A J Bartlett, Ed. - Badiou & His Interlocutors

Badiou and His Interlocutors
Also available from Bloomsbury
Happiness, Alain Badiou

Conditions, Alain Badiou
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin
Badiou and His Interlocutors
Lectures, Interviews and Responses
Edited by
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury

Publishing Plc
First published 2018
© A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and contributors 2018
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2665-0

PB: 978-1-3500-2666-7
ePDF: 978-1-3500-2663-6
ePub: 978-1-3500-2664-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii
Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down A.J. Bartlett and

Justin Clemens 1
Part One Lectures
1 In Search of the Lost Real Alain Badiou 7
2 Cinema and Philosophy Alain Badiou17
3 The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy Alain Badiou31
Part Two Presentations
4 Badiou’s Concept of History Knox Peden 41
5 Deleuze’s Badiou Jon Roffe55
6 Mathematics in the Bedroom: Sex, the Signifier and the

Smallest Whole Number Sigi Jöttkandt73
7 From Prohibition to Affirmation: On Challenges and

Possibilities of a Badiouian Philosophy of Art Ali Alizadeh89
8 Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal Louise Burchill105
9 An Inessential Art?: Positioning Cinema in Alain Badiou’s

Philosophy Alex Ling127
Part Three Essays
10 Subjected to Formalization: Formalization and Method in the

Philosophy of Alain Badiou John Cleary 143
11 Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa): Love and

Abstraction in Badiou and Lacan Bryan Cooke159
vi Contents
12 Where Thought Is Not Campbell Jones177
13 The Priority of Conditions: On the Relationship between

Mathematics and Poetry in Being and Event Robert Boncardo
and Christian R. Gelder193
Part Four Interviews with Alain Badiou
14 Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou 211
15 ‘The Movement of Emancipation’219
Part Five Encomium
16 The Beginner Lia Hills239
Notes 243
Bibliography 263
Contributors 269
Index 271
Acknowledgements
This collection is the outcome of Alain Badiou’s visit to the Antipodes, Australia
and New Zealand, in November 2014. The visit was organized and funded in
the first instance by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, a not-
for-profit, non-university educational collective, committed to philosophical
thought and the means of its transmission. The MSCP, through the offices of
the convenor James Garrett and treasurer Bryan Cooke, having stumped up
the money for airfares, hotels, dinners, room hire, catering and so on, for the
initial Melbourne leg of the journey, also helped to facilitate Badiou’s visit to
Auckland University, the University of New South Wales and Western Sydney
University. The commitment of several individuals within discrete faculties in
these Universities made this co-operation possible: Sigi Jottkandt and William
Balfour at University of NSW, Alex Ling at Western Sydney University and
Campbell Jones and Jai-Bentley Payne at the University of Auckland. It is
to their credit that funding was made available to support these visits and,
moreover, that these visits – which included public lectures, master-classes,
interviews, and many casual and ongoing conversations – were extremely well
attended. The important contribution of several comrades deserves special
mention: Sunday Cullip-Bartlett, Angela Cullip, Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey,
Lauren Bliss, Kim Mereine, Sam Lindsay, Helen Johnson and Trades Hall
in Melbourne. At Bloomsbury, we’d like to thank Liza Thompson and
Frankie Mace. We would also like to thank Joe Gelonesi and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation for permission to use a transcription of Badiou’s
interview with them. Finally, this book has been supported by a Faculty of
Arts Publication Subsidy Scheme from The University of Melbourne, as well
as by the School of Culture and Communication.
Abbreviations
AP The Age of the Poets

BE Being and Event
C Conditions
CMA Cinema
CH The Communist Hypothesis
CM The Concept of Model
D Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
E Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
HB Handbook of Inaesthetics
IA The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts
IPL In Praise of Love
IT Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy
JLPP Jacques Lacan, passé présent
LM Logiques des mondes
LW Logics of Worlds
M Metapolitics
MP Manifesto for Philosophy
MT Mathematics of the Transcendental
NN Number and Numbers
P Polemics
PP Pocket Pantheon
PPP Petit panthéon portatif
PE Philosophy and the Event
PR Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters
RRP À la recherche du réel perdu
SMP Second Manifesto for Philosophy
SP Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
TC The Century
TS Theory of the Subject
TW Theoretical Writings
WA Wittgenstein’s Anti-philosophy
Introduction:
The World Turned Upside Down
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
But now the salmon-fishers moist

Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go!
Let’s in: for the dark hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.
– Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House
Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures Interviews and Responses is a unique

collection in a couple of ways. First, it brings together in a single volume
lectures and interviews given by Alain Badiou while in the Antipodes:1 –
scholarly and critical responses by attentive scholars in the field, such as Knox
Peden, Sigi Jottkandt, Louise Burchill, Ali Alizadeh, Jon Roffe and Alex Ling,
originally delivered at a conference in Melbourne, attended by Badiou; and
original essays commissioned to address specific concepts and categories
discussed by Badiou on this trip but specific to his work more generally. Three
were authored by the young Australian scholars, Bryan Cooke, John Cleary,
Christian Gelder and Robert Boncardo, whose engagement with Badiou’s
work, already insightful, will undoubtedly be ongoing; rounding out this final
section is an essay by the New Zealand scholar Campbell Jones, addressing the
‘true’ nature of Badiou’s thought. The volume concludes with an encomium to
the Idea of the visit by the New Zealand-born writer Lia Hills.
The second aspect of the unicity of the collection is its marking a ‘site’,
something remarked by Badiou when he wondered out loud at the depth
and breadth of the engagement with his work ‘down under’ as he put it,
and pronounced that, with regard to his oeuvre, there was clearly an ‘école
2 Badiou and His Interlocutors
antipodean’. But we must be careful here for the last thing that is appropriate
to Badiou’s work is some form of parochialism, some essentialization of
identity. Indeed, this very reference to specificity, the antipodes, garnered
understandable resistance from the publisher, Bloomsbury, when we
originally proposed the title ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’. They wondered if such
a title reference would make the volume seem too local, too parochial – as
if the collection were about the antipodes as such. So, conscious always of
Plato’s note in the Cratylus that ‘we philosophers begin not with words but
with things’, we agreed to change names, conscious also that in the world
of marketing a parochial globalization makes all the running. Of course,
it is clearly the case that this is a local intervention into the oeuvre of the
philosopher Alain Badiou – no collection can never not be. But the work of
a philosopher – including that which conditions its possibility, that which it
is tasked to think, and the various means of its transmission and reception –
is itself anything but parochial or reducible to nationalist, culturalist,
geographical or natural determinations. Clearly, all or any of these have their
affects but to suppose an empirically indexed reduction – an identity, if you
will – is to suppose already that philosophy does not exist, that, finally, it
is a matter of localized opinion, of ‘dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ as
Deleuze and Guattari ironized. Nowhere in this volume will the reader find
any such reduction nor any gesture towards such parochialism, let alone to
nationalism or identity as conceptual tropes. Rather, precisely because of
the philosophy under consideration and transmission – that it is philosophy
at stake – any local or singular intervention is already inscribed within the
universality proper to any philosophical trajectory: that which it names,
addresses and is oriented by. This volume is clearly an intervention at a site,
local and singular insofar as it is the matter of this place and these scholars
who happen to inhabit this place – which is not ours by definition – but any
such intervention, any such thought at all is conditioned absolutely by the
necessary universality of its address, that it can and must be the thought of
all. To speak philosophically, to speak with and after Badiou, is to suppose
that the addressee of the intervention, always local because always sited, is
anyone at all, here and now, near or far, present and future.
Such a (mis)titling, ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’ would have then at once
reflected a simple fact – Badiou was here! – and a comic turn, making
use of a sort of antiquated phraseology itself derived from a idealizing
exoticism concerning the world down under. Badiou himself makes play
with this antiquation when he tells his New Zealand audience that, from the
perspective of Europeans even today, New Zealand is ‘a paradise’. Many in the
audience begged to put him right on that score. Some of us were also bound
to recall the indelible sarcasm of the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul
Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down 3
Keating, who described the antipodes (Australia specifically) as being at ‘the

arse-hole end of the world’.2
Yet such a non-title also reflects the less banal or comic side of this
antiquated exoticism, gesturing towards the manifest and brutal colonial
history of these places for which the notion of an exotic unknown served
ideological cover, and which continues to haunt the existential imaginary of
both Australia and New Zealand. It is probably the case that Australia, with
its history of the legal, determinative fiction terra nullius at its heart – now
perversely translated into the excised camps filled with extraordinary ‘others’,
thus repeating as some sort of return of the repressed the colonial history
of the original prison camp3 – suffers from it more profoundly than New
Zealand, who can at least cite the Treaty of Waitangi as referential for it as
political entity.
This ‘void’ title also reflects, for those who live here, as partly noted,
the view of ‘us’ by ‘those’ who live in the places of supposed sophistication
and civilization (the use of ‘supposed’ here being entirely symptomatic!), as
somehow backward or behind, ‘natural’ in some sense, colonial in outlook,
insular and perhaps wild – certainly not the place one turns to for lessons in
culture or thought (even if it can be admitted it throws up the odd individual).
Of course this is fantastical. Any thought for the antipodes by Europeans or
Americans (seemingly the only referents that matter) must today interrupt
this vision, but the reflexive vision is no less real for all that. Symptomatically,
the view of this view is both long and truly held and is thus fantasized and
fetishized by Antipodeans themselves. It is fantasied in the sense that we
believe anyone at all really cares about what happens in the antipodes – in
general, they do not, and thus the Antipodean’s desire for recognition takes
this perverted form. It is a fetishized view in the antipodes because as much
as it stems from a mourned-over lack (of recognition), it also conditions our
very identity. That we are not like them – despite our desire to be just like
them – is the structural fetish of modern (white) Antipodean identity. As the
inverts of Europe, the Antipodean is at once its lack and its fulfilment.
The lacking title also, finally, is philosophical. We know that in the great
dialogues of Plato, Socrates, the great Platonic creation, is singled out by the
Athenian city. He is, as one of his primary accusers Meletus says – under
Socratic questioning, bien sûr – the only figure among the entirety of the
citizenry who does not educate. All good Athenian sophisticates, being just
that, the accusers say, namely, educators. Moreover, we must take this to be
the position of the city itself as determined by the votes at the trial. Now
Plato, in a move of great genius, takes this determination or even diagnosis
of abnormal corruption and essentially inverts it under the form and force
of a retrial. The entirety of the dialogues is a retrial of the singularity of
Socrates such that in fact this abnormal singularity is seen to be the very
subjective form of the universal which Plato’s avatars will call the ‘just city’ –
nowhere visible but not impossible. Hence, the form of the enquiry, which
is the dialogues, and for which the dialogues act as body – ‘corpus’ –, the
new living and eternal body of the Socratic idea, is to take up this singularity
as the means of a return to the city as it is, to be transformed. The figure of
abnormal singularity is the means of an entirely new orientation to all the
extant knowledge of the city, to everything that conditions that knowledge
and which is also the means of its transmission.
In other words, from within the world of the city, there is an ‘other’
orientation to it and this other orientation, affirmed as such, confirmed as the
mode of an enquiry, itself the means of the orientation, opens up the city of
knowledge to what has been hitherto impossible for it to know. For Plato, this
generic construction is precisely the very truth of this city: that it is not what
he calls sophistic Athens, the world or knowledge of Athens as it exists, but
the not-impossible Republic in which the thought of justice, the true concern
of the philosopher, is its real and manifest orientation. The argument is that
if the Socratic figure could be seen to be there in the city of Athens, even if
marked as anomalous there to the knowledge of that city, then this anomaly,
being at all times what seeks after the truth of this city, could be, indeed must
be, enquired into and if enquired into, then, step by step, demonstrated to be
for all. Hence for Plato, the singularity of Socrates is precisely his universality
tout court. Socrates is what is in Athens more than it knows, to paraphrase
Jacques Lacan; his intervention on the global scene of Athenian knowledge at
its site is the universal truth of its knowledge, which it is not. Plato stages this
retrial of Socrates as singular-universal across the entirety of the dialogues.
Let’s end this introduction to what is and is not Badiou in the Antipodes by
citing one example from Plato of this singular intervention on the global scene,
wherein the universality of what is true is at stake and where it is summed up
in decided and absolute terms by a cosmopolitan and sophisticated man of
the city, a man of knowledge, ‘of sound education’ who for all his ‘cleverness
has failed to grasp the truth’. ‘You have not observed’, Socrates continues,
‘how great a part geometric equality plays in heaven and earth, and because
you neglect the study of geometry you preach the doctrine of unfair shares’
(Grg. 508a). To which Callicles responds: ‘by the gods Socrates… if you are
in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human
life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be
the opposite of what we should do?’ (Grg. 481c). The world upside down, the
injunction not to continue doing the opposite of what we should, a French
philosopher down under.
Part One
Lectures
1
In Search of the Lost Real

Alain Badiou
I am very glad to be here with you. You know in France, everybody says
that New Zealand is a paradise. So, for a philosopher it is something very
interesting, to go to a paradise. Naturally, maybe it is the paradise lost. Of
course, you can tell me if it is really a paradise. But this is the legend of New
Zealand, everywhere in the world, and particularly in my country. So, it is a
real joy for me to speak to you, and to be with you in this country. It is my first
time to New Zealand, and it’s always intimidating, the first time you go to a
place and when the place is a paradise, it’s really intimidating.
The second point is that, as very often, I must speak in English. The
question of English is for me a difficult question, as very often for the French.
I want to tell you a story about my English. Some years ago I was in New
York; it’s not a paradise, it’s very different. I was in New York and I had to
give a talk, and to excuse my English I said ‘excuse me, but I must speak in
English, but my English is something between French and Spanish’, and after
that I spoke my English, which in my opinion is somewhere between French
and Spanish. At the end of the talk, a young man comes and says to me, ‘Oh
your English is not at all between French and Spanish, not at all’. I was very
glad, maybe my English is near English, but he continued ‘no, in my opinion
it is much more near German’. I was not glad for very long. So, please excuse
that kind of thought; even in paradise today, we must speak English. So, it’s a
question, maybe God himself speaks English today?
I want to say some words to you today, about the real, the question of
the real. What is (if I can say something like that) really real? And it’s a very
important question, because in the world, which is our world today, even
here, the real is generally confused with economy. The true real of the world
is economy. The knowledge of the real has been reduced, progressively, to
economics. It is economics that knows all the realities, and it is economics
that dictates, literally, the obligations of politics. It seems that in the world
as it is, the economic discourse presents itself as the guardian of the real.
And so long as the laws of the world, of capitalism, are what they are, we will
be submitted to the economic discourse. It is really the economic discourse
which is today our master. In the world, economics as the discourse of the
real has never done anything but confirm the violent nature of this so-called
real, because in the end, we must obey. We must obey the real as it is said by
economics.
Paradoxically, today as you know, economy is in some sense of a
pathological nature. We have crisis, we have devastation; we have bad
consequences for millions of people. Today, the economists themselves
are in some sense totally confused. And paradoxically, the dominance of
the intimidation through the economic real is not only not reduced, but
is actually increased. The economists and their sponsors reign even more
supreme in the face of the disaster that they were unable to forecast.
There is an extremely interesting lesson in all that. Economics as such
in no way teaches how we might escape from that sort of oppressive
conception of the real, the real as something we must obey. This is very
important, because the question of the real is clearly also the question of what
relationship human activity, intellectual as well as practical, has with the real,
and in particular whether the real functions as an imperative of submission
or whether it can, or could, function as an imperative open to the possibility
of human emancipation. Let us say that the philosophical question of the real
– so my question – is always, and perhaps above all the question of whether
given a discourse according to which the real is constraining, we can or
cannot change the world in such a way that a previously invisible opening
would appear, through which we might escape this particular constraint. Not
deny that there is some real, and some constraint, but escape this necessity of
submission to the economic real.
So the question is how we can escape the submission to the real which
is ‘economy’. There is a relationship here with my beloved Plato. I think
Plato would be very happy to discover New Zealand, because of the search
for a country to establish the true politics. He knew that in Greece it was
impossible, and after Plato in the Roman Empire it was impossible, and today
probably it is impossible, but maybe, says Plato, there exists some country we
don’t know where it is, but where it is possible to establish justice. To create
a new politics, a new form of the state, and maybe Plato, in knowing the
legend of New Zealand, that New Zealand is a paradise, would come to the
conclusion that the true Republic can be established here.
But, you know, the idea of the way out, the way out of obedience, the way
out of oppression, and to find a piece of emancipation is an idea, fundamental
to Plato, that you find in the famous allegory of the cave. The allegory of the
cave depicts a world closed on a figure that is a false figure. It’s a figure of some
lies that appears to everyone who is trapped in the cave as a figure of what can
only exist. Maybe that is our world situation; maybe we live in the cave, in
In Search of the Lost Real 9
the cave of economy. Maybe the hegemony of the economic constraint may
ultimately only be pure appearance, and not the true real. Maybe economics
is our cave, our modern cave. What Plato is teaching us, is that in order to
know whether a world is under the rule of appearance and not under the law
of the real, you have to get out of the cave. You have to escape from the place
that, that semblance, that false world organizes, and today in the form of the
discourse of constraint, which is in modernity the discourse of economics.
There is something very instructive about this, namely the function of
scandal in our world. Maybe there is no scandal in New Zealand? If it is
a paradise. But I can say to you that in Europe, there exist many scandals,
practically one a day. But there is a philosophical signification of the scandal.
Scandal is always the revelation of a small bit of the real. One day we learn,
via our preferred media, that somebody, so-and-so, went to so-and-so’s
house and emerged with a briefcase full of cash. We are of the overwhelming
impression that we are dealing with something more really real than what all
these people usually talk about. Generally, they are saying ‘all is good with
progress, we pay our debts’ and so on. But one day, you learn that some of
these politicians, maybe even your president sometimes, in the night, goes
to receive cash for propaganda for his party. When that is all known, it’s a
scandal. And you know the idea is that when we have the scandal, there is
something real. There is a point of the real you see across the scandal, a small
part of the real, which generally is obscured and invisible. But, in fact, the
point is that the scandal is not the revelation of the real of our society, but
a sort of exception to the law of the world, which is finally a sort of excuse.
Because at the end, what is said is that this person is really scandalous, but
everybody is honest, the system is honest but you have bad exceptions which
are of a scandalous nature. And so the scandal is the idea, that when we touch
the real, it’s in the form of an exception, and paradoxically it is the exception
which is the real of the real, and not the general and structural situation. But
it happens that in that sort of situation that the scandal is always, particularly,
a scandal of corruption. So the idea is that, when you are in a scandalous
revelation you know that maybe some corruption exists. But it’s strange that
in our society it will be only when you have a scandal, and a scandalous
situation, that there is a revelation that something is corrupted, something
is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark. But maybe something is rotten in our
world after all. Maybe corruption is not a scandalous exception, but maybe
corruption is the law of the world itself, as it is.
In a society that openly, explicitly, and it must be said largely consensually,
accepts that profit is the only means capable of driving the community, it
is fair to say the corruption is plainly the name of the game itself, and not
an exception. Since, if making the most money possible is the norm, this is
the definition of profit, the most money possible is the norm, of enterprise,
and finally of all society, it will be difficult to dispute the fact that everything
goes in the direction of corruption. Corruption, in some sense, is precisely
the real of our capitalistic world. And so the scandal is something which is
useful to the system because it presents, as an exception, the rule itself. And
when we are terrified by the scandal we are in fact blind to the real. So the
scandal, it is very interesting, the scandal is the use of a small bit of the real,
as an exception to the real itself, and so the scandal is the use of a little piece
of corruption to escape to the idea, the reasonable idea, that corruption is
everywhere.
All that to say, concerning the question of the real, that it’s not from the
perspective of the primacy of economics as scientific knowledge that we can
have free access to the question of the real. But it’s not the sensible experience
of the scandalous exception which can correct the scientific illusion. In some
sense, between the scandalous experience and the illusion, the scientific
illusion of the economist, is the same play, it’s the same game. It’s a game
where finally the real itself is obscure. So concerning the real, we must
begin not by scientific economic knowledge, and we must not begin by the
scandalous exception. So what is the beginning?
You know the question of the beginning is probably the most important
question in philosophy. We are very often in philosophy in a search for the
beginning. But how you can begin the search for the beginning is a delicate
question. The philosopher is a man or woman, in some sense, who begins to
begin. Something like that. It’s because philosophy is the idea to go beyond
opinions, so we cannot begin by opinions, by common opinions, and we
cannot begin by the real itself because we are in search of the real. So the real
is not here at the beginning, so the question of the beginning is very difficult.
I’ll just say, negatively, that in our world today we cannot begin the search
for the real of this world, by either the discourse of economy, which is in fact
not the science of the real, but the science of obedience to the real, nor by the
scandalous exception which finally is a piece of propaganda.
So my choice to begin for you is provisionally, a definition of the real,
an obscure definition of the real. When we begin by something obscure,
you have the chance to clarify. If you begin by something clear, the job is
finished. It’s a definition of one of my masters, the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan was straight to the point, and immediately
proposed a definition of the Real, so it’s a real beginning. The definition of
the Real, a bit of a devious one of course, is as follows: the Real is the impasse
of formalization. So it’s really obscure, as a beginning.
At this point, what can we do with this obscure sentence: the Real is the
impasse of formalization? I don’t want to begin by the pure concept. I shall
have to begin with an example, a clear example of the definition of Lacan. This
example will be basic arithmetic, arithmetic for children. When you count,
when you multiply or add, which is a common practice, two and two, you
have four, and so on. Let us agree, that when you count you are, practically
speaking, doing arithmetical formalization, in the form of numbers and in
the rules of calculation. Formalization which is very simple, formalization
for children. Your calculation is always finite: note this point, which is very
important in my clarification. So any calculation ends with what is called
its result. You do multiplication between two numbers, you have the result
which is also a number, and your calculation is finished. All that is finite,
naturally. So, when you count, you are doing formalization which has rules,
the rules of addition, the rules of that are taught to children, and it is finite.
And from within this formalization there is a particular activity, which is the
calculation. But, in reality, there is something about this business that is not
completely explicit, which is the following: when you calculate numbers you
are sure the result will be a number, there is not the slightest doubt about that,
if you add numbers you get a number. This obviously assumes that however
long the finite calculation is, you will always come up with a number. If
you make this a very long addition at the end, you have a number, and this
requires that there be no final number. Because if there is a final number, how
can you take this number and do the calculation of this number and one, for
example? If it is the final number it becomes impossible to have a calculation
with this number, which is a final number.
So, you can have the rule of calculation through the formalization, the
elementary formalization, which is arithmetic, and know the condition
that there does not exist a final number. Ok? The existence of the final
number would be absurdly contrary to the freedom of calculation, and to
the formalization itself. Consequently, there is something about this business
that is not finite, but infinite. The sequence of numbers has no end, because
there is no final number. You cannot have calculation, in the hypothesis
of the existence of the final number. But, what is that sort of thing that is
infinite? It cannot be a number, because there are no infinite numbers in
the field of arithmetic. So arithmetic does not accept, in its formalization,
infinite numbers, but without the idea of an infinite sequence of numbers, no
final numbers, you cannot have the calculation and so the formalization is
useless. It is in this sense, that we can affirm that the Real of final numbers of
arithmetic is an underlying infinity. It is in this sense that something which is
an impasse of the calculation, the existence of an infinite number is required
for the formalization itself, and therefore is really an impasse. To assume the
calculation of numbers is absolutely finite, there is no infinite number, there
is no infinite operation, all that is finite, but this finitude is supported by a
hidden infinity, which is the inexistence of a final number. So the Real of

the finite numbers of arithmetic can be said to be this underlying infinity,
which is inaccessible to the formalization itself. So the Real of formalization
is inaccessible to the formalization. So Lacan is perfectly right. The Real must
be, in some sense, the impasse of formalization.
Let us try and generalize, because you say ok, arithmetic for children,
but for serious things, maybe it’s different. Let’s try and generalize. In the
arithmetic example the hidden infinity is a condition of finite calculation, but
at the same time this hidden infinity cannot be calculated, and so it cannot
figure as itself in the formalization in which the calculation operates. It is a
number, according to the formalization, and as a result of the calculation is
essentially finite. Consequently, we will say – to change the vocabulary – that
the Real is the point of impossibility of formalization. It is precisely what is
impossible from the point of view of formalization. In our example, what is
required is finitude, absolutely. But this finitude can be operated, calculated
and so on, only under the condition of the existence of something infinite, that
is, something that from the point of view of the formalization is impossible.
And so we can transform the formula of Lacan, by saying that the Real is the
point of the impossibility of formalization. This point is very simple in some
sense, strange and simple. We have an operation, in general, action, decision,
all that constitutes it to be rational, to be coherent, constitutes always what we
can name in formalization, a practical formalization.
To return to the point. What is this point of impossibility of the
formalization? It is something which cannot be inscribed in what the
formalization creates as a possibility. When you count, we are in the
formalization of arithmetic which creates the possibility of counting, naturally,
the possibility of numbers. And the infinite is precisely the point which is
excluded from the new possibility, which is the possibility of arithmetic. So
we can say, the possibility is created by a formalization, but the Real of the
formalization is precisely what is impossible, which is not reducible to the
new possibility which is opened by the formalization. It is in that sense that
the infinite number, which is impossible, is the Real of arithmetic, arithmetic
being the opening of the new possibility concerning numbers. All that is in a
sort of complex dialectics between possibility and impossibility and between
the possible and the impossible. The possible is prescribed by formalization in
general, for example, the poetic possibility is prescribed by language, which is
a formalization. Or the possibility of being victorious in a match of handball
is prescribed by the formalization in the rules of the sport, and so on. But the
Real of all that is not reducible to the creation of the possibility because, as
we can see in the example of numbers, it is in some sense outside, precisely,
the new possibility. This is why the best definition of the Real is that the Real
is the impossible, not the impossible in general, but the impossible of a given
formalization. So, the Real of formalization is the point of impossibility of
this formalization.
We can give many examples of that, but to simplify, a very striking
example that concerns cinema. Much more amusing than arithmetic. We can
demonstrate this: what is the Real of cinema, of the cinematic images? The
Real is what is off screen, which is not in the image itself. It is all the world
which is outside the image: the image being in relationship to this absence
in the form of the presence. The cinema is the creation of a new possibility
concerning images; the formalization is the film. The film is the formalization
of images, but the strength of the image, what made the image beautiful,
extraordinary, is largely the world which is in the image as outside the image.
The image as something which contains, in some sense, all the world that is
not in the frame of the image. And you can find many examples, when you
take a concrete activity, or a creative one, art, cinema, arithmetic you can
find always the necessity of a formalization, this formalization creates some
possibilities, but finally the strength of the new possibilities are not in the
possibilities themselves. They are the point of impossibility, which is the Real.
In politics it’s really interesting to apply this definition. What is a
formalization in politics? A formalization is in fact on the side of the state;
the constitutional rules, the organization of the party, rights, the law and so
on. So that creates the space of the formalization of politics. Precisely politics
in the sense of the normal possibilities of politics that we can perfectly
define. Go to the Law faculty and you find a definition of the formalization of
politics. But in some sense the conviction of revolutionary politics, the real
of this politics, is not in the rules, is not in the possibility, but it is a real that
is like the underground of all the rules. Maybe, for example, the real of an
economic nature, which is the secret infinity beneath the appearance of the
formalization of politics.
And so, the conclusion of Marx, for example, is that politics as real politics
cannot be to play by the rules, it cannot be to be in the rules, but to access the
latent infinity, and to supress the real which is in this latent infinity, which
is why finally there is two fundamental prescriptions in the strategic, and
maybe impossible, vision of Marx: first, the abolition of private property,
because private property is in fact the secret real of the rules and second, the
dissipation of the rules themselves. That is what Marx names the vanishing of
the state, the disappearing of the state. In all these examples, we find the same
dialectics between possible and impossible.
And what is said by the propaganda of the established world in politics
concerning this sort of vision? The propaganda always says it is impossible.
It’s clear, it’s impossible yes, but it’s precisely because it is impossible that it
is real! You must reverse the objection; we accept that from your point of
view it’s impossible, because you are in your formalization. But we must be,
not in your formalization, but in the Real of your formalization. So, the real
of that formalization is your point of impossibility, and what is the point
of impossibility concerning the formalization of politics today? This point
is equality. The name of the point of impossibility in a world where the
capitalist rules is equality between everybody. Capitalism is totally hostile
and cannot accept the eradication of private property, and it cannot accept
equality, it considers equality to be a utopia and something that is humanly
impossible. This has been clear for a long time, possibly since the French
Revolution. The particular point of impossibility of a capitalist world is
equality and the actual assertion of this point of impossibility, the assertion
that this point, equality, must be the source of any new political sort is what
my friend Jacques Rancière calls the axiom of equality. It’s an axiom because,
precisely, it is not in the rules of the formalization. So it is an assertion which
is outside any result of the political formalization of today.
As a point of impossibility of our world, equality can only be a result if
it is declared a principle. The consequence of this is very, very important.
When you must touch the Real of any game, and I say game as the name of
every sort of human activity from arithmetic to the political construction
of the capitalistic world. When we have a real desire to touch the Real you
must affirm something which is impossible, but when you affirm something
which is impossible we cannot affirm it as a result of the rules. So you cannot
convince a player of the game that what you are saying is possible, so you
must affirm in some sense the possibility of the impossible. That is, a new
principle outside the rules, so the new beginning of new rules by necessity. So
we are in the Real of something only when we find a principle which affirms
the impossibility of something, as a possibility. It is why the argument that it
is impossible is precisely the proof that it is true.
There was a French politician, a good man, not a monster. We have some
monsters today in politics, but it’s not the place to talk about monsters, I
cannot speak of monsters in paradise. He was a good man who said ‘politics
is the art of the possible’. This is saying that politics is always strictly reducible
to formalization, to one formalization. So politics is not emancipation, it’s
not the movement of creation of something new. Politics is to play, correctly,
the game; and it is true that it’s possible to play the contemporary game of
politics, sometimes correctly, and sometimes in a horrible fashion. There is
nuance, sometimes. But if you have the idea that politics is not reducible to
a result of the formalization, a possible result of the formalization, so not
reducible to the possible as it is defined by the formalization itself (and not
outside). If you have the idea that politics is more ambitious, you must affirm
something impossible as possible, and so you must create a new principle.

This new possibility, which is the proper impossible of the formalization, is
also the politics of the Real and not the politics of the organization of the Real
in a specific formalization. Because when you organize the Real in a specific
formalization you create the Real as the impossibility of the formalization
itself. And revolutionary politics, as all forms of creativity, is always to say
‘yes, but my vision is a vision of the Real, the Real is not a result of the
formalization, because it is outside the formalization, the Real is impossible
and so I affirm that this impossibility is in fact possible’. A new principle is
always in this form, to affirm what was the proper impossibility of a situation.
Now to conclude, maybe it’s not our world, the world of economics, or
economic formalization, which is the true and desirable Real. Maybe it’s what
this world constitutes as its proper impossibility. That is, I repeat, equality.
So maybe, the true and desirable real is on the side of the construction, at
the scale of humanity as such, of a new form of life. Such that the law of
equality and emancipation, to accept that, you must refuse the argument ‘it’s
impossible’. It is at the end the only argument of the formalization. Because
when you say the impossible, you touch the Real of the formalization.
The formalization cannot say its proper Real, exactly as when you are in
arithmetic you cannot affirm the existence of an infinite number. And maybe
revolution is always the infinite number of the world as it is. To find the new
infinity, and today we know its equality.
During ‘May 68’ in France, a long time ago, I was young and I had the
conviction that you can establish paradise in France. But it was not the case;
finally, we have had the return of the monsters, like some gore films. Politics
sometimes seems like a gore film. But during May 68 one of the slogans
on the walls was ‘the most important thing is to desire what is impossible’.
A good sequence, a good moment. But maybe we can say that in another
manner, the true desire is the desire of the Real life after all. The true desire
in all forms of creativity. You know, even when an artist searches for a new
form of painting, it is the search for a new principle. A search to affirm that
what was impossible from the academic point of view concerning painting is,
precisely, possible. It is affirmation that the dominant formalization must be
transformed by the mediation of its proper Real, its invisible Real. So the true
desire is a desire of a real life; that is a life under the law of what is impossible.
From Socrates, as you know, the philosophic act and not only the
philosophic discourse, but the philosophic act, is to corrupt the youth. It’s
my business. To corrupt the youth is precisely to say the new principle, that
is to say the impossible. It’s clear in Socrates, it’s explicit. When Socrates was
in this Real and sentenced to death finally, it was precisely because he was
speaking to the youth of what is impossible from the point of view of the laws
of the city. So the philosopher is always saying ‘come out from the cave of
possibility’, and so after Socrates, and many others, I say that to you: ‘Come
out from the cave of possibility, today.’
This lecture was given at the University of Auckland, 25 November 2014.

2
Cinema and Philosophy

Alain Badiou
I must speak of cinema and philosophy. But the most important question
for the philosopher, from Plato to today, is the question of justice. Today I
want us to mark and to be part of our thinking the terrible injustice that has
been committed in Ferguson.1 So it is not immediately the relationship to
the question of cinema but the relationship to the question of the profound
destination of philosophy, which is not to be an academic discipline, but if
it is possible it is an attempt to change subjectivity and to change the world
and to go from injustice to justice. So this evening maybe is under the sign of
justice because precisely we have too much injustice. That is my beginning.
Now concerning cinema and philosophy. My talk will be about six questions.
First question – what is cinema? This question is a very difficult one and
probably you can discuss the question ‘what is cinema’ for hours. But why is the
question ‘what is cinema’ necessary, when you must speak about the relationship
between cinema and philosophy? It is because philosophy can think something
only if it is possible to construct inside philosophy itself the definition of this
thing (called cinema). This is why philosophy is not speaking of everything.
There are some philosophical questions and not a sort of discourse about what
exists. Deleuze, who has written two fundamental books concerning cinema
said that these books were not about cinema but about what he named the
concepts in cinema. It was the same idea; finally, philosophy can think really
what philosophy constitutes. And so the question is ‘what is cinema’ from a
philosophical point of view. We must begin with something like that.
Second question: after the definition of cinema ‘what is the relationship
between philosophy and cinema?’ It is not evident after all. It is not evident
because not only must we give a definition of cinema but we must propose
a proof that cinema is an interesting question for philosophy and this is not
evident after all. So it will be my second question.
The third question ‘is cinema an art?’ Is cinema really an art? The last art.
A film really is or can be a work of art. Philosophy is generally interested by
art and so the question of the artistic dimension of cinema is very important
from the point of view of philosophy.
Fourth question: if cinema is an art what is its relation to all sequences

of art – painting, sculpture, theatre, poetry, music, dance, novel and so on.
What is the place of cinema inside the veil of the history of different forms
of artistic activity?
Fifth question: is the relationship between cinema and philosophy singular
or is cinema in a relationship to philosophy similar to the other arts, because
cinema is an art if we give a positive answer to the fourth point. And this
question of the singularity of the exceptional dimension of the relationship
between cinema and philosophy today is also a discussion with Alex Ling,
who is here.2
And the sixth question, is it possible that cinema becomes a form
appropriate for philosophy – the possibility of philosophical cinema. Not
the relationship in exteriority between cinema and philosophy, but the
relationship in interiority.
So I start with the first question ‘what is cinema?’ Generally when we
speak of cinema we say that cinema, finally, is composed of images and the
theory of cinema is also the theory of images. But I think it’s not sufficient.
It’s not sufficient to say cinema is images because drawing is also images,
painting too is images and photography is images. So there is something
else. The second idea is to say, ok, it’s images, but with movement. The title
of one of the two books about cinema by Deleuze is ‘Image-Movement’.3 In
one word in some sense Image-Movement. But it’s not sufficient because
a film is not reducible to one image movement or images movement
because it’s a composition of different image movements which we name a
sequence, for example, and so a combination of sequences. It’s not sufficient
to say that cinema is a composition, a composed, a complex composition
of image movements because there exist sound, speech, music, noises
and it’s not sufficient because we have also narrative and it’s not sufficient
because we have also theatre, actors and so on. Finally, we have as a totality
the relationship between shots, sequences, editing and so a complexity of
practically all dimensions of perception. So we can see something like that.
Cinema is not reducible to one of the elements of cinema. So we can define
cinema as a composition, a complex structure with many dimensions. And,
finally, it’s impossible – this is my proposition – to give a clear definition
of cinema. It’s the case where we have an experience of cinema, but not
really the definition. And it’s the first exceptional point concerning cinema
because I can demonstrate that it is not the case for the other arts. Cinema
is a complexity in a new form of complexity and it is why there is something
interesting in cinema precisely because we cannot reduce cinema to a
conceptual definition; neither images, neither composition of images and so
on and so on. There is something in fact in cinema that is infinite. There is a
Cinema and Philosophy 19
latent infinity in cinema, in the production and the history of cinema there is
in some sense the history of the progressive constitution of this infinity: from
mute to sound, from black and white to colour and so on. And finally, cinema
is the history of complexification of itself, more and more. So my answer
to the first question ‘what is cinema?’ is deceptive. We cannot really know
what cinema is. We have experience and we also have a concrete history of
a new form of complexity. Maybe the complete understanding of what is
cinema is something for the future. Because cinema is not achieved, cinema
is today also transformed. You know that cinema is something essential in
the collective existence of today with its weak form, which is television. But
between the weak form and the strong form, between the vulgarity and the
artistic invention there is a relationship, a strange relationship concerning
cinema, but finally we don’t really know what cinema is. We are inside cinema
without knowing exactly its conceptual signification. So I pass to my second
question in the failure of the first.
Second question: why a relationship between philosophy and cinema?
I think we can propose two hypotheses. First hypothesis, the relationship
between philosophy and cinema is a necessity because there is in fact an
opposition between philosophy and cinema, a contradiction. If cinema is
composed of images, if cinema is a form of imaginary relationship to the
world, cinema is exposed to a fundamental critique from the point of view
of philosophy, a very old critique, which is the suspicion concerning images
and the opposition, in some sense, to the potency of images in the name
of concepts, thinking and rationality. After all, in Plato, we find a critique
of cinema because the famous allegory of the cave is the representation,
the most important representation in the history of philosophy, of cinema,
which did not exist, naturally. The philosophical critique of cinema has been
made many centuries before the existence of cinema. It’s the strangeness of
philosophy: the potency of anticipation of philosophy. In my translation of
Plato’s Republic, I have transformed the cave into a contemporary cinema.4
It was clear. It was the presence of images in the place of the Real and the
humanity in the cave is seeing some images in the conviction that these
images are the unique reality and philosophy is to organize the possibility of
going out of the cave, to escape the dictatorship of images. It is very striking.
In some sense, it’s certainly more true today that we are in the cave than
in the time of Plato because we have now the complexity of the world of
images which is far beyond what Plato could imagine. So the allegory of the
cave is properly a contradiction between philosophy and cinema. And so we
can, after all the hypotheses, know that there is a close relationship between
cinema and philosophy which is the relationship of aid. Philosophy is finally
something that is against the potency of images, against cinema in the end.
It’s the first possibility. It’s not mine. It’s not mine for one fundamental reason,
which is my answer to the first question. I think that we cannot reduce cinema
to images. And so, finally, cinema is not the cave of Plato. It’s an obscurity and
it’s the light of images and so there is something like an illusion. But this
illusion, the illusion of the cinema, is not the negative function of images
in the sense of Plato because for Plato images are something that is a false
reality. But cinema is not a false reality. Cinema is a new relationship to the
real itself. We can demonstrate cinema is composed of complex images but
this composition is not saying ‘I am the truth, I am the true real.’ No! Cinema
is an illusion that says it is an illusion, naturally. And so it’s a completely
different situation from the prisoner in the cave, who has the conviction that
images are the only form of the real. On the contrary, cinema is something
like a didactic of images, something that is saying that images exist not as the
substitute to the real but as something which says something new concerning
the real itself—in the absence of the real, but as a new form of knowledge. So
my hypothesis is that there is no strict contradiction between philosophy and
cinema but that on the contrary today cinema is in some sense a condition of
philosophy. I name condition of philosophy an activity, a form of creation, a
form of thinking which is in some sense the horizon of philosophic activity.
So a condition is what is present in the world and which is really a sort of
new possibility for philosophical thinking. In this direction, my position
is that today we cannot do philosophy without any relationship to cinema.
And we can say that from Bergson to myself, if you accept this narcissistic
consideration, we find a growing interest in cinema for the philosopher with
the books of Deleuze, the books of Rancière, the books of many contemporary
philosophers concerning cinema. And this is because cinema, which is an
essential component of our world, is also something new and something like
a new lesson for the philosophical possibility.
So I come to my question three. Is this condition of philosophy, cinema, in

the register of artistic creation? Is cinema an art? From the very beginning of
cinema, we have had the question ‘is cinema an art? or is cinema something
like a new dimension of entertainment?’ And the difficulty is that it is both.
The question ‘is a cinema an art’ is a complex question and there is on this
point a big discussion. Why is there a discussion? After all we are not in a
complex discussion concerning the question is painting an art, is a novel an
art, or is poetry an art. There is in some sense evidence of the artistic nature
of some practices. Naturally there exist bad poems, but nobody is saying that
poetry is not at all an art. You know this point. It is the same thing for
painting, there exist horrible paintings. It is not an objection: the existence of
horrible paintings is never an objection to the fact that painting is an art
and so on. Why, for practically a century, is there a difficult discussion

concerning the fact that cinema is an art and in the same context there is no
discussion at all concerning poetry and even theatre, which is near cinema –
we’ll return to this point – poetry, painting and so on. I think the difficulty
here is in relationship to the first question. The point is that practically all
other forms of art have simple definitions. We can give, of painting, of poetry,
of theatre and so on, a clear definition. For example, it is clear that poetry is
an activity that has as its goal to extract from language something new. The
possibility that language says something which is impossible to say or to say
what cannot be said, something like that. So poetry is the maximal intensity
of language. The possibility that language must be something other than the
common communication, as Mallarmé says ‘there is on one-side language as
pure communication, pragmatic communication, and on the other side
poetry’, precisely. Poetry is the non-pragmatic use of language, the expressive
use and in poetry we say or attempt to say what cannot be said. And it is
poetry which is an objection to the famous formula of Wittgenstein, ‘of what
we cannot say we must shut-up’. Poetry is exactly the refutation: it says, what
we cannot say we must say. And, naturally, it’s not communication it’s
something else, a sort of transformation of the language in an obscure and
difficult material and we extract of this material something completely new.
And painting, for example, is the same thing. In painting the point of a great
painting is to create the visibility of what is invisible. It is the visibility of the
invisible. The painting is not the visibility of the visibility. It is not a copy, not
at all. If you have a magnificent painting of a naked woman, it is not
photography. It is in fact the visibility of beauty as such, the visibility of the
idea of beauty across the singularity of the sensible form. And so we can say
exactly that poetry is a language that speaks of what cannot be said. Painting
is the production of an image of something that has no image. So it is this
no-image that is presented in the genius of the painting and so on. Theatre
also, the precise definition, is to present for a collective audience, like you
now, an external form of the possible relationship between human beings. All
the possible relationships between human beings are presented in theatre in
an external form, to an audience. It is the relationship of humanity to itself in
the distance between the spectacle and the audience. And so it is a definition
of theatre from the very beginning to present to humanity a figure of
humanity. It is the immanent relationship of humanity to itself by the
mediation of the fiction, of the fiction on the screen. But we have said – and
we can continue, we can define sculpture and architecture and so on – we
cannot define cinema precisely. This is why the question of the artistic
dimension of cinema is obscure. It is obscure because how can we exactly
create the distinction between a horrible film and an artistic film? We are not
able even to say what cinema is. How are we able to say what is a good film
after all? We don’t know what a film is in some sense. So we cannot exactly
say what is a good film. And you know there are many discussions on this
point. Critiques are confusing and discussions between friends after a film
‘oh it was excellent’ and so on. The difficulty of the pragmatic discussion
concerning film is a symptom of the real difficulty to identify in cinema what
is really a good film, a work of art. And it is clear that in an excellent film you
can always find some part of the film that is without interest. So many images
that are transitions, something like that, precisely because the complexity of
the cinema is of a special nature, concerning its artistic determination. My
position is that cinema is an art, after all, but an art that cannot be pure, an
impure art. It is an art that is always composed with something which is not
of an artistic nature, an art that is inside something which is of a non-artistic
nature but which has the possibility of escaping its proper vulgar nature.
Cinema is a conflict between something noble, something which is really of
an elegant artistic nature, profound vision and something, the material,
something which is material, which is also vulgar, common and sometimes
not at all interesting. And so the artistic definition of the cinema is that the
cinema is the art of the fight between art and non-art. It is my definition of
the cinema. Cinema is an art but the material of this art is precisely the
contradiction between art and non-art and it’s something very of today. After
all the idea that art is finished, that art which is non-art is formulated by
Duchamp at the beginning of the last century. So it’s a long history. Hegel
himself at the beginning of the nineteenth century was saying that ‘art is
something of the past’. That was his formula – ‘art is finished’. Cinema is the
contemporary production of the visibility of the conflict between art and
non-art in the contemporary world. When we have a very good film is when
you have a perception of this fight, it’s like a war, like an image of the war
between good images and false images, something like that, between the
constructions of a visibility which is of great interest, but which immediately
conflicts with a visibility which is without interest. And so cinema is very
interesting – and in relationship to philosophy – because it’s not a peaceful
art. It’s not an art for contemplation. When you are in front of a movie it is
not at all the same thing as being in front of a painting. No! There is a conflict,
a conflict between you and the images but also between images themselves.
There is a conflict because there is a conflict, a fundamental conflict, of
something that is really in the register of thinking, of profoundness and so
on, and something which is vulgar and deceptive. Furthermore, if we examine
the history of cinema we can understand this history precisely at the level of
the successive forms of the fight. The great invention in cinema, maybe the
form of the composition in the films of Orson Welles, is a classic example.
What is a film of Orson Welles? It is a film where the image is composed with
a sort of immanent violence and this immanent violence of the image is not
to create fear and terror, it’s not bloody, it’s not a gore film. The violence of the
image is the idea that the violence of the image can only be victorious if the
tendency of images is to be common and without interest. If we can recognize
some images of Orson Welles immediately, it is because we recognize that
sort of victory in the war against —what?— against the image itself. So it is
something like an image that is composed against its proper nature, and
really an immanent conflict between images and images. It is same thing at
another level in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. It is not the same means, not
the same violence. There are some images in Godard that are peaceful in
some sense, which are quiet, but strangely quiet, a quietness that is suspicious.
It’s the war against the vulgarity of images, not by violence and the
compactness of the image but more by something, which is not ‘gone’ straight
away, we go slowly, deliberately. A sort of ‘suspect as witness’.
Finally, we see here that the relationship to philosophy is clear. The fight
against the cave of Plato is inside the cinema itself, if cinema is not the
production of images but the war against bad images and to affirm what is a
true image. Not as a substitute to reality but the true image as an image. What
is a true image? As for Godard, what is an image is not a representation of
something but an image as something that by itself is a new thinking of the
real. But to have that sort of true image we must have a fight, a visible fight,
in the image itself. And Godard is saying, for example, a true image is always
an image when we find two things that have no relation between them. The
image is cut in two parts. It is divided because it’s not a peaceful image of a
world unified, but the presence in the image itself of elements that are not
compatible, which cannot go (together). So to conclude all that cinema is an
art that cannot be pure because it’s an art that is defined, in some sense, by
a fight against itself. It’s very interesting because it’s not the end of art, it’s
another way; not the classical affirmation that our modernity is also something
like the equivalence between art and non-art. No! It’s the organization of a
fight between the two and it is why cinema cannot be pure, it cannot be pure
precisely because it must also present what is impure and there is a sort of
necessity of abjection in the cinema as a fight against abjection itself.
So we come to question 4, Cinema’s relationship with all the other arts. Now
this point is very strange in some sense and there is a discussion with Alex
Ling at this point. It is clear that cinema has a relationship to practically all
the other arts. It’s a form of its impurity, precisely: the impossibility to define
cinema as such. It’s evident for theatre, for example, by the mediation of
actors, the play and so on. It is evident for music – music is a composition
of the film images. It’s also evident for the novel because practically all films
have narratives. It’s evident for dance – for all the arts which are in the
visibility it is evident. But it’s also evident by quotation. Inside a film there
are quotations of the other arts. Of painting – by allusion to great paintings;
of architecture – by representation of new constructions; to poetry – because
there are many quotations of poetry, there are a great number of quotations
of poetry in cinema. So cinema is in a relationship with all the other arts
without exception. It’s also a new reason for it to be impossible to define
cinema because cinema is always a definition that is also the definition of the
other arts as a part of cinema itself. So the destiny of cinema is also the destiny
of the totality of art. There is a symbolic function of cinema as a sort of centre
of the generality of artistic activity and it’s also the reason for what there is in
cinema as the true destiny of all arts today. Not because cinema is a substitute
of all art but because the judgement concerning the destiny of art is linked
by necessity to the becoming of cinema itself. We can say that the cinema
is the composition of all arts in the historic trial concerning their existence.
And so Alex Ling was saying on this point that finally cinema and philosophy
do the same thing. Because my definition of philosophy is that philosophy is
composed, a sort of compossibility of all its conditions. And cinema composes
a sort of compossibility of all different artistic creation in some sense. Cinema
is a totalization also and so there is a rivalry between cinema and philosophy
today. And it is clear there is a rivalry because cinema is also a representation,
a global representation of all artistic functions in the contemporary world, a
totalization of music, dance, theatre, narrative, novel, poetry and so on, and
many other invariants. For example, there is the presence of history in many
films. This totalization is enigmatic because we can return to the allegory of the
cave. Finally, the total cave is a cave where all forms of images are present and
it’s a cave as a totalization of the aesthetic experience itself. So we can object
to Plato if Plato was here to see a film (but it will be my conclusion, Plato and
the cinema). If Plato was here his objection will be ‘OK, cinema is exceptional
because it is not the presentation of some images but is the place of totalisation
of all imaginary fictions, all imaginary creations.’ And so we cannot escape
cinema, we cannot find a way out because there really is a presence, the omni-
presence of cinema in all activities of artistic nature. But I think it’s not the
case. We must return to the preceding point and say that when we have music,
painting, theatre and so on in cinema we have also a judgement concerning
these activities. Because precisely cinema must be, when it is really a work
of art, the fight between what is really of value in all that and what is of no-
value. If you take the quotations of great music in cinema, for example, the 5th
symphony of Gustav Mahler in the film of Visconti, it’s also a new evaluation
of the symphony of Mahler. It’s not a little quotation, it’s not only the fact
that we hear this music, OK ‘it’s magnificent’ and so on, No! It’s something
like a new experience concerning this piece of music. Maybe the experience
is also of the fight concerning the affective value of the music when music is
confronted with something else. Images, precisely! Is music able to resist the
fascination of images or is music the same thing as the fascination of images?
So it’s an experience that is not only a totalization, but is also a critique in some
sense, maybe a positive critique in some sense, finally, a good judgement. It
is the same case when we have the quotation of a painting, or when we have
experimentation concerning something which is in a relationship to theatre
and so on. In some sense, cinema is also a judgement concerning all artistic
activity precisely because their presence in a film is not only ornamental but
active and is the creation of a contradiction between different forms of artistic
creativity which, finally, is also a judgement concerning their value. It’s very
interesting to see if something which is generally considered as very beautiful
and so on resists when it’s in a film. We could call this the filmic resistance
of artistic activity, concerning a piece of music, a poem that is inscribed in a
movie, in the story and so on. It’s not only its pure existence, but also a conflict
between its pure existence and something else. So it’s the experimentation of
the alterity. You know when you are at peace and you have music and so on,
music is easily victorious, but in a film it is something else. It’s something else
because there are extraordinary complexities of judgement.
So we can consider the fifth point. After all that is there a singularity of the
relationship between cinema and philosophy? I was really interested by the
fact that Alex Ling was saying that for me cinema is finally inessential, an
inessential art. So it was the last art but inessential. But inessential has two
possible significations. The first is that cinema has no essence and we have
said something like that. There is no clear definition of cinema; there is
no stable essence of cinema. But there is another more negative sense that
cinema is not essential. That cinema can in-exist: it will not be a disaster if
cinema disappears. Godard, for example, says that cinema is dead, cinema
is finished, except maybe the cinema of Godard because it’s a cinema of
the death of the cinema. It’s always the same with the cinema because we
always have the possibility to inscribe the negativity. Exactly as I said that
cinema is the art where something is said concerning non-art. Why not the
possibility of cinema which is the cinema of the death of the cinema? Or
the cinema of the non-cinema; of the impossibility of the cinema and so on.
Precisely, because we cannot define it as a pure art, it is a sort of possible
scenography of all drama, of all intellectual drama. Inessential can be
understood in its ambiguity. If there is impurity then there is no essence of
the cinema but after all the result is that cinema is not essential in the same
sense as artistic activity in general. I think that my position at this point is

that cinema cannot disappear. Cinema cannot disappear. Not because it is
a new form of images, but precisely because cinema creates a new form of
dialectical operations concerning art in general. So this function of cinema,
which is a major function in some sense, of the value of all activity in the
form of fiction, representation, images and so on, is a function so essential
that cinema cannot really disappear. So I think that cinema is eternal and
eternal in a new sense. Eternal not as painting, poetry and so on are eternal –
they are eternal because they are sublime, because they are magnificent,
because they are creativity and so on – but cinema is eternal, cannot die,
because precisely cinema is a fight. Cinema is a form of a conflict and this
conflict cannot disappear. It is a new conflict, a possibility to have a form
of art so impure, so horrible (in some sense) that what can be inscribed
in this form is all the possible fictions of the fundamental conflict of our
existence. So cinema is a recollection of all contradictions inside aesthetic
creation, but also more generally. It is why cinema, and the derivative of
cinema, television and all that, is today the only artistic activity that is really
a mass art, for everybody. Everybody has access to cinema. We cannot say
that there is a ‘snob access’, an access which is educated and so on, or that
there is a bad access, vulgar and so on. No! We cannot say that because the
vulgarity is immanent to the cinema in general. It is present in the very good
cinema as a form of the conflict and it is why during the last century and
now, it is the only art where some evidently magnificent productions are also
a massive success, seen by millions of people. It was something like that for
the novel during the nineteenth century but the function of the novel during
the nineteenth century today is the function of cinema. So cinema is also the
question of democracy. It’s the only democratic art in some sense. All forms
of art today are aristocratic, exceptional. This is not a judgement. I am not
very often a democrat, so it’s not a judgement. But it’s a fact, a restriction,
and it’s true that the only artistic activity that has the possibility to be the
experience of millions of people is cinema, the cinema itself or around the
cinema. And it’s not by the fact that we have in cinema excellent products
or products which are popular and vulgar. No! It’s because the cinema is,
inside itself, a contradiction, the movement of the contradiction between
what is pure creativity and what is in fact horrible material. This is why also
we have very splendid films in genres or forms that are really sinister: the
story of monsters, like King Kong; the story of cowboys, melodrama, the
extraordinary and so on. It’s not an obstacle to the greatness of a film to be in
this genre, this form, in this relationship to something very vulgar in some
sense. It’s possible to produce an internal critique of all that. Not to separate
the critiques but to create the critiques inside what is criticized. And so
cinema has two qualities: it is dialectics, because it is an art of contradiction,

and it is democratic. And so the cinema is a democratic dialectics. It is
something exceptional.
We can conclude with the sixth point. Finally, it’s because of its exceptional
nature that cinema has its relationship with philosophy, because cinema is
probably the most important symptom of our history. It is the fundamental
symptom. It is a place where all the contradictions of the world are really
assumed, for the ‘best of all worlds’. But finally they are assumed. Philosophy
also after all has the function of creating a space of thinking to examine the
contradiction of the contemporary world and to propose an orientation.
Philosophy finally is the search for a true life. That is, a search for an orientation
of life, for something that is not a pure nonsense, something that is not a life
that is absurd or sinister. It’s the task of philosophy from the very beginning.
And Plato was saying to do that we must escape the potency of images, the
allegory of the cave. Today we must say on the contrary, in some sense, we
must go to cinema. So we must go into the cave, in the modern cave where
the spectacle of images is more elaborate. If we say something concerning the
relationship between cinema and philosophy we must say that the cinema is
for philosophy today the new allegory of the cave which is ‘go to the cave, go
to the cave’. It’s only by going to the cave that we can find the new means to go
outside, because precisely the cinema is the immanent conflict between what
is the bad presentation of images, the troubled fascination of images on one
side, but on the other side the possibility of clear vision by images themselves
of the possibility to an orientation in the real. So to go to the cave, which is
today the cinema, is also to participate in the democratic dialectics. And so
it’s a part of our modern education.
Questions
Ben Ferris: Hello, Ben Ferris

Badiou: Just one point – it’s not an interdiction to speak, but speak
slowly because the question of my English is also the question of an
impurity of language.
Ben Ferris: I hope I can do otherwise. Ben Ferris, my name, thank
you very, very much. Cinema is not unique as a conflict between
something that is noble and something that is vulgar. Famously,
James Joyce’s Ulysses is the embodiment of such a conflict. Would
you mind commenting on this?
B: Yes. The general idea of presentation, to find a new presentation, of

the conflict between art and non-art or of the idea of the end of the
purity of art, or something like that, is not an idea that is only from
cinema. I have said myself that we can find this idea in Duchamp,
absolutely explicit, at the beginning of the twentieth century. But I
think that cinema is a massive form of realization of this conflict,
and it’s very interesting to see that the sophisticated forms of the
realization of this conflict, like your example – which is very good,
Ulysses by Joyce – has had an effect to separate more and more
artistic creation from the popular vision. Contemporary art today
is an art outside cinema, is an activity, an artistic activity really
absolutely interesting with strong critiques concerning precisely
the historical density of art itself. So the conflict is present outside
cinema. But cinema has the particularity to organize this conflict
at a scale which is completely specific, completely new, a popular
dimension. In some sense, everybody who will see a film will take
in the contradiction between something that is of the register of art
and something that is not. But to read Joyce is something else, really,
than to see a movie. And it is why also we can see bad movies. We
have the right to see bad movies. We have nowhere the right to read
horrible books, or to see archaic paintings. It’s not respectable. But
to see bad movies, everybody goes to see bad movies, some horrible
monsters, stories absolutely without any significance and we can
discuss all that and so on. You know the impurity of cinema is also
the strength of cinema. And the unification of a mass of people by
the cinema is a fact. Philosophy must say that it is an important
fact. We cannot escape cinema. And the truth exactly is that the
only thing that is of the same nature is the detective novel. Detective
novels, I have read myself thousands of detective novels, detective
novels are the same thing. We have the right to read the detective
novels of the world.
Lisa Trahair: Hi I am Lisa Trahair. I was very interested throughout
your paper at some of the resonances with Stanley Cavell’s work.
But when you started to talk about conflict it actually seemed that
you were talking about something very different and I was thinking
about his books on the remarriage comedies and how he wants to
make arguments all the time for cinema as marriage. So it would
seem that conflict and marriage were opposite kinds of things
in cinema. In fact when Cavell is talking about marriage in the
remarriage comedies and the couples squabbling with each other,
he talks about that squabbling being a discourse of love and so I am
wondering if that conflict that you are saying is endemic to cinema

is also something really to do with our love of the world and so that
cinema is about conflict and has to be about conflict because is also
something to do with love?
B: It’s really interesting to examine the different positions and the
different points of intervention of philosophical commentary on
cinema today. Because precisely cinema is also for the philosopher
something complex and impure, and the interrogation of Cavell
concerning cinema is really complex because the comedy
concerning marriage is, in some sense, I agree with you, the idea
that cinema is also something which says that an optimistic vision of
the scene of humanity is possible. The allegory of the failure of love,
but that the failure of love can be surmounted finally, and we have
the resurrection of love. It’s an idea that is really in the direction of
a love of humanity, the possibility of the love for humanity. We can
trust human beings in some sense and in fact the cinema says this.
I agree with Cavell. But Cavell is also saying that in the cinema we
have a lesson in scepticism. So Cavell is really an example of the
relationship between philosophy and cinema that finds in cinema
the possibility of a philosophical education of a popular nature.
Cinema is a possible art for the pragmatic vision of philosophy
itself. And so effectively when I say that in the cinema we are in
conflict it’s also very often the conflict between the possibility of a
clear and vigorous orientation of life and something that is, finally,
the way of a nihilistic destruction of life. Cinema is also very often
the presentation of the conflict between affirmation and nihilism. It’s
the subject of practically every classical western. These westerns are
really the organization, the dramatic organization of the possibility
of savage nihilism and the final possible victory of a universal vision
for human beings. So there is also an ethical dimension of cinema
that is of great importance. Very often a film is also a lesson, not
a dogmatic lesson, but a lesson that is inside the conflict that is
organized by cinema itself. And so this conflict is not only aesthetic
but also ethical.
You know my most important conviction is that we must use the
cinema in education, massively, massively. It’s a pity that cinema is
not today a very important part of the education of young people
from the very beginning of their education. Not making use of
cinema in this way is proof that we do not have a good relationship
with children and youth. It’s the proof. If we are to have a good
relationship, we must understand that exactly like in the nineteenth
century it was necessary to speak of novels as a new form of art

because the novel is an art of the nineteenth century. But the novel
has been inscribed finally in today’s pedagogy – Balzac, Zola,
Flaubert and so on. But why today when cinema is exactly in the
position of novels in the last century, that it is the most important
democratic art, which is for everybody, we must normalize this
study with the same attentive obligation as a sign of wealth. And we
know that at the level of university but we must do something like
that from the very beginning with small children. And so I propose
a complete reformation of all the systems of education.
Lecture given at the University of New South Wales, 27 November 2014.
3
The Common Preoccupation

of Art and Philosophy
Alain Badiou
Good morning to all of you.

I must speak here, in the cave as it were, of the relationship between art
and philosophy, and I begin by what I name the paradox of Plato. You find
in Plato a violent opposition to epic poetry, Homer and so on and also to
dramatic poetry, but also against painting as pure imitation. And finally,
the great tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is, for him, for
the foundation of philosophy, something like enemies. On the other side,
Plato gives to philosophy a theatrical form: dialogues – dialogues with many
persons. So we have a theatrical opposition to theatre, and we have the most
violent conceptual attack against theatre with the means of theatre. That is
the paradox of Plato, and you see this paradox is immediately the symbol of
a difficult relationship between philosophy and the arts.
So, my goal today is to give signification to this difficulty. Why, from the
very beginning, a complex relationship between the arts – theatre, but theatre
is finally a synthesis of all the arts. We know that in theatre, we have poetry,
we have literature and we have spectacle, painting, dance and music. So a
violent attack against theatre is in fact a violent attack against all forms of art.
You find all that in the most important book of Plato, the Republic.
As a parenthesis let me note: I have produced an excellent translation
of Plato’s Republic from Greek to French, and after that Susan Spitzer has
made an excellent translation into English of my French translation of the
Greek. At the last level, the Chinese is to realize an excellent translation in
Chinese of the excellent translation of English, of my translation in French
of the Greek original. If the Japanese take the Chinese translation to do an
excellent translation in Japanese, and so on… I think in the end we don’t
know what is exactly the Republic of Plato. It’s possible that I say, finally, that
in fact the Republic of Plato is a book of Badiou. It is the sign maybe of the
end of philosophy.
To return to the paradox of Plato. This paradox is a very curious one, and I
must explain why. In some sense, Plato is the inventor of the current meaning
of the word philosophy. Plato proposes, in fact, the word philosophy for its
historical destiny. But the form he gives to his writings is by no means a classical
form. In fact, practically no philosopher after Plato uses the theatrical form
invented by Plato, the form of the dialogues. So, we have the strange situation
that the creation of philosophy, of the contents of philosophy, is made in a
form which has no future. It is an artistic form, and Plato is a writer, but it’s an
artistic form that after Plato has no descendants. I know only two interesting
exceptions. Malebranche, the French philosopher of the seventeenth century,
whose dialogue between a Christian philosopher and a Chinese philosopher,
is a very original text, and Diderot with Jacques the Fatalist and his Master.
But in fact the dominant form of philosophy, all along its history, is not at
all the dialogue, but the academic treatise, and the academic treatise is not
an invention of the first philosopher Plato. The academic treatise is invented
by Aristotle, the second philosopher. But Aristotle is not at all an enemy of
theatre, so you see the enemy of theatre writes dialogues, and the friend of
theatre writes academic treatises. The situation is a really a complex one.
Aristotle, as we can see in his Poetics (an academic treatise) is a good
friend of tragedy, and not at all an enemy. So, we have a complete paradox:
the enemy of theatre creates philosophy in theatrical form and his disciple,
a friend of theatre, imposes on philosophy for many centuries, against the
theatrical form of Plato, the academic dissertation. So, the beginning of
our history concerning the relationship between art and philosophy is very
obscure. I propose an attempt to generalize this story. That philosophy is
against art in its classical form because art pretends to be an imitation of
nature. And why philosophy takes the artistic form of theatre, the dialogue
and not only the dialogue but also the famous Platonic allegories which
pertain to poetry? Noting also, many dramatic references to history in the
style of Thucydides or Tacitus. So when philosophy is against the imitative
nature of art, philosophy takes an artistic form, and when philosophy is on
the side of a quiet relationship to art, philosophy proposes a style without art
at all, the academic style.
In Plato, art is something dangerous. In Aristotle, there is absolute
difference between art and philosophy. It’s not at all the same thing. For
Plato, if the arts are dangerous, it’s because precisely it’s unclear that art and
philosophy are really so different. Maybe the temptation of artistic creation is
inside Platonic philosophy, and in the case of Aristotle there is not that sort
of temptation, and art is absolutely outside the philosophical desire. So, we
have the beginning of the question, which is a divided beginning, and not in
the form of the one. We have, from the very beginning of philosophy, two
tendencies concerning the relationship between art and philosophy, and I see
that paradoxically the position of Plato is more the position of the possible
The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy 33
immanency of art to philosophy, art as a possible part of philosophy. This is

why it is dangerous, an immanent risk to prefer beauty to truth. In Aristotle
we don’t have that sort of position, because quietly philosophy and art are
different, and philosophy can be knowledge of art from its proper position,
which is outside artistic creation. In some sense, there is no paradox at all
in the position of Aristotle, which has been, for centuries and centuries, the
dominant position. Aristotle is not a philosopher of contradictions, but a
philosopher of quiet differences. He is not a philosopher of the complete
change of life, but an academic philosopher of encyclopaedic knowledge.
So, Aristotle has no problem with theatre, and more generally with
art. Theatre is something different to philosophy that is all. Philosophy is
an objective knowledge, and theatre is a subjective pleasure. Philosophy
concerns the soul, psyche, logos and rationalism; theatre concerns the
passions, terror and pity. The close relationship between philosophy and
theatre is that philosophy must rationally explain what is theatre, the very
essence of theatre. This is the Aristotelian beginning of this academic branch
of philosophy named aesthetics. Aesthetics is the relationship between art
and philosophy which is in the Aristotelian tradition and which assumes that
philosophy is the possible knowledge of what is art but is different, absolutely
different from art itself. I have written a book, the title of which is Handbook
of Inaesthetics – so you can see immediately that I am not on the side of
Aristotle, concerning this question but on the side of Plato, in a new manner.
This is why in my translation of the Republic I was obliged to introduce some
amelioration, some modification, some points where Plato is not taking the
‘right line’ and so my translation is not at all a pure imitation of Plato but a
prolongation of Plato, something after Plato, and naturally, in my opinion,
better than Plato!
Now we must understand that the paradox of Plato, to be in some sense an
enemy of art but inside art in another sense – because after all Plato is a very
great writer in the Greek language, practically a poet in prose of the Greek
language – is precisely not of an aesthetic nature. Plato does not say that
tragedy is not a pleasure or a beautiful thing or weak and without interest –
not at all. It is because tragedy is a very profound pleasure and a magnificent
thing that the philosopher must be suspicious. Because for Plato philosophy
is not a knowledge, and there is no aesthetics in the relationship to tragedy.
Philosophy is a movement, the goal of which is to transform subjectivity,
a subjectivity which is corrupted by dominant opinions. And you know
that if Socrates was sentenced to death for the corruption of the youth, the
definition of philosophy must be, effectively, the corruption of the youth: to
destroy the true corruption of youth by the ordinary world and to corrupt
the corruption. That is, to save the youth from the heavy presence of the
corrupted world. So, the relationship which is important for Plato is not a
question of the potency of art, and it recognizes absolutely the potency of
art – it’s precisely here that we can find the risk of aesthetics. The question for
Plato is the relationship between theatre and opinions, between theatre and
corruption; between theatre and something that has the form of domination –
the dominant opinion. And we give to dominant opinion the strength of a
strange beauty. And so the arts are dangerous not because they are weak or
without interest but because it’s possible that art is the form of the imposition
of false opinions. The better form to present false opinions as a pleasure.
And we can say that art maybe for Plato (not always, it’s a question) – is the
pleasure of falsity.
Philosophy is also a public action for Plato. Philosophy is not inside the
academic closure, and theatre too is a public action and more ordinarily art is
a public action and cinema is a terrible public action. And I think that Plato
created cinema in the allegory of the cave. Plato in the allegory of the cave
presents the world, the real world, as a very big cinema, where all humanity is
seeing images and these images are confused because nobody can distinguish
between images and the real because there are only images and so we are in
the big cosmic cinema just as where we are now [in this hall] with the big
screen and me as an image – but you can make the distinction between the
two; so it’s a good cave! But for Plato there are bad caves which is precisely the
domination of false opinion, and the domination of corruption. And so the
philosophical effort is to transform the subject by rational means. But rational
means conceived as an act and not as a pure theoretical transmission. The
goal is to go out of the cave, to find the sun and the light, to find the real in
the place of images and this public action, this necessity to educate in how to
come out of the cave is the true definition of philosophy and Plato knows that
theatre and more generally art also transform subjectivity. But, by what sort
of means? That is the question, and finally, the discussion between philosophy
and art is a discussion concerning the different means for transforming
subjectivity. For Plato, the relationship between philosophy and the theatre
cannot be reduced to a quiet difference. So the Aristotelian peace between
art and philosophy is not possible. It is in fact a rivalry. In the public space,
the tragic poet is not immediately a friend of the philosopher because they
have the same goal, to transform subjectivity, to create something new in the
subject but by completely different means.
It’s precisely why Plato writes philosophical dialogues, to be at the heart of
the fight concerning the arts. To assume in the field of reason that philosophy
can also as theatre organize discussions in a vivid manner, dramatically,
but with a completely different goal as an end. In fact the philosopher –
on this point Plato and Aristotle – has distinguished in theatre or in art
generally, three different parts or components: first, theatre or classical art

is a sort of imitation of real life. It is the idea of theatrical representation,
which is different from pure presentation. Second point, tragic theatre or
epic poetry represents violent situations and violent actions; love, passion,
civil war, murder and so on. Theatre is the representation of exceptional
subjectivity – this point is very important. Third point, all that provokes
in the audience a sort of identification with the exceptional subjectivity –
this is a difficult point: identification with the victims or identification with
the hero. Theatre provokes subjective reactions, strong affects like terror,
pity but also admiration and enthusiasm – and it’s also the case with novels,
poetry, cinema, and so on. All that is true. We know today the ability of
cinema to present something exceptional and to provoke identification with
monsters and so it’s the completion of the idea of Plato regarding the goal
of art and theatre.
So to resume: theatre and art more generally is a complex of imitation,
exception and identification – the three fundamental theorems. How can
philosophy examine these three determinations? For Aristotle and for
the aesthetic tradition, all that is excellent. Before good imitations, the
violent affects of identification with exceptions are like subjective therapy,
the medicine of the subject. All this violence is realized as images and so
banished from the real. It’s the peace and quiet transformation of passions by
the mediation of the identification with images. And so for Aristotle, when
you see, in a movie, horrible monsters, it’s an excellent thing because that
sort of monster is banished from the real. For Plato, all that is suspicious.
First imitation, images are not good by themselves (contrary in some ways
to the psychoanalytic idea of transference based on the notion of images in
Aristotle), we perfectly know today that the potency of images is the most
important form of reactionary propaganda. Second, the cult of exceptions
must be divided: murderers, monsters are also exceptional, and certainly
truths are exceptional in regard to opinions. And this is the point, the relation
to exception because for Plato truth is exceptional and for art the exception
is also the goal. But horrible false news and false convictions can also be
exceptional and very dangerous. Third, it is not evident at all that all that
realized in the form of images is banished from the real. The relationship
between the real and images is for Plato more complex than for Aristotle.
There exists a return of images in the real itself, and that is the point. That is
the suspicion concerning art. The possibility is that images and false images
return in the real itself. In particular, obscure and false opinions as opposed
to the discovery of a truth can have dramatic consequences in the real.
So, finally, Plato proposes something like a philosophical theatre or more
ordinarily, if you want, philosophical art. It’s not imitation of what exists but
the movement of thinking itself oriented by a truth. It’s not the exceptional
violence of concrete history, but the struggle against different forms of refusal
of the movement of orientation to a truth: against the reactionary defence of
false and oppressive opinion. It’s not the strong and dark effect of terror and
pity but luminous affects such as the clear understanding of a problem; joy
when we find a solution, collective enthusiasm for a good change of the world,
new forms of friendship and love and so on. And it’s not identification: there
is much more a sort of positive conversion, the moment when we experiment
with what can be thought and done with what before seemed to us purely
impossible. So the goal of artistic philosophy, or art in philosophy, is to create
a new means to represent the possibility of the impossible, as a goal for new
thinking. And the Platonist theatre is a theatre for progressing the possibility
of the impossible and not the liberation of affects against and in front of the
world as it is. But we can ask why theatre for all this, why dialogues? After
all why not write a treatise on all this? Why not the constructive movement
of a good Aristotelian treatise? Why, finally, the necessity of a new form in
philosophy, to speak of the new form of the relationship between art and
philosophy?
To solve this problem of the necessity of the theatre in philosophy itself,
and more generally the necessity of an artistic presentation in philosophy
itself for Plato, I think we must go to the origin of Greek culture and of
Greek art as the context of the discussion between Plato and Aristotle. You
know that theatre is created from a religious ceremony concerning the God,
Dionysus. It was a religious ceremony, and in the religious ceremony you are
under the law of a unique voice, the voice of a unified community, the voice
of the divine fable, in a sense, the voice of the One. And the theatre is the
invention of a split in the One. You know that the beginning of theatre is the
invention of the second person, speaking on the stage. So it’s the invention
of a ceremony, certainly – the old theatre is a ceremony – which presents
the opposition between two subjects, two opinions and two contradictory
convictions. So in theatre, in relation to the religious ceremony, the two comes
after the One. And so theatre, before philosophy, is the appearing of negation;
the artistic appearing of the potency of division and negation. It’s the way out
of the cave of the One. It’s the invention of dialectics. And maybe the difficult
relationship between philosophy and theatre, properly, but practically all
forms of art concerns the question of dialectics. Because philosophy too is
the invention of dialectics, philosophy too is the examination of the question
of negativity. And this is why we have the presence of theatre in the entire
philosophical history of dialectics. In Hegel – the contradiction between
Antigone and Creon in Sophocles: universality against particularity. Or in
Aeschylus, the opposition of Athena and Erynes: the creation of an objective
trial and political rights against familial revenge and so on. Finally, the
question of the relationship between art and philosophy is the question of
dialectics; the question of the presentation of what is dialectical thinking that
is also a critical thinking, thinking which is able to develop negativity.
So, if we have dialogues in Plato it’s to say philosophy too is the creation
of a new form of dialectics and not only theatre and this is why it is the
creation of something like a philosophical theatre: a quarrel with art over the
legitimacy of dialectics. Is dialectics an invention of philosophy or finally an
invention of art in the form of theatre? For Plato philosophy is a subjective
movement and not a passive reception of a lesson and so we must be in
rivalry with theatre, we must be with theatre and Plato is against theatre
because he is with theatre, in conflict with theatre, properly. So dialegesthai,
it’s a Greek verb to indicate the action of philosophy. Dialegesthai is to speak
across negativity, to speak across difficulties and not to speak under the
authority of the One. So, it’s to speak with contradictions. We have, even
today, two convictions or two positions concerning theatre. That is, two
positions concerning the relationship to theatre, philosophy, dialectics,
negation, contradiction. You have the Aristotelian One, where theatre is
the representation of violent passions as the form of the possible cure for
the passions themselves. I think of the case of great American theatre, for
example, the theatre of Eugene O’Neil or Tennessee Williams, but also of
Ibsen, Chekov or Strindberg. We have violent passions, generally in the
familial context – in a very small and violent context. And the continuity
of the play is to obtain specific redemption, specific salvation by the saying
of what was unsaid, the end of the silence, the birth of new possibilities to
speak, and in some sense, this great Aristotelian tradition of the theatre as a
therapy, finally, is today the background to psychoanalysis.
The other orientation is a Platonist one. That is the idea that theatre is
political and ideological first. This is the case in Germany and in France,
this time with the Marxist background, much more than a psychoanalytic
background, and with Bertolt Brecht, but also with Paul Claudel in France
– Brecht with a revolutionary conviction and Claudel with a reactionary
one, but in any case it’s the theatrical realization of an idea. This is also the
case with the theatre of Sartre. We know from Plato to Sartre we have a
constant relationship between philosophy and theatre: in Sartre we find the
theatre of the pure choice, of the strict moment of decision, the moment the
subject decides to become something else. In any case you see, theatre and
modern art – particularly and in general – are an art of discontinuity. It’s
not the presentation of a unified world but the presentation of discontinuity,
of situational contradictions and contradictions of subjectivity. Maybe the
discussion between theatre and philosophy, between art and philosophy
concerns the ideal of life. Is the ideal of life the good life? In the sense of
subjective peace with the world as it is and with others as they are. Or the
ideal is not the good life but the true life, in the sense of subjective struggle to
change the world and to resolve profound contradictions with some others,
sometimes, by the conflict itself.
All this history, but finally we cannot decide on the relationship between
art and philosophy except by saying that in some sense they pertain to the
same history, the same conflictual history.
The true question, in the end (and it is also my conclusion), concerns
happiness. What is happiness? It is for Plato the most important question.
For Plato, it was very important to demonstrate, to give a proof that the
philosophical life was better than the ordinary life, that the philosopher, the
man or woman of wisdom, the man or woman transformed by the coming
out of the cave, achieved a real happiness, much more than the satisfactions
of the tyrant, the despot or the criminal. So the question of happiness is
central. It is that happiness is a witness to the truth, the subjective witness to
the truth. So the question, but it’s an open question, much more today than
ever: is happiness an acceptation of what exists, is happiness to find your
place in the world as it is, that is, happiness as something like satisfaction? Or
happiness is much more a choice or sort of a will concerning not what exists
but what must exist, and this difference between what exists and what must
exist has been the common preoccupation of art and philosophy for all of our
history and all of this continues.
Thank you.
This lecture was given at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of
the Sydney Seminar for Art and Philosophy, Western Sydney University,
29 November 2014.
Part Two
Presentations
4
Badiou’s Concept of History

Knox Peden
In Lacan: In Spite of Everything, Elisabeth Roudinesco begins a chapter with

a disquisition on the ‘list’ and its function as a ‘prop for creating narrative
processes’. It is as if the ‘list’ she writes, ‘be it anarchic, ordered or deconstructed,
alone possesses the power to guarantee longevity or universality to the thing
named. In this respect, any list is traumatic in its kind: it makes a stir’.1
Nothing I present in this chapter will guarantee the longevity of Alain Badiou’s
thought, much less its universality. And it would be pretentious to think any
list I would provide might prove traumatic. But since portentousness is a
risk for anyone who hazards the Lacanian idiom, perhaps I can admit my
intention to ‘make a stir’ not simply by focusing on the concept of history
in Badiou’s work, but approaching it by way of the list. Though Badiou often
subjects various historical sequences to philosophical assessment, at no point
is the word ‘history’ itself subjected to any kind of extensive conceptual
analysis in his work. To be sure, there are many illuminating discussions
of historicity, the ‘historical situation’, etc., and what distinguishes these
notions from History with a capital H. But it remains the case that, if there
is a concept of history in Badiou’s work, it is not one that he formulates for
us. Rather it emerges from the sequential nature of his philosophical effort
and the impasses it encounters along the way. As such, compiling a list of
Badiou’s convocations and dismissals of history might be a productive way to
see if the notion aspires to the dignity of the concept in Canguilhem’s sense.
That is, does Badiou provide a workable concept of history that manifests
‘the function of a form’?2 I admit that such an effort does not appear very
promising at the outset. For if one considers the ‘concept’ in Canguilhem’s
or even Frege’s sense, what is immediately clear is that Badiou rejects, indeed
philosophically combats, an extensional sense for history. As a concept that
extends infinitely to include all that has happened before us, history effectively
occludes events; it converts subjects into objects, or, worse, partitions them
into two collectively exhaustive categories: victims or villains.3
But here the list comes to our rescue. For if history is often pilloried in
Badiou’s writing – a foil for the event – the sequence of his thought betrays
surprising implications for the historical perspective that his philosophy

provides. In the Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou writes: ‘Philosophy’s
relation to art, like its relation to every other truth procedure, comes down
to showing it as it is. Philosophy is the go-between in our encounters with
truths, the procuress of truth’ (HB 9–10). Now, we know from elsewhere that
history as such is not a truth procedure in Badiou’s rubric; truth procedures
occur in the domains of art, science, politics and love. But it is equally
clear that each of these domains – philosophy’s perennial ‘conditions’ – is
at once occurrent within history writ large and also endowed with its own
singular history. A truth procedure will be historical or it will not be, to the
simple extent that it takes place in time, and unites present efforts with past
exemplars in an intelligible schema (even if the intelligibility in question
is that of the radical break). So the question then becomes: how does this
historical relation come to be thought in Badiou’s philosophy? How does
Badiou’s philosophy ‘show’ truth procedures as they are, which is to say:
history as it is? A possible answer is given in ‘Beyond Formalization’, Badiou’s
2002 interview with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward, where he remarks:
‘You could almost say that my entire enterprise is one giant confrontation
with the dialectic.’ He also concedes that there is ‘a certain confusion in this
whole business.’4 Misgivings about Badiou’s central work – Being and Event –
often take the form of regrets about its absolutist tendency. The work is
driven to abstraction and ultimately indifferent to actual, mediated historical
processes. Bosteels has long laboured for a fuller appreciation of the category
of historical experience in Badiou’s thinking about politics, yet this effort
is equivocal. Sometimes it takes the form of criticism targeted at Badiou
himself; more often it presents as a case for the underappreciated persistence
of the dialectic in Badiou’s thought. In this critical matrix, history becomes
aligned with the dialectic and the image of mediated activity (i.e. experience)
that the dialectic renders intelligible. History serves at once as a mechanism
of presentation and representation. But if history and the dialectic are not
strictly synonymous, it is no less clear that they are even commensurate.
For it is quite possible that Badiou’s ‘giant confrontation with the dialectic’,
far from being the illuminating core of his effort, functions as a distraction
from a profound and in many respects truly original philosophical thinking
of history that accompanied Badiou’s thought from the late 1980s to the late
1990s. Indeed, the claim of this intervention is that Badiou is in fact closest
to history when he is farthest from the dialectic.
Taking Badiou’s confessions about his ambivalence towards the dialectic
to heart, I seek to show that this ambivalence is in large part a consequence
of the recasting of philosophy he undertook in Being and Event, with its
rejection of all historicist hermeneutics and any trace of phenomenological
Badiou’s Concept of History 43
experience as a foundation for ontology. Ontology is the keyword of Being

and Event, as a book and an object of reception. But the recasting of ontology
was in many respects also a rejection of all the metaphysical baggage
that French philosophy had accreted from the German inheritance that
conditioned so much French innovation in the twentieth century. Whatever
its guise, be it the machinations of the dialectic or the history of being, it is
clear that philosophy of history has no place in Being and Event. But it is the
elimination of philosophy of history that allows Badiou’s philosophy to serve
as a conceptual apparatus for thinking history in a more direct sense, for
showing history to be composed of truth procedures in the same way that
philosophy ‘shows’ art ‘as it is’. This showing is in no way dialectical, and it’s
difficult to see how a dialectical perspective could be incorporated into it.
To be sure, the dialectical is often counterpoised to speculative metaphysics,
grounding the latter and its extravagances in a series of concrete mediations.
But to ventriloquize Althusser ventriloquizing Marx: the concrete of the
dialectic always remains an abstract concrete, and not in a productive sense.
In other words, a historical dialectic cannot avoid the capture of historicism,
or a model of historical intelligibility that one way or another limits the
responsibility of subjects for consequences by inscribing such responsibility
in a metaphysical schema that operates according to a logic that is not
exhausted by the truth procedures that comprise it. This is the full force
of Badiou’s polemical point in Conditions, which extends well beyond the
‘history of philosophy’ that is its apparent context: ‘it is entirely legitimate
for this new philosophical appraisal to direct itself against the authority of
history, against historicism’ (C, 20 tm).
But I maintain that the force of this point can only be appreciated
if we take a sequential approach, that is, if we focus not on Badiou’s
‘confrontation’[démelée] with the dialectic, but with history as a
philosophically muddled alternative. A word of warning: compiling the list of
Badiou’s confrontations will lead us into an impasse. This impasse will require
a brief detour through the ideas of Badiou’s long-time interlocutor and
political collaborator, Sylvain Lazarus. But working through the intersection
of their projects in the 1990s will also put us in a better position to appreciate
the shifts in Badiou’s thinking in the 2000s, where the dialectic and mediation
begin to regain their philosophical rights. The return to a quasi-philosophy
of history in Badiou’s recent work has the potential to eclipse the insights
of the previous period if we fail to insist on the set of differences internal to
Badiou’s philosophical effort. This seems fitting for a philosopher who values
consistency only to the extent that one remains vigilant in upholding the
inconsistency that serves as the ontological basis of all thought, historical or
otherwise.
From history to ontology?
Even if it can’t be exhaustive, any list of Badiou’s confrontations with history

ought to at least begin at the beginning. So it’s worth noting that his 1964
novel Almagestes announces a literary project that will seek to foment a ‘kind
of plasma, a creation of the world in which the Subject and History begin
to take form’. The trilogy announced by this work remains incomplete, with
only the second volume, Portulans, appearing in 1967.5 As we know, Badiou’s
literary aims were thwarted in the 1960s, first by the theoretical agenda that
was the Cahiers pour l’Analyse and then by the political one that unfurled from
the events of May 1968. Though it was written after ‘Mark and Lack’ (the first
but by no means the last time Badiou would criticize Jacques-Alain Miller
for his lack of faith in rationalism), Badiou’s first published contribution to
the Cahiers was an exercise in the history of mathematics titled ‘Infinitesimal
Subversion’. The article concludes with a lament that, in the struggle between
the materiality of the signifier and the ideality of the Whole that has marked
the history of philosophy, the infinitesimal traces of mathematics have been
victims of the latter. Victims, ‘not because they contravened some supposedly
formal atemporality, but because a ramified history supported the Reason of
an epoch in excluding them, and in not linking the infinite through them’.6
In this original matrix of Badiou’s thought, history is already a vector of
obscurantism. To be sure, Reason with a capital ‘r’ is the culprit here, but
this totalizing Reason – the ideality of the Whole – operates through a
‘ramified history’ that prohibits the sequential construction of links from
one instance of the infinite to the other across historical time; it prevents
the construction of what Lazarus would call a ‘homogeneous multiplicity’.7
The nexus of history, totality and ideality will remain an onus in Badiou’s
thought throughout the 1970s as he struggles to decouple Marxist thought
and politics from these and related instances of conceptual capture.
Badiou’s obituary for Sartre written in 1980 serves as a kind of summation
of this sequence. There he writes: ‘the subject that concerns us today cannot
be the Subject of history. The idea of a historical totalization is inadmissible.
At issue is the political subject, a totally particular subject’.8 The 1982
publication of Theory of the Subject will reproduce Badiou’s words from a
lesson delivered in 1976, which are even more emphatic on this score: ‘history
does not exist […]. Only historical periods or historicizations […] exist’
(TS 92).9 Elsewhere in the same course he remarks that ‘history is the chance
of political necessity’. The political subject’s exceptional status is affirmed later
on when he notes that, regarding the working class, torn between ‘its social
immediacy and political project, […] we will never say that it makes history,
not even that it constitutes history’ (TS 60, 188). Badiou’s allergy to history
is maximal in this period of this work, which witnesses a strident effort to

decouple the dialectic from philosophy of history, or History as totality,
ideality, or any number of avatars that militate against local, concentrated,
political engagement. The figure of the dialectic that emerges in Theory of the
Subject is that of ‘torsion’, where it is always tied to unique subjects and their
efforts to traverse the fantasy from anxiety to courage. Theory of the Subject
lacks many things, yet pathos is not one of them. Indeed, despite his efforts
to disavow history and focus on localization Badiou winds up generating
a metaphysics of historical destruction in this book, one whose focus on
purification and whose unavowed logics of redemption would be cause for
regret in Badiou’s later works.
This historical pathos starts to be tapered in his 1985 missive, Can Politics
Be Thought?, a key transitional work between Theory of the Subject and Being
and Event. Here Badiou writes ‘it is necessary to deliver politics from history,
in order to give it back to the event’.10 More: Badiou’s dialectic will prove
superior to Hegel’s precisely to the extent that it yields a ‘politics, rather than
a history’.11 The move towards the event is a move towards abstraction; it is a
move that broadens Badiou’s philosophical vision. But the move is arguably
not so much a move ‘from history to ontology’ in Peter Hallward’s phrase,12
as it is a shift from one philosophical vision of history to another: from the
dialectical to the subtractive, from a logic of redemption to a logic of tenacity.
In other words, Theory of the Subject was no less ontological in its structural
analysis than Being and Event will be; the difference lies in the ontology itself.
If history was primarily a figure of rhetoric in Theory of the Subject, the
notion becomes a conceptual figure in the 1988s Being and Event, where it is
subjected to further refinement, especially in its contrast with the conceptual
work of ‘nature’. In particular, Badiou introduces the notion of a history that
is naturalized, rendered inert and well-ordered as nature is in itself. This is
significant, because it is no longer History as a speculative totality that is
rejected, but rather any vision of history that converts it into a naturalized
phenomenon, be it atomized or totalized. Even if Badiou is not explicit about
this in Being and Event, it’s important to recognize how forceful a rebuke this
is to the Marxist inheritance – to speak of laws in history, even tendencies,
is to betray it precisely by naturalizing it. A cornerstone of Being and Event’s
ontology is the idea that there are no events in nature. Consequently, there
is no better way to eliminate the event from history than to naturalize the
latter, to render it an array of facts – infinite and incomplete to be sure –
and yet immune from any subjective sequence that cannot be rendered fully
intelligible within the terms of the situation itself. In certain respects, Being
and Event continues to castigate History in terms consistent with Badiou’s
writing over the previous twenty years. But if history remains maligned,
the historical regains its rights, tethered in fact not to ‘the political’, but to
politics (not le politique but la politique), and more broadly to the ontological
possibility of events as such. ‘Situations are named historical in which figures
at least one evental site. […] A historical situation is, in at least one of its
points, at the edge of the void’ (EE, 197).
This recasting of the historical as a domain constituted by the intersection
of the sequential and the evental site is one of the most significant moments
in Being and Event, but it is one that risks being taken for granted given
the apparently quotidian nature of the qualifier ‘historical’. Granted, the
distinction between ‘history’ and the ‘historical period’ was operative in
Theory of the Subject, but the latter was underdeveloped as a concept, arguably
a mere placeholder for Badiou’s de-historicized vision of the dialectic as so
many local ‘torsions’. This reconfiguration of the historical as the anti-natural,
serving equivocally as both a descriptive and prescriptive term for situations
in which evental sites may occur, will inform Badiou’s prolific output
throughout the 1990s in which he tracks the potential of his new organon
amongst philosophy’s various conditions: art, science, love and politics.
Axiomatics contra dialectics
Yet it is in Badiou’s discussion of politics that the importance of the historical

becomes clearest, as does the significance of Badiou’s long-time political
collaborator Sylvain Lazarus in the development of this line of thought. In the
discussion of Lazarus’s work that forms the centrepiece of Metapolitics, Badiou
affirms the idea that ‘the historicity of politics – its subjective efficacy, which is
the Real of its name’ cannot be conceptualized. ‘For this would presume that a
politics can be the real object of thought […]. Historicity is outside the scope
of the investigation […]. But its intellectuality is conceptualized’ (M, 47).
Being and Event teaches that ‘we can think the historicity of certain multiples,
but we cannot think a History’ (EE, 196–197). Via Lazarus, this thinking of
historicity is divorced from any concept of historicity, which is to say any
direct conceptual capture of historicity in thought that would convert such
historicity into an object. All that is available to conceptual capture is what
Lazarus calls the ‘intellectuality’ of historicity, which is to say the thinking
of historicity at a reflective remove from the direct thinking of historicity
that takes place when subjects undertake political sequences. I take this to
mean the following: whereas historicity cannot be given a concept directly,
the manner in which we think it can, and we think it according to its places
[lieux], that is to say, its effects, its occurrences. To my mind, this is the sense
of the ‘unnameable name’ that is politics in Lazarus’s intervention. Politics
is a name, but it is an unnameable name – what this means is that it names,

it does the naming; it cannot itself be named without losing the subjective
element that gives it its political quality, which means it cannot be inscribed
in a metaphysical or philosophical framework, a conceptual scheme, that is
different from the political sequence itself, again without subtracting all that
makes it a political situation in the first place. To state it most tersely: what
we grasp when we grasp the concept of politics is at once its inapplicability to
objects and its singular relation to subjects.13
It is important to grasp here how this subtle differentiation in what it
means to think historically distinguishes Badiou and Lazarus’s work from
the vision that predominated in Theory of the Subject. For the signal insight
of Lazarus’s thought at this time – the one that resonates with Badiou’s own
efforts – is that the conceptual work that forms reflection on historical
sequences can in no way be confused with or assimilated to the thinking that
takes place in those historical sequences themselves. And yet – this is the
paradox of his position – the only genuine thinking of politics as so many
historical sequences, the one that grasps thought as a rapport du réel is one
that seeks to identify the wholly subjective aspect of such thought from an
equally subjective perspective in the present. But there can be no imaginary
identification with the historical actor, no fusion of subject positions. ‘If
thought is thinkable’, Lazarus writes, ‘this thinkability operates beyond the
[historical] mode’s termination’.14 But thinkability depends on difference and
distinction, which is opposed to an imaginary identification that would seek
to establish a continuity of experience, an experience of indistinction across
historical time. Lazarus is insistent that ‘saturation’ is a real occurrence in
‘historical modes of politics’ and that their thinkability is in many respects
consequent on this saturation, itself the flipside of exhaustion. The distance
in thought is crucial to the vision that allows one to grasp the sequence as
subjective – a subjective sequence is by its nature saturated in the sense that,
as pure purposiveness, its historical actuality is exhaustive of its content.15 By
contrast, the torsional dialectics of Theory of the Subject harboured a tendency
towards identification – the philosopher as subject akin to the historical
actor as subject, conducting torsions that generate novel perspectives from
immanent situations, rejecting exhaustion in a phoenix-like commitment
to renewal.
If Theory of the Subject sought to salvage the dialectic from history by
localizing it, Being and Event salvages history from the dialectic by recasting
it as a matter of axiomatics. Again the shift is not from history to ontology,
but from a historical ontology to an axiomatic ontology. The former occludes
the actual stuff of history by turning it into a philosophical occasion, a
space for dialectics to do its work; the latter renders history visible via the
construction of a lens for discerning subjective sequences that, as Lazarus

is keen to note, are finite to the extent that they have definite beginnings
and ends and occupy places [lieux].16 They cannot be re-actualized, pace
Badiou’s distressing moves in Logics of Worlds to recalibrate something like a
Husserlian schema of sedimentation and resurrection within the domain of
the imaginary. The Badiou of the 1990s thinks otherwise. Here, axiomatics
are not simply an alternative to dialectics, but a means for neutralizing its
effects. This is what’s at stake in Badiou’s introduction to Metapolitics when
he tackles the question of the political intelligibility in the Resistance activity
of Jean Cavaillès and others of his cohort. Here Badiou writes: ‘In fact, choice
has its intelligibility neither in the objective collective nor in a subjectivity
of opinion. Its intelligibility is internal, in the sequential process of action,
just as an axiom is intelligible only through the applications of the theory
that supports it’ (M, 6–7). This position echoes that developed by Robert
Blanché in his classic book L’Axiomatique, a key work for Badiou and others
associated with the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. There Blanché notes that ‘the
axiomatic method has the precise value of revealing isomorphisms between
apparently heterogeneous concrete theories, gathering them in the unity
of an abstract system’.17 This is the vision of history as unintelligible but for
the presence of thought, in Lazarus’s and Badiou’s sense – a thought that,
through its interventionist capacity, culls homogenous multiplicities out of
heterogeneous ones, establishing ‘isomorphisms’ that are not to be forsaken
in imaginary identifications.18
Before moving on, it will be helpful to linger in this impasse of Badiou’s
thought, and perhaps to take a second pass through Lazarus’s ideas and
compare them with similar theoretical efforts from other contexts. The 1990s
find a thinking of the historical in Badiou’s thought at a remove from the twin
threats of speculative identification or objective intelligibility. Tethered as it is
to the purely subjective, his vision of history is virtually incommensurable to
any recognizable notion of historical knowledge or historical understanding
prevalent in the discipline. These paradoxes are precise in Lazarus’s work.
Seeing that politics is purely subjective and occurrent only in various
‘historical modes of politics’, one can never know politics objectively, insofar
as we regard ‘objective’ history as a site of accreted, complete sequences –
that is, insofar as we regard history as an object that exists for a subject to
understand. But the lesson of Lazarus’s thought is that politics does not know
historical objects, but historical subjects. So the historical relation, that is,
the relation of the present to the past, is not subject–object, but subject–
subject. This is the sense of Lazarus’s peculiar concept of ‘homogeneous
multiplicity’ as the gathering of sequential singularities operative within
various ‘historical modes of politics’. Historical understanding – historical
objectivity – cannot but regard the past as a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity,

which denies singularity’.19
Lazarus’s language is arcane and difficult, but the point is familiar to any
historian who has recused philosophy so as to seek out a truly ‘historical’
view of the past. If you ditch the artifice of narrative, and have done with
the assurances of the dialectic, history appears as pure dispersal – pure
heterogeneous multiplicity. This is the historical correlate, in Lazarus’s work,
to Badiou’s ontological notion of inconsistent multiplicity, errant void, as
foundational term. A pure historian presents no story, but pure heterogeneous
multiplicity. The philosopher of history Hayden White made a similar
point in his jocular suggestion that the purest form of history, the mode of
objectivity sought by modern historiography, was already accomplished in
the medieval chronicle. The chronicle is pure sequence, devoid of narrative
links and figurative intelligibility. White points to The Annals of St Gall,
composed between the eighth and tenth centuries A.D. He focuses on the
late 700s and gives us the history by citing the chronicle: ‘709: Hard winter,
Duke Gottfried died. 710: Hard year, and deficient in crops, 711: [no entry].
712: Flood everywhere. 713: [no entry]. 714: Pippin, Mayor of the Palace,
died…’ and so on. There are many blank entries until 732, during which time
we learn ‘Charles fought against the Saracens in Poitiers on Saturday.’20 This
is pure history as inconsistent multiplicity.
But White’s point is of course ironic. A pure history is unintelligible as
history, and what gives it intelligibility is the infusion of subjectivity into
the inchoate material of the past, the inconsistent multiplicity of Badiou’s
ontological perspective. One of the major scandals of White’s work was his
elimination of the distinction between the voluntarism that is operative
in the historical actor and the voluntarism that conditions the practice of
the historian in the present. In both instances, meaning results primarily
from moral and aesthetic comportment, not from any objective given in
itself. Badiou and Lazarus promote something similar, except for two key
differences. First: contrary to White’s focus on the moral and aesthetic,
they are concerned with the rationality and axiomatic nature of subjective
engagement. Juxtaposed alongside Badiou’s work, White’s appears still too
beholden to a Kantian universal history, one driven by moral and aesthetic
refinement. In other words, next to Badiou and Lazurus, White is still too
dialectical. Yet this is related to the second difference: the commitment
to the axiomatic is a way to retain the difference between the subjectivity
of the historical actor and that of the philosopher or in Lazarus’s case, the
‘anthropologist of the name’. The historical actor is unavoidably enmeshed
in variously mediating conditions – the domain of the imaginary – but the
philosopher in the present who considers such a sequence is able to isolate
what is truly subjective in the sequence precisely to the extent that he forsakes
any imaginary identification or investment in it.
Just as Badiou recognizes that any philosophy of consistency must first
traverse the ontological fact of inconsistency if it is to prove compelling, so
too does Lazarus recognize the force of heterogeneous multiplicity lying in
wait to undo any radical, directed, or transformative political sequence. The
entire historiography of the French Revolution is basically a version of this
battle – pluralization, ramification, reinscription and renaming, all mobilized
to undo the singularity of the event as subjective effort pursued under the
‘unnameable name’ of Revolution. White recognizes this too; whatever its
value, historical objectivity often serves to undo historical subjectivity.21 But
the power of Lazarus’s thought – which is also the power of Badiou’s work in
Being and Event and the 1990s – is this: to produce a thinking of the subject
that is immune to dialectical recapture, which is to say, a thinking of the
subject that could be recuperated in, or rendered commensurate with, an
objective schema that then serves as a higher order ground of intelligibility.
It’s important to appreciate the significance of this move against a broad
sector of critical theoretical work from Adorno to Žižek that sees unbridled
subjectivity as a source of horror, and the dialectic as either a prophylactic
or a kind of energy efficient historical engine channelling such terroristic
effects into beneficent ends. What Badiou’s work allows us to see is that it’s
not the dialectic that serves as a salve to violence of unbridled subjectivity,
the Schwäremerei that keeps Kant and his heirs up at night. Rather, the
dialectic is itself tasked with being a source of violence insofar as it is the
philosophical alibi that restores directionality or ‘purpose’ to history, all the
while purporting to account for the heterogeneous multiplicity that is history
in itself. It accounts for it, but takes it as given. The historian can always
disabuse the dialectician of his pretentions by treating it as philosophical
manoeuvre that, far from accounting for or redeeming heterogeneous
multiplicity, simply obscures it. But this move undoes politics in turn,
eliminating not simply the effects of subjective tenacity but their very place.
Between the historian and the dialectic the options are unappealing: political
impossibility or metaphysical alibi. Badiou’s axiomatic formalizes this
impasse, and hence points towards an exit.
Thinking the century
As one might expect, these themes come to a head in Badiou’s lectures

dealing with ‘the century’, which open thus: ‘Let’s be tempted by the mistress
of the moment: History. History, which is presumed to be the unshakeable
support for any politics whatsoever’ (TC 1). We can see where this is going.
Badiou’s ‘aim is not to judge the century as an objective datum, but rather
to ask how it has come to be subjectivated’ (TC 5). This subjectivation is by
no means an unequivocal good. Indeed, the central thesis of this powerful
and strange book concerns ‘the passion for the real’ that resulted in attempts
to master History, ‘to master it politically’. One is tempted to say ‘to master
it politically’ above all, but the central provocation of the book is, to take
an exemplary case, that the will to formalization that obtained in Stalin’s
show trials bears resemblances with the procedure operative in Malevich’s
White on White. The minimal difference is that the former was a matter of
destruction, and the latter a matter of subtraction. Subtraction preserves
minimal difference; destruction obliterates it in the nothingness of the real.
Nota bene that Badiou’s otherwise ludicrous comparison of show trials and
White on White itself performs the subtractive gesture that is the only viable
antidote to destruction in his view. By inviting us to a scene in which the
relation between the two historical events is one of minimal difference,
Badiou introduces us to the minimal difference between formalization and
mastery. The violence of mastery in the twentieth century was, for Badiou,
a matter of course. Speaking of Brecht’s relentlessness, Badiou observes: ‘In
murder, we can make out a metonymy of History’ (TC 46). Again History
writ large warrants murder – each murder finds its alibi in History, such is
its metonymic status. We might say that the ethic Badiou promotes in The
Century, and the lesson it harbours, is the need to subtract formalization
from mastery, again to subtract the historical from history.22 One can gloss
the relation between the terms as minimal difference.
In the interview with Bruno Bosteels titled ‘Can Change Be Thought?’
Badiou offers some remarks on Foucault that illuminate the project of The
Century, and the equivocal significance of history at this moment in his
thinking. In effect, he comes to regard history as a situation in which ‘the
discursive truth of a time comes at the price of stripping this time of its
generic procedures’. More:
[History] is the attempt to write the history of everything, to grasp

a situation outside the belabouring of this situation by the generic
procedures properly speaking. That is only normal, because history
must treat of time without eternity, at least that is one way of putting
it. When I deny history, or when I polemicize against history, that is
what I’m opposed to. I am not against the relation to our past, even less
so against the presence of the past, because, on the contrary, I think
that the past can convoke you with an enormous liveliness as present.
But I am against this figure that apprehends situations in their time by
first subtracting any hypothesis concerning the way in which this time
has been treated by something other than itself, that is, ultimately by
subtracting the procedures of truth of which this time has occasionally
been the site.23
Even as this passage illuminates Badiou’s views on history, it confounds his

investment in subtraction. Based on Being and Event and The Century, one
would think that subtraction is a kind of ethical imperative for the philosopher.
But in this instance, we grasp subtraction’s equivocal sense – a tool (or weapon)
suitable to a variety of purposes. In this case, Badiou criticizes the historian
for subtracting ‘the hypothesis’ from the array of facts – the discursive truth
of a time comes at the cost of its generic procedures. Badiou by contrast
valorizes history to the extent that one can subtract the facts so as to isolate
the generic, the hypothesis. One subtracts history so as to attend to the
historical. It is unfortunate that the phrase ‘the historical’ resonates so closely
with ‘the political’, a derided term throughout Badiou’s mature thought. As
noted, in French, le politique and la politique – the political and politics – are
distinguishable (minimally different?) thanks to the definite article. But the
apostrophe intervenes in l’historique, occluding any difference. One might be
tempted to posit the neologism ‘historics’ to align with politics, against ‘the
political’ and ‘the historical’ as ontological grounds.
If Fredric Jameson is correct that one cannot not periodize, then The
Century seems to close a period inaugurated by Being and Event in which
the historical view in Badiou’s philosophy is constructed in a way opposed
to the machinations of dialectical capture. It is also a work that makes
good on the expansion of ontology beyond politics in Being and Event,
for Badiou’s point is that ‘the passion of the real’ operative in the century
is one that traverses philosophy’s conditions, linking developments in
arts and science and those in politics. While at first glance the apothegm
of ‘the passion of the real’ might look like an instance of ‘homogenous
multiplicity’ – linking the ontologically disparate in a coherent sequence
– it is important to see how far a departure this is from the sense of the
idea promoted in Lazarus’s work. Granted, Lazarus is uniquely concerned
with politics; this is in fact the substance of Badiou’s philosophical
critique of him. But the virtues of Lazarus’s more narrow position become
clear alongside Badiou’s expansive brief in The Century. For tracking
the passion of the real across various domains, tethering instances
of formalization to one another via analogy or the figure of minimal
difference, paves the way towards re-establishing the intelligibility of
‘the century’ – a historical period – in broadly dialectical terms. In other
words, the meaning of the century is not a mere composite of manifold
subjective instances; it emerges rather from their relation to one another

in a broadly coherent frame.
The Century is a transitional book, looking forward and backward in
Badiou’s work. This is only fitting, given the centrality of Xenophon’s Anabasis
to the book itself. Aspects of the argument – the focus on subtraction, for
example – tie it to the axiomatics of the post-Being and Event sequence.
Others – the century as relational composite – tie it to the work to come. The
first decade of the twenty-first century saw Badiou develop his work on Logics
of Worlds at the same time that he was procuring an exponentially increasing
Anglophone readership. This created a peculiar discrepancy in that right as
Badiou’s anti-dialectical works of the 1990s were being translated, and his
work was being treated to a kind of second reception following the French
one, he was in fact working on materials that would qualify and move away
from some of the more extreme positions of this period. The return of the
dialectic in Badiou’s thought – the step back from the axiomatic – is not
coincidental to the work of criticism developed by his leading Anglophone
interpreters. Badiou says as much himself in his interview with Peter
Hallward in Concept and Form: ‘it’s true that Logics of Worlds [… ] is partially
a response to longstanding Anglo-Saxon objections’.24
Logics of Worlds is an incredibly rich work, and I can’t do justice to it
in what will now be a too brief conclusion. But it’s worth making a few
conjectures about it and subsequent works to try to endow this list of Badiou’s
engagements with history with the dignity of the sequence. First: as noted,
a logic of sedimentation and re-actualization is in play in Logics of Worlds
that squares awkwardly with the saturated sequences discussed in Being and
Event. A case in point is the mythic figure of Spartacus, who, through a series
of imaginary identifications, is re-actualized across historical time. This new
vision is developed even more fully in Badiou’s brief for a renewal of the
‘communist hypothesis’. There, Badiou is explicit about his reconsideration of
History. To be sure, there remains no overarching meaning [sens] of history.
But there is the persistence of the Idea, devoid of predication and tethered to
subjects.25 There is nevertheless something strange in this reconfiguration.
As ever, Badiou continues to align truth with the real. Yet History becomes
a space of the symbolic in which the subject intervenes via vectors of
identification, that is, in the domain of the imaginary. Earlier, from Theory of
the Subject up through Being and Event, history as totality was on the side of
the imaginary, the ruse of specular wholeness. And the subject, via punctual
interventions, was the vector of the symbolic, leading the real to its impasses
through the miasmas of imaginary history. But Badiou now sees value in
the subject’s imaginary capacities. Indeed he writes: ‘it is necessary that
allegorical facts ideologize and historicize the fragility of the true’.26 As ‘the
century’ came to be mediated by the passion of the real, so too do subjects

mediate between the real of truth and the symbolic of History via the allegory
of facts in their attempts to persist in the Idea. Facts? Whither events and
their axiomatic consequences?
The historical dialectic has regained its rights in Badiou’s recent work.
To be sure, one can argue with Bosteels and others that it was never wholly
absent. The will to integration is there in Being and Event even if it is abated
and resistant. For as we confront Badiou’s ontology, we sometimes need to
ask the naïve questions: why would it ever be the case that science, politics
and art, to say nothing of love could be rendered intelligible with the same
tools? Why assume even a minimal homogeneity that would allow such
linkages? To be sure, each is a case of a subject, events and truth procedures.
But their distinction is belied in Badiou’s very evident desire, actuated in
The Century, and efflorescent in Logics of Worlds and beyond, to arrange
such disparate sequences in a coherent philosophy of historical co-existence
and belonging. With this will towards fusion, however riven and fractured,
Badiou returns to the notion of philosophy of history as alibi, as a practice
that identifies schemata or grounds that relieve subjects of their isolation and
responsibility. In this, he takes leave of the cold seclusion of the axiom for
the warm comfort of the allegory. But in this as well, the split between the
philosopher and the subject is forsaken in a more generic line of continuity
and imaginary identity. Again, the paradox of Badiou’s work is that, whereas
history and philosophy are traditionally opposed (in a disciplinary sense), his
most abstract philosophical vision is most resonant with the widest historical
vision. But that vision is occluded when the distinction between the effort to
think such events as historians or philosophers and the effort to think (and
live) such events as subjects is obscured. What results is not distinction, but
indistinction. If being is not univocal, then neither is thinking.
My own approach to Badiou’s work has attempted to develop this ethic, to
see what the historical–philosophical prism provided in his Being and Event
era work allows into view once we articulate the discrepancies in thought in
Badiou’s monumental oeuvre. Ruminating further on the list, Roudinesco
writes: ‘The list is the archival real of history, the mark of the irruption of the
event, whose logic is to be reconstructed.’27 When we reconstruct Badiou’s
concept of history, we find that, unlike the historical sequences it allows into
view, its consequences are not yet fully saturated, and its virtues far from
exhausted.
5
Deleuze’s Badiou
Jon Roffe
I met a man recently who told me that, so far from believing in the square
root of minus one, he did not even believe in minus one. This is at any rate
a consistent attitude. There are certainly many people who regard √2 as
something perfectly obvious, but jib at √-1. This is because they think they
can visualize the former as something in physical space, but not the latter.
– E.C. Titchmarsh, Mathematics for the General Reader1
In a long footnote appended to ‘One, Multiple, Multiplicity’, a restatement of

the main themes of his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Alain Badiou discusses
the brief, perplexing text that Deleuze devotes to his work. He writes:
I consider Deleuze’s note in What is Philosophy? – whose obvious

amicable and attentive intention I welcomed – as one more enigmatic
aspect (there are others, of course) of Deleuze’s take on multiplicities.
I am, moreover, delighted to have provided him with the occasion. But
I would be grateful to anyone who could clarify this textual fragment
for me, and explain what relation it bears to Being and Event. This is a
genuine invitation, wholly devoid of any irony. (TW 245-6n3)
The note in question – approximately two pages in length – is indeed

enigmatic as it is important. Ostensibly devoted to a critical explication of
Being and Event, it refers by name to a number of its key terms – situation,
state, event and event-site. Even a cursory familiarity with Badiou’s work,
however, reveals its peculiarity. One quickly senses the gap between the
original and the copy; in fact, Deleuze’s account is riddled with errors
of interpretation, errors which are hardly accounted for by an appended
footnote which declares that, ‘Badiou’s theory is very complex; we fear we
may have oversimplified it.’2
It is not simply enough to dismiss Deleuze’s reading as false, since his
misreading of Being and Event proceeds according to the fundamental
claims of What Is Philosophy? There is, that is to say, a logic that guides the
misrecognition. Badiou expresses this well when he writes that ‘I do not
register any incorrectness in this text, only a bizarre torsion, an impracticable
vantage point that makes it impossible to understand what is at stake or what
we are dealing with’ (TW 245). It is precisely such a symptomal torsion that
is apparent in Deleuze’s account of Badiou, a torsion that arises because of the
context of the note itself.
Here, I would simply like to take up this invitation and discuss Deleuze’s
rendering of Being and Event. While Deleuze’s misreading cannot be excused,
we can subject it to a series of interpretive transformations that make it
at least legible. Once this is done, an interesting line of criticism emerges
that has not, to my knowledge, been advanced anywhere else, and which
turns around the structure of the relationship between philosophy and its
conditions in Badiou’s philosophy.
Schema I: The project of What Is Philosophy?
First, though, let’s recall the general context of the Note, What Is Philosophy?
itself. The book is framed by the contention that thought confronts two
combatants. The first is the ancient and original enemy of philosophy, doxa,
what Deleuze here most often calls cliché or opinion. The second combatant
is chaos, a chaos that belongs fundamentally to thinking itself. Chaos here is
absolute speed, what Deleuze sometimes, misleadingly I think, calls infinite
speed. Thought itself, thought as such, takes place without any necessary
concessions to relative positions in thought. Deleuze is informed here by the
work of Raymond Ruyer, and his notion of survol absolu.3
Now, while it is an enemy of thought in one sense – given that, as Deleuze
notes, ‘We require just a little order to protect us from the chaos’ (WP 201) –
chaos is at the same time the ally of thinking in its merciless combat with
doxa. It is only by siding with chaos and the absolute speed of thought that it
becomes possible to engender any genuine break with orthodoxy.
Facing each of these combatants is one face of the Janus, stupidity. Doxa
is itself thought’s degree zero, a non-thought, whether it takes the form of
the discourse of marketing firms, or ‘polite [...] dinner conversations at Mr.
Rorty’s’ (WP 144). On the other hand, Janus’ other face, there is stupidity as
problematic and problematizing, engendered by the encounter with chaos.
This leads us to a second, introductory point. Though it is often overlooked,
What Is Philosophy? insists on the fact that thought never arises without an
encounter with the problem. Of philosophy, for example, Deleuze writes that
‘All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no
Deleuze’s Badiou 57
meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their

solution emerges’ (WP 16). Difference and Repetition’s central edict on this
point remains in force: something causes us to think.
[T]here is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within

thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born,
illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. Thought is primarily
trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy:
everything begins with misosophy. Do not count upon thought to
ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the
contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up
and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to
think.4
Philosophy, science and art are, on Deleuze’s account, the three creative acts
in thought engendered through the encounter with the problem, which is to
say the three procedures by which doxa may be overturned and the new enter
into thinking human existence. While they share chaos and the encounter
with the problem, they constitute three different ways of responding to it.
Given the note on Being and Event is concerned above all with
philosophy and science, we will forego a consideration of art. How, though,
do philosophy and science differ? For our purposes, three characteristics are
worth insisting upon.
‘The first difference between science and philosophy’, Deleuze writes, ‘is
their respective attitudes towards chaos’, (WP 118) conceived, as we have
seen, as absolute speed.
For its part, philosophy aims to situate thought on the level of this
speed itself, not in toto (which would be impossible), but by selecting out
certain movements of this pre-subjective and non-human infinite thought.
Philosophy’s first act is therefore a filtering, selecting or sieving of chaos, such
that certain features become capable of appearing as such. Science grasps
chaos in the inverse fashion, by slowing it down. Its first act consists in fixing
a frame or plane of reference, in relation to which chaos becomes capable of
supporting subsequent acts of indexing.
This leads to a second point of difference. What philosophy creates
for Deleuze, as is well known, are concepts. If it begins by selecting, what
it selects for are elements (components) that can be brought together in
concepts themselves. While there is no space to make this as clear as it may
be here, consider for a moment the concept of the Cartesian cogito, one of
Deleuze’s examples. The cogito is constructed out of a variety of components:
doubting, thinking and being, and three concomitant positions of the
I (I doubt, I think, I am). Each of these in turn can be further analysed –

doubting being first perceptual, then scientific, then obsessional (‘phases of
variation’ in the concept [WP 25]). Deleuze argues that Descartes, in creating
this concept, brings together components such that what is produced can no
longer be caught – at least in the first instance – with the net of habitual cliché.
It renders chaos consistent in order to assemble an exception to stupidity. The
cogito is not just a concept that involves thinking as a component, for it also
embodies a new capacity for thinking, a capacity to think anew and as such.
Concepts are the always renewed eyes of the mind.
In rendering consistent absolute speed, the concept thus attains the status
of event for Deleuze. In broad terms, this is in keeping with the account
presented in the Logic of Sense, which also emphasizes the event as product,
and as belonging to a surface that adheres to the regime of bodies and
language without being reducible to it. Thus, Deleuze writes that the concept
as event adsorbs states of affairs (WP 153).
Science, on the other hand, creates functions rather than concepts.
Due to science’s relationship to chaos, we can see why Deleuze will note
that ‘A function is a slow-motion’ (WP 118), since, whatever else, it acts by
sacrificing the speed of thought for stability. The kernel of every function
is the pair fixed constant-independent variable. Consider Einstein’s famous
statement of the mass-energy correlation e = mc2. The amount of energy
and the mass of the object in question are two independent variables. Their
interrelation is made possible by the constant c, the speed of light. Or take
one of Deleuze’s own examples, Cantorian set theory, where the constant is
the first transfinite set aleph-0, which allows for a whole new range of exo-
referential connections, even if these are problematic or problematizing on
their own (e.g. the Continuum Hypothesis). In a nutshell, science produces
new ways of knowing, organized by the initial cut in the absolute speed of
chaos, an anchor around which all things may be arrayed.
I’d like to insist on the quintessentially Leibnizian character of the account
of science in What Is Philosophy?.5 The functions science creates are not lenses
through which to look at a real exteriority, but structural forms interior to
thought that constitute their objects. Science does not engage with things
stricto sensu, for the simple reason that the very category of the thing itself
is the creation of science. Even living beings – often held to be the emblems
and embers of Deleuze’s ontology – are conceived as complexes of differential
relations, rather than as free expressions of wild Being.
Finally, we must note Deleuze’s answer to the question of the relationship
between science and philosophy itself, since it is central to his presentation
of Being and Event. In the interviews given as Cinema I: The Movement-
Image was being published, Deleuze begins to express the view that between
philosophy on the one hand, and art and science on the other, there exists a
relationship of mutual interference. Here is how he puts the matter in the final
paragraph of The Time-Image:
For many people, philosophy is something which is not ‘made’, but is

pre-existent, ready-made in a prefabricated sky. However, philosophical
theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract
than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the
light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema
is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to
and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to
other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege
over others, any more than one object has over others. It is at the level
of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images,
concepts, every kind of event.6
What Is Philosophy? refines this thesis, arguing that we can identify three
kinds of interference.7 The first is the unlocalizable interference that chaos
itself exercises within philosophy, science and art equally, ‘as if they shared the
same shadow that extends itself across their different nature and constantly
accompanies them’ (WP 218). The second kind of interference is localized
and extrinsic, such that ‘each discipline remains on its own plane and utilizes
its own elements’ (WP 217). Deleuze gives the examples of a philosopher
who would create ‘a concept peculiar to Riemannian space or to irrational
number’. A better example, close to Deleuze himself, would be the role of the
differential calculus in post-Kantian thought, where it appears as a powerful
philosophical topos. On the other side, he invokes the scientist who would
create ‘functions of concepts, as Lautman demonstrates for mathematics
insofar as the latter actualizes virtual concepts’ (WP 217). The third kind of
interference is localized and intrinsic in character. It involves the insertion of
concepts and conceptual components in the space of scientific thought itself or
elements of scientific thought appearing as internal and yet foreign elements
in philosophical construction – think of Leibniz’s use of the infinitesimal.
The latter two forms of interference characterize the nature of the
relationship between philosophy, science and art. While irreducible, they act
as loci of provocation for each other, irritants, like the grains of sand that are
the foreign kernel of the oyster.
We are now in a position to summarize Deleuze’s position in the following
schema.
Schema II: From logic to phenomenology
To draw closer to our main concern, the note on Being and Event appears
in a remarkably critical chapter of What Is Philosophy?, devoted to logic and
phenomenology, which are bound together for Deleuze in an alternative vision of
the relationship between science and philosophy. On Deleuze’s view, it is a capital
error to conceive of either science or philosophy as concerned with language,
whether conceived in terms of democratic conversation (Habermas, Rorty), or
in terms of logical propositions. Concepts are, he argues, unrelated to questions
of reference, being governed instead by the requirement of endo-consistency.
Functions, on the other hand, clearly do involve an exo-referentiality. As we have
seen, however, it is not reference to a reality outside of the function, but concerns
the relationship between constants and variables as the function’s extrinsic parts.
As we well-know, however, a certain logical capture of philosophy is ubiquitous,
in the English-speaking world in particular. This – ruinous – state of affairs
arises, in Deleuze’s view, on the basis of a certain initial admixture of philosophy
and science, under the rule of an extra-philosophical, extra-scientific decision.
This decision is double. On the one hand, the logicist grasps the concept
as a proposition, that is, a formalized statement. On the other hand, the
proposition is subordinated to the requirement that it have a relationship to
a referent by which its truth value can be ascertained. This hybrid monster
is what Deleuze will call the prospect, in which a bastardized conception of
science provides both the ideal form (exo-reference) and the initial content
of philosophy (discovery of ‘facts’), provided that we already construe science
as proceeding by way of logical propositions.
We see then the sleight of hand: in order to subordinate itself to science,
philosophy must first construct its own vision of scientific practice that has
no direct reference to this practice itself – here, one only need to consider the
staggering state of the contemporary philosophy of mathematics, more than a
hundred years behind mathematics itself.8 This is not Escher’s two hands, one
drawing the other, but rather a hallucinatory act of grounding. The logicist
is akin to the masochist, who must first actively seduce his punisher into
adopting the position of the master before he can be passively dominated.
In some of the most interesting pages of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze will
show that the logicist concept, the prospect, exposes philosophy to the full force of
Gödel’s undecideability results: by recasting philosophy in logico-propositional
terms, it is eviscerated. But we need not go so far as this here, because it is already
evident that the logicist position vitiates philosophy. By subordinating it to the
finite order of recognition and exo-reference, we have lost the concept. What is
left for philosophy is, of course, the tepid remnants of ‘lived experience’ – which
is nothing other than doxa itself. The order of the everyday is itself the order of
cliché – up to and including the subject of experience (‘the habit of saying “I”’).
To the degree that philosophy is shut up in the tawdry finitude of the lived,
on the presupposition that all the ‘serious’ thinking is already being done by
science and logic, it has two modes available to it. The first involves a simple
generalization or abstraction of the lived – we take the boredom that is felt in
airports, and write a book about it. The sadness of traffic, shifting shopping and
dating habits, how nice classical architecture is, how wretched contemporary
art is, and so on. ‘This is’, as Deleuze says, ‘the Western democratic, popular
conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner
conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ (WP 144). It is no surprise as a result, he adds, that
so many discussions that turn around the abstract features of lived experience
take this form: ‘as a man, I consider all women to be unfaithful…’ (WP 145).
The second course of action is more interesting. Beyond the work of its
worst and most insipid representatives, philosophy has never been content to
adopt the perspective of simple generalization. A powerful alternative approach
emerges which aims to extract what is essential from the lived itself. This is, of
course, the approach called phenomenology. The goal of the phenomenological
reduction is to retrieve those quintessential, authentic modes of being in the
world that underlie and are obscured by veils of inauthenticity: ‘Phenomenology
wanted to renew our concepts by giving us perceptions and affections that
would awaken us to the world, not as babies or hominids, but as beings whose
proto-opinions would be the foundations of this world by right’ (WP 150).
There is for Deleuze an unavoidable reintroduction of transcendence here, of a
kind of transcendence-in-immanence that ruptures with opinion from within.
Earlier in What Is Philosophy?, he invokes some familiar figures of this – for
example, Levinas’ Other – but more generally the claim is that phenomenology,
in attempting to locate the exceptional within the mundane, cannot but
reproduce it on another level after giving it a more intractable claim on reality.
The passage of Maurice Merleau-Ponty from the embodied subject of The
Phenomenology of Perception to the flesh of the world announced in The Visible
and the Invisible is the refinement, rather than the deposition, of the clichés
of human existence. At the same time, Deleuze will insist, this path also leads
nowhere: ‘The distinction between the original and the derivative is not by itself
enough to get us out of the simple domain of opinion, and the Urdoxa does
not raise us to the level of the concept’ (WP 149). Merleau-Ponty was certainly
right to say that the phenomenological epoché could not be completed; this
is not due to the lived reality of the body, but to the fact that the essence of
the lived is itself the essential form of doxa itself, doxa in person, the Urdoxa.
Phenomenology does not transcend opinion – it cannot help but catechize it.
The authentic is essentially inauthentic. Taken together, we get what Deleuze
calls the four orders of the prospect, and a second (logicist) schema:
Schema III: Deleuze’s Badiou
We now arrive at the note itself, which appears immediately after the
discussion of phenomenology. I want to stress that what we have just seen –
the outline of the project of What Is Philosophy? and its critique of logicism
in philosophy – are essential prerequisites for reading the note. It is only from
this point of view that Deleuze’s peculiar way of reassembling the argument
of Being and Event becomes meaningful. We can summarize the content of
the note by saying that, on Deleuze’s view, Badiou is led despite himself into
a certain repetition of the logicist program.
How? Let’s consider the third schema, Deleuze’s Badiou:
[Badiou] proposes to distribute a series of factors, passing from functions

to concepts. Starting with a neutralized base – the set – which designates
an any-multiplicity-whatever, Badiou draws up a line, complex while
remaining unique, on which functions and concepts will be arrayed,
the latter above the former. Philosophy thus seems to float in an empty
transcendence… .(WP 152)
The first thing that is clear here is that we are dealing with the question of the
science–philosophy relationship from the very beginning. But let’s consider
each moment in this schema, placing Deleuze’s commentary alongside as we

do. We are not in a position to enumerate all of the errors that Deleuze makes
in this text. Let’s keep in mind, in any case, that the goal is to understand it.
First of all, the an any-multiplicity-whatever (the indefinite article,
obscured in the English translation, is key to Deleuze’s argument). In the place
of chaos, we begin with a multiplicity (what Being and Event calls inconsistent
multiplicity). Deleuze will insist that this is ‘neutral’, neither philosophical
nor scientific. It is, that is to say, both pre-philosophical and pre-scientific, a
posit or decision that invokes something created by neither discipline.
We next have a range of scientific functions. Why are the situation, the
state, and the four generic procedures scientific? The answer, it would seem,
is that they all proceed from the initial encounter between (inconsistent)
multiplicity and set theory, that is, a scientific relationship with multiplicity
that turns around the Cantorian intervention that installs a constant in the
infinite continuum – aleph-0 – and makes everything else turn around this.
Like the passage from the simple function to the living being in What Is
Philosophy’s? discussion of science, the first moment of Badiou’s argument
can only be scientific for Deleuze because it all follows from this initial
moment: Badiou proceeds ‘in conformity with set theory’ (WP 152). In other
words, once again, we must have adopted Deleuze’s definition of science in
order to make sense of this analysis.
Now, this characterization might seem fine with respect to the situation
and the state, but why are the four procedures also scientific? Here is how
Deleuze puts his answer:
The errant line [that Badiou constructs, after Cantor] forms four figures,
four loops as generic functions – scientific, artistic, political or doxic,
and amorous or lived – to which the productions of ‘truths’ correspond.
(WP 152)
Two things are interesting here, first the implication that the truth procedures
are, in Deleuze’s reading, functions. They begin by positing a constant, and
then connect independent variables to this function. This is in fact quite a fair
description of the process of a subjective fidelity, which does precisely this
beginning with the affirmation of an event and its belonging to the situation.
On the other hand, we must pay attention to the terms ‘doxic’ and ‘lived’
here, for they mark quite clearly the fact that, on Deleuze’s reading, the four
generic functions as such remain at the level of the cliché. Given the analysis
of the four prospects we have just seen, it is difficult to overlook now the
conclusion that Badiou’s generic procedures constitute the level of the third
prospect, the regime of the lived.
But then, ‘an immanent conversion’ (WP 152): philosophy. We might

expect, if Deleuze was replaying the analysis of logicism, that at this fourth
level, there would be some analogue of phenomenology, and its recourse
to a transcendence-in-immanence, to be located in Being and Event. And
in one sense, this is just what he does. When describing the transition into
philosophy, he writes that here, ‘perhaps we then arrive at a conversion of the
immanence of the situation, a conversion of the excess into the void, which
will reintroduce the transcendent’ (WP 152).
Deleuze’s point – again in a certain kind of parallel of the arguments
of Being and Event – is that set theory, for all its resources, is incapable of
accounting for either the evental site or the event. But on the other hand,
there is no sense in which Deleuze is describing Badiou’s project as a kind of
phenomenology. Interestingly, what is missing from this schema is the figure
of the subject, both as the locus of the construction of a generic truth and
the fulcrum of its forcing into the situation. The closest Deleuze gets to this
aspect of Being and Event is his invocation of ‘an operation like a dice-throw
on the site, that qualifies the event and makes it enter into the situation, a
power of “making” the event’ (WP 152).
The last element that Deleuze in fact introduces is the event itself, which
is the punctum, the initial undecideable singularity. Having seen, though,
the equation of the event and the concept in Deleuze’s own account, it should
come as no surprise to read that:
The fact that the event is the concept, or philosophy as concept,

distinguishes it from the four preceding functions, even if it takes
conditions from them and imposes them on it in turn – that art is
fundamentally ‘poem’, that science is set-theoretic, that love is the
unconscious of Lacan, and that politics escapes from opinion. (WP 152)
Duplicity of philosophy
We have seen that the logicist account turns around a pre-philosophical

decision that subordinates science and philosophy to the logical proposition,
and it is precisely this decision that the final passage I have just quoted
conveys. It conveys, in fact, what I think is the most interesting element in
the note, a critique of Badiou’s way of organizing the science/philosophy
relationship – despite the fact that Deleuze certainly agrees that science is
not capable of addressing the event on its own terms.
But let me first quickly note that the latter half of the note presents not one
but two critiques. The one that does not interest us here is in any case the one that
is most well known. It concerns two incompatible treatments of multiplicity,
and feeds into the more general question of the virtual in Deleuze, and in
Badiou’s reading of Deleuze. For his part, Deleuze argues that Badiou’s starting
point already vitiates the attempt at constructing a philosophy of the multiple.
He writes that ‘It seems to us that the theory of multiplicities does not support
the hypothesis of an any-multiplicity-whatever [une multiplicité quelconque]
(even mathematics has had enough of set-theoreticism). Multiplicities plural –
from the outset there must be at least two, two types’ (WP 153).
This is what accounts for his insistence on the indefinite article in the
phrase ‘an any-multiplicity-whatever’. Philosophy and science engage two
different multiplicities – whether we call them virtual and actual or not, this
is Deleuze’s point here. But the other critique is in fact the more interesting of
the pair. To see what Deleuze is getting at, consider how the note continues
after the passage cited above:
Philosophy thus seems to float in an empty transcendence, the

unconditioned concept that finds in the functions the totality of its
generic conditions (science, poetry, politics and love). Is this not the
return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of superior
philosophy? (WP 152)
‘Higher philosophy’ here does not mean philosophy conceived of as above

the (mundane) concerns of material reality that are dealt with by the sciences.
Deleuze is rather invoking a conception of philosophy as the position from
which the interrelation of other capacities – he sometimes uses the Kantian
term ‘faculties’ – of thought takes place.
We saw earlier the way in which logicism, for Deleuze, functions by
adopting an implicit position of mastery outside of both philosophy and
science, putting them each to work according to its own goals. Deleuze’s
most interesting critical point with respect to the project of Being and
Event takes the same form. What it is that is the master of the relation of
conditionality itself? Art, science, politics and love condition philosophy, but
what conditions this assessment itself? Or again: from what point of view can
one construct the logic of conditioning?
For Deleuze, it seems that philosophy must play two roles in Badiou’s
system. It is, on the one hand, the discourse of the concept (however poorly
Deleuze understands this in Badiou’s case). On the other hand, it appears as
the extra-conditional arbiter of this organization itself – only philosophy is
in a position to posit the conditional relationship itself, the equality of the
conditions, and in doing so, it forfeits its claim to necessarily coming after the
truth procedures themselves.
The case of complex numbers
To make this point more concrete, I would like to invoke a case in which
this duplicity of philosophy is particularly clear. The example is drawn from
the near-companion volume to Being and Event, Number and Numbers,
which first appeared in 1991; in question is the status of the complex
number field C.
The goal of Number and Numbers is to produce a philosophical answer to
the question: what is Number? We must insist on the philosophical character
of the project. Throughout his engagement with mathematics, Badiou will
insist that mathematicians, ‘absorbed as they are by the forgetting of the
destiny of their discipline due to the technical necessity of its deployment’
(BE 341), do not grasp mathematics as ontology. Thus, in ‘Philosophy and
Mathematics’, he writes:
That philosophy is obliged to ground mathematics always signifies

it must name and think the ‘paradigmatic’ nature of the paradigm,
establishing the illumination of the continuous at the moment of
discontinuity, at the point where all mathematics has to offer is its blind,
stubborn inability to propose anything other than the intelligible, and
the break. (TW 32)
This is particularly the case with respect to the question of the being of
Number. On the one hand, there is this functional blindness proper to the
effort of mathematics itself, unconcerned with ontology qua ontology. On
the other hand, there is no question – Badiou argues – of subordinating the
category of Number to intuition or representation, however profound or
refined. Speaking of the various formulations of the nature of number that
have traversed the history of mathematics and mathematical logic since the
nineteenth century, he writes that: ‘none of these concepts can be inferred
from experience, nor do they propose themselves to any intuition, or submit
to any deduction, even a transcendental one’ (NN 212). It is for this very reason
that, in ‘One, Multiple, Multiplicity’, Badiou writes that ‘mathematics shows
itself perfectly capable both of providing schemas adequate to experience,
and of frustrating this experience by way of conceptual inventions that no
intuition could accept’ (TW 73).
However, when we turn to Number and Numbers itself, one finds the very
opposite assertion about complex numbers. In question is another note,
this time a footnote that Badiou appends to a demonstration taken to have
provided ‘a unification of the concept of Number’ (NN 177). I take the liberty
of citing it in full, including as it does a large number of interesting details. A
complete concept of Number is in hand. However, Badiou writes,
One might object at this point that our Numbers do not authorize the
representation either of complex numbers or of quaternions, upon
which physics relies to a considerable extent.
But are complex numbers and quaternions numbers? I think it can be
reasonably maintained that, from the moment we take leave of all ‘linearity’
when we abandon dimension 1, we are dealing with constructions based
on Numbers rather than with Numbers per se. Basically, the innermost
essence of complex numbers is geometrical, it is the ‘complex plane’
which delivers the truth of these ‘numbers’. Around the complex numbers
is organized the profound link between pure algebra (the extension of
fields) and the ontological scheme of space as topological concept. I am
tempted to call complex numbers operators, operators whose function in
thought is to articulate algebra and topology. Hence the simultaneously
combinatorial (a complex number being a pair of real numbers) and
geometrical character of these ‘numbers’. They are in fact numbers which
do not number, but suggest schemes of representation and inscription
which are already, in effect, something very close to a conceptual ‘physics’.
Moreover, it seems to me unreasonable to speak of ‘numbers’ when it is
not even possible, in terms of the operational field considered, to say that
one ‘number’ is larger or smaller than another. In short: a field of numbers
must in my view be an ordered field which neither complex numbers nor
quaternions are. Finally, I restrict the concept of Number, insofar as it is
thought as a form of being, to that which can be deployed according to
the intuition of a line. This is made clear by the decisive part played in the
definition of Number by that fundamental ‘line of being’ constituted by
the ordinals. (NN 228n6)
Elsewhere Badiou writes of ‘a general law: everywhere where mathematics

is close to experience but follows its own movement, it discovers a
“pathological” case that absolutely challenges this initial intuition.
Mathematics then establishes that this pathology is the rule, and that what
can be intuited is only an exception’ (TW 74). It would be hard to conceive
of a topic in mathematics to which this applied better than complex numbers
given that mathematicians – prior to Gauss and the fundamental theorem
of algebra – confronted them as exceptional and troubling ciphers, as those

‘amphibian[s] between being and non-being’, to invoke Leibniz’s crystalline
phrase. It is even the perfect characterization of every revolution in number
theory throughout the history of mathematics, in which the rationals were
confronted with the irrationals, the finite with the infinite, the real with the
surreal. Each time the aberrant only assumes its true significance when it
appears in its absolute generality. And yet, for Number and Numbers, the
complex field, aberration from the point of view of the ‘intuition of the line’,
is excluded from the philosophical concept of Number. The agent of this
segregation is none other than the philosopher.
There are three sets of remarks I would like to make about this note –
concerning operation, order and intuition – the last of which provide a
context for the recapitulation and generalization of Deleuze’s critical claim
about conditionality in Badiou’s work.9
The first concerns the assertion that complex numbers are essentially
operational extrapolations rather than numbers themselves. This is a strange
remark on its own terms, for if we were to take into account the full range
of uses to which numbers are put, we would be hard pressed to exempt any
number type from this assignation. Moreover, the major resource Badiou
draws upon in Number and Numbers is John Conway’s surreal number
system which, as Conway clearly states – and as the title of the first volume,
On Numbers and Games, in which they are developed announces – is itself
set up initially and solely in terms of game theory: ‘We obtain a theory of the
real numbers at once simpler and more extensive than Dedekind’s theory of
the real numbers by defining numbers as the strengths of positions in certain
games.’10 Conway’s system manifests a pure instrumentality, not accidentally
but at its origin and root. One could even hazard to say that the instrumental
character of the surreal number belongs to its ‘innermost essence’. But beyond
this point lies Badiou’s own edict concerning the absolute impertinence of
the category of operation for the philosopher seeking to found a concept
of Number: ‘According to the ontological conception of Numbers, every
Number is, none results or is resolved in the name of an operation’ (NN 175).
It is hard to see, therefore, how looking at any species of number from the
vantage point furnished by the notion of ‘operation’ has any place.
The second point concerns the notion of order. As Badiou notes, C is not
orderable in the fashion that obtains for the reals and their more rarefied
subordinate classes like Z. However – and putting aside the fact that the
cardinality of the complex number system C is the same as that of R, the real
number system and thus that the two are themselves comparable without
‘taking leave of “linearity”’ – this is not equivalent to the assertion that
the order relationship can only be framed in terms of relative cardinality
(‘larger or smaller’). For in fact, the complex system is able to be completely

lexicographically ordered – that is, ordered according to the sequential
composition of the number’s letters, just as words can be organized according
to their sequential composition relative to the alphabet. This is the analogy
that Badiou uses when he defines it: ‘lexicographic order, which organizes
words by recourse to an alphabet of the phonic or scriptural unities that
compose them’ (NN 130). It may be surprising indeed to see that Badiou
himself invokes lexicographic ordering in the case of the reals – and to link it
to the linguistics, writing that ‘Number is indeed like a signifier’ (NN 130) –
given his hostility to any collapse between the order of mathematics and that
of language. It is equally surprising, despite its well-known applicability in
this case, that such consideration is not extended to C.
Now, the lexicographic ordering of the complex numbers is incompatible
with the form taken by basic operations on numbers (addition, multiplication,
subtraction and division) over R. While the complex system can be
completely ordered, therefore, and while these elementary operations hold
between members of C, these two strands cannot be woven together. There
is a disjunction between the relations of order and operations in the complex
field. But the essential point, as Badiou himself notes, is that any thought that
grasps Number in its being must be ultimately unconcerned with questions
of order as such. Speaking of the ordinals, he thus writes that ‘we must
abandon the idea of a well-orderedness and think ordination, ordinality,
in an intrinsic fashion’. He continues in the next paragraph: ‘It is not as a
measure of order, nor of disorder, that the concept of number presents itself
to thought. We demand an immanent determination of its being’ (NN 58).
There is thus, once again, a seeming unwillingness on Badiou’s part to extend
this immanent thought to C.
Conversely, it is because of the use of Conway’s surreal number framework
that this compact between order and operation is necessary in Badiou’s
account, since he holds with the former that arithmetic operations are to be
defined in terms of the transitivity of the ordinals, rather than processually,
the latter incorporating as it does (but what theory of operation, including
Badiou’s, avoids this?) a minimal subjacent temporal sequencing. But these
preliminaries now bring us to the heart of the matter, our third point, the
invocation of the metaphorico-geometrical figure of the line in Badiou’s note.
It evicts C from the class of numbers because it does not demonstrate ‘linearity’,
or single-dimensionality, before characterizing its ‘geometrical’ character as its
fatal trait. What are we to make of this somewhat shocking countersense?
We can start by noting that – unlike, for example, the infinitesimals –
the earliest discussions of complex numbers were not in fact geometrical at
all but arithmetic. The first comprehensive discussions of number theory
that included complex numbers was Cauchy’s Cours d’analyse (1821), in

which they are dealt with on entirely algebraic grounds. The same approach
was used – though not exclusively – by Gauss, who wrote that while the
mathematics of complex numbers are ‘capable of the most intuitive sensible
representation’, he has pursued a ‘purely arithmetic treatment’.11 Already in
the early years after its (somewhat begrudging) acceptance into the working
mathematician’s toolkit, then, C was not conceived of as necessarily, let alone
‘essentially’, geometric in nature.12
But, given Badiou’s absolute hostility to intuition in mathematics, such
historical concerns pale in comparison to the explicit role of geometrical
intuition in the note on C. Badiou begins, as we have just seen, by insisting
that what disqualifies complex numbers from being conceived of as numbers
strictly speaking is their essentially geometric character. But the note ends
by insisting on precisely this geometrical character: ‘I restrict the concept of
Number, insofar as it is thought as a form of being, to that which can be
deployed according to the intuition of a line’ (NN 228n6). That is, Badiou
begins by presenting C as geometrical, and thereby rules it out; he then
insists that the geometrical intuition of the line is an essential criterion of
numberhood, and rules it out again.
This rather technical note is worth considering because it provides an
exemplar of the kind of problem that Deleuze raises in What Is Philosophy?.
Let us ask: what licenses the exclusion of complex numbers from Number,
either in general, or in terms of the geometrical intuition of the line? It is not
mathematics itself, in which C plays an increasingly key role. As Fernando
Zalamea writes in Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics,
The fact that complex numbers are not an ordered field, for many decades
seen as an important limitation in the architectonic construction of sets
of numbers, has today come to be seen as a strength (for reasons of
stability) [… ] This is one example, among many others in advanced
mathematics, that forces us to change our philosophical perspective, if
we are really to be in a position to accept the advances of the discipline.13
Now, Badiou is perfectly capable of responding to this by invoking the

operational blindness of the practicing mathematician – who, like Cantor, ‘is
blind’ (TW 33) – and the fact that mathematics is ‘blindness itself ’ (BE 9). On
these grounds, the deployment of complex numbers can be identified from
without by the philosopher as purely operational rather than foundational-
ontological. So, it is not merely the case that mathematics does not license the
exclusion of C from Number, but that it cannot do so.
By its own terms, this is a perfectly coherent position. But by proceeding

in this way, Badiou is led into the bind that Deleuze, on my reading, identifies
in What Is Philosophy?. It is Badiou the philosopher who decides what of
mathematics will be significant for philosophy – but it is also Badiou the
philosopher who claims to be under the unilateral condition of mathematics
qua science. In this way, the position of philosophy vis-à-vis science must
necessarily split.
To recapitulate the point one more time: science, here mathematics
and specifically number theory, is conceived by Badiou as conditioning
philosophy. However, this conditioning relationship is itself conditioned by
a decision bearing on what counts as relevant for philosophy: the geometrical
intuition of the line, and the correlation between the form of Number and
the capacity for ordering. If, Deleuze suggests, the form of the relationship
between the mathematical number and the concept of Number is determined
by philosophy, then we necessarily place philosophy in the position of
final arbiter, not as the queen of the sciences but as its quasi-immanent
bureaucracy.
6
Mathematics in the Bedroom: Sex, the

Signifier and the Smallest Whole Number
Sigi Jöttkandt
For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are; and do thou
restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry.
– Plato, Parmenides
The expression ‘not-man’ is not a noun. There is indeed no recognized term

by which we may denote such an expression, for it is not a sentence or a
denial. Let it then be called an indefinite noun.
– Aristotle, On Interpretation
Several times during his teachings in the mid-1960s, Lacan makes use of a
paradox, what he calls a ‘logical enigma’, to demonstrate something critical
about the difference between writing and speech. ‘Madame’, he requests his
assistant at one point, ‘take this little piece of chalk, make a rectangle, write
1, 2, 3, 4, on the first line, […] and then write: the smallest whole number
which is not written on the board’. The parenthetical laughter noted on the
seminar’s transcript suggests that his assistant fell for the trap. Lacan was
not asking Madame to chalk up the number 5 (i.e. the next smallest number
once 4 has been notated), but rather to write the sentence ‘the smallest whole
number which is not written on the board’.
In the still unpublished Seminar XIV, Logic of the Fantasy (1966–1967),1
where this little comedy took place, Lacan’s concern is to chart the logical
pathways by which one can arrive at satisfaction. Our relations to jouissance
partake of what he calls a ‘more fundamental’ (principielle) logic than its
modern iterations. Lacan’s immediate target here is mathematical and formal
logic, in particular that of George Boole and Gottlob Frege, as well as the
challenge posed to Frege by Bertrand Russell. Very briefly, since this part
This essay was previously published in Sex and Nothing: From Ljubljana to Elsewhere, ed. A.
C. Rued (London: Karnac Books, 2015).
of the story has been told many times and is consequently very well known,
Frege’s effort to construct a ‘formal language of pure thought modelled upon
that of arithmetic’ was catastrophically ended by his fellow logicist, Bertrand
Russell.2 Russell showed that Frege’s system for defining natural numbers by
means of logical terms was internally inconsistent. Frege, as Martin Davis
explains in a useful summary, sought to define numbers logically by making
them into sets:
The number 3 is a property of a set, namely, the number of its elements.

