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Friday, July 14, 2006
Being and Event - or - Nullifying the Opposition, the Rip Van Winkle Way!
This can be my follow-up to the whole Heifetz-Leiter dust-up. Whether you approve of Leiter’s tone or not, I think he’s basically right about what goes wrong in the n+1 piece. Heifetz is discussing the so-called ‘analytic-continental’ divide, but has severe misconceptions about what lies on both sides of it. Her notion of what goes on in Anglo-American departments is just plain erroneous. Her notion of what the continental tradition contains is much too narrow. Basically, she mistakes one perspective on the continental tradition for the tradition itself.
Rather than pick apart Heifetz’ article, let me make these points, indirectly, by doing a spot of reading of the Intro and Meditations 1 & 2 of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event [amazon]. (I’m teaching ‘recent continental philosophy’ this semester, and maybe I’ll have the kids read these opening bits.)
Let me first say that I haven’t read the whole damn brick. I’ve read significant portions, the first 100 pages quite closely. So if anyone wants to correct me on the basis of what other bits say, or other things Badiou has written, that would be most welcome. (I wish the book had an index. A 480 page academic tome with no index is not so convenient for certain purposes.)
I basically have two theses about Badiou. One negative, one more positive. First, his ignorance of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition is downright weird. I think he is probably at least partially to blame for Heifetz’ rather dire confusion on this score (she seems to be taking her cues from him.) Second, he has actually reinvented a major analytic philosophy wheel: namely, the metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. This sounds like a silly thing to do - perhaps a symptomatic footnote to the aforemenioned ignorance. But I don’t actually think it is silly. That Badiou’s view is the same as the early Wittgenstein’s - not just in outline, in significant doctrinal detail - is not the sort of thing you would necessarily notice, given the differences in vocabulary. It’s a repetition that could easily take place non-negligently, even though I think Badiou actually has been quite historically negligent. I happen to think tractarian metaphysics is a very interesting place to end up. People don’t give this spot nearly enough credit. So: good. I am conditionally well-disposed towards Badiou and sincerely looking forward to reading more of this big book. (I don’t honestly expect my impression of near-perfect identity with the doctrines Tractatus to survive acquaintance with the next couple hundred pages. I can see there is some Lacan coming down the track. I’ll probably have to get off at that point. But it’s not a bad start.)
Also, the fact that Badiou has so strikingly reinvented the early Wittgenstein says something interesting about the relation between the analytic and continental traditions. Just as Wittgenstein migrated out of 19th Century post-Kantian idealism via Frege and Russell, so Badiou is migrating out of the Heideggerian tradition, via Frege, for more or less exactly the reasons Wittgenstein thought he had in 1914. Namely, there is something wrong with the whole post-Kantian inheritance. Badiou sees something wrong with Heidegger that is very similar to what Wittgenstein saw wrong with Schopenhauer. This reinvention of the wheel is in fact a very natural development, in its way. I think it really speaks to the essential shapes of certain ideas that they can tend to grow this way.
Now it might seem impossible that you could BOTH throw over Heidegger for Frege AND be ignorant of the Anglo-American tradition. But Badiou manages it in the strangest way: namely, by exhibiting interest in analytic philosophy’s roots, while betraying no awareness of anything that has happened in the tradition since roughly 1930. In a way my complaint is: he hasn’t kept up with the literature. But he takes this to such extremes that - well, it amounts to not keeping up with ancient history. Badiou treats Anglo-American philosophy as culminating in Carnapian logical positivism. It is really hard to exaggerate what a weird effect this has on his narrative. It would be like treating Sartre as the last word in continental philosophy. Suppose I wrote a 480 page book, the thesis of which was, basically: Sartre’s theory of freedom is wrong, therefore whatever everyone who comes after says must be derivative ‘Sartrean sophistry’, because it comes after Sartre. (Therefore the analytic/continental split is nullified!) And suppose that was the sum total of my commentary on, say, Foucault. Namely: ha! Sartre is wrong! Given what Foucault has written about Sartre, would that be regarded as decisive? I think it would be regarded as downright bizarre. Badiou’s commentary on the Anglo-American tradition is at this level of sophistication. I must say: it’s fairly breathtaking.
