Badiou’s conversion, which he himself has called his “road to Damascus” (alluding to the exemplary mystical conversion of the Apostle Paul), was his experience of the solidarity of French students and workers in May 1968. It was an event that could claim universal significance. It seemed to echo the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, and it occurred in synch with a global watershed of two epochs, one the aftermath of World War II, the other the new age which understood itself, however vaguely, as a revolutionary new beginning of the baby boomer generation. But the revolutionary aspirations of 1968 faded. They died slowly and dishearteningly in France and elsewhere.
What was one to make of this? Among those who faced the bitter disappointments that settled in after ’68, many shrugged it all off and went their own way. Feminism and gay liberation were more successful but also more reformist. Others couldn’t give up on their revolutionary aspirations and pursued them in a new leftist party or in some communitarian sect that went “back to the land” or embraced eastern mysticism.
Badiou didn’t give an inch. He helped found a new revolutionary party. But above all, he pursued politics in the domain of theory. If he and his comrades couldn’t force the revolution or resurrect May ’68, he would at least assert the possibility of revolutionary change in the domain of philosophy. Revolutionary change might or might not occur again in our time. In any case, it must be possible. History hadn’t ended. Theory hadn’t ended. Revolutionary politics hadn’t ended.
So this is how one has to read his Being and Event. It’s Badiou’s answer to the oppressive and widespread feeling that world history and the history of thought had indeed exhausted all possibilities of fundamental innovation. The pie of the world had been baked and much that we find detestable had been baked into it once and for all. All we who oppose injustice and falsehood could do was clamor for a fairer share of the pie. Never mind that it’s a poison pie. Never mind if it rots and stinks under our very noses. We want our fair share! Badiou for one rejected that outlook heart and soul.
Here is my take on Badiou’s Being and Event: By identifying ontology with the mathematics of set theory and transfinite numbers, he precludes the completion and exhaustion of possible worlds. The set of all sets that do not contain themselves as a member cannot be. If it exists, it doesn’t, and vice versa. A logically exhaustive whole contradicts itself and, in the process, leaves the door ajar for the unexpected. Thought cannot terminate the fecundity of being or foreclose future revolutions.
We won’t know it until we see it, that unexpected transforming moment. But Badiou gives us this name for it: the event. The aporia of the mathematics of infinite possibilities leaves the mind open for it. No calculation can preclude it. It will arrive as an exception to the rules of the situation which will be its site. We will only confirm it after the fact by remaining faithful to its consequences as they unfold and create a new subject of truth. But what is the criterion of a new truth? What can possibly confirm the truth of an event which is by definition unforeseeable and anomalous?
It seems to me that the answer is there for the grasping. It’s in the subtitle of his little book on St. Paul. It’s there in his precondition for any proposition to claim truth. It’s the criterion of universality. Paul declared the universal subject of his faith in the Resurrection. To keep faith with that “event” is to create a transformed world, much as Communist militants who would keep faith with the truth of the world revolution would likewise institute a new reality—though neither was free of destructive contradictions. The French Revolution created a new, if incomplete, universality, as did the October Revolution. The contradictions were always failures of universality, as for example the privileges of the new communist bureaucracy. That was the contradiction that, in Badiou’s opinion, the Cultural Revolution aimed to overcome. That was what inspired French Maoists including Badiou. Feminism and other liberation movements extended the assertion of universality but not by way of a complete revolution.
By the same token, the scientific event universalizes the range of explanation in order to encompass previously unknown or neglected phenomena. The “event” of falling in love—no less revolutionary in its sphere—creates a new expanded subject of the faithful lovers. Art is charged with the potential of creating a new “subject” of all those who respond to art’s unique truths. All—art, politics, science, love—are true in the measure that they bring about a commitment or fidelity which transcends the anomic singularity of the private individual in a bourgeois society whose anomie is the condition of all those inwardly defeated by the reaction against ’68 and the revolutionary tradition. This resistance to anomie explains the pathos informing Badiou’s tour of the bloodless realm of modern mathematics.
If universality is the criterion of truth—as so much in Badiou’s work suggests—why is this conclusion not highlighted and heralded by resounding clarion calls in his writing? I think that the problem with proclaiming universality as the criterion of truth is the unum at the root of universalis. Badiou cannot champion what is in effect his own conclusion because he rejects both the mathematical concept of the One and the metaphysical postulate of monism. Being as being must consist of infinite multiples if the realm of possibilities is to remain open-ended.
Monism is for Badiou a relic of religious monotheism. I would argue, however, that his avoidance or deemphasis of the One is unnecessary and self-defeating. It strikes me as a misguided consequence of the exaggerated French rejection of the church and its theology. It is unnecessary because Badiou himself insists that any ontology rests on a “choice.” Therefore, he might just as well have chosen to “count as one” the totality that presents itself to the mind. Moreover, it is self-defeating because it misconstrues the political meaning of secular monism in the history of philosophy.
I’ve written elsewhere that Spinoza offers a relevant comparison—relevant because Badiou wrote on Spinoza early in his career, and because Jonathan Israel has written extensively on the impact of the Ethics in what he calls the Radical Enlightenment. Spinoza equated God with Nature, but this was never taken as a concession to theism. Quite the contrary, the monism of Spinoza excluded the possibility of a personal god and did so more effectively than Newtonian physics or Voltairean skepticism. The equation of Deus sive Natura rejected the theism of a personal God precisely because all things are one and subject to the laws of natural causation. Spinoza’s proclaiming “god” indistinguishable from nature was a bolder elimination of the Christian creator and redeemer than the clockmaker god who constructed the world and then let it run its course. The deist notion of God is in fact only possible insofar as the totality of being is not one and whole. This is why Spinoza’s monism sent shockwaves through the Christian world. Badiou’s rejection of monism won’t even register on the Richter scale. The consequences of Spinoza’s monism were self-evident. Badiou’s political consequences require tedious explanations which for this reader never quite click.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 