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Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma
*Robert Hughes *
/ Ohio State University/
hughes.1021@osu.edu
(c) 2007 Robert Hughes.
All rights reserved.
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1. "Can we be delivered, /finally/ delivered, from our subjection to
Romanticism?" asks the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937),
with an evident sigh (Conditions 158f, Theoretical Writings
22e).[1 <#foot1>] A peculiar question, it would seem, for an epoch
often eager to declare itself at once post-Romantic and
postmodern. For Badiou, however, Romanticism denotes not an
historical moment now long past, but a philosophical gesture whose
reach extends through both analytic and Continental philosophy as
well as through contemporary theory: an almost fatal and complete
"disentanglement" of philosophy from mathematics (Conditions 159f,
Theoretical Writings 22e), coupled with the rise of the "age of
the poets," when philosophy was sutured to /art/ as the only
possible "body of truth" (Petit Manuel 12f, 3e).[2 <#foot2>] For
the first tendency, Badiou cites G.W.F. Hegel; for the second,
Friedrich Nietzsche and especially Martin Heidegger, its acme. We
should not misinterpret Badiou's sigh, however. When he seeks to
overcome Romanticism through the reengagement of philosophy with
mathematics and set theory, when he seeks to desacralize the
Romantics' Infinite through its mathematization, he is not thereby
seeking to bury Romanticism's rediscovery of poetry as a mode of
thinking. Certainly it is true that Badiou's project strives to
re-entangle philosophy and mathematics. He succeeds, I think, and
in this respect, Badiou may indeed be said to have overcome
Romanticism. Nevertheless, as we shall also see, poetry is
essential to Badiou's thinking of truth and remains at the very
heart of his project, whether he is writing of mathematics or
MallarmÃ(c), ethics or aesthetics. So while Badiou would contest any
claim that poetry /alone/ has a purchase on truth, in important
ways his own project reaffirms the Romantic schema in art: poetry
and truth are not to be disentangled. One term implies the other.
2. My aim here is not to elaborate a full philosophical description
of Badiou's relation to Romanticism--Justin Clemens has already
begun such work in his admirable book on the Romanticism of
contemporary theory. Nor do I wish to quibble over the use or
usefulness of "Romanticism" as a label to describe an historical
tendency of thought. Rather, what I would like to do in the
present essay is to trace out a series of propositions concerning
art, ethics, and subjectivity, which derive from the Romantics and
which Badiou places at the heart of his own project. Badiou is
important to considerations of art, ethics, and subjectivity
because, among other reasons, his work stands as the most serious
effort by a dedicated philosopher to develop a philosophy
consistent with the fundamental insights of Lacanian
psychoanalysis.[3 <#foot3>] As our guiding thread, we will follow
the way Badiou uses /trauma/, conceived in a Lacanian sense, as a
trope in thinking about art and its relation to ethics. Thus, my
discussion broaches two key questions: in what way does it make
sense for Badiou to think of the event of art in terms of trauma,
and what does this imply for the nature of ethics in Badiou's
philosophy? We shall begin with a general consideration of art and
ethics derived primarily from two of Badiou's books of the 1990s:
his Ethics (1993) and his Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998). As we
move further into Badiou's thought, we will turn to two somewhat
earlier writings, to Being and Event (1988) and to the 1989 essay
on Beckett, in order to see why trauma was a useful trope for
Badiou in particular--that is, for a post-Heideggerian,
post-Lacanian thinker informed by set theory and striving for a
post-Romantic philosophy of the event. As we will see, Badiou
opens up an ethic of art and also suggests a larger trend in the
history of aesthetics since the Romantics that locates the force
of art as bearing upon a traumatic subjectivity--a force thus at
once ethical and existential.
3. Finally, Badiou is often positioned, by himself and by others, as
a thinker at odds with the mainstream of Continental and
Anglo-American thought. This he certainly is in many respects--as
in his remarkably compelling elaboration of set theory as the
cornerstone of his philosophy. But if we trace out the logic of
his tropes, we are reminded that he is, after all, situated within
a tradition of thinking about art, ethics, and
subjectivity--whatever we might wish to call this tradition,
whether Romantic or post-Romantic, Lacanian or post-Lacanian,
Heideggerian or post-Heideggerian--and that he shares certain
strands of this tradition not only with his older contemporaries
such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida,
but also with thinkers at the origin of Romantic thought:
Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and others.
I. The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured
Subject
4. We begin, then, with Badiou's conception of the work of art.
Despite the several novels and plays he has written,[4 <#foot4>]
it is evident that Badiou's ultimate commitment is to philosophy,
so it is not altogether surprising that for him, as for Heidegger
and many other philosophers, /art/ is a matter of /truth/. Badiou,
however, has a rather idiosyncratic notion of "truth," and since
it refers neither to the veridicality of propositions nor to
Heidegger's /aletheia/, this claim requires a little unpacking.
5. Badiou opposes what he calls "truth" to the domain of objectivity
and ordinary knowledge. Indeed truth, in the very essence of its
operation, "constitutes a /hole/ [/un trou/] in forms of
knowledge," as he puts it in several places, and he associates it
with the Lacanian real.[5 <#foot5>] Thus truth, for Badiou, is the
name of an exceptional event and a process that forces a break
with the everyday course of knowledges and situations and
consequently brings into being a "subject" where there was
formerly just a human animal, a mere inhabitant of a given
situation.[6 <#foot6>] Before turning to consider some of Badiou's
examples, let us briefly note that a truth in the first instance
is an event, a flash, an irreducible singularity, and subsequently
is marked by the continued fidelity of the subject who constitutes
the site of that truth. This second moment of the truth, the
fidelity, is understood as a continuing commitment by the subject
to bear witness to the event that was its first moment and to
relate henceforth to his or her particular situation from the
perspective of that event, to think according to its radical
truth, and to invent, in consequence, a new way of being and
acting in the situation (L'Ã(c)thique 61f, 41e). It is a crucial
point for Badiou: for him, truth is productive, inventive,
creative, anticonservative; it is "the coming-to-be of that which
is not yet" (L'Ã(c)thique 45f, 27e).
6. There are, for Badiou, four fundamental procedures of truths: art,
science, politics, and love. Or, to put it in terms more typical
for Badiou: the poem, the matheme, the politics of emancipation,
and the encounter with the disjunction of sexuation (Conditions
79f, Manifeste 141e). Badiou gives a number of images of an event
of truth. In the Ethics book, his favored examples of such events
in art come from the history of music and, less frequently, from
theatrical experience. Elsewhere, he writes of modern poets,
including Hölderlin, MallarmÃ(c), Beckett, and Celan. But in the
Ethics book, he returns repeatedly to Haydn's invention of the
classical musical style and remarks that it is characteristic of
any event of truth in that it
is both /situated/--it is the event of this or that
situation--and /supplementary/, thus absolutely detached from,
or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation. Hence the
emergence of the classical style, with Haydn . . . concerns
the musical situation and no other, a situation then governed
by the predominance of the baroque style. It was an event for
this situation. But in another sense, what this event was to
authorize in terms of musical configurations was not
comprehensible from within the plenitude achieved by the
baroque style; it really was a matter of /something else/.
You might then ask what it is that makes the connection
between the event and that 'for which' it is an event. This
connection is the void [/le vide/] of the earlier situation.
What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every
situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a
'situated' void, around which is organized the plenitude (or
the stable multiples) of the situation in question. Thus at
the heart of the baroque style at its virtuoso saturation lay
the absence [/vide/] (as decisive as it was unnoticed) of a
genuine conception of musical architecture. The Haydn-event
occurs as a kind of musical 'naming' of this absence [/vide/].
For what constitutes the event is nothing less than a wholly
new architectonic and thematic principle, a new way of
developing musical writing from the basis of a few
transformable units -- which was precisely what, from within
the baroque style, could not be perceived (there could be no
knowledge of it). (L'Ã(c)thique 92-93f, 68-69e)
The Haydn-event, as Badiou calls it, inaugurated the configuration
of classical style, from Haydn himself to its saturation point
with Beethoven; it inaugurated a truth that, whether consciously
or subconsciously, whether more or less articulately, befell the
composer in the first instance, and then also listeners and
subsequent composers who had been likewise situated within the
baroque, but who thereafter found themselves seized by this same
revolutionary truth concerning musical architecture as the
hitherto unnamable vanishing point or void of the baroque. It is a
"truth," precisely, in that this truth of the Haydn-event is the
same for all, even as it unfolds or proceeds within differing
particular compositions or performances of music. Within a given
situation (and all truths are so situated), there is no one truth
for person a and a different truth for person b. For that matter,
within a given situation, there is no one truth for culture g and
a different truth for culture d. And, yet again, there is no
objective truth out there in the world, waiting to be discovered
by any who would see it. As the Haydn example illustrates, truth
is an event that proceeds /in/ a given situation (L'Ã(c)thique 63f,
42e), here the symbolic field of the musical baroque, but this
truth is the /same/ truth for all who bear witness to it (46f, 27e).
