Badiou's Deleuze

Jon Roffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844655083
• eBook ISBN: 9781317547587
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's summary interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, a highly influential work of considerable power. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, whilst it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider what Deleuze's philosophy amounts to, to reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential of recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped to shape much contemporary thought.

1. THE HISTORY OF A DISJUNCTIVE SYNTHESIS

Over what were to be the final years of his life, Gilles Deleuze engaged in a long written correspondence with Alain Badiou. Badiou, in the light of his magnum opus Being and Event (L’Être et l’événement), published in 1988, had come to see Deleuze’s philosophical project as the closest among those of his contemporaries to his own, and in turn saw Deleuze as his key rival in the attempt to present a philosophy of multiplicity and immanent being. This correspondence, unfortunately never published owing to Deleuze’s dissatisfaction with its abstract tone (DCB 6/14), concluded at the end of 1994, shortly before the latter’s death. In 1997, Badiou published Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Deleuze: Le clameur de L’Être), which was a final letter to Deleuze, a summary of their epistolary disagreements and a restatement of the critical appraisal of Deleuze’s thought first expressed directly to Deleuze himself.

The Clamor of Being is presented as a work of demystification, an attempt to reinstate a classical image of the latter’s philosophy in the face of a pervasive attempt to cast him as a thinker of “the heterogeneous multiplicity of desires” (DCB 8/17): in place of the caricature, “A faithful portrait of the master” (DCB xii).¹ The central claim of this work is infamous: that Deleuze, far from being a philosopher dedicated to propounding the fundamental status of multiplicity and difference, is rather concerned with the ultimate status of ontological unity: “Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One” (DCB 10/19). Ranging across a number of Deleuze’s works – above all his two key monographs from the late 1960s, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense – Badiou presents a surprising and, for some, shocking account of a philosopher who was often thought to be already understood.

Badiou’s portrait of Deleuze was (and remains) particularly confronting for many who considered themselves partisans of his thought. The response of Arnauld Villani, who declared that “this is a false book, the falsest book imaginable’, is characteristic: ”in the place of the most beautiful movement of life, [Badiou] has only proposed an abstract field, he only manages to strike up a dirge“ (1998). And, while Villani himself, along with many others, sided with Deleuze, yet others again manned the barricades on behalf of Badiou. The Clamor of Being thus became the epicentre of conflict in thought.

The epistolary sequence concluded by The Clamor of Being is rooted in an engagement with Deleuze’s thought that begins much earlier.² Its first incarnation is entirely polemical in nature, and is manifested in Théorie de la contradiction, published in 1975, and two texts from 1976, all of which directly attack the aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy that Badiou will later declare to be inessential, namely, the account of desire and multiplicity found in that grimoire, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and the text “Rhizomes” (1976), which would later take the form of the infamous first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Théorie de la contradiction, a thoroughly Maoist presentation of contradiction and the dialectic, adds “saint Gilles (Deleuze), saint Félix (Guattari)” and “saint Jean-Frangois (Lyotard)” to Marx’s Saint Max (Stirner). For Badiou, their philosophies, committed as they are to “propulsive desire, evasive flux”, to “the heterogeneous”, and to the critique of “all organization” and “’totalitarian’ Marxist-1 eninism”, merely repeat “word for word” the kind of claims that Marx and Engel’s German Ideology needed to “tear to pieces” in order to present a cogent revolutionary program (Badiou 1975: 61).

The same critical rejection is registered in De l’ideologie, a presentation of a fascinating Maoist logical communism, written with Frangois Balmès and published in 1976.³ There, after citing Deleuze and Guattari’s praise of the Reichian theme, according to which fascism must not be explained by recourse to misrecognition or illusion but rather in terms of what the masses in fact desired, Badiou writes:

This opposition between an argument on the basis of “illusion” and an argument on the basis of “desire” is itself argued on the basis of a rejection of reality. The reality is that the masses, under the general effect of the great “physical” defeats of the proletariat … have seen their organic capacity for resistance in no way annulled, but rather weakened, and in a profound way.

(Badiou & Balmès 1976: 38)

Finally, “The Flux and the Party”, the single most substantial text dedicated by Badiou to Deleuze before The Clamor of Being, oscillates between a rhetorically wide-ranging promotion of Marxist-Leninism, a mockery of Anti-Oedipus and what border on ad hominem attacks on Deleuze him-self.⁴ Badiou’s key contention here is that the political metaphysics of Anti-Oedipus is effectively a renewed form of Kantian philosophy in its most traditional sense. We are presented, Badiou loudly inveighs, with nothing more than the Kantian notions of freedom, the autonomous subject and the Good once the rhetorical fog is waved off: “Deleuze and Guattari don’t conceal this very well: return to Kant, that’s what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost” (2004a: 79tm). And, as in Théoriedela contradiction, Badiou presents this approach as entirely irrelevant to contemporary political struggle, concluding by writing: “Look at them, these old Kantians who pretend they’re playing at scattering the trinkets of Culture. Look at them: the time is nigh, and they’re already covered in dust” (ibid.: 84).⁵ A text published by Badiou in the following year under the pseudonym Georges Peyrol, unfortunately entitled “The Fascism of the Potato” puts the point even more bluntly: “Deleuze and Guattari are protofascist ideologues” (Badiou [Peyrol] 1977: 51).

While the initial overt moments of this debate – Badiou notes that related sentiments were expressed verbally around this period (DCB 2/8–9) – revolved around politics and polemic, the next discussion takes the form of a considered philosophical critique, found in the 1982Theory of the Subject.