The number 3 is something that all the following have in common: the
Holy Trinity, the set of horses pulling a troika, the set of leaves on a
(normal) clover leaf, the set of letters {a, b, c}. […] Frege’s idea was to
identify the number 3 with the collection of all of these sets.3
Russell’s devastating intervention was to show how Frege’s system was self-
contradictory. If, for Frege, there must always be a set that contains all the
elements that meet the formal criteria for that set, Russell proposed the
paradox which has since borne his name, namely, the paradox of the set
of all sets that do not contain themselves. Including itself would contradict
the set’s formal criterion of sets that do not contain themselves. But not
including it would destroy the set’s claim to comprehensiveness: it would
not be the set of all the sets that do not contain themselves, since this set
of all sets would be missing itself. As Davis relates, this insight was fatal to
Frege’s project.
A mathematical proof that runs into a contradiction is a demonstration

that one of the premises of the argument was false. This principle is
used all the time as a useful proof method: to prove a proposition, one
shows that its denial leads to a contradiction. But for poor Frege, the
contradiction had shown that the very premises on which his system was
built were untenable.4
Frege was shipwrecked on the observation that, in Russell’s words, ‘under

certain circumstances a definable collection […] does not form a totality’.5
And much like Frege under Russell’s corrective gaze, Lacan’s faithful assistant
encountered similar a logical conundrum that day: which number should
she write on the board? Once the sentence ‘the smallest whole number that
is not written on the board’, is written on the board, one enters into a logical
conundrum, making it impossible to ‘solve’ the problem. From the moment
that the above sentence is written on the board, the obvious first answer
to the problem (i.e. the number 5) is ‘excluded’, Lacan observes, by being
Mathematics in the Bedroom 75
already written on the board (i.e. in the form of the linguistic statement).
Lacan continues,
You have only to search, then, whether the smallest whole number which
is not written on the board might not, perchance, be the number 6, and
you find yourself with the same difficulty, namely, that from the moment
that you pose the question, the number 6 as the smallest whole number
which is not written on the board, is written on it and so on.
This instructive demonstration occurred during the lesson of 23 November

1966, which is also the session Lacan raised the problem of Russell’s paradox
vis-à-vis writing and speech. Defining a set, Lacan explains that it is founded
on nothing other than the fact of its being written. ‘Everything that can be
said about a difference between the elements [i.e. such that the elements that
compose it may be radically different from each other] is excluded from the
operation.’ As an example of what he means, Lacan describes a set containing
such disparate elements as this ‘charming person’ (who played the dupe in
the little sketch above), ‘the mist on this window and an idea which is just
now going through my head’. What transforms this medley of heteroclite
objects into a set, he claims, is simply that, saying no other difference exists,
I write them as if they were all the same. As it turns out, however, this simple
act of ‘writing’ will introduce some interesting properties that bear decisively
on the paradox of the Russellian set.
But first let us note the lesson of Russell’s paradox, which is the idea that
in any formal system there is nothing that can contain everything. Lacan
translates this paradox into the axiomatic statement that the signifier cannot
signify itself. The signifier cannot signify itself because, as a sliding movement
of substitution, signification always involves what Lacan calls another
signification. What is represented by the signifier, as he cautions in a much
earlier text, is never the signified but only another signifier.6 It is on this insight,
along with its nested idea of the fundamental arbitrariness of the sign, that the
science of modern linguistics is based: the orders of the signifier and of the
signified are distinct, and separated by a bar that ‘resists signification’. The
consequence of this separation is that signification occurs through a chain;
meaning emerges as a signified effect produced by a signifying function (in the
proper mathematical sense of this term). We will have reason to return to this,
but for now it suffices to note with Lacan that this ‘operation of the signifier’
means that no signifier belongs ‘properly’ to any meaning, and accordingly,
nothing can be guaranteed.7 Another way of expressing the same idea is
Lacan’s other well-known statement, the Other of the Other does not exist;
there is no metalanguage that would guarantee the ‘universe of discourse’.
Now, although direct access to meaning or ‘Being’ is perennially

precluded by the operation of the signifier, Lacan suggests that an alternate
pathway lies open to us. This is through logic insofar as logic allows one
to isolate the ‘loci’ and points in language in which language speaks about
itself.8 Without appealing to anything beyond the ‘universe of discourse’ to
ground it, and without betraying that universe’s fundamental axiom of the
signifier’s non-signifiability with respect to itself, logic nonetheless procures
us access to some sort of Being to the extent that it ‘writes’ all the possible
(and impossible) relations to jouissance that are available to us. As we will
see, however, what Lacan means by writing here is very specific.
But first to dispel any fears the word logic might conjure up. Any view
of it as the preserve of the dusty classroom would be misguided for it is in
the soft recesses of the bedroom that this logical writing takes place – in the
twists and torsions of the sexual act. As it will become clear, however, what
Lacan means by the sex act is fiendishly complex, which apparently enlists
an array of mathematical and formal operations in its effort to reach the holy
grail of a One. A considerable part of the difficulty of this seminar, in fact,
lies in keeping straight the different meanings of the various Ones that Lacan
invokes this year. In his elaboration of the effect produced through writing,
for example, Lacan refers to what he calls an ‘additional One’ (l’un en plus).
Shortly thereafter Lacan also speaks of the unary trait as something that
enables difference to be presented as a One. And a little later in the seminar,
he employs the One to describe something he calls the ‘unit of sex’, which is to
be further distinguished from the (second) One of the phallus. To grasp the
logic of the fantasy requires that we get a handle on these multiplying Ones.
The One of sex
Before proceeding any further, we must first institute a definitive break

between Lacan’s One of sex and any idea of a One understood as the sum
of two divided halves. The latter is familiar to us from the literary and
philosophical traditions as a mythical One, an original unity from which we
have been irremediably severed. Its most famous philosophical expression
comes in Aristophanes’ speech at Plato’s Symposium. Here Aristophanes
relates the myth of how men and women came to be separate. Primeval
man, we learn, was in those days round and possessed of two faces and
four hands and feet. However, Aristophanes relates, one day the gods
became angry with mankind and split these orbicular creatures in half. The
comedian tells how, in their desire to reunite with their other half, these
divided beings came together, and ‘throw their arms about each other,
weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together’. Observing their

distress, Zeus, in an uncharacteristic gesture of compassion, rearranged
their genitals so that their seed would enter each other rather than being
scattered on the ground.
Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half ’ of a human whole, because each

was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking
the half that matches him (191d)[…] We used to be complete wholes in
our original nature, and now ‘Love’ is the name (193) for our pursuit of
wholeness, for our desire to be complete.9
In contrast to this Aristophanean originary unity, Lacan’s ‘unit of sex’ presents

as a more prosaic entity. The One as sex unit merely describes a point from
which we can begin to calculate a certain value. Here one can draw an analogy
with a slide rule. Comprised of two fixed rulers and a central movable strip,
a slide rule enables one to solve complicated mathematical problems such
as logarithms with ease. We do so by placing the cursor in alignment with
any point on one of the non-moving parts of the ruler. We can then read
off the correct answer for our calculation from the fixed sides of the rule. In
this analogy, what we designate as ‘One’ is therefore nothing more than the
place from which we begin, the point where we place the cursor with a view
to obtaining the values of the other elements of the equation. Rather than
representing an originary unity, such a ‘One’ contains no intrinsic meaning or
content in itself. Its value comes solely from its relation to the other numbers
that, in lining themselves up in relation with the cursor, become accessible to
us as the solution to our mathematical problem.
Something along these lines appears to be what Lacan has in mind
when he designates the One as the unit of sex. This One is a base point, a
place we can begin in order to count off towards the right or the left, that
is, towards the field of the Other (the Symbolic) or into the domain of the
a (the Real, jouissance). Furthermore, as the analogy with the slide rule
suggests, while the numerical values of these points to the right and left
change depending on where you locate the ‘first’ point on the ruler, their
ratios with respect to each other remain the same; there is a constancy in
their relative positions vis-à-vis their distance from each other. But as the
primary unit of measure within a symbolic system, this One of sex has an
important function for Lacan. It enables us to calculate the ‘value’ of the
object a from any place within the Symbolic that we nominate as One. As
Lacan puts it, ‘the One is simply in this logic the coming into play of the
operation of measurement, of the value to be given to this small a in this
operation of language’.10
An image of One
Although the suggestion would be that Lacan’s One of sex is a purely arbitrary
starting place, this is not to say that just any point on our slide rule will serve
in this role. Or rather (since in fact any random point can indeed offer itself as
this function of the One), we must ask what turns any-point-whatever into a
One that can serve as the unit of sex? We have already broached this question
above in the discussion of the paradox of Russell’s set where Lacan proposed
that writing provides a way of inscribing a whole or totality without needing
to seek recourse in a metalanguage. We must now look in more detail at
this question of writing, as it plays a decisive role in the choice of where to
position the One of sex as the unit of measure in a signifying system.
When Lacan talks about writing, he invariably has something very specific
in mind. In Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973),11 for example, Lacan discusses
writing or écriture in relation to the signifying effect that occurs in the field
of speech and language. As mentioned earlier, what one hears in speech is the
signifier rather than the signified. The signified, then, is not what we hear (in
the auditory sense) but something that must be read. In order to signify, the
signifier must undergo an act of signification. In ‘The Instance of the Letter’,
Lacan describes this process as the signifier, S, becoming shot through or
‘injected’ with signifieds, s, that have undergone a certain operation: a transfer
occurs whereby a signified crosses over the bar that separates signifier and
signified to become a signifier, S. Lacan writes this as the algorithm:
S
s
Once this first signifier, S, has been constructed, it can slide through the
signifying chain according to operations permitted by the two ‘fundamental
structures’ of metaphor and metonymy. By way of metaphorical or metonymic
substitutions, the ‘signifying function’ generates an effect that is characterized
either by a plus (+) or a minus (−) of sense. While metonymy’s minus of sense
(its famous deferral) oversees the maintenance of the bar as the ‘irreducible
nature of the resistance of signification’,12 metaphor permits further crossings.
Because of this potential for creation (Lacan calls metaphor’s signifying effect
‘poetic or creative’),13 it is the structure of metaphor that will be of primary
importance in Lacan’s discussion of sex in Seminar XIV.
Now, according to Lacan, writing is directly implicated in this act of crossing
the bar. The bar, he says in Seminar XX, ‘is the point at which in every use of
language writing may be produced’.14 However, in Seminar IX, Identification
(1961–1962) Lacan gives a more detailed explanation of what is involved in this
transfer and, in particular, the role that ‘writing’, understood as the inscription
of an eruption of jouissance plays in this operation. In a discussion that recalls

our earlier discussion of set formation, in Seminar IX Lacan conjures up a scene
of writing. He imagines a prehistoric hunter jubilantly recording a series of
kills by notching them onto a fragment of bone: ‘first two, then a little interval
and afterwards five, and then it recommences’. Lacan notes how through the
vagaries of their repeated inscriptions these notchings inevitably begin to form
little clusters or patterns, and hypothesizes how these patterns might start
to take on another meaning – while five notches might still simply indicate
five instances of the same event, a certain grouping of two markers might at
some point become shorthand for ten, for example. From the simple repeated
inscription of the mark, we see the emergence of a shape or symbol that stands
in for – represents – a collection or number of kills (i.e. eruptions of enjoyment).
Lacan conceptualizes his happy hunter’s notation or ‘writing’ of these
instances in terms of the application of what he calls the unary trait. Originating
in Freud’s theories of identification and narcissism, the unary trait is involved
in the acquisition of identity through the incorporation of what Freud calls the
Einziger Zug. However, in Lacan, this Einziger Zug or trait unaire acquires a far
greater reach than in Freud. For Lacan, the trait is implicated in the creation
of the signifier. Recall how in our earlier discussion the multivariate items
Lacan proposed made up a set only because each of the heteroclite objects
were treated as being in some sense the ‘same’. Their commonality lay in the
way that, beyond all of their obvious and immediate (‘small’) differences, their
instances were recorded with the same mark. ‘Writing’ them in this way, that is,
applying them with the unary trait, transforms each item into something that
can be counted as a member of a set, that is, a part of a larger unity or whole.
We can make new additions to the set by notating them with the same
mark, regardless of whatever strange new objects Lacan decides to include as
members, for the unary trait can ‘write’ all and any disparate objects as if they
were the same. However, as soon as we begin to write things down in this way,
naturally we begin to repeat. And with repetition something strange may
happen. As they start to be written down, one of the traits may unpredictably
transform into something that represents something else, changing into a
shape or figure that represents in shorthand a particular amount of unary
traits, for example. Through this action of representing more than just a
single occurrence of the trait, an image or ‘picture’ of number emerges where
previously there had been only instances (i.e. signifieds) of repetition.15
It is by means of a similar process that the unit of sex emerges. Through the
repeated inscriptions of the unary trait, a One blossoms into being, forged by
nothing more than a repetitive series of eruptions of jouissance (signifieds). As
a result, the One that emerges as the unit of sex on our slide rule both is and is
not so arbitrary. It is arbitrary insofar as any signified, that is, any sort of marker
(a slash, a cough, a chalk sign on the board) can serve as the unary trait, as a
mark for an enjoyment that can be repeated. Nevertheless, any signifier or One
that emerges from the repetition of this inscription will be intimately linked to
the trait from which it was generated. Created from a certain repetitive writing
of the trait in the body,16 the One of sex is thus never simply an act of free choice
or decision where the subject says, ‘let’s begin from this point’. But neither is this
One of sex connected in any ‘natural’ kind of way to particular physical organs,
which only come into play afterwards, as imaginary and symbolic receptacles
for a jouissance that we are discovering is mathematical in origin. ‘It is not the
function that makes the organ’, Lacan reminds us, ‘but the organ that makes the
function’.17 Neither a voluntarist nor a biologically determined One, the unit of
sex comes into being through an originary repetition that always precedes it.
The result is that the One of sex is never originarily marked but only re-marked.
The One of sex would be the Symbolic registration of an originary falter, a re-
marking of the absent ‘first’ One but which, in being so re-marked, inaugurates
the universe of discourse and its signifying chain.
A golden number
For Lacan, sex is the relation between the One and the Other. This sounds fairly
uncontentious but as our discussion above should have already alerted us,
this statement conveys far more than the idea of two people coming together
in coitus. Already it seems the sex act involves considerably more entities in
the bedroom than just the two lovers. We have the unary trait, for one, whose
repeated inscriptions in the Other generated the One of sex and which tarry
in the One like tiny pointillist brushstrokes, visible only in extreme close-up.
But we must also make room now for a couple of new personages taking up
precious space on the bed. These are the famous third parties found in any sex
act, the object a, and its stealthy accomplice, the phallus.
In Seminar XIV, Lacan adverts to one of the great marvels of mathematics to
illustrate the a’s fundamental incommensurability of with respect to the One.
In three dense and complex lessons in April of 1967, Lacan recalls the unusual
properties of the golden ratio, which produces a number that can be defined in
terms of itself. The golden ratio produces what is called a ‘continuous fraction’
which is created by dividing 1 with the golden number and then adding 1,
then dividing 1 again by the golden number and adding 1, and so forth to
infinity.18 Lacan assigns the object a the value of the golden number in this
seminar to illustrate the a’s fundamental incommensurability with the One.
The continuous fraction the golden number generates is analogous to how the
object a drops out from the relation of the One and the Other in the sexual
act. Traditionally written in mathematics as phi (φ or Φ, for its reciprocal), the

golden number in its fractional expression can be infinitely extended:
1 φ=1+
φ
= 1 +
1
φ
1
= 1 + φ …
What particularly interests Lacan in the golden ratio is the way it offers an
effective means for illustrating how the phallus comes to assume the positive
(or ‘symbolic’) value of the a. Referring back to our slide rule, the phallus
arises in the zone over to the right of the One of sex (i.e. in the field of the
Other, the Symbolic). There it bears a very exact value: its numerical value
precisely reflects the distance separating the One and the object a on the
left-hand or negative side of the One. Recall how Lacan told us that the One’s
sole function is to enable us to calculate the value of the object a. Now we
learn that we obtain the value of a by counting away from the One to the left
to the value of the inverse golden number, that is, 0.61803…. The phallus is
then assigned the reciprocal amount of this value on the right of One. On
this, positive, side of the One, the value of the phallus is thus 1.61803… As
Lacan explains, ‘the phallus designates… this something which constitutes
precisely the distance between the small a and the unit of sex’.19
We understand how the phallus makes its emergence by referring again to
our discussion of the emergence of the One through writing. For it appears that
in the repetitions by which the a drops away in the relation of the One and
the Other, a similar act of transfer, or ‘metaphor’ occurs. Among all the partial
objects or a’s that are produced and fall away as continuous fractions in the
sexual repetitions, a single one of them – that is, the phallus – acquires the ability
to represent or signify the infinite series of a’s. Once again, Lacan resorts to some
curious attributes of the golden number in order to help us understand this. To
the extent that the golden number can be defined in terms of itself, it also has the
unusual property where, by subtracting the golden number from 1, the result is
the square of the golden number. And reciprocally, by subtracting the square of
the golden number from 1, the result is once again the golden number.20
1 − φ = φ2
1 − φ2 = φ
What this mathematical analogy gives Lacan is an image for conceptualizing

how the object a, as object of desire (i.e. a Vorstellingsrepräsentanz or
representative of enjoyment), emerges from the objects of demand. The

breast, as object a, would be the breast ‘squared’ to the extent that it has been
subtracted from the One of the unit of sex and comes to represent a portion
of enjoyment that floats free, as it were, removed from its physical location
and origin in the body’s needs and concomitant demands. The same goes for
the cry, the look and the penis. Multiplied by themselves, these objects of
demand result in their ‘squares’ (in the shape of the voice, the gaze and the
phallus).
What interests is the way that, of all of these ‘squared’ objects – that is,
these objects a – a single one of them, the phallus, manages to cross the bar
to assume a representative function for them all. The phallus, that is, is a
metaphor in Lacan’s precise sense of a signifier that stands in for another
signifier with the addition of extra sense.21 Crossing over the bar of repression,
the phallus installs itself in the Symbolic as the signifier of the ever-receding
series of a’s as they drop out in the repetitions of sex to cascade their way to
infinity.22 At this point, two points must be noted. The phallus is not the unit
of sex for this, as we saw, was generated through an anterior operation, in the
inscriptions of the trait in the Other. Rather, insofar as the phallus can be said
to make a ‘One’ (i.e. a signifier, a ‘picture’ of the repressed a’s), it is always a
One plus a fraction of jouissance. The phallic One equals 1.61803…, to use
Lacan’s mathematical analogy. Second, to the extent that the phallus provides
a certain ‘cover’, as it were, for the a within the ‘universe of discourse’, it
inaugurates a very specific economy, which Lacan calls desire.
One or none
Logic enables us to express all possible relations in a formal language but

it also allows us to make propositional statements which, while factually
impossible can still be logically ‘true’. This is why logic is so vitally important
to Lacan in this seminar. If it is to Aristotelian rather than to mathematical
or formal logic he turns to when he wishes to define men and women, it is
because Aristotle gives him a richer array of types of negation than other
logical systems.23 Aristotelian logic, for example, allows for varieties of
opposition including contradictions, contrarieties, sub-contrarieties and
sub-implications. The most well-known case of Lacan’s use of Aristotelian
logic is his use of the peripatetic philosopher’s square of opposition in
constructing his famous formulas of sexuation. While the thorny details of
Lacan’s Fregean revision of the logical square need not concern us here, what
we can observe is that, by using Aristotelian logic, Lacan arrives at logical
expressions of the two sexes that are defined not in relation to each other,
that is, not as opposites, but as contraries defined in relation to a third term,
the phallus.24 The consequence of defining the sexes in this way is profound
as it opens up a number of ways that Man and Woman, as propositions,
relate to enjoyment. For if there is anything that intersects the two sexes,
it is jouissance.25 Defined logically, Lacan’s propositions expressing the two
sexes – his famous formulas of sexuation from the Encore Seminar – imply
not one but two forms of jouissance.26 One of these forms is literally ‘ruled’ by
the phallus insofar as the latter provides a universal yardstick for measuring
enjoyment. The Other, or feminine, jouissance famously, is not ruled by the
phallic function.
In his lesson of 24 May 1967, Lacan describes the part played by the
pleasure principle in establishing the phallic economy of desire. In a cunning
reversal, the limit of pleasure paradoxically turns around to become the
negative sign of the possibility and promise of an endless jouissance. Lacan
explains,
‘Detumescence, by being the characteristic of the functioning of the penile
organ, specifically, in the genital act – and precisely in the measure in which
what it supports in terms of jouissance is kept in suspense – is there… to
introduce the fact that there is jouissance beyond.’27 To the extent that Man, in
the sexual act, comes up against the limit of the pleasure principle in the fact of
detumescence, means that sex confronts him over and over again with the fact
of his castration. While this might explain the famous post-coital sadness, what
Man’s sexual melancholy misrecognizes is the instrumental role that castration
plays in generating the prospect that total satisfaction lies somewhere out
there. The inevitable failure of the sexual act is in fact not the consequence
of castration. Rather, as Lacan explains in the same lesson, sex fails because
there is no phallic object. Sex fails because there is no object that would be the
opposite or logical complement of the phallus. In the sex act, we have sex with
the a, not with other. However, insofar as we view our sexual partner through
the perspective of castration, we misperceive the a as the other sex in all its
glorious difference from us. When the sexual relation subsequently fails, as
it always does, we put this failure down to something faulty in this particular
sexual other, rather than in sex itself. Back down the merry path of metonymic
desire we head in our search for the really ‘right’ other next time.
One desire, Two jouissances
Under the reign of the phallus, enjoyment circulates in the symbolic as

something that, in being limited, promises total satisfaction beyond. Phallic
enjoyment’s very insufficiency negatively points to an unlimited jouissance.28
The remarkable side effect of this phallic ‘ruse’ is that jouissance is henceforth
turned into a commodity, something that can be bought and exchanged. To
the extent that it provides a way of symbolically measuring the amount of
jouissance that circulates in the economy of desire, the phallus suggests a
‘bottling’ operation, one that packages the fractions of jouissance that
slipped into the Symbolic beneath the phallic veil. Like a jar of preserves, the
phallus cans the a, enabling it to be handled and put into wider circulation.
Registering this economy, the phallus subsequently becomes something
one can either ‘have’ or ‘be’, for once it has acquired its signification as the
signifier for absent jouissance, the phallus enters into a series of metaphorical
and metonymic substitutions just like any signifier in the signifying chain.
Thus in the metaphorical substitution that Lacan calls copulation, phallic
enjoyment symbolically passes from the male organ to the feminine object
which, signifying phallic value, comes to hold that value; the feminine object
‘is’ the phallus in this sense. By means of a metaphorical transfer of phallic
value, the woman as sexual object comes to represent man’s jouissance:
It is no longer the sexual organ of our bull – use-value – which will serve
for this sort of circulation in which there is established the sexual order.
It is the woman, insofar as she herself has become on this occasion, the
locus of transference of this value subtracted at the level of use-value, in
the form of object of jouissance.29
Metonymic substitutions, on the other hand, take us into the realm of the
fetish. In both cases, jouissance slides effortlessly through metaphorical and
metonymic chains of signification because of the character of the phallic
signifier’s character of ‘easy handling’, as Lacan slyly puts it.30
While sex repeatedly aims at a One, in the economy of desire sex
delivers only in multiple fractions of enjoyment that secrete their way into
the universe of discourse under the cover of the phallus. If there is a One
produced in the repetitions of the sexual act, then, it is as Lacan puts it, a
perforated One, riddled with tiny holes that mark the absence of the little
a’s. From this perspective, sex under the rule of the phallus would be a
paradoxical matter of the void attempting to plug the void. If our earlier brief
foray into Aristotelian logic has been of use to this discussion, it is found in
how Aristotle prompts our recognition that there are two ways by which this
stopping up may be effected. Given that the a logically precedes the phallic
metaphor, it seems there is another means through which sex may ‘plug’
the hole in the universe of discourse. This word, however, is a misnomer,
since it is only the phallus that tropes the absent a’s from the universe of
discourse in terms of a hole. The Other or feminine jouissance is neither the
complement nor the opposite of the phallic solution. Rather than plugging a
hole, the Other jouissance approaches the problem differently: it hollows out
the universe of discourse from the inside.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is by turning to an image Lacan
proposes for feminine jouissance. In the lesson of 7 June 1967 (Sem. XVI),
Lacan calls feminine jouissance the ocean that keeps the ‘ship of Oedipus’
afloat. The Oedipal ship, that is, the desiring subject dreaming of total
satisfaction under the steerage of the phallus, is a leaky vessel that requires
constant plugging with new fantasmatic objects in its metonymy of desire.
But this view regards sex from only the masculine side of the formulas of
sexuation. If one were to completely submerge the ship, the question of its
‘plugging’ is altogether irrelevant. The little barque, that is, no longer ‘leaks’
because the water is both inside and outside the vessel. It no longer makes
sense to speak in terms of leaking, sinking or stopping up at all.
Sex and the signifier: The smallest whole number
‘Sex’ is evidently an even more complicated activity than anyone thought,

involving not two partners but a bizarre series of Ones and Others engaged
in complex series of additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions.
What one aims for in sex, it transpires, is a mathematical unit, a One that
represents the signifier of the other sex for us. Unlike in love, where one aims
for the other partner as subject, in sex, it turns out, we aim at our partner as
signifier. If we are men, sex delivers us the signifier Man through the body
of the woman. If we are women, we seek the signifier Woman through the
body of the man.31 Confirming this, towards the end of Seminar XIV, Lacan
describes the sexual act as ‘the passage of the subject to the function of
signifier’. But the passage that is to create the signifier Woman fails. While
the chiasmus of sex aims for a signifying effect, as a metaphor in Lacan’s
precise sense, sex is thus an interrupted crossing. Sex will always frustrate the
woman’s quest for the signifier that would make of her a One. As Lacan puts
it in the lesson of 14 June 1967 (Sem. XVI),
[…] in the sexual act, […] there is a jouissance, that of the other, which
remains in suspense. It is because the inter-crossing, the required
chiasmus – which would make of the bodies, by right, the metaphor, the
signifier of the jouissance of the other – it is because this chiasma is in
suspense, that we cannot but […] see this displacement which, in effect,
makes a jouissance dependent on the body of the other. As a result of
which, the jouissance of the other, as I told you, remains adrift.
The upshot of this is that sex is a logical enigma which repeats. What it repeats
is a surplus in the universe of discourse that was produced in the originary act
of creating the set that makes up the Symbolic system. At the level of the set’s
contents, this surplus is registered in the form of the two sexes of Man and
Woman whose irreducibility with respect to one another is expressed in their
fundamental maxims: ‘there is the sexual act’ and ‘there is no sexual act’. From
the masculine side, there is the sexual act: sex produces the signifier, Man,
insofar as he is defined in terms of phallic enjoyment. On the feminine side,
however, there is no sexual act. The infinite generations of the a fail to coalesce
and produce a signifier for Woman, instead hollowing out the entire universe
of discourse from the inside. Returning to Russell’s paradox, one could say that
from the masculine perspective sex allows that the set of all sets would include
itself: this would be the masculine dream of an exceptional One, the Father
who enjoys all the women. This exceptional One somehow manages to include
itself in the very set that it describes. From the feminine side, however, sex
asserts that the set of all sets does not include itself, and this failure of inclusion
ultimately dissolves the very set itself. From the Woman’s side, that is, the
universe of discourse does not exist – although this by no means implies that
Woman is therefore without some kind of language with which she insists, as a
number of notable Lacanian feminists have devoted themselves to discovering.
Sex presents us on a daily basis with the fundamental enigma that lies
at the heart of the universe of discourse. In our repetitions of the sexual
(non-)act, we repeat again the choice we once must have made: whether to
be a Man or a Woman. Thus if there is something originary about sex, if sex
can produce in us an uncanny sense of being the ‘first’ man or woman, this
derives from sex’s metaphor, the way it produces (or fails to produce) what
Lacan calls the ‘instauration of a signifier in the real’. In its small, quotidian
repetitions, sex thus repeats an earlier repetition. It is the ghosting repetitions
in our everyday lives of the originary signifying Act through which we
created our ‘universe of discourse’. Uniquely in our everyday life, sex thus
presents us with the phenomenal recreation of the logical (but never actually
temporal) moment when we originarily chose to enter language. This is, I
think, also why it is usually some kind of sexual difficulty that finally drives
a subject into analysis, to the talking cure. The sexual act represents us with
our fundamental alienation, laying out before us on the bed the two different
pathways by which a subject may choose to enter language. Faced with the
forced choice of Being or Thinking, the speaking subject by necessity chooses
Thinking. However, the path towards Thinking is doubled between a logic
of the exception and a logic of the not-whole. Invisible from the phallic
viewpoint, this second pathway solely becomes visible when the totality of
our possible relations towards enjoyment is written out in logical form. In
this sense, logic shows us something that cannot be seen from inside the
framework of phallic representation.
To conclude, what is the smallest whole number not written on the board?
The question of Woman poses an unanswerable riddle within the universe
of discourse. Although the signifier of Woman cannot be written (in the
sense of producing a signifier, a ‘One’), the unconscious nevertheless never
ceases to (half-)speak of it. Perhaps in response to Lacan’s demand that day,
Madame, the long-suffering stenographer might simply have said, ‘c’est moi!’
7
From Prohibition to Affirmation:

On Challenges and Possibilities of
a Badiouian Philosophy of Art
Ali Alizadeh
It is possible to argue that the wide ranging and indisputable achievements

of Alain Badiou as philosopher, militant and even ‘celebrity’ have somewhat
obfuscated the other aspects of his work, most significantly, it seems to me,
the crucial place and formative role of art in the development of his discourses
and various discursive formations.
Badiou’s first two books were not ontological studies or political treatises,
but rather ‘two avant-garde novels or anti-novels’; and his first theoretical
publication, in 1966, was an essay on the rapport (or, more specifically, the
present and significant absence of a rapport) between literature and ideology,
including a close reading of a passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel
Demons, titled ‘L’autonomie du processus esthétique’.1 The centrality of art –
and, in particularly, the literary arts – to Badiou’s thought and work is worth
emphasizing not only because he is better known, as noted, for his non-
artistic (e.g. political) intellectual interventions, but also because, despite – or
precisely due to – art being one of Badiou’s famous four conditions of truth,
his quite extensive writings on art (and his own works as a novelist and a
playwright) have been seen to promote ‘approaches’ ‘none [of which] directly
contributes to a “philosophy of art”’.2
One of the key features – arguably the key feature – of Badiou’s
philosophical work has been the radical detachment or de-suturing of
philosophy from the four generic conditions in general and from the
condition of art and from the scene of literary arts in particular. If one legacy
of the conceptual sutures of the short philosophical nineteenth century –
from Hegel to Nietzsche – was the persistence or indeed the saturation of
these sutures in the twentieth century (one may contrast, for example, the
nineteenth-century Marxian attachment of philosophy to politics with the
near total erasure of the philosophical in the service of so-called ethics,
human rights and so on, as seen in the thought of many of today’s apparently
committed philosophers) the imperative in the twenty-first century is,

according to Badiou, ‘to break all these contracts’ (MP 67). The gesture
Badiou has proposed is ‘purely and simply of de-suturation’ (MP 67) of
philosophy from the four generic conditions of art, love, politics and science.
I would argue that this break would also have the effect of a desaturation of
the previous bonds between philosophy and politics and between philosophy
and science.
Badiou has specifically advocated and indeed enacted a break with twentieth-
century Continental philosophy’s pro-Heideggerian suturing of thought to
literature. He has called for a formative split from the situation ‘foreshadowed
by Nietzsche, extended in Germany by the philosophic cult of poets, in France
by the fetishism of literature (Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze as well…), which
delegates the living flesh of thought to its artistic condition’ (MP 66–67). In
Badiou’s philosophy, ‘the living flesh of thought’ is decisively separated from
the generic condition of art, a separation which is readily evident in the
consequences of Badiou’s various resurrections of Plato’s crucial establishment
of ‘the quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ (PR 335) – the most important
of these being the designation of art as a condition for production of truths
radically autonomous from philosophy, with philosophy itself being, according
to Badiou, fundamentally incapable of producing truths but solely able to
discern and articulate the four conditions’ truths through ideation.
This distinction between philosophy and art is also seen in the very
style of Badiou’s writings. He maintains a strict differentiation between
philosophical and artistic modes of writing. In addressing this precise
differentiality, Badiou has observed:
Writing philosophy is, to tell the truth, something I find relatively boring.
My aim is, in fact, to give to things that are already formed in my thought
a protocol of transmission that is already satisfactory to me, personally.
[…] When I write theatre, it’s totally different. I don’t know myself exactly
what I’m going to write. The writing process is constitutive here of the
thing itself. I’m no longer concerned with a protocol of transmission. I
don’t believe, on the other hand, that this applies to philosophy. (PE 88)
There exists, in short, a fundamental challenge for a view of Badiou as

a major philosopher of art – or as an aesthetician, or as a proponent of a
poetics – inherent to both the content and the form of Badiou’s philosophy.
According to one recent study, ‘Badiou’s writings on contemporary art and
aesthetics present perhaps an impossible challenge to art and its education.’3
In this piece, however, I will argue that, despite the difficulties Badiou’s work
entails for an easy deduction of a philosophy of art or an aesthetic theory
From Prohibition to Affirmation 91
or a poetics, such artistic prisms are realizable and they offer a range of
fruitful possibilities to the theorist and also to the literary writer. Without
at all dismissing the significance of Badiou’s de-suturing of a protocol of
transmission from a protocol of creation – and, indeed, by building on this
separation – I will argue that despite the Platonic rhetoric of the philosopher’s
putative quarrel with the poet, Badiou’s work offers both a highly astute and
incisive philosophy of art and of literature – which is capable of delivering
one from the inadequacies of contemporary literary theory – and also a
methodology or poetics for the creation of new works of art.
In the course of advancing this argument, I will cite some of the other
concerns with such an endeavour, such as commentaries by critical readers
of Badiou’s philosophy – most notably, Jacques Rancière’s misgivings about
Badiou’s supposedly anti-aesthetic agenda – who have seen his thoughts on
art as unsympathetic to the development of a theory of art for reasons other
than the tension (between the philosopher and the poet) intrinsic to Badiou’s
philosophy. My aim here is to promote a Badiouian understanding of art
through engagements with obstacles for such an understanding found both
within and without Badiou’s writings.
The (Artistic) antinomies of Platonism
An avowed revival of Platonism constitutes the primary and perhaps most

significant impediment to the development of an uncomplicated Badiouian
perspective amenable to either an aesthetics or a poetics – Rancière’s above-
mentioned critique, for example, takes aim at the supposed ‘ultra-Platonism’
of Badiou’s ‘essential project’.4
Indeed, in his rewriting of The Republic (La Rèpublique de Platon, 2012),
Badiou does not at all obviate or re-conceptualize, and indeed intensifies,
Plato’s injunction against art, despite a vast array of quite creative and in many
cases contentious reconfigurations of the Greek philosopher’s thoughts in
some other parts of the book (such as, most noticeably, equating Plato’s ideal
city with an ideal communism). Badiou’s re-enactment of the denunciation
of artists from Book X of The Republic begins with an apt concentration
on ‘poetry that’s excessively characterised by imitation’ (PR 316); but this
condemnation soon turns against all poetry and all artistic activity:
I declare that my argument is irrefutable, that it’s right for us to attack the
poets since they’re nothing but imitators, and that it’s legitimate to lump
them together with the painters. They’re like the latter in that their works
are of scant importance where Truth is concerned. This comparison can
be further substantiated by the fact that it’s with the heteronomous part
of the Subject that they’re associated, not with the part that steers it in
the right direction of the universality of the True. So it’s perfectly right
for us to refuse these kinds of poets admittance to our community ruled
by communist dictates, because they arouse the purely empirical part of
the Subject, encouraging it with imaginary forms, reinvigorating it, and
thereby weakening the rational part, the only one that’s dedicated to the
dialectic of truths. (PR 331)
It is worth noting that, while written in the dramatic voice of the character
of Socrates as conceived by Badiou in an openly inventive retelling of Plato’s
canonical work, the above passage is clearly a manifestation – or, if a pun
may be permitted, an imitation – of Badiou’s own philosophical rhetoric.
‘Our community ruled by communist dictates’ is, as mentioned before,
Badiou’s rephrasing of Plato’s ‘well-ordered State’.5 This rewording is a clear
declaration of Badiou’s own well-known political inclinations; and other
revisions of this passage – such as changing the phrase ‘an inferior part of
the soul’, in Plato’s discourse, to ‘the heteronomous part of the Subject’ –
further identify the speaker of this speech as someone very much like Badiou
himself, i.e. a thinker who is both a materialist – redefining ‘the soul’ as ‘the
Subject’ – and an idealist who, as well as not abandoning the transcendental
category of soul/Subject, views heteronomy – very much à la Kant, the
idealist thinker par excellence – as something ‘inferior’. This characterization
closely matches one recent, rather enthusiastic depiction of Badiou as ‘the
name, in the history of philosophy, of a new synthesis between the rigorous
lucidity of materialism and the invisible hope of idealism’.6 Therefore, if
Badiou’s Socrates can be seen as an articulation of Badiou’s own position
and convictions, can it be said that Badiou is in substantial agreement with
Plato apropos of the philosophical imperative to ‘refuse’ poetry and art in the
pursuit of ‘the universality of the True’?
As observed by a perspicuous reader of Badiou, however, while the
‘resources Badiou derives from Plato are extensive’,7 Badiou’s adherence
to Plato is not simplistic or ‘slavish’; and, importantly, it entails a ‘different
conceptual attitude’ with regard to poetry.8 This divergence is most vigorously
stated and explicated in Badiou’s central book-length writing on art, Petit
manuel d’inesthétique (1998).9 Here, after evoking the Lacanian Master/
Hysteric dyad and, by so doing, somewhat updating and destabilizing
the Platonic philosopher/poet dialectic – concluding that there are three
fundamental existing schemata for investigating the relation between
philosophy and art, and that Plato’s didactic schema is only one, albeit the
most foundational, of these – Badiou poses that these differing schemata
(including the Heideggerian, proto-poststructuralist, hence anti-truth

modality, which Badiou titles the romantic schema) share a concern with ‘the
relation between art and truth’ (HB 8). For him:
The categories of this relation are immanence and singularity. ‘Immanence’

refers to the following question: Is truth really internal to the artistic effect
of the works of art? Or is the artwork instead nothing but the instrument
of an external truth? ‘Singularity’ points us to another question: Does the
truth testified by art belong to it absolutely? Or can this truth circulate
among other registers of work-producing thought? (HB 9)
Badiou’s definitions of the terms immanence and singularity are specific

to his thought – as we shall see later in this piece, Rancière, intentionally
or otherwise, confuses this singularity with specificity – and these terms
are vital both to Badiou’s rethinking of Plato’s view of art as an opposite
of philosophy and also to his own ultimate proposal that art is an
autonomous albeit co-productive or ‘coresponsible’ (HB 15) condition
vis-à-vis philosophy. Furthermore, Badiou’s definition of truth itself is as
unique and divergent from a Platonic provenance as his final definition
of art against a purely mimetic phenomenon. Put simply, Badiou’s truths
issue from being entering reality via an event; whereas for Plato, truth is not
produced (by an event or by anything else) and it resides in being, above/
outside of reality. Also, before formally putting forward his own schema –
which, I will argue, amounts to an invitation to both a new philosophy of
art and a manifesto for a new poetics – Badiou is proposing a description of
truth that simultaneously undermines the Heideggerian schema, a schema
which Badiou has elsewhere associated with a pre-Platonic view of a quasi-
mystical, romantic ‘indistinction’ between thought and the poem (IT 70)
which perfectly encapsulates post-structualism’s fixation with dismantling
so-called binary opposites.
By proposing that truth is something which can be ‘testified’ to by art
(absolutely or otherwise), Badiou is reintroducing a distinction between, on
the one hand, art/work/the material as a testimony and, on the other hand,
that to which the object testifies, i.e. truth. As such, Badiou maintains that
there are truths – as opposed to indistinguishable phenomena that simply
‘circulate among all registers of work-producing thought’ – and, by so doing,
he refutes claims to a pure immanence and suchlike, as put forward by
Heidegger’s poststructuralist disciples. There can be no artistic or otherwise
immanence free from (the impurity of) a transcendent singularity; and,
according to Badiou, artistic truth is that which is produced at the juncture
between immanence and singularity.
Badiou’s return to truth, however, and his powerful break with

postmodernist, late capitalist doxa apropos of the discourse of ends do not
in any way vindicate a definition of truth as a concrete externality, as a
corporeal, empirical object apropos of which the work of art is nothing but
an ‘instrument’, an imitation or a deceptive, seductive semblance. And it is
here that, crucially for my discussion, Badiou breaks with Plato. Viewed from
a perspective occasioned by the categories of immanence and singularity –
or, more specifically, the dialectical category of immanence-with-singularity –
Badiou sees the Platonic, didactic schema as problematic and insufficient,
since it explores only one of the categories of the relation between the artwork
and truth (singularity) and condemns its constitutive Other (immanence).
According to Badiou, in Plato’s philosophy of art, ‘the relation is certainly
singular (only art can exhibit a truth in the form of semblance), but not at all
immanent, because the position of truth is ultimately extrinsic’ (HB 9).
It is at this precise point that Badiou emerges not only as an occasionally
critical practitioner of a Platonic philosophy but also as the instigator of
a philosophy of art of his own which breaks with both Platonic sanctions
against art – Badiou is more circumspect than me in this regard, and sees
his position as ‘a stance transversal to the Platonic expulsion of the poets’
(HB 22) – and also repudiates pre-Platonic or Heideggerian sanctions against
truth. Badiou terms this schema inaesthetics, since it opposes, in addition to
the didactic schema and the romantic schema, also an Aristotelian aesthetic
or classical schema, the third existing modality of a relation between artworks
and truths, according to which the problem of art is resolved through
a deliberate dismissal of an exploration of the relation between art and
philosophy – in which, in other words, the relation between artworks and
truths is neither immanent nor singular – in favour of ‘something entirely
other than knowledge’, i.e. ‘catharsis’ (HB 4). Badiou’s view of art, on the other
hand, depicts art as a condition in which the works are neither pleasurable (à
la Aristotle), nor false, seductive obstacles to thought and truth (à la Plato),
nor mysterious, romantic substitutes for truth (à la Heidegger). For Badiou,
the poem is ‘a truth-procedure’ and ‘poetry makes truths’ (HB 22) via certain
methods or operations in a series or configuration of artworks.
I shall limit myself to mentioning only a few exemplifications of how art
in general and poetry in particular ‘make truths’ to demonstrate Badiou’s
theory of inaesthetics. In his writings prior to Handbook of Inaesthetics and
the above explication of a philosophical stance apropos of art, arts in general
and the poem in particular have played fundamental, in some cases central
roles in the construction of the premise and attributes of his philosophy –
see, for example, the deployment of a reading of Mallarmé’s poem ‘Un coup
de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ as a key mediation in L’être et l’événement
(1988) in which ‘the poem realizes the essence of the event itself ’ (BE 197),
or the ‘labour’ taken on by a grouping or configuration of poets who, in the
intellectual (if not strictly historical) period between Hegel and Heidegger
dubbed the age of poets, ‘assumed certain of philosophy’s functions’ (MP 69).
In his writings since Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou has placed an even
greater emphasis on the capacity of poetry in producing truths. In 2001
(and again in 2002 and in 2005), he put forward versions of ‘A Manifesto
for Affirmationist Art’ which praises ‘an art capable of measuring up to… “a
mathematics of being”’ (P 140). In Le Siècle (2005), the earlier theme of the
age of poets is expanded, via startlingly original readings of poems, theatre
and artworks by Brecht, Saint-John Perse, Malevich, Pessoa, Mandelstam and
Celan, among others, proposing that it has not been the science of history or
the discipline of political theory but the art of poetry which has been ‘put in
charge of naming’ the historico-political events of the twentieth century (TC
88). In a recent lecture titled ‘Poetry and Communism’ (2013, presented at
the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden), Badiou concludes that, despite
‘all kinds of discussions’ about communism from a variety of perspectives –
‘philosophy, sociology, economics, history, political science…’ – it is only ‘by
way of the poem’ that ‘there exists a proof of communism’ (AP 108).
In short, Badiou provides a specific and rigorous view of what art and
its traditionally most philosophically engaged species (the poem) are. If
philosophy of art is, at its most basic, ‘the study of the nature of art’,10 then I
feel that Badiou’s view of art as a condition of thought, according to which
the work of art possesses the capacity to produce truths, supplies us with
precisely such a study. According to him, the poem – or, more specifically, a
certain configuration of artistic production which materializes the inaesthetic
combination of immanence and singularity apropos of the relation between
art and philosophy – is capable of realizing, naming and bringing into
existence proofs of events. (And, if need be, one should be reminded that
in Badiou’s philosophy an event is not an existing, external fact or reality,
but rather a transient, immaterial rupture in the state of things which has
the capacity to instigate subjects capable of transforming knowledge and
forging a new reality.) Furthermore, although what I’ve explored so far does
not specifically outline an aesthetic theory – in so far as aesthetics has been
defined as ‘a philosophical activity concerned not just with the question
of beauty but with the whole nature of experience in terms of perception,
feelings and emotions’11 – it is evident that Badiou’s proposed philosophy
is also a commentary on or a critique of a narrowly defined prism which
sutures perception to emotion, art to beauty and beauty to harmony, as seen
in his naming of his approach inaesthetic, in defiance of dominant classical
aesthetics, which are predicated upon precisely such attachments.
Last but not least, Badiou’s writings on art may also serve as a poetics. His
discussion of the age of poets is based upon a ‘central operation’ according
to which the discussed poets are singularized for their ‘“method” of
disobjectivation’ (MP 76), a method which Badiou has illustrated in a number
of astute close readings of the relevant poets’ works, such as Mallarmé’s
tripartite ‘subtractive’ method in the sonnet ‘À la nue accablante tu’ (C 49–58).
More explicitly, ‘A Manifesto for Affirmationist Art’ is an open call for a new
way of producing art, ‘an art that is just as allergic to obscurantist hypnosis as
it is to the pornographic stupidity of festive performances’ (P 140). This text
performs both a polemical, unashamedly provocative demand for an art that
breaks with dominant modes and styles – of both the pseudo-avant-gardist
‘obscurantist hypnosis’ of today’s supposedly innovative artworks as well
as ‘the pornographic stupidity’ of commercial entertainment and popular
cultural products – and also instructs on how such a radically inaesthetic and
affirmationist art may be conceptualized and indeed practised.
It is for these reasons that we should not view Badiou as simply a
partisan to Plato apropos of art – or as a Platonic thinker deeply suspicious
and dismissive of art – but as a philosopher who has developed a pertinent
and poignant philosophy of art and poetics. While accepting the basic
situation of Plato’s problematization of art – the radical distinction between
the poem and thought, between art and philosophy – Badiou does not
participate in a denunciation of art and proposes his own novel and incisive
rejoinder to Plato in defence of art, one which is neither pre-Platonic
(romantic) nor anti-Platonic (classical). It is perhaps for this reason that,
in his retelling of The Republic, the highly astute and inquisitive figure of
Amantha (Badiou’s own fictive invention, a female character based on
Adeimantus in Plato’s original) disrupts Socrates’ admonition of artists by
telling the philosopher:
It’s just that you haven’t convinced me, either about poetry or the theatre.
Your target – an art that’s supposed to be the mere reproduction of
external objects and primitive emotions – is very narrow, whereas you
act as if it represented practically the whole field. Neither Pindar, nor
Mallarmé, nor Aeschylus, nor Schiller, nor Sappho, nor Emily Dickinson,
nor Sophocles, nor Pirandello, nor Aesop, nor Federico García Lorca fit
into your scheme. (PR 334)
Nothing like this interjection appears in Book X of Plato’s Republic. This

negation is Badiou’s own creation and intervention in the Platonic discourse,
and, even if intended as a melodramatic, disputatious remark, dismissive of
the subtleties of Socrates’ personal relationship with poetry, it nevertheless
points towards Badiou’s own appreciation of art. It succeeds to interrupt

Socrates and suspend, however momentarily, his antagonism towards artists.
In Badiou’s version of the dialogue, immediately after the above riposte,
‘Socrates, a tense look on his face, said nothing’ (PR 334).
Party to a ‘Great Anti-Aesthetic Consensus’?
It is my intention that this discussion presents a valid claim for the

acknowledgement and exploration of a coherent artistic perspective based
on Badiou’s philosophy. I fear, however, that it has thus far been too narrowly
couched in propositions, and that I have not subjected Badiou’s proposals
to anything other than a descriptive summary. I would therefore like to
question how well Badiou’s views of art fair when viewed from parameters
not set by the philosopher himself. Furthermore, are the consequences of his
thought in the theorizing, practice and education of art as propitious as my
discussion has thus far intimated?
I shall return to the second question – and what I view as an unintended
limitation in (my sketch of) a Badiouian philosophy of art – in the final part
of this piece. At this point, I’d like to consider the rather stern criticisms
made of Badiou’s thoughts on art by his contemporary and fellow French
philosopher, Jacques Rancière. My aim here is not so much to shore up my
claim for the constitution of a distinct Badiouian poetics and philosophy
of art through synthesizing it with Rancière’s antithesis, but to expand the
applicability of Badiou’s artistic thoughts beyond the immediacy of his own
systemic context and references.
In Malaise dans l’esthétique (2004), Rancière conflates Badiou’s ‘principle
interventions on the question of art’ with a poststructuralist (in this case,
Lyotardian) ‘denunciation of aesthetics’ and proposes that Badiou’s views
belong to ‘this great anti-aesthetic consensus’.12 Rancière premises his
criticism in a conditional acceptance of Badiou’s suggestion that ‘there are
three major philosophical attitudes concerning the identification of art
and the arts’,13 and agrees with Badiou that two of these can be generally
summarized under the names of Plato and Aristotle.14 In the context of the
third modality – which Rancière titles the aesthetic regime and which, as
seen before, Badiou identifies as a romantic schema – while Rancière readily
concedes that this regime entails something very similar to what Badiou
describes as the pre-Platonic assimilation of art and philosophy – Rancière
portrays this perspective as one ‘in which art is no longer identified as a
specific difference… but as a mode of sensible being… identical with a form
of thought’15 – he radically dismisses Badiou’s break with this schema/regime.
For Rancière, the romantic–aesthetic modality is profoundly, revolutionarily

democratic, and, precisely through dissolving artistic specificity in a particular
distribution of the sensible, it allows for the entry of non-art into the classically
artistic or poetic genres – for example, ‘via the Rimbaudian searching for the
gold of a new poem in simple-minded refrains and idiotic paintings’.16 This
(re)distribution also allows for the entry of the people into politics during
the modern democratic period which Rancière sees as contemporaneous
and in many ways coterminous with the aesthetic regime.17 Badiou’s view
of the political correlative of this schema/regime is wholly unlike Rancière’s.
According to Badiou, the romantic (or aesthetic) schema/regime, far from
being correspondent with a democratic or egalitarian political configuration,
is active in ‘certain fascisms’ as ‘it requires philosophy to prostrate itself before
art’ (P 135) since it displaces the dialectical with the aesthetic, as may be seen
in, for example, what Benjamin famously formulated as the aestheticization of
politics under Nazism.18 According to Badiou’s ‘A Manifesto for Affirmationist
Art’, potent elements of this anti-philosophical, anti-emancipatory
aestheticism are also found in today’s ‘postmodern’ artistic products which
express and fetishize individualism, egoism and so-called identity politics
instead of promoting an art that produces truths and speaks to revolutionary
collectivity and internationalist universality.
It is worth noting that Rancière’s criticism comes pursuant to the
thinkers’ strong political disagreements, in the course of which Badiou
dubbed Rancière an ‘anti-philosopher’ (M 115) and someone ‘who is a bit
like a magician who conjures up shadows’ (M 123). This is not to suggest
that Rancière’s disapproval of Badiou’s philosophy of art is occasioned by
unresolved debates in other areas and that his view is potentially insincere,
but to indicate that Rancière’s opposition to Badiou regarding a theory of
art and/or of aesthetics is potentially symptomatic of a more fundamental
divergence, particularly in terms of politics and its relations with philosophy
and with art. As such, it may be tempting to reduce Rancière’s contention to a
matter of political variance – as noted by one commentator, against Badiou’s
‘more “Platonic” form of politics grounded in the universal form-of-thought’,
Rancière ‘remains faithful to the populist-democratic impulse’19 – but such a
reduction would miss Rancière’s sharp, potentially devastating understanding
of the consequences of Badiou’s break with the romantic–aesthetic schema.
Rancière proposes that Badiou’s theory of inaesthetics is primarily a
solution to the latter’s ‘unfair’20 deprecation of romanticism; and that, even
more disparagingly, this theory is a reactionary modernist ‘rampart’ built
against the liberating ‘disorder’ of the aesthetico-democratic distribution
of the sensible.21 For Rancière, Badiou’s theory of art as a generic condition
of truth is yet another iteration of modernism, albeit one ‘with a twist’,22 a
troubled, and ultimately unconvincing torsion which attempts to approximate

‘the Platonic condemnation of images with the affirmation of art’s specificity’.23
This attempt fails, according to Rancière, because Badiou is, ultimately, too
much of a Platonist to allow the aesthetic regime to absorb or ‘shatter’24 the
modernist tendency. In Rancière’s assessment of what he sees as Badiou’s
‘Platonic modernism’25 – Rancière attributes the coinage and use of this term
to Badiou himself, and claims that it appears somewhere in the introduction
to Petit manuel d’inesthétique, but I have not been able to find this or any
admission to an adherence to any kind of modernism anywhere in Badiou’s
text26 – there is something disingenuous in the latter’s advocacy of the
specificity of art.
According to Rancière, Badiou is less concerned with ‘the purpose of
reserving a specific domain for poetry or art than of preserving the educative
value of the Idea’.27 To paraphrase Badiou’s own criticism of Heidegger,
according to Rancière, Badiou forces art to prostrate itself before philosophy
and its didactic and ethical priorities. The denial of the aesthetic does not
liberate art from doxa; it instead enslaves it to episteme. According to
Rancière, in Badiou’s inaesthetics, philosophy is ‘called upon to discern those
truths that the poem throws up as enigmas, only to find its own truths there’.28
The poem is therefore reduced to nothing but the rather un-modernist
‘mimesis of Idea’, and therefore ‘the tying – or “suturing” as Badiou would
say – of philosophy to the poem occurs through its very denial’.29 In short,
Badiou fails to either enact a Platonic division between art and philosophy, or
to rescue the poem (via what Rancière sees as a modernist theory of artistic
specificity) from Platonic admonitions.
Since I have already gone some way towards contesting assumptions
apropos of Badiou’s Platonism – which, as I have claimed, is a unique take
on Platonism, and one which, due to the decisive inclusion of (Badiou’s own
take on) the theme of event, owes as much to Mao, Marx and Lacan as it does
to the ancient Greek philosopher – I will not focus on Rancière’s apparent
suspicion that any perspective on art which has anything whatsoever to
do with truth is inherently ‘ultra-Platonic’. (The notion of truth content as
found in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, for example, has an ostensibly Hegelian
orientation.) I am also not convinced by the assertion of Badiou’s supposedly
self-conscious modernist gestures. While most of the artists that Badiou has
included in his writings on art are indeed identified with various historical
modernisms – Mallarmé, Pessoa, Hikmet, Woolf, Stevens, Beckett, etc. – his
view of art is clearly not limited to a modernist artistic configuration. The
age of poets, for example, is inaugurated by the Romantic poet Hölderlin, a
‘prophet and anticipating vigil’ to the other poets of this grouping (MP 71), a
figure who also plays a part in the development of Badiou’s central theory in
Being and Event, by providing the philosopher with key features of the theme
of fidelity to the evental site (BE 255–61). The pre-Islamic Arabian poet Abu
Aqil Labīd ibn Rabī’ah is the subject of a substantial comparative analysis
in a chapter of Handbook of Inaesthetics (HB 46–56); and the 2007 lecture
‘Destruction, Negation, Subtraction: on Pier Paolo Pasolini’ (AP 83–92)
discusses a poem by a twentieth-century European writer and filmmaker
who is not associated with any form of modernism.
Despite my own concerns with Badiou’s choice of artists – which I shall
articulate in the final part of this piece – I believe Rancière and some others’
designation of Badiou as a modernist30 is, in itself, neither here nor there,
and what concerns me much more is the viability of the criticism of Badiou’s
philosophy of art inaugurated by this designation. As such, my central
difficulty with Rancière’s view of Badiou as a thinker (modernist or not,
Platonic or not) who, despite appearances, ultimately submits both art and
aesthetics to the will and postulates of the Idea (and as such fails to develop
a significant or productive theory of art) is that Rancière both misreads
the dialectics of Badiou’s theory – by rephrasing it, as we have seen, as an
(impossible) reconciliation of ‘the Platonic condemnation of images with
the affirmation of art’s specificity’ – and also presents the relation between
these two (misrepresented) imperatives as a basic contradiction instead of a
dialectical interrelation.
As I have elaborated in the previous section, neither is Badiou’s adaptation
of the basic premise of the Platonic perspective an acquiescence to a
‘condemnation of images’, nor is his rejection of the romantic schema based
on a positioning of art as a specificity vis-à-vis aesthesis; his is an apprehension
of art as the condition which entails configurations of work which posit their
truths as a singularity vis-à-vis the other generic conditions (politics, science
and love). Rancière, the great theorist and indeed champion of an aesthetic
regimentation of art, in his determination to see Badiou as belonging to a
‘great anti-aesthetic consensus’, has perhaps overlooked the pivotal point
that Badiou does not see the artistic as materially different to the sensible.
For Badiou, art is not an Other to the aesthetic but is an operation which
takes places within the aesthetic or, put in his own words, ‘the truth of which
art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible, that is, the
transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea’ (P 144) – and Badiou
sees the truths of art (e.g. the ‘enveloping vision of ephemeral totalizations’
in Woolf ’s fiction (P 141), or ‘revelation of the power of dreams contained in
the juncture of frame and light’ in Murnau’s cinema (P 142)) as producible
only in artistic forms (fiction, cinema, etc.) and not in politics, science or love.
Badiou’s strategy for claiming art as a condition of truth and the
configurations of artworks as truth-procedures depends not on claiming
a specific, autonomous space for art divorced from general aesthetics. He

does not propose an elitist (Platonic, modernist, etc.) extraction of art from
non-artistic society, mundane cultural activities and so on (i.e. the scenes of
Rancière’s democratic distributions of the sensible) but declares an absolute,
modal differentiation between the methods of art’s production of truths
and the methods of science, politics and love. Rancière may contend that
Badiou is ignorant of not only the sensible but also the artistic potentiality
of, for example, science, citing ‘Balzac’s assertion in La Peau de chagrin that
the new era’s great poet is not a poet but the geologist Cuvier.’31 But the
poeticity or beauty of a science is clearly not the question here – Badiou has
no hesitation in quoting favourably Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos’s words that
‘Newton’s binomial is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo’ (P 140) – and for
Badiou what makes art singular or autonomous is not that art is the sole
repository of either the beautiful or the sensible, but that art produces truths,
and that these truths are generically and epistemologically different to those
of science, politics and love.
In my view, against Rancière’s characterizations and caricaturizations,
Badiou’s affirmation of the singularity and autonomy of art is not at all an
expression of a high modernist Greenbergian belief in the desolation of the
quotidian and the righteousness of the modernist avant-gardes – Badiou is
explicit in his view of the avant-gardes as ‘desperate and unstable’ struggles
against the classical (Aristotelian) schema, which ‘did not achieve their
conscious objective’ (HB 8) – and his definition of artistic autonomy is
radically different to the postures of any kind of l’art pour l’art. In his first piece
of theoretical writing in 1966, Badiou claims that art possesses a ‘regional
autonomy’, but he makes this claim after stating that ‘the “raw material”’ of art
or ‘of aesthetic production is already in itself aesthetically produced’, and that
the study of art is the study of ‘the theory of the formations and deformations
of aesthetic generalities’ (AP 126). While a number of Badiou’s views have
ostensibly changed since the writing of this work – for example, the younger
Badiou perceives that ‘an aesthetic mode of production is by no means an
art’ and that this mode is ‘transversal to the classification of the arts’ (AP
130), a thesis which is more or less incompatible with the significance of
singularity in mature Badiou’s theory of inaesthetics – the view that artistic
events, as deforming and dissensual as they may be, occur within the aesthetic
and not external to it is present and consistent throughout Badiou’s oeuvre.
This can be seen in the relatively recent Logiques des mondes (2006), in which
Badiou writes that the images of horses in Upper Paleolithic cave paintings
in southern France as well as in Picasso’s 1945 works posit the animal as ‘an
intelligible paradigm’ – or the Idea of horse – as the result of a ‘cut’ inside ‘the
formless continuity of sensorial experience’ (LW 18–19).
I could find fault in many of Rancière’s other observations – for example,

his assertion that for Badiou art amounts to a ‘mimesis of Idea’ which ignores
Badiou’s insistence on the novelty of Ideas that could eventuate from the
philosophical processing of art’s truths, and that for Badiou, the Idea is not
an existing, concrete phenomenon that awaits representation in art, but
an Idea is formed through an understanding of, and is entirely contingent
upon, the new truths produced in/by art – but I shall end this rebuttal by
concluding that, despite the title of his mature theory of art, for Badiou art
is not ‘anti-aesthetic’ but in fact inexplicably immanent to the aesthetic. In
my view, if according to Badiou’s teacher Althusser, art is placed ‘somewhere
between science and ideology’,32 for Badiou it is placed somewhere between
philosophy and aesthetics. Art provides truths for philosophy without
becoming servile to it, and it cuts through, deforms and transforms the
aesthetic without occluding it. Art is, in other words, the singular creation of
the void between thought and perception.33
Poetic fidelities to the Badiou event
I’d like to conclude this piece by appraising both the compatibility of Badiou’s
theories on art with a protocol of creation – as a practical poetics – and to
also question the consequences of these in literary-theoretical contexts. After
all, one can be confident that Badiou, both as a self-professed communist
and as a revivalist of Plato, would not wish to have philosophy retreat to
a purely philosophical space – where it is nothing other than arguments
about philosophers, by philosophers and for philosophers – and, based on
the proliferation of his explicitly accessible, non-specialist publications and
lectures (on current issues such as terrorism, globalization and, indeed, the
arts), it would be reasonable to assume that he wishes for his thought to
directly enter and affect non-philosophic milieus.
This desire is perhaps also evident in Badiou’s recent speaking tours around
the world, to places as remote as, yes, Melbourne, where, in the conference
held to mark his 2014 visit to Australia, I presented a version of this piece and
recited a poem titled ‘Evental’.34 ‘Evental’ is but one of my works of creative
writing directly influenced by Badiou’s thoughts, and I have drawn on his
theories in my other writings. The central character in my 2013 story-cycle
novel Transactions35 is constructed à la Badiou’s discernment of a ‘method
of disobjectivation’ in the works of the poets associated with his proposed
age of poets. I have also heavily drawn on Badiou’s writings in devising
frameworks for analysing others’ literary texts, mostly poetry and fiction
by contemporary Australian writers. Badiou’s theory of inaesthetics and his
extraordinarily careful readings of select poems by the likes of Mallarmé and

Pessoa can equip one with a theoretical prism far more germane than most
existing literary theories.
In my view, the genre of contemporary literary theory renders literature
criticizable, not thinkable. A common tendency in postcolonial literary
theory, for example, is to scrutinize (Western) literary works for their latent
so-called Eurocentrism. Such investigations – progressive as they might
appear to some – serve neither a philosophical, nor an artistic, nor, come
to that, a properly political engagement, an engagement which would
impel political action in lieu of speculative chastisements of literature. The
operations and elements of a Badiouian philosophy of art, on the other hand,
can encourage one to recognize places and temporalities in literary texts in
which an aesthetico-literary doxa or ideology is cut through or ruptured,
and, by viewing these scissions as truths capable of substantiating new
ideas – many of them radical and political – we can explore works of poetry
and fiction without regressing to the quasi-moralistic and highly ideological
agendas of much of contemporary literary theory.
I am therefore in strong disagreement with Andrew Pendakis’s claim,
made in his entry on Badiou in a recent reference book, that ‘Badiou’s
theory of the poem… does not in any way attempt to ground a literary
analysis.’36 Pendakis is only correct if by ‘literary analysis’ we mean the
imposition of an ethico-interpretive judgement on a work of literature – an
all too common paradigm which, I believe, can be circumnavigated via the
application of a genuine philosophy of art such as Badiou’s. I am, however,
also aware of what Pendakis sees as the criticisms, mostly issuing from
literary-theoretical or critical-theoretical perspectives, regarding Badiou’s
evident devotion to ‘the tradition of Great Books humanism’.37 While I
find nothing in Badiou’s propositions or axioms as such which valorizes
the so-called Western Canon, I cannot deny that Badiou’s persistent use of
texts by mostly culturally consecrated European writers could (in my view,
inadvertently) imply that Badiou’s theory of art may not be as radically and
unapologetically universalist – i.e. non-particularist, hence not particularly
sited within European or any other culture – as it is intended to be. While,
in my argument against Rancière’s counterargument, I strove to lessen the
consequences of Badiou’s lionization of artistic figures often portrayed as
protagonists of modernisms, I cannot confidently make a similar attempt
apropos of the historico-literary status or, come to that, the gender of the
overwhelming majority of Badiou’s artistic exemplars.
I maintain that there’s nothing whatsoever canonist or masculinist in
Badiou’s theory of art – unless one were a disciple of certain fellowships of
post-structuralism and deconstruction which immediately deride, rather
dogmatically, any innovation of truth, subjectivity and event as logocentric,

phallocentric, anthropocentric and so on – but I do have my own reservations
with the implications, if not the intentions, of Badiou’s overt reliance on
artistic configurations composed almost entirely of very famous, indisputably
canonized male European figures. I do not wish for this concern to resonate
with what I have already depicted as faux progressive, in other words,
politically correct. This concern arises from my view that, an insufficiently
informed or lay perception, based on a hasty encounter with Badiou’s
writings on art, could conclude that only a certain class of writer – belonging
to a certain time, gender and geography – fosters an affirmationist art that
produces truths. The consequences of such a perception would no doubt be
highly undesirable for as sincere a champion of the egalitarian axiom and the
communist hypothesis as Badiou.
I ended my presentation at the above-mentioned conference in Melbourne
with articulating this potential problematic. As part of my presentation, I
recited a section, from my poem ‘Evental’, in which I have portrayed the mid-
twentieth-century female Iranian writer and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad’s
poem ‘Tavallod-ee deh-gar’ as a text in which, in a method very similar to
that of the poets comprising the age of poets – Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Pessoa,
etc. – the poet ‘orders lack or disorders presentation’ (MP 77). I wonder if a
figure like Farrokhzad cannot be added to Badiou’s well-known groupings of
truth-producing poets and artists; and whether or not such groupings are in
fact necessary. Can there not be other perspectives on artistic configurations
which, while remaining true to Badiou’s philosophy of art – and the anti-
romantic exigency to avoid seeing individual works as finite containments
of infinities – also resists the near-deification of certain writers as the most
luminous purveyors of artistic truths? Or is this precisely one of the tasks
that lie ahead for practitioners of a Badiouian philosophy of art? It is perhaps
up to thinkers and writers loyal to the Badiou-event to develop his theory
of inaesthetics and the poetics of affirmationism in ways which respond to
those who insist on ‘Badiou’s failure to produce any adequate discussion
and understanding of the social dynamics of new kinds of artistic form.’38
Badiou’s philosophy of art has solicited misunderstandings and oppositions
similar to those generated by his often controversial thoughts in other areas
such as politics. (And it is possible that Badiou, famously opposed to seeing
philosophy as a theory for a non-philosophic condition, may not himself
share my desire for the construction of a philosophy of art based on his
thought.) However, it is hoped that this piece has contributed to a more
accurate appreciation of this important philosopher’s astute and incisive
thoughts on art and on literature.
8
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal

Louise Burchill
A recent reorientation in Alain Badiou’s work radically calls into question

a number of central tenets that have, for at least the last thirty years or so,
underpinned his affirmation of a rigorous universality of truths – an affirmation
that, itself, constitutes the crux of Badiou’s philosophical undertaking. Let
us specify from the start that this is a reorientation still embryonic in form,
which, evident in but a sprinkling of texts over roughly the last decade,
must undoubtedly await the forthcoming third volume of Being and Event,
‘The Immanence of Truths’, and its analyses of what happens for an individual
when s/he is incorporated within a truth process before its full measure can be
taken (PE 116). The radicality of the rethinking it entails is, nonetheless, already
attested to, with its full brunt bearing on nothing less than ‘“truths” trans-
particularity’: that is, the premise that, insofar as the universal is addressed to
all and everyone equally, this renders the configuration of particular identities
making up the world as it is – ‘the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of
humankind’ – strictly insignificant. Only through ‘subtraction’ from identitarian
predicates can an authentic subject of a truth process emerge as a result, with
such predicates thereby destined to be ‘dissolved’ or ‘undifferentiated’, qua
differences, within the power of a universal capable of signification for one and
all.1 Which is to say that, in the terms of this tenet of trans-particularity, the mark
of a genuine truth process consists quite simply in its indifference to difference.
It would, as such, seem judicious to recall the context in which Badiou’s
claims for truths’ trans-particularity came pre-eminently to the fore before
focusing on the reorientation now inflecting his philosophical trajectory.
Badiou has himself singled out the period from the late 1980s to the mid-
1990s as that of ‘the battle around the universality of truths’, with his most
influential texts of this sequence (Ethics, Manifesto for Philosophy and St Paul
and the Foundation of Universalism) expressly constituting a three-tiered
buttressing of ‘the rights of the universal’ against the (then) contemporary
‘cult of national, racial, sexual, religious and cultural identities’ that would,
via its collective claims for a critical recognition of differences, seek to deny
the neutrality of the universal (SMP 4). Proponents of a politics, or ethics, of
difference – including, most notably, advocates of women’s equality and/or of

feminine specificity – were accordingly castigated by Badiou for the ‘sophistic
error’ of promulgating that, far from there being any neutral trans-positional
value asserting the truth of that which is necessarily the Same for all, the ‘only
genuinely universal prescription consists in respecting particularities’ (ET/
TW 144). Upholding, for his part, the necessary subtraction of identitarian
particularisms entailed in every universal or truth process, Badiou’s response
to the representatives of this ‘Great Modern Sophistry’ may be summed up by
the sentence he delivers in his ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’: namely, ‘there
is no possible universal sublation of particularity as such’ (ET/TW 144).
Set against this background, Badiou’s proclaiming, in a paper delivered in
2011 on ‘The Figures of Femininity in the Contemporary World’, that truth
processes can no longer be considered as indifferent to sexual difference –
such that it is now absolutely necessary to examine the way in which sexuation
functions in the domains of political, scientific, artistic and amorous truths –
is nothing less than startling. Not only does such a proclamation on Badiou’s
behalf of the ‘inevitability’ of a sexuation of symbolic and philosophical
thought constitute a radical reorientation, or inflection, of his tenet of truths’
trans-particularity or trans-positionality – ‘woman’ as a category of sexed
being or a sexuate position having been, as just indicated, hitherto judged an
identitarian predicate requiring subtraction – but it would, in certain respects,
seem well-nigh to border on a recognition of ‘sexed universals’. Indeed, the
entire sphere of symbolic thought (which encompasses, of course, Badiou’s
four truth processes) finds itself characterized in this 2011 paper as having
been cast throughout the Western tradition in uniquely ‘masculine terms’. All
forms of symbolic creation – which is to say all supposedly neutral universal
truths? – would up until now, then, be the expression of a ‘logic of the One’
as summed up in the unity of the ‘Name of the Father’, itself most evidently
manifest in the ‘absolute, and absolutely masculine, unity’ of the monotheistic
God.2 It is the confirmed death of this God in contemporary capitalist societies
that renders it impossible for the One of masculine logic to unilaterally govern
any longer the entire order of the Law or of symbolic initiative. Whence the
‘inevitability’ that new forms of symbolic creation will be invented. What these
new forms will consist in is a question that Badiou doesn’t presume to pre-
empt, abandoning in this instance his more customary axiomatic modality
in favour of a resolutely interrogative one: ‘What is a woman who engages in
emancipatory politics? What is a woman artist, musician, painter or poet? A
woman excelling in mathematics or physics, or co-responsible for conducting
an amorous passion in thought and acts? A woman philosopher?’ ‘And
conversely, what do the fields of politics, art, science and love become once
women fully participate [… ] in the creative equality of symbols?’ (FF 16).
Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal 107
On the basis of this succinct summary of Badiou’s propositions in 2011

alone, one can hardly fail to wonder as to the forces or tensions in his conceptual
apparatus that might have led to such an inflection of his thesis of symbolic
thought’s – that is, universality’s – neutrality. Are there precursory signs in his
work – be these in the form, say, of implicit problematization, isolated insights
or indeed of unresolved aporetic constellations – of this necessity for symbolic
creation to admit of sexuation, which, it cannot be emphasized enough,
constitutes an indubitably startling stance when viewed from the perspective of
Badiou’s battle against particularities? And what exactly are the ramifications of
Badiou’s professing that those who occupy the sexuate position ‘woman’ would
entertain a different relationship to – if not necessarily a full-blown sublation
within – the universal than do those who occupy the sexuate position ‘man’?
Would, for example, acknowledging ‘woman’ and ‘man’ to hold a differential
relation to the universal, such that sexuation would be operatively marked
within all truth procedures, not call into question the very manner in which
Badiou has up to now defined sexual difference itself – that is, as not only strictly
determined within the sole field of love, but as strictly existing within this field
alone? Should this be the case, what then becomes of Badiou’s core opposition
between love and desire qua the crux of his entire revision of Jacques Lacan’s
formulae of sexuation? After all, Lacan’s error, on Badiou’s reading, consists
precisely in inscribing sexual difference in the field of desire or jouissance, and
not (or at least not solely) in that of love. Yet, if sexuation is marked in all truth
procedures – artistic, scientific and political, as well as, but not solely, amorous
procedures –might it not also be marked in the order of the ‘real’, understood
in this context, provisionally at least, as the order of the drives?
These are the questions (amongst others) I want to pursue here by way
of charting that which – as indicated by this text’s title – I would like to
designate as ‘woman’s adventures with, or in, the universal’ over the course
of Badiou’s corpus. I maintain that, as set out not only in Badiou’s various
axiomatic, logical or speculative definitions of woman but, equally, in the
profusion of phenomenological narrations, polemical stances, literary or
dramatic personae and declarative propositions pertaining to this category
within both his philosophical work narrowly defined and his corpus as a
whole (novels, plays, political and critical essays, etc.), these adventures –
that is, woman’s relation to the universal – can be seen to display three main
modalities. The latter may be schematically defined, or designated, as follows:
1) Subtraction. In terms of this modality, woman is taken up within a

universalizing truth procedure only on the condition that sexed being
is discounted or excised – that is, precisely subtracted. For this reason,
‘woman’ is, strictly speaking, disqualified, or ‘cancelled out’, as a category
here, being but one of the infinity of existing differences making up

humankind that the universal crosses through in its assertion of that
which is the Same for everyone.
2) Sublimation. Here ‘woman’ not only holds as a category taken up within
a truth procedure but functions as the guarantee or, indeed, ‘guardian’, of
universal totality on the condition of sexuate specificity as established in
the field of love and marked procedurally, thereby, by ‘the power of the
passage from the sensible to something more essential’ (PE 52).
3) Sublation. ‘Woman’ here attains to the status of a category marked in the
universal, such that there is sexuation of thought, under the condition of
sexuate/sexed specificity as established by a logic of ‘passing-between-two’,
in terms of which the feminine is not a position but a process affirming
the non-being of the One. Hence the speculative definition proposed by
Badiou in the 2011 paper referred to earlier: ‘Woman is the going-beyond
of the One in the form of a passing-between-two’ (FF 11–12).
It should be noted that, despite being set out as though three distinct
processes, these modalities of woman’s relation to the universal are
imbricated in a (quasi-dialectical) variety of ways. As established in the
field of love, for example, woman’s relation to the universal is pre-eminently
in the modality of sublimation: ‘woman’, like ‘man’, exists as a category of
sexuation only as taken up in the process of love, which, passing through and
beyond desire with its finite economy of the object, aims at the ‘being of the
other’ and is of the order of the infinite. Yet, the emergence of a new subject,
the Two of the lovers, involves at the same time a subtraction from sexual
difference since woman and man now relate to something in common that
attests their belonging to a single humanity – their being (in a non-fusional
sense) ‘the same’. Sublimation equally opens onto the modality of sublation
insofar as woman’s being defined (within the amorous procedure) by the
singular symbolic value she gives to love, qua the guarantee of universality
for humanity, simultaneously marks a sexuation, if not altogether of, at least
in respect of the universal, such that it is then but a matter of taking ‘another
step’ to arrive at the sexuation of thought. Whatever the intricacies of these
imbrications, however, the fact that woman’s adventures with the universal
as played out in Badiou’s work should finally lead to woman’s being ‘linked
for the first time to a philosophical gesture’ hailing the sexuation of symbolic
creation (FF 15–16) remains an astonishing reorientation of a philosophical
enterprise hitherto upholding the neutrality of the universal. In turning now
to Badiou’s period of ‘battle’ and, thus, his key ‘subtractive’ moment, we shall
indeed find the categories of woman and the feminine to have a long way to
go before attaining universal signification.
SUBTRACTION, or woman as particularity
That Badiou, up until the end of the ‘90s, discerns nothing of any value or
force in positions seeking to promote “woman” as a category capable of
engendering innovation in the fields of politics, art, science or love, is, of
course, completely consistent with what we already know of the tenet of
truths’ trans-particularity. There seems little need to dwell here, then, on
the conjunctural analyses Badiou adduces for his disqualifying ‘woman’ (or
‘feminism’) from functioning as the subject of a truth process.3 Let us rather
attempt to draw out more comprehensively the logic informing Badiou’s
stipulation that identitarian predicates, such as ‘woman’, are subtracted or
transcended by the operation of a truth that only has any real effectivity to the
extent that a ‘de-particularization’ of those adhering to this truth takes place.
For Badiou, the first to have grasped this trans-individual, de-particularizing
force of universalism is, of course, St Paul, whose proclamation that, in
respect to the event (i.e. the event-Christ), ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek,
neither slave nor free, neither male nor female’4 constitutes, in this regard, a
‘fundamental statement’ (SP 104). For this reason, it is instructive for us, in our
turn, to then briefly examine Paul’s pronouncements on sexual difference: our
aim here being to show up the tension already apparent in the conception of
‘indifference to difference’ that Badiou – before the reorientation of his recent
work – would make synonymous with the neutrality of universalizing truths.
Now, one thing that is certainly not to be understood by Badiou’s equating
‘subtraction from sexed particularity’ with the affirmation of a universal,
trans-particular value is any form of conceptual complicity with the thesis
prevalent in contemporary gender studies of a multiplication of sexes, or
gender indistinction. Attempts to deconstruct the man/woman polarity
and replace it with a panoply of possible sexuate or gendered positions are
strenuously dismissed by Badiou as a form of postmodernist sophistry,
fully consonant with the prevailing Capitalist ideology of a generalized
equivalence of values. In diametrical opposition to any and all such claims
for – as Badiou puts it – ‘a quasi-continuous multiple of gender constructions’
(LW 421), subtraction from identitarian sexuate predicates involves nothing
less than the ‘re-marking’ of dyadic sexual difference from the standpoint of
the very universal value in respect of, and by, which this difference is, strictly
speaking, rendered insignificant.
This re-marking of sexual duality is, of course, most explicitly thematized
by Badiou with respect to love, yet a number of his texts show that subtraction
from sexed particularity equally leads – via its dual, constitutive processes of
negation and affirmative incorporation – to a new determination of woman’s
‘sexuate position’ in the fields of politics, science and art. The Incident at
Antioch offers, for example, a dramatic representation of the subtraction from

particularity that is brought about by exposure to the universalizing force of
an evental truth in the field of emancipatory politics. In the course of her
‘conversion’ to the revolutionary process, the play’s main protagonist, Paula –
an avatar of St Paul, the ‘founder’ of universalism – is led to internally negate
all the worldly determinations, such as ‘sister’ and ‘lover’, which defined her
up until then as a woman.5 By wresting herself from the predicates of sexed
identity as set down by her epoch and becoming incorporated within a truth
procedure – an incorporation that amounts, for Badiou, to an affirmation of
a universal value, or universalization tout court – Paula is ‘symbolically’ re-
marked as a ‘new’ woman: that is, a woman fully engaged in the creation of
symbolic value. While the precise status that accrues to this figure of the ‘new
woman’ in Badiou’s thought will be examined later on, it must be stressed here
that it is the sheer fact alone of her engaging in the truth process of politics or,
put otherwise, of her becoming ‘the subjective body’ of a process of symbolic
creation, that makes Paula a ‘new woman’. The same logic equally informs –
to give but one other example here – Badiou’s text on the nineteenth-century
mathematician Sophie Germain, who won the grand prize from the French
Academy for her work on the problem of elastic surfaces at a time when
women’s access to any form of intellectual endeavour – much less that of
‘stern mathematics’ – was barred by a myriad of obstacles. To proclaim, as
Badiou does in this text, that ‘“Woman” names here the dazzling universality
of mathematics’, Germain’s victory is a ‘victory of humanity’,6 clearly brings to
the fore the logic underlying Badiou’s subtractive understanding of ‘woman’ –
viz. as an identitarian predicate that must lose any subjective effectivity for
individuals if they are to become subjects of a truth process. All in all, the
ultimate signification of a woman’s becoming engaged in the creation of
symbolic values and, hence, a ‘new woman’ lies in the exemplary proof this
proffers of the indifferentiation of sexual difference within the universal.
With this in mind, we are now better equipped to turn to Badiou’s analyses
of Paul’s pronouncements on sexual difference, for the logic governing these,
according to Badiou, is strictly one of establishing the universal’s power over
‘difference qua difference’. As such, the Paulian prescription that women
should cover their hair when they publicly pray or proclaim their faith –
which is the prescription focused on in this context – is parsed by Badiou as
follows: a woman’s long hair being in itself a sort of ‘natural veil’, the fact of
reduplicating it by an artificial sign testifies both to women’s acknowledging
their sexed particularity and to the ‘indifferentiation’ of this identity within a
signifying process of trans-particular scope. Indeed, Badiou argues that the
‘only reason’ a woman must wear a veil is to show that the ‘universality of the
declaration’ (i.e. the resurrection of Christ) includes ‘women who confirm that
they are women’ (SP 105) or, otherwise put, in order that the indifferentiation
of (an avowed) sexual difference within the universal confirms the very
status of the universal as such. It is, then, of the utmost significance, from
Badiou’s perspective, that Paul addresses a ‘symmetrical’ prescription to men
exhorting them to leave their head uncovered when they manifest their faith
in public so as not to ‘disavow’ their sexed particularity, such as this is (in part)
defined by the customs of Paul’s time. This symmetry of constraints imposed
upon men and women would, in itself, attest to an essential ‘egalitarianism’ of
the universal according to Badiou, who thereby dismisses feminist criticisms
of Paul’s precepts in respect of women as fundamentally skewed. There is,
Badiou stipulates, no disputing the massive sexual inequality of Paul’s epoch
or even Paul’s adhesion to the hierarchical vision of the world then prevalent,
in terms of which Christ rules over man and man rules over woman. Yet,
with respect to his time, Paul proves to be progressive as concerns the status
of women insofar as he conveys the universalizing equality of truth by setting
down constraints that apply symmetrically to men and women alike in lieu
of unilateral ones in respect of women alone (SP 105).
What are we to make, then, of the fact that, contrary to Badiou’s claims,
Paul’s prescriptions on sex and headdress arguably actually constitute a
highly problematic exemplar of universalizing egalitarianism? Indeed,
Paul’s precision – nowhere mentioned by Badiou – that the veil is a sign of
woman’s subservience not only to God but also to man (stipulated to be ‘the
image of God’)7 makes it clear that, underpinning the so-called symmetry
of constraints, there is precisely his hierarchical vision of the world: a
vision Badiou acknowledges Paul to hold but without relating this to the
prescriptions in question. While certainly contingent on the customs or
general opinion of Paul’s time, this hierarchical worldview no less informs
the very ‘truth of the declaration’ insofar as fidelity to the event-Christ also
entails acknowledging Christ to be ‘the head of man’… and, therefore, ‘man
the head of woman’.8 Men and women are, as a result, treated equally by the
law only in the formal sense that both are submitted to constraints, while the
law itself proves to be substantively unequal since it makes man the unmarked
term (wholly in ‘the image of God’) in relation to which woman is marked
(both ‘naturally’ and ‘artificially’) as subservient – which is, of course, also
to say, other or different. That this ‘difference’ bears no significance for one’s
capacity to participate in the process of truth – truth being indifferent to
differences – in no way entails its not being (re-)marked within, and indeed
by, the process as such.
Amounting, all in all, to claiming the inequality – or non-neutrality – of
not only a law supposedly supporting the universal but the very content of a
universalizing truth process itself, this objection to Paul’s precepts obviously
runs contrary to all the claims Badiou makes for the latter in his 1997 book.
This renders it all the more remarkable, then, that, as shown by Badiou’s
2011 paper referred to above, his thinking on the universal has taken a ‘turn’
whereby the non-neutrality of symbolic thought is no longer denounced as
an error entertained by feminists and other postmodernist protagonists of a
contemporary sophism but affirmed as having characterized the history of
‘humanity’ up until today. Turning now to women’s adventures with and/or
in the universal as these are played out in the modality of sublimation, we
shall see that the generic function borne by the feminine in the field of love is
undoubtedly a – and, indeed perhaps, the – crucial key to Badiou’s reorientation
in respect of ‘woman’ and the possibility of sexed truths/universals.
SUBLIMATION, or woman as a guarantee of

universality for humanity
The field of love is precisely singled out in Badiou’s texts of the 1980s and
1990s as the specific, and sole, field in which ‘woman’ (like ‘man’) holds as
a category relative to the universal. Love alone, in other words, furnishes
a universal ground on which sexual difference can be thought. The reason
forms of knowledge such as biology and sociology prove incapable, for their
part, of providing a criterion by which ‘woman’ and ‘man’ can be distributed
universally is that they fail, in the same way as do claims for particularity, to
cross through the configuration of ‘what is given’ – the infinite diversity or
simple facticity of the human animal – to attain the truth of that presented in
an existing situation. Since everything of the order of ‘the sexual’ or sexuality
is, for Badiou, precisely a simple given – or, put more technically, of the order
of being9 – nothing on the level of sexed being itself has, then, any pertinence
for the demarcation of the categories of sexual difference. Not only are bodies
themselves sexually ‘insignificant’, as it were – subsisting solely within the
‘brute opposition’ of animal sexuality – until they are taken up within an
amorous encounter (WL/C 183),10 but it is, as such, a purely nominalist
gesture on Badiou’s behalf to designate the resulting sexuate positions ‘man’
and ‘woman’: as generic positions immanent to love and defined strictly
internally within the amorous process, they could, Badiou states, ‘just as well
be called something else’ (PE 63).
The new subject that emerges within the amorous process – the Two of
the lovers or, as Badiou sometimes puts it, the Two of the sexes – involves, as
already indicated, a subtraction from sexual difference since the individuals
involved are no longer enfolded within the confines of their singular, narcissistic
experience of the world but now share a common, if unanalysable, term – the
indefinable element at the basis of their love – that, by manifesting the non-
substantial, or non-ontological, nature of the positions’ disjunction, establishes
them as belonging to a single humanity. This in no way abolishes, however,
the disjunction of the sexuate positions since sexual difference is re-marked in
terms of the new (amorous) configuration in which it now operates. Thus, while
love is the scene in which the truth of the disjunction of sexuate positions is
produced, what each of the positions knows about love or the other sex remains
distinct from the knowledge of the other.
What criteria serve, then, to define sexual difference as this is attested to
within the process of love? As set out in the series of axiomatic definitions
Badiou furnishes in his 1992 text ‘What Is Love?’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are
distinguished in terms of how they function in love, the knowledge they hold
in respect of love, and their relation to humanity, understood as ‘that which
provides support’ for the four truth procedures but which, qua ‘the historical
[historial] body of truths’ (WL/C 184), might also be called ‘the Symbolic’.
Hence, first: woman is concerned with ensuring that love is ongoing and re-
affirmed; man considers that, once named, love no longer needs to be proved.
Second: woman professes the Two to endure throughout life’s vicissitudes,
such that what she knows of love is ontological in scope, focused on the
existence of the Two, or being as such; man focuses, to the contrary, on the
split within the Two that re-marks the void of the disjunction, such that his
is an essentially logical knowledge, concerned with the numerical change
between One and Two. Third and most decisively: woman requires love to
exist for the symbolic configuration of truth procedures to hold and to have
value, whereas man views each type of truth procedure to be in itself a gauge
of humanity, such that each is a metaphor for the others (WL/C 192–197).
That these axiomatic definitions fundamentally concur with the most
common of clichés concerning the difference between the sexes – man
ostensibly does nothing for and in the name of love, woman is the being-
for-love; man is silent and violent, woman is garrulous and makes demands;
‘man is always viewed by the woman as [… ] in the process of leaving’ (WL/C
193, 195 & PE 62) – is fully acknowledged by Badiou. Such clichés compose
the ‘empirical material’ love has to work through in order to establish the
truth of the sexual disjunction, he states, specifying that, in this respect,
the ‘staging of sexual roles’ within a dyadic gender system has the merit of
revealing the disjunction to be a ‘law’ of the situation. Not that gender is
an expression of the disjunction per se; it is but an ‘obscure mediation’ or
‘mediating display’ (WL/C 186). Far better, though, such a mediation than a
sexual indifferentiation that, by obnubilating the disjunction, allows this to
operate all the more forcefully, with individuals simply abandoned thereby
to a solipsistic and, all in all, purely animal sexual regime. Gender roles’
rendering sexual disjunction visible aids love to show, in this sense then, not
only that this disjunction is a law of the situation but, more crucially yet, that
it is nothing more than this – namely, not a substantial division in being itself.
At this point of Badiou’s argumentation, one might, however, query the
operation of a certain circularity. His axiomatic definitions of sexuation
ultimately seem to concur with gender stereotypes because the latter would
themselves, in his view, concur (however ‘obscurely’) with the ‘truth’ of sexual
difference revealed by amorous relationships throughout history – especially
as portrayed in literature (PE 62). This being the case, it would appear that
the ‘real’ of sexual difference resides, in the final analysis, in (axiomatically
consecrated) socio-historically determined, subjective positions alone. What,
then, of the universality Badiou claims for the truths revealed by love: would
this prove simply synonymous with a consistent determination, within the
Western tradition, of the form taken by sexed relations in different socio-
historical configurations? And if so – regardless of whether such a consistent
determination even exists in the West, much less in different cultural
spheres,11 – doesn’t such a claim for love’s production of a universal truth
pertaining to the sexes then squarely come up against the objection (such as
would follow from a perspective such as Luce Irigaray’s12) that all identifiable
‘stagings of sexual roles’ in the history of the West reflect the ‘imaginary’ of
one sexuate position alone: the masculine? Or, put another way, wouldn’t
the truth of sexual difference produced by working through the empirical
material comprised of gender stereotypes turn out to be, qua an assertion
emanating from the sole point of view of man, a ‘truth’ still firmly held within
the sexual disjunction?
With these interrogations in mind, it is all the more appropriate to turn
at this juncture to Badiou’s ‘explication’ with Lacanian psychoanalysis since
not only does this constitute the very core of his axiomatics relative to love
and the sexual disjunction but he disqualifies the ‘truth claims’ advanced by
Lacan in respect to sexuation on precisely the same grounds as those just
put forward: namely, that these claims proceed from one sexuate position
alone and therefore fall short of their pretention to universality. Badiou’s
objections to Lacan crucially hinge furthermore on the question of feminine
jouissance, with this proving, in fact, decisive for his argument that sexual
difference – or, as he more usually puts it, the sexual disjunction – exists
solely in the field of love.
There is, effectively, only one tenet of Lacan’s teaching on sexual difference
with which Badiou wholly agrees: ‘there is no sexual relation’. This holds,
for Badiou, even in the field of love since what love founds ‘is the Two and
not a relationship between the Ones in a Two’ (WL/C 191). For Lacan’s
part, the absence of any reciprocity or complementarity between man and

woman follows from the subjection of speaking beings to a symbolic order
that is fundamentally asymmetrical insofar as it instates the phallus as the
sole signifier determining sexuation. Sexual difference is therefore defined,
regardless of any biological or naturalistic criterion, in terms of what
Lacan designates ‘the phallic function’, understood (to put this somewhat
schematically) as the ‘universal quantifier’ that divides the sexes on either
side of a unary trait: having or being the phallus. There is, then, no sexual
relationship because any interaction between the sexes is mediated by the
phallic signifier, which is equally ‘the cause of jouissance’: ‘jouissance, qua
sexual, is phallic – in other words, it is not related to the Other [to a “sex
as Other”] as such’.13 That said, although the phallic function as a ‘universal
quantifier’ applies to all speaking beings, it nevertheless does so ‘wholly’ in
respect of the masculine position alone. The feminine position, for its part,
is only partially covered by – or ‘not-all’ within – the phallic function, such
that woman constitutes ‘an objection to the universal’.14 Consequently, while
phallic jouissance is always jouissance of an object borne by the body (the
object a) and in no way of ‘the other’ as such, all those who occupy the
feminine sexuate position have, in Lacan’s terms, access to a ‘supplementary
jouissance’ – a jouissance ‘beyond the phallus’ – at the basis of which
‘something other than object a is at stake in what comes to make up for
(suppléer) the sexual relationship that does not exist’.15 ‘Not-all’ under the
phallic function or, in other words, not wholly within the economy of the
object, the feminine position, in sum, both escapes the finitude of phallic
jouissance and renders problematic the function’s universality.
Although embracing the proclamation ‘there is no sexual relation’, Badiou
deems it an error to make the phallic function the ‘universal quantifier’ by
which sexual difference is decided. Relegating this function, for his part,
to the strict register of desire or jouissance alone, Badiou stipulates sexual
difference as such not to exist on this level. Women and men alike are
‘wholly’ subject to the intrinsic finitude accruing to desire and its economy
of the object: there is, in other words, no feminine jouissance, opening onto
the infinite, that women would have access to by virtue of their being ‘not-all’
under the phallic order. Indeed, since such a jouissance calls into question
sexual difference’s basis within a universalizing truth applicable to all equally,
it is absolutely essential for Badiou to disprove such a contention. Whence
the veritable battery of arguments he musters to this end, with these ranging
from highly technical objections – viz. Lacan’s invoking an actual infinite
is incompatible with his reliance on ‘intuitionist logic’16 – to what amounts
to a reductio ad absurdum: Because castration is predicated on the finite
availability of language, feminine jouissance, being of an infinite nature,
must be literally dumb or speechless, such that either some part of woman
comprises (despite all) an angelic negation of castration or women, in the
infinite element of their enjoyment, must silently make an axiomatic decision
that something of this enjoyment is inaccessible to the phallic order (SI/C
216–217; 221).
Whatever the twists and turns of Badiou’s argumentation here, however,
the crux of his refutation of an infinite feminine jouissance ultimately consists
in declaring the latter a ‘fiction’ or ‘fantasy’ that attests to a fundamental
misconception of the sexual disjunction. Lacan’s formulae of sexuation are
indeed flawed from the start, in this sense, for Badiou since, defining the
phallic function as having strict universality for the masculine position
alone, they determine sexual difference from within the disjunction itself,
with the phallic function being unsuitable, as such, as a support for the
universal. Indeed, the very supposition of an infinite, inaccessible, feminine
jouissance could only emanate from the masculine position according to
Badiou, for whom Lacan’s formulae thereby uphold ‘the segregative thesis
of sexual difference’ (ST 47). If the disjunction of the sexes is presumed
such that there is no element whatsoever in common to the two, and each
sex accordingly knows nothing of the space occupied by the other, then
it follows, Badiou states, that the masculine position is fantasmatically
predisposed to imagining a mysterious and potentially infinite dilation of
the feminine. While this obviously begs the question of what mechanisms
might, then, underlie (at least some) women’s own claims of a ‘pantheistic,
infinite enjoyment’ – a question Badiou never raises, unless the reference
to women’s silently making an axiomatic decision of this type is to be taken
seriously –, ‘woman’s infinitude’ is in the final analysis for Badiou both the
necessary correlate of any stance maintaining a complete segregation of the
sexes and proof per se that such a stance errs in its conception of the sexual
disjunction (ST 48–50). For, all while agreeing with Lacan that there is no
relation between the sexes, Badiou sets down that there has, nonetheless, to
be at least one term with which both sexuate positions entertain a relation.
This is, of course, the indefinable, unanalysable element brought into play by
love, which establishes man and woman as belonging to a single humanity.
Now, it is critical for the comprehension of Badiou’s axiomatics of love and
sexual difference to grasp that the element operative in love – and thereby in
the ‘humanity function’ replacing Lacan’s phallic function as core criterion
of the sexes’ distribution – consists in a sublimatory transmutation of the
object a. Transposed within a ‘different topology’ by virtue of the amorous
encounter (ST 54), the object a now serves as the point of intersection on
the basis of which the sexes compose an immanent figure of the Two and
is, as such, renamed by Badiou ‘the atom u’ by way of marking (in part)
the ‘universality’ to which it attests (ST 48). Badiou specifies the ‘atom u’
to animate the non-sexual component of the love relationship, even though
u’s ‘causality’ here must be understood to operate through its ‘internal
excision’ from the two sexuate positions. It is, as such, as ‘an absent centre’,
or sublimatory subsumption of a, that u governs the ‘external expansion’
of the Two of the lovers in their shared investigation of the world from
the perspective no longer of One but of Two. This new experience of truth
concerning what it is to be Two and not One, or, in other words, concerning
the nature of the disjunction or of difference as such, is, then, what properly
defines love, for Badiou, as not only a truth process of universalizing scope
but, beyond this, the ‘very guardian of the universality of the true’. Love quite
simply ‘elucidates the possibility of universality’ (WL/C 190).
Yet, here again, a certain tension or highly condensed point of
problematicity becomes apparent in Badiou’s conceptual apparatus. For
while ‘love’s truth’, for Badiou, is that sexual difference is not a duality or
plurality of situations grounded in a separation in being but simply a law
of one shared situation such that a common humanity is shared by the two
sexes, the fact that the latter nonetheless relate to this ‘common symbolic’
in markedly distinct ways calls into question love’s very capacity to furnish
a universal ground on which sexual difference can be thought. It is crucial
to recall here Badiou’s core axiomatic definition of the sexes’ disjunction in
respect of the humanity function: namely, man views the symbolic sphere as
a composite of the different truth procedures, such that each type of truth can
stand for all the others, whereas woman privileges love as the truth procedure
that would knot all the others together and without which the symbolic
sphere, or humanity, as a whole simply does not exist. Defining ‘woman’
thereby as the position that upholds love as the guarantee of a universality to
humanity – as what ensures that this is indeed shared –, Badiou’s axiomatics
of love end up assigning the universal quantifier to the feminine position
and not, pace Lacan’s sexual formulae premised upon the ‘universality’ of
the phallic function, to man (WL/C 198). Would, though – to recall here
the interrogations of ‘non-universality’ raised above – Badiou’s ‘returning the
universal quantifier to women’ not thereby commit the same error he detects
in Lacan: namely, that of treating the problem of sexual difference from
within the sexual disjunction itself? Of course, Badiou’s whole argument
rests on the claim that, whereas the phallic function – despite its applying
to both sexes – is uni-positional by virtue of its having strict universality in
respect of the masculine position alone, the humanity function introduced
by love is, to the contrary, of trans-positional scope and relative to men and
women equally. Yet the fact remains that it is indeed within the terms of sexual
difference as defined on the ground furnished by love that woman is marked
as singularly upholding love’s status as the guarantee of universality, whereas

man, not according love such universal sway, might be said to be the sexuate
position for which love is ‘not-all’. The humanity function has, as such, strict
universality relative to the feminine position alone, and is – no less than the
phallic function – always-already situated within the disjunction of the sexes.
Not only, then, is this function uni-positional but Badiou’s revision of Lacan’s
formulae of sexuation is thereby shown to (still) uphold a certain ‘feminine
exceptionality’: an exceptionality displaced from the field of jouissance to
that of love.
In short: by way of a curious form of meta-paradox, Badiou’s ‘sublimatory’
understanding of woman as a category defined by the particularity of making
truth, or universality, dependent upon the operation of love, ultimately marks
a sexuate specificity within, or with respect to, the universal that borders on
a sexuation of thought itself. Needless to say, this outcome runs diametrically
counter to Badiou’s express intention in his texts on love to dismiss any
possibility of truths being sexuated. That is, although the co-existence of,
respectively, a feminine science and a masculine science, a feminine political
vision and a masculine political vision and so on, would seem to follow
logically from the assertion of a sexual disjunction entailing that each of the
two positions, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, can know nothing of the experience of
the other, Badiou maintains that love is precisely the place that proves truth
to be, on the contrary, generic. Indeed, the operation of love is articulated
around this very paradox – namely, that the sexual disjunction is radical, yet
truth is subtracted from every positional disjunction (WL/C 186).
As we know, however, some twenty years later Badiou was to set out,
in a radical inflection of this tenet, the necessity of examining the way in
which sexuation functions in the domains of political, scientific, artistic and
amorous truths. Would not ‘woman’ as a category taken up within the truth
procedure of love have presaged, or, perhaps more strictly, have forced, such
a ‘turn’ in Badiou’s thought?
SUBLATION, or woman as the going-beyond of the One
Embryonic expressions of a sexuation of truths

From the perspective of ‘What Is Love?’ it does indeed seem inconceivable
that Badiou should raise in 2011 questions such as ‘What is a woman artist;
a woman excelling in mathematics or physics; a woman philosopher?’ ‘And
what do the fields of politics, art, science and love become once women fully
participate [… ] in the creative equality of symbols?’ Equally, everything
I’ve outlined here in respect of Badiou’s positions in the 1980s and 1990s on
woman as particularity and the process of political truths or other symbolic
initiatives shows that, during this period, truths always involve for Badiou
subtraction from a particular standpoint. This position is maintained,
moreover, in most of his work published in the early 2000s, be these major
texts such as Logics of Worlds, or more circumstantial writings such as the
‘Manifesto of Affirmationism’, which sets down that art, as the impersonal
production of a truth addressed to all, ‘cannot be the expression of mere
particularity’17 – a maxim that obviously rules out any such entity as ‘women’s
art’. That said, there are sporadic indications from the very end of the 1990s
on that Badiou was open to rethinking the question of truths’ sexuation
and, hence, more largely, the ‘immanence of truths’ insofar as that which is
ultimately involved here is a truth’s relation to its originating site – which is,
of necessity, a particularity.18
In 1999, in a short text entitled ‘Of Woman as a Category of Being’ – serving
as the preface for a book originally written as a thesis under his supervision –,
Badiou notes his ‘having had to be convinced’ that woman can be a concept
before setting down quasi-programmatically that, were one indeed committed
to the ontological enterprise of thinking sexuated being, then this entails taking
‘another step in the universal’.19 That said, it is not until 2008 that Badiou takes
a more decisive stance on the sexuation of truths when, in a discussion of
The Incident at Antioch, he specifies his reasons for making the play’s main
protagonist a woman.20 Interestingly, in the preface to his book on St Paul in
1997, Badiou had explained this ‘feminization’ of the play’s central figure as
simply a means of preventing too explicit an identification. Eleven years later,
however, he sets out a very different motivation for the change of sex. The
gesture of going from Paul to Paula, he now states, signifies that the ‘old vision’
of sexual difference, casting religious or political theory and political action
in masculine terms, is a thing of the past. The question posed today is that of
a new relationship between sexual difference and the political field whereby
women take on a ‘new importance’ insofar as a political subject/subjectivity
no longer organized around power would reflect a feminine perspective on
political thought and action. Of this new relationship, this new importance
of women for the political field, he can, Badiou adds, offer no real proof; it is
rather of the order of an intuition, though one obviously related to the ‘great
feminine movements of the past century’.21
While Badiou claims to have had the intuition of a new relationship
between sexual difference and politics at the time of writing The Incident at
Antioch, it seems clear – for all the reasons just enumerated regarding his work
in the 1980s and 1990s – that such an ‘intuition’ is something new for Badiou
himself: something, that is, he only formulates in 2008 and retrospectively
applies to the play written some twenty-six years earlier. Nothing in the
play, in fact, explicitly signals that the new form of emancipatory politics
advocated by Paula would be intrinsically indexed to a singularly new figure
of the feminine – or, put another way, that it is, indeed, as a figure of the ‘new
woman’ that Paula bears this innovatory form of politics. Rather, the whole
point of the play’s dramatizing ‘the relation between departicularization and
universalization’ is – as indicated earlier – that a woman’s being a subjective
body of truth proffers exemplary proof of universality’s power to cut through
differences, such that Paul’s becoming Paula constitutes, all in all, a dramatic
enactment of Paul’s foundational tenet of truths’ indifference to difference.
That said, Badiou’s intuition or insight concerning the sexuation of symbolic
thought might be said to be found in the play in embryo – as is perhaps clearest
in the ‘second great ideological scene’ in which Paula tries to convince her
son, the then head of the revolutionary party previously co-led by his father,
to give up power and allow the desire for emancipation to be reinstated in
a totally different perspective (IA Act III, Scene 4). As set out in this scene,
Paula’s advocacy of a new form of emancipatory politics could indeed be
understood to follow from her position as a woman: as though the figure
of the mother would emblematically herald a path beyond the discourse of
(paternal) power and the law.
Particularly illuminating in this respect are the three short texts Badiou
published in the 1990s on the fifteenth-century resistance fighter, Joan of
Arc, and two mathematicians working respectively in the early nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, Sophie Germain (whom we have already
mentioned) and Emmy Noether. As seen, the triumph of Germain’s work
on the problem of elastic surfaces – which equally counts as a triumph over
her epoch’s massive sexual inequality – is proffered as proof, by Badiou, of
truths’ indifference to difference: viz. ‘“Woman” names here the dazzling
universality of mathematics.’ In the terms of Badiou’s analyses, Noether and
Joan of Arc perfectly illustrate this exemplarity of ‘woman’, qua paradigmatic
expression of universality’s neutrality, no less than does Germain. Noether’s
accomplishing, despite all the barriers erected by the university of her time,
the ‘Platonic enterprise’ of transforming into more abstract, ideal conditions
and generalities the object-based methods of her predecessors – foremost
amongst whom her father, a specialist of algebraic geometry – is accordingly
situated by Badiou as ‘a significant allegory, almost a chiasm of the sexes,
and, thus, a lesson contra any rigid view of the paths of universality’.22 As
for Joan of Arc, it is precisely the choice ‘not to be reduced to the predicates
of submission her time imposed upon her’ that makes of her, in Badiou’s
terms, a ‘truth of her time’ and, as such, a ‘truth for ever’.23 All three of these
exemplary women are, in this sense, ‘subtractively bound’ to their epoch:24
the truths that they themselves are, are at once totally immanent to this
epoch and yet subtracted.25 That they should thereby wrest themselves from
the predicates of ‘woman’ imposed upon them and accede to the status of
a subject of symbolic truth ultimately constitutes, for Badiou, not simply a
‘proof ’ but a ‘supplementary proof ’ of the fact that, ‘in the form of such a
subject, humanity encounters itself ’.26
Yet, notwithstanding this glowing, threefold attestation to universality’s
neutrality adduced by Badiou, his analyses of these women’s ‘subtractive
binding’ (nouage substractif) to their time implicitly plead for a very different
understanding of the universal and woman’s relation to it – which, if contrary
to Badiou’s intentions in the 1990s, nonetheless accords with his later
reorientation in respect of sexuation. After all, what he shows, succinctly
put, is that in the case of this trio of exceptional women ‘subtraction
from particularity’ consists in the refusal to be reduced to the ‘predicates
of submission’ a patriarchal social formation would impose upon them.
The victory represented by Noether’s, Germain’s and Joan of Arc’s creative
initiatives is not, in this sense then, first and foremost one of ‘humanity’,
but – qua the very condition underlying this latter – a victory over man’s
monopolization of symbolic processes. Badiou’s analyses here would, as a
result, seem – from the perspective of his philosophical trajectory overall –
to be in the process of assembling, as it were, the elements from which (in
part) will eventually arise the insight he was not to explicitly formulate until
2011: namely, that the organization of symbolic thought has itself historically
depended on the Name of the Father (FF 10).
Of a no longer in-different universal

That a sexuation of truths is inevitable once a symbolic order structured by
the sole ‘logic of the One’, or Paternal Signifier, comes to its demise – viz. the
demise of God – is, indeed, the core contention of ‘Figures of Femininity in
the Contemporary World’. Badiou unhesitantly asserts in this paper – and
subsequently elsewhere27 – that women’s full participation in art, science,
politics and love, as well as philosophy, cannot fail to open these fields to
‘completely new possibilities’, adducing in this regard the series of definitions
he proffers of femininity. Badiou first sets down that, underlying all traditional
figures of femininity – which invariably involve a sort of ‘doubling’ along the
lines of the mother/whore dichotomy – there is the ‘profound, abstract idea’
that woman is defined by a logic of the Two or the passing-between-two.
Femininity is, as such, opposed to the affirmation of the One or a unique
instance of power, which is traditionally characteristic on the contrary, of
course, of masculinity (FF 10). Indeed, it is the relation to the One – insofar
as this One precisely is not – that governs the formula of feminine sexuation,
Badiou contends, rather than, as Lacan would have it, the negative relation
to the Whole or the not-All (FF 11). Badiou expressly sets out to show, in
this regard moreover, that ‘a formalism dialecticizing the One and the Two
suffices for thinking sexuation’. Whence his specifying the ‘logic of the Two
or passing-between-two’ that defines femininity to consist in ‘the affirmation
of the non-being of the One’ or the ‘process of non-being constitutive of the
whole being of the One’: woman would, in other words, set up alongside
whatever claims to be (of the) One another – a second – term by which the
first is precisely disunified. This dialecticized axiomatics of sexuation then
culminates in Badiou’s ‘speculative’ definition: ‘Woman is the going-beyond
of the One in the form of a passing-between-two’ (FF 12).
‘Woman’ so defined can indeed foster confidence in the becoming of
symbolic truths – which is to say, the universal. For, transposed to the context
of contemporary capitalism – characterized by Badiou as seeking to ‘unify’
woman in the figure of a new One erected on the ruins of the Name of the
Father – this formula of femininity assures that women will pass between
both traditional and contemporary representations of femininity and (in
conformity with their very nature, so to speak) circumvent or undo the
revamped figure of the One proposed to them by ‘passing beyond’ to the
invention of new forms of symbolic creation (FF 16). All that granted, were
the question of women’s creation of truths set aside for the moment, there is
a further aspect of Badiou’s definitions of femininity here that is of no less
consequence for his conception of a ‘sexuated universal’. It is, in fact, striking
that the ‘numericity’ these definitions mobilize remains strictly homologous
with the formalism proposed two decades earlier in ‘What Is Love?’, where
a dialectized relation of the One and Two yields the formula not only of
sexuation – as regards both ‘the Two of the sexes’ (stipulated, of course, to
exist solely within the field of love) and the axiomatic definitions of man and
woman that then ensue – but of love ‘itself ’, qua an evental procedure defined
by the ‘effraction of the One by the Two’. Badiou’s ‘thinking of sexuation’ in
2011 is, in short, still under, or at least ‘compatible with’, the condition of love.
This being the case, we thus find ourselves directly confronted with the
very question from which this ‘cartography’ of woman’s adventures with/in
the universal over the course of Badiou’s work first set out. For, what indeed
are we to make of the fact that, despite their continued compliance with the
condition of love, Badiou’s 2011 formulae of feminine sexuation support an
inevitable sexuation of truths, whereas twenty years earlier the truth love
produces is precisely that the sexual disjunction has no bearing for the ‘one’
of humanity or the universal, such that not only love’s truth but all truths
are trans-positional… failing which, one might say, they are no truths at
all? This very reformulation, though, of our initial interrogation of Badiou’s

reorientation vis-à-vis the tenet of truths’ trans-positionality immediately
reveals – or confirms – where the key to this inflection lies. For, as important
as the ‘insight’ of symbolic thought’s historical dependence on the Name
of the Father may be for the formulation – or formalism –, Badiou gives of
the sexuation of truths in 2011, the pivot on which his thought ‘turns’ in
this regard is undoubtedly the point, or points, of problematicity met with
in his conceptualization of love. Indeed, as indicated earlier in terms of the
meta-paradox affecting Badiou’s sublimatory understanding of woman, his
axiomatic stipulation that love assures a universal ground to the two sexes
seems itself incapable of ‘dealing with’ the very problem – or paradox – it
accredits this truth procedure with making sense of: namely, given the
existence of two sexuated positions that are so irreducibly disjunct that they
seem to disjoin humanity itself, ‘how can a truth come to be for all, or trans-
positional?’ (WL/C 185).
Let us recall that the way in which love was said, in 1992 (‘What Is Love?’),
to ‘treat’ this paradox is – as Badiou succinctly puts it – by making truth of the
paradox itself. Yes, there is an irreducible disjunction between the sexes – as
‘is actually a non-paradoxical or apparent law of things’ (WL/C 186) – but
this disjunction is the law of one shared situation and not, as the ‘apparent
law of things’ would have it, a duality, or plurality, of situations grounded
in a separation in being. ‘Love fractures the One in accordance to the Two.
And it is on this basis that it can be thought that, although worked over by
the disjunction, the situation is exactly as if there is a One, and that it is
through this One-multiple that all truth is assured’ (WL/C 189). Love yields,
in other words, a new figure of the Two and the disjunction, and does so
on the basis, of course, of an evental encounter by virtue of which man and
woman now share something in common that establishes them as belonging
to a single humanity. All of which may be summed up by stating that the
‘generic multiplicity’ – that ‘anonymous’ part of the situation (or ‘world’)
eluding the predicates of available knowledge – which love, qua event, brings
into existence is nothing other than the disjunction itself, and this generic
status of the disjunction is precisely the ‘response’ love gives to the paradox
of two disjunct positions but a trans-positionality of truths.28
The problem with this response, though, is that, despite Badiou’s
characterizing the generic as ‘difference reduced to almost nothing, that is,
to being of the same [situation or] presentation’,29 the disjunctive synthesis
formed by the ‘Two of the lovers’, qua the ‘smallest possible kernel of
universality’, quite simply introduces difference into the universal. This is
not to ignore that the introduction of difference into the same is merely, in a
sense, what is proper to love, with the other types of truths progressing, on
the contrary, from difference or diversity to the same (PE 41). Yet, as set out
earlier in our analyses of the two sexes’ differential relation to the humanity
function, this internal difference proves problematic to the extent that the
latter function is itself thereby shown to fall short of the trans-positionality –
and, hence, universality – Badiou claims for it since it is always/already
situated within the sexual disjunction, which is to say, constitutively ‘split’
along the axis of sexuation. Badiou himself, moreover, crucially identifies a
problem of this order – the ‘disruption of a truth’s unity’ – as being found ‘at
the core’ of his theorization of love when stipulating, in Philosophy and the
Event, the points of his philosophy he is to focus on in The Immanence of
Truths (PE 118). Given it is impossible to admit that a ‘duality internal’ to the
experience of incorporation disrupts the unity of the subject, it is necessary,
he states, to account for ‘how individual difference function[s] within the
protocol of truth’ without this difference – or indeed, in the case of love,
‘complete separation’ – calling into question universal applicability (PE 117–
118). The third volume of Being and Event is to entail, as a result, a formal
transformation of the category of negation, by the means of which the co-
existence of differences or contradictory perceptions is without consequence
for the unity of the truth in question. Whether the new formalism involved –
the logic of paraconsistent negation – will, in fact, resolve the ‘meta-paradox’
of love’s truth being disrupted by a disjunction claimed to be constitutive,
qua generic multiplicity, of its very core remains, of course, to be seen. What
can be set down here and now, however, is that Badiou’s new focus on the
question of difference – as implicated in all truth procedures, and not solely
love – undoubtedly stems from the problem presented by the Two of the
lovers: that unique subject or un-multiple, which, though specified to be
the ‘smallest possible’ universal singularity, not only displays a disruption of
unity but does so on the very point of the sexes’ supposed ‘intersection’ – viz.
the humanity function, or element u.
It is instructive in this light that the modifications Badiou has made to his
formulations of love over the last two decades effectively testify both to his
rethinking the protocol of this truth through the prism of difference and to
his re-evaluation of the latter concept per se – ‘difference’ being, it must be
recalled, hitherto consistently qualified by Badiou as without any significance
whatsoever for thought. Indeed, in conformity with this assignation to
insignificance, difference is a concept – or, rather, word – that is quasi absent
from ‘What Is Love?’, ‘The Scene of the Two’ and Manifesto for Philosophy,
Badiou’s early texts on love, where the very locution ‘sexual difference’ finds
itself replaced by that of ‘sexual disjunction’. The subsequent shift in Badiou’s
thinking can be indicated by a simple comparison of the ways in which he
defines the Two of the lovers from ‘What Is Love?’ to In Praise of Love,30
his relatively recent book-length study of the question: In 1992, the Two
of the lovers ‘is specifically the name of the disjunct as apprehended in its
disjunction’ (WL/C 189); Six years later, in ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’,31
this same definition, so to speak, is reformulated as ‘the undivided subjective
experience of absolute difference’ – the amorous scene being ‘the only scene
in which a universal singularity [… ] ultimately pertaining to difference as
such [… ] is proclaimed’ (ET/TW146); In 2009, In Praise of Love stipulates
again that ‘difference as such’ (IP 38) is the content, or experience, of the
truth attested to by the Two of the lovers: ‘All love produces [… ] a new truth
about difference’ (IP 38–39).
Badiou’s conceptualization of love must be understood to shift away, as
such, from an initial emphasis on the unicity proper to the situation whatever
the workings of the disjunction – ‘as if there is a One, and… through this One-
multiple… all truth is assured’ –, to increasingly focus on the co-existence
of differences as that which renders this protocol of truth an ‘experience
of potential universality’ (IP 17). Certainly, this does not mitigate in any
profound sense the primacy his thought of the universal attributes to unicity.
Badiou’s intentions are, as seen, clear: to set out how difference functions
within the protocol of truth without this disrupting truths’ unity, which is
to say, the unicity of universality. Yet the shift in emphasis, or perspective, is
significant: it tallies, in fact, with that, presaged for The Immanence of Truths,
from ‘asking about truths in relation to being’ to asking about ‘being from the
point of view of truths’ (PE 107). What it attests to above all, however, is the
crucially constitutive convergence between Badiou’s rethinking love through
the prism of difference and the reorientation of his thought on the point of
truths’ sexuation. The universal can no longer be indifferent to difference
since, with love’s introduction of sexual disjunction/difference into its very
core, it is, itself, no longer in-different at all.32
9
An Inessential Art?: Positioning

Cinema in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy
Alex Ling
Alain Badiou’s philosophy is nothing less than a rigorous attempt to think

novelty itself; at one end, a thinking of how something new – and, crucially,
universal – arrives in a world, and at the other, of how real global change can
come about. Which is equally to say that his principal concerns lie with the
possibility of thought per se: of thought as divorced from the perambulations
of knowledge; of thought as what cuts through or ‘interrupts repetition’ and
delivers to us something truly new; of thought as ‘the existence of a possible
relation to truth, and nothing else’.1
Needless to say, such original thought is fundamentally rare, and doesn’t
occur just anywhere. In fact, as is by now well known, Badiou holds there to
be but four generic fields in which real thinking might take place, being the
fields of art, politics, science and love. It is moreover by virtue of this fact that
these four fields also constitute the sole conditions of his philosophy, insofar
as the single (and singular) objective of philosophy, as Badiou defines it, is
that of bringing together (or ‘compossibilizing’) these disparate thoughts. Put
simply, philosophy is nothing less – and, it must be said, nothing more – than
‘the thinking of thought’ (D 21). Or to be more precise, it is the (re)thinking
of the real thought that truth-procedures think.
This absolute need on the part of philosophy to investigate its own
conditions has naturally proven to be the driving force behind much of the
secondary scholarship surrounding Badiou’s work, not least concerning his
engagement with politics (specifically communism) and science (in particular
mathematics). Given this clear philosophical imperative, it is interesting to note
that Badiou’s many writings on cinema have to date received comparatively
scant attention. For aside from a smattering of papers that critically engage
with his work on cinema, the only sustained investigation of the relation of
Badiou’s philosophy to film remains my own Badiou and Cinema (although
this may soon change now that Badiou’s own various writings on film have
been brought together by Antoine de Baecque in the collection Cinema).2
On one level, this critical oversight is unsurprising, given that Badiou’s

best-known musings on film appear (at least at first glance) to suggest
that, far from serving to condition his philosophy, cinema is in fact of little
consequence to Badiou. This suspicion is only further confirmed when we
place these works alongside his more exuberant writings on poetry, theatre,
music and the like. His portrayal of cinema as an art that is ‘both parasitic and
inconsistent’ (HB 83), for example, would appear rather less than inspiring
(to say nothing of the more ‘excremental’ metaphors Badiou employs,
whereby cinema is associated with processes of ‘purging’ and ‘purification’,
and is alternatively described as ‘contaminated’ and a ‘waste product’…).
However, as with the cinema itself, appearances can be deceiving, and
Badiou’s philosophical engagement with cinema actually stretches back at
least as far as 1957, with the publication of his first paper on ‘Cinematic
Culture’ in the journal Vin Nouveau.3 Since then, Badiou has in fact: written
well-over thirty articles on cinema; founded and regularly contributed to two
separate cinema journals (La Feuille foudre and L’art du cinéma); appeared (in
one way or another) in two of Jean-Luc Godard’s films (La Chinoise and Film
Socialisme); and even (so we’re told) started work on his own ‘big feature film’
on The Life of Plato (La Vie de Platon).
Moreover, when we look closely, we can discern a noticeable evolution
in Badiou’s thoughts on film. While previously content to define cinema
alternatively as a ‘bastard art’ or a ‘Saturday night art’,4 we now find him
saying: that ‘cinema is the art that, still today, seems to me the most alive,
the most active ’ (PE 84); that cinema ‘is today the only art that is cut to
the measure of the world’;5 and that ‘in publishing the final synthesis of my
philosophy… I will try to turn philosophy toward filmic expression’.6 And
indeed, the gradual unravelling of a theory of appearing in Logics of Worlds
and similar works arguably follows a decidedly cinematic logic, so much
so that it is not unreasonable to argue that if poetry serves as the artistic
paradigm for thinking the subtractive purity of presentation – as it did in
Being and Event and other works of the period – it is in fact cinema that best
illuminates the logics of appearance. Thus, it comes as little surprise when in
his recent Second Manifesto for Philosophy he argues that cinema’s ‘advent of
virtual images or images without any referent undoubtedly opens a new stage
of questions of representation’ (SMP 122). For the very nature of cinema
raises questions that reach beyond ‘the flat surface of indifferent multiplicity’
(MT 165) and the thought of presentation as such, to instead think everything
that is presented (or ‘appears’) in the infinity of the real situation itself.
At the same time, however, we can also isolate a number of constant
themes present in Badiou’s cinematographic writings, such as the way that
cinema functions as a peculiarly pedagogical medium – one which confronts
An Inessential Art? 129
its audience with questions regarding ‘their orientation in the contemporary

world, the world and its exaltation, its vitality, but also its difficulty, its
complexity’ (CMA 18) – as well as how, in sharp contrast to the other arts,
cinematic thought is primarily conceived negatively, through a process of
purification (on which we will have much to say presently).
In any case, as Badiou sees it, philosophy is obliged to engage with film
for the simple reason that ‘cinema is a philosophical situation’ (CMA 202).
The aim of this paper is accordingly to consider Badiou’s understanding of
cinema itself – that is, cinema taken in its generic sense, as an art almost
entirely defined by its relation to other arts – and draw out some of the
more interesting artistic and philosophical consequences of his position.
As there is much to cover here our approach will be multipronged. We will
begin with an examination of cinema’s paradoxical relation to being and
appearing, or its status as an ‘onto-logical art’. Following this we will briefly
review Badiou’s inaesthetic conception of art (in particular its relation to
truth and philosophy), before moving on to discuss cinema’s unique position
among the arts. We will then conclude by addressing some (more) of the
paradoxes Badiou’s understanding of cinema gives rise to, as well as some of
the challenges it presents his philosophical system as a whole.
False real copies of a false real
That Badiou understands cinema as a ‘philosophical situation’ ultimately

stems from the fact that it presents us with a number of ‘paradoxical
relations’.7 As Badiou says, ‘a situation is philosophical, or “for” philosophy,
when it forces the existence of a relation between terms that, in general, or in
common opinion, can have no relation to each other’ (P 3). Of the many such
relations on offer in cinema, arguably the most immediate concern those
between being and appearing.
To be sure, that cinema is generally understood to constitute an
‘ontological art’ is due to the fact that it proposes, in its very nature, an
altogether impossible relation between artifice and reality (or between
semblance and the real). This is after all the ‘classic’ philosophical entry into
the question of cinema, championed by the likes of André Bazin (among
others), who famously held that ‘there is ontological identity between the
object and its photographic image’.8 Bazin of course, like Walter Benjamin
before him, premised cinema’s ontological efficacy on the basis of the relative
autonomy of the photographic process, observing that while ‘all the arts are
based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from
his absence’.9 Simply, human interference, according to Bazin, necessitates
an ontological inconsistency, a definite shift away from an ‘essential’ re-

presentation (where the object and its reproduced image are ontologically
identical) towards a merely ‘apparent’ representation (where the image only
serves to approximate the object; where the image and the object, while
ontologically ‘similar’, fail to coincide).
Now, Badiou of course holds as untenable any understanding of cinema
as an ontological art on the basis of some ‘essential’ relation it exhibits
between its own intrinsic semblance and an objective reality that remains
fundamentally exterior to it. But this is not to say that Bazin’s protestations
regarding the inherent ‘realism’ of cinema must be abandoned altogether.
Rather, the terms of the relationship simply need to be rearranged: cinema is
not, strictly speaking, an ontological art; to the contrary, cinema is a logical
art. Or again, film is not (as we will see) an essential art – an art of ‘essences’ –
but rather one of appearances (‘appearing’ being, for Badiou, one and the
same as logic, as what appears is nothing other than a logical determination
of what is). Meaning what is peculiar to cinema is in fact its ability to stage
the complex interplay between being and being-there – between the purity
of the real and the relative impurity of semblance, or between what is and
what appears – by way of the fiction of appearing. Cinema is then finally not
an ontological art but rather an onto-logical art (or to be perfectly precise,
a logically onto-logical art): it is the art of appearing which dramatizes its
relation with being.
So even if we can no longer suppose with Bazin any ontological identity
between the object and its photographic image, this is not to say that the
image fails to demonstrate any logical coherency. For such purely logical
identity remains on the plain of appearing and thereby eschews questions of
essence. As Badiou observes, ‘the principle of the art of cinema lies precisely
in subtly showing that it is only cinema, that its images only testify to the real
to the extent that they are manifestly images’.10 Which is equally to say that
the cinematic image can have no ontological identity to its referent precisely
because it is image (however, as we have just seen, this does not rule out its
having a logical identity). In a word, cinema does not present the real of the
image; rather, it presents images of the real. (Or as Godard famously put it:
‘not a just image, just an image’.) In subtracting the image from the visible –
this being, after all, the basic operation of cinema – cinema does not cut from
what is, but from what is there.
The fundamental point then is that the real of cinema is paradoxically
internal to semblance. Meaning that cinema is at once absolutely real (in its
manifest falsity) and absolutely false (in its manifest reality). Or as Badiou
puts it, each and every film presents us with ‘the false real copy of a false
real’.11 Yet this is precisely where cinema’s virtue as an onto-logical art lies:
in the very real of semblance, which is to say, in the reality of artifice; in its
‘thinking appearance as appearance, and thus as that aspect of being which,
by coming to appear, gives itself to thought as a disappointment of seeing’.12
Plainly put, that there can be no transitivity between the thing itself and its
filmic (re)appearance means that cinema truly is a superficial art. We need
not understand this assertion as being pejorative. Rather, it simply means
that cinema is an art of surfaces, not essences. Indeed, this is, in the final
analysis, the very core of the paradoxical relation by which cinema figures as
an onto-logical art: the art that so effectively displays the infinite wealth of
being is precisely the art whose real is nothing but the desert of semblance.
Intraphilosophical effects
We can already see that cinema holds a unique ‘borderline’ position amongst
the arts. Simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘false’, ‘vital’ and ‘parasitic’, cinema is
undoubtedly a most paradoxical art. But what exactly does cinema mean
to art itself? And what, moreover, does art mean for philosophy? Central
to Badiou’s writings on art is his contention that art is not an object for
philosophy, but rather one of its fundamental conditions. Needless to say,
proclaiming art’s ‘conditional’ status is in no way to suggest that art serves, or
is somehow subordinate to, philosophy. To the contrary, art is most assuredly
its own master. In fact, the relationship is, if anything, the other way around,
for while philosophy has a definite need for art, art can happily make do
without philosophy.
This one-sided relationship is moreover one of the principal reasons
behind Badiou’s rejection of traditional aesthetics – which he holds has little
to add outside of establishing various rules and hierarchies of ‘liking’ – in
favour of an approach to art which limits its interest to the manner by which
art effectively thinks for itself, and thus might come to affect philosophy.
Briefly, he calls this approach to art ‘inaesthetics’, and defines it as ‘a relation
of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths,
makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic
speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects
produced by the independent existence of some works of art’ (HB xiv).
Of this definition, we will suffice ourselves for the moment by saying that,
as a philosopher, one of Badiou’s foremost concerns is to examine art – or
rather particular arts; some arts (most notably poetry) – as constitutive of
what he calls universal truths, and, as such, as having something essential to
offer philosophy. And indeed, we have already noted that art constitutes one
of the four generic conditions of his philosophy (alongside politics, science
and love), and that philosophy, as Badiou defines it, operates only inasmuch
as it seizes these independent truths and places them in an immanent relation
to one another.
In point of fact, philosophy according to Badiou is itself fundamentally
truthless, being rather the unique discipline tasked with thinking the
compossibility of the various (artistic, political, amorous and scientific) truths
that litter the world (and that are themselves ultimately forms of thought). Or
again, Badiou tells us that there are truths which exist out there, prior to and
wholly independent of philosophy, and that the latter’s job is precisely that
of grasping these diverse truths and ‘re-thinking’ (or re-articulating) them
in such a way that they can be brought together to cohere in a single system,
which is finally what he calls ‘a philosophy’ (HB 14). Thus, the relationship
between art and philosophy (or indeed between philosophy and any of its
conditions) is for Badiou not an ‘instructive’ but rather a ‘thoughtful’ one,
where philosophy is charged with re-thinking the thought that art first thinks.
To come full circle, it is of course philosophy’s structurally ‘secondary’
nature – its forever coming after truths – that leads Badiou to write off
aesthetics in favour of ‘inaesthetics’, which, as we have already seen, restricts
itself to ‘the intraphilosophical effects produced by the existence of some
works of art’ (HB xiv). In a word, it is truths that prescribe philosophy, and
philosophy doesn’t condescend to its conditions. Returning then to Badiou’s
definition of inaesthetics, it is important to highlight how this term designates
moreover the philosophical recapitulation of a relation between art and truth
that is at once singular and immanent. This relationship is absolutely crucial
for Badiou – as it is for our argument here – and as such it is worth pausing
to consider in some detail.
First, the relationship between art and truth is ‘singular’ inasmuch as
Badiou holds that every artistic truth is peculiar to the art in question. This is
in part a consequence of, on the one hand, his adamant belief that the arts
constitute fundamentally closed systems (no painting is ever going to turn
into music, no poem is ever going to become dance, and so on), and, on
the other, the fact that every truth, while universal in address, is always the
truth of a particular situation, and in art this situation is generally (though
not necessarily) the situation of a particular art. Or as Badiou puts it, every
artistic truth is ‘in a rigorous immanence to the art in question’ (HB 13): it is
always a truth of this art, in this situation (and not another).
Parenthetically, it is at this point that some people may be tempted to write
Badiou off as just another ‘high modernist’. To be sure, every so often it can
appear as though he is recycling a (supposedly discredited) line of thought
generally associated with the modernist project; namely, the idea that it is the
exclusive commitment of each art to its proper medium that will finally allow
it to lay bare its ‘pure form’ (or, as Badiou would have it, its ‘generic truth’).
Now, while Badiou may well at times be arguing something not entirely
dissimilar to this, we would be far off the mark were we to reduce his thought
to this kind of Greenbergian ‘autotomizing’ framework. Indeed, while it is
clear that each art is for Badiou entirely differentiated from the other arts
(possessing its own form, its own possibilities, particular content and modes
of expression, and so on), it is important to remember that an artistic truth is
always the truth of a particular (artistic) situation, and a ‘situation’, so far as
Badiou conceives it, is an incredibly plastic concept, inasmuch as it basically
means any grouping whatsoever. So, for example, while Badiou praises
someone like Malevich or Picasso for giving us ‘the generic truth of painting’s
singular situation’,13 he can equally celebrate someone like Duchamp, whose
work – most notably his infamous ‘readymades’ – arguably explodes the
very idea of medium-specificity and exposes something vital in the artistic
situation at large.
There is however another important ‘thread’ to the inaesthetic knot tying
together art, truth and philosophy; namely, the thread of immanence. For
Badiou holds that the relationship between these terms – art, truth and
philosophy – is not only singular but also immanent, insofar as every artistic
work must be wholly present to the truth it fabricates. This is a slightly more
delicate point, and results from Badiou’s materialist conception of truths, the
general idea being that an artistic truth (or any truth for that matter) – despite
its infinite nature – isn’t simply the truth of a situation, but is moreover itself
situated. That is to say, it takes place in a world.
To summarize brutally: Badiou holds that an artistic truth is always embodied
in an identifiable ‘artistic configuration’, the origins of which lie in a vanished
event – which suddenly (and inexplicably) gives form to what was previously
formless – and whose entire body is composed of the manifold artworks that
belong to this configuration. Meaning that each individual artwork serves as
the very fabric from which its truth is gradually woven. Needless to say, this
‘weaving’ can, in principle, go on forever (one can always create another work x
exploring the consequences of artistic event y…). Hence, the infinity of a truth
is in no way confined to a single finite work, but rather comprises an (for all
intents and purposes) infinite – or indeed, ‘eternal’ – sequence of works.
As such, the entire ‘being’ of an artistic truth is located within its works,
works which are, for complex reasons, outside of artistic ‘knowledge’ (or
outside of ‘the state of art’), and as such can proceed solely by chance (this
radical subtraction from knowledge being, incidentally, precisely why they
constitute a mode of thought). Thus, each individual work figures something
like an investigation or an ‘enquiry’ into the truth that it actualizes, piece by
painstaking piece.
So, to sum up, Badiou defines an artistic truth as a material configuration

that, issuing from an event, and unfolding by chance alone, comprises an (in
principle) infinite complex of works. Or again, to think art as both singular
and immanent to truth – that is, to think inaesthetically – is for Badiou one
and the same as to (re)think an artistic configuration.
The great impurifier
Badiou’s peculiar take on cinema however arguably throws something of a

spanner in the works of his inaesthetic program, particularly with regard to
these crucial concepts of singularity and immanence. This complication is
ultimately a consequence of his thesis – which, it must be said, remains latent
in his own writings – that cinema is, in the final instance, an inessential art.
Needless to say, declaring cinema an inessential art is not the same as
saying that cinema is unimportant artistically. To the contrary, Badiou
actually holds cinema up as ‘the greatest artistic invention of the past century’
(SMP 121). Moreover, we have already seen that cinema performs at least one
crucial function with regard to philosophy, inasmuch as it ‘opens a new stage
of questions of representation’ (SMP 122). Rather, cinema is ‘inessential’ – or,
alternatively, ‘baseless’ – insofar as it is an art that is, fundamentally, devoid
of essence, being in the final analysis nothing other than a series of ‘takes’: as
Badiou observes, ‘cinema is nothing but takes and montage. There is nothing
else’ (HB 86 trans. modified). As always, Badiou needs to be read here à la
lettre, inasmuch as a ‘take’ must be understood first in its literal sense – as
something that is ‘taken’, wrested from its proper place – while ‘montage’ is
for Badiou (as it was for Deleuze before him) nothing other than a film’s final
arrangement; the ultimate coupling and uncoupling of all of these ‘taken takes’.
What this means is that cinema is, for Badiou, ultimately a purloined
art, being first and foremost the art of taking. Put simply, what is ‘proper’
to cinema is, precisely (and, once again, paradoxically) its impropriety,
its inessentialness; its figuring as an empty site of appropriation. Crucially,
however, Badiou holds that cinema’s pilfering extends beyond its apparent
relation to the visible and the audible to include the other arts. Indeed, at the
very core of Badiou’s cinematographic writings – and proceeding directly
from his implicit contention that cinema is an inessential art – is his thesis
that cinema is a fundamentally impure art form, in the sense that it ‘takes’ all
that it needs from the other arts (without, for all that, actually giving anything
back). In his own words, ‘cinema is the seventh art in a very particular sense.
It does not add itself to the other six while remaining on the same level as
them. Rather, it implies them’ (HB 79 emphasis added). Cinema, Badiou
declares, is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, operating not with but rather on the
other arts, ‘using them as its starting point, in a movement that subtracts
them from themselves’ (HB 79 emphasis added).
Needless to say, seeing cinema as an inherently ‘impure’ art form is not in
itself anything especially new. To the contrary, this is a thesis that has been
bandied about in various ways throughout the short history of cinema, most
notably in the pioneering works of Ricciotto Canudo (who immediately
recognized that cinema would ‘increasingly serve as Art’s powerful
coadjutor’)14 and André Bazin (whose celebrated What Is Cinema? volumes
spend a considerable amount of his time defending cinema’s impure status).
What Badiou brings to the mix is the way in which he re-situates these well-
established arguments in relation to his own concepts of art and truth and, of
course, philosophy (whose relationship is, as we have seen, at once singular
and immanent).
So, taking cinema’s impurity into account, Badiou’s fundamental contention
regarding film as an art form – and therefore not simply as a medium, but
as a form of art (and thus an agent of truth) – is that whenever an Idea visits
us cinematically – whenever we encounter an effective ‘cinema-Idea’ – it is
always brought forth by way of a kind-of intrafilmic ‘complication’ with the
other arts. So, for example, an ostensibly original cinematic Idea might be
indebted to a certain musical evocation, or an actor’s peculiar theatricality,
a balletic movement or a poetic phrase and so on. As Badiou puts it, what
cinema in effect does is ‘take from the other arts all that is popular, all that
could – once isolated, filtered, separated from their aristocratic requirements –
destine them to the masses’.15
As such, cinema at once ‘democratizes’ the other arts – ‘popularizing’
them by ‘[weakening] their aristocratic, complex and composite quality’16 –
while simultaneously figuring as ‘painting without painting, music without
music, novel without subjects, theatre reduced to the charm of actors’ and
so forth.17 The point being that in Badiou’s model of cinema each and every
‘authentic cinema Idea’ is first taken – stolen – from the other arts. Badiou
is absolutely adamant about this: as he puts it in Handbook of Inaesthetics,
‘whenever a film really does organise the visitation of an Idea… it is always
in a subtractive (or defective) relation to one or several among the other arts’
(HB 86). Or again, cinema’s inessential nature means that its own Ideas – its
truths – must in fact always be first drawn from elsewhere, meaning even a
truly original cinematic release is, in some sense, always-already a re-run.
The paradox however is that this seemingly disreputable impurity is
finally what Badiou holds to be the great power of cinema, inasmuch as its
truly artistic role is ultimately that of ‘impurifying’ Ideas which have first
been given in the other arts, so as to create from this impurity altogether new
Ideas (and thereby, quite literally, ‘bring to light’ new facets of old Ideas). As
Badiou himself puts it, cinema’s ‘force as a contemporary art lies precisely
in turning – for the duration of a passage – the impurity of an idea into an
idea in its own right’ (HB 83). In contradistinction to the other arts, cinema
then figures as the ‘great impurifier’ (HB 88 trans modified), procuring and
amplifying Ideas which do not in truth belong to it.
The treatment of waste
Placing momentarily to one side this ‘idealization’ of cinema, it is necessary

to emphasize another aspect of cinema’s impurity, namely, its non-artistic
side, which relates to its peculiar status as a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility
between art and non-art’ (IT 111). In a nutshell, cinema figures for Badiou as an
art that remains in an important sense ‘beneath’ art. Indeed, Badiou explicitly
holds that ‘no film strictly speaking is controlled by artistic thinking from
beginning to end. It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn
from ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts, and from conventions
with a limited shelf life’ (IT 111). Or as he puts it elsewhere (in relation to Plato’s
theory of Forms), ‘if cinema is… the chance visitation of the Idea, it is in the
sense in which Plato has the old Parmenides demand of the young Socrates that
he accept, together with the Good, the Just, the True, and the Beautiful, other
equally abstract though less respectable ideas: the ideas of Hair, or of Mud’.18
What this of course means is that – at least in the case of cinema –
non-art is immanent to art as a rule. Not only is every film, in the final
analysis, a commodity circulating in a global market, which is produced by
a certain number of labourers, and manufactured within a specific system
of economic and ideological relations; moreover, the voracious relation of
the camera to the real means that no film can truly shield itself from the
stock images of the time. It is with this in mind that Badiou proclaims that
‘with only slight exaggeration cinema could be compared to the treatment
of waste’ (CMA 226). Indeed, insofar as cinema figures as something of a
grey area between art and non-art, Badiou contends that any properly artistic
activity in cinema – that is, the effective passage of a cinema-Idea – can only
be discerned as a ‘process of purification of its own immanent non-artistic
character’ (IT 111). Which is to say that, for a film to be truly artistic, an
(effectively interminable) process of purging must first take place. And yet,
Badiou quickly concedes, such an absolutely purificatory process can of
course never be actually achieved. At best, such a ‘pure’ cinematic ideal might
only be approached asymptotically. ‘This impossibility’, Badiou declares, ‘is
the real of cinema, which is a struggle with the infinite, a struggle to purify
the infinite’ (CMA 227). To this effect Badiou concludes that ‘cinema’s artistic
operations are incompletable purification operations, bearing on current
non-artistic forms or indistinct imagery’ (IT 111).
Now, while it might seem that cinema’s necessary non-artistry forecloses
from the start any possibility of its attaining true (or ‘pure’) artistic status,
again, the paradox is that, according to Badiou, it is precisely in maintaining
a degree of non-artistic content that cinema is guaranteed a certain
artistic capacity. For as Badiou sees it, an absolute purification of cinema’s
non-artistic content would actually work to suppress its artistic capacity,
inasmuch as it is precisely through its inherent non-artistry that a film is
able to find its ‘mass’ address. Indeed, Badiou actually holds a film to be truly
contemporary – and thus, at least potentially, ‘universal’ – if and only if ‘the
material whose purification is guarantees is identifiable as belonging to the
non-art of its times’ (IT 113). Which, incidentally, is also why cinema is, for
Badiou, intrinsically a mass art. For a film is truly contemporary, he says, only
inasmuch as its principal internal referent is a ‘common imagery’, and ‘not
the artistic past of forms’ (IT 113).
Thus Badiou effectively posits a second impure movement at play in film,
inasmuch as cinema ‘gathers around identifiably non-artistic materials…
[and] transmits their artistic purification, within the medium of an apparent
indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT 113–114). Cinema thus, as
Badiou puts it, ‘democratises the movement by which art drags itself from
non-art by drawing from this movement a border, by making from impurity
the thing itself ’.19 Which is to say that film also serves a kind of artistic
‘filtering’ function, ‘purifying’ non-art and bringing it into art (in a kind of
symmetry with its ‘impurifying’ the other arts). In a word, cinema purifies
non-art at the same time as it impurifies art.
So to sum up, Badiou sees cinema – at least implicitly – as an inessential
art, in the sense that it has no ‘essence’ to speak of, no base material that is
its and its alone. One of the consequences of this is that cinema figures as an
inherently impure art form, inasmuch as it draws all of its material from, on
the one hand, the other arts, and, on the other, non-art. Thus, Badiou holds
that whenever we encounter a true cinema-Idea, it is always brought forth by
way of a kind-of intrafilmic complication with the other arts. Yet at the same
time he sees this as cinema’s proper artistic role, insofar as film’s principal
task is that of impurifying Ideas which have first been given in the other arts
(and thereby creating from this impurity altogether new Ideas). Moreover,
even truly ‘artistic’ cinema is hopelessly complicated with non-art – being,
as he says, a ‘place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art’ (IT
111) – yet at the same time it is precisely its inherent non-artistry that assures
a film’s universality, its ‘mass’ address.
The cinema of thought
It is plain to see that cinema introduces a number of complications into

