Badiou, Poem and Subject

Tom Betteridge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350262270
• eBook ISBN: 9781350085879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Reinterpreting Badiou's philosophy in light of both his persistent, reverent invocations of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, and his long-term engagement with Samuel Beckett, Badiou, Poem and Subject fundamentally reassesses Badiou's radical departure from the legacy of Martin Heidegger, and his wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. For Badiou, both writers, from the terminus of Literary Modernism, affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation: Celan's collective and ephemeral subject of 'anabasis', and Beckett's disjunctive 'Two' of love.
Blending close textual analyses with critical reflections on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, among others, Tom Betteridge argues that Badiou's innovative readings of both Celan's poetry and the 'latent poem' in Beckett's late prose are crucial to understanding his significance in the history of twentieth-century French philosophy and its German heritage, offering a significant contribution to a growing field of interest in Badiou's philosophical encounter with poetry, and its political ramifications.

1

Silence Being Thought

Paul Celan’s ineloquence

In an endnote to Logics of Worlds (2006/2009), Alain Badiou declares his philosophical debts to Samuel Beckett and Stéphane Mallarmé. He asserts that two concepts fundamental to his philosophy – ‘generic truth’ and ‘subtractive ontology’, respectively – continue to be shifted, modified, ‘sharpened’ by his readings of these writers; Badiou’s philosophy, he claims, is ‘under condition’ of Beckett’s prose and Mallarmé’s poetry. Further, without irony, Badiou declares that understanding the ‘stories’ produced by Beckett’s late prose work How It Is and Mallarmé’s poem ‘A la nue accablante tu … ’ is ‘perhaps the only goal of [his] philosophy’.¹ Badiou’s writings on these two figures comprise a book-length collection, published in English as On Beckett, and a sustained engagement with Mallarmé spread out over the course of thirty years, from Theory of the Subject (1982/2009) to Being and Event (1988/2005) and the books of the 1990s that would further elaborate its central claims, especially Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998/2005), and then throughout the philosophical shift marked by Logics of Worlds (2007/2010) and Second Manifesto for Philosophy (2009/2011). In stark contrast, the page-time afforded to the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan over this writing period consists of about twenty pages, disparately placed among ten or so publications. And, this is to be further contrasted with the time dedicated to Celan by certain of Badiou’s philosophical contemporaries, most notably Jacques Derrida, both in his posthumously published Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan and at a distance through his friendship with Celan’s close friend and interpreter Peter Szondi.² As well, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has dedicated a book, Poetry as Experience, to Celan and his strained relationship with Heidegger.³ Badiou’s relatively modest engagement with Celan is not in proportion to the overall importance of his poetry to Badiou’s project at large, especially when they are used as interface with which to open up the complexities of Badiou’s departure from Heideggerian thinking. Badiou’s most thorough investigations of Celan’s poetry take place in Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998/2005) and The Century (2005/2007). It is more useful to start, however, with the importance afforded to Celan in Being and Event’s complementary treatise, Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy (1989/1999). One of Badiou’s most provocative claims therein is that, following Hegel, the willingness of philosophy to relinquish its independence to the imperatives of science or politics, or in Peter Hallward’s words, philosophy’s preoccupation with ‘the sterile hypotheses of scientific positivism and historical materialism’,⁴ gave rise to an ‘Age of Poets’ in which poetry was burdened with an ostensibly philosophical task. For Badiou, the Age of Poets is a philosophical category pertaining to a specific ‘epoch’, stretching from Stéphane Mallarmé to Paul Celan, for which ‘poetic saying not only constitutes a form of thought and instructs a truth, but also finds itself constrained to think this thought’.⁵ A moribund philosophy finds its central theses concerning being, truth and subject outsourced, then, to a specific poetic enterprise engaged in the reflexive interrogation of its own thinking. For Badiou, this operation, by which philosophy settles itself within the bounds of the poem, is termed a ‘suture’: philosophy stiches itself to, or perhaps within, the poem.

Beneath these claims lies an important theory concerning how philosophy relates to, broadly speaking, that which is not philosophy. Oriented by the desire to restore the question of ‘Truth’ to the centre of philosophical endeavour, Badiou insists that, far from having ‘truths’ of its own with which to work, philosophy ‘thinks’ the truths produced by its ‘conditions’, of which there are four: love, science, art and politics. For Badiou, an adequately contemporary philosophy must be able to think its own time, by engaging not only the singular instances of truth produced by its conditions but also their ‘compossibility’, or how the truths produced by local experiments in emancipatory politics might interact with those borne by innovations in formal mathematics, or those produced in poetry or theatre with psychoanalytic accounts of love, for example. When Badiou claims that philosophy following Hegel has subsumed itself to science or politics, then, he is gesturing towards, for example, the elevation of scientific knowledge in nineteenth-century scientific positivism and its legacy in contemporary Analytic philosophy from Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine or the exclusive relation between philosophy and politics expressed during the development of orthodox Marxism from Marx through to György Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. Badiou’s claim is that the danger of these intimacies between philosophy and either one of its conditions is its confinement of ‘truth’ to the chosen productive discourse. This is detrimental both to the other conditions, whose own productions of what philosophy would call ‘truth’ are passed over, and philosophy itself, which gives up its autonomy, or its ability to learn from and traverse multiple fields of thought.

