parrhesia 25 · 2016 · 62-85
polemic as logic in the work
of alain badiou
aj bartlett and justin clemens
What has not yet been satisfactorily discussed in the extensive and expanding
secondary commentary on the work of Alain Badiou is the particular way in which
he orients and structures almost all his philosophical work, from his brief notes all
the way up to his major treatises. Yet the structure of Badiou’s writing is crucial to
his argument, and in several ways. The key to this structuring is the order-relation
that he establishes between the subsections of his presentations. Every beginning
in Badiou invariably and explicitly takes on a form of self-situation in order to
proceed through targeted argumentative negations to affirmative, constructive
propositions—and this very organisation is itself intended to enact and exemplify
the work of affirmative reconstruction that it calls for in the world.
This article limits itself to identifying, isolating, and describing this recurrent
characteristic polemical structure in Badiou, as a prolegomenon to further
investigations into the crucial relationship between polemic, logic and assertion in
contemporary philosophy more generally. Its more general significance is directed
towards establishing how certain philosophical conditions of presentation come
to be presented in and by the presentation itself as a crucial conceptual task.
If such a focus on formal questions can prove tiresome, the stakes here are to
expose how particular “thematics” or “contents” can remind blind to un-thought
implications of their own form.
In the present context, we offer a close exegesis of Badiou’s rhetorical procedures.
If such exegeses can seem to imply an uncritical adherence to their subject—
perhaps precisely through their obsession with minor formal details—we do
not intend this to be the case. Quite the contrary: the point is rather to ensure
a rigorous basis from which a real confrontation can thereafter be rigorously
launched (if there will unfortunately be only minimal space for that here).
Certainly, it is not the case that Badiou’s stylistics have gone entirely unremarked.
Almost every commentator has noted—whether with enthusiasm or repulsion—
Badiou’s aggressive and declarative tones.1 Moreover, some go further. As Bruno
Bosteels remarks in a section of his “Translator’s Introduction” to Theory of the
Subject, which “adopts the format of a seminar inspired by Lacan’s example.
Badiou’s fidelity to this model is actually quite extensive.”2 Bosteels proceeds to
note the very different styles of Badiou’s three great treatises, noting that each:
adopts a unique generic format, following three different models in the
history of philosophy: Theory of the Subject is a Lacanian-inspired seminar;
Being and Event is made up of 37 Cartesian or post-Cartesian meditations;
and Logics of Worlds adopts a structure vaguely reminiscent of Spinoza’s
Ethics.3
Leaving aside the quibble that Lacan’s seminars may not be so much an event in
the history of philosophy as in psychoanalysis (or perhaps in “anti-philosophy”),
Bosteels’s suggestive indications don’t draw out the conceptual implications of
the form of presentation that is at stake beyond noting several broad generic and
syntagmatic differences. For his part, Oliver Feltham identifies three different
figures of the philosopher at work throughout Badiou’s oeuvre, which he calls “the
eagle,” “the old mole” and “the owl.”4 If such an identification usefully analyses
the weave of heterogeneous conceptual attitudes that traverse Badiou’s oeuvre,
it nonetheless cannot account for the self-conscious formal unity of each of
Badiou’s texts. In a long review of Logics of Worlds, Justin Clemens makes several
suggestions regarding the immanent tensions between structure and presentation
in Badiou’s work, including that, developmentally speaking—both in the sense of its
historical becoming and at the level of individual philosophers—philosophy really
requires a concept of the “sequel” to account for the regulated transformations
of philosophy from text to text.5 Such “sequelization” should at once attempt
to account for the drive-to-form exhibited by each text, the emergence of an
immanent conceptual tension out of this form, and the subsequent attempt to
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 63
return to and treat that tension in another text, another form. Yet Clemens’s
account also lacks the appropriate attention to the ‘little texts’ that come
between the ‘major’ ones, although this may well be precisely the places where
the auto-thematization of unthoughts emerge point-by-point. Finally, although
the philosophical commentary is usually happy to add that Badiou is a playwright,
a novelist and librettist, it just as often sets aside the questions of form, genre
and style thereby raised. Yet it is not a priori clear that philosophy can avoid the
challenges of form without hamstringing itself.
We therefore ourselves begin with Badiou’s beginnings, drawing from a simple
example which stages this development in a stark and clarified form. In the short
essay “Philosophy and desire,” Badiou opens by invoking Arthur Rimbaud and
Stéphane Mallarmé, before moving to a sketch of the doxa of the contemporary
world. From there, Badiou moves to an analysis of the dominant modalities of
contemporary philosophy, before offering his own account of the current tasks
for philosophy:
This philosophical investigation begins under the banner of poetry;
thus recalling the ancient tie between poetry and philosophy. Rimbaud
employs a strange expression: “les révoltes logiques,” “logical revolts.”
Philosophy pits thought against injustice, against the defective state
of the world and of life. Yet it pits thought against injustice in a
movement which conserves and defends argument and reason, and
which ultimately proposes a new logic.6
The beginning of this essay thus constitutes a rapid double-shift. Its incipit is
an astringent form of captatio benevolentiae, a recommendation deriving from
classical rhetoric: open with an appeal of some kind, an anecdote or allusion to
put the audience onside. Here, the allusion is to the ‘ancient quarrel’ that Plato
speaks of between philosophy and poetry. We are at once returned to the most
familiar and the most contested territory of the origins of philosophy and its first
and greatest enemy. Yet this allusion also scrambles the received doxography
around the polarities of poetry and philosophy, for Rimbaud and Mallarmé are
invoked here in order to provide watchwords for philosophy itself. In doing so,
they establish the terms in which the rest of the essay will be played out: revolt,
logic, universality and risk. As such, they are immediately arrayed against the
dominant tendencies of our world, which demands the liberty of commodities
over revolt, inconsistent communication over logic, fragmented specializations
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over universality, and security calculations over risk. Note, moreover, that this
allusion at once establishes a direction and a directive or declaration: it directs
us to the key terms whose discussion will constitute the bulk of the subsequent
essay; it declares its position in such a way as to offer directives for contemporary
thought in general.
What follows this opening is extremely illuminating in its operations. From the
establishment of the key terms in a general polemical context, then, Badiou outlines
three specific tendencies that have flourished in, even govern, this contemporary
philosophical context (in this case, the late 1990s): hermeneutics, analytic
philosophy, and postmodern philosophy. As he remarks, “together they form the
most global and descriptive geography possible of contemporary philosophy,”
and further specifies, “these orientations correspond, in some measure, to three
geographical locations.”7 In line with the theme of self-situation, let us emphasize
the term ‘geography’ here, for ‘spatial’ terms are implicitly deployed over and
above ‘temporal’ ones (we shall return to this feature below). Note, too, that the
late 19th century French poets are thereby treated as if they were as contemporary as
the contemporary philosophical orientations that they will simultaneously be shown to at
once found and rebuke. (We will explain these points further below.) Badiou himself
makes it clear that he is using the poets at once “positively” and “negatively”
(although these terms are probably inadequate here): positively insofar as they
provide the crucial directives for our initial orientation to the problems, negatively
insofar as these directives will paradoxically require us to depart from them in
order to follow them.
At the moment that these poets are invoked to scramble the received distinctions
between poetry and philosophy from within philosophy itself, they also prove
exemplary acts of analysis and foundation. For Badiou these three philosophical
tendencies share something which has been derived from these poets (perhaps
without knowing it), as they simultaneously fail to live up to their challenges. The
philosophers have followed the poets without knowing it—but have failed to draw
all of the consequences. Moreover, even though Badiou himself is clearly drawing
something essential from these poets, he is also, as we will specify, seeking to
exceed the situation which their injunctions presuppose, expose and address. The
paradoxes are clear: existing philosophies are covertly determined by poets that
they perhaps ignore or rebuke; to escape these determinations, one must confront
these poets by affirming the truly radical status of their utterances; in doing so,
one must go all the way…and not tap out before the consequences are fully drawn.
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 65
As those already familiar with Badiou’s work might recognise, Badiou’s rhetoric
here is implicitly stringently governed by his own conditions. He is taking Rimbaud
and Mallarmé with an absolute philosophical seriousness. Yet to be conditioned is
not simply to have to say this or that about this or that. Alternatively: even if one
indeed make certain assertions on the basis of a conditioning, such assertions—
however stringently or strongly expressed—do not thereby constitute a dogma or
doctrine. Rather, they become the index of a non-dialectical point for what we will
call the directives of philosophical excession.
Badiou’s summary of the key aspects of these three orientations purports to
target their key concepts, methods and aims. Hermeneutics, identified with the
names of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, has interpretation as its key
concept, its method to confront the nihilist technological closure, and its aim to
open the ‘closed’ to meaning. Analytic philosophy has the rule as its key concept,
its method a logico-grammatical analysis of propositions, and its aim is a therapy
of meaning, “to shew,” as Wittgenstein famously has it, “the fly the way out of the
fly-bottle.”8 Postmodern philosophy has the deconstruction of modernity as its
key concept, propounds a rigorously mixed method, and proposes detotalization
as its goal.
What Badiou then identifies are two features which these otherwise heterogeneous
orientations share. First, there is the common conviction of the “end of
philosophy”: “the ideal of truth as it was put forth by classical philosophy has
come to its end,”9 as evidenced in the work of Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap and JeanFrançois Lyotard. Second, there is the “central place accorded to the question
of language” by all three.10 These two features, the first negative, the second
positive, thereby link these orientations according to a logic that they themselves
are resistant to examining—which exposes an initial moment of a non- or antiphilosophical tenor at the heart of contemporary philosophy itself.
Badiou then makes two further moves. First, he criticises these commonplaces
on a number of grounds, above all in their resistant complicity with the general
situation of thoughtlessness he had previously sketched. As he puts it, “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.”11 Hence the tendency within each orientation to locate—with some
desperation—a mode that will stabilise the generalising corrosion of global
communications. Heidegger famously reverts to the priority of (the German)
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language itself; analytic philosophy sutures itself to an image of scientific language
(above all, to an image of logic); postmodern philosophy prefers and promulgates
the elucubrations of literature and art. In each of these cases, an explicitly political,
scientific, or aesthetic mode not only fails to establish itself universally, but falls
into a unjustifiable condemnation or exclusion of other forms of thought. In
Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism, the deleterious implications are perhaps
most evident, but they are certainly there too with the other orientations.12 As
Badiou points out, analytic philosophy’s suture to scientific language leads not
only to contempt for all other forms of thought, but an extraordinary political
blindness to the fact that “even today the overwhelming majority of humanity
is out of reach of such a language.”13 Such sutures, in other words, entail and
encrypt a certain esotericism and elitism, even when they genuinely attempt
to speak “universally.” This is not to say that universalisms cannot be elitist
or “aristocratic” (an adjective Badiou himself employs at various points); only
that the nature of such elitism would need to be laid out and justified, that is,
established as egalitarian.
Second, Badiou uses this trinity of negative examples to forge his own position in
a polemical fashion. To do so, however, Badiou has to locate the aforementioned
“fixed point, a point of interruption” that is not corroded by the methods of these
existing orientations. It is at this point that he once again has recourse to extraphilosophical elements, to his own conditions and to their enemies. Philosophy
must confront commodification, media, technocratism and security. Having
begun with a preliminary excursus in philosophical self-situation, Badiou turns
to the world outside philosophy to show how the philosophies he is examining
are simultaneously attempting to follow the directives of the poets yet, precisely
because they are also sutured to one other condition above all, remain too in fee
to the non-philosophic situation. The non-philosophical horror, the corruption of
the world, must be confronted by philosophy as a foundational requirement. But
the world too still yearns for philosophy, even at the very height—or depth—of
its corruption.
This is a post-dialectical procedure on Badiou’s part, then. One must establish
oneself with regard to both contemporary philosophy and to non-philosophy
at once. Such an establishment must break with both. But it can only do so by
reference to both. One seeks the points at which philosophy falls back into the
corruption of the world; but one also seeks the points at which the world itself
demands philosophy. “Corruption” itself must be given a philosophical bearing:
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 67
a drive towards particularity, totality, inconsistency, injustice that nonetheless
demands the restitution of universalism, infinity, consistency and justice.
But in this recourse to extra-philosophical elements, Badiou simultaneously
has recourse to an interpretation of the history of relations between the concepts
and forms of presentation of philosophy itself—a recourse that is simultaneously
an auto-differentiation. We give two references here, although examples could
be multiplied. The first announces the necessity of attending to variations of
genre in philosophy, as well as to their necessity of their (self-) justification in
and by the “genre” of philosophy itself. In the “Author’s Preface” to Theoretical
Writings, Badiou begins: “Philosophical works come in a peculiar variety of
forms….basically, anything whatsoever that can be classified as ‘writing.’”14 Does
this statement not seem to return us to the very priority of language with which
Badiou wishes to break? Certainly not. It is to raise a vital question that has rarely
been explicitly raised (in analytic philosophy at least until recently), regarding the
generic status of the presentation of philosophy itself as integrally bound to the problem
of conceptualisation. As we shall see, this question is so important for Badiou that
it perhaps constitutes the very heart of his philosophy: to anticipate radically, it
will turn out that conditions are generic, while philosophy itself is a conditioned
trans-generic enterprise.
Tending to rely on a particular form of the professional journal article or the
technical treatise and a mode of proceeding that privileges the logical form of the
proposition, analytic philosophy only rarely comes to recognise this genre as genre
and, to the extent that this remains the case, it is therefore unable to recognise,
let alone think, the institutional conditions that enable and corral it in the first
place. Its formulas of thought, which it doesn’t know are formulas—or, worse
still, thinks that these are the only proper modes appropriate to thought, thereby
pathologising and indiscriminating its rivals—are thus essentially transmissionsof-unthought. This is especially peculiar given that the great progenitors of analytic
thought were themselves extraordinary inventors of forms of presentation.
Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, and J.L. Austin were all creators
of new forms, new styles of thinking, whose attention was captured by the full
gamut of conceptual requisites ranging from the most minimal, technical marks
of inscription to the structuring or anti-structuring of the full-length treatise
itself. Take Frege’s invention of new inscriptive systems in his revolutionary
works; Russell and A.N. Whitehead’s vast treatise; or Wittgenstein’s own radical
self-reinvention between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.
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Such styles are forged because it is clear that, in thinking, there must simultaneously
be what Harold Bloom calls a “breaking of the vessels” (of-received-form), in a
way that is precisely non- or anti-rhetorical (if we accept the received modern sense
of ‘rhetoric’ as persuasive-speech-without-any-necessary-rational-foundation).
As such, for Badiou too, polemic is separated from rhetoric. To be polemical is not
just to present contrary declarations or propositions, new methods and countermethods, but is to engage an entire modality that must be up to the challenge of the
ideas with which it is itself struggling. This is also why Badiou is very fond of the
genre of the Manifesto, for essential philosophical as well as of course “political”
reasons. A manifesto is a genre that declares its own generic status, from its title
onwards.15 To put this another way, whose import will be evident to those already
familiar with Badiou, the manifesto is a genre that generically declares its own
genericity. As we have been suggesting, moreover, certain elements characteristic
of the genre of the manifesto are found in Badiou beyond the self-denominated
instances, above all in the structuring by self-situation, the declarative passages,
the rhetoric of rebellion.
Yet if the modern continental tradition has tended to be more (explicitly and
centrally) attentive to these questions than is often in evidence in the analytic
tradition—since, especially in the wake of Heidegger, the technologies of
philosophy themselves come to be considered finite means of revealing, with
their own generic limitations emerging as a result and as a further goad to
more profound trans-philosophical investigations of the vicissitudes of extrapropositional thought—this very attentiveness has paradoxically often induced
thinkers to a concomitant dissemination or dissolution of the questions of truth,
being and the subject. Heidegger himself is exemplary here, especially given that
the thematic of technology is central to his oeuvre. Take the very famous early
analysis of the “damaged tool” in Being and Time:
in a disturbance of reference—in being unusable for…—the reference
becomes explicit. It does not yet become explicit as an ontological
structure, but ontically for our circumspection which gets annoyed by the
damaged tool… The context of useful things appears not as a totality never
seen before, but as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in
our circumspection. But with this totality world makes itself known.16
What is crucial in the present context is what becomes of this analysis in the
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 69
so-called “later Heidegger” following “the turn.” Here, it is the “disturbance of
reference” that, in rendering impossible the execution of a task through accident
or happenstance, forces out the exposure of a predigested totality and, through
it, the contingent revelation of the contingency of any actual sense of the world.
The damaged tool, in being damaged, simultaneously draws attention to itself as
‘unusable’ and the task that was to have been accomplished as un-doable, and thus
has a double implication. The first is that the materiality of the thing, its thingness
beyond-one’s-own-world-within-one’s-own-world begins to appear as such; the
second is that this ontic exposure reveals the already-implicit structuring of one’sown-world qua preconceived totality by constituting a local, punctual exception
to it from within.17 This double operation of the disturbance of reference through
a banal technological mishap—a completely quotidian non-event, suffused with
ordinary everydayness—exemplifies the genuine radicality of phenomenology’s
emphasis upon daily occurrences as having the potential to give rise to everyone’s
coming-to-philosophizing in the first place. The forgetting-of-forgetting effected
in and by the enacting of embodied know-how can also always already find the
potential for anamnesiac restitution by means of the little failed encounters of the
everyday, towards materials always in excess of their context of use and towards
thoughts always in excess of their context of consciousness.
What happens to Heidegger’s thought after his so-called “turn” with respect
to the poem takes up these early analyses of technology-as-revealing-essencein-its-breakdown by coupling it with an affirmation of poem-as-extra-legalevent-of-opening-to-Being. Why, then, and how? Simultaneously taking up and
confronting the Nietzschean analysis of the work of art as the essence of formgiving-will-to-power, Heidegger comments that, for his great predecessor, “Art
is not only subject to rules, must not only obey laws, but is in itself legislation.
Only as legislation is it truly art. What is inexhaustible, what is to be created, is
the law.”18 For Heidegger, however, it is not simply that great art establishes law
as such, but that it opens a more fundamental relation of dwelling-with-Being.
Because, as Heidegger notoriously announces, “Poetry that thinks is in truth the
topology of being,”19 great poems become not merely legislators or legislative, but
events: they are events which at once constitute a breaking-of-form (the novelty
of the poem exceeding the limits of contemporary language and its genesis), a
concomitant revelation of the status of the forms-that-they-have-broken (the
“background conditions” of the constitution of language as such that they expose
in the rupture), and a new bringing-of-truth that exceeds any technical closure
or operation of knowing, which, in its very presentation qua re-gathering of the
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disparate, opens the possibilities of different modes of thinking beyond any
proposition or prescription.
We should briefly pause here to consider some of the key ways in which Heidegger
elaborates this doctrine. First, if language is primary in the order of thinking, then
we must interrogate the language, and the forms of language, in which thought
has come to present itself as thought. Second, in this formal auto-interrogation of
formal interrogation, it becomes clear that such forms are essentially contingent,
finite inheritances, passed down to us without the passing-down itself becoming
available as such: indeed, such forms necessarily entail an occlusion of precisely
what they purport to transmit, and for a number of reasons. Third, language
as such must therefore become a topic for thought, albeit in modes that are
themselves localised by their (unthought) situation. Fourth, what leads us to
thought cannot simply be what already passes-for-thought, but neither can we
simply rupture with what conditions the historicity of our thought on the basis
of any putative will-to-think. Fifth, this situation directs us towards the poem as
the place in which the preceding concerns are exposed and re-framed, with a form
of language-recreation that is tantamount to the event-advent of thinking itself.
On the “analytic” side, then, we have an invention of forms that are occluded as
forms by the very tradition that comes to take up their challenge, while on the
“continental” side we have an invention of forms that come to complicate the
generic distinction between philosophy and its others to the point of dissolution
of every traditional philosophical point of distinction. On the “analytic” side, we
also have the privileging of mathematics and logic; on the “continental,” that of
poetry and art. Yet these divisive tendencies simultaneously extend themselves on
the basis of shared convictions about the ultimate priority of language over thought.
Notably, such analyses set up precisely a structure of situation and site to which
Badiou himself will directly respond in Being and Event and all his subsequent
works, if sometimes covertly and with entirely different tasks in mind. It is perhaps
remarkable that, in the secondary commentary to date, these connections have
gone altogether unmade, even in writing dedicated to the links between Heidegger
and Badiou.20
Let’s consolidate these remarks by invoking a moment in which style and
philosophy are explicitly examined by Badiou; indeed, our reference here further
specifies the import of these operations with respect to a crucial founding
figure: Descartes. At first glance, however, Descartes does not seem to be a key
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 71
interlocutor in any of Badiou’s major texts: if we take, for example, the thinkers
surveyed in the various meditations of Being and Event, we naturally find highly
detailed technical meditations dedicated to Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz and
Hegel, as well as to mathematicians and poets, including Cantor and Mallarmé.
The final meditation is entitled “Descartes/Lacan,” but one finds very little detail
about Descartes there and certainly not an intervention of the order of the other
meditations. On the contrary, this meditation explicitly announces Badiou’s own
program for a step-beyond the conception of the subject-qua-cogito, even in the
limit-version of Jacques Lacan, where that subject has become “void, cleaved,
a-substantial and ir-reflexive.”21 Nor is there any direct or extended encounter in
Being and Event with modern thinkers who are clearly in the Cartesian tradition:
no Kant, no Husserl, no Sartre.
Yet, in his latest “great work” Logics of Worlds, Badiou expressly nominates
Descartes as one of three key thinkers for him and his work, along with Plato and
Hegel.22 Why? When we start looking more closely, Descartes is everywhere in
Badiou. For Descartes announces a radical break of a kind that produces a new
thinking of style along with a new thinking of thought in an inseparable “act.”
Hence Badiou declares in the very essay on which we are focussing here: “My
position is to break with these frameworks of thought, to find another philosophical
style, a style other than that of interpretation, of logical grammarian analysis, or
of polyvalence and language games—that is, to rediscover a foundational style, a
decided style, a style in the school of a Descartes for example.”23 The Cartesian
reference is therefore no accident—on the contrary. Yet it immediately raises the
question of the relation between style and thought, not least in a context that
Badiou himself marks as marked by Lacanian psychoanalysis, for which, following
Buffon, “style is the man.”24
In 1637, Descartes publishes in the French vernacular the unprecedented work
Discours sur la mèthode. Badiou notes that Descartes incarnates a division between
the language of the people and an appeal to the savants of the Sorbonne, a division
that continues—despite all the stylistic, temporal, philosophical and institutional
differences—to be maintained in French up to and including Lacan and Deleuze
themselves in the form of an irresolvable equivocation between philosopher and
writer. Yet Descartes, in doing so, separates thought from natural language—which
is why he can write so happily in either Latin or French.25 Certainly, this is also
a beginning in the French language—entirely unexpectedly by the way—of the
seduction of women as an elementary democratic step. Not the learned gentlemen
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of the Latin Sorbonne, but French women become the affirmed addressees of
first philosophy. Yet this means that Descartes must also reject etymology as
determining of sense, in favour of a syntactically-restricted semantic field. As
Badiou glosses, Descartes’ thus becomes “a language of decision, principle and
consequence.”26
This further gives a political, polemical aspect to Descartes’ style, which, in
making a new incision into the language, means “in French, syntax politicises
every philosophical utterance.”27 He continues: “the privilege accorded French
has nothing to do with the language as such.”28 Indeed, Descartes never meditates
on the singularity of the French language at all—in notable contradistinction
from the German tradition whose peak moments are Hegel and Heidegger, both
of whom expatiate at length and with often-bombastic profundity about the
extraordinary priority of the Greek and German languages as such. Rather, we see
the emergence of an explicit philosophical writing that simultaneously egalitarian
and public in its language, as it takes upon itself the task of elaborating a subject
that is absolutely universal. In doing so, it enjoins its public to undergo a singular
meditation of their own, to follow the instructions it elaborates and justifies as a
form of ethical reorientation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. Such an
address is irrevocably translinguistic.
Recovering Descartes from the now-familiar image of the deleterious thinkers who
introduced the Western self-present subject as correlate of imperial sovereignty,
Badiou shows how Descartes instead develops: a philosophical style that privileges
no natural language (it can be read in Latin or French or another translation);
justifies its own clarity rationally; calls for rational ripostes to its claims (think of
the “Objections” that are published with the Meditations); is eminently polemical,
directed against the faults of other philosophers; is pedagogical (anybody can try
this at home); experimental (nothing like this has been written before); separates
truth from knowledge, insofar as the foundation of the cogito becomes that
certain point at which thought touches being; and arrogates to itself a radical
contemporaneity.
It is at this point that we begin to see the extraordinary powers of Badiou’s method
also operative in the little occasional essay “Philosophy and Desire” with which
we began. He has begun by extracting paradoxical directives from certain poetic
formulae which he arrays against a global context of thoughtlessness; in a second
stage, he outlines the three major variant forms of philosophical thought current
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 73
in the context, in order to identify something that they unexpectedly share; in
doing so, he pinpoints a fourth position that all the dominant tendencies reject;
finally, in returning at another level to the directives with which he began, he
establishes himself in this impossible fourth position with a concomitant modification of
the form of philosophical presentation itself.
Let us quickly verify the recurrence of this approach in 3 further texts: Being and
Event, The Century, and Logics of Worlds. In Being and Event, this is extremely clear.
We cite from the very beginning of the treatise:
Let’s premise the analysis of the current global state of philosophy on the
following three assumptions:
1. Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher.
2. Those programmes of thought—especially the American—
which have followed the developments in mathematics, in logic
and in the work of the Vienna circle have succeeded in conserving
the figure of scientific rationality as a paradigm for thought.
3. A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject is unfolding: its origin
can be traced to non-philosophical practices (whether those practice be political, or relating to “mental illness”); and its regime of
interpretation, marked by the names of Marx and Lenin, Freud
and Lacan, is complicated by clinical or militant operations which
go beyond transmissible discourse.29
As we might now expect, Badiou outlines a fourth position—his own—on the basis
of this initial self-situation. To do so, he “draws a diagonal” (a favoured image
of Badiou’s, whose provenance goes back to at least Plato) through the three,
simultaneously showing their differences, what they inadvertently share, how
they can be used to confront each other, and what can be taken from them. This
procedure creates a position that none of them could affirmed on their own, and
which indeed could not be even minimally sketched without such a foundational
and introductory self-situation.
We encounter this once again in The Century, on the face of it an altogether
different kind of investigation in that it attends to major cultural achievements
of the twentieth century, from Malevich through Freud and the Surrealists and
beyond, rather than to a formal meta-ontological reconsideration of the status
74 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
of mathematics. The Century opens precisely by discussing three plausible
contemporary accounts of the twentieth century. In Jan Voelker’s words, “the
Century is a time frame which can be counted threefold: as the ‘communist
century,’ from the war of 1914-18 through the end of the Soviet Union, or as the
‘totalitarian century,’ dating from 1917 to 1976, the year of Mao’s death. Then it
can also be counted as the liberal Century, the ‘victory of Capital,’ lasting thirty
years from the 1970s onwards.”30 Although Voelker has quite rightly discerned
the introductory import of this “threefold,” he does not expand further upon its
function beyond remarking that “the threefold count seems to indicate that its
intention is not historical.” This is of course quite correct, but, in line with our
demonstration here, we need to say a little more.
To summarize: each of these narratives (the communist, the totalitarian, the
liberal) is indeed plausible; they nonetheless cannot all be held together without
inconsistency; yet they must be held together; in placing them in apposition
with each other, their respective strengths and limitations are exposed; this
then also exposes their statist (representational) nature insofar as they don’t
take the century on its own terms although they precisely do! So we now have
another conceptual implication to add to Badiou’s procedure: in exposing the
representational claims of such partial meta-narratives to each other, it also
exposes the necessity to return to the sources themselves. “Back to the things
themselves!” was of course a critical phenomenological catchcry, but it is one
of the recurrent moves of philosophy. Badiou likes to (mis)quote the Cratylus in
this regard: “We philosophers do not take as our point of departure words, but
things.”31 So such a self-situation further justifies a return to the matter beyond
its representational capture, while using these contemporaneously dominant
representations as an initial orientation.
Badiou’s very staging of such dissensions in his opening self-situations is, let us
say, a contemporary form of Platonic dialogue: not simply in the received terms
of a strenuous local discussion between historical or fictional personages, but
an analysis of the irreducibility and partiality of even the strongest forms of
representation, by placing them in the same space, and thereby reducing them at
once to their key operations and to the aporias which they cannot think. Note this
also has the effect of making the allegedly old or outmoded newly contemporary,
to return to it its powers as forever young.
A final example here: Logics of Worlds. This example, however, is exceptional, as
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 75
it is one of the few places where the representative triplet breached by a fourth
construction is not immediately in evidence. We therefore include it here as a kind
of confirmation-through-exception of Badiou’s formal approach. Indeed, as has
been pointed out, Badiou doesn’t begin with a particular philosophical situation
but a much more general cultural one.32 He opens with a little thought experiment:
“What do we all think, today? What do I think when I’m not monitoring myself?
Or rather, what is our (my) natural belief? ... Today, natural belief is condensed
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.”33 Indeed, this is a first reason why “materialism” is no longer a very
good signifier of anything: it literally signifies everyone and everything, if not in a
good (philosophical) way. Neo-Darwinians, neo-liberal economists, neo-neos, all
wrap themselves in the signifier’s capacious embrace, with the usual consequences.
As Badiou proceeds to unpack the standard view: “The humanist protection of all
living bodies: this is the norm of contemporary materialism… Our materialism is
therefore the materialism of life. It is a bio-materialism.”34 Second, this materialism
presents itself as essentially democratic: “the assimilation of humanity to
animality culminates in the identification of the human animal with the diversity
of its sub-species and the democratic rights that inhere in this diversity.”35 In fact,
the only thing that is intolerable for democratic materialism is intolerance itself:
“intolerance” being implicitly defined as precisely those discourses and practices
that refuse this total reduction to life. Confronted by those discourses that reject
their own submission to democracy, military intervention to crush the intolerant
becomes the paramount duty of the tolerant materialist powers of the present.
Badiou’s own response is as follows: “After much hesitation, I have decided to
name materialist dialectic the ideological atmosphere in which my philosophical
undertaking conveys its most extreme tension.”36 He immediately continues:
What a way to conjure up a phrase from the realm of the dead! Wasn’t
my teacher Louis Althusser, more than thirty years ago, among the last
nobly to make use of the phrase “dialectical materialism,” not without
some misgivings? Didn’t Stalin—no longer what he once was, even qua
exemplary state criminal (a career in which he’s been overtaken by Hitler
in the last few years), though still a tactless reference—codify, under the
heading Dialectical and Historical Materialism, the most formalist rules of a
communist subjectivity, the source of whose paradoxical radiance no one
can locate any longer?37
76 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
Badiou, in other words, is well aware not only of the term’s desuetude but its
anachronistic offensiveness. Take the three terms at stake, materialism, historical
and dialectical. Dialectical materialism was to be distinguished from historical
materialism, insofar as the adjectives bore the brunt of doctrinal affiliation and
practical methodology. Both dialectical and historical materialism were materialist
insofar as they polemically directed themselves against the idealisms that
stemmed from German idealism, and were to be rediscovered as always-already
active in bourgeois thought of all kinds. Yet dialectical materialism as a general
phenomenon adhered to and promoted, first and foremost, the proper mode of
attention to all phenomena, positing them as inherently limited, entering via their
very self-limitation into relations of contradiction with their negation, and, in
doing so, progressing through a dynamic struggle out of which would eventually
pop a third, unprecedented term. Whereupon the whirligig would be repeated
at a higher level, forever preserving as interiorized difference the contradictions
that had been incorporated in prior struggles in transformed and transforming
presentations. “The real is the rational and the rational is the real” and “the whole
is the true” are its notorious philosophical slogans, drawn from Hegel himself,
and above all from the great “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Historical materialism, by contrast, in general foregrounded chronological locales
over method, in order to, in its most sophisticated forms, confront the dialectical
method with the historicity of its own emergence and hence its own nondialectically-absorbable nature. When dialectical was the adjective, the emphasis
was placed on contradiction, struggle, and the necessary self-overcoming of the
Two; when historical wore the pants, as the expression has it, the singularities
of the sites it designated led to multiplicity, negotiation, and contingencies of
redescription, “concrete analysis of concrete situations.” In both cases, of course,
the point was political revolution; the problem was how to best hasten the triumph
of the coming revolution.
Even Althusser’s radical position turns out to have relied upon a variant of these
presuppositions. Badiou, again:
Althusser regarded Marxism as a complex ensemble because it contained
two creations (that of a science, historical materialism, and that of a new
philosophy, dialectical materialism) enveloped in a single break, a single
historical discontinuity…. Two breaks—one philosophical (dialectical
materialism) and the other scientific (historical materialism) were
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 77
contained in a single intellectual dispositif, which took the form of a
worldview: the proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism.38
For Althusser, there was thus a necessity to think this double creation from a
single historical rupture and the single dispositif from two conceptual ruptures as
themselves constituting a dialectical advance. There is the further paradox that
this chiasmatic dialectic constituted a break with traditional forms of ideologycritique, precisely because ideology could no longer be thought of as any kind of
false-consciousness, but rather the practical condition for entering into any field
of struggle in the first place. Under Althusser’s description, ideology becomes
transcendental and constitutive, and it is from within ideology that science and
philosophy essay to break with its current structuring principles.
When “materialism” becomes naturalised and generalised, however, it pulls the
rug out from under the critical power both of the adjectives and the programs they
designated. As we regularly experience today, the discourses that have done best
out of such naturalism are science and religion—or, more accurately, the parodies
of science and religion that are scientism and fundamentalism. Their avatars will
now undoubtedly continue to continue to appear to be struggling with each other
worldwide, at the very moment that what has been foreclosed from such discourse
is the very matter at stake: the matter of the political. Under the descriptions
offered by such socio-biologists, human politics is just another form of animal
interaction; under the descriptions offered by such fundamentalists, human
politics is just another form of fallen animal interaction. The apparent struggle
is a false one—that is, it cannot itself be thought dialectically from either of its poles
nor within their antagonism, not least because, if there is even any contradiction
involved, the negation does not enter into a relation of self-transformation with
its assertion—and the “debate’s” very ubiquity and virulence is a further effective
distraction from the default of the political itself.
Despite these considerations regarding the fate of materialism, Badiou continues
relatively undismayed. For him, the tenets of democratic materialism remain
viable, only he adds: “except there are truths.” It is these truths—politics, art, love
and science—that thus constitute exceptions to the democratic materialism of
the present. In his parlance, then, calling his project a material dialectic not only
has the rhetorical force of its syntagmatic inversion, but the process of struggle
itself is primary. Whereas dialectical materialism, like historical materialism,
like our contemporary democratic materialisms, implicitly had materialism as a
78 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
substantive, thereby encrypting the primacy of substance at its base, with Badiou
the substance disappears from materialism. Material becomes adjectival; as it
does so, the dialectic itself must rearticulate the “real and the rational” which was
the essence of Hegel’s program. This rearticulation leads to a shattering of the
unity—as well as the duality!—of the dialectic. Or, rather, the new materialist
dialectic articulates being and becoming in such a way as to make any movement
between the two non-dialectical, non-total, and non-temporal.39
What, then, is privileged by Badiou’s construction? It is the primacy of situation
and the irreducibility of struggle. Here, it is absolutely crucial to understand how
Badiou’s rationalism founds his position vis-à-vis “diversity.” The “materialist
dialectic” bespeaks a unified approach to diversity. What is this diversity? In Logics
of Worlds, it is the diversity and intensity of appearances themselves, and such
diversity and intensity require a phenomenology. What sort of phenomenology? It
can be neither of the Hegelian kind, despite the reprise of the term phenomenology
itself, nor of the Husserlian or Heideggerean varieties. Why not? Because the
former’s phenomenology depends on a logic of the becoming of contradictions
as totality and teleology. For Badiou, contemporary logic neither tolerates
contradiction as dynamism, nor totality as a consistent concept. There are forms
of logic—such as paraconsistent logic—which, even if often allegedly inspired by
Hegel himself, only tolerate true contradictions under very specific circumstances.
These contradictions, moreover, are not dynamic relations. All forms of modern
logic resist the category of the whole, which Bertrand Russell showed to be
inconsistent in a famous 1904 letter to Frege (and of which Badiou makes a good
deal in many of his metamathematical arguments throughout his oeuvre). On
the other hand, Badiou also rejects the descriptive phenomenology whose peak
moment in the twentieth century was Heidegger. Such a phenomenology places
the emphasis on a linguistic-historical unfolding of the site into which Dasein is
thrown, and tends towards an in-principle unlimited hermeneutics of opening to
being against its nihilist closure in technology (we have already briefly touched
on this above).40 Nor is Badiou happy with allegedly naturalistic descriptions
of the phenomenal world: for him, evolutionary biology remains a wild mess of
empirical observations, and not a real science at all.41 Finally, and in the most
rigorous perspective, the challenge boils down to the recreation of an acceptably
contemporary problematic of negation. In an interview with Critical Inquiry in
2008, Badiou asserts: “Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation
produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly
speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 79
not give rise to a new creation.”42 He immediately proceeds to reiterate “our
contemporary need to produce a non-Hegelian category of negation.”43
In Being and Event, Badiou drew on post-Cantorian set-theory in order to explore
his claim that “mathematics is ontology.” Mathematics is the paradigm of
rationality, necessary for all empirical sciences, as well as in itself establishing the
limits of the pure structures of thought. But a phenomenology is not and cannot
be an ontology in this sense, since it is not dealing with such structures and their
limits, but with intensities of appearing. Given that Badiou is unwilling to abandon
reason to think appearing, he has recourse at this point to contemporary logics
to formalise and ground his approach. In fact, he defines logic as the cohesion or
consistency of appearing; outside of such logic, one has only the extra-rational
if not entirely irrational claims of “experience.” Several key points follow. First,
unlike the Hegelian dialectic and its Marxist inheritors, there must be a gap for
Badiou between being and appearing that is irreducible in principle. This gap
cannot be thought as “base” to “superstructure,” and, if one wishes to retain such
metaphors, the articulation between them must be reconfigured in rationalist and
not empiricist terms. Badiou’s genius is to propose that the historically-unstable
relationship between pure mathematics and logic maps onto the relationship
between being and being-there, ontology and phenomenology. Pure mathematics
becomes the science of being qua being, being as such, being without its appearance
in a world. Pure logic, however, must be then a science of appearing without its
being; being-in-its-appearing, that is, localised being. Mathematics becomes an
axiomatic ontology, logic a transcendental phenomenology.
One of the many benefits of such an approach is that it enables a genuine critique
of the oppressiveness of situations, of real situations, as themselves not merely
irrational, but oppressive insofar as they are anti-rational. Rationality, moreover,
can thereby be shown to be inherently egalitarian—refusing all and any claims of
authority in its elaboration. As such, it is also necessarily atemporal, or what Badiou
would call eternal. It’s not that mathematics and logic aren’t historically variable;
rather, it’s that this variability or development is absolutely and in principle
independent of authoritarian dictates; moreover, every radical renovation of
maths and logic enables its predecessors to be rewritten without loss in its own
terms (but not vice-versa). This means that contemporary mathematics and logic
are differing limit-inscriptions of reason, whose actual limits they establish and
enforce as such. It is on the basis of such rational principles, and such principles
alone, that Badiou can maintain that political action, for example, is ultimately
80 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
independent of economic directives, both theoretically and practically.
Although this is not the appropriate place to examine some of the more
controversial aspects of Badiou’s post-Being and Event doctrines, it is perhaps
worth noting that it must be the case “in the last instance” for Badiou that, though
political action must always emerge from and treat of its specific situation in terms
necessarily drawn from that situation itself—exactly as we have been arguing that
he does in his own writings—strictly speaking this “situation” can no longer be
restricted to the terms and teleology of inherited forms of revolutionary class
struggle. Rather, à la Badiou’s abstract accounts of the operations of truths, every
procedure emerges from an event that exposes the foreclosed void (ontologically
considered) or the minimum-becoming-maximal (phenomenologically considered)
of the existing situation. Briefly, if class-struggle is indeed bound to certain kinds
of economic structure, radical politics in Badiou’s sense is not only not always
reducible to class-struggle (although such may constitute the central material or
theme of a sequence of political action), but politics necessarily transforms both
matter and structure (and thus for example the “meaning of class-struggle”) in
the course of its activity.44 (This is partially also what Badiou’s notorious term
“subtraction” means.) Finally, this approach enables Badiou to return to historical
situations in a new way, rereading them according to the directives of logic. This
entails that “historical materialism” is itself compromised insofar as it insists
on the priority of either history or substance, and therefore that to pursue their
primacy is, whatever the motivation, to uphold the oppression of unfair shares.
In other words, and despite the apparent exception to Badiou’s own usual
stylistic practice in Logics, the pragmatic upshot of his self-situation in terms of
the materialist dialectic comes to precisely the same point: to create a rational
metaphysics in a new style that affirms the egalitarian character of all true thought, at
once simultaneously situated, singular and universal. In fact, on the basis of our rule
and our exception, we can now formalize the logic of polemic chez Badiou in an
acceptably grounded fashion.
As we have been suggesting, we see this formal demonstrative procedure—of what
we might call the “Five Cs” of context®commonplace®critique®condition®cons
truction—recur throughout Badiou’s work. Aside from any other considerations,
this procedure is surely one model of argumentative writing, indeed one kind of
generic paradigm for contemporary philosophical practice. To begin each time with
another effort of self-localisation immediately emphasizes not only the necessity
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 81
of foregrounding situation as such, but the singularity of each presentation. To
not do so—as we find so often in philosophy today—is to risk assuming a preexisting institutional framework that is thereby itself occluded as its routines
quietly organise and authorise inherited, invisible distinctions between what is
permissible and unacceptable. This is what “Philosophy and Desire”—as indeed
Badiou’s other work—sets out to expose and, in doing so, lays out a possibility for
a philosophy that can exist beyond any particular form of institutional closure. It
is certainly not the only, nor necessarily the best, possible model for philosophical
practice. But it certainly has a number of clear and present benefits.
Such attempts to attend to the situation of (one’s own) thinking as such, forces
the presentation itself to present the conditions of its own presentation, and
in such a way as to stage the problem of the grounds of its auto-differentiation
in its relation to the extension of its conceptual consistency and referential
claims. Badiou thereby forces himself to return again and again to establishing
and exposing, clearly and openly, the situation, site and means by which his
own arguments will take place. One consequence of this is that every principle,
argument and conclusion is openly staged for the reader; it is incumbent upon
the latter to assent or contest, that is, participate, and, by the same token, to
participate with the same commitment to public reason shown by Badiou. Each
point of articulation offers the possibility for contesting Badiou’s decisions—if
one can indeed demonstrate that his articulations are false.
Badiou’s forms therefore invariably propose a challenge of rational participation.
The challenge is triple: first, regarding the plausibility of the context presented;
second, if one can show that Badiou’s articulations on that basis demonstratively
fail, then Badiou himself must assent to such a demonstration; third, one might
also show that, if Badiou is not “wrong,” there were other routes to be taken
at those decisive points which bear undecidable rational claims. In other words,
Badiou’s forms in themselves polemically provoke a challenge of rationality, even
if one ultimately decides for another route than Badiou himself on the basis of
extra-rational — but not irrational—grounds.
This is the logic—yes, the logic—of polemic in the work of Alain Badiou.
A.J. BARTLETT is the Secretary of the Melbourne School of Philosophy.
JUSTIN CLEMENS teaches at the University of Melbourne.
82 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
NOTES
1. See P. Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
2. B. Bosteels, “Introduction,” to Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject. Trans. B. Bosteels. London and
New York: Continuum, 2009, xxvii.
3. Bosteels, “Introduction”, xxvii.
4. See O. Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory. New York and London: Continuum, 2008, passim.
5. J. Clemens, “Had we but worlds enough, and time, this absolute, philosopher…” The Praxis of
Alain Badiou. Eds A. Bartlett et al. Melbourne: re.press, 2006, 102-143.
6. A. Badiou, Infinite Thought. Eds J. Clemens and O. Feltham. London: Continuum, 2003, 39.
7. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 42.
8. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker
and J. Schulte. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, n. 309, 110.
9. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 46.
10. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 46.
11. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 47.
12. See A. Badiou, A and B. Cassin, Heidegger: les femmes, le nazisme et la philosophie. Paris: Fayard,
2010.
13. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 48.
14. A. Badiou, Theoretical Writings. Eds R. Brassier and A. Toscano. London and New York:
Continuum, 2004, xiii-xiv.
15. See J. Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University
Press, 1999; M. Puchner, Poetry of the revolution: Marx, manifestos, and the avant-gardes. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
16. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY, 1996, 70.
17. For an influential recent reinterpretation of the status of the broken tool in Heidegger, see
Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Illinois: Open Court
Publishing, 2002.
18. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art. Trans. D.F. Krell. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981, 130.
19. M. Heidegger, Poetry, language, thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971,
12.
20. See J. Clemens and J. Roffe, “Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou.” Sophia
47 (2008, 345-358); G. Harman, “Badiou’s Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject,” Badiou
and Philosophy. Eds S. Bowden and S. Duffy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 225-243;
M. Hewson, “Heidegger,” Alain Badiou: Key Concepts. Eds A.J. Bartlett and J. Clemens. Aldershot:
Acumen, 2010, 146-154.
21. A. Badiou, Being and Event. Trans. O. Feltham. London and New York: Continuum, 2006, 3.
22. A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Trans. A. Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2009, 527.
23. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 50.
24. J. Lacan, Ecrits. Trans. B. Fink with H. Fink and R. Grigg. New York: Norton, 2006, 5. Note,
of course, that Lacan invokes this classicism in order to distinguish it from the psychoanalytic
thinking of the object a which is both cause of the subject and its occlusion.
25. This is a key point, and implicates a very wide range of seventeenth-century authors who
contributed to what is often broadly (and perhaps misleadingly) called “the scientific revolution,”
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 83
including, beyond Descartes himself, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Thomas Hobbes, and others.
The point is not that Descartes or his contemporaries were simply indifferent to the language in
which their thought was presented, but that, by the very act of writing in vernacular languages as
well as in the Latin in which all educated men had to be fluent was a crucial aspect of the radical
transformations in the possibility of address that they were forging. This is undoubtedly why most
accounts of Descartes’ work are constrained to at least mention this aspect of method, e.g., “After
the Galileo affair, Descartes did not give up his project of reforming the sciences. In 1637, he tested
the response to his new ideas by offering a sampler, the Discourse on the Method together with
essays on Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry. These works were also written in French, making
them accessible to literate people outside the universities, including artisans, people at court, and
‘even’ women. (Descartes held that all human beings, irrespective of gender, possess the same
intellectual power.)” Gary Hatfield, Descartes and the Meditations. London: Routledge, 2003, 2021. Precisely along these lines, Stephen Gaukroger opens his “Introduction” to a collection on
the Meditations by underlining “The Meditations aim to make one responsible for one’s cognitive
life in a way that the devotional texts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—where a
range of exacting moral standards, accompanied by demands for self-vigilance which had been
the preserve of monastic culture throughout the Middle Ages, were transferred wholesale to
the general populace.” The Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Ed. Stephen Gaukroger.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 1. Whatever an individual’s reservations and hesitations, ambiguities and
complications, to write philosophy in the vernacular was at this time in itself an assault against the
dominant institutions of knowledge. We might also note the impact of Montaigne’s Essais upon
so many of the major philosophical writers: Bacon himself almost immediately started writing his
own Essays in English; Descartes frankly refers to some of his own works as “essais.”
26. A. Badiou, “Français: de la langue Française comme evident.” Vocabulaire européen des
philosophies. Ed. B. Cassin. Paris: Editions du Seuil/Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004, 468.
27. Badiou, “Français,” 470.
28. Badiou, “Français,” 471.
29. Badiou, Being and Event, 1.
30. J. Voelker, “Reversing and Affirming the Avant-gardes: A New Paradigm for Politics.” Badiou
and the Political Condition. Ed. M. Constantinou. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 147.
31. Cited Badiou, Infinite Thought, 50.
32. See Clemens, “Had we but worlds enough,” passim.
33. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 1.
34. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 2.
35. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 2.
36. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 3.
37. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 3.
38. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 515-516.
39. For a different account of Badiou’s putative “materialism,” see Frank Ruda’s book-length study,
For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
40. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 46.
41. See A. Badiou, Ethics. Trans. P. Hallward. London: Verso, 2003.
42. A. Badiou, “‘We need a popular discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the
Negative.” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008, 652).
43. Ibid. See also the essays collected in Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity. Eds J.
Vernon and A. Calcagno. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015.
84 · ajbartlett and justin clemens
44. The resolute “abstraction” (in the common acceptation of this word) of Badiou’s theory often
makes it difficult to see how, in the real sequences of politics (but this also necessarily holds for
the other truth procedures), such action might be understood. By far the most ambitious and
extended account to date that seeks to take up Badiou’s theories and apply them in detail to
“real,” “historical” “sequences,” see Colin Wright’s extraordinary (and gigantic) Badiou in Jamaica:
The Politics of Conflict. Melbourne: re.press, 2013. We have also learned a lot from another very
detailed (if currently unpublished) paper by Robert Boncardo and Bryan Cooke, ‘“Long Live the
International Proletariat of France,”’ which takes up the relation between the SONACOTRA rent
strike and Badiou’s Theory of the Subject.
polemic as logic in the work of alain badiou · 85