in its totality. And

1 Alain Badiou, The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, ed. and trans. Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 17. 2 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds:  Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London:  Continuum, 2009), 527. 3 Ibid., 143. 4 Badiou comments on these debates in his text ‘Hegel in France’, in The Rational Kernel, 11–15. 5 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 141.

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such an interpretation appears to be in fact also urgent with regard to Hegel at first sight. For Hegel repeatedly suggests that basic categories in his philosophy like ‘spirit’ and ‘concept’ denote an all-encompassing meta or second-order entity that is more than the sum total of its particles. Badiou cannot share this belief since he ties his philosophy exclusively to ‘local occurrences’ of the identity of being and thinking within multiple multiplicities where the ‘Whole’ is a concept without an extension. One of his most extensive criticisms of Hegel is expressed in §15 of Being and Event in relation to Hegel’s understanding of ‘bad infinity’ as opposed to ‘good infinity’ with reference to mathematics. According to Badiou’s criticism presented in this paragraph, which picks up arguments developed in the early text ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’,6 Hegel refers to a bad infinity among other things as a continuous accumulation of numerical figures, as, for example, the sequence of integers exemplifies. Here, a quantum becomes constantly larger inasmuch as a certain unit of quantity (e.g. n + 1) is continuously adding itself to the existing sum and keeps on going. Each step further convokes the void in which the count repeats itself. Hegel: In this emptiness beyond the finite, what arises? [.  . .] On account of the inseparability of the infinite and the finite (or because this infinite, which stands apart, is itself restricted), the limit arises. The infinite has vanished and the other, the finite, has stepped in. But this stepping in of the finite appears as an event external to the infinite, and the new limit as something that does not arise out of the infinite itself but is likewise found given. And with this we are back at the previous determination, which has been sublated in vain. This new limit, however, is itself only something to be sublated or transcended. And so there arises again the emptiness, the nothing, in which we find again the said determination – and so forth to infinity.7

To be sure, Hegel emphasizes to a certain extent the positive effect of this infinity as well, since numbers are inscribed in the genesis of their own infinity as quanta and, of course, can be regarded as infinite and productively unstable entities in this sense. But in the end this infinity will ultimately be denied true transgression as the progression itself is only a repetitive recurrence of the past 6 Alain Badiou, ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’, first published in Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Summer 1968): 118–37, reprinted and translated as ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’. In Concept and Form, vol. 1, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, trans. Robin Mackay with Ray Brassier (London: Verso, 2012), 187–207. 7 Georg W.  F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112.



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onto the future. So, for Hegel, the seemingly positive infinity of self-transcendence, inscribed in the genesis of numbers, ends up finally in being ‘poor’ by its stasis that abolishes what true infinity is about for Hegel: the self-transcending of itself within a process of ever new and not repetitive falsifications. Badiou writes: After all, the bad infinity is bad due to the very same thing which makes it good in Hegelian terms: it does not break the ontological immanence of the one; better still, it derives from the latter. Its limited or finite character originates in its being solely defined locally, by the still-more of this already that is determinateness.8

Hegelian infinity is an intrinsic property of the finite. Therefore Badiou accuses Hegel of missing the true potentiality  – or better  – the true actuality of mathematics:  its insight in various countable and uncountable infinities ‘in which God’ as a classical synonym of the ‘Whole’ ‘in-consists’ rather than consists.9 For Hegel, the infinity of numerical entities is bad because, according to Hegel’s classical monism (at least this is how Badiou reads Hegel), there is a qualitatively different realm of the infinite, which he inter alia calls the realm of ‘absolute spirit’. However, Hegel’s work is closer to Badiou than Badiou seems willing to grant, despite the difference shown here at the outset with, admittedly, a broad brush. This shall be illustrated in the following sections of this article. They show affinities between Hegel and Badiou especially in their particular understanding of dialectics and their respective interpretation of what Hegel calls ‘concrete’ or ‘actual universality’.

Thinking and being If there is a fundamental conviction that Hegel as a dialectical idealist and Badiou as a dialectical materialist share, then it is, as already mentioned, the following:  the ‘conviction about the identity of being and thought. But for us [Badiou speaks here of himself and his school] this identity is a local occurrence and not a totalised result’ as Hegel allegedly sees it.10 The emphasis on identity should not suppress the fact that Hegel and Badiou give credit to a gap between thinking and being as well. Hegel credits especially Kant with the merit of having introduced this gap into ontology. For Kant’s solution of the conflict between 8 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 165. 9 Ibid., 170. 10 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 143.

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empiricism and rationalism exists exactly in not having delivered a synthesis of both philosophical currents, but instead in formulating the avoidance of a positivistic solution between two mutually exclusive ontologies. Hegel radicalizes this Kantian insight for his process-philosophical purposes when he reinterprets the gap between the ‘thing-in-itself ’ and ‘phenomena’ as a gap that separates phenomena from themselves and no longer from a seemingly coherent matrix of ‘the world’ as totality. Hegel discusses this train of thought in almost all of his metaphysical works when he repeatedly points out to what extent the primary structure of being is to be understood as one that can be grasped by reason and that expresses itself conceptually. The precondition for this insight, though, is the already mentioned gap, which brings the space of reality(/-ies) at a distance to itself. For if there were no difference between thinking and being, it would not be clear how knowledge from its classical definition onwards as ‘justified true belief ’ (Plato, Theaetetus) could be understood at all. Hegel speaks of a symbiosis of being and thinking. ‘Being’ is ‘reflection of itself into itself ’,11 ‘absolutely mediated’12 and proves to be in its abundance of things, facts and states of affairs as ‘substantial content’13 through the conceptual determinations of thought. In addition, Hegel points out that the content-related object of thought is ‘the property of the self ’, just as the same object is ‘self-like’ (in German: ‘selbstisch’) through its determinate being in the thinking subject.14 An object, a thing, an entity is in its being insofar as it has its concept, just as the concept is a concept for subjects. For Hegel, however, a symbiosis of being and thinking can only take place – and this is decisive for the elective affinity with Badiou – if the object takes, symbolically speaking, in its concept ‘a seat’. As already mentioned, this is only possible if being and thinking are related but not one. For were the difference between being and thinking resolved without friction or tension, we would, as Hegel writes, ‘soon die of hunger, bodily as well as spiritually’.15 In the vocabulary of Badiou one could say: thinking shows itself capable of ‘multiple-presentations’ but ‘the errancy of the void’,16 which is included in every

11 Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §7. 12 Ibid., §37. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., §32. 15 Georg W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, ed. and trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199. 16 Badiou, Being and Event, 93.



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situation, can never be entirely excluded by thinking. A gap or divide between thinking and being is thus a condition of both, and until today it manifests itself in the plurality of our references to the world, where a plurality of ‘fields of sense’ (to quote the neo-Quinian philosopher Markus Gabriel)17 opens up a plurality of respective objects within these fields of sense – no matter if they are fictional entities (like Sherlock Holmes), epistemic ones (numbers) or scientific ones (subatomic particles). Even the law of identity ‘A  =  A’ expresses this train of thought for Hegel. ‘A’ literally comes to a distance as part of a symbolic network in ‘= A’ and only then becomes one with itself. The distance manifests itself in the proposition that A is equal to A in a purely formal manner. A ‘fits’ into its mould. From the first ‘A’ onwards, which assumes the role of a predicative subject, the object ‘A’ becomes the predication ‘=A’. The first ‘A’ comes to coincide in the second and says, albeit with little content, nevertheless very much for Hegel formally about the self-reflexivity of entities in structures of their objectification. Badiou endorses this division within identities and entities prominently in his early work The Theory of the Subject. Here he presents a theoretical and in his thinking recurring argument for his theory of the event. For an event is conceivable only if, in addition to the reference between being and thinking, a non-coincidence lurks between the two antipodes which opens up places of untamed significations. But, as I already mentioned, even Kant shows to what extent being must exceed thinking, because, similar to the flight of a dove ‘cutting [with its wing] through the air’, thought needs ‘resistance’ from a world that can never coincide with thought itself. This is indispensable in order for facts and state of affairs to stand out (even untruly) in whatever forms of representation.18 In the first chapter of Theory of the Subject, Badiou introduces his reader to this Hegelian dialectic according to which every identity imparts a formal eccentricity to itself.19 Badiou shows how each being is constitutively split into its ‘being-in-itself ’ and its indexical localization, that is, in the place of its appearance. The splitting of an entity into an ‘in-itself ’ and its ‘localization’ is the condition for something to appear. Badiou names the elements of division by differentiating between A (read as: ‘A as such’ or ‘A as pure being’)20 and Ap (read as: A ‘being placed’ at a location).21 A-as-such is the appearing being, the 17 Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense:  A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129 (A 5). 19 Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 3–12. 20 Ibid., 7. 21 Ibid.

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being that has no place – the utopian dimension of A (as such). Ap, on the other hand, is A as placed. It is the being that is inscribed in a topos. A and Ap are not two independent entities. Rather, they signify how each entity is divided into its ideal form, its thought, its perfect identity, and its local embodiment in spacetime (presentable in its extension). Badiou sums this thought up as follows when he writes: ‘A is itself, but it is also its power of repetition, the legibility of itself at a distance from itself.’22 He proposes the neologism esplace, which derives from the abbreviation of ‘espace de placement’ (‘space of placement’).23 For the unregistered, not placed, and thus utopian A, he suggests the word ‘horlieu’ (‘outplace’).24 This out-of-place or the ‘being in itself ’, which is the ‘real’ of the ‘esplace’ (‘splace’),25 is not representable. It stands in for what Lacan calls a lack of being. Badiou makes clear here that the entity A is affected in its division between A and Ap by an inherent negativity, because the ‘in-itself ’ of A  is by its localization even at a distance to its very embodiment in A.  It is utopian. Badiou thus illustrates Hegel’s thesis that ‘identity internally breaks apart into diversity because, as absolute difference in itself, it posits itself as the negative of itself and these, its two moments (itself and the negative of itself), are reflections into themselves, are identical with themselves’.26 In the Preface of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes, ‘the bifurcation of the simple [.  . .] is the True’27 to express the extent to which each entity is inscribed with a double negation: on the one hand, by being the difference from other determinations and, on the other, by being in a purely formal self-relation, which is always effected by an inherent non-identity. Hegel once again expresses this idea in his Science of Logic in relation to the already mentioned identity theorem. He asserts that the form of the identity theorem (A = A) expresses more ‘than simple, abstract identity’.28 The first half of the proposition:  ‘A is’ stands for, ‘a beginning that envisages a something different before it to which the “A is” would proceed.’29 Here Hegel underlines that in the symbolic system of this ‘propositional form’ hides a ‘necessity of adding to abstract identity the extra factor of that movement  – Thus an A  is added’.30 If I understand Hegel correctly, this means that the symbolic structure 22 Ibid., 6. 23 Ibid., 10. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Hegel, Science of Logic, 362. 27 Hegel, Phenomenology, §18. 28 Hegel, Science of Logic, 360. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. (My emphasis).



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of language itself always embodies this ‘extra factor’ that it can never catch up with. Hegel illustrates these thoughts also with regard to the proposition ‘God is God’.31 What sounds like a boring tautology is, for him, the form in which things become identities of themselves, as well as the symbols of their absence. Badiou applies the Hegelian definition of identity, which is equally marked by two excluding moments of identity and non-identity, to political situations. As is well known, he formalizes them with the help of set theory in the form of embedded and excluded multiplicities that can conflict with one another about the sovereign claims of their representation. In Being and Event he describes, for example, to what extent ‘there is nothing apart from situations. Ontology, if it exists, is a situation.’32 But ontology is just a situation among others, so to speak, on the meta-level of philosophical reflection. Other situations can be located concretely in space and time. This implies that Paris in 1848 is a situation or Russia in 1917 or the ‘White on White’ painting of Kazimir Malevich from 1918 as well. What distinguishes these situations as exceptional situations from others, is the manifestation of their inconsistencies through identities in which  – as in Badiou’s split of ‘A-in-itself ’ and ‘A-placed’ – the utopian moment (the in-itself) opens the place of placement. For example, the painting ‘White on White’ of Malevich as an artistically utopian idea, or the Russian Revolution as a political one meet in their respective form of being ‘in itself ’ the place of their arrival with incomprehension or resistance surrounding them. In other words, their identity is shaped by inherent moments of non-identity. Consistency, as Hegel and Badiou suggest, is always dependent on inconsistency. In other words, every structured situation that is counted as one is based on a lack of structure that cannot be presented from the point of view of the prevailing count. With Slavoj Žižek one can say that the inconsistent situation is ‘the pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given; this multitude is not a multitude of Ones, since the counting has not yet taken place’.33 Therefore, Badiou can also write: ‘All multiple-presentation is exposed to the danger of the void: the void is its being. The consistency of the multiple amounts to the following: the void, which is the name of inconsistency in the situation (under the law of the count-as-one), cannot, in itself, be presented or fixed.’34 31 Ibid., 359. 32 Badiou, Being and Event, 25. 33 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 97 (Spring 1998): 235–61, 235. 34 Badiou, Being and Event, 93.

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Antigone exposes such void within a situation in a Badiouan as well as in a Hegelian sense.35 The tension between ‘situation’ and ‘inconsistency’ becomes visible in her fate. With focusing on her, Hegel rejects explicitly Kant’s philosophy of right as for him her desire is no illegal delusion of a misguided conscience. As such, though, Kant would have to look at the daughter of Oedipus and reject her claim according to his contract-theoretical dogma that any uproar against state authority should be always and everywhere prevented. For Hegel, however, Antigone is a facilitator of the fact that a unity can be confronted with a paradoxical element that enters into the unity from the unity’s own lack of being. It is her legal and illegal claim to bury her brother Polynices, which makes her a paradoxical element in the ruling doxa of the state.36 For Antigone acts on behalf of a right for which she cannot give reasons in the light of the modern state. Sophocles emphasizes this mismatch. The origin of the law Antigone refers to is lost in myth, that is, not accessible to modern reason. It is thus Antigone’s stubborn will alone to defend a purely utopian value (i.e. an ‘in-itself ’ without reasonable justifications) in a location that has to resist this challenge as being outright irrational. The laws of the underworld stand literally diagonal to the laws of the polis. The state would risk abolishing itself as the reasonable unity of multiplicity. The state can guarantee only his count through keeping distance to the mythical past. For Hegel Antigone provokes nevertheless a productive crisis within normative orders. With Badiou one could say, that although Antigone is included in the life-shaping situation of the modern polis, she cannot defend her normative claim as belonging to the situation. Her claim embodies a ‘point of excess’.37 In other words, Antigone is included in the polis of Creon but she is not politically represented in it. For Hegel, the necessity of such misunderstanding stands time and again for the birth of a new way of life. The action of the individual has the ‘appearance of contingency’,38 but the movement proves to be necessary retrospectively. By not bowing to doxa, as her sister Ismene, Antigone becomes the progeny of what Badiou calls a normative ‘excrescence’.39

35 Hegel, Phenomenology, §437. 36 See on this topic my book Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundations of Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), especially ch. 4. 37 Badiou, Being and Event, 97. 38 Hegel, Phenomenology, §475. 39 Badiou, Being and Event, 99.



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Subject within substance As we saw in the section above, for Hegel the law of identity (A = A) expresses the unity of an entity as reflected with its own other as its same. For this reason, the proposition ‘A is equal to A’ can also be related to Hegel’s famous definition of substance, which ‘shows itself to be essentially Subject’.40 We want to explain this reference in more detail since this definition presents Hegel’s monism as shaped by an ontology of contingency. Substance, as a ‘multiple-presentation’,41 is confronted with its own place of emptiness so to speak, the subject, which is paradoxically also to be understood as substance. But what does the term ‘substance’ and ‘subject’ mean in this context, and to what extent is Hegel’s redefinition contradictory from the point of view of ontology? A long tradition of philosophy, faced with the change of things, facts and state of affairs around us, tried to clarify at least until the seventeenth century (via Locke, Hume, etc.) whether certain entities (substances) persist and can be determined as permanent while others (accidents or modes) are defined by relational dependence. For if  – without this differentiation  – there existed only change, no structures of experience could form at all. Plato’s ideas feature properties of substances, Spinoza’s understanding of God as nature, Russell’s ‘sense data’ as consistent building blocks of sensory perceptions as well, and even a single stone can be, according to Jonathan Lowe, interpreted as a substance.42 In the wake of Hume’s rejection of the allegedly pseudo-scientific concept of substance, Kant was one of the first philosophers of the eighteenth century to contribute to the dethronement of this classical-metaphysical concept. For him, substance was not a metaphysical entity, as Plato, Aristotle or Spinoza believed, but a formal-logical structural principle of conceptual thinking. It embodies a purely formal function: perdurability through time.43 It guarantees that an object of experience lasts through time and can be intersubjectively experienced as such.44 Hegel now reinterprets the concept of substance in a very unique way, because he not only refers especially to Spinoza’s understanding of substance as the totality of what exists in different modes of particularities, but he also connects 40 Hegel, Phenomenology, §37. 41 Badiou, Being and Event, 93. 42 Jonathan Lowe, ‘Substance and Identity’. In Substanz:  Neue Überlegungen zu einer klassischen Kategorie des Seienden, ed. Käthe Trettin (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittoria Klostermann, 2005), 33–52. 43 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 183/B 226. 44 See Georg Sans, ‘Wieviel Substanz braucht Kant’, Rivista Portuguesa de Filosofia, vol. 62 (2005): 707–30.

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to this concept of substance the concept of the subject, opposing Spinoza himself. Substance, as we saw above, ‘shows itself to be essentially Subject’. That is, where classical metaphysics, and especially Spinoza, speaks of substance as a metaphysically consistent entity and  – in contrast to everything changeable and contingent (accidental) – associates it among others with a divine primal principle of the universe or as the essential idea of form ​​ in transformable things, Hegel breaks with this understanding. He does so by consciously implanting in the concept of substance a contingent particular: this very subject. ‘Subject’ here is not something that, as a transitory particularity, is secondary to the substance (just as accidents are towards their substantial bearers). For Hegel in contrast, the subject is substance in its own subject-being. This is more than irritating, for a person may well – as Aristotle describes in the Categories – be a primary substance as well as instantiate the secondary substance of his species, and, ergo, the individual Socrates may instantiate his own natural kind of human species as well.45 However, Hegel does not mean this understanding of the substantiality of a subject in the quotation mentioned above. For Hegel, the subject itself is the paradoxical moment within substance where substance (qua subject) is confronted with its own non-identity. So, substance is for Hegel ‘subject’ where it, the monistic substance, is able to establish itself as a non-uniform entity in an exception of itself. And this exception is the subject. It provokes moments of non-identity – that is, where substance meets its own exception as substancequa-subject. However, according to the definition of the concept of substance – especially Spinoza’s reinterpretation – this cannot actually be thought. Substance cannot be carried by accidentals and contingencies themselves. Anyone who asserts this actually annihilates the foundational criterion from which the concept of substance, at least since Aristotle has gained its essential definition. Hegel, however, does exactly this and Badiou will follow him on this path into a materialist rearrangement of idealism’s insights. Badiou does so because he too knows that each world has to conceal one or more points of exclusion to foster its own coherence so that it, the world or a world, can count itself as one. What is excluded stands for an indefinable potentiality that can cause the topicality of the world to implode. In other words: Hegel’s speech of the subject that shows itself as the out-of-place where the substance encounters its non-coincidence, corresponds to Badiou’s theory of the ‘point of excess’46 from which any totality can be remarked. 45 Aristotle, Categories, ch. 5. 46 Badiou, Being and Event, 97.



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For Hegel, therefore, substance via ‘subject-as-substance’ is affected by a missed encounter with itself through a paradoxical particular that is included in it (in the situation) but not represented in it or only represented too late. This particular, as we shall explain more fully below, may itself stand within the series of particulars for the universal. For ‘subject’, as I said, is not just placed upon ‘substance’ as a secondary and arbitrary property, but as accidental property of substance as substance. Hegel’s talk therefore corresponds structurally to the ontology of Lacan’s logic of exception, or more precisely, to the logic of a parallax gap in a totality by an element included and excluded from that totality at the same time.47 The subject as substance is then both particularity and the universality enclosing this particularity. To make this argument palpable we refer to the example of the fate of Jesus of Nazareth, which is very similar to Badiou’s interpretation of Paul the Apostle.48 Both of them – Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus – are for Hegel as well as for Badiou part of one and the same truth procedure, according to which a universality arises from a neglected count that ultimately appeals to the raising of a new world.

Concrete universality Hegel, the qualified theologian, has commented on the figure of Jesus from Nazareth time and again through his entire career. For in the Messiah crystallizes the uniqueness of a worldview, in which worldly matters themselves enhance the world as ‘creation’ within a process of theological and teleological soteriology. Jesus Christ has the structural peculiarity of being literally the moment in the ‘substance’ of the God of the Israelites in which this same God reveals via his ‘Son’ his non-coincidence. In this respect, for the Man-fromGalilee’s own sublimation ‘in Christ’, he had to appear within orthodox Judaism as a paradoxical subject, similar to the case of Antigone – both included in the multiplicity of presentations of a world, as well as excluded from it. As the ‘Son of God’, he represents the metaphysical substance that embraces creation as a whole and is the reality of substance at the site of a particular exception. Jesus comes from Nazareth, that is, from a place that has no symbolic location whatsoever. 47 On this topic see Jacques Alain Miller, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’. In Concept and Form:  Volume One. Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London: Verso, 2012), 91–102. 48 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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Jesus, as the ‘anointed one’, is, literally speaking, coming from nothing. He is the Russellian antinomy in person, which in the fundamental debates of logicism has led to various axioms for ensuring the coherence of a univocal ‘logical space’ of conceptual determinations, among other things through Russell’s type theory. So far, however, it has not been clarified how the divine substance, whose bearer is allegedly Jesus from Nazareth, can be embodied in an exception, a human being at all. The ‘concrete’ or ‘actual universality’49 that is Jesus is undoubtedly historically contingent and far from sharing the properties that correspond to Yahweh’s traditional properties according to the Hebrew Bible. Why is the man from Nazareth, for example, born near Bethlehem and not in Jerusalem? Why does he show himself to some chosen Jews, but not to all, or, to save time, to Romans, Greeks, and Persians too? This seems to contradict the understanding of a universal entity. In addition, we do not experience Jesus Christ according to the four Gospels as omnipotent, omniscient or omnipresent. Certainly, qualities of the universal and the divine appear in him sometimes. Think of his ethical way of life, the miraculous healings and the conversions induced by him. But numerous other determinations of the divine substance are put into question. God appears in him in a strangely capricious form. And yet this form succeeds in retotalizing the universal via a particular and contingent exception from which the universal can never really encompass itself. Why? Well, he is particular and not universal. And if there is a mystery of Christ, it is probably this: that he is supposed to be both nevertheless. For Hegel, the just described tension between substance and subject, particularity and universality is essential, since he expects a concrete universality only at the site of a contingently historical realization. Where should it, the concrete universality, be realized otherwise, if the universal in form of an idea can only reveal itself in the world of phenomena as one phenomenon among others? Jesus of Nazareth was a charismatic leader among many prophetical figures in the first century. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, a prophetic figure himself. In this sense, he was one phenomenon among others. This fact, though, did not prevent him from subjectivizing his own soteriology in the name of the ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). One could say therefore with a set-theoretical term, Jesus from Nazareth ‘diagonalizes’ as Christ not only different prophetic figures of his time but also the Yahweh entity of the Hebrew Bible, who cannot even be named, let alone be seen with a human, even all-too human form. In other words, a concrete subject overrides (or ‘crosses out’) willingly in the name 49 Hegel, Phenomenology, §449.



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of his own name the traditional framework of what the classical metaphysical substance, Yahweh, embodies. In this moment a place erupts where the ‘frame’ of orthodox Jewish doxa is confronted with its own non-identity:  ecce homo. A fracture becomes the site of a new calibration of a particular space of being. Substance, that is, the substance of Jewish metaphysics, becomes within itself the form of itself, but – and now it becomes paradoxical – in the form of another – or, in other words, in the form of an ‘out-of-form’ of itself. This is what the Man from Galilee is:  the distance of Yahweh to Yahweh. In this rational hides the train of thought, from which Hegel, but also Badiou, interprets the ontology of dialectical materialism. With reference to the example mentioned above, one can say that the universal must embody itself – in the wording of Cantorian set theory favoured by Badiou – as a ‘subset’, that is, as a special element in its own totality. It must incarnate itself into a paradoxical species among species (or in a void of its subsets) that make up its genus (or superset), so that this species can negate all other parts (species) within the extension of its genus-being. Only in this way can true universality be conceived for Hegel in the name of a substance that is constantly overwritten from an open future. The illustration below explains the argument well. It is an adaptation of a drawing from Žižek’s book They Know Not What They Do.50 A

a1

Bb

B (=-A)

a2

b1

b2

The drawing exemplifies several aspects that are unthematically part in the moment when a concrete universality autocreates its space of arrival. What Hegel calls concrete or ‘actual universality’ emerges – to say it with Badiou – from the void of a situation that is the condition that anything exists as represented at all. In relation to the drawing, the set A is this ‘situation’ with its elements (a1 and a2) as bound variables within itself. The mentioned void in the drawing is 50 Slavoj Žižek, They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2007), 35. I owe the drawing to Moritz Kuhlmann (unpublished manuscript).

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marked with the variable: Bb. This place is the subset of the other elements (a1, a2, etc.) in A and provokes that Bb is the part in A which has no part because it is the subset, which in radical demarcation of all other subsets (a1, a2, etc.) in A is an ‘other’ of A. The radical opposition of Bb to other signifiers (a1, a2) means that it can mutate to the one signifier that potentially occupies the place of exclusion within A and becomes A in an inverted form, namely B = –A. The combination of meaning and excess announces itself when an apparently consistent plurality (in our case the genus A) suddenly sees itself confronted by a lack of itself. Literally: a defect shows itself and becomes excessive. And ‘Jesus Messiah’ is a defect in orthodox Judaism, while Jesus of Nazareth is obviously not. Jesus as Messiah is entrapped in Judaism, growing out of it, but does not belong to it. A place of remarcation opens up from which substance forms itself into a new form at the point of its non-coincidence with itself. A  totality not only experiences its non-identity in an element that is excessively and seemingly anamorphic to itself, but also expands into itself through this non-identity of another. Badiou expresses this idea when he writes: ‘nothing has taken place but the place’ (rien n’a eu lieu que le lieu).51 The conflict between Arians, Sabellians and Gnostics about the soteriological status of Christ Jesus, which Badiou touches upon indirectly in his Theory of the Subject,52 shows how virtually impossible it was within early Christianity to apply the traditionally positive determinations of God’s infallibility, infinity and so on to a spatiotemporal exception that destroys exactly these positive determinations in one form or the other. In a sense, we are faced with a similar absurdity, which, as Badiou points out elsewhere, the painter Malevich introduced into the artworld in 1918.53 He exhibited a painting depicting a ‘white square on a white background’. In doing so he confronted the contemporary doxa of art lovers, claiming at the same time that anyone who does not see the meaning of the difference between white and white as difference that makes a difference must necessarily be excluded from a novel universality: modern art. The situation is similar in Christian soteriology. Those who do not believe that the arrival of the Messiah at a certain space and a certain time implies no victory over the Roman occupiers but another, rather mystical form of salvation, will not be able to understand the concrete universality that Paul the Apostle announces in his epistles. A  new theology is taking shape because for orthodox Judaism 51 Badiou, Being and Event, 182. 52 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 18–19. 53 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. and commentary Alberto Toscano (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 2007), 55.



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the Torah reveals neither the Messiah in the figure of Jesus Christ nor any such universalism as Paul describes among others in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28). The conflicts surrounding Christological movements of the first centuries like Sabellianism and Arianism illustrate how almost impossible it was (or is) for a particular element (which embodies a paradoxical structural principle in a situation) to be given a permanent status of a missed encounter between the universal and the particular.54 When a true event has occurred and established itself in the course of a truth-procedure, it is necessarily exposed to the fate of reification. It even has to become, in Quinean vocabulary, a ‘bound variable’ again. It proverbially needs a state-apparatus that manages certain properties of the event but thus immobilizes other properties of the event at the same time, at least to a certain extent. Badiou describes this difficulty, as aforementioned, in The Theory of the Subject. Certain forms of political management of an event can undo the event. Badiou charges the followers of Arian but also the Gnostics with this failure. Badiou’s reverence to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) derives from this background of events failing in the long run. This political movement embodies for him one of the few revolutionary attempts to give the ‘void’ of a political situation even after the success of an event a potential space to, again, rein freely. The Chinese Revolution is the event and the Cultural Revolution of Mao, so to speak, an attempt to protect the revolution from reification through its own doxa. Badiou admits the failure of the Cultural Revolution repeatedly. But in various writings and interviews he emphasizes nevertheless its utopian potential: to protect the multiplicity of situations after an event from the process of auto-annihilation. For Hegel, but also for Lacan and Badiou, the fact that something can be opened up in substance in the passage through its non-coincidence (via subjects), is due to the fact that reality only opens up in the inferential network of justifications, knowledge and beliefs, that is, in the so-called web of belief. This network depends on transcendental-virtual beliefs in its own coherence. Recall Lacan’s famous saying that ‘truth is when it inhabits fiction’.55 But why is that? Because for Lacan and Badiou, as well as for Hegel, there is at the core of reality an unrepresentable excess that is both revealed and covered up by that 54 Sabellius, a third-century priest, taught that God was single and indivisible. Arius (256–336) and his followers subordinated Jesus Christ as the Son of God to the Father. Both teachings contradict the homoousian understanding of Christ, that is, the latter’s ‘consubstantiality’ with the Father. 55 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:  The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New  York:  W. W. Norton, 1996), 4.

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moment of retotalizing the whole in an event. The emptiness – or, to put it with Hegel, the negative (with Lacan’s words: the real) – is inconspicuously enclosed in every situation and master signifiers are representational ‘templets’ to close this emptiness off. A gap as real opens up nevertheless time and again out of the blue. It allows a missing object, claim, value, universality to appear when there is a subject that, by virtue of its particularity, assigns an extension to what until now cannot be thought. And this is even so if the object is hallucinated and – as in the case of Paul’s downfall on the way to Damascus – can be perceived only as a hallucinatory ‘voice’ or a ‘gaze’ of (an)other. Lacan expresses this thought when he writes, ‘Le tableau, certes, est dans mon oeil. Mais moi, je suis dans le tableau’. ‘The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am in the picture.’56 This can mean that ‘I, Jesus Christ, see the reality in the year 37, but not only that. Reality also sees me: as Messiah’.

56 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar: Book XI, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 96 (translation modified).

4

Hegel’s Immanence of Truths Frank Ruda

Je crois, moi, qu’il n’y a pas de précurseur. – Alain Badiou1

Introduction: Back forwards The greatness of a singular way of thinking sometimes manifests most directly in its ability to change the past. This is less paradoxical than it may seem at first sight. It has, for example, famously been stated that the greatness of Kafka becomes fully apparent through the fact that he was able to create his own predecessors. But this was not a magic trick. Rather, after Kafka – when one read his work, obviously – one recognizes a certain Kafkaian ‘something’, a Kafkaesque style, a Kafkaesque scene or character even in writers that predated Kafka by centuries. After Kafka, in reading Dante one may be involuntarily reminded of something Kafkaesque, of something that could not have been there before Kafka – as there was no Kafka – but will appear to have already anticipated him and will therefore forever be in Dante after Kafka’s emergence. But this is peculiar back-forward dynamics is not limited to the history of literature or the arts in general, but also applies to what happens in the aftermath of the emergence of great thinkers in philosophy. After Hegel, not only parts of Kant’s project but even Plato’s dialectic will have latently anticipated Hegel. More dramatically put, after Hegel even Plato will have been Hegelian. And a Hegelian perspective adds another twist to this dynamic, since if there is an adequate philosophical conceptualization of this historical dynamic (pertinent to philosophy) – in short: if there is a proper

1 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Images du temps présent: 2001–2004 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 306.

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history of philosophy  – it cannot but present not only a multiplicity of such back-forward loops but must ultimately culminate in one particular articulation of this very logic that cannot but retroactively totalize this very history – from its end-point, as it were. Against this background, what about a philosopher who has been compared not only to Plato, but, curiously enough, even to Parmenides, namely Alain Badiou? How does someone supposed to recommence philosophy relate to the back-forward movement? The comparisons suggest that something of Parmenides or of Plato, or both, repeats in his work. But this cannot be a case of a simple repetition.2 On the one hand, Badiou seems to incorporate the very birth of philosophy, that is under present conditions a rebirth of philosophical thought  – as if he were a Parmenides for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet, according to Badiou’s own reading, even though Parmenides brought philosophy into the light of the day, philosophy proper is not born from Parmenides’s intellectual womb. Rather he brought into the world its embryonic form, something that is not-yet fully philosophy, because it is still too much inscribed in an already constituted physis. Such Parmenedian newly born philosophy was still too natural, as most births are; it was still too naturally embedded in a poetic mode of thinking.3 This is why for Badiou philosophy proper only begins with Plato. As he was the first philosopher to have examined the conditions and potentials of a post-poetic philosophy, inter alia by unfolding a more complex theory of philosophy’s conditioning by other practices and by attempting to create a first space of compossibility between them. With Parmenides philosophy was born. And with Plato it was raised to become a grown-up woman. So, if Badiou reinvented the very possibility of philosophy – a philosophy after the declared end of philosophy – he also unfolded what this philosophy must look like, and this is his Platonic side, which is also why it necessarily took a structured or systematic form.4 The comparison with Parmenides and Plato thus suggests that after Heidegger – and one can specify that for Badiou Heidegger was our Parmenides5 – and after 2 Obviously Kierkegaard would beg to differ such a thing could even exist, but already the very form of Badiou’s actual repetition of Plato’s Republic (Alain Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in Sixteen Chapters, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) indicates that things are more intricate. 3 For this characterization, cf. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire:  Parménide. L’être 1:  Figure ontologique (1985) (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 4 As everyone knows, grown-ups differ from children because they are structured differently. Freud, for example, depicted infantile sexuality as lacking ‘centering and organization’, whereas in adult sexuality ‘a well-organized tyranny has been established’. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 401. 5 Cf. Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger. L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (1986–1987) (Paris: Fayard, 2015).



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the different versions of Heideggerianism (from the Strasburg school and the diverse branches of deconstruction6 up to a broad variety of newly emerging sophists that inhabit the space left empty by philosophy’s disappearance and thrive on the vanishing of any claim to truth), Badiou thought what had to be thought to properly conceive of the transformation needed for philosophy to resurge. Badiou begins anew, not with a clean philosophical slate, but with a historical slate that needed purging as well as with a new formation, so as to determine what can be done with this new(re)born.7 And within this very endeavour, Badiou necessarily and retroactively totalizes the history of philosophy and thus articulates the previously depicted logic – of the loop backforward – as a genuinely subjective – not subjectivist – understanding of history; an understanding of history that is finally without object.8 This becomes intelligible, for example, when he demonstrates why and how after the historically dated emergence of the idea of communism even the longgone Spartacus revolt can be retroactively read as something that will have been a part of the history of communism. But again, this does not hold for the practice of politics and the so-called conditions alone. I  contend that Badiou also had such an impact on the history of philosophy.9 But as it is too broad a task for one article to determine the status of the history of philosophy after Badiou, I  limit myself to something like a particular case study. I  single out one thinker with whom Badiou has repeatedly engaged during all the phases of his work, namely Hegel, and attempt to demonstrate that with and after Badiou emerged a peculiar new possibility of reading Hegel. My claim is that after Badiou’s systematic and conceptual intervention, it has not only become possible to conceive of a different Hegel, but furthermore to read Hegel as a thinker who actually already published a detailed systematic elaboration of the 6 There are many places where this becomes explicit. One particularly instructive text in this regard is Alain Badiou’s Can Politics Be Thought? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 7 The characterization of Badiou as Parmenides and Plato could also imply that Badiou is not one but two thinkers, so that out of his own conceptual deadlocks – a philosophy still too sutured to one of its conditions, notably politics in Theory of the Subject and before – his thought re-emerges as if rejuvenated and reborn, reborn because of a specific and singularly determined deadlock. This idea is not at all foreign to Badiou’s oeuvre. Recall the discussion of Lacan. If Freud is comparable to Marx (as he invented a new discipline), Lacan actually is ‘the Lenin of psychoanalysis’ and at the same time its Mao, since he is ‘like a king succeeding himself ’. Lacan, as much as Badiou, is his own successor. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 126f. 8 Cf. Alain Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’. In Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduaro Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24–32. Badiou repeatedly claimed in public lectures, ‘I am philosophy’. 9 This obviously raises the difficult problem – difficult within Badiou’s own conceptual framework – if there can be ‘events’ in philosophy. I have to disregard this problem here but have provided the sketch of an answer in my For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

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last – and as yet unpublished – cornerstone of Badiou’s philosophical oeuvre, notably the last part of his Being and Event trilogy. There is thus an additional temporal-historical loop involved in the following reflections: not only does the appearance of a great thinker retroactively transform the precedent history, it even allows for the paradoxical possibility that what this very thinker is involved in expounding and developing already exists in the past, in a past that becomes only readable as anticipating the as yet inexistent future because of his very intervention into history. In the following I try to show that after Badiou one is able to see that there already exists a book deserving of the title ‘The Immanence of Truths’, even though now, in 2018, Badiou is only on the brink of publishing it himself. This book is Hegel’s Science of Logic. To substantiate this claim I do not engage with Badiou’s explicit criticisms of Hegel10 or try to defend Hegel against them. I also do not investigate Badiou’s own comparisons of his system with that of Hegel (his Being and Event being his Science of Logic, his Logics of Worlds being his Phenomenology of Spirit). I endeavour to do one and one thing only, namely to present how after Badiou one can read a hitherto unread book, namely Hegel’s Immanence of Truths – that might even ultimately be able to make a highly valuable contribution to Badiou’s own system. Yet, in the frame of the present article I am only able to present a highly condensed fragment of such a reading. However, I  hope that it demonstrates why a continuation of this kind of exploration is worthwhile. Before I begin: Lenin once argued that no Marxist had understood Marx’s Capital because no one properly understood Hegel. And so he went to Switzerland to study Hegel after the emancipatory movement in Russia suffered a brutal defeat and returned right in time for the Russian Revolution to take place, an act that might therefore be read as the first time someone practically applied Hegel’s thought to political practice. Althusser twisted Lenin’s diagnosis by asserting that the latter had actually understood Hegel even prior to reading him – because he was such a precise reader of Capital – but without knowing it. In the following, my claim is that, given the back-forward dynamics, it is plausible to claim that no one has properly understood not Marx but Hegel, simply because he has not yet been read the way he has to be, after Badiou, that is as a Badiouan.11 10 See ibid., 133–53. 11 This might be said to even hold for Badiou himself, since Badiou’s criticisms of Hegel still refer to a Hegel constituted before Badiou, and the Hegel I try to bring out in the following is thus even unknown to (the) Badiou (critical of Hegel), even though he is the one who allowed for him to become intelligible after all.



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Encountering an event, or absolute knowing The first step must consist in addressing Hegel’s most notorious and most frequently criticized concept: absolute knowing. What is absolute knowing for Hegel, the Badiouan? This question can best be answered by asking another question: what does Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit seek to achieve, since only at its end does absolute knowing appear. A classical answer, one that does not rely on any knowledge of Badiou, is that the Phenomenology is the introduction to Hegel’s system. It introduces into the system by depicting that and how we must get rid of all our presuppositions and preconceptions of what it is that we are about to engage in, namely thinking the absolute (or truth). The Phenomenology therein works like the self-negating ‘presupposition for a presuppositionless’12 (scientific) presentation of the absolute – that we encounter in the Logic. It is thus a gigantic endeavour of subtraction that is more Cartesian than Descartes; it is maybe the most encompassing subtraction in the history of philosophy. Hegel articulates this task by stating that the ‘road’ of the Phenomenology is not only ‘the pathway of doubt’, but ‘more precisely . . . the way of despair’13 – a redoubling radicalization of doubt (Zweifel) to the despair (Verzweiflung) indicative of anxiety.14 The Phenomenology traverses all possible forms of consciousness and thereby takes us down a path on which we lose any stable ground that we could cling to. Yet, this movement is not only performed apropos of the substance, as the famous Hegelian saying goes, but also apropos of the subject  – that is to say, not only do we lose all substantial ground and our footing in a given substantial symbolic universe (be it a life-world, community, family, etc.), we also lose the substance of the subject or the subject as substantially determined in itself so that we experience something that exceeds our coordinates of experience. And we thereby even lose the substantial link between substance and subject. The subject neither has a substantial preordained place in substance nor does the subject itself have any kind of inner substance. Undoing all substantial conceptions of substance, subject and their relation is the precondition for the commencement 12 William Maker, Philosophy without Foundation:  Rethinking Hegel (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1994), 85. 13 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49. 14 Kant reached this point as he had ‘anxiety of the object’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010], 30, translation modified, F.R.], but he shied away from facing its proper consequences. A systematic elaboration of this point can be found in chs. 1 and 2 of Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). In much of my argument I rely on this work I have done together with Comay.

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of philosophy or the commencement of thinking – which is as much practice as it is theory of – truth(s). If the Phenomenology is a book that presents us with an immanent perspective of a process in which all presuppositions are subtracted and our world crumbles, the conceptual name for reaching the point,15 at which the peculiar completion of the gigantesque process of undoing is attained, a point where completion coincides with incompletion, is absolute knowing. So, absolute knowing is not a name for a knowledge of an object (the absolute), but rather for an encounter with a moment of utter decreation of everything that is. And this is the very precondition for thought to begin (as thought is creative). The Phenomenology depicts the attempts of consciousness to avoid confronting the rational insight(s) that there is no substance, no substantial subject and no subjective or substantial relation between the two  – and it presents the inventiveness of consciousness that is driven by the will to avoid what it cannot but encounter16  – ultimately we move from the impotence of consciousness to avoid what it cannot but encounter to a point of impossibility:17 to the impossible point where we experience that our knowledge is constitutively incomplete, not because we do not know enough, but because the world and universe is constitutively incomplete  – and thus something new can emerge. Another way of putting it is that in absolute knowing we know that any kind of knowledge is incomplete because it cannot account for the very thing that drives the very creation of new knowledge. Absolute knowing is the paradox and impossible knowledge of the incompletion of knowledge that we cannot integrate into our knowledge, as incompletion is not an object. The absolute known is the point where it becomes entirely clear that we have nothing – not even a substantial nothingness – that we could knowingly rely upon. And this point is the point where we are about to begin to think truth(s). Thinking is in this sense constitutively unprecedented. All theoretical knowledge of the world and our capacities, all practical knowledge and knowhow does not help when

15 Hegel explicitly refers to this as a point, when he claims that, ‘In pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at a point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien, with what is only for it, and some sort of “other”, at a point where appearance becomes identical with essence, so that its exposition will coincide at just this point with the authentic Science of Spirit.’ Hegel, Phenomenology, 56f. Literally, as the reader might have noticed, Hegel refers to the point three times, as if indicating this very elision and subtraction by stating: ‘. . .’ 16 Cf. Rebecca Comay, ‘Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel’, Research in Phenomenology, vol. 45 (2015): 237–66. 17 Raising impotence to a point of impossibility was Lacan’s definition of the psychoanalytic cure, of the end of analysis, of the moment when there is a (re)constitution of subjectivity. Badiou himself refers to this formula in Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy (New York/London: Verso, 2008), 34. The transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic deals structurally with the same thing.



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we want to commence thinking, or more precisely:  think thinking. To begin thinking we need to reach this impossible possibility of absolute knowing. This is why Hegel’s shortest definition of it is articulated in the language of sacrifice: ‘to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself ’.18 The sacrifice – that is absolute knowing – is not a sacrifice for any greater good, or for oneself as a greater good, but is a sacrifice of the very idea that one would have anything to sacrifice. To begin to think means to ‘throw oneself as if into a boundless ocean . . . all footholds have disappeared, all otherwise friendly lights are extinguished. Only the one star, the inner star of spirit shines . . . But it is natural that spirit in its loneliness with itself is affected, as it were, by horror; one does not know what it is pointing at [wo es hinauswolle], where one will get.’19 In thinking, I do not simply give up myself and thereby retain myself in the representation of being a sacrificed object – which would amount to a form of melancholia – but I give up everything even the idea that giving up myself is a sacrifice and that there is anything I  could sacrifice. The attentive reader might have already figured that what Hegel’s absolute knowing formally presents us with is precisely what happens to an individual at the moment when he or she encounters an event. His or her world is shaken, no certainties remain intact, nothing – not even nothing – is there to rely upon, there are no objective guarantees, the only thing one knows is that one does not know what will follow from it and one did not anticipate this possibility even to exist. One experiences that something new is potentially about to take place. This is to say that the Phenomenology depicts what happens when we encounter an event. When we fall in love, for example, we quite literally traverse all possible forms of consciousness, from sense certainty (can I  trust my eyes that this is really happening, even if I cannot see it?) to religious belief systems (is this what destiny or God had always planned for me?); we ultimately rebut all of them, because one is suddenly confronted with the emergence of an entirely new possibility that makes one radically responsible for what will happen with it. Absolute knowing in this sense confronts us with what happens when we encounter something new, or, more profanely:  a problem of totally different kind. We experience the incompletion of knowledge  – thus the impossibility of experiencing the way we experience otherwise. Falling in love, for example, we experience that we will never know why we fell in love with precisely this 18 Hegel, Phenomenology, 492. 19 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Konzept der Rede beim Antritt des philosophischen Lehramtes an der Universität Berlin’. In Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 3, Werke, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 416. My translation, F.R.

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person20  – and this is the experience specific to absolute knowing. And this experience amounts to a ‘problematization’ of everything we were supposed to know. We experience something out of this world, something real and ‘the real makes a hole’ – in knowledge – ‘for truth’,21 since ‘a truth is always what makes a hole in a knowledge’.22 Absolute knowing names the point where we have the paradoxical experience of a hole in knowledge and in our structure of experience, a hole through which the absolute might seep through. It is thus not a kind of objective knowledge, but rather the transition from objective knowledge to a subjective (conviction and) truth. It is an index of subjectivization.23 The whole of the Phenomenology of Spirit can thus be read as a very elaborate account of what happens precisely at the ‘moment’ we identify an event as an event.24 At such an evental ‘moment’ it is as if we traverse the whole Phenomenology in less than a nanosecond – that is, in no objectively measurable time. Absolute knowing thus radically changes the established coordinates of the existing regime of possibility, as it points us to the very impossible possibility of an event. And just as an event is constitutively unforeseeable, absolute knowing does not know what the event will have been, but it confronts us with a moment of utter freedom: we must choose, either to affirm the newly emerging possibility and act and think accordingly or refuse to engage in it. In this sense, absolute knowing is a pointed knowledge, a knowledge of a point (of the real) that can change everything; but this change only occurs when we start doing what we did not know we were capable of. Absolute knowing means to know that one must do something that one does not know how to do, even though, or more precisely because, it is impossible. And this is why in passing 20 The trivial explanation of this is that if we were able to tell the other why we loved him or her, it could only be an utter disappointment (e.g. if it is because she earns more than a million per year or because he is so charmingly tiny); we only know that we do not know why we are in the situation we are in, and even if it seems utterly contingent, we are nonetheless fully responsible for what happens afterwards. 21 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 199. 22 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005), 327. 23 Against the obvious objection that Hegel’s discourse is the discourse of philosophy and he is hence not talking about any ‘condition’ in Badiou’s sense of the term, the reader should be reminded that Badiou himself described the function of philosophy in similar terms: ‘Philosophy is subtractive, in that it makes a hole in a sense or interrupts . . . the circulation of sense.’ Alain Badiou, ‘The Definition of Philosophy’. In Infinite Thought:  Truth and the Return to Philosophy (London/ New York: Continuum, 2003), 166. So, philosophy produces holes, too, by constantly affirming the very impossible possibility of truths that make holes in knowledge, by affirming absolute knowing. 24 This is why the despair that pertains to it is not accidental, but an evental encounter cannot but produce anxiety. But it needs to be confronted with the right amount of courage  – as Badiou elaborated in Theory of the Subject and  – as Hegel points out when he emphasizes that ‘the will and courage for the truth’ is absolutely necessary to think. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusätze). Part I  of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), 5.



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through it, we – for Hegel – also place ourselves in an impossible position, an impossible point (of view), notably that of ‘God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’.25 If for a moment we lay aside the apparently megalomaniac language here, one can see that for Hegel with the encounter of an event and through its affirmation, we are in a position from which we can create something new, a new world, including ourselves (the finite spirit) and even everything we will regard as unchangeable (nature). An event confronts us with a choice and allows for the impossible possibility of finding ourselves in the position of creation. And in creating, that is by unfolding the consequences of the newly emerging possibility, we ‘live “as an Immortal” ’.26 That is, we live, act and think like God did in creating the world. If one takes seriously Hegel’s reference to God before the creation of the world in our context, and if this is the peculiar ‘perspective’ from which the Science of Logic will run its course, not only does this mean that everything we read in this work are God’s thoughts before the creation of the world, but it also means that we are in the very same position and think his or her thoughts. To put this differently: passing through the Phenomenology – which presents what happens when we encounter an event – we reach a point (this is subjectivization) where we are in a position of utter exception from the previous laws and norms of the world (or situation). The world, the situation, the whole universe is bracketed not phenomenologically, as in Husserl, but ontologically. And if Hegel’s Logic depicts us the very thoughts of the creator before or while creating, it can consistently be claimed that this very book is formally presenting the immanence of any truth procedure as such. Any true creation, this must be Hegel’s claim, follows the very logic depicted in the Logic. But before we can examine – at least in parts – the formal constitution of this creative procedure, we have to take a brief detour and tackle one intricate question, namely the question of how, for the Badiouan Hegel, the Phenomenology is actually related to the Logic.

Affirming the event, or resolve If one can defend the claim that the vanishing of all determinations that the Phenomenology depicts is what happens when we encounter an event, and if the

25 Hegel, Science of Logic, 29. 26 This is Badiou quoting Aristotle, in Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 507.

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Logic structurally follows the Phenomenology, it cannot but depict the unfolding of the consequences of an event. Yet, an intricate question arises:  do the two books follow one and the same dialectical schema? Hegel, the Badiouan, cannot but give a straightforward answer. It cannot be the same dialectical movement. In the Phenomenology we can begin by writing something on a piece of paper, by then waiting a couple of hours and articulating the dialectical insight that what once seemed true, is not any longer. This instigates the dialectical processes that Hegel describes as that of overcoming ‘sense-certainty’.27 The same does not hold for the Logic. For one, this is because after the Phenomenology we have nothing left, nothing we could take for granted or as a given. The process of subtracting all determinations that it depicts is so profound that absolute knowing does not provide us with a new footing. Rather, as Hegel states in the Logic:  ‘Pure knowledge . . . has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; it is without distinctions and as thus distinctionless it ceases to be knowledge; what we have before us is only simple immediacy.’28 The process of the vanishing of all determinations  – the Phenomenology  – culminates in absolute knowing and absolute knowing is so pure – it is the pure identification of an event as an event – that it ceases to be knowledge. So, there is a process of disappearance of all determinations and appearances that ultimately disappears itself: a vanishing of the process of vanishing.29 What does this leaves us with? With simple immediacy. What does this mean? It means that the Phenomenology leads us to something immediate, but that, as it is mediated by its whole process, it is a mediated immediacy, an immediacy of a newly emerging choice.30 For Badiou as well as for Hegel, in the beginning there is the immediacy of a forced decision, as this is precisely how an event appears to an individual. The forced decision is the form of subjectivization. But the subjectivization, that is, the identification of an event as an event, the forced recognition that one must choose, is not identical to the practical exploration and unfolding of the consequences of this very event. It is precisely Hegel’s Logic that presents the latter from an immanent perspective. This also means that in the transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic we are dealing with a logic of subjectivization; a logic of becoming-subject due to the encounter 27 Hegel, Phenomenology, 58–67. 28 Hegel, Science of Logic, 47. 29 This and the following points are elaborated in detail from within Hegel in Comay and Ruda, The Dash. 30 And one can obviously see that the Phenomenology, as saturated with historical references and material, proves the fact that any event is essentially historical; even if for the emergence of history proper, one needs something that cannot but appear a-historical. See Badiou, Being and Event, 173ff.



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of an event. But to uphold this reading one must demonstrate that the actual process of subjective practice that springs from the evental encounter is thus not identical with the moment of subjectivization (i.e. the dialectical movement of the Phenomenology is different from that of the Logic). If absolute knowing is the knowledge of the emergence of an evental exception to the laws of the situation and if this places us in an exceptional position vis-à-vis the previous laws of appearance (the position of God before the creation), to more precisely articulate the move from the former to the latter, it is important to note that there is no automatism of the event. An event does not automatically yield consequences. They are produced by those who have become subjectivized in them. There is no automatic unfolding of the consequences of an event. The event forces us to be responsible for its very unfolding, but we can obviously refuse this responsibility. Either one becomes practically engaged in seeing what the event will have been through unfolding its consequences in a concrete situation or one refuses such an engagement. Encountering an event, we have no choice but to choose, between engaging in its consequences practically or not engaging in them. And only in the practice initiated by the event, can we thus fail in a strong sense of the term. Only after falling in love one can ruin one’s own love practice and will one have become responsible for this particular failure. This means that with the event the responsibility emerges for us to determine what the event will have been. And, as if to add insult to injury, this is important because the event is essentially nothing other than what it will have been – it is nothing but its consequences. Since we are forced to choose, the choice in question is not a free choice, neither deliberate nor the result of reflection.31 But is all this reference to choice not entirely foreign to Hegel, the thinker who in recent years has been prominently read as theorist of normativity and the space of reasons? It is in the very transition from the Phenomenology to the Logic – in a text that precedes the actual beginning of the Logic proper – that one can find Hegel’s rendering of precisely this point. He raises the question of how one can begin with the endeavour he is about to begin – the Logic, that is the presentation of truth(s) as such – and it is here that he elaborates what it means that we are, after the Phenomenology, left with simple immediacy. Since the only thing to make a beginning is ‘to take up, what is there before us’.32 We just have to take up the simple immediacy, which it itself already ‘an expression of reflection’,33 notably of 31 In this sense, the choice is paradoxical. Since no one decides to fall in love, for example. One is either in love, without ever having consciously decided to be in love, or one is not. This choice was thus (unconsciously) taken. 32 Hegel, Science of Logic, 47. 33 Ibid.

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the subtractive process of the Phenomenology. But what does this mean? Hegel answers by stating what is there before us: There is only present the resolve, which can also be viewed as arbitrary, of considering thinking as such. The beginning must then be absolute or, what means the same here, must be an abstract beginning; and so there is nothing that it may presuppose, must not be mediated by anything or have a ground, ought to be rather itself the ground of the entire science.34

In the beginning – as an effect of the encounter of an event – there is a resolve, a decision. This decision decides nothing but to consider thinking as such; it decides to start to think, it affirms the very newly emerged possibility of thought. This resolve – like the ‘decision’ to fall in love – is not an individual resolve,35 not my decision, but it is a kind of anonymous decision36 taken within me to which in the following process I can only remain faithful. Resolve is Hegel’s name for the affirmation of the event.

Immanence of truths: The logic Following this, Hegel’s Science of Logic depicts in great detail the consequences of such an affirmative resolve that will only have become possible as an effect of the forced choice of the event, that is, the point of absolute knowing. The Logic is therefore not an exhibition of the transcendental coordinates of thought or the world, but it presents the very form of any practical creation of any post-evental truth. This is why Hegel also refers to the Logic as ‘the science of absolute form’37 because the absolute – truth – is nothing but a practical creation of a form for that which did not yet receive any since it previously seemed impossible. And this very creation does not happen automatically, it is the result of an immense labour of thought. What is the first result of the decision to affirm the eventually emerging possibility of thinking?

34 Ibid., 48. This is in line with Badiou’s claim that ‘philosophy is a construction of thinking where . . . it is proclaimed that there are truths’. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/ New York: Continuum, 2008), 11. 35 This is what mistakenly Kierkegaard claimed. 36 Badiou also refers to the anonymity in his elaboration of the status of the intervention (or decision). Cf. Badiou, Being and Event, 229f. 37 Hegel, Science of Logic, 523.



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As any reader of Hegel will know, the first concepts the Logic begins with are being and nothing.38 Why is this? Because the very ‘being of an event is a disappearing’39 or put differently: because an event is essentially undecidable.40 This is to say that there are no objective criteria by means of which one could determine in advance if what is happening to us is an event or not. Only its consequences will offer the proof of that. Or more precisely: there is no proof that something is happening to us except what might follow from it. This is another way of saying that truth is index sui. There is no objective proof that we fell in love when we fell in love, other than that we start acting in a peculiar manner. That is to say, an event has no special kind of being – as it is something that is not, for example, it happens41 – and it can only become something if it produces effects. An event therefore creates a peculiar indistinguishability between being  – as it is happening to us – and nothing – as its whole ontological status depends on the consequences it will have yielded. This is why the Logic begins with the indistinguishability of being and nothing  – since being is not identical to nothing, but also not different from it, because both have no determinations yet. As such indistinguishability characterizes any event, being and nothing being peculiarly indistinguishable from one another are the first determinations one can gain from encountering an event. With this indistinguishability all thought commences. Being and nothing are undistinguishable and yet distinguished – ‘they are not without distinction’42 – they are two that form an inseparable unity that is the event. Hegel articulates this in stating: ‘Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same.’43 In the beginning there is a ‘non-being . . . since in non-being there is contained the reference to being . . . – and this can also be expressed, if one so wishes, simply by saying the mere “not” [durch das bloße Nicht]’.44 This is commencement of thinking in the emergence of the ‘place of thought of that-which-is-not-being’,45 that is, the event. But if an event is nothing but its consequences, this also means that there is never the pure moment of the event 38 A critical examination of the beginning of Hegel’s Logic can be found in Alain Badiou, The Rational Kernel of Hegelian Dialectics (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 49–85. I want to suggest that the whole ontological status of the beginning of the Logic changes if one takes into account the decision that precedes and thus (un)grounds it. 39 Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’, in Infinite Thought, 87. 40 See Badiou, Being and Event, 327ff. 41 Obviously, on another level an event is a multiplicity, as everything that is a multiplicity (for Badiou). But it is a special kind of (paradoxical, self-belonging) multiplicity. 42 Hegel, Science of Logic, 60. 43 Ibid., 59. 44 Ibid., 61 (translation modified, F.R.). 45 Badiou, Being and Event, 173.

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in which we could dwell. Rather one is ‘immediately in the consequences’46 – note the emphasis on the immediacy again. The evental indistinguishability that forces us to decide does thus not present us with being and nothing as stable entities, rather both always already ‘had passed over’47 into the other. Because an event immediately places us in the realm of consequences, the unity of being and nothing articulates itself also immediately in ‘a third’.48 We can only speak of the peculiar ontological constitution of an event after we already moved on, that is in retrospect and this is the reason as to why for Hegel, we only retroactively introduce being and nothing to give an account of that in which we already are, the third (concept), which is becoming.49 What is becoming? It is determined as twofold transition from nothing to being and from being to nothing – so we are still determining the event as event in a purely formal manner, becoming is the unity now of this repeated movement of one passing over into the other. This is what Hegel calls coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.50 No evental consequences without bringing new determinations into the world and without the vanishing of into nothing of others, but the latter is not simply nothing, but obviously introduces a more determinate form of negation (as we are negating this or that determination51). The unity of these two movements Hegel calls – and the reader should be reminded that we are here in the Logic and are thus not dealing with appearances52 – existence, being-there (Dasein).53 What is being-there? It is the determinate and qualitative unity of being and nothing. It is qualitative because it is real, it is there and determinate because due to its being-there it entails negation. Being-there is the first real consequence of an event; events create a new existence, a new ‘something concrete’.54 We thus move from a newly emerging possibility to the creation of a concrete new something, a new existence. So, being-there is there and thus real, but it also entails a negation, being this being-there and not another and 46 Alain Badiou, Séminaire:  L’images du temps présent II, 2002–3, session of May 14, 2003. www. entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/02-03.3.htm. 47 Hegel, Science of Logic, 60. 48 Ibid., 69. 49 Consistently with what I  suggest above, Hegel claims that ‘all further logical determinations . . . are therefore examples of this unity’ (ibid., 62) of being and nothing that characterises the evental encounter. For Hegel, as for Badiou, philosophy only thinks events – which are what they are only because of their consequences – and shapes its concepts accordingly. 50 Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 80. 51 Not ‘this or that’ concrete determination. But the ‘this-ness or that-ness’ of determination, since we are here still on a entirely formal plane. 52 As Hegel remarks, ‘the representation of space does not belong here’ – as we are in the process of creating a world and did not yet arrive there; ibid., 83f. 53 Ibid., 81. 54 Ibid., 84.



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precisely because of this determinateness of the unity of being and nothing – that is the event – we here encounter something. This means that the consequence of an event is that there is something and this means that there is something-there (das Dasein ist Daseiences, Etwas). And this something is ‘the beginning of the subject’55 – even if it is only its beginning, because it only ‘obtains in the concept its concrete intensity’.56 Any subject begins as a something, even though this is not the most intense subjective form. But because the something is a more determinate unity of being and nothing and their unity conceptually necessitates the concept of becoming, something becomes, even though in a more determinate manner. Something becomes something else, an other. Yet, there is no stark difference between something and some other, as this other is also something (actually the becoming-other of something). But if something necessarily becomes an other and the other is a something that therefore also becomes other, both – something and the other of something – ‘are other in the same way’.57 So, the something that we seemed to have as a stable ground is less stable than assumed. One can here see that in the unfolding of the consequences of an event, what is produced are not simply new forms of existence, but the fact that these forms do not have any substantial identity except that they become other. But with the other, there also emerges the other of the other – as the other is simply the other of something and hence a repetition of something. But the other of the other is different from the other, the other of the other is the other becoming other, whereby we see that we can only properly determine what follows from an event in its most formal manner if we account for something in itself – something just as it is there – and something for an other – as any something constitutively is in itself becoming other.58 Any something is in itself a being-for-others, as it is constitutively othering (and othering of this very othering) – which is what it means that we are in the realm of becoming.59 The identity of something is determined by its becoming and thus being other. But what then is the something formally, if it is not supposed to vanish fully in something else? Hegel replies by introducing a further distinction, namely that between determination and constitution. What any being – any something – is in itself equals its determination, its ‘affirmative determinateness’,60 notably – here 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 89. Ibid. (Translation modified, F.R.). Ibid., 91. I cannot but apologize to the reader for the many elisions needed to be able to at least proceed even through the first pages of Hegel’s Logic. 59 Ibid., 95. 60 Ibid.

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in the beginning – that it is (there as something). But because any something becomes other, any something also has a constitution, which is ‘that in the something which becomes an other’.61 The constitution is what changes; the determination is what subsists through the change. But because any something is in itself something for others, it is not entirely just an othering, because there is still something in the something  – even if it is just the indistinguishable difference between the in itself and the for-others of this very something  – that does not become other. Another way of putting this is to say that there is something that resists in the something and this is its determination. Hegel’s point is that what resists becoming other, the being-for-the-other is precisely the othering of something itself. That is to say there is nothing which does not become other and hence it is precisely this determinate nothing, or this very othering that resists the othering. The only thing that does not become other is the becoming other itself and it is thus precisely what determines the identity of the newly created something. No commencement of the subject without a constant othering that resists all stability, except that of othering. One can here see, and very much in line with Badiou’s most recent elaborations of the concepts of identity and difference (that nonetheless Hegel at this point did not yet introduce),62 why we very slowly begin to determine the identity of the newly emerging subject. The consequences of the event can only be unfolded if a new subject emerges and if this subject does not rely on any stable form (of identity or transformation), but is engaged in a permanent process of othering, of becoming other. This is a conceptual necessity of thought itself. But with this move it is clearly determined that becoming other is part of the subject on the level of something. But the problem is that the othering is not clearly determined. Because something can only become other – constantly – if we still can make a difference between something and an other. Otherwise, there is no othering and we ended up precisely where we did not want to end up, in a peculiar substantial undifferentiated and indeterminate stability. This is why one must avoid the complete collapse of something into something else, hence the distinction between determination and constitution. But this difference itself is not enough and therefore Hegel derives the concept of the limit. There must be a limit (Grenze) between something and something else to avoid there collapse in a

61 Ibid., 96. 62 See Alain Badiou, ‘True Communism Is the Foreignness of Tomorrow’. www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1547-true-communism-is-the-foreignness-of-tomorrow-alain-badiou-talks-in-athens.



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generalized othering. Since if something would be constantly become something else, it would not be something but the othering into something else, which then could not be conceived of as there would not be anything else anymore. So, to remain something (new), something must be different from something else (something old, for example). It must be affirmatively this something and posit a limit between itself and something else. Otherwise, not only something vanishes but also the very process of othering that is needed so that the something remains what it is conceptually supposed to be. Hegel resumes this very idea by stating ‘that something has existence only in limit’.63 It only and properly exists not only when it is different but in the very difference from something else. Hence, in that which limits it from being something else is where it truly exists. But precisely thereby it does not seem to exist truly in itself but only by the negative determination of what it is not. To elaborate this point, Hegel takes refuge to the dialectic of the point and the line. I will end my commentary – a bit arbitrarily – here, as it is this discussion which will subsequently give rise to one of the most complex discussions in the first part of the Logic that leads into the distinction between good and bad infinity, which would need an article of its own to be adequately linked to Badiou’s own treatment of the concept of infinity.

From the point to the line to the finite Hegel’s treats the concept of the limit by recourse to the dialectic of the point and the line. Why? Because the line is only a line if it is not a point – the point is the limit of the line because if the line becomes a point it stops being a line.64 But any line begins in a point, there is always a point not only from which a line starts, but also from which one starts calling a line a line. The point is the limit of the line but at the same time it is its ‘absolute beginning’ – and remains, however infinite the line is, ‘its element’.65 The limit thereby becomes the very principle of that which it limits. Hegel’s point vis-à-vis the point is that the limit is not an external limit, but an internal one – which is why the next concept he starts to discuss is the concept of finitude (i.e. the idea of something that is internally limited).

63 Hegel, Science of Logic, 99. 64 See ibid., 99f. 65 Ibid., 100.

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What do we get from this transition from the limit to finitude? First, we learn that an event produces a new (form) of existence. We then see that it can only remain what it is when it relates to (and becomes) something else. But this becoming must have specificity and determination, something must remain stable in the overall becoming other of something. What is this what remains stable? It is precisely what is affirmed when the event is affirmed, what the in itself of the something new is – that which determines it – is what Badiou calls ‘the evental statement’.66 The beginning of the consequences of an event formally manifest in the effects the affirmation of the event as event has. This manifests so that the something has no other ‘kernel’, no other in itself that this very affirmation. Otherwise, it is nothing but a constant process of becoming-other. But this means that its constitution changes, yet its affirmative determination remains the same. Why does this have anything to do with finitude? Because the evental affirmation internally limits and thus determines the something, as this or that specific something. It relates to something internally finitizing it on a formal level, because, say, if I affirm the possibility of ‘proletarians of the world unite’ then this excludes any kind of action which stands in violation with this very affirmation and thus inscribes a limit into my actions – which is why finitude is as immediate67 as the decision which constitutes the something as one of the (infinity of) consequences of the event. The question that arises here is how does this finitude relate to the inherent infinity of the truth procedure itself? How does finitude finalize itself? And how is this finitude here related to what Badiou refers to as an ‘oeuvre’? These are questions that we will have to deal with in another place.

66 Alain Badiou, ‘Thinking the Event’. In Philosophy in the Present, ed. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 33. 67 Hegel, Science of Logic, 101.

5

The Torsion of Idealism Jan Völker

Before My aim in this chapter is to analyse a fundamental structure in philosophical thought and to emphasize the specific turn it takes in Badiou’s philosophy. I will argue that it is in this specific turn, that Badiou’s philosophy repeats and changes a fundamental moment of German Idealism. The fundamental structure I want to analyse is the relation to the world that any philosophy unfolds. Philosophies relate to objects, and to thought, and often they relate objects to thought as objects of thought. By ‘world’ I thus simply propose we understand the entirety of these relations between objects and thoughts. Now, one of the most peculiar traits of Badiou’s philosophy is to be found in its exceptional form of relation. Philosophy, for Badiou, is conditioned by four truth procedures – love, politics, art and science – that is, it is related to them, but philosophy is not able to grasp these procedures as its objects. Philosophy does not produce an objective knowledge about that upon which it relies. On the contrary: philosophy relies on the singularity of the truth procedures that are to be found in the difference they inscribe into objective knowledge. The challenge for philosophy is thus twofold: it cannot classify the occurrences in the conditions within a preexisting order, but it relies on the singularity of their ‘taking place’. Philosophy’s relation to the world is thus not inscribed into the frame of knowledge, and thereby a certain unease must appear, a restlessness concerning the actual relation of a philosophy to the world. Can we ever know that what the philosopher declares is true? Philosophy unfolds its relation to the world as an exception within and from the world, philosophy is itself the place of an exception within and from the world.

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Alongside the general construction of a relation to the world, philosophies form relations among each other. One might consider those relations as another instance of the relations to the world, and definitely other philosophies are part of the world. But as philosophy builds an exception within the world of relations, a philosophy relating to another philosophy does also relate to it as to another exception. If we want to address the form of the relation to the world in Badiou and want to relate this form to the forms of relating to the world in German Idealism, we are then neither dealing with two different things, nor with two identical things; instead, we are working towards a repetition that receives a derivation at some point. To get to this point, we will follow a twofold program: in a first step, we will assume that the general aspect of relation can be referred back to the construction of a ‘before’, the formation of a line by which philosophy indicates something it relates to. In a second step, this distinction itself will be shown to refer to a ‘desire’ for philosophy. And it is this ‘desire’ that marks an incision, in which philosophy begins. Our hypothesis then is that it is in this incision that Badiou’s philosophy repeats an essential moment of German Idealism, although, as already alluded, this repetition is marked with a specific incision, inserting a difference into it.

Beginning Everything is about the beginning then, and I  will provide two prominent examples to show how the question of the beginning can be unfolded: one says that we won’t be able to understand this problem of the beginning, because we always have already begun to think. Even if all the differences between objects and subjects, between philosophy and non-philosophy are a result of thought itself, we cannot think the difference from thought in thought. Thus we are always already in thought, and philosophy is a specific way to think, but is incapable to say what is not-thought. Thinking is marked by the infinity of its possibilities, but also by the finitude of its capacity. This is the transcendental answer given by Kant. Recall one of its canonic statements: ‘The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.’1 It is thought alone that gives us access to its outside, but strictly speaking we cannot think anything outside thought. 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234 (A 111).



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The other answer is that we can actually escape this paradox if we take it into account as such. We can basically think the paradox because it is the paradox of thought. Thus, at the moment we think, we are in the middle of the paradox. The paradox of the ‘before-thought’ is thought itself, although thought might not know this from the beginning on. Thought will disentangle its presuppositions, but will then find out that it is itself the split between the inside and the outside, it is, so to speak, its own outside. Thought will already have been there, and thinking will have to grasp its own difference that is always inscribed into its belatedness. Thinking is marked by the finitude of its inscriptions, but also by the infinity of its capacity. This is the Hegelian answer. We can refer to of the beginning of the Logic, in which being and nothing prove to be only distinguishable in a movement that sublates the distinction: becoming. Thought and its outside can only be distinguished once thought realizes itself as the real outside itself. For Kant, then, there can be no ground of philosophy before philosophy. We thus get an abyss as the negative ground, the infamous thing in itself, the ontology of being about which we cannot know anything. For Hegel, the paradox of the missing ground is the ground itself, we thus get the abyss of the ground as the ground itself of absolute knowing. The ‘before’ remains unthinkable in Kant, and it is precisely not before thought, but rather the centre of thought in Hegel. If we take the line of the ‘before’, separating philosophy from that to which it relates, and read it as the line between the object and the subject, then we might even say that the object is the object of the subject in Kant, and the object is the subject in Hegel. And we can also draw a further conclusion from this comparison. On the one hand, the assignment of a ‘before’ is an act that is closely related to the existence of philosophy itself, as philosophy can only exist once there is something before it. On the other hand, yet again, the actual ‘before’ gains a problematic status, suspended in Kant, sublated in Hegel. But once the line of the ‘before’ is precarious, the existence of philosophy itself is also rendered uncertain. In Kant as in Hegel the question of a true beginning is obscured, the beginning is deferred into an unreachable prehistory of thought or the beginning will always already have been there. For Badiou, as it is clear that philosophy has not existed at all times, there is a ‘before’ of philosophy, by which it is conditioned. The before of philosophy are its conditions, and if not all of the conditions are in place, philosophy cannot properly exist.2 This is a temporal and a structural before: structurally, philosophy 2 See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY:  State University of New  York Press, 1999), 35.

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follows upon its conditions, on which it relies. But it is also a temporal ‘before’, philosophy itself has a beginning, and before it there was no philosophy.3 The structural ‘before’ seems to imply that the before is set only when philosophy is there too. Philosophy is there, and its before is indicated within it. But what happens when there is no philosophy and we are not sure about how to figure out its structural before? How do we find out about the conditions if that what is conditioned does not yet exist, simply because the conditioned does not indicate the conditions to be its before? In this temporal aspect of the ‘before’, we can also recognize a very modern aspect. To begin something new and not to belong to the ancients any longer is a decisive moment in the understanding of modernity. To be modern, it is necessary that before it there were the ancients; ancients that only become ancients for the modern. ‘Modern’ in this relation is the consciousness of a break: modern philosophy does perhaps not, if it is not too narcissistic, declare itself to be the beginning of a new time, but it declares eras of thought to be dead and other eras to be beginning. This modern moment of philosophy did already take place within the ancients, if we think of the famous parricide in Plato, when he refutes Parmenides. Let us say that philosophy accepts that there are changes in time, and because of this it necessarily has to engage with time. Structurally, something non-philosophical exists before philosophy, but there is also a time before and a time of philosophy. It might also have been a different philosophy that took place ‘before’ philosophy. For example, a certain philosophy declares that metaphysics reigned, before reason was able to unfold and develop itself in its full strength. In Kant’s understanding, metaphysics was a disoriented affair before critical philosophy came along, and metaphysics after criticism can only be better, can become an oriented thinking. This temporal aspect of the before  – thus the time before philosophy and the time of philosophy – can result in a history of philosophy that is also a philosophical history. But there is a peculiarity to be recognized when this ‘before’ refers to another philosophy. Another philosophy can be turned into a simple before of philosophy. It is then treated not as an exception from the world, but rather is taken as a part of the world, to which (the new) philosophy relates. This implies negating the actual philosophical impact in any ‘previous’ philosophies, it implies stripping off their exceptionality by reducing them to just another part of the world. The true difficulty is the singularity of the relation of one philosophy 3 Ibid., 33.



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to another: philosophy relates to another philosophy as to another exception, and the latter is a part of the world as well as an exception within and from it. But often the singularity of the relation to another philosophy is tacitly reduced. Any real philosophy in Kant’s sense, for example, can only be transcendental. In this sense the line of the ‘before’ does lead into the one history of philosophy, and the question of the ‘before’ is reduced to the temporal development of philosophy as such:  there is a time in which philosophy exists, and there is a time in which philosophy does not exist. But the problem of the relation to other philosophies points us to a different, more complex understanding. The temporal notion of the ‘before’ is split: on the one hand, if philosophy situates itself as an exception within and from the world, it can only do so by referring to exceptions and their becoming in this world. Philosophy relates to the world not only as to something non-philosophical, but it relates to the world in its exceptions and their time. And on the other hand, the existence of philosophy itself is not simply an exception from the world, but an exception within the world, insofar as philosophy unfolds itself in time. Thus philosophy inscribes a time of its own into the world, a time that continues into the ‘before’, which becomes a before of exceptions. Philosophy creates an exceptional world. Once philosophy is there, structural and temporal aspects of the ‘before’ fall into one. Now that philosophy is there, something is there that is not philosophical and this non-philosophical moment introduces a temporal gap into a philosophy that comes after the before. But now that philosophy does also unfold a time of its own, as an exception, it does also relate to the becoming of other exceptions. The relation of one philosophy to another is a specific case then, insofar as we can grasp in it the specific problem of the before. On the one hand, it does relate an aspect of time with an aspect of timelessness, which is the case in any relation that philosophy inscribes. But on the other hand, in other philosophies these exceptional relations are negated or affirmed and are thus given a specific existence or are repressed. Philosophy then, in its beginning, inscribes a difference: not only a difference in the sense of the acknowledgement of the existence of another object, different from philosophy, but a difference in the fundamental sense: philosophy inscribes difference itself, as that which differs from objects and makes it possible to say that this is a different object. Philosophy indicates its having something before it, and it deems itself different to what precedes it, although this will be a different exception. In this act, philosophy is a subject that distinguishes an object as its ‘before’. Subsequently, the object might prove to be a subject, and the subject to be an

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objective structure, but still we can say that the question of beginning comprises three elements: an object, a subject and the before (in its structural as well as in its temporal aspects). The problem here, the problem of all beginnings, is of course that the first two moments – the object and the subject of the beginning – show the beginning to be filled with presuppositions. Philosophy sets the before:  it arranges the object as coming before the subject or vice versa, and both of them to be before philosophy. But philosophy is incapable of inscribing this inaugural gesture into its own discourse. Both, Kant and Hegel, develop different answers to this problem, deferring from or inscribing the unbridgeable gap in philosophy itself. This unbridgeable gap is the motor of modern philosophy itself, with the uncertainty of its inaugural gesture it is marked by a certain impossibility. However, in this triad of the subject, the object and the before, the third component, the before, opens up a different angle from the other two, as it differs structurally from the other two components. The essential moment of difference is that we can understand the before as the interruption between the object and the subject: the object comes before the subject or the subject comes before the object, and both are ‘before’ philosophy. The ‘before’ establishes a relation, and therefore it differs from the components of the object and the subject. The third component, the question of the ‘before’ belongs exclusively to philosophy alone. In the indication of a ‘before’, it is philosophy that brings itself into relation with the world of subjects and objects by making the incision of a before in the structural and the temporal sense. With the incision of a ‘before’, philosophy adds itself, it adds itself as this incision. So where does this ‘before’ properly belong, if it belongs properly to philosophy but comes before it? Philosophy creates a before, and we do not know how to handle this philosophically. Philosophy is marked by an incision in itself and it is itself an incision in the world. How can we understand philosophically the cut that philosophy is, in itself and for the other in which it makes its cut? Philosophy as this incision is without a place.

Un pas de plus I suggest to understand as of one of the fundamental claims in Badiou’s philosophy that the beginning begins with the second step. The first step is constitutively missing, as it is in Kant, but this does not mean that we cannot think it. We begin with the second step, as in Hegel, but this does not mean that



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we actually cannot begin, because we would always already have begun. Rather, beginnings are possible. The first step is missing, yet beginnings are possible. This might be reformulated as: there is no beginning, but there are beginnings. Thus, philosophy with Badiou makes ‘un pas de plus’, takes a step further.4 This pas de plus is, and this is decisive, fundamental and secondary; it is a step without origin. This is how we can understand the first part of the incisive cut of Badiou’s philosophy: to think the fundament, the ground of thought without implying any reference to it as an origin of thought. Ein Grund ohne Ursprünglichkeit (A ground without originality). We infer this pas de plus by purloining a passage from the beginning of Being and Event. Here it is a matter of the philosophical balance between the one and the multiple: For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not. But this is unacceptable for thought, because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there could be an access to being outside all presentation. If presentation is not, does it still make sense to designate what presents (itself) as being? On the other hand, if presentation is, then the multiple necessarily is. It follows that being is no longer reciprocal with the one and thus it is no longer necessary to consider as one what presents itself, inasmuch as it is. This conclusion is equally unacceptable to thought because presentation is only this multiple inasmuch as what it presents can be counted as one; and so on.5

The pass to this impasse is given by Badiou in the form of a decision: We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption. This decision can take no other form than the following: the one is not.6

Philosophy is defined on the threshold of this distinction and as the consequence of a necessitated choice. Subsequently, Badiou will unfold the one as the result of an operation, so that the one is not in any ontological sense, but rather results only from a secondary operation that Badiou will name the count. What is presented is multiple and is counted as one. Thus, we begin with the second step:  not because we would have to begin with the one that is counted, but because the decision about the non-being of the one cannot be a first, but only a second step. It is a philosophical decision 4 Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 12. 5 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2010), 23. 6 Ibid., 23.

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built on the necessity fuelled by the impasse of the one and the multiple. It is the reaction to an impasse, but it is not as a reaction to this impasse that it is a second step; it is a second step in the full paradox of a second step as the first step of a beginning. It takes the decision to set another beginning. But still, we see, beginning with the second step, the first step can be thought. Only now, after the second step has been taken, the first can be thought. But why think the first step at all, the fundament, the ground, if this ground does not give the reason for the second step? This is the second part of the incisive cut: we need nevertheless to think the first step. If the one is not, then the multiple is, but the multiple brings us back to the one. In Badiou’s philosophy ontology will be the discourse that grasps being in its inconsistent multiplicity, as that which is excluded by the law of the one. But here, our question is the beginning of philosophy in the second step, and if mathematics as a discourse is the proper tool for grasping being as multiplicities of multiplicities, then philosophy takes the risk to deny the being of the one. Which is to say, it takes the risk that being is ‘neither one . . . nor multiple’7 – for otherwise the multiple would be a multiple of ones – and can only be grasped in its inconsistency. If the one is a count, it has to be a count of the multiple, the multiple that is in itself multiple as it is consistent and inconsistent. That the one is not leads us to the point that it results from the multiple, it has to be the multiple of something and the multiple reveals an inconsistency upon which it relies to be truly multiple. This is why the one as a count cannot be understood, if the inscription of being is not understood. Thus we get from a philosophical decision to the law of the count and only then can being be accounted for. The first step, the ground, the fundament, can be thought, but it becomes a ground that is cut off from any direct causality that might install it as the first from which everything else would have to be unfolded: it is the first that comes after the second. And this first needs to be thought, not only because the one is the one of something, but also because otherwise being that is not one would contradict itself. The decision that the one is not demands that something else is. And if something else than the one is, then it is without one. One might say it is multiple, but it is multiple without one. And it is impossible to begin without one. Thus, the philosophical decision that the one is not is a second step, as it does not serve as a fundament upon which a philosophical structure could be built. But it does allow to infer the first step that ontologically precedes it, namely to 7 Ibid., 24.



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claim a possible discourse on being that inconsists in the one. All this would not be possible if the multiple would be set as the first step. The difference is one of the order of steps:  it is the difference between stating ‘the multiple is, therefore the one is not’ and ‘the one is not, and therefore being is neither one nor multiple’. What is being radically erased is any notion of the fruitful ground of being. For Badiou, being does not necessitate existence. This is the first moment of the incision. But to think existence as inherently multiple makes it necessary to think its being. This is the second moment of the incision. Thus, we have to begin with the second step – existence – in order to think the first step – being – properly. The pas de plus is to think a being that is not an origin, a being without origin. This is an incision, because it separates being from itself, it separates being from its existence. Being is not-one. We cannot start from being, because it is not-one. At this point, we might return to our structure of the ‘before’. We gain two different ‘befores’ in Badiou’s philosophy from this pas de plus. Before Badiou’s philosophy, being was one, even if it were multiple, insofar as it ever was the – negative or positive – ground of something. But the ‘before’ is also to be understood in the structural sense: before philosophy there is being that is notone, that cannot serve as an origin:  this impotent ground now comes before philosophy, philosophy follows upon this impotency of being. This ‘before’ therefore cannot come ‘before’ philosophy because it does not exist. What exists are the differences of existence and they are the effect of being’s not-being-one. What is before philosophy is not the not-one of being, but the effects of its being not-one:  the differences of existence. This is what we said before:  we have to think being, because it enables differences to exist. But if being cannot come first, that what really is the ‘before’ of philosophy are the effects of the not-beingone of being. This is a very radical moment to say:  yes, we are able to think being, but being as such does not ground anything. In the contemporary discourse the postmodernist might come along and say: ‘Of course, there is no ground of our existence or our actions. Maybe we can define rules and reasons, but the ground of it all, this does not exist, and it would be a metaphysical gesture to claim this.’ Against this, Badiou’s claim is:  we can think being, but we will think it differently. It will not be the one being that in any way imperatively commands our existences. It is rather a being that founds nothing. As such a being it does not necessarily bring about anything, it is a being without being the being-ofsomething. And as such a being it is not-one, because it is always the being-one of being that turns it into a foundational ground. Whenever you start with a

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ground, it is already one. Whenever you start with a ground it is already one that serves as a foundation for something else. But if you reject all thinking of the ground at all, you presuppose the most absolute ground, the darkest One, because you will not be able to account for differences. If you claim the absence of the ground, all differences are in the end the same and thus there are no differences at all. In the night of the abyss all cows are black. Because without thinking being, you cannot even think that which differs from existence. You cannot even think an extant difference at all. That is why we will have to think being, as enabling differences, but without being the one being that is the point of origin. What comes before philosophy is, then, fundamentally not-one in the form of extant differences. For this claim to be made, we need the difference between being and phenomena, for otherwise in the world of phenomena no real difference could be thought of. But being is not-one and the differences in the world are not grounded in being. Un pas de plus is the step that philosophy takes, it starts with the second step, it starts with what has begun, but it is philosophy that decides that being is and that enables differences to be different. We can also say: the fundamental decision that philosophy makes is one in favour of the existence of the multiple, in favour of differences. Let us again change the terminology. In the first step, we said that the question of beginning comprises three moments:  the object, the subject, and the indication of the ‘before’; the structural and temporal implication of the exceptional relation of philosophy. And now, in the second step, we say that philosophy begins with the second step, and thinks a being that is not the one ground of existence. But because existence is full of differences, we still need to think being. What we get is a ‘before’ that is not one, but multiple, as a temporal and structural before; but also we get a structural and non-temporal before of the inconsistent multiplicity. What we called ‘object’ in the first step was only understood as an indicator of the material of philosophy. What we called ‘subject’ was understood as an indicator of the difference in the material. And what we called the ‘before’ was understood as the original secondary gesture of philosophy, namely to add itself. So we have object, subject and the plus-one of philosophy. In Badiou, the secondary ‘plus-one’ comes first and we have a different before:  the before of the multiple, as effects of being’s not being one. We can now translate the first step of object, subject and the ‘gesture of the before’ into the second step, the Badiouan triad: being, subjects and truths. Subjects are the multiple effects of being’s not being one. And truths? Truths, as the description



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of the taking place of the conditions, and thus truths as the truths of the multiple ‘before’, need the incision of the act of philosophy as the plus-one, the act of the pas de plus. Philosophy thus begins with a decision for philosophy, a decision that precedes any relation of object and subject. The secondary ‘plus one’ of philosophy is the necessary second step to take first. It is a logical part of every thought, as a revolt against the given. Being is before only after philosophy indicates truths and their subjects – as its non-temporal and temporal effects.

Truth To explain this in a little more detail, a fundamental structure of Badiou’s philosophy will have to be outlined, namely philosophy’s twofold relation to truth. If philosophy takes a step further, we can understand this in the sense that philosophy always follows the event. Something happens in the world and the philosopher comes later, in the evening, after everything is said and done, and then explains the truth of what has happened. This is the first understanding of un pas de plus. Obviously, we stumble upon all the above-mentioned problems. Notwithstanding, such is the structure of philosophy in Badiou:  philosophy follows events. For Badiou, events take place in the world, and they do so in four possible spheres, namely in the spheres of love, art, science or politics. It is the philosopher who is able to discern the truth in these events and it is the philosopher who is able to balance the different truths of different events in one system of philosophy. So, here, philosophy comes after the event and philosophy begins as the second step. But the question is precisely how the philosopher takes this second step. What does it mean to follow after the event? What does the philosopher do, when looking upon the event before her or him? The philosopher works by acknowledging that there is something new, that there is something different in this love, in this political event, in this scientific invention or in this work of art. The philosopher’s work consists chiefly in taking up the declaration of the novelty and formalizing the truth of what is happening as the minimal structural difference. The minimal structural difference is what distinguishes the event from anything that is reducible to its circumstances. It is the very small ‘nothing’ that cannot be reduced to its circumstances; it is the ‘nothing’ that results from the subtraction of all objective circumstances, it is what cannot objectively be stated. The philosopher formalizes a certain objective nothingness of the event, which is at the same time the incision of the new. So in the midst of everything

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that is happening, the philosopher reduces the event to the structure of its irreducibility, a structure that is in itself void. Subtracting all objective moments, the philosopher formalizes the subjective structure of the eventual process. It is important to see that this is what the philosopher does when looking at the event before him or her:  the philosopher subtracts all objectivity and marks the difference of the subject. There is, then, no object to philosophy, nothing to make sense of, there is only what differs from the objective. One could call this the inobjective. The philosopher marks the cut of inobjective, distinguishing the subject from the object. Therefore, the first important moment of the pas de plus is that the philosopher inverts the process: philosophy follows after the event, takes it as its condition and declares its truth to be what it is not, namely this minimal cut of the inobjective. This inversion is the first part of the philosophical act, the first part of what it does mean to follow the event. The second part arises once we take another look at the philosophical operation as such. Philosophy does not only follow the one event, but instead several events. Thus it declares not only one truth of one event, but it rather declares that there exist multiple truths of multiple events. Philosophy operates in relation to different truth processes. The philosopher declares that there are multiple truths:  and this can be done because philosophy asserts at the same time that there is Truth with a capital T.8 So, philosophy makes a twofold declaration: that there are multiple truths and that there is the category of Truth, in the singular, with a capital T. Of course, if the one-Truth-with-the-capital-T would be the meta-truth, the one truth of all other truths, the multiplicity of truths in the plural would vanish. They would all be nothing than forms of the one-truth. Truth with a capital T is not a meta-truth, but rather is the construction of a place. So, whereas we noted above that philosophy as the pas de plus is without a place, we see now that it creates a place of its own. Philosophy creates an excessive place. Badiou describes this operation, the construction of a place called Truthwith-a-capital-T, as an operation that consists of two moments. On the one hand, philosophy imitates the procedure of knowledge  – philosophy argues, concludes, concatenates. It imitates the procedure of knowledge, but it does not produce knowledge. Therefore it is a ‘fiction of knowledge’.9 On the other hand, philosophy imitates art, as Badiou explains, by using the power of language as 8 Cf. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 11. 9 Ibid., 12.



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art. It imitates art, but it does not produce art. Therefore it is a ‘fiction of art’.10 So neither moment attempts to seize the truth as if it were an object. But the moments of the operation proceed negatively and thus create a place: The void place of philosophy is the ‘inversion’ or the ‘reverse-side’ of the argumentative chain and the ‘limit-point’ indicated by the image.11 The void as an operative place of philosophy is the result of an imitation of the procedure of knowledge and the procedure of art, but an imitation that uses these procedures only to bring about the effect of a difference:  that which differs from the chain of arguments and that which differs from the image. Philosophy imitates two of its conditions – science and art – in an inverted way, to become receptive for them. Badiou describes this operation as one of a ‘pincer’, one part ‘link[s]‌’ its elements together  – concatenating, via the argumentative chain  – while the other ‘sublimates’ via the density of the image.12 We recognize a qualitative moment in the latter, a quantitative moment in the former. The pincer is one that combines quality and quantity in a spatial figure: a void place, in which we find the spatial as the quantitative and the void as its qualitative determination. The philosophical operation creates an excessive place in which it can receive multiple truths from different events. Here we find a decisive structural moment:  Philosophy embraces different truths and opens up a space in which different truths can co-exist, or rather, in Badiou’s terminology, become ‘compossible’.13 Philosophy creates the one place of Truth in which multiple truths can co-exist, become compossible. It is very important to see that the reason for philosophy’s assertion that there are multiple truths is not a meta-truth, but rather is the operation of philosophy, the creation of its place. The tricky point is, then, the following: on the one hand, the events in the world come before philosophy comes along. But then philosophy does not only declare the truth of the one event to be that what it is not; it also declares this one truth to be one out of several. From the beginning on, philosophy does not only follow one truth. Philosophy’s operation, the pincer, is a negative and undetermined operation. And it is an operation that collects the inversions or flipsides of its own method: the method is linking and concatenating, the method is also to use metaphors, but what is collected in the void place of philosophy is the flipside of the concatenation as well as that which is limited by the image. Philosophy 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 12. 12 Badiou, Conditions, 13. 13 See Badiou, Manifesto, 37.

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inverts the singular truth, and it collects its own inversions. As an operation, it is repeatable. In its fundamental arrangement, philosophy is not determined to accept only one truth. It is an operation of seizing truths as moments of the inobjective, and as such there is no prescription about the number of truths. Thus there are can be multiple truths, but there also have to be multiple truths. The reason for this is, that already in the one event before philosophy, philosophy denotes its not-being-one. Philosophy declares the truth of the event to be that it is not-one, because the truth is what it is not. One event is inherently multiple. The place of philosophy allows for a multiplicity of truths. There have to be multiple truths, because the one truth does not exist. All that exists are differences. I maintained that philosophy imitates science and art in its operation. Let us add that philosophy ‘resembles love’14 in the intensity with which it embraces each singular truth, and that it resembles politics in the structure of the compossibility of different truths. The philosophical operation is an inverted mimesis of its own conditions, as it combines the imitation of the procedures of science and art, and as it resembles the condition of love in its intensity and the condition of politics in its combination of different singularities. To summarize this last point: Philosophy takes up the event by inverting it, proving it to be multiple. And philosophy constructs a place in which it collects events as the result of the inversion of its own method. Now, it is by this operation, as Badiou argues, that philosophy seizes truths as well as those truths seize us.15 The excessive place of philosophy is an act, an act of incision, by the means of which multiple truths are not only collected, but also collected as inverted. So if the multiple difference of existence comes before the not-being-one of being, it is philosophy as the place and act of Truth with a capital-T that arranges this ‘before’. It is philosophy that initiates the difference, that places the incision, that makes the cut and that is the cut as an act and as an excessive place. So, again, is there nothing that comes before philosophy, because philosophy arranges its own before? While it is true that philosophy arranges its own before, this does not mean that therefore the before is lost in its reality. This is the result of the twofold operation of a philosophy that only collects multiple truths as the inversion of the philosophical method and as the inversion of what exists as given. Due to this, philosophy is the one operation that arranges the before – but it nevertheless does not swallow the ‘before’ to be only a ‘before’ set by 14 Badiou, Conditions, 13. 15 Ibid.



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philosophy. There is a real before, one that does not come before philosophy, but begins in philosophy. The real of philosophy are the multiple conditions that come before philosophy, but only start in philosophy. Does then everything begin with philosophy? No, it does not, because there is always something that comes before philosophy.

Desire That what comes before philosophy now needs to be understood as neither being, nor the subject, nor the truth, if it is true that philosophy is to be understood in a relationship with these three. What comes before philosophy then is the difficult notion of desire. Before there is philosophy, there needs to be a desire for philosophy. How then can we understand, what this desire for philosophy is, if we cannot name it properly, at least not philosophically? Badiou has described the desire for philosophy as a fourfold structure. It contains moments of revolt, logics, universality and risk. In his derivation of this fourfold structure in the first chapter of Métaphysique du Bonheur réel, Badiou extrapolates this structure from two quotations of two poets, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. The famous phrase by Rimbaud called upon is that of ‘les révoltes logiques’, logical revolts, and the quote by Mallarmé, is that ‘All thought begets a throw of the dice’.16 We have two quotes from poets, and we get the notion of revolt – every thought intends to revolt against the given thought. We also get the notion that this revolt is logical, of logic within it, and then we get the notion of universality as the desire to realize the universal, together with the notion of risk, of the wager, because this desire is not grounded in any necessity, but rather always takes on a risk of failure. It is clear that in this description, the desire for philosophy is not simply what comes before philosophy, but is also what comes along with philosophy. It is both: it is the desire for philosophy to be the risk of the logical revolt that realizes the universal, and as such a desire it continues to be the desire upon which philosophy thrives. Philosophy, being nothing in itself, being just a place that is marked by an operation of negativity and by a redoubled inversion, needs the desire to continue, as it would otherwise fall apart. But in its excessive existence, philosophy is the split of the existing being. Thus, the desire is also the desire 16 See Alain Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Desire’. In Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London/New York: Continuum, 2004), 39–57: 39.

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for this split: And it is again both; it is the desire to risk the split of being, and as such a desire it is the existing split of being. Is this to say that there is strictly nothing before philosophy, that the real of philosophy begins in philosophy, and that the desire for this philosophy is the inversion of philosophy, is itself the motor and the split of philosophy? We find the same structural moment as it occurred in the relation between the real before philosophy that only begins within philosophy. The desire for philosophy, if it exists before philosophy, is the desire for a place without a place. It is not the desire that desires one of the existing places, but a desire for a place without a place. The desire for philosophy does not exist before philosophy; it can only be understood as the inexistence of a possible difference. Therefore, it does not exist in the sense that somebody could utter it and would be able to say: I desire a place of philosophy, a place that would have the following demarcations. In its purity it is already there, always, without being there. Let us go back to the first structural moment, namely the poetic formulas. At the beginning of the text on ‘Philosophy and Desire’, Badiou clearly states: ‘This philosophical investigation begins under the banner of poetry; thus recalling the ancient tie between poetry and philosophy.’17 And then he invokes the two quotes by Rimbaud and Mallarmé to find the fourfold structure of desire in these quotes. The quotations are more than some simple illustration: one thing that comes before philosophy is, for example, poetry with which philosophy breaks. Badiou writes:  ‘These two poetic formulas capture the desire of philosophy.’18 Capture – what does capture mean here? It says the following: Thought is there. In every thought there is the possibility of another thought, and therewith the desire for a new thought. But as this revolt is not yet fulfilled, it bears the risk of failure. We have a paradoxical situation before us: is there something else or is there not?

Philosophy In the beginning we referred to Kant and Hegel and to the problem of the existence of philosophy in their construction of the ‘before’. If the ‘before’ thought is unthinkable in Kant, it gets lost, if the ‘before’ thought is the kernel of thought in Hegel, it gets lost as well. That the status of philosophy is problematic 17 Badiou, ‘Philosophy and Desire’, 39. 18 Ibid.



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is, as we can see now, related to the question of the being one of the ‘before’. And here is the problem: on the one hand, the status of philosophy is blurred because its before is rendered as unthinkable or to be the kernel of thought, but on the other hand, philosophy’s status is excessive precisely because there is a ‘before’. So here, in German Idealism, we find the paradoxical situation or the moment in which it is undecidable as to whether philosophy exists or does not. But we see that the manifest moment of these philosophies is to conceal or to catch the inherent problem of philosophy, namely that it is unable to close its discourse. German Idealism, Kant and Hegel, then do apply a strategy of dissimulation. Although there is the incision of philosophy and its before, it is then again blurred, because it is declared to be unthinkable or to be the point of thought. What is being dissimulated then is precisely the incision and the desire for it. German Idealism then is a decisive moment in philosophy precisely because nowhere else do the moments of incision/scission and dissimulation overlap so exactly as to become indistinguishable. But, of course, German Idealism, as philosophy, is what we have before us, as a philosophy. It is what we have before us in its twofold existence, as an incision and as a dissimulation. It is there before us as the difference that philosophy makes and the dissimulation of this incision. That it is, that it exists, is rendered very clearly by Hegel at the beginning of the Phenomenology when he insists on the impossibility of summarizing the content of a philosophical work in advance. For whatever might appropriately be said about philosophy in a preface – say a historical statement of the main drift and the point of view, the general content and results, a string of random assertions and assurances about truth – none of this can be accepted as the way in which to expound philosophical truth.19

This cannot be done, because precisely philosophy needs its time and space to unfold and is fundamentally irreducible to a result. It is the movement of the speculative sentence in which philosophy unfolds itself, and which cannot be reduced to the indication of a content. Philosophy needs the length of the text or speech in which it actually exists. But although Hegel rejects the idea of summarizing the unfolding of philosophical ideas, this does not imply that philosophy would simply exist by itself, in a kind of arbitrary existence, relying only on itself. Philosophy is a form of the spirit itself, and as such necessary, but it is also not self-evident and rather needs the labor of the concept. The speculative

19 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 1.

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movement of the sentence does create an interruption, and in the practical reality the appearance of contradiction does not guarantee its overcoming. In the early text on the Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Hegel concludes:  ‘When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.’20 There is a desire (the word Hegel uses is ‘Bedürfnis’21) for philosophy, a desire for philosophy to exist and a desire to have philosophy as an incision in the given world. This becomes clear when Hegel begins to unfold the aims of the Phenomenology in the next step of his introduction, after he has declared that the objective orientation of the philosophical text to follow cannot be given. And isn’t Kant’s primary claim that the world needs philosophy, that there is a need for the philosophical incision, because otherwise human reason will get tangled up in the dialectical semblance of reason? And clearly enough this task cannot be resolved once and for all. Toward the end of the first Critique, Kant discusses ‘transcendental hypotheses’ that might serve as weapons in the fight against the delusions of reason, and he writes: Hypotheses are therefore allowed in the field of pure reason only as weapons of war, not for grounding a right but only for defending it. However, we must always seek the enemy here in ourselves. For speculative reason in its transcendental use is dialectical in itself. The objections that are to be feared lie in ourselves. We must search them out like old but unexpired claims, in order to ground perpetual peace on their annihilation. External quiet is only illusory. The seed of the attacks, which lies in the nature of human reason, must be extirpated; but how can we extirpate it if we do not give it freedom, indeed even nourishment, to send out shoots, so that we can discover it and afterwards eradicate it with its root?22

But as reason is itself dialectical, this annihilation will never be complete, and the drastic tone of this passage reads as a symptom of the impossibility to purify the structure of reason. In Hegel as in Kant, philosophy cannot be guaranteed, but it is needed. German Idealism utters the need for philosophy as an incision into the world. It utters the need to add itself as a necessary structure to the world, and thus to 20 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), 91. 21 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie. In Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 2, Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 9–138: 22. 22 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 663 (A 777).



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change the world. In the cases of Kant and Hegel, there are two different moments in which this need is placed. On the one hand, for Kant, it is the necessity of a critique of reason, which is actually – I take up a formulation by Rado Riha – a self-critique. That is the inner necessity for philosophy:  there is reason, but without its critique, possible progress cannot be realized. The critique of reason has to be a self-critique. On the other hand, for Hegel, reason, if we use the Kantian terminology, has to realize its own existence in time. It has to become aware of the difficult structure of its own unfolding in time. Reason thus is not only reason as a self-reflective capacity, but a self-reflective capacity that, due to its development, has to become aware of its own contradiction. It is thus a contradiction that unfolds in time: it is a history of its own. What we have is thus the transcendental I – the impossible object of reason’s self-critique  – and the Logic, as an attempt to grasp the impossible point of the Phenomenology of Spirit, logically to grasp the point of the becoming of the Logic. The transcendental I  in its most basic structure is constitutively withdrawn from Kant’s philosophy and the becoming of spirit is incapable of becoming anything else in the Phenomenology than precisely its own becoming. It is always becoming something else, and therefore it cannot radically differ, it cannot unfold a real difference. Thus, we have two different strategies of dissimulation. But they dissimulate the incision that philosophy is, by turning it into the unthinkable or into the core of thought itself. It becomes thus undecidable as to whether philosophy exists.

Ideology Do we not live in a similar situation today? It is unclear whether something else than what exists can exist. It is unclear whether philosophy, which is the place in which the difference exists, itself exists. What we do have today for sure is the dissimulation of thought: that which exists tries to cover up the idea that it could be different. The desire that exists pretends to be a desire only for something else that already exists. That everything that exists could also be different, that is what is being covered up. Therefore, we can say that the strategy of what exists is to dissimulate that it could be different. This strategy is in itself a sort of philosophy that wants to be a dissimulation without an incision. This strategy can be called ideology. But what exists, as existing, can also be different, because difference exists as well. Philosophy, the incision of the before, the act that creates a place for

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the plural of different truths, philosophy is the act that enables something else to exist. But philosophy does actually nothing else than to remind the existing of its possible difference: It takes the logic of what exists seriously. This strategy then could be called ideological, because it presents an idea that is the idea of the logic of existence. But German Idealism indicates not only the one moment in philosophy in which the strategy of dissimulation and the strategy of incision become indistinguishable. German Idealism also proves that it is impossible to have a philosophy that is only the philosophy of dissimulation, and not also a manifest incision at the same time. This is why we find the problem and the reality of German Idealism today before us: because we are living in a situation in which thought is said to be the same as the thing and it cannot be different. But by the very act of saying this, the ideological dissimulation already takes the stance of an incision, because it is in itself already the statement from a place that is without a place. The claim that nothing can be different already makes a difference. The strategy of ideology thus fails fundamentally in that it is in itself an incision, that it needs to dissimulate itself. It is therefore wrong. Badiou’s philosophy makes an incision into the overlapping of incision and its dissimulation, it extrapolates and affirms the incision. Thus it relates to German Idealism in an exceptional form of a relation, namely by separating it from itself. Badiou’s philosophy presents a torsion of German Idealism. And if we take German Idealism to be the philosophy of modernity, and if we understand modernity as a non-temporal moment of philosophy as such, then Badiou’s philosophy presents a torsion of philosophy as such. In a very early definition of the concept of a torsion we can read: The ‘process of torsion [is a process] by which force reapplies itself to that from which it conflictually emerges’.23 Badiou’s philosophy is a torsion of philosophy, splitting the temporal from the structural before, but inferring the latter from the former, erasing any temporal relation from it, and thereby insisting on the desire for philosophy as a necessity: for it is a desire that continues to be, and as a desire for the actuality of differences it brings philosophy about, which by its incision indicates the existence of truths, effects of the inconsistency of being, the real before philosophy, an exceptional world.

23 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/New  York:  Continuum, 2009), 11.

6

Marx, an ‘Antiphilosopher’? Or Badiou’s Philosophical Politics of Demarcation Svenja Bromberg

But Marx is so little German! Perhaps he’s not exactly a philosopher, either. Anyway, let’s leave Marx to one side.1 Philosophy is always heir to anti-philosophy.2 Badiou’s relationship to Marx and Marxism has been the object of much debate.3 And while it is my aim to build on and add to this already long list of interventions, I will do so from a probably at least slightly unexpected angle. So far, readers of Marx and Badiou, myself included, have often been concerned with the way Badiou utilizes classical Marxist concepts, as, for example, the materialist dialectic, communism, revolution and emancipation, with the effect of redefining them at a distance from Marx and Marxism. But as this volume is concerned with Badiou’s relationship to German philosophy, understood ‘not as the attribution of an identity [based on national territorial boundaries

1 Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2018), 8. 2 Alain Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, Pli, vol. 11 (2001): 10. 3 Some of the key references are Daniel Bensaïd, ‘Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event’. In Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 94–105; Bruno Bosteels, ‘The Fate of the Generic:  Marx with Badiou’. In (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy, ed. Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 211–26; Antonio Negri, ‘Is It Possible to Be Communist Without Marx?’, Critical Horizons, 12.1 (2010): 5–14; Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event: The Limits of Alain Badiou’s Ontology’, Historical Materialism, 19.2 (2011):  35–59; Alberto Toscano, ‘Marxism Expatriated’. In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 529–48.

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or language], but rather as a broad framework for complex contestations’,4 we are challenged to consider the role that Marx plays within these philosophical contestations that take place in and around Badiou’s oeuvre. For Marxists this premise might seem rather misled as the whole point is that Marx’s project lies precisely in grasping his break with German philosophy and not to repatriate him back into it.5 And as we see in the epigraph, Badiou himself would rather avoid an explicit discussion of Marx’s place within (German) philosophy, because he doesn’t quite belong there. But Badiou’s suggestion that Marx ‘is not exactly a philosopher’, his notquite belonging to philosophy, while not a generally surprising claim, takes on a curious resonance when considered in the context of Badiou’s broader philosophical politics of demarcation. With that I  mean his constant effort of establishing his own philosophy against and in contradistinction from other philosophies that are, in his eyes, either not at all or only partially worthy of being considered ‘philosophy’. Besides the philosophers, there are in Badiou’s universe of proper names the sophists and antiphilosophers. Against this background, Badiou’s comment on Marx, questioning his status as philosopher, is not just a commonplace or throwaway comment but it raises the serious question whether Marx does indeed fit one of the categories that Badiou has prominently used to describe and evaluate the work of other non- or not-quite philosophers. More specifically, this article will investigate whether Marx might fit the category of ‘antiphilosopher’, a label that Badiou has taken from Lacan and prominently extended back to him as well as to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and a longer list of other, yet-to-be-developed and more minor or tenuous candidates.6 Exploring the question whether Marx’s critique and overcoming of philosophy fits within the delineations that define antiphilosophy for Badiou will allow us to revisit the premises of Badiou’s reading of Marx and Marxism in a new light. And it simultaneously gives rise to an investigation of Marx’s own relationship to philosophy that is very much an unfinished project within contemporary continental philosophy and Western Marxism.7

4 Jan Völker in Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 79–80, amended trans. See also my debate with Ishay Landa in Svenja Bromberg, ‘Badiou’s Recommencement of the Young-Hegelian Purification of Politics: A Response to Ishay Landa’, International Critical Thought, 4.3 (2014): 367–83. 5 See, e.g., Karl Korsch, ‘Marxism and Philosophy’. www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxismphilosophy.htm (accessed 15 May 2018). 6 See Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (London:  Verso, 2011), 71, 83; see also Bruno Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 16 (fn14). 7 See, e.g., Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2014).



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Renewing philosophy from the midst of its crises Badiou’s concern with antiphilosophy becomes explicit only in the 1990s, when he dedicates several year-long seminars at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris to four major antiphilosophers:  Nietzsche (1992–3), Wittgenstein (1993–4), Lacan (1994–5) and Saint Paul (1995–6).8 But, we shouldn’t be misled by this somewhat late occurrence of Badiou’s explicit engagement with what he defines as anti- or non-philosophy and its proper names. Because in one way or another all of Badiou’s writings are concerned with the triangular relationship of the failure of philosophy the spread of which he witnesses from the 1980s onwards (after the end of the red years), his own project of renewing philosophical thought in the face of its desertion9 and the importance of philosophy’s ‘other’, its ‘outside’, for such a renewal. Throughout his work Badiou is therefore concerned not just with establishing his own philosophical doctrine, but with simultaneously fathoming, drawing and defending the frontiers to that which potentially endangers as well as enriches (his) philosophy from the two other sides of the triangle – on the one hand, the failed or would-be philosophies in contrast to which he is formulating his own project and, on the other, the problem of how to allow the non-philosophical dimensions of the world, such as politics or art, to affect philosophy without reducing it to these other, non-philosophical logics. The meta-philosophical explications of the struggles on the ‘philosophical front’,10 as Badiou perceives them in proper militant fashion, can sometimes appear overly principled or even simply polemical and therefore lacking in nuance. But it is precisely part of the challenge that these position statements and categorizations of philosophers as rivals or dangerous yet necessary tempters present to us as readers of Badiou, that, looking at the vast range of them together, one philosopher is rarely confined to only one side of the ‘front’. These vacillations in Badiou’s oeuvre concern not just whether he reads someone as an antiphilosopher, sophist or philosopher at a certain moment of his theorizations but it notably also concerns the very distinction between antiphilosopher and sophist, which is not always clearly maintained. That is why it wouldn’t make sense to start with a thorough attempt of defining criteria for antiphilosophy, not just because the criteria themselves appear variable, but

8 Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 13. 9 See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009), xxxviii. 10 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy (London: Verso, 2012), ch. 1.

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because antiphilosophy gains its meaning and stakes only once the frontiers on which philosophy fights for its survival and renewal have been clearly delimited.

Crisis of sophistic defeatism Badiou arrives at his project of beginning philosophy anew via a diagnosis of a deep crisis that the main philosophical traditions have entered at the end of the twentieth century. By citing some of the most famous French representatives of poststructuralist or postmodern theory, such as Lyotard, Deleuze and Derrida, Badiou highlights the different ways in which they have all given up on philosophy. ‘Most of them say in fact that philosophy is impossible, completed, assigned to something other than itself.’11 Badiou sees the proclamation of the end of philosophy due to it having become impossible or completed as a crisis of defeatism, of philosophers giving up on their own discipline and declaring its ‘end’ as the end of grand narratives, of metaphysics, of truth, of the subject.12 In other words, the end of philosophy in its ancient and modern incarnations.13 Within the most prominent strands of twentieth-century French postmodern, German hermeneutic as well as AngloSaxon analytic philosophy Badiou observes a disorientation that led to the replacement of the philosophical concern for truth with some version of relative truths, meaning, sense, knowledge(s) and language games.14 It is thus not just the philosophers giving up on the potentiality of philosophy, but philosophy itself losing its ability to formulate universal truth claims about the world as it is and, equally important, to contribute to its transcendence.15 All it can do is historicize its own more or less glorious metaphysical past.16 We find ourselves, writes Badiou in a paper from 1999, so right at the turn of the century, ‘in a difficult and dark passage in which the destiny and even the very existence of philosophy is at stake’.17 The category under which Badiou sums up this exhausted and misled philosophy that has given up on itself is ‘generalized modern sophistry’. The modern sophists have two modes of denying philosophy’s quest for truth,

11 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 27. 12 Cadava, Who Comes after the Subject? 13 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 42. 14 See Norman Madarasz in Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 7. 15 See Jelica Šumič, ‘Another World Is Possible, or the Task of Philosophy in Worldless Times’. In Beyond potentialities? ed. Mark Potocnik, Frank Ruda and Jan Völker (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011), 55–75. 16 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 113. 17 Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought (London: Continuum, 2005), 40.



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either by replacing Truth with ‘effects of discourse’ and the rules of language or by merely pointing to that which cannot be said, which Badiou calls ‘pure showing’.18 They are historicist through and through in the bad sense in that they let themselves be taken hostage by the multiplicity of appearances and history’s genealogical judgment of what is, or respectively by what cannot be said/known. Only enunciations and interpretations of the given on one side, mysticism on the other. The modern crisis of philosophy is, however, not wholly of its own making, because the world as it is currently configured also bears responsibility in the sense that it ‘exerts an intense pressure upon [ . . . ] philosophy’.19 This is a world that, at the turn of the century, is ordered by fluxes of money and circulation, a world of ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’.20 It is a world of multiplicities of sense and meaning that are produced, exchanged and managed under the auspices of capital and the state. What appears as politics in this world is nothing more than ‘Realpolitik’, the political administering of supposed necessities without alternative that is carried out through supposed democratic electoral rituals while it is really ruled by private interests negotiated in the market place. What appears as the natural and most advanced societal order is, for Badiou, a world of horror and emptiness. It is empty or ‘barren’ because of the absence of ‘truth’, that is, the lack of events that could provoke the formation of subjects and the seizing of truths qua thought by philosophy.21 All such a world does is administer the exploitation, domination and economic and spiritual immiseration of the people that live within it. It is a world in which being itself is lacking or remains absent, a nihilistic world.22 Badiou’s diagnosis of the state of the world at the turn of the century has implications not just for the state of philosophy within this world, that is, that it is under pressure to conform to the reigning nihilism and denial of truth, but also for its very purpose, definition and survival. Philosophy, according to Badiou, only deserves its name if it stands in conflict to this nihilistic world, if it aims at its interruption. That means, philosophy cannot be of this world, it has to be in and against it. Revolt is one of philosophy’s key dimensions and its unconditional requirement. And it is precisely the problem of the main strands of twentieth-century philosophy – postmodern, hermeneutic and analytic – that 18 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 116; Alain Badiou, Conditions (London: Continuum, 2008), 6. 19 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 40. 20 Ibid., 48; Badiou, Conditions, 166. 21 Badiou, Conditions, 149; see also Sumic, ‘Another World Is Possible’, 62. 22 Badiou calls this state of being ‘désêtre’ or lack of being; see Badiou, Conditions, 159.

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by giving up on ‘the care of truths’23 in the name of a multiplicity of meaning and sense, they reflect or mirror the state of the world too much and thereby forfeit their ability to confront and interrupt it.24 If revolt is one key condition for philosophy’s return in and against the nihilistic world, which Badiou develops clearly starting with what many of his readers consider as his main philosophical contribution, Being and Event (1988), it is, however, by far not the only one. For philosophy to return to ‘the care of truths’ it also has to (2)  involve ‘universality’ (3)  be grounded in ‘logic’ and (4)  take ‘risks’.25 Involving universality means philosophy as thought must be framed as addressing being in its entirety, that is, its truth is a truth for all thinking and everyone who thinks, all of humanity. That also means that philosophy can never be limited to its own time or be realized in any one time. Philosophy’s Truth is transversal and transhistorical in that it captures something eternal with which it turns against its own time and history.26 To be grounded in logic is first of all to make recourse to reason, to claim a rationality that is specific to philosophy and with which, once again, philosophy is able to confront an illogical and irrational world. Finally, philosophy takes risks in that it engages in speculation and makes decisions in situations that are undecidable because they don’t adhere to the logic of the status quo. Mallarmé’s roll of the dice is the archetypal risk-taking image that Badiou borrows from poetry.

Crisis of relocalization into non-philosophy At this point let’s conclude that the first manifestation of the crisis of philosophy is that having entered the stage of ‘generalized sophistry’, it merely mirrors a nihilistic world and thereby stops exercising its own singular power, which Badiou ties to the four conditions of true philosophy, revolt, universality, logic and risk-taking. In order to complete this picture, we need to move on to the second frontier on which philosophy struggles for its survival. The struggle here manifests as philosophy assigning its task of producing universal truths to ‘something other than itself ’. This something other than itself has been as varied as language (or linguistics), poetry (a development Badiou already traces back to Heidegger27), art more generally, journalism, psychoanalysis, science, ethics and 23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2010), 4. 24 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 39, 49–50. 25 Ibid., 39–40. 26 Badiou, Conditions, 21. 27 Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge:  Polity, 2007), 23–24; also Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 49–50.



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politics. Closely following Badiou’s terminology, we can define this tendency as philosophy’s crisis of relocalization.28 Now, for anyone who got to know Badiou’s philosophy via his more explicitly political writings, for example, on the idea of communism, or his writings on theatre and poetry (we just mentioned his borrowing from Mallarmé), this concern might come as a surprise as he clearly seeks the encounters with those non-philosophical practices. In his early work Theory of the Subject, first published in 1982, Badiou goes so far as to argue that ‘the modern philosopher is [ . . . ] a systematic proletarian’,29 meant here in a moral and spiritual sense rather than a strictly sociological sense. By overlaying the philosopher with a subjective political figure loosely adapted from a Marxist canon, he emphasizes his desire to reconfigure the tension between philosophical, ambitious thoughts and political revolutionary acts and between the written and the spoken word in the practice of a philosophy that also wants to be politically engaged.30 Badiou is already concerned at this point with defining his own philosophy based on a specific relationship between thinking and being-in-itself, a relation that he defines against other idealist and materialist philosophies as torsion and that lies at the basis of the quest for ‘truth’.31 With this definition he simultaneously rejects reducing politics to being or practice without thought as well as any dreams of integral totalization, whether anchored in the past or in the future. But due to his focus on the emergence of subjects as truth that disrupt a given situation, whether political, psychological or philosophical, he is unable at this point to separate philosophical truth from any other truths production as he does not account for the specificity of the role and operational logic of philosophy vis-à-vis these other procedures. Badiou’s later identification of the danger of more or less accidentally giving up philosophy by displacing it into those non-philosophical practices instead of finding a way of rendering them accessible to philosophical thought needs to therefore also be read as a moment of self-criticism, of Badiou taking sides against his earlier self and that muddled attempt of renewing philosophy.32 He himself momentarily succumbed to the temptation of suturing philosophy to a non-philosophical logic,33 thereby running the risk of giving up philosophy’s task of ‘thinking truth’ by replacing the ‘thinking’ part with a celebration of any 28 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 113. 29 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xxxviii. 30 Ibid., xxxviii–xlii. 31 Ibid., 117. 32 See Badiou, Being and Event, 4–5. 33 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 61.

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subject-effects. It is from Being and Event onwards that Badiou perceives and works to avoid this danger: first of all, by introducing one of his most important conceptual distinctions, namely between philosophy and its conditions. The first, well known step, of which we need to remind ourselves before we can look at the conditions in more detail, is Badiou’s three-part definition of philosophy with reference to Descartes: philosophy is a knot of being, Truth and subject.34 The foundation for this nodal relation is established via the axiomatic thesis mathematics = ontology (or being-qua-being), whereas ontology is further defined, with the mathematical tool of Cantorian set theory, as ‘the theory of inconsistent multiplicities’.35 Mathematics as the science of being has thereby entered philosophy and serves as the ground for its ‘rationality’ or ‘logic’  – a logic of multiplicity rather than of the One to escape any illusion of wholeness or totality of that which ‘is’. This however, does not mean that philosophy has become a foundational or self-authorizing discourse that can develop its own Truth based on thinking ontology.36 In order to tie the first knot between being and Truth we need to make a detour through philosophy’s outside. It is at this moment that the conditions become crucial. Badiou has established in the first part of Being and Event that every ontological situation, that is, a moment where the pure multiple of being is structured into a consistent one, ‘inconsists’. The important dimension of the argument is that (ontological) situations always contain the possibility of being disrupted, of being opened up by an event to the infinity of multiplicity or simply the new, within their ontological constitution.37 Second, Badiou, citing Plato, also argues that in philosophy we ‘do not take as our point of departure words, but things’.38 This statement combines a persisting materialist desire to reconfigure the relation between thinking and being as torsion, to give a place to the non-philosophical in philosophy39 and the need to reject discursivity as the ground for philosophical thought. Both arguments combined result in the key assertion of Badiou’s philosophy that the evental procedure, that is, the intervention of ‘that which is not beingqua-being’40 into the situation, making a ‘hole’ that is not discernible from the 34 Ibid., 32 (the author amended ‘truth’ to ‘Truth’ with capital T to differentiate from truths that are produced by events). 35 Badiou, Being and Event, 13, 28. 36 Ibid., 4; Justin Clemens, ‘Conditions’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 69. 37 See François Wahl in Badiou, Conditions, xii–xiii; Badiou, Being and Event, Parts I–III. 38 Plato cited in Badiou, Infinite Thought, 50; see also Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 34; Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), 5. 39 Badiou, Being and Event, 1. 40 Ibid.; see also Badiou, Conditions, xiv.



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situation itself, cannot be initiated by philosophy itself. It instead takes place in what Badiou argues are the four conditions of philosophy today:  science, politics, love and art. It is these non-philosophical conditions that give rise to events and subjects and thus produce ‘truths’. We have thereby arrived at the true challenge for philosophy in Badiou’s understanding:  how is it possible to relate to these evental truths and the emergence of scientific, political, passionate and artistic subjects philosophically, that is, how is it possible to respond to these truths by producing a ‘Truth’ that is strictly immanent to philosophy? Or simply, what does it mean to think these truths? When developing our answer, we have to remember that Badiou carefully rejects labels such as political philosophy or aesthetics that would classically be applied to the strictly philosophical grasping of political or artistic events, because he sees them as ‘academic division[s]‌of philosophy into would-be objective domains’41 that they are not.42 They are not objective because the grasp of these non-philosophical domains cannot be grounded in a purely philosophical foundation. Or in other words, the philosophical truth about art and politics (and love and science) cannot have a specific or substantive ground in philosophy. The task is to carve out the distinct space of philosophy vis-à-vis nonphilosophy under the condition that events are contingent, rare and not produced by philosophy itself. Of primary concern – and one of the key axis of confrontation with antiphilosophy as we will come to see – is to simultaneously avoid and alleviate any false relocalizations of philosophy into this outside, namely the disastrous suturing43 of philosophy to one specific condition that would immediately contradict the multiplicity of truths by imposing the Truth and thereby give up on what Badiou calls philosophy’s ‘critical virtue’.44 Philosophy is treading on narrow ground: it needs to forcefully assert its specificity in the production of Truth against sophistry (as discussed in the previous section) but resist any extreme temptations to prove the sophist wrong, once and for all. Because once philosophy exists under the condition of its outside and arrives at Truth under the condition of evental truths, ‘philosophy must forever endure the sophist’s company and sarcasm’,45 because it is this company that will save it from itself and its own dreams of totalization and substantial Truth. 41 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (London: Verso, 2011), xxxi. 42 See ibid., ch. 8. 43 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 131; see also Bruno Bosteels, ‘Radical Philosophy’, Filozofski vestnik, 2 (2008): 176. 44 Ibid., 130. 45 Ibid., 133.

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That means, in order for philosophy to embrace its outside – the conditions – in a truly philosophical manner, it does not produce Truth or, in other words, ‘the philosophical category of Truth is by itself void’. The operation of Truth – systematically defined, without causing philosophy to become a system – is the thought of the truths of events as types of being that are however indiscernible and undecidable from within the law of the situation in which they occur. Badiou refers to the act of thinking the truths produced by conditions as ‘seizing’ truths. The philosophical act of capturing evental truths and stating ‘there are truths’ first of all links the events to being, thinks them as types of being. But it does so in an act of subversion, because it subtracts these truths from the situations in which they are not presented as part of the ontological count, in which they are thus indiscernible and undecidable. Seizing then can never be representing or approximating, but it implies affirming a speculative fiction against the nonexistence or active denial of this fiction from within the situation (or ‘the world’) in which philosophy argues this fiction has occurred.46 Badiou uses the notion of the matheme, borrowed from Lacan, to systematize the philosophical operation of seizing Truth. Mathemes, as Samo Tomsîc summarizes insightfully, ‘formalise something that does not exist but nevertheless has material consequences’.47 We see here the category of revolt and risk-taking as essential conditions of philosophy returning:  a revolt against the world, and  – in the register of ontology – against the situation has to be a risky and militant endeavour. But philosophy does not only seize singular and localized truths. Having defined it as a distinct space that operates according to its own logic means that it is the space in which all truths produced by the different conditions within a certain moment in time are welcomed and find shelter, to use Badiou’s terminology.48 More precisely, it ‘propose[s]‌a conceptual framework in which the contemporary compossibility of the conditions can be grasped’.49 We can now formulate in strictly philosophical terms what we merely asserted above: by seizing truths from situations qua subtraction, philosophy establishes the compossibility of truths within and against a certain time. Because truths always reopen a seemingly closed, whether that is ontologically consistent or genealogically determined, situation to the eternal and universal multiplicity of being.50 46 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 143. 47 Samo Tomsîc, The Badiou Dictionary, 199; see also Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 81. 48 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 82. 49 Badiou, Being and Event, 4. 50 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 39, 82.



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From antiphilosophy in general to the case of Marx We have carefully established the relationship between Badiou’s renewal of philosophy, which we read through its double crisis of generalized sophistry and defeatism, on the one hand, and the crisis of delocalization of philosophy into non-philosophical discourses, on the other. On this ground we are now able to reach a more solid definition of the notion of antiphilosophy51 that will then allow us, in a second step, to interrogate whether it would make sense, starting from Badiou’s own reading of Marx and Marxism, to label Marx an antiphilosopher.

Defining antiphilosophy It can appear as if Badiou had not reached a clear distinction between antiphilosophy and sophistry, especially as he also identifies some of the most prominently discussed antiphilosophers, like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as major modern sophists  – drawing a parallel between Plato’s sophistic opponents and his own modern ones.52 I’m however going to contradict this initial impression by arguing that sophistry and antiphilosophy have distinct, yet equally important and ultimately interlinked roles to play as the polemical enemies and tempters of Badiou’s philosophy. And we can understand these roles along the lines of the two frontiers of the crisis of philosophy previously outlined. Modern sophists perform a three-step devaluation of philosophy:  they reduce its logic to the laws of language, a reduction of what is or can be to what is or can be said, whereby logic becomes tied to rhetoric, making language the new sovereign of philosophy;53 they thereby deny philosophy the possibility of making universal truth claims; and they introduce into philosophy the realms beyond language as that which is inaccessible for philosophy, a remainder or simply ‘the real’. Antiphilosophers also try to wrest truth away from philosophy. But instead of denying its possibility tout court and making themselves complicit with the continuation of the world as it is (philosophy’s nihilism), they try to overcome what they identify as philosophy’s limitations or failures by instituting

51 For an extensive study of antiphilosophy, see Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’. 52 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 137. 53 See Bosteels, Radical Antiphilsophy, 162–3.

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a radical act that ultimately destroys the world and philosophy. They achieve this by replacing the production of classical philosophical truths in three ways. First of all – and in this regard they are very close to the sophists if not occupying a sophistic position54  – antiphilosophers reject philosophy’s drive towards systematization and its institutionalized form. This rejection of philosophy proper is inherent in Lacan’s deployment of the notion of ‘antiphilosophy’ which inspired Badiou’s uptake for his own polemical demarcations.55 In ‘Peut-être à Vincennes. . .’ (1974), Lacan suggests that antiphilosophy could serve as the category under which to investigate what the ‘university discourse’ owes to its ‘educational’ assumptions.56 Antiphilosophy would then serve to expose the perversion and ultimate failure of philosophy by being turned into knowledge that can be passed on as a complete Weltanschauung or even as a self-sufficient and coherent theory within an educational, thus ideological apparatus. Antiphilosophy is the rebellion against philosophy as something close to a master discourse – for which Hegel’s system or the French ‘philosophes’ are prominent examples, in addition to some of Lacan’s more immediate contemporary rivals such as Deleuze and Guattari.57 Part of the rebellion is aimed at exposing the truth philosophy claims to think as misleading, harmful or even criminal, whether it is Wittgenstein’s identification of philosophy as nonsensical (unsinnig) nonthought58 or Nietzsche’s descriptions of the philosopher’s loss of their mastery of knowledge and of their value judgements.59 Philosophy is unable to think ‘life’ – its core task according to antiphilosophy. Second, and here antiphilosophy departs notably from sophistry, it wrests truth from classical philosophy by somewhat allowing it back in via a detour through non-philosophy. Based on having delineated in a sophistic fashion what can and what cannot be thought, antiphilosophy goes on to make access to that which is beyond thought and therefore the key to grasping life conditional upon non-philosophy, whether that’s politics (Nietzsche), science (Lacan) or art.60 To make it conditional on these non-philosophical discourses neither 54 See Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 11. 55 Badiou, Being and Event, 2. 56 Jacques Lacan, ‘Peut-être à vincennes’. In Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 2001), 314. http:// espace.freud.pagesperso-orange.fr/topos/psycha/psysem/vincenne.htm (accessed 15 May 2018). 57 See Adrian Johnston, ‘This Philosophy Which Is Not One; Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy’, Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, 3 (2010): 137–58. 58 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, 77. 59 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nachgelassene Fragmente-1885’. In Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe (eKGWB), Gruppe 35 (24). www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,35[24] (accessed 18 May 2018); ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’. In eKGWB, §205. www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB-205 (accessed 18 May 2018); see also Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 1. 60 Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 172.



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means displacing philosophy into them nor making philosophy the foundation from which to interpret non-philosophical events. Instead antiphilosophy requires ‘philosophy’ to imitate the non-philosophical practices by means of a ‘radical act’. Mimicking scientific, political or artistic events via a radical, supraphilosophical act is for the antiphilosopher the only way to overcome the limitations of classical philosophical thought. The reason why Badiou calls the radical act supraphilosophical and distinguishes it clearly from the notion of the event in his own philosophy, is that while the act draws on non-philosophical events, like Nietzsche’s anecdotal reading of the French Revolution, it remains firmly anchored within philosophy; a philosophy that reimagines itself as practice that is more radical than what, in the antiphilosophers’ eyes, a political, artistic, scientific or passionate event could ever achieve. In order to mark clearly which condition a certain antiphilosophy wants to replace with its own act, Badiou places the prefix ‘archi’ in front of the four conditions.61 It further allows knowledge (savoir) of that which cannot be known (connaître) as long as philosophy’s logic is predicated on the existence of that which cannot be known, that is, grounds itself in a logic that accounts for the limits of pure thought. Antiphilosophy positions itself not radically outside philosophy, but in what Bosteels insightfully calls ‘the strange topological position of an . . . “internal exteriority” ’.62 Third and last, the antiphilosopher himself (even the antiphilosophers are all men!) enters the stage. Part of the specificity of the radical act that for Badiou makes it distinct from the operation of the philosophical seizing of the event is the role that the antiphilosopher plays. Because the radical act sits in an indistinguishable space between reality and its philosophical announcement or declaration, on the basis that there is no distinction between the philosophical logic and the logic of the event, it is antiphilosophers themselves who become the proper name of the act. The antiphilosopher brings the act into existence by declaring its rupture as well as the new world it has created. It is not a seizing of that which will have taken place (in the temporality of the future anterior), but it is an act of creation by pure power of will and thought. That means, the antiphilosopher, in the last instance, sacrifices himself for this creation.63 If we now summarize the role of antiphilosophy for a renewed philosophy, it is to remind philosophy of its new duties, to keep it ‘on guard’.64 The sophistic 61 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 79–80. 62 Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 158. 63 Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 8–10. 64 Ibid., 9–10.

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dimension, that denies philosophical truth as well as systematization, helps to keep its category of Truth minimal, or more precisely ‘empty’, and to grant a place to the singular and to the contingent.65 The exclusively antiphilosophical dimension is a reminder of a) philosophy’s duty to disrupt not just rival philosophies but the world as a whole and b) that this disruption will depend on philosophy’s incorporation of philosophy’s outside and of what takes place beyond philosophy’s specific horizon. When Badiou argues infamously that ‘philosophy is always an heir to antiphilosophy’,66 this is for him not just an intraphilosophical claim about what a renewed philosophy needs to learn by discovering antiphilosophy ‘in its truth’ and finding the relevant provocations and tasks. It is also a proposition about the ethics of philosophy as practice: while the philosopher needs to ultimately lose the antiphilosopher in philosophical terms, the antiphilosopher is forever the philosopher’s double, whose polemical challenges the latter can never escape once and for all, if they want their philosophy to live on.67 Because antiphilosophy puts philosophy, as Bosteels formulates, ‘to the test of its own contemporaneity’68 – a contemporaneity that is grounded in a constructed understanding of the contemporaneous situation the philosophers find themselves in, allowing them to define the requirements for continuing the revolt against it.

Marx, an antiphilosopher? We are finally in a position to return to the key question of this chapter, namely whether and to which extent Marx might ‘fit the bill’ of the antiphilosopher. There is an intuitive answer to this question which jumps out at us if we just open the very first pages of Being and Event. Summarizing the ‘global state of philosophy’ Badiou mentions Marx twice:  once, alongside Lenin, Freud and Lacan as those who have developed interpretations for the origin of a postCartesian doctrine of the subject in non-philosophical practices. And second, again alongside Lacan (as well as Heidegger and analytic philosophy), Marx is listed as one of the prophets of the end of an entire philosophical epoch. As he writes, ‘Marx announces the end of philosophy and its realization in practice. Lacan speaks of “antiphilosophy”, and relegates speculative totalization to the imaginary’.69 65 Badiou, Conditions, 19, 21. 66 Badiou, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’, 10. 67 Badiou, Conditions, 25; Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 144. 68 Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 27. 69 Badiou, Being and Event, 2.



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In his recent dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Badiou develops this latter point slightly further, arguing that Marx (and Freud) have ‘a definite praxis’ as the explicit goal of their thought. That means in turn that they don’t aim at creating a philosophical oeuvre, instead they use philosophical argumentation for a nonphilosophical purpose.70 The key reference point from Marx’s writings, which otherwise contain plenty of variations on his critique of philosophy, is here the infamous eleventh Feuerbach thesis:  ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’71 What we can immediately gather from these comments on Marx is that a) he plays a central role within Badiou’s polemics of demarcation and b) that he does so not as a philosopher but as someone who proposes a critique of philosophy in general that becomes synonymous for Badiou with pronouncing its end. Marx’s critique seems furthermore primarily aimed at the inability of philosophy to change the world as it is currently constituted. These points taken together make Marx a rival of philosophy who certainly does not fit into the purely sophistic, namely conservative camp that ends up mirroring the world. But whether he fits into the category of the antiphilosopher requires a slightly deeper investigation into how Marx’s critique of philosophy unfolds in more detail and how it corresponds to the three dimensions of antiphilosophy identified in the previous section. Our first axis of inquiry will be Marx’s sophistic tendencies, that is, his explicit rejection(s) of philosophical truth. These are not entirely easy to pin down in that they require a survey of an oscillating trajectory rather than an analysis of a single position. It is therefore important to consider key moments of Marx’s avowed relationship to philosophy between his early student years in the mid-1830s and The Poverty of Philosophy, first published in 1847, which marks a threshold from an explicit debate with philosophy to what Marx himself perceived as ‘his entrance to science’,72 which is accompanied by a certain loss of interest in confronting philosophy in and of itself. If we start with Marx’s letter to his father from 1837, we find an account of his urge to, above all, ‘wrestle’ with philosophy73 as well as of his difficulty to maintain a clear sense of purpose and distinction throughout confrontations with specific philosophical positions: 70 Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 34. 71 Karl Marx in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173. 72 Marx, ‘1859 Preface’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 427. 73 Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Werke (hereafter MEW), vol. 40 (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2012), 7, my trans. (See English version in Marx, ‘Letter to His Father’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 10.)

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In the discussions here many contradictory views appeared and I chained myself ever more closely to the current world philosophy that I had intended to escape. But all that used to resonate was silenced and a true fit of irony came over me, as could easily happen after so many negations.74

Despite his self-doubt at the end of the letter, Marx does put forward a concern at this early point in his life that ultimately becomes the pivot for his critique of philosophy. If philosophy’s ‘grasp of truth’ depends on configuring the relationship of the world of ideas and the ‘object itself ’, that is, the real, the world or simply life, it is his concern that it does so in such a way as to allow the rationality of the object to unfold on its own terms;75 something German Idealism, specifically Kant and Fichte, but possibly Hegel, who at this point simply makes him feel uneasy, do not allow due to giving unrivalled primacy to the idea.76 In the works that follow, from the ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’ over his dissertation, the German-Franco Yearbooks up to his double-edged critique of Proudhon and Hegel in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx solidifies this unease (Unbehagen) into a firm critique of Hegel who he perceives as embodying the great philosophical adversary of his moment. One must not let oneself be bamboozled by this storm that follows a great, a world philosophy.77

From this moment, Hegel and philosophy largely become synonyms in Marx’s writings, which turns Hegel into the only German idealist worthy of explicit rivalry. And while other Hegelians are led astray in the aftermath of the Hegelian storm towards unphilosophical quarrels about Hegel’s morality,78 Marx sees himself on course to reconfiguring not just the relationship between thought and being, but between thought (the concept) and reality as such, between thought and the world.79 When Badiou therefore argues that what French philosophers of the twentieth century sought in Germany was a ‘new relation between concept and existence’,80 this is precisely what Marx is after a century earlier fuelling his appreciative rivalry with Hegel. 74 Ibid., 10, my trans. (Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 10). 75 Ibid., 5, my trans. (Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 11). 76 Ibid., 8, my trans. (Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 12). 77 Marx, Hefte zur epikureischen, stoischen und skeptischen Philosophie. In MEW, vol. 40, 217, my trans. 78 See ibid. 327. 79 See Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London: Verso, 1979), 134; Stuart Hall, ‘Marx’s Notes on Method: A “Reading” of the “1857 Introduction” ’, Cultural Studies, 17.2 (2003): 113–49, 137. 80 Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, lv.



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First of all, the world as it is  – the bourgeois world  – is for Marx divided, fragmented and deeply conflicted, whether he expresses this through a reconfigured Hegelian separation of civil society and the state81 or, from the ‘1844 Introduction’ onwards, through the notion of class struggle.82 The question of the world is then not coextensive with language in particular  – something Badiou emphasizes in relation to the modern sophists – but with its religious, political and economic, in short its social relational configuration. The development that Marx observes in Hegelian philosophy is a double-edged one. On the one hand, he acknowledges how Hegel strove to open his system up to the outside world, how, in Marx’s own words, this new philosophical paradigm ‘flung itself to the chest of the worldly siren’.83 On the other hand, this opening of philosophy towards the different non-philosophical dimensions of society or ‘the world’ is misleading as it follows its own agenda: instead of opening itself up to the thought of the world itself, to the truths that lie within it, it turns itself into the world. As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so does philosophy, after it expanded to be the world, turn against the world as it appears [the ‘real’ world]. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.84

By creating a philosophical system Hegel (thus, the philosophy of the moment) sets up a spiritual, abstract totality that not only takes itself for the world, but, motivated by the will to fully realize itself, it creates a critical tension with the world as it currently appears. Despite its dialectical mediations, it pits Ideas or concepts against particular appearances that do not conform to them. While this direction towards a critical relation to a conflictual and ultimately unjust and irrational world is the same direction that Marx seeks for his own renewal of philosophy, it is, in his mind, pursued by the wrong means. The problem with Hegel’s philosophy is that it assumes reason has already been realized and can be realized in the realm of spirit alone. This critique is clearly formulated in Marx’s accusation of Proudhon’s Hegelian critique of property and inequality as being grounded in ‘pure, eternal, impersonal reason’85 which 81 See especially Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 46–70. 82 See Marx, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 71, esp. 80–82. 83 Marx, MEW, vol. 40, 215, my trans. 84 Ibid., my trans. 85 Karl Marx, ‘Poverty of Philosophy’. In Collected Works (hereafter CW), vol. 6, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 105–212, 162.

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is not dependent on anything outside itself, that is, formulated independently from any historically specific rationality of the world that produces the specific inequalities and property relations. This type of principled Hegelian reason has outside itself ‘neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself ’.86 Instead it is fully detached from the rationality of things themselves, from the objective and subjective relations, struggles and consciousness(es)87 that create and in turn might be able to alleviate inequality. Thus, while reason does move ‘through the world’ with its dialectical method, it does not truly open itself up to being affected by the (ir)rationality of it. The contradictions it deals with remain internal to philosophy.88 It is against this background that Marx pits his own project of formulating a ‘critical philosophy’ whose aim it is to help clarify the struggles and wishes of a conflictual bourgeois world and its subjects89 against philosophy (Hegel) and against unphilosophy (positive philosophy that lets itself be determined purely by reality). And however many variations we are going to identify in the following section of the precise relation that this critical-philosophical or ‘selfclarifying’ approach takes to the world, once it tries to move beyond the critical dialogue with those who helped pave its way: at this point, we can say that truth for Marx, while he hasn’t abandoned its possibility, which is bound up with his faith in the possibility of changing the world and realizing human emancipation, certainly lies beyond the limits of philosophy proper or the ‘old’ philosophy. In this sense he turns against philosophy as a discipline and prefigures the Lacanian critique of the university discourse.90 By wedding a certain sophistic rejection of the possibility of philosophical truth with his radical desire of changing the world for which he needs to gain access to the truths that the world holds in its falsity, he fulfils the first criterion of the antiphilosopher. The second step in our inquiry concerns the means by which Marx formulates the possibility of gaining access to the truth of the world in order to change it. The precise question we need to answer: is Marx a thinker of the radical act and if so what kind of act is it?

86 Ibid., 162–3. 87 See Karl Marx, Early Writings (London:  Penguin:  1992), 380 (‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’). 88 Ibid., 382. 89 Ibid., 209 (‘Letters from the German-Franco Yearbook’). 90 See Marx on the transition from philosophy as discipline into freedom in McLellan, Selected Writings, 17.



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In his famous letter to Ruge from 1843 Marx argues that the role of critical philosophy is to formulate an immanent critique of the world that, instead of imposing new dogmas, makes the world aware of the dreams and possibilities it already holds within itself, even if they are currently buried in false appearances of the worldly relations and in the false consciousness of the world’s bearers.91 This position is certainly far away from any Nietzschean and thus antiphilosophical desire to break the world into two – instead it argues for critical philosophy’s responsibility to understand itself as the gold-digger of past ideas that it needs to unearth in order to uncover their critical and transformative potential. This line of thinking weds ‘critical philosophy’ firmly to its task of exposing the errors of idealist thought alongside the contradictions of bourgeois society. But if the task of critical philosophy or ‘critique’ is merely to help the world become conscious of what it does and how it conceives of its actions, then philosophy needs something and someone else of the world to translate the new insights into political action, someone to be made and become conscious outside of philosophy. This is where Marx’s demand for critical philosophy having to be a ‘united effort’, ‘a task for the world and for us’,92 comes to bear. It is, however, not a united effort between the entire world and critical philosophy, but, as we see in the ‘1844 Introduction’, the world gets reduced to one particular class, the proletariat, who is tasked with the dissolution of the entire world order.93 This is the moment when Marx ‘takes sides in politics’94 – not just against the conflictual bourgeois world as a whole, but where he becomes the partisan thinker of the proletarian movement, aiming to bring about a revolution that can truly succeed in the aim the French revolution set itself but failed to bring about: human emancipation. In that sense, the radical act that Marx ultimately seeks is the revolution that will abolish bourgeois social relations and bring about communism. And this act is – if we hear the echo of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ – a practical, a political event; it is not a philosophical act. Only ‘in human practice and the comprehension of this practice’ lies rationality and truth for thought.95 The role of philosophy has been reduced vis-à-vis idealist philosophies to midwife and witness while its constitutional dimension was relocated into non-philosophy, that is, practice. It has therefore not been radically and hyperbolically expanded into a radical act as it is the case for the antiphilosopher. 91 Marx, Early Writings, 208–9. 92 Ibid., 209. 93 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81. 94 Marx, Early Writings, 208. 95 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 171 (amended trans.); Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. In McLellan, Selected Writings, 171–3, esp. theses 2, 8 and 11.

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Nevertheless, there is a moment when Marx comes close to formulating the role of philosophy with resemblance to that of the archipolitical event that Badiou identified in Nietzsche, where the latter denies that the French Revolution has taken place as it left the Christian value system intact and aims to rectify it with a more radical supraphilosophical event. This moment is Marx’s discussion of the possibility of a revolution in Prussian Germany which lags so far behind France and North America regarding the modernization of its political and economic relations that it has neither experienced a political revolution nor formed a consistent class society.96 But, so Marx argues, Germany has a different productive mode that makes it the contemporary of the overall political situation by other means: As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have lived our future history in thought, in philosophy. We are the philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the  ideal prolongation  of German history. [ . . . ] What, in progressive nations, is a practical break with modern political conditions, is, in Germany, where those conditions do not yet exist, at first a critical break with the philosophical reflexion of those conditions.97

Thus, Germany’s revolution is essentially bound up with critique, which is why, in Germany, philosophy cannot be negated tout court. It has to be ‘realized’ (verwirklicht) and only through its realization it can and will be lost.98 The realization of philosophy is here conceived as the philosophical conception of ‘the emancipation of man’: an emancipated individual (the social individual99) who is freed from both religious and political abstractions that take its powers away from him/her.100 Curiously, Marx ties this realization of philosophy and liberation of Germany to the formation of a proletariat about which he himself has in that same text delivered all the arguments for why structurally, it cannot yet exist in Germany.101 Which causes suspicion whether the political act is ultimately a rhetorical proclamation of the formation of the radical subject, 96 See Völker in Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy. A Dialogue, 80. 97 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 75, amended trans. based on this version available at www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm (accessed 15 May 2018). 98 Ibid., 76; see also Marx, MEW, 329. 99 See the work on the social individual and transindividuality by Jason Read, Politics of Transindividuality (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 100 We have here a link to Marx’s critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular, which could be developed in relation to Badiou’s notion that the struggle against some or all dimensions of Christianity is a key dimension of the antiphilosopher’s turn against philosophy. But this will need to be developed elsewhere as it leads beyond the scope of the current inquiry. 101 See Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81–2.



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grounded in philosophy (namely, its realization and ultimate loss) and denied by the structural sociohistorical conditions – all of which would well qualify Marx as a potential antiphilosopher. However, we have to be careful not to overlook the very last sentence of the ‘Introduction’: ‘When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.’102 In the end, philosophy is still nothing more than the midwife to the revolutionary event and the political subject, which are a contingent occurrence dependent on economic and political structural conditions that are always also historical conditions. When Badiou mentions in passing the possibility of Althusser almost qualifying as a twentieth-century antiphilosopher due to ‘the proximity of revolutionary politics [to his materialist philosophy], under the partisan name of “taking sides”, that silently educated the clarity induced by this separating act’,103 then it is this same closeness that we have just witnessed in Marx’s conception. But this is not the final word Marx speaks concerning the relationship of philosophy and the world – even though the concepts of ‘philosophy’ and ‘critique’ appear much more sparingly in the publications that follow The Communist Manifesto. In there, Marx (and Engels) firmly state that ‘man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life’.104 If we have so far developed the impression that philosophy takes a backseat to (political) practice, we are now seeing another side of the Marxian primacy of man’s social and material existence over the realm of ideas and thus, the realm of thought. At this moment philosophical thought is truly stripped of any possibility of conceiving transcendental or, as Badiou likes to say, eternal truth precisely because it is firmly overdetermined by the mode of production or ‘economic structure of society’.105 We have, in a way, circled back to Marx’s most modest formulation of philosophy in his 1843 letter to Ruge: namely that as critique it can help unearth the economic, political, religious, etc. principles that govern the historical moment and thus will help those living within such a moment – for example, within a capitalist class society – to understand their condition and find the weapons to change it. The only difference is that in his later work Marx has truly given up on his archipolitical temptation from the ‘Introduction’ where he suggests that philosophy could ‘think’ human emancipation and ‘emancipated Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 81–2, trans. modified. 103 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 81. 104 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 62. 105 Marx in McLellan, Selected Writings, 425. 102

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man’. By radically historicizing ‘truth’  – as understanding of the world and all that live within it – when reducing philosophy to critique, Marx holds on to a reconfigured notion of philosophy against sophistry precisely because Marx never gives way to the rules of sense or meaning alone; we only need to remember ‘commodity fetishism’ and the distinction between the appearance and essence of a commodity. That which is not attainable within pure or Idealist philosophy can be thought if philosophy opens itself up to the worldly elements by which it is conditioned. And by tying ‘truth’ (as radical change) to the emergence of political subjects, Marx leaves the primary emancipatory function with politics instead of trying to draw it back into philosophy. We therefore don’t even need to traverse the third and last criterion of antiphilosophy anymore, namely whether the antiphilosopher becomes himself or herself the subject of enunciation or the name of the act. If Marx ever falls prey to such a rhetorical conjuring, it is not with regard to himself but, as we’ve seen above, in relation to his preferred political subject, ‘the proletariat’.

Conclusion Not formulating an archipolitical or indeed an archieconomic act106 means that Marx is ultimately uninterested in reclaiming a fundamental emancipatory role for philosophy after he has achieved107 its multifaceted materialist deterritorialization. In that sense he differs from the antiphilosophers who are happily taking the risk of destroying philosophy altogether in order to rectify the failure of the non-philosophical realms to deliver a radical exit from the worldly status quo. And it makes Marx’s concern a very different one from Badiou’s, whose philosophical Kampfplatz with sophistry and antiphilosophy is set up to reclaim philosophy’s emancipatory potential and regain the license of doing philosophy unashamedly.108 In this chapter, we have not dealt very much with Badiou’s own reading of Marx and Marxism, of which there are many accounts elsewhere. What concerns us nevertheless is that, while Badiou himself never explicitly suggested You might accuse me of not having sufficiently explored the possibility of Marx formulating an archi-economic act as we have, of course, the moments of technological determinism in Marx’s writings from The Communist Manifesto onwards. But this will have to be explored another time. 107 ‘Achieved’ is, of course, a strong word considering the many oscillations that this materialist deterritorialization of philosophy takes throughout Marx’s work – and which we have certainly not been able to address comprehensively. 108 See Bosteels, ‘Radical Antiphilosophy’, 161. 106



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considering Marx an antiphilosopher, he has, via his reading of Althusser’s struggles over determining a satisfactory relationship between philosophy and politics in the name of founding a ‘materialist philosophy’, formulated a much more straightforward criticism of Marx’s relation to philosophy. That is the problem of suture, which we briefly mentioned earlier on in the chapter: I called this rupture of symmetry and determinant privileging of one of philosophy’s conditions a suture. Philosophy is sutured whenever one of its conditions is called upon to determine the philosophical act of seizing and declaration. [. . .] The trouble with sutures is that they make their two edges, that is, both philosophy and the privileged condition, difficult to discern. On the side of philosophy, the suture, which invests the philosophical act with a singular determination concerning its truth, destroys the categorial void necessary to the philosophical site as a site of thought by filling it in.109

I think what we experienced while trying to read Marx along the lines of the categories of antiphilosophy was precisely this indiscernibility between philosophy and politics, which comes hand in hand with Marx’s refusal of defining the philosophical act on its own terms. But the previous discussions of Badiou’s and Marx’s struggles with philosophy strongly suggest that this distinction simply marks their fundamentally differing desires concerning philosophy, that reflects a different understanding of what helps humanity/class society to grasp and change the world. Badiou is trying to reinvigorate radical philosophy by carving out a space in which its thought is clearly distinguished from its conditions while maintaining what he above calls a ‘symmetry’ between the world’s singular events in all four conditions and philosophy’s operation of seizing the truths they produce to formulate its Truth. Philosophy has to remain, above all, without an object. Marx, on the other hand, is not concerned with the future of philosophy in any substantive manner. He continues to draw on philosophy  – which might challenge us into qualifying our statement by distinguishing explicit and implicit concern – but he does not fear the loss of philosophy as he makes clear at several points. That, it seems to me, while on some level a fairly obvious conclusion, offers a sometimes forgotten starting point, from which we might reread Badiou’s discussion of Marx and Marxism as well as the many Marxist criticisms of Badiou’s work more productively. And we might bear in mind Barbara Cassin’s objection to Badiou’s categorization of his rivals into sophists 109 Badiou, Conditions, 160.

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and antiphilosophers: ‘The philosophy/antiphilosophy binary will have been a pure product of philosophy, one that philosophy will present as always-already having a structuring effect.’110 Not having found Marx an antiphilosopher might then have not just allowed us to clarify why Badiou hesitates to subsume him under his existing categorizations of philosophy’s rivals, but it might also come as a relief. A relief for Marx’s legacy, for whose work it would be ironic to be subsumed back into philosophy by such an operation (which doesn’t mean the last word is spoken on whether Marx is really ready to lose philosophy) and a relief for Badiou (or rather the Marxian readers of Badiou?), who we have found continues his struggle with Marx and Marxism’s thought even though it might prove more explosive to his firm aim of renewing radical philosophy than any of the sophists and antiphilosophers could ever be.

110 Barbara Cassin, quoted by Bruno Bosteels in Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 64.

7

The Question Concerning Technology: Badiou versus Heidegger Justin Clemens

For those interested in Alain Badiou’s work and its development, it is striking how little he refers throughout his oeuvre to that of Martin Heidegger. From his earliest published essays such as ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’ (1968) and ‘Mark and Lack’ (1969), through Theory of Contradiction (1975), up to and including Theory of the Subject (1982), there is a notable paucity of reference by Badiou to the German philosopher.1 Given the astonishing priority that Heidegger’s thinking established for itself in twentieth-century philosophy – whether in the familiar forms of overwhelming passion for his thinking or the intense analytic rejection thereof – this is prima facie an odd, that is, a nonstandard expression of something like indifference or distaste. In the preface to Theory of the Subject, for example, Badiou expressly lists his key materials as deriving from ‘the two great German dialecticians, Hegel and Hölderlin’, ‘the two great modern French dialecticians, Mallarmé and Lacan’, ‘the two great classical French dialecticians, Pascal and Rousseau’, and from ‘four of the five great Marxists: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong’.2 (Stalin is the fifth.) Heidegger goes notably unmentioned. Aside from Hölderlin and, perhaps, Hegel, this is in itself a very un-Heideggerean list of masters. Heidegger receives only four pages in the index. When he briefly appears in the text proper, it is, rather unremarkably, first in regards to the ontological question and to the deconstruction of metaphysics, but also, perhaps less usually, as an analogy to contemporaneous Marxist struggles. Badiou writes: 1 See A. Badiou, ‘La subversion infinitésimale’, Cahiers pour l’analyse, vol. 9 (1968): 118–37; ‘Marque et Manque: à propos du Zéro’, Cahiers pour l’analyse, 10 (1969): 150–73; Théorie de la contradiction (Paris:  Maspero, 1975); Theory of the Subject, trans. and introduction by B.  Bosteels (London/ New York: Continuum, 2009). 2 Badiou, Theory of the Subject, xl.

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Heidegger would like to put an end to the philosophical idea of a guarantee of consistency by the cause. You will be able to shed some light on this point if you know that what we contemporary Marxists want to put an end to is the theme of a guarantee of communism by the socialist State.3

That, however, is just about the extent of Heidegger’s appearance in the treatise. The paucity of reference in this context is particularly noteworthy given the notorious impact of Heidegger on ‘French philosophy’ of the twentieth century, at least since the early 1930s. Along with Hegel and Husserl, Heidegger is a clear and present influence upon thinkers as diverse and as important as Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on and on – to the extent that the high points of such philosophy are literally unimaginable without Heidegger’s impact.4 But this is not clearly the case for Badiou. Not only is Heidegger almost absent from Badiou’s early work, but he doesn’t seem to fare any better in the later. If one cites Badiou’s own express affirmations of influence, Heidegger never appears in any significant, let  alone positive, way. In Logics of Worlds, for example, Badiou asserts that: ‘In effect, I think there are only three crucial philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel.’5 When Heidegger is mentioned at all, it is as the object of a certain irritated disdain coupled, moreover, with Badiou’s characteristic hostility to any concept or trope that smacks of theological or religious affiliations. As Badiou puts it in the same text:  ‘Phenomenology, in its German variant, is indisputably haunted by religion. This probably stems from the motif of a lost authenticity, of a forgetting of the true Life, of a deleted origin – a theme that traverses all of Heidegger’s writings.’6 Even when Badiou deploys the apparently emblematically Heideggerean terminology of ‘Dasein’, things are by no means as Heideggerean as they might initially seem. As Alberto Toscano, the English translator of Logics of Worlds comments:  ‘Badiou often evokes Heidegger, with some irreverence. It is rather Hegel’s Dasein . . . that is at stake here.’7 Once again, Heidegger seems to have failed to have made any real impression upon Badiou’s work.

3 Ibid., 235. 4 For an incomparable overview of the impact, see D. Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015). 5 A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London/New York: Continuum, 2009), 527. 6 Ibid., 516. 7 A. Toscano, ‘Translator’s Note’ in Logics of Worlds, xvi.



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Badiou’s seemingly essential indifference towards Heidegger has been to some extent mirrored in the commentary, where, if we find a sequence of dutiful articles laying out key terms in a ‘compare and contrast’ sort of way, as well as the usual obligatory smattering of references to Heidegger in the dedicated monographs, no real encounter seems to have been adequately registered.8 In fact, the commentary itself tends to suggest that, outside of a few general indications – the primacy of ontology, the importance of events – there is no especial significance to their relationship . . . or non-relationship. Let me give a couple of instances here. As Mark Hewson writes: If Badiou [like Heidegger] restores the primacy of ontology for an understanding of what philosophy is, he does so, I would suggest, in a largely autonomous way. His project is not conceived primarily as a critique of Heidegger . . . despite the similarity of the titles – Being and Time, Being and Event – these works do not stand in the kind of close communication and dialogue that one might expect.9

Even in regards to the one ‘book’ that Badiou has published in which Heidegger’s name appears on the cover – Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy (whose English 8 See, e.g., B. Bosteels, ‘Vérité et forçage:  Badiou avec Heidegger et Lacan’. In Alain Badiou:  Penser le multiple, ed. C. Ramond (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 259–94; M. de Beistegui, ‘The Ontological Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger, and Deleuze’. In Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. G. Riera (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 45–59; J. Clemens and J. Roffe, ‘Philosophy as Anti-religion in the Work of Alain Badiou’, Sophia, 47.3 (2008): 345–58; G. Harman, ‘Badiou’s Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject’. In Badiou and Philosophy, ed. S. Bowden and S. Duffy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); M. Hewson, ‘Heidegger’. In Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 140–48; S. Prozorov, ‘What Is the “World” in World Politics? Heidegger, Badiou and Void Universalism’, Contemporary Political Theory, 12.2 (2013): 102–22; B. Radloff, ‘Ontotheology and Universalism: Heideggerian Reflections on Alain Badiou’s Political Thinking’, Existentia, 22.3–4 (2012): 301–35. I think the paucity of commentary is perhaps most evident, however, in anthologies such as B. Besana and O. Feltham (eds), Écrits autour de la pensée d’Alain Badiou (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and I. Vodoz and F. Tarby (eds), Autour d’Alain Badiou (Paris: Germina, 2011), as well as in such monographs as B. Baki, Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); S. Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty:  Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics (Melbourne:  re.press, 2008); P. Hallward, Badiou:  A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); N. Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière:  Re-thinking Emancipation (London/New  York:  Continuum, 2007); C. Norris, Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative (London/New  York:  Bloomsbury, 2012); E. Pluth, Badiou:  A Philosophy of the New (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). I don’t mean to suggest that these texts are in any way lacking as a result – only that Heidegger remains for all of them a minor or glancing reference or, rather, an occasion for prosecuting a polemic. I must confess that my ignorance of the German critical reception, in particular, possibly vitiates my claims here (my online searches turned up few results), although (1) I still suspect that there is no extended study of the relation in question, and (2) even if such exists, it is still noteworthy that the relation has not really proved a significant focus of attention in the Anglo- and Francophone uptake, and, moreover, (3) in the German context the question of Heidegger’s Nazism continues to impact seriously upon academic debates in a way that, for obvious reasons, goes beyond even the controversies in the United States. It is further worth noting that, as the number of books treating ‘Badiou and X’ multiplies – for example, J. Vernon and A. Calcagno (eds), Badiou and Hegel:  Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity (Lanham:  Lexington Books, 2015) – none that I know of exist for ‘Badiou and Heidegger’. 9 Hewson, ‘Heidegger’, 140.

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title is a publisher’s traducing of the original French Heidegger. Les femmes, le nazisme et la philosophie) – it is significant that this is a very brief occasional text co-authored with Barbara Cassin.10 Moreover, as one scathing reviewer commented: ‘The title of this book is highly misleading . . . Perhaps the most important point to make about this book . . . is that it offers nothing of interest to scholars or philosophers studying the works of Heidegger.’11 The same could certainly not be said for Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, or even Deleuze, whose Difference and Repetition is utterly saturated with the influence of the German thinker.12 And yet there are always exceptions to any rule. We should above all remember that the course of true influence never runs smoothly  – not in philosophy, nor indeed anywhere else. Which leads me to my central thesis here: that Heidegger is in fact the most crucial of philosophers for Badiou, if in a modality of polarization. In fact, Badiou only becomes ‘Badiou’ – that is, an indispensable philosopher – through reuptaking the Heideggerian project in a radical and absolutely singular fashion. If it remains true that Badiou repudiates Heidegger on almost every point (although not all, as we shall soon see), he takes the bulk of his primary bearings from the latter. It is in Being and Event that this rupture and the contestation emerges in its most fulsome way.13 Indeed, this influence is at once so shocking and so profound that it comes as self-confessedly a surprise to Badiou himself. As he puts it in a recent interview, which is worth quoting at length: Being and Event is, frankly, against the idea of the poetical nature of ontology – something like that. So it’s a book against Heidegger . . . Now the text of my 1986 seminar on Heidegger, my habilitation, is coming out in Spring and so I re-read my seminar with many surprises [laughter].14 My most important surprise was that all that, subjectively, was in fact an explanation with Heidegger, and so an 10 A. Badiou and B. Cassin, Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy, introduction by K. Reinhard, trans. S. Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). The German edition does a much better job of calquing the original, Heidegger:  Der Nationalsozialismus, die Frauen, die Philosophie, but which, with a certain je ne sais quoi, has somehow managed to slip the Nazis in front of the women. Luckily, in all three versions, philosophy brings up the rear or, alternatively, comes in last place. One suspects that, in a German context, the ‘women’ being placed before ‘Nazism’ would give a misleading impression of the subject of the book. 11 B. Harding, ‘Review of Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy’, Heythrop Journal, 58.4 (2017): 726–7. 12 As Deleuze himself puts it regarding his bibliographic strategy: ‘For a certain number of authors (Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Hegel, Freud and Heidegger) we have put only passim in the column for works. This is because the themes of difference or repetition are really present throughout all their work’: Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 334. 13 A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005). 14 This text has now been published as A. Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015).



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explanation not only with Heidegger but across Heidegger with the French Heideggerian current . . . And you know that during practically thirty years from Being and Nothingness of Sartre to Nancy, French philosophy has been Heideggerian, largely. And retrospectively, it was clear for me that I  was also Heideggerian in some sense, because of Sartre and so on.15

My task in this chapter is therefore to provide an elucidation of some of the precise ways in which Badiou is indeed ‘also Heideggerian in some sense’. The key themes will be:  ontology and metaphysics, mathematics and technology, poetry and the event. Permit me, however, one last underlining of the first movement of this chapter: the relation of Badiou to Heidegger is so crucial that it cannot not be ‘forgotten’, even by Badiou himself. It is not a pleasant, friendly or comfortable relationship, but a relationship that is rather of the order of a real. I will return briefly to this question of the real in the conclusion to this chapter. As I  have already remarked, Heidegger is almost altogether absent from Badiou’s work before Being and Event. Yet, in Badiou’s own self-nominated return from his predominant commitment to political activism back to philosophy in the early 1980s, Heidegger is instrumental. As aforementioned, Badiou’s Habilitation was a seminar dedicated specifically to Heidegger, and Badiou’s own cover notes to the published text read: ‘In the year of this Seminar (1986), I was finishing Being and Event, which constitutes the base [socle] of the ensemble of my philosophical oeuvre. It proposes in effect a contemporary metaphysics, where all the classic concepts are redefined and reordered. Centrally, the fundamental triptych: being, truth, subject.’16 Indeed, it is this triptych we find at work throughout Being and Event. The very opening of Being and Event lays out the stakes of the treatise with Badiou’s characteristic clarity: Let’s premise the analysis of the current global state of philosophy on the following three assumptions: 1. Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher. 2. Those programmes of thought – especially the American – which have followed the developments in mathematics, in logic and in the work of the Vienna circle have succeeded in conserving the figure of scientific rationality as a paradigm for thought. 15 A. Badiou et al., ‘“The Movement of Emancipation”: Round Table Interview with Alain Badiou’. In Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses, ed. A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 221. The interview took place in November 2014. 16 Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, back cover.

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3. A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject is unfolding: its origin can be traced to non-philosophical practices (whether those practices be political, or relating to ‘mental illness’); and its regime of interpretation, marked by the names of Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan, is complicated by clinical or militant operations which go beyond transmissible discourse.17 As Oliver Feltham, one of the few commentators to take the relation between Badiou and Heidegger very seriously (if, for topical reasons, perhaps too briefly), sums up this shift: ‘no longer is the domain of Badiou’s discourse the dialectic of revolutionary knowledge; now it is a question of philosophy and its transformation. Badiou’s interlocutor or stalking horse is no longer Hegel and the structural dialectic but Heidegger and the philosophies of finitude.’18 Feltham proceeds to comment that Badiou’s claims for Heidegger are ‘highly contestable’, but more fully comprehensible in the context of specifically French philosophy, and, above all, that of the ‘Left Heideggerians’ Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. I am perhaps more sanguine than Feltham about Badiou’s claims regarding Heidegger here. For much the same reasons as I have been indicating regarding attributions of influence above, I  believe it would be possible to show how analytic philosophy is itself polarized in its inquiries by Heidegger – and not just via the famous anathemas of Rudolf Carnap – who it wishes to condemn and dismiss, if not to ignore entirely.19 This is itself a fundamental ‘polemical’ point, which perhaps Heidegger and Badiou share: it is essential in philosophy to orient oneself with respect to one’s enemies; or, alternatively, that a philosophy essentially orients itself with respect to other philosophical enemies whether it knows it or not.20 As the Platonic dialogues both show and embody from beginning to end, it is through a conflict with the sophists that one at once establishes the situation, the operative antagonisms within it, the personnel that flourish in it, the arguments that can be drawn on and made to transform it. In one sense, in philosophy, given that one is already fighting on the enemy’s terrain, it is necessary to take up the enemy’s weapons against them. Moreover, in philosophy, one attacks one’s enemy at their strongest point in order to reduce them, at the very least, to an aporia or standstill; there is no real philosophical good to be gained by simply

17 Badiou, Being and Event, 1. 18 O. Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 88. 19 In his monograph on Badiou, Christopher Norris also mentions that Badiou takes Heidegger ‘seriously’, but primarily as an indication of Badiou’s ‘continental’ affiliations. See C. Norris, Badiou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). 20 And, in passing, let’s note that Heidegger himself shares a comparable doctrine in his discussions of Auseinandersetzung.



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denouncing a philosophy’s allegedly ‘weak’ points. Finally, if one mistakes one’s enemy, then one’s attacks are pointless or vain; you must locate the proper antagonism or go terribly awry. So the opening of Being and Event has as its very first key claim in the establishment of situation the proposition that ‘Heidegger is the last universally recognized philosopher’, followed by the analytic focus on science, and then the extra-philosophical revolutionary practices of subjects. In terms of the triptych already introduced, we will say that the three opening propositions correspond to the concepts:  truth, being, subject. But hang on!  – hasn’t Heidegger’s contribution, whether universally recognized or no, been to reintroduce the centrality of the question of (the meaning of) being to philosophy as such? And hasn’t the contribution of ‘analytic’ philosophy been to turn towards questions of science, mathematics and logic as establishing the only truth worth the name, that is, above all, epistemological questions? This is the first great inversion or displacement that I  want to suggest that Badiou machinates in Being and Event. If Heidegger has reopened the ontological question, he has also botched it. Heidegger’s topic is crucial, but his means mislead. Moreover, as Heidegger’s work proceeds, he comes more and more to question the subject:  the eminently philosophical analytic of Dasein in Being and Time gives way to a form of thinking that explicitly nominates ‘philosophy’ as a bad and muddled danger compared to the ‘good danger’ that is ‘poetry’, at the same moment that the problematics of techne, aletheia and the event move more and more to the fore; in this movement, the subject qua subiectum is itself subjected to critique.21 Of this, more below. As for analytic philosophy, it generally brackets off questions of being and the subject in favour of rendering itself ancillary to the knowledge deriving from the sciences. Meanwhile, Marx and Freud establish modes of action that explicitly exceed the closure of philosophy qua knowledge – what Badiou telegraphically nominates as ‘transmissible discourse’ in the pursuit of such a subject, which can render such modes radically epistemologically insufficient from the point of view of ‘philosophy proper’. As A. J. Bartlett and I have examined elsewhere, this initial triple establishment of situation is a fundamental strategy of Badiou’s method.22 In presentation after presentation, Badiou typically lays out three incommensurable elements 21 See, e.g., ‘The Thinker as Poet’ (1947). In Poetry Language Thought, trans. and introduction by A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 22 See A. J. Bartlett and J. Clemens, ‘Polemic as Logic in the Work of Alain Badiou’, Parrhesia, 23 (2016): 62–85.

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of a situation, in order to show, first, that these elements, in their very incommensurability, are nonetheless contemporaneous with one another; second, that, in their contemporaneity and despite their incommensurability, they share an unconfessed complicity, which itself has a double aspect; third, that, on the basis of these features, one can rearticulate their desiderata in such a way as to construct a new, fourth position, one which would previously have been impossible if one continued to work within any of the elements. This ‘impossible’ then names, to draw on an indispensable Lacanian concept, the ‘real’ of the situation into which it is an intervention. Badiou tends to effect this last operation by resplitting the elements of the situation, that is, by pinpointing an immanent aporia within their projects; showing how this aporia can be treated by an operation available from one of the other elements in a way that would be impossible for that element (in accordance with basic psychoanalytical doctrine, no element can treat its own split, its symptom, by itself); finally, reknotting the elements to produce a new weave. Badiou’s favoured metaphor for this procedure, picking up on the most ancient Pythagorean references as well as on set theoretical proofs, is to ‘draw a diagonal’ through the situation.23 With respect to Heidegger, then, Badiou certainly begins by affirming Heidegger’s reintroduction of Being as a key requisite for contemporary philosophy: ‘Along with Heidegger, it will be maintained that philosophy as such can only be re-assigned on the basis of the ontological question.’24 As I have said, however, this affirmation proves to be eminently counter-Heideggerian. Indeed, we are quickly confronted by the thesis which has proved the most controversial and notorious of Being and Event, that mathematics is ontology.25 For Heidegger, such a claim would be a travesty. As he puts it in ‘The Age of the World Picture’: One of the essential phenomena of modernity is its science. Of equal importance is machine technology. One should not, however, misconstrue this as the mere application of modern mathematical science to praxis. Machine technology is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis, a transformation which first demands the employment of mathematical science. Machine technology still

23 See, e.g., Badiou, Being and Event, 2. 24 Ibid. 25 For a different examination of Badiou’s equation from the one I offer here, see the very interesting essay by B. Baki, ‘Notes on the Equivalence between Ontology and Mathematics’, Crisis and Critique, 5.1 (2018): 36–55.



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remains the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology, an essence which is identical with the essence of modern metaphysics.26

For Heidegger, the ‘mathematics’ of such a science is a specific deployment which entails the guarantee of the ‘always-already-known’ and, in its submission of nature to physics qua mathematics alongside the experimental expressions of research – ‘being’ or ‘nature’ thereby becoming secondary to methodology – is integrally bonded with a process of mechanization, which places the subject of representation as the norm of being and beings. Modern science and modern technology are thus inseparable, that is, they are not simply related as ‘pure’ to ‘applied’, but ensure their reign over the totality of beings by disappearing, in the most absolute way, the question of being itself. And that, finally, is what renders their essence ‘identical’ with ‘metaphysics’. These are then the three indissociable Ms of the modern age:  mathematized physics, mechanized technology, metaphysics. Heidegger’s thinking regarding modern mathematics therefore refuses to distinguish it from science and technology, for what he would propose to be essential ‘historial’ reasons. The event of modernity, the advent of the world picture, is precisely the unprecedented fusion of these phenomena as establishing the ‘new’ itself. In Being and Time, the thinking of technology was restricted (although not entirely) to the famous analysis of the broken tool, which, in its very disturbance of reference, or its becoming unhandy, suddenly and rudely interrupts our actions to reveal a net of unthematized, presupposed expectations that we had about the world and, thereby, allows something like a ‘world’ to emerge thetically for us at all. But as Heidegger’s work proceeds, ‘the question concerning technology’ becomes more and more pressing. Heidegger moves away from such phenomenological descriptions of the experience of tools and fundamental affects towards the historicity of the revealings that establish beings as totality.27 In ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Heidegger drills further down into the peculiar event that founds the modern world. This essay, which one might even nominate as one of the most important single essays on technology of the twentieth century, redescribes the paradoxical concatenation of events 26 M. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57. 27 As Reiner Schürmann notes, promulgating a ‘retrospective’ reading of Heidegger’s piste, ‘Only restrospectively can it be held that the descriptions of the “mathematical project” as an existentiell a priori contain in germ the later descriptions of technology as Gestell, enframing, and of the total control it exercises over the modern world’:  Heidegger on Being and Acting:  From Principles to Anarchy, trans. C.-M. Gros with the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15.

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that established the modern regime of technology as Gestell. In Heidegger’s account, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century could never have gotten going without the prior development, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of mathematized physics. Yet such mathematized physics, if it still to some extent concealed its essential solidarity with industrial technology, must already been animated by the very essence of technology from the first. There is therefore a kind of triple or even quadruple fold in Heidegger’s account here: in post-World War II cybernetic technology patently establishing its dominion over the entirety of the earth, the time in which Heidegger is writing the essay, we are sent back to its origins in the industrial revolution; from that revolution, we are returned to the emergence of mathematized physics a century or so earlier, without which the revolution could not have taken place; in being so, we are thereby led to an apprehension that such mathematized physics was already an expression of the essence of technology. Such an epochal ‘event’ for Heidegger is thus of an extreme complexity: it is not simply a puncture in the flow of time, nor a discrete ensemble, but a ramifying concatenation of disjoint phenomena whose immanent logic necessarily emerges belatedly, and that belatedness is integral to the contingent fatality of destiny itself. What was unthought in Galileo is only thought in Heidegger, but too late. Thought always comes too late, whereas technology – like Zarathustra – always comes too soon. After all, ‘to be “new” belongs to a world that has become picture’.28 Heidegger, as a preeminent thinker of the complex destining of times of the sense of time, gives here an incomparable description of the ‘necessity’ of the ‘new’ as a driver of modern research. Indeed, dare I  say, Heidegger’s thought effects here a quintuple fold:  for, whatever its differences from the mediaeval and Greek epochs of being – and Heidegger is extremely careful and explicit about the genuinely irreducible differences that mark out each epoch – there is still an attenuated but real bond to the Greek origins of metaphysics. This recognition forces Heidegger back to ‘the origin’ again  – which, from his perspective, does not simply lie ‘behind’ us, but ‘before’ us. As is well known, he regularly identifies Plato as one of the key culprits in the concealment of the eclosion of Being more primordially apprehended by the pre-Socratics, insofar as Plato reconceives Being under the heading of eidos, and, in so doing, fixes the thinking of being according to a kind of formal transcendence.29 This is why Badiou remarks that, ‘for Heidegger, 28 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 69. 29 See, e.g., Heidegger’s absolutely magnificent interpretation of Plato in The Essence of Truth, trans. T. Sadler (London/New York: Continuum, 2002).



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science, from which mathematics is not distinguished, constitutes the hard kernel of metaphysics, inasmuch as it annuls the latter in the very loss of that forgetting in which metaphysics, since Plato, has founded the guarantee of its objects: the forgetting of beings’.30 The long metaphysical march has begun. So: how to get out of it? Metaphysics, that is. For Heidegger, it is impossible to simply wrench oneself outside of one’s historical situation by an effort of will or thought, no matter how violent or imaginative. On the contrary, if there is any potential ‘outside’ to the total epoch of enframing, this outside must come from ‘within’. This is where the readings of poetry become so important. If poesis was for the Ancient Greeks a matter of techne, for Heidegger it is a founding aspect of such techne that has been, well, technicized in the modern age. But, because qua poetry it necessarily precedes, subsists in, and is not entirely in solidarity with the Triple M of modernity, it remains as a fundamental-if-infirm resource that, if carefully attended to, may yet offer glimmers of another way beyond metaphysics despite the metaphysical death-grip on the present. (Hence, too, the charge of ‘melancholia’ that critics, including Badiou, regularly level at Heidegger.) Yet it is also through attending to the poets that we move beyond ontology in Heidegger’s later work towards a kind of ontology-beyond-ontology – given that the word ‘ontology’ is itself a seventeenth-century coinage tributary to the fixing of being-as-idea – and yet this ontology-beyond-ontology is placed at the heart of a thinking that can no longer be, strictly speaking, philosophical, but rather poetic. Or which at least attempts to listen to poetry, to be guided by poetry, as Dante is guided by Virgil. Poetry, as a techne-with-in-techne-with-out-Gestell, enables the breaching of the means of revealing in an ‘act’ that perhaps opens onto the otherness of ‘being’ with which poetry silently trembles. Poetry thus becomes a kind of eventing, or, at least, more attuned to the eventing of beings than any other discourse. This is why ‘poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of being’.31 Poetry cracks open the languages necessary to any revealing, in order to reopen the problem of revealing itself anew: the a-letheia of ‘a non-violent power’ of event.32 Badiou’s position, obviously, could not be more different. As I  have been saying, Being and Event is in a fundamental way a deliberate confrontation with and reversal of Heidegger’s doctrines, and bears explicitly upon the essence of 30 Badiou, Being and Event, 9. 31 Heidegger, Poetry Language Thought, 12. 32 Heidegger uses this phrase in the Spiegel interview, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, as a paraphrase of René Char, in Heidegger, The Man and the Thinker, ed. T. Sheehan (New Jersey: Transaction, 1981), 56.

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mathematics, on ontology and on their original apprehension in Ancient Greece. If Heidegger doesn’t have a single one of the book’s thirty-seven ‘meditations’ dedicated to him, he does, nonetheless orient it in its entirety, as well as leaving his mark – in a variety of modalities, some negative – scattered throughout the text itself. The second meditation, on Plato, is a direct riposte to Heidegger’s position; the whole of ‘Part III Being:  Nature and Infinity’ is marked as a dispute regarding ‘Heidegger/Galileo’; the meditation on ‘Hölderlin’ expressly announces its debt to Heidegger; and so on. But it is section 4 of the introduction to Being and Event that is decisive here. Badiou himself sums up the dispute in three key points, which are worth quoting at length for both their incisiveness and indicative rhetoric: ‘Heidegger still remains enslaved, even in the doctrine of the withdrawal and the un-veiling, to what I  consider, for my part, to be the essence of metaphysics:  that is, the figure of being as endowment and gift, as presence and opening, and the figure of ontology as the offering of a trajectory of proximity.’33 Badiou nominates this as a poetic ontology. Second, the claims of such poetry must be curbed if a ‘subtractive ontology’ is to be effected: such an ontology attends to ‘the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but from all presentation’.34 Third, given that mathematics is essential for this task, the Ancient Greek philosophers were indeed the first philosophers, insofar as they ‘established, with the first deductive mathematics, the necessary form of its discourse’.35 Plato is a villain for Heidegger, but a hero to Badiou – and this not only because of his deployment of mathematics.36 Let us now turn to this last problematic in a little more detail. For Badiou, if mathematics is ontology, set theory fulfils this role for our time. Set theory, developing out of Georg Cantor’s researches into infinity in the late nineteenth century, immediately created an extraordinary international mathematical controversy which was somewhat – if not entirely – pacified by the axiomatization of the theory in the early twentieth century. As Badiou puts it, ‘isolated and extracted between 1880 and 1930, these statements are, in the presentation charged with the most sense, nine in number’.37 Much of the bulk of the first half of Being and Event is taken up with an astonishing explication of the details of these axioms and their philosophical import, at least as attentive in 33 Badiou, Being and Event, 9. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Ibid. 36 On which point, see A. J. Bartlett, ‘Plato’, in Key Concepts, 101–11. 37 Badiou, Being and Event, 499. He continues: ‘They concentrate the greatest effort of thought ever accomplished to this day by humanity.’



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its own manner as any reading of a poet by Heidegger or Derrida. For Badiou, set theory is not founded on any thing or number or idea, but on the mark of the empty set; the empty set, a kind of avatar of zero in the system, thereby undoes the ‘one’ as foundation, which becomes merely a result; set theory thereafter formally and consistently constructs infinite infinities as a banal feature of its operations, giving the ancient concept of ‘infinity’ a rigorous conceptual consistency for the first time. What, however, is perhaps more important to note in the current context is that the statement ‘mathematics is ontology’ is a meta-ontological statement, that is, it necessarily issues from a point external to mathematics itself. Badiou is not engaging in an epistemology, a philosophy of mathematics, nor a foundational enterprise. For Badiou, mathematics is certainly not the regime of the ‘alwaysalready-known’; on the contrary, it is a practice quite as inventive as poetry or politics. Moreover, it takes place outside metaphysics and philosophy. Rather than contributing to the forgetting of Being, it is the only discourse that enables the restitution of the thinking of Being. Into the bargain, it must therefore be separated from modern science and technology. If there is no question that they are empirically bound together, pure mathematics radically exceeds all and any empirical, sociological or historical closure. Language is not primary for Badiou, it is not ‘the house of Being’. Instead, it is the rupture with language effected by the little letters of mathematics that enables the inscription of Being. Let us underline just how subtle Badiou’s position is. Despite all the ongoing virulent controversy over the sense and reference of the equation ‘mathematics  =  ontology’, Badiou really could not have more clearly asserted that this is not the centrepiece of his enterprise. Badiou: ‘If one category had to be designated as an emblem of my thought, it would be neither Cantor’s pure multiple, nor Gödel’s constructible, nor the void, by which being is named, nor even the event, in which the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being originates. It would be the generic.’38 Why is the generic so important? Because it enables the demonstration that truth and being are compatible but non-reducible. The generic supplies the and of Being and Event. In so doing, it enables the articulation of the discourse of ontology (mathematics) together with the nomination of events (poetry) addressed to the essentially collective aspects of a situation (politics) by means of an infinite inquiry regarding conditions (love). As Badiou puts it: ‘What happens in art, in science, in true (rare) politics, and in love (if it exists), is the coming to light of 38 Ibid., 15.

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an indiscernible of the times, which, as such, is neither a known or recognized multiple, nor an ineffable singularity, but that which detains in its multiple-being all the common traits of the collective in question: in this sense, it is the truth of the collective’s being.’39 The truth is at once not a known multiple nor an ineffable singularity, but a practice which, on the basis of an event, works to transform faith into knowledge through operating on the pure belonging of materiality. So set theory for Badiou is not at all the be-all-and-end-all of his enterprise. Yes, it has rigorously assumed the burden of formalizing and thereby banalizing the infinite; yes, it has become a ‘foundational language’ for the rewriting of many other mathematical operations; yes, it defines the consistency of absolute (if not total) knowledge in our situation. But what makes its enterprise so incredible for Badiou is that, with Paul Cohen’s demonstration of the independence of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis from the other axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel, set theory has proven that it is incapable of resolving its own central animating problem. Cohen completes set theory insofar as he has shown that it cannot be totalized, and that, even at the heart of the most rigorous formal proofs, there must be a point of decision that formal proofs cannot themselves decide. The choice of set theory as meta-ontology for Badiou is because it attempts to seize the eventual occurrence of being in the discourse concerning being itself, and proves that this cannot be done. Yet forcing furthermore shows that what cannot be known is nonetheless capable of being thought. As for Heidegger, for Badiou: truth is separated from knowledge; the question of being is central, but only insofar as the primacy of epistemology is evaded; the question of the inconsistency of the event must be integrated into the inquiry; and so on. With the proof of an immanent aporia of set theory itself, the techniques of that proof thereafter enable a formalization of truth that binds the foreclosed void of being to the vanished fragment of the event. Perhaps this is the weirdest aspect of the relationship between Badiou and Heidegger that I am trying to trace here: even as Badiou reverses and displaces all of Heidegger’s key thematics, he himself mimes and completes the itinerary of the Heideggerian project in an anti-Heideggerian way. In a sequence of writings published in the immediate aftermath of Being and Event, Badiou pursues his polemic with Heidegger. This polemic takes two major routes:  (1) a direct assault on Heidegger’s propositions regarding the alleged ‘planetary reign of technique’, in which he repeats, in a clarified fashion, many of the criticisms broached in Being and Event; (2) an indirect critique of the grounds 39 Ibid., 17.



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of Heidegger’s rejection of mathematics as, first, unexpectedly consonant with the analytical affirmation of mathematics and, second, both as downstream of the ‘Romantic gesture of disintrication’ of philosophy and mathematics. The first of these is most evident in Manifesto for Philosophy, where Badiou reasserts that mathematics, metaphysics, and technology must be separated at the level of the concept. As he puts it in a chapter titled ‘Nihilism?’ We shall not accept that the word ‘technology’ – even were we to resonate the Greek tekhnè within it – is apt to designate the essence of our time, nor that there be any relation useful to thought between ‘technology’s planetary reign’ and ‘nihilism’. The meditations, calculations and diatribes about technology, widespread though they are, are nonetheless uniformly ridiculous.40

While Badiou’s separation of this triplet is indisputably justifiable, it is not prima facie self-evident that his nomination of Heidegger’s position can be so simply dismissed as ‘uniformly ridiculous’. Even given the self-professedly polemical context of a manifesto – assertoric, divisive, hyperbolic – such remarks do not really touch at all upon the details of Heidegger’s analyses of technology, even in the truncated form that I have supplied above. And even if one accepts that Heidegger is indeed ‘nostalgic’, ‘melancholic’ and ‘reactionary’, one has not effectively refuted his claims nor deconstructed his demonstrations through casting such adjectival aspersions. Indeed, Badiou seems not to think that the thinking of technology is an especially pressing concern for philosophy today: ‘If I  had to give my opinion on technology, whose relation to the contemporary demands of philosophy is fairly scant, it would much rather be to regret that it is still so mediocre, so timid.’41 Even if one agrees with such a statement – and it is by no means entirely implausible – this is hardly to give any concept at all to the matter. One is almost reminded of the Platonic disdain for the workers in arts and crafts, as well as their sophistic theorists, for being unable to give any consistent rational account or true idea for their practices and products – other than time and money, of course. The Platonic identification of technical knowhow with established and unjust powers is presumably still at work in Badiou’s thinking. What is slightly more persuasive, however, is Badiou’s reassignation of the predicates Heidegger assigns to the modern epoch to the operations of capitalism itself, and here Badiou provides much stronger indications. This

40 A. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. N. Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999), 53. 41 Ibid., 53–4.

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reassignation, moreover, can be immediately coupled with Badiou’s useful and incisive comments regarding the decoupling of mathematics and philosophy at the moment of Romanticism – itself of course almost strictly coterminous with the Industrial Revolution. As Badiou writes in an essay in Conditions, having first demonstrated how Hegel, above all, was crucial in the severance of the ancient bond between mathematics and philosophy, which was nonnegotiable for almost all his major predecessors in modern philosophy, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and, to some extent, even Kant: ‘Romantic speculation opposes time and life as temporal ecstasies to the abstract and empty eternity of mathematics.’42 As a result of this definitive Hegelian disintrication, Empiricist and positivist attitudes, which have been highly influential for the last two centuries, merely invert the Romantic speculative gesture. The claim that science constitutes the one and only paradigm of the positivity of knowledge can only be made from within a complete disentwining of science and philosophy. The anti-philosophical verdict of positivisms reverse the antiscientific verdict of romantic philosophy, but without altering its fundamental principles. It is striking that Heidegger and Carnap disagreed about everything, except about the idea that it is incumbent upon us to inhabit and practise the end of Metaphysics.43

This brilliant analysis again stages some of the difficulties of assigning philosophical influence: Carnap and Heidegger’s irresolvable antagonism finds a zone of indistinction which, unbeknownst to its participants, is itself a historical symptom of the Romantic quarrel between philosophy and mathematics. The displacements, rejections, inversions and subversions of twentieth-century philosophy share a common, unknown and unthought origin in Hegel’s philosophy – an origin that almost all would, moreover, repudiate! Badiou conclusively demonstrates here that the fundamental reason for the Hegelian banishment of mathematics from the field of proper philosophical conceptuality is due to a new rivalry over a very particular concept: that of the infinite.44 Time entails finitude; mathematics projects eternality and infinity. If there is not the space to discuss the details of this polemic in further detail here, what can be again underlined for the purposes of this chapter is simply how 42 A. Badiou, Conditions, trans. S. Corcoran (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 97. 43 Ibid., 95. 44 On this point, see my own entry under ‘Romanticism’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. S. Corcoran (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and my chapter ‘Sublime or Infinite?’ in The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192–215.



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directly, explicitly and extensively Badiou’s Being and Event and its spin-offs are committed to, even constituted by, the confrontation with Heidegger. To sum up:  Badiou’s entire later work, from Being and Event onwards, is polarized by Heidegger, a philosophical polarization that orients, in a negative vein, all of the key constructions of Being and Event and, hence, all Badiou’s development since. Taking up the Heideggerian return to Being, as well as the German’s crucial distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, Badiou revisions both by arguing that, contra Heidegger, ontology is not ‘the fundamental question’ of Western philosophy; ontology is rather external to philosophy; yet, in its irreducible externality, it nonetheless functions as one indispensable condition of philosophy. Mathematics is ontology. Such mathematics has almost none of the characteristics that Heidegger assigns it: it is pure, void, inventive and constitutively exceeds any particular technical application. Moreover, contemporary set theoretical mathematics as the contemporary form of the discourse on Being enables us to affirm the banal infinity of Being, against the finitude assigned it by Heidegger; it also provides us with a motif, the generic, that proves truth and being are compatible, while retaining the necessity for a subject (of decision). Yet we also find that Badiou’s thought, however inventive and persuasive, also fails to deal seriously with something that Heidegger thought about more deeply and originally than perhaps any other twentieth-century philosopher:  the question concerning technology. Even today, across a wide slew of studies into technology, both present and historical, Heidegger is omnipresent, if often obscured. He was perhaps the most significant influence over such thinkers of technology as Hubert Dreyfus, Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler and, through them, to a contemporary range of thinkers such as Yuk Hui and Benjamin Bratton. As I have noted, Badiou’s theses regarding technology (and, significantly, his remarks concerning biology, too) are, by comparison, marginal and weak: it is currently difficult to see any significant work in this area deriving from him.45 The consequences of this paradoxical situation currently remain obscure. If, as Badiou himself would say, no philosophy can think the totality of being because there is no such thing, it is bracing to consider that Heidegger can only establish his non-metaphysical thinking of technology on the basis of what now appears an exemplary metaphysical error, while Badiou can ‘correct’ 45 See J. Clemens and A. Nash, ‘Irremediability: On the Very Concept of Digital Ontology’. In Digital Existence:  Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed. A. Lagerkvist (London/ New York: Routledge, 2018) for a more extended account of Heidegger and Badiou’s contributions in this regard.

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Heidegger only at the price of losing the capacity to intervene seriously in the regime of technology. Badiou provides us with an ‘advance’ in the thinking of being and truth – that is, in the creation of new propositions that, as they take into account the Heideggerian intervention, cannot be easily recouped by it – at the cost of a ‘regression’ in his thinking of technology. Badiou also shares several points of agreement with Heidegger, with the appropriate nuances. The first is that philosophy does indeed begin in earnest in Ancient Greece. Second, if they differ in their evaluation of the key philosophical figures, they both agree that the same figures are crucial, above all, that the Greek and German sites of philosophy are decisive. Third, if they differ in their respective evaluations of poetry and mathematics, both agree that poetry provides a kind of matrix of the event itself; in fact, Badiou, in the wake of Heidegger, retains a concept of the poem as the matrix of the nomination of an event to which it itself belongs. There is thus a kind of ‘integration’ of Heidegger’s crucial theses, at the very moment that Badiou machinates a displacement. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Badiou completes and transcends the Heideggerian program by justifying a new way of knotting together truth-event, being and the subject. In doing so, however, Badiou perhaps forces us into a new epoch of thinking, one in which he – as well as we – find ourselves lost in una selva oscura. We live in obscure times, Badiou frequently asserts, invariably quoting Stéphane Mallarmé’s great sonnet on Edgar Allan Poe as he does so: chu d’un désastre obscur . . .

Beyond the intra-philosophical allusions here to Heraclitus the Obscure and despite several of his own declarations to the contrary, Badiou’s procedure at such moments suggests a final analogy: Badiou cites Mallarmé just as Heidegger cites Hölderlin, as a guide, a Weise, for his own thought. But, unlike Heidegger, poetry is not his only guide. For as Badiou also says, ‘Just as the ontologies of Presence [i.e. Heidegger!] cite and comment upon the great poems of Hölderlin, Trakl and Celan . . . here one must allow me . . . the right to cite and dissect the mathematical text.’ More pointedly yet: ‘These citations, all things considered, are more universally accessible and univocal than those of the poets.’46 These differences, however, are only preliminary indications. The consequences of the paradoxical and polemical relationship between Badiou and Heidegger still remain substantially undrawn. 46 Badiou, Being and Event, 18.

8

Can a Philosopher Have Dirty Hands? What Adorno Has to Say about Badiou Alexander García Düttmann

Adorno and Badiou are both concerned with the question of praxis, of intervening in the world so as to change it, not partially but radically. They differ when it comes to conceiving of the manner in which this should be achieved. For Badiou, it is a matter of making coherent and consistent decisions in particular setups. For Adorno, it is a matter of destabilizing the decision-making process itself since, for him, the need to choose between options prevents radical change from taking place. But what does this mean for the philosopher, for Adorno and Badiou as philosophers? Is the insistence on practical and political interventions, the holding fast to a revolutionary perspective, as remote as the transition from theory to praxis may prove, compatible with a philosophical vocation? How must the philosopher face, if at all, the so-called problem of dirty hands? And is there something in this context that Adorno may have to say about Badiou, or even to Badiou, who is critical of negative dialectics since he considers it to be an antiphilosophical endeavour? Let’s rehearse a few general answers to the question whether a philosopher can have dirty hands. Here is a first answer. A philosopher cannot have dirty hands since he is concerned with the good or with truth. The moment his hands get dirty, the moment he allows himself to be corrupted by worldly matters, matters that carry corruption by the fact of being worldly – though such matters are not the only possible corrupting source as there may also exist a corruption of the mind – he ceases to be a philosopher, and it is uncertain whether he will ever be a philosopher again. What would purify him? The rigorism implied in this first answer is denied by those who give it. In their eyes, a philosopher who is really concerned with the good or with truth will never be tempted by anything that could corrupt him; hence his concern cannot be considered a form of

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rigorism. Sartre, in an interview with Paolo Caruso that addresses the problems thematized and presented by his play Dirty Hands, denounces the rigorism that lies in the Stalinist version of what he calls the ‘demand of praxis’.1 Such rigorism comes with a totalizing effect, he says – if someone turns out to be a traitor, or is accused of treachery, he must always have been a traitor, and will probably remain one unless he undergoes a radical change. So we find the same argument on both sides, on the side of the ‘demand of praxis’ and on the side of what could be termed the ‘demand of theory’, or the ‘demand of philosophy’. There is a second answer to the question whether a philosopher can have dirty hands. A philosopher must have dirty hands; he must compromise his means if he is to achieve his ends, namely rendering truth effective. Why? Because there is a ‘demand of praxis’ inscribed in the ‘demand of philosophy’. Philosophy must position itself under the condition of politics. The good, or truth, must acquire a reality in the world if it is to be rescued from the kind of corruption that threatens purism, the corruption lurking in an ideality all the more exposed to the vicissitudes of the world the more it seeks to keep apart, to keep to itself, unperturbed by what it takes to be mere shadows and illusions. In Dirty Hands, the play, Hoederer, a revolutionary leader whose murder the Communist Party has ordered because of his willingness to collaborate with reactionary political forces who do not aim for the revolution, tells Hugo, his idealist assassin:  How you cling to your purity, my dear boy! How you are afraid of besmirching your hands. Well then, stay pure! Whom will your purity serve and why do you come to us? Purity is an idea that belongs to fakirs and monks. You, intellectuals and bourgeois anarchists, turn it into a pretext so as not to engage with this or that. Not to do anything, to remain unmoved, to press one’s elbows against one’s body, to wear gloves. I have got dirty hands. Up to the elbows. I have plunged them into shit and blood. And then what? Do you assume that one can govern innocently?2

In his translation, or rewriting, of Plato’s Republic, Alain Badiou has Socrates warn Glaucus against an ‘aristocratic minority’3 that reaches the mind’s heights and enjoys the ‘Idea of Truth’ without showing an interest in politics, in the fact that historical and social conditions must be established that allow everyone to participate equally in this idea, in an idea that is not an idea since truth 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Entretien avec Paolo Caruso’ (1964, excerpt), in Théâtre complet (La Pléiade, Paris:  Gallimard 2005), 370. (All references are to the French and German originals, and the translations herein are the author’s own.) 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mains sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 198. 3 Alain Badiou, La République de Platon (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 375.



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‘supports the ideality of all ideas’4 and rather than pertaining to the ‘order of what offers itself to thought’5 releases, or sublates, it. What the contemplation of the scholarly lucky few misses, then, is the link between the ‘Idea of Truth’ and the ‘Communist Idea’.6 Obviously it could be argued that the ‘Communist Idea’ needs to be situated beyond the realm of ideas, too, or beyond ‘what offers itself to thought’, it being only the practical aspect of philosophy’s claim to truth. Hence the corruption lurking in a self-sufficient ideality is the corruption of nihilism. Unable to conceive of a relationship between truth and semblance, unable to descend into the cavern or the cinema of shadows, the purism of the good, or truth, the defence of an untouched ideality, must advocate an elitist nihilism of the world, of appearance, and fall prey to semblance, to illusion. What is it that one may find striking about these two prototypical answers to the question of the philosopher’s possible or necessary corruption? One may find striking that the same conclusion can be drawn from both, namely that no matter how different and even opposed the answers may seem, the hands of the philosopher end up clean  – dirt proves incapable of sticking to them. The philosopher may have plunged his hands into ‘shit and blood’. But once reality will have touched upon the ‘Communist idea’, once each and every individual will have become a philosopher, once each and every individual will have been capable of following the injunction ‘all philosophers!’ that Badiou attributes to Socrates but also repeats in his own name at the end of his paper on the ‘enigmatic relationship between philosophy and politics’,7 ‘shit and blood’ will have been washed away, corruption and violence will have been justified and thereby turned into agents of integrity, rectitude, clarity and distinction. Whether or not ‘hybrid and doubtlessly violent’8 circumstances may allow for ‘the possibility of a politics aligned with the Communist hypothesis’ to emerge, as Badiou’s Socrates contends, whether or not, in a period of clandestine armed resistance, the terrible menace of an overpowering enemy may reveal as ‘inevitable’ the ‘physical suppression’9 of single individuals who oppose the party line, as Sartre contends, whether or not placing philosophy under the condition of political ideas or truths may end up inscribing it in a situation of 4 Ibid., 370. 5 Ibid., 357. 6 Ibid., 378. 7 ‘From the moment the existence of philosophy, placed under the condition of politics, will be democratic in the communist sense of the word, retrospectively as well as prospectively, it will be possible to define it as stemming from all and directed at all.’ See Alain Badiou, La relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique (Paris: Éditions Germina, 2011), 46. 8 Badiou, La République de Platon, 336. 9 Sartre, ‘Entretien avec Paolo Caruso’, 367.

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‘absolute antagonism’10 that combines ‘terror’, ‘absolute authoritarianism’ and ‘fundamental equality’ by forcing each individual to make a choice, and calls for the ‘substitutability’ of all individuals located in a ‘specific political camp’, as Badiou contends – eventually the philosopher will come out clean and proper from the succession of compromising struggles into which he will have been enmeshed. Philosophers are the only beings who do not know what it means to have dirty hands. Their hands never get stuck in ‘shit and blood’, regardless of how deeply they have plunged them into the mess of the world. Ultimately, there is no problem of dirty hands for the philosopher. Or if there is, it is the problem of what ceasing to be a philosopher means. Must I cease to be a philosopher, heed the ‘demand of praxis’, so that, once my practical engagement will have paid off at the cost of my hands having been stained I  will be able to become a philosopher again, a philosopher who will have contributed to bringing about a practical totality of philosophy and turning every single individual into a philosopher with clean hands, myself included? In this case, the ‘demand of praxis’ would either be understood as a philosophical demand, as a demand that cannot be corrupted in any serious manner, or else it would indicate a resistance to philosophy that seriously threatens to compromise its ambition to accomplish the totality intended by Socrates’s and Badiou’s injunction, ‘all philosophers!’ Hoederer at one point in the play tells Hugo that ‘intellectuals’ cannot really act, that they must think, consider the consequences of an act and thereby condemn themselves to inactivity. The word ‘intellectuals’ targets philosophers, especially. Will there not always be an unwanted or unforeseen and unforeseeable consequence that, for philosophers, will stand in the way of ‘efficiency’? Two incompatible automatisms seem to clash here, the automatism of a mind that cannot help but think – ‘il faut que ça pense’11 – and the automatism of hands that cannot help but put themselves to work, because the revolution is not a question of meritoriousness but of successful outcomes – ‘il y a du travail à faire, c’est tout’.12 Philosophers, then, may be regarded as exceptional beings. Their hands are impervious to dirt. Unless, of course, no one has dirty hands because we are all innocents with dirty hands. From the perspective opened up by this hypothesis, evil, the power of corruption, is so much stronger than us, or than anything to do with our nature, that, when corrupted, we remain untouched,

10 Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 34. 11 Sartre, Les mains sales, 218. 12 Ibid., 222.



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forever shielded because of our weakness, our fundamental exposure. There is always innocence within us that evil cannot reach, not because of evil’s lack of power but precisely because of its overpowering essence. Innocence does not need to resist evil. Entirely at the mercy of evil and its insidious, rebellious, and contagious violence, it restores itself before evil can corrupt it. Our hands are so dirty that dirt falls off them. There is, however, a philosophical exception to the rule that states the incompatibility of philosophy with worldly corruption, whether on account of its ideality or on account of its efficiency. It can be encountered in Heidegger’s conception of truth as untruth. Truth, this conception claims, harbours error and erring within itself, yet does not put them to work in the guise of negativity, of speculative self-recognition. In his famous essay on the essence of truth, Heidegger writes that truth and untruth are not ‘indifferent’13 towards each other but ‘belong to one another essentially’; accordingly, erring is the ‘essential counter-essence’14 to the ‘primordial essence of truth’. To the extent that the decision to support National Socialism militantly, and to do so as a philosopher who wishes to distinguish between true and untrue forms of National Socialism, is an expression of Heidegger giving the ‘demand of praxis’ all the weight philosophy requires it to carry, an expression of Heidegger’s appropriation of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, as it were, it is not possible to regard such political engagement as external to the philosophical work itself, just as it appears impossible to reduce the philosophical work to it and to its consequences, two approaches represented, on the one hand, by the separatism Badiou and Cassin stipulate in their essay on Heidegger, Nazism, women, and philosophy, and, on the other hand, by the extremism Adorno pursues when claiming that the 13 Martin Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’, in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978, 2nd rev. edn), 188. Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, posits that there is no relation between truth and the most extreme form of untruth he knows: the obfuscation triggered by myth, which he distinguishes from the untruth of mere error. Myth is utterly indifferent to truth, and this is why it can be so destructive, or why one’s hands must get dirty when our minds are mythically clouded. There is no truth of myth. Only cognition, as a third term not to be conflated with truth, can relate to both, truth and myth. While cognition is something we may possess, truth seems to be something in which we can dwell, and in which everything appears to be just as it is. Despite the apparent incompatibility in their respective conceptions of truth and untruth, there is an affinity between Heidegger and Benjamin when it comes to conceiving of truth as a dwelling place (Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandschaften, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. I.1 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974], 162). Peter Trawny, in his essay on erring in Heidegger, asks: ‘What happens to philosophy when we separate it from errance? Is it possible to separate it from errance? Would such an attempt at immunisation not be the worst kind of errance?’ See Peter Trawny, Irrnisfuge (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2014), 19. Further on in the text he writes: ‘The most terrifying thing, according to Heidegger, is not that we kill but that we do not pay any attention to the origin of our freedom to kill’ (57). 14 Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’, 194.

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‘innermost cells’ of Heidegger’s philosophy are imbued with ‘fascism’.15 Rather, one would need to risk the hypothesis that the German philosopher’s political commitment, which prolongs, and extends into, his philosophical meditations, stuffing the history of being with anti-Semitic and racist elements, produces an aporia that exposes the essence of truth as he conceives of it, an essence that, split into an essence and a counter-essence, escapes the philosopher’s mastery. Precisely because it is always possible to make the wrong choice and because, even when one makes the right choice, no crime and no criminal complicity can be made light of and forgotten if the good is to prevail, it exposes the unresolvable tension between probity and corruption that expresses the problem, or the dilemma, of dirty hands when applied to philosophy. Can a philosopher have dirty hands? The answer now is: yes, he can, and that’s why one never knows what it actually means to be a philosopher; that’s why the philosopher, once he acknowledges the ‘demand of praxis’ as a demand of philosophy itself, generates both separatism and extremism as reactions to his thought. An unresolvable tension between probity and corruption expresses the problem of dirty hands when applied to philosophy. Yet is the problem or the dilemma of dirty hands ever applied to philosophy? Is it not a philosophical dilemma to the extent that some notion of the good is at stake – a notion of the good that no longer figures in Badiou’s active translation of Plato’s Republic, at least not explicitly, because he replaces it with the notion of truth? A shift from truth to the good,16 from the abolition of untruth to the historical, social and political realization of the good, can be detected in one of Hoederer’s replies in Dirty Hands. It is with Hoederer, who pretends to ‘make a politics of the living, for the living’,17 that Sartre, the self-professed critical companion of communism, identifies when pressed to identify with a figure in his play: ‘We shall not abolish lying by refusing to tell lies but by using every means at hand to abolish social classes’,18 Hoederer states. Michael Walzer, in the final paragraph of his essay on the problem of dirty hands, comments upon this statement as follows:  I suspect we shall not abolish lying at all, but we might see to it that fewer lies were told if we contrived to deny power and glory to the greatest liars – except, of 15 See Alexander García Düttmann, ‘Das Ungedachte’, in Gegen die Selbsterhaltung. Ernst und Unernst des Denkens (Berlin: August Verlag, 2016). 16 ‘The “good” here does not mean what is orderly in the moral sense, but the valiant, which achieves and can achieve what is proper to it. The agathon is the standard as such, what first grants Being the potency to unfold essentially as idea, as prototype.’ See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014), 210f. 17 Sartre, Les mains sales, 195. 18 Ibid., 197.



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course, in the case of those lucky few whose extraordinary achievements make us forget the lies they told. If Hoederer succeeds in abolishing social classes, perhaps he will join the lucky few. Meanwhile, he lies, manipulates, and kills, and we must make sure he pays the price. We won’t be able to do that, however, without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some way of paying the price ourselves.19

If one assumes that it is not merely by choice that philosophy meets the ‘demand of praxis’, as if it could just as well refuse to do so, the philosopher can still make wrong choices, as the case of Heidegger shows. Is he less of a philosopher for that? What choices will Socrates have to make after choosing ‘true politics’,20 the politics that does not discard philosophy, and recognizing that one can never ‘do exactly as one says’,21 given that, when measured against the desired participation in truth, ‘nature’ always imposes moments of inertia and resistance to action and prevents it from matching discourse, true discourse? It is a this point that it may prove helpful to turn to Badiou’s theory of points in his Logics of the Worlds, which comprises a reference to Sartre’s Dirty Hands, to a ‘theatre of points’,22 and to confront it with Adorno’s critique of decision making and choice in his Negative Dialectics, which also refers to Sartrean drama. In his radio talk on political engagement and art, Adorno mentions Dirty Hands and calls it one of its author’s finest achievements. The relevance of the point for Badiou resides, on the one hand, in the crucial role it plays when change is to occur, or when a point of inexistence allows for the radical transformation of existence, while, on the other hand, it resides in the disclosure of a world in which a truth appears. For change to occur, an element needs to be distinguished that is part of being, of a pure multiple appearing in and as a world but that, in this world, exists as little as possible and hence can be said to have a value of zero. It denotes a withdrawal of being, the possibility for a pure multiple to appear in another world, and to do so differently. There is always only one such element or point for every object that appears in a world. When the necessary inexistence of such an element or point ceases to have a value of zero, when value is attributed to it because it comes into existence, an event has taken place that has destroyed the cohesion of an existing world and that modifies its basis, the transcendental indexation of its beings, as Badiou writes 19 Michael Walzer, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2.2 (Winter 1973): 180. 20 Badiou, La République de Platon, 291. 21 Ibid., 287. 22 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 426.

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using a term from Kantian philosophy. Seizing this reminiscence as a pretext, one could quote the French writer Charles Péguy, who observes that Kantian philosophy has ‘pure hands’23 and yet has ‘no hands at all’, as if having hands meant always having ‘calloused’, ‘gnarled’, even ‘sinful’ hands, and sometimes also ‘full hands’, the hands of a fortunate because innocent person. Socrates, in Badiou’s rendering of the Republic, captures the idea of inexistence coming into existence in simple terms: ‘What we require is a unique and inexisting, yet real point that must be identified and drawn out for everything to change. Then, the truth of the political body will transpire. Yes indeed! Let’s change this one point at the edge of nothingness and we will be able to show that the totality of the State in question changes entirely.’24 It is here, at the point where a point is changed by lifting it from its inexistence, and where such change induces a revolutionary change, a change that concerns a world or a political State, that Badiou differs from deconstructive thought for, in his late homage to Derrida, he charges him with not recognizing that a point of inexistence in a world in which a multiple appears indicates not only the contingency of this world but also the possibility of another world, or the ‘possibility of a full existence elsewhere’,25 for example, the full existence of a communist political body in which all individuals will have become philosophers. But does not such a body itself conceal an element, or a point, of inexistence, a further withdrawal of being, as one might be led to assume in the wake of Badiou? If so, ‘full existence’ must always be ‘elsewhere’, the revolution must always be a permanent one,26 and Badiou would come rather close to Derrida, though a deconstructionist might infer from such constitutive delay, from the fact that ‘full existence’ can only be had at the expense of its dependence on an ‘elsewhere’, that the identification of a point of inexistence must also remain uncertain. This uncertainty would highlight the inevitability of contamination between objects and between worlds, the unavoidability of corruption and dirty hands. Writing ‘inexistance’ with an ‘a’, as Badiou pledges to do, would not be merely a tribute paid to the forcefulness of the thought of ‘différance’, or to the ‘passion of Inexistance’. Is some of this forcefulness not equally distinctive of 23 Charles Péguy, ‘Victor Marie, comte Hugo’, in Oeuvres en prose completes, La Pléiade, vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 331. I am grateful to Jean-Luc Nancy for alerting me to this passage. 24 Badiou, La République de Platon, 288. 25 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 571. 26 Even if one were to say that in a communist society the point of inexistence would no longer concern the revolutionary passage from capitalism to communism, whatever its instances and intermediary stages, each transformation of the world as a whole induced by the coming-into-existence of a point of inexistence must amount to a revolution, whether it concerns the relationship between society and nature or some other aspect of its organization.



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what one could term the ‘passion of non-identity’ in Adorno’s thought, the constant quest for a ‘no man’s land between the boundary-posts of being and nothingness’?27 It is ‘point by point’ that a world is disclosed, that it ceases to be lifeless, a world without stress and tension, a world in which everything communicates infinitely, and in which intensity, always conditional on some isolation and solitude, on the interruption effected by a halt, on the concentration that the creation of a place entails, is reduced to a minimum. For Badiou, disclosing a world ‘point by point’, and doing so each time at the point where the subjective, or a truth procedure, and the objective, or a multiple that appears in the world, differ and touch, is tantamount to making decisions and choices. A decision has a double aspect, then: it has the subjective aspect of a course of action whose choice may alter the course of things and the objective aspect of a contraction whose result is the unavoidable limitation to two, and only two, possible ways for things to continue in the world. Points take on the form of alternatives. They resemble knots binding the world to the world, so that it can generate binding relationships, affirmations, instead of drowning in the endless variations of mere occasions that define ordinary action. When one has a point, one has two clean and pure hands – on the one hand, on the other hand – while when one inhabits a world without points one remains enmeshed in a ‘many-sided impurity’.28 Points are narrow gates29 and tribunals, strictures which turn the world into a place of situations, or into a site of stakes, risks, efforts and commitments. They operate, in a worldly situation, as testing schemes for the ‘appearance of a truth’, as schemes which locate the transcendental topologically and bodily by placing the world in its infinity and variety before the ‘instance of the Two’,30 of the option between yes and no, truth and opinion, pledge and indifference. With every single point and the act, the choice, it imposes, the totality of the world is at stake. There is a correlation between, on the one hand, the idea of 27 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 374. 28 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 427. 29 André Gide’s novel La porte étroite  – a title that alludes to the Gospels, to Luke and Matthew  – features a journal written by its main female character, Alissa. One can gauge from this journal that the passage through the ‘narrow’ or ‘strait’ gate, when understood spiritually, is also a progressive one, one that occurs step by step: ‘I imagine heavenly joy, not as a confounding of the spirit with God, but as an infinite, a perpetual drawing near to Him . . . and if I were not afraid of playing upon words I should say that I did not care for any joy that was not progressive.’ See André Gide, La porte étroite (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 163. How extensive is the intensive totality intended by Badiou’s injunction ‘all philosophers’? 30 Ibid., 421. Peter Szendy briefly discusses Badiou’s ‘theory of points’ and stresses that a ‘dual decision’ always also chooses the ‘form of the alternative itself ’, not only one of two options. See Peter Szendy, À coups de points (Paris: Minuit, 2013), 145.

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the world as a totality that is at stake in a decision and, on the other hand, the constitution of a subject in the decision-making process, since such a subject has decided to acknowledge, or not, a political, artistic, amorous, or scientific truth, to adhere faithfully to, or to betray, a truth that forces the world to appear differently on account of a coming into existence of a point of inexistence. It is for a subject that constitutes itself as it makes decisions and choices that the world as a totality is at stake, the world that intensifies as a truth appears at the site of a point. The totality implied in the injunction ‘all philosophers!’ is the totality of a deciding subject, of a subject that decides in favour of viewing the world as totality, no matter which choice or decision it makes, and of viewing it as the totality of the ‘Communist Idea’ or ‘Communist hypothesis’ which alone allows individuals to participate in truth equally, as if only the totality of an equal participation in truth could be a true totality. Hence, for the philosopher as Badiou conceives of him, the problem of dirty hands is not so much the problem of a demand of praxis in general, or in the abstract, but of a demand that reveals itself to be the demand of passing through the gates of points in particular situations and in so doing appearing before the tribunal of an appearing truth. The problem of dirty hands is not the problem of a praxis that cannot but put an ideal at risk by forcing the individual idealist to become a realist, to compromise, or even to act as a criminal. Rather, it is the problem of making a decision that permits a truth procedure to persevere and continue in the world. It is the problem of resisting betrayal, the ‘sacrifice’31 of a truth induced by a refusal to decide and choose. It is the problem of making the right choice and decision, the choice and decision that do not cause disaster, or a cessation, a reflux, destruction. Having had to sacrifice so much for the sake of discipline, or for the sake of the strict and predictable organization of the Party’s revolutionary activities, Hugo asks Hoederer not to ‘sacrifice’ these ‘sacrifices’ with his ‘own hands’,32 not to make the wrong decision, not to get his hands dirty so as to attain an ideal through efficient action, even though, in the play, this action, Hoederer’s readiness to collaborate with the enemy, is designed to prevent further ‘sacrifices’33 of human lives. A situation is always a situation of solitude. It is so by definition, for it is a break with ‘universal communication’ that produces it. Hence the problem of dirty hands, the problem of how to sacrifice and how not to sacrifice, the

31 Ibid., 422. 32 Sartre, Les mains sales, 194. 33 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Entretien avec J. B. Jeener’ (1948, excerpt), in Théâtre complet, 364.



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problem of how to maintain a purity without abandoning it to an impure ‘suicidal propensity’,34 which the philosopher, the one who seeks to transform everybody else into a philosopher, must feel more intensely and unsparingly, is a problem that poses itself as the result and in view of a situation of solitude. Yet there is also a solitude that the prospect of the point, the necessity of choosing between two options, thrusts upon the subject. The subject confronted with the purifying simplification of an ‘implacable duality’35 – in Sartre’s play, Hugo the idealist – the subject that projects the many worldly facets into a binary respectful of the conjunctions and infoldings that are typical of the transcendental configuration of a world, is a solitary subject, a subject that undergoes an ‘existential gathering’, a subject that cannot turn elsewhere for help and support, whether it is a group of individuals who must come up with a decision or an individual left to his own devices. Is there not also a third form of solitude involved in making a choice or a decision at the point where a truth is to appear and proliferate in the world, namely the solitude of the act itself, of the demand of praxis that manifests itself first as a demand to make choices and decisions? After receiving the order to kill Hoederer, whom the Party sees now as a treacherous dissident, Hugo reflects on what acting means: ‘I left the order behind and moved forward all by myself and . . . I no longer even know why.’36 When one acts, one is alone since acting always relies on someone actually doing the act, on someone practically holding on to his or her freedom and taking on the freedom of others, or relinquishing it, regardless of how replaceable the acting agent may be according to the logic of the Party, the organization’s sacrificial economy of life and death. This solitude is especially dangerous as it threatens the agent with forgetfulness. To the extent that the automatism designated by the locution ‘it thinks’ conflicts with the automatism designated by the locution ‘it acts’, or ‘it works’, to the extent that the making of a decision is not enshrined by a set of given criteria that revoke the decision as it is made, to the extent that one can make the wrong decision and therefore acts alone, spontaneously, freely, and yet strangely coerced, there is a moment in the act when reasons don’t apply, when one feels abandoned by deliberation, reflection and calculus, by the principle of reason, and when one cannot know whether one’s hands are clean or dirty. ‘I no longer even know why.’ Badiou underlines the relation between decision and freedom when he investigates the ambiguous nature of the point and refers to the ‘subjective’37 34 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 429. 35 Ibid., 426. 36 Sartre, Les mains sales, 22. 37 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 423.

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metaphors in which decisions tend to be cast. They all convey the following message: ‘to do it or not to do it, all depends on me’. These metaphors collide with ‘objective’ ones that indicate a necessity rather than the deciding subject’s freedom. They all convey a different message:  ‘Here, there are only two possibilities for pressing forward, nothing can be done about that.’ Ultimately, though, it is obvious that, if a decision’s dimension of necessity, its topological rootedness in a situation of duality, renders its experience more intense and more urgent, a decision from which all freedom would have been excised would not be able to fulfil the task Badiou ascribes to it, namely the task of militant faithfulness to the event of an appearing truth. Without the decision’s dimension of freedom, truths would not appear in the world and the world would be, at best, a more or less functioning machine. In the chapter on Kant that provides one of the so-called models of his Negative Dialectics, Adorno, after referring to the familiarity he detects between Kant’s examples, or moral ‘thought experiments’, in the Critique of Practical Reason, and Sartre’s ‘existential ethics’, points out that freedom is irreconcilable with alternatives. Only the individual who does not have to yield to an alternative, whether he does occasionally or ‘point by point’, can be said to be free:  Kant knew well that good will is conveyed in the continuity of a lifetime rather than in isolated acts; but in the experiment, to make it prove what it should, he exacerbates good will into a choice between two alternatives. That continuity hardly exists anymore  – which is why Sartre, in a kind of regression to the eighteenth century, clings to the decision alone. Yet the alternative situation, which is supposed to demonstrate autonomy, is heteronomous before it is filled with a specific content [. . .] A free man would only be one who need not bow to any alternatives, and under existing circumstances there is a touch of freedom in refusing to accept the alternatives. Freedom means to criticise and change situations, not to confirm them by deciding within their coercive structure.38

A previous passage from the same book denounces ‘given alternatives’ as heteronomous impositions that stem from ‘prevailing opinion’, which requires the ticking off of chosen options, and from the sphere of ‘administration’, or ‘bureaucracy’, which elicits ‘yes or no’ decisions in relation to ‘submitted drafts’. ‘The bureaucratic way of thinking’, Adorno states, ‘has become the secret model for a thought allegedly still free.’39 In the choosing of an option, of one alternative over the other, of a position opposed to another position, Adorno recognizes 38 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 225f. 39 Ibid., 42.



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an ‘extension of the coercion of conscience’ that triggers not simplification but oversimplification, a ‘coarsening process’ that renounces truth. Against such renunciation Adorno advocates the experience of vertiginousness as an experience of thought40, a ‘surrendering’ to the object that, unable to ‘hold on’ to something, arises the suspicion of lacking an ‘unequivocal position’. What holds for philosophical thought holds equally for art. When Adorno acknowledges that the controversy between committed and autonomous art is of the highest relevance for spirit, for the ‘possibility of spirit’,41 and hence for truth, this controversy should be understood as presenting the artist, in Badiouan language the one who engages in a truth procedure, with an alternative, an option, a choice, a decision to be made. Committed art does not lend itself to such an understanding because art vertiginously undoes the alternatives to which it seems to give rise. In fact, commitment itself does not have the consistency and the coherence necessary for it to form one side of an alternative, for example, in the guise of committed art opposed to autonomous, or formalist, or aesthetic, art. Adorno declares that it remains ‘politically ambiguous’,42 at least ‘for as long as it does not reduce itself to propaganda’, to a mockery of its very idea, of the freedom the concept of decision entails. The ambiguity of commitment becomes manifest in art when art unravels the dialectics that destabilize alternatives, something Adorno credits Sartre’s plays with achieving.43 For if alternatives can only appear as alternatives by acquiring a ‘prescribed form’,44 the form of duality, they suspend the freedom that the choice of one side of an alternative, or the decision in support of one option, should ascertain. Choice ceases to be choice and collapses into ‘choice enjoined’.45 Freedom, then, is associated by Adorno not with the subjective metaphors of dual choice in a situation but with the deforming intensity that lies in the vertiginousness of thought and that renders commitment, in art and in politics, unfit for the univocity its alternatives are supposed to promote, unfit for the univocity and the recognizability of the right 40 Adorno relates the experience of thought as experience of vertiginousness to an experience of the open. Badiou’s critique of openness as an ‘ideal’, which challenges the ‘matheme’, targets a ‘formal transformation’ that must always tend towards the ‘limit of non-form’ and therefore remains caught up in ‘idle waiting’. See Alain Badiou, Cinq lessons sur le ‘cas’ Wagner (Condé sur Noireau: Nous, 2010), 60. In Badiou’s seminar on Heidegger, which dates from 1986 to 1987, the wait implicit in Heidegger’s hope for a rescuing god is said to be a recipe for disaster: ‘Disaster, the abyss of death, is the only God we know’, in Heidegger. L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 27. 41 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Engagement’, in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 1965), 109. 42 Ibid., 110. 43 It honours Sartre, one reads in Negative Dialectics, that his plays ‘disavow the philosophy with whose theses they deal’. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 60. 44 Adorno, ‘Engagement’, 113. 45 Ibid.

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choice or the good intention: ‘What weighs heaviest against commitment in art is that even good intentions sound a false note when they are noticeable; they do so all the more when they disguise themselves because of that.’46 For Adorno, as one may gauge, a theory of points that operate as schemes and mediate between the transcendental and the appearance of a world, or a theory of decision making and commitment to a truth that appears in the world and frees it from numbing and lifeless neutrality, from being a worldless world, a world of neutral spectatorship, a world bereft of situations, will always be a theory of dirty hands, a practice that cannot touch the world without corrupting and falsifying it, without legitimizing the sacrifice of thought. There are two main reasons for such a conclusion, a more general one and one that concerns art more specifically. 1. The world disclosed, or intensified, on the grounds of the figure (of the) two is a world of untruth and unfreedom, given that two is a figure of worldly coercion, of coercion resulting from a particular world, a ‘mythical’ world, a world split by power, by social antagonism and exploitation. The object of such coercion is the vertiginousness that belongs to unbiased thought and comportment, or action. For free thought and comportment, or action, the figure (of the) two is not a neutral, innocent logical entity, a mathematical number that allows for ‘portentous, or fateful, possibilities of a world’47 to constitute themselves. 2. Art, if it is not to surrender to the coercion of the world, to a ‘prescribed form’, and if it is to preserve both its quality of thought and its quality of commitment, of active comportment towards the world, must endorse a ‘thoroughgoing articulation’48 that pushes the world to the ‘point of worldlessness’, even independently of the kind of world in which its truth appears. Adorno puts it like this: ‘All commitment to the world has to be canceled if the idea of the committed work of art is to be fulfilled.’ When one identifies the appeal that may originate in an artwork with its ‘thematic commitment’,49 in Dirty Hands with the question whether Hugo can be recovered for party politics despite his doubts, his detachment and his disenchantment, when one thereby subordinates the artwork to a ‘gesture of addressing’50 and encourages a ‘secret complicity’ between the artwork and its beholders, readers, listeners, or spectators, one

46 Ibid., 124. 47 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 431. 48 Adorno, ‘Engagement’, 129. 49 Ibid., 128. 50 Ibid., 133.



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subscribes to the ‘friendly approach to the world’ that such identification comprises and deserts the truth supposed to appear in the world. It can be gauged from what precedes that the point of contention between Adorno and Badiou in relation to the problem of dirty hands, of the philosopher’s dirty hands, is the point itself, and that what would need to be developed at this stage is a twofold question, the question of the experience of thought as experience of vertiginousness, and the question of a mediator that would not be a point established as duality. Let’s then add a few hints intended as closing remarks on the French–German border. 1. Thought as an experience of vertiginousness, as what Hegel, in his determination of truth, calls a Bacchanalian rapture, or frenzy, or revel, ‘in which no member is not drunk’,51 dissolves the object to which it surrenders. It discovers, it invents, it uncovers the object’s dissolution as its own movement, though not with the aim of appropriating this movement as a movement that would confer an intelligible identity to the object and to itself. Thought exaggerates, it keeps pushing the Dionysian reeling and transport of truth, the intensity of its ‘Taumel’ to the point where it begins to differ from theory and opinion because it reveals itself not to have, and not to be, an object, an option.52 Thought is anarchic. There is no philosophical position, no recognizable thought, just as there is no definite work of art. 2. For Adorno, what prompts action, practical or political interventions, and also the act of thinking itself, is less the detection of a gathering point, the making of a choice or a decision in a situation dominated by the tantalizing power of the two, than an uncontrollable ‘addendum’ that is neither extra- nor intra-mental, an undecidable ‘supplement’ that underlies the subject’s decisions, a ‘jolt’, a ‘jerk’, a ‘twitch’, an ‘impulse’, a ‘heartbeat’,53 a ‘spontaneity’, an ‘arbitrariness’ that affects thought, overcomes and interrupts it where it seeks ‘unflinching theoretical awareness’54 so as to attend to the needs of ‘true praxis’, to the ‘totality of acts that would satisfy the idea of freedom’ and that Badiou might consider as a

51 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 46. 52 This is also the point where the ‘Taumel’ of truth touches upon another ‘Taumel’, both a- and prephilosophical, that Derrida discusses in the context of a quasi-transcendental ‘stricture’ from which philosophy has always already arisen; philosophy as a formally organized, methodic, determining and justifying inquiry into truth; philosophy as speculative dialectics. See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 270. 53 Adorno speaks of a ‘heartbeat’ within and ‘yet beyond’ the res cogitans (Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 229). Against the spiritualization and rational assimilation of the will he also claims that there would be no will ‘if the hand no longer twitched’ (229). 54 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 228.

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philosophical totality, as a totality in which all agents would be philosophers. In the wake of Adorno, acts are in excess of the order and the continuity suggested by the following up of a truth procedure ‘point by point’,55 and this excess is their vertiginousness. In the wake of Adorno, the question ‘can a philosopher have dirty hands?’, the question of commitment, must be completed by adding a further qualification: ‘can the philosopher as anarchist have dirty hands?’ After all, the philosopher, no matter how much he may side with ‘true praxis’, cannot know what his jerking hand will do. Either he has a hand or he does not.

55 Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 423.

9

Yes and No, Adorno or Badiou: The Negativity of the Subject Christoph Menke Translated by Roland Végső

Does freedom consist in saying yes or no? How are we supposed to understand this choice between yes and no? Is freedom the power to say no or the power to say yes? Is freedom negativity or affirmation? A common answer to these questions holds that freedom is neither the one nor the other but the power to say yes or no – that is to say, it is the power to choose (or the power of indifference).1 This definition of freedom understands the latter as a specific capacity of the subject (the ability to choose). It thereby always already presupposes that there is a subject, that the agent of choice is a subject, who also possesses (or lacks) a number of other capacities. The question whether freedom is negativity or affirmation, however, concerns the being of the subject. This question understands freedom not as a specific capacity that the subject possesses but as something that the subject is.2 And the latter cannot be the capacity to choose since every choice is in turn preceded by an act that does not have the form of a choice. The subject produces itself through this act that is presupposed by the capacity to choose between yes and no. The definition of freedom as the being of the subject, therefore, implies that we understand the being of the subject as its self-generation. If freedom is the being of the subject (rather than one of its capacities or even one of its qualities), then the subject is precisely nothing but its own becoming. The subject understood in terms of freedom is a process and not a substance or an entity: the subject is ‘subjectivation’. 1 For a detailed genealogy and a critique of this concept of freedom, see Frank Ruda, Indifferenz und Wiederholung. Freiheit in der Moderne (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2018). 2 See Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995), 10.

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The question of freedom (whether freedom is negativity or affirmation) is, therefore, the question concerning the process of the subject: What does it mean to be a subject? Which means: what does it mean to proceed like a subject and, thereby, to constitute oneself as a subject? Alain Badiou describes the subject in terms of a ‘procedure, which is its being’.3 But in contrast to (almost) all other philosophers who understand the subject in terms of its own self-generation, Badiou does not rely on the concept of freedom.4 He develops a theory of the subject as a procedure of subjectivation that consistently avoids the concept of freedom (or, we could even say, he circumvents the concept of freedom). Yet he does not do so merely for strategic reasons  – because the concept of freedom is supposedly already co-opted by other positions that he aims to criticize. And he certainly does not do so out of mere carelessness. Rather, I  understand Badiou’s avoidance of the concept of freedom to be a consequence of his rejection of a category that has played an absolutely foundational role for modern philosophy: the category of negativity. What Badiou says about Paul also applies to his own thinking of the subject as procedure: ‘It eradicates negativity.’5 This is why, I assume, Badiou does not speak about the freedom of the subject: to speak of its freedom means to define the subject through the power of negativity (or, at least, this is what it meant traditionally from Hegel all the way to Heidegger, Sartre and Adorno). The decisive question for this interpretive hypothesis concerns a systematic point:  why would Badiou (like Paul or along with Paul) want to ‘eradicate’ negativity? The answer lies in his critique of the dialectic, that is to say, in his critique of the theory of determination developed by Hegel’s (positive) dialectic.6 Understood in dialectical terms, determination must be thought as (the negation of) negation, which means that (the true form of) determination must be grasped as ‘self-determination’. In what follows, I reconstruct this interpretive thesis about Hegel that forms the foundation of Badiou’s eradication of the concept of negativity. But here I  will not pursue the question whether or not this is a good interpretation of Hegel. The problem that interests me most is how Badiou’s 3 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 407. 4 This applies to both of the books by Badiou that I use as my exclusive references in what follows: Being and Event and Saint Paul:  The Foundation of Universalism. They can be read as the esoteric and exoteric versions of the same fundamental argument. For a helpful discussion, see Frank Ruda, For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015). 5 See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 73. 6 In accordance with Hegel, in what follows I use the concept of determination as equivalent with that of ‘thought’.



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critique of the Hegelian dialectic proceeds and what we can learn from it about the theory of determination. Regardless of how we answer the question of whether the model of self-determination is appropriate for the Hegelian system or not, it is unquestionably the figure that stands at the centre of influential (neo-)pragmatistic reconstructions of Hegel.7 This is why Badiou’s critique of determination as self-determination is so significant from a systematic perspective, independently of the question of interpretation. For a better understanding of this critique, a comparison with Adorno will be helpful  – this exercise forms the centre of the following investigations (in the second section of this essay). Badiou shares with Adorno the critique of the Hegelian or positive dialectic. Adorno also criticizes the latter for its definition of determination. Based on this critique, both of them come to the same conclusion: namely, that true determination should not be understood as selfdetermination but as a transcendence of the self. Badiou calls this understanding of determination ‘affirmation’. But in contrast to Badiou, Adorno claims that true determination can go beyond the subject only if it passes through the negativity of the subject:  the eradication of negativity would also abolish affirmation. Adorno, therefore, draws the opposite conclusion from Badiou’s based on the critique of Hegel’s concept of self-determination:  the thought of affirmation requires the negativity of the subject.

Determination as self-determination: Hegel’s concept There are some very good reasons for Badiou’s decision to avoid the concept of freedom. First among these is the fact that freedom functions as the foundational concept of bourgeois society, which currently appears to be on its way to becoming a global order without an outside or an alternative. But freedom is the foundational concept of bourgeois society not only in the ideological sense, as the justification of the current order of things. Rather, freedom founds bourgeois society, since the latter builds its new forms of domination on freedom, since it implements its rule through freedom: freedom is the medium and the means of bourgeois rule. Freedom and domination coincide in bourgeois society.8

7 See, e.g., Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy. Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2009). 8 See also Christoph Menke, Kritik der Rechte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), part III.

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The definition of bourgeois freedom holds that freedom is the natural ability to choose. Choice, therefore, means choosing or selecting from a given set of possibilities. The ability to choose, therefore, presupposes that one has possibilities. This holds true not only in the obvious sense that there must be already given possibilities that are available for the subject so that the latter can choose from them and, thereby, exercise its freedom. But also in the more general sense that relating to properties and states as possibilities is itself an act of the subject: having possibilities is also a capability. It presupposes that it is possible not to be determined by properties and states, that it is possible to disregard them, to abstract from them or to negate their power of determination. Only one who is not determined by any specific determination, only one who can say no to her own determinateness (by a specific need and an object that satisfies this need) can choose among determinations. One who chooses must first say no. She chooses a determination under the precondition of its negation (as a determination that determines her). Bourgeois freedom, thus, consists of the ability to disregard determinations and the ability to choose a determination. Freedom is the unity of negation and determination.

Negative and positive freedom The philosophical problem of freedom is, thus, located in the unity of negation and determination. It is immediately obvious that the bourgeois notion of freedom as the capability to choose cannot solve this problem. It connects the two sides (the selection of one determination and the disregard of all other determinations) only externally and, as a result, it oscillates between them. The free individual, therefore, is just as empty as it is full. It is empty because, for it, nothing carries absolute meaning. At the same time, however, it is filled with the particular possibilities that are already given to it in the situation, which it cannot escape. In order to think the unity of negation and determination, it is then necessary to go beyond the bourgeois freedom of choice. To use Kant’s formulation, we could say that we must move from a ‘negative’ to a ‘positive’ conception of freedom.9 The positive concept of freedom (which is its true concept) conceives of freedom as the unity of negation and determination. Its basic idea is that the unity of negation and determination can be thought only if this unity is understood as a fundamental, categorical transformation of determination – of the meaning of ‘determination’. In the bourgeois freedom of 9 Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), 318.



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choice, determination remains the same. In the act of choosing, the individual disregards the fact that it is determined by specific needs and then, based on this absence of determination, it declares one of its needs or an ordered series of needs (what John Rawls called a ‘life plan’) to be determinative. But here determination remains unchanged. In Hegel’s language, we could say that it remains mere ‘determinacy’ (Bestimmtheit). The freedom of choice is ‘the transition from undifferentiated indeterminacy to differentiation, determination, and the positing of a determinacy as a content and object’.10 In reality, therefore, there is still no determination of the subject in the freedom of choice. Regardless of whether they are ‘given by nature, or generated by the concept of spirit’,11 there are only different determinacies from whose mere positivity or givenness, in a first step, the subject abstracts and, then, in a second step chooses one or more options. Determining givenness itself becomes something posited. But then ‘positing’ (Setzen) means only ‘imposition’ (Einsetzen): it is the preference for determinacy or its imposition as binding in relation to others. The transformation of determination in true freedom, on the contrary, consists of grasping determination as the ‘self-determination’ of the subject.12 Its fundamental meaning is self-realization. The positive concept of freedom, which Hegel borrows from Kant, is constituted in an expressivist manner.13 This means that the subject in its free self-determination posits as its own not only one of the given determinacies (whose determining power it negated in a first step), but that at the same time it posits itself in it. Determinacy becomes (self-) determination when it is not only the effect but the expression of its positing as well as the expression of the positing subject. The claim that free determination is the self-determination of the subject means that, as a determination by the self, it is at the same time the self as determination: the self is there or it is real in determination, or that in its determination it ‘remains with itself [ . . . ] and in this determination, it joins together with itself alone’.14 Only this way can the requirement be fulfilled to think the unity of negation and determination  – while the freedom of choice is merely the external back and forth between negation and determination (and remains in this dualism).

10 Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), 39. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Ibid., 41. 13 Christoph Menke, ‘Autonomy and Liberation: The Historicity of Freedom’. In Hegel on Philosophy in History, ed. Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 159–76. 14 Hegel, Elements, 41.

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According to the formal structure of this unity, the negation through which, in a first step, the subject ruptures the positivity of the determinacies that condition it, remains present and preserved in the second step of the positing of determinations. The first step is the negation of givenness; the second step is the negation of this negation in the positing of determinations – however, not as the abstract other of the (first) negation, but in such a way that the self remains by itself as negative in its determination (in the negation of its negativity).15 The ‘identity with itself ’ that the subject realizes in its self-determination is nothing other than its negativity in relation to external determinacy. Conversely, free selfdetermination is the kind of determination that is at the same time negation (as the negation of every given determination) and not negation (as determination), since in the negation of negation it is at once the overcoming and preservation of negation. In light of this explanation of the positive freedom of self-determination in opposition to the negative freedom of choice, we can now form a more precise understanding of the question why Badiou defines the subject without any reference to the concept of freedom. In the case of negative freedom, the answer is quite obvious: negative freedom is the foundational category of domination in bourgeois society. Bourgeois society, however, is a society without subjects.16 Negative freedom, therefore, can and must be avoided when we try to think the subject (in opposition to the citizen as bourgeois). But the question of the freedom of self-determination is more important: why and how does positive freedom miss the subject? The answer is that self-determination misses the meaning of determination (the determination of determination) and, consequently, must be avoided.

Determinate negation: Logical and ontological Positive freedom is the unity of negation and determination. As such, positive freedom is nothing other than the (dialectical) truth of determination in general. Every determination is in truth (in its true form as determination) free or selfdetermination. This is the lesson of Hegel’s theory of determinate negation, 15 The full definition of self-determination, therefore, is the following: ‘the self-determination of the “I”, in that it posits itself as the negative of itself, that is, as determinate and limited, and at the same time remains with itself [bei sich], that is, in its identity with itself and universality; and in this determination, it joins together with itself alone’ (Hegel, Elements, 41). 16 I cannot go into detail about this diagnosis here. Among other places, Badiou describes the form of thought that corresponds to this society in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2013). See especially ch. 3, ‘Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism’ (30–39).



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which states that determination is the negation of negation. At the centre of this theory, we find ‘the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive’.17 On the first level, the concept of determinate negation serves to describe the way the operation of negation proceeds in actuality, in the praxis of negation. In this process, the negated ‘does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; or that such a negation is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved, and is therefore determinate negation’.18 Since negation is always the negation of something determined, it does not stand in an external opposition to what it negates. Negation is the ‘nothingness of that from which it results’.19 The negation of determination is its ‘immanent movement’.20 Since negation itself is a result of a determination that it negates (or that negates itself in it), negation itself has a result: ‘Looked at as a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative which is consequently a positive content as well.’21 Or: ‘Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content.’22 If negation as such is ‘determinate negation’ (if every operation of negation in reality is always determined), then it is a negation of a determination and, consequently, at the same time the production of another determination.23 But this presentation describes negation merely as a logical operation – ‘logical’ in the classical and not in the Hegelian sense. This understanding of negation as a logical operation defines it on the basis of its effects on the meaning and, thereby, on the truth-value of a determination. Logically speaking, the negation of a false thought produces its contradictory opposite as true; and the negation of a true thought produces its contradictory opposite as false.24 Logical operations 17 Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33. 18 Ibid. 19 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 51. 20 Ibid., 36. 21 Ibid. 22 Hegel, Science of Logic, 49. 23 To put it differently: negation is already a negation of negation. For if negation is to be understood as determinate negation (the act of negation of a determination as the expressive realization of its immanent or self-negation), then every act of negation is at the same time an act of determination and, therefore, possesses a positive content since it is the negation of a self-negating determination, and as such at the same time the negation of the self-negation of this determination. 24 ‘Thus for every thought there is a contradictory thought; we acknowledge the falsity of a thought by admitting the truth of its contradictory. The sentence that expresses the contradictory thought is formed from the expression of the original thought by means of a negative word.’ See Gottlob Frege, ‘Negation’. In Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 385. Robert Brandom’s interpretation of determinate negation as ‘material incompatibility’ corresponds to this logical concept of negation. See Robert Brandom, ‘Holism and

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refer to relations among determinations. The dialectical concept of determinate negation, on the contrary, refers to what a determination is:  it applies to the form of determination. The concept of determinate negation, therefore, is not merely a logical concept (concerning judgments) but an ontological concept. Hence the other side of ‘the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive’ is the insight that ‘determinateness [Bestimmtheit] is negation posited as affirmative’.25 This is why ‘Spinoza’s proposition: omnis determinatio est negatio, [is] a proposition of infinite importance’: it offers us another definition of determination.26 Accordingly, being a determination now means being the ‘result’ of a negation. The ontological meaning of determinate negation lies in the concept of the ‘result’: negation is an act directed at a first determination, which then produces a second determination as a result. The second determination ‘contains’ in itself the first determination and its negation: ‘In the result there is therefore contained in essence that from which the result derives – a tautology indeed, since the result would otherwise be something immediate and not a result.’27 Being a result, the second determination is ‘richer’ than the first: ‘richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite’.28 The second determination, however, is not ‘richer’ than the first in its content but in its form. It is richer precisely because it comes second and, therefore, it has a history: the history of being a result of a negation of a previous determination. Precisely because it has a history and therefore a past, the second determination is a structurally ‘new’ determination: ‘But when [. . .] the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made.’29 Every determination that is understood to be a result of a negation, that is, of its history is a new determination. To understand determinations, that is to say, determination as such this way (as a result and, therefore, as a new determination) is what ‘constitutes the truly dialectical factor’.30

Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology’, in Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 180–82. Hegel, Science of Logic, 87. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 33. 28 Ibid. 29 Hegel, Phenomenology, 51. 30 Hegel, Science of Logic, 34. 25



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The thesis of determinate negation claims that every determination is the result of an act of negation directed at another determination. In a logical sense, this mean that determinations are bound up with each other through their negations: one determination is (nothing other) than the negation of another or the negation of one determination is ‘immanent’ to the other. But while the logical understanding makes it appear as if they were both of the same kind and form as determinations bound by negation, the ontological understanding of determinate negation makes it clear that they are fundamentally different:  determinate negation is the act of their formal differentiation, the production of a ‘new form’ (or the production of determination in a new form). Determinate negation is not a relation of ‘material’ (Brandom) but of formal incompatibility. Determinate negation produces a form in which determination and negation, the positing of determinations and the cancellation of mere givenness are thought together.

An ontological impasse Badiou’s case against Hegel is that the latter’s theory of determination leads to an ‘ontological impasse’.31 According to Badiou, the essence of this impasse is precisely that the unity of negation and determination – that the concept of determinate negation thinks  – is nothing other than the figure of self-determination that Hegel develops in his theory of freedom. To think determination as selfdetermination  – this is Hegel’s fundamental thesis and, simultaneously, his ontological impasse. To think determination as self-determination in reality means not to think determination at all. The first step of this critique develops the thesis that the unity of negation and determination is nothing other than the unity of the self of the determination, that is, the unity of the subject. According to Badiou, this point is already demonstrated by the first category that Hegel’s logic uses to develop the dialectic of determination:  the category of the ‘something’.32 The basic structure of the something provides a prototype for the unity of negation and determination 31 Badiou, Being and Event, 161. 32 See Meditation 15 in Badiou’s Being and Event (161–72). I  follow here Badiou’s interpretation without comparing it with Hegel’s text. Hegel, however, writes not only that the something is ‘first negation of negation, as simple existent self-reference’ or ‘negative unity with itself ’ and, as such, it is ‘the beginning of the subject’ (Hegel, Science of Logic, 89), but he also refers back to the category of the something at the beginning of the doctrine of the concept where he describes the concept as the ‘kingdom of freedom’ or as the ‘I’ (Being and Event, 513). For a discussion of this section, see Thomas Hanke, ‘Das Wesen im Begriff: Über den Zusammenhang von objektiver und subjektiver Logik in der Passage “Vom Begriff im allgemeinen”’. In Hegels Lehre vom Wesen, ed. Andreas Arndt and Günter Kruck (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 159–79.

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that, in a developed form, stands at the centre of the dialectical theory of self-determination. The starting point for this dialectic is the insight that the one is the negation of the other:  that a specific determination is the negation of every other determination. The other is, therefore, the limit of the one, or the one exists only through or as its limit (separating it from the other). At the same time, it is the one (it is a determination that is other than the other) only if it is not its limit separating it from the other. The one must, therefore, go beyond its negative relation to the other in order to be the one; the one exists only as a crossing of its limit (Grenze) (which, thereby, becomes its ‘frontier’ [Schranke]).33 To put it differently, a determination is the negation of all other determinations and, at the same time, it must be or strives to be more, it must be or strives to be itself. It must be the negation of the negation of all other determinations. But this is only a requirement or an ‘ought’. Thought this way, the one is not but ought to be (it is a ‘having-to-be’).34 The dialectical solution for the problem of the existence of the one defined through negation requires ‘that the passing-beyond [i.e., the negation of the other] be passed beyond’.35 This becomes possible only if we redefine the relation of the one (determination) to the negation of the other. The negation of the negation of the other (through which the one produces itself) cannot mean that the one is beyond negation. As such a beyond, it would remain forever deferred as the goal of an endless ‘ought’ and, thus, as something unreal. Rather, determination must be grasped as being itself the movement of the passing beyond negation. Thus, the dialectical solution to the endless deferral of determination in a mere ‘ought’ states the following: the one is itself (and nothing other than) the present of its movement beyond the mere negation of the other. The negation of negation remains a mere unrealizable ‘ought’ as long as it is supposed to be beyond negation in relation to the positivity of the one. It becomes real only as the movement of the passing-beyond that unfolds inside the one: as the one’s own realization. The one produces its ‘presence’ as or through the ‘interiority of the negative’.36 In a different formulation, we could say that this is the move from bad to true infinity: from determination beyond the negation of determinacy to the infinite 33 In Oliver Feltham’s English translation, we read the following:  ‘The passage from the pure limit (Grenze) to the frontier (Schranke) forms the resource of an infinity directly required by the point of being’ (Badiou, Being and Event, 162). 34 Badiou, Being and Event, 163. 35 Ibid., 164. 36 Ibid., 162.



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as ‘the contraction in virtuality of repetition in the presence’.37 The dialectical answer to the bad infinity of the ‘ought’, in which determination exists only in deferral, is the thought of a truly endless determination – of determination as truly infinite. And determination is truly infinite when it is simultaneously present and negative. But this is possible only if we understand these concepts (the presence of a determination as the negation of all others) from the internal perspective of its own realization (the having of a determination as the cancellation of any determination). Infinite determination is, therefore, subjective or selfdetermination; true infinity is ‘subjective virtuality’.38 Infinite determination is the determination in which the subject ‘remains with itself [bei sich], that is, in its identity with itself’,39 since its identity ‘as one’ consists of the negation of all determinacy and in the realization of determination. The concept of determinate negation, therefore, introduces an ontological distinction between determinacy as something already given and determination as a result. This also shows that determination is the result of a twofold act: just as much a negation of merely given determinacy as the negation of this negation as position (Position). The critique of the negative freedom of choice has already shown us how position cannot be thought: it cannot be a mere ‘positing’ (Setzung) (since the posited is either undistinguishable from mere determinacy or it is empty and indeterminate).40 From this, the concept of true infinity draws the following conclusion: infinite determination is not posited by the subject since the subject is present in it. Position means the presence of the subject. And the presence – or, more precisely, the realization – of the subject takes place in determinations in which it presents its ‘identity’: in which it realizes what it is and what it is not as a subject. What the subject is constitutes its inner or second nature; what it is not or what it negates makes up its external or first nature. In infinite negation, the subject realizes itself in its universality both negatively and positively: in the recognition of the true determination and the cancellation of the merely given one.41 If, following Badiou, we accept that this is the goal of Hegel’s demonstration, then the latter finds himself in a dead end from which there is no way out. Badiou’s objection to the dialectical program holds that determination cannot be transformed in self-determination:  determination has a necessarily 37 Ibid., 167. 38 Ibid., 166. 39 Hegel, Elements, 41. 40 This is the so-called paradox of autonomy. See Menke, ‘Autonomy and Liberation’. 41 To put it simply, the introduction of the concept of true infinity explains the difference between givenness and the result, between determinacy and (self-)determination as the difference between nature and normativity.

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indissoluable external moment. According to Badiou, this becomes apparent in Hegel’s logic in that he must grant a quantitative dimension to the difference between the one and the other. The difference falls within the dimension of countability. The essential moment ‘of the quantitative something is the externalization of identity’.42 The quantitative, as the countable, is essentially ‘external’:  it ‘cannot be pure presence, interior virtuality, the subjective’.43 This does not simply mean that the one can be distinguished from the other by way of counting without qualitative determination, without referring this difference to its identity. Rather, what is at stake is the definition of determination itself: all determinations have an external side, through which they are distinguished from each other quantitatively and, therefore, can be grasped in such a way that they do not appear to be the ‘result’ of a determinate negation as the presence of self-determination. All determinations (in order to be determinations) have a side of immediacy that does not allow itself to be cancelled in the autonomous operation of a negation directed at itself. There is no determination without mere determinacy, the external other of negation. Hegel’s dialectical theory ‘fails’ because of the externality of determination: ‘However heroic the effort, it is interrupted de facto by the exteriority itself of the pure multiple.’44

Affirmation and negativity: A critique of the dialectic The alternative to the dialectical theory of determination as self-determination is designated by Badiou’s concept of ‘affirmation’. The definition of affirmation is also subjective (or ‘subjectal’):  the subject is the realization of affirmation; affirmation is tied to the subjective procedure. Hegel understands the connection between determination and subjectivity in such a way that (the true, correctly understood and accomplished) determination contains the negativity of the subject in relation to every determining determinacy (so that the subject, inasmuch as it determines itself and negates its own negativity, at the same time remains ‘with itself ’ and, thus, remains negative):  understood dialectically, determination is self-determination since (or to the degree that) it is the expression of the negativity of the subject. Understood as affirmation, however, according to Badiou determination is constitutive of the subject

42 Badiou, Being and Event, 168. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 169.



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precisely because it is ‘without preliminary negation’.45 Badiou’s counterprogram to Hegel consists of grasping determination (and the subjective procedure that it constitutes) as the process of affirmation that is not mediated through a subjective act of negation, as a yes without a preliminary no. In what follows, I will first present my understanding of this program. I will do so in reference to Adorno, whose critique of Hegel’s (positive) dialectic begins in a similar fashion to Badiou’s. But based on this criticism, Adorno draws a conclusion that is quite different from Badiou’s: negative dialectic is an alternative to the alternative of the negation of negation and affirmation. The contrast between Adorno and Badiou that thereby emerges can be sharpened and resolved if we read their works as theories of (critical or subjective) ‘intervention’.

Rescue and fidelity In my understanding, Badiou’s basic idea behind the concept of affirmation corresponds to one of Adorno’s arguments in ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’. There, Adorno calls the ‘flattening of the intelligible into the imaginary’46 the fundamental mistake of all ‘phenomenological’ philosophies.47 Phenomenology reduces the intelligible to acts  – that is, subjective acts  – of the imagination. Adorno opposes to this mistake the following description of the essential determination of the human spirit as mind (Geist): ‘To be a mind at all, it must know that what it touches upon does not exhaust it, that the finiteness that is its like does not exhaust it. The mind thinks what would be beyond it.’48 The mind is only mind; it thinks only where it is not equal to itself, where it is more or other than itself. Thinking means: to think more or differently than we can think. True thought is not the product of the thinking subject. It is not exhausted by the subjective act of thinking that produced it. Thinking is defined by its ‘moment of transcendent objectivity’.49 It is ‘the negation of the finite which finiteness requires’ that defines the mind: ‘The concept of the intelligible is the self-negation of the finite mind. In the mind, mere entity becomes aware of its 45 Badiou, Saint Paul, 66. 46 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 391. 47 For more on this question, see Christoph Menke, ‘Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Zu Adornos Begriff der Philosophie’, in Spiegelungen der Gleichheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003), 184–99, as well as ‘Subjektivität und Gelingen: Adorno – Derrida’, in Derrida und Adorno. Zur Aktualität von Dekonstruktion und Frankfurter Schule, ed. Eva L. Waniek and Erik M. Vogt (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2008), 189–205. 48 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 392. 49 Ibid.

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deficiency.’50 The mind or thinking is ‘the departure from an existence obdurate in itself ’: ‘in its self-negation, the mind transcends itself ’.51 This self-transcendence through ‘self-reflection’ is the opposite of the selfrealization that, according to Hegel, constitutes the freedom of spirit as mind. The self-negation of the spirit is, therefore, not (positive) dialectical. It is not sublated by the negation of negation (the negativity of the spirit in its selfdetermination). Rather, it is the movement in which the spirit passes beyond itself and its self-determination in the movement of thinking. Adorno calls this movement of the spirit beyond itself ‘rescue’ (Rettung): Nothing can be saved unchanged, nothing that has not passed through the portal of its death. If rescue is the inmost impulse of any man’s spirit, there is no hope but unreserved surrender: of that which is to be rescued as well as of the hopeful spirit. The posture of hope is to hold lightly what the subject will hold on to, what the subject expects to endure.52

Rescue is the rescue of phenomena:  the rescue of the phenomena from the spirit through the spirit (that flattens them into mere phenomena, appearances for it). Rescue is the self-movement of the spirit in which it discloses itself: the disclosure of the spirit that it alone can accomplish because otherwise it would not be its disclosure to the intelligible and infinite (but to the existent as it is there positively: the spirit that does not rescue phenomena through its own selfdisclosure but accepts them as they are perpetuates an ‘obstinate insistence on existence, forms of a clutching’).53 The subject is free not in its self-determination but in thinking as self-transcendence, in its redemptive relation to truth. This argument parallels Badiou’s interpretation of Paul’s letters as attempts ‘to refound the connection between truth and the subject’.54 This connection is ‘paradoxical’: it is the connection between ‘a subject without identity and a law without support’.55 To put it differently, we could say that the connection between truth and the subject requires thought. According to Badiou, this is why Paul’s ‘unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth’ from what is constituted by the subject.56 But this subtraction of truth from what the subject produces is nothing other than the ‘procedure, which is its being’.57 The passing of truth 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 391–2. 53 Ibid., 391. 54 Badiou, Saint Paul, 7. 55 Ibid., 5. 56 Ibid. 57 Badiou, Being and Event, 407.



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beyond the subject is the realization of the subject. This is why the ‘sudden appearance of the [. . .] subject is unconditioned’.58 The subject produces itself only by reference to the unconditioned: it produces itself by producing truth as the unconditioned; which means that the subject produces itself by producing truth as that which it does not produce. Discussing Paul, Badiou describes this unconditioned truth-relation that constitutes the subject as the relation of love: ‘the subjective process of a truth is one and the same thing as the love of that truth’.59 This means that the relation to truth as the unconditioned cannot be a theoretical relation, a relation of contemplation or cognition. If relating to a truth means producing oneself as a subject by producing this truth as unconditioned and, thus, as something not produced, then for a subject relating to a truth means to bear witness to this truth. To witness a truth means to believe it; and to believe it means that truth becomes a ‘power’ through our love for it.60 In Being and Event, Badiou calls this the ‘procedure’ of ‘fidelity’ whose realization constitutes the subject: ‘Every truth is transcendent to the subject, precisely because the latter’s entire being resides in supporting the realisation of truth.’61 By the same token, conversely, this also means that the being of the subject consists of the ‘local’ realization of a truth that transcends it in this realization as the truth is ‘incommensurable’ with it ‘because the subject is finite, and the truth is infinite’.62 The subject is the process of the infinite inside the finite. It is the paradoxical capability to realize the incommensurable infinite in the finite itself. The process of the subject, therefore, succeeds only when it fails. This brief description already allows us to see the differences between Adorno and Badiou. I  will address this issue presently, but first I  want to acknowledge their agreements. The latter consists not only of the fact 58 Badiou, Saint Paul, 18. 59 Ibid., 92. This point should be compared to the way the theory of positive freedom as selfdetermination evokes Paul. According to this theory, ‘the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or way of choosing is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself ’. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 100. In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes that ‘Gentiles, who do not possess the law’ (since it was not given and, therefore, not revealed to them) are ‘a law to themselves’, and ‘they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts’ (Rom. 12.14-15). See Holy Bible:  New Revised Standard Edition with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159. For Korsgaard, the freedom of the subject consists of realizing its own law. Subjectivation, therefore, means the realization of the law that is already inscribed in the subject. For Badiou and Adorno, on the contrary, subjectivation means the realization of the incommensurability of truth in relation to the subject within or as the subject itself. 60 Badiou, Saint Paul, 96. 61 Badiou, Being and Event, 397. 62 Ibid., 396.

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that both Badiou and Adorno reject the (positive) dialectical concept of self-determination but also of the way they justify this rejection. Adorno and Badiou conceive of the subject as the paradoxical movement of selftranscendence through which the finite becomes infinite as intelligible idea (Adorno’s ‘rescue’), or the equally paradoxical movement of intervention as the declaration or demonstration of the infinite in the finite (Badiou’s ‘love’ and ‘fidelity’). These two movements  – the infinitization of the finite and the finitization of the infinite – are therefore not empty (or evacuating) but the realizations of determination, about which Adorno and Badiou are in agreement in that they both think that it takes place precisely where the subject breaks with the logic of self-determination. ‘Rescue’ (Adorno) and ‘fidelity’ (Badiou) are concepts that supposedly describe the connection between truth and the subject in terms of an infinite difference. Here, the concept of truth is understood in an ontological sense. Truth means: the true form of determination (or of thought). The concept of truth refers to the way a determination should be in order to be a true determination. It must be understood as something unconditioned or transcendent. True determination, therefore, infinitely exceeds anything produced by the subject. Badiou and Adorno understand this position to be the opposite of Hegel’s positive dialectic. The latter’s main thesis is that true determination is the self-determination of the subject. As a result, Hegel’s dialectic amounts to ‘the unrestrained expansion of the subject’, since the ‘Hegelian subject-object is subject’.63 In contrast, both Adorno and Badiou aim to think true determination as a passing beyond the self-determination of the subject that is realized precisely and only in the procedure of the subject. We can speak of true determination only when the subject does not ‘remain with itself ’ (as Hegel put it) but transcends itself: when it goes beyond itself in itself.

The move to negative dialectics The opposition between Adorno and Badiou surfaces where the question of negativity emerges. Badiou’s critique of the positive dialectic inevitably leads to the (abovequoted Pauline) demand to eradicate negativity, to think determination as affirmation without a preliminary negation. This demand directed against Hegel, 63 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shiery Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 5, 13.



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however, presupposes his definition of free self-determination. According to this definition, self-determination means the production of determination out of the negativity of the subject. Since Hegel is right here, according to Badiou, the critique of the dialectical concept of self-determination must also reject the thesis of preliminary negation. Adorno’s critique, by contrast, concerns Hegel’s definition of free selfdetermination. His critique targets the connection between negativity and selfdetermination, that is to say, Hegel’s thesis that the realization of the negativity of the subject should be understood in such a way that, in its determination, the subject remains with itself and merges itself only with itself. But, for Adorno, the claim that there is true determination only through the negativity of the subject does not mean that it is the subject’s self-determination. Selfdetermination and negativity must be distinguished from each other. It is precisely this critical differentiation that accounts for Adorno’s move to negative dialectics. The basic anti-Hegelian thesis of negative dialectics, therefore, holds that it is incorrect ‘to equate the negation of negation with positivity’ since ‘what thus wins out in the inmost core of dialectics is the anti-dialectical principle’.64 In negative dialectics, on the contrary, ‘a negation of particularities [ . . . ] remains negative’.65 It has no ‘circumventing result’ in which negation (as negated or self-negated) would simultaneously sublate and preserve itself.66 But this is not the case because for Adorno there is only (pure or mere) negativity and no true determination, or because negativity is the whole. Quite the contrary: negation does not have a determination as its ‘result’ because the determination that is the result of a negation is not true; because there is true determination only if the negation remains purely negative without a result. The purity (i.e. the resultlessness) of negativity is the condition of true determination. The ‘rescue’ of unconditioned truth leads through the ‘portal of death’.67

64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 158. 65 Ibid., emphasis added. 66 Ibid., 159. 67 As Ansgar Martins insists, this formulation should not be understood in a Christological sense. Martins explains this point by reference to a similar passage from Gershom Scholem’s Die jüdische Mystik:  ‘Unlike the death of Jesus, Sabbatai Zevi does not transmit new, authentic revolutionary values. His apostasy merely destroys the old ones’ (quoted in Ansgar Martins, Adorno und die Kabbala [Potsdam:  Universitätsverlag, 2016], 88). Therein lies the antinomian motif that brings Adorno and Scholem together:  ‘The path into the abyss precedes the one that leads upwards’ (quoted in 87). See also Asaf Angermann, ‘Redemption ex negativo: Critical Theory and the History of Mystical Heresy’, Bamidbar, 4.1 (2014): 1–20.

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The fundamental thesis of negative dialectics, therefore, opposes both Hegel and Badiou. Against Hegel, Adorno argues that negativity does not produce a determination as a result and, consequently, determination cannot be the result of the negativity of the subject  – hence negative dialectics. Against Badiou, Adorno argues that, at the same time, there is no true determination without the negativity of the subject and negativity precedes the truth – hence negative dialectics. Negative dialectics shatters the equation that both Badiou and Hegel (the former disapprovingly, the latter approvingly) accept: to think together negativity and determination means to think determination as self-determination. Against Hegel, the thesis of negative dialectics must be explained by the way it understands the connection between true determination and the negativity of the subject. Against Badiou, however, Adorno’s thesis must be explained in terms of why the negativity of the subject is necessary at all in order to think true determination as the self-transcendence of the subject. First, a quick discussion of the first explanation before I  try to intensify the disagreement between Adorno and Badiou in the next section. It concerns the unavoidability of negativity for truth. Hegel’s figure of self-determination requires that we think negativity and determination ‘as one’, as two sides of self-determination. Adorno, on the other hand, defines their connection ‘in the movement of thought’ in such a way that ‘the fixed, positive point, just like negation, is a moment’, but these two do not form a ‘synthesis’.68 The moment of negation, therefore, consists in the cancellation of the false, reified ‘positivity’ of the concept that seeks to identify the thing. But this is possible for negation only because ‘there is perhaps a so-called positive motive force of thought’.69 This ‘moment of positivity, which acts as a corollary to negativity’ is not cancelled but revealed by the negativity of thought.70 Negative dialectics is not the dissolution of the positive in negativity but the rescue of the positive as a moment through the destructive power of negation that directs itself against the violence ‘in the act of identification’.71

68 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics:  Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965/1966, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 29, 27 (translation modified). Adorno calls this ‘positive moment’ the moment of ‘naïveté’ in thinking (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 39). See also the different interpretations by Alexander García Düttmann, So ist es. Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos ‘Minima Moralia’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), and Martin Seel, Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). 69 Adorno, Lectures, 26. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 30.



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Intervention This explanation of the way Adorno connects determination and negation (like Hegel but in a very different way) already indicates how, in a second step, negative dialectics tries to justify, in opposition to Badiou, why this connection is necessary:  why the indeterminateness of true determination must be thought together with its determination by the negativity of the subject. The reason for this lies in the fact that, according to Adorno, true positivity cannot be rescued without the critical cancellation and even destruction of false, reified positivity. The unavoidability of negativity is based on the unavoidability of positivity:  without the power of negativity, there is no true determination, no affirmation; without negativity, there is only reified positivity. This is how determinations exist by themselves. How we are supposed to understand this argument of negative dialectics, in the end, can be demonstrated by reference to the way Badiou thinks the connection between the ‘event’ of affirmation and the ‘intervention’ of the subject. This connection defines Badiou’s concept of historicity, which is in direct opposition to negative dialectics. (i) Badiou describes the emergence of affirmation (i.e. of true determination) as an ‘event’. This account defines affirmation as something that happens historically. At the same time, Badiou thinks the concept of historicity in such a way that he describes it as a type of situation: the event of affirmation is possible only in historical situations; or, to put it differently, a situation is (or becomes) historical when the emergence of affirmation takes place in it. What makes a situation historical arises from its difference from natural situations. The difference between a historical and a natural situation lies in the way the ‘operation’ that Badiou calls ‘presentation’ unfolds in them.72 Situations exist only in their presentations. Presentation implies that something is counted as one or forms a unity: it is ‘the “passage” to the set of subsets’.73 This operation brings about the unity of the situation (or the situation as unity) and, at the same time, fundamentally exceeds it: it goes beyond what is included in the situation (namely, the subsets). The operation that produces the unity of a situation is ‘in absolute excess of the situation itself ’.74 The production of unity is, therefore, at the same time the production of an absolute difference. This difference is

72 Badiou, Being and Event, 84. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.

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absolute since it is not the difference between one unity and another but the difference of unity in and by itself. At the same time, there are two fundamentally different ways in which presentation unfolds in a situation. On the one hand, we have the natural situation. Badiou defines it structurally as ‘self-homogeneous self-presentation’.75 This is also the definition of ‘normality’: nature means normality. What is normal or natural is a presentation without excess: the natural situation is a situation without (absolute) difference.76 In opposition to this, the historical situation is ‘the abnormal, the instable, the antinatural’: ‘It is rational to think the ab-normal or the anti-natural, that is, history, as an omnipresence of singularity – just as we have thought nature as an omnipresence of normality.’77 Singularity here refers to those elements that ‘belong’ to a situation without being ‘included’ in it and, therefore, are not moments of a unity or a totality. This is why events are possible only in the abnormality of history. The realization of this possibility is a leap carried out through an interpretative ‘intervention’. The intervention decides the undecidable, the belonging of the event to the situation.78 This belonging is undecidable since there can be no objective criteria for the difference between normality and abnormality (and, therefore, no objective criteria for the difference of a situation from itself and in itself). As the decision concerning the undecidable, the intervention is thus subjective. The intervention is the act of the subject: it is the act through which it makes itself into a subject and, at the same time, allows the event of affirmation to emerge (or, to be more precise, allows the historical situation to emerge as the possibility of the event). The intervention of the subject, therefore, shows itself in its fidelity to the event of affirmation, whose possibility was brought into history by the subject’s decision. (ii) Thereby, we can raise the decisive question about Adorno and Badiou. The question is: what is an intervention? What does the act of intervention that constitutes the procedure of the subject consist of? We already know – based on their definitions of the concepts of ‘rescue’ and ‘fidelity’  – that Adorno and Badiou both understand the intervention through which the

75 Ibid., 128. 76 Shouldn’t we, then, conclude that the natural situation is the situation that misrepresents itself (since the determination of the situation means that the presentation of the situation ‘overshoots’ the situation) and, therefore, the difference between the natural and the historical situation is never symmetrical? In this case, the historical situation would not be a second type of situation next to the natural situation but rather the situation of the situation. 77 Badiou, Being and Event, 174. 78 Ibid., 201.



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subject constitutes itself as the subject’s self-transcendence in reference to a true determination. Furthermore, we also know that the intervention of the subject (through which it brings itself into being and transcends itself towards a truth that it itself did not produce) requires that we distinguish two fundamentally different situations:  the natural-normal and the historicalabnormal situations. The historicity of the situation in which the intervention of the subject takes place is not given. The intervention of the subject must first produce the situation in which it can take place. To be more precise, the intervention of the subject must produce the situation as a historical one, or it must produce the historicity of the situation. It must produce it as a situation in which there are elements that are not included in the totality of the situation and, therefore, can become events of affirmation or truth events. How do we have to think the intervention of the subject if it is to be able to accomplish this goal? In Badiou’s account of the intervention of the subject, the subject intervenes in situations that first appear to be ‘neutral’. Neutral (or apparently neutral) situations are those in which ‘it is neither a question of life (nature) nor of action (history)’.79 According to Badiou, then, the intervention of the subject must be understood as an act of decision. But this decision is not a choice among already given possibilities. The intervening decision of the subject must always be a decision in favour of the historicity of the situation and the event of truth. A  decision against historicity is not an intervening decision at all (but the resigned acknowledgment of the present impossibility of a decision). Adorno see this the same way – and he adds a decisive qualification to the description of the situation that fundamentally changes our understanding of the subjective intervention. It concerns the concept of neutrality. For Adorno, there is no neutrality. The neutralization of the difference between the natural and the historical is not itself neutral. Neutrality in relation to this difference means nothing other than an avoidance of the difference of the historical from the natural. Neutrality means second nature.80 In its primary form (i.e., by itself, 79 Ibid., 177. 80 In Negative Dialectics, we find the following: ‘The theory of second nature, to which Hegel already gave a critical tinge, is not lost to a negative dialectics’ (38). For more about this question, see Christoph Menke, ‘Hegel’s Theory of Second Nature: The “Lapse” of Spirit’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy  – Revue Canadienne de philosophie continentale, 17.1 (Spring/ Printemps 2013): 31–49. The theory of second nature assumes ‘the abrupt immediacy, the formations which society and its evolution present to our thought’. The self-presentation of the social and the historical proceeds as their self-cancellation. In Badiou’s vocabulary, the presentation of the situation appears as non-presentation; it appears as identity. The absolute difference that, according

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as it is given before and to thought), the situation is not neutral in relation to the difference between the historical and the natural. In its primary form or by itself, the situation is always already the scene of a totalization whose closure the situation allows to appear as (or as if it were) natural: in the beginning we find the false, quasi-natural, or second-nature-like totality (that Adorno analyses as the totality of the concept, which in turn forms the model of the socially real totalization of situations). What is at stake in the intervention of the subject, therefore, is not the decision that the situation is historical and not merely natural. Rather, in a first step that precedes this decision, its task is to dissolve the appearance of naturalness, the power of second nature, and, thereby, to initiate the time of history.81 The intervention of the subject cannot be the decision about the possibility of the event without turning itself against the inert and tenacious power of false totalization in order to dissolve it. This is why Hegel’s definition of thought as the ‘enormous power of the negative’ is so fundamental for Adorno’s understanding of the intervention of the subject.82 The intervention of the subject (made possible by the event of affirmation) begins with the ‘energy’ and ‘restlessness’ through which the natural totalization of the situation will be set in motion and will be dissolved from within itself.83 This is the labor of the negative, which can become effective only as a ‘moment’ in its interplay with the ‘positive motive force of thought’ but cannot be deduced from it:  it is an independent force, and without its efficacy there is no truth event. This is the thesis against Badiou: without preliminary negativity, there is no affirmation. There is no such thing as an ‘affirmation without preliminary negation’.84 to Badiou, defines the concept of presentation can be laid bare through ‘analysis’ as ‘the immanent difference between phenomena and that which they claim to be in themselves’. Adorno’s positive definition of ‘analysis’ corresponds to the ‘praise of understanding’ (whose labor prepares the ‘birth of the New’) in Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing:  Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 273. 81 A strong counterclaim can be found in Being and Event (where Badiou distances himself from his Theory of the Subject). Here, he argues that there is no ‘essential link between destruction and novelty’ (407). This means primarily that novelty (i.e. affirmation) does not by itself require destruction (or, to put it more emphatically, novelty does not mean destruction): ‘Killing somebody is always a matter of the (ancient) state of things; it cannot be a prerequisite for novelty’ (408). The fact that there is no ‘essential link between destruction and novelty’, however, also has a more fundamental meaning for Badiou in the sense that novelty or affirmation does not presuppose destruction: ‘Destruction is the ancient effect of the new supplementation amidst the ancient’ (407). Destruction, therefore, comes after innovation, and innovation does not need any negative labor. See also John Van Houdt, ‘The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou’, Continent, 1.4 (2011): 234–8. The crisis of negation is the crisis of the idea ‘that negation can be creative, create something new’ (234). 82 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 38. 83 Ibid., 157. 84 Badiou, Saint Paul, 66.



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* Badiou wants to think the subject (as the subject of radical change) without the concept of freedom precisely because he wants to think the subject without negativity. The subject is the subject of affirmation, and affirmation must be thought as a ‘pure and simple encounter’.85 At the end of Being and Event, we find Mallarmé’s line:  ‘Nothingness gone, the castle of purity remains.’86 The foundation for the avoidance of the concept of freedom in the definition of the subject is Badiou’s theory of affirmation as the form of true determination. The argument is the following: if the true form of determination is affirmation without preliminary negation, and if the subject is the procedure of affirmation, then we do not need the concept of freedom to think the subject. The presupposition of this argument is that freedom and negativity belong together  – they explain each other reciprocally. This is the basic assumption of modern philosophy that Badiou also shares. This is why he strikes out both concepts with one stroke from his theory of affirmation and his theory of the subject. To think determination as affirmation and to think freedom as negativity are mutually exclusive.87 This thesis can invoke Hegel’s theory of determination:  Hegel thinks true determination (in opposition to mere ‘determinacy’) as self-determination because it is not the abstract other in relation to the negativity of subject and, this way, the subject remains ‘with itself ’ as negative in its determination (or, because determination as selfdetermination is a negation of negation, the passage over into determination that sublates negation). Hegel understands the determination that arises from the subject’s negativity as its self-determination. This is the very same idea that, in a negative form, underlies Badiou’s eradication of negativity from affirmation and his avoidance of the concept of freedom. The basic premise of Badiou’s antiHegelian theory of affirmation is Hegelian. Hence the objection against Badiou that we can raise from the perspective of Adorno’s negative dialectics: Badiou is too Hegelian because he does not see the gap that opens up between negation and determination when we try to think them in their indissoluble correlation as ‘moments’. This gap is the focus of Adorno’s attention: this is the reason why (unlike Badiou) he thinks together the truth of determination and the negativity of the subject as independent or, even, 85 Ibid. 86 Badiou, Being and Event, 435. 87 This is where Frank Ruda’s radical program intervenes to think the freedom of affirmation and freedom as affirmation (in order to release it from its conceptual entanglement with negativity). See Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

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in relation to each other autonomous moments (unlike Hegel). The justification for this position is that this is the only way we can think the intervention of the subject that opens up the event of truth. This intervention is essentially polemical. It does not simply define the intervention of the subject in such a way that it must make a decision in a neutral (neither unequivocally natural nor unequivocally historical) situation, but rather in such a way that the subject must direct itself against the dissimulation of the possibility of the decision (dissimulation in the form of the naturalization of history as second nature). This is why the intervention of the subject presupposes the force of negativity. The objection against Badiou raised by Adorno’s negative dialectics argues that one can accomplish the goal to think together affirmation and subjectivity only if one also thinks together affirmation and negativity.

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Badiou and Adorno on Philosophy and Music Jelica Sumic

Philosophy and its time At first blush, Badiou and Adorno seem to make an unlikely couple. What, indeed, could there be in common between a militant philosopher of events and eternal truths and a thinker who could only find hope and resistance in melancholy, a philosopher, moreover, who was obsessively concerned with the ‘saving of thought’s honour’, to borrow Lyotard’s term? In what does this saving of thought’s honour consist? And how does the saving of thought’s honour connect with what it means to think and to resist? Adorno’s solution consists in assigning to thought the task of bearing witness to that which resists. Thought, according to Adorno, cannot exist without the unthought, without the something other than thought that thought plunges into. What is noteworthy about Adorno’s idea of thought yielding to the unthought is that thought aiming at that which disrupts it exhibits and enacts the very rupture in question. According to this view, the resistance of the unthought, ultimately, of the somatic, results in a set of fractures in thought’s conceptual edifice that denounces all pretensions to totality and thus reveals the irreducible remnant of non-identity within every claim to identity. And it is in the inevitable non-identity between thought and that which it thinks, in the awareness of the irreducible gap, that Adorno grounds negative dialectics. Essentially, with negative dialectics, this being Adorno’s proposal for a new direction for philosophy after Auschwitz, we are dealing with a paradoxical attempt at reconciling thought, inevitably conceptual in form, with the recognition that heterogeneity of the non-identical cannot be conceptually grasped. The task of bearing witness to that which resists thus poses an almost insurmountable obstacle for thought, as it is in the nature

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of thought, as Adorno himself claims, to do violence to that which is other than thought. Although Adorno and Badiou are hardly kindred spirits – indeed, by situating the site of resistance in the somatic rather than in the conceptual, Adorno is closer to Lyotard and Deleuze than to Badiou – nevertheless, they have more in common than one might expect. Hence, the question that I wish to address here in relation to Adorno’s and Badiou’s work is the extent to which both in their different ways attempt an exploration of the possibility of philosophy in today’s world. What is at stake here is nothing less than the question of knowing if it is possible to mobilize philosophy in the task of changing the world we live in. However, in examining the possibility of philosophy in today’s world, Adorno and Badiou adopt two incompatible positions regarding the destiny of philosophy today. According to Adorno: ‘Philosophy . . . lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.’1 Although it seems that philosophy, by missing the moment of its realization, outlives its proper raison d’ être – in a sense, it is still alive simply because it has ‘forgotten to die’ – there is, according to Adorno, a way in which philosophy, despite this unrealized opportunity, ‘can be responsibly practiced’. At the end of Minima Moralia, Adorno links this survival of philosophy to its ability to ‘contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’.2 What is remarkable about these two formulations:  ‘Philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ and the survival of philosophy depends on its ability ‘to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’ is the way they bring together the redemptive function of philosophy and its survival. The point made by Adorno is to not merely acknowledge that philosophy has failed to realize itself this time. The point is rather that, due to its failure, philosophy seems to have also ruined the possibility of the world’s redemption. Yet, far from denying the irreparability of the missed opportunity, Adorno paradoxically insists that philosophy’s survival depends on it. A peculiar survival to be sure, as it entails that no second chance for redemption will present itself. But, there is another reading of the task that Adorno assigns to philosophy in the contemporary world. According to this reading, by missing the moment

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), xi–xii. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:  Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F.  N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 247.