The claim of any ‘sutured’ philosophy is that ‘truth’ may only arise within the condition it binds itself to. In its ‘sutures’ to politics and science, philosophy relinquishes its vocation, but for Badiou, it is the poem that then takes on the role of philosophical thinking. Although one of the desires central to Badiou’s own philosophical intervention is to ensure that philosophy is restored, as he has it, to its role as the ‘thinker’ of the compossibility of truths produced elsewhere, the ‘Age of Poets’ is still an ‘epoch’ of significant importance. Badiou’s ‘Age of Poets’, in which poetry does philosophical work, is anticipated by Friedrich Hölderlin, begins in earnest in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud and is then borne by Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam and Fernando Pessoa, before finishing, crucially, with Paul Celan. Against philosophical assertions of a fundamental consistency, whether via scientific method or in the teleological promise of ‘History’, these poets, for Badiou, understood the essential disorientation and ‘inconsistency’ of their time:

The fact is that there really was an Age of Poets, in the time of the sutured escheat of philosophers. There was a time between Hölderlin and Paul Celan when the quavering sense of what that time itself was, the most open approach to the question of Being, the space of compossibility least caught-up in brutal sutures and the most informed formulation of modern Man’s experience were all unsealed and possessed by the poem. A time when the enigma of Time was caught up in the enigma of the poetic metaphor, wherein the process of unbinding was itself bound within the ‘like’ of the image. An entire epoch was represented in short philosophies as a consistent and especially oriented one. There was progress, the sense of History, the millenarian foundation, the approach of another world and other men. But the real of this epoch was on the contrary inconsistency and disorientation. Poetry alone, or at least “metaphysical” poetry, the most concentrated poetry, the most intellectually strained poetry, the most obscure also, designated and articulated this essential disorientation.⁶

For Badiou, these poets ‘submitted to a kind of intellectual pressure’ to take on the role of philosophy itself (i.e. devoid of its ‘suturing’ to science or politics), and their work is ‘recognizable as a work of thought … at the very locus where philosophy falters, a locus of language wherein a proposition about being and about time is enacted’ (MP, 69). Not only this, such poetry ‘[constructs] the space of thinking which defines philosophy’. Badiou’s general claim concerning Paul Celan, then, is that his poetry ‘thinks’ (like those of the other figures in this Age of Poets) and that this poetic thought, through ‘the art of binding Word and experience’, is guided by ‘the question of Being’, by ‘the real of the epoch’. However, a further claim specific to Celan’s poetry is that it closes or ends the Age of Poets, and this is a claim inextricably bound to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger: for Badiou, indeed, Celan’s poetry ‘completes Heidegger’(MP, 77).

Badiou admits that Heidegger was successful in ‘philosophically touching an unnoticed point of thought detained in poetic language’. Yet, in order to go beyond the ‘power of Heideggerian philosophy’, Badiou claims, it is imperative to reconsider the ‘couple formed by the saying of poets and the thought of thinkers’ profuse in Heidegger (C, 36). That is, following a period of near-exclusive intimacy between poetry and thought (or philosophy, as Badiou would insist), it is once more necessary to radically distinguish their respective discourses; there is to be an irreducibility between poetic thought and its subsequent thinking in philosophy. It seems clear that, for Badiou, the poetry of Celan embodies this movement through and beyond Heidegger, both in its departure from the ‘indistinction’ between the ‘poet’ and the ‘thinker’ and in its ultimately disjunctive relation to the exploration of being, pervasive throughout the Age of Poets. Badiou’s argument is that the poet/thinker couple is broken by Celan, and in the process of this break the site in which being may be thought is recast beyond Heidegger’s demands for poetry. For Badiou, ‘the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition’ (MP, 74).

It is worth noting at this point a second temporalizing claim made in Badiou’s The Century. Badiou understands Celan to be the last to fulfil the poetic task of ‘naming the century’ the ‘short century preceding the Restoration of the last twenty years’.⁷ This claim is inextricable from Celan’s attempt to construct a poetics capable of engaging with the Holocaust. Celan’s engagement with Heidegger, a member of the Nazi party between 1933 and 1945, appears peculiar and compelling in light of this poetic task especially given their protracted relationship, manifest in their long-term correspondence, in Celan’s serious theoretical and practical engagement with Heidegger’s thought, and finally in their meeting at Todtnauberg in 1967, but it is also helpful when interrogating Badiou’s claim that Celan’s poetry heralds a fundamental departure from Heidegger’s dictates for thought. Badiou’s assertion here is of no small importance with regard to his own philosophy too, for Celan marks not only the saturation of Heidegger’s thought but also the gateway into Badiou’s philosophical break with much that precedes him.

