Why, thus far, has the sizable corpus of a major
contemporary philosophical figure in France (someone now installed in the
prestigious École Normale Supérieure) been left largely untranslated into
English?  Whereas the writings of
various French postmodernists have been available in translation for quite some
time–for instance, nowadays, Derrida’s texts are translated nearly as soon as
they appear in the original–the oeuvre of Alain Badiou has been almost totally
passed over in silence by Anglo-American continental philosophy.  Thanks in large part to Slavoj Zizek’s
enthusiastic engagement with Badiou’s thought, an engagement that has served to
alert English-speaking readers to the importance of his thought, this oversight
is beginning to be corrected.  Three
shorter books (Manifesto for Philosophy, Deleuze, and Ethics–the
last one translated by Hallward) have recently appeared in translation, and
more are on the way (including, most importantly, Badiou’s 1988 magnum opus, Being
and Event [L’être et l’événement]).

One of the many strengths of Peter Hallward’s lucid
and thorough study of Badiou (a study weighing in at almost five-hundred pages)
is the way in which it highlights the uniqueness of Badiou’s philosophical
position, thus lending support to the suspicion that the odd neglect of this
prolific author by normally Europhilic intellectuals enamored of all theories
French is far from accidental.  Badiou
simply doesn’t fit into any of the current, familiar categories according to
which the terrain of thought is mapped. 
He isn’t a transcendental or existential phenomenologist, a
structuralist or poststructuralist, a deconstructionist, a semiotician, a
psychoanalytic theorist, a traditional Marxist ideologue, or even an analytic
philosopher (despite his heavy reliance upon mathematics and logic).  Thus, in the parlance of his philosophy,
Badiou is his own "event"–that is, an unrepresented "x"
situated "on the edge of the void" and yet ready to disrupt the
reigning philosophical "state of the situation" by forcing this
state’s representational meta-structure to reconfigure itself so as to take
account of something novel and unprecedented, something that, thus far, has
remained invisible in the eyes of the hegemonic intellectual order.  Badiou is a philosopher for whom a new
category must be invented, whose theoretical identity (to be established après-coup)
is yet-to-come in a philosophical future that will have been transformed by his
own intervention in this field.

The fourteen chapters of Hallward’s book are grouped
together into four parts.  The first
part ("Matters of Principle") charts Badiou’s development starting
from his early association with Althusser and Maoism up to his
"mathematical turn" (a turn that sets the stage for L’être et
l’événement as the foundation for all his subsequent work up through the
present).  The second part ("Being
and Truth") delineates the core structure of Badiou’s mature system,
explaining the essential components of both his ontology (grounded on
post-Cantorian set theory) as well as, to put it somewhat awkwardly, his non-
or trans-ontology (i.e., the level, irreducible to being as such, involving the
related concepts of event, subject, forcing, and truth).  For Badiou, ontology does not fall under the
jurisdiction of philosophy;  rather,
ontology is, in his view, a mathematical affair, whereas philosophy’s attention
should be directed to that which exceeds "being qua being" (l’être-en-tant-qu’être).  The third part ("The Generic
Procedures") touches upon, chapter-by-chapter, Badiou’s four truth
processes, namely, his "generic procedures" as the apparatuses and
domains through which subjects, in fidelity to the events that found their
subjectivity, draw out truths exceeding the strictures of recognized and
legitimated knowledge (one could say "state sanctioned" knowledge,
using the word "state" in its broad Badiouian sense).  According to Badiou, love, art, science, and
politics are the four spheres through which truths can shine forth and be
explored.  The task of philosophy (in
this third part of the book, Hallward includes a chapter on Badiou’s answer to
the question "What is philosophy?") isn’t to produce its own truths,
but to carefully think through the manner in which the amorous, artistic,
scientific, and political truths of the here-and-now are possible in
conjunction with each other;  Badiou
maintains that philosophy is externally conditioned by, instead of internally
conditioning, the truths produced through the generic procedures.  In part four ("Complications"),
Hallward moves in two directions. 
First, he carefully explains the quite recent twists and turns of
Badiou’s ongoing work, including those places where Badiou has changed his mind
about some of his earlier positions (Hallward provides readers with tantalizing
previews of Badiou’s forthcoming texts in which these developments unfold,
including Le siècle and Logiques des mondes–as well as the
unpublished seminars entitled Théorie axiomatique du sujet).  Second, Hallward articulates a series of
criticisms bearing upon some of Badiou’s most central philosophical
axioms.  He tends to attach the caveat
to these criticisms that Badiou is still in the process of resolving these
difficulties.  However, in the case of
Hallward’s more telling blows, it’s hard to see how the Badiouian system might
cope with such challenges.

