Now I have spent over a month reading Badiou’s philosophical and literary texts, reading secondary literature about him, listening to his magnificent YouTube presentations, and even corresponding with scholars who know him. While my admiration for his breadth and stalwart adherence to his principles is unchanged, I now have some reservations about the soundness of his foundations as announced in the very title of his key philosophical work Being and Event. My concern is that his definition of objective reality on the one hand and political aspiration on the other are two separate domains which are not bridged and integrated sufficiently. The widest and deepest object of philosophical thought is the study of Being as Being. In a stroke of genius and originality, Badiou equates this study with mathematics. Why? Because all reality is multiple, consisting of multiples (of things, people, aspects, divisions, etc.) which can only be understood in terms of the modern branch of mathematics known as set theory. Badiou is well informed about this and I find his argument cogent.
But alas, mathematics is politically or ethically neutral. Badiou is a man of the Left who opposes inequality and injustice. We can imagine, however, just as readily a mathematician who is elitist and reactionary, who has contempt for the lesser beings who cannot grasp his higher truth. It is the second term of Badiou’s title that anchors the politics of his philosophy: the Event. This is hard to define but for Badiou it reflects his experience of May 1968. An event is something unexpected that opens up new possibilities, comparable to the paradigm shift in the history of science (the sun, not the earth, is the center of the cosmos), or comparable to the coup de foudre which can blossom into a lasting, life-transforming love.
But why does this have to be an egalitarian, revolutionary or leftist event? How do we know it when we experience it? It’s clear that the true event is on the side of revolutionary transformation: Badiou refers to the election of Trump as a “counter-event,” implying a counter-revolutionary one. How do we know the true event from the false one? He introduces the concept of “fidelity to the event” which implies a kind of pragmatism: if you act as if x is true and get results that conform to that hypothesis, then x is true for you. But this could mean that we act as if everyone is against us and in so doing turn them against us, which is, I’m afraid, the pragmatic truth of America today.
My suggestion would be that the true event would be the one that issues in greater or deeper universalism as in the French Revolution, all (male) French citizens are equal; or in Socialism: all workers are bound by class solidarity. We are changed, transformed as subjects, by embracing the truth that men and women are equal; or that those dark figures sneaking across southern borders are exactly like us, not alien invaders but motivated by the fears and desires we share. The killing of George Floyd was an “event” in a way that all the documented racist murders and lynchings of the past were not. Why? The piety that instantly veils the event makes it hard to see the truth of the transition. It was an event because people everywhere recognized their own capacity for suffering in a figure who would have been disregarded as a “low-life” in past times. I hope the next great event may involve people recognizing that they would act no differently than these bedraggled immigrants on the border if confronted with the conditions that made them flee.
But alas, this is an interpolation, mine and in places his, into the towering conceptual framework of Badiou’s philosophy which I am afraid tries but fails to hitch the wagon of the revolution to the stars of logic and mathematics. The implicit universalism of the true event would need to be shifted from the periphery of his work to its center, at the risk of inciting sharper challenges from his philosophical critics, in order to activate the political potential of his thought outside the circuit of French academic theory.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 