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On Conditions (1992), Ch. 1 “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself,” featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth.
Badiou is arguing against contemporary post-structuralist French philosophers like Derrida and Foucault whom he characterizes as denying the existence of truth. Philosophy as a profession has consequently devolved into just being a history of philosophy. Post-structuralists, along with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein among others, play the same role for philosophy now as the sophists did for Plato: Sophists are essential in any age to give philosophy a conversation partner against which it can argue for the positive Truth that comes out of the individual truths of what Badiou calls philosophy’s “truth conditions,” which are politics, art, science (including mathematics), and love.
So it’s not philosophy itself that generates truths, and in fact when it thinks it does, then we get “disaster”: the type of dogmatism that led to Stalinism and Nazism. Badiou also distinguishes truths from knowledge, which is routinized, part of something considered established and communicated around. A truth instead emerges through an “event,” which is something unexpected, inspirational, special… Essentially something that can’t actually be articulated, yet we try to do so anyway. Think about a political revolution, an artistic creation, an act of falling in love, a startling scientific discovery: All these can be events, as described in Badiou’s previous book Being and Event (1988).
So why would we need philosophy if these other activities actually generate truths? Philosophy weaves them together into a unified vision of the world, which is something we need in order to be fully human. Philosophy lets us “think truths as compossible,” i.e. existing together. Contra Wittgenstein, who famously said, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Badiou claims that philosophy exactly tries to speak about what can’t strictly be spoken about. He regards Jacques Lacan as his master, and from Lacan we get the idea of the “real,” which is the unarticulated residue between language, something that’s of vital psychological importance. Badiou refers to “the void” as where Truth resides, and philosophy’s role is not to fill that void (again, that would result in dogmatism), but to use that void to sustain philosophy as the “pincers of Truth” that grab individual truths and bring them together. Philosophy, Badiou insists, is “subtractive,” in that Truth is subtracted from the labyrinth of meaning, kind of like when a sculptors say they create a thing by cutting away everything that is is not that thing. So the sophists put out arguments, definitions, metaphors — the whole philosophers’ toolkit — and the philosopher stakes out the truth by subtracting from the sophists’ positions, showing how they don’t make sense and thereby pointing to something better.
Are you bewildered by this language? So are we! Our goal in this episode is to try to decode all this terminology in order to then in ep. 282 explain what Badiou has to say about one of the particular conditions, love (described in ch. 11 of this same book).
Purchase Conditions or try this online version. A helpful secondary source is Alain Badiou: Key Concepts. The Roger Scruton (very critical) book that Wes brings up is Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.
Image by Solomon Grundy. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
So, this episode really made me want to here an episode on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, for, with perhaps all the irony of this, it seems that all Badiou asks for was present in Deleuze’s philosophy, especially his work with and after Difference and Repetition. For, in Difference and Repetition, it does deal with the history of philosophy, but it does so to go beyond it (in a way Hegel does the same thing, he just didn’t name names as much in the Phenomenology). From that history of philosophy, and you can see this clearly in Chapter 1, he brings it up in order to critique it and go beyond it. In another sense, it almost seems Ironic that Badiou’s critique presented here seems closer to a condemnation of Derrida’s philosophy of Hauntology (anti- or reversed ontology) whereas Deleuze is doing Metaphysics, Deleuze also has a theory of Event, a theory of sense, which is then auto-critiqued with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.
Perhaps this is all to say, I would love it if you could do even the first chapter of Difference and Repetition — Difference in Itself. It is not an easy book; however, I think Deleuze’s Metaphysics/Ontology has not been explored as much as it could be.
I wouldn’t hold your breathe if you are expecting to get a proper treatment of D , D&G. there are a number of reasons but the most immediate is that this group of people has settled in to a formulaic approach . psychoanalysis has its metaphysics its name is oedipus. the previous episode was the attempt to substitute D&G with someone else and this episode was the attempt to conceal that. ‘dg’ as the return of the repressed on the nose of the picture of badiou.
Wow, I sure have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe Wes has his “formula,” I.e. a professionally grounded grasp of psychoanalysis that none of the rest of us feel competent to judge, but the rest of us have no skin in this game. On the previous D episode, we specifically pulled in a guest with an entirely foreign viewpoint to ours to help ensure that we wouldn’t just dismiss him. But yes, if you mean that we go through texts slowly and methodically and are not thoroughly steeped in Lacan, then we are guilty.
I’ll say this, the hard part about Deleuze’s philosophy, that is, his main texts like Difference and Repetition or Logic of Sense, or his work with Guattari Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, is that it isn’t very kind to Partial readings. I remember listening to PEL’s episode on What Is Philosophy which only covered the named philosophy parts; however, there is the contrast that is missed by not covering the sections on Science and Art (and the conclusion).
This is to say, I don’t blame a lack of Lacan for not reading Deleuze (if I did, then I’d have to blame myself for reading Deleuze without Lacan). In fact, for Difference and Repetition, I see it more as a critique of Husserlian Phenomenology (which in some respects, to my knowledge of Ideas, is a return to Plato through Transcendental Phenomenology), and also a critique of Kant and Hegel. There is the presence of Structuralism in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense for Deleuze; however, one can see that as the influence of Saussure and Roman Jakobson who eventually get replaced with the linguistic theory of Hjemslev (and a brief comparison with C.S. Peirce).
This is to think, I think PEL would be more ready now; however, there is another barrier to entry in just the presentation of the work. For example, PEL has also done an episode on Henri Bergson; however, that was done on Bergson’s text Introduction to Metaphysics. I feel that Bergson would present the same problem as Deleuze because Bergson’s main texts — Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, and etc — have a prosaic style which does what Bergson states needs to be done in Introduction to Metaphysics: adding a metaphysics or a philosophy complementary to contemporary Science. In the same way, Deleuze’s text Difference and Repetition, based on my read, developed in a similar way, but instead of a direct addition with science or art, also interrogates philosophy from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, to Kant Hegel, Husserl, and (begrudgingly) Heidegger.
I feel I’ve made this too long. I don’t care about formulas, and I don’t mind that PEL hasn’t done more Deleuze, I just think they are more ready for him if he presents some peculiar challenges from his ouvre. As Derrida stated about Deleuze (which might be the reason for his difficulty) is that Deleuze was the philosopher of his generation doing philosophy and Metaphysics most gaily (old sense of the term).
I disagree. deleuze and guattari were simply focused on the creative work and developing concepts that adequately addressed problems. they say that their writing was in response to the political / intellectual climate of their times. it should come as no surprise that people still fight for freedom. the problem today is that everyone has their priorities screwed up. they have their cart before the horse. you are in the thralls of the last man and deleuze was one of the last thinkers who was speaking to persons. you shouldn’t be apologetic for these people who are too dense to get it in to gear.
their work was explicitly developed with the mind set that one could reterritorialize on to a given piece of philosophical writing that could aid as a bridge or point of passage to coordinate ones object relations when prefab subjectivities are the order of the day. actually, they introduced novel ideas in to their work as well such as a pamphlet that was meant to be taken along and read on one’s daily commute.
*breath
‘psychoanalysis has its metaphysics its name is oedipus’
Seems like a pretty odd claim to me. How would you substantiate this claim (without merely gesturing to the D&G treatment of this notion)?
I would agree with you on this. While D&G have created a radical philosophical/political/ethical project, understanding the ground or, in the case of Deleuze, the specific ungrounding of the project is what I believe to be the difficult part.
Man, those comments from, I think, Mark, about Althusser really only reveal that he has not read any Althusser, haha…
Very true!
transcendence is an illegitimate basis for grounding syntheses.