spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation

Badiou, A. (2005) Infinite Thought. London: Continuum

It has only been in the last decade or so that Alain Badiou’s work has been translated into English; since then his (radical) ideas have percolated into various disparate areas of study. Within geography, two recent papers explicitly draw on Badiou’s work (see Bassett, 2008; and Dewsbury, 2007) and have provided very thorough commentaries on his innovative philosophy. As part of this on-going venture of translation, Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens have collated what they describe as a representative selection of Badiou’s work: Infinite Thought (IT). In this collection of essays, Alain Badiou addresses the problem of the current end-state of philosophy and attempts to re-invigorate the discipline. He identifies the source of disquiet in the major branches of modern philosophy and pleads for an interruption to these practices in order to take a different position and find a way to allow a notion of truth to re-emerge as a legitimate philosophical concern. Rupture, or interruption as Hewson (2006) remarks, is a key word here, suggesting a radical shift towards truth and not meaning, things and not words.

Arguably the highlights of this collection are to be found at the beginning and the end of the book: Feltham and Clemens provide not only an excellent introduction to Badiou and his philosophical project but also include an interview with the man himself (‘Ontology and Politics’), which serves to query the nature of truth, situations and events. Following the introduction there are eight chapters which are entitled ‘Philosophy and …’; these topics include: desire, truth, politics, psychoanalysis, art, cinema, the ‘death of communism’ and the ‘war against terrorism’. It is only in the penultimate chapter that Badiou, albeit briefly, describes his definition of philosophy. It is perhaps worth noting that the translators\\editors have adapted the previous titles of the papers to create thematic chapter headings. The origins of these papers are in fact rather varied: three were presented at conferences in Australia in 1999 (1, 2 & 4), two are from Badiou’s book Conditions¹ (5 & 9) and the others are from journals (3 & 6), a book (7) and a talk in Paris (8). The last chapter, the interview, or rather a discussion, took place in Australia (10).

Truth is the central notion of Badiou’s philosophy: truth is what disturbs\\ destroys\\ interrupts the order of knowledge or politics. What is true forces us to commit ourselves to some new idea or new world of ideas. Truth occurs in an event to a subject, and it cannot fold itself into preformed or known categories. It proceeds in the subject in an act of faith on the one hand, but (being unknown and therefore unsayable) proceeds by chance and adhering to the lessons of the event. What is unnameable thereby becomes a kind of clean slate upon which the singular event and subject force their existence, generating something new in the face of the unknown. Hold on(!), I hear you say: what about Badiou’s ontology? And what does he mean by ‘event’?

Badiou understands mathematics as ontology²: maths speaks of or writes being (IT: 10). From this point of departure, he is able to draw on set theory which he argues makes no “claims concerning the nature of being, nor concerning the adequation of its categories to being” (IT: 13). Indeed, Badiou’s ontology is subtractive; it speaks of beings without reference to their attributes or identities. In effect, all qualities are subtracted. Already it is clear that there is a disconnect between ontology proper, the formal language of set theory, and meta-ontology, Badiou’s translation of set theory’s axioms and theorems into philosophical terms. This review does not dwell on set theory however, and is instead more interested in the notion of event which recurs throughout the book.

Badiou has a dramatic view of the event. For him, an event is a “major historical turning point, or moment of rupture in time and space, which brings something new into the world” (Bassett, 2008: 895). This is not the same as an ordinary event, such as a birthday, a sporting event or even death³; it is a totally disruptive occurrence (IT: 20) which is rare and unpredictable. Interestingly, although he employs the notion of rupture, Badiou is keen to stress that events cannot easily be recognised within a given state of affairs and thus have no well-defined location. Badiou suggests a certain fidelity to the event whereby it is named and believed to exist. He argues that “not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in” (IT: 5). Thus, an occurrence becomes an event to the extent that it is injected with subjective significance. Put differently: the singular truth, arising in an event, happens to (or calls into being) a subject.

Badiou argues that the nonlocation of an event and its relation to truth avoids a monolithic politics yet retains militancy: ‘truth’ emerges in the naming and militant fidelity. In other words, “someone must recognise and name that event as an event whose implications concern the nature of the entire situation” (IT: 20-21). It is quite possible that an event occurs in a situation but that nothing changes, simply because nobody recognises the event’s importance for the situation. Indeed, as Feltham & Clemens remark, they were required to create the neologism ‘evental-site’ (see IT: 28n.26), as ‘event-site’ would not be an appropriate translation for site événementiel, as it suggests that the site is defined by the occurrence of an event.

Although fidelity, event and situation are all technical terms of Badiou’s ontology, Feltham & Clemens remark that the “reader’s intuitive sense of these words can be trusted to provide an initial approximation” (IT: 26n.10). One way of thinking the event is through love. When two people fall in love, their ‘meeting’ (whether that meeting be a matter of hours\\days\\years\\life) forms an event for a couple in relation to which they change their lives; love changes their relation to the world irrevocably (IT: 5). The duration of the relationship depends, Badiou would argue, upon the couple’s “fidelity to that event and how they change according to what they discover through love” (ibid.). Although this hints at predestination, Badiou counters that there is “nothing other than chance encounters between particular humans and particular events; and subjects may be born out of such encounters” (IT: 6).

Here readers may begin to accuse Badiou of decisionism, an accusation he refutes wholeheartedly in the last chapter. To reiterate, the “crucial question is the event and the event is not the result of a decision [which he had claimed in his hefty tome ‘Being and Event’]”; the decision is to uniquely be faithful to the transformation of the logic of the situation (IT: 129-130). Philosophy, therefore, is “required to ensure that thought can receive and accept the drama of the event” (IT: 41), as well as “seize the event of truths, their newness, and their precarious trajectory” (IT: 57). Badiou writes that truth begins with an axiom of truth, a groundless decision: that the event has taken place (IT: 46). The truth is not, it occurs (IT: 125). If that’s hard enough to understand, there’s more: although a “a truth commences by an event, … this event has always disappeared or been abolished; there will never be any knowledge of it. The event thus forms the real and absent cause of truth” (IT: 65). Truth is something new⁴ (IT: 45), a commitment and an openness. Truth is something to which we commit ourselves, but it and we always must also remain open, because a new truth may strike at any time (Sartwell, 2005). Thus for Badiou, the event is a notion, “a sort of illumination” (IT: 140), although the consequences of an event within a situation are always very different.

There are, of course problems with Badiou’s work, some of them serious. Although Badiou no longer describes himself as a ‘Maoist’⁵, it can be rather disturbing to find Mao quoted as a political, or even philosophical, authority (see IT: 60, 102-103) which is rather ironic. This suggests that there is perhaps a totalitarian undercurrent even as he critiques totalitarianism. As it is, there are traces of Badiou’s movement towards a kind of anarchism, or at least a critique of the state (and its various machinations). Another awkward argument can be found in ‘Philosophy and politics’, where Badiou describes thought as the “specific mode by which a human animal is traversed and overcome by truth” (IT: 53, 55). This thinking seems to embrace a mind\\body separation which this reader, perhaps naively, had hoped was no longer.

Infinite Thought aims to “provide a brief, accessible introduction to the diversity and power of Badiou’s thought” (IT: 1) and it does not fail. As Hewson (2006: 376) notes, the “brevity and directness of the texts makes the book … a very useful introductory volume”. That the book is so concise is perhaps both the strength and the weakness of this collection: whilst the reader discovers many of Badiou’s arguments and interests, it can at times be difficult to follow the threads through the very focused yet discontinuous chapters. To be sure, Infinite Thought explores many themes and the discussions are at times frustratingly brief. Further, the editors\\translators do not reference the texts Badiou mentions, instead preferring to leave it to the reader to explore his oeuvre themselves. Although this rather ‘abrupt gesture’ (their description, not mine) is a shame, it does not dull the eagerness to read more of his work.

Basset, K. (2008) Thinking the event: Badiou’s philosophy of the event and the example of the Paris Commune. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26: 895-910

Dewsbury, J-D. (2007) Unthinking Subjectivities: the location of thought in thinking politics after the Badiouian event. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(4): 443-459

Hewson, M. (2006) A fixed point, a point of interruption. Cosmos and History, 2(1-2): 376-379

Sartwell, C. (2005) http://www.crispinsartwell.com/badiou.htm (last accessed: 19/01/09)

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This post is tagged badiou, event, philosophy