A science of being is not enough. This subtraction which purifies, this selection and division which makes holy, which ‘invents’ and ‘discovers’ truth — how could ontology do anything but give us theories of the One, of the Law, of the Real, of the existing-as-such? How could it do anything but carefully induce multiplicity to subtract itself into unified theory, divide itself into functions and axioms; endlessly seduce differences into homogeneity, and minorities into conformity; plumb the depths only in order to reproduce an absolute height for an absolute voice?

Ontology is always the political ontology of Power, taken to the absolute point of dispersion where nothing remains, everything is subtracted, except for forces and matter — only functions, pure functions, and even concepts are now only seen in terms of effects, the site they create, “their” ontology. Ontology as both lens and situation, a regime where truths are always the same, is insufficient as long as it remains without a phenomenology of becoming, the concept as event, coming from outside of being which throws existence into doubt.

Multiplicity is first apprehended as risk, as danger; this much seems to be always already understood. The ontological question is how much can we take, what can be subtracted — from the situation, in short from life. Life as subtraction and transubstantiation. The holiness of being should not be misunderstood, for we encounter the most peculiar bifurcation precisely here, the curvature of space itself, the uncanny pull of the invisible — the Other, a zone which implies another reality — where being merges with non-being. The fold between us.

Ontology grasps the other only as what-escapes, as invisible or abstract lines of flight carrying on vertiginously into infinity, as impossibilities spiralling into a “beyond” of the situation itself. The other infects ontology like a virus, causes thought to question itself. The other is why ontology is insufficient, and why it always already demands a meta-ontology, and perhaps even explains the disconcerting rigor of ontology’s essence: a code of codes designed to produce a generalize, cosmic decoding. Multiplicity is the outside: ontology grasps the Other only in the form the void-set, thereby grounding multiplicity in the void. The ontologist prays: the void is One, being is empty, God is dead. Anarchy and servitude, chaos plus transcendence: strangely enough, this is precisely how ontology forces an overflow, an excess, which causes it to precisely catch sight of its other. An agitation which awakens.

At the height of its concentration, the art of the [twentieth] century — but also all the other truth procedures, each according to its own resources — aimed to conjoin the present, the real intensity of life, and the name of this present as given in the formula, a formula that is always at the same time the invention of a form. It is then that the pain of the world changes into joy.

Alain Badiou, The Century 146

To move beyond an age, a century, an image of thought — what, today, does this require, and what would it allow? What does it mean to exit the territory, to proceed beyond the limits of a century, that is, while still maintaining oneself firmly within it, and thus despite constituting a series of processions within it? 

Immersed in the viscous flow of time, to turn over a new leaf, to work out a new concept, to produce a new kind of humanity, for a new kind of world. The concept of novelty is fraught with internal fissures and cracks. It is neither wretched nor glorious, but already an experiment in formalization, the process of deactivating a mythology, a path.

To deactivate a machine, there must be an overflow, a glitch or fault, topologically speaking a bursting, as though the paradoxical new formula itself unfolded in order to become a smooth space of thought. The notion escapes in two directions, a new earth rises within the old.

Alain Badiou argues the new is neither an inexplicable sacrifice of tradition nor a mediation of the various dimensions of human becoming, but rather the production, the education, and the very culmination of a new humanity, ready for a new thought, a new world. There is here, perhaps, more than a parallel to the work of Gilles Deleuze. The paths by which one leaves the territory, the lines of flight or vectors of deterritorialization, are exacting experiments — a cautious but unsparing dislocation of cognitive and cultural coordinates.

Stellar cartographies has translated two different selections of course notes from Badiou’s lectures circa 1980-82 here and here. This translation is short, but extremely concise, so there’s a lot of material to absorb. In particular, the notes help to explain Godel’s achievement and his theorem and offers good insight into Badiou’s own mathematico-ontological project. Definitely check it out for a quick read on a slightly neglected aspect of this philosopher’s expanding corpus. Also be sure to check out his other posts on Deleuze/Meinong, Heidegger/Lucretius, and an extremely hilarious link to Simon Critchley’s musical side project.

Laruelle, Francois. Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie. Paris, Kime, 1998. Original translation by Taylor Adkins.

Non-epistemology

Unified theory of science and philosophy that takes for its object and material the discourse which lays claim to a particular mixture of science and philosophy: epistemology.

Philosophy recognizes epistemology in two ways which are not always exclusive. It can treat it as a continuation of traditional philosophy of science, crystallized around the Kantian question of the possibility of science, often relating precise and delimited scientific problems to philosophical systems, whether classical or modern (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Quine, etc…) along with traditional philosophical positions (realism, empiricism, idealism, etc.). It can also consider it as a relatively autonomous discipline—simultaneously more regional and more technical—whose sources or occasions are extensions beyond the mechanical or Euclidean geometry of the physical, or even “exact” model of the concept of science; or still it can consider the technological interpretations of this concept. With this more specific preference, the epistemological tradition, going strong for over a century, has become extremely multiform and varied in regard to the nature and order of grandeur of its objects and methods. Nevertheless, its object or its final interest always more or less explicitly remains the criteria of scientificity for science or the sciences. This question, in its constantly displaced and renewed repetition, is always understood as aporetic and even at times gives rise to an admission of failure, which is the motivation for “external” perspectives (technological, sociological, economic, political, and ethical) on science. The advent of epistemology under these hypotheses seems like a becoming-network of its concept of science in a complex, non-linear and instable system.

This “advent” of epistemology is explained, according to non-philosophy, by the fact that it treats (and only treats) local problems in a spontaneous way beginning with the reduction of science to isolated knowledges and theories, consequently to the detriment of the nature of its extreme poles of constitution which are supposed in advance and without examining the fundamental supports which are decided upon. Therefore, it supposes the general rule of an implicit continuity between scientific and philosophical concepts, the possibility of an amphibological recovery of the ones through the others. It simultaneously acts as though one could produce statements on science—which is already in itself problematic—and as though philosophy were on the contrary a simple passage to the limit of an object defined or definable by a universal correspondent, a passage which makes it impossible to speak specifically about this uniting (englobant) which is philosophy. Instead, non-philosophy admits that we cannot take science for an object in the manner in which epistemology has done by imposing a philosophical objectification and reduction on it, but that we can describe an “invariant” of philosophy, which, far from being reified in a model, enriches and multiplies the effects and in particular makes their experimentation possible. For its own account, it will use the material of epistemology; it will relate its amphibologies, justifiably that which functions as “continuity” and “recovery,” to an identity which determines them in-the-last-instance, but by conserving the terms and the words of epistemology which, in a certain way, it will axiomatize according to a transcendental, but not logical, mode. This labor will make it possible not to give this discipline up to its mechanically foreseeable advent and to liberate the sciences and philosophy from an overly narrow and historical image. It will then have to shed light on new problems which are embarrassing and poorly thought: the impoverishment of the notion of “domain,” the formation of disciplines whose interest is not simply theoretical, taking into account the conjunctions around analogies in the formation of a scientific problem, the status of applied sciences, the signification of ethical discourses accompanying scientific and technological developments, etc…The latter only appear for an instant and in this epistemological framework in a symptomatic form, because the inexplicitness of its concepts and an overly narrow, not quite universal comprehension of philosophy insist that it always proceeds under the same hypotheses, occasionally reversed and intensified, not recognized as such, but always given up to philosophical sufficiency. Hence some of the very narrow and consequently moral descriptions (it’s necessary to “get your hands dirty” in order to comprehend science, etc.).

The dualysation of epistemology in accordance with its two sources permits the liberation of the latter as transcendental orders, their unification without hierarchy or non-unitary unification. But, as a result, the object of epistemological discourses seems as though it never had anything to do with science since these discourses essentially suppose a continuity between their object and the knowledge of this object. Epistemology effectively yet confusedly makes use of philosophy on behalf of the sciences. By transforming it into material, non-philosophy will be able to utilize these discourses as a source of new scientific and philosophical problems and knowledges in the occasion from which philosophy and science work on an equal footing. For example, the geometrical concept of fractality can find a scientific usage without being geometrical for all that; it can also be formulated in natural language without becoming a philosophical or epistemological mixture through a non-philosophical process of universalization. Hence the new non-epistemological conceptions of induction, deduction, axiomatization, hypotheses, definitions, and other notions of traditional epistemology.

Formal ontology (Uni-versalized transcendental Logic)

Equivalent of transcendental Logic (under its “analytic” aspect) generalized under the uni-versal conditions of the vision-in-One. It contains the a priori non-autopositional moments which are equal to Position as dimension of the philosophical Decision. Counterpart of material ontology as generalized transcendental Aesthetic, the former would also be under the same uni-versal conditions and would correspond to Givenness.

A formal ontology does not exist as such in philosophy, but it does find its restrained forms here, for example in Kant’s “transcendental Analytic” (ontology or “transcendental” philosophy” “considers the understanding and reason even in the system of all the concepts and principles which are related to objects in general without admitting the objects which would be given,” Critique of Pure Reason, version B, part II, chapter III); and in Husserl’s “formal ontology” (the aprioritic doctrine of the object but taken on the modes of something in general).

Non-philosophy contains a “material ontology” or a “generalized transcendental Aesthetic,” uni-versalized in-the-last-instance, which is a theory of “something in general” insofar as it is given. It results from the work of the force (of) thought on the aspects of Givenness which are those of the philosophical Decision and in particular of this givenness par excellence which is that of the regional. It also contains its counterpart from the perspective of the Position which belongs to Decision. To the a priori of position correspond the non-autopositional a prioris of Transcendence, Position, and Unity. Why are these formal?

a) These a priori are all generalized and simplified in a non-autopositional mode in the sense that each of them, as cloned identity, in-the-last-instance escapes from or leaps beyond the contrasted couple which it forms with another or with itself in its being-doubled: they are all expressed in an equal way from philosophy in accordance with the One-real.

b) In particular, transcendental logic is generalized because it leaps beyond the disjunction of forms as intellectual or sensible: it also contains the clones of the sensible or intuitive forms (“Transcendence” and “Position” insofar as they are simultaneously intellectual and intuitive, ideal and sensible—topological), provided that they form, posit, or objectify something in general. The givenness/position couple (the leading thread in the research of the a priori) must be distinguished from the intellectual/sensible couple (which completely remains internal to philosophy, its frontiers being indeterminate and porous). The terms “formal” and “material” intend to surpass the formal/material philosophical couple and its internal folding, the Kantian projection of the intellectual form and the sensible intuitive form. These couples are restrained, even when they are no longer understood “metaphysically” but “transcendentally” (neo-Kantianism) and when form conditions matter a priori. This transcendental direction, still understood as circle or empirico-transcendental doublet, does not succeed in generalizing form (the formal) or matter (the material), i.e. in breaking the circle of their correlation or reciprocal determination and in positing relatively autonomous orders (in regard to the force (of) thought) of a generalized transcendental logic and aesthetic. This generalization is only acquired when the “transcendental subject” and its circle yields to the force (of) thought which alone is uni-versal and which alone can determine the a prioris of form and matter, of position and givenness, in their universal and equal validity for philosophical material.

Two complementary points follow:

1. Being given the uni-versal generality of non-philosophy, it is less a question in this universal transcendental logic of “categories” than transcendentals (the Other, Being, Unity, the Multiple, etc. and the One equally as objects of a theory); consequently, it is a question of transcendentals in their non-autopositional usage.

2. When non-philosophy breaks away from theories of something in general (object in general + given or matter in general), in the theory of some object X (the Event, the Subject, the Multiple, the Affect or something still more concrete) it must establish that which we will call the transcendental equation of this object X, i.e. to preliminarily define the type, order, nature and syntax of the non-autopositional transcendentals which in some sense establish the proper formula or “algorithm” for this object. The syntax of this system of transcendentals is always a mode of the determination-in-the-last-instance or envelops the latter.

Material ontology (Chôra, uni-versalized transcendental Aesthetic)

That which philosophy becomes or the function which it fulfills in relation with experience when its sufficiency is suspended by the force (of) thought and when it is reduced to its sense (of) identity. It then becomes the material a priori through which all phenomena are necessarily given; equal to the term of chôra in its non-philosophical usage.

Philosophy claims to give regional or singular phenomena through its form and submits them to its legislation. Consequently, it posits them according to the very diverse modes in its interior and from its relation to the experience of universal and necessary structures of the “a priori” type, which are all generally copied from the sciences. It therefore supposes: 1) a certain contingency or autonomy, indeed alterity, of experience in relation to these a priori; 2) a certain superiority, which is proper to it, over experience through the means of the a priori itself—to which it is however not reduced—through which it is the superior form still called “transcendental”: the principle of reason for example must be “grounded” in turn or “ungrounded” accordingly. Philosophy presents itself as both the ultimate legislator of experience as well as its a priori organon. As a whole, philosophy wills or desires its unity with experience, but this unity remains contingent, menaced, aleatory: reassuring it is the motor of the creation of new philosophies supposedly more in control of the real than preceding philosophies.

The suspension of the Principle of sufficient philosophy in its different stages (real, transcendental, a priori) liberates the identity (of) philosophy and transforms the latter in a general way into a noematic a priori of the World or all possible experience, but into an a priori itself of the non-philosophical type. Thesis: “everything, from experience, is philosophizable” never ceases being a new philosophical and antinomical decision, while philosophy is necessarily and universally equal to all phenomena without exception, if the diverse dimensions of the mixture of philosophy insofar as it is givenness—and from the latter with experience—are lived in their sense (of) identity through the force (of) thought. Philosophy ceases being the legislator of the event in order to become the a priori donator: mixture itself is given as identity.

The contingent relations of experience and philosophy are then intrinsically indissoluble or thought beyond all hierarchies. Hence an equivalence (without exchange or reciprocity) of identities (non-mixtures) which introduces democracy into the heart of the given or new experience. Every ontic or ontological and philosophical term of object or action, every statement, etc. is henceforth treatable as such an identity in which experience is immediately inscribed philosophically and philosophy immediately incarnated ontically in the same movement. This radical diversity of “material” identities forms a chôra to which philosophy and its necessary relation to experience are reduced. Philosophy is reduced to the state of simple “material” a priori, or “material” rather and thus itself becomes, under this form, the basic material of non-philosophy. This is the “uniformal” form of the material givenness of phenomena. It fulfills a function, but only from a simple a priori organon of experience. It corresponds to a “transcendental aesthetic” of the World or to whichever experience possible beginning from transcendence. “Aesthetic,” but which substitutes philosophy itself (its identity) and thus its relation to whichever experience for regional and limited models of givenness which are scientific, perceptual, artistic, etc. which would be grasped so as to be assured of givenness and its mastery over phenomena. “Transcendental,” but only because of the origin of this reduction in the force (of) thought. Its principle being the identity—but exercised in its real origin, not posited dogmatically—of Being and the Existent, it thus generalizes the fundamental axiom of a recent materialist ontology: mathematics=ontology (Badiou) by intending it for all experience possible beyond mathematics and by transcendentally determining this equation instead of passing over to a dogmatic thesis lacking any legitimacy other than being one decision among others. Philosophy as simple material ontology is a way of cutting materialism short as a hidden philosophical decision. Furthermore, by limiting philosophy to a simple aprioritic ontology of experience, non-philosophy legitimates it or validates it—in certain limits which precisely returns to the extrication of the violent and arbitrary act of auto-legitimation (including its Kantian auto-limitation or its deconstructive hetero-limitation) but which better assures it a necessary and positive function.

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.

The question which we wish to pose here is not the difficulty of situating the ruptures, knots and singularities within a history of psychology, or even of reweaving these ambiguously differentiated series into a “better” genealogy. Rather, we simply wish to know: where is the eternal return of difference in this complex and heavily-implicated dialogue? More generally, in what way (if any) can a critical “genealogy” of psychoanalysis allow us insight into the problem of differential resonance as such? There are at least three major barriers here obstructing our progress.

1. In what sense is it possible to follow these writings to their “situation”? Many serious difficulties are raised by the clear though uncanny coupling of these thinkers to one another — not to mention the even stranger knots or “pure repetitions” in their respective discursive content — but the difficulties here, while formidable, are not insurmountable as long as we resist the “natural” urge for synthesis (an absolute or pure interpretation.) However, as our reading grows closer to the burning heart of the matter (clinical practice,) we must keep close to mind the really intractable problem of situating any one of these thinkers in relation to themselves — or indeed, to any total systematic unity or ground. For each one of these thinkers — (Heidegger and Lacan, Deleuze and Levinas, Derrida and Badiou) — ceaselessly concern themselves (though ostensibly for widely divergent reasons) with the brilliant invention of better, faster and more general ungrounding and upturning machines — yet, in a sense, at one point or another, they all betray themselves, either by sacrificing difference (and silence) for unity (and writing, mathematics, love, etc.) — and so the machine itself is botched, already tearing itself to pieces: pure theory disappears, sliding down into the labyrinths of transcendental or empirical illusions. In fact there is a principle at work here, a signal for caution: psychoanalysis must be exceptionally wary of the risk it runs of consuming thought in the act of formulating ‘existence’ as a lost object or fractured (even fractal!) subject — out of which a pure difference, a pure intensity, “can” be salvaged. In other words: where non-unity and non-presence are offered as privileged signifiers, we will also find the origin of structure as “internal” differentiation, even molecular disintegration; what is really being offered here is a subjective or even moral transformation: a pure mode of non-relationality supplanting an “impure” relationality (i.e., that a structural, or “extensive,” differentiation tends to cover over an “intensive” difference.)
2. We may choose, after all, to simply call all these “illusions” poetic disguises (and like Socrates condemn them, even while suffering more than any other from them); but it is clear this remains only an approximate way of saying that writing has here “almost” captured a thought passing between heterogeneous systems of language — that strange rarity which can only be spoken of innocently and in spontaneous poetry — in other words, an early map of a living idea which has yet to become formalized, inscribed, memorized, vivisected, made calculable. It is in this sense that Badiou, despite all appearances, is the least differential and least psychoanalytical of all these writers — mathematics is a graveyard, a religion for absolute ascetics — though to be fair there is a “legal” or lethal bone in each of these thinkers’ throats (and not only theirs…,) which is the concealed lust for a pure language, an absolute presencing of human signification, infinitely capable of endowing all activity with meaning. This suppression is signified, paradoxically, by the privileging of a-subjectification, a-signification.
3. We are already experiencing the true difficulty underlying all of us this: How do we formulate the “real” question of their relation to one another without always already placing these dialogues into new systems of resonance? Is it necessarily a matter, in the end, of formalizing mathematically a kind of “openness” beyond the negative — an elemental or atomic differend of non-thought — which would have the consequence of supplanting metaphysics itself (not to mention psychoanalysis)? And, beyond these metaphysico-linguistic considerations, in what sense is it possible to conceive of psychoanalysis along differential, or non-oppositional, lines?

Before we attempt our genealogical sketch, allow me to briefly attempt to formulate the intuition which guides me. In the origin and destiny of psychoanalytical thought, I find an uncanny serialization, a conjuncture of disjunctions, a formal gap which endlessly supplants the old signifiers even as it conditions the new powers — in short, a variation of theme which itself becomes the unvarying eternal melody. Two instances:

(a) Deleuze’s differences with Lacan slowly seemed to “multiply” until Deleuze would finally turn more or less against Lacan in seeking a new field altogether for psychoanalysis — shizoanalysis, the science of desiring machines, following a flow of pure multiplicity through the unconscious instead of reproducing subjects virtually castrated by a mommy-daddy complex (even abstractly, and this is indeed where we have the most to be concerned about!)

(b) Levinas’ objections to Heidegger grow consistently in depth and lucidity over his career; he locates at the heart of Heidegger’s deconstructive effort a return to a more ancient mode rather than a push forward into the future. Lodged deep in Heidegger’s architecture, we will discover a fractured, abstract, minimal remnant of the hierarchical logic of the ancient system — and owing only to this tiny revenant, we discover that the whole system is compromised by a kind of “ontological imperialism,” seizing upon existents through the Void of existing and discovering only a luminous horizon, a silhouette which has lost its face (for Levinas, an existent is the very appeal addressed to comprehension; i.e., Being is “always already” an appeal to subjectivity. [on this, cf. Totality and Infinity 45])

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.

A book by Sam Gillespie (to whom the Praxis of Alain Badiou is dedicated) is also being published at re-press. It’s on mathematics and Alain Badiou (maybe from his dissertation?), and it sounds really promising.

My philosophy professor (Sid Littlefield) told me that apparently there are quite a few books currently being translated (I know that Bruno Bosteels is publishing a book of Badiou’s on politics and one on Nietzsche). Maybe this means we will see Theory of the Subject sometime soon–I hope so… I want to translate sections of that and his books Of Ideology and Theory of Contradiction…which I hope are underway for translation. Finally, Badiou co-authored a book on the Hegelian dialectic in the 70’s. I wonder if that would be interesting to see in English, along with Henri Lefebvre’s book on Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s dialectic…That along with Simont’s chapter on Hegel/Deleuze and Gueroult’s appendix to the Hegelian critique of Spinozist concepts will be up on the site, too, soon.

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, equivalent with “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 problematization 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. Hence the necessary disqualification of the One of the Greek from its empirical component, the one of the count or counting (Badiou), a point of extreme conflict between Being and the One and the ‘death’ of the former. 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 never 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).

(4) The One is the given-without-givenness and separation-without-separation—of the given.

(5) The One is that which determines in-the-last-instance the Thought-World as given (the object of givenness).

Non-philosophy renounces the thought-of-the-One or the desire-of-the-One, but this renunciation has a higher purpose than the renunciation of desire: the One-in-One is the unknown of philosophy, that which is correctly foreclosed but, by confusing the transcendental One with the transcendent One, philosophy believes the former is within its power to think, sometimes close to repression. Philosophy represses its own ‘One’ but forecluses the being-foreclosed of the One-in-One in its own way. This confusion is the faith and sufficiency of philosophy which starts by raising the vision-in-One. Non-philosophy is installed on a different terrain than philosophy or, better still, on “the absurd” that is the Real. Philosophy occurs upon a ground which it delusionally takes as the Real but which is ‘real’ only for experience, while non-philosophy takes its departure from the utopia of the Real. This is not a ‘utopia’ ‘in the vulgar philosophical sense, but a thought-according-to-utopia. Utopia determines-in-the-last-instance thought which takes the Thought-World for its object. Rather than the interminable end of metaphysics, it is a question of its identity, such that this identity (of) metaphysics invalidates or unilateralizes its sufficiency and its authority. With this substitution of the thought-according-to-the-One for the thought of the science of the One, the triumph or victory over the Greek One, over the desired One, whether it is conveyed or spoiled by the Multiple (Deleuze/Badiou), is of little importance: the philosophical adventures of the One are property of the objects of non-philosophy as vision-in-One, and nothing more.

In any case, the vision-in-One ‘gives’ the One and it alone; it is “the” given entirely, the given as the identity of the given, as the given-without-givenness, unfolding or doublet of the given and givenness. It is thus radical phenomenon, without the background phenomenological world in its vastest sense: without Being behind the phenomenon or related to it. But if it does not give the One and if it neither exceeds it nor is alien to it, it also gives the Thought-World, but it still gives it in-One or in the form of the given-without-givenness. The givenness-of –the-given (Thought-World) is the object of a non-philosophical givenness by force (of) thought, the latter itself given-without-givenness or given-in-the-last-instance. The vision-in-One is thus universal-in-immanence instead of universal by transcendence, extension, generality, etc. It is necessary to write uni-versal: with the sense of the One, while remaining in an immanence foreclosed as the Thought-World, receiving it without being effected by it, or offered and opened to it as an openness-without-horizon, from a completely immanent in-stasis [instase]. In a sense the One is ‘for the World’, understanding that ‘for’ does not signify any end, internally or externally, but is available through indifference (and not an indifference through abstraction as this abstraction is generally understood).

Continue to the next definitions

Continue to the introduction of Laruelle’s Beyond the Power Principle

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].

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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.

One will see in this text not only a document and a benchmark but also fortunately an interrupted patience.

But it can be another thing: keeping in mind of course the sense of the proportions as to the historical significance of the crisis, and more still as to quality the actors, one will remember that Lenin, shortly after the failure of 1905, granted for a moment an exceptional importance to the philosophical struggle against the empirio-criticistes.

These are the apparent failures of practical politics, the erroneous diagnoses of “reflux,” the discouragement of the petty bourgeois, always nourishing a race of liquidators, idealists and revisionists, who, failing to instantaneously change the world, even their “life,” comfort themselves while undertaking simply “to change” Marxism-Leninism.

We do not maintain any illusion: the area of this work (doctrines of science) is not only very limited, and very indirect, but it can also be dangerous, if one mistakes the sense of its limitation. We believe it is nevertheless useful to recall which theoretical shift, in this field, in our opinion and from our point of view, can continue or consolidate the revival of “Dialectic Materialism.”

Theory, December 1968

1. Some preliminaries concerning ideology

We suppose here the known[1] description of an ideological particular formation, distributing the discourse of science according to a presupposed difference: the difference of empirical reality and theoretical form.

It is pointed out that this difference orders an image of science, defined, approximately, as a formal representation of its given object. In this configuration, the element that holds dominance can be considered the effective presence of the object. In this case, one confirms the designer as empiricism; but predominance can also return to the anteriority of formal devices, with a mathematical code in which the present object is represented. One then indicates the configuration as a formalism.

It is quite clear that empiricism and formalism have here nothing but the function to be the terms of the couple that they form. What constitutes bourgeois epistemology is neither empiricism, nor formalism, but the whole of the notions by which one indicates, initially their difference, and afterwards their correlation.

This is exactly how logical positivism, the dominant epistemology in the Anglo-Saxon countries for more than twenty years, poses the problem of the unity of science.

In a canonical article of 1938 titled “The Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science,” Rudolf Carnap proceeds in the following way:

a) He explicitly poses the constitutive difference of which we are a part: “The first distinction that we have to make,” he writes, “is the distinction between formal science and empirical science.”

b) He tries to find rules of reduction which can make it possible to convert the terms of an empirical science into those of another. He thus shows that the terms of biology are convertible into terms of physics: physics is a “base of reduction” sufficient for biology. The use of the operators of reduction makes it possible for Carnap to affirm the unity of the language of science, in the sense that a “physicalist” language is the basis of a universal reduction for the empirical sciences.

c) He poses the problem of the relationship between this single language and the artificial languages of the first group of sciences, formal sciences. All of Carnap’s semantic analysis culminates in this question, why the course is constricted through the distinction of the two types of science.

Concepts like: empirical sciences, reducibility, analyses of sense etc, and their refined development, articulate the stages of the position and the deposition of the initial difference.

This articulation is elaborate, special. It is not, in its discursive existence, immediately reducible to the generality of the ideology of the given. For the remainder, Carnap explicitly opposes it to other variants, for example to that of Quine the logician, who erases from the start the distinction between truth in fact and logical truth. For Quine indeed, to admit variables in a logical calculation is also to make necessary the constants which are values of these variables. However, these constants are fixed only in so far as they have to be able to indicate concrete objects. Reciprocally, what “exists” empirically is nothing other than what is assignable by a constant. Finally, as Quine writes, “being, means to be the value of a variable;” the empirical is a dimension of the formal, or the reverse.

Nevertheless, the oppositions between Carnap and Quine are interior to the same problems. Quine, indeed, defines the characteristic of his enterprise (the originality of its subject matter) by the justified negation of a difference that Carnap, for his part, undertakes to reduce. If Carnap’s discourse has as its essence this reduction, then it is important that in Quine only the justification of what is not reduces what is convenient to deny. The difference in question—of the “fact” and of logical forms—is the common engine of these two discourses.

Or more exactly: the instability of this difference, its perpetual rebirth represents the constraint of the lure of ideological discourses, and consequently deprived of any access to their own cause. These characteristics are in the principle of a discursive agitation which moves the primarily empty place ad infinitum when it should mark the impracticable Science of science.

It should here be understood that what separates two ideological discourses is not of comparable nature only with that which separates, for example, the science of ideology (epistemological cut), or a science of another. Because the rule of this separation is precisely also the ultimate form of the unity of the two discourses.

We will compare this with the musical variations of a theme: different, they are, but of a difference which brings them back one to the other as variations of the same topic. The (infinite) system of the differences between variations is the effect of the (unique) difference between the theme and what, not being it, is referred to it nevertheless: that is to say the field of the possible variations, variational space. Variation is only what comes in this space, with which variation merely justifies, because it is the place where, canceling itself in the unity, proves to be the differences. The ideological lure resides in that which one allots to the variations themselves as the causal capacity of the systematic unity of their differences, thus confusing the course of the system and the law of its production, since the latter is only the lack of the theme to which it should be attached.

It has been shown[2] that to speak about the science was an ideological symptom. To tell the truth, this also goes for speaking of ideology in the singular. Science and Ideology are plural. But their type of multiplicity is different: sciences form a discrete system of articulated differences; ideologies are a continuous combination of variations. We hold this assertion as a thesis. And let us propose the following definition:

Being given an ideological formation, characterized by a couple of terms, one calls the variant any system dependent on notions that make it possible to postpone the question of the unity of the terms of the couple, and, if required, to answer it.

I say to postpone, since the unity of the couple is always already the condition of the existence of the ideological discourse considered. Therefore, the question of that unity is a pure and simple repetition. Marx says–with little to add–: man poses only the problems that he can solve. Here it is necessary to say: one raises only the questions whose answer is the condition already given in the question itself. However, it is the rule of this repetition to be unperceived by its operator. And this invisibility precisely develops in the artifice of the variants. To take again the musical metaphor: these discourses are variations on a theme which is not given (which appears among the variations, neither at the front, nor elsewhere), so that each variation can only be for itself an image, taken as its presence, of the theme itself. Hence, any variant dogmatizes over its own precedence.

The proliferation of methodologies, in these pseudo-sciences that are the so-called “social sciences,” reflects an infinite variational principle, as its ignorance.

2. Theses that remain to be justified

We call notions the units of ideological discourse: concepts those of scientific discourse; categories, of philosophical discourse.

Philosophy being essentially an ideological recovery of science, a category indicates “non-existent” objects where the work of the concept and notional repetition combine. For example, the Platonic category of the “ideal number” indicates, in a “non-existent” arrangement, concepts of theoretical arithmetic and hierarchical notions of a politico-moral origin; the Kantian categories of time and space owe a debt to the notions relating to the human faculties of the concepts of Newtonian physics; the Sartrean category of History combines Marxist concepts and metaphysico-moral notions, like that of temporality, or freedom, etc.

Saying this, we formulate the following theses:

Thesis 1: There exist two epistemological instances of the word “model.” One is a descriptive notion of scientific activity; the other a concept of mathematical logic.

Thesis 2: When the second instance is used as a support for the first, there is an ideological recovery of science i.e. a philosophical category, the category of the model.

Thesis 3: The actual task of philosophy is to distinguish, in the uses of the category of the model, a subdued use, which is only a variant, and a positive use, invested in the theory of the history of the sciences.

3. On certain uses of models that are not in question here

The first part of Thesis 1 is illustrated perfectly in a well known methodological text of Lévi-Strauss, at the end of his book Structural Anthropology. The couple empiricism/formalism is redressed there in the form of the opposition between the neutrality of the observation of facts and the active production of a model. In other words, science is thought here with respect to a real object, into which one must inquire (ethnography), and of an artificial object intended to reproduce, to imitate in the law of its effects, the real object (ethnology).

As an artificial object (Levi-Strauss says precisely: “constructed”), the model is controllable. One can “envisage how the model will react in the event of the modification of one of its elements.” This forecast, in which the theoretical transparency of the model resides, is bound to the fact that it is completely assembled (Lévi-Strauss would say readily: arranged [bricolé]), so that opacity is ascribable to a reality that is absent. From this point of view, the model is not a practical transformation of reality, of its reality: it belongs to the register of pure invention, it is equipped with a formal “unreality.”

Thus characterized, models recover a broad class of objects. For the convenience of this exposition, I will divide this class into two groups: “abstract” models and material assembages.

The first group comprises what one can call the scriptural objects, i.e. the properly theoretical or mathematical models. The question in fact is of a bundle of hypotheses, presumed complete relative to the studied field, and of which coherence, then the deductive development, are guaranteed by a generally mathematical coding.

A ground of election for these models is Cosmology. In his book Cosmologies du xx siecle, Jacques Merleau-Ponty studies systematically, without exceeding the simple chronicle of science, the models of the universe: in fact, the Whole never being susceptible to an experimental inscription, cosmology is bound to the idealism of the model. These deductive constructions were born from a convergence: there were on the one hand the theoretical developments of Relativity, on the other hand astronomical experimentation, culminating in the discovery of the red shift in the spectrum of nebulae. The model is a body of statements thanks to what this historical convergence has integrated in a single discourse. Naturally, these integrations are varied, and none through force of law. This is because models are not intra-scientific constructions. As the child begins to overcome, in the deception of the mirror, the horror of its divided body, the models reflect according to the premature ideal of the text unifying the instantaneous disorder of the production of knowledge. The model relates to securing the meta-theory of a conjuncture.

In the second group, one finds material assemblages, whose destination is triple:

1) To present in space, in a synthetic way, the non-spatial processes: graphs, diagrams etc.

For example, the information given by the national census allows the construction of a graph animated by five headings: administrations, households, goods and services, companies, and financial market. Mobile flows between the headings manifest the structure of the exchanges, graph theory making it possible to refine the speed and the dimension of the flows.

This is the occasion to indicate that generally, bourgeois political economy is achieved in the construction of models of expansion in equilibrium: there still, the model avoids the capitalist “disorder” not by the knowledge of its cause (either the Marxist science of social formations and intelligence of the class struggle), but by the technical image integrated in the interests of the middle-class. “Expansion,” presented as a progressive standard, is actually the inescapable effect of the structures where it is generated, with the asymptotic fall of its rate, profit. “Equilibrium” is the rule of security against the exacerbation of contradictions and the political risk of a rise to the extremes of the class struggle. The models of expansion in equilibrium, under the cover of thinking their object (the economy of the alleged “industrial society”), objectify objectives of class. A nation’s economy expanding in equilibrium represents the motivation satisfied with the state’s interventions in the name of “the general interest.” Portable image, the model externally unifies an economic policy, legitimates it, and disguises its cause as its rule.

It is of primary importance to show how econometric control and the increasing use of the alleged “mathematical models” in economy are one of the clearest forms of revisionism, that is to say of dividing Marxism down the middle even in its best constituted part, and an inevitable alignment according to the objectives of the middle-class.

2) Always in the second group, other models tend to carry out formal structures, i.e. to transfer the scriptural materiality to another “region” from the experimental inscription. The traditional book of Cundy and Rollett, Mathematical Models, exposes for example how to construct indeed, out of cardboard or wood, the five convex regular polyhedrons; how to manufacture a machine to trace the lemniscate of Bernoulli; but, just as easily, how to present a logical connector in the shape of a simple electrical circuit.

3) Lastly, a final class of models aims at imitating behaviors: it is the vast domain of automata.

Of course, the only question for the epistemologist will be that of denying the existence of these devices, none of which are similar, as in cosmology, their “regulative” importance in the history of a science, or, as in cybernetics or in economy, their techno-political importance.

We will restrict ourselves by noting that the model, technical moment or ideal figure, takes place, as well as possible, in the environment of scientific practice. It will be noted that as a transient adjunct, it is intended only for its own dismantling, and that the scientific process, far from fixing it, deconstructs it. Bachelard[3] shows well how the “planetary” model of Bohr delivered a useful image of the atom only at a time when microphysics stressed the obliteration of the orbits, the jamming of their layout, and finally the renouncement of the image itself to the benefit of a statistical model. Who could not know renouncing the model means renouncing the knowledge attributed to it: any stop on the model makes an epistemological obstacle. This is to say, to what point the model remains within the margins of the production of knowledge. But finally, at this point, it is not challengeable. It is not even a necessary question.

[1] Louis Althusser, Cours de philosophie scientifiques.

[2] For a series of examples, see: Michel Serres and Alain Badiou, Modèle et Structure, the text of a scholarly television broadcast (mainly the fifth part). In Emissions de philosophie pour l’année scolaire 1967-8, publication of l’Institut Pedagogique National.

[3] Gaston Bachelard, L’activite de la physique rationaliste, chapter III, and especially part 7 of this chapter.

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).

I only say this to arouse a little excitement in the reader, because I’d love to get some feedback about possible translation projects for other untranslated works of French theory/philosophy. Some other works that come to mind, for me, are Lyotard’s Discours et figure cited by D+G in Anti-Oedipus as the first sustained critique of the signifier (maybe a project for Sid’s Philosophy of Language [Being, Structure, Language?]); also Badiou’s novels and plays, along with his pamphlet on Sartre–the first literary comparison of the authors in English? Canguilhem is largely untranslated, and there are gaps in Dumezil’s work in English. There’s always the hilarious idea of translating Lacan (why though with the bootlegs already?). Many Spinoza authors (including Macherey, Alquié, Balibar, -Althusser-) remain untranslated, although Warren Montag and Ted Stolze did an amazing job in The New Spinoza. Many of Deleuze’s seminars are untranslated even. Isabelle Stenger’s work on Whitehead needs to be translated; Zourabichvili is always cited by major Deleuze scholars, and he is untranslated as well. Alliez, Kofman, the Royaumont Conference, the Nietzsche aujourd’hui, Bachelard’s early work (cited by Deleuze in Difference in Repetition), Brehier’s book on the Stoics, Brunschvig, and, finally, Cavailles and Lautman.

The translations that are already on the site will be continually updated and modified, and at a later date introduced with critical commentary. I wish this to be of use and interest to everyone, so come back often and check the translations in progress and, more than anything else, let me know how I can include selections from works that you would like to see translated.

Here are the stable links:

Badiou – Sections 1-3 of The Concept of the Model: Introduction to a Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy – First half of Chapter 1 of Thinking Individuation: Simondon and the Philosophy of Nature

Véronique Bergen – Diagram of the evolution of Deleuzian concepts from Deleuze’s Ontology; Syntheses of the Unconscious in Difference and Repetition

Boudot – The Dia-critical Method; Nietzsche’s Ontology; Discussion at Nietzsche aujourd’hui

Laruelle – Preface to Beyond the Power Principle ; 6 Selections from the Dictionary of Non-Philosophy ; Definition of Vision-in-One (Tr. Sid Littlefield)

Lautman – Introduction to the Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics: Models of Structure

Ruyer – Introduction to Genesis of Living Forms

Serres – “Eternal Return” ; “Mathematization of Empiricism”

Simondon – Section 1, Chapter 1 of The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis ; Completion of Section 1, Chapter 1.

Zourabichvili – Two Entries from Deleuze’s Vocabulary

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.

Even so, the resurrection of the crucified is, “for us,” rigorously impossible to believe (5). Since Paul’s entire discourse centers around belief (faith or pistis), Badiou does not pursue any questions of the veridicality of the resurrection, except to deny it outright.

Thus, a common question to ask Badiou, which has already been addressed by Zizek and Hallward, is: how can Paul be such an exemplary type for the subject of a truth event if atheism is one of your axioms? Badiou might possibly reply that, since philosophy and anti-philosophy must be kept in close proximity of each other, then atheism, in its search for the specific nature of the truth event, should also keep theological assertions nearby for the necessary differences to be accentuated through their juxtaposition. This is the only way for philosophy (and materialist atheism) to guard itself against its sophistic, but necessary double.

One might well question Badiou’s opposition philosopher/anti-philosopher and ask some questions about his Platonism. For example, the word rhetoric is coined by Plato in order to distinguish it from true philosophical activity. My point is that: is the gesture of accusing another thinker of sophism axiomatically provable? Or, to put it another way, how does Badiou explicate what it means to be sophistic? This is another question that will hopefully lead to further discussion.

Having begun with those preliminary remarks, Paul is of interest because of three unusual aspects of his relationship to the Christ event:

1. his historical site (or, the distance of Paul spatially and temporally in relation to Christ’s crucifixion, etc.)

2. his role as Church founder (one of the main reasons being that his writings are the earliest dated in the NT)

3. his centering of the Christian narrative on its fabulous element (this resonates with Badiou’s notion of the declaration of the event)

Paul develops the fabulous element that relates the “proposition concerning the subject to the interrogation concerning the law” (5). He continues:

Let us say that. For Paul, it is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only ‘proof’ lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject (5.)

This reminds me of Foucault’s Fearless Speech with one exception: it focuses superbly on the question of universality, or unverisalism, as Badiou’s subtitle puts it. What I mean is that, for the time being, any thought of parrhesia with its context of the enunciation of the truth—being self-founded via the authority of the enunciator—is not at play here, yet. What Badiou proposes through Paul is the empty subject, devoid of any particularity. Therefore, if the event is universal, then it necessarily must have universal effects. Another lengthy quote states:

Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class (5).

In declaring the Christ event to be true, he does not restrict it to Jews or Greeks, but declares it universally for all. This will be brought up later. Another question to ask, which needs more formation, is this: considering Badiou’s aversion to debate and discussion (against Habermas and Arendt), how is it possible for him to ground enunciation—declaration of the event as such—if it is to be withdrawn from the people. In other words, how is such a declaration mediated and disseminated—if this is possible—and what happens to truth in all of its divergent stages of mediation? What is the role of rumor and gossip to the veridical representation of fidelity to an event? Can fidelity be represented?

No answers yet. But Badiou acknowledges that Paul’s project attempts to “sharply separate each truth procedure from the cultural ‘historicity’ wherein opinion presumes to dissolve it: such is the operation in which Paul is our guide” (6).

Thus the next target on Badiou’s list is hermeneutics/analytic philosophy (6). Following from his distinction between the human animal/Immortal, Badiou claims:

All access to the universal, which neither tolerates assignations to the particular, nor maintains any direct relation with the status—whether it be that of dominator or victim [contra Hegel]—of the sites from which its proposition emerges, collapses when confronted with this intersection between culturalist ideology and the ‘victimist’ conception of man (6).

This echoes some of the statements that Badiou formulates in his Ethics. While we will return to this book later, we can say up front that the distinction between master and slave, this particular Hegelian dialectic, is nullified for Paul’s purpose. To foreshadow a theme that will become clearer later in the text on Paul, we should acknowledge that this clearly means that any discourse of the Master is always already equalized or rendered equal (in-different) from any new discourse, particularly that of the Son. So the Name-of-the-Father is opposed here, and no particular authority can claim access to the universal without explicitly linking itself with Mastery. Paul’s discourse is opposed to the Greek and Judaic forms of Mastery.

The second point to elucidate before we continue with the text is the opposition that develops in Badiou’s Ethics. If the interests of human beings are considered from the standpoint of man’s victimization and oppression, along with the viewpoint that man’s finitude inherently binds him towards-death, then we deny the Immortal dimension of humanity. Despite his atheistic bent, Badiou reintroduces a transcendental element into his scheme of immanent ontology. Thus, by laicizing or secularizing the concept of man’s Immortality, he essentially wishes to de-sublimate a specifically divine or transcendental attribute of mankind, i.e. immortal qualities as such. Before leaving this topic, one thing to question is: if Kant showed that no existence is specifically necessary a priori because existence itself is not a predicate of Being or beings. Therefore, if existence is not a predicate, then can immortality be a predicate of the Immortal? Is immortality existence, or indeed, how are the two asymmetric?

Against cultural relativism, whose reign of tolerating differences is represented by capital’s false universality. So, awkwardly, Badiou begins with Paul’s declaration and immediately brings up an opposition to “the absolute sovereignty of capital’s empty universality” (7). This is Badiou’s Marxist ties asserting the importance of Paul for contemporary history. Linked with capital’s sovereignty is the “mediocre political appendage” of democracy (7). So, in a tangential way, Badiou and Nietzsche have ties in their skepticism toward and sometimes vehement denunciation of democracy as a true political process or thought, including all of Badiou’s appropriation of ‘eternal return’ in his works (cf. “Philosophy and Politics.” Infinite Thought).

–Taylor Adkins

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.

Introduction

This is truly the epoch of absolute relativity. Morality and reason no longer appear sufficient for justice; truth and faith no longer appear sufficient for belief; and courage no longer seems necessary for action! Plato is dead: only a fool today would admit he considers truth to found knowledge.

But his ghost haunts us yet. Have we almost lapsed into a too-precisely opposing view, such that only doubt and paranoia could found ‘true’ knowledge (like Descartes, or his postmodern revenant, Jacques Lacan)? And should we accept this, then we certainly must consider the further hypothesis of Alain Badiou’s that knowledge is always subtracted from the indiscernible truth of an event1, accomplished by an engaged generic process of becoming-subject through which the unrecognized truth is supported (2). According to Badiou, truths invest subjects (ontologically speaking) by a rigorous subtraction or subdivision, an act not of will, but of faith. Underlying the relation between subject and event is the connection of confidence or fidelity which constitutes us, as subjects to a truth we carry.

It must already be recognized that this ontologically ‘alternate’ hypothesis is not altogether different in spirit to that of Alfred North Whitehead’s3 (with his theory of event-particles, his assertion of transcendence, and his advocacy for a universal algebra — of sets, no less,) and even perhaps that of Gilles Deleuze’s (who is also a rigorous thinker of multiplicity, has a conception of a ‘plane of immanence,’ and even deals extensively with “pure events” in the series of the same name in his Logic of Sense.) All these voices are congruent, even polyphonous, and not antagonistically opposed — a reading which Badiou would sometimes seem to encourage.

We should read these each of these singular threads of thought as mysteriously but fundamentally univocal (4). Indeed, it is one of the goals of this paper to assert that all of us are flag-bearers of the same singular epistemological involution, one which is lucidly in process for each of these thinkers. What is not my goal is to explain the unique historical forces which have so radically compromised our faith in the power of reason to discern. Of much more urgency is a therapeutic critique of the contemporary theoretical and sociopolitical terrain.

For epistemology, insofar as it remains apolitical, degenerates into an apologetics for the horror of the real. It seems much more relevant and important to me to rather develop a map of potential fields of social intensity — zones where it becomes possible to create open spaces beyond institutionalized forms of justice, thought and conviviality. I am not here concerned with advocating some new and exotic theory of knowledge, but rather with identifying and intensifying unrecognized zones of micro-revolutionary resistance.

For as reality becomes obscure, so does revolutionary potential: it is certainly not clear that we can collectively will the struggle against authoritarian systems of power without reinvigorating precisely those very ‘fascisizing’ elements of political thought and behavior we would seek to eradicate. “Philosophy has to expose the possibility of a true life.”5 The path I shall take I hope will be an original and not merely a reactionary one. Today we must venture to describe the conditions within which a liberating, utopian hope would become a resonant impulse to overcome, a fresh will towards becoming conscious. For a veritable becoming is beginning to make itself appear possible historically once more, and we would be well-advised to listen closely to the voice of history– to ensure we have not misheard the call of the future.

Experience and Identity

We experience the world: but beyond this, what more can be said? What indeed would suffice to describe the encounter with what is ‘beyond’ any experience? Can language indicate the abyssal and incorporeal depths of its own origin, and could it perhaps reach even farther? And finally: must we silence our questioning out of ignorance, even as our investigation has just begun upon its journey to peer through the shattered lattices of universal order — or is this already where our knowledge meets it limits of certainty?

But before we engage these questions further, let us introduce some of our terms. As I will use it (in a somewhat Deleuzoguattarian sense) the word description names the process whereby enunciations delimit observational spaces, by deploying pre-signifying elements onto a mapping of functions in a particular social field. Descriptions stratify intensities: they invest regiments of distinctions which encapsulate and coordinate observed singularities. Observation will be seen to function as the production of distinctions or divisions between contrasting zones of value and intensity. Finally, thinking begins with an unrecognized distinction.

Now we are in a position to provide a certain narrow kind of answer to the questions we opened with. We shall begin with an exposition of the nature of the relationship between identity and. First, let’s consider why a purely logical account of identity could not fully describe our experience of self-identity.

Descriptions logically subdivide spaces into zones or territories of equivalence. The ontological question regards the division of the zones, but not the separation of spaces, for this is its operation of division. But even the panoramic ontological view would grasp only the most formal aspects of identity. For in an ontological account of identity, identity thinks itself as collections of distinct experiences. Even if we suppose identity to be some species of ‘pure’ cognitive event, this would again demonstrate only the indirect-tautological function of identity6 (“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 passionately to explain based on a total comprehension, which is to be accomplished by a rigorous division. I say that logic studies this same schism, but algebraically rather than differentially. Yet the profound question has remained silent: why is the subject missing from our experiential space? Where has identity gone?

Event and Becoming

It is partly to Alain Badiou’s credit that we now think the relation of being to events as essentially multiple7. But this same principle undermines the very mathematical principle of continuity upon which he seeks to found this relation. Mathematics is presupposed in his ontological analysis of being as constituting a complex and heterogeneous assemblage of events (collections) and spaces (voids) nut ultimately founded upon the void.

The paradox glimpsed here can be seen most clearly if we approach identity naively, as meaning a “belonging in a certain way to a certain state of affairs.” This doesn’t explain what we’re interested in, which is its actual continuity, the unique and surprising symmetry of identity. A subject maintains its identity despite, and sometimes even because of the discontinuity it has experienced. So belonging already entails a multiply-complex balance of coordinating transformations. Thus, without actually discerning or explaining any particulalr identity, we can generically suppose it is made up of disjoint, discontinuous zones of varying degrees of belonging (to some situation of events.) There is no participation between non-equivalent classes, the ontological break is ‘clean’: “There are only bodies and language.”[8]

We find that we have need for a more complicated algebraic structure, one which at least allows for division of bodies and words into partial membership classes. The very nature of equivalence depends fundamentally on this division into ‘similar’ sets. Not to mention the fact that inclusion itself is already an ontological division demands further explanation. After all, an identity cannot be ‘induced’ from the situation by the simple observation (or negotiation) which decides that such-and-such belongs to the event (considering 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! The void undermines identity insofar as the void is divided; whereas a truly pure induction on the basis of the multiplicity of events would affirm that multiplicity doesn’t end in the void.

Multiplicity goes all the way down: as soon as we make a single distinction, an infinite number of tautologically equivalent distinctions follow. Faith denotes reality. Identity, then, cannot refer only to the void’s self-belonging (even as we have shown by infinite subdivision of the void into n classes of varying degrees of belonging.) Rather, after Deleuze, a becoming, a process of actualizing a virtual multiplicity, occurs as an unfolding series of never-endingly complex and self-referential patterns, flows emanating from power sources. Thought occurs on the void, not outside distinctions but requiring them to be made without statist negativity[9].

The void is never self-identical, never unicity but always the purest, or ‘least’ unit of division. For if it is split, it is then split eternally, split infinitely, and so it never belongs to or contains itself or anything else. In fact, the power of the void is not activated simply by its pure, abstract emptiness but rather the mathematical intuition of the operator, the one who utilizes the void in order to reconstruct a fractured ontology. The ‘smoothness’ of a new cognitive space is no index for its fertility. Even Badiou recognizes that thought finds its full expression beyond a statist or constructed conception of reality[10].

Mathematics is a thought sublimely broken, purified of violence, cured of resistance, ‘bent to heel,’ stripped of its subjectivity and made absolutely disinterested. Yet its accomplishments, however breathtakingly elegant and beautiful, always and only reconstitute a shrinking remainder of experience. The technological evolution of human society originates not only on our learning to calculate, but our being made calculable [11]. Nietzsche has identified this process with the very origin of morality, but it is enough to say here that a mathematical philosophy founded on the void accomplishes its aims by a sort of violent self-discipline which thus locks itself into only one situation: provocation.

Even more importantly, such a conception of ontology appears to focus its attention upon an inconsistent layer of being. This logical inversion just traps being in a paradox, and isn’t ‘capturing’ it in its multiplicity but rather surgically inscribing transcendent and radical distinctions upon it as pure events [12]– much less accomplishing some sort of transcendental ‘logic’ of events!

To perceive in reality only the paradox of becoming is to introduce transcendence by the back door, as a desperate escape from an immanent reality (which is therefore all we can ‘speak’ about — without lapsing into hypocrisy.) It is to understand being as a cage, only as a challenge, consigning to the undiscerned and the invisible anything marginal, transparent, or secret. We finally capture only a shrinking portion of living experience which crumbles, continually self-dividing into an abyss of silence.

Hence, we claim that ontology, understood as this operation of a primary division (instead of, say, a distribution) thus cannot in fact account for the reciprocal yet asymmterical relation between reality and time — that is, it can pose precisely but never resolve the question of experience and identity. Instead, we need political logic to follow logically from a truly immanent ontology, which is psychologically astute enough to recognize its prejudices (of identity, experience, etc) and reorganize itself, even diagnose and heal itself. For the ontological principle (that being becomes) has no goal written upon its surface, and even ontology must take care of what it becomes.

Immanence

Immanence is, upon its surface, just a word which indicates that amongst the present relationships we observe, we perceive them as interlocking. It means reality is ‘inner’ space. Another way of saying this would be to say that we do not believe there to exist a deepest space. Thus when we make a claim of ‘pure’ immanence, we assert that there are no extra layers of being above or beyond the situation, and that nothing spontaneously intervenes from another order of time. Immanence implies something special about the initial conditions of any space it is applied to: namely, that they open onto multiplicity, and fold in upon themselves without reference to an exterior. That there is no ‘outside’ of Being: this is pure immanence.

Nothing encapsulates an anti-immanent perspective more closely than the delicate epistemological framework inaugurated by Plato (but exemplified best, perhaps, by the cogito) which asserts that knowing and experiencing are but modalities of a fundamental distinction. Life is essentially separate: both within and without, split between thinking and acting.

But is it really so clear and distinct that such separated spaces would not communicate? Whatever the case may be, in every theory advancing a transcendent distinction as primary, there emerges the necessity for an enduring interface produced by a geometric projection between the distinguished spaces. In the ontology of Alain Badiou, ‘fidelity’ names the connective operation between elements of an enumerated network of forces. In the clarity of this fidelity, the distinctions between subject and event, process and underlying ‘reality’ become critically blurred and radically ambiguous. The void can no longer be absolutely distinguished from the situation. The originary reflection which discerns the indiscernible becomes autonomous — a faithful machine — by this same maneuver.

Love

In Badiou’s somewhat classical conception, the subject-space is divided between art, science, politics and love (not so curiously, he deliberately excludes psychoanalysis13.) Each of these has its subjects in terms of goals, identities, procedures and structures. They are implicit division algorithms which ensure success to the faithful. But we should not judge from this that these spaces are indeed so absolutely separate (in reality or in Badiou’s ontology,) nor should we conclude from his idiosyncratic treatment of the ontological question that his project is without certain precedents.

For example, when Deleuze and Guattari say that “love is not reactionary or revolutionary, but love is an index of the reactionary or revolutionary investments of the libido in the socius,”14 they are indicating a requirement not only for political thought, but for creative activity in general: when we participate in sociality, if we do not do ‘it’ with love, the engagement becomes reactive, psychoanalytic, capitalistic, even neurotic or self-destructive15. Badiou’s sort of fidelity16 has a similar requirement: you belong to the event only when you have made it what it is–and by this process of subtraction, we by chance and faith become whatever we are. Either notion supposes only a single portal to the event: you either enter with love in your heart and hands open in passivity and generosity — or you do not really enter at all, or only to critically misjudge the nature of your relationship to the event. For without love there is no distinguishing revolutionary necessity.

Love is most enlightening, most important when it is immediately political, when it is immediately ethical. When it is so intense that it resonates, when it is totally without jealousy, this is when love unfolds its mysterious potential: its capacity to inspire, to dominate, to intensify a flow of desire. Love is reality: it’s affect is most closely claimed by the word ‘infusion.’ An unasked-for or obscure love17 is indiscernible but essential, if only for its unanticipated transversality, its radical inclusivity — which is why love is an ethical intercourse, or else a tragic ignorance: faith without love is dogmatic, impotent, incomplete and unsatisfied.

We say love is perhaps the revolutionary impulse, for it is that emotion which first reminds us, with piercing clarity, of our real condition. Though we are driven to self-affliction, suffering is not guilt, nor a guilty desire. Pain relates to situations which are not eternal, to arrangements which evolve and change by their nature. To love just means we could not stand the shame of another’s degradation. To love is to precisely understand the shame of the situation — and not to accept it.

Hope can only be inspired for a universal social truth which is actually wagered upon, where love engages and focuses our intensity. Love provokes us to create new kinds of spaces for living-together. To wager on an event is to become infected with patience, belief and confidence, and it is (for better or worse) to become an intense potential for social difference. We wager our singularities, and we have faith; only then can we create a new kind of situation. Faith has to be propelled; it doesn’t exist in rest. Transitory ontology is the science of trajectories: it perhaps provokes the deepest revelations, but never the deepest joys. That there is still a non-ontological space for thought today we perhaps owe to the stout-hearted endurance of joy.

Politics through the Abyss

We no longer need to be reminded that politics, and more generally ontology, are no longer concerned solely with concepts. We can even now question whether they have ever been. Ontology serenely and passionately desires to explain the primordial origin of all conceptual and actual order; whereas politics, slightly more modest, seeks to divine, explain and control the source of value, or ‘final’ motive towards social order. Political ontology is therefore not primarily concerned with concepts, but rather with social functions whose specific operation is division, or ideological concept whose essential modality is exclusion, separation. We should be alert for when a thinker is actually deploying ontological or political concepts, rather than simply dividing in an ontological or political way. For the consistency of a political axiom rests fundamentally on the actual effectiveness of the virtual distinctions it draws.

Our experience of political reality is intimately shaped by an careful community ‘surgery’ which conditions potential expressions of value. In practice, only a delicate subdivision accomplishes the total vision of faith, or ontology. A numerical theory of the event aims at continuity through becoming, where a genetic theory of society aims at becoming through intensity. The essence of the political is the abstract; the question of politics is first that of clarity. Accordingly, the truly political desire is a progression: from the will to transparency, to the will to distinction, and finally, the will to loyalty — or the will to power.

Both ontology and politics are in effect a careful study of the potential varieties (and strata within varieties) of groups, masses, and milieus. More precisely, ontology presents the geometry of plausible inter-relations: mapping logical trajectories between evolving surfaces. Then ‘division’ is the ontological term, because whereas masses are indiscernible depths of correlation, surfaces present explicitly calculable interfaces. Surfaces are transversal for this reason, too: they skillfully restrain their powerful depths, maintain smooth boundaries even as they transcend, divide and encompass the inner abyss with a sublime act of distinction. For even (social and scientific) classes have to do, morphologically and genealogically, with an inclusion/exclusion apparatus, an integral divisibility of property and reality.

Ontological inferences are not simply mathematical distinctions; and political thought precisely remembers the reasons not to give into comfortable abstraction, or to yield to transcendence-claims distinguishing degrees of belonging. For if masses of any kind can be said have an interest in this sense, then the idea of justice even as disinterestedness should invite us to inquire whether and how they are cared for. Thus we can say that materialism (and even, in an ironic sense, its modern subversion) contains an important kernel of ethical truth, namely, that counting is not comprehending. Consider the different investments of intensity from a cursory scientific experiment which merely takes account of a sequence of events, to a mature scientific project which investigates interconnections between and within a variety of processes.

Similarly, framing social justice as an ontological distinction already begs the question of participation: for masses always have interests, even when ignored by those who ‘count.’ Counting can be seen as ‘disinterested’ only through a sublimation of inherited violence, a violence which imitates thought in its procedure of desire: to become invisible, to become shadow, to become ingrained even into the very geometry of the universe… finally even into the clarity of light itself.

Beyond the Count, Outside the Distinction

The territory of the count is not absolute: there are wanderers roaming about the edges, brave adventurers tracing paths into the void beyond the state. Of course, many break down– but some inevitably break through. Those who escape the territory of the count are those in whom real thinking can occur. For Alain Badiou, political thought must take place at a distance from the state in a militant subject. Justice is pure disinterestedness, and the revolutionary’s ethic would have no substance if it were not for his unselfish confidence in the face of the event, his potential to become equal to the events of life.

For Gilles Deleuze, the question of political thought is enacted by mapping fields of differential intensity, offering the possibility of a process of healing social desire18. Deleuze believes we need a radical kind of post-institutional analysis which is forward-thinking and energetic, both critical and clinical, in order to produce results. This analysis is distinguished not by its specialized knowledge, but its ability to rearrange the blockage, misdirection and appropriation of desire by the machine. It is not a political project, but a new disciple whereby we can learn to create more healthy ecosystems — mental, physical and social.

But what ties them together is not faith in the future, but rather a faith in an originary vision of society which has become possible from our modern perspective. We could not have gotten this far without bringing a past along with us; history has indispensable lessons for those even with the most humble or sweeping of goals. Above all, history teaches us that this moment is the event, a rare break in the linear flow of time where we still have the oppourtunity to intervene: but the mysteries held by the future are as dangerous as they are likely to be curative. Becomings of any sort should not be taken lightly.

