badiou – Page 8 – objet (a)

pluth lalangue 4/4

Pluth, Ed. An Adventure in the Order of Things: Jean-Claude Milner on lalangue and Lacan’s Incomplete Materialism

Lalangue, Milner argues, is not unstructured and without reason. It is structured and, according to Milner in L’amour de la langue, its structure marks the presence of a kind of “knowledge in the real.” This is what “dooms” language “to equivocity” (L’amour22). The structure or “reason” intrinsic to lalangue can even be considered extra-linguistic since it involves things like resemblances among sounds, or, in writing, the physical arrangement of letters. It is “extra-linguistic,” therefore, on the condition that language is thought of along the lines of Saussurean linguistic structure. Milner writes that “homophonies, homosemies, palindromes, anagrams, tropes, and all the imaginable figures of association” are the effects of lalangue, and are due to nothing other than the materiality or physicality of languages, and not to that in languages which is involved in the creation of meanings — such as relations and differences among signs (L’amour104). On Milner’s reading, lalangue is, therefore, also a term for what it is of language that escapes and exceeds formalization, and it therefore presents a challenge to the science of linguistics.

The way back to dialectical materialism?

Can a materialism that would not be eliminative or reductionist, but instead dialec-tical (because it posits a real transformation of being by something like thinking), and, in turn, a real influence on thought from being (if not in the domain of the hard sciences then in that of the old “human” sciences) … can such a project do anything with the idea of a “knowledge in the real,” as odd as this sounds, and as outré as such a thing would be for most types of materialism? If Hegelian idealism is to be avoided — if there is to be no super-subject who knows, no spirit or mind who is driving things—and yet thinking and being are to be aligned in a way that is more vig-orous than what occurs in the natural sciences or in mathematics itself, should this relation be put in such a way that there can be said to be a “knowledge in the real”?

The “knowledge in the real” allegedly contained in lalangue, according to Milner’s reading in L’amour de la langue, involved an ordered appearance of phonemes; an appearance that is not guided according to the dictates of sense and classical Saussurean differential relations among signs, and thus also not in accordance with a language-user’s intent, or with what a language-user wants to say. This order is guided simply by resemblances among sounds, by homophonies, or by other physical factors. Structuralist linguistics did much to teach us that a speaker says more (or less) than what she wants to say: a linguistic system generates a surplus of meaning. There is, in language use, a production of meaning that occurs in indifference to anything like the conscious intent of a speaker. This perspective affects how the relation between thinking and language should be conceived, and it helps to refute the idea that there is a clearly articulated thought that precedes its expression in language.

Rather, it is the case that being put into a form of expression gives a thought or an intention a clarity it did not previously have. This is why we continue to work with and alter the form of expression, and is why we feel that our thoughts have sometimes not been adequately expressed: not because the form of expression (language) fails to portray them accurately, but because what is expressed is itself, if not inexhaustible, then at least vague enough and indeterminate enough to allow for repeated and multiple expressions. Here, linguistic form not only forms content (meaning) but indeed makes (much of) it.

It is no wonder then that structuralist approaches to language were of interest to psychoanalysis. Lalangue shows us instead a kind of stupidity proper to language, something that concerns not the relation between thinking and language, and not the generation of unintended meanings, but rather a level of no meaning at all. A zombie-like level of language, the level of language’s materiality itself, the phoneme or grapheme; a level responsible for homophonic insistences (one sound influencing the sounds that appear elsewhere), resemblances, etc., which insist within or alongside what is meant, running parallel to what is said. As we have seen, Milner at one point wanted to call the structure that guides such articulations in lalangue a “knowledge in the real” (as opposed to the knowledge in/of the symbolic that classical linguistic structure would be). In L’Œuvre clairehe reconsiders this, because what goes on in the real no longer deserves the name of thinking. I will go over his case for this in a moment.

What Milner overlooks, however, is the fact that the dimension of lalangue can, of course, serve as a basis for the development of potential linguistic content, and for thinking. But here it is not a matter of there being, first, a relatively undetermined, vague thought that is the seed for continuing formation, precision, in words, as is the case for the relation between language and thinking.

In lalangue we see how the matter of language itself can inspire further adventures in thought. If Saussure is right about Saturnian poetry, we would have an entire genre based on this dimension. But, as I will explain in a moment, something as simple as punning shows us the same thing. And beyond punning, everyday language use contains aspects of the same thing. What I am getting at, then, is the idea that lalangue is a positive factor in, and a genuine contributor to, the creation of thought. Lalangue shows us how an adventure at the level of things can feed an adventure at the level of thought—exactly the sort of relation between thinking and being that a dialectical materialism is about.

What is going on in lalangue can be described as a zombie-like non-thinking. But punning is something else, and the punning during the silent seminars is like a folding in of lalangue into sense, an exploitation of it for sense, for thinking . . . or a forcing of sense from lalangue, such that any purity in the domain of the real is not respected at all. (And isn’t this one of the lessons of the knots anyway — the interweaving of all three orders, the abolition of the distinctness of any one of them from the others?)

We are back to what was always Lacan’s violation of Wittgenstein’s prohibition. The purity of the ineffable is rejected. Milner might take this assertion to be, in fact, a negative conclusion about theory and language — because it would seem to sanction saying whatever, presumably. Yet Milner’s interpretation of lalangue in Lacanian theory points to just what a philosophical materialism needs.

Lalangue shows us a de-individualized “knowledge in the real,” and a link between thinking and being that is more vigorous than what Quentin Meillassoux’s interesting and important project gives us.

One needs to look outside the hard sciences to find this, to what used to be called the “human sciences.” Not only linguistics, but economics and, of course, psychoanalysis need to be considered by such a project as well, as cases in which an interaction between thinking and being indeed takes place.

pluth Badiou theory of the subject 3/4

A table from Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is very helpful for gaining clar-ity on the nature of this debate and where I wish to take it—toward a position that I would describe as some variant of dialectical materialism. [Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009) 117.]

Nor is it the point of a dialectical materialism to claim that being and thinking are really one (à la Parmenides). Rather, what is desired is a theory in which the actual reciprocity and strong mutual influence between thinking and being, theory and practice, at least in some domains of human life, is accounted for; a theory in which there is no absolute barrier between thinking and being (and also not between saying and showing) that would require us to adopt silence as the most appropriate philosophical attitude (and therefore devaluing thought itself).

As Georg Lukàcs put it in History and Class Consciousness, when contrasting dialectics to what he called metaphysics, “in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.” Obviously, the merely contemplative status that thinking must have in mathematics is one of the things that concerns me about Meillassoux’s attempt to refute correlationism. Much better, it seems to me, is to reconsider what a dialectical materialism can do.

