Badiou Calls Research Articles

A Lacanian supplementation to love in L\u2019Immanence des v\xe9rit\xe9s

In L’Immanence des vérités, Alain Badiou rewrites the Platonic allegory of the cave. As the book’s structure reveals, Badiou’s central claim is that truths are absolute, for they are constituted by the dialectic between finitude and infinity, the consequence of which lies in the creation of the œuvre. Although love is often affected by individual difference, family, money, and social norms, philosophy calls for a rupture with these instances of finitude, awakening us to the truth that love is open to the possibility of infinity embodied by contingent encounter, amorous declaration, and the faithful construction of the Two. Badiou calls for subjectivization of this possibility in the form of the amorous œuvre, through and beyond the Lacanian impasse of the sexual non-relationship. This article supplements Badiouian love with Lacanian psychoanalysis by developing five points. First, the binary framework “Lacanian finitude vs Badiouian infinity” can be misleading. Second, Badiou himself regards the unconscious and the analytic discourse as inscribed by the dialectic between finitude and infinity. Third, Lacan allows us to recognize that the œuvre and the waste are not opposed, but rather supplementary to each other. Fourth, for both Lacan and Badiou, love constitutes the interlacing of the non-relationship and the Two. Fifth, the Badiouian amorous absolute must deal with the real of the absolute as the fusional One and thus, can be supplemented by the Lacanian problematic of the sexual relationship in its fantasmatic form of the One. Based on these points, this article elaborates such concepts as the amorous labor, the dialectic between œuvre and waste, and the artisan of love.

Bernard Shaw's Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel

Bernard Shaw's Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel

On Why Mathematics Can Not be Ontology

The formalism of mathematics has always inspired ontological theorization based on it. As is evident from his magnum opus Being and Event, Alain Badiou remains one of the most important contemporary contributors to this enterprise. His famous maxim—“mathematics is ontology” has its basis in the ingenuity that he has shown in capitalizing on Godel’s and Cohen’s work in the field of set theory. Their work jointly establish the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the standard axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, with Godel’s result showing their consistency to the affirmative, while Cohen’s showing it to the negative. These results serve as the cornerstone of Badiou’s mathematical ontology. In it, drawing heavily on Cohen’s technically formidable method of forcing, Badiou makes the latter result the key to his defense of the possibility of a faithful tracing of the consequences in the ‘state’ of an ‘event’ by a ‘subject’. Whereas, Godel’s result based on the assumption of constructability becomes the pivot for criticism of the general philosophical orientation that Badiou calls ‘constructivism’. Viewed from a position internal to mathematical formalism itself, and taking into account the twentieth century developments in the relevant field, Badiou’s stance seems to be neither appreciative of the actual course of such developments, nor just to the philosophical view point that was actually maintained by Godel. In the present paper, this concern is intended to be substantiated through an exposition of certain facts pertaining to the said developments as well as to Godel’s philosophical inclinations.

Negation, Structure, Transformation: Alain Badiou and the New Metaphysics

Abstract In this article, I discuss Alain Badiou’s 2008 address titled “The Three Negations.” Though the text was originally presented in a symposium concerning the relationship of law to Badiou’s theory of the event, I discuss the way this brief address offers an introduction to the broad sweep of Badiou’s metaphysics, outlining his accounts of being, appearing, and transformation. To do so, Badiou calls on the resources of three paradigms of negation: from classical Aristotelian logic, from Brouwer’s intuitionist logic, and in paraconsistent logics developed by DaCosta. I explain Badiou’s use of negation in the three primary areas of his metaphysics, as well as to diagnose the degrees of transformation that may have occurred in a situation. My analysis of Badiou’s use of negation in this text is aided by examples from his broader ontological oeuvre. I also explain the underlying requirement in Badiou’s work that formal considerations - mathematical or logical - get their sense by being tethered to readily-identifiable political, aesthetic, scientific, or interpersonal concerns. I conclude by addressing the foundation Badiou’s work establishes for pursuing a new metaphysics, and by discussing certain of the liabilities that remain in the wake of his account.

Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory by Luke Gibbons

Reviewed by: Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory by Luke Gibbons Andrew Gibson Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory. Luke Gibbons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. xx + 286. $45.00 (cloth). Joyce’s Ghosts is an important book. Indeed, read aright, it may be one of the most important books on Joyce to have appeared in the past twenty years. This may not be immediately obvious. It is cluttered with references to secondary sources; Gibbons would have been better off abandoning his habitual modesty and trusting more to his own often very fine intuitions and perceptions. The focus is unsteady, and parts of the book don’t seem very clearly related to its main theme—notably the first chapter, on the modernist text and the city, where hardly a ghost makes so much as the merest apparition. The comparisons and analogies (between “The Dead,” for example, and John Huston’s film of it), though interesting in themselves, sometimes distract a little from the force and originality of Gibbons’s central case. In its largest scope, we might summarize this case as follows: Joyce’s is a world in which what Alain Badiou calls “inexistents” of many kinds are as important as the beings the novelist represents; here “inexistents” are almost palpable and exert a certain pressure on the living.1 Working from this premise, Gibbons has produced a book that has the power to shift some of the most deeply rooted emphases conventional within Joyce studies. As such, it is a major contribution to the growing number of serious, scholarly volumes that not only prioritize a (British- and) Irish-centred Joyce, but do so increasingly diversely, with more and more divergent orientations and dispositions The dominant conception of Joyce, certainly within readings of him as an international modernist, has long characterized him as a “hard” one, to use a Poundian term of approval. Whether it was a question of the crystalline precision of his early prose, the rigor of his later concern with language, the concretion and immediacy of the environment he evoked, his vast immersion in the dense factuality of historical worlds, his seeming impatience with high-sounding rhetorics, romanticisms, and idealisms, his clear-eyed grasp of the vagaries of the flesh and sexuality, or the richness and scope of his mocking laughter, Joyce appeared to confront his readers with a [End Page 920] modernity that was ungainsayably solid, material, whose “sudden reality,” in his own words, was capable of smashing delusions “to a pulp.”2 When Stephen Dedalus advised himself to “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past,” he seemed to sum up a crucial aspect of the Joycean aesthetic.3 True, there was room for doubt. Was not almost all of Joyce’s work, certainly prior to Finnegans Wake, retrospective, a conjuration of vanished scenes? Might it not even be, in a certain way, elegiac? In “Oxen of the Sun,” was Stephen not possibly gesturing towards an aesthetic different to the “hard” one: “If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call?” (14.1114). Whether he was or not, they did troop to Joyce’s call in practically endless numbers. It is important to remember that the substantial biographical (and “modernist”) world of the later Joyce that has attracted such lavish devotion, with its Pounds, Gilberts, Beaches, Budgens, Weavers, Jolases, Léons, et al., was, if we except the fleeting verbal nods in the Wake, never a world he had the very slightest interest in writing about. In one way, it was as though he didn’t live in it at all. All the same, for decades, Joyce the necromancer had practically no status or purchase alongside, say, Hugh Kenner’s Joyce, a Joyce whirling forwards into a boundless modernity with all the vast energy of a literary juggernaut. Gibbons markedly departs from this kind of conception of Joyce. His Joyce is obsessed with Irish phantoms, spectres, disembodied presences. He is both a haunted writer and one who attends to a haunted world. Gibbons sets out from the right starting-points: Joyce’s susceptibility to...

The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

When Labor and Migration Dis‐Place Film: Sketch of an Idea

This essay proposes a sketch of an Idea for how to investigate connections between Film Studies, film as a medium, labor, and migration. It begins by making three interconnected provocations: (1) histories of Film Studies, and of film as a medium, should display constant engagement with labor, work, labor movements, class, and justice; (2) in our current world of globalized capital and culture, film embodies the unending processes of adjustment intrinsic to labor, class, and migration; (3) nowadays, images cross borders and boundaries easily, and thus call for a sustained critical look at how the medium of film represents matters of labor, class, and migration. Building on these provocations, the essay argues that labor, class, and migration might be, collectively, what Alain Badiou calls “a new sun” and “a new mental country” that Film Studies must desperately find lest, perhaps, Film Studies perishes. In so doing, the essay explores three interrelated questions: firstly, ways in which belief (in specific processes) can be described, prior to being applicable to anything; secondly, in a search for the real, in a quest for what is real, how an Idea of science is mobilized; and finally, ways in which “Labor”/“Migrant Labor” and “Film” can be perceived today.

THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.

The Hurt Locker: Cinematic Addiction, “Critique,” And the War on Terror

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically received “critical” film, as a symptom of today's prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today's dominant ideology, which Badiou calls “democratic materialism.” We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its depoliticizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today's democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist's (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of what Deleuze conceptualized as “time-images.” Our point here is that with the The Hurt Locker we are within “the cinema of the seer,” within a nihilistic portrayal of nihilism from inside, on the basis of highly formalized time-images that do not become politicized. In other words, The Hurt Locker is trapped within what it describes.

Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology

1. Being and Event When an English translation of Being and Event appeared in 2005, Alain Badiou took the opportunity to reminisce about the initial French publication some twenty years before: “at that moment I was quite aware of having written a ‘great’ book of philosophy.” He located that greatness in four “affirmations” and one “radical thesis.” Affirmation one: “Situations are nothing more, in their being, than pure multiplicity.” Two: “The structure of situations does not, in itself, deliver any truths. By consequence, nothing normative can be drawn from the simple realist examination of the becoming of things. . . . A truth is solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an effect of that order.” This type of truth-constituting rupture Badiou calls “the event.” Three: “A subject is nothing more than an active fidelity to the event of truth.” Four: “The being of a truth, proving itself an exception to any pre-constituted predicate of the situation in which that truth is deployed, is to be called ‘generic.’” A truth is a “generic procedure. And to be a Subject (and not a simple individual animal) is to be a local active dimension of such a procedure.” Finally, the “radical thesis”: “Insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself.”2 The thesis is indeed radical. Using language borrowed from set theory (Georg Cantor’s multiplicity, Paul Cohen’s generic) Badiou is, throughout, asserting that sets and their properties are there, regardless of whether

The Interesting, the Remarkable, the Unusual: Deleuze's Grand Style

Gilles Deleuze takes up the challenge to create a philosophy of the interesting, the remarkable and the unusual. He does this in what Alain Badiou calls the ‘Grand Style’, the style of Descartes, Spinoza and Kant whose philosophies arise in relation to developments in the natural sciences and mathematics. Grounding himself in the molar-molecular pair, Deleuze sets out a new image of thought. He conceptualises an immanent but still relatively closed, deterministic, atomistic and reversible system that is not immediately reduced to entropic equilibrium because its processes take place on the molecular level, at speeds which he hypothesises are beyond the speed of light. He postulates a manifold, a sphere of immanence that is the entire universe and not merely the Earth or our solar system. It is a system governed by sensitivity to initial starting points and unstable boundaries, thus although it is chaotic as well as probabilistic, it remains a mathematically formal, deterministic system.

Towards a Divine Atheism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Monotheism and the Passage of the Last God

In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heideggerian pathos of a “last god” and deny the affliction of finitude. I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of monotheism, as well as his thinking of the world, remains resolutely atheistic, or better a-theological, precisely because of Nancy’s insistence on finitude and his appeal to the Heideggerian motif of the last god. At the same time, I want to underline, by considering it as a Derridean paleonymy, the danger of Nancy’s maintenance of the word “god” to name the infinite opening of the world right at (a meme) the world.

Militants of Truth, Communities of Equality: Badiou and the ignorant schoolmaster

Badiou's philosophy of the ‘event’ has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou might call ‘the state of the situation’. After briefly outlining the manner in which Badiou's reinvigoration of the concept of ‘truth’ constitutes a serious challenge for the politics of difference and the ethics of alterity, this paper explores the significance for educational philosophy of what, borrowing from Jacques Rancière, Badiou calls the ‘axiom of equality’, or the notion that, in democratic politics, ‘equality must be postulated not willed’. I suggest that this axiom is best understood when read in relation to Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and thus explore an intrinsic link between Badiou's more obscure philosophical claims and political assertions on the one hand, and the question of education on the other. I further propose that the limitations of Badiou's criticism of Rancière's work, which suggests that he stops short of locating an effective political subject who might oppose the parliamentary state, are revealed most explicitly when we reassess Rancière's approach to education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in his more recent work on political aesthetics. Ultimately, however, I conclude that a truly democratic approach to education will have to learn from both Badiou and Rancière, and take seriously the ‘axiom of equality’.

Book Review: Badiou, A. (2007). The Century. Oxford, UK: Polity Press

Book Review: Badiou, A. (2007). The Century. Oxford, UK: Polity Press

Meta-estética e ética francesa do sentido (Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, Nancy)

"Meta-estética e ética francesa do sentido" é uma análise de alguns conceitos formadores do chamado "pós-estruturalismo" e de certos aspectos de sua seqüência histórica. Através de fontes textuais de pensadores que ocupam um momento significativo da produção filosófica internacional, com Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres e Jean-Luc Nancy, dos anos sessenta até os noventa, o texto coloca em perspectiva conceitos nevrálgicos e estratégicos ressituados nas suas implicações críticas. A manifestação das convergências ligando os pensamentos desses quatro filósofos permite ressaltar os bastidores especulativos de uma "condição poética do pensamento" (Alain Badiou) delineando os contornos de uma meta-estética do sentido que é ao mesmo tempo uma ética. Essa fusão, bem sintetizada na fórmula de Michel Serres, que diz que "a moral é a física", é determinada pelas elaborações, as experimentações e as conquistas realizadas na filosofia derridiana da desconstrução, na filosofia deleuziana do conceito, na filosofia serresiana da física e na filosofia nancyana da arealidade. Os processos em jogo nesses sistemas tentam descobrir nos estratos aporéticos do pensamento as chances de induzir uma cosmologia paradoxal e inaudita.