Being by Numbers - Interview - Alain Badiou

7/28/2019 Being by Numbers - Interview - Alain Badiou

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Alain Badiou is an anomaly. What he has attempted has all the allure of the obviously impossible.That's the fascination of the thing. Judge it retrograde or eminently contemporary, aberrant or astroke of genius, but take it squarely for what it is: the painstaking effort on the part of anAlthusserian Marxist, longtime Maoist, and unanalyzed disciple of Lacan to quit the confines thatseveral generations of "limit-makers" have erected around philosophical practice.

Wittgenstein's fragmentary sophistics is merely a symptom. Revolutionary political theorizing, thevarious positivisms, and the vast textualization of the world all share the same restrictive modusoperandi of suturing philosophy to some other, seemingly stronger, extrinsic body of thought.What's more, Jacques Derrida's interminable perambulations inside Western metaphysics involve aswap of one kind of system for another: the compelling demonstrative logic of systematicphilosophy for the latent tissue of relations embedded in language. With the revelation of writing asthe long-repressed factor--and its ultimate fetishization--the issue of demonstrability has curiouslyvanished from the horizon. Odd, wouldn't you say, in a century thoroughly dominated bymathematization? Badiou emerges right here, with a singular question: how do we advance,proceed, reinsert ourselves into a pattern of succession, the "plus-one" established by taking "one

step more"?

In a word, Badiou has founded a philosophy. Take "founded" in the full philosophical sense. Andthat philosophy is rigorously systematic. Take "systematic" in the full philosophical sense. Whatdoes it require to reanimate a dead tradition? A single consolidating intuition permitting the kindof strategic move, in its elegance and simplicity, most often associated with a game of chess. It goeslike this: ontology is mathematics. DON'T RECOIL. NOT YET. Some people don't know whatontology is, and even those who do, don't. (For confirmation, read the opening pages of Heidegger'sBeing and Time.) The word "Being" has always resonated with a mysterious attribution of someextra added value to "what simply is," and its science has remained philosophy's foremost red

herring. By slipping mathematics into that eerie slot, Badiou snaps the file shut with assurance ofontology's thorough rationality. "What is" is pure multiplicity. As for what can be said about it, themathematicians are still at work.

In his massive L'Etre et l'evenement (Being and the event), Badiou makes mathematical set theorythe reader's guide to some 2,500 years of problems raised by ontology. From the axioms of settheory he not only recapitulates the history of philosophy but derives all the concepts of his system.DON'T RECOIL. NOT EVEN NOW: his prose is so tight and lucid that even in your relativemathematical illiteracy you'll be surprised to discover, like Plato's Meno, that you already knewhow to draw the inferences. And in those inferences the stakes are revealed. What were thedevastating criticisms forever leveled against systematic philosophy? That the system was invented

g by numbers - interview with artists and philosopher Alain Badiou - ... http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n2_v33/ai_1

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and arbitrary, its propositions unverifiable. In Badiou's reformulation of philosophy as acontemporary systematics, only mathematics, the unassailable archetype of demonstrability,intelligibility, and transmissibility, can offer sufficient authority, sufficient legitimacy--not as amodel but as the very armature of the system itself.

Badiou's philosophy, however, is not a philosophy of mathematics. For him there is no such thing.Nor is it about the world or consciousness or knowledge. He calls it a philosophy of time. Forgetteleologies and historical determinisms, the Kantian a priori, Husserl's time consciousness,

Bergson's duration. Think of it rather, to risk a neologism, as a neology. Set theory's closing chapter,the generic set, the set with no ascertainable identifying characteristic, the "set without qualities,"provides Badiou with a unique and provocative prototype for theorizing the emergence of the new.The event is no more than an extraneous, evanescent incident--but it may make waves. When itdoes, it involves the active participation of subjectivities in a process whose contours and destinyelude and exceed them. To grossly reduce the subtleties of Badiou's argument, call the sum total ofactivity in that formative stage a generic set. The time traced there is the discrete time of random,heterogeneous advances, indiscernible quantum leaps that jolt science, politics, art, and love, thefour Platonic conditions on which Badiou's system reposes. Yes, Platonic--Badiou is an unabashedPlatonist, as may be surmised from the mathematical premise.