(And actually this sort of confusion follows a pattern: what sinks Derrida, from the first sentence of his response to Searle, is his refusal to believe that Searle could admit the possibility of vague concepts and predicates. That is, Searle has read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Derrida’s arguments are non-starters against any post-mid-century analytic philosopher.)
But I’m getting a bit ahead of my story. Badiou very much frames his book as a decisive intervention in the continental/analytic dispute: "I would like this publication to mark an obvious fact: the nullity of the opposition between analytic thought and continental thought" (p. xiv).
Now how do we get this nullity? We have to make some assumptions.
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 practices 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. (p. 1)
Taking these in order: ‘universally recognizable’ is sort of vague, but presumably what Badiou means is something like ‘the last figure that everyone agrees must be engaged with seriously, rather than ignored or dismissed as a charlatan, lightweight, hopelessly wrong-headed, etc.; the last figure you ignore at your peril.’ The problem is that then it is obviously wrong to say Heidegger is the last. Because Anglo-American philosophers are often rather dismissive of Heidegger. At the very least, it is regarded as possible to get your Ph.D. without having taken a Heidegger course. People work on metaphysics and epistemology - work on the mysteries of ontology and all the rest - without reading Being and Time. This may be regarded as a very unfortunate attitude, but it is in fact a common one, attended by no feeling of intellectual bad conscience whatsoever. That means Badiou’s assumption is factually mistaken. It can only be made factually correct by writing off all this Anglo-American stuff as ‘not really philosophy, then’. That’s fine, actually; but then the promised ‘nullification’ of the analytic/continental divide ceases to be interesting. (Obviously you can nullify the divide just by refusing to take seriously one or the other side of it. But are we really going to accept that everyone who has been more or less ignorantly dismissive, on both sides, has already decisively anticipated this first crucial step of Badiou’s solution? Obviously not.)
Who is, in fact, the last ‘recognizable philosopher’. It’s Wittgenstein, no? Philosophical Investigations is the last major philosophical work that no one on the analytic or the continental side will really say it is completely safe to ignore. (Or if they do say that, they will say it with the knowledge that they are being a bit heretical.) I think Badiou may be leaving out Wittgenstein because he is an ‘anti-philosopher’. If so, I don’t really think that makes much sense. At any rate, I think it is highly significant that the last universally recognizable work of philosophy/anti-philosophy is, in fact, an attempt at a refutation of the very views advanced in Being and Event. (I hope to get around to talking about this, but not in this post.)
Suppose we leave out Wittgenstein. Then who? Well, obviously: Kant. You have to go back to Kant to find a figure that everyone, on both sides of the analytic-continental divide will agree is a great philosopher, whom one cannot legitimately ignore. (Analytics feel free to ignore Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Many continentals don’t know a thing about Frege and Russell, and don’t feel one bit guilty about it.)
Moving along:
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.
Now we get to what dropped my jaw. Badiou is apparently seriously claiming that contemporary American philosophy ‘follows’ the work of the Vienna Circle. Of course this is true in a temporal sense, but in a philosophical sense it is beyond ridiculous. Read any history of analytic philosophy - read Scott Soames two volume history, for example - and you will hear that logical positivism is now regarded as an extremely marginal cul-de-sac. It was a view that loomed large, then - to a truly astonishing degree - fell out of fashion, just fell clean out of sight. It was regarded as decisively refuted. (Hence my Sartre analogy, above. He too has gone into astonishing eclipse, given how prominent he used to be.) The fact that American philosophy ‘conserves the figure of scientific rationality’, which is at least partially true, is not due to any significant, lingering taste for logical positivism in American philosophy. What this shows is that attachment to a ‘scientific image’ was independent of belief in this one highly specific attempt to fill in the details of that image. I’ll just finish this thought by skipping ahead a bit. Here is Badiou on his own path of intellectual development:
I was entangled in the consideration that if one supposes that there is a referent of logico-mathematical discourse, then one cannot escape the alternative of thinking of it either as an ‘object’ obtained by abstraction (empiricism), or as a super-sensible Idea (Platonism). This is the same dilemma in which one is trapped by the universally recognized Anglo-Saxon distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘empirical’ sciences. (p. 5)
The last time this dilemma was universally acknowledged in the Anglo-American tradition, if ever it was, was in the 1940’s. By the early 50’s, Quine had attacked the analytic/synthetic distinction.