            Hallward portrays the essence of
Badiou’s philosophy as residing in its "subtractive" character.  That is to say, Badiou defines the key terms
of his system (being, event, subject, and truth) as being inherently
anti-relational, withdrawn from the densely tangled structural web of
interconnected relations constituted by the state of the situation (i.e., the
presentational and representational regime governing what entities within a
given situation "count" as known, recognized, and legitimated).  The anonymous synthesizing operation of
"counting-for-one" (always-already presumed from within a situation
rather than performed as an active gesture) stands between being qua
being (as "inconsistent multiplicity" incapable of being presented or
represented in and of itself) and the situation with its accompanying state (as
"consistent multiplicity," namely, circumscribed sets of one-ified
elements that, through the one-ification of counting, become [re]presentable).

As noted, Badiou claims that ontology is
mathematics, more specifically, post-Cantorian set theory.  Badiou’s reasons for this claim include the
idea that mathematical structures, in their sheer abstractness, are indifferent
to the same specific qualitative differences to which being as such is also
indifferent–"Badiou equates ontology with mathematics because mathematics
isolates the pure gesture of presentation as such, that is, the presenting of
something such that the question of what exactly this presented thing is, let
alone what it re-presents, never comes up" (pg. 57).  For the typical connoisseur of recent French
theory (i.e., a mathematically illiterate humanities scholar), this aspect of
Badiou’s work is likely to be perceived as too high a barrier to entry.  However, the basic points made by Badiou vis-à-vis
set theoretic reflections on the nature of infinity can be grasped even by
those allergic to all things mathematical (and, for the more complex issues at
stake involving a more nuanced employment of mathematics, Hallward not only
goes to great lengths to enumerate these matters in as straightforward a
fashion as possible–he also provides an accessible appendix explaining the
fundaments of transfinite set theory). 
As Hallward explains in the appendix, prior to Cantor, infinity is cast
as a never-actually-attained, grand One-All, a notion with a long philosophical
and theological history.  A single
infinity presumably serves either as an all-encompassing absolute holding
everything finite within its embrace or as a transcendent pinnacle existing
beyond humanity’s reach–a mystical potential, something forever evading the
firm grasp of thought.  Cantor’s
discovery of the infinite variety of infinities, a discovery precisely
delineated in the most rational and exact terms possible, destroys this:  there is no One-All, no culminating point
wherein the proliferation of number comes to a halt.  If mathematics is the only ontological discourse, then the
consequences of this discovery are quite significant.  As Badiou observes, Cantor effectively kills God, shattering the
infinite One into infinite fragments–"As soon as we accept a mathematical
rather than a metaphysical or ‘ethical’ conception of infinity, the very notion
of a (divinely) inclusive ‘One-All’ is made irredeemably incoherent…  Badiou’s philosophy, we might say, is
ontologically atheist" (pg. 62). 
So, if ontology is set theory, and if set theory compels the
renunciation of the singularity of infinity, then being qua being is
without a unifying one, without a containing boundary-limit.  In other words, being qua being is,
as Badiou designates it, an inconsistent multiplicity, that is, a multitude of
infinitely multiplying multitudes lacking ultimate atoms or aggregates and
proliferating in every direction. 
However, Badiou also stipulates that situations, as fields of phenomenal
disclosure, require for disclosure to occur that this inconsistent multiplicity
be rendered consistent through the synthesizing effectuated via the operation
of counting-for-one.  Thus, being qua
being subtracts itself from any and every situation and its corresponding
state.  The mark of this subtractive
withdrawal (i.e., Badiou’s "void" as the "proper name of
being") subsists within the state of the situation as a trace of the
necessarily occluded ontological ground invisibly underpinning what occludes
it–"Although the being of what was thus counted cannot be presented as
the inconsistent multiplicity that it is, its multiplicity continues to hover
like a shadowy ‘phantom’ or remainder on the horizon of every situation"
(pg. 64).  Hence, Badiou advances what
could be called a "subtractive ontology."

But, as Hallward observes, Badiou’s entire
philosophy, rather than just his ontology, is subtractive.  The non/trans-ontological plane opened up by
the miraculous, ex nihilo upsurge of the event–events are occurrences
disrupting the normal "run of things" as dictated by the state of the
situation–also involves subtraction. 
Both Badiouian ontology and non/trans-ontology are subtractive;  both are subtracted from the domain of
relationality, a domain consisting of a regulated status quo order of
one-ified presentations and representations. 
An event is an intrusion of something foreclosed by a situational state
within the interior of this very state, confronting this state with its unrecognized,
disavowed ground.  The state doesn’t
recognize the event as an event–it’s dismissed as an anomalous glitch, an
aberrant malfunctioning of the established system calling merely for correction
(or, at most, some minor technical adjustments).  But, for those who choose to discern in this disruption of
present affairs something more, the inauguration of some sort of
"revolutionary" shift, the event ushers in a truth demanding of its
partisans a faithful labor on its behalf (i.e., the sustained transformative
process of "forcing" [forçage], whereby the consequences of an
event and its truth are brought to bear upon the framework of extant knowledge
vouched for by a reigning state of the situation).  The event generates subjects-of-the-event as those who choose to
define themselves in and through their recognition of a particular event as an
event per se.  Badiou goes so far as to
maintain that subjectivity proper only comes into existence through the
occurrence of events, and that every subject is a subject of a particular
event.  Subjectivity is always
"post-evental," an effect of an event.  The thus-constituted subjects name the event, thereby putting
into circulation inscriptions serving as the coordinates that guide the ensuing
struggle to alter the state of the situation in the wake of the
event–"evental nomination is the creation of terms that, without
referents in the situation as it stands, express elements that will have been
presented in a new situation to come, that is, in the situation considered,
hypothetically, once it has been transformed by truth" (pg. 124).

Badiou’s entire system orients itself around a set
of points of subtraction:  being’s
withdrawal, as inconsistent multiplicity, from the consistent multiplicities of
situations;  the event’s intrusive
disruption, both unanticipated and unpredictable, of the present state of
affairs;  the subject’s breaking,
achieved through its decision to relate to its founding event as a proper
event, with its human animality, with its petty individuality as an entity
specified by a state;  the truth’s
puncturing of holes in knowledge by confronting knowledge with that for which
it cannot and will not account. 
Hallward observes that this subtractive approach is a double-edged
sword.  On the one hand, it epitomizes
the startling originality and seductive strength of a philosophy that dares to
reaffirm a robust notion of universal and ahistorical truth in an era of jaded
postmodern relativism (as Badiou puts it, sophistical anti-philosophy’s
linguistic constructivism holds sway on both sides of the Atlantic).  On the other hand, it’s in danger of
rationalizing an irrationally stubborn refusal to think through and explain
both the pre-conditions for evental sequences (as a pre-evental dimension) as
well as the details involved in bringing the ramifications of such sequences to
bear on existent relational structures (as a post-evental dimension).  Near the end of his introduction, Hallward
states:

This déliaison underlies both the
extraordinary ambition of Badiou’s philosophy, its unflinching determination,
and its own peculiar difficulty–the difficulty it has in describing any
possible relation between truth and knowledge, any dialectic linking subject
and object.  Rather than seek to
transform relations, to convert oppressive relations into liberating relations,
Badiou seeks subtraction from the relational tout court.  So long as it works within the element of
this subtraction, Badiou’s philosophy forever risks its restriction to the
empty realm of prescription pure and simple (pg. xxxiii).

As
Hallward points out repeatedly, the Badiouian subtractive conception of
truth–truth is heralded by an event and forcefully extended in its
implications by a militantly faithful subject–stipulates that although events are
always situated in "evental sites" (i.e., contextually specific
socio-historical configurations in which events first come to light), the
truths to which events give rise rupture and transcend the continuums in which
their evental sites are embedded.  Badiou,
in his efforts to philosophize the New as such, seeks to demonstrate how
ahistorical universality immanently emerges out of historical particularity and
subsequently explodes the frame of this same particularity–"The
singularly true retrospectively eliminates the merely specific circumstances of
its advent" (pg. 37).  Or,
"Truth is what happens in history, but as a subtraction from history"
(pg. 50).  Badiou convincingly
demolishes the untenable presumption that truth is socio-historically relative
just because its genesis is associated with a particular socio-historical
locale (as a given situational state and its "encyclopedia" of
knowledge).  In Lacanian-Zizekian
parlance, evental sites, as socio-historical locales, contain within themselves
"something in them more than them." 
The advent of a truth-event (along with the form of subjectivity it
engenders) erupts in a sudden flash within the structured regularities of an
established order.  And yet, this
immanently produced break cannot and must not, Badiou argues, be dialectically
reincorporated/reintegrated back into the consistent continuity with which it
has definitively and decisively broken (doing so entails failing to recognize
the event as an event per se, since, according to Badiou’s definition of event,
an event is something so new that it confounds attempts to understand its
import in terms of the old coordinates of the situational state of its evental
site).  The truth-event subtracts itself
from its surrounding socio-historical situation, just as the
subject-of-the-event, engaged in the work of forcing the event’s truth,
subtracts itself from the mediating matrix of established objects and forms of
knowledge in which the individual supporting this subjectivity just so happens
to be located.

            Hallward suggests that Badiou’s
subtractive approach to truth, despite its various merits, risks remaining
strictly prescriptive.  Badiou writes as
though he’s describing what truth is, but Hallward indicates that subtraction
is more an ideal, an imperative guiding how one ought to situate oneself as the
subject of a truth-event:  the event
ought to be recognized as utterly irreducible to its context of emergence;  the truth ought to be treated as
fundamentally incommensurate with extant knowledge;  the subject ought to operate independently of the contingent
characteristics of the all-too-human individual.  From Hallward’s perspective, Badiou limits the power of his
system by refusing to discuss the detailed dynamics through which, for
instance, the truth of an event comes to be placed in relation to the
encyclopedia of established knowledge (however, Badiou’s notion of forcing and
the related distinction between truth [vérité] and veridicality [véridicité]–veridicalities
are new elements of knowledge yet-to-come, alterations in the situational
encyclopedia brought about by virtue of a subjective forcing of an evental
truth–at least hint at the unavoidable necessity of positing some sort of
relation between truth and knowledge).

In the course of his critical assessment, Hallward
offers a way out of this conundrum: 
differentiating between the "specified" (as whatever is
determined by its situational milieu) and the "specific" (as
something particular to a given situational milieu, but, nonetheless, not wholly
determined by it).  Hallward contends
that "Badiou’s system" is governed by a strict dichotomy between
"state-driven operations of inclusion or classification, and truth-driven
operations of separation or subtraction" (pg. 274).  He then argues that this is, essentially, a
false dilemma:  being specific to a
state of a situation (i.e., included within a situational state’s network of
relations) need not automatically entail, as Badiou sometimes seems to assume,
being specified by this inclusion (i.e., dominated and controlled by a
"state").  But, at the same
time, Hallward also acknowledges that Badiou’s conception of truth is
"firmly situation specific" (pg. 272) and that the evental site, linked
to the void of being subsisting within each and every situation, always has an
"edge" as a region of contact with its specific situation.  Perhaps Hallward can be construed as saying
that Badiou’s anti-relational, subtractive thought both explicitly rejects and,
all the while, implicitly presupposes something along the lines of the
distinction between the specific and the specified.

            The bulk of Hallward’s criticisms
deal with the post-evental dimension of the problems with Badiou’s devaluation
of relationality (i.e., queries concerning how the disruptive consequences of
the truth-event are brought back into productive connections with situations
and their states).  However, Badiou is
plagued by difficulties at the pre-evental level too.  In fact, these difficulties might well be the most serious
shortcomings of his philosophy. 
Hallward again reminds readers that, for Badiou, "Truth subtracts
itself from the circumstances in which it is produced, be they social,
psychological, or cognitive" (pg. 250). 
Simply put, if something is universally and truly true, then it cannot
be reduced to the mere background against which it surfaces (this being why,
for instance, all the myriad varieties of ad hominem arguments, seeking
to de-legitimize a truth by pointing to its positional locus of
articulation/production, are fallacious). 
What’s more, according to Badiou, the empirically delineable features of
human beings are incidental with regard to their potential status as subjects
faithful to truths.  This blanket
dismissal of the relevance of "human nature" in a theory of subjectivity
is, as Hallward observes, quite unsatisfactory:

…Badiou’s firm dissociation of the process of
subjectivation from its enabling ‘natural’ or ‘psychological’ conditions may do
more to simplify our understanding of that process than explain it.  He defines the human in terms of our
exceptional ‘capacity for thought,’ but shows little interest in the origin and
nature of that capacity…  No amount of
insistence upon the exceptional or nonnatural status of the subject, however,
accounts for or justifies dismissal of the nature of that being which is
uniquely able to become exceptional, any more than it helps us
understand how and why certain individuals actually become subjects (pg.
284-285).

Correlative
to the dichotomy between inclusion and subtraction, Badiou posits a sharp
binary division between, on the one hand, the individual (i.e., the human
animal, a creature shaped and specified by various situational elements), and,
on the other hand, the subject (i.e., an agency exceeding the mere individual,
transcending the empirical features of the human animal).  The individual is included in a situation,
whereas the subject subtracts itself from its situation.  The individual isn’t always-already a
subject;  subjectivity is conjured into
effective existence through the individual being, as it were, interpellated by
an event and its truth.  For Badiou,
individuals become subjects, and, as he describes it, subjectivity is something
occasional and momentary–in short, the subject is "rare," something
literally extra-ordinary.  And yet,
Badiou’s philosophy fails to furnish any account whatsoever of human nature, a
nature that Badiou dismisses as irrelevant to evental subjectivity qua
subtracted from situated innerworldly individuality.  Thus, a major question, one that insistently demands a response,
is left unanswered:  What is it about
human nature that makes individuals intrinsically capable of (at least
potentially) becoming subjects?  There
has to be something in the constitution of individuals that sustains the
possibility of heeding the summons of truth-events.  If, in terms of other aspects of his system, Badiou allows for,
broadly speaking, the immanent genesis of the transcendent (i.e., the event
arises out of an evental site, trans-historical truth arises out of the defiles
of history, etc.), then why not similarly develop an account of human nature
that explains how it is that this nature contains within itself the
potentiality to transcend itself?  What
is it within the individual that enables this individual to step outside of
him/her-self in responding to an event? 
Hallward remarks that Badiou’s "philosophy effectively proscribes
thought from considering the production of an event" (pg.
371).  Badiou pronounces a prohibition
against all attempts at explaining the preconditions and enabling circumstances
precipitating events.  Consequently, in
refusing to spell out the particular features of human nature making possible
the production of subjectivation-effects, Badiou is at least being consistent.  However, the prescriptive injunction of
subtraction (subtract the event from situations, subtract the truth from
knowledges, subtract the subject from objects) both hobbles and eclipses the
necessary-yet-neglected task of, at a minimum, explaining how and why humanity
is able, from time to time, to inhabit those infinite planes opened up by
events.  What mediates between the
evental site and the event?  What
mediates between the individual and the subject?  Badiou remains silent.

            Although critical of Badiou towards
the end of his study, Hallward is, by and large, an enthusiastic and eloquent
advocate on behalf of Badiouian thought. 
The bulk of the book consists of clear and detailed explications of the
various facets of Badiou’s rich and provocative corpus.  Furthermore, Hallward traces the outlines of
those works-in-progress in which Badiou is currently grappling with the sorts
of objections and difficulties enumerated here.  Even if his system is judged to be somewhat flawed, nobody who
reads Hallward’s Badiou could plausibly deny that Badiou forcefully and
productively challenges many of the central assumptions cherished by reigning
theoretical sensibilities.  Rather than
having subtracted Badiou from his environs by engaging in idiosyncratically
obscure and hyper-technical exegesis–this is always a risk with a complex
systematic philosopher unfamiliar to many of the readers being
addressed–Hallward succeeds in putting Badiou’s ideas into relation with the
key questions of the philosophical present, questions of burning concern to
anyone who thinks.

 

 

 

© 2003 Adrian Johnston

 

Adrian Johnston, Ph.D.
holds a position as interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at
Emory.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis