badiou

Metastases of Enjoyment

September 20, 2011

Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso, 1994.

[T]he problem that confronted Lacan was: how do we pass from animal coupling led by instinctual knowledge and regulated by natural rhythms to human sexuality possessed by a desire which is eternalized and, for that very reason, insatiable, inherently perturbed, doomed to fail, and so on? …

So the answer to Lacan’s problem is: we enter human sexuality through the intervention of the symbolic order qua heterogeneous parasite that disrupts the natural rhythm of coupling. 155

Zupančič Interview

Alenka Zupančič interviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books, March 9, 2018

CASSANDRA B. SELTMAN: The aim of What IS Sex? is to return to and preserve the idea of sexuality as a subject of philosophical investigation. How do you understand the proliferation of new ontologies in “the times we live in”? Do you see this as a “return” to ontological questions?

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ: I see this as a symptom. There are two levels or aspects of this question. On the one hand, there is a truth, or conceptual necessity, in what you rightfully call the return to ontology. Philosophy should not be ashamed of serious ontological inquiry, and the interrogation here is vital and needed. There is, however, something slightly comical when this need is asserted as an abstract or normative necessity — “one should do this,” and then everybody feels that he or she needs to have their own ontology. “I am John Doe, and here’s my ontology.” There is much arbitrariness here, rather than conceptual necessity and rigor. This is not how philosophy works.

Also, there is this rather bafflingly simplifying claim according to which Kant and the “transcendental turn” to epistemology was just a big mistake, error, diversion — which we have to dismiss and “return” to ontology, to talking about things as they are in themselves. Kant’s transcendental turn was an answer to a real impasse of philosophical ontology. We can agree that his answer is perhaps not the ultimate or philosophically the only viable answer, but this does not mean that the impasse or difficulty that it addresses was not real and that we can pretend it doesn’t exist.

My attempt to “return to” the idea of sexuality as a subject of ontological investigation is rooted in my conviction that psychoanalysis (i.e., Freud and Lacan) and its singular concept of the subject are of great pertinence for the impasse of ontology that Kant was tackling. So my claim is not simply that sexuality is important and should be taken seriously; in a sense, it is spectacularly more ambitious. My claim is that the Freudo-Lacanian theory of sexuality, in its inherent relation to the unconscious, dislocates and transposes the philosophical question of ontology and its impasse in a most interesting way. I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.

12 Questions ALENKA ZUPANČIČ

Alenka’s Answers

I – As a philosopher, what is it that interests you in psychoanalysis, and why?

Psychoanalysis is not simply a therapeutic practice. It is – perhaps above all – a stunning conceptual invention that made this new practice possible. In this sense, psychoanalysis is also something that “happened” to philosophy and that philosophy cannot remain indifferent to, as if nothing happened there. But this implies of course that – as Lacan put it somewhere – “psychoanalysis is not psychology”. For me this means that psychoanalysis is not a regional science of human being, but concerns, and has something to say about, the very constitution of subjectivity, also in its profound philosophical sense. Lacan’s “return to Freud” involved an extremely serious engagement with philosophy, the whole history of philosophy, as a means of showing and conceptualizing what is so new, or different about Freud. Psychoanalysis is not simply a move “beyond” philosophy; in many ways, philosophy itself has always been a move beyond (previous) philosophy… Continue reading “12 Questions ALENKA ZUPANČIČ”

Here are some interesting articles

The Event

Truth, Subjectivity and Fidelity

Exploitation of Nature From Theoryleaks dot org.

It has become common today to announce, for various reasons, the end of the human species as we know it. In the typically messianic direction that a certain ecology proceeds, the predatory excesses of this bad animal that is the human will soon lead to the end of the living world. In the direction of the technological surge, we are promised, pell-mell, the robotization of all work, sumptuous digitization, automatic art, the plasticized killer, and the perils of superhuman intelligence.

