Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou's Dispute with Lyotard

157 Pages·2015·0.662 MB·English

by  Matthew R. McLennan

Philosophy, Sophistry,
Antiphilosophy
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Philosophy, Sophistry,
Antiphilosophy
Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard
Matthew R. McLennan
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© Matthew R. McLennan, 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Philosophy’s present 1
Old battle lines redrawn 4
A note on method and sources 5
1 The Thinking of Being 9
Lyotard’s thinking of being 11
Badiou’s thinking of being 29
2 Philosophy in its Relation to Being 49
Lyotard’s metaphilosophy 50
Badiou’s critique of The Differend 55
3 Demarcations: Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy 67
Lyotard, sophiste? 70
Badiou, philosophe? 79
Lyotard, antiphilosphe? 87
4 Ethics and Politics 95
Philosophy as ethical and political vocation: Lyotard 98
Philosophy as ethical and political vocation: Badiou 104
A desire for the One 112
Conclusion 121
Notes 129
Bibliography 137
Index 145
Acknowledgements
Any book is a team undertaking. Though any inaccuracies and omissions in the
text are my own, the success of this project has depended at each step upon the
gracious contributions of others.
First and foremost I would like to thank my family for their love, support
and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank Anna Seifried, Leo
McLennan, Susan McLennan, Doreen Richmond, Audrey Lundy, Louise
Legault, Pierre Legault, Louise Guay and Christopher Seifried.
My gratitude also extends to my greatest philosophical teachers and mentors:
Denis Dumas, Jeffrey Reid, Daniel Tanguay, Paul Forster, Brian Keenan, Diane
Gall, Karim Dharamsi and George Fulford.
I would also like to acknowledge the patience and good will of Bloomsbury
editors Frankie Mace and Liza Thompson; the indispensable labours of my
assistant Thérèse Barrett, who formatted the manuscript, created the index etc.;
the inspiring enthusiasm and insights of Deniz Guvenc, with whom I read Being
and Event; the support of my friends, as well as my wonderful colleagues at Saint
Paul University; and lastly the contributions of my students, too many to name,
who have inspired and challenged me.
This work is published thanks to a grant by the Aid to Publication Program
at Saint Paul University.
I dedicate what follows, with boundless love, to Anna and Leo.
Introduction
Philosophy’s present
Now, as ever, the question of philosophy’s definition is intimately bound to that
of its survival.
Without pre-deciding the issue, let us assume for now the kind of broad
definition of philosophy proffered in undergraduate courses: philosophy is an
activity of higher-order questioning, a search after truth. Thus construed, in
the present conjuncture philosophy is threatened on two fronts. It is in fact
subject to a double bind: if unable to plead its utility, philosophy is existentially
threatened; pleading its utility, it is threatened no less.
In the first place, philosophy as pure pursuit of truth is widely considered
impractical or useless, and its claims to the intrinsic value of its labours tend
to fall on deaf ears. But this is nothing new; Thales, traditionally considered to
have been the first Western philosopher, was already subject to the ridicule of
the Thracian maid when he fell in a well while gazing at the stars. More inter-
esting is the fact that philosophy also and increasingly flirts with absorption into
the very discourse of economic efficiency that undermines it. It finds a place
at the table by pleading its utility, as training for the flexible, lateral thinking
often said to be essential to economic and professional success. Philosophy may
also be tapped for its therapeutic value, to the effect that the wisdom of the
great philosophers alongside yoga and other techniques helps to cultivate the
contentment, health and productivity of economic contributors. Moreover, the
philosopher increasingly finds a role in practical ethics training, an explosive
growth field by which she contributes not only to genuine ethical deliberation,
but to the alibis of institutions and the individuals who populate them.
This economic operationalization of philosophy is of course part of a
global trend with much wider implications. Where the economic winners in a
globalized post-Fordist system see flexibility, dynamism and opportunity, the
vast majority of Earth’s labourers – adjunct philosophy faculty included – see
precariousness, pressure, displacement and the permanent threat of obsoles-
cence. Frequently, formally educated labourers must retrain midstream to stay
2 Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy
swimming, and the increasingly irrational demands on one’s time and one’s
spatial locations push many to top up their credentials with night classes and
online certification. Less and less frequently one locates the philosopher in the
comfort of the ivory tower, pursuing pure research. It is increasingly common to
find her on the adjunct treadmill, or at the intersection of diverse digital applied
humanities courses in programmes targeting non-philosophical professionals.
