Monday, March 28, 2005
(11:22 AM) | Anonymous:
Report on Badiou Conference at Duke
In the hope of socializing Badiou's appearance this weekend a bit, I thought I'd add to Old and offer a quick report. Some preliminary comments... As I mentioned in a comment below, the conference was quite disappointing. Two things would have made it more profitable. First, there could have been a real push for a Badiouian view of things, of philosophy and politics. I say this because, I confess, I am not sure how to understand the attraction of this manner of thinking. I wished I could have had a better understanding, but that could never have happened. The project was, we might say, given, and most of the work amounted to tinkering. Second, since Badiou's philosophy is clearly quite strong and rich, we could have had papers which said something like, "Ok, let's do Cohen," or, "here's why set theory is a good way to do ontology" - in other words, something that would force all present to think.Hallward was first up, and his talk seems essentially identical to one that Infinite Thought reported on a while back. Henry, Deleuze, and Badiou, with reference to painting. Henry involves Kandinsky, Deleuze involves Bacon, and Badiou received no artistic emissary. But the argument, quite crudely: (1) what's interesting about french thought in the twentieth century is subtraction; (2) Henry subtracts from representation, and Deleuze subtracts as well (contra Badiou, Hallward wants to say that Deleuze is not simply 'animal'); (3) Badiou subtracts, but by a double subtraction. Implied: what "all of us" are after is subtraction, but Badiou is the one who follows it most profoundly. What struck me was the mode of presentation. I'm not sure that we can foreground some common subtraction in this way. There is something a bit bizarre about this, almost flattening, tendency. He ventured to analyze, in one or two sentences each, about ten contemporary philosophers according to how they would think a spark of being. This would be an outstanding score for an American phd student on a prelim exam, but... is this philospohy? I sound harsh, i know, but seriously... what is happening in this sort of work? The cynical element in me would say that this is brilliant and terrible. Our present task is simply to scan all the philosophers on the market, find the one that's "best", and then apply the philosophy to more concrete occurences. This is the way i'm tempted to understand Hallward's allegiance to Badiou but insistence that we need a "relation," or "dialectic": Badiou is the best philosophy, but any philosophy then needs to add a relation to historical/'worldly' conditions. (Now this seems different than Badiou's thinking of the event, or Deleuze's thinking of problems.) I had the feeling that i was witnessing a concretion of the dialectic before my eyes, where Hallward was the minor term, recuperated by Badiou's event. Badiou would explicate/affirm the truth-event, Hallward would basically agree but say things are 'more' undecidable, things are too 'soupy' just to affirm the event, and then Badiou would say, "yes, of course, i should explicated, but nonetheless, the simplicity of the event!"
Moreiras seemed to want to use Badiou's militant to extend Schmitt's understanding of the partisan. We need a more universal partisan... i think you can follow. I won't elaborate too much, as my attention waned a bit during this one. He thinks the political is both autonomous and heteronomous, borrowing from Derrida. Bosteels have a summary of Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou. It was... a summary. But his Deleuze is a bit emaciated - no ethology, no counteractualization, just affiming the oneness of all events, as if amor fati completes rather than begins to determine ethics. Boer offered a really interesting point, so quite quickly: is it possible to have an event without a fable? Probably not. If so, then how are we to separate the fable or myth from the truth-event, or specifically, the resurrection fable from the truth-event. This was intriguing, because i'm not sure that fabulation can function, within Badiou's philosophy, in the expressive-constructive way that Boer seemed to be hinting at. But of course this raises the question of mathematics, as Jared says below.
Badiou's talk was taken from the new book, which i've not yet read, so there's probably complexity that i'm missing. But in any case, the question is a dialectic between the body and the subject. The body belongs to worldly multiplicity, and the subject belongs to this multiplicity as well as to the singular event. As Old noted, the failures are idealist (reducing the body to the subject, life into death, sacrifice) and monist (reducing subject to the body, death in life, jouissance). Very well. So we need the subject as immanent difference. I'll say that i find this disappointing. The reason is that it does not seem to develop substantially the priority of the event to becoming, bodies, and so on (these are just names, but i think its basically clear what they signify for one who prefers Deleuze). The world, the body, is included, but as a minor term of the event. This of course is probably no problem for one who prefers Badiou. In any case, it was telling that he said the subject is process, is becoming, but precisely as the consequence of the event. Not, in other words, as the construction or creation of the event (or, not getting tied down by the plurivocity of "event," of what philosophers and revolutionaries want the event to produce). There is clearly a certain incommensurability between Badiou and Deleuze, and i don't want to dilute this. But perhaps there could have been more engagement with the proposition that being is entirly productive. In his Pli review, Toscano notes rightly that Badiou places a demand on Deleuzians - but is there not also a demand placed on Badiouians? Also, somewhat peculiarly (but in my perhaps slanted reading, tellingly), Badiou said that the relation of event to body was not identical to, but fundamentally similar to, the idea that the event would form and the body matter!
As for the theological question raised by Old, i'll just echo the observation of C. (not sure if i should be using names), a friend, who noted that Badiou is making possible an analogical reading, where the dialectic of monism and idealism is overcome by a proposed (but undecidable, or uncountable) analogy between world and event. This would seem to involve an implied positive infinity. But at the same time, Jared is absolutely right to 'mathematize' this problematic. I think it does indeed turn on set theory. Echoing a thought by another friend, R., I'll ask whether set theory does not function to fully account for reprsentation and then break with it via forcing of the uncountable. In this way Badiou trumps representation but keeps it in place. I might extend this, saying something similar happens with a situation - we need to break with it by going to the event via the real break. The possibility of saying the resistance is always primary, that any representation is parasitical upon constituent power, that puissance is anterior to pouvoir, or whatever you like... these are not available. There is a sort of foregrounding of represenation and then an uncountable or aleatory break with it.