As a result, threatening categories, such as transhumanism and the posthuman, rise to the surface; or, symmetrically, a return to animalism – depending on whether one prophesies on the basis of technical creation or laments on the basis of the attacks on Mother Nature. I hold all these prophecies as so many ideological rattles intended to obscure the real danger to which humanity is exposed today, namely the impasse into which globalized capitalism is leading us. It is in reality this social form, and it alone, which authorizes the destructive exploitation of natural resources, linking it to the pure notion of private profit. Continue reading “Badiou”

Sigi Jöttkandt on Badiou

This lecture addresses an apparent shift in Alain Badiou’s thinking on sex and the universal. Previously Badiou had maintained that sex was a particularity that requires subtraction from the universal, together with the other predicative descriptions of identity such as nation, race and class. However in a recent paper, “Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World”, Badiou contends that the sexuation of philosophical and symbolic thought is “inevitable”. Taking Badiou’s readings of Samuel Beckett as its guide, and addressing Badiou’s discussions of change in Logics of Worlds and Subject of Change, this lecture works through the implications of this new claim. It asks whether Badiou’s thought allows the possibility of a real change in his philosophy, including thereby the potential to change one’s sex.

What is a true change?

Philosophy and the Event Alain Badiou 2010

First published in French as La philosophie et l’evenement
Editions Germina, 2010. This English edition Polity Press, 2013

The political field today: the Left/Right opposition and consensus

Alain Badiou, politics has an essential place in your life and work. You view it, moreover, as one of what you call philosophy’s conditions. It is, then, a good place for us to begin tackling your philosophy. First, hasn’t it become difficult today to be involved in politics? I’d also like to hear how you define it. What is politics, the truth of politics?

– We really have to take into account the system of constraints in which people find themselves today. What is their margin of manoeuvre? What freedom do they have? For there to be true politics, the framework within
which things take place has to be both clear and held in common. For example, if society is a society of classes with conflicting interests, then politics will lie within this framework. If the established order rests upon
a collective organization totally at odds with equality, politics will have to deal, locally and globally, with this issue. Politics always has to do with what one knows, and experiences, regarding the nature of contradictions.
I think that in the great political tradition we’ve inherited – a heritage that, moreover, disconcerts us and puts us ill at ease – the fundamental point is that there are enemies. There are not just adversaries, but enemies. There are people whose worldview and what they inflict upon, and expect of, us is something we deem completely unacceptable. Bringing the notion of the enemy into focus like this has always been the perspective of the great tradition of politics, particularly its revolutionary tradition – with ‘revolutionary’ understood in a fairly vague sense, extending from the French Revolution up to the 1980s. Continue reading “Philosophy and the Event Alain Badiou 2010”

Anamnesis

September 4, 2017

Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re-collection of what has been lost, forgotten, or effaced. It is therefore a matter of the very old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the new: that is the task of Anamnesis.

Alain Badiou: Reflections on the Recent Election

15 November 2016 From a Verso blog

In French: “C’était pendant l’horreur d’une profonde nuit.” In English: “It was during the horror of a profound night.” Racine

Thinking beyond reactive affect
I think it’s a necessity to think beyond the affect, beyond fear, depression, and so on — to think the situation of today, the situation of the world today, where something like that is possible, that somebody like Trump becomes the president of the United States.

The historical victory of globalized capitalism
The victory was signaled in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and the complete failure of Russia and China and this marked an important change in subjectivity.

“During more than two centuries, there existed in public opinion, always two ways concerning the destiny of human beings. Continue reading “Alain Badiou: Reflections on the Recent Election”

badiou encounter

Interview with Alain Badiou: ‘People cling onto identities… it is a world opposed to the encounter’ By Clement Petitjean, 14 April 2014

What is an encounter?

It is a contingent, chance element of existence. Something happens to you that nothing among your existing world’s points of reference made likely or necessary. You encounter someone who you do not know and yet who strikes you, attracts you, enters into your life.

In your book In Praise of Love, you say, in substance, that there is no encounter without risk…

For it to be a genuine encounter, we must always be able to assume that it is the beginning of a possible adventure. You cannot demand an insurance contract with whomever it is that you have encountered.