What's happened to his Marxism? This, I think: change is precisely the issue. Badiou fixes hisattention on disruptions of the status quo, the kind that have the power to activate human agency.The essence of history's movement, we now know, boils down to these unpredictable, disparate,indeterminate countercurrents that circumscribe times of truths in the making, truths that losetheir truth value once fully acknowledged and fully accepted. Times, truths, heterogeneity, puremultiplicity. No totalizing here. No forcing of the venture, no specific investments. Philosophy, inBadiou's terms, stands outside these temporal ramifications. It guarantees only its aptitude to seizewhat's happening and provide an aftermath for calculating what it will have been worth--in a futureperfect tense that underscores endurance.


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LAUREN SEDOFSKY: The return to systematic philosophy today might seem archaic, if notimpossible. How do you explain your conviction not only that the systematic thinking that runsthrough the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is still possible, but also that thisarchitecture serves some purpose?

ALAIN BADIOU: Philosophy is always systematic. Naturally, if by "system" you mean anarchitecture necessarily endowed with a keystone or a center, then you can say, to employHeidegger's vocabulary, that it's a matter of an ontotheological systematicity, and therefore nolonger valid. But if by "system" you mean, first, that philosophy is conceived as an argumentativediscipline with a requirement of coherence, and second, that philosophy never takes the form of asingular body of knowledge but, to use my own vocabulary, exists conditionally with respect to acomplex set of truths, then it is the very essence of philosophy to be systematic.

The distinctive service that philosophy renders thought is the evaluation of time. The issue iswhether we can say, and according to what principles, that this time, our time, has value. For thatthe systematic dimension is necessary. To my mind, it's one and the same question to ask whether

philosophy can be systematic and whether philosophy can exist at all.

LS: Your project is strictly philosophical, "a thesis about discourse, not about the world."

AB: Absolutely. Strictly speaking, philosophy doesn't take the form of knowledge about the world.What's more, like Lacan, I'm inclined to think that the idea of the world is itself in the final analysisa phantasy. My project makes claims on the strictly philosophical, within a general logic ofdelimitation. Philosophy is irreducible to other forms of thought. And it should maintain thiscriterion of delimitation as one of its most precious possessions. The threat that has loomedthroughout its history is a confusion between what philosophy is in itself and what it is not, forexample political, or esthetic, or scientific discourse.

It should be understood that philosophy, in itself, has no object. It isn't and mustn't become a bodyof knowledge. Here I remain faithful to Louis Althusser, who was the first to have pointed this outwith perfect clarity. What's astonishing is that the thesis "philosophy is philosophy" seems originaltoday. However tautological, it's a militant thesis, and not at all accepted. We are in a period whenphilosophy is marked by doubt, or even by a conviction that it is extinct.

LS: The striking equation "ontology = mathematics" has the immense merit of eradicating themystification that clings to the word "being." You've identified this choice as an exit fromromanticism and a program for the death of God.


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AB: We're far from having exhausted the consequences of the question of the death of God. Thephilosophical destiny of atheism, in a radical sense, lies in the interplay between the question ofbeing and the question of infinity. The real romantic heritage--which is still with us today--is thetheme of finitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human condition occurs primordially inthe understanding of its finitude maintains infinity at a distance that's both evanescent and sacred,and holds it in the vicinity of a vision of being that's still theological. That's why I think the onlyreally contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of infinity.


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If we take "ontology," as we must, literally or etymologically, that is, as what can be said about beingqua being, then we ought to say that it's mathematics. Mathematics secularizes infinity in theclearest way, by formalizing it. The thesis that mathematics is ontology has the double-negativevirtue of disconnecting philosophy from the questioning of being and freeing it from the theme offinitude. That's why it represents a powerful break.

LS: In your magnum opus, L'Etre et l'evenement (Being and the event, 1988), you manage, in anastounding way, to elaborate all the concepts of your system inside a presentation of the axioms ofset theory. What led you to this improbable wager?

AB: [laughs] To a degree, this performance is easy--once you've thought of it. The moment it occursto you that mathematics is ontology, that idea itself has a considerable capacity to clarifymathematics. I was astonished myself. If we begin with the thesis that being is fundamentally puremultiplicity, including infinite chains of multiplicities, and if we consider that the most formalized,most complete framework of axioms of the multiple today is set theory, then why not examine settheory, axiom by axiom? What do those axioms say about being qua being? The mathematician

doesn't need to ask himself this kind of question. He can be an ontologist without knowing it.

