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ONE

INTRODUCTION

What is philosophy? Lets imagine that a certain kind of philosophical thinking, one that in English-speaking contexts goes by the name Continental, passes from Germany to France after World War II. After Husserl and Heidegger, with an assist from Bergson and Sartre, philosophy switches territories and gears and becomes structuralism, whose main purpose (again from the standpoint of English readers of French philosophy) is to become poststructuralism. Poststructuralism has integrity as a (French) philosophical movement, although it immediately bifurcates into deconstruction, which attaches to the proper name of Jacques Derrida, and postmodernism, which is invented by Jean-Franois Lyotard but is useful as a catchall to encompass most forms of poststructuralism. Lets imagine that there are two major French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century who are not easily assimilated into these categorical schemas: Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Finally, lets consider that there are two main problems of philosophy toward the end of the twentieth century: First, the general problem posed by the linguistic turn that affects all forms of philosophy in the twentieth century, analytic as well as Continentalthis turn eclipses both the traditional philosophical concerns with ontology as well as Heideggers renewal of the question of being, which is also posed in terms of language. Second, the problem that haunts twentieth-century philosophy,

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especially after World War II, is the problem of totality, which distinguishes a postwar and post-Holocaust (as well as anti-Hegelian) philosophical attitude. Whether the linguistic turn is associated with Frege or Nietzsche or Saussure, language becomes the fundamental problem of philosophy during the twentieth century. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger take up the question of language and its relation to reality in different ways. Jrgen Habermas claims that we can see a paradigm shift from philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language around the turn of the twentieth century.1 At the beginning of Being and Event, Badiou declares that Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher, primarily because he renews the question of being. 2 However, Badiou rejects Heideggers poetic discourse as the primary model for philosophy, opting instead for a mathematical ontology. Mathematics, not poetry, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being.3 According to Badiou, there is little doubt that the century has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential than the linguistic turn with which it has been credited.4 Badiou opposes the linguistic turn in philosophy that characterizes philosophy of much of the century, and calls for a renewed formalization in and of philosophy. Heidegger raises the ontological question, but then he links ontology with language. Post-Heideggerian French philosophy, also influenced by Saussures linguistics, remains obsessed with questions of language, and how it affects the discourses of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Deleuze avoided these dominant discourses of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and he never viewed language as a fundamental problem. Deleuzes philosophy was always already ontological, and it was not shaped by the linguistic turn. Badiou follows Deleuze in evading the consequences of the linguistic turn, although Badiou is more invested in formalizing this ontology in mathematical terms, whereas Deleuze is more interested in problematizing philosophy, that is, seeing how philosophy asks questions and poses problems. Badious philosophy and his mathematics are axiomatic, whereas Deleuzes philosophy is more unsettled, and in a continual state of becoming.

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The problem of totality is partly the theoretical response of European philosophy to the shocking forms of totalitarianism that emerged in the twentieth century, most famously under the names of fascism (Nazism) and communism (Stalinism).5 In order to avoid or oppose totality, philosophers have sought ways of affirming pluralism, perspectivalism, difference, and multiplicity. Continental philosophers attempt to think and to thematize that which resists thought and escapes thematization. Here the immediate enemy is Hegels encyclopedic system of dialectics, because it is seen as swallowing all forms of thought and life. Kierkegaards existential protest against Hegel is valorized as an authentic opposition to a totalizing and dehumanizing system. Although in the early twentieth century a Marxist Hegelianism was extremely influential in French thought, primarily by way of Alexandre Kojves incredible synthesis,6 after the crimes of Stalinism became apparent Hegels thought became suspected of being complicit with the logic of totalitarianism. For most of the late twentieth century, Hegel was viewed oppositionally, and Deleuze was one of the main philosophers who wanted nothing to do with Hegelian dialectics. At the turn of the twentyfirst century, however, Hegelianism has been rehabilitated beyond the poststructuralist critique, which has been shown to be a caricature by the important work of Slavoj iek, Catherine Malabou, and others.7 Behind the problem of totality, however, lies the problem of the One, and hidden in the shadow of Hegel looms Plato. Deleuze opposes Platonism and the One by liberating simulacra from their enslavement to models, forms, or copies, while Badiou rehabilitates Plato but rejects the One. Both Badiou and Deleuze valorize the multiple, but in different ways, as will become clear in this study. Deleuze is able to affirm multiplicity by opposing Platonism, and he sees the death of God as the dismantling of the foundational One. Badiou, however, claims that Deleuze cannot escape the shadow of the One, and ends up grounding multiplicity in a renewed vision of the One, whereas for Badiou an affirmation of Plato is possible that does not necessitate an embrace of the One. A genuine Platonic multiplicity can be achieved mathematically, by means of set theory, and this set theory provides Badiou an ontology that frames an event. Even though the event

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cannot be prescribed from mathematical being as irreducible multiplicity, an understanding of being allows one to understand how it is that events can happen. Finally, the follow-up to Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, develops a transcendental logic that explains how events irrupt out of being. This book offers a counterreading of Deleuze over against and beyond Badious powerful critique in his influential work Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, published in French in 1997, shortly after Deleuzes death in 1995, and translated into English in 2000. Badiou was inspired by a series of written letters between himself and Deleuze between 1992 and 1994 that eventually came to an end and an impasse. Deleuze told Badiou that he did not want his letters published, declaring them too abstract, not up to the occasion.8 After Deleuze died, Badiou was asked to write an essay on Deleuze, and he says that he saw this as one last, posthumous letter written to a friend with whom he had a relationship that was conflicted, and as concerning a philosophical encounter that never quite took place.9 Badiou expresses his critique in strong terms, although he seems ambivalent about attacking the person he considers his only serious contemporary rival after the publication in 1988 of Being and Event. Badiou claims, despite Deleuzes language celebrating multiplicity, that Deleuze is ultimately a philosopher of the One. In order to open up a space for his own claim as a great philosopher, Badiou is forced to criticize and ultimately distort Deleuzes philosophy, as I will show in this book. Badiou claims that, in addition to being a philosopher of the One and deceiving most of his readers about it, Deleuze is austere, aristocratic, and politically quietist in his work. However, he reads Deleuze selectively and ignores what does not fit the image of Deleuze that he constructs. In chapter 2, I will exposit Badious critique and show how he interprets Deleuze in his influential book. This reading of Badious book will provide a foil against which to develop my reading of Deleuze, which occurs in chapters 35. In chapter 3, I will provide my own reading of Deleuzes masterwork, Difference and Repetition. I claim that it is not possible to really understand Deleuzes thought without engaging and comprehending Difference and Repetition, although at the same time this is

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extremely difficult to do because Deleuze synthesizes so much philosophical, scientific, and literary material, and he radicalizes it in profound and unexpected ways. In chapter 4, Deleuzes Logic of Double Articulation, I focus on Deleuzes logic, from his follow-up to Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense. In The Logic of Sense, drawing from Stoicism as well as his reading of Lewis Carroll, Deleuze posits two series, a series of bodies and a series of sense. This duality is not grounded in a unity, although Badiou cannot read it any other way. I will explain how Deleuzes logic in The Logic of Sense develops into his logic of double articulation in A Thousand Plateaus, written with Guattari. Furthermore, this logic of double articulation can be read as a motor schema, to use Catherine Malabous phrase from her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Although Malabou privileges Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida in her work, I argue that her understanding of plasticity is informed by Deleuze and is in some respects compatible with his philosophy, although there is a profound tension in reading Hegelian dialectics together with Deleuzian difference. Chapter 5, Producing the Event as Machine, as Fold, and as Image, takes the notion of event that Deleuze expresses in The Logic of Sense and shows the shape it takes in his later work, specifically Anti-Oedipus, The Fold, and the Cinema books. In this book I am explicitly developing a coherent interpretation of Deleuzes philosophy over the course of his extraordinary career. For this reason I will not directly engage with the many important and influential works Deleuze wrote about other figures, including Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Proust, Bergson, Kant, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, and Bacon. These are all valuable and important studies, and in many ways Deleuze worked out his philosophy by means of a profound engagement with other thinkers as well as artists, but the danger of reading Deleuze on another figure is that the result is a composite. Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, is the expression of a kind of Deleuze-Nietzsche. In this book, Deleuze helped create the so-called French Nietzsche who became so prominent and influential in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, it takes a great deal of time and effort to extract Deleuze from this composite, and if readers of

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Deleuze in English exclusively focus on these texts as opposed to the foundational philosophical works like Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, it becomes almost impossible to adequately understand Deleuzes overall thought. According to my interpretation, Deleuze is a philosopher of the event. Of course, he is not the only philosopher who thematizes the idea of the event, but his understanding of an event is crucial for appreciating the importance this term takes on in poststructuralism and eventually for Badiou. Badiou axiomatizes being in order to allow for an event. In chapters 6 and 7, I will turn directly to Badious philosophy in his major works. Although I favor Deleuze and criticize Badiou in this book, I am in no way dismissive of his work and its significance. I will engage with Badiou explicitly and seriously, but it will be a contrasting reading to the one I valorize of Deleuze, so in this sense it is a limited (and limiting) reading. Chapter 6, Being a Sublime Event, will focus mainly on Being and Event, although I will draw a connection with his early work, The Concept of Model. In addition to explicating Badious mathematical ontology, I will critically engage it from the standpoint of Kant and the Kantian sublime. Both Badiou and Deleuze were hostile to Kant and Kantianism, but Deleuze acknowledged Kants influence more explicitly and repressed Hegels, whereas Badiou acknowledges his similarity to Hegel but repudiates Kant. I will show, however, that Badious mathematical ontology almost exactly reproduces Kants argument concerning the mathematical sublime, even if Badiou expresses it in terms of set theory. Chapter 7, Being a Subject in a Transcendental World, shows how Badious Logics of Worlds remedies a lack of consideration of the subject in Being and Event. In many respects, subjectivity is downplayed in Being and Event, and a subject comes into being out of fidelity to an event rather than by being inscribed in being. At the end of Being and Event, Badiou even criticizes the residual Cartesianism in Lacan, suggesting that we need to get away from the idea that there were always some subjects.10 From this extreme position, which Badiou adopts in order to avoid the subjectivity of pathos, Romanticism, and language, he returns to an earlier work, Theory of the Subject, in order

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to integrate the subject more deeply into being in Logics of Worlds. I will show how the subject becomes compatible with the object in this sequel, and how both converge on the thinking of a body. Logics of Worlds does not constitute a break with Being and Event, but is a qualification and complexification of the dualism that pervades Being and Event. I argue that Badious logic in Logics of Worlds is more compatible with Deleuze than his logic in Being and Event, even though Badiou describes himself as becoming more Hegelian. At the same time, Badious axiomatization of mathematics in set theory still contrasts with Deleuzes concern with the immanent becoming of mathematics and physics. In a more speculative chapter, I assert the significance of theoretical physics over against theoretical mathematics, and suggest that this emphasis on physics is not a return to the Pre-Socratics, as Badiou charges in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Chapter 8 sketches a provocative Energetics of Being that is inspired by Deleuze, but draws out more explicitly some of the connections of his work with theoretical physics, which Deleuze himself mostly neglected to specify. Deleuze engaged more obviously with mathematics and biology than with physics, but he was writing at the same time that chaos theory and complexity theory were being elaborated, and he provides a philosophical framework that better accounts for these phenomena than the strictures of Badious thought. In chapter 9, I argue that the creation of a time-image is a directly political and revolutionary event for Deleuze, against the charge that Deleuze detached himself from politics and political concerns at the end of his life and retreated into aesthetics. Badiou argues that Deleuze retreats into a kind of austere, solipsistic solitude toward the end of his life. I suggest that this reading is incorrect, because it ignores the revolutionary political significance of the time-image that Deleuze constructs in Cinema 2. Along with Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze with his analysis of nomadology and the war machine presses a political analysis of territory as far as it will go, but he realizes that deterritorialization will always be reterritorialized by the state, with its apparatuses of capture. In order to escape this inevitable reterritorialization, Deleuze turns to aesthetics, first in

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his book on Francis Bacon, and then his books on Cinema. Politics thought as territory conforms to what Deleuze calls the movementimage, whereas his goal in Cinema 2 is to construct a time-image, a brain for the people who do not yet exist but can be brought into existence. The state cannot think, which is why the state cannot create a time-image, only appropriate it. Although Deleuzes political event is different from Badious, I will suggest that it is no less important and in some respects it is potentially more revolutionary. In a final chapter on Vodou Economics, I will examine Haiti as a sort of case study of what Deleuze calls the people who are missing in contemporary neoliberalism, and suggest that understanding Vodou spirits or lwa in terms of a time-image provides striking resources for conceiving a radical politics in a postsecularist context. This last chapter is less explicitly focused on Deleuze, but it develops a quasi-Deleuzian reading of and application for our contemporary political and economic situation, and shows why Deleuze remains an important theoretical resource.

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