Since the encounter is incalculable, if you try to reduce this insecurity then you destroy the encounter itself, that is to say, accepting someone entering into your life as a complete person. It is precisely this that distinguishes the encounter from libertinism.

And the encounter, you always say, supposes construction

I say that with regard to what follows from the encounter. It must, indeed, give rise to shared consequences, shared innovations. And this construction cannot be left to pure chance, because it is formed of a whole series of decisions.

‘The encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: Accepting or refusing what is happening to you’

But right from the outset, the encounter is not, for you, an experience…

Improbability distinguishes it from an ordinary experience. When the encounter happens to you, when you have the very strong feeling that it is happening to you, there is a phenomenon of attraction or repulsion – sometimes the two are mixed – toward what has disturbed the rhythm of your existence.

Experience, for its part, can perfectly well fit within your work or family activities, whereas the encounter is a beginning. But the beginning of what? It is at the point of acceptance: accepting or refusing what is happening to you.

To take the example of an amorous encounter, the whole problem lies in knowing whether to declare it or not. People speak of a declaration of love. The encounter has to be declared, that is, accepted.

That being the condition for its real existence?

Yes. A person found themselves there at the same time as you were, you exchanged glances, something happened. But unless it is uttered, declared, ratified, the encounter remains in suspense.

Why is philosophy not so concerned with the encounter?

There is a deep historical reason for that. To simplify things, we could say that since its origins philosophy has been divided into two main orientations. The rationalist one, based on the development of the sciences, which proposes that there is an explanation for everything. And the empiricist one, which proposes that everything relates to some experience.

So we find ourselves caught between a logic of necessity and a logic of experiences. But the encounter is reducible neither to rationality, nor experience, but represents an element of contingency, and philosophy has no love for contingency. We must, therefore, accept that some things occur within existence that are neither calculable nor experienced. That something happens…

Yes, what is it that happens?

The need to choose. You are constrained, you must accept what happens or else you will alienate, obscure and refuse it.

Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and the first existentialist, saw this link between chance and the need to choose. The miracle of the encounter is this paradoxical conjunction between the pure exterior – a person whom I encounter – and pure interiority – the consequences that I must draw by myself…

Is it really a miracle? Is there not a savoir-faire of the encounter: that is, some people are better at it than others?

That is its ‘rationalisable’ side, where the sites of encounter tend to make up a sort of popular savoir-faire. You only engage in the encounter with the right person, with the person who will reduce the margin of insecurity to the minimum. But are these encounters?

The pick-up artist who knows how to attract attention to himself probably only takes on the most minimal consequences of the encounter, which risks just being an experience, indeed an asymmetrical one. A person who has savoir-faire is in control; whereas the person who believes it is an encounter, but then realises that it is an experience, suffers.

‘There must be some disposition towards openness, the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen’

But if such ‘savoir-faire’ is placed to one side, then does that not mean that we need special qualities to be happy in the encounter?

There must be some disposition towards openness, thus a fundamental relation of confidence. And moreover, bizarrely, a passive faculty, a sort of virtue – to use an old-fashioned word – the virtue of accepting that something is happening that you had not foreseen.

Today it is interest in the amorous encounter that predominates. Was this always the case?

It has often been said that the Greek world was the world of friendship… I am a little troubled by this retrospective vision according to which the ancient Greeks had the serene world of friendship and the Christian West the impassioned world of love. It is an intellectual construct, elaborated by Denis de Rougement in his late 1930s work L’Amour et l’Occident. In reality, there was love even in Homer’s Iliad: Hector and Andromache are a magnificent couple.

Do the different types of encounter – be they amorous, political or artistic – obey the same rules?

There are some important differences. For example, my main political encounter is probably more an encounter with collective situations rather than with individuals. Similarly, the artistic encounter is the hold that some type of organised imaginary exerts on you. But the common element is always this feeling that ‘this is happening to you’. A novel that changes you, is something that you have to deal with, even if later your taste changes and you ask yourself ‘why did I like this book when I was younger?’, exactly as Proust’s hero asks himself why he loved a woman who ‘wasn’t his type’…

Are we in an epoch favourable to the encounter, or not?

