More notes on the Paul book. I’m finding it a challenge not being able to write in this book, and reading someone else’s notes, while interesting on one level, provides a sort of interference to the reading process. Ah well. 21 pages to go to the end. Hope to finish tonight, certainly by the end of the weekend, and then to write something more coherent. Anyway…
Paul, and presumably Badiou, has no time for those who “believe themselves to be guarantors of truth.” (44) I presume this is not ‘those guarantors’ but guarantors as such. Truth needs to be enacted, but not underwritten?
This is nice: “memory does not prevent anyone from prescribing time, including the past, according to its present determination (…) “memory” cannot settle any issue. There invariably comes a moment when what matters is to declare in one’s own name what took place, and to do so because what one envisages with regard to the actual possibilities of a situation requires it.” But “[w]e will not ask for proofs and counterproofs. We will not enter into debate with erudite anti-Semites, Nazis under the skin, with their superabdunance of “proofs” that no Jew was ever mistreated by Hitler.” (44) Brilliant.
The resurrection is not falsifiable or demonstrable. “It is pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and impossible.” (45) Sure, but what’s weird in reading this is that I think Badiou agrees with me that it really didn’t happen. In that case, is Paul indicative of what Badiou likes as a fictional portrayal, or as a historical case study? “In contrast to the fact, the event is measurable only in accordance with the universal multiplicity whose possibility it prescribes. It is in this sense that it is grace, and not history.” (45) Event vs fact. ?? I don’t know what the measurable thing is supposed to mean here, particular as event founds that which measures/is the standard of measure, I’m not clear what it would mean to measure an event in Badiou’s idiom.
Paul names the possibility within all this, within what occurred (I think naming is part of what constitutes an event - occurrence/protosubject(denominator)/naming-act). “His discourse is one of pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event. It cannot, therefore, in any way fall under the remit of knowledge. The philosopher knows universal truths; the prophet knows the univocal sense of what will come. The apostle, who declares an unheard-of possibility, one dependent on an evental grace, properly speaks nothing.” One becomes an apostle “[a]ccording to the truth of a declaration and its consequences, which, being without proof or visibility, emerges at that point where knowledge, be it empirical or conceptual, breaks down.” (45) Why call this truth? Why not conviction? Is there any thing lost if I perform a mental translation operation, where I substitute the word conviction for B’s use of the word truth? If so, what?
“one of the phenomena by which one recognizes and event is that the former is like a point of the real that puts language into deadlock. (…) What imposes the invention of a new discourse, and of a subjectivity that is neither philosophical nor prophetic (the apostle), is precisely that it is only by means of such invention that the event finds a welcome and an existence in language. For established languages, it is inadmissible because it is genuinely unnamable.” (46)I think by languages here he means idioms, discourses, not language as such. Even so, how does one tell an event from a simple misfire? Clearly there are hard cases such that it’s not easy to articulate them - many speakers and writers find themselves in a deadlock - but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they had to, and that any possible speaker or writer of that idiom had to enter into deadlock a priori. Nor does it mean that any idiom whatsoever would find itself deadlocked. Of course, this probably isn’t a problem for Badiou because the event is absolutely subjective, but if that’s the case what are the criteria for determining cases of deadlock? Also absolutely subjective? Then it’s not deadlock so much as deadlock-for or deadlock-as-perceived-by. If this is so, then this is less explanatory than it sounds.
I like all the moments, happily they’re not particularly rare, when the politics is more on the surface. Christ is not a mediation. Among the stakes here, revolution. “For many of those faithful to it, the revolution is not what arrives, but what must arrive so that there can be something else; it is communism’s mediation.” Against whom Badiou poses revolution as “a self-sufficient sequence of political truth.” (48) I don’t know what to do with that. On the one hand, I don’t like the received official marxist series capital-political revolution-social revolution-socialism-communism. Holloway’s marxism’s one decent alternative to this. Capital’s a social relation (with many possible instantiations/iterations), so’s communism. Revolution must be communist, be the product(ion) of communist social relations. In that sense the distinction b/w revolution and after the revolution may be problematized, but by the same token one does want a post-revolutionary condition, a generalized global communism. Mediation might not be the best term for describing this, but neither is lack of mediation. Hmm.
Generally, reading the book I get a sense of something like what I half-remember MacIntyre saying about Hume and Kant: they’re christians, they have certain cultural values. Those values come out in their philosophy, and are as much the impetus as they are the outcome, nor are those values the only things one might derive from their philosophy, particularly if it were shorn from the starting point of those values. Ditto Badiou, only not christian but … what, maoist? Question still of what Badiou’s goal is. Keith says its intervention. I like that idea, not totally sure I get what Badiou’s intervention is, though.
Note to self: read the Alliez piece that Keith references at his, and see if that Zizek book’s in the library.
“For Paul, the event has not come to prove something; it is pure beginning.” (49) Perhaps Badiou’s not anti- the questions I have about explanation and history and all that, maybe they’re just not his questions. Badiou may want his project, his subject, his politics, and think Paul’s a decent metaphor thereof, rather than trying to give an account, despite how I keep thinking it sounds, of becoming a subject/militant as such. Not sure.
