Alain Badiou

Beyond formalisation an interview

Born in Rabat in 1937, a student of Althusser’s at the École Normale Supérieure, Badiou taught philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes/Saint Denis) from 1969 to 1999 before returning to the École Normale to take up Althusser’s former position. Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 rebellion in Paris. A leading member of the Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistesléninistes) in the 1960s, he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the centre of L’Organisation Politique, an organisation dedicated, at a principled “distance from the state,” to the pursuit of a “politics without party” – one concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues including immigration, labour and housing. He is the author of several novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, of which the most of important are Being and Event (1988), Logiques des mondes (forthcoming 2005) and Théorie du sujet (1982). Very broadly speaking, Badiou seeks to link, on the one hand, a formal, axiomatic and egalitarian conception of thought (as opposed to any close association of thought with language, with the interpretation of meanings or the description of objects), with, on the other hand, a theory of militant and discontinuous innovation (as opposed to a theory of continuous change or a dialectical theory of mediation). The two principles connect, from time to time, in exceptional affirmative sequences through which an instance of pure conviction comes to acquire a universal validity. Such sequences are what Badiou calls “truths.” Truths are affirmations to which in principle we can all actively hold true, in excess of our ability to prove that what we thereby affirm is correct or justified in any demonstrable sense. Truths are not to be confused with matters of knowledge or opinion, they are not subject to established criteria of adequation or verification. As Badiou explains in detail in his major work to date, Being and Event, truths are militant processes which, beginning from a specific time and place within a situation, pursue the step-bystep transformation of that situation in line with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles. Badiou’s most general goal can be described, in other words, as the effort to explore the potential for profound, universalisable innovation in any situation. Every such innovation can only alain badiou

“We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative

FILIPPO DEL LUCCHESE and JASON SMITH: We would like to begin by asking you to clarify the relation between philosophy and politics. What do you mean when you speak, for example, of a militant philosophy? ALAIN BADIOU: Since its beginnings, philosophy’s relationship to the political has been fundamental. It’s not something invented by modernity. Plato’s central work is called The Republic, and it is entirely devoted to questions of the city or polis. This link has remained fundamental throughout the history of philosophy. But I think there are two basic ways of structuring this relationship. The first way assigns philosophy the responsibility for finding a foundation for the political. Philosophy is called upon to reconstruct the political on the basis of this foundation. This current argues that it is possible to locate, for every politics, an ethical norm and that philosophy should first have the task of reconstructing or naming this norm and then of judging the relation between this norm and the multiplicity of political practices. In this sense, then, what opens the relation between philosophy and politics is the idea of a foundation as well as an ethical conception of the political. But there is a second orientation that is completely different. This current maintains that in a certain sense politics is primary and that the political exists without, before, and differently from philosophy. The political would be what I call a condition of philosophy. In this case, the relation between philosophy and politics would be, in a certain sense, retroactive. That is, it would be a relation in

RHAPSODY FOR THE THEATRE: A SHORT PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE

I It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day! Who fails to see that this territorial and mental division has the additional merit of cutting across that other, all-too-saturated divide of West and East or of North and South? Because at the far end of this East we find the brilliance of a theatre of exception, whereas it is generally elided from Islam. I say “generally” because no consideration of universal theatricality can ignore the sacred dramas through which Iranian Shi’ism conferred Presence upon its founding martyr. In this last case, the scandal is home to a heresy. But all true Theatre is a heresy in action. I have the habit of calling its orthodoxy “theatre”: an innocent and prosperous ritual, from which Theatre detaches itself as a rather implausible lightning bolt.

The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?

Why discuss the “Cultural Revolution”—which is the official name for a long period of serious disturbances in communist China between 1965 and 1976? For at least three reasons: 1. The Cultural Revolution has been a constant and lively reference of militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies. I can say “our,” I was part of it, and in a certain sense, to quote Rimbaud, “I am there, I am still there.” In the untiring inventiveness of the Chinese revolutionaries, all sorts of subjective and practical trajectories have found their name. Already, to change subjectivity, to live otherwise, to think otherwise: the Chinese—and then we—called that

Logic of the Site

Take any world whatsoever. A multiple that is an object ofthis world?whose elements are indexed by the transcendental ofthis world?is a site, if it happens to count itself within the referential field ofits own indexation. Or again: a site is a multiple that hap? pens to behave in the world with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to be the support of being of its own appearance. Even if the idea is still obscure, we can begin to see its content: a site is a singu? larity, because it convokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being-there of its being. Among other consequences, the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself.

Plato, our dear Plato!

It is reasonable to assume that a philosophy always unfolds its arguments between two imperatives – one negative, the other positive – which define, on the one hand, the vice that destroys true thought, and on the other, the effort, or even the ascesis, which makes true thought possible. It is thus that the philosopher, that polyvalent worker, builds the frame for that canvas in which he will convey the sense of the world. Plato, with whom everything begins, also begins these operations of framing. Negatively, you must prohibit every commerce with the poem, especially the descriptive or lyrical poem, restricting yourself to patriotic and warlike rhythms alone. The poets must be chased from the ideal city. Positively, you must submit yourself to a decade of studies of the most profound and most difficult mathematics – in Plato’s day, this was spatial geometry, whose methods had just been invented. Let no one enter this city who is not a student of geometry. Seen from the vantage point of our intellectual situation, these imperatives are both violent and obscure. This is why, after all, ‘‘Platonist’’ is in general not a flattering epithet – not for Heidegger, Popper, Sartre, or Deleuze, nor even for the hard Marxists of the golden age, or for the logicians, whether Viennese or Yankee. ‘‘Platonist’’ is almost an insult, as it was for Nietzsche, who argued that the mission of our age was to ‘‘be cured of the Plato sickness.’’ Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely sceptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort. Those who wish to have done with Plato expose themselves to speculative euthanasia. But why did I call these imperatives of Plato ‘‘violent and obscure’’? It is violent to suppress the intense use of language, the enchanted reinvention of the word, the compact exploration of the infinite power of saying, which poetry, and it alone, succeeds in distilling. And it is violent to oblige us to follow, via the mathematical page, the constraining intricacies of ciphered black signs, leading to conclusions whose connection to the empirical world is so tenuous that popular wisdom regards them as nothing but a useless ordeal, reserved for alain badiou translatedbyalberto toscano

Who is Nietzsche

What is the true centre of Nietzsche’s thought? Or: what is it that Nietzsche calls “philosophy”? I believe it is essential to understand that, for Nietzsche, what he calls “philosophy” is not an interpretation, is not an analysis, is not a theory. When philosophy is interpretation, analysis, or theory, it is nothing but a variant of religion. It is dominated by the nihilist figure of the priest. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche declares that the philosopher is “the greatest of all criminals.” We should take this declaration seriously. Nietzsche is not a philosopher, he is an anti-philosopher. This expression has a precise meaning: Nietzsche opposes, to the speculative nihilism of philosophy, the completely affirmative necessity of an act. The role that Nietzsche assigns himself is not that of adding a philosophy to other philosophies. Instead, his role is to announce and produce an act without precedent, an act that will in fact destroy philosophy. To announce the act, but also to produce it: this means that Nietzsche the anti-philosopher is literally ahead of himself. This is exactly what he says in the song from Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled: “Of the Virtue that Makes Small”. Zarathustra introduces himself as his own precursor:

Is there a theory of the subject in Georges Canguilhem

Although there is no clear-cut doctrine of the subject in the work of Georges Canguilhem, nevertheless there is a sense in which the subject functions as a kind of operator in his work. This article delineates three aspects of such an operative function: a quasi-ontological discontinuity separating the living from the non-living; a discontinuity separating technique from science; and an ethical discontinuity that can be exemplified in the case of medicine. It is at these points of discontinuity that the notion of the subject effectively comes into operation in Canguilhems work.

An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries"

We are familiar with Mao Zedong’s formula: “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel against the reactionaries.” This phrase, which appears so simple, is at the same time rather mysterious: how is it conceivable that Marx’s enormous theoretical enterprise, with its ceaselessly and scrupulously reworked and recast analyses, can be concentrated in a single maxim: “It is right to rebel against the reactionaries”? And what is this maxim? Are we dealing with an observation, summarizing the Marxist analysis of objective contradictions, the ineluctable confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution? Is it a directive oriented toward the subjective mobilization of revolutionary forces? Is Marxist truth the following: one rebels, one is right?1 Or is it rather: one must rebel? The two, perhaps, and even more the spiraling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion

Fragments of a public diary on the American war against Iraq

“A present is lacking,” said Mallarmé. This is our problem in its entirety: how do we identify, in ourselves and beyond ourselves, the infinity of a present? For what is presented to us as a present is only the perpetual instant of absence, pleasure [jouissance] carefully calibrated, pleasure that can be bought and paid for. Since long ago, war has been what historically attests to the present. This has been so for at least three reasons: The temporal order. We’ve always said “the pre-war,” “the postwar,” as though the moment of war, a pure present, fixed the long forms of the before and the after. The decision. In forms that are, admittedly, sometimes suspect, war is what decides, and in this sense what determines the present of politics. Clausewitz thought that battle, fought under the authority of someone firmly decisive, is what tips the balance into the present of war. Carl Schmitt generalized this vision of things. Exception. Especially in the distribution of images, war is the fraternal sharing of exception. It places the community outside of the usual rules. To share danger is to share the present itself. Yet, I would like to propose that the American (“western”?) wars that took place after the fall of the USSR – from the Gulf War to the projected invasion of Iraq, including the attack on Serbia and the aggression against Afghanistan – have as their defining characteristic precisely that they do not constitute a present of any kind. They are wars whose aim is to protect, to endure, and for this very reason to destroy what is not homogeneous with this duration, this protection – the protection, that is, of “western” comfort, pleasure [jouissance] measured out in millimeters. They are wars that are entirely sterile with regard to the temporal order.