The Conditions of Badiouian Philosophy

Alain Badiou, the preeminent philosopher of our time, in his effort to re-instate a philosophy that dares speak in its name has laid out four conditions on which the edifice of the philosophical project rests on. These four pillars, to use an architectural metaphor correspond to practices integral to our human condition 1. Politics 2. Love 3. Art 4. Science. The relation of philosophy to these disciplines is not that of a moderator, a position which rightly speaking can only operate from within these disciples themselves. Its position, as I see it, is rather twofold - Philosophy must be able to account for what has been spoken of in Althusserian terms as an epistemological break - a point where from within these disciplines a nameable form of reasoning can no longer continue or is forced to change. An example may be the point where the novel in its classical form as a bildungsroman is forced to confront the space and contours of modernity along with the multiplicity of encounters it brings. The narrative which unfolds cannot speak straightfacedly in its earlier pastoral register and come to terms with the city in a way that literature has not witnessed before. Yet, breaks in the logic of a discipline itself do not account for the task of philosophy. It is here that we must heed Alain Badiou’s project to take up ontology itself in its original vocation and begin to think about how such breaks in distinct disciplines can be thought of together. And, whether such an inquiry reveals certain fundamental relations which emerge between practices that were not evident earlier, a new situation, and yes, perhaps even a new constellation. At its breaking point, the name for such an event is revolution. 

Badiou remarks somewhere, in a playful dig at Nietzsche that if every work of philosophy is nothing more than an autobiography of the philosopher, then it must also be conceded that an autobiography of a philosopher is a work of philosophy. This is not a trivial matter, for the question of individual authenticity of representation is what seals the sanctity of any autobiography - the reason why such a form is of interest to departments of literature for example. Yet, I do not believe I would have much to offer in terms of my own account of the situation of my life, or at least, this would not be an offering I deem worthy of what Plato once named ‘the dear delight’. My time, which may be represented in a diary entry or blog in this digital age, is itself subject to conditions. Conditions not only of my experience but the place of my experience - this being the strict definition of a situation beyond which I would only be able to posit speculations, a task which I may leave for others. 

What I would like to take up is the relation between the conditions of philosophy as re-established by Alain Badiou, yet seen from the situation where I find myself. Love for instance is bound by the social, and ultimately the political realities within which a couple may come together. The difference between two personalities, two families, two orders even revealing themselves in light of the other. This is a site that is as ancient and as contemporary as wood, water, and poetry. There is always, in love, a call for an act of boldness, a decision as it were to make a pass, a declaration, a token - signifying nothing more than an invocation of the beloved as seen in a moment that seals the destiny of a desire. Where does such a moment take place, of course in the encounter, and an encounter, for it to be discernible even - is always an encounter between differences. 

Let us take up linguistic differences for these are as commonplace as ever and despite the various refutations of the linguistic turn, it's hermeneutic, like some bad infinity, still appears to linger, ‘whisper from the corridors’ as it were, reminding a perplexed philosopher of another order, another kind of relation which perhaps may not have been represented, such being the criticism which any bold (dare I say great?) representation has to face up to. 

The play of such a turn as I see it today itself rests on an invisibilisation of an even older dichotomy, not between different languages, but between language and that which is simply not linguistic. An act, a call, a cry, noise, the murmurings of dwellings, of construction laborers hammering outside. As flaccid as such a distinction may be, it is important to notice it, for those who insist on the primacy of linguistic differences don’t seem to want to. Yet, does this very distinction, in its very formulation not house the essential question of intelligibility itself? A border as it were where philosophy constantly grapples with that which it does not know or understand?

The diminishing of the sophistic role that linguistic differences played for philosophy is nowhere more apparent than on image-sharing sites such as Instagram. Here, communication is contrived between comments placed beneath images, fronts as it were for entry into ‘DMs’ or direct messages which may be sent to inboxes. Is this situation really very different, however, front picket fences and mailboxes that any neighborhood would have had in some form? I state this not to diminish the difference but to highlight a similarity of function. And it is important to take up the difference, which I believe is a positive and even constructive one.

Fredric Jameson in his diagnosis of contemporary politics in one of his last public talks on the subject had a very simple proposition to posit - that today all politics is the politics of real estate. There is, clearly, a very strong truth to this, yet it is also here that we find a possibility to rework not so much the site of politics, which may always be reduced to contestations over a place, but its strategies and modes of initiation. Here, it is perhaps closest, admittedly in a degraded form to what we once called love. You may ask why I would want to tarnish a word once deemed sacred in the West at least. Perhaps because this is the only place, and the only way it can be saved from a short-circuited fusion with politics, which has always in its classical masculine form, posited it as a minor becoming. 

There is a way in which encounters produce new forms, new platforms even. This is a fact attested to by frontiersmen and stags on online dating apps, in very different narratives of course. A letter to a mailbox, however, yet remains what attests to the essential step between the public sphere and an invitation to privacy, however necessary or unnecessary; the beginning of what was once recognized as a courtship. 

And is it surprising that such innovations, as new as they may be, happen in the realm of what is now known as communication technologies or to be up to date with the jargon ‘IT’? Badiou, in a moment of Platonic love, declares in his First Manifesto for Philosophy, that science can never be reduced to the technologies it serves, lest it becomes its slave. This is a point I will hold with him, in classical liberal fashion even, withholding the right of formal mathematics to continue to distill the difference between different sizes of infinities, even if they can’t be counted. Yet, I believe it was Marx who posited that the technological infrastructure of society does determine the social relations which emerge, and perhaps in our idealism we should not lose sight of this teaching. 

In this place as it were, if I may speak of it as a place, the realm of the symbolic, drawing from Badiou’s old teacher - Lacan, where do we see art? Or perhaps even more pertinent, what is art? Is the construction of a narrative for instance to be reduced to a report filed in a newspaper, or to a boss arranging for the shipment of an order? Is it to remain in erotic seductions in encounters that have been happening since the dawn of time but today have found a new vehicle in screens? Is music, that profound violence done to language, to be the only way in which the sense of a place, an idea of belonging, a notion of kinship can be expressed? It is here, that I believe that it is up to the artists to say no and demonstrate why.

For my own account, let me say this - I agree with Badiou that there was an age of poets, where these remarkable individuals, such as Holderlin and Mallarme sought to supplement what philosophy, following the industrial revolution, was yet to come to terms with i.e.. depicting a social imaginary, a shared hermeneutic horizon, the compossibility of differences, in other words, and I do not mean this as a provocation, ontology itself, by other means. I also agree, that perhaps this age is over, yet this negation of poetry is what fuels innovations in literary forms, however painful and frustrating it may be for an artist, particularly one committed to canonical or stylistic purity. The question hence emerges, what can replace the immediacy of experience that the prose-poem from France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries provided? My own tentative proposition and I believe the roots of this may have been found in the very movement of poetry shaking off the shackles of rhyme and meter to embrace narrative and analysis, is the essay.