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones. (p. 132, Ways of Paradox, “Carnap on Logical Truth”)
It is astonishing that Badiou is advancing a picture of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition in which the last word is Rudolf Carnap. In which there is no later Wittgenstein, no Quine, never mind any of what we consider contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. (Quine is already regarded by analytic philosophers as not really a contemporary figure. He’s part of the history of analytic philosophy.)
I won’t say so much about Badiou’s third assumption, except that it, too, is clearly wrong. "3. A post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject is unfolding: its origin can be traced to non-philosophical practices." It is certainly true that no one in Anglo-American philosophy is likely to accept a Cartesian picture of the nature of the subject. (Certainly, to defend one would be an extremely unorthodox thing to do.) But it is not true that the grounds for rejecting this view are what Badiou suggests: namely, Marx and Lenin, Freud and Lacan. Badiou is too inconsiderate of alternative paths of arrival at the same conclusion: namely, there seems to be something wrong with this Descartes stuff.
What do these three statements [the three assumptions] have in common? They all indicate, in their own manner, the closure of an entire epoch of thought and its concerns. Heidegger thinks the epoch is ruled by an inaugural forgetting and proposes a Greek return in his deconstruction of metaphysics. The ‘analytic’ current of English-language philosophy discounts most of classical philosophy’s propositions as senseless, or as limited to the exercise of a language game. (p. 1-2)
Once again, Badiou’s assumption is that analytic philosophy ground to a complete halt with Carnap. But - I keep saying it - no one today is in the strictly 1930’s business of dismissing classical philosophy’s propositions because they cannot be translated in the Vienna Circle’s Protokolsätze, or anything of the sort. (And the ‘language game’ reference is very odd-sounding. It doesn’t sound like the later Wittgenstein at all. Badiou has no ear for any analytic philosophy developments after the 30’s, it seems.)
So Badiou’s confident dismissals of ‘Anglo-Saxon linguistic sophistry’ (p. 7) really are anything but harmless errors. They seem to have inspired Heifetz’s ill-advised piece, at least to some degree. She writes: "Analytic philosophers, who strangle philosophy with a linguistic noose just because nothing else seemed to be working fifty years ago, fail to see the danger in thinking that language is the only truth procedure—or even one at all." But the reason she thinks nothing has changed for fifty years is that she is getting her information from someone who, apparently, just woke up from a fifty year coma, in terms of studying Anglo-American philosophy. (Also, I have no idea what ‘language is the only truth procedure’ is supposed to mean.)
In general, once we clear away all three of Badiou’s basic assumptions as erroneous, we are in a position to put a potentially intelligible frame around his project, which really does seem to deserve one. His philosophy seems not so essentially concerned with the fate of Heidegger’s attempt to bury metaphysics as Badiou himself thinks. No doubt Heidegger is important enough, and no doubt he is essential to Badiou’s own intellectual trajectory, but this trajectory is a repetition of Wittgenstein’s. (Oddly, those who fail to study the history of analytic philosophy may be doomed to repeat it. In at least this one case.) But even that is not so essential. What is really essential to what is going on here is that we are still dealing with an attempt to sort out post-Kantian idealism. We are still trying to bring that story to a close. If we say that the last universally recognizable philosophers are Wittgenstein and Kant, then you get the correct coordinates between which these various movements constitute an unsettled oscillation. The way to sort out the analytic/continental split is by sorting out what is going on between Kant and Wittgenstein. I really think that Badiou ought to agree with this.
I think this is really the most productive, positive way to spin the problems with Heifetz’s piece (if we are still wondering what to say about that.) What she is doing is conflating one strain within continental philosophy - the post-Heidegger line, which plausibly culminates in Badiou - with the whole post-Kantian tradition. That causes her not to see the possibility of other takes on the post-Kantian tradition. Which is precisely what Leiter is complaining about, incidentally. There isn’t any room in Heifetz’ over-simple analytic/continental scheme for someone like Leiter. Hence Leiter’s irritation at being made out to be a symptom of the problem, when it is Heifetz herself who is wearing the strait-jacket. (Again, feel free to think he was a bit harsh in his response. But he is right about this.)
This more or less takes us to the end of Badiou’s introduction. I will say: I was in really a bad mood after getting only this far into his book. But Meditations 1 & 2 perked me up, because it was so - refreshingly familiar. I found it quite lucid. Just translate "there is nothing apart from situations" as ‘the world is all that is the case’ and everything starts to fall into place. Badiou’s multiplicities correspond to objects as clusters of possibilities - possible participations in states of affairs. The idea that ‘the ontological situation’ is ‘the presentation of presentation’ fits with Wittgenstein’s strictures against certain sorts of universalizations.
Come to think of it: I’ll just stop there. I’ve said enough for one post. I am curious whether anyone can produce any evidence that I’m wrong about Badiou’s apparently comprehensive ignorance of Anglo-American philosophy, post-Carnap.
I will add four notes. First, it might seem strange that someone could dislike logical positivism as much as Badiou seems to, yet reinvent the Tractatus (the text the logical positivists found so inspirational.) The simple answer is that the early Wittgenstein is not an empiricist - as the positivists were. His metaphysics is more Platonic, in a weird sort of way. His ‘objects’ are not empirical items. The logical positivists a bit too eagerly took up the Tractatus for their empiricist ends but the actual thoughts behind Wittgenstein’s first book are more about ... well about the one and the many, about Plato. Badiou’s first two meditations remind me a great deal of Wittgenstein’s wartime notebooks. He is working out the same lines.
Second, apparently Badiou does discuss the Tractatus somewhere. I read here that "Unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is for Badiou one of the great antiphilosophical texts." On the basis of what I’ve read in Being and Event, I think I can guess. I think I can also guess why Badiou wouldn’t realize that he was, in fact, repeating Wittgenstein. (It’s not a stupid thing to miss. If Wittgenstein had written a bit more clearly, these things wouldn’t happen.) But better if I just find out where Badiou discusses Wittgenstein and just see for myself what he says.
Third, I haven’t really tried to work through the set theory. I have reached my tractarian conclusions about Badiou on the basis of the Platonic metaphysical arguments of the opening meditations. If that turns out to be not a good guide to what follows, I may be barking up the wrong tree.
Fourth, I probably owe a clue about what I think Heidegger and Schopenhauer have in common, such that Badiou’s rejection of the former, Wittgenstein’s of the latter, could be analogous. Here’s what Badiou writes:
Heidegger still remains enslaved, even in the doctrine of the withdrawal and the un-veiling, to what I consider, for my part, to be the essence of metaphysics; that is, the figure of being as endowment and gift, as presence and opening, and the figure of ontology as the offering of a trajectory of proximity. I will call this type of ontology poetic; ontology haunted by the dissipation of Presence and the loss of the origin. We know what role the poets play, from Parmenides to René Char, passing by Hölderlin and Trakl, in the Heideggerian exegesis. I attempted to follow in his footsteps—with entirely different stakes—in Theorie du sujet, when I convoked Aeschylus and Sophocles, Mallarmé, Hölderlin and Rimbaud to the intricacy of the analysis.