Badiou’s understanding of the inaesthetic knot tying together art, philosophy
and truth. Perhaps, the most obvious of these is the fact that cinema’s impurity
with regard to the other arts would appear to render the truths it elicits as
being far from singular. Rather, cinema’s ‘truths’ are themselves, much like the
medium itself, fundamentally repetitious (being first drawn from elsewhere).
It is moreover questionable whether Badiou is able to surmount this problem
through recourse to a kind of ‘re-singularization’; that is, by holding that
cinema ‘impurifies’ Ideas belonging to the other arts and turns these impure
ideas into new cinema-Ideas in their own right. Arguably, if cinema is to
have any true artistic status, it needs to present something radically singular,
something ‘pure’ to cinema, something no other art can offer.
So too it is questionable whether we can discern any singular ‘power’ to
cinema, in the sense that poetry for example ‘makes truth out of the multiple,
conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language’ (HB 22), or
that dance ‘provides the metaphor for the fact that every genuine thought
depends on an event’ (HB 112) and so forth. (That said, it is worth noting
that Badiou’s own treatment of dance is itself essentially a ‘creative repetition’
of Mallarmé’s own reflections on ballet as constituting a ‘visual embodiment
of thought’.)20 For when it comes down to it, cinema’s ‘democratic’ power is
inextricably entangled with the other arts, lying as it does in its ability to
‘popularize’ these arts by diluting their otherwise difficult and aristocratic
nature, and thereby destining them to the masses.21
One might even go so far as to suggest that cinema, at least structurally,
in fact shares a greater affinity with philosophy itself than it does with the
other arts. For cinema’s artistic imperative according to Badiou – namely, that
of impurifying or ‘idealizing’ Ideas, making of them new ‘cinema-Ideas’ –
is clearly analogous to philosophy’s own concerted task to ‘rethink thought’.
Moreover, like cinema, philosophy is basically an empty site of appropriation,
whose role it is to ‘compossibilize’ truths. These truths, taken – or as Badiou
frequently puts it, ‘seized’ – from outside of itself, are themselves wholly
indifferent to the (capital ‘T’) ‘Truth’ that philosophy finally constructs. Which
is to say that philosophy, like cinema, does not remunerate its conditions.
The congruence is, I think, difficult to ignore: cinema’s ‘impurification’
clearly corresponds to philosophy’s ‘compossibilization’, while film’s ‘taking’
neatly translates into philosophy’s ‘seizure’, and so on. Indeed, from its
primordial connection to Plato’s cave (which allegorically charts the journey
of the philosopher, not the artist) through its inessential and impure being
(cinema figuring an empty site of appropriation) up to its ‘unique’ artistic
imperative (of impurifying or idealizing Ideas that are first taken from
elsewhere), it would seem that cinema has from the start been hopelessly
entangled with philosophy, or more specifically, with philosophy’s structural
obligations.
Badiou in fact comes close to registering this parallel when, while
discussing the question of philosophical ‘style’ in Philosophy and the Event, he
points to the way in which cinematic and philosophical works are similarly
composed from a range of extraordinarily heterogeneous materials as
testament to the fact that, stylistically speaking, philosophy ‘does the same
thing cinema does. Philosophy is the cinema of thought!’ (PE 91). While
Badiou is explicitly referring here to philosophical expression – that is, its
written as opposed to its structural composition – the formula is nonetheless
remarkably apposite. It is also worth noting that he concludes his paper on
‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ in a similar manner, observing – possibly
in reference to his own as-yet undeveloped ‘feature film’ – that there is today
not only ‘a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema – or of cinema
by philosophy’, but also that ‘after the philosophy of cinema must come –
is already coming – philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the
opportunity of being a mass philosophy’.22
And yet, stylistically or structurally, cinema can of course never be
philosophy. Rather, cinema can only reproduce philosophy (much in the
manner it reproduces the other arts). Moreover, if cinema bears something
of a family resemblance to philosophy – or, for that matter, to antiphilosophy
or sophistry, each of which in some sense mimic philosophy – it must
nevertheless maintain its proper distance. For regardless of its impure nature,
cinema is foremost an art (albeit a singularly complicated art), which is to say
a condition of philosophy, and the absolute separation of philosophy from its
conditions is crucial lest philosophy succumb to the disaster of ‘suture’.
Where exactly this leaves cinema as an art form is difficult to answer, and
I suspect it is this, rather than any inherent distaste for the medium itself, that
causes Badiou to waver in his granting cinema a definite ‘artistic’ position.
Because cinema – that most paradoxical and liminal of arts – is, in the final
analysis, torn between two heterogeneous (and fundamentally, repetitious)
procedures, being at once the reproduction of art, and the reproduction of
philosophy itself.
Part Three
Essays
10
Subjected to Formalization:
Formalization and Method in
the Philosophy of Alain Badiou
John Cleary
At first sight, it appears difficult to impute a method to Alain Badiou’s

philosophy. It is without a doubt systematic, but that it has a method seems far
less certain, and all the more so given that Badiou has never really explicitly
espoused one. I nevertheless think it is possible to locate the axiomatic site of
a method in the displacement of the following couplet of Lacanian theses: the
real is inscribed as an impasse in formalization; the real is the impossible. A
displacement, because for Badiou Lacan’s formulation of them is too structural,
and tied to repetition. For Badiou, the real of thought is rather what passes
through an impasse of mathematical formalization, making the impossible
possible. This relationship to the impossible gives mathematics a paradigmatic
place in Badiou’s thought, as well as a distinctive style: to formulate the ground
or principle of this axiom of impossibility at the very edges of mathematicity.
We could perhaps call it a transcendental of the impossible, and it determines
Badiou’s engagement with logic and mathematics, from his early studies of
non-standard analysis, to his recent uptake of topos theory.
To say that a philosophy has a method doesn’t preclude of course that it
changes regarding its axioms or principles, or even undergo certain reversals.
Indeed, the very force of Badiou’s thought has been its capacity to subject
itself to the impasses of its universality vis-à-vis what he now calls conditions.
This is nowhere more evident than in the case of the concept of the subject.
Initially characterized as ideological, the concept of the subject comes first to
be the central name of the impossible, and then in turn its localized effect.
This displacement of the concept of the subject constitutes a dialectic between
mathematical formalization, philosophy and the Lacanian theory of the
subject. Its stages are determined as a series of variations on Badiou’s version of
the Lacanian theses, and realized as relations between the real of mathematics
and the concept of the subject: an opposition, their abstract correlation, and
lastly the grounding of the former in the latter as an effect of a truth.
I want to show that underlying this are two modes of philosophical

formalization whose divided point of transition is Being and Event. While I
will leave the details of each mode for later, the substantive point to note here
is that the latter mode is related to the former through its impasses. More
specifically, the latter mode forces a way through an impasse by grounding
Badiou’s axiomatic affirmation of the existence of subjective truth processes
in principles bound to mathematical formalization. If there is a method in
Badiou’s philosophy, this constitutes its form.
In order to understand Badiou’s relationship to the Lacanian theses, it is
necessary to make a number of very introductory remarks that are pertinent
to Badiou’s interpretation of them. In terms of the concept of the ‘real’, the
first thing that needs to be pointed out is that Lacan distinguishes it from
the notion of ‘reality’. The concept of reality is that of a domain peopled
with consistent objects, whose unity, for Lacan, places them at the juncture
between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.1 The real is however not an object,
since it is exceptional with regard to the symbolic law, and counter to the
imagination.
While Lacan’s concept of the real underwent a number of changes, for our
purposes what is crucial is the notion that the real is constituted around a
lack as the absent cause of the subject’s desire. The symbolic order introduces
a cut in the real such that there is an impossible and foreclosed remainder
that is ‘internally excluded’. The imaginary constitution of this foreclosure
becomes the lacking object of desire, the objet petit a. The very impossibility
of obtaining the petit a means however that the subject itself is established
as the operational repetition of this fundamental lack. It is this repetitive
operation that constitutes the structure within which the subject is bound,
and moreover, the subject itself is determined as a void that connects the
signifiers in the structure as a vanishing mediator between them.
Lacan develops the idea that this concept of the real is inscribed at the
impasses of mathematical formalization through a series of analyses of
different fragments of mathematics, including mathematical logic, number
theory and topology. And, as we will see later, these choices are not without
significance. The example that I want to briefly outline here however is not
from Lacan himself but Jacques-Alain Miller. In his analysis of Frege’s theory
of arithmetic in the article Suture (Elements of the Logic of the signifier),2
Miller argues that the real of mathematical logic is constituted as the lack of
a paradoxical object at the very impasse of logical identity (i.e. the law A=A).
This object is summoned and then foreclosed from logic as impossible, but
then ‘sutured’ onto the logical discourse as the number zero. The zero is in
turn ‘paradoxically’ counted as one, which establishes a form of repetition
that generates the natural numbers. This non self-identical void object is
Subjected to Formalization 145
the subject and its lack within logics determines it as the oscillation of a
vanishing term because each number is generated by a logically paradoxical
representation.3
That mathematics and logic here have a privileged place with regard to
the real is rooted in Lacan’s understanding of formalization. In the twentieth
century, formalization came to have a rather specific meaning. It refers
firstly to formalized languages where a vocabulary of symbols is fixed as
well as the explicit rules for how to construct the formulas and statements
in the language. In addition, formalization refers to axiomatization whereby
one gives the basic and fundamental premises of that theory from which
theorems are then to be derived in the formalized language. The process of
formalization of a theory is one in which the implicit presuppositions of the
theory are rendered explicit as statements in a formal language.
While the early twentieth century was the grand era in mathematics of
formalization, for Lacan, it is of the essence of mathematics itself. As Jean-
Claude Milner points out, this is because Lacan sees this essence as residing
in the literality of mathematics, that is, the constitution of its symbolic by
what Lacan calls letters.4 Letters in formalization are not, like signifiers in
general, determined in a relational web with other signifiers. Rather, the letter
is qualified by explicit rules that govern its use and its meaning. It is thus
always tied to a pure decision about its function, which means that it can be
displaced and changed.5 This is why the essence of the relationship between
letters and formalization is substitutability. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XX,
‘Formalisation is nothing other than the substitution of a number whatsoever
of ones, for what is called a letter.’6
What this implies then is not simply that letters in mathematics have no
strict meaning, but further that they are ‘contrary to sense’ or ‘counter-to-
sense’.7 It is because mathematical formalization has this extreme and liminal
form of signification that it can deploy itself consistently across categorical
oppositions. In doing so, it inscribes within itself what it cannot say, what is
impossible for it to say, which is why it is for Lacan the science of the real.
II
At the most general level, Badiou’s relationship to this Lacanian vision of

mathematical formalization consists of a double movement that forms a
fundamental axiom of his thought. On the one hand, he affirms with Lacan
that the real of thought is to be found at the impasses of mathematical
formalization. On the other, Lacan’s theory of the relationship between
mathematical formalization and the impossible fixes it to a given structure.
What interests Lacan is the determination of the possible on the basis of

the impossible, whereas what interests Badiou is the way the impossible
transforms a structure by displacing it.
However, this by no means implies that Badiou’s relationship to Lacan’s
position is itself fixed. In fact it fundamentally changes, and at the centre of
this is the question of the relationship between the real of mathematics and
the subject. As I mentioned in the introduction, across Badiou’s work this
relationship is construed in three distinct ways. The first way is as an opposition,
the second as a correlation, and the third is as a grounding of the correlation
in a displacement of the opposition. Beginning then with the opposition, it is
important to firstly point out that it is established entirely around the question
of science: there is no subject of science in general or mathematics in particular,
since the real of mathematics absolutely excludes its concept.
This exclusion is premised firstly on a formalist vision of the mathematical
real. In his study of Abraham Robinson’s non-standard analysis, Infinitesimal
Subversion, Badiou argues that mathematics develops through ‘transgressive
extensions’ of a theory whereby what was deemed impossible in the
original theory’s structure is actualized. This actualization begins around
the theory’s impasse, which he calls an ‘infinity point’. An infinity point is
firstly a statement expressible in the language of the theory yet determined
as being beyond its domain as an ‘unoccupiable empty place’.8 But unlike
other empty places in a theory, an infinity point may be occupied such that
the original theory is recast, extended and transformed. The link between the
impossible and the possible is thus located around how the impossible comes
to reappear ‘as the instigating mark of a real (historical) process of production
of a different structure’.9
In an article published a year later, Mark and Lack: On Zero, logic is
presented as the ground of this real in the guise of a purely productive space
of inscriptions, that is, a series of structural mechanisms for the production
and manipulation of signifying orders grounded in marks and signs.10 The
former here literally refers to their material production as ‘graphemes’
which are then formed into signs, or well-formed statements.11 Particular
mathematical theories are then determined as a specific signifying order
in which the marks are placed according to the relation of deduction. The
logical space of science is thus one founded on letters in the Lacanian sense
of the term.
However, in Badiou’s conception of letters, here logic and mathematics
are articulated around the real as universal and particular: logic is a universal
space of which mathematical theories constitute localized sections. The
mathematical impossible is thus grounded in this logical space because this
space produces the mark that comes to occupy the infinity point. Moreover
given this logical space is determined as the pure production of operations,

the process of the occupation of the infinity point occurs through a structural
automatism. Consequently, this logical space ultimately has no relation to its
outside: ‘Infinitely stratified, regulating its passages, science is pure space,
without inverse or mark or place of that which it excludes.’12
The Lacanian categories of the subject and of lack thus do not touch on
the real of mathematics, but are ideological. Moreover, because they attempt
to ground logic on something excluded from it, they impose a kind of closure
on its productive essence. What this means is that the Lacanian theory of
lack with respect to logic can be explained away by the latter operational
nature. In Mark and Lack: on Zero Badiou argues that if we look at any
formal logical theory, everything that comes to lack is in fact produced
elsewhere in another strata of the logical space. Logic begins with a formal
language made up of marks (variable, constants, relation symbols) and then
determines recursively the well-formed formulas of the language, followed
by the formulas that are derivable in the theory and those that are not. This
threefold process means firstly that one can never produce a mark in logic
that is not self-identical, since in the very presentation of the formal language
they are always inscribed in the same way.13 If we then consider in particular
the formula (x ≠ x) we can see that it is produced in the logical process as
an element of the set of well-formed formulas, and then placed in the set
of non-derivable statements. Thus, there is not some fundamental lack or
paradoxical object in the discourse of logic, but rather just an excess of the
formal production of statements over what can be derived in the theory. In
addition, given that it is possible to construct the number zero in a formal
theory as a predicate formed by abstraction on this formula, it is in no way
necessary to postulate that the zero mark should be thought with regard to
any object whatsoever, impossible or otherwise.14
When this opposition to the concept of the subject is abandoned in Theory
of the Subject, it is of course to develop a philosophical theory of the political
revolutionary subject. Central to this uptake of the concept is the idea that
the subject is not inherently, at least with respect to politics, a concept bound
to conservatism, but the name of the impossible, and hence of the real of
politics as such. But if the subject is to name the impossible, it must be tied
to the production of novelty, and not to the structure of the place where
it emerges. What was formally deemed ideological and excessive is then
intimately tied to the real of politics.15 Yet, as opposed to his other shorter
books of the seventies, Theory of the Subject formulates this by correlating the
concept of the political subject to the impasses of mathematics in a way that
shares many of the names of his earlier vision of science by introducing an
important new element – the decision.
Before getting to the question of the decision, it is necessary to point

out that Badiou knots the subject of politics to a conception of the real by
discerning a split within Lacan’s subject with respect to mathematics. There
is the ‘early’ Lacan where the real is ‘algebraic’ and concerns the cause of the
subject as a discrete element in relation to the symbolic structure of placement,
or ‘splace’ in Badiou’s terminology. But there is also the ‘later’ ‘topological’
real of subjective consistency that is in excess of the law, or what Badiou also
calls the ‘outplace’ (TS 228). This is the Lacan of the Borromean knots.
In Lacan’s formulation, Badiou argues, these two reals enter into a kind of
impasse with regard of their relationship, and Lacan ultimately reduces the
second to the first. In theorizing the excessive consistency of the subject over
the law, Lacan’s recourse to the Borromean knot ties the orders of the real,
the imaginary and the symbolic together in a relation of interdependence.
If one of the links in the knot is cut, they all disperse. As Badiou point out,
this conception of the real fixes it to the ‘One’ (TS 232). In other words,
the topological excess is treated as if it were discrete, algebraic and thus
determined by a lack that binds it to the law of the structure. In order to
overcome this obstacle, Badiou argues that what is needed is the simultaneous
connection and extrication of the algebraic and topological: ‘The theory of
the subject is complete when it manages to think the structural law of the
empty place as the punctual anchoring of the excess over the place’ (TS 261).
Badiou’s approach to theorizing the simultaneous connection and
difference between lack and excess is to abstractly correlate it to a number
of results in set theory through an analogy. If we consider some set M as an
abstract representation of the place where our subject emerges, its power set,
the set of all its subsets, is determined as an immanent lack or inexistent. On
the one hand, it lacks because it is excluded from belonging to M due to its
superior size or cardinality. It thus appears within the place as nothing (TS
266). On the other, all its elements are subsets of M, and so M ‘holds within
itself the excess over this prohibition’ (TS 266). The subject is firstly then
an effect of the taking place of this inexistent excess, or the forcing of the
belonging of the excess to the place.
Yet, this is not sufficient, since the nature of this excess can vary. As the
proofs of Gödel and Cohen about the continuum hypothesis show, when sets
are of infinite size, the cardinality of the power set of such a set is independent
of the standard axioms of set theory. Consequently, it is consistent to assume
that the size of the power set in these circumstances is the minimum possible,
that is, the next ‘size’ of infinity above our original set (this is the continuum
hypothesis). But it is also consistent to assume that it is more or less any ‘size’
that is greater than that of the original set. Consequently, ‘the logic of the
excess is real, insofar as it is impossible to limit it’ (TS 273).
What Badiou draws from this is that the real of the subject is determined
formally as differences in this excess. A conservative subjectivity will limit
this excess to the smallest possibility (‘trade union’ politics, for Badiou, is
analogous to the affirmation of the continuum hypothesis), whereas a
revolutionary one will force it maximally (TS 271–274). A point to keep in
mind for later is that here the inexistent is identical to the generic set. What
this implies is that the articulation of the empty place and the excess always
involves some form of a decision.
Mathematics thus clarifies the theory of the form of the subject, insofar as
form should be understood as what results from the abstraction of content.
But this correlation only overcomes the original opposition abstractly
because it simply assumes it. Indeed, the difficulty at hand post Theory of
the Subject is to account at once for the materialist theory of the existence of
subjects and the mathematical formalization of it. A last point to note is that,
as opposed to his earlier engagement with mathematical formalization, here
the impossible is not determined through the difference between logic and
mathematics, but as a split articulation within mathematics itself.
The third period of the relationship between the real of mathematics and
the subject in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds is a grounding of the
latter in the former. By grounding I mean the way in which the compatibility
of a theory of the subject and mathematics is reasoned through a principle.
In Being and Event this principle is: ‘mathematics (in its set theoretical
presentation) is ontology but there is what is not being qua being’. The first
thing to note is how this repositions the split in the real of mathematics.
There is the global real of set theory, namely, the inexistence of a whole. The
immediate consequence of this is that being is infinite, or rather limitless,
and moreover that this limitlessness of the Multiple establishes itself as a
fundamental gap in set theory through the continuum problem. But there
is also the cause of the subject as a point of impossibility that subtracts itself
from mathematics locally, namely, the event.
Before discussing the way this principle is deployed, it is worth making
the point that it has its origins in the realization that mathematics itself
is subjective. In Being and Event, Badiou takes the independence of the
continuum hypothesis as proof of the idea that the fundamental problems
of mathematics are bound up with a mathematical (and hence subjective)
decision. Indeed, the very nature and role of this decision vis-à-vis the
continuum determines the scientific ‘epoch’ in which we find ourselves (BE
3). This gestures towards the above principle because if the real as a category
of the subject is also operative in mathematics, then perhaps we do not need
to seek an ontology of the subject external to mathematics. Moreover, a
theory of the subject that took into account the mathematical subject would
have to also theorize the possibility that the cause of this subject is a point of
rupture with mathematics itself.
In terms of the principle, the central point to be emphasized is that it
allows for the grounding of the possibility of a subject in a number of ways
through the way it renders rigorous the relationship to generic sets. Firstly,
the infinity of a situation is a prerequisite for generic sets because they are
necessarily infinite (BE 333). Secondly, since generic subsets in a situation
do not actually belong to the situation itself, but to an extension of it, the
subjective procedure immanent to the situation cannot itself be a generic
subset. Rather, the being of the procedure is a finite subset of the generic set.
However, the subjective procedure is linked to the generic set by the relation
of forcing. This latter relation is the law of the subjective decision because it
shows how in an extended situation some previously undecidable statement
is made to be true or false depending on the elements that one decides to
add to the generic set. Thirdly, while the technique of forcing gives us the
structure of a decision, it does not establish how the decision is determined
one way or the other. This is where the event comes in, since it is that about
which these decisions are made.
At work in this grounding is the displacement of the prior positions of
opposition and abstract correlation. This revolves firstly around the concepts
of the void and the event. The event as the cause of the subject is established
by a foreclosure from mathematics, because its form is determined as a
set that belongs to itself, which is axiomatically banned from existing in
standard set theory. On the other hand, with respect to event, the opposition
is maintained by the fact that the subject is not here sutured onto the void.
The mathematical void is in Badiou’s ontology the ground of his theory of
multiplicity in the sense that every multiple is construed set theoretically as
constructed from the void set. An event is determined also by the fact that
it separates itself from the void. This grounds the correlation in Theory of
the Subject because it explains why mathematical ontology and the theory of
the subject must be correlated in the form of a philosophical compatibility:
because the event cannot appear in ontology.
A fundamental point that needs to be made here is the way this grounding
of the subjective process as an effect of a generic truth re-determines what I
have called the axiom of Badiou’s thought. In particular, it effects a shift in
the primary name of the impossible from ‘subject’ to ‘truth’. The reason for
this ultimately is bound up with the question of universality. Generic subsets
are determined as universal by Badiou in so far as they punch a hole in
knowledge by escaping the language of the situation. Put very basically, there
is no formula of the language of the situation that can determine completely
which elements of the situation do or do not belong to the generic subset. The
generic set thus is universal insofar as it evades the particularizing operations

of language. But given this, the generic set is thus what is determined from
within the situation by the structure of knowledge as the impossible. However,
the fact that the generic set is just that – a set – and not a process, means
the subjective process must then be derivative with regard to its ‘completed’
generic being. A different name is thus needed for the impossible universality
of this ‘completed’ generic set – truth.
This grounding operation in Being and Event is nonetheless only partial
and it falters around the formalization of the inexistent, which is determined
through the concept of a site. A site in a situation is the point where an event
takes place, and its ontological form is given as an intransitive set, that is,
a set that belongs to the situation but none of its elements do (BE 181). It
is thus not strictly speaking void but ‘on the edge of the void’ (BE 181). An
immediate and ultimately intractable problem of this formalization is that it
renders the inexistent transcendent to the situation. To see why, recall firstly
that a situation is formalized such that its being qua being is given by the
relation of belonging (BE 96). Given that the elements of the site are defined
such that they do not belong to the situation, they are formally speaking
external to it, and thus not immanent.
It is the grounding of this inexistent through the formalization of the
ontico-ontological difference that forms the basis of the reworking of the
theory of places in Logics of Worlds. This takes the form of a supplementation
to the principle of Being and Event: ‘every pure multiple has a localized form of
identity in a world (appearance) that is different from its ontological identity’.
I won’t present all the details of how this is determined in the theory of worlds,
since they are all clearly outlined in Logics of Worlds. For our present purposes
it suffices to say that every element in a world is given a degree of intensity of
its appearance or existence that is determined by the world’s transcendental.
Importantly, a multiple may have a zero degree of existence, which means it
appears as nothing. In Logics of Worlds, the principle (postulate of materialism)
states that every object in a world has such an element, its inexistent (LW 321).
An event is then a reflexive set that by chance forces the inexistent’s degree of
existence to be what is maximally allowed by the transcendental.
III
Underpinning the shifts in this dialectic are in fact different modes of

philosophical formalizations. By philosophical formalization I understand
very broadly, the way in which fragments of mathematics come to be used
in philosophy, and thus the relationship posed in philosophy between
philosophical concepts and mathematico-logical structures. Across Badiou’s

thought there are essentially two modes. The first I call an analogical
formalism, and the second, for reasons that will be made evident below, a
mode of mathematical form.
The relationship between the two modes of formalization is an impasse
because in the process of trying to ground the axiom by theorizing a
philosophical concept, the former mode is thrown into an intractable bind.
Mathematical formalization comes to provide the conceptuality of the
passage through a philosophical impasse, but only in so far its relationship to
its outside is recast within philosophy.
Analogy and formalism

As we ready saw, the formalism of Badiou’s early period is determined by the
absence of a relationship between the real of mathematics and its outside.
Ideology with regard to science is thus precisely the representation of
science’s relationship to this outside as if it were inside. Philosophy does not
escape this, and it is more or less ideological to the extent that it obscures or
clarifies in particular the break between science and ideology.
The paradigmatic form of philosophy on the obscuring end of the
spectrum is for Badiou logical positivism because of the fundamental
opposition it poses between the formal and empirical sciences, that is,
between logic and mathematics on the one hand and physics, chemistry
and biology on the other (CM 6). Implicit in this distinction is firstly that
the real of science is characterized by a predetermined empirical object that
is supposed to semantically satisfy the formal syntax of a theory, the latter
being identified with its mathematical dimension. What is crucial for us
here is that for the logical positivist, the material real is posed as external
to the mathematical syntax of science. Consequently, mathematics becomes
the theory of mere form in which its consistency and rigour is reduced to
the syntactic consistency of its statements and its matter is determined as an
external object.
Levi-Strauss’s structuralism is for Badiou a ‘vulgar’ version of this logical
positivism. For he too begins with the split between an empirical object and
a formal theory such that the latter is supposed to describe or account for
the ‘facts’ of the former. The question then becomes that of knowing how
to connect the formal and the empirical. In this context formalization, as
Badiou notes, is construed as a ‘plausible image’ of the empirical object, that
is to say, an analogy (CM 16).
This however is precisely the mode of formalization operative in Theory
of the Subject, and it takes the form of an analogy between the concept of
matter and the set theoretical relations of belonging and inclusion. For
Badiou, the former is determined by an affirmation of the identity of matter
as well as the thesis that matter precedes thought. While the first part affirms
the univocity of being as matter, the second part implies that there is some
kind of difference that is nonetheless annulled by the asymptotic process
whereby thought tends towards matter. What this implies for Badiou is that
the materialist concept of matter is dialectically split between an absolute
notion of matter (matter as matter) and a relative one (matter as thought)
(TS 190–200). This translates into the need to theorize the subject as both an
element in a place and as placed in process. For reasons we can’t go into here,
Badiou moreover deduces from this scission that there is no material whole.
The analogy to set theory is then:
1) The univocity of being in materialism is analogous to univocity of set

theoretical language in the sense that there is only one primitive relation,
belonging.
2) The absolute and relative notions of matter are analogous to the relations
of belonging and inclusion respectively.
3) The non-existence of a material whole, and the theorem that there is no
set of all sets (TS 220).
This analogical approach to mathematics shares with Badiou’s prior

formalism the idea that mathematics still has no relation to its outside, and
the real of the subject is still formally separated from that of mathematics. In
fact, it is precisely because mathematics’ real is de-subjective that it can act
as a kind of analogical resource with regard to certain words or concepts of
philosophy, allowing it to ‘exploit to the maximum – to death – the signifiers
to which the subject is sutured’ (TS 149). In other words, because mathematics
has no subject, it can give the most extreme, liminal interpretation of its
signifiers. In this way, it can reveal perhaps previously unseen properties
or connections in the concept that can then analogically be grafted into
philosophy. The role of mathematics is then only to give a clarifying force to
the theory of the subject: ‘precision put into the razor of the Marxist barber,
mathematics is that unalterable blade with which one ends up bleeding the
pigs to death’ (TS 210).
This analogical approach however persists in Being and Event in the
relationship between set theory and historical situations.16 The analogy
emerges from the general typology of situations. Τaking up Heidegger’s
analysis of φύσις, Badiou argues that we can distinguish between natural
situations, whose concept is determined as that of supreme stability and
internal cohesion, and historical situations whose concept is the opposite,
namely, instability (BE 127, 174). Reasoning that any situation can be
formalized by taking a set whose structure is ‘comparable’ to the situation
(BE 130), natural situations are then formalized using the concept of transitive
sets, and historical situations using intransitive sets, that is, a set that belongs
to the situation, but whose elements do not (BE 131, 175).
What is crucial in all this is the way that the analogical mode of
formalization determines the matter of a place, and thus its being as such,
as something external from the matheme of its form. In Theory of the
Subject form is determined via abstraction in relation to a given being as
the purification of its particularities. And it is precisely this exclusion of
particularities from the form that establishes the singular matter of the being
in question as an object external to its mathematical form.
The central consequence of this externality is that it sets up a fundamental
contradiction between the analogical mode of formalization and the axiom
that the real is the impasse of formalization. This is the case for an entirely
general reason: not only can the real not be an object, but its status as a
point of impossibility of mathematical formalization means that it cannot
be straightforwardly determined either as internal or external, since it is
internally excluded with regard to the formalization in question.
This contradiction, concealed in Theory of the Subject, only became
apparent as an impasse in the search for a possible ontology for the subject.
As Badiou notes in the introduction to Being and Event, the analogical mode
of formalization had led him to the idea that that if it was possible to establish
an ontology with respect to logico-mathematical discourse, then its real had
to be determined ‘either as an “object” obtained by abstraction (empiricism),
or as a super-sensible Idea (Platonism)’ (BE 5). In other words, an ontology
premised on the analogical mode of formalization determines the real
of mathematics itself as an (either empirical or ideal) externality. None of
which, Badiou remarks, is consistent with the Lacanian thesis on the real.
Yet the same externality of matter with regard to mathematical form is
reproduced in Being and Event through the analogical concept of historical
situations. Central to historical situations is the notion of a site as the
immanent point of concentration of the ontological difference of a situation
such that its elements ‘inexist’ in the situation and are in this way internally
excluded. Yet if situations are ultimately only structured by a single relation,
namely, belonging, then the elements of the site are not internally excluded in
the situation, they are, as I noted earlier, just straightforwardly excluded from
its mathematical formalization because they do not belong to it. Given that in
the theory of situations they still constitute the matter of the site and ultimately
of the event, the site’s mathematical form as a multiple in the situation then
becomes a mere form. Consequently, the theory of historical situations is
also not consistent with the axiom of the real as impasse, and moreover, the
formalization of the notion of the internally excluded inexistent constitutes a
point of impossibility of the analogical mode.
Mathematical form
The second mode of formalization that runs across Being and Event and
Logics of Worlds overcomes the impasse of the analogical mode through an
internalization of the notions of matter and form to mathematics. Given what
we have said about the real, the first point that needs to be made here is that this
internalization requires the notion of the real to be distinct from that of matter.
In Being and Event the real of mathematics is inconsistent multiplicity – a non-
whole – and this stands in a relationship of internal exclusion to mathematics.
The matter of mathematics is in contrast consistent multiplicity, or the sets
that make up its universe.
However, the two are logically related through the concept of the void. In
fact, as Badiou argues throughout meditations 2–4, it follows from being’s
unlimited and inconsistent nature that at its very foundation it is void or
nothing (BE 36). Any ontology of inconsistent multiplicity must be able
to capture this, and ZFC set theory does so in two ways. Firstly, it ‘sutures’
being to language through the axiomatic decision that a set with no elements
exists. This establishes the void in mathematical language as a proper name
whose symbol – Ø – is a (Lacanian) letter in the sense that strictly speaking it
names nothing, and hence being as such (BE 67).17 The void set thus presents
a Parmenidean identity between thought and being. Secondly, all sets in the
ZFC universe are built up by applying certain operations to the empty set.
Set theoretical ontology is thus ultimately a theory of the void’s ubiquity.
Consequently, the matter of mathematics (i.e. nothing as such) is entirely
internal to it. Moreover, this matter is never presented as an object: not only
is its very foundation void, and hence heterogeneous to the unity of an object,
the existence of the matter of mathematics is invoked by a pure nomination
that cannot be separated as an object from the letter that names it.18
In contrast, Logics of Worlds establishes the internalization to mathematics
of the ontological difference. It does so by determining the form of inconsistent
multiplicity as the mathematical theory of its localization in a world, and
thus as what renders its inconsistency consistent. In particular, the form of
inconsistent multiplicity is the synthetic unity imposed on a multiple such
that it appears as an object, which is defined as a compatible set of ‘real atomic’
functions (LW 251). What such a theory crucially allows is firstly of course a
concept of an inexistent as internally excluded: the inexistent is a multiple in
the world that is excluded from appearing by its zero degree of existence.
This internalization however requires a more complicated relationship to

mathematics. On the one hand, the theory of the form of a multiple must be
mathematical, since it pertains to the localized appearance of a (mathematical)
set. As Badiou says, ‘in so far as appearance, i.e. relation, is a constraint that
affects being, the science of appearance must itself be a component of the
science of being, and therefore of mathematics’ (TW 172). Yet on the other,
the theory of this localization cannot be reducible to ontology, since if the
latter is the theory of inconsistent multiples, the laws that make a multiple
locally consistent are beyond its scope. For reasons we cannot elaborate here,
the mathematical theory of topoi satisfies these two criteria.
Central to these internalizations is the priority given to mathematics
over language and hence logic, if the latter is understood as the theory of the
relation of deduction over formal languages. What this means firstly is that
the consistency and apodicticity of mathematical discourse are not due solely
to its logical or formal nature, but are rather determined by its ontological
grounding in the concept of the void (BE 6). Underscoring this prioritization
is the idea that it is ultimately not possible to reduce the theory of being
to one of language. Which is why for Badiou the Fregean logicist program
of attempting to derive the foundation of mathematics from a number of
self-evident logical principles was ultimately doomed to failure. This is also
crucial to the general importance Badiou gives to the axiomatic approach to
mathematics: if the foundational point of the set theoretical universe cannot
in the end be induced by operations on formal languages according to logical
rules, then it must be axiomatically decided to exist prior to language.
In Logics of Worlds, this prioritization is extended to logic itself in so far
as the internalization of form requires that logic be mathematical. While
in Being and Event mathematics is interpreted in a way that is antithetical
to logical formalism, logic itself, on the other hand, still is not. Set theory
in Being and Event is elaborated in a first-order predicate logic via a model
theoretic presentation. Logic pertains therein to the satisfaction of statements
by a structure, and its rules are decided more or less independently of
the structure. In contrast, the transcendental logic of Logics of Worlds is
fundamentally the determination of the structure or form of possible worlds,
and logic as deduction in a formal language is entirely dependent on this form.
Consequently, different forms produce different formal logics (LW 173).
This internalization is also intimately related to what I have described as
the grounding of the axiom in a principle. The reason is that through this
internality the principles are able to identify a certain philosophical problem
with a branch of mathematics, (mathematics is ontology, topos theory is
phenomenology), hence the principles’ anti-analogical nature. Yet this
identification is used to locate the impasses of formalization, and construct
there the concept of a supplement via the interlacement of exceptionality and

Badiou’s version of ontological difference.
The crucial effect of this is that philosophical names, including those that
relate to the structure of a place (void, inexistent, for example) as well as
those that determine the notion of truth (event, subject, generic procedure,
for example) can be conceptualized in a pure matheme. The concept, for
example, of the inexistent in Logics of Worlds is its matheme determined via
the postulate of materialism as the element in an object with the minimal
intensity of appearance. Thus, the development of a matheme through the
grounding of the axiom in a principle establishes the pure intelligibility of
the form of truths.
The relationship of internalization to the principles also helps clarify a
few important differences in the way this formalization proceeds in Badiou’s
thought. For example, it explains the non-homogeneity of the formalization
in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds with regard to the notion of the
impasse. In Being and Event, Badiou begins from the central impasse in
Set Theory, the continuum problem, and then works back towards its
grounding according to the principle. In the latter, the principle discerns
a particular subclass of topoi that have the specific property that every
object has an inexistent. We could put it this way: he goes from the impasse
of formalization, to the formalization of the impasse. The point is that his
interest in a particular class of topoi appears arbitrary unless understood as
attempting to ground the theory of truth.
But what is most important, and on this point I will conclude, is that it
determines the general subtractive approach of this method. The material
form of truths, that is a truth as it is (dis)placed, is not in any way subject
to the concept or presupposition of an empirical object. In fact the way
philosophical principles are articulated with mathematics aims to dissolve
the empirical as a given prior to language, or as a ground for thought. Every
complaint of its ‘abstract’ nature thus in the end amounts to an empiricism,
a call to come to our senses. And it fails to see that in the end for Badiou it
is a question of philosophy ‘constructing its method from the very Forms by
themselves’.19
11
Everything Must Become Nothing

(and Vice Versa): Love and Abstraction in
Badiou and Lacan
Bryan Cooke
No theme requires more pure logic than that of love.1
What do people hate when they hate (the philosophy of) Alain Badiou?2 If we
start by setting aside everything which can be put down to ignorance,3 malice,4
veiled political scare-mongering;5 or the kind of free-floating indignation
which awaits all those who fail to pronounce whatever shibboleths du jour are
demanded by whichever moralizing clique is currently busy equating its own
discursive mores with Justice per se, it is still possible to notice some recurring
motifs in what remains in the more or less serious criticisms of Badiou’s work.
On the one hand, a number of the more inchoate objections to Badiou’s
oeuvre seem to converge upon what might be seen as the philosopher’s
modernism. By modernism, I mean Badiou’s penchant for the apodeictic
mode and the rhythms of the manifesto; his avant-garde (but also Pauline)
preoccupation with rupture and with novelty, with the diagonal line traced
through the known world that is a scandal to the world’s wisdom (SP 19–21);
his penchant for numbered theses;6 for definitions, axioms, scholia and
schemata designed to cut through rather than to merely elucidate – let alone
to ‘save’! – the phenomena under discussion.
However, once we go beyond the realm of objections to Badiou’s style,
some of the most common critiques of the philosopher are, I contend,
almost always to do with what the critic perceives as a tension between the
formal, indeed the formalist underpinnings of Badiou’s philosophy and the
intransigent political commitment which both animates and impels his
corpus. Put differently, we can see this as a tension between the abstraction of
Badiou’s thought (in its form as much as its content) as against what, to the
eyes of many critics, appear to be the ‘concrete’ objects, tropes and figures of
art and science, literature, love and, above all, politics.
In published criticisms on Badiou, this concern about the limits (or more
accurately what Peter Hallward calls the ‘consequences’)7 of abstraction has
often been expressed by way of a demand for a greater degree of mediation
within Badiou’s corpus.8 In speaking of ‘mediation’ (or, more often, ‘relation’)9
many of the philosopher’s critics are, I submit, looking for something in his
philosophy that might more definitively tether the subtractive meta-ontology
of Being and Event (or the equally austere ‘logics of appearing’ [apparaître] of
that book’s sequel) to:
1) The ‘para-ontological’ (or perhaps mē-ontological) theory of subjects,

events and ‘truths’ established by the second half of Being and Event and
reprised with an equal degree of dedication, rigour and invention in
Logics of Worlds;10
2) The praxes of contemporary artists, militants, lovers and scientists
insofar as these are pursued within specific contemporary situations;
3) Badiou’s earlier ‘Maoist’ writings from his Theory of Contradiction up to
the period of Theory of the Subject (1982);11
4) The contemporary world-situation as the scene of wars, riots and
insurrections, but also of the routine repression of all extra- or para-
parliamentary politics by the ‘law-preserving violence’12 of the State;
of Bitcoin and of Trump Tower, of the massive displacement of a
significant portion of the world’s population to spaces (camps, detention
centres, offshore processing facilities, prisons) abandoned, in Giorgio
Agamben’s sense, by the law;13 of the day-to-day struggles of Palestinians
in Gaza; ComicCon; selfie-sticks, Naxalite guerrillas in India; the on-
going cholera epidemic in Port-au-Prince five years after the appalling
earthquake and two centuries after the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture –
and much (everything?) else which belongs to our worlds irrespective
of whether or not what is talked about is included within/represented
by what Badiou at the time of Being and Event calls the ‘state of our
planetary situation’.14
At stake in this demand for ‘mediation’ is, I believe, a question as old as

philosophy itself: what, ultimately, is the point of abstract thought, of philosophy?
At its heart, this question concerns the relationship between concepts
(mathematics, dialectics) and the realities/relations/forms of life from which
such things emerge and to which they seek (obliquely) to respond. Ever
since Plato, the history of philosophy has never attempted to answer such
questions (both epistemological and ontological) without simultaneously
complicating and demystifying the notion of a clear and distinct opposition
between the abstract and the concrete.15 For Hegel, mediation is that which
Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa) 161
(retroactively) reveals how what is taken to be the rich, singular, that is,
unconceptualized phenomenal plenitude of the world is not the opposite but
the apogee of abstraction.16 The ‘labour of the negative’17 – abstract thought
as a synecdoche for the dissolution, explosion and recreation of all form – is,
in fact, the only route to the genuinely concrete: the ‘speculative’ Good Friday
without which there cannot be any Sunday of Life.18
If we understand abstraction in this manner, we can safely assume that
when Badiou’s critics, exegetes and fellow-travellers call for greater ‘mediation’,
they are calling for precisely this kind of mutual implication of the abstract
and the concrete and not what the young Hegel would have referred to as the
Understanding’s [Verstand] reified or static (in the etymological as well as
the everyday sense of this last word) opposition between the abstract and the
concrete. This is especially important because, as Hegel stresses continually,19 if
thought cannot think the real interconnection between (what passes for) the
abstract and the concrete then any attempt to make a bridge between these
two (artificially separated) registers of reality will be impossible. In the light
of this, Hegel, from very early in his career, will insist that philosophy should
move beyond the limited and limiting perspective of the Understanding –
the faculty which implicitly hypostasizes oppositions by assuming their
reality – so as to better follow Reason (Vernunft) which works through such
oppositions,20 taking them as the material of a thought that is not ultimately
separate from reality, any more than reality is separate from thought.
Now, while Badiou is clearly, in one sense, an avowed Hegelian,21 he also
has a pronounced and lifelong aversion to any vision of dialectics that is tied
to both:
1) a vision of ineluctable move from alienation to reconciliation governed

by an ‘invisible hand’ of history (TS 4/19)
2) a metaphysical dialectics which assumes the existence of the Whole in
the form of an expressive totality.22
It should be noted at this point, that ‘2’ can be seen as a necessary

presupposition for any form of ‘Absolute Idealism’, that is, for any reading of
Hegel which sees dialectics as stemming from a necessary and ultimate (as
opposed to limited) imbrication of concepts and reality.23 Against a dialectics
of reconciliation, Badiou, frequently, indeed from his earliest writings,
opposes a ‘Maoist’ dialectics of scission (TS 4/14–21). For Hegel, negation and
mediation are co-extensive, even if they are not strictly identical. But while
Badiou shares Hegel’s fundamental notion that the non-conceptual is more
rather than less ‘abstract’ than that which has passed through abstraction,
he does not accept some of the metaphysical theses which (arguably) are the
concomitants of Hegel’s rejection of the abstract-concrete opposition. For

instance, Badiou explicitly rejects what for him would constitute the dogmatic
version of the Hegelian thesis that essence necessarily appears.24 Instead,
Badiou will, in his second great book, Logics of Worlds, both stick closely
to the program of Hegel’s Logic by coming up with a theory of the way in
which being appears in multiple worlds and, at the same time, distinguish his
mathematical logic(s) of appearing/existence from any classically ‘Hegelian’
motif by which logic-appearance would be connected to a metaphysical
notion of necessity, that is, a teleology (LW 146–152).
Returning to our initial problem, however, if it is still necessary to look for
the ‘mediation’ in Badiou’s corpus, it is worth inquiring what problem this
ostensibly absent mediation is supposed to fix.
For many of Badiou’s most eminent and acute interpreters (I am thinking,
to begin with, of Peter Hallward, Bruno Bosteels and Colin Wright),25 the
question of mediation can be seen as synecdoche for anything in Badiou’s
corpus which might militate against the possibility of deriving concepts from
what Jean-Toussaint Desanti calls Badiou’s ‘minimal’ or ‘intrinsic’26 ontology
which might eventually help with contemporary political struggles for justice
or emancipation.
That said, the production by a number of figures influenced by Badiou
(Wright, Hallward, Nina Power, Frank Ruda and A.J. Bartlett)27 of acute
political analyses of particular situations (e.g. Haiti in the time of the Lavalas
movement,28 Jamaica in the century and a half since the Morant Bay revolt,29
the condition of women under later-capitalism; the situation of education
under capitalism)30 seem to suggest that thinkers who have learned from
Badiou are singularly well- equipped to make precisely the kind of ‘concrete’
analyses and interventions with which Badiou’s formalism is apparently
incongruous.
To what, then, is the demand for mediation directed? For several
commentators, beginning with Peter Hallward, one of the primary concerns
about Being and Event seems to turn around the perceived dangers of a
sort of Gnostic split between apparent poles of Badiou’s system. Thus, for
instance, we could speak (as Badiou does) of the distinction between the
‘human animal’ (E 10–16) as opposed to the generic humanity that touches
eternity through the infinities of the truth procedures;31 of subjectivity as
an essentially imaginary-symbolic-(k)not vs. the painstakingly constructed
body of the (collective) Subject, of the individuals separated by lines of
class, nation, gender and ethnicity vs. the forms of organization (the titular
‘Subject’ of Badiou’s Theory of the Subject) that would bring together generic
humanity (humanity stripped of all recognizable predicates including those
attaching to ‘the human’) under the new ‘tent-words’ of the twenty-first
century (TC 88–95); between the state of the situation with its always violent
defence of its own ‘count’ and those uncounted elements on the ‘edge of the
void’ that amount to the evental-site (BE 175–177); between the inexistent
as a minimum degree of appearance and everything else that is ordered
according to the ‘transcendental’ of a given world. But if Badiou is, pace some
of his commentators, always scrupulous about what he calls the kind of ‘leftist
deviation’ which posits some sort of absolute split between an all-corrupting
situation and an ‘angelic’ proletariat (TS 12),32 the accusations of a sort of
Badiouean dualism persist, particularly in the form of a question about the
way Badiou’s Communism (and in particular what he calls the ‘Communist
Invariants’)33 relates to various forms of Marxism.34
Given how often Badiou emphasizes (to quote the title of the forthcoming
third volume of Being and Event) the immanence of truths, it would seem
strange to act as if Badiou had posited some impassable ‘Kantian’ fissure
between the world of the subject and of truth-procedures. Instead, then,
‘mediation’ must ultimately have something to do with some tension or
disparity perceived to hold between Badiou’s ontology and the phenomenal
richness and ‘complexity’ of given situations. In addition, the ‘objective’
phenomenology of Logics of Worlds makes the effort to explain the relationship
between Being, on the one hand, and existence/being-there/appearing on the
other. In the name of this relation, Badiou goes to great lengths to develop
a formalism for how the ‘pure multiple’ ‘can exist (i.e. appear) in multiple
worlds with varying degrees of intensity according to the transcendental of a
given world’ (LW 100–140).
But if Badiou’s deduction of the notion of both transcendentals and what
he calls ‘objects’ which are not dependent on the quirks of human cognition,
is still considered too ‘abstract’ with respect to actual situations, then we are
forced to assume that even if the value of Badiou’s efforts to formally deduce
categories like truth, event and subject is acknowledged, then this work of
theoretical construction nonetheless remains insufficient with respect to
something which Badiou’s work otherwise seems to gesture towards. But in
what sense and in regards to which task? If, as I would suggest, the answer
to this question concerns political praxis then the prior question, namely, is
what is it that drives Badiou towards abstraction?
First, it is clear that Being and Event’s fundamental decision regarding
ontology (the non-existence of the One, which is the basis for the assertion
that mathematics is ontology (BE 23–37)) is ultimately directed towards
the idea that there exists such a thing as a rational demonstration of the
impossible. In particular, when Badiou turns to the theory of subjects, the
indiscernible, and truths, the task he sets himself is nothing less than an
attempt to formalize, that is, to demonstrate the consistency of tasks which are
generic, infinite, as well as beyond the scope of philosophy. Instead such tasks
(and the inquiries that they entail) are, for Badiou, pursued by the collective,
that is, trans-individual and trans-historical subjects, of the truth-procedures
(science, art, love and politics.) The first thing, it seems to me, that is valuable
about this sort of process of theoretical construction is the way in which
it breaks with the thought that politics, art and love are domains in which
reason falters.35 But just as he wishes to show, in a spirit that is simultaneously
Hegelian and Freudian, that the irrational is treatable by rational means,
Badiou also rejects the scientistic conception of philosophy which would
render it only a handmaid to the natural sciences. Instead, philosophy, as the
compossibility of the truth conditions is able to draw from the truths of art,
science, politics and love, to show (as the meaning of Leibniz’s neologism
implies) how they belong to the same world. Badiou’s own philosophy
performs this demonstration of the compossible by attesting to the way
in which the truths which emerge from each of these domains (‘bodies of
truth’ or ‘new presents’) are both infinite and composed of combinations of
things, entities, ideas whose at least minimal presence in the world is given,
but whose conjunction is unthinkable on the basis of the way that things are
separated according to the State laws and knowledge’s of a given situation (BE
331–339/356–371). In attempting to come up with a general theory of generic
truths, Badiou proceeds formally because he is devoted, as a philosopher, to
proceeding rationally. But Badiou also wants to show that ‘reason’ is not a
pre-existing set of norms (and still less a particular set of opinions which
we can clutch to our chest like the pearls of insecure rentiers). Instead, for
Badiou, philosophy requires (despite its inability to produce truths of its own)
a similar mixture of daring and sobriety, of creativity and rigour as we’ d find
in the truth processes. And one of the goals of Badiou’s thought in general, it
seems to me, is to show and not simply to assert (against a dominant doxa of
our own time) the way the rigorous and the creative become indistinct in the
tracing through the consequences of an event which Badiou associates with
truth (a procedure, an infinite set of enquiries unbound from time, place
and language). For Badiou, there is no creation that is not also an exercise in
consistency, no consistency that is not, at the same time, an act of creation.
And yet such creation is not a creation ‘out of nothing’ so much as it is a
creation out of the teeming infinities of a reality whose excess demands
intellectual construction as opposed to pious awe.
In addition, and while this has been less frequently observed, I think
that it is clear that Badiou is also demonstrably loyal to the Hegelian insight
(particularly manifest in the Science of Logic) that we cannot assume a strict
or static separation between the concepts and categories of thought and the
objects which these categories think. By this, I do not of course mean that
either Badiou or Hegel thinks that minds create worlds (everyone her own
demiurge!). Instead, I mean that Badiou is committed (especially in Logic
of Worlds) to the fundamental principle of Hegel’s Science of Logic whereby
what passes for a clear and distinct opposition between thought, on the one
hand, and the world it is supposed to think, on the other, is itself the product
of a kind of prior movement of thought whose separation from reality’s own
dynamism cannot be assumed without lapsing into pre-Kantian dogmatism.
Again, this is not to deny the existence of the Real or (most importantly
for Badiou’s materialist philosophy) the independence of reality from the
existence of a thinking subject.36 However, what this does mean, for Hegel
and for Badiou, is that a consistent philosophy is also one which should
derive the categories with which it thinks from the material which is the object
of its thought. If politics (or art) can, as Badiou’s 1985 pamphlet maintains,
be thought this is because it is possible to derive from a particular political
(or amorous/artistic/scientific) conjuncture concepts and categories which
are adequate to that conjuncture.37 At the same time, Badiou will maintain
that if thought is to be adequate to the present, it must also be true not only to
what he calls the ‘weak present’ as affirmed by those reactive subjects who are
the often vociferous servants of the status quo – but also to the ‘impossible’,
difficult, yet-to-be-constructed present which exists only in the future anterior,
that is, the present which subjects to truth attempt to bring into being when
they find themselves trying to follow the trace of events: continuing to love,
thinking about how a series of egalitarian political axioms may be applied
in this particular conjuncture and so on. At the heart of Badiou’s corpus,
therefore, we find an attempt to forge a link between something minimal,
dubious and vanishing (the event and the afterglow of its trace) and the
surging infinity of infinities which represents the inconsistent multiplicity of
Being qua Being. Badiou’s philosophy can thus justly be described as a post-
Cantorian Platonism insofar as it attempts to find a new way of identifying the
Real and the Idea, albeit one which neither posits a ‘hyper-Uranian’38 world
of Ideas, nor making the world into an epiphenomena of human cognition
or experience.
In the remainder of this essay, I want to try to (briefly) defend this
orientation of Badiou’s. However, I shall do so not by discussing mathematics
nor politics which, as we have seen, some of Badiou’s critics consider to
be threatened by the abstract-formal-subtractive dimension of Badiou’s
thought. Instead, I want to try and show the benefits of Badiou’s devotion
to abstraction and subtraction by a discussion of another truth-procedure,
specifically, love.
The advantage of doing this, I submit, is that the term ‘love’ is very often
taken (e.g. in Romantic thought and poetry) as the paradigm of that which is
supposed to be completely recalcitrant to rational conception and (a fortiori)

formal inscription. For this reason, it is not at all surprising that we find so
much extraordinary writing on love within various – often religious – anti-
philosophies from Augustine to Kierkegaard.39
Just, however, as love seems to be held up as an exemplar of the ineffable,
it can, from another perspective (equally antipathetic to Badiou) be seen as
something which is reducible to a set of socio-cultural forms, for example to
a particular configuration (arguably rising out of Medieval Christianity) for
human sexuality that is as contingent and improbable as anything in human
history. By contrast, the question of love in Badiou’s corpus cannot, I suggest,
be approached without invoking two other questions on which it touches.
First, we cannot talk of Badiou on love without a reflection on the
relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy. But given the complex
and sometimes antagonistic relationships between the above-mentioned
disciplines, might we usefully speak of something like a point of convergence,
or a common purpose which philosophy and psychoanalysis might share?
Despite the complexity of the question, I would like to risk absurdity
by offering a simple (if provisional and obviously far from exhaustive)
answer. Specifically, it is my contention that one of the shared goals of both
psychoanalysis and philosophy is to make lack manifest. But what is meant
here by ‘lack’?
Before offering an answer to such a serious question, I would like to try to
tie this first question to a second. Specifically: Why does Badiou sometimes
seem to suggest that Lacan’s work constitutes something like an event within
the amorous condition itself?40 What is curious about this is that Badiou
stipulates elsewhere that the amorous event is always equivalent to an
evanescent and always dubitable aspect of the encounter between lovers.41
To be faithful to the (amorous) event is to rigorously trace the consequences
of this encounter insofar as this demands a transformation (involving rigour,
experimentation, inquiries) of the lovers’ worlds.42 But if Lacan’s corpus is
obviously not a part of the truth-procedure of love in this sense what does
Badiou mean by stressing the importance of Lacan’s corpus for the domain
of amorous truths?
Lacan
In one sense, psychoanalysis can be seen to speak (as Lacan himself says)43
of nothing but love. After all, psychoanalysis begins with Freud’s discovery of
a (non-)relation between truth and sex which, when rigorously investigated,
evacuates all that has previously passed for knowledge of the psyche. In this
sense, although there is a great tradition that begins with Plato and whose
most fully realized forms are the various forms of religious Neo-Platonism
and their mystical supplements that makes Eros both the indispensable
condition of philosophy and that which undermines its pretensions,
psychoanalysis goes further in elucidating the way in which the force of
desire interrupts – via the protests and stammerings of the Unconscious
in symptoms – the limits of a certain vision of philosophical mastery (for
instance, the undermining of rational discourse in dreams, slippages, the gap
between words and intentions).
At the same time, psychoanalysis seems from its inception to be
marked by a profound scepticism with regard to love, at least if the term is
understood to name either a pure affect (i.e. devoid of any admixture of
hatred or ambivalence)44 or a concern for the other (the beloved) often over-
determined by any number of edifying and/or ethical precepts governing sex,
desire, and amorous relationships more generally.45
First, this is apparent in Freud’s suggestion that love is always tied to an
‘over-valuation of the object’46 (i.e. to idealization). Second, it is manifest in
Freud’s insistence that the loved object ‘takes the place of the ego’ (thereby
suggesting that love is a kind of displaced narcissism).47 In particular, Freud
never ceases to describe the ways in which there is something hallucinatory
about ecstatic, idealized, erotic love that is also often tied to certain forms of
aggression both in the form of a fundamental ambivalence (towards the loved
object) whereby idealizing love turns to devaluing hate48 and finally towards
a kind of displacement whereby the elevation of the beloved to something
sublime is accompanied by a concomitant hatred for either the lover’s ego
(establishing the well-known connection between love and melancholia)
or projected on to an out-group.49 In both cases, Freud describes the ways
in which the harsh or aggressive feelings from which the beloved object is
completely immunized are turned outwards towards those who – at the
aphelion of the lovable – are deemed acceptable objects of detestation.
As such, psychoanalysis has very little time for what both Badiou and
Lacan call ‘oblativity’,50 for a conception of love as an (implicitly) pure
devotion to the other. This thereby extends towards any notion of love which
would pose a connection to Christian agape and love as eros (where the latter
and not the former is the traditional object of both Platonic philosophy and
psychoanalysis).
Even more so than Freud, Lacan is relentlessly withering (witness his
remarks about the utopian desideratum of ‘genital sexuality’)51 about any
notion that psychoanalysis exists to return love or desire to the auspices of
some conception of morality. In particular, Lacan has absolutely no time for
the notion of love as a telos, whether this means some kind of variation of
‘ideal of human love’ (as, for instance, a harmonious meeting via the Greek
and Hebrew roots of Western Culture of philia, agape and eros) or of ‘love
fulfilled’ which Lacan calls ‘genital love that is supposed to be itself alone the
model for the object relation’: doctor love…love as hygiene’.52
At the same time, Lacan is by no means silent on the issue of love. In
Seminar XX, love is held to make up for (suppléer à) or cover over the
‘absence of the sexual relationship’.53 The discussion in this seminar seems,
in one sense, to confirm the impression that, for Lacan, as for Freud, love
is largely a matter of a delusion, a veil over an unthinkable truth, which
hides even as it supplements a kind of void in reality.54 This, for instance,
is manifest in the way that Lacan reprises his discussion of courtly love
(from Seminar VII) describing it as a particularly intricate way of covering
over the sexual non-relationship which the seminar attempts to describe.55
In particular, Lacan’s deflationary or sceptical notion of love seems most
manifest in his account of phallic jouissance – that is, of the way in which
desire, propelled by the (missing/impossible/lost) objet a (the cause of desire)
finds partial satisfaction through a series of objects whose desirability stems
from their having entered into a pre-existing fantasy space through which
the (unconscious/desiring) subject flickers and fades like the shadow of a
candle on the wall of a dimly illuminated room.
Furthermore, Lacan’s remarks about the sexual non-rapport that holds
between the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ positions (and their accompanying
logic) seems, if anything, to emphasize the extent to which love – as shown
for instance in the elaborate liturgies of courtly love – seems largely to be
an ingenious way of covering over the gap that separates Lacan’s ‘masculine’
and ‘feminine’ positions as different (and utterly heterogeneous) ways of
sustaining desire in the world.56 The point of Lacan’s insistence on this sexual
non-relation is that while people can and do obviously have sex, sex remains
a kind of mutual masturbation in which each partner in the sexual act
fluctuates between the monadic framing of their partner within the space of
fantasy and a traumatic encounter with the unsymbolizable jouissance which
sets desire into motion.
However, there are moments in which Lacan does seem to speak about
love as something which may be something more than a mask over the
sexual non-relationship. In particular, we can see this in Lacan’s comments
on the relationship between Plato and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. In
his extraordinary account of that dialogue’s celebrated final scene, Lacan
describes a relationship between the two lovers which, while by no means
contradicting his later remark that there ‘is no such thing as a sexual
relation’,57 implies a conception of ‘love’ which seems to be something other
than narcissistic demand or the tendency for a given individual to take the
body of her partner as an occasion for her own (partial/surplus) enjoyment.

