Alain Badiou

361 Pages·2009·1.21 MB·English

by  Badiou, Alain

CONDITIONS
Also available from Continuum:
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Infi nite Thought, Alain Badiou
Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou
Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou
After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere
Art and Fear, Paul Virilio
Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio
Desert Screen, Paul Virilio
CONDITIONS
Alain Badiou
Translated by Steven Corcoran
Continuum International Publishing Group
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Originally published in French as Conditions © Editions du Seuil, 1992
This translation © Continuum 2008
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.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9827-2
ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9827-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Badiou, Alain.
[Conditions. English]
Conditions/Alain Badiou; translated by Steven Corcoran.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9827-4
ISBN-10: 0-8264-9827-2
1. Philosophy, French–20th century. I. Title.
B2430.B27113 2008
194--dc22 2008017483
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
The Subtractive: Preface by Francois Wahl vii
Acknowledgements xlv
Part I Philosophy Itself 1
1 The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself 3
2 Defi nition of Philosophy 23
3 What is a Philosophical Institution? Or Address,
Transmission, Inscription 26
Part II Philosophy and Poetry 33
4 The Philosophical Recourse to the Poem 35
5 Mallarmé’s Method: Subtraction and Isolation 49
6 Rimbaud’s Method: Interruption 68
Part III Philosophy and Mathematics 91
7 Philosophy and Mathematics 93
8 On Subtraction 113
9 Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable 129
Part IV Philosophy and Politics 145
10 Philosophy and Politics 147
Part V Philosophy and Love 177
11 What is Love? 179
CONTENTS
Part VI Philosophy and Psychoanalysis 199
12 Philosophy and Psychoanalysis 201
13 The Subject and Infi nity 211
14 Anti-Philosophy: Plato and Lacan 228
Part VII The Writing of the Generic 249
15 The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett 251
Notes 285
Index 311
vi
The Subtractive
Preface by Francois Wahl
When we agreed to gather together the larger part of papers and inter-
ventions in colloquiums that Badiou has given since Being and Event,
texts that all make considerable advances and that for the interest of
each of them ought not remain scattered, we planned that I would intro-
duce them with a preface. Even if this were only to mark twenty-fi ve
years of collaborative work. I should strictly apologize for the length this
preface has taken. But there is nothing more futile that those ‘introits’
that only cast a semblance of light, since they can only be understood
once the book has been read and worked-through. Further, philosophy
does not tolerate – should not tolerate – the ‘extraction’ of concepts; the
movement, articulation and deduction of a concept in a text is some-
thing whose course, whose wovenness, we either rejoin and assume, or
else we have nothing but the conversation the café philosophique. Last, a
number of the papers included here – of an apparently easy read –
present a particular diffi culty in that they make reference to the termi-
nology, and therefore to the apparatus, of Being and Event, which means
that any reading of these texts is incomplete without bearing in mind
what we should, properly speaking, refer to as the system that forms
their background.
First up, then, I have resolved to go over the great work again, stop-
ping along the way at the points that are here reprised, and indeed
re-elaborated. I therefore do not pretend not to have, on some points,
omitted parts of the revision. Second, I try to indicate the new contribu-
tions that the present essays make to the point that constitutes their
vii
PREFACE
central theme: the relation of philosophy to its ‘conditions’. Finally,
prepared by years of exchanging objections and responses, I state at least
one of the points on which Badiou has not totally convinced me, or,
more seriously, on which he seems in diffi culty. In consideration of
which, I will have fulfi lled the ternary plan he is so fond of.
I
Beyond academic inventories, there are two styles of defi nition of
philosophy: one is descriptive, the other foundational. Gilles Deleuze has
recently provided us with an example of the fi rst, through a sort of
laying bare of philosophical work, from which he draws out the features
specifi c to philosophy itself1; Badiou2 has taken on all the risks of the
second, whereby philosophy exists only on the condition of a thinking of
being, one constructed according a systematic process, that takes into
account the contemporary developments in rationality, and that allows,
at its end, a proclamation about the current moment of truth. The
rapprochement might seem inappropriate: Deleuze saves Bergson via
Nietzsche, Badiou saves Plato via Cantor. But such are the points of
convergence, and such the contrasts, that a comparison would bring out
in more than one place the kernel of Badiou’s thought: it is such that by
embracing it very closely, one would let escape what it is when fi rst seen
from a distance.
At a glance Deleuze and Badiou can be seen to proceed along parallel
paths in opposition to what might be called a contemporary koinè. Their
work counters the claim that we bear witness to an ‘end’ of philosophy:
philosophy has always been and continues to be specifi ed by its opera-
tional procedures, which distinguish it as radically from science (more gen-
erally, from the knowledge of states of affairs) as from art (and Badiou
adds: from politics and from love). Deleuze attributed uniquely to
philosophy ‘the art of forming, inventing, fabricating concepts’3; Badiou,
while denying it can create truths, vests it with securing the compossibil-
ity of the truths that these four produce, the only ones that can. These
procedures, then, make up so many of philosophy’s ‘conditions’. For
both thinkers, the operations specifi c to philosophy are immanent: they
are uniquely immanent to thought, are grounded in what is ‘presented’
viii
PREFACE
to it, and to the exclusion of anything situated below or above whose
obscurity would cloak thought in darkness. More: philosophy cannot be
construed as that which completes, with a supreme or transcendent
gesture, the count of Ones in which experience is enveloped: this would
be a disaster. The reason is that if what philosophy has to think is con-
tent, donation, or being, then the onus is on it to affi rm multiplicity, that
is the multiple of multiples, pure multiplicity, or the without-one. It is not
true, then, to say that philosophy is under the condition of language
conceived as a transcendental condition of thought: for Deleuze, this
would mean that thought remains confi ned to arguing in propositions;
and, for Badiou, to refl ecting the state of the situation – that is to grasp-
ing it without remainder: language can only accede to the pure multiple
when forced. So, although the philosopher does pass through language,
it is displaced each time anew with the dice-throw of a non-derivable
naming. Last, Truth cannot be said to be a matter of reference, of the
object of knowledge: Truth proceeds on the basis of a decision, which
constitutes an event, a supplementary and thrown act, and, but it is also
(says Badiou) subtractive, because it deducts.
Thereupon, Deleuze and Badiou part company. Deleuze described
a practice whose key-word is the creation of concepts, ‘self-positing’ but
fl uid concepts, condensing a plurality of components that are remodelled
in accordance with each displacement in this practice’s site of intensity;
it is a creation for which the only image is that of ‘a point of absolute
survey at infi nite speed’.4 On this view, a philosopher is one who articu-
lates consistent concepts. This construction, however, is an art in which
concepts comprise ‘“non-discursive” centres of vibration’5, and in which
‘deciding’ between concepts is impossible inasmuch as the crossroads
of problems to which they attempt to respond differ. Concepts, to be
sure, are distributed on – but without coinciding with a diagramme or a
plane – that is traversed by curved movements and the comings and
goings of thought. This plane is a ‘reserve of purely conceptual events’6,
which, although not situated outside of philosophy – for which reason
it is called a ‘plane of immanence’ – is pre-philosophical, intuitive and
avers that ‘concepts themselves refer to a non-conceptual comprehen-
sion’.7 Deleuze’s work is very clearly an attempt to describe the process
of philosophical work, to maintain thought in the movement – another
key word – of its elaboration; as a result of which, Deleuze had clearly to
model ‘the philosophical’ on the factuality of its production, confi gure
ix