In response to my points here, Meillassoux may be able to assert that mathematics does have effects on being too. The natural sciences have assisted, after all, in the creation of new material beings, as well as new types of beings, and have certainly given us an effective “know how” with the real. While this is certainly practical, and suggests that mathematics is something other than merely contemplative, it does not allow us to assert that any change in the nature of being itself has come from mathematics (or from any of the hard sciences). In fact, it is difficult to see how the hard sciences could offer us any examples of the kind asserted by a dialectical theory in which being and thinking would be mutually influencing each other (unless one adopts an undesirable “quantum mysticism”). And therefore it is difficult to see how the hard sciences can offer a model for how thinking and being are actually unified, along the lines of the Parmenidean thesis Meillassoux himself wishes to rehabilitate. It would seem that Meillassoux’s position is, by Lukàcs’ standard, metaphysical rather than dialectical, even though it does qualify as a philosophical materialism.

My study of Milner’s interpretation of the notion of lalangue in Lacanian theory in the next section will give us an example of what is desired: something like a dialectical materialism on the question of the relation between thinking and being. Yet lalangue also plays a key role in what Milner considers to be the impasse in Lacan’s materialism, because Milner ultimately concludes that what is going on in lalangue cannot be called a thinking at all. Thus, it functions as a “silent” real, and the barrier between thinking and being is reinstated. This is the point I will question in my conclusion.

Lacan introduced the term lalangue in the 1970s to address what there is of the real in language — something like the very sound of a language, such as phonemes considered apart from the creation of sense. The phrase lalangue is itself written in a way that is supposed to get us to pay attention to the sound of language under or alongside its meaning, which is the very thing the term is about. Bruce Fink uses “llanguage” as an English translation for this, in which the graphically repeated,and in speech a bit elongated “l” gets us to hear the word differently, having basically the same effect— calling our attention to the thing the concept is supposed to designate.

pluth correlationism thinking being meillassoux 2/4

correlationism“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 5)—that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets.

One way to oppose correlationism would be with a naïve realism, which supposes that access to what is other than thought is possible and even relatively unprob-lematic—that the relation of being to thought can be immediate. Meillassoux, by contrast, wants to hang on to the idea that there is something problematic about this relation.

Naïve realism, according to him, does not sufficiently appreciate the weirdness presented by our ability to make meaningful claims about, for example, what preceded the emergence of any conscious being whatsoever, as we do when we make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe before the existence of humanity.

Meillassoux claims that it is being’s ability to be “mathematized” that gives us a way out of correlationism, and this also requires us to reconsider the Kantian turn in philosophy, whose essence can be described as follows: “being and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other”—as good a definition of what Meillas-soux understands as correlationism as there is (Meillassoux 44). Yet a strong correlationism goes further than this, positing a strong separation of thinking from being, making thought into something radically other than being—not superior to it, not a cause of it, but typically more of a sub-being, a mere epiphenomenon, appearance, fiction, or illusion, as it would be for a Nietzschean as well as for an eliminative or reductionist materialist.

In this case, thinking would have access only to what it produces, while being would continue on, independent of and indifferent to what is (rightly or wrongly—it hardly matters) thought about it.

What I want to show next is how Meillassoux’s project, precisely in its most compelling gesture—its reconsideration of a kind of mathematical realism, its evocation of the Galilean mathematization of nature as a continued inspiration for thought—over-looks an opportunity to make a more vigorous materialist claim about the union of thinking and being.

Consider more closely the relationship between thinking and being that is asserted in Meillassoux’s work. Being is said to be mathematizable, and so correlationism is wrong, because mathematics shows us how the “Parmenidean postulate” can be returned to: it shows us where “being and thinking are the same” (Meillassoux 44).

Yet this does not mean that mathematics is, or is even part of, the really real. Mathematics is a thinking. It is through mathematics that being and thinking are sup-posed to be joined together. Yet this still amounts to an imbalanced union, because Meillassoux’s way out of correlationism does not allow for anything like a “knowledge in the real”—an idea I will discuss via the notion of lalangue in the next section. It is doubtful that Meillassoux wants to say that being itself knows anything about mathematics. It would be erroneous to say that the real knows the laws of physics and chemistry. And there is also no need to posit a subject in the real who knows these laws. The formal languages we use for such laws are not at all etched into the heart of things either. Must it then be said that such formal expressions of laws “correlate” to the real? Yet this cannot be what Meillassoux wants to say!

This leads me to conclude that the way in which Meillassoux articulates the relation of mathematics to thinking poses a problem for his speculative materialism. While he says of his work that it refutes correlationismby bringing thinking and being back into a union with each other (via mathematics), this relation turns out to be one-directional and therefore not as far from correlationism as it is possible to go.

Let’s agree that being is mathematizable. This still leaves being ultimately unaffectedby its mathematization—and therefore, mathematics does not show us where there is an interactionand interrelation—not to mention union—of thinking and being. (If there is not even a strong interaction between thinking and being, it is hard to see how there could be a meaningful union . . . unless Meillassoux really meant to go all-out Parmenidean on us, by claiming that thinking is being, and vice versa: the monist direction, in other words. But I see no evidence for this in what I’ve read of him.)

The hard sciences, and mathematics, can only take us from one kind of correlationism to another, it seems. What is needed, for a different sort of materialism, one of human practice, is a reconsideration of the status of the so-called “human” sciences.

pluth on milner meillassoux 1/4

One of the great merits of Milner’s reading of Lacan is not only the fact that he places Lacan within the materialist tradition in philosophy, but that, by bringing Lacan into relation to Wittgenstein, he gets us to pay attention to a topic that any materialist project now should attempt to clarify: the relation between thinking and being. It is perhaps obvious why materialisms avoid this topic, since it seems to be the very stuff of idealism.

A common point shared by most contemporary materialisms is their degradation of the status of thinking, which is usually considered to be epiphenomenal and non-real, reducible to and constituted by brain activity. Why bother accounting for its status? Therefore, many contemporary philosophical materialisms do not at all require that thinking, or anything like it, be considered a part of the real.

The real, for these materialisms, can well be considered silent, and its silence is an unproblematic one — all the more reason why the “showing” of the real would be better than any possible “speaking” about it, which will always be off the mark. The real’s silence does not cause any difficulties for the sciences that study it, since these sciences circumvent ordinary human language and linguistic meaning in the first place, precisely by relying on a mathematization of nature.

It is not ordinary human language that hits the real at all, but a more formalized “language” that does so. None of this stops natural scientists from trying to convey in ordinary language
something about their discoveries sometimes but we know that, when they do this, their writing approximates the status of poetry, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, and that such written texts are not really the conveyors of scientific knowledge anyway.

