Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History

(often referred to as) Theses on the Philosophy of History

I The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppets hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called historical materialism is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

II One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature, writes Lotze, is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.

III

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour and that day is Judgment Day.

IV

Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you. Hegel, 1807

The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

V The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. The truth will not run away from us: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)

VI

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

VII

Consider the darkness and the great cold In this vale which resounds with mystery. Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu tre triste pour ressusciter Carthage.* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his

task to brush history against the grain.

* Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.

VIII The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are still possible in the twentieth century is notphilosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledgeunless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

IX My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. Mein Flgel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurck, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich htte wenig Glck. Gerherd Scholem, Gruss vom Angelus A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his

wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their mass basis, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.

XI

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as the source of all wealth and all culture. Smelling a rat, Marx countered that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must of necessity become the slave of other

men who have made themselves the owners However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: The savior of modern times is called work. The improvement of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do. This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, exists gratis, is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

*The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his Critique of the Gotha Program

XII

We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought

fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

* Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.

XIII

Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter. Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie

Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in mens ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

XIV Origin is the goal. Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tigers leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

* Benjamin says Jetztzeit and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mysticalnunc stans.

XV

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

Who would have believed it! we are told that new Joshuasat the foot of every tower, as though irritated with time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.

Qui le croirait! on dit, quirrits contre lheure De nouveaux Josus au pied de chaque tour,

Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrter le jour. *

XVI A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the eternal image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called Once upon a time in historicisms bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

XVII

Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

*The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.

XVIII

In relation to the history of organic life on earth, writes a modem biologist, the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-fourhour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour. The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

A.

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the time of the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

Lloyd Spencer's home page http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

JEAN BAUDRILLARD - THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM TRANSLATED BY DR. RACHEL BLOUL LE MONDE 2 NOVEMBER 2001
We have had many global events from Diana's death to the World Cup, or even violent and real events from wars to genocides. But not one global symbolic event, that is an event not only with global repercussions, but one that questions the very process of globalization. All through the stagnant 90s, there has been "la greve des evenements" (literally "an events strike", translated from a phrase of the Argentino writer Macedonio Fernandez). Well, the strike is off. We are even facing, with the World Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the "mother" of events, the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened. Not only are all history and power plays disrupted, but so are the conditions of analysis. One must take one's time. For as long as events were at a standstill, one had to anticipate and overcome them. But when they speed up, one must slow down; without getting lost under a mass of discourses and the shadow of war ("nuage de la guerre": literally clouds announcing war), and while keeping undiminished the unforgettable flash of images. All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less selfdestroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which -- unknowingly -- inhabits us all. That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it. It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity. This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order. No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself. Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's) realization is always close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to perfection or absolute supremacy. It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete the event. In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process. When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what

other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer. Terror against terror -- there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force. Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in the very core of this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to the internal fracture of the dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But with terrorism -- and its viral structure --, as if every domination apparatus were creating its own antibody, the chemistry of its own disappearance; against this almost automatic reversal of its own puissance, the system is powerless. And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent reversal. Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the conflict to give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution (through force). It certainly is a fundamental antagonism, but one which shows, through the spectrum of America (which maybe by itself the epicentre but not the embodiment of globalization) and through the spectrum of Islam (which is conversely not the embodiment of terrorism), triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of war through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists domination. Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of proportional violence. In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil, according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured tension and equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the face-toface of the two powers insured an equilibrium of terror. Thus, there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as soon as there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death, of any potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the Good). From there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil regained an invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential fashion. Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the political order with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from every interstice of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of the crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror... But asymmetrical terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower totally disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic challenge and death, as it has eliminated the latter from its own culture.

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death a counter-offensive. "What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death. Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute, no appeal event. This is the spirit of terrorism. Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse. The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals. One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of action that enters the game and appropriate its rules, the better to confuse it. Not only do these people not fight with equal arms, as they produce their own deaths, to which there is no possible response ("they are cowards"), but they appropriate all the arms of dominant power. Money and financial speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it. Most cunningly, they have even used the banality of American everyday life as a mask and double game. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying within families, before waking up suddenly like delayed explosive devices. The perfect mastery of this secretiveness is almost as terrorist as the spectacular action of the 11 September. For it makes one suspect: any inoffensive individual can be a potential terrorist! If those terrorists could pass unnoticed, then anyone of us is an unnoticed criminal (each plane is suspect too), and ultimately, it might even be true. This might well correspond to an unconscious form of potential criminality, masked, carefully repressed, but always liable, if not to surge, at least to secretly vibrate with the spectacle of Evil. Thus, the event spreads out in its minutiae, the source of an even more subtle psychological (mental) terrorism. The radical difference is that terrorists, while having at their disposal all the arms of the system, have also another fatal weapon: their own death. If they limited themselves to fighting the system with its own weapons, they would be immediately eliminated. If they did not oppose the system with their own death, they would disappear as quickly as a useless sacrifice; this has almost always been the fate of terrorism until now (thus the Palestinian suicidal attacks) and the reason why it could not but fail. Everything changed as soon as they allied all available modern means to this highly symbolic weapon. The latter infinitely multiplies their destructive potential. It is the multiplication of these two factors (which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives them such superiority. Conversely, the strategy of zero death, of a technological, 'clean' war, precisely misses this transfiguration of 'real' power by symbolic power. The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to understand it, one must tear oneself away from our Western perspective, to apprehend what happens in terrorists' minds and organization. Such efficacy, for us, would mean maximal calculation and rationality, something we have difficulties imagining in others. And even then, with us, there would always be, as in any rational organization or secret service, leaks and errors. Thus, the secret of such success is elsewhere. The difference, with them, is that there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation of sacrifice. Such obligation is secure from defection and corruption. The

miracle is the adaptation to a global network, to technical protocols without any loss of this complicity for life and to the death. Contrary to the contract, the pact does not link individuals -- even their 'suicide' is not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial act, sealed by demanding ideals (I'm a bit free here but I feel it corresponds better to what is meant by 'exigence ideale'). And it is the conjunction of these two mechanisms, born of an operational structure and of a symbolic pact, which makes possible such an excessive action. We have no idea anymore of what is such a symbolic calculation, as in poker or potlatch, with minimal stakes and maximal result. That is, exactly what terrorists obtained in the attack on Manhattan, and which would be a good metaphor for chaos theory: an initial shock, provoking incalculable consequences, while American gigantic deployment ("Desert Storm") obtained only derisory effects -- the storm ending so to speak in the flutter of butterfly wings. Suicidal terrorism was the terrorism of the poor; this is the terrorism of the rich. And that is what specially frighten us: they have become rich (they have every means) without ceasing to want to eradicate us. Certainly, according to our value system, they cheat: staking (gambling?) one's own death is cheating. But they could not care less, and the new rules of the game are not ours. We try everything to discredit their actions. Thus, we call them "suicidal" and "martyrs". To add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove anything, that it has nothing to do with truth and even (quoting Nietzsche) that it is the enemy of truth. Certainly, their death does not prove anything, but there is nothing to prove in a system where truth itself is elusive -- or are we pretending to own it? Besides, such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of the kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral argument (the above is not to negate their suffering and their death). Another bad faith argument: these terrorists exchange their death for a place in Paradise. Their act is not gratuitous, thus it is not authentic. It would be gratuitous only if they did not believe in God, if their death was without hope, as is ours (yet Christian martyrs assumed just such sublime exchange). Thus, again, they do not fight with equal weapons if they have the right to a salvation we can no longer hope for. We have to lose everything by our death while they can pledge it for the highest stakes. Ultimately, all that -- causes, proofs, truth, rewards, means and ends -- belongs to typically Western calculation. We even put a value to death in terms of interest rates, and quality/price ratio. Such economic calculations are the calculation of those poor who no longer have even the courage to pay (the price of death?). What can happen, apart from war, which is no more than a conventional protection screen? We talk of bioterrorism, bacteriological war or nuclear terrorism. But none of that belongs to the domain of symbolic challenge, rather it belongs to an annihilation without speech, without glory, without risk -- that is, to the domain of the final solution. And to see in terrorist action a purely destructive logic is nonsense. It seems to me that their own death is inseparable from their action ( it is precisely what makes it a symbolic action), and not at all the impersonal elimination of the Other. Everything resides in the challenge and the duel, that is still in a personal, dual relation with the adversary. It is the power of the adversary that has humbled you, it is this power which must be humbled. And not simply exterminated... One must make (the adversary) lose face. And this cannot be obtained by pure force and by the suppression of the other. The latter must be aimed at, and hurt, as a personal adversary. Apart from the pact that links terrorists to each other, there is something like a dual pact with the adversary. It is then, exactly the opposite to the cowardice of which they are accused, and it is exactly the opposite of what Americans do, for example in the Gulf War (and which they are doing again in Afghanistan): invisible target, operational elimination. Of all these vicissitudes, we particularly remember seeing images. And we must keep this proliferation of images, and their fascination, for they constitute, willy nilly, our primitive scene. And the New York events have radicalized the relation of images to reality, in the same way as they have radicalized the global situation. While before we dealt with an unbroken abundance of banal images and an uninterrupted flow of spurious events, the terrorist attack in New York has resurrected both the image and the event. Among the other weapons of the system which they have co-opted against it, terrorists have exploited the real time of images (not clear here if it is real duration, real time or images in real time), their instantaneous global diffusion. They have appropriated it in the same way as they have appropriated financial speculation, electronic information or air traffic. The role of images is highly ambiguous. For they capture the event (take it as hostage) at the same time as they glorify it. They can be infinitely multiplied, and at the same time act as a diversion and a neutralization (as happened for the events of May 68). One always forgets that when one speaks of the "danger" of the media. The image consumes the event, that is, it absorbs the latter and gives it back as consumer goods. Certainly the image gives to the event an unprecedented impact, but as an image-event. What happens then to the real event, if everywhere the image, the fiction, the virtual, infuses reality? In this present case, one might perceive (maybe with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the violence of the real, in a supposedly virtual universe. "This is the end of all your virtual stories -- that is real!" Similarly,

one could perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image... It is as if they duel, to find which is the most unimaginable. The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event. A surplus of violence is not enough to open up reality. For reality is a principle, and this principle is lost. Real and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the attack is foremost the fascination by the image (the consequences, whether catastrophic or leading to jubilation are themselves mostly imaginary). It is therefore a case where the real is added to the image as a terror bonus, as yet another thrill. It is not only terrifying, it is even real. It is not the violence of the real that is first there, with the added thrill of the image; rather the image is there first, with the added thrill of the real. It is something like a prize fiction, a fiction beyond fiction. Ballard (after Borges) was thus speaking of reinventing the real as the ultimate, and most redoubtable, fiction. This terrorist violence is not then reality backfiring, no more than it is history backfiring. This terrorist violence is not "real". It is worse in a way: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and innocuous. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and the black magic of terrorism. One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find any possible interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism imposes the terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it engenders a universal moral reaction) the political order can do nothing. This is our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us, -extraordinary because it unites the most spectacular to the most provocative. It is both the sublime micro-model of a nucleus of real violence with maximal resonance - thus the purest form of the spectacular, and the sacrificial model that opposes to historical and political order the purest symbolic form of challenge. Any slaughter would be forgiven them if it had a meaning, if it could be interpreted as historical violence -this is the moral axiom of permissible violence. Any violence would be forgiven them if it were not broadcast by media ("Terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But all that is illusory. There is no good usage of the media, the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror and they are part of the game in one way or another. Repressive actions travel the same unpredictable spiral as terrorist actions -- none can know where it may stop, and what reversals may follow. At the level of the image and information, there are no possible distinctions between the spectacular and the symbolic, between "crime" and repression. And this uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the underground and extensive ramifications of the event - not only in direct, economic, political, market and financial recessions for the whole system, and in the moral and psychological regression that follows; but also in the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc... that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world. Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic) idea, is being erased from everyday lives and consciousness, and liberal globalization is being realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order' globalization, a total control, a policing terror. Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society. Production, consumption, speculation and growth slowdowns (but not of course corruption!): everything indicates a strategic retreat of the global system, a heart-rending revision of its values, a regulation forced by absolute disorder, but one the system imposes on itself, internalizing its own defeat. It seems a defensive reaction to terrorism impact, but it might in fact respond to secret injunctions. Another side to terrorist victory is that all other forms of violence and destabilization of order favor it: Internet terrorism, biological terrorism, anthrax terrorism and the terrorism of the rumor, all are assigned to Ben Laden. He could even claim natural disasters. Every form of disorganization and perverse exchange benefits him. The structure of generalized global exchange itself favors impossible exchange. It is a form of terrorist automatic writing, constantly fed by the involuntary terrorism of the news. With all its consequent panics: if, in that anthrax story, intoxication happens by itself, by instantaneous crystallization, like a chemical solution reacting to the contact of a molecule, it is because the system has reached the critical mass that makes it vulnerable to any aggression. There is no solution to this extreme situation, especially not war that offers only an experience of deja-vu, with the same flooding of military forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and pathetic discourses and technological deployment. In other words, as in the Gulf War, a non-event, an event that did not happen... There is its raison d'etre: to substitute to a real and formidable, unique and unforeseeable event, a repetitive and deja-vu pseudo-event. The terrorist attack corresponded to a primacy of the event over every model of interpretation. Conversely, this stupidly military and technological war corresponds to a primacy of the model

over the event, that is to fictitious stakes and to a non-sequitur. War extends/continues the absence at the heart of politics through other means. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Spirit of Terrorism." Le Monde 2 November 2001. Available:http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/

ALAIN BADIOU. SAVE THE GREEKS FROM THEIR SAVIORS!

Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Anastazia Golemi and Drew S. Burk.
Translations: Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Drew S. Burk and Anastazia Golemi. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Sauvons le peuple grec de ses sauveurs! in: Liberation. February 22, 2012. (French). Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Retten wir das griechische Volk vor seinen Rettern! February 21, 2012. Translation into German by Judith Dellheim. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Salvemos el pueblo griego de sus salvadores! February 22, 2012. Translation into Spanish by Mauricio Rugeles Schoonewolff. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Vamos salvar o povo grego dos seus salvadores! February 23, 2012. Translation into Portuguese by Alexandra Balona de S Oliveira and Sofia Borges. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Salviamo la Grecia dai suoi salvatori: Un appello agli intellettuali europe. laRepubblica.it. February 22, 2012. Translation into Italian by Vicky Skoumbi, Dimitris Vergetis, Michel Surya. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. A T . in: tometopo. February 21, 2012. (Greek). Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Rdda det grekiska folket frn sina rddare! February 24, 2012. Translation into Swedish by Erik Bryngelsson and Elin Fritiofsson. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Verlos de Grieken van hun verlossers! February 23, 2012. Translation into Dutch by Dennis Schep. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. ! February 26, 2012. Translation into Russian by and redflora. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Zbawmy Grekw od ich zbawcw! February 23, 2012. Translation into Polish by Krzy Rowiski. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Spasimo Grki Narod Od Njegovih Spasitelja! February 22, 2012. Translation into Serbian by Vesna Madzoski. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Reite Grke pred njihovimi reitelji! February 24, 2012. Translation into Slovenian by Joica Grgi. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Yunan Halkn Kurtarclarndan Kurtaralm! February 24, 2012. Translation into Turkish by Ali Bolcakan, Nilfer Akaln and Can Semerciolu. Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, tienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Shptojini grekt nga shptimtart e tyre! February 24, 2012. Translation into Albanian by Arlind Qori. At a time when one Greek youth out of two is unemployed. Where 25,000 homeless wander the streets of Athens. Where 30% of the population has fallen under the poverty line and where millions of families are forced to place their children in the care of someone else in order for them not to die of hunger or cold, where refugees and the new poor compete for trashcans at the public dump, the saviors of Greece, under the pretext that Greece is not trying hard enough, impose a new aid plan that doubles the lethal administered dose. A plan that abolishes the right to work and reduces the poor to the most extreme misery, at the same time as it makes the middle class disappear.

The goal is not about saving Greece. All economists worthy of this name agree on this point. Its about gaining time in order to save the creditors at the same time it leads the country into deferred collapse. Above all its about making a laboratory of social change out of Greece that, in a second generation, will spread throughout all of Europe. The model experimented upon Greece is one where public social services, schools, hospitals, and dispensaries fall into ruin, where health becomes the privilege of the rich, and where vulnerable populations are doomed to a programmed elimination while those who work are condemned to the most extreme conditions of impoverishment and precarity. But in order for this neo-liberalist offensive to achieve its ends, it is necessary to install a regime established an economy of the most basic democratic rights. Under the injunction of saviors, we see throughout Europe technocratic governments installing themselves with disregard for popular sovereignty. This is a turning point in the parliamentary system where we see the representatives of the people giving carte blanche to the experts and bankers, abdicating their supposed decisional power A kind of parliamentary coup detat, which also uses an amplified arsenal against popular protest. Thus, when members have ratified the convention dictated by the troika (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), diametrically opposed to the mandate for which they had received power, without any democratic legitimacy, it will have committed to the future of the country for thirty or forty years. Meanwhile the EU is preparing to establish an account which would be paid directly to aid Greece but only so that it is used for servicing the debt. The revenue of the country should be the "absolute priority" devoted to repay creditors, and, if necessary, paid directly to the account managed by the European Union. The agreement stipulates that any new bond issued under it shall be governed by English law, which involves material guarantees, so that disputes will be adjudicated by the courts of Luxembourg, having Greece waive in advance any rights to appeal against an entry determined by its creditors. To complete the picture, privatization is assigned to a fund managed by the troika, where the title deeds of public goods shall be placed. In short, it is the widespread looting, characteristic of financial capitalism which here offers itself a really beautiful institutional consecration. To the extent that sellers and buyers sit on the same side of the table, we have no doubt that this enterprise of privatization is a real treat for the buyers. But all the measures taken so far have only dug Greece into deeper sovereign debt. With the help of rescuers who lend at exorbitant rates, it has literally exploded into free fall in approaching 170% of GDP, while in 2009 it represented more than 120%. It is likely that this cohort of rescuers - whenever presented as "final" - had no other purpose than to weaken further still the position of Greece so that, deprived of any opportunity to propose itself the terms of a restructuring, is reduced to yield to all its creditors under the blackmail of "the disaster or austerity." The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved. Thus, the weakness of a country caught between speculation and endless devastating bailouts, is the backdoor through which a new social model erupts conforming to the requirements of neoliberal fundamentalism. A model destined for all Europe and maybe elsewhere. This is the real issue and why defending the Greek people can not be reduced to a gesture of solidarity or abstract humanity: the future of democracy and the fate of European nations are in question. Everywhere the "pressing necessity" of "painful but salutary" austerity will be presented to us as the means to escape the fate of Greece, while it really leads us right into the middle of it. Up against this attack against society, faced with the destruction of the last pockets of democracy, we call our fellow citizens, our French and European friends to speak loudly. Do not leave the monopoly on speaking to the experts and politicians. Can we remain indifferent to the fact the German and French leaders in particular have requested Greece to be banned from elections? Does the systematic stigmatization and bashing of a European people not deserve a response? Is it possible not to raise ones voice against the institutional assassination of the Greek people? And can we remain silent in front of the establishment of a forced march towards a system that outlaws the very idea of social solidarity? We are at the point of no return. It is urgent to fight the battle of numbers and the war of words to counter ultra-liberal rhetoric of fear and misinformation. There is urgent need to deconstruct the moral lessons that obscure the actual process at work in society. It becomes more than urgent to demystify the racist insistence on the " Greek specificity " that allegedly is the supposed national character of a people (laziness and cunning at will) the root cause of a crisis in global reality. What matters today is not the specifics, whether they are real or imaginary, but the common: the fate of a people that will affect all others. Numerous technical solutions have been proposed to overcome the alternative of "either the destruction of the society or bankruptcy" (which we see today really means "and the destruction and bankruptcy" of the society). Everything must be brought to the table as food for thought for the construction of another Europe. But first you must report the crime, bring to light the situation in which the Greek people is because of

"rescue packages" designed by and for speculators and creditors. When a movement of support is woven around the world, where Internet networks buzz with initiatives of solidarity, are French intellectuals the last to raise their voices for Greece? Without further delay, multiply articles, media appearances, debates, petitions, demonstrations. For any initiative is welcome, any initiative is urgent. As for us, this is what we propose: quickly move towards the formation of a European community of intellectuals and artists in solidarity with the Greek people in resistance. If we cant do this, then who will? If we dont do this now, then when? Vicky Skoumbi, Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Altheia, Athens, Michel Surya, director of the journal Lignes, Paris, Dimitris Vergetis, director of the journal, Altheia, Athens. And : Daniel Alvara,Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Etienne Balibar, Fernanda Bernardo, Barbara Cassin, Bruno Clment, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Yannick Courtel, Claire Denis, Georges Didi-Huberman, Roberto Esposito, Francesca Isidori, Pierre-Philippe Jandin, Jrme Lbre, Jean-Clet Martin, Jean- Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancire, Judith Revel, Elisabeth Rigal, Jacob Rogozinski, Hugo Santiago, Beppe Sebaste, Michle Sinapi, Enzo Traverso

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-theirsaviors/

ALAIN BADIOU. QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE INFINITE. 2011.

Alain Badiou. Questions Concerning The Infinite. in: EGS Lecture.Summer 2011.
I have divided the questions in four parts. First, questions concerning the three sequences, so the beginning of the session. After that questions concerning, in fact, the second choice to go beyond the third sequence, so the question of the philosophy of life, so the question of Nietzsche, Delezue, Spinoza and this form of choice. Third, questions concerning the infinities of infinities, or more technical questions concerning the infinite. And, four, other questions, questions which are not near our discussion. Sometimes I dont identify the answer by the name of theso, this one, anybody recognize? [Badiou holds up a students paper with a question written on it.] Its you? Okay. And this one? Its you? Okay. So the first question, What is the relationship between hubris and science in the three sequences? Its you? Okay. YouI read the questions, and you say, Its mine, a clear rule, a personal responsibility concerning the question. I think that the relationship between hubris and science is a good question because we know that the question of an excess inside the scientific knowledge is really a question today of the second sequences under the first two, the idea that with science we constitute, human beings constitute a knowledge without really any control fo the effects fo this knowledge. And so I think the question has two dimensions, first, the question which is not exactly the question of science, but of the effects of science. And so its much more the question of technique or something like that. And the relationship between hubris and technique is a different question in some sense because we have directly with technique a question which is the transformation of nature, the transformation of the world, the transformation of life, people and so on. So maybe there is a difficulty to control the technical application of science, but its not exactly a scientific question because the organization of scientific questions is not of scientific nature. It is of social nature. So the question finally would be the relationship between hubris and some form of social organization of the effects of science. And its a clear and classical question. Is there a social organization where we can have a real control concerning the technological and concrete effects of scientific knowledge? Probably today there is a sort of capitalistic appropriation of science, science inside the movement of capitalism, inside the production of new things on the market and so on. And certainly this appropriation can be an hubris in some sense. Why? Because if the goal is totally external to knowledge, of the disinterested sense of knowledge, we have something without control. In fact the contemporary appropriation of science is dominated by the question of money once more, the question of profit. And its not a scientific question at all. Its a purely social question. And when we have some forms of technological development and so on there is always behind all that a question of organization of the capital itself. So in the first part of the questions, this part is clear, we can speak of hubris when the effect of science seems to be out of scientific control, our of rational control, and should be irrational because they are not, precisely, inside scientific norm. But there is another part of the question, which is in relationship to the question to the idea of totality. Maybe in science itself, this time, and not only in the effect of science, we can have the idea of a complete knowledge, of an achieved knowledge, of a total knowledge. And probably this desire of a complete knowledge can be a form f subjective hubris because in some sense its an idea which is in relationship to the One once more, the idea of science between the big One of knowledge, of complete knowledge. And so the question is here really a question inside what we can name subjective, scientific subjectivity. Is scientific subjectivity a form of desire of totality? And the desire of totality is practically always a form of the desire of power. If you accept the different forms of scientific research you accept the fact that science is an infinite task and not a task with the end in the form of a complete knowledge. We are not in the form of hubris. But, in fact, it can exist. It has existed, an hubris in the scientific subjectivity, itself in the form of the desire of a complete knowledge. That is the desire also of a form of the end of science. If science is achieved, science is complete. And so the ethical norm here is to accept the truth in fact, which is that there is no complete knowledge. Its a phantasm, an imaginary figure. There is always new problems. And so the real existence of science is not the totality but the continuation inside, naturally, that is another question, a relationship to novelty with events and so on. But all this is precisely much more the existence of rupture in the becoming of science than the existence of a complete and total knowledge. So, you know, the second question is also concerning hubris. I go immediately to this questions: If hubris is the downfall of the tragic figure in the first sequence, and the tragedy of Christ was the crucifixion in the second sequence, then was Christs return to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday an act of hubris which Christ was punished for, Father, why have you forsaken me? Its a subtle question in some sense, a subtle question. In some sense the question is the question of the tragic, of tragedy, at the beginning of the question. The question is can we say that there exists a tragedy of Christ, in fact, before a question of the hubris of Christ? I think, you know, we can object to the idea that the death of Christ, the crucifixion is of a tragic nature in the

sense of the old Greek tragic nature. And why? Because its a fact, in some sense, something dramatic, something violent, something horrible with torture, death and so on, but in another sense, the signification of all that is the redemptive nature of the death of the Christ. The center of the idea of tragedy is the lesson of the crime, the lesson of hubris is death, crime and destruction. The old Greek tragedy is the relationship between hubris and disaster, but the story of Christ is the not the relation of maybe hubris and disaster. Its the realization of the redemption of humanity by a subjective identity of God to humanity itself because God was, between us, in the middle first, in the form of a human. So my first remark would be that in any case, we cannot say that the death of the Christ is of a tragic nature. A very important point because if we say that, we must say also that the Christian tragic is completely different from the classical tragic, that [it] is a completely new form of tragedy because [it is] a tragedy the end of which is redemption and not at all the punishment, you know? Because in tragedy we have the punishment of hubris, but in the death of Christ we have nothing like that. We have the complete achievement of the identification of God to the form of a human. That is the first point. And the second point is, in any case, is there an hubris of the Christ? Maybe its a different question because maybe there is an hubris of the Christ and after that the crucifixion is not a punishment of hubris because its a redemption of humanity. But is there, in the life of Christ, something like an hubris? Its an interesting question. We have no means to decide without a very close reading of the Bible, of the life of Christ. Maybe there is a moment of what we can describe like, in some sense, a negative hubris. We have said that hubris was to have faith in a new access to the infinite, to the totality, the hubris of tyranny, the hubris of the king, the hubris of the general of an army, and so on, the hubris of the conquest of the world, something like that. But the moment of weakness of the Christ is when he is thinking that he is without any access to the infinite, when he is in the idea that his relationship to the father, the God has been destroyed, has disappeared. And so the moment of the weakness of the Christ is not at all when he is in the desire of power, conquest and so on, but it is the reverse. It is a moment where he is completely reduced to a poor human condition and has lost the fundamental relationship to the father, so to the infinite after all. And so we can name maybe this sort ofanxiety, in fact, anxiety, the moment of weakness of Christ, anxiety to be separated form the father, to be abandoned by the father. But this anxiety is certainly a fall. Certainly there is something like a true weakness of the subjectivity of Christ during this moment. And so, to conclude this subtle question, first, probably we cannot exactly identity the crucifixion of the Christ to a classical tragedy. I dont think so, maybe a new form of tragedy, of the tragic. And after that we can identity the moment of weakness, of the wondering of Christ, not at all to a form of hubris in the classical sense, but much more in the form of despair. So, you are satisfied? You say, in fact. After all we can open a struggle also, with Bree Wooten for example. With Bree Wooten, I have a very long text, a very interesting text, which is not properly a question, which is the organization of a critical point of view concerning, finally, my relationship to finitude, something like that. And so by a very true interpretation of some passages of Nietzsche, for example, but I can extract from all that at the end a real question, and I read the question: I would like to hear more about how you understand the relation between infinity, equality and subtraction as well as the destiny of a body when the One is completely separated from finitude. I am also curious as to why you think being could be so vulgar as to prescribe possible finites and separate a body from what it can do in the first place, as in Plato, and also why you think our task should not be to make finitude clearer in order to generate the new. So its a very strong question in the framework of the desire of a new classicism, in fact, a new classicism which is also a new reading of the old classicism with, in fact, the idea that first there is no close relationship or necessary relationship between finitude on one side and finite possibilities, that finitude can be a form of perfection by itself, that finitude can be a complete correspondence between being and existence without restriction, without saying that by doing that, in the space of finitude, you separate a body from what it can do in the first place. So its a very strong defense, or another approach of all that, which would be to make finitude clearer, to clarify our finitude to generate the new and not to go beyond or outside the finitude in the dialectical direction of something which is under the name of infinite maybe. So, what I think is we cannot do thatwait, to finish the question, because its a part of the text, there is a point in the text which is important to understand completely the question, which is thathow I can summarize this difficult point?...which is an anti-dialectical vision, the idea that the dialectical vision is always to go outside the true place of the action of the body and that, in fact, when you are in the dialectical position you are reading the first sequence form the point of view of the second sequence. So you are on the side of the Christ finally. And it is why, naturally, as you know the war of Nietzsche is the war against Christianity. Why the war of Nietzsche is against Christianity is because, precisely, for Nietzsche we must return to Greece because after the Christian age, or in the Christian age, we cannot understand really what was the first sequence. And so the question is also to say that I, and many others, presuppose the second sequence in my reading of the first sequence, and we must restitute the first sequence to its authenticity, which cannot be a dialectical authenticity because the idea of a dramatic correlation between finite and the infinite and so on, all that is a characteristic of the Christian age. So the idea is that when I speak of the first sequence I speak of something completely difference of the first sequence when it is described by Nietzsche. And so

the attempt of Nietzsche is to produce a possible return to the first sequence, an eternal return to the first sequence in the real strengths of the sequence and not across or with the help of the dialectical thinking of the second sequence. And so, to summarize, the questions doesnt say something like that, but its the truth of the questionI am a Christian finally, for Nietzsche. I am a Christian because I am inside a thinking of the first sequence and of finitude, which is, finally, of Christian nature. So in the end its a real discussion. But I think the questionin some sense its true I accept. We are after the Christian age, the modern age, and we cannot return to a pure origin of finitude. But the most interesting point is not this acceptation of the historical destiny of a vision. The most important point is that the finitude in the first sequence is the finitude without any clear representation of the infinite. That is the point. And so its not a history of religion, all that. Its first a history of mathematics. But why the Greeks have no idea of the infinite? Certainly because they are not in the cultural context of monotheism. They ignore, in fact, the Bible, the Jews and so on. There is a religious content in fact. But for the history of the western world, its not the negative aspects of the Greeks which are of importance, the mythology, the gods and so on are, for us, consequences because what is of importance? Its the invention of a new rationalism, naturally. It is this point which is today active, the point of the invention of a new rationalism, that is, the invention of a new access to being across not only a sacred demonstration, declaration of king and queen and priest and so on, but across a discussion of definition and concepts. That is the birth of something, certainly. We can have judgments concerning this birth, but inside this birth there is precisely exclusion of the infinite because the realm of mathematics for the Greeks is limited to numbers and figures, geometry and arithmetic. And when there has been a problem concerning irrational numbers Greeks have solved the question by the reduction of all that to geometry. So in some sense, the characterization of finitude, the intellectual characterization of finitude in the Greek world is not the completeness of finitude, but much more the absence of the infinite, the absence that is the consideration of a real infinite like something imaginary. And there exist only some limited attempts in Greek thinking to go beyond this absence, beyond the pure limitation, which we can find effectively in the idea of the Good of Plato or the God of Aristotle and some other place like that, which are something like limited anticipations of the second sequence inside the first. So today we perfectly know that its absolutely rational to think with the infinite and that its not necessary for thinking with the infinite to think with something like a transcendent god. We know all that, and it is why we cannot return to the Greek world. We cannot return to the Greek world because we have differential calculus, infinity belonging to sets of Cantor and so on and so on. We are in a context, in a general intellectual context, and in some sense there is something reactive in Nietzsche, much more than progressive. There is something reactive which is a desire of a moment where we are not in relationship to the infinite, a moment where our finitude can be a pure affirmation. And its why we must go not on the side of intellectual thinking, science and so on, but on the side of violence of life. So my ultimate point would be that we must do with the infinite today. We have no choice. The pure return to the perfection of finitude is a dream, is a beautiful dream, I know, an aesthetic dream. Its the idea that the existence must be a finitude as clear as a work of art. But the infinite is here. And it is why its really the dream of a poetic of life, the poetry of life, something like that. And it is why, in fact, Nietzsche was a poet. But I must say that this dream is for me too a temptation, and its a philosophical temptation to return to the Greeks. And why its a philosophical temptation? Because in the realm of finitude we have immediate connection between the question of being and the question of existence. We have the idea of a possible harmony, a possible perfection of the relationship between the two, and so the idea that our body can be not separated, in fact, of its proper possibilities. If we introduce into all the dialectical relationship of finitude and the infinite we have another situation, a situation where probably the pure affirmation of our existence as perfection is much more difficult. And it is why when we say, and we all say, all philosophers say philosophy is, the goal of philosophy is to find what is the true life, what is the good life, when we say that we are immediately in the temptation of perfect finitude. And we see the Greek sculpture and the Greek tragedy also as something which is in some sense perfection, but its a perfection of the first sequence. We are also, we are at a point of history. I think Nietzsche was certainly true with one question. There is an anticipation in Nietzsche of the end of the third sequence, something like that. But probably, very often, the first form of the end of something is the nostalgia of something before. And all the sequence between Nietzsche and today is haunted by a nostalgia of Greek. That is in fact the nostalgia of perfect finitude. And the positive aspect of all that is that in fact we must go beyond the third sequence, but we must do with what exists, what is here now, not only in products, things, a form of life and so on, but also in what is the forms of rational thinking today. And we have a new status of the infinite. That is the point. From cantor we have a new status of the infinite, which is not theological, not in fact, which indicates the possibility of thinking with the infinite outside the religious framework. It was, I have said that, it was the anxiety of Cantor, the writing of Cantor to the pope to have the benediction for all that. And in fact the church gives the benediction for all that. The church today is giving its benediction to practically everything. Its a form of weakness. But I must conclude by saying all what Bree Wooten has written in the question, inside all that, is very, very important.

