• Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy

• Peter Hallward, editor, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Both from Continuum Publishing, 2005
  

All too often, fame is the handmaiden of hypocrisy. People make it big and renounce their youthful excesses. It happens to politicians. It happens to movie stars. And it happens to intellectuals. That’s why France’s philosopher of the moment Alain Badiou is so refreshing. Even when it would be easy for him to reject portions of his past, he refuses. Reflecting on the supposed “death of communism” in one of his recent essays collected in Infinite Thought, he recalls a political chant he composed two decades before in the fading light of May 1968. Instead of bemoaning the chant’s datedness—he was a Maoist at the time—he insists that it remains relevant. The vicissitudes of intellectual fashion do not trouble him. “Against aesthetic nihilism, I hold that convictions and commitment are more durable than tastes. Must be.”

This sentence provides an excellent point of entry for Infinite Thought. Badiou’s project is not easy to grasp. Because he goes out of his way to break with the dominant trends in contemporary philosophy, he actually puts informed readers at a disadvantage. And his writing is too spare to give much help to neophytes either. But, though it proves difficult going, his work radiates a consistency of “convictions and commitment” that demands our patience. He is no intellectual gadfly bent on provocation for its own sake. Even if it’s a struggle to figure out what, precisely, he means, we know that he means it.

This may explain why Badiou is finally achieving the international fame his philosophy merits. Fed up with the slippery thinking associated with post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, many intellectuals of the post-Cold War era have been seeking more stable ground. Some have given in to the hegemony of neo-conservative thought. Some, like Students For A Democratic Society-veteran Todd Gitlin, have advanced a sober, restrained progressive agenda frequently identified as “left conservatism.” Some have turned to religion and the politics of meaning advocated by Tikkun-founder Michael Lerner. Interestingly, Badiou has something to offer all of them. Because he occupies the center of French intellectual life as a professor at the École Normale Superieure, the critiques he levels against relativism carry special force.

Badiou is an insider who stands outside the “common sense” of the Left. Although neo-conservatives do not share Badiou’s political allegiances, they can find ample ammunition in his work for their attacks on the sacred cows of American and European progressives. Intellectuals of Gitlin’s stamp can find validation for their conviction that the Left goes astray when it concludes that anything goes. And the spiritually-minded can point to Badiou’s repeated invocation of religion and his reliance on the idea of a higher truth as evidence that even outwardly secular leftists cannot, if they are honest with themselves, dispense with the human need for the superhuman.

If it seems like the right time for Badiou’s philosophy, it is because he argues forcefully that we still live in a time when philosophy has the power to right us. “My hypothesis is that although philosophy is ill, it is less ill than it thinks it is, less ill than it says it is,” he writes in “Philosophy and Desire,” the first of the essays included in Infinite Thought. “When it is the patient who says he is ill, there is always a chance that it is at least in part an imaginary illness.” Because Badiou is not given to flights of metaphoric fancy, this picture of philosophy as a neurotic is particularly significant. It implies not only that philosophy is a patient in need of a cure, but that he is the analyst capable of performing it. The task is to break philosophy free from its destructive self-absorption. Despite all the “negative pressures” that the world places on philosophy, Badiou contends, “the world, that is the people who live in it and think in it, is asking something of philosophy. Yet philosophy is too morose to respond due to the morbidity of its own vision of itself.” What philosophy needs, then, is a confidence boost. The world has not turned its back on philosophy; philosophy has turned its back on the world. Philosophy only needs to recognize its delusion to once again have a meaningful impact on everyday life.

One of Badiou’s main objectives, then, in the essays included in Infinite Thought, is to demonstrate how philosophy can resume the conversation with the world that constitutes its reason for being. The essays range widely, going far beyond the sphere of his professional expertise. He writes extensively about philosophy, to be sure, but also about politics and art. Many of the big names in American philosophy departments confine themselves to a tiny sub-field they can dominate. Badiou, by contrast, exercises a less intense dominion but one that covers far more territory. This quality is apparent when we compare Infinite Thought to Peter Hallward’s collection of articles about Badiou, Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Although all of the pieces in it have something valuable to offer, they tend to be a lot more specialized than the work they examine.

While Badiou generalizes without apology, his commentators find hidden folds within the fabric of his boldness. Even intellectual superstar Slavoj Zizek, always ready for a stroll down the runway of the public sphere to the staccato of flashbulbs, comes off as somewhat too disciplined in relation to the Badiou of Infinite Thought. Whereas Badiou keeps the name-dropping to a minimum, Zizek finds it necessary to situate his friend’s thought at the intersection between two competing intellectual traditions, Marxism and psychoanalysis, by invoking names like Lenin, Jacques Lacan, and Ernesto Laclau. Similarly, political theorist Etienne Balibar contrasts Badiou’s interest in the “history of truth” to the homologous efforts of Derrida, Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem. Other contributors throw in the usual suspects from the history of philosophy: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche.

While all this work is illuminating, it threatens to strip Badiou’s work of what makes reading it most worthwhile. For it is precisely in his refusal to confine himself to the safety of a shared tradition that he proves most radical. As he states in the essay “Philosophy and Desire,” his aim is to “rediscover a foundational style, a decided style, a style in the school of a Descartes.” Given what Descartes means in the history of philosophy, this statement indicates that Badiou really does mean to start over, no longer bound by the self-defeating expectations that have hindered his predecessors and his contemporaries alike. It doesn’t get bolder than that.

Badiou’s daring manifests itself principally in his will to redefine terms with long histories of both philosophical and everyday usage. When he writes of “truth,” or “the event,” or “the political,” he goes out of his way to make it clear that conventional definitions are inadequate to the task of understanding his argument. Consider this passage from the essay “Philosophy and Politics”:

Any politics of emancipation, or any politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act. Thought is the specific mode by which a human animal is traversed and overcome by a truth. In such a subjectivization one goes beyond the limits of interest, such that the political process itself becomes indifferent to interests.

While Badiou cannot be accused of failing to define his terms—he tells us here what “thought” is, for example—the violence with which he frees them from their past sometimes makes his work seem like a riddle without a solution. What does it mean to be “traversed and overcome by a truth?” Why does that process entail a “subjectivization”? How can it be possible that such a “subjectivization” actually transcends self-interest, unless the self in question is explicitly differentiated from the subject? Everything Badiou has written inspires this sort of questioning. In the abstract, that must be regarded as a good thing. In practice, however, it may make his work too baffling to achieve its goals.

The more Badiou one reads, of course, the easier it becomes to make sense of passages like the one above. What is obscure here may be clarified elsewhere; what is obscure elsewhere may be clarified here. The degree of traction his readers get within his work is directly proportional to the amount of time they spend on it. That’s true of any difficult work, surely, but the effect is especially pronounced where Badiou is concerned. And that’s where the trouble with his philosophy arises.

Even the least busy among us has limited time for reading philosophy. If understanding Badiou requires a long-term commitment—the intellectual equivalent of monogamy—then deciding to take that step will decrease the amount of time one spends reading in other philosophical traditions. The danger, in short, is that readers of Badiou will spend so much time trying to figure him out that they will end up turning their backs on the world despite his injunction to face its demands. That certainly seems to be the case for the contributors to Think Again. Even those who normally do a good job of maintaining a healthy balance between scholarly specificity and real-world concerns—Zizek, Balibar, and Ernesto Laclau come to mind—fail to escape from the vortex of Badiou’s prose. Paradoxically, then, Badiou manages to provoke precisely the sort of responses that his philosophy seeks to transcend.

A better approach to his work might be to favor practical application over theoretical explanation. As Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach waits to remind us, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Let’s start with Badiou’s reflections on the Cultural Revolution, which pop up at a number of points throughout Infinite Thought. When he was a Maoist, he clearly regarded the radicalization that occurred in China between 1966 and 1968 as a positive development. And even today, he obviously retains some affection for the idea of it, while distancing himself from the harsh realities that sullied that idea’s promise. It would certainly be a worthwhile scholarly exercise to situate Badiou’s philosophical project within the context of the peculiar brand of Maoism that flourished in French intellectual circles in the 1960s and 1970s, noting the sectarian disagreements whose after-image can be discerned in his prose. But that labor would also require a turning away from the here and now that would be inconsistent with the spirit of his philosophy. By contrast, if one seeks to excavate his reflections on the Cultural Revolution in search of tools appropriate to the present conjuncture, the result might be something less rigorous but also more useful.

In the essay “Philosophy and Politics,” Badiou writes that, “for a political orientation to be worthy of submission to philosophy under the idea of ‘justice,’ its unique general axiom must be: people think, people are capable of truth.” His two examples of this “egalitarian recognition of the capacity for truth” are something Saint-Just said before the French Revolutionary Convention of 1794, and “the sixteen-point decision of 8 August 1966: ‘Let the masses educate themselves in this great revolutionary movement, let them determine themselves the distinction between what is just and what is not.’” Badiou does not use these examples to shock, though their revolutionary dimension is clear, but because they are specific examples that help him make a general point:

Equality is in no way a social programme. Moreover, it has nothing to do with the social. It is a political maxim, a prescription. Political equality is not what we want or plan, it is what we declare under fire of the event, here and now, as what is, and not as what should be.

Debating whether or not this description really matches up with the actually existing Cultural Revolution is less important than recognizing the value in what Badiou’s philosophy has been able to pry loose from its historical example.

In the essay on “Philosophy and the Death of Communism,” Badiou argues that, “philosophy exists solely insofar as it extracts concepts from a historical pressure which would grant them nothing other than a relative sense.” From his perspective, then, philosophy begins its work precisely where “actually existing” circumstances end. “What does ‘communist’ signify in an absolute sense? What is it that philosophy is able to think under this name?” The point of philosophy, in other words, is to transcend the particular. What really happened in the Soviet Union of Lenin or the China of Mao is important, according to Badiou, but it is not the task of philosophy to think it.

At times, formulations like these leave him open to charges of historical erasure. The person who thinks the name “communism” without stopping to recall the atrocities committed in its name is treading extremely dangerous ground. There is a fine line between the roles of redeemer and apologist, one that grows imperceptible when contemplated from the distance of philosophical abstraction. Thankfully, Badiou does demonstrate awareness of the risk he runs in trying to overcome relativism.

“We know now that there are no such great emancipatory forces, that there is neither progress nor proletariat.” Instead of relying on these abstract forces to serve as the instruments of change, individuals must fall back on their own devices. “This means that each of us, and not only the philosopher, knows that today, if we are confronted with the inhuman, we must make our own decision and speak in our own name.” If we think the name “communism,” then, it is not in order to act in its name but our own. “But in order to take a position in one’s own name when faced with the inhuman, a fixed point is needed for the decision.”

Badiou’s philosophy—bold, iconoclastic, open to the absolute—represents his attempt to provide us with such a point. Whether his readers choose to seek this point there or elsewhere, they will surely benefit from his forceful argument for its necessity.