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of its realization, philosophy seems to be returning to the point of departure, as it were: to be once more nothing but the interpretation of the world. But in assuming its traditional role, philosophy nevertheless succeeds to embody a point of excentricity or extimacy within the world, which allows it, by reopening a gap between the world as it is and the ‘saved’ world, to maintain a critical distance vis-à-vis the world. What constitutes the task of thought, according to Adorno, is nothing less than to create perspectives that would ‘displace and estrange the world’ in order to ‘reveal it to be, with rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light’. At the same time, this task is ‘also the utterly impossible thing’, as Adorno himself admits, because it presupposes a standpoint removed from ‘what is’. But thought must at least understand ‘its own impossibility . . . for the sake of the possible’.3 Paradoxically, the restoration of the possible, in which redemption in our time should consist, is given, if we follow Adorno, only as an always-already missed opportunity. According to Adorno, it is the ‘despair of the world’ that, paradoxically, ‘guarantees to us that the hopelessly missed things exist’.4 This is why the task set for thought is nothing less than to restore the possibility that dwells within these ‘hopelessly missed things’. This can only be achieved by turning our attention not to things as we find them solidified in concepts but rather to things as they are in their ‘becoming’. Thus, to see things in their becoming or, to use Adorno’s proper formulation, to read things ‘as a text of their becoming’,5 it is to glimpse what he calls ‘the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one’.6 Such a perspective can only be achieved if our thinking ‘while doing violence to the objects of its synthesis’, says Adorno, ‘heeds the potential that waits in the object, and it unconsciously obeys the idea of making amends for what it has done’.7 On this reading, the capacity of thought to bear witness to ‘a potential that waits in the object’ would reside in the very splitting of thought between victimization and testimony to the inflicted wrong. Thought is unable to make ‘amends for what it has done’ to that which tries forever to evade it – the unthought, the ungraspable – unless thought turns against itself. Hence, if the task of thought appears to be almost impossible, this is because it requires 3 Ibid. 4 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 372. 5 Ibid., 52. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 19.

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nothing less than ‘thought thinking against itself ’.8 Only by turning against itself can thought become the resistant thought. Only then can thought assume the task assigned to it: to bear witness to resistance already operating in the world, and, at the same time, to augment this resistance with a resistance of its own. For Adorno, this resistance proper to thought consists essentially in its refusal to give in. In making it impossible for ‘a desperate consciousness to deposit despair as absolute’.9 Hence, rather than criticize the impotence of thought confronted with the unthought, Adorno pleads for a passivity in the face of the disparate, of that namely which always and inevitably escapes thought: he calls for a thought that thinks against itself, that knows of its own inevitable limitation and refuses to go beyond it. It is precisely to the extent that the primacy of the object inevitably entails thought’s passivity that we could argue that the capacity of thought to bear witness to ‘a potential that waits in the object’ depends ultimately upon thought adopting an attitude that could be characterized as passivity without anxiety. Thus if the becoming of things, as Adorno sees it, is, strictly speaking, given only in retrospect, through cracks and fissures in their appearance, it is no doubt a fantasy, a utopia, says Adorno. Nevertheless, this utopia yields hope. This is all the more paradoxical since it is grounded in a fantasy: staging not what a thing could have become but rather what it has failed to become. Adorno’s peculiar articulation of melancholy, resistance and hope, as many commentators have noted, seems to only lead to a hopeless ‘negativism’. To flesh out the roots of this ‘negativism’, Adorno’s critics focus on negative dialectics. Considered as an erratic use of determinate negation, emancipated from Hegelian dialectics, negative dialectics, for Adorno’s critics, is simply not dialectical enough. It then comes as no surprise that for someone like Robert Pippin, Adornian negative dialectics is not dialectics, but a philosophy of finitude. This also explains why, in this reading, Adorno’s non-identical is identified with Kant’s Thing-in-itself. The reference to Kant is revealing because it draws a parallel between negative dialectics and Kant’s transcendental dialectics, since the latter also questions the notion of totality resulting from the transcendental use of reason’s ideas. Important in this respect is a short but rewarding passage in Badiou’s Five Lessons on Wagner, wherein Badiou positions himself in relation to Adorno 8 Ibid., 141. 9 Ibid., 404.



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on the specific issue of negative dialectics. His comments reveal a profound scepticism about thought’s self-limitation. Thus Adorno’s negative dialectics and Kant’s transcendental dialectics may differ in their details, but they share, in Badiou’s estimation, a decisive failing which he labels a ‘pathetics’. On Badiou’s reading, the Kantian moment that Adorno takes up and develops further is ‘the conviction that philosophical thought must be concerned with the question of its own limits’. And, indeed, for a philosophy of non-identity, a ‘thought of what is different from itself ’, this requires the internalization of ‘its own limits’. In more general terms, what Adorno preserves from Kant is the irreducibility of experience, the fact that it is impossible to dissolve the experience in the pure activity of the concept. An utterly irreducible element of passive limitation remains – just as in Kant, passivity, which is the practice of the sensible, is irreducible . . . In short, there is a non-constructed element in the construction:  receptivity. This very fundamental idea of receptivity – the notion that, since it is impossible to remain within the pure constructive movement of the concept, there is consequently not just a dialectics but a ‘pathetics’, or a fundamental receptivity – is precisely what Adorno retains.10

It is not for nothing that Badiou detects a philosophy of finitude in Adorno’s negative dialectics. This is so because Badiou sets out from an alternative vision of philosophy’s task, categorically different from Adorno’s and provides a definition of philosophy’s task that consists in the recognition of a timebreaking novelty causing a radical reorientation of thinking and existence. Thus, with Badiou, we have rather a different emphasis on the current time and therefore a different solution for philosophy. And, indeed, there is perhaps no better example of a desire for the continuation of philosophy than Badiou’s audacious repetition of a Platonic gesture, a master’s gesture if ever there was one, that, while redrawing the limits of its pertinence, succeeds nonetheless in establishing philosophy as a genuine place of and for a thought that strives to transform the world by thinking about the time-breaking novelties, ‘eternal truths’, as he calls them. For Badiou, the task proper to philosophy, as it turns to its time, consists namely in marking the discontinuity of time by wrenching something eternal from the present moment. Only in this way, that is, by going against the grain of the times in order to rescue the moment of eternity in it, can

10 Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Suzan Spitzer (London: Verso, 2010), 48.

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philosophy, insofar as it is considered as a form of resistance to the present, to borrow Foucault’s term, ‘“heroize” the present’. To think its time means, for Badiou, that philosophy has to detect points of interruption which mark a break with the previous paradigm of thinking, and, as a consequence, inaugurate a new time, and start a new counting of time. More specifically, philosophy could be designed as an attempt to isolate, to extract the real of its own time or, to paraphrase Badiou, literally ‘wrench time from time’,11 in order to reveal those unheard of possibilities of which time, because of the constraints of reality, did not know that it was capable, to identify those points at which the impossibility of a given time turns unto a possibility of some unheard of novelty, allowing for a definitely new beginning. Philosophy, on this view, is a paradoxical turning towards its time, a turning which involves a curious torsion of the thought of time onto itself. We can find the most concise formulation of this torsion, this turning of time onto itself, this return of time to itself, precisely in the book consecrated to reflection on the twentieth century: For us philosophers, the question is not what took place in the century, but what was thought in it . . . What was thought in the century that was previously unthought  – or even unthinkable? . . . to be more precise, how the century thought its own thought, how it identified the thinking singularity of the relation it entertained with the historicity of its own thought?12

Taking up Hegel’s metaphor of Minerva’s owl that takes flight only at nightfall, in short, when all is said and done, Badiou claims that philosophy as such always comes after the fact. Indeed, by coming ‘after’, philosophy is constitutively anachronistic in its own time. This may explain why, for Badiou, the principal task of philosophy is to draw up a balance sheet of its own time. But what becomes of philosophy as conditioned by its conditions in worldless times? How can philosophy continue to operate in accordance with the task it has set for itself, without the possible overstepping of the limits imposed on it? No doubt, there is no problem in ‘heroizing’ the present when something radically new takes place. It is, however, more difficult to extract something ‘eternal’ from worldless times. Generally, philosophy is supposed to come ‘after’ its conditions. Yet this usual task of philosophy seems to be particularly difficult to accomplish in periods in

11 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 21. 12 Ibid., 3.



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which nothing appears to be happening, in times in which no truth procedures seem to be active, in short, in ‘eventless times’. In such times, ‘short of events’, philosophy has to adopt a different stance towards its time. In the times, when no new truth seems to be emerging, philosophy has to make a wager à la Pascal, namely that contemporary philosophy is ‘capable of enveloping today’s actions and drawing strength, tomorrow, from what these actions will produce’.13 Paradoxically, it is precisely because the duty of philosophy is to think at ‘the breach in time’,14 in worldless times, when such a ‘breach in time’, a bifurcation of time, or the co-existence of two, heterogeneous times, historical time and evental time or the time of truths, is obliterated, practically invisible, to the point that the inhabitants of such a world are unable to even conceive of the possibility of another world, the role and the importance of philosophy seems to increase. The difficulty that philosophy faces today is that, precisely as the owl of Minerva, that is to say, coming ‘after’ the event, it must prove that it can also be truly contemporary to its time. That is to say, capable of taking part, participating, together with ‘its’ conditions, in bringing new truths to life. Philosophy presents itself today as a paradoxical articulation or knotting of a balance sheet of the past and a manifesto enveloping the precarious present of the emerging novelties in a fiction of the future of this nascent present. Just like avant-garde’s proclamations, philosophy, today, must provide formulas to ‘invent a future for the present’ of truths, without being ‘certain whether the thing itself is already present’.15 In an interview with Le Magazine Littéraire, following the publication of his book, which was, as its very title signals, The Century, conceived as a philosophical balance sheet of the past century, Badiou introduces a new definition of philosophy’s task in a striking and at the same time enigmatic fashion, by stating that, by definition, philosophy comes ‘after’, after the fact, yet despite or more properly because of this, as philosophers we also have ‘the possibility to come before, if we assume that, by means of the categories that we forge, something of that of which we have been belated contemporaries, is gathered together, brought back to life’.16 By being intrinsically late, by coming ‘after’, that is, once the event that has inaugurated a truth procedure has already disappeared, i.e. by situating itself in this delay, lagging behind, philosophy is capable of wrenching, extracting 13 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds:  Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New  York: Continuum, 2006), 7. 14 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1999), 38. 15 Badiou, The Century, 138–9. 16 ‘Alain Badiou, Un philosophe dans le siècle’, Le Magazine littéraire, 438 (January 2005): 96.

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from its own time something more in the times than time itself, the instant of ‘eternity’ as the objet a, a bit of the real that remains irreducible to chronological time. Yet the price to be paid by philosophy, insofar as it is true to its task – to identify the real of its own time, is that its own gesture is displaced, excentric, ultimately anachronistic, in relation to its time. But it is precisely on the basis of its excentricity, I would argue, that the philosophical gesture of ‘seizing truths’ is a paradoxical ‘after’ that is at the same time ‘before’. However, in intervallic times, that is, periods in which nothing new (seems to) take(s) place, philosophy, in particular one which defines itself as a philosophy of the event, that is a philosophy which, because it cannot directly create novelty, or force the events, but can only record its traces in thought; philosophy which is, ultimately, under the condition of its conditions, seems to lose its reason d’ être. What, in fact, could be the task of a philosophy which is ‘under the condition of its conditions’, if these conditions seem to be unable to produce something new? How, indeed, can philosophy be of help to its conditions? If philosophy is not ‘eternally condemned’ to ‘come after’, that is, to make a balance sheet of its time, but is also required to be contemporary with its time, this requirement coming from a thinker committed to a philosophy ‘under conditions’, cannot but come as a surprise. Does it mean that philosophy should be descending in the playground previously assigned to its ‘conditions’ in order to prove that it is indeed capable of being contemporary with its time, that it can actively contribute to the creation of the present, this being the only time of truths?

Philosophy and music It is precisely from the perspective of this curious torsion of time, that is, when the conditioned, philosophy, seems to be intervening in its conditions, that this paper will examine the relationship between philosophy and one of its conditions, art, and more specifically, music, in order to shed some light on Adorno’s and Badiou’s respective positions on the entanglement of temporality and transformation. The question of art is at the forefront of Adorno’s philosophy. However, to grasp the full significance of Adorno’s stance on art, it is necessary to assess his more general comments on the relationship between philosophy and art. In broad terms, art presents a challenge to philosophy insofar as it appeals to truth while being unable to fully express it. But the radical question about art in which Adorno is interested is centred on its transformative power. Given the apparent



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hopelessness of the present situation, due to the lack of the expected radical social and political transformation, the possibility of the hoped-for change, according to Adorno, should rather be considered from the vantage point of the promises of a new order brought into existence by the most innovative contemporary artistic creations. Thus, despite his unrelenting pessimism that predominantly informs his implacable critique of modernity in general and the actuality of the dystopian reality, Adorno did not renounce the possibility that it could be otherwise, searching for this ‘otherwise’ in art, particularly music. Crucially, he conceives of art’s role – music especially – in terms of a utopian promise. This is questionable for a variety of reasons, but the defensible part of the argument is apparent in Adorno’s insistence that the function of utopia is to be understood as a critique of what is present. As Adorno notes, ‘an “it shall be different”’, the possibility of something different that art signifies, is ‘hidden in even the most sublimated work of art’.17 But for art to be able to express its opposition and make its resistance understood, it ‘requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy, which is nothing but the thought that refuses all restrictions’.18 From a rigorously Adornian perspective, the need of artworks for the philosophical interpretation is itself grounded in ‘their need for the production of their truth content’, but this necessity of interpretation is at the same time ‘the stigma of their constitutive insufficiency’.19 Art and philosophy thus share the same responsibility as each turns to the other in order to realize its potential for truth. In this respect, as Adorno never tires to repeat, ‘there is no artwork that does not participate in the untruth external to it, that of the historical moment’.20 In view of this untruth that tarnishes art’s utopian promise and unrelenting yearning for happiness, artworks inevitably fail in their striving to present something different than reified reality. The utopian moment that every artwork, according to Adorno, generates and shelters, is therefore not to be seen in ‘the longing for the new’, for such a longing for the new itself, says Adorno, would remain ‘the negation of what exists’ while being ‘obedient to it’.21 On the contrary, for an artwork to be truly utopian, it must be capable of stopping time. It is, indeed, as ‘a cessation, a suspended moment 17 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’. In Notes on Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 92. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jepphcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 262. 19 Ibid., 128. 20 Ibid., 347. 21 Ibid., 32.

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of the process’,22 that an artwork interrupts the dystopian progress of time and in so doing it allows access to another time, a time that, strictly speaking, does not (yet) exist, the time of its utopian promise. Only in this sense can then be argued that art, as ‘a promise of happiness’, ‘embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom’.23 It goes without saying that this task applies to music as well. As Adorno succinctly puts it, ‘the promise contained in the age-old protest of music [is] the promise of a life without fear’.24 In giving music a pride place in his writing on the transformative power of art, Adorno emphasizes criticism as being ‘immanent to music itself ’, because the power of music points to something beyond itself. Indeed, music criticism is ‘required by music’s own formal law: the historic development (Entfaltung) of works and of their truth content occurs in the critical medium’.25 It is because of its capacity to refashion what is into what might be that what Adorno calls ‘music’s own formal law’ can be considered as incarnating the utopian moment in music. Addressing what he regards as the music’s critical utopianism, more precisely, its quest for lost difference, while following precisely that logic from which difference is expelled, Adorno insists that insofar as music keeps ‘reopening the wound, instead of affirming the world as it exists’, its goal ‘must be the complete liberation of the human subject’.26 Here, music inevitably encounters philosophy, that philosophy namely upon which it is incumbent – ‘after having missed its opportunity’ – ‘to provide a refuge for freedom’.27 There is, then, a curious proximity, a familiarity even, between music and philosophy. Indeed, philosophy, in its suspended state and aiming at ‘the expression of the inexpressible’, is ‘a true sister of music’.28 How are we to understand this sorority of philosophy and music? Following Benjamin, Adorno points to something which is crucial for philosophy and music, namely, the power of nomination: As language, music tends toward pure naming, the absolute unity of object and sign, which in its immediacy is lost to all human knowledge. In the utopian 22 Ibid., 6. 23 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 248. 24 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livnigstone (London: Verso, 1981), 145. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New  York: Continuum, 1988), 149. 26 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Classicism, Romanticism, New Music’. In Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120–21. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy’. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 14, 10. 28 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 109.



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and at the same time hopeless attempts at naming is located music’s relation to philosophy, to which, for this very reason, it is incomparably closer, in its idea, than any other art. But the name appears in music only as pure sound, divorced from its bearer, and hence the opposite of every act of meaning, every intention toward meaning.29

Precisely because music, as Adorno claims, ‘can only express what is proper to itself ’, it is only ‘in mediated form, that is, as philosophy’,30 that music offers greater resistance to interpretation than other art.31 So, what Adorno calls its immanent movement, music’s lack of objectivity and unambiguous reference make it freer than other art, because it is less compelled to reproducing existing reality and is therefore able to take on a critical role in keeping alive an awareness of how things could be transformed. This allows Adorno to claim that the strict concept of art can only be derived from music. For Adorno, music’s idea is ‘the form of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings.’32 Music is the idea of naming in so far as it is intentionless, non-representational. In being a non-representational mode of presentation, music serves as a paradigm for philosophy, an example to follow. However, if philosophy is truly the sibling of music, as Adorno maintains, this is not only because his idea of music is informed by modern music, specifically by the ‘Second Viennese School’, but also because he thinks philosophy with music’s idea in mind. It is no exaggeration to say that Adorno’s negative dialectics, a proper philosophy of dissonance, is almost exclusively shaped by his experience of contemporary music. Taking cue from contemporary music Adorno claims that ‘the task of art today is to bring chaos into order’.33 To introduce chaos into the existing order in the name of a different, utopian ‘order’, is precisely the task that allows Adorno to compare philosophy to music. In emphasizing the transformative power of art he insists at the same time on the transformation of this transformative power. His comments on Wagner’s relevance for today are particularly instructive:

29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’. In Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 2002), 140. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven:  The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jepphcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10. 31 Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’, 143. 32 Adorno, ‘Music, Language and Composition’, 114. 33 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 222.

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As spiritual entities, works of art are not complete in themselves. They create a magnetic field of all possible intentions and forces, of inner tendencies and countervailing ones, of successful and necessarily unsuccessful elements. Objectively, new layers are constantly detaching themselves, emerging from within; others grow irrelevant and die off. One relates to a work of art not merely, as is often said, by adapting it to fit a new situation, but rather by deciphering within it things to which one has a historically different reaction.34

If even Wagner can become new in a new time, this is because, as Adorno acknowledges, ‘the binding, truly general character of musical works of art is to be found, if at all, only through the medium of their particularity and concretion, and not by recourse to any kind of general types’.35 Adorno can therefore locate Wagner’s musical power in the fact that there is nothing general there, except the extreme particularity. Thus, one of music’s indispensable tasks lies in ‘the overcoming of the temporal dimension through articulation’.36 Paradoxically, art is successful in performing this task only by deploying its trace through embodied beings in time and space: Since truth of musical works themselves unfolds in time, it is no metaphorical exaggeration . . . when one states that Beethoven, for example, is revealed much more readily when one starts from what confronts us today, as the construction of an antagonistic totality, and ultimately its suspension, than if one were to confine oneself to the historical preconditions and immediate intension from which this work once originated.37

In view of this, one can better understand Adorno’s fine irony implied in the title of one of his famous essays:  ‘Schoenberg and Progress’. While Adorno clearly acknowledges the expressionistic period of ‘heroic’ free atonal works by Schoenberg, he is one of the first commentators to note the self-defeating tendency within the dodecaphonic compositional approach. According to Adorno, the integral serialism which evolves from free tonality, instead of increasing freedom leads to its abolition. This is why Adorno claims that ‘twelve-tone technique approaches the ideal of mastery as domination, whose boundlessness consists in the exclusion of whatever is heteronomous, of whatever is not integrated into the continuum of this technique’.38 Paradoxically, 34 Adorno, ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, 586. 35 Ibid., 588. 36 Ibid., 639. 37 Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Music and Philosophy’, 147. 38 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Schoenberg and Progress’. In Philosophy of New Music, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 53.



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the effect of this ‘mastery’ is not the liberation supposedly ensured by the break with tonality and seen as ‘emancipation of the dissonance’. On the contrary, in striving for ultimate mastery, serial composers are either unable or renounce to create the form which would shape the musical material, as a result ‘material and composition remain alien, opposed to each other’,39 thus rendering the music completely alienated and inaudible: ‘Today the alienation inherent in the consistency of artistic techniques itself forms the content of the artwork.’40 It is here, though, that the decisive questionable assumption in Adorno’s linking of philosophy to music can be located. For Adorno, if music provides important insights into the development of modern society, this is because the evolution of music itself depends on the given social-historical constellation. Thus, by being inseparably linked to the social and politics crisis of modern society, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique of composition exemplifies, for Adorno, a crisis in modern music rather than the progressive method on which the future of music could be constructed. And conversely, as he suggests in his celebrated essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in which he outlines ‘une musique informelle’, new music that would be capable of avoiding the impasses of serialism by taking up ‘the challenge posed by the idea of an revised, unrestricted freedom’41 in order to resolve ‘the dilemma of how to reconcile temporal form and musical content’.42 Rejecting both extremes:  ‘faith in the material’ and ‘absolute organization’, the future musique informelle will strive to transform the deformation of rationalism that reigns in serial music into a true rationality through the self-critical intensification of the control over material. The aim would then be ‘music in which the ear can hear live from the material what has become of it’.43 The idea behind Adorno’s proposition of a future music, musique informelle, is essentially Kantian. As Adorno himself suggests, musique informelle could be understood as an idea of reason in the sense that it is a concrete, which is to say, realizable possibility, while remaining an idea. As such, musique informelle is in the service of ‘free humanity’. Thus, to follow Adorno, ‘only what is fully articulated in art provides the image of an undeformed and hence free humanity’.44 But this goal can be attained only by ‘a music which is

39 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’. In Quasi una fantasia, 285. 40 Adorno, ‘Schoenberg in Progress’, 101. 41 Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, 275. 42 Ibid., 297. 43 Ibid., 319. 44 Ibid.

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in control of itself ’ and which would therefore be ‘in control of its own freedom from every compulsion, even its own’.45 For Badiou, by contrast, ‘only the serial sequence opened by the Schoenbergevent pronounces the truth of the post-Wagnerian musical world’.46 More specifically, if the Schoenberg-event, ‘by affirming the possibility of a sonic world no longer ruled by the tonal system’,47 marks a break in the history of music, this is because it opened a new music-world to be populated by a virtual infinity of works resulting from ‘the systematic exploration, within the sonic universe’ of the intrinsically infinite possibilities initiated by the Schoenbergian event. For such a world to be identifiable, it is necessary to extract from the artworks belonging to this world the prescription that presides over their production, and whose formulation Badiou reconstructs as follows:  ‘An organization of sound may exist which is capable of defining a musical universe on a basis which is entirely subtracted from classical tonality.’48 However, if serialism or, more exactly, ‘the serial organization which refers the notes back to their internal organization alone’,49 treating the twelve tones of the chromatic scale no longer according to the laws of harmony, but equally, has eventually reached a point of its saturation, this is not because it failed, Badiou argues, it is because ‘its “corporeal” capacities, those that could inscribe themselves in the dimension of the work, were increasingly restricted’, leading to the splitting of ‘the musical body “serialism” . . . between pure written form and auditory sensation’.50 Adorno and Badiou may well detect the same internal antinomy in new music, yet they treat it in a radically different manner. It might also be said that although Adorno and Badiou both connect art and music in particular to their conceptions of philosophy, there is a crucial difference in their handling of truths that art is capable of engendering. In comparison to Adorno’s statement on the relationship between philosophy and music in terms of sorority, Badiou considers the relation between art and philosophy ‘hierarchically’, that is, in terms of the relationship between the conditioned and the condition. Badiou is emphatic that ‘art itself is a truth procedure’51 as it produces truths of its own that philosophy ‘welcomes and

45 Ibid., 318–19. 46 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 85. 47 Ibid., 80. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 81. 51 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9.



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shelters’52 by describing ‘the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art’.53 Badiou takes his most antiAdornian turn in the following passage with his consideration of the relation between philosophy and art claiming that ‘art – as the configuration “in truth” of works – is in each and every one of its points the thinking of the thought that it itself is’.54 Badiou insists that truth is as such immanent to art, signifying in this way a radical break with a position of aesthetics, Adorno’s including, a position that transforms art into an object in order to extract the truths that art is capable of producing. But if art deserves moreover to be counted as one of philosophy’s conditions, this is because, in dealing with the sensible via the formalization of the seemingly formless, the specific status of art as a truth procedure consists in exemplifying for philosophy the problematic relationship between the finite (the artwork being a finite objectivity in space and time) and the infinite nature of truth (this being a generic multiple initiated by an eventual rupture). Or, more to the point, what singularizes art and its truths can be seen in an intricate relationship between the sensible and the formal as can be revealed through always particular possibilities of formalization. Concerning music, by contrast, music may well be recognized as thought capable of generating new truths, nevertheless it does not constitute a condition for Badiou’s philosophy. Thus, unlike Adorno’s philosophy that has deployed itself under the condition of the ‘Schoenberg event’, more specifically, under the condition of the ‘Second Viennese School’, Badiou’s philosophy was not particularly marked either by that or any other musical event. Not only does the Schoenberg event fall under a peculiar category of ‘a non-conditioning event’, to borrow François Nicolas’s felicitous term,55 moreover, in Badiou’s book consecrated to the twentieth century’s new truths generated by time-breaking events music is singularly absent. Hence, the century particularly reach in events, appears to be musically mute, indeed, ‘a century “without music” ’.56 On the other hand, however, Wagner’s music, although it is situated prior to a musical event ‘Schoenberg’, without explicitly being assigned the status of a musical event, appears to have strongly affected Badiou’s thought. What, then, are we to make of Badiou’s recent incursion into music, if this implies that the Schoenberg event is overshadowed by the prior Wagner-event? Thus, even 52 53 54 55

Ibid., 63. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., 13–14. François Nicolas, ‘Schoenberg’. In The Badiou Dictionary, ed. Steven Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 306. 56 Ibid., 307.

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though the Schoenberg-event is given a pride place in Badiou’s Logics of Words, it is obvious that the name Schoenberg is simply used to exemplify, in the world of music, the problematic articulation of the infinite truth and the finite body of the artwork. The fact that this particular production of a generic truth in the world of music is treated in Badiou’s philosophy as an example, this clearly signals, as Nicolas rightly points out, that, as far as Badiou’s philosophy is concerned, there is nothing necessary nor compelling about the Schoenberg-event. Because it is contingently linked to Badiou’s philosophy, it can be replaced by another example. It is in view of this externality of the Schoenberg-event with respect to Badiou’s philosophy that the key to understanding Badiou’s philosophical relation to music is to be found in the way in which Badiou’s philosophy relates to Wagner. This may account for the somewhat awkward place Five Lessons on Wagner, this being a rare incursion into music, holds in Badiou’s oeuvre. This insituability of Wagner, however, will be taken as an opportunity to ask how does Badiou’s analysis of Wagner relate to his broader philosophical project? In particular, this essay will focus on the status of music in view of its possible transformation into a full-fledged condition for his philosophy. Badiou’s starting point could be summarized as follows:  what musical innovation did create Wagner that this novelty succeeded in making a claim on philosophy? In his meticulous and comprehensive rehearsal of the anti-Wagner case, Badiou does not so much try to refute anti-Wagner arguments as to open access to a ‘new Wagner’, conceived as a creative project that still holds promises for the future. Taking up Lacoue-Labarthe’s critical account of the Gesamtkunstwerk, considered to be the key for teasing out the implications of this notion for the relationship between art and politics in Wagner’s music drama, Badiou relegates the Gesamtkunstwerk to ideology in order to shed some light on Wagner’s music dramas considered as a stage on which ‘music of the future’57 and a different conception of politics is played out. Thus instead of focusing on an ideological pseudoproblem of the Gesamtkunstwerk, we should venture instead into ‘Wagnerian fragmentation’ and localization ‘at the point where continuity and dissonance, the local and the global confront each other both musically and dramatically’.58 More to the point, it is only by divorcing Wagnerian music dramas from the notion of totality inherent to the Gesamtkunstwerk, that the singular Wagnerian dialectical 57 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 32. 58 Ibid., 84.



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tension between music and drama can be brought to light and in so doing it will be possible to demonstrate that music, far from being in the service of a preconceived totality, stands as the very medium in which dramatic possibilities are created that engender unforeseeable transformations. When turning to Adorno, one comes across the symptomatic absence of Adorno’s pivotal text In Search of Wagner and his later, yet crucial text on ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’. Instead, provocatively, yet ingeniously Badiou takes as Adorno’s text of reference Negative Dialectics, in order to find clues in it for Adorno’s criticism of Wagner, but also some indications concerning a positive alternative to Wagner, ‘musique informelle’, as Adorno terms it, which is, strictly speaking, non-existent, still to come, yet capable of functioning as a condition for Adorno’s negative dialectics. Badiou’s principle target in his reading is Adorno’s critique of ‘the identity principle’ and his insistence on the moments of heterogeneity, difference and non-identity, precisely to the extent as such moments of the unthought that resist the conceptual capture, prevent any attempt at a reaching unity or a resolutive closure. In this critique of unity, Adorno is by no means lonely. In fact: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe all agree in viewing Wagner as someone who forces musical unity upon a variegated mass, upon difference whose essential character of otherness disappears or dissolves as a result . . . Unity in Wagner’s music is ultimately in the service of a vision . . . of the nation in general and of the German nation in particular.59

In spite of the obvious divergence between Adorno and Badiou, both nevertheless converge upon a few crucial points in their assessment of Wagner’s artistic creation that offer a point of philosophical contact. In view of Badiou’s summary criticism of Wagner’s adversaries, it is enlightening to turn to Adorno’s essay on Wagner’s relevance. Emphasizing the importance of Wagner’s work for Schoenberg and his disciples and its potential for new music, Adorno rejects, retroactively, so to speak, Badiou’s reproach that musique informelle is presented as Adorno’s solution to Wagner’s ‘totalitarian’ failings. Thus, Adorno claims, in Wagner’s music, the continuity is created, over long stretches, by an unconstraind redrawing of the dramatic curve from moment to moment. The intact diatonic tonal structure makes it possible to dispense with surface links. In this way, the music achieves a concreteness of the irregular that traditional music never dreamed of. This 59 Ibid., 58.

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would remain prototypical for Schoenberg, for Berg, and for the most recent tendency: the trend toward structures that are free, yet dense . . . it would provide the ideal model for a truly informal process of composition.60

In defending Wagner against Adorno’s charge, Badiou argues that Wagner’s music cannot be seen as imposing ‘musical unity upon a variegated mass’, since ‘dramatic possibilities are created through the music’,61 this being precisely Adorno’s argument for ‘musique informelle’. One cannot but wonder why Badiou stubbornly refuses to acknowledge how close he and Adorno are in their assessment of Wagner’s work and its relevance for today. Both insist on Wagner’s relevance which imposes his bringing ‘back again using different means’.62 For both this construction of ‘a second Wagner’ takes as its point of departure a problematic articulation between true and false, progressive and reactionary, innovation and restoration in Wagner. Thus, for Adorno, His truth content and those elements that legitimate criticism has found questionable are mutually interdependent. The uncertainty with which a selfconscious performance practice approaches him is caused, not least at all, by the fact that there is no way around this interweaving of the true and false in his work.63

For Badiou, by contrast, the examination of the knotting of new and old, progressive and reactionary, true and false, is unavoidable because we are dealing in Wagner with a multiplicity of artistic configurations and each of them explores ‘a possibility of ending’.64 Put otherwise, each music drama elaborates musically the consequences of its own innovative mode of thought regarding the possibility of ending. Of particular interest to Badiou are the elaborations of various possibilities from the perspective of the ‘relationship between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation’,65 such as have been elaborated in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. The lesson to be drawn from Wagner’s music dramas is that, just like politics, art cannot be only ‘grounded in formal subtraction, that is, in a break with the past’, in short, neither art nor politics can take as its ultimate goal ‘radically new creation, irreducible originality’.66 This is because a radical break with the 60 Adorno, ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, 592. 61 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 89. 62 Ibid., 129, 83. 63 Adorno, ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, 596. 64 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 99. 65 Ibid., 107. 66 Ibid., 108.



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past would sacrifice its transformative potential, what is needed instead is a creative repetition of the past, such that its disruptive effects can persist in the present – via the incorporation of the evental trace. It is precisely at the point at which art encounters politics that Badiou mobilizes Mallarmé’ s ambition of restoring a modern, non-religious and non-transcendent ceremony, considered as a generic ‘community’s mode of self-representation’.67 Despite the fact that Wagner’s Parsifal, according to Badiou, ultimately failed to establish a new, modern ceremony, Wagner’s idea of a modern ceremony, addressed to a generic humanity rather than to a mythical Volk, cannot be simply discarded. Hence, for Badiou, the ‘question as to whether the Crowd declares itself . . . cannot be exclusively recapitulated in collective figures of revolt . . . It must also put forward, examine and produce its own consistency’.68 It could then be argued with Badiou that even though Parsifal ultimately does not change ‘the ceremony into something new’, it nevertheless encourages us ‘at least to be able to get ready to intrude into future celebrations, that is, to anticipate or have the necessary prerequisites for the future celebration’.69 Thus, according to Badiou, it is possible to tease out of Wagner’s music dramas a novel concept of art as well as of politics. Badiou’s focusing on ceremony is clearly overdetermined by his reading of Mallarmé, more exactly, of Mallarmé on the future of ceremony. In presenting Parsifal in Mallarméan terms, a displacement is produced which might have some unforeseeable consequences:  in recasting the question of ceremony in the vocabulary of the Mallarméan Book, it seems that Mallarmé is summoned in order to reassure us that future ceremony will not be the perpetuation of the ruined modern ceremonies such as the Catholic Mass, the concert hall, or politics. Meillassoux’s close reading on this issue offers a slightly different perspective on Badiou’s reading Mallarmé into Wagner. Taking as his point of departure Badiou’s central question in Five Lessons on Wagner, namely, ‘Can humanity really do without ceremony? Can politics do without ceremony?’70 – and if, as Badiou clearly announces, this is not possible in the long run, then the question is obviously in what must the modern ceremony consist? – Meillassoux sets out to ‘construct a Mallarmé other than that of Badiou, but capable in this sense precisely of responding . . . to the most recent interrogations of the philosopher’,71 by insisting on what Meillassoux 67 Ibid., 147. 68 Ibid., 158. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Badiou and Mallarmé:  The Event and the Perhaps’, trans. Alyosha Edlebi, Parrhesia, vol. 16 (2013): 35.

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calls ‘discrete resistances of Mallarméan poetics vis-à-vis Badiou’s philosophy’.72 While there is no doubt about the centrality of the question of ceremony in Wagner and Badiou, Mallarmé, such as Meillassoux constructs it on the basis of his examination of the ceremony of the Book, is capable of providing ‘a response in his own way to the question that guides Badiou’s analyses on Wagner’.73 Crucially, Mallarmé’ s positing of Chance as the new infinite that takes place of the old God, necessarily leads to the eternalization of the moment of hesitation: The infinitization of verse must be produced by a hesitation to toss the dice, a hesitation that is then incorporated into the verse . . . Igitur simply shakes the dice in his hand . . . he tosses the dice without tossing them, confining himself to this ambiguous gesture as symbol of the poetic act to come.74

Thus, on Meillassoux’s reading, it is forever uncertain whether the toss of the Master has taken place or not. But it is precisely through the irresolute ‘perhaps’ of the poetic act, the irreducible hesitation of the poetic gesture between affirmation and negation of the toss that the ceremonial splendour is symbolized, the latter is infinite precisely to the extent that it is hesitant. This allows Meillasoux to conclude that the ceremony of the moderns will be a ceremony of hesitation, the sole act capable of comprising in itself the infinite opposites:  hesitation to smile with irony, or to believe with sincerity in the possible rebirth of a poetic and political communion.75

Badiou, in effect, concludes his Lessons on Wagner with the enigma of Parsifal, an enigma formulated as the question concerning the true subject of Parsifal, this being ultimately none other than the ‘great question’ of the nineteenth century: the possibility of a new ceremony, of a post-Christian ceremony. Yet in Meillassoux’s Mallarméan recasting of this question, the true subject of Parsifal is not the question of whether a modern ceremony is possible or not but, rather, the undecidibility, an irresolvable oscillation between restoration and innovation of the future ceremony. For Meillassoux, the double splitting of ceremony: first, between two ceremonies in Parsifal itself (the first celebrated by Amfortas, the second by Parsifal), two ceremonies that are formally identical, as Badiou points out, and the splitting of ceremony between a real ceremony (in Parsifal) and the

72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 44. 75 Ibid.



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performed ceremony in Bayreuth, clearly signifies that it is ‘not certain . . . that there will have been here a new ceremony or even a ceremony tout court’.76 Put otherwise, if, for Badiou, the hesitation produced through the double splitting of ceremony, as a sort of empty repetition, marks a painful suspension to be resolved through the event, for Meillassoux, this hesitation is in itself the answer posed by Wagner’s Parsifal. Thus, what could have reconciled – be it partially – Mallarmé and Wagner: this whole uncertainty, oscillating between the ridiculous and the sublime, the new and the repetitive, the real and the fictive – all of this could have represented fairly well, I believe, not a failure, not a waiting for another thing, but quite precisely the modern ceremony, according to its intrinsic and, in a certain way, unsurpassable ‘perhaps’. The ceremony as eternal hesitation between the derisory and the solemn, the constellation and its night.77

In his reading of Mallarmé, Meillassoux offers a different version, revising various aspects of the Mallarméan–Wagnerian–Badiouan question concerning the possibility of creating a new ceremony, a ceremony of the generic. While Meillassoux’s conclusions may well raise suspicion about the well-foundedness of Badiou’s belief in the evental resolution of the future ceremony issue, the crucial point here is less about the accuracy of such a reading-revision than about the implications that it might have for the status of Wagner in relation to Badiou’s philosophy and, more generally, for the status of music as a possible condition of this philosophy. Concerning this specific point, the relationship between philosophy and music, Adorno, once again imposes itself as Badiou’s privileged interlocutor.

Conditioning philosophy’s conditions If Schoenberg constitutes for Badiou’s philosophy a non-conditioning event and can therefore be used to illustrate or exemplify particular aspects of the artistic truth production, the status of Wagner in relation to Badiou’s philosophy is quite different. In order to better determine the status of Wagner within Badiou’s evental philosophy, Nicolas proposes an in-between notion, between the event and the example, namely, the singularity. As he writes, ‘In Badiou’s

76 Ibid., 46. 77 Ibid.

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philosophy, Wagner is the name of a singularity more than of an event properly speaking:  there is, for this philosophy, the Wagner-singularity, more than a Wagner-event.’78 For were Wagner the name of an event, it would by the same token be apt, just like Mallarmé’ s poetry or Cantor’s set theory, to condition Badiou’s philosophy. While Adorno and Badiou seem to have hardly anything in common, there is a strange coincidence that brings their philosophical trajectories in some proximity. In his first novel, Almageste,79 Wagner’s music is assigned ‘a singular power of nomination that permits us to conceive of it as the secret prayer of things’.80 As aforementioned, Adorno, too, sees music endowed with the power of nomination. By being a non-representational mode of presentation, intentionless, music, for Adorno, incarnates the power of naming things directly, unlike philosophy, equally apt to naming things, only indirectly – via language. In a similar way, Badiou attributes to Wagner’s music this power of naming directly, because, for him, only music is ‘able to name everything, since it is hardly a sign . . . but the secret prayer of things’.81 In its capacity to give things a name that suit them, music holds a secret that it can ‘avow’. Introduced as the name of a singularity for Badiou’s thought, Wagner as a name of a singularity changes several statuses. There are, in fact, two principal figures of Wagner-the-name-of-a-singularity: the first Wagner intervenes in the relationship between philosophy and music and modifies it at the same time, and precisely to the extent, that it is a name for a music presented as a ‘fundamental operator of contemporary ideology’. The second Wagner, certainly more complex regarding its nominative function, is a Wagner that has been retroactively extracted from Badiou’s Five Lessons on Wagner. Indeed, in Five Lessons, Wagner emerges as a name for a music capable of generating and exploring different types of possibilities: the possibility of a future great art, the creation of new subjective possibilities, based on the split subject and the toleration of heterogeneity; the exploration of a collective capacity of transformation; the capacity of staging a new, post-Christian ceremony allowing a generic collectivity that can attain its self-representation; and finally the possibility of non-dialectical figures of resolution, that is, transformations no longer guided by teleological principles; the exploration of this possibility implies the affirmation of a new faith or fidelity. In unearthing these diverse facets of Wagner’s music Badiou posits Wagner as a 78 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, in The Badiou Dictionary, 380. 79 Alain Badiou, Almagestes, Trajectoire inverse (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 199. 80 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, 381. 81 Badiou, Almagestes, Trajectoire inverse, 101.



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philosophical name, a name for philosophy, but also for music, in so far it is ‘the name of an opening and of a future’,82 rather than the name of a closure or even a name of an event. Here, again, the status of Wagner as a name used by Badiou’s philosophy remains to a certain extent elusive, enigmatic as an anticipation of something that will only receive its full significance retroactively. This emerges clearly from the following description, offered by Nicolas, to capture various, yet converging aspects of Badiou’s use of the name Wagner. Indeed, ‘Wagner’ is used in Badiou ‘as a possibility, as a motif that is still secret but already there, as the promise of a future anterior, as the announcing of a moment in which the Wagner-possibility will have come’.83 Put simply, what Badiou’s incursion into music, in particular Wagner’s music dramas, ultimately aims at is to transform Wagner or, better, to create the name Wagner as a philosophical name for music, rather than its saturation or closure, as Adorno would have it. This gesture is more ambitious than it might first appear. Ultimately, by transforming a proper name, Wagner, into one of the possible names for music itself, Badiou explores nothing less than the possibility of music as a condition of philosophy, as he conceives of it. Put another way and drawing on some insights from Nicolas’s highly perspicacious comments on Badiou’s reading of Wagner, the question that is put on the philosophical agenda with Badiou’s Five Lessons is the following: is what starts to be gradually uncovered under the name Wagner and which is still to some extent hidden, secret, undisclosed, a promise of the future-anterior for the music to be situated as one of the conditions of philosophy? Badiou’s subtle, yet extremely detailed analyses of Wagner’s music dramas in view of their actual and future impact on music and philosophy seem to lead to the conclusion that music is slowly emerging as a specific condition for Badiou’s philosophy, a condition that is clearly to be distinguished from the already established conditions (science, politics and love), but also from various artistic creations that have effectively conditioned Badiou’s philosophy (from Mallarmé via Pessoa to Beckett). Crucial here is that the name Wagner as a philosophical name for music, names something that is already ‘there’, although not yet fully deployed in view of its still to be uncovered potentials. In this sense it could be said that music, as it can be derived from Badiou’s analysis of Wagner, has a paradoxical status of a precondition for a philosophy, since philosophy, in so far as it is affected by Wagner, has discerned by now 82 Nicolas, ‘Wagner’, 382. 83 Ibid.

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some aspects of its transformative power and potential for future developments in music. In order to capture the specific modality that allows Badiou to conceptualize, for philosophy, the effects produced by Wagner, not directly on philosophy, but rather on the relationship established between philosophy and music, Nicolas borrows one of Badiou’s notions from Being and Event, namely: intervention. The philosophical intervention in question is one that can best be described as an anticipatory retroaction, a peculiar temporal and logical operation intended to intervene into that which is supposed to condition philosophy:  music as a would-be condition of a future philosophy under conditions. In this respect, retroaction can be considered as an act by means of which philosophy, while not yet conditioned by this music, posits the latter as ‘music that is liable to condition it’.84 Bringing together both aspects, anticipation and retroaction, Badiou’s intervention in the way in which philosophy relates to music as one of its prospective conditions, retroaction, as Nicolas defines it, presents itself as ‘a (philosophical) avowal of a (music) secret, an avowal that endeavours to designate, under the (philosophical) name Wagner, an unperceived musical capacity’.85 Strictly speaking, what ‘Wagner’ as a name for music designates is a not fully effectuated and thus still undisclosed, secret capacity of music, that is only slowly starting to emerge via Badiou’s philosophical intervention. One is tempted to say that in the same way in which Badiou reconstructs, retroactively, by deriving from existing serial musical pieces the prescription that guided their creation as a sort of prescription of serialism, he tries to formulate a prescription in order to capture that which conditions actually existing Wagnerian music. However, to the extent that this retroactive prescription is inferred from already created music while simultaneously addressed to music that is still to come, Badiou’s use of the term ‘prescription’ here is somewhat misleading. This is why, as Nicolas suggests, it takes the form of a prophecy. For this reason, this prescriptionprophecy ‘concerns less future music as such than music as a possible condition for philosophy’, that is, the music to come that will be able to ‘re-engage its power of conditioning on philosophy’.86 Thus, to follow Nicolas in his rather tortuous attempt to gauge what Badiou’s reading of Wagner amounts to, Badiou’s philosophy by disclosing or

84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 382–3.