The question is not: how are we to judge ontologies? For they already contain eschatologies, and dictate potential utopias. Ontology is mathematics only in that its goal is to become wholly symbolic. Logic lives in ontology’s dreamworld of an unbroken text. But utopia is not just a self-contained truth lodged within its own marking. Any particular ontology already has its entire future sewn within itself – and even its prehistory. Yet it is in the form of the intuition that prehistory shapes the present that we find a curious and golden thread running through Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Their modern counterparts – Deleuze, Badiou and Whitehead – have taken a similar inspiration towards a new kind of metaphysics.

The Power of Fidelity

What does it mean to say we are faithful to a process? Do we affect the series of experiences in the same way the event affects us? Even if we are faithful observers, we are mirrors for the world, but we are still not in the picture. Authentic belief is a becoming-void and a becoming-full at once, a dangerous becoming-neither, indeed by an act of pure symmetry: turning something into nothing, turning nothing into something. Topologically, such a faithful subject could only be considered as the miraculous origin of the situation, the distinguishing void-point around which the entire symbolic coordination is achieved. Yet what is most interesting about this kind of conceptual apparatus is not its transitory stability but the implicit potential for evolution, counter-coordination, for provocation and mediation, in fact for the whole complex balance of authentic conviviality. Public space is ontology’s Being: the subject as void-origin just the inauguration of a new kind of public space, which is able to dispense with the hypocritical historical divisions between private ‘self’ and public ‘person.’ This division is the radical core of ontology, its danger and saving power – it is the dream of an ontology.

We should now consider what the power of fidelity means in terms of its construction of social divisions. Fidelity empowers a transitory subject as an event occupying a place between spaces, accomplishing their inter-involution. The topology glimpsed here is characteristic of the field of intensities which invest social drives. Fidelity invests prearranged divisions of space with asymmetrical value; it is the counter-part to a distinction. Badiou even claims fidelity is the operation of distinction[19].

Thus ontology, understood as a primary separation, would divide its own operation by faith alone. What indeed is theory, and what practice to such a subtractive, non-distributive ontology? For it is certainly not merely counting! If the object of ontology is Being, then practically our consideration is not political (at least primarily) — but ethical and aesthetic. Transitory ontology proceeds from a passion to make being good, to make it beautiful, to make it make sense… and only secondarily recounts to make the first count just, to actually make the game fair.

But for the moment accepting the hypothesis, let’s suppose the question of the political is governed by a logic of interests. We would only be able to ask the historical, or genealogical question: how does the apparent order of political categories arise in the first place? Thus we have abandoned a total vision to attain the power of multiple distinctions; but these sublime clarities become blurred when re-cognized as heterogeneous but communicating spaces. Univocity becomes the mysteriously infinite power of division, singularization, disjunction. Jurisprudence is then stillborn as merely the power of distinction, the transient bifurcation of a wandering void.

In other words, if disinterestedness remains our criteria for justice, then the logic of politics collapses into a pseudo-logic of public and private spaces. The field of the political is introduced by a divisional logic. And if politics is the logic of interest, then thinking politically is only about fidelity, or loyalty – distinctly discerning within from without. My point is that finally this amounts to a violent surgical incision, an uncertain split which is claimed to found knowledge. Ontology understood thus deliberately provokes a suffering which reharmonizes our body into new rhythms, making of our bodies, our faces, and our minds a single goal: an object-lesson.

Transversality is something we do

A distinction serves a new axis of freedom for it allows access to new spaces of the machine, implies new trajectories of social movement. But insofar as distinction is a compressed sort of division, distinction also wounds us even as we ultimately escape its grasp. Though we remain but ghostly traces, the passion for division (almost!) fulfills our desire to be whole. In order to explain this, we must borrow the use of the term transversality from Felix Guattari.

Transversality is a group phenomena. It is the unconscious dynamic which propels the crowd forward. This aspect of transversal mappings is already the snare which prevents them as such from being politicized: that those who ‘transversalize’ their group become subject-groups, with definite desires, aims, goals, in short, identities. Then they have already created virtual subjugated groups, and in fact risk decaying themselves into dependency upon a reified transversality, which is already an outdated and neurotic fetish.

Guattari writes that transversality means the unconscious source of action in the group. There are no objective limits it cannot exceed, no ontological ruptures which a transversal mapping cannot reconstitute. Transversality carries the groups’ desire. We cannot separate this from a political or ethical sense to transversality as well:

“It is my hypothesis that there is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self-multilation of a subject group, or its unconscious report to mechanisms that militate against its potential transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance of the risk — which accompanies the emergence of any phenomena of real meaning — of having to confront irrationality, death, and the otherness of the other.” (Guattari, Molecular Revolution 23)

Transversality, as I see it, is an involution of social desire which transfigures reality by scrambling and reordering all of the infinite segments of experience – maximizing their potential. To speak of the pure transversal is in a sense dishonest, because it isn’t, it becomes, it’s already speaking. It is the flowing of speech and even of comprehension itself. Transversality should be thought immanently, not transcendently. For the pure transversal would be the very source of order, in fact the opposite of its aim which is to draw lines of flight towards potential sites of resistance or escape. Thus thought becomes poetry if we describe it figuratively; after all, the transversal is not a point, but the flowing and endless remapping and self-organizing of singularities. Just as with distinction, the transversal ought to be thought of as more a function than a concept, a process than a singularized event. Transversality is not something you think; it’s something we do!

The transversal aspect of distinction allows us to describe what underlies the investments of social intensity in the political field. Deleuze is undoubtedly correct on this point: desiring-machines invest unconscious and even preconscious interests. These are either repressed or transversalized, in any case, no matter how deep the division, we are always reterritorialized into subject groups with identities and desires. Our desires, political or otherwise, seem to express themselves as though formed and even enunciated by complex machine of coordinating energy, force and power. Ontology is a symptom of the social deflection of transversality — in this case inevitably into transcendence, beyond the social. Thus the will to power is identical to the will to truth only if society is to be abandoned.

But, above all, society must be defended. Love names the most disinterested emotion and thus also the most dangerous, the most radical of passions, whose evocation already demands a new becoming, a transversalization of hope into eternity. Certainly faith is never far from love, nor hope from good works: this simple paradox by which abundant organic health invests the whole field of social desire with its intensity is the essential mystery and goodness of love. Faith is involution itself, a counter-revolution which is yet ever more radical, demanding ever different intensities to be deployed: successively, in parallel, and finally even in transversal couplings, fractally self-dividing until it finally submerges itself purely in itself, whole, immanent and sublime. But to demand even more of love, to demand that it explicitly accomplish a transcendent self-reunification of being is too much. Being is a fractal machine, not a perfect circle: to replace ontology by mathematics is to abandon the field of social intensities at the very moment when it is the most ripe for revolution — that is, when it is in the most danger of annihilation.

Conclusion

Over the last century, an epistemological inversion engulfed and splintered our experience of the world like a tidal wave. We have been shaken by a tremendous earthquake of uncertainty — until we have reached the point scholars and scientists alike have actually become afraid of hard judgments and decisive evaluations. Psychologically speaking, this is a symptom of a withering envy, amidst weakening decadence; and at the very least, many thinkers have betray their social function by losing the confidence they once possessed of the power of the concept to approach, and to change, the real.

After phenomenology, ontology is the only science which really asks: does it make sense any longer to follow rules, to make copies of models, to mold ourselves in the images of icons, to become obedient before a sovereign truth? Ontology is the dream of inventing, invigorating and commanding an army of truths, and in turn to humbly ‘obey’ them; and thus to exhaust the potential geometries of sense: this is a more apt description of the goal of the conventional ontological process than as a second-order phenomenology. For there is no outside of being studied by ontology, the other is subsumed completely within the same. That I am another is already a poet’s fancy; indeed it would be much more incisive to say: there is an other within me, between myself and myself. Thus the fractured tautology could at least postpone its inevitable collapse.

My aim here has been to suggest that ontology be reformulated as an immanent science of harmonics, a materialist dynamics of social intensities in time and space. Division is not sufficient, and already betrays the nature of the metaphysical relation to the other. We have to be extremely careful here: the other is a purely immanent transcendence — as the extreme cusp at the apex of a range of mountains. The other is a primary investment of the world prior to my own separate journey. The leap between us is infinite; any path across would also fly between the irreducibly separated spaces. No distance could traverse it; our separation is absolute. This division is atheism, and it is already the ontological situation, that is: an irreducible separation is the foundation of faith. For events are communities, even entire ecosystems: an ontology without ethics would become an ontology without reason. Thought becomes real when it involves itself in the situation, through complex assemblages of spaces delicately cloven by rigorous distinctions– but seems to shutter and shake when confronted with the void of non-reason, the abyss of nonsense or the primary experience of multiple disjunctions.

The present, this convergence of heterogeneous series, is a primary experience which is ontologically non-describable. The truth of reality is an indiscernible which is quickly becoming-imperceptible. A transcendent relation to the infinite is implicit in any divisional algorithm which would claim to predict the future, even if it claimed to found order upon the void by infinitely subjecting yet another new assemblage of forces to its sovereign ownership and control. The grasp of ontology seems boundless, but it is not infinite, and despite Cantor not yet having been made capable of approaching the infinite. For ontology itself has not yet been made calculable, it is still its own indiscernible, and is incapable of recognizing itself as being an artifact of the arrangement of power sources in the social field, from whom its light and energy and sense emanate. Even transitory ontology only provokes the projective geometry of situations towards revolution, unable to conceive of a purely immanent involution other than as a pure act of faith.

Faith in separation alone is nothing but a desperate escape from a dangerous or inconsistent situation, precisely when we should be on the lookout for novelty (or at least a weapon!) Furthermore, by evoking a primary interface to a ‘transcendent’ plane of immanence, we imprudently (and quite impotently) presume a relation with the absolutely Other. Politically speaking, we need to forget the subject and transcendence. We should focus on redistributing intensities across the immanent social field of desires. “In a word, the social as well as biological surroundings are the object of unconscious investments that are necessarily desiring or libidinal, in contrast with the preconscious investments of need or of interest. The libido as sexual energy is the direct investment of the masses, of large aggregates, and of social and organic fields.”20

Appendix

1 cf. Being and Event, especially Meditation 35 (‘Theory of the Subject’) in which we see that “the subject is literally separated from knowledge by chance. The subject is chance, vanquished term by term, but this victory, subtracted from language, is accomplished solely as truth.” (Being and Event 397)

2 “The singular relation of a subject to the truth whose procedure it supports is the following: the subject believes there is a truth, and this belief occurs in the form of a knowledge.” (ibid)

3 “In an intellectual feeling the datum is the generic contrast between a nexus of actual entities and a proposition with its logical subjects’ members of the nexus.” (Process and Reality 407, Whitehead 1929)

4 In Deleuze’s sense, “there has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal… A single voice raises the clamour of being… What is important is that we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one.” (Difference and Repeition, Deleuze 35)

5 Alain Badiou, Bodies, Language, Truths (article, 2006)

6 “Thus ultimately all science depends upon direct observation of homology of status within a system. Also the observed system is the complex of geometrical relations within some presented locus… a loci of entities in ‘unison of becoming’ obviously depends on the actual entities… The factor of temporal endurance selected for any one actuality will depend upon its initial ‘subjective aim.’” Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 195)

7 “For if being is one, then one must posit that what is not one, the multiple, is not. But this is unacceptable for thought, because what is presented is multiple and one cannot see how there be an access to being outside all phenomena.” (Being and Event 23, Badiou 2006)

8 Alain Badiou. Bodies, Language, Truth (2006)

9 As Ellrich observes regarding Difference and Repetition, “Deleuze argues that the construction of distinctions without negation is not just possible, but absolutely necessary, if we wish to break the spell of representational thought and dialectics” (Lutz Ellrich 2003, “Negativity and Difference: On Gilles Deleuze’s Criticism of Dialectics”)

10 “It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.” (Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, Badiou 2003)

11 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 58, tr. Kauffman1969)

12 “The one-truth, which assembles to infinity the terms positively investigated by the faithful procedure, is indiscernible in the language of the situation… It is a generic part of the situation insofar as it is an immutable excresence [something not represented in the situation, but present as operation] whose entire being resides in regrouping presented terms.” (396 Being and Event, Badiou 2006)

13 “With respect to the doctrine of the subject, the individual examination of each of the generic truth 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 ruined Marxism prescribes as a militant task, everything, finally, which the name fo Lacan designates will be met with, reworked, and traversed by a philosophy restored to its time by clarified categories.” (Being and Event 435, Badiou 2006)

14 Anti-Oedipus 374. Also cf. John Protevi from Between Derrida and Deleuze (London 2002): “Love is the call to enter that virtual and open up the actual, to install inclusive disjunction so that roads not taken are still accessible, so that we might experiment and produce new bodies.”

15 cf. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (380-381): “…desiring-production produces the real, and… desire has little to do with fantasy and dream… Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the machinic, social and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the parts, wheels and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them to enter into their own parts, wheels, and motors.”

16 “…[Fidelity is] the procedure by means of which one discerns, in a situation, the multiples whose existence is linked to the name of the event that been put into circulation by an intervention.” (Badiou 2006, Being and Event 507)

17 cf. Anti-Oedipus 367, where Deleuze writes: “Nonfigurative loves, indices of a revolutionary investment of the social field, and which are neither Oedipal nor pre-Oedipal since it all amounts to the same thing, but innocently anoedipal, and which give the revolutionary the right to say: ‘Oedipus? Never heard of it.’”

18 “The task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these–in short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire.” (Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus 382)

19 “I call fidelity the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation… of an evental multiple.” (Badiou 2006, Being and Event 233)

20 Deleuze 1977, Anti-Oedipus 292

Works Cited

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Continuum Press, London: 2006. Trans. of L’etre et L’evenement. Editions du Seuil, 1988 by Oliver Feltham.
Felix Guattari. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1984). Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Selected essays from Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La révolution moléculaire (1977).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Viking Press, New York: 1977. Trans. of Anti-Oedipe. Les Editions de Minuit, Paris: 1972, by Hurley, Seem, and Lane.
Gilles Deleuze. Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press: 1990. Original from Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1969, by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
Freidrich Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals (1887). Oxford University Press: 1996. Translated by David Smith.
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. MacMillan Company, New York: 1929.
Lutz Ellrich. “Negativity and Difference: On Gilles Deleuze’s Criticism of Dialectics” Modern Language Notes 111 no. 3 (1996), 463-487

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

“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]

With Being and Event recently translated, Alain Badiou has now enjoyed over a decade of philosophical clamor in English. His contentions with Deleuze over multiplicity, ontology, truth and the event (among other things) have already sparked numerous responses in various forms. The continued explosion of material onto the academic scene comparing these thinkers could be due to Badiou’s energetic polemical nature and the fact that he continues to produce boldly precise criticisms of Deleuze. One of those criticisms involves pointing out that Deleuze does not consider politics to be an autonomous form of thought. For Badiou, this exemplifies the reasons for their divergence and everything can be said to follow. This paper is an attempt to answer this provocative thought with a conjunctive analysis of the various political concepts that we find in these thinkers in order to imagine how the situation might proceed otherwise than divergence. The problem concerns a different current of thought that creates a space of affirmation for the coexistence and hybridization of the assemblages that populate the theoretical worlds of Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari.

Fidelity and Nomadic Thought

Jumping straight to the heart of Being and Event we find in Meditation 23 the introduction to the concept of fidelity. I say concept, but we find within the notion of fidelity a complex network enveloping not only the event and the subject, but also the State and possible counter-states involved with an other legitimate count. The most straightforward definition of fidelity begins the meditation: “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” (232). Therefore, fidelity is three things: (1) a functional relation to the event, (2) an operation of the count-as-one of the regulated effects of an event by marking multiples as to their (non)-inclusion the groupings of multiples related to the event, and (3) a process that includes these group-multiples in the situation by operating on the terrain of the state of the situation, effectuating another count that legitimates a new space of political representation (233).

A process of fidelity must always make enquiries into situations because of its finite nature with respect to the infinity of situations themselves. An enquiry is a term that Badiou gives to any “finite series of atoms of connection for a fidelity” (234). Fidelity requires faithfulness “to the event that we are” because it is “an almost-nothing of the state, or…a quasi-everything of the situation” (235). Here Badiou highlights the statist aspect of fidelity clearly: fidelity, as another count, oscillates between a break with the old state of affairs in which presented multiples are unrepresented, to the establishment of a new, legitimate count in which hitherto excluded multiples can be said to be included and represented. These two moves are coextensive, but there are two negative forms in which fidelity can present itself, and philosophy must safeguard itself from falling into these traps.

The two illegitimate claims of fidelity can be reduced to a statist or spontaneist thesis on the one hand and the dogmatic thesis on the other. On the side of the former, a multiple is said to be connected to the event only under the condition that it belongs to it. Badiou equates this with the view that “the only ones who can take part in an event are those who made it such” (237). On the other hand, a dogmatic fidelity would claim to be coextensive with the presentation of the situation: this amounts to positing that “every multiple depends on the event” (237). Either a limited number of representatives belong according to the statist thesis, or a maximum number of presented multiples are in fact represented in the guise of the state of the situation’s goal to make sure all multiples are accounted for. Between these two operations that are linked to statist functions, Badiou proposes a generic fidelity. This typology of fidelities allows for Badiou to claim that the generic type is “definitively distinct from the state if, in some manner, it is unassignable to a defined function of the state; if, from the standpoint of the state, its result is a particularly nonsensical part” (237). In fact, this nonsensical part constitutes a real fidelity because it “establishes dependencies which for the state are without concept, and it splits—via successive finite states—the situation in two, because it also discerns a mass of multiples which are indifferent to the event” (237). Fidelity, in its truly legitimate power, must sever itself from the state and begin an arduous journey that I can only describe as a becoming-nomadic. If the fidelity is to perform legitimately both its role as count and as operator of connection, then it must effectively de-center its procedure through a nomadic escape route from the state—it must become-imperceptible in rendering itself unassignable and nonsensical to the dominant state of affairs.

But now we are back to where we began with fidelity: linked to the state in its role as operator of connection and inclusion, fidelity can be nothing less than a “counter-state,” otherwise known as “within the situation, another legitimacy of inclusions.” (238). Here is where the genuine role of the subject shines forth. In fact, the subject is split in a definitive way in Badiou’s theory: between subjectivization and subjective process. The former is linked to the concepts attached to intervention—the circulation of the name of the event—and the latter is linked to the concepts attached to fidelity—the operator of connection grouping multiples related to the event. Since Badiou holds that “A non-institutional fidelity is a fidelity which is capable of discerning the marks of the event at the furthest point from the event,” it becomes imperative for Badiou to split the event in two and argue for an additional supplement in order to assure fidelity’s legitimate actualization (237).

This is the fabulous moment in Badiou’s edifice, where, like the event, the subject disappears as it appears. This occurs only insofar as Badiou is careful to mention: “I will call subject the process itself of liaison between the event (thus the intervention) and the procedure of fidelity (thus its operator of connection)” (239). Yet in the next paragraph, Badiou proposes a radical hypothesis: “If, however, we suppose that there is no relation between intervention and fidelity, we will have to admit that the operator of connection in fact emerges as a second event. If there is indeed a complete hiatus between…the intervention and the faithful discernment…then we must acknowledge that, apart from the event itself, there is another supplement to the situation which is the operator of fidelity. And this will be all the more true the more real the fidelity is, thus the less close it is to the state, the less institutional” (239). Not only will this fidelity be more legitimate because it is less institutional, but it will also be legitimate insofar as the subject’s two halves never join to constitute it. Like Descartes and Lacan, Badiou divides the subject, except along other boundaries: the subject of fidelity and the subject of connection. Since Badiou defines the subject as the corresponding link between these two halves, the true faithful process requires us to think of processes of subjectivity without a subject.

Badiou writes with this same thought in mind in his Metapolitics: “(Bourgeois) ideology is characterized by the notion of subject, whose matrix is legal and which subjects the individual to the ideological State apparatuses: this is the theme of ‘subjective interpellation.’ It is crucial to note that ideology, whose materiality is provided by the apparatuses, is a statist notion, and not a political notion. The subject, in Althusser’s sense, is a function of the State. Thus, there will be no political subject, because revolutionary politics cannot be a function of the State” (63). So Badiou’s convoluted remarks about the subject become clearer with these statements, especially the subject of politics: not only is there no subject in so far as fidelity and intervention must be split to render a counter-state (or counter-count) legitimate, but also there is no political subject in so far as this subject is merely understood in terms of ideological state apparatuses that pre-establish socio-symbolic coordinates through which we must then come to occupy through a sort of becoming-accountable via the state. For Badiou, ontology has nothing to say about the event, but it also has no consistent stance toward those subjects that are presumably faithful to the events that inspire truth procedures, procedures that remain vital insofar as they articulate concrete divisions between the subjects that arise through disparate conditions, such as love, politics, science, and art. This is the first indication that there is a crack in Badiou’s theory of the autonomy of these conditions and their respectively singular subjects.

It almost seems ironic that two terms that Badiou utterly despises come to take on a fuller and broader significance when brought to bear upon this theoretical slippage. I’m referring to nomadic multiplicities and the lines of flight that constitute the speed of their deterritorialization. As early as Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari formulate some sketches for what seem to be two powerful concepts in light of this impasse. For example, how is the operator of connection supposed to be evaluated in terms of its proximity to the state (or the count of a projected new one)? Fidelity must become nomadic in order to develop the group-multiplicities that depend on the event. A sedentary fidelity will ultimately lapse back into resurrecting the old body of the former count and will never be able to develop the consistency and rigor of a new subjective space for the representation of the excluded. Even Badiou’s rendition of St. Paul can be read in this way—the apostolic discourse spread through a nomadic, epistolary intervention that steadily worked through a universalism for the construction of an egalitarian count (otherwise known as the Church). Fidelity must become nomadic, and this means that it has to be able to map out the lines of flight escaping and leaking from major power centers. A nomadic enquiry and fidelity is necessary insofar as the state is hostile to the wandering void and indifferent towards events and the truths they inspire.

The minor mode of a nomadic fidelity enquires into different molecular flows, invents and sustains lines of flight that are not mere metaphors as Badiou assumes them to be. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give a good example of a refined understanding of Badiou’s project: “The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, or appropriating locally” (360). Here the question of the operator of connection in a fidelity is transposed onto a problematic relating the ‘internalizing’ function of the state’s count and the externality of the multiples presumed to be illegal according to the state-of-the situation. Deleuze and Guattari are unequivocal when it comes to this principle of leakage or drift from the state’s power to assure its own count: “Every central power has three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relating to the flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity” (226). These three zones correspond to Badiou’s state-of-the-situation, the alternate space opened up through another count, and the zone of impotence that relates to the multiples that escape the state’s capacity for representation. Fidelity must be able to seize upon and alter the terrain of this impotence. By locating these weak zones, a successful nomadic count attains the potential for destabilizing the official state of the situation. But the power that is unlocked by the event has to organize itself in such a way that the new count is a truly revolutionary investment; otherwise, the state can always contort its surface in order to axiomatize revolutionary desire back into preconscious class interests.

The Reactionary and the Revolutionary

This leads us into a deeper discussion of fidelity insofar as Badiou comments on a fault in the construction of his system in his Ethics. In the “Preface to the English Edition” written 12 years after his main work, Badiou writes: “The subject cannot be conceived exclusively as the subject faithful to the event. This point in particular has significant ethical implications. For I was previously unable to explain the appearance of reactionary innovations. My whole theory of the new confined it to the truth-procedures…I was then obliged to admit that the event opens a subjective space in which not only the progressive and truthful subjective figure of fidelity but also other figures every bit as innovative, albeit negative—such as the reactive figure, or the figure I call the ‘obscure subject’—take their place” (lvii). Badiou’s concept gains extra clarity in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari analyze in terms of the revolutionary and the reactionary poles of a social body. They theorize these terms through a synthesis of two concepts: the split between subject-groups and subjugated-groups and the division between pre-conscious interests and unconscious libidinal investments. Through developing the interactions between these two concepts we will be able to understand how Deleuze and Guattari thoroughly provide a theory that is subtle enough to see the dangers in a simple opposition between the reactionary and the revolutionary.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari stress that the duality of revolutionary/reactionary does not function in the same way on the preconscious and unconscious levels: “The preconscious revolutionary break is sufficiently well defined by the promotion of a socius as a full body carrying new aims, as a form of power or a formation of sovereignty that subordinates desiring-production under new conditions. But even though the unconscious libido is charged with investing this socius, its investment is not necessarily revolutionary in the same sense as the preconscious investment. In fact, the unconscious revolutionary break implies for its part the body without organs as the limit of the socius that desiring-production subordinates in its turn, under the condition of an overthrown power, an overthrown subordination” (347). What becomes clear in the pages that follow this is the fact that these are two ways of looking at desire: on the one hand, desire refers to a break “between two forms of socius, the second of which is measured according to its capacity to introduce the flows of desire into a new code or a new axiomatic of interest (348). But this is to still invest the new socius with values that subordinate desiring-production to the criteria of possibility that are pre-established with the former socius. On the other hand, the unconscious revolutionary break “is within the socius itself, in that it has the capacity for causing the flows of desire to circulate following their positive lines of escape, and for breaking them again following breaks of productive breaks “(348). Again, Deleuze and Guattari are unequivocal when they write, “Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire” (348). The task of the unconscious libidinal investments, then, is linked to the making possible of the logic whereby the intervention and the procedure of fidelity—undeniably dislocated due to the criterion of legitimacy—are able to function by “subjugat[ing] the large aggregate to the functional multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale” (348). Could it be possible that the finite enquiries of a fidelity are molecular in the sense that they subordinate the state of affairs to a network of alternative legitimate inclusions, thereby creating novel processes of selection of the counting operations that effectuate positive political representation?

This reading is a tempting path to follow. However, at another level the corresponding conceptualization of the subjugated-group and subject-group brings to light just how mistaken Badiou was when he argued in his early essay that Deleuze and Guattari are merely returning to the Kantian subject. For unlike Badiou’s conception of the ‘good’ subject faithful to the event and the ‘obscure’ subject that is vaguely irrational yet innovative, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a more supple theory that allows for us to understand why and how subjugated groups and subject-groups continually spin off and turn into each other. Instead of invoking the fullness or emptiness of the void, these two groups have to be related to indices of the revolutionary or reactionary potential in preconscious and unconscious investments. And unlike the subjugated group that enslaves desiring-production to a pre-formed state, “the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct: it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group super-ego” (348-349). Another question comes to mind with these lines: is it possible to think of every count, including fidelity’s counter-count insofar as it still remains a statist notion, as supporting the formation of subject-groups if the former is suffused with an inherent, transitory mortality? This makes sense with the definition of enquiry that Badiou gives: the finitude of representation versus the infinity of situations—in other words, because enquiries are by their nature recursive, can we think of mortal fidelities as a concept that can help theorize not only the reduction of the power of the state, but also the exploitation of its weaknesses and blindspots in relation to the events and truths that escape them?

These mortal formations embody the infinity of the organizations of new legitimate subject spaces through mortal counter-states that continually undermine the preconscious interests of exclusive classes. In fact, Badiou has come close to arguing this sort of duality, though with different terms and concepts. For example, his essay “Philosophy and Politics” begins to make more sense in light of the subjugated/subject-group dichotomy: “Any definitional and programmatic approach to justice turns it into a dimension of the action of the State. But the State has nothing to do with justice, for the State is not a subjective and axiomatic figure…The modern State aims solely at fulfilling certain functions, or at crafting a consensus of opinion. Its sole subjective dimension is that of transforming economic necessity—that is, the objective logic of Capital—into resignation or resentment. This is why any programmatic or State definition of justice changes the latter into its contrary: justice becomes the harmonization of the interplay of interests. But justice, which is the theoretical name for an axiom of equality, necessarily refers to an entirely disinterested subjectivity” (55). This dualism between the interests of political non-thought and disinterest as the true subjectivity of political thought finds a similar articulation in Deleuze and Guattari, for they write: “In the subjugated groups, desire is still defined by an order of causes and aims, and itself weaves a whole system of macroscopic relation that determine the large aggregates under a formation of sovereignty. Subject-groups on the other hand have as their sole cause a rupture with causality, a revolutionary line of escape” (377). This revolutionary line of escape is justice (in Badiouian terms) insofar as it cuts a diagonal of thought transversal to both the State and its promotions of interests (including preconscious interest groups and their respective subsets). Distinguishing subject-groups and subjugated groups should involve asking about the nature of justice and whether or not these concerns are disinterested in terms of the State.

Conclusion: Masses, Classes and Moles

“I learned that [Deleuze and Guattari] had spoken approvingly of my little book De l’ideologie for the way in which I put into play, at the core of political processes, the distinction between ‘class’ and ‘mass.’ –Alain Badiou[4]

Love, for Badiou, takes off where politics ends (Metapolitics 151). For Deleuze and Guattari, love is the index of the reactionary or revolutionary character of the social investments of the libido (Anti-Oedipus 352). Moreover, politics for Deleuze and Guattari pervades the social whole—it precedes being (A Thousand Plateaus 203). This can be considered one of the axioms of schizoanalysis because the latter is the “analysis of desire” and is “immediately practical and political whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relationships, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does. Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new” (203). Schizoanalysis should be understood to include the self-recursive observer space that the construction of a new political subjective space entails. It analyzes the ways in which different groups in relation to their desire are already stratified through the segments that divide them. Furthermore, schizoanalysis argues that desire is always contorted by these divisions. This torsion entails an affirmation of the ways that political spaces are consequently segmented by this deterritorialization. This analysis can reveal effective ways of changing our methods of inclusion that must involve a decision that wagers on the becoming-legal of a subject through the process of fidelity.

We will wager against Badiou that there is no strict division of the conditions of philosophy into four sutures—instead the social field is overflowing with a blossoming of subjects that are segmented in different ways, and these types are not reducible to static categories like love, science, art, and politics. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari make this clear by arguing that “art and science have a revolutionary potential, and nothing more, and that this potential appears all the more as one is less and less concerned with what art and science mean…but that art and science cause increasingly decoded and deterritorialized flows to circulate in the socius, flows that are perceptible to everyone, which force the social axiomatic to grow ever more complicated, to become more saturated, to the point where the scientist and the artist may be determined to rejoin an objective revolutionary situation in reaction against authoritarian designs of a State that is incompetent and above all castrating” (Anti-Oedipus 379). This can occur when the scientists and artists become unbound from the state and therefore become-nomadic. This will allow them more freedom from the sedentary domain of the state and cause the flows of their productivity to enhance the depth and energy that has to suffuse fidelity in order to force it to get up, move about and enquire into the situation.

But doesn’t the social axiomatic relate to the functionality of the state’s accountability? In other words, when Badiou stresses that, in forming a counter-state, “fidelity operates on the terrain [my emphasis] of the state of the situation,” we should understand fidelity to subordinate the “conditions” of philosophy to the deterritorializations that unlock molecular flows on the terrain or topography of a new representative subjective space. This should hold for all four of the conditions, and once we understand that desire creates real effects in the terrain of fidelity, we should be able to theorize more abstractly about the operations under which collective statements are formed.

This brings me to Deleuze’s seminar “Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance).” Deleuze refers to a book called the Sexual Life in Ancient China, and in it we find descriptions of “manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscinerible” (92). Through the torsion of deterritorializations, what seem to be unrelated discursive areas somehow become twisted in a parallel genesis. In other words, Deleuze theorizes that there are social transformations at work that produce a co-development of seemingly autonomous cultural spheres. Deleuze follows this thread up by trying to find a conceptual gateway to these phenomena without the concepts of structuralism or Marxism. In fact, Deleuze goes so far as to invoke an abstract machine and a machinic point, the latter designating, for a given collectivity and at a given moment “the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation” (93). Another paper topic would be able to analyze Badiou’s conditions in terms of abstract machines that cover a social space and refer to machinic points that indicate the speeds at which machinic assemblages of love, war, science, and art can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized according to—what Guattari would have called—existential refrains and incorporeal universes of value (93).

The social axiomatic is being challenged in other ways as well. For the terrain of a fidelity is crisscrossed by flows and segments: “one distinguishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand, masses or flows, with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, connections, and accelerations; on the other hand, classes or segments, with their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line of overcoding favoring one line over the others” (221). Masses and classes? Sounds familiar—let’s see if we can detect the slightest hint of admiration in the footnote attached the section I just quoted: “Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are ‘invariants’ that oppose the State-form in general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the concrete State, and in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De l’ideologie [Paris: Maspero, 1976]. But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the ‘peasant-plebeian’ mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses-or even monetary masses” (A Thousand Plateaus fn. 20, p. 537).

This small footnote can allow us to see a much broader picture concerning fidelity. There are a vast multiplicity of fidelities that spread throughout the social body with preconscious interests and unconscious investments. These multiplicities are also variable in their typology and are constructed and revised, divided and revisioned through singular processes. Each ‘mass’ has to be analyzed along with the abstract machines to which the process of creating a new subjective space endows itself with actuality. Different masses, too, are striated and segmented by the hierachization of class interests that tie the former to promoting their interests back into the given state of the situation. A transversal of thought must be crafted in order to render these interests indifferent by light of the truths that chance to infuse the social body with enough energy to transform—for better or worse.

^[1] Badiou, Alain. “One, Multiple, Multiplicities.” Theoretical Writings. Trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. Continuum, London: (2006). p.69.

^[2] Badiou, Alain. “The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus.” Trans. Alberto Toscano. Polygraph 15/16: (2004). p. 79.

^[3] Deleuze, Gilles with Antonio Negri. “Control and Becoming.” Trans. Martin Joughin. Futur Anterieur 1 (Sptring 1990).

[4] Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louis Burchill. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. p.2.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

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

Of course, with Series 25, one could, along with Badiou, single out the title as the concept that needs to be unpacked, especially since univocity has a particularly Deleuzian ring to it. But the term—and Deleuze starts using it around p. 150 in the text—that most interests me in this series is counter-actualization.

On the one hand, we can remember the play of the virtual/actual couple that Badiou finds so fun to dismantle. On the other, the most important thing is to signify how this term works in this particularly situated part of the text. So, giving Deleuze the benefit of the doubt, we should keep in mind that Deleuze doesn’t use the word virtual anywhere in this passage. Neither does he use the word compossible in this passage, but since he has introduced this term with reference to Leibniz, I think it’s important to stress a point that Deleuze makes at the beginning of the series: there is no such thing as incompatibility between events because such a term can only be used when referring to worlds, individuals, or persons (177). Since the disjunctive synthesis is the basis for the affirmation of the divergent, worlds that actualize events can become incompatible because of the divergent singularities that populate their series; strictly speaking though, “it seems that all events, even contraries, are compatible” (177).

So, simply put, Deleuze’s question is: how is the individual able to “transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world” in order to “attain the universal communication of events” (178). But this is not so simple. Here Deleuze seems to mean the following: if, as quoted above, all events are compatible, then how is any language of the event possible? Before following Deleuze’s argument more closely, we should bring Leibniz back to the center of discussion. Deleuze draws on and explicates Leibniz’s theory of monads through The Logic of Sense, and so it would not be inappropriate here to talk about his theory of monads: all monads “perceive” the world from a distinct perspective and also link up with other monads, causing permutations in the vicinity as they link up–Deleuze continues this discussion in Difference and Repetition in order to explain the ways in which the monads express a differential relation between themselves (47). So, in themselves, monads contain a grain of truth about the world which they inhabit. Each monad must be considered in itself, a part which has a reciprocal relationship with other parts, like a link in a signifying chain, and thus a world is constructed from this double action.

Yet, as Deleuze points out, with the event we cannot refer to a grammar of worlds. Syntactically, the event seems both to insist on its extra-being and also entail a pre-individuality that lacks any true communicability. That’s unless we can bring about counter-actualization. In the sense that I understand it, counter-actualization comes about when an individual considers herself as an event and that event as “another individual grafted onto her” (178). This double affirmation extends to treating other individuals as events and their events as individuals—it is this affirmation that brings events “to the power of the eternal return” (178). The power of the eternal return is what allows for an affirmation of the disjunctive synthesis; in other words, the divergence of two series (individuals with respect to the distance of other individuals/events) is not only affirmative but it necessarily alters the other series by resonating in it and vice versa. It is the conjunction of Leibnizian monads and counter-actualization that allows for Deleuze to talk of a unique Event. It is this unique Event that the univocity of Being is: “if Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with one another, univocity refers both to what occurs and to what is said” (180).

–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.”