Polemics

Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Peter Hallward, Ray Brassier, Steve Corcoran, Bruno Bosteels, Peter Hallward, Ray Brassier, Steve Corcoran

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844677634
• eBook ISBN: 9781781689561
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution. At once witty and profound, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

Part One:
Philosophy and Circumstances

Introduction

This text is extracted from the transcription of the beginning of a seminar held at the Alliance française in Buenos Aires at the invitation of Gerardo Yoel. The overall theme of the seminar was ‘cinema and philosophy’. In it I tried to show in what sense cinema can present a philosophical situation. An earlier version of the text was given as part of an amicable encounter with Slavoj Žižek at the invitation of the Institut français in Vienna.

What is a philosophical situation? What do circumstances propose to us that is relevant to philosophical examination? Certainly not just anything at all. Certainly not – as Guy Lardreau maintains – any discourse, any assertion, excepting those of ‘grand politics’. I propose the following abstract definition: a situation is philosophical, or ‘for’ philosophy, when it forces the existence of a relation between terms that, in general, or in common opinion, can have no relation to each other. A philosophical situation is an encounter. It is an encounter between essentially foreign terms.

I shall give three examples.

The first example is already, I might say, philosophically formatted. It may be found in Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias. This dialogue presents an extremely forceful encounter between Socrates and Callicles. A philosophical situation is created by this encounter, which is, besides, arranged in a totally theatrical fashion. Why? Because the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles have no common denominator. They are two types of thought that are totally foreign to one another. The discussion between Callicles and Socrates is presented by Plato in such a way as to make us understand what it is to have two different kinds of thought that, like the diagonal and the side of a square, remain incommensurable. The discussion consists in a relation between two terms without any relation. Callicles maintains that right is force, that the happy man is a tyrant – he who wins others over with cunning and violence. Socrates maintains that the true man, identified with the happy man, is just, in the philosophical sense of the term. Now, between justice as violence and justice as thought, there is no simple opposition, i.e. one that can be dealt with by means of arguments submitted to a common norm. Any real relation is lacking. As it so happens, then, the discussion is not a discussion. It is a confrontation. And what becomes clear to everyone while reading the text is not that one will convince the other, but that there will be a winner and a loser. This further explains why Socrates’ methods in this dialogue are hardly fairer than Callicles’. Where there is a will there is a way; what is at stake is to win, and especially to win over the minds of the youths who witness the scene.

Callicles is eventually defeated. He doesn’t acknowledge defeat, but becomes mute and remains in his corner. Note that he is the loser in a theatrical dialogue by Plato. Here we have probably one of the rare occurrences where someone like Callicles is defeated. Such are the joys of theatre.

As regards this situation, what does philosophy consist in? The unique task of philosophy here is to show us that we must choose, that we must choose between these two forms of thought. We must choose either to be with Socrates or to be with Callicles. In this example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision. Its proper task is to make the choice clear. Hence, we can say: a philosophical situation involves the moment in which a choice is proclaimed – a choice of existence, or a choice of thinking.

Second example: the death of a mathematician, Archimedes. Archimedes is one of the greatest minds ever known to humanity. To this day, his mathematical texts amaze. He is someone who had already reflected upon the infinite; he practically invented infinitesimal calculus twenty centuries before Newton. He was an exceptional genius.

Archimedes was a Sicilian Greek when Sicily was invaded and occupied by the Romans. He participated in the resistance and invented new war machines, but the Romans finally won out. Once the Roman occupation began, Archimedes took up his activities again. He was in the habit of drawing geometrical figures in the sand. One day, as he was thinking on the beach, using complicated figures traced on the shore, a Roman soldier arrived, a sort of liaison officer, telling him that the Roman General Marcellus wanted to see him. The Romans were very curious about the Greek thinkers, a little like the CEO of a cosmetics multinational might be curious about a philosopher of renown. So General Marcellus wanted to see Archimedes. Between us, I don’t think that it could be said that General Marcellus was proficient in mathematics. Simply, and it is an honour to his curiosity, he wanted to see what a résistant such as Archimedes was like. Hence the liaison officer on the beach. But Archimedes didn’t budge. The soldier repeated: ‘General Marcellus wants to see you.’ Archimedes still did not respond. The Roman soldier, who can’t have been terribly conversant with mathematics either, couldn’t comprehend that someone might disregard an order from the General Marcellus. ‘Archimedes! The General wants to see you!’ Archimedes looked up slightly and said to the soldier: ‘Let me finish my demonstration.’ The soldier responded: ‘What, are you going on with “your demonstration”? Marcellus wants to see you!’ Without responding, Archimedes resumed his calculations. After a certain time, the soldier, by now absolutely furious, drew his sword and struck him. Archimedes fell dead, his body effacing the geometrical figure in the sand.

