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Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy

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Here gathered is a diverse selection of writings from varied provenances, given as articles and talks. Together they don't exactly cohere, but that's hardly the point. Badiou is a potent writer and thinker. He campaigns for the primacy and universalim of truth in a clear fashion not seen from many continental philosophers. Perhaps, most exciting about Badiou's writings is that he considers them something along the lines of an intervention. He makes not philosophy for philosophy's sake but applies his acumen with the intent to persuade the reader: change your life (or at least your thinking)! Badiou's heroes and formulae make an odd collection (Saint Paul, Mao, Lacan, Plato, Game Theory, set theory), so the introduction to the collection provides helpful context. One can find philosophical engagements with cinema, poetry, truth, psychoanalysis, politics, art, marxism, and terrorism, to name some topics; it's really a grab bag. As a volume, it's weaker than his manifesto, but it may be more accessible. Nonetheless, it makes worthy reading.

I picked up this book because I liked the title, although I was suspicious that it would be one more post-modern ranting, because the philosopher is a contemporary Frenchman. However, the essays collected in this work represent a new ray of hope of combining whatever is positive in post-structuralist and post-modern criticism with essential debates on the ethical and the political.

Badiou is both a critic of these traditions and in some sense continues these traditions. His presumptions on the question of the subject (as consituted rather than constituting), etc., remain quite post-structuralist. His basic system of 'situation' and 'event' makes it seem as if humans respond only in fidelity to events and the situation as such cannot directly elicit a response without reference to an event. And it does not resolve how a subject is consituted by fidelity of response when the fidelity of response itself presupposes a subject.

Yet his philosophical ontology based on set theory is welcome and refreshing. And above all his open-minded humility towards inquiry makes him a stark contrast to dogmatically minded 'endists' of all hues who have permeated much of conteporary discourse.

The essays in the book do not form a system or a whole, but references to his basic philosophical system based on the theory of sets abound. His elaboration of concepts of situation and event based on set theory and his new theory of subjectivity as fidelity of response, in spite of its logical shortcomings open the way for the ethical and political which recent French philosophy had almost closed.

In this collection of essays, Alain Badiou addresses the problem of the current end-state in philosophy and attempts to re-invigorate it with something of its older, classical character. He identifies the source of malaise in the major branches of modern philosophy and pleads for an interruption to these practices in order to take a different position and find a way to allow a notion of truth, as opposed to meaning, to re-emerge as a legitimate philosophical concern.
This is not philosophy looking for employment in the face of redundancy. Philosophy has always been a counterbalance to excess and should be so now, in the current political climate. Interruption is a key word here, for it is only through this kind of breaking that the word suggests a radical shift back towards truth and not meaning, things and not words.
But philosophy must take a position if this interruption is to take place. Truth is not to be conditioned by any prevalent habits of thought. This is an absolute, for any condition thrust upon it will turn it once again into a familiar pattern that is the province of an existing body of knowledge, and so be removed from philosophical speculation. But this in itself says something about truth, since what now counts as knowledge is defined in statistical terms which smooth over difference and plane down truth to a categorical sameness. Truth must therefore be of a singular character, and the problem is how to universalise it, given that this is a pre-requisite of philosophy. How does the singular maintain its character, faced with the current trends of thought that tend to fold everything into preformed packages?
Statistics are subjectless, but the singular truth, arising in an event, happens to (or calls into being) a subject. Indeed, the subject has long been a casualty in philosophy, and its re-emergence through the notion of event is overdue and welcome.
Truth occurs in an event to a subject, and it cannot fold itself into preformed or known categories. It proceeds in the subject in an act of faith on the one hand, but (being unknown and therefore unsayable) proceeds by chance and adhering to the lessons of the event. What is unnameable thereby becomes a kind of tabula rasa upon which the singular event and subject force their existence, generating something new in the face of the unknown.
This is a crude and much oversimplified account of truth as Badiou outlines it in his essays. He is to be commended for attempting to revitalise philosophy and recognising the need for such a radical departure. But it is not as radical as it at first appears. His notion of the indiscernible is strongly reminiscent of Jaspers notion of Existenz, while his concept of the count-as-one, the structure of event or situation, is not so different from the notion of an actual entity as formulated by Alfred North Whitehead in process philosophy.
The problem is that Badiou is unable to free himself entirely from the tradition which he seeks to interrupt. Consequently, although the claim for truth in the singular state is unconditional, he conditions it nonetheless by assuming that universality is synonymous with thought.
This is the crux of the problem. What he fails to recognise is that the one universal principle which is also singular is the presence of death. It is the most singular event in a life, a feature of existence which is the source of separation and the background which in-forms the structure of Being. For Badiou, death is all too predictably defined in its phenomenal guise as an indifference to existence and a non-event.
Here lies the problem with his philosophy. Without death, there could be no events, for it is in a relation to death that anything at all comes into being. By this I mean that desire, consciousness, striving, unrest, sense of lack, love and even stones would not have any kind of being. Indeed, in the absence of death, there would be no need of sexuality, nor genes by default either, nor any kind of memory structure, and no innameable.
Certainly, it is unnameable, for it is not an event that is part of experience, but its presence in-forms experience through an inverse of itself. It is not a set among sets. It is not that the barber who shaves the beards of men is not part of the set; it is the error in assuming that the barber is male in the first place. Death is a part of all sets, but does not belong to any set. It is an unspeakable presence that is probably better served by the unconscious than by conscious thought, but only in a form which is an inversion of itself and which consequently generates conscious thought.
Without reference to this inversion, conscious thought acts to suppress it as an agency of change and reduces thought to non-thought. Such suppression is the opposite of Badious notion of forcing, and ultimately reduces thought to subjectless non-thought. Ironically, it is in this way that science has come to resemble the very metaphysics it loathes and avoids, and in so doing has created itself on a metaphysics of inertia and neutrality. More seriously, the subscription to scientific methodology in all areas of social concern, usurp the unnameable by assuming death in passive mode and totally phenomenal. In this way, it is easy to adopt a position in which death becomes a solution to many political problems, as witnessed by the inordinate expenditure in military hardware as a way of guaranteeing security.
But for all its flaws, Badious cry for interruption, and the basic form of the event, represent an important departure from the current tendencies in philosophy. His ideas have a weight and a seriousness about them that cannot be ignored. They offer a route to involvement in the practical world of affairs in a way that could make a difference to it.

Having read Ethics and The Meaning of Sarkozy, and with the intention of starting Being and Event, I picked up this volume, which claims to be "THE place to start" with Badiou. As I suspect most readers will come to this book with the hope of receiving a firm and concise grounding in Badiouan thought, I would like this review to serve as a moderate caution. Feltham's introduction is quite clear; he situates Badiou between the analytic and continental traditions by focusing on the latter's central question--the ontology of the modern subject. However, while Feltham spends a lot of time explicating Badiou's relation to set theory, there is very little set theory in the work itself. The rest of the book is comprised of a bunch of short chapters, most of which are entitled "Philosophy and..." (art, politics, cinema, etc.) With each chapter, the vigor and originality of Badiou's ideas seems to wane. The first chapter, "Philosophy and Desire," is the most coherent exposition of Badiou's overall theory. Beginning with the relation of philosophy and poetry, a question that returns a couple of times in the rest of the book, Badiou criticizes the post-structuralist's insistence on language as the ultimate horizon of philosophical thought and asserts the need for universal truth (a dirty word in contemporary theory). As the book progresses, the subject matter seems to become more and more specific, and less and less relevant. At times, Badiou can sound, as Hallward has noted in a review of another one of Badiou's works, "parochial and abstract." That is to say, if this is truly a "representative selection" of Badiou's work, as the back cover advertises, then Badiou's moments of originality and insight occur alongside much that is overly obvious and, at times, downright vapid. The "revealing" interview at the end of the book is neither helpful, nor interesting. In the end, I don't think this book lives up to its promise of providing a firm grounding in the basics of Badiou's thought. If I had to do it over again, I would either save this one for later and read Feltham's book on Badiou first, or read only the introduction and the first three chapters. As I read more Badiou, I hope to find that this collection is not a fair representation of a philosopher whom I have otherwise found to be both unique and important.

re: mortality in Badiou (addressed in Sam's review above).

Is it not the ethical subject that is supposed to be immortal, not the human animal? The ethical subject can exceed the human subject -- can be, for example, more than one person. I think.

Great synopsis, though.

Wide ranging but largely nonsense. A few paragraphs from different chapters will illustrate my view.

"If the forcing of the unnameable exclusion is a disaster, this is because it affects the entire situation, by pursuing singularity itself, whose emblem is the unnameable. In this sense, the desire in fictioning to suppress the unnameable frees the destructive capacity contained in all truth."

"Philosophy wants to and must establish itself at this subtractive point where language consecrates itself to thought without the prestige and the mimetic incitements of the image, fiction or narrative; where the principle of amorous intensity unbinds itself from the alterity of the object and sustains itself from the law of the Same; where the illumination of the Principle pacifies the blind violence that mathematics assumes in its axioms and its hypotheses; where, finally, the collective is represented in its symbol, and not in the excessive real of political situations."

Honest that was one sentence/paragraph and its typical of Badiou's writing. It was not meaningful to me. I think Badiou would be well served by Wittgenstein's admonition to remain silent.