“For Paul (…) it is precisely the absence of proof that constrains faith, which is constitutive of the Christian subject.” (50) Okay, fair enough. The communist subject as well. But where do different responses to absence of proof come from, what are the conditions for the naming that the protosubject/denominator enacts in the face of an occurence (naming being a necessary condition for an event)? More to the point, can anything be done to help foster these conditions? This is in many ways very resonant with me, communism is a sort of faith, it’s unproven to some degree - though I think I’d want to say that all cases of proof I’ve encountered involve some kind of faith, just that some are easier to make than others (but why?), and in my experience with housecalling people on campaigns, someone who trained me once said ‘all we can do is ask people to make decisions’, put in this idiom one might say that all that happens is that people have opportunities to name, and to remain in fidelity to the event in which that naming is bound up. But, there are better and worse ways of posing decisions to people (there are better and worse ways to do housecalls). My impression, though, is that Badiou’s not posing naming as a decision, but as something that is done in a sort of “it happens to someone” kind of way (like me when I drink too much!). I could be wrong. Event and naming, both terms for B that I could stand to get clearer on and read a bit more about. Have to ask Tzuchien and Keith and Julie for references.
Badiou quotes Paul in 2nd Corinthians (foreshadowing perhaps B’s attack on ‘bio-materialism’?) - “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they have divine power to pull down strongholds.” (53)
“since the event that [Paul] takes to identify the real is not real (because the Resurrection is a fable), he is able to so only by abolishing philosophy.” (58) Not sure what the abolition of philosophy means or what’s stake there, but the “the event is a fable” thing is really weird. This is surely not a description that Paul would have accepted. That’s not a big deal to me, but the fable stuff…? It’s a fable, but it - or it’s naming or fidelity to it - is true? It’s not real but it’s true? True in the sense of a truth of literature - the fiction is fiction, it didn’t happen, but it has a truth to it? If that’s what’s mean then great, I like that, but how does this truth relate to other orders of truth? (And why call them all truth? Not that I have an argument as to why not, but simple absence of a counter-argument is no reason to agree with something or to take on a term, one can also reserve judgment pending a future better argument/counterargument.)
On the abolition of philosophy, maybe this is what is meant: “Paul’s thesis is not that philosophy is an error, a necessary illusion, a phantasm and so forth,” - this against contemporary anti-philosophers who take a therapeutic approach that seeks to cure people of (the need for) philosophy - “but that there is no longer an admissible place for its pretension. The discourse of wisdom is definitively obsolete.” (58) Is this obsolescence a condition of being aufgehoben? This reminds me of Badiou’s comments on the figure of the militant - no longer the party/Leninist militant, have to check reference - and also sounds kind of like Hardt and Negri: the event of the transition to postfordism makes it such that the party form is obsolete, the era of the one and of sovereignty is over. Perhaps Negri and Hardt are apostles of the multitude? There remarks on it do have a declarative character.
Badiou/Paul identifies (58, this is actually my friend Colin’s marginal note summing up the passage) three subject positions: 1) demanding (slave) 2) questioning (disciple [philosopher]) 3) declaring (apostle, son). Interestingly, Badiou writes, based on a story in Acts, “it is no longer even possible to discuss philosophy” re: Paul and the obsolescence of the discourse of wisdom, “one must declare its effective extirpation, along with that of every other figure of mastery” because Paul’s declaration (or the discourse it founds?) “commands the dissipation of the formula of mastery, without which philosophy cannot exist.” (58) Interesting. Reminds me of Ranciere, mastery, explication, remarks on Socrates. But Ranciere falls under what Badiou calls therapeutic, he’s critical of mastery, it’s a type of mistake (and pernicious act). Badiou instead seems to diagnose an end of, an exhaustion of mastery. (Fits with the post-party thing…) This end is also, presumably, internal to Paul’s fidelity (ie, subjective)? And presumably not one Badiou fully holds to as he does maintain a commitment to philosophy, I think. The idea that apostle-ship and declaration is sans mastery strikes me as overstated. Paul’s master might be said to be the Voice he heard, or god. B’s anti- demanding and question, because who ever can respond to those can become master. But whoever can claim to represent in some way the voice or god is too, in a way. Mastery is political, a project, an act, and it’s not clear to me that declaration can’t also be a forum in which that conflict might not also play out. Particularly given that it’s all subjective for Badiou. For instance, “All equality is that of belonging together to a work. Indubitably, those participating in a truth procedure are coworkers in its becoming.” (60) Indeed, but it’s all subjective there can, presumably, be (inter)subjective disagreement over who is a coworker and who is not (ie, over who is and is not a subject), a disagreement that itself might be way for mastery to still play out. I’m not sure if Badiou admits of this type of disagreement or not, if not then this might be part of what he’s on about re: Ranciere in Metapolitics. I’ll have to revisit that, and R’s Disagreement, as I didn’t really understand it.
Actually, thinking of it now, the ability to decide on who’s in and who’s out is key, and while problematic it’s not something I’d want to immediately jettison, if we take the coworker thing literally: management are out of the bargaining unit because of their ability to hire and fire (ie, because of their [relatively] individual power to decide who is in and who is out, coworkers don’t have that power over each other, though there are of course various other ways that individual and groups of coworkers can exert exclusion on coworkers), this is a distinction that at least some people in management disagree with. (This example to my mind also points up a question for Ranciere - if this is a case of disagreement then not every case of the ‘wronged’ party is one where that party is right, don’t know if R said this but I sort of took it that way.)
?? “Like every genuine theoretician of truth, Paul (…) does not believe that there can be a “historical truth.” Or rather, he does not believe truth to be a matter of history, of witnessing, of memory. ” (61)
Badiou (63) talks of serving a truth procedure, in the sense of being a servant of. But, he asserts (without argument as far I can see) that this is sans mastery. Also adds that the event of resurrection, presumably events as such, is supernumerary (presumably relative to some … set … or to all sets?), it “presents itself as pure givenness.” (63) Interested to know the French says. To my mind ‘present itself’ implies an agency and an activity, not a passive voice construction here (is presented, which, if read literally might then be a claim about being, the is). Also, givenness, in the sense of a gift? I don’t think so. I think in the sense of assumed, foundational, accepted as given (a la “given X, we find …”) Badiou identifies this with grace. How is this different from a sort of primitiveness (or a regulative idea or a type of foundationalism/realism - oh yeah, it’s subjective, but then might it be foundation-for or real-for some one)? Don’t know what to do with this.
“The subject of the new epoch” inaugurated by the event/naming/fidelity “is a “not…but”.” (63) ?? Interesting to note that Badiou quotes Paul re: being under not law but grace. Again, this is not mastery? Definitively? (If so, great. If not, then might we not say that mastery which is obfuscated might be an even harder type to combat, or minimally that self-obfuscation is a tool mastery might well make use of.)
“an evental rupture always constitutes its subject in the divided form of a “not … but” (…) it is precisely this form that bears the universal. For the “not” is the potential dissolution of closed particularities (whose name is “law”), while the “but” indicates the task, the faithful labor, in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is “grace”) are the coworkers. (…) If the event is able to enter into the constitution of the subject declaring it, it is precisely because through it, and irrespective of the particularity of persons, it ceaselessly redivides the two paths, distributing the “not…but,” which, through an endless process, sets aside the law the better to enter into grace.” (63-64) This reminds me of Hegelian Marxists I used to hang out with - dialetics as analytic, negating, breaking up, a positivity/subjectivity only via negation (subtraction=negation?).
Oh, well then: “Is the Pauline conception of the event dialectical? Is the path of affirmation always that of the labor of the negative”? (65)
In dialectics “the event as supernumerary givenness and incalculable grace is dissolved into an auto-foundational and necessarily deployed rational protocol.” (65) Of course. Clear as mud. Does this mean the event ruptures dialectics, or dialects fucks up the event?
“Paul’s position is antidialectical” (66), though I don’t understand why. (Maybe this is another subjectively declared truth.) Grace “is not a “moment” of the Absolute. It is affirmation without preliminary negation; it is what comes upon us in a caesura of the law. It is pure and simple encounter. (…) Everything hinges on knowing whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective division and beyond the human animal’s survival imperatives, an immortal.” (66) ?? Interesting, but I don’t follow. Unless I’m using the word wrong, I’d think a caesura is an opening in the law, which is describable as a negation. Breaking with, division, these terms could also be described that way, so what’s the difference w/ dialectics?
This is great: “That materialism is never anything but the ideology of the determination of the subjective by the objective disqualified it philosophically. Or let use posit that it is incumbent upon us to found a materialism of grace through the strong, simple idea that every existence can one day be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all” (66). Sounds like the little I know of late Althusser’s aleatory materialism, have to wait for that new Althusser volume from Verso. But why is it that the subject is happened to first before it makes other things happen? Given that the declaration and the truth are subjective, what’s to say that the subject isn’t just acting? It may look to the outside like it’s just happening (or like it’s just acting) but for the subject it might be the other way around. Perhaps he’s proposing that the subject’s acting (becoming subject) is a taking-as having-happened-to, a seizure of life conditions? If that’s it then it’s the act (the taking-as) that’s important, not the happened-to. This also reminds me of Benjamin - every moment is a gate through which the messiah might (have) arrive(d).
God (or is it Christ, of god through Christ’s death?) “creates, not the event, but that I call its site. The evental site is that datum that is immanent to a situation and enters into the composition of the event itself, addressing it to this singular situation, rather than another.” (70) How does this relate to the “addressed to all” from before? Events are not made but evental sites are? Or these are only made by something like god (ie, given)?
“the events sudden emergence never follows from the existence of an evental site. Although it requires conditions of immanence, that sudden emergence nevertheless remains of the order of grace.” (71) So it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition? And, presumably, it’s being a condition is only ever known retroactively, after an event.
Not critical but affirmative (72), so much so that death, negation, is engulfed, abolished (B’s terms) — a sort of nondialectical absolute negation of death/negation?
“By “statist” I mean that which ennumerates, names, and controls the parts of a situation. If a truth is to surge forth eventally, it must be nondenumerably, impredicable, uncontrollable. This is precisely what Paul calls grace”. (76) But it’s ungraspable, countable, predicable, how’s it not a negativity? This sounds close to Hegel’s definition at the beginning of the Science of Logic of being (and of nothing). What’s at stake in the antidialectical thing anyway?
“The subjectivity of faith is unwaged (which, in the final analysis, entitles us to call it communist).” (77.) Colin’s written in the margin here “Or a slave…” Indeed. How do we distinguish the unwaged labor of surplus value from the unwaged (anti?)labor of communist activity? Probably not via Badiou’s rather schematic formulations.
I do like this, though: “the subjectivating point is the declaration of the event, rather than the work that demands a wage or reward” (77). One caveat: demands for wages and recognition for unwaged and unrecognized but nevertheless value productive labor, a la Wages For Housework, can precisely be something like an event/declaration. Still, I like that it’s not waged labor that subjectivates, contra orthodox marxism (including Hardt and Negri on immaterial labor making certain political forms/subjects/capacities possible) — Agamben and Virno both remark that the point of politics is Aristotelian, the good life. Orthodox marxism sees that the good life is attainable because of and via work. Against that, in how I want to read Ranciere and some of Virno - waged work is possible because the good life is possible, not the reverse. Seems like there’s a moment of that here, the declaration or prescription… Militance is gratuitous (in a good way). I like that. Except for the uncaused part. I’m ambivalent about that. In one sense, it’s Kantian, I think - the I as the source of, rather than subject to, series of causality. But … the I is also caused, subjected to causality.
Salvation: “that thought can be separated from doing and power. There is salvation when the divided figure of the subject maintains thought in the power of doing.” ?? “This is what, for my part, I call truth procedure.” (84)
I can’t help but pause over the talk of the need “to distinguish between a legalizing subjectivity, which is a power of death, and a law raised up by faith, which belongs to the spirit and life.” (87) How is this not to be the return to mastery? How does one distinguish ‘law raised up’ from submission to and love of mastery? (Not to say that this might not indeed be a more preferable mastery than its currently existing modes.)
“It is incumbent upon love to become law so that truth’s postevental universality can continuously inscribe itself in the world, rallying subjects to the path of life. Faith is the declared thought of a possible power of thought. It is not yet this power as such.” (88-89.) This actual power is in some way bound up with a return of an allegedly transfigured law. I don’t get it.
I’m far too juvenile for statements like this: “the new faith consists in deploying the power of self-love in the direction of others, addressing it to others, in a way made possible by subjectivation (conviction).” (90) My friend Nathan and I are going to see if we can find a cheap screenprinting kit, make t-shirts w/ the first part of that quote and a picture of the singer for the Divynils.
* * *
Okay, finished reading the book. Rest of my notes below, will review these soon(ish) and try to properly write something.
… is Alain’s deal with Paul (continued)?
“I call this universal power of subjectivation an evental fidelity (…) fidelity is the law of a truth.” (90) So truth is subjectivation? Events or naming of events is the condition for the making of a subject, and fidelity is that making?
“What grants power to a truth, and determines subjective fidelity, is the universal address of the relation to self instituted by the event, and not this relation itself. This could be called the theorem of the militant. No truth is ever solitary, or particular.” (90) I’m not sure on what this says: the relation to self, is that self-to-itself (self-reflexivity) or self-to-event? I think I get the rest, it’s not the relationship but its universal declaration, that is the power of a truth though I don’t get what that means (power to do what?) or what’s at stake. Particularly given that I think there’s no evil militants (presumably the claim would be because they’re not universalizable, but I don’t think that’s so - we could imagine a sci-fi villain militant of the nuclear bomb, the event is, say Bikini Atoll, the truth is the coming destruction of the whole planet, fidelity is the project of bringing that about — this is embarassing because I’m both a snob and very low brow, but one figure like this might be Ras Al Ghul in Batman Begins).
“a subjectivation that does not discover the resource of power proper to its universal address misses the truth for whose sudden emergence it seemed to be the sole witness.” (91)
“there is no instantaneous salvation; grace is no more than the indication of a possibility. The subject has to be given in his labor, and not only in his sudden emergence.” (91) But not waged labor, as noted above, something more like ‘political work’.
“The materiality of universalism is the militant dimension of every truth.” (92) Again, truths are only good. (A la Plato/Socrates? To know the good is to do the good?) Or, perhaps, a la a certain possible dialectics - even bad truths express something good (a la the quote, I think Adorno said it?, that the desire to be rich is the desire to be free from the power of money). I suspect this latter is not the case for Badiou, which is fine.
Badiou (96) talks about how Paul has no interest in hell, “the roasting pit of enemies” because, presumably, Paul’s militant organization doesn’t have specific enemies? (Paul does have opponents, in Badiou’s terms, p95.) There’s one enemy, death. (Badiou calls this a “generic name”, don’t know what that means.) “[e]very victory is in reality a victory for everyone.” (96) Reminds me of the part where Carl Schmitt remarks that fighting in the name of humanity’s a great way to make up a friend/enemy distinction, because it means one’s opponents are anti-humanity. Can the same be said here, the opponents of Paul(ine militants) are pro-death, anti-everyone?
“there is something absurd about bringing [Paul] to trial before the tribunal of contemporary feminism. The only question worth asking is whether Paul, given the conditions of his time, is a progressive or a reactionary so far as the status of women is concerned.” (104) Fuck that. Paul may be judged in the same way that his time may be judged, so saying Paul is any different from others in his time may be a problematic claim (I’m not one who could make or evaluate that claim). Also, it’s not just a matter of “progressive or reactionary” but of how progressive or how reactionary, and in comparison to others (and, ultimately, one can still find against Paul and yet find things in his work that one likes).
“the problem for Paul consists in reconciling - according to the circumstances - this requirement with the obvious and massive inequality affecting women in the ancient world, without the debate over this point hindering the movement of universalization.” (104) Strikes me as an echo of the “after the revolution…” refrain from much of the organizational left.
“what is proper to philosophy is not the production of universal truths, but rather the organization of their synthetic reception by forging and reformulating the category of Truth.” (108)
Death camps are not universal for Badiou (contra Adorno, perhaps Agamben). (109) What’s at stake in this? What difference does is it make if the truth of universalism is one or the others? Why not just say there are some universals and there are others?
“waiting is pointless, for it is of the essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to catch us unawares with its grace, regardless of our vigilance.” (111) That sounds good, but ambiguous. Don’t wait as in don’t stand in a watchtower looking for an event but instead do your thing until an event happens to you, or don’t wait as in there’s always an event so just start declaring, it’s happening to you already?
Don’t wait as in don’t stand in a watchtower looking for an event but instead do your thing until an event happens to you, or don’t wait as in there’s always an event so just start declaring, it’s happening to you already?
