Badiou with Beckett: Concept, Prose, and the Poetics ‘d'avenir’

C L A I R E J O U B E R T

Badiou with Beckett: Concept,Prose, and the Poetics ‘d’avenir’

At the time when the following study was conducted, AlainBadiou’s reception was only starting to develop in English-speaking intellectual circles.1 When in May 2002 the Centre forCultural and Critical Theory at Cardiff University made its ownparticular contribution to this inauguration of a British readershipfor Badiou’s work, Peter Hallward had just recently translatedand prefaced Badiou’s Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil(Badiou, 2001), while his study Badiou. A Subject to Truth (Hallward,2003), which was to play such a generative role in the constitutionof this readership was still to come out – as it did the followingyear.2 This transitional/translational time is interesting to continueexploring, as it connects in illuminating ways with one of theissues at stake in my reading of Badiou’s articulation of poeticsand ethics which takes as one of its major bases the work ofSamuel Beckett: the issue of language and, with Beckett’s case, thepeculiar linguistic exercise of bi- (or multi-) lingualism. So muchin Badiou’s philosophical infrastructure rests upon the fragile tipof this question of the diversity of languages, and so much of it

Journal of Beckett Studies 21.1 (2012): 33–55Edinburgh University PressDOI: 10.3366/jobs.2012.0032© The editors, Journal of Beckett Studieswww.eupjournals.com/jobs

34 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S

is again put in the balance in the moment when Badiou’s textsenter the ‘translation zone’, that it is worth, some ten years on, afterthe publication and active discussion of most of Badiou’s key textsin English, to revisit his engagement with Beckett’s translinguisticpoetics.

We can begin from the singularity of Alain Badiou’s contentionin the theoretical debates of the early 2000s – which has sincegained not only substantial international resonance but also muchnew public audibility on the political scene in France3 –, andwith his pamphleteering radicality. Our starting point here willbe his critique of contemporary nihilism, philosophical but alsomore generally cultural, and his critique of the morals associatedwith identity politics. From the startling effect this is having onAnglophone theory in particular – insofar as much of it is basedon the twin supports of, on the one hand the deconstructionistlineage of Continental phenomenology, and on the other the nativedevelopment of cultural studies. For there is much to be gainedfrom what his forceful readings identify as the points of conceptualconcretion in these discourses, the complacencies of doxa wherethe poststructuralist and postmodernist incisiveness has turnedto, in his own words, ‘non-thought’. There is a tonic in thecritical insights that they produce about the relativist abdicationof philosophy, as he sees it, and its compensatory reliance onaestheticised fetishes. My aim is therefore to see which questionshis intervention raises, and which he further enables us to raise.

Of particular interest to me is what he makes of the question ofart – and the question of the poem, specifically –, which he marksout as the stress point in the post-humanist attempts at extricatingthe ties between truth and value. As the focus onto whichconverges all the aporetic tension accumulated in the attemptsto conceive a non-essentialist ethics – that is, to contemplate thehistoricity of value. His diagnosis of the instrumentalisation ofart in the ‘pathos’ (Badiou, 1989, 33) of truthlessness is a salutaryjolt in the routines of literary theory as well as in philosophy,as is his indictment of the fetishisation of literature by ‘Blanchot,Derrida, and Deleuze for that matter’4 – for if philosophy loses itsepistemological specificity in what Badiou calls the suture to theHeideggerian cult of the Poem, there is also the symmetrical lossfor poetics to consider: its subordination to an aesthetics which

Badiou with Beckett 35

burdens the artistic down with the compensatory responsibility forultimate value.

The question is: can Badiou’s efforts to recover the Platonicpurity of philosophical force by proseifying the poetic actuallyundo the confusion which tends to suture together the artisticand the absolute, because it has, on the other side of theconceptual mirror, made immanence and the arbitrariness oftruthlessness – identified with the formula of the arbitrariness ofthe sign – indistinguishable?

Certainly, what Badiou does with literature points directly to therecognition of art’s power to interrogate the theories of truth, andof the demise of truth, with the question of value: to art’s ethicalcriticality, and creativity, to be precise. What he does specificallywith Beckett is particularly interesting: he creates a site for himselfwhere he can rethink the articulation of ethics and art by unpickingthe Sartre and Blanchot-inspired association of Beckett with themotifs of literary and moral exhaustion. By squaring himselfagainst the aesthetics of negativity which Beckett is a major pre-text for, he finds an opportunity to work at his own ‘doctrine oftruth’ with the support of an ethics of prose. Beckett makes possiblehis project of an ‘inaesthetics’ (Badiou, 1998, 7), beyond Mallarméand Rimbaud and the other key authors from the ‘Age of poets’which make up his literary corpus. Through the revaluation ofBeckett, he can plan the renegotiation of the tie between ‘prose andconcept’ (Badiou, 1998, 137–187) which will free philosophy fromits subjection to the exclusive ‘condition’ of the Poem: a renewal ofthe live collaboration and mutual specification of philosophy andart, in the shared exercise of the affirmative production of truths.

My aim here is to measure the productivity, indeed both forphilosophy and for poetics, of Badiou’s ‘true encounter’ (Badiou,1995, 5) with Beckett, which he offers us as an opening out of thesemiotic morals of arbitrariness and its dilution of the subject.

The point of discussion for me is what Badiou actually proposesas the alternative to the ethical deadlock of poststructuralistthought, especially in the context of the ‘ethical turn’ whichpreoccupied much of English-speaking academia in the late1990s and early 2000s (see for instance Garber, Hanssen andWalkowitz, 2000). The issue boils down, it seems, to the questionof what we make of the Saussurian legacy, and, crucially, of


which understanding of the arbitrariness of the sign we chooseto build on from. Badiou’s critique of negativity and the cult ofthe Poem as ‘reactionary nostalgia’ (Badiou, 1998, 47) for pre-Nietzschean absolute Truth indeed shows up one conception ofthe arbitrary; as the absence of foundational legitimacy and theconsequent obliteration of ethics – the theories of language asexile from truth and ‘prison-house’ for the subject. The questionis to see whether his campaign to recover the possibilities oftruth and subjectivity manages to break the hold of the semioticdualism between presence and absence – between the alternativesof transcendence: absolute authority, or absolute relativism. It isBadiou’s contribution to the ongoing renegotiation of the linguisticturn, as epistemological paradigm of the 20th century, which giveshis propositions their topical feel. But the question has to betherefore: can he actually take the poststructuralist aporia on ethicsout of its moralising pathos and wrest thinking clean away fromthe nostalgic morals of the sign, based as it is still on a reductionof Saussure’s concept of the signifier to the ancient linguistics ofthe name? For this reduction consists in the denial of the historicityof semantic value, which organises the arbitrary counters of langueinto the specific processes of discours, thereby making language thevery process of subjectivation, and ethical creation.

To this question, my own conclusion is an unambiguous no.Badiou’s ‘Platonism of the multiple’ (Badiou, 1989, 85) claims tofind a solution in a theory of truth able to account for being quabeing, and yet non-essential, and ‘de-totalised’ (Badiou, 1992, 341).A truth whose immanence would be justified in the particularityof the situation – Badiou claims to be a materialist, in this sense(Badiou, 2001, 130) – and the historicity of the truth-event. Yet it isclear that his concept of the generic is a wholehearted radicalisationof identity – which he subtracts altogether from all the socialisingand semantic organisations which make up the historical textureof value: Badiou’s ‘particular’ means the ontological purity ofsingularity, and the event is precisely the process by which thesituation is de-historicised into truth, ‘immortal’ (Badiou, 2001, 12)and absolute, demanding the total adhesion of a fidelity. So that inhis ‘ethics of truths’, the plural, which is meant to de-totalise, onlymakes totalisation the omnipresent operation in the re-foundingof philosophy. It is a process of atomisation of systems into


discrete elements, each to its own totality5, which voids all unitsof meaning and particularity in order to establish the rule of purenumericity (Badiou, 1992, 358): ‘the empty power of the letter’(Badiou, 1989, 91). And if the theory of the truth-event tries todefend the concept of the subject against the ‘death of man’, if itclaims to offer a theory of subjectivation, which refuses the ‘stodgyconservatism’ of the current ‘ethical ideology’ (Badiou, 2001, 14)and recaptures the movement of desire, yet its ethics of fidelityconstructs a view of the subject as quelconque: ‘pure quantity’(Badiou, 1989, 87), characterless and de-subjectivised. The ‘sujetdu mathème’. But when value is no longer what is of count butwhat is counted, when ethics is replaced by ‘the arcana of quantity’(Badiou, 1988, 187) – counting and its exception, the supplement,the supernumerary: when truth adds a new number –, then we areleft with the pure formality of the imperative: the authority of thelaw in its mathematical arbitrariness.

This voiding of value results from the avowedly ‘Platonicgesture’ (Badiou, 1989, 79–84) which rids the philosophical horizonof the relativism of meaning by turning back to the authority ofthe Name, and short-circuiting language. The terms are clear: thisis a theory of truth, and not of signification. Truth, to Badiou, iswhat ‘delivers no meaning’ (Badiou, 1988, 429) but brings forth anew signifier, as it punctures the plane of knowledges and shinesout in its own extra-linguistic revelation. The ethics that such atheory of truth generates might hang on the Lacanian axiom of‘not giving up on one’s desire’, but the fidelity it militates forremains a curious reworking of Lacan’s psychoanalytical ethics:it takes the imperative out of the context of the ‘talking cure’ andthe parlêtre, and alienates it from what makes the core of Freudiananthropology: the linguistic nature of the subject and of the law.The recurrent vindication of Plato’s exclusion of the Poet from theRepublic, on the grounds that it is in itself the recognition of thepoetic as a condition for philosophy, amounts again to a similargesture: it functions as a protection against language and therebyagainst the historicity of semantic and ethical value.6 This indeedhas every chance of making a space for a philosophical activitywhich will be free from all possibility of nihilism. But from thisdevil it must fall back into the deep blue sea of the absolute;and must develop into an epistemology of certainties; a ‘modern


doctrine of the subject’ (Badiou, 1988, 8), and a ‘doctrine of theevent’ (Badiou, 2000, 73). Badiou is right, it is ‘a matter of the ethicsof thought’ (Badiou, 2000, 74): the philosophical practice here is amilitant dogmatics, which advertises its Platonic authority.

We can only accept such a self-conscious gesture. And yet still tryto locate the issues on which the doctrinal epistemology will find itsfault lines: the question of ethics – because it can only accommodatean unhistorical conception of value and therefore only producedogmatic morals – and the question of the poetic – because thecritical force of the poem has a tendency to sabotage the strategiesof totality.

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This is why Badiou’s ‘encounter’ with Beckett is particularlyrelevant: it doesn’t tell us only what Badiou does with the poeticwhen he works on his concept of prose to undo the suture to thePoem; it also tells us what the poetic does to his thinking, how itcreates problems in it, and reintroduces the movement of criticalityin a corpus of truths. How it leads Badiou into the historicity ofhis own thinking – which he is regularly ready to acknowledgehimself, it has to be noted.7 My purpose is just to indicate a fewof these problematic points, not in order to build a case againstBadiou but to show the criticality of the poetic at work – even insidea philosophy of the name: as an illustration of the power that thequestion of the poem has as the rub in the human sciences.

There are three main texts about Beckett, all testifying tothe strategic importance of his work for Badiou’s thinking – inchronological order: the concluding section of Conditions (1992),where Beckett’s writing comes to flesh out the concept of thegeneric and give the volume of essays a kind of mythicalconclusion, the monographic study entitled Beckett, l’increvable désir(1995 – Badiou doesn’t often single out an author to write about.The other cases are Saint-Paul and Deleuze), and a chapter in PetitManuel d’inesthétique (1998), where the late prose text Worstward Hois invoked in support of the critique of the Heideggerian Poem. Thethree texts build Beckett’s fiction into one fable of the generic: theyare made to exemplify the drama of the truth procedure in the orderof art. Against the prevalent readings of Beckett which perpetuate


the ‘false and oppressive thesis that “nothing is, nothing is ofvalue” [rien n’est, rien ne vaut]’ (Badiou, 1995, 5); which pictureBeckett as ‘convinced that outside of the obstinacy of words, thereis only blackness and emptiness’ (Badiou, 1995, 9), Badiou wantsto present ‘this other Beckett, which is a Beckett of the gift andof the happiness of being’ (Badiou, 1992, 359): a work whichaffirms the perseverance of desire, the possibility of value, and thefreedom from ‘the torture of sense’ (Badiou, 1995, 46). Two mainpropositions organise the demonstration: one is that ‘the asceticmovement of [Beckett’s] prose’ (Badiou, 1995, 30), his ‘prosodicbareness’ (Badiou, 1992, 332) enables him to ‘apprehend the essenceof generic humanity’ (Badiou, 1992, 331). His prose is artistic in thatit brings existence down to its ‘essential determinations’: paringdescription down to a minimum, bringing characterisation down toa typology of generic figures, reducing action to the three ‘essentialfunctions’ of ‘going, being, and saying’ (Badiou, 1995, 22) and lateradding one more: the Other: ‘presenting in fiction the timelessdeterminants of humanity’ (Badiou, 1995, 24) – the Platonic genera.‘Beckett’s writing is beautiful [because it] asks nothing of prose[. . .] but to hold itself as close as possible to that which, ultimately,makes up all existence: the empty stage of being . . . and the eventswhich suddenly populate it’ (Badiou, 1995, 77–78). Beckett’s proseis this ‘purified axiomatics’ (Badiou, 1995, 25), this configurationof ‘aphorisms’ and ‘maxims’ (Badiou, 1995, 6 and 9) which affirmsthe absolute value of essence and ultimately the stolidity of generichumanity.

The second proposition discovers another dimension to thedrama of genericity in the evolution of Beckett’s output: a firstperiod would have led him to the impasse of solipsism and the‘torture of sense’ up until How It Is, published in 1960, and thenthe period when the late prose opens onto the historicity of theevent and the alterity of the Two (‘le Deux’), and through that, theregime of the ‘miracle, which contains all of Beckett’s paradoxicaloptimism’ (Badiou, 1992, 354). The miracle of love, and beauty;and the undoubtedness of values, effectuated through nomination:Beckett’s poetics of the ‘ill said’ is interpreted here as the process ofnaming the event that has pierced through to the essence of speechbeyond speech: the ‘ill said as essence of the said’ declares that‘being inexists from language’ (Badiou, 1992, 336), and is thereby


able to name this Presence of being in the negative of language:‘one can call “Presence” being as it inexists from language [. . .]. Wewill state that this Presence is neither an illusion, which would bethe sceptical thesis, nor a true and utterable comprehension, whichwould be the dogmatic thesis, but a certainty without concept. [. . .]there cannot be [any clear and distinct idea of presence] becausethat which is left of it to us is a pure proper noun, void, or nothing.’(Badiou, 1992, 337–338) What Badiou comes to call ‘a poetic name,a name without a signification’ (Badiou, 1992, 351).

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It is easy enough from the point of view of literary theory torecognise here the ordinary critical tropes of hermeneutics, whichhave been one traditional philosophical mode of accounting for theliterary – including that of Heideggerian poetics – and to point tothe usual problem with the equation of writing with fiction, andof art with representation. Here the problem takes the form ofthe indistinction between the effectuation of the truth-event in theprose, and the allegorical representation of the truth-event: whenBadiou sets up his demonstration of Beckett’s work as ‘operationof truth’, the shift has already been made from one to the other:‘For Beckett, who is an artist, th[e] operator is an arrangementof fictions [un dispositif de fictions]’ (Badiou, 1992, 333). But assoon as prose starts to mean fiction,8 we lose the question of art,language becomes transparent and is soon blotted out; and from‘événementiel’ as ‘evental’ (according to the translation suggestedby Peter Hallward), we shift to what French narratology also calls‘événementiel’, to mean the diegetic content. It is interesting, forinstance, to realise when we come to the end of Badiou’s theoreticaltale of the truth procedure in Beckett, that we are no longer holdingon to an event in the order of art: the miracle which has happenedis one that now belongs to the truth regime of love. The ‘eventof the meeting’ (Badiou, 1992, 363) with alterity has indeed takenplace, but it is the meeting between characters, as generic figures ofthe feminine and the masculine. It is, indeed, ‘the characters’ who‘realise the fiction of generic writing’ here (Badiou, 1992, 331).9 Andwhen Badiou takes one of Beckett’s words to name the affirmationproduced in this event – ‘bonheur’ –, the shift is explicit: ‘there


is happiness only in love, it is the reward particular to this typeof truth. In art there is pleasure, in science joy, and in politicsenthusiasm, but in love there is happiness’ (Badiou, 1992, 363).This literalisation of récit as histoire casts the shadow of a seriousdoubt on the truth-event as exception from the linguistic situation:this encounter needs no ‘incalculable poem [for] its nomination’(Badiou, 1992, 363): it has fallen into the ordinary realm of narrativetelling, and its ordinary agonising over fiction and truth. The samecan be said about the incidents which break the uneventfulnessof Watt’s life in the house of Mr Knott: Badiou talks of ‘theevental brilliance, the pure and delectable ‘appearing’ [‘surgir’] ofthe incidents in question’ (Badiou, 1995, 41): nonetheless they arestill events in the story and not events in the writing. It doesn’ttake the specificity of Beckett’s prose to represent the genericevent – Badiou’s prose does this just as well.

This puts a different complexion of the issue of an ethics ofprose, and the attempt it constitutes of rethinking the articulationof art and thought outside of the nihilist pathos of the Poem. Thisissue is certainly one of the most fruitful points of Badiou’s workon Beckett, and in both the article in Conditions and the book onBeckett, it functions as pivotal moment in the argument. For whatis at stake in it is the theory of value, which will determine thedemarcation between ethics and morals. Between value and therepresentation of – the fetishisation of – value.

Badiou starts with a very perceptive reading gesture, whichindeed works against the absurdist interpretations of Beckett: henotes that, in How It Is, the terms ‘victim’ and ‘torturer’ [‘bourreau’]must not be confused with the moralistic meanings that they canhave outside the semantic context of the work: ‘No pathos, noethics is implied here. Except that of prose’ (Badiou, 1995, 53).Beckett takes care to let us feel the ironical exaggeration in ‘these[otherwise] conventional denominations’ (Badiou, 1992, 355), andtheir semantic value is clearly specific to the text’s poetics; theirreference is intra-systemic. They create a specific conception of‘justice’ therefore, in which the Beckettian ethics is at work in theprosaic invention of value. But the point at which Badiou losesthis hold on a poetics of value is when he moves on to interpretthe two terms as ‘female’ and ‘male’, which leads him then tobuild his final scenario of the love encounter and the affirmation of


happiness as ultimate value. He remarks himself that ‘[t]he words“man” and “woman” are not uttered by Beckett, precisely becausethey refer too easily to a permanent, structural Two’ (Badiou, 1992,356). But by drawing away from the actual terms of Beckett’s prose,he himself breaks out of the semantic context and reintegratesthe realm of the hermeneutic de-specification of value. He goesback to building his interpretation of narrative motifs, and endsup offering Beckett’s text as the direct statement of a generic truthabout mathematical justice – a maxim ‘of great depth’: ‘En tous cason est dans la justice je n’ai jamais entendu dire le contraire’. ‘[T]hejustice mentioned here doesn’t refer to any norm,’ Badiou writes,‘to any finality. It concerns the ontological equality of the figures ofthe generic human subject’ (Badiou, 1995, 53): the maxim deniesall semiotic reference, including that of the poetic system, andemerges, beyond the specificity of value, straight onto the planeof genericity; of transcendent valuelessness.

In the end, Badiou’s critical revaluation of Beckett, and hisrethinking of ethics through the poetics of prose, turns out to bethe process where the ethical pathos of nihilism is simply reversedin an equally pathetic repositivation of value, and a return to thestaples of moralistic tradition, organised around the core virtueof fidelity.10 The attempt to take Beckett’s work ‘literally at last’[‘prendre enfin Beckett au pied de sa lettre’] ends up celebrating‘Beckett’s lesson in moderation [mesure], in exactitude, and incourage’ (Badiou, 1995, 9). With Beckett are now associated hopeand happiness, courage and justice, truth, love and beauty. It isa classic move to found morals on the aestheticisation of art, asthe value beyond values, to legitimate all values. In this sense itis no coincidence that both texts conclude on Beckett’s ‘slow andsudden execution of the Beautiful’ (Badiou, 1995, 80). Prose hadshifted over to mean fiction, in support of mimetic hermeneuticsand the morals of narrative. Now, under the effect of love, it istransfigured into the beauty of poetry: ‘The Two of love establishesthe sensible version [of Beckett’s axioms]. Love delivers beauty,nuance, colour. [. . .] And this is why one finds in Beckett’s prosethese sudden poems [. . . ,] these latent poems of the prose’ (Badiou,1992, 359). The equation of poetry with the Beautiful – as bothsensible presence and language beyond language – is a clear returnto the tradition of aesthetics, with its explicit Kantian reference


(Badiou, 1995, 80). It is also an acknowledgement that the conceptof prose has done little to overturn the Heideggerian orthodoxy,if it is defined as the ‘poetisation of language’ (Badiou, 1995,39), and the event-advent of the Beautiful – as what silences allphilosophical speech, and freezes the movement of thought in thecelebration of this fetish of the absolute. The conclusion of thearticle in Conditions ends in such a mood of awe: the thinkingstops in order to let the beauty of Beckett’s truth-statements speakfor itself. Long passages are quoted, all the while exhibiting thecritical abdication of the philosopher: for ‘the text speaks for itself,basically’ [‘le texte, au fond, parle de lui-même’], Badiou writes(Badiou, 1992, 351). The extracts are simply presented with suchindications as ‘this other, very beautiful text’ (Badiou, 1992, 360):‘What is there to do but to listen to what is happening? Here is thebeginning [of Ill Seen Ill Said], one of the most beautiful texts in ourlanguage, in my opinion’ (Badiou, 1992, 365). In Beckett’s proseas generic ‘no man’s land’ (Badiou, 1995, 48), the question of anethics of prose gets its simple answer: it is swallowed up in thesilent authority of the absolute. Art essentialised is taken outside ofsignification, and the expulsion of the poetic is replayed.

It is a problem of the historical, and of theories of the historical. InBadiou’s inaesthetics the idea is to restrain the linguistic practice ofaesthetics, as ‘domestication’ and ‘pacification’ of artistic events11;and to submit to the extra-linguistic revelation of art’s direct truthsas the ‘awakening of thought’ (Badiou, 1995, 43), in order then tofind the fidelity that will enable the radical renewal of philosophicaldiscourse. The truth, as ‘certainty without concept’ comes first,timeless and immortal, in its anti-historical newness; meaning andvalue are worked out, literally, after the event, in the course ofwhat Badiou calls ‘enquête’, or ‘subject-language’ (Badiou, 1988,438). Art is therefore invoked as a model for the post-eventalconception of value. But, as Andrew Gibson has noted in his ownarticle on Beckett and Badiou (Gibson, 2002), the encounter withBeckett’s poetics leads Badiou into a peculiar contradiction aboutthe historical sequence of the truth procedure:

Badiou appears to reverse [. . .] the structure of the progressof a truth – in what he has to say of Beckett. For Beckettian


fidelity appears to be rather to the possibility of the eventthan to any specifiable event in itself. The very concept offidelity seems less relevant, here, than that of courage. [. . .]In ‘Art and Philosophy’, Badiou describes a work or worksof art as constructing a particular truth in a ‘dimensionpostévénementielle’ (AP, p. 25). [. . .] But the Beckettian seriesrather moves laboriously towards the event, adumbrates it. [. . .](Gibson, 2002, 100–101)

The extraordinary implication of Badiou’s work on Beckettis that Beckett’s art is neither a representation, nor anexpression, nor an indication of a truth. It is rather adisposition, a way of waiting for a truth, of clearing the groundfor it. [. . .] By implication, the process in question is also anethico-political practice. (Gibson, 2002, 102)12

Indeed, because Beckett’s poetics challenges the anti-historical andrepresentational view of the ethics of prose, it moves Badiou toactually envisage something that comes close to a rehistoricisedevent, developing within the time of sense-making and ethicalactivity. Certainly, as Gibson remarks, ‘Badiou manages to makeBeckett both vital and central and yet, at the same time, incidentalto the mainstream of his own thought’ (Gibson, 2002, 101): Beckettposes him a problem. It is, in my view, that of historicity of values,which reflects back onto the whole of his theory of ethics.

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It is useful to remember, in this sense, that the Beckettian virtuesof exactitude, courage, and moderation correspond with the threemoral qualities needed in Badiou’s ethic of truths as it ‘tries toward off Evil [the three modes of which are simulacrum or terror,betrayal, and disaster], through its effective and tenacious inclusionin the process of a truth.’ This ethic, he writes, ‘combines, then,under the imperative to “Keep going!”, resources of discernment(do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and ofmoderation [réserve] (do not get carried away to the extremesof Totality)’ (Badiou, 2001, 91). The sequential reversal that hasto take place when accounting for Beckett’s work gives us an


index as to what is untenable in Badiou’s ethics: the fact that itis, precisely, incapable of accounting for the ethical activity itself.The evental ‘critical decision’ (Badiou, 1988, 49), as ‘ontologicaldecision’ (Badiou, 1988, 169), is explicitly pre-ethical, and thefidelity due to it, actually extra-ethical. The event leaves the entiretyof the ethical determination to be done, and it is only afterwards,and outside it, that the question of value finds its belated, agonisingmoment; in the blind leap of the wager, and in the time regimeof the ‘future anterior’.13 It can only therefore take on the ready-available forms of traditional humanist morals – including theconcept of Evil, capitalised. So that the three maxims can also read:find a way out of the totalities of the dictate, out of the ‘the absoluteauthority of truth nomination’ (Badiou, 2001, 83); find the historicaldimension of ethics, to ensure us against the no man’s land of thegeneric.

It is not only the poetic in Beckett that forces Badiou to take intoaccount the problem of value. There is also the sticking point of the‘Age of poets’, which haunts him with the quandary of modernity.His thesis is that between Mallarmé and Celan, with Hölderlinas visionary precursor, philosophy suffered a century-long eclipse,while the work of thought was taken over by poetry: the task ofphilosophy now is to insist that Celan has brought this age to aclose, and to make sure that this de-suturing will once again ejectthe question of art in its position as transcendent ‘condition’ forphilosophy. Yet modernist poetry still fascinates Badiou, and it isMallarmé, Rimbaud, that he keeps turning to, to theorise the eventas irruption of the new – the ‘frisson nouveau’ (Badiou, 2000, 68).In this love-hate relationship, there must a degree of perplexityas to the advantages in the expulsion of poetry from the horizonof thought. Questioned on this choice of poets in an interview byCharles Ramond (Badiou, 2000, 65–75), Badiou explains:

I can only point to a subjective, capricious, arbitrary element,and maybe also to one other thing [. . .]: the way in which,for a philosopher, a certain type of poem guides or orientatesspeculation. I appreciate, I admire, I frequent and learn byheart Hugo and La Fontaine: I appreciate them extremely.[. . .] Let’s say that the difference will fall between a poetic


condition in which I accept to be only the one who receives,appreciates and tastes the immanent truth of the poems inquestion, and then the use I can make of other poets, frominside the elaboration of philosophical categories themselves:which I call poetry made to condition philosophy, which afterall is not its entirely normal, its natural status: that is not whatit is made for, but maybe precisely a certain type of modernpoetry is more made for that than another. (Badiou, 2000, 71)

The commentary is still knotted in a contradiction, and it is only inthe channelling of one type of poetry into the delimited period ofthe Age of poets that it can find a way to resolve his ambivalence.When the interviewer presses him to clarify the actual nature, inhis theory, of the articulation between poetry and philosophy, hereaches the uncomfortable core of the problem:

Don’t forget that I support this claim about these [modern]poets in one singular thesis, which I don’t support for poetryin general. [. . . I]n this period [. . .], the question of knowingwhat exactly distinguishes the ambitions of philosophy or ofspeculation and the ambitions of poetry becomes a difficultquestion to decide. [. . .] In my terms, it is an ‘age’; but thisepochal confusion is unnecessary: because at bottom, the mostgeneral definition of poetry is that what it’s interested in, inthe sensible, is its capacity of presence as such. It is thereforenot necessarily devoted to the presence of the un-presentableor the presentation of the subtractive or the appearing of thedisappearing; to my mind it is devoted rather to capturingin language the singularity of sensible presence, and to doingwhat apparently language is powerless to do: name not thecategory of the thing, but the thing itself, as it presents itself.And at bottom, the poem is dedicated not so much to thesunset in general but to this sunset, not so much to the colourof the tile in general but the colour of these very tiles. (Badiou,2000, 72)

Poetry ‘in general’ could be accounted for in the most ordinaryterms of phenomenological aesthetics, with a reliance on the


Kantian concepts of taste and personal opinion, of the sensible andits ‘universal without concept’. But then modernity would indeedhave to except itself from such aesthetics: with the insistence of theremainder, it keeps Badiou’s doctrine of the event open onto thequestion of historicity, which Baudelaire first identified in coiningthe concept of the moderne as ‘a rational and historical theory of thebeautiful, in opposition to the theory of the beautiful as unique andabsolute’.14 In particular, it keeps open the problem of the ethicalquality of the new, as is attested in the very pertinent text whichBadiou wrote as a preface to the English edition of Ethics. This islisted as number three in the four points that he indicates as theunresolved difficulties which he is currently working on:

The subject cannot be conceived exclusively as the subjectfaithful to the event. This point in particular has significantethical implications. For I was previously unable to explainthe appearance of reactionary innovations. My whole theoryof the new confined it to the truth-procedures. But when all issaid and done, it is obvious that reaction, and even the powersof death, can be stamped with the creative force of an event.(Badiou, 2001, lvii)

This is precisely the bone of contention in the whole modernistdebate, and that which, at least in the terms of its Anglophoneramifications, marks the difference between the proto-fascistconception of the radically new as developed in T.E. Hulme’s neo-classic, anti-historical, anti-linguistic theory of art15, and the theoryof the ‘modern’ as ‘time sense’, to use Gertrude Stein’s expression(Stein, 1971, 22): as the sense of the historical and the historicity ofsense. The difference also between Wyndham Lewis’s view of theartistic ‘new’ as the totalitarian design (both formal and political)of the artist as tyrant (Lewis, 1986), and Rimbaud’s earlier intuitionof the poetic modern, the ‘en avant’ of poetry16, as the processof ethical invention: ‘l’homme [. . .] se travaillant’ (Rimbaud, 1972,251) – mankind working at its own humanity.

The poetic, as the force of modernity in language, keepsBadiou on this shifting ground where doctrines must confront themovement of the problematic. It might be worth noting that the


book on ethics was a commission, and perhaps not a necessityspringing from the course of his work in its own terms. Alsoworth noting, the fact that despite the central importance Badiougives to poetry everywhere in his writings, the book makes nomention of the question of art. Both ethics and poetics are treatedas regional concerns, in his work, and yet they function throughoutboth as blind-spots and as critical spurs. In Ethics, four newquestions are raised, which all have to do with the effort to accountfor the centrally problematic issues in the doctrine of truth. Thefirst ‘accept[s] that a situation cannot be understood simply asa multiple [. . .]. We must also take into account the network ofrelations is sustains, which involves making sense of the way amultiple appears in the situation’ (Badiou, 2001, lvi): the move isfrom the morals of numericity to a conception of ethical productionwithin a signifying system. The second concerns the nature of theevental truth itself, and its temporality:

Today I can no longer maintain that the only trace left byan event in the situation it affects is the name given to thatevent. This idea presumed, in effect, that there were two eventsrather than one (the event-event, and the event-naming), andlikewise two subjects rather than one (the subject who namesthe event, and the subject who is faithful to the event). So nowI posit that an event is implicative [. . .] When it takes place, theevent decides its value (Badiou, 2001, lvi–lvii).

The event, and the value – semantic and ethical – of the event, arenow intertwined into one simultaneous process, which is the timeof signification. So that ‘the ontological theory of the event’, Badiouanticipates, will need ‘to be completed by a logical theory’ (Badiou,2001, lvii). The grammar of logos is still not the full historicity oflanguage, far from it; yet it is one distinct step away from the anti-linguistics of the mathematical letter. And lastly the fourth questiontakes Badiou on to the need to account for the becoming of truths;for ‘logical transformations’: ‘the question of how truths appear,whereas up to this point I had considered only their being (i.e. thefact that truths are generic multiplicities)’ (Badiou, 2001, lvii–lviii).All four questions converge around the gradual and still reluctant


recognition of historicity, even if it is in near phenomenologicalterms, and of language, as the process where the possibilities ofmeaning, subjectivity, and society, are at work. Badiou’s Platonicmistrust of the sophistry of language is an impatience with thepoststructuralist doxa of the alienation of the subject and theimpossibility of truthful meaning. But that is not language: it is onlyone theory of language – and it is distinctly not Saussure’s. WhatBadiou is pulled towards at this stage is the intuition of languageas what Wittgenstein calls ‘form of life’; the very medium of ethicalpossibility.

The article on Beckett in Conditions concludes on a definitionof the work of art as the process by which the inessentials of lifeare transmuted into the ethical no man’s land of genericity – from‘vie’ to ‘vide’: ‘It is [. . .] what I would like to call the writing ofthe generic: to present in art the passage from the unhappiness oflife and the visible to the happiness of a veridical rousing of thevoid’ (Badiou, 1992, 366). The Beckettian ‘ill said’ being identifiedwith ‘poetic name, the name without signification’ (Badiou, 1992,351), which excepts itself from language to bring forth this spacebeyond value. But Beckett’s poetics of ‘ill saying’, of ‘misusing’language and ‘leaving,’ he says, ‘nothing undone that mightcontribute to its falling into disrepute’ (Beckett, 1984, 172), isanything but a superseding of language, or an ethical voiding. Itis, to be precise, an un-wording, which takes language out of the‘Grammar and Style’ of ‘official English’ (Beckett, 1984, 171)17 tomake it ‘express things other than words’ (Beckett, 1984, 125) – fromwhich poetic programme Beckett proceeds to delve into all formsof possible ill-saying of the English language and its colonialinscriptions, including through its translinguistic stretching acrossto French, German, translation, and self-translation. The practiceof such ‘enormous pauses’ torn through the wording of Englishhas certainly proved to be a spectacular development from thisearly, circumstantial ars poetica. Yet the terms of Beckett’s attack on‘words’ here already point clearly to a fully-fledged poetics of thehistoricity of values, ethical as well as semantic. The non-wordingof language (which in Beckett’s work would take place peculiarlythrough the simple agency of the difference of languages) is, in hisown terms, ‘when language is most efficiently misused’ (Beckett,1984, 171)18: freed from a linguistics of a priori units and reified


counters, or from any ‘poetics of nomination’ (Badiou, 1992, 350),and en avant, at work in the time sense (Beckett talks of the workof art as time-maker, as time-factory), towards a ‘savoir-vivre’(Beckett, 1984, 119).19 An essaying in the futurity of ethics. In ‘LeMonde et le pantalon’,20 Beckett takes the opportunity of writingabout contemporary painting to mark the difference between themorals of aesthetics, as practised by traditional art criticism, andthe ethical criticality of ‘la malfaçon créatrice voulue’ (Beckett, 1984,122): the ‘ill made’ painting is ‘a painting with a future’ [‘un tableaud’avenir’], in that it induces the ill saying which is the texture oflife: ‘the only life that counts, that of featherless bipeds’ (Beckett,1984, 119). About the art of the van Velde brothers, he writes: ‘Thething is that, at bottom, painting doesn’t interest them [or ‘beauty’,or ‘truth’ (Beckett, 1984, 132)]. What interests them is the humancondition’ (Beckett, 1984, 129). This is the criticality of art, whichis indeed so powerful in Beckett’s own work that it brings thequestion of ethics and language regularly back in Badiou’s field ofvision.

*

The Badiou phenomenon – which was taking off in its English-speaking developments in the 2000s – makes sense at a time whenthe linguistic turn was itself being actively reassessed, and thepromises of a turn to ethics much discussed. It makes clear whatwas, and is still, at issue: what we make of language, whenrethinking the anthropological. It is worth remarking that at thesame moment in time a major editorial and conceptual eventwas taking place on the French intellectual scene, which is stillfiltering slowly through with discrete revolutionary potency: thepublication in January 2002 of Saussure’s Ecrits de linguistiquegénérale (Saussure, 2002). The manuscripts published in this newvolume are mostly the autograph fragments of his planned book ongeneral linguistics, which were only unearthed in 1996. One crucialpoint in it is the introduction, along with the central conceptualcouple of langue and parole, of the distinctly non-formalist conceptof discours, which precisely opens onto the ethical and socialdimension of language. Here we rediscover a Saussure who is notso much a thinker of the immanent arbitrariness of the sign, in


the traditional semiotics interpretation of the Cours as edited byBally and Sechehaye, but a theorist of value, and of historicity.This makes possible re-readings of a Saussurean tradition whichhas too easily projected onto the Cours de linguistique générale aphilosophy of language as naming owing much still to Platonicreflexes, which the implications of the one page of notes entitled‘Note sur le discours’ is enough to shrug off (Saussure, 2002, 275).21

The critical value of this new publication, which has now beentranslated and opened to vivacious debate by English-languagescholarship,22 is a solid ally in the continuing effort to establishthat the mutual exclusion of language and ethics, which alwaystakes us back surreptitiously to the mutual exclusion of form andcontent – or poem and concept –, is a non-issue, and one fromwhich we can move on easily every time the enunciation of a poemmanages to un-word a language to let the historicity of discursivevalue play out its ethical implications. A poem ‘d’avenir’.

N O T E S

1. First presented at the international conference on Alain Badiou,organised by the Centre for Cultural and Critical Theory at CardiffUniversity in May 2002. The original version of this study was publishedonline under the title ‘Badiou and the Ethics of Prose: Revaluing Beckett’(Joubert, 2004).

2. To my knowledge the only English-language translation of Badiou’swork published at the time was Manifesto for Philosophy, translated byNorman Madarasz (Badiou, 1999). The Handbook of Inaesthetics, whichwill be discussed in the course of this article, came out at the StanfordUniversity Press in 2005, in a translation by Alberto Toscano.

3. The pamphlet De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (Paris, Lignes, 2007) hasdone much to establish his as a noted public voice, and to associate himinto the tradition of ‘the French intellectual’.

4. ‘[E]n France, le fétichisme de la littérature (Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuzeaussi bien. . . ) [. . .] délègue le vif de la pensée à la condition artistique’(Badiou, 1989, 47). Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine.

5. Society for instance is conceived (despite the Spinozian echoes of theformula) as a set of isolated singletons, ‘a communism of singularities’(Badiou, 1989, 92).


6. Poetry will be possible on the condition that the poem be repressed: ‘jepense que la poésie, et singulièrement le poème tragique sont absolumentune condition de la philosophie de Platon, même si une part de l’effet decette condition est de bannissement, d’exclusion, de polémique; d’ailleursil en parle constamment, considère que c’est une question de la plus hauteimportance’ (Badiou, 2000, 74).

7. See for instance the correction of the earlier position taken in Théoriedu sujet in the introduction of L’Etre et l’événement, the correction ofseveral key propositions of Ethics in the preface to the English edition,or the comments about his own suture to the political in Manifeste pourla philosophie: ‘Toute suture est une exagération. [. . . Heidegger] n’a pasfait mieux au regard du poème que ceux – j’en fus – qui absolutisèrentphilosophiquement la politique de l’intérieur de la suture marxiste, bienau-delà de ce que la politique réelle était en état d’énoncer sur elle-même’(Badiou, 1989, 57).

8. In the same way, in Badiou’s reading, the issue of theatricality, whichis raised as a matter of the poetics of prose, is reduced to dialogue, asverbal exchange between characters – as diegetic event, not as the text’senunciative mode: ‘Là est peut-être la singularité du théâtre de Beckett. Iln’y a théâtre qu’autant qu’il y a dialogue, discord et discussion entre deuxpersonnages, et la méthode ascétique de Beckett restreint la théâtralité auxeffets possibles du Deux’ (Badiou, 1995, 73).

9. In the same way, the idea of the prose event – ‘that-which-is-happening’, the ‘incalculable advent’ (Badiou, 1992, 347) – is alwaysillustrated by examples of events that actually belong to the plane ofthe diegetic: the event of Godot’s coming, or the conceptual drama ofthe nymphs’ vanishing in Mallarmé’s ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’, studiedin great detail in ‘Philosophie du faune’, a chapter in Petit Manueld’inesthétique (Badiou, 1998, 189–215). It might be argued that these are putforward as allegories of textual events. Yet Badiou does not present themas such, but as the artistic event itself.

10. See for instance: ‘Et puisque c’est en lisant L’Innommable qu’est néema passion de quarante ans pour cet auteur, plutôt que les sentences sur lelangage qui ont enchanté ma jeunesse, j’aimerais en retenir cet aphorismequi encore aujourd’hui me bouleverse, quand le parleur innommable, àtravers ses larmes, certain de ne jamais renoncer, déclare: Moi seul suishomme et tout le reste divin’ (Badiou, 1995, 9).

11. ‘[I]l m’a toujours semblé que l’esthétique comme science du beau,comme science séparée du beau, et comme branche de la philosophie,consiste toujours à dire: ‘ce que à travers le beau je peux désignercomme vrai est ce que la philosophie va dire à propos du beau ou àl’occasion du beau’. L’esthétique saisit donc la disposition artistique dans


une sorte d’alignement à autre chose qu’elle-même qui finalement estl’espace philosophique comme tel: il y a alors une sorte de domestication,de pacification, de ce qui est en jeu dans l’art par cette esthétiquephilosophique. C’est pourquoi je préfère parler d’‘inesthétique’ plutôt qued’esthétique’ (Badiou, 2000, 66–67).

12. A similar contradiction is perceptible in the function given to art astruth procedure: does the work of art enact the procedure itself, or does itonly preserve the truth that has appeared, before and outside it? ‘Il arriveque quelque chose arrive. Que quelque chose nous arrive. Et ces pointsd’exception, dont toute vérité procède, l’art a pour mision de les garder, deles faire briller, de les détenir, stellaires, dans le tissu reconstitué de notrepatience’ (Badiou, 1995, 79).

13. The concept of the futur antérieur as time regime for the truthprocedure is developed within the theory of the relationship betweensubject and truth, of the undecidable and the forçage, in particular in‘Méditation trente-cinq’ of L’Etre et l’événement, entitled ‘Théorie du sujet’(Badiou, 1988, 429–447).

14. ‘Une théorie rationnelle et historique du beau, en opposition avec lathéorie du beau unique et absolu’ (Baudelaire, 1976, 685).

15. I have developed a fuller treatment of this question in “L’Infini et lavaleur: enjeux de la modernité avec T.E. Hulme” (Joubert, 2002).

16. ‘Enormité devenant norme, absorbée par tous, [le poète] seraitvraiment un multiplicateur de progrès ! [. . .] La Poésie ne rythmera plusl’action; elle sera en avant’ (Rimbaud, 1972, 252).

17. Or ‘Literatur des Unworts’ (Beckett, 1984, 54 in the original text,written in German. Given as ‘this Literature of the unword’ in MartinEsslin’s translation into English, reprinted in Beckett, 1984, 173).

18. It is of course pertinent to reconnect this notion with the writingsituation in which Beckett has placed himself when he starts testingthese ideas: the text is a letter written to a German friend, in German.Its immediate practical business concerns a question of translating (orrefusing to translate) a selection from the German poet Ringelnatz for ‘theEnglish public’.

19. Beckett writes of Abraham van Velde’s painting as ‘faiseur detemps’, ‘usine à temps’ (Beckett, 1984, 125).

20. ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon’ (Beckett, 1984,118–132). This is, not entirely coincidentally, Beckett’s first publication inFrench, for which I believe he has not given a translation in English. Thetranslations here are mine.

21. For a full discussion, see Linguistique et poétique du discours. A partirde Saussure (Chiss and Dessons, 2005). My own contribution, ‘Critique dusigne et criticité du discours: Saussure relit Derrida’ (Joubert, 2005) centreson these issues particularly.


22. The volume Writings in General Linguistics, edited by Simon Bouquetand Rudolf Engler, on a translation by Carol Sanders and Matthew Pires,was published by Oxford University Press in the summer of 2006. For arecent discussion, see Russell Daylight, What if Derrida was wrong aboutSaussure? (Daylight, 2011)

W O R K S C I T E D

Badiou, Alain (1988), L’Etre et l’événement, Paris: Seuil.Badiou, Alain (1989), Manifeste pour la philosophie, Paris: Seuil.Badiou, Alain (1992), Conditions, Paris: Seuil.Badiou, Alain (1995), Beckett, l’increvable désir, Paris: Hachette.Badiou, Alain (1998), Petit Manuel d’inesthétique, Paris: Seuil.Badiou, Alain (1999), Manifesto for Philosophy, translated by Norman

Madarasz, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Badiou, Alain (2000) ‘La Poésie en condition de la philosophie. Entretien

avec Alain Badiou’, Europe, 849–850, pp. 65–75.Badiou, Alain (2001), Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil,

translated and prefaced by Peter Hallward, London: Verso.Badiou, Alain (2005), Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto

Toscano, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Badiou, Alain (2007), De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom ? Paris: Lignes.Baudelaire, Charles [1868] (1976), Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Claude

Pichois (ed.), Œuvres complètes II, Paris: Gallimard.Beckett, Samuel (1984), Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic

Fragment, Ruby Cohn (ed.), New York (NY): Grove Press.Chiss, Jean-Louis and Dessons, Gérard (eds.) (2005), Linguistique et poétique

du discours. A partir de Saussure, Langages, 159, September.Daylight, Russell (2011), What if Derrida was wrong about Saussure?,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (eds.)

(2000), The Turn to Ethics, London: Routledge.Gibson, Andrew (2002), ‘Beckett and Badiou’, in Lane, Richard (ed.),

Beckett and Philosophy, London: Palgrave, pp. 93–107.Hallward, Peter (2003), Badiou. A Subject to Truth. Preface by Slavoj Zizek,

Minneapolis (MN) and London: University of Minnesota Press.Lewis, Percy Wyndham [1919] (1986), The Caliph’s Design. Architects! Where

is Your Vortex? Santa Rosa (CA): Black Sparrow Press.Joubert, Claire (2004), ‘Badiou and the Ethics of Prose: Revaluing

Beckett’, Polart – poétique et politique de l’art, [http://polartnet.free.fr/papiers/textes.php].


Joubert, Claire (2002), ‘L’Infini et la valeur: enjeux de la modernité avecT.E. Hulme’, in Shusterman Ronald (ed.), L’Infini, Bordeaux: PressesUniversitaires de Bordeaux, pp. 47–65.

Joubert, Claire (2005), ‘Critique du signe et criticité du discours:Saussure relit Derrida’, in Chiss, Jean-Louis and Dessons, Gérard (eds.),Linguistique et poétique du discours. A partir de Saussure, issue of Langages,159, September, pp. 74–92).

Rimbaud, Arthur [1871] (1972), Letter to Paul Demeny, 15th May 1871,in Adam, Antoine (ed.), Œuvres Complètes, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 249–254.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (2002), Ecrits de linguistique générale, BouquetSimon and Engler Rudolf (eds.), Paris: Gallimard.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (2006), Writings in General Linguistics BouquetSimon and Engler Rudolf (eds.), translated by Carol Sanders andMatthew Pires, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stein, Gertrude [1926] (1971), ‘Composition as Explanation’, inMeyerowitz, Patricia (ed.), Look at Me Now and Here I am. Writings andLectures 1909–1945, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 21–30.

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Badiou with Beckett: Concept, Prose, and the Poetics ‘d'avenir’

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