Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou's Philosophy 3031182952, 9783031182952

Table of contents :
Preface: Invitations
Other Works by Alain Badiou
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction: Alain Badiou’s Affirmations
Chapter 2: Art
1 The Artist as a “Vanishing Cause”
2 The Amorous Encounter of the Aesthetic
3 The Betrayal of Heteronomy
4 Artists as Great Affirmationists
Chapter 3: Science
1 Is the Matheme Scientific?
2 Ancient Science and Psychotherapy
3 Sovereignty of the Concept
4 Biology or the True Life
Chapter 4: Love
1 Love and the Confrontation with Enemies
2 A Solitary Event of Two
3 Deadly Jealousy
4 The Reinvention of Love?
Chapter 5: Politics
1 Enemies and Their “Destruction”
2 The Communist Hypothesis
3 The One and the Many of Politics
4 Politics or the Truth of Independence
Chapter 6: Conclusion: A Future and Happy Immanence
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy Giosuè Ghisalberti

Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

Giosuè Ghisalberti

Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

Giosuè Ghisalberti Liberal Studies Humber College Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-18295-2    ISBN 978-3-031-18296-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Invitations

In one of the more remarkable if not most often-cited statements Alain Badiou has made (in a short, two-page note, with only “five remarks”), a historical relationship is established that serves us in the present. “At the heart of the Middle Ages,” he writes, “the philosopher finds two large-­ scale intellectual operations: a textual restitution and a new interpretation.”1 The statement is, first and foremost, an invitation—to read, as a form of fidelity and as the most fitting relation to the past. By telling us about an essential characteristic of the Middle Ages, Badiou believes we, today, are in a similar situation as the medieval monks who, drawing on the classical past by recovering and re-interpreting ancient writing, contributed to the creation of the Renaissance. The possibility of a “re-birth” is now preferable to the last half-century of critical thought and its many announcements, for example, about the death of the subject. Peter Hallward, one of Badiou’s translators, has also left an address for readers. “Every rigorously singular procedure articulates a thoroughly generic truth. There can be no irreplaceable subject without

1  Badiou, Alain. “Five Remarks on the Contemporary Significance of the Middle Ages.” Tr. Simone Pinet, 156–157 Diacritics, Vol. 36, No. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2006, 156.

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Preface: Invitations

engagement in a process which, in principle, any subject may take part. This book extends an invitation, indifferently addressed, to take up such a part.”2 The invitation has been gratefully accepted; the work to follow is my personal engagement in the on-going process of the philosophical consideration of truth, above all, for the individual. Spring, 2022

Giosuè Ghisalberti

2   Hallward, Peter. “Translator’s Introduction,” vii–xlvi in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London, Verso, 2012, xxxvi.

Other Works by Alain Badiou

“Afterward: Some Replies to a Demanding Friend,” in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward: London: Continuum, 2004. “An Essential Philosophical Thesis: “It is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries”.” Tr. Alberto Toscano. 669–677 Positions, 2005, 13 (3). “Beyond Formalization,” 318–350 Appendix 2 of Bruno Bosteel’s Badiou and Politics. “The Communist Hypothesis,” 29–46 New Left Review, Vol. 49, 2008. “The Democratic Emblem,” Democracy in What State? Fr. Tr. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. “Destruction, Negation, Subtraction,” The Scandal of Self-Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multicultural Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions. Ed. Luca di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F.  E. Holzhey. Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012). “Ethics and Politics.” Tr. C.J. Davies, 401–407 Philosophy Today, Vol. 59. Issue 3 (Summer 2015). “Five Remarks on the Contemporary Significance of the Middle Ages.” Tr. Simone Pinet, 156–157 Diacritics, Vol. 36, No. 3/4, Fall/ Winter 2006. “From Logic to Anthropology: Affirmative Dialectics,” Badiou and the Political Condition. Ed. Marios Constantinou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. “Human Rights as the Rights of the Infinite,” An Interview with Alain Badiou, 162–186 Historical Materialism, 20.4 (2012). vii

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OTHER WORKS BY ALAIN BADIOU

“In Search of Lost Prose.” Tr. Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret. 1254–1266 MLN, Vol. 132, Number 5, December 2017. “In Search of the Lost Real,” Badiou and his Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses. Ed. A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. “The Lesson of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power After the Storm,” Tr. Tzuchien Tho, 30–54 History, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (eds.) Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. “L’etre, l’evenement, la militance,” interviewé par Nicole-Édith Thévenin https://www.multitudes.net/l-­etre-­l-­evenement-­la-­militance/. “L’intellectuele du gauche va disparâitre, tant mieux.” Le Monde. July 7, 2007. https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/ article/2007/07/14/l-­i ntellectuel-­d e-­g auche-­v a-­d isparaitre-­t ant-­ mieux_935544_3224.html. “Live Badiou.” Interview conducted by Oliver Feltham in December 2002 as an appendix to his Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008. “Love must be reinvented,” 6–17 Theory and Event, Vol. 22, Number 1, January 2019. Tr. Duane Rousselle. “Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics.” Tr. Alberto Toscano, 174–190 Pli (2000). “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” Can Politics be Thought? Tr. Bruno Bosteels. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. “On a Finally Objectless Subject,” 24–32 Who Comes after the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. New  York: Routledge, 1991. “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen. Cabinet, Issue 5/Evil, Winter 2001–2002. “On Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance,” 154–162 Critical Horizons: Journal of Social and Critical Theory, Vol. 10, issue 2, 2009. “Philosophy as Biography.” The Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan.com. https://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html. “Philosophy as Creative Repetition.” https://www.lacan.com/badrepeat.html. “Philosophy’s French Adventure,” 67–77 New Left Review, Vol. 35 (Sept. 1, 2005), 74.

  OTHER WORKS BY ALAIN BADIOU 

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“Plato, our dear Plato,” Tr. Alberto Toscano, 39–41 Angelaki, Vol. 2, Number 3 (December 2006). “Politics and Philosophy,” an interview with Peter Hallward, 113–133 Angelaki, Vol. 3 (3), 1998. “The Subject of Art,” in The Symptom, Online Journal for Lacan.com., 1997. Transcript by Lydia Kerr. https://www.lacan.com/symptom6_ articles/badiou.html. The Subject of Change: Lessons from the European Graduate School. Ed. Duane Rousselle. New York: Atropos Press, 2013. “The Subject Supposed to Know: On Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting.” Tr. Natalie Doyle and Alberto Toscano. The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 2, Number 3, 2008. “St. Paul, Founder of the Universal Subject,” 27–37 St. Paul among the Philosophers. Tr. Thelma Sowley. Ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. “Three Negations,” 1877–1883 Cardozo Law Review. Vol. 29:5 (2008). “The Triumphant Restoration,” Tr. Alberto Toscano, 659–662 Positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 13, Number 3, Winter 2005. “Twenty-Four Notes on the use of the word ‘People’,” 21–31 What is a People? Tr. Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion,” An Interview with Adam S.  Miller. Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Vol. 3, Issue 1, Fall 2005. “We need a popular discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview by Filippo del Lucchese and Jason Smith. 645–659 Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer 2008). “Who is Nietzsche?” 1–11, Pli (2001). “1977, une formidable regression intellectuelle.” Le Monde 1944–1994. Le Monde, SARC (Nov. 1944). Badiou, Alain and Critchley, Simon. “Ours is not a terrible situation,” Philosophy Today, Fall 2007.

Contents

1 Introduction: Alain Badiou’s Affirmations  1 2 Art 31 1 The Artist as a “Vanishing Cause” 31 2 The Amorous Encounter of the Aesthetic 46 3 The Betrayal of Heteronomy 55 4 Artists as Great Affirmationists 69 3 Science 79 1 Is the Matheme Scientific? 79 2 Ancient Science and Psychotherapy 89 3 Sovereignty of the Concept100 4 Biology or the True Life110 4 Love123 1 Love and the Confrontation with Enemies123 2 A Solitary Event of Two136 3 Deadly Jealousy150 4 The Reinvention of Love?161

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5 Politics173 1 Enemies and Their “Destruction”173 2 The Communist Hypothesis186 3 The One and the Many of Politics199 4 Politics or the Truth of Independence212 6 Conclusion: A Future and Happy Immanence221 Bibliography229 Index243

Abbreviations

BE Br

Being and Event. Tr. Oliver Feltham. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Tr. Ed. And with an introduction by Norman Madarasz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. BZ Badiou & Žižek: Philosophy in the Present. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Ed. Peter Engelmann. Tr. Peter Thomas and Alberto Toscano. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. CPT Can Politics be Thought? Tr. Bruno Bosteels. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. CH The Communist Hypothesis. Tr. David Macey and Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2010. C Conditions. Tr. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. Co Controversies: A dialogue on politics and philosophy for our time. Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner. Moderated by Philippe Petit. Tr. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014. D Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Tr. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. E Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Tr. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2012. F For a Politics of the Common Good. Alain Badiou and Peter Engelmann. Cambridge: Polity, 2019. G Greece and the Re-Invention of Politics. Tr. David Broder. London: Verso, 2018. GP German Philosophy: A Dialogue, Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy. Ed. And with an afterword by Jan Völker. Tr. Richard Lambert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.

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ABBREVIATIONS

Happiness. Tr. A. J. Bartless and Justin Clemens. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. HE Le Séminaire. Heidegger. L’être 3. Figure du retrait. Ed. Isabelle Vedoz. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2015. HI Handbook of Inaesthetics. Tr. Alberto Toscano: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. IK I Know There are so Many of You. Tr. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019. IPL In Praise of Love. Alain Badiou, with Nicolas Truong Tr. Peter Bush. New York: The New Press, 2012. IPM In Praise of Mathematics. Alain Badiou, with Gilles Haéri. Tr. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017. IT Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. Tr. and Ed. by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2005. L Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3. Tr. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. LW Logics of Worlds. Tr. Alberto Toscano. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. M Malebranche. Theological Figure, Being 2. Tr. Jason E. Smith and Susan Spitzer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. MP Manifesto for Philosophy. Tr. Ed. and with an Introduction by Norman Madarazs. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. MeP Metapolitics. Tr. and with an Introduction by Jason Baker. London: Verso, 2005. NS Nietzsche Seminars, 1992–1993. I. Anti-Philosophy. Notes taken by Aimé Thiault. Transcription by François Duvert. Tr. and Ed. Wanyoung Kim. file:///C:/Users/owner/Downloads/nietzsches-­antiphilosophy-­alain-badiou. pdf%20(1).pdf. NN Number and Numbers. Tr. Robin McKay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. P Polemics. Tr, with an Introduction by Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2011. PE Philosophy and the Event, with Fabien Tarby. Tr. Louise Burchill. Cambridge, UK, 2013. PP Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Tr. David Macey. London: Verso, 2016. SP Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Tr. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. SMP Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Tr. Louise Burchill. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011. TC The Century. Tr. with a commentary and notes, by Alberto Toscano. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. TE The End: A Conversation, Alain Badiou with Giovanbattista Tusa. Tr. Robin Mackay. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019.

 ABBREVIATIONS 

TL TS TW WB

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The True Life. Tr. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017. Theory of the Subject. Tr. with an Introduction, by Bruno Bosteels. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Theoretical Writings. Ed. And Tr. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Badiou, Alain and Cassin, Barbara. Heidegger: The Withdrawal of Being. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Alain Badiou’s Affirmations

It seems to me that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical. Very often, one equates philosophy and critique. So that philosophical commitment would ultimately amount to saying what is evil, what is suffering, of saying what’s not acceptable, or what is false. The task of philosophy would be primarily negative: to entertain doubt, the critical spirit, and so on and so forth. I think this theme must be absolutely overturned. The essence of philosophical intervention is really affirmation. Philosophy in the Present

Looking back today at the last half-century of European philosophical thought and choosing May ’68 as a pivotal date gives us the opportunity to assess a number of the predominant sensibilities of an epoch and what has been inherited, and self-imposed, in the present. Burdened with the consequences of historical events, and uncertainties about the future, much of the hope or simply the belief in the human had become doubtful. “Anti-humanism” was taken for granted as a guiding principle, as were other attitudes to modernity. Any previous confidence was abandoned with resignation, indifference, or cynicism. Justifications were not lacking; and yet when the focus, for example, directed itself towards one

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_1

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obligation—“philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself,”1 as Theodor Adorno demanded from a prior generation—the disappointment about history and the human became almost all consuming. Philosophy has in part allowed itself to forego its historical responsibilities, submitting to a thinking that could not always anticipate its effects, the ones that today have become dominant, much too powerful, and overly influential. All the force of “negative dialectics,” or critical theory more generally, has had innumerable consequences, in and out of the university and for everyday life. Today, one begins to simply wonder how the extent of the critical and the negative can contribute to anything but its own perpetual continuity when it is so deeply divided from itself. Its conditions are chronic and, to a large extent, self-imposed; how long they can be endured and whether they can be altered remains to be seen. Badiou begins classically, as a physician with a diagnosis—which is quite different from critique. In Infinite Thought, and true to his Platonic fidelity, he writes. “There is no doubt that philosophy is ill. As always, the problem is knowing whether this illness is mortal or not, knowing what the diagnosis is, and knowing whether the proposed remedy is not in fact, as is often the case, exactly what will finish off the patient” (IT 39). The situation could be summed up with the recollection of philosophy’s therapeutic origins. For Plato, illness and symptoms were relatively easy to diagnose; the allegory of the cave has left us with a powerful image, with one word standing out: cure,2 and one ultimately much more important than overcoming ignorance. Freedom and a certain kind of intelligence will be interrelated. Remedies for the patient were (and are) not at all certain; our contemporary situation is no cause for the belief, or the hope, in a remedy—in both senses of the idea. Rethinking an escape from Plato’s allegorical cave and serving ourselves through education should still be possible; the return, however, is as perilous as ever. Badiou has remained undaunted. Are there today alternatives significant enough to initiate a new commitment to thinking and so revitalize the human, individually and for the many? “Evidently the problem is one of knowing if, in the world as it is, there the slightest chance for such an enterprise to flourish or be heard, or if what is proposed here is yet another vain invocation” (IT 1  Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Tr. E.B.  Ashton. New  York: Continuum, 1973, 3. 2  Plato. Republic. Tr. G.M.A.  Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974, 168.

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39). The either/or opens the dilemmas of the four generic truths of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. Are his dilemmas constitutive and indications of irresolvable problems within the human and so of thought as such? Can they be overcome when, as we’ll see, they can be extreme and not be reluctant to declare enemies, violence, and war—which is quite different than the Greek idea of flourishing, the eudaimonia that also makes happiness attainable? In more than a half-century of writing, Badiou has devoted himself to the effort of philosophy with a new belief—the fidelity in affirmation— despite the virtually abandoned trust in its purpose: truth, for so long undermined, relativized, or arrogantly dismissed, has been once again supported—first by a diagnosis and then by a series of proposals for remedies that will require examination from several sides. “Truth is suffering from two illnesses. In my opinion, it is suffering from linguistic relativism, that is, its entanglement in the problematic of the disparity of meanings; and it is also suffering from historical pessimism, including about itself” (IT 39). One should note, reading Badiou closely in the above statement and the rest of the way, how he thinks about human illness and suffering. The possibilities of an improvement, from out of a set of four generic truths (art, science, love, politics), are intended to at least offer an alternative to the realities of the day, for a different kind of thinking and being; they are, one hopes, more than consolations or a palliative. Can the suffering be alleviated by renewing the philosophical commitment to Badiou’s triad of being, subject, and truth and, perhaps, create sufficient protection against a virus that is much more insidious than a microbiological one? Well into the 21st century we can begin to examine several of the most prominent developments of post-humanistic thought as a whole and reflect on how, and to what extent, their various forms and more specifically the relation of critical theory to politics have contributed to a set of consequences that are becoming more and more intractable. The antagonistic reality of liberal democracies is intensifying. Badiou will often use the extreme word “nihilism” (that idea so inseparable from Nietzsche’s 19th century cultural diagnosis) to define the conditions of the age. The triplet of terror, betrayal, and disaster will be one of Badiou’s responses, which he announces, of all places, in Ethics and with an unrestrained polemic against the intentions of and for the “good.” To so malign taken-­ for-­granted ideas, as Badiou does (and as Nietzsche did before him) will require particular attention and a pause; reactions, extreme or measured, will have to be anticipated. “It is for me a relative surprise to discover

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myself a Nietzschean,”3 Badiou announces in one of his seminars; while the purpose of the following study on four truths will not be a comparative one, Nietzsche will be called upon on different occasions to trace how deeply Badiou’s philosophy continues the revaluation of values. Did the denigration of the subject make it easier to subjugate real-life individuals to the imperatives of a politics believing itself to be ethical? The problems of our age are no longer easily identifiable according to standard models, as critical theory has traditionally done, and seen uniquely by exposing the manipulations of the State, capitalism, classes, economics, or ideological domination; the latter has been adopted from many disparate interests and it might be better to use a related term, propaganda, since there are many different elements of persuasion today. They are more forceful than the strategies of rhetoric; they are indifferent to the finer points of eloquence. If we have long reached the position put forward by Slavoj Žižek, and one inherited from Althusser, “that the idea of the possible end of ideology is an ideological idea par excellence,”4 then a shift in analysis might lead to a different outcome. Jacques Ellul’s observations on the nature of propaganda are more relevant today than they were in 1962. Americans or Soviets are no longer the sole culprits. The State is not the monolithic fault it used to be; there are new political actors today. “Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.”5 There are many different “ruling classes” now; they are indeed organized groups and with characteristics that can be recognized for making entire populations susceptible and exposed to the contagion of ideas—symptoms present in the 19th century

3  Badiou, Alain. Nietzsche Seminars, 1992–1993. I. Anti-Philosophy. Notes taken by Aimé Thiault. Transcription by François Duvert. Tr. and Ed. Wanyoung Kim. file:///C:/Users/ owner/Downloads/nietzsches-antiphilosophy-alain-badiou.pdf%20(1).pdf. Although the following study has not been carried out with the intention of a comparison or dialogue between the two philosophers, Nietzsche will be referenced on a number of occasions in order to emphasize the role of philosophy, today, and the obligations he assumes—which are compatible with the whole of Nietzsche’s project. (Is it possible, also, to affirm that Badiou is one of Nietzsche’s heirs and the one with the most fidelity to his thought?) 4  Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989, 2. 5  Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes. Tr. Konrad Kellen and Jearn Lerner. New York: Vintage Books, 1965, 61.

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study of crowds and not foreign to us in the present.6 Coercion is no longer limited to one recognizable social body. The traditional objects of study of critical theory have been well known, to the point that reconfirmations are repetitive, the same as they have always been. All the critiques have been on-going; to what effects, today, is an open question and one in need of being addressed. Their relations have become so binding that one can hardly envision another possibility. More specifically, “ideology-­ critique,” as Richard Rorty remarked as a problem, “has, ex vi terminorum, moral implications.”7 These moral implications have become so exacting that thought, philosophy and what it can offer, has been deprived of its most fundamental value. If Peter Sloterdijk is right and we have come to “the complete exhaustion of ideology critique,”8 what are our possibilities for the future and how does Badiou offer us choices and specifically four truths for the subject of being to be able to move beyond the fatigue and towards a philosophical reinvigoration of ourselves? He can do so by being conscious of the specific organization of politics and how, in our situation, it has begun to exhibit peculiar, if not totally unknown, characteristics— prohibitive and authoritarian and defined, by some, with stronger language. Totalitarianism within the neoliberal order may be hyperbole. For now, 20th century history should have relieved us of any naivete. It is not simply a matter of admitting to ourselves, as Benjamin Noys does when it comes to well-known routines of thought, that “it seems that it is difficult to break with the habit of polemic and antagonism.”9 Our “antagonisms” have become much more serious and produced effects only now beginning to be experienced. It will be up to Badiou’s four truths (along with philosophy) to face up to the challenges of the times. Costas Douzinas writes: “Critique takes its severe and austere stance from the protocols of legal propriety and sobriety. But critique is not just a tribunal. It is also a 6  A recent translation has appeared in a collection of Scipio Sighele’s writings with the title The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu. Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins. With a Foreword by Tom Huhn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Sighele deserved mention in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 7  Rorty, Richard. “Freud, Morality, Hermeneutics,” 177–185 New Literary History, Vol. 12, No. 1, Autumn 1980, 185. 8  Sloterdijk, Peter. “Cynicism—The Twilight of False Consciousness.” Tr. Michael Eldred and Leslie A. Adelson, 190–206 New German Critique, No. 33, Autumn 1984, 190. 9  Noys, Benjamin. “Small Differences,” 141–143 New Formations, Vol. 8, 2014, 143. The article is a review of François Laruelle’ Anti-Badiou.

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policing operation.”10 The conjunction of law, policing, and ethics makes for an increasingly tightening situation and one where truth, despite all contrary claims, has been surreptitiously defined according to one absolute—the political and its alliance with a new ethicism that has ancient characteristics: once power is a dominant force, the consequences can be felt, viscerally. Antonio Negri writes of the need “to break the connection between negation and politics in which the metaphysical pulse of western politics continues to beat.”11 Without extending the metaphor unnecessarily, just far enough, it is crucial to identify, precisely, what the nature of this “metaphysical pulse” actually is—in other words, what is the heart of the matter? Will our expression of love be implicated? Is Negri right to call it a Thanatopolitics, recalling Freud’s warnings about the death-drive and its sadistic and destructive compulsions? The response to come, unavoidable as it is must be today and due to Badiou’s courage, will be tied to the most prevalent sign of the times in liberal democracies: a powerful form of thought that has subsumed everything into itself and as Badiou highlighted since the first of his philosophical writings. “It is obvious,” he writes in Metapolitics, “that we are living through the unconditioned primacy of opinions” (MeP 17). How these “opinions,” subsisting as new sacrosanct truths, have been so successfully disseminated as a new 21st century reality can be traced across several dynamic collaborations. None of them, individually, are new; together they have become a force of unparalleled power and make up, psychologically, what Badiou called “the ferocious figure of the law” (TS 293) and its super-ego projections. One of Freud’s inventions of the three-part psyche will not often be invoked. Its formidable presence in the 1975–1979 Theory of the Subject has become more relevant today. When Badiou writes that “politics has been reduced, in general, to a sort of cross between economy and management, with a fair dose of police and control thrown in” (SMP 120), we should not be complacent about who the police has become as a force, for its reliance also on advertisements and media promotions. Its presence can be noted in history by the number of the maimed and the dead it leaves behind; today, of course, the social methods have become both more unconscious and more 10  Douzinas, Costas. “Ouliez Critique,” 47–69 Law and Critique, Vol. 16, Iss. 1, (Jan. 2005), 50. 11  Negri, Antonio. Politics and Negation: For an Affirmative Philosophy. Tr. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019, 9.

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sophisticated.12 The cadavers of liberal democracy are neither physical nor graphic. Graham Harman has attempted to make one difference when he writes that his philosophy of object-oriented ontology “avoids the left/ right polarization of political discourse since the French Revolution, focusing instead on the difference between truth politics and power politics.”13 The difference remains as elusive as ever. Within the consciously defined limits of the presentation here, concentrating only on the four generic procedures of truth of art, science, love, and politics, and resisting the temptation to supplement the four with others (namely, Badiou’s unique engagement with both St. Paul’s gospel14 and psychoanalysis) following his responses to our historical situation will give us at least an initial pause. One affirmation can be made immediately. From Ethics: “as for the subject, the Immortal, he cannot lack the truth, 12  Introducing the psychoanalysis of the super-ego would take us in a supplementary direction. It will have to be deferred and with only a brief mention of Badiou’s analysis of the super-ego in Theory of the Subject. There will be occasion, here and there, to add a few comments on one of the most astute ways to analyze the political conditions of the times. Karen Horney describes the super-ego thus: “It is like a secret police department.” New Ways in Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Routledge, 1939, 211. The definition is doubly revealing: it is not just a “police department” (which, in society, is necessary, otherwise Thrasymachus will have his way), it is “secret” and therefore has the characteristic of a private institution within the totalitarian state established to ensure its defense. The pertinent question is: how have so many of the political regimes of the 20th century (i.e., the German Democratic Republic) exhibited the most totalitarian of super-ego tendencies when they were, as their foundation, intended to be precisely the opposite? Is the psychopolitical constitutively perverted? 13  Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: A Pelican Book, 2018, 15. But which is which? Because if we naively make the same distinctions with different names, then we are still in the same place as before. Surely no one still believes that the right has power and the left has the truth. No such symmetry has existed for quite some time, not for anyone in the middle looking in both directions and noticing, with some apprehension, similar psychological drives. In our current age of a viral pandemic, we can also think about adversarial contagion as Freud warned us about in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In another work, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political. London: Pluto Press, 2013, Harman adds: “Truth Politics and Power Politics, both of them coming in Left and Right forms,” 4. The Truth/Power and Left/Right relations are going to be necessary categories through the examination of Badiou’s thought. In politics, this will be one more dilemma to add to the rest. Harman’s “freelance dissident” seems to be preferable than Badiou’s militant. 14  Which has its own set of far-ranging problems that are foundational for Badiou. One note should be sufficient to alert us to the complications of the dilemmas inherent in his thought. He is, to say the least, a most unusual atheist. “So we need to renounce God without forfeiting any of the benefits he provides.” (IPM 77) An English proverb about a cake is not out of place. You can’t eat it and still have it.

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since it is from the truth and the truth alone, given as faithful trajectory, that he constitutes himself” (E 61). Subject, truth, immortality, self-­ constitution. These are unique affirmations when one considers how sensibilities have become more than common since the advent of structuralism and its aftermath. Have we moved ahead sufficiently to see post-­modernity as a fable? Ideas have not become so certain, one hopes, that they cannot return and re-examine their foundations, their intentions, and the outcomes today. In this Introduction and in the remaining presentation, Badiou’s declarations will have to be highlighted as a method for our commentary. Are the four generic procedures of truth sufficiently powerful to be an alternative to our current situation; or are they, as Badiou presents them, complicated by characteristics that make them structurally unsteady, too burdened with opposing intents, and so counter-productive? He has identified the task at hand; the first of his many concepts can be introduced here: the supplement. “For the process of truth to begin, something must happen. What there already is—the situation of knowledge as such—generates nothing other than repetition. For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement” (IT 46). Can we, at this historical point, simply argue for a “supplement” to be added, over and above what has been consistently argued as essential? Many of Badiou’s other leading concepts will be analyzed for their efficacy, that is to say, for life and for our existential benefit. His imperative has been clear. “To say that ontology is not a situation is to signify that being cannot be signified with a structured multiple, and that only an experience situated beyond all structure will afford us an access to the veiling of being’s presence” (BE 28). Philosophically, the announcement opens one of the many from Being and Event. The supplement and the multiple will have to be sustained by an elaborate edifice, its many parts joined to sustain the whole. The obligation ahead will be to outline its most sturdy aspects, of Badiou’s truth and its other supporting concepts. In the July 1981 seminar, he said: “philosophy today is deserted … the inevitable result of the lack of ambitious thoughts is a mediocre politics and a devalued ethics” (TS xxxviii). Four decades later, we seem to be in a far worse situation than mediocrity and devaluation. Ethics has bound politics to itself, making political thinking, thought as such, servile. Politics has been, if not annulled by ethics, subjugated. Badiou’s confrontation with the ethics of our times stands out considerably. Can philosophy intervene with enough influence to overcome the strange conjunction of a

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perfectly acceptable anti-humanism and an ethical drive supporting many political symptoms, all of them identified by Badiou and exposed for their effects? Are any future possibilities going to be sufficient to address the many obstacles of our present—the ones internal to the very efforts to further the ideals of emancipation and justice and, with them, the four procedures of truth Badiou has uniquely identified as art, science, love, and politics? The responses ahead will attempt to deal with these and other issues. One concern will be pre-eminent. Badiou has adopted both a certain attitude, polemical, strident, and unapologetic (for one, for his tenacious support of Mao and the “Cultural Revolution”) while at the same time distinguishing himself from virtually all his contemporaries by arguing for the primacy of four truths. A reader will have to determine whether the continuing support of an episode in Chinese history can be maintained at the same time as truth; or whether this is but one of Badiou’s many allegiances that even a sympathetic reader will find limiting. Philosophically, the four procedures of truth, for all their immense merit, will nevertheless be self-divided and along different lines. The problem is not anything like consistency; nor are formal considerations the issue. Rather, and despite my fidelity to Badiou’s philosophy, each of the four procedures of truth suffer from a number of dilemmas. Presenting them, from one side and the other, will be part of the work to come. Despite his commitment to the possibility of living what the Greeks understood to be essential to the good life and Badiou supplements with “the true life,” which is more than ethically “good” (and certainly more than fulfilling today’s human animal satisfactions, which capital and productive society is more than happy to provide with goods), the presentation of the truth of art, science, love, and politics will be the focus of my attention and as the universal affirmations Badiou believes them to be. One more brief reference to Socrates/Plato can be one fitting aspect to this Introduction. Badiou has maintained his devotion to Platonic thought, as he presents it, without so much as a hesitation. He is an avowed Platonist, and for reasons to be revealed at appropriate moments, as when Diotima speaks about love, procreation, and immortality in the Symposium,

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or when psychagogia15 or the “leading of the soul” (psyche) is recognized to be at the origin of the philosophical endeavor to achieve the human. We are here at one of the dilemmas that will be constant. On the one hand, the individual taking care of his or her own soul and, on the other, the obligation one has to the polis. The philosopher/poet, without monarchical ambitions, without any desire to be a king and a philosopher, finds an immediate conflict. A thinker with Badiou’s political motivations is in the same situation, in relation to the Laws, as was Socrates after his trial and waiting for his execution to take place. In the Crito, the voice of the Law speaks, but in this case in the form of an interrogation. The rhetoric is not disguised. Can you deny that by this act which you are contemplating, you intend, so far as you have the power, to destroy us, the Laws and the whole State as well. Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgements which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?16

Private persons: the individual, the one who can be (in his daily existence) an effrontery to what is deemed to be the real. By thinking about the Laws in their context after Socrates’ trial, Badiou makes the political and the judicial essential to each other. The laws in Athens, however, are exposed in the case of Socrates insofar as he is an individual philosophically motivated by the idea of paideia or education, the edification of others, and with nothing else but the discipline called philosophy, the ancient “love of wisdom” that Badiou adopts as his own and with the added obligation to recognize how, late in the 20th century and beyond, it had been historically conditioned by the human acts of art, science, love, and politics. These truths, for Badiou, correspond to his conception of the ancient cycle of learning, his encyclopedia. Socrates had no need to answer the 15  In Plato’s Phaedrus (Tr. with an Introduction and Notes by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) we have the relationship of the human to the therapeutic function of speech, as Socrates understands it in his conversation, and his definition of the “skilful leading of the soul by means of words” (48), which he distinguishes from the sophistic art of eloquence and persuasion of rhetoric. Language is not one of my explicit themes; nevertheless, it is assumed. 16  Plato. Crito, in The Last Days of Socrates. Tr. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant. London: Penguin Books, 1993, 86.

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Laws. He had made up his mind before the trial. The defense began with truth, as Plato expressed it. “The truth being simply that in all that I say I am guided by what is right and that my actions are in the interest of those who are sitting in judgment of me. So presumably I shall have no alternative but to submit to my fate, whatever it may be.”17 We are familiar with his “fate.” It is not tragic, fated by imperious gods. Socrates made a decision, for himself and for anyone who will show fidelity to him—one or more disciples, like Plato who testifies on his behalf and moderns who support its truth. Leo Strauss, for one, believes “the law of the city may be foolish and hence harmful or bad. Therefore the justice that consists in giving everyone what is due to him [as the laws believe they have fulfilled dutifully] may be bad. If justice is to remain good, we must conceive of it as essentially independent of law.”18 Badiou’s polemical announcements have not always been well received, as can be expected from someone who has been atopos19 like Socrates, out of place and as a disrupting force for anyone who could find themselves too settled, in the city or, allegorically, in the cave of proliferating images and today promoted by techno-narcissistic companies specializing in social media. Many of Badiou’s previous associations were severed; others solidified as the situations presented themselves. He has forced himself out of place,20 from one he occupied—and still does, in his own way—with tenacity. “L’intellectuele du gauche va disparâitre, tant mieux.”21 Badiou has no reluctance at all to direct his ire at anyone he considers to be enemies, whatever their affiliations. Either way, his idea of the event goes beyond any “dislocation” and the critical apparatus deployed in its acts. “Every event is an infinite proposition, in the radical form of a singularity and a 17  Plato. Gorgias. Tr. with an Introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960, 140. 18  Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, 146. Getting past right/left distinctions would go a long way in establishing the beginning of a dialogue between Strauss and Badiou. 19  One memorable description of Socrates as atopos (strange and out of place) comes to us via one of his mathetes, student and disciple and, parenthetically, someone with a name not to be taken for granted. Apollodorus, a gift of Apollo, the god of medicine, for one, tells his listeners that there has never been anyone like Socrates. His interventions, in a conversation with certain business leaders, appear in the “Introductory Dialogue” to Plato’s Symposium. 20  The reference is to the neologism esplace from Theory of the Subject. 21  Badiou, Alain. “L’intellectuele du gauche va disparâitre, tant mieux.” Le Monde. July 7, 2007. https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2007/07/14/l-intellectuel-de-gauche-vadisparaitre-tant-mieux_935544_3224.html.

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supplement. Everybody experiences, not without anxiety, that the current dislocations propose nothing to us.”22 Far worse than the dislocations proposing nothing, critical theory and a new kind of ethicism have, for him, become complicit with the state, capital, propaganda, and bureaucracies, each of them continuing to exploit the temptation to be authoritative in the cause of the good. How does Badiou’s work set itself to be an alternative of the thought of an epoch he has often characterized and definitively so in The Century? One conclusion and with the inevitability of antagonism: “the passion of the century,” he writes, “is nothing other than war” (TC 38). Can the 20th century be overcome in more than in the succession of time? Or are enemies and war (of words and in the formation of reality) omnipresent in the antagonisms of political thought in liberal democracies? His manifestos, aptly named, were emphatic; their urgency, for an epoch approaching the end of the last century, responded to many different necessities of being a witness and providing a testimony. “The fundamental problem in the philosophical field today is to found something like a new logic.”23 The necessity of a new logic follows from an earlier difficulty. Thought as such (and within the university, an institution that will have to begin to bear a certain responsibility for its culture and its influence on everyday life24) has been almost exclusively driven by critique and negation. Ideology-critique has been an orthodox requirement; these are now departmental initiatives, with individuals being subjected to a pressing imperative. The effects are now impossible to ignore. Badiou recognized them as a problem; this was no philosophical exercise. It has permeated the conditions of life. The manipulations of existence had to be re-thought. “In order to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new foundation of the problem of negation and critique.”25 Badiou’s proposal, succinctly stated and to be often repeated, involves a 22  Badiou, Alain. “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State,” in Can Politics be Thought? Tr. Bruno Bosteels. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, 114. 23  Badiou, Alain. “From Logic to Anthropology: Affirmative Dialectics,” in Badiou and the Political Condition. Ed. Marios Constantinou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 45. 24  Badiou only very rarely mentions the university. When he does, the words are restrained, measured, but not complimentary. In agreement with Lacan, he strictly separates the academic from the psychoanalyst (and the conscious analysand), a second difference that has yet to be investigated. 25  Badiou, Alain. “‘We need a popular discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview by Filippo del Lucchese and Jason Smith. 645–659  in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer 2008), 652.

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new existential commitment to affirmation as one logic of his philosophy. In a conversation with Slavoj Žižek, the testimony had become definitive. “It seems to me that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical … the essence of philosophical intervention if really affirmation” (PP 81). The imperative, before it could be enacted, for life (the true life for Badiou) had to clearly analyze the symptoms of the age. On the occasion of the English translation of Being and Event, Simon Critchley defined Badiou’s thought as a “constructive philosophy,” in part because it was impossible to ignore “a sense of frustration and fatigue with a whole range of theoretical paradigms.”26 Badiou began to offer us something more than critique. Is the affirmation of four truths enough? And does the role of philosophy, because it is conditioned, become something different than in the past? “Philosophy does not generate any truths,” he writes in Being and Event, “however painful the admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times. Philosophy can aid the procedure which conditions it, precisely because it depends on it” (BE 359). The first of our many dilemmas can be stated, not to immediately defend the autonomy of philosophy, but to respond to its function as an “aid,” analytically, to be more than a condition since its work can also alter the conditions of truth. Philosophy will come to the support of truth and, due to the social uses of science, art, love, and politics and how they are each effected by different principles. Philosophy will, at the outset, attempt to be both affirmative as a discipline of thought and sustain the relevance of truth. In the following set of responses, the first will be to return philosophy to its responsibility. Everything that was supposed to be coming to an end had no impact on Badiou—to the possibility of philosophy, or to him personally as someone who remained independent of currents and cultural influences on ends, whether open or closed. He simply did not believe in any such event, one or many. “It is simply a matter of saying I don’t believe in the discourse of the end, the end of philosophy and so on. Because I prefer affirmation to negation. I prefer to talk of trying to make a step rather than always saying philosophy is bad, or impossible, and as such paralysing philosophy” (IT 143). Badiou singles himself out with this programmatic incipit. While an entire tradition headed with ever-greater drive towards negation, Badiou adopted the stance of an independent thinker by 26  Badiou, Alain and Critchley, Simon. “Ours is not a terrible situation,” Philosophy Today, Fall 2007, 358. The optimism of 2007 has perhaps changed since then.

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doubting the drive of a cultural movement; its confidence seemed to him to be too pronounced, too self-assured, most especially when it made all kinds of admissions as to the extreme hesitations of its work. He was not alone. Others did not for a moment get caught up in certain sensibilities. “The death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy has never been a problem for us: it is just tiresome, idle chatter.”27 Responding to the haste towards ends—that is, of humanism, the subject, the author, not to mention the one that started all the others, the death of God—Badiou was not influenced by the fervor of the times, with its various posts-, in one way or another making announcements about a before and after, as if the expression of an apocalyptic anticipation could confirm its truth. “In my view,” Badiou writes, “the century that is coming to a close was characterized by the fact that it did not introduce, on a massive scale, any new schema. Though it is considered to be the century of endings, of breaks, and catastrophes … I see it instead as a century that was simultaneously conservative and eclectic” (HI 5). For all the dazzling thought in recent memory, with such a range of prominent thinkers— which included, to name but only the three disciplines of archaeology, deconstruction, and il pensiero debole28—their present relevance is no longer as assured as it once was. The neglect of the spirit was noticeable, most especially because of one philosophical foundation and a phenomenological statement Badiou too will inherit, for its origin in a crisis and for one answer: Edmund Husserl wrote that “the spirit alone is immortal.”29 27  Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? Tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 9. On Badiou’s relationship to Deleuze’s philosophy, and to him personally, see Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. 28  Associated with the Italian philosophers Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti. See, for example, their co-edited collection Weak Thought. Tr. Peter Carravetta. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. I do not much like the idea of debolezza since, to me, it has always implied illness and debility and, as above, frailty. Admittedly, once Vattimo approaches his term through Heidegger’s verwindung (which, as he tells us, has the sense of “eine Krankheit verwinden,” someone ill and recuperating, “getting over” an illness) its sense becomes sufficiently intricate and, perhaps too, paradoxical. In “Verwindung”: Nihilism and Postmodern Philosophy. SubStance, Vol. 16, No. 2, Issue 55: Contemporary Italian Thought (1986) pp.  7–17. Vattimo writes: “This possibility of an event that is outside or beyond metaphysics is tied to its Verwindung.” At this point, then, we can continue with the idea of Badiou’s event as a remedy and a recuperation—and leaving the latter hermeneutically open in terms of the double meaning of recovery. 29  Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Tr. with notes and an introduction by Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965, 192.

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Structures and their debility were easier to focus on, as was the annulment of the subject; which makes Heidegger’s ideas have their own place for us as it concerns Badiou’s thinking and his responses to this one unavoidable precursor. “Heidegger is the last universally recognized philosopher” (BE 1), he writes, understandably, at the beginning of Being and Event. In one sense, Badiou disqualifies the statement; because of him, there will not be any last, only successors and the will to persevere, to further a project. One opening response from the philosopher of the 20th century, then, on the spirit: “The inquiry into the essent as such and as a whole, the asking of the question of being, is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of the spirit.”30 The word, spirit, as a principle for Badiou, will have to be kept in mind even if he only alludes to the word with circumspection and, understandably so, from a committed materialist; and yet, he will in no way reduce his thought to what he calls the narrow reality of language and bodies. There are going to be infinite truths for the immortal subject. Affirmation as an alternative to the negative, and the effects of critical theory has had on more than one generation, will be continuous in what follows. One definitive statement deserves to be placed here at the beginning. The examples of the same declaration have been many; they have been presented, with quite a few repetitions, to emphasize this one point and to ground Badiou’s thought in a different sensibility. “I feel philosophy to be commanded by a duty of affirmation.”31 Duty. Other classical virtues (like courage, discipline, and even heroism) will be added in order to accept the commitment to thought and to what philosophy can still contribute to the condition of being human. His decisions have been unwavering. One other position from the many of post ’68 can be cited, to make Badiou’s decision relational. Once Michel Foucault had reached the end of his archaeology of the human sciences of words and things, he announced (so dispassionately, and yet so poetically) “then one can certainly wager that man would be

30  Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Tr. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, 50, my emphasis. Heidegger’s formulation (with the Ereignis and his own Event in the background) is well poised to be relatable to Badiou’s philosophy. Their dialogue may well be more important than the ones already included in the tradition. 31  Badiou, Alain. “Live Badiou.” Interview conducted by Oliver Feltham in December 2002 as an appendix to his Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008, 136.

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erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”32 How fitting that Foucault announced the end in the form of a wager, which makes it appear like an either/or proposition that might be more interconnected than he would like and symmetrical in its effects—Pascal and Foucault both with stakes in the future, one on the being of the God/human relation, the other on the disappearance of “man.” In Logics of Worlds, Badiou responds to Foucault twice. “Ultimately life is the wager, made on the body that has entered into appearing, that one will faithfully entrust this body with a new temporality” (LW 442). The “new temporality” will be nothing short of the infinite and, also, capable of being more than an effect of bio-power. The subject of being will in no way submit to being denigrated to the level of a biological entity, or an even more manipulated because vulnerable animality and its needs multiplied by advertising and promotion, of objects and identities. How does the spirit deal with the effects of bio-power? The ancient pneuma, as breath and spirt, does not give way to modern bios and the reduction of life to human animality in either nature or history. Heidegger reminds us that “even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not exhaust the world.”33 Any attempt to transcend both nature and history, however, is going to be perilous. Badiou has no metaphysical delusions on the matter. There is language and there are bodies—originally stated as les mots et les choses; but there is (more than both, Badiou declares) truth, a concept Foucault himself would give more attention to than the previous archaeology of the archive and its discourses once he set himself towards the project of a history of sexuality. A point of agreement can be mentioned, in lieu of a dialogue. Foucault writes: “For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence one cannot hope to attain the desired results simply,” he adds, “from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued.”34 Theory is not enough. But is it possible that “the least glimmer of truth” is not conditioned by politics? Has that been one grievous problem all along?

32  Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973, 387. 33  Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. And with an Introduction by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, 129. 34  Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, An Introduction. Tr. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, 5.

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Philosophy, for Badiou, “exists in a movement that is always a wager, a risky engagement. In this engagement of thought, the part of chance remains indelible” (H 42). The wager is on thought and life, for the being whose essence cannot be circumscribed by the hard materiality of terrestrial existence or the order of world-makers. Badiou could extend himself to the thought of Pascal and others who, traditionally, have been placed in a limited category—of theology. Reducing thought to the assumptions about a discipline are going to be limited and incomplete. He adds: “Since it is of the very essence of the event to be multiple whose belonging to the situation is undecidable, deciding that it belongs to the situation is a wager” (BE 211). The individual has to make the bet; making the bet ensures there will be no loss since the act itself is simply the belief in freedom. Nothing will be squandered during this pivotal situation because the wager corresponds to an act of freedom, of commitment, of an irreducible decision that marks (as it always has, with all its complications) the act of subjectivation. The individual will be supported from here on in and as inseparable from the supplement and the multiple and, finally, in the perception of the event and its possibilities. No thought can be sustained for its contribution unless the individual is once again made to be a subject of being and truth. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche provides us with one enduring idea of the individual—as an autonomous and creative interpreter. The individual is something quite new which creates new things, something absolute: all his acts are entirely his own. Ultimately, the individual derives his values of his acts from himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at last is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative.35

Badiou has been methodical; over a life-time of work, he has given us sufficient truths to consider and evaluate—for a different good, a different truth. Despite all the currents of thought in the last half-century, Badiou has not failed in his obligations as a philosopher. A few reminders are in order, personally, and so to acknowledge the beginning of the responses to come. Autobiographical moments are not going to be avoided; the 35  Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.  Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 403.

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individual cannot be overlooked when he speaks in his own name, as a witness, for the sake of testimony. One disclosure out of a few others can be the first. Calling upon his own “living experience” and one reminiscent of Nietzsche’s own autobiographical sense, Badiou has said. “I first experienced the point in my life and only after had to create the concepts to justify and clarify this point.”36 To take Badiou at his word, for the sake of fidelity, means a reader will have to follow him personally, as far as conceivable, as far as possible and until such time as the dominance of politics leads to some doubt. “I published my first Manifesto for Philosophy in 1989. It wasn’t a happy time, believe me!” (SMP 3). Badiou was not happy, a statement that, as we will see, is more important than it first looks. Alienation, to recall an old concept, was one of his experiences; it was soon replaced by sober-minded analysis. “Only the most elementary form of moralizing preaching qualifies any longer as ‘philosophy’… It is a matter today, in sum, of de-­ moralizing philosophy” (SMP 68-69). The word “preaching” is no mere rhetoric. Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals provided a foundation for Badiou’s thought and its considerable reach. The transmission was direct; in many cases, it would be arresting. To carry the thought forward was not an easy matter, because as soon Nietzsche is consulted, the message for some readers is not an easy one, not when difficult references are made. His cultural critique has become current to the point of normality; there are, however, moments without restraint, such as when he writes, so filled with self-possession and an extreme independence, on a process, “down to that which the socialist dolts and blockheads today see as their ‘man of the future’—as their ideal!—this degeneration and diminution of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of the ‘free society’), this animalization of man to the pygmy animal of equal rights.”37 Needless to say, such statements will be experienced with great discomfort by many. Our post-secular culture is, for the most part, supportive of his denunciation of religious sensibilities and metaphysics; our attitude to his repudiation of “equal rights” is much more unsettling. Revulsion would not be an exaggeration for those who, today, have committed themselves to the inherent difficulties of achieving justice, equality, and rights; and yet 36  Badiou, Alain and Critchley, Simon. “Ours is not a terrible situation.” Philosophy Today, Fall 2007, 362. 37  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Tr. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, 109.

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Badiou has gone some way to pursuing this line of Nietzschean inquiry and not have the slightest hesitation about modern ideals. His dialogue is confrontational and iconoclastic. Can his revival of a philosophical ethos compete with the moral self-understanding of the present? In the “Author’s Preface” to Being and Event, Badiou recollects the time of the original publication and writes: “we were at the end of the eighties, in full intellectual regression. What was fashionable was moral philosophy disguised as political philosophy. Anywhere you turned someone was defending human rights, respect for the other” (BE xiv). Immediately polemical and without any apprehension as to any expected reactions, Badiou marks a time. Its momentum has increased and intensified. More than thirty years have passed. The contemporary world, in liberal democracies, has continued to “regress” right down to the present—with no sense of a suspension of the current drive towards a secure moral exactitude and its implementation. All visible forces are united in a common goal, for the “other,” for “rights,” and for the memorial of the victim whose mourning is perpetual. Badiou began some of his works from out of anger and frustration; the shift to a deliberate affirmation would require a new disposition and a philosophical decision. Peter Hallward makes a point. “No philosopher is more urgently needed, in this particular moment, than Badiou.”38 Tracing his development serves to emphasize his unique place in thought today, for the vigor of his arguments no less for the challenges he poses for his readers, those in the Humanities in general. The left and the right are both addressed; and a certain interpretation of morality enjoys no privilege with him. But can his offensive dialogue (as both a confrontation and in its consequence) be maintained at the same time as he posits universal truths? At the beginning of a work and in the “Preface to the English edition” of Ethics (one should note, parenthetically, the autobiographical importance of all his prefaces and introductions) he tells us about his personal situation. On the one hand, I was driven by genuine fury. The world was deeply plunged in “ethical” delirium. Everyone was busily confusing politics with the hypocrisy of mindless catechism. The intellectual counterrevolution, in the form of moral terrorism, was imposing the infamies 38  Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, xxxvi.

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of Western capitalism as the new universal model. The presumed “rights of man” were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought. (E liii)

What Badiou analyzes is the bind between the moral and political and where disparate groups within liberal democracies have made both the church and the state seemingly, from all superficial appearances, irrelevant. Their structures have been internalized to fashion the power of a new and growing elaboration of the social world for the 21st century and a beyond. Badiou’s courage—or, to some, recklessness—in exposing the meaning of our cultural ideals culminates in a diagnosis first made, again, by Nietzsche, on the effects of nihilism. Badiou writes: “The mainspring of the effervescent practices of human rights and humanitarian interventions is a political nihilism” (MeP 118). Nihilism: Nietzsche prepared his readers for its advent, with many different kinds of symptoms, political and otherwise. One entry should strike us with poignancy. It was written for us. “What I relate,” Nietzsche writes, “is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently— the advent of nihilism” (WP 3). “The next two centuries.” Our present. The crucial task ahead would then be to outline all the characteristic of our nihilism and how (and where) it is most being enacted, by whom, for what purpose, and to what end. One could make a veritable list of all of Badiou’s interventions; they are exhaustive, and yet the political holds him to one guiding principle. He has never lost faith in politics, or in the ideals of his version of community. Some readers will (perhaps, too, for moral reasons) find this to be a first and long-lasting objection. The privilege of the political, and its revolutionary ambitions, is not immediately acceptable; we are, today, much less idealistic, or naïve, about the events of a revolution and how they would end up. Badiou’s convictions should not be, for us, self-­ evident. This one affirmation, among others to follow, is the basis for one disagreement. “The infinite comes into play in every truth procedure, but only in politics does it take first place. This is because only in politics is deliberation of the possible (and hence about the infinity of the situation) constitutive of the process itself” (MeP 143). The infinite in politics? One of Badiou’s primary objectives will be to once again place politics at the forefront of our considerations and, at the same time, being independent from ethics. The two, politics and social morality, will be wrenched apart. Whether the operation is successful will be one outstanding question.

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Isolating three of Badiou’s prime obstacles (he does not hesitate to use the word enemies, which will concern us in many different places) can be provisionally named critical theory, morality, and nihilism. In Ethics proper, the devotion to the work ahead was made clear: one more engagement with the problem of nihilism is not superfluous. “To begin with, I will examine the precise nature of this phenomenon, which is the major ‘philosophical’ tendency of the day, as much in public opinion as for our official institutions. I will try to establish that in reality it amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such” (E 3). The critical intent will be, for us, minimized and replaced, in points and when possible, with an analytic one as the first step towards the affirmative. Prior to embarking on the responses to Alain Badiou and the attempt to make certain decisions once again relevant for our contemporary situation, consulting other prominent thinkers on the nature of the reality at hand shows an unavoidable commonality. Despite all the conscious assertions of their importance, as relevant thinkers for our situation, a curious myopia has accompanied theoria. One aspect of philosophy has been suppressed: argument, debate, or that now almost archaic word (dialogue) has been effectively undermined by the absolute assertion of a moral worldview. Morality and ethicism are the ur-categories of the times; the power of the ethical has been effective and disarming. Philosophers have not been reluctant to state their cases. Their analysis has revolved around several interrelated points. But have they, more than cognitively, been noticed? Because when we examine many of the most eloquent and influential thinkers of our age, the drive of the present has not been even slightly altered despite their repeated warnings: the three symptoms of the times, with equal if different power than capital and the state, has resulted in a forceful relation—critical theory, morality, and nihilism are not, according to our most well-known thinkers, inimical to each other. “There are signs of significant theoretical, moral, and political disaffection with some aspects of liberalism.”39 It is all the more necessary to make an emphatic first statement on the matter and follow it up with selected others. The arguments, as a whole, should be sufficiently robust for all of us to take notice and in what way being complicit may have eluded our perception. Giorgio Agamben calls one symptom an aporia. “Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in 39  Geuss, Raymond. “Liberalism and its Discontents,” 320–338 Political Theory, Vol. 30. No. 3 (Jun. 2002), 320.

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post-democratic spectacular societies … may well be rooted in the aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy.”40 The complicity between enemies (a word Badiou will not hesitate to use, and stridently so when it comes to the truth of love and politics) is no longer such an aporia. Normalization has made it well protected. Sloterdijk writes: Only a civilization in which the right to have rights has become an internalized disposition and an institution sustained by state agencies could the spiral of continually expanded juridification begin to develop … This expansion of the space in which rights are claimed admittedly casts an increasingly problematic shadow. A national and supranational regulatory law-monster that is virtually unparalleled in history has been created by the reciprocal interaction of the limitless propagation of rights with gargantuan statist system of self-reinforcement.41

Byung Chul-Han asks: “What kind of politics—what kind of democracy—is still conceivable today, given that civil society is vanishing, given the mounting egoization and narcissification of human existence?”42 Decadence, expanded juridification, narcissification, along with Badiou’s all-encompassing nihilism: all of them have resulted in the most sophisticated critiques imaginable. The analysis is clear: a comprehensive ortho-­ behaviorism has been applied; methods and consequences have been exposed. A more complete list would involve a catalogue of thinkers who have been concerned about the nature of ideologies. Augusto del Noce calls the current process a sliding “toward a new totalitarianism.”43 Adding one more observation among many others he has made, René Girard (true to his Freudian engagements) refers to pathologies. “In many cases, caricatures are taking root, pathological explanations and hijackings of the victimary obsessions. It’s now no longer possible to persecute except in the 40  Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 10. 41  Sloterdijk, Peter. What Happened in the 20th Century? Tr. Chris Turner. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018, 9. 42  Han, Byung-Chul. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. Tr. Erik Butler. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017, 65. 43  Del Noce, Augusto. The Crisis of Modernity. Ed. And Trans. by Carlo Lancellotti. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.

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name of victims.”44 Including this one phenomenon, on the most serviceable of political instruments, only adds to the complications of the times. The analysis of the function of the victim has been presented. But who has taken notice, analytically instead of merely with cognitive awareness, this statement and many others by Slavoj Žižek? The crucial point is thus to recognize clearly in the ideology of global victimization, in this identification of the (human) subject itself as “something that can be hurt,” the mode of ideology that fits today’s global capitalism. This ideology of victimization is the very mode in which—most of the time invisible to the public eye, and for that reason all the more ineluctable—the Real of Capital exerts its rule.45

These are harsh judgments; their impact is hard to minimize. How does this assessment, by some of our leading thinkers, force us (instead of simply relying on rejection or disavowal) to consider their positions? For the victim to have served instrumental use leaves us with some apprehension as to what can still be used and abused. For Žižek, the managers of the state and their corporate partners are more than eager to go along with any new proposal made by this and that ethical group, as long as it does not interfere with the only objective that counts: the circulation of capital outlined in Marx’s Grundrisse and the perpetuation of the human animal as a fragile and helpless organism that requires constant care. Once solicitude became the concern of high-minded bureaucrats (we are, today, well beyond elementary “the care of the self,” and in the classical forms outlined by Foucault) the human was quickly eventually defined according to either their use value or its ontological debility—indeed, both together. One is cared for in order to produce and consume more efficiently. The solicitude today is all pervasive. The human has never been more fragile, nor more infantilized. The more care it receives, the more function and use-value it will have as the go-between of production and consumption. On the question of the self and of truth, Foucault observes that the classical idea of “(the care of the self) designates precisely the set of conditions of spirituality, the set of transformations of the self, that are the necessary 44  Girard, René. When These Things Begin. Conversations with Michel Treguer. Tr. Trevor Cribben Merrill. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 37. 45  Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute; or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?” London: Verso, 2000, 60.

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conditions for having access to the truth.”46 One could add that, today, the possession of certain truths, inviolable as they are, forego the difficult obligation of “the transformation of the self” as long as one makes the loudest pronouncements about this or that moral imperative to be addressed—usually, with grievance and rage and self-justification. The perceptions of a pressing reality have been confirmed many times over; whether they have been heeded is another matter. There seems to be no willingness to consider an additional situation to the well-known one. Jean Baudrillard writes: “Capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever generates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital.”47 Have capital and “public morality” today become inseparable allies in the progress of a system that makes objects and subjects, things and human beings, according to full-fledged workings of propaganda. Karl Marx is our impeccable source. “A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.”48 We can conclude the segment with one more observation, from Badiou. He can leave us with a permanent reminder and with one more reference to Marx, who “accepted that there were similarities between the ambitions of emancipatory politics and the workings of capital … obviously it’s a formidably complex problem, which can sometimes expose us, I admit, to the risk of being the unconscious agents of capital itself.”49 Once the unconscious is introduced into the analysis of politics, the subject of truth and of being becomes all the more central. The demands on us, as individuals, or for anyone teaching in institutions of higher learning, are considerable. The doubts raised by an entire tradition of thought should leave us with a certain discomfort— for being relieved of some of our ideals and for the pressure of, perhaps, beginning the process of a re-evaluation. The genealogy of our morals has been presented to us in the 19th century. What do we do now?

