Badiou, Spinoza, Lacan and moNONtheism

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Infinite Thought is right. It is totally misleading to construe Badiou as a religious thinker.

Attempts to dragoon Badiou into being a crypto-Catholic theologian will inevitably produce only distortion. The whole point of Badiou's book on St Paul is that is not a religious text. What Badiou wants to abstract from St Paul's texts, what fascinates him about them, is their theories of political militancy and universality. It would be better to say that Paul is Leninist than that Lenin is Pauline.

But it seems to me that the opposition theism-atheism is less interesting or significant than the opposition theism-anti-theism.

Badiou is certainly an anti-theist: but then so is Spinoza, who is also, needless to say, a theological - or should that be theo-rational? - thinker.

Think it's worthwhile trying to think through the relationship between anti-theism, mathematics, politics, Spinoza, Lacan and Badiou.

As a starting point, some ideas:

Badiou's reliance upon mathematics is one of the ways in which his Lacanianism differs from Zizek's. Zizek's Lacan is the inheritor-subverter of German Idealism, and one of Zizek's great virtues is his astonishing decontinentalization of that trajectory. But the Lacan that is suppressed in order to make Zizek's reading work is the Lacan who was fascinated with cybernetics, Godel and <a href=>Cantor. Lacan's processing of incompleteness and undecidability is one of the ways in which he can make good on the dismantling of the cogito that Zizek describes so well in the first chapter of <I>Tarrying with the Negative</i>. Yes, there is thinking, there is thinkability, but it has nothing to do with me. <i>It thinks, therefore I am not. </i>

That there is no set of sets, that there is no way of logicizing axiomatic systems, is one of the meanings of Lacan's gnomic claim that the true formula of atheism is not that God is dead, but that <I>God is unconscious</i>. Modern mathematics provides a rigorous demonstration that the God of classical theism - the all-powerful Father who knows All - could not possibly exist. It can be shown that there are things which not only we - particular, contingent animals - cannot know, but which no possible being could know. This excess is thinkable, even if it is not representable or experiencable.

Seems to me that a theology based upon the unconscious God would take us towards Spinozism. Zizek is notoriously ambivalent if not to say hostile to Spinoza. Badiou is less hostile, but still does not count himself as a Spinozist. Can Badiou and Lacan be usefully deployed as part of a neo-Spinozist moNONtheism?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
I'm still making my way through Spinoza's "Ethics," so I can't address Badiou's possible relation to Spinoza and, more generally, rationalism . . . . What I will say is that Badiou reminds me of the early Heidegger, the Heidegger of "Being and Time," and that his recourse to set theory strikes me as veneer, the veneer of rationalism . . . . Of course I concede that I have no capacity for maths and, try as I might, can't really follow Badiou's discussions of set theory. And I should also say that I've only read "Infinite Thought" and some Badiou writings posted on line

Getting back to my point, which is this, Badiou is a return to Heidegger. Badiou speaks of four categories of truth, in philosophy, in art, in politics, in love. Zizek correctly points out, however, that St Paul is Badiou's model, that REVELATION is the model for Event/Truth in Badiou. I'll put matters crudely. (1) There is the thinker who anticipates the Event, who is open to the Event. (2) There is the Event, which event cannot be understood in terms of what came before, which could not have been calculated in advance, because it is radically heterogeneous from the world/constellation that it shakes/interrupts. (3) I this event is to indeed count as an Event, if it is to be an effective rupture or break with the existing order or State or things, then the thinker must be true to its meaning, which means, in the first instance, NAMING the event an Event, which is the same as DECIDING that the event has necessitated the need to count everything anew. (4) This decision is groundless from the standpoint of the existing order of things. Where some decide the event is the true Event, others decide that the Event is a pseudo Event, and they ignore its truth, its power, its call. The believers call the deniers blind, the deniers call the believers fools, and there is no measure to adjudicate between them. (5) The thinker who HEEDS the Event must now be true to its meaning, faithful to its call. To the extent the thinker is faithful, his words and thoughts RING true as a bell. And insofar as he falls away from the truth of the Event, he is inauthentic, his words empty, his actions hollow, his thoughts at best correct, never powerful or true. (6) Truth is now the process of making sense of the world anew, in the light of the Event . . . . And so on.

Badiou, no less than Heidegger, is on the side of Revelation, not Reason. Revelation precedes Reason. Reason merely operates in the world disclosed by the thinking of the Event.

Correct me if I'm wrong
 
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k-punk

Spectres of Mark
All of this is right except for the emphasis on Revelation. The Event is precisely NOT an Experience. It is not something private, but is defined by its TRANSMISSIBILITY. The Event belongs to reason, and not at all to Revelation. The model is the demonstration of a new mathematical proof, not some ineffable, inexplicable happenstance.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
Badiou has four categories of truth, philosophy, science, politics, love. (I got it wrong in the passage above, substituting science with art.) The truth of love, it would seem, is *not* transmissible; it is private, its possible truth limited to two persons. Whether this infects the other categories, I'm not sure . . . . Further, the truth of religion *is* transmissible. Why equate revelation with private conscience? This is a modern notion, as is "experience." If revelation were not transmissible -- capable of being shared -- then it would not be, ipso facto, the foundation of truth and meaning. An Event is Revelatory. An Event Reveals the need to count everything anew . . . . Actually, does Badiou even use the term "transmissible"? Seems to me that he has in mind the Heideggerian concept of "space." The two lovers live "in" the truth or space of their love. Modern science exists "in" the space opened up by Galileo, Descartes, etc, and the truth of modern science consists in its keeping faith with the Event of modern science's founding . . . . Last, precisely because the Event is radically heterogenous to the standing order of things, precisely because it exceeds existing norms and measures, its Truth *cannot* simply be demonstrated. That is, Badiou may claim that he can "demonstrate" the ontological structure of Event/Truth by recourse to set theory, such that he perhaps qualifies as some kind of rationalist. But what he describes -- the Event -- is a work of Revelation. The Event reveals . . . .
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Thing is though, if disovering a mathematical proof is a 'revelation', and seeing an angel is transmissible, then I have no possible concept of what you mean by a 'revelation'.

The point is that revelation CANNOT and HAS NOT been the basis of anything except pagan mystery cults like Catholicism. It can have nothing to do with (Badiou's notion of) Truth, precisely because it is not COGNITIVELY replicable. Paul's Damascene conversion is NOT what Badiou is interested in about Paul (indeed Paul himself barely mentioned it).

What is transmissible about revelation is only the kind of mind virus that the likes of Dawkins describe. Such revelation has to be taken on trust, and is therefore fit only as the basis of an authoritarian, mystagogic cult. 'I believe in Christ because I believe that X was telling the truth when they had an experience of Christ (or one of his emissaries).' The point is that, in principle, ANYONE could cognitively reproduce the steps that lead to a mathematical proof. Revelatory experience can only be undergone by those to whom it randomly happens.

I think Badiou is on dodgy ground with the love thing myself, but he obviously doesn't think it is a matter of private experience.
 

bat020

Active member
k-punk said:
It would be better to say that Paul is Leninist than that Lenin is Pauline.

Yes. Religion is mystified politics.

k-punk said:
Badiou is certainly an anti-theist: but then so is Spinoza, who is also, needless to say, a theological - or should that be theo-rational? - thinker.

Not sure what you mean by "anti-theist" here, nor what is "anti-theist" about Spinoza: God is a central category in his works, surely? Badiou argues that Spinoza's ontology is fundamentally "closed", that it conflates certain crucial distinctions (eg presentation v representation, situation v state), that it admits no possibility of the event, in short that it reinstates the transcendent One.

It's also worth noting that the aspect of Spinoza that Badiou is most positive about is that which most contemporary Spinozists ignore or downplay - his "geometric method". On this note, there's a fascinating comment in Badiou's book on Deleuze:

"His [Deleuze's] canonical references (the Stoics, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson...) were the opposite of my own (Plato, Hegel, Husserl)... Spinoza was a point of intersection, but "his" Spinoza was (and still is) for me an unrecognisable creature."
 

bat020

Active member
dominic said:
Badiou reminds me of the early Heidegger, the Heidegger of "Being and Time," and that his recourse to set theory strikes me as veneer, the veneer of rationalism

That's an absurd thing to say. Badiou's work for the past two decades has been intricately, intimately, unyieldingly involved with mathematics. To dismiss this as a "veneer" is sheer philistinism.

I suspect there may be some wishful thinking going on here, after all, Badiou would be an awful lot easier to assimilate into the Academic Theory Production Industry if it wasn't for all those pesky symbols.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
bat020 said:
That's an absurd thing to say. Badiou's work for the past two decades has been intricately, intimately, unyieldingly involved with mathematics. To dismiss this as a "veneer" is sheer philistinism.

I suspect there may be some wishful thinking going on here, after all, Badiou would be an awful lot easier to assimilate into the Academic Theory Production Industry if it wasn't for all those pesky symbols.

i conceded at the outset that i was not well versed in badiou . . . . i'm simply a layman who has an opinion about badiou's position, based upon my first readings of him . . . . in time, that opinion may change as i read more of badiou's works

my (provisional) opinion may also change if i'm persuaded of the merits of a contrary interpetration . . . .

however, despite your haughty remarks, you've made no argument. my choice of the word "veneer" may have been ill advised, but your reference to badiou's 20-year engagment with higher mathematics and set theory in no way establishes that his philosophy is, in the final analysis, rational. it shows only that badiou's ambition *may* have been to give a rational account of what is -- or that his ambition *may* have been to overcome heidegger . . . . but it seems to me that the primacy of the Event must mean the primacy of Revelation . . . . and that any historical actor's decision to treat the Event as the Event is just that, a decision to count everything anew . . . .

that is, Badiou gives us no rational ground for treating the Russian Revolution as an Event, on the one side, and treating the Wilsonian project for spreading liberal democracy as a pseudo-Event, on the other. And the reason there can be no rational ground is that the Truth of the Russian Revolution, or the Truth of the French Revolution, is in the most important respect a matter of Revelation

ALSO, I noted in passing above that Badiou's recourse to set theory may have proven profitable for his FORMAL ontology -- but the question is how to get from FORM to CONTENT

and just because a thinker is rigorous does not mean his philosophy is rationalist -- certainly the early heidegger was rigorous! -- and i mean this as no criticism of either heidegger or badiou -- if the world is not in the final analysis rational, then no honest philosopher can have a rationalist philosophy

again, i've only read a few things by Badiou and may well be wrong in my assessment of his position. but rather than dismiss my comments out of hand, why not condescend to make an argument?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
or if your position is based upon someone else's interpretation of Badiou, then why not post a link to that interpretation . . . . you know, be helpful
 

bat020

Active member
Dominic, my point was simply that mathematics is central to Badiou's project and that it is quite witless to dismiss this engagement as a "veneer". Given that you've conceded this very point, I'm at a loss to understand your protests that I am being haughty, unhelpful, failing to provide arguments etc etc.

I can't see how there can be any doubting that Badiou's ambition is to provide a rationalist account of ontology that opposes and supersedes Heidegger's work. He explicitly says as much, on several occasions. See "Manifesto for Philosophy", for instance, or the introduction to Being and Event. Whether Badiou succeeds in his stated ambition is, of course, another matter.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
dominic said:
Badiou gives us no rational ground for treating the Russian Revolution as an Event, on the one side, and treating the Wilsonian project for spreading liberal democracy as a pseudo-Event, on the other. And the reason there can be no rational ground is that the Truth of the Russian Revolution, or the Truth of the French Revolution, is in the most important respect a matter of Revelation

actually, I gave a really poor example here. STATES spread liberal democracy, and states may be said to FORCE the (pseudo) event of liberal democracy's worldwide victory and truth -- so Badiou does seem to account for this difference. (Although this points to a second set of problems with Badiou, which is that he seems to have no interest in pursuing the question of political order -- of why one kind of political order is preferable to another kind -- for Badiou the only politics worth discussing are ecstastic politics, revolutionary politics, the politics of the mobilized collective -- but it seems to me that so long as Badiou avoids the question of the best regimes, or of better vs worse regimes, he'll be vulnerable to the charge that his philosophy lacks content)

the example I was trying to think of, however, which either Badiou or Zizek gives, is how to distinguish b/w the Russian Revolution of 1917/20 as a true event and the Fascist street revolutions of the 1920s as pseudo events -- and on this point there would seem to be no rational ground for knowing the difference
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
Thing is though, if disovering a mathematical proof is a 'revelation', and seeing an angel is transmissible, then I have no possible concept of what you mean by a 'revelation' . . . . The point is that, in principle, ANYONE could cognitively reproduce the steps that lead to a mathematical proof. Revelatory experience can only be undergone by those to whom it randomly happens.

The mathematical proof is the work of reason. However, the decision to rely on math to explain and make sense of the world is a decision that has its basis in a kind of revelatory experience. The world understood in terms of physics seems more "true" or more "reliable" [reliability as a transmutation of truth] than does the world understood in terms of this or that religious orthodoxy. Modern science is an ongoing project, and the people who enter into that project as research scientists and mathematicians do so as a matter of faith -- faith that the most important kinds of knowledge are to be gained through the scientific method, or faith that the best life is the life devoted to scientific inquiry -- and everybody else defers to the authority of the scientific elite, largely because products and inventions traceable to modern scientific inquiry have proven so useful, made the average person's life so much more easy and comfortable, or because military technologies traceable to modern scientific inquiry have allowed nations which host such inquiry to dominate others

But the example of science is your best card, my weakest card . . . . Again, Badiou has four categories of truth: science, politics, love, philosophy . . . . Does Badiou anywhere provide a rational account of the Event of love, politics, or philosophy??? I ask this question because, again, I'm not well versed in Badiou -- and I assume you've read much more of him

Further, I do recall Badiou describing the truth of science as a process that keeps faith with the founding of modern science by Galileo/Descartes . . . . If you'd like, I can go back to "Infinite Thought" in search of quotes or consult the Zizek article posted on the web
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
Thing is though, if disovering a mathematical proof is a 'revelation', and seeing an angel is transmissible, then I have no possible concept of what you mean by a 'revelation'.

What I mean by "revelation" is Heidegger's concept of TURNS in the history of Being

so it then becomes a matter of determining how many crucial turns have occurred in this history

However, on the level of the individual person, I mean by the term "revelation" that which is for him most true or important -- God or gods, science or philosophy, music or making money, and so forth -- for surely no person makes this decision based on reason -- and to the extent that a person fails to even make a "decision" on what is most important to him, then he merely accepts prevailing opinion -- and prevailing OPINION is the degenerate form of authoritative revelation

And rather than use the bogeyman of angels, let's talk in terms of music -- Wasn't the "truth" of rave music a matter of REVELATION for those who were drawn into its matrix? And to put it in Badiou's terms, could it not even be argued that rave music EXCEEDED the pop music/pop culture paradigm as it had stood up until 1988/1990, such that everything had to be counted anew -- AND YET the only people who would have believed this to be true were people who had undergone the revelation, who knew first-hand the power of the music and scene -- for everyone else, rave was merely a blip on the pop culture radar screen, not a true Event
 
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bat020

Active member
dominic said:
the example I was trying to think of, however, which either Badiou or Zizek gives, is how to distinguish b/w the Russian Revolution of 1917/20 as a true event and the Fascist street revolutions of the 1920s as pseudo events -- and on this point there would seem to be no rational ground for knowing the difference

This point is treated at length in "Ethics" - Badiou's basic argument is that fascism is not universalisable (it is based on plenitude rather than the void, its "subject" is the "German nation" rather than the international proletariat), consequently it is a simulacrum of an event, specifically of the Bolshevik event.
 

bat020

Active member
Also, for the record, Badiou's four truth procedures are: art, science, politics, love. Philosophy is *not* a truth procedure, it does not produce truths directly and is entirely dependent on its four conditions for its existence.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
okay -- thanks -- that's what i'd call "helpful" comments! (i suspected that i had the four truth procedures wrong -- but hadn't reflected upon why i had them wrong)
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
bat020 said:
Badiou's basic argument is that fascism is not universalisable (it is based on plenitude rather than the void . . . )

what do you (or Badiou) mean by "plenitude rather than the void"?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
dominic said:
However, on the level of the individual person, I mean by the term "revelation" that which is for him most true or important -- God or gods, science or philosophy, music or making money, and so forth -- for surely no person makes this decision based on reason -- and to the extent that a person fails to even make a "decision" on what is most important to him, then he merely accepts prevailing opinion -- and prevailing OPINION is the degenerate form of authoritative revelation

actually, reading this passage over, it looks like i may be conflating inclination w/ revelation . . . .

but the expression that people give to their inclinations is largely determined by the political-religious order in which they live, by the prevailing opinions of the best way to lead one's life
 

Wrong

Well-known member
dominic said:
but the expression that people give to their inclinations is largely determined by the political-religious order in which they live, by the prevailing opinions of the best way to lead one's life

Largely but not entirely, and I think for Badiou that's important. Isn't this where his concept of the situation comes in? For ontological reasons, the situation can't be all-encompassing, there's always the space for an event. Of course, this brings back your problem about how we figure out what is an event, which I also haven't figured out yet.
 

bat020

Active member
dominic said:
what do you (or Badiou) mean by "plenitude rather than the void"?

Here's the man himself (from "Ethics", pp72-73):

When the Nazis talked about the 'National Socialist revolution', they borrowed names - 'revolution', 'socialism' - justified by the great modern political events (the Revolution of 1792, or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917). A whole series of characteristics are related to and legitimated by this borrowing: the break with the old order, the support sought from mass gatherings, the dictatorial style of the state, the pathos of the decision, the eulogy of the Worker, and so forth.

However, the 'event' thus named - although in certain formal respects it is similar to those from which it borrows its name and characteristics, and without which it would have no constituted political language in which to formulate proposals of its own - is distinguished by a vocabulary of plenitude, or substance: the National Socialist revolution - say the Nazis - will carry a particular community, the German people, towards its true destiny, which is a destiny of universal domination.

So that the 'event' is supposed to bring into being, and name, not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude - not the universality of that which is sustained, precisely, by no particular characteristic (no particular multiple), but the absolute particularity of a community, itself rooted in the characteristics of its soil, its blood, and its race.

What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth - which is the only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally - is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void. The void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone. It is the absolute neutrality of being - such that the fidelity that originates in an event, although it is an immanent break within a singular situation, is none the less univerally addressed.

By contrast, the striking break provoked by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, although formally indistinguishable from an event - it is precisely this that led Heidegger astray - since it conceives itself as a 'German' revolution, and is faithful only to the alleged national substance of a people, is actually addressed only to those that it deems 'German'.

It is thus - right from the moment the event is named, and despite the fact that this nomination ('revolution') functions only under the condition of true universal events (for example the Revolutions of 1792 or 1917) - radically incapable of any truth whatsoever.​
 
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