If the philosopher examines set-theory axioms with the idea that they are statements about beingqua being, he sees an unexpected pertinence emerge. Let's take the simplest possible example, theaxiom of extensionality, which says that two sets are equivalent when they have the same elements.It's very straightforward. But if we look at it closely, we realize that this is in fact a theoreticaldeployment of the old question of identity and difference, same and other, that any thinking aboutbeing qua being must inevitably address. And it's the same for the entire set of axioms. Theyconstitute a coherent body of propositions about being qua being, based on the implicit suppositionthat being is reducible to pure multiplicity.

LS: In Le Nombre et les nombres (Number and numbers, 1990), you write, "A number is neither acharacteristic of a concept, nor an operational fiction, nor an empirical given, nor a constitutive ortranscendental category, nor a syntax or a language game, nor even an abstraction of our idea oforder. A number is a form of Being ... the infinite profusion of Being in Numbers." What ismathematics, then?

AB: Ultimately, being qua being is nothing but the multiple as such. What there is is the multiple.Mathematics is the kind of thought, and consequently the kind of discourse, that apprehends theconfigurations of multiplicity independently of any characteristic other than their multiplicity. As athought procedure, mathematics will be subject to general laws. It will be scanned by events,


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radical innovations, breaks, and interruptions.

From the moment that what is being taken into account is being qua being, that is, puremultiplicity, it is indispensable that language rid itself of its equivocalness. (There we are withLacan.) Formalization, this way of tearing language away from its status of mother tongue, thistransformation of the mother tongue into a tongue that no longer offers any natural reception forthe speaker, is the discipline through which thought appropriates the form of the pure multiple.


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LS: You make another rather audacious wager on the possibility of resurrecting a philosophicalconcept of truth.

AB: The relative discredit of the category of truth today has two sources. For a long time,philosophy suspended the question of truth on the protocol of the question of being, with the

Supreme Being as an ultimate guarantor. The death of God, then, as Nietzsche saw, amounts to acheckmate of truth. The second source is the vast contemporary movement to anthropologizephilosophy--the idea that philosophy deals with more or less heterogeneous linguistic or culturalorganizations of thought, and is itself the result or production of one such organization. Thismovement obviously entails a relativism, what could be called "a pragmatics of exactitude."

Mathematics dismantles the perilous theological connection Truth-Being-One. And quite apartfrom anthropological thought, I'm deeply convinced that procedures of a universal kind do exist.That's why I've undertaken to reorganize philosophy in its entirety, entrusting it to the category oftruth, at the price of a radical reformulation of the notion.

For me, paradoxically, truths are the nonphilosophical, even truths about being qua being whenthey're mathematical. At the same time, the nonphilosophical is precisely what provides for theexistence of philosophy. As a category specific to philosophy, truth is what I call an operator forseizing truths. Philosophy is active; at the heart of its discursive organization is an act, theparticular act of seizing truths, principally the truths of its time, truths in progress, incipient truths,truths in the process of constituting themselves, the truths that indicate what our time is reallymade of. It is philosophy's seizing of these truths that designates them as truths; they don't appearas such in themselves. A work of art appears as a work of art, a mathematical theorem as amathematical theorem, a great love as a great love, a political revolution as a political revolution.For philosophy, these are truths in my own special sense: they are truth procedures. Philosophy'stask is to show why and under what conditions these absolutely heterogeneous truths are, at least,compossible.

LS: What does "compossible" mean?

AB: Compossibility, a true philosophical creation, can't be understood simply as empiricalcollection. Truths are compossible because philosophy's seizing of them simultaneously designatesthem as truths. Truths are multiple and heterogeneous, but the philosophical act displays themtogether. In doing so, it evaluates its time. By "evaluating time," I mean evaluating how far thisparticular time has gotten in its capacity to generate truths. It's a matter of measuring our timeaccording to an idea of what that time contains that exceeds it. A truth is what within time exceeds


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time. And the philosophical act is its active witness.

LS: These truths emerge inside "the situation." How do you put a mathematical construction onsuch a simple word?


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AB: The situation is an ordinary multiple, a multiple that is obviously infinite because all situationsin reality are infinite. It can be a historical, political, artistic, or mathematical situation; it can evenbe a subjective situation. I take the situation in an exceptionally open sense, and to capture thatopenness I say it's a multiplicity.

I also posit that every situation is accompanied by a language, a capacity to name that situation'selements, their relations, their qualities, their properties. And in every situation there is also what Icall "the state of the situation"--the order of its subsets. The situation's language aims at showinghow an element belongs to such and such a subset. The situation is what presents the elements thatconstitute it; the state of the situation is what presents, not the situation's elements, but its subsets.

From this point of view the situation is a form of presentation, the state of the situation a form ofrepresentation. And knowledge, being the way we organize the situation's elements linguistically, isalways a certain relation between presentation and representation. Knowledge is most simplydefined as the linguistic determination of the general system of connections between presentationand representation. The set of a situation's various bodies of knowledge I call "the encyclopedia" ofthe situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth.

Considering the privilege I give to Plato--out of coquetry, or to go against the current--

LS: Coquetry? And I've been taking you seriously!

AB: [laughs] And you were right to--I mean, out of serious coquetry! Our century is fundamentallyanti-Platonist. So there's an element of coquetry in calling yourself a Platonist, which I am,profoundly.

In any case, as a Platonist I don't make a clear distinction between knowledge and opinion. So theencyclopedia is the anarchy of our knowledge. You'll find things in it that are correct, things thatare incorrect, interesting classifications, lively opinions and sterile ones, reactive ideas and activeones. But this is all still without truth.

LS: So how do you bring truth into the situation?

AB: My system's second major thesis, after "ontology = mathematics," is: in order for there to betruth, there has to be something other than the situation. Now I am absolutely an immanentist--Iam convinced that if there is truth, it isn't something transcendent, it's in the situation--but I am


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nevertheless led to the conclusion that the situation, as such, is without truth. This antinomy mustbe resolved. That's where I turn to the category of "the event," which pushes the system in anotherdirection.

LS: Everything hinges on the event, this possibility of the new that emerges in the situation andgives it a temporal, even transtemporal, dimension. How should we understand the event?

AB: The event has posed formidable problems for me, and still does. Here, following both

Mallarme and Lacan, I have recourse to the logic of the term "the evanescent"--something whosevery being is to disappear. I think of the event as a totally chance, incalculable, disconnectedsupplement to the situation. It will be recorded in its very disappearance only in the form of alinguistic trace, which I call the "name" of the event, and will supplement the situation with next tonothing. You might say my thinking on this point is a minimalism of the new.


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LS: Still, the evanescent has to fit the system's mathematical base.

AB: Through a kind of miraculous convergence--but that's how philosophy works--I found what Ineeded in mathematics. In 1964, the American mathematician Paul Cohen elaborated a doctrineconcerning the generic subsets of a given set. That doctrine provided me with the concept of a

subset whose particularity is precisely to have no particularity. This was truly a moment ofdiscovery for me, a moment of real illumination. We were getting to the thesis that a truth is not ina simple regime of opposition to knowledge; as a generic subset, it's really a gap or break in theencyclopedic organization of knowledge. It constitutes the void specific to this encyclopedia. All ofthis clarified the fact that a truth is a truth about the whole situation, not simply a truth about thisor that.

LS: A set with no apparent shared property among its elements must necessarily remain invisibleor, to use your key word, indiscernible. Faced with the indiscernible, what do you do?

AB: Take a simple event like the encounter of love. The encounter is the event's specific mode in

the truth procedure called "love," the procedure that renders the truth of that totally particularsituation, sexuation. The event itself is the encounter. The encounter does not constitute thesituation, it supplements it: there is what there was before, and then there's the encounter.

Next comes the truth procedure of love itself. Its name is marked by the various forms that thedeclaration of love can take; the declaration of love is strictly what constitutes the name, theenduring trace, of the event of love. We have to explore the situation with respect to this new entityin such a way as to find out what is related or unrelated or difficult to relate to this primordialevent. In so doing, we will trace a subset of the situation, little by little over time--because theextraordinarily ramified activities of love necessarily circumscribe a particular time. The subset isgeneric and, therefore, indiscernible. This means that the lovers cannot discern the subset that they

themselves constitute. It's in this sense that I'd say they are its subject.

LS: In entering into the truth procedures that activate the four Platonic conditions of philosophy--mathematics, politics, art, and love--are we exclusively in the realm of thought?

AB: A truth procedure is the experience of thought, or thought as experience. All the possibleelements of human activity--sensitivity, emotion, concepts, practice, violence--can be mobilized bythe deployment of a truth. The doctrine of truth I propose has the merit of ending theconfrontation between thought and experience, theory and practice. Those dichotomies aresubverted by this conception of truth and of its subject.


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LS: What kind of subject is this exactly?

AB: Truth induces the notion of a subject in a totally singular manner. The subject of a truth is theterm or terms (here, the lovers) of the situation that are seized or engaged by a truth procedure,and that constitute the generic subset--that is, they trace the path by which this subset emerges as atruth. They are factors of the indiscernible. At the same time, it is only because there is this processof indiscernibility that the subject, in this singular moment, finds itself constituted. The subject of atruth is certainly not in a position of mastery over a truth. The only subject is the subject of truth.

What is not the subject of truth is only an inhabitant of the situation.


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LS: The procedure has more being than the subject?

AB: Inevitably. Because a single generic set of the situation, even if it's always incomplete, is in itsbeing essentially infinite. The subject, though, is only engaged in finite operations. The subject isalways the differential or finite dimension of the truth procedure.

LS: You characterize your system as a "philosophy of time of this time." How do you situate thetime you're theorizing within the history of philosophy?

AB: That's an immense question. Every event constitutes its own time. Consequently, every truthalso involves the constitution of a time. So there are times, not one time. On the other hand,philosophy doesn't constitute time. That's why I was led to reintroduce the old word "eternity,"which was even less used than "truth" was. I sought it out to designate the singularity ofphilosophy's relationship to time.

Philosophy has a relation to the different heterogeneous times of truths, since those are what it

seizes. It exposes these times to precisely the aspect of time that is not temporal. Because whatwithin time is constituted as truth both marks a new time and, strictly speaking, exceeds thesingularity of its time. What is specific to truth, after all, is that it endures. Philosophy tries to seizetruth's endurance, to capture the eternity contained within time.

LS: What about the event's historical dimension?

AB: The fact that events belong to history signifies only that they can be located in arrangements ofbefore and after. Those arrangements offer no reason to argue that they constitute a history.Historicism consists in referring the singularity of a procession of events to a historical meaningthat penetrates it and goes beyond it. I'm not at all a historicist, in that I don't think events are

linked in a global system. That would deny their essentially random character, which I absolutelymaintain.

LS: Michel Foucault drew our attention to the breaks, the discontinuities, the nonlinear aspect ofhistory, without proposing a thesis about the jolting of what you call the situation. Might you be thephilosopher that many take Foucault to be?

AB: Foucault is a theoretician of encyclopedias. He was never really interested in the question ofknowing whether, within situations, anything existed that might deserve to be called a "truth." Withhis usual corrosiveness, he would say that he didn't have to deal with this kind of thing. He wasn'tinterested in the protocol of either the appearance or the disappearance of a given epistemic


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organization. As long as you don't have an immanent doctrine of what in the situation exceeds thesituation, you can't be concerned about answering the question of how we pass from one system toanother.

LS: In your Manifeste (1989), you propose the following program of compossibilization:mathematics from Cantor to Cohen, Paul Celan's poems, love under the sign of Lacan, and, inpolitics, the "obscure incidents" of the period 1968-80. In the framework of a "philosophy of timeof this time," are these events really on the breach?


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AB: Today, I would certainly rework this mapping of events, which was meant only as anindication. Anything empirical is always only indicative, and rapidly contestable. In mathematics,something else would be needed to be on the breach; that would be the theory of categories, whichhas led me to further systematic developments that I hope one day to write as a sequel to L'Etre etl'evenement. In the arts, we would have to examine how arts other than poetry function as

conditions for philosophy. Gilles Deleuze wasn't wrong to consider film philosophically important;I'd like to say something a bit more elaborate about it. And music, in its complexity and relativeuncertainty, interests me. And then of course there would be the visual arts. Supplementarydeployments also need to be made in relation to the "obscure incidents" of politics. Politically the'80s were strongly reactionary, and in no way clarified the new.

LS: Mathematics is only one of the four conditions of philosophy, yet it constitutes the concepts andstructure of your system. Isn't your philosophy sutured to mathematics?

AB: It's an obvious objection. The impression that I privilege mathematics comes from myannouncement that mathematics is the science of being qua being. But just as the declaration

separates philosophy from ontology, from a questioning of being, it also separates philosophyradically from mathematics. It's a protocol of distinction, not of suture at all.

The mathematical thread was absolutely necessary in L'Etre et l'evenement, but not in everythingI've written. There, I wanted to convince my reader that mathematics is the science of being quabeing. I couldn't do that without making abundant use of mathematics. I also wanted to assuremyself that the theory of truth I was proposing was mathematically consistent. But you mustn'tthink that mathematics occupies such a privileged place in the whole of my philosophical program.

LS: I would have thought that the strategic move of putting mathematics in the place of ontologywould at last open the way to a philosophical seizing of the theoretical sciences, written in the same

formal mathematical language and possessing an oblique, if not to say blind, relation tophenomena. You have remained silent on this point.

AB: My silence about science is entirely temporary and contingent. There's absolutely no principleinvolved. A whole series of aspects of the sciences, and particularly of contemporary physics, are ofgreat philosophical interest. I had launched into arid studies of quantum mechanics years ago. Butfor the moment I still don't feel sufficiently experienced or intimately acquainted with what's inquestion there to talk about it. You can't do everything!

LS: Forgetting for the moment the military/industrial establishment, is there a better example of


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the truth procedure than the scientific community?

AB: If the scientific community designates the system of protocols for evaluating scientificinnovations, you're quite right. Scientists are a body of the faithful. But the scientific communitysometimes designates something more institutional: efforts to impose State control--which fallsinto the order of subsets that I refer to as the state of the situation--on the truth procedure. Therelation between the state of the situation and the truth procedure is always complex, since thetruth procedure disrupts the state of the situation, feeding on that situation's void, not its closure.

This makes for an ambivalence in the scientific community. On the truth side, it's a community ofthe faithful. On the state side, it will always involve an attempt to sell its fidelity to the State.


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LS: Concerning politics, why have you seized on the "obscure incidents" of the period 1968-80rather than a namable event?

AB: I call these happenings obscure because I'm not convinced they have received their name yet.Nomination takes place in an aftermath. It can be left in abeyance for a long time. I have the feeling

that what happened in the '60s received a series of false names, because it wasn't clearly perceivedthat what was at stake in these happenings was, precisely, a calling into question of the previousprotocols of political nomination. (That's why they're obscure.) A lot of young activists in thisperiod spontaneously tried to name what was happening through the Marxist vocabulary of class,or to inscribe it in the logic of a new party, or used the signifier "revolution," etc. But these wordswere inadequate for what was happening. What events showed was exactly the opposite: even andespecially in revolutionary politics, there was something used up, inoperative, and outdated in thisprotocol of nomination.

LS: It's possible there was no event at all?

AB: It's entirely possible that there was no event at all. I really don't know.

LS: You must know, or you wouldn't have designated that obscure time for examination.

AB: No, I really don't know, because it's possible that we're in a time, itself uncertain, when we'regoing to be able to find names for a whole series of events that have disappeared into the past.Although they remain undecided for the moment, they may become fixed as events. Undecidabilityis an intrinsic attribute of an event.

LS: What was the last namable event?

AB: In politics, the revolution of October 1917.

LS: We're very far behind.

AB: We're very far behind. But that's the situation of politics.

LS: In the U.S. right now, the left is splintered into communities organizing to promote the rights ofthose who are denied them. These subcommunities have spawned sectarian modes of thought.How do you see this situation?

AB: As one of the most catastrophic imaginable. Some day it will be necessary to review this


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communitarian venture and the considerable damage it entails for thought itself. In order for thereto be emancipatory politics, it is absolutely necessary that the substantiality of the communityremain unnamable. If emancipatory politics claims to proceed in the name of any predicativecharacteristic, it denies itself the possibility of being generic. When you're for African-Americans,women, and others having the same fights as anyone else, it's absolutely indispensable to supportthat on other grounds than the existence of a community of African-Americans or women.

The theme of equal rights is really progressive and really political, that is, emancipatory, only if it

finds its arguments in a space open to everyone, a space of universality. If not, despite all theapparent radicalism a community puts into its system of demands, we have a profound submissionto the figure of the state of the situation. To every generic procedure I attach a limit, a term I call its"unnamable point." More and more, I am tempted to think that in emancipatory politics thecommunity in a racial or biological sense is strictly an unnamable point. In order for politics toremain emancipatory, the community must not be named as such.


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LS: Marxist from the outset, Maoist for a long time, would you accept the accusation of havingyielded to a philosophical idealism?

AB: Not at all. To be an idealist you have to distinguish between thought and matter, transcendenceand immanence, the high and the low, pure thought and empirical thought. None of these

distinctions function in the system I propose. Actually, I would submit that my system is the mostrigorously materialist in ambition that we've seen since Lucretius.

