Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

225 Pages·2012·1.184 MB·English

by  Jean-Jacques Lecercle

PLATEAUS • NEW DIRECTIONS IN DELEUZE STUDIES
Series Editors Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook
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‘Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou have never been discussed so lucidly as n
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in this brilliant comparison, which brings out the salient features of two J
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major bodies of thought. Not afraid to be utterly straightforward in his
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exposition of their similarities and differences, Lecercle shows that their q
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contrasting engagements with literature can help us get to the heart of e
their philosophical projects. Once I started reading I did not want to stop. s
A tour de force which is destined to become a classic assessment of these L
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two thinkers.’ c
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Professor Jonathan Culler, Cornell University r
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Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent
does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has
read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions.
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This book is the first attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong D
readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. IO
Lecercle demonstrates that philosophers need literature, as much as literary U
critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature A
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(where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, D
a heady if unusual mix. D
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Jean-Jacques Lecercle is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of L
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Nanterre, Paris. U
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Cover image: © iStockphoto.com/John Woodcock
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Edinburgh University Press barcode in
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22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF u
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www.euppublishing.com g
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ISBN 978 0 7486 3800 0
Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single
concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain
its mutations.’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
Editorial Advisory Board
Keith Ansell Pearson
Ronald Bogue
Constantin V. Boundas
Rosi Braidotti
Eugene Holland
Gregg Lambert
Dorothea Olkowski
Paul Patton
Daniel Smith
James Williams
Titles Available in the Series
Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible):
Beyond Continental Philosophy
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy:
From Kant to Deleuze
Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated
by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism
Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Forthcoming Titles in the Series
Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
BADIOU AND DELEUZE
READ LITERATURE
2
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Edinburgh University Press
© Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3800 0 (hardback)
The right of Jean-Jacques Lecercle
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Disjunctive Synthesis 6
Chapter 2 A Question of Style 38
Chapter 3 Deleuze Reads Proust 68
Chapter 4 Badiou Reads Mallarmé 92
Chapter 5 A Modernist Canon? Badiou and Deleuze
Read Beckett 119
Chapter 6 Reading the Fantastic after Badiou and Deleuze 158
Conclusion: Aesthetics or Inaesthetics? 189
Bibliography 205
Index 211
v

Introduction
Tell me which literary texts you read and how you read them and I
shall tell you what kind of philosopher you are and how important
your philosophical contribution is.
Alain Badiou begins the introduction to his magnum opus Being
and Event by positing three numbered theses, or ‘assumptions’,
about the ‘current general state of philosophy’.1 In a pastiche of
the philosopher’s practice, I shall start by stating my own three
assumptions, or theses.
Thesis one. Badiou and Deleuze are two of the most important
contemporary philosophers. This is the weak version of the thesis,
which, I am afraid, is trivially true. All you have to do in order to
ascertain this is to browse among the philosophy section of any
Waterstone’s bookshop. A few years ago, the shelves were fi lled with
books of philosophy of an impeccably analytic cast, where applied
ethics vied with the philosophy of mind. Today, Wittgenstein and
Cavell (who is not even an analytic philosopher) are lone survivors
in a sea of translations from the French or German: Adorno, Barthes,
Baudrillard, Blanchot and so on to the end of the alphabet. Badiou
and Deleuze fi gure prominently in that glorious list. There is hardly
a text by Deleuze that has not been translated into English and
translations of Badiou are coming thick and fast (the massive second
part of his magnum opus, Logic of Worlds, published in 2006,
has already been translated).2 The time of the research monograph
devoted to a little known philosopher is already past – the time of
readers, primers and assorted cribs is increasingly near. So the weak
version of my fi rst thesis is trivially true indeed. But I decided to write
this book because I believe in a strong version of the thesis: Badiou
and Deleuze are the two major contemporary philosophers. I am
entirely aware of the highly contentious nature of this strong version,
perhaps even of its outright falsity. How dare I ignore Derrida or
Foucault, or even Lyotard? And what about, if we extend the fi eld,
Adorno and Heidegger? At this stage, the strong version can only
be supported by a philosophical decision (a move that should please
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badiou and deleuze read literature
Badiou). Whether this will induce effects of truth remains to be seen.
But the fi delity, to use Badiou’s term, is already there: I believe that
the work of Badiou and Deleuze is there to stay, aere perennium.
And this Pascalian wager on the future of philosophy is supported
by an analysis of what Badiou himself calls the ‘moment of French
philosophy’: an ‘adventure’ that for him begins with Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness and ends with Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is
Philosophy?, but also, Badiou claims with characteristic but under-
standable immodesty, with his own work: ‘Time will tell; though if
there has been such a French philosophical moment, my position
would be as its last representative.’ 3 A strange statement for a phi-
losopher who claims that what he has in common with Deleuze is
the rejection of all thought of the end (as in the phrases ‘the end of
philosophy’ or ‘the end of history’) and of fi nitude, but a statement
that must be understood in the light of his conception of history as
a dotted line of ‘historical sequences’ that produce eternal truths
but that are themselves deciduous. I happen to believe that Badiou’s
claim, large as it may seem, is justifi ed – that there is such a thing as
a moment in French philosophy and that Deleuze and Badiou are its
major representatives. In saying this, I have already moved towards
my second thesis.
Thesis two. Badiou and Deleuze form a pair, which is a form
of unity, the unity of a set, and a pair of opposites, which is a form
of distance or separation. We could describe this in the language of
Deleuze: they share a plane of immanence, where their individual
lines cross (in agonistic strife), then converge and are entangled (in a
philosophical correspondence), while remaining entirely distinct and
ultimately separate. We shall need a concept to describe this form of
relation which is a non- relation (and certainly a non- relationship)
– the Deleuzian concept of ‘disjunctive synthesis’ will do the philo-
sophical work that is needed. But we can also, more traditionally but
perhaps more perspicuously, describe this situation in the language
of Bourdieu (which in this case is not incompatible with the language
of Deleuze): contemporary French philosophy is a fi eld of forces, in
which Badiou and Deleuze occupy two opposite places that function
as poles and, by acting as attractors, structure the fi eld. As we can
see, my second thesis is as strong, and potentially as unpalatable, as
the fi rst. But there is a third thesis, which is perhaps even worse but
which actually impelled me to write this book.
Thesis three. The best way to enter the (non- )relation between
Badiou and Deleuze is through the way they read literature. Again,
2
Introduction
a weak version of the thesis is trivially true. Their interventions in
the fi eld of literature are as numerous as they are notorious. Badiou
is a novelist and playwright, a complete philosopher like Sartre his
mentor, and he is the author of theses on drama and a ‘handbook’
of what he calls ‘inaesthetics’, in reality a collection of essays mostly
on literary texts.4 His philosophical works, from Théorie du sujet
to Logic of Worlds, abound in ‘readings’ of poems and other texts.
Deleuze, at a time when he was still a historian of philosophy in the
French tradition, devoted a volume to a reading of Proust, and the
last collection of essays published in his lifetime is largely devoted
to literature – obviously a lifelong passion.5 The weak version of
the thesis is even more trivial than this: in showing an interest in art
(Deleuze wrote extensively on painting and the cinema, Badiou has
an essay on dance in his ‘handbook’) as well as literature, Deleuze
and Badiou play the usual role of continental philosophers who,
unlike their analytical counterparts, never hesitate to wander beyond
the narrow limits of their favourite subjects: Heidegger and Adorno,
Foucault and Derrida, as the French language has it, ne sont pas en
reste (they, too, wrote extensively on literature).
But there is a strong version of the thesis. It can take two forms.
The fi rst states that literature plays a crucial role in the contents
of our philosophers’ respective positions. For Badiou, literature is
a c ondition of philosophy. Sometimes it is included in the fi eld of
art, one of the four fi elds (science, politics, art and love) in which
events occur and procedures of truth are conducted – literature is
a source of truth, unlike philosophy, whose more modest task is
to ‘compossibilise’, to think together the truths produced in other
fi elds. Sometimes, the conditions are, through synecdoche, reduced
to two: the matheme and the poem, mathematics and literature. In
both cases thinking the poem is, for the philosopher, of the essence.
For Deleuze, literature is a constant source of thought experiments,
it is one of the fi elds in which thought is at work, perhaps even in
an e xemplary fashion, as the literary text is a locus where the shift
between interpretation (‘What does it mean?’) and experiment (‘How
does it work? Let’s put it to work!’) is least expected and most fruit-
ful. This is why Proust, Lewis Carroll and a host of American writers
are as important to philosophy as Hume and Spinoza. The second
form of the strong version of the thesis goes one step further. In a
pastiche of Deleuze’s attitude, it is not interested in the contents
of the philosophical positions of the two philosophers, even where
they directly concern literature: it seeks to ask their texts the wrong
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