Reflections on the Philosophy and Anti-Philosophy of Art

Abstract

BADIOU AND RANCIERE When reading Alain Badiou, especially the topical works that deal with politics and art, one is immediately struck by the urgency with which he delimits the identity of philosophy. Perhaps having done more than anyone in recent memory to separate vulgar theoretical production from the supposed purity of philosophy, Badiou is never quite sure what to make of thinker like Jacques Ranciere, whose theoretical approach, to him, consists of a rebellious apprehension of discursive positivities.1 Ranciere's political-aesthetic interventions provoke from Alain Badiou philosophy's ageold drive to classify and categorize, and his attempts to pin down Ranciere immediately call to mind Plato's efforts to track down the sophist in the dialogue by that name. Badiou has made career out of encouraging us to re-connect with the long disparaged tradition of philosophy, and, as was the case with Plato, such philosophical exhortations inevitably rely upon discourse on philosophy's outside in order to gain traction. This is more, however, than philosophy's immemorial battle with sophistry; for Badiou it is the question of the very conditions that enable to be the discourse of the true: art, love, politics, and science. Sophistry of course remains the enemy, and Badiou never fails to marshal the charge when confronted with an opponent who complicates our picture of truth.2 Ranciere, however, is never, to my knowledge, painted with that brush. Badiou instead places Ranciere within genealogy of what he terms Anti-philosophy is not sophistry, and it should immediately be pointed out that the title is not intended as term of insult, or at least not severe one. Indeed, Badiou acknowledges certain debt to anti-philosophy, via Lacan, and suggests, in an oft-quoted remark, philosophy should always think as closely as possible to antiphilosophy.3 Badiou distinguishes antiphilosophy from on the basis of attitude, if not content or method. It is type of thought that is constituted, if we are to believe Badiou, in hostility to the systematic pretensions of proper. It deploys the logical and analytical tools of against itself in an effort to point to its tacit assumptions or systematic failures. It is helpful, I suggest, to distinguish between two main species of anti-philosophy. The religious variety, as Peter Hallward explains, opposes transcendent and ineffable meaning to die strong rational claims of philosophy.4 Anti-philosophy thus characterizes those forms of thought that posit founding act of intuition or unsayability, such as is to be found in Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel. The term, however, also includes the early Wittgenstein who, in the Tractatus, famously restricts to position of silence on matters extending beyond the verification of the natural sciences.5 In its second, historical-critical form, anti-philosophy is an investigation that, following the lineage that passes from Nietzsche to Ranciere via Foucault, exposes the supposed purity of philosophical concepts by excavating their historical soil. This species of anti-philosophy tempers the claims of reason by exhibiting their historical contingency, tacit political assumptions or, as was the case in The Philosopher and His Poor, the machinations of philosophical apparatus that elaborates itself through elitist exclusions. To describe Ranciere's enterprise as antiphilosophical is not, for all that, to say that his critique of does not emerge from itself. Even on Badiou's terms, anti-philosophy is para-philosophy that accompanies it throughout its long history, and without which itself could not advance. Ultimately, for Badiou, what tips Ranciere into the camp of anti-philosophy, is his unwillingness to move from critique to affirmation. Note how Badiou reconstructs Ranciere's supposed methodological principles: Always situate yourself in the interval between discourses without opting for any of them; reactivate conceptual sediments without lapsing into history; deconstruct the postures of mastery without giving up the ironic mastery of whosoever catches the master out. …