LS: Concerning the condition of love, is the event situated in the encounter of love or in Lacan'srenovation of Freud?

AB: In the truth procedure that is love, the immanent event is the encounter of love. If I mentionLacan as a theoretical event, it's because Lacan represents psychoanalysis' contemporary time,when the question of love, in a modern form, has returned to the scene of thought as a realtheoretical issue. Lacan tried to grant a quasi-ontological significance to the encounter of love. Heinscribed love in its real terrain, the formula of sexuation. And he also tried to disentangle the

extraordinarily complex web that ties and unties love and desire. For all these reasons, he madeinvaluable contributions to restoring love to its function as a truth procedure, a point that had beenpartially forgotten since Plato.

LS: You've found a generic set and truth inside the analytic situation.

AB: Until now, my interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis has been confined to showing that what Iwas saying in philosophy was compatible with Lacanian thought. In doing this, I was led to say anumber of things about the situation of the analytic cure. But I've never resolved the issue ofwhether the analytic cure represents an independent, autonomous truth procedure. The difficultyis that there's something in the analytic situation that's analogous to the love situation.

Transference, after all, is an encounter that is supposed to take the form of knowledge. Lacanhimself was unable to clarify transference except by referring to the great philosophical works onlove. The determination of the analytic situation's exact point of autonomy requires research on mypart that is not yet complete.

LS: Sexuation enters your system as a radical disjunction between the fundamental Two. Expellingall pathos, you equate feminine jouissance with the structure of an axiom, and a woman with thegeneric function.

AB: Given my relationship to the axiom, it's hardly an insult to say that feminine jouissance is


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axiomatic. What interests me in feminine sexuality is its singular link to infinity. It's a quasi-ontological process, a test of infinity, that seems subtracted from the finite regime prescribed byphallic logic. I don't see how the irreducibility of this jouissance could be a source of any pathoswhatever. That's the price of a deromanticization of infinity.

LS: How do you identify the unity of an pertinent for philosophy, what you call a "configuration"?

AB: In music there is a sequence that starts with Arnold Schonberg and renders the truth of the

tonal system retroactively by proposing an essentially different figure of musical composition. Thissequence has all the attributes of a truth procedure. The protocol of the break is grouped aroundcertain works by Schonberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, the uncertain progressiveprotocol of nomination, dodecaphonic, then later serial music, and the labor of fidelity to thatevent. I would call this set a "configuration." It's not the work of an artist, or even of several artists,but a sequential constellation of works, inaugurated by an event and tracing a singular trajectory. Inthe investigation of art, we should completely abandon the notion of the auteur. Because of theencyclopedia, however, the auteur continues to paralyze our thinking.


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LS: You've explicitly rejected the kind of suture of philosophy to the visual arts that we find in theworks of Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. Is that why you're kept a distance fromvisual art?

AB: Of all the arts, it's the one that intimidates me the most. Its intellectual charge is the greatest.

In front of great painting, contemporary as well as past, I'm often seized with emotion. So turningto visual art philosophically has always been rather difficult for me. It's not a feeling of ignorance atall, but a feeling that the mode in which intellectuality proceeds irreducibly into complex andpowerful sensory forms . . . really, painting intimidates me. That's why I never talk about it.

What's more, I've never been very satisfied by the attempts of my predecessors to place themselvesunder the condition of painting. Nor have I ever found a regime of prose adequate to talk aboutpainting. Where phenomenology is concerned, it isn't badly deployed, but it hasn't broughtanything really decisive to the problem, even in texts of great quality like Maurice Merleau-Ponty'son Cezanne. Even if we take Lacan's brilliant analyses, or Foucault on Velazquez, we see thatpainting is missing somehow, that it isn't really the issue. Where my program is concerned, I don't

know if I'm capable of including it. I like painting too much, perhaps. Or it's a lack of inventivenesson my part.

LS: In the Manifeste, however, you propose an approach to painting: "exhibit what in painting isthe gesture of all painting or, precisely, what is the nonspecifiable in painting as such," by asking"where is the indiscernible in this affair."

AB: I think I see it in what I know about painting, which is incomplete, fragmentary, and nowperhaps outmoded. The movement to disengage painting from mimetic space consisted inproducing the pictorial configuration's genericity, not as an induced or secondary effect, but as thecentral volition. When I propose exhibiting pictorially the act of painting itself, and showing its

specific intellectuality in the work's visible form, that obviously means rendering the generic truthof painting's singular situation. That gesture is indiscernible in the sense that it will not allow itselfto be captured by any of the encyclopedia's previously constituted predicates for the recognition offorms.