Such knowledge is in the formulas, the math (if it can be said to “be” anywhere), and not in the ordinary language descriptions of those formulas, which are always metaphorical.

Whatever is going on at the atomic or sub-atomic constitutive level of nature defies our ability to think, imagine, or intuit. Furthermore, our ability to manipulate the constitutive level of nature does not require that we think anything particularly clearly about it either. It simply requires a technical know-how, based on proper formalizations; not on the creation of correct linguistic expressions about it, and not on having proper intuitions about it either.

The sciences show us a way, then, in which knowledge is transmitted through mathemes, and what is said about them is basically superfluous.

According to Milner’s reading, Lacan embraces the Borromean knots because they are “saying” even less about the real than the mathemes do, and are therefore respecting even more ably what is supposed to be an inviolable barrier between the shown and the spoken. For that reason, Lacan’s is a failed or unachieved materialism: in fact, less a materialism than a mysticism.

universal bartleby

Daly, Glyn. “Politics of the political: psychoanalytic theory and the Left(s).” Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2009), 14(3), 279–300

In this sense our autonomy is at once more precarious and more radical. Today we are bombarded with all sorts of choices (consumption, lifestyles, customization of computers, cell-phones, iPods, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) that identify us as ‘free individuals’. Yet we also possess the capacity to refuse the field of choosing and freedom; to reject the very modality of making changes to our lives and to break with the terms and conditions that are implicit in the latter.

Along the lines of the famous monologue from Trainspotting, we are in a position in which we can choose ‘not to choose life’. This involves a more radical ethical freedom in which one can assume a certain position of ‘being impossible’: i.e. a position of refusing the terms of socio-political engagement and identitarian inscription; of refusing the terms of existing possibility.

In other words, what is needed is the development of forms of political subjectivity that do not embrace the conventions and protocol of existing hegemonic engagement.

Both Žižek’s Bartleybyan politics and Badiou’s politics of subtraction—i.e. the effective withdrawal from official political/participatory structures in such a way that it undermines simultaneously their symbolic purchase and constitutive logics—point in a different direction. Thus it is not so much a question of siding with the underdog in the game of existing democracy, but rather rejecting the very terms of the latter. In other words, it involves a critique of how democracy, through its mythologization of the idea that all underdogs are potential winners provided they play the game effectively, can become drawn into, and start to function on behalf of, the dominant politico-economic forces.

Second, and related, the political focus is placed not so much on marginalized groups/identities in general but rather on those whose position (or perhaps, more accurately, lack of position) embody the symptomal truths of our age — i.e. those whose situation appears naturalized as irresolvable, inert and beyond any feasible or direct solution.

These are the displaced and the destitute, the poverty-trapped, the vagrants, homeless and slum-dwellers. They are the radically excluded who are constitutively excessive, who cannot be accommodated and who present a kind of dysfunctional resistance that is nevertheless necessary to the functioning of the whole. They are the nameless ‘unfortunate’ who are passed over, treated with gentrified deliquescence and kept at a non-threatening distance through the ‘ethical’ concerns of charity and aid. What is needed is a politics that strives to overcome this distancing and to confront directly the primordial repressions that are central to the operation of capitalism as a global economic and socio-cultural system.

It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing the fantasy emerge.

In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid getting caught up in the ‘cataclysmic desire of fantasy’. The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach ourselves from objet (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can ‘really enjoy our partial enjoyment’.

– Radical politics should consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general, political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic.

– Yet it is precisely in these terms that radical democracy appears to remain stuck in the register of desire: real emancipation is postponed eternally; we should be enthusiastic in the chase but never believe that we hold it in our grasp. This is a politics of desire, of infinite deferral. It becomes effectively ‘a constant search for something else… (with) no specifiable object that is capable of satisfying it’.

– Radical democratic desire, in this sense, is sustained by not having the ‘object’ of democracy. Democracy is always finally elsewhere. In this context, political subjectivity becomes one of establishing a kind of homoeostatic predisposition or proper distancing: one avoids excess in order to avoid disappointment in never attaining the real Thing.

Yet for Žižek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such.

Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive.

Traversal, in this sense, puts one in touch with the object of drive — the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves.

To put it in the terms of Star Wars, the problem is not to bring balance to the force but to recognize that the force itself is the result of a certain (tilted) excess — a Real intervention/structuring — and that it is only through contingence with the latter that alternative possibilities (a different kind of force, or indeed political) can be shown.

The freedom which is gained here, which can be called post-fantasmatic, is thus not one of overcoming alienation but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pre-given partiality or disposition.

Ž’s Lacanian radicalism can be thought of as something that tries to break out of the endless cycle of desire and to move towards a certain logic of love (involving both desire and drive).

While this may sound hopelessly sentimental, we should recall that in Lacan love is distinguished from desire in coming to terms with the non-ideal and the non-all and with accepting precisely the lack in the Other. Love is its own excess, an uncompromising ‘violence’ that goes beyond mere antagonism (i.e. it does not externalize blockage/failure but accepts this as the very condition of being). Through love one finds, and indeed makes, the universal-divine in all its contingent fragility and failing.

Perhaps a more appropriate way of thinking about this shift is in terms of opening the possibility of a politics of excess; a politics that effectively chooses ‘something else’ — i.e. something other than the current mode of choosing.

It refuses to embrace today’s alibis where social ‘problems’ are displaced onto charities, ethical committees, focus groups and all the institutions of political deferral up to and including existing democracy. In this way it places ‘us’ in the scene and refuses not to take responsibility for the contemporary totality and its symptoms. Such a politics is distinguished from radical democratic hegemony in that it does not give up on the real thing or view concrete projects as merely the ersatz fillers of the empty place.

The point is rather to see how this very division between the universal (as empty place) and particular (contingent filler) is inherent to the latter.

In other words, the universal-divine is manifested … through substantial engagement; through finding and making the universal in the particular and through ‘excessive’ commitment, without excuses or dependency on the Other. It is a politics that affirms that the only way out is the way in.

otherless ontology

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Opposing himself to what he takes to be Badiou’s position in matters ontological, Ž in his more Hegelian manner, proposes an Otherless ontology in which those dimensions Badiou seeks to capture at the level of non-being (i.e. , events as irruptions of radical newness) are to be found within the domain of being itself, a being whose internally conflicted fragility leaves it open to immanent breaks forming parts of its unstable processes of self-sundering. 137-138

Žižek refuses to maintain a sharp distinction between being and non-being (recalling that Badiou does indeed recognize such a difference to the extent that he identifies the evental as what-is-not-being-qua-being or what is other-than-being. From the Žižekian standpoint, the ordinary being of society is not to be opposed to the extraordinary event of politics — the very “substance” of the former (as an insubstantial inexistence) consists of (even if it usually works to conceal) the negativity at play in the antagonisms and clashes of the latter.