46  Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneuetics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82. Ed. Frédéric Gros. Tr. Gramah Burchell. New York: Picador, 2005, 17. 47  Baudrilland, Jean. Simulations. Tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983, 27. 48  Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. The Communist Manifesto. Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. London: Verso, 2012, 70. 49  Badiou, Alain. “Politics and Philosophy,” an interview with Peter Hallward, 113–133 in Angelaki, Vol. 3 (3), 1998, 120–121.

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One attitude will be maintained now that several of our foundational perceptions are adopted. The precise term given to us by Nietzsche, nihilism, will give way to the overall project of presenting the universality of four truths even as, at times, they will seem internally unsteady and, together, very uneven. The agonistic confrontation with the purveyors of morality and ethicism will be, from here, indirect. One issue will involve the replacement of ethics with the virtue of a Greek arete ̄, human excellence as opposed to the imperative of being morally, and one-­dimensionally, “good.” In what way will the analysis of our contemporary situation and its substitution with excellence lead, Badiou believes, to the possibility (of all things) happiness? “In every one of his experiences, the individual who is subjectivated, incorporated into the process of truth, experiences that he is living, that he is living in the joy of being—and that in itself is enough to separate oneself from the world as it is” (E 94, my emphasis). The joy of being. One has to be aware of being tempted by cynicism here; otherwise, in the usual serious, today grave, discussion of philosophy, the choice to be dismissive is always present. Nietzsche’s fröhliche Wissenschaft will not have been squandered. Surely the idea of happiness is preferable than the general malaise produced by the negations of the critical theorist. In any case, Badiou makes us aware of a condition and asks us if we have any thoughts on changing it. Badiou’s affirmation leads him to the creation of a many-layered philosophy with similarities to Nietzsche’s supplemental palimpsest,50 the ontological figure capable of interlacing moments of situations one on top of another to sense their comprehensive affect and what, together, they may be able to create. Events do not just happen; preparations are involved, expectations thought about, the future anticipated for what it might hold and reveal from the traces of long-lost events. My response to Badiou’s work will have one overall intent: to present a modern thought that offers the individual more than the totalizing impositions of our present. “The misadventures of critical thought”51 are going to be suspended, if only momentarily, to give us a chance simply to think otherwise. In the 50  First presented in his essay on history in Untimely Meditations. The concept is discussed in Nietzsche and the Self-Revelations of a Martyr. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 51  Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Tr. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2011. The reference is to the title of Chapter 2.

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meantime, as we begin to examine the four generic procedures of truth, the responses for Badiou will be consistent both with the attempt to use the figures of thought so important for him and the ones adopted here until the end: interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation. These are the primary acts of the free subject of being and truth. The first point sets out from the turning away from any announcements of one or more ends and instead follow Badiou in his call for a decision. “To put an end to the end, it is necessary that a decision be made” (H 65). No hesitations, no deferrals, no endless theoretical hand-wringing about philosophy and the task it has had for itself since Socrates and before. A decision—that is to say, an act of freedom and a declaration. Badiou has made himself clear on the matter. One of his unique traits, unlike virtually all of his contemporaries, is to re-affirm the necessity of perhaps the most important conviction of all: the subject and his and her freedom. The “project,” to recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s word, is not misplaced. Nothing less than the freedom of the subject is presented once more, as a conviction. One lesson would not be relinquished. Jean-Paul Sartre writes: “For strictly philosophical reasons, our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual—not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our doctrine on truth.”52 The individual and the truth. Badiou outlines one of his origins, as a disciple of a maître. What Sartre taught me was simply, existentialism. But what does existentialism mean? It means that you must have a tie between the concept on the one hand and on the other the existential agency of choice, the agency of the vital decision. The conviction that the philosophic concept is not worth an hour of toil if, be it by mediations of a great complexity, it does not reverberate, clarify and ordain the agency of choice, of the vital decision. And in this sense, the concept must be, also and always, an affair of existence. That is what Sartre taught me.”53

52  Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Tr. Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, 40. 53  Badiou, Alain. “Philosophy as Biography.” The Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan.com. https://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html.

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Others, “existentialists,”54 if you will, were no less important and some others have emerged at the right time to also make a difference. Badiou asks himself—and us: “what can we expect from a theory of the subject, if not to shed some light on the mystery of decision?” (TS176). Badiou’s intentions will be followed. He makes a wager on his axioms; the willingness to purse them as far as possible allows him, at the end, to make a claim. A recent work, La métaphysique du bonheur réel, can serve as a point of arrival and from there retrace the path of his thought, in parts, since first dedicating himself to the subject, that is, the individual and four truths. As an event is a revelation of a part of the world which existed previously only in the form of a negative restraint. And the correlation between the revelation and the question of happiness is clear: as it is the lifting of a constraint, there is immediately, for all those who subsist without clearly recognizing his constraint, the apparition of new possibilities for thought and action. Thus a possible definition of happiness might be: to discover in oneself an active capacity of what we unknowingly possess. (H 82, my emphasis)

A revelation, for Badiou, is the discovery, in the individual, of a previously excluded possibility of being. The affirmations to come, on the four procedures of truth (art, science, love, and politics) are going to have to be declared from out of their consequences for human life, better yet, for what Badiou calls the true life. To support the effort, despite the lingering and perhaps never overcome hesitation about the primacy of the political, complements will be introduced and enacted all the way through. Acting, as much as possible, affirmatively, the subject of being will be attentive to Badiou’s work. One more reminder is not superfluous. After a life-time of philosophical work, Badiou arrives at a conviction; the belief in its possibility has not been undermined by the three fundamental obstacles to the attainment of what he calls (after Nietzsche) a revelation. Despite the last half-century of a persistent critical thought, 54  Badiou’s references to Kierkegaard are not merely occasional. See Book VI, Section 2 of Logics of Worlds and being “summoned to a radical decision,” 365. We can now consider the movement fully revived and made relevant for the times by Markus Gabriel. See his Neo-­ Exsistentialism. That Gabriel chooses the science of neurobiology to respond to will be mentioned again at a later point. Badiou again: “it turns out that existing in what one thinks always comes down to choosing,” 367.

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Badiou remains faithful to the ability—to discover in oneself the resources for a recommitment to what he calls, with the Greeks, the good life and, equally as important, the true life. “Philosophy’s subject matter is the true life. What is true life? That is the philosopher’s sole question” (TL 7). How, then, does Badiou propose to make the revelation of the true life possible and, perhaps too, livable? Although the explicit thesis is often made, and unequivocally so (philosophy is conditioned by art, science, love, and politics, and is therefore in a strong sense supported by them) once we examine, one by one, the four conditions of philosophy and as generic procedures of truth, we will be in a better situation to consider Badiou’s overall intent. Can philosophy, admitting to its conditions but also drawing on many resources, find itself today with the means to provide a strong enough, an appealing enough, alternative to some of the symptoms Badiou has diagnosed in our contemporary culture? Jason Barker writes. “The consequences of (his) thinking becomes absolutely incalculable for thinking.”55 Thus far, we find ourselves in a predicament that will not easily be avoided as we more systematically analyze how Badiou’s philosophy as a whole and in his creation of a four-part condition of philosophy leads him to offer an alternative to the increasing influence of critical theory, morality, and nihilism. Are the four procedures of truth, as Badiou presents them, sufficient to be an alternative to the drive of the times? Or will this be, necessarily, one among other responses that are needed and so to build a counter-consensus to the mis-steps of our contemporary situation? Badiou has been tireless and committed to a perpetual obligation. Like many philosophers or, more generally, anyone committed to thought, he has recognized age-old problems and, in the last half-century of our focus as a tradition, identified them as opposite to what he has dared to call, in this age of high skepticism and worse, truths. “To put things succinctly, let’s say that technology, culture, management and sex have taken up the generic place of science, art, politics and love. As a result, not only must we recall these conditions and their modern countenance, we also need to defend their active autonomy”56 (SMP 120-1). There is bound to be little 55  Barker, Jason. “Wherefore art thou Philosophy?” 78–93  in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 8. No. 1, 2012, 79. 56  The relevance of autonomy, soon to hold our attention in the thinking of the work of art, will also be essential when we think about the subject of perception—whether the viewer (of, say, a painting) and how different forms of sensibility will enhance the life of the individual.

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to disagree with; and yet one recurring problem will continue to preoccupy us during an investigation into the systematic presentation of Badiou’s philosophy and, if at the end (despite the unquestionable commitment to an affirmative thinking dedicated to the subject and to freedom), the whole can be sustained. I am not so much concerned with the foundational argument that philosophy does not, itself, present any truth and only supports the truth of art, science, love, and politics. The argument, for the sake of exposition, can be accepted; more difficult is the thesis, as above, and the relation between the conditions and their autonomy. Because we will immediately recognize, and then continually see, that the explicit declaration is not at all sustained with any sort of consistency. On the contrary, at some point we will have no choice but to wonder if the “vacillation” (his term) does not seriously compromise the whole endeavor. The conclusion to Theory of the Subject will be taken into consideration and as an inherent aspect of his philosophy. “To vacillate defines the structure of the subject” (TS 323). Let the claim not be a rationalization or the evasion of a responsibility. “Vacillation” can be conscious and methodical; or it can be a symptom of unresolved tensions and forces Badiou cannot easily control. The many-sided forces opposing truth require a sophisticated and self-conscious dexterity. There will be many opportunities to identify them, including raising the question on the four generic procedures of truth being conditions of philosophy. In “By circuitous paths,” one of the last sections of Daybreak, Nietzsche asks himself a few questions that will become guiding. “Whither does his whole philosophy, with all its circuitous paths, want to go? Does it more than translate as it were into reason a strong and constant drive?”57 Part of the work to come will be to both highlight the dilemmas of truths and, if possible, minimize their use and instrumentalization. The truth of art and science, love and politics, can certainly be affirmed; they also represent persistent difficulties because they are driven by purpose. Whether Badiou’s philosophy can contribute to addressing the epoch now unfolding in the 21st century and with the dynamic of the last half-century fading behind us remains the responsibility to come. The “Conclusion” to his Second Manifesto for Philosophy leaves no doubt as to his commitment; they echo sentiments already expressed, with the same determination. During an epoch of the deepest suspicions about both the human being 57  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Tr. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 223.

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and the truth, Badiou dared to introduce an entirely new disposition and, instead of being caught up in a counter-current (which effectively moved on and past May ’68, and with the participation of “new philosophers”58), he held firm to some of its most important ideals. Claude Lefort describes the times this way: “to suddenly see such a liberation of words, powerful words, that was in itself an extraordinary event.”59 Whether the power of the words as events are, ultimately—and so, regrettably—merely political will be one of the responsibilities in the following examination. Other truths will have to be emphasized with equal if not more commitment. “When all is said and done, this second Manifesto is the result of our confused and detestable present time forcing us to declare that there are eternal truths in politics, art, science and love” (SMP 129-130). Our examination will set us towards identifying Badiou’s four generic truths as conditions of philosophy. In so doing, one problem will be primary: are the four truths beset by difficult, perhaps intractable dilemmas; and, if so, can the aid provided by philosophy make it possible to effectively overcome our present situation and the one most evident in our social and political life? Can the truths as articulated by Badiou lead to a “genuine life?” The opening begins with such an aspiration; whether it can be maintained will involve on-going responses until the end and the final chapter on the truth of politics. Badiou has not given up on his task. In what follows, his ensemble will have to be examined in some detail, with disparate elements, moving in different directions, motivated by different concerns. The subject of truth, our individual, will bear the responsibility of witnessing Badiou’s testimony, with fidelity, and with the care that the truths of love, art, science, and politics require. Whoever is the subject of truth (of love, art, or science, or politics) knows that, in effect, he bears the treasure, that he is traversed by an infinite power. Whether or not this truth, so precarious, continues to deploy itself depends solely on his subjective weakness. Thus, one may justifiably say that he bears it only in an earthen vessel, day after day enduring the imperative—delicacy and subtle thought—to ensure that nothing shatters it. (SP 54)

 One notable example was Bernard-Henri-Lévy’s Barbarism with a Human Face.  Lefort, Claude. “The Test of the Political: An Interview with Claude Lefort” with Pierre Rosanvallon. Tr. David Ames Curtis. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory,” Vol. 19, Issue 1, March 1, 2012, 14. 58 59

CHAPTER 2

Art

When one undertakes the thinking of art as an immanent production of truths, what is the pertinent unity of what is called “art”? Is it the artwork itself, the singularity of a work? Is it the author, the creator? Or is it something else?” Handbook of Inaesthetics

1   The Artist as a “Vanishing Cause” Since his 1975–1979 lectures, published as Theory of the Subject, defending the being of the subject (the individual) has singled out Badiou as a thinker whose commitments ran counter to his times and culture; the philosophical defense of the individual made him virtually unique among his contemporaries and with a particular form of expression, a testimony, representing in no small measure the force of his language, at once adopted from a juridical and/or theological source and stamped with his own method. Badiou has not been reluctant about adopting specific terminology and using it for himself. “Of all those for whom I am testifying,” he writes in the “Preface,” then followed by a list of individuals who will be called upon to reflect on his proposal: “militants, friends, students, difficult interlocutors, provisional or returning enemies, and who know that I know it” (TS xxxix). All the neglect, and worse, the aversion to the subject by a generation of thinkers, is philosophically suspended and countered by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_2

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a new imperative. Badiou set himself towards the almost solitary task of re-founding what he calls “the place of the subjective.” In so doing, and by making truth—that once most discredited of concepts—necessary again, philosophy was reinvigorated and set towards the development of ancient foundations. Can the correlation between the generic procedures of truth and philosophy be sustained in the way Badiou presents it, even as he admits to “an acute wandering on behalf of the reader” (TS xxxix)? Will one subject (us, the reader) be sufficiently and clearly addressed and become not only indispensable for the entirety of his work-to-come, but also free enough, unencumbered enough, to experience his triad of subject, being, and truth? His “wandering,” at times improvisational and moved by his free-form multiplicity, may lead to new discoveries. The whole range of his philosophical edifice, with by no means a shortage of interrelated concepts, will be experienced as challenging and, at times, leaving the reader with loose ends, disparate issues running counter to each other, and with each of the four procedures of truth beset by internal and external difficulties. Whether these often-noticed dilemmas can be overcome will be one of the obligations to be met, in the truth of art and in others. The difficulty in Badiou’s “inaesthetic” questions should be heard from the beginning in order to turn to the first of the four generic procedures of truth and, for us, the insistence on its three inseparable elements (the artist, the work of art, the third is the “something else”—us as individual recipients) and respond with interpretations which, in the best-case scenario, are supplements to his thinking rather than a “critique.” An opening statement from his Handbook of Inaesthetics can set us towards identifying a number of difficulties in Badiou’s thinking of the truth of art. Whether the dilemmas are constitutive, and accepted as such, cannot be readily discounted. Badiou may be philosophically opting for an agonal relationship to truth, a conflictual one even if he has abandoned any reliance on dialectical opposition. The extremes of two positions on the truth of art will be introduced and examined, and often enough for them not to be accidental. In doing so, some of the most important concepts of his philosophical system will also be necessarily presented. Can the parts sustain the whole? Or will the problems be intractable? His inaesthetic theory opens with an opposition: art and the “discourse” of philosophy. “Art is always already there, addressing the thinker with the mute and scintillating questions of its identity while through constant invention and metamorphosis it declares its disappointment about everything that the

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philosopher may have to say about it” (HI 1-2). The truth of art (seemingly, in itself) makes its “disappointment” known. How is not explained, except by the intuition of the philosopher. In the case of one art historian, Hubert Damisch, the declaration is rather posed as a question. “How are we to deal with images, with works of art, if the process of describing and interpreting them, of putting them into words, may cause them to disappear as images to be seen, by being cast away in the mold of discourse?”1 If Badiou’s inaesthetic is to be addressed, then the saying of philosophy (and its theories of the sensible and the beautiful) will have to accept the obligation of speaking for art with particular care, as an ad-vocatus. Is art fated to a perpetual “disappointment?” Or can the philosopher speak on behalf of art and, due the three-part relation to be presented here and as a response to Badiou, insist on the unity of the artist, the artwork, and the viewer? Is art, as Badiou writes, also at the same time “mute?” How can it not reveal itself while “addressing the thinker?”—who is attentive and respects both the object to be contemplated and also never neglects the individual artist? His phrasing often leaves the reader’s hermeneutics with undeniable frustration; his logic and rhetoric are not always sharp in their clarity and for our understanding as readers. For Badiou, art and philosophy have been divided from themselves, the latter giving itself special privileges. He does not work towards a reconciliation. Far from it; he is prepared to increase the opposition and does so, remarkably, by undermining the individuality of the artist—in some of his writings on aesthetics, while in other, ontological discussions, the opposite appears to be the case. The aesthetic and the ontological are supposed to act in accordance with each other, as they can under ideal conditions and during the occurrence of the decisive event. Every process of truth begins with an event. An event is unpredictable and incalculable—it is a supplement of the situation. Every truth, and therefore every subject, depends upon an evental emergence. A truth and a subject do not derive from what there is, but from what happens, in the strongest sense of the term “happens.” (HI 55)

1  Damisch, Hubert. “Bridging the Gap Between Two Scenes,” 93–95 in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, 93.

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Situation, event, supplement: these concepts, and many more, form the architecture of Badiou’s systematic philosophy as supports, ultimately, for the truth of the subject. The human being cannot be renounced. Philosophically, the interlocking parts are many, some of them uniquely his own, others inherited from a philosophical lexicon of long-standing. The event, for example, has a substantial history. His meaning of the event requires an understanding of his nuances. One argument, which is also one of our numerous dilemmas, involves the nature of the “evental emergence.” At this point, while explaining the sense of the inaesthetic, Badiou presents the subject as being in a state of dependence. The subject depends on the event. The event is primary. My first response on the matter is this, now and all the way through: but what if (or better yet, when) the event and the subject—the artist who creates the event in his or her work—perfectly coincide? The consummate thinker of the artist, the free spirit, and the noble soul, who aims for a unity of the three in the philosopher, and without requiring the superlatives of the Übermensch, is described by Nietzsche in terms of a phenomenological act. “A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below, as by his kind of events” (BGE 198). The power of Nietzsche’s interiority has never been in doubt; his individual events are, as he so often tells us, self-revelations. There is no denying the subject of the will to power as generative.2 If the artist and the event of creation are inseparable, why does Badiou (at times) need to make a case for the “vanishing of the creator in the work” (PE 72)? What are the motivations for effacing the artist when the preservation of the subject was a foundational philosophical argument. Mine is not an external, critical objection; on several different occasions, Badiou himself creates two different and antithetic perspectives. Can they both be held at once? His “admitted wandering” or errance has an enigmatic sense; the oscillation is unsteady and insecure. A kind of unsteadiness pervades the whole once disparate writings are brought into contact with each other. He can present the disappearance of the artist without the slightest hesitation and then make one individual, with a name, perfectly visible and due to the singularity of the work in question, like Schönberg’s 2  In The Will to Power, he adds: “every basic character trait that is encountered at the bottom of every event, that finds expression in every event, would have to lead every individual who experienced it as his own basic character trait” (WP 36).

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dodecaphonic or twelve-tone compositions. Badiou does so by attaching a name to an event, as in the “Schönberg-event” (LW 36), or when, in Polemics, he makes a who’s who list of exemplary names and their particular art forms, each more renowned than the next. How does the creator of the work vanish at the same time as his name precedes, ontologically and grammatically (as an adjective, as its attribute), the event? The first dilemma is, for us, stark. The truth of art, and truth as such, begins with an uncertainty that pervades the whole of Badiou’s thinking. One of his arguments concentrates exclusively on the work of art and thereby relegates the artist to a barely marginal point; as for another essential subject, the previously mentioned “something else,” no mention is made of his or her event. The omission will here be remedied, with an unequivocal commitment; because unless the recipient of the message is fully acknowledged as essential in a three-part process, the actuality of the event may not be experienced at all and recede so far it will simply disappear. The order will be adhered to as closely as possible; the cross-references of many of his writings do not at all present an identifiable whole. The problem is not, for me, one of logical consistency. The lived truth of philosophy is, ultimately, the only concern, more so than any sense of an epistemological contradiction. The lived truth will always be specific and chosen. Any discrepancy of thought or articulation will have to be overcome axiomatically and in the service of life. Theoria has no bearing here until such time as it devotes itself, once more, to the lived experience of the human and to the values of our commitments. One first example can be chosen, this from the end of Being and Event, for one confirmation of the name/event relationship. “Every subject generates nominations. Empirically, the point is manifest. What is most explicitly attached to the proper names which designate a subjectivation is an arsenal of words which make up the deployed matrix of faithful marking-­ out” (BE 418). “Proper names.” These are individuals. As for being “faithful” (acting with fidelity) these individuals are also essential for the supplement to the situation and the Event to be sustained, whether they are working with “an arsenal of words,” or in another medium of the visual, like painting or photography, or the auditory and music. Our senses, our relation to aisthesis as the Greeks celebrated them, physically, are not to be distinguished for Badiou. He stresses how an “arsenal of words” (in the case of a written document) “designates a subjectivation,” in other words, contributes to the simultaneous creation of a work of art

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and the enhancement of an aesthetic recipient. We are not, parenthetically, referring to Nietzsche’s justifiably famous aphorism 290 of The Gay Science. He writes: “One thing is needful.- To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art” (GS 232). Nietzsche’s character is an ontological accomplishment, of the spirit, certainly not one related to an aesthete or the superficiality of appearance. Badiou does not also hesitate to name the individuals, like Nietzsche, he calls “my principal masters” (H 34) of philosophy, that is, the individuals (among others, he names Plato, Spinoza, Pascal, and Kierkegaard) who have been omni-present in his thinking. It is they who “teach us that all that possess a true value is earned; not by means of ordinary usages and adoption of dominant ideas, but by the effect, existentially experienced, of a rupture with the course of the world” (H 37, my emphasis). His laudatory statements leave us with certainty about his personal relationships. The apparent certainty, however, can be quickly dispelled by other, quite different arguments. One heartfelt belief can be just as easily inverted. In the case of art and its creation, and as one human act of the artist singled out from the rest, the first subject of art (the artist) becomes less identifiable in Badiou’s truth—minimized, bereft of qualities, almost without individuality at all and representative of “the cult of the creator” (PE 72). The term (the cult of the individual— associated with the political or religious leader) is easier to see as a 20th century political phenomena. Ending, provisionally, the either/or with an unsettling repudiation of the creative individual can be the lead-in to one other participate in the complete work of art. So far, and despite the testimony of one writing—his first magnum opus, Being and Event—the individual associated artistically with an event is, also, made to vanish and denigrated by associating such an individual with a “cult.” Even less prominent than the artist is one other individual who, here and perpetually so, will be made essential in the experience of the work of art; there is simply no way to understand the event without its experience and then the emphatic testimony as to its reality. Badiou cannot abnegate on his responsibility of making the individual recipient of the thing (i.e., a painting) and then transmitting its sense with fidelity. The viewer, in the case of one chosen artwork, painting, suffers (at times) from a similar if not more pronounced absence than the artist. That subject of perception is nowhere to be seen. Badiou’s attempt to be independent of the history of phenomenology is unworkable. The viewer has to be included in a three-part process. A series of interconnected events are all equally necessary. The work of art usually (but not always) has two genetic sources: the

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individual, and a tradition. Both are mutual and in a particular kind of relationship that will involve one obvious one—a historical transmission, as ancient, for example, as Paleolithic cave paintings—and as contemporary as the modern viewer in the present who will be active in the process of an enduring transference. Transmission and transference will unify, in a unique, three-part relationship, the artist in his or her historical event, the work of art, and the viewer. By unifying this one triad, Badiou’s polemical inaesthetic will have to be modified. The individual artist and viewer is not, for us, a dilemma; the human will not be, under any circumstances, neglected. The creative impulse, as one antidote to cultural indifference— or worse, nihilism—will be affirmed here unequivocally. Once he made one decision, at least in Philosophy of the Event, to look at the artist and then make them “vanish,” then a former presence, voided, was soon replaced by many volunteers. Ridding ourselves, by fiat, of one theoretical inconvenience, does not ensure we will be freer than before; ghosts and specters, as metaphors, remind us of the force of remnants. The effacement of the artist is not without unintended consequences. And so, we have to ask ourselves constant questions on the nature of his thought and respond in kind, just as we did in the beginning with the difference between ethos and morality, a relation to being and a strict way of ordering our collective social life. One commentator believes that “his appeal to great modern art and literature produce lines of flight out of the aporias of thought, not only for speculative purposes, but also, inevitably, for ethical and political ones, is very much to the point.”3 Does Badiou offer a way of out of the aporias? Or does his thought, without meaning to do so, bring them to the fore and therefore lays down some of the conditions for the future of philosophy for the 21st century? Does Badiou offer something different from the tradition of critical theory and can his aesthetic subject be safeguarded from what he has called “the dominance of artificial individualism?”4—rightfully a concern in an age when truth no longer has a bearing and has been substituted with laissez-faire opinions and consensus from the extremes of opposing interests. 3  Moulard, Valentine. “Thought as Modern Art or the Ethics of Perversion,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 48, Iss. 3 (Fall 2004), 288–298, 296. 4  Badiou, Alain. “Seven Variations on the Century.” Tr. Alberto Toscano. 72–70 Parallax, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2003. He is specifically referring to the modern-day “ego-ideals” of money, success, and sex. These are traditional. There are other ego-ideals today that are concerned much more with ethical status, as we will see in Badiou’s “essay on the understanding of evil.”

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One of his declarations in the Manifesto for Philosophy leads us to truth, the event, and the faithful individual. “Every truth is an infinite production suspended to an event, irreducible to all established knowledge and determined only by the activity of those faithful to this event” (MP 81, first emphasis mine). Our concentration will be focused on one internal inconsistency in Badiou’s presentation, a wavering that represents the vulnerability of truth; it aspires to the new by being independent of tradition and yet can always be re-incorporated back into the well-known or the mandatory. For the second time, however, we have his support of the acts of the faithful. The truth of the event, which can be both an individual and their work, ultimately reaches someone who adheres to the message and is so struck by its visceral reality that there is simply no question of ignoring the call to be its representative. The ancient word martyr, as a witness, should not be inappropriate, not when Badiou has been exclusively willing to be rhetorically provocative. His unique use of language, and concepts from specific traditions of thought, can leave his readers ambivalent. Resurrection is only one of many. How wily: what better way to provoke his old comrades, who “turned,” than to adopt a quintessential Christian concept? “In the end, what Badiou tells us is that there is no truth without a fight, that to be a subject requires a certain degree of militancy.”5 The “fight” of the militant can, perhaps, be postponed for the time being; or is an aesthetic antagonism as necessary as it is in politics because many have been tempted to subsume art into their ends? As a response, and keeping his leading questions in mind, if the dilemma of art (as he presents it) is to be remedied, a triadic relationship will have to be made sturdy enough to withstand the exertion of political and other pressures. The artist, the work of art, and the necessity of a subject of aesthetic being as represented by a viewer will become interrelated in a triadic event at each of the moments of their revelations. A first declaration on art can be mentioned. Starting out, as it were, in media res, Badiou has highlighted the work. Badiou begins with the object of art. The artist has been neglected or taken for granted; whether he or she is nullified requires some attention; when the argument is presented in Ethics, the absence of the artist may be symptomatic of other issues. “I don’t think at all that the affirmation of sovereignty is essential to an artistic configuration” (E 142). 5  Wren, Jacob. “No Truth without a Fight,” Contemporary Art, Iss. 86, Summer 2005, 14–16, 16. The word “militancy” has a lot of currency in Badiou’s thinking. How it will figure for the reader can be a postponed decision for now.

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The “sovereign”6 artist, from some statements, is unnecessary for him; the freedom of the viewer seems to be likewise dispensed with. Where, then, is the configuration supposed to be experienced and given a contour and its place? “The goal of great artists is to give their thinking the form of a work, and nothing more” (IT 63). The great artist is noticed; the qualification is no mere add-on. The viewer, in an on-going present, can turn an everyday experience into an event that is transhistorical. If individual artists do not matter, especially ones as important as inaugural ones, then why does he mention, for example, Lady Murasaki’s fiction if not to lead us to her work and The Tale of Genji as a novel, as he does in his Second Manifesto? Or more spectacularly since in this passage he invokes the artist and the infinite and the movement from a particular example to the universality of the aesthetic triad: when “the artist destines the infinite to the finite” (TW 160, my emphasis) the address is specific, as is the one who receives the transmission (in an individual act of transference) who then completes, always provisionally, incompletely, the first connection. Does Badiou want to give up on sovereignty when it involves two individual decisions—from the artist who works, and the viewer who responds, looks, and testifies with faith? And can he really give up on the individual artist and the act of creation when he associates happiness (a concept, as we’ll see, unlike any other in his work—or in the history of philosophy) with the idea that “artistic creation can here serve as paradigm” (H 86). Happiness and artistic creation. Who has dared to make such a claim? The echoes, from the self-flourishing of the Greeks to the exuberance of romantics, has been a historical constant. The correlation of the infinite and happiness, while perhaps strange to modern attitudes, is revitalized by Badiou and one more of the comprehensive elements of his multifaceted thought. The happiness he later supplements with “the joy of being” is no mere hyperbole. In what follows, unifying the triadic relationship between the artist, the painting, and the viewer will be a “three-in-one,” a numerical figure often used by Badiou and sometimes called, noticeably, a “Trinity,” another concept he has adopted from a most traditional history and altered it to suit his philosophical development. In Philosophy and the Event, he writes: 6  One notable objection to Badiou’s thesis comes (of all people, someone who proclaimed the “death of the author”) from Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida, the affirmation of the act of a “sovereign consciousness” makes the crucial distinction between the studium (how we have been conditioned to look and see) and the freedom of perceiving the punctum, as a possible event.

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What we have to understand is that works configure a new artistic sequence. In this configuration, a generic truth of the situation of a given art becomes progressively discernible. Individuals are incorporated within this truth by mutations in their way of relating to his art. These mutations affect the way the work is defined and how it is seen or heard. (PE 74)

The density of his concepts is not to be easily read and overlooked; they are many and their interrelation can be examined separately and chronologically. Works, for one, have a consequence; they configure a “new artistic sequence.” But does he mean in terms of a work (say, the paintings of Picasso and Braque’s cubism and what they artistically influence or lead to) or in terms of a subject? One other point will be analyzed at different moments: are individuals incorporated within something, into? Or is the “direction” of the experience to be re-routed and turned around in order to make the individual the center point of the process as a receiver? The incorporation will be a volitional act; the individual will incorporate the perception of an event (as he and she view the paintings and internalize, via a transference, the transhistorical presence of the artist and the work) into him and herself. In both cases, the previously mentioned activity is part of the process of reception and “seizing,” a word echoing with force and in need of being explained more as the going forth of the subject, with a certain attraction, with expectation and gratitude. The pincers of Truth, which link and sublimate, have a duty to seize truths. The relation of (philosophic) Truth to (scientific, political, artistic, or amorous) truths is one of seizing. By “seizing” we mean capture, hold, and also seizure, astonishment. Philosophy is the locus of thinking wherein (non-philosophic) truths are seized as such and seize us. (MP 126)

This is but one of the many instances where the reader has to balance one assertion against others—along with commentaries. “Une tâche philosophique: saisir les vérités produites par les configurations.”7 Philosophy would be the activity itself; truth cannot sustain itself without 7  Lévy, Denis. “Badiou, l’art et le cinema,” Appareil 6, 2010, 5. Would Badiou have objections to this formulation? On the one hand, art gives philosophy a task—conditions its questions and thoughts; on the other, the truths of a configuration are ultimately seized by philosophy.

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philosophical activity, that is, thought for life. We come to one of many intersections and to one reminder of the philosophical enterprise as one of astonishment, which delights in the reality of the appearance for its beauty, in art, and for its ontological creativity. Astonishment and happiness; these are aesthetically created and philosophically relevant once more. Where the seizure originates cannot be easily known. A statement, again from Ethics, can lead us to one of Badiou’s back and forth sides. In this one instance, different in tone and emphasis from others, he makes his case again for the primacy of the work of art. The artist is made marginal if present at all. Our essential viewer is nowhere to be seen. The subject of an artistic process is not the artist (the “genius,” etc.). In fact, the subject-points of art are works of art. And the artist enters into the composition of these subjects (the works are “his”), without our being able in any sense to reduce them to “him” (and besides, which “him” would this be?). (E 44)

One can, legitimately, ask how his process of “entering into the composition” (so indirect, impersonal) can be readily understood. The “genius,” placed between outstanding markers, is minimized by Badiou when it comes to art. In the next chapter, the scientific status of the matheme will not make him hesitate in the slightest about the mathematical or geometrical genius. For Badiou, at least here, there is no single individual; just the work itself, a creation, a configuration. From what follows, an inviolable relationship will be asserted as my response: the artist, the work of art, and the viewer (a phenomenologist, in the case of our prime example, painting) will become inseparable. Noting the ambiguity in Badiou’s presentation, Benjamin Noys writes that “insisting on the singular heroic capacities of artistic creation” is an aspect of Badiou’s aesthetics. “It is true, however, that Badiou also insists on the artwork as the true subject of art—not the artist.”8 The heroic individual and the autonomous work of art stand apart. Is this philosophically acceptable and defensible? Are we going to readily accept the argument when so much, for us, tends towards a completely opposite view, one that insists on the three-part relation that,

8  Noys, Benjamin. “‘Monumental Construction.’ Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 383–392 Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July 2009, 383–384.

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as a consequence, draws one history into another and so creates a necessary continuity in the transmission of one human being to another? Returning to Badiou’s examples, the decision to be made in art, or in aesthetics as its study, is on the multiple origin of the event and on the consequences that follow. The event cannot “occur,” as a happening, on its own. Is there a precedence to the event and can an argument be presented for a chronologically certain individual who creates it? The difficulty of answering the question (as Badiou sees it) is not, in itself, the problem; rather, at the same time as he is faithful to one of his arguments, there are others which are equally compelling. “Art can and must take a stand on History, take stock of the past century and propose new sensory forms of thought that is not simply rebellious but also a force of unification around a number of affirmations” (SMP 122). But how does the reader understand the philosophically enticing possibility of “new sensory forms”—comprehensively, a new way of being aesthetically in the world, and the opposition, which is fundamentally a political one, between “rebellion” and affirmation?9 One rebels against; an affirmation, on the other hand, seeks to create and augment and fortify with an aesthetic will to power directed at its internal energies. The “force” he mentions here is quite different when it pertains to an individual working artistically and a later viewer, on the one hand, and the force to be invoked in a political context. In art, we have the event, as “intuition grasps it” and what is then enhanced, in the individual, after the experience. If, as he writes, “only an interpretative intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation” (BE 190), the viewer in the present is absolutely necessary when it comes to perceiving the truth of the art as it has been made and transmitted. The intervention is necessarily a hermeneutic one; there is simply no way to avoid the primacy of meaning as the interpreter perceives it in the experience of looking. Badiou’s animus against interpretation, and meaning, cannot easily be defended, not when his “interpretative intervention” is a consummate act by the exegetical individual who is conscious of his responsibility. The intervention, as a form of interpretation, is a prerequisite both for the recognition of the event and the fidelity that will testify to its reality. There will be several opportunities to allow Badiou to speak on 9  As we will see, Jacques Rancière will take up the problem as well. The ontological implications of the statement are far-reaching: art indeed proposes “new sensory forms” (of thought, of perception, of the imagination), but why are these human possibilities so readily drawn towards their political meaning? Why does the polity have, for Badiou, the last word?

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his own behalf—to testify for himself and for truth—and to continue with the guiding thesis, that is, to “propose new sensory forms,” thereby confirming, despite his intentions, both a hermeneutics and a phenomenology, the meaning/consciousness relation. We are also obliged to counter Badiou’s inclinations with other proposals; they are personal, which gives them more poignancy. “The artist ultimately needs no one” (TW 160). He should, of course, know better than most; the novelist and playwright works in solitude and independently while writing. Adopting one view of the artist by Sloterdijk, the individual understood as fundamentally a “heretic” will therefore be given a unique place and one with a significant history. “During a metamorphosis that lasted two thousand years, the adventure of heresy shifted from priests to philosophers and from the latter to artists—the last inheritors of the urban quest for the powerful, effective, true, and good.”10 Can the artist become the representative of a new kind of “true, and good” that is not aligned with archaic forms and not give in to the force of political initiatives that continue to believe in their efficacy despite history being replete with counter-­ examples. The heretic is an individual; the orthodoxies of our times are many and increasingly binding. They are certainly well represented. To refuse to be forced into a political pre-eminence will require us to remain committed and loyal to the individual, the artist, and the viewer and without any political interference or suggestion or coercion. Whatever art-­ form is chosen to discuss, none can be given priority, at least not for Badiou. In the context of the theatre, Jacques Rancière writes: “More than any other art, theatre has been associated with the Romantic idea of an aesthetic revolution, changing not the mechanics of the state and law,

10  Sloterdijk, Peter. The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art. Ed. Peter Weibel. Tr. Karen Margolis. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2017, 186. The quote comes from “Essay on the Life of the Artist.”

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but the sensible forms of human experience.”11 There is one way to present an alternative to the isolation of the work of art and the neglect of the artist and more so for the spectator or viewer, the individual in the present who, by Badiou’s own account, is the one to recognize the event and therefore assume the responsibility of being a witness to its truth. Badiou presents the work of the individual as well as his responsibility in a methodical three-part process. For the moment, the analysis of the experience of the process of 1) interpretative intervention, 2) configuration, and 3) incorporation will be deferred. It will be a matter of unifying Badiou’s philosophical concepts into a three-part experience by the viewer that will, under the right conditions, with the right attunement and sensibility, finally with the right decision, lead to a perpetual fidelity—one sentiment at the heart of what I would call an authentic ethics since it shares a positive transference, one that Badiou will categorically equate with the love of an amorous encounter. “The word ‘fidelity’ refers directly to the amorous relationship, but I would rather say that it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event” (BE 245). Instead of the power of the dialectic, my preference is for the transference insofar as Badiou describes it as an amorous experience; once again my responses are not so much disagreements as a shift in emphasis, taking what is already implicit in segments of his argument. The event cannot occur until the one, the individual who perceives the work art, recognizes in the image something more than a sight, in the present; rather, one recovers an original disposition by the artist and the conveyance of an original act in the work of art, the painting to behold. Sloterdijk’s “adventure of heresy” is the transference of an artist, his or her work, and someone in the present who is not persuaded by the ethos of the time and what Badiou often refers to as consensus. The 11  Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Tr. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009, 6. The presence of the word “revolution” might be part of the burden of an on-going inheritance. The division has to be made more definitive. Has one problem always been this one? That as long as we continue to view the transformation of our perception as irreducibly tied to politics, the inherent limits of a certain thinking, and praxis, are going to remain inviolable. Like Badiou, he too emphasizes the transformation of human experience; but as I will insist all the way through, there is no experience of seeing (anything—drama, photograph, painting, etc.) that can in itself cause the subject to change. A disposition, and perhaps too a yearning, is a condition of being prior to the personal experience of an event. To transform and enhance the nature of sensibility may be politically relevant; but neither its origins nor consequences need be political. It might ultimately be preferable, at this early point in the century, to make different proposals than the ones we have become too accustomed to.

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idea of an amorous encounter, as an individual experience (these are Badiou’s words and ideas) are the ones that soon will be at the center of my argument—a fidelity to an amorous encounter with a work of art (by this artist, this individual, this name, and no other) and to lead us, by the end, and despite considerable dilemmas, to an incontrovertible affirmation of the artist, the work of art, and (us) the viewers. To return once more to the subject of art, Badiou hardly differs from Heidegger, who will leave us with echoing thoughts. “The art work opens up its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this revealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work.” Art reveals truth. The nature of the revelation cannot be yet defined as to its origin. Heidegger continues: To gain access to the work, it would be necessary to remove it from all relations to something other than itself, in order to let it stand on its own for itself alone. But the artist’s most peculiar intention already aims in this direction. The work is to be released by him to its pure self-subsistence. It is precisely in great art—and only such art is under consideration here—that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge.12

Making the artist inconsequential is a philosophical decision whose implications have not yet been settled; the irresolvable problem will remain with us until the end. Leaving aside the suggestion of a sacrificial creativity, as has been so commonly accepted as one explanation for the suicidal and the “mad” (which, let us admit, most of us respect and love despite our strong or weak empathy), Heidegger leads away from the individual artist and, like Badiou, pursues another line of thinking. One enigma stands: what the “pure self-subsistence” of the work of art could possibly mean is impossible to fathom. The more troubling aspect of art is the willingness to dispense so readily with the individual and make the artist fleeting. Nico Baumbach writes: “As for the artist, she may lend her name to the event constituted by her final invention, but the subject to the truth is composed of the works (always multiple) … and not the individuals who 12  Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New  York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977, 166–167. My emphasis for “destroys itself.”

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were the instruments of the creation … For him [Badiou] there is a kind of martyrdom to artistic creation.”13 Once the word “martyrdom” makes an appearance and in the sense of Baumbach’s intention, the association inevitably leads us to sacrifice; but this is precisely where my alternative represents the testimony of the artist and the viewer for life. The ancient religious martyr, as the individual to be killed, for a justified cause, is relinquished into ancient history and replaced by a living artist, for life, and for an individual at any time in his or her present. To safeguard the artist from any sacrificial imperative, the viewer then has the obligation to resurrect the artist (this, after all, is Badiou’s guiding word for the subject of immortality) and counter any enticements of death with Eros. The amorous encounter will take on many different characteristics, depending on each of the three elements of the relation—artist, work of art, viewer. The sacrificial, in Badiou’s own formulation, appears twice as a threat—the first in relation to the artist, the second in relation to the viewer. At the moment when violence, death, and martyrdom has been introduced into art, if wholly unintentional and, perhaps, unconsciously, the most appropriate response can only be with Eros and, in Badiou’s particular formulation, his idea of the amorous encounter. For us, the amorous encounter will involve our trinitarian relationship: subject, being, truth. There will be no sacrifice and no martyrdom. The martyr (the witness, who provides, as Badiou himself wrote, a testimony) will be living; the martyr, as a witness, will both be present in the act of perception and the consciousness of being faithful and part of an on-going transmission. Confronting martyrdom with love and life may also be one way, and a necessary one, to restore the primacy of the individual artist in his and her genetic priority and then to extend their life, as an immortal, by being incorporated into the subject of faith and fidelity.

2   The Amorous Encounter of the Aesthetic Neglecting the role of the individual artist in the creation of the work of art has led to the first of our dilemmas of truth in Badiou’s philosophy. By responding to him and making the role of the artist genetic and inaugural 13  Baumbach, Nico. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 107, my emphasis. Will the classical meaning of the martyr be productive for our thinking of the work of art in terms of a living witness where nothing (and certainly no one) will be sacrificed?

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(and, equally important in the process to be described as an amorous encounter, stressing the participation of the viewer), the work of art can be enhanced due to its involvement in a triadic relationship. Without the individuals on either side of a temporal event, the artist and the viewer, the truth of the art object may be left to be a metaphysically forlorn concept and without any human beings to give it the meaning and life it deserves. The problem is only deepened when we turn to one of his most important aesthetic principles: configuration, the middle term (as we emphasized earlier) in another of his triadic sets of interpretative intervention and incorporation. His configuration will introduce one more element to his discussion; the concept does not help to clarify our philosophical situation. To respond to his first determination of art (on the singularity of the work, what Heidegger called its “self-subsistence”) does not require anything extraneous to Badiou’s philosophy. He advances one idea at the same time as he seemingly withdraws it; the ever-present oscillation, or ambivalence, has been either accidental, or it has a particular function. For us, only one of his polarizations will be defended and sustained. How can Badiou deny the subjectivity of the artist when he himself, at the beginning of Being Event, defined one of the four militants of truth as “the artist-creator” (BE xvi)? My responses to him are less a resolution than a decision to be responsible to a philosophical position. A choice must be made. To present the other, almost forsaken sense of art requires us to follow him as he presents the amorous encounter and its supplement to the idea of configuration. The two human beings, involved in a transference (of love) exceed the being of the artwork. Badiou, however, makes a new point and unsettles a previous either/or. “In the final analysis,” he concludes the first chapter of Handbook of Inaesthetics, “Art and Philosophy,” the pertinent unit for thinking of art as an immanent and singular truth is thus neither the work nor the author, but rather the artistic configuration initiated by the evental rupture (which is general renders a prior configuration obsolete). This configuration, which is a generic multiple, possesses neither a proper name14 nor a proper contour, not even a possible totalization in terms of a single predicate. (HI 12)

14  Notice how the idea of a “proper name” is one Badiou cannot at all philosophically settle; unlike the importance of the name in Being and Event, here in the work on inaesthetics he describes the “evental rupture” as if it was merely a formal category.

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Neither the work nor the author. His inaesthetics advances a difficult argument; as a theoretical position on his part, it can be understood to be episodic and partial, a gravitational pull towards the idea of the configuration and what it can, in principle, represent, by itself. Is the emphasis on the configuration, as an idea irrespective of the work and the artist, at all defensible? The sense of a “rupture” in the configuration is acceptable, in form and content. But without the involvement of the human, the configuration on its own cannot have any effects—as Badiou, elsewhere, fully realizes when he introduces the all-important truth of love in aesthetics and in the amorous encounter of the two. In Ethics, he writes. “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ my situation” (E 42). Unlike the heavily formal sense of his inaesthetics of configuration, the attention to a subjective experience is crucial; the experience is a responsorial one. “I must completely rework.” A decision is made; a life is changed because of it. “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of fidelity to an event” (E 42). I shall call; this is a declaration, not just a naming. The “I,” in the first person, is relational. To appreciate how Badiou presents a subjective experience, all the cumulative moments of a specific truth are to be outlined. There are many and not without complexity; with some care in seeing his organization, they can be ordered chronologically and, always, with two human beings present whose loving encounter leads to the configuration of the subjective. The configuration, once it has been transferred from its idea to a human being, in time, reconfirms its status as a historically dynamic event. The amorous encounter, in the case of painting, begins with the event of seeing, in the immediacy of a “first sight” that is both temporal, in the moment, and part of the initiating impulse. The initial moment between the viewer and a painting represents the very definition of an amorous encounter; one more element, however, will be added since the first—between individual and painting— is only one aspect of the encounter. The individual and the artwork are not enough; they are, also, not alone. Even when he emphasizes “the single ‘great work,’ perpetually re-worked in solitude” (TW xiii)—and so presenting the work of the artist and the solitude as one of the many requirements of the process, a faithful subject must enter the relation. The first sentiment is anticipated by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and

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solutions to problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude” (SE 18: 83). The sober-minded understanding of solitary work— for Freud, autobiographically experienced—can be enhanced by Nietzsche’s admittedly “romantic” appreciation. A little more romanticism would not do our hard, critical, and cynical age any harm. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.—If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. (EH 72)

The art event involves the transhistorical transference between the artist and the viewer as they are both present in the perception of the painting as a revelation. If we analyze the procedure of this truth, each of the moments of a whole can be discerned. In order, and to reiterate, they involve the artist at work, the history of the work of art as it enters public history and its perception—say, in an art gallery, a museum, or its reproduction in a book—and the unique moment when one individual beholds the painting for the first time and experiences an amorous attraction and transference. The concept of enchantment should not be foreign to us. What does Badiou mean by this experience when it is not, simply, in the transference of love between two human beings in the present and instead related to viewing a painting? As we begin to describe this moment, the first returns us to its more-than-immediacy. The second involves a number of interrelated subjective processes and are comprehensively understood to involve the triad of an interpretative intervention, a configuration, and an incorporation. These are among Badiou’s most fundamental concepts for the defense of the subject of being and truth, for art and the other generic procedures. They lead, finally, to the commitment, in freedom, of the acts that will ensure the historical continuity of a perception. Using his language of being a witness and providing a testimony, the long-lasting experience that happens to an individual is given prominence. Again, in Ethics he writes.

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In all that concerns truths, there must be an encounter. The Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity. That is to say: broken, in its multiple-being, by the course of an immanent break, and convoked [requis], finally, with or without knowing it, by the evental supplement. To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you. (E 51)

Encounter, evental supplement, fidelity: all of the moments are intrinsic to a personal experience. A configuration cannot be reduced to an idea or qualities. The primary and inaugural work of the artist, say, Wassily Kandinsky, one specific painting, “Composition VII,” and one viewer (you, the one who looks) are united in a comprehensive amorous encounter. The event requires all three elements. For all of Badiou’s “wandering” or errance, readers can find their place in the whole. The amorous encounter, because it is founded on an experience of love, involves one of Badiou’s concepts (that of fidelity) and then a commitment to avoid either betrayal or the affect of jealousy—which, in matters of love and as a form of political ideology, will soon require attention. The politics of jealousy are among the most destructive of all contemporary forms of ideology, in art, and much more seriously in politics than in the privacy of love. The response of the viewer to the work of art, to the painting, results in the on-going obligation of an interpretative intervention, a configuration, and, as the final experience in the experiential process, incorporation; the internalization of a transference completes the first part of the process. The spirit of the artist and the configuration of the artwork are incorporated into the self; and by doing so, the experience creates the possibility of an ontological enhancement that cannot be understood as a form of knowledge or a merely cognitive experience. Inspiration is generational; it moves across time and through human beings to continue to be generative. One of the unresolved issues—on the origin not so much of the work of art, Heidegger’s question—has been at least partly clarified; in any case, the struggle with different and opposing perspectives has led to a re-­ working of Badiou’s concepts. The primacy of the idea of configuration has been modified; instead of thinking of the idea in isolation, it has been included in a necessary human relationship—one that will be constant from now on. The subjects of truth cannot be relinquished for any reason. “I will call subject the process itself of liaison between the event (thus the

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intervention) and the procedure of fidelity (thus its operator or connection)” (BE 252). The “liaison” is the immediate experience of the amorous encounter. The intervention is the first response by the viewer. The fidelity ensues after the three processes have been gathered together as one unified experience. The amorous encounter has been defined in its aesthetic context and as reflective of an event. Badiou says as much. “Love always starts with an encounter. And I would give this encounter the quasi-metaphysical status of an event” (IPL 28). In the case of art, a painting, the encounter is not, strictly speaking, with the physical presence of another human being; the event occurs in the moment of a perception that, suddenly, turns into a process leading to a sustained revelation, to use a word that will become increasingly obvious and always to be understood as an immanent realization. If, for Badiou, a revelation is an immanent possibility of the subject, then it can only be roused from one interiority to another, from an artist to a viewer. The analysis of such an event is what interests me above all and allows for a response for Badiou. The moments of the experience have been alluded to. They require concentration and discipline and work with Badiou’s concepts. An intervention is active; the individual viewer has to approach the painting with a disposition. Needless to say, such an experience will not be, simply, spontaneous—except in exceptional cases, when the phenomenological experience overwhelms by virtue of its break with the expected and customary. A commitment will be made. Badiou’s reader has to constantly keep his numerous examples of terminology and how they creatively interact. In art, they intersect on many levels. In Being and Event, the intervention of the subject and the ensuing fidelity are instances of the phenomenology of the event, the experience of coming to the painting to look and then being moved to act, for the future. The acuity of sight only happens very rarely. The artist, first of all, will not be forsaken; one initial motivation is to re-assert the centrality of the artist and his and her consciousness, act, and work as a multi-level transference initiated in time, along an infinite and never completable spectrum that is then affirmed by faith. “The word ‘fidelity’ refers directly to the amorous relationship” (BE 245). When it comes to the work art, what is the subject faithful to if not the work of art and the human being who supplemented the perception of the world, the artist? The amorous relationship of the subject of being, who at the moment is looking at a painting, becomes faithful through the dynamic presence of a transference that transcends history on each side of the temporal divide between them.

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One classical word stands out; there may be no better romantic word. It shows itself in Badiou’s writing on very rare occasions, when he mentions mathematicians; still, it is there to make us aware that the subject of art, the artist, can be described with two titles. Two occasions, both of them musical, can provide our example. A composer is described in terms of being a “Haydn-event” (E 68), of making real what “could not be perceived.” An artistic event, created by an individual, does nothing less than augment the quality and the intensity of the real. The other, previously mentioned one, is described as the “Schönberg-event” (LW 36) and involves a similar transformation in the ability of a composer to present a mode of listening and perception. Similar events could be described for other art forms. Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “new novel” comes to mind. When Badiou writes of “a mutation so major, a novelty so luminous, that no creator of good faith can resist its power,”15 which concepts are going to be highlighted? The “good faith” of the creator? The “power” of the work? The viewer? All of them are to be considered and included in a relationship. The questions which opened the chapter can all be answered and according to one principle. To make the three subjective acts pertinent, the individual was obliged to unify the interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation into one comprehensive experience; by doing so, the artist, the art work, and the individual were all present at one moment in history that could be repeated, infinitely, at any point in time. The reader will have to make a choice; he or she will either consider ­themselves essential, in their singular relationship to aesthetics and, when considering the other generic procedures, all other truths; or they may decide, for whatever reason, to abolish themselves. One commentator who follows one aspect of Badiou, to the letter, writes: “I argue that the presentation of an event cannot be shown, but must show itself. The event shows itself as the limit to, that is, in excess of, all signifying practices.”16 Can an event present itself? The event cannot, in my estimate, occur and show itself. The event of the everyday is not an occurrence within a given situation and as a natural phenomenon. An event cannot show itself pure and simple. An event is not—to take an example from both nature and history—a presentation such as a flash of 15  Badiou, Alain. “Art and Mathematics,” Tr. Steven Corcoran, 163–173  in Art and Contemporaneity. Ed. Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker. Zürich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015, 173. 16  Butchart, Garnet C.  An excess of signification: or what is an event?” 291–307  in Semiotica, Issue 187 (October 2011), 293.

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lightning during a storm or an occurrence in the world like others, identifiable by a newspaper article on the objectivity of an occurrence. Revelations of truth do not present themselves pure and simple and for everyone to see. Badiou’s “communist hypothesis” has no effective reality in the experience of art. Robert Lehman stresses an important aspect of the event. “It [the work of art] exists only as an interruption, a cut, and it always risks being missed or forgotten. For this reason, it depends on the testimony of faithful subjects for its existence.”17 Alex Ling makes the same observation: “if an event is to have any real effect then its happening must be in some way affirmed.”18 Badiou can be relied upon to be at the origin of the matter. “Every truth is an infinite production suspended to an event, irreducible to all established knowledge and determined only by the activity of those faithful to this event” (MP 81). There is no event without the activity of the faithful who recognize the moment, in time, of the artist/ work and what it can transfer into the real and into consciousness simultaneously. Given the diversity of statements Badiou has made philosophically and on the nature of art, one is almost forced to admit to an impasse; judgement can, for the time being, be deferred. All we can do, in the reading of Badiou’s thought, is to present it for verification and then analysis. One can either accept and live with the aporia, or one can make a decision and move beyond it, accepting the with and against. For a philosophy of affirmation to be maintained, a decision is necessary. The subject is, again, indispensable. There can be no event without the subject, the witness, and the testimony. There can be no event without including a transhistorical process beginning with the artist, the work, and the amorous encounter at any moment in time. The first truth of art is intended to be foundational; although there will be many significant counter-­proposals, this one argument will be maintained until the end—against Badiou, if necessary. The dilemmas continue; we are far from resolving its constituent parts. One other crucial concept must now be examined. Badiou presents it uniformly, consistently; there is, for a significant time-period in the development of his thinking, no change. His concept of incorporation, however, 17  Lehman, Robert S. “Between the Science of the Sensible and the Philosophy of Art: Finitude in Alain Badiou’s Inaesthetics,” 171–185  in Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 15:2, (2010), 178. He should be commended here for his willingness. Anyone who does not hesitate to use the word “testimony” or “faithful” when discussing Badiou has rightfully made a decision to include the whole range of his thinking. 18  Ling, Alex. Badiou Reframed. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd., 2017, 69.