Why is that a philosophical situation? Because it expresses the following: that between the right of state and creative thought, especially the pure ontological thought embodied in mathematics, there is no common denominator, no real discussion. In the end, power is violence, whereas creative thought knows no constraint other than its own immanent rules. In the law of his thought, Archimedes remains outside of the action of power. The time proper to mathematical demonstrations is unable to integrate into its process the urgencies and the summons of military victors. This is why violence was ultimately used – proof of the fact that there is no common denominator, and no common chronology, between power, on the one hand, and truths, on the other: truths as creation.

Let’s recall in passing that at the end of the Second World War when the American Army was occupying the suburbs of Vienna, a GI killed, seemingly without recognizing him or being aware of who he was, the greatest musical genius of the time, the composer Anton Webern. An accident. An accidentally philosophical situation. Let’s say that between truths and power there is a distance, which is the distance between Marcellus and Archimedes. It is a distance that the liaison officer, no doubt an obtuse but disciplined soldier, did not succeed in crossing. Philosophy, in this instance, has a mission to shed light on this distance. It must reflect upon and think the distance without measure, or the distance whose measure philosophy itself must invent.

First definition of the philosophical situation: clarify the choice, the decision. Second definition of the philosophical situation: clarify the distance between power and truths.

My third example is a film, an astonishing film by the Japanese director Mizoguchi called The Crucified Lovers. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful films about love ever made.

The nature of the film’s story is extremely commonplace. It is set in classical Japan, whose plastic qualities, especially in black and white, seem inexhaustible. A young woman is married to the proprietor of a small workshop, an honest man who lives in affluence. He is a bit of a drunkard, and a bit of a womanizer, not in a nasty way, but she doesn’t love him, doesn’t desire him. Enter a young man, an employee, with whom she falls in love. Obviously, in these classical times, whose women Mizoguchi exalted for their endurance and misfortune, adultery is punished by death: the guilty must be crucified. The two lovers end up fleeing into the countryside. This sequence, which depicts their flight into the forest, into the world of paths, of cabins, of lakes and of boats, is absolutely extraordinary. Love, itself tormented by its own power over this hunted and harassed couple, is enveloped in a nature as opaque as it is poetic. All the while, the honest husband tries to protect the runaways. Husbands are obliged to denounce adulterers, otherwise they come to rue being held a party to it. Nevertheless, the husband, and this is proof that he loves his wife deeply, tries to gain time. He pretends that his wife has left for her parents’ place in the provinces … He really is a good husband. He is a very beautiful character in the film, of a dense mediocrity. But all the same the lovers are denounced and captured. They are taken to be tortured.

Finally, we come to the film’s last images, which constitute a new instance of a philosophical situation. The two lovers are tied back to back on a mule. The shot frames the two bound lovers going to their atrocious deaths; both of them are as if rapt, but without pathos: on their faces is simply the hint of a smile, a kind of fortification in the smile. The word ‘smile’ here is only an approximation. What their faces reveal is that they are totally in their love. But the film’s thought here, embedded in the infinitely nuanced black and white of the faces, is not at all the romantic idea of a fusion of love and death. These ‘crucified lovers’ never desired to die. The shot says, on the contrary: love is that which resists death.

At a conference at the Femis,¹ Deleuze, citing Malraux, said that art is something that resists death. Well, precisely, in those magnificent shots, the art of Mizoguchi not only resists death but gives us to understand that love also resists death. In doing this, he creates a tacit agreement between love and art, which is something that we know has existed for a long time.

