Abstract
Alain Badiou’s suggestion that we are currently poised at a point of the ‘rebirth of history’ is perhaps signalled by the recent somewhat feverish reception of his own work. With over a dozen of the 76-year-old French philosopher’s books published in English since the start of 2010, with his ideas increasingly taken up across the human sciences, with an International Journal of Badiou Studies now established – we are surely witnessing something rather extraordinary. The moment, then, is probably a good one for a book such as Philosophy and the Event, which is composed of a series of interviews with Badiou, across all of his major concerns – politics, love, art, science, and philosophy (a chapter on each) – providing a thinker with the capacity for pithy, surprising, bracing formulations a good stage for a more popular account of his central concerns.
There will be little in Philosophy and the Event that will be new for those who have long followed Badiou’s work. However, his crisp encapsulations of his most difficult works, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, together with an outline of the planned third volume, The Immanence of Truths, his occasional clarifications or reformulations, and the dialogue with a lucid and probing interviewer – and one willing to introduce Metallica into the conversation! – makes this of interest to specialists, too. For the most part, then, we get, here, a rather clear laying out of the fundamentals of Badiou’s philosophy. This approach – combining the influences of Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, Plato, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin and Mao, set theory – centres around a number of important notions, such as the event, truth, subjectivization, multiplicities and fidelity. According to Badiou, being is best approached through mathematics and can be understood as ‘a pure multiplicity’ (p. 106). Given this conclusion, the post-modern emphasis on difference is beside the point, for Badiou: ‘Difference is what there is’ (p. 41), and sameness, ‘the in-common’ (p. 57), is the really interesting question. This rather logical ontological approach, however, is complicated by the notion that, apart from the mathematically discernable existence of bodies and language, there exist truths.
The importance given to truth again marks Badiou’s separation from the post-modern relativization of truth, but neither is truth, in Badiou’s account, about correspondence between world and representation. Truth, instead, is linked to the event, a break or rupture that unsettles the state of the situation, ‘something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable’ (p. 9). An event can happen in one of four realms – the four ‘conditions’ of philosophy, which is purely about thinking these truths and their consequences – art, politics, science, and love. The encounter of the event is perhaps most easily understood in the case of love, the ‘scene of the Two’ (p. 40), the shock of ‘falling’ in love. Truth, here, is an ‘undertaking’, ‘a process made possible by the event’ (p. 12). This truth procedure, more closely, involves subjectivization, the creation of a subject determined to show fidelity to that event, to ‘go with the consequences’, as it were. In Badiou’s case, and in the realm of politics, for instance, he has insisted on his own fidelity to the event of ‘1968’.
This event, then, summons the subject. That is, Badiou suggests that prior to the evental encounter and fidelity we are in mere animality (repetition, opinion rather than knowledge, etc.). We only become subjects through such truth procedures. We may always abandon such truths, of course, and this question of fidelity to or abandonment of truths is, for Badiou, the only real sense in which we can speak of ethics and of evil. Here, he has trenchantly resisted both ethics as a concrete set of propositions and the post-modern-influenced ‘return to ethics’ (as well as the closely linked rising fortunes of the discourse of human rights), found, very often, intertwined with the notion of finitude – the emphasis on limits of human knowledge and action. Truth, by contrast, is the realm of the infinite and the universal.
This is, unsurprisingly, rather controversial stuff – especially as these formulations are so tightly interwoven with Badiou’s decisive political statements. Most importantly, here, Badiou has proposed that we must bring to life a ‘third sequence’ of the ‘communist hypothesis’. The first sequence is that of Marx, the proletariat, class struggle; the second, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, is about achieving victory, about organization, marked by the figure of the party. The third sequence will be, above all, about re-inventing the communist Idea, beyond the now saturated language of the proletariat, Marxism, the party, and so on.
Such forthrightness and daring are evident in Badiou’s diagnostic theses and arguments about the present. In terms of politics, he claims we live in a period of straightforward restoration – a-political consensus around the rule of merchandise and democracy (which he is relentlessly and provocatively hostile towards). This consensus, built on the withering of ‘really existing socialism’ and the supposed disappearance of class, reduces the necessary delineation of enemies in politics to the clash of civilizations, ‘a fairly pathetic combat between tradition and pornography [merchandise]’ (p. 31). In the realm of love, today, we are pulled between Romantic visions of fusion and marriage as convenient illusion. In art, Badiou suggests that ours is a time of ‘research and obscurity’ (p. 78), asserting the need for an ‘affirmationist art’, which would be ‘unified like a demonstration, surprising like a night raid, elevated [in presenting an Idea] like a star’ (pp. 86–87). And, again, science – which is understood rather restrictively by Badiou and apparently in accordance with a discipline’s proximity to mathematics – is negatively marked at present by its alignment with ‘mercantile consumption’ (p. 93). And, outside of these four conditions, there is plenty of lively provocation throughout the book: for example – reflections on Palestine/Israel and the charge of anti-Semitism; a critique of environmentalism as ‘a millenarianism’, a perspective that leaves us merely with ‘animalized humanity’ bereft of an Idea (p. 35); the suggestion of the ‘withering away of the family’, which is understood as a ‘consumption unit’ (p. 51).
It is worth turning, finally, to some of the innovative parts of the text and to one or two critical questions that might be raised. In terms of innovations, there appear to be certain shifts in Badiou’s thinking around the artistic subject, as well as some interesting insistence on art’s unity. Most important, though, is Badiou’s encapsulation of his plans for the third volume of Being and Event, which will be dedicated to elaborating on subjectivization and its affects – ‘enthusiasm for politics, joy for scientific knowledge, pleasure for art and happiness for love’ (p. 105) – as well to exploring the problem of the ‘full life’. In terms of critical questions, Tarby raises again the important problem of the exhaustiveness of Badiou’s four conditions. Why, for instance, amorous love as truth procedure, but not friendship? Might not, say, spirituality constitute another realm of events and truths? A closely related question that is often raised is the possibility of ‘bad’ events. Here, sceptics will wonder about Badiou’s refusal to characterise anything other than his preferred political, artistic, etc. tastes and commitments as events, as having the possible status of truths. Bluntly, might not fascism exist as event, and might there be a shifting of the co-ordinates and a transformatory procedure of subjectification after a fascist encounter? Here, Badiou’s crucial specifications are those of equality and universality, which will assuage the doubts of those already leaning towards his own politics, but will surely seem unjustified to others. A last question is of particular concern to sociologists, on whom Badiou is typically hard. Is there a sociology in or any sociological applicability to his work? One issue, here, is that the event has often appeared to critics as ‘miraculous’, as coming from nowhere, as unable to be discerned from anything that we might sociologically describe or explain. The problem of Marxism is interesting, in this respect. At one moment, Badiou will suggest that Marxism is now saturated, gone. At another, it is deemed perfectly adequate to the comprehension of the operation of contemporary capitalism. It may be unfair on Badiou, especially as he declares our task as experimental, as one of making the communist Idea exist anew, but there is a glaring absence in his suggestions of both a social science that might succeed historical materialism and a collective subject that might replace Marxism’s working class politics.
Despite such hesitations, it is, I think, quite hard not to be drawn to Badiou, to wonder if perhaps Zizek is right in contending that ‘a figure like Plato … walks here among us’. After a moment marked by the post-modern emphasis on limits, beyond the once widely compelling discourses of post-socialism and post-Marxism, Badiou’s forceful, startling body of work is one that often feels like something of an event itself, one that strikes a series of unsettling, ruptural blows.