Ž’s critique of Badiou

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

Žižek’s argument is that Badiou’s need philosophically to prohibit the theoretical delineation of the (pre-evental ) emergence of the evental out of the ontological , a prohibition Žižek identifies as betraying the allegedly idealist core buried within the heart of Badiouian philosophy, is an inevitable, necessary by-product of mathematizing ontology, of insisting that set theory is the sole “science” up to the task of thinking l’être en tant qu’être. In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek describes what he sees as the proper manner in which genuine materialism would accommodate the phenomena Badiou struggles to grasp vis his fundamental disctinction between being and event:

The materialist solution is … that the Event is nothing but its own inscription into the order of Being, a cut/rupture in the order of Being on account of which Being cannot ever form a consistent All. There is no Beyond of Being that inscribes itself into the order of Being.

There “is” nothing but the order of Being … An Event does not curve the space of Being through its inscription into it: on the contrary, an Event is nothing but this curvature of the space of Being. “All there is” is the interstice, the nonself-coincidence, of Being, namely, the ontological nonclosure of the order of Being.

What this means at the ontological level is that, ultimately, one should reject Badiou’s notion of mathematics (the theory of pure multiplicity) as the only consistent ontology (science of Being); if mathematics is ontology, then, to account for the gap between Being and Event, one either remains stuck in dualism or one has to dismiss the Event as an ultimately illusory local occurrence within the encompassing order of Being. Against this notion of multiplicity, one should assert as the ultimate ontological given the gap that separates the One from within. (Žižek cited in Johnstone BZPT 2009 136)

badiou forcing event

Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.

The Zizekian interpretation of Lenin’s writings suggests something already proposed here: in certain circumstances, forcing must precede,rather than simply follow, an event. A forcing prior to the actual event itself must seize an opportunity arising by chance for disruption (i.e.,some sort of structural flaw or historical vulnerability, the “weakest link”as a proverbial chink in the armor of the status quo) inadvertently presented by the reigning state-of-the situation. This point of weakness within a state’s constellation must be grasped firmly beforehand (steered by the discerning gaze of one not fooled, not taken in, by the preexistent distribution of relations and roles as influenced by statist ideologies) in order to spark an event’s occurrence.

Badiou, by contrast, describes the labor of forcing as transpiring only after the fact of an evental occurrence; the already-past event is identified following its having appeared and disappeared, and exclusively in the aftermath of this vanished winking can the work of stretching out the effects of its truth-consequences through forcing move forward under the guidance of subjects-of-the-event.

Badiou treats events (including political ones)as anonymous and mysterious happenings. Badiouian events can not be forced into occurring; as others have justifiably described them, such moments just pop up within the current scene as out-of-nowhere miracles. This sort of purposive refusal to think through in precise details the preconditions for the genesis of events is incompatible with Lenin’s insistence that, in initiating a revolution, one must “prematurely” force an event before it actually transpires spontaneously (in the mode of organically emerging out of the defiles of sociohistorical trends) by deliberately and nimbly exploiting whatever small chances there are in a situation despite the overall absence of the “proper conditions” for this event’s blooming.

In short, Badiou’s adamant insistence on there being a theoretically unbridgeable divide between an event and its pre-evental background (including his position that all subjects, with their capacities for forcing, are post-evental) forecloses considering how concrete forms of engaged praxis might, in certain instances, participate in precipitating in advance an ensuing evental sequence. 133-134

Ž on Badiou ch. world truth 12 LTN

Here is Ž from his latest book:

My ongoing debate with Badiou could be read as a series of variations on the motif of how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for the contemporary universe of radical contingency. In terms of the most elementary ontological coordinates, my difference with Badiou is threefold, with regard to the triad Being/World/Event.

1. At the level of being, the multiplicity of multiples has to be supplemented by the “barred One,” the Void as the impossibility of the One becoming One.

2. At the level of appearance, the world has to be conceived of as language-bound: each world is sustained by a Master-Signifier (the true reference of what Badiou calls a “point”).

3. At the level of the Event, the “negativity” of anxiety and the (death) drive has to be posited as prior to the affirmative enthusiasm for the Event, as its condition of possibility.

How we pass from being to appearing, how and why does being start to appear to itself? Ray Brassier is thus right to insist on Badiou’s “failure to clarify the connection between ontological inconsistency and ontical consistency,” that is, the passage from Being to a World

In the history of philosophy, the most consistent answer to this question (in a certain sense one could say the only true answer) was provided by the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel. In his Weltalter manuscripts, Schelling outlined the birth of logos (the articulated World) out of the pre-ontological antagonism of drives, while Hegel, in his Logic, tries to demonstrate how “appearing” (correlative to Essence) emerges out of the immanent inconsistencies (“contradictions”) of Being. In spite of the insurmountable differences between Schelling and Hegel, the two share a key feature: they try to account for the emergence of appearing with reference to some kind of tension or antagonism or contradiction in the preceding order of being. LTN 809

🙂 Being to appearing, the stuff of being is sheer multiplicity, what Ž is arguing is that there has to be something to organize this chaos. But the push from being to appearing first happens as drive 🙂

This route, however, is excluded a priori by Badiou, since his axiom is that “being as being is absolutely homogeneous: a mathematically thinkable pure multiplicity.” This is why all Badiou can do is offer obscure hints about “a kind of push” of being towards appearing which belongs more to the Schopenhauerian Gnostic notion of how the abyssal Ground of Being harbors an obscure inexplicable will to appear.

The key axiom of Badiou’s “logics of worlds” concerns the concept of the “inexistent” of a world: “If a multiplicity appears in a world, one element of this multiplicity and only one is an inexistent of this world.”

A “non-existent” is an element which is part of a world but participates in it with the minimal degree of intensity; that is, the transcendental structure of this world renders it “invisible”: “The thing is in the world, but its appearing in the world is the destruction of its identity.”

The classical example is, of course, Marx’s notion of the proletariat which belongs to the existing society but within its horizon is invisible in its specific function. Such an inexistent is, of course, the “evental site” of a world: when the Event occurs, the inexistent passes from minimal to maximal existence, or, to quote the well-known line from the “Internationale”: “We were nothing, we shall be all.”

As Badiou makes clear, this inexistence is not ontological (at the level of being, workers are massively present in capitalist society), but phenomenological: they are here, but invisible in their specific mode of existence. The philosophical question here is: why, exactly, does every world contain a “non-existent”?

