Saturday, February 05, 2005
(9:12 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Alain Badiou
From Manifeste pour la philosophie, ch. 9, "Questions":Dans son contenu, le geste de recomposition de la philosophie...I'd like to take a look at that little word geste. As I try to translate that sentence, I come across a difficulty. The first subordinate clause is easy enough, "in its content," but then I come up against a problem: geste means equally gesture in terms of a sign, a movement disconnected from the reality it seeks, and the real act itself -- both the conventional means of expressing emotions, of refusal, of waving; and the deed itself, the gestures of a watchmaker's hand, the serve in tennis, and also the token gesture. The Collins Robert dictionary seems to have some trouble distinguishing rigorously between a "mere" gesture and an actual act. For instance, the "token gesture" falls under the heading of act, while the idiom for "not lifting a finger to help someone" falls under the heading of the mere gesture (presumably, the "lifting a finger" is still just a gesture, not yet the help itself so much as an outward show of the willingness to help -- sometimes we are only required to show our willingness and the other is satisfied).
Badiou is not one to play with words. It's one of his principles, in fact: the translator of the Ethics disclaims any major translation problems because for Badiou it is a matter of principle that his ideas be easily translatable into other languages (surely a change of pace, and a welcome one, from the "decadence" of certain French philosophers). But I wonder about this word, geste -- and the geste that corresponds to the four convenient events in Badiou's four fields of math, poetry, love, and politics. ("Events," let it be said, that are hardly singular. The only generic procedure whose event can be named in a singular manner is love, whose event is "Lacan," a name that is already plural, and the political event refers to a series of diffuse and ambiguous political occurences, ranging from Solidarity to the Iranian Revolution to May 68. "Something is happening," one might say, or "some things are happening." There is no need to assume that Lech Walesa and the Ayatollah were responding to "the same thing" or represent "the same thing.")
Alenka Zupančič, whose The Shortest Shadow is deeply indebted to Badiou, picks up on the ambiguity of the geste and, in a very Žižekian manner (which is not the same, let us note, as a "very Badiouian manner"), makes it the very condition of possibility of the "event." Nietzsche's declarations of his own importance, absurd as they are on their face, already consistitute the event itself. (One almost hears the "Is not...?") Or Badiou himself, writing in a different vein, more casually -- in a book that is far from being of any decisive importance for his project as a whole -- presents as a model of faithfulness to the event a figure whose "event" definitely never happened, namely St. Paul with his resurrection. Should Badiou absorb, in a Hegelian gesture, the event into its proclamation, make the all-too-clever proclamation that faithfulness itself is the event, that the event doesn't ever happen, that our faithfulness is always motivated by nothing? Then the failure of the resurrection "fable" to "touch any real" would itself be the real of the fable and of the faithfulness (again: the rhetorical "Is not...?" to which one can always answer, "No, it's not...").
... because it might well appear that Badiou's attempt to reconsistitute philosophy as such, his claim that our times both demand and make possible a reconstitution of that meta-discipline of thought, this glorious project, or act, or gesture -- is à propos of nothing.
