1 ISSN 17551-8229 Volume One, Number Two - Žižek and Badiou The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation Adrian Johnston - Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico at Albuquerque In Being and Event, Alain Badiou links his theory of the event to the thesis that “there is some newness in being.”(Badiou 2005a: 209) And, in a recently published interview, entitled “Can Change be Thought?,” he declares that all of his philosophical endeavors are ultimately animated by a desire to theorize how it’s possible for novelty to surface within situations. (Bosteels 2002:205) He explains himself thus: Really, in the end, I have only one question: what is the new in a situation? My unique philosophical question, I would say, is the following: can we think that there is something new in the situation, not outside the situation nor the new somewhere else, but can we really think through novelty and treat it in the situation? The system of philosophical answers that I elaborate, whatever its complexity may be, is subordinated to that question and to no other. Even when there is event, structure, formalism, mathematics, multiplicity, and so on, this is exclusively destined, in my eyes, to think through the new in terms of the situation. (Badiou 2005b: 252) The most important feature to note in this statement is the constraint Badiou places upon himself in relation to this task of philosophically grasping newness in its strongest sense: The new must be conceived as immanently arising out of specific “situations,” rather than as swooping in from some unspecified transcendent other place in order externally to modify the coordinates of a particular status quo reality as an agent of alteration essentially foreign to the given site of change. (Bosteels 2004a: 152) However, certain 2 of what might be described as Badiou’s “aesthetic” preferences in his political vocabulary are in danger of preventing him from taking into consideration possible types of transformation that exemplify precisely the sort of change he claims to be most interested in thinking through—namely, transformations immanently generated from within the internal parameters of a specific situation and/or a given world. One striking feature of both the aesthetics of Badiou’s political discourse as well as this discourse’s conceptual-argumentative content is the recurrent emphasis on figures of abrupt discontinuity. Here are just a few examples: An authentic intervention in politics involves a “cut” establishing a separation from communitarian links and relationships (Badiou 1985: 18); any genuine event establishing a political sequence marks a moment of “rupture” in relation to the socio-historical contextual terrain within which this evental detonation occurs (Badiou 2005c: 7 and Badiou 2004a: 18); political pronouncements “spring up” in spaces left uncounted and uncovered by existing configurations of society or state (Badiou 2005c: 101); singular events of declaration creating the stratified histories of politics each amount to an “eruption” exploding (out of) the continuum of the status quo (Badiou 2005c: 117); politics as such requires a decisive “break” with that which exists in the current state of affairs (Badiou 2003a: 126) … and so on. In his 1998 text on “metapolitics,” Badiou speaks of “the suddenly emergent materiality of a universalisable collective.” (Badiou 2005c: 146-147) He repeatedly invokes the evocative figures of “rupture” (Badiou 2003b: 63) and “sudden emergence.” (Badiou 2003b: 71) In so doing, Badiou endorses a sharp contrast between “repetition” (i.e. the static inertia of what is) and “interruption” (i.e. the kinetic gesture of separating from what is). (Badiou 2004b: 112 and Badiou 2000: 64) Various thinkers engaged with Badiou, including both commentators and critics, have picked up on this thematic thread appearing to entail that the initiation of real political trajectories is to be pinpointed in an irruptive happening that emerges with a surprising, shocking, and stunning degree of rapidity. (Lazarus 1996: 50,102,152 and Lecercle 1999:8) Similarly, the same set of motifs operates throughout Sylvain Lazarus’ Anthropologie du nom, in which Lazarus (a theoretical and political ally of Badiou) describes the event of politics as a “caesura” (Lazarus 1996: 20) and “irruption” (Lazarus 1996: 156); he maintains that, politically speaking, “The subjective is not continuous. It arises suddenly, then ceases to be.” (Lazarus 1996: 59) Despite the general thrust of these images and metaphors portraying true change as shining new light on the world through brief, intermittent flashes blinking on- and-off in an unconditioned, unpredictable fashion, Badiou, in the 1998 essay “Of an 3 Obscure Disaster,” articulates a crucial qualification to be kept in mind apropos the issues at stake in this discussion. He clarifies that: …an abrupt and complete change in a situation does not at all mean that the grace of an event has happened to it… In the serenity of the concept, let’s say that everything that changes is not an event, and that surprise, velocity, disorder, may only be simulacra of the event, not its promise of truth. (Badiou 2003c: 61) Or, as he succinctly puts it in his Ethics, “not every ‘novelty’ is an event.” (Badiou 2001: 72) So, it would seem to be safe simply to say that, although every event has the power to lead to changes exhibiting “surprise, velocity, disorder,” not everything that exhibits these features qualifies as an event. Furthermore, Badiou’s above caveat