In short, precisely because of the gap between being (irreducible multiplicity) and appearing (atoms or Ones), the unity (overlapping) of being and appearing (existence) can only appear within the (transcendental) space of appearance in a negative way, in the guise of an inexistent, a One which is (from within the transcendental frame that regulates appearing) not-One, an atom which, while part of the world of appearing, is not properly covered by it, participates minimally in it.

This inexistent is the point of symptomal torsion of a world: it functions as a “universal singular,” a singular element which directly participates in the universal (belongs to its world), but lacks a determinate place in it.

At the formal level of the logic of the signifier, this inexistent is the empty “signifier without a signified,” the zero-signifier which, deprived of all determinate meaning, stands only for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence, to non-meaning: its meaning is tautological, it means only that things have meaning, without saying what this meaning is. 810

What Badiou calls “subtraction” is thus another name, his name, for negativity in its affirmative dimension, for a negativity which is not just a destructive gesture, but gives, opens up a new dimension. LTN 811

The question to be raised here is this: why should an Event not designate a modification of the very internal rules of the transcendental of a world? Why do we not actually pass from one to another world? Is it not that, for a non-existent to change into a being with the maximum intensity of existence, the very rules which measure the intensity of being have to change?

🙂 Žižek’s Butler moment

If proletarians are to count as “being-human as such,” does not the very measure of what counts as “being-human” have to be modified? In other words, is it not that an inexistent which is the point of symptomal torsion of a world can only be made fully existent if we pass into another world? 812

********** PAGE 815 **************

…reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consistent unity. Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its transcendental features. LTN 813

The term “inconsistency” is used here in two senses that are not clearly distinguished. First, there is inconsistency as the “true ontological foundation of any multiple-being,” namely “a multiple-deployment that no unity can gather”―inconsistency is here the starting point, the zero-level of pure presence, that which is subsequently counted-as-one, organized into a world, that which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon.

Then, there is inconsistency as the symptomal knot of a world, the excess which cannot be accounted for in its terms. (Exactly the same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.)

a World is historical, a transcendental-historical organization of a sphere of Being, while―as Badiou repeatedly emphasizes in his unabashedly Platonic way―Truth is eternal, in enforcing it one enforces onto reality an eternal Idea. We are thus dealing with two radically different levels: a World is a formation of human finitude, “hermeneutic” (a horizon of meaning); the evental Truth is eternal, the trans-historical persistence of an eternal Idea which continues to haunt us “in all possible worlds.” 815

Both World and Truth-Event are modes of appearing: a World consists of the transcendental coordinates of appearing, while a Truth-Event (or an immortal Idea) is something that, rather than appearing, “shines through,” transpires in reality. The status of the World is hermeneutic, it provides the horizon of meaning that determines our experience of reality, while the status of the Idea is Real, it is a virtual-immovable X whose traces are discernible in reality. In other words, the universality of a World is always “false” in the Marxist critico-ideological sense: every World is based upon an exclusion or “repression” which can be detected through its points of symptomal torsion, while the universality of Truth is unconditional, for it is not based upon a constitutive exception, it does not generate its point of symptomal torsion.

Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou: a life in writing Interview in the Guardian, May 18, 2012.

Love, says France’s greatest living philosopher, “is not a contract between two narcissists. It’s more than that. It’s a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself.”

Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline “Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?”, smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. “Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it’s not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!” Continue reading “Alain Badiou”

Žižek interview with Derbyshire and russia talk

Žižek interview with Derbyshire On June 2012 and Žižek in Russia August 21, 2012

Why Hegel Today?
Cut to Hegel is 1 of the key 3 philosophers: Plato, Descartes, Hegel. Each defines a whole epoch that comes after them but in a negative way.

All history of philosophy is a history of Anti-Platonism: Aristotle, Plato to Nato (Popper, Levinas), Marxist anti-Platonism, Analytical philosophy anti-Platonism. And the same goes for Descartes. Nobody is ready to be a Hegelian, everyone wants to mark a distance.

The same for Descartes, all modern philosophy is a refute of Descartes. Leibniz and feminists, ecology etc. The same is for Hegel, all modern philosophy is a way to distance itself from Hegel: Marx Heidegger etc. Nobody wants to be a Hegelian. Even if you largely agree with him you have to set out a marginal space where you disagree with him.

Is is possible to be a Hegelian today. The answer is NO.

In each of these 3 cases what people react to is SCREEN MEMORY, an easy simplified image and memory which protects you from something much more unsettling, traumatic. And the thing is to see through this screen memory.

Plato: Traumatic encounter, an idea is something you traumatically encounter
Descartes: de-substantialize philosophy, introduces madness into philosophy
Hegel: the ultimate philosopher

All the problems of reading Hegel: the crazy guy who knows everything, Absolute Knowledge, can read the mind of God, this is a screen memory to cover up something which is maybe TOO RADICAL and TRAUMATIC for us to accept today.

Cut to Joke about Ninotchka: Coffee without cream, coffee without milk

but nor is he a historicist. Both poles are wrong.

Hegel is a hinge point in the history of philosophy: The moment of German Idealism 1787 when Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason and 1831 when Hegel dies.

CUT TO: Speculative Realists (Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier) This is I think where we disagree. For me philosophy is transcendental. Philosophy before Kant was too naive. They though reality was out there, how do we understand it.

We should think with Hegel but BEYOND HEGEL. All this post-Hegelian reversals, Willing of Schopenhauer, Late Schelling production process for Marx, were ways to NOT confront HEGEL. Hegel’s deep insight was too traumatic, monstrous to accept for post-Hegelian period. So we have to go back and seek what Hegel did.

CUT TO: Kant’s transcendental turn: the conditions of possible experience. What is it that takes Hegel beyond Kant. Epistemological into ontological. What Kant sees as epistemological obstacles, imperfections in knowledge, Hegel sees as “cracks in the real.”

Quantum Physics Uncertainty Principle

Where Heisenberg sees it as an epistemological limitation: velocity/position we can’t measure at same time, if we measure one we can’t get the other

Neils Bohr: Not only can’t we measure at the same time but In itself reality is INCOMPLETE

ŽiŽek brings up the computer game analogy, you play a computer game, and you see a house, but the total house is not programmed, because it doesn’t belong in the game, it only exists in blurred not fully realized way. (This is from the Nicholas Fearn book)

INCOMPLETELY PROGRAMMED REALITY AND QUANTUM physics.

IF we are not to approach the house in the game because its not part of the game, we have incompleteness in reality because God underestimated us. God created the world but God thought we would not go beyond the atom but we surprised him. But I’m an atheist. So is it possible to think reality as incomplete without GOD.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO THINK THIS INCOMPLETENESS WITHOUT GOD.

