Badiou, Spinoza, Lacan and moNONtheism

dominic

Beast of Burden
dominic said:
(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)

I should probably retract this statement . . . . I just read an article on the Internet about Badiou and the Organisation Politique [OP], about which I previously knew nothing -- here's the link to article, "Badiou's Politics: Equality and Justice," by Peter Hallward:

http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm

None of which is to say that I endorse Hallward's reading of Badiou, or his attendant criticisms. Simply put, I haven't read enough of Badiou to even say. But I found the article stimulating and helpful.

Hallward treats several issues:

(1) The connection b/w Badiou's egalitarian politics and his ontology:

"It is a rudimentary principle of Badiou’s ontology, that all elements which belong to a situation belong (or are presented in, or exist, or count) in exactly the same way, with exactly the same weight. Politics is the process whereby this simple belonging [to this space here] is actively and effectively abstracted from all differentiating conditions or re-presentations."

(2) Politics as axiomatic prescription rather than reasoned argument (Badiou contra Arendt):

"The status of universal political principles, like all forms of truth, is necessarily axiomatic (or non-definitional) . . . . Justice cannot be defined, it is a pure affirmation without guarantee or proof."

"A generic or axiomatic politics asserts the ‘political capacity of all people’, the principle that ‘everyone can occupy the space of politics, if they decide to do so’"

(3) Badiou's relationship to Rousseau and the "general will":

"There is, strictly speaking, only one political actor, namely the we that comes out or demonstrates in the real of fraternity (i.e. in the element of pure presentation as such). What resists the organised political we is not an alternative political subject so much as the brute inertia of re-presentation, which is nothing other than the inertia of the status quo itself."

"All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal interest . . . .
Other, more narrow principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are merely a matter of ‘syndicalism’ or trade union style negotiation, i.e. negotiation for an improved, more integrated place within the established situation."

(4) The importance of the figure of the worker:

"By ‘workers’ Badiou means something almost as broad as ‘people’, insofar as they cannot be reduced to units of capital. In the subjective absence of the worker, there persists only the values of capital (production, competition, consumption). Clearly, work here includes intellectual as much as physical work. If physical work, above all factory work, nevertheless remains pre-eminent in Badiou’s account, it is because it is obviously the least counted, the most vulnerable to exclusion from the criteria of our prevailing social count. Because the factory (and its analogs) is thus on the edge of the void or in the least protected part of our political-economic situation, so ‘all contemporary politics has the factory as its place.' By not counting its workers, a factory becomes nothing more than a place of industrial production regulated by managerial decisions. By not counting its workers, a country is nothing more than a balance sheet writ large, a set of capital flows and statistics, a purely objectified (i.e. thought-less) realm."

(5) Separating the Political from the Economic and Social (in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Arendt):

Badiou and the OP have long maintained that ‘the only kind of economy is capitalist’, which is to say that ‘there is no socialist economy’ as such. What is known in France as la pensée unique adopts this economy as its sole principle, a principle of apparent ‘necessity’ driven by global competition and European monetary union. The OP seeks to articulate a viable refutation of this ‘politique unique whose present form is the declaration that the economy decides everything.’ True politics can only begin at a distance from the economy, and policies supposedly justified by economic necessity are for the OP simply synonymous with reactionary politics . . . . On the other hand, there can be no political retreat from the challenge posed by an ever more global, ever more triumphant capitalist economy . . . . Progressive politics as Badiou understands it must both operate at a level of universality that can rival that of capital itself and ensure that this rivalry unfold on a plane other than that dominated by capital. ‘I think what is Marxist, and also Leninist, and in any case true, is the idea that any viable campaign against capitalism can only be political. There can be no economical battle against the economy.’ Should politics try to confront capitalism on its own economic terrain, the eventual result will be capitalist every time . . . .

(6) Badiou's Ambivalence toward the State and Liberal Democracy, or the Vis-a-Vis:

"The OP remains suspicious of any political campaign – for instance, electoral contests or petition movements – that operates as a ‘prisoner of the parliamentary space.’ It remains ‘an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.’ However, it is now equally clear that ‘their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought.’ The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical ‘vis-à-vis’ with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses ‘any antagonistic conception of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism.’ There is to no more choice to be made between the state or revolution; the ‘vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the annihilation of one of the two.’"

