Think Again

Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy

Peter Hallward

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780826459077
• eBook ISBN: 9781441134882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Slavoj Š ZiŠzek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou's recent work is "the event of contemporary philosophy." Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou's work, presents a range of essays which explore Badiou's most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. Alain Badiou has devised perhaps the only truly inventive philosophy of the subject since Sartre. Almost alone among his peers, Badiou's work promises a genuine renewal of philosophy, a subject he sees as conditioned by innovation in spheres ranging from radical politics to artistic experimentation to mathematical formalization. Slavoj Š ZiŠzek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou's recent work is "the event of contemporary philosophy." Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou's work, presents a range of essays which explore Badiou's most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.

1

The History of Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy b

Etienne Balibar

The twenty-first meditation in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, which is devoted to Pascal, opens with the following quotation from the Pensées: ‘The history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth.’1 The pensée in question is numbered 858 by Brunschvicg, and 776 by Lafuma. Although it is not my intention here to discuss Badiou’s proposed interpretation of Pascal for its own sake, or to discuss all the problems raised by this provocative formula, I must begin with a few comments on both points.

Reduced to a sentence, this pensée of Pascal’s has a very strange status: although it is not impossible to relate it to others in such a way as to outline a possible Pascalian doctrine of history or of truth, of even of their reciprocity, it has yet to find its rightful place in any of the various arrangements of the Pensées that have been proposed. In his very interesting attempt to reconstruct the continuity of the several Pascalian ‘discourses’ that may have existed prior to the posthumous fragmentation of the Pensées, Emmanuel Martineau is unable to find any satisfactory place for it, which suggests a contrario that it marks a discontinuity, a singular utterance, and that it is in some way in excess of the theoretical economy and the writing regime of the Pensées.2 We might add that it has very rarely been commented upon as such in the enormous literature devoted to Pascal, which means, amongst other things, that its genealogy remains obscure, despite the undeniable family resemblance to major theological formulations of medieval origin and, going further back, of Augustinian origin, such as that of the traditio veritatis, which designates the function of the Church within the history of salvation. For my own part, I am tempted to think that Pascal was the first person to formulate the phrase histoire de la vérité in French, and I will come back in a moment to the enigma of its posterity.

Turning to the few discussions of this fragment that do exist, we find that in the conclusion to his Blaise Pascal: Commentaires (1971), Henri Gouhier sees it as the slogan for a militant struggle designed to provide a topical inscription for the truth of the Church Fathers, the tradition of which is preserved by the Church. This means that it is always possible for it to correct its errors by going back to its origins.3 For his part, Jean Mesnard extends its meaning to the sequence of the Old and New Testaments, and makes it the basis for a whole theory of ‘figures’, or of the twofold movement of the veiling and unveiling of the truth that has been going on since the world began, and whose overall meaning is supplied by the sequence of prophecies and miracles.4

To the extent that Badiou himself elucidates the formula – and he does so only indirectly, as the phrase is used as the epigraph to a chapter in which, although it is not formally discussed, it does find an interpretation – his reading is midway between Gouhier’s pragmatism and Mesnard’s grand narrative: the Church is not so much a pre-existing institution established by divine right, as a retroactive effect of an ‘interventionist logic’ or of the decision to choose in which that logic is concentrated. That decision’s sole referent in reality (i.e. in history) is the absolutely anti-natural and undecidable event of the miracle, indeed the most miraculous of all miracles, namely the coming of the Saviour, which contradicts all rules (‘the symbol of a suspension of the law’ [EE, 239]) and therefore demonstrates the inadequacy of rules. It should also be noted that this chapter in Badiou’s book is one of those – there are not many of them, but they are all significant – which include professions of atheism on the part of an author who speaks in the first person. Such professions are always found together with references to militant faith or to fidelity as correlates of the evental (événementielle):

Even though I can scarcely be suspected of Christian zeal, I have never enjoyed this self-seeking nostalgia for a scientific and moralizing Pascal, I know full well that the real target of those who denounce Pascal’s commitment to Christianity is in fact his militant conception of truth […]. What I admire above all else in Pascal, on the contrary, is precisely the attempt, in difficult circumstances, to swim against the current, not in the reactive sense of the word, but in order to discover modern forms for an old conviction (EE 245).

I find it very interesting that Badiou should not only place a meditation on Pascal at the heart of his study of ontology, but that he should also choose to cite this excessive and enigmatic formula. It would be interesting immediately to ask Badiou what – in a transposition that is certainly devoid of any Christian zeal – becomes of the term Church, which is tautologically placed by Pascal in a complete equivalence (‘should properly be called’) with ‘truth’, as defined, at least, by the modality of history: is it a meaningless remainder, a hidden key, or a relative condition? But that is not how I wish to begin, as I do not believe that any theologico-political principle is immediately at work in the theorization of truth elaborated by Badiou, or that its importance can be marked in that way. I am convinced, on the other hand, that Badiou has intervened in an original manner, or a ‘strong’ way, in a philosophical conjuncture marked by a characteristic debate about the question and even the phrase ‘history of truth’, not in order to offer a different conception, but to disagree with most of his contemporaries by swimming against the current. What he has done, not only by using the expression but also by signalling its Pascalian usage, is of the greatest interest, both for the reason he gives and for another reason on which I will now dwell for a moment by outlining the most schematic points of reference for what might, in other circumstances, form a chapter in a history of French philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century.

IDERRIDA, CANGUILHEM, FOUCAULT

The expression histoire de la vérité is not, whatever what we might think, a very common expression. And nor is it an expression that can be easily translated, not in the sense of finding a literal equivalent (there is nothing to prevent anyone saying ‘History of the Truth’ in English, Geschichte der Warheit or even Warheitsgeschichte in German, or Historia de la verdad in Spanish – in the sense that Borges wrote a Historia de la eternidad), but in the sense of establishing its acceptability within the philosophical idiom. And yet it is one of the main themes of the logico-phenomenological, and logico-epistemological, debate which, from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, helped – perhaps for the last time – to confer upon French-language philosophy a relative autonomy with respect to its international environment. To demonstrate that this is the case, one has only to study the way in which an expression that is, I repeat, both unusual and restrictive circulates in the writings of a constellation of authors. At the same time, it signals the differences between them: it constitutes, in other words, the index of a point of heresy that both unites and divides them, or brings them together in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ around their differend. Let me simply give three essential points of reference: Derrida, Canguilhem, Foucault.

I will begin with Derrida and Canguilhem, who both use the expression in a hypothetical and, ultimately, critical way. Derrida does so in certain key passages in his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which dates from 1962:

The culture and tradition of truth are marked by a paradoxical historicity. In one sense, they can be divorced from all history, as they are not intrinsically affected by the empirical content of real history […]. For both those who confine themselves to historical facticity and those who lock themselves into the ideality of value, the historical originality of the story of truth can only be that of myth. But in another sense, which is in keeping with Husserl’s intention, the tradition of truth is history at its most profound and most pure […]. Once phenomenology escapes both conventional Platonism and historicist empiricism, the moment of truth it wishes to describe is indeed that of a concrete and specific history whose foundations are the act of a temporal and creative subjectivity […]. Only a communitarian subjectivity can produce and fully vouch for the historical system of truth […]. In any case, if a history of truth does exist, it can only be this concrete implication and reciprocal encirclement of totalities and absolutes. Which is possible only because we are dealing with ideal and spiritual implications […]. Husserl therefore provisionally refrained from discussing the historical content of the Erstmaligkeit only in order first to raise the question of its objectivation, or in other words its being launched into history and its historicity. For a meaning [sens] enters history only when it has become an absolute object, that is to say an ideal object which must, paradoxically, have broken all the moorings that tied it to the empirical ground of history. The preconditions for objectivity are therefore the preconditions for historicity itself.5

I cite these formulations at some length because their object is obviously very close to the object we will be dealing with in Being and Event. In a sense, it is still the same debate. Here, Derrida ‘reads’ the problematic of the history of truth in the Husserlian text he is translating, but elsewhere – in a series that began with Of Grammatology and that still continues in recent texts such as Spectres of Marx – he absorbs it into his own critical discourse at the cost of a decisive torsion: the history of truth becomes a fable, a delusion or trap [leurre], but that delusion is as essential as a transcendental appearance:

This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not an illusion like any other – as it is the precondition for the very idea of truth – but we will demonstrate elsewhere how it deludes itself [se leurre]. That delusion is the history of truth …6

The history of the ghost remains a history of phantomalization, and the latter will indeed be a history of truth, a history of the becoming-true of a fable, unless it be the reverse, a fabulation of truth, in any case a history of ghosts, or ghost story [histoire de fantômes].7

We in fact know that, for Derrida, the temporalization of idealities is always already caught up in the movement of the dissemination of their meaning because their status as writing or, more accurately, as archi-écriture has inscribed in their origins the gap of a difference that escapes all appropriation or mastery.

I will immediately contrast these formulations of Derrida’s with others from Canguilhem. They are contained in a single but essential text: the 1969 essay ‘What is a Scientific Ideology?’:

A history of the sciences that describes a science in its history as an articulated succession of facts of truth [faits de vérité] does not have to concern itself with ideologies […]. A history of the sciences that describes a science in its history as a gradual purification of norms of verification cannot but concern itself with scientific ideologies. What Gaston Bachelard described as, respectively, the obsolete history of the sciences and the sanctioned history of the sciences must be both separated out and interlaced. The sanction of truth or objectivity in itself implies a condemnation of the obsolete. But whilst what must later become obsolete does not at first initially expose itself to sanctions, verification itself cannot make truth appear […]. By insisting on writing the history of mere truth, we write an illusory history. M. Suchodolski is right on this point: the history of mere truth is a contradictory notion.8

I have demonstrated elsewhere that this formulation is related, on the one hand, to the famous expression borrowed from Koyré to resolve the long posthumous debate, which actually founds modern epistemology, about the status of Galilean science with respect to hypotheses and proofs: ‘Galileo did not always speak the truth, but he was in the true.’9 Which is to say that he worked by establishing ‘the true’ within the unfinished process of the verification of a mathematical theory of physico-cosmological invariants or ‘laws of nature’. On the other hand, it is also related to the reworking of the analysis of ‘epistemological obstacles’ in terms of scientific ideologies, which demonstrates not only that error is characteristic of scientific objectivity but also that it relates to the conflict that constitutes its practical relationship with the imaginary and with life. That is why, as it happens, Canguilhem describes error as the ‘mark of thought’. As we can see, Canguilhem adopts the idea of a history of truth only in a hypothetical sense, and does so in order to transform it into its opposite or, rather, to make it contain its opposite and thus give it a constituent meaning.

In order to complete and specify these two formulations we would have to inscribe them within their own genealogy. Where Derrida is concerned, we would have to look in particular at Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses (which he in a sense takes up where – as we are now in a better position to know – Merleau-Ponty left off)10 of ‘rationality in contingency’ and the sensible preconditions for the intersubjectivity that ‘step by step links us to history in its entirety’, on the basis of the last writings of Husserl.11 Where Canguilhem is concerned, we would have to look at Bachelard’s attempts to theorize an ‘epistemological history of the sciences’ in which the actuality and efficacy of science, and the division it establishes, determine, through recurrence and rectification, the meaning or direction (sens) of progress in the order of explanation. In a sense, Derrida is attempting to invert Merleau-Ponty by exploding his representation of meaning, just as Canguilhem attempts to correct Bachelard and to ground his idea of the normativity of knowledge in a critical anthropology. It is very striking to discover (and it would take only a short while to demonstrate the point) the extent to which both attempts are, whether they admit it or not, informed by a meditation on – or by the after-effect of – Cavaillès’ formulations in Sur la Logique et la théorie de la science,12 whose enigmatic evocation of a dialectic of the concept, as opposed to the activity of consciousness, provides a constant stimulus to the search for a viable philosophical formula, irreducible to both historicism and essentialism, for the equating of truth with historicity. We would also have to recall in some detail how these formulations (starting with Cavaillès himself, as he cites Husserl’s Crisis) form a counterpoint to the gradual reception of Husserl’s work on historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) and the Heideggerian theme of history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), on which any position with respect to the problem of ‘the essence of truth’ must obviously be based. Histoire de la vérité is in a sense the French equivalent of Geschichtlichkeit or of the Seinsgeschichte-Unverborgenheit, but the profoundly idiomatic use made of it by both Derrida and Canguilhem also reveals an irreducible discrepancy, which probably relates to a very different idea of ‘culture’. This takes us to the heart of the great debate, which is both epistemological and metaphysical (or post-metaphysical), characteristic of the French philosophical moment of the second half of the twentieth century.

But we now have to introduce a third character, who was by no means averse to playing the role of spoilsport: Michel Foucault. ‘The history of truth’ figures in remarkable fashion in several of his texts, most of them later than the ones I have just evoked, rather as though he were attempting to summarize the debate whilst at the same time decisively displacing it. The histoire de la vérité becomes a ‘political history of truth’ (which is not to be confused with a history of political truth, always assuming that there can be such a thing). At first sight, this seems to mean the ‘subjective’ sense of the historia rerum gestarum, or in other words that, when we are dealing with any enunciation of the truth, even in the form of scientific disciplines and their logical norm, we must reconstruct the system of the relations of power and the institutional divisions that govern its discursive being or its discursive materiality. But, ultimately, it also has the ‘objective’ sense of res gestae, or in other words the ‘politicity’ intrinsic in the ‘truth-telling’ of the ‘discourse of truth’ that constitutes the active moment in the relations of power, which is the prime issue at stake in the differential between domination and resistance, at least in certain historical societies. More specifically, this reworking of the concept, which means that the history of truth ‘should properly be called’ a political history of truth, must be inscribed within an uninterrupted series.

I will look only at the most obvious points of reference by taking us all back to our not too distant readings. First, L’Ordre du discours, where – at the cost of a break with Canguilhem’s epistemology that still pays tribute to it – we find the final, rationalist and even aufklärerisch version of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism: ‘It is as though, from the great Platon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘Consequences of Abstraction’
• 1 The History of Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy
• 2 Philosophy Without Conditions
• 3 Nihil Unbound: Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism
• 4 Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou
• 5 Badiou and Deleuze on the One and the Many
• 6 Badiou and Deleuze on the Ontology of Mathematics
• 7 Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event
• 8 States of Grace: The Excess of the Demand in Badiou’s Ethics of Truths
• 9 An Ethics of Militant Engagement
• 10 Communism as Separation
• 11 On the Subject of the Dialectic
• 12 From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real
• 13 What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’
• 14 The Fifth Condition
• 15 What Remains of Fidelity after Serious Thought
• 16 Badiou’s Poetics
• 17 Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics
• Afterword Some Replies to a Demanding Friend
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes
• eCopyright