Heidegger is crucial for me here, I agree with Quentin Meillassoux, ultimately we cannot ask this direct naive question, does this table exist, do I have a soul, all we can do is ask within what hermeneutic horizon do these things appear so that we can ask this question.

The basic way things are disclosed to us. In medieval times nature meant meaningful order, in modern nature becomes grey endless universe, with no value. With Heidegger we can go no further, it’s meaningless. In order to approach the question, REALITY has already to be disclosed to you in a certain way. This attitude becomes our daily bread.

The predominant form of continental French philosophy is historicist discourse theory. For a typical continental philosopher: Does the human being have a soul. All I can describe the episteme within which such a question could be raised. My problem is IS THIS ENOUGH. CAN WE MOVE BEYOND THE TRANSCENDENTAL. And for me Hegel Lacan is a way to say YES WE CAN but without falling into Speculative Realists pre-Kantian objectivism.

This “reality is out there we can endlessly approach it and so on and so on” No! How can we break out of the TRANSCENDENTAL HORIZON? the answer for me is Hegel-Lacan. I’m not a continental thinker in terms of this TRANSCENDENTAL HISTORICISM.

I try to be more productively ECLECTIC but in a stupid way. I’m on side of Lacan and Deleuze, because they do not say, “all guys until me are idiots, only I see the way it is.” I don’t do this.

Just look at Hegel’s work. The end of his lectures of the history of philosophy. As a good idealist, he ends up with his system. He says this is where we are today for the time being. He doubly relativizes it. When he talks in his philosophy of history, in 1820 when he talks about about USA and Russia, he says we cannot develop a full philosophical history of these countries, because their century will be the 20th century. Not bad saying this in 1820.

I follow here Robert Solomon, he wrote In the Spirit of Hegel, Absolute Knowing, at every historical period, if you go to the end you reach the limit, so that Absolute Knowing is historicism brought to its most radical extreme. Hegel opens up a space for Otherness. Hegel’s point is not that we now know everything. Hegel is out there is an openness, not that WE know it it all. Hegel is more materialist than Marx. Marx thinks the proletariat have access to some historical necessity, out of contradictions of society, you can know history and act as an agent of this knowledge. for Hegel this is too IDEALIST, Hegel is more open to contingency than Marx.

Žižek gives the Hegel lecture at Free University of Berlin in March 2011

Žižek in Russia August 2012 on Totality at 45 minute mark

Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to see hidden harmony of its whole. but to include into a system all its symptoms: antagonism, the Hegelian totality is self-contradictory antagonistic. The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, it’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. If you want to talk about today’s global capitalism means you must speak about Congo.

Hegel is absolutely NOT a holistic philosopher. IF there is something foreign to Hegel, it is the legitimation of EVIL. the comparison with a big painting, you may think you see evil in the world, but the things you see as evil, is like viewing a picture too close and you see just a stain, but from a proper distance that stain is part of the global harmony. For Hegel this position of holistic wisdom this is NOT Hegel.

Hegel’s dialectic is not this stupid wisdom we have to take into account all sides. NO for HEGEL TRUTH IS UNILATERAL.

A JOKE

There was in 1930s a debate in Politburo. Will there be money or not? First there was a Leftist deviation, Trotsky said there will be no money, it will be a transparent society then Bukharin the Right winger said but money is necessary in a complex society. Then Stalin says you are both wrong. There will be a dialectical synthesis, a dialectical unity, “There will be money and there will be not money. Some people will have money and other people will not have money.”

The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of the abstract harmonious whole, and all the excesses which undermine it.

For Freud it’s not that we have a normal person and then here and there we have pathologies, as Freud put it, pathological phenomena are the truth of normallity itself.

Whenever you have a project to do something, you can expect it to go wrong. Every project is undermined by its inconsistency.

“Property is theft.” external negation becomes self-negation. Theft becomes internal to definition of property itself.

Hegel does not subscribe to liberal critique of French Revolution (1789 but not 1793). Hegel saw the necessity of going through the Jacobin Terror. 1793-94 is a necessary consequence of 1789. Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.

You arrive at the highest only through the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.

The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that creates the conditions for the right choice. You only arrive at the choice where you see the choice of the rational state, through the choice of abstract terror, it is only terror itself that opens up the space for concrete freedom. You arrive at the choice in 2 stages, the choice has to be repeated.

Ultimate Hegelian Joke

Rabinovitch, a Soviet Jew, wants to emigrate from Soviet Union. I want to emigrate for 2 reasons. 1) I want to emigrate because if Soviet Union falls the Jews will be blamed. The bureaucrat says are you crazy, the Soviet Union will be here forever. Nothing will change here. Rabinovitch says, that’s my second reason. The necessity of this detour is Hegelian

Bad news is God is dead, we have no support in the big Other. Good news is this bad news, we now have substantial freedom.

Book of Job (click here too): First great critique of ideology in history of humanity. why? Things go terribly wrong for Job. Each of his 3 friends (ideologists) try to convince Job that there is a deeper meaning to his suffering. One says God is testing you, the other one, oh God is Just, so if you suffer you must have done something wrong even if you don’t know what, they all 3 try to justify Job’s suffering.

The greatness of Job he doesn’t say I’m innocent, only that these catastrophes have NO MEANING. God comes and says everything the 3 ideologists say is wrong, and everything Job says is right, he agrees with JOB. Then comes an even more subversive moment. Then JOb asks god, ok I get the point but nonetheless, “why did I suffer?” God’s reply might sound arrogant. Where were you when I created the earth, all the animals and so on. HOW ARE WE TO READ THIS? Who are you small men to understand me God, we are on different levels. THis is how it is usually read.

GK CHESTERTON provides a much more radical reading: Why did all this happen to me?? God’s reply is usually read as arrogance of god, the gap that separates us from God. Chesteron turns this around God’s answer: You think you are in trouble, look at the entire universe I created it’s one big mess all around. Here is Žižek at Princeton in Oct 2010 explaining this point

The commandment NOT TO KILL is primarily addressed at God himself, “Don’t be too brutal to humans.” Which I think the first theology to say that GOD IS DEAD is Judaism. The God of the law is a DEAD God.

Recall the story from the Talmud about two rabbis debating a theological point: the one losing the debate calls upon God himself to intervene and decide the issue, but when God (Jehovah) duly arrives, the other rabbi yells at him, go away old man, that since his work of creation is already accomplished, God now has nothing to say and should leave. God says yes you are right and walks away. This is a sacred text, wow!!

