1 http://substanzlose.theriomorphous.co.uk/index.

php/transcript-from-logic-to-anthropology Transcript: 'From Logic to Anthropology, or Affirmative Dialectics' by Alain Badiou September 13th, 2012 Transcript: 'From Logic to Anthropology, or Affirmative Dialectics' by Alain Badiou Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wczfhXVYbxg I think that the fundamental problem in the philosophical field today is to find something like a new logic. We cannot today begin by some considerations about politics, life, creation, or action. We cannot find in all that a true beginning for philosophy. We must first describe a new logic, a new way of thinking, and finally a new definition of philosophy itself. More precisely we must find a new dialectics. I think that there has been two fundamental stages in the history of dialectics. First, dialectics in the sense of Plato, and after that dialectics in the sense of Hegel. Our time is time for a third stage: the inventionmaybe the collective inventionof a new dialectics. After all, this is also the way Marx had proposed after Hegel. The work of Marx is not first a new historical vision, a new theory of class struggle and so on, but from its very beginning it's a new general logic in the wake of Hegelian dialectics. Marx was perhaps the first, maybe after Plato, to create an explicit relation between new politicsrevolutionary politicsand a new dialectical framework. The way of Plato is finally also the way from logic to anthropology and politics. The way of Marx has been from Hegel to revolutionary politics. We have the same problem today, but with other problems. To be sure we have to rectify many things, after two centuries of successes and dramatic failures in revolutionary politics, and in particular after the dramatic failure of the state form. But we also have to find a new logic, a new philosophical proposition adequate for all forms of creative novelty. And so the question of dialectical and non-dialectical relations is a pressing difficulty. If you want, our problem today is the problem of negativity; the problem of the strength of negativity. When the logical framework of political action is the framework of the classical dialectical type, what is fundamentalyou know thatis negation. The development of the political struggle is fundamentally something like revolt against, opposition to, negation of. And the newness, the creation of the new state, or the creation of the new law, is always the result of the process of negation. This is the political form of the Hegelian framework. You have a relation between affirmation and negation (construction and negation) in which the real principle of movement and the real principle of creation is in fact negation. And so, the very definition of the revolutionary class, for example, is to be against the present state (the present law). The revolutionary consciousness, as Lenin would say, is classically the consciousness that one stands in a relation of negation to the existing order. I think that this vision as such cannot be sustained today. We are living a sort of crisis of the trust in the power of negativity. We classically know two great forms of this crisis, this crisis of the conviction that there is a possible creativity in negation as such. Adorno, for example, thinks that the classical Hegelian dialectics was too affirmative, too submitted to the potency of the totality and of the one. He proposes to go beyond the crisis of negativity, in a

2 sort of hyper-negativity the name of which is Negative Dialectics. We know today that in this way, the way of Negative Dialectics, we have finally nothing else but an ethics of compassion: a vision where the hero of our consciousness is the suffering human body, the pure victim. We know also that this morality of the victim is perfectly adequate to Capitalist domination under the mask of democracy. On the other sideanother attempt to go beyond the crisis of negativityNegri (but also in some sense Althusser, which is a paradoxical conjunction but a real conjunction) thinks that Hegelian dialectics was too negative, too subjective, and too indifferent to the potency of nature, of life, of the movement of history. He finds in Spinoza a model of history which is finally without negation. It has been in some sense Spinoza against Hegel. We know today that in this way of pure affirmation that we have finally a sort of acceptance of the dominant order owing to the conviction that this order is full of affirmative newness and creativity "it's bad but it's the movement of life itself". It is as if modern Capitalism has the immediate strength that works, beyond Empire, beyond negativity, in the direction of a sort of new Communism! What I search [for], in all my work, is to propose a new dialectical framework (which is a common project with Adorno, Negri, Althusser and so on) which is not a return to the Young Marx or to Hegel but which is neither the negative dialectics of Adorno (which is something like the aesthetics of human rights) nor the affirmative construction of Negri (which destroys all forms of dialecticity and is in my opinion like the Nietzschean Gai Savoir of history). I think the burden today is to find a way of reversing the classical dialectic logic inside itself so that the affirmation, or the positive proposition, comes before the negation instead of after it. Or in some sense, my attempt is to find a dialectical framework where something of the future comes before the negative present. I am not suggesting the separation of the relations between affirmation and negation; certainly revolt and class struggle remain essentialand critique of the past too, like criticism of all forms of artistic creation. All that is a necessity. I am not suggesting a pacifistic direction, some general peace, or affirmative quietness. The question is not whether we need to struggle or oppose. Certainly we need. The question concerns more precisely the relationthe precise relationbetween negation and affirmation. So in my work I search for some traces of something outside the classical dialectics but which is dialectics in some sense. In the cases when I write about Paul, about Wagner, about Love, about Mathematics, or about the field of concrete political analysisformally in all that is the same Idea. We have to try to understand exactly the conditions under which we may still have anything like the possibility of concrete negation. I believe this can only be realised in the field of primitive affirmation, for something that is primitively affirmative and not negative. It's a question of Event and Subject in my terminology. Ultimately I am saying something very simple. Althusser said philosophy must be as simple as the hand, as new as the hand. I think there is something true [in this]. I attempt to say something very simple. I am saying first that to open a new situation, a new possibility, we must have something like a new creativity of time, in time, and a new creativity inside the situation. You must have something that is really an opening, and I name this opening an Event. What is an Event? An Event is simply

3 that which interrupts the law, the rules, the structure of the situation, and creates a new possibility. An Event is not initially the creation of a new situation, the creation of a new world; an Event is the creation of a new possibility of a new world, which is not the same thing. In fact the Event takes place in a situation that remains the same, but the same situation can be seen and can be transformed inside the new possibility. For example, for Paul we know that the Event is the Resurrection of Christ and this Event does not directly change anything in the Roman Empire. The general situation, which is the Roman Empire, remains the same. But inside the situation, by the Event there is the creation and the opening of the new possibility for the life and the conviction of people. In the political field it is the same thing. In Paris Mai '68 there is no real change (there is certainly an Event but there is no real change) in the general situation of the state: de Gaulle remained in Power; the Government was still functional, with its police; and so on. But there was an opening for a new possibility of new forms of political action and this is what I call an Event. After that there is the possibility of the materialisation of the consequences of this new possibility. The elaboration of these consequences is the creation of what I name a new Subjective Body. A new Subjective Body: a new thing inside the situation as a consequence of the Evental rupture. A new Subjective Body is the realisation of the possibility that is opened by the Event in a concrete form, and which develops some consequences of the new possibility. Naturally, among these consequences there are different forms of negation (we find finally negation): struggle, revolt, a new possibility to be against something, destruction of some part of the law, and so on. But these forms of negation are consequences of the birth of the new subjectivity and not the other way round. It's not that the new subjectivity is a consequence of a negation. There is something really non-dialectic (in the sense of Hegel or Marx) about this logic. We do not start with the creativity of negation as sucheven if the site of negativity is certainly included in the consequences of somethingbut with something which is affirmative. I can return on this point to the book concerning Paul 1. This book was written ultimately to propose a clear example of this new logic. That is, a new logic for all truth procedures; not only political action, but [also] artistic creation, a life in love, and so on. Paul offers a very clear and in some sense mythologique example of how to think the relation between an Event and a new subjectivity. And so my main point: Paul provides a new and very acute perspective on how this logic operates in the field of law, and specifically in the relation of the new subject to the old law. In a very explicit manner Paul explains that when you have an Event that is really the creation of a new possibility in the situation, one must first create a new body and affirm a new subjectivity before all negation and before all negative consequences. The first thing is to create; to affirm the new subjectivity. What then is at the very beginning of a new subjectivity and of the new Subjective Body in the case of Paul? It is the group of people who affirm that there is really a new possibility. So at the beginning the question is to affirm the affirmation, not to negate. In the case of Christianity the affirmation is the Resurrection. After that there are a lot of practical and symbolic consequences in all the situations, but it is interesting to see in the case of Paul that the very beginning of something new is always something like the pure affirmation of the new possibility as such: there is a Resurrection. You have to affirm that (true or false is another problem!) When you affirm the Resurrection and you organise that sort of

4 affirmationbecause affirmation is always with others, and in the direction of othersyou create something absolutely new not in the form of a negation of what exists, but in the form of the newness inside of what exists. There is no longer negation on the one hand and affirmation on the other; there is rather affirmation and division of the creation that grounds the independence of the new subject from within the situation of the power. This is the general orientation of the new logic. In this orientation we can propose a new examination of all the old words in some field of knowledge or action. As an exercise I propose to discuss the word democracy. Today democracy is really the common term of all the ideological dispositions of the statesof pretty much all the reactionary states in fact. Therefore we must declare our first rupture by saying that we don't accept that sort of ideological line, which ultimately amounts to the idea that one can't resist democracy without being a terrorist or an ally of despotism. How can we do that? How can we really create a new way to critique the false democratic order? We are in a situation where we have to clarify for ourselves not only the content of the concept democracy in this casebut also whether we want to use the word. Is there today a possible good use of the word democracy? Is there today a possibility to affirm democracy in the framework of affirmative dialectics: that is my subjective question. There can be both good and bad uses of the word democracy, after all! The subjective question is: how can we be sure of the existence of a really affirmative vision of what is democracy today? We can decide to keep the wordand it's my position: it's better to keep the word. It's generally a good thing to keep the word, because there is something problematic about some Leftist saying I'm not interested in democracy at all because it has become practically meaningless. That's true but it's also true that when you talk about democracy you are always participating on the terrain of the common ideologythe critique is with meaningand the situation is difficult precisely because we cannot simply have the new means to criticise the word democracy in the framework of affirmative dialectics. To negate is very simple, we can say this democracy is certainly a false democracy but the question is not negation; the question is to inscribe democracy in the new affirmative framework. It's another question, it's a true political question. It is probably too easy to say OK, yes, we are in a democracy but democracy can do something elseto negate the actual sense of democracy and create by negation another sense to the word. Finally, if you say yes we are in a democracy but it's not the true democracy [then] you are in a defensive position; you will be the true defender of democracy. It's the opposite of my conception, because my position is to begin by affirmation, and not at all by a defensive position. We will only be in a defensive position true democracy against (dominant) false democracy. We can take another way, and distinguish two forms of positive democracy. For exampleand this is classicwe can distinguish popular democracy from bourgeois democracy or perhaps to be more contemporary, popular democracy from European democracy. The possibility of that sort of division is also the possibility of thinking democracy as something other than the pure form of state. It is a decision not only between popular democracy and European democracy but between true democracy and democracy as a form of state, as a form of power, as a form of oppressive state or as the form of a class state.

5 All that is the classical discussion. The point is today that this strict duality is not convincing in the framework of a new dialectical thinking. It's too easy to negatively determine the popular democracy as being all that the state democracy is not. To escape that sort of game of negation and negation of negation, I do not present two understandings of democracynot a division in two, but in three. Very often the passage from the classical dialectical framework to a new dialectical framework is the passage from two to three, or sometimes from three to four. That is a sort of trick in fact: when you are in difficulty with a division in two, you create a division in three. It is why generally (because it's my trick, as Agamben was the first to remark here some years ago) I have finally for every problem four terms. The new dialectical framework is finally composed of four terms. Hegel, as you know, has three terms concerning the active process because after the negation, which is the first movement of the Hegelian dialectic, and the negation of negationwhich is the second great movement Hegel has the totality of the process inclusive of the negation and the negation of the negation as the third term. In the new framework that I propose, we cannot have something like that because we don't have negation as the first term, negation of negation as the second term and finally the incorporation of all that in the absolute process. I begin in fact by two different affirmations: the reactive one and the new one. The new affirmation is not the negation of the first affirmation, it is something that is affirmatively new and is not constructed by the negation of what exists. We begin with two affirmations and so we have the possibility of two negations: the negation of the first term by the second term, or the negation of the second term by the firstso: revolutionary action and counter-revolutionary action. But the point is that the conservative negation of novelty, the first negation, cannot be the same as the negation by the newness of the conservative position. A new affirmation is not new if its negation of the old is absolutely the same as the negation of the novelty by the old world. If the reactive negation is the same thing as the affirmative negation, we have a pure symmetry between the old world and the new world and we have no real novelty. We have two affirmations at the beginning and we have also two different negations. The point is very important because in fact during all of the last century the negative action of the revolutionary state is in the same form as the oppressive negation of the old state. By the negation we have the construction of a symmetry: a new oppressive state in place of the old oppressive state; here we are in a dialectical framework in the old manner. If we begin with affirmation we open to negation at the second term and not at the first but this negation must be different from the reactive negation of your enemy. You have by necessity four terms as a complete intelligibility of the dialectical framework. The three primitive terms in the classical dialectic for the question of democracy: first, democracy as a form of state. This is democracy in its commonplace meaning, that is, representative democracy, parliamentarian ideology, the modern existence of the state. Secondly, democracy as movement: a sort of mass democracy which probably is democracy not directly in the political sense but much more in the historical sense, something like the birth of the new in a democratic formlike the Arab Spring if you want. You have mass democracy but in a form which is not the form of the power or the state but in the form of the uprising itself. When that sort of democracy takes place, it is democracy in the form of an Event. Much more than in the form of a political process it's in the form of an historical Event which is the revolt itself. This is the sense of democracy in the work of Jacques Rancire for example, and it is why for Rancire democracy exists only from time to time.

6 It's not a state of affairs, it's something that happens: we have democracy sometimes, but not very often. It's normal if democracy is the name of an exceptional situation concerning the people. What Rancire says is that this sort of democracy is in fact the activation of the principle of equality. It is not at all the question of the organisation of the power or the stateit's not the question of the organisation of the society. It's the internal law of a collective event. When we have a collective event, the internal law of the collective event is to activate some principle of equality. When the principle of equality is really active you have some version of our understanding of democracy, that is, democracy as the eruption of collective equality in a concrete form. This can be protest, insurrection, popular assembly or any other form in which equality is effectively active. This understanding itself has many forms but we can perfectly understand precisely what this form of democracy is: the regular form of revolutionary democracy. But it's much more a form of sudden emergence in history, ultimately in the form of an Event, than in the form of the consequences of the Event, or of the creation of the new political body. In the movement of revolutionary rupture we have the true meaning of democracy, mass democracy, but it's not exactly the political concept of democracy. This is why I propose to say that it's much more the historical definition of democracy than it's political definition. And so we have to find a third sense of democracy we have not to be enclosed in the pure opposition between popular democracy (mass democracy) and democracy as a form of state. In the new dialectical framework we must find a third sense of democracy which is properly the democracy of the determination of the new political subject as such: the new political subject as [in] the consequences of the Event and not only in the Event as such. This is my ultimate conception. Democracy at this level is a name for the elaboration of the consequences of collective action and for determining the new political subject. So we have three terms in appearance: democracy as a form of state (first affirmation), democracy as a mass democracy (second affirmation), and after that we have collective action, the determination of the consequences of the Event as the emergence of a new political subject. But in fact we have four terms finally, because after the classical representative democracy, which is a form of state power; after mass democracy, which is of historical nature; after democracy as a political subject; we have as in Hegel the process of all that returning to the first termreturning to the state. What is the democratic process when it is returning to the first term? It is necessarily the possibility of declining the state itself, as in Marx. It's the possibilitythe horizonof the progressive disparition [disappearance] of the state as the central necessity, as a form of power. So the fourth term is the first three terms when they return to the first (to the state) in the Communist vision of the vanishing of the state, the historical process of the progressive disparition of the first term. This is why have in fact four terms in this example of the new dialectical framework. We substitute for the clear classical opposition between the dominant false democracy and the true popular democracy a sort of complex with three places: state, revolutionary event, and politics. Three processes: affirmation of the peoples' access to politics outside the state, negation of this access by the state, and possibly victory of the political organisation of people. As the totalisation of the complete complex we have what I can name the point of Communism as the concrete results of all thatresults which have proofs (small proofs or big proofs) of the weakness of the state, of the weakness of the first stage, and finally of the possibility of its declining.

7 Another example is precisely the relationship between politics and power (more generally, not in the form of the term democracy). Classically the point of all political action is to seize power, to destroy the state machinery of the enemy. The name of all that is the master-name of all political classicism, the name revolution. Revolution is probably in the political field the most important name of the classical dialectics, because it's the name for negativity itself. Revolution is first the possible destruction of the state of the enemies and after that the creation of a new state or finally the creation of the conditions of the vanishing of the state. But first by revolution we have the destruction of the state. Today I think we cannot have a simple use of the word revolution because if we assume the word revolution in this classical sense we return to beginning by negation; we return to classical dialectics. The word revolution cannot be our master-name. We have to be entirely on the outside of state power. Not only in the action, which naturally is not the action of the state because it is the action of the new political subject, but also as a goal. We must affirm that our goal is not by itself the state, the seizing of the state power. We have to be in some sense outside state power (subjectively) but we know that the state is always in the field of political questions, and in the space of action. If our political subjectivity is not inside the state, inside the common law and so on, if to the contrary it is on the outside of the state, [then] the state is nonetheless in the field of every political action today. To take a concrete example from some of my direct experience: suppose we have to do something about workers who are without papers undocumented workers, say African immigrants in Franceand we want to organise and change things in this field. We want it to be possible for African immigrant workers, who are here sometimes for many years, to have papers. We want that those African immigrants can live with us, as us. We will quickly find that the state is in our space. We will have to confront new laws and decisions of the state, and we will have to create something, some new form of organisation, that will be face-to-face with the state; not inside the state but face-to-face with it. So we will have discussions with the state or we will organise various forms of disruption in any case we have to prescribe something about the state from outside the state. We will have to prescribe something that establishes a relation with the state that is not a relation in the state. The big difficultyand it's really the big difficulty in the new dialectical frameworkis to maintain the possibility of being outside while prescribing something that concerns the inside. There is then a sort of topological difficulty in the development of politics today namely the relation between the outside and the inside, because the state is always inviting you inside and asking that you not be outside. It's the most important point for the statethat everybody will be inside, inside the power, inside the law and so on. I have had very many concrete instances of this. Suppose for instance I shall go with some workers to discuss matters with some minister or other because the state refuses their regularisationit refuses to give them papers to live as everybody (else). Always this state representative in the office will ask who are you? and we always answer, we are a political organisation which is constructed by people. The reply is always, OK, but who are you? The problem is simple. For the stateand it's a general law of the powerto be somebody is to be inside the state. Otherwise you cannot be heard at all . So there are two possible outcomes: either finally there is a discussion and some political results or else there is no room for discussion because we are nobody. It is once more the present question of affirmation: how can we be

8 somebody without being on the inside? We must affirm first our existence, our principles, our action, always from outside. Finally we can say to the man in the state office that we are exactly who we are; that the creation of something outside is a fact. We must impose this affirmative existence to the question of the state, and this is no question of possible negation. Negation is without any strength. The fact is, we must affirm our existence face-to-face with the state. I know that some critics of my thinking (that we want to represent possibilities of complete transformation) [say that this] is too outside of the real process, so that it cannot be an active game in the concrete and immanent world, and so that finally we must be inside in some sense. It was a point of the old dialectics: negation was immanentactive inside firstand we create the new affirmation by negativity. If first we have affirmation we must be outside the state, and the objection is that if we are absolutely outside the state, we cannot have any strength. I disagree with this sort of objection because I think this objection finally denies the necessity of a new conception of affirmative dialectics. It's a realistic objection, as very often in politics: Oh, what you say is very beautiful, but it's not real. Certainly it is not real, but what is the definition of the real? Precisely the question of new affirmation is the question of the new definition of the real. We cannot accept the consideration that it is not real without first a discussion of what is real, and this really is the point. If I can organise something outside the state, it's real. It's real to be outside the state. If you are saying that it's not real [then] you are saying that all that is real is only that which is inside the state. That is precisely the return to the old form of political negativity. I know, naturally, that the Event comes first, that the reality of action comes first. Without the French Revolution, without the action of workers; without the real and concrete movement of the Parisian proletariat, Marx certainly would never have created his political concept of proletariat. The movement is not from the concept of proletariat to the proletarian movementthe real becoming is from the revolt of workers to the new proposition. I accept all that. Finally, the true discussion is not about the concrete analysis of global society but really about our relation to the state. The real question is whether today the political determination is to be outside or inside the state. The fundamental idea [is that] to be in the new affirmative dialectical framework you must be outside the state. Inside the state you are precisely in the negative figure of opposition. To be in opposition is not a new figure, not a creative political position. If you are enclosed inside the state, even in a negative figure or figure of opposition, finally the appearance of negativity comes first and so we have undone the idea of an affirmative dialectics. To finish I want to insist on the fact the new logical framework is not only a vision of politics, or even a vision of some particular practises; it prescribes much more generally a sort of anthropologya new definition of mankind. First, I think we are animals, all of us. I speak at this level of Human Animals. By contrast to all classical Humanism I put in this definition of animals a lot of things. Ultimately the Human Animal encompasses practically all our concrete existence as such without anything else and without any supplement. I really think that Capitalist anthropology is the conviction that fundamentally Humanity is nothing else but self-interested animals. It's a very important point (I think we have to do some propaganda on this point). Modern Capitalism is always speaking of human rights, democracy, freedom and so on, but in fact we can see concretely that under all these names we find nothing else but human animals with interests, who have to be happy with products. We have

9 to search for the Good Life in the big market. What the Capitalist world names subject or citizen is something like animals in front of the market and nothing else. This is really its definition of the Human. It's only with this definition of the human being that Capitalism can work: animals with interests. In this definition we have in fact a hierarchy, it's not at all equality. At the bottom we have the poor, who are before the market but without means, and at the top are the rich who are also before the market but with far greater means. The protection of all that is really nothing else but Capitalist anthropology, which is always saying that this form of humanity is the true form of humanity, that there cannot exist another form of the collective existence. All the democratic states of the world are also the organisation of the protection of this vision of collective existence. The possibility to be something else [other] than animals is the question and it's really the becomingsubject of a Human Animal, not in the abstract sense of Capitalist anthropology (citizen, subject, human rights and so on). How can a Human Animal become a subject? It's by the incorporation of a new body, which is something else than being in front of the market; it's to become something like a subject by being precisely something else than animal in front of the market. It's a process, the process of becoming-subject for the Human Animal. It's an infinite process. Infinite is a name for this process because when we have this kind of incorporation in a new subject, that is, incorporation by beginning with affirmation of a new possibility, we create the possibility of infinite consequences. The consequences are by principle infinite. The new possibility has always infinite consequences. We can say that human rights, in the sense of rights that are the subject's rights, are in fact the Rights of the Infinite. It's very important to understand that the vision of humanity by Capitalism is under the law of finitude. There is no infinite possibility because the infinite possibility will be something else [other] than repetition, but the law of the market is circulation and repetition, it's the law of finitude which is imposed in the very vision of human animals as such. Human rights that are really the subject's rights are the Rights of the Infinite. It was Jean-Franois Lyotard who has for the first time written this formula in his most important book, The Differend3. Jean-Franois Lyotard writes that the true formula is not human rights, but the Rights of the Infinite. I assume this formula of Lyotard's. We can say something concerning the anthropological question. I propose to say that the question of Mankind, the fundamental anthropological question is: what exactly is the singularity of Mankind the singularity of human beings? We know today there exists a species of Human Animals defined by their inclusion in the human market. In contrast we can name Humanity the capacity of becoming the subject to an Eventto something that happens, and not only to something which is; the capacity of accepting the possibility of an incorporation in a new Subjective Body; the capacity of drawing its practical consequences of incorporation, which is itself the becoming of the new subject. In the becoming of the subject, beyond the support of all that which is one of some human animals, there is something infinite, the new creation of something infinite, and the name of this infinite something is for me Truth. We can define humanity by the capacity of everybody to be an active part of the creation of a new Trutha new Truth in the field of political action, artistic creation, and finally a new Truth in common life too. The incorporation of the subject is the incorporation of some Human Animals to something like the process of Truth. That is the global field of what we can name Humanity or Human Beings in the context of affirmative dialectics. I agree ultimately with the Young Marx on one point: it's only in the successive creation of new forms of subjects that there is something like a generic humanitya true humanity, which is not

10 under the law of finitude. A generic humanity is by necessity an infinite humanityit's the same thing. The human animal in front of the market is under the law of finitude of interests and is not at all generic, it is absolutely particular. All that is like a new hypothesis about the subject, and it's also a new hypothesis about human life, about what it means for humans to live and not only to exist. In my book Logics of Worlds2 I oppose Human Rights in their ordinary meaningthe meaning in the direction of finitudeto the Rights of the Infinite by opposing what I name democratic materialism to the project of dialectical materialism (dialectical materialism: it's a possible name for affirmative dialectics). What makes these forms of materialism opposed is their respective understanding of human life. Because at the end the point is human life, for a philosopher. Two completely different understanding of what is human life: either there is nothing but language and bodies (it's the proposition of democratic materialism) or there is a third term. Either there is only the constitution of human animals in front of the big market, or there is something else, like the production of Truths that cut through the hegemony of our animal existence. The title of the conclusion of Logics of Worlds is What Is To Live?, and it's clearly the final question of anthropology. Two completely different conceptions of human life: the first reduces human life to common animal life, satisfaction of all natural desires, happiness, security and so on; the second one is what we are speaking ofthe context of affirmative dialectics. Human life must be identified by the incorporation to a Truth body. The human being is properly living only when he or she is the agent of the passage from particularity to universality, from local process to genericity, from the singular world to an eternal truth. For all that we must create progressively a new world, a world which is not the world of the big market. The question of the real life of human bodies is also the question of the future. But it is not because it is a question of the future that we cannot affirm this vision; as I was saying at the beginning, we must precisely affirm the future before the present, to do something, to create something. This second conception is a bit of a heroic one, and we know that many philosophers affirm that the time of heroism is passedthat we must only affirm ordinary languages, ordinary lives, ordinary and modest creations and so on; that is the real. Naturally, to be heroic is always to propose something that is a bit beyond the real. But it's the price to pay to have something else than the human animal in front of the market. Maybe after all Althusser was right to affirm that philosophy is a unique form of thinking which has no history (it was a paradoxical, strange and very interesting affirmation for a Marxist). The fact that an Idea is old is not for a philosopher an objection against this Idea. If the Idea is an heroic one it is not an objection against the Idea, even if we are in a non-heroic world. In any case, even if this conception is a bit of an heroic one, I must affirm before you: it's mine, and certainly I'm too old to change my mind on this point. Thank you! Alain Badiou, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, 2012 [1] This refers to Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press (Cultural Memory in the Present series) 2003 [2] Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds. Continuum 2009 [3] Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [Le Diffrend. Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1983]