Phelps, Hollis. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology. Acumen Publishing. 2013 B2430.B274 P44 2013 Rye U
🙂 Phelps delves into Cantor’s infinity and also provides very useful discussion of Badiou as witness below. I should read this book carefully, because its a good resource for any work on Badiou in the future.
Badiou’s subject does not immediately correspond to the human individual. There is no one-to-one relationship between them. This gap between inidivudals and subject ruls out thinking of the subject in finite terms, as a category of morality, a locus or register of experience, or an ideological fiction.
First, concerning the subject of morality, it does not matter for Badiou if it is the (neo-)Kantian subject of human rights or the Levinasian subject that underpins the “ethics of difference”: both tend to flatten the subject “onto the empirical manifestness of the living body. What deserves respect is the animal body as such” (LW 48; cf. E 4-29).
Conceiving the subject primarily in moral terms ultimately reduces the human being to “the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, [it] equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of living organism, pure and simple”
Badiou’s main point is that understanding the subject as a category of morality confines the subject to finitude, to the limitation constitutive of individual human beings. The reduction of the subject to finitude is part and parcel of what Badiou pejoratively refers to in Logic of Worlds as “democratic materialism”, whose axiom is: “There are only bodies and languages” Democratic materialism, and the subject that corresponds to it, takes as its horizon “the dogma of our finitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death.” The claim that “there are only bodies and languages” amounts to little more than a “bio-materialism” that reduces “humanity to an overstretched vision of animality”.
Second, if the subject is not a category of morality, it is also not “a register of experience, a schema for the conscious distribution of the reflexive and the non-reflexive; this thesis conjoins subject and consciousness and is deployed today as phenomenology” (LW 48). The phenomenological or existential subject is, as Badiou points out, irrevocably bound to meaning, to the circulation of sense. It does, to be sure, exercise a transcendental function in relation to experience, but this subject can only conceive of the infinite as a horizon, as a negative correlate of the immediacy of its own essential finitude (BE 391).
[…]
Third, although Badiou rejects conceiving the subject in either moral or existential terms, this does not lead him to reduce the subject to a mere ideological fiction, an “interpellation” of the state and its apparatuses, as Louis Althusser thought. At both the political and the ontological level, the state certainly reproduces itself through various ideologies and their mechanisms. But strictly speaking that state exerts this pressure through the re-presentation of individuals, which latter, we have said, do not correspond to subjects for Badiou.
In contrasts to these three broad understandings of the subject, Badiou’s subject is a formal category. Badiou’s subject is “any local configuration fo a generic procedure from which a truth is supported” (BE 391); the subject is for Badiou the “local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation. 74-75