The whole strategy is to keep God at a proper distance. Images of God is too close, God should only be in the letter, a dead god. The only atheists today are theologists. People usually say, God dies in Aushwitz. If there is God how could he have permitted the holocaust. Even Habermas said a nice answer, in view of the horrors of the 20th Century, these crimes are so horrible, to describe them in secular terms is not strong enough, it doesn’t match the horror. So we need here some dimension of the sacred, a excessive sublime, its too much, it can’t be explained as a secular affair. Not only did GoD NOT DIE at aushwitz, maybe he came back at Aushwitz, he came too close to us. [Ž at University of Vermont Oct 16 2012]

So in Judaism God is dead what only remains is the LAW. But Nietzsche knew this death of God is NOT enough. This death of God is not enough. I think that what happens with the death of Christ is even this dead God which is still alive as a moral authority HAS TO DIE. Which is why the death of Christ can only be read as a radicalization of the book of JOB.

The message of Christ is not don’t worry if you’re in trouble there is a good old guy upstairs that will take care of things. The message of the death of Christ is there is no one. You are alone. Even intelligent Catholic conservatives Paul Claudel, is not put your trust in God, he can do it, but that God put his trust in us.

God expresses his perplexity at his own creation. This is an incredible ETHICAL REVOLUTION.

First step out of Pagan justice means: do your particular duty … this withdrawal culminates in the death of Christ: What dies on the cross: not God’s messenger, what dies on the cross is GOD of BEYOND himself, God as that TRANSCENDENT power that secretly pulls the strings. Precisely god can no longer be conceived as we are in shit, but there’s a guy up there who secretly pulls the strings, NO this is no longer. Something tremedous happens in Christianity. After death of Christ we have not the Father but the HOLY SPIRIT. where there is love between the two of you I AM THERE.

God says to Job, “You think you are something special but I screwed up everything.”

What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. God abdicated, the Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution, (Communist Party).

For Hegel what is contingent is necessity itself

No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is not fully constituted, history is open, events are retroactively constituted.

There is needed a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. The position adopted by Marx is that you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel says no way. This is strictly prohibited by Hegel. For Hegel precisely there is no big Other. This is not because we cannot know this higher divine plan, its because there IS NONE. Those philosophers who claim that Hegel is also a philosopher of LOVE are RIGHT!!

You know how it is when you fall in Love. You float around in a contingent way. You just slip down on a banana. You are taken to hospital, you fall in love with the nurse. You automatically translate all your previous life as leading to this moment. It is a retroactive semiotic totalization of a contingency. There is a necessity but it is always a retroactive necessity. Something contingently happened and you retroactively create the necessity that leads to it.

Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predecessors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners or predecessors. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is not fully constituted, history is open, events are retroactively constituted. Every totality is retroactive. There is no deeper teleology. Something happens contingently and retroactively creates an order. Hegel is more materialist than Marx.

The conservative poet T.S. Eliot stated, this: Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written. This is the Hegelian totality.

Something happens contingently and retroactively creates an order. Hegel is more materialist than Marx.

Push this contigency idea to the limit and we get to the ONTOLOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS OF REALITY

True Materialist task, the Hegelian challenge to quantum physics. Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking it? This is the task.

***************

Avenir not Future. Future means also the continuation, once and future thing. Avenir points to a radical break, a true openness.

LACAN IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT FOR ME TO READ HEGEL, I OPENLY ADMIT IT. AT 39:40

Conservative Hegelians: McTaggert and Bradley

Now its the LIBERAL HEGEL: Hegel of RECOGNITION

CONSERVATIVE LACAN: paternal authority, symbolic law, the problem of today’s permissive society, the only thing that can save us is return to paternal authority

Now Liberal Lacanianism: I part ways with Jacques Miller. Every social field is based on imaginary symbolic illusions, we can only accept the necessity of these illusions, like Edmund Burke, better not to know too much

Late Lacan’s rumblings, how to organize the Lacanian school, his Leninist writings, how to construct a social space, a group, a society of psychoanalysts without the MASTER FIGURE.

Is there a chance for EGALITARIAN society, not just a Tahir square, every now and then.

Alain Badiou: This idea that the state is here to stay. Authentic politics has to take place outside of the state. Authentic politics should not engage in power, but SUBTRACT withdraw, resist.

What I don’t like, I see here an opening for a comfortable safe position, I can be in my safe position. I believe in HEROICALLY INTERVENING.

I don’t sit and wait for some radical violent moment, my attitude is extremely pragmatic. The most threatening thing to do is REJECT dialogue. Occupy Wall St. Oh fine let’s come together, let’s debate. This is not a time to do that. It was only possible there to speak the language of the enemy. Sometimes, you have to strike with all brutal violence (Against Hitler), and sometimes, you have only minor political gestures. I have a sympathy for Obama, (disagree with Tariq Ali), Healthcare. What kind of traumatic sore point this is for the conservative establishment, it disturbs the very foundation of popular American ideology. FREE CHOICE. At the same time its not an impossible demand. There is universal healthcare in other countries. This is how to ACT. Place a demand. NOW Ž sounds like a social democrat.

Hey Liberalism did something wonderful. It was the answer to a desperate predicament of European religious wars. How can we live together, construct a shared space. Even Social Democracy, with all the criticism we can make of it … can you imagine in the period in history of humanity, so many people lived such prosperous free lives in social democratic western Europe in last 50-60 years. But these times are over.

I still accept the greatness of Lenin. We have to accept, it’s easy to say USSR had a great chance, Stalin screwed it up, or No it was already in Lenin, Marx no Rousseau, No it was in Christianity, No it was already in Plato.

On the one hand the October Revolution was an authentic explosion of egalitarianism, emancipatory project. But Stalin … You can’t say same for Hitler. There is no tragic split in Nazism.

I really fully support in OCCUPY WALL ST. But the Bartleby point: I would prefer NOT TO. Contrast to single issues protest, we have for first time Big protest movement that targets Capitalist system as such, there is a structural fault in system as such.

The existing institutional democratic mechanisms we have are not strong enough to control this excess of capital.

What then should the LEFT DO: All Žižek finds here are ironies. Too general stuff. The critique of FINANCIAL capitalism, no its not this. Re-organize society so bankers don’t have power to do this.

THE MORNING AFTER: the true test what will really change when afterwards, things return to “normal” will there be any changes felt there. If no. Then we are in sad cyclical stuff where things explode and then return to normal.

Syriza in Greece is the idea that Ž truly supports. The commies hate Syriza so much they’ll make a pack with New Democracy, because commies say the situation is not ready yet … but if you wait for the right moment the right moment will never arrive, it only arrives through repeated attempts repeated failures.

The lesson the the last years: the true illusion is that things can go on as always with a little tinkering. No we are approaching a zero-point. things cannot go on indefinitely the way they are, even if we don’t do anything things will change, it will be some form of authoritarian, one of the first to get this point was Terry Gillian in BRAZIL. Its crazy comical, Berlusconi rule of BRAZIL. This is for me what is unsettling in China. Till now one can reasonably claim that capitalism may have required 10-20 years of dictatorship, once it began to take hold, there were movements for democracy. THis time is over. Capitalism Asiatic/Berlusconi. Capitalism more dynamic,creative destructive, than our western flavour, but it DOESN’T need democracy to function. IF you are serious about protecting LIBERAL values, you need to work with the socialists.

We like your ideas but why do you stick to Communism?

1. There is still a tradition clearly identified as part of Communism that is precious: Spartucus rebellion, radical millenarian rebellion, there is something great in authentic popular outbursts

2. The problem that I see today is communist problem, all the crucial problems today are problems of the commons, intellectual, bio-genetics, environment.

3. All trauma associated with “communism” all the other terms: Democracy/socialism/justice can all be appropriated but not communism.

4. We are approaching dangerous times. Isn’t it nice to have as your master signifier a term that can remind of all the time of how WRONG things can go, you are all the time aware of how things can go wrong.

hallward on logics of worlds badiou

Hallward, Peter.On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds New Left Review 53 sept oct 2008 97-122.

French philosophy in the twentieth century was marked above all by two projects.1 For the sake of simplicity we might distinguish them with the labels of ‘subject’ and ‘science’. On the one hand, thinkers influenced by phenomenology and existentialism—Sartre, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty—embraced more or less radical notions of individual human freedom, and on that basis sought to formulate models of militant collective commitment that might engage with the forms of oppression or domination that constrain the subjects of a given situation. On the other hand, thinkers marked by new approaches in mathematics and logic, and by the emergence of new human sciences such as linguistics or anthropology, attempted to develop more adequate methods to analyse the fundamental ways in which a situation might be ‘structured in dominance’. In the 1960s in particular,many thinkers came to the conclusion that a concern for the subject or for individual freedom was itself one of the main mechanisms serving to obscure the deeper workings of impersonal and ‘inhuman’ structure, be it unconscious, ideological, economic, ontological, or otherwise.

Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida—all sought to develop forms of thinking that might integrate or at least accommodate aspects of both these projects; and that, conditioned by a broadly ‘scientific’ anti-humanism, might decentre but not simply exclude the role of an active subject. What is immediately distinctive about Alain Badiou’s contribution to this endeavour is the trenchant radicalism of his own peculiar subject-science synthesis. Badiou formulates this synthesis in the uncompromising and unfashionable language of truth. Badiou’s chief concern has been to propose a notion of truth that holds equally true in both a ‘scientific’ and a ‘subjective’ sense. A truth must be universally and even ‘eternally’ true, while relying on nothing more, ultimately, than the militant determination of the subjects who affirm it.

By ‘holding true’ to their consequences, the militant partisans of such truths enable them to persist, and to evade the existing norms of knowledge and authority that otherwise serve to differentiate, order and stabilize the elements of their situation. The discoveries of Galileo or Darwin, the principles defended by the French or Haitian revolutionaries, the innovations associated with Cézanne or Schoenberg—these are the sorts of sequences that Badiou has in mind: disruptive and transformative, divisive yet inclusive, as punctual in their occurrence as they are far-reaching in their implications.

Within a situation, a truth is the immanent production of a generic and egalitarian indifference to the differences that (previously) structured that situation.

The two most important general notions that underlie this philosophy of truth are fidelity and inconsistency. However varied the circumstances of its production, a truth always involves a fidelity to inconsistency. The semantic tension between these terms is only apparent. Fidelity : a principled commitment, variously maintained, to the infinite and universalizable implications of a disruptive event. Inconsistency: the presumption, variously occasioned, that such disruption touches on the very being of being.

Inconsistency is the ontological basis, so to speak, of a determined wager on the infinitely revolutionary orientation and destiny of thought. Fidelity is the subjective discipline required to sustain this destiny and thus to affirm an ‘immortality’ that Badiou readily associates with the legacy of Saint Paul and Pascal. Inconsistency is what there is and fidelity is a response to what happens, but it is only by being faithful to the consequences of what happens that we can think the truth of what there is. In every case, ‘the truth of the situation is its inconsistency’, and ‘a truth does not draw its support from consistency but from inconsistency’.

To think the being of a situation as inconsistent rather than consistent is to think it as anarchic and literally unpresentable multiplicity. Badiou posits being as the proliferation of infinite multiplicity or difference, rather than as the orderly manifestation of stable and self-identical beings.

As far as the discourse of being is concerned, the multiple having priority over the one means that any figure of unity or identity, any conception of a being as a being, is itself secondary. Unity is the derivative result of a unifying or identifying operation performed upon a being that is itself without unity or identity, i.e. that in-consists. Badiou admits that we can only ever experience or know what is presented to us as consistent or unified, but it can sometimes happen, in the wake of an ephemeral and exceptional event, that we have an opportunity to think, and hold true to, the inconsistency of what there is. page 99

This means that unity or consistency is not itself a primordial ontological quality, and it implies that the unifying or structuring operation specific to each situation applies to material that in itself is not unified or structured, i.e. that is inconsistent. All that can be presented of such inconsistent being, however, from within the limits of the situation, is that which counts for nothing according to the criteria of the situation. What figures as nothing or ‘void’ will thus present inconsistency ‘according to a situation’.

In the situation of set theory (the situation that presents or counts instances of counting as such), inconsistency takes the form of a literally empty set, a null- or void-set — one that counts as zero. By analogy, in the situation of capitalism, a situation that counts only profits and property, what counts for nothing would be a proletarian humanity.

Now although it is an intrinsic determination of being that it be there, or that it appear (locally), nevertheless it is not exactly pure being-qua-being as such that appears: what appears of pure being is a particular quality of being, namely existence. Thanks to the equation of ontology and set theory, pure being-qua-being is essentially a matter of quantity and univocal determination: something either is or is not, with no intermediary degree. Existence, by contrast, is precisely a ‘quality’ of being, a matter of relative ‘intensity’ or degree.

Something is if it belongs to a situation, but it exists (in a world that manifests something of that situation) always more or less, depending on how intensely or distinctively it appears in that world. We might say for instance that while a great many things belong to the world of the US, it is normally arranged such that certain distinctively ‘American’ things—free speech, pioneers, private property, baseball, freeways, fast food, mobile homes, self-made men—appear or exist more intensely than other, dubiously ‘un-American’ things: ‘unassimilated’ immigrants, communists, supporters of Hezbollah or Hamas, for example.