Long Sunday

badiou: reactionary modernist

We don't do enough Radical Philosophy around here, I suppose because there's not enough on-line for us to link to. But it really is - along with NLR and n+1 - one of the few things I'm genuinely excited to see drop through the slot in the front door.

In the new one, a particularly lucid piece by Peter Osborne on Badiou. Here are the first paragraphs, all that's publicly available on-line:

Neo-classic Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
Peter Osborne

If anyone was in doubt about the continuing grip of French philosophy on the theoretical imagination of the anglophone humanities, the reception of the writings of Alain Badiou must surely have put paid to such reservations. The translation of his magnum opus, Being and Event, in spring 2006, brought to eleven the number of his books published in English in eight years – a period following swiftly on, not entirely contingently, from the deaths of Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard (1995–1998), and coinciding with that of Derrida (2004).* However, it is not simply the number of translations that is remarkable (‘remarkable, but not surprising’, as Wittgenstein would say), but the fact that a philosophy such as this – for all its idiosyncratic philosophical charms – could so readily have assumed the role of ‘French philosophy of the day’ within the transnational market for theory.

Badiou’s philosophy takes a forbiddingly systematic form; it is anti-historical, technically mathematical and broadly Maoist in political persuasion. It has no interest in (in fact, denies the philosophical relevance of) ‘meaning’, and appears impervious to feminism. It takes a roguish self-satisfaction in its heterosexism.

Stylized individuality is a condition of branding, and ‘difficulty’ is a prerequisite of entry into this particular field, but there are more than market factors at work in Badiou’s successful transition to international theorist. It is a gauge of a number of things: the desire still invested in the English-language reception of French philosophy; the theoretical heresies that a new generation of the so-called ‘old’ Left will overlook in exchange for political solidarity (Žižek, master of this field, is Badiou’s mentor here); the strategic brilliance of two interventions – against Deleuze (The Clamour of Being, 1997; trans. 2000) and against the ‘delirium’ of ethics (Ethics, 1994; trans. 2001);1 the inherent brilliance of Being and Event, for all its ultimate philosophical madness; and last, but by no means least, the rhetorical power of ‘the (re)turn of philosophy itself’ – title of an essay of Badiou’s from 1992.2 It is in the profoundly contradictory character of the return of philosophy in Badiou – at once avant-garde and breathtakingly traditional – that the historical meaning of his thought is to be found.3 To anticipate my conclusion: Being and Event is a work – perhaps the great work – of philosophical neo-classicism. As such, at the level of philosophical form, it surpasses its ambivalent predecessor, Heidegger’s Being and Time, in the rigour of its reactionary modernism. The modernity of Badiou’s mathematics does not mitigate, but rather reinforces, the authoritarianism of his philosophical axiomatics and the mysticism of his conception of the event.

It really is a shame that we can't read this together on here. There's even a convincing bit on our perennial favorite, the history of big T little t theory, that I'm sure would produce a lovely comment thread. (The wonderful thing is, Osborne is able to 1) treat the subject "theory" while 2) never losing sight of the particulars, especially, the historical particulars of its rise and fall...)

If every one of you out there would just subscribe, we could talk a bit more about the piece. What are you waiting for?

badiou

Well I've been reading Badiou laetely and I've got to say: ~

But I guess  that joke's been made before.

ASSI, BILLIORAY, FERRAT, BABICK, Edouard MOREAU, C. DUPONT, VARLIN, BOURSIER, MORTIER, GOUHIER, LAVALETTE, Fr. JOURDE, ROUSSEAU, Ch. LULLIER, BLANCHET, J. GROLLARD, BARROUD, H. GERESME, FABRE, POUGERET.

As a footnote to yesterday's contribution to the Being and Event Reading Group of The Weblog, a translation of a short passage from Alain Badiou's La Commune de Paris: Une déclaration politique sur la politique:

Everything depends, therefore, on the consequences. But let us note that there is no transcendental consequence more powerful than the appearance of something that did not exist. That is how the day March 18, 1871 places in the center of a political turmoil a collection of unknown workers, unrecognized even by the specialists of the revolution, by those old "forty-eighters" that will unfortunately hinder the Commune with their ineffective disputes about words. Let us return to the first proclamation of March 19 by the Central Committee, the organism directly responsible for the insurrection of the eighteenth. "May Paris and France together lay down the foundation for a republic acclaimed in all ways, the only government that will forever close the era of invasions and civil wars." Who signs this political declaration without precedent? Twenty people, three-quarters of whom belong to the proletarians defined and constituted solely by circumstance. The newspaper of the government has every reason to ask: "Who are the members of this Committee? Are they communists, bonapartists or Prussians?" Here the unshakeable motive of the "foreign agents" can already be seen. In reality the result of the event is that for the first time the inexistent workers are carried into a temporarily maximal, political existence.

How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Love

'Passivity is anything but resignation. I'm speaking of an almost ontological passivity, one that changes your being in a practice that depends on an absolute elsewhere. It is striking that Campos lays out this passivity - creative as well as corrosive - under the emblems of femininity. Over time, I have come to notice that women attune themselves more profoundly to this uprooting abandonment, just as, inversely, they are drier and more obstinate when it comes to caution and conservatism. The feminine, when it ceases to be the domestic organisation of security and fear, goes furthest in the termination of all cowardice. For this reason, I would like to spare a thought for Ulrike Meinhof, a German revolutionary of the Red Army Faction, 'suicided' in her cell. And also for Nathalie Ménigon, a French revolutionary of the group Actione Directe, currently rotting away in our national prisons. Say what you will, these women had 'the passion of the illegal joined to the ferocious'.' - Alain Badiou, 'Seven Variations' from The Century, 2005.

Zizek's Symptom

“The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom…” The Ticklish Subject(Pg. 131)

Not the Badiou Meme

Okay, some time ago Fort Kant initiated a ‘meme’ on Badiou’s fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. He takes his cue from the Vienna Circle’s voting on the truth or falsehood of certain propositions. The meme then passes from here to here.

Of course, I have no intention of doing the meme. I would just like to take up something from AvW’s response. Now, Alph. has yet to reach the propositions themselves, struck instead by certain rhetorical gestures -

..... And this immediately places Badiou in the corps of clerks labouring away at the maintenance of the Art Market, which is fuelled constantly, and desperately, by the seemingly gratuitous issue of such prescriptions, Art is This, Art is That. It IS this, really, if hiddenly, and ought then be rendered more obviously itself (but not too obviously. It mustn‘t become out and out criticism). The predicates are of no consequence whatsoever.

Indeed. Before one sets about the content, what’s remarkable is the strident intoning of ‘Art is’. It seems to me that the chords struck by this intoning are like those of a manifesto. That is, Badiou’s ‘Theses’ = precisely the kind of statement one would expect to be made, pre-emptively, by a Movement in order to authorise and anticipate its own artistic practice.