I like this point. One criticism of Badiou is that he seems to only favor the “immense” event, that sort of grand, Christiological interruption that ‘changes a whole life’. Of course those ‘exist’, happen, but I don’t see this as the point of his theoretical engagement with events. There are all kinds of events happening all of the time, some of them might seem rather insignificant. For Badiou though, I think these are discret instead of the sort of continuous variation where everything is an event all the time - which is a somewhat Deleuzian perspective that he criticizes. Fortunately, I don’t particularly buy into his critique of Deleuzianism and the Deleuzian version of events. It’s a kind of scarecrow for me. Perhaps we don’t wait because events are always happening, in a sort of ‘always already’, but not all the time.
One of Deleuze’s main points was that the individual must always precipitate events. There’s something similar here in Badiou, since he recognizes that events can in fact be created by a subject working within one of philosophy’s four conditions (though arguably there are more than just the four that Badiou provides), so there’s no waiting but active engagement (militancy). He’s also convinced, and I’m not sure whether I completely agree with him on this, that philosophy does not produce events - that is to say truths.
I’m interested in the point you bring up about Schmitt and the opponents of Paul being anti-everyone. I just read a Zizek article on Levinas (appropriately title “Bashing in the Neighbors Face”) last night, where he brings this up toward the end, though without reference to Badiou. I’ve got to give this one more thought but it’s worth some attention because I think that it is important to Badiou’s conception of politics (a shared point with Zizek too) that involves drawing a line, somewhere - though with no ’specific enemy’.
cheers,
Keith
Comment by Keith — January 15, 2006 @ 1:10 am
“waiting is pointless, for it is of the essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to catch us unawares with its grace, regardless of our vigilance.” (111)
This, and its preceding passage, is one of the biggest deadlocks I have reached with Badiou’s thought. How do you live in fidelity to events of the past while not conforming - without being worldly or an object? Particularly if you accept Keith’s suggestion that events happen all the time and by implication that we are all simply living in the consequences of the events of the past - they are all the myriad human developments since we emerged as hominids and what make a life practically liveable. Does this not in the end marginalise Badiou’s system of ethics - one either waits for a truth-event or one must be a communitarian? Or as he wrote elsewhere (and I haven’t checked the quote) “there are only bodies and languages except that there are truths!” Would love some thought to help guide me through this.
Comment by Matt — January 15, 2006 @ 8:20 pm
Matt -
Aren’t some past events inconsequential? A subject can always remain indifferent to certain events and maintain fidelity toward others - this is, at least, what Badiou would suggest. I’m curious as to how you might elaborate on the distinction between waiting and communitarianism. Badiou’s Ethics distinctly resists being communitarianism, so there has to be something else? I’m familiar with that quote, though I can’t think off hand where it derives from. It might appear in his Ethics. I do know that it is positioned specifically against a statement by Negri, and is part of Badiou’s attempt to escape a ‘postmodern’ rhetoric - it is not that Badiou is insisting that there are only bodies and languages (since this was Negri’s statement, in Time for Revolution I believe), but that there are truths and they cannot be accurately subtracted from a situation so long as we have only bodies and languages. I don’t know it that helps, but I don’t consider myself to be any kind of expert on Badiou either.
- Keith
Comment by Keith — January 15, 2006 @ 10:03 pm
I’m also no expert with spelling and grammar either, apparently. Oops.
Comment by Keith — January 15, 2006 @ 10:07 pm
hi Matt,
I don’t know Badiou well enough to guide anyone anywhere, sorry. I don’t know what to make of any of it. After I get clearer on the Paul book and Metapolitcs (read that recently, those two are the sum of the Badiou I’ve read, other than a bit of interviews and such here and there) I plan to crack open the Theoretical Writings and see what I can see, or maybe I can get something else out the library. I’m trying to talk my friend Tzuchien into weighing in on this, as he’s read more of the guy than I have.
I think the Badiou thing that that quote comes from is Logique du Monde, but I’m not positive. It’s from the same place where he disses on what he calls the ‘biomaterialism’ of Negri.
take care,
Nate
ps- if either of you speaks Spanish, there’s some Argentines you might be interested in, the Grupo Acontecimiento (the Event Group), they publish a journal, put out some stuff by Badiou in Spanish, they have a website here - http://www.grupoacontecimiento.com.ar/
Comment by Nate — January 15, 2006 @ 11:35 pm
Here’s where that statement from Badiou can be found:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=17175
It is in relation to something Negri has said. It may appear elsewhere in his writings though I’m not so sure about it showing up in Logiques du Monde (at least not in the portions of this which appear in Theoretical Writings). He explains himself a bit in the link above.
Comment by Keith — January 16, 2006 @ 12:51 am
Hi Keith and Nate
Thanks for your thoughts and the links.
I think that my problem lies in the point you raise Keith about “inconsequential events”. What are the universal truths that have been “established” to date? I see very few, only communities with their own truths. This then leaves me with a decision - free float until a truth event comes along or ’select’ the community whose worldly truths I find most agreeable and stay fidelitous to those truths - isn’t this just communitarianism if those truths are not universal?
I think that my difficulties stem from the kind of subjects I want to Badiou to write about! Namely, what is a human being, what does it mean to live socially, how does one make a difference, how does one practically work with the ideas he offers. He appears to condemn worldly living and is refreshing and compelling by doing so, yet I for one, only arrived at his work when already pretty fully world-ified i.e., adult, graduate, job, etc. My experience of trying to pursue it practically and academically (I’m well advanced in a PhD inquiring into the use of Badiou’s thought in change agency) is that I hit a wall when I try to bring it back to everyday life. I’m aware that these are the ‘wrong’ questions to ask of Badiou’s thought - but I feel compelled to ask them anyway.
Not a well though through contribution I’m afraid but I’d rather keep the conversation moving than wordsmith!
Comment by Matt — January 17, 2006 @ 9:37 pm
Hi Matt,
You do raise some valid points concerning Badiou’s sort of ‘disregard’ for worldly affairs, everyday existence (i.e. what does it mean to live socially?), etc. Badiou hardly adresses this, and when he does (as in his Ethics) it seems that his position trivializes those questions. However, I don’t think this is an entirely accurate evaluation. His theory of event, truth, subject, whatnot, all stem from the subject as impersonal and in excess of the individual. So a subject, while it could be a person, could also be ‘the party’. But he did recently write an aritcle for New Left Review where he considered that one of the principle tasks of modern philosophy (French in particular)is to remove itself from the university and engage it with everyday life. Perhaps there’s something there?
As far as the universal truths, he gives the example of Einstein in physics. It would be impossible, no doubt, to practice physics today or even think about the world and our relationships to time and space without taking into account Einstein’s contributions. So this event could be considered universal, right? Then there would also be Schoenberg in music. As for having to free float, wait for events, and choose communities, well, I don’t really agree with this but I do see where that’s coming from. I’m sure both you and I, or Nate, could rattle off a list of event/encounters in our lives that have already happened (that we at least as ’subjects’ would declare to have happened), be they works of art, music, political events, scientific discoveries, amourous encounters (all four generic procedures Badiou identifies), etc., that have informed our ‘fidelities’ and that we continue to feel the effects of/work out the consequences of. Even though Badiou might see this as a project consuming us in excess of ourselves (that is, beyond mere perseverence in being), I don’t see how these also don’t affect how we live socially while at the same time remaining diametrically opposed to anyting ‘communitarian’. Even while Einstein or Schoenberg’s developments may only have severe importance for the ‘communities of physicists and musicians’, don’t these events also invade almost every other community, producing effects accross the board? I fail to see how there are ‘only communities with their own truths’. Not every truth involves a community, and not every community is faithful to ‘universal truths’.
Comment by Keith — January 18, 2006 @ 12:00 am
hi Matt, Keith,
Thanks for your comments as well Matt. Matt, Keith and I have some plans to read another Badiou thing together, if you’re interested. Let us know, we can contact you by email to hammer out the specifics. A couple things - as I’ve said, I don’t understand Badiou’s use of the terms truth, event, and and universal. I don’t get the conjunction of truth=subjective and truth=universal. If we take Paul’s encounter with Peter, as narrated in the Paul book, I think the following options are possible:
1. Paul’s truth is universal (I’ll call this “A”, for abbreviation’s sake), but Peter doesn’t see it/get it.
2. A”, Peter sees it but opposes it.
3. “A”, Peter has his own universal truth in conflict with or incommensurable with Paul’s truth.
Those are the outcomes I can see, there may be others. Each of these has a different problem that follows.
1 = communicability/comprehensibility of truth, who is qualified/competent to ‘get’ a truth.
2 = something like the problem of evil.
3 = a problem of two conflicting universals.
Each of these suggest in a different way that Badiou’s sense of ‘universal’ is in some way limited or partial, ie, not ‘universally’ universal, but more like universal relative to something (some peson, group, idiom). Or, to use the term Matt used in his question, the universal truths that have been “established” are few and far between. Even more so, in at least one case that Badiou points out at as an example, that of Paul, there is still conflict around an established universal truth, such that it’s not clear what something establishes truth/what something truth is established for (in the sense of being relative-to, I think Badiou wouldn’t like these terms - universal, not relative! - but it does seem to me that subjective universal is synonymous with relative universal). What that something is very curious.
In some ways, I get the sense that Badiou, in the admittedly little I’ve read of him, is less talking about events as such (the category of event, what one is, how it’s identified) than he is talking about some events that he likes. If that’s the case no problem, I like that actually, but I’d like to know if that’s the case or not. Hence, more reading…
One more thing: Keith, following on from what Matt said about truth and community - I think Keith is right that not all Badiou’s truths are communitarian, but I think there is an important sticking point here, that connects to some of my own questions about this. That is, Badiou’s descriptions of truth seem to hold best for individuals (Abraham ascending the mountain with Isaac springs to mind, also the lone prophet figure), but in relation with others there’s the questions I have re: Paul and Peter and there’s also the question about collectively held allegedly universal but still subjective truths. Namely, how are these collectively held truths (collectivities of fidelity) different from a type of communitarianism/communitarian truths?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 18, 2006 @ 4:17 am
I think Badiou would say Universal Singularity, or singular universal, perhaps even Laclau’s particular universal. Relative universal makes sense, even though it doesn’t make sense, if that makes sense. The point seems to be that these truths would always count ‘for all’, would be the same for everyone, even if it happens to be a particular that is faithful to the truth. That is, a particular that doesn’t make of the truth a particularity (meaning that it won’t be a truth which counts only for such-and-such a people, such-and-such a community). For instance, Badiou gives the example of the sans papiers in France that, although they would be struggling to create a political category for themselves, what they are struggling for is essentially the same for everyone(though this may be misreading it a bit but I’ll see if I can find the passage I’m remembering this from).