On the one hand, the field of possibility for the encounter is widening, because of our means of transport and communication. On the other hand, as always, this enlargement comes at the cost of a ‘loss of intensity’. Encounters are so easy and numerous that the intensity of the change that we could accept as a result is no longer the same as it once was. We introduce a set of precautions: I will take someone sufficiently similar to me that I can hope to go along with this person while myself remaining exactly the same. This is a tendency of the contemporary world, to introduce a false variety within a vast sameness.

‘I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes’

Are these not encounters?

No, these are mere consumption. Since the hidden model of all this is the market. You are offered a range of products that change all the time, but always remain the same. Consumption is, in its very essence, repetitive. You can change your ‘type’ of woman, without necessarily needing an encounter.

And the encounter that stays at the virtual stage?

The distinction between the virtual and the real never struck me as being of capital importance. After all, we can have great encounters in the forms of absence, abstinence or virtuality. We can have a love that remains even at a great distance. Heloise and Abelard or Tristan and Isolde are myths, but they indicate that the instances of loving fidelity are extremely varied. We have considerable loyalty for the absent just as we have considerable dishonesty toward the present.

Is it true that we more and more ‘stick to our own kind’?

There are very rigid social divisions that are not of recent vintage. In the nineteenth century, a young daughter of the bourgeoisie did not encounter the worker in the street: she never even saw him. But transgressions are always possible. The most beautiful of Conrad’s novels revolve around this, an English adventurer’s love for a Malayan, and its novelistic substance is to show the intensity of this, even though faced with a slim chance of success. I dream of a world where encounters are less coded by the social, professional, cultural and linguistic universes. If I can allow myself to use a word that is no longer in fashion: less coded by class barriers.

‘The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is to create micro-milieux, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes’

Are they not in fact being accentuated?

Yes. I lived through the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s period, we met a huge number of people whom we would never have met beforehand; and, alas, nor would we do so afterwards. To speak to people who did not have the same culture as us absolutely did not prevent us doing projects together, back then. The current regression is spectacular. Its tendency is not to create mass, class solidarity, but micro-milieux, a type of marquetry, in the image of American society, namely as a collection of ghettoes.

Are we threatened by this in France?

Since commodities are the principal motor of society, each person is called to appear before the market as a subject-consumer. In correlation with this, people fall back on identities, since to be drowned in this abstract world as an individual is a nightmare, wandering without end. So we cling onto family, provincial, national, linguistic and religious identities. Identities that are available to us because they refer back to the dawn of time. It is a world opposed to the encounter, a world of defensive retreat.

A world of the Right, whereas the world of the encounter would be a world of the Left?

I fear that the audacity of the Left does not go very far… It makes so many concessions to the identitarian retreat, to the privatisation of everything. For the people of the nineteenth century, Marx first among them, internationalism was a key notion, one that they opposed to wars and national egoism.

‘Internationalism seems, to me, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…’

But this internationalism is constructed against an enemy, the class enemy…

Of course! I am not fanatical about the idea of class that once had a considerable rigidity about it; but internationalism seems, to me, even more than in the nineteenth century, a value of capital importance if we do not want to be devoured by aggressive identities…

So what, ultimately, is an enemy?

Someone who thinks that the world is excellent just as it is now, and that it must continue down the same road.

Is the encounter with an enemy interesting?

It is always interesting to make the contradictions public – as rationally as possible. Above all if your adversary is prepared to debate them without relying on invective. It is like theatre, which has a didactic role…

Was encountering Alain Finkielkraut, as you did in your book L’Explication, an encounter with an enemy?

No, because he does not think that the world is excellent just as it is now and that it must continue down the same road. On the contrary, he is passionately attached to Third Republic-era [1870-1940] schooling. He has this passion, it is honourable, I do not blame him for it: my four grandparents were teachers! So our head-to-head was something of a piece of theatre, with each of us playing his role as a presumed adversary.