Recall that the end of the Symposium is heralded by the entrance of the
drunken Alcibiades.58 Having disrupted the drinking party, the beautiful
Alcibiades makes an extraordinary speech about the balding, pot-bellied
Socrates: a figure whose physical description is the antithesis of the Greek
ideal of masculine beauty. Socrates, Alcibiades tells us, wants nothing more
than to talk with beautiful young men (like Alcibiades or Phaedrus). And
indeed, Alcibiades notes, Socrates has all kinds of opportunities to satisfy
this desire because of the mysterious and profound fascination which the
philosopher exerts over people who (like Alcibiades himself) would seem to
be in possession of far too much (wealth, beauty, fame, contacts with noble
families) to want to spend time with someone who, in the contemporary
vulgate ‘adds little to no value’ to the rich (in every sense of the word), lives
of his born-to-rule students. In reflecting on the comic inversion which Plato
performs by making the gorgeous Alcibiades the erastēs and the ugly Socrates
the eromenos of their relationship, Alcibiades, Lacan notes, describes that he
has discovered Socrates’ secret – the reason why the satyr-like philosopher
and husband of Xanthippe seems to possess such a mysterious charm for so
many glittering examples of Athenian youth. The secret, Alcibiades says, has
to do with something which Alcibiades once glimpsed in passing, namely,
that Socrates has inside him an extraordinary preponderance of agalma,
these golden, astonishing ‘little treasures’ (or golden statuettes) that seem to
be inside Socrates (as the substance of his soul).59 In describing Alcibiades’
vision and the ensuing discussion between Socrates and Alcibiades, Lacan
will read Socrates’ behaviour towards Alcibiades as, at least in part, an
ancient Greek adumbration of the figure of the analyst.60 In the aftermath of
Alcibiades’ speech, Socrates, far from responding in kind with an encomium
to his lover, mockingly rebuffs him, suggesting that he has seen through
the ruse of Alcibiades’ discourse. Instead, Socrates tells Alcibiades to pay
attention to Agathon – the tragic poet whose name, in Greek, means ‘good’.
For Lacan, what is interesting about Socrates’ actions towards Alcibiades is
the way in which these at once perform a kind of seduction (in the sense of
eliciting desire) and a refusal to take the position of the object of desire that
has been inflamed. In this way, Socrates’ behaviour to Alcibiades mirrors the
way in which the analyst strives to occupy the place of the objet petit a in his
patient’s desiring-economy.
Significantly, this process, by which the analyst (gradually stripped of her
status as ‘The Subject Supposed to Know’) eventually involves showing the
patient the incompletion of the Other which has hitherto been the basis of
the patient’s fantasy.61 As a result, the analyst, like Socrates, tries to lead the
patient back to his own desire, a desire that is occluded by being bound up by
the role of the Other in the patients’ fantasy. Like a good analyst (or teacher),
Socrates refuses the role that Alcibiades wishes to assign him as a master,
a beloved or someone who possess a specialized knowledge of Alcibiades’
innermost thoughts or feelings. The result is that Socrates comes to occupy
the role not of the object but of the cause of his lover’s desire.62 Now, of
course, this psychoanalytic sleight of hand manoeuvre does not, at face value,
have much to do with any conventional understanding of love. Instead, it
seems to be a brilliant exemplar of psychoanalytic transference – the process
whereby the analyst refuses the position of the Subject Supposed to Know
and comes to take the place of the Other to whom the analysand addresses
his demands, thereby allowing for the possibility that the analysand forms
a different relationship to the Other. However, and this will be important
for Badiou, Lacan does raise the question of something in love which, by
a kind of emptying out of the ‘state of the subject’ (the lover’s demands,
fantasies, proclivities, self-conception), allows the subject to rediscover – as
it were through love – a lack in her libidinal economy and its investments
with the world. In particular, Lacan associates (here as elsewhere) love with
something that is at once tied to knowledge and to something in the face of
which knowledge must be evacuated. If psychoanalysis therefore ‘comes not
to praise, but to bury love’,63 the psychoanalytic internment also performs
the important function of marking out a lack, that is, of turning lack into
the mark of a nothing. ‘Love’, Lacan says, in the above-mentioned seminar,
consists in ‘giving what one does not have’,64 and that gift is an awakening to
our own lack of being/wanting to be (manque-à-être). At this moment, the
anti-philosophy of psychoanalysis performs a function which Plato (in his
Sophist) makes essential to any philosophy that would distinguish itself from
sophistry, that is, the bringing to bear of a properly analytic seriousness to
that which is not.65
Badiou
Badiou’s conception of love is so unapologetically formalist, so far from an

attempt to account for the phenomenal riches and mystical singularity of
love that it can be expressed in terms of a perpetual ambiguity between two
numbers. For Badiou, love as the ‘scene of the two’ ultimately concerns the
aftermath of an encounter (an event). Following on from the encounter,
there is a declaration (‘I love you’) which retroactively attests to something
implicit in the encounter, namely, the shattering or laceration of the individual
conceived as unified subject (the count-of-one of each individual) followed
by the attempt of these beings-that-can-no-longer-count-as-one to trace
the consequences of the amorous event and construct a Two which, for
Badiou, is always precarious for the quite straightforward reason that it is
also impossible (IPL). To understand such prima facie paradoxical (and even
nonsensical) statements, we must pay attention to what Badiou does not
mean by love.
First, Badiou insists that love is not identical to the existence of the loving
couple (C 187). As the portion of the amorous situation that is visible to third
parties (and occasionally even State institutions), the couple is instead simply
love’s state form, the portion of the amorous situation that is discernible
according the transcendentals of a given world (‘Those two seem to hang
out a lot/are they together/married/just friends?’). But if love is, as Badiou
maintains, a truth procedure then it cannot be reduced to that which accords
with the laws of appearing that govern the given set of worlds in which the
lovers’ appear. What is indiscernible to the situation is the work of love, that is,
the decisions and operations by which new connections are made between
every world in which the lovers find themselves.
In addition, Badiou denies that love has anything to do with the
consciousness of the loving subject, that is, with what one or both of the
parties to love feels or thinks (C 182). Following Lacan, Badiou seems to
accept that a focus on the lovers’ own experience of love (embroiled as it
inevitably must be in the particular psychical grammar of the lovers)
is inadequate to love’s essence insofar as it can only speak of each lover
individually as a being with a particular psyche and psychic history (with
her particular sexual predilections, fantasies, etc.). From such an individual
focus, we are thereby counting each lover as one and not as two: in such a
discourse love would come ultimately to refer back to the identity of each
party in the loving relationship as if the amorous-event had never exposed
the possible amorous subject to the wind and rain of an existence beyond
monadic individuality.
However, while Badiou opposes what he calls love to the State-discourse
of love as a kind of shopping trip through the sexual marketplace/New
Age Quest for the Self, his thesis is in no way motivated by any puritanical
depreciation of sex. Instead, sex, for Badiou, is simply what there is, as
ordinary as trees, death, bacteria or infinity. Badiou takes sex (with all its
complications) to be the part of love which has some non-minimal degree
of appearance in a number of worlds, before, after and during the amorous
encounter. There are, in other words, always sexual desires and acts, all of
which can be lamented, obsessed over, problematized, defined, celebrated,
tabooed, instigated etc. But Badiou’s point is not to emphasize that these
things are obstacles to what he calls love. Badiou refuses to see in love a kind
of sentimental Judeo-Christian veil over the truth of sex. As he says: ‘love
can only consist in failure (ratage) on the fallacious assumption that it is a

relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth. The truth of what? The
truth that the Two, not only the One proceeds in the situation’ (C 182).
But what does it mean to talk of love as a truth procedure? First, Badiou
sees the amorous production of truth, like any such production as involving
a way of following through the consequences of an always dubitable trace
of an event. For Badiou, love begins with an encounter. The encounter then
splits the world and its subjective history in two (‘my life before I met her’)
and demands a response (‘What do we do now?’). Once the event has been
declared (‘I love you’), the truth-procedure of love then involves the attempt to
create a new orientation to the world, a new ‘enchanted’ present on the basis of
the existence of something which requires the bodies and subjectivities (the
souls) of the lovers but which is irreducible to what is possessed by either of
them. The inherent difficulty or implausibility of the ‘Two’ (which is the Body
which the amorous truth-procedure constructs) comes from the fact that,
for love to be possible there must, on the one hand, obviously be at least two
ones (1+1), that is, at least two distinct entities which can be related to each
other through the act of loving.66 At the same time, however, if love consists
only of two people and their distinct and determinate entities, than this
necessary condition of love becomes a condition of love’s impossibility insofar
as the distinction implies that the Two ‘is not’, that is, that there is nothing
of love but the two individuals who are seized by the amorous encounter.
For Badiou, this problem (‘are we one or two?’) is a question that is asked in
practice, by those who declare that the encounter from which love developed
was real, that is, is something that demands an existential response. The
question of love’s number is, in other words, not a theoretical or academic
matter, but something that must be constantly addressed in the lives of the
people who have declared for the amorous event. In the aftermath of such
a declaration, a lover will ask herself: should I go to Paris or Buenos Aires
without my beloved? How long do we stay apart? Do we see other people?
What happens if we are separated by thousands of miles or dozens of years?
In declaring Lacan’s corpus something like an event for the truth procedure
of love, Badiou does not retract the idea that love is actually only a matter for
amorous subjects. Instead, what Badiou does with Lacan is to treat his ‘wily
master’ as someone who exposes the void or lack for what overtly exists as
love, that is, in that which is discernible of love. By following psychoanalysis
in evacuating the conventional discourses of love (the hymns to the sexual
relationship whether classical or Romantic, libertine or conservative, cynical
or sentimental) Badiou inters love as a figure of this world, thereby elevating
love to a condition for philosophy. In this way, he repeats the Platonic gesture
whereby what passes for love, politics, art and science (all aspects of the
situation as subject to state discourses, sophistries, the ‘education’ of and by

the ‘city’) has to die in order to live again in relation to truth. Abstraction is
both the murderer of what passes for life and the world and the god which, like
the young Dante before Beatrice, announces la vita nuova. In his discourse
on love, Badiou can thus be seen to perform an exemplary philosophical
recuperation of the anti-philosophy of psychoanalysis. This is not to say that
when Badiou describes love he squashes the round pegs of a defiant anti-
philosophy into the square holes of philosophical credulity. Instead, Badiou
accepts what psychoanalysis has to say about the impossibility of the sexual
relationship and tries to find appropriate conceptual form for that which,
despite and even because of this, gives rise to the possibility of an amorous
subject of truth.
Conclusion: Touching the Void or Love’s Generic Exception
Badiou begins In Praise of Love by deploring the ads for a dating agency that
offers its subscribers the possibility of ‘love without chance’ and ‘…perfect
love without suffering’. But if Badiou admits seeing love as threatened by such
fantasies of zero-risk, frictionless fun, or of passionate encounters that would
somehow leave our little worlds fundamentally secure and intact, his defence
of love is in no way motivated by any desire to defend any amorous tradition
or institution. He is as uninterested in defending marriage or monogamy as
he is in defending a Saturday night-club ‘meat market’. At the same time,
would it not be possible to object that nothing is less in need of defence
than the cultural mélange of Messianic hopes, psychological needs, cultural
artefacts and intimate joys which we associate with this all-too-evocative
word? Along these lines, I think that there is a case to be made that we live in
a time where love, far from being the jetsam of a more adventurous epoch,
continues to be praised in exactly the same mawkish, hollow and strangely
liturgical ways that we salute ‘democracy’, ‘education’, ‘values’, ‘ethics’ and
much else whose quantity of pious invocation seems directly proportionate
to the extent to which it seems emptied of all determinate meaning. But while
a certain maudlin banality of love and it’s praise is undeniable, I think that
Badiou is, in the end, motivated by the thought (lurking deep in every human
psyche) that there is still something in the phenomena of love (as well as
in our various lover’s discourses) which allows us a glimpse of a different
logic to that of a world in which sacrifice to a late-capitalist reality principle
is the destiny of everyone. Of course, we must be careful of sentimentality.
We should also take seriously the ‘cynical’ notion that, just as education is
simply a polite name for institutional time spent in preparation for one’s future
social role – whether this is working in a factory, an office, or spending time

attending cocktail parties on island resorts – love is simply an old name for
an old-fashioned way of organizing sex. On this picture, just as education
would be completely absorbed (as in Bourdieu’s work) by the task of social
reproduction, so love would be a kind of figure of sex which in a post-Fordist/
neo-liberal age breaks down completely into a thousand free-market forms
with the consequence that sex, to quote the title of Michel Houellebecq’s first
novel, is simply an extension of the domain of the [capitalist] struggle.
For Badiou, however, statements such as the one above are veridical
without being true. In other words, they show a correct knowledge of the
situation, of our situation. But as Lacan also says: les non-dupes errent, that
is, there is something in such knowledge – in the reduction of names to their
nomination that falls short of the truth. In the end, philosophy has nothing
to offer, pace Boethius, by way of consolation. We can know the world and
rightly, wisely, cast love out as an excess or a kind of madness that is destined
only to create misery or interrupt our own private quest for enjoyment.
Far from gainsaying this wisdom, Badiou, as we have seen, sees love as the
psychoanalyst does: that is, as a veil covering a void which covers over an
impossible disjunction. At the same time, we are, for Badiou, also an animal
who is capable of staring into the starry abyss at the heart of our own worlds,
the animal for whom a manifestation of the void (of lack) can also open on
to the surging infinities at the heart of existence: the everything beneath the
nothing from which this everything is also, finally, indistinguishable. When
Lacan says that to love is ‘to give someone something you don’t have’, we have
to think of how it is that our everything (all the predicates that attach to us,
all that we might actually comfortably give someone else) can be reduced
under the force of something as everyday as an encounter with another
person to nothing as well as that we are (perhaps even more strangely)
capable of producing a similar kind of apocalypse in others. And what would
it mean, after all, to give, accept or to return the gift of the nothingness of our
own subjectivity, against everything we know of ourselves, all our inherited
certainties, our shopping-trolley fantasies and wisdom about our own wants,
our inherited dreams of success or the State-or-Place-where-Life-will-finally-
be-worth-Living-and-I-will-finally-be-happy-among-the-right-kind-of-
people-who-will-provide-glamour- excitement-recognition?
I know of precisely one indubitable statement about love. Specifically, I
am thinking of Ian Curtis’s anhedonic, melancholy, looping half-chant: love
will tear us apart….again. Badiou, of course, agrees that love begins with such
a shattering. But philosophy cannot repair broken vessels (or hearts). Rather,
when Badiou recognizes in love a condition for philosophy, he repeats Plato
in declaring love to be something that cannot be about restoring a lost
wholeness (however much this may be, as both Plato and psychoanalysis
shows us, part of love’s comic, impossible, self-defeating telos). Instead, love
is a dance of light emanating from two distinct sources, tracing and retracing
a constellation across vast reaches of space. It is a movement that brings
previously unrelated points of light into new configurations, new figures
which, for an instant, take shape against the blackness of space following
principles of figuration that seem utterly arcane except for the thought that the
patterns drawn from the lights emanating from each of the two sources seem
(somehow) to be responding to each other. For Deleuze, invoking Proust,
love and the sufferings caused by love are what gives birth to the Idea.67 For
Badiou, love’s movement is already a thinking, not, of course, because love is
primarily (as in a parody of fatuous philosophical intellectualism) cognitive
or devoid of physical passion, but because, like all thought, love starts from
an encounter which then forces us to stand back (abstract) from whatever
hitherto counted as reality, to carry our shattered selves into the interstices of
the world we once knew. In love, we comport ourselves by the ever-dwindling
and ever dubious light of an encounter. In Badiou’s philosophy, this light
cannot be understood as a promise for any kind of a new dispensation, of
a guaranteed transcendence which would tattoo itself on the flesh of the
world. Instead, Badiou’s subtractive vision of love connects to his visions of
love and art by way of the fact that it involves trying to live in the afterglow
of something fundamentally dubitable and evanescent: a Mallarméan siren
on the foam of our lives, which nonetheless impels us to try to draw new
connections between that which the state of our situation (our world of
proliferating differences and fissaprous tribalisms) never ceases to separate.
Love is, in the end, for Badiou, the gateway drug to the other truth-
procedures. It is the only one of the four which we are all guaranteed to have
been seized to the point of our elevated destruction. As such, it is an empirical
universal that opens on to the true universalism which Badiou calls by the
name of the ‘generic’. In making this passage, each of us comes face to face
with the irreparable lack in what passes for reality. And it is this lack which
points to the ‘everything and more’ of the Real, the intelligible but sense-
shattering infinities that we discover when the ways of counting what belongs
to the world start to tremble and break down. That this everything is also a
nothing is, for Badiou, something which can be demonstrated by ontology.
But Badiou’s is an ontology which, in its crystalline abstraction, owes much
to the idea that there is something in the sexual (non-)relationship which
points towards the ways in which each of the four truth procedures belong to
something like a generic humanity. In the end, love is, for Badiou – and to use
a phrase from another thinker with whom he has little in common – a kind
of highest poverty: a way by which, in giving and receiving the nothingness
of human subjectivity (of desire), we may come to discern the outlines of

something other than merely existing. In Badiou, as in Plato, the pre-eminent
form of this discernment is mathematics (which forces us to understand
beyond the limits of our own experience). But if, as in both thinkers,
mathematics opens on to the question of justice out of the rivalry between
what Badiou calls the ‘matheme’ and the ‘poem’, the first connection between
subtraction and the Real comes from something that seems like the opposite
of abstraction: love as a way by which we are dragged into the effulgence of a
truth procedure. Our first, faltering, inevitable opening to the possibility of
living with and for an Idea.
12
Where Thought Is Not

Campbell Jones
Against the arid superficiality of our age, Alain Badiou has, over the course
of the past half century, produced one of the most remarkable defences of
thought. This is not a romantic insistence on the importance or honour
of thinking but rather the construction of a quite singular conception of
thought sculpted both in relation to the philosophical tradition and also
directed to intervene in the present. In significant ways, advocacy of thought
is the most classical gesture of philosophy, the gesture by which philosophy
pits itself against its mortal enemy, the sophist. But the sophist does not stand
still, and rather constantly invents new means by which to evade the dangers
presented by thought. Because thought can never be completely suppressed,
the sophist constantly creates new mechanisms for putting thought ‘in its
place’. Philosophy responds, ever anew, to these constant attempts to place
limits on thought.
I seek in this paper to give some specificity to the practices of the opponents
of thought today. This will elaborate and clarify Badiou’s argument that
behind the ostensible end of ideologies is ‘a violent subjective injunction’, the
content of which is to ‘Live without an Idea’ (LW 511). Of interest is how this
maxim seems at first glance to be at odds with a historical juncture at which
thought and ideas are apparently everywhere, in a ‘knowledge economy’ or
‘cognitive capitalism’ in which ideation is the staple fare of daily life and the
world seems to be ruled by little more than ideas.
In a certain sense, the world today is fully populated with and worked over
by ideas. The great idealists today are not philosophers or authors of fiction
but economists and financial analysts, the writers of code, designers and
creatives, brand managers and corporate executives. The present financial
and geopolitical reworking of the world is routinely decided on the finest of
theoretical points and is arranged by action in the name of the purity of the
idea. Thus the wide sense of the inescapability and inevitability that results
from the effort to adjust the world and its populations by force of an idea. The
classic philosophical motif of ‘dying for an idea’ then takes a perverse turn in
which, almost universally, populations have the means of life, or life itself,
extinguished in a process not so much of martyrdom in the name of an idea,

but in a grotesque martyrdom for the ideas of economists.
The key enemy of thought today then is not outright hostility to or hatred
of thought. While such responses remain in force in obviously violent sites,
other and more sophisticated strategies of opposition to thought have become
increasingly important. First, with the rise of simulacra of thought, one is
invited to ‘think’ while something apparently very close to thought is taken
to be thought. Thus the comforting simulacra of thought take the place of
thought but without the hard work, and without the upheavals and radically
transformative consequences that follow from thought. Alternatively,
the need for the hard work and radical consequences of thought are fully
embraced and indeed encouraged as a glorified pathway and boutique
lifestyle choice, but so long as thought remains well contained in the seminar
room and behind paywalls and the obscure jargon of academic discourse.
Just as Jacques Lacan stressed that the injunction of the superego is to ‘Enjoy!’
while not openly disclosing its mechanisms or particularities, sophistry today
is quiet about its motivations but nevertheless enjoins everyone to ‘Think!’.1
This apparent universalization of thought invites scrutiny of the
concomitant rise of these more subtle mechanisms of the evisceration of
thought. Philosophy, as with other revolutionary political sequences, opens
with the recognition of the capacity of all for thought and asserts a radical
equality against a social allocation of functions and roles which finds that
only a few can think. While there is something reassuringly democratic in
the notion that thinking is a universal human capacity, the philosophical
appeal to the universal capacity for thought much more profoundly finds
thought where there is imagined to be none and the absence of thought there
where thought is most proudly proclaimed.
Grasping the place of thought today requires specifying those places
where, against the apparent idealism of our age, thought is not, while at the
same time identifying those places where, surprisingly, thought is. Much
can be gained in such an enterprise from Badiou’s conception of thought,
a conception which, as will become clear, is far from unique or restricted to
the proper name Badiou. In the remarkable conclusion to Logics of Worlds,
Badiou makes a pressing argument for thought that binds thought strictly
to life. The position he advances is radical but requires considerably more
elaboration, in light of Badiou’s own admission that his arguments there are
‘still too condensed and abrupt’ (CH 239).
The first part of this chapter therefore formalizes Badiou’s understanding
of the nature of thought, offering as he does a negative definition of thought
in terms of what thought is not. This formalization of Badiou’s position on
thought will require clarifying some of the often implicit use that he makes in
Where Thought Is Not 179
the crafting of his conception of thought from Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger
and Lacan. Along with placing emphasis on Badiou’s allies in thought, I
further draw out the pivotal place for Badiou’s understanding of thought of
his critique of finitude and in particular his critique of the finitude of thought
and of the human being. These are intimately linked, and militate against the
widespread celebration today of finitude, limitation and individuality, which
as Badiou so importantly argues, reduces the human being to animality.
The second part of the chapter offers a materialist compliment to Badiou’s
conception of thought by turning to the place of thinking and ideas in business
and economics. Badiou offers a profound and timely critique of the platitudes
that circulate in these areas, clarifying the simultaneous absence of thought in
the midst of frenetic intellectual activity. At the same time, however, concrete
detail of economic life is missing in Badiou’s own writing and in the work
of many of his followers. For all of his professed materialism and emphasis
on the multiplicity of being, Badiou’s own understanding of the capitalist
economy is often formal and abstract. Moreover, Badiou often presents the
capitalist economy as far more unified and consistent than it is, and, perhaps
more importantly, presumes a conception of capital that forestalls political
action in the present. To join Badiou and ‘those who wander on the borders
of evental sites, staking their lives upon the occurrence and the swiftness of
intervention’ (BE 294) involves finding that capitalism is not near so unified
and complete as it is so often taken to be. Refusing the classical image that
sees thought begin when work ends, and against the risk of repeating the
self-understanding of capitalism that is presented by capitalists and their
sycophants, and equally by too many of their critics, will be to recall not only
where thought is not but equally the radical results of finding thought where
there is imagined to be none.
Thought and its others
Badiou follows a classical philosophical arc in finding the universal

determination of the human being in thought. From this, he draws his
distinct sense of thought, which involves introducing his specific conception
of truth and of how truths relate to the human being: ‘The capacity which is
specifically human is that of thought, and thought is nothing other than that
by which the path of a truth seizes and traverses the human animal’ (IT 71). If
this generic capacity for thought is the positive side of the relation of thought
to the human animal, thought as such remains radically negative. Thought
will be conceived by Badiou in terms of what is at first approximation its
opposition to its others: sophistry, interest, opinion, knowledge. The positive
content of thought is therefore radically open, and philosophy is essentially

subtractive (C 13–14).
Philosophy is subtractive because of the concrete implication of thought
in the realities of a definite situation. This marks the perennial productivity
and as we will see the necessity of the enemies of thought. Just as his minimal
conception of an event is the uprising of ‘something other’ (E 67), thought
is a transformative coordinated uprising against the others of thought. These
others of thought, whether they can be identified strictly as sophistry or not,
are situationally specific and take profoundly different forms. Interventions
against the others of thought are themselves not defined so much by positive
content but are rather characterized by their subtraction from specific and
singular situations.
As has been noted, repudiation of thought does take the form of outright
hatred of thought, either because of the effort required or the consequences
of living life seized by something transformative and transindividual. It would
be wrong to say that hatred of thought has no concrete reality today. While
‘the sophists of old substituted force and convention for truth’ (C 60), and the
new sophistries of today are our concern here, it would be foolish to not see
that we are surrounded today by vast number of ‘sophists of old’ and that these
are not safely located in marginal positions outsides of power and influence.
The history of domination is not that of the replacement of the old
with new forms of domination, but rather the invention of ever new forms
that co-exist along with the old. In the same way, new forms of sophistry
do not abandon the past but rather invent new forms of sophistry that live
on alongside the old. Thought alert to the possibility of corruption must
be vigilant about the lures and the seductive rewards of both the old and
the new sophistries that thought can fall prey to. The question of interest is
important, because the instrumentalization of reason involves a reduction of
thought to technique, skill or the usefulness of the results of thought.2 But the
fact that the exposure of the particularity of interest is itself often insufficient
as demonstration of the corruption of thought points to further and much
deeper enemies of thought that serve as accomplices to the outright hatred
of thought and the reduction of thought to technique. These more subtle
enemies are opinion and knowledge, and will be examined in turn.
Badiou’s critique of opinion and his persistent pitting of opinion against
thought can only be understood within the complex contours of his critique
of the finitude of thought and of the human being. The almost universal
presence of opinion today is one of the defining features of the ideology of our
age. What Badiou calls ‘democratic materialism’ is a materialism that appears
democratic by reducing everything that might appear as thought back to the
particularities, desires and understandings of an individual. Opinion is the
enemy of thought through this recourse to the figure of the individual. It

is not just because opinion is received ideas or shared common sense that
Badiou militates against opinion. More to the point, ‘the democracy of
opinion, which is everywhere praised and exalted, is the exclusion of the true;
it bestows royalty on that perfectly empty figure which is the individual, who
thinks himself the free poet of his existence all the more inasmuch as he takes
his place in commercial imitations’.3
As the democracy of opinion continues to expand its reach, there is an
extension of the justifications of the reduction of thought to opinion and its
further reduction to what Lacan, in an expression often quoted by Badiou,
described as the reduction of life to ‘the universal spread of the service of
goods’.4 Contemporary university discourse not only falls prey to this service
of goods, but has by and large abandoned any interest in truth and moreover
finds ways of justifying the moral virtues of that abandon. It accuses those
who speak of truth or thought of presuming a unity of the subject or a
transparency of experience that are of course philosophically discredited.
Others turn thought into a pure means, asserting with, for example, Deleuze
and Foucault that theory is a ‘tool’ and that thought provides little more than
a ‘toolbox’.5 Ideas, research projects and teaching programmes are justified
on the grounds that they are ‘interesting’, which ultimately means that they
satisfy the whims of funding bodies or student preferences, or just as trivially,
the particular preferences or individual interest of the researcher in question.
In the democracy of opinion, capitalists and their stooges take themselves
as authorities not because they know anything but because of their position.
The successful trader or entrepreneur therefore licenses themselves to offer
baseless ‘rules for life’ that arise from the most superficial vision of ‘the way I
see it’.6 Politicians revise history and justify avoidable suffering on the grounds
of positions that rest on little more than their individual subjective opinion.7
Here, there is no argument and no demand for thought, but instead there is
authority and the prospect of access to channels of media distribution. This,
it should be recalled, is authoritarianism. ‘An authoritarian regime exists
when the truth of a statement depends, not on the argument that supports it,
but on the position of the one who pronounces it, whether God, king, priest,
professor or prophet’.8
Opposition to the authoritarianism that accompanies the opinionated
pronouncements of the powerful is therefore the most ancient and the most
contemporary of projects. The reduction of thought to opinion is the classic
charge of the founding of philosophy in opposition to sophistry. Although
Badiou associates this most closely with contemporary ‘democratic
materialism’, represented for instance in postmodernism and its avatars, it
should be stressed that the reduction of thought to opinion is not a recent
development but has long roots and lies at the heart of the classical and
contemporary liberal conception of the finitude of thought and of the
human being.
This reduction is expressed with particular clarity in Locke’s emphasis on
the finitude of human understanding and his very particular idea of self-
aware and self-possessing individual consciousness.9 Although fully in place
in Locke, this presumption that thought occurs only in a finite thinking being
was deepened in Kant’s emphasis on the limits of reason and the origin of
knowledge in synthetic activity of an individual human consciousness. These
developments Hegel calls ‘the reflective philosophy of subjectivity’, which
Hegel subjected throughout his work to excoriating critique. Hegel attacked
Locke and his school precisely because they ‘transformed philosophy into
an empirical psychology. They raised the standpoint of the subject, the
standpoint of absolutely existing finitude, to the first and highest place’.10
These motifs of finitude and subjectivity have radically accelerated in
contemporary university discourse. This unquestioned motif of the individual
and locus comes to centre stage even among those claiming some relation or
another to what they like to call ‘poststructuralism’, but who have jettisoned
the critique of the subject from which poststructuralism arose. In this form
of the reduction of idea to opinion, the stress falls on the involvement of the
observer in observation, the standpoint or ‘perspective’ of the observer as an
ineliminable restriction on what can be seen, and therefore of the limits of
perception as a result of the demonstration of what returns as the primacy of
the observing subject and of particular individual senses and brains in their
relation to the empirical world.
This extended and renovated reflective philosophy of subjectivity –
whether presented as new or not – is taken in contemporary university
discourse as adding layers of complexity to accounts of the origins of ideas.
Kant had of course stressed the vital stage of intermediation of the subject,
and in the contemporary humanities and social sciences that stress the place
of subjectivity, location and perspective, this Kantian vision reaches its
apotheosis. This is not to say that the Kantian revolution was not a massive
advance, nor is it to suggest that ideas might be transparent or not arrive
from the particularities of a subject. It is rather to stress that what is so often
lost in this emphasis on finitude and particularity is the way that thought at
once touches an individual human being but also exceeds the particularities
of any individual.
This is why Badiou stresses the exceptional nature of truth, such that truth
is exceptional to interest and opinion but moreover is exceptional to the
particularities of any specific, individual, human being. Thought for Badiou
involves being seized and traversed by a truth. Clearly, human beings live
in mortal finitude. In opinion, the individual remains in the order of the

imaginary and, as Lacan stresses, a good part of the painfulness of thought
issues from the very real cost to the human animal of any breach in the
imaginary. Thought is unpalatable precisely because it breaks the individual
apart. At the point of the breach, one is a finite mortal but also an immortal
who transcends particularity and finitude. It is quite understandable then
that the human animal would have an active interest in avoiding truth and
falling back on their animal particularity. But in thought, a truth traverses
and seizes that animal, and in doing so that animal becomes something it had
previously taken to be impossible.
While thought is opposed to opinion, thought finds another major
contender in this struggle, in the form of knowledge. In many ways,
knowledge militates against opinion just as strongly as thought, but beyond
their shared refusal of opinion, the relation between knowledge and thought
is not one of simple opposition. Knowledge is a perilous companion to
truth and must remain with truth even while truth exceeds knowledge. The
problem is that, so often, knowledge is taken to be all there is to thought,
and in this, one loses sight of the fact that thought at once involves but also
exceeds knowledge. Thought requires knowledge but also the opening to the
way that knowledge is exceeded by truth.
The way and the reasons for which Badiou distinguishes truth from
knowledge has an important historical lineage. To lose sight of this heritage
risks both reducing Badiou to an individual thinker and furthermore to
reduce the relation of knowledge to truth to one of simple opposition. Badiou
frequently evokes the way that the distinction between knowledge and truth is
made by his ‘master’ Lacan, stressing that Lacan ‘had to place the distinction
between knowledge and truth at the centre of his thought’ (BE, 334). Lacan
insists that truth remains firmly connected with knowledge, while at the
same time exceeding it. In Seminar XVI, he identifies ‘the function at once
joined and disjointed in which I have articulated knowledge and truth in a
dialectic distinguishing if not opposing them’.11 Truth is bound to knowledge
yet is that which punches a hole or creates a collapse in knowledge. Thus, in
Seminar XX, he offers as the result of ‘a long reduction of pretensions to truth’
the formula, ‘The true aims at the real’.12
While Badiou is clear about how much his distinction between truth and
knowledge owes to Lacan, in Badiou, this distinction also actively joins with
and translates the distinction Kant makes between reason (Vernunft) and
the understanding (Verstehen) and the distinction Heidegger makes between
truth and science. Badiou is very precise about his debt to these distinctions
in Kant and Heidegger: ‘Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential.
It is a distinction that is already made in the work of Kant: the distinction
between reason and understanding. It is a capital distinction for Heidegger: the

distinction between truth – aletheia – and cognition or science – techne’ (IT 61).
Kant maintained that he developed the distinction between reason and
the understanding from Plato, and that he follows Plato’s sense of the term
‘idea’ as something that exceeds the senses and therefore, the understanding.
Kant therefore claims:
Plato made use of the expression idea in such a way that we can readily
see that he understood by it something that not only could never be
borrowed from the senses, but that even goes far beyond the concepts
of the understanding [die Begriffe des Verstandes] (with which Aristotle
occupied himself), since nothing encountered in experience could ever
be congruent with it.13
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel notes that ‘Only since
Kant’s time has the distinction between reason and understanding become
normal in philosophical usage. This distinction is necessary. Among the
earlier philosophers, on the contrary, the distinction was not drawn in
this way.’14 In the hands of Hegel, this distinction between reason and the
understanding involves a demonstration of their complex interrelation
and a celebration of the capacities of the understanding. While strident in
his critique of empiricism, Hegel also celebrates empiricism because, like
philosophy, empiricism is driven to know what is in actuality, the nature
of things.15 Further, Hegel celebrates empiricism and the capacity of the
understanding in drawing distinctions, in separating out the multiplicity of
what would otherwise appear as flat and undifferentiated being. As he writes
in the Phenomenology: ‘The activity of separating is the force and labor of the
understanding [die Kraft und Arbeit des Verstandes], the most astonishing
and the greatest of all the powers.’16
This celebration of the understanding is a vital moment in Hegel, and
one that is lost if, in the name of thought, one merely reacts negatively
against empirical science as such or against the powers of distinction that
characterize knowledge. The difficulty, to put it simply, is that while the
understanding exceeds opinion, the understanding is in turn exceeded by
reason. Or, to translate this into terms of Lacan and Badiou, while opinion is
exceeded by knowledge, knowledge is in turn exceeded by truth. This is the
limit of knowledge: that knowledge is not-all. Knowledge is a necessary but
not sufficient condition of truth.
Positioning Badiou in relation to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Lacan helps
to situate Badiou’s distinction of knowledge and truth. It can also provide
some barriers against the shallow opposition of thought to knowledge in
both Badiou and beyond. This is a vital ground on which to understand

the advocacy at the opening of Being and Event of ‘a new departure in the
doctrine of truth’ that involves, above all, ‘the dissolution of its relation of
organic connection to knowledge’ (BE 3).
This dissolution of the organic connection of truth to knowledge is not
an irrationalism and is certainly not an opposition to or repudiation of
knowledge. While Badiou repeatedly criticizes knowledge for the fact that
knowledge simple counts or repeats the situation, this is not a matter of
‘rejecting’ knowledge. Knowledge remains crucial for Badiou, which is subtly
positioned in his essential quip that ‘Even for those who wander on the borders
of evental sites, staking their lives upon the occurrence and the swiftness of
intervention, it is, after all appropriate to be knowledgeable’ (BE 294).
One of Badiou’s most important conclusions is exactly his defence of
radical thought without dismissing knowledge. Badiou explicitly identifies
this as one of the virtues of Lacan’s rejection of the temptations of both on
the one side mysticism, obscurantism and religion and on the other hand of
scientism (LW 523; JLPP 96). Much of the humanities and social sciences
today falls prey to one or the other of these temptations, retreating into
irrationalism and particularistic subjectivism or alternatively to the idea
that all thought can do is to know the world and to map it with ever more
precision. According to the latter pathway, it is assumed that knowledge
of the nature of the situation and its contradictions will lead smoothly to
emancipation, and following this presumption, the humanities and the social
sciences have created vast mountains of knowledge and learned erudition.
In this direction, thought is nothing more than the amassing of knowledge
in the form of an ever more complete and unified ‘encyclopaedia’ (BE 328).
Against this might be recalled the lesson Hegel made in compiling his own
Encylopedia, that ‘Erudition is not yet science.’17 Such a critique of erudition,
science, empirical knowledge, the understanding and knowledge does not
diminish these one bit, but rather puts them in their place. It marks the great
value of knowledge and at the same time acknowledges that thought always
takes us somewhere else. And it is only when the great value of knowledge
has been recognized that we can insist that ‘a truth is always that which
makes a hole in a knowledge’ (BE 327).
A human animal seized and traversed by truth finds itself in opposition to
opinion and in excess of knowledge. In this, Badiou follows directly Lacan’s
characterization of the subject in Seminar XIII as that which is ‘divided
between truth and knowledge’.18 A subject of thought is traversed and seized,
which is far from impotence but rather involves the confrontation with the
impossible and the appearance of new objects. Finding those things that are
otherwise taken to not exist or to have their own very particular place in a
world requires great fidelity to what is, but also a refusal of the count of the
objects in that world. We might usefully recall Lacan’s conclusion that it is
‘necessary not to forget that it is a characteristic of our science not to have
introduced a better and more extensive knowledge of the world but to have
brought into existence, in the world, things that did not in any way exist at
the level of our perception’.19
Think!
In terms of what exists in the world, the contemporary scene presents what
seems to be a remarkable efflorescence of ideas. Ideas circulate freely in
politics and the media, and in the worlds of business elites, management
consultants, financiers and computer programmers. Ideas spread wide and
fast, and according to Bill Gates, business takes place, or should take place, ‘at
the speed of thought’.20 All are encouraged to have their own ideas, to have an
opinion rather than regurgitate facts. Meanwhile, the capacities for creation
and destruction that follow from modern science demonstrate that thought
has become a frighteningly practical reality. At the level of the global political
economy, the fact that the fate of billions rests on adjustment to very specific
set of ideas – structural adjustment, austerity, the finite bounded individual –
again clarifies the astonishing depth of what ideas can do.
At the same time, the thing that seems most lacking today is anything
that could seriously be called an Idea. Popular culture reduces thought to
soundbites. In schools and the university, there is a generalized thoughtlessness
and a relentless assault on the humanities. New areas of inquiry pop up
celebrating their absence of intellection – whether in the business school
and the capitalist techno-sciences or in the flourishing of ‘new materialisms’
in which the history of the world is found in objects. From this apparent
omnipresence of thought issues the merciless annihilation of thought.
Hence, Badiou’s claim that the injunction today is that we must live
without an idea. He describes this injunction as ‘inconsistent’ (LW 511).21
This inconsistence plays out in its very contradictory character, and in spite
of this is vigorously effective and insistent.22 So while Badiou earlier asserted
that ‘philosophy today is deserted’ (TS xxxviii), later, in his Second Manifesto
for Philosophy, he emphasized that thought is not so much lost as a false
version of thought has become generalized. The point is that an account of
where thought is and is not today will necessitate going deep into the places
in which thought is claimed to be.
Of all of the places in which thought has become worldly, this is no more
so than in the nitty-gritty practical world of capitalism. The stakes of thought
are today not just philosophical or logical matters. Those of us working on

concrete social analysis, or even social sciences, need firstly to identify the
specific content of the specific ideas that circulate there. Then there is a matter
of what happens to the nature of ideation as such in the realm of business.
The world of business is far from a simple enemy of thought. Businesses
seek to hire the ‘brightest and the best’, and it is no surprise that graduates
of the humanities from elite universities are so prized in capitalist enterprise
for their intellectual skills. The place of thought and ideas in contemporary
capitalism is vital, even while it would be a gross mischaracterization of
the concrete realities of the work today to speak of a generalized state of
‘cognitive capitalism’ or to assert that today, or in the near future knowledge,
‘becomes the basic source of value’.23 Still, profound shifts around the
nature and location of knowledge, thought and ideation are crucial parts of
contemporary capitalism. Programmes of ‘thinking big’ have moved from
state organized public works to become the core strategy of capitalist business
as part of a return and reconfiguration of the realities of economic planning
that are at the heart of contemporary ‘market economies’.24 The challenge, so
often foregone, is to think through the consequences of what it means for
capitalist corporations to place such importance on ideas in their internal
practice and public presentation of self. In this, the dividing lines between the
seriousness of thought and the utter venality of the sophist are incredibly fine.
The fact that a company such as IBM takes as a slogan and registered
trademark the expression ‘Think!’ functions in a complex, multilayered
space that speaks both the truth and the falsity of contemporary capitalism.
It reflects the abstract idealism that is at the core of many business ideologies,
while at the same time, it speaks of the way that today the abstract interweaves
with the immediately and practically concrete. It is part of a self-aware
business practice that far from eschews thought as such, but rather celebrates
thought for both its appearance and its practical consequences. In realms
like finance, the technical, mathematical, ideational and ideological enter
into complex new alliances, such that thought and practice become at points
almost indiscernable.25
The injunction to ‘Think!’ is no less complex in business than it is in
philosophy, as are the forms and reasons for its compromise. IBM explains
that the motto ‘Think!’ came to Thomas J. Watson one morning in 1911 at a
meeting with sales executives, at which he declared: ‘The trouble with every
one of us is that we don’t think enough.’ This is a problem, he explained,
because ‘Knowledge is the result of thought, and thought is the keynote
of success in this business or any business.’26 Clearly there is considerable
mobility in the meaning of knowledge and thought here, although Watson
later explained: ‘By THINK I mean take everything into consideration. I
refuse to make the sign more specific. If a man just sees THINK, he’ll find
out what I mean. We’re not interested in a logic course.’27
If Watson here, like Badiou in Logics of Worlds, puts ‘lesser logic’ in its
place in search for a greater logic, elsewhere he offers considerably more
clarity. He is reported to have said in 1914:
we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and

thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The
trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter – thinking –
because it’s hard work for people to think, and, as Dr. Nicholas Murray
Butler said recently, ‘all of the problems of the world could be settled
easily if men were only willing to think’.28
Cut forward a century, and a 2015 advertisement for IBM presents Watson as
the author of oracular wisdom. Constructing a high speed montage reflecting
the apparent plurality of our age, this advertisement confidently announces
that:
All of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only
willing to think. All of the problems of the world, all of the inefficiencies,
complexity, bad information, bad decisions, could be settled easily. All of
the opportunities could be realised if we were only willing to see patterns
in data that we could never see before, put analytics in our hands,
reinvent businesses in the cloud, fight cybercrime with math, design
a machine that thinks like we do. If we were only willing to use data,
and science, and curiosity to track epidemics, clear traffic, clear the air,
predict breakdowns, blockbusters, injuries, blackouts, so that everybody
and everything becomes smarter every day, all of the problems of the
world could be settled easily if men, women, students, leaders, citizens
and machines were only willing to think.29
While such an advertisement reproduces the shallowest and most

sociologically naive techno-utopianism, there is something important in this
sentiment and the ideas that inform it. It is this idealism, and not that of the
philosophy classroom, that has the most impact in the material world today.
This is the idealism that informs business practice. It is an idealism of the
promise of the future, but what is most important in contemporary capitalist
idealism is the question of what is here taken as an idea.
As the early nineteenth century saw the forming of the idea of communism,
the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries witnessed the most massive
reaction against it. Pivotal here was not the opposition to communism of a
better idea, but the reconfiguring and reclaiming of the idea of the idea. This
reaction certainly operated through the violence of the crushing of the Paris
Commune and through the imposition of other ideas. But it also involved
advocating what can be called, to paraphrase Frank Ruda, a set of ‘ideas
without idea’.30 Capitalist reaction is not opposed to ideas as such, but rather
to a specific idea of the idea. This struggle over the idea of the idea is a key
stake at the present moment, and one with important historical antecedents.
In the closing pages of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money, John Maynard Keynes posed the question of whether the ideas
advanced in his book were merely visionary hopes that might be thwarted
by political interests. Writing seven years after the 1929 crash, he called on
a spirit of openness for ‘fundamental analysis’ and for experimentation with
alternatives. He wrote, famously:
But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and
political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the
world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves quite
exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist.31
In relation to practice, Keynes ended up back in the realm of ideas, concluding

that ideas have a concrete reality when they are applied in the world by ‘civil
servants, politicians and even agitators’.32 He sets explanation of social change
based on changing ideas against explanations of social change based on
interests. With a certainty for which he offers and indeed has no justification,
he asserts: ‘I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated
compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas’ and that ‘it is ideas, not
vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil’.33
Keynes sets ideas against interests as explanations of the course of history.
He reassures his readers that it is ideas rather than interests that determine
the course of history, but moreover that ideas and interests are distinct from
one another. Indeed, then as today, it is not so much the decision in favour of
ideas over interest but the very remarkable idea of their separation that is at
issue. It is this separation, the separation of thought and being, of subject and
object, which modern philosophy has in so many different ways effectively
dismantled, and which was one of the overriding philosophical problems for
the young Marx.
A remarkably similar idealism to what is found in Keynes equally
animates Hayek. It is not by chance that in his speech at the April 1947
meeting of the foundation of the Mont-Pèlerin society, Hayek cited with
approval from the remarks by Keynes we have cited here.34 Hayek offers
an extreme sanctification of the individual which involves not only singing
the praise of possessive individualism but a defence of what he called ‘true
individualism’ from its pretenders. Further, and beyond Keynes, in Hayek,
the very categories of experience and thought are translated into the register
of the individual.
Hayek’s ‘true individualism’ as he conceives it, ‘began its modern
development with John Locke’.35 In a tradition that was earlier identified as
the reflective philosophy of subjectivity, which runs from Locke through
Hayek to the present, the finitude of thought and of the human being are
taken, paradoxically, as unshakeable grounds. Such inconsistencies, along
with other troubling issues regarding the intellectual probity of this tradition
might induce the temptation to dismiss it out of hand. But what is important
is the social and political impact of this line of thought, down to the question
of ultimately what in this tradition and its derivatives is taken as thought.
In this tradition, ideas ultimately result from the experience of individuals.
Subjectivism or individualism thus draws thought back to the coordination
of the various sense experiences. Thought here is a business matter, involving
little more than the administration of sense experience. This involves a
radical delimitation of the idea and its consequences. Locke is a great critic of
opinion, to be sure, but against it the idea is given a very narrow and reduced
sense. As Hegel explains:
Locke goes on to say that all people are conscious of what they think, and
what the mind occupies itself with is ideas. People have different ‘ideas’.
These are really ‘representations’, for by ‘idea’ we understand something
different. In Locke’s case ‘ideas’ are such things as the ideas of elephant,
white, hardness, softness, rest, motion and so forth.36
This Lockean conception of ideation and the finite individual runs through the
history of English and other empiricisms and is subsequently taken up in the late
nineteenth century as the presumedly solid ground of what becomes modern
economics. In the process, ideation is principally taken as the integrative act
of a finite individual consciousness. Oscillating between Lockean empiricism
and Kantian synthetic apperception, Hayek concludes, with confidence:
‘It is not only those mental entities, such as “concepts” or “ideas”, which are
commonly recognized as “abstractions”, but all mental phenomenon, sense
perceptions and images as well as the more abstract “concepts” and “ideas”
must be regarded as acts of classification performed by the brain.’37
The business world and its repetition in politics is not a battlefield
of thought or even a ‘marketplace of ideas’. It might then be tempting to
conclude that capitalist business and the capitalist state are the key sites today
where thought is not. Still, just as capitalism rests on constant change – or at
least modification – while being terrified by genuine change, capitalism in its
practical instantiation requires that the transindividual thought and action
that it rests on be misrepresented as the action of individuals. Whatever
happens in the process of appropriation and ownership, thought remains a
transindividual act in which particular bodies are traversed and seized by
truths. There is a dual and contradictory process here in which the history of
capitalism rests on the expansion of transindividuality and its representation
in terms of individuals. In the transindividual creation of novelties, there is
a constant reactive effort to put these novelties in their place. Not to obscure
them, because the powers unleashed by these novelties is so blindingly
obvious, but rather to put them in their place, to locate transindividual
capacities in the individual, to reduce thought to the finitude of the human
beings that are its bearers.
Against this effort at placement, thought always arises from the concrete
location of a particular, mortal human individual but at the same time is
radically exceptional to that or indeed any other place. Thought is the
human capacity to be seized by the truths that arise out of knowledge and
against opinion, and moreover, thought is the human capacity to be more
than a particular, finite, limited individual. Thought, which is here as always
something that disrupts interest, confronts opinion and exceeds knowledge,
involves contact with a truth that is uncontainable in place. As Lacan puts it,
‘what is frightening about truth is what it puts in its place’.38
Thought and sophistry bear a fundamentally different relation to finitude,
location and the human body. Sophistry embraces particularity while
thought arises out of particularity and mortal finitude but exceeds it. It makes
sense to recognize that thought requires assigning the sophist to their place
(C 18) because the sophist has only their place, their desires, their interests
and opinion and a little bit of knowledge. The effort or even the idea that it
would be possible to ‘put thought in its place’ is destined to failure because
thought has on the one hand a place, a bearer, a representative in a mortal
body. On the other hand, thought is also generic, placeless, dislocated or
decentred with respect to the body of ‘the thinker’. Where thought is not is
in this finite, restricted mortal body. Thought exists in the transit out of this
and all restrictions to limitation, finitude and the individual human being.
13
The Priority of Conditions:

On the Relationship between Mathematics
and Poetry in Being and Event
Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder
For Badiou, philosophy follows two universal rules. The first is that it must
construct a coherent concept of truth that renders what he calls the four
generic procedures compossible: art, science, politics and love. Philosophy
only exists, then, if there already exist truth procedures occurring in these four
domains. The second is that it must re-think the intra-philosophical effects of
certain generic procedures it is contemporaneous with. The reason this duty
needs to be constantly taken up anew is that philosophy not only depends
upon the extra-philosophical existence of these four generic procedures;
it must also be engaged in a constant dialogue with them, opening itself
up to the possibility of having to reconsider and re-work its own internal
operations under the pressure of their unprecedented constructions. Badiou
names this second rule conditioning. In his magnum opus Being and Event
(1998), the two conditions of mathematics and poetry play a crucial role
over the course of the book. Mathematics thinks ontology and the poetry
of Stéphane Mallarmé is called upon to think the event. We ask how and in
what way Badiou renews philosophy by focusing on the relation between
the conditions of poetry and mathematics – of Mallarmé and set theory,
respectively – in Badiou’s work, as well as by examining the methodological
presuppositions that underwrite his doctrine of conditions.
The first step is to determine what conditioning minimally consists of by
identifying what it is not. The doctrine of conditioning in no way implies a
pure submission of the philosopher to the autonomous mode of thinking
at work in the conditions. Regarding the artistic condition, this would see
the philosopher attempt to first reconstruct the intrinsic particularities of
the poem or artwork in question, and only then transpose it as such into
their philosophical apparatus. As Badiou has remarked, ‘I think that
literary events are indeed operative for philosophy, but when philosophy
puts them as conditions for its own development, it nonetheless proceeds
through operations of selection, change, or transformation. In my eyes,

these operations are not exactly falsifications, but they are, after all,
displacements.’1 Nor, however, does conditioning imply a unilateral relation
of appropriative, interpretative activity. A purely active relation between
philosophy and art would dissolve the evental singularity of the latter to
accord with the premeditated desires of the philosopher. In Badiou’s own
words, ‘[p]hilosophy sets out to think its time by putting into a common
place the state of the procedures that condition it’ (MP 37 – modified trans.),
and yet it does so by ‘organizing the generic procedures in the dimension, not
of their own thought’ (MP 39 – modified trans.) but in terms of philosophy’s
overall strategy and the criteria it sets itself.
Badiou argues that philosophy has often succumbed to the first of these
temptations by ‘delegat[ing] its function to one or other of its conditions’,
delivering the ‘whole of thought’ over ‘to one generic procedure’ (MP 61).
Since Nietzsche, but culminating in the poetic ontology of Heidegger and
his French inheritors Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,2 philosophy has been,
for Badiou, ‘in the hands of the poem’ (MP 66). This recurrent philosophical
recourse to the poem involved a number of interrelated ideas about the status
of the poem qua thinking. On the one hand, insofar as the ‘great modern
sophistry, holding firm to the multiple, renounce[d] the category of truth’
(MP 104 – modified trans.), the poem, as that which manifests ‘language’s
flexibility and variance’ (MP 42) in a paradigmatic form, became a privileged
object of inquiry. On the other hand, what he calls in Being and Event
‘constructivist thought’ (BE 286) – an orientation that grants absolute
sovereignty to language – conceives of the poem as the exemplary means
for exploring the limits of what can be said of being.3 Badiou uses the term
‘suture’4 to describe the way philosophy has submitted, in both of these cases,
to the poem.
Badiou mobilizes his concept of suture in two different ways. The first
is polemical: his doctrine of conditions works in direct opposition to
the suturing of philosophy to one of the generic procedures, in this case
the poem, allowing him to distance himself from a loosely connected
constellation of twentieth-century figures and philosophies. The second
designates ‘the philosophical fetishism of the poem’ (MP 87) that has had the
effect of arbitrarily delimiting the possibilities of thought. Against this suture
of philosophy to the artistic condition, Badiou holds that ‘[t]he poem need
not be the melancholic guardian of finitude, nor a fragment of a mysticism
of silence, nor even the occupation of an improbable threshold’.5 Instead,
he attempts to chart a passage between the Charybdis of passivity when
confronted with the poetry of Mallarmé and the Scylla of active invention.
Our question is thus as follows: what are the specific ‘operations of selection,
The Priority of Conditions 195
change or transformation’ that Badiou makes Mallarmé’s work undergo –

and what irreducible contribution does the poet make to the mathematically
conditioned ontology of Being and Event?
Being and Event opens with an explicit act of de-suturing philosophy from
poetry. In ‘Meditation One’, Badiou argues that insofar as being qua being
is ‘unpresentable within the configuration of that-which-is-maintained-
there’, thought always has the option of drawing on ‘the poetic resource
of language’ (BE 26) to obliquely speak of it. By virtue of ‘the breakdown
it inflicts on the law of nominations, [poetry] alone is capable of excepting
itself […] from the current regime of situations’ (BE 26–27 – modified trans.).
Nevertheless, Badiou does not succumb to this ‘Great Temptation’ (BE 26)
because, as he argues, poetic ontologies threaten to lead thought either
down the path of ‘negative theologies’ or of ‘mystical annihilation’ (BE 26),
both of which engage in ‘a logic of transcendence’ (BE 283) that posits the
existence of a ‘gigantic infinity’ (BE 284) synonymous with God. Instead,
God being long dead for this good Frenchman, it is the axiomatic succession
of Georg Cantor’s mathematical set theory that provides Badiou with the
secular, transparent and integrally transmissible means to inscribe being qua
inconsistent multiplicity. Having purged poetry from his discourse on being,
he proceeds to re-think traditional ontological categories – ‘the multiple […],
the void, the excess, nature, infinity’ (BE 173) – in terms of Zermelo-Frankel’s
axiomatization of set theory (ZFC).
Nonetheless, Mallarmé’s poetry occupies an absolutely central position
in the conceptual architecture of Being and Event. He is the first non-
mathematical, non-philosophical figure to appear in the book. In a displaced
reprise of the Platonic gesture, whereby Plato ‘submit[ted] language to the
power of poetic speech’ (HB 20) once he had reached the limits of discursive
thought – of dianoia – Badiou replaces the image of the Sun with Mallarmé’s
Stars: that is, the poetry of the ‘obscure Sphinx of Tournon’6 seems to return
at the very moment mathematics reaches its own internal limit. Specifically,
when mathematics demonstrates that the quantitative difference between two
subsequent transfinite cardinals is undecidable – a result that shows there
exists an errancy to being that makes radically transformative events possible –
poetry, for Badiou, returns. After its initial banishment, when the mathematical
thinking of quantity so spectacularly breaks down, poetry is summoned to
think the event. As Jacques Bouveresse has said, ‘[t]his five-footed rabbit that
Alain Badiou is runs at top speed in the direction of mathematic formalism,
and then, all of a sudden, taking an incomprehensible turn, he goes back on his
steps and runs at the same speed to throw himself into literature.’7 However, as
Bartlett, Clemens and Roffe have clarified, ‘the poem thinks that which is not,
or rather, thinks the thought which ontology qua mathematics cannot think’.8
Mallarmé therefore plays a twofold role in Being and Event. On the one
hand, he is an example of a postevental truth procedure, which produced
‘the truth of French poetry after Hugo’ (BE 404). But on the other, the truth
procedure he was engaged in involved a poetic thinking of the event: ‘Un
Coup de dés [is] the greatest theoretical text that exists on the conditions
for thinking the event.’9 This is what makes Mallarmé, properly speaking,
a condition for the philosopher. In fact, Badiou generalizes this thesis to
the whole of poetry tout court. In the essay ‘What Is a Poem?’, he writes
‘philosophy will recognize that, in summoning the retention of what
disappears, every naming of an event or of the evental presence is in its
essence poetic’ (HB 26).10 What allows this to take place is modern poetry’s
most crucial philosophical achievement, as Badiou conceives it, namely its
dissolution of the category of the object.11 As he states, modern poets such as
Mallarmé and Rimbaud were engaged in an unprecedented poetic procedure
that lead to ‘the destitution of the category of the object, and of objectivity,
as necessary forms of presentation’ (MP 72). If an object is what can be
rigorously discerned by the knowledge of a situation, then the event, which
poetry is supposed to name, cannot in any way take the form of an object:
‘This is what Mallarmé tells us: Whoever restores the category of the object,
which the event always revokes, is led back to abolition, pure and simple’
(HB 136). Following Mallarmé, in his reading of Un Coup de dés, Badiou
therefore distinguishes between a use of language that ‘employs language
for commercial tasks alone’ – that is, language that continues to circulate
linguistic values already recognized in a situation – and poetry, which folds
language ‘to the paradoxical function of maintaining that which, being
radically singular, pure action, would without it have fallen back into the
nullity of the place’ (BE 192 – modified trans.). The possibility of capturing
the event in a signifier is dependent upon poetry – not mathematics.
Nevertheless, in examining and assessing the capacity of poetry to think
and name the event, what we hope to show is that it is necessarily mediated by
the mathematical condition and its meta-ontological consequences. In other
words, in terms of their philosophical distribution, the conditions do not exist
on an equal plane. To establish this, we shall first turn to the relation between
poetry and the three orientations of thought outlined in Being and Event,
namely the generic, the constructivist and the transcendental. Succinctly
put, we will show that without a generic philosophical and mathematical
mediation, the role poetry plays in naming the event will always threaten
to lead thought either down a constructivist or transcendental path. After
which, we shall examine the mathematical procedure of forcing and the way
it retrospectively determines the contours of the event. Finally, we shall turn
to Badiou’s reading of Un Coup de dés in ‘Meditation Nineteen’, as well as his
remarks on Mallarmé’s thematically related sonnet A la nue accablante tu, to

show how his engagement with the poetic condition is always mediated by
the mathematical condition.
II
In Being and Event, after studying the mathematical demonstration of the

undecidability of the quantitative distance between two subsequent transfinite
cardinals, Badiou advances the following meta-ontological thesis: ‘Everything
leads us to believe that it is for ever that this provocation to the concept, this
un-relation between presentation and representation, will be open in being’
(BE 281). Crucially, this thesis depends upon the procedure of forcing, which
mobilizes generic multiples; we will return to this in more detail further on.12 In
addition to the generic orientation implied by forcing, Badiou recognizes the
existence of two other orientations in thought that are equally provoked by, and
respond to, the errancy of being. The first is called constructivist, an orientation
that involves categorically rejecting the formless excess of being in favour of
what a well-formed language can clearly discern. Following the principle of
indiscernibles, this orientation states that ‘[w]hatever is not distinguishable by a
well-made language is not’ (BE 283). The second, the transcendent orientation,
is more recognizably theological: it attempts to establish a stopping-point for
the proliferating excess of being by positing the existence of ‘a multiple whose
extension is such that it organizes everything that precedes it’ (BE 283). The
canonical form of such a multiple is nothing less God himself.
We would now like to show that a philosophy sutured to the poem always
has the tendency to be in a complicit liaison with constructivist thought. To
establish this, it is first crucial to point out that what grounds the constructivist
orientation is not, as might be supposed, the eradication of poetry but rather
that this orientation makes language absolutely sovereign when thinking
about being. As Badiou puts it, what the constructivism always affirms is
that ‘between language and being there is nothing, and that either a possible
“gathering of being” in language does exist or what is, is only insofar as it is
named’ (MP 94 – modified trans.). Whether it speaks of being clearly or not,
for constructivism language constitutes an absolute horizon for thought. To
read poetry within the space of a constructivist suture would involve treating
the poem as something of a limit-experience for language or sense – a poetic
encounter with the limit of what is sayable of being.
The problem that Badiou has with constructivism is best elucidated when
compared to his own generic orientation. While he claims that the power
of poetry lies in its capacity to corrode the stability of any given language,
thereby referring to a beyond such as the event, this power is indissociable

from the existence of indiscernibles in his philosophy. He writes, ‘ever
since the event in the matheme constituted by Paul Cohen’s operators, it is
precisely possible to produce a concept of the indiscernible and to establish
under certain conditions the existence of multiplicities that fall within this
concept: “generic” multiplicities’ (MP 95). While poetry is charged with the
intra-philosophical task of producing ‘the murmur of the indiscernible’ (HB
34), Badiou also implicitly establishes that, unlike the mathematician and
their meta-ontological escort, by itself, poetry cannot speak clearly or ground
the veritable existence of indiscernibles without falling into a performative
contradiction. Badiou explains this point by way of a question: ‘To refute
the doctrine that a part of the situation solely exists if it is constructed on
the basis of properties and terms that are discernible in the language, would
it not be necessary to indicate an absolutely undifferentiated, anonymous,
indeterminate part? But how could such a part be indicated, if not by
constructing this very indication?’ (BE 288–289). Even if Mallarmé can
poetically stage the event in its constitutive undecidability via the metaphor
of a dice throw, a throw of the dice will never abolish the fact that this is only
‘a metaphorical treatment of the concept of undecidability’ (BE 194). Either
the poet is trapped in a performative contradiction or is forced to merely
gesture towards something whose existence he cannot found. If Mallarmé is
the poet-thinker of the event, it is only insofar as his poetry coincides what
has already been established through the meta-ontological transliteration of
mathematics.
In addition to the relationship between poetry and constructivist
thought, Badiou is very aware of the potential solidarity poetry may have
with the transcendent or theological mode of thought. Cited above as the
‘Great Temptation’ of ontology to suture itself to the poem, Badiou comes
close to establishing an equivalence, which holds in all situations except the
mathematical, between a beyond of structured presentation – a beyond that
poetry gestures towards in its attempt to name the event – and the notion of
God. As he writes, ‘[i]n reality, an inhabitant of [a situation] can only believe
in the existence of an indiscernible for the reason that, if it exists, it is outside
the world […]. For an inhabitant of [a situation], in any case, it seems that
God alone can be indiscernible’ (BE 373 – modified trans.). Insofar as Badiou
recognizes that the only way to prove the existence of the indiscernible is
via his meta-ontological transliteration of the procedure of forcing, he
necessarily equates a poetic murmuring of the indiscernible either with an
empty metaphorical gesture, as it is within a constructivist horizon, or with
theological thought. While Mallarmé ‘always designates a multiple presented
in the vicinity of unpresentation’ with the image of ‘the Abyss’ (BE 192)
that is evoked at the opening of Un Coup de dés, he can never establish the
ontological correlate of this poetic metaphor. In fact, all his intra-poetic
indexes of what exists ‘beyond all structure’ (BE 26) can always be positioned
against the backdrop of a theological horizon where the only conceivable
beyond is God himself. Without inscribing his reading of Mallarmé within
the framework of his generic mathematical ontology, Badiou’s claims about
the poet would be guilty of erring towards constructivist or transcendent
modes of thought. Simply put, mathematics must have philosophical priority
in the doctrine of conditions.
III
We have thus far hoped to establish that Badiou’s philosophical orientation

relies upon a rejection of constructivism and transcendentalism. As neither
orientation adequately thinks the event, his construction of the matheme
of the event necessarily occurs within a generic orientation.13 This, we shall
argue, carves out in advance the only space where Mallarmé can be seen to
produce ‘the thought-poem of the event and of the undecidable’ (C 298).
In the following passage, Badiou explains how he constructed the
matheme of the event:
The approach I shall adopt here is a constructive one […] Ordinarily,

conceptual construction is reserved for structures whilst the event is
rejected into the pure empiricity of what-happens. My method is the
inverse. The count-as-one is in my eyes the evidence of presentation. It is
the event which belongs to conceptual construction, in the double sense
that it can only be thought by anticipating its abstract form, and it can
only be revealed in the retroaction of an interventional practice which is
itself entirely thought through. (BE 178)
This passage makes the following two things clear. Firstly, the matheme of
the event is not an analytical consequence of the transliteration of the axioms
of ZFC set theory into ontology. Secondly, the event must nonetheless remain
intelligible with respect to set theory, both in terms of its actual conceptual
contours and the language in which it is inscribed: it cannot be established
on the basis of mystical insight, sense-perception, or an ineffable experience
of the Divine. In other words, the event falls outside of the domain of
mathematics, yet its concept must be transmissible in its terms. What, then,
are the respective contributions made to the construction of the matheme of
the event by mathematics and Mallarmé’s poetry?
Let’s begin with the mathematics. In the following passage, Badiou clarifies
what the relation of the multiple of the event to mathematical set theory is: ‘With
the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology.
Here, as always, ontology decides by means of a special axiom, the axiom of
foundation’ (BE 184). The axiom of foundation states that for all multiples α –
with α not being the empty set – there also exists another multiple β, which
belongs to α but which itself shares no multiples with α. More technically, the
intersection of α and β is the empty set, or what Badiou calls the proper name
of the void. This is written as such: α ∩ β = Ø. No multiple that belongs to
β also belongs to α. Regarding the multiple of the event, Badiou writes that
‘[c]onsidered as a multiple, the event contains, in addition to the elements of
its site, itself, which is thus presented by the presentation that it is’ (BE 189 –
modified trans.). Breaking with the axiom of foundation, the multiple of the
event does contain itself as an element. As a matheme, it is written as follows:
ex = {x ∈ X, ex}
If a self-belonging multiple were possible within ZFC set theory, then

multiples such as α ∈ α would be permissible. If α existed, the axiom of the
power set would allow the singleton of α, written {α}, to exist. The reason
such a multiple would contradict the axiom of foundation is that there exists
no multiple that belongs to {α} whose intersection with {α} is void. For only α
belongs to {α} and therefore the intersection of α and {α} is not the empty set
Ø, as it should be, but α itself. Badiou explains: ‘Ontology does not allow the
existence, or the counting as one as sets in its axiomatic, of multiples which
belong to themselves. There is no acceptable ontological matrix of the event.’
The event therefore constitutes ‘a point of impossibility of the discourse on
being-qua-being’ (BE 190). This is the properly mathematical foundation for
the claim that set theory cannot think the event – and that, consequently, a
different discourse is required.
In ‘Part IV, The Event: History and Ultra-One’, Badiou moves from the
construction of the matheme of the event to the deciphering of its intra-
poetic symbol. He writes in ‘Meditation Nineteen’ on Mallarmé, ‘[t]he event in
question in Un Coup de dés … [is] that of the production of an absolute symbol
of the event’ (BE 193). Further on, he reinforces this conclusion by stating
that ‘the poem realizes the essence of the event itself ’ (BE 197). There seems,
then, to be a series of separate constructive contributions, interwoven into the
philosophical fabric of Being and Event, given by poetry and by mathematics.
However, to what extent is it reasonable to say that mathematics cannot
definitively think the event by itself if the multiple of the event is constructed by
explicitly breaking the axiom of foundation? In other words, if the matheme of
the event is transmissible in the language of set theory and if it has an intelligible,
albeit negative, link to the axioms, then what irreplaceable contribution does
Mallarmé make to its formulation? Before we turn to Badiou’s reading of Un
Coup de dés, it is worth noting that the matheme of the event also anticipates the
procedure of forcing, which is identified as the ontological substructure for the
law of the subject and the being of a truth. Very schematically, the procedure of
forcing involves the construction of a generic extension to an initial situation.
Crucially, a statement that is undecidable in this situation will have been decided
in the generic extension. In Badiou’s meta-ontological transliteration, this
procedure constitutes the intra-mathematical inscription – or the ontological
substructure – of a truth procedure. He thus constructs the event in a manner
minimally consistent with what the procedure of forcing makes thinkable: that
is, the event will be an undecidable supplement that will have been decided
in its evental status over the infinite course of a truth procedure. In short, the
matheme of the event cannot be divorced from the procedure of forcing.
Turning to Un Coup de dés, Badiou begins by stating that ‘[t]he metaphor
of all evental-sites being on the edge of the void is edified on the basis
of a deserted horizon and a stormy sea’. He continues: ‘The term with
which Mallarmé always designates a multiple presented in the vicinity of
unpresentation is the Abyss’ (BE 192). The poet stages a metaphor that gives
the topology of the concept of the evental site, from which the multiples of
the event will be drawn.14 In the matheme of the event, the evental site is
designated by the term X:
ex = {X ∈X, ex}
An evental site has the singular property of being a multiple that belongs
to a situation while none of the multiples that belong to it also belong to this
same situation. As Badiou writes: ‘I will term evental site an entirely abnormal
multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in
the situation’ (BE 175). Insofar as nothing can be differentiated within it, the
image of the Abyss metaphorically corresponds to the concept of the evental
site: like a completely abnormal multiple, nothing that is within the Abyss
can be counted by the situation in which the Abyss is itself counted in its
indivisible massivity. This is the meaning of the topological metaphor Badiou
draws on to describe the Abyss as being ‘in the vicinity of unpresentation’
(BE 192): that is, the multiples that belong to it are unpresented or void with
respect to the situation that presents the Abyss.
Badiou claims that Mallarmé stages a particular paradox associated with
the evental site, namely that ‘it can only be recognized on the basis of what it
does not present in the situation in which it is presented’. He states: ‘Mallarmé
brilliantly presents this paradox by composing, on the basis of the site – the
deserted Ocean – a phantom multiple, which metaphorizes the inexistence

of which the site is the presentation’ (BE 192). This metaphor for the
unpresented multiples that belong to the Abyss is the phantom shipwreck,
which is dragging the Master, the poet-hero of the poem, beneath the waves.
As is proper for an unpresented multiple, the existence of this shipwreck is
strictly uncertain: ‘there is now composed an image of a ship […] which,
itself, does not exist, being the figurative interiority of which the empty scene
indicates, using its resources alone, the probable absence’ (BE 192 – modified
trans.). Via the metaphor of the Abyss, Mallarmé establishes the topology
of the evental site and accurately transcribes the mode of existence of the
unpresented multiples that belong to it. Badiou can therefore make the
following series of claims:
The event will thus not only happen within the site, but on the basis of
the provocation of whatever unpresentability is contained in the site: the
ship ‘buried in the depths’, and whose plenitude – since the Ocean alone
is presented – authorizes the announcement that the action will take
place ‘from the bottom of a shipwreck’ […]. Consequently, the name
of the event – whose entire problem, as I have said, lies in thinking its
belonging to the event itself – will be placed on the basis of one piece
of this debris: the captain of the shipwrecked vessel, the ‘master’ whose
arm is raised above the waves, whose fingers tighten around the two dice
whose casting upon the surface of the sea is at stake. (BE 192–193)
Almost all of the elements of the poem that Badiou transliterates into the
matheme of the event have now been established: the topology of the evental
site, the unpresented or void multiples that belong to it, and finally the name
or signifier of the event itself, which Badiou insists is undecidable.
We shall now turn to the most crucial moment in his reading, which
opens with a question: ‘Why is the event – such that it occurs in one of the
site on the basis of “shipwrecked” multiples that this one solely presents
in their one-result – a cast of dice here?’ The answer Badiou gives is ‘[b]
ecause this gesture symbolizes the event in general; that is, that which
is purely hazardous, and which cannot be inferred from the situation,
yet which is nevertheless a fixed multiple, a number, that nothing can
modify once it has laid out the sum – “refolded the division” – of its visible
faces’ (BE 193). Like the result of a throw of dice, the event is absolutely
contingent. Once it has occurred, however, it is named as an event and
henceforth exists as a fixed multiple. That said, insofar as Badiou believes
Mallarmé is set upon producing an absolute symbol of the event in Un
Coup de dés – of the event in its essential undecidability – he argues that
the poet knows he is conceptually required to never show the dice actually
being cast:
However, given that the essence of the event is to be undecidable with

regards to its belonging to the situation, an event whose content is the
eventness of the event (and this is clearly the cast of dice thrown ‘in eternal
circumstances’) cannot, in turn, have any other form than that of indecision.
Since the master must produce the absolute event […] he must suspend
this production from a hesitation which is itself absolute and which
indicates that the event is that multiple in respect to which we can neither
know nor observe whether it belongs to the situation of its site. (BE 193)
Badiou will argue that the constellation emerges at the close of the poem
as a kind of reward for the conceptual precision Mallarmé demonstrates
here.15 Before continuing, it is worth clarifying exactly what the event being
undecidable with respect to its belonging to the situation of its upsurge
actually means. Recall the matheme of the event:
ex = {x ∈ X, ex}
If one wished to determine whether or not the event belonged to the

situation, it is impossible to rely upon the unpresented multiples designated
by the term x since they unequivocally do not belong to the situation. All
that remains is the signifier of the event ex. The question therefore becomes:
does ex belong to the situation or not? The problem is that this question
presupposes it is already possible to identify the signifier of the event by
recourse to some knowledge, which risks beings that of the situation itself.
Badiou phrases this point as follows: ‘The basis of this undecidability is thus
evident: it is due to the circularity of the question. In order to verify whether
an event is presented in a situation, it is first necessary to verify whether
it is presented as an element of itself ’ (BE 181). Writing in the context of
his demonstration of the way constructivist thought cannot recognize the
event, and after reminding us that the multiple of the event has the essential
property of being self-belonging, he states: ‘If you can name the multiple,
it is because you discern it according to its elements. But if it is an element
of itself, you would have had to have previously discerned it’ (BE 289). It is
imperative to understand that, strictly speaking, the event does not belong to
the situation of its upsurge: since the signifier of the event ex is itself drawn
from the void multiples belonging to the evental site, it by definition does
not belong to this situation. If it is nevertheless identifiable, then this is
only with respect to a knowledge that is not yet possessed but which the
subject of an event will wager they will have constructed in the course of
a generic procedure. Undecidability is therefore a property meaningfully
attached to the event only insofar as the procedure of forcing establishes the
thinkable possibility that an undecidable statement will have been decided
in a generic extension. The undecidability of the event means that it hovers
precariously, like the feather in Un Coup de dés, between one situation –
which definitively excludes it – and another situation – which will, perhaps,
have been constructed and in which the event will, again perhaps, have been
decided. In other words, undecidability must be given this precise meta-
ontological meaning, which is first grounded in the mathematics and only
then deciphered within the poetry.
IV
In the final section, we shall critically assess this reading by focusing on the
question of interpretation. When we began this chapter, we spoke about how the
doctrine of conditions implied a complex distribution of activity and passivity
on the part of the philosopher. This distribution, we argued, is weighted in
the favour of the mathematical condition for essential reasons. Having always
to mediate the poetry by way of mathematical and meta-ontological results
established prior to the fact, the philosopher necessarily engages in a highly
active interpretative and appropriative procedure with respect to it. Our final
argument will not, however, involve saying that Badiou’s analysis of Mallarmé
misses the mark. On the contrary, we agree with Lyotard when he says that his
reading in Being and Event is ‘a very beautiful reading, perhaps the best that has
ever been made of the Coup de dés’.16 Rather, our aim is to demonstrate, given
the de facto existence of other possible interpretations, that Badiou can be seen
to systematically fix the meaning of Mallarmé’s texts within a predetermined
mathematical horizon. To do this, we will briefly invoke Jacques Rancière’s
interpretation of Mallarmé in The Politics of the Siren (1996). By putting
Rancière and Badiou in parallel, we shall bring out the way Badiou selectively
interprets Mallarmé so as to make the poetic operations he identifies interlock
with the results his mathematical ontology has already grounded.
Mallarmé’s late sonnet A la nue accablante tu has often been considered as
a miniature counterpart to Un Coup de dés:
À la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu
Quel sépulcral naufrage (tu

Le sais, écume, mais y baves)
Suprême une entre les épaves
Abolit le mât dévêtu
Ou cela que furibond faute

De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé
Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traîne

Avarement aura noyé
Le flanc enfant d’une sirène.17
Hushed to the crushing cloud

Basalt and lava its form
Even to echoes subdued
By an ineffectual horn
What shipwreck sepulchral has bowed

(You know this, foam, but slobber on)
The mast supreme in a crowd
Of flotsam and jetsam though torn
Or will that which in fury defaulted

From some perdition exalted
The vain abyss outspread
Have stingily drowned in the swirl

Of a white hair’s trailing thread
The flank of a young Siren girl.
Of A la nue accablante tu, Badiou writes that the poet stages two successive
vanishing terms in order to inscribe the essential undecidability of the event:
‘That which took place, the ship, must fail in its having-taken-place’ – which
is to say be annulled by the vanishing siren – ‘if the poem is the thought of
the event as such’ (C 53). Badiou concludes: ‘This is the only way in which the
poem can give us the gift of the event with its undecidability. Annulment is
finally that which adds to the vanishing subtraction of the event the necessity
of deciding on its name’ (C 53 – modified trans.). The syntactical structure
of the poem is determined by the conceptual requirement of presenting the
essential undecidability of the event, which consequently makes it necessary
to proceed to its nomination. This decision would be the first step in a truth
procedure. So far, this is consistent with what the mathematical procedure of
forcing retroactively makes necessary in thinking about the event.
But does this reading exhaust the interpretative possibilities of the poem?
Is there, in other words, another reading that could frame its undecidability
in a conflicting manner? The poem gives an explicit reason as to why one
vanishing term follows another: it is in fact ‘for lack/Of some high perdition’,
such as the shipwreck might have provided, that the Abyss – which is here
personified – ‘will avariciously have drowned/The child-like flank of a siren’.
While Badiou recognizes that the furious Abyss is ‘guilty of having drowned
the young siren’ (C 50), he does not ask why the lack of a shipwreck would
provoke the Abyss to do this or if the logic of such an enigmatic drama could
be mapped onto the relation between the event and its site. In addition, how
is it possible to drown a fictitious marine creature?
As Rancière has argued, the Abyss is an ambivalent figuration of the
audience Mallarmé aimed to address with his poetry. According to Rancière,
Mallarmé believed that this audience desired a grand drama that would reflect
its collective grandeur. Yet this audience was denied such a drama due to the
mediocrity of the time and the swarm of artistic simulacra it was otherwise
seduced by. In its blind fury, the Abyss drowns the child-like siren; a siren
that stands for the fragile poem Mallarmé would have offered the Abyss but
which, in its violent vulgarity, it abolishes. In a tragic paradox, this vulgarity
is in fact caused by the lack of the poem in the first place. Nevertheless, as
Rancière remarks, ‘sirens, in contrast to boats, do not drown in water. On
the contrary, they dive down in its depths to escape danger’.18 The ‘furibond’
Abyss – an adjective that describes a state of undignified agitation or fury – is
mistaken when it supposes it has drowned the siren, for the fragile siren-
poem has simply dived beneath the waves and returned to its natural aquatic
element. While Badiou argues that a specifically conceptual necessity is at
work in the poem, Rancière alternatively reads the poem as the figuration of
a complex poetico-political problematic Mallarmé encountered. If the poem
moves from shipwreck to siren, or rather from a shipwreck to a siren-poem
that has managed to avoid the impotent fury of the Abyss, then it is insofar
as it stages Mallarmé’s choice of poetic ideal: that of the poem as a vanishing
siren. Badiou’s reading, then, is predicated on a suppression of the semantics
of the poem. If, however, the semantics of the two vanishing terms are taken
into account, the syntax that is crucial for inscribing the undecidability of the
event is fundamentally transformed.
In presenting Rancière’s alternative reading, our aim has not been to judge
or assess the relative validity of either Badiou or Rancière’s accounts of the
poem. Rather it is to bring out the following two points. Firstly, the relation
between the event or the vanishing term and the Abyss, characterized by a
complex play of desire and repulsion, attraction and avoidance, cannot be
mapped onto the ontological distinction between unpresented multiples
and the site without suppressing its complex semantics. Secondly, the
two hypotheses as to the provenance of the foam on the surface of the sea
cannot be unequivocally considered as undecidable without a prior concept
of undecidability organizing the reading. Indeed, it could be argued that
Mallarmé decides on the siren over the shipwreck since the former incarnates
his poetic ideal.
Both Rancière and Badiou argue that the Abyss from A la nue accablante
tu is the same encountered in Un Coup de dés. The shipwreck and the Master
therefore have the same ambivalent relation to the Abyss as the siren-poem – a
relation that equally need not be reduced to the relation between unpresented
multiples and the site. Consequently, if the throw of dice is never seen to
occur, then, by Rancière’s reading, it is because it cannot be certain whether
the poem, like the song of the siren, will ever be heard. Hence the hypothetical
nature of the constellation that – perhaps – emerges on the glorious second-
last page of the poem. The constellation need not be considered a reward
for successfully carrying out a conceptual program as Badiou, following the
Australian critic Gardner Davies, takes it to be. Just like A la nue accablante
tu, Un Coup de dés can also be read as pursuing an entirely different program,
one which need not necessarily correspond to ‘the production of an absolute
symbol of the event’ (BE 193) but could instead involve the dramatization of
a specifically nineteenth century poetico-political problematic.
To close, it is worth mentioning that one of the most important claims
Badiou makes about Mallarmé is that his concept of undecidability compels –
perhaps forces – a decision. Recall the following passage: ‘Annulment is finally
that which adds to the vanishing subtraction of the event the necessity of
deciding on its name’ (C 53 – modified trans.). Further on in the same essay,
Badiou repeats this claim, writing that ‘the terms issuing from annulment
(siren, constellation) point to undecidability, and engage victorious thinking:
truth’ (C 57 – modified trans.). As we have already said, the specific concept
of undecidability at work in the matheme of the event is related to the fact
that one is required to decide on an event in order to begin constructing a
generic multiple – that is, a truth – within which the event will have been
decided. In the above passages, Badiou declares that the practical injunction
tied to this singular sense of undecidability – that of having to decide at the
point of the undecidable – is found in Mallarmé’s poetry. With respect to
the hypothetical appearance of the constellation that closes Un Coup de dés,
Badiou avers that ‘the constellation is subtractively equivalent, “on some
vacant superior surface”, to any being which what-happens shows itself to
be capable of, and fixes for us the task of interpreting it’ (BE 197). In other
words, its undecidability is a spur to a truth procedure that will have decided
it. Badiou’s young student, Quentin Meillassoux, however, notes that in
the poem, the emergence of the constellation is qualified by the adverb
‘PERHAPS’. As he writes:
Badiou makes this PERHAPS the expression of a ‘promise’: nothing will

have taken place except perhaps – in the future – a constellation […]
But nothing of this kind, once again, is expressly indicated in the Poem:
the PERHAPS is neither realized nor invalidated – it is on the contrary
hypostasized, celebrated for itself, erupting in the Heavens as an intrinsic
property of the constellation.19
As Meillassoux continues, there is nothing intrinsic to the poem’s treatment

of undecidability that compels a decision to be made in a manner isomorphic
to the procedure of forcing: undecidability may be the main thematic trope
of Un Coup de dés, but for Meillassoux, this trope does not correspond to the
conceptual parameters of the mathematics of forcing. Badiou, on the other
hand, closes his reading with the trenchant statement that the ‘conclusion of
this prodigious text – the most dense text there is on the limpid seriousness
of a conceptual drama – is a maxim’, namely ‘[d]ecide from the standpoint
of the undecidable’ (BE 197 – modified trans.). This maxim and the sense
of undecidability it implies are fundamentally determined, in our view,
by the philosophical motivation the transliteration of forcing provides for
considering truth as the postevental production of a generic multiple in
which an undecidable supplement will have been decided. For us, then,
Badiou decided upon a certain conception of the undecidable when deciding on
what Mallarmé’s indecision meant.
In this final section, we have not wished to be dragged into ‘an infinite
regression of quibbling and calculating’ (IT 40) over the proper interpretation
of Mallarmé’s poetry – a regression that Badiou believes characterizes all
philosophy that takes hermeneutics as its absolute horizon. In presenting
alternative readings of Mallarmé, we have hoped only to show that Badiou
systematically fixes the meaning of the texts he reads within the boundaries
of what his mathematical and meta-ontological apparatus has elsewhere
and already established. The poetry of Mallarmé therefore conditions his
philosophy only insofar as its own internal operations are made to interlock
with his meta-ontological categories. In short, there exists a priority of
conditions.
Part Four
Interviews with Alain Badiou

14
Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou
RN: Alain, welcome to Australia. You’re giving a lecture titled,

Considerations on the World Situation; what will you be saying?
AB: I think the question of the world today is a very complex and
difficult question. Why? Because I think a long historical sequence
is now finished. Probably the beginning of the end was during the
1980s, of the last century. It was the time of the end of the socialist
state, the end of the idea of communism as a really vivid idea, and it
was the time of the return of a global conception of liberalism and
the strong development of capitalism in every country in the world.
So, really, a new situation, a completely different situation. It was
also the end of the cold war, which was a sort of binary structure
of the world. And all that is finished. And so, the question is now,
what are really the great contradictions in the contemporary world
if this contradiction is not between socialist states and the capitalist
world, the so-called free world against totalitarianism and so on.
And so, my idea is to propose a vision, a structure in some sense of
the contemporary world.
RN: And what are those contradictions, if there are any that can be used
as a way for change. What do you see those contradictions as being?
AB: You know, before saying all that, it’s probably a necessity to clearly
understand the dominant ideology today. The dominant ideology
is that there is no real contradiction. Because the liberal world,
as capitalism, is really the situation; the situation of the world as
such, so the world is not divided, really. There are, naturally, local
contradictions: for example, the political contradiction between
democracy and dictatorship. But all these contradictions are inside
the same representation of the becoming of the world, of the
construction of economy, of the social organization and of the law,
finally, of private property and of liberalism in all fields of economy.
So the dominant ideology is that there is only one world today, there
Joe Gelonesi interview with Alain Badiou for The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC Radio National
(RN), 30 November 2014.
is not two different worlds, there is not two different orientations.