What I refer to here as the ‘smile’ of the lovers, for lack of a better word, is a philosophical situation. Why? Because once more we come across the incommensurable, the relation without relation. That is, we see that between the event of love – the turning upside-down of existence – and the ordinary rules of life – the laws of the city and the laws of marriage – there is no common denominator. What will philosophy say to us? It will say: ‘We must think the event.’ We must think the exception. We must know what we have to say about that which is not ordinary. We must think change in life.

So, we can sum up the tasks of philosophy in relation to situations as follows:

1. Clarify the fundamental choices of thought. And such choice is ‘in the last instance’ (as Althusser would say) always a choice between that which is interested and that which is disinterested.

2. Clarify the distance between thought and power, that is, the distance between the state and truths. Measure this distance. Know if it can or cannot be crossed.

3. Clarify the value of the exception, of the event, of rupture. Moreover, do so against the continuity of life and against social conservatism.

Such are the three great tasks of philosophy: deal with choices, distances and exceptions. Or we should say, such are the tasks of philosophy as soon as it counts for something in life, for something other than an academic discipline. Further, and more profoundly, philosophy, confronted with such circumstances, seeks the link between the three types of situations: it seeks the link between a choice, a distance and an exception. A philosophical concept, in Deleuze’s sense, that is as a creation, is, I maintain, always that which knots together a problem of choice (or of decision), a problem of distance (or of gap), and a problem of exception (or of event).

The most profound philosophical concepts say something like: ‘If you want your life to have meaning, it is imperative that you accept the event, that you remain at a distance from power, and that you hold resolutely to your decision.’ This is the story that philosophy is forever telling us, in all kinds of ways: be in the exception, in the sense of event; keep a distance from power; and accept the consequences of a decision, however remote and difficult they may be.

Understood in this way, and only in this way, philosophy really is something that helps to change existence.

Following Rimbaud, it is often said that ‘true life is elsewhere’. Philosophy is not worth an hour’s effort if it is not committed to the fact that the true life be present. As regards circumstances, true life is presented in choices, in distances and in events.

Yet, on the side of circumstances, one should not lose sight of the fact that a choice is forced upon us to arrive at the thought of the true life; and this choice, as I have said, is grounded in the sole criterion of incommensurability.

Uniting our three examples, then, is the fact that they are founded on a relation between heterogeneous terms: Callicles and Socrates; the Roman soldier and Archimedes; and the lovers and society.

Any philosophical rapport with a situation will thus involve staging an impossible relation; it is like a story we are told. We are told about the discussion between Callicles and Socrates, about the murder of Archimedes, about the story of the crucified lovers.

Hence, we are told about a relation between two elements. But at the same time the narrative establishes that this relation is not a relation, that it is a negation of all relations. So much so that what we are ultimately told about is a rupture: a rupture with natural and socially established relations. Of course, in order to relate a rupture it is necessary to relate a relation. Yet, ultimately, such a story is about rupture. A choice must be made between Callicles and Socrates. It is imperative to break absolutely with one of the two. Similarly, if you side with Archimedes, you cannot side with Marcellus. Or again, if you voyage with the lovers right until the end, then you will never again side with the rule of conjugality.

So it can be said that philosophy, which is thought, not about what is, but about what is not – thought, not about contracts but about ruptures of contracts – is exclusively interested in relations that are not relations.

Long ago, Plato said that philosophy implies an awakening. And he knew perfectly well that awakening implies a difficult rupture with sleep. As it was for Plato, and will always be, philosophy is what consists in the seizure by thought of what breaks with the sleep of thought.

So it is legitimate to think that each time there is a paradoxical relation, that is, a relation that is not a relation, or a situation of rupture, then philosophizing is possible.

I insist on this point: it is not because there is ‘something’ that philosophy exists. Philosophy does not simply involve reflec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Philosophy and Circumstances
• Part Two: Uses of the Word ‘Jew’
• Part Three: Historicity of Politics: Lessons of Two Revolutions