7. For Badiou, this event of truth implies an ethics in the way it
calls upon the subject whom it befalls to continue to bear witness
to this truth by engaging one's life, one's decisions, and one's
existence, in a continuing reinterpretation that is through this
event and according to its truth. Badiou refers to this second
moment in the process of a truth as a /fidelity/. "To be faithful
to an event," he writes, "is to move within the situation that
this event has supplemented, by /thinking/ . . . the situation
'according to' the event" (L'Ã(c)thique 62f, 41e). Alban Berg and
Anton von Webern, to take other of Badiou's examples, were
faithful to the event that was Arnold Schoenberg's invention of
the twelve-tone technique in musical composition. Thus, they
"[could] not continue with /fin-de-siÃ(r)cle/ neo-Romanticism as if
nothing had happened" (62f, 42e). Likewise, as he also notes, much
contemporary art music constitutes a fidelity to the great
Viennese composers of the early twentieth century. The fidelity,
in which the subject continues the truth process beyond its
initial event, accepting the obligation "to /invent/ a new way of
being and acting in the situation" (62f, 42e), is the ethical
decision to which the subject must continually commit him- or
herself (or not).
8. The course of an artistic truth thus has three moments. The first
moment is the inaugural event of art, which then, in the second
moment, persists through the choice of continuing, in the
subject's fidelity to the event. The truth comes to a certain end,
in the third moment, only when its configuration has become
saturated and it has exhausted its own infinity, as Badiou puts it
(Petit Manuel 89f, 56e). In the exhaustion of a truth, its
component works succeed less and less in inquiring into the truth
in which they themselves participate. A configuration, as he puts
it in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, "thinks itself in the works
that compose it" (28f, 14e)[7 <#foot7>] and when it ceases to
think itself, when its component works no longer succeed in
inventively inquiring into the procedure of that configuration,
then that truth comes to an end.
9. What I especially want to highlight here in Badiou's description
of the event and process of a truth, and in the ethic of truths
that follows from it, is the position of the subject who, we can
say, is called upon to dwell with a trauma.[8 <#foot8>] Committing
oneself to Schoenberg's tonal innovations may not seem such an
onerous ethical calling, and is hardly traumatic in the everyday
sense, but we might recall that truth, for Badiou, is essentially
a hole. It pierces a given order of knowledge, but it also pierces
those who are faithful to it. Someone who bears witness to an
event of truth can, for example,
be /this/ spectator whose thinking has been set in motion, who
has been seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire
[/un Ã(c)clat thÃ(c)âtral/], and who thus enters into the complex
configuration of a moment of art. (L'Ã(c)thique 66f, 45e)
The subject's seizure in the work of art is an old theme for
philosophy, but here there is no repose, no restful contemplation
of the beautiful, no subjective harmony as in Kant's third
critique.[9 <#foot9>] Instead, our spectator has been seized and
bewildered by--what?--a burst of theatrical fire (!), and thereby
enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art. Theatre
spectators on the edge of their seats, he writes,
demonstrate a prodigious interest in what they are doing -- in
the advent of the not-known Immortal in them, in the advent of
that which they did not know themselves capable of. Nothing in
the world could arouse the intensity of existence more than
this actor who lets me encounter Hamlet . . . . Nevertheless,
as regards my interests as a mortal and predatory animal, what
is happening here does not concern me; no knowledge tells me
that these circumstances have anything to do with me. I am
altogether present there, linking my component elements via
that /excess beyond myself/ induced by the passing through me
of a truth. But as a result, I am also suspended, broken,
annulled, dis-interested [/suspendu, rompu, rÃ(c)voquÃ(c):
dÃ(c)s-intÃ(c)ressÃ(c)/]. For I cannot, within the fidelity to fidelity
that defines ethical consistency, take an interest in myself,
and thus pursue my own interests. All my capacity for
interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has /poured
out/ . . . into what I will make of my encounter, one night,
with the eternal Hamlet. (L'Ã(c)thique 71-72f, 49-50e)
In Badiou's theater-going subject we see a curious tension
between, on the one hand, the subject's being "altogether present"
in a way that seems familiar to Romantic and Heideggerian thinking
about the promise of art, and, on the other hand, in the very same
moment, the subject's being "suspended, broken, annulled,
dis-interested"--and, earlier, "/riven/, or punctured
[/imperceptiblement et intÃ(c)rieurement/ rompu, /ou trouÃ(c)/]"
(L'Ã(c)thique 67f, 46e). For Badiou the subject is, in the very
instant of its coming to be, already in "eclipse," as if the
subject itself, in the event of art, were to appear in the flicker
of its own vanishing or void. Thus a poem, for example, summons
one--but summons one to give oneself over to, or dispose oneself
to, /its/ poetic operations and commits one to think according to
/its/ thought instead of according to the pursuit of one's own
interest (Petit Manuel 51f, 29e). Thus, the reader of a poem, as
Badiou writes in relation to Celan, must "will his or her own
transliteration" (58f, 34e), as if the letters of one's aesthetic
subjectivity, the "letters of one's body," as Willy Apollon calls
it,[10 <#foot10>] were to be offered up to the event and cast into
a foreign idiom. Although for Badiou fidelity to the event
involves a conscious willing, the first instance of the truth
event seems distinctly traumatic in his trope. "To enter into the
composition of a subject of truth," as he puts it, "can only be
something that /befalls you/" (L'Ã(c)thique 74f, 51e; trans.
modified). Insofar as the will may later enter into Badiou's
ethics, fidelity is a commitment, whether knowingly or
unknowingly, to sustain oneself in a certain relation to that
originary traumatic eclipse of the subject.
II. A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
10. To be clear, "trauma" is not a word Badiou himself employs; as we
have seen, he uses an array of others to describe his
subject--riven, punctured, ruptured, severed, broken, annulled,
and so forth. These terms, if we consider them in a Lacanian
register, suggest physical trauma in the "imaginary" sense of the
/corps morcelÃ(c)/, the fragmented body that implies a notion of
trauma as a sort of mirror-stage in reverse. But how, more
precisely, do these tropes, which we group under the rubric of
/trauma/, bear upon Badiou's theory of the /subject/, especially
upon the subject in the event of /art/--and why does it make sense
to place all of this under the heading of Ethics? The answers have
something to do with the theoretical edifice elaborated by Jacques
Lacan, who is significant for Badiou for four principal reasons:
for initiating a modern thinking of love,[11 <#foot11>] for
insisting on the importance of the category of the subject in
philosophical thought (Manifeste 24f, 44e), for developing a
conception of the real at the heart of human subjectivity,[12
<#foot12>] and for repeatedly asserting that mathematics is the
science of the real (Conditions 185f; Theoretical Writings 107e).
We will see that insofar as Badiou develops a theory of the
subject consistent with the Lacanian subject instituted through
trauma, for Badiou the stakes of this "trauma" are ultimately read
not in the imaginary, but at the limit of the symbolic and the
real. But let us approach these questions of the subject and what
we are calling trauma a little more deliberately, since Badiou is
approaching these matters not from the exigencies of the analytic
clinic, but rather from the interest of philosophy--and
specifically of a very particular philosophy grounded in
mathematical set theory.
11. We can begin by considering more carefully and more particularly
the structure of the subject implied by Badiou's description of
the theatergoer who encounters in Hamlet both the utmost intensity
of existence as well as, in the same instant, a certain annulment.