There is one world, and inside this unique world we have some
differences, but not central contradictions. It’s the reason we have
had the idea of the end of history, with Fukuyama and some other
thinkers; the end of history was finally the end of big contradictions
in the world; and the idea that the future of humanity is a future
in one world without an end, without the death of this world, in
a sort of infinite and definitive world. Against all that, I propose
to say that the contemporary world is organized around two
fundamental contradictions. Not one, it is important to note, but
two. The first one, which is a theoretical and abstract one in some
sense, is the contradiction in the field of the economy. In the field
of the economy, we have had, during the last two centuries, two
hypotheses, two ideas. On one side, capitalism and liberal ideology
and on the other side, the different forms of socialism, communism
and so on, which were on the side of the idea that it is possible
to organize the economy and social determinations without the
domination of private property. I propose that this contradiction is
always the possible fundamental contradiction of the world as it is.
Naturally today, for historical reasons, the idea of communism is
very weak, and many people think this idea has disappeared, purely
and simply. But, at the theoretical level, it’s true, always, that you
have the possibility of something other than dominant capitalism,
and so the first contradiction, at a sort of ideal level, is the
contradiction between capitalism and communism – communism
in its ‘primitive’ sense, not the communism of Stalin and so on
during the last century, but the communism of Marx. The vision of
the possibility of the destiny of humanity as something completely
different from liberalism and the appropriation of practically all the
great means of production by private property.
But, today, there is a second, very important contradiction,
which I name the contradiction between modernity and tradition.
Modernity and tradition is something different. For example, it
seems to me that during all the existence of the socialist states,
communism has been in relationship, not to modernity, but to
tradition precisely. Classical communism was finally a sort of
moral orthodoxy, a conservative aesthetics, a taste for social order,
discipline and so on – so a good reactionary vision. And the result
has been that modernity has been entirely, practically, on the side
of the capitalist world. Even today we have this contradiction at a
very large scale, because in some sense, all religious terrorism and
Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou 213
so on is on the side of tradition, against modernity, precisely the

modernity of the Western world. And so to understand the world
today, we must organize a sort of mixture of the two contradictions.
The potential contradiction, which is weak in fact, between
capitalism and communism on the one side, and the contradiction,
which is very active and real today, between modernity and
tradition. My conclusion is that the point is to create a new
modernity, a modernity which is not the modernity of capitalism
as such – the modernity of new forms of technology, of products,
finally, the modernity of the market, the modernity of the things
which are in the market – but another form of modernity, which is
compatible, which can be organized in the field of a possible new
communism. That is, at the very abstract level, my vision of the
contemporary world.
RN: That second contradiction, although abstract, is seen in a very
practical sense. You have written that the contemporary world is a
war between enjoyment and sacrifice, and the democratic person
lives only for transient desire. Is this what you mean by a sort of
capitalist modernity, that it creates that contradiction?
AB: You know, I think that the contradiction between enjoyment and
sacrifice is a form today of the contradiction between modernity
and tradition. Because the democratic life, with the freedom of
access to the market, and free enterprise and so on, has finally as
its norm, the norm of enjoyment. The goal is to have the means to
pick in the market what you want for your proper jouissance. It’s the
reason why this world is also the world of individuality, the world
of the individual as such. On the other side with have sacrifice,
but today, sacrifice practically is sacrifice on the side of tradition
– of religious tradition. It’s not a creation or invention, it’s the old
sacrifice really. It is why the complexity of the contemporary world
is that a part of the apparent opposition to the democratic world
of enjoyment, personal freedom and so on, is not at all new. It’s
reactive in some sense. It’s something that is a sort of repetition of
an old tradition. And, if things stay in that form of contradiction,
we shall have a world that is really dangerous in my opinion. A
world with, on one side, the development of a vision of individual
enjoyment which is in some sense not really creative, not really
on the side of a new invention of humanity as such, but which is
also a form of repetition – repetition under the development of
new technology – and on the other side a reactive current, which
proposes a form of sacrifice, but a form or sacrifice which finally
is of a purely traditional nature. It’s a bad composition of the two

contradictions, and it’s why the image of the world today is obscure
in some sense. It’s obscure, filled in with some young men going to
sacrifice in the name of an obscure god, and on the other side the
sad proposition to buy on the market the object of enjoyment.
To propose a new vision of contradiction is also to propose a
new way for creation and invention, and so on, under the flag of
a new modernity. A new modernity which is not the opposition
between sacrifice and enjoyment, but which is a new proposition
concerning enjoyment in fact. A new proposition which opposes, in
my opinion – but it’s conceptual work – something infinite in true
enjoyment and true happiness of creative humanity, and the finitude
of the material enjoyment of the capitalist society. And so, the most
important question is the possibility – which is not a certitude – the
possibility of a sort of connection, a sort of relationship, a strong
relationship between, in the political field, the idea of communism,
and the idea of something else and not the dictatorship of private
property and big financial determination … you know that in
the world today 1 per cent of the population has 46 per cent of
the world’s wealth and that 10 per cent of the population has
84 per cent of the world’s wealth, so it’s a world with incredible
inequalities. In this world, it’s impossible in fact, to propose a new
vision of humanity as such. And this is why we must recognize and
create a new form of the idea of communism, that is the idea of a
society which is associative, which is really the organization of the
collectivity, and which is not the development of, in some sense, an
oligarchy, a financial oligarchy at the level of the world in its entirety.
So the question here is: is humanity able or not able to create
this new vision which is not at all the opposition of reactive sacrifice
to modern enjoyment, but the creation of a new vision of what is
collective happiness and collective creativity. And this task is a new
task. It is a new task because during the revolutionary sequence,
from the French Revolution to the end of the socialist state, we
have had something like a mixture between the traditional vision
of sacrifice, and, on the other side, the possibility of individual
freedom and enjoyment on the side of capitalism.
So we must find something new, and it is why the beginning is
of a philosophical nature, and not immediately of a political nature.
This was the case for Marx after all, during the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Marx was first a dialectical philosopher, he
was a son of Hegel. After that, there is his big work concerning the
economy and revolutionary politics and so on, but the beginning

is in the field of philosophy. I think it is the same thing today, not
because philosophy is more important per se, than economics
or politics, but because we must have, we must find the idea, the
orientation. You know, my definition of the contemporary world is
that it’s a world which is disoriented, fundamentally, and we must
find a new orientation. It’s a philosophical task at the beginning,
after that a creative task in the field of art, of politics and so on.
RN: Well, you’ve talked about art and politics, and you’ve come to
Australia to talk about art. But what about love? I know that you’ve
recently written about love as one of the key conditions that you talk
about, why is love central to your philosophical view?
AB: In my vision, love is always something important, it not only has a
sort of delicious affect, but because love is the fundamental experience,
for everybody in some sense, of the relationship to the other. Because
in love, we must accept that the existence of something different is
entirely in your existence, and sometimes I say that love is the minimal
communism, the smallest communism, the communism with two
individuals. Because there is something in love that must be not only
the world as experienced by one individual but the world as it is seen
by two, by the two; in the creation of that sort of minimal community
– which is a community of the two. This is the first point.
But I think also that we know, that in love we also have the old
contradiction between enjoyment and sacrifice after all. Love is also
something dangerous, something which sometimes is in the nature
of a sacrifice of the individual process for the other. But, precisely,
the question is a question of a new love. A new love, that is a love,
the central contradiction of which is not the contradiction between
sexual enjoyment on one side and the difficulty of material life on
the other side, or between happiness and suffering, jealousy and so
on. But, love as a sort of metaphorically political experience of the
relationship to the other at the level of the pure personal existence.
And so I am on the side of the French poet Rimbaud, who said
that we must invent love, that love is not something that we know
completely, but that we must create a new love. And I think, to
create a new love is a part of our fundamental search of today, which
is of a new modernity, and a new modernity is also a new love.
RN: You talk about the mini-communism of the two, but is that also a
reactionary idea, that notion of love?
AB: You know, the question of love is really the question of the
primitive dialectical situation between a subject and the other. In
the foundation of the subject as such, the relationship to the other

has always been fundamental. In psychoanalysis, the other is not
something which is outside myself, but is a constitutive part of the
construction of myself, and love is a very active and intense part of
this constitutive relationship to the other in the individual. We must
distinguish between this dialectic and all the social consequences
and organizational models of all that. For example, family must
be understood in many different significations. In some sense,
the relationship between family and love is exactly the same as
the relationship between state power and politics. Politics is a
collective subjectivity which creates, in the Real, a new organization
of social life and so on, and there is a relationship between that
and state power, but it’s not identical. Because state power is not
the creation of anything, state power is state power, and we know
the only idea of state power is to continue. So there is something
abstractly conservative in state power, and politics as such is
precisely the collective movement, which is against the stagnation,
the conservative aspect of the state. I think the same thing applies –
maybe the context and the consequences of love are of a social
nature, naturally, but if the law of love comes from the consequences
of family and many others, professions, the question of the house
and property and so on, love is destroyed finally. So exactly like the
state must be under the law of politics, and not politics under the
law of the state, love must be the law for family and not under the
law of family. That is why we know that today, the invention of a
new love is also an invention of a new family.
RN: Can I ask you about the theatre, I know that you’ve come to
Australia to talk about art and cinema, but I’m interested in your
work in the theatre. In particular because you’ve said that it bridges
the gap between politics and love. What did you mean by that, when
you said the theatre bridges those two?
AB: Theatre has been very important for me, and it was very important
for Plato too, so a relationship to theatre is the oldest thing in
philosophy. It’s because, in my definition of philosophy, I insist on
the point that philosophy is in relationship with different forms
of truth: Art, Politics, Science and Love. But we must observe the
theatre too is in relationship with all that, theatre is a form of art,
but very often the question of love is on trial in the theatre, the
question of politics too. The question between politics and love is
central, for example in all classical tragedies in the Greek world, and
in French tragedy. So there is a sort of function of the theatre which
is the same as a function of philosophy, but by completely different

means. So there is a rivalry between philosophy and the theatre,
from the very beginning.
And the philosopher is always suspicious concerning theatre;
he thinks that theatre is the same thing as philosophy but by
some means which are not very clear, finally, with affects, with
identification and so on. My vision, my task is to propose a peace
treaty between philosophy and theatre, and not in the form that
we can find, for example, in the theatre of Sartre, which is really
to transform theatre in the form of propaganda for philosophy.
I trust the theatre really, but I think that we can observe that
the possibilities of theatre are different from the possibilities of
philosophy. But we can do the two without hierarchy, without the
disposition of superiority of philosophy, or of theatre to the other
term. It is why I write theatre, I speak of theatre, I take theatre as a
philosophical example and so on. But really not in the Platonistic
vision of rivalry, but in the vision of a new alliance, something like
that.
RN: Perhaps if I could just ask you one last question, and that is to do
with this idea of where change might come from. You’ve talked
about it being a philosophical idea at this stage, trying to find some
grounding in philosophy to find a direction. Is there anything that
you can see in the world where real change, affective change might
begin? I mean, does the occupy movement make any difference to
the way things are?
AB: The question, how to change the world, is a very complex one.
Because there is never really only one dimension. I think that when
there is, really, a new proposition in the concrete world, there is
always three dimensions, and not one. There is first, something
like an idea, that is a strategic vision – a strategic vision which is
common to all the actors of the situation. Today, this is precisely
what does not exist. Because today practically everybody thinks that
capitalism is here for many centuries, and so there is no strategic
vision. But, it’s a necessity; for example in the Arab Spring and
Occupy Wall Street, you do not have a strategic idea, we have some
negative convictions. We want something else, and so on, but there
is no clear strategic proposition common to all the actors. That is
the first point.
The second point is the movement as such. So, if there is not a
collective movement, an uprising, a revolt and so on is a component
but it cannot by itself change the situation in a real manner. And,
this is why we have the third necessity, which is in some sense the
mediation between the two, the mediation between the strategic
idea and the strength of the movement, which is the question of
organization. It’s always the most obscure question in the field of
politics, it’s central but it’s a very difficult question. Because it’s the
question of the relationship between action and thinking, and the
relationship between action and thinking is the very heart of true
politics, and organization is theoretically the place where something
like that is active, is real. It is why during one century, the Leninist
party has been dominant. It has been dominant because it has been
victorious in Russia and so on. It was a proposition, a concrete
proposition concerning the relationship between theory and
practice, between the strategic idea and the tactic of revolution.
And now this paradigm is out, and so we must invent a new
paradigm, that is a new conception of organization which is in
some sense, less military, less under the law of strict discipline,
centralization and so on, which is much more near the movement.
But to be near the movement is not to be confused with the
movement, the political organization cannot disappear in the
movement, we know that. We know also, that if the organization is
without the movement, finally the organization and the state are the
same thing, it’s the history of the socialist state. So we have the state,
we have the movement, we have the strategic idea, and we have the
political organization: this is our problem. If I have a solution to this
problem, I shall give it to you immediately … I have not!
15
‘The Movement of Emancipation’

Round Table Interview with Alain Badiou
JC: Alain, thank you for agreeing to this interview – or being forced to
agree (laughter). We have a few questions for you, both general and
specific about your most recent work. You said earlier that there is a
triplet of philosophy: first, the leaving of the cave, a kind of mystical
moment; second moment, the moment of return; and then the
third, how the light of the absolute can be practised in the cave as a
work of philosophy. Can you say something more specifically about
Immanence of Truths, the book you are working on at the moment,
in this regard?
AB: I think that the Immanence of Truths has, at first, a synthetic
function, as always for the third book. In Being and Event, the
fundamental question was to propose an ontological framework
where it is possible to identify what is a truth, and how we can
identify what is a truth neither in a purely formal context – to say
that truth is something like judgment, universal judgement with
some given form – nor in the ontological way which affirms the
existence of transcendence, God and so on … But the question
was to create an ontological framework where being as such is
pure multiplicity and nothing else, but how is it possible to identify
something like a truth in this framework. The conclusion is in some
sense that we cannot. Because we must introduce the form of being
that is not reducible, not exactly to pure multiplicity, but to the
system of pure multiplicity which is included in given situations. So
something comes from outside in some sense, but I would say this is
a metaphor: something happens and so, finally, it is the disposition
of Being and Event and with this disposition we can identify a truth
as a generic multiplicity.
Conducted by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, 24 November 2014.

Present: A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Louise Burchill, Robert Boncado, Bryan Cooke,
Lauren Bliss, Kim Mereine, Alex Ling, Lia Hills, John Cleary and James Garrett (recording).
Initials are used to identify the speakers.
Logics of Worlds is a second stage, the problem of which is to

understand how a truth appears. Now not only the question of what
is the form of being of a truth, which has a categorical answer – it’s
a generic multiplicity, okay – but how this form of truth, this sort of
being, appears in a determinate world. And so it’s a theory of what
is a world, first. It’s much more complex than to say only what is a
situation, because a situation is in fact a multiplicity and nothing
else. But in a world we have a structure, not only a multiplicity, but
a structure and the structure I name, in something of a traditional
fashion, the transcendental of the world. And so after that, what is
the relationship between a truth and the transcendental of a world?
It’s not the same question as the question of the relationship of truth
with the common ontological framework which was ‘what is a truth
as a multiplicity’, whose answer was, this multiplicity is generic.
But in Logics of Worlds the question was, ‘how can a truth happen
in a world’, not only in relationship to the world as multiplicity,
but in relationship fundamentally with a world as a structure and
so the relationship to the transcendental of the world. And the
answer is that the event, once more, is the point of departure of the
construction of a truth, of the happening of a truth, in the sense that
there is a trace of the truth and the trace of the truth is a particular
determination of the terms of the relation of the transcendental
because it’s a maximal intensity of existence. I insist on the fact that
maybe the most crucial point in Logics of Worlds is the distinction
between being and existence. It is really the fundamental point.
In some sense, in Being and Event, there is only the level of being.
In Logics of Worlds, there is really two different levels: being and
existence; and they are separate because, for example, the inexistent,
which is part of the question of truth, is in the world without existing.
So there is really a disjunction between being and existence. And
it is finally a possibility to resume drastically the first two books by
saying that the first book is a theory of the being of a truth, and the
second book is a theory of the existence of a truth. So the answer to
this was an onto-topological question: ‘is a human being subjectively
able to participate in the creation of truth’? And this question cannot
be formulated in the framework of Being and Event only. We have
to decide, concerning the relationship of the creation of a truth and
the structure of a world. The book, Immanence of Truths, is not a
synthesis of the first two books, in the sense of the question: ‘how
can we think a truth simultaneously as generic multiplicity and as the
appearing of a form of existence’? This is the question of what is to
‘The Movement of Emancipation’ 221
exist for a generic multiplicity, that is, the synthesis between the two
definitions of truth, finally, in the two first books and I have explicitly
said that I ‘don’t take care of this question’ [laughter]. So it’s for my
‘descendants’. But it’s the true question … probably not simple.
My question in Immanence of Truths is in some sense at another
level. It’s neither the question of being nor of existence. It’s much
more the question of the particularity of truths from another point
of view than its ontological nature, generic multiplicity, first, and
the conditions of its appearing, like in Logics of World. But it’s much
more a descriptive theory of what is a truth in relationship to its
proper absoluteness. So it’s a theory in some sense much more
logical – like a general logic of all that. By the explanation of the
very nature of a truth from the point of view of its relationship
to finitude and the infinite, and some positive description of
truths in the different forms of truths. This is why at the end of
the book we have – or we will have [laughter] – some precise
descriptions concerning the qualitative difference of truths. And
the first qualitative descriptions of what is a truth procedure in the
framework of politics and so on. I have said something about this
question but not systematically.
So the most important categories in this book are the absolute,
first, which is not a category of the two previous books. So not
the question of the universality of judgment but the question of
the absoluteness of truths – they are not the same thing. It’s a
question of the infinite, naturally, and the question of finitude. So
it’s also the possibility to distinguish the different polemics in the
different books. Being and Event is, frankly, against the idea of the
poetical nature of ontology – something like that. So it’s a book
against Heidegger, in fact. It’s possible to read Being and Event as
a book against Heidegger. … Now the text of my 1986 seminar on
Heidegger, my habilitation, is coming out in spring and so I re-read
my seminar with many surprises [laughter].
My most important surprise was that all that, subjectively, was in
fact an explanation with Heidegger, and so an explanation not only
with Heidegger but across Heidegger with the French Heideggerian
current. So also with my good friends, Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe and my good enemies Derrida … and all that.
And you know that during practically thirty years from Being
and Nothingness of Sartre to Nancy, French philosophy has been
Heideggerian, largely. And retrospectively, it was clear for me that I
was also Heideggerian in some sense, because of Sartre and so on.
And then Being and Event is a strong… it’s an emancipation … the

movement of emancipation from Heidegger and it is true in that
book I say, ‘Heidegger is a great philosopher of the last century’ or
something like that, and it’s a violent determination to go outside the
framework of Heidegger completely. And naturally to say, to begin by
saying ‘being as such is of mathematical nature’, was a rupture with
that, without mercy! [laughter] But the consequences of all that …
so clearly my going outside what I see as the dominant framework of
French philosophy since my youth … so it was the end of my youth.
In Logics of Worlds, it’s something completely different, it’s really
against the dominant ideology, not of the role of Heidegger: it’s
the social and political field. It’s against what I name ‘democratic
materialism’. So my enemy is relativism and so on and it is why
the question of appearing is fundamental and not the question of
Being: against Heidegger we must take a position concerning the
question of Being, naturally, but against the dominant relativism,
a sort of governmental pragmatism and so on, which is the law
of the world today. The question was completely different and so
it was to affirm the necessity of the concrete existence of truths.
Not only the question of truth in its relationship to the question of
being, which is after all inside the Heideggerian problematic, but
the question of the truth in relationship to concrete situations and
finally the appearing of truths in a world, and so it was a different
polemics, really. It was a polemic concerning something like the
onto-topological destination of truths, the fact that truths are not
something speculative in the direction of being as such and so on
but in fact, finally, the question of the true life … at the end of Logics
of Worlds, what is the true life ... it’s not of a theoretical nature. At
the end is the question of the orientation of life, the question of
truth, the question of ideas. As you know, finally, I name as Idea, the
subjective existence of truths. The relationship of the individual to
truth I name Idea, as the principle of orientation to life.
I think that in The Immanence of Truths, the question is different.
It’s not the question of a fight against Heidegger, it’s not the question
of a fight against the world as it is, it is a question in fact of the
absolute as such, that is, the question – and I attempted to explain
it this morning – ‘where are we now concerning the long history
of the conflict, the radical conflict between, enlightenment and
tradition, between religion and secularism, between positivism and
idealism’ and so on. So, another level. And my attempt is really to
say that we can take something of the two orientations: we can take
from the theological orientation the necessity of the absolute. And

so against relativism and anarchic secularization – which in my
sense is the ideology of planetary capitalism. And we can also take
from the enlightenment and so on the fact that the absolute is not in
relationship to ‘transcendency’ – the absolute is zero. It’s a Hegelian
affirmation [laughter] … it’s a return to Hegel. But a Hegel which
crosses the experience of the contemporary world.
And it is why, as metaphor in some sense, of the two camps
today, we have the dialectic of infinity and finitude as the centre of
the new book, the general centre – of that there are many detailed
and really complex descriptions. In some sense, finitude is the
metaphor of the dominant ideology and the infinite is the metaphor
of the last enemies of all that. So the metaphor of why, today, the
religious vision is something important in the world as it is. And
we must explain that from a philosophical point of view, by other
means than that it is purely tradition, reactive and finally that of
rivalry, that it’s barbarous, and so it’s a question of bombs, the
number ... And now I am not on this side any more … But it’s very
important for me being not on the side of Islamic theology or the
Tea Party … because we must say that Christianity is not pure in
this affair … But I don’t want to be against this side with the other…
it’s my problem, and it’s really a problem of today.
And so, Immanence of Truths is an abstract theoretical book and
so on but it’s also a book of today, exactly as the first and second – the
first against Heidegger in France and the second against the ‘end’
finally of the great political strategy and the democratic materialism,
the poor ideology, the minimal ideology, the ideology which is the
ideology of the conservative vision in fact, and it really is the vision
of the world as it is today, which is a world open to some form more,
and more than the use of war and destruction in fact. And my attempt
is to propose a form of thinking which is outside the construction
of the contradiction itself, as it is today. I am not on the side of the
groups in the Middle East and so on, but I am not on the side of the
western world, and the war of the western world against all that … it
is in some sense no better than those things itself. All this is without
any orientation, without any idea. It’s an obscure war, with many
manipulations, with certain operations of armed groups, we don’t
know who is behind all that. It’s a very confusing situation, which is
very near the situation of the Balkan countries before the First World
War. So it’s really a bad situation, a very bad situation.
And so my philosophical intervention is also in that sort of context.
JC: … no more questions [laughter].

AJB: My question touches on this because I can see Plato in all of this,
in those three movements of those three big books: the first against
Heidegger, so a return to Plato against the Heideggerian veiling
of Plato; in Logics of Worlds, democratic materialism and so the
constitution of democracy, as obviously organizing the regimes
of appearing but there being something within or immanent to
that which undoes that; and of course in the latest book as you
just described it. But I know in Theory of the Subject, Plato is still
paradigmatically an idealist … and then of course comes the turn
to Plato. So what is Plato for you in the construction of the three big
books post-Theory of the Subject?
AB: You know my philosophical history is, in some sense, a strange
history of a relationship to Plato. Because at the very beginning
of my philosophical life, I was a Sartrean! And to be a Sartrean
was to be against Plato. No problem, because existence is what is
important, not essence. But another part of myself was on the side of
Plato. Mathematics. And I was, for a long time in my youth, divided
in fact. Divided because, on the question of existence, I am on the
side of Sartre … absolute freedom … and so on the side of the form
of romanticism, in fact – existential romanticism, with negativity,
coquetry with anxiety, despair and so on. Something very adequate
to youth. But on the other side, I was not at all like that, but on the
side of Plato because of mathematics. But it was a peculiar vision.
Maybe my philosophical construction is an attempt to re-try myself
(laughter). I am the first client of my philosophy. And maybe it
is the idea of Nietzsche, of philosophy as the biography of the
philosopher … maybe always and everywhere it’s true.
And so I hoped that structuralism, which was the proposition
when I was twenty, was the possible direction to introduce
mathematics in the field of philosophy. Not in the form of
epistemological study of mathematics by philosophy but by a sort
of effective presence of mathematics in philosophy itself. It’s the
case in Plato. But there, philosophy goes beyond mathematics:
dialectics in Plato is after mathematics. But you know he said ‘first,
ten years of mathematics’ and after you see! (laughter). He doesn’t
say ten years of dialectics … because in ten years of dialectics, you’ll
see nothing at all (laughter). But with ten years of mathematics
you see! So I did ten years of mathematics … (laughter). In the
framework, the general framework of structuralism, which was
after all a form of positivism because it was the idea that the study,
the onto-topological study of structure was the way, the scientific

way in the place of philosophy. So everybody was in negotiation
with science, even Lacan and Althusser. So the price to pay for me
was the absence of Sartre, and also the difficulty of doing that in a
strictly Platonist manner. So I come to a point, of which Theory of
the Subject is witness to the sequence, where in some sense I unify
myself, but by negation of the two parts! (laughter). Neither Sartre
nor Plato.
AJB: An impasse?
AB: Yes, yes, a sort of an impasse … and what saved me was Lacan.
Because I find in Lacan the idea that it’s not because you are on the
side of structure, the symbolic prescription and so on that you must
sacrifice the very notion of subject. Because the negation of the
notion of the subject was the common point between Heideggerians
and structuralists. That is my vision now. A clear vision. There was
a complicity in the French framework between Heidegger and a
certain form of structuralism. After all, even Lacan was a translator
of Heidegger, everybody was Heideggerian in some sense. Foucault
was Heideggerian too and so on … and why, because the idea was
the end of metaphysics and the subject was the last metaphysical
concept which would be destroyed finally, and Althusser – history
without subject, and a coquetry between Althusser and Derrida …
AJB: … and Deleuze in that?
AB: Deleuze apart in some sense, but the relationship between Deleuze
and the category of the subject is [fraught] also … and in Deleuze,
there is no category of truth at all. He said to me: ‘truth does not
interest me’! I say, ‘ok’! (laughter). So the situation, neither Sartre
nor Plato, is in some sense presented in Theory of the Subject, but as
a negative construction, negative solution of my problem. But as you
know, the philosopher must always think that his or her problem is
the problem (laughter) – it’s the condition of being a philosopher.
And so in the space between Theory of the Subject and Being and
Event, there is a sort of return to my primitive problem and the
proposition of another solution. Not neither Sartre nor Plato but
finally the two. A contemporary vision and the existence there in
some sense of subjectivization, on one side, and on the other side,
a new reading of Plato, the beginning of a new reading of Plato,
because, finally, Plato becomes more and more important because
I find Sartre in Plato, in the end. I understand Plato in a more
dramatic manner. And I can see that in the descriptions of Plato, in
the investigation of the different types of subjectivity, in the question
of choice, which is very important finally. At the end of Book IX of

the Republic where Socrates says to the young men, ‘after all, it is
your choice: you can choose to live with my idea, even if the world
is not a form’. So in some sense, Plato is also the philosopher of the
revolt. He is not only the philosopher of the state, even if the book
is a state. Not only a philosopher of the state because he shows you
can have this other orientation in life even in circumstances which
are absolutely opposite to this orientation. Which is also, philosophy
for minorities.
And after that, Plato becomes a sort of part of myself. And this is
why I decided to write my Republic as an exercise in discussion with
the most important philosopher for me: which is a discussion inside
the philosopher itself, and not outside, not an academic discussion.
I am in Plato, like a sort of parasite, maybe like a cancer (laughter).
I transform Plato and this is proof he can be transformed into
something very new. And it was a really extraordinary experience.
It was not at all an academic exercise of translation. It was a vital
experience to be inside this text for six years, and I think that
the idea that philosophy can and must be the proposition of an
orientation to life became really the most important thing for me.
And so the latent place of Plato … (coughing) excuse me, I speak
too much. ‘It’s your fault!’ (laughter). I finish on this point!
I think that the translation of Plato has been the direct preparation
for Immanence of Truths, because I have understood in Plato that the
fundamental point of Plato is not transcendence – it’s the common
and ordinary Plato but not the interesting Plato. The point of Plato
is that we can construct a new form of life in relationship to the
absolute. And that relationship to the absolute is not a question of
transcendency or non-transcendency, it’s a question of subjectivation.
And it is why I am more and more Platonist. … but I cannot
distinguish between Plato and me! (laughter).
LBu: In Philosophy and the Event, you state at one stage that in the
Immanence of Truths, you look at how truths are universal in scope;
obviously they have their site of origin within a particularity … and
along that line, you are going to look at truth processes rather than
from the point of view of either being or existence but from the point
of view of the truth process itself, and hence in a way, my question
also refers back to something you said yesterday; you said you
consider that you can have truths that are connoted in a particular
way – for example you can have a truth that is connoted as feminine
… that came from a point of particularity, a site of origin that was
‘woman’ or something of a feminine subjectivity, a sexuate position;

so you would have truths that are connoted differently; obviously
they’d still have universal scope – and the question bears on that – it’s
as though the universal would be traversed by differences?1
AB: Yes, I think so. We can observe some very simple things. If we read,
for example, Greek tragedy, we know perfectly well from inside
their relationship to universality, that they are made in the Greek
world. We don’t forget this point. Never. And if it’s possible that
the truth process was oriented from the point of view of femininity
[the question of what this point of view is, is another discussion],
we cannot forget in the result this determination by feminine
difference. Furthermore, for me it’s clear. In poetry, I consider that
Emily Dickinson is an exemplary poet but I know in the writing
of Emily Dickinson, that it’s the work of a woman and the fact
that it’s evidently the work of a woman is not an objection to the
universality. But the feminine connotation is only the result that
every truth procedure is made of particular material, and in the
particularity is the access to the symbolic creation, a new access to
the symbolic creation of woman. And so the point is, when I said,
which is your point, that universality is indifferent to differences –
maybe it was a polemic formula in some sense because, we know it’s
impossible to be indifferent to differences, because there exist only
differences and it’s also the point of view of Paul himself: ‘there is
neither male nor female’ and so on. There is only male and female,
woman and man, two faces. And so with the radical sentence, all
that disappears. So to say universality is indifferent to differences is
only to say that from the point of view of the truth itself, difference
is not requisite, that is, the truth is really a truth for everybody. So
the truth is universal in the sense that it can be understood to fix
an orientation of life for everybody. But the experience of the truth
is always also the experience of many particularities that are inside
the truth itself and it’s impossible that the fact that the poem is
written in very strange and difficult conditions by a woman, does
not become invisible in the work: on the contrary, it is something
like what constitutes the poem itself. So it’s something that not
only constitutes its universality itself but maybe something new
in universality itself. And so I agree with you! When we say that
universality is indifferent to difference, we must say immediately
that in universality itself there are only differences, in some sense,
because it’s made with differences. With concrete differences, in a
historical context and it’s made also in relationship to some forms
of the relationship between femininity and masculinity and so on,

some control of the symbolic order by men or some exception,
some feminine exception. So all that is part of my fundamental
conviction that we must understand universality not as something
separated from particularity but as something the material of which
is always particular. Because, precisely, there is no universality as
such, as something different in the world, as something else. We
have truths but truths are always situated or localized in specific
cultural dimensions and so there is also an impact of sexualization
in universality. It’s not a problem and we have examples of that – as I
said concerning Emily Dickinson but in fact I can also demonstrate
that we can understand, even in mathematics, the appearing of
some women. It’s clear in the work of Sophie Germain that Sophie
Germain is a woman – which was very surprising.
LBu: Is it – she fooled Gauss, didn’t she? He thought she was a man…?
AB: Yes, yes but Gauss himself said finally that it was absolutely
surprising that Sophie Germain was a woman but that something in
her work was saying that she was a woman and, where in the more
formal and abstract universality, it’s absolutely true concerning
Emmy Noether.
LBu: But don’t you get into a mise en abyme? You can understand
that yes, a universal will take into account the difference of a poet,
that a woman poet can write something of a universal truth, but if
there is a female truth about love, if it’s in a field that defines sexual
difference itself, why would it necessarily have universality? Isn’t
that the aporia … it’s the aporia of which you speak in Philosophy
and the Event that’s precisely a different relationship of sexuation
toward love … is that your point?
AB: It’s absolutely evident concerning love that the impact of sexuation
is immediate. And so, it’s not exactly the same as for the other
procedure because the question of love is precisely immediately
the question of sexuation. And so all forms of love, even between
two men or two women, witness the question of sexuation. And so
I think that it is the sense of love, its particularities, its particular
context is in some sense immediately the question of sexuation: by
the mediation of the consideration of the minimality of the situation
that is the production of the two; the passage from one to two, the
first passage from one to two. Sometimes, there is the idea that
you pass from one to two and then from two to the rest … two to
multiplicity … (laughter). It’s not true, there is no fusion between
love and politics.
AL: On that note actually I’d like to ask you … a question about something
you raised earlier today … namely the question of the interplay
between generic procedures. Specifically, I’d like you to elaborate on
it if possible. For example, are you talking about an interplay between
discrete conditions, i.e. possible connections between politics and
love, or are you talking about an inter-conditional connection; say for
example the various artistic truths, and so I suppose how that relates to
the question of a truths singularity?
AB: Yes. You know that to pose the question of the relationship between
two different procedures, we must apprehend what the situation is of
this connection. In my opinion, there is no easy beginning, no easy
abstract theory of the connection because if we think the procedure
at the too-general level, you find the same concerns, so it’s very
difficult to return to the clear understanding of the connection itself.
But for example, concerning the question this morning on ‘climate
change’, it’s clearly a situation between science and politics … for
sure, it’s a clear example and the difficulty is here: the difficulty is
that the scientific affirmations are not by itself the solution to the
problem of something which is between science and politics. And
this is why, finally, you have a mixture between scientific conviction
and political activism. So the creation of a new subjectivation that
is not of one procedure, but the intersection of two procedures.
Another example is in art. Very often, art organizes the thinking
of the interplay between two different procedures. It’s clear, for
example, that classical tragedy is the creation of a space, an artistic
space, to dispose the relationship between love and politics. And
certainly we must understand why it’s the third procedure, art, which
is the point of view for the examination of the relationship between
love and politics. Is it possible to have a general theory? I explore this
point in my ‘future book’ (laughter). But for the moment, I have no
clear vision explaining this point. I clearly understand that we have
situations where the problem is precisely the correlation between
two or more procedures. It has been clear of tragedy from the
beginning. Tragedy is always some form of the relationship between
love and politics. And the theory of the interplay between social
transformation – which is the classical field of politics – and the
science of the becoming of nature is also a typical example.
With tragedy we know, it’s an invention to say something about
this relationship: for climate change, we don’t know really, because
there is a juxtaposition between political activism and scientific
determination. But science as such is always very cautious, and an
activist is always impassioned. It’s very interesting to do an abstract

exercise concerning this question, to explore it. For example, is
Marxism, classical Marxism, an attempt to have an immediate
connection between science and politics? It’s a possible definition
of Marxism – scientific socialism! It was a name. And maybe a part
of the failure, finally, of that sort of classical Marxism, is precisely
that it wasn’t the case that is was the real space for that sort of
connection, and finally the question of power dissolved science in
politics. But we can also, for example, ask, ‘is there a question of the
relationship between science and love’? as an abstract motif. We can
write a book of science fiction concerning this transformation of
love by science and finally the new manipulations of the relationship
between bodies … and it’s a definition of a part of fiction in general.
Very often, fiction and especially science fiction, is the creation of a
work in which we have the interplay, the exploration of the possible
interplay, between truth procedures. But at a formal level, I am always
in the impasse, that I find what I know is that two truth procedures
have in common certain determinations, which is precisely what
philosophy proposes. And so I think that the problem of the interplay
between two different truth procedures is always in the form of a
particular problem. It’s the characteristic of a situation. For example,
the relationship between love and politics is typically a problem of
monarchy, as the form of the state. And similarly, monarchy like our
president (laughter) … the game of love ….2 It’s only where power is
somebody and love is always the love of somebody and so that the
interplay of love and politics is characteristic. Finally in democracy,
it’s not important at all. A politician can do what they want, it’s not
important, but when the power is monarchical, it’s very important …
the fate of Louis and so on, the history of monarchy…
And it’s why tragedy is a form of theatre appropriate to old forms
of power, and it was so from the beginning because the theatre was in
a democracy but the story of the theatre was not at all democratic. The
Greeks themselves who create classical tragedy, immediately think
the tragedy, project the tragedy in this old world of kings and queens
because the question of the relationship between love and power: the
perpetuation of love by power, the perpetuation of power by love.
BC: Alain, forgive me for asking a question in the same vein as Alex’s,
but I am also interested in this question of the interaction between
generic procedures. I was thinking, you have written a lot about
fidelity and renegacy and renegades and I had a feeling that when
you say in Manifesto for Philosophy and elsewhere, or in Being and
Event, that the purpose of philosophy is to think the compossibility

of truths, this word from Leibniz, compossibility, that one of the
things that makes that possible is perhaps, and this is something you
haven’t said, and it’s something that I wonder whether you think,
that the experience of fidelity in one generic procedure, in relation
to one of the conditions, can be inspiration for fidelity in regards to
the other conditions. I ask this because when you speak of ‘militant’s
impatience’, as earlier, we live in a time, I think, when many of
your generation have gone down the road of renegacy and perhaps
because of defeats and betrayal, like we see defeat and we cannot
think the eternal, and this makes me think that perhaps, would it be
true to say for you, that the importance of science or love or say ten
years of mathematical education is precisely that you get a vision of
the irrelevance of time, of the fact that you can be faithful to a project
against defeat across time and at that level, can the procedures thus
inform each other in that what I learn of fidelity in science or love
is something that I can then transfer to politics, like, and again the
figure of Cavailles, who I mentioned to you this morning.
AB: Yes, I agree with your proposition. And I think in my own
experience, there is a close relationship between faithfulness in
politics and other forms, in love, but also to be faithful to Sartre at
the end (laughter) … yes, yes, finally I was a renegade of Sartre …
but this is not the end of the story, the end of the story is the return
to faithfulness to Sartre in another context, in different forms and
so on, but it was a return and behind all that, we have the figure of
the renegade … the renegade in love, the renegade in science too –
because we have the genius which was Alexander Grothendieck, a
renegade in science, and for extraordinary reasons. Grothendieck
was not in my generation but let me say something about this as I
have some information about it.
Grothendieck had the idea that his proper work creates
something absolutely new in mathematics and this destroys
mathematics. He represents his proper work as a cut, an event, if
you want, a radical event. He was saying that with all this work,
this work and some others, naturally, we have a completely new
mathematics, a new vision of mathematics. And he was saying
that it was not the same thing as created by the Greeks; the Greeks
had created the first stage of mathematics and Grothendieck and
these others create the second sequence of mathematics. So it was
something like Nietzsche. To break the history in two parts. It was a
Nietzschean vision of the history of mathematics. And progressively,
Grothendieck, thought that it was not true, finally, it was not so;
mathematics continued. And so it was uninteresting for him. And
so he went to the country with ‘le moutons’ (sheep) (laughter).
So the fable of renegation, in science. It is possible also in
science … and for clear reasons, exactly the same: the project
was too big to support the possibility. From the very beginning
in some forms of ultra-leftism of May 1968, I have understood
myself that the project was too big; it was imaginary; it was false,
in fact. And there was impatience because, progressively, they see
that in regard to this big project, which they participate in, which
is something correct and interesting, is really small. The time
was not right for the destruction of the French state, not at all
and finally they said ‘the country is calm’. And it was true; it was
true in one sense. But even in big revolutions, in some sense the
country is calm. The majority of the country is always calm.
And so, coincidentally, it was the same thing: the idea was too
big for the process. And it’s also the impossibility of the romantic
conception of love – Tristan and Isolde and so on – whose unique
destiny is death. Because the absolute love is too big for the
situation. Finally, they must negotiate with King Mark and King
Mark is a difficult negotiator (laughter). And so it’s not renegation
but it’s the same in the form of absolutization – but absolutization
is death. There is nothing else. And so this question of renegation,
different forms of renegation, why renegation, of communication
between different truth procedures, concerning this point, I agree
absolutely with you it’s a very interesting theory, a very interesting
theory. And to be faithful is fundamental … because it’s the price to
pay for truth. And renegation is destructive, only destructive. And
you know the consequence of renegation; finally you go far away, far
away (laughter). You return to the old world, quickly.
AJB: John, Lauren you have a question?
JC1: I have a question.
My question is about the absolute and mathematics. At the
beginning of Immanence of Truths, you argue for an absolute
place, a singular place of mathematics – a single set theoretical
universe. So first question is ‘what’s at stake in the singularity of an
ontological place’? And secondly, ‘what are the consequences of that
singularity for truths, for instance, in particular, of mathematics’?
If mathematics is a truth procedure and truth procedures are made
up of generic extensions, what are the consequences of the idea that
mathematics is a truth in an absolute place?
AB: You know, I don’t say that mathematics is absolute. I say that
mathematics is, for the moment, the only way we know to propose
a concept of the absolute. Exactly as I say when, very often, people
say to me, ‘oh, well, you think that being is mathematics’. But not
at all! It’s not at all. Being is being. We can say that the mediation
is that being is pure multiplicity, maybe, and after that you say that
mathematics is the way we know. Maybe there exists some other
ways that we don’t know, it’s a possibility, but it’s the only way we
know to have an idea of what is, effectively, pure multiplicity and
so Being as such. So it’s question of truth procedures, concerning
this specific knowledge which is ontology, precisely. It is a means,
mathematics is the means we have, to understand something
concerning being as such. And so it’s limited. Concerning the
absolute, it’s an ontological category. That is the idea of a place
where we suppose that there exists the totality of the possible form
of the multiple as such. So it’s a fiction of the class of all sets. It’s a
fiction because the set of all sets is a contradiction. Therefore we
have this fiction, which is something purely normative in some
sense, because we cannot have a complete concept of the class of all
sets. But I name that the absolute because if something is absolute,
it is designated by the fiction. Not thought by the fiction. It is the
designation of the mathematical fiction. And mathematicians
themselves, mathematicians whose job concerns the theory of sets,
proceed by some form of the manipulation of the fiction: that is they
use classes – it’s necessary to be cautious, because quickly we have
contradictions but they are just this side of contradiction – and all
that is the work to determine as absolutely referential the fiction
of the class of all forms of multiplicity. That is the place where in
some sense, mathematics produces some new truths of ontological
destination, and that is why there is no real problem. It is not
because mathematics is the way to understand something with the
help of some fiction concerning what is the place where all forms of
being can be understood, that there is something different from the
other truth procedures. It’s only that the ontological part of all forms
of reality can be thought in the form of multiplicity as such. If we
want to absolutely have some knowledge of all that, it’s mathematics.
But in many circumstances, for many forms of creation, for many
other truth procedures, the ontological level is useless: it’s not
necessary to be at that level, it’s not always the case. For example, in
architecture, there is a part of geometry, in physics – which is also
a truth procedure, a truth procedure of our specific world – the
part of mathematics is very important. But finally, in politics, for

example (or in music, there is a part of mathematics). But from
the very beginning of Being and Event, I have said ‘ontology is a
situation’. Ontology is not the knowledge of totality. Ontology is
a specific situation, which consists in reducing what exists to its
ontological level. But in Logics of Worlds, and after that, I have said
that the ontological level is not at all the totality of what exists,
because precisely to be and to exist are not the same thing.
We can stop here? Oh, no? One more.
LB: Ah ok, I’ll be the last. Too much pressure!
AB: You conclude! (Laughter)
LB: I have a question, but I don’t know if you’ll find it eccentric or
unusual. I am not a philosopher, my training is in cinema … my
question is about your writing on femininity and the controversy,
I guess, that it has caused because for the most part I find that I
agree with a lot of your work and I don’t want to find myself being
an anti-feminist or something, which I think you’ve been maybe
labelled… but if you could pick up on a point which I find the most
compelling, which is something that you say in The Century, on
Dora and Freud, and this really interesting idea that psychoanalysis
was a contributor, I suppose you could say, to female emancipation
in the twentieth century – which I completely agree with … and
I agreed with that before I even read your book (laughter). But
the problem with that, an idea like that it’s in some sense a matter
of transmission or maybe political in the sense that it can’t really
be organized, if you know what I mean … you say it’s a matter of
an autonomous individual or autonomous subject … but it’s not
something that can necessarily be brought together politically? It’s
a weird contradiction … on the one hand you say it’s emancipatory
for women as a group but then on the other hand, it’s about a very
specific individual process.
AB: Psychoanalysis in this process, concerning this question?
JC: Yes, psychoanalysis … concerning this question.
LB: I thought you were going to break into French for a moment, Justin!
JC: Of course I wasn’t (laughter).
AB: Maybe it’s not for me because as we know here (points at Justin),
psychoanalysis is an anti-philosophy (laughter).
AJB: That’s his philosophical position!
AB: When I observed that psychoanalysis has been a part, a moment
of the beginning of the great movement of the emancipation of
women, I don’t think it is the first or only point for concerning the
emancipation of women but it was a part because it was a change

concerning the understanding of sexuality and the understanding
of the division of the sexes, it was a new sequence. But it was a
moment and I don’t maintain the idea psychoanalysis as such,
finally, is linked in history with the emancipation of women …
we can discuss this point. We have had many great women in
psychoanalysis. Sometimes dissident, like Melanie Klein and some
others but we have had also something like a closure concerning
the question of femininity but also homosexuality and so on. So
psychoanalysis has been divided, finally, and I agree with you when
you say that the dimension of psychoanalysis was not adequate to
the general problem of feminine emancipation, not at all. It was,
in fact, a consideration of individual difficulty, personal suffering
and so on and we cannot transform psychoanalysis into a global
ideology, it is not and it was not the idea of Freud, neither of Lacan.
It’s a specific intervention concerning the process of construction
of the subject at the individual level – this is true and so in that sort
of determination, psychoanalysis can say something and defuse
some new parameters in global ideology, concerning sexuality,
filiation, family, differences of sexes and so on but no more, no
more. And this is why there is ambiguity today: at the moment of
the creation of psychoanalysis, it was a sort of revolution about a
point which was very closed and obscure. It was the idea to extend
the enlightenment to this obscure question and that by itself, it was
an emancipation of the question; the idea that the ‘dark continent’
must be enlightened. But very quickly, it was difficult, because of
problems of organization, of situation, the place of psychoanalysis
in medicine and so on. And so I think many women at the
beginning of the last century conceived that psychoanalysis was
something on their side. It was also the transformation of hysteria
from a destructive figure, and suspect figure, a monstrous figure to
something else: something like the form of heroic subjectivity in
some sense. This point was emancipatory. But the final judgment is
ambiguous. I agree with you.
So we stop!
Part Five
Encomium
16
The Beginner
Lia Hills
Logic dictates that you wear a red dress to a Trades Hall to listen to an old
Marxist give a lecture. A red dress that once belonged to someone else, though
you don’t know who – maybe a lover, maybe a poet, a tosser of cobblestones,
a free-wheeling mathematician, a proclaimer of the impossible. People are
nervous, excited. The ‘greatest living philosopher’ has come to town. Alain
Badiou sits on the stage, watches the gathering crowd, a mic placed before
him. He must speak in English. It is the language of this place, albeit not
the queen’s version. For the next few days, he must largely leave behind his
native French; talk, as the idiom would have it, like a ‘vache espagnole’. It is
part of philosophy’s inscription in the world as it is – though by no means
a metaphysical necessity – to converse in the language of globalization, of
capitalism, whose ideological power rests, he tells us, on the belief that it is
not possible to imagine living any other system. Later, in another lecture, he
will jest, ‘Maybe God himself speaks English today’.
II
The philosophical act is to corrupt the youth. ‘It’s my business’, says Badiou
with his characteristic cough-snort. He likes to play – to seek the impasse in
the rules of the game. And he’s looking for others to join him. A revolution is a
collective act. This he learned in May ’68, where it was written on the walls: ‘The
most important thing is to desire what is impossible’. But France is a paradise
lost. The monsters returned. ‘Plato would be happy to discover New Zealand’,
he says ironically. The Antipodeans smile to themselves at the notion that Plato
might have even given them thought – bugger anachronisms. The arse-end of
the world finally on the philosophical map! ‘The true republic established here’.
But there is something of the utopian in all this. A man who speaks of
affirming the impossible – its name: equality – against the violent dictates of
an economic discourse that poses as the Real. Does the Real function as ‘an
imperative of submission’ or one of emancipation?, he postulates. Can we
escape – step out of Plato’s cave – and, if so, how? The crowd leans forward.
Some hold their breath. There is new theory here, but also a call. Alain Badiou,
septuagenarian, soixante-huitard – the first to show that all philosophers
before him eventually fall back on a theory of the One – is not just describing
his vision of the Real, but is launching an appeal through academic halls, so
often places of inaction. ‘Come out of the cave of possibility’, he says. ‘The
true desire is the desire of a real life’. When the painter dips a finger in red
acrylic, searches for a new principle amidst the uneven surface of the gesso;
the lover falls to arise in a new world, one of duel construction, forever driven
to affirm the moment of the falling, remain faithful to it; the student pitches
a ripped-up cobblestone against the limits of a discourse, breaching it with a
call, Soyez réaliste, demandez l’impossible!; the scientist, hand paused beside
the blackboard, the formula not yet complete but writing itself as chalk dust
collates at her feet; the poet, fist poised above the page.
But what of the philosopher? There are some in the audience, fully fledged,
half-baked, students of, aspirants. Among them, there too is the desire for
subjectivity, regardless of how that sits within the theory. You can see it in their
faces, hear it in the hallways after every one of Badiou’s lectures or master classes.
For some of them it is the reason why, if truth be told, that they have journeyed
through the night, across a sea or a border, left behind unfinished papers. If
‘happiness is the arrival, in an individual, of the Subject that he discovers himself
capable of becoming’,1 is their happiness to be had by those who work not only
within the conditions of philosophy, but within philosophy itself?
III
‘A philosopher is a man who begins to begin’, he says. I’m reminded of

Rilke’s advice that at the commencement of a work we must return to that
‘unsophisticated spot’ – ‘to always be beginning’ – otherwise the angel who first
afforded you that moment of poet’s grace will never deign to visit you again.
Badiou is a man in his seventies, but there is something of the eternal youth. It’s
not just the energy he brings to his work – for there is much work to be done –
nor even the newness of what he’s saying. It’s as much a refusal to concede.
To time, a time.
To finitude.
The possible.
If you’re not careful, he’ll make you feel you’re twice his age.
The Beginner 241
IV
An equation. 2 + 2 = . A child’s game, though you squirm, feel the constraints

of its formalization, sense in yourself as he speaks of simple arithmetic, that
you may fall short. You know the answer. You know it’s right. That it is a
number, ‘not a bird or a glass’. But you are returned to the horror of that
moment when you first understood what it meant to stray from the laws
you were being taught. An instant when you learned how to turn your back
on the Real, refuse even the slightest glimpse of it. But today you are here in
search of the Lost Real, like some twenty-first-century Proust dreaming of
madeleines, ones robbed of their tisane-infused essence by a pathological
economic discourse, rather than time or wayward memory.
Mathematics can speak the moment of falling in love, the point at which
the artist breaks through and begins to articulate the infinite number
of the world. You wish you’d listened harder in school. Learned your
algebra and your algorithms. Not turned a petulant ear to the language of
ontology.
Never trust a lover who shows no fidelity to past loves.

The Melbourne Gang – which is what he will later call us – are seated
around a long table in a warehouse restaurant so big you could park a car in
it, which we have. Questions are asked, clarification sought, and he delegates
with the fluency of a thinker who knows to what he must devote his time.
There are fields of enquiry that others must take up, run with, pursue to
their philosophical end, if only to begin again, continue. The word ‘disciple’
tempts, has been drawn into his repertoire, but there is no sense of ‘he is who
not for me is against me’. Maybe, like Lacan, he sees some of his most faithful
readers amongst his detractors; those who listen with an ear for the impasse.
Resist stasis.
A few are huddled. They speak about love, in French – some would say
its native tongue. Between mouthfuls of spicy food, the philosopher and the
lover morph, then divide again, theory plays out in the arena of romance,
commitment, what the world misguidedly calls fidèle. It is clear that love is no
poor-cousin condition of philosophy here. ‘What is really interesting in life’,
he affirms, chopsticks taming a grain of rice.
It is only hours before he will leave us.

Never trust a lover who shows no fidelity to past loves.
VI
Melbourne wakes to another November dawn. The city feels empty, flatter
than it actually is. The philosopher has flown. We grapple in messages to
understand what happened. To pinpoint, articulate, maintain fidelity. There
is a sense of rupture. Of living in the wake. Of the morning after.
‘To walk, then, under the imperative of a true Idea, destines us to
happiness’,2 Badiou writes in a new work, still in the throes of translation.
A call to action.
A warning.
A parting gift.
Notes
Introduction
1 The lectures and interviews were transcribed from Badiou’s English by Jai
Bentley-Payne, Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey and A. J. Bartlett.
2 Keating also described Darwin, Australia’s most northern city, as best seen
from a plane headed to Europe. This confident, intelligent irreverence is all
but gone out of what passes for public life in Australia today.
3 In order to serve a (re)newed will to classification, determination and
circumscription of peoples, Australia runs an offshore ‘archipelago’ of
indefinite detention for would be seekers of asylum, specifically those
who arrive by boat and from countries Australia is actively involved in
rendering uninhabitable one way or another: military and surveillance
support of the Sri-Lankan state against the Tamils; wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, etc., and the usual ‘run of the mill’ exploitation and corruption of
resources and peoples a functioning ‘democracy’ requires. The status and
treatment of these people are subject to periodic, formulaic and ineffective
criticism. Internal dissension, including that of medical professionals,
has been subject to corporate style laws against ‘disclosure’. External
and international agencies including the United Nations have made the
usual noises. These latter have no effect, not because Australia is deaf to
them necessarily, but because the logic of classification, determination
and circumscription used to effect these police actions is impeccably
contemporary and global, and would-be critiques only serve to repeat it
after their own fashion. Hence, the critical (liberalist) posture, including
empirical ‘data’ and hermeneutic nuance, is its own repetition, lacking the
capacity or the knowledge to break with its own form. This is why certain
‘good Europeans’ are now (re)turning an admiring gaze on Australia’s
efforts at ‘on water matters’. As noted, the irony of Australia’s terror of
arrivals by sea should be lost on no one familiar with its short history; that
this irony affects a symptom in Lacan’s clinical sense, would bear an analysis
that continues to not be forthcoming.
Chapter 2
1 Badiou is referring here to the shooting death of a black teenager in
Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer, which sparked off massive street
protests across the United States. [Ed.]
2 See A. Ling’s contribution to this volume. [Ed.]
244 Notes
3 Translated into English as Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. We have left

Badiou’s ‘inversion’ stand. [Ed.]
4 A. Badiou, Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, trans. Susan Spitzer
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Chapter 4
1 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2014), p. 109.
2 See Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds.), Concept and Form, 2 vols.
(London: Verso, 2012).
3 Cf. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘History and Event in Alain Badiou’, trans.
Thomas Nail, Parrhesia 12 (2011), pp. 1–11.
4 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), p. 331.
5 For discussions of these works, see Emily Apter, ‘Laws of the 70s: Badiou’s
Revolutionary Untimeliness’, Cardozo Law Review 29:5 (2008), pp.
1885–1904. See as well Oliver Feltham, Badiou: Live Theory (London:
Continuum, 2008). The passage from Almagestes is cited on p. 134.
6 Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form, vol. 1, p. 206.
7 Sylvain Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom (Paris: Seuil, 1996), pp. 16–18.
8 A. Badiou, Jean-Paul Sartre (Editions Potemkine, 1980), p. 8. Adventure of
French Philosophy, trans. B. Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), p. convert.
9 Cf. BE convert p. 196.
10 Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), p. 18.
11 Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? p. 84.
12 Peter Hallward, ‘Order and Event’, New Left Review 53 (2008), p. 100.
13 See Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom, p. 119 (M 29–30).
14 Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom, p. 52; cf. (M 48).
15 Compare Althusser’s famous remark from Reading Capital: ‘The knowledge
of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet.’ Louis
Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 106. Knowing is opposed to identification, not continuous with
it, even when that knowing takes place between two subjects – the subject of
knowledge (the philosopher/historian) and the historical subject/actor.
16 His examples are not unfamiliar, and amount to classical revolutionary
sequences. The particular gain of Lazarus’s vision is that it decouples
significant sequences from the broader periods in which the subjective
element is rendered inscrutable. Key dates include 1792–1794; 1907–1917.
17 Robert Blanché, L’Axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1955), p. 46.
18 Despite their apparent similarity in effect, the conceptual distinction
between the isomorphism (which results from the symbolic work of the
axiomatic) and identification (which occurs within the imaginary) is crucial.
Notes 245
19 Lazarus, L’Anthropologie du nom, p. 16.

20 Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’,
Critical Inquiry 7:1 (1980), p. 11.
21 Cf. Knox Peden, ‘Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive’,
Journal of the Philosophy of History 9:2 (2015): 177–195.
22 Badiou makes scattered remarks regretting the figure of the ‘unnameable’
in Being and Event and Ethics, regarding it as a concession to a kind of
moralism. That wasn’t the problem in my view. Subjectivism is only pure to
the extent that it voids itself of the illusion that it has mastered any object.
If it thinks it has mastered any object, the delusion lies not in the force of
the subject but in the machinations of the dialectic.
23 Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, p. 311.
24 Hallward and Peden, Concept and Form, vol. 2, p. 284. The other way to
gloss the transition from Being and Event to Logics of Worlds is to see it
as a move from set theory to category theory. And we know that Jean-
Toussaint Desanti’s critique of Badiou was significant in this regard. See
Jean-Toussaint Desanti, ‘Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of
Alain Badiou’, in Peter Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the
Future of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 54–66. In a word,
Badiou’s minimal ontology – his commitment to the intrinsic – limited
its applicability to maximal situations where extrinsic relations might
obtain, which is to say any situation commensurate with experience and
qualitative differentiation. But surely Badiou anticipated Desanti’s critique,
based on Desanti’s own aversion to exporting discursive consequences
from one field to another. In the notes to Being and Event Badiou remarks
that Desanti’s work on mathematics ‘is perhaps too restrictive’. So Badiou’s
error in Desanti’s view was not in the mathematical ontology as such, but
in the view that it might serve to illuminate anything.
25 Alain Badiou, L’Hypothèse Communiste (Paris: Lignes, 2009), p. 190.
26 Badiou, L’Hypothèse Communiste, p. 200.
27 Roudinesco, Lacan: In Spite of Everything, p. 109.
Chapter 5
1 E. C. Titchmarsh, Mathematics for the General Reader (New York: Dover,
1981).
2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and
G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); cited hereafter
in text as WP; I have modified the translation throughout, particularly the
note on Badiou.
3 R. Ruyer, Néo-Finalisme (Paris: PUF, 1952) and in particular Chapter Nine,
which is devoted to ‘“Absolute Surfaces” and Absolute Domains of Survey’,
pp. 95–109.
246 Notes
4 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 139. One should cite this passage as
often as possible, given the implicit voluntarism of many contemporary
‘applications’ of Deleuze’s thought.
5 No doubt there are readings of Leibniz that would part ways with this
connection – and it is certainly the case that Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz on
this point is coloured by his Maimonian commitments. Nonetheless, one
need only read the definition of science in What Is Philosophy? (especially
WP 117–125) alongside Deleuze’s account of Leibniz’s epistemology in The
Fold (see in particular ‘Raison Suffisante’, G. Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et la
Baroque [Paris: Minuit, 1988], pp. 55–78) to see how much the he draws
from Leibniz’s thought in this part of What Is Philosophy?
6 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta
(London: Athlone Press, 1989), p. 280.
7 In fact Deleuze will present these three in a different order: extrinsic,
intrinsic and unlocalizable. I have reordered these here for the purposes of
the current argument.
8 This situation is subject to a tour de force critique in F. Zalamea, Synthetic
Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Z. L. Fraser (Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2012).
9 Beyond these points – and leaving aside here the particularly strange
invocation of ‘inner essence’ – it is perhaps worth briefly noting why
Badiou’s assertion that ‘a complex number [is] a pair of real numbers’, is a
little misleading. While complex numbers are often written in this way –
in the form (x, y) where x and y are reals – complex numbers per se are
not composed of two real parts, but one real and one imaginary: x + iy.
With this substitution in place, it is true, the complex number field can be
defined as follows: C = {x + iy | x, y ∈ R}. However, one problem with this
substitution is that it covers up precisely what is in question in the current
context. (‘This process is known as “equating real and imaginary parts”.
It is sometimes necessary, of course, but it often would not only double
the labour of calculation, but would obscure the whole point of formulae
containing these numbers.’ E. C. Titmarsch, Mathematics for the General
Reader, p. 100.) Moreover, it is this formulation that is often used when
complex numbers are presented in terms of Argand diagrams – in other
words, when complex numbers are presented in strictly geometrical terms.
10 J. Conway, On Numbers and Games (London: Academic Press, 1976), p. vii.
Conway even notes that it was in order to think through the game of Go
that he developed the surreal number system and the canonical form
for numbers, not, as it seems from his Introduction, in order to extend
Dedekind’s notion of cut to a greater range of cases. The latter thesis is
explicitly rejected right before the passage cited above.
11 Gauss, cited in M. Detlefsen, ‘Formalism’, in The Oxford Handbook of
Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, ed. Steward Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 270.
Notes 247
12 For a very useful account of this history, see U. Bottazzini, ‘Complex

Function Theory, 1780–1900’, in A History of Analysis, ed. H.N. Jahnke
(Providence: American Mathematical Society, 2003), pp. 213–259.
13 See Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, p. 198, n203.
Chapter 6
1 Translated by C. Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts.
2 G. Frege, Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache
des reinen Denkens (Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert, 1897). Translated as
Concept Script, A Formal Language of Pure Thought Modeled upon That of
Arithmetic, by S. Bauer-Mengelberg in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book
in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, ed. J. van Heijenoort (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967).
3 M. Davis, Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer
(New York: Norton, 2000), p. 55.
4 Davis, Engines of Logic… p. 56.
5 van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel… p. 125.
6 J. Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since
Freud’, in Écrits: the First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink (New
York: Norton, 2006), 412–441. See also his discussion in chapter 3 of The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and
Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 26–38.
7 Lacan qualifies this statement by recalling the concept of buttoning points,
points de capiton, which function as paradoxical immanent points of
guarantee within the world of discourse.
8 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV, Lesson of 24.4.67, XVIII 2. All
further references to Seminar XIV are to this translation.
9 Plato, Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Complete Works,
ed. J. M. Cooper and ass. ed. D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1997), pp. 457–505.
10 Lacan, Seminar XVIII 3, lesson of 24.4.67.
11 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality,
The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B.
Fink (New York: Norton, 1999).
12 Lacan, Écrits, p. 428.
13 Lacan, Écrits, p. 429.
14 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 34.
15 Although he does not conceptualize it in this way, Freud’s account of
primary identification follows this same trajectory. As the child copies and
repeats a certain trait possessed by its parents (usually the father; Freud’s
examples are a cough or a certain look) a meaning begins to be attached
to it. The trait, that is, starts to represent something the child wishes to
248 Notes
emulate and, like Dora’s father’s cough, this feature becomes incorporated
into the subject’s behaviour. Formed around the repetitions of the Einziger
Zug, an image of the self as a whole or One emerges.
16 In the lesson of 24.5.67, Lacan asserts that there is no jouissance except of
one’s own body. The examples Lacan gives of this repetitive bodily ‘writing’
are largely mechanical, unthinking actions such as walking (and, one
would assume, sex). But since we are dealing at this point with the pre-
lingual, pre-castrated subject-to-be, the division between its own body and
the Other has not yet occurred. For this reason, Lacan can also say without
contradicting himself that ‘The body itself, is, from the origin, this locus of
the Other, insofar as it is there that, from the origin, there is inscribed the
mark qua signifier.’ See the lesson of 31 May 1967.
18 1.61803… = 1 + 1/1.61803….
19 Lacan, Seminar XIV, lesson of 19.4.67.
20 An irrational number, the golden ratio approximates to 1.6180340….
As noted anonymously in the margins of the French transcription of the
seminar, Lacan actually uses the mathematical ‘inverse’ of the golden
number in his demonstrations, that is, 0.6180340…. The square of this
number is 0.38196602515. Hence 1 – 0.6180340 = 0.38196602515, and 1 –
0.38196602515… = 0.6180340.…
21 See ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Ecrits, p. 429.
22 ‘…the small a is the metaphorical child of the One and the Other, insofar as
it is born as a piece of refuse from the inaugural repetition, which, in order
to be repetition, requires this relation of the One to the Other’. Seminar
XIV, lesson of 24.4.67.
23 In addition, unlike in formal logic, in Aristotelian logic we are still dealing
with questions of Being. See P.S. Popov:
In the last analysis, the diversity of Aristotle’s categories rests on the
concept of being and is of fundamental importance for logic since
the root of the categories lie in Aristotle’s theory of the concept.
For formal logicians, logic essentially not a way of obtaining
knowledge, but only a group of rules of thought. Where Aristotle
sees a problem of knowledge, the formalists find only a question of
observing certain simple rules of thought.
P. S. Popov, ‘The Logic of Aristotle and Formal Logic’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 8:1 (September, 1947), pp. 1–22, 16.
24 For an excellent account of the history of the square of opposition and
contemporary geometric challenges to it (including a brief description of
Lacan’s revision), see A. Moretti, ‘The Geometry of Logical Opposition’,
PhD thesis, Faculty of Humanities Institute of Philosophy, University of
Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2009) @ http://alessiomoretti.perso.sfr.fr
/NOTMorettiPhD2009GeometryLogicalOpposition.pdf (accessed 25
November 2013).
Notes 249
25 Lacan’s use of Aristotle’s modal categories – necessity, existence, possibility –

adds to our difficulties of understanding, allowing for such provocative
statements such as ‘Woman does not exist’ that have elicited many
misunderstanding, not to mention feminist outrage.…
26 The formulas of sexuation are: Masculine side: There is at least one x that
is not submitted to the phallic function/All x’s are (every x is) submitted
to the phallic function. Feminine side: There is not one x that is not
submitted to the phallic function/Not all (not every) x is submitted to
the phallic function. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Encore: One
Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. J.-A.
Miller, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 78. See also J. Copjec’s
remarkable reading of these formulas, ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’,
J. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 1996), pp. 201–236.
28 This unlimimted jouissance is expressed in one half of the logical definition
of Man: ‘there is at least one x that is not subject to the phallic function’.
29 Lacan, Seminar XVI, Lesson of 12.4.67.
30 Lacan, Seminar XVI, lesson of 12.4.67.
31 To avoid misunderstanding it’s vitally important to remember that
Man and Woman here are not biological distinctions but rather the
different logical pathways through which a subject relates to jouissance.
Nothing stops a biological woman from approaching jouissance through
the masculine formulas and vice versa. Interestingly, the question of
homosexual sex is only briefly alluded to in his lesson of 12.4.67. While
Lacan doesn’t give us any detailed account of which signifier is involved
in the homosexual sexual act, he calls masculine homosexuals ‘homme-
ils’ (‘he-men’ as opposed to homme-elles, ‘she-men’). ‘He-men’ are those
who have the phallus in the phallic economy. Lacan jokes that masculine
homosexuality is ‘a society for the protection of homme-il’.
Chapter 7
1 Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels, ‘Introduction’, in Alain Badiou, The Age of
the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-century Poetry and Prose, ed. &
trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), p. xx.
2 Elie During, ‘Art’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen, 2010),
p. 92.
3 Jan Jagodzinski, ‘Badiou’s Challenge to Art and Its Education: Or “art
cannot be taught – it can however educate!”’ Educational Philosophy and
Theory 42:2 (2010), p. 177.
4 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 70.
250 Notes
5 Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, Plato,

Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and associate ed. D. S. Hutchinson
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), pp. 971–1223.
6 Tarby, ‘A Short Introduction’, Philosophy and the Event (PE), p. 154.
7 A. J. Bartlett, ‘Plato’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A. J. Bartlett and
Justin Clemens (London: Acumen, 2010), p. 107.
8 Bartlett, ‘Plato’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. Bartlett and Clemens,
p. 114.
9 See HB. Badiou’s departures from Plato on the question of art were
suggested prior to this publication in, for example, his 1993 lecture,
‘Language, Thought, Poetry’ (TW pp. 233–241).
10 John Hospers, ‘Art, Philosophy Of ’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last modified
December 14, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/36433
/art-philosophy-of (accessed 8 June 2015).
11 Christopher Kul-Want and Piero, Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide (London:
Icon, 2012), p. 7.
12 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, pp. 63–64.
13 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 64.
17 For a detailed and illuminating presentation of this argument, see Jacques
Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir
Paul (London: Verso, 2013).
18 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, trans. Harry Zohn: https://www.marxists.org/reference
/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
19 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Lesson of Rancière’, in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 70.
26 The nearest I have come to finding a rather unlikely admission to anything
like a ‘Platonic modernism’ on Badiou’s part is his advocating a ‘modern
Platonist’ position apropos of mathematics and ontology in his TW 54. I’m
grateful to Alireza Esmaeilzadeh for pointing this out to me.
30 See, for example, Benjamin Noys, ‘“Monumental Construction”: Badiou
and the Politics of Aesthetics’, Third Text 23:4 (2009), pp. 383–392.
Notes 251
32 Apter and Bosteels, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi.