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presents us with distinct challenges. My response to the way Badiou has conceived of the process of configuration has been resisted. It seems to me that every time he mentions incorporation, the subject is always drawn into; and, for better or worse, the inclusion of the subject into underlies a political imperative and the absorption of the individual into his much-­ valued “we”—which, later, will be guided by his communist aspirations, which are not shared. The concept of configuration presented us with one set of problems. Badiou’s concept of incorporation will present another. On many occasions (by far the most numerous) incorporation is an experience for the subject of being drawn into; the subject is subsumed if not, precisely, subjected. It seems to be that Badiou’s political exigencies force him to conceive of incorporation as, in distinct ways, like the one being drawn into the many or what he calls the “we,” and which group psychology tells us can quickly degenerate into the familiar us and them. Only on a few rare occasions does Badiou invert the process; the moments are rare but noticeable. His one consistent description is: “say, you go to an art exhibition and you find yourself dazzled by a painting; this involves your incorporation within a truth procedure—in this specific case, an artistic one” (PE 60, my emphasis). The incorporation is “within.” In a few other places, however, for example, in Logics of Worlds, he appears to amend how he views the process. If the presentation and all its moments have been faithful to his intentions, then this one affirmation seems to be the most philosophically justifiable given his project as a whole. “We will say that every faithful subject can also reincorporate into the evental present the fragment of truth whose bygone present had sunk under the bar of occultation. It is this reincorporation that we call resurrection. What we are dealing with is a supplementary destination of subjective forms” (LW 23, my emphasis). The individual incorporates the transference into her or himself, not the other way around; his often-used concept of resurrection, adopted from its theological terminology to serve an immanent and existential purpose, adds one more complication to his truth of art and, more completely, to the entire range of his philosophy. Once the reincorporation and the resurrection become mutually complementary concepts, in art and the other truths, we are in the closest proximity to the ideal accomplishment of what he calls “the constitutive truth of modern philosophy.” There is more than one; Badiou always insists on the presence of multiplicity. “Being, subject and truth” (MP 108) are his three-in-one. As for the allegory of the resurrection, once the creative idea of spirit is recalled, we

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can also allude to another momentous concept he transforms from its proper ground. Being, subject, and truth are his trinity. At this point, when subjects of the amorous encounter have incorporated a historical transference into themselves and made the decision to be a faithful witness to the event, one formidable intrusion can be considered. Whether the drive of the political can be powerful enough to dissuade the individual from fulfilling his task of fidelity can only be made by the reader, the one individual who is never (by me) taken for granted. In a discussion in “an essay in political aesthetics,” we have a typical disclaimer; others will follow in the chapter on politics. “Badiou himself is not a believer in resurrection or other religious ideas.”19 And yet, if his defense of the idea of the immanent resurrection of the subject is to be enacted in the world, one other ideal place would be the three-part relation of artist, work of art, and viewer. We can all be relieved if, indeed, Badiou’s thinking of art and inaesthetics can claim to have made it possible that “there is no longer any exploitation of art by philosophy.”20 An equally important and still outstanding question can then be raised: why has the politicization of aesthetics become so dominant and so easily rationalized? Has the politicization of aesthetics become justifiable because of its claim—no longer so certain—that its intervention was in the service of art and to prevent its exploitation? Have the consequences, however unintended, finally become obvious? Political questions, intruding on the other truths, are all too common. In May ’68 and for a period after, the standard truth was “everything is political” (TC 150). Are we still willing to make the same claim?

3   The Betrayal of Heteronomy Thus far, Badiou’s generic procedure of the truth of art has involved us in one issue that, for the moment, has been presented but not resolved. Is it possible to now firmly place the neglected and, “vanishing” artist, in his and her creative event (as they work) and as the individual inseparable from the witness and thereby confirm the singularity of the amorous encounter? One of Badiou’s central concepts, which in itself wavers 19  Evans, Fred. Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 111. This was the argument for his inaesthetic thesis. 20  Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 199.

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between two meanings, will be analyzed further; the experience of incorporation will have political consequences. From our central motivation— that is, the on-going support of the individual—his concept of incorporation will be discussed for its direction. The difference may seem slight; but if the political consequences of art are to be anticipated, as Badiou invariably does, there seems to be a specific reason for him to define the experience of the incorporation of the individual into a process. Our main concern now will be to identify the nature of the incorporation—that is, to argue for the experience being a transference into the subject. For Badiou, he remains steadfast—with the one specific exception we found; for him, the subject is incorporated into. Badiou’s position, and his specific language, leaves the reader unsure about the direction and the process. “Individuals are incorporated” he says, “by mutations in their way of relating to this art” (PE 74). Are aesthetic individuals incorporated; or is the transformation of their relation, consciously willed, not one of ontological supplements? One of the responses involves the act of perception as the experience (the event) between a past accomplishment—the individual artist creating himself and the work of art, as an event—and the act of a viewer in every single possible future. Nietzsche was perhaps the first to isolate the individual—both for the artist and for the witness who would emulate the process. As early as in The Birth of Tragedy, when his aesthetic exuberance was resourced from the Greeks, he write. “He is no longer an artist, he is a work of art” (BT 37). The enduring aesthetic philosophy, for the life of an individual, would be continued by Gilles Deleuze and his sense of “la vie comme oeuvre d’art.”21 For the moment, however, and before continuing with the individual, the imperative of heteronomy will be our next topic. Art has to confront one serious complication once political demands begin to be made. There can be no (easy) reconciliation between the three-part experience of the viewer for individual enhancement and any contribution to political thought for a collective; can there be any proximity between the one and the many? Once art is forced to serve heteronomous ends, the individual relation—the amorous encounter—moves from two to the many, from the one individual in the present to Badiou’s “we.” 21  Deleuze, Gilles. “Life as a Work of Art,” 94–101 in Negotiations: 1972-1990. Tr. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

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The supplement of the amorous encounter in the experience of art, which moved away from the neglect of the artist and argued for a triadic relation, has to now confront the place of art in politics, a reality that for Badiou is a collective endeavor, for all. He does not avoid the relation. Badiou has been careful to point out, as a matter of preparation, of anticipation, that there can always be “the simulacrum of the event” (IT 102), that is, the ready dissimulation of the event by public opinion and consensus. The event can always be promoted as a form of delusion. This is the reason— to, again, borrow from Badiou in order to not impose any outside influences on his thought and allow him, as we have all along, to testify on his own behalf—that one of the problems he has had to work out, within his own thought and polemically against others, is the vulnerability of the event. At this juncture, we are obliged to deal with one of the more persistent problems vis-à-vis art: its political use and its instrumentalization. Does the amorous encounter of the two allow for a possible collective expansion? Or does the relationship between two become effectively manipulated by the jealousy of the many? There is simply no way of evading the persistent demand of politics to be acknowledged; abnegation will not be a choice, even as the temptation of a withdrawal is considerable. Instead, and what seems more and more likely to be a theme that, rightly or wrongly, dominates the truth of our epoch, politics has to be thought despite recognizing how ethics and morality have become substitutes for politics, to the detriment of both. To continue the position, then, will involve stressing the difference between being incorporated into (into what Badiou will call the “we,” communist hypothesis and all) or making the subject the one who, in and through his triadic acts, incorporates a relation into himself. This is a definitive either/ or; this is a decision to be made, one based on this argument: the politicization of art is the complete opposite of a supplement to the situation. Politicizing the aesthetic means the life of the artist, his and her work, and the transmission to a viewer, will be interrupted, deflected, and determined from one perspective. Art and the individual will be made to be servile to political ends. According to John Roberts, Badiou “remains committed to the promise of the revolutionary function of art, and the place of social and cultural

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critique within it.”22 One becomes ever more skeptical about such declarations, most especially well into the 21st century, when art being in any way critical or “revolutionary” (politically speaking, for a group or the many) is an unlikely event. As a fantasy, it is much better left unrealized. The effects for the anticipation of such a reality are not self-evident. If anything, to continue with a central argument, what “cultural critique” can offer seems to have less beneficial effects; the promises of the avant-garde are historical memories of an art movement. Translating the independent community of artists, at the Bauhaus, for example, into a larger social movement is one ambition that will not easily be realized. If the position held here is going to be emphasized, then a polemical response can be added: is it not the claims for a “revolutionary” art that are themselves paralyzing what art is and can be by relying on the same old and, perhaps, exhausted claims? One of the vulnerabilities of art, politically managed, has been its subordination. Art has been instrumentally useful to advance one idea or another, to the point that today we have one drive to make art be representational, as if art had begun to serve as a parliamentary proxy. Badiou’s relationship to art, however, divided as it is, also presents an entirely different orientation and one, evident since Being and Event, on the triadic relationship. As A.J.  Bartlett writes, “Badiou argues that the tendencies saturated by these schemata [of critique] are thus incapable of offering anything new with regards to thinking (the thinking of) art.”23 The former dilemmas are augmented. The reader is exposed to yet another either/or—from Badiou and his interlocutors. A decision has to be made on resolving the aesthetic/political dilemma for oneself. It is a matter of the subject in the present relating to both the artist and the work of art and at the same time refusing the now traditional tendency to submit artist/work into a pre-ordered perspective—ethical and political, for an ideal or a scheme. By what justification, rationalization, or ideology can the artist, the work of art, and the individual viewer be commandeered to 22  Roberts, John. “On the Limits of negation in Badiou’s theory of art,” 271–282 Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2008), 273. Whether the old concepts of revolution and critique are not in themselves the obstacles to overcome is going to be one of my responses. Are we willing to think about the possibility that it has been the insistence on the revolutionary, the critical, and the political that has perpetuated a way of thinking, a way of being, that has perhaps reached the historical moment of its exhaustion and, therefore, its possible transformation? 23  Bartlett, A. J. “Conditional Notes on a New Republic,” 39–67 Cosmos and History, Vol. 2, no. 1, 2006, 48.

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serve a political end? Is it possible to turn Badiou in one definitive direction despite the strain of doing so? If he, in fact, “opposes the philosophical penchant for twisting a work into an example of theory,”24 then the previous relationship described as an amorous encounter, a transference of love, and an on-going fidelity will be affirmed over any other considerations. The amorous encounter of the two cannot be superseded or contravened by any other consideration. Can the aesthetic rather serve the human, that is, ontological ends instead? One can barely resist the temptation to continue to allude to other thinkers who were Badiou’s direct predecessors and who are constant presences in his thought. When, for example, Nietzsche makes the distinction between “monological art” or one that is conscious of “art before witnesses,” he does not and cannot forsake the artist or the viewer during the very act of creation because, for Nietzsche, the work in progress can be analyzed from out of the individuality of the artist and “the point of view of the witness” (GS 324). Is this Nietzsche’s fröhliche aesthetic? The reminder of Badiou’s philosophy as a testimony, which is how he began Theory of the Subject, places him in a personal connection with Nietzsche. Do we not see the evidence of the will to power when Badiou writes that “force is its own affirmative expansion” (TS 37), which also means depoliticizing the will? In such an event, then, the one+one of art leads to the transformation of the subject in the present, as a witness, and for others who will be influenced by the testimony, who will benefit from the prior resources of working subjects. We can admit, with Andrew Gibson, that “in its inception, theory was an extraordinary break with opinion … But this is a momentum that it subsequently lost and which has now disappeared. Badiou effectively tells us to renew it.”25 What does Badiou stand for? To persist in both situations—the individual and the collective—is untenable, not without accepting a permanent impasse. So we note, again, how the back and forth remains a permanent feature of his thought. To give another example of a now familiar argument: “Many find it hard to admit that when they’re exposed to a piece of music, they are exposed to an anonymous sequence of art. They will say: that’s Mozart or that’s Beethoven” 24  Tanke, Joseph J. “Reflections on the Philosophy and Anti-Philosophy of Art,” 217–230 Philosophy Today, Vol. 53, Iss. 3, Fall 2009, 223. 25  Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 80. The idea of “renewal” is, in principle, acceptable. How is the question.

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(PE 72-73). And with good reason; because how does anyone, with common sense (which is not always the purview of theory) separate the individual Mozart from his music and, at the same time, recognize him in the work? What does it mean to listen to Mozart if not, also, to be aware of an ontological attunement expressed in the composition of music, the tonality of a being? Mozart’s music is surely not an “anonymous sequence.” Does Badiou tend towards the effacement of the individual for specifically political reasons—denying the life of the one to be subsumed into the dream of a future collectivity? To argue for the concept of anonymity instead of the individual can only be done for one specific purpose. Despite the noticeable oscillation, the argument cannot be indecisive: the music of the individual Mozart is incorporated into the subject. The Mozart-event occurs, today, and always, when someone has given themselves the responsibility of doing more than listening to the music but also in recognizing how the complexities of a musical sound are intended to be concordances with the being of a subject who, in principle, can attain the same “style.” Delicacy is but one of its characteristics. So as we find ourselves at an epitome of art, with the proper name of Mozart, the reflection on the heteronomy of art becomes all that much more of a burden and, especially here and now, easily repudiated because of our commitment, which is not political. Art has been made to act as a representative, forced into uneasy alliances for and against, as if the aesthetic being of the human had been conscripted into a political adventure and for uses outside the aesthetic and certainly the beautiful or, to recall one of its enigmatic concepts, the sublime. Obstacles to the mode of its expression are evident on many sides, and principally from the easily identifiable either/or: the world, as it is (i.e., driven by economic absolutes, now more precisely worldly more than “global”), and the world as some would like it to become. The question of autonomy has to remain crucial, both for the work of art and, perhaps more importantly, for the subjective—the perceptive—freedom of the individual. The tradition of the politicization of the aesthetic, or the heteronomy of art, will now be briefly examined, long enough to press for the continuing initiative of the individual—that is, the autonomy of the artist, the work of art, and the viewer and for the triad to elude being subsumed into the ethical/political imperative of our times. The political use of art should leave us skeptical and suspicious, unless we can be quite sure about the consequences of such instrumentality. Ideals are so often unaware of what, in fact, they can produce. Historical

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examples from the 20th century are not lacking; their detailed enumeration is unnecessary. Walter Benjamin can be a representative. If, as the final lines of his iconic essay on art attests, “communism responds by politicizing art” (as it did, e.g., in the Soviet Union circa 192226) the “revolutionary demands in the politics of art”27 cannot serve the individual artist, the individual work of art, or the individual viewer. The state has the power to determine the fate of our triad; as does public opinion and consensus. Badiou adds: “Walter Benjamin’s emphatic theses are well known: The (fascist) aestheticization of politics must be opposed by the (revolutionary) politicization of art” (TC 41). The confrontations of the last century have today, at least in liberal democracies, shifted. Stated in such stark contrasts, where the argument has been neatly divided between extremes (fascist or revolutionary) any nuance is lacking; more to the point, the political categories are no longer applicable, not without hyperbole. The either/or were too extreme. Badiou invokes the “revolutionary politicization of art” (E 61), as if the conditions today were the same as in the 20th century. The reliance of a definitive one or other, fascist or revolutionary, is no longer acceptable. The conditions have changed, become more ­complex; forces from many different sides and independent of the state are exerting pressure on art. Is one current word, autonomy, to be understood in Heidegger’s sense of the artwork’s ontological independence and “self-subsistence?” Or, as Markus Gabriel argues, is autonomous art one that will be neither simply reduced to an object to be owned as a commodity or as some outstanding example of a specifically political and “radical” idea? He states: “artworks are radically autonomous individuals.” At the same time as he argues for the autonomy of art, he raises (for us) an even more important point. “Art in itself,” Gabriel adds, “is not subject to any evaluation beyond itself. Its autonomy is radical. This means that our autonomy might be triggered

26  On the fate of the great artists who had made the decision to return to Russia after 1917 and who, only a few years later, had to deal with the bureaucratic directives soon to become (let’s say, omnipresent) see Camilla Gray’s The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922. Our guiding question is: is the aim of art, as Badiou asserts, “compelling humanity to some excess with regard to itself” (TC 160), or is the “excess” (or, my term, enhancement) only possible for individuals first? 27  Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 2 and 20.

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through exposure to art.”28 Our autonomy, our freedom. Gabriel asks us to consider how our one-to-one relation to art is personal (as a first experience) and in support of the human freedom to perceive and to be. Any incursion on the art and the individual risks betraying both for the sake of politics, which (as we know) can never be sure of reaching its ideals in the same way as they are conceived. What about a more or less old word, “commitment?” Adorno’s negative dialectics, for one, are another matter. “The uncalculating autonomy of works which avoid popularization and adaptation to the market, involuntarily becomes an attack on them. The attack is not abstract, not a fixed attitude of all works of art to the world which will not forgive them for not bending totally to it.”29 As for works of art being an “attack” on the market, it might be in the best interest of the relation (the artist, the work, the viewer) to create a binding transference of fidelity and therefore effect a transformation of self-perception and there be an affirmative example of another real. Forget the “attack” and the animosity. Perhaps a better attitude might be autonomous indifference, independence, and withdrawal—in the privacy of the two; because the language of hostility has no place in the relationship of an amorous encounter, not unless we are prepared to recognize the possibility of a masochistic-sadistic bind. Are we to pursue the Nietzschean call for self-­ invention or the collective responsibility of an equitable world—even as all the methods towards such an attainment are no longer as certain as they used to be and, today, appear to be more inimical to freedom because of the absoluteness of our regulations? Might not a movement away from critique, negation, Badiou’s “rebellion,” and Adorno’s “attack,” to focus instead on the autonomy of the viewer and how, in the transferential relationship to the artist and his or her work, more surely contribute to the process of the subjectivation Badiou has been supporting all along? When Rancière talks about “the autonomy of aesthetic experience,” one emphasis can be separated, strictly, from its political objectives. The lead-in is always the same: “the political effect of art” is “a transformation of our

28  Gabriel, Markus. The Power of Art. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020, 55 and 80. Indeed, this is what the transference accomplishes. Gabriel has now contributed a set of writings that, comprehensively, are a necessary defense of the 21st century individual. In terms of art, our “exposure” to it—what happens to us phenomenologically, as an event—is in principle capable to making a revelation visible, effective, and perpetual. 29  Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” Tr. Francis McDonagh, 177–195 in Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1980, 190.

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ways of feeling and thinking, the construction of a new sensorium.”30 Politics does not determine our feeling and thinking; nor does it limit what a “new sensorium” might mean for the future. Can a political foundation be effective for the phenomenology of the witness? Politics is the most vulnerable human activity to what Badiou has defined according to terror, betrayal, and disaster. Coupling art with politics—making art heteronomous, even with the laudable ideals of emancipation and equality— exposes it to motivations whose effects cannot always be anticipated. Why not propose a “new sensorium” as an ontological possibility (for one) instead of a political one (for the many), which in any case requires much more hope and ambition and idealism. Starting from the one, each of us might be led to an unexpected accomplishment. Why has the discussion of the aesthetic, even when a “new sensorium” is proposed, been prefaced, as condition of possibility, by the political? How has this one human activity been dominant over all others and, today, aligned with a new ethicism? What gives politics such a privilege as to be able to determine the reality and legitimacy of a human act—one as central to human universality as art? Why not consider, in the first half of the 21st century, the separation of art from politics for the autonomy of our triad, which consistent with one strain of Badiou’s thought, is the one individual reclaiming his and her own nomos? His Theory of the Subject made the same and compelling argument, and with a rhetorical force that was not at all intended to be hyperbolic. He called the nomos of the state or public opinion “the universal barbarism of the law” (TS 296). Against the law, of the world—whether his detested state and capital, or the politicized elements forcing everything to be a representative of themselves—Badiou proposes another kind of autonomous law, as the principle of and for the individual. Without twisting his thought and forcing it to utter what it only does on occasion (though this one is very recent) my attempt has been to continue to force one direction of his thought. Is it legitimate to introduce, before all the arguments are presented, a very recent position when Badiou, in another reflection on art and the 30  Rancière, Jacques. “You can’t anticipate explosions: Jacques Rancière in conversation with Chto Delat,” 402–512 Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 20, Iss. 3 (Jul. 2008), 403. Rancière believes that a “new sensorium” is made possible as a “political effect.” For us to now wonder about the possibility of enhancing human perception, it may require precisely a separation of the subject from politics. Is it not critique and negation and “revolution” that has continued to dominate the subject with its imperative and therefore estranged it from other possibilities of thinking and being?

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artist, mentions both freedom and happiness, a human term surely understandable as one opposite to misery and suffering? In Métaphysique du bonheur reel, he writes. “The true essence of freedom, essential condition of real happiness, is discipline. This is why artistic creation can here serve as a paradigm. Everyone knows that an artist obeys the strict discipline of innovation: day after day, patient and often gruelling work, in order to achieve or to firm the forms for a new representation of the real” (H 86). The artist, in this case, is far from being effaced. He or she is not a “vanishing cause.” The individual artist is represented as someone who is disciplined, works, creates, represents new forms, new configurations, of art and of the self. Can we now come to a provisional conclusion on art as a condition of freedom, happiness, and more? One quote from Boris Groys’ collection of essays, Art Power, sufficiently states one important point. The long quote should be seen as heading towards a conclusion that has, once more, an affinity to a prior argument from the Introduction. It has hopefully resonated since then. Might we now have to consider, at length, without reservations, how the politicization of the aesthetic has led to the ruin of both? There’s nothing wrong in itself with the demand that art give up its modernist “autonomy” and become medium of social critique, but what goes unmentioned is that the critical stance is blunted, banalized, and finally made impossible by this requirement. When art relinquishes its autonomous ability to artificially produce its own differences, it also loses the ability to subject society, as it is, to a radical critique. All that remains for art is to illustrate a critique that society has already leveled at or manufactured for itself. To demand that art be practiced in the name of existing social differences is actually to demand the affirmation of the existing structure of society in the guise of social critique.31

Groys confirms the consensus argument from the introduction, when many of our most prominent thinkers (some of them with, and since, Marx) have all expressed the same worry and warning. Groys sums up a problem. One possibility is to, once more, disengage art from its supposedly critical function to instead enhance the subject to become different from, and independent of, the real. By doing so, can autonomy perhaps 31  Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013, 113, my emphasis.

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better guarantee the process of equality? Might not the subject be inspired to be disciplined, work, and imagine what innovation might mean for oneself and a few others instead of anticipating grand designs for everybody? Frank Ruda is right to bring our attention to “a much-needed contemporary axiomatic conception of the art-philosophy relationship.”32 Whether Badiou does in fact present us with a “new model,” as Ruda argues, remains outstanding only because his movement, from one extreme to another, leaves us with lingering uncertainty. His most recent declarations give us some confidence in resolving the dilemmas in the truth of art. “An event is the revelation of a part of the world which existed previously only in the form of a negative restraint” (H 82). The intimacy of revelation and happiness, first mentioned by Nietzsche, can lead us towards a conclusion to one argument. Heteronomy will have no part in the revelation of art. My interests, however, are not at all related to what David Michael Levin calls “the moral disposition and character of our way of seeing—the humanization of the material gaze.”33 My act of perception is preoccupied only with its ontological possibilities, not its moral ones, which are, in any case, today so often aligned and indistinguishable from the political. Any theory of “humanization” bound to a moral disposition is not at all certain and, once again, runs the danger of making art aligned with imperious demands. One way to bureaucratically manage art is to make it serve moral ends in the guise of an “emancipatory politics.” The interference of a cultural compulsion towards moral ends has perhaps never been more in evidence than today. The awareness is by no means slight that “art is being taken over by ethical criteria.”34 The nexus politics/ethics presents a formidable imperative that can only be off-set by safeguarding the autonomy of the viewer from seeing what is required of him or her to serve a cause. Ideology is the force of creating one consensus perception of reality. Art re-affirms the autonomy of the individual as an independent viewer of every aspect of the real. To quote Markus Gabriel’s The Power of Art again: “Art in itself transcends the public sphere and its socio-political constitution. It is not subject to any of the rules that pertain to disciplining and 32  Ruda, Frank. “Alain Badiou,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2 ed.). Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 33   Levin, David Michael. The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of the Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 17. 34  Day, Gail. “The Fear of Heteronomy,” 393-4-6 Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4, July, 2009.

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regulating human behaviour within socio-political forms of organization. Art in itself is not an institution and nor is it bound by any institution” (36). Art therefore presents the individual with a choice; art presents the individual with a possibility of being: either one is disciplined and regulated by “socio-political forms of organization” or one begins to see and think for oneself and therefore commits to the perpetual task of being attentive to the possibility of an event revealing itself, which is one reason there has been a growing awareness of the concept of the visibility of the invisible.35 From the beginning of the examination of the truth of art, the focus has not been, simply, with the work of art itself but rather with the artist as the individual who inaugurates a three-part relation that finds its first completion in the viewer. To do so requires me to respond to Badiou and, if my analysis is correct, to continue to point out a fundamental dilemma in his thought. A reconciliation seems necessary. Any possibility can be set with a word not used yet—noticeable considering the theme of art: beauty. For Badiou, truth and beauty are synonymous. On beauty, Heidegger writes: “beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth, and here truth means the disclosure of what keeps itself concealed. The beautiful is not what pleases, but what falls within that fateful gift of truth which comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.”36 Is there a more appropriate beginning to the origin of the phenomenology of art? The “invisible” has now become crucial, as an experience of seeing. The radiance of appearance is a revelation. Badiou’s ontology made the same ­confirmation, and once again in a manner of re-confirming the acts of the individual in his and her perception. “Only an interpretative intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation; as the arrival in being of nonbeing, the arrival amidst the visible of the invisible” (BE 190). Badiou’s aversion to hermeneutics and phenomenology can no longer be maintained, nor, more particularly, can his own philosophical relationship to Heidegger be in doubt; his inaesthetics, which attempted to do away with a philosophy of art, can be re-introduced in light of what a phenomenological sensibility may suggest for the viewer. 35  See, for example, Mauro Carbone’s La visibilité de l’invisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001. 36  Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Tr. J.  Glenn Gray. New  York: Harper Torchbook, 1968, 19.

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Still, how does the event of “a fateful gift” occur for Heidegger? Being drawn towards the consequences of Badiou’s argument, however divided, can allow us to proceed. Badiou adds: “What the doctrine of the event teaches us is rather that the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence” (BE 221). In this instance, phrased in this way, we are perhaps more willing to accept the consequences as being more important than the occurrence. We can, for a moment, consider how the artist and the work of art, in their singularity (during the entire process of the work—while, e.g., Mozart composed), are historical episodes that will only confirm the immortality of the individual and the work of art once it has been performed and heard, lived, and then “reproduced.” Jacques Rancière affirms “the absolute singularity of art.”37 An “absolute” singularity gives it unequivocal autonomy, so much so that one has to return to his prior declaration and separate art from all politics. When we look to Badiou to make the all-important addition, there are more than enough instances of a doubt. “A great painting,” he writes in In Praise of Love, “is the capture by its own means of something that cannot be reduced to what it displays. The latent event emerges and, we might say, break through what you can see” (IPL 78). The “latent event?” For whom? Because, in the example to come, the artist surely had an intimation (at the very least) of his accomplishment. My difficulty with Badiou remains; for it is the artist who first has conceived the work of art to be more than its appearance; at the same time, there is no recognition of the painting’s revelation unless someone actually perceives it—as we know, for example, from the many people who first saw Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles

37  Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Ed. And Tr. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2004, 19. My difficulty with Rancière’s argument (in some ways, the same as in Badiou) is on the relation to art and politics. Their use of the word configuration is illustrative. “This section,” he writes in the Foreword, “is concerned with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity” (3). I agree fully until the novel forms are reduced into the monolithic “political subjectivity.” Art does create new modes of sense perception—for some; the consequential subjectivity cannot be reduced to the political; otherwise we run the risk, so obvious today, of making the political ethical and moral. How about foregoing the forms of political subjectivity and instead aim for a less restricted and therefore a more universal way of being? Is it not possible that the relation (art/politics), of which we have been familiar at least since Benjamin, have led us down a wayward path?

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d’Avignon and were dumbfounded.38 For some time, no one but Picasso could actually look at the painting and see it. The event had yet to take place outside of Picasso’s consciousness despite the objective reality of his painting. An event in the truth procedure of art begins with the artist, is given reality in the work, and can only take its place in the real world when at least one other individual looks at the painting and has an amorous encounter in the moment of a perception and, from out of this immanent revelation, proceeds to the three interconnected moments of intervention, configuration, and incorporation. The subject of art is enhanced with a different form of consciousness with the Picasso-event and his work is incorporated into another human being and there, with fidelity, begin the on-going process of witnessing and being a testimony. Choosing another example, here, is not arbitrary because it goes to the heart of the matter and the individual artist as approached by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his deeply personal account of Cezanne. The phenomenological observations are pertinent because the artist is of utmost concern. He writes: “The meaning of his work cannot be determined by his life,” that is, his empirical, day-to-day existence. Another experience was essential; the self-­ awareness was in some sense private. “Cezanne’s observers did not guess the transmutations which he imposed on events and experiences; they were blind to his significance, to that glow from out of nowhere which surrounded him from time to time.”39 At the time, these observers were simply unable to be witnesses. The artist, however, continued to work—in his or her self-subsistence. Despite the quite severe wavering, back and forth, can we present a final view of the truth of art in Badiou’s philosophy? Can we complete the preceding argument and the three-part process emanating from the artist, the work of art, and the phenomenological subject incorporating a transference into consciousness and thereby enhancing one’s being?

38  See John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 19. 39  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense. Tr. Hubert L.  Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 11 and 25.

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4   Artists as Great Affirmationists The previous section concluded with one argument as a supplement to the others: the individual’s ability to incorporate the transference of the artist and the work of art into his or her consciousness, in a private interiority, could not be compatible with the politicization of aesthetics. Heteronomy was a betrayal of the individuals of the amorous encounter as well as the work of art, for its singularity and autonomy. Arriving at our last section on the truth procedure of art allows us to recapitulate, for the sake of the preceding arguments, and overall structure, as we prepare to advance towards the equally complicated and divisive truth of science. We began, from one of Badiou’s perspectives, with the representation of the work of art without the artist or, for that matter, the viewer—who, for us, were both ontologically necessary for events to be witnessed. The transference, unless experienced first-hand, as an affect more visceral than cognitive, was based on a one-to-one correspondence. By using Badiou’s amorous encounter in the experience of art, the dilemma was, in part and at least temporarily, overcome. The tripartite subjective process of interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation were each essential in a comprehensive relation. Commitment and fidelity followed. Since the event occurred on two levels simultaneously, one, the transference of the artist into an on-going history and, two, the perception of the work of art, the viewer then had the responsibility of being a witness and testifying, making the truth of the work-of-art endure. For us, to reach a provisional conclusion on the generic truth of art leads us to one final statement, one Badiou has specifically called a manifesto and dedicated to an affirmation of art. The manifesto makes the individual artist now fully acknowledged; the previous philosophical uncertainty has no place in his manifesto for the individual artist as an affirmationist. There is no ambiguity about the individual artist here. “These are the great affirmationists, the best, those who did not need to know they were: those who by themselves, by their acts, opened out entire configurations, in their principle as well as in their implementation” (P 141). In his “Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art,” and beginning with the statement above, we can isolate the statement—“by themselves,” in the previously mentioned solitude, working alone, and by their creation supplementing the real. The three-part process can be better, more precisely defined. The configuration (the middle term of the three) involves the individuality of the artist and the work of art. A subject can be

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configured as much as the work of art itself; the second is often a condition of the first. When the viewer is presented with the work of art by an individual artist, the experience leads to two concurrent relations: an interpretative intervention into the meaning of the affect and the incorporation of the transference. The idea of a configuration, as simultaneously a subjective and aesthetic creation, is transferred to a possible viewer who, for an event to occur, has to be a witness to its force—or, what Nietzsche has called the will to power of a revelation. If, at times, the idea of configuration seemed to be a merely formal property of the artwork, merely a thing to be catalogued in its historical vagary (as a piece of avant-garde art, e.g.), it was also now inseparable from the individual who is now called, by Badiou, both a great artist and a great affirmationist. Now that we are well into our responses, having reached the first of the four truths, the essential word since the introduction will have to be emphasized; it will become all-too evident that, for all their possibilities in presenting truths in the world (for the world), they will come under duress, manipulation, and instrumentalization. The configuration, as Badiou has stressed repeatedly, must be at the level of the work, say, Jackson Pollock’s painting, and his physical “technique” or his “action painting” (SMP 127), and at the level of the individual’s subjectivation. Configuration, in principle, can—and must—alter the ontological expression of the human. Needless to now say, nearing the last point, the necessary presence of the artist is inviolable. He or she will not be a “vanishing cause.” On the contrary, their appearance becomes renewed; or to use one of Badiou’s most enigmatic and personal concepts, the artist is perpetually resurrected from the limits of his or her historicity. Perhaps Badiou’s two-sided relation to art was a preparation, to accustom us to the confrontations to occur; our interpretation will be made under a certain duress. “I am convinced that the ‘we’ to come, the affirmationists of this century just under way,” Badiou writes, “this ‘we’ shall form the contours of its own and definite affirmation of the arts” (P 136). His hope in the “we,” however, is not shared, not when the implications are, ultimately, political. The individual will always be skeptical of any “we,” most especially when an affirmation is only made on the condition it becomes aligned with a collective identification and endeavor, whether represented by the identity of groups or the power of the state. Neither one nor the other are going to be chosen. The intention may be well-­ meaning; the plans to follow are inevitably disappointing. For the time being, the fuller treatment of politics has to be deferred. It is a matter of a

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change of mind to accompany Badiou in his belief—which includes art and, more comprehensively, “the communist hypothesis” that leaves me reluctant, much more so than in the heteronomous instrumentalization of art. Still, not giving in to a fatalistic expectation is worth the effort of thought, either for those who think the politicization of art can be beneficial or those who are all too aware of its intrusiveness. One point becomes noticeable. The dilemmas have not been solved; many others are going to become all-too evident in the other truths. Even as Badiou announces a manifesto, we remain caught between, on the one hand, great individual artists, their work, and their effects for an individual witness and, on the other, the presentation of a “we” that leaves the reader highly ambivalent. No resolution is forthcoming. When, to cite another example, we follow Badiou as he writes about the artist in “the moments of crisis,” it is above all the individual who experiences the day-to-day discipline of work and, at times, the paralysis of “an artist’s sterility” (E 78), when thoughtful effort and work do not coincide. How does the “we” matter here? How does any notion of the community of the “we” have any bearing on the individual artist who, in solitude and perpetually, that is, daily, has to confront who they are and how their interiority can be expressed and revealed, in itself and for one other? The great affirmationists in his Manifesto are each named, in a long and extensive list, along with their acts and work. The prior working-out of the relationship between interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation cannot but be thought as a subjective experience. Any attempt to minimize the individuals in question runs the risk of making the event a merely formal occurrence in the world, with anonymity as an accepted or demanded condition of the creative act; in each case of an event, both before and after, before its creation when it can only ever be an idea and a calling, and after when someone has to be willing to be other than themselves to see a sight that can possibly force them to renounce an old self (no small feat), only then does the event take shape and find itself being real. “Art makes an event [fait événement] of what lies at the edge of what is given to perceptual experience … To force to see something, as if it was practically impossible, something that is anyhow clearly visible, is precisely what painting does, for example” (P 144).40 The previous allusions to a 40  The truth of art if, for Badiou, equally applicable in politics. In Metapolitics, he writes: “politics makes visible the invisible peculiar to the state of the situation,” 117. What is the visibility of politics? Is it the mystification of the real? Or something else?

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phenomenology of painting are not lacking in Badiou. He has, it seems, thoroughly neglected viewers; and yet they have been present from the start, because the act of seeing, once it has been inspired, exerts itself in all other domains of human experience; which is one reason for the phenomenological witness of art to be so consequential for other acts of perception. Badiou’s argument for universality can be supported now. The event of looking at the work of art can extend to all other experiences in life. Our three-in-one can be emphasized one last time. The ephemeral “something else” that Badiou mentioned in Handbook of Inaesthetics has been faithfully represented as the subject of art—the individual who acknowledges the artist and the work of art as essential in reconfiguring a present sensibility of being. The impossible and the invisible: what can it mean to make this presentable and have we over-extended ourselves? Many have been attracted to this one peculiarly aesthetic idea, as aisthesis and related to all the senses of being human. Nietzsche defines the experience with a word which, today, has less currency that it used to; our previous defense of the spirit can be emphasized from The Will to Power. “Whatever takes place in the spirit must enkindle a subtle extraordinary happiness and play in the senses” (WP 540, my emphasis). Are we willing to invoke the spirit for a determined materialist like Badiou? Defenders of the artistic experience are not lacking, and with the entire range of all our definitions of seeing: vision, perception, gaze, and the fleeting enticement of the invisible. Rosalind Krauss provides one insight, in her case preceded by a negative, the task of “concellation.” “Empirical vision must be cancelled, in favor of something understood as the precondition for the very emergence of the perceptual object of vision.”41 Extending ourselves even further: if the classical reference to visionary can be maintained, it impels us towards the entire configuration of being. For all of Badiou’s uniqueness, here he can only follow more than a few prior reflections, many of them from a tradition resulting, in part, from the individual mentioned earlier, Merleau-Ponty for one. Badiou comes ever so close to making the same observations as others who, as phenomenologists, have paid particular attention to human perception of the aesthetic and other experiences besides. Jean-Luc Marion writes: “our gaze reaches a world—exercises its being-in-the-world— because perspective, in the sense of the invisible organizing the visible, has 41  Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993, 15.

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in itself the ability to see through the visible, therefore in terms of the invisible.”42 Is there an inescapable crisscross here, a compossibility of someone Badiou has called a “pious phenomenologist” and a reflection art and what it stands for? Throughout the encounter with the first procedure of truth, one problem has been avoided—the one Badiou has identified as the denigration of art by “culture,” that is, the system in place and its handling of what can be created. One other issue has also been mentioned. Chantal Mouffe writes: “given the current situation, where there are no longer any agreed upon criteria for judging art production, there is marked tendency to replace aesthetic judgments with moral ones.”43 Or, to augment the problem: hegemony looks and feels the same no matter who yields the power and control over others. The imperative of heteronomy can so easily turn into the hegemonic when art has been reduced to one necessity—today more and more impelled towards its ethical representation, that is, its “message.” What happens when the very defenders of emancipation (now) are led instead, with all the best intentions in the world, to become as hegemonic as the 1920s’ Soviets and force art to be servile, acting as another of the many worthy causes in need of advertisement and propaganda? The shift in representation hardly matters, though the difference is striking: we have passed from the gargantuan statues of the Soviet heroic proletariat to the representation of other, equally compelling subjects of art. The political force of an aesthetic subsumption into itself was predictable in Badiou’s idea of the individual being incorporated into. The individual or the collective. The subjective process of intervention, configuration, and the difficult experience of incorporation rests on this one distinction. What does the reader choose? To be the individual who incorporates into their life; or the individual who is incorporated into collective ideas and the group psychology of the “we,” with all its safety in numbers and danger of not being for the one except by identifying with others? My response on this matter has been put forward: if, following Plato by his own account, Badiou writes of “the incorporation of our individual life within the new body constituted around the primordial statement, that trace of the event” (SMP 108, my emphasis), once again the incorporation 42  Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible. Tr. James K.A. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 4. 43  Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013, 104.

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is not “within the new body,” which can result in effacement, disappearance, once again the neglect of the individual human being in a process. Unless the incorporation is a matter of a phenomenological internalization, the political consequences are potentially dire. No “we” can be considered here. In Philosophy and the Event, Badiou gives another example, again on painting. “Say, you go to an art exhibition and you find yourself dazzled by a painting; this involves your incorporation within a truth procedure, an artistic one” (PE 60). While I fully agree that the process of incorporation is inseparable from the phenomenological experience of immortality, from one historical point to another, once again my response is in the direction of the incorporation. The painting and the transference from the artist go from the work into the subject of perception, not the other way around. Only by ensuring the one direction of the experience can the individual be assured of not being taken in and, given enough pressure from external forces, coerced into a diffuse membership guaranteed by identification. The individual of the first generic procedure of truth is a case study; either this subject of truth and being will make individual declarations or risk being subsumed into a collective imperative and as a consequence both abnegate one’s responsibility and accept the decisions of the many. One is incorporated into a work of art when it has been politically determined by morality. Once the experience is properly understood as also an amorous encounter (both with the individual artist and the work of art) then the event can be given its due. The transference of the incorporation—the experience of being dazzled, with beauty or truth, with the “glow” of an individual and a work—means that, as Badiou writes in The Century, “the key issue consists in thinking love not as a destiny, but as encounter and thought, as an asymmetrical and egalitarian becoming, as the invention of oneself” (TC 145, my emphasis). Here we have the most pressing distinction. The matter will only be settled by each individual reader and according to what they believe to be non-negotiable for themselves and for their lives. The love of an encounter with a work of art and the recollection of the life of an artist leads to the invention of oneself. Is this compatible with Badiou’s many-times repeated “invention of politics” in Manifesto for Philosophy? The reader simply has to decide if “there is no philosophy without the political possessing the real status of a possible invention” (MP 35). Leaving aside, as has been the case until now, the question of philosophy being a condition, does it not seem as if the truth of art is conditioned by a truth, politics, that seems to dominate all

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the others? That is our dilemma; and one to be faced and, as appropriate, saved for last. The amorous encounter can be thought about as a procedure of truth inseparable from art. We can supplement an answer to Badiou’s initial “something else.” The power of art comes from the transferential relationship between the individual artist, the work of art, and the fidelity of the viewer who recognizes, in the act of perceiving a great work of art, an act of intervention, configuration, and incorporation leading to a revelatory subjectivation. As such, the event is for Alex Ling “thought exclusively under conditions of art. Indeed, it cannot be stressed enough how it is for Badiou, not mathematics but rather art that delivers us the true thought of the event. For it is art and only art, Badiou says, that supplements ontology.”44 Ling’s representation of Badiou’s philosophy is important because it stresses the supplement to being and, therefore, for us, the on-­ going process of subjectivation that proceeds in relationship to a set of social forces (whatever their provenance and motivations) that seek to circumvent the freedom of the subject for the expediencies of propaganda, one way or another. Despite the oscillation and ambiguities, all the shifts of emphasis that have been traced, one strain of Badiou’s thought can be isolated; the reader will ultimately have to decide on the emphasis—the either/or of incorporation or the “first person.” The phrasing never changes; it is certain and deliberate. My emphasis, of the subject being the one who decides on the incorporation (into him and herself) would be a philosophical starting point and the one that will be supported all the way through. The subject is the principle. In Controversies, Badiou says: “subjective incorporation into a truth procedure, qua universal, is always in the first person” (C 87). Again, into. If the process is always “in the first person,” it is then always individual. One of the dilemmas, then, marks a response: there has been a consistent argument about the centrality of “the first person” as well as the need to define the nature of incorporation. The individual cannot be incorporated into anything. Indeed, one can and must argue that as soon as the individual is incorporated into a “we” or a group with an identitarian collectivity, then a certain effacement will have taken place. Instead, and relying on phenomenological language, the event of the configuration (the work of art and the artist) makes possible both the intervention by the viewer and 44  Ling, Alex. Badiou Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017, 91. Only art, Ling argues.

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the incorporation into himself. “L’événement est toujours vécu à la première personne.”45 Our starting point in the event results in the affirmation of a singular subject of importance because it is the individual who will then be the one responsible for the act of fidelity to continue the consequences of the event. “Each subject is, as such, the embodiment of an event.”46 We are left with the repeated affirmation of this one inviolable truth. Thinking back at the Introduction and the last half-century of denigration of the subject, we can once again commit ourselves to the human within ourselves and to no longer abnegate on a fundamental obligation. “It takes a subject to declare that the event has indeed taken place within a situation. The subject’s fidelity to the event in a truth procedure will consist of the efforts to transform the situation.”47 Isn’t the declaration a testimony from a witness? Nietzsche’s development of the idea of the “free spirit” and what such individuals can accomplish is a historical task. His understanding of the experience leaves no doubt as to his intent. Nietzsche’s incorporation has the future in mind. “History might one day give birth to such people … What so far entered our souls only now and then as an exception that made us shudder, might perhaps be the usual state for these future souls” (GS 231, my emphasis). The strongest claim can now be made in the approach to our transition to science—of which Michel Henry will have a comment to make as well. Whether art and science can be included in any relation will be a matter of debate. Henry writes: “The work of art is imaginary. It develops outside of the real world and thus in a dimension of irreality.” This “outside” is not readily identifiable. He has to ask himself a question. How can the work of art belong to a real world defined by sensibility and also situated beyond it, beyond its support, in a pure imaginary? … If the work of art is never in this world, if it is not truly situated where its support is—right there on this wall in front of us, in this context— it is not that it is foreign to sensibility, but instead that its essence is located in sensibility and that its being unfolds where sensibility unfolds, in life,

45  Vinolo, Stéphane. “L’apostrophe de l’ événement: Romano à la lumière de Badiou et Marion,” 51–67 Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. 21 (2), 2013, 1. 46  Cunningham, Conor. Genealogy of Nihilism. London: Routledge, 2012, 263. 47  Benĉin, Rok. “Rethinking Representation in Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Rancière,” 95–112, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 36 (5), 2019, 103, my emphasis on “the efforts.”

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in the radical immanence of absolute subjectivity.48

We have, nearing our conclusion, two great affirmationists: the artists themselves who are at the real origin of an inauguration; and, to counter Badiou’s suspicion about the impropriety of philosophy to comment on art, philosophers like Henry capable of affirming “absolute subjectivity” on both sides of the historical divide. The reader has been given a few of the more important points. A decision on fidelity, if any is to be made, can be postponed. In the meantime, we are left with an either/or, the choice between the individual’s self-invention or politics. One reminder can prepare us for the next generic procedure of truth. Byung-Chul Han writes: “Fidelity and what commits us are mutually dependent. Commitment demands fidelity. Fidelity presupposes commitment. Fidelity is unconditional. This is what constitutes its metaphysics, its transcendence event.”49 Fidelity in art, like love, can be unconditional. How does science fare, and will it be hampered by equally, if not more serious, dilemmas, especially when the collaboration between scientism and technology continues to develop exponentially and without being able to realize what the long-­ term consequences, for human being, may be. The affirmation of science will not be straightforward; hesitation and doubts will be constant because of Badiou’s insistence on the truth of science. The matheme, as an ideal, is one concept; whether science is, as such, compatible will be a recurring problem.

48  Henry, Michel. Barbarism. Tr. Scott Davidson. London: Continuum, 2012, 35. “Absolute subjectivity.” The affirmation cannot be made with more resoluteness. 49  Han, Byung-Chul. Saving Beauty. Tr. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018, 81.

CHAPTER 3

Science

I was struck early on by this quasiesthetic feeling about mathematics. In Praise of Mathematics

1   Is the Matheme Scientific? Just as a number of fundamental dilemmas have not yet been settled in Badiou’s philosophy as it pertains to the artist, the work of art, and the viewer as the subject of perception (which, in my argument, formed a three-part unity in order to emphasize a human relationship—i.e., two individuals and their transference on either temporal side of the work of art, which is infinite), the generic process of science as a truth will involve us in a series of preliminary questions and, also, uncertainties, the most important being whether the idea of the matheme can be considered a scientific concept at all. Can the matheme be included, generically, in the multidisciplinary nature of science, which essentially deals with the study of empirical objects—as does, for example, biology and its definition of bios or life? There is no self-evident certainty about the matheme as a truth of science; as a principle of being, however, its consequences will be multiple, including (as above) the development of a quasi-aesthetic feeling, a sense of the true and, therefore, to remind ourselves of Badiou’s happiness. Badiou’s special relationship to mathematics, as a unique ontological truth, allows him the liberty to extend its extra numerical or formulaic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_3

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reality. After noting that his use of the concepts of the generic multiple and set-theory was given to him to think by mathematicians (Paul Cohen and Georg Cantor, who are individuals and so named), he writes: “In L’Etre et l’Evénement, I completely unfolded the dialectic between the mathematical edification of the theory of the pure multiple and the conceptual propositions that today can found philosophy again” (MP 105). To re-establish the foundations of philosophy through mathematical concepts and the generative power of a multiplicity is one ambition which sets us towards recognizing, and accepting, how one discipline, as a truth, can transform another. Mathematics and philosophy, together, will create the possibility of a new kind of thinking and being. Much more important than the relation of disciplines—or the matheme being a condition of philosophy—are other challenges. How does the matheme create a supplement to a situation, make an event perceptible, and above all be relevant for the lived experience of human beings? No limit will be imposed on thought. One complicated relation can be discerned in “Mathematics and Philosophy,” when there are three different intersections, each of them recognizable for their distinctiveness and their contributions: poetry, mathematics, and “religion,” the latter term not easily defined in Badiou’s unique and expansive vocabulary. One other (possible) truth receives a mention. There are many instances when the purity of matheme is no longer isolated; its being will be intermixed with other relations, perhaps other truths beyond the four. Badiou is no stranger to either Pauline Christianity or psychoanalysis. The following is one of many examples. Reading Book II of Lautremont’s Maldoror, he quotes the poet’s exclamation: “Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Awe-inspiring trinity” (TW 11). In what way does the three-in-one lead to awe, that is, a feeling and a perception and with a most unusual substitution? Mathematizing the metaphysics of the trinity is wholly supported by Badiou. A self-declared materialist, and atheist, has no difficulty in adopting the language of religion for his own purposes. He does not exclude any power available to him; the connection of relegere, of binding relations, is not avoided due in any way to the historical actuality of religion. Once a connection has been made, however, there are all kinds of consequences which follow. The ideality of the matheme abstracts it from objects, which makes it unique and, perhaps, incompatible with science. The alteration can be noticed in his careful use of the word “scientism,” “which only knows the naturalness of objects, never the immortality of subjects” (SMP 119). Badiou’s

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matheme, since it is not an object found in nature but is nevertheless the quintessential representation of being qua being, allows him to adopt (as he has done consistently since Being and Event) recognizable language from neither pre-established philosophy nor science. “It is with joy that one must receive the fact that the destiny of every situation is the infinite manifold of sets … Consequently, as disconnected from finitude, we live the infinite as our absolutely placid sojourn” (BrE 30). Trinity, immortality, the infinite: how these classically metaphysical concepts can be the creation of the matheme will have to be demonstrated. In the meantime, the beginning of the answer to our first question (is the matheme scientific—or is it closer to an aesthetic and a religious experience?) leads to others that are familiar from the truth of art and one, in particular, that will be introduced for the first time, with implications for the rest of the examination, and from Badiou’s Briefings on Existence. Joy, destiny, the infinite: Nietzsche can be heard as a distinct echo, who can serve as a transition towards, one, the affirmation of individual names,1 two, the idea of the individual genius and, three, an idea allowing us to connect Badiou’s thinking to the ancient past and with three thinkers in particular: Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus, the latter especially significant because of his supposed status as a “materialist” (often categorized as an atomic materialist) and the nature of his philosophical thinking as both scientific and therapeutic. At the same time as the first question continues to occupy us, one important digression cannot be avoided: the individuality of the genius and the psychotherapeutic aspect of the matheme, a relationship, consistent in antiquity as the correlation of spirit and psyche. For Badiou, despite the extensive use of mathematics as a foundation for his ontology, there are other, almost surreptitious references to his relation to mathematics for aesthetic reasons (as above, aisthesis a reference to the senses of human being—i.e., to a phenomenological sense) but 1  As usual, however, we have to note how Badiou formulates his discussion. The emphasis should, hopefully, not be redundant. The dilemmas are perpetual. In the chapter on Ideation in Second Manifesto of Philosophy, after once more declaring himself to be a Platonist and committed to the “materialism of the Idea” he turns to Georg Cantor and makes two comments that are significant for us: one, and inseparable from the individual, how Cantor created the concept of the set and “he fully grasped that the thought passing through him, and which he was one of the first to organize, equally radically changed mathematical rationality’s relations to philosophy and to religion.” 113 The italics are my emphasis. The comment that stands out is “the thought passing through him.” The phrase, used only once in his writings, has been conceived earlier, in relation to art, as a transference.

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much more noticeably for its therapeutic function. Is Badiou implying that the matheme reduces the unsettling symptoms of everyday life—anxiety and a certain neurotic nervousness? In Conditions, Badiou makes a statement that has not received due attention, in large part because of the mathematic/ontology claim: “I shall make the provocative therapeutic claim that mathematics is ontology” (C 111). The claim is therapeutic. Should the matheme be included as a scientific principle and be merely one among many, or does the matheme as conceived by Badiou have unique characteristics that, as a singular truth, distinguishes it from science—and from the sciences in the plural? Prior to discussing the relation between the matheme and science and whether they are compatible and capable of being included, beneficially, together in a philosophical work, a supplement to the previous truth of art can be one starting point. Badiou was, by his own conscious admission if not always by his implied arguments (attributing an event, e.g., to a proper name such as Haydn and yet, in another example, making Mozart’s music “anonymous”) willing to neglect the individual artist and avoid one resounding word and concept that, traditionally, has been regarded as “romantic.” In the truth of mathematics, he has no such compunctions; the genius (i.e., an exemplary individual who can also be recognized for being a source, an inauguration) is given due recognition. Mathematics and the individual genius are not philosophically separated. “It’s clear that mathematics has gradually brought founding geniuses to light in practically all regions of the world” (IPM 37). The individual trait is included; a barely noticeable emphasis should, however, also be mentioned. The rhetorical phrase could be overlooked. Mathematics, a discipline, “brings” an individual (a genius) to light—not the other way around. In this one instance, the mathematical genius serves a fundamental purpose: the transmission of a new discovery, a new thought, and a new way of being. Badiou is so willing to extend himself to the mathematical individuals that they are both a genius and universal. The generic procedure of truth cannot be sustained as an architectonic system unless all its points, one by one, are symmetrical; we surely cannot have an individual genius in one domain or procedure of truth but not in another. If Alexander Grothendieck is justifiably recognized, by Badiou, as a genius in the field of algebraic geometry, he cannot deny the same achievement in another creative domain, in photography, for example, both which are attracted, in their own way, to the spatial and the possible. Is there, then, an underlying reason for Badiou to use the concept of the individual genius in mathematics but not for art, or any other truth?

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The difference has to be noticed. (How noticeable, also, that the category of the political genius is rare). There is no question that, for Badiou and by his own admission, certain forms of thought and acts are inseparable from the individuals—for example, the “young geniuses” in France in the 1930s who “undertook something like a total refoundation of the mathematical setup, integrating all the crucial creations of their time” (LW 45). What allows him to use the concept of the genius for mathematics but never for the artist might be nothing more than his reaction to an aesthetic cliché and an aversion to any notion of romanticism.2 His reasons are never fully explained, at least not convincingly; for us, no adequate argument can be made for excluding the artistic genius from our presentation. His overwhelming respect for mathematics, and its central place in his ontology, made the philosophical decision understandable if, for us, incomplete. We can reintroduce a prior quote; the context gives us a different sense than before. When Badiou writes of “a mutation so major, a novelty so luminous, that no creator of good faith can resist its power,”3 which concepts are going to be highlighted? The “good faith” of the creator? The “power” of the work? The individual who first notices the mutation? All of them have been considered and included in a relationship, as they have been in art. Our first problems are multiple insofar as science is a generic truth and a condition of philosophy that raises many different points: the reality of the mathematical genius and the psychotherapeutic aspects of the matheme will both have to remain with us, especially since (very briefly, without over-stating an obvious reality) the present conditions of social life are inseparable from one that has become virtually unavoidable and, as most admit, counter-therapeutic. Two additional factors will be briefly mentioned; they are not peripheral to the problem of truth and are significant for assessing the matheme’s centrality in Badiou’s systematic philosophy: on the one hand, the ubiquitous reality of techno-­ scientism and, on the other, the marketability of science and its submission to the ends of capitalism as its manufacture of a world of globalized uniformity. “There can also be a degenerate mathematics, at the service of the current opportunities provided by business and technology” (HI 31), he admits, with an ancillary threat increasing in scope. These are, today,  In The Century, he defines romanticism as an “aesthetic religion,” (154).  Badiou, Alain. “Art and Mathematics,” Tr. Steven Corcoran, 163–173  in Art and Contemporaneity. Ed. Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker. Zürich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015, 173. 2 3

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all-­too familiar and unavoidable in the realm of human life and experience. Our anthropological extension, the cell phone, is only the most omnipresent form. How our material world is regenerated is another matter. One very noticeable testimony on Badiou’s part will receive attention since it has been avoided by commentators. Science and the matheme are given many attributes and accomplishments; no one, as far as I know, has highlighted Badiou’s all-important relationship to mathematics as a therapeutic discipline. He has been nuanced in presenting a pervasive confrontation in our world. We are once again in the middle of a dilemma of truth, a most serious one since it threatens the viability of terrestrial existence. Badiou is well aware of a drastic reality despite dismissing ecological and/or environmental solicitude. The language is startling. “There is also a terror of the matheme.” Genius, therapy, terror. How they will be reconciled and, later, complicated by additional factors (with references to biology, and the advent of neurobiology) will be part of the on-going examination of Badiou’s four truths. To set out on an analysis of science as a generic procedure of truth can take us to a first assertion on “the paradigmatically scientific status of mathematics.”4 Not one among many, but paradigmatic; so when we proceed from Badiou’s foundational position in Being and Event that mathematics is ontology (which will not be controversial because, in principle, his presentation of the infinity of the matheme is accepted) one objection is raised. Is the infinity of the matheme in some fundamental way nullified as soon as we keep in mind all the possible objections to come on the practical effects of mathematics and its increasing role, today, in the development of techno-scientism? No one can dispute the claim, in itself: when Norris writes “how mathematically-informed science has come up with so impressive a range of applied technological advances,”5 we are still forced to deal with a now more than obvious problem of the mathematics/ techno-science relation and its making of a world. Let the word “advances” also stand in for the more traditional idea of “progress.” The infinity of the matheme, when instrumentalized into things, compromises its possible ontological effects. The capital, market, and issues of globalization are not going to be included in a lengthy discussion since they would add one 4  Brassier, Ray. “Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics,” 135–150 in Angelaki, Vol. 10 (2) 2005, 135. 5  Norris, Christopher. Re-thinking the Cogito: Naturalism, Reason and the Venture of Thought. London: Continuum, 2010, 170.