As Schoenberg was an event for the composers and audiences of the
late Romantic style typified by Mahler, Hamlet may equally be
considered an event in the history of literature--for example by
demonstrating the possibility of a modern, post-Attic tragedy, or
by turning to national or non-classical sources as fit topics for
tragedy, or by more explicitly locating the real event of the play
in the obscure existential drama of a character's deepest
interior. But Hamlet is also an event situated within an I--that
is, within Badiou's theatergoer in his or her particularity:
I am altogether present there [/Je suis là tout entier/],
linking my component elements via that /excess beyond myself/
[/l'excÃ(r)s sur moi-mÃ(tm)me/] induced by the passing through me of
a truth. But as a result, I am also suspended, broken,
annulled, dis-interested. For I cannot, within the fidelity to
fidelity that defines ethical consistency, take an interest in
myself, and thus pursue my own interests. All my capacity for
interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has /poured
out/ . . . into what I will make of my encounter, one night,
with the eternal Hamlet. (L'Ã(c)thique 71-72f, 49-50e)
Structurally speaking, the key aesthetic event for Badiou here is
an encounter between, on the one hand, the presence and finite
"altogetherness" enjoyed by the theatergoer, wherein his or her
component elements are linked into One, and on the other hand an
excess beyond this altogetherness, the infinity of the eternal
Hamlet, that passes through the subject, annuls the theatergoer in
his or her situation, and demands some kind of accounting of what
the subject will "make of the encounter." Is there not something
paradoxical about this altogetherness which encounters an excess
beyond itself--for how can someone be, precisely, /all/-together,
if there is some other element that remains in excess of the /all/?
12. Badiou's Being and Event (1988) is devoted to a much more
technical and complete description of "situations" generally and,
by implication, of the seemingly paradoxical structure of the
situation in which the theatergoer's encounter with Hamlet takes
place. We might take the theatergoing individual him- or herself
as a "situation," a structured whole composed of a set of
component elements or terms: the particulars of one's history,
one's sense for family and romantic obligations, one's tastes,
one's regard for literary and theatrical history, one's openness
on a given night to the drama of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and a
multiplicity of other elements chance has thrown together. Any or
all of these elements may be highly complex, but they are
"consistent" in the sense that, however complex they may be, they
are included in how one represents oneself to oneself (in what
Badiou calls "the state"), or, more basically, they simply belong
to one's situation, present but prior to any question of
representation. They compose that of which the situation consists.
One's taste, for example, may be composed of a vast array of
sometimes-conflicting influences and voices coming from one's
culture, one's circle of friends, one's reading, the quirks of
one's personal history, both conscious and subconscious, and so
forth. Whatever their origins and however internally incoherent
they may be, they are all counted as being situated in the
theatergoer as elements of his or her own taste. In this sense,
the situation is defined by its /all/, the Oneness of one's
multifarious elements. Moreover, each of these elements, insofar
as it counts as belonging to the situation, has been acted upon by
some kind of a logic, a regime or rule that produces the situation
by determining what counts as belonging to it. By contrast, the
occurrence of an event, which in Badiou's sense is always an event
for a given situation, poses the question of what lies outside the
jurisdiction of this regime, when, according to the law of the
situation, everything that counts, everything presentable, lies
within it--hence its Oneness, its all-togetherness.
13. Badiou argues that in the event of art (or science, or politics,
or love), the Oneness of the situation is indeed disrupted by some
unpresentable, supplementary /thing/ that, within the law of the
situation, counts as no-thing. Intriguingly, Badiou also claims in
Being and Event that this void, or "nothing" of the situation,
lies at the very heart of poetic movement in particular as a kind
of impasse or impossibility:
Naturally, it would be pointless to set off in search of the
nothing. Yet it must be said that this is exactly what poetry
exhausts itself in doing . . . . [P]oetry propagates the idea
of an intuition of the nothing in which being would reside
when there is not even the site for such intuition . . .
because everything is consistent. The only thing we can affirm
is this: every situation implies the nothing of its all. But
the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation.
For if the nothing were a term that could only mean one thing;
that it had been counted as one. Yet everything which has been
counted is within the consistency of presentation. It is thus
ruled out that the nothing . . . be taken as a term. There is
not a-nothing, there is "nothing" [/Il n'y a pas un-rien, il y
a « a rien »/], phantom of inconsistency. (L'Ã(tm)tre 67-68f, 54-55e)
While every situation "implies the nothing of its all," the
situation itself cannot, by definition, provide a way to bring
this void point into knowledge, since there is no consistency to
the void of the real, and since even intuition lies under the rule
of the situation which, by definition, has no law capable of
discerning (or "counting") anything in excess of itself. In the
face of this encounter with alterity, poetry since the Romantics
has tried to say what cannot in fact be said, to present what
cannot in fact be presented--as if a fullness of being might be
approached, the phantom of inconsistency banished, by causing the
indiscernible "nothing" supplementary to the situation to assume a
visible consistency.
14. This, then, is what justifies the term "traumatic" as a general
trope for Badiou's description of the ethical subject in the event
of art. It is not just that the coherence of the situation is
punctured or riven by something radically alterior to itself,
something that threatens to undermine or reorganize the
configuration of the existing situation--this might be a
commonsensical, imaginary description of trauma--but that this
radical alterity constitutes a hole in the order of language.
Indeed, from a Lacanian perspective, Badiou's event is precisely
traumatic insofar as it marks an encounter with the irreducible
real at the heart of the signifier and the symbolic order.[13
<#foot13>] Badiou's "nothing" or void shares a number of key
structural features with Lacan's concept of the traumatic
encounter with the real: its "extimacy" to the subject, its
essential resistance to signification, and its radical potential
for introducing something new. Lacan's real is located in
"extimate"[14 <#foot14>] relation (167f, 139e) to the subject in
that the real is at once situated as the "traumatic nucleus" (Le
SÃ(c)minaire XI, 66f, 68e), governing the syntax of the subject,
utterly interior and intimate to it, and is at the same time
radically supplementary, that is, exterior and excluded from it.
So when in his Ethics seminar Lacan describes that which, in the
real, suffers from the signifier (150f, 125e), he situates it "at
the center precisely in the sense that it is excluded . . .
strange to me while being at the heart of this 'me'" (87f, 71e;
author's translation). Moreover, because the real as such cannot
be assimilated to the order of the signifier (55f, 55e), the
"trauma" of an encounter with the real is witnessed precisely in
its "opacity" and its "resistance to signification" (118f, 129e).
Finally, due to the very fact that the real constitutes an impasse
in the logic of the signifier, the encounter with the real "admits
something new, which is precisely the impossible" (152f, 167e
)--admits, that is, something impossible in the order of the
signifier as it has hitherto been governed. For these reasons,
surely, and perhaps others, Badiou himself describes, at the heart
of his event of art, an ethic of a "truth" that is also, in a
precise Lacanian sense, "an ethic of the real" (L'Ã(c)thique 74f,
52e).[15 <#foot15>]
15. Badiou is not ordinarily one to follow philosophical trends that
place language /per se/ at the center of philosophical inquiry,
but there seems no way to escape this problem of language in
thinking the event.[16 <#foot16>] One believes that there has been
an event, that something new has happened, that there /is/
something beyond the One of the situation, and yet, from within
the horizon of the situation where one discerns, thinks, and
speaks, one cannot name the event, one can only surmise an
appropriate "generic" procedure that would faithfully work to
incorporate the event into the situation. Even the particular
nature of this "something new" remains indiscernible:
A subject, which realizes a truth, is nevertheless
incommensurable with the latter, because the subject is
finite, and the truth is infinite. Moreover, the subject,
being internal to the situation, can only know, or rather
encounter terms or multiples presented (counted as one) in the
situation. Yet the truth is an un-presented part of the
situation. Finally, the subject cannot make a language out of
anything except combinations of the supernumerary name of the
event and the language of the situation. It is in no way
guaranteed that this language will suffice for the discernment
of a truth, which, in any case, is indiscernible for the
resources of the language of the situation alone. It is
absolutely necessary to abandon any definition of the subject
which supposes that it knows the truth, or that it is adjusted
to the truth. Being the local moment of the truth, the subject
falls short of supporting the latter's global sum. Every truth
is transcendent to the subject, precisely because the latter's
entire being resides in supporting the realization of the
truth. The subject is neither conscious nor unconscious of the
true.
The singular relation of the subject to the truth whose
procedure it supports is the following: the subject believes
that there is a truth, and this belief occurs in the form of a
knowledge [/un savoir/]. I term this knowing belief
/confidence/. (L'Ã(tm)tre 434-435f, 396-397e)
The subject is called upon to support the realization of a truth.
He or she has "confidence" that there /is/ in fact a truth and
that something new /has/ happened in the situation. But from the
standpoint of the situation itself, the subject can speak only a
kind of nonsense in relation to this event, knitting together a
language out of existing terms inadequate to the situation and to
"the supernumerary name of the event." The name of the event,
"Hamlet" in our example, or "Schoenberg," is supernumerary in the
sense that it has no conceptual referent within the situation. Of
course "Hamlet" as a proper name designates a Danish prince, a
character, and a play (to say nothing here of Hamlet's phantom
father). It is also used antonomastically to refer to an
event--yet this it does in the most nebulous fashion, as if
"Hamlet" were neither name nor signifier, but a kind of
conceptless signifier-surrogate used to indicate the
whatever-it-was-that-happened one night at the theater. Likewise,
"Schoenberg" may be used as an antonomasia for innovations in
musical composition such as atonality, dodecaphony, and serialism,
which may in turn be more precisely described, but fidelity to the
truth of the "Schoenberg event" surely exceeds the instance of
even its inventor, running its course through Olivier Messiaen,
Pierre Boulez, and György Ligeti to younger and more recent
composers like Kaija Saariaho, Erkki-Sven Tüür, and Helena
Tulve--each of whom has departed from anything like atonal,
twelve-tone, or serialist orthodoxies, while still, arguably,
being faithful to the Schoenberg event and, certainly, committed
to composing within a tonal space made possible by Schoenberg's
work. In this sense, "Schoenberg," too, is used in place of a
signifier to indicate the nebulous whatever-it-was-that-happened
to the tonal system in classical composition with the appearance
of Pierrot Lunaire (1913). These names, Hamlet and Schoenberg,
together with the signifiers one associates with them, strive to
refer to something that exceeds the situation. In order to do so,
the subject must rework or redirect existing terms to "/displace/
established significations" and thereby support a truth for a
situation that at present cannot discern it (L'Ã(tm)tre 437f, 399e).
If, for Badiou, a truth makes a hole in knowledge, it likewise
marks a babble-point in relation to the present language of the
situation.
16. The fidelity of the subject, then, is exposed to chance, grounded
in nothing, unsupported by knowledge, and nonsensical to the eyes
and ears of outsiders. It calls for a decision to commit to an
interpretation of an event and it requires the ethical subject to
assume a course of action (a "procedure") faithful to that event
from among choices that, within the best knowledge of the
situation, are strictly undecidable. This is true because, from
within the situation where he or she is located, the subject has
no recognized way to decide whether there has even been an event,
no way to adjudicate whether one interpretation of the event
(supposing there to have been one) is superior to another, and no
way to know with certainty whether a given procedure is a proper
and faithful response to the event that the subject supposes has
taken place.[17 <#foot17>] Thus one commits oneself on a chance, a
wager, and, like Badiou's MallarmÃ(c), casts one's die. As Badiou
writes,
If poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because
it is able to devote the latter [language] to Presence; on the
contrary, it is because it trains language to the paradoxical
function of maintaining that which--radically singular, pure
action--would otherwise fall back into the nullity of place.
Poetry is the stellar assumption [/l'assomption stellaire/] of
that pure undecidable, against a background of nothingness,
that is an action of which one can only /know/ whether it has
taken place inasmuch as one /bets/ upon its truth. (L'Ã(tm)tre
213-214f, 192e)[18 <#foot18>]
Against Heidegger's nostalgia for lost presence, and surpassing
the presence and altogetherness of his own theatergoer, Badiou
asserts that poetry and art find their true and ethical task in
supporting a pure action: the coming into being of a subject and,
with it, the truth that occasions the subject. Poetry is itself,
in the poet as in the reader, the casting of a die among
undecidables, set against a background of nothingness. Hence
/poetry/ is intimately aligned with the /subject/, which Badiou
defines as "that which decides an undecidable from the standpoint
of an indiscernible" (445f, 407e), and with ethics, which,
similarly, comes down to an imperative: "Decide from the
standpoint of the undecidable" (219-220f, 197e).
17. In his Ethics book, Badiou gives his ethical imperative a more
Lacanian ring. Lacan's "ethics of psychoanalysis" is well known,
both through his great 1959-1960 seminar of that name and through
the writings of Slavoj Zizek.[19 <#foot19>] Lacan formulates his
ethical dictum with a characteristic, concentrated simplicity: /do
not cede ground on your desire/ (Le SÃ(c)minaire VII, 368f, 319e;
author's translation). For Lacan, this ethical position bears upon
symptom formation: giving up on one's desire, forsaking this one
Good, produces the Evil of symptoms. In his own Ethics book,
Badiou echoes Lacan, his "master" (L'Ã(c)thique 121e) as he calls
him, when he articulates his own ethic of truth: /do all that you
can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance.
Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has
seized and broken you/ (L'Ã(c)thique 69f, 47e). Both Lacan's ethic of
psychoanalysis and Badiou's own ethic of truth are ethics of the
real and call for a certain persistence in one's relation to that
real. Truth and ethics bear upon a certain relation with the real
of language: the indiscernible truth of music beyond musical
syntax, the unnamable truth of a poem beyond communication and
hermeneutic concerns of reference and interpretation. This truth
event, which has broken and seized the subject, requires the
subject to commit to a decision regarding what cannot be decided,
articulated, or known. One must give oneself over to the event,
contend with the situational anxiety of the void, and persevere in
this relation to chance and the real. And if, through this
process, one is obliged to cast one's lot with something that
ruptures the very situation in which one lives, this is surely all
well and good for a philosopher who, after all, defines the Good
as "the internal norm of a prolonged disorganization of life"
(82f, 60e).
III. Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
18. Badiou's use of trauma as a trope aligns him not only with Lacan's
ethics of the real, as we have just seen, but also, to a more
limited extent, with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who in his late
years often employed trauma as a trope for describing the ethical
encounter with the face of the Other.[20 <#foot20>] Badiou's own
thinking of ethics arrives at a moment when the conceptualization
of ethics in the academy has been brought decisively under
Levinas's name, first through the sponsorship of Jacques Derrida,
Luce Irigaray, and Jean-François Lyotard, and then through its
appropriation by the rhetoric of contemporary multiculturalist
politics. The Ethics book is evidently among Badiou's best-selling
volumes and clearly his most sustained statement on ethics, and,
though he might there seem to claim a counter-Levinasian position,
in fact the polemical thrust of that book belies his closeness to
the Jewish thinker. Even in the Ethics book, his brief account of
Levinasian ethics as an ethics of difference, or an ethics of the
other, stands as a moment of scrupulous care and respect, before
he turns to address what he considers the misappropriation of
Levinasian thought by multiculturalism, which, Badiou argues, is
committed to a conventional conception of "otherness," one cast in
ethnographic or demographic terms rather than in properly
phenomenological terms (or pre-phenomenological terms, one might
say), as with Levinas. Later, when he highlights (and distances
himself from) Levinas's theological grounding of the ethical
alterity of the other in the infinite alterity of God, Badiou's
pique lies with what he sees as the easy moralism of
multiculturalist ideologues and the fashion they have made of the
"ethics of the other" as, precisely, a pious discourse divorced
from true Levinasian piety (L'Ã(c)thique 41f, 23e). In short,
Badiou's reader must make a careful distinction between his
polemical adversaries in the Ethics book, since his true quarrel
lies elsewhere than with the "coherent and inventive" (40f, 23e)
work of Levinas. Levinas's work may disappoint Badiou for
orienting itself ultimately via religious axioms, but he defends
it as "strikingly distant" from the "catechisms" of
multiculturalism (37f, 20e).
19. Badiou makes a more interesting and direct claim for Levinas's
importance in an off-hand remark in his Manifesto. There, writing
of the history of philosophy since Hegel, he claims that
philosophy has come to misapprehend the nature of its own work and
has ceded its task, at various moments, by "suturing" itself to
one of its four conditions: according to Badiou, Anglo-American
philosophy has sutured itself to the promise of positivist
/science/ as the sole procedure of truth, Marxism has sutured
philosophy to the promise of emancipatory /politics/ as the sole
procedure of truth, and, faced with philosophy's sutures to
science and to politics, Nietzsche and Heidegger gave philosophy
over to the /poem/. Now, just as the attentive reader begins to
wonder whether there were no overly enthusiastic philosophical
partisans of /love/, Badiou offers a strangely phrased
afterthought: "It may even be added," he writes, "that a Levinas
[/un Levinas/], in the guise of the dual talk on the Other and its
Face [/visage/], and on Woman, considers [/envisage/] that
philosophy could also become the valet of its fourth condition,
love" (Manifeste 48f, 67e). This is certainly a curious statement
and one wonders what is meant by it, since love is not usually
considered a central term for Levinas. What, for Badiou in
particular, can be the relation between love and Levinas, the
eminent thinker of ethics? What is love as, precisely, a condition
or truth procedure for philosophy? Why, finally, do some of
Badiou's most sustained discussions of love as a condition of
philosophy appear amid discussions of art--for example in
discussion of the works of Samuel Beckett,[21 <#foot21>] or in his
intriguing remarks on the novel as an art form essentially coupled
to love?[22 <#foot22>]
20. Badiou, whose most serious philosophical work is thought through
mathematics, perhaps unsurprisingly describes the course of an
amorous truth as supporting a subjective movement through three
distinct "numericalities." The numericality of love, according to
Badiou, is counted thus: one, two, infinity. That is, love is
essentially the production of a truth about the Two (Manifeste
64f, 83e), pertaining ultimately to difference as such
(Theoretical Writings 146e). Love is a riving of the One of
solipsism in an encounter with the Two of the amorous couple that
opens, like a passage, upon the plethoric Infinite of the sensual
world:
In love, there is first the One of solipsism, which is the
confrontation or duel between the /cogito/ and the grey black
of being in the infinite recapitulation of speech.[23
<#foot23>] Next comes the Two, which arises in the event of an
encounter and in the incalculable poem [/le poÃ(r)me
incalculable/] of its designation by a name. Lastly, there is
the Infinity of the sensible world that the Two traverses and
unfolds, where, little by little, it deciphers a truth about
the Two itself. This numericality (one, two, infinity) is
specific to the procedure of love. We could demonstrate that
the other truth procedures--science, art, and politics--have
different numericalities,[24 <#foot24>] and that each
numericality singularizes the type of procedure in question,
all the while illuminating how truths belong to totally
heterogeneous registers. ("L'Ã(c)criture" 363f, 33e)
Prior to the encounter of love, there is only solitude: the
everyday situation of the ego and, as Levinas argues, "the very
structure of reason" (Le temps et l'autre, 48f, 65e). The Two of
love, by contrast, inaugurates an extraordinary /event/, in
Badiou's sense of the term, insofar as it is a
hazardous and chance-laden mediation for alterity in general
[/une mediation hasardeuse pour l'altÃ(c)ritÃ(c) en general/]. It
elicits a rupture or a severance of the /cogito/'s One; by
virtue of this very fact, however, it can hardly stand on its
own, opening instead onto the limitless multiple of Being. We
might also say that the Two of love elicits the advent of the
sensible. The truth of the Two gives rise to a sensible
inflection of the world, where before only the grey-black of
being had taken place. Now, the sensible and the infinite are
identical . . . . ("L'Ã(c)criture" 358f, 28-29e)
The aesthetic tropes of Badiou's description are remarkable--not
just his evocation of the Infinite of love through citation of
sensual scenes from the oeuvre of one of the great literary
writers of the twentieth century, but Badiou's own affirmation
that such scenes are, in themselves, "poems," regardless of their
prose form ("L'Ã(c)criture" 359f, 29e). His language is also
remarkable, and strongly reminiscent of Levinas when Badiou writes
of the encounter with alterity as a "rupture" of the cogito's
solitude, together with the sense that the ethical consists in
persisting, in being faithful to this evental encounter with
alterity.[25 <#foot25>] Let us examine these two points about
Badiou's language more closely.
21. Badiou's use of aesthetic tropes can be understood if we recall
the almost impossible role of language necessary for the faithful
elaboration of a truth within a situation that cannot discern or
name it. When, therefore, we read above that the Two, the heart of
the amorous event and the opening of the ethical subject to the
alterior and the Infinite, "arises in the event of an encounter
and in the /incalculable poem/ of its designation by a name," or
when we read in a different essay that "one must be /poetically/
ready for the outside-of-self [/il faut/ poÃ(c)tiquement /Ã(tm)tre prÃ(tm)t
au hors-de-soi/]" ("Le Recours" 100f, 75e), Badiou does not here
indicate a unique role for poetry in the elaboration of an amorous
truth. Rather, Badiou is suggesting a special role for poetry in
the elaboration of /any/ kind of truth. We might think of this as
somewhat akin to the insight of Poe's Dupin, who says, referring
to the Minister who has purloined the royal letter, that "as poet
/and/ mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician,
he could not have reasoned at all" ("Purloined Letter" 691).
Regardless of the truth procedure in effect, whether scientific,
political, artistic, or amorous, fidelity to a truth event
requires a naming that, in turn, can only proceed indirectly,
through the language resources of the poetic act, which Badiou
suggests are uniquely capable of introducing alterity into the
language of a situation:
For the nomination of an event . . . an undecidable
supplementation which must be named to occur for a
being-faithful, thus for a truth--/this/ nomination is
/always/ poetic. To name a supplement, a chance, an
incalculable, one must draw from the void of sense, in default
of established significations, to the peril of language. One
must therefore poeticize, and the poetic name of the event is
what throws us outside of ourselves, through the flaming ring
of predictions. ("Le Recours" 100f, 75e)
The poem, then, is more than the heart of the artistic event,
whatever its medium. It is also the composition of a supernumerary
name for the unnamable and undecidable event of truth, composed
out of the language of the situation. More than this, it is poetry
that "throws us outside of ourselves" to surpass in
subjectivization the solipsism of the One and to open upon the Two
of love and the true Infinite of the sensible world. One might
venture it as a new formulation of Badiou's ethical maxim: /One
must poeticize/. That is, one must exceed one's situation and
assume an ethical relation to the event by striving to name it
through poetic word. As the Romantics intuited and as Badiou's
philosophy formulates much more precisely, poetry and ethics, like
poetry and truth, are not to be disentangled.
22. One would not wish to overstate the similarity between the ways
Badiou and Levinas conceive of the ethical. Badiou, for his part,
considers himself resolutely committed to what he thinks is a
/Greek/--philosophical, mathematical--mode of thinking ethics,
whereas Levinas, for his part, is very self-consciously committed
to what for Badiou is a non-Greek, /Jewish/--theological--mode of
thinking the ethical. Thus, Badiou's mathematical grounding and
conceptualization of alterity, his "numericalities" of solipsism
and the Infinite, his set-theoretical elaboration of the event,
and his insistent recourse to the category of /truth/ as the
grounds for the specifically /ethical/ force of alterity and the
infinite--all this is quite foreign to Levinas's philosophical
interests. And, as we have already seen, Badiou displays little
sympathy for Levinas's grounding of the ethical nature of alterity
within Jewish tradition, so that Levinas's often Abrahamic sense
of alterity with, as Levinas himself muses (Autrement 195n1f,
197-98n27e), its potential caprice and persecutory command, is
absent when Badiou writes of the subjective commitment to forsake
the pursuit of one's own interest, will one's own
"transliteration," and live and think according to the alterior
truth of the event that has befallen one. Finally, where Levinas
concentrates his thinking at the intersection of phenomenology and
theology, writing little on love as such, less on literature and
politics, and nothing at all on science, Badiou makes it a matter
of principle to circulate his thinking among the four "procedures
of truth" as he himself defines them: the scientific (as in Being
and Event), the artistic (as in the Handbook of Inaesthetics), the
political (as in Metapolitics), and the amorous (as in the essays
on Beckett and on the Lacanian description of sexuation). This
also gives Badiou a broad scope for thinking the ethical in
places--art, science, politics--where Levinas's writings do not
often venture.
23. Nonetheless, we have also seen that both Badiou and Levinas, when
they present their work on ethics, write through tropes of
/trauma/, as a way of thinking subjectivity as the rupture of the
solipsism of the cogito in an encounter with alterity, difference,
and the infinite. This is indeed very significant. If Badiou
stands together with the Romantics (and Lacan) to posit, at the
heart of the work of art, a subject who contends with a
constitutive void or "nothing" or hole, Badiou and Levinas (and
again Lacan) stand against hundreds of years of philosophical
thinking by imagining at the core of ethics a subject who has been
riven and punctured in relation to a singular, traumatic event.