So the question after that is in relationship to the three sequences. How can we pronounce Cvejeticanin, Srdjan? What iswe can say your name? [Badiou gestures to student]. Its very difficult to say a name with the idea that we say something which is completely different from the name. Its Srdjan, Srdjan like a doctor, like a surgeon.Okay. Its a technical, theological question. So we are on the completely other side than with the question concerning Nietzsche. Its very interesting. [Badiou reads students question]. Could you elaborate on the relation between finitude and infinite in the Christian event when we consider the doctrine of transubstantiation rather than consubstantiality of God and son? Its awe return on the other side to the dialectical question, precisely, after the attempt to restitute the perfection, the possible clarification of perfection of finitude, we return to the very beginning of the dialectical thinking inside the relationship between finite and the infinite inside the Christian event. To understand this point we must clarify the dialectical distinction between consubstantiality and transubstantiation first. In fact, if we have a dialectical vision of something, here of the Christ, we have two possibilities of a description of this vision, a static one and a dynamic one. The static vision is to say that there is coexistence of two different things, two contradictory things in the same thing. So to say that being itself is divided, by its proper nature, between two different natures. So we have in the static vision the idea that the One has a two inside it, or, if you want, that the two is the law of the One. Its a thinking of the One, but its a thinking of the One as a contradiction. So you affirm that the nature, the substance of God, of the Father, is the same as the substance of the Christ, and Father and son is a metaphor, a poetic metaphor of this identity. The Father is finally identical to the son, but its the point of view of substance, that is, of what is the true and static and fundamental being of God is to assume that the nature of God and the nature of the son are the same. So the One is simultaneously infinite and finite. Naturally after that we can say that the infinite is the condition of possibility of the becoming finite, but we go to the second interpretation. In this vision the dialectical vision is to recognize that all what exists is contradictory and to see in every phenomena the specific contradiction. And, for example, God in the Christian vision is unity of the Father and the son, which are contradictory terms because one if infinite and the other is finite. But after that we can say that also society, modern society is a unity of two contradictory terms, for example, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Its why we have the second sequence from the Christ to Marx. Abstractly we have the recognition of the contradiction. But its the static vision. The dynamic vision of dialectics is somewhat different in the idea that the potency of the infinite is to become finite. So its the becoming which is of interest and not the difference of the terms. So the infinite, the Christ can become finite. So there is transubstantiation because one substance is able to go trans, beyond, its proper identity. And in the other sense its possible that something finite realizes the presence of something infinite. That is the case with the host in the Catholic ceremony. The host is a finite object of the world, but at a certain moment of the ceremony, there is a form of dialectical miracle, something like that, which is the real presence of God inside the finitude of the material object which is the host. So in that sort of dynamic vision, the point is not the strict duality in the unity of the things, but the dynamic point is the movement of the contradiction, that is, the transformation of one of the two terms into the other and with the possibility not only from the infinite to the finite, but also, and its much more interesting, from the finite to the infinite. And we can say that transubstantiation is a real truth of consubstantiality. Its the dynamic truth of consubstantiality exactly like in Marxist ontology. We can describe two places. We can describe the condition of the workers and so on, and we can describe the activities of bourgeoisie. That is the first static point, but finally the most interesting is to analyze the struggle of classes. That is the point where one class is becoming in front of the other and finally suppresses or replaces the other. So this question is really a fundamental question concerning all the dialectical process, the dialectical relationship between the infinite and the finite. And you say the extreme point of that is the Christian vision because all that is under, maintains the law of the One. The law of the One isthe relationship between the Father and the son is the determination of the potency of the One. If we separate the One and the infinite we have something different. And its why we have question five, the same writer, Could you elaborate further the distinction between the Hegelian and Cantorian conceptions of infinities? This question is a very philosophical one because its a question of the dialectical vision of infinity in Hegel and another vision of infinity, which begins with Cantor. Its not very simple. Its a technical question too. Its not very simple. If we read different texts, the numerous texts of Hegel concerning the infinite its not an easy reading, to find a philosophical text so obscure and so difficult. But we can say some clear words as possible. For Hegel, there does not exist a separate form of the infinite. That is the point. And for Cantor, there exists finally something like a separate form of the infinite because we can define what is exactly an infinite multiplicity, an infinite set, and infinite set is not at all a finite set. So the answer is possibly to say only this point. Clearly in Hegel something infinite is never separated form the finite and is a result of the movement. And for Cantor there is really a new world of the infinite in the form of a separation. But we can examine the point more precisely. In Hegel we have, I think, three different definitions, three different possible definitions of the infinite, or, much more precisely, three levels of the existence of the infinite. We have first what Hegel names a false infinite, and the beginning of the true infinite is the false infinite, naturally. So the false infinite as always in Hegel is not at all something which doesnt exist. No. Its the form of the infinite in the negative

context of falsity, but the false for Hegel exists as truth exists. What is a false infinite? Its exactly our series of natural numbers of yesterday. The false infinite is the pure continuation. So the false infinite is exactly the without-limit. So the false infinite is purely the repetition of the finite, the possible repetition of the finite without limit. Naturally, in Hegel we find the idea that without-limit is not a positive characterization. So the without-limit does not exist. What exists is the repetition. And so when we say that all that is infinite, there is an infinity of numbers, we say something which is false, which is not appropriate to what exists really in the situation, and what exists is a continuation of the finite and not at all something really infinite. So that is a false infinite. After that we have the abstract infinite. The abstract infinite is the new mathematical infinite at the time of Hegel that we find in differential calculus and in new mathematical analysis. Hegel knew all that. He knew the new mathematics of his time. Here we find something infinite, which is not the continuation of a process but which is the limit of a process, is infinite a point which is the limit of a repetition as the limit of a series, in fact, in differential calculus. So something like that. We have a point here, and we have, much more, near the point and at the end the difference between two terms of the series is practically zero because we are absolutely near the limit point. You know this is not exactly the question of numbers and omega because we can have the idea to be near the limit point. Near omega has no sense at all. You take a very, very monstrous number is not nearer omega than somethingso its, when we have that sort of series the point really is the limit point. That is, the difference between the limit point and the term of the series can be more and more small. And so this infinite is really approximated by the finite in the form of something which is more and more near the limit point. But for Hegel this is not a false infinite because we have really something which exists, the limit point, but its purely abstract because the determination of the limit is, in fact, a determination of negative nature too because we cannot go to the limit. We are more and more near the limit. But we cannot go to the limit itself. So the limit is really infinite in some sense, but we have no real access to this infinity, which is like something which is inaccessible. The limit is the infinite but in the sense of inaccessibility. And so the definition of that sort of infinite is of purely mathematical nature, and it is why, finally, it is purely abstract. And after that we have the true infinite, which is always not a pure limit but a result, a production of the finite. That is finally what Hegel names the absolute Idea, which realizes the immanent truth of the finite by successive steps. So the idea of Hegel is that the infinite, when it is not the false infinite or the abstract infinite, which exist, which are really on the way of the conception of the infinite, the infinite is only the truth of the finite, the realization of the truth of the finite. And so its the One in some sense, the absolute Idea, but not the One in the form of separation of the finite, but the finite realizing its proper idea. Its an historical production of something like a consciousness of the finite itself. And Hegel has a very important and obscure formula in some sense, the infinite is in fact the absolute not only as substance but also as a subject, a fundamental formula. Realization of the absolute which is realization of the true infinite is the realization of what exists, but not only in the passive form of substance but also in the active form of subject. And its the imperative of the Phenomonology of Spirit of Hegel. We find the sentence we must think the absolute not only as a substance but also as a subject. It is why for Hegel there is always a subjective nature of the infinite, which is like a recollection of the sense and truth of the finite but not in the form of a transendency. So its maybe the first rational attempt after Spinoza to define an immanent God under the name of subjective absolute. And in Cantor we have something completely different naturally. In Cantor we have the possibility to think of something infinite in a separate form without any connection to the One, and so which is not properly absolute precisely because we shall have a multiplicity, a great multiplicity of different infinities. But all that is clear. The general lesson is that with Cantor we have probably a stopping point of a part of dialectical thinking. The relationship between the finite and the infinite is not of dialectical nature in Cantor. Its a real separation. We shall see that tomorrow. and for Hegel the infinite is the historical result of the movement of the finite. And this historical result is also the truth of the finite. And in Cantor we have a return to the separation in some sense with the problem of a separation between the infinite and the One without a classical return to finitude. And the last question concerning the three sequences after all thata question ofI read the new question. There is another question which is in the same scope as the last probably. [Badiou reads students question]. Is it possible, but I dont know the writer to the question, Is it possible to account for cosmological events, big bang, through creative repetition of the true infinite? You? [Badiou gestures to student]. I clearly understand the question because its common today to speak of some events of cosmological nature in fact because we can observeits an absolute change with the first sequence. In the first sequence, the world, the stars and so on, the planets are an image of stability and eternity. They are an image of the complete closed form of the world, and the movement of the stars, the movements of the planets was a sort of symbol of what, at the difference of human life, human nature and so on, is always the same. But now we know its not the case. We observe terrible catastrophes, destruction of stars, explosions and so on, and the universe is not at all the sort of great peace of the ancient world. It is a sort of anarchy with terrible facts and so on. And so it is why the idea of discontinuity, rupture, completely new things is

expanded today to the universe and not only to the poor living existence of human beings. So we can examine the question of cosmological events through creative repetition, [which] can in fact be a true concept. There is something repetitive in the cosmological movements because we are in the movement of planets. There is a mathematic of all that. But in some sense there is a rupture which is the creation of something new. The difficulty of this point is that we know these cosmological events first by retroactive construction, the case of the big bang. The big bang is much more a hypothesis than an event in fact today, and very often by indirect observation, observation of traces of something, of cosmological noise, of effects of something. Its very difficult for us to speak of a direct observation because of the time. We observe the interplay between space and time when we observe something of cosmological nature in something very often millions and millions of years before because there is this very new fact because the signal has a certain speed and is not immediate. Its a fact that the speed of light is not infinite. So we have the thing very often a very long time after the supposed event. So there is not for us a pure present of the event, like an historical event, like an artistic event. We are not agents of that sort of event because there is indirect observation of retroactive construction. So cosmological events are the result of deductive activities, scientific activities. Or, precisely, we affirm that an event can be the result of a calculation. So there is a difference of principle between a cosmological event, which is a construction in fact, maybe a true construction but for something which is past for a very long time, and what we name an event properly, which is precisely something which is a rupture in the historical time without any possibility to calculate this rupture. This is the first point. So maybe we can say that its, for us, an hypothesis that in the cosmos there exists something like events in the proper sense. Its an hypothesis. And precisely an event in the normal sense cannot be an hypothesis. It is, no the contrary, a pure happening. And if we say something like the big bang is a happening, we must say it in a very different sense because, finally, you see we have always historians of the cosmos, much more than contemporary. You write with some physical documents, you write the history of the cosmos, and we have events in the sense of the narrative of the cosmos. The second point is that there exists enormous [audio unclear]. We know that the most important part of the couple material-energy, which constitutes the real of the world, is today beyond all possible access by our experience. We know that practically the most important part of the universe cannot be known by us because its something like black matter, anti-matter, black energy, but in the scientific jargon black signifies [that] we dont know. Black material, black energy signifies only that we dont know and we cannot know for the moment. So not only cosmological events are hypothesis of cosmological events, but the background of all that is we know very few, a very limited part of the universe as it is, and we dont understand some fundamental facts. We know, for example, there exists by necessity matter and anti-matter, and we dont know why. We dont observe anti-matter. Its something like half of the universe has disappeared without any hypothesis concerning this disappearance. Its only to say that what is really the universe, the cosmos, the cosmological level, is for the moment something like a very limited knowledge. So we continue. Its possible to continue another ten minutes? Alohr, a new question, we enter in the second part of the questions, questions concerning the second choice to go beyond the third sequence, so two important questions concerning, finally, Spinoza, Deleuze, and so on. Tal Shamir, first, [Badiou reads students question] Could you please explain your comment why there is not the possibility for creativity in the blind process of life within Spinoza and Deleuzes systems? And the question of Eric Lorge, Why cannot a new concept of life, God, immanence, like Spinoza and Deleuze, be a supreme consciousness and a neutral chemical reaction. Why must it be transcendent for you? So, two questions concerning the discussion, the very complex discussion between my orientation and the orientation of Spinoza and, in some sense, Deleuze, but in Nietzsche too and so on. But first I dont say that a new concept of life-God must be transcendent. I accept absolutely the hypothesis, like a new concept of God, of life, to be immanent. The discussion is not between transendence and immanence for the moment. There is no irrationality in the affirmation of the existence of the One in an immanent form. And if we have the point of the immanent determination of the One, certainly the consequences can be of a different nature. We can affirm that this immanent God is a supreme consciousness. Its not the case in Spinoza and neither in Deleuze. We can affirm that its a pure material process with a sort of immanent center and so on. So the discussion is not at this level, the contestation of the rationality of this supposition. The discussion is that by life, immanence, it is signified something like the process of the One. That is the question, and its always this process which finally is truly infinite. The creativity of the life is the proper infinity of all limited actualization of this process. Its clear because its the general example in Bergson or Deleuze. The creativity of life is that actualization of life is the infinite virtualization of forms with realization in the form of animals, bodies and so on, of limited figure of this potency. So we find here really without any discussion a relationship between the One and the multiple, which is a creative relation between the One and the multiple in the immanent creativity of the One, which is actualized, realized in some finite form, and the point is, for me, not by itself that sort of relationship between the infinite and the finite, but the fact that its always in the form of a connection between the One and the infinite, and so first that there is only one form of true infinity, which is named by Deleuze the One-All. there is no choice by Deleuze between the One and the totality,

and its the same thing in Spinoza after all. God in Spinoza is the One and also the whole. Or, if you want, we can say that God is same thing as nature, this fundamental identification between God and nature is the immanentization of God, of God as the One and as the infinite and is inside nature and not outside. We have, in fact, an immanent God which is the concrete realization between the One and the infinite with the classical effect that there is only One-All, what is also in the technical vision of Deleuze the univocity of being. So the choice here, which is much more interesting than the polemics, is to maintain the relationship, the identity between the One and the infinite with the price you pay that you have a totality at the end. We have a totality at the end, which is precisely the concrete existence. The totality is the One-All. We have totality of Spinozas substance. We have a totality which is precisely the realization of the intimate connection between the One and the infinite, and in this totality we have no place for something like a contradiction, development, multiplicity inside the infinite as such. In Deleuze the infinite in fact is the general virtuality of what is actualized in the One-All. That is the point of the choice, and so I think, I maintain that in this vision we cannot have true creativity in my sense, naturally, because creativity, for me, is under the condition of the possibility of a rupture, but a true rupture cannot be assumed if you have the creativity, if the law of creativity is the totality itself. That is the point. If the totality realized inside the One, all the virtualities of the totality, its creativity in the sense of repetition, creativity in the sense of immanent creativity, which is purely and simply the existence of the All-One. The All-One is the development, the existence of forms, of new things and so on, but its not the creativity in the possibility of a local new, which is the expression of the totality. Its the point. Creativity can be the expression of totality itself. Its the position of many great thinkers from Spinoza first, under the historics before, until Deleuze. But, for example, if we, the conclusion for Deleuze is that, strictly speaking, there exists only One event. He writes that explicitly. And its true because it exists only the evental capacity of the totality as such. So only all events are ontologically repetition, expression, of the fundamental event, which is the creative nature of the totality. And so I dont agree with all that. I cannot say something else because there is always a limit in the critiques. If there is no limit we realize a general harmony without difficulty. And I dontbecause I think that we must have another vision of creativity, and we can have another vision of creativity, which is that something which is purely local, localized, without any relationship to a global creativity can create something. That is the point. So its a theory of discontinuity. So the point is here is creativity always a relationship to a totality and so to a form of continuity of the creative activity? Is something creative, can be or not, a purely local disposition? So we have opposite problems. In fact, you see, to Spinoza, to Deleuze, to Nietzsche, the difficulty is to explain why there exists something which is not of creative nature, naturally, because the totality itself is of creative nature. So the difficulty to explain why we have so suddenness, repetitions, and so on, why there is locally something like an interruption of the creativity of life. And it is why the history of Nietzsche is the history of negation, why there exists reactive forces, and why there exists the Christ and so on, and its forms of alienation and negativity. For me this is not the problem at all. The problem is why and hoe can exist creativity in a world, which is absolutely neutral without any totality. I dont see the world and the cosmos and so on as a creative totality. I see it is a purely neutral combination of multiplicities, and the laws of the world are absolutely arbitrary. There exists gravitation and so on, and all that is without any signification for our creativity after all. There is a certain number of planets, and we have poems concerning the moon and the sun, but the moon and the sun dont wait for poems. Its very simple, but its true. So when we create something, for example, a magnificent poem concerning the moon its not because there is something creative in the moon, not at all, neither in the moon, neither in the earth, neither in the relationship. The creativity is a local one where somebody in the relationship to the existence of the moon, certainly, proposes something which is absolutely new concerning this relationship. But this relationship is not inscribed in the totality itself. The totality itself, finally, is something neutral. I dont affirm that the totality is negative. I think that the totality, the cosmos or as you want, is neither positive nor negative. There is something indifferent in the world as it is in the totality, but locally we can assume the creation of something new. You can observe an event. You can have consequences of something new and to do, to create the creativity. There is really two different thinkings, that what we can do, which is universal taking this word, what we can do, which is universal, so which is really interesting for everybody at the end, is prepared somewhere. Its a conception of the virtual existence of the creativity in the totality. But I think that its not the case. There is rupture and there is true beginning. There is true beginnings, true discontinuities, and after that we observe, rupture, discontinuity, we can do something with the discontinuity or nothing. Its a pure proposition. But there is no general affirmation of all what exists. In Nietzsche we find the idea of a big yes to the world, but its not my vision to say a big yes to what exists, a big no very often, and sometimes a big yes. But the idea to go to a point where we are in the joy of the eternal return of the same and thatits naturally, if the totality is creative by itself, we must have the joy of the eternal return of the same, that is, the return of the affirmative dimension of the totality. I agree with that, but under the condition, the first condition, that finally we have in the natural totality something which is the fusion of the One and the infinite and of the potentiality of all that. But if not, if the vision of the world is that the world is composed of multiplicities and multiplicities,

and all that under its proper laws completely indifferent to our destiny, I cannot desire to say a big yes to the eternal return of the same. I hope, I desire, that the world as it is does not return to the same. Its true. I understand the poetry of the thinking of Nietzsche and Deleuze. There is something poetic because poetry is always to find new words to say the world as it is. Poetry is in the search of new reasons to agree of the existence. There is something in poetry which is affirmative. And so its a poetic philosophy to search, in fact, in the world itself, in being itself, new reasons to find a new form of joy, a new form of affirmation, and at its poetic level, its also a temptation. I agree with that because I love poetry, but as my master Plato has said from the beginning, philosophy is cautious concerning poetry. Philosophy is cautious. It was not an idea against poetry. Everybody knows that Plato loves first poetry and writes poetry and that in the texts of Plato himself we find many passages which are purely poetic. But inside that we cannot go directly without any critique, without any observation, without saying what, in mathematics and so on, what are the political questions and all that. We cannot say that there exists a good totality, which poetically dictates our vision. Its a lyrical possibility. Its not a philosophical possibility. And it is why we must separate philosophy from poetry. After that we can return to poetry as a condition. We can understand that in poetry something is said which is very important. But first we must separate. And so it was a necessity for Plato because everybody was educated by poetry. Homer was the great teacher of Greece. Everybody knows absolutely the Iliad and so on, and the separation was also a didactic problem, a problem of education, if we want philosophy we must separate philosophy. We must accept that to say something we must have first a discussion of concepts, and the magnificent vision of poetry is a temptation, but the philosophic price is always a new conception of totality, the beautiful totality. In many complex forms, maybe the virtual of Deleuze, maybe the eternal return of the same of Nietzsche, maybe the cosmos of the historics, but finally we have summarized that. Its very beautiful, but maybe philosophy is not here to be beautiful, but to be true. Okay, we stop here.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/questions-concerning-theinfinite/

ALAIN BADIOU. IS THE WORD COMMUNISM FOREVER DOOMED?

Alain Badiou. "Is the Word Communism Forever Doomed?" in: Miguel Abreu Gallery. 2009. (English).
Thank you for being here today. Its a real brave gesture to talk of Communism just after the victory of Barak Obama and when there is a violent crisis of capitalism. However, to do that in a theater in New York is magnificent. I begin by two very different things. On the one hand some very abstract definitions, on the other hand some very concrete points in concern with the victory of Obama. And its from the point of view of the position between the two, philosophical definitions and concrete study of contemporary thought, that I shall introduce the old word Communism. So first the definitions. I name event, a rupture in the normal disposition of bodies and normal ways of a particular situation. Or if you want, I name event a rupture of the laws of the situation. So, in its very importance, an event is not the realization/variation of a possibility that resides inside the situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility. An event changes not only the real, but also the possible. An event is at the level not of simple possibility, but at the level of possibility of possibility. I name state or state of the situation the system of constraints, which precisely limit the possibility. For example today I name the state of our situation, capitalist economy, constitutional form of government, veridical laws about the order of labor, army, police, and so on all that composes the state of our situation. The state defines what is possible and what isnt. So an event is always something which happens beyond the state. And therein lies the difference between an event and a simple fact. I name truth procedure or truth an organization of consequences of an event. The process or the fact of naming the process of what follows an event. And I name facts the consequences of the existence of the state. So the truth is not purely composed of facts. Its my own position to complete. The truth is also the becoming of the new subject, the new collective subject, when the event is political. Concerning this new collective subject, I can speak of the creation of the truth. Concerning the state, I can speak of historical facts. For example, the revolution of October 1917 in Russia is the creation of a new political truth. In the same country, the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in 1945 is a historical fact. Towards the same history, which happens at times from an event and at times from a historical fact. And finally a historical point. In fact when it transforms the relationship between the identities of individuals and the identity of the power. For example when Lula became the president of Brazil, it was a simple fact and not an event of historical transcendence. Because it was the first time a simple worker occupied the head of the state. Identities like worker, gay, black, woman, Jew, youth, small, red-haired, etc., are of no importance in the true political being which is universal or general. But the relationship between these predicates, this identity and the power, can be of some simple value concerning the action of the state. With all that in mind we can say some words about the great victory of Obama, though it is impossible for me to say anything concerning a fact, here and today. First, and I hope its not too sad for you, its clear that Obamas victory is not a political event. To hard comparison, with the same feel for the movement of the civil rights, under the direction of Martin Luther King during the 60s, has been a great popular event. But the success of Obama is for the moment, of the moment, straight inside the apparatus of the state, the great capitalist economy, huge social inequalities, the war outside in Afghanistan, etc, two political parties. So Obamas victory is a fact maybe an important fact of the history of the state, but not, at least for the time being, a political event. Second, Obamas victory is certainly a very important symbolic point of the state, of the history of the state. The development of this real from Africa of black people, in the name of slavery, of cultural domination, of racism and poverty is an enormous event, a strong symbol, and not only for African Americans, but also for humanity as such. But the symbolic level of the state is different from political truth. This strong symbol can perfectly be, at the political level, empty or even negative. The decision will be, finally, not in the hands of Obama, but in the subjective determination of the symbol. Could you accept the advice from an old philosopher, from an old country? I just can say to you, separate the levels. Dont confuse them. Enjoy the Symbolic. Dont trust the state. And concerning politics rely only on yourself, on the collective action. But here we have a new operation: How can we be prepared for a political event? How can we believe in something which is really a political event and not a fact of the state of history? Generally, in those acts we live in a sort of political activity. We accept the general laws of the state as a necessity. To anticipate the creation of the new possibility, the possibility which is not the simple development of the state facts, at least at an intellectual or ideological level, we must have an idea of the possibility, a general idea of the possibility of a different possibility. We have the ideal of the formal possibility of other possibilities. And during more than one century, Communism has been the name of this ideal. And it was a great name at first. When we find this name which was the name of the possibility of something else, we have to return to the signification

it had originally in two texts of Karl Marxs. One is from 1844 the manuscripts of 1844 and the other is from 1848, the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party. In these texts Communism first signified negativity. It signified that the logic of place, of the fundamental subordination of global workers to a dominating class, could be surmounted. The structure of domination, which is that of history in its antiquity, is not to be confounded. Consequently, said Marx, the oligarchic power created in the corrupt state, although theyre paying the workers in an organized situation, is not ineluctable. Other, the negative part of the word Communism. The Communist idea, the good word, and I quote not for Marx, but as a hypothesis. The Communism hypothesis is that another collective organization can go on. Each an every one that has this, this new organization will eliminate the inequality of worth and even, for Marx, the division of work. People who were separated between manual work and intellectual work, in other words between the city and the country, each and everyone will be polyvalent workers: this is the expression in Marxs Manifesto. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission of within their means by the very existence of the political state apparatus, protected by the military and the police, separated from the civil society, will no longer appear to be an obvious necessity. There will be, after Marx set up, after a brief sequence of what he names the plus-value, charged with destroying working men or the poor workers, a long sequence of the organization in the ways of free association of producing wealth, which would support what Marx named the Decline of the State. And it was the most important definition of Communism, which was the process of the decline of the state. Let me remind you that the state is here not only the state of government, police, army, and so on, but all that limits the possibility of collective creation. So Communism in the middle of the 19th century designated the very general fact of intellectual reorganizations. And this fact is the horizon for any action, although local and limited in time, as it may be, which breaking with the order of the established state composes a fragment of the new politics, fragment of politics of mobilization. It is in short Communism, an idea whose function is regulatory and not a program. It is absurd to categorize the Communist hypothesis to be a petit objet a because it serves to produce, between different politics, lines of demarcation for a given political sequence. It is extra compatible with the hypothesis of equality with which Communism is an ideal, and it is emancipating, on the one hand, as directly opposed to the Communist identity and its reactionary stance. Communism in fact is a heuristic hypothesis frequently used in politics even if the word does not appear. And so its a useful idea for the political determination and not the concrete program of these politics. Maybe you know the violence and kinds of ferocity with Jean-Paul Sartre who, in the 50s of the last century, said that any anti-communist is a dog. If we correctly read these abrupt contents its true. Any action of the state, because it can, any action of the state that appears formally contradictory with the communist hypothesis in the general sense must be judged as opposed to the recognition of the goal of humanity. And so its opposed to the properly united destiny of humanity. As we know, the contemporality of, as we should say, capitalism, a name of social existence, as the correct name of social existence is competition. That is to say, it is the war within the capital and outside it, that the war as real is certainly the intra-human part of humanity. In another interview, the same Sartre says, in such terms, I quote; If the Communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not applicable, this means that humanity is not in itself something very different from ants or ferrets. What he is saying there is that if competition, free markets, the search for little jouissance and the walls that protect you from the desires of the weak are collectivified, the human being is not worth scum. So only, to be a real actor, the real activity of the becoming-human of the human beast, we have to know the history of the Communist hypothesis. And we have to study the question: is really the Communist hypothesis right or completely wrong? In fact, there are two great historical sequences of this hypothesis. And it is quite a question both of them. The sequence of the creation, the creation of the power itself and that of the first attempt to realize the theory. The first sequence begins with the French Revolution and goes to the Paris Commune. Let us say, from 1792 to 1871. The first sequence of the Communist hypothesis: it is that of the creation of the hypothesis. This sequence links (and develops) the idea of Communism as a popular mass movement with the notion of the savior of all. That is, the concrete form of the idea during this sequence, mass movement on one side and on the other side the savior of all. Because it was a mobilizing popular movement, under multiple forms demonstrations, strikes, uprising, armed action, and so on around the figure of overthrowing the state we know, the state was, within its walls, not only the government, the state was the form of the reduction of possibility it must be strong to emancipate the possibility as such. And the only possible actor of this destruction is the mass movement, and, first, the mass movement of workers. And this overthrowing of the state is an insurrectional overthrowing, which is called, as you know, revolution. So finally, there is a strong lesson achieved between the Communist idea and the practical upheaval, revolution. This revolution must suppress the existing forms of society private property, private means of ownership, the separation of humans into nations, the distribution of work, and so on and establish Communist equality, or what the working-class thinkers of the 19th century, as my friend Jacques Rancire

was so well inclined to, names the community of peoples. Communism was, by insurrection, the realization of the community of peoples. This sequence closes with the astonishing newness and radical flavor of the Paris Commune in 1871. The Commune represented a different alternative, a rare combination of popular movement, working-class direction, and augmented insurrection. It showed the economy of modernism of this formula, namely who was murdered, as you know, or exercised the power of the completely new tying of two moments, in one of the largest capitals of Europe. But it also showed it for what it was worth, for it was not able either to extend the revolution to a national scale, or the capacity to organize resistance to the counter-revolution, which was entirely supported by the French middle class. The second sequence of the Communist hypothesis goes from 1917, the Russian Revolution, to 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, which also marks the end of the militant youth movements in Europe and America (and Latin America of course), which arose all over the world, somewhere between 1966 and 1975, and whose center, from the point of view of political innovation, was May 1968 in Paris and consequently during the years that followed. But as you know during the late 60s we have many of the things forming political resistance to the Vietnam War in America and also the movement of the youth practically in all countries all over the world. This second sequence lasts about 60 years, but notice that it is separated from the first by a gap of about the same length, more than 40 years. The history of the Communist hypothesis is not a continuous history; its a continuity by sequences, which are separated. It is important for us, for maybe we are right now between two sequences. So this second sequence, which begins with the Russian Revolution, is dominated by one thing and its (betting on it): How can we be victorious? That is the somber and practically unique question during the revolution. How contrary to the Paris Commune can we endure, embracing the sanguine revelation, the rich people and their mercenaries? How can we organize the new power, the new state, in such a way that its enemies would not destroy it? Lenin recognized it, since under Lenin it the first answer to this question was founded. And its certainly not for nothing that Lenin responded to the problem, when the insurrection lasted in Russia one day longer than the Paris Commune. This official victory and the real, what concerned Lenin were the problems of organization and indifference and was entirely contained, starting with 1902 and of course in What is to be done?, Lenins famous text What is to be done?, in the theory and the practice of the centralism and organization of a class party. We can say that the Communist Party only gives body in their thesis to the realization of the Communist hypothesis. This construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis, the Party, actually restores the question initiated in the first sequence, the question of the victory, in Russia, in China, in Albania, in Korea, in Vietnam, and sometimes in Cuba, and thus gives directions to the Communist Party, the complete revolution of the political and social order at once. After the first sequence, whose dividing line was the formulation of the Communist hypothesis, and of the reality of the movement, of the mass movement, there was effectively a second sequence whose very line was a harsh and militaristic organization, local victory, duration, and construction of the new state. As it is known, the second sequence created in its turn a program that did not have the means to dissolve, with the result that apparently it did not solve the problem left by the first. And in fact, the Party, the Communist Party, which was the body of the Communist hypothesis, the Communist Party adapted to the insurrectional and military history that was successful against fighting their supporters, opposed to the inept, for the construction of the State around the dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense of Marx. That is, a state organizing the transition towards another state. The power of organizing the non-powered, the dialectical form of the decline of the state. Under the form of the party-state like in Russia, China, and other places a new form of state, which was authoritarian and imperialist, was instated. And this state was negative, very far from the practical law of the people, and very far from the ideal of the decline of the state. The deployment of, as some would have put it, violence, was in no recognition in the state of the inertia of its internal bureaucracy. When the peasant has competition imposed on him by a mercenary, with the army taking more than its share to demonstrate it, you would never win. The most important contemporary problem is that the political form of the party does not equate with the certain reorganization and the creative transformation of the Communist hypothesis. And it is to this problem that participated the last important contributions of the second sequence. The Cultural Revolution in China and its neighbor Russia, is named, for example, after Mao. In China, Maos maxim on this point was: No Communism without the Communist movement. No Communism is without the Communist movement. The party is not sufficient: if you dont have the movement, you have nothing at all if any cause can be taken in the name of, to resonate, to develop the power of the state, and consequently the combination of the real world, the Cultural Revolution attempted to start, and quickly becomes cowardly and violent. The definition of the enemy, being either uncertain or directed against the unity the whole of society, the Communist Party Mao has something to do with this when he declares, and I quote: We do now know, in our country, where the movement is, or whether the movement is in the Communist Party.

So, the struggle was finally between the party and the facts. And it destroyed the social consistency. Finally, the old order had to be re-established in the worst conditions. In France, after May 68, the dominating motif was that the organized collective action should create new political space, and not reproduce the centralized management of the state. The reinvigorated content would be new forms of organization and action, enveloping the same political divisions, intellectuals and workers, and proposing the prolongation of the Communist hypothesis even beyond the logic of size or of power. There is an event that even if this experience were under new forms, at the end of May 68, it would be considered that on the whole the modern form of the reactionary state was once again dominant in markets, under the cover of democracy. The word Communism is today a completely forgotten word, only practically identified with a lost experience. It is why the political situation, and the ideological situation are so confusing. Because in fact, the Communist hypothesis, with or without the word Communism, which is only a word, you can speak, for example of the egalitarian hypothesis or the hypothesis of radical equality or whatever, but all that remains of the right hypothesis, the right to think an idea of new possibilities, and not only of realization of old possibilities inscribed in the state. I see no hope. If this hypothesis must be ours, once more we need new words. But we know better to do anything whatsoever as far as the collective action is concerned. Without the horizon of equality and Communism, without this idea, nothing in historical and political revolution is of the nature to interest the philosopher. Let everyone mind his own business and talk no more about it. In fact, what has become of it, or we can even say our philosophical duty, is to contribute with finding a new mode of existence of the hypothesis we have, new kinds of political organization this hypothesis can give rise to. We have learned from the second sequence and its fateful failure, we must return to the conditions of existence of the Communist hypothesis, and not only to perfect the means of our struggle. The lesson of the second sequence is that the question of victory cannot be the center of our sequence. We have, and we must, experience something new, and, there is, after the resistance, the question of the power. What is the politics which is not to be confused with the question of the power? That is, the real one. We cannot be satisfied with the dialectic situation between the state and the mass movement, with the preparation of the insurrection, with the construction of the power pool and dialectic organization, with the concept of revolution, which today is obscure. We must, in reality, reestablish first the hypothesis, communist or egalitarian, with the ideological or militant fit. And with respect to this, we are closer to the powers already in mind in the 19th century. There we are with the history of the revolution of the last century. We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time. Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves. Forever growing in inequality, the radical cut between the people of the working classes, of the uninformed, and the middle class, the complete dissolution of political power in the service of property and capitalist profits. Several years of ratiocination, disorganization of revolutionaries, and the nihilist despair of large portions of the youth, the servility of the large majority of them, and the experience of the base obsequiousness of formal groups in the quest of the contemporary means to establish, re-establish, find new definitions for the Communist hypothesis. All these characteristics are very close to the political situation which was dominant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the apparent victory of capitalism, occasion to the second sequence of the Communist hypothesis, had been, in fact, a very strong reaction, a very strong return to something very old. The politicization of contemporary capitalism is as you see the return to the cynical capitalism of the 19th century. And it is probably why after the 19th century the question is not for us the victory of the Communist hypothesis, but the conditions of its identity. Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin, and that was the great question of the revolutionaries of the 19th century. First, did the historical existence of the hypothesis produce the conditions in a large nation of people and that we are not made prisoners by the very definition of the word uttered by our enemies? Even historical resistance to the hypothesis, where there is a lot of power, is that, sort of identified here, that is oppressing us. It is complex, but at the moment exciting too. By combining conflicts of thought because at the beginning we are dealing with a new form of an instance or idea, there is a weight to the constructions of thought, like the construction of a new form of dialectic by Marx. These constructions of thought are always normal and universal. But we are also with new political experimentations, which are local and singular, and the mixture of the two may constitute a thought at the universal level, with political experimentation at the local or singular level, which finally can produce the new form: the Communist hypothesis. This existence must be, throughout history, in consciousness, by new forms of these organizations of what is the political event, and on the level by the result and by learning of local experimentation. So we can open the third sequence of this great time, we can. And if we can, we must. Thank you.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/is-the-word-communismforever-doomed/

ALAIN BADIOU. ON COMMUNISM.

Alain Badiou. "On Communism." in: Liberation 2009. (English).
It becomes increasingly clear that its always the citizens who lose, as the crisis showed it amply. Why does society give the impression of being powerless, unable to react and thus require another model? The current difficulty is that it is very hard to resist and react within the existing political and institutional framework. It would be necessary to invent both the means of reacting and the contents of this reaction. That will take time, but I remain convinced that it is possible. Do you think, as Jean-Luc Mlenchon affirmed yesterday evening at Serge Moatis, that the state of public freedom these last few months is rotten in France, under the action of the government and of the president? Certainly. A whole part of the policy of Sarkozy produces a reduction in public freedoms. There is an increase of controls, aggravation of sorrows, and open attacks against the institutions charged with defending these freedoms. There is no longer any doubt that Sarkozys conception of a head of the State is basically an authoritative and repressive conception. The Socialist Party has called for a social and political mobilization Thursday. Has the time finally come for the mobilization against the policy of Sarkozy? I do not believe that the Socialist Party showed, during the last years, a particular vocation to be the engine of a mobilization. Rather it seems to follow other initiatives taken in this direction. This mobilization has been coming for a long time. The main question is whether it will finally unify and reinforce itself. During the first third of his five-year term, were there policies which you did not expect in Sarkozy and his accessory ministers and capitalist members to carry out? Were you surprised, or, quite to the contrary, was it just what you had anticipated? Part of the repressive action of Sarkozy was beyond what I could imagine. I will quote in particular the administrative control concerning mental patients, and the repeated attempts at unchecked toughness on the repression of minors. From another point of view, one can obviously be surprised at the States systematic intervention to bailout banks and financial institutions, whereas liberal economic doctrines wanted to compress, nearly without measure, public expenditure. There are many of us who expect intellectuals, if any still exist, to break the silence and raise their illustrious voices together, to spare our brave professors from resisting and disobeying alone. That some scholars, who do not run any risk, raise their voices and take action It seems unjust to me to say that no intellectual speaks against the present state of affairs. It is painfully true that were leaving a period when a considerable number of intellectuals appeared to put up with the established order. I believe and, furthermore, wish that this situation would change. In any case, as far as Im concerned, the new fact is not so much that I speak, but that (what I say) is better heard than before. What do you think of the news making in France concerning the Israeli aggression on Gaza? I would like to intervene on a apparently secondary factor, which in my view is very important: it would have been essential to produce more information and testimonies on the demonstrations opposed to the war, even in Israel. This trend was, as might be expected, in the minority, but it existed, it was a courageous and determined one, and if the future must be that of peace, it is this current which incarnates the future. You are atheistic. Would you say that religions are nothing other than antiquated or totemic forms of politics? And by politics I mean the dismissal of transcendence as the norm of collective destiny? My position on this matter, reinforced by a recent trip to Palestine, is that today it is absolutely imperative to separate politics from religion, just like it should be separated, for example, from racial or identity questions. Religions can and must coexist in the same country, but only if politics and the State are separate. Do you think that the French will awake before the end of Sarkozys presidential term? Because when one thinks about who was elected in 2007, it says a great deal about the state of brain decay of our countrymen The election of Sarkozy is the outcome of two processes: first, the collecting of the votes of the Front National by the conservatives; and secondly, the illegible character of left-wing politics. Only in this regard could the brains have softened. Why did the No to the European referendum not cause a bursting of the Socialist Party and, consequently, a coherent rebuilding on the left? What followed showed that, on the whole, the rallying by certain leaders of the Socialist Party to vote No on

the referendum corresponded more to a tactical choice, inside the party, rather than a sincere attempt to create a new left. This vote was actually much more orchestrated than a failed political expression. Philosophy operating near the political power: is this new? Do you think that Nicolas Sarkozy is worth the sorrow, and is this not perhaps giving him too much credit? The political engagement of philosophy belongs to a French tradition that goes back to the eighteen century, so I did not invent anything. As for Sarkozy, hes been functioning like a symptom of the situation of current politics, which is why I spoke about that of which he is the name, and not about his person. Intellectuals have a small megaphone, whereas governments and institutions have access to a very large microphone and million television sets. Do you think as Chomsky does that the mass medias business is in manufacturing consent while turning political economy to their advantage? Isnt this a hijacking of democracy? The State and those in power have always had more leverage on propaganda and information that the poor and the destitute. Let us consider for example the Churchs propaganda apparatus in the Middle Ages, with a church in each village; there is nothing new here. The success of popular movements or of revolutions had always to triumph over the dominant opinions. And we know that it is possible, including by using some of the new means available, like printing, radio, television and finally the Internet. Dont you think that there is a proper compromise between the unabashed capitalism of Sarkozy and your antiquated radical line? Having begun its journey four centuries ago, capitalism, even unbridled, is much older and archaic that all the radical lines that one opposes to it. Let us cease considering that liberalism, fashionable in the 1840s, embodies modernity and reform. It is Communism which is a new idea in Europe. Which are the political limits of the youth riots in France? To begin with the problem concerns the unity of youth, and then the unity between youth and the mass of ordinary workers. On the first point, the limit it is that there is not, for the time being, real convergence between the popular youth riots and the protests of high-school and university students. Secondly, what constrains the movement is that it lacks a unifying call, common to the frustration of youth and the serious difficulties of adult life. Libration, January 26 2009

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/on-communism/

ALAIN BADIOU. PHILOSOPHY AS BIOGRAPHY.

Alain Badiou. "Philosophy as Biography." in: The Symptom. Vol. 9, 2008. (English).
Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality... The first story is the story of the father and the mother. My father was an alumnus of the cole Normale Superieure and agrg of mathematics: my mother an alumna of the cole Normale Suprieure and agrge of French literature. I am an alumnus of the cole Normale Suprieure and agrg, but agrege of what, of philosophy, that is to say, probably, the only possible way to assume the double filiation and circulate freely between the literary maternity and the mathematical paternity. This is a lesson for philosophy itself : the language of philosophy always constructs its own space between the matheme and the poem, between the mother and the father, after all. Someone saw that very clearly, my colleague, the French analytic philosopher Jacques Bouveresse, from the Collge de France. In a recent book in which he paid me the horror of speaking of me, he compared me to a five-footed rabbit and says in substance: "This five- footed rabbit that Alain Badiou is runs at top speed in the direction of mathematic formalism, and then, all of a sudden, taking an incomprehensible turn, he goes back on his steps and runs at the same speed to throw himself into literature." Well, yes, that's how with a father and a mother so well distributed, one turns into a rabitt. Now the second story : about mother and philosophy. My mother was very old and my father was not in Paris. I would take her out to eat in a restaurant. She would tell me on these occasions everything she had never told me. It was the final expressions of tenderness, which are so moving, that one has with one's very old parents. One evening, she told me that even before meeting my father, when she was teaching in Algeria, she had a passion, a gigantic passion, a devouring passion, for a philosophy teacher. This story is absolutely authentic. I listened to it, obviously, in the position you can imagine, and I said to myself: well, that's it, I have done nothing else except accomplish the desire of my mother, that the Algerian philosopher had neglected. He had gone off with someone else and I had done what I could to be the consolation for my mother's terrible pain which had subsisted underneath it all even until she was eighty-one. The consequence I draw for philosophy is that, contrary to the usual assertion according to which "the end of metaphysics" you know, is being accomplished, and all that, philosophy precisely can not have an end, because it is haunted, from within itself, by the necessity to take one more step within a problem that already exists. And I believe that this is its nature. The nature of philosophy is that something is eternally being bequeathed to it. It has the responsibility of this bequeathal. Your are always treating the bequeathal itself, always taking one more step in the determination of what was thus bequeathed to you. As myself, in the most unconscious manner, I never did anything as a philosopher except respond to an appeal that I had not even heard. The third story is about the famous notion of engagement. I arrive in Paris in 1955, during the beginning of the war in Algeria. The horrors of this war that are today coming into the open - mass murders, torture, razzia, systematic rapes - are well known to everyone. Nevertheless, we are a small number in 1955, a very small number to want stop these horrors, to be against the war in Algeria. We demonstrate, from time to time, boulevard Saint-Michel, shouting "Peace in Algeria!", and when we get to the end of the street, the police are waiting for us, striking us with their cloaks, and we were joyfully knocked senseless. What is strange is that we could not say anything but this: we have to do it again. And yet, I can tell you this, the "pelerine" cloak is not particularly gay. I even think I prefer to be clubbed. But we had to do it again, because that's what the pure present is: wanting the end of this war, as few as we were to share this wanting. I drew the conviction that philosophy exists if it takes charge of the quick of the contemporary. It is not simply a question of engagement, or a question of political exteriority, but that something of the contemporary is always raw, and philosophy must testify to this raw or take place within it, however sophisticated its intellectual production be.

The story number four is about love and religion. Before coming to Paris, I lived in a province, I am a provincial who came to Paris a bit late. And one of the traits that characterized my provincial youth is that a majority of the girls were still raised in religion. These girls were still kept or reserved for an interesting destiny. Which gave an important figure to the masculine parade: the different manners to shine in front of these girls still pious, the principal of these being to refute the existence of God. This was an important exercise of seduction, both because it was transgress! ve, and rhetorically brilliant when one had the nieans of doing it. Before conquering their virtues, the souls had to be yanked out of the Church. Which of the two is the worst, that's for the priests to decide. But out of this conies the idea, that I had very early, that the most argumentative, the most abstract philosophy also always constitutes a seduction. A seduction whose basis is sexual, no doubt about it. Of course, philosophy argues against the seduction of images and I remain Platonist on this point. But it also argues in order to seduce. We can thus understand the Socratic function of corruption of the youth. Corrupting youth means being seductively hostile to the normal regime of seduction. I maintain and I repeat that is the destiny of philosophy to corrupt the youth, to teach it that immediate seductions have little value, but also that superior seductions exist. In the end, the young man who knows how to refute the existence of God is more seductive than the one who could only propose to the girl. a game of tennis. It's a good reason to become a philosopher. This is what has become the place of the question of love, as a key question of philosophy itself, exactly in the sense it already had for Plato in Symposium. The question of love is necessarily at the heart of philosophy, because it governs the question of its power, the question of its address to its public, the question of its seductive strength. On this point, I believe I have followed Socrates's very difficult direction: "the one who follows the path of total revelation must begin at an early age to be taken by the beauty of bodies". The fifth story is a marxist one. Naturally, my family tradition was to the left. My father had bequeathed to me two images: the image of the anti-nazi resistant during the war, and then the image of the socialist militant in power, because he was mayor of a big French town, Toulouse, for thirteen years. My story is the story of a rupture with this sort of official left. There are two periods in the history of my rupture with the official left. The last, well known, is May 68 and its continuation. The other, less known, more secret and so even more active. In 1960 there was a general strike in Belgium. I will not give the details. I was sent to cover this strike as a journalist - I was often a journalist, I have written, it seems to me, hundreds of articles, maybe thousands. I met mine workers on strike. They have reorganized the entire social life of the country, by constructing a sort of new popular legitimacy. They have even edited a new money. I assisted at their assemblies, I spoke with them. And I was from then on convinced, up till this day I am speaking to you, that philosophy is on that side. "On that side" is not a social determination. It means: on the side of what is spoken orpronounced there, on the side of this obscure part of common humanity. On the side of equality. The abstract maxim of philosophy is necessarily absolute equality. After my experience of mine workers strike in Belgium, I have give a philosophical order to myself : "transform the notion of truth in such a way that it obeys the equalitarian maxim, this is why I gave the truth three attributes: 1) It depends on an irruption, and not on a structure. Any truth is new, this will be the doctrine of the event. 2) All truth is universal, in a radical sense, the anonymous equalitarian for-all, the pure for-all, constitutes it in its being, this will be its genericity. 3) A truth constitutes its subject, and not the inverse, this will be its militant dimension. All that, in a still total obscurity, is at work when I meet in 1960 the Belgium mine Workers. The story number six is a very moral story. After 68, during what we can call the red years, when we invented new things, when we created bonds with peoples that we did not know, when we were in the conviction that an entirely other world than that of our academic destiny awaited us, we entered into a political enterprise with a good many people, - and some of

them, me included, continue this new political enterprise. But what really struck me, the experience I wish to speak of here, is the experience of those who, starting with the middle of the 1970s, renounced this enterprise. Not only did they renounce this enterprise, but they entered into a systematic renegation that, starting with the new philosophers, from the end of the 1970s, little by little establish themselves, spread and dominate. And this is planted in philosophy like an arrow. It is a question in itself: How is it possible that one can cease being the subject of a truth? How is it possible that one return to the routine of the world This question nourishes my conviction that what is constitutive of philosophy is to stay not only within the vividness of the event, but within its becoming, that is, within the treatment of its consequences. Never to return to structural passivity : That is properly constitutive of philosophy as thought. It is what I simply called fidelity. And fidelity forms a knot, it is a concept that brings together the subject, the event and truth. It is what traverses the subject with regard to an event capable of constituting a truth. Here again I think of Plato. At the end of Book IX of the Republic, Socrates responds to the objection that the ideal city which he had traced the plan of would probably never exist. This is a massive objection that the young people make: "All that is magnificent, but we don't see it coming!". Socrates responds more or less like this: that this city exists or may one day exist is of no importance, because it is only its laws that must dictate our conduct. That is the principle of consequence. And it is not a question that is inferred from a problem of existence or inexistence. It's our philosophical duty : to continue. It's my story seven which is an erotic story. This is what is expended by all biographers. Will you be disappointed? I will stay within the discreet erotic genre. A "soft" story. Just like everyone, in the 50s and 60s, we were tormented by sexuality. This torment is certainly stil very perceptible in my first novels, Almagestes, in 1964 and then Portulans in 1967. But literature is a filter here. In the end, this trouble is foreign to philosophy strictly speaking., in conformity to its great classical tradition. I would say that I learned little by little why. It is certain that sexual situations are fascinating, and it is also certain that the formalism of these situations, the erotic formalism is extraordinarily poor. And all its force depends on a repetitive injunction, with variations of little amplitude. I would say then that little by little in life a relation of charmed connivance is established with this formalism. Finally neither transgressive fascination, nor the repression of the superego are really at their place in this affair. All that is delicious, and, after all, without great consequence for thought. I have come to conclude philosophically, that as acute as this pacifying charmed connivance might be, at least for me, desire is not a central category for philosophy, and cannot be. Or rather desires only touches philosophy - just as well as jouissance - as bodies are seized in love. That is why, from this long crossing through sexual torment the final result is, as I had already said for other reasons, that love, and not desire, must instantly return into the constitution of the concept. The story number eight is a formal story, or a story concerning forms. I said, on the subject of the erotic injunction, "formalism", and I said it as a philosopher. Because I deeply believe that what permits a singular truth - amorous as well as political to touch philosophy is, in the end, its form. In this sense, I would sustain that the only philosophy is formalist. Perhaps in the sense of Plato when he says: "the only veritable thought is in forms" what is often translated by "Idea" is better rendered by "form". And I believe that the creation of concepts lies in this: philosophy conceives the singularity of theorms of truth. And there again, we have a Platonic program. Why Platonic? Dialectics is the science of forms. And form is, in philosophy, singularity. It is, as Socrates says in Phaedo, "the unique form of what remains identical to itself." From this we have an intimate tie between philosophy and mathematics (a tie strongly thematized by Plato himself.) If the philosophic concepts are in the end the form of the concepts of truth, then they must support the proof of formalization. Whatever this proof be. All the great philosophers have submitted the concept to an overwhelming, speculative form of formalization. I think this is why mathematics must have remained a passion for me? I scrutinize this precisely - in mathematics: What is thought capable of when it is devoted to, pure form? As the literality of form? And the conclusion I have progressively drawn is that what it is capable of, when it is ordained as pure form, is thinking being as such, being as being. Which gives my provoking formula according to which effective ontology is nothing else than constituted mathematics. Which, obviously, in the eyes of the psychoanalyst, means that my desire is only there to sublimate the image of my mathematician father. The final story, the story number nine, is about my masters.

Philosophy is a question of mastery, and this in a triple sense. First because it belongs in effect to what Lacan called the discourse of the master. Then because it supposes, in its very subjectivity, the encounter with a master. Finally and lastly, because if we look closely at it, philosophy always ends up by constituting a discourse that is ordained to a principal signifier, a master signifier, such as is, in my thought, the signifier "truth. In the three cases, philosophy is a question of mastery; So, biographically, who were my masters? During the decisive years of my education, I had three masters: Sartre, Lacan and Althusser. They were not masters of the same thing. What Sartre taught me was simply, existentialism. But what does existentialism mean? It means that you must have a tie between the concept on the one hand and on the other the existential agency of choice, the agency of the vital decision. The conviction that the philosophic concept is not worth an hour of toil if, be it by mediations of a great complexity, it does not reverberate, clarify and ordain the agency of choice, of the vital decision. And in this sense, the concept must be, also and always, an affair of existence. That is what Sartre taught me. Lacan taught me the connection, the necessary link between a theory of subjects and a theory of forms. He taught me how and why the very thinking of subjects, which had so often been opposed to the theory of forms, was in reality intelligible only within the framework of this theory. He taught me that the subject is a question that is not at all of a psychological character, but is an axiomatic and formal question. More than any other question! Althusser taught me two things: that there was no object proper to philosophy this is one of his great theses , but that there were orientations of thought, lines of separation. And, as Kant had already said, a sort of perpetual fight, a fight that was constantly begun again, in new conditions. He taught me consequently the sense of delimitations, of what he called the demarcation. In particular the conviction that philosophy is not the vague discourse of totality, or the general interpretation of what there is. That philosophy must be delimited, that it must be separated from what is not philosophy. Politics and philosophy are two distinct things, art and philosophy are two distinct things, science and philosophy are two distinct things. Finally, I was able then to keep all my masters. I kept Sartre despite the disregard he was object of for a long time. I kept Lacan despite what must really be called the terrible character of his disciples. And I kept Althusser despite the substantial political divergences that opposed me to him starting with May 68. Crossing through the possibility of oblivion, the dissemination of disciples and the political conflict, I succeeded in conserving my fidelity to three disparate masters. And I maintain today that in philosophy masters are necessary; I maintain a constitutive hostility to the tendency towards democratic professionalization of philosophy and to the imperative that is rampant today and humiliates youth: "Be little, and work as a team." I would also say that the masters, must be combined and surmounted, but finally, it is always disastrous to deny them. It's the end, now. And when I am at my wits' end, my trick is to pass the stick on to the poet. I have chosen the poet of my adolescence. Saint John Perse. With him, I can speak of another dimension of life, the companions, the companions of existence. The companions of the poet are different from the companions of the philosopher. The companions of the philosopher are the different societies within which the question of a truth is at least posed. The companions of the poet are often the companions of his solitude, which is why Saint John Perse enumerates them as companions in exile, at the moment when he himself must go into exile. And aftet the enumeration of his companions, he returns to his solitude, and he says that: Stranger, on all the beaches of this world, with neither audience nor witness, press to the ear of the West a seashell without memory: Precarious host on the outskirts of our cities, you will not cross the sill of Lloyds, where your word is not honored and your gold has no title... 'I shall inhabit my name' was his response to the questionnaires of the port; And on the tables of exchange, you have nothing but trouble to produce, Just as these great moneys in iron exhumed by lightning. "I shall inhabit my name": this is precisely what philosophy tries to render possible for each and every one. Or rather, philosophy searches for the formal conditions, the possibility for each and every one to inhabit his name, to be simply there, and recognized by all as the one who inhabits his name, who, by right of this, as inhabiting his name, is the equal of anyone else. That is why we mobilize so many resources. That is also what our monotonous biography can be used for:

to constantly begin again the search for the conditions by which the proper name of each one can be inhabited.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/philosophy-as-biography/

ALAIN BADIOU. THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS.

Alain Badiou. "The Communist Hypothesis." in: The New Left Review. Vol. 49, Winter 2008. (English).
There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France in the aftermath of Sarkozys victory. [1] It is often said that unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones sometimes prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath of May 2007. Something else was at stakesome complex of factors for which Sarkozy is merely a name. How should it be understood? An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will. A second component of the lefts depressive disorientation after May 2007 was an overwhelming bout of historical nostalgia. The political order that emerged from World War Two in Francewith its unambiguous referents of left and right, and its consensus, shared by Gaullists and Communists alike, on the balancesheet of the Occupation, Resistance and Liberationhas now collapsed. This is one reason for Sarkozys ostentatious dinners, yachting holidays and so ona way of saying that the left no longer frightens anyone: Vivent les riches, and to hell with the poor. Understandably, this may fill the sincere souls of the left with nostalgia for the good old daysMitterrand, De Gaulle, Marchais, even Chirac, Gaullisms Brezhnev, who knew that to do nothing was the easiest way to let the system die. Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over which Chirac presided. The Socialists collapse had already been anticipated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round). The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the actual size of the vote47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orientation itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers. The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties? A third component of the contemporary disorientation arose from the outcome of the electoral conflict itself. I have characterized the 2007 presidential electionspitting Sarkozy against Royalas the clash of two types of fear. The first is the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans. Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even one who oppresses and impoverishes you further. The current embodiment of this figure is, of course, the over-stimulated police chief: Sarkozy. In electoral terms, this is contested not by a resounding affirmation of self-determining heterogeneity, but by the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows nor likes. This fear of the fear is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose content beyond the sentiment itselfis barely detectable; the Royal camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed; the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear. For both sides, a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan (where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming with French military administrators). Public discussion of alternatives on these issues was on neither partys agenda. The conflict between the primary fear and the fear of the fear was settled in favour of the former. There was a visceral reflex in play here, very apparent in the faces of those partying over Sarkozys victory. For those in the grip of the fear of the fear there was a corresponding negative reflex, flinching from the result: this was the third component of 2007s depressive disorientation. We should not underestimate the role of what Althusser called the ideological state apparatusincreasingly through the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than TV and radioin formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary fear of the fear than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after all, to a real situation, whereas the fear of the fear merely takes fright at the scale of that

reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from reality. The vacuity of this position manifested itself perfectly in the empty exaltations of Sgolne Royal. Electoralism and the State If we posit a definition of politics as collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form, that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function. This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics. If the electoral mechanism is not a political but a state procedure, what does it achieve? Drawing on the lessons of 2007, one effect is to incorporate both the fear and the fear of the fear into the stateto invest the state with these mass-subjective elements, the better to legitimate it as an object of fear in its own right, equipped for terror and coercion. For the world horizon of democracy is increasingly defined by war. The West is engaged on an expanding number of fronts: the maintenance of the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sustained by force. This creates a particular dialectic of war and fear. Our governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect us from it at home. If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists in Afghanistan or Chechnya, they will come over here to organize the resentful rabble outcasts. Strategic Neo-Ptainism In France, this alliance of fear and war has classically gone by the name of Ptainism. The mass ideology of Ptainismresponsible for its widespread success between 1940 and 1944rested in part on the fear generated by the First World War: Marshal Ptain would protect France from the disastrous effects of the Second, by keeping well out of it. In the Marshals own words, it was necessary to be more afraid of war than of defeat. The vast majority of the French accepted the relative tranquillity of a consensual defeat and most got off fairly lightly during the War, compared to the Russians or even the English. The analogous project today is based on the belief that the French need simply to accept the laws of the US-led world model and all will be well: France will be protected from the disastrous effects of war and global disparity. This form of neo-Ptainism as a mass ideology is effectively on offer from both parties today. In what follows, I will argue that it is a key analytical element in understanding the disorientation that goes by the name of Sarkozy; to grasp the latter in its overall dimension, its historicity and intelligibility, requires us to go back to what I will call its Ptainist transcendental. [2] I am not saying, of course, that circumstances today resemble the defeat of 1940, or that Sarkozy resembles Ptain. The point is a more formal one: that the unconscious national-historical roots of that which goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Ptainist configuration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the Restoration of 1815 when a postRevolutionary government, eagerly supported by migrs and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population, that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the nation, yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Ptain himself, an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment of national rebirth. Numerous aspects of this neo-Ptainist tradition are in evidence today. Typically, capitulation and servility are presented as invention and regeneration. These were central themes of Sarkozys campaign: the Mayor of Neuilly would transform the French economy and put the country back to work. The real content, of course, is a politics of continuous obedience to the demands of high finance, in the name of national renewal. A second characteristic is that of decline and moral crisis, which justifies the repressive measures taken in the name of regeneration. Morality is invoked, as so often, in place of politics and against any popular mobilization. Appeal is made instead to the virtues of hard work, discipline, the family: merit should be rewarded. This typical displacement of politics by morality has been prepared, from the 1970s new

philosophers onwards, by all who have laboured to moralize historical judgement. The object is in reality political: to maintain that national decline has nothing to do with the high servants of capital but is the fault of certain ill-intentioned elements of the populationcurrently, foreign workers and young people from the banlieue. A third characteristic of neo-Ptainism is the paradigmatic function of foreign experience. The example of correction always comes from abroad, from countries that have long overcome their moral crises. For Ptain, the shining examples were Mussolinis Italy, Hitlers Germany and Francos Spain: leaders who had put their countries back on their feet. The political aesthetic is that of imitation: like Platos demiurge, the state must shape society with its eyes fixed on foreign models. Today, of course, the examples are Bushs America and Blairs Britain. A fourth characteristic is the notion that the source of the current crisis lies in a disastrous past event. For the proto-Ptainism of the 1815 Restoration, this was of course the Revolution and the beheading of the King. For Ptain himself in 1940 it was the Popular Front, the Blum government and above all the great strikes and factory occupations of 1936. The possessing classes far preferred the German Occupation to the fear which these disorders had provoked. For Sarkozy, the evils of May 68forty years agohave been constantly invoked as the cause of the current crisis of values. Neo-Ptainism provides a usefully simplified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and 2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy government, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the element of racism. Under Ptain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: we are not an inferior racethe implication being, unlike others; the true French need not doubt the legitimacy of their countrys actionsin Algeria and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the disorientation that goes by the name of Sarkozy may be analysed as the latest manifestation of the Ptainist transcendental. The Spectre At first sight there may seem something strange about the new Presidents insistence that the solution to the countrys moral crisis, the goal of his renewal process, was to do away with May 68, once and for all. Most of us were under the impression that it was long gone anyway. What is haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume that it is the spectre of communism, in one of its last real manifestations. He would say (to give a Sarkozian prosopopoeia): We refuse to be haunted by anything at all. It is not enough that empirical communism has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the hypothesis of communismgeneric name of our defeatmust become unmentionable. What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, communist means, first, that the logic of classthe fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquityis not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away. Communism as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revoltsthe slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by Mntzermight be identified as practical examples of this communist invariant. With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity. What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves in the history of the communist hypothesis. A fresco of the modern period would show two great sequences in its development, with a fortyyear gap between them. The first is that of the setting in place of the communist hypothesis; the second, of preliminary attempts at its realization. The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass movement to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of the existing order; this revolution will abolish the old forms of society and install the community of equals. In the course of the century, the formless popular movement made up of

townsfolk, artisans and students came increasingly under the leadership of the working class. The sequence culminated in the striking noveltyand radical defeatof the Paris Commune. For the Commune demonstrated both the extraordinary energy of this combination of popular movement, working-class leadership and armed insurrection, and its limits: the communards could neither establish the revolution on a national footing nor defend it against the foreign-backed forces of the counter-revolution. The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966 75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold outunlike the Paris Communeagainst the armed reaction of the possessing classes; how to organize the new power so as to protect it against the onslaught of its enemies? It was no longer a question of formulating and testing the communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what the 19th century had dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obsession with victory, centred around questions of organization, found its principal expression in the iron discipline of the communist partythe characteristic construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The party effectively solved the question inherited from the first sequence: the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war, in Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and succeeded in establishing a new order. But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted for the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense that Marx had intendedthat is, a temporary state, organizing the transition to the non-state: its dialectical withering away. Instead, the party-state developed into a new form of authoritarianism. Some of these regimes made real strides in education, public health, the valorization of labour, and so on; and they provided an international constraint on the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the statist principle in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run, ineffective. Police coercion could not save the socialist state from internal bureaucratic inertia; and within fifty years it was clear that it would never prevail in the ferocious competition imposed by its capitalist adversaries. The last great convulsions of the second sequencethe Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sensecan be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party. Interludes Between the end of the first sequence and the beginning of the second there was a forty-year interval during which the communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable: the decades from 1871 to 1914 saw imperialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the adversary in the ascendant once more. What is at stake in these circumstances is the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not becannot bethe continuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist stateall the inventions of the 20th century are not really useful to us any more. At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable. The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it. At this point, during an interval dominated by the enemy, when new experiments are tightly circumscribed, it is not possible to say with certainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the political movement and the level of the ideologicalone that was prefigured in the expression cultural revolution or in the May 68 notion of a revolution of the mind. We will still retain the theoretical and historical lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory that issued from the second. But the solution will be neither the formless, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the multitudeas Negri and the alter-globalists believenor the renewed and democratized mass communist party, as some of the Trotskyists and Maoists hope. The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the socialist states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into existence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improving its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesisthe proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitablewithin the ideological sphere. What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the

temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called the service of wealth. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: There is only one world. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of alter-globalization. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The one world of globalization is solely one of thingsobjects for saleand monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so. The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the worlds wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The problem of immigration is, in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other countries provide living proof thatin human termsthe unified world of globalization is a sham. A Performative Unity The political problem, then, has to be reversed. We cannot start from an analytic agreement on the existence of the world and proceed to normative action with regard to its characteristics. The disagreement is not over qualities but over existence. Confronted with the artificial and murderous division of the world into twoa disjunction named by the very term, the Westwe must affirm the existence of the single world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase, there is only one world, is not an objective conclusion. It is performative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow from this simple declaration. A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children in a park. That is where we reverse the dominant idea of the world united by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, here and now. These people, different from me in terms of language, clothes, religion, food, education, exist exactly as I do myself; since they exist like me, I can discuss with themand, as with anyone else, we can agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I exist in the same world. At this point, the objection about cultural difference will be raised: our world is made up of those who accept our valuesdemocracy, respect for women, human rights. Those whose culture is contrary to this are not really part of the same world; if they want to join it they have to share our values, to integrate. As Sarkozy put it: If foreigners want to remain in France, they have to love France; otherwise, they should leave. But to place conditions is already to have abandoned the principle, there is only one world of living men and women. It may be said that we need to take the laws of each country into account. Indeed; but a law does not set a precondition for belonging to the world. It is simply a provisional rule that exists in a particular region of the single world. And no one is asked to love a law, simply to obey it. The single world of living women and men may well have laws; what it cannot have is subjective or cultural preconditions for existence within itto demand that you have to be like everyone else. The single world is precisely the place where an unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far from casting doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its principle of existence. The question then arises whether anything governs these unlimited differences. There may well be only one world, but does that mean that being French, or a Moroccan living in France, or Muslim in a country of Christian traditions, is nothing? Or should we see the persistence of such identities as an obstacle? The simplest definition of identity is the series of characteristics and properties by which an individual or a group recognizes itself as its self. But what is this self? It is that which, across all the characteristic properties of identity, remains more or less invariant. It is possible, then, to say that an identity is the ensemble of properties that support an invariance. For example, the identity of an artist is that by which the invariance of his or her style can be recognized; homosexual identity is composed of everything bound up with the invariance of the possible object of desire; the identity of a foreign community in a country is that by which membership of this community can be recognized: language, gestures, dress, dietary habits, etc.

Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritarian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation rather like Nietzsches famous maxim, become what you are. The Moroccan worker does not abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he isa Moroccan worker in Parisnot through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity. The political consequences of the axiom, there is only one world, will work to consolidate what is universal in identities. An examplea local experimentwould be a meeting held recently in Paris, where undocumented workers and French nationals came together to demand the abolition of persecutory laws, police raids and expulsions; to demand that foreign workers be recognized simply in terms of their presence: that no one is illegal; all demands that are very natural for people who are basically in the same existential situationpeople of the same world. Time and Courage In such great misfortune, what remains to you? Corneilles Medea is asked by her confidante. Myself! Myself, I say, and it is enough, comes the reply. What Medea retains is the courage to decide her own fate; and courage, I would suggest, is the principal virtue in face of the disorientation of our own times. Lacan also raises the issue in discussing the analytical cure for depressive debility: should this not end in grand dialectical discussions on courage and justice, on the model of Platos dialogues? In the famous Dialogue on Courage, General Laches, questioned by Socrates, replies: Courage is when I see the enemy and run towards him to engage him in a fight. Socrates is not particularly satisfied with this, of course, and gently takes the General to task: Its a good example of courage, but an example is not a definition. Running the same risks as General Laches, I will give my definition. First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtuethat is, not an innate disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one constructs, in practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests itself through endurance in the impossible. This is not simply a matter of a momentary encounter with the impossible: that would be heroism, not courage. Heroism has always been represented not as a virtue but as a posture: as the moment when one turns to meet the impossible face to face. The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate in terms of a different dure to that imposed by the law of the world. The point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of time. Those imprisoned within the temporality assigned us by the dominant order will always be prone to exclaim, as so many Socialist Party henchmen have done, Twelve years of Chirac, and now we have to wait for another round of elections. Seventeen years; perhaps twenty-two; a whole lifetime! At best, they will become depressed and disorientated; at worst, rats. In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the service of wealth, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis... Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processesalways global, or universal, in characterand political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground. Notes: [1] This is an edited extract from De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances 4, Nouvelles ditions Lignes, Paris 2007. [2] See Logiques des mondes, Paris 2006 for a full development of the concept of transcendentals and their function, which is to govern the order of appearance of multiplicities within a world.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/the-communist-hypothesis/

ALAIN BADIOU. CINEMA AS DEMOCRATIC EMBLEM.

Alain Badiou. "Cinema as Democratic Emblem." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 6. 2008. (English).
Philosophy only exists insofar as there are paradoxical relations, relations which fail to connect, or should not connect. When every connection is naturally legitimate, philosophy is impossible or in vain. Philosophy is the violence done by thought to impossible relations. Today, which is to say "after Deleuze," there is a clear requisitioning of philosophy by cinema - or of cinema by philosophy. It is therefore certain that cinema offers us paradoxical relations, entirely improbable connections. Which ones? The preformed philosophical response comes down to saying that cinema is an untenable relation between total artifice and total reality. Cinema simultaneously offers the possibility of a copy of reality and the entirely artificial dimension of this copy. With contemporary technologies, cinema is capable of producing the real artifice of the copy of a false copy of the real, or again, the false real copy of a false real. And other variations. This amounts to saying that cinema has become the immediate form (or "technique") of an ancient paradox, that of the relations between being and appearance (which are far more fundamental than the relations everywhere exhibited between the virtual and the actual). We can thus proclaim cinema to be an ontological art. Many critics, Andr Bazin in particular, have been saying this for a long time. I would like to enter into the question in an infinitely simpler and more empirical manner, removed from all philosophical preformation, starting with the elucidation of a statement: cinema is a "mass art." The syntagm "mass art" can be given an elementary definition: an art is a "mass art" if the masterpieces, the artistic productions that the erudite (or dominant, whatever) culture declares incontestable, are seen and liked by millions of people from all social groups at the very moment of their creation. Adding "at the very moment of their creation" is especially important, because we know that we are dominated by a melancholy historicism, which creates a pure effect of pastness. Millions of people, regardless of their social background (apart of course from the base proletariat) are able to go to museums, because they like the icons of the past as treasures, for the modern passion for tourism extends to a kind of tourism of treasures. It is not of this kind of tourism that I am speaking, but of the millions of people who love an exceptional work at the very moment of its appearance. Yet we have, in the short history of cinema, incontestable examples of such love, examples that can only be compared to the public triumph of the great Greek tragedies. Take, for example, the great films of Chaplin. They have been seen throughout the world, even in the homes of Eskimos, or projected on tents in the desert. Everybody immediately understood that these films spoke in the profound and decisive way that I have proposed to call (when writing on Beckett's prose) "generic humanity," or humanity subtracted from its differences. The character of the Tramp, perfectly placed, filmed in a close frontal manner, in a familiar context, is no less a representative of generic "popular" humanity for an African than for a Japanese or for an Eskimo. It would be wrong to believe this kind of example is limited to the comic or burlesque genre, which has always been able to reflect the vital energy of the people, the strength and cunning of social survival. We could as easily cite an extraordinarily concentrated film of staggering formal invention, doubtless one of the greatest existing cinematic poems: Murnau's Sunrise. This pure masterpiece was a phenomenal success in the United States, a sort of Titanic, without the industrial flavour. Cinema is without a doubt capable of being a mass art on a scale which suffers no comparison with any other art. Certainly in the nineteenth century there were mass writers, mass poets: Victor Hugo in France, for example, or Pushkin in Russia. They had, and still have, millions of readers. However, the scale - at the moment of their creation - is incomparable to that of the great success of cinema. The point is thus the following: "mass art" fixes a paradoxical relation. Why? Because "mass" is a political category, or more precisely a category of activist democracy, of communism. The Russian revolutionaries were able to define their actions in terms of a time when "the masses climbed onto the stage of History." We usually oppose "mass democracy" to representative and constitutional democracy. "Mass" is an essential political category. Mao said that "the masses, the masses alone, are creators of universal history."

However, "art", which is the other half of the syntagm "mass art," is and can only be an aristocratic category. To say that "art" is an aristocratic category is not a judgement. We simply note that "art" comprises the idea of formal creation, of visible novelty in the history of forms, and therefore requires the means of comprehending creation as such, necessitating a differential education, a minimal proximity to the history of the art concerned and to the vicissitudes of its grammar. A long and often unrewarding apprenticeship. Broadening of the mind. Pleasures, certainly, but pleasures which are sophisticated, constructed, acquired. In "mass art" we have the paradoxical relation between a pure democratic element (on the side of irruption and evental energy) and an aristocratic element (on the side of individual education, of differential locations of taste). All the arts of the twentieth century have been avant-garde. Painting was an avant-garde art and only ceases to be so at that crepuscular moment when it is introduced into museums. Music was an avant-garde art, and, from the days of Schoenberg, has not ceased to be so (unless we also call "music" the groaning of popular music). Poetry exists today only as an avant-garde art. We can say that the twentieth century is the century of avant-gardes. But we can also say that it is the century of the greatest mass art that has ever existed. The simple form of the paradoxical relation: the first great art which is mass in its essence appears and develops in a time which is the time of the avant-gardes. The derived form: cinema imposes impracticable relations between aristocracy and democracy, between invention and familiarity, between novelty and general taste. It is for this reason that philosophy takes an interest in cinema. Because it imposes a vast and obscure complex of paradoxical relations. "To think cinema" comes down to forcing the relation, to arranging the concepts which, under the constraint of real films, shift the established rules of the connection. I believe, however, that there have been five major attempts at such a displacement. Or rather, five different ways of entering into the problem: "to think cinema as mass art." Firstly, from the paradox of the image. This is the classic entry which I mentioned at the beginning: the ontological art. The second traces the paradox of time, of the filmic visibility of time. The third examines the difference of cinema, its strange connection to the established system of the fine arts. To put it another way: the paradox of the seventh art. The fourth establishes cinema at the border of art and non-art, its paradox being that of artistic impurity. The fifth proposes an ethical paradox: cinema as reservoir of figures of conscience, as popular phenomenology of every situation wherein we must choose. Let us say a word about these five attempts. 1 On image. We will say that cinema is a "mass art" because it is the height of the old art of the image, and that the image, as far back as we go in the history of mankind, has always been ruthlessly fascinating. Cinema is the height of the visual offered as semblance. And since there can be no identification without the support of semblance, we will say that cinema is the final mastery of the metaphysical cycle of identification. Movie theatres, dining rooms, bedrooms, even the streets surprise the masses through a deceptive network of disparate identifications, since the technique of semblance outdates the religious fable and universally hands out the loose change of the miracle. Cinema's masses are at base pious masses. Such is the first explication. 2 On time. This approach is fundamental for Deleuze, as for many other critics. It is tempting to think that cinema is a mass art because it transforms time into perception. We have with cinema the most powerful becoming-visible of time. It creates a temporal feeling distinct from lived time. More precisely, it transforms "the intimate sense of time" into representation. It is this representative gap which destines cinema to the immense audience of those who desire to suspend time in space in order to push fate aside. This hypothesis moves cinema closer to music, which, in its basest form, is also a mass production. But music - and again "great" music more than popular music - is also an organization distanced from time. We can say very simply that music makes time audible, while cinema makes time visible. Certainly, cinema makes time audible as well, since music is incorporated into cinema. However, what is proper to cinema, which was for a long time mute, is definitely making time visible. The production of this visibility is universally

enchanting. Such is the second explication. 3 The series of arts. It is clear that cinema takes from the other arts all that is popular, all that could, once isolated, filtered, separated from their aristocratic requirements, destine them to the masses. The seventh art borrows from the other six what in them most explicitly aims at generic humanity. For example, what does cinema retain from painting? The pure possibility of changing the sensible beauty of the world into reproducible image. It does not take the intellectual technique of painting. It does not take the complicated modes of representation and formalisation. It retains a sensible and framed relationship with the external universe. In this sense, cinema is a painting without painting. A world painted without paint. What does cinema retain from music? Not the extraordinary difficulties of the musical composition, not the subtle arrangement of harmonic verticality and thematic horizontality, not even the chemistry of timbre. What is important for cinema is that music, or its rhythmic ghost, escorts the happenings of the visible. What it imposes everywhere - today even in everyday life - is a certain dialectic of the visible and the audible. To stuff all representable existence with a musical paste is the immense work of cinema. We regularly succumb to the emotion provoked by a strange mixture of existence and music, a musical subjectivization, a melodious accompaniment of the drama, an orchestral punctuation of the cataclysm. All this inserts in the representation a music without music, a music freed of musical problems, a music borrowed and returned to its subjective or narrative pretext. What does cinema retain from the novel? Not the complexities of subjective formation, nor the infinite resources of literary montage, nor the slow and original restitution of the taste of an era. No, that of which cinema has an obsessive and insatiable need, and in the name of which it ceaselessly plunders universal literature, is the fable, the narrative, which it renames the "screenplay." The imperative of cinema - artistic and commercial, indivisibly, since it is a mass art - is that of telling great stories, stories which can be understood by the whole of humanity. What does cinema retain from theatre? The actor, the actress, the charm, the aura of the actor and the actress. In separating this aura from the powers of the literary text, so fundamental to theatre, cinema has transformed actors and actresses into stars. This is one possible definition of cinema: a means of transforming the actor into a star. It is absolutely true that cinema takes something from each of the other arts. But the operation of this appropriation is complex, because it takes a common and accessible element from its sophisticated artistic conditions. Cinema opens all the arts, it weakens their aristocratic, complex and composite quality. It delivers this simplified opening to images of unanimous existence. As painting without painting, music without music, novel without subjects, theatre reduced to the charm of actors, cinema ensures the popularisation of all the arts. This is why its vocation is universal. Such is the third hypothesis: the seventh art is a mass art because it is the active democratisation of the other six. 4 Impurity. Let us directly examine the relation between art and non-art in cinema. We will thus be able to affirm that it is a mass art because it is always at the edge of non-art. Cinema is an art particularly charged with non-art. An art always invested with vulgar forms. Cinema is, by a high number of its ingredients, always beneath art. Even its most obvious artistic successes comprise an immanent infinity of wretched ingredients, of obvious pieces of non-art. We can maintain that in every stage of its brief existence, cinema explores the border between art and that which is not art. It stands on this frontier. It incorporates the new forms of existence, be they art or non-art, and it makes a certain selection, albeit a selection which is never complete. So that in any film, even a pure masterpiece, you can find a great number of banal images, vulgar material, stereotypes, images seen one hundred times elsewhere, things of no interest whatsoever. Bresson was particularly irritated by this resistance of artistic non-being. He desired pure art and called this purity "cinematographic writing." But to no avail. With Bresson as well one must endure the worst of the visible, the incomprehensible invasion of the sensible baseness of the times. As essential as it is involuntary, this impurity does not prevent a number of Bresson's films from being artistic masterpieces. They just show that the cinematic art can be a mass art. For you can enter into the art of cinema from that which, always present in it in abundance, is not art. Whereas for the other arts it is the other way around. You can only enter their non-artistic part, their failings, from art, from the grandeur of art. We can say that in cinema it is possible to rise. You can start from your most common representations, from your most nauseating sentimentality, from your vulgarity, even from your cowardice. You can be an absolutely ordinary spectator. You can have bad taste in your access, in your entry, in your initial disposition. This does not prevent the film allowing you to rise. Perhaps you will arrive at powerful and refined things. But you will not be asked to

go back. Whereas in the other arts you always have the fear of the fall. This is the great democratic advantage of the art of cinema: you can go there on a Saturday evening to rest and rise unexpectedly. Aristotle said that if we do good, pleasure will come "as a gift." When we see a film it is often the other way around: we feel an immediate pleasure, often suspect (thanks to the omnipresent non-art), and the Good (of art) comes as an unexpected bonus. In cinema we travel to the pure from the impure. This is not the case in the other arts. Could you deliberately go and see bad painting? Bad painting is bad painting; there is little hope it will change into something good. You will not rise. From the simple fact that you are there, lost in bad painting, you are already falling, you are an aristocrat in distress. Whereas in cinema you are always more or less a democrat on the rise. Therein lies the paradoxical relation. The paradoxical relationship between aristocracy and democracy, which is finally an internal relationship between art and non-art. And this is also what politicises cinema: it operates on a junction between ordinary opinions and the work of thought. A subtle junction that you don't find in the same form elsewhere. Such is the fourth hypothesis: cinema is a mass art because it democratises the movement by which art drags itself from non-art by drawing from this movement a border, by making from impurity the thing itself. 5 Ethical figures. Cinema is an art of figures. Not only figures of visible space and active places. It is foremost an art of the great figures of active humanity. It proposes a kind of universal stage of action and its confrontation with common values. After all, cinema is the last place populated by heroes. Our world is so commercial, so familial, so unheroic. However, even today no one would imagine cinema without the great moral figures, without the great American battle between Good and Evil. Here, even the gangsters are nothing but cases of conscience, redemptive decisions, sincere abolition of Nastiness. The most sordid cruelty is a cunning of reason toward a didactic enlightenment. The cops fare no better. Among them angelic inspectors, nowadays often women, keep watch . The ridiculousness of these fables, their dogmatic impurity, their dirty hypocrisy, by no means prevents their also possessing something admirable. As admirable as the Greek tragedies could be, cinema of Antiquity, of which we have the most noble yet false idea, since the innumerable turkeys played in the amphitheatres were not passed on to us. We only have a few dozen masterpieces, something like three Murnau, one Lang, two Eisenstein, four Griffith and six Chaplin. So that we do not see the impurity and massive banality of these spectacles. But we can recount their common end: to present an immense audience with the typical and excessive figures of all the great conflicts of human life. To speak of war, of passion, of justice and injustice, of truth, with, for ordinary material, all the cock-and-bull stories of old crooks, of female poisoners and mad kings. Cinema also speaks to us of courage, of justice, of passion, of betrayal. And the great genres of cinema, the most coded kinds, like the melodrama, the western and the "space opera," are precisely ethical genres, that is to say genres which address humanity inasmuch as they propose a moral mythology. We know that philosophy began as a vast discussion with tragedy, with the theatre, with the impurity of the visible and performing arts. The essential interlocutors of Plato were on the stage, and included in this broader rhetorical visibility are the public stage, the democratic assembly, the performance of the sophists. We should not be surprised today that philosophy is, for an increasing part of its activity, a vast discussion with cinema. Because cinema and its derivatives, including television, represent on a human scale, after Tragedy and Religion, the third historical attempt at the spiritual subjugation of the visible, available to all, without exception or measure. Also present at the meeting, the democratic politicians and their sophist advisors, renamed "public relations consultants." The screen has become their supreme test. The question has changed in destination only. It goes: "if there exists a sovereign technique of semblance, and if this technique, when it is cinema, is also capable of producing a mass art, what torsion, what metamorphosis does this art impose on that by which philosophy supports itself, and which has the name 'truth'"? Plato looked for the answer in a transcendent mimesis. To the figurative semblance, we will oppose everything that shows itself to the Idea which does not show itself. This gesture required the support of that which subtracts itself from semblance: the mathematics of finite perfection, numbers and figures. We will search rather for that which in the visible itself exceeds its visibility, tying semblance to the immanent but eternal register of its infinite form. One also needs mathematics of infinite perfection: sets, topologies, sheaves. So, just as Plato dominated semblance with allegory, saving the image in the very place of Truth with his immortal "myths," we can in the same way hope that cinema will be overcome by cinema itself. After the philosophy of cinema must come -- is already coming -- philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the opportunity of being a mass philosophy.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/cinema-as-a-democraticemblem/

ALAIN BADIOU. THE EVENT IN DELEUZE.

Alain Badiou. "The Event in Deleuze." in: Parrhesia. Winter 2007. (English).
Deleuze always paid tribute to Sartre as the figure who, during the thirties and forties, woke French philosophy from its academic slumbers. He considered the 1937 article, 'The Transcendence of the Ego', the origin of everything: why? It is because, in this text, Sartre proposes the idea - I am citing Deleuze - of 'an impersonal transcendental field, having the form neither of a personal synthetic consciousness nor subjective identity-the subject, to the contrary, always being constituted.' I want to emphasize this remark of Deleuze's all the more insofar as the motif of an impersonal transcendental field is dominant throughout my Greater Logic, where it is effectuated, in the finest technical detail, as a logic of appearance or worlds. Deleuze remarked also that Sartre had been prevented from thinking all of the consequences of his idea because he had attached the impersonal field to a (self)-consciousness. This is absolutely correct. We could also say: Sartre continued to believe in an auto-unification of the transcendental. He did not expose the subject to the alea of a pure Outside. Now, one of the names of the Outside is 'event'. This is why the event, as that to which the power (puissance) of a thought is devoted, and/ or that from which this power proceeds, has, after Sartre, become a common term for the greater number of contemporary philosophers. Other than through the critique of the phenomenology of consciousness, this term has been transmitted to us, on the side of truth-procedures, by the lasting fragment-in the 20th century-of four entangled motifs: that, in politics, of Revolution; in love, of erotic liberation; in the arts, of performance; and in the sciences, of the epistemological break. In philosophy, it can discerned as well in Wittgenstein ('The world is everything which happens') as in Heidegger (being as being-on-the-way, Ereignis). The idea is central in Deleuze, as it is in my own enterprise-but what a contrast! The interest of this contrast is that it exposes the original ambiguity of the idea itself. It effectively contains a dimension of structure (interruption as such, the appearance of a supernumerary term) and a dimension of the history of life (the concentration of becoming, being as coming-to-self, promise). In the first case, the event is disjoined from the One, it is separation, assumption of the void, pure non-sense. In the second case, it is the play of the One, composition, intensity of the plenum, the crystal (or logic) of sense. The Logic of Sense is the most considerable effort on the part of Gilles Deleuze to clarify his concept of the event. He does so in the company of the Stoics, they for whom the 'event' must be integrated into the inflexible discipline of the All, according to which Stoicism orients itself. Between 'event' and 'destiny', there must be something like a subjective reciprocation. I will extract from The Logic of Sense what I will call the four Deleuzean axioms of the event. Axiom 1: "Unlimited becoming becomes the event itself." The event is the ontological realisation of the eternal truth of the One, the infinite power (puissance) of Life. It is in no way a void, or a stupor, separated from what becomes. To the contrary, it is the concentration of the continuity of life, its intensification. The event is that which donates the One to the concatenation of multiplicities. We could advance the following formula: in becomings, the event is the proof of the One of which these becomings are the expression. This is why there is no contradiction between the limitless of becoming and the singularity of the event. The event reveals in an immanent way the One of becomings, it makes becoming this One. The event is the becoming of becoming: the becoming(-One) of (unlimited) becoming. Axiom 2: "The event is always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening." The event is a synthesis of past and future. In reality, the expression of the One in becomings is the eternal identity of the future as a dimension of the past. The ontology of time, for Deleuze as for Bergson, admits no figure of separation. Consequently, the event would not be what takes place 'between' a past and a future, between the end of a world and the beginning of another. It is rather encroachment and connection: it realises the indivisible continuity of Virtuality. It exposes the unity of passage which fuses the one-just-after

and the one-just-before. It is not 'that which happens', but that which, in what happens, has become and will become. The event as event of time, or time as the continued and eternal procedure of being, introduces no division into time, no intervallic void between two times. 'Event' repudiates the present understood as either passage or separation; it is the operative paradox of becoming. This thesis can thus be expressed in two ways: there is no present (the event is re-represented, it is active immanence which co-presents the past and the future); or, everything is present (the event is living or chaotic eternity, as the essence of time). Axiom 3: "The event is of a different regime than the actions and passions of the body, even if it results from them." Whether thought of as the becoming of becomings, or as disjunctive eternity, the event intensifies bodies, concentrates their constitutive multiplicity. It would therefore be neither of the same nature as the actions and the passions of the body, nor supervene on them. The event is not identical to the bodies which it affects, but neither is it transcendent to what happens to them or what they do, such that it cannot be said any longer that they are (ontologically) different to bodies. It is the differenciator of actions and passions of the body as a result. What then is an immanent One of becomings, if not Becoming? Or difference, or Relation (other Deleuzean terms)? However, Becoming is not an idea, but what becomings become. Thus the event affects bodies, because it is what they do or support as exposed syntheses. It is the coming of the One through them that they are as distinct nature (virtual rather than actual) and homogenous result (without them, it is not). This is the sense that must be given to the formula: 'The event is coextensive with becoming'. The event of Life will be thought as the body without organs: of a different regime than living organisms, but uniquely deployed or legible as the result of the actions and passions of these organisms. Axiom 4: "A life is composed of a single and same Event, lacking all the variety of what happens to it." What is difficult here is not the reiteration of the One as the concentrated expression of vital deployment. The three preceeding axioms are clear on this point. The difficulty is in understanding the word 'composed'. The event is what composes a life somewhat as a musical composition is organised by its theme. 'Variety' must here be understood as 'variation', as variation on a theme. The event is not what happens to a life, but what is in what happens, or what happens in what happens, such that it can only have a single Event. The Event, in the disparate material of a life, is precisely the Eternal Return of the identical, the undifferentiated power (puissance) of the Same: the 'powerful inorganic life.' With regard to any multiplicity whatsoever, it is of the essence of the Event to compose them into the One that they are, and to exhibit this unique composition in a potentially infinite variety of ways. With these four axioms, Deleuze reveals his response to evental ambiguity: he chooses for destiny. The event is not the risky (hasardeux) passage from one state of things to another. It is the immanent stigmata of a One-result of all becomings. In the multiple-which-becomes, in the between-two of the multiples which are active multiples, the event is the destiny of the One. It is enough to invert these four axioms-here as in Book II (of Logiques des mondes), 'inversion' reveals negations-in order to obtain a quite good axiomatic of what I call 'event', that which is a site, appearing in maximal intensity, and equally capable of making absolute its own inexistence in apparition (l'apparatre). Axiom 1. An event is never the concentration of a vital continuity, or the immanent intensification of a becoming. It is never coextensive with becoming. It is, on the contrary, on the side of a pure break with the becoming of an object of the world, through the auto-apparition of this object. Correlatively, it is the supplementation of apparition (l'apparatre) by the emergence (surgissement) of a trace: what formerly inexisted becomes intense existence. There is, with regard to the continuity in the becomings of the world, at once a lack (the impossibility of autoapparition with the interruption of the authority of the mathematical laws of being and the logical laws of appearance) and an excess (the impossibility of the emergence of a maximal intensity of existence). 'Event' names the conjunction of this lack and this excess. Axiom 2. The event would not be the inseperable encroachment of the past on the future, or the eternally past being of the future. It is, to the contrary, a vanishing mediator, an intemporal instant which renders disjunct the previous state of an object (the site) and the state that follows. We could equally say that the event extracts from a time the possibility of an other time. This other time, whose materiality envelops the consequences of the event, deserves the name of a new present. The event is neither past nor future. It makes us present to the present.

Axiom 3. The event would not be the result of the actions and passions of a body, nor does it differ in nature from them. To the contrary, an active and adequate body in a new present is an effect of the event, as we have seen in detail in Book IV (of Logique des mondes). We must here reverse Deleuze-in the sense in which, after Nietzsche, he himself wanted to reverse Plato. These are not the actions and passions of the multiples which are, under the title of an immanent result, synthesised in the event. It is the blow of an evental One which animates multiplicities and forms them into a subjectivisable body. And the trace of an event, which is itself incorporated in the new present, is clearly of the same nature as the actions of this body. Axiom 4. An event does not make a composite unity of what is. There is, to the contrary, a decomposition of worlds by multiple evental sites. Just as it performs a separation of times, the event is separated from other events. Truths are multiple, and multiform. They are exceptions in their worlds, and not the One which makes them converge. Deleuze often adopts the Leibnizian principle of Harmony, even as he defends the idea of divergent series and incompossible worlds. The eternal and unique Event is the focal point at which the ingredients of a life converge. Beyond the 'chaosmos' in which the divergent series and heteroclite multiplicities are effectuated, 'nothing but the Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum Tantum for all contraries, which communicates witih itself through its own distance, resonating across all its disjuctions.' No, this 'resonance' does not attract me. I propose rather a flat sound, without resonance, which in no way modifies the the apparition of a site, and nothing is disposed in harmony-or in disharmony-either with itself (considered as subsisting solitude) or with others (considered as the reabsorption of contraries). There is not-there cannot be-a 'Unique event of which all the others are shreds and fragments.' The one of a truth is initiated on the basis of the without-One of the event, its contingent dissemination. This dispute is without a doubt, as Lyotard would say, a differend, since it bears on the fundamental semantic connection of the word 'event': with sense for Deleuze, and with truth for me. Deleuze's formula is without apology: 'The event, which is to say, sense.' From the beginning of his book, he forges what is for me a chimera, an inconsistent neologism: the 'sense-event.' Such a claim communicates with the linguistic turn of the great contemporary sophists, much more than Deleuze would have wished. In maintaining that the event belongs to the register of sense, the entire project finds its ground on the side of language. Consider: 'The event is sense itself. The event belongs essentially to language, it is in an essential rapport with language.' It would be necessary to detail the dramatic reactive consequences of this kind of statement, and of many others: for example, '[The event] is the pure expressed in what happens which makes us signify.' Here is the kernel of the aestheticisation of everything, and the expressive politics of the 'multitudes', in which the compact thought of the Master is today dispersed. Insofar as it is the localised disfunction of the transcendental of a world, the event does not have the least sense, nor is it sense itself. If it only remains as trace, it can in no way be supported on the side of language. It only opens a space of consequences in which the body of a truth is composed. Like every real point, as Lacan saw, it is absolutely on the side of this unsensed which by itself can only maintain a rapport with language by making a hole in it. And nothing sayable, nothing of the order of the transcendental laws of language (du dire), can fill this hole. Like all philosophers of vital continuity, Deleuze cannot abide any division between sense, the transcendental law of appearance, and truths, eternal exceptions. He even seems sometimes to identify the two. He once wrote to me that he 'felt no need for the category of truth. He was certainly justified in such a claim: sense is a name sufficient for truth. There are, however, perverse effects of this identification. Vitalist logic, which submits the actualisation of multiplicities to the order of the virtual One-All, overlooks the fact that, in the simultaneous declaration that events are sense, and that they have, as Deleuze proclaims, 'an eternal truth,' we find religion in its pure state. If sense has in effect an eternal truth, then God exists, having never been anything other than the truth of sense. Deleuze's idea of the event would have had to convince him to follow Spinoza to the end, he who Deleuze elects as 'the Christ of philosophers,' and convince him to name 'God' the unique Event in which becomings are diffracted. Lacan knew well that to deliver that which happens over to sense is to work towards the subjective consolidation of religion, since, as he wrote, 'the stability of religion is provided by sense, which is always religious.' This latent religiosity is all too apparent in the disciples eager to praise the supposed inverse and constituant moment of an unbridled Capital, the 'creativity' of the multitudes: those who believe they have seen-or what they call seeing-a planetary Parousia of a communism of 'forms of life' in the anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle or Genoa, in which disaffected (dsoeuvre) youths participate in their own way in the sinister meetings of the financial establishment. Deleuze, often sceptical towards the formulations of those concerned with political matters, would have, I believe, laughed to himself about such pathos. Having openly conceptualised the place of the event in the multiform procedures of thought, Deleuze had to reduce

this place to what he called 'the ideal singularities which communicate in a single and same Event.' If 'singularity' is inevitable, the other terms are of dubious value. 'Ideal' could be taken as 'eternal' if Deleuze was not overly obsessed with the real of the event. 'Communicate' could be taken as 'universal' if Deleuze did not interdict any interruption of communication which would immediately connect any rupture to transcendental continuity. Of the 'single and same,' I have already noted its unfortunate nature: the effect of a One, on bodies, of an evental blow (frappe) is necessarily transformed by the absorption of the event by the One of life. Deleuze has very strongly marked the nature of the philosophical combat in which the destiny of the word 'event' is played out: 'A double struggle has as its object the prevention of every dogmatic confusion between event and essence, and also every empiricist confusion between event and accident.' There is nothing to add. Except that, when he thinks the event as intensified result and continuity of becoming, Deleuze is an empiricist (which he, in any case, continually proclaimed). And that, when he reincorporates it into the One of 'the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which it subsists and insists', into the always-there of the Virtual, he is tendentially dogmatic. To break with empiricism, the event must be thought as the advent of what is subtracted from all experience: the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous. To break with dogmatism, the event must be released from every tie to the One. It must be subtracted from Life in order to be released to the stars. The original French text is "L'vnement selon Deleuze" in Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006).

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/the-event-in-deleuze/

ALAIN BADIOU. BODIES, LANGUAGES TRUTHS.

Alain Badiou. "Bodies, Languages Truths." in: lacan dot com. Winter 2007. (English).
Our question will be : What is the dominant ideology today? Or, if you want, what is, in our countries, the natural belief? There is the free market, the technology, the money, the job, the blog, the reelections, the free sexuality, and so on. But I think that all that can be concentrated in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? First : democratic materialism. In the contemporary world, the individual recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone, and, first of all, of his or her own body. In the pragmatics of desires, in the evidence of the domination of trade and business, in the formal law of sale and purchase, the individual is convinced of, and formatted by, the dogma of our finitude, of our exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death. I speak here in a Center of Arts. So I can find a symptom of all that in artistic creation. The great majority or artists, today, choreographers, painters, videomakers, try to expose the secret of bodies, of the desiring and machinic live of bodies. It is the global trend of arts which proposes us a body art. Intimacy, nudity, violence, illness, dereliction....through all theses features of bodies the artists adjust our finite life to the fantasy, the dream and the memory. They all impose upon the visible the hart relationship of bodies to the great and indifferent noise of the universe. A random example: a letter from Toni Negri to Raoul Sanchez, from December 15, 1999. In it, we read the following: Today the body is not just a subject who produces and who - because it produces art - shows us the paradigm of production in general, the power of life: the body has become a machine into which production and art inscribe themselves. That is what we postmoderns know. 'Postmodern' is one of the possible names of contemporary democratic materialism. Negri is right concerning what the postmoderns 'know': the body is the only concrete instance for desolate individuals aspiring to enjoyment. Human being, in the regime of the 'power of life', is a slightly sad animal, who must be convinced that the law of the body fixes the secret of his hope. In order to validate the equation existence = individual = body, contemporary doxa must courageously absorb humanity into a positive vision of animality. 'Human rights' are one and the same thing as the rights of the living. The rights of the living being to remain a desolate individual aspiring to enjoyment. Mortal bodies. Suffering lives. The humanist protection of all the animals, humans included: such is the norm of contemporary materialism. Its scientific name is 'bioethics'. The philosophical and political name comes from Foucault: 'biopolitics'. This materialism is therefore a materialism of life. It is a bio-materialism. Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. That is because the contemporary ideology, recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. The absorption of humanity into animality culminates in the identification of the human animal with the diversity of its sub-species and with the democratic rights inhering in this diversity. This time, the political name comes from Deleuze: 'minoritarianism'. Communities and cultures, colors and pigments, religions and religious orders, uses and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law. But democratic materialism does admit of a global halting point for its tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to gain from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule all bodies, will be called dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of a 'right to intervention': legal, international, and, if necessary, military. Offensive actions serve to rectify the universalistic claims, as well as the linguistic sectarianism. Bodies will have to pay for their excesses of language.

That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship - at any price!) supports the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, permits the alignment of languages. War is the materialist essence of democracy. That is what we are already seeing, and we shall not stop doing so, in this dawning century, if we do not cut short the effects of the maxim: 'There are only bodies and languages.' No democracy for the enemies of democracy. My goal is a complete philosophical critics of democratic materialism. But under what name? After much hesitation, I have decided to name my enterprise a materialist dialectics. Let us agree that by "democratic" we understand the dissolution of symbolic or juridical multiplicity in real duality. For instance, the cold war of the free nations against communism ; or the semi-cold war of democracies against terrorism. So the active dualism which is summarized bu the axiom : "only bodies and languages". Let us agree that by 'dialectic', following Hegel, one is to understand that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between the two others. It is then legitimate to counter democratic materialism with a materialist dialectic, if by 'materialist dialectic' we understand the following statement, in which the Three supplements the reality of the Two: There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths. We will be attentive to the syntax that disjoins the axiom of the materialist dialectic from that of democratic materialism. Specifically to this 'except that'. This syntax indicates that we are dealing neither with an addition (truths as simple supplements of bodies and languages), nor with a synthesis (truths as the selfrevelation of bodies seized by languages). Truths exist as exceptions to what there is. We admit therefore that 'what there is' - what composes the structure of worlds - is well and truly a mixture of bodies and languages. But there is not only what there is. And 'truths' is the (philosophical) name of what thus comes to interpolate itself into the continuity of the 'there is'. In a certain sense, the materialist dialectic is identical to democratic materialism. After all, they are indeed both materialisms. Yes, there are only bodies and languages. Nothing exists which is a separable 'soul', 'life', 'spiritual principle', etc. But in another sense, the materialist dialectic differs entirely from democratic materialism. We find in Descartes an intuition of the same order in what concerns the ontological status of truths. Descartes names 'substance' the general form of being qua really existing. What there is is substance. Every 'thing' is substance. It is figure and movement in extended substance. It is idea in thought substance. Whence the commonplace identification of Descartes's doctrine with dualism: the substantial 'there is' is divided into thought and extension, which, in human being, means: soul and body. Nevertheless, in paragraph 48 of the Principles of Philosophy, we see that substantial dualism is subordinated to a more fundamental distinction. This distinction is precisely the one between things (what there is, that is substance, thought or extension) and truths: I distinguish everything that falls under our knowledge into two genera: the first contains all the things endowed with some existence, and the other all the truths that are nothing outside of our thought. What a remarkable text! It recognizes the wholly exceptional ontological and logical status of truths. Truths are without existence. Is that to say they do not exist at all? By no means. Truths have no substantial existence. That is what must be understood by they 'are nothing outside of our thought'. In paragraph 49, Descartes observes that this criterion designates the formal universality of truths, and consequently their logical existence, which nothing other than a certain kind of intensity: For instance, when we think that we could not make something out of nothing, we do not believe that this proposition is some thing that exists or the property of some thing, but we treat it as a eternal truth that has its seat in our thought, and that is called a common notion or maxim: nevertheless, when someone tells us it is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time, that what has been done cannot be undone, that he who thinks cannot stop being or existing whilst he thinks, and numerous other similar statements, these are only truths, and not things. Descartes is not a dualist only because of the opposition between, on one hand,'intellectual things', and 'corporeal things' on the other hand, that is 'bodies, or rather properties belonging to these bodies.' Descartes is dualist at a more essential level, the level at which things (intellectual and/or corporeal) are distinguished. One will carefully remark that unlike 'things', be they souls, truths are immediately universal and very precisely beyond doubt. See the following passage:

There is such a great number of [truths] that it would be difficult to enumerate them; but it is also not necessary, because we could not fail to know them once the occasion presents itself to think about them. One can see in what sense Descartes thinks the three (and not only the two). His own axiom can in fact be stated as follows: 'There are only (contingent) corporeal things and intellectual things, except that there are (eternal) truths.' The idea that we can identify the special being of truths was one of the principal stakes, in 1988, of my book Being and Event which has been published in English last year. There I established that truths are generic multiplicities: no linguistic predicate can allow them to be discerned, no explicit proposition can designate them. I said why it is legitimate to call 'subject' the local existence of the process that develops these generic multiplicities (the formula was: 'a subject is a point of truth'). These results ground the possibility of a prospective metaphysics capable of enveloping the actions of today and to reinforce itself, tomorrow, in view of what these actions will produce. Such a metaphysics is a component of the new materialist dialectic. Deleuze too sought to create the conditions for a contemporary metaphysics. Let us recall that he said that when the philosopher hears the words 'democratic debate', he turns and runs. That is because Deleuze's intuitive conception of the concept presupposed the survey of its components at infinite speed. Now, this infinite speed of thought is effectively incompatible with democratic debate. In a general sense, the materialist dialectic opposes the real infinity of truths to the principle of finitude that is deducible from the maxims of democracy. For example, we can say: A truth affirms the infinite right of its consequences, with no regard to what opposes them. That was in Being and Event, the most important result concerning the ontological nature of truths. We can say that in another form : It is true that a world is composed of bodies and languages. But every world is capable of producing within itself its own truth. Nevertheless, the ontological break does not suffice. We must also establish that the mode of appearance of truth is singular. What the 1988 (nineteen eighty-eight) book did at the abstract level of pure being, must be done at the level of appearing, or of being there, or of concrete worlds. It is the contents of my new book, which has been published in Paris this year, Logiques des mondes. The clearest contemporary form of democratic materialism is: There are only individuals and communities. To this statement, we must oppose the maxim of materialist dialectics: The universality of truths is supported by subjective forms that cannot be either individual or communitarian. Or: Inasmuch as it is the subject of a truth, this subject substracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation. If we examine closely a truth: a scientific theory, a work of art, a sequence of emancipating politics, or a new form of life under the law of love, we find some features which determine why a truth is an exception. Let us summarize the properties of theses productions which simultaneouly lie in the common world of bodies and languages, but are not reducible to the laws of this world. "Truth" is the name that philosophy has always reserved for these productions. We can say that their body the body of a truth, the new truth-body - is composed only of the elements of the world in which this body appears. And nevertheless, the truth-body exhibits a type of universality that these elements themselves have not the power to sustain. This type has seven fundamental properties. Firstly, produced in a measurable, or counted, empirical time, a truth is nevertheless eternal. Inasmuch as from every other point of time, or from any other particular world, it remains integrally intelligible that it constitutes an exception. Secondly, though generally inscribed in a particular language, a truth is trans-linguistic. Inasmuch as the general form of though that gives access to it is separable from every particular language. Thirdly, a truth presupposes an organically closed set of material traces, traces that refer not to the empirical uses of a world, but to a frontal change. A change which has affected (at least) one object of this world. We could thus say that the trace presupposes that every truth is the trace of an event.

Fourthly, these traces are linked to an operative figure, which we call a new body. One could say that a new body is an operative disposition of the traces of the event. Fifthly, a truth articulates and evaluates what it comprises on the basis of its consequences and not on the basis of a simple givenness. Sixthly, on the basis of the articulation of consequences, a truth induces a new subjective form. Seventhly, a truth is both infinite and generic. It is a radical exception as well as an elevation of anonymous existence to the level of the Idea. These properties legitimate the 'except that...' which grounds, against the dominant sophistry of materialist democracy, the materialist dialectical space of a contemporary metaphysics. We can say: Materialist dialectics promotes the correlation of truths and subjects, while democratic materialism teaches the correlation of life and individuals. This opposition is also that of two conceptions of freedom. For democratic materialism, truth is clearly definable as the (negative) rule of what there is. One is free if no language comes to prohibit to individual bodies to deploy their own capacities. Or again: languages let bodies actualize their vital possibilities. This is why, in democratic materialism, sexual freedom is the paradigm of every freedom. It is in effect clearly placed at the point of articulation of desires (bodies) and linguistic, prohibitive or stimulating legislations. The individual must see recognized its right to 'live his or her sexuality'. The other freedoms will necessarily follow. And it is true that they follow, if we understand every freedom from the point of view of the model it adopts with regard to sex: the non-prohibition of the uses that an individual can make, in private, of the body that inscribes it in the world. It is nevertheless the case that, in materialist dialectics, in which freedom is defined in an entirely different manner, this paradigm is no longer tenable. It is not a matter in effect of the bond - of prohibition, tolerance or validation - that languages entertain with the virtuality of bodies. It is a matter of knowing if and how a body partakes, through languages, in the exception of a truth. We can put it as follows: being free is not of the order of relation between bodies and languages, but, directly, of incorporation (to a truth). That means that freedom presupposes that there appears in the world a new body, a truth-body. The subjective forms of incorporation made possible by this new body define the nuances of freedom. Freedom has nothing to do with the capacities of an ordinary body under the law of some language. Freedom is : active participation to the consequences of a new body, which is always beyond my own body. A truth-body which belongs to one of the four great figures of exception : love, politics, art and science ; so freedom is not a category of elementary life of bodies. Freedom is a category of intellectual novelty, not within, but beyond ordinary life. The category of life is fundamental within democratic materialism, and we must critic the confusing use, today, of this word: "life". 'Life' - and its tributaries ('forms of life', 'constituent life', 'the art of life', and so on) - a major signifier of democratic materialism. At the level of pure opinion 'to have a successful life' is the only imperative that is today understood by everyone. That is because 'life' designates every empirical correlation between bodies and language. And the norm of life is, all too naturally, that the genealogy of languages be adequate to the power of bodies. For all that, what democratic materialism calls 'knowledge', or even 'philosophy', is always a mixture of a genealogy of symbolic forms and a virtual (or desiring) theory of bodies. It is this mixture, systematized by Foucault, which can be called a linguistic anthropology, and which is the dominant form of knowledges under democratic materialism. Is that to say that materialist dialectics must renounce any use of the word 'life'? My idea is rather to bring this word to the centre of philosophical thought, in the form of a systematic response to the question 'What is it to live?'

But in order to do this, we must obviously explore the considerable retroactive pressure exerted, on the very definition of the word 'body', by the 'except that' of truths. The most considerable stake of philosophy today is certainly to produce a new definition of bodies, understood as bodies-of-truth, or subjectivizable bodies. This definition prohibits any capture by the hegemony of democratic materialism. Then, and only then, will it be possible to propose a new definition of life. This definition would be more or less the following : to live is to partake, point by point, in the organization of a new body, which supports the exceptional creation of a truth. The resolution of the problem of the body has for essence, I recall, the problem, of the appearance of truths. That's why this resolution is a terrible task. We have to completely explain the possibility of something new in an old world. It is only by examining the general dispositions of the inscription of a multiplicity in a world, by exposing the proper category of "world", that we can hope to know what is the effectiveness of appearing, and then, to know the singularity of those phenomenal exceptions which are, in their appearing and unfolding, the new truths. After that only we shall be able to define the new possibilities of living in our desolate world. We can set that the question on which depends the exception is that of objectivity. A truth, such as a subject formalizes its active body in a given world, is not a miracle. A truth takes place among the objects of a world. But what is an object? In a sense, what we have to do, is to find a new defintion of the object and it is in fact my most complex and innovative argument. Because, with this new conception of objectivity, it is possible to clarify the paradoxical status of the existence of a truth. It is absolutely impossible to give here an idea of this very hard project, which has confronted me with the great attempts of Kant and Husserl. It is a synthesis of mathematical formalism and of descriptive phenomenology. But you can understant that the path of materialist dialectics organizes the contrast between, on one hand, the complexity of materialism (logic of appearing, or theory of objectivity) an, on the other hand, the intensity of dialiectics (the living incorporation to a new truth). It is the contrast between what I name, after Hegel, a Great Logic and the answer to the question "How are we to live really." This contrast is philosophy itself. We can here give only a poor idea of the program of this philosophical enterprise. Once one is in possession of a great logic, of a real theory of appearing and objectivity, it is possible to examine the question of change. Particularly the question of radical change, or of the event. This new theory of change differs entirely from the theory of change in Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze. A real change is not a becoming, but a cut, a pure discontinuity. And its most important consequence is that a multiplicity, which did not appear in he world, appears suddenly with the maximal intensity of appearing. A new body is that sort of object which supports and give its orientation to the local consequences of that sort of change. It is a logical set of creative practices. But what can be a general description of the potency of a truth-body? One can intuitively grasp that a creative practice relates a subject to articulated figures of experience, so that there is a resolution of precedently unperceived difficulties. The language I propose to illuminate the process of a truth is that of the points in a world: by formalizing a new body, a subject-of-truth treats points of a world, an a truth proceeds point by point. Of course, we still need to have a clear idea of what a point is, on the basis of the rigorous data of appearing, the object and the change. A point in a world is something like a crucial decision in existence ; you have to choose between two possibilities. The first one is completely negative, and will destroy the whole process of a truth, by destroying the new body. The second one is completely affirmative, and will enforce the new body, clarify the truth, exalt the subject. But we have no certainty concerning the choice. It is a bet. A point is the moment where a truth has to pass withou guarantee. We are in possession of everything that is needed to answer the initial question : "What is a body?" and to thus trace a decisive line of demarcation with democratic materialism. The delicate part of this construction is the one which, after having articulated body and event, opens up the problem of truths by organizing the

body, and does so point by point : everything is then recapitulated and clarified. In the whole extension of the existence of worlds - and not only in political action - the incorporation to the True is a question of organization. That is the path : From a theory of appearing and objectivity to the physics of truth-bodies ; or from the logical framework of the world to the essential drama of the subject. All that passing through the great logic and the thinking of change, in the radical form of an event. All that defines a new future for philosophy itself. Philosophy has to expose the possibility of a true life. As Aristotle has said, our goal is to examine the question : How can we live really, that is, are immortals. And when we are incorporated within a truth-body, we are in fact as immortals. As Spinoza says, we experiment that we are eternal. But all that is always after some events, events in politics, arts, sciences or love. So, we, philosophers, are working durtng the night, after the day of the real becoming of a new truth. I think of a beautiful poem of Wallace Stevens : Man carrying thing . Stevens writes: "We must endure our thoughts all night" . It is really the destiny of philosophers and of philosophy : to endure, after the day of creation, the small light of concepts, though the night. And Stevens continues: "Until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold." Yes, it would be the final step of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. The fusion of the philosophical concept of truth with the mulciplicity of truths themselves. The truth, with a small t, becoming the Truth, with a big T. It is our dream, through the night. In the morning we shall see that the brightness of Truth stands motionless in cold. But it does not happen. On the contrary, when something happens in the day of living truths, we have to start doing again the hard work of philosophy : new logic of the world, new theory of the truth-body, new points... Because we have to protect the fragile new idea of what is a truth. To protect the new truth itself. So, when the night falls, we do not sleep. Because, once more, "we must endure our thoughts all night". The philosopher is nothing else than, in the intellectual field, a poor night watch-man. "Bodies, Languages Truths" was originally delivered at the Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne, on September 9th 2006.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/bodies-languages-truths/

ALAIN BADIOU. THE DESIRE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD.
Alain Badiou. "The Desire for Philosophy and the Contemporary World."in: lacan.com. 2006. (English).
I would like to begin this philosophic talk under the banner of poetry, thus recalling that ancient tie, which has existed since the Greeks, between poetry and philosophy. Rimbaud uses a very strange expression: les rvoltes logiques, "logical revolts". Philosophy is something like that: "logical revolts". Philosophy sets up thought against injustice, against the defective state of the world and life. But it sets thought up in a movement which conserves and defends argument and reason, and which ultimately always proposes a new logic. Mallarme gives us this aphorism: "a thought begets a throw of the dice". It seems to me that this enigmatic formula also designates philosophy. Because philosophy proposes to think the universal, which is true in fact for all thinking, but philosophy does this from within a commitment which is always somehow a risk, a commitment which chance always plays a role in. The four-dimensional desire for philosophy Fundamentally the desire of philosophy 1 first implies a dimension of revolt, for there is no philosophy without some muted discontent of thinking as it confronts the world as it is. It also implies logic, that is the belief in the power of argument and reason. It implies universality: philosophy adresses all men as thinking beings and supposes that all men think. Finally it comprises a risk: thinking is always a decision submitted to circumstances or chance. We can say then that the desire of philosophy has four dimensions: the dimensions of revolt, of logic, of universality and of risk. I think that the contemporary world, our world, exerts an intense pressure on these four dimensions of the desire of philosophy. As far as the dimension of revolt is concerned, this world, our world, the "western" world (with as many inverted commas as you want), this world does not engage in thought as revolt and this for two reasons. First because this world decrees itself already free. It presents itself as "the free world", and this is even the name it gives itself, an "isle" of liberty within a planet otherwise reduced to slavery, or devastated. But at the same time, as you know, this world, our world, standardizes and commercializes the stakes of this liberty. It projects them into monetary uniformity, with such success that our world does not have to ordain the revolt to be free since it guarantees us this liberty, nor the use of this liberty, since this use is, in reality, coded, oriented or channelled by the infinite glitter of merchandise. This is why this world exerts an intense pressure against the very idea that thinking can be insubordination or revolt. As for the dimension of logic, our world exerts a strong pressure on it too, essentially because it is submitted to the profoundly illogical regime of communication. Communication transmits to us a universe made up of disconnected images and incoherent remarks. Communication undoes all relations and all principles, transforming what happens into a confused motley excluding any reference whatever. And what is perhaps even more distressing, mass communication presents the world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory, a spectacle in which new images and new remarks appear to cover, erase and forget the very thing that has just been said and shown. A process which exerts considerable pressure on the resoluteness of thinking's fidelity to logic. As for the universal dimension, our world is no longer suited to it because, as we know, it is an essentially specialized and fragmentary world . It is split up in response to the demands of the innumerable ramifications of the technical configuration of things, of the apparatus of production, of the distribution of salaries, of the diversity of functions and skills. And the requirements of this specialization and fragmentation make it difficult to perceive what might be given as transversal or universal, or what might be valid for all thinking. Finally we have the dimension of risk: our world does not favor commitments or risky decisions, because, little by little, we are losing the capacity to submit our existence to the perils of chance. Existence requires a more and more elaborate calculation. Life is devoted to calculating security, and this obsession with calculating security is contrary to the Mallarmean hypothesis that a thought begets a throw of the dice,

because in such a world there is infinitely too much risk in throwing the dice. The desire for philosophy, then, encounters in our world four principal obstacles. These are the reign of merchandise, the reign of communication, the need for technical specialization and the necessity for realistic calculations about security. How then can philosophy take on this challenge? And is it capable of such a challenge? The answer must be sought in the state of philosophy. What is the state of contemporary philosophy? The present state of Philosophy I would like now to give you a planetary vision of philosophy, which will necessarily be an overview. What are the principal tendencies in philosophy, if we consider it from afar? I think it can be said that in the world today, three principal currents can be distinguished, which correspond, in some measure, to three geographical situations. I will first name them and then describe them. The first can be called the hermeneutic current which goes back historically to German romanticism. The best-known names of this current are Heidegger and Gadamer, and its historical site was originally German. Then there is the analytic current, originating with the Vienna Circle. The principal names connected to it are those ofWittgenstein and Camap. Despite its Austrian origin, it now dominates English and American academic philosophy. And then we have what can be called the post-modem current, which in fact borrows from the two others. It is without doubt the most active in France, and minds as different as Jacques Derrida's or Jean-Franois Lyotard's can be included in it. It is equally very active among our neighbors to the south, in Spain, Italy and Latin America. A hermeneutic current, an analytic current, and a post-modem current: these comprise the most global and the most descriptive geography of the contemporary locus of philosophy. There are, of course, innumerable intersections, mixtures and networks of circulation between these three points. But I'm speaking here within the logic of an overview. The hermeneutic current assigns philosophy the aim of deciphering the meaning of existence, the meaning of existence-in-the-world. Its central concept is that of interpretation. There are utterances, acts, writings, configurations whose meaning is obscure, latent, hidden or forgotten. Philosophy must be provided with a method of interpretation which can serve to clarify this obscurity, and bring forth from it an authentic meaning, a meaning which is a figure of our destiny in its relation to the destiny of being itself. The clearest fundamental poles of the hermeneutic current are those of closed and open. In what is given, in the immediate word, there is something dissimulated and closed. Interpretation is intended to unfold this closure and open it to meaning. Philosophy, from this point of view, has a "vocation devoted to the open". This point marks a quarrel between the world of philosophy and the world of technique which is the accomplishment of closed nihilism. The analytic current holds the aim of philosophy to be the strict demarcation between those utterances which have meaning and those which have not, those utterances devoid of meaning. A demarcation between what can be said and what it is impossible or illegitimate to say. The essential instrument of this current is the logical and grammatical analysis of utterances, and ultimately of the entire language. The central concept this time is not interpretation but the rule. The task of philosophy is to uncover the rules which assure an agreement about meaning. The essential distinction here is between what can be regulated and what cannot be regulated, or what conforms to a recognized law assuring an agreement about meaning, and what eludes all explicit laws, thus falling under illusion or discordance. The aim of this view of philosophy is therapeutic and critical. It is a question of curing us of illusions and the language aberrations which divide us, by isolating what has no meaning, and returning to those rules which are transparent to all. The post-modem current holds the aim of philosophy to be the deconstruction of those evident facts that have come out of our modernism. In particular, it proposes to dissolve those great constructions generally inherited from the nineteenth century, which we were captive of and which are: the idea of the historical subject, the idea of progress, the idea of revolution and the ideal of science. Its aim is to show that these great constructions are now outdated, that we live in the multiple, that there are no great epics of history or of thought; that there is an irreducible plurality of registers of thought and action, diverse and heterogeneous registers that no great idea can totalize or reconcile. Fundamentally, the post-modem current aims at the deconstruction of the idea of totality. The post-modem current thus activates what might be called mixed practices, de-totalized practices, impure thinking practices. The post-modem current occupies the outskirts, domains which cannot be circumscribed. In particular it installs philosophic thought at the periphery of art, and proposes a sort of untotalizable mixture of the conceptual method of philosophy and the sense-oriented

artistic enterprise. The themes common to today's currents But do these three orientations that I have so summarily described have anything in common? Does anything permit us to say that despite this diversity, features can be found in them which ascribe a unity to philosophy. I submit that there are two principal features that the three orientations: hermeneutic, analytic and post modem, have in common. The first of these features is negative. All three orientations hold that we are at the end of metaphysics, that philosophy is no longer in a position to sustain its locus classicus , that is, the great figure of the metaphysical proposition. In a certain sense these three currents maintain then that philosophy is itself situated within the end of philosophy, or that philosophy is pronouncing a certain end of itself. We can immediately give three examples: it is clear that for Heidegger this theme was the central block of his thinking. For Heidegger our time is characterized by the closure of the history of metaphysics, and also of an entire epoch, going back in fact to Plato, an entire epoch of the history of being and thought. And this closure is first realized in the distress and dereliction of technical injunction. No philosophy could be farther from Heidegger's than Carnap's. Yet Carnap also announces the end of any possibility of metaphysics, because, for him, metaphysics was only made up of utterances which were nonregulated and devoid of meaning. The aim of analytic therapy is the curing of the metaphysical symptom, that is of utterances whose analysis shows that since they are really devoid of meaning, they cannot give rise to assent. If I now take Jean-Franois Lyotard, one of his great themes is what he calls "the end of the great narratives". Once more we have an "end". But the end of the great narratives is the end of the great configurations that modem metaphysics has been associated with, on the theme of the subject and history. We find then a theme common to the three currents, which is the theme of an end, of a drawing to a close, of an accomplishment, and which can be articulated in this way: the ideal of truth as it was put forth by classical philosophy has come to its end. To the idea of truth we must substitute the idea of the plurality of meanings. This opposition between the classical ideal of truth and the modem themes of the equivocalness of meaning is in my opinion, an essential opposition. We might say in a schematic, but not inexact way, that contemporary philosophy institutes the passage from a truth-oriented philosophy to a meaning-oriented philosophy. In these three principal tendencies, contemporary philosophy brings to trial the category of truth, and with it the classical figure of philosophy. We might say that in these three tendencies there is a triple opposition of the idea of meaning and its proliferation, to the idea of truth. That is what these three tendencies have in common negatively. What they have in common positively, and this is capital, is the central place accorded to the question of language. The philosophy of this century has become principally a meditation on language, on its capacities, its rules, and on what language authorizes as far as thought is concerned. This is clear in the very definition of the currents I have been talking about: the hermeneutic current is always in a certain sense the interpretation of a speech act, the analytic current is the confrontation between utterances and the rules which govern them, post-modemity is the idea of a multiplicity of sentences, of fragments and of forms of discourse in the absence of homogeneity. To recapitulate, I will simply say that contemporary philosophy has two fundamental axioms common to all these tendencies, and in any case, transversal to all these tendencies. The first is that the metaphysics of truth has become impossible. This axiom is negative. Philosophy can no longer pretend to be what it had for a long time decided to be, that is a search for truth. The second axiom is that language is the crucial site of thought because that is where the question of meaning is at stake. The question of meaning replaces the classical question of truth. The flaws in contemporary philosophy My conviction is that these two axioms represent a real danger for thinking in general and for philosophy in particular. I think that their development, their infinitely subtle, complex and brilliant formulation, such as it is found in contemporary philosophy, render philosophy incapable of sustaining that desire which is proper to it, in face of the pressure exerted by the contemporary world. It does not seem to me that these axioms can give philosophy the means to sustain its desire under the quadruple form of revolt, logic, universality and

risk. If philosophy is essentially a meditation on language, it will not succeed in removing the obstacle that the specialization and fragmentation of the world opposes to universality. Accepting the universe of language as the absolute horizon of philosophic thought, in fact amounts to accepting the fragmentation and the illusion of communication, for the truth of our world is that there are as many languages as there are communities, activities or kinds of knowledge. I am convinced that there really is a multiplicity of language games, but this forces philosophy, if it wants to preserve the desire for universality, not to establish itself within a multiplicity, and not to be exclusively subordinated to it. If not, it will become what it mostly is in one way, an infinite description of the multiplicity of language games themselves. Or else, but that would be even worse, philosophy might elect a language, claiming it to be the only one that can save it. We know what that leads to. Heidegger explicitly upheld the thesis of the intrinsic philosophic value, first of the Greek language, and then of the German language. He said that "being speaks Greek". He said that the German language was in a way the only language where thought could sustain the challenge of its destiny. And there is an ineluctable connection between this election of a language and the political position that you know, which resulted in Heidegger's commitment to German nationalism in the criminal form that Nazism gave it. As for analytic philosophy, it is absolutely clear that it accords a unilateral privilege to scientific language, as the language in which rules are explicit, and most adequate to its subject. This is clear in the way in which sense and non-sense are distinguished by presenting the distinction in the guise of a rule, as can be seen in mathematics and scientific language in general. But this privilege is itself philosophically dangerous because it leads directly to contempt for all the sites and spaces which are rebel to the configuration of scientific language. And the figure of rationality isolated by the privilege accorded this language, is ineluctably accompanied by disdain or contempt or the closing of one's eyes to the fact that even today the overwhelming majority of humanity are out of reach of such a language. On the other hand, if the category of truth is ignored, if we never confront anything but the equivocalness of meaning, then philosophy will never assume the challenge that is put to it by a world subordinated to the merchandising of money and information. It is in fact a sort of anarchy of more or less regulated, more or less coded flux, where money, products and images are exchanged. If philosophy is to sustain its desire in such a world, it must propose a principle of interruption. It must be able to propose for thought something which can interrupt this endless regime of circulation. Philosophy must examine the possibility of an interruption point, not because all this must be interrupted, but because thought must at least be able to extract itself from it and take possession of itself once again as other than an object of this circulation. It is obvious that such an interruption point can only be one conditionless requirement, that is something which is submitted to thought with no other condition than itself and which is neither exchangeable nor capable of being put into circulation. That there be such an interruption point, that there be at least one conditionless requirement, is, in my opinion, a condition sine qua non for the existence of philosophy. In absence of such a point, all there is, is the general circulation of knowledge, information, merchandise, money and images. This conditionless requirement cannot, I think, be supported solely by the proposition of the equivocalness of meaning. It also needs the reconstruction or the re-emergence of the category of truth. We are subjected to the media's inconsistency of images and commentaries. What can be opposed to that? I do not think that anything can be opposed to it except the patient search for at least one truth, without which the essential illogicism of media communication will impose what we might call its temporal carnival. Philosophy requires that we throw the dice against the obsession for security, that we interrupt the calculus of life determined by this obsession. But what chance has it to win, except in the name of a value which ordains this risk and gives to it a minimum of consistency and weight? And there again I believe it is vain to imagine that, in the absence of a principle of truth, one can oppose to the calculus of life an existential gamble, which will give rise to something that can be called a liberty. That is really our problem. Can the four dimensions of the desire for philosophy be maintained in the world such as it is? Can we maintain the dimensions of revolt, logic, universality and risk against the four contemporary obstacles: merchandise, communication, technical division and the obsession with security? I submit that this cannot be done within the framework of the hermeneutic, analytic or post-modem options. I think these options are too strongly committed to the equivocalness of meaning and the plurality of languages. I would say that these three orientations are too compatible with our world to be able to sustain the rupture or the distance that philosophy requires. Toward a new style of philosophy

My position then is to break with this framework of thought, to find another philosophic style, a style other than that of interpretation, other than that of logical grammarian analysis, and still other than that of equivocalness or language games. I think that such a proposition can be supported by two ideas, both simple but in my opinion preliminary to the development of philosophy. The first idea is that language is not the absolute horizon of thought. I think what can be called the great linguistic turn of philosophy, or the absorption of philosophy into the meditation on language must be closed. You know that in Cratylus, which is concerned with language from beginning to end, Plato says, "we philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but things". Whatever may be the difficulty and the obscurity of this statement, I am for philosophy's renewing with the idea that it does not take as its point of departure words, but things. Needless to say, it must be acknowledged that a language always constitutes what can be called the historical matter of truth and of philosophy. A language always has to give what I would call the color of philosophy, its tonality, its inflexion, its style. All those singular figures which are those that language proposes us. But I would also maintain that this is not the essential principle of the organization of thought. The principle that philosophy cannot renounce is that of its universal transmissibility, whatever be the prescription of style or color, of its connection to such or such a language, in the widest sense of the term. Philosophy cannot renounce that it addresses itself to everyone in principle if not in fact, and that it does, then, not exclude from this address linguistic, national, religious or racial communities. Philosophy privileges no language, not even the one it is written in. Philosophy is not enclosed within the pure formal ideal of scientific language. Its natural element is language, but within that natural element, it institutes a universal address. The second idea is that the irreducible role of philosophy is to establish within discourse a fixed point, an interruption point, a point of discontinuity or a conditionless point. Our world, you know, is marked by its speed: the speed of historical change, the speed of technical change, the speed of communications, of transmissions, and even the speed with which human beings establish connections with one another. This speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency. It is because things, images and relations circulate very quickly that we do not even have the time to measure to what extent all that is incoherent. Speed is the mask of inconsistency. Philosophy must propose a slowing down process. It must construct a time for thought, which in face of the injunction to speed which is the mask of inconsistency, will constitute a time of its own, and only this time will slow down. I would consider this as a singularity of philosophy, that its thinking is leisurely, because today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed. This thinking, slow and in consequence rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point, whatever it may be, whatever its name may be, which we need to sustain the desire of philosophy. It is obviously a question of reconstructing philosophically, with a slowness which can insulate us from the speed of the world, the category of truth, not as it is passed down by metaphysics, but as we are able to reconstitute it, taking into consideration the world as it is. It is a question of reorganizing philosophy around this reconstruction and giving it the time and the space which are proper to it. This supposes that philosophy no longer be in pursuit of the world, that is that it stop trying to be as rapid as the world, because by wanting to be as rapid, philosophy dissolves itself at the very heart of its desire, no longer being in a state to maintain its revolt, to reconstitute its logic, to know what a universal address is, or be able to take a chance or liberate existence. The world questions philosophy The problem is obviously how to know ir\m the world as it is, there is the slightest chance for such an enterprise to flourish or be heard, or if it is simply matter for vain invocation . There is no doubt that philosophy is ill. As always, the problem is to know if this illness is mortal, to know what the diagnostic is, and if in fact the remedy proposed is not, as is often the case, the one that will finish off the patient. Truth is suffering from two illnesses. It is suffering in my opinion from linguistic relativism, from being entangled in the problematic of the disparity of meanings, and it is also suffering from historical pessimism including about itself. My hypothesis is that although philosophy is ill, it is less ill than it thinks it is, less ill than it says it is. One of the characteristics of contemporary philosophy is to elaborate page after page on its own mortal illnesses. But, you know, there is always a chance when it is the patient who says he is ill, that it is at least in part an imaginary illness. And I think that it is so, because the world itself, despite all the negative characteristics and pressures it exerts on the desire of philosophy, the world, that is the people who live in it and think in it, this world is asking something of philosophy. The problem Today is that philosophy is morose

because of the morbidity of its vision of itself. Four reasons make me believe that the world is asking something of philosophy. The first reason is that we know today that there is no hope that human sciences will replace philosophy. The awareness of this seems to me now fairly widespread, because, as we know, human sciences have become the home of statistical sciences. They are themselves caught up in the circulation of meaning and its equivocalness, because they measure the rates of circulation. This is their purpose. Finally they are in the service of polls, election predictions, demographic averages, epidemiological rates, of tastes and distastes, and all that makes certainly for interesting labor. But this statistical and numerical information has nothing to do with what humanity is about, nor each absolutely singular being. Everyone knows that the singular is finally always the true center of a decision which counts, and that all truth has first been presented in the form of the absolutely singular, as can be seen in scientific invention, artistic creation, political innovation or the encounter that comprises the love relationship. In every place where in sme way a truth is pronounced on existence, it is founded on a singularity. Averages, statistics, sociology, history, demography, or polls are not capable of teaching us what the history of a truth is. Philosophy will thus be expected to be a philosophy of singularity, to be capable of pronouncing and thinking the singular, which is what the general system of the apparatus of human sciences does not have as its vocation. That is the first reason. The second reason is that we are witnessing the ruin of what might be called the great collective enterprises which we once might have imagined carried within themselves the seeds of emancipation and truth. We know now there are no such great emancipating forces, that there is neither progress, nor proletariat, nor any such thing. We know we are not caught up by such forces and that there is for us no hope of sustaining our desire by incorporating ourselves simply into such a force, or by being a member of such a force. What does that mean? That means that each of us, and not only the philosopher, knows that today, confronted with the inhuman, each of us is obliged to make decisions and speak in his own name. He cannot hide behind any great collective configuration, any great supposed force, any metaphysical totality which might take a position in his stead. Only, in order to take a petition in one's own name when faced with the inhuman, a fixed point is needed for he decision. A conditionless principle is needed to regulate both the decision and the assent. This is what everyone calls today the necessity for a return to ethics. But let us not be mistaken. Philosophically, the return of ethics necessarily means that there be a return of an conditionless principle. There is a moment when one must be able to say that this is right and that is wrong, in light of the evidence of this principle. There cannot be an infinite regression of quibbling and calculating on this point. There must also be utterances of which it can be said they are unconditionally true. You know very well that when a positional a given question and an agreement on that position are demanded, as a last resort it is necessary to find a position which will be unconditionally true for everyone. It is not possible then to say that, in face of the inhuman, each of us must take a position in his own name, without re-engaging philosophy in the dimension of truth. And this is required of the world as it is, and is required of philosophy. The third reason is connected to the new rise of the reactive or archaistic passions, the rise of cultural, religious, national or racist passions. These historically observable phenomena too, have given birth to this demand on philosophy. We can see this in the world, which oscillates and hesitates, but where the great archaistic and reactive passions are once more at work. Confronted once again with these, philosophy is solicited to say where reason lies. These passions are the contemporary figures of irrational archaism, and they carry with them death and devastation. And it is required of philosophy to make a pronouncement concerning what contemporary rationality might be about. This rationality can certainly not be the repetition of classical rationalism, but we also know that we cannot do without it, if we do not want to find ourselves in a position of extreme intellectual weakness, when faced with these reactive passions. We must then forge a rational philosophy in this sense of the term, that is, in the sense that philosophy must reiterate, under the conditions of the time, what it has already resolved. The fourth and final reason I see, is that the world we live in is a vulnerable, precarious world. It is not at all a world stabilized within the unity of its history. We must not allow the planetary acceptance of liberal economy or representative democracy to dissimulate the fact that the world is a violent and fragile world. Its material, ideological and intellectual foundations are disparate, dis-unified and largely inconsistent. This world announces not in the least the serenity of a linear development, but a series of dramatic crises and paradoxical events. Take the examples in the most recent period. Two of them, the Gulf War and the fall of bureaucratic Socialism. Add to these the war in Bosnia, the Rwandan massacres and the American invasion of Iraq. Philosophy is thus required to decodify the event without the anxiety inherent in it. We do not fundamentally need a philosophy of the structure of things. We need a philosophy open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. It

must be a philosophy of the event and that too is required of philosophy by the world as it is. A new doctrine of the subject It seems to me then, that what is demanded today of the poor night watchmen is a philosophy of singularity, a philosophy of contemporary reasoning and a philosophy of the event. That is a program in itself. To accomplish this program, I think we must go beyond the three main tendencies I have just described. We need a more determined and more imperative philosophy, but one that is at the same time more modest, more remote from the world and more descriptive. A philosophy which is a rational intertwining of the singularity of the event and of truth. A philosophy open to chance then, but a chance submitted to the law of reason, a philosophy maintaining conditionless principles, conditionless but submitted to a non-theological law. And this will enable us to propose a new doctrine on the subject (and I think this is the essential objective). We will be able to say what a subject is in other terms than those of Descartes, Kant or Hegel. This subject will be singular and not universal, and it will be singular because it is always the event which constitutes its truth. In view of this program, it can be certainly said that the metaphysics of truth is ruined and classical rationalism is insufficient. But the deconstruction of metaphysics and the contestation of rationalism are also insufficient. The world needs philosophy to be re-founded on the combined and blended ruins of metaphysics and modern criticism of metaphysics.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/the-desire-for-philosophy/

ON THE TRUTH-PROCESS: AN OPEN LECTURE BY ALAIN BADIOU, AUGUST 2002

Schirmacher: Those of you who have heard him already know that he is 'like a rock', as they say, still fighting for the relevance of philosophy. Everyone abandoned Plato, abandoned Paul, everyone abandoned the history of philosophy, and at the same time he was saying 'No way, we need this!' How can he say this at the same time as all the deconstruction and questioning of philosophy which followed after Heidegger's studies of its history? Badiou was a student, friend and opponent to those who wanted to proclaim the end of philosophy, but although he is fighting for something like truth, he is not ignorant or naivehe is still on the side of Plato, but with a little smile, certainlyI am very glad that you have a chance to hear his version of philosophy and an opportunity to ask him, to attack him, and to think with him, because thinking is what we all have in common, that we think, that should be our battle cry.Let's think with Alain Badiou. Badiou: Our epoch is most certainly the epoch of rupture, in light of all that LacoueLabarthe has shown to depend on the motive of mimesis. One of the forms of this motive which explicitly attaches truth to imitation is to conceive of truth as a relation, a relation of appropriateness between the intellect and the thing intellected. A relation of adequation which always supposes, as Heidegger very well understood, the truth to be localizable in the form of a proposition. Modern philosophy is a criticism of truth as adequation. Truth is not limited to the form of judgment. Heidegger suggests that it is a historic destiny. I will start from the following idea: Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction already made in the work of Kant, between reason and understanding, and it is as you know a capital distinction for Heidegger, who distinguishes truth as aletheia, and understanding as cognition, science, techne. Aletheia is always properly a beginning. Techne is always a continuation, an application, a repetition. It is the reason why Heidegger says that the poet of truth is always the poet of a sort of morning of the world. I quote Heidegger: 'The poet always speaks as if the being was expressed for the first time.' If all truth is something new, what is the essential philosophic problem pertaining to truth? It is the problem of its appearance and its becoming. Truth must be submitted to thought not as judgment or proposition but as a process in the real. This schema represents the becoming of a truth. The aim of my talk is only to explain the schema. For the process of truth to begin, something must happen. Knowledge as such only gives us repetition, it is concerned only with what already is. For truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement. This supplement is committed to chanceit is unpredictable, incalculable, it is beyond what it is. I call it an event. A truth appears in its newness because an eventful supplement interrupts repetition. Examples: The appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical tragedy. The eruption, with Galileo, of mathematical physics. An amorous encounter which changes a whole life. Or the French revolution of 1792. An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable. Take the sentence 'This event belongs to the situation.' If you can, using the rules of established knowledge, decide that this sentence is true or false, the event will not be an event. It will be calculable within the situation. Nothing permits us to say 'Here begins the truth.' A wager will have to be made. This is why the truth begins with an axiom of truth. It begins with a decision, a decision to say that the event has taken place. The fact that the event is undecidable imposes the constraint that the subject of the event must appear. Such a subject is constituted by a sentence in the form of a wager: this sentence is as follows. 'This has taken place, which I can neither calculate nor demonstrate, but to which I shall be faithful.' A subject begins with what fixes an undecidable event because it takes a chance of deciding it. This begins the infinite procedure of verification of the Truth. It's the examination within the situation of the consequences of the axiom which decides the Event. It's the exercise of fidelity. Nothing regulates its cause. Since the axiom which supports it has arbitrated it outside of any rule of established knowledge, this axiom was formulated in a pure choice, committed by chance, point by point. But what is a pure choice? A choice without a concept. It's obviously a choice confronted with two indiscernible terms. Two terms are indiscernible if no formation of language permits their distinction, but if no formation of language discerns two terms of a situation, it is certain that the choice of having the verification pass for one over the other can find no support in the objectivity of their defense, and so it is then an absolutely pure choice, free from any other presupposition than having to choose, with no indication marking the proposed terms, nothing to identify the one by which the verification of the consequences of the axiom will first pass. This means that the subject of a truth demands the indiscernible. There is a connection between the subject on one side and the indiscernible on the other. The indiscernible organizes the pure point of the subject in the process of verifying a truth. A subject is what disappears between two indiscernibles. A subject is a throw of the dice which does not abolish chance but accomplishes it as a verification of the axiom which founds it. What was decided concerning the undecidable event must pass by this term. It is a pure choice: this term, indiscernible, permits the other. Such is the local act of a truth: it consists in a pure choice between indiscernibles. It is then absolutely finite. For example, the world of Sophocles is a subject for the artistic truth which is the Greek tragedy. This truth begins with the event of Aeschylus. This work is a creation, a pure choice in what before it is indiscernible. However, although this work is finite, tragedy itself as an artistic truth continues into

infinity. The work of Sophocles is a finite subject of this infinite truth. In the same way, the scientific truth decided by Galileo is pursued into infinity: the laws of physics which have been successfully invented are finite subjects of this infinite truth. We continue with the process of a truth. It began with an undecidable event, it finds its act in a finite subject, confronted by the indiscernible, this verifying course continues, it invests the situation with successive choices, and little by little, these choices outline the contour of a subset of the situation. It is clear that this subset is infinite, that it remains interminable, yet, it can be said that if we supposed it was to be ended, it would ineluctably be a subset that no predicate unifies. It is an untotalizable subset that can neither be constructed or named within the language of the situation. Such subsets are called generic subsets. We shall say that truth, if we suppose it to be terminated, is generic. It is in fact purely impossible that a succession of pure choices could engender a subset which could be unified under predication. If the construction of a truth can be resumed by an established property, the course of the truth will have to be secretly governed by a law. The indiscernibles where the subject finds its acts will have to be in reality discerned by some superior understanding. However, no such law exists and there is no god of truths, no superior understanding. Invention and creation remain incalculable. So the path of a truth cannot coincide in infinity with any concept at all. Consequently, the verified terms compose or rather, will have composed, if we supposed infinite totalization, a generic subset of the situation. Indiscernible in its act or subject a truth is generic in its result, or in its being. It is withdrawn from any unification by a unique predicate. For example, there does not exist after Galileo a closed and unified subset of knowledge that we could call physics. There exists an infinite and open set of laws and experiments. Even if we supposed this set to be terminated, no unique formula of language could resume it. There is no law of physical laws. The Being of the truth of the physical is that it is a generic subset of knowledge, both infinite and indistinct. In the same way, after the 1792 revolution in France, there were all sorts of revolutionary politics, but there is no unique political formula which could totalize these revolutionary politics. The set called 'revolutionary politics' is a generic truth of political understanding. What happens is only that we can anticipate the idea of a completedgeneric truth. It's an important point. The being of a truth is a generic subset of knowledge, practice, art and so on, but we can't have a unique formula for the subset because it's generic, there is no predicate for it, but you cananticipate the subset's totalization not as a real totalization but as a fiction. The generic Being of a truth as a generic subset of the situation is never presented. You have no presentation of the completeness of a truth, because truth is uncompletable. However, we can know formally that the truth will always have taken place as a generic infinity. We have a knowledge of the generic act and of the infinity of a truth. Thus the possible fictioning of the effects of its havingtookplace is possible. The subject can make the hypothesis of the situation where the truth of which the subject is a local point will have completed its generic totalization. Its always a possibility for the subject to anticipate the totalization of a generic being of that truth. I call the anticipating hypothesis a forcing. The forcing is the powerful fiction of a completed truth. A completed truth is a hypothesis, it's a fiction, but a strong fiction. Starting with such a fiction, if I am the subject of the truth, I can force some bits of knowledge without verifying this knowledge. Thus, Galileo could make the hypothesis that all nature can be written in mathematical language, which is exactly the hypothesis of a complete physics. From this anticipation, he forces his Aristotelian adversary to abandon his position. Someone in love can say, and generally they do say, 'I will always love you', which is the anticipating hypothesis of the truth of infinite love. From this hypothesis, he or she forces the other to come to know him or her and to treat him or her differentlya new situation of the becoming of the love itself is created. The construction of truth is made by a choice within the indiscernible; it is made locally within the finite, but the potency of a truth, not the construction, but the potency, depends on the hypothetical forcing. The construction of a truth is, for example, 'I love you.' It's a finite declaration, a subjective point, and a pure choice, but 'I will always love you' is a forcing and an anticipation. It forces a new bit of knowledge in the situation of love. So in a finite choice there is only the construction of a truth, while in infinite anticipation of complete truth there is something like power. The problem is knowing the extension of that sort of power of a truth, knowing if such a potency of anticipation, from the point of view of subject of truth, is total. If we can force all the bits of knowledge concerned, then the potency is total. It is, for example, the romantic problem of absolute love. It's the political problem of totalitarianism. In all cases the problem concerns the extension of anticipatory forcing, and it's very important to distinguish the pure question of the construction of a truth across finite choices, and the question of the potency of a truth which is always the question of infinite anticipation of a complete truth and the forcing of bits of knowledge. This question can be expressed simply thus: Can we, from the finite subject of a truth, name and force into knowledge all the elements that this truth concerns? How far does the anticipating potency of generic infinity go? My answer is that there is always in any situation a real point that resists this potency. I call this point the 'unnamable' of the situation. It is the point that within the situation, within the eyes of a truth, never has a name. Consequently, it remains unforceable. The unnamable, being that which is excluded, is the term that fixes the limit of the potency of a truth. From the point of view of the truthprocess, we have a new proper name for all elements in a situation. It is the action of forcing to give a name to all the terms of a situation. For example, when Galileo says that all nature can be written in mathematical language, he is saying that all elements of nature have a mathematical name possible in the situation. The hypothesis of the point of the unnamable is that there is

always one point without that sort of name, without a name from the point of view of the construction of a truth. The unnamable is then something like the proper of the proper. It doesn't have a proper name because it is the proper of the properit is so singular in its singularity, so proper in its propriety, so intimate in the situation that it doesn't even tolerate having a proper name. The unnamable is the point where the situation in its most intimate being is submitted to thought and not to knowledge. In the pure presence that no knowledge can circumscribe, the unnamable is something like the inexpressible real of everything that a truth authorizes to be said, thus the limit of a potency of a truth is finally something like the Real of truth itself, because the limit is the point where something is so Real for the truth that there isn't a name in the field of truthconstruction. Let's take an example. The mathematical is, as you know, pure deduction. We always suppose that it contains no contradiction, but as you know the great mathematician Godel showed that it is impossible to demonstrate within a mathematical theory that this theory is noncontradictory. A mathematical truth, then, cannot force the noncontradiction of mathematics. For mathematical truth, the noncontradiction of the mathematical is the limiting point of the potency of mathematical truth, thus we will say then that noncontradiction is the unnamable of the mathematical. It is properly the real of the mathematical, for if a mathematical theory is contradictory, it is destroyed. It is nothing. So first, the Real of mathematical theory is noncontradiction, second, noncontradiction is the limit of the potency of mathematics, because within the theory we can't demonstrate that the theory is noncontradictory. Consequently, a reasonable ethic of mathematics is not to wish to force the point. If you have the temptation to force the point of noncontradiction, you destroy mathematical consistency itself. To accept the ethical is to accept that mathematical truth is never complete. This reasonable ethic, however, is difficult to hold. As can be seen with science or with totalitarianism there is always a desire for the omnipotence of truth. Here lies the root of evil. I propose a definition of evil. Evil is the will to name at any price. Usually it is said that Evil is lies, ignorance, deadly stupidity, brutality, animality and so on. The condition of evil is much rather the truthprocess. There is evil only insofar as there is an action of truth, that is, an anticipation, a forcing of nomination at the point of the unnamable, an artificial nomination of that which is without name, the proper of the proper. The forcing of the unnamable is always a disaster. The desire in fiction to suppress the Unnamable, to name at any price, to name all terms, without restriction, without limitation, frees the destructive capacity contained in all truth. Evil is something immanent to truth, and not something exterior to it. The destructive capacity of truth is the potency of truth across the fiction of the complete truthwhich is without limitation, without the point of Unnamable, which is in subtraction to the potency of the truth. The ethic of truth resides entirely in a sort of caution, as far as its powers are concerned. The effect of the undecidable, of the indiscernible, and of the generic, or else the effect of the event, and of the subject, and of truth, must admit the unnamable as a limitation of its powers. To contain evil the potency of the true must be measuredwhat helps us is the rigorous study of the negative characters of the powers of truth: The event is undecidable. the subject is linked to the indiscernible. Truth itself is generic and untotalizable, and the halting point of its potency is the unnamable. This gives us four negative categories, and the path of truth is something across these four negative categories. Their philosophical study is, for ethic reasons, capital. This study of the four negative categories, undecidable, indiscernible, generic and unnamable can be nourished also by thoughtevents which shape our times: For example, the undecidability of an event and the suspension of its name are features of politics that are particularly active today. It is clear for a Frenchman that the events of May 68 continue today to comprise an unattested anonymous promise. However, even the 1792 revolution or the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 remain partly undecided as to what they prescribe for philosophy. The theory of indiscernibles is in itself an entire mathematical theory. We can also say that one of the aims of contemporary poetics is to found in language a point of the indiscernible between prose and poem, or between image and thought. The theory of the generic is at the bottom of the ultimate forms of the logic of sets. The modern politics of emancipation freed from the dialectic scheme of classes and parties has as its aim something like a generic democracy, a promotion of the commonplace, of a quality abstracted from any predicateso it's possible to speak of a generic politics, and a warfield of prose such as Samuel Beckett's, which tried by successive subtraction to designate the naked existence of generic humanity. So you can see the study of the four categories is really a strong activity in all fields of modern thought: prose, poetry, mathematics, logic, politics and so on, and that that sort of study is finally also the study of what is the construction of a truth, and more ethically, what is exactly the potency of a truth and the disaster when the potency is without limitation. The poet investigates the unnamable in his exploration of the limits of the force and potency of language. In addition to being a framework for contemporary poetics, the unnamable is the question of the mathematician who looks for the undefinables of a structure, and it's also the question for the person in love, tormented by what love comports, the unnamable sexual. Thus the ethic of truth, in being attentive to the relation or disrelation between the construction of a truth and its potency, is that by which we take the measure of what our times are capable of. The construction of a concept of truth is the real of philosophy, because philosophy finally is always the construction of some concept of truth, with or without the name of truth. The construction of a concept of truth is useful to evaluate the potency of a singular truth, political, mathematical or artistic there is a relation between philosophy on one side and the general question of the ethics of a specific truth on the

other. Since the ethics of a truth is the question of the relation between the truth's construction and its potency, the general concept of truth is useful to evaluate it. My final point is the relation, in a truth's construction, between singularity and universality, because a truth is exactly that; something which is absolutely singular, and which begins with a singular event, yet is also something the anticipation of which is universal. So a truth is a mixture in a real process of singularity and universality, and naturally the question of the relation between construction and potency is the question of the relation between a truth's singularity and the universal anticipation of that truth. We can also say that the question is the relation, connection or contradiction between truth and multiplicitywhat exactly is the relation between a truth as a truth and multiplicity? Our experience is that something true must be absolutely true, because if something isn't absolutely true it isn't true at all, absoluteness is a predicate of truth. The connection between something absolutely true and something absolutely open is the real question of the relation between construction and potency. We prescribe a philosophical world which is pure multiplicity on one side, because we are not in the dream of a Great One, and so we have to accept that the world is pure multiplicity , but not, on the other hand, without the perfection of some truths. It's very difficult, however, to have simultaneously the conviction of the pure multiplicity but also the conviction that there are some real and absolute truths in artistic production, in scientific invention, in love, and so on and that sort of world, philosophical, with pure multiplicity but some truths, with anarchy but also with perfection, is like the world in a poem by Wallace Stevens. It will be my conclusion, in poetry. I conclude with a friendship, with peace between philosophy and poetry. The title of the poem is very appropriate to our situation because it is July Montaigne. I quote: 'We live in a constellation of patches and of pitches not in a single world in sayings said well, in music on the piano, and in speech as in a page of poetry thinkers without final thoughts in an always incipient cosmos.' Schirmacher: YeahAlain, you really disappointed meI was expecting an attack on what others have said here so far, but it seems that we have so much in common that it's embarrassing, you know, we have fighting for the honor of the name by not naming, that's Lyotard, so much in common hereand what you gave in other classes was always Heidegger's aletheia, the interplay between revealing and concealing, etc, but we have to work hard now to find the distinction, to find what you have said that is new for us. Take Heidegger. It sounds like Heidegger, so what is not Heidegger here, what have you done that Heidegger couldn't do? You certainly went into how this revealing and concealing is really working as a path, not just something which is a play in front of us, which we live in our lives and which has a very singular subjective personal moment to it, which is at least what Heidegger is not saying. That's one interpretation here. So to ask you a difficult question. You said it was evil, this forcing, this tendency in our investigation, in our thinking, to perfect, to complete, to find all words. I would agree with you, but I would ask myself, what makes us evil? What is it in us which cannot stop us in forcing? We know it's wrong and we just do it anyway. I don't believe in any judgment here. Maybe if there is something strong in us, it has also a great truth to it. So evil is not actually evil, evil is something we couldn't live without, our life would be such a boring thing, without this perfection, this forcing, this challenging of the unknown to say, 'I want to have a name again, if it's evil, then it's evil, but it's what I want.' But how come? Badiou: It's a question of the disproportion between truth and the subject of the truth, between finite and infinite. There is something infinite in the generic construction of truth and there is always something finite in the subjective choice. It's true that there is something in truth which is bigger than the subject of the truth, so when we are in anticipation, when we are in the necessity of forcing some bits of knowledge from the point of view of the newness of the truth, it's always a possibility, a temptation, to identify our subjectivity with the truth itself, to something which is infinite in the truth. It's a temptation of complete forcing, not forcing a bit of the knowledge, but forcing a total knowledge. There is a simple explanation for that sort of movement. My thesis is that a forcing all the field of elements is real disaster, it's the destruction of the condition of truth itself, because it's the destruction of the real point of the field. It's not a moral question but one of destroying the point of the real which is finally the point of the real of the truth itself. So this sort of coercion is also a question of the possible continuation of truth's construction. Thus the disaster, the destruction, is a possible consequence of the truth, but that sort of consequence is the destruction of truth. By what? By truth. Truth is always the possibility of its proper destruction. So now let us hear some more questions, my English is not so good, so if I don't understand the question, the response will be savage. Audience: Five minutes into your talk I was thinking 'Wallace Stevens, he's talking about Wallace Stevens', and then you ended with Wallace Stevens. As you talked through it all, the model and design of it, I was thinking of your system in relation to the supreme fiction, which has three elements. It must be abstract, this is abstract. It must give pleasure, it gives pleasure. It must change it must account for change, but it must also pass away, If you figure into your thinking here that your parasystem would also pass away and be replaced with yet another. Badiou: You know, the big problem for a philosopher is always the conviction that he is the last philosopher. It's very difficult to think you are not the last philosopher, but I think my theory, my design is just a schema. It's not conceptually refined for the moment. It's possible to modify the general structure, and I am in a moment of modification of the question of the presentation of truth. Your question is difficult because you

can't say that yes, my proposition is nothing, it's perfectly equal to another proposition, because you have to think that something is true in your proposition. I am very glad for the first part of your question, regarding my proximity to Wallace Steven's poetry, because I think the period between the middle of the 19th century and nowadays is a period where poetry is essential, where it says something which philosophy proper cannot say. Audience: My question has two parts: First, about the relation between the status of the fictional and the status of the truth, and whether you consider this a schema which in a sense presents the truth as a fiction, the fictional as a condition of truth. Second, the relation between potentiality and negativityto what extent do you consider the terms 'undecidable' and 'unnamable' as negative terms, and to what extent as open or potential terms, and how do you think the tension between the negative and the potential? Badiou: It's a very complex field of questions. First of all the schema is not a distribution between the real and the fictional. It's the schema of the path of the truth. In the path of a truth, there is something purely real, for example, the event. The event is real, but only from the point of view of the path. The subject is something real but not a point of real like the event or the unnamable. Additionally there is the possibility of the subject to be in the fiction of a complete truth. A complete truth is a fiction because a truth is never complete, never finishes. There is something like a fiction in the potency of a truth if the potency is forcing the situation from the idea of a complete truth. Thus the schema is first of all the integration of the real part of truth and the fiction part in truth. The second part of your question: Naturally, there is not only negative determination, but something positively real under the negative determination. For example, the event is undecidable, but it's real, and the unnamable is a negative determination, but the point of unnamable is a real point. So it's possible that in another process of truth that the point of unnamable will be in fact name able. It's not a ontological characteristic to be unnamable, it's relative to the singularity of a truthprocess. Audience: My question is in the field of political truth, regarding the limitation of ethics to a present context. It seems that we have a specific philosophical concept of truth at presentare we at the mercy of an unbridled technological movement that is changing our situation without allowing some ethical examination of what that movement entails? Badiou: The question of technology, of modernity, of techne is in my opinion not a very important question. There are always technical questions, but there is no capital newness in the question of technology. There is no direct ethical question of the relation between ethics and technology. Ethical questions, for me, are questions in the field of truth. Naturally, you are talking about scientific truth and you have problems about the technical consequences of scientific truth, but you have to determine the problem like that: first, of what field of truth we are talking, not about technology directly and so on. Technology is not a real concept, it's a journalistic debate. It's not a serious question. You have to say, first of all, what is exactly the scientific question in the situation, the question engaged in a technological problem, what is the truthprocess in some particular technological question, what is the political framework of the question, because there is no technological problem per se, only technopolitical problems. You have to determine the political questions, the scientific questions, and finally which field of truth, and after that sort of investigation you can examine the consequences of technical transformation in our world. Schirmacher: Ach so, Max, you understand that I couldn't disagree more with him, for me truth is generated by life technique which is like all other technologies. So Alain we have a few more years to make you aware how important the question concerning technology is, beyond Heidegger. Anyway, next question. Zizek: I would like to ask one question which I think can play a useful role in the discussion to begin with, the presentation you gave here did open the way towards engaging some of the standard criticisms of your work. So I don't agree with my own question now, but I will ask it so you can make it clear for us. One of the standard criticisms is that the way you formulate the truthprocess, in which the subject as finite discerns, in a pure ethical decision out of nowhere, an indiscernible event. So, I'm almost ashamed to formulate it, but isn't your ultimate position, in the finite subject which makes a pure irrational decision out of nowhere, who says 'I love you, this is truth,' or whatever, simply between Kant and proper relativism? Your position can be interpreted as yes, you should follow the axiomatic procedure but not too far, you should always proceed with some kind of reservation, the idea of total truth is a dream, you know what I mean. This would be the standard reproach to you, I know it's not like that, but I think it would serve well if you made clear why is it not, for example, a kind of Kantian reference, the dream of total truth inside the Kantian regulative Idea why are you not saying that?Ifif you are not saying that? Badiou: Yes, yes, you anticipate my response. It's possible I am exactly as you say I am, that which you are demanding that I say I am not. [laughter]. The question is ontologically the question of the relation between finite and infinite, that's the real point. When I say the subject is finite, the only signification of that point is that the subject is nothing else as the finite part of a truthso there is not a subject, and after that, something like a predicate of the subject which is that the subject is finite. It's really on the contrary: first, truth is infinite, and second, that which is the subject is a finite point of the infinite path of a truth. So on one side, I write the subject is finite. On the other side, I am absolutely in contradiction with all the modern philosophy of finitude, and I don't agree with the thesis for which the ontological destiny of human nature is finitude, because the fundamental destiny of humanity is not the subject but in the production of truth. The

real content of humanity for me is creation and invention of truths. The subject is only the local operation of the infinity of a truth. In my conviction the destiny of humanity is infinite. The question of ethical moderation and so on is only the question of the salvation of the condition of infinity. This is because the point of the unnamable is the point which if forced to be named destroys the complete field and so destroys the possibility of infinity. Thus, it's not in the question of relation between finite and infinite, finally, the question is infinite creation and moderation, it's not at all something finite in the infinite, but on the contrary, preservation of the possibility of infinite creation, and the limit point is properly the possibility of the impossibility of the infiniteit's the real of the infinite itself, the possibility of the infinite. Schirmacher: Thank you, I think it's perhaps much clearer that we are maybe not all friends here. Agamben: I want to ask you a question about the limit point of the unnamable. We might recall the axiom of the white knight in 'Alice through the Looking Glass'. You remember that the white knight says that we have no name for the name. The thing for which we lack names is the name itself. This goes with what Heidegger says in a certain way, that we have no word for the saying of language itself. It seems to be in that perspective that the point you call unnamable is a strange point in which language and real in a way coincide. The thing for which we have no name is language itself. Badiou: Yes, I prefer your second formulation, that the point is something like a point where the real and nomination are not really separated. The proper of the proper, the pure real, but the pure real is something which is indiscernible to the pure word as well. I agree with the conviction that under the unnamable you have a real point, but its relation to language is absolutely irreducible. So not exactly the name for name, because it is lack of name, not lack of name for name, but lack of name for something like the real of the real, the absolute real of the complete field. Zizek: What I wanted to mention is the misunderstanding about this unnamable point, which becomes a kind of evolutionary vulgarity, you know, that without finite language we can just approach it, reality is infinitely more complexstop that! When you are speaking about how the generic procedure cannot name itself, cannot produce itself, I would say that in this sense the unnamable is not a transcendent thing, it's absolutely immanent. Badiou: Absolutely. it's not something of an expansive nature, certainly. It's just a point. We can isolate the unnamable by a formal procedure, for example it's very remarkable that in mathematics you can demonstrate that it is impossible to name the noncontradiction. It's not at all something ineffable, religious, infinite, indeterminate, no not all, it's a specific point. For example in love, I think it's precisely sexual enjoyment which is the unnamable of love. It's nothing mystic. Although it is within the field of love's truth process, from the point of view of this process, sexual enjoyment has no amorous name. Zizek: This limitation is not simply the fact that we don't have a name for the nameit's not a limitation of language but how we can have language. It's not that oh my god, language is never complete. It's a positive condition, not a negative limitation. Schirmacher: What will we do after you leave us tomorrow, Slavoj? Zizek: Shoot yourself! [laughter] Audience: You made a very nice phrase, that evil is the will to name at any price, but it invokes for me the question whether truth can assume a commodity form, which I believe it can. if it can, is that a fixed price? Badiou: I think truth cannot be a pure commodity, it's impossible, because truth is simply something new without any possibility of exchange, of market. There is no market of truth, because truths are something like pure creations, without finality. You have the possibility of exploitation of truths, but you have to distinguish between production of truths, potency of truths, and exploitation of truths. Exploitation is always possible but it's not in the field of truthproductionit's something like a sort of forcing. I think there is something absolutely disinterested in truthproduction, something which creates a new subject which is without proper interest. In my opinion there is no proper possibility that the truth can become a simple commodity, but there can always be the exploitation of a truth, like of anything else.

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/on-the-truth-process/

JUDITH BUTLER. CRITIQUE, DISSENT, DISCIPLINARITY.

###NAV### Language: English

JUDITH BUTLER - CRITIQUE, DISSENT, DISCIPLINARITY

Judith Butler. "Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity." in: Critical inquiry.University of Chicago Press. Vol. 35, No. 4, 2009, (English).
Academic freedom has become a contested category within the United States. On the one hand, conservative scholars have sought to use the term to criticize what they perceive as political correctness in the academy, whereas progressive scholars have sought to bolster academic freedom as a principle that safeguards academic self-determination over and against corporate and government intrusion. Recently I 1 published a debate with Robert Post in Academic Freedom after September 11. This collection was first of all an effort to understand the definition and range of the concept of academic freedom. In his contribution, Post argues that the way to pre- serve academic self-governance is to allow tenured faculty to make judgments about curriculum and appointments because they have undergone the relevant professional training in a given discipline and so are uniquely prepared to make these sorts of judgments. To protect academic freedom in this domain, then, depends upon our ability to protect the singular professional capacities that tenured faculty have assumed by virtue of pro- fessional training and practices of peer review. For Post, the viability of the institution of academic freedom is founded upon established and agreed-upon academic norms, set and enforced by a professional class of educators who know the fields in question, and these norms, in turn, enable the kinds of research and teaching that we do. These norms, in fact, are the legitimating condition of our academic freedom. I have agreed with Post that academic self-governance, which is crucial to academic freedom, must find a legitimate basis on which to argue against illegitimate political or administrative interventions on matters of curriculum and hiring. But I introduce a worry here because it would seem that when and if academic norms, understood as professional and disci- plinary norms, become the legitimating condition of academic freedom, then we are left with the situation in which the critical inquiry into the legitimacy of those norms not only appears to threaten academic freedom but also falls outside the stipulated compass of its protection. So too do disciplinary and interdisciplinary innovations that might unsettle the boundaries of the disciplines. Professional norms, construed in part as disciplinary norms, legitimate academic freedom, but what, if anything, legitimates such norms? If we cannot find a good answer to that question, then it might be that we end up with the following conundrum: we must accept norms that we cannot legitimate (or whose legitimacy we refuse to question) in order to legitimate our academic freedom. Indeed, in our eagerness to ground academic freedom in certain pro- fessional and disciplinary norms that only certain faculty members are trained to know and apply, we produce a different problem for academic freedom. If disciplinary innovation becomes the price we pay in order to establish a basis on which to legitimate an argument against unwanted polit- ical intrusions, then it would seem we establish a conservative academic cul- ture and even suppress disciplinary innovation, as well as interdisciplinary work, in order to preserve academic freedom. Then, of course, we have to ask, for whom is academic freedom preserved and for whom is it destroyed, and with what sense of the academic are we left? One can see a serious disagree- ment brewing: either professional norms are necessary restraints that we ought not to question if we are to preserve academic freedom, or professional norms have to bear internal scrutiny if we are to preserve academic freedom. This conundrum has led me to ask two different sorts of questions. The first has to do with the question of what is critical in academic work and how that relates to the problem of the disciplines. If a certain sort of critical inquiry is to be defended, how do we begin to go about understanding what that critical inquiry might be? The second question is whether what we mean by critical inquiry can be decided by a particular discipline, whether it is itself a disciplinary operation, and whether critical inquiry can be grounded in a notion of critique. Although critique clearly attains its modern formulation with philosophy, it also makes claims that exceed the particular disciplinary domain of the philosophical. In Kant, for instance, the operation of critique operates not only outside of philosophy and in the university more generally but also as a way of calling into question the legitimating grounds of various public and governmental agencies. Hence, I hope to show that what is critical in academic work relates more broadly to the problem of political dissent, where the latter is understood as a way of objecting to illegitimate claims of public and governmental authority. I should say at the outset that I do not think the operation of critique can supply all

the norms we might need in order to make strong claims about legitimate and illegitimate authority, but I see its operation as necessary to any such claims we might eventually want to make. It seems important to note the political context in which such questions are currently posed or not posed at all. In the United States the term academic freedom characterizes a faculty entitlement to be free of incursion by corporate and administrative powers on matters of making curriculum, peer review, and research. On the other hand, academic freedom some- times is invoked as a right on the part of researchers to enter into contract with whatever funding sources they deem fit and to agree to terms imposed by those outside sources that very often affect hiring, curriculum, and research. It is important to note the assaults on academic freedom (1) by the Academic Bill of Rights, which, among other things, seeks to mandate a 2 balance of perspectives in the classroom; (2) by new forms of state intervention instituted through the joint workings of the Patriot Act, the formation of advisory boards overseeing Middle East studieswhat practitioners do, what affiliations they maintainand new organizations seek- ing to regulate the teaching of religion and science; and (3) by the increased reliance on outside donors and alumni associations for the maintenance of higher education, which can involve restrictions on funding that lead, directly or indirectly, to pressures on academic decisions such as hiring and tenuring, to curricular developments, and to valorizing those forms of knowledge that may lead directly to profit. To make a strong case for academic freedom, we have to understand the kind of freedom we are defending and to be able to describe its permuta- tions. If a certain critical operation of thought is part of the very exercise of this freedom, then we have to specify the sense of critical that we consider worth defending. Critique does not supply the grounds for making a de- cision on any particular case of academic freedom, but without critique there can be no robust debate on the issues raised by academic freedom. The operation of critique has from its formulation inKant been bound up with the question of legitimate and illegitimate state interventions in aca- demic life. Although there are many reasons not to turn to Kant to recover some sense of the meaning of critique, it seems to me nevertheless that a passage through Kant is useful. In the first place, The Conflict of the Facul- ties is precisely such an inquiry, one that seeks to distinguish between modes of thought that should be supported by the state and modes of thought that ought to be free of state intervention. Of course, in our con- temporary predicament, it is not only the state that exerts consequential pressure on the course of academic and intellectual life (so do political lobbies, alumni associations, the media, and other funding agencies), so the possible analogies between Kants text and our circumstances can al- ready be seen to be limited. In asking about the implications of Kants text for our time, I am not asking whether we might apply Kant to matters of academic freedom that preoccupy us but, rather, whether and how a trans- lation between Kants idiom and our own might profitably take place. This project is complex for several reasons because of course Kant has several versions of critique, and it remains to be understood which conception of critique bears on his discussion of the disciplines. Such a passage through Kantdoes not mean subscribing to a transcendental philosophy, but it may well prompt the question of whether a passage through a transcendental form of argumentation can lead to political and social consequence. After all, we call for certain historical institutions, like the university, to support the operation of critique, but we clearly have access to some notion of critique when we make the judgment that certain universities fail to ade- quately defend its place and exercise. On what grounds do we make that latter sort of judgment? The notion of critique is bound up with what we still call open inquiry, even though we understand that what makes an inquiry open is something that circumscribes and binds the inquiry and so determines a limit to its operation. Not all forms of inquiry are open and critical, and the line we draw around those that are produces a closure, if not a foreclosure, that makes an inquirys operation possible. The exercise of critique typically takes place through the formulation of a set of questions. This does not mean that we identify a critical feature of certain formal properties of the question and then develop a typology according to which we list certain kinds of questions as critical and others as not; rather, the task is more historically specific: can we think about how, under certain conditions, certain kinds of questions cannot be posed or, rather, can only be framed and posed by breaking through a certain prohibition that functions to condition and circumscribe the domain of the speakable? This approach would define the critical in relation to the variable historical ways in which the domains of the speakable and the thinkable are circumscribed. My suggestion is that the domain of the speakable is established in part through casting certain intellectual positions as rogue viewpoints. It would be easy enough to say that rogue viewpoints are those that are commonly and explicitly deemed illegitimate and that they are differentiated from those that are explicitly deemed legitimate. But such a framework fails to take into account what cannot be explicitly stated and what acts precisely as the implicit and defining limit to the stateable. In other words, at its extreme the rogue viewpoint is not one that can be spoken without doing some damage to the idea of what is speakable; such viewpoints are under- stood to undermine the idea of the viewpoint. Here I refer less to view- points that take declarative form, though I understand that they also constitute rogue formulations, and more to viewpoints that are emergent or, rather, that take form as questions that are raised about the proper bounds within which questions are posed. Of course, Kant in some ways insisted on the reverse. His question was how to limit our knowledge inquiries so that we would not be constantly ending up in dogmatic or skeptical conclusions. On what legitimate basis

can we know? But, in asking this question, he was trying to sort through those kinds of bases that prove legitimate, that can be proven according to reason, and those that cannot. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant lays out several meanings and functions of critique, including the dethroning of metaphysics, the overcoming of what he called the reign of tedium (a perpetual altercation between skepticism and dogmatism), an effort to supply sufficient grounding for the sciences, the attempt to establish a tribunal through which all claims to knowledge might pass, the way to- ward civil peace, a public means for adjudicating knowledge claims, a solitary means for adjudicating knowledge claims, a way of deriving knowledge claims from a priori principles, and a way of distinguishing such claims from empirical ones as well as speculative ones. Critique is also described as a kind of revolution, what he calls a revolution at the level of procedure, a progressive path for science, a way of enforcing rightful claims, of protecting the public against harmful doctrines (especially those that involve contradiction, groping [Herumtappen], and excess), and a way of resisting popularity and yet serving the public. But, somewhere in this list, he suggests that there is a particular form of the question that belongs to critique, and it has a dual formulation. When one is undertak- ing a critique, one is not simply supplying the legitimating ground of any project of knowledge, but one is asking a set of questions about how that mode of self-legitimation takes place. Those questions are: 3 in what way? and by what right? So let us keep these questions in mind, in what way? and by what right? as we consider what use a critical perspective might be to some of our contemporary quandaries regarding disciplinarity and academic freedom.Kant wrote a small but engaging essay entitled What Is Enlightenment? and Foucault offered a contemporary reading of this piece in an essay of his own by the same name, What Is 4 Enlightenment? There Kant elaborates what he means by critique, but he limits his claim by remarking that ques- tions that give evidence of the free and public use of reason should be free only in their public use, but 5 remain submissive in their private use. There are certain duties that are to be accomplished in the private realm, which includes, for instance, the realm of the family, the church, and tax- ation. We are not to question the authoritative character of those norms but only those that belong to a restricted conception of the public. Kant not only restricts his claim but shows that the claim to the free and public use of reason depends upon an unfree and private domain, suggesting not only that public criticism is a conditioned freedom, strictly speaking, but that one of its conditions is that there be a domain where the exercise of state supervision takes place free of critical intervention. How do we un- derstand the circumscription of the domain of the free and public use of reason on the basis of a domain that is unfree and private? How does that line get drawn by whom? Through what means? By what right? Further, Kant offers another point of view in The Conflict of the Faculties where he maintains that though the faculties of law, medicine, and gov- ernment should be subjected to government scrutiny and authorization, should duly receive and enact the commands of the state, the discipline of philosophy should be free of any such intervention. In fact, philosophy can only make use of reason freely if it remains unimpeded by such political requirements. The circumstances of the texts production are complex; it was written in 1794 in response to repressive measures undertaken by Frederick Wilhelm II, a time in which Kant himself received a cabinet order requesting that he no longer write on the topic of religion. Kants argument is complex, distinguishing the higher faculties, namely, theology, law, and medicinewhich directly serve the public goodfrom the lower faculties, which include philosophy and history and are occupied with teachings which are not adopted as directives by order of a superior. Insofar as philosophy preoccupies itself with the truth of certain teaching to be expounded in public, a free judgment is required, one that nego- tiates the command, judging it autonomously and agreeing to become subject only to laws given by reason, not by 6 the government. Kants argument about the domain of critique seems to depend on clear disciplinary distinctions; politics understood as the sanctions of the statelegitimately governs certain disciplines whose task is to expound and maintain the public good and illegitimately governs others whose task is to function critically, to test public views and proclamations against the laws of reason, and to maintain autonomy in relation to public directives of all kinds. Philosophy is thus defined as unconstrained precisely through its critical function, but its lack of constraint depends upon the constraint imposed upon other disciplines or faculties. Indeed, the task of deciding where and when those imposed constraints are legitimate forms is one of the tasks of philosophy itself. In this sense, freedom of inquiry for philos- ophy depends upon the lack of that very freedom for other disciplines. Philosophys freedom from state constraint comes to define the disciplin- ary task of philosophy; its freedom serves as a constitutive precondition of philosophys claim to free and open inquiry, a condition necessarily absent from all other disciplines. Thus the possibility of the disciplinary site of philosophy is a consequence of the withdrawal of state intervention. In- deed, when Kant himself makes this claim, namely, that philosophy ought to be unconstrained and other disciplines are rightly subject to constraint, it makes sense to ask whether he is speaking within the discipline of phi- losophy or as some sort of extradisciplinary arbiter of the disciplines. I suggest that both will prove to be true. When Kant argues that philosophy ought to be free of state supervision and sanction, it seems that we are then compelled to take the inverse view. The state must learn from philosophy that itthe statemust restrict its own power and allow for the free and public vocation of philosophy. Phi- losophy, even though it

sees itself as free from state intervention and dif- ferent from those disciplines that the state supervises, still defines itself in relation to the state and actually depends on the state for its own philo- sophical definition of itself. So the view that, for Kant, philosophy must be free of politics does not always take into account how that very freedom is dependent on a certain political precondition for philosophy, one that is built into the structure of the university, as Derrida has made very clear, and its public mandate. Thus, we have every reason to wonder whether this move can ever remove philosophy from politics or, more restrictedly, from state power, since (a) state power operates to support philosophy, and the form that support takes is to withdraw supervision over the paths that philosophy takes; and (b) the distinctions among the disciplines (the higher faculties) that must justify their modes of inquiry and their knowledge claims in light of the public good established by state power are emphatically nonphilosophical, and so philosophy comes to be defined by what it is not, and that defini- tion, in turn, sanctions or limits state intervention into the disciplinary formations of knowledge at issue. Where philosophy can be shown to be at work, restraints on state supervision are legitimate, which means that phi- losophy has as one of its critical tasks the limiting of illegitimate state power. Philosophy names the moment when state power retracts or should retractits commands or submits its own commands to a certain testing by a form of reasoning that is not itself furnished by the state; conversely, philosophy names the moment in which reason, defined as the power to judge autonomously, establishes the possibility for political dis- sent, that is, for refusing to accept certain commands or sanctions from the state as legitimate. If philosophy performs this function with respect to state interventions into university business, does it follow that philosophy, in its critical function, posits itself above or outside of state power and has the more general task of inquiring into those governmental commands and policies whose legitimacy has not yet been persuasively established? Now, there are many reasons to question whether Kants position can translate into the present or be useful to our own reflections on academic freedom and the critical tasks of university life. But here we can see at least two points that are worth underscoring for the purposes of negotiating the present. First, the operation of critique takes place within the discipline of philosophy, but it also takes place every place and any place its distinguish- ing questions get posed, so critique belongs not just to the discipline of philosophy but, as Derrida has insisted, throughout the university. Sec- ond, the operation of critique takes place not only in the identifiable do- mains of philosophy and within the walls of the university but every time and any time the question of what constitutes a legitimate government command or policy is raised. Thus, critique does not remain limited within any of the domains that claim to circumscribe the appropriate op- eration of critique, which means that this very notion of critique, initially furnished by Kant, exceeds the Kantian formulation and even leads to a critical distance from theKantian text itself. One feature of the Kantian position that preoccupied Derrida in several essays published in the volume entitled Eyes of the University was the mode through which disciplines are divided from one another. Derrida calls attention to the contamination that happens between disciplines, and though he quite literally praises philosophy, especially in the interview by that name, he also calls into question whether we can continue to rely on reason as the basis for a critical exercise and whether critique itself is too bound up 7 not only with the claims of reason but with the untroubled distinction among the disciplines. Derridas critical engagement with Kant, if I may continue to call it that, relies on a reading of Friedrich Schellings 1803 Lectures on the Method of University Studies, in whichSchelling makes the case for an operation of knowledge that would be prior to any delimitation of the disciplines. Later, Derrida will wonder whether thinking precedes and disables the rigid distinction between the disciplines and comes to prefer this term to critique, which, in his view, takes disci- plinary differentiations for granted.Derridas question, posed through Schelling, is, What is presupposed by critical delimitation itself? Derridareserves thinking (penser) for that prior relation, prior to delimitation, understood as a wild or rogue region or, at least, a region that precondi- tions those institutionalized forms of knowledge to which it cannot be readily admitted. Derrida rightly asks how communication between the disciplines can happen if we cannot presume the possibility of translation between them, translations that very often show up disciplinary bound- aries as fragile constructions and disciplines themselves as always plagued by contaminations that cannot be expunged or managed easily or finally. This problem emerges within Kants own exposition of critique because, belonging to a discipline, critique takes place whenever and wherever a free exercise of reason takes place. In this way, we find the transdisciplinary operation of critique foreshadowed in Kant himself, though he did not, could not, pursue those kinds of conclusions. These are all important questions, but I want to suggest that we do not need to consign critique to the various problematic partitions upon which Kant relied. Ive suggested that Kant calls into question precisely what he thought must be beyond the scope of critique itself. The critique of critique is not the destruction or nullification of critique, the double negation that culminates in a transcendence of the category of critique; rather, it is its elaboration in forms that could not have been known or authorized in advance and that call into question the implicit and uncritical precondi- tions of its operation. For instance, consider the pivotal role that the distinction between public and private domains plays in Kants discussion of critique and the conflict among the faculties. As noted above, philosophy is emphatically

public, and its critical operations have no place in the private domain. This differentiates philosophy not so much from the other disciplines as from the private sphere, one in which certain differentials of power are consid- ered to be, appropriately, beyond the reach of critique. So here we can see most clearly how the free and open use of critique, even, I would suggest, its claim to transcendental status, comes into crisis by virtue of its impli- cation in politics. Is it a transcendent ground that conditions philosophys difference from the other disciplines, or is it precisely the way that line of demarcation is drawn that produces the transcendental effect upon which the disciplinary self-definition of philosophy depends? The politics to which we refer is not the politics of the state or the politics of the public realm but the particular political power of delimitation that constantly divides private from public on questionable grounds. If the way of distin- guishing private and public does not hold, then the exercise of critique is only illegitimately restricted to the public sphere. Since the private domain includes obligations that pertain to family and to religious institutions, to matters of health and reproduction, the sexual division of labor, regula- tions concerning sexuality and gender, even questions of conditions and means of subject-formation, including pedagogy and class- and race- based access to educational institutions, it would only be uncritical to say that these are areas in which critique ought not to go, or where relations of subordination are to be presumed as part of the prepolitical fabric of social life and even philosophical reflection. If, according to the Kantian scheme, philosophy has held itself exempt from state commands and policies, then philosophy has been instrumental in limiting the scope of critique. If issues emerging from the private domain as well as the very demarcation of the public and private can be thought about critically, then philosophy must lose its place among the disciplines and enter into a social field, neither public nor private, in order to pose the questions that instantiate its operation. This perspective would imply shifting our understanding of critique to something that happens through the sociopolitical field and questioning whether established ways of delineating public and private are themselves legitimate. If critique is understood as restricted to the open public sphere, we have to ask how this restriction takes place. It takes place through political means that do not show up within that sphere itself since they constitute precisely the delimiting power by which those spheres are es- tablished and stabilized. Hence, we need something like a critique of cri- tique to understand these other differentiating effects of power and to undo their effects. Let us remember for a moment that the operative ques- tions of critique include by what right? and through what means? This means that the exercise of critique can take place precisely in relation to those assertions of state power over academic inquiry. It becomes possible to restate the Kantian position in a different way. After all, the operation of reason that distinguishes the philosophical enterprise for Kant is precisely the critical one, so it makes sense to claim that what should be preserved as a value of the university is precisely that operation of critique that asks by what right and through what means certain doxa become accepted as nec- essary and right and by what right and through what means 8 certain gov- ernment commands or, indeed, policies are accepted as the precritical doxa of the university. One can and must make use of Kant against Kant to ask, Through what means does Kant construct the sphere of public reason and by what right? And through what means does he separate public and private and by what right? His question can and must be reiterated, breaking with the context in which it was formed, calling into question the contexts that his further articulations sought to constitute as given. One could say that one is no longer a Kantian if one asks the Kantian question of Kant, but that must surely be acceptable, even historically necessary because the questions he unleashed do not belong to him in the end as they are taken up by readers who seek to know what translation from Kant might be possible between his text and the impasses of our time. The critique of critique becomes the reiteration of critique, the subjecting of critique to a translation of texts that emerged from a divergent political temporality. This redoubling operation proves central to some of the most important efforts to make sense of Kant for our times. What sense do we make, for instance, of Foucaults 8. Now, of course, in debates about state and external intervention in the disciplines, including interventions in hiring, curriculum, and tenure cases, we do not for the most part encounter arguments about the necessity to immunize philosophy, but there are other ways in which this kind of argument works, especially when the disciplines are linked to the public good and the state understands itself as in the business of articulating and protecting the public good. What we do find, however, is the suppression of certain kinds of questions that might destabilize the presumptive relations between universities and corporate donors, between universities and supporting government agencies, between universities and alumni associations, and between universities and powerful nonprofit organizations, including major philanthropic organizations required to sustain the research dimension of the university. Ill return to this question toward the end of my remarks, but, for the moment, let me return to the question of how we might continue to reiterate Kant, to subject Kant to a certain translation into the present reiteration of Kant in What Is Enlightenment? the text in which he uses Kants title as his own and produces that uneasy identification between Kant and himself? What first appears from the juxtaposition of these two essays is that the title is a question, the same question, and so it is a title that happens twicesomething happens by way of the question that is distinct and iterable. What is that something? Foucault tells us that for Kant, at least in this essay, the Enlightenment is not to be understood exclusively as a time or a place but rather as that which recurs every time a certain

kind of question is asked under conditions in which doxa has reigned. To ask the question, what is enlightenment? is effectively to let enlightenment take place again and to show that enlightenment is something that can and does take place when such questions are posed. So what follows right away from Foucaults procedure of reading is that enlightenment is being radically dehistoricized and that, methodologically, enlightenment constitutes a certain break with historicism. Foucault remarks that if enlightenment has a motto, it appears to be this: dare to know (W, p. 35). So what follows secondly is that for Foucault critique has something to do with a disposi- tion of the subject or even a certain risk that the subject takes with respect to prevailing authorities that have been protected from critique. This seems bound 9 up with what he says about critique as the virtue courage in What Is Critique? and with his late 10 reflections on fearless speech in the title by that name. When Foucault reads Kant, when he, perhaps somewhat perversely, allies himself with a Kantian trajectory of thought, he reads Kant selec- tively, leaving out those portions of Kants argument that do not suit his own transposition and translation. Foucault extends certain ideas of en- lightenment that he finds in Kant and, in doing so, finds a necessary reason to break with Kant, even to show us that the break with Kant is a perfectly Kantian thing to do. Kant gives us a certain notion of critique that comes to necessitate a critical break with Kant. Foucaultcites those resources in the text that he can bring forward for his own uses, and we might be tempted to fault him for this. But Foucault does this in a critical spirit; he exercises judgment in deciding what of Kant to bring forward into the present. So Foucault extends the Kantian notion of critique, but does so in a way that undermines some of the crucial and emphatically uncritical partitions on which the Kantian discussion relies. Some years ago, Bruce Robbins suggested that Kant and Foucault are oppositional figures, especially when it comes to thinking about the disci- plines. Robbins writes that The Conflict of the Faculties renounce[es] pol- itics and the significance that goes with it [so] that philosophy [can] claim a unique right to autonomy: 11 having no commands to give, [it, philoso- phy] is free to evaluate everything. Robbins thinks that no such renun- ciation of politics can or ought to take place, at least not for us, and not for now. Indeed, for Robbins, Kant is wrong to separate politics from knowl- edge, and Foucault is the one who shows him that it is impossible by claiming that knowledge and power are invariably linked. What I want to suggest is that Robbins misses a certain alliance between Foucault and Kant, precisely the one that would query the legitimacy through which any given knowledge project proceeds. To say that power and knowledge are inextricably related is of course an important, if not salient, contribution of Foucault to our contemporary thinking. For Robbins, it is the problem of power that compels interdisciplinarity, since power (corporate, institu- tional, state) produces and traverses the disciplines and so gives them a common object of concern. Robbins warns us against understanding such struggles as an invariable conflict among the faculties. And he suggests that our transdisciplinary alliances ought to form the basis of a robust and collective response to our various publics. I think this is a fine idea, and it may well be that David Horowitz and the Higher Education Act and the Patriot Act will continue to produce all kinds of alliances among us. Robbins clearly thinks that the disciplines ought to be joining together to combat increased privatization and the further destruction of the welfare state. Although I readily sign his petitions, I want a certain amount of room to hesitate as well because there remains a question of how politics is to be understood in this context and how we understand freedom as well. If we substitute politics for power, we have to distinguish which sense of politics we mean. And here it seems most important to distinguish between the view that would say that all our knowledge projects are just so many political projects and that we are, when we disagree on matters of knowledge, actually engaged in position- ing ourselves politically and trying to win and the view that would critically ask, How is knowledge made in tandem with a certain orchestration of institutional power? In my understanding, this kind of critical question is surely also politi- cal, but in a precise sense: it questions the basis on which certain kinds of claims for legitimacy are maintained, and it insists upon a time and place, even a legitimate time and place, for that questioning within academic life. That there must be a time and place for such questioning suggests the insufficiency in Kants position or rather shows that what is sometimes called a transcendental inquiry opens up within a set of institutionsand as a consequence and effect of a set of prior delimitations among the dis- ciplinesand cannot be pursued without some form of institutional sup- port. I would add here something more, namely, that that sort of questioning, which is not necessarily grounded in existing convention or established norm but which takes existing conventions and norms as its objects, is related to the question of political dissent. And where political dissent is a practice that is sometimes protected by the very state that becomes the object of its critique, it is also that which emerges precisely when there is no such protection and as a direct result ofas a response tothere being no such protection. In this sense, it is not a claim that is grounded in advance, and I want to suggest that what I am calling critique in this context is similarly an ungrounded inquiry into the legitimacy of existing grounds, one that might be understood in Kantian terms as the free and public use of reason but that extends outside the domain of the public to a sociopolitical field that is broader and more complex than the public/private distinction can avow. To call the operation of critique un- grounded as I have is simply to say that what form it takes is not knowable or predictable on the basis of established norms; it is not, however, to say that it can or will take place regardless of whether or not there are protected institutional venues for its

happening. The petition to produce certain kinds of departments or centers can emerge precisely from such a critical claim with the understanding that such a critical inquiry cannot be sus- tained without such institutional supports. The operation of critique and even the subsequent petition can emerge from the interstices of institu- tional life (which is not the same as emerging from a transcendental field); it may emerge precisely from those interstitial sites where disciplinary boundaries have not been firmly maintained. The practices of demarca- tion precede and condition the transcendental turn because the opera- tion of critique apart from existing disciplinary authorization or existing ideas of the public sphere depends essentially on the demarcations that are called into question through its practice. In addition to calling into question established notions of discipline and the public sphere, critique also takes aim at reason, but not in order to celebrate unreason. In What Is Enlightenment? Foucault contends that enlightenment is critique, that we have no other way of understanding it, and that critique takes place any time that humanity puts its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority (W, p. 38). This em- phasis on reason does not quite sound like Foucault, but he is working within Kants language to see what he can do with it. One important con- clusion he draws is that critique is not merely or only a sort of nay-saying, an effort to take apart and demolish an existing structure. Rather, critique is the operation that seeks to understand how delimited conditions form the basis for the legitimate use of reason in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hopedthe three aims of critique as Kant formulated them. To the degree that we can still ask the question, what is enlightenment? we continue to mobilize the question and so to show that critique has not stopped happening, and in that sense neither has enlightenment stopped happening. It is a process subject to historical translation, to the recurrence of questioning the limits imposed upon the askable. Foucault will not argue from a priori principles, and he will not finally stay with Kants idea of reason. What he proposes instead is an attitude of critique, one that he identifies with an ethos, a way of acting and behaving that belongs to a certain culture or community, that signals that belong- ingness, and that is also an ongoing process that presents itself as an obli- gation and a task. In this context, he refers to an attitude toward modernity and suggests that the problem for modernity is not a matter of accepting ones finitude but of tak[ing] oneself [to be an] object of a complex and difficult elaboration. Modernity . . . compels [man] to face the task of producing himself (W, p. 42). Why suddenly does he introduce the production of oneself in this con- text? What is the relation then between this invention, elaboration, or production of the self and the problem of critique that Foucault opened up earlier? He maintains that the philosophical ethos of modernity involves sustaining a permanent critique of our historical era (a term that involves a transposition of the Maoist slogan of permanent revolution). That cri- tique involves the exercise of a free and public reason, and it seems also to imply moving into adulthood from a childlike position, which means not accepting on face value different forms of authority and their commands. In point of fact, it would seem that a certain exercise of disobedience is necessary for the inventive elaboration of the self. So it seems that there are now two dimensions of his notion of critique, and they are interrelated: on the one hand, it is a way of refusing subordination to an established au- thority; on the other hand, it is an obligation to produce or elaborate a self. The first function is negative, a refusal; but the second function is inven- tion. And it seems to follow that the refusal opens the space for this inven- tion or that, in some way, refusal, disobedience, is linked to selfinvention. ForFoucault, this linkage between critique and the production of ourselves is an exercise in an autonomy distinct from various human- isms. It is clear that what Foucault has to say about the production of the self would not have found resonance in Kant, but perhaps it is worth considering how Kants The Conflict of the Faculties concludes with a rather elaborate set of reflections and precepts on self-care. Indeed, in the final section, Kant considers the task of the faculty of medicine to be teaching its students health and wellbeing. Kant makes clear that principles that govern the morally practical life have bearing on how matters of health should be taught, and he has advice to offer on why, for instance, he does not believe that the head and feet need to be kept warm, on why insomnia happens, how we might master morbid feelings through the exercise of reason, and why his headaches are so bad. This is a strangely neurasthenic conclusion to a discourse on pub- lic reason, suggesting that the body and its daily demands emerge as a kind of necessary supplement, offering an implicit critique of the hu- man animal who dwells exclusively in the domain of a public reason. The body is the site of private unreason, and yet its signs can be read and its care can be thought. How does this reflection on the body constitute a modality of thought other than the one that Kant explicitly defends as reason? The resonances with the late Foucault are quite striking, since Fou- caults way of linking critique with the production of the self will take yet another form when self-production comes to imply self-care in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality. There are grounds for considering the resonances between Kants and Foucaults recipes for self-care. Whatever ethos is involved in critique is opened up by a specific historical reality and demand. It follows neither from a capacity for reason as such nor from any other inherent aspect of our humanity. It follows, rather, from a distinct and largely contingent historical accumulation and formation of conven- tions that produce subjects who, in turn, open up a set of possibilities within that historical horizon or, rather, by virtue of it. The norms that establish the modes of intelligibility and

recognizability for a subject are themselves queried, called into question, and so the very social basis for the intelligibility of the subject is risked at the moment in which such historical norms are interrogated. The point, of course, is not to stay at the site of risk or to celebrate risk as a way of life, but to keep the possibility of critique alive in the face of any and all possible intrusions and requirements leveled by illegitimate authority 12 or leveled in illegitimate ways. Although a standard reading of Foucault suggests that he is less inter- ested in asking how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate im- positions of power than in describing the modalities through which power works, I want to suggest that these two questions cannot be fully disartic- ulated from one another. In What Is Critique?Foucault considers cri- tique as it functions in two different domains of established authority: the first is regimes of rationality, and the second is modes of governmental 13 obligation. Foucault makes clear that what he seeks in the characteriza- tion of the Enlightenment is precisely what remains unthought within its own terms (and it is interesting that for Derrida the alternative to critique is thinking, and the redefinition of critique in Foucault is interrogation, always partial, of the unthought, though they may well mean something similar by these divergent terms). In Foucaults view, critique begins with questioning the demand for absolute obedience and subjecting every gov- ernmental obligation imposed on subjects to a rational and reflective eval- uation. Thus, he recasts the origins of critique more radically than Kant. Although Foucault will not follow the turn to Kantian reason, he will nevertheless ask what criterion delimits which sorts of reasons and so can come to bear on the question of obedience. What produces that criterion and by what means does it become binding? What enters into the production and implementation of that criterion? Is it necessary, and can it be changed? When we consider how the field of legitimate reasons for obey- ing and disobeying is circumscribed, we are considering the conditions and limits of rationality. Our ability to identify or even to question those limits does not presume that we are, as it were, outside reason but only that we are outside one set of conventions by which reasonand the reason- able has been circumscribed. And so there follow the questions, who are we if we are not on the inside? how is this we possible? and who is asking this question of an established domain of rationality? The very fact of these questions suggests that there is a speaking and inquiring being here, and so, rhetorically, we are left with a paradox because the question of the legitimacy by which the domain of reason is circumscribed cannot be taken into account within that domain. Hence, Foucault mobilizes critique against both a mode of rationality and a set of obligations imposed by a specific governmental exercise of authority. The two are clearly linked, but not causally. Modes of rationality do not unilaterally create kinds of governmental obligation, and those governmental obligations do not unilaterally create modes of rationality. And yet to question government authority one has to be able to think beyond the domain of the thinkable that is established by that authority and on which that authority relies. To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute is not just to take a point of view but to elaborate a position for oneself outside the ontological jurisdiction of that authority and so to elaborate a certain possibility of the subject. And if that domain establishes some version of political rationality, then one becomes, at the moment of being critical, irrational or nonrational, a rogue subject as it were, unintel- ligible within those political terms and yet with a critical relation to exist- ing modes of intelligibility. Thus Foucault thinks that such an inquiry, a critical inquiry, involves some manner of courage or audacity. It is also why such a critical practice opens up a new possibility for elaborating the subject or what he sometimes calls creating a new subjectivity, one that would by definition maintain an uncertain relation to existing terms of legitimacy and intelligibility, at least at first. Hannah Arendt and others have asked about the conditions under which citizens and soldiers might justifiably voice dissent to existing au- thority and come to practice civil disobedience in relation to 14 conventional law. Her view was that moral judgment must be exercised, and her own turn to Kant in her reflections on willing strongly suggest a reconsideration of the meaning of autonomy in light of dissent, civil 15 disobedience, and even revolution. Without exploring that important view in detail here, I would nevertheless like to underscore the way in which the operation of critique becomes linked with strong political terms of opposition, a move that suggests that the exercise of calling existing authorities into question moves outside the university into the broader terrain of politics. Dissenting from authority is not a mere desisting, and it may entail much more than the punctual enunciation of a speech act or mode of comportment. Dissent may well imply an alteration both in and of the subject and can challenge and reformulate historically specific modes of rationality. Thus, dissent maintains important relations to the modes of knowledge that articulate modes of governmental authority. The practice of consent, on the other hand, involves a free acquiescence, even when that freedom is not always selfreflectively understood as such. One does not consent on the basis of ones autonomy, and one does not draw from ones autonomy in order to consent. Consent is the act through which auton- omy is constituted, and, similarly, dissent is also a way of freely withdraw- ing ones consent and so constituting oneself at a remove from authority (and elaborating a certain exercise of freedom). If there is a condition of possibility for either, it is to be found in the historical conditions that have accumulated and made such acts obligatory or possible.

In the context of civil or political disobedience, the impetus for with- drawing ones consent from a given authority consists in trying to establish a limit to governability. And this can, depending on how it is formulated and publicized, result in a more radical inquiry into the legitimacy of the authority in question. Again, there is no part of the self that is by definition ungovernable; in withdrawing itself from the domain of governability, the self constitutes its own ungovernability in and through the act. Foucault does not propose, in What Is Critique? or elsewhere, the possibility of radical anarchy (although he makes room for a provisional anarchic rela- tion to existing law). The problem for him is not to produce a subject who will be radically ungovernable for all time. The question, how not to be governed? is always the question of how not to be governed in this or that way. But it is not a question of how not to be governed at all. As a consequence, it is a specific question that emerges in relation to a specific form of government and might well constitute a kind of tactical and provisional anarchy in relation to existing authorityin his words, how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and 16 by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them. If these words seem to suggest that critique amounts to a lot of nay- saying, it is important to remember that the no delineates and animates a new set of positions for the subject; it is inventive and, in that sense, operates as a determinate negation in Hegels sense. Foucault thus characterizes the negative and positive dimensions of critique. How, then, does the no that he articulates relate to the no that we find in acts of dissent? Let us remember that when Socrates argues that the law that sentences him to death is unjust, he does not therefore have permission to question the legitimacy of the court or, indeed, the state itself. He refuses to flee, even though he understands his punishment as unjust, because, in his words, he belongs to the state, and his very being, the very possibility of his interlo- cution, depends upon that state. My sense is that Foucault, if faced with similar circumstances, would take another tack, that he would object to the law as unjust and flee, establishing the independence of his critical attitude from any established governmental authority. A certain conception of freedom is to be understood as part of such an act of dissent, the one that not only objects to this law but also calls into question the legitimacy of a court that makes its decisions on such bases (corruption of the youth, for example). But, in the case I am perversely imagining, the refusal of the law and the questioning of the legitimacy of the court itself do not necessarily proceed from provisions that the state itself stipulates, namely, that free- dom to dissent is an integral conception of the idea of democracy that the state is bound to uphold. Although dissent can sometimes take this form, as when one files for conscientious-objector status under stipulated pro- visions, it can also take a form that is not authorized by the authority from which consent is withheld. And this establishes dissent both inside the purview of a democratic polity and as the principle by which a departure from an established polity can and does take place. In other words, there is a link between dissent and the right to revolution, one I can, for reasons of time, only gesture toward and that doubtless would require a return to the relation between Arendt and Kant. One reason that Kant thought that the conflict among the faculties should never end is that a certain critical operation must attend to statu- tory precepts of the government regarding teachings to be set forth in public. Figuring philosophy as a kind of antigovernment militia, Kant. writes, the philosophy faculty can never lay aside its arms in the face of the danger that threatens the truth entrusted to its protection, because the higher faculties [those bound up with state power] will never give up their desire to rule. 17 Interestingly, the right to dissent has to be provided for by government, but where a government fails to provide it the right to dissent can become the basis for a critique of the legitimacy of that government. It requires institutional support, but it is also the basis on which a critique of the institution can and must proceed. In this sense, no government provision finally justifies the right to dissent. When government does grant and pro- tect the right to dissent, it opens its own practices to critical scrutiny. In a sense, the government acts, provides for this dissent, but in providing for it cedes the condition by which its own action may well be curtailed. This curtailment might follow from the successful articulation of a dissenting view or practice, one that shows government mandates or policies to be illegitimate, at which point the curtailment would be a consequence of a dissenting view gaining acceptance. But the very granting of the right of dissent, although an act of power, is also an act in which power checks itself. In other words, the state derives its own legitimacy through granting rights of dissent, but to the extent that it cannot control the terms of dissent, it also allows for a deterioration of its own claims, a suspension of its own mandate, and even a withdrawal or compromise of its own sover- eignty. In a time in which Carl Schmitts theory of the sovereign has, for a variety of reasons, captured the theoretical imagination, perhaps the thought of dissent is actually the inverse of the thought of sovereignty. Whereas sovereign power may withdraw its protections and entitlements and establish itself as independent of any rights and obligations secured through conventional law, dissent is precisely the site where the state re- tracts its sovereign claim or lays open its sovereign commands to be checked and undone by those it is obligated to govern in a fair way. Every- thing depends on whether the state comes to manage the terms of dissent or whether it casts certain viewpoints as rogue viewpoints, ones that would call into question forms of power that are supposed to remain protected from critical consideration.

Of course, the field of power cannot be restricted to the issuing of gov- ernment commands or policies, and so the challenge for thinking about how power works in the academy today would have to take into account all of the nongovernmental agencies and operations that seek to impose cer- tain restrictions and directions on academic work. Nevertheless, it is im- portant to note that many of the most controversial academic positions that have caused serious disputes about the meaning and purview of aca- demic freedom have centered on the legitimacy of certain state authorities. Of course, there are several important and problematic issues of academic freedom that arise from the religious Rights effort to seize control over science teaching and research to reflect religious convictions. The powers at work there are churches and their political lobbies. Some of the view- points that are most seriously subjected to rogue status are those that ask about the legitimacy of existing states. Israel is clearly a case in point, and the debates about Israel in the U.S. academy reveal an extraordinary con- fusion about what constitutes legitimate critique, what constitutes a cri- tique of legitimacy, and whether these can be dissociated from a call to destruction. Those who ask by what right and through what means does Israel legitimate itself through requiring a religious basis for citizen- ship or differential degrees of citizenship that maintain Jewish demo- graphic advantageare clearly asking about the mode and rationale for the self-legitimation of a state. Some are immediately suspicious of the question, suggesting that to ask the question is to delegitimate the state and to subject its Jewish population to new threats. But whether or not one wishes to defend the state of Israel on already formulated grounds, and even if one wishes to call into question the existing form of that state in order to suggest reforms that might make for a different kind of state on those contested lands, it would be good to hear these questions actively posed and debated. To suspect the questions or shut down the conversa- tion is to say that the matter of legitimacy should be assumed but not demonstrated, and that is precisely to make support for the existing form into a dogmatic position and label any other position as rogue. Whether or not one wants to make political arguments about the viability of neighbor- ing states, one would do well to open the debate to a larger question of how and when states provide for their selflegitimation. No matter which po- litical conclusion one reaches, it will have been arrived at through a critical operation, which means that we can begin to ask any questions we might have about what makes this state, or any state, legitimate. If we cannot pose the questions by what right and through what means a given state has achieved its status as legitimate, then we have already eroded the claim not only of critique but also of dissent, without which the process of legitima- tion cannot take place. It makes sense that the debates about the legitimacy of the Israeli state (which is not the same as the legitimacy of the occupation) would form the center of debates on the proper purview of academic freedom. If academic freedom depends on critique, and critique is bound up with the question of how state legitimation takes place, then it would seem that the questions raised about Israels subordination and exclusion of the Palestinians prove to be a test case for whether or not critique can remain at the center of academic freedom during this time. At stake in all of these reflections, however, is the question of whether we can continue to think about critique as something other than the prac- tice of destruction, of nay-saying, of nihilism, or of unbridled skepticism. Could it not be that critique is that revolution at the level of procedure without which we cannot secure rights of dissent and processes of legiti- mation? When grant applicants are disqualified by virtue of the questions they pose (and without any reference to the conclusions they draw), then we have to ask whether the domain of the speakable and the domain of the askable are being foreclosed in order to limit critical debate and to thwart the demand to offer justifications for the points of view that we do hold. For such points of view to be debated, they have first to be admissible into academic and public debate; they have to be regarded as viewpoints. There would have to be room for a set of questions to be posed about the meaning of destructiona term that is proliferated in confusing and frightening ways of a state and the conditions of state legitimacy. Is extending rights of citizenship through formal and legal means or through new constitu- tional efforts the same as destroying a country or its people? How has this fearful conclusion taken hold, and does it sometimes stop us from asking very fundamental questions about equality and justice? Perhaps another kind of inquiry would be needed to know what precisely fuels efforts to circumscribe the speakable and the thinkable through means that com- promise the very democratic values in whose name this censorship is per- formed and that ally modes of thinking with the kinds of viewpoints that uncritically adhere to governmental policy. When we identify and cast out the rogue viewpoint, we miss the point that every critical question is ini- tially rogue in relation to existing conventions. We lose the traditions of both Socrates and Kant, not to mention Derrida and Foucault, since the very questions that would establish a critical viewpoint on state authority and governmental obligation are precluded from the asking. At that point it may well be that we are silenced by existing authorities, but we have also become, paradoxically, subjects whose muteness and political stammering come to define a mode of being. Notes: 1. See Robert Post, The Structure of Academic Freedom and Judith Butler, Academic Norms, Contemporary Challenges: A Reply to Robert Post on Academic Freedom, in Academic Freedom after September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (New York, 2006), pp. 61106, 107 42.

2. See the Academic Bill of Rights 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London, 1982), p. 32. 4. See Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? trans. James Schmidt, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. Schmidt (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 5864, and Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? trans. Catherine Porter, The Foucault Reader, trans. Josue V. Hasari et al., ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), pp. 3250; hereafter abbreviated W. 5. Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? p. 59. 6. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992), p. 43. 7. See Jacques Derrida, In Praise of Philosophy, interview by Liberation, Eyes of the ?University, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford, Calif., 2004), pp. 156 64. 9. Foucault, What Is Critique? trans. Lysa Hochroth, in The Political, ed. David Ingram (London, 2002), p. 192. For an elaboration of the idea of critique, see my commentary What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, in The Political, pp. 21228. See also Butler, What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Malden, Mass., 2004), pp. 30222. 10. See Foucault, Fearless Speech, trans. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, 2001). 11. Bruce Robbins, Less Disciplinary Than Thou: Criticism and the Conflict of the Faculties, Minnesota Review n.s. 4546 (199596), www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns45/robbins.htm 12. Although Foucault does not elaborate on this notion of self-invention, he does move in this brief essay from a discussion of Kant to a consideration of Baudelaire. What kind of supplement is Baudelaire to Kant in this instance? Foucault references the flaneur as a subject who does not seek to know or confess itself, but to craft itself. But he misses the chance to think about the problem of agency in Baudelaire and what consequences it might have for his own efforts to delineate something specific about a certain kind of subject who emerges within European modernity. For instance, what Foucault misses is that to which Benjamin calls attention: the idea of the crowd as a way to rethink the sociality of the subject and the problem of agency. One does not craft oneself from ones own resources, and self-making never happens alone. For Benjamin, for instance, the individual is jostled in the crowds that populate Baudelaires poetry, and this jostling is at once unwilled and animating. Sociality is impingement, but it is also excitation, and this conditions a different scene of self-invention than one that would be based on an ontology of individualism. Can we understand self- invention as something that emerges not from a self whose individuation is presupposed but rather one whose individuation is always, even constitutively, jeopardized by the impingements of sociality itself? Can we imagine that the operation of critique emerges neither from a radically unconditioned freedom nor from a radical act of individual will, but from a kind of jostling that happens in the midst of social life, the very scene of being impinged upon by those we do not know? To be jostled is to encounter impingement not only as repression and constraint but also as the animating condition for a certain kind of social existence. The point reminds us that the critical task is not to become free of all impingement (and to be restored to a fully free and autonomous reason) but to distinguish among those modes of impingement that are illegitimate and those that are not. 13. See Foucault, What Is Critique? 14. See Hannah Arendt, Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2003), pp. 17 48. 15. See Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations, Responsibility and Judgment, pp. 159 89, Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, 1992), and Civil Disobedience, Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972), pp. 49 102. 16. Foucault, What Is Critique? p. 193. 17. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 55

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