07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 123

The Provocations of Alain Badiou

Benjamin Noys

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

by Alain Badiou
London and New York: Verso, 2001, 18 hbk
Manifesto for Philosophy
by Alain Badiou
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 34.75 hbk, 10.75 pbk
Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
by Alain Badiou
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 33.50
hbk, 16 pbk

HE FRENCH philosopher Alain Badiou is a deliberately provocative

thinker, as these three new translations of his work demonstrate. In
each case a cherished element of the current postmodern doxa is
violently overturned. The Ethics is a scathing attack on contemporary
ethical ideology, whether that is the celebration of human rights or of a
respect for the Other. In the Manifesto for Philosophy Badiou indicts all talk
of the end of philosophy for its arrogant assumption that the task of philosophy is over. Finally, in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, he overturns the
commonly accepted image of Deleuze as an anarcho-desirer amongst the
bearded militants of 1968, bearing the standard of their gross desire
(Badiou, 2000: 12) and their heirs amongst Anglo-American Deleuzians.
These provocations are not just provocations for the sake of it. Instead
Badiou has a more profound project: to rehabilitate ontology, love, a
universal emancipatory politics and the subject from their current ignominious status as discredited metaphysical concepts.1In doing so Badiou
forces us to re-think how we understand our own time and suggests a new

 Theory, Culture & Society 2003 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 20(1): 123132
[0263-2764(200302)20:1;123132;030924]

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 124

124 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)

emerging configuration of Critical Theory at the beginning of the 21st

century.
Certainly, however, the gesture of provocation is central to Badious
work, as he states: I have never tempered my polemics: consensus is not
one of my strong points (Badiou, 2000: 2). Perhaps this taste for provocation can be partly explained by his intellectual background. After a
Sartrean adolescence (Badiou, 2000: 1), Badiou joined the Spinoza
research group created by Louis Althusser. His work of this period, Le
Concept de modle (1972), was an attempt to create a Marxist science of
mathematics. Badiou was also fascinated by Lacans attempts to formalize
psychoanalysis through mathematical models, and he still considers Lacan
the greatest of our dead (Badiou, 1999: 28). Then, after the events of May
1968, Badiou began a long political and philosophical engagement with
Maoism. The title of his major work of this period, Thorie de la contradiction, indicates his shift away from Althusserianism to Maoism.2 It was
during this period that his polemics and interventions at the University of
Vincennes, where he was professor, angered both Gilles Deleuze and JeanFranois Lyotard with what they regarded as his attempted Bolshevization
of the philosophy department (Badiou, 2000: 2). For Badiou, at this time,
philosophy was also a political matter and this politics demanded a rigorous
struggle against revisionism without compromise.
In the 1980s Badious thinking underwent a major shift, although he
remains politically engaged and still calls for a militant thinking (Badiou,
1999: 81).3 The dissolution of Maoism in France and China and the attempts
by the new philosophers in France (many ex-Maoists) to call for an end to
philosophy because of its totalitarian pretensions led Badiou to a more
sympathetic engagement with his contemporaries, such as Lyotard and
Deleuze. As Badiou himself puts it, when a new period is opened and other
adversaries climb onto the stage, conceptual alliances shift or are overturned (2000: 2). In 1982 he published Thorie du sujet, which marked the
beginning of this re-orientation. However, it was in Ltre et lvnement
(Being and the Event), published in 1988, that Badiou set out his new
system.4 As the title suggests, this book was not without ambition, echoing
Heideggers Being and Time and Sartres Being and Nothingness. It undertakes a two-fold task, first setting out ontology by understanding being qua
being through the discipline of mathematics, and particularly set theory
(from Gdel to Cantor). For Badiou set theory allows him to develop an
ontology of the multiple (Badiou, 2000: 3).5 That, however, is only the half
of it, as Badiou also develops a philosophy of the event. The event is the
what-is-not-being-qua-being (Badiou, 1999: 105), a supplement to the
multiple that is, at the same time, immanent to it. The event punctures
knowledge and leaves behind a trace which it is the task of philosophy to
seize.
Such a brief description can only be extremely abstract, but Badious
more recent works have provided a series of useful explications and applications of his system. In Ethics, in particular, Badiou provides one of his