indicates that both events and their simulacra can and do involve change. Hence, the question to pose now is: What general account of change is to be found in Badiouian philosophy? Such an account sits at the center of some of Badiou’s most recent work. In the interview “Beyond Formalisation,” conducted in 2002, Badiou delineates four distinct categories of change: …I distinguish between four types of change: modifications (which are consistent with the existing transcendental regime), weak singularities (or novelties with no strong existential consequences), strong singularities (which imply an important existential change but whose consequences remain measurable) and, finally, events (strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite). (Badiou 2003a: 132) This fourfold typology of transformation, succinctly sketched in the course of a rapidly moving conversation, clearly foreshadows the much more detailed and sustained treatment of this topic four years later in “Book V” (entitled “The Four Forms of Change”) of Logiques des mondes. Therein, as visually encapsulated and summarized by a helpful graph, (Badiou 2006a: 395) Badiou begins with the general category of “becoming” (devenir), which initially is sub-divided into “modification,” qua becoming without real change, and “site,” qua a locus/place with the potential to give rise to real change. The category of site is then further sub-divided into “deed/occurrence” (noting that the term “fait” can be translated either way - it could even be rendered in English as “act”), qua site lacking a maximal degree of existential intensity in a given situation/world, and “singularity,” qua site endowed with a maximal degree of existential intensity in a given situation/world. Finally, the category of singularity is itself sub- divided into “weak singularity,” qua maximally existent singularity whose ensuing 4 situational/worldly consequences aren’t maximal (although such a singularity, while not [yet] an effective change in the authentic sense of evental transformation, retains the possibility of eventually becoming stronger (Badiou 2006a: 415-416)), and “event,” qua maximally existent singularity whose ensuing situational/worldly consequences are indeed maximal. Simply put, an event doesn’t just happen within a world as one occurrence among others in this world’s history. Rather, an event changes a world so radically that, at one and the same time, an old world is destroyed and a new one is assembled in the clearing opened up by the demolition of what was. (Badiou 2006a: 400, 417- 418, 601) Obviously, the greatest contrast exists between, on the one hand, modification (as simple becoming comfortably and compatibly going with the flow of the run of things as regulated by an already-existent “state-of-the-situation” or “transcendental regime” ordering a particular “world” (Badiou 2006a:379)), and, on the other hand, event (as a genuine transformation of what exists dictated by the unforeseen and unanticipated upsurge of an “x” that, before the event, didn’t exist for the situation’s state or the world’s transcendental regime, while, after the event, the implications of this upsurge are so potent and powerful as to force the situation or world to be razed and rebuilt as a place wherein the previously inexistent is accorded the most intense degree of existence—with Badiou claiming that the strongest existential-transcendental consequence is to make what was before an invisible inexistent be the most visible of existents (Badiou 2006a: 397-398, 416, 600-601). Highlighting this stark contrast between modification and event, the title of the first section of “Book V” of Logiques des mondes is “Simple Becoming and True Change.” This axis of tension between “simple becoming” (i.e. modification) and “true change” (i.e. event) is an enduring theoretical motif in Badiou’s work, a motif present in some of his earliest writings. As regards the problem of philosophically grasping change, the novel, innovative contribution of Logiques des mondes consists primarily in the nuance added to the Badiouian account of processes of transformation by his admission that there are intermediary forms of change between modifications and events. (Badiou 2006a: 389, 393) In an interview broadcast on French radio in April 2006 to mark the publication of Logiques des mondes, Badiou, when asked about his relationship to Deleuze - the latter allegedly is enthralled by a Bergsonian variety of vitalist becoming which amounts to, in Badiou’s language, nothing more than mere modification - maintains that the question of continuity versus discontinuity, of a philosophical choice between models favoring 5 images of transformation as fluid dynamics of uninterrupted movement (i.e. gradual becoming) or as staccato rhythms of abrupt shifts (i.e. punctuated change), is an absolutely central thematic in contemporary philosophy (Badiou 2006b: unpaginated) (perhaps this choice could be said to be “axiomatic” in Badiou’s sense - namely, the decision to bet on one or the other model is an un-derivable, un-deducible ground for any and every philosophical system today). In this radio interview, he again confirms, during a discussion of the various categories of change outlined in Logiques des mondes, that his focus is on figures of rupture, going so far as to affirm the occurrence of instances of “radical discontinuity” (Badiou 2006b: unpaginated) (i.e. events). Indeed, “Book V” of Logiques des mondes departs from the assertion that “real change,” as a happening that isn’t authorized either by the mathematical-ontological order of “being qua being” (l’être en tant qu’être) or by the logical system of transcendental structures regulating the play of appearances within situations in a given world, (Badiou 2006a: 380) necessarily includes the imposition of discontinuity upon a world. (Badiou 2006a: 377) For Badiou, faced with the challenge of conceptualizing change, “It is necessary to think discontinuity as such, as that which nothing reabsorbs into any creative univocity, however indistinct, or chaotic, the concept of it would be.” (Badiou 2006a: 382) But, what would be involved in this thinking of “discontinuity as such?” And, what are its implications specifically for thinking through politics, especially in terms of questions concerning the conditions and consequences of processes of socio-political transformation? Answering these important queries requires outlining Badiou’s inter- linked philosophical constructions of history and temporality. In the 1982 volume Théorie du sujet, Badiou issues a declaration whose foundational status and various ramifications he has adhered to ever since: “history does not exist.” (Badiou 1982: 110 and Badiou 2006a: 531) Broadly speaking, this means (invoking Badiou’s later identification of the four “generic procedures” producing the truths handled by philosophy (Badiou 1999:35)) that the sequences of humanity’s amorous, artistic, political, and scientific activities do not unfold in the all-encompassing medium of a neutral, homogenous, and single historical time, the chronological continuum of a unified temporal One-All. What alternative vision of historical temporality does Badiou propose? By tying his account of real change to events, Badiou is prompted to argue that, as he nicely summarizes this particular point from Being and Event during an interview, (Badiou 2005a: 210) “Every event constitutes its own time. Consequently, every truth also involves the constitution of a time. So, there are times, not one time.” (Badiou 1994: 118) As he puts it more recently, “An event establishes a 6 singular time… the event outlines in the situation—in the ‘there is’—both a before and an after. A time starts to exist.” (Badiou 2005d: 61) Peter Hallward christens this “the beginning of a new time.” (Hallward, 2003:158) Similarly, “history” is non-existent precisely because what exists instead are histories-in-the-plural, namely, multiple strata of temporalized truth-trajectories (in the realms of love, art, politics, and science) that cannot be compared and integrated with each other on the basis of reference to an overarching historical totality as a standard yardstick of mutual measurement. Badiou fragments both history and time into a heterogeneous jumble of incomparable, autonomous sequences. (Hallward, 2003: 157 and Strathausen 2005: 279) For him, truths-that-have-appeared form a non-temporal (“temporal” being understood here as an enveloping homogenous chronology) meta-history (as the succession of singular flashes in which eternal truths burst forth into the temporal defiles of banal, hum-drum historical becoming (Badiou 2006a: 532)). Despite Badiou’s general systematic consistency on these issues (as with his rigorous handling of other issues too), subtle differences in his various wordings of these points regarding history and time signal the lurking presence of serious theoretical difficulties. In his 1998 text Metapolitics, he insists that, “singularity… has no relation as such to historical time, for it constitutes its own time through and through.” (Badiou 2005c: 117) In other words, evental singularities utterly break with history’s temporalities; these tears in the fabric of historical time suddenly rip into this fabric in an abrupt, discontinuous manner. However, in Logiques des mondes, Badiou words this line of thought somewhat differently—“the event extracts from one time the possibility of another time.” (Badiou 2006a: 407) The latter formulation clearly is more consistent with the previously mentioned constraint Badiou places on any theory of change (articulated in the interview “Can Change be Thought?”): Such a theory must succeed at envisioning processes of transformation as immanently arising from a given situation, rather than being imposed upon “what is” from a mysterious external Elsewhere. As per the latter formulation from Logiques des mondes, evental time emerges out of (and then separates itself off from) other historical-temporal currents (this could be described as an immanent genesis of the thereafter-transcendent qua subsequently independent in relation to its evental site as a situational point of origin). And yet, Badiou’s other above- cited insistence that one must think “discontinuity as such” appears to pull him away from stressing the immanence to broader stretches of historical time of the event’s engendering of another time, perhaps based on the worry that this would amount to a concession to the “cult of genealogies” (Badiou 2006a: 531) (i.e. historicist orientations 7 in post-modernism that compulsively re-inscribe all occurring phenomena back within overdetermining streams of historical continuity) resulting in the inability to think genuine newness per se due to the implicit denial that utter and complete ruptures with what comes before are possible. But, obviously, Badiou could embed aspects of evental times within larger temporal cross-sections of a given historical period without thereby positing, as he wishes to avoid doing, a single, monolithic history or time, a stifling historical-temporal closure within which it’s impossible to affirm that there is or can be anything new under the proverbial sun. Along these same lines, it’s well worth remembering Schelling’s 1809 warning, apropos Spinoza’s substance metaphysics, that identifying all attributes and modes to be part-and-parcel of substance is not, regardless of whatever one might think, to succeed at reducing these attributes and modes to the status of mere epiphenomenal resides of a unified substantial substratum. (Schelling 1936: 16-17) What’s important in this Schellingian stipulation for Badiouian philosophy is the notion that, as Schelling himself puts it in his Freiheitschrift: …dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom. Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent, and merely declares that the dependent entity, whatever else it may be, can only be as a consequence of that upon which it is dependent; it does not declare what this dependent entity is or is not. (Schelling 1936: 18) Schelling’s statements, if taken seriously by Badiouian philosophy, would permit proposing, without fear of this proposal pushing one into conceding there being the One- All of an ultimate historical-genealogical consistency qua temporal continuity, that specifically evental times immanently arise within and out of broader, longer currents of non-evental times (as will soon be seen, Hallward’s crafting of a distinction between the “specified” and the “specific” similarly permits Badiou the option of admitting that something could be related to a situation or world without, for all that, being entirely determined and dominated by such relations). Although evental time is produced on the basis of the materials of non-evental time, the former nonetheless achieves a self- defining, auto-constituting autonomy that distances and separates it from the preceding background of temporal currents from which it branched off as what might initially have appeared to be a tributary. The issues and problems at stake in the preceding discussion can be rendered clearer and more concrete through turning attention to the reverberations in Badiou’s political thought of these ways of conceiving history and time. As early as Peut-on 8 penser la politique?, Badiou proposes that one of the main tasks of authentic politics in his sense is the “re-punctuation of the chronique” (Badiou 1985: 69); it should be noted that “la chronique” could be rendered in English as either “the chronic” and/or “the chronicle,” with Badiou likely intending to condense both of these meanings (that is to say, the events of political interventions interrupt, displace, and reorganize the chronic constancy of chronicles à la continuous, liner socio-historical narratives—echoing this point, Lazarus describes this re-punctuation as a “de-historicization” essential to any and every real political gesture, with history here understood as the homogenizing chronologies of extant socio-political narratives (Lazarus 1996: 48). Badiou goes on to describe this re-punctuating as a distribution of “other accents” and an isolation of “other sequences” (Badiou 1985: 69) (i.e. truth-trajectories irreducible to and incompatible with the current state-of-the-situation’s stories about its political history - Lazarus, without directly citing Badiou, links this Badiouian assertion about the political re-punctuation of, so to speak, the chronic-logical to the thesis that time itself only exists as a dispersed, heterogeneous multiplicity of constructed and constructible times (Lazarus 1996: 141- 142)). The thread of these remarks from 1985 is picked up again in the 2005 study Le siècle, in which Badiou goes so far as to describe time itself as a political construction; and, he complains that, today, there is no real thinking of time. (Baduiou 2005e: 151- 152) The roughly contemporaneous second installment of Circonstances further develops this weaving together of the political and the temporal. Therein, Badiou claims that, “there is no common measure, no common chronology, between power on one side and truths on the other—truths as creation.” (Baduiou 2005b: 13) A few pages later, insisting again upon this gap by invoking “the distance between thought and power, the distance between the State and truths,” he assigns to philosophy the task of measuring this distance and knowing whether or not the chasm dividing the history of statist power from the history of events giving rise to real political truths can be bridged. (Baduiou 2005b: 16) In fulfilling the role of assessor and potential sealer of this rift (with this rift being a particular instance of the foundational parallax split between stasis and kinesis arguably posited by Badiou at the level of his overarching theory of change), philosophy supposedly assists in changing existence itself. (Baduiou 2005b: 17) However, all of this raises a set of troubling questions: If there is an abyss of incommensurability separating history-power-state from politics-thought-truth - this abyss reflects the in-eliminable time- lag that Badiou repeatedly insists leaves the dynamic movements of political events and their subjects always and necessarily out-of-synch with the sluggish inertia of an 9 inherently conservative and essentially homogenous status quo (Baduiou 2005c: 105 and Baduiou 2005e: 155) - then what does it mean to charge philosophy with the mandate of crossing this boundary line of division so as to negotiate a link between otherwise foreign territories? How, if at all, can this apparently absolute split be sutured? The strangeness of Badiou’s position here is promptly signaled on the page of Circonstances, 2 immediately following his claim that philosophy transforms political situations by bridging the gap between history-power-state and politics-thought-truth. He contends that philosophy concerns itself with “paradoxical relations” that are “relations which are not relations” (Baduiou 2005b: 18) (maybe these could be conceived of, in vaguely Schellingian parlance, as instances of transcendence-in-immanence). Along related and relevant lines, in Le siècle, he refers to another paradox, one at the heart of his mode of conceptualizing temporality - “Time… is an inaccessible mix of agitation and sterility; it is the paradox of a stagnant feverishness.” (Baduiou 2005e: 152) Is there (as will subsequently be asserted here) a subtle rapport between these two paradoxical structures (i.e. non-relational relations and the blending of stasis with kinesis)? This precise juncture marks the point of entry into a tangled thicket of difficulties. Moreover, this is a point where various thinkers’ critical-interpretive paths diverge - for instance, the paths of two particularly articulate experts on Badiouian philosophy: Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward. Bosteels departs from the conviction that Badiou’s 1988 “mathematical turn” in Being and Event, rather than functioning as a sudden shift in a totally new and different direction, is a continuous and consequent extension of his earlier work as culminating in the 1982 philosophical treatise Théorie du sujet. (Bosteels 2004a: 150-151 and Bosteels 2005: 578) He argues that the “and” in the title of Badiou’s magnum opus indicates that, instead of inflexibly partitioning the trans-ontological realm of the event from the ontological domain of being qua being, Badiou is interested in formally articulating the paradoxical conjunction-in-disjunction, the tension-ridden relation-that-is-not-a-relation, operative between being and event (Bosteels 2004a: 153-154); for Bosteels, the title of Badiou’s 1988 tome shouldn’t be heard as announcing yet another rigid dualism to be added to the long list of philosophy’s dichotomies accumulated over the course of its history. (Bosteels 2004a: 103) Hallward, by contrast, views Being and Event as a fault line demarcating a pronounced distinction between early and late periods in Badiou’s thought. He contends that “his books up to and including Théorie du sujet (1982), the summa of his early work, have become partially obsolete by his own subsequent criteria,” (Hallward 2003: 29) and 10 he denies that these pre-1988 writings can be read as a “hesitant, embryonic version of a subsequently finished product.” (Hallward 2003: 30) In terms of the knot (and knottiness) of the positioning of politics and temporality with respect to each other in Badiouian philosophy, Hallward, contra the implications of the position defended by Bosteels, maintains that the post-1988 Badiou, with his emphases on event-prompted subtraction and separation, is pushed into promoting “a politics of the ‘flash,’ a politics grounded in the revolutionary but ephemeral moment in which a serial inertia can be suspended with only minimal recourse to an institutional stability of any kind.” (Hallward 2003: 43) What Hallward is picking up on here is Badiou’s frequently reiterated characterization of events as fleeting moments of extraordinarily rare dysfunctionality - for Badiou, an event, including a political event, amounts to a dysfunctioning of the representational state-of-the-situation and/or the transcendental regime of a world (Badiou 1985: 77, Badiou 2005c: 72, Badiou 2003a: 131 and Badiou 2006a: 408)— surfacing within the run of things ever-so-briefly. Throughout Logiques des mondes, for example, Badiou repeatedly emphasizes that the temporality of the event (as issuing forth from the evental site) consists of an instantaneous appearing-and-then- disappearing, a “brusque,” “evanescent,” and self-consuming conflagration that immolates itself into non-being as soon as it strikes the surface of being. (Badiou 2006a: 389, 391, 399, 413)) Badiou and Bosteels would both respond to Hallward’s comments on Badiou’s “flash politics” by contrasting the abrupt, irruptive temporality of the instantaneity of the event with the protracted, enduring labor, engaged in by a militant subject-of-the-event, of both drawing out the consequent truths following from this event as well as faithfully “forcing” the situation and its state to change by inscribing these truths back into the textured being of the world. According to Badiou, whereas the time of the event is an immeasurably fast coming-and-going, the unique time this specific event creates in its wake, a time forged through the fidelity of this event’s subject(s), can be (and often is) an extended, sustained period or path spanning lengthy stretches of the becoming of chronological-historical time, (Badiou 2006a: 389 and Badiou 1990: 23) a post-evental time tied to the enduring, eternal “trace” left behind by the vanished event (Badiou 2006a: 399), as early as 1976, Badiou characterizes revolutionary political sequences as long, extenuated processes always capable of being interrupted (Badiou 1976: 75). Such is the reply of Badiou, Bosteels, (Bosteels 2002: 198-199 and Bosteels 2005: 603) and certain others (for instance, Carsten Strathausen (Strathausen 2005: 279) to lines of criticism departing from the apparent link between the rapid-fire