A primarily philosophical encounter with Celan’s poetry cannot be exercised without caution, for it threatens to mirror the flippant responses his poetry garnered when it first came to prominence in Germany and France. For a philosopher like Badiou, unafraid to posit ‘strong’ philosophical readings of the artists he privileges, this is a pressing concern,⁸ not least due to the potential resonance of any encounter between philosophy and poetry with Martin Heidegger’s notorious readings of Friedrich Hölderlin: poetry is made into the aesthetic vehicle for the grand political inauguration of a specifically ‘German’ people’s hitherto deferred emergence into history – a subject to which this book returns in some depth in Chapters 2 and 3. Describing the German reception of Paul Celan’s work in the 1950s, John Felstiner argues that all too often a blind eye was turned towards the trauma and loss at the heart of Celan’s poetry, critics choosing to emphasize instead his ‘surrealism’ or his ‘special gift for imagery’, ‘as if’, Felstiner argues, Celan were not ‘a Chagall but an effete Whistler’, not an artist whose work is grounded in historical trauma but an artist purveying ‘art for art’s sake’. Felstiner writes that, in the Hamburg journal Die Zeit, for instance, ‘a German friend of Celan’s was sympathetic yet made no mention of “Todesfuge” or the realities conditioning the poetry – loss, death, Jewishness’.⁹ Badiou’s claims that they produce a ‘thought of being’ aside, Celan’s poems, however, despite this inextricability from concrete experiences of loss, of course address philosophical questions, not least in their rendering of a thorough, dedicated engagement with Heidegger’s writings.

This chapter is oriented primarily by Badiou’s assertion that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’ as well as by a broader philosophical attempt to understand the nuances of what Badiou terms the poem’s ‘thought of being’. But in what immediately follows, I want to give some of the coordinates of Badiou’s engagement with Celan, starting with one of his two most in-depth readings of Celan’s poetry from Badiou’s collection of lectures The Century, including passages to which I will return at some length in Chapter 3 when discussing the particular subjective movement at stake in Badiou’s encounter with Celan here. In The Century, Badiou extrapolates his understanding of some of the constituent parts of Celan’s poetics from a comparative study of his poem ‘Anabasis’ (1963) and an earlier poem of the same name (from 1924) by the francophone poet Saint-John Perse.¹⁰ There are several ways in which Badiou specifies the divergence in poetics across this forty-year span, and across languages, though at all times such difference is conditioned by their respective experiences of twentieth-century violence. Badiou presents, perhaps reductively, an essentially pre-Holocaust poetics in Perse, in which a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ of ‘spiritual vacancy’ and ‘epic affirmation’ sustains, in poetry, a bathetic encounter with early twentieth-century nihilism, understood by Badiou as a figure of the saturation of ‘nineteenth century conditions’ (TC, 84–85). It is with undisguised disdain, some of it self-deprecating given his own colonial background, that Badiou draws out details of Perse’s childhood in Guadeloupe, as the white West-Indian son of plantation owners, followed by his six-year appointment as Secretary-General at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as his self-imposed exile in 1940 to the United States. After this, claims Badiou, Perse becomes the heir to Valéry, the ‘official poet of the Republic’, a writer of state-sanctioned poems. Perse’s biography is intended to reveal a certain orientation within language towards the violent innovations in political subjectivity emerging primarily out of Russia from 1917 onwards; he is able, in Badiou’s words, to ‘clearly perceive’ ‘the century’s epic dimension’, but only ‘from the recesses of his gilded armchair in a waning republic’.

For Badiou, Perse’s poetry represents what is already deemed to exist with a verbose eloquence adequate to the engorged and self-satisfied persistence of ‘the era of tranquil imperialism’ (TC, 85). Though Perse recognizes the century’s ‘epic’ dimension, the qualitative magnitude of the century is imbricated in his work only with the persistence of this imperialist ‘benevolence’ or of ‘what already is’. In Badiou’s contemporaneous ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto for Affirmationist Art’ (2003), his fifteenth axiom for ‘affirmationist’ art states, contra Perse, that ‘it is better to do nothing than work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist’.¹¹ Badiou’s claim is that Perse’s poetry reinforces what is already deemed visible and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Silence Being Thought
• 2 The Poem Becoming-Prose
• 3 Anabasis
• 4 Subtraction and Love
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint