SOPHIA (2008) 47:345358

DOI 10.1007/s11841-008-0078-z

Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou

Justin Clemens & Jon Roffe

Published online: 13 September 2008

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a

phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the
key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this
opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as
metaphysics was perhaps integrally onto-theology, that is, ultimately continuous
with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the
philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that Heidegger is the
last universally recognised philosopher, provides the means for a radical
reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of
the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the
deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its
legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key
Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself.
Keywords Onto-theology . Poetry . Mathematics . Religion . Badiou . Heidegger
I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart upon her hand
J. Clemens (*)
School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, P.O. Box 4272, 3052 Victoria,
Australia
e-mail: jclemens@unimelb.edu.au
J. Roffe
Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: overground@imap.cc
J. Roffe
Philosophy Program, School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry, La Trobe University,
Victoria 3086, Australia

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J. Clemens, J. Roffe

And bear that beating heart away;

And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though Gods death were but a play. W.B. Yeats
If in thinking there were already adversaries and not mere opponents, then
thinkings case would be more auspicious. Martin Heidegger
The possibility that there may be an irrevocable complicity between philosophy
and theology has proven one of the central philosophical themes of the twentieth
century. Indeed, Martin Heidegger indisputably one of the greatest thinkers of
that century came more and more to believe that metaphysics itself was integrally
onto-theology, that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of
the thought of being by Plato as eidos and which, for that reason, had never
thereafter been able to adequately separate itself from religious motifs despite the
radical banishment of the gods. In the wake of this capture by the idea, Western
metaphysics found itself, in the very course of its ceaseless struggle to extract itself
from the destiny of its own founding gesture, the subject of a non-dialectical
sequence of ruptures that saw its forgetting of the forgetting of the being of beings
culminate in the demonic carnival of nihilism that is our own age of the worldpicture and the deleterious epoch of technology.1 As Michael Gillespie puts it:
The danger for man, as Heidegger sees it, is that he may believe nihilism is only a
recent deviation from an otherwise healthy tradition that can be restored by a minor
correction. It is necessary instead to recognize the irremediably nihilistic essence of the
Western tradition as a whole and turn away from it altogether toward a recollection and
reconsideration of the forgotten question of Being that nihilism makes possible
(Gillespie 1987, p. 891). For Heidegger, then, we find ourselves today assailed by
dangers on all sides; indeed, perhaps now menaced by irremediable dangers, the
possible obliteration of the earth itself in the wake of the disasters of thought.
Integral to Heideggers own astonishing recomposition of the workings of this
catastrophe-machine which is itself essentially non-historical because it founds
the very possibility of the emergence of history, and so would be better denominated
a kind of ever-involuting eventing of thinking is the attempt to exit from ontotheology in a resolutely non-traditional way. Indeed, one can discern in this regard
an intricate triple strategy on Heideggers part:
i) An attentive, destructive rereading of the entirety of the philosophical tradition,
which at once demonstrates that the key thinkers are already other than the
thoughts that seem most their own (that is, those turnings in the history of
philosophy such as are designated, say, by Descartes), and that there subsist
intimations of ways out of the runnels of nihilism if one attempts to approach the
unthought at the very origin of their thoughts and thought (see especially
Heideggers reinterpretation of the pre-Socratics here);2

See Heidegger 1977 for easily-accessible English translations of some of the key texts.

See Heidegger 1975.

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ii) A new mobilisation of the resources of the poem, which becomes a witness to
the disaster in the midst of the disaster itself, and which can at once provide an
extra-philosophical diagnosis of our situation as well as tentative indications for
an exit and a new beginning (see especially the readings of Hlderlin, Rilke and
Trakl here)3;
iii) An awaiting, suspension or a letting-be that, beyond the tasks prescribed
by i) and ii), affirms that only a god can save us now, that no exertion of
willing, belief or thought alone, however strenuous, can lead us out of the
Egypt of Nihilism to the Promised Land of Being. For, as Heideggers analysis
runs: On the one hand, the world picture is Christianized inasmuch as the
cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditioned, absolute. On the other
hand, Christendom transforms Christian doctrine into a world view (the
Christian world view), and in that way makes itself modern and up to date. The
loss of the gods is the situation of indecision regarding God and the gods.
(Heidegger 1977, pp. 1167) Even the word hope is inadequate to denominate
the extremity of this final doctrine of Heideggers, which is essentially linked to
a conviction of the radical in-finitude of being.
This is why, in a 1947 paper entitled The Thinker as Poet, Heidegger can
carefully discriminate between the three pressing dangers of thinking: the good
danger, poetry; the evil danger, thinking, which must, but only can rarely, manage
to think against itself; and, finally, philosophizing, dangerous insofar as it is
constitutionally muddled, itself the unknowing tributary of an ancient decision it
cannot seize as its own. Heidegger can thus, in alluding to Hlderlins magnificent
line where the danger is, there the saving power grows, affirm the slogan: poetry
that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. (Heidegger 1971, p. 12). So: the
injunction for a recovery of the question of being as finitude in the medium of
thought through a turn from onto-theology to poetry and the patient holding-oneselfin-suspension toward the possibility of new gods against the furore of technological
nihilism.
Heideggers intervention, then, establishes an approach (the triplet of destruction-poetising-suspension), a central non-theme (the being of beings), and a set of
extraordinarily complex doctrines (especially regarding philosophy as essentially
onto-theology, science as specialized institutional research, the essence of
technology as enframing, the engulfment of art by culture, the loss of the gods,
etc.) that continue to govern the regimes of thought today. Moreover, these factors
continue to do so not so much in their compelling of assent or confirmation by
commentators, but in the sense that they cannot not be encountered as affecting the
current practices of both philosophy and non-philosophy no matter what ones
image of philosophy might be.
Hence the intimate critiques of Heidegger by such thinkers as Jacques Derrida,
Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for whom Heidegger must be
extended by being turned against himself: in these critiques, Heidegger is revealed as
still himself a metaphysician, in the course of a further displacement of the topos of
the being of beings; but the question concerning science tends, at best, to retrace the
3

See the collection of texts in Heidegger 1971.

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Heideggerian pathways, and, in the still-further-radicalised drive to reinterpretation

of the tradition, we discover a new antiquarianism, a new poeticising, and a new
onto-theology.4 Indeed, we can even discover a quasi-phenomenological tradition
which, on the basis of its struggle with Heidegger, reinvigorates the theological as
such.5 Alternatively we find, in thinkers like Jacques Lacan and, after him, JeanClaude Milner, a stringent critique of the Heideggerian analysis of the sciences, of
the status and place of the nothing, but at the price of abandoning philosophy
altogether.6 We find, differently still, in Michel Foucault and in his wake, an
innumerable host of cultural-studies scholars and media theorists examining
discourse networks and histories of sexuality; yet, if the question of being has
disappeared almost altogether from such work, along with philosophy itself, what
remains is a sense of the contingency and disparity of epistemes.7 The work of Gilles
Deleuze and his epigones, though projecting a quite different task and mode for
philosophy, different references and ideals, is still indebted to Heidegger in its
struggles with the problematics of language, of the event and of affect.8 With
analytic philosophers we continue to find either a wholesale rejection of the
Heideggerian enterprise ( la Rudolf Carnap) or an attempted compromise on the
basis of a redescription of technical motifs ( la Hubert Dreyfus).9 In the realm of
political philosophy, we find very diverse attempts by such thinkers as Giorgio
Agamben, as well as by certain neo-conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, to
contest politically the Heideggerian closure of nihilism which, paradoxically,
often seems to take place on the basis of a fundamental agreement regarding the end
of history (even if there are significant variations in the specifics).10 The point of
this untenably-truncated sketch is simply to suggest that in none of these cases has
there been a clear rupture with the Heideggerian enterprise, and, above all, with the
motif of finitude a finitude, not incidentally, that allegedly undercuts any concept
of the subject or universal truth.
We can schematise the vectors of this alleged dispersion in the following way:
either one retains the claims of philosophy at the cost of an adequate account of
science, or, if science is to be saved, philosophy must go; either philosophy remains
continuous with theology as onto-theology, or they can be separated only by
subordinating both to poetry (or, which comes to the same thing, the problematics of
contemporary media); either we submit to an elevated form of historicism (whose
4

See, among the very many works of Derrida which directly engage with Heidegger, Derrida 1982, 2008,
1987, and 1989; see also Lacoue-Labarthe 1990, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, and the latters The
Birth to Presence (Nancy 1993).

See, for instance, the work of Emmanuel Levinas, including Levinas 1969, the more recent theology of
Jean-Luc Marion, e.g. Marion 1991, and that of Michel Henry (Henry 2002; OSullivan 2006).

See on this point, Milner 1995.

See the notorious interview with Foucault in which he admits that, for him, Heidegger always remained
the essential philosopher, (Foucault 1989, p. 326); see also the illuminating interview with the great
German media-theorist Friedrich Kittler, in which he baldly states: For me, the import of Foucault and
Lacan rests on the fact that their writings are two possible ways of returning to Heidegger without naming
him, Kittler and Armitage 2006, p. 20.

The key text in this regard is Deleuze 1990.

See, for example, Inwood 2000.

10

See, for instance, Agamben 1998, or Fukuyama 2002.

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matrix remains nihilistic), or affirm a technicist naturalism (which may well come to
the same thing). The question then becomes: are the ontological and theological
separable, whether de facto or de jure? Or: is there a way to sustain philosophy
against science without succumbing to an irrationalism whose epitome is
theological? Or: is there a way of discoursing upon method which is neither
historicist nor technicist, neither a formalised description of circumscribed
anthropological practices nor an abstracted account of the limits of pure reason?
Alain Badiou has recently attempted to answer all these questions in the affirmative,
and in a way which moves to use one of his own favoured terms
transversally across the established accounts.11 What, then, does he have to say,
and on what grounds does he say it?
There is no question that Badious program has been explicitly conceived and
constructed as a confrontation with Heidegger. Badious masterpiece Being and
Event (first published in French as Ltre et lvnement in 1988) in fact opens with
the statement that Heidegger is the last universally recognised philosopher (Badiou
2005 [1988], p. 1). We need to underline that this little phrase is not merely a passing
description of a localised intellectual situation. On the contrary, it is at once a
diagnosis and a declaration of hostilities, which prescribes a general task and
projects a global definition of philosophy. A diagnosis: the Heideggerian legacy still
determines thought today, even among those who seem to be its opponents and
repudiators. A declaration: I, Badiou, declare war on this Heideggerian capture! A
task: to reconstruct philosophy from the ashes to which it has been reduced by the
Heideggerian fire. A definition: philosophy must be at once interventional and
universal. To do this, Badiou must therefore confront Heidegger on his own ground,
especially regarding the latters strictures regarding the question of being, the
subject, and the powers of science.
Certainly, Badiou gives his assent to at least two central Heideggerian
propositions: 1) philosophy must have something to do with the question of being;
2) the question of being, if not itself strictly speaking historical, is historically
expressed. The assent, however, ends there. Badiou proceeds to enunciate their
points of difference, which are many and absolute. To lay out the minimal logic of
Badious argument as a ten-step program:
i) Plato is the founding moment of philosophy.
ii) This moment is the first at which the problematic of being is properly put (and
not the moment of the falsification of the un-veiling of Being as eidos).
iii) The problematic of being is properly put when the claims of poetry are curbed
by those of mathematics.
iv) Mathematics is not a deficient form of speaking being, but the only way in
which being can be properly expressed, i.e., mathematics = ontology.

11
Interestingly, this term is also to be found deployed in the writings of Flix Guattari, both before and
after his encounter with Deleuze (see Genosko 2002, especially the second chapter). Given Badious
strangely delayed introduction to the Anglo-American philosophical scene having all of the
characteristics of the structure of a trauma much remains to be done in relating his thought in an
appropriately detailed manner with that of his contemporaries, especially when they are, like Guattari,
enemies.

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v) Mathematics = ontology because it is as pure as reason gets, i.e., mathematics is

at once non-empirical, axiomatic, deductive, extra-linguistic, non-definitional,
universalising.
vi) Mathematics is therefore anti-theological insofar as it assaults any form of
revealed presence through its in-principle subtractive operations.
vii) The history of being is not given through sequences of the great prophets,
philosophers or poets, but through innovations in foundational mathematics.
viii) These innovations in foundational mathematics run from Euclidean geometry,
through analytic geometry, calculus, to set-theory and beyond.
ix) Each mathematical innovation delivers an entirely new account of multiplicity,
which enables its own mathematical predecessors to be rewritten in its own
terms without loss.
x) Our contemporary situation sees multiplicity as formalised by set-theory, in
which the multiple is essentially infinite.
The consequences for philosophy are as follows (given as a further, relatively
arbitrary, ten steps):
i) If mathematics = ontology, philosophy must rely on mathematics for ontology
(and not believe itself capable of this by itself), a reliance which takes the form
of transliterating mathematical axioms into philosophical jargon, e.g., being,
nothingness, idea, etc.
ii) But if mathematics = ontology, then philosophy ontology, i.e., philosophy
must be in excess of ontology.
iii) But also philosophy theology (the claims of revealed presence), because the
former depends on mathematics, which necessarily breaches with the
mysterious revelations upon which the latter depends.
iv) But if philosophy is to be more than a commentary upon mathematics, there
must be something other than ontology with which philosophy thinks, and
which also exceed the ruses of revealed presence (or, at least, do not entail that
philosophy succumbs to such).
v) This something other was given foundationally by Plato, i.e., it engages the
problems of art, science, love and politics.
vi) These problems are problems for philosophy not on the basis of Platos
authority, but because they specifically concern universal human problems
which are nevertheless extra-rational without, for all that, simply being
irrational; moreover, they constitute the only universal human problems which
constantly demand new solutions.
vii) These universals must be given the name of truths.
viii) Philosophys task is to think the (non) relation of these truths, i.e.,
mathematics, poetry, love and politics at once.
ix) Philosophy does this through what is absolutely specific to it, the category of
Truth.
x) This category is constructed on the basis of truths, but does not rule over or
legislate for them.
Telegraphically, for Badiou: Philosophy thinks the Truth; this Truth is dependent
on truths for its viability; this dependence is a conditioning by universals; these

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universals are essentially anti-religious because they work against all received or
ancestral truths; philosophy itself is, accordingly, essentially anti-religious and antitheological. Indeed, philosophy is the great adversary of theology which is why,
as we shall see, they are so often confounded, and why, moreover, philosophy
cannot, paradoxically, ever fully purge itself of theological tendencies.
This is not the place to discuss all the difficulties of Badious program, nor justify
some of his most ambitious claims; here, we wish only to sketch its most determined
features in their relation to the situation of onto-theology with which we began. One
should, however, immediately recognise where, why and how Badious procedures
and terms confront the dominant trajectories of contemporary philosophy,
particularly its post-Heideggerian variants. Truths, Truth, Being, Universal,
Infinite, Subject, etc., are key terms for Badiou, unlike so many other
contemporary philosophers. We can also see how, despite their shared investment
in being, Badiou explicitly distinguishes himself from Heidegger at almost every
other point: the status of Plato, of mathematics, the account of the history of being,
the sense of the history of and tasks for philosophy, etc. If there are of course very
many topoi where Badiou explicitly takes on Heidegger, let us concentrate on two,
whose related import should quickly become apparent. These bear, first, on the
interpretation of the phrase God is dead, and, second, upon the use and abuse of
poetry for thought.

Theology and Poetry

In the first volume of his magisterial interpretation of Nietzsche, Heidegger writes:
The phrase God is dead is not an atheistic proclamation: it is a formula for the
fundamental experience of an event in Occidental history (Heidegger 1981,
p. 156).12 This event is the experience of the destruction of the supersensible
world, of the doctrine of the two worlds that had been given its decisive
significance by Plato and which, in this very destruction, obliterates the sensible
world in the same moment. The experience of nihilism, as the outcome of an
immemorial process, is literally the catastrophe of the destruction of the world itself
in the realisation more precisely, in the turbulent incarnation of a failure to
recognise that there had never really been a world at all, that world depending
on the presupposition of an other world. Nietzsches paradoxical genius in breaking
the history of the world in two would be due to his recognition that there have only
ever been two-worlds-or-none, and that this was equivalent to two-and-none.
Moreover, Heidegger at once accepts the constrained teleology of Nietzsches
diagnosis the destiny of the West finishing itself in and as the nihilism it always
already was but demonstrates that Nietzsche could only himself accomplish this
through a simple inversion of metaphysics, which, in and through this inversion,
separated metaphysics from its essence and thus prevented the adequate thinkingthrough of this essence itself. Heidegger believes himself better able to redirect us
towards this essence in the wake of Nietzsche qua last metaphysician precisely
12

As the translator David Farell Krell notes, the translator of this volume notes, this is perhaps the earliest
terminological use of the word Ereignis in Heideggers thought.

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because he, Heidegger, will essay a thought that seeks the proper approach to the
question of being in finitude by attending to the sayings of the great poets who,
being by definition the best attuned to language, are in and by the same gesture the
best attuned to being. Heidegger thereby proposes to evade the catastrophic
grounding of philosophy-in-the-rational-idea with poetry as his guide.
Badiou, in contrast, proffers an entirely different kind of analysis of Nietzsches
statement. In the Preface to his Briefings on Existence, he notes that there is a
difference between the theoretical formula that God does not exist, and the
historical recognition that God is Dead (Badiou 2006a [1998], p. 21). The first,
clearly, concerns God as a concept; the second that God is a proper name. As a
proper name, the statement effects a peculiar torsion: it could only be stated of a
creature-that-was-once-alive, but is (claimed to be) no longer. As such, a living God
is always the God of someone, that is, already a finite God. Here, Badiou closely
follows Nietzsche. For the very recognition of the finitude of God (or the gods) is, in
and of itself, evidence of the non-universality (and the non-truth) of such a creature.
Moreover, as Nietzsche has his madman declaim in Zarathustra, the news of such a
death takes a little time to get around, though it does not contradict the fact; Badiou,
likewise, declares that God Himself is really dead, has really died, and that this death
is itself a great and momentous occasion for thought.13 For what subsists is no
longer religion, but its theatre. As for God as a concept, this is of course a properly
metaphysical lets say: an onto-theological conceit. Badiou, following Quentin
Meillassoux, remarks that the God of the Concept had always been the centrepiece
of a rationalist war-machine directed against the Living God of religions. This is
where Heidegger enters for Badiou, as the apostle of a third God, the God of the
Poets, for whom God is neither living/dead, nor a concept, but a thing whose
withdrawal has disenchanted the world: the question of the poem is therefore that of
a retreat of the gods, and it coincides neither with the philosophical question nor
with the religious question. This, for Badiou, proves to be Heideggers aporia, and
entirely bound up with the latters obsession with finitude. In other words, the
problematics of nihilism, finitude and the poem prove, with Heidegger, to be
inextricably bound together. The way to cut this knot is evidently then: a) to displace
the diagnosis of nihilism; b) to confront all accounts of finitude; c) to urge the
unleashing of the poem from its self-appointed task as the melancholic guardian of
finitude. For Badiou, the task of philosophy today is therefore that of the triple
destitution of God. This will entail a concomitant secularisation of the infinite by
means of mathematics, and a rejection of the motifs of finitude, death and the One:
just like existence, death is not a category of being (Badiou 2006b, p. 285).
Badiou attempts to effect this destitution in a number of places, sometimes
dealing directly with the problematic of nihilism, sometimes directly with the
problematic of finitude, sometimes directly with the poem.14 But Manifesto for
Philosophy is perhaps the text in which he most directly and extensively confronts
the Heideggerian account of modernity. There, Badiou reiterates just how
commonplace Heideggers doctrine of modernity has become, that it has congealed

13

Indeed, in Badiou 1999, Badiou gives the palm to modern capitalism for killing God.

14

In addition to the aforementioned references, see Badiou 1991, 1992a, b, 2003b, c, and 2005b.

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into a dogma that paralyses thought. Badiou recapitulates the key points of
Heideggers doctrine as follows:
a. The modern figure of metaphysics, articulated around the category of the
subject, is in the process of its completion, and this subject is essentially the
subject of technology.
b. The global domination of technology is coupled with the finishing-off of
philosophy.
c. This technical finish of philosophy, the massive symptoms of which are modern
science and the totalitarian State, has to be denominated as nihilism, as the
destitution of time and times.
d. In our destitute, nihilistic epoch, only poets are still holding up their guttering
candle in search of being.
e. As such, thought must reorient itself by way of the great poets.
f. This reorientation entails not only an attention to the great poets, but the
simultaneous reinscription of the divagations of the history of philosophy qua
thought of being back to Plato, accompanied by an intensified interrogation of
the pre-Socratic prehension of Being.
Badiou proceeds to take this schema apart, point by point. First of all, Badiou
notes (as, indeed, have others) just how archaising and nostalgic Heidegger is for the
blood and soil, for the humble craftspeople and peasants who, in the deep wisdom
garnered from their honest labours, remain the least compromised in their relation to
being by the degenerate hubbub of modern technology. Badiou further notes that
Heideggers analysis of the features of technology as nihilism would be more
accurately applied to the globalisation of capitalism and not to the essence of
technology at all. In fact, far from being submitted to the unrestrained dominion of
technology, the world is rather subject to the vagaries of capitalist profiteering,
which severely restrict technological inventiveness. As the very title of his book
should suggest it is indeed a manifesto Badiou does not believe that
philosophy is responsible for the disasters of our epoch, nor that it has been finished
or finished-off, or just another victim paraded through the streets in the
phantasmagoria of late-capitalist triumph. Indeed, this belief is already to give
philosophy both too little and too much. Too little, because it sees philosophy as a
kind of zombie suicide, self-killed at the moment of its birth by its own nihilism, but
somehow continuing to shamble through history in an oblivious daze. Too much,
because it simultaneously also treats philosophy as the matrix of universal history,
positing a kind of contingent yet absolute teleology whose limits can only finally be
experienced as such today.15 Badiou, in contrast, places philosophys powers and
responsibilities altogether elsewhere. In fact, he tries to sap the grounds of
Heideggers attributions insofar as he believes that philosophy itself makes nothing
happen, but rather follows after is conditioned by the truly productive
processes of politics, art, science and love.

Indeed, as Richard Rorty once remarked, Heidegger was never able to see politics or art as more than
epiphenomenal never able to shake off the philosophy professors conviction that everything else
stands to philosophy as superstructure to base (Rorty 1992, p. 225).

15

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J. Clemens, J. Roffe

Peculiarly enough, the severity of his assault forces Badiou to return a limited
pertinence to several of Heideggers doctrines regarding the poem. For Badiou,
certainly, we are neither in the era of technical control (as aforementioned, he thinks
the possibilities of technology are severely limited under capitalism), nor that of
nihilism (because real thought is still possible, necessary and actual). However,
nihilism is certainly operative insofar as thought continues to refuse to take up the
genuine opportunities that have been created by the rampage of capital; for example,
as long as it continues to exhibit nostalgia for all the sacred bonds that capital has in
fact already really destroyed. In Marxs famous phrase: all that is solid melts into
air. For Badiou, it is in fact the retention of the One (i.e., God) that is among the
principal symptoms of nihilism in thought today.16
In other words and this is absolutely crucial for Badious definition of
philosophy philosophy is not always and everywhere possible. To take place,
philosophy minimally requires that its four truth-procedures (science, love, art,
politics) are all active in the situation in which it finds itself, i.e., in a society without
a living form of mathematics (that is, without mathematicians continuing to work on
real problems in the field), philosophy itself would be impossible. This four-fold
availability of its conditions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
philosophy for it can always also bungle its relation to its own conditions. One
of the necessities of philosophy is that, in its construction of the concept of Truth, it
genuinely puts all four truth-procedures in an egalitarian relation of some kind
without simply subordinating one to another, or excluding one or another absolutely
from the realm of truths. These truth-procedures are essentially and practically
incommensurable with each other, but, because they each deal with something
singular, they each have something to say that only they can say.17 Certainly, as
Plato does, a philosopher can evince genuine suspicion of, say, poetry, apparently
excluding it from his ideal republic, but it is also the case that, in this very exclusion
not to mention the properly poetic aspects of Platos presentation of his
justifications for such an exclusion it is clear that this particular form of
exclusion in fact denotes a unique and real relation.
The same is not the case for post-Hegelian philosophy in Europe which, for
Badiou, badly bungled its job. In fact, philosophical modernity has been
characterised by its inability to do philosophy, in a number of modalities. In such
circumstances, that is, given an immanent failure of philosophy, one or another truthprocedure can take up the sorts of investigations that would usually be the province
of philosophy. From Hlderlin, through Rimbaud and Mallarm, to Paul Celan, there
was indeed an age of poets, in which these poets started to propose radical theses
on being and time that had a properly philosophical dimension, above all, in their
destitution of objectivity as a basis for thinking being. It is precisely this that gives a
limited pertinence to Heideggers turn to the poets. Even if his poets were not always
the right or only ones, even if his readings were not always accurate (e.g., the
falsification Heidegger makes in his implicit opposition of matheme-knowledgeobject versus poet-subject-truth, the problem posed to Heideggers scheme by a great
16
See also Chapter 3 of Badiou 2003a for a slightly different account of the concept of nihilism, where
he takes up the Nietzschean definition of preferring to will nothingness rather than not will at all.
17

For a brief justification of these features, see Clemens 2006.

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philosopher-poet like Lucretius), even if the consequences Heidegger draws are

contestable, Heidegger recognised something genuinely important about the status of
the great poets in modernity, and was attempting, by means of his return to them, to
make grand philosophy possible again.18
Such a philosophy must affirm that God is indeed dead, and this entails it forge a
new relation between the matheme and the poem, between truth and infinity, and so
on. A surprising amount of Badious work can, when seen in the light of this
directive, take on a new import. When he speaks of Saint Paul, for instance, it is
clear that part of the work of philosophy is to rip out of allegedly religious texts their
kernel of truth, which, to the extent that this can be done at all, exposes that its
allegedly integrally religious aspects were in fact merely parasitic, opportunistic,
and exploitative. In other words, philosophy for Badiou can be done by anyone,
even deeply religious people but it is not the religious aspects that will prove to
be of any value. Moreover, if theological motifs are ultimately inexpungible, part of
the ongoing labour of philosophy is to keep on trying to purify, for ever and ever....

Theology and Mathematics

But is it really that simple? Can philosophy really purify itself of both its religious
animus and theology? In a footnote to The Sense of the World, Jean-Luc Nancy
remarks that:
Concerning the one, it would no doubt be necessary to involve oneself in a
confrontation with the ontology of number practiced by Alain Badiou. My
mathematical incompetence makes this impossible. But it does not prevent me
from recognizing certain formulations as being strictly equivalent to those to
which a deconstruction of ontotheology leads.... Up to a certain point, I
perceive nothing other than a transcription based on a regulated change of
terms. Beyond this, I am tempted to perceive in Badiou a negative theology of
this one through which the presentation of an infinity of multiples is
structured. (Nancy 1997, p. 186)
Perhaps, then, in the very essay to purify, philosophy actually reintroduces
ontotheological elements of an entirely more virulent kind? While Nancy grasps a
significant aspect of Badious thought viz. that mathematics is ontology his
diagnosis concerning this most central of onto-theological tropes is ultimately misplaced.
It is indeed the case for Badiou that mathematics instantiates the Parmenidean
claim of the unity of thought and being, and this instantiation presents an alternative
to both the positive and negative theological programs (which, in the first case,
concerns the thinkable presence of a fundamental divine being, and in the second,
the unthinkable status of the same being, which is unthinkable precisely insofar as
we cannot even properly assert its own proper being).19 This alternative is the
18
19

See also the essay on Philosophy and Poetry in Badiou 2003b, pp. 13549.

Badiou discusses this conjunction insightfully in the opening Meditation of Being and Event (Badiou
2005 [1988]), but also in his book on Deleuze (see Badiou 2000, pp. 7981). On the inscriptive nature of
Badious use of mathematics, see also Clemens 2003.

356

J. Clemens, J. Roffe

following: being, in ontological discourse, is present in the form of the material

inscription of mathematics. The point of contact between thought and being is
uniquely to be found in this absolutely rigorous and (rigorously) arid discourse. We are
not here before a substantial thought of being, but rather (as indicated above) a
subtractive one. Nancys suspicion is misplaced to the extent that he continues to
consider ontology solely in terms of its referent. Mathematics as inscription has none.20
Furthermore, the figure of the one in Badiou is only ever the result of an operation,
never posited as an origin, in the manner of traditional metaphysics that deconstruction
concerns itself with.21 This would be a second anti-theological claim that takes root in
Badious fidelity to mathematics: that there is no fundamental unity in being, neither
God, One, nor Act. Being a science of the multiple, as we have noted, mathematics is
in a position to render consistent an ontological claim to primordial difference just
as Heideggers philosophy does. The difference is that, thanks to the inscriptive nature
of mathematics, thought is freed of its representational shackles in a much more direct
and profound manner. Thus, in place of Nancys concern, it would be better to insist
that the homology between the deconstructive project and Badious philosophy
extends even as far as this key question.22
A correlative point concerning the interrelation of history, poetry and mathematics
remains to be made. For Badiou, it is no longer the case, as in Heidegger, that poetry
and mathematics provide two ways in which thinking and being come together,
insofar as being is historically unfolded or deployed, but rather as regimes whose
elemental capacity is to introduce novelty into this unfolding itself. History is made
only on the basis of creative thought on the basis of poetry and mathematics, of
love and politics and the natural unfolding of being in all its apparent diversity is
only delivered into an historical reckoning by the insinuation of change and the
institution of novel thought. History, then, is always a history of truths, and for
philosophy in turn, of Truth, in its singularity and plurality.
The ultimate or underlying difference between Badiou and Heidegger is thus
neither the emphasis on the fundamental status of mathematics for thinking, nor his
alternative presentation of the role of poetry, but rather the manner in which
mathematics and poetry are positively articulated, not in the form of an architectonic
opposition, but as two different yet equally significant sites for formal innovation.23

This is already indicated in his claim that Badiou maintains an ontology of number. Certainly, Badiou
does present such an ontology, particularly in the closing parts of Badiou 2008. However, the claim is not
that being is numerical in nature a claim that has a number of close relatives and a rich lineage in early
modern philosophy. Rather, as Badiou insists in the Introduction of Being and Event, The thesis that I
support does not in any way declare that being is mathematical, which is to say composed of mathematical
objectivities. It is not a thesis about the world but about discourse. It affirms that mathematics, throughout
the entirety of its historical becoming, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being. (Badiou 2005a
[1988], p. 8).

20

21

Again, the key point of reference here is the opening Meditation of Being and Event, which connects
the subordination of the one to the multiple to Lacan.

22

The paradigmatic text, with respect to deconstructive approaches to the tradition, is certainly Jacques
Derridas Differance (Derrida 1982, pp. 327).

23

On the significant role of formalism in Badious thought, see the enlightening remarks on this topic in a
recent interview published at the close of Badiou 2007.

Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou

357

Thus, finally, a double figure emerges concerning the philosophytheology

relationship. In static terms, it is mathematics which makes possible a radical split
between the two. But in dynamic terms, it is the always ongoing process of invention
that characterises not just mathematics but poetry, politics and love that is the
engine-house of a perpetual effort, in philosophical thought, to expunge its
theological twin, from its deployments of its exclusive valorisation of Truth.

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