Now, to the seduction of poetic proximity—I admit, I barely escaped it—I will oppose the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but from all presentation. I will say that being qua being does not in any manner let itself be approached, but solely allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality of a deductive consistency without aura. Being does not diffuse itself in rhythm and image, it does not reign over metaphor, it is the null sovereign of inference. For poetic ontology, which—like History—finds itself in an impasse of an excess of presence, one if which being conceals itself, it is necessary to substitute mathematical ontology, in which dis-qualification and unpresentation are realized through writing. Whatever the subjective price may be the genealogy of the discourse of being—and the refelction on its possible essence—in Cantor, Gödel, and Cohen rather than in Hölderlin, Trakl, and Celan.
That’s the problem with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of World as Will, for Wittgenstein. Not so much withdrawl as unveiling - a disclosure of Being - that is really only possible privately or poetically. Wittgenstein basically concludes that the epistemology here makes no sense. And that’s what Badiou thinks about Heidegger. Wittgenstein went for a subtractive approach. A purified version of Frege’s Begriffsschrift. Badiou goes for: "Finally the language, repealing any poem, will possess the potential of what Frege named ideography. Together the esnemble will oppose - to the temptation of presence - the rigour of the subtractive, in which being is said solely as that which cannot be supposed on the basis of any presence or experience" (p. 27). I don’t know whether that makes sense to you, but it seems pretty intuitive to me, actually. I don’t think it’s right. But there’s a lot to be said for it. It is a very elegant philosophy, at the very least.
Now if only someone can shove something later than Carnap under the guy’s nose ...
Comments
Now that the whole thing hasn’t been indexed by reference to Leiter’s tone, I agree with most of what he says. There’s a highly favored (in these locales) rhetorical move that defends literary theory by elevating it into continental philosophy, but the people who do so often seem to be fairly ignorant of philosophy except for a small group of Theory-heavy recent stars. But because they know continentals from Derrida onwards fairly well, they’re sure that they know the basics of philosophy. That’s the only way I can interpret most of the comments on _On Zizek and Trilling_, as saying “Kierkegaard who?”
It’s an over-confident grad student thing, and Heifetz’ essay fits the mode exactly.
And as a political activist, I do get really tired of the other thread of the whole thing (cue Scott), the assumption that literary theory / recent continental philosophy is “leftist” and that e.g. Leiter’s politics must therefore not be “leftist”. Leiter’s PGR sub-issue is especially interesting to me in this regard; it’s straightforward academic politics, but look at the gloss of pseudo-leftist outrage sometimes placed on it.
Suppose we leave out Wittgenstein. Then who? Well, obviously: Kant. You have to go back to Kant to find a figure that everyone, on both sides of the analytic-continental divide will agree is a great philosopher, whom one cannot legitimately ignore.
Marx? Freud? As figures that plenty people disagree with, but none dare ignore? And don’t be a-telling me they aint philosophers. I know better.
More seriously:
Isn’t it the case that Badiou is talking about (is interested in, is generalising about) ontology rather than philosophy tout court? Whatever the latter might be. Then, when you say:
Second, apparently Badiou does discuss the Tractatus somewhere. I read here that “Unsurprisingly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is for Badiou one of the great antiphilosophical texts.” On the basis of what I’ve read in Being and Event, I think I can guess. I think I can also guess why Badiou wouldn’t realize that he was, in fact, repeating Wittgenstein. (It’s not a stupid thing to miss. If Wittgenstein had written a bit more clearly, these things wouldn’t happen.) But better if I just find out where Badiou discusses Wittgenstein and just see for myself what he says.
Well, yes. I don’t know Badiou very well, but my sense is that he’s perfectly up-front about his debt to Wittgenstein, and his dialogue with that body of work. He describes his own stuff as a hybrid of Heidegger and Wittgenstein in the Infinite Thought book; and in an interview with Oliver Feltham we get:
OF: In L’Etre et l’evenement you say ‘the heterogeneity of language games is at the base of the diversity of situations. being is unfolded in multiple ways because its unfolding is only presented in the multiple of languages’ (312-2). What must be added to this to distinguish it from what you precisely characterize as the ontology of ‘idealinguistery’ (linguistic idealism)?
AB: Yes, yes, it is a sort of citation of Wittgenstein , a sort of strange beast between and me ...
There’s a whole bunch more, but my fingers are tired with all this typing.
... and a PS. Pardon my tired fingers; that last Badiou quotation should read:
AB: Yes, yes, it is a sort of citation of Wittgenstein , a sort of strange beast between Wittgenstein and me ...
Adam, I think Anglo-American figures do feel that they don’t really need to address Marx and Freud. I don’t mean they would think it was wrong to address them. But a contribution to philosophy of mind that bypassed Freud would be considered fine. A philosophy of mind that had no relation to what Kant said about the mind, on the other hand ...
That’s interesting about “Infinite Thought”. I’ll have to give a look.
My understanding (and I’m really no expert on Badiou) is that Infinite Thought is rather ill-thought-of amongst Badiouists: it’s a kind of cobbled-together Greatest Hits of Badiou rather than a vol that gives a reader any proper sense of the depth or complexity of the man’s thought.
What I’d like to know, in my outside-the-sweetshop-looking-in ignorance, is whether this ongoing philosophising of ‘the Event’, or philosophising around ‘the Event’, is a big deal or no. I have friends who think it’s quite the coming thing. Is it?
Hey John, I’ll have to read more closely soon and catch up (busy silly life), but two thoughts are whizzing about. Old thoughts, revivified by this whole problem of misrecognition, deliberate or otherwise.
I’ve been chewing on a couple of essays for some time. One is about the Vendler v. Perloff prize fight of some years ago. Vendler usually the more traditional, New Critical in her leanings, Perloff clearly an avant garde partisan. Both rooted in the Modernist period. I adore them both. (This situation is the basis for this post, and both of the essays I’ve been chewing.) I keep their books next to each other on my shelves in violation of all accepted alphabetical operating procedures.
Here’s the rub, with the n+1 problem, V vs. P, and another coming soon: often some combination of deliberate misrecognition and/or suspicious use of metonymy and/or simple human “talking past one another.” All problems I spent most grad school untangling when they happened between students or students and profs in class. Basically, I think there’s a lack of ability to see the forest and the trees at the same time ----- which is what close reading taught me to do (not always perfectly).
First Example: Why, isn’t it curious?, that it’s Vendler who writes many essays on the poetry and poetics of Jorie Graham, while JG’s influences all, quite clearly, come out of the traditions so beloved of Perloff? (there will be an essay on this just as soon as I get going on my “sabbatical") Really? Something is going on here that neither of these two immanent critics have brought to consciousness, and which is nearly endemic to the academic scene in the ways you and others note regarding the n+1 problem.
Second Example: The old straw-boogey-man that Post-structural or Postmodern thought is all the early Foucault, Baudrillard, some bits of Derrida and so forth. When!, there’s a very strong “humanist” strain in both Post- modes of thought: also found in Derrida, the late Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, et al. (The essay/s will include a chart of this tension within Post- thought.)
Third Example: This article I read at Arts and Letters by Mark Goldblatt for Ducts.org,"Can Humanists Talk to Postmodernists,” the conclusion of which is, surprise!, that Humanists and Postmodernists can’t talk to each other because they’re operating from completely different axioms. (Loosely, this is his conclusion.) Which, I call balderdash. Why? See Examples 1 and 2.
Humanists and Postmodernists are siblings, raised in the same house, with very different perceptions of what happened in the family of origin. They are not aliens to each other requireing the use of a babblefish in order to get on. Most of the greatest of my professors, and my own peculiar way of working, have combined the strengths of each. It seems to me that Postmodernity (to use some shorthand) turns on Humanism to point out its failures, to problematize it, to critique it ………… the better to complete it, my dear.