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more complication to the ones already at hand. Once we analyze the connection between mathematics, science, and technology, the problem is not going to be at all theoretical; the manufacture of a world has led, we can all sense, every day, the re-making of the human and the reach towards a globalized totality. To set out the parameters of the discussion on the generic truth of science and its exemplary domain (the matheme), we will have to decide if they are, in the end, compatible and beneficial for life and without an inherent obstacle that makes them inimical to the true life so important for Badiou’s philosophy. We should also mention one of his interlocutors’ objections. In the dialogue published as Controversies, Jean-­ Claude Milner responds: “I’m not sure anything more than a distance can be marked between us here, since, for me, mathematics, which I in no way claim to pursue as deep a level as Badiou does, has no importance other than for mathematics itself. I don’t think it provides any insight outside of mathematics itself” (Co 66). Making the insights accessible will have to be one of the responsibilities ahead—for mathematics as well as all other forms of thought, in and out of the university.6 One other concern arises, again. As is so often the case, Badiou’s four generic procedures are by no means equal; for many, one necessity (the political) is the perspective for the evaluation of all the others. Whether the political is not a serious obstacle (to thought, and to a certain kind of being) will also have to be eventually decided, both as it intrudes on the questions of the matheme and, later, when the truth of politics is examined on its own. The political objections are noticeable, and for reasons that are always, it seems, tied to the central and dominant imperative of politics; all else takes second place. In the Manifesto for Philosophy, he writes: “Poem, matheme, inventive politics and love are quite precisely the different possible types of generic procedures” (MP 107). The four, however, are not independent; one is given prominence and will be eventually 6  In Theory of the Subject, Badiou writes: “what is taught is not mathematics but only its locus. Pedagogy delimits its splace, it is up to you to be out of place with respect to it, that is, to produce were it only one decisive theorem, one that provokes a thorough reshuffling— which is the only title than can be claimed for the mathematician, who is not to be confused, as Lacan would say, with the university professor of mathematics” (TS 39). Badiou has been circumspect about the role of education in institutions of higher learning. The professor, as such (which was already a problem for Nietzsche when he made comments on “we scholars”), is a figure who has somehow eluded reflection. The particular time early in the 21st century may be more than appropriate to begin an investigation into the identity of the academic.

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raised to be so. Criticism has been duly noted; the political takes a certain lead over all the others. “There may remain some cause to doubt whether Badiou’s rigorous and penetrating reflective consideration of forms can indeed succeed in uniquely supporting the specific kind of praxis that are most appropriate to the inherent structural problem and contradictions of today’s global political order.”7 The demand, here, proves to be extreme; there may be no way to satisfy those who would like Badiou’s matheme to contribute something for the purpose of altering a global order. One antagonism, already present in the truth of art, will continue to be unavoidable and force us towards a decision. It may well be an either/or again— individual and therapeutic, or collective and political. Can both be unified? Or is the political, by its very nature, anti-therapeutic? How can we better define, or at least pursue some of the implications, of a comment such as the one defining Being and Event as “a work whose discursive structure programs a refined spiritual pedagogy?”8—one completely different than a political one? Can we, given what has been discussed earlier in the truth of art, turn our focus to mathematics so as to follow not so much its formal intricacies, but its effects, for thought and life, in Badiou’s philosophy. Mathematically inclined commentators have been exacting in their responses; and yet the criticism is, philosophically, almost beside the point. One has to recognize Badiou’s philosophical intent and the ability to incorporate disparate elements of thought into a comprehensive whole—that is, in a system he has himself devised, and which can be unabashedly called metaphysical, in the best sense of the term. One wonders about the effects of a critique of Badiou’s use of mathematics by experts in the field. “The politico-philosophical claims that result have no grounding in the set theory that is deployed to justify them … Any rigorous attempt to base an ontology upon them will entail such a

7  Livingston, Paul. “Badiou and the Politics of Form,” 304–315 in Philosophical Compass 75, Vol. 7 (5), 2012, 312. While this is one more repetition of the matter of such concern to, seemingly, a great majority of Badiou’s readers, one can begin to wonder now that we are halfway into the four generic procedures of truth, why the political is the one everyone wants to address. What if that was one of the problems? What if the proper thinking of the matheme, as a universal—and, as Badiou will tell us at a very personal level, as a therapeutic idea— was its independence from politics and so more capable to freeing the individual from the materiality of the constituted world? 8   Hunter, Ian. “Heideggerian Mathematics: Badiou’s Being and Event as Spiritual Pedagogy,” 116–156 Representations, No. 134 (Spring 2016), 116.

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drastic loss of life and experience that the result can never amount to an ontology in any humanly meaningful sense.9 An echo can be heard—though it has not very often been made: a Christian could in fact make the same critique at Badiou for using the concept of the resurrection while completely forsaking its ground in a metaphysical belief in the ascension of the Christ to heaven and as return to God. Granted, some (mathematicians, understandably) could see this as a problem: still, the formal ideas of the matheme and any relation it may have to formulas is, for Badiou, not the essential point. Just as the resurrection in Badiou has nothing to do with the post-mortem ascension of a man towards God, so the matheme has to be thought, ultimately, beyond its numerical grounds. The matheme, on one of its levels, is metaphoric. Are we at all justified in simply accepting Badiou’s overall purpose which, ultimately, involves “metaphor” as well as “extra-mathematical considerations?”10 After all, a theory of being founded on mathematics has to be relevant for the experience of life, not any relation to a numerical world or its various theories, no matter how interesting or intricate set-­ theory, for example, may be. When Cantor, one of the individuals most associated with Badiou’s mathematical thinking, is described by him as “that isolated, shuddering prophet of a wholly secularized conception of the infinite” (TC 154), the idea of the matheme has become so interrelated with other purposes that it cannot be looked at from its disciplinary regulations. Badiou was aware of the risks. “I imprudently expose myself, first, to the mathematician’s condemnation if I borrow metaphorically from his vocabulary” (TS 209), just as he did with theology and psychoanalysis. Are we then justified in ignoring the mathematical formulas because, within the discipline of what is termed continental philosophy, numbers are usually lacking and language, and its tropes, so highlighted? Can we then simply allow ourselves the convenience of a metaphor and, for example, draw on the idea of “the logic of rigorous experimentation?”11 The concept, as Badiou transforms it for his own purposes, is what matters. In Briefings on Existence, he writes: 9   Nirenberg, Ricardo L. and Nirenberg, David. “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology,” 583–614 Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Summer 2001), 586. 10  Tasić, Vladimir. “Badiou’s Logics: Math, Metaphor, and (Almost) Everything,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2017, 22–45. 11  Plotnitsky, Arkady. “Experimenting with ontologies: sets, spaces, and topoi with Badiou and Grothendieck,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 30, 2012, 351–368, 368.

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The fact that mathematics at least allows us to designate the excess and have access to it, confirms the discipline’s powerful ontological vocation. Regarding the concept of Number or any other concept, the history of mathematics is exactly the history of the relation between the inconsistency of manifold-being and what this inconsistency our finite thinking manages to make consistent. It is a never ending history, whose very principle is endless. (Br 131)12

More than a few have taken the mathematical towards its extra-­ numerical consequence The claim is, perhaps, over-extended in one case, granting the idea of mathematics too much power on its own. “Philosophy’s ties to mathematics means that demystification can finally be demystified.”13 The theme offers a promise; whether it can be delivered without additional support, from the therapeutic, is another matter. Ray Brassier, one interlocutor among a few others with personal fidelities to Badiou, writes that his philosophy “is essentially a de-mystificatory screen designed to prevent us from becoming fascinated by the luxuriant plenitude of what there is, by the actuality of the world as it is now, so that we may be prepared to seize the possibility of its radical transformation.”14 The references to “demystification,” which sounds like a typical concept from critical theory or a hermeneutics of suspicion, are turned back on themselves by Vladimir Tasić and made far less effective than is thought or hoped. Does “demystification” reveal anything new? There are many promises made on behalf of the matheme for philosophy. Specifics are going to have to be presented and keeping in mind Badiou’s reminder, one that will soon force us to return to classical origins. “Rational philosophy and mathematics originated at the same time” (IPM 25). A few more beginning are in order. One statement by Jeremy De Chavez can be an introduction. “I shall proceed with the rather audacious claim that most of Badiou’s ideas, even the central ones, may be sufficiently explained with minimal reference to mathematical theory.”15 The claim can allow us to move towards a transition. Instead of pursuing an analysis of Badiou’s  The quote is from Chapter 11, “The Being of Number.”  Ford, Thomas H. “The Mathematical Turn,” 113–125 International Social Science Journal, Vol. 63, Issue 207–208, 2012, 118. 14  Brassier, Ray. “Presentation as anti-phenomenon in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event,” Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 39, Iss. 1 (May 2006), 59–77, 74. 15  De Chavez, Jeremy. “‘No theme requires more pure logic than love’: On Badiou’s Amorous Axiomatics,” 269–285 Kritike, Vol, 10, No. 1 (June 2016), 271. 12 13

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references to the admittedly arcane intricacies of mathematical set-­ theory—which he admirably, and thankfully, explains in Meditation 17 of Being and Event without numbers, formulas, or diagrams—a re-appraisal of interrelated ideas at the beginning of modernity can take us back to the classical world, especially with Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus. “La place particulière des mathématiques dans L’être et l’événement tient au projet de ce livre, qui est de dégager le concept générique de la vérité, ce qui exige de libérer la pensée de l’être de toute corruption herméneutique.”16 But how do we avoid “hermeneutic corruption,” especially in our consideration of the thought (and hence meaning) of being when Badiou himself initiated the three-part project of interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation? Can we place the hermeneutical and the mathematical side by side and doing so for a reason that will now become predominant?

2  Ancient Science and Psychotherapy The anticipated return to the ancient world and the conjunction of philosophy and psychotherapy can be initiated with two categorical statements. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “a proposition of mathematics does not express a thought.”17 Heidegger went further and wrote “science does not think.”18 Faced with these declarations, Badiou was not going to be dissuaded from his appointed task, even though he has often strayed into the realm (like Heidegger) of the poetic as a supplement to philosophical thought. Math and science have been deemed thoughtless; and yet, once we turn to one of Badiou’s experiences, one can recognize the personal relation he has to mathematical thought. Nietzsche points us in one direction and confirms what may be the most important one since it bypasses the formal entirely. In a section entitled “Mathematics” he writes: 16  Badiou, Alain. “L’etre, l’evenement, la militance,” interviewé par Nicole-Édith Thévenin https://www.multitudes.net/l-etre-l-evenement-la-militance/. 17  Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. D.  F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 65. Wittgenstein is not one preoccupation among others for Badiou when it comes to mathematics. In the chapter “Mathematics is a Thought” from Briefings on Existence, Badiou opens with “there is nothing quite obvious about this statement” and then adds: “It has also been negated time and time again: especially by Wittgenstein” (45). 18  Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking? Tr. J.  Glenn Gray. New  York: Harper Torchbook, 1968, 8.

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Let us introduce the refinement and rigor of mathematics into all sciences as far as this is at all possible, not in the faith that this will lead to know things but in order to determine our human relation to things. Mathematics is merely the means for general and ultimate knowledge of man.19

Knowledge of things; knowledge of ourselves. For Badiou, the knowledge of both, more than cognitively, and more than any veridical confirmation, was thought to be intimate. A particular kind of experience, here once again to mention the therapeutic, was at the origin of his dedication to mathematics and inseparable from his conviction about the purpose of philosophy for life. During a dialogue with Badiou, in Controversies, Jean-Claude Milner is forthright and skeptical about the ultimate possibilities of mathematics in a field other than its own. As we noted earlier, he neither believes the matheme offers anything substantial to thought, for life, or politics. Badiou’s response is telling. The sense of the therapeutic here cannot be disassociated from taking a certain distance from an involvement in the world, a necessary if temporary withdrawal, for the sake of independence and calm, the latter consistent with Epicurus’ philosophy. In this instance, the mathematical offers relief from the polity and from the real as a whole. All of Badiou’s intellectual focus cannot deny the psychotherapeutic relations he has to thought—to mathematics, philosophy, and science understood from the perspective of the ancient world and with three thinkers in particular. When I spoke biographically about mathematics as a means of relief and calming me with respect to the disorders and failures of politics, it didn’t mean that there is any relationship whatsoever between mathematics and politics. The opposite is even the case. What I meant was that, by turning my thought towards something that was utterly different from politics, mathematics could temporarily act as a kind of personal therapy. (Co 65, my emphases)

The personal disclosure is not a simple remark made in the context of a conversation. The experience, and its implications, has been neglected by commentators, in part because the mathematical and the political are 19  Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, 215.

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separated and, for Badiou, the therapeutic is given priority. In other words, his honest testimony of a personal experience was in part a response to the difficulties of the political. Was the matheme and the therapeutic the only alternative to the political? Is it today? To do justice to Badiou (and to his therapeutic philosophy, which has not been sufficiently noticed or affirmed despite his affiliation to psychoanalysis) a momentary return to the ancient world is necessary—beginning with one figure, then others, who are foundational. Plato is present enough for him not to be in any way forgotten. If, as we noted earlier, the mathematical and the philosophical emerged from a singular source of thought—and if, at this point, we make the attempt to separate what the effects of “science” are from politics—we find ourselves, with Badiou, in specific epochs of the ancient world, the pre-Socratic, the Platonic, and the Hellenistic, each represented by a monumental figure. The visit, all too brief, restrained for this context only, takes us to the ancient Greeks and the relationship between philosophy, “science,” and psycho-therapy, the latter with a dubious status in science unless one follows the developments of the day in the realm of neurobiology. Here we find ourselves suddenly in a completely other realm of being and thought, always instructive as an experience different from our modern sensibilities. For the purpose of highlighting the mathematical and the therapeutic, as Badiou does, we may briefly provide a few more definite descriptions, beginning with Plato’s reference to “the Pythagorean way of life.”20 Secondly, in his Metaphysics, Aristotle mentions “the so-called Pythagoreans, who were engaged in the study of mathematical objects, were the first to advance this study, and having been brought up in it, they regarded the principle of mathematic objects as the principle of all things.”21 One foundation has been provisionally established with an intimacy between mathematics and a way of life.

20  Plato. Republic. Tr. G.M.A.  Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974, 245. 21  Aristotle. Metaphysics, in Selected Works. Tr. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson. Grinnell, Iowa: The Peripatetic Press, 1982. Much more generally, but also with a more all-­ inclusive sense, one fragment from Aristotle’s Protrepticus has Pythagoras describe himself as someone who observes the heavens and nature. The use of the word, theoron (contemplation, as theory) gives us the sense of Pythagorean perception, of the visible world, no less than the interiority of the human. The reference can be found in Leonid Zhmud’s Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Tr. Kevin Windle and Rosh Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 56

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A reconstruction of a line in Greek history takes us to Pythagoras and his “Golden Verses,” the saying that have been preserved by his acousmatici, those who listened, just as his mathematical, geometrical, astronomical, and musical theorems have been handed down by his mathematici.22 Pythagoras has been sufficiently regarded not only for his contribution to the practice known as philosophy (a word, philosophia, he is reputed to have invented) but for setting a certain kind of deliberative thought towards specific and attainable ideals for life. Pythagoras said: “what is wisest? Number … what is the wisest thing in the human realm? The art of medicine.”23 At the very origins of philosophia, philosophical wisdom, mathematics, and psychotherapy all converge; or rather, they were originally thought as one comprehensive pursuit. To think about the unity of the “three-in-one” can be briefly followed in the ancient world. Once the modern and the ancient are brought into close contact—and calling Badiou, without controversy, a neo-Pythagorean—the formalism of mathematics seems less existentially meaningful than its relationship. Finding a starting point for Badiou’s reliance on mathematics as a foundation for ontology took us to his personal experience. There are others; they have been mentioned before. Since one consequence of the matheme has eluded the interest of interlocutors—Badiou’s comments are sporadic on the issue, which, for me, makes them all the more noticeable—they will be highlighted here. When we examine Badiou’s statements on the matheme for its personal psychotherapeutic effects, one more connection to the founding ideas of the ancient world can be witnessed. One of the modern 22  As distinguished by Walter Burkert in Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Tr. Edwin L. Minar Jr. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972. 23  Riedweg, Christoph. Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence. Ithaca: Ithaca University Press, 2005, 77. With this one reference we are led, in the ancient world, to a problem that Badiou effectively inherits: once we find one of the quintessential origins of philosophy, mathematics, and the therapeutic (as complementary reflections on the good, the true, the healthy life) we are no less led to an enduring problem. From what we know of the Pythagorean community in the colony of Croton in southern Italy (modern-day Calabria) Pythagoras and his followers were not content to pursue their “way of life,” as Plato defined them in the Republic. The destruction of the community came about when the Pythagoreans believed they were capable to extending their dedication to wisdom to the political realm. In the time of Pythagoras, to our own day, the question therefore remains: is philosophy compatible with politics and should the philosopher—or, to be less definitive, any thoughtful individual—become involved in politics or remain as much as possible removed from its demands? Epicurus is our guide in the matter and, in relation to Badiou, the one philosopher who presents a significant argument.

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forms of an ancient thought can be presented in the philosophy of Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius. Badiou’s affinities to “atomic materialists” has often been mentioned by him, by name, and with specific arguments.24 Specifics are helpful even if his reliance on Epicurus and the great Roman poet, author of On the Nature of Things, is suggestive in a number of places but thematically under-developed. Badiou made the origin of philosophy, mathematics, and psychotherapy inseparable. An equally important relationship existed between philosophy and, specifically, physiologia (the observation of physis or natural phenomenon independent of any gods) as one of the foundations of Epicurus’ philosophy. Reading Epicurus demands a three-point unity. To begin with, while being aware of how many interconnecting parts there are and how complicated the palimpsest of interests is in this case, some order will be laid out. Beginning with Badiou’s reliance on the ancient world is foundational. The earlier statement on philosophy and mathematics has been supplemented, in part because Epicurus (at least from the extant writings or the doxography—in Cicero,25 e.g.) gives us no evidence of any interest in mathematics, in part because of the Epicurean independence from either number or geometrical theorems. Platonists were their philosophical rivals; Epicureans had no interest in mathematics or, for that matter, geometry as an interest in itself or as part of their pedagogical curriculum. Physiologia, the study of physis or the interest in the cause of natural phenomena, however, is a grounding necessity. In one section on science as a lead-up to a few comments for Badiou, one argument is made. Deleuze and Guattari believe that “it seems that the Greeks had a clear enough idea of science, which was not confused

 He did so already in Theory of the Subject—though he uses different names for them. “Greek materialists” is one (TS 56). “Greek atomists” is another (TS 60). The philosophical and scientific designation has to include one other one: Epicureans “withdrew” (Badiou’s word) from politics and precisely for psychotherapeutic reasons. 25  Cicero’s philosophical works, for example, his Tusculan Disputations, are the best direct testimony we have of Epicurean ideas as understood in a Roman context in addition to the surviving writings of Philodemos of Gadara and the inscription found and attributed to Diogenes of Oenoanda. 24

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with philosophy.”26 Familiarity with Epicurus, for example, his three extant letters (to Herodotus, for one) disqualifies the assertion, if “science” is understood to be independent of any technical application. Epicurus’ entire conception of physiologia, without also bringing into the discussion his atomic theory or the clinamen (what has traditionally been labelled, too one-sidedly, an aspect of his “materialism” and which is rightly mentioned by Badiou as an argument for human freedom) is articulated not so much in the service of a certain kind of knowledge as in a contribution to the therapy of the human soul. “Science,” a word or concept that strictly speaking cannot be used for the Greeks, has an entirely different meaning for Epicurus than it does for the moderns or, indeed, for the categorical and encyclopedic compulsion of his older contemporary, Aristotle. In his Letter to Herodotus, a form of communication from master to disciple, Epicurus writes: “I recommend constant activity in the study of nature; and with this sort of activity more than any other I bring calm to my life.”27 Epicurus does not separate the study of physiologia from philosophy and its “service,” its therapeia, towards treating the afflictions of the soul. The Hellenistic philosopher has a comprehensive aim for thought: the “calm” he aspires to make a condition of being (i.e., ataraxia, to be free from the disturbance of the soul) is to be turned into an affect, as Badiou told us and specifically with the ideal of being calm. As for his scientific studies, when, for example, Epicurus comes to the realization that rainbows have a rational cause based on observation and thought—light and “water-laden air” are necessary to produce the effects of color—all previous explanation, with its origin in divine intervention, are dispelled and so make the world’s natural occurrences independent of any metaphysical origin. The therapeutic effect of science is explicit in Epicurus. The individual is transformed simultaneously as the explanations of the world, which was the point of teaching and learning and, most especially, in the transference between master and disciple. Badiou takes up the same language. Some attention to a few personal disclosures is 26  Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? Tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 147. Commenting directly on Badiou, they add: “the fact that the event is the concept, or philosophy as concept, distinguishes it from the four preceding functions, although it takes conditions from them and imposes conditions on them in turn,” 152. 27  Epicurus. Letter to Herodotus. in Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Tr. With an introduction and notes by Brad Inwood and L.  P. Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1988.

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worth a closer look. More pointedly, when the therapeutic is set against the political as a relief, for its independence, a number of wide-ranging themes come to the fore that, again, originate in the ancient world; and yet, despite the consistency of this one argument, Badiou cannot give up on the concern that, for him, is pre-eminent. “Science itself began—with mathematics—with the radical renunciation of every principle of authority. Scientific statements are accurately exposed in their entirety to general criticism, independently of the subject of enunciation, and in accordance with explicit norms that are accessible by right to whomsoever takes the trouble to grasp them” (MeP 14). One can argue, in principle, for the “democratic” nature of scientific thinking; the application of math and science are an entirely other matter. The previously described problems might eventually turn into unavoidable antagonism within thought itself and for the subject of thinking: can the ancient and inseparable triad of philosophy, mathematics, and psychotherapy be recovered with enough force to be an alternative to the politics of the present? Can such a proposal be made and from the original distance, in our Introduction, to critical theory and negation? If the four truths in Badiou’s philosophy are filled with unresolvable tensions, does the presence of a psychotherapeutic imperative allow us to insist on another and essential truth? The argument, at this juncture, has several aims, and from Badiou’s own personal disclosure: one, to introduce a form of philosophical truth that, in Badiou’s generic four, is not included; two, to anticipate later arguments and to make one more attempt, started in the section on art, to minimize the power of the political. We cannot continue with the exposition of the four procedures of truth without making it clear how Badiou views each of them and one in particular. The following statement will be kept in mind; the repetition serves to emphasize one of Badiou’s unquestionable commitments. In Metapolitics, he writes: “The infinite comes into play in every truth procedure, but only in politics does it take first place. This is because only in politics is deliberation about the possible (and hence about the infinity of the situation) constitutive of the process itself” (MeP 143). If, from the outset, Badiou had been shown fidelity (as, I think, is called for with regards to a philosopher who, today, stands virtually alone in what he defends and supports for the subject, for being, for truth) the responses going forward will be much more guarded and be skeptical about the ideals and the promise of politics. A slight detour will not be without a purpose here because once he makes the claim that politics “takes first place,” and in effect to raise an objection to what has been

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previously presented, we are again caught in a familiar problem. The connection of philosophy and therapy was essential in the ancient world. The calm of the matheme gave Badiou a personal sense of necessary solitude and the ability to withdraw himself from the conflict of the political. For specific reasons, however, he could not maintain that position. He could not turn away from the obligations of politics. From the all-too brief argument on the three philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Epicurus) and the triadic nature of ancient thought, three modern references can be made and to continue to supplement the argument as a whole. To trace the partial influence and persistence of the ancient world is now necessary if the whole of the tradition—both the acknowledged one (the scientific) and the neglected, the therapeutic—are going to be both a central concern. One peculiar word, used in science at the same time as the French revolution, has a place in what follows. The observations on “revolution” are applicable for science and, in the instance given to us by Immanuel Kant, for art as well. In his “Preface to the Second Edition” of his first critique, Kant writes: In the earliest times to which the history of human reason extends, mathematics, among that wonderful people, the Greeks, had already entered upon the sure path of science … the transformation must have been due to a revolution brought about by the happy thought of a single man … A new light flashed upon the mind of the first man (be it Thales or some other) who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle.28

While the mathematics/science connection is obvious in the argument, my particular interests also lead towards what might be easily overlooked. The first is the idea of a “happy thought.” The sense of happiness might not be as noticed as much as it should be. After all, what philosophers, in recent memory, have cared about happiness? The idea sometimes turns rationalists into cynics. The second idea is that of “a single man.” The one person who accomplished the feat is an individual, even if some ambiguity exists as to his identity. The discovery, whether it was Thales or Pythagoras, was made by an individual. Finally, and most importantly for Badiou, the discovery of a mathematical truth and its place in the history of science is for him incontrovertible. Happiness, the individual, revolution: the three 28  Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Norman Kemp Smith, Houndsmills, UK: MacMillan, 1929, 19.

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in Kant’s critique are going to be long-lasting in the history of philosophy. Two other references can be made to orient us further into the modern world to underscore our situation at the moment as we move through the history of thought. A first response is due to Badiou’s thesis on philosophy being conditioned—by science. A philosophy of science gives us one brief opportunity. A Renaissance event is illustrative. Alexandre Koyré gives us the example of Galileo’s perspicillum as an instrument that either allowed for the visibility of (a) the very small or (b) the very distant. Was the instrument a microscope or a telescope? Koyré explains: The second interpretation, that which makes visibility a function of distance, appears to us now to be the only one possible. Yet this was not the case in the seventeenth century. As a matter of fact both interpretations fit the optical data equally well and a man of that period had no scientific, but only philosophical, reasons for choosing between them. And it was for philosophical reasons that the prevailing trend of seventeenth century thinking rejected the first interpretation and adopted the second.29

This is nothing more than the beginning of a response someone else may want to pursue at greater length. My only interest, at the moment, is to set the investigation into science as Badiou uses it (for himself and his needs) and to explain his particular direction. Another is worth a mention as well; a reminder, once again, is not out of place. One has to appreciate the reasons for Badiou to invest so much faith in a human activity that does not leave us without the most serious of hesitations, especially when considering what he knows all too well and has not ignored. Some mathematics and techno-scientism can only leave us with the horror of instant incineration. Michel Serres can intercede at a moment that forces us a pause between Kant’s happiness and Galileo’s perception. In the incandescent caldera that our sciences prepared and caused to explode in the American desert and across the islands in Japan, we recognize a hellish hate that resides in and outside us, in our innermost consciousness and the social group, a hate that works and poisons our acts of knowledge, acts formerly written in myth, then in history and today in those technologies.30 29  Koyré, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1957, 94. 30  Serres, Michel. Biogea. Tr. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012, 77.

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However, to remain consistent and to avoid—as much as possible— negation, which could be multiplied and bring up innumerable memories from the 20th century, a reason should be thought about for Badiou’s enthusiasm for science. He will give us several examples. One influence, perhaps, precedes him. Once more, the appeal to revolution to counter the real and its betrayal, terror, and disasters is done to maintain the commitment to affirmation and not so easily revert back to being, simply, descriptively critical. The comment comes to us via Thomas Kuhn and the idea of a scientific revolution again. He tells us what all scientific revolutions are about. Each of them necessitated the community’s rejection of one time time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution. And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific word was done. Such changes, together with the controversies that almost always accompany them, are the defining characteristics of scientific revolutions.31

We can see how Badiou’s trust in the infinite matheme, the revolutionary character of science, and its possible influence on the political could become a reality. The confluence of so many factors require much more than a momentary attention. Another problem has to be taken up instead: can the infinity of the matheme and its incorporation by the infinite subject be sufficient for the transformation of the real? Our situation in the present is not like the one of Epicurus’ time. Is one sufficiently confident in human beings to be able to transcend both their metaphysical superstition and their political animality and become something other, something more, than is the case at the moment and while avoiding extreme temptations and even worse delusions? Psychoanalytic skepticism has not been set aside. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud reminds us that “human creations are easily destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up, can also be used for their annihilation” (SE 21:6). Still, following Badiou’s argument is an obligation; the doubt will not be wholly 31  Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

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presumptive. Returning to origins in Being and Event gives us other important additions to the development of his thought and the importance of Epicurus’s philosophy for life as a contributing factor. One objection will be made (again, a political one) to continue to separate—even if against Badiou’s intentions—the matheme from politics. “Epicurean atomism should therefore be embraced as a productive ontology for political radicalism.”32 Epicurus would object, for the following reasons and others. Epicurus would respond much more decisively, which makes him a prudent materialist: if one wanted to achieve any kind of ataraxia, by first living a life of theoria (a perception of the world, for the life of a human being) then it was necessary to avoid all political involvement. Immersing himself in the observation of the natural world gave Epicurus a double-­ relief from, essentially, two mythic fictions—the world of the gods and the world constructed by human beings for their safety and security as human animals. For Epicurus, the false stories of the gods were no different than the false stories told by politicians and other world organizers about the purpose of human life, especially if it was rationalized by morality. A dictum: no superstitious belief about the gods, no politics. That subtraction would, Epicurus believed, be an unparalleled contribution to a good, a true, a happy human life. His philosophical suggestion remains active today; and, for Badiou, an obstacle he has not always been free from. Epicurus is a thinker of physiologia; he also has advice for individuals who aspire to be wise: “they must free themselves from the prison of general education and politics.”33 The ancient conviction and how it has permeated, for some, modern sensibilities can be further developed. It is a matter of complementing the therapeutic with the philosophical as intrinsic to each other in the ancient world and making such a unity effective for the present. 32  Spencer, Joseph M. “Left Atomism: Marx, Badiou, and Agamben on the Greek Atomists,” 1–16 in Theory and Event, Vol. 17, Issue 3 (2014), 2. The use of Epicurus’ philosophy for any kind of politics would be inimical to one of the foundations of his thought. Epicurus’ unequivocal council to his followers was to avoid politics altogether and devote themselves to individual development, with like-minded friends and, ideally, within a community, what was called in the ancient world a hairesis (a school) and, noticeably, where we derive our word heretic. We are left with one possible choice among others: to become involved in the on-going and increasingly serious antagonisms of the times; or, like Epicureans and others, withdraw into a heretical existence with friends. 33  Epicurus. Vatican Sayings 58.

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In the end, the term “materialist” for Epicurus is much too reductive and can, in fact, be misleading. What Epicurus represents, in our cursory examination of the ancient world’s philosophical developments, is the persistence of the therapeutic and the scientific and its influence on Badiou’s philosophy. This has been one of his leading purposes since Being and Event when, in relation to his discussion of Pascal in Meditation 21, he summarizes, in an exemplary way, the shift away from the critical to the affirmative. “What I admire more than anything in Pascal is the effort, amidst difficult circumstances, to go against the flow; not in the reactive sense of the term, but in order to invent modern forms of an ancient conviction” (BE 234). The return to the ancient world with a connection to Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus has been one way to turn away from critical theory and negation and instead look at the resources Badiou has drawn from to establish the many components of his philosophy. A few more will confirm the disposition and be a contribution to presenting Badiou’s complicated truths—which are made up of so many parts (moving parts, as it were) that a reader has to first deliberate on the disparity of material and, ultimately, make a decision as to what matters most. The dilemmas are in no way intended to be part of a “critique.” On the contrary, to make the dilemmas evident may, by the end, lead to the will towards a systematic presentation of what is most worthwhile about his thought for our present. Can modernity be reinvented by turning to the classical past? Have we rushed too quickly into the presumption of the “post-modern” and missed some of the most important of lessons to be learned and lived—and, perhaps not surprisingly, as we continue to suffer both from a profound forgetting and from the burdens of historical consciousness Nietzsche warned us about in his Untimely Meditations?

3  Sovereignty of the Concept34 At the end of Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou concludes with one of his most impassioned and clearest presentations of the meaning of the generic, the multiple, and the event as exemplified by the matheme. 34  An appropriate way to determine what the implications are for the sovereignty of the concept is to add one comment from Badiou on Pascal. To my mind, there is no more important statement in the whole of Being and Event than the one he makes for the individual Pascal and, therefore, for the inherent possibility of all subjects of being and truth to attain the same event in  themselves. “This immense writer transcended his time by means of  his militant vocation” (BE 226).

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Concerning being qua being, we will hold that mathematics historically constitutes the only possible thinking, inasmuch as it is the infinite inscription of the pure multiple, of the predicateless multiple in the empty potency of the letter, and that is essential to what is given and grasped in its presentation. Mathematics is actual ontology. (MP 108)

Still, as is so often the case, the reader cannot escape a lingering impression, even at the conclusion of his first of two manifestos. Thus far, the argument has been accepted; the ontology of mathematics will not be, given his argument, controversial or unacceptable, in part because the specificity of his mathematical example cannot be easily self-contained, not when “every truth is without an object” (MP 91). The matheme, in other words, corresponds to his understanding of the Platonic idea. Can the matheme, then, be a principle of science? Badiou himself raises his own objections. To keep them in mind has been constant. The idea, however it may be presented, cannot do without the ever-necessary witness and testimony. The matheme/science relation is set closely aside for a moment in order to examine what Badiou has called the sovereignty of the concept— an idea that, for us, has to recollect the earlier discussion on the sovereign subject of art: the amorous encounter of the two. The truth of love has its own uniqueness, as we’ll see. Once Badiou introduces the necessity of a disciple as an individual who can receive the transmission of a truth from the past and ensure its continuity, through fidelity, then the concept and the subject are mutually supporting truths. One could, given sufficient time and deliberation, compare the disciples of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (who have Biblical antecedents) and Badiou’s individual who receives a “trans-temporal” (SMP 129) truth. The use of the word disciple—the ancient mathetes, the student, who learns willingly—has been infrequent. It is now appropriate and an important supplement. A student and disciple has to accede to the idea as it is transmitted by a present or historical teacher and work within its possibilities, the ones for Badiou connecting antiquity and the present, the modern forms of ancient convictions as one way to retrieve abandoned or unrealized ways of thinking and life. In Conditions, Badiou writes about a transmission, from one historical point to any other, and stresses the acts of the one receiving it. There are two essential figures involved, as in the amorous encounter. No public is involved. In this instance, and in others, his reliance on the “we” cannot be taken into consideration. The many are irrelevant.

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Philosophy’s transmission has never been tied to the extension of a public, but instead to the restrained and unfigurable (infigurable) figure of the disciple. A disciple is one who undertakes to endure and coincide with the void of address. A disciple is one who knows that he does not form a public or constitute an audience but supports a transmission.” (C 28)

The statement will lead us back to the truth of art and the argument made on the transference between the origin of the individual who created a work of art and the one who, by looking (at a painting, e.g., and enacting an interpretative intervention, a configuration, and an incorporation), can perceive and even then begin to participate in a supplement to history. Can the same experience be duplicated in the infinite thought of the matheme? Does the idea of the matheme, soon to be defined as a “sovereign concept,” have the philosophical and therapeutic resources to transform the individual who commits to its reality? If so, can we, with some assurance, demonstrate how the idea of sovereignty (for the concept and for the subject) is intimate and acts as one other amorous encounter? The important presence of the disciple is necessary for Badiou’s philosophy to subsist, both on its own, and as the incorporation of a dynamic mix of ancient and modern thought. In so doing, the absolute fidelity to the subject, of truth, has and will not be forsaken—for any reason. An initial problem, our leading set of questions, has not been overcome. It does not seem entirely convincing that Badiou supports science, as a whole, with its different disciplines and its many uses, many of them determined both by their inner logic and by their use-value, while presenting the infinity of the matheme and its incorporation into an immortal subject. Can a philosopher, influenced by Badiou, actually support a natural science like biology and include it as a truth similar to the matheme? That Badiou calls biology “that wild empiricism disguised as science” (TW 16) is only one comment that could be extended and be the basis of his withdrawal from the findings of science insofar as they determine a conception of human life, a terrestrial existence that does not seem at all compatible with the infinite matheme and the immortal subject as someone who represents and furthers philosophical convictions. The logos of bios is but one conception of life. It is veridical; but is it true in Badiou’s sense? The intricacies of biology as a condition of existence have no exclusive bearing on being, nor on a quasi-mechanical process of change in terms of adaptation to conditions of nourishment and survival. Biology is true

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insofar as it outlines the conditions of human animality; its principles are irreducible. This is a version of existence, a description of the lowest common denominator of the human animal in a natural process of evolution. But is it life when biology allows for a too-involved relation with matter and produced objects—for example, of consumption? The distinction (a reader will, or not, admit—the decision will make all the difference) has nothing to do with the facts. Existential being and terrestrial biology are, from Badiou’s perspective, only marginally related as veridical truths and confirmed by empirical observation and reasoning. Biology is real. Is it true in Badiou’s sense when his confrontation with matter as defined by capital is constant? “What I’m trying to uphold is that the authentic life is a life marked by the idea” (SMP 124). For the time being, the “life-­ science” of biology will be kept in mind and deferred for a few moments. Before arriving at a consideration of one exemplary science, previous arguments need to be stressed in terms of their unity. The transmission and transference, once it has been presented to an individual source and a disciple (making real a sovereign concept in the world) the relationship requires more attention. What “transmission” does the disciple ensure? Once again, the individual subject of truth, here the disciple, is the one who affirms the event. “Lacking any ontological status, the event in Badiou is instead linked to a rigorous conception of subjectivity, the subject being the sole instance capable of ‘naming’ the event and maintaining a fidelity to it through the declaration of an axiom.”35 The reader will by now have recognized my affinity to individuals who are connected to Badiou because of the responsibility he expects from the acts of fidelity. Truth cannot be impersonal. Badiou’s personal disclosures, the specifically therapeutic ones, are revealing since they are autobiographical and express a memorable experience that results from a perception, above all, about himself and his own acts of fidelity. Plato is a constant. Two others should be noticed because he shows faith in Epicureanism—and, therefore, to the interest in physiologia on the one hand as the thought of an independent thinker and, on the other, the affirmation of philosophia being dedicated to human life, to the good and the true and the psychologically healthy. Badiou’s fidelities are here emphasized. So that the word and trust of the disciple should not be misunderstood, Badiou writes: “The real law of the discourse remains constructive and rational argument, such as Lucretius receives from  Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 289.

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Epicurus” (IT 81).36 A genealogy of fidelity can now be specific. Badiou gives us one historical example. The transmission from a master to a disciple who then commits to his or her fidelity ensures that the temporally present will not be singled out. The great Roman poet/philosopher receives a constructive and rational argument from Epicurus and, in his On the Nature of Things, expresses its continuity. Fidelity was crucial to him, as a substitute for metaphysical faith. Lucretius was the poet/philosopher of human fidelity as opposed to divine faith. Writing with a look back at superstition, Lucretius writes: “a man of Greece [Epicurus] was the first that dared to uplift mortal eyes against her, the first to make a stand against her; for neither fables of the gods could quell him, nor thunderbolts, nor heaven with menacing roar, but all the more they goaded the eager courage of the soul, so that he should desire, first of all men, to shatter the confining bars of nature’s gates.”37 For anyone who has been too comfortable about atomic materialism as it concerns Epicurus and Lucretius, the poet’s concluding remark, repeated on many occasions in his poem, can be singled out. Epicurus is a thinker who defies the polis as a community made up of the consensus of the many. But the more important statement (much more unique than a merely political one) is the ability to shatter the confining bars of nature’s gates. These are not the words of a materialist at all. Epicurean philosophy includes in its comprehensive view one aspect in its study of physiologia. “Science,” transcending superstition, is only the first step in another overcoming—the determined limits of the natural world as conceived and perpetuated, socially and politically. Epicurean philosophy is simultaneously committed to transcending certain conceptions of nature and history and to thereby re-affirm, as its continuous project, the individual human being as pneuma, spirit. Where does that leave us in the examination of the truth of science and for us as readers of Badiou who calls himself “a faithful follower of Lucretius” (TW 108)? Another argument will be instructive and complimentary, beginning with the concluding affirmation at the end of the chapter “Sciences” in Philosophy and the Event. Badiou takes us back to the ancient world again and to origins whose consequences are operative now in the present. 36  We should note that Badiou never makes the same claim for Plato’s relationship to Socrates. 37  Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Tr. W.H. D. Rouse. Revised by Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1924 and 1975, 9, my emphasis.

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The philosopher can and must love his mathematical world where the concept is so pure and so strong that it renders intuition ridiculous. It was already the case in ancient Greece that the discovery of irrational numbers rendered ridiculous the banal intuition of what a number was. This kind of sovereignty of the concept is like the mathematical, and hence the ontological, image of what Plato calls an Idea. (PE 104, my emphasis)

The philosophical argument, as a principle to live by, is accepted. The “sovereignty of the concept” also grounds the sovereignty of the subject—who will be proclaimed infinite. The human is lived, materially, and thought, infinitely. The infinite matheme and the immortal subject are one and the same; and that is the reason for the existing dilemma between science and the generic truth of the matheme. The idea, for Badiou, has to be transferred into a disposition of being. Intuition, as perception of the world, of external reality (as human-made and finite), does not encompass the real. To make intuition or perception “ridiculous” is not to dismiss the reality of the natural world—although certain philosophical inclinations are moving in that extreme direction, and with affirmations about the nature of physical reality and its laws (in the universe) far more uncertain than in the previous confidence in any absolutes. The sovereignty earlier rejected for the artist is now re-introduced into the truth of the matheme. Can we then unify the idea of the sovereign concept and the genius as the individual who has the idea and transmits it to others? Is there a process in time essentially moved by such a relationship between one and one—the generative power of the genius and the resulting idea, sovereign concept, transmission, disciple, and fidelity as it moves through history by a unique inheritance? We can begin to see how Badiou’s foundational principles in mathematics are to be transferred, affectively, into an idea on how to live, not just think about this or that problem, with numbers and letters and figures as explanatory devices, scientific or otherwise. The concept of the mathematical, more than its numerical or propositional principles, is not ultimately its most important element. If, as one of our arguments indicated, the mathematical was for Badiou always related, from its classical origins to its perpetual, infinite contribution to a certain kind of life, once he brings up a point that has become much more important as of late can be mentioned. Our first indication of the idea of joy will not be the only one. “It is with joy that one must receive the fact that the destiny of every situation

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is the infinite manifold of sets” (Br 30). The matheme, as a therapeutic idea (with consequences for joy, no less) remains effective in the whole of Badiou’s thought, as part of what he has deemed, several times, a “program.” One of the problems that arises, within the matheme and any relation it might have to science proper, is its reducibility to a manufactured world—which is one reason why Badiou aims at a program of philosophy that is “at the same time, more modest, more remote from the world and more descriptive” (IT 42). More remote from the world, and so consistent with the temptation of the Epicurean withdrawal, which is understandable given the instrumental uses of ideas. Philosophically, someone who has accepted the distinction between the pure concept and seen through the “ridiculous intuition” should then be prepared to live his or her life according to a principle. Badiou has no hesitation in calling it a Pascalian wager. The conviction is axiomatic and allows for a dedication to a certain way of life. “Only an interpretative intervention can declare that an event is presented in a situation” (BE 190). The interpretation, by the subject of truth, does not get caught up in the intuition of what is given (certainly not by others, however laudable their values may be)—which, indeed, is all too often “ridiculous.” Does the sovereign concept not lead, at the same time, to the sovereignty of the individual and the one humanist idea that can never be forsaken: the essence of the free human being who will, by the end of our examination, be capable to exercising his and her free intelligence? How science, as a whole, conditions philosophy will only be thought about as a peripheral problem. There are more immediate interests to deal with as we concentrate on the history of the transmission of an idea to a disciple. “Badiou is above all,” Jason Barker writes, “a mathematical philosopher, and no serious understanding of his work could bypass its scientific foundations.”38 The introductory statement seems to be wholly uncontroversial. The problem remains how the connection between mathematics and science remains binding; or, if at some point, we can divide one from the other because of the inherent difference between the matheme as an idea and the interests of science in objects. The singularity of the idea of the matheme makes it incompatible with the wide-ranging use of science insofar as it must deal with the materialism of the world and with a certain use-value. Science generates socio-economic drives. Does  Barker, Jason. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2002, 8.

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mathematics and science, the latter representative of many different kinds of disciplines, share a commonality rigorous enough to be identified with each other? As far as a reader can tell, the association between two different disciplines, the ideality of the mathematics of most interest to Badiou (i.e., set-theory) and any science whose object of concern is an aspect of the material world, is hardly compatible. An immediate disjunction between the ideal of the matheme and the materiality of science raises a problem. Once Badiou makes this one affirmation, “I think that the power of mathematics lies in its never letting itself be limited by the finitude of our intuition” (PE 103), confirming an ancient conviction, it immediately becomes independent from the sciences that are inseparable from their objects. Stated otherwise and from out of the implications of Badiou’s thought, the matheme is infinite, science is wholly and irremediably finite and determined by the objects of its interest in the material world—insofar as its instruments (e.g., in physics and astronomy) can give us knowledge and information about the universe. Despite one conclusion, however (and the argument of the infinity of the sovereign concept as opposed to the finite intuition of objective science), Badiou made a fateful decision, foregoing the tranquility of the purely mathematical and its therapy for a necessary involvement with politics. Ultimately, Badiou parts ways with Epicurus and Lucretius, which means that a follower of Epicurus has to also part ways with Badiou. A question for the reader: are we then led to make a decision—in short, and with one example, torn between the Socratic one of being a gad-fly in the midst of the city and with an ultimate risk? Or is it preferable to be a classical Epicurean and withdraw from the world and assume the position of hermit and recluse from the city and developing relationships only with like-minded friends? Is the tranquil life of a contemplative to be chosen over the disparity of social and political acts? There are many decisions offered. A recent one strikes me as being especially important. The responses to Badiou, mine and others, add one more element to the discussion as a whole. Once we subtract ourselves from the rigors of the mathematical arguments and accept Badiou’s premise that mathematics is ontology, then what its formalism does is reveal another aspect of the human situation. The argument made by Alexander Diones seems to me to have revealed a crucial aspect of Badiou’s thought. He writes: “there are three dimensions to the politics of Badiou’s mathematical ontology:

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formalism, subjectivity, and judgment.”39 In so writing, Diones presents us with perhaps the most serious dilemma of all—between the personal judgment of the subject and the group psychology of politics, sovereignty, and collectivity. As we look ahead and anticipate the truth of politics, and its disjunctions most especially in the exhibition of its psycho-politics, the impression of a widening separation is hard to suppress. Except that once again, as always, one affirmation continues to be made and with as many interlocutors as are available who continue to repeat and confirm this one truth. “Not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act with fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in.”40 This would seem to be true in the encounter with Badiou’s philosophy. Remembering what he wrote at the beginning of Theory of the Subject about his testimony, does he lead us to a confirmation of his commitment to truth? Or are we suspended by uncertainty, in order not to relieve ourselves of the assumed responsibility? There are many; some have not been mentioned because they are, like techno-scientism, omnipresent. Yet at this point, one more problem will be analyzed. We began with the difficulty of deciding whether the matheme was, in principle and for its effects, scientific. The decision of a subject was crucial. By mentioning one science above all, which today enjoys a certain privilege since biology, as the science of bios, defines life, we can begin to provisionally answer the leading question. The matheme as an idea (a Platonic idea for Badiou) and science may be wholly incompatible. Once we then introduce one science—first, biology, then one of its ambitious developments, neurobiology—the schism between the matheme and an empirical attention to the brain may be too far apart to settle. 39  Diones, Alexander W. “On Logic and the Theory of Ensembles: Formalism and Alain Badiou’s Experience of Politics,” 950–972 Theory and Event, Vol. 20, Iss. 4, Oct. 2017, 951. The formalism, then, grounds something that, for the philosopher, is more important than numbers. It leads to one more support for subjectivity and the one element that no one, as far as I know, had mentioned before as Diones does, that is, the importance of judgment. This is one occasion to affirm how careful, unique readings are themselves supplements in Badiou’s sense. One more important point. Although my attachment to the idea of conviction is unwavering, Diones prefers another. He mentions “Badiou’s style of confidence” and how, as he reads it, this “con-fidence” is a “fidelity in common.” I understand this to be one more way to seeing the importance of the transference of thought. 40  Feltham, Oliver and Clemens, Justin. “An Introducion to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,” in their translation and edited Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2005, 5.

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“Mathematics is nothing other than the human history of eternity” (C 112). How can we possibly reconcile Badiou’s foundational belief in the immanent infinite (which is constant) and the historical vagaries of evolutionary biology most especially as it has transformed the development of the brain? The mathematical, the philosophical, the therapeutic: they have been all unified, from the ancient world, and transmitted to the present as guiding ideas, as sovereign concepts, for the disciple to continue to make real and active and, coupled with thoughts and practices, contribute to the good life. Despite the connection between Pythagorean thought and Badiou, one restraint was necessary. To include any specifically theological reflections, which are most prominent in his interactions with Saint Paul, would have mandated a long digression and therefore had to be omitted.41 Others have pursued this one line of examination. Roland Boer has noticed a “tension” in Badiou’s thought. “The shape of that tension that interests me most is between the triumphant banishing of theology via mathematics and its perpetual recurrence in his thought.”42 Owing to the procedures he himself put into effect, in Being and Event and after, an odd relationship has been established. Hollis Phelps has argued that “Badiou’s ontology sees no place for theology,”43 and yet one outcome of his ontology as it has been established by mathematics has consequences that are not always limited to a discipline as it has been traditionally conceived. The truth insinuates itself into many different and interrelated ideas of the human, however incommensurable they may appear. Badiou’s ontology has no place for the thought of the One or God. Still, there is no surprise (or a dilemma either) when some thinkers have been willing to make active Badiou’s mathematical ideas with the ones he adopted from Saint Paul and his particular reading of the gospels. There are outstanding questions in Badiou’s thought that remain to be examined and as outcomes of his free

 A follow-up work is now in progress called Modern Forms of Ancient Convictions.  Boer, Roland. Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology, II. Leiden: Brill, 2009, 155. Ch. 6 is called “The Fables of Alain Badiou.” 43  Phelps, Hollis. “Badiou, Keyser, and the Theo-mathematics of the Infinite, 49–63 Theology and Science, 12.1 (2014), 61. 41 42

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use of specifically Christian concepts (the trinity being but one) and transformed in Badiou’s unique thinking.44 Instead of proceeding with one possible examination, the theological, it will serve our chosen topic of science much better if we go, as it were, in the opposite direction and head towards the science of biology and, further still, neurobiology. One statement can be introductory. “Access to being and truth presupposed the destitution of the category of object as an organic form of presentation. The object may well be a category of knowledge, it still hinders the post-eventful production of truths” (MP 91). The implications of Badiou’s arguments are far-reaching. Whether science can still be included in his definition of truth remains suspended. The infinity of the matheme and the immortality of the subject have been supported. The classical origins of philosophy, and its psychotherapeutic concerns, can now be compared with, arguably, the single most important scientific discovery of modernity and the consequences, for thought and life, of evolutionary biology—with questions and an admission. “Is truth what comes to being or what unfolds in being? We remain divided” (TW 108). Can the division be overcome by reflecting more generously on the subject of truth and once again ground being in human interiority and on the double-nature, first articulated by Nietzsche, of inspiration and revelation?

4   Biology or the True Life The return to Badiou’s origins of the truth of science and the matheme is stated by him, in In Praise of Mathematics, for a specific, metaphysical reason. The existence of God, as a regulative idea, has been an enduring problem—for the absolute he proposes to guarantee with the matheme instead. “Right from Being and Event (first published in 1988), I thus proposed, in order to reach the goal, to preserve the absoluteness of truths without having recourse to God, and to simply incorporate set theory, as 44  The theological work undertaken by Badiou is only mentioned here, in passing, to highlight how he has been on the whole hostile to biology (and, as we’ll see, to neurobiology even more) but at many different points receptive to the ideas, and the metaphors, of Judaism and Christianity. As early as Theory of the Subject, he writes: “it is only through a topological reading of the Testaments, dissolving the letter of the text into the figures that overflow it, that one can discover that these Scriptures are an exception to the world” (TS 301). The quote is significant for also referring us back to a prior quote on the incompleteness of the letter.

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a founding mathematical condition, into philosophical reflection” (IPM 78). He would do so under increasing pressure when all the consequences of the matheme and science were considered. The opposition is a crucial one: mathematics instead of God, which is one reason, as more than one commentator has noted, that the matheme and the theological are not always, strictly, separated. In the beginning of Being and Event, Badiou writes: Strictly speaking, mathematics presents nothing, without constituting for all that an empty game, because not having anything to present, besides presentation itself—which is to say the Multiple—and thereby never adopting the form of the object, such is certainly a condition of all discourse on being qua being. (BE 7)

This one superlative opening makes Badiou at once the revivalist of a certain kind of metaphysical thinking and, after all the announcements of the end of philosophy, concentrating on precisely the one unavoidable obstacle to a renewed conception of life—our inability to become at least partly autonomous from a conception and a relation to objects or historical events. It is no exaggeration to highlight this one project as foundational. In many ways, the matheme/science relation is under strain, as a unity, because the purity of one does not remain unaffected by the instrumentalization of the other. This is one of the reasons that Baki Burhanuddin has clarified an argument that makes it easier to see the separation between mathematics and science. Mathematics has no proper object to draw its attention to the world. Mathematics is ontology for Badiou; and yet a clarification of his meaning is necessary. “Being is essentially multiple, which is not the same as claiming that Being is essentially the mathematical set. He distinguishes between the inconsistent multiplicity of Being and the consistent multiplicity of sets.”45 His distinction is maintained, but the consequence of the idea remains in effect. Whether Badiou can sustain an argument and transform the thought of the matheme into a disposition of being has been, in part, the main concern here irrespective of its inclusion in the theme of science. Can the 45  Burhanuddin, Baki. Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 24.

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infinity of the matheme, in other words, be incorporated into the being of everyday life affectively, and be perceived with the same impression of a painting—or more? Can the matheme be intuited sufficiently to effect life? Edging towards phenomenology, as he did earlier by calling upon the language of “intuition,” Badiou has to make the matheme move from an idea to its incorporation into a life and become an affect and dynamically operative. The matheme is pure, powerful, and unconstrained by perception of the physical world. It appears to be the one indication of the infinite in human beings. Human interiority is infinite and revelatory. He could have easily used the mathematics of the spirit as a phrase; the religious echo is hard to suppress since, for the Pythagoreans, no division could exist between what later came to be called the quadrivium (mathematics, geometry, astronomy, music) as a curriculum of paideia and the most therapeutic way to live life in harmony with the whole. Badiou’s statements are perhaps more superlative when invoking the mathematical than with any other thought. “Mathematics is nothing other than the human history of eternity” (C 112). That reality (if it has been—if it is) has been squandered for the safety of the animal finite, one reason it deserves to be repeated as an affirmation to believe in. The philosophical argument can be fully supported in order to bring it in proximity, to unsettle, the solidity of the human history of finitude. The matheme is the infinite in human beings that has to be made actual in the world of objects. Have things prevented us, as societies motivated by material security, from more full pursuing ideas? Is the real, as in one way an obstacle, insurmountable? In itself, the answer has to be no; in human beings is where the problem ultimately lies. Human animality is a condition of terrestrial existence; the facts are irreducible, at least for the time being and as it concerns, for example, human procreation as opposed to scientific engineering. Despite our certainties (about evolution, e.g.), Badiou has made comments that leave us with lingering questions, and rightly so. “Darwinism makes it possible to eliminate creationism, but it hasn’t as yet constituted a theorized science of the evolution of biological forms … What life is hasn’t been able to be set out—it remains an extremely elusive concept” (PE 95). The concept of life cannot, in any way, restrain the human unless an elaborate, repeated, and historical process is imposed on it as a matter of necessity. When eternity has been presented as an immanent reality, human beings are confronted with a choice: to continue to live a largely animal existence and with an ever-increasing tie to specific objects (increasingly made available through techno-science and capital and

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various modes of advertisement and promotion) or begin to think what another form of existence could be. Independence and withdrawal from one aspect of the world is relatively straightforward. The matheme renders the biological, conceptually, vulnerable to its uses in the actual human world. There has never been a more omnipresent confrontation in the world: on the one hand, the subject, and on the other, as he has been made to conform to a certain conception of reality over and above biological realities. The made-up world has been protected, in the age of capital and techne, by the ubiquity of things deemed necessary. Who, today, does not live without a “smart” phone in their pockets or, much more closely, in the palm of their hand? The belief in the matheme and science as infinite and revolutionary is suppressed, without any effort, by the new gadgets of the world and what they have ordered for the supposed benefit of all. Arguments for the support of its contributions are understandable. The infinite, however, has to be disavowed and substituted with the infinite pleasure of the constantly renewable image or the access to a certain tempo of life, the increased speed of existence. The matheme becomes all the more necessary today. But as Badiou admits, its reality does not exist ideally; the infinite is continually undermined by a specific organization of materiality that informs the human of a developing deception: their techno-transcendence. A few words on techno-science are not wasted; they are added here to a previous reference. The analysis could in principle lead to a new, almost inexhaustible direction of analysis. More than any political argument, more than all the critical theory of the last half-­century, one requirement today would amount to nothing more than a decision and an act. We have given ourselves the illusion of being modern and therefore being free from superstition. But how will we become free from the growing complicity between capital and techno-science that confirms, in opposition to our humanity, our modern sophistication and arrogant independence from an archaic past? There are even more ambitious ideas being promoted that are nothing less than a confrontation with the physical conditions of existence. The two points can remain with us the rest of the way: one, how knowledge of mathematics will be able to determine our relation to things and, two, find ourselves better able to know who we are—as Badiou has done with the matheme as the ontological principle of the infinite for human beings. There is little incentive now to argue for the matheme/science relation when the purity of one and the capital instrumentalization of the other are inimical to each other and metaphysically at opposite ends of the

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reality spectrum. We have not wavered from the belief that, as Paul Livingston argues, Badiou’s formalism renders “the infinite mathematically (and hence, ontologically) thinkable.”46 Thinking the infinite has not been the issue. “Thought can, and indeed must,” Graham Priest asserts, “think beyond its own limits.”47 The problem, which ultimately is the manufactured limits of the finite, comes down to recognizing how finitude has been installed in the world and if, once the limits are recognized, more than just a few will work towards making the infinite an actuality. The problem has never been the limits of thought; the problem has always been the limits of being as an imposition—that is, recognizing the difference between the biology of terrestrial existence and how the human condition has been circumscribed, as a matter of necessity, by culture or civilization. Not surprisingly, some have now begun to witness how the ambitions of secularism (with that overwhelming symbol given to us by Nietzsche on the death of God—and what we think, mistakenly, it means) are leading to most unexpected consequences. Gilles Deleuze, following Nietzsche’s theme, wrote on the fate of the human: “when, no longer in need of an external authority, he denies himself what was denied him and spontaneously takes on the policing and the burdens that he no longer thinks comes from the outside.”48 Many have repeated a similar observation and with its many different aspects. The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of commodities. Waves of enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all the media of communication, are thus propagated with lightning speed.”49

The problems of the ubiquity of techno-science are well known. The bind between a certain kind of “fervor” and its association to “policing” 46  Livingston, Paul M. “Badiou and the Consequences of Formalism,” 131–150 Cosmos and History, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, 133. 47  Priest, Graham. “The Limits of Thought—and Beyond,” 361–370 Mind, Vol. 100, no. 2 (Jul. 1991), 369. 48  Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Tr. Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books, 2005, 72. 49  Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983, unpaginated publication, section 67, my emphasis.

