On the Subject of Badiou: A Deleuzian Critique (original) (raw)
Related papers
Deleuze and Badiou on Being and the Event
Deleuze and Metaphysics (Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian & Julia Sushytska Eds.), 2014
In the mid-1970s, Badiou turns in mockery to the philosophy of "Saint Gilles and Saint Félix," which he qualified as "egoist" and "anti-militantist." 1 The "ideology of desire" that Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus is unfit for supporting real struggles. It defends nothing more, argues Badiou, than a "anarcho-desiring" and "bourgeois" conception of political struggles. 2 It is in this context that Badiou sends his "brigades" into Deleuze's classes with the mission of denouncing Deleuzian politics insensitive to workers' concerns. 3 These attacks launched against the "micro-political" model of the "molecular revolutions" multiplied until the mid-1980s. Badiou then re-assessed his positions. He remained uninterested in Deleuze and Guattari's joint texts, yet nuanced his assertion regarding the goal of freeing Deleuze's solo works from the anarchic philosophy of desire. In his 1997 book devoted to Deleuze, Badiou argues that Deleuzian thought has nothing of the anarcho-desiring expressionism with which it is often associated. This thought remains, on the contrary, "resolutely classical." 5 From the very first chapter of Badiou's work, we learn that the two thinkers exchanged an intense correspondence between 1991 and 1994 (for obscure reasons, Deleuze seems to have destroyed these letters) and that Badiou considers Deleuze his primary philosophical rival in the development of an "ontology of the multiple"; the two form "a sort of paradoxical tandem." In perusing this work, the reader quickly understands that Badiou considers Deleuze's vitalist attempt at thinking the pure multiple to be a failure. The most polemic part of his interpretation argues thatunlike what is generally believed-Deleuze's thought is not a philosophy of difference and of infinite differentiation. Rather, it was rigorously and platonically oriented to the question of the univocity of being. This argument has numerous and sometimes counter-intuitive implications. With the failure of Deleuzian vitalism, which operates on an ascetic thinking of the transcendence of One,
Distinguishing the Event: Badiou's Challenge to Deleuze's Account of Multiplicity and Change
Is there a statement to which both Deleuze and Badiou rally in their thought? They share in the proclamation that Badiou picks out in Plato's Parmenides dialogue: 'the one is not' (Badiou 2005a: 34). This means that we must be rid of any dialectic of 'the One' and 'the many'. The multiple is to be thought without presupposing any form of oneness or unity. They aim to be faithful to the non-being of the one by speaking of the multiple on its own terms. Oneness or unity is not given in advance and therefore multiple being is liberated and able to relate and develop as multiplicity. It follows that Deleuze and Badiou are equally concerned with forms of unity or organization that result from processes immanent to the multiple. However, they differ when it comes to the nature of these multiplicities. For Deleuze there are intensive multiplicities and extensive multiplicities from the start. For Badiou we must begin with extensive multiplicities only. This presents us with quite different landscapes which are to be the settings for 'events' and the thought and action which respond to these events.
A Cartesian Rereading of Badiou's Political Subjectivity
Philosophy Today, 2019
This article traces the consequences for Badiou’s political subjectivity if his understanding of the Cartesian subject is incorrect. For Badiou, the faithful subject, political and otherwise, is formed through fidelity to the appearance of an event of truth, and the process of this fidelity creates a world. These truths are immanent to the worlds in which they appear. An obscure subject, however, is faithful to a negation, while a reactive subject denies the appearance of a truth’s event. Badiou’s subject radicalizes Lacan’s radicalization of the Cartesian subject, but for him both Descartes and Lacan consider the subject stable since they are caused by truth rather than by the event of a truth. However, immanent to Descartes’s philosophy is an unstable subject, thanks to the role of the imagination in the discovery of the cogito. Fidelity to this immanent Cartesian subject shows Lacan as an obscure subject and Badiou as reactive.
seek to formulate the conditions under which a subject can participate in or be submitted to an Event. For Badiou the Event is a moment in which truth is revealed. 1 Event introduces a rupture in the unchanging order of the actual. It poses an alternative and allows for the emergence of a new world. The Event can be represented, often in a clear and distinct manner, and become a basis for a politicized form of subjectivity. A new political territoryterritory that breaks with the confines of capitalism and the parliamentary democracycan be formed only given an orientation at and faithfulness to an Event. The philosophical point of departure of Deleuzehis reversal of Platonism -does not allow him to speak of the truth that is revealed in the Event. It does neither allow for any search for clear and well distinct formulations which can represent the Event. For Badiou Deleuze is incapable of thinking a political subject that is faithful to an Event and can act accordingly. 2 This criticism is unjustified. The philosophical point of departure of Deleuze does not prevent him from searching of concrete formulations of subjective relationship towards an Event. In analysis of the phantasm in Logic of Sense as well as in the analysis of the various becomings undertaken in 'Thousand Plateaus' we find Deleuze and Guattari's contributions to a constructivist politics of public and individual life. Phantasm helps us to select the true problems and allow for a search of adequate solutions. The conceptualisation of the relation to Concepts that are crucial for the understanding of the political dimension of the ontology of Logic of Sense are double causality and the quasi-cause. The causality proper to the matter is not the only type of causality. The emergence of the surface of sense introduces ruptures into the material causal chain. It introduces Events that allow for emergence of new forms of organisation. Depth generates surface but is subsequently influenced by the Events that are proper to this surface. 8
in a very interesting article (the text of a talk given in September 2001), entitled "Existe-t-il quelque chose comme une politique deleuzienne?" ("Does something like a Deleuzian politics exist?"), devoted to the subject of Deleuze and politics, Badiou goes out of his way to be just with Deleuze’s ideas and to highlight their points of convergence. Badiou does not always show the same concern for a charitable and equitable reading, and often he is quite reductive and quite polemical. However, in this text he is trying hard to do Deleuze justice, while still indicating their points of disaccord. This is why I wish to give the text an extended analysis.
Description Following the publication of his magnum opus L’être et l’événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France’s greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticising Badiou’s stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou’s concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognised as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou’s work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark. Authors, editors and contributors Paul Ashton Victoria and LaTrobe University A. J. Bartlett The University of Melbourne Justin Clemens The University of Melbourne
Deleuze and Badiou: Novelty and Self-Reference
Badiou and Deleuze both elaborate metaphysical/ontological systems that show that radically novel changes take place. Deleuze develops a metaphysics in which difference is another name for the new: habit for instance ‘draws something new from repetition—namely difference’. For Badiou, events occur only with domains of specifically human functioning, in politics, art, love and science. In Being and Event in particular, events are precipitated by another specifically human capacity: the ineradicable possibility of self-reference built into language.I argue that novelty production in Deleuze stems from a structurally similar function of self-reference, but one whose domain is wider than that of human language and typically includes organic matter in evolutionary systems. To the extent that Badiou’s overall argument depends on postulating events in order to explain the manifest existence of novelty, his argument fails.