Something came to mind regarding the problem of how one might think the universality of truths. If Badiou is insisting that there be universal truths (so that particularized truths are not truths even though the path of a universal truth has to paradoxically pass through the ‘particular-universal’) and that they hinge on an unnameable, indiscernible point within the situation that will always remain undecideable, perhaps the following comparison: take the example of the Turing Machine (of which I don’t know enough about to really wax poetic…) where you have what would be an essentially undecideable mathematical problem. The computer cannot determine whether a certain statement is true or false, so it goes on testing the equation indefinitely, without resolution or completion. This is exactly how Badiou would describe subjective fidelity to a universal truth. The truth can never be filled with any particularity, any determinate content. It is always indiscernible, and the decision to count an event as a truth will never become either an objective or subjective certainty. The subject in his/her fidelity will go on through to successive situations continuing to test the truth/falsity of the event - but since there can never really be any sort of ‘empirical evidence’ that would validate the truth, the truth of the event as truth will remain entirely subjective. By extension, the truth never completes itself - there is no announcement from the initial event that says it will fill the void in the situation which it carved out (and which is also the subject as that zero element), so perhaps fidelity is the computer, the subject being the equation itself.
As for the communitarian truth, here’s from the Balibar piece (help/hurt?):
Being consists of nothing other, to begin with, than belonging or membership (or indeed, originally, nothing other than the degree zero or neutral figure of belonging: non-belonging). All properties are derivatives. Similarly, at the opposite extreme, universalism as such is, for Badiou, anti-communitarianism, or in other words an in-common without a community or a membership without membership that creates no property links, no ontological or anthropological difference, but only fidelity to an Event.
So a truth-event produces sameness, not differences? Well, as Deleuze might say of the eternal return: ‘it’s the return of the same, but the same only insofar as it is different’. By this comparison I want to indicate what is (for myself at least) one of the more challenging aspects of the notion of truth-event. If Badiou insists that a truth-event eliminates differences, this must only be at the level of representation, of the ’state’ of the situation, since there will always be difference as the truth of ‘what there is’. So difference wouldn’t disappear per se, but the event would disappear(being nothing other than a disappearance), and along with it the difference of difference as such(?). I’ve manage to confuse myself quite thoroughly on this point so that’s all I have for now.
cheers,
Keith
Comment by Keith — January 19, 2006 @ 8:05 pm
Oops. Didn’t blockquote that Balibar excerpt. It’s “Being […] Event” (how ironic). The last paragraph was mine if that wasn’t entirely obvious.
Comment by Keith — January 19, 2006 @ 8:11 pm
Matt’s comment, which got lost in the blogsome tech whatsit, came to me via email, now pasted here.
*
Thanks to both of you for your comments, I feel a lot further forward than I was only five days ago. I’d love to continue this and would be very interested in reading a Badiou text together. Please let me know how the process works and what text you are considering. I assume you are located in the States? I’m near Oxford in UK.
This posting is going to be more personal than purely academic but I hope will make some sense in the light of the ‘links to the everyday’ strand that has developed. Let me know if the style is okay and doesn’t come across as biographical indulgence.
I found the link to the New Left Review article very interesting. Badiou gave a related summary of 20th C French philosophy and his positioning within it at a talk he gave at Birkbeck last summer in memory of Derrida - he referred to him and his near contemporaries as “collective signatories to a moment of thought”. I absolutely agree on the importance of philosophy engaging with everyday life.
So, he is in a tradition that sees us as producing rather than discovering ourselves. This rings bells for me regarding where I first came into the subject. My PhD began as a study of the philosophical foundations of transformational or breakthrough change agency. There are several different forms of these so-called technologies that share roots in the twentieth century philosophical tradition (especially Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein), existential psychotherapy, and various strands of New Age-ism - theosophy, traditionalism, etc. They essentially take seriously the notion
that we produce ourselves.
My background was a graduate science education in psychology combined with a New Age upbringing and I was beginning to feel the tensions! My concern was that the practitioners’ didn’t appear to understand the roots of their work well and, to my mind, lacked ethical skills.
I dived in to the original literature and near drowned! The most solid ground I found was the work of contemporary and ex-Berkeley academics Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus. They wrote a great book called “Disclosing New Worlds” in which they explored the skills of entrepreneurship, democratic action and the cultivation of solidarity. They position themselves in the line of thinking that sees selves as productions rather than discoveries and appear to align themselves with communitarians.
One of the achievements of that book was to clarify some of the philosophical difficulties in the transformational technologies that arose in the sixties and seventies such as est. Among others, these difficulties included that new ideas don’t come from nowhere but arise in a world constrained by style, language, etc.
However, they were not material enough about the origin of transformational novelty for my still scientific liking. Hence, when I came across Badiou, by chance in an Oxford bookshop I was intrigued. Badiou appears to me to give a great account of how radical newness can originate working forwards from the point of innovation. He hasn’t yet given a clear account of everyday being
and how to stimulate the conditions for breakthrough only some oblique comments about education being the organisation of knowledge so as to create the conditions for break through. This remains to be worked out.
What we have been discussing in Badiou’s thought also appears to me to require working out. Namely the danger of trivialisation: what is to stop the post-modern mantra of “My truth is a Truth” leading to the trivialisation that has beset the New Age movement where Eastern truths have mindlessly superseded Western truths? For example, as Keith suggests, can’t any event or encounter that causes a disruption from my routine inform our fidelities and lead to a truth? I’ll be bold and suggest “No, I don’t agree” - or at least not in the sense of truth that I understand Badiou to be intending. Are not most of these encounters relatively trivial engagements
with other worlds or other communities? Yet, the fidelitous adherents of the New Age movement are absolutely clear that they are making universal truths.