"The OP [has] recognised that the only contemporary movement of ‘désétatisation’ with any real power [is] the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. ‘We are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The state is what can sometimes take account of people and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not incarnate the general interest’ "

(7) The nature of the OP's political interventions:

"The OP intervenes only on particular questions, raised by specific confrontations or events, always guided by the strict, axiomatic assertion of subjective equality: political equality for everyone living in the national community, residence papers for the sans-papiers, political empowerment of all workers as workers, equal universal access to health and education, and so on."

"The prescriptions of the OP are invariably simple, minimally ‘theoretical’ principles – for example: that every individual counts as one individual, that all students must be treated in the same way, that ‘everyone who is here is from here’, that factories are places of work before they are places of profit, and so on. A political situation exists only under the prescription of such transparent statements whose universality is as clear as it is distinct"

"Badiou insists that these interventions don’t add up to form a general programme or party line. ‘God protect us from "socio-political programmes"! The essence of modern politics is to be non-programmatic. Politics, as we conceive it in the OP, promises nothing. It is both without party and without programme. It is a prescriptive form of thought, discerning possibilities entirely inaccessible to parliamentarism, and one that works entirely independently for their realisation’"

(8) The dependence of these prescriptive interventions on the State:

Hallward poses the question -- "The question is whether the very possibility of such prescription according to the general interest does not itself presuppose that same liberal-parliamentary realm upon whose systematic vilification its own critical distance depends. What kind of state can respond ‘responsibly’ to political prescriptions, if not one closely responsible to electoral pressure?"

Hallward goes further -- "That participation in the state should not replace a prescriptive externality to the state is obvious enough, but the stern either/or so often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique reads today like a displaced trace of the days when the choice of ‘state or revolution’ still figured as a genuine alternative."

(9) Are prescriptions aimed at the State adequate to the challenge posed by global capitalism?

Hallward poses the question -- "In what sense can a politics that defines itself as a prescription upon the state afford to remain indifferent to global economic trends whose direct effect is to undercut and limit the functions of a prescribable state? Can Badiou affirm both the fully ‘random’ distribution of events and the structural regularity of ‘global trends’ – without, at least, relating the one to the other?"
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
bat020 said:
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.
[/INDENT]

This looks like the key paragraph in the passage, but I can't make any sense of it. I think my next move will have to be to read either the book on St. Paul or else the Ethics, from which this passage was taken . . . .

As a matter of historical fact, many of the fascists on the streets in 20s and 30s were veterans of wwi trench warfare -- men who had experienced the "void"

of course badiou's conception of the "void" probably has nothing in common with the "void" of trench warfare
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
dominic said:
As a matter of historical fact, many of the fascists on the streets in 20s and 30s were veterans of wwi trench warfare -- men who had experienced the "void"

of course badiou's conception of the "void" probably has nothing in common with the "void" of trench warfare

Of course... there really is absolutely no point surrendering Badiou's take-up of terms to their commonsense rendering ---- especially since, as Bat's very lucid exposition makes clear, the void is precisely THAT WHICH CANNOT BE EXPERIENCED.

Look, experience and revelation are paradigmatically inegaliarian because they 'just happen', (I can't have a Damascene conversion by force of will); whereas IN PRINCIPLE at least, anyone can follow a mathematical proof.

I think there is are some troubling issues surrounding Badiou's concept of the Event - has he so evacuated experience that Rave or even May 68 couldn't count as an event, but 'having a certain thought' could? In other words, is he simply rehearsing the idealism that Marx decried?

Bat, the Spinoza anti-theism point is this:

theism is not just a believe in God, but a belief in a particular kind of God - a personal, transcendent, creator God who intervenes in the universe, has free will and will judge humanity at the End of Time.

Spinoza demonstrates, by use of reason alone, that such a God COULD NOT POSSIBLY exist. This is much more radical than not believing in God, since such belief is merely a contingent matter (i.e. such a belief, at least in principle, leaves open the possibility of empirical refutation). Spinoza's idea that God = Nature has been read, by atheists and theists alike, as covert atheism (Spinoza was 'really' an atheist, but, for reasons of historical context etc, he couldn't admit it). But this 'progressivist' reading (Spinoza our contemporary) is a way of domesticating the dread-ful implications of Spinoza's theo-rationalism: yes, God does exist, but It is impersonal, immanent, lacking in free will, and indifferent to human interests, because it is Indifference and Disinterestedness 'themselves'.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
as Bat's very lucid exposition makes clear, the void is precisely THAT WHICH CANNOT BE EXPERIENCED.

Look, experience and revelation are paradigmatically inegaliarian because they 'just happen', (I can't have a Damascene conversion by force of will); whereas IN PRINCIPLE at least, anyone can follow a mathematical proof.

Bat was quoting Badiou's "Ethics" in the paragraphs above . . . . Which is not to say that the language is not lucid, merely that I couldn't follow it

and while i think i should probably duck out of this debate now, as i haven't read enough badiou to justify saying as much about him as i have, i think you're missing the connection b/w revelation and heidegger's conception of truth as "bringing out from concealment" . . . .

perhaps I should say Appropriation rather than Revelation?

in any case, it seems clear to me that badiou takes his conception of the Truth-Event directly from Heidegger

the mathematical proof that you keep referring to is a work of cognition, techne, etc -- which is why "anyone can follow it" -- it is not a truth-event for heidegger/badiou

and as for what role "experience" as commonly understood may play in all of this, i'm not sure

(nor am i sure why i referred to the experience of the "void" in trench warfare -- i suppose i thought it somehow germane to the earlier discussion of the historical situation of the 1920s, when people had to choose b/w the Leninist and fascist alternatives -- i.e., how to tell the difference b/w real and pseudo events -- i certainly didn't mention it b/c i thought it would illuminate badiou's conception of the void)

but again, i think i'd be wise to bow out of this conversation (at least until i've read more badiou)
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
i should, however, add that i find your thoughts on Spinoza compelling, i.e, they strike me as on the mark

but my impressions aside, i'm not in a position to discuss the relationship b/w Spinoza and Badiou
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
God does exist, but It is impersonal, immanent, lacking in free will, and indifferent to human interests, because it is Indifference and Disinterestedness 'themselves'.

i'm not trying to be cheeky, and I'm not trying to be a troll . . . . indeed, on a certain level I'm being quite serious . . . .

but substitute God for some such term as "war" or "trench warfare" or "modern warfare" . . . . and what do you get?
 

bat020

Active member
k-punk said:
I think there is are some troubling issues surrounding Badiou's concept of the Event - has he so evacuated experience that Rave or even May 68 couldn't count as an event, but 'having a certain thought' could? In other words, is he simply rehearsing the idealism that Marx decried?

Hmmm, I don't think Badiou "evacuates experience" - bear in mind that events always occur at an evental site in a historic situation, they do not just appear "out of the blue". I'd agree that Badiou hasn't so far given a particularly satisfactory account of the relationship between the event and its site, but he doesn't ignore experience and empirical reality entirely, as the "miracle" interpretation of the event would suggest.

For my money the reason Badiou doesn't quite get this right is connected to the lack of a theory of relations between elements of a situation. This lacuna has long been acknowledged by Badiou himself and forms the backdrop to his turn to category theory in his latest (for the most part unpublished) work.

Re "having a certain thought", "idealism" etc - bear in mind that Badiou uses the term thinking [pensée] almost always to mean an *activity*. Thinking has nothing to do with mere cogitation or detatched speculation, rather it is always something we *do* in this world... praxis, in other words.

///

Re Spinoza - okay, I see what you mean now. I'm similarly suspicious of the all too convenient "Spinoza was an atheist really" line, it screams of a cop out. Nevertheless, without wanting to downplay the abyss between the "personal, transcendent, creator God" and Spinoza's "impersonal, immanent, indifferent" God... well, it's still God isn't it? Isn't this shift only radical from a narrowly Christian-centric point of view? How does, for instance, the far more abstract God of Islam fare in this?

Also: your (quite correct) move from tedious prattle about "personal belief" to sharp questions of necessity and reason surely throws the Does God Exist? question into even sharper relief rather than relegating it as a secondary matter.

Badiou offers his "the One is not" formula as an updated and radicalised version of Nietzsche's "God is dead" - he also explicitly links the Oneness-less of contemporary mathematics with the "desacralisation of infinity", which he sees as an essential if we are finally to bid the romantic era goodbye and activate the possibility of a truly materialist thought.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
bat020 said:
Hmmm, I don't think Badiou "evacuates experience" - bear in mind that events always occur at an evental site in a historic situation, they do not just appear "out of the blue". I'd agree that Badiou hasn't so far given a particularly satisfactory account of the relationship between the event and its site, but he doesn't ignore experience and empirical reality entirely, as the "miracle" interpretation of the event would suggest.

OK ---- but doesn't Badiou to some extent equivocate between his own thought-based version of an event and a historical event in a more everyday sense? For instance, strictly speaking, it wouldn't be the occurences on the street of 68 that would be the Event, but the change in thought that precedes and makes such occurences possible? If not, what role does the emphasis on truth procedures etc have? I mean his rationalist egalitarianism surely depends upon the idea that, in principle at least, anyone could go through the cogniitive steps of a mathematical proof; at least in the sense that this doesn't depend upon any animal proclivities? Or could an event only happen to those who are in its historical ambit as it were? I'm genuinely puzzled.

For my money the reason Badiou doesn't quite get this right is connected to the lack of a theory of relations between elements of a situation. This lacuna has long been acknowledged by Badiou himself and forms the backdrop to his turn to category theory in his latest (for the most part unpublished) work.

K - I think I agree. :p --- isn't the issue that Badiou doesn't give enough emphasis to the influence of activity upon cognition? i.e. to the simple Marxist thought that breaking out of dominant ideology is only possible in certain conditions?

Re "having a certain thought", "idealism" etc - bear in mind that Badiou uses the term thinking [pensée] almost always to mean an *activity*. Thinking has nothing to do with mere cogitation or detatched speculation, rather it is always something we *do* in this world... praxis, in other words.

Yes, I was perhaps overstating the criticism there, but I'm still suspicious of this: I mean, where does the empthasis lie - is activity a kind of thinking or is thinking being equated with activity? The latter seems to me dangerously close to the idealism Marx denounced.


Re Spinoza - okay, I see what you mean now. I'm similarly suspicious of the all too convenient "Spinoza was an atheist really" line, it screams of a cop out. Nevertheless, without wanting to downplay the abyss between the "personal, transcendent, creator God" and Spinoza's "impersonal, immanent, indifferent" God... well, it's still God isn't it? Isn't this shift only radical from a narrowly Christian-centric point of view? How does, for instance, the far more abstract God of Islam fare in this?

I don't know enough about Islam to comment, but my conjecture would be that all three of the major theistic religions have what (for them) is a heretical immanent tradition. It seems to me that it isn't 'still God' if it's not supernatural. (Most of my Christian students certainly don't think so for instance - they violently object that Spinoza's God cannot be God AT ALL). All of this begs the question: what is meant by God then? Or: what is the common ground between the theistic concept of God and Spinoza's that means that the latter is 'still' God?

Also: your (quite correct) move from tedious prattle about "personal belief" to sharp questions of necessity and reason surely throws the Does God Exist? question into even sharper relief rather than relegating it as a secondary matter.

But, again, we would have to clarify what is meant by God really... because, if God = nature, then what is someone claiming to disbelieve in God claiming not to believe in?


Badiou offers his "the One is not" formula as an updated and radicalised version of Nietzsche's "God is dead" - he also explicitly links the Oneness-less of contemporary mathematics with the "desacralisation of infinity", which he sees as an essential if we are finally to bid the romantic era goodbye and activate the possibility of a truly materialist thought.

Yes - I recongnize that these moves are crucial. Because even (the) God (of classical theism) couldn't count all the real numbers --- which precisely proves, rigorously and definitively, that this God CANNOT EXIST (because that God is supposed to be all-knowing and no being could be). Which is why in my initial post on this thread I made the link with Lacan's gnomic claim that the true slogan of atheism is not that God is dead but that God is unconscious. What you are saying also made me think about the not-all and female jouissance, which Lacan links with God and not knowing.
 

bat020

Active member
k-punk said:
Doesn't Badiou to some extent equivocate between his own thought-based version of an event and a historical event in a more everyday sense? For instance, strictly speaking, it wouldn't be the occurences on the street of 68 that would be the Event, but the change in thought that precedes and makes such occurences possible?

Strictly speaking, the event is a kind of "vanishing mediator" that sets off a chain of consequences, which is the truth process. Badiou's currently reformulating the mechanics of how this all happens.

Re your question, the "change in thought" does not "precede" or "make possible" the "occurences on the street" for Badiou. For him the two are quite inseparable, they are one and the same process.

His close readings of Lenin or St Just, for instance, are at pains to point out how their thought was thoroughly immersed in an unfolding political sequence. You cannot make sense of their writings without understanding that sequence, nor can you make sense of that sequence without understanding the thinking and decision making at work in its midst.

His rationalist egalitarianism surely depends upon the idea that, in principle at least, anyone could go through the cogniitive steps of a mathematical proof

Yes, Badiou's favourite example here is the extraordinary scene in Plato's Meno where a slave boy works out a geometric construction (with a bit of prodding from Socrates).

Or could an event only happen to those who are in its historical ambit as it were? I'm genuinely puzzled.

I think the tricky point is that while an event is always situated to a singular time/place, its consequences are universal and eternal. Thus we can still understand and grasp the force of Euclid's proofs, for instance, many centuries on. So the event's "historical ambit" is in a sense everywhere and for all time.

This identification of the singular with the universal (and its contrast with the particular) is a characteristic dialectical twist in Badiou - it's also a key theme in Zizek's work.

Where does the empthasis lie - is activity a kind of thinking or is thinking being equated with activity? The latter seems to me dangerously close to the idealism Marx denounced.

I'd say thinking is a kind of activity, but not the only kind. Most activity is unthinking for Badiou, and of no philosophical interest. It's the rare occasions when "truth punches a hole through knowledge" that are of value.

If God = nature, then what is someone claiming to disbelieve in God claiming not to believe in?

It would be a claim that Nature does not exist. And Badiou makes just such a claim, in fact he says the non-existence of Nature is the ontological content of the Burali-Forti Paradox (there is no ordinal that enumerates the ordinals).
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
bat020 said:
It would be a claim that Nature does not exist. And Badiou makes just such a claim, in fact he says the non-existence of Nature is the ontological content of the Burali-Forti Paradox (there is no ordinal that enumerates the ordinals).

Good point. But I don't think that the Nature Spinoza insists upon is necessarily the same one that Baidou rejects. Because, for one thing, no-one can know what Nature is. Even God. Because God is unconscious. :)
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
Il m'arrive que la réalité soit trop complexe

I wonder if the language barrier plays a part. Delivering a paper in your second language (which I'm assuming is what happened here) and then being questioned about it afterwards has got to be an exercise in frustration. And cautiousness.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Can't comment on Badiou's paper obviously, but I suspect that someone in thrall to the Continentalist ponderocracy wouldn't be uh especially receptive to it. The whole point of Badiou's philosophy is to reject the whole notion of fixed 'horizons'. How do you know what such horizons are? So, yes, he would fall foul of the 'strictures' laid down by that whole sad crew of limit-mongers ([a certain version of] Kant, Husserl, Heidegger). But of course for anyone who wants to do more than bleat on about 'conditions' and 'finitude' forever, that's a good thing.
 

bat020

Active member
I've heard Badiou speak in English a couple of times and he is disappointing - he sketches a vague outline but doesn't fill in details. But I'm almost certain it's the language barrier. I went up to him and asked him a fairly straightforward question in English once, he kind of looked embarrassed and baffled and turned to his interpreter... Given how godawful my French is I can't really complain. And there's something to be said for keeping it simple when addressing philosophical ideas to a general audience.
 
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