When Badiou salutes Levinas as a thinker of love,[26 <#foot26>] as
he does in his Manifesto, he is recognizing Levinas's rigor in
thinking the event of love as an ethical movement from the One of
solipsism, through the encounter with alterity (the Two), to the
Infinite, even if Badiou is also, at the same time, working from
an Infinite conceived through mathematics (not theology), and also
underlining his own critique that Levinas's suture of philosophy
to the condition of love unduly neglects other possible procedures
for truth--the political, the scientific, and the artistic.
24. Badiou's implicit critique of Levinas's thinking of ethics--that
it correctly elaborates certain structures of an ethical event in
one procedure (love) only to turn a blind eye to the event in any
other procedure (artistic, political, scientific)--is analogous to
his critique of Romantic philosophies of art. Romantic theories of
art, in Badiou's view, correctly locate the position of truths as
immanent to the work of art--so that, for the Romantics, art is
not thought to point to a truth that exists outside of art, as
when it is called upon to illustrate a truth situated in politics,
science, or love. Rather, the truth of art is intrinsic or
internal to the artistic effect of works of art. As Badiou and the
Romantics agree, art is not /about/ a truth; art /is/ a truth.
However, the Romantics, in Badiou's view, fail to recognize the
singularity of the truth produced by art; they fail to see that
the particular truth activated in the artwork is specific to art
alone, and thus "irreducible to other truths, be they scientific,
political, or amorous" (Petit Manuel 21f, 9e). We will grant
Badiou his point here: it is hard to imagine any thinker, Romantic
or otherwise, who would fully prefigure Badiou's declaration that
there are four "procedures of truth" and that every truth is the
truth /of/ a given situation strictly within one of these four
procedures, either artistic, political, scientific, or amorous.
These are surely among the most fundamental and original features
of Badiou's own philosophy.
25. But I would argue that there is another debt, unacknowledged, that
Badiou's thinking of art owes to the Romantics: the description of
art as addressed to a subject constituted through a foundational,
traumatic encounter with a "nothing" or void of the real. This
seems to me the key Romantic gesture in the thinking of art: from
Schiller's irremediable "dismemberment of being" (586g, 43e)[27
<#foot27>] and Emerson's declaration in "The Poet" that man "is
only half himself" and must therefore poeticize to address his
fundamental void of being (448), to Heidegger's later view that
one must bear poetic witness to being to attain a greater degree
of being oneself (Erläuterungen 36g, 54e),[28 <#foot28>] to
Lacan's claim that the work of art renews the subject's relation
to the real (Le SÃ(c)minaire VII, 169-70f, 141e), Romantic theories
of art, like Badiou's own, proceed from the given of a subject
that faces the void and elaborate a theory of art specifically as
addressing that unspeakable ontological hole.
26. What Badiou contributes to Romantic philosophies of art is a new
rigor in elaborating the event of this situated void, and
especially in thinking it through the innovations of
mid-twentieth-century set theory. Thus, where the early Romantic
thinkers of the event of art work more or less intuitively, as
both poets and theoreticians of poetry themselves, where Heidegger
works out of dormant linguistic possibilities, and where Lacan
works through empirical observation and practical clinical
interest,[29 <#foot29>] Badiou gives a much fuller philosophical
grounding to those earlier developments toward a Romantic theory
of art.
27. Additionally, by grounding his event of art in set theory, Badiou
is able to further prise apart the theory of a subject constituted
in traumatic relation to an originary event from the pathos or
horror customarily associated with trauma and loss. This matter
has already caused some misunderstanding in Badiou's critical
reception. Perhaps because of his narrow focus on Badiou's book on
Paul, or perhaps because he is quick to appreciate manifestations
of horror, Zizek far overstates the case when he claims, in The
Ticklish Subject, that Badiou's "main point" in his elaboration of
the subject is to "avoid identifying the subject with the
constitutive Void of the structure" (159).[30 <#foot30>] Zizek, so
it would seem here, regards the void as necessarily horrific and,
missing the sense of horror in Badiou,[31 <#foot31>] wrongly
minimizes the extent of Badiou's actual theoretical engagement
with the traumatic real. As we have already seen, although Badiou
spends much effort describing the second moment of an evental
truth, its poeticization in the subject's "fidelity," he also
gives a full description of the subject in that first moment of
facing the "nothing"--a fact highlighted by those many terms
suggesting physical trauma: "suspended, broken, annulled," "riven
or punctured," "a rupture or a severance," and so forth. In Being
and Event, he is quite plain: while "a truth alone is infinite"
(433f, 395e), "the subject is finite" (434f, 396e). Indeed, this
very incommensurability faced by the finite subject gives it its
specific sense: overwhelmed, annulled, inarticulate--and
persistent nonetheless.
28. Yet, however overstated, we might also say that Zizek's argument
nevertheless points to an important difference in tone that
distinguishes Badiou from his more Romantic theoretical forebears
in thinking the real of art. The thrust of Badiou's philosophy
resists attaching any Romantic /pathos/ to this "trauma" of the
finite subject as he or she contends with the void and the
incommensurable, infinite truth. To be sure, the traumatic
structure of the subject is not a dry fact for Badiou--the very
passion of his writing on the topic recognizes its drama. But in
contrast with the pathos or nostalgia inherent in Emerson and
Heidegger when they present the fundamental absence at the heart
of human subjectivity, and in contrast to the rawness and
destitution of Antigone when Lacan presents the subject's ethical
bearing of the real, for Badiou the traumatic structure of the
subject is part and parcel of the very event he celebrates for
being inventive, creative, "the coming-to-be of that which is not
yet" (L'Ã(c)thique 45f, 27e), indeed the only way for something new
to appear within a situation. The point is that, in what is for
Badiou "the event of truth," the subject, which is indeed finite
and, yes, traumatically riven and babbling, is nevertheless able
to participate in a fidelity to something that exceeds his or her
own finitude and is thereby able to accede to an ethical, more
properly human, subjectivity. So Badiou's ethics and his theory of
art aim to represent an escape from the suffering body, an escape
from the animal, an escape from the contemporary organization of
moral life around the figure of the victim.[32 <#foot32>] If we
speak of trauma with regard to Badiou's subject, it is neither to
rally the reader's pious sympathies nor to invoke his or her
horror on behalf of the subject. Rather, as we have seen, "trauma"
highlights certain features of Badiou's subject to place his
theory of art in limited relation with that of the Romantics, to
display his debt to Lacan's traumatic real in particular, to
clarify his critique of Levinasian ethics, to highlight the role
of the poetic naming of the void in any "procedure of truth" and
to refute the critique offered by Zizek by demonstrating that one
need not read the void in Lacanian theory as horror.
/ Department of English
Ohio State University
hughes.1021@osu.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Throughout the essay, page numbers followed by "e"
refer to the English translations; those followed by "f" refer to
the French-language editions.
2 <#ref2>. Jacques RanciÃ(r)re, in his "Aesthetics, Inaesthetics,
Anti-Aesthetics," rightly contests ascribing to the German
Romantics (as Badiou seems to do) any claim that art alone is
capable of truth (Hallward 220).
3 <#ref3>. Badiou names Lacan an "anti-philosopher," but his
estimation of the importance of Lacanian thought for contemporary
philosophy is nevertheless the very highest. As he writes in his
Manifesto: "the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the
renaissance of philosophy. A philosophy is possible today, only if
it is compossible with Lacan" (64f, 84e).
4 <#ref4>. Almagestes (1964), Portulans (1967), and Calme bloc
ici-bas (1997); also a short story, "L'Autorisation" (1967), and a
/romanopÃ(c)ra/, L'Echarpe rouge (1979), according to Peter
Hallward's very helpful bibliography in the English translation of
Ethics (151-59e). Badiou's plays include Ahmed le subtil (1994),
Ahmed se fâche, suivi par Ahmed philosophe (1995), and Citrouilles
(1995); the writing of the first of these seems to have been
underway as Badiou was writing his Ethics in the summer of 1993.
Evidently there are other theatrical pieces, too: in the prologue
to his book on Paul, Badiou mentions one from the early 1980s
called The Incident at Antioch (1f, 1e).
