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Alain Badiou PDF

361 Pages·2009·1.21 MB·English
by  BadiouAlain
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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 The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com 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

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Also available from Continuum: Being and Event, Alain Badiou. Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou. Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou. Theory of the Subject,
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