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 125

Noys The Provocations of Alain Badiou

125

clearest statements of his philosophy, not least because the book was
originally written for a series aimed at secondary school and university
students. Outside of his short book on Saint Paul (Badiou, 1997), which has
yet to be translated, it is also the most direct statement of the political and
ethical implications of Badious work. Already, so soon after its translation,
it has proved to be an immensely controversial work. The defenders of
Continental philosophy in its more familiar forms have been quick to criticize Badious position (Critchley, 2000; Dews, 2002), and a debate is
already forming.6 Therefore, it is a useful place to begin reading Badiou and
confirms our thesis of the provocative nature of his work. Why has the Ethics
proved so provoking? No doubt it is provoking because of the uncompromising assault Badiou makes on what he regards as our current ethical
delirium but also it is provoking because of Badious own ethic of truths,
which he offers as a replacement.
Keep Going!
The opening gesture, the opening provocation, is the call for a reconsideration of the anti-humanism of the 1960s. For Badiou, the model of ethics
based on human rights is a rejection of that thought, and a reactionary
movement away from the political demands that it made into the safety of
the ethical. He suggests that the obsession with the ethical is the result of
the collapse of revolutionary Marxism, and of all the forms of progressive
engagement that it inspired (Badiou, 2001: 4). Of course, from the perspective of the ethics of human rights, the anti-humanism of Foucault, Althusser
and Lacan appears to be anti-human. For the partisans of the ethical such
anti-humanism is indifferent to human suffering. However, for Badiou, the
truth is exactly the opposite (Badiou, 2001: 6) in that Foucault, Althusser
and Lacan were all engaged militants concerned with human suffering.
While those who extol the ideology of ethics condemn the abstractions of
theory, in fact it is their discourse of human rights which is supremely
abstract while the anti-humanists paid a constant attention to concrete situations and an activist inquiry into the situation of the most varied kinds of
people (Badiou, 2001: 7).
Badious second provocation is to go on to argue that the ethical, at
least in its current configuration, is not at all ethical. Where the discourse
of human rights claims to be founded on the dignity of the individual human
it, in fact, reproduces the image of the passive suffering human animal as
the one who must be saved. On the other side stands the noble saviour of
the wretched of the earth, which, as Badiou remarks, is the justification of
a new colonialism predicated on the subhumanity of the victims (2001: 13).
If we turn to the alternative dominant ethical discourse, that of a respect for
the Other, then there too we find that the Other must stay as Other to receive
our pity. The Other is only acceptable on the condition that he or she
remains the good other, so there is a respect for differences as long as those
differences remain within the bounds of the ideological consensus (Badiou,
2001: 24). In each case, then, the promise of ethics has been traduced.

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 126

126 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)

Whether we turn to human rights or the respect for the Other we encounter
an ethics that is not properly ethical and which, in fact, is complicit with
the limits of our current politics. In both cases, that of human rights and of
a respect for the Other, ethics is both fatally abstract and reproduces an
image of man (or woman) as suffering animal.
Badious alternative ethics is an ethics that is both situated and that
affirms man as a tissue of truths (Badiou, 2001: 12). There is no ethics in
general but only an ethics of singular situations and ethics is the name for
how we respond to the demands of these situations, or of how we respond
to the event. So, there is no abstract ethical subject but only a subject who
comes about through the response to an event, to a call that calls us to
become something more than a living animal. This then returns us to
Badious philosophy of Being and the event. On the one hand, what there
is is the multiple, which is an objective situation. In the situation we get
by as best we can, exchanging opinions and living within the circulation of
knowledge. On the other hand, there is an event which supplements that
situation and which compels us to a new way of being (Badiou, 2001: 41).
For Badiou, events occur in four fields: the political, the scientific, the
artistic and the amorous.7 These events include the French Revolution and
the Chinese Cultural Revolution (political events); Galileos creation of
physics and Grothendiecks creation of Topos theory in mathematics (scientific events); Haydns invention of the classical musical style and Schoenbergs invention of the 12-tone scale (artistic events); and the meeting of
Hlose and Ablard and Lacans theory of love (amorous events). This list
is obviously not exhaustive and is particular to Badiou; it is also obviously
contestable (Lecercle, 1999: 12). However, the event, situated in a situation
but also subtracted from it, is the beginning of ethics.
Let us take an example, the Russian Revolution of 1917, which, for
Badiou, is the last nameable political event (Badiou, 1994: 123). There is
a situation, that of the Russian peasantry, the military situation at the end
of the First World War, political agitation, etc. The event, the Russian Revolution, cannot be named from within that situation but instead supplements
that situation and profoundly alters it. As iek points out (2002: 553), when
Lenin publishes the April Theses calling for revolution even his comrades
regard him as mad! The event requires a naming that subtracts itself from
the situation and is unnameable within it, and that is the naming of what is
happening as the Russian Revolution. Then the ethical comes into play
through the requirement of a fidelity to that event, which requires a real
break (Badiou, 2001: 42) with the situation to produce the truth of the event
through a process of fidelity. This process convokes a subject who bears this
truth (in the sense of tolerates this truth and carries it). In the case of the
Russian Revolution this process of fidelity to the Revolution is maintained
through Leninism and the subject of it is the Bolshevik. The ethical then is
the ethic of a truth, not something general but something that maintains
fidelity to the truth emerging from a particular event.
That is why the maxim of this ethic of truths is Keep going! or

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 127

Noys The Provocations of Alain Badiou

127

Continue! For Badiou, Lacan had already formulated this ethical demand
as Do not give way on your desire. There is an event which is an unpredictable or evanescent supplement to a situation. Then there is a fidelity
which tries to maintain this immanent break with the situation and, finally,
the truth that this process of fidelity produces.8 Badious ethics is an ethics
written under the merciless rule of immanence (Badiou, 1994: 124). It is
internal to the process of fidelity and can only make sense in relation to a
situated event, and so it cannot be an abstract universal. At the same time
this ethics carries us beyond our animal existence to the Immortal through
maintaining our fidelity to a truth. Although the word Immortal has a
religious connotation it should not be mistaken for a new religiosity.9
Instead, Badious thinking of truths depends far more on mathematics than
it does on religion (Hallward, 2000a: 27). It is the pressure of truths (which
are always post-evental) that carry us beyond ourselves and toward philosophy.
One More Step
The Ethics then returns us to the question of philosophy for Badiou, and to
his Manifesto for Philosophy (1999). In the Manifesto Badiou calls us again
to Keep going: we must take a step within the modern configuration, the
one that since Descartes has bound the three nodal concepts of being, truth
and the subject to the conditions of philosophy (Badiou, 1999: 32). Rather
than the postmodern retreat from philosophy and ontology, Badious provocations demand that we take one more step. This step requires that we call
an end to all talk of the end of philosophy and instead maintain philosophy
as that which makes it possible to seize our time in thought. If a truth is
what within time exceeds time (Badiou, 1994: 87), then philosophy must
act as the witness of these truths as they emerge. Therefore Philosophy tries
to seize truths endurance, to capture the eternity contained within time
(Badiou, 1994: 118). To declare an end to philosophy is to declare an end
to this task of capturing the opening that truths make in time. It is to
renounce the imperative to keep going and so leads to an accommodation
with our time.
To take this extra step within the modern configuration requires an
inquiry into the possibility of philosophy today. The possibility of philosophy
can only be established through a consideration of the conditions of philosophy and the relation of philosophy to its conditions. These conditions of
philosophy are the fields from which truths emerge: the political, the scientific, the artistic and the amorous. What this means is that philosophy does
not produce truths but instead it is conditioned by truths that originate from
events in these fields. However, philosophy can become blocked when it
becomes sutured (the word is derived from Lacan) to one of its conditions.
In this case, philosophy delegates its function of constructing a space where
truths can be gathered, but not totalized, to one particular condition of philosophy. The suturing of philosophy to politics can be found in Marxism,
where politics will answer the problems of philosophy. In Marxism, the