5 <#ref5>. See his Manifesto 60f, 80e; also L'Ã(c)thique 63f, 43e;
and Conditions 201f, Theoretical Writings 123e. The relation
between truth and knowledge is a complex one for Badiou. For
present purposes, we might think of knowledge as something like
the degraded and distinct afterlife of a truth--/degraded/
because, following Lacan, Badiou asserts that "a truth is
essentially unknown" (Conditions 201f; Theoretical Writings 123e)
and that "what we /know/ of truth is merely knowledge" (Conditions
192f; Theoretical Writings 114e), and /distinct/, because, as this
paragraph makes plain, knowledge as such no longer enjoys the
status of truth and is precisely what is disrupted and reorganized
by the appearance of a new truth.
6 <#ref6>. Correspondingly, as Badiou notes in his interview with
Lauren Sedofsky, "most of the time, the great majority of us live
outside ethics" ("Being by Numbers" 124).
7 <#ref7>. Badiou's claim here echoes the very influential
description of "the literary" made by Friedrich Schlegel: that
literature is an interrogation of its own status (for example, in
Athenaeum Fragments, numbers 116 and 255). Badiou may be familiar
with this claim from the work of his colleagues, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, whose The Literary Absolute is
concerned with the aesthetics of Schlegel and of the Jena
Romantics. Badiou cites Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's book (but does
not name Schlegel) in his Ethics (112f, 84e).
8 <#ref8>. For Badiou there is the possibility (the necessity,
really, because no truth procedure is solipsistic) for a
collective subjectivity. In brief, all those who bear witness to a
given truth event enter into the composition of /one/ subject
(64f, 43e). Hence Berg and Webern, for example, together with
other witnesses to the Schoenberg event, compose but one subject.
Badiou (and Hallward, his translator for the Ethics) write of the
subject in the singular (however multiple its composition in terms
of human individuals); I shall follow suit.
9 <#ref9>. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant is, of course,
writing of the beautiful very generally, not specifically of
beautiful /art/ (indeed his examples are natural ones: flowers,
birds, crustaceans). See the General Comment on the First Division
of the Analytic for a compact description of subjective harmony in
the beautiful and §27 for remarks on "restful contemplation" in
the beautiful.
10 <#ref10>. Apollon elaborates his concept of the "letters of the
body" in several essays included in the After Lacan collection,
most explicitly in the chapter of that name, "The Letter of the
Body" (103-15).
11 <#ref11>. Lacan is the thinker of love named most frequently by
Badiou: "I moreover know of no theory of love having been as
profound as [Lacan's] since Plato's, the Plato of the Symposium
that Lacan dialogues with over and over again" (Manifeste 63f,
83e). The final section of the present essay returns to Badiou's
conceptualization of love.
12 <#ref12>. Here is how Badiou describes the Lacanian real in an
interview with Peter Hallward that serves as an appendix to the
English translation of Ethics: "What especially interested me
about Lacan was his conception of the real . . . . And in
particular, this conception of the real as being, in a situation,
in any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of
impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as
a whole, according to its real" (121e).
13 <#ref13>. See Lacan, Le SÃ(c)minaire XI, 51f, 52e and 54f, 55e,
where Lacan describes "the real as trauma," as his editor,
Jacques-Alain Miller, writes in the topical subheading. Lacanians
in general tend to regard the key theoretical insight of the
talking cure as the intuition that language, always and
inevitably, carries some supplement of trauma at its core. For a
fascinating discussion of how it is that language--in certain
respects absolutely heterogeneous to the unrepresentable
real--nonetheless implies an element of the traumatic real,
readers might usefully consult three essays by the Gifric analysts
in QuÃ(c)bec: Willy Apollon's "The Letter of the Body," Danielle
Bergeron's "Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to
the Sword," and Lucie Cantin's "The Trauma of Language," all
available in their After Lacan collection.
14 <#ref14>. A neologism.
15 <#ref15>. Eleanor Kaufman's article proposing to contrast the
ethics of Badiou with the ethics of Lacan is, of course, correct
to observe that Badiou's ethics and Lacan's are not the same thing
and do not cover the same territory. This is so in part because
Badiou is a philosopher dedicated to thinking the ethics of a
situated/supplementary truth, whereas Lacan is a training analyst
describing for his students an ethics (and aesthetics) that
proceeds from a set of practical, clinical facts concerning the
subject's relation to jouissance, the signifier, and the drive.
But Badiou and Lacan are not so far apart either, as my own essay
suggests. Kaufman's strenuous claim that the ethics of Badiou and
Lacan are incompatible and opposed seems to rest on her impression
that Badiou's position is essentially a conservative one, rather
than one dedicated to radical, innovative truths, as Badiou would
claim on his own behalf (L'Ã(c)thique 61f, 41e). Thus, for Kaufman,
Badiou's "systematic" style of thought reflects an allegiance to
the "system" of a given situation (145); thus, too, for Kaufman,
Badiou fails to allow for exceptions that change the rule, so that
his ethics is dedicated to faithfully following rules (145); thus,
finally, in locating ethics (and truth) in art, love, politics,
and science, Kaufman's Badiou is under the misapprehension that he
has delimited all experience--or, at least, her Badiou is
"unequipped" to deal with anything that cannot be mapped out
within the four "conditions" that give rise to ethics (146). These
misreadings of Badiou (as I see them) nonetheless imply one point
of genuine contrast between the ethics of Lacan and of Badiou: for
Badiou the /object/ of ethics (that which his ethical subject
pursues with faithful tenacity) matters much more than for Lacan,
for whom the subject's particular object of desire is less
important than the subject's "access to desire" generally--that
is, apart from the particularity of this or that object (Le
SÃ(c)minaire VII, 370-71f, 321e). Contra Kaufman, one might read
Peter Hallward's introduction to his Think Again collection for an
illuminating and concise presentation of the essential
anti-conservatism of Badiou's thought (7-12). For a much fuller
treatment of Badiou's effort to think the possibility of novelty,
see Adrian Johnston's outstanding piece "The Quick and the Dead"
and its sequels: Zizek's essay "Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing
Debate" and Johnston's reply, "Addendum: Let a thousand flowers
bloom!"
16 <#ref16>. Claire Joubert has objected to this de-emphasis on
the linguistic in Badiou's ethics and is correspondingly skeptical
of the "compossibility" Badiou claims with the Lacanian subject
which was theorized out of Lacan's encounter with semiology in the
1950s (4). Badiou does develop his theory of subjectivity and
ethics through the essential categories of semiology--presence and
absence--even if he does so through set theory (as in what
"counts" and what is void), rather than through Saussurean
linguistics. By the 1970s Lacan himself was moving away from
semiological formulations and increasingly toward mathematical
models in describing his subject and the workings of the talking
cure.
17 <#ref17>. Distinguishing truth from opinion (or from a mere
simulacrum of truth) appears to be a key difficulty in the
elaboration of Badiou's project thus far. Badiou himself commits
the problem to the care of philosophy and regards it as the
central task of philosophy--the ethical task of philosophy--to
seize the truths that appear in art (and in science, love, and
politics) and to announce them and distinguish them from mere
opinion (Petit Manuel 28-29f, 14-15e). In this way, philosophy,
too, faces the real, but it also contributes to the elaboration of
truths within sense. Ernesto Laclau, in his incisive essay on
Badiou, seems not to be comforted by the aid of philosophy in
sorting out the success of such wagers. As Laclau puts it, one can
hardly look to the logic of the situation itself to identify its
true void as an event of truth; nor, in the case of a
pseudo-event, can one really look to the pseudo-event to declare
itself as mere simulacrum. In short, as we have also seen above,
there seems to be no place within Badiou's theoretical edifice
from which to decisively enunciate a truth/simulacrum distinction
(Hallward 123-26).
18 <#ref18>. In this "MallarmÃ(c)" chapter from Being and Event,
Badiou does not explicitly develop his thoughts on MallarmÃ(c)'s
stellar imagery in the poem, "Coup de dÃ(c)s," but it seems plain
that, here as elsewhere for Badiou, "stellar" carries a MallarmÃ(c)an
resonance (see also Deleuze 11f, 4e and Petit Manuel 89f, 56e).
19 <#ref19>. Zizek's best-known essay on Badiou, "The Politics of
Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul," is largely staged
in terms of Lacan's Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. See
The Ticklish Subject (127-70). Zizek specifically cites Lacan's
ethical formula (/ne pas cÃ(c)der sur son dÃ(c)sir/) at least twice in
the same volume (153, 297).
20 <#ref20>. Levinas employs the term throughout his late
masterwork, Otherwise than Being (1974), where "trauma" appears in
a number of contexts, from the way the transcendent encounter with
alterity /befalls/ the chosen ethical subject prior to will (10f,
xlii-e and 95f, 56e), to the ethical exposure of the subject to
sensibility and to pain in particular (82f, 48e), to the violence
and unrepresentability in the "non-relation" of subject and other
(196-197f, 123e and 195n1f, 197n27e), to the general problem of an
ethics that strikes one from a place outside of being (225f,
144e). One might also recall Levinas's answer to Philippe Nemo's
first question ("How does one begin thinking?") in the Ethics and
Infinity (1982) interviews: "It probably begins through
traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know how to
give verbal form" (11f, 21e).
21 <#ref21>. "L'Ã(c)criture du gÃ(c)nÃ(c)rique: Samuel Beckett."
22 <#ref22>. "Qu'est-ce que l'amour?" On this point regarding the
novel, see 254f, 264e.
23 <#ref23>. This is a reference to Beckett's short prose piece
entitled "Lessness" (1970), which describes the endlessness of a
landscape, ash grey under a grey sky, which Badiou reads as "the
place of being" ("L'Ã(c)criture" 334f, 6e).
24 <#ref24>. In his book on Metapolitics, Badiou gives some brief,
cryptic hints concerning the numericalities for /politics/ (whose
first term is the /infinite/, in the sense that politics "summons
or exhibits the subjective infinity of the situation," rejecting
all finitude), for /science/ (whose first term is the /void/), and
for /art/ (whose first term is a finite number). He also remarks
that "the infinite comes into play in every truth procedure, but
only in politics does it take the first place." Further, and again
cryptically, "Art presents the sensible in the finitude of a work,
and the infinite only intervenes in it to the extent that the
artist destines the infinite to the finite" (Theoretical Writings
154e).
25 <#ref25>. Peter Dews, in his very interesting essay "States of
Grace," also remarks, briefly, on the similarity of such
structures in the thought of Badiou and Levinas (Hallward 113-14).
26 <#ref26>. Given his particular philosophical perspective, it
makes sense that Badiou also regards psychoanalytic theory after
Lacan as, above all, an elaboration of the Two of sexuation--and
love, as Badiou writes, "is that from which the Two is thought"
(Manifeste 63f, 83e). Hence, for Badiou, psychoanalysis after
Lacan "is the modern treatment of the condition of love"
(Manifeste 24f, 44e).
27 <#ref27>. Curiously, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay "The
American Scholar," uses a similarly vivid trope, describing man as
a sort of monstrous amputee (53-54).
28 <#ref28>. To be clear, I am not claiming that Heidegger, any
more than Lacan or Badiou, is a thoroughgoing Romantic; only that
Heidegger's views specifically /on art/ derive from the tradition
initiated by the Romantics.
29 <#ref29>. One might say that Lacan's entire theory of art, as
it appears in the Ethics seminar he gives his clinical trainees,
aims to work through a practical puzzle: why it is that, in the
course of an analysis, when the analysand approaches something he
recognizes as "aggressive towards the fundamental terms of his
subjective constellation," he will, with predictable regularity,
make reference to some work of literature or music (Le SÃ(c)minaire
VII, 280f, 238-239e; my translation).
30 <#ref30>. For a superb treatment of Zizek's relation to Badiou
(and an outstanding treatment of Badiou's relation to materialist
thought in the tradition of Althusser), see Bruno Bosteels's
careful two-part essay in Pli, "Alain Badiou's Theory of the
Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?" See also
Zizek's rejoinder to Bosteels, "From Purification to Subtraction:
Badiou and the Real" (Hallward 165-81), a much stronger essay than
his earlier venture in The Ticklish Subject. In the newer essay,
Zizek offers a more appreciative account of Badiou's engagement
with finitude and the real, though he misstates the case when he
writes that the
ultimate difference between Badiou and Lacan thus concerns the
relationship between the shattering encounter of the Real and
the ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of
negativity into a new order. For Badiou, this new order
"sublates" the exploding negativity into a new consistent
truth, while for Lacan, every Truth displays the structure of
a (symbolic) fiction, i.e. no Truth is able to touch the Real.
(Hallward 177)
It is not clear to me that Zizek has located a genuine dispute
here. Badiou's subject may indeed be tasked with "sublating" the
truth into a new order of language, logic and sense, but Badiou
also seems well aware that the status of the truth /as real/ is
lost in that very process and has instead lapsed into mere
knowledge--albeit a new knowledge with (if one may put it this
way) a still vibrant relation to the truth as real. Readers may
recall a claim this essay cited earlier: "what we /know/ of truth
is merely knowledge" (Conditions 192f; Theoretical Writings 114e).
I am intrigued, however, by Zizek's idea that a kind of
formalization, as an approach to the real, might allow Badiou to
surpass the "Kantian" impasse that Zizek sees in the way Badiou
manages the gap between situational knowledge and real truth and
between finite animal and immortal subject (Hallward 174, 178).
Regarding Zizek's critique of Badiou's Kantianism, see Johnston's
"There is Truth, and then there are truths--or, Slavoj Zizek as a
Reader of Alain Badiou."
31 <#ref31>. Badiou's clear sense that horror is not a necessary
Lacanian association for the void or hole of the real is shown
when he discusses the inaugural trauma of the subject in a 1991
paper presented to the Department of Psychoanalysis at the
Paul-ValÃ(c)ry University: "We are so accustomed to thinking of
castration in terms of horror that we are astonished to hear Lacan
discussing it in terms of love" (Conditions 197f; Theoretical 120e).
32 <#ref32>. Badiou's examples in his Ethics include a range of
contemporary moral discourses, from multiculturalism to Western
humanitarianism to a certain formation of human rights discourse.
Badiou's philosophical objections to these moral discourses are
fourfold. First, the centrality of the image of victimhood poses
evil as primary and poses good as merely reactive and remediary.
Second, the /image/ of suffering (with the emotion of horror it
produces) cripples thought and reason, including any truly
progressive analysis of oppression. Third, in making a fetish of
human suffering, such discourses take as their object only the
most animal aspect of humanity and do not recognize the human
being defined by his or her potential for situation-transcending
thought and action. Fourth and finally, the set-apartness of any
group under the exceptional name of "victim" participates in the
anti-universalist gesture which for Badiou makes possible (as in
the case of the European Jews) the group's oppression to begin
with. This fourth objection, or rather its example of the European
and Israeli Jews in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has
inspired a rather spirited public exchange in Les temps modernes
(Dec. 2005 to Feb. 2006), where Badiou was accused of
anti-Semitism. Eric Marty subsequently published his polemic as
Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (Gallimard, 2007).
In the short interview with Nicolas Weill in Le Monde, 15 July
2007, Badiou defends himself concisely against the charge of
anti-Semitism and presents to a general reader his defense of
universalism as emancipatory. Badiou's philosophical claim is
that, in an event, the ethical subject identifies the void of the
existing situation as pertaining universally within that
situation, informing its every aspect. Truth, we recall, is always
universal for Badiou: a truth is true for all. In a pseudo-event,
as in the revolutionary break claimed by the Nazis, the
universality of the void is disavowed and the void itself
displaced onto an exceptional set of particular elements
(L'Ã(c)thique 99-100f, 74e). For the Nazis, Jews (and others) filled
this function and were subsequently, brutally, "voided" to
speciously assert plenitude (rather than a void) in a situation
that named German Jews as exceptions to the "German people."
Badiou sees a contemporary moral plenitude or prestige attached to
the word "Jew," and insofar as it refers to the sufferings of Jews
in the Holocaust, it participates in that same gesture of setting
apart a subset of elements as exceptional and subject to its own
moral "truth." Badiou is not at all dismissive of man's "animal"
suffering. He is not making a general, philosophical objection to
collective action in pursuit of justice. He is not contesting the
historical suffering of Jewish people or their rights to live in
Israel. Rather, he is arguing that brutality and oppression are
often banal cruelties "beneath" good and evil, having no relation
to any situation-transcending event. He is arguing that any true
political good proceeds from a universalist avowal of the real of
a situational void, not a particularist displacement of the void.
And he is arguing that a properly human politics proceeds out of
an ethical fidelity to a singular, radical truth that inventively
addresses the state of the situation and holds forth the promise
of producing something new in relation to that situation.
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