LS: As reference points in the arts you take Mallarme, Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam, FernandoPessoa, Kasimir Malevich, and Schonberg. How is it that a philosophy of time of this time remainsfaithful to the high Modernism of the early century?

AB: I don't in any way think the high Modernism of the early century has gone without breaks up to


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the present--that we can still refer to it as a notion of the contemporary. I don't at all maintain thatnothing is happening, that there are no new works. It must be remembered, however, that whatphilosophy designates as susceptible of being seized in truth procedures are generic truths, rathervast subsets, vaster generally than is imagined within the interior movements of these arts. I takethese examples as testimony or metonymy of the configuration; I could take other, morecontemporary ones. But in terms of configurations, is there an essential break? Of that I'm notcompletely convinced.


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In the last twenty or thirty years, what intrigues me is: what is emerging? I can see this a bit interms of works, but it's much harder in terms of configurations.

LS: Since the truth of each condition of philosophy is both immanent and singular, can we speak ofpolitical art?

AB: Yes, we can, because there are different ways of singularizing the types of generic procedures.There is a matheme of politics; in its events, its names, its protocols of fidelity, its slogans, etc.,every singular political sequence is irreducible to any other. But there is also the singularity of theunnamable term that remains the limit point of a generic procedure--for politics, the substantialcommunity. Providing the matheme of each of the procedures--which I haven't done in any of mypublished works--is a very important task. It's what I call "time-two" of the event.

LS: And if I were to ask you for the matheme of art?

AB: Right now, I don't think I can go any further.

LS: You've made the choice, not without grave consequences, to situate ethics inside the genericprocedures. Why?

AB: Obviously, the idea of a general ethics overhanging ordinary situations would take me out ofmy general philosophical organization, which is under the merciless rule of immanence. Moreover,if ethics, in the real sense of the term, exists, it must be attached to what is not the ordinary regimeof the situation's pure and simple living multiplicity. In this way, ethics must be connected to truthprocedures. There will be as many ethical forms as there are truth procedures, as many singular,ethical actions or determinations as there are singular truths.

LS: But can one seriously confide and confine ethics to mathematicians, political activists, lovers,and artists? Is the ordinary person, by definition, excluded from the ethical field?

AB: Why should we think that ethics convokes us all? The idea of ethics' universal convocationsupposes the assignment of universality. I maintain that the only immanent universality is found inthe truth procedure. We are seized by the really ethical dimension only inside a truth procedure.Does this mean that the encounter of ethical situations or propositions is restricted to the actors ofa truth procedure? I understand that this point is debatable.

Of course, it can happen to anyone. Anyone can be seized by a political event, anyone can be seizedby love. Most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics. We live in the living


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multiplicity of the situation. When we are engaged in a truth procedure, however, we are seized byit and follow the maxim of fidelity to it. There is no ethical imperative other than "Continue!,""Continue in your fidelity!"

LS: If we find ethics inside the truth procedure, evil must inhabit the same space.

AB: That's the problem with which the trajectory ends. It's necessary to understand how evil isconnected to the existence of truth procedures: there can be an imitation, what I call a

"simulacrum," of the truth event, convoking not the void but the plenum. It's a pseudoevent thathas a substance as its agenda. Any closed community always approaches this kind of racial,biological, or territorial conception. In connection with fidelity, evil presents itself in the choice offidelity. Only a fidelity offers the possibility of what I call "betrayal." In connection with theunnamable, evil takes the form of the idea that a truth can be total, that a truth is not just a subsetof the situation but can englobe the entire situation, ignoring the points that must remainunnamable. When a truth is forced beyond its unnamable point, the consequences are necessarilyruinous, even criminal. That's what I call "disaster."


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LS: As your ultimate wager, you acknowledge that philosophy itself can expose us to disaster.

AB: In seizing truths, philosophy may come to consider itself the sole, synthetic source of allpossible truth. Once it dominates, directs, or subsumes, it can constrain truths to make claims tototality, breaking their limits, smashing their unnamable points. When philosophy articulates its

seizing of truths in the form of identity or fusion, it exposes us to disaster.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group


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Being by Numbers - Interview - Alain Badiou

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