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philosophically avowing the secrets of a possible musical conditioning, . . . intervenes here upstream of its own upstream, as it were, in such a way that it is a matter for it of prophesising about what music, under the name Wagner, is already capable of (without being really known in music or by musicians), which means: capable of for philosophy.87

To clarify in what exactly this prophetic prescription consists in with respect to a music to come, there is perhaps no better way than to compare Adorno’s and Badiou’s respective interventions. Unlike Badiou, Adorno’s philosophy, as aforementioned, is deployed under the condition of the event ‘Second Viennese School’, while this event was still capable of producing consequences within the musical field. It could then be asserted that, for Adorno, music is indeed the principle condition of his philosophy. By contrast, ‘une musique informelle’, which is his proposition for a future music, was motivated by the very project of his negative dialectics, an intervention that will lead to the invention, by Adorno’s philosophy, of a non-existent music  –  une musique informelle  – specifically destined to serve as an ideal musical condition for philosophy. Succinctly put, instead of composing as the musician that he was a musique informelle that he considered lacking in his time, Adorno circumscribes, within philosophy, a place destined for the music that would be appropriate to conditioning philosophy. In this respect, it is not by accident that his Negative Dialectics has been called a musique informelle. As Badiou himself points out in his Five Lessons on Wagner,88 by proposing a  musique informelle  as a musical solution to the impasses of serial music deriving from the Schoenberg School, Adorno accomplishes a sort of a retroaction. According to Badiou, Adorno philosophically constructs a place for this music that would be able to condition philosophy, this place operating here as a ‘condition in absentia’, since no music of that kind existed to occupy this predestined place. Hence, what we are dealing with here is a kind of a philosophical precondition of a musical condition, because, in music, nothing new had taken place, nothing had been happening in music itself that would afford it the status as a condition of philosophy. But this also means that Adorno’s intervention into the musical condition or music as a condition of philosophy, does not work as Adorno had expected. In this sense, Adorno’s musique informelle could be seen as an inverted conditioning, where the conditioned conditions its condition or

87 Ibid., 383. 88 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 33, 44, 46, 53, 67.

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supposed condition, prescribing to music what or how it should be in order to be of any interest for philosophy. Badiou’s philosophical intervention, on the other hand, is entirely different, though it is true that we are dealing with the same retroactive gesture, in so far as Badiou’s retroaction is also grounded in already existing music. In this sense, it presents itself as a manifesto enveloping the precarious present of the already existing yet not fully disclosed music, as well as the musical novelties to emerge in the future of this nascent present.

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Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and Badiou Rok Benčin

In a rare confrontation with Adorno’s philosophy, found in his book on Wagner, Badiou situates the German thinker among his usual philosophical foes  – Heidegger and Deleuze – as another proponent of ‘the ideal of the open’. Badiou presents Adorno’s critique of the principle of identity as a denunciation of any kind of unifying or universalizing closure in the name of multiplicity and difference, thus significantly contradicting his own philosophical programme, which seeks to renounce the one without affirming the multiple. In the context of music and art more generally, Adorno’s ideal of the open supposedly entails a disintegration of form, the unifying principle that Badiou himself reaffirms as the vehicle of artistic truth. A closer look at Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, however, reveals that form nevertheless remains the only means art has of expressing the non-identical. While indeed form does violence to the heterogeneity of the sensible, which makes all art melancholic, form is also the only way art can keep its promesse de bonheur. In what follows, I examine how Adorno’s theory of artistic form and its immanent relation to affect reflects back on Badiou’s own account of artistic truth in terms of form as well as on his recent outline of a ‘metaphysics of happiness’. My contribution is based on the assumption that a parallel reading of Adorno and Badiou can reveal how unravelling the aporias of their philosophical conceptualizations of artistic truth requires the development of a peculiar dialectics of form and affect.

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Setting the scene Reading original philosophers side by side requires the construction of a scene on which their thinking can meet, even if this scene turns out to be a battleground. In order to go beyond simply identifying the obvious divergences that make philosophical endeavours irreconcilable (and perhaps spotting some apparent similarities along the way) a common conceptual problem should be (re)constructed as a scene against the background of which the differences between their conceptual designs can be measured. In the case of Adorno and Badiou, the divergences are obvious enough. Even if both could be argued to claim that the existence of philosophy is conditioned by events, the nature of the events in question differs greatly. While Badiou articulates his notion of truth as a subjective fidelity to an event (whether in politics, art, science or love) that redefines the coordinates of possibility, for Adorno events compel subjects to impossibilities (living after Auschwitz) and missed opportunities (the failure of communist revolution, i.e. philosophy’s self-realization). On the other hand, similarities can be discerned, for example, between both authors’ stance towards contemporary philosophical thought on being, especially between Badiou’s critique of Deleuze and Adorno’s critique of Heidegger. But beyond differences and similarities, is there a specific philosophical problem, a conceptual scene that would truly allow us to read both thinkers side by side? An example of a scene of this kind was presented by Badiou as ‘the French moment’ in philosophy, that is, as a set of conceptual problems and modes of approaching them that he and his French contemporaries from Sartre to Deleuze have shared despite their many differences.1 While there is no such historical ‘moment’ that would include both of them, Badiou nevertheless frames his reading of Adorno in the context of a more thematic philosophical sequence. Alongside mainly Nietzsche and Lacoue-Labarthe, Adorno and Badiou himself belong to what Badiou calls the Wagnerian philosophical ‘genre’, revolving around the philosophical questions that Wagner’s music implies.2 For these philosophers, as Badiou emphasizes, ‘Wagner as a philosophical question’ was not a peripheral topic of interest, but a question they felt was essential to address. This is why Badiou does not focus on Adorno’s texts on Wagner, but

1 Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London/ New York: Verso, 2012), li–lxiii. 2 Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, trans. Susan Spitzer (London/New York: Verso, 2010), 55–6.



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goes straight to Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s philosophical magnum opus.3 The implications of philosophical discussions on Wagner are not limited to music or even to aesthetics, but put the core differences between philosophical endeavours at stake. On the background of this common ‘genre’, Badiou’s presentation of Adorno is set up to provide a stark contrast to his own views. According to Badiou, Adorno’s philosophy of the non-identical entails an aesthetics that demands of art to abandon form in the name of affect. The disintegration of form enables art to bear witness to suffering in which the non-identical appears.4 For Badiou, on the other hand, the affect of truth can only be happiness, while artistic truth is specifically identified with the capacity of form. Although Badiou’s reading is highly respectful, there is not much in Adorno he would be willing to affirmatively extract and potentially recycle. I will argue that Adorno and Badiou nevertheless share a theoretical concern that sets up a scene allowing their work to be read in conjunction. A closer look at Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory reveals that for him as well, the notion of form is in fact what allows philosophy to think the truth of art. Despite the fact that form inflicts violence upon the sensible, it is through formal innovation alone that art can convey the suffering it is compelled to express. Reading Badiou’s account of Adorno in isolation, on the other hand, one might get the wrong impression that Badiou himself stands for forms as ideal and ahistorical templates that determine artistic relation to truth. On the contrary, Badiou defines artistic truth as the transformation of form, as art’s ability to move the boundaries of its capacity to form the sensible. Both authors declare their intention to move away from the traditional ‘academic’ understanding of forms as fixed designs of an aesthetic ideal. Badiou identifies academicism with the reactive subjective position which claims that formal novelties in art are mere deformations of established forms.5 Similarly, Adorno claims that by insisting on formal unity academic artworks ‘strangle the diffuse element of art’, whereas a great artwork is not an informal one but rather one ‘whose form springs from its truth content’.6 For both Adorno and Badiou form is the site of struggle for truth in art. Artistic truth is thus less a matter of form than it is a matter of the capacity of formalization, the ability of artistic form to be transformed. Here, the emphasis 3 Ibid., 27. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds:  Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London/New  York: Continuum, 2009), 73. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London/New York: Continuum, 1997), 188–9.

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shifts from form’s relation to its other, that is, the sensible material that it forms, to its own productive and transformative capacity. The question can then be posed as to what drives the transformation of form and in relation to what such autoreferential form could be said to be the bearer of artistic truth. As I try to show, this is precisely where the relation between form and affect is established. In both philosophers an account of affect can be found that pertains to artistic form as such. In Adorno, the ‘melancholy of form’ is also what allows art to make its ‘promise of happiness’.7 Badiou, on the other hand, has recently developed a metaphysical understanding of ‘real happiness’ as related to truth (artistic truth included), even allowing for a certain ‘measure of despair’ as its condition.8 The status of these affects in their relation to truth nevertheless remains somewhat unclear in both authors. With reference to the psychoanalytic conceptualization of melancholy and mania I argue that the relation between form and truth is established precisely through an affect that is immanent to form. In its selfreferentiality, form produces a particular kind of object as a remainder – or, more precisely, a surplus – of the process of formalization itself. It is in its relation to this elusive object, I argue, that form is affected and thus capable of transforming itself and becoming the site of artistic truth.

Poetic ontology and ontological need Bringing Adorno and Badiou together around the notion of form provides the necessary ‘scene’ for this parallel reading, although it does not limit the effort to the field of aesthetics. What is first and foremost at stake is the appearance of truth. In this regard, Badiou classifies Adorno alongside Heidegger, Bergson and Deleuze as a propagator of ‘the ideal of the open’ that resists any formal and identitarian closure.9 The primacy of open-ended transformation over the closure of formalization is not so much an aesthetic preference as it is an antiscientific stance that all the above-mentioned philosophers share in contrast to Badiou’s embrace of mathematics as ontology. Annulling the gap between Adorno and Heidegger, perhaps the fiercest philosophical divide in twentiethcentury German philosophy, but also between the German philosophical tradition and the French vitalist current from Bergson to Deleuze, requires a

7 Ibid., 144, 136. 8 Alain Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel (Paris: PUF, 2015), 39. 9 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 43.



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great leap that is only possible on the assumption that Badiou’s philosophy itself introduces a break so radical that the differences between previous currents of thought become irrelevant. To understand this stance, one must go back to Badiou’s Being and Event, where he introduces his philosophical project as a break with Heidegger’s ‘poetic ontology’.10 As is also clear from his critique of Deleuze,11 Badiou is primarily concerned with challenging any kind of ontology that seeks for a revelation of being, its poetic expression or opening, regardless of how its presence is conceptualized. Instead of searching for the proximity of being, Badiou’s ontology is based on ‘the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but from all presentation’.12 Ultimately, Badiou ‘un-binds the Heideggerian connection between being and truth’ and proposes a concept of truth that is not the truth of being but a truth procedure instigated by a subject in fidelity to an event.13 Is it justified to claim that Adorno was a poetic ontologist? The answer to this question is not straightforward. The project of negative dialectics is as much a critique of the identity principle as it is a defence of conceptual thinking that unavoidably succumbs to this very principle. Adorno’s own critique of Heidegger, but also of Bergson, aims precisely at attempts to relieve thought of its identifying burden. While Heidegger is trying ‘to heal the concept of “Being” of the wound of its conceptual thinking’, Bergson yields to ‘a cult of irrational immediacy’.14 For Adorno, thought cannot gain direct access to the nonidentical in ‘the open’ since thinking cannot shed its identifying form: ‘Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify.’15 It is through this form alone that the non-identical can be thought – this is the contradiction that drives negative dialectics and distinguishes it from contemporary ontological and vitalist attempts at surpassing metaphysics. Along these lines, Adorno presents his own version of the critique of poetic ontology: ‘A philosophy that would try to imitate art . . . would be postulating the demand of identity, claiming to exhaust its object by endowing its procedure with a supremacy to which the heterogeneous bows a priori.’ Even though the

10 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London/New York: Continuum, 2005), 9–10. 11 Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3. 12 Badiou, Being and Event, 10. 13 Ibid., 15. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London/New York: Routledge, 1973), 70, 8. 15 Ibid., 5.

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concept stands in the way between thinking and what is thought, it is also the only connection that can be established between them, which is why philosophy ‘must strive, by way of concept, to transcend the concept’.16 Even though Adorno, as Badiou notes, anticipates the critique of the one dominant in philosophy thirty years later, his critique is closer to Badiou’s own primary philosophical decision that ‘the one is not’17 than to some kind of ‘postmodern’ affirmation of multiplicity. For Adorno, the ‘illusion of taking direct hold of the Many would be a mimetic regression’, since only unity is able to ‘transcend’ unity.18 For Badiou as well (even though strictly speaking the comparison cannot be made in such a direct manner), there is no one, only the process of unifying (the ‘count-as-one’) that undoes itself.19 On the other hand, Badiou is right in claiming that, according to Adorno, the non-identical nevertheless appears to thought: ‘What is the appearance of what is non-identical to thought? The latter obviously doesn’t present itself as thought:  it necessarily presents itself as affect, as body, even.’20 Even though thought cannot avoid its identifying form and think non-identically, its attempt to transcend the concept by way of concept is based on the affective appearance of the non-identical. The non-identical appears to thought as an imperative posed by suffering: ‘The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.’21 Contrary to Heideggerian anxiety, however, this ‘ontological’ affect is not existentially tied to Dasein but is rather historically and socially determined. The principle of identity is not limited to thought – it is the spiritual reflection of the principle of domination that ‘antagonistically rends human society’.22 Even though the non-identical does not have an explicitly ontological status, the ‘poetic’ claim to express something real beyond what is transcendentally constructed as reality can still be traced in Adorno. In Badiou, the situation is reversed. According to Being and Event, thought can directly access the pure multiplicity that is the form of the presentation of being by way of mathematical set theory. On the other hand, there is no affective access to being, no ontological experience – being is simply not in the mood, so to speak. From the perspective of Badiou’s radically subtractive ontology, Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s

16 Ibid., 15. 17 Badiou, Being and Event, 23. 18 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 158. 19 Badiou, Being and Event, 44–5. 20 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 38. 21 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17. 22 Ibid., 48.



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‘ontological need’23 that substantializes the very non-substantiality of being thus falls short.

Artistic truth: Immanent and singular? Turning our attention more specifically to the articulation of form and affect in aesthetics, the question can first be posed as to how the critique of poetic ontology translates into the critique of what could be called ‘onto-poetics’: the idea that the expression of being beyond what is representationally constructed as reality is also what ultimately paves the way for philosophical thought on art, detectable in both Heidegger and Deleuze. Considering Badiou’s subtractive approach to ontology, in which the link between being and truth is untied, ontopoetics ought not to be an option his philosophy would pursue. Although he does not explicitly frame his discussion of aesthetics in these terms, his ‘inaesthetics’ seems to confirm this by denouncing ‘aesthetic speculation’ and insisting on the ‘independent existence’ of artistic truths with regard to what philosophy extracts from them.24 For Adorno, on the other hand, the voice of suffering as an expression of something real that lies beyond what is cognitively and socially constructed as reality is indeed what philosophy looks for in art: ‘If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something [behind] the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides.’25 Adorno’s aesthetics thus still has an onto-poetic structure, even though what is to be unveiled beyond the construction of reality is not being as such but rather suffering caused by social domination. As Rancière points out, even Badiou’s own accounts of artworks, especially poetry, are often very close to simply reproducing his ontological insights.26 Even if the ontology thus evoked by poetry is of a subtractive and not of a ‘poetic’ kind, the question nevertheless lingers whether Badiou’s break with onto-poetics is as clear-cut as the logic of his philosophical system would demand.

23 Ibid., 102, 106. 24 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xii. 25 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18. 26 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), 215–25.

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Be that as it may, Badiou’s philosophy is based on the assumption that philosophy itself does not produce any truths but is rather conditioned by the truth procedures that occur independently in art, science, politics and love.27 This is why he rejects both Plato’s philosophical dismissal of art’s capacity for truth and Heidegger’s devotion that puts artistic truth above all else.28 These two extremes give rise to two principle historical models of philosophy’s relation to art. The so-called didactic model claims that ‘art is incapable of truth, or that all truth is external to art’.29 This entails that art must be radically criticized by philosophy or put into didactic use conveying a truth prescribed from outside. The romantic model, on the other hand, is based on the thesis that ‘art alone is capable of truth’.30 In this model, philosophy can only be subordinated to art. There is also the third model, the classical one, originating in Aristotle, which deproblematizes the artistic relation to truth. Classicism claims that what is to be looked for in art is not truth but resemblance and verisimilitude in relation to affects that fiction is able to provoke. It thus makes no sense to criticize it for its lack of truth since art is simply not a matter of thinking but a matter of affect – of pleasure and catharsis.31 Badiou has declared that the twentieth century was unable to put any alternative models on offer:  Marxism was didactic (Brecht), hermeneutic philosophy, romantic (Heidegger), and psychoanalysis, classical.32 It falls to inaesthetics finally to introduce a new model, one based on the immanence and singularity of artistic truth:33 against classicism it claims that art is capable of truth, against didacticism that this truth is immanent to art and against romanticism that it is also singular, that is, specific to art  – it cannot be considered as a general, supreme truth. Considering his view on the century’s ‘passion of the real’ and its indissoluble connection to art,34 Badiou’s dismissal of twentieth-century aesthetics could perhaps be seen as surprising. He does, however, address the phenomenon of the historical avant-gardes, which he sees as an anticlassical mixture of didacticism (their critical dimension) and romanticism (their radical call for renewal).35 If Badiou gives the avant-gardes a special mention, on account of 27 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 33–9. 28 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 1. 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Ibid., 3. 31 Ibid., 3–5. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press, 2007). 35 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 8.



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their being consistent with his theory of subjectivation, then the omission of modernism may seem curious, especially considering Badiou’s fascination with Beckett, something he incidentally shares with Adorno. Still, Badiou’s readings of modern literature could very well be seen as antimodernist, which might also explain why Adorno can simply be left out of Badiou’s account of twentiethcentury aesthetics. Adorno is famously anticlassical in his critique of the cultural industry and the ‘culinary’ attitude towards art. But where would he fit in the dilemma between didacticism and romanticism? Rejecting both Lukács’s and Brecht’s versions of Marxist aesthetics – the former for its affirmation of realist representations of social totality at the expense of modernist presentations of social antagonisms through experimenting with artistic form and the latter for its naïve didactic simplification of political truth  – Adorno defends the autonomy of art and adopts (much like Badiou) a modernist artistic canon. Nevertheless, his theory of art’s ‘truth content’ is not immanent in the strict Badiouan sense. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the ‘truth content of an artwork requires philosophy’.36 According to Badiou, philosophy only conceptualizes artistic truths so that it can transform its own concepts. For Adorno, on the other hand, the truth conveyed by artworks needs philosophical interpretation to be fully developed. Yet, this does not mean that art would be instrumentalized in the name of an external truth of which philosophy would be in full possession. Philosophy itself, as Adorno famously states in the first sentence of Negative Dialectics, lingers on because the truth it stands for failed to be realized. Art is now in the position to both bear witness to this failure and act as a placeholder for the further possibility of this realization or, as Badiou himself puts it with regard to his philosophy of event, ‘the possibility of possibilities’.37 Art’s truth content refers to the nonexistent realization of truth by means of its semblance, which is to say its form: ‘The appearance of the nonexistent as if it existed motivates the question as to the truth of art. By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears it must indeed be possible.’38 Art thus reminds philosophy of the possibility of truth that evades philosophy itself. In this manner in Adorno too, art conditions philosophy. In any case, a properly philosophical interpretation of artworks ‘is defined by the reflected immanence of works, not by the external application 36 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 341. 37 Alain Badiou, ‘The Idea of Communism’. In The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London/New York: Verso, 2010), 6. 38 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 82.

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of philosophems’.39 The immanence of artworks thus remains the privileged site in which the possibility of truth remains open and it is this possibility that philosophy is obliged to conceptualize by interpreting art. This leads us to the second problem of Adorno’s understanding of artistic truth from a Badiouan standpoint: it is not singular either. Clearly, the truth that is at stake does not refer to art alone but has much wider implications. In this respect, Adorno’s aesthetics could be seen as romantic. But the truth content found in art’s immanence is not a Hegelian incarnation of the infinite within the finite nor the Heideggerian return of the Gods. The truth at stake is rather the truth of social antagonisms and the possibility of reconciliation. If reconciliation would indeed take place in a utopian society, truth would be able to exist on its own, leaving both art and negative dialectics behind: ‘There is no artwork that does not promise that its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing, realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk.’40 According to Badiou, artistic truth is singular, but not immanent in the didactic model, immanent, but not singular in the romantic model and both immanent and singular in the inaesthetic model. From this perspective, Adorno’s aesthetic theory could be seen as the missing final logical possibility of this squared schema: art is indeed capable of truth, but this truth is neither immanent nor singular. One could see Adorno’s aesthetics as some sort of disjunctive synthesis of the didactic and romantic models. It is negatively didactic in that it teaches with silence what is no positive doctrine or method. It teaches us to be faithful to the promise of the nonexistent. In a similar manner, Adorno’s aesthetics is romantic, but in a materialist and subtractive way: its generalized truth is not the truth of being but the untruth of social antagonism, with the possibility of its abolition being alluded to by way of rejecting any kind of incarnation: ‘Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled.’41

Form in Adorno: Original sin and permanent protest Badiou claims that Adorno’s critique of the identity principle implies an antiformalist aesthetics:  ‘a process of formal “doing” that is simultaneously

39 Ibid., 341. 40 Ibid., 132. 41 Ibid., 33.



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a disintegration of form’, which ultimately contributes to ‘the struggle against identity’s dominance’.42 The artistic ideal that follows from this is the type of art that ‘terminates the unifying processes of form and consequently tolerates real difference or multiplicity, that is, the genuinely heterogeneous’.43 A closer look at Aesthetic Theory confirms that Adorno indeed understands form as a process of identification and unification that commits violence to the multiplicity of the sensible material that it forms:  ‘What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses: This is the ritual of the domination of nature that lives on in play.’44 At the same time, however, form remains the element in which truth is unfolded in art. In fact, Adorno himself warns against endorsing the ideal of formlessness: ‘art is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed’.45 How, then, does the dialectics of form play out in Aesthetic Theory? ‘As little as art is to be defined by any other element’, Adorno claims, ‘it is simply identical with form.’46 The other of form, that is, the heterogeneous that it unifies, can thus only come to expression within it: ‘those artworks succeed that rescue over into form something of the amorphous to which they ineluctably do violence’.47 The violence of form is also the means by which art gains its distance from the merely existing and thus gains its autonomy and critical stance towards the empirical reality it transforms.48 This is why the element of form is both ‘the original sin of art as well as its permanent protest’.49 Identifying the violent aspect of form does not therefore imply the ideal of its abolition. Adorno is himself critical of the antiformalism in aesthetic theory, represented by realism, on the one hand, and vitalism, on the other.50 Regarding the former, Adorno picks on Lukács’s rejection of modern art. Against formal experiments, which he considers to be merely subjective, Lukács emphasizes the essentiality of content that dictates its own form. According to Adorno, Lukács considers form as something superimposed on the sensible arbitrarily from the outside. A similar abstract and undialectical opposition of form and life is posited by vitalism. For Adorno, form is rather the objective transformation of the material that generates its own content – there is no content outside of form.

42 Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, 50. 43 Ibid., 53. 44 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 50. 45 Ibid., 144. 46 Ibid., 140. 47 Ibid., 50. 48 Ibid., 143–4. 49 Ibid., 50. 50 Ibid., 141–5.

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Furthermore, Adorno is highly critical of artistic practices that are based on the disintegration of form. Such modern artists get caught in the paradox of formalizing their spontaneity: ‘Today artists would like to do away with unity altogether, though with the irony that those works that are supposedly open and incomplete necessarily regain something comparable to unity insofar as this openness is planned.’51 Action painting or l’art informelle try to avoid ‘the burden of giving form’, which only results in surrendering the formal outcome to mere statistics that determines the contingency of the material.52 Such ‘open forms’ ultimately succumb to a ‘nominalistic critique of universality’ and prove insufficient, as testified by Brecht’s inability to find convincing conclusions to his plays.53 By renouncing the original sin, art also loses its ability to protest and surrenders to the very barbaric reality it is supposed to stand against. This does not mean, however, that art is completely closed off in its form. Instead of an ivory tower type of seclusion, its formal separation from reality gives art a monadic structure. The Leibnizian metaphor allows Adorno to present artworks as completely separated from reality and yet be internally shaped by the same forces that govern the outside world. As monad, art resembles reality without imitating it.54 Form is thus the medium of the artwork’s relation to objectivity: ‘Only in the crystallization of its own formal law and not in a passive acceptance of objects does art converge with what is real.’55 The heterogeneous element is thus immanent to form itself. The antagonisms that run through reality are reproduced and transfigured in artistic form: ‘unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form’.56 The divine harmony that aligns the monads into a coherent universe according to Leibniz is thus replaced by Adorno with the disharmony of history. The reproduction of social antagonisms in artworks also entails that art is unable to simply oppose domination and the identity principle. Art’s autonomy is in fact a continuation of the very processes of domination and identification at work in history and thought. And yet, it is only by perfecting its identity with itself that art gains separation and thereby the possibility of witnessing the non-identical: ‘Spirit does not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it. By pursuing its own identity with itself, art assimilates itself with the nonidentical.’57 51 52 53 54 55

Ibid., 141. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 224. 56 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 6. 57 Ibid., 134.



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Adorno even states that the ‘aesthetic unity of the multiplicitous appears as though it had done no violence but had been chosen by the multiplicitous itself ’.58 The expression of suffering thereby requires form, not its disintegration. If it is to be expressed from the perspective of the possibility of reconciliation, the promise of happiness, art should not renounce form but rather pursue its radical modes. The dialectics that makes the violence of form at the same time its capacity of alluding to reconciliation nevertheless remains enigmatic in Adorno. If we are to avoid the messianic trope of redemption lurking in the proximity of danger, which would bring Adorno dangerously close to Heidegger, the productive aspect of form, its ability to not only allude to but in a certain sense produce the non-identical, is still to be conceptualized. As it turns out, the productive aspect of form is precisely what is emphasized by Badiou . . .

Form in Badiou: Between finitude and infinity The problem of artistic truth is introduced by Badiou in his book on inaesthetics as a problem of the relation between finitude and infinity: while in its essence, truth is ‘an infinite multiplicity’, the artwork itself is not only finite but ultimately ‘the only finite thing that exists’.59 Without entering into the complicated technical details of Badiou’s conceptualization of the infinite, it should be noted that, on the one hand, Badiou reaffirms the infinity of truth against Heideggerian embrace of finitude and, on the other, uses Cantor to multiply infinity in order to reject the theological and romantic notion of truth as the infinite transcendent one that descends into the finite sphere. For Badiou both the situation of mere existence and the truth that eventually comes to disturb this situation are infinite. As explained in a recent seminar, ‘the finite is a result of a dialectics between two types of infinities . . ., the infinity of the situation on the one hand and the infinity of form or the idea on the other’.60 Finitude, exemplified by the work of art, is therefore always a product, which exists as something completed and closed off in the autonomy of ‘its own immanent ends’.61 How to think a finite product as a development of the infinite without succumbing to the romantic 58 Ibid. 59 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 10–11. 60 Alain Badiou, ‘L’immanence des vérités 3:  Séminaire d’Alain Badiou (2014–2015)’, 24 September 2014. www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/14–15.htm (accessed 18 April 2018). 61 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 11.

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logic of expressing or incarnating the infinite is thus the challenge of Badiou’s conceptualization of artistic truth. In the Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou resolves this problem by describing the structure of the truth procedure in art as an ‘artistic configuration’. Artistic truth is not identical to specific artworks. Instead, artworks are ‘differential points’ in which an artistic configuration develops a truth, inaugurated by an event.62 Greek tragedy from Aeschylus to Euripides, the classical style of music from Haydn to Beethoven, the novel from Cervantes to Joyce are examples of such configurations in which the virtual infinity of a truth is elaborated by a multitude of individual artworks until it becomes ‘saturated’.63 Curiously, Badiou’s actual inaesthetic practice shows that specific artworks nevertheless remain the centre of attention and the primary source of lessons that philosophy learns from art. Beyond listing examples of it, Badiou’s works do not seem to include a single comprehensive analysis of an artistic configuration. From the conceptual perspective, the problem of this solution is that it merely describes the procedure of artistic truth without identifying its operation – what an artistic truth actually ‘does’. The answer to this question comes with the Logics of Worlds, the second volume of Being and Event, in which Badiou defines artistic truth in terms of form. The artistic state of things in which a truth procedure will have intervened is defined as a given regime that regulates the ‘tension between the intensity of the sensible and the tranquillity of form’.64 The event is then defined as a break with this regime. All of a sudden, ‘what seemed to partake of the formless is grasped as form’.65 The procedure of truth will consist of a set of works (much like the earlier notion of configuration) that treat or realize the ‘consequences of the new capacity to inform the sensible’.66 Defining artistic truth in terms of the tension between formalization and the chaotic sensibility brings Badiou close to Adorno, although the resolution of this tension is quite different. For Badiou, the sensible is simply indifferent with regard to form. There is no indication that form could be violent to the sensible or that the sensible could in any way resist form. The struggle to move the frontiers of form and conquer the formless seems to be entirely immanent to form. It seems that Badiou thus achieves the ultimate break with onto-poetics – there 62 Ibid., 12. 63 Ibid., 13. 64 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 73. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.



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is no oppressed ‘real’ that needs to be expressed by art. If that is indeed the case, the question could then be posed:  what is it that drives this process of transformation, of discovering new forms? An answer can perhaps be found in his most recent work, where Badiou defines the truth content of an artwork as its ability of bearing witness to infinity. Formal innovation is thus driven by ‘a certain experience of the infinite’,67 making an artwork’s form a finite witness of the infinite. This infinity, however, is immanent to the production of form itself. Artistic innovation is a pure affirmation of the capacity of formalization: ‘I think in the artistic field the immanent infinity is finally something like the infinity of the form itself. And what is infinity of the form itself? It’s the possibility that the new form – the new possibility of the form – is in relation, in direct relation with the chaotic sensibility.’68 Even though such formal infinity is still defined in relation to the sensible, it seems to tend towards the absolutization of form itself in what could be read as a distant philosophical echo of Flaubert’s ideal of a book about nothing, a book with no subject matter, held together by its style alone. Defined purely as an access to chaotic sensibility, it seems that form no longer has an objective correlate to its infinite capacity. It is as though Adornian windowless monads would thus be transformed into monadless windows.

From the melancholy of form to the metaphysics of happiness If in Adorno we missed the elaboration of the productive aspect of form that would produce its object (the non-identical), in Badiou this productivity is intensified to the degree that it becomes purely self-referential and again misses its object. This ‘missing’ object, however, should not be understood as a deficiency of form or its essential limitedness with regards to the richness of its other – the sensible that it forms. What is at stake here is precisely the objective correlate of form itself, the relation to which makes form immanently affected. If the aporias of form as the element of artistic truth are to be understood, the specific articulation of form and affect should be given due consideration. While the suffering that conditions truth in Adorno is indeed, as Badiou points out, the appearance of the non-identical that contradicts form, form and affect are nevertheless not necessarily opposed in Adorno. For Adorno, in fact, form itself

67 Badiou, ‘L’immanence des vérités’. 68 Badiou, ‘The Subject of Art’, The Symptom, 6 (2005). www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou. html (accessed 18 April 2018).

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is affected. Its separateness from the empirical and the violence that it does to the sensible material that it forms permeate it with melancholy: ‘Melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is heterogenous, which form strives to banish: mere existence.’69 The promise of utopia that form implies is restricted to semblance and based on violence. The work of form necessarily ‘limits what is formed’; it is ‘a process of selecting, trimming, renouncing’ the sensible.70 The lost and the not-yet-attained refer to the non-identical that form as identity gives rise to and at the same time excludes. And yet, as we have seen, form does not merely identify the non-identical but identifies with it: it is thus suddenly transformed from the violator to the protector. How should we understand this turn? Although Adorno does not elaborate further on the concept of melancholy that he uses, the identification with something non-identical and even nonexistent corresponds well with Freud’s famous definition of melancholy. Freud’s melancholic identifies with the lost object, although the nature of this object or, more precisely, its loss, remains unclear. What distinguishes melancholy from mourning  – the non-pathological reaction to a loss of an identifiable object  – is the unconscious character of loss. This does not necessarily mean that the melancholic is unaware of the loss or cannot identify the object that has been lost – the problem is that the actual lost object is not identical to what is lost. Freud writes that the melancholic may very well know ‘whom he has lost’ (identify an actual lost object), but cannot figure out ‘what he has lost in him’ (the loss does not refer to the identifiable lost object as such).71 The true melancholic object seems to be its very non-identity to any identifiable lost object. It seems that beyond any object, the melancholic clings to the loss itself as object. From this perspective, melancholy is less a reaction to than a production of loss. The peculiar nature of the melancholic object is confirmed by Lacan who describes melancholy as a direct identification with the object a beyond the imaginary frame within which it otherwise appears.72 The psychoanalytic elaboration of the melancholic object can shed additional light on the dual nature of Adorno’s melancholy of form. On the one hand, the loss implied by form’s violent imposition on the sensible, the loss of everything the formal frame necessarily excludes, can be seen as the identifiable lost object common to both mourning and melancholy. The properly melancholic aspect 69 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 105. 70 Ibid., 144. 71 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 245. 72 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety:  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book X, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge/ Malden: Polity, 2014), 335–6.



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of form, however, comes from its identification with the non-identical, the evasive object of loss produced by the process of identification itself. While the lost object can still be understood as something external to form, that is, the sensible multiplicity being unified, the object of loss is the heterogeneous moment immanent to form itself. One could be tempted to take this analysis further, drawing a parallel between narcissism and self-loathing characteristic of the melancholic ego in its identification with the lost object and Adorno’s ambivalent view of art as simultaneously the herald of utopian truth and the carrier of ideological falseness. But what is perhaps more interesting is the convergence of the melancholy of form with the promise of happiness, the other principle affect related to the artwork according to Adorno. Far from being the manic other side of melancholy, the happiness that art promises is, again, of a subtractive character. Given that there cannot be any true happiness in a false world, art can only keep its promise by breaking it.73 But there is also a more affirmative, although still subtractive aspect of the Adornian promise. Towards the end of Negative Dialectics, Adorno discusses the fascination Proust’s narrator as a child has for the names of unknown towns and villages. The promise of happiness these names provide can of course never be fulfilled by actually going to these places. And yet, actually going there does not make one disappointed but rather makes one feel he or she is now too close to see the beauty.74 The promise of happiness cannot therefore be empirically broken by an experience of the body – rather, it indicates a metaphysical experience: ‘Happiness, the only part of metaphysical experience that is more than impotent longing, gives us the inside of objects as something removed from objects.’75 The promise of happiness should therefore not be understood merely as a desire for something indefinitely delayed, but also as a fulfilled affect in its own right. This is the singular point of convergence between Adorno’s and Badiou’s philosophy of affect: far from looking for a psychological or a physiological seal of immediacy, both explore affect with the view of reaffirming the possibility of a metaphysical experience. That being said, it should be taken into account that for Badiou promise is not a modality in which truth could transpire. As a subjective procedure of developing the consequences of the event in a specific situation, truth can only be actual or does not exist. Beyond the satisfactions of the finite

73 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 311. 74 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 373. 75 Ibid., 374.

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individual, then, Badiou defines ‘real happiness’ as the affect of subjectivation and further characterizes it as enthusiasm in politics, bliss in science, pleasure in art and joy in love.76 The emphasis on affirmation and actuality also entails that there can hardly be a ‘true sadness’ as a correlate of subjective happiness. For Badiou, sadness seems to be relegated to the travails of the human animal, except for ‘a certain measure of despair’ involved in the rupture the contingent encounter with the event may inflict upon an individual existence.77 Happiness itself, on the other hand, is not defined as the pure annihilating joy of such rupture, but rather as the affect of truth in its immanence. As such, it touches on the topic of the forthcoming third volume of Being and Event, entitled Immanence of Truths, where Badiou plans to address truth procedures no longer from the point of view of their radical break with a specific situation or world, as in the first two volumes, but rather in their own proper dynamic.78 It is perhaps tempting to dismiss Badiou’s examination of affect as a merely ornamental addition to his theory of truth. It would not be wrong to claim that real happiness is a secondary effect of truth procedures without consequence for their unfolding itself. After all, happiness is a reward for the individual’s integration into a subject, not an affective driver that would push the individual towards such integration. On the other hand, however, Badiou uses his booklet on happiness precisely to present a preview of the final volume of his philosophical project. The question of happiness, he claims, is closely related to the central aim of his forthcoming conclusion to the Being and Event trilogy, namely to tackle the dialectics of finitude and infinity at play in the immanence of truth:  ‘Evidently, happiness is implicated in this affair since its definition could be simply the following: happiness is a finite enjoyment of the infinite.’79 If we now recall Badiou’s claim that new artistic forms are brought about precisely as a consequence of witnessing or experiencing the infinite, it seems that – at least in art – happiness is no longer merely the affective effect of truth but rather an affect coinciding with the truth procedure itself. In this sense it could be claimed that for Badiou as well as for Adorno, there is an affect pertaining to form itself, an affective moment in the production of a formal novelty that exempts form from mere formal academicism. In the case of Adorno, Freud’s account of melancholy helped us to determine form’s relation to 76 Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur réel, 40, 51. 77 Ibid., 39. 78 Ibid., 59–60. 79 Ibid., 61.



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the sensible in terms of a duplication of the object: first as a lost object and then as an object of loss, produced by form itself as the appearance of the non-identical. It is less certain that a psychoanalytic account of affect could help us propose a productive reading of Badiou’s metaphysics of happiness. Badiou’s subject, after all, is defined precisely as ‘the subject without object’,80 thereby excluding it from the reach of analysis. As we have seen, the sensible does not appear to resist formalization, which is simply defined as an access to the chaos of the sensible. To nevertheless risk the Freudian perspective on the case, the absence of the object in affective terms could be said to equal the transition from melancholy to mania. As specified by Lacan, ‘what is at issue in mania is the nonfunction of [the object] a and not simply its misrecognition. No a comes to ballast the subject and this delivers him, in a way without any possibility of freedom, to the sheer infinite and ludic metonymy of the signifying chain.’81 Considering Lacan’s remark, characterizing the Badiouan subject of truth as manic proves to be less odd than it may seem at first sight. For Badiou, the truth procedure is a non-teleological and non-systematic (‘ludic’) series of interventions – local instances of a virtually infinite truth – which do not lead to a final incarnation of truth itself but are nevertheless faithfully bound (not ‘free’) to the event in terms of strictly developing its consequences. It could therefore be claimed that the truth procedure is structured as an infinite metonymical chain set loose by the deactivation of the object (the event being the very definition of non-objectivity).

Conclusion This parallel reading of Adorno and Badiou shows that their philosophical conceptualizations of artistic truth share two elementary assumptions: 1. Form is the concept that allows philosophy to think artistic truth. 2. Form becomes the element of artistic truth through its capacity to be transformed. Both philosophers’ versions of these propositions, however, bring about different, but complementary, issues. In Adorno, the violent relation of form to its other, that is, the sensible material that it forms, obscures the productive capacity of form to identify directly with the non-identical. In Badiou, on the other hand, 80 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 93. 81 Lacan, Anxiety, 336.

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this productive capacity becomes absolute and there seems to be no other to which form would relate. I have attempted to resolve these issues by adding the third proposition, situating form’s capacity of truth in its ability to be immanently affected: 3. The ability of form to be transformed stems from the fact that the process of formalization produces a surplus, an object that immanently affects form. Formal transformation is played out in relation to this evasive object through which form is affected. If there is an affect pertaining to form itself it is because form is not merely related to the other that it forms, but is also in a (non-)relation to an object that it itself produces in the process of formalization. The productivity of form that makes it the site of truth in art can thus be understood as circling around this evasive object:  either in the manner of melancholy (the non-identical in Adorno) or in the manner of mania (the truth procedure in Badiou).

Index Adorno art 142–6, 179–83, 197–216 artistic form 203, 205–9, 211–16 Hegel 14, 162–5 intervention 165–8 multiplicities 207–9 music 178–89, 195 Negative Dialectics 14, 162–4, 174–5 non-identity 139 ontology 201–3 philosophy 171–3 reality 202–3, 208 subject 159–62 thought 142–3 Wagner 9 affirmation dialectic 158–9 event 59, 62, 68, 165–70 and negation 9–11, 14–16, 21, 147–9, 170 world 17 antiphilosophy 90–2, 99–112 art Adorno 142–6, 179–83, 197–216 music 179–96 Nietzsche 10 and philosophy 80–1, 179 and politics 143–5 truth 197–207, 209–11 being art 96–8, 125–30 in Hegel 37–42, 62–7 and Heidegger 118, 121–4, 129, 201–5 in Husserl 11–12 idea 123 mathematics 14, 125–6 one 75–82 ontology 71, 76 qua Being 96–8 conditions music 185–96

philosophy 10, 69–74, 81–2, 96–101, 109–11, 176–8 time 71–2 unconditional 28, 161–3 dialectics 9–12, 14–16, 148–9, 156–70 event annihilation 49–50 Hegel 55–62 intervention 165–70 reality 15, 64, 177–8 truth 14–17, 79–82, 167–8 world 14–15 freedom Adorno 180 decision 141–6 Hegel 58, 149–52 Kant 27 negativity 147–52, 169 subject 150–2 Freud, Sigmund 52 n.4, 53 n.7, 119, 212–16 generic 14, 30–1, 125, 129 German Idealism 69–70, 85–6, 88, 104 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich absolute knowing 55–8 Adorno 14, 162–5 Being 37–41, 62–7 determinate negation 64, 152–8 and the event 55–62 freedom 58, 149–52 and Heidegger 114 infinity 36–7, 67–8, 70–1 and Kant 20, 37–8, 42, 70–2, 74, 84–7 and Marx 104–6 Master-Slave-dialectic 11–12 mathematics 36–7, 128 negativity 147–52 reality 38, 40, 46, 49–50

218 subject 38, 43–50, 64–7, 169–70 truth 56, 58–9, 62–3 world 44–5, 59, 105 Heidegger, Martin being 118, 121–4, 129, 201–5 Hegel 114 Kant 12–14 mathematics 121–30 ontology 119–23 philosophy 113–18 Plato 52–3, 124 poetry 116–19, 123–5, 130, 201–3 subject 119 technology 121–3, 127 truth 135–6, 209 world 121 Husserl, Edmund 11–12 idea and being 123 ideal 133, 140, 207 Kant 31–3 music 181–3 truth 133 ideology 87–8 infinity Hegel 36–7, 67–8, 70–1 Kant 70–1 mathematics 124–5 subject 157 Jesus of Nazareth 45–50 Kant, Immanuel and Adorno 142, 174–5 Critique of Practical Reason 26–9 Critique of Pure Reason 22–6 Critique of the Power of Judgment 29–30 freedom 27 and Hegel 20, 37–8, 42, 70–2, 74, 84–7 and Heidegger 13–14 idea 31–3 infinity 70–1 ontology 22–3, 38 reality Kant 20–6, 29 subject 19–33, 71 thing-in-itself 20 universal 30–3 world 20–1, 32–3

Index Lacan, Jacques antiphilosophy 100, 102 melancholy 212 object a 215 real 21, 49–50, 120 Malevich, Kazimir 41, 48 Marx, Karl antiphilosophy 102–12 Hegel 104–6 philosophy 90–112 politics 107 reality 102, 104–9 truth 106 world 103–7 mathematics being 14, 125–6 Hegel 36–7, 128 Heidegger 121–30 multiplicities 202 ontology 14, 96, 125–9 and structuralism 13–14 Meillassoux, Quentin 189–91 multiplicities, multiple Adorno 207–9 inconsistent multiplicity 22, 41, 96 mathematics 202 the one 75–83, 96 sameness 31 world 35–6, 93–4, 137–9 negativity, negation and affirmation 9–11, 14–16, 21, 147–9, 170 determinate negation 64, 150, 152–8 doubled negation 32, 40, 156–60 freedom 147–52, 169 Hegel 147–52 Negative Dialectics 137, 142–3, 162–7 Nietzsche 10 one 156–8, 164 philosophy 81, 83, 108 subject 147–9, 158, 163–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 100 one being 75–82 count-as-one 202 and the multiple 75–83, 96 and negation 156–8, 164

Index 219 ontology Adorno 201–3 being 71, 76 determinate negation 154–7 event 64 Heidegger 119–23 Kant 22–3, 38 mathematics 14, 96, 125–9 poetry 200–3 situation 41–2, 96–8 Parmenides 52–3, 114 St. Paul 22, 45, 48–50, 148, 160–2 philosophy conditions 10, 69–74, 81–2, 96–101, 109–11, 176–8 Marx 90–112 negativity 81, 83, 108 poetry 83–4 politics 82, 90, 111, 132–3 reality 82–4, 87, 94, 179, 205 subject 74, 80 time 51–3 truth 79–82, 92–5, 177–9 universal 83, 94 world 69–70 Plato Heidegger 52–3, 124 Parmenides 52–3, 114 The Republic 132, 136 sophists 99, 118, 127 truths 12–13 poetry Heidegger 116–19, 123–5, 130, 201–3 Mallarmé 190 ontology 200–3 philosophy 83–4 politics antiphilosophy 109 art 143–5 Marx 107 and music 183, 186, 188–9 and the party 144 philosophy 82, 90, 111, 132–3 Realpolitik 93 resistance 13, 16 truth 95, 137 psychoanalysis 120, 200, 204, 212, 215

reality, real Adorno 202–3, 208 derealization 32–3 event 15, 64, 177–8 Hegel 38, 40, 46, 49–50 Kant 20–6, 29 knowledge 58 Lacan 21, 49–50, 120 Marx 102, 104–9 the One 156–8 philosophy 82–4, 87, 94, 179, 205 politics 93 situation 120 subject 151–5, 161–2, 172–3 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11, 132–43 Schoenberg, Arnold 182–8 Spinoza, Baruch 43–4 situation event 15–16 historical situation 165–8 impossible 33 ontology 41–2, 96–8 real 120 void 47 state 42, 138, 150 subject Adorno 159–62 decision 139–42 freedom 150–2 Hegel 38, 43–50, 64–7, 169–70 Heidegger 119 infinity 157 intervention 165–8 Kant 19–33, 71 negativity 147–9, 158, 163–4 and object 215 philosophy 74, 80 reality 151–5, 161–2, 172–3 truth 14, 160–3 time 51–3, 72–4, 175–8 truth absolute 62–3 art 197–207, 209–11 being 96–8, 125–30 decision 140–3 determination 152–4 event 14–17, 79–82, 167–8 and the good 131–3

220 Hegel 56, 58–9, 62–3 Heidegger 135–6, 209 idea 133 immanence 214 Marx 106 music 182–6 philosophy 79–82, 92–5, 177–9 politics 95, 137 Plato 12–13 subject 14, 160–3 truth procedure 15, 45, 59, 69, 148, 177, 184–5, 210, 214–15 universal 13–14 untruth 135–6 world 137–44 universal concrete universality 45–50 Kant 30–3 philosophy 83, 94

Index truths 13–14 void 22–6, 41, 47, 81, 98 Wagner, Richard 9, 182–95, 198–9 world affirmation 17 contemporary world 172–4 event 14–15 exception 72–3 Hegel 44–5, 59, 105 Heidegger 121 Kant 20–1, 32–3 Marx 103–7 music 10, 184–6 multiplicities 35–6, 93–4, 137–9 nihilistic world 93–4 philosophy 69–70 truth 137–44 worldlessness 144, 176–7