That Dawn to Be Alive

Abstract

That Dawn to Be Alive Andrew Gibson, Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 326 pp, £70 hardcoverUnder long shadow of postmodernism, project of assigning any final meaning to history has come to be considered by many as naive, if not dangerous. A conception of human story which moves towards a future end point - a final totality associated with Hegel or Marx - is routinely dismissed by both critical theorists and empirical historians alike. Damning such theories at one moment, however, in next very same thinkers will replicate narratives of progress and development; statements aligned with a linear model if ever there were. Between such a linear model and pure relativity it falls to critical theory to provide some new alternatives. It is into this space that Andrew Gibson intrepidly goes with his work Intermittency.The new approach to historical reason that Gibson proposes is smuggled out of France in guise of a review of contemporary continental theorists. However, as Alain Badiou states in both a foreword and a dusk jacket quotation, it remains 'the most subtle and original study of a crucial orientation' to have been written: suggesting Gibsonian 'intermittency' may become a theory in its own right. Presented through work of five philosophers (Alain Badiou, Francoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Ranciere), 'intermittent' approach to history is to see it as a series of rupture points, crises, or Events, which shatter an otherwise concrete normality. Drawing on Jambet's conception of esoteric Islam, Gibson suggests these moments to be 'a juddering series of unpredictable and discrete singularities, the multiplied one, 1X1X1X1X1 ...' (p8). History is not linear, like a melody, it is not even staccato, as each of notes appears in middle of a profound silence, each representing a new beginning. Once new moment of history happens, one is then defined in terms of how one relates to new Event. Gibson fittingly presents each of his five readings as distinct responses to central insight of theory of intermittency.The general outline of theory will be familiar to readers of Badiou's two-part magnum opus Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds, and it is from this philosopher's works that central concept of intermittency is excavated within first chapter. Badiou 'rethinks world from ground up on basis of absolute philosophical privilege of contingency' (p24), reemerging into ethics, politics and truth through a commitment to Event. The 'exceptional value' springs from morass of 'unexceptional non-value' (p52) and it is on these rare occasions, occurring intermittently within history, that theory and practice unite in authentic response. Such a response is found in Francoise Proust's reading of Kant's 'exceptional value' of Sublime: 'Critique does not get its truth from history. The historical and critical events are rather two coincident presents' (p80). Kant enters modernity without an end in sight; his 'Enlightenment' is a process of becoming and, through Proust's encounter with Critiques, Gibson aligns it with project of historical intermittency. This early negotiation of Badiou and Proust's Kant erects banner under which Gibson will march for rest of book: History happens, get used to it.So how do we get used to it, or, in more academic terms, how is one to align one's subjectivity in response to Event? Through his readings of Jambet, Lardreau and Ranciere, Gibson suggests a number of possible responses, each of which reframes initial conception of Event in its elaboration. Christian Jambe t's study of Islamic gnosticism presents most insightful historical example of 'intermittency' in practice. In medieval Ismaili stronghold of Alamut, society lives in an 'imaginal world' ruled over by an absent God who is 'not of whole or One, but of lack'. …