It seems to me, humbly and arrogantly at once, that the Age of Problematization is what has passed. Not Postmodernity, not Humanism, not Theory --- but the necessary threshing period. And what needs to come next is an Age of Cautious Invention, or a new Renaissance. That age would have to admit that we know what the problems are in our philosophies, in our social orders, why The One Dimensional Man is so flat in her and his cube, her and his factory station making sneakers for $2/per diem. Then, having made confession, move on to pluralistically, ecumenically, carefully, creating what I think would ultimately be an incarnation of Humanism—to, in other words, really grow up. But, I read a LOT of Irigaray, so it could just be me.
A good rule of thumb is that if Zizek is paying attention to it, it’s either already trendy or soon will be. So yes, this “event” thing is likely to be a topic of conversation for a while.
This post is really fascinating to me. I have no loyalty to Badiou whatsoever and find the vast arrogance of the intro to Being and Event to be appalling, so I am in favor of anything that will deflate it. “As soon as I set down my pen, I knew that I was going to be a Great Philosopher forever and ever!” (I’ve read basically everything of Badiou that’s in book form in English, except Being and Event, so maybe I’m not qualified to talk about him anymore.)
The genealogical thing with Heidegger is interesting, because I would see the “deconstructive” line as having the best prima facie claim to be the inheritors of Heidegger—Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Agamben.... The latter two, in my study, tend to reference Badiou here and there, and Nancy even has an essay in Déclosion that is specifically in response to Badiou. I just really don’t know what one does with Badiou—unless you count posturing about how finally “truth” is making a comeback, how philosophy will never be the same, etc.
The set theory gives it its exquisite truthiness!
(Sorry—the Badiou essay is actually in La création du monde: ou la mondialisation. It’s mainly about the four “truth conditions.")
Re: the event, it’s a term that shows up with regularity in Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s work, starting in the early 90s, which means there’s plenty of eventing to talk about, so yeah, it’s probably set for trendy goodness.
I’d like to request the post on “why Wittgenstein is just Schopenhauer plus Frege.” Does the Valve take requests?
Thanks for asking, ansklul. This post comes as close to fulfilling your request as I am likely to do this week. (I really should get around to rewriting that darn dissertation, though.) Also, I reviewed a pair of Wittgenstein books for NDPR. You may find my reviews contain more portions of the answer.
Best I can do right at the moment. Again, thanks for asking.
Badiou, Baudrillard, Derrida… behind the times. Foucault was talking about “eventalization” in 1980!
Craig,
Yeah, well Deleuze’s work on the event is in Logic of Sense and that came out in 1968!
John,
“Philosophical Investigations is the last major philosophical work that no one on the analytic or the continental side will really say it is completely safe to ignore.”
Didn’t I get a bunch of shit for this before?
Hmmmm, not from me, I hope. But feel free to point out my inconsistency, if I have been.
Good point Anthony. Badiou has a book on Deleuze (the only Badiou I’ve seen), whom he praises as a serious metaphysician (but alas committed to “overturning Platonism"). Here is the beginning of chapter two, which is relevant to our concerns:
“Our epoch can be said to have been stamped and signed, in philosophy, by the return of the question of Being. This is why it is dominated by Heidegger. He drew up the diagnosis and explicitly took as his subject the realignment, after a century of Criticism and the phenomenological interlude, of thought with its primordial interrogation: what is to be understood by the being of beings? When all is said and done, there is little doubt that the century has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential than the “linguistic turn” with which it has been credited. This turn amounts to making language, its structures, and its resources the transcendental of every investigation of the faculty of knowledge, and to the setting up of philosophy as either a generalized grammar or a weak logic. But when we read Wittgenstein, who is the only really great thinker of this turn, we realize that the moment of the most rigorous conceptual tension in the Tractatus is when an altogether remarkable ontological base—the theory of eternal objects—has been secured. We also realize that the last word belongs to a silent supracognitive, or mystical, intuition that lies beyond the logical structures to which cognitive propositions are confined and that alone opens us to the question that matters: what ought I to do? If it is true that the limits of the world are exactly the limits of language [see below - DM], the result is that whatever decides the fate of thought, which exceeds the limits of the world, exceeds equally those of language. This implies that, although the validity (or the sense) of scientific propositions (propositions bearing on the representations of such or such a part of the world) can only be assured by the means of the analytic of language (this is the critical residue), it is nevertheless beyond this analytic that thought accords with its highest power, which is that of interrogating the value of the world itself. In Wittgenstein, language is undermined by the question concerning Being—if not regarding its uses, at least regarding its finality.
In this sense, Deleuze belongs absolutely to this century. [...] The question posed by Deleuze is the question of Being.” Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, p. 19-20.
Incidentally (or not!), Tractatus 5.6 reads: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” [orig. emph.] That’s MY language, not language itself. 5.63 = “I am my world. (The microcosm.)”; and 5.62 makes clear that the issue is solipsism, not linguistic idealism—let alone a Platonic realm of Being beyond language, or whatever, accessible through “supracognitive intuition”! Although surely Badiou is reserving the Platonism for himself, and is crediting Wittgenstein only with pointing out, despite himself perhaps, the crying need for same.
So maybe the reason Badiou never gets beyond Carnap is (ironically) that he sees that Carnap got the Tractatus wrong, and even though subsequent analytic philosophers rejected Carnap’s positivism, they devolved into an utterly non-Heideggerian Seinsvergessenheit, toward Quinean naturalism and suchlike, when what they should have done is to go back and see where Wittgenstein was pointing, beyond language to the One.
Now I wonder what he says about the Investigations...
I seem to remember that too, Anthony.
And don’t forget a little insignificant fellow, Maurice Blanchot, back in 1962 with Awaiting Oblivion. Or 1941 if you take it back to Thomas, or even 1935 with the so-called ‘turn to literature.’ Without all of which, no Badiouing bluster would today be thinkable.
the post-Heidegger line, which plausibly culminates in Badiou
A bold, highly contentious and thoroughly unsubstantiated generalisation, of course.
No, not directly from you (from Rich, yes), though I am wondering now why you didn’t come to my defense at the time about it.
I also wonder what is guiding your view with all this high falutin talk of culminatin’. I wasn’t able to read this whole post very closely, a bit too long for my eyes at the computer (and this is why I hope we never loss paper), but I’m wondering if this is a direct line of progress towards better philosophy or what it is you mean by this.
Rich attacked you for saying that continental philosophers acknowledge that Wittgenstein is a great philosopher? That sounds implausible. As to the culminating - that is probably a slip. I think it comes from reading too much Badiou, who really thinks he is the culmination of a certain line (see his NLR piece); and thinking of him as the culmination in a more neutral sense - the latest thing to come down the pike. Obviously the latter sense is highly artificial since it is somewhat an artifact of delayed translation. Anyway, Badiou is sort of trying to bury Heidegger, and he is the most fashionable Heideggerian of the moment. That is where I got ‘culminate’ from - possibly inadvisably. I am happy to drop it.
I read “culminate” as “calumnate.” In fact, that misunderstanding is the only reason I clicked from the comment notification over to post a comment.
Possibly kind of true: Badiou calumnates the line of philosophy stemming from Heidegger.
Dave, thanks for that good quote (who is it from?) about Deleuze; that’s useful. I sort of agree with it, but then again I don’t entirely, because this is wrong: “We also realize that the last word belongs to a silent supracognitive, or mystical, intuition that lies beyond the logical structures.” Actually, I think it belongs to Will - to doing. The transcendental subject is the willing subject. (There are no logical objects, only logical operations.) Also, ‘the limits of my language’ is, I think, ‘my’ in the transcendental sense. So it is the limit of language generally, not of LW’s language.
Thanks again for the Deleuze quote. That’s a very useful link to have for purposes of pulling this stuff I’m working on together.
"Rich attacked you for saying that continental philosophers acknowledge that Wittgenstein