I discovered Alain Badiou when I was holed up in a Montmartre apartment last November, collaborating on a research project by day and trying to improve my uncertain French comprehension in the evenings. In search of a clear, cognate-rich French, I googled politicians and authors. Then I happened upon Badiou about whom I knew almost nothing. After listening to a few of his presentations, I felt as if I had tuned in to Socrates himself. Like the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, Badiou remains congenial even while mercilessly deflating the weaker premises of his interlocutors by asking essential questions. In a media culture crowded with gurus, hacks, and hucksters, his is a stunningly lucid oppositional voice that delights in reflection and dialogue. The 85-year-old veteran of every French leftist struggle since the Fifties carves out the measured periods of his discourse with gestures that signal his urgent will to make himself understood. Fascinated, I began to trace out the architecture of his political philosophy from his YouTube presentations and a collection of his recent essays, Les possibles matins de la politique, from a nearby bookstore. I tried to extrapolate the whole from bits and pieces, splicing together my personal Alain Badiou. This would lead to frustration when I immersed myself in his writing later on.
Several points aroused my curiosity. Born January 17, 1937, ten years and a day before me, Badiou has known all the key thinkers of the French intellectual Left. He took part in the events of May 68, embraced Maoism, engaged with factory workers, continued to engage even after he lost faith in the party organization principle, and still speaks out at every opportunity to every kind of audience. He does this without authoritarianism yet also without soft-selling his communist principles. His spirit presides over a cultural-political institution in the banlieue of Aubervilliers. It is a public forum and theater intended to address in equal measure French and foreign-born, intellectuals and those without higher education while serving their political, cultural, social, and language-learning needs. As a philosopher and political thinker, Badiou has kept faith with the ideals of his youth, even while anticipating the unpredictable transforming event to come. His philosophical chef d’œuvre, Being and Event, attempts to anchor his politics in the most general theme of ontology. This overarching goal reflects his engagement with Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, and Sartre. His radical political philosophy aspires to extend from the infinite multiplicity of mathematical set theory to the unique, transforming event of the here and now, as it were from the stars to the streets. Like Socrates, Badiou is both sovereign and unprepossessing.
What won me over was his adherence to the often ignored but constantly confirmed truth of the Communist Manifesto, the truth of globalization, of the ceaseless dynamic of capital that subverts all boundaries of states and all bonds of culture, tradition, or transcendence, reducing everything and everyone to a commodity and turning those with nothing to sell but their labor into the wretched of the earth, the proletariat. Only because we cling to the superseded status of the nation do we think Marx’s immiseration of the proletariat was a failed prediction. Badiou notes that 50 % of the world’s population owns no share at all of the earth’s wealth, while 10 % owns 86 %. The remaining 40 % of the population with its 14 % of global wealth is the global middle class. Unsurprisingly, the global middle class is terrified of losing its hold and is torn between opposite poles, on the one hand, right-wing populism, hostile to immigrants, and on the other the egalitarian demands of human rights. Reflecting on those global property relations suggests why our sporadic attempts to reform the police, restore democracy, or occupy public spaces to protest autocracy, nationalism, and inequality are doomed to futility. It is hard to dispute the veracity of Badiou’s term for migrants and illegal aliens: nomadic proletarians. They are the wild card, the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit into prevalent patterns, the key to a coming world-historical event. The issues posed by the growing ranks of nomadic proletarians dwarf all issues of refugee crises, human rights, identity, or cultural diversity. Badiou is critical of diversity as a focus of opposition. Between him and a cousin in Lyon, there are already infinite differences. Being as beings consists of infinite multiples which mathematical set theory can only “count as one.”
What unites partisan militants in a common cause is not identity but the shared allegiance to a truth. Truth, to be sure, is not transcendent and singular. Badiou writes rather of “truth procedures” that play out in four spheres: science, including mathematics, politics, art, and love. This striking assertion appeals to me because I am accustomed to assuming that even the most undisputed of scientific laws do not exist in the external nature which they accurately describe. They are the refined harvest of scientific procedures, of empirical methods correctly applied. And just as scientific truth is laboriously obtained, I have my personal reasons to affirm that the truth of love is not some equitable quid pro quo, but might instead require the patience and suffering of a party militant or an intrepid researcher. Because truth in science, art, and love is the result of procedural exertion, truth in politics must likewise reside in the active pursuit of the good. Badiou has no truck with the degrading valuation of victimhood as a source of political authority and no sympathy with the relativism of truth which we sometimes associate with French critical theory.
When I came home from France in December, I ordered several of his works including Being and Event in English, along with some secondary literature. I set out to get a grasp of the heart of his system. Here I came up against what I now regard as a core problem of Badiou’s political thought. In his ontology, being is identified with number, with the logical systematization of the mathematics of transfinite numbers known as set theory, about which Badiou, the son of a mathematician, is evidently well informed. The science of being is mathematics. This isn’t intended to imply a Pythagorean mysticism in which the substance of things is numbers. Numbers are the science of being which “presents” as an infinitude of multiples subject to the set theory procedure of the “count as one.” He discards the presumptive oneness of things as in Spinoza, upon whom Badiou wrote his graduate thesis. Any postulate of oneness is a relic of theology, which Badiou eliminates from ontology altogether. Religion is not among the spheres in which truth manifests itself.
This identification of ontology with mathematics has its allure. As Badiou says in Number and Numbers, we face the paradox that “we live in the era of number’s despotism; thought yields to the law of denumerable multiplicities; and yet (unless perhaps this very default, this failing, is only the obscure obverse of a conceptless submission) we have at our disposal no recent, active idea of what number is” (p. 1). One could wish for the author’s explication of that parenthetical “perhaps.” Doesn’t the tyranny of numbers coincide with what Badiou indicts as the tyranny of economics over politics? Economic rationales reduce every value or subject to a statistical entity, even while, as Badiou says, economics remains a pseudoscience, less reliable in its predictions than the weather report. Could the mystery of number point our way to overcoming this false authority of economics? As Badiou says, economics is at root nothing but the unfolding logic of capital with its globalizing commodification in which the essences of all things are reduced to their exchange value. Political reasoning is reduced to economics couched in statistics. If we reflect on our situation, terrorized by pandemic statistics, cut off from fellowship, and dependent on an Internet whose algorithms manipulate our consciousness, we ask whether the tyranny of numbers might indeed be a factor in the angry, inarticulate rebellion against state controls. What sort of consciousness would be needed for a more articulate response?
Badiou’s Being and Event should suggest answers. But when I proceeded from my preconceived notions of his political thought to his main work, I encountered a labyrinth and a riddle. The labyrinth is Badiou’s interpretation of set theory, a modern branch of mathematics that attempts to consolidate all possible relations of finite and transfinite multiples in the logical relationships of sets. Its procedure makes one think of how all information can be digitally recorded by combinations of zero and one. In order to gain some rough knowledge of the terms of Being and Event, I consulted Burhannudin Baki’s Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory and Peter Hallward’s Badiou: A Subject of Truth. At best, I could then assign to such terms as “forcing” or “the continuum hypothesis” a certain content. Only the reader with a deep mathematical knowledge could possibly intuit what if anything set theory has to do with the tyranny of capitalism or how Badiou’s metaphysics relates to his politics or his theory to any revolutionary practice. True, Spinoza’s quasi-geometrical demonstrations also pose difficulties for the reader. But the relation of Spinoza’s ideas to their political consequences is clearer. Spinoza’s metaphysics in fact proclaims itself as an Ethics. The radical consequences of his equation of Nature with God, Deus sive Natura, were apparent to clergy and kings, as well as all those groaning under their yoke. Anyone familiar with the outline of Spinoza’s thought could see how his infinite one-story universe held no place for Hell, a Creator and Redeemer, or for the superiority of kings and clergy over the enlightened commoner. In contrast, hardly anyone is likely to intuit the relation of mathematical “constructivism” to parliamentary democracy or of the “generic orientation” in set theory to “a kind of disciplined anarchism” (Hallward, p. 217). This doesn’t make Badiou wrong; it does mean that his political sympathizers would have to accept key matters on his authority. Authoritarianism is the bane of leftist movements. Badiou’s modesty and congeniality encourage the reader or spectator to overlook the potential for mysticism and guruism.