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has resonances from the ancient world. The phenomenology of idolatry has become a modern phenomenon. A modern, Byung-Chul Han, echoes the ancient. “Every dispositive—every technology or technique of domination—brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate.”50 Their cognitive effects are not altering in any discernible way the making of a world connected to techno-gadgets. In an interview when his interlocutor, who mentioned “abstract mathematics, and not technologies”—a difference Badiou has many times upheld— René Girard continued his answer: “the more science develops, the more the mutually exclusive realms of technology and science tend to bleed into each other.”51 There are, however, more important consequences of the science/technology relation; and it has been mentioned when objects of consumption are described as “devotional” and filled with a kind of “religious fervor.” Is the fetish of the object still adequate as a form of analysis? Or are the new conditions in the 21st century forcing us to witness a new relation to the made-up world? The matheme and science, once we separate them (even provisionally) comes about from Badiou’s own argument. “This is why, when I constantly stress the triplet of being, the subject and truth, what’s at issue is its effective appearance or observable action in the world since this is what scientism (which knows only the naturalness of object, never the immortality of subjects) … seek to deny exists” (SMP 119). By his own account, and at quite a few different points, the subject (our still present individual as an immortal) has been denigrated by the world to become a servant of things; or, equally troubling, by the power of delusions to order a new world, physically and otherwise. Badiou’s thesis in Logics of Worlds has not yet had its total effects; more time will be required for its incorporation. In many ways, we remain behind his transmission that life, as defined by biology and, in complicity with capital and technology, has reduced us to a state of dependent animality, the “herd” Nietzsche so excoriated for its submission. Badiou therefore writes, with the stress on “becoming:” “Through the discipline demanded by participating in truth, the human animal will be accorded the chance—whose barrenness is of little significance—of an Immortal becoming” (LW 43). The only question remains. How? How does philosophy, or thought in 50  Han, Byung Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Tr. Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2017, 12, my emphasis. 51  Girard, René. When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer. Tr. Trevor Cribben Merrill. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2014, 51.

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the Humanities, respond to this possibility, the becoming immortal of the human, and immanently in order to determine the direction of thought and life into the century? The previous dilemmas are only multiplying despite the clear-sighted vision of a possible future. One optimistic view, expressed with ever more confidence in a particular biological science, has captivated the imagination of a few philosophers in addition to the individuals working in laboratories or fields or examination rooms. The contemporary developments of neurobiology are making a few philosophers enthusiastic and confident in the success of a certain kind of knowledge. Others, like Markus Gabriel, are skeptical and more than prudent—and ultimately philosophically unmoved by any new findings of the scientific sort. Biology is not a science like others. It has been, since the 19th century and for obvious reasons, predominant as a form of thought. Approaching the end of the section on science as a generic truth presents us with one final topic—on the intersection of biology and its concentration on that most unique of objects: the brain. Can we add, using a most unusual duo (the brain and God) a statement from Logics of Worlds as an analogy? “I need neither God nor the divine. I believe that it is here and now that we rouse or resurrect ourselves as Immortals” (LW 447). Badiou would be the first to admit that he has not often been thorough in the examination of any science in particular—with, perhaps, one exception that for us has to be of utmost importance. This has nothing to do, of course, with any opposition to the facts and proofs of evolutionary biology. These are entirely different matters and not relevant. The axioms of philosophy, for life, are unfazed by any counter-reality proposed by science. Origins or development of life, as such, as a planetary phenomenon, are in this context uninteresting. Life, as lived, is the issue. How has life been ordered, and for what reasons, is the last, open-ended question, and one that will remain with us throughout. Biology, for one, will hold our attention, for its claim it has on the “meaning of life.”52 The assertion requires modification and its own limit. 52  That expression, so old, the answer to it so varied, can be mentioned here as an introduction to a few thoughts to come near the conclusion of the section on science, evolutionary biology, and life and, in part, as a response to Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Dennett might have considered adding Scientific in front of Meaning. This is not intended as an off-the-cuff remark. Still, there is not one proof of Darwin’s scientific theories that is in any way a problem. Let us simply concede and say they are true. Whether they are meaningful for life, today, is a total other story.

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One response by Michel Henry takes us directly to the matter at hand. The work in question, Barbarism, announces what is at stake. Henry’s visceral responses, as motivated as Badiou’s and with the same sense of frustration, reflects on the human-made world and its objectivity and finds it limited by a particular characteristic. One human act is necessary: “entering into life and by finding in it the essence that excludes every exteriority from it, because it excludes every relation to the object, every intentionality, and every ek-stasis from itself.”53 Such an undertaking and a commitment has been presented by Badiou; it is nothing other than the subject of truth entering into a relation with an event, incorporating it into oneself as an ontological condition and then being perpetually aware of the infringement of the made world on human interiority, on the subject. Life, philosophically understood, can hardly be the subject of biology’s attention. Does one want to live according to the dictates of objects as they have been manufactured and presented in the world—including, today, the ubiquity of what Marshall McLuhan called “gadgets,”54 along with their inaestheticizing images—or can another idea of the human recollected from the ancients and from Badiou’s alternative, that is, to live as an immortal, be made possible, for one certainly, and perhaps for a few more. The alternative is not remotely a far-fetched or unattainable ideal. The obstacles are, however, epochal. It is here, by way of a conclusion and in the transition towards the truth of love, that another dilemma can be raised and one indicative of the times. When we now add one more, on the conviction of the infinity of the matheme against the truth ambitions of neurobiology, we have reached a truly modern juncture and one to add to the rest of the arguments as we proceed towards our conclusion. For if Badiou can be understood in all his daring and that “the common desire on the basis of which psychoanalysis and philosophy can enter into discussion is the desire of the matheme”

 Henry, Michel. Barbarism. Tr. Scott Davidson. London: Continuum, 2012, 12, my emphasis. 54  McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1964. The specific reference is to Chapter Four. “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis.” 53

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(IT 68),55 we are witnesses to the whole of Badiou’s project and, more importantly, its repercussions for us and for life. When he then makes the philosophically interrelated extension towards the matheme and its possible confluence with psychoanalysis, then the tendency for me would be to make an emphatic argument—as does Badiou. One division can be added to all the rest. As an axiomatic decision—and, admittedly, forsaking the findings of contemporary researchers—there can be no reconciliation, as a matter or principle, between psychoanalysis and neurobiology, effectively placing Freud’s discipline (and his disciples) on the side of the spirit instead of the side of science. The pursuit of genericity in general and, here, science in particular, has led us from the purity of the matheme to the pragmatic application of the scientific world in technology and ordered by capital. Badiou’s sense of the terror, betrayal, and disaster of the manipulation of his generic truths can be used, again, as one last reminder of “a technologized scientism, the crowning glory of which is the visualization of stereoscopic brains in colour” (SMP 5). The biology of the brain and its technological image is infinitely distant from Plato’s monoeides and, since Badiou has shown so much fidelity to him, it seems fitting to turn to love, in the guise of eros or agape and of an unimaginable love, to see how far another generic truth can fulfill in us. Before turning to love, we should point out how Badiou’s Second Manifesto for Philosophy begins and ends with a reference to the reduction of what the ancients called psyche and pneuma (the spirit—in the world and in human beings) and the world today has managed to order according to an object, “namely, a sort of scientism stipulating the mind must be naturalized and studied according to the experimental protocols of neurology” (SMP 118). The structure of his second manifesto is clear, its force directed at one concern overall: just as the problem of life had been, in many cases, handled as an object—according to the 55  The continuing presence of psychoanalysis in Badiou’s thought can now be brought into relation with theology and in the most opportune section—on science. It has been my intention from the start not to include the foundations of psychoanalysis for Badiou’s thought and, at a certain point, the personal experience of a necessity—to write on St. Paul and with arguments that have still not been completely presented, in themselves, or for their consequences. It now seems to me that there are (at least) two projects that need to be addressed in Badiou’s philosophy: 1) the dilemma of four truths and 2) the specific relation between psychoanalysis and St. Paul’s letters. One argument, in the form of a question, can be stated: what happens when St. Paul is read as a thinker of the unconscious (and not morality) and when the trinitarian concepts of grace, resurrection, and immortality are immanent?

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organization of biology, with all its categories—so too the spirit has been studied within the parameters of a thing. The enthusiasts of neurobiology and, for instance, the brain’s “plasticity” seem to be in a curious historical position. Recently, attempts have been made to advance thinking along the scientific lines of neurobiology. But to be open ended, someone turning in this direction has not completed the work. Time will tell whether Catherine Malabou’s philosophical work, for one, continues or meets a cul de sac. Whether the biological, the technological, and lived experience of the human can be reconciled for the benefit of a certain kind of life (Badiou would call it true and good) remains in its formative stages. The exaggerated claims or confidence in the science of neurobiology and its anticipation of rendering the brain translucent and mediated by techno-images and machinery will not affect how philosophy can still conceive of the human to come outside all positivistic principles.56 A turning point can be discerned. Is there anything more inimical than neurobiology and the immortal subject? Or, to turn to a wider interest, are the movements within scientific disciplines enough to displace human immortality from its pre-eminent position as it was first conceived and defended in the ancient world and once again supported, by Badiou, in Theory of the Subject? Adrian Johnston, for one, is adamant. He believes Badiou’s anti-­naturalism and his dismissive attitude to science is a severe deficit. The position is, wholly, based not at all on knowledge and on any sense of proof, verification, findings. Badiou has made a philosophical decision that has nothing to do with materialist confirmations. The axiom is not a matter of proof. The only philosophy that has ever mattered, outside of the propositions of logic and other regulative disciplines, is one wholly and uniquely dedicated to the human. Johnston presents an argument for the “brain’s plasticity” as “the component for the articulation of a truly materialist account of subjectivity.”57 Any discussion of the brain in any way related to human subjectivity, and the reduction to the materialist, is anathema to Badiou. The issue will remain a philosophical one, as it has been for responders such as Markus Gabriel and his own declaration about a philosophy of the 56  One reference is to Catherine Malabou’s Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. Tr. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 57  Johnston, Adrian. “What Matter(s) is Ontology: Alain Badiou, the Hebb-event, and the Materialism Spirit Within,” 27–49 Angelaki, Vol. 13, number 1, 2008, 27. Johnston believes that Badiou tries to uphold a “philosophically indefensible neglect of scientific knowledge regarding the brain,” 36.

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spirit, one without antecedents.58 All the proofs of science will do nothing to dissuade human beings from making decision about belief. There is simply no reconciling the plasticity of the brain, for all its promise and whatever its future benefits may be, to the belief in the psyche and the pneuma—a matter, for the ancients, of what “breath” is when it is internalized as more than a physical experience. Scientific proof does not sway; nothing definitive in its findings about the world or the human in terms of things and corporeality can ever lead to a conversion to empiricism. The 21st century will not be decided by any empiricisms without a firm response from the spirit. Life eludes all science. Ending with a response to Johnston makes the philosophical position clear. One hopes that the accusation of obscurantism would be unwarranted; if so, however, fidelity to Badiou will have extra motivations. The question of the brain and the spirit are never going to be reconciled—and for very good reasons. For the fidelity to the spirit to give way to the discourse of neuroscience and the brain would mean to abandon a specific belief in the human and live within the parameters of scientific research. We are faced, again, with a decision. How will we live? And what will we believe to make that life sustainable? Badiou takes us to the ancient convictions when philosophy had one concern, the one he addresses, and we will focus on at the end, of the “daunting” question (his quote) at the end of Logics of Worlds and “what is it to live?” In science, much more than art, the infinite was drawn back into securing the world for its control and utility. The beginning and ending of Badiou’s second manifesto both repeats the reason for writing his first one—to outline the persistence (I would add) of truths since antiquity— and how they have been ordered according to a predictable and unthreatening force. “To put things succinctly, let’s say that technology, culture, management and sex have taken up the generic place of science, art, politics, and love” (SMP 120-121). His language will become even more forceful; the four generic procedures of truth will be manipulated into becoming something other than themselves and, in the process, creating the conditions of terror, betrayal, and disaster—the threatening triplet prepared to eradicate truth if it serves the obsession with finitude and its 58  The reference is to I am not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-Fist Century. Tr. Christopher Turner. Cambridge, UK. Polity, 2017. The German Philosophie des Geistes is not to be abandoned to the singularity of a translation. “Philosophy of mind” can have a much too strict correlation with the analytic tradition of philosophy. There should be no hesiation in invoking the spirit as a philosophical concept.

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terrestrial security. Does love stand a chance, or will it be “caught between a contractual conception of the family and the libertine conception of sexuality” (SMP 120), the illusion, today, of an either/or defended by extreme sides. These are two problems Badiou will take up in his analysis of love in the world; and it will most certainly not be decided by any formulation of love in relation to the activities of the brain. Nietzsche can be called upon here, as a free thinker, to interject. “Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse?”59 As usual, Nietzsche leaves us with questions to answer, for ourselves. There can be no complacency on the matter. If Badiou is heeded, here at the point of a transition from a discipline to one of the fundamental essences of the human, love, then his comments are going to be directed at the classical political opposition, between conservative and radical, both ultimately shown to be complicit in the ever-growing domination of ethics as a substitute for politics. Badiou has no illusions. “There is also a terror of the matheme” (LW 45). Another terror will also be present in love and one visceral in its effects, destructive in its possessiveness.

59  Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Tr. With a commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. The quote comes in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” He adds: “the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science.”

CHAPTER 4

Love

Love confronts two enemies, essentially: safety guaranteed by an insurance policy and the comfort zone limited by regulated pleasures … Seen from this perspective, I really do think that love, in today’s world, is caught in this bind, in this vicious circle and is consequently under threat. I think it is the task of philosophy, as well as other fields, to rally to its defense. In Praise of Love

1   Love and the Confrontation with Enemies If several of the situations described thus far as dilemmas have never been explicitly mentioned, as such, by Badiou, in matters of love their threats become unavoidable and defined in uncompromising terms as a confrontation with enemies (from two opposite sides, both involved in a “vicious circle”) and with a spirited defense from philosophy; at times, his attitude feels like a counter-offensive. Badiou has been programmatic about philosophy since Theory of the Subject, the early work where so many of his commitment were first announced; they have not changed and, today, may be more serious than ever. The triad of being, the subject, and truth have never been abandoned; in love, they are represented first of all by the love of the Two. Coming to the defense of love, to support it against its various manipulations, from extremes, was one more necessary endeavor © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_4

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of Badiou’s thought and perhaps the truth most indicative of his aspirations. Philosophy has a particular kind of power: to be able to defend the human and the truth. Badiou does so with unwavering commitment. In one case, allowing himself a measure of irony, he writes: “I consider that in the situation sphere of the individual … love (if it exists, but various empirical signs attest that it does) is a generic procedure of fidelity” (BE 358). When any one or all four of the procedures of truth are under duress, it is only the independence of philosophy and its innumerable resources that can present a sturdy enough defense of truth and of the Two individuals. Love needs an ally, a representative who can speak in its name and because of the attacks it endures from all sides, the traditional and the “radical,” the conservative and the transgressive, each of them compelled by an ideological avarice to subsume reality into itself. Philo-­ sophia remains impelled by love—against hate, one that will again force us to deal with a pressing difficulty, one more intense than in other truths. After all, when enemies have been declared, how love enters the discussion is no easy matter. How does one devise an affirmative response to enemies of love who are motivated, with various explanations and rationalizations, by justified hate? Badiou is surely not about to “turn the other cheek.” If “philosophy imitates the matheme”1 (MP 142), then one of the obligations that philosophy has will be especially focused on love in order to bring itself (as infinite) towards a similar sense in what was earlier called the amorous encounter of art, the aesthetic brought to a different sensibility. In love, the amorous encounter will be an immediate transference, in the present, both emotional and physical. Can the same commitment to the matheme, as the infinite, be made in terms of love? Eleanor Kaufman believes that “of his four generic procedures (science, art, politics, love) Badiou dwells least on love.”2 Whether this is indeed the case will have to be examined more closely. Commentators, too, are not always as participatory as the topic demands; love is, without a doubt, the least discussed truth from those who have read Badiou. The exceptions are few. Calling, for example, Badiou’s truth of love “too prescriptive”3 stands out. The  The quote comes from “Definition of Philosophy.”  Kaufman, Eleanor. “Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan against Badiou),” 135–151 Diacritics, Vol. 32, Iss. 3/4, (Fall 2002), 148. 3  Enns, Diane, and Calcagno, Antonio. “Thinking about Love: An Introduction,” in their co-edited Thinking About Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2015, 2. 1 2

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critique does not match how love is articulated from out of the whole of Badiou’s philosophy. At this juncture, structurally half-way through the four truths for the subject, the moment seems to be right to see if an advancement in the thesis has been made and if, more importantly, the next two sections on love and politics can lead us to a possible resolution of the dilemma as a persistent concern. Love should be promising. If it will not grant us a resolution, perhaps nothing more and nothing less than a pause in the drive of our epoch will be achieved, a drive which has become far more compulsive than the withdrawal and hesitation of anything connected, at one time, with “anti-humanism.” Any claim as to Badiou’s “anti-humanist mathematical ontology”4 cannot be easily maintained, as an argument, when we consider how he has been most concerned with the human as an Immortal and the truth of being as infinite. Love surely remedies any anti-­humanism. How can love and the matheme be anti-humanist? If the matrix between mathematics and ontology is to have real relevance, it can only do so by supporting, by re-thinking, the nature of the human—which previously, in biology and in its neuro-variation, was deemed to be inadequate. We are not going far in saying that Badiou’s philosophy is true to its origins and founded on love, as he often reminds his readers. “Anyone who doesn’t take love as their starting-point will never discover what philosophy is about” (IPL 93). Too prescriptive? Starting out on the truth of love is not going to be straightforward. Philosophy, if conditioned by love, will also return the favor; the reciprocity in this case is constant, as is the most committed of transferential relationships. “Philosophy is that singular discipline of thought that has as its departure point the conviction that there are truths. From there, it is led towards an imperative, a vision of life. What is this vision? That which has value for human individuals, that which grants them a genuine life and orients their existence, is the participation within these truths” (PE 128). Human individuals, with a vision for a genuine life. Badiou has no hesitation here; he has been assured about the essential reality of individuals who, because of their fidelity, will make love true and actual and, perhaps, resilient enough to resist its contemporary degradation. In doing so, one predominant perspective will be challenged. Many believe that Badiou’s work “can only be fully appreciated if seen as a programmatic understanding of the failure of revolutionary politics, 4  Spencer, Joseph M. “Humanism and anti-humanism in the philosophy of Alain Badiou,” Appraisal, Vol. 9, Issue 2, March 2012, 33–39.

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supported by a rigorous onto-mathematic base.”5 From here, the “programmatic” emphasis on politics—so standard it has become expected— will be provisionally denied; and for reasons Badiou himself will present with an unsparing denunciation of our supposed values, the ones he does not hesitate in calling nihilistic. Badiou has dedicated himself to revealing the possibility of a genuine life (a good, a true, a happy life) through the love of philosophy. The proximity to affirmation is, however, suspended for a time. In order to properly defend love, from its enemies, Badiou can in this case be called a militant who sets himself the task of confronting who he calls “the terrorizing follower of the false event” (E 91). The accusation of “terrorist” is not made, one presumes, without due consideration. More disturbingly, however, is the figure of such a follower (different, extremely so, from his sense of a disciple) when ethics are invoked. Laurent Godmer has been one of the few not to be restrained when writing about Badiou’s Ethics. “Ethics is not opposed to Evil: It is actually perceived by Badiou as an Evil in itself. There lies the effective radicalism of Badiou’s posture in this book. In fact ethics seems a philosophical way of how injustice is maintained. 6 Ethics as injustice? We can isolate the thesis as well beyond the polemical; its declaration is, to say the least, philosophically unexpected. The enemies are, for Godmer, the new ethicists of the 21st century, those who are programmatically revising the nature of the real within neoliberal societies and in ways that are not restricted to the market and the economy. Does it seem counter-intuitive to begin to analyze Badiou’s truth of love in a writing devoted, not without signs of extreme emotion (disappointment, frustration, anger—against his enemies, and later with the language of war), to the subject of ethics and with the subtitle “an essay on the understanding of evil?” The polemics of Ethics are, for some, unsettling; they confront consensus truths that are considered inviolable— indeed, sacrosanct, on the ruling ideas of the epoch and its declared ideals of emancipation, equality, and human rights, directions that are in principle founded on sentiments of love and on other feelings—of empathy, for one. Badiou has never been more direct about who his many enemies are.

5  Henry, Chris. The Ethics of Political Resistance: Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 49. 6  Godmer, Laurent. “Alain Badiou’s ‘Counter-Ethics’ and Philosophy of Emancipation in Perspective,” 99–110 Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, vol. 52, Iss. 1 (2007), 103.

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In one instance he calls them “bons apôtres inquisitoriaux.”7 Apostles of the inquisition. One difference between himself and his enemies has certainly been made. Making a list of the identities of these new apostles would be extensive. They have been long anticipated, by Freud, for example, and with characteristics of group psychology and the symptoms of identification and contagion. As for what the new ethicists represent, Badiou makes a distinction between “the ideology of human rights,” for example, and the subject who is “the immortal creation of an event” (E liv). The conviction has been accepted from the start. Ethics and love will be in some way incompatible; today, the two have never been more estranged from each other despite all claims to the contrary and during a time when no subject has received more solicitude than “the other” and that most unusual object of love (the victim) who has been at the pinnacle of political sensibility. Badiou’s militancy is, perhaps, intended to shock. He has not been a stranger to provocation. “Anti-ethics is sufficiently shocking to current orthodoxies to need some careful explanation and contextualization.”8 That the triplet of terror, betrayal, and disaster first appears in Ethics is no coincidence. Reducing the human to the status of biological thing has never been more natural—hence one of Badiou’s first objections. “Because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated dying body, equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple” (E 11). Biology and the victim are, for him, absolute relations. Are we to contemplate how they can be separated? Did Darwin unwittingly prepare for a biology/ethics bind in such a way as to betray the metaphysics of the human? For Badiou, if “we are to find Man, if we are determined to think him,” such a being of truth “lies not in his fragile body but in his stubborn determination to remain what he is—that is to say, precisely something other than a victim, other than a being-fordeath, and thus: something other than a mortal being” (E 11-12). Once again we can state, with confidence, and respect, how Badiou has made the enormous effort to shift our sensibilities. Immortal beings, once they are circumscribed within a biological/ethicist bind, are reduced to the lowest of common denominators and, therefore, part and parcel of 7  Badiou, Alain. “Lettre d’Alain Badiou à propos d’une recension autour Faye/Heidegger sur Actu Philosophia,” April 6, 2014. http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.com/2014/04/ lettre-dalain-badiou-propos-dune.html. 8  Gibson, Andrew. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 90.

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capitalism and neoliberal societies, each of them implicated in a ceaseless campaign of marketability, advertising, and propaganda for the human who is regarded, first and foremost, vulnerable to animal insecurity. How does Badiou plan to overcome the relation through love? It remains to be seen, without giving too much attention to the degeneration of love in society under the conditions of tradition or the claims for its alternatives, whether philosophy can come to the assistance of the amorous as an ideal. After all, if the human creation of the “love of wisdom,” and the wisdom of love, cannot lend its service for one of the pillars of life, then it has without a doubt forsaken its responsibility. Critique and negation have been avoided as much as possible up to this point; the effort has been intentional, to maintain the benefits of affirmation, and to persist in an Epicurean attitude of gratitude for Being. In matters of love, as is understandable when Eros and Thanatos are so perpetually in a face-off, an antagonism is unavoidable. Enemies are not, simply, adversaries. One has to, above all, avoid being infected by internalization. Coming to the defense for the truth of love is one of Badiou’s motivations, and in part because many of his compatriots had joined “the pantheon of 1960’s antihumanists,”9 a designation that cannot be applied to Badiou for many reasons that, here, will hopefully become more evident. To free him from the designation is crucial if the truth of love is to be given the support it needs. Whether the term humanist can be retained as historically conceived is one of Badiou’s concerns as he mounts his agon against two sides. “It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity” (IPL 25). Survival and identity, the twin-pillars of biology and ethicism. Is it conceivable that the generic procedure of the truth of love has to confront the wayward presumption of the ethical as it is being expressed today and established with absolute force? At the social level, there should be nothing more co-related than love and ethics. After all, the “love of neighbor,” as ancient and revered as the Book of Leviticus 19, was a commandment; and yet, for all that, Badiou has been virtually unique for his analysis of the nature of the ethical today. “To begin with, I will examine the precise nature of this phenomenon, which is the major ‘philosophical’ tendency of the day, as much in public opinion as for our official 9  Gutting, Gary. Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 177.

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institutions. I will try to establish that in reality it amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such” (E 3). Nihilism; not a word among others, a phrase that can be repeated and with a reminder of its provenance. That Badiou equates the ethics of the epoch with nihilism is no slight provocation; he has either chosen a path of complete recklessness, or similar to one of the individuals who most influences him in matters of love and hate (Nietzsche), he has made an irrevocable decision to expose the pretensions of the ethical and to do so, precisely, in a defense of love. The repercussions of his thinking are far-reaching. They should also be disturbing most especially for those who consider themselves at the forefront of today’s ethical commitments, discursively and otherwise. The highest values of ethics have devalued themselves; they have nihilistically turned into their opposite, as Nietzsche predicted. “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism” (WP 3). That it has taken the form of ethics and, as can be easily witnessed, implemented by bureaucratically sanctioned power should leave no one under any illusion. Badiou’s message is insistent and never in doubt. His intention to be affirmative is not, however, always maintained; there is no dilemma whatsoever in his presentation of wayward ethics. Badiou presents us with the most unlikely antagonism of ethics and love, one other philosophical project he inherits from Nietzsche and by bringing a genealogical awareness to the present. In the case of love, Badiou asks us “to rally to its defense,” which can at times demand strength of character and something else besides. He often uses the word courage, an ancient virtue; because to so run counter to the consensus and opinions of the many is not always easy and, in fact, can be dangerous. Reactions and persecutions have been swift. Stigma and ostracism has not been rare in the 21st century condition of ethical projects. For philosophy and any other thought willing to defend love, from “two enemies” who have previously been identified in the Introduction—tradition and the radical as a binding vicious circle—requires some difficult analysis and in many ways to genuinely think differently, that is, beyond the approval of “differences.” Badiou has not been previously shown to use the word enemies. They will be defined as such, in part because the recognition of an enemy comes only after dialogue and negotiation has been refused—capital for systematic reasons (believing itself to be the best of all possible worlds) and the politics of the present for their self-possession and moral certainties. Absolutes of the good have become imperious; their edicts are not

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dialogic for those who exploit them. Whether the solicitude for the “other” is, in fact, an act of love, or a duplicitous strategy, will have to be raised. Badiou’s rhetoric of irony serves his intentions well. “The conclusion will be, first, that we must support democracy, and, second, that we must teach our children the ethical imperative of the love of the Other.”10 The refusal of the taken for granted democracy and love of the other re-­ affirms Badiou as the daring thinker he is, for reasons that have not been fully articulated even by his most faithful supporters. My argument has been, it seems to me, avoided by his followers and disciples with more than prudence; understandably, because to make Badiou’s intentions explicit, his enemies are going to multiply and his philosophy, as a whole, could be discredited more than it already has. Badiou associates nihilism with the pretensions of a good conscience— or, much more accurately, the dominating coercions of a moralizing super-­ ego, which makes his arguments in Ethics far more “radical” than any run-of-the-mill revolutionary politics. When he refers to “ideological tendencies,”11 the phrase can no longer be heard, conveniently, as it once was, with reference to the old nemeses—capital and everything associated with it. The ideological, today, is driven by the strongest forces imaginable—from the ethical compulsions in service of the good. To set out in the defense of love from the overcoming of ethics is not an easy path. To further Badiou’s position on certain matters is part of the motivation at this point. Defending love is not an obligation like others. And there will be neither shame in doing so nor the same compulsions as associated with the end of philosophy. Jean-Luc Nancy asks: “We know the words of love to be inexhaustible, but as to speaking about love, could we perhaps be exhausted?”12 Badiou has no hesitation in answering the question. He will conclude with the need to reinvent love, as one of his relied-upon poets suggested; but before reaching the point where love may be reinvented (and, as we will see, happiness experienced in more than a fleeing moment), Badiou turns in the other direction and confronts enemies. In Praise of Love raises one unique problem; the enemy is now fully exposed. Readers will find themselves in a tough situation. Defending love, against enemies, 10  Badiou, Alain. “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen. Cabinet, Issue 5/Evil, Winter 2001–2002. 11  Badiou, Alain. “Ethics and Politics,” 401–407 Philosophy Today, Vol. 59. Issue 3, Summer 2015, 402. 12  Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 245. The chapter is “Shattered Love,” Tr. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney.

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requires a certain stance; there is simply no avoiding a martial attitude and preparation. His questions are posed; they are unequivocally answered. Can an individual (who is committed to freedom, and its responsibilities) not understandably react to anyone who determines the course of thinking and life and gives us no opportunity either for a dialogue or a choice? The issue is: do enemies exist? I mean by that, real enemies. A real enemy is not someone you are resigned to see take power periodically because lots of people voted for him. That is a person you are annoyed to see as head of State because you would have preferred his adversary … An enemy is something else: an individual you won’t tolerate taking decisions on anything that impacts on yourself. So do real enemies exist or not? That should be our starting-­point. (IPL 58)

Identifying the enemy is also a starting point. Badiou asks the question twice. To answer once is enough. The militant in him has been most active when love has been manipulated by one of its enemies. Without a doubt, the situation as it stands today involves the persistent consequences of decisions being made in many different places and not only in places where there is a “clique of worthless state bureaucrats” (IPP 50-51) who are both numerous and dependent, most especially in departments of “human resources.” Decisions are indeed being made, in many places, by enemies—those who insist on their truths and force everyone to submit, with well-meaning coercions if necessary, with that discomforting imperative of “re-education” and that new invention: the “training workshop,” which amounts to be instructed into the “thou shall nots” of government, institutions, or private companies who are all too eager to follow protocol if it will further their bottom line. The enemy is no longer as old or as predictable as the State and capital. Our situation in the 21st century has become more dynamic—in the worst sense of the term; the enemy is no longer defined by the state. Carl Schmitt can be mentioned here as an introduction to a later presence in politics. For now, a beginning: “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.”13 The bureaucrats of ethics are everywhere today: the parliaments of liberal democracies, the “private sector,” and in institutions where departments rival each other for the 13  Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Tr. CJ.  Miller. Antelope Hill Publishing, 2020, 9.

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implementation of ethical directives. To begin to outline all the obstacles would lead us down a path we wanted, as much as possible to avoid; to move beyond the critical, ironic, or sarcastic, it is best to follow Badiou and find solace in his concept of love between two. The argumentative structure of Ethics is decisive, for reasons that will be supplemented often in later writings and without abandoning the polemical vigor. “Only the most elementary forms of moralizing preaching qualities any longer as ‘philosophy’” (SMP 68). Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, finds itself today in an opposition to moral-mongering. Only Nietzsche had the foresight to imagine a time when only philosophy could effectively oppose, and overcome, the pretensions of ethics and its nihilistic reduction of the human. His anticipations have been confirmed. Badiou has been one of the very few to draw on its consequences for our present. There will be several points after this start on ethicists as enemies: the experience of the amorous encounter for the Two, only two, as opposed to any group identification is a first priority. There will also be a repeated affirmation of love as it effects the one, that is, the individual who is going to be recovered from its past neglect and denigrations when he and she was reduced to being the subject-thing of philosophy. The individual will stand alone against enemies. Badiou will identify them. The enemies of love are the nihilists who, under the cover of the ethical, have mounted an attack on love and in the worst form possible, with the psychopathology of jealousy as a political ideology. Norris has traced “his [Badiou’s] heterodox conception of ethics and his acidulous view of what currently passes under that name … as so much window-dressing designed to avert the public gaze.”14 One will have to determine the reasons for this heterodoxy and Badiou’s alternative with his “ethics of truth.” “It is certain that the ethic of truths compels so considerable a distance from opinions that is must be called literally asocial” (E 54). His ethic of truth is asocial and so consistent with the amorous encounter of the two as opposed to the identification with a group that would like to subsume everything into itself. The one and the two will be asocial in love, withdrawing into their amorous privacy in part to contemplate how to best deal with the coming pressures and all the worldly interference of the polarized extremes of a collapsible either/or. 14   Norris, Christopher. “Alain Badiou: Truth, Ethics, and the Formal Imperarive,” 1103–1136 Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 2009, 1135–1136. He adds that Badiou is “ethically so much at odds with the major currencies of nowadays accredited thought,” 1136.

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Once the confrontation is announced, however, and despite the presence of enemies, Badiou will choose an alternative (for the time being). We all know where a certain agon can lead: Thanatos and all the violence and destruction accompanying it. To remain focused on affirmation, Badiou will take us back towards a neglected foundation of philosophy, which will be the primary affect and disposition to being and truth. Whether happiness can be maintained under the current pressures of capital and the ethical absolute for the other and the victim remains, for now, undecided; yet love and happiness will at some point be crucial for us, as will the affirmation that amorous love can be called a “miracle” (IPL 30), as long as one is reminded that the appearance in the word in the Gospels is always semeia, that is, a sign that has to be understood only after our interpretative intervention, our configuration, and our incorporation— the latter inseparable from the transhistorical transference that has been one of the foundations of our responses to Badiou. We will have occasion to once again recall the transference between the artist and the individual phenomenologist; that transference occurred across history. The love of the amorous encounter in this case will be two individuals, in the flesh, as they meet in the present, and with a perception as immediate as it is startling. To witness a work of art is one thing; to see a human being, in the immediacy of a transference (and so with the most powerful of effects) may have few comparisons. Despite their inaugural moment, when a situation becomes an event and, in the process, enhances both due to the fidelity of what the truth of love can create, Badiou does not allow himself any long-lasting indulgence since he knows that love is under siege—from two sides. Before turning to Badiou’s two enemies, the ones unmistakably identified in Ethics, the single most pervasive threat to the possibility of love and what it can achieve (in one, and two, individuals) has to be first introduced. One individual—“the revolutionary”—has for Badiou a special position; the “title” may be old and no longer useful. A new conception might be needed. “A true leftist revolutionary fights the Right as well as the official Left.”15 In the emotions of love and in the revelation of the 15  Badiou, Alain. “The Lesson of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power After the Storm,” Tr. Tzuchien Tho, 30–54 History, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (eds.) Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 41. What Badiou has identified as “the struggle on two fronts” has today become much more diffuse and not nearly as symmetrical.

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amorous encounter and what it can accomplish, the threat of jealousy, from two sides, will have to be exposed for its imposed limits—and cruelty; because once we see how the two enemies of love are today conspiring to negate love and replace it with ersatz substitutes—including false promise of the Dionysian type that lead to what Badiou has termed “sex in crisis”16 or Pornographie du temps present.17 We will see how one overwhelming affect has come into place. Badiou’s analysis of jealousy is unique, in part because the conditions have made it new. More specifically, the analysis of jealousy as a political phenomenon will be pursued and as one of the insinuations of a new ethical “paradigm.” The ideology of ethics has led, amongst many other consequences, to the most intense kind of jealousy. Domination and possessiveness are intensifying. The neurosis of jealousy, which has caused so much misery between individuals, will have to be off-set by one of the possible consequences of an amorous encounter and what it may mean for the true life as a whole. In a rare case, chosen in part for the possibility of a future dialogue, Freud can interject at this point with a comment surely well known to Badiou since he has been more than willing to pursue the implications of psychoanalytic insights. We add one more reference to further complement Badiou’s philosophical edifice and, fully intentionally, to bring to awareness our future decision to think about the efficacy of ancient convictions in matters of love, whether realized as Eros or agape. In any case (in both cases) they will not be overwhelmed by Thanatos and the nihilistic drive. In its origin, function, and relation to sexual love, the “Eros” of the philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido of psychoanalysis … and when the apostle Paul, in his famous epistle to the Corinthians, praises love above all else, he certainly understands it in the same “wider” sense. But this only shows that men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them.18

Without saying so, in so many words, as it were, Freud has a counsel: read. He has analyzed a predicament of an entire culture. Modern thought, reading, and its interpretations have not done the past any justice. Two individuals, Sappho and Diotima, a poet and a philosopher, will be  From Chapter 5 of The Century.  Badiou, Alain. The Pornographic Age. Tr. edited, and with an Aferword by A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 18  Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18:91. 16 17

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representatives of a conception of eros. Ancient convictions will be foundational; they will be transformed somewhat in their modern forms. One theme has been constant all along: how does a human being have the means to access the infinite, in the world, and to then become immortal—as an individual and (to raise this for the first time) for at least one other in an amorous encounter? Because in matters of love, in recognizing the encounter as the beginning of being faithful to an event, the individual who at times has been isolated, secluded, and withdrawn and recalling our ancient exemplars, like the heretic, is now complemented. The individual has been emphatically defended from the beginning, in many ways in seclusion; and yet in love, Badiou makes it necessary for the first time to bring the secluded and withdrawn individual into an actual relationship. Love has been described as a “force that urges the lover beyond their individual seclusion.”19 Due to the power of the transference, the force does draw one outside. The on-going work to be accomplished after the amorous encounter as an event, as Badiou defines it, is then to bring the power of the two together to stand independently of the formidable obstacles that are now omnipresent in the social—on the one hand the directives of tradition, on the other the equally if not more forceful imperatives of today’s libertinage, both of them operating according to the affect Badiou will single out as a deadly kind of jealousy. A recurring word in Badiou’s vocabulary will again make its appearance. In love, there will be two—individuals who will share some human essence of each other (if we cannot state that love is an essence of beings, then our destitution is far worse than can be imagined) as well as the knowledge that their love will be very soon confronted with the most enduring impositions of the real, from people (family, friends, peers) and from the twin oppositions of culture and the propagandas of emancipation, today identifiable by all manner of proposals about the freedom of the erotic subject that has collapsed into the narcissism of what John Caruana calls “autistic self-identification.”20 The individual is affirmed in the truth of love. How the individual is different from its traditional formulation and as an alternative to what earlier was termed the “bourgeois” individual and Badiou today calls “identitarian singularity” (SP 11) will be 19  Steven, Mark. “Love in the Time of Capital,” 147–166 Substance, Vol. 47, Iss. 3 (2018), 147. 20  Caruana, John. “The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism,” 46–60 in Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Eds. Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 46.

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an on-going effort. The recognition of enemies as the groups who today are installing the ethical with such absoluteness are ignored by the event of the amorous encounter and its fidelity. Love is, for Badiou, the most appropriate substitute for the ideology of ethics. “The faithful subject is everything that orientates love towards the effective power of the Two it institutes” (SMP 99-100). It is the faithful subject, as always, who will be best able to resist the pressures from enemies and their manipulation of love. But are some readers going to be mired in a personal dilemma and because of Badiou’s sense that, at our present moment, love and ethics are no longer compatible? Is the moral drive of our time antithetical to love since its force depends so much on rage and aggression and the peculiar self-justification of the persecutor? Has love been abolished by the self-­ righteous and the judgmental who are, because of their relation to victims, sanguinary?

2  A Solitary Event of Two One other possibility to the amorous encounter of the Two, in the present, stands out in addition to how Badiou describes the moment as usually understood: as a supplement to the event, there is also a co-relation here with the transference between the painter and the viewer and the work of art discussed earlier. An amorous encounter can occur in the act of reading. “Love designates the occurrence of a Two,” Badiou writes in Manifesto for Philosophy, and then adds: “this we understand when reading” (MP 34, my emphasis). He has often mentioned the act of reading without expanding his individual sense. In this one instance, when the amorous encounter will be both meaningful as a transference and transhistorical as a transmission, a dense note from Being and Event can be retained. The amorous encounter, as the solitary event of the Two, will again be detailed as a phenomenon effecting two historical periods as well as two individuals and their experience. “The extreme condensation of figures—a few objects— aims at isolating, upon a severely restricted stage, and such that nothing is hidden from the interpreter (the reader), a system of clues whose placement can be unified by one hypothesis alone as to what has happened, and, of which, one sole consequence authorizes the announcement of how the event, despite being abolished, will fix its décor in the eternity of a ‘pure notion’” (BE 201). His first example, Sappho, leads to the occasion to read her fragments and to recognize, in one of the first times in the

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ancient world and as a lesson for moderns, the praise of the individual and the indifference both to the gods (i.e., to any form of idolatry—as the latreia or “service” to an idol) and the conventions of society. The traditional praise of the gods and the prayers offered to them are, with Sappho, substituted with poetry for a human being; feelings of love are emphasized over devotion to the gods. The mythic, understood as a form of traditional piety, is relinquished in its effects and replaced by human love. The lyrical and the individual are not contingent relations. Neither metaphysics nor the finitude of history, we have an original expressing of lyrical love between two. The poet and her words have been transferred to the modern world; they are as poignant now as ever. For Badiou, reading and love constitute a unique form of transmission; for in the original act of writing, the poet provides a testimony of themselves, in their immediate reality, and then an involvement in the continuity of a transtemporal reality. Philosophy may be uncomfortable with love (for its emotions and compulsions); love, in our culture, has been over-saturated, to the point of banality and degradation. When love is expressed as popular, its meanings are confined to pre-determined formulas; and when love is expressed as populist, within the identification of groups, ideology and propaganda reduce it to an instrumental idea to be used for a political purpose. Badiou returns us to the dynamic connection of love and philosophy and poetry and without being at all apprehensive about any obstacles. He has often taken the greatest care to talk about poetry. When poetry and love come together, one creation can be witnessed. “The certainty that love is compatible with poetry and therefore exists in the world, in the form of prose.”21 To take ourselves back to one of the original poets of love is significant for her ability to portray the individual in love and what happens—to one’s subjectivity and life. Sappho is one of the first poets of the amorous encounter and, simultaneously, who appears to be indifferent to any thought about the reality of the gods as an extraneous consideration. Two lines are unique. He’s equal with the Gods, that man Who sits across from you.22

21  Badiou, Alain. “In Search of Lost Prose.” Tr. Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret. 1254–1266 MLN, Vol. 132, Number 5, December 2017, 1266. 22  Sappho. Fragments. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Sappho.php.

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To start with one observation from Ethics, this time in the affirmative instead of the previous identification of enemies (of hate, to use that word, or disdain), Badiou writes about “the possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter” (E 39). Before moving forward, then, one more reminder of the inherent dilemmas of Badiou’s truth: to start out the chapter on purpose with hostility, enemies, and the mention of war put ourselves in a position of evaluating both the nature of ethics (which is supposed to be, in one universal version, about loving our neighbor) and the much more immediate experience of amorous love, for one other. For us, now, there is no rapport between one and the other anonymously, as an ethical category. As a possibility, can one withdraw from all the clamor about the ethical and, instead, follow Badiou towards the exchange, the transference, between the two and what happens to them as individuals. Two forms of love will be concurrent: the love between the writer and the reader as a transhistorical relationship; and the love of the Two in the immediacy of the present. We can, for a moment, relieve ourselves of the presence of enemies despite their overwhelming influence and domination of our present liberal reality. The language is virtually repeated infinitely. One could collect all of Badiou’s pronouncements on love and the majority would not be without the word: possibility. Sometimes, love is a counter-force; it has to resist all the manipulations imposed on it and turn away. “Love isn’t a possibility, but rather the overcoming of something that might appear to be impossible” (IPL 68). To make an encounter between human beings a condition for the perception of an event is an affirmation—especially when there have been few acts, universally, that have required more order and control, and for reasons that could be called bourgeois according to that now faded 19th century word and when love was submitted to formal conditions—so much so that all content was essentially withdrawn and replaced by a handed-down formalism inseparable from theological-political jurisdiction or, today, state and bureaucratic sanctions. The law is never far away as it meddles into matters of love. The previous commitment to the defense of love is two-pronged: on the one hand, to renew the act of reading as the enduring relationship between the transference of the spirit in history and, on the other, to preserve the authenticity of love and what it can achieve despite the intrusions by a culture always prepared to control its future—either by subjugating it to the old, or compelling it to adopt the propaganda of the new. A turn from Sappho’s lyrical poetry to Diotima’s philosophy, as expressed by Plato, gives us one more intimation of Badiou’s suggestive thinking for his readers and possible disciples.

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Diotima of Plato’s Symposium teaches Socrates about eros in unexpected ways. She was the woman who presented Socrates with the idea of two kinds of procreation—one of the body and its parturition, and one of the soul or psyche and its creativity. Love, in an early testimony of philosophy, affirmed immortality, twice. Sensing how close we are coming to the political, love will have to be defended, against all its worldly distortions, as the foundation of immortality and the infinite, in the creation of a child or in the revelation of a world from out of another kind of interiority. One dilemma now re-appears. Plato gives us an option: will love lead us to the attainment of “immortal virtue (are ̄te)”23 or to the necessary return back into the cave for the sake of a few and knowing how the entrance into a false world might lead to death—more precisely, to a state execution justified and legitimated by the state or today prolonged according to the dictates of social media? The decision is not an easy one. Because the initial fidelity, once proclaimed from the testimony of a witness, can have devastating consequences; the “education by truths” can be, also, distorted in the extreme.24 Nietzsche will defend more than love; he will also be the witness to the individual who is sacrificed for the supposed good of others. Nietzsche has so often been defined as a quintessential anti-Platonist. On one issue, the point is conceded. The transcendental and other-worldly had no appeal for him. On the question of are ̄te, the Greek “virtue” was impossible to reduce to the ethical and the moral because (as Plato and Nietzsche both knew) the virtue of the city can lead to the death of the one who has practiced the highest form of are ̄te as a comprehensive excellence. Nietzsche’s “anti-Platonism” can be identified as an amorous and political problem much more than a metaphysical one. He resisted, absolutely, Socrates’ sacrifice (out of love, being a representative of philosophy and its wisdom) for the sake of the city. We can ask ourselves a question that is inseparable from later political considerations. Why has love and sacrifice so often been paired as a quintessential human act? Why is sacrifice, the sacer facere or “making sacred,” inseparable from violence and cruelty and death? And why, in our distressed present, are more and more sacrificial scapegoats being found to justify the persecutions in the name of 23  Plato. Symposium. Tr., with Introduction & Notes by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989, 56. There are many kinds of “virtue” or, better, excellence for the Greeks. What distinguished them was their ability to recognize the ethical as only one of the many forms of excellence. 24  Bartlett, A.J. Badiou and Plato: An education by truths. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

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ethical absolutes? The anticipation of the truth of politics should be the cause of some anxiety. One word, like the one word love so often spoken by Zarathustra and, very noticeably, directed to his disciples, is complemented by the essential word fidelity. It has been omnipresent in everything prior; the word and disposition will assume its pre-eminent place as the conscious drive against all merely impulsive instincts. “‘I offer myself to my love, and my neighbour as myself’—that is the language of all creators”25 (Z 114). Offering, grace, and love: Zarathustra too teaches his students and disciples with a foundational sentiment. The predicament faced at the moment is the crucial difference between the giving (from Diotima or Zarathustra) and the way love has been construed by ethics today. Nihilism, as a condition, cannot be forgotten as one of Badiou’s symptoms of the times. To defend love is to defend the human, essentially. “Man is to be identified by his affirmative thought, by the singular truths of which he is capable, by the Immortal which makes him the most resilient [résistant] and most paradoxical of animals” (E 16). But as he knows all too well, the truth is never obvious; the truth, by nature, has to be unremitting and a force. The presence of enemies is, therefore, unavoidable. He does not confuse love and ethics. Love is a matter of Two; there is no “other” in the equation. There is no sense whatsoever, as we begin to look ahead to politics and the fourth procedure of truth, that love could involve any community of “we.” Love is a unique event between two individuals. No one else matters, for a time. Love stands out, as an experience, inside and out, for its unique ability to exclude everyone but the two—if only for a brief period of time and before everyone begins to interfere with their desires. The desires of others will make them into enemies. You meet someone. It so happens that between you and he or she, between he and she and you, an unexpected and unforeseeable possibility opens up in your personal, empirical existence. This doesn’t mean that love is formed by the encounter on its own. It will be necessary to live something; there will have to be consequences. The encounter is the opening in my own life of a possibility that wasn’t calculable in advance. (PE 10)

25  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Tr. R.J Hollindgale. Harmondsworth, 1961, 114.

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Again, possibility, which Heidegger told us was more compelling than anything actual, remains as a promise for what love can achieve. But the perception of the possibility, of an event, cannot be remotely seen if there are already anticipations of the inevitable calculations of others. The event of love is soon followed by all kinds of interference and expectations of how the amorous encounter will be managed, by friends and families who, some tempted by jealousy, will insist on the fulfillment of their desire in the name of love. The possibility is quickly erased. The event cannot subsist on its own; as soon as it appears, there are many (of course, in their eyes, with the best of intentions) who are intent on its erasure as an event between two. The interference, and planning, of the many soon becomes a social prerequisite. The two cannot remain independent for long. The all-inclusive other has made it very difficult to see the one, the individual, in a context, in his and her private experience. One agon has raged for some time. Badiou had no hesitation in bringing politics and love together. Whether the transference between one and the other can be maintained, beneficially, is not at all certain. “In love (as in politics26), there are extraordinary moments of enthusiasm when each individual has the feeling of going beyond him- or herself and of accomplishing sensational things” (PE 44, my emphasis). Despite the uniqueness of the amorous encounter of the Two, in time, physically, the individual will continue to make his and her presence felt. The individual experiences love as a temporal transference—and in a way that he thinks about “the other” differently than is now common. “There is something about philosophy that requires the relation to the other to take on an amorous figure . . . Psychoanalysts analyze this as transference love. The argument comes down to stating that there is no complete philosophical communication without transferential figures” (PE 54). The point, with consequences beyond the encounter of love between two people in the present, can be recalled as an aesthetic experience, in art, in feelings or affect. Transference, communication, incorporation: some of Badiou’s leading concepts can be further clarified and, in the context of love (but also, as we saw, in art) shown in their interrelationship. In the end, being true to the philosophical purpose and its achievement, Badiou continues to work towards 26  It remains to be seen whether Badiou’s enthusiasm for politics can be maintained within the four generic procedures of truth or whether it will have to be isolated and separated from the rest. One problem is now addressed, however fleetingly and incompletely. The presence of enemies and the truth of love are not going to be reconciled.

