Contemporary ­35

that could not be reduced to the vagaries of experience, the conten-

tions of language, or the force of opinions and majorities. If such a
discourse existed, one for which the real was at stake – ‘things, not
words’ as the famous philosophical declaration has it – then it had
to be thought. Mathematics is intelligible beyond opinion, and thus
conditions a possible and actual exception to the rule of ‘bodies and
languages’.*

This is not to say that mathematics is the last word on being or

truth, just that its sheer existence as the discourse it is – incomplete
as such and consistent in terms of its deductive capacities and articu-
lated effects – means that poetry, with its characteristic analogic,
metaphoric, metonymic and oratic operations, cannot maintain its
monopoly over the forms of thought, nor sophistry over the means
of its transmission. Mathematics effects this at the point of the para-
doxes that the discursive adaptation of the knowledge of the poets
themselves logically generates. In his essay ‘What is a Poem?’ (and
elsewhere) Badiou nuances this ‘old quarrel’ between poetry and phi-
losophy, situating it as between poetry and mathematics, not poetry
and philosophy per se, thus making possible a recalibration of poetry
as a thought in itself, as is, he argues, mathematics.† For Badiou,
it is the turn to language in its various guises, the pre-dominance
of an ‘aestheticised’ logic, phenomenology, language games, etc.,
rather than poetry as such, which for Badiou turns ultimately, onto-
logically, on or towards (pros en) some conception of the One.‡ For
Badiou, it is to this linguistic complex that today the name sophistry
refers – later we will note the ways in which ‘great modern sophistry’
remains contemporary to ‘great ancient sophistry’. The point remains
that the thinking of being qua being is always that of mathematics,
demonstrable now vis-à-vis set theory’s handling of infinite infinities;
while language, logic, etc., avers in one way or another the sets of
relations, rules of appearance, forms of representation, discernments
of objects, of what mathematics presents as the real of being qua
being. To be contemporary is to be contemporary with whomsoever,
in whatever way, participates in or decides for (it’s the same thing)
this Idea – which this very participation makes manifest.

* Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 1.
†
See Handbook of Inaesthetics and Theoretical Writings. The latter has to be argued for,
against mathematical Platonists as against Heidegger, Hegel and ultimately Plato himself.
‡
Badiou, Theoretical Writings, p. 166.
­36 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Thinking again This means, then as now, now as then, that what is
known as thought, what counts existences, has to
be thought again, at least for philosophy – time and again subject to
what conditions it – ontologically and, in terms of what it is for being
to appear, logically as well (although the latter, for Badiou, is an
onto-logic, a mathematised and so de-aestheticised logic). Certainly,
Plato would agree with Lacan that ‘the human animal is such that it
can get by very well without truth’ (and as Plato pointed out, without
philosophy too) – at least up to the point of questioning what this
‘well’ might be. As Giorgio Agamben puts it in his own essay ‘What
is the Contemporary?’, ‘success’ here is ‘evaluated . . . by our ­capacity
to measure up to this exigency’.*

If Plato is ‘our contemporary’, then what it means to be contempo-

rary is to think in such a way that one is not subject to what Badiou
calls the authoritarian regime of the true or its relativist counterpart:
An authoritarian regime exists when the truth of a statement
depends, not on the argument that supports it, but on the position
of the one who pronounces it, whether God, king, priest, profes-
sor, or prophet. A relativist or sceptical frivolity reigns when the
critique of the authoritarian regime of the true leads to the suppres-
sion of the absoluteness and universality of truths.†
As he puts it in Theory of the Subject, ‘when one abdicates universal-
ity, one obtains universal horror’.‡ As ever with Badiou’s conception
of philosophy we shouldn’t overlook the polemos involved in this
motif of making Plato our contemporary. Indeed, it’s as much in
what this Platonic framework makes impossible as possible for phi-
losophy today, which as conditioned is always ‘contemporary’ or not
at all, that Badiou is interested. Thus ‘Plato’s problem – which is still
ours – is how our experience of a particular world (that which we
are given to know, the “knowable”) can open up access to eternal,
universal and, in this sense, trans-worldly truths.’§

* G. Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik

and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 39. In speaking of
success here Agamben is referring to his seminar, but the context is the texts and authors
‘many centuries removed from us’ as well as those more approximate.
†
Alain Badiou, ‘Plato, Our Dear Plato!’, trans. Alberto Toscano, Angelaki, Vol. 2, No. 3
(2006), pp. 39–41; p. 40.
‡
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. with intro. Bruno Bosteels (London and New
York: Continuum, 2009), p. 197.
§
Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 106, translation modified.
 Contemporary ­37