If set theory opens into a labyrinth, the second term of the title, the event, poses riddles. At first, to be sure, Badiou’s “event” seems as concrete and simple as his “being” is abstract and challenging. An “event” in his sense is a development that breaks all the patterns of previous experience and the ways of understanding a situation. An event discloses new possibilities which can be extended to all; and in so doing, it creates a new “subject.” By remaining faithful to the implications of the event, adherents become subject to a truth which is realized by their faithfulness. Revolutions, political and scientific, are events. So is falling in love, which allows the creation of a new subject of the faithful lovers who actualize the truth of their transforming love. Badiou wants to coordinate his notion of the event with the aporia of set theory; but this is a bit like invoking Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to justify free will or invoking advanced physics to confirm that bodies move when everyone can see that they do. We do not need elaborate theories to know that life is full of surprises. The real difficulty would be anchoring the surprises in the theories.
The vivid yet elusive notion of the event can be brought into focus by considering two of Badiou’s favored examples: the conversion and ministry of the Apostle Paul and the experience of May 1968. To the former, he has devoted a small book, Saint Paul and the Foundation of Universalism. In all ways but one, it seems ideally suited to embody the transforming event: Paul founds his universal ministry to Jew and Gentile, free and slave, male and female, on the event of Christ’s Resurrection. Faith in this finite but unparalleled event creates the universal community of believers and unfolds limitless consequences. Because of the scandalous singularity of the Resurrection with its imperative of faith and its universalizing, transforming consequences of faith, Paul parallels the profile of a communist militant. There is a catch, however. Badiou, a militant atheist, categorically regards the Resurrection as pure myth. The event can therefore be a fictional event. To make sense of this, one might adopt two recourses: the pragmatic one (if we act as if X is true and get the corresponding results, it is true for us) or the Hegelian (the dialectical truth of Paul’s conversion is the truth of universal humanity which is in turn the hidden meaning of Christ’s humanization of divinity). The Hegelian interpretation is more likely the intended one. However, it also brings with it a more pragmatic understanding of what Badiou means by truth procedure: the truth lies in how the event works out.
Most curious of all is Badiou’s insistence on the “evental” nature of May 68 Paris. It was of course by no means unique. I was a student that year in Hamburg, Germany, where such “events” had been playing out for months, with German students looking to the precedent of American demonstrations and sit ins. Badiou would doubtlessly include all such as events. But even if they fed off one another like the revolutions of 1848, Hamburg and Paris, Berkeley and Prague were all different, so the question arises: what was it about the Paris May that urged Badiou to such a faithfulness to the event, when so many other participants would soon become disillusioned with it. I believe that the universalizing moment for the radical philosopher was first and foremost the elusive prospect of students and workers joining forces, and second the spirit of limitless possibility conveyed by such slogans as “Imagination to Power!” or “Demand the Impossible!” While other observers reacted with bemused skepticism, Badiou must have taken such paradoxes as key to his dawning understanding of the unheard of character of the true event. But of course for him the truth of the event remains a matter of keeping faith with it. He has never given up doing that.
As my infatuation has receded, I have been thrown back, sadly, onto my studies of German mystical and esoteric literature which I have always sought to unmask as so many responses to social-historical crises: Hildegard of Bingen possesses no authority as a woman in the church—until God summons her in a visionary event. Saint Augustine is torn between classical learning and Christian faith—until he realizes in an illuminatory event that the Logos of philosophy and the Creator Word of the Gospel must be one. Badiou—torn between his elite intellectual culture and sympathy for proletarian revolution—combines the most rarified intellectuality with the euphoria of May ‘68. It becomes his Damascus Gate, his mystical transformation. He extends it to all. Unfortunately, for all his creative commitment, the merger vitiates the force of his message. As a slogan for engendering solidarity, “Let’s be count-as-one!” lacks the urgency of “Workers of the World Unite!” I’ve come to regard the configuration of his thought as symptomatic of a French phobia of religion. Aiming at absolute laïcité, rejecting even oneness as a vestige of monotheism, they import repressed theological contents by a back door into their thought. One finds evidence of this in Le Royaume of Emmanuel Carrère or in the Christ-like cult that springs up around Vernon Subutex in volume three of Virginie Despentes’ novel of that title. One can admire Badiou’s erudition and commitment and at the same time hope for an adept interpreter capable of discerning in his intricate structures signs that orient us toward equality, peace, and a more just and humane order in the world.
Andrew (Weeks)
March 12, 2022
Normal Thoughts 