Unless, what it is that we are encountering in that other world is itself a universal then it is communitarian.
Universals must surely be from the edge of the void of all the sets
(communities) of the world at a point in time?
This leads on to Nate’s questions around conflict between universal
truths. As Keith suggests, Badiou has pointed to Schoenberg as marking the foundational event of a truth in music by opening an infinite space of possibility in atonal music. Yet in “The Art of Possibility” (pop-management book exploring infinite possibility) conductor Benjamin Zander damns atonal music as leaving no room for development. Is this just opinion? Is either one or both ‘right’? How can we move it forward?
Anyway, I am exhausted - hope it made some sense.
Warmly
Matt
Comment by Nate — January 23, 2006 @ 3:51 pm
hey gang,
Sorry for slowness in replying, I was out of town a bit.
Keith, I still don’t get the truth stuff, the whole “the same for everyone” thing, or the “addressed to all” part in the Paul book. Please do see if you can find the quote re: the sans papiers in France and this idea, as I really don’t see it. Here’s how it seems to me. The idea of a truth being the same to all - or, for that matter, different for all - depends on what the sameness/difference is relative to/what idiom the relationship is expressed in. (I am convinced that neither absolute sameness nor absolute identity are coherent ideas.) That’s what I want to know, then, re: the idea of truths as the same for everyone, what’s the criteria for sameness? More simply, in what way is it the same? Particularly in regard to something like the sans papiers or a workers struggle, I have a hard time seeing in what sense they’d be meaningfully the same for everyone. It also strikes me that the claim to truth being the same for everyone implies an implicit denial that the truth is also different for everyone, relative to other idioms/frames of reference. So, the sans papiers are for some a threat to French identity, to others an interesting cocktail party conversation topic, to others a boring conversation topic, to themselves something else that I don’t know but would like to (and to themselves as individuals there’s also a variety I’m sure). Perhaps it’s not that Badiou denies these differences but rather simple lack of interest on Badiou’s part for these other idioms - if that’s so I can respect that, but that means that it is the case that truth is not only the same for everyone but also different. (Or, one could say it’s the same-in-X idiom/frame of reference, which says nothing about other idioms.)
One of the questions at stake here for me is whether truth is ever subject to a hard misfire/disconnect. Ranciere calls something like this ‘disagreement’, which is when two people speak but one or both takes the other’s speech as not speech at all (he doesn’t use this example, but one could think of the case of ignoring the ravings of a friend who is heavily intoxicated or someone having a hallucination, but this also includes important political disagreements like moments and places when people have been written out of humanity). I need to look at the Ranciere again because there’s much I don’t understand and don’t know what to do with. But in short, that’s one of my big questions re: Badiou, is such a situation possible where truth is concerned?
All of this in a sense gets to Matt’s remark about everything being a truth or not. I don’t know what Badiou means by truth, but if one’s going to start laying out truths from nontruths, one needs criteria. And I have a question as to what the status of those criteria are, on what basis they’re recommendable or not, etc. And, along these same lines I don’t see how truth is really the same for everyone regardless of what criteria they’ve got. Matt, what’s your sense of what Badiou intends by the word truth?
best wishes,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 23, 2006 @ 4:15 pm
Hey Nate,
I’m beginning to think that perhaps I really don’t get the truth stuff either, and that it might be time for me to read Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. They way you don’t get truth in Badiou is a bit like the way I don’t get his writings on art - I just have to ask myself every time: “What the hell is he talking about?” As for the possibility of a ‘misfire’ for truth, I’m sure this finds its equivalent in Badiou’s use of the figure of evil. Here are a couple of links that might be of help for this and upcoming discussions:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou/badiou-truth-process-2002.html
I would like to recommend making selections from the second section in Theoretical Writings since all of the essays therein take up the subject of truth, universalism, event (everything that’s causing difficulty for this discussion). I’m going to read them all starting next week so I might be able to jump into discussion regarding them as soon as you have started chipping away at the book. Here’s a translator’s footnote from Peter Hallward in Badiou’s Ethics (p. 87-88) that might be of help (or hurt) also:
Comment by Keith — January 24, 2006 @ 7:50 pm
hi Keith,
Thanks for all this. If you get round to reading Ranciere, please let me know. I’m a big fan.
Re: reading Theoretical Writings, are you going to read the second half in order, or skip around? Please let me know, I’ll try to read along.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 25, 2006 @ 7:54 am
Nate -
I’m just going to skip around and whatnot. I should also be getting a copy of Being and Event in the mail next week (its finally been published) along with Ranciere’s The Names of History. I won’t be getting to Ranciere until late March I’m sure but I’ll start plowing away at Badiou immediately, and I’ll be on Blog hiatus for about two weeks starting the 13th of Feb. I’m going to be in Seattle for a week, and I’ll be missing a Badiou lecture at the University of WA by two days! I’m going to see if I can change my return flight so that I might have the chance to listen to Badiou’s really bad English for an hour or so.
Comment by Keith — January 26, 2006 @ 6:53 pm
Sorry I’ve not been in contact for a while - work too demanding - this will continue for a further week but should get some let-up then.
I’m going to start work re-reading Theoretical Writings next weekend. I’ll also be getting Being and Event in the next couple of weeks and will crack on with that straight away. From sketchy French reading the relevant chapter defining truth is chapter thirty one. Let me know if you make progress.
Comment by Matt — February 5, 2006 @ 7:57 pm