Badiou claims here that Deleuze adopts one of the two theses characteristic of materialism (“there is only matter”, the thesis of the One) at the expense of the other (“matter is primary in relation to thought”, the thesis of the Two). Moreover, anticipating the central line of argument of The Clamor of Being, Badiou argues that this commitment necessarily involves the demotion of multiplicity: “There are others, like Deleuze, who posit the Multiple, which is never more than a semblance since positing the multiple amounts to presupposing the One” (TS 22). Interestingly, Badiou finesses this by claiming something that The Clamor of Being and the texts that follow it would fundamentally reject: he characterizes Deleuze’s materialism as an “ultra-l eftism”, stating that “the leftist deviation adopts the perspective of flight. It is a radicalism of novelty that breaks all mirrors” (TS 207).

This sequence, which poses Deleuze as a combatant entirely external to and distant from Badiou’s own programme, is to a significant degree resolved in Badiou’s interesting review of Deleuze’s The Fold (Badiou 1994), and in The Clamor of Being itself. These texts, while remaining critical, proceed on the basis of the recognition that he and Deleuze share a number of fundamental tenets. In particular, Badiou notes the following points as indicative of a common ground of sorts:

• the rejection of the idea that philosophy and metaphysics are exhausted or have come to their natural end;

• the elaboration of a philosophy of the multiple; and in particular

• the importance of the concept of multiplicity;

• the thesis of ontological immanence; and

• the affirmation that thought is bound up with singularity.

The critique that Badiou offers, then, is made possible by the assessment that, in fact, he and Deleuze “constituted … a paradoxical tandem” (DCB 4/12). To be more precise, the possibility of a more refined and exact disagreement became possible for Badiou as a result of an emerging closeness between his work and Deleuze’s with respect to fundamental philosophical questions, an opening for a new kind of debate, one that would “cut straight to the sensitive point at which different conceptual creations separate” (DCB 5/13).

Whether or not this mode of engagement is in fact put into play in The Clamor of Being is the subject of the pages to follow, but what is striking is that the texts published on Deleuze after this tend increasingly to emphasize the differences between the two projects, rather than their closeness, and the goal of obtaining the sensitive point of divergence is gradually replaced with an external opposition of two blocs of thought. And, while the genre of these subsequent statements remains philosophical, some of the rhetorical flavour of “The Flux and the Party” begins to return. “One, Multiple, Multiplicity” (TW 67–80), Badiou’s somewhat bewildered defence and restatement of The Clamor of Being, while beginning “at the point of greatest proximity” (TW 68), depicts Deleuze’s philosophy as a “natural mysticism” (TW 80), which impoverishes (TW 70) and metaphorizes (TW 75) mathematics, and neutralizes formal thinking as such by subordinating it to empirical sensibility. Many of the same notes are sounded in “Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology”, a text from the same – immediately post -Clamor of Being – period.

In the chapter devoted to Deleuze in Badiou’s 2006 Logics of Worlds, entitled “The Event in Deleuze’, the increasingly disjunctive quality of the latter’s approach is even more evident. Badiou claims there that ”a quite good axiomatic of what I call ‘event’“ (LM 384/406) can be arrived at by inverting Deleuze’s philosophy of the event. Most recently of all, in the notes that close his Pocket Pantheon, Badiou is to be found presenting the two respective positions in starkly opposing terms: ”Finally: Platonism and anti-Platonism“ (2008b: 175). This is in keeping with the claim found in Logics of Worlds that ”there are in effect only three crucial philosophers in my eyes: Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Note that these are precisely the three that Deleuze could never manage to love“ (LM 527/552).

Thus, at the end of this lengthy engagement, the theoretical proximity whose recognition underpinned the epistolary sequence at the end of Deleuze’s life, replacing the rhetorical hostility of “Flux and the Party”, is finally disassembled, to be replaced with an unbroachable stand-off. The “non-rapport” (BE 1/6tm) is made complete.

***

Despite these recent developments, and this potted lengthy polemic, there is no question that The Clamor of Being is at the very centre of Badiou’s engagement with Deleuze. It is not only the single longest moment of this history, but it unfolds in a systematic fashion that is much less pronounced elsewhere. As Badiou’s works on aesthetics and politics are to Being and Event, so are “One, Multiple, Multiplicity” and “Deleuze’s Vitalist Ontology” to The Clamor of Being.

The goal of this study is to carefully and critically examine the account of Deleuze’s philosophy presented by Badiou in this sequence. It will argue with respect to each significant point made by Badiou in The Clamor of Being that he misunderstands and misrepresents Deleuze’s philosophy. More importantly, however, it argues that Badiou’s thesis, according to which Deleuze mounts and defends a metaphysics of the One, functions not as a conclusion drawn on the basis of a careful study of the latter’s texts, but as an initial axiom, a filter or lens through which the material under consideration is examined. It is principally this mode of approach that leads Badiou astray from the very beginning, and the divergence between the account in The Clamor of Being only increases as Badiou’s reading moves on to the difficult terrain of Deleuze’s work at the end of the 1960s.

To this point, examinations of Badiou’s reading of Deleuze have been either specific to certain concepts, insufficient with respect to the breadth of their treatments of both philosophical positions, or prohibitively partisan. What follows aims to present a fully fledged reading and critique of Badiou’s account of Deleuze’s philosophy, and a defence of the latter’s metaphysics on the points of contention. This is to say that I am not concerned to defend Deleuze’s entire work, a project whose possibility and desirability remain to be demonstrated.

I hope to show that the sensitive points at which Deleuze and Badiou part ways are not themselves revealed in Badiou’s critique of Deleuze. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1. The history of a disjunctive synthesis
• 2. Is Deleuze a philosopher of the One?
• 3. Method
• 4. The virtual
• 5. Truth and time
• 6. The event in Deleuze
• 7. Thought and the subject
• 8. A singular palimpsest
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index