Fractal Ontology

Metaphysics beyond Psychoanalysis

0: Entryways

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”
Lacan

“Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives.”
Badiou

Questions, not meanings, are forgotten. May we therefore at last refrain from inquiring what psychoanalysis means, or asking what it is supposed to signify? And, since this alone is clearly insufficient, could it also be possible to take a cautious step “backwards,” simply in order to ask: which psychoanalysis, and how does it work? Where, when, and how much is it thinking? Where and why does it forget (merging imperceptibly here with a mythical alien outside, or fading transparently there into an empirical illusion)? From what eerily formal abyss “must” the “truth” must be continuously salvaged? Why these specific fixations, abstract algorithms and “critical” meta-languages — and in what ways are these translated (and transformed) into applications as clinical practice?

The history of psychoanalysis is a torus, and offers few instances of non-paradoxical theoretical encounters. It is in this sense that Lacan’s project of critically deconstructing the “origins” of (post-Freudian) psychoanalysis could be said to follow analogically — or even metaphorically — from Heidegger’s project of ungrounding (Platonic) metaphysics via a “detour” through the Pre-Socratics. In a different but curiously parallel way, Deleuze’s distaste for — and now subtle, now overt subversion of — Lacan, especially his analysis of desire (bordering at times on a strange kind of “power struggle” within psychoanalysis not unlike Lacan’s own break with the analysts of his early career) can indeed be said to mirror Levinas’ tense and passionate struggle with Heidegger over the question of desire — which, not coincidentally, Heidegger also characterizes as structured around a central lack.

In terms of contemporary theory, Laruelle and Badiou’s anti- or non-philosophy could be said to present a similarly-effective overturning of literary-deconstructive methods — we find a deceptive model of this technique in the work of Derrida, and in a different sense, the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Badiou’s position could be baldly summarized as a critique of what is really a humanistic or “centralizing,” isolationist move within theory, which claims to be the opposite, or “de-centralizing” — while ancient philosophy suffered badly from a similar “axiomatic” illusion as well, it is especially modern thinkers whose theory is built starting from a promise (instead of a premise,) and so filled with convincing but misleading interpretations of facts (rather than taking a de-subjectivized scientific position capable of producing a rigorous analysis of the “facts” of the matter.) Laruelle expresses this “inhumanism,” or post-metaphysical materialism, particularly rigorously: only science is really capable of moving thought beyond the philosophical as such.

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Joe and I arrived in California on Wednesday for the conference on Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead concerning ontology and politics. On Thursday, Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (both translators of Badiou) gave a wonderful paper on a rapprochement between Deleuze and Badiou (focusing on the Logic of Sense and Being and Event–seemingly a strange synthesis at first). One of the juicier comparisons was made when Justin reminded us that Deleuze’s nonsense–that which says its own sense–is isomorphic to Badiou’s understanding of the event, which is a set that belongs to itself, thus violating (or acceding to) Russel’s paradox. You can check out the site for more details here.

In any case, Joe will be presenting his paper entitled “Ontology beyond Politics” tomorrow morning. An older draft of the paper has been filed in the archives in pdf and can also be viewed in its original post on the site. Just to make it immediately available, I will include it in this post as well. Here’s the link to a pdf version:
Politics Beyond Ontology.

I am only here to support Joe: so let’s hope that he kicks some ass tomorrow morning, takes name, and of course, never forgets to simultaneously chew bubble gum (unless he’s all out of it).

As I have found out recently from A.J. Bartlett (co-editor of the Praxis of Alain Badiou), Re-press has just published a new translation of Alain Badiou’s The Concept of Model (see my partial translation here) with a scholarly introduction, translated by Zachary Fraser and Tzuchien Tho.

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The following is an entry from Francois Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998. Original translation by Sid Littlefield, 10/31/07.

Vision-in-One (One, One-in-One, Real)

Primary concept of non-philosophy, equal to “One-in-One” or the “Real”. What determines the theory of in-the-last-instance and the pragmatics of the Thought-World (“philosophy”). The vision-in-one is radically immanent and universal; it is the given-without-givenness of the givenness of the Thought-World.

Philosophy is the desire and oppression of the One, divisible or associated with division. The problemization of Being (Heidegger included) supposes this barred One without really thematizing it. Philosophies of the One (Plato, neo-Platonism, Lacan) suppose a final convertibility with Being based on the fact that Being is given a final objectivity, that is ordered by the criteria of Being or abstracted from them. All ‘thoughts of the One’ are still structured like that of metaphysics: They hold an ultimate bound between the metaphysics of the science of Being and the science of the One. The necessary disqualification of the One of the Greek from its empirical component, the one of the count or counting (Badiou), in an extreme point of conflict between Being and the One and the ‘death’ of this one. The philosophy that wishes to be post-metaphysical oscillates, in the best cases, between the end of Being and the end of the One, while not ceasing to honor metaphysics.

Non-philosophy enunciates a series of axioms on the One understood as vision-in-One and no longer as the desire of the One:

(1) The One is radical immanence, identity-without-transcendence, not associated with transcendence or division.

(2) The One is in-One or vision-in-One and not in-Being or in-Difference.

(3) The One is the Real in so far as it forecloses all symbolization (thought, knowledge, etc.)

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The following is the first three sections of Alain Badiou’s first theoretical book Le Concept de modèle: introduction à une épistémologie matérialiste des mathématiques. Paris: Maspero, 1968. p. 7-17 and is an original translation by Taylor Adkins [10/17/07].

Editor’s Advertisement:

The beginning of this text continues a talk given on April 29, 1968 by Alain Badiou within the framework of the “Course of philosophy for scientists” given to the National university.

This continuation should have been the subject of a second exposition on May 13, 1968. This day, it is known, the popular masses mobilized against the middle-class Gaullist dictatorship affirming in all the country their determination, and enticing the process that led to a confrontation of classes on a great scale, upsetting the political economic situation, and causing effects whose continuation will not be made to wait.

It is often imagined that in this storm, the intervention on the philosophical front had to pass to a second plan.

This very day, the somewhat “theoretical” accents of this text return to a surpassed economic situation. The struggle, also ideological, requires a totally different style of labor and a just and lucid political combativeness. It is no longer a question of aiming at a target without reaching it.

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My last six posts have all been translations; they range from philosophy of science to paradigms for approaching and studying Nietzsche. I plan to continue working on translating Boudot’s work (including sections from three of his books on Nietzsche, featuring comparisons of Nietzsche with Bataille, Camus, and Bachelard); Ruyer’s work (Genesis of Living Forms, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, and The Paradoxes of Consciousness and the Limits of Automatism); Guattari’s work (Schizoanalytic Cartographies; The Machinic Unconscious; and Psychoanalysis and Transversality); Laruelle’s work (Nietzsche contra
Heidegger; Beyond the Power Principle); Badiou’s (early) work (Theory of the Subject; Of Ideology); Simondon’s work (The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis; Psychic and Collective Individuation; and
On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects); and Serres’s work (Hermes II, III, and IV; The Origins of Geometry).

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Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Badiou starts off his book with an interesting definition of the fable:

A ‘fable’ is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails to touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly accessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary (4).

Thus Badiou asserts that Paul reduces the Christian narrative to the singular element of fabulation, “with the strength of one who knows that in holding fast to this point as real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that surrounds it” (4-5).

This seems like a good way for Badiou to preclude any question of the supposed myths surrounding Christianity. Badiou is atheist, but in his reading of Paul he strictly excludes this from affecting his interpretation. In fact, one could say he suspends or brackets off this part of his perspective in order to forestall any skepticism that might encounter Paul along the way of his enunciation of the Christ event.

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Fractal Cow is made by Gabor Csordas and Gabor Papp and can be found at http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow.

Hypothesis in Process Philosophy

Abstract

It seems that we experience the world: but beyond this, what more can be said? Can we hypothesize the abyssal and incorporeal depths of the origin of social desire, and could description perhaps reach even farther? In this paper, my goal is to provide a reading of the work of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze in light of present sociopolitical conditions. I stress that we should see conventional ontology as a social machine which functions by division, and in this it operates in a precisely opposite way from a political logic of (just) distribution. If universalism would actually imply a transcendent origin of social order, we must learn to do without the hypothesis. I argue that the future must be sought immanently, as a process of utopian restoration. Tomorrow’s truth is to be constructed by our hands or not at all.

Ontology has a new goal and new project in the twenty-first century. How do we think the relation of subjects to events without transcendence? How do we organize the field of social intensities without division and repressing desire? How can we accelerate distribution, and intensify healthy and potent forces of social change? This paper aims to provide a new kind of mapping of the social field, pointing towards a space for thought where ontology can be seen as secondary to metaphysics. Deleuze writes that “politics precedes being,” so metaphysics must clarify what to ontology is indiscernible — the lack produced by social and conceptual division — and recognize this divisive operation not as productive of an immanent equality, but in fact a transcendent subjugation.

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“Our quarrel can be formulated in a number of ways. We could approach it by way of some novel questions such as, for example: how is it that, for Deleuze, politics is not an autonomous form of thought, a singular section of chaos, one that differs from art, science and philosophy? This point alone bears witness to our divergence, and there is a sense in which everything can be said to follow from it.” –Alain Badiou^[1]

“Freedom, and by the way, what Freedom? ‘Subject-group,’ Freedom as Subject. Deleuze and Guattari don’t hide this much: return to Kant, here’s what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost.” –Alain Badiou^[2]

“It definitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subject-ification: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing to do with going back to ‘the subject,’ that is, to something invested with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can’t be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead.” –Gilles Deleuze^[3]

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Identity Project (Skull Lab), oil on old silkscreen frames (February / March 2006)

What is the relation between experience and identity? Clearly, a purely logical account of identity cannot lay claim to our ‘experience’ of identity, only its most formal aspects. Even an ontological account of identity, identity as collection of experiences or even identity as a pure cognitive event, would again demonstrate only the tautological function of identity (for example, agent A is that entity which experiences ‘being-agent-A’.) Like the tangled hierarchies implicit in the cogito, the ontological perspective aims to resolve at a higher position than it began: it seeks to make decisions based on a total comprehension, which is to be accomplished by a rigorous division. We say that logic studies this same schism, but algebraically rather than differentially. Yet a profound question remains silent: why is the subject missing from our experiential space? Where has identity gone?

It is to Alain Badiou’s credit that we now think the relation of a subject to an event as essentially multiple. But this same principle undermines the mathematical principle of continuity upon which we must base any ontological analysis of a ‘system’ of events. Even if we approach identity naively, as meaning a “belonging in a certain way to a certain state of affairs,” we cannot thereby functionally account for its continuity (a subject still maintaining its identity despite, even perhaps because of her transpositions, or non-continuously varying degrees-of-belonging.) We already see that we have need for a more complicated algebraic structure, one which at least allows for division into partial membership classes. The very nature of equivalence depends fundamentally on this division into ‘similar’ sets.

Furthermore, the fact that inclusion itself is already an ontological division demands further explanation. For example, an identity cannot be ‘induced’ from the situation by the simple observation (or negotiation) which decides that such-and-such belongs to the state of affairs, or does not. In reality, we cannot rigorously establish the existence of the void or the multiple from a pure induction. Rather, even induction depends on a rigorous subdivision of the One until this operation approaches its ‘vulgar’ limit (of non-accuracy, of meaning ‘nothing’.) So when we say this ‘limit’ (zero) belongs to every set, even to itself, we mean that induction (the operation-as-limit) has meaning only when the situation its observes is already understood as meaning ‘nothing.’ Hence the infallibility of the inductive process; it is already a “transductive” tautology! So ‘identity’ (as singularity) refers only to the void’s self-belonging (by subdivision into n classes of varying degrees of ‘belonging’…)

We can of course use induction to demonstrate that the endless process of the self-division of the void will “eventually” produce a pure distinction, a tautological “A is A (and not B)” which, by being so utterly commonplace, completely escapes attention. Distinction masquerades as some sort of absolute truth-event, a pure objective identity. We claim to the contrary that the void is never self-identical, that it never belongs to itself or anyone else. In fact, the power of the void is not ‘activated’ by its emptiness but rather the mathematical intuition of the operator, the one who utilizes the void in order to reconstruct a shrinking remainder of the ‘original’ existential-schematic, again only of this ‘layer’ of being. Thus, we claim that this operation of division cannot in fact account for the reciprocal yet asymmterical relation between experience and identity.

Three aspects of the spectacle—society itself/parts of society/means of unification. This is the place of false consciousness because it is where all consciousness converges–it is merely the official language of generalized separation [Badiou, language of the state of the situation, field of knowledge that is encyclopedic in its domination--a truth pierces the whole of knowledge by piercing a hole in knowledge, and, shall we say, causes an irruption to take place within the "official language," thereby reconstituting a counter-officiality, a counter-fidelity for the revolutionary reorganization of the molar state of the situation via molecular flows of singular multiplicities that are always already subtracted from the count in an endless proliferation of simulacra--thus the schizophrenic scrambles the codes and disorganizes the hierarchy where beginning and end, cause and effect lose their mark and cease to create limits--or at least, limits that work--so the schizo breaks through the system, showing it to be what it tries to deceive us it isn't--an open system--Oedipus is open to the social field! The openness of the system requires for a new logic of the distribution of singularities on the potential field of forces that animates desire's social fluxion and function (a flunction?). This new logic would have to take into account the affirmative, disjunctive synthesis that forces [shall I risk it?] value and sense to be determined only through the traversal of the distances between and among singular points (thus constituting a non-totalizing Whole that becomes added to the set as a part itself–much like the notion of the power set–the power set as non-totalized Whole allows for the communication of noncommunicating vessels–in effect, what D+G are describing here in Anti-Oedipus is a network that is not considered as a One. This network is added onto the parts as an excessive part–it is this excess that escapes that count-as-one, and it is this excess that constiututes the singular points of intensity on the BwO. But back to the open set–the BwO as open set–affirms what Deleuze will say in the Logic of Sense: “circle qua circle is neither a particular circle, nor a concept represented in an equation the general terms of which must take on a particular value in each instance; it is rather a differential system to which an emission of singularities corresponds” (123). This logic would lead us to conclude that the fields of potential and thresholds of intensities that are all involved with becomings on the BwO are to be opposed to the particularity of the formations of a global person that psychoanalysis constantly refers to (in its ego-obsessed variants). The externality of desire–its external relation to the Real, constituting it as such–forces the symbolic structures of Oedipus and spectacle to succumb to an openness that threatens the closed transmission of triangulating forms. Whereas in the triangle, Oedipalized subject is confined to a vertex, a mere corner–in the circle qua circle, the schizophrenic process flings the subject from any fixed (or repressed) position and endlessly de-centers the subject through a succession of states along a circle that must be conceived in terms of differential relations and not in terms of a fixed radius with particular values! To stress this last point, we have to assert that the formation of a circle must be infinite in progress, and thus errant too; in effect, there can be no telos of the circle, for a teleology would posit an end goal and purpose for the BwO-circle qua circle-will to power breaks apart the limits, rips open the vertices of the triangle, creating the real circle-square (Oedipus is not contradicted or neutralized, but instead both intensities coexist as operative forces–molecular and molarizing) Or does it instead proliferate as an endless number of concentric circles that rudely coexist–constituting the socius as BwO?].

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

I call fidelity the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation (under the supernumerary name conferred by an intervention) of an evental multiple. In sum, a fidelity is the apparatus which separates out, within the set of presented multiples, those which depend upon an event. To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance

The word ‘fidelity’ refers directly to the amorous relationship, but I would rather say that it is the amorous relationship which refers, at the most sensitive point of individual experience, to the dialectic of being and event, the dialectic whose temporal ordination is proposed by fidelity…How, from the standpoint of the event-love, can one separate out, under the law of time, what organizes—beyond its simple occurrence—the world of love? (EE 232)

The explication of one of the truly fascinating concepts in Being and Event occurs in Meditation 23. Fidelity, as we shall see, leads also to the introduction of the subject—something that occurs last in this work, after all the order of reasons that serve as a foundation for Badiou’s set theory edifice. Though Badiou is quick to point out the resonance of fidelity to the amorous condition of philosophy, one should also point out the resonance of fidelity with notions of faithfulness and allegiance, like an oath sworn to a lord. In the short space that I have, I will set out to explicate the two dimensions of fidelity as a concept and its relationship to the subject.

Before we begin, I would like to arouse some intrigue into Badiou’s innovative theory of the subject. In Meditation 35, Badiou says that “the subject is chance” (396), and so we should juxtapose this to another quote that ends the first paragraph of Meditation 23: “To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance” (232). Having convoked these two statements together, what is fascinating is the fact that, from the point of view of the situation, the event is not counted as such—it is up to the subject to wager on its inclusion and to follow out the implications of this wager, implications that, in the current state of affairs, can only be described as that which will have taken place in the situation. This inclusion of the event entails the becoming legal of the logic of the event as chance, but it also indicates that the subject (retroactively?) becomes legal. Therefore, we must conclude that the subject is initially illegal.

Before flattering ourselves about this connection, we should define fidelity. It would be simple to introduce fidelity as the process that separates multiples in the situation in accordance to their (non)-connection to the event. More helpful for our topic, though, would be to point out some delimitations. First, fidelity is not linked to a “general faithful disposition;” instead, it relies on an event and so is always particular (233). Second, fidelity is not a multiple—strictly speaking, it is not. A fidelity acts as a different count, one not necessarily opposed to the state’s count, but one that enquires into the situation and marks the multiples that depend on the event. Therefore, as Badiou makes explicit more than once, fidelity is a concept related to the state. Third, when a faithful procedure is successful and it marks multiples as depending on the event, these multiples consequently are included in the situation. The fidelity is thus triply bound in its structure: it is defined by its situation, the event to which it corresponds, and the rule of connection that binds multiples as depending on the event.

However, we must remember that onto-mathematicians like Badiou wager that the being of situations is infinite. This assumption about the infinity of situations forces us to consider fidelity in its dual temporal aspect: it is “both the one-finite of an effective representation, and the infinity of a virtual presentation” (236). This means that fidelity’s goal—to count-as-one multiples marked by their dependence on the event and thus to present these marked multiples as a one—is never coextensive with the situation. The faithful count always lags behind the infinity of presentation: fidelity is a process that forever perpetuates its consistency by a further need to enquire into the connectivity of multiples to the event—the still-more of the faithful.

Before concluding our analysis of fidelity, we have to radically assert the deinstitutionalization of fidelity in order to truly capture its innovative essence. Opposed to a statist or spontaneist fidelity (the event only belongs to those who intervene) and a dogmatic fidelity (all multiples depend on the event), Badiou proposes the concept of a generic fidelity, that “which is unassignable to a defined function of the state…[and] from the standpoint of the state, [results in] a particularly nonsensical part” (237). This is because a generic fidelity allows the organization of another legitimacy of inclusions within the situation (238). For a fidelity to be generic it must be removed from the proximity of the state, the further the better. This argument makes Badiou assert a radical hypothesis: what if there is no relation between the two aspects of fidelity, namely the intervention and the operator of connection? This would mean that the operator acts as a second event in itself. Provocatively, the more it appears as a second event because of its subtraction from the proximity of the state, the more real the fidelity is for Badiou.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

Levinas addresses a question (or criticism) very similar to Badiou’s in his essay God and Philosophy (published in 1975, the ideas put forth were already put forth in different forms in lectures given from 1973-4). In these writings we find Levinas considering the tenability of the inclusion of God within philosophical discourse. It would seem that as soon as we conceptualize God’s existence, we must also situate God amidst existence, somehow mysteriously within being’s movement. But yet, “in the most unlikely way,” God signifies “the beyond being, transcendence.” (G&P 1, all future quotes ibid.)

Thus, Levinas question is whether we can meaningfully express transcendence: can we “thematize” this radical excess of God’s being, or does transcendence delimit sensibility as such? He implies that part of the meaning of the ontological “height” of God’s existence is the exclusion of the possibility of an automatically meaningful self-revelation of being:

“Does not the modality which this adverb [“height”], borrowed from the dimension of the sky over our heads, expresses modify the verbal meaning of the verb ‘to be’ to the point of excluding it from the thinkable as something inapprehendable, excluding it from the esse showing itself, that is, showing itself meaningfully in a theme?” -God and Philosophy

In other words, since the very conception of God is that of the entity par excellence, the manner of God’s being exceeds the thinkable: God is ontologically out of bounds. Levinas’ next move here is worth following closely. He recognizes as a “major tradition of philosophical rationalism” the claim that “the God of the Bible does not have meaning, that is, is not properly speaking thinkable.” He cites Mademoiselle Delhomme: ‘The concept of God is not a problematical concept; it is not a concept at all.’ This, of course, is a very Badiouian sentiment, insofar as it radically separates any conception of God from the philosophical discourse, as inherently and unconditionally irrational.

On the contrary, Levinas argues, without the concept of God we would not have thinking, let alone rationality: this radical ontological surplus we find in the transcendence of God is “among the concepts without which there would be no thought.” But the question still remains of the meaning of the word ‘God’ in the debate. After all, the radical belief implied in religious sentiment still seems to place an almost fascist restriction on critical thought. But, according to Levinas, God exceeds infinitely any possible curtailment of meaning. Indeed, meaning originally founds and manifests itself through a transcendent movement which is the very beginning of signification itself.

Thus Levinas’ aims to determine whether the meaning “first broached in presence,” the meaning which is equivalent to the esse of being, is already a restriction of meaning, “already a derivative or a drifting of meaning.” Levinas harbors an intuition that beyond the intelligibility of immanence (the “rationalism of identity, consciousness, the present, and being,”) that the “signifyingness” of transcendence can be and is understood, and (in a sense) is understanding itself. Transcendence is both “rationality” and “rationalism”, for it precedes and structures both. Indeed, this temporal precedence is critical to Levinas’ understanding of transcendence as a meaning which has priority “over and beyond being,” whose translation into ontological language Levinas names as the “antecedent” to being. In other words, we can still meaningfully speak ontologically of a transcendent being, and we are not necessarily lapsing into blind faith or wild opinion the moment we go beyond rational “terms and beings”:

“In fact, in staying or wanting to be outside of reason, faith and opinion speak the language of being. Nothing is less opposed to ontology than opinion and faith. To ask, as we are trying to do here, if God can be expressed in a rational discourse which would be neither ontology nor faith is implicitly to doubt the formal opposition…between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, invoked in faith without philosophy, and the god of the philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition [between the God of Abraham and the god of philosophy] constitutes an alternative.”

This unnecessary alternative has led to a foundational crisis for modern ontology: what has still “not yet reached the threshold of intelligibility” (transcendence) is identical to what appears in the Bible as that which is above and beyond all possible comprehension. Ontology is not necessarily atheistic; in fact, opinion and faith must belong to ontology, if only because they are things that are. Less tautologically, if faith “speaks the language of being” in wanting to stay outside of reason, it must be because being is manifest in opinion and faith: in authentic belief, being is given a voice, a theme, by that ingenious and overflowing thought (the idea of infinity) which, out of rationality, aims at the outside and limit-point of reason.

Thus the very suggestion can only be justified retroactively through an original archaeo-ontological discovery: we can recover a “meaning equivalent to essence” only through the potential of “going back from this allegedly conditioned meaning to a meaning which could no longer be put in terms of being or in terms of beings.” The meaning which is an equivalent to the essence of being cannot be put in terms of many (beings) or one (being); the truth, as for Plato, is suspended in the void between the universal on the one hand and particulars on the other. Meaning is expressed in the participation between the multiple and the singular, enacted in the relationality of existence and existents.

In the last chapter of Being and Event, Alain Badiou investigates Lacan’s relation to (what Badiou perceives as) his contiguity with the history of thought since Descartes. Badiou confronts Lacan with his overemphasis on the solidarity of the subject and her speech.

In order to show this, Badiou highlights Lacan’s assertion of the subject’s ex-centered dependency with regard to language. After all, isn’t this already the Cartesian gesture embodied by the cogito? For example, when Lacan says it is our destiny to articulate a world–does he not aspire here to some transparency between thought and being, some (obviously imaginary) pure reflection between language and reality?

I understand Lacan to be saying that the world is not merely the background against which we pursue our destinies, but that our destiny is speech, is defined reciprocally by the social relation. Our response and responsibility is already to faithfully articulate (a/the) world.

Now, Badiou is making the case that, nevertheless, the intrusion of this third term (i.e., language) is “not sufficient to overturn this order which supposes that it is necessary from the standpoint of the subject to enter into the examination of truth as cause” (B&E 433) In other words, no knowledge, no matter how acquired, can be held to be certain without a (faithful) procedure of examining the truth of it oneself. A truth can only be a source of certainty, or veracity, once a subject “forces an undecidable,” that is, acts on the basis of a supposed future completion whose certainty is (ontologically) in a great deal of question.

Badiou is arguing that the position in which the subject finds himself is always the site of an event, that there are no subjects without events, that the subject is only a “finite local configuration” of a generic procedure aimed at discovering the truth of the being of the situation. The truths which a subject discovers/creates are found only through maintaining an active faithfulness to a investigatory procedure.

No amount of philosophical games will allow us “interpret” our way out of this crux: a truth is, in the end, neither decidable nor undecidable on the basis of its linguistic context–”truth only exists insofar as it is indifferent [to language] since it’s procedure is generic inasmuch as it avoids the entire encyclopaedic grasp of judgments.” Thus, truth follows the trajectory of a given subjects’ truth procedure, a “faithful” thought which overturns and escapes the structure of a situation.

Therefore the subject is rare, Badiou suggests, and we should not think (with Lacan) of the subject-effect as a void-set, since this makes it identifiable from within the “uniform networks of experience.” Lacan errs because his very “gesture” is overly soldered to language alone: even though Lacan moves towards a conception of truth which is “at last” completely disconnected from what Lacan calls “exactitude” or “adequation,” Lacan is still attached to the Cartesian epoch of science–that is, by stressing the lack (and not the intervention) and thus structural permanence of the subject, we miss the event proper.

Lacan wants to “rescue” the truth but he ends up positing the subject in the absolute void of its own erasure. Unless we conceive of the genesis of the subject (argues Badiou) as its self-constitution by an active fidelity to an event or truth-procedure, we maintain the (weak) conception of the subject as maintained in the pure void of its subtraction–all this to save truth.

By contrast, Badiou defines a truth as multiple, the gathering together of all the terms which will have been positively investigating by a generic procedure of fidelity supposed complete (and thus infinite.) This supposition of completeness is critical to understand what Badiou means about nomination, but right now what we’re interested in is the fact that Badiou identifies this “generic” truth-procedure as the very constitution of the subject even as (and because) the truth is constituted by a subject’s engagements and faithfulness to a generic procedure.

So, despite the fact that the void for Lacan is de-localized, and that its ineffability does not yield to any sort of pure reflection, in the end Lacan yields to what Badiou claims is the “empty and apodictic transparency of the cogito” by claiming the revelation of certainty about the subject (from the standpoint of the other) through psychoanalysis.

Badiou is attacking the possibility of a hermeneutics of truth (and so indirectly psychoanalysis, which claims it is a site where the truth of the subject emerges, transformed.) Psychoanalysis is shown to make a surprising presupposition: that “the truth of neurotic suffering is that of having the truth as cause.” Badiou argues that it is not the truth which is the cause for subjective anxiety (which is actually a “false plenitude,”) rather:

“The truth is that indiscernible multiple whose finite approximation is supported by a subject, such that its ideality to-come, nameless correlate of the naming of an event, is that on the basis of which one can legitimately designate as subject the aleatory figure which, without the indiscernible, would be no more than an incoherent sequence of encyclopaedic determinants.”

What’s going on here? There’s a lot to unpack, but in essence: when we try to identify a “subject-cause,” that is, some clear, distinct and certain conceptualization of the genesis of the subject, we tend to (incorrectly) think the subject in terms of a transparent, linguistic agency which unites being and thought through a gesture which maps the web of language onto the true.

The cogito gives language has a hidden capacity to poetically open up the world and verify it at the same time, revealing the subject through the very clarity and distinctness of truth itself (which is now revealed as the ‘true cause’ of the subject, and thereby the subject is identified completely with truth. Thus “truth” has been restricted to the whole of subjective existence.) Badiou says this is wrong; we cannot return to the truth, or to infinity, or simply to transcendence to find the cause of the subject. For that, we must return to the event (the truth, on the other hand, is just the “stuff” of the subject).

For Badiou, an event is composed of the elements of the site and the event itself; an event “interposes” itself between the void and itself. A part of a situation is said to be “indiscernible” if no statement of the language of the situation separates it or discerns it. This lack of separation is really an avoidance of falling into pre-existing determined categories that structure the situation. The truth IS that indiscernible multiple (or set) whose source is a generic procedure undertaken by a faithful subject.

A procedure of fidelity is generic by definition if, for any determinant in the “encyclopaedia” (a classification of the parts of a situation which can be discerned by a property,) it contains at least one enquiry, or line of investigation, which avoids that determinant. The four (and only four) types of generic procedure, and thus the only four sources of truth, are for Badiou: art, science, politics and love. (He has been criticized, rightly in my opinion, by Zizek and others for the brevity and oddness of this list of truth-investigatory procedures, most notably leaving religion out.)

So, a part is indiscernsible if it does not fall under any encyclopaedic determinants, i.e., parts of the situation composed of terms which have a property in common which can be formulated in the language of the situation. It would seem that, without the indiscernible, our language would be quite boring–just a series of judgments without a qualifying investigator procedures, language as pure performance.

As the subject would be as well; without the mysterious capacity of the event to be “more” than the situation (Badiou says it is “ultra-one” relative to the situation, since it stands in a relationship with itself,) our speech would amount to no more than incoherent sequences of judgments about common properties of terms in the situation. Actually, the subject-language unfolds “in the future anterior”; the subject is the trajectory of the enquiries of the truth procedure. So when Lacan writes: “Thought founds being solely by knotting itself within the speech in which every operation touches upon the essence of language,” Lacan in fact secures a position within his theory for the enunciation and veracity of the cogito. Indeed, he retains intact the Cartesian discourse of ontological foundation which Badiou is attempting to reinterrogate.

More broadly, Badiou claims that the categories of the event and the indiscernible have been at work, unnamed, throughout the entire history of philosophy. Regarding the doctrine of the subject and his apparent overall position on Lacan (near the end of the book):

“With respect to the doctrine of the subject, the individual examination of each of the generic procedures will open up to an aesthetics, to a theory of science, to a philosophy of politics, and, finally, to the arcana of love; to an intersection without fusion with psychoanalysis. All modern art, all the incertitudes of science, everything, finally, which the name of Lacan designates will be met with, reworked, and traversed by a philosophy restored to its time by clarified categories.”