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 128

128 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)

political suture can also be crossed with a scientific suture, where Marxism
becomes a science of history or of all reality (as in Stalinism). Other
examples of the suturing of philosophy to science can be found in positivism
and in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The suturing of philosophy to
art is found most in post-Nietzschean Continental philosophy, particularly
in its linking of philosophy to poetry. Finally, the suturing of philosophy to
love is rarer, although Badiou claims that this can be found in some
comments of Levinas.
To maintain philosophy we must maintain it in relation to all its
conditions without allowing it to become sutured to any one of its conditions.
Therefore philosophy must be de-sutured to restore it to its proper place.
Of course the importance of mathematics in Badious philosophy could lead
to the suspicion that he is suturing his philosophy to mathematics. Although
Badiou argues that mathematics is the science of being qua being, he also
separates ontology from philosophy as well (Badiou, 1994: 123). Therefore,
although mathematics is important for Badiou as the thinking of ontology,
it does not hold a necessarily privileged position in his philosophy. Instead,
philosophy must draw on the truths that emerge from all the fields that
condition it. The task of philosophy is not to draw these truths together into
Truth; that would be disaster. Instead philosophy opens a general space in
which thought accedes to time, to its time, so long as the truth procedures
of this time find shelter for their compossibility with it (1999: 38).
In the Manifesto, philosophy is sheltering four particular events from
its four conditions that allow it to accede to its time. In politics this is the
series of obscure events from 1965 to 1980 that have yet to receive a name,
not least the events of May 68. Then, in science, it is the mathematics of
set theory, from Cantor to Paul Cohen, as the articulation of the multiple
and the model for a secularized infinity. From art Badiou draws on the age
of the poets, and the closure of that age in the work of Paul Celan. In the
amorous field it is Lacans theorization of love as an event of the Two that
must be thought. In a sense then, if we look back to Being and the Event
we can see it not only as the statement of Badious philosophy but also as
the attempt by Badiou to force philosophy to accede to its time through these
events and their concomitant truths. However, in an interview given in 1994
Badiou stated that Today, I would certainly rework this mapping of events,
which was meant only as an indication (1994: 123). As the preface to the
English edition of the Ethics also suggests, Badious philosophy is still in
development and still responding to its time (Badiou, 2001: liiilviii).
Despite the impression Badious work might give of being an unassailable
system (Lecercle, 1999: 13), it is, on the contrary, open to its time without
reserve.
This openness to its own time is perhaps most evident in Badious own
debate with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In the book Deleuze, Badiou
attempts to respond to a mute interlocutor, silenced by death. The result is
both a clarification of Badious position and a provocative reading of
Deleuze. Badiou reads Deleuze as, fundamentally, a philosopher of the

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 129

Noys The Provocations of Alain Badiou

129

One-All rather than as a philosopher of difference. What readers of Deleuze

have tended to ignore is Deleuzes claim that being is univocal: A single
and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same
Ocean for all the drops, a single clamor of Being for all beings (Deleuze in
Badiou, 2000: 11). Badiou goes on to claim that although Deleuzes thought
announces itself as an immanent philosophy of multiplicity, it fails to obey
the merciless rule of immanence. In fact what Deleuze produces is a
Platonism of the virtual, at least according to Badiou.10 In doing so, Deleuze
restores a transcendence of the virtual into a thought of immanence. This
deeply provocative reading has not passed without comment, either in
France or amongst Anglo-American Deleuzians. Whatever its merits, it has
led to a reconsideration of the type of singular thought that Deleuze exemplifies (Hallward, 2000b, 2001). It is also a statement of Badious own
position in relation to Deleuze, his closest contemporary.
Badiou is closest to Deleuze because they both share a commitment to
philosophy, although in very different ways, and because they are both
committed to a thinking of the multiple. This proximity makes all the stranger
what Badiou calls the strange story of his nonrelationship with Deleuze
(Badiou, 2000: 1). Despite an exchange of letters between them begun in
1991, Badiou and Deleuze never met and they shared a conflictual friendship that, in a certain sense, had never taken place (Badiou, 2000: 6). This
conflictual friendship did allow for a certain clarification, at least for Badiou,
of their respective positions. In Deleuze, Badiou suggests that while Deleuze
offered a thinking of immanence and the multiple based on a Bergsonian filiation, his own work depends on a second line (Badiou, 2000: 99). This
second line draws on the resources of logic, mathematics, and abstraction
(against logicizing grammaticalism), as well as on those of organized emancipatory politics (against democratic consensus) (Badiou, 2000: 99).
Badiou vigorously defends this second line against Deleuze.
Both the Manifesto and Deleuze represent not only the statement and
clarification of Badious own philosophy, of his own extra step within the
modern configuration, but they also open a new understanding of that
configuration. Badious provocations shatter our image of the current
representation of Continental Philosophy or French thought (neither very
adequate names for many reasons). In particular, he gives us a new sense
of what is at stake in that configuration that lies far from the clichs of the
postmodern that too often are thought to stand for all that is taking place
today. In Deleuze, Badiou argues that when all is said and done, there is
little doubt that the century has been ontological, and that this destiny is
far more essential than the linguistic turn with which it has been credited
(Badiou, 2000: 19). Therefore, instead of the linguistic turn we would be
more justified of speaking of an ontological turn in 20th-century thought
running, in particular, from Heidegger to Lacan and Deleuze and on to
Badiou. Not only does this alter our image of the history of 20th-century
thought, it also alters our understanding of our present, that time which, for
Badiou, it is the duty of philosophy to grasp.

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 130

130 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)

The Ontological Turn?

As we have left the 20th century and entered the new millennium, there
have been an increasing number of interventions that are evidence of the
resurgence of the ontological turn as central to critical thought today.11 A
wide range of heterogeneous works have all re-opened the question of
ontology in particular ways, such as Jean-Luc Nancys Being Singular
Plural (2000), Slavoj ieks The Ticklish Subject (1999), the work of
Antonio Negri and his collaborations with Michael Hardt (see Hardt and
Negri, 2000), Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer (1998), as well as Badious
own writing.12 Even if we consider the exception to this new ontological
configuration, Jacques Derrida, we can find a complicated relation to
ontology even in his recent writings. When Derrida responds to Antonio
Negris criticism of Specters of Marx for its refusal to elaborate a postdeconstructive ontology (Negri in Sprinker, 1999: 12) he concedes, with a
certain humour, that perhaps the two of us could, from now on, agree to
regard the word ontology as a password, a word arbitrarily established by
convention, a shibbloeth [sic], which only pretends to mean what the word
ontology has always meant (Derrida in Sprinker, 1999: 261).
We might then understand ontology as a password that allows us to
grasp this new configuration despite its heterogeneity. As Derrida notes, it
may well be that ontology only pretends to mean what it has always been
taken to mean, and so we must analyse this ontological turn with great care.
As the most rigorous and provocative statement of this turn, Badious work
will therefore demand particularly close attention. The clarity of his wager
and his sensitivity to the political and social stakes of his philosophy make
a reckoning with Badiou all the more necessary. Despite the fact that his
work might seem so untimely in its style and its references, not least in its
insistence on a Platonism of the multiple (Badiou, 1999: 103) it is, in fact,
a demand to think the events of our time. This is a provocation that cannot
be ignored.
Notes
1. For more detailed accounts in English of Badious project see Hallward (1998),
Lecercle (1999), iek (1999: 127243), Barker (2002) and the introductions in
each of the works under review here.
2. See Barker (2002: 1338), chapter 1 Maoist Beginnings, for a description of
this work.
3. On Badious politics without a party and his group LOrganisation politique see
Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou (in Badiou, 2001:
95144).
4. A translation of this work by Oliver Feltham is forthcoming in Athlone Press
scheduled for 2003 (see Badiou, 2001: 151).
5. For Badious use of set theory see Barker chapter 2 The Science of Being (2002:
3958) and Hallward (1998: 902).
6. See Hallward (2000a) for a reply to Critchleys criticisms.
7. This confining of events to these four fields is a result of Badious Platonism. It

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 131

Noys The Provocations of Alain Badiou

131

has been argued by his critics that Badiou should add more fields where events can
take place, such as the religious (Critchley, 2000: 21; Lecercle, 1999: 11; iek,
1999: 1414, 183) or the historical (Lecercle, 1999: 12).
8. Badiou argues that the truth that results from an event is generic because it
refers to the pure multiplicity of any multiple (1999: 1039), this is what makes it
true (universal).
9. As does Peter Dews (2002: 36).
10. As Lecercle notes, Badious Deleuze soon becomes yet another celebration of
Badious system (1999: 7), see also Barker, chapter 5 The Cult of Deleuze (2002:
11129) for an even-handed discussion of the debate between Badiou and
Deleuze.
11. This ontological turn, despite appearances to the contrary, is not a matter of
(as Jason Barker suggests of Badiou) politics having given way to ontology (Barker,
2002: 112). This is an extremely misleading characterization, both of Badiou and
of the ontological turn that I have sketched. Rather than politics giving way to
ontology, it is a matter of politics and ontology being thought together to analyse
how they pass over and through each other.
12. This is simply the beginning of a sketch of this new configuration, which could
easily be extended to previous and forthcoming works by the thinkers listed as well
as a range of other contemporary thinkers.
References
Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A. (1972) Le Concept de modle. Paris: Maspro.
Badiou, A. (1982) Thorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil.
Badiou, A. (1994) Being by Numbers, interview with Lauren Sedofsky, Artforum
33(2): 847, 118, 1234.
Badiou, A. (1997) Saint Paul: la fondation de luniversalisme. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Badiou, A. (1999) Manifesto for Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Badiou, A. (2000) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London and New
York: Verso.
Barker, J. (2002) Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London and Sterling, VA:
Pluto Press.
Critchley, S. (2000) Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou, Radical
Philosophy 100(March/April): 1627.
Dews, P. (2002) Uncategorical Imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the Ethical Turn,
Radical Philosophy 111(January/February): 337.
Hallward, P. (1998) Generic Sovereignty: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou,
Angelaki 3(3): 87111.
Hallward, P. (2000a) Ethics without Others: A Reply to Critchley on Badious
Ethics, Radical Philosophy 102(July/August): 2730.

07 Noys (jr/t)

12/12/02

3:30 pm

Page 132

132 Theory, Culture & Society 20(1)

Hallward, P. (2000b) The Singular and the Specific, Radical Philosophy
99(January): 618.
Hallward, P. (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press.
Lecercle, J.-J. (1999) Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, Mme Combat: The Philosophy
of Alain Badiou, Radical Philosophy 93(January/February): 613.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000) Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sprinker, Michael (ed.) (1999) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques
Derridas Specters of Marx. London and New York: Verso.
iek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject. London and New York: Verso.
iek, S. (2002) A Plea for Leninist Intolerance, Critical Inquiry 28(winter):
54266.

Benjamin Noys is Lecturer in English at University College Chichester.

He has written extensively on the work of Georges Bataille and Critical
Theory. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto
Press, 2000). Currently he is researching the question of desire in contemporary Critical Theory.