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Badiou
This page intentionally left blank
 Badiou
a subject to truth

Peter Hallward
Foreword by Slavoj Žižek

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London

Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hallward, Peter.
Badiou : a subject to truth / Peter Hallward ; foreword by Slavoj Žižek.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3460-2 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3461-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Badiou, Alain. I. Title.
B2430.B274 H35 2003
194—dc21
2002015357

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All things proceed from the void and are borne towards the infinite. Who can fol-
low these astonishing processes?
—Pascal, Pensées, §84

There is no science of man, since the man of science does not exist, but only
its subject.
—Jacques Lacan, Ecrits

Today the great majority of people do not have a name; the only name available
is “excluded,” which is the name of those who do not have a name. Today the
great majority of humanity counts for nothing. And philosophy has no other le-
gitimate aim than to help find the new names that will bring into existence the
unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are waiting for it.
—Alain Badiou, “The Caesura of Nihilism”

The subject is rare because, contrary to contemporary opinion, it cannot simply

coincide with the individual. It falls to us to preserve the form of this rarity, and
we shall succeed insofar as the God of the One has died. . . . We who are sum-
moned by the void, we who intervene so as to decide the undecidable, we who
are sustained by the indiscernible truth, we who are finite fragments of that
infinity which will come to establish that there is nothing more true than the
indifferent and the generic, we who dwell in the vicinity of that indistinction in
which all reality dissolves, we, throws of the dice for a nameless star—we are
greater than the sacred, we are greater than all gods, and we are so here and
now, already and forever.
—Alain Badiou, Une Soirée philosophique
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Foreword: Hallward’s Fidelity to the Badiou Event / ix

Slavoj Žižek

Acknowledgments / xv
Notes on Translation / xvii
Abbreviations / xix
Introduction: A New Philosophy of the Subject / xxi

Part I. Matters of Principle

1. Taking Sides / 3
2. From Maoism to L’Organisation Politique / 29
3. Infinite by Prescription: The Mathematical Turn / 49

Part II. Being and Truth

4. Badiou’s Ontology / 81
5. Subject and Event / 107
6. The Criteria of Truth / 153

Part III. The Generic Procedures

7. Love and Sexual Difference / 185
8. Art and Poetry / 193
9. Mathematics and Science / 209
10. Politics: Equality and Justice / 223
11. What Is Philosophy? / 243
Part IV. Complications
12. Ethics, Evil, and the Unnameable / 255
13. Generic or Specific? / 271
14. Being-there: The Onto-logy of Appearing / 293

Conclusion / 317
Appendix: On the Development of Transfinite Set Theory / 323
Notes / 349
Bibliography / 427
Index / 453
 f o r e w o r d

Hallward’s Fidelity to the Badiou Event

Slavoj Žižek

According to Richard Dawkins’s well-known formulation, “God’s utility func-

tion” in living nature is the reproduction of genes, that is, genes (DNA) are
not a means for the reproduction of living beings, but the other way round:
living beings are the means for the self-reproduction of genes. Ideology
should be viewed in the same way, and we should ask the following question:
What is the “utility function” of an ideological state apparatus (ISA)? The
materialist answer is this: The utility function of an ISA is neither the repro-
duction of ideology qua network of ideas, emotions, and so on, nor the re-
production of social circumstances legitimized by this ideology, but the self-
reproduction of the ISA itself. The same ideology can accommodate itself to
different social modes, it can change the content of its ideas, and so on, just
to “survive” as an ISA. However, from time to time something emerges that
cannot be reduced to this placid logic of survival and reproduction: an event,
an engagement for a universal cause that inexorably follows its inherent ne-
cessity, disregarding all opportunistic considerations.
So what does Alain Badiou aim at with his central notion that philoso-
phy depends on some truth event as its external condition? When Deleuze,
Badiou’s great opponent-partner, tries to account for the crucial shift in the
history of cinema from image-mouvement to image-temps, he makes a sur-
prisingly crude reference to “real” history, to the traumatic impact of World
War II (which was felt from Italian neorealism to American film noir). This

ix
x / Foreword

reference is fully consistent with Deleuze’s general anti-Cartesian thrust: a

thought never begins spontaneously, out of itself, following its inherent logic;
what provokes us to think is always a traumatic, violent encounter with some
external real that brutally imposes itself on us, shattering our established
ways of thinking. It is in this sense that a true thought is always decentered:
one does not think spontaneously; one is forced to think. And, although with
a slightly different accent, Badiou would agree with Deleuze: an authentic
philosophical thought does not spin its web out of itself, following an “im-
manent conceptual necessity”; it is rather a reaction to the disturbing impact
of some external truth event (in politics, science, art, or love), endeavoring to
delineate the conditions of this event, as well as of a fidelity to it.
Badiou—a founding member, together with Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-
Claude Milner, Catherine Clément, Alain Regnault, and Alain Grosrichard,
of the pathbreaking Lacano-Althusserian Cahiers pour l’analyse in the mid-
1960s—is a supremely charismatic intellectual figure. He combines in a
unique way rigorous mathematical knowledge, authentic philosophical pas-
sion, artistic sensitivity (he is not only the author of remarkable analyses of
Mallarmé and Beckett, but also himself a noted playwright), and radical po-
litical engagement, which started with his “Maoist” activity in the 1960s and
went up to supporting publicly, in a letter to Le Monde, the Khmer Rouge
regime against the Vietnam invasion in 1978. What more should one want
than an author who combines the three great Ms of scientific, aesthetic, and
political revolutions: mathematics, Mallarmé, and Mao? But Badiou starts
to look even more impressive when one resists this fascination by his person
and seriously immerses oneself in his work.
Komar and Melamid, the two former Soviet painters who emigrated to
the West in the mid-1970s, in the early 1990s made two paintings, the “best”
and the “worst,” on the basis of an opinion poll they conducted of a repre-
sentative sample of the average American population. The worst painting, of
course, was an abstract composition of sharp-edged triangles and squares in
bright red and yellow à la Kandinsky, while the best was an idyllic scene, all in
blue and green, of a clearing, with George Washington taking a walk near the
bank of a river running through it and a Bambilike deer timidly observing
him from the wood. During the past several years, they expanded this proj-
ect, producing the “best” and the “worst” paintings of Germany, Italy, France,
and other countries. This ironic experiment perfectly renders what Alain
Badiou is opposed to when, in an unrepentant old Platonic way, he rejects
today’s rule of “tolerance,” which tends to dismiss the very notion of some-
one’s sticking to truth against the pressure of others’ opinions as intolerant,
Eurocentric, and so on. That is to say, today’s predominant liberal political
 Foreword / xi

philosophers relegate politics to the domain of opinions (tastes, preferences,

etc.), rejecting the conjunction of politics and truth as inherently “totalitari-
an”; is it not “evident,” they might insist, that if you insist on the truth of
your political statement, you dismiss your opponent’s view as “untrue,” thus
violating the basic rule of tolerance?
Badiou not only passionately advocates a return to the politics of truth,
but turns against all other predominant “postmodern” political and philo-
sophical mantras. Although his thought is clearly marked by the specific
French politicophilosophical context, the way it relates to this context (his
critical rejection not only of the predominant pseudo-Kantian democratic
liberalism, inclusive of its self-complacent criticism of “totalitarianism,” but
also his penetrating critique of the stances that are allegedly more “Leftist,”
from philosophical “deconstructionism”—which he dismisses as a new form
of sophism—to “politically correct” multiculturalist identity politics) also
makes its intervention in the present Anglo-Saxon theoretical scene ex-
tremely important and productive. The point is not only that Badiou serves
as the necessary corrective to the still predominant identification of “French”
thought with “deconstructionism” (this empty container into which Anglo-
Saxon academia throws authors who, if dead, like Lacan, would turn over in
their graves if informed of this insertion), presenting us with thought that
clearly eludes all received classification: he is definitely not a deconstruction-
ist or a post-Marxist, and is as clearly opposed to Heidegger as to the “lin-
guistic turn” of analytical philosophy, not to mention that he shows disdain
for liberal-democratic “political philosophy” along the lines of that espoused
by Hannah Arendt. A perhaps even more important point is Badiou’s critical
rejection of the predominant form of today’s Leftist politics, which, while ac-
cepting that capitalism is here to stay as the “only game in town,” instead of
focusing on the very fundamentals of our capitaloparliamentary order, shifts
the accent to the recognition of different cultural, sexual, religious, and other
lifestyles, endorsing the logic of ressentiment: in today’s “radical,” multi-
culturalist, liberal politics, the only way to legitimate one’s claim is more and
more to present oneself as a victim. Against the politically correct identity
politics that focuses on the “right to difference,” Badiou emphatically insists
that the justification of any political demand by the substantial features
that define the contingent particularity of a group (“We want some specific
rights because we are women, gay, members of this or that ethnic or religious
minority,” etc.) violates the fundamental democratic axiom of principled
equality, that is, the right to be defended today is not the “right to difference,”
but, on the contrary and more than ever, the right to Sameness.
Most of today’s Left thus succumbs to ideological blackmail by the Right
xii / Foreword

in accepting its basic premises (“The era of the welfare state with its free
spending is over,” etc.). Ultimately, this is what the celebrated “Third Way”
of today’s Social Democracy is about. In these conditions, an authentic act
would be to counter the Rightist stir apropos of some “radical” measure
(“You want the impossible. This will lead to catastrophe, to more state inter-
vention, etc.”) not by saying, defensively, that this is not what we mean, that
we are no longer the old Socialists, that the proposed measures will not in-
crease the state budget, that they will even render the state expenditure more
“effective,” give a boost to investments, and so on, but by saying, resound-
ingly, “Yes, this, precisely, is what we want!” When the status quo cynics ac-
cuse alleged revolutionaries of believing that everything is possible, that one
can change everything, what they effectively mean is that nothing at all is
really possible, that we cannot really change anything, since we are basically
condemned to live in the world the way it is.
One is therefore tempted to apply Badiou’s notion of event to his phi-
losophy itself: in today’s philosophical scenery, in which the old matrixes
(analytical philosophy, Heideggerian phenomenology, deconstructionism, the
“communicative” turn of the late Frankfurt School) appear more and more
saturated, their potentials exhausted, its impact is precisely that of an event
that intervenes in this constellation from the point of its “symptomal torsion,”
questioning as the indisputable background of its endeavor the series of pref-
erences accepted by today’s deconstructionism—the preference of difference
over Sameness, of historical change over order, of openness over closure, of
vital dynamics over rigid schemes, of temporal finitude over eternity.
With regard to this book of Peter Hallward, one is again tempted to resort
to Badiou’s own categories: if Badiou’s recent work is the event of contempo-
rary philosophy, Hallward’s book bears the greatest fidelity to this event—
fidelity, not dogmatic allegiance and blind repetitive résumé. Philosophical
fidelity is not fidelity to all that an author has written, but fidelity to what
is in the author more than the author himself (more than the empirical
multitude of his writings), to the impulse that activates the author’s endless
work. So, with a breathtaking vigor, Hallward traces the consequences of the
Badiou event, pointing out not only Badiou’s tremendous achievements, but
also local inconsistencies, deadlocks to be resolved, tasks that await further
elaboration. Of course, although Badiou recognizes Lacan as one of his mas-
ters, his critical differences with regard to Lacan’s “antiphilosophy” (to which
antiphilosophy I subscribe) are well documented in Hallward’s book. With
regard to these differences, I can only turn around the standard phrase and
say, With “enemies” like this, who needs friends? Because Badiou was engaged
in a Maoist political group two decades ago, let me invoke Chairman Mao’s
 Foreword / xiii

well-known distinction between nonantagonistic contradictions within the

people, to be resolved by patient argumentation, and antagonistic contradic-
tions between the people and its enemies: the gap that separates Badiou from
Lacan is definitely a nonantagonistic contradiction.
Furthermore, the fact that an English-speaking author has written a
book on a French philosopher has had the rare, miraculous result of bring-
ing together the best in the English and in the “continental” philosophical
tradition: what we have here is the almost impossible intersection of clear
analytic argumentation and “continental” philosophical speculative reflec-
tion. The only apprehension I have about Hallward’s book is that, on ac-
count of its very excellence, it will—contrary to the author’s intention, of
course—contribute to the recent deplorable trend toward preferring intro-
ductions to the works of original authors themselves. So, although I am sure
that Hallward’s book will enjoy well-deserved success among philosophers,
mathematicians and logicians, political theorists, and aestheticians, I hope
its very success will also contribute to the growing interest in the writings of
Badiou himself.
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Bruno Bosteels for his meticulous and trenchant reading

of an earlier version of this book, and to Gilbert Adair, Daniel Bensaïd, Ray
Brassier, John Collins, Sam Gillespie, Brice Halimi, Keith Hossack, Eustache
Kouvélakis, Sinéad Rushe, Daniel Smith, and Alberto Toscano for their vari-
ous comments and support. Andrew Gibson and Todd May wrote helpful
reviews of the full manuscript when it was at a particularly cumbersome
draft stage.
Were it not for Alain Badiou’s own encouragement and readiness to engage
in an argument that has now gone on for more than seven years, this would
have turned into an altogether different book.
I dedicate this book to my father, John.

xv
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