33 The artistic debate between Badiou and Rancière need not always be
presented as tendentiously oppositional as the philosophers themselves
might have it. For attempts to read the thinkers ‘together’, by seeing them
as complementary rather than contradictory, see John W. P. Phillips,
‘Art, Politics and Philosophy: Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière’, Theory
Culture Society 27:4 (2010): 146–169; or my own ‘Marx, My Muse: Towards
a Far Left Poetics’, Axon: Creative Explorations 4:2 (2014): http://www
.axonjournal.com/issue-7/marx-my-muse
34 Ali Alizadeh, Evental (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2011).
35 Ali Alizadeh, Transactions (St Lucia: University of Queensland, 2013).
36 Andrew Pendakis, ‘Badiou’, in Contemporary Literary & Cultural Theory:
The Johns Hopkins Guide, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre
Szeman (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 32.
37 Pendakis, ‘Badiou’, p. 32.
38 John Roberts, ‘On the Limits of Negation in Badiou’s Theory of Art’,
Journal of Visual Arts Practice 7:3 (2008): 277.
Chapter 8
1 The two crucial references here are: E 25–28 & SP 5–15.
2 ‘Figures de la féminité dans le monde contemporain’, unpublished paper
delivered in Athens (2011), p. 10. Hereafter in-text as FF.
3 I’ve dealt with this subject in my entry on ‘Feminism’ in The Badiou
Dictionary, ed. S. Corcoran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
4 Galatians, 3:28–29.
5 The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts/
Tragédie en trois actes, trans. S. Spitzer (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013), Act I, Scene 4. Hereafter referred to in-text as IA.
6 ‘Sophie Germain’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, Paris, no. 10, June (1993), p. 12.
7 1 Corinthians 11: 7–10.
8 1 Corinthians 11: 3.
9 ‘The Scene of Two’, trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21 (2003), p. 42.
Hereafter referred to in-text as ST.
10 ‘What Is Love’. Hereafter referred to in-text as WL/C.
11 In Logics of Worlds, Badiou succinctly dismisses arguments ‘reducing’
the form of sexed relations to distinct cultural configurations: ‘Love is
an experience of truth and as such is always identifiable whatever the
historical context may be’ (LW 131).
12 I’ve undertaken a comparison of Badiou and Irigaray on questions such
as this in: ‘Life-giving Sex versus Mere Animal Existence: Irigaray’s and
Badiou’s Paradoxically Chiasmatic Conceptions of “Woman” and Sexual
Pleasure’, forthcoming in an edited volume of papers from the Irigaray
Circle 2011 conference.
252 Notes
13 J. Lacan, Seminar XX On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and

Knowledge, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, trans. Bruce
Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 9.
14 J. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 102. My emphasis.
15 J. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 63.
16 ‘The Subject and Infinity’, in C. Hereafter in-text as SI/C.
17 Badiou, ‘Manifesto of Affirmationism’, Lacanian Ink, 24/25 (Spring, 2005),
2nd maxim.
18 See on this point: ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’, §2, where Badiou states:
‘every universal presents itself [… ] as a singularity that is subtracted from
identitarian predicates, although obviously it proceeds via those predicates’.
(Emphasis added.)
19 Preface to D. Moatti-Gornet, Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? Traité d’Ontologie
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), pp. 11–14.
20 W. Blanton and S. Spitzer, ‘A Discussion of and around Incident at Antioch:
an Interview with Alain Badiou’, Art & Research 3:2 (Summer 2010).
21 Balanton and Spitzer, ‘A Discussion…’, p. 6.
22 ‘Emmy Noether’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, Paris, no. 6, November (1992), p. 2.
23 ‘L’insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit, no. 238, December 1997, pp. 32–33.
24 ‘Sophie Germain’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, p. 11.
25 ‘L’insoumission de Jeanne’, p. 28.
26 ‘Sophie Germain’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, p. 11. Emphasis added.
27 Notably, a radio interview conducted by Laure Adler ‘Alain Badiou: Un
parcours philosophique’, Hors-champs, France Culture: 14 November (2013).
28 This formulation of the generic status of the disjunction as the ‘response’
to love’s paradox comes from François Wahl, whose preface to Conditions
(and hence ‘What Is Love’?) remains one of the most insightful
commentaries on Badiou’s thought.
29 A. Badiou, ‘Dix-neuf réponses à beaucoup plus d’objections’, Cahiers du
Collège International de philosophie 8 (1989), p. 263.
30 Hereafter in-text as IP.
31 While first published in 2000, Badiou’s ‘Eight Theses’ was delivered as a
paper at the Collège International de Philosophie in 1998.
32 I would like to thank Susan Spitzer for sending me copies of her translation
of The Incident at Antioch and the interview with Badiou on this play.
Thanks too to Eon Yorck.
Chapter 9
1 A. Badiou and L. Sedofsky, ‘Matters of Appearance: An Interview with
Alain Badiou’, Artforum 45:3 (2006), p. 322.
2 See: A. Ling, Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2011); A. Badiou, Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Hereafter CMA.
Notes 253
3 A. Badiou, ‘La Culture Cinématographique’, Vin Nouveau 5 (1957), pp.

3–22.
4 A. Badiou, ‘Le Plus-de-Voir’, Artpress, hors série (1998): p. 90.
5 Alain Badiou and Eli During, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé: entretien
avec Elie During’, Art Press, 310 (March 2005): p. 58.
6 Badiou, ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé’, p. 58.
7 Alain Badiou, ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, Parrhesia, trans. Alex
Ling and Aurélien Mondon, 6 (2009), p. 1.
8 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?: Volume 2, ed. & trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 98.
9 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?: Volume 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 13.
10 Alain Badiou, ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, in Matrix: Machine Philosophique,
ed. Eli During (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), pp. 128–129.
11 Badiou, ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, p. 1.
12 Badiou, ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, pp. 129.
13 Alain Badiou and Lauren Sedofsky, ‘Being by Numbers’, Artforum 33:2
(1994), p. 124.
14 Ricciotto Canudo, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, in French Film Theory
and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–1939, Volume I: 1907–1929,
ed. Richard Abel, trans. Claudia Gorbman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
18 Badiou, ‘Le Plus-de-Voir’, p. 90.
20 Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws, trans.
Rosemary Lloyd and Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions
Publishing Corporation, 2001), p. 112.
Chapter 10
1 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 91. All translations by the author.
2 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the signifier)’, in
Concept and Form, Volume 1, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (London:
Verso, 2012), pp. 91–101.
3 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Suture’, p. 99.
4 Jean-Claude Milner, L’Oeuvre Claire (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 128.
5 Milner, L’Oeuvre Claire, p. 129.
254 Notes
8 Badiou, ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’, in Concept and Form, Vol. 1, ed.

Hallward and Peden, p. 188.
9 Badiou, ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’, p. 199.
10 Badiou, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, in Concept and Form, Vol. 1, p. 161.
11 Badiou, ‘Mark and Lack: On Zero’, p. 161.
15 A. Badiou and F. Balmès, De l’Ideologie (Paris: Maspero, 1975), p. 19.
16 Tzuchien Tho makes this point in an interview with Badiou in the English
translation of Concept of Model (CM 95).
17 For an analysis of the fundamental importance of letters in Badiou’s
thought, see J. Clemens, ‘Letters as the Condition for Conditions for Alain
Badiou’, Communication & Cognition 36:1–2 (2003), pp. 73–102.
18 For a more detailed discussion of the crucial importance of the non-
objective nature of this ontology and its relationship to formalization
in Badiou’s thought, see Z. L. Fraser’s introduction to the English
translation of Concept of the Model, ‘The Category of Formalisation: From
Epistemological Break to Truth Procedure’ (CM xiv–lxv).
19 Plato, Republic, Books 6–10, (ed.) & trans. C. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy
(Cambridge: Loeb, 2013) p. 99. (Translation modified.)
Chapter 11
1 A. Badiou, ‘What Is Love’ (C 183).
2 Cf. Augustine’s Confessions, VI, p. 8, ‘…But what do I love when I love my
God?’ [quid autem amo, cum te amo? What do I love when I love you?]
in St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London:
Penguin Books, 1961), p. 211.
3 See C. Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
4 M. B. Kacem, Après Badiou: Ni Badiou, Ni Maître (Paris: Grasset, 2011) is,
even on a cursory reading, a masterpiece of the genre of the angry Oedipal
break-up-letter-as-a-warning-to-posterity.
5 While it does possess the (by no means negligible) virtues of both actually
supposing to engage with Badiou’s mathematics and a certain conceptual
and literary sophistication, this appears to be the ultimate motivation
of R. L. Nirenberg and D. Nirenberg, ‘Badiou’s Number: A Critique of
Mathematics as Ontology’, Critical Inquiry 37:4 (2011), pp. 583–614.
6 See for example ‘Seven Variations on the Century’, Parallax 9:2 (2003), pp.
72–80, 72.
7 P. Hallward, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy
(London: Continuum, 2004), p. 1.
Notes 255
8 A paradigmatic criticism of Badiou’s philosophy as desperately lacking

in mediation can be found in D. Bensaïd’s response to Being and Event.
See Bensaïd, ‘Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event’, in Hallward,
Think Again, pp. 94–106. In both the introduction and the conclusion
to his Badiou and Politics, B. Bosteels offers an insightful critique of
the way in which the common critical focus on Badiou’s ostensibly
‘missing mediators’ relies upon a distortion of Badiou’s philosophy
(and particularly of the way both truth procedures and events relate
to the situations to which they are immanent) which ignores both
the letter and the spirit of his texts (see Bosteels, Badiou and Politics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 8–16, 280–286 ). For a
critique of Bosteels’s position, cf. B. Cooke, ‘“Declares by the Void…”
Review of Bruno Bosteels’ Badiou and Politics and A.J. Bartlett’s
Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths in Parrhesia 16 (2013),
pp. 77–101.
9 P. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
10 Hallward, Think Again, pp. 17–20.
11 See Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, pp. xvii–xviii, 110–111.
12 W. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913–
1926, ed. and trans. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The
Bellknap Press 2002), pp. 236–253.
13 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 58–60.
14 For Badiou’s use of the word ‘state’ as a reference to the ‘meta-structure’ of
the situation, see (BE 93–103), cf. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth,
pp. 94–99.
15 While these terms (of Latin origin) are not, obviously, present in the
Platonic dialogues, the classically Platonic equivalence between the real and
the idea begins with the rejection of the (sophistic) notion that ideas (and
indeed truths) are mere nomoi, that is, institutions/conventions/customs
/laws.
16 See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), §100, pp. 65–66, cf. Agamben’s
extraordinary account of this issue in G. Agamben, Language and Death,
trans. K. E. Pinkus and M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), pp. 10–26, also cf. The Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 45–52.
17 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 10.
18 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1977), pp. 190–191. La dimanche de la vie is
a novel by Raymond Queneau.
19 See Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte and Schelling’s System of
Philosophy, trans. W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1977), pp. 89–91.
256 Notes
20 Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte and Schelling’s System of Philosophy.

(Note that Cerf and Harris translate Verstand as ‘Intellect’ rather than
Understanding.)
21 ‘In effect, I think that there are only three crucial philosophers: Plato,
Descartes and Hegel’ (LW 527), cf. (TS 4–12 & 182).
22 In Logics of Worlds, Badiou explains his point of departure from Hegel with
a depth and nuance that I am incapable of giving here (LW 141–152).
23 For an incisive and innovative account of how Hegel sees the connection
between concept and reality (one which dismisses both ‘pragmatist’
readings of Hegel and the cliché that Hegel is a pan-logicist with an overly
intellectual theory of both subjectivity and the world), see M. Gabriel,
Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Continuum,
2011), pp. 54–59.
24 Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 418–419.
25 See above and also C. Wright, Badiou in Jamacia: The Politics of Conflict
(Melbourne: Re-Press, 2013), pp. 19–20.
26 J.-T. Desanti, ‘Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou’, in
Hallward, Think Again, pp. 59–67.
27 Wright, Badiou in Jamacia; P. Hallward, Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide
and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2010); N. Power, One
Dimensional Woman (Winchester: O Books, 2009); F. Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble:
An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (London: Continuum,
2011); A. J. Bartlett, Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
28 Hallward, Damning the Flood.
29 Wright, Badiou in Jamacia.
30 Power, One Dimensional Woman.
31 Power, One Dimensional Woman. (The phrase ‘generic humanity’ is not
actually used by Badiou in this context, but only by Hallward on p. xiv of
his introduction.)
32 Cf. B.’s remarks on ‘anti-repressive’ politics, TS 31–32.
33 See CH.
34 For an excellent critical reflection on Badiou’s relationship to Marx
(which goes by way of an analysis of the difference between the focus on
communism vs. the commons), see N. Power, ‘Towards a New Political
Subject? Badiou Between Marx and Althusser’, in Badiou and Philosophy,
ed. S. Duffy and S. Bowden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press),
2012, pp. 157–177. Cf. A. Negri, ‘Is It Possible to Be Communist Without
Marx?’ Critical Horizons 12:1 (12 January 2011), pp. 5–14.
35 Badiou, like Hegel, is continually critical of any notion of the ineffable. See
(WA).
36 See Badiou’s evocation of Quentin Meillassoux in LW 119.
37 Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989).
38 Plato’s reference to a ὑπερουράνιος τόπος (a ‘place beyond heaven’) can be
found in the opening myth of Plato’s Phaedrus, 247c. See Plato, Complete
Notes 257
Works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

Publishing, 1997), p. 525.
39 See Badiou’s comments on the latter in LW 425–435.
40 ‘In the order of love, of the thinking of what it conveys with respect to
truths, the work of Jacques Lacan constitutes an event’ (MP 81).
41 See for example Badiou, ‘The Scene of Two’, pp. 42–54: 42–43, cf. C 184.
42 ‘I will argue that love is not even an experience of the other, but an
experience of the world … under the post-evental condition that there are
Two.’ Badiou, ‘The Scene of Two’, pp. 181–182.
43 ‘Indeed people have done nothing but speak of love in analytic discourse.’
Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 83.
44 On ambivalence, see S. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Freud
Reader, ed. P. Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), p. 588.
45 See for example Lacan, Écrits, pp. 96–97. Cf. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller and
trans. D. Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 8–10.
46 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol 18: (1920–1922) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology,
and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey and A. Tyson
(London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 99–111.
47 Lacan, Écrits, pp. 96–97.
48 S. Freud, The Penguin Freud Library Volume 2: New Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books 1991).
Cf. Lacan, Écrits.
49 Freud, The Penguin Freud Library Volume 2….
50 Lacan, Écrits, pp. 97–98.
51 Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 8.
52 Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 8.
53 Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 69, although note that here Lacan is talking
specifically of courtly love.
54 The truth here being the ultimate disjunction between the ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ positions which hides the sexual relationship.
56 Lacan, Seminar XX, pp. 71–81, p. 102.
57 Lacan repeats this formula many times in Seminar XX, but see p. 144.
58 Plato, Symposium, trans. S. Benardete with commentaries by S. Benardete
and A. Bloom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 43 (212d).
59 Plato, Symposium, pp. 47, 216e–217a. Bernadete translates algamata as
‘images’ … ‘so divine, golden, altogether beautiful…’. When Lacan talks of
love in his eleventh seminar, he will invoke the Symposium again in relation
to the meaning of love. In depicting love as both a ‘masquerade’ and a ‘lure’,
Lacan will introduce the concept of the lamella which intriguingly recalls
both his earlier discussion of Aristophanes, speech (and the little feet of
the spherical, roly-poly animals that pre-exist their division by eros) and a
kind of fragmenting of a primal-egg like unity into a proliferation of objets
258 Notes
a. see J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A.

Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 199.
60 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference, 1960–1961,
trans. C. Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts. 1/3/61. Cf. the final
discussion of love and the analyst’s desire at the end of Seminar XI, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 274–276.
61 Lacan, Transference, pp. 230–235.
62 Lacan, Transference, p. 267.
63 J. Clemens, Psychoanalysis I an Anti-philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
64 What provokes this remark, which Lacan will repeat in later seminars
is Lacan’s reading of Diotima’s speech in the Symposium in which Penia
(poverty or privation) seduces Poros (resourcefulness), thus giving birth to
love. What makes the Platonic story so Lacanian-Badiouian avant à letter
is that poros has the sense of ‘a way through’. Love is born in the gift of an
impoverished person (a person with nothing) to a being whose very nature
is to find solutions, ways through impasses. But nothing can thrive without
the gift of nothing, that is, of lack.
65 For an excellent account of the general philosophical importance of Plato’s
argument regarding non-being, see R. Brassier, ‘That Which Is Not’, Stasis
no. 1, EUSP (2013), pp. 174–186.
66 Badiou regularly rejects any notion of love that speaks of a kind of fusion
of lovers, associating this notion largely with a Romantic cult of Fate and
ultimately death. See for example Badiou’s remarks on love’s obscure (as
opposed to faithful or reactive) subject (LW 73–74).
67 G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. R. Howard (London: Continuum,
2000), p. 47.
Chapter 12
1 Lacan, Book XX, p. 3.
2 See M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974);
Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. M. J. O’Connell et al. (London:
Verso, 2012); J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. J.
Shapiro (Oxford: Polity, 1987).
3 A. Badiou, ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato!’, trans. A. Toscano, Angelaki 2:3 (2006),
p. 40.
4 J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992),
p. 303.
5 M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in M. Foucault,
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans.
D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
Notes 259
6 For a particularly obscene example of this seemingly boundless tendency

see A. Sugar, The Way I See It: Rants, Revelation and Rules for Life
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2011).
7 See for example my analysis that develops from the example of the 38th
Prime Minister of New Zealand in C. Jones, ‘John Key biofinancial
entrepreneur’, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Social Sciences Online 11:2 (2016).
8 Badiou, ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato’, p. 40.
9 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. R. Woolhouse
(London: Penguin, 2004). On Locke’s ‘invention of consciousness’,
see E. Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of
Consciousness, trans. W. Montag (London: Verso, 2013).
10 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 63.
11 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire livre XVI. D’un Autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006),
p. 171. At this point in his seminar, Lacan refers his audience to the chapter
on ‘Science in Truth’ that appears in Ecrits, which is in turn a transcript of the
first class of Seminar XIII. In this text, he begins by summarising the result
of the seminar of the previous year as being that of ‘our experienced division
as subjects as a division between knowledge and truth, and to accompany it
with a topological model, the Möbius strip’, Ecrits, trans. B. Fink (New York:
Norton, 2006), p. 727. For more on knowledge and truth in Lacan, see also,
inter alia, lecture 8 ‘Knowledge and Truth’ in Seminar XX, the response to
question 6 regarding ‘In what respects are knowledge and truth incompatible’,
in ‘Radiophonie’, in Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 440–443; and the
entirety of Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965–1966, trans. C.
Gallagher (www.lacaninireland.com). Regarding the direct impact of this
thinking on Badiou and his cohort, it is notable that ‘Science and Truth’ was
first published in the inaugural volume of Cahiers pour l’analyse in 1965.
13 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 395 (B370).
14 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, Volume III:
Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 184.
15 See for example G. W. F. Hegel, Encylopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
in Basic Outline, Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. K. Brinkmann and D. O.
Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 79.
16 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, in press), §32.
17 Hegel, Encyclopedia, p. 24.
18 Lacan, Seminar XIII, p. 3, see also ‘Science and Truth’, in Ecrits, p. 727.
19 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, trans. R. Grigg (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 158.
20 B. Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought (London: Penguin, 1999).
21 Translation modified. Badiou’s ‘inconsistante’ (LM 533) is more accurately
rendered as ‘inconsistent’ rather than ‘incoherent’ (LW 511), but moreover,
260 Notes
serves to remind of the way that Badiou evokes and draws on the important
place in Lacan of the active sense of inconsistency. See for example Lacan,
Seminar XVI, pp. 29–103.
22 See Lacan ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’, in Ecrits, p. 419.
23 Cf. Y. M. Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Oxford: Polity,
2011), p. 57.
24 C. Jones, ‘Think Big’, New Zealand Sociology 27:1 (2012), pp. 88–103.
25 C. Jones, ‘The Embers of Truth in the Ashes of Finance’, in M. Peters, J.
Paraskeva and T. Besley (eds.), The Global Financial Crisis and Educational
Restructuring (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
26 IBM, ‘A Culture of Think’. Online at: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history
/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_culture/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
27 T. Watson, quoted in T. Belden and M. Belden, The Lengthening Shadow:
The Life of Thomas J. Watson (New York: Little Brown, 1962), p. 158.
28 IBM, ‘Thomas Watson comments on “think”’. Online at http://www-03.
ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/index.html (accessed 7 January 2016).
29 IBM, ‘IBM: Think’. Online at http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en
/think/stories/ibm-today (accessed 7 January 2016).
30 F. Ruda, For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2015).
31 J. M. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London:
Macmillan, 1936, reprinted 1967), p. 383.
32 Keynes, General Theory, p. 384.
33 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 383–384.
34 F. A. Hayek, ‘“Free” enterprise and competitive order’, in Individualism and
Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
35 F. A. Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False’, in Individualism and Economic
Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 4. In Hayek, the list
of names in this tradition is typically Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Tucker,
Ferguson, Smith, de Toqueville, Acton, Burke, Bentham. See Individualism
and Economic Order, pp. 4ff and The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies
in the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, IL: Liberty Press, 1952), p. 360n.
36 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, Volume III, p. 136.
37 Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, pp. 82–83.
38 Lacan, Seminar XVII, p. 187.
Chapter 13
1 Alain Badiou, Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels, ‘Can Change be
Thought?’, in Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
pp. 312–313.
2 While Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are emblematic of this orientation,
Badiou extends his diagnosis to French philosophical scene in the late 80s:
Notes 261
‘how should we interpret the fact that Lyotard can only evoke the destiny of
Presence in commentaries on painters, that Gilles Deleuze’s last great book
had cinema as its topic, that Lacoue-Labarthe (like Gadamer in Germany)
devotes his energies to Celan’s poetic anticipation, or that Jacques Derrida
calls upon Genet?’ (MP 28).
3 ‘For a long time, philosophical speculation has fostered a sacralisation of
the limit. What I have called elsewhere the suture of philosophy to the
poem rests largely upon this sacralisation […] This horizon-effect is only
captured, so it seems, by the poem’ (NN 81).
4 See BE, 123–129, MP, 61–67, C, 35–48, HB, 3–5. For discussion, see J.
Clemens, ‘Conditions’, in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (London: Acumen,
2010), pp. 25–37 and M. Hewson, ‘Heidegger’, in Alain Badiou: Key
Concepts, pp. 151–153.
5 A. Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 21.
6 J.-P. Sartre, Mallarmé: La lucidité et sa face d’ombre (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),
p. 92.
7 Quoted in A. Badiou, ‘Philosophy as Biography’, http://www.lacan.com
/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html (accessed August 2015).
8 A. J. Bartlett, J. Clemens and J. Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 159.
9 A. Badiou, ‘Is It Exact That All Thought Emits a Throw of Dice?’, trans.
Robert Boncardo and Christian R. Gelder, Hyperion: On the Future of
Aesthetics IX:3 (Winter 2015), p. 74.
10 See also ‘The Philosophical Recourse to the Poem’ (C 35–48): ‘Because
naming an event in the sense I give to the latter, that is, that which, being
an undecidable supplementation, must be named for a being-faithful, and
therefore a truth, to occur – this naming is always poetic’ (C 41–42).
11 This notion of the object precedes the philosophical theory of the subject-
less object in Logics of Worlds. See Book III of LW, pp. 191–242.
12
The goal [of the forcing procedure] is to show that in a generic
extension S(♀) – which we will fabricate – there are at least
as many parts of ω0 as there are elements in the cardinal δ.
Consequently, for an inhabitant of S(♀), we have: | p(ω0) | ≥
δ. Since δ is an indeterminate cardinal superior to ω0, we will
have thereby demonstrated the errancy of statist excess, it being
quantitatively as large as one wishes. (BE 420 – our emphasis)
13 On the one hand, constructivism rejects all self-belonging multiples, such
as the multiple of the event. As Badiou states,
[c]onstructivism has no need to decide upon the non-being of the
event, because it does not have to know anything of the latter’s
undecidability. Nothing requires a decision with respect to a
paradoxical multiple here […] If you can name the multiple, it
is because you discern it according to its elements. But if it is an
262 Notes
element of itself, you would have to have previously discerned

it. (BE 289)
On the other hand, transcendentalism cannot propose a rational logic to
what would not belong to the situation.
14 Note that Badiou has re-worked his conception of the evental site in Logics
of Worlds so as to accord with the logic of appearing that he establishes
there: see in particular LW pp. 360–361, 594.
15
By causing the place to prevail over the idea that an event could
be calculated therein, the poem realizes the essence of the event
itself […] Consequently, the courage required for maintaining
the equivalence of gesture and non-gesture – thereby risking
abolishment within the site – compensated by the supernumerary
emergence of the constellation, which fixes in the sky of Ideas the
event’s excess-of-one. (BE 197)
16 P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J. Rancière, J.-F. Lyotard and A. Badiou, ‘Liminaire
sur l’ouvrage d’Alain Badiou “L’Etre et l’événement”’, Le Cahier (Collège
international de philosophie) 8 (Octobre 1989), p. 234.
17 Translation cited in J. Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren (London:
Continuum, 2011), p. 1. This translation, which S. Corcoran, translator
of The Politics of the Siren, slightly modifies, is by H. Weinfield, Stéphane
Mallarmé: Collected Poems (University of California Press, 1994).
18 Rancière, Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, p. 6.
19 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps’,
Parrhesia, 16 (2013), p. 38.
Chapter 15
1 See L. Burchill’s contribution to this volume: ‘Woman’s Adventures With/in
the Universal’.
2 A reference to Francois Hollande’s ‘amour fou’.
Chapter 16
1 ‘Le bonheur est la venue, dans un individu, du Sujet qu’il découvre pouvoir
devenir.’ A. Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur reel (Paris: PUF Collection,
2015), p. 41.
2 ‘Marcher, alors, sous l’impératif d’une Idée vraie, nous destine au bonheur.’
Badiou, Métaphysique du bonheur reel, p. 27.
Bibliography
Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D.Heller-
Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Agamben, G., Language and Death, trans. K.E.Pinkus and M.Hardt.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Althusser, L., and Balibar, E., Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London:
Verso, 1997.
Apter, E., ‘Laws of the 70s: Badiou’s Revolutionary Untimeliness’, Cardozo Law
Review 29, no. 5, 2008, pp. 1885–1904.
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. R.S.Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin
Books, 1961.
Badiou, A., ‘A Discussion of and Around Incident at Antioch: An Interview
with Alain Badiou’, with W. Blanton and S. Spitzer, Art & Research 3, no. 2,
Summer 2010, pp. 1–10.
Badiou, A., Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.
Badiou, A., Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2013.
Badiou, A., ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’, trans. Alex Ling and Aurélien
Mondon, Parrhesia 6, 2009, pp. 1–6.
Badiou, A., Conditions, trans. S.Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008.
Badiou, A., Court traité d‘ontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Badiou, A., ‘De la femme comme catégorie de l’être’, preface to D.Moatti-Gornet,
Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? Traité d’Ontologie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999, pp. 11–14.
Badiou, A., Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Badiou, A., ‘Dialectiques de la fable’, Matrix: Machine Philosophique, ed. Eli
During. Paris: Ellipses, 2003, pp. 120–129.
Badiou, A., ‘Dix-neuf réponses à beaucoup plus d’objections’, Cahiers du Collège
International de philosophie 8, 1989, pp. 247–268.
Badiou, A., ‘Emmy Noether’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, Paris, no. 6, November
1992, p. 2.
Badiou, A., Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005.
Badiou, A., ‘Figures de la féminité dans le monde contemporain’, unpublished
paper delivered at L’Institut français d’Athènes (French Institute in Athens),
27 January 2011.
Badiou, A., Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, ed. and trans.
Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2003.
Badiou, A., ‘Is It Exact That All Thought Emits a Throw of Dice?’, trans. Robert
Boncardo and Christian R.Gelder, Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics IX,
no. 3, Winter 2015, pp. 64–86.
264 Bibliography
Badiou, A., Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Editions Potemkine, 1980.

Badiou, A., ‘La Culture Cinématographique’, Vin Nouveau 5, 1957, pp. 3–22.
Badiou, A., L’Être et l’événement. Paris: Seuil, 1988.
Badiou, A., ‘Le Plus-de-Voir’, Artpress, hors série, 1998, pp. 86–90.
Badiou, A., ‘L’insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit no. 238, December 1997.
Badiou, A., Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano.
London: Continuum, 2009.
Badiou, A., ‘Manifesto of Affirmationism’, trans. B.P.Fulks, Lacanian Ink no.
24/25, 2005, pp. 92–109.
Badiou, A., Mathematics of the Transcendental, ed. and trans. A.J.Bartlett and
Alex Ling. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Badiou, A., Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1985.
Badiou, A., ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato!’, trans. A.Toscano, Angelaki 2, no. 3, 2006, pp.
39–41.
Badiou, A., Polemics, ed. & trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006.
Badiou, A., Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2011.
Badiou, A., ‘Sophie Germain’, Lettres sur tous les sujets, Paris, no. 10, June 1993,
pp. 11–15.
Badiou, A., The Communist Hypothesis, trans. D.Macey and S.Corcoran.
London: Verso, 2010.
Badiou, A., The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three
Acts/Tragédie en trois acts, trans. S.Spitzer. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013.
Badiou, A., ‘The Scene of Two’, trans. B.P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21, 2003, pp. 42–55.
Badiou, A., Theoretical Writings, eds. & trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano,
Badiou, A., and Balmès, F., De l’Ideologie. Paris: Maspero, 1975.
Badiou, A., and During, E., ‘Le 21e siècle n’a pas commencé: entretien avec Elie
During’, Art Press 310, March 2005, pp. 56–58.
Badiou, A., and Sedofsky, L., ‘Being by Numbers’, Artforum 33, no. 2, 1994, pp.
84–87/118/123–124.
Badiou, A., and Sedofsky, L., ‘Matters of Appearance: An Interview with Alain
Badiou’, Artforum 45, no. 3, 2006, pp. 246–253/322.
Badiou, A., and Tarby, F., Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Badiou, A., and Truong, Nicholas, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush. London:
Serpent’s Tail, 2012.
Bartlett, A.J., Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011/15.
Bartlett, A.J., and Clemens, Justin, ed. Badiou Key Concepts. London: Acumen,
2010.
Bartlett, A.J., Clemens, J., and Roffe, J., Lacan Deleuze Badiou. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Bibliography 265
Bazin, A., What Is Cinema?: Volume 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967.
Bazin, A., What Is Cinema?: Volume 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971.
Belden, T., and Belden, M., The Lengthening Shadow: The Life of Thomas J.
Watson. New York: Little Brown, 1962.
Benjamin, W., ‘Critique of Violence’, in Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913–1926,
ed. and trans. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The
Bellknap Press, 2002.
Blanché, R., L’Axiomatique. Paris: PUF, 1955.
Blanton, W. and Spitzer, S., ‘A Discussion of and around Incident at Antioch:
An Interview with Alain Badiou’, Art & Research 3, no. 2, Summer 2010, pp.
1–10.
Bosteels, B., Badiou and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Bottazzini, U., ‘Complex Function Theory, 1780–1900’, in A History of Analysis,
ed. Hans Niels Jahnke. Providence: American Mathematical Society, 2003.
Boutang, Y.M., Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery. Oxford: Polity, 2011.
Brassier, R., ‘That which Is Not’, Stasis no. 1, EUSP, 2013, pp. 174–186.
Burchill, L., ‘Feminism’, in The Badiou Dictionary, ed. S. Corcoran. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2015, 126–132.
Burchill, L., ‘Life-giving Sex versus Mere Animal Existence: Irigaray’s and
Badiou’s Paradoxically Chiasmatic Conceptions of “Woman” and Sexual
Pleasure’, in E. Mortensen, M. Rawlinson and G. Schwab (eds.), forthcoming
volume of papers from the Irigaray Circle 2011 conference.
Canudo, R., ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, in French Film Theory and Criticism:
A History/Anthology 1907–1939, Volume I: 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel,
trans. Claudia Gorbman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Clemens, J., ‘Letters as the Condition for Conditions for Alain Badiou’,
Communication & Cognition 36, no. 1–2, 2003, pp. 73–102.
Clemens, J., Psychoanalysis Is an Anti-philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2013.
Conway, J., On Numbers and Games. London: Academic Press, 1976.
Copjec, J., Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1996.
Crockett, C., Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Davis, M., Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer.
New York: Norton, 2000.
Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H.Tomlinson and R.Galeta.
London: Athlone Press, 1989.
Deleuze, G., Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
Deleuze, G., Le Pli: Leibniz et la Baroque. Paris: Minuit, 1988.
Deleuze, G., Proust and Signs, trans. R.Howard. London: Continuum, 2004.
266 Bibliography
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., What Is Philosophy? trans. H.Tomlinson and
G.Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Detlefsen, M., “Formalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics
and Logic, ed. Steward Shapiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Duffy, S. and Bowden, S., eds., Badiou and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Feltham, O., Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008.
Foucault, M., and Deleuze, G., ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews, M. Foucault, trans.
D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Fraser, Z.L., ‘The Category of Formalisation: From Epistemological Break to
Truth Procedure’, in The Concept of the Model, A. Badiou, trans. Z.L.Frazer
and Tzuchien Tho. Melbourne: re.press, 2008, pp. xiv–lxv.
Frege, G., Concept Script, A Formal Language of Pure Thought Modeled upon
That of Arithmetic, by S. Bauer-Mengelberg in From Frege to Gödel: A
Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, (ed.) Jean van Heijenoort.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Freud, S., The Penguin Freud Library Volume 2: New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. J.Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
Freud, S., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol 18: (1920–1922), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology,
and Other Works, ed. and trans. J.Strachey. London: Vintage, 2001.
Gabriel, M., Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism. London:
Continuum, 2011.
Gates, B., Business @ the Speed of Thought. London: Penguin, 1999.
Habermas, J., Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J.J.Shapiro. Oxford: Polity,
1987.
Hallward, P., Badiou: A Subject Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003.
Hallward, P., Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.
Hallward, P., ‘Order and Event’, New Left Review 53, 2008, pp. 97–122.
Hallward, P., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London:
Continuum, 2004.
Hayek, F.A., Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948.
Hallward, P. and Knox Peden, eds., Concept and Form, 2 vols. London: Verso,
2012.
Hayek, F.A., The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1952.
Hegel, G.W.F., Encylopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part
1: Science of Logic, trans. K.Brinkmann and D.O.Dahlstrom. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hegel, G.W.F., Faith and Knowledge, trans. W.Cerf and H.S.Harris. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1977.
Bibliography 267
Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825-6, Volume III:

Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. R.F.Brown and J.M.Stewart. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2009.
Hegel, G.W.F., The Difference Between Fichte and Schelling’s System of Philosophy,
trans. W.Cerf and H.S.Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.
Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.Miller. Oxford: Oxford
Hegel, G.W.F., The Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni. Cambridge:
Horkheimer, M., Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. M.J.O’Connell et al.
Horkheimer, M., Eclipse of Reason. Continuum: New York, 1974.
Jones, C., ‘John Key biofinancial entrepreneur’, Kōtuitui: New Zealand Social
Sciences Online 11, no. 2, 2016, pp. 89–103.
Jones, C., ‘The Embers of Truth in the Ashes of Finance’, in The Global Financial
Crisis and Educational Restructuring, ed. M. Peters, J. Paraskeva, and T.
Besley. New York: Peter Lang, 2015.
Jones, C., ‘Think Big’, New Zealand Sociology 27, no. 1, 2012, pp. 88–103.
Kacem, M.B., Après Badiou: Ni Badiou, Ni Maître. Paris: Grasset, 2011.
Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P.Guyer and A.W.Wood. Cambridge:
Keynes, J.M., General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London:
Macmillan, 1936, reprinted 1967.
Lacan, J., Écrits, trans. B.Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
Lacan, J., On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, trans. B.Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
Lacan, J., ‘Radiophonie’, in Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001, pp. 440–443; and the
entirety of Seminar XIII: The Object of Lacan, J., Psychoanalysis 1965–1966,
trans. C. Gallagher (www.lacaninireland.com).
Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
1959–1960, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference, 1960–1961,
trans. C. Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts, 1961.
Lazarus, S., L’Anthropologie du nom. Paris: Seuil, 1996.
Ling, A., Badiou and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. R. Woolhouse.
London: Penguin, 2004.
Mallarmé, S., Collected Poems, trans. H.Weinfield. University of California Press,
1994.
Mallarmé, S., Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws, trans. Rosemary Lloyd and
Mary Ann Caws. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2001.
Meillassoux, Q., ‘Badiou and Mallarmé: The Event and the Perhaps’, Parrhesia
no. 16, 2013, pp. 35–47.
Meillassoux, Q., ‘History and Event in Alain Badiou’, trans. Thomas Nail,
Parrhesia no. 12, 2011.
268 Bibliography
Milner, Jean-Claude., L’Oeuvre Claire. Paris: Seuil, 1995.

Miller, J.-A., ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the signifier)’, in Concept and
Form, Volume 1, ed. P. Hallward and K. Peden. London: Verso, 2012.
Moatti-Gornet, D., Qu’est-ce qu’une femme ? Traité d’Ontologie. Paris: L’Harmattan,
1999.
Moretti, A., ‘The Geometry of Logical Opposition’, PhD thesis, Faculty of
Humanities Institute of Philosophy, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland,
2009.
Negri, A., ‘Is It Possible to Be Communist Without Marx?’ Critical Horizons 12,
no. 1, 12 January 2011, pp. 5–14.
Nirenberg, R. L and Nirenberg, D., ‘Badiou’s Number: A Critique of
Mathematics as Ontology’, Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4, 2011, pp. 583–614.
Peden, K., ‘Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive’, Journal of
the Philosophy of History 9, no. 2, 2015, pp. 177–195.
Plato, Republic, Books 6–10, ed. and trans. C. Emlyn-Jones and W.Preddy.
Cambridge: Loeb, 2013.
Plato, Symposium, trans. with commentaries by S. Benardete and A. Bloom.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Popov, P.S., ‘The Logic of Aristotle and Formal Logic’, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 8, no. 1, September 1947, pp. 1–22.
Power, N., One Dimensional Woman. Winchester: Zone Books, 2009.
Power, N., ‘Towards a New Political Subject? Badiou Between Marx and
Althusser’, in Badiou and Philosophy, ed. S. Bowden and S. Duffy. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Rancière, J., Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren, trans. S Corcoran. London:
Continuum, 2011.
Roudinesco, E., Lacan: In Spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliott. London:
Verso, 2014.
Ruda, F., For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism. Evanston: Northwestern
Ruda, F., Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Ruyer, R., Néo-Finalisme. Paris: PUF, 1952.
Sartre, J.-P., Mallarmé: La lucidité et sa face d’ombre. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Sugar, A., The Way I See It: Rants, Revelation and Rules for Life. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2011.
Titchmarsh, E.C., Mathematics for the General Reader. New York: Dover, 1981.
Wahl, F., ‘The Subtractive’, in Conditions, ed. A. Badiou, trans. S.Corcoran,
London and New York: Continuum, 2008, pp. vii–xliv.
White, H., ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical
Inquiry 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 5–27.
Wright, C., Badiou in Jamacia. Melbourne: repress, 2013.
Zalamea, F., Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Z.L. Fraser.
Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012.
Contributors
Ali Alizadeh is Senior Lecturer at Monash University.

Alain Badiou taught at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Collège
International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of over twenty books
of philosophy, several novels and plays and a hyper-translation of Plato’s
Republic. His major philosophical works include Theory of the Subject
(1982), Being and Event (1988) and Being and Event II: Logics of Worlds
(2005). Being and Event III: The Immanence of Truths is forthcoming.
A. J. Bartlett is Secretary of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
and teaches at the Centre for Adult Education in Melbourne.
Robert Boncardo is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney.
Louise Burchill is Visiting Lecturer in Contemporary French Philosophy,
Aesthetics, and Feminist Theory at the VCA, University of Melbourne. She
is the translator of Alain Badiou’s Philosophy and the Event, Deleuze: The
Clamor of Being and Second Manifesto for Philosophy.
Joe Gelonesi presents the weekly program and podcast The Philosopher’s Zone,
which airs in Australia on ABC Radio National. He has been a long-standing
member of the network’s executive editorial team, and in his role as editor
of genre Joe guides the work of some the ABC’s most influential specialist
broadcasters, journalists and content makers.
John Cleary is doing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.
Justin Clemens is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne.
Bryan Cooke is the Leading Tutor in Humanities (Philosophy) at Ormond
college and the current Convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental
Philosophy.
Christian R. Gelder is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Studies at
The University of New South Wales.
Lia Hills is a Melbourne-based novelist, poet and translator. Her latest novel is
The Crying Place (Allen and Unwin, 2017).
Campbell Jones is Associate Professor at the University of Auckland and a
Researcher at Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA).
Sigi Jottkandt is Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Australia. She is author of Acting
Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic, First Love: A Phenomenology
of the One, and numerous articles on literature and psychoanalysis.
270 Contributors
Dr Alex Ling is Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at

Western Sydney University. He is the author of Badiou Reframed (I.B. Tauris,
2016) and Badiou and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and co-
editor and translator (with A.J. Bartlett) of Mathematics of the Transcendental
(Bloomsbury, 2014).
Knox Peden is Gerry Higgins Lecturer in the History of Philosophy at the
University of Melbourne. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology:
French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and co-editor,
with Peter Hallward, of a two-volume work devoted to the Cahiers pour
l’Analyse (Verso, 2012).
Jon Roffe is Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New
South Wales.
Index
Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes

Abstraction, 42, 45, 61, 147, 149, 154, Aristotle, 32, 33, 35, 36, 73, 82, 84,
159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 173, 94, 97, 184, 248 n.23, 249 n.25
175, 176, 190 Athens, 4
Abu Aqil Labīd ibn Rabī’ah, 100 Augustine, 166
Academic, 15, 17, 32–4, 172, 178, Australia, 1–3, 102, 207, 211, 215,
226, 240. See also Aristotle 216, 243 n.2, 243 n.3
Adorno, Theodore, 50, 99 Avant-gardes, 101
Aeschylus, 31, 36, 96 Axiom(atics), 46–50, 53, 54, 75, 76,
Aesop, 96 103, 106, 107, 143–5, 150, 152,
Aesthetics, 33, 34, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 154–7, 159, 200, 201, 244 n. 18
100–2, 131, 132, 212. See also of equality, 14, 104, 165
Inaesthetics of love/sex(uation), 113, 114, 116,
Affirmation, 15, 23, 29, 64, 89, 96, 117, 122, 123
99–101, 104, 105, 109, 110, of set theory, 148, 150, 156, 195,
121, 122, 144, 149, 153, 223, 199, 200
229
Agalma, 169 Balnchot, Maurice, 90
Agamben, Giorgio, 160, 255 n.16 Balzac, Honoré, 30, 101
Alcibiades, 168–70 Bartlett A. J., 162, 195
Algebraic, 70, 120, 148 Bazin, André, 129, 130, 135
Allegory, 29, 54, 120 Beatrice, 173. See also Dante
of the cave 8, 19, 24, 27, 34 Being, 43, 54, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68, 70,
Almagestes, 44, 244 n.5 71, 76, 79, 80, 86, 93, 95, 97,
Althusser, Louis, 43, 102, 225, 244 108, 112, 114, 117, 122, 123,
n.15 125, 129–31, 133, 138, 150,
America, 3, 37 151, 153, 155, 156, 162, 163,
Analogical, 151, 153–6 170, 179, 184, 194, 197, 248
Analyst, 169, 170, 258 n.60 n.23
The Annals of St Gall, 49 being(s), 59, 61, 64, 76, 113, 115,
Antipodes, 1–4 170, 201, 207, 220, 221, 226,
Appearing, 36, 57, 59, 129, 130, 155, 258 n.64
163, 220–2, 228 errancy of, 195, 197
laws of, 171 human, 179, 180, 182, 190, 191
logics of, 160, 162, 262 n.14 non-, 68, 108, 122, 258 n.64, 261
regimes of, 224 n.13
theory of, 128 qua being, 149, 151, 154, 165, 195,
Aristocratic, 26, 135, 138 200, 219, 222, 233
Aristophanes, 76, 257 n.59 science of, 156
272 Index
sexed, 106, 107, 112, 118, 119 139, 143, 162, 164, 166, 167,
thought and, 155, 189 172, 174, 184, 193–208, 215,
of truth, 201, 220 229, 231, 240, 241. See also
Belonging, 54, 64, 148, 151, 153, 154, Generic
202, 203 Constructivist(vism), 194, 196, 197,
self, 200, 203, 261 n.13 199, 261 n.13
Benjamin, Walter, 98, 129 Continuum Hypothesis, 58, 148, 149
Bergson, Henri, 20 Contradiction, 19, 20, 22, 25–8, 33,
Blanché, Robert, 48 36–8, 74, 82, 100, 154, 185,
Boole, George, 73 211–15, 223, 233, 234
Borromean knots, 148 performative, 198
Bosteels, Bruno, 42, 51, 54, 162, Conway, John, 69, 70, 246 n.10
255 n.8 Corruption, 3, 9, 10, 33, 34, 180. See
Bourdieu, Pierre, 174 also capitalism
Bouveresse, Jacques, 195 and Australia, 243 n.3
Brecht, Bertolt, 37, 51, 95 and theatre, 34
of youth, 33, 239
Cahiers pour l’Analyse, 44, 48, 259 n.11 Curtis, Ian, 174
Callicles, 4
Canguilhem, Georges, 41 Dante, 173. See also Beatrice
Cantor, Georg, 54, 64, 71, 165, 195 Davies, Gardner, 207
Canudo, Ricciotto, 135 Davis, Martin, 74
Capitalism, 7, 14, 122, 162, 177, 179, Dedekind, Julius Wilhelm Richard,
186, 187, 191, 211–14, 217, 69, 246 n.10
223, 239 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 18, 20, 55–66,
Cauchy, Augustin-Louis, 70 69–72, 90, 134, 175, 181, 225,
Cavaillès, Jean, 48, 231 246 n.4, 246 n.5, 246 n.7,
Celan, Paul, 95, 261 n.2 261 n.2
Chaos, 56–9, 64. See also Deleuze and Guattari, 2
Chekov, Anton, 37 Democracy(cratic), 26, 27, 30, 60,
Christ(ianity), 32, 109–11, 166, 167, 61, 98, 101, 138, 173, 178, 181,
171, 223 211, 213, 224, 230, 243 n.3. See
Cinema, 13, 17–30, 34, 35, 59, 100, also materialism
127–39, 216, 234, 261 n.1 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 221, 225, 261
Claudel, Paul, 37 n.2
Clemens, Justin, 195 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 162, 245
Cogito, 57, 58 n.24
Cohen, Paul, 148, 198 Descartes, Rene, 58, 256 n.21
Communism, 91, 95, 127, 163, 188, Detective novels, 28
211–15, 256 n.34 Dialectic(al), 12, 13, 26, 27, 36,
Compossibility, 24, 132, 164, 231 37, 42–54, 92, 94, 98, 100,
Condition(s), 12, 20, 24, 42, 46, 49, 108, 122, 143, 151, 153, 160,
52, 56, 65, 66, 69, 72, 89, 90, 161, 183, 214–16, 223, 224,
93–8, 100, 104, 107, 108, 121, 245 n.22
122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 138, Dialegesthai, 37
Index 273
Dialogues, 3, 4, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, libidinal, 170

255 n.15 of object, 108, 115
Dickinson, Emily, 96, 227, 228 phallic, 83, 84, 249 n. 31
Didactic, 20, 99 Educate(ion), 4, 27, 29, 30, 90, 97,
schema, 92, 94 162, 173, 174, 231
Diderot, Denis, 32 Einstein, Albert, 58
Difference, 33, 43, 47, 52, 57, 75, 76, 79, Emancipation, 8, 14, 15, 120, 162,
83, 97, 105, 108, 111, 120, 123, 185, 222, 234, 235, 240
124, 148, 149, 151, 153, 175, 227 Enjoyment, 79, 80, 82–6, 116, 169,
absolute, 125 174, 213–15
feminine, 227 Equality, 4, 14, 15, 66, 106, 111, 118,
indifference to, 105, 109, 111, 120, 178, 239
120, 227 Eternal, 4, 26, 133, 203, 231, 240
minimal 51, 52 Euripides, 31
ontological, 151, 154, 155, 157 Europe(ans), 2, 3, 9, 100, 103, 104,
qua difference, 110, 117, 125 243 n. 2
qualitative, 221 Exception(al), 9, 10, 18, 24, 26, 27,
quantitative, 195 32, 35, 36, 44, 58, 62, 68, 86,
recognition of, 105, 106 118, 121, 144, 157, 173, 182,
sexual, 106–19, 124, 125, 228, 235 191, 228
Dionysus, 36 Excess, 65, 147–9, 164, 174,
Discourse, 8, 56, 66, 75, 89, 92, 96, 120, 185, 195, 197, 261 n.12,
167, 169, 173, 195, 200, 247 n.7 262 n.15
academic/university, 178, 181, 182
analytic, 257 n.43 Farrokhzad, Forough, 104
economic, 7–10, 240, 241 Feminine, 83–6, 106, 108, 112,
of ends, 94 114–22, 168, 226–8, 235, 249
logical, 144, 147, 154 n.26, 257 n.54
of love, 28, 171–3 Fidelity, 64, 100, 111, 186, 230, 231,
mathematical, 154, 156 241, 242
philosophic, 15, 17 Finite, 11, 12, 15, 18, 48, 61, 69, 104,
universe of, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84–7 108, 115, 113, 150, 182, 183,
Disjunction, 70, 123–5, 174, 220, 252 186, 190, 191
n.28, 257 n.54 Flaubert, Gustave, 30
sexual, 113–18, 122–5 Forcing, 65, 148, 150, 196–8, 201,
Distribution of the sensible, 98. See 204, 206, 208, 261 n.12
also Rancière Formalist, 146, 159, 170
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 89 Formalization, 51, 52, 143–5, 149,
Doxa, 56, 57, 61, 62, 94, 99, 103, 164 151–7, 241, 254 n.18
Duchamp, Marcel, 22, 28, 133 France, 7, 15, 37, 90, 101, 223, 239
Frege, Gottlob, 73, 74
Economy, 7–10, 108, 179, 186, 211, French Revolution, 14, 50, 214
212, 215 Freud, Sigmund, 79, 167, 168,
of desire, 82, 84, 169 234, 235
knowledge, 177 Fukuyama, Francis, 212
274 Index
Gates, Bill, 186 IBM, 187, 188

Gauss, Carl, 68, 70, 228, 246 n.11 Ibsen, Henrik, 37
Generic, 4, 51, 52, 54, 64–6, 89, 90, Idea(l), 1, 8–11, 14, 21, 22, 28, 29, 37,
98, 101, 112, 118, 123, 124, 38, 44, 52–4, 61, 99–102, 121,
127, 129, 131, 133, 149–51, 135, 136, 164, 165, 169, 175,
157, 162, 164, 173, 175, 179, 176–9, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189,
191, 193, 194, 196–201, 190, 212, 215–18, 222, 223,
204, 207, 208, 219–21, 226, 233, 242, 262 n.15
229–32, 252 n.28, 256 n.31, cinema, 135–8
261 n.12 of communism, 91, 188, 211, 214
Geometric, 4, 68, 70–2, 246 n.9, 248 of love, 168
n.24 Plato, 91, 120, 136, 154, 184, 255
Germain, Sophie, 110, 120, 121, 228 n.15
Globalization, 2, 102, 239 poetic, 206, 207
God, 4, 7, 36, 105, 106, 111, 121, 173, Socratic, 4
181, 195, 197, 198, 199, 214, Ideal(ism)(ality)(lization) 44, 45, 92,
219, 239, 254 n.2 136, 139, 167, 187, 188, 222, 224
Godard, Jean-Luc 23, 25, 128, 130 absolute, 161
Gödel, Kurt, 61, 148 Ideology, 89, 102, 103, 109, 152, 180,
Golden Ratio, 80, 81, 248 n.20 211, 212, 222, 223, 235
Graphemes, 14 Imaginary, 3, 19, 24, 47–9, 53, 54, 80,
Grothendieck, Alexander, 231, 232 92, 114, 144, 148, 162, 183,
Guattari, Felix, 2 232, 244 n.18, 246 n.9
Immanent, 21, 23, 26, 27, 33, 47, 65,
Habermas, Jurgen, 60 70, 72, 94, 102, 112, 116, 121,
Hallward, Peter, 42, 45, 53, 160, 162, 132–6, 148, 150, 151, 154, 224,
245 n.24, 255 n.8 247 n.7, 255 n.8
Happiness, 38, 214, 215, 240, 242 Impasse, 10–12, 21, 43, 48, 50, 143,
Hayek, Friedrich, 189, 190, 260 n.35 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154,
Hegel, G. W. F., 22, 36, 45, 89, 95, 99, 155, 157, 225, 230, 239, 241
160, 161, 162, 165, 179, 182, Impossible, 4, 8, 11–18, 21, 24, 36,
184, 185, 190, 214, 223, 256 56, 57, 74, 76, 82, 90, 100, 106,
n.22, 256 n.23, 256 n.35 124, 129, 143–51, 161, 163,
Heidegger, Martin, 90, 93–5, 99, 153, 165, 168, 171, 174, 175, 183,
179, 183, 184, 194, 221–5, 261 185, 203, 214, 227, 239
n.4 Impure, 22, 23, 26, 29, 134–9. See also
Historicity, 4, 46 Cinema
History, 41–54, 95, 161, 181, 225, Inaesthetics, 94, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104,
231, 244 n.15 131, 132
end of, 212 Inclusion, 86, 153
science of, 95 Indiscernible, 163, 171, 198
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 99, 104 Inessential, 25, 127, 134, 135, 137, 138
Homer, 3 Internalization, 155–7
Houellebecq, Michel, 174 Intervention, 2, 4, 29, 42, 46, 64, 74,
Hugo, Victor, 196 96, 179, 185, 223, 235
Index 275
Intransitive, 151, 154 151, 153–7, 164, 194, 195–201,

Irigaray, Luce 114, 251 n.12 239, 241
Isomorphism, 244 n. 18 formal, 74, 82, 147, 156
Lautman, Albert, 59
Jameson, Fredric, 52 Lazarus, Sylvain, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48,
Janus, 56 49, 50, 52, 244 n.16
Joan of Arc, 120 Leibniz(ian), 58, 59, 68, 164, 231,
Jouissance, 73, 76–85, 107, 114–18, 246 n.5
168, 213, 248 n.16, 249 n.28, Letters, 69, 74, 145, 146, 254 n.17
249 n.31 Levinas, Emmanuel, 62
Joyce, James, 27, 28 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 152
Justice, 4, 8, 17, 159, 162, 176 Ling, Alex 18
Local, 2, 45, 46, 211
Kant(ian), Immanuel, 49, 50, 59, 66, Locke(an), John, 182, 190, 259 n.9,
92, 163, 165, 179, 182, 183, 260 n.35
184, 190 Logicism, 63, 65, 66
Keating Paul, 3, 243 N.2 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 96, 182, 259 n.9
Keynes, John Maynard, 189, 190
Kierkegaard, Søren, 166 Mahler, Gustav, 24
King Kong, 26 Malebranche, Nicolas, 32
Klein, Melanie, 235 Malevich, Kasimir, 51, 95, 133
Knowledge, 4, 7, 10, 20, 33, 48, 94, Mallarmé, Stéphane, 21, 94, 96, 99,
95, 112, 113, 123, 127, 133, 103, 104, 138, 175, 193–204,
150, 151, 166, 170, 174, 177, 206–8
179, 180, 182–7, 191, 196, 203, Man, 83, 85, 86, 249 n.28, 249 n.31
233, 234, 243 n.3, 248 n.23, Mandelstam, Osip, 95
259 n.11 Mao(ist), 99, 160, 161
Marvell, Andrew, 1
Lacan(ian), Jacques, 4, 10–12, 41, Marx(ist)(ism)(ian), Karl, 13, 37,
65, 73–86, 92, 99, 114–17, 43–5, 89, 99, 153, 163, 189,
122, 143–6, 148, 154, 155, 212, 214, 230, 239, 251 n.33,
159, 166–74, 178, 179, 181, 256 n.34
183–6, 191, 225, 235, 241, 243, Materialism, 92, 153, 179, 186
247 n.6, 247 n.7, 248 n.16, democratic, 180, 181, 222–4
248 n.20, 248 n.24, 249 n.25, postulate of, 151, 157
249 n.26, 249 n.31, 257 n.40, Mathematics, 44, 59, 61, 66–73, 81,
257 n.43, 257 n.53, 257 n.57, 95, 106, 110, 118, 127, 143–57,
257 n.59, 258 n.64, 259 n.11, 159–65, 176, 193, 195–200,
260 n.21 204, 208, 224, 228, 231–4, 241,
Lack, 3, 104, 144, 147, 148, 166, 170, 245 n.24. See also Set-theory
172, 174, 175, 206, 258 n.64 May ’68, 15, 44, 232, 239
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 194, 221, Mediation, 15, 21, 23, 35, 43, 94, 113,
260 n.2 160–3, 196, 218, 228, 233,
Language, 12, 21, 27, 58, 60, 70, 76–8, 255 n.8
86, 115, 138, 145, 146, 150, Meillassoux, Quentin, 208
276 Index
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 62 Pendakis, Andrew, 103

Metalanguage, 75, 78 Perse, Saint-John, 95
Metaphor(ical), 70, 78, 81–6, 113, Pessoa, Ferdinand, 95, 99, 101, 103, 104
128, 138, 198, 201, 202, 215, Phaedrus, 169, 257 n.38
219, 223, 248 n. 22 Phallus, 76, 80–5, 115, 249 n.31
Metonymy, 51, 78, 85 Phenomenology, 60–5, 156, 183, 184
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 44, 144, 249 n.26 Picasso, Pablo, 101, 133
Milner, Jean-Claude, 145 Pindar, 96
Modernism, 98–100, 103, 159, 250 n.26 Pirandello, 96
post-, 181 Plato(nist)(nic), 2–4, 8, 9, 17, 19, 20,
Mont-Pèlerin, 181 23, 24, 27, 31–8, 73, 76, 90–4,
Multiplicity, 44, 48–50, 52, 55, 63–7, 96–9, 101, 102, 120, 128, 136,
105, 123, 124, 128, 150, 155, 160, 167–70, 172, 174–9, 184,
165, 179, 184, 195, 219–21, 233 195, 216, 224–6, 239, 240, 250
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 194, 221, 260 n.2 n.9, 250 n.26, 255 n.8, 255
Neo-Platonism, 167 n.15, 256 n.10, 256 n.38, 257
New York, 7 n.59, 258 n.64, 258 n.65
New Zealand, 7, 8, 9, 239, 259 n.7 Platonism, neo-, 167
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 89, 90, 194, Platonistic, 217
224, 231 Portulans, 44
Nihilism, 29 Post-Structuralist, 93, 97
Noether, Emmy, 120, 228 Power, Nina, 162, 256 n.34
Number, 11, 12, 15, 59, 67–87, 144, Presentation, 24, 27–9, 35–7, 42, 58,
145, 147, 170, 172, 202, 241, 104, 123, 128, 147, 149, 156,
246 n.9, 246 n.10, 248 n. 20 187, 196–200, 202
Property, 74, 81, 157, 201, 203, 204,
O’Neill, Eugene, 37 208
Obje(c)t a, 77, 80–2, 115, 116, 168 private, 13, 14, 211, 212, 214, 216
Oedipus, 85, 254 n.4 Prospect (Deleuze), 61, 62, 64
One, 36, 37, 76–87, 106, 108, 113, 114, Proust, Marcel, 175, 241
117, 118, 121–5, 148, 163, 172, Psychoanalysis, 114, 166, 167, 170,
200, 240, 248 n.15, 248 n.22 172–5, 216, 234, 235
of sex, 76–86 Public action, 34
Ontology, 43–5, 47, 52, 54, 58, 67,
149, 150, 154–6, 160, 162, 163, Rancière, Jacques, 14, 20, 91, 93,
175, 193–5, 198–200, 204, 221, 97–103, 204, 206, 207, 250 n.
233, 241, 245 n.24, 250 n.26, 17, 251 n.33
254 n.18 Real, 10–19, 46, 77, 165, 175, 176,
Opinion, 2, 10, 33–6, 48, 56, 62, 65, 216, 240, 241
129, 164, 179–86, 190, 191 Reason, 44, 161
Other, 3, 62, 75, 77, 80–5, 94, 100, Representation, 19, 23, 24, 26, 35,
115, 169, 170, 181, 248 n.16, 37, 42, 67, 68, 71, 87, 102, 110,
248 n.22 122, 128, 130, 134, 145, 148,
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 100 152, 190, 191, 197, 211
Patriarchal, 121 Reproduction, 96, 139, 174
Index 277
Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 240 Socrates, 3, 15, 16, 33, 92, 96, 97, 136,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 98, 196, 215 169, 170, 226
Robinson, Abraham, 146 Sophist(ic)(ry), 4, 106, 109, 139, 170,
Roffe, Jon, 1, 55, 195 173, 177–81, 191, 194
Romantic, 93–100, 104, 165, 172, Sophisticates, 3
177, 224, 232, 258 n.66 Sophocles, 31, 36, 96
Rorty, Richard, 2, 56, 60, 61 Spitzer, Susan, 31, 252 N.32
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 4, 54 Stalin, Joseph, 51, 212
Ruda, Frank, 162, 189 State, 8, 13, 47, 55, 60, 61, 64, 92,
Russell, Bertrand, 73, 74, 75, 78, 86 95, 133, 160, 163, 164, 170–5,
Ruyer, Raymond, 56 187, 189, 191, 194, 206, 211,
214, 216, 218, 226, 230, 232,
Saint Paul, 109, 110, 119 255 n.14
Sappho, 96 States of affairs, 58
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 37, 44, 217, 221, Strindberg, August, 37
224, 225, 231 Sublation, 108
Schiller, 96 Sublimation, 108
Schwärmerei, 50 Subtraction, 51–3, 70, 85, 105–9, 112,
Sequence, 11, 15, 18, 42, 44, 45, 47, 119, 121, 133, 165, 176, 180,
49, 50, 52, 53, 105, 133, 211, 205, 207
214, 225, 231, 235 Symbolic, 24, 53, 77, 80–6, 106–23,
Set Theory, 58, 64, 65, 148–50, 153, 144, 145, 148, 162, 225, 227,
155–7, 193, 195, 199–201, 245 228, 244 n.18
n.24. See also mathematics
Sex, 73–87, 111–15, 119, 166, 167– Tacitus, 32
71, 174, 248 n. 16, 249 n.31 Terra nullius, 3
Signified, 75, 78, 79 Theatre, 18, 21–5, 31–7, 90, 95, 96,
Signifier, 44, 70, 73, 75, 78–80, 82, 128, 135, 216, 217, 230
84–7, 103, 115, 121, 144, 196, Thucydides, 32
202, 248 n.16, 249 n.31 Titchmarsh, E.C., 55
Singular, 2, 4, 18, 42, 47, 94, 101, 102, Topological, 68, 148, 201, 220, 222,
108, 112, 127, 132–8, 154, 168, 225, 259 n.11
177, 180, 196, 201, 207, 232 Torsion, 45–7, 56, 76, 99
Site, 1, 2, 4, 46, 48, 52, 55, 65, 100, Toussaint L’ouverture, François-
119, 134, 138, 143, 151, 154, Dominique, 160
163, 200–3, 206, 207, 226, 262 Tragedy, 31–3, 216, 227, 229, 230
n.14, 262 n.15 Transcendental, 67, 92, 143, 151,
Situation, 8, 9, 15, 20, 32, 41, 45–7, 156, 163, 171, 196, 199, 220,
51, 55, 64, 65, 90, 96, 112–14, 262 n.13
117, 123, 125, 128, 129, Transference, 35, 84, 107
132, 133, 150, 151, 154, 160, Transmission, 2, 4, 34, 90, 91,
162–4, 171–5, 180, 185, 196, 234
198, 201–4, 211, 215, 217, Treatise, 32, 36. See also Aristotle
220, 223, 228–35, 245 n.24, Treaty of Waitangi, 3
255 n.14, 262 n.15 Two, 108, 112–17, 121–5, 171, 172
278 Index
Unary trait, 76, 79, 80, 115 White, Hayden, 49, 50

Undecidability, 197, 198, 202–8, 261 Whole, 44, 73–5, 77–80, 85–7,
n.13 117, 122, 149, 153, 161, 194,
Universal(ity)(ism), 2, 4, 29, 36, 41, 248 n.15
49, 83, 92, 98, 103, 105–25, Williams, Tennessee, 37
127, 131, 132, 137, 143, 146, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21
150, 151, 175–81, 193, 219, Woman, 83–7, 106–23, 227, 228, 249
221, 226–8, 252 n.18 n.25, 249 n.31, 251 n.12
Univocity, 153 Wright, Colin, 16
Unnameable, 46, 47, 50, 245 n.22
Xanthippe, 169
Visconti, Luchino, 24
Void, 3, 46, 49, 65, 84, 102, 113, 144, Zalamea, Fernando, 71, 246 n.8
150, 151, 155–7, 163, 168, 172, Zero, 56, 144, 147, 151, 155, 173,
174, 195, 200–3 223
Zeus, 77
Watson, Thomas J., 187, 188 Žižek, Slavoj, 50
Welles, Orson, 22, 23 Zola, Émile, 30

A J Bartlett, Ed. - Badiou &amp; His Interlocutors

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

A J Bartlett, Ed. - Badiou &amp; His Interlocutors

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Badiou and His Interlocutors

Also available from Bloomsbury

Happiness, Alain Badiou

Lectures, Interviews and Responses

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury

First published 2018

© A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens and contributors 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2665-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down A.J. Bartlett and

Part One Lectures

1 In Search of the Lost Real Alain Badiou 7

2 Cinema and Philosophy Alain Badiou17

3 The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy Alain Badiou31

Part Two Presentations

4 Badiou’s Concept of History Knox Peden 41

5 Deleuze’s Badiou Jon Roffe55

6 Mathematics in the Bedroom: Sex, the Signifier and the

7 From Prohibition to Affirmation: On Challenges and

8 Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal Louise Burchill105

9 An Inessential Art?: Positioning Cinema in Alain Badiou’s

Part Three Essays

10 Subjected to Formalization: Formalization and Method in the

11 Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa): Love and

12 Where Thought Is Not Campbell Jones177

13 The Priority of Conditions: On the Relationship between

Part Four Interviews with Alain Badiou

14 Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou 211

15 ‘The Movement of Emancipation’219

Part Five Encomium

16 The Beginner Lia Hills239

AP The Age of the Poets

But now the salmon-fishers moist

Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures Interviews and Responses is a unique

Keating, who described the antipodes (Australia specifically) as being at ‘the

In Search of the Lost Real

hidden infinity, which is the inexistence of a final number. So the Real of

something impossible as possible, and so you must create a new principle.

This lecture was given at the University of Auckland, 25 November 2014.

Cinema and Philosophy

Fourth question: if cinema is an art what is its relation to all sequences

So I come to my question three. Is this condition of philosophy, cinema, in

and so on. Why, for practically a century, is there a difficult discussion

sense as artistic activity in general. I think that my position at this point is

cinema has two qualities: it is dialectics, because it is an art of contradiction,

Ben Ferris: Hello, Ben Ferris

B: Yes. The general idea of presentation, to find a new presentation, of

wondering if that conflict that you are saying is endemic to cinema

century it was necessary to speak of novels as a new form of art

The Common Preoccupation

Good morning to all of you.

immanency of art to philosophy, art as a possible part of philosophy. This is

generally, three different parts or components: first, theatre or classical art

Badiou’s Concept of History

In Lacan: In Spite of Everything, Elisabeth Roudinesco begins a chapter with

surprising implications for the historical perspective that his philosophy

experience as a foundation for ontology. Ontology is the keyword of Being

From history to ontology?

Even if it can’t be exhaustive, any list of Badiou’s confrontations with history

is maximal in this period of this work, which witnesses a strident effort to

A J Bartlett, Ed. - Badiou & His Interlocutors

A J Bartlett, Ed. - Badiou & His Interlocutors

1 In Search of the Lost Real Alain Badiou 7

2 Cinema and Philosophy Alain Badiou17

3 The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy Alain Badiou31

4 Badiou’s Concept of History Knox Peden 41

5 Deleuze’s Badiou Jon Roffe55

8 Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal Louise Burchill105

12 Where Thought Is Not Campbell Jones177

14 Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou 211

15 ‘The Movement of Emancipation’219

16 The Beginner Lia Hills239