To this extent the philosopher becomes more than ever a facilitator who helps
others – the real producers, the real drivers of the economy, it is said – to think
differently; to look at alternative points of view; to cultivate intuition, under-
stood as an openness to unthought-of solutions to practical impasses (and it
goes without saying that such solutions are – at least on paper – to be ethically
sensitive if not ethically sound).
In sum, philosophy – where tolerated – is increasingly tapped for its
productive potential rather than its millennia-old and, arguably, essential
link to truths. In a general way, this poses with a new urgency the question of
philosophy’s survival. But it also raises a more focused question: whether or not
present conditions, by insisting on economic efficiency, encourage philosophy
to distance itself from the standard, broad definition and even, perhaps, to slide
into sophistry.
Why sophistry? Compare Socrates to Protagoras. It is widely known that
Socrates took no money for his philosophical craft, and that ultimately he
martyred himself for the truth. Though arguably he was Socrates’s intel-
lectual equal, the craft of Protagoras was linked in perhaps an essential way to
economic and political survival and flourishing. In Plato’s Protagoras (1992a) –
tendentious though we may assume it to be – the character Protagoras pulls shy
of the anti-democratic conclusions to which he is pushed by Socrates’s rigorous
questioning. He thereby demonstrates a political savvy placing him squarely
and ably in the realm of doxa, mere opinion. He is no partisan of truth, but
seeks above all to cause effects with language, and this with a view to human
flourishing.
Certainly, high-quality philosophical work in the Socratic/Platonic tradition
of fidelity to truth continues to be produced internationally. But the existence of
a hungry, desperate intellectual underclass – the army of adjunct faculty and the
reserve army of underemployed and unemployed philosophy graduates seeking
a toehold in the academy – favours the unmooring of philosophical technē
from this fidelity. Since philosophy is tied to money through the university,
it is at any rate fair to question whether or not this tends to corrupt it at the
pedagogical level. Adjunct philosophical under-labourers are more competitive
Introduction 3
to the extent that they can balance the demands of challenging, even titillating
their millennial students, with the demands of telling the latter what they
want to hear. To be safe, one usually assumes a basically liberal-democratic
framework for discussion, in which thought experiments are brought out to
show instinctively liberal-democratic students the minute inflections of applied
liberal-democratic thought. One challenges, but only mildly; acts the benev-
olent eccentric, the clown even, the fondly remembered philosophy professor,
within this familiar space. On a cynical reading, one does so to gain favourable
student evaluations by which to secure one’s incumbency, and with which to
pad one’s portfolio in pursuit of increasingly rarer tenure-track positions. The
razor-thin difference between Socrates and Protagoras has perhaps never been
so important, since it is precisely by Protagorean political instinct and flattery,
not through fidelity to truth, that the professional philosopher increasingly wins
and keeps her place at the table.
The question of philosophy’s survival, then, is tied up with its potential slide
into sophistry, broadly construed as the politically astute practice of creating
effects with language for a fee. But this poses anew the ancient question
of whether the definitions of philosophy and sophistry here assumed are
sound, and to what extent the line between the two can or should be drawn
in any rigorous way. Indeed, not all thinkers in the ballpark of philosophical
practice agree that sophistry should be quarantined from philosophy; Hegel
notably assimilated sophistry to the history of philosophy and Heidegger, far
from defending philosophy against sophistry, charged sophistry rather with
provoking the fall of Greek thought into philosophy. In a more contemporary
vein, Keith Crome has drawn attention to the crucial distinction between
sophos, sophistēs and philosophos, roughly wisdom, sophistry and love of
wisdom. His indispensable Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry is a promising
reflection on the possibility of a positive definition of sophistical intelligence,
as distinct from both pre-Socratic sophos and Platonic–Aristotelian philosophos
(Crome 2004). And not only the rich written corpus, but also the very career
trajectory of Barbara Cassin, troubles any neat distinction between the craft of
the philosopher and that of the sophist (Cassin 2014). The standard definition
of philosophy is, in other words, question-begging according to some scholars
on the grounds that it degrades, implicitly or otherwise, sophistical intelligence
either by assimilating it to a stop on the road to philosophy, or to the status of
a lesser rival. Is the story of sophistry parasitical upon that of philosophy? Is
sophistry essentially autonomous? Or is the distinction between the two insuf-
ficiently nuanced to begin with?