And I was really struck, I must admit, through the twists and turns of our dialogue, by two points that attest to the truth of our encounter. The first was a form of patriotism that, in the last analysis, I share with him: I love France, its history – the Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Resistance, May ’68 – in sum, the famous France of the rights of man, such as it continues to be viewed abroad.

And I suffer its actual state, defensive and tired, its lack of political inventiveness, which I can clearly see that Finkielkraut also suffers, though in my view for mistaken reasons…

The second point of mutual understanding was our common recognition that we exist in a world where there are many factors to make intellectuals melancholic. The difference between us is that while Alain Finkielkraut never stops looking for these factors, I for my part try to combat them.

How so?

In directing my attention toward amorous encounters, small political experiences, people of whose existence I am glad, and new works of art. It is not true that society is sterile and empty, even if I am not content with the turn that things have taken. It is a question of encounters. I have always had the impression that Finkielkraut exaggeratedly limits the possible terrain of his encounters.

‘Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself’

Alain Finkielkraut says, in your regard, that ‘As not to exclude anyone, you would have to make a void within yourself, pluck out any substance of your own, and be nothing else, in the last analysis, than the very gesture of opening out to others’…

But I never said that no one should be excluded: and we do have enemies! Contrary to what Finkielkraut says, you have an encounter based on what you are, not by making a void within yourself.

He has at least convinced me of one thing: the ideological-political front dividing humanity today does not lie between those who have a melancholic vision of the country (like him) and those who try to have a more creative vision of it (like me). But rather, between those who consider the present state of things excellent, feeling perfectly at ease with it and making propaganda for it, and everyone else…

Is there not also another form of ‘front line’, connected to each person’s intellectual laziness?

We are talking about the ‘external’ enemy, but if you want also to address the ‘internal’ enemy, then yes, of course! Many people barricade themselves within their ignorance of a number of matters, not wanting to have to know – they have a ‘passion for ignorance’, as one of my teachers, Lacan, put it.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme you give a talk in front of… no one!

It is an allegory… Jean-Luc Godard spent a long time telling me that he planned to film me like that. He wanted this sequence to express the idea that on this ship symbolising consumer society, I was a dissident, solitary figure…

Can an author or a philosopher transform your existence?

Of course! The person who most altered my existence was Sartre, to whom I was subsequently very disloyal. In final year high school science class my intention was to become an inspector of forests and lakes – my future was very clear and planned-out. And then I read L’Imaginaire, then Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, then Being and Nothingness. And I reoriented myself, from the sciences towards letters: it was an overwhelming encounter.

Which artists were decisive encounters, for you?

In the field of poetry, Mallarmé taught me that the power of art hangs on the notion of the event: to think and formalise what happens as it happens, and not as it is. As for music, I learnt from Haydn that you can create extraordinary effects from very little material, using limited and almost banal ‘cells’ of music. This made me used to seeking the extraordinary within the ordinary. As for the visual arts, Tintoretto showed me how a painter can grasp the boldest monumentality of something coming to being, as it is happening.

Different epochs privilege certain types of encounters. For example, we hardly ever speak of mystical encounters. What do you think of these?

Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross had a profound conviction – substituting for the real – of an amorous fusion and an absolute encounter. And I think that these were authentic encounters, even if I think that maybe God does not exist.

Then again, to introduce such a conception within worldly love – wanting it to fuse with some ideal archetype – seems dangerous and negative, to me. This leads to something that I do not like much at all: the cult of a supposed feminine transcendence, which we find in German romanticism and was propagated right up until the Surrealists. The last sentence of Goethe’s Faust, ‘The eternal feminine/Draws us on high’ is, for me, a very problematic sentiment. It transposes the mystical order within a terrestrial order that is in part a rebellion against it.

‘Everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market’

What do you think of a recent study by the Fondation de France reporting that four million French people suffer from loneliness?