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making possible the process of subjectivation and his belief in an immanent immortality, in the many expressions of love in an amorous encounter, beginning with the experience of reading, which is for him paradigmatic in part because of its initial privacy. Badiou ends Manifesto for Philosophy with this: “what we know about love, at last, is that beyond the encounter, it declares its fidelity to the pure Two it founds and makes generic truth of the fact that there are men and women” (MP 109). Today, the statement has added meaning. The amorous encounter therefore begins what Badiou believes to be an infinite process, one based on the recognition of the event and the fidelity to its power to transform the ones involved. His ideals are not slight; they are, also, not independent from the underlying struggle to define the nature of love from various forces on either side of a widening spectrum. We can now bring together two experiences of love, both of them transferential: one involves the meeting of someone in the present, the other of picking up a book and reading or, to use a previous example, looking at a painting. The truth of art and love are mutually conferring. Philosophy has not ceased to defend both from interference and from manipulation. The event of an amorous encounter is understood to be an exceptional moment; the ensuing transformation from an everyday situation to a universal event can occur at any time in the present, from one that is physical and immediate to one extending back into history and to the infinite transmissions of the word. Badiou makes a final and definitive statement on ethics when he opposes his enemies with his own “ethics of truth” and does by invoking the individual who, in Ethics, is given the sense of anyone and yet be a someone, an individual who can only be so when a decision is made. The more we make the attempt to adequately represent Badiou’s thought on love (this will prove to be nearly impossible in matters of politics), the more it is difficult to deny what has to remain, in principle, and in reality, an unavoidable obstacle. The confrontation with enemies and love is irreconcilable. To then ignore, or disavow, the pain and suffering experienced when one has real-life enemies and turn to the possibility of attaining happiness, as another ideal, becomes a serious challenge. A word can be introduced again. It will also now take us to the end. “Love, the essence of which is fidelity in the meaning I give to this word, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself. Happiness, in a word” (IPL 48). Happiness. The experience occurs in love, with a human being who is present, with a human being who has written

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or painted or left anything at all in the world that could be part of an interpretative intervention, a configuration, an incorporation—for any of us who chooses to. So far, then, our three first words are love, ethics, and happiness and with one more to make its appearance, jealousy as the sign of Thanatos, the death-drive of nihilism. By the end, two will be excluded— from the Two. Love and happiness are to be an alternative to ethics and jealousy. The amorous encounter as an event takes precedence. For us, here, the event is exemplary for Badiou and only an instance for what follows; because an amorous encounter, experienced by the subject of being (his reader), does not require the bodily presence of the one who is loved. To experience an absolute fidelity to the event is not, cannot be, limited to the coming together of the two, that is, two individuals who meet in time, physically, erotically. The subject of love can come to an extraordinary realization. Love is evental; it happens in the world. To confine it to the exchange between two individuals in a present time is to make an infinite possibility result back into a situation experienced innumerable times every day in the world. Love is a transtemporal phenomenon that actualizes the infinite of the past and multiplies it exponentially so that amnesia will not be possible and the dynamic of memory will be as active as the reach for every historical transference. Diotima made love a condition of a certain ascension on the stairs of love and in the rising into oneself and not in some imaginary and remote metaphysical topos where the monoeides are revealed as the so-called “Forms.” The stairs of love are pure interiority. The matheme is found in no other place than in the human being. All the resources for the immortal being are internal. “I think that philosophy requires the experience of love, as the primitive, or proto-, experience of an opening-up of finitude, of the passage from the one to the two” (PE 54). Once love has been introduced as a human possibility of passing beyond the finite, its event can occur in two different ways—a phenomenon that is explicit if understated in Badiou. For as soon as the transference is introduced in matters of love, and borrowing the term from psychoanalysis, what love shows is its double-possibility: love in the present, love in the infinite—that is, in any point in history. Fidelity to the idea then demands it to be shared with one other. And so on, where the supplement and the multiplicity will not be the iterative on and on of the bad infinite, more and more of the insufferable sameness, but the evental revelation proper to human beings. In what way? How? Badiou’s words and concepts and arguments are compelling. They sound, and feel, so different than all the proclamations made by

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his contemporaries, the ones who, for one reason or another, were much more well known. Can Badiou overcome the remnants of late 20th century thought and inaugurate, for us, another way of thinking that could in principle free us from our self-imposed constraints, the finite that ensures our security and complacency? The claims of philosophy, so poignant, are not going to do anything unless they can move the individual into incorporating a way to be. The word spirit has been mentioned before. Looking back at the perversions of science as they are manipulated by the techno-­ logos and looking ahead to the thinking and feeling about love is not without benefits. Heidegger writes: “What spirit, in particular as reason (ratio), has formed and created for itself in technology, economy, in world trade, and in the entire reorganization of existence symbolised in the city, is now turning against the soul, against life, overwhelming it and forcing culture into decline and decay.”27 Heidegger here defends life, the soul, and the spirit against the city. Can a spirit be reclaimed from its use and, most especially, for a renewed sense of love that would not be instrumentalized in the world of objects but rather as the inspiration of one subject, then two? Whether the individual then makes a decision to withdraw, from the city, and from the machinations of culture, is not out of the question; faced with the either/or of the effacement of politics by ethics or the withdrawal into the privacy of one, two, and a few like-minded individuals, as heretics, appears more and more appealing so as to evade totalizing ambitions, those who will make the world a “better place,” at any cost. The models and schemes are all too well known. Ideals and their perversions have a long and intimate history. After the hardly veiled aggression shown to his ethicist enemies, Badiou’s alternative again comes down to faith, work, and living one’s situation differently. “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ my situation” (E 42). I, my, living. The amorous encounter begins with the Two. However, Badiou’s argument also leads us to a return to a subject of being who is also a subject of truth. (He and she have been with us the entire time). Among the statements that stand out, fidelity has to be one of them; normally, in the situation of a couple, it means being true and never betraying the other. For Badiou, the meaning 27  Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 70

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extends much further than an ethical responsibility. Living. Badiou does not mean the experience of living in the everyday. Life. What is it to live? How does one live the true? How does love and fidelity to the event of the encounter transform a factical experience? How does one begin, from here, to understand the idea of being faithful, really so? One does not, then, have faith, as a possession, as some belief one holds, or even less to give one the comfort of an identity. An ethics of the other could very well be replaced by an amorous encounter that makes the one, with the two, aware of one fleeing reality. “The pure multiple scarcely occurs in presentation before it has already dissipated” (BE 37). The “pure multiple,” in the case of love, depends on its constant reaffirmation and on the refusal to be drawn back into the prescribed limits of what there is to do once love is either reduced to tradition or forced to submit to the false promise of excess or transgression. The “some-one” thus caught up in what attests that he belongs to the truth-processes as one of its foundation-points is simultaneously himself, nothing other than himself, a multiple singularity recognizable among all others, and in excess of himself, because the uncertain course [trace aléatoire] of fidelity passes through him, transfixes his singular body and inscribes him, from within time, in an instant of eternity. (E 45)

Passes through him. The resonance of the traversal of the spirit is again noticed. When Badiou has deigned to call the individual a “multiple singularity,” there can no longer be any sense of this being (this one) reduced to a finite history. The excess indicates how, in principle, the individual has been given all the resources to exceed what he has been given to be in the world, by the world, for the world. “Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world” (IPL 26), a sentiment he shares with Plato, and one that has to also be tempered in the consideration of love thus far: ethics and love have been presented as inimical to each other. Can the opposition be saved, overcome? Can Badiou’s move from the limits of ethics to love be reconsidered? Can his sense of love (transhistorically and in the present) be reconciled with the framing of ethics? Can it be reconciled to Simon Critchley’s idea of “the demand?” What is essential to ethical experience is that the subject of the demand assents to the demand, agrees to finding it good, binds itself to the good, and shapes its subjectivity in relation

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to the good. A demand meets with an approval. The subject who approves shapes itself in accordance with that demand. All questions of value begin here.28

A response, appropriate in length, is not possible. One polemical comment will have to suffice. Critchley is asking for the very difficult, perhaps for the impossible, on the other side of love. Ethics has never been more of a problem than it is today because not only are demands being made, but the subject is no longer given the choice of assenting, is no longer given the time to determine how it is good, and for whom. The good is presupposed, declared, and imposed. When the process of assenting to the demand shapes subjectivity, then the visible forces of power, in terms of manipulation and coercion, are easy to recognize as the will of enemies. I would ask Critchley to reconsider the nature of the demand and who is making it; what, moreover, is added along with the demand as a dominating imperative? To assent to the demand must presuppose (perhaps, wrongly) that the demand was itself ethical. Is it, now, today? While the thrust of the age has been determined by an ethical demand, as Critchley acknowledges, not enough attention has been paid to its origins and the consequences they have had on the shaping of subjectivity. A re-thinking of ethics of the demand might lead to a refusal. Or worse, it might have to come to the conclusion about precisely how Badiou defined an enemy, that is, someone, a group, or the State, who determine how the individual will have to live and think according to principles defined by imperious groups. The political antagonism today centers around the excessive and too-particular demands of the ethical, to the exclusion of a great many others who are simply unwilling (or unable) to comply. “To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you” (E 51). The affect of the experience is crucial. This is when the ethical, as Critchley presents it, begins to feel like the demands of an enemy. Ethical demands are becoming intolerable because they impinge on what must always remain independent of force, domination, propaganda. The terrible situation of the present is the confrontation between the particularity of the demand from a self-possessed super-ego and the response (the refusal) by a great many. The ancient distinction of left and right, made real in the French Revolution, if it can still be relevant today, can be 28  Critchley, Simon. “On the Ethics of Alain Badiou,” 215–236 in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005, 216.

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alternatively thought as a confrontation of psychical dispositions—which, on both sides, is self-divided. The presumption of wholeness makes the problem much worse. Once a political citizen is reduced to being a serviceable ethical subject, for others, for a cause, then he and she can become expendable—that is, precisely, a sacrificial thing. Once ethics supersedes the political (and when private groups and the State are complicit in regulatory exercises) then we have what Badiou called, in the Theory of the Subject, a “terrorizing prescription” as well as “the universal barbarism of the law.” The results have been anticipated. “The sacrifice of the excess to the restoration of the place is what subordinates subjectivation to the conservative subjective process: the superego” (TS 292). It is surely a sign of the times that philosophy has to come to the defense of the ego, one individual, and two individuals in love who are compelled by desire, against the morality of the super-ego. The situation has today become much worse; the demands made by the purveyors of the super-ego have become total and intolerable. The amorous encounter of the Two has led Badiou to come back to a fundamental origin: the individual, in the poetry of love, and in the philosophical stairs of love. Badiou’s defense of love involved both the encounter of the two and their independence from the world and, perhaps surprisingly, a few well-chosen insights about the one, the individual who (alone) has to establish a rapport with the path of the spirit in order to effectively become self-sufficient enough to avoid being forced into an untenable ethical situation. Epicurus’ autarkeia, as the individual’s independence from all social coercions, are essential. Either individuals develop their own autonomy and its still unknown effects (which, over a long period of time, have been denied and suppressed according to intellectual exigencies, according to “theory” and morality) or one runs the risk of being unduly influenced by the force of judgement and the mendacity of an excessive conscience obsessed with guilt and retribution. For a long time, ethics has been about the other; a return to the responsibility of the individual (for the one) might have unknown benefits, for all. A temporary experiment might be much more beneficial than can be imagined at the present time. The critical theory and negation of the subject can be suspended for the attempt, once more, of a decisive project, one motivated by self-constitution. For whom is a truth absent? For the human animal as such … there is no truth, only opinions, through which he is socialized. As for the

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subject, the Immortal, he cannot lack the truth, since it is from the truth and the truth alone, given as faithful trajectory, that he constitutes himself. (E 61)

The constitution of the self—that is, the subject of being—is made possible by the truths indicative of fidelity. Are we going to present the consequences of Badiou’s argument as this? The human animal is socialized into the ethical opinions of his time; the human Immortal finds his and her way to another set of truths and, by doing so, can commit to the un-­ ending project of self-creation, what Nietzsche called becoming and what we, today, can begin to simply call a life dedicated to truth and, as the ancients advised us, psychological health. Again, the argument is presented: the individual has to begin with an act of subtraction from the social and from the determination of being a biological thing. Independence is essential. The individual has no peers. We can begin to see the political dilemma on the horizon. How does the independence of the individual lead, possibly, and necessarily for Badiou, into a new concept and being of the “we?” How does the individual, alone as a subject, and then together with the Two of love, avoid being overwhelmed by the demands of socialization? Because the threat to love, for the one and the two, is being produced from both sides. Badiou’s one example, in love, could not be more precise. The individual and the Two have to most worry about the effects of jealousy. We will see how, true to his word, Badiou moves from the negativity of the nihilistic and jealousy to a philosophical preoccupation forsaken for far too long. It is only fitting that a section on love should conclude with joy, bliss, and happiness. To continue to present the dilemma is an obligation; the attempt to find a resolution is no less pressing as we continue to move through all the different and competing versions of love, ideally and actually. There has been one effect (among the many) that Badiou has exposed with fidelity to love and for its defense. We are now at another critical juncture. From the ultimate defense of the individual, Badiou leads us to one more realization out of the many his philosophy has been presenting. The subject has never been more vigorously defended and affirmed. The attack from both sides on the question of jealousy (as a political phenomenon) now comes to the fore. Much has already been said about the complications of love and the many directions taken because of Badiou’s references. One writing in particular can serve for a more prolonged examination of what he surmises, all told, at a time when he found himself

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compelled to write a second manifesto. One was clearly not enough; the times demanded a second testimony, true to his beginnings in Theory of the Subject. Something in the nature of love had changed. The two enemies, each from a different side of the political extreme, were now fully exposed. Between tradition and transgression stood the individual who, if he or she wanted to still believe in the possibility of not only love but of being human, had no choice but to make an axiomatic decision, to live with, to live by. There is no forgetting his emotions. He summed up his experience of a “detestable time.” Love in the modern world has become a particular kind of phenomenon; above all, one absolute has been advanced as a priority. The ancient dictum from the book of Leviticus and from the gospels (love your neighbor) has taken on an ethical imperative all its own, with the universality of all directed only at specific others. Has difference negated universality? The neighbor has been transformed into, first, the ubiquitous other and today the dead victim and the vulnerable living who both require succor and solicitude. Badiou’s provocative polemic in Ethics exposed the machinations of ethics and, as an alternative, created the truth of love as an amorous encounter between two—on the one hand (one example) in the act of reading poetry and philosophy, on the other with the event of two people experiencing a transferential relationship and, owing to its effects, making themselves faithful—to the experience, to the event for the future. Their future. However, between the violations of the ethical and the possibility of the amorous encounter, one danger almost immediately follows: the meddling of others makes love vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation, from the closest of friends and from the institution Badiou has no love for: the family. Badiou only uses the particular diagnostic of neuroses, hysteria, and pathology at the most appropriate times. When it comes to matters of love, his analysis of jealousy (from friends and family, not between the two in love) is a devastating indictment. The entire presentation of love, after the power of ethics and the amorous encounter, is going to be caught between the dilemma of jealousy and happiness. The realities of love are much graver than the non-relation between the solicitude for the other and the victim (as well as all our aspirations about justice, equality, and emancipation) and the amorous encounter of the two: separate, in solitude, without any external interferences. Norman Madarazs writes: “When Badiou speaks of love, he does not exactly describe the loving condition of the human animal. He leads us to an

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ontological experience.”29 An ontological experience that, so far, has been severely divided. Our next section is hardly going to make the dilemmas of the truth of love any easier. Badiou, however, outdoes himself once again by having the courage and the analytic insight to expose both sides of the divide on questions of love and how today the many aspects of a profound conflict is being enacted with ruthlessness. Cross-roads have been reached on several occasions before; this is another. The prior dilemmas have been, one, between enemies, two, between two individuals in love. Two more will now be examined—the first on the presence today of a “deadly jealousy” and, once diagnosed, the possibility of becoming happy and, perhaps, attain an elusive ideal returning us once again to the ancient world, the happiness so often invoked by philosophers. Between the misery of jealousy and Badiou’s “joy of being,” one conclusion will be guiding if not, yet, achievable.

3  Deadly Jealousy The urgency of writing a second manifesto, he tells us in the Introduction, “ is to announce that a moment has come to make a declaration” (SMP 1). The first manifesto, for philosophy, for thinking, and the task of life, was not enough; there were other, outstanding supplements to be made to an original statement, with more intensity than first expressed in Ethics for every individual and for the “advent of the not-known Immortal in them” (E 49). The immortal human being was placed beside the biological animal—as a philosophical comparison. To then place love in an antagonistic relationship to ethics should have been forceful enough. We can be witnesses to a unique argument: immortality and love are the philosophical affirmations to be compared to the re-ducations of human animality and its ethical support. The second manifesto responded to an analysis of a worsening symptom (parenthetically, in a category he does not use, i.e., neoliberalism) and how to address any possibility of a remedy. Something specific about the times, in the first decade of the new century (2009), needed more compelling ideas. “When all is said and done, this second 29  Madarasz, Norman. “Love in the Time of the Communist Hypothesis,” 187–211 Badiou and the Political Condition. Ed. Marios Constantinou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 188. Madarazs makes a further comment that may be of interest to those who have written on love, or sex and gender, from a certain perspective. He writes that “commentaries and critiques” on Badiou’s concept of love have been “written primarily by women,” 189.

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Manifesto is the result of our confused and detestable present time” (SMP 129-130). The affirmative intent is not always wholeheartedly maintained; he does nothing to conceal his exasperation and something more. Was there a lingering worry in Badiou’s thought, one divided between his complete confidence in the individuals who, alone, could more firmly hold themselves autonomous from external pressures, and the overwhelming movement of the times to subject as many people as possible to its dictates, with ideas, with systems, with demands? Badiou had come to an uneasy realization; realities had to be acknowledged. In the Second Manifesto for Philosophy, he writes: “The faithful subject is everything that orientates love towards the effective power of the Two it institutes” (SMP 99-100). The confidence in the power of the Two quickly came under extreme duress—from the enemies Badiou has already identified, with a right/left compass not everyone had been willing to register, both of them complicit in maintaining extremes and avoiding the difficult work of moderation. If his concerns had been (as they still are) motivated above all by political life, he came to an uneasy realization: the truth of love was being attacked from two sides and with one peculiar form of expression. In matters of love, it was all too well known and felt. The form of a “deadly love,” in politics, exhibited new characteristics. A defense had to be mounted against a hostile and bitter jealousy. In what two forms was jealousy being enacted? The complicit relationship between left and right could be seen, according to Badiou, by looking at the modes of authority and domination, the ones he had been exposing since Theory of the Subject, which had worsened exponentially. One distinction could have been mentioned earlier but was saved for this one opportunity, in and for love; the situation serves as an extra incentive for the reader. Previously, in part to maintain the possibility of an escape from the alternatives presented by the current realities of situations, the idea of an Epicurean-like withdrawal was not immediately rejected. Badiou gives us one other option at the same time as he presents his own ethics of truth. “The opposite of the ethical decision is not the selfish decision, far from it. The proper opposite of ethics is betrayal, the essence of which consists in betraying oneself, in inexisting in the service of goods” (TS 311, my emphasis). His ethics of truth is the simultaneous defense of the individual as well as the intimation of an analysis, which receives its spur from Lacan on the doubled meaning of goods. The implications, which are fully evident today, requires to be stated and in a way that will undermine the pretensions of ethicists; for once we see how “the service of goods” brings

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capital and ethics in the closest relation, their propaganda and illusions collapse into each other. A 21st century phenomenon can be witnessed; it may very well be unprecedented. The material “goods” produced for the needy and avaricious consumer, without the need to deliberate on the fetish object, are symmetrical to the ethical good presented by the ideologues who are given legitimacy by advertising and marketability. Profits are amassed, at the expense of those who are skeptical about the proliferation of what is increasingly promoted. The 21st century relationship between capital and ethics introduces a new phenomenon into our “detestable” time—which, at least, makes the enemies fully visible since they depend on the repeated message of advertising and promotions—of things and of themselves. Anyone who has doubts about the thesis can spend some worthwhile time taking notice of commercials. The situation of the present makes the truth of love, and the vigilance for the individual, ever more crucial. Badiou would agree that, here, he is also Kierkegaard’s equal in the absolute defense of the individual. One has to think about the need for decisions to be made: between giving it to the “goods” being promoted from two extreme sides—the traditional and the radical and therefore, either way betraying oneself for a false cause—or being true to oneself precisely not to betray either one’s own individuality or the truth of love. The intersection of goods (as objects of consumption and as values) are not as distinct as one might think. The previous references to nihilism can be supplemented: the goods of capital and the goods of ethics more interrelated than has been imagined, both of them complicit in the malice of propaganda and either permitting or prohibiting everything it deems fit. Badiou’s diagnosis has led him to one memorable insight. Recalling one more bind to Plato and love in addition to the ascending stairs of the Symposium, he writes: “It has become difficult to challenge opinion, even though this would seem the duty of all philosophy since Plato” (SMP 15). To so separate ethical opinion, today both ordinary and expected, and his own ethics of truths force him to continue to make interrelated arguments in the service of his good—the truth and how it is supported by, in our case here, love. Reading too quickly might lead to a ready assumption, or an omission; because the eternity of love is today confronted with two enemies, both of them polarized and extreme. The traditional family and all its values of conservation is not the only problem. One has been commonplace; the other has barely been imagined. “Between the indistinct family and deadly jealousy, love must take up the wager of its moving

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eternity” (SMP 104). Deadly jealousy does not emanate, only, from the family, despite its all too well-known problems and “dysfunctions.” There is more than sufficient uncertainty in those who have removed themselves from family ties; inverting the traditional and the regulatory does not guarantee anything. Badiou’s recognition of “deadly jealousy” as a symptom of the times goes a long way in explaining some of the more pathological of our cultural inclinations. “Concerning truth, the philosopher states his declarations from the bias of love” (Con 129). And yet, there is simply no avoiding an equally forceful declaration; the “bias” is not of love at all, but rather of intense animosity, so much so that he does not restrain himself from making psychological assessments and, as he has done before, use classical terms such as hysteria to describe social and political pathologies. The frame of reference was set, the antagonism defined: the jealousy of the traditionalists and the transgressors, Janus-faced in appearance, were now going to be opposed by the individual who, indeed, had made the wager of long-standing, the one heard since Being and Event and to be bet on one more time by the subject of being who put life and eternity (Immortality) together instead finitude and history (the domesticated animal) for the sake of love. The original amorous encounter had its stakes raised to the highest degree. The jealousy of others, from right to left, was increasing, each side being driven by a kind of avarice. Others had to be possessed. Psyches and bodies were put on alert. Jealousy and prohibition were, as always, inseparable. Is this the reason, as Alexander Galloway writes, that “Badiou is not universally loved, far from it?”30 Badiou does not hesitate to show up pretensions; he has not been loved or forgiven, all the more reason to come to his defense, in the truth of love more than others. The two lovers become increasingly significant as we proceed because every single time and with every single example of the present state of authoritarian meddling (from either end of the political extremes), whenever the conservative and the “radical” continue their incessant interfering into questions of love, it is only the autonomy of the two lovers who can withstand all external pressure and remain committed to fidelity to the event, which represents the immortality of the two against those who would reduce them to either the imperatives of convention or the equally imposing control of what love can, or should, be. Freud anticipated  Galloway, Alexander R. “Mathification,” 96–115 Diacritics, vol. 47, Iss. 1 (2019), 100.

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Badiou in the love of the Two against “the herd.” In the “Postscript” to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud writes: “Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling” (SE 18:140). Each of the two is an individual. There is no “they.” There is no “we.” One and two come together in different ways— in the immediacy of an amorous encounter when the event is created and then multiplied for the individuals who will recognize themselves as subjects, in every case to be independent of the groups who are coercive in their demands, absolute in their knowledge of their situation and, above all, in the identity that has to be promoted and repeatedly acknowledged. So, once again, we are caught in a dilemma; the situation has, however, shifted. Perhaps, it has never foundered because Badiou has been absolutely steady and unmoved. An introductory note from The Century can add one more emphasis to all our previous ones. “The century has been a great century for the vision of love as a figure of truth … The key issue consists in thinking love not as a destiny, but as an encounter and thought, as an asymmetrical and egalitarian becoming, as the invention of oneself” (TC 145). The invention of oneself. He has used the term before. How the inventions will take place (as something more than what usually happens) will continue to motivate the analysis to come. Up until now, in art and science, the obstacles to their truths and the interference have been mentioned, incompletely, concentrating only a few of the more intrusive ones. Devoting too much time to exposing them would have involved a necessary commitment to critique and the negative. In matters of love, any authentic defense of love will have to be more and more aware of both “insurance policy” and “regulated pleasures,” the opposition within a finite reality. Badiou defines the crucial problem of love as one of jealousy. The enemy of self-invention is deadly jealousy. Has he thereby returned, again, to one of his foundations in Theory of the Subject and hinted at the relation between the moralizing authority of the super-ego and its collaboration with the death drive? The other has been too narrowly defined as someone in need of solicitude, who was weak and vulnerable and needed help. He has been made into a victim. But the other, in many ways, has benefited from an identity that could also be persecutory. The catechism and the orthodoxy of the other has been well concealed behind the niceties of ideals when, most recently, he has given himself all kinds of privilege and authority to dictate both truth and being, belief and how life had to be lived, privately and

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within institutions and the societies of neoliberal reality. Sanctimony is not lacking. The reader is asked to dwell on this particular reality and decide if the interventions of this other have been ethically beneficial or oppressive in its reality and effects and responsible for the creation of a situation with the characteristics Badiou has defined as terror, betrayal, and disaster. Betrayal, in Badiou’s categorical triplet, is caught between: one has to therefore notice how the social and political conditions of terror are leading so many to betray themselves, and the truth of love, and lead themselves to a disaster, the propaganda of an either/or, traditional or radical, each making demands about love and much else besides. Fortunately, if terror is a permanent condition, betrayal (self-betrayal) and disaster can be averted; or they can be reversed with sufficient awareness and commitment and—this, with difficulty—to give oneself the permission to turn against ethical directives of the many who are huddled together in group identity. Nietzsche, again and as is so often the case, tells us. “All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have a firm grip on themselves are capable. It makes the most telling difference whether a thinker has a personal relationship to his problems and finds in them his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness; or an ‘impersonal’ one” (GS 283). Can the “great problems” of our times be countered, affirmatively, only with love and happiness and, perhaps, leading to an indirect conflict of attrition. Despite the negativity of Badiou’s analysis most especially on the topic of ethics today, are we confident enough in his defense of love—and happiness—to stress one side of the equation? Badiou’s Second Manifesto of Philosophy has never been as eloquent in discussing love and beyond the extreme wandering of the topic when he allows himself moments of Lacanian speculation—diagrams and all.31 Among the four generic procedures of truth, love has been the most immediate but also, in many ways, the most reserved, the most intellectually remote—until a moment of transition, actually two: on the one hand, when the concepts of incorporation and subjectivation follow one another, and on the other, when the most exemplary instance of love is not, only, the amorous encounter, but the commitment, the decision, the 31  One example is “What is Love?” in Conditions. Questions of sexual difference is left to others. See, for example, Louise Burchill’s “Love” in The Badiou Dictionary. Ed. Steven Corcoran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. The occasion of a few of these efforts can be read with caution, for theoretical and other reasons.

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conviction, to become faithful to the consequences of the event. To repeat Badiou’s imperatives is not wasted; the reminders can be constant. The amorous encounter in the present is compossible with a retroactive intervention of the past (to remind ourselves, in the act of reading) and with the same trinitarian process as before—from intervention to configuration to incorporation, each as instances of one comprehensive act of the subject of truth. The amorous encounter can be experienced in two forms: with another human being in the present, with another human being (through his or her work, in writing, in painting, in every creative human act) in the past. Whether we, as readers of Badiou, can maintain ourselves on the side of love or on the side of the necessary confrontation with enemies remains an outstanding question; the dilemma has not been, for the moment, resolved. The power of love can be recalled for one more reason, in effect to make oneself independent of jealousy, in this case because of a private and, if need be, secretive experience. The power of love extends in both historical directions—from author to reader, and the other way around. One kind of love is going to be shown by a student and a disciple. One of Badiou’s examples, to add a modern to the classical one of Epicurus and Lucretius previously highlighted, is “the great students and disciples of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern after the dodecaphonic turn” (SMP 85-86). He continues. Although one word, disciple, will be retained, in the manifesto Badiou adds another important one. “Thousands of other examples show what it entails, for an individual rallied by the authority of a primordial statement, to declare him- herself, body and soul, on the side of the statement and a confirmed volunteer for the incorporated (and reiterated: ‘encore!’) unfurling of its effects” (SMP 86, my emphasis). Once the phenomenology of incorporation has initiated the creation of a process of subjectivation, one of its consequences will be to become a disciple and a “volunteer” for the dissemination of the idea and the way of life. The one word, essential for me since the beginning, despite how it has fallen in some disrepute, is the individual, the one who would choose and prefer solitude than suffering through enforced emulation and the prescriptions of capital and ethics and all other coercions of the times. This one has to be defended with utmost conviction; because, in the end, when a certain materialism is transcended, “beyond bodies and languages, there is real life and some subjects” (LW 412). The real life of subjects can become evident only when opinion and consensus has been replaced—not at all easy to accomplish. In any case and moving towards the on-going

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process, love and jealousy are counter to each other since the latter aims, with extreme avarice, at possession, while the former cannot be separated from the universal ideals of philosophy in intelligence and freedom and creativity. The amorous encounter, as conceived from out of Badiou’s thought, cannot be circumscribed by two classical conceptions, either eros or agape. Fidelity can now be recognized for the power of its love and for what it can accomplish—as a disciple, in the example in the manifesto, and soon as a consequence of being a reader as we saw earlier, which was the possibility of establishing a fidelity to an event in history and, by doing so, subtracting oneself from the present and so refusing to be claimed and possessed by jealousy and be forced to be incorporated into an ideological struggle. The reason for the love of fidelity being exemplary is its autonomy from the meddling of the many (from all sides) when it comes to the amorous encounter of the two today. If “love is the first degree of the individual’s passage to an immediate beyond her- or himself” (SMP 100), Badiou describes the subjective experience of a situation that may become an ontological event, with the transcendence of (the place) always created from out of the resources of the one. In the various ways of presenting the event of the amorous encounter, the individual (more than any other procedure of truth) has been emphasized. Badiou did so because, the whole time, he was conscious of the most pressing danger to individuals in love. He could have easily concentrated his analysis on the vulnerability of each subject in love and what they may expose themselves to as they deal with the difficulty of being faithful to the event as well as the other human being. Jealousy between the two, from one or the other, or both, was only the most obvious, the most common, kind of analysis. But such an interest would have been too partial, nothing more than an occasional idiosyncrasy or a personal malaise. He was not interested in the jealousy of the lovers, Badiou was drawn to a much more serious and universal problem. Jealousy, in its many perverted forms, is simply the desire to possess the other internally, in perpetuity, and thereby being able to have access to the promise of wholeness forever and without fail. This form of jealousy did not interest Badiou. The jealousy of one lover was incidental. He was much more concerned and aware of a political jealousy of love and how it is more and more demanding in forcing others to submit to its moribund desire. “Just like fascism in what concerns the life of society, jealousy transforms the life of a couple into an ongoing saga of policing” (SMP 103).

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Although Badiou narrows his pin-point analysis down to the family, in this instance, the greater threat comes from tradition as a whole and the compulsion to repeat that is preserved in what has been handed-down from the past and what will be inherited in the future. That’s one side of jealousy. Needless to say, the economic intersections (i.e., the construction of the finite) are many. The structure of the finite bind of history today is then guaranteed by the very principles that are supplying all apparent alternatives to history. Without surprise he mentions “the whole array of sensorial means within the new imaginary constructions, and the cultural relativism dissolving any and all norms” (SMP 120). The philosophical language, seemingly exoteric, gives the reader a sense of what Badiou has ultimately presented in an argument that, since the Introduction, has been repeated a great many times. There are exceptional moments when Badiou writes with circumspection; and yet the message appears clear. Isolating fascism and policing is necessary; equally important is the one argument he has been making, almost surreptitiously, on the double-sided expression of political jealousy today and the complicity between two different kinds of authority, the traditional and the culturally relative. “The only way they can sustain their vision in the long run is by torture, both themselves and others, and finally by murder, whether real or symbolic” (SMP 103). The reader is invited to identify the “they.” No one should be self-­congratulatory or complacent; and if Badiou is resented, then the psychological effect will be one’s own. Badiou does not exclude anyone from his analysis, which again makes him unique among his many philosophical contemporaries— many of them now no longer with us.32 Jealousy, torture, murder: these are his words and very serious accusations. All three forms of social policing are evenly administered by conservatives and libertines. The most pervasive threat has become the injunction against self-invention. Have the right and left come together, each of them advancing their particular form of the good and for their personal reasons, each to advance a way of being in the world, each of them in the form of a contagion and one more to add during an age of technological and microbiological viruses? For once, in matters of love, a critical confrontation has been explicit and with the use of enemies as a declaration. How does one proceed? With prudence, as Epicurus would counsel. Badiou has given us the issues of the conflict. With few exceptions, they have never been made with such deliberation and for the analysis of the times. Instead of the all-out  A kind of eulogy to them can be read in his Pocket Pantheon.

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confrontation, another possibility is made and, strategically, with the same advice as before. The attempt at affirmation should at least be tried. Badiou gives us a choice; he repeats the suggestion and has never hesitated: “between the indistinct family and deadly jealousy, love must take up the wager of its moving eternity” (SMP 104). No one should underestimate precisely what he means; being between means two different and opposite sides have to be, somehow, surmounted and with methods much more visceral than philosophy. What is the wager of eternity going to lead to? In a word, and the same one that so preoccupied Freud when he reflected on the malaise of civilization: happiness. Its attainment is no easy matter; it might even be on the whole impossible he tells us. Nonetheless, the wager must be made. One final set of comments are warranted from Byung-Chul Han. He begins his chapter on “The Politics of Eros” with a diagnosis. “If love is profaned into sexuality, as is happening today, the universal quality of eros vanishes.”33 There are too many symptoms to analyze; the procedure might be redundant since no one needs special acuity to notice society’s infatuation with images or with drives no longer separated from the desire for destruction, at the level of civilization no less than at the level of biology. What characterizes our pornographic age and with the ancient porneia is no longer confined to its biblical translation of “fornication” unless it can be universally applied to all kinds of human acts and involvements. Where a response to Han is necessary is on the analysis of his conclusion: “neo-liberalism is depoliticizing society in general—and not least of all, by replacing eros with sexuality and pornography” (AE 44). Badiou’s presentation of two sides (both against individuals) is more thorough. The ancient convenience of right and left is no longer workable because the many in each of the two bears responsibility for the state of affairs today. Han comments on Badiou. Even though Alain Badiou rejects a direct link between politics and love, he presumes a “kind of secret resonance” that arises between life wholly under the sign of a political idea and the intensity of love. They are “like two musical instruments that are completely different in tone and volume, but which mysteriously converge when unified by a great musician in 33  Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. Foreword by Alain Badiou. Tr. Erik Butler. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017, 43. Hereafter cited as AE followed by page number.

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the same work.” Political action is mutual desire for another way of living—a more just world aligned with eros on every register. Eros represents a source of energy for political revolt and engagement. (AE 44)

My difficulty, my skepticism, and also, admittedly, pessimism leads me to be highly suspicious of both the nature of “political action” because I cannot trust any of the actors who have proclaimed themselves political. Eros, as Badiou presented it, is a matter of two. No one else. Agreeing in principle with the initial analysis but not with the possibility of a “solution,”—if one still possible, conceivable—I fully agree with Han that “this transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros” (AE 45). My hesitation lies exactly with the subjects and the consequences of this transcendental fidelity. For me, at this juncture and as we prepare to move to the political, the fidelity is to and for the individual independently of the right/left bind—which seems more and more to be necessary in their relation in order to perpetuate the real, with each narcissistically unable to witness their contribution to half of the whole. Let me return to Badiou’s conviction. “Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world” (IPL 26). The sentiment, which is shared with fidelity and one hopes by every reader, from experience, also now makes us more attentive to our situation and—to use the word he replaces with world—to what confronts us from all sides. There may be no better place to conclude the section on love than with Badiou’s declaration: “love begins where politics ends” (PE 40). His meaning is not obvious. Keeping the truth of politics until the end was necessary because, for me, politics is the truth with the most far-reaching consequences for everyone. My responses thus far have been, hopefully, measured. The political is the one most fraught with complications. The Introduction and notes all the way through have been adamant about the role of politics today. The State exercises the same power it always has; the point, earlier, has been to emphasize the tremendous power of the cultural super-ego and how, today, it has effectively become dominant because the finite system of social management has recognized how appeasing minor grievances—satisfying the narcissism of minor differences—the system as a whole could continue uninterrupted. Before turning to politics, and also to anticipate the conclusion to come, it is necessary to make love and possibility conclude with a way of being. “The work of love in praising love,” Kierkegaard writes, “is a work and naturally a work of love, for it can be

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done only in love, more accurately defined, in love of truth. We shall try to make clear how this work may be carried out.”34 As does Badiou. He continues to work towards the connection of truth and love. Still, our initial hesitation has not been settled.

4  The Reinvention of Love? If Badiou gives us sufficient awareness of the deadly jealousy of the times and therefore makes the need for independence all the more necessary, how do we restrain our understandable anger, minimizing its effects, and remain steadfast to the one imperative from the outset: affirmation and the positive, most especially when the category of enemies will become even more telling in the truth of politics? Turning from the harsh characterization of an epoch as it abuses love from two sides to sustaining, as he tried to do, a positive affirmation was no easy matter. The temptation has been obvious to revert to the objection and, with it, the customary critique. Only the idea of “eternal truths” could be a satisfactory response to our “detestable time.” “When all is said and done, this second Manifesto is the result of our confused and detestable present time forcing us to declare that there are eternal truths in politics, art, science and love” (SMP 130). To continue with his one philosophical program is not straightforward; deviations have their own appeal, though detrimentally so, since one has no choice but to adopt the tactics of the enemies and become like them, emulation through opposition. The critical temptation is hard to suppress. It comes too easily, as natural as aggression, hostility, and, sometimes, violence. Given Badiou’s guiding principles, the previous (and much restrained) analysis of the complicit acts of conservative tradition and its many “progressive” alternatives was apparent in Badiou’s love as a procedure of truth. Let the individual once again be manifest, and with him and her, also declare what he has called la métaphysique du bonheur reel. “Because in every one of his experiences, the individual who is subjectivated, incorporated into the process of truth, experiences that he is living, that he is living in the joy of being—and that in itself is enough to separate one from the world as it is” (TE 94). The nuances here are not slight. There are two. The first has been prominent. The individual is not incorporated into; the truth is incorporated into oneself and transformed, 34  Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Tr. Howard and Edna Hong. New  York: HarperPerennial, 2009, 331.

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heightened, at the same time as the process of subjectivation. Second, and my sense of a possible direction: the individual may very well have to be “separated,” willfully, from the world as it is. The joy of being, happiness, has often been mentioned—as a philosophical concept, one emotion taking us back and forth across epochs of history and towards the classical world and the origins of thought, from ancient convictions towards its modern forms. After the unpleasant and disconcerting examination of the perfidy of the ethical, the event of the amorous encounter solely between the Two (in the act of reading, transtemporally, e.g.), or the political jealousy of the right and left, it was incumbent on Badiou to provide, if not a resolution to the dilemmas of love, a sign of a possible decision being made by one and two individuals who could re-affirm the necessity of joy. The truth of love had to offer a way to become impervious to the common terror of the present and the typical self-betrayal which the times demand as a matter of course; above all, the personal disaster for the individual subject who, from then on, would simply be incorporated into the machinations of an either/or of love had to be avoided with all the courage possible. Whether love can be re-invented might be too ambitious. A disposition, also, cannot be enough; such a feeling can only be temporary and will simply not last long enough. The times demand a permanence of conviction. “It is the power of lovers to be left alone in the world because they find in their separate coexistence the means of revolting against the servile wickedness of popular thought.”35 If love can be reinvented, the isolation of the two will also have to overcome and due to what has been a problem all along—the easy reaction of “revolt.” There is, to my mind, a far better choice than revolt. (At least until such time as the situation demands otherwise—which will not be rejected, as a principle). Badiou has offered us a first choice, a private one, since he had a first-hand experience when the matheme gave him the calm of withdrawal—which is not “weary resignation,” but rather (and perhaps temporary) time of reflection on the perennial question of what can, and must, be done. Badiou makes himself clear when, once more returning to the ancient world to draw from its sustenance for modern thought, he relies on that most fleeting of states of being—the one Freud deemed virtually impossible to attain and yet commits the human being to its perpetual work: happiness. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes: “The program 35  Badiou, Alain. “Love must be reinvented,” 6–17 in Theory and Event, Vol. 22, Number 1, January 2019. Tr. Duane Rousselle, 13.

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of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (SE 21:83).36 Revealing the bind between two apparently opposite social forces that are, in effect, working in tandem could leave one with either resignation or desperation. The modern afflictions of melancholia and anxiety are hardly surprising; techno-narcissistic objects are no help. Companies are sure to exploit the need for love and provide everyone with cheap substitutes of imagistic self-love and gratuitous exhibitionism. There is one other alternative. Philosophy has offered it to us since its beginnings and to reiterate a previous argument, involved philosophy as a therapeutic endeavor. Thankfully, Badiou has been presenting the effects of such a therapy all along and, very recently, with another kind of manifesto, defended happiness. There is an additional philosophical theme to be mentioned and to be anticipated. Enemies and jealousy are to be forgotten; their projections, of wayward ideals, do not have to interfere with the authentic expression of love. “The basic affect in the case of love is happiness” (PE 44). Before the word and affect are dismissed as trivial, by the cynical, the theme can be given more attention. Happiness: does it deserve to be re-included in philosophy after what seems to be a long process of forgetting, or in the age of irony and other forms of rhetoric of the 20th century, forsaken because of horrifying realities of instant or bureaucratic incineration? The spirit of the human, surmounting the unmistakably evil, makes the answer definitive. It will now be a matter of thinking the meaning of happiness and most especially today in the modern world, and with the choice of two out of the infinite sources available, again taking us back to the ancient world. In Book One of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: “What is the Good of man? It must be the ultimate end or the object of human life: something that is in itself completely satisfying. Happiness fits this description.”37 Identifying this “good” and attaining it is, however, not at 36  The emphatic “must not,” “cannot” is a testimony to Freud’s conviction in never giving up, persevering, above all when it comes to matters of love. There is, for him (along with the pursuits of science and art as his principles of truth—and the exclusion of politics) the one constant and “passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of happiness.” His answer is telling. “And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. I am, of course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved.” 37  Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tr. J.A.K. Thomson. Revised with notes and appendices by Hugh Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, 73.

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all the same. In the work on the discontent of culture, Freud appeared to be highly skeptical about human beings ever being able to achieve ­happiness, even when they had science and art38 to give them at least instances of the experience of one form of happiness: the self-flourishing of experimentation and creation. Despite his skepticism, his three truths (art, science, love) were never relinquished, for any reason. Is it philosophically reckless to turn towards something as fleeting as happiness and defend its attainment when, for so long, as a matter of routine, it was preferable to be conscious of our collective human misery and give ourselves solace by knowing it and reminding ourselves constantly, as if enjoying the pain of our collective reminiscence with a kind of masochistic/ sadistic pleasure not yet completely satisfied or appeased? Is there not a better, though more trying, alternative because it requires great discipline, and fidelity in the human, and not the simple reliance on reaction? JeanLuc Marion reminds us that “philosophy comprehends only to the extent that it loves.”39 Does love, then, ultimately support understanding, and reason too? Badiou brings together more than a few alternatives to enemies and their political jealousy: love, fidelity, eternity, happiness, and the joy of being. More affirmations can be made, few can equal them. Praising love, he writes. “Love, the essence of which is fidelity in the meaning I give to the word, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself. Happiness, in a word” (IPL 48)! This one emotion and philosophical idea, an ethical good for Aristotle, as it was for Epicurus, leads Badiou to find a measure of independence, as he had earlier with his faith in the infinite thought of the matheme. “So it is with joy that one must receive the fact that the destiny of every situation is the infinite manifold of sets … Consequently, as disconnected from finitude, we live the infinite in our absolutely placid sojourn” (BrE 30). For Badiou, not at all apprehensive about hovering near the matheme as it expresses an ancient religious idea, happiness and the infinite are experienced by him in the here and now.

38  In Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes: “he who practices art and science emphasises the cleavage between the talented and untalented among men. But he who praises love equalises all, not in a common poverty nor in common mediocrity, but in the community of the highest” (335). Despite their many points of contact, Kierkegaard and Badiou will always remain apart: one privileges love and God, the other privileges politics. 39  Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Tr. Stephen E.  Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, 2.

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As we move from love to politics, there has never been a more opportune time to express doubt and the possibility of achieving happiness. Are we, as Freud believes in Civilization and its Discontents, fated to confront a malaise as a permanent condition; and, if so, are there more than palliative consolations to support our endurance—that is, more than the ones he outlined as the three truths of culture, first with love, and with his two preferences science and art? On Badiou’s fourth generic procedure of truth, politics, we will see if the measured responses are going to be able to carry through on all the previous concepts (i.e., interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation) and examine if politics, “revolutionary politics,” can contribute to the society for so long dreamed of by philosophers and others and whether “the metaphysics of real happiness” can be achieved. “Happiness can be defined as the affirmative experience of an interruption of finitude” (H 38). My fidelity to Badiou’s conception of happiness, as the interruption of finitude, has to be carried over to the “truth” of politics and see if it can deliver on its promise as Badiou conceives it and with such a possibility as his “communist hypothesis.” The problem, as a structural one, does not pose any difficulty. It remains to be seen whether the fundamental preoccupation of philosophy since its inception—happiness, evident in Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, and many more besides—can be reconciled with a collective undertaking or whether there are some irremediable obstacles to its attainment. In terms of love, with the permanent threat of jealousy, one thought can carry us forward and with many allies. Moving from the numerical two to the expansive “couple” of a concept is necessary. In the end, subject/truth is a couple, but it is a couple that ultimately refers to a co-relation, and sooner or later we have to define the ontological status of this co-relation … And the conclusion I draw is that this co-relation between subject and truth must really be conceived as a metamorphosis of the individual … a metamorphosis that is only made possible by the provocation of the event. (TE 22)

One is always positively supported when Badiou elevates the situation of the individual to his and her reserved place, what he has called “the place of the subjective.”40 Previous references are supported and  The title of Part I of Theory of the Subject.

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strengthened. Once again, we can place the event and the metamorphosis of the individual in a relationship. The two have been essential since the truth of art when the artist and the viewer collaborated in perpetuating the event. That Badiou supports the “metamorphosis of the individual” makes him one thinker (and the most visible today) who has been part of an essential genealogy and one that has transferred the ancient conviction and modern forms for the thought to be continued in the 21st century, today now relinquishing all previous announcements about ends and instead re-commit ourselves to the legitimacy of the human and with the constant questions coming from out of our own being. “Man is obliged to be human. Obliged by what engagement? By nothing other than the logic of his own being. How to be human, how to distinguish oneself from the prehuman, how to guard oneself from the inhuman? This is what all the formulas specify, which are somewhat maladroitly called ‘commandments’.”41 That last question will perhaps be the most crucial one as the century advances. In any case, Remi Brague’s engagement is no different than the individual reflection every human being has to undertake without recourse to anyone but themselves, and surely without relying on the contemporary pressures of public opinion and consensus. Badiou uses the same language. We are going to name the inexistent of a previous state of the world that finds itself raised up or elevated to the maximal power of appearing by the evental mutation; a primordial statement. This is not because it’s necessarily a matter of something said, but because the term in question is equivalent to a sort of commandment. (SMP 84)

To move from love to politics, back and forth and permanently, has been autobiographical for Badiou. No theoria here, only the conviction ensuing from the most personal of experiences. “I would like to make a qualified revelation here,” he says in the dialogue In Praise of Love, on the connection between communism following the May ’68 experience and my future life around processes of love that were by and large definitive. What came later, of the same order, was illuminated 41  Brague, Rémi. The Legitimacy of the Human. Translation and Introduction by Paul Seaton. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2017, 164.

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by that inspiration and its enduring nature. In particular, as I have already mentioned, conviction in love and politics, something one must never renounce. That was really the moment when, in between politics and love, my life found the musical chord that ensured its harmony.” (IPL 75-76)

In between politics and love. We will see, by way of a response, if it is at all comfortable to be in this particular between today; or if they have been separated, wrenched apart by identitarian claims whose ferocity leaves no room for real ethical feelings, like compassion or charity or forgiveness; because when the ethical is predicated only on marginalia, then all appeals to love are illusory. The initial motivation to respond to Badiou, with him, was done to address a number of contemporary phenomena. The most serious, for me, was the sense of a more implacable cultural super-ego proclaiming itself at the service of emancipation and justice and human rights but with increasingly authoritarian demands (to use Critchley’s word again) and debilitating effects for all individuals. We can now witness one of the consequences of demands which have become coercive, manipulative, and dominating. Anxiety and all manner of afflictions have been created because of the cultural super-ego and its drive to impose its ethical absolutes and with the rationalization of the other and the victim. As we move forward to the fourth procedure of truth with politics, two supplements will be kept in mind; the deep distrust of the identitarian ethicists and their methods cannot be easily forgotten. No allowances will be made for their particular demands because they are much too narrow, much too determined by the pathologies of a now unlimited super-ego. For the first time, Badiou’s unparalleled philosophical concept of grace (“pure grace”) will be introduced and placed beside our experience of the many making demands on us when they do not have to meet the same standards. Is the following statement about love or the event? “It is a gift without background. It is what I call the event, authorizing thought by pure grace, which is not to be thought but only accepted, followed, and deployed in its consequences.”42 Badiou has been urging all his readers to become aware of the event, in themselves, and then to carry it through, advancing it beyond the narrowness of groups and their identities. The ideal has been 42  Badiou, Alain. “In Search of Lost Prose.” Tr. Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret. 1254-1266 MLN, Vol. 132, Number 5, December 2017, 1257.

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presented, as a conclusion to the difficult analysis of the politics of jealousy, when love has been submitted to its use-value. Despite all the impositions of the worldly, Badiou does not doubt for a moment that the true life can become manifest. “I think that true life is when an individual perceives that he is capable of far more than he thought he was, when he crosses his own internal limits, precisely in terms of creative affirmation and the realization of a collective idea” (TE 93, my emphasis). Being able to again emphasize the respect for the individual is not taken for granted, not when, for so long, the one had been reduced to a disdainful category. If the dilemmas of Badiou’s philosophy have been presented here, they have been done with a consistent intent: the defense of the individual and of a value that is non-negotiable because higher than any moral ideals. Our political hesitation can be mentioned: can the individual, as he and she has been defended from the beginning, be reconciled to a “collective idea?” Or do the many and serious problems of all group psychology make our individual attitude cautious, at least, or because of the intense pathology of our times, necessarily independent and averse? Are we forced to accept our situation at this moment—between the individual and friends, and groups as enemies? In order for the fidelity and therefore the freedom of decision to remain steadfast, one final doubt has to be introduced; it will become unavoidable in the next section on politics. The problem is this: can the individual reconcile the possibility of his and her creative affirmation with the realization of a collective idea, especially when moral imperatives have become absolute and a matter of (apparently) liberal consensus and self-congratulation? The concept of incorporation into a procedure of truth results in subjectivation; however, in the world of objects and appearances, incorporation is continually off-set by a process of intrusion. The philosophical edifice of Badiou’s entire system stands opposed to the objective validity of the world and proposes an alternative way of being. His is not an academic exercise; we cannot be cognitively aware of our constant intrusions (and fully participate in them) and then expect to philosophically act within the truth of incorporation and subjectivation. No such process is possible. Intrusion nullifies incorporation and negates its effects. Badiou’s philosophy has to result in a decision about a way of life, philosophically and practically, as an everyday obligation; otherwise, it becomes one more sophisticated academicism that can be rendered null by the institution today most vulnerable to manipulation (from within)—that is, the

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university. The language is as powerful as Nietzsche’s in its effectivity, in entering into the subject (Badiou’s philosophy has to itself be incorporated) to lead to a permanent process of subjectivation—or, to use Nietzsche’s language, the free spirit43 and the noble soul, the twin-characteristic of the philosopher of the future. We return, as always, to the spirit of human beings over and against the use of objects and/or ethicists and moralists to manipulate their interiority. Immortality is no mere metaphor, adopted from a philosophical argument of the ancients and dropped into the modern world as some fortuitous accident. Immortality is the result of a process of recognizing the subject-altering consequences of an event, its incorporation as a perpetual process of coming-to-be independently of the objects of the world despite their durability. In the beginning, love has been articulated as the event between two individuals. In the end, and beyond the specificity of an encounter, Badiou makes an essential addition: I think that philosophy requires the experience of love, as the primitive, or proto-, experience of an opening-up of finitude, of the passage from the one to the two. This passage from the one to the two is the first opening-up of finitude—the smallest but, undoubtedly, also the most radical. Moreover, from the point of view of philosophical transmission’s overall configuration, there is a particular function of transference. (PE 54)

We can now reconfirm the initial argument in the truth of art and the transference between the artist and the individual in the present who is capable to perceiving the event and, in the three-part subjective process of interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation begin to realize the possibility of living a different kind of life. The resulting fidelity, and attitude, will be all-important. Keeping in mind the situation of our present forces us towards a decision: will we be inclined towards subversion or self-invention, opposition, or a return (first of all, prior to any act) to our interiority? “L’événement est la pure apparition révolutionnaire propre à subverter les lois réglées de l’être.”44 It is one thing to make philosophical assertions (i.e., on paper, or electronically), it is quite another  A “Book for free spirits” is, after all, the subtitle of Human, all too Human.  Sauvêtre, Pierre. “Exception et revolution: Sur la dialectique de l’exception chez Alain Badiou,” tracés: Revue de Sciences humaines, 20/2011, 107–122. 43 44

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for these and other ideas, however desirable, to actually take place; because as far as I know, “subverting” the “laws of being” does not happen linguistically. Heidegger has tirelessly reminded us of our estrangement from even properly thinking the question of Being. On top of it, one should be well aware of what the consequences would be if any such “subversion” were to take place. Previous revolutions do not inspire any confidence, as we will see in the next chapter. Can we make a claim, or express a hope, that love “will be a militant act of fidelity with the ability to fundamentally overturn a situation and produce a new founding name?”45 Or are we left with much less ambitious aims: to first of all recognize the possible impositions of our moral directives and to maintain, as much as humanly possible, the reality of the amorous encounter of the two and with the least amount of interference, physically and erotically, or when reading—on our own, struggling to make hermeneutic sense of the logos insofar as it can dynamically alter us? Julia Kristeva adds to our confidence with a therapeutic disclosure from In the Beginning was Love. “From being the subject of an amorous discourse during the years of my analysis (and, in the best circumstances, beyond them), I discover my potential for psychic renewal, intellectual innovation, and even physical change.”46 Badiou’s truth of love, exemplified by Kristeva in terms of renewal, innovation, change, takes us to our next preoccupation. The truth of politics in many ways will present us with the most serious dilemmas. Badiou’s arguments on the failures of communist enterprises is a question that can only be examined with patience and, necessarily, by suspending at least some of our historical knowledge. We began the chapter with the truth of love and reading. That one act (of love, and comparable with looking at a painting, and many other forms of perception that readers here are asked to identify for themselves) reconfirmed for us the reality of a transmission and, in particular, as one individual choice made from others that are historically available, from the ancient Greek world. We were led towards one of Badiou’s projects, to invent modern forms of ancient convictions and therefore make the attempt to think originally, for ourselves, and without the contemporary pressures to conform. Cornelius Castoriadis writes: 45  Jöttkandt, Sigi. “Love,” 73–81  in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts. Ed. A.J.  Bartlett and Justin Clemens. Londong: Routledge, 2010, 80. 46  Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 3.

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Original thought posits/creates other figures, brings about the existence of a figure of that which could not previously so exist; and this involves, inevitably, a tearing apart and a recreation of the existing background, the given horizon… This in turn implies that, for us, this thought of the past becomes a new being under a new horizon, that we create it as object of our thought, in another relationship with its inexhaustible being… This is why, in the last analysis, no “faithful” reading is ever important, and no important reading is every truly “faithful”—which is not to say that a reading need only eschew fidelity in order to attain importance.47

Where do we stand thus far and with the admittedly daunting prospect of the truth of politics? An appropriate, and first, reference to desire can prepare us for the most severe dilemma of all. That it comes in The Pornograpic Age is not surprising. Since the opening of my responses to Badiou, one dilemma has been prominent. On the one hand, Badiou can recall one truth and write, “mathematics, a desire for intellectual beatitude,” and on the other he can continue to present “the desire for revolution, which would bring about the real equality of all humanity.”48 The philosophical argument between the one and the many now becomes visceral, between the individual and humanity. Are we going to have to decide between beatitude and revolution?

47  Castoriadis, Cornelius. Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Tr. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1984, xxv. 48  Badiou, Alain. The Pornographic Age. Tr. A.J.  Bartless and Justin Clemens. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 6.

CHAPTER 5

Politics

Only politics is intrinsically required to declare that the thought that it is is the thought of all. Theoretical Writings

1   Enemies and Their “Destruction” The three preceding procedures of truth have been analyzed from the perspective of their highest achievements in the work of art, the matheme, and the transformation of a life-condition after an amorous encounter (whether in the present, between two people in love, or as a historical transference, e.g., in the act of looking at a painting or reading), and at the same time stressing how each generic truth can be manipulated, from extreme sides—of which there are many fragmented elements: the instrumental cynicism of capital and its globalization, and the right and left both driven by their respective compulsions to order the world, and human beings, according to their prescriptions. The widespread collaboration between the state, various forms of media supporting this and that worthy cause, and the ever-widening scope of “bureaucratic legalism” (SMP 5) are making all of Badiou’s truths especially vulnerable; a taken-for-granted relativism, as one understanding of freedom, has compounded the many problems. The intertwined processes of the manufacture of a total world and idealistic projections are not, from all available evidence, always © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_5

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indicative of conscious intentions or foresight; the results, when organizing the presumed benefits of the thoughts and acts of human beings, are difficult to wholly anticipate. Premises and consequences are by no means the same. How does the subject of being (and the fourth and final truth, of politics) orient modern life to become, as much as possible, free from competing “values”—the ones Badiou has defined as nihilistic? The truth of politics is going to leave us with especially difficult challenges, for many reasons, only a few that will be outlined from the many, from the innumerable. To be free—which was an ideal articulated from the beginning, as the truth of an existential humanism—demands a certain amount of personal self-possession; the subject can always be reclaimed, forcefully, and subjected and deprived of its human characteristics, like the free exercise of intelligence and its expression in thought, in speech, in writing. Whether Badiou’s interpretative intervention, configuration, and incorporation of political truth can prevent the further advance of a totalizing order is uncertain. Truths, for all their positive contribution to Badiou’s idea of what human life can be, may be too beset with internal problems to be wholly effective; being attentive to their vulnerabilities will have to be constant in order to avert the terror, betrayal, and disaster he has warned us about. Every individual will have to examine themselves, as the first principle of thought—as Plato advised us to do when philosophy was essentially represented by one individual against the constructed reality of the city and by the philosophical ideal of self-examination. The examined life was a personal (and perpetual) responsibility, as was the pursuit of freedom and independence—today under mounting pressure to conform to many social dictates, of being and thought. The dynamics of a system are overwhelming when the promotions of “public opinion” so reviled by Badiou and what amounts to a 21st century version of two forms of authority are collaborators, both of them intent on effacing the idea of the political: the economy and the moral, with the liberal democratic State content to enable and manage both according to its needs. How, then, does Badiou’s truth of politics offer an alternative to the propaganda of “authoritarian opinion” (MeP 78) and create a different conception of life for one and, perhaps, for the many? The time has come to ask whether the four truths, as conditions of philosophy, are enough; or, given the realities of the day, other allies will have to be chosen in order to continue to support the positive and the affirmative. As we again mention a perennial and unavoidable conflict of politics (the difference between friends and enemies, which has been present from the beginning) will the four truths be

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obliged to make appeals beyond themselves, to other truths which, thus far, have only been cursorily mentioned—psychoanalysis, for one? The truth of politics has had one exigency. “The difficulty today is to extricate oneself from consensus. This is a real difficulty. It’s not enough to want to escape from it, to decide you are going to escape from it. It’s much more complicated than that” (PE 2-3). Only some of the complications of politics will be outlined; they are more numerous, more intractable, than other truths. Old knowledge no longer makes much difference, like the fact that the modern state has developed “an insurmountable allegiance to the necessities of capitalism.”1 These are super-structural realities, omnipresent and almost mundane as to their systematic order; they have been an unavoidable part of human reality. As for “revolution,” whether as delusion or promise, a note at the beginning of Being and Event is relevant, both in itself and for introducing psychoanalysis as a thought and a practice impossible to divorce from a thorough examination of ourselves and social reality. “The idea of an emancipation or salvation is proposed by Marx and Lenin in the guise of social revolution, but considered by Freud or Lacan with pessimistic scepticism” (BE 2). We are today further along than skepticism about any would-be revolution; the issue might be a question of not being naïve or deluded; or ultimately too familiar about what human beings are capable of doing in the name of ideals and the good. Fantasies and the imagination are acceptable and expected in art, science, and love; in politics, once they are active, ends become hazy, and how ideals are enacted (for the good of all) leaves many feeling, ironically, very excluded to the point of being invisible and non-­ existent. Except that Badiou has not lost any of his hope in the possibility of such an event and has no difficulty in proposing a “communist hypothesis” about the future. A skepticism can be mentioned, before an objection, as to the idea of a revolution and because of the differently stated idea of “inventive politics” (MP 107). Politics as a hypothesis and as inventive: in other words, politics for Badiou is intertwined with science and art. Ed Pluth’s suggestion will be, in part, accepted. “Politically, a critique of democracy should take precedence over a critique of capitalism.”2 Whether a “critique” is sufficient, or simply redundant, might no longer 1  Badiou, Alain. “Twenty-Four Notes on the use of the word “People”,” 21–31 in What is a People? Tr. Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 25. 2  Pluth, Ed. “The Narrative Politics of Active Number,” 76–95 in Badiou and the Political Condition. Ed. Marios Constantinou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 87.

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be an open question. More to our point: has the age of critique run its course and, its practitioners so settled into a predictable routine, that an expiration has eluded notice? Might critique be best left to expire and an authentic alternative found that is more reflective of Badiou’s affirmationism, which has been supported all the way through? The fourth generic truth, politics, is the most susceptible to interference, the one with the most total everyday impact and the one, today, suffering through a tightening tug-of-war, with mounting pressure and, for the time being, no foreseeable outcome; the prospects for simply an adversarial and healthy antagonism, as Mouffe believes can be the case for a workable democracy, is proving to be extremely elusive. Rage,3 coming from different and opposite sides, has been visceral. The confrontation is becoming more deliberate; as accepted, everyone in the middle, the ones who remain moderate, are squeezed mercilessly. Political passions are intensifying. The “exhaustion of ideology critique” that Sloterdijk informed us about in the Introduction is nowhere near as serious as its growing substitute in liberal societies. Where does that leave us once we’ve reached our conclusion and the situation of friends and enemies? We are still far from being able to transcend our own capacity for negation—of the most critical type. A reminder again. “It seems that it is difficult to break with the habit of polemic and antagonism.”4 The more immediate question, after our admission, is: can Badiou fulfill the promise of the positive and affirmation, and with a truth, of politics, not always capable to suppressing his enthusiasm and with historical effects all too well known? One problem is re-stated. “The question is how we can escape submission to the real,”5 Badiou writes, to which one should immediately add: which version—the economic or the moral; or both? All kinds of idealist statements about “escape” can be made. The question is: how does one make the alternatives real as opposed to replicating what already exists? Or worse, creating a system of “the good” so total it strives to banish all other forms not approved by the most insistent propaganda?

3  On the emotion and its political reality, see Peter Sloterdijk Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. 4  Noys, Benjamin. “Small Differences,” 141–143 New Formations, Vol. 8, 2014, 143. The article is a review of François Laruelle’ Anti-Badiou. 5  Badiou, Alain. “In Search of the Lost Real,” in Badiou and his Interlocutors: Lectures, Interviews and Responses. Ed. A.J.  Bartlett and Justin Clemens. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 8.

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A fundamental philosophical idea returns us to Badiou’s systematic origins in Being and Event. “The fact that a generic procedure of fidelity progresses to infinity entails a reworking of the situation” (BE 361). It is one thing to invoke the infinite truth; it is quite another to be able to know, with any degree of confidence, how exactly “reworking a situation” will end up. That Badiou returns to one of his classical foundations, the Platonic, is philosophically meaningful. “How are we to live, such that our life measures up to the Idea?” (SMP 50) Badiou’s political answers, however, do not leave us with much enthusiasm at all; the prospects are not inviting, not when his examples are historically very well known and particularly brutal; untold persecutions and slaughter does not help his cause and makes a sceptical attitude understandable. Our doubts are considerable, especially if we begin to consider his sources and his continuing fidelity to one or more 20th century events—a historical word, not a Badiou terminology. Why should “the Idea” be driven by an imperative and a private one? The laudable hope does not easily lead to a confident outcome, not when the abolition of the state is one vision of a future society. “In such a society, the State as an authority separate from public coercion is dissolved. Politics, which is the expression of the interests of social groups, and whose aim is the conquest of power, is itself dissolved” (MeP 80). Perhaps we could begin less ambitiously: “dissolving” identitarian politics would go a long way in restoring a moderate liberalism and one founded on individual freedom (and tolerance for other ideas challenging the orthodox) as opposed to the presumptions of our modern day. Given today’s conditions, public coercion does not originate, exclusively, in the State or with capital; as for the pursuit of power by social groups, eliminating the State would have no bearing on their continuity and would lead, hardly surprising, to untold terror since power—or, that highly ambiguous word, “empowerment”—would continue to be exercised and with ever more impunity. Without the State, the situation could in principle become infinitely worse—depending, as always, on one’s conception of the human. One name, Rousseau, should be sufficient to make us state, without hesitation, that any appeals to “nature” are going to be, at best, illusory. Following his line of political and revolutionary thinking, Badiou makes one declaration closer to our own developing century. The call is not without hesitation. In whatever way we understand Chariman Mao’s premise that “it is correct to revolt” (MeP xxxiv), the meaning, and means of,

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revolt is not obvious. Is revolt to be added to escape and invention; or are they different, each according to a physiological “reflex?” How do we understand a similar statement, still from Metapolitics, that all “resistance is a rupture in thought” (MeP 8)? These are only the first of our political choices—if, indeed, they are; there are so many more to come. Resistance, revolt, escape, invention: are these concepts to be unified into one whole, like a revolutionary program? One will have to wonder, at some point, whether the language Badiou uses in both love and politics (from the enemies in love to the war of politics) will have to lead to all-too-familiar consequences of Thanatos, aggression and hate and uncontrolled violence. Thus far, and admittedly, one possibility has been avoided. In this case, both a name and a political euphemism can be cited. Badiou’s phrase, again borrowed from Mao, is: “it is right to rebel against the reactionaries.” Rebellion, a counter force, one more to add to the list. But unlike the conditions in China well known to Badiou, the “reactionaries” are more numerous and not as easily identifiable as they once were, though land-­ owners and peasants have modern counter-parts along with many other fragmented equations. The workers of the world are used and abused and mistreated as they always have. If only the enemy could be so easily identified today as in the age of agrarian destitution. The disparity in wealth is one outward reality, for individuals, states, and hemispheres. Everyone knows, cognitively, about the worldly situation; and yet knowledge makes not the slightest difference to its reality. There are many others, now in cities, that do not correspond to archaic categories—though farmers, as always, are made to suffer through both nature and culture, at the mercy of weather and both multinational and bureaucratic programs. Any way one approaches Badiou’s thinking and categories, they seem more irreconcilable than ever—which makes this last section, rightly and necessarily, a culmination. One possibility has not yet been considered: how do we revolt against ourselves in such a way that there will indeed be a rupture in both thought and being. Today, everyone seems to be reacting in incompatible ways, with antithetical desires; the decisive separations of the past no longer have the same appearance. Badiou continues with his Chinese example and the one with the most troubling consequences. “Mao Zedong’s sentence clearly situates rebellion as the original place of correct ideas, and reactionaries as

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those whose destruction is legitimated by theory.”6 The rationale is all too familiar. “Correct” ideas can be politically outlined; their power and promotion today, in liberal democracies, is ubiquitous. Back to orthodoxy once more and always, typical and predictable; except that any reliance on deceptive euphemisms are going to be rejected. As soon as one makes the “destruction” of human beings “legitimated by theory” (which is the time when theory finally reveals itself to what it has always aimed at) then a separation between philosophy and politics is, for me, necessarily underway and for very good reasons. One can assume that Badiou’s admiration for the Chinese revolutionary is not widely shared. The Maoist enthusiasm during 1968, at least in Paris, has come and gone.7 The diagnosis of the neuroses of society is nothing out of the ordinary. Badiou, after all a former auditor at Lacan’s seminars, wrote about “a hypothesis regarding the hysterias of the social” (CPT 33). The mundane “slips” Freud originally used as examples (of the pen or tongue) have become much more serious; they now occupy both sides of the political spectrum and their identification, and their various identities, has splintered social life in a way perhaps not seen before within the parameters of liberal democracies, certainly not with the same urgency. The psychopathology of social life will not be overcome by ridding ourselves of “reactionaries.” “Destroying” our enemies is, one hopes, restricted to our fantasies; and murder can best remain within the images of our dreams. Because there are, always, too many enemies to get rid of when one spends too much time on obsessions; and what happens when they are gone? Reactionaries are no longer as identifiable as they used to be. Enemies come in all guises. What can be 6  Badiou, Alain. “An Essential Philosophical Thesis: ‘It is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries’.” Tr. Alberto Toscano, 669–677 in Positions, 2005, 13 (3), 670, my emphasis. Needless to say, when the euphemism “destruction” is both used and then rationalized (“legitimated by theory”) then we are at the extreme form of the negation. Killing human beings, however, is not a theoretical act. How a dialectic overcomes piled-up bodies is not an academic problem. 7  I do not at all consider myself what Richard Wolin, in the “Preface to the Second Edition,” has described as one of the “ill-willed detractors” of the French events of 1968 and for a few more years after until the turn of events in the mid-1970s. As for the origin of the subject (of Maoism and its history) that is an entirely other matter. Any ill-will can be understood in the context of the Chinese present. Wolin has provided an invaluable reading in French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960’s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) that explains the relevance of Maoism and how it worked in its French milieu. Maoists living in Paris are one thing; those in Peking, and most especially during the “cultural” version of events, is quite another.

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summed-­up in Badiou’s commitments? The revolution of the future and the “communist hypothesis” remains operative for him. For some, Mao’s presence in philosophy has been a severe obstacle, and a legacy (after all, a hybrid Marx in a specific context) not worth preserving. François Laruelle has been “outspoken,” to put it mildly. His scathing rebuke overall is not intentionally measured. However, one comment has been noted. “In any case, he [Badiou] is a militant and contemplative, rather than a practical, materialist.”8 A fitting summary, for showing the two sides to the philosopher, the thinker and the militant. A “contemplative.” (A word can be suggestive, one reason never to dismiss hermeneutics. The same word— set besides, and different from, political—is used by Badiou and Cassin in relation to Heidegger9). Is there a sense, a personal one for Badiou, that a philosopher is the individual divided between thought and the right course of action? If so, does Badiou suffer from the fraught experience he has been more than forthright about since discussing his attraction to the “purity” of the matheme and how the Idea (so pure, impervious to degradation) allowed him a measure of calm? The truth of politics will, if not solve the discrepancy, reveal its various decisions and hopefully to avoid precipitous reactions, those following from enthusiastic action. Badiou knows they are old and, thus far, have not been reconciled. Are we to concentrate on “the importance of honouring the soul,”10 as Plato advised in his Laws, and if so, is that in the end to be shared with any involvement with politics? One truth is categorical: honoring the soul and killing other human beings cannot ever be a binding relation, political or otherwise. Are we compelled, by reason and argument, to tend towards the contemplative life and the ideals stipulated to us by Nietzsche and the achievement of the free spirit and the noble soul? Granted, these are extraordinarily difficult to achieve in an epoch characterized by anything but the spirit and the soul and a reflective, and conscious, psyche. We are therefore compelled (by an ethics of truth) to turn away from the rationalization of eliminating reactionaries to assuming an individual responsibility. The “fundamental act of freeing ourselves from the enemy” (GRP 92) returns us, again, to the need to escape (i.e., to be rid 8  Laruelle, François. Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy. Tr. Robin Mackay. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 38. 9  Badiou, Alain and Cassin, Barbara. Heidegger: The Withdrawal of Being. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 10  Plato. Laws. Tr. with an Introduction and Notes by Trevor J.  Saunders. London: Penguin Books, 1970, 143.

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of—internally) instead of a direct and violent confrontation. Withdrawal is, for the time being and until such a moment comes when no other option is left, the most ethical decision for our being. They, the enemies, are as present in politics as in questions of love—and for interconnected reasons, the bind of love and hate, Eros and Thanatos. Again, we (readers of Badiou and subjects of being and truth) are forced to a decision: on the one hand, identifying and freeing ourselves from the enemies of our being, internally and externally, and without the convenience of only one, and on the other avoiding a physical destruction. “Any politics must be built around a system of what it affirms and proposes—not around what it denies or rejects” (GRP 26). We have come a long way, quickly, from one to the other. The challenge will be, from here, to continue with the work of the positive. Freedom will not come at the expense of others; any such freedom would be irremediably contaminated and would leave us, hopefully with the persistence of proper conscience instead of a rationalized psychopathology. Both political exigencies—destruction or affirmation—cannot be carried out at the same time, whatever Mao (or Pol Pot) may have thought. Affirmation and enemies are not going to be reconciled, in politics, unless one ancient attitude is adopted. Loving your neighbor as yourself is, perhaps, asking for much too much. Loving enemies? Identifying enemies, and responding to them, as well as continuing with a project of affirmation, poses enough challenges on their own. Who can meet them except for the very few who have the soul for it? In each of the four procedures of truth, Badiou’s complications have been seen and identified. Overcoming them is essential to his thought. The response to a politics, one of four, may be simply a part of a much more comprehensive endeavor. Being, the subject, truth: these are his foundations and the endurance of his philosophy. Withdrawal is not, compulsively or exclusively, retreat; the time can be used for thinking and preparation, for an honest assessment of what has been accomplished in our recent history and whether we can still rely on the same formulas as in the past. “One has to invent a new modernity” (PCG 26). “Invention” has been mentioned before. Badiou has done so since Being and Event and most recently, for us, on matters of love. To invent “a new modernity” seems to be highly ambitious. Has the old one even been realized to its capacity and as the culmination of a full historical understanding? The discrepancy between its thought and its realization depends on too many factors that have not yet (not all) been recognized. Inventing modernity (not a new one, but a first one) would, however, be intriguing since we would have to give ourselves a pause as to all our current presuppositions and have to

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re-think the whole of our past, as Bruno Latour has done.11 Can a new modernity be founded on the re-invention of ancient convictions, as Badiou suggested in Being and Event? Is one lesson from the Middle Ages no less, given to us as a thought in the Preface on the idea of the resurrection, sufficient to give us a quite remarkable vision and hope, ones requiring a separation from the urgency of the moment and instead contemplate a longer development in thought as evidenced by the attainment of a Renaissance? Despite one argument, Badiou also presents an additional one. There are times when Badiou’s prescriptive recall of the past (like his Chinese model) is overshadowed by a different diagnosis, his original wavering maintained throughout as a matter of philosophical virtue and again reliant on Nietzsche, but not to entertain the relative but to avoid the dogmatic. Badiou sums up his sense of the enemy with a more comprehensive analysis of what he deems to be “the omnipresence of scission. The passion of the century is the real, but the real is antagonism. This is why the passion of the century—whether it be a question of empires, revolutions, the arts, the sciences, private life—is nothing other than war” (TC 38). Are enemies and war and a perpetual antagonism going to define our 21st century as well? Or have we reached a point where the antagonisms are necessary, acceptable, or as Mouffe has recently argued, desirable. The “confrontation between adversaries is what constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.”12 If the 11  In We Have Never Been Modern. Tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. The subtitle is Essais d’anthropologie symmétrique. 12  Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013, 7. Let me only respond briefly to the position. The agon, as conceived in ancient Greece, was first of all a competition between equals and with one universal goal in mind—the attainment of arête or excellence. Today the antagonism is between a right and left whose vision of excellence is absolutely incompatible. If, as I presented, part of the intense conflict of contemporary politics is an essentially psychical one, id and super-ego irreconcilable in their confrontation, the presupposition of anything like a rational debate between groups is remote. The interview at the end of the book makes a comment; it can also be answered. She believes “a vast chain of equivalences is needed in order to establish the institutional mediations necessary to challenge the hegemonic order” (135). The hegemonic order. Which one? Given the time necessary to pursue one direction of this debate, René Girard would point out how the “equivalences” are going to be very hard to unify. Are they not fundamentally involved in a mimetic rivalry? The “chain,” as a metaphor, is more real than Mouffe may have wanted. The crucial problem today is this: the antagonism has been perpetuated because of the age-old reasons: one group wants power and (because they perceive themselves to be right and just) everyone has no choice but to agree. Liberal democracies are floundering because the moralism of the times (from some equivalences) are unacceptable—and intolerable—from another set of equivalences.

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struggle was taking place with equal forces, the argument might hold; today the adversaries have amassed much too much power and influence, leaving everyone who does not identify with the either/or on their own. Badiou has not, because of the situation, refused to exclude options. “The way of freedom is a subtractive one. But to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot readily exclude all forms of violence.”13 The subtractive path to freedom has two entirely different procedures: they can be provisionally named, classically, praxis or contemplative withdrawal. There has been, thus far, no more serious dilemma. Disagreeing about art is not at all the same as deciding between private contemplation and conversation with a few like-minded thinkers and the appeal, never excluded, to enemies, violence, and war. Raising the possibility of a choice, to avoid necessity and force, is being prudent in terms of what can be expected. Relieving ourselves of the burden of capitalist “hegemony” only for it to be replaced by an equally insidious hegemony under the cover of morality is not an appealing choice. Totalities are insidious however they are presented. Moral coercions are not necessarily any less brutal than the run-of-the-mill authoritarianism; they can easily be replicated. Badiou once used the term “moral terrorism” to define a sensibility in the ethical ideals of liberal democracies. The current alternatives offer nothing attractive for him; he has not spared denunciations. His response to any of the self-definitions clustered around the word “democracy” are, at best, prudent. “The only way to make truth out of the world we’re living in is to dispel the aura of the word democracy and assume the burden of not being a democrat and so being heartily disapproved of by ‘everyone’ (tout le monde).”14 Badiou has at least the virtue of being independent from either side of the moribund spectrum; and this is where one of my responses (as a possible choice to be made) will be brought up. Withdrawal or, as in Badiou’s case, the dedication to being the Socratic “gadfly” and facing so-called “democrats” and exposing not so much equality, emancipation, and justice—which are now as desired for as they’ve ever been—but the methods and consequences of their implementation. 13  Badiou, Alain. “Destruction, Negation, Subtraction,” 269–277 in The Scandal of Self-­ Contradiction: Pasolini’s Multicultural Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions. Ed. Luca di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati, and Christoph F. E. Holzhey. Cultural Inquiry, 6 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012), 277. 14  Badiou, Alain. “The Democratic Emblem,” in Democracy in What State? Fr. Tr. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 7.

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Justin Clemens, one of Badiou’s translators and interlocutors, writes: “For Badiou, notoriously, there can be no such thing as ‘political philosophy’. Yet there is also no philosophy without politics. Part of the essential work of philosophy proper—as a thinking of the thinking of its conditions—is already multiple. It must first break with active politics in order to establish a real difference from it.”15 A philosophical break. The issue is (and has been) the independence of philosophy from politics and whether it might be, on the whole, preferable to keep the two far apart. If politics conditioned philosophy, it did so, first of all, negatively; philosophy understood itself as a discipline of thought at the service of human beings because of the impositions of life within political parameters. The “break,” and the withdrawal, might be one and the same. The choice has always been there; because to recall Badiou’s reference to Prometheus in Theory of the Subject, as well as the “materialists of antiquity,” Epicurus and Lucretius, philosophy emerges not only in the abstractions of the infinity of the matheme but when human beings confront their submission to the contingent making of the real. “An ethics designates explicitly a general articulation of the subject” (TS 321). Ethics is therefore an ontological condition; ethos returns us to the classical ideal of character and a way to be. The philosophical antagonism has been set—prior to the decision to withdraw. The philosopher, like Epicurus, can opt out, at least temporarily, to first change human interiority and prior to any project for the transformation of the human world. If not to go into exile, in a place other than within the walls of the polis, for the virtues of separation and independence. In confrontational terms, the independent individual becomes aware of the stake and (for the time being) decides to be among any few like-minded individuals. In other words, friends for Epicurus and for us. Is brothers and sisters too much? By withdrawing among friends, the confrontation with enemies can at least be postponed until such time as it might be necessary to do otherwise. Badiou is, of course, being pragmatic on the question of violence. It is always best avoided; it is sometimes necessary. Badiou, however, has made a conscious choice. He was tempted, for a time, to withdraw into the solitude and tranquility of the matheme. Let us not forget the word calm. The relation between the matheme and psychotherapy was a personal one. The thesis that mathematics is ontology 15   Clemens, Justin. “When the levee breaks: Badiou, philosophy, politics,” 11–20 Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 15, Issue 3 (Aug 2016), 12. Mao’s dictum to “get involved in state affairs” leaves open the question: how?

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was, for him, a “therapeutic claim” (C 111), part of a personal experience; he was also convinced that “the situation of the analytical cure” was “precisely one of the places in which a truth is held to be at work” (C 141, my emphasis). The word work should not be overlooked; because work undertaken, in terms of the metaphor of a “ploughshare,”16 is preferable to its Biblical opposite, the forging of swords. There is, however, a world of difference between the work of the analysand and the truth of the psychoanalytic cure, and its unendliche demands, on-going and so infinite, and the proposal made by Badiou in the realm of politics. He has set out one parameter and their choices: the strategy by Mao to get rid of adversaries, engage in an agonistic polemic—which has its own problems most especially when it comes to refusing to be a “democrat” because the moral imperatives of the times are coercive, or withdraw in partial solitude and in relationship with like-minded individuals who have seen through the bind of capital and identitarian politics. As for Badiou, one has to note (admiringly or with skepticism) his participation in the on-going process of historical philosophy, and plan of praxis, he has not abandoned. He has vigorously renewed his convictions and translated the historical failures of the 20th century, catastrophic as they have been, into the promise of a future he still calls with the name communist. “In my terms, this is what I call the question of communism—but other names are possible. It’s a question, in any case, of whether or not an authentic global alternative exists as regards the destiny of human history” (PE 36). We have not used one of Badiou’s most important concepts (resurrection) very often, in part because to do so would have required us to turn to the centrality of St. Paul’s gospels and Badiou’s interpretative intervention of its evangelium, or its opposite, “bad news,” depending on attitude. In the case of what he calls “sepulchral communism,”17 a resurrection is, for him, more than necessary.18 Badiou has not excluded violence, war, and the destruction of enemies. He has been pragmatic on the issue. There are, however, other possibilities. His “communist hypothesis” is one of them. One of the 16  Incidentally, the working title of Nietzsche’s later renamed Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. 17  The phrase is used in the Appendix to The Communist Hypothesis, a “Letter from Alain Badiou to Slavoj Žižek: On the Work of Mao Zedong.” 18  They will not, however, be confirmed by Badiou’s hope in the very short-lived demonstrations associated with the so-called “Arab Spring.” Simply being realistic and not at all cynical made one quickly realize how such a movement would end. Badiou’s The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings does not make for easy reading.

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definitions of the society he envisions would be based on “a community no longer subject to arbitrary authorities or inexplicable divisions but a community, a collectivity, that is its own guide and provides its own direction, based on a shared sense of justice” (IPP 6). The past point alone is, viewed skeptically (realistically), no longer possible. The universal concept has too many particularities. Does communism offer a solution? The previous sections have been forthright about the dilemmas, presenting them as starkly as possible. The difference between the “joy of being” and “destroying” enemies is, after all, extreme. The back-and-forth has been intentional if trying. Presenting an indecisive Badiou has also been done on purpose. Our first dilemma has never left us. Arriving at the last of the four generic procedures of truth presents unique challenges and opposed ends—none more visceral than the happiness Badiou has mentioned (and will continue to pay attention to) along with revolutionary objectives. One fact needs few arguments: there will never be any kind of happiness, an idea soon to receive much more attention and as one of Badiou’s ontological objective, or attention to Plato’s intuition of the soul, if the choice of violence and war is chosen as the method of confronting enemies. The extremes have been pointed out, even if the twin terms (revolutionaries and reactionaries) cannot be used for the situation in the present in liberal democracies. Reaching back to 20th century mass movements does not inform us about our own times. And yet Badiou has been unwilling, over the entire movement of his life as a thinker and writer, to give up on this one desire. He calls it “the new communism” (IPP 121). Is communism and modernity to be the inventions of the 21st century? Or are individuals going to be forced, by the situations of liberal democracies, to withdraw into the partial solitude of the heretic and continue to dedicate themselves to self-invention and with the inviolable truth of love and creativity? The disciple, who is also a “confirmed volunteer” (SMP 86), will from here on in be hard-pressed. Choices will be deferred, but only until the conclusion.

2   The Communist Hypothesis Badiou’s political initiatives made it incumbent on him to return to the failures of revolutionary history and give an account of their possible force for the future; to judge his argument to be deeply unsatisfactory (and unsustainable) is only the beginning of a response to his political defiance

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and his stance as a provocateur. Whether Sloterdijk would be counted as an enemy is unknown. His response is tinged with customary crispness. He calls Badiou “one of the last keepers of the treasure of lost radicalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”19 Only as a rebuttal does it become possible to think about whether a certain form of radicalism can still be a viable reality; or whether one notes its passing and definitely so as an unrealized project and remnant of a political archaicism. Badiou has vigorous responses to his many detractors, and what he calls “enemy propaganda,” in order to maintain his fidelity to an idea. He has never renounced the possibility. What does he argue and propose? According to a confident thesis, the failure of a previous series of events (various revolutions in the 20th century) is for him a condition for their successful repetition at some future date. The hypothesis must in principle arrive at a different, better, result, Badiou believes that all past communist failures were, in essence, conditions for a future accomplishment and a long-lasting event. This is one affirmation, attributed to Mao, that should leave anyone with severe doubts and apprehension. It is, to say the least, and as Badiou admits, a “surprising statement.” It sounds considerably more than that. “Considering the complexity and apparent strangeness of the Cultural Revolution in China, that another seven or ten such revolutions might be needed to see things clearly” (IPP 128-129). See things clearly? No hesitation or lengthy reflection is mandated after such a statement. One does not have to be a phenomenologist or someone aware of how tempting projections can be to see, without recourse to political fantasy, what can be anticipated from even one such repetition. The sheer image of such a repeatable future—even if we separated the revolution into a military “march” and then its cultural alteration—would still end predictably, in the all-too-familiar persecutions and then “re-education,” whether in schools or in labor camps. Badiou, however, shows no hesitation when it comes to what he calls “the communist idea,” which was put into practice several times in different contexts and has, in more than a few of them, been disastrous for showing precisely how an idea can obliterate the human and without the slightest mercy as long as the schemes are dreamed-up for the greater good. In several places, the thesis has been re-­ stated. “Despite the epico- tragic experiences that incarnated it for a time—several decades of the twentieth century—far too short a time to 19  Sloterdijk, Peter. “What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to a Critique of Extremist Reason,” 327–356 Cultural Politics, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 2007, 329.

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draw any conclusions at all” (H 55). Does Badiou give himself extreme latitude for such an observation because, in the case of the failures of political experiments, he speaks like a true scientist who, embodying the tried and proven method of the repetition in a laboratory, maintains the hypothesis because it has not been definitively disproved? If he can contemplate (ten?) revolutions, then he gives himself over to a scientific principle, the hypothesis, that has not been sufficiently aware of what the consequences might in fact be outside a laboratory where experiments are usually best kept and failures contained; because an innocuous experiment in a laboratory is not comparable to a political one where millions of human beings are required and, if need be, expendable. The logic presented by Badiou on the communist hypothesis has the sense of a scientific idea and, with it, the necessity of experimentation until proof and verification is achieved. A scientific analogy for social and political life is not one that inspires trust, and no fidelity either. A discrepancy separates philosophy from the aspirations of politics; more polemically, philosophy does not turn away from its duty to analyze the pretensions of politics if they pose a serious threat to the life of the human. In such cases, philosophy and politics have been irreconcilable. The agonism has been present all along: the truth of philosophy standing, independently, of the “truth” of politics and in defense of the human—as lived, and not as conjured up from the imagination of the political theorist or the enthusiastic activist, for social justice or any other laudable ideal. The very first decision made by a philosophically minded citizen is to withdraw into contemplation and reflection—to assess his and her responsibilities and consciousness. Enthusiasm has too often been rationalized for theory and action. Doing nothing (for a period) is never considered as the only choice if tragic outcomes are to be avoided. If my hesitations about Badiou’s thinking have been stated from the beginning, here they are becoming more certain. Whether the dilemmas of the truth of politics can be presented remains a motivation, even as we continue to object to some statements. Fully confident, Badiou writes: “the communists embody the unbound multiplicity of consciousness” (MeP 74). Who these communists are is, more so today, hard to know. One can be highly skeptical, and express some reservations, perhaps incredulity, when communists are described in terms of a quite unique consciousness that, as far as many can tell, has never been quite evident, not when the entirety of their directives have been assessed. We need not isolate the communists for such pretensions; anyone who claims to have “the unbound multiplicity of consciousness” can already be

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excluded from a serious consideration. As always, it has been precisely those who know, without fail, fully confident, what the truth should be for everyone else that the most obvious atrocities have been committed, either directly, with graves, or indirectly and with the kind of malaise and malice being experienced today in liberal democracies. Badiou has been aware of the inherent dilemmas of political thought and action and tries to evade it with a relationship that cannot in any way be equal. One reader, up until now, has been attentive and hermeneutically devoted to understanding the complex range of his thought, and at times with fidelity and committed to the idea of a transmission; however, the truth of politics leaves me with hesitations much more severe than all others. In principle, political ventures, in thought, are not difficult to consider since many of them require time and effort to study. Proposals made for the alteration of reality are quite a different matter. A brief turn to psychoanalysis, with its science/art connection and as a discipline not at all strange to Badiou does not easily accept either the theory or the reality of a political thesis or its revolutionary past. He writes: “That political thinking protects itself from dogmatism by listening to psychoanalysis, and that psychoanalytic thinking protects itself from scepticism by listening to politics” (IT 64). The relation is, for me, immediately rejected. There is no way to abandon a certain resistance here. Few analysts or former analysands will listen to the cautionary interjection without some pause. There is simply no conceivable way for the analysand to be swayed by political considerations as primary; the withdrawal of the analysand is not arbitrary, for the imperative of unendliche reflection is not theoretically interminable. Skepticism is achieved after hard work and working-through and with the realization of what the human animal, under duress or pushed by the loftiest of ideas, is capable of thinking and doing. The analysand cannot suspend the skepticism towards him or herself because of any political ambitions. Still, one can in principle agree with Badiou’s vision of a possible future while remaining non-committal about methods. The title itself, In Praise of Politics, is for me enigmatic. “Let’s show how a way of organizing society that is completely divorced from capitalism is really possible” (IPP 91). Would it be prudent to abandon the “completely” and instead work in increments? What about “the new communism?” Is the “new” going to be separated from a tradition? What remains to be decided is the form of the intervention, because it is one thing to kill an enemy, a human being, it is quite another to experience a phenomenology of intervention, configuration, and incorporation while

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looking at an artwork by El Lissitzky and drawing from the phenomenological sense of its figures independently of their political (that is) Soviet context. His artistic geometry is no less a matheme than Euclid—unless, of course, a discourse is superimposed on the image and manipulated in meaning to serve heteronomous ends. Although my fidelity to Badiou’s philosophy and his anti-historicism leads me to reject, without the any doubt, Fredric Jameson’s imperative to “always historicize,”20 the distinction between fantasy and reality should be maintained in politics and in more than a few other human preoccupations. Our previous references to consciousness and seeing can return us to a responsibility (an individual one, for each one of us) before making up schemes and projects of a political nature for all. Paul Virilio writes, “to look at what you wouldn’t look at, to hear what you wouldn’t listen to… To deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence.”21 One value should be pre-eminent: to enhance the nature or our lives instead of submitting it to any forceful imperatives too convinced of their own merit. My response, returning to ancient convictions and one exemplary modern form, has to begin not with any acts, but with the most careful of thoughts: heeding to a transmission and being faithful to it. Badiou depends on Marx to once again remind us of one phenomenon of the political and that it requires an “interpretation-interruption of a symptom of hysteria of the social” (CPT 38). Hysteria: that word, so striking when applied to politics, so apt today when demands are being made left and right and with increasing authority. To have written on the subject of hysteria in one of his earliest writings, Can Politics be Thought?, demands that one strain of humanism, the depth-psychological, cannot be omitted from any future possibility for political actuality despite, in our work on the four truths, simply mentioned. He has repeated the observation later, on more than one occasion. Being observant adds one more element to our ongoing dilemmas. Life in liberal democracies and during its current superego pathologies will be one of the pressing issues; to be more diagnostic, 20  Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. 21  Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Tr. Philippe Beitchman. New  York: Semiotext(e), 1991, 37.

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analysis will not be sparing, not when Badiou himself, in his subtitled book “the clamour of being,” will not be hesitant to think about repeating himself on “a hypothesis regarding the hysterias of the social” (D 33). This hypothesis makes the previous one extremely vulnerable. The hypothesis of a diagnosis (which is how the study on Badiou’s four truths began) is nowhere near as uncertain as the communist one. How one may be internalized into the other is not difficult to sustain as a historical event. No doubt, one runs the risk of being defined, categorized, and summed-up. So be it, because any personal slight seems far less important than to acknowledge that communism was pathological and, more worrisome, can be readily witnessed in a number of public and bureaucratic initiatives today. The unconscious of politics is, today, far different than as conceived by Jameson. Although, from the outset, the psychoanalytic vision was not to be fully examined as to its function in Badiou’s thought, one cannot suppress one impression: admittedly, the assessment of his thought cannot fail to at least mention the presence of both Freud and Lacan. Has anyone been sufficiently self-critical and tough enough to hold oneself up to scrutiny? Is it possible to go beyond Louis Althusser’s insight into “the neurotic character of our civilization”22 and, also, isolate our character? Pathology, hysteria, neuroses: no thinker can avoid these categories or the accompanying diagnostic and with far more scrutiny than the original members of the Frankfurt School did. To do so overlooks more than a few of Freud’s lasting insights into the nature of our human condition. The primacy of the psychological for any future politics should be under consideration. Otherwise, the terror, betrayal, and disasters of the past will simply be repeated, as can be expected when the passions of the human animal (compelled by political idealism—and with the ambitions of the moral good) forces itself on others and, that too as usual, with the rationalization of a quasi-sacred imperative. Badiou has been able to consider many different ideas and eventualities. The reader has been presented with sufficient examples to be able to at least begin an assessment of Badiou’s philosophy; the truth of politics is unlike others and has a duty to account for itself—its past and its future, with honesty. “We don’t have any theory that helps us to explain Stalinist communism” (PP 64-65), Badiou remarked to Žižek in a conversation. But we 22  Altusser, Louis. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences. Tr. Steven Rendall. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, 4.

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do. We have much more than “theory.” We have historical examples and an interpretation of their events. Badiou’s trust in renewing the “communist hypothesis” and his willingness to try again despite not one but quite a few complete political catastrophes (the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia—there are others to name) should leave a majority, not only the “nouveaux philosophes,” with extreme reluctance and trepidation. Badiou can hardly blame the individuals he calls “the new philosophers” (almost never by name—in any case, they are well known in France) who responded with a more than justified condemnation of the totalitarian regimes of the states deluding themselves with the designation “socialist.” One thinker, who may or may not be one of Badiou’s “enemies,” deserves some attention, for many reasons, one being his reminder of the “totalitarian experiments” of the past (what Badiou calls momentary “failures”) but more importantly the fact that, for Bernard-Henri Lévy, the “totalitarian temptation”23 is not, merely, historical and in the past. It has its own kind of fascination and enticements. Temptations, after all, are desires and they have also been strong impulses among the people who should be, on the face of it, better able to assess human conditions of thought and being. All the critical theory of the past may have to be turned against individuals (ourselves) who have benefited from the position of being academics if not, precisely, scholars. A revolution out of desperation can be predicted in its effects. According to the position taken by Freud, consistently, repeatedly, and long before Civilization and its Discontents, human beings are much too dynamic to be relied upon to act in the best interests of all, or, to cite the conversation between Peter Engelmann and Badiou, to work towards a “politics of the common good.” The factors involved are still not completely explained; human aggression, hate, and ultimately Thanatos, plays a part. These are further exacerbated when there is competition and rivalry between the “factions” (identitarian groups who are supposed to be on the same side in their defense of justice and equality) who are striving for the disastrous desire for recognition and can only do so by being in the most aggressive kind of competition. The acknowledgement of one faction leads to the effacement of another faction. How does Badiou continue to believe in a future communism when “the Left,” whatever remains of that fragmented body of idealists and visionaries and advocates for social change, are today 23  Lévy, Bernard-Henri. Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the new Barbarism. New York: Random House, 2009, 55.

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so divided, in themselves, and from by far the great majority. Calling one dominant phenomenon in a moribund liberalism a “cult of cultural identities” (SMP 4) is a reality not soon to be dislodged from its forceful pre-­ eminence. Judgmental thinking has become one power to add to the critical; as has the reliance on the facile condemnation of those who do not readily submit to consensus opinion. Nietzsche, as always, reminds us of individual obligations. “Whence comes the energy, the inflexible strength, the endurance with which the individual thinks, in opposition to tradition, to attain a wholly individual perception of the self?”24 As for communism, Freud’s sobering analysis, which can be read in part as the psycho-analysis of the pathology of political groups, is presented as follows: after a list of classical proposals—the abolition of private property and assessing the centrality of the economy in human life, his 1929 response is as effective today as it was almost a century ago. “I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable position” (21:13). Is there an insurmountable human characteristic? Are the Soviets (or those irrepressible teenagers of the Chinese Cultural Revolution who thought smashing a Western piano25 was better than playing one) a testament of a pressing human drive that can emerge precisely during those times and historical movements with the greatest hope? How does idealism and the attempt to make the world a better place (the age-old dream of heaven on earth, without calling upon the idea of redemption) lead to the most catastrophic terror, betrayal, and disaster? In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes: “it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out the bourgeois” (SE 21:115). Once the enemies emerge out of oneself, as projections, they can multiply exponentially. The name Stalin or the institution of the gulag is enough to add to Freud’s summary. Badiou has hardly been in denial about history. The situations are there for all to assess. Were they events? By no means: they were the sobering reminder that the pretensions and expectations of an event are sometimes associated 24  Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Tr. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 110. 25  The complete name of the instrument is pianoforte. I was briefly tempted to undertake an analysis of what the Chinese accomplished by destroying Western pianos. Žižek is, however, inimitable.

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with catastrophe. Hope can lead to ruin. Psychoanalysis has been invaluable for its contribution to the one and the many outside of the analytic setting. “We can also agree,” Badiou writes, “that philosophy and psychoanalysis make no sense without a desire for something to take place other than the place” (IT 202). Previous allusions to his horlieu have become relevant in this context. The difference lies in the proposal about what this “other place” is going to be exactly. The withdrawal to an independent place has its appeals. Badiou experienced its effects and nevertheless made the commitment, as a true Platonist, to return into the cave and inform the prisoners of their slavish conditions, no matter the outcome and the expected reactions. One can admire the courage of returning into the cave while remaining skeptical about the message of the communist hypothesis and its particular version of freedom. When Badiou makes his position unequivocal, the reader is left (as he and she has from the beginning) with one certain prospect. The need for a decision has been often mentioned. Arriving at our conclusion, and amidst the truth of politics, calls for one to be considered if not definitively made. “The infinite comes into play in every truth procedure, but only in politics does it take first place. This is because only in politics is deliberation about the possible (and hence about the infinity of the situation) constitutive of the process itself” (MeP143). The “first place” of politics, and its infinite situation, presents us with serious difficulties; but only at first. Faced with a choice, the analysand would hardly be in conflict. The privilege of the political may be understandable given Badiou’s commitments of long-standing and from out of the enthusiasm of 1968 France and before. All kinds of distance for the modern reader makes an affinity almost impossible. In this instance, the analysand is too prudent to allow politics to be pre-eminent; politics is always going to appear as a second-order phenomenon with psychical antecedents. Approaching and being closer to the end of our responses for Badiou and after one of the two significant presences in his thought that have not been defined as truths (St. Paul’s letters or psychoanalysis as necessary supplements to Badiou’s philosophy), the commitment since our beginning will have to guide us from here. The promise of positivity and affirmation (and the “joy of being”) will have to be maintained for the reader as much more than a theoretical proposition. In any case, confidence in a rational assessment of Badiou’s philosophy can be expected from the reader who, all along, has been present as a transferential interlocutor.

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Some of the political problems are taken up in the concluding chapters of Peter Hallward’s study Badiou: A Subject to Truth. One or two may be added, beginning with one of the fundamental categories of modern political thought—the care for the other and, more particularly, the solicitude for the victim. The language has by now become commonplace, among philosophers (and there are many) and yet the truth of the insight has not been forceful enough to effect a change. In his “Introduction,” Hallward points out that “ours is a moment in which effective alternatives to this mechanism [globalization, for example, or what Badiou calls capital-­ parliamentarism] finds expression almost exclusively in the bigotries of culturally specified groups or identities.” 26 One particular subject of solicitude has become omnipresent to the point of being oppressive. A few rare voices have made themselves clear on the issue. Girard writes: “The illusion of persecution is as rampant as ever … the concept that crowds, or even entire societies, can imprison themselves in their own illusion of victimage”27 has become the norm and the compulsion of the political today; the mention of “crowds” deserves some thought. Is Badiou’s appeal to the thought of Mao intended as a political lesson for today; for when he tells us in The Communist Hypothesis that Mao’s pedagogical sessions included the slogan “support the left, and not the factions” (CH 125), we are, in a strange fashion, at the cusp of a repetition. The “factions,” under the cover of a direction, have made the attempt to camouflage themselves, without any success. The conditions of all social life are depth-psychological and appearances and disguises always reveal themselves. Still, Badiou’s commitments are not going to be swayed. Instead of disparate and competing identities, all of them striving for recognition, he turns towards his hypothesis of a collective achievement. Badiou has been relentless in exposing the various privileges that the moral has given itself. Still, no past failures, in history, will dissuade him from an old ideal. How the circumstances of the present are, among many factors, severe obstacles to their realizations is one problem Badiou has contemplated; perhaps his belief and hope and faith in his truths gives him enough fortitude to continue with his one argument. Repeating it will not be redundant.

26  Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, xxxvi. 27  Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Tr. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 41.

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In his “Preamble: What is Called Failure?” in The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou presented his rationale with tenacity. The word “failure” is far too timid for the historical situation of the 20th century. Badiou would have us believe in a thesis: “Any failure is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth” (CH 28). And what if the construction of the truth Badiou envisions is not, rather, the lamentable certainty of a human disposition, a condition, that will not allow for the collective realization of a universal “we,” that peculiar designation more and more self-divided and never further from a possible reconciliation? In The Century, he asks: “What is this dialectic of present and future, of immediate intervention and annunciation” (TC 137). The main problem is not, as Badiou believes, that an alternative to the current forms of democracy (in quotes or not) cannot be contemplated. An alternative to the status quo is surely no secret to many. One does not have to appeal to “the wretched of the earth,” to recall Frantz Fanon, for confirmation; there are an infinite list of exploited people along with all the migrants of the world and Badiou’s sans papiers. The many of the world have never been more vulnerable. However, communism, with its examples, has made just about everyone extremely wary. The enormous fatigue of the present does not allow for the exertions necessary for a revolution, of any kind except one concentrating on the exception of the one. Does anyone today actually think about the future of a “polymorphous” worker and from out of the Communist Manifesto? The argument against such an anticipation come too easily. Still, if “the conclusions one draws from one’s defeats are a precondition for victory—that’s clear” (PCG 7), the language used here betrays the ultimate dilemma of politics, one more visceral in its immediacy than in art: it has to be a process of confrontation and struggle. As long as there is a victor and a vanquished, there will never be a “we.” That, in itself, might be an issue difficult to resolve, especially if we unavoidably acknowledge how there are sides today and, more dangerously, as Badiou has identified, enemies. They should not be ignored; one has to be vigilant about the schemes. If the motivations are, as Badiou writes, nothing less than “bringing into being, by all possible means, a new world” (PE 21), we don’t need an intricate imagination to think about “all possible means.” Or for that matter, possible ends. Badiou’s reliance on a “we” leaves this reader uncommitted; or rather, more than ever tending towards a very different kind of attitude—one, without apologies, closer to the one philosopher who has been present throughout and who has not wavered from his fundamental dedication to the free spirit

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and the noble soul and, unifying both, the philosopher who can still represent something individually meaningful for us. The Nietzschean spirit can be upheld, without reservation. In this context, an unusual voice, and someone who has distinguished himself for different reasons, can be called upon. In a chapter entitled “The Death and Birth of Worlds,” David Bentley Hart writes. Violent, sudden, and calamitous revolutions are the ones that accomplish the least. While they may succeed at radically reordering society, they usually cannot transform culture. They may excel at destroying the past, but they are generally impotent to create a future. The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels—the only real revolutions, that is to say—are those that first convert minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow tyrannies of the soul.28

According to one tradition of thought, there will be no shame in agreeing with the desire to be free from the “tyrannies of the soul” and most especially as they are today being enacted in liberal democracies and with a moralism that seems more and more collaborating with nihilism. In the end, a point of disagreement with Badiou may not be surmountable because, above all, Hart’s sense of the “tyrannies of the soul” are the ones most crucial to address and the ones no politics will ever really influence. The skepticism of the analysand, and the reader of Badiou’s interpretation of St. Paul’s gospel, proves more suggestive than other aspects of the subject of truth, and for one decisive reason. The word to be highlighted, once more, is individual; the uncertain one is “collective.” “I think that the true life is when an individual perceives that he is capable of far more than he thought he was, when he crosses his own internal limits, precisely in terms of creative affirmation and the realization of a collective idea” (TE 93, my emphasis). I have neither interest nor desire to realize a “collective idea” because at the moment the only alternative from the finitude of a detestable world (Badiou’s word) dominated by an either/ or is for the individual, the Two in love, and yes perhaps a few others, but not very many, who are the only possible individuals of a creative affirmation. The “we” no longer exists except in factions. The most prudent decision would be to avoid any identification at all with either “us and them” 28  Hart, David Bentley. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 183.

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and withdraw from all the pretensions and demands of impetuous selves who are busily enforcing their psychical fragmentations on others as if they were new-found virtues. The subject of being and his and her access to procedures of truth, for life, will have to be thought while keeping in mind Badiou’s rejection of “the dominance of artificial individualism” (TC 98) and the affirmation, defended all the way through, of the individual who will make responsibility a more than moral imperative. Are there moments of a political lapse in Badiou’s thought when all the most traditional ideas about the communist hypothesis are tempered by other ideas that are not easily reconciled with social change on a “large scale?” To answer, “yes,” and then to add how one whole direction of his philosophy moves towards the subject, the individual, the one, even when this singular figure runs the risk, so tempting today, of a narcissistic self-­ involvement leading to the loss of self. Within Badiou’s philosophy, and at the same time as a perpetual self-confrontation between the individual and the collective, there are leanings towards ideas about the individual. “All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself” (MeP 7). A rupture with oneself. The exertion seems to be more analytic and one where a “conversion” can also be contemplated. Nevertheless, Badiou is more unsettled about the individual than he is about any other problem. There are moments when, occasional and polemical, he can appear harsh and uncompromising, as when, in a discussion of Plato, he writes “of that perfectly empty figure which is the individual, who thinks himself the free poet of his existence.”29 The response could be lengthy, not only because of Socrates, but also because of the notion of the Greek poesis and what the creation of a human being could mean. “Courage, I would suggest, is the principal virtue in face of the disorientation of our own times.”30 The hypothesis of an enduring courage is certainly one to be re-affirmed as an ancient conviction. Courage too will be necessary to overcome the inherent dilemma in Badiou’s wavering thinking about the individual who can be self-creative. The difficulty now comes down, as it has from the beginning, to defending the idea of “the free poet of his existence” (without naivete and 29  Badiou, Alain. “Plato, our dear Plato,” Tr. Alberto Toscano, 39–41 Angelaki, Vol. 2, Number 3 (December 2006), 40. 30  Badiou, Alain. “The Communist Hypothesis,” 29–46  in New Left Review, Vol. 49, 2008, 45.

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in full knowledge of what it would mean to work towards such freedom— with courage) and the many different impositions made on the subject today. “Truth-procedures do not exist as unilaterally unconnected, as entirely independent of each other, each following their own path” (E 139). If so, and has been part of the presentation all the way through, is it not possible that only the individual who is aware of the truth and its complications can make the decision to think and act with the one specific goal in mind: to be independent from as much coercion and consensus as possible and to determine oneself, as a subject (of being and truth) by drawing upon more ancient resources instead of modern compulsions? Can we, despite the many dilemmas thus far outlined and without attempting to protect Badiou, recover enough of the truth of being and the subject to be able to continue to develop the four truths and rid them of their most destructive tendencies? Will we perhaps have to unify, more strongly, two truths (such as the creativity of art and love) and as much as possible independently of science and politics?

3   The One and the Many of Politics From what we have thus far examined about Badiou’s commitments, the ones at the center of his political ideas and the hope for a collective transformation of social life and the realization of a still viable communist reality, enemies and a hypothesis have been concurrent. One dilemma, among others, of the truth of politics remains: the life of the individual and the identity of the “we” will not, without force and coercion, be reconciled. To give us a sense of Badiou’s philosophical indecisiveness, in Ethics, he writes: The “some-one” thus caught up in what attests that he belongs to the truth-process as one of this foundation points is simultaneously himself, nothing other than himself, a multiple singularity recognizable among all others, and in excess of himself, because the uncertain course [trace aléatoire] of fidelity passes through him, transfixes his singular body and inscribes him, from within time, in an instant of eternity. (E 45)

If the prior examination of the identity of enemies and the inevitability of violence led us to pause and ask ourselves questions about severe conflicts in politics, we are in this section no longer concerned with others at all and focused exclusively on one of our (if not the) central concern: the

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individual, the one who stands independent of any collective hypothesis and who is defined by Badiou in ways that are not, ultimately, political at all. His language, without tracing it to an ancient tradition (and we have not forgotten our three first philosophers: Pythagoras, Plato, and Epicurus) nevertheless echoes with a far different impression than a modern one. What does it mean to see the individual as a “multiple singularity” and to strive towards the self-recognition, first of all, in Badiou’s unique language, of being immortal? At this particular moment, we have reached a decisive turn. The dilemmas have been presented in many different ways up until now. There can no longer be any doubt about a divergence, which means to make a decision. Two issues, one historical, one contemporary, can be looked at in order to make sure that Badiou’s presentation has been correctly assessed; part of my sympathy has been withheld, for the sake of prudence. In explaining the failure of the USSR, for example, Badiou’s explanation in Infinite Thought may leave us skeptical: “militant subjectivity, philosophically received in the form of the ‘we’, was obsolete or inactive well before the system of the Party-State entered into the sequence of its ruin” (IT 102). Badiou would like to attribute the political failure (which was, also if not primarily, a distortion of subjectivity) to philosophy; but that would make politics, in that particular case, a condition of philosophy, the opposite of his central argument on philosophy being conditioned by four truths. A certain kind of subjectivity was not “obsolete”; it was refuted by an interiority unable to overcome its conditions and therefore turned against itself. The same nihilistic tendencies of the past can be witnessed, again, today. Nihilism: Badiou’s word for what has turned today into a “we” of a narcissism of both minor and major differences supported by a demanding cultural super-ego of guilt and retribution. In support of the individual, Badiou believes that “the process of truth induces a subject” (E 43), but so does mendacity and the uncompromising demands of opposed and opposite psychical drives, sometimes dynamically operative in the same subject, for example, in the political symptoms of masochism and sadism. Subjects are also induced from mimeticism and the rivalry for power, to determine the nature of the real. Adding another example, in Conditions Badiou would have us believe that “communism was exposed disaster because Stalinism saturated politics with philosophemes” (C 165). Does Badious expect this account to be believed? Were “philosophemes” at the origin of the Soviet disaster? Freud has already responded to the Soviets while anticipating the consequences of their so-called idealism—which is

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more accurate to call it political psychopathology, in the one, and in the many. Unless the complications of the human psyche as they are projected onto the political world are not fully analyzed, we continue to lack the explanations for our propensity to impose simultaneous restrictions and commandments on social beings who, given the circumstances, can also be led, complacently, to slaughter other human beings and towards the three outcomes of terror, betrayal, and disaster. The most visceral kind of hatred turns into aggression turns into murder. And so on. Is there a better definition of the bad infinite? Repetitive, wholesale murder, and made worse because justified by one ideology or another that makes the real life of human beings expedient, all for the preservation of an idea and a delusion. The contemporary situation, while for the time being lacking overt self-­ possession at least in the societies Badiou calls capitalo-parliamentary, our liberal democracies, certainly has overt characteristics. We are no closer to resolving the dilemma initially presented in the truth of art, science, and love. They can all be (they are all now) forced to capitulate to the extraordinary demands made by factions—those who are infatuated with their identity and its various forms of advertising—to the detriment of Badiou’s “we.” Is the perversion of the “we” into our contemporary populism one discernible effect. Chantal Mouffe’s “left populism”31 has a most unusual sense. Is it an oxymoron or an accurate description of the symptom of the times? One can of course always choose to be hopeful in the face of an advancing peril. The prefix Left does nothing to mitigate the potential onslaught of what populism can do—indeed, has been doing; because a populism of moral opinions and one of its supports—“the subsumption of politics” to “bureaucratic submission” (MeP 70), to mention one phenomenon—will only become more intolerable for the individual. Reading Badiou on the “we” and the individual leaves us with a continuing crisis of allegiance—at once faithful to some of his profound convictions on the triad of being, the subject, and truth, and then extremely guarded, with justification, about any superlative plans for the many. The option of separation cannot be discounted. The individual withdraws from any association with groups and pauses to wonder if the “we” Badiou has in mind, everyone, tout le monde, can still be contemplated or if the identities have become irrevocably splintered and, in any case, insupportable. The reader is asked to think analytically, not morally, which is (today)  Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. London: Verso, 2018.

31

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mandatory; any perceived deviation from a moral consensus is leading to more severe consequences, for individuals who are not “taken in,” who refuse to be incorporated. Badiou is certainly not naïve about our contemporary situation—despite the vigor of his ideals. “Reactionary, and particularly fascist, politics are always ferociously identitarian” (PE 27). The truth of his political analysis has not, however, led to any interruption in the drive of the times. The cherished “we” of Badiou’s politics has been ideologically reduced to the narcissism of identities and their opposites— which is one way to account for the situation at hand as the struggle between populist and factional identities, one definition of our current right/left circle, elliptical as it may be, and anyone who cannot bring themselves to join in or to support. A struggle between the perceived many and the few who are so insistent on being recognized that the desire to be master will only lead to the enslavement of virtually anyone who has identified with either. Has the “we” of identitarian politics not created an intolerable situation? Francis Fukuyama has recently used a concept from the ancient world to elucidate what he sees as a present phenomenon. The one-sidedness of the interpretation, no less than the support for the clamor today of anyone who would like to be recognized, has not been analyzed as a divisive problem. As soon as one demands to be recognized, for being what (who) they are, then anyone else who does not identify with the desire necessarily experiences indifference to who they are, which could be, simply, anyone—that is, everyone else who, in the schema of differences, no longer matters. The moral support for recognition has become unquestioned. The moral absolute is incessantly advertised. Others have reacted by experiencing their own estrangement, and then their exclusion. They (the unrecognized) therefore react, making themselves known and demanding attention—which the media is more than happy to give them as long as it fills up their quota of captivating stories and create perpetual conditions of crisis, with the loud and silent more and more evident, the latter not daring to say a thing. Any non-approved comments about politics can only be heard in whispers and hush-hush tones, in different kinds of hallways and corridors where power and be quickly, and mercilessly, unleashed. There are a lot of declarations and also a great many slogans; as for dialogue and debate (and the use of the ancient parresia—the bold and free speech of the individual, used by Socrates, Epicurus, and St. Paul) no evidence of any is currently taking place. Fukuyama argues that thymos “is the part of

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the soul that craves recognition and dignity.”32 A decisive response could not be more Epicurean: the desire for recognition is precisely the problem. Epicurus would counsel that dignity cannot be bestowed; dignity is a personal characteristic that is ontologically self-created and intimately experienced. One is not given any aspect of subjectivity. The ethical character (what is possible within the subject) cannot be bestowed except in the rare cases of like-minded individuals capable of extracting themselves from the propaganda of the times. As for recognition, one of Epicurus’ enduring lessons at the level of psychology and the health of the soul has been largely forgotten. Epicurus makes a crucial distinction. In a document discovered in the Vatical Library, he writes: “Praise from other men must come of its own accord; and we must be concerned with healing ourselves” (VS 64). Because when recognition is given by others, the individual is always going to be vulnerable to (and dependent on) possible changes in others and their fickle judgments. Do we want to be hostages to the ideological judgment of others who can, with impunity, force individuals into categories? The Epicurean individual is completely indifferent to the judgment of the other since, by its very nature and its drive, it relates to the one instrumentally, to be of service or an impediment. Charles Taylor writes: “The thing about inwardly derived, personal, original identity is that it doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail.”33 An Epicurean, to continue to use the incomparable philosophy of the Hellenist individual, would go one better, and further. An “inwardly derived” sense of individuality cannot be altered by the opinions of others. Identity is created from the inside out, not the other way around. Instead of the one interpretation of thymos as presented by Fukuyama, we can best define the concept as an aspect of the individual spirit and its relation to a classically defined incorporation, what 32  Fukuyama, Francis. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, xiii. He adds: “the problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways. This is part of a larger story about the fate of modern liberalism, in which the principle of universal and equal recognition has mutated into the special recognition of particular groups,” 90. There is a deeper problem. How has contemporary society (capital, technology, propaganda) ensured that universal needs would be ignored—indeed, suppressed—at the same time as the celebration of so-called differences? 33  Taylor, Charles. The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1991, 48.

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Nietzsche believes was essential (for himself, and for others) as both the inspiration and revelation of the free spirit. The problem of the age has been the insistent clamor of various groups all expressing their desire to be recognized, which creates the very conflict Girard has so scrupulously presented as mimetic rivalry. The bourgeois/proletariat divide of the 19th century has become much more dynamic and differentiated. There is no longer the easy identification of an either/or. On the contrary, it appears more and more likely that a civil war of thought within liberal democracies will increase in intensity, “factions” continuing to demand what they believe is their due, while others will simply be ignored bystanders. Solutions and reconciliations appear to be more and more remote; they are more personal than collective. Badiou has moments, that we have seen before in other procedures of truth, when the status of the individual is differentiated from any idea of a social, collective, or communist aspiration. Is the one, the individual, a recurrent presence in Badiou’s philosophy and ontology? An examination of different works shows a consistent confrontation. Beyond all external enemies, which are always easily found, Badiou also struggles with a personal dilemma—as all thinkers aware of their life must. Badiou’s stated affinity to the ancients drew him towards mathematics at a time when distance had become necessary. One cannot underestimate his personal agon post the 1970s, when all hope for a transformation of social and political life, at least in France, had been halted and reversed. In Conditions, he writes: “I shall make the provocative and therapeutic claim that mathematics is ontology” (C 111). He became aware, with some relief, that the personal estrangement had forced him to withdraw into the therapeutic isolation of mathematics and (let it be said) into his own individuality as well. One should not underestimate one biographical piece of information. “Badiou’s political isolation during this period [post-1976] was profound.”34 To remain faithful to his collective “commitment,” to use Sartre’s word, Badiou could not remain estranged for long. He set himself to finding a “solution” for himself; the attempt led him to a working compromise. One evaluation has been: “In its traditional from, the individual operative subordinates his own judgement to that of the party. In his own political activism, he has attempted to foster relationships between the individual and the collective marked by an

34  McLennan, Matthew R. Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard. London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 104.

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indeterminate equality.”35 Could this equality (like others) actually be maintained? Did the individual, as an idea, force Badiou as much as his collective responsibilities? Among the most committed of his commentators, Bruno Bosteels ends the Introduction to his study with a wide-­ ranging and politically charged comment. He could not have more precisely defined the stake for readers of Badiou and, finally, how his philosophy can be analyzed according to two different and, perhaps, antithetical ideas: the therapeutic reflections of the individual and the force of “emancipatory politics” and the exigency of turning the one into the “we” of the many. Everything previously discussed has led us here. Every logical and ontological operation, however formal it may well seem to be, must thus be related against the grain to the experiential core that conditions it. For the purpose of what follows, this means above all to size up the iceberg of emancipatory politics that is all but hidden—if it has not already suffered a complete meltdown as a result of global warming—below the arctic waters of mathematical formalization.36

The mathematical formalization, as a few instances have indicated, has a profoundly therapeutic end for Badiou. The temptation is almost irrepressible to take the truth of art, the matheme, and love and separate them from politics—which can be regarded as the one truth with the most negative consequences and, indeed, where critical theory has been directed all along. Badiou’s “wavering” has been constant. Was it programmatic or accidental? Is our response to Bosteels unequivocal? The matheme, as we previously defined it, has been presented as a philosophical idea and with the force capable of re-addressing what “emancipatory politics” means and so give us an alternative to the exhausted demands from a politics aiming to transform the nature of reality and then, with any consequences that are necessary, human beings. “A subject is singular because it is always an event that constitutes it in a truth” (H 64). Once the singular subject of being can be or is the event itself, then the constitution of truth occurs during the immanent revelation of an experience; an event cannot be revealed outside the perception 35  Diones, Alexander W. “On Logic and the Theory of Ensembles: Formalism and Alain Badiou’s Experience of Politics,” 950–972 Theory & Event, Vol. 20, Number 4, October 2017, 952. 36  Bosteels, Bruno. Badiou and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 43.

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of the attentive and alert subject who has been moved, to perceive their own sense of immortality in the nature of being. The beginning of the event, interpreted here outside of its communitarian phenomena (i.e., the French Revolution) emanates from the one, the singular individual. What are we to make of Badiou’s comment, previously quoted and following Freud on the malaise of culture, that “the social is the neurosis of politics” (TS 141), a statement that could easily be turned around and which leads us, given enough time, to a supplemental analysis and the political is the neurosis of the social? Much more seriously—and, at this point, the divergence is complete and will not, as a matter of principle, be brought together—when Badiou rationalizes the Chinese initiative of “political re-­ education” and has no difficulty responding to “the humanist charge made against it” (TS 143), we have reached much more than a dilemma or an impasse. The reader, who has been omnipresent, and never for a moment taken for granted, is invited to make a last (and lasting) decision. Being an individual and part of a collective and identitarian “we,” of minor or major differences, is impossible to uphold. When Badiou then writes, in Theory of the Subject, “this is the avowed goal of the cultural revolution, the event presupposes the conviction that the old man can or may die” (TS 143). The specificity of his metaphorical language (and its source) can no longer be hidden and points us towards the necessity of a supplemental work. His appeal to the metaphor of the “old man,” from St. Paul’s gospel letters, leaves us with a future responsibility. The present work has only intimated, briefly, with circumspection, how Freudian psychoanalysis and St. Paul’s letters figure in Badiou’s philosophy in a way that demands attention. Our conclusion will be the opportunity for the intimations of a necessary work-­in-­progress. Will the depth-psychological, in its ancient and modern form, be one way to overcome the inherent dilemmas of Badiou’s philosophy? Until then, the decision necessary for the present has been made, as a response for Badiou and in conversation with the reader. In a great many cases, in three truths, we have thought about the singular subject as the one who creates an event, first in themselves, and then offers a subjectivity and a spirited one as a human possibility, as exemplary. There is, of course, quite a difference between the decision made by a possible follower and one who is forced to endure “re-education” and so sit placidly in workshops run by bureaucrats, the lesson intended to improve the moral conscience of individuals. There have been many points of disagreement with Badiou on the four procedures of truth. The truth of politics is the most difficult one because of its extremes between the individual

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and the collective. “Every individual disposes, more or less secretly, the capacity of becoming Subject” (H 69). Badiou makes, again and as he so often does, the ultimate statement. Every individual can become a subject. He might want to add that becoming a subject cannot be as a consequence of manipulation, coercion, or “re-education.” The individual has to somehow find the resources, within the present situation, to accede what has been kept in suspense or denied altogether. All the promotion of difference does not mean exclusion and suppressions are taking place all the time and at a rapid pace. This cannot be isolated into a “we” proposition and exemplified by the ur-example of the French Revolution or any other political upheaval with emancipatory ambitions. The individual makes his or her presence felt and without the demand for recognition. Where, then, do we turn from here once Badiou’s four procedures of truth have been outlined, and in the time available to us? So far, in the truth of political thinking and nearing the conclusion of the four procedures, the individual has been recalled from its denigration—from its representative of “bourgeois individualism” and from the more contemporary forms of narcissification. The individual can be reclaimed from its mimetic manipulation and exposure to the multiple influences of propaganda, including the one, today, with many attractions—what Badiou calls, at the beginning of his second manifesto, the “cult of identities” (SMP 4). In itself, identitarian politics exhibits certain tendencies; they are multiplying the more they are accepted. There are others (to again recall the Introduction) that should be considered as a social effect. One of Badiou’s special insights deserves thoughtful consideration; the context of the writing should be looked at closely. “A correlation exists between the process of homogeny and the process of identity: that of the destructive submission of identity to homogeny.”37 Badiou has been forthright. How we respond to his insights is entirely up to us. Increasingly, the contemporary analysis of our predicament revolves around one unavoidable perception. The ensemble of thinkers in the Introduction were well aware of the challenges. Quoting Agamben again is not redundant. “Modern democracy’s decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular societies … may well be rooted in the aporia, which marks the beginning of modern 37  Badiou, Alain. “St. Paul, Founder of the Universal Subject,” 27–37 in St. Paul among the Philosophers. Tr. Thelma Sowley. Ed. John D.  Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 27.

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democracy and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy.”38 Once again the enemy has been mentioned; our dilemmas have also been defined as an aporia. They are not, however, a dead end. These are the remarks of a thinker who considers his words well: the convergence with a totalitarian disposition, in the liberal democracies seemingly most committed to those laudable projects of emancipation, are leading to a complicity with its enemy. Political thought is obliged to reflect hard on itself and whether, to be prepared, it had better foreshadow Mouffe’s democratic adversary or a much more fierce and uncompromising totalitarian enemy. No one can dismiss the claims as hyperbolic. The affects of political passions are increasing. The diagnostic has been first of all recognized, the symptom seen. They were uttered by someone who, in the present, might again deserve a wider readership. In The Rebel, Albert Camus wrote: “Politics is not a religion, or if it is, it is nothing but the Inquisition.”39 The term “the return of religion” has much more than theological aspects attached to it. It may require further psychopolitical investigations and an attitude that will look at both the right and the left, each with their own very private interests, inter-esse, and withdraw from both. Byung-Chul Han writes: “Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”40 To be heretical means one has become conscious of how deeply manipulative our politics has become and the necessity of finding a freedom for oneself and one’s friends who, increasingly, are meeting to talk and discuss topics that are simply not permitted in any context—not even in the place where the bold and free speech of parresia should be most free, that is, institutions of higher learning. As for Agamben’s momentary resignation, there can be no submission to the orthodox demands of the times nor, more significantly for us, the acceptance of the aporia. The most fundamental problem remains active: unless an antidote is found, the gradual approximation of democracy to a self-deceptive authoritarian compulsion seems today more and more anticipated and, seemingly, without any possible intervention, which makes Badiou’s exigency even more pressing. All previous announcements, about crisis or urgency, 38  Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 10. 39  Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage Books, 1956, 301. His statement is close to the conclusion of the chapter entitled “Nihilism.” 40  Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: New Liberalism and New Technologies of Power. Tr. Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2017, 83.

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can hardly be expected to have an effect. Agamben’s words of caution and his sense of a possible complicity is repeated by as many thinkers as were cited in the Introduction. The threat is real and its features are not easily recognizable—especially when they present themselves, to cite Critchley again, bound to the good. Promoting the good of what is infinitely demanding, Critchley writes: “For me, the ethical subject is the name for the way the self relates itself bindingly to the good.”41 When he then adds that this decision about the good founds the subject, then we can begin to discern how, today, the defense of the good with such unrivalled passion leads to the worst kind of consequences that can in no way be defined according to morality or the good. Bindingly and, to recall his earlier argument, to the demand. Being “bound” can have two entirely different meanings—as religio has often demonstrated: one can be “bound” to another, as in the love of the two, and one can be “bound” in the form of restraint. The possible ambiguity is always going to make the individual careful and suspicious and skeptical—especially when it comes to what Timothy Snyder has called the contemporary promotion of “eternity politics.” “Like all immorality, eternity politics begins by making an exception for itself. All else in creation might be evil, but I and my group are good.”42 Žižek responds with the incisive analysis and never lets the ethicist forget that “the object of the obsessional desire is the Other’s demand: his imperative is to guess it and comply with it at any price. The obsessional is completely at a loss if the Other poses no demands on him.”43 We are now in a most unusual position where the obsessional no longer needs the Other to do or say anything since all the serviceable formulas have been put at everyone’s disposal, willingly or not. Badiou responds to the demand—of the idea above all. “Ideas, in the process of becoming with the disparate worlds, through their traversal of unforeseen worlds, of their universal demand.”44 There is one demand, above all, for Badiou—the Platonist: the only demand to be met by a­ nyone 41  Critchley, Simon. “On Alain Badiou,” in The Moment. Time and Rupture in Modern Thought. Ed. Heidrun Friese. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001, 94. 42  Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New  York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018, 22. 43  Žižek, Slavoj. For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor. London: Verso, 1991, 271. 44  Badiou, Alain. “The Lesson of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power After the Storm,” Tr. Tzuchien Tho, 30–54 History, Politics, Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (eds.) Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 54.

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thinking is the idea that will exceed the world of actuality, not simply (and self-deceptively) make it better. “Plato’s problem—which is still ours—is how our experience of a particular world (that which we are given to know, the ‘knowable’) can open up access to eternal, universal and, in this sense, transmundane truths” (SMP 106). The death of God and the socalled end of metaphysics has become replaced by an absolute moralism driven by an uncontrolled super-ego and the counterforce of a libidinal and reactive id. When the demand, however, turns into an “absolute right,” then ethics supersedes the political where, once, two different and opposing individuals could discuss and debate. As Mark Lilla reminds us: this was an essential tactic in the early years of the civil rights movement, but it has since been a disaster for liberalism’s reputation with the public ever since. It got liberals into the habit of treating every issue as one of inviolable right, leaving no room for negotiation, and inevitably cast opponents as immoral monsters, rather than simply as fellow citizens with different views.45

When the subject is forced to be good, the reactions will be commensurate with the pressure. Opposites can be expected. Binding itself to the defense of the good and of that ubiquitous category today, “human rights,” assures itself of maximal protection and continued legitimacy. Because, after all, how can “the good” be opposed? Who would dare to contravene that category? One argument has been consistent since the Introduction. One argument, one analysis, one diagnosis. Badiou can give us his sense of it again, with a reference to Marx who “accepted that there were similarities between the ambitions of emancipatory politics and the workings of capital … obviously it’s a formidably complex problem, which can sometimes expose us, I admit, to the risk of being the unconscious agents of capital itself.”46 The admission should not be passed over in haste or casually. Are we justified in our arguments thus far that our factional politics have become “unconscious agents” and are therefore complicit, tragically, without their awareness or knowledge—a fact explained by their reactions against themselves and their projective nihilism? 45  Lilla, Mark. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politcs. New  York: Harper, 2017, 113 46  Badiou, Alain. “Politics and Philosophy,” an interview with Peter Hallward, 113-133 in Angelaki, Vol. 3 (3), 1998, 120-121.

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The awareness, for Marx, of “unconscious agents,” has today turned into a more wide-ranging predicament for all and with adversarial (severely antagonistic) politics. To make such an assessment is not enough. It has been the motivation of the dialogue and response so far to lay out some of the ways these “unconscious agents” are provocateurs without knowing it. To think for another moment about a right/left complicity, even if the designations are no longer accurate and need to be rethought if not abandoned. These are categories of use and value in the 20th century. Have they become obsolete as strictly political categories and require to be supplemented by analytic principles within the divisions of the psyche—that is, in all of us as individuals? Marx recognized the grounds of a possible distortion; but it was Nietzsche who confronted us with our most insistent dilemma. Once the death of God was proclaimed, then the “unconscious agents” would multiply, each of them (each group and identity) would exert as much pressure as possible on the entire fabric of social life. Capital has been constant; inter-mixed with the techno-logos, all kinds of media, and propaganda, its “critics” are more and more assimilated. This incorporation is counter-intuitively supplementing all the consequences of capitalist finitude and history. If we have reached this one insight; and if, indeed, it is accurate, then the challenges are more formidable than previously thought. The 20th century preoccupation with “ideology” seems archaic. Leo Strauss’ words in 1964 are, almost, ancient. “As regards modern political philosophy, it has been replaced by ideology: what originally was political philosophy has turned into ideology. This fact may be said to form the core of the contemporary crisis of the West.”47 Have we reached the point, with Badiou, that the nexus of capital and ethics are the new ideology for our emerging century? If so, our situation presents historical problems whose origins may have to be recollected from our amnesia. The manipulations have never been more numerous or sophisticated. What options are left? What happens now that, one, Badiou’s hope in another experiment with communism has been put in doubt, two, the traditional antagonisms are no longer recognizable because they have substantially shifted, and, three, the only path seemingly left requires the individual subject of being to re-think his and her life and a future? Can Badiou be made to represent the individual as a culmination; or are other stated positions enough to impede any such movement forward? Is the individual and the “we” the one intractable problem? For Badiou, despite all  Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964, 2.

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attempts to reconcile an ancient philosophical problem with real-life consequences (the one and the many), a solution seems remote, for his readers the crux of a decision to come. A critic can be cited here. His “critique” sums up a choice. Alexander Galloway writes. “The uncoupling of the ontological realm from the political realm is not entirely neutral,” he begins, unsure whether the comments are directed at Badiou. He believes that this “uncoupling” is “an ideological strategy bent unwittingly or not on the elimination of competing discourses. The question becomes even more pressing when a philosopher uncouples Being from politics in order to withdraw from the project of political critique altogether.”48 In what follows, and by way of a conclusion on the truth of love and the other three generic procedures, the previous references to a withdrawal are, first of all, not designed to be permanent (that may come later) but are, full admission here, to exclude political critique from Being in order to see if another alternative to social life may be possible and, with more daring, Badious’ belief in happiness and the true life becomes attainable. It may indeed be necessary to “uncouble” Being from politics and re-think the four procedures of truth towards a new eventuality.

4   Politics or the Truth of Independence In many ways, politics as one of Badiou’s generic procedures of truth has been the most difficult to analyze—and to defend; there have simply been too many easily made objections about both its historical reality and any extravagant hopes for its future. Approaching our end and with the never abandoned support for the individual, independent of the many, relying on Badiou’s beginning in the Theory of the Subject should be sufficient for us to remain true to this one affirmation. All other motivations have been secondary. Disregarding both the identified enemies and the ambitions of a communist hypothesis, an easier, less conflictual, more individual summation may be possible and not contradictory to many of Badiou’s repeated declarations. “The difficulty today is to extricate oneself from consensus” (PE 2). How does one prepare for this “extrication,” a question repeated again to stress, finally, the most important situation facing us at the moment. What we should not do may be as important as any thought 48  Galloway, Alexander R. “The Poverty of philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” 347–366 Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 2 (Winter 2013), 357.

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or action taken. Socrates’s daimon may serve as an example of an internal principle, phenomenological and without recourse to metaphysics; the age-old decision to leave the cave remains a compelling allegory. But what does it really mean and are we justified in focusing on Plato’s desire for what he called the “turning” of the soul towards a cure? We may be left with a dilemma that has been essential in Badiou’s entire philosophical enterprise, even as he made every attempt to reconcile its division. For us, now aware of the difficulty as it has persisted in our thinking, a decision may both be desirable and unavoidable. Others have not left us entirely on our own; indeed, essential problems have been identified. Richard Rorty writes: “We should stop trying to combine self-creation and politics.”49 Rorty supports a belief expressed from the beginning. Given the responses thus far, and no doubt Badiou’s disagreement, readers will have to decide for themselves if both projects can be sustained or if politics (due to its specific demands) necessarily complicates if not actually undermines the project of self-creation; everything in evidence today leads in either a different direction or makes inauthentic proposals. In any case, once the “submission to the real” is only made possible by another kind of giving in, the cause of freedom has not advanced at all, and the subject remains in the place where he and she is always forced by those who think they know better and impose the design on everyone else. For Badiou, what he has called “the great enigma of the century” is the tendency for political projects, especially revolutionary ones, to suffer from a degradation of the human and to be manipulated into different kinds of submissions, which are becoming more aligned and organized, and today even more extreme as the symptoms of nihilism are over-acting in civilization no less than our attitude to the human body. Our situation in the present confirms his fear. The moral and the bureaucratic have aligned themselves to create a powerful new directive to the process of subjectivation and the organization of society as a whole in liberal democracies. The state has not hesitated in taking advantage of its own moral pretensions. Badiou’s most impassioned writings, as in Ethics, have been dedicated to this one phenomenon: how can the commitment to the ideals of emancipation be so easily reversed and lead to their brutal opposite? He has not been alone in preparing readers for an old and predictable eventuality; and 49  Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, 120.

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yet, leaving aside the human tendency, he has not wavered from one belief and hope and aspiration about the future. The courage of his thinking and his independence makes him sympathetic; whether the expressions of a revolutionary militant and, if and when necessary, destruction of an enemy remain irreconcilable or not to the equally present philosophy of happiness will be up to the reader to decide and as their personal affirmation dictates. Anyone who believes both are attainable will be asked to provide their own rationale and explanation. Badiou’s remarks about happiness are inheritances with ancient convictions about the purpose of philosophy; cynicism cannot be allowed to be dismissive about this one human disposition of being, so difficult to achieve since culture does everything in its power to dissuade the individual from such a pursuit except with pre-prescribed substitutes, whether as objects to be purchased or as ideas to be disseminated about this or that value. How the individual will fare as he and she make decisions about the moral imperatives of the present will determine affects as well as the quality of life: in a more or less permanent state of confrontation or in the calm Badiou earlier told us about in his personal life and due to his study of mathematics. The matheme, for one, remains with us as one pure indication of our abilities to think beyond the confines of the made-up finite. For many, the situation is forcing a decision: submission to the consensus and opinion Badiou has been adamant about; or the will towards independence. To come to a provisional end, polemically, in advance of affirmation, he writes: “terror, betrayal, and disaster are what an ethic of truths—as opposed to the impotent morality of human rights—tried to ward off, in the singularity of its reliance on a truth in progress” (E 71). Is this, finally, the dilemma at hand once we have examined the four generic procedures of truth as the pillars that remain to “ward off” the increasing movement of the ethical absolute? This is, without a doubt, the most difficult situation: is Badiou justified, and philosophically right, to separate his ethic of truths from the morality of human rights? It is my belief that the 21st century is facing this one predicament and, one hopes, towards a gradual thinking-through rather than a decisive reckoning. It would seem that the either/or Badiou left us with in Theory of the Subject has not changed. Whether it is a solution can only be determined by careful thinking and without being led by the expediency of political rationalization or the taken-for-granted ideals of the times.

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We are in a ruinous and thoughtless epoch, in the putrefaction of the selfsame place where we remain and from which no new political subject is the internal excluded or the placed excess, then the opposite temptations—resigning oneself to the course of the world, supposed to be necessary, or withdrawing from it completely—begin to communicate from all sides. (TS 319)

Returning to his first concern with the individual will gives us, as we approach the end, a sense of Badiou’s experience; the situation was personal, as we have shown before with the therapeutic calm he experienced with the infinity of the matheme as opposed to the clamor of the social. Badiou has recognized a choice: resignation or withdrawal. After the extremes presented to us as possibilities—they were, traditionally, radical, militant, and revolutionary—Badiou offers an alternative. He is not satisfied with the option. Everything in him resists making such a choice; and yet when we consider the status of our contemporary liberalism, almost a half-century after he was first presenting his theory of the subject in his seminars in 1975–1979, the individual is still in the same place and today more coerced and under the dominance of intense forms of propaganda. There can be no denying the individual person who, committed to the good and true life, has to slowly, methodically, evaluate the best course of thought and action. Rorty’s emphasis on making the choice of “self-­ creation” is obvious and sensible. One of his declared adversaries (Nietzsche, at least as he has been misconstrued) does not at all differ from him on the matter. Despite so many different possibilities presented as to the cause of freedom for the individual (and to live a true and good life—a reality not to be squandered for moral ideals), there are nevertheless lingering temptations in Badiou’s thought that, in the end, every reader will have to examine for themselves. Provisions are not lacking. All his political commitments have not made him so driven that he could overlook the signs of the political times—the ones he had also confronted philosophically. The chorus from the Introduction can be recalled and to present one last objection to the methods currently being deployed today by certain political groups, above all with a new ethicism and its moralizing super-ego. I don’t see anything else in the Left today. In this sense, it is simply a category forming part of the consensus—a category that the system absolutely needs. The system vitally depends

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on a falsified contradiction, on a game consisting in fictitiously designating enemies on the basis of subtle differences, which are, in fact, what drives the game of pseudo-politics. (PE 4)

The following set of comments are less argumentative than a presentation of an objection to one of the consequences of a political organization. “Falsified contradiction.” Simply being aware of such a possibility, and the many concurrent sides of a formidable deception, should give us some time for thought. Is this an analysis of the motivations of the previous century and not a prescription? One of his solutions has not been accepted as a social hypothesis. “Since the being of the subject is the lack-of-being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project that exceeds him that an individual can hope to attain some subjective real” (TC 101). To agree to the argument is, for me, the surest sign of terror, betrayal, and disaster for the individual—unless the “dissolving” is rather thematized as an enhancement and as the work towards the recognition of what he earlier called an excess of the self and surely being more than an object to be used for moral purposes to support causes and identities. Nothing makes me respond with more vigor than the idea that a collective project could further itself than with the sacrifice of the one. “Dissolving,” another euphemism, sounds like exile or elimination or the worst kind of collective incorporation. When the dilemmas have been not at all minimized here; when all the difficulties had to be faced, Badiou leaves us with considerable work to do; because if, above all, he has been philosophically arguing, as did the ancients, for the reality of an immortal and happy life, then a final choice has to be made and this one word, dissolving, offers us a way out of the dilemmas and doing so by making a decision we can accept without hesitation and as the one certain evidence of our personal commitments. Freedom from the cave will not come by “destroying” the other prisoners. Cadavers will not get rid of the shadows on the wall. “I believe that is an affect of the true life. This affect doesn’t have any sacrificial component. Nothing negative is required … This affect is the affirmative feeling of the dilation of the individual” (PE 130). “Dilation,” a perfect metaphor, at once to describe the enhancement of the individual and the ability to see with more clarity, which once again reacquaints us to the most profound aspects of phenomenology as the work towards achieving a certain clarity of consciousness. Badiou’s call for a “new modernity” will only emerge, as a conceivable thought, when all appeals to sacrifice are abolished as surely

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as the ones abolished in the temples of antiquity. The 20th century was more than willing to make sacrifices, of the individual. “Thenceforth, the ‘we’ constructed in and by this project is the only thing that is truly real— subjectively real for the individual who supports it. The individual, truth be told, is nothing. The individual is thus, in its very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject” (TC 101). The individual, the nothing. Is this an analysis or a prescription? There are still moments of uncertainty when everything has been considered. The dilemmas are presented here as clearly as possible. Badiou tries, impossibly, to hold both together. The decision of fidelity, consequential as it must personally be, will be made when (and if) this dilemma can be resolved. Badiou has sustained the primacy of the individual. There have been sufficient examples to make the argument sustainable; but when, in places, he invokes sacrifice and “the nothing of the individual” (which is nihilism pure if not simple), hesitation is understandable and advisable. We should remind ourselves of arguments Badiou made as early as in the Theory of the Subject. Its relevance is more acute now than when he first wrote that “the sacrifice of the excess to restoration of the place is what subordinates subjectivation to the conservative subjective process: the superego”50 (TS 292). Decisive then, more so today. Individual subjectivation cannot be allowed to be sacrificed for any reason, and not when the pretensions of the super-ego has been gathering its forces and with outside help, from certain institutions that are becoming complicit with the exercise and the attainment of power. One commentator writes of “Badiou’s conception of politics as the project of radical equality,”51 which begs the question on the “radical” and equality and much else besides, especially as it has been conceived and enacted 50  We unify the arguments made in the mid-1970s to Badiou’s evaluation of the 20th century as a whole. The subordination of the process of subjectivation was made in Theory of the Subject. That initial and foundational insight cannot be forsaken—for any reason, that is, for any and all senses of the truth. 51  Karavitis, Gerasimos. “On the concept of politics: A comparative reading of Castoriadis and Badiou,” 256–271 Constellations Vol. 25, Issue 2, 2018, 262. Without the desire to be obtuse, one could ask what the adjective “radical” does, precisely, to the concept of equality. It would seem to be exceedingly difficult to first of all conceive (then work for—if desired) any such concept. I am not entirely sure about anyone, today, writing about the reality of what has been for so long called “radical leftist politics.” There comes a point when words sound like slogans and one simply asks what they could possibly mean.

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today. How is equality to be possible when factions are vying for individual recognition and necessarily resenting those who do not belong and who, in one way or another, are going to be made to conform, agree, or be incorporated into a collective we? The single-most important dilemma of our contemporary situation has been outlined. Every single thing Badiou writes about the individual is immediately suspended when the language of the “we” takes precedence over the individual. Once the political argument is made for the individual one to be expedient for the many and the greater good as commanded by the imperious nature of the super-ego, then a certain philosophy responds and also begins to counter the claim of being a condition and as an alternative to the politics of the real. The self-possession of the minor “we,” if it comes into conflict with the one, reacts with predictable methods. We know exactly what happens to the one: poison and nails. A fundamental problem emerges at the heart of Badiou’s politics. He has been the one to repudiate the politics of identity, the idolatry of the victim, and the logomachy of human rights; and, even so, he has surreptitiously smuggled the identity of the “we” back into an unacceptable political discourse that rationalizes the very worst principles of the 20th century and gives permission for the “we” to treat the individual with the same contempt and indifference as in history. The subject of truth, in art, science, and love, always regarded as the one—the one artist, the one scientist, the one lover—were not subsumed into the collectivity of a we, in this one identity and group psychology. Perhaps the time has come for a suspension of the critical and the negative in politics (and everywhere else) and to see if another tendency might not be better suited to our future and for a healthier, curative, therapeutic state of being. Badiou’s “we,” like Plato’s hoi polloi or Epicurus’ the many, can be ignored for a period of time and to give over some attention to the individual who has suffered manipulation from every conceivable side—from the pressures of being a consumer, narcissistic, identitarian, or “radical.” Only the reader will be able to decide if the critical theory of the last half-century has been successful, or, at this particular juncture in the history of liberal democratic societies, a pause might not be in everyone’s best interest in order to at least avoid being compelled into all-out antagonisms. Superlative thoughts are not to be dismissed, reactively or cynically. “When I say that all situations are infinite, it’s an axiom. It is impossible to deduce the point. It is an axiomatic conviction, a modern conviction” (IT 136). The foundations of

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Badiou’s ontological thought are going to be followed from their momentary location in politics, and in the four procedures of truth, and see if the dilemma (the one and the many) can be resolved; or if the antagonism is going to be perpetual and have to be accepted as a permanent aspect of our civilizations and its discontents. Badiou does leave us with identifiable dilemmas; he has also left with considerable work to do, none more important when confronting the nature of our age and its drive in the 21st century than to return to the past and recollect, and make true, the modern forms of ancient convictions, a project that will here be announced and as a necessary supplement to follow in our on-going responsibility to being, to the subject, and to truth.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: A Future and Happy Immanence

The previous arguments, beginning with the revaluation of critical theory and negation (as symptoms) for any possible transformations in 21st century thought, has stressed the commitment to affirmation as a remedy and to the constancy of an awareness in the recent moralizing drive of the times. A comment by Étienne Balibar in a section of a work entitled “revolution against philosophy” brings our attention to one origin, in Marx, who “discovered the dual meaning of the term critique: on the one hand, the eradication of error; on the other, knowledge of the limits of a faculty or practice.”1 Who, today, involved in direct political engagement or, more broadly, in Humanities departments within the university, has turned an ideology critique towards the limits in themselves? Has this always been one fatal omission in political enthusiasm—so directed towards an object, and an objective, that the subject could remain unattended except in the form of theoretical distance or abolition—and as a form of defense? Has anyone been sufficiently self-critical and analytic enough to hold themselves up to scrutiny? Can we pace Balibar, displace the critical, and make a different set of affirmative proposals and beginning, in one place, with the psychoanalytic (on its own, without contributions from Frankfurt) and as Badiou offers us in a number of different writings? “The psychoanalytic cure is, in principle, infinite” (CPT 88). Prior to any cure, sufficient work 1

 Balibar, Étienne. The Philosophy of Marx. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2014, 18.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9_6

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will have to be attempted and devoted to one of the most insistent issues of our time. Calling our present morality nihilistic is only a beginning. A few last words by Freud, on morality and recalling his analysis of the power of the super-ego—which Badiou followed as one of the first obvious signs of a conjunction between the good and its acts of domination— gives us one last sense of a current movement that “has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others … I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relation of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction” (SE 21:143). The beginning of a proposal, from Civilization and its Discontents, begins with Freud putting morality in its place and returning us to our relation to things, to “possession,” to things no less than to the ideals, and delusions, we hold on to with such desperate tenacity and at an extremely high cost to ourselves as individuals and to the societies of liberalism as a whole. One summary of our contemporary predicament: on the one hand, the imperious nature of the super-ego with all its various agendas, supported by its inviolable morality of the good, and on the other, the equally pressing enticements of “possessions,” the two different things today being produced for consumption and which reveals an odd relation of who or what is, in fact, being consumed. Lacan’s superbly stated “service des biens” can be introduced here as a lingering echo: has the service of the moral good and the consumption of goods finally reached a moment of osmosis? To recall a previous and still active dynamic of the subject: an alternative, one of our primary words, can be more strenuously presented. The incorporation of the classical and still inexhaustible past can be an antidote to consumption, of things and ourselves. One can see how the disposition of heresy and asceticism could well be a personal response to the overbearing reality of the times, which is becoming ever more developed, and imposed, as an unconscious theological-­ political imperative. What better response could there be, outside of Plato’s “cave,” than the ability to think freely and to minimize our materialist and ideological obesity? The escape and extraction is also, as mentioned quite a few times, a withdrawal—at least temporarily, for a time of reflection, for the chance to think on one’s own and without all the pressure of either being wealthy or good, which amounts to a similar kind of avarice. It was one of Freud’s greatest contribution to thought to make us aware of not so easily allowing ourselves any leisure of complacency when it comes to the decisive ideas of a culture that has developed itself out of

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the tireless work of individuals and people and will not then so easily be displaced by reactive groups who believe themselves working towards emancipation and not for a moment recognizing how they are contributing to the most severe discontent. Peter Sloterdijk sums up, for me, an impeccable point. He raises doubts as to the value and longevity of any improvements and the possibility of realizing general participation, doubts that have taken on epidemic proportions; in addition to this, these questions have their foundation in a skepticism vis-à-vis the moralism of sociopolitical modernity that is rapidly becoming radicalized. This skepticism allows us to ask whether, in the moralism of the Enlightenment, the legitimate voice of wounded life that is demanding its restitution can really be heard, or whether the syndrome of moralizing social activism has not long since unwillingly become part and parcel of the tendencies that, from behind the pretext of further improvement and humanitarian progress, lead to an unprecedented proliferation of suffering.2

If Sloterdijk is right, and I think he is, then the psychological problem has to be both confronted and specifically identified. The diagnostic of a “moralizing social activism” is only a start. We have had enough of critical theory for so long it is any wonder there is any other kind of thought possible in the Humanities and in society in general. Individuals, who are the exception, are barely heard above all the declarations of this or that moral imperative. What Sloterdijk alerts us to (and by appealing to the “alert individual”) is how “humanitarian progress” has led, logically, to the “unprecedented proliferation of suffering.” To return to the earlier substance of the super-ego and its transformation most especially during the last half-century of liberal self-confidence and unhampered will towards a comprehensive project for the human, we now have to alter our conception of the super-ego and recognize its unique features in the 21st century. Whether a Freudian analysis of the super-ego and the death drive will lead to what Sloterdijk calls the imperative to “deneuroticize politics” will, at least, have to be attempted.3

2  Sloterdijk, Peter. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism. Tr. Jamie Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 77–78. 3  The work-in-progress is called The Malice of Our Contemporary Super-Ego: An Essay on Psychopolitics.

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These words of caution, to and for the one who Sloterdijk calls the alert and conscious individual, resound more today, overall and in the reengagement with Nietzsche, and Freud, for the precarious now. Considerable work will be necessary, trying, labor-intensive, above all to make explicit how the real has been created and managed, with factical finitude submitted to a process of domestication. There will be one individual reader who will (on his or her own, in private first and perhaps with one other later) have not so much reached a conclusion as a resolve and, so too, a decision for what thinking and being can still become despite all the obstacles present in the world. Only a few of Badiou’s dilemmas have been outlined here. In the end, however, and with the willingness to still emphasize affirmation, we can turn to one final declaration on the relationship between another kind of truth altogether: the truth of philosophy and happiness. A recent work, on the “metaphysics of true/real happiness,” brings one discussion, originating in the 1975 Theory of the Subject, towards another possibility. Our beginning in the exhaustion of critical theory can be given one more finale. Pascal Bruckner writes: “The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of the process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself.”4 Avoiding a critical “self-­ cannibalism,” especially if it comes from a source as debilitating as “the tyranny of guilt,” will be an on-going concern for us moving forward. The pleasure, more seriously, seems part of a masochist-sadistic bind. The punitive imposition of an absolute guilt, for history no less, has to be non-­ effectual if the purveyors of our new morality are to be diminished. The dilemmas presented thus far, given one description by Nick Hewlett, will have to be overcome. He believes that Badiou’s thought is characterized by “a lack of coherence between two major influences in his writings: the Platonist idealist on the one hand and the materialist and activist on the other.”5 Hewlett is not the first to point out the “lack of coherence” in Badiou’s thought. Several readers, sympathetic and otherwise, have made the same observation in all the truths examined thus far. The still 4  Bruckner, Pascal. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Tr. Steven Rendell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, 34. 5  Hewlett, Nick. Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Rrethinking Emancipation. London: Continuum, 2007, 48. The “lack of coherence” argument comes in Chapter 3, “The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou’s Theory of Politics.”

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outstanding question is: where is the origin of the dilemma—in the subjects of his discussions or in Badiou? Any conclusive statement would be hazardous and perhaps misleading, which is the reason (as in other cases) where the reader is given the problem to analyze on his or her own time and according to their individual and intellectual resources—and perhaps without departmental or institutional interference. Despite Badiou’s stated antipathy to hermeneutics, it is for me indispensable and so to establish a dialogic relationship to the reader. Badiou has not relented from one commitment; conceived from an abiding concern for everyone, all his foundations have led him to what he calls, in De la fin, the “joy of being.” He too, like Nietzsche, has a fröhliche Wissenschaft. He too aspires to a certain joy. “Because in every one of his experiences, the individual who is subjectivated, incorporated into the process of truth, experiences that he is living, that he is living in the joy of being—and that in itself is enough to separate one from the world as it is” (TE 94). The conversations and writings over the last few years are an indication of a certain summing up. The rest will have to be done by those with fidelity to him. When all will be said and done over a life-time of work, Badiou has ensured that one concern will not be forgotten. An earlier, tenuous relationship was proposed. Never ceasing to think about the most meaningful acts in life—art, science, love, politics—Badiou did not give up on that most elusive of human conditions of being: happiness. The joy of being was not a remote concern. Happiness was, too, a condition, one that many of the thinkers of the last half-century have neglected. “To put an end to the end, to finish with the end, it is necessary that a decision be made” (H 65). Happiness is a result and a consequence of freedom, a word Badiou associated in his very early days with another quintessential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, when he was one of his early “masters.” One could do a lot worse than a philosopher who, as it happened, inspired Badiou to think and to write novels and plays—which was a paradigm of happiness because creative. Happiness cannot come from opinion and consensus; on the contrary, for one final time, the negation inherent in critical thought has produced exactly the opposite of happiness: we have come to accept misery as a condition of the intellect, with a now chronic malaise and rationalized as understandable given the conditions of the world and of the history (a Western history) all too maligned and in the present the object of intense scorn. We have, in the very societies formed to ensure some sense of happiness, and without so much as an awareness of the process over the last half-century, a citizenry that is increasingly

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dour, morose, and forced to endure the malaise of an overbearing guilt. Our unhappiness has been made chronic. Surely this is not a satisfactory situation and one that can be maintained for very much longer. The malice of our contemporary super-ego has become insufferable. Our intellectual class and the various departments of the Humanities in the university as a whole will have to take some of the responsibility for the state of affairs. Whether the situation can be reversed remains to be seen; a few individuals with hope have mentioned the movement of a pendulum. The twin-allies of technology and propaganda are not going to relent; capital exploits them to the best of its ability. The complicity of political obsession and anxiety are only going to get worse; no relief seems to be currently on the horizon. That is a choice. Only the individual, first, acting alone if need be, can turn away from the world and search out another way of being. “It is therefore necessary, to my mind, to reconstruct philosophically, without restoration and without archaisms, by the trial of a modern eventuality, the category of truth, and, by way of consequence, that of the subject” (H 58). Without archaisms. Ancient convictions will have to be adopted from the work of retroactive intervention, reconfiguration, and incorporation—for today. Only then will it be possible to think and live up to the possibility of “the metaphysics of real happiness.” Only then will it be possible for joy and happiness to come together in “an eternal work, of an eternity whose affect is a shared kind of bliss” (IPP 132). To underscore, on just a few occasions since one hopes by now the thesis has been clearly stated and supported, each of the three-in-one are not to be deliberately cut off from each other and given independent existence; the interconnection of being, the subject, and the truth are axiomatic. “The philosophical ingredients are put in the service of a singular, rigorously defined end, which in itself is extraphilosophical” (GP 35, my emphasis). The “extra” can he taken to imply the good, the real, the true, life. Philosophy will have to be enhanced from what Badiou believes to be its determining conditions, now in the form of a service, a therapeia. Such has been the proposal offered in the three-in-one, with philosophy recovering its destiny as the affirmative thought of the human. True, “it most often sustains itself through precarious, nascent conditions” (MP 38). Whether the conditions are indeed final and closed with the four of art, love, science, and politics is, again, a question for the reader and in assessing what has been presented. Ending his conversation with Fabien Tarby in Philosophy and the Event by using another triad seems appropriate.

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Philosophy is, then, three things. It’s a diagnosis of the epoch: what does the epoch propose? It’s a construction, on the basis of this contemporary proposition, of a concept of truth. And, finally, it’s an existential experience relative to the true life. The unity of the three is philosophy. When I’ve finished writing The Immanence of Truths, and have, thereby, assured the contemporary unity of the three components of any philosophy, I’ll be able to say: philosophy is me. (PE 130)

An iteration for emphasis to conclude: the end of Happiness repeats the above statement almost verbatim, with a final addition: if friends and enemies can, together, experience “the happiness of the immanence,” then the destruction of others will have been, for a time, averted for good and we, all of us, will be able to achieve something far more important than negation and critical theory and the moralizing obsessions of our times. “Philosophy is me. And it is also, equally, all of you, who read me, and think of me, or against me as well. For if there is thought, there is also the eternity of the earthly experience, that of the immanence to the true life. Then, all of us, friends and enemies, will share the happiness of the immanence” (H 121-122).

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Index1

A Adorno, Theodor, 2, 62 negative dialectics, 2, 62 Affirmation, 1–30, 38, 39n6, 42, 45, 53, 54, 64, 69, 70, 76, 77, 81, 98, 103–105, 107, 108, 112, 126, 128, 132, 133, 138, 150, 159, 161, 164, 168, 176, 181, 187, 194, 197, 198, 212, 214, 221, 224 Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 99n32, 207 aporia, 21, 207, 208 Allegory, 2, 54, 213 of the cave, 2, 213 Althusser, Louis, 4, 191 Anti-humanism, 1, 9, 125 Archaeology, 14–16 Arete,̄ 25, 139, 182n12 Aristotle, 91, 91n21, 94, 163–165 Art aesthetic revolution, 43 artist-creator, 47

artistic configuration, 38, 47 autonomy, 28n56, 60, 61, 63–65, 69 cult of the creator, 36 heteronomy, 60, 65, 69, 73; of the viewer, 60 sovereignty, 38, 39, 101 Atopos, 11, 11n19 B Badiou, Alain, v, 2, 31, 79, 123, 173, 221 affirmation, 1–30, 69, 70, 77, 104, 107, 133, 176, 198 communism, 185, 191, 192, 200, 211 configuration, 26, 40, 40n7, 41, 70, 89, 174 decision, 15, 19, 21, 26, 27, 38n5, 39, 42, 47, 53n17, 107, 119, 134, 168, 206

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Ghisalberti, Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18296-9

243

244 

INDEX

Badiou, Alain (cont.) disciple, 26, 101–103, 138, 156 discipline, 10, 51, 84, 102, 107, 121, 189 esplace, 11n20 event, 14n28, 20, 35, 44, 51, 52, 67, 73, 75, 103, 143 fidelity, 2, 3, 9, 18, 30, 44, 45, 88, 95, 103, 104, 118, 120, 125, 133, 148, 157, 164, 190 grace, 118n55, 167 happiness, 25, 64, 79, 130, 164, 165, 186, 212, 214, 225; philosophy of, 214 homogeny, 207 inaesthetic, 32–34, 37, 55 incorporation, 26, 54, 56, 73, 75, 89, 102, 112, 141, 174 interpretative intervention, 26, 42, 89, 133, 174, 185 matheme, 81–83, 86, 87, 90, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 107, 110, 111, 113, 162, 164, 215 nominations, 35 philosophemes, 200 resurrection, 55, 87, 118n55, 185 seminars, 4, 179 situation, 8, 10, 11, 21, 25, 28, 30, 59, 154, 155, 165, 183, 202, 214, 215 subtraction, 99, 148, 183 supplement, 7–9, 25, 57, 75, 108n39, 136, 194 testimony, 30, 46, 53n17, 59, 137 transference, 44, 47, 49, 136, 138, 141 transmission, 101, 137 true life, the, 9, 13, 27, 28, 85, 168, 212 truth, 8, 9, 26, 30, 36, 44, 66, 124, 126, 138, 161, 165, 170, 173, 174, 181, 196, 206, 207, 212;

procedures of, 9, 161, 165, 181, 206, 207, 212 vacillation, 29 wager, 17, 106, 159 Balibar, Étienne, 221 Barker, Jason, 28, 106 Barthes, Roland, 39n6 Bartlett, A.J., 58 Baudrillard, Jean, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 61, 67n37 Biology, 79, 84, 102, 103, 108–121, 110n44, 125, 127, 128, 159 neurobiology, 27n54, 84, 91, 108, 110, 110n44, 116–119 Bosteels, Bruno, 205 Brague, Rémi, 166 Brassier, Ray, 88 Bruckner, Pascal, 224 C Cantor, Georg, 80, 81n1, 87 Capital, 9, 12, 21, 23, 24, 63, 84, 103, 112, 113, 115, 118, 129–131, 133, 152, 156, 173, 177, 185, 203n32, 210, 211, 226 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 170, 217n51 Cézanne, Paul, 68 Christianity, 80, 110n44 Clemens, Justin, 184 Communism, 61, 166, 185, 186, 191–193, 196, 200, 211 the new, 186, 189 Community, 20, 58, 71, 92n23, 98, 99n32, 104, 140, 164n38, 186 Crisis, 14, 201, 202, 208 of the West, 211 Critchley, Simon, 13, 145, 146, 167, 209 the demand, 145, 146, 167 the ethical subject, 147, 209

 INDEX 

Critical theory, 2–5, 12, 15, 21, 28, 37, 88, 95, 113, 147, 192, 205, 218, 221, 223, 224, 227 ideology critique, 5, 221 Critical thought, v, 27, 225 misadventures of, 25

245

D Damisch, Hubert, 33 Darwinism, 112 Del Noce, Augusto, 22 new totalitarianism, 22 Deleuze, Gilles, 56, 93, 94n26, 114 Democracy, 3, 6, 7, 12, 19, 20, 22, 61, 130, 131, 175, 176, 179, 182, 182n12, 183, 186, 189, 190, 196, 197, 201, 204, 207, 208, 213 Dennett, Daniel C., 116n52 Diotima, 9, 134, 138–140, 143

Foucault, Michel, 15, 16, 23 archaeology, 15, 16 bio-power, 16 care of the self, the, 23 Freedom, 2, 17, 26, 29, 39, 39n6, 49, 60, 62, 64, 75, 94, 131, 135, 157, 168, 173, 174, 177, 181, 183, 194, 199, 208, 213, 215, 216, 225 French Revolution, the, 7, 96, 146, 206, 207 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 7n13, 48, 49, 98, 118, 127, 134, 153, 154, 159, 162, 163n36, 164, 165, 175, 179, 191–193, 200, 206, 222, 224 psychoanalysis, 118, 175, 193 super-ego, 6, 222 Fukuyama, Francis, 202, 203, 203n32 Identity, 203n32 Thymos, 202, 203

E Ellul, Jacques, 4 propaganda, 4 Epicurus, 81, 89, 90, 92n23, 93, 94, 96, 98–100, 99n32, 104, 107, 156, 158, 164, 165, 184, 200, 202, 203, 218 autarkeia, 147 Ethics, 3, 6, 8, 19–21, 25, 38, 41, 44, 48, 49, 57, 65, 121, 126–132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142–147, 149–152, 155, 156, 180, 184, 210, 211, 214 Euclid, 190 Eudaimonia, 3 Existentialism, 26

G Gabriel, Markus, 27n54, 61, 62, 62n28, 65, 116, 119 Galileo, 97 Genius, 41, 81–84, 105 Girard, René, 22, 115, 182n12, 195, 204 God, 7n14, 11, 11n19, 16, 87, 93, 99, 104, 110, 111, 116, 137, 164n38 death of, 14, 114, 210, 211 Greeks, the, 3, 9, 25, 28, 35, 39, 56, 91–94, 96, 139, 139n23, 170, 198 Groy, Boris, 64 Guattari, Félix, 93, 94n26

F Factions, 192, 195, 197, 201, 204, 218 Fanon, Frantz, 196 Fascism, 157, 158

H Hallward, Peter, v, 19, 195 Han, Byung-Chul, 22, 77, 115, 159, 160, 208

246 

INDEX

Happiness of the immanence, 227 metaphysics of, 165, 224, 226 See also, Joy of being Harman, Graham, 7, 7n13 object-oriented ontology, 7 Hart, David Bentley, 197 Heidegger, Martin, 14n28, 15, 15n30, 16, 45, 47, 50, 61, 66, 67, 89, 141, 144, 170, 180 Henry, Michel, 76, 77, 117 Hermeneutics, 33, 42, 43, 66, 88, 170, 180, 225 Heteronomy, 55–69, 73 betrayal of, 55–69 Historicity, 70 Horney, Karen, 7n12 Humanism, 14, 174, 190 Human rights, 19, 20, 126, 167, 210, 214, 218 ideology of, 127 Husserl, Edmund, 14 I Ideology, 4, 5, 22, 23, 50, 58, 65, 132, 134, 136, 137, 176, 201, 211, 221 of victimization, 23 Immortality, 8, 9, 46, 67, 74, 81, 110, 118n55, 119, 139, 142, 150, 153, 169, 206 of subjects, 8, 46, 80, 110, 115, 153, 206 Individual, the, vi, 10, 17–18, 25–27, 28n56, 31, 33, 36–37, 39, 40, 42–48, 51, 52, 54–77, 81–83, 81n1, 86n7, 87, 94, 100n34, 102–106, 116, 124, 129, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144–149, 151–154, 156, 157, 160–162, 165, 166, 168, 169,

171, 180, 192, 193, 197–207, 209, 211, 212, 214–218, 225, 226 J Jealousy, 50, 57, 132, 134, 135, 141, 143, 148–165 politics of, 168 K Kandinsky, Wassily, 50 Kant, Immanuel, 96, 97 Kierkegaard, Søren, 27n54, 36, 152, 160, 164n38 Krauss, Rosalind, 72 Kristeva, Julia, 170 L Lacan, Jacques, 12n24, 85n6, 151, 175, 179, 191, 222 Laruelle, François, 180 Latour, Bruno, 7n13, 182 Lefort, Claude, 30 Lévy, Bernard-Henry, 192 totalitarian temptation, 192 Liberalism, 21, 177, 193, 203n32, 210, 215, 222 Lissitzky, El, 189 Love, 3, 44, 85, 123, 173, 225 jealousy, 50, 143, 149, 152, 154, 157, 159, 164, 165 Lucretius, 93, 103, 104, 107, 156, 184 M Malabou, Catherine, 119 Manifestos, 12, 30, 69, 71, 101, 118, 120, 149–151, 156, 157, 161, 163, 207

 INDEX 

Mao Chinese history, 9 “Cultural Revolution”, 9, 187 Marion, Jean-Luc, 72, 164 Martyrdom, 46 Marx, Karl, 23, 24, 64, 99n32, 175, 180, 190, 210, 211, 221 Marxism, 63n30 Masochism, 200 Mathematics formalization of, 205 set theory, 86, 89, 107 May ‘68, 1, 30, 55, 166 McLuhan, Marshall, 117 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 68, 72 Morality, 19–21, 24, 25, 28, 37, 57, 74, 99, 118n55, 147, 183, 209, 214, 222, 224 Mouffe, Chantal, 73, 176, 182, 182n12, 201, 208 Mozart, Wolfgang, 59, 60, 67, 82 Mozart-event, 60 N Negative dialectics, 2, 62 Negri, Antonio, 6 Thanatopolitics, 6 Neurobiology, 27n54, 84, 91, 108, 110, 110n44, 116–119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 4, 4n3, 17, 18, 20, 25, 27, 29, 34, 36, 49, 56, 59, 65, 70, 72, 76, 81, 85n6, 89, 100, 101, 110, 114, 115, 121, 129, 132, 139, 148, 155, 168, 169, 180, 182, 193, 204, 211, 215, 224, 225 death of God, 114, 211 the free spirit, 34, 76, 169, 180, 204 nihilism, 3, 20, 25; advent of, 20, 129; political, 20 Noys, Benjamin, 5, 41

247

P Palimpsest (Nietzsche), 25 Pascal, Blaise, 16, 17, 36, 100, 100n34 Phenomenology, 36, 43, 51, 63, 66, 71–72, 112, 115, 156, 189, 216 Picasso, Pablo, 40, 67, 68 Plato, 2, 9, 11, 11n19, 36, 73, 81, 89, 91, 92n23, 96, 100, 103, 105, 118, 134, 138, 139, 139n23, 145, 152, 165, 174, 180, 186, 198, 200, 210, 213, 218, 222 paideia, 10 psychagogia, 10 Pluth, Ed, 175 Pneuma, 16, 104, 118, 120 Politics enemies, 12, 22, 149, 161, 164, 174, 178, 199 factions, 192, 195, 197, 201, 204, 210, 218 identitarian, 167, 177, 185, 192, 202, 207 Pollock, Jackson, 70 Propaganda, 4, 12, 24, 73, 75, 128, 135, 137, 138, 146, 152, 155, 174, 176, 187, 203, 203n32, 207, 211, 215, 226 Pythagoreans, 91, 91n21, 92n23, 109, 112 Q Quoting Agamben, 208, 209 R Rancière, Jacques, 42n9, 43, 44n11, 62, 63n30, 67, 67n37 new sensorium, 63, 63n30 Renaissance, the, v, 97, 182

248 

INDEX

Revelation, 27, 28, 38, 45, 49, 51, 53, 62n28, 65–68, 70, 110, 133, 139, 143, 166, 204, 205 Revolution, 20, 43, 44n11, 58n22, 63n30, 96, 98, 170, 171, 175, 180, 182, 187, 188, 192, 196, 197 Rights, 5–7, 7n13, 11, 11n18, 18, 19, 22, 27, 44, 65, 76, 95, 125, 133, 146, 151, 153, 158–160, 162, 173, 178, 180, 182n12, 190, 202, 208, 210, 211, 214, 223 human, 19, 20, 126, 127, 167, 210, 214, 218 Rorty, Richard, 5, 213, 215 Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 14n28 S Sacrifice, 46, 139, 147, 216, 217 St. Paul, 7, 109, 118n55, 185, 194, 197, 202, 206 gospel, 7, 109, 185, 197, 206 letters, 118n55, 194, 206 Sappho, 134, 136–138 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 204, 225 Schmitt, Carl, 131 Schönberg, Arnold, 34 Schönberg-event, 35, 52 Science, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 27–30, 27n54, 69, 76, 77, 79–121, 124, 144, 154, 161, 163n36, 164, 164n38, 165, 175, 182, 189, 199, 201, 218, 225, 226 scientism, 77, 80, 115, 118 Self-revelations (Nietzsche), 34 Sloterdijk, Peter, 5, 22, 43, 44, 176, 186, 223, 224 Snyder, Timothy, 209 eternity politics, 209 Socrates, 9–11, 10n15, 11n19, 26, 104n36, 139, 198, 202, 213 Spirit, 1, 14–16, 34, 36, 50, 54, 72, 81, 104, 112, 118–120, 120n58, 138,

144, 145, 147, 155, 163, 169, 180, 196, 197, 203, 204, 224 Stalinism, 200 Strauss, Leo, 11, 11n18, 211 Subject, the, v, 4, 31, 79, 123, 174, 221 incorporation of, 54, 56, 73, 98, 102, 156 Super-ego, 6, 7n12, 130, 146, 147, 154, 160, 167, 182n12, 190, 200, 210, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 226 T Tarby, Fabien, 226 Taylor, Charles, 203 Thanatos, 128, 133, 134, 143, 178, 181, 192 Theoria, 21, 35, 99, 166 Totalitarianism, 5 U University, the, 2, 12, 12n24, 85, 85n6, 168, 221, 226 USSR, 200 failure of, 200 V Vattimo, Gianni, 14n28 Virilio, Paul, 190 W Withdrawal, 57, 62, 90, 102, 106, 113, 125, 144, 151, 162, 181, 183, 184, 189, 194, 212, 215, 222 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 89, 89n17 Wolin, Richard, 179n7 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 13, 23, 191, 193n25, 209