Not only is Badiou repeating the alignment he makes between his

philosophy and that of Plato as the founder of philosophy (most
prominently in Manifesto for Philosophy), he is also marking out in
the contemporary situation that discursive configuration and those
philosophical positions that reject this Platonic identification and,
paradoxically, are therefore not ‘our contemporaries’ despite having
the closest temporal, situational and even spatial proximity. These
latter temporal and spatial categories are not critical to what Badiou
means by contemporary – if Plato is and the anti-Platonists of the
twentieth century are not. The latter, spread across the discursive
fields of hermeneutics, Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and
post-modernism,* are in one way or another in thrall to the authority
of language or the scepticism its inherent excess permits sanctuary:
‘after all, “Platonist” is in general not a flattering epithet – not for
Heidegger, Popper, Sartre, or Deleuze, nor even for the hard Marxists
of the golden age, or for the logicians, whether Viennese or Yankee.
“Platonist” is almost an insult, as it was for Nietzsche, who argued
that the mission of our age was to “be cured of the Plato sickness”’.†
Nor – we can add – for Lacan. Thus time, language and spatial prox-
imity are not the conditions of possibility for what is ‘contemporary’.

It is not true, however, that amongst this timely anti-

Anti-Platonism regnant

Platonism there is no nuance. On the contrary, we

could invoke: Deleuze’s overturning of Plato’s difference on the basis
of Plato’s own internal division; Lacan’s subversion of Plato vis-à-vis
his ‘avatar’ Socrates; the generalised reduction of Plato to
Aristotelianism, the better to ‘include’ the division and so reduce it to
‘nothing’, and so on. Indeed, these differences are enough (or part
thereof) to set them against each other, but one should not mistake
diversity of opinion for difference as such. The former, as our demo-
cratic age attests, is merely cover for a shared manifest antipathy to the
mathematical condition and therefore to the conception of ‘truths’ it
makes ‘not impossible’. This conditioning is for Badiou that which

* Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, ed. and trans. Justin
Clemens and Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 46, and Deleuze: The Clamor
of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp.
101–2. ‘Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the
malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a
relativist, vaguely sceptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in
the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.’ Badiou,
‘Plato, our Dear Plato!’ p. 40.
†
Badiou, ‘Plato, our Dear Plato!’, p. 39.
­38 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

displaces language as the medium of the expression of being, of what

is sayable of being qua being (or ‘difference’ or ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ or
‘selves’ or ‘consciousness’ or whatever the term for ‘what is’ might be),
and so as the sole recourse of any articulation or manifestation of the
true or truths, whether thought, as sophisticated as it may be, as
unconscious or as sense. It is this rejection, this negationism, no matter
how rigorously worked through – Deleuze’s spatial geometry and
Lacan’s knots— which unites this disparity. It’s the point of their indis-
cernibility, we might say, which is not the same as their similarity.

To be the contemporary of Plato, with the Idea of Truth, then, is

to be resolutely non-contemporary to what Badiou nominates with
generality, the linguistic turn, to great post-modern sophistry at its
worst, to philosophies or anti-philosophies of the One at its best. To
the former Badiou remains un-contemporary, just as was Socrates to
his sophistic interlocutors – present to, but divided from, demonstra-
bly, eternally. With the current non-philosophies Badiou establishes
protocols of non-relation, of minimal difference; with contemporary
philosophies insofar as they take up the question or problem of phi-
losophy itself: those of being, truth and subject, under condition of
their elaboration and in a way that is itself a manifestation of what it
is to think through the discipline of philosophy.

Obviously, other concepts and categories than those of language,

experience, authority and opinion, or in fact those of time, nature
and history, give us the constitution of ‘contemporary’ in Badiou’s
telling. The key question, as he remarks in Second Manifesto for
Philosophy is: ‘What is thinking in our times?’ Still, we need to note
that when it comes to thinking about some of the figures of what
Badiou designates as contemporary anti-Platonism – such as, say,
Wittgenstein, Lacan, or Nietzsche – it is precisely their status as
contemporary anti-philosophers (thus anti-Platonists) that becomes
important for Badiou’s conception of philosophy itself. Moreover,
it is in rivalry with two twentieth-century (nominally) anti-Platonist
philosophers, Heidegger and Deleuze, that Badiou also sets out
his two great works of philosophy, Being and Event and Logics of
Worlds. But even here we need to realise that both these works are
constructed with regard to the discoveries of contemporary math-
ematics as well as contemporary politics, art and love, in conformity
to the Platonic conditions.
✥
 Contemporary ­39

Even as the contemporary anti-philosophers are, well, contemporary,

in the sense that they inhabit and draw from (but also ignore, falsify
and foreclose) the temper of the times, they still do so in a way which
accords with the approach, emphasis and commitments of those
pre-Socratic ‘anti-Platonists’ such as Heraclitus or Democritus; or of
Plato’s sophistic contemporaries Protagoras and Gorgias; or of the
post-Platonists – if not Aristotle directly, then, in no particular order
and making no particular reference, the Stoic, Cynic or Epicurean
types, to say nothing of the neo-Platonist anti-Platonists. For Badiou,
anti-philosophy is a category immanent to that of philosophy. As
such, contemporary anti-philosophy has ancient anti-philosophy as
its contemporary, just as does ‘sophistry’. What this means, though,
is that despite anti-philosophy’s position on the question of truths
and of Truth as such, its relation to the Idea – and despite the fact
that anti-philosophy prides itself on being untimely at all times
– something Ideal insists between the two, something that makes
‘Heraclitus the contemporary of Nietzsche or Wittgenstein that of
Arcesilaus’.*

So, again, contemporary in the sense of (temporal) proximity and

contemporary in the sense of (the eternity of) the Idea (in this case
of philosophy itself) and contemporary in the sense that what is near
is far away and what is far away is most near. In other words the
contemporary is subjective and formal, conditional and philosophi-
cal, proximate and eternal – philosophical or anti-philosophical.
The difference is that the former will conceptualise this, while the
latter disavows any such division; the former will affirm this, while
the latter, in one way or another, like Nietzsche, will consider such
a formalisation exemplary of the illness of the times, and not at all
‘untimely’.

Still, the notion of the contemporary insofar as it can be thought only

gets us so far. We have a sort of an impasse in that it is possible that
two forms of the contemporary exist side by side: the contemporar-
ies of the poem and those of Plato, of language against mathematics.
The ‘old quarrel’ which marks our contemporaneity is re-enacted, if

* Arcesilaus was head of the Academy for a time and it seems he developed his notion
of suspending judgement from a selective reading of what Plato understood by aporia.
Thus it is not so much the starting point but the consequences of thought that reveal the
­anti-philosophy of philosophy.
­40 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

subtly reconfigured,* under the conditions of a contemporary math-

ematical invention whose consequences, ontological and logical,
must not go un-thought, thus affirming again the non- or not-just-
temporal dimension of the contemporary, such that it is simultane-
ously a participation in the eternity of the Idea (of what it is to live)
and the place of its evental and subjective renovation.

A new present As we have remarked, what this contemporary

impasse calls forward, as the same contemporary
impasse called forward for Plato ‘our contemporary’, is the forma-
tion of what Badiou calls ‘a new present’. We must pass from the
contemporary, as the name for what subtracts itself immanently
from the time of this time, to the present as that which must be made
manifest, affirmed here and now. To forge a new present – which
‘neither perfectly coincides’ with its time nor ‘adjusts itself to it’† – is
what it is to be Plato’s contemporary (or Saint Paul’s or Marx’s or
Freud’s) and simultaneously to not be contemporary, insofar as phi-
losophy, which thinks the thoughts of its time after all, is concerned
with those contemporaries of the ‘suture of language to being’. The
present, then, which exists and must be thought, depends on the
enacting of a procedure which, in its act but not in its principle, is a
de-suturing of what can be thought from the dominance of a single
condition, the repetition of a definitive (conception of) logic, or the
‘exorbitant excesses of the state’.‡

Philosophy circulates, Badiou argues, between its conditions, which,

insofar as they accomplish what is true of the situations in which they
are manifest, affirmatively subtract themselves from the norm, rule
or states of these specific situations. This movement, which Badiou
names compossibility (after Leibniz) is key, for it links philosophy
qua discourse to the thought (or forms of thought) of its time and
at the same time provides for its irreducibility to this time alone.
Philosophy in-exists when this circulation, this capacity for compos-
sibility, is given up in favour of one or other of the conditions, as
if that condition could itself be the sole and single condition for all
thought.§ This is what Plato’s Socrates was up against in fifth-century
Athens: the sophistic shackling of the poetic as condition or currency

* Badiou, ‘What is a Poem?’, in Handbook of Inaesthetics, pp. 16–27.

†
Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 40.
‡
Badiou, Being and Event, p. 282.
§
Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 41.
 Contemporary ­41

of all possible knowledge, whether political, amorous, scientific,

etc.* The domination by one condition of the general capacity for
knowledge means, despite the multiple disavowals of the contempo-
rary sceptics (including relativists, constructivists and hermeneuts),
that this condition sets itself up as the place of truth. From its
occupation of this place it comes to dominate all the other generic
conditions for thought such that, for example, under the positivist
suture that locates all truth within science, the thought of the poem
is relegated to the function of supplement in the sphere of culture or
a matter of linguistic analysis; that the amorous condition is ignored
altogether or at best relegated to the inconsistent complex of ‘sex and
sentimentality’; that the political condition is conceived as a technical
problem of administration and management.†

What we can say, then, is that when philosophy

Some consequences of
philosophy’s default
ceases to circulate and to compose, and instead
delegates its function of thinking the thought of its time qua generic
procedures, then there is, as such, no present or at least no Idea of the
present. In other words, what is thought in this time, cannot be
thought precisely because what it is to be contemporary lacks any
access to an Idea beyond the immediacy determined by the suture of
which philosophy has become the support and, in some archaic
sense, the guarantee. Philosophy fails to think the thought of its time,
which is to say, be conditioned by and circulate as the discourse of
the four generic procedures and, as such, it subordinates the thought
of the present to the determinations of the most recent, most up to
date, most ‘current’. Knowledge turns to oikonomia.‡ We have said
enough on this to forestall any supposition of nostalgia or ‘idealism’
in the sentimental sense: Badiou certainly offers no comfort to the
Restoration tendencies that periodically do the rounds. We need to
note that today this progressive reductionism goes even further and
that the generic conditions for thought – as discourses in themselves

* A. J. Bartlett, Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2011).
†
Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie, p. 42. Cf.: ‘and, finally, on the level of knowledge
. . . the strange concoction we’re supposed to swallow of a technologized scientism, the
crowning glory of which is the visualisation of stereoscopic brains in colour, combined with
a bureaucratic legalism whose supreme manifestation is the “evaluation” of all things by
experts hailing from nowhere who invariably conclude that thinking serves no purpose and
even proves harmful’. Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 5.
‡
For the genealogy of this notion or, really, the reverse genealogy, see Giorgio Agamben, The
Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans.
Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
­42 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

capable of conditioning a contemporary philosophy – have been

reduced in the contemporary world, the pedagogic world of ‘demo-
cratic materialism’ as Badiou calls it, to mere techniques of the
market.* In his Saint Paul and the Foundation of Universalism, in the
chapter entitled ‘Paul: Our Contemporary’, Badiou declares:
The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures.
This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the
name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses
it, holds sway. The name ‘culture’ comes to obliterate that of ‘art.’
The word ‘technology’ obliterates the word ‘science.’ The word
‘management’ obliterates the word ‘politics.’ The word ‘sexuality’
obliterates love. The ‘culture-technology-management-sexuality’
system, which has the immense merit of being homogeneous to the
market, and all of whose terms designate a category of commercial
presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the
‘art-science-politics-love’ system, which identifies truth procedures
typologically.†
Like Plato, Paul is ‘our contemporary’ because, as this repressive
litany shows, the contemporary world lacks precisely the courage
to be present. This same lack of the present confronted Plato and
Paul (and Marx and Freud, etc.). But this shared lack, really, and
somewhat paradoxically, can only be retroactively asserted, on the
basis precisely of the courage of Plato, Paul, etc., to act and so to
think despite the time of their time, despite the knowledge and the
law current to their world, and to make such a thought intelligible
and transmissable. This is to say, to subject themselves to what, for
that world, inexists within in it, and to be seized by what signifies this
inexistence: an inexistence that must mark itself as such.

However, it’s not as if the knowledge which circu-

Courage as act not virtue

lates of this world, which is itself ‘contemporary’

and which works to make itself known as the knowledge (or encyclo-
paedia) of the world per se, experiences itself as lacking. On the
contrary, it is full: excessively so and indeed the encyclopaedia by
definition not only disavows lack but controls excess. What this
means, moreover, is that to be the contemporaries of Plato and Paul,
Spartacus or Luxemburg, Rousseau or Alexander, to use Badiou’s
examples from Logics of Worlds, is to ‘take courage’. Courage, like

* Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 1.

†
Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 12.
 Contemporary ­43

fidelity (its alter ego, so to speak), is not a virtue of the present (in
fact, it’s not a virtue at all), but its act. The present, which inexists, is
the effect of the courage to decide against what represents itself as
‘contemporary’. Such representations in the guise of knowledge must
be contested for the truth of the present whose construction is the
traceable effect of this courage. This courage is therefore the courage
to ‘keep going’, ‘to continue to be this someone’ as Badiou says in
Ethics, ‘striving to hold fast to some true thought, whatever it be’,
that is, to some single ‘point’.*

Thus we return to the Idea of the eternity of the true and, as such, to
what is contemporary in the present, which is to say, we reverse the
appearance of the present in the contemporary world. In the terms of
Logics of Worlds, as we have already noted, this present inexists for
the contemporary world. We must activate the Idea, which remains
the same Idea as Plato, as Paul, as Marx, as Freud, ‘our contempo-
raries’. To inexist is not not-to-be. As in Being and Event, in Logics
of Worlds the key is to demonstrate as rigorously as possible and by
the involvement of the four key philosophical conditions that what
belongs to a world can come to appear there and so disrupt, reverse
and reconfigure that world in such a way that the truth of that world
be present and coterminous with its very presentation as such. Put
another way, to ensure that this new world not be simply another
instance of the state.

It is the same to think as to be, insofar as the

The subject manifests

subject is the finite trace or instance of an infinite

process of making manifest what an event opens up to the possibility
of being true, for that situation for which the event is an event is
thought in its being by mathematics and in its appearing to a world
by a mathematised logic: two contemporary onto-logical conditions
for any contemporary Idea of truth. As Badiou’s series of examples in
Logics of Worlds illustrates, this subjective work is the actuality of
courage, of the affirmation of what is as opposed to what counts, or
the praxical fidelity to that which is demonstrably other than, excep-
tional to, the timely, coincident, discursive form described by Badiou
as that of ‘bodies and languages’. This world, timely and ‘atonal’ as
he says in Logics of Worlds, and thus ‘pointless’, in which opinion is

* Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001), p. 90.
­44 Lacan Deleuze Badiou

raised to the level of the constitution of the subject, its authentic

virtue in fact, retains, he says in The Century, the signature of an
earlier romanticism.* It’s less a world without qualities than one
saturated with them, to that ‘atonal’ point where life and its repre-
sentations are thought inseparable, uninterruptible, and so where the
‘times’ overwhelm the present and, not-coincidently, repetition over-
whelms interruption and interpretation formalisation.†

It is at this point of indiscernibility – between presentation and

representation or, in another register, void and excess – that the
contemporary becomes present as consequence. Yet this is not to
say that everything is given over to the act or to action. For Badiou,
this double articulation of act and totality, which he presents as the
twentieth-century dialectic between nihilism and romanticism (both
of which make declarations as to their contemporaneity under the
synthesis of what Badiou nominates as ‘the passion for the Real’),
are both limited, insofar as their engagement with this Real is
concerned, and excessive, insofar as this effort to so engage with it
yields destruction as its only terminus, either of self or all.‡ This is
the result, Badiou says, using the condition of art as illustration, of
the general failure of the century’s dominant tendencies to ‘discover
another articulation of the finite to the infinite’ (or of their compul-
sion to repeat).§ For Badiou, this ‘new articulation’, itself the effect of
a new orientation to this same world, is what ‘formalisation’ names
and effects, such that form is not opposed to matter or content but is
instead coupled to the real of the act. Thus
every creation of thought is in reality the creation of a new for-
malisation and at the same time this new formalization establishes
a relation or takes part in an interaction with the particularity of
what we are trying to express. In this case, we determine the for-
malisation as a universality, but it is ultimately a particularity that
carries universality in the model. Because, at base, we can say that,
even if we take, for example, a painting by Picasso, that is, if we are
taking a cubist painting by Picasso or by Braque in 1913, we find
the creation of a possibility of a new type of pictorial formalization.
That is to say, it renders possible a way to formalise in the space of

* Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Polity, 2007), p. 153.
†
Badiou, The Century, p. 164.
‡
This coincides with Plato’s designation of the dual nature of tyranny as either individual or
mass. In the first, the individual is all ‘l’état c’est moi’; in the second, the mass is itself One.
§
Badiou, The Century, p. 155.