The paradigm of the contemporary world is the consumer. Its target, as they say… And objects do not bring you out of loneliness.

But the market has not destroyed the encounter – it is not as powerful as that!

Thank God! You are speaking to an optimist, I have never thought that the market destroyed sociability. Such a catastrophist vision belonged far more to my colleague Jean Baudrillard. There do exist solidarities, encounters, artistic productions: I do not at all have a nihilist vision. But I do see that everything is pushing toward an atomisation of society, composed of free consumers who above all else seek the objects that interest them on the world market.

So the encounter is under threat?

Absolutely. On the cruise ship in Godard’s Film socialisme, there were three thousand people. And I can tell you, they were very lonely.

pluth logical time on badiou

Pluth, E. and Hoens, D. (2004) What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’ In Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Edited by Peter Hallward. 182-190.

The enthusiast knows he or she is making claims that cannot be proved, but is courageous enough to proceed and is confident that the claim is true and that sufficient reasons for it will show up. The enthusiast is by definition modest. He or she has neither the modesty of someone who decides nothing (‘I cannot decide, there are not enough premises, I don’t have enough information, my knowledge is too limited’, etc.) nor the modesty of the fanatic who says that he or she is sure about a claim but that it is only a subjective point of view and that, of course, others may have another opinion (the contemporary, liberal ideology of tolerance, where everything is ‘an interesting opinion’).

The enthusiast is modest in making a claim precisely because of how he or she is positioned ‘on the way to’ truth. Or put differently, the enthusiast leaves the gap between the singular decision and a universal truth open until the situation changes in such a way that the singular can be universally assumed as ‘a given’.

Furthermore, the situation is limited by the way it is set up, and in particular by the fact that there are only two possibilities: either one is white or black. A’s entire reasoning process is based on these two possibilities. Whatever claim A then makes can already be verified within the terms of the situation.

While we have been trying to point out the similarities between Badiou’s theory of decision or intervention and the situation in ‘Logical Time’, the two don’t quite match, and the reason for this is very simple: there is no event in ‘Logical Time’. In the absence of an event, it is difficult to see what the act is based on.

Elsewhere in Badiou’s theory, of course, decisive acts, or truth-processes, are contingent upon events. By contrast, an event seems radically excluded from the situation of ‘Logical Time’, because there are only two signifiers, or two names, available (black or white), and they fully describe all the elements of the situation among which one has to choose.

Apart from these problems inherent to the situation described in ‘Logical Time’, the situation there does allow both Badiou and Lacan to show the importance of a singular moment of acting which precedes an intersubjective verification process.

This implies that the individual decision might be mistaken. What is important is what follows. Using the distinction between enthusiasm and fanaticism again, we see that there are two modes of acting: the enthusiast can enthusiastically make mistakes, but what will always differentiate the enthusiast from the fanatic is the way he or she fails.

The fanatic resembles a prisoner who might have learned the truth from a whisper in his ear by the prison warden. Like this prisoner, the fanatic does not go through the anxious moment of the act.

As Badiou formulates it, ‘only the intervener will know if there was something that happened’. A fanatic is not actually intervening, because he or she has not made a decision and therefore does not participate in a truth process.

Only someone who has decided can put a decision to the test. This reminds us of one of the commonly acknowledged features of enthusiasm: enthusiasm is contagious, it needs others with whom it can share its ‘divine insight’. The fanatic does not need others because in the end he or she is completely satisfied with a mystical union with supersensible truths.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability. The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic.

Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability.

The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic. Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.

The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.

At the opening of his discussion of ‘Logical Time’, Badiou declares that what is at stake for him is the fixing of an ‘irreducible gap’ between his theory and Lacan’s. We have shown that when it comes to an understanding of the act, both thinkers are quite similar. Where Badiou differs from Lacan is in his ability to draw explicit ethical and political lessons from the kind of act described in ‘Logical Time’. In political terms, Badiou’s conclusion implies adherence to a familiar Leninist principle:

When the popular insurrection bursts out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has come. It is because there is nothing left for it but to rise up, which is what Lenin said: there is a revolution when ‘those on the bottom’ no longer want to continue as before, and the evidence imposes itself, massively, that it is better to die standing than to live lying down. [Lacan’s] anecdote shows that it is the interruption of an algorithm that subjectivates, not its effectuation (TS 272–3).

Any revolutionary act must work with the troubling undecidability inherent to a symbolic universe, and acts precisely as a reply to the real of an event.

But as we have shown, Badiou nonetheless emphasizes the necessary struggle or work to be done to name this event. This process of naming eventually creates a new symbolic order whose operational closure, to use Lacanian terminology, will be ensured by other master signifiers.

fink on Badiou 1996

Fink, B. (1996) Alain Badiou. Umbr(a): One, 1: pp. 11-12.

Hegel marks, according to Badiou, a romantic, historicist tum in Western thought away from the mathematical concept of the infinite, Hegel seeing the latter as “interesting” but fundamentally unsubstantiated compared to the “properly philosophical” view that man’s existence is essentially finite.

Whereas Plato views mathematics as establishing a realm of discourse which has no need to resort to myth or any other discourse to found its conclusions — which thus breaks with mythopoetic discourse and can serve as the foundation or precondition of another discourse (philosophy or dialectics) with its own grammar and methods — Hegel opposes philosophy and mathematics, invalidates mathematical notions of infinity, and rather than effecting an Aufhebung (sublation), returns to a pre-Platonic view whereby a certain myth (of man’s finitude) rules philosophical “reason.”

This romanticism can be seen, according to Badiou, in both the Heideggerian project and co the “postmodem” project, both of which refuse the notion of the infinite nature of every human situation, subjecting infinities to the horizons of the “human.”

The lack of serious attention devoted to mathematics — whether by Carnap, Heidegger, or Derrida — is indicative of a philosophical tendency which is ultimately conservative and romantic in content, Badiou argues, and which leads directly to the view that philosophy has reached its end.

Badiou proposes that we rethink the very notion of endpoint and limit using modern developments in mathematics, a project which reestablishes mathematics as a condition of philosophy and allows us to think beyond the latter’s supposed end.

The importance of Badiou’s insight here goes far beyond the “simple” conditioning of philosophy upon mathematics. For what he refers to as romanticism is essentially defined by what he terms the “regime of the One,” that is, the regime or rule of a discourse of totalization.

As antitotalizing as certain modem discourses may claim to be, they too succumb, Badiou sustains, to a Parmenidean view of the whole, “counted as One,” complete with notions of limits which predate modern mathematics.

Badiou’s emphasis on the modem concept of multiple infinities, of infinities of infinities, subverts traditional views of limits and horizons, and moves in a radically non-logocentric direction. Badiou, in a sense, moves from the post-modem to the post-finite, from the end of philosophy to the beginning of philosophical multiplicity: towards the liberation of philosophy from the regime of the finite.

Clinamen

Sources: Wikipedia and this rather strange article

Clinamen is the Latin name Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in order to defend the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus.

When atoms move straight down through the void (kenon) by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything

Clinamen is the word that Lucretius, in his 2nd century book, The Nature of Things, used to describe how the world works. Today, people are not inclined to read a physics book that is 2000 years old, but it is not the particular beliefs that Lucretius may have held that interest us but, rather, the way he used inversion to uncover a key truth that is just as true in the world of particle colliders and Hibbs’ Fields as ever.

Instead of describing solid things as fixed and resting in space, he got his readers to imagine that the whole solid spatial world was moving along in the same direction. Our analogy would be a 12 lane highway where commuter traffic is all moving along at exactly the same speed. In terms of the cars and trucks on the highway, there is no apparent motion, although they are all traveling, if they are lucky, at 60 mph.

What creates a sensation, however, is when something swerves. He called this a “clinamen,” and we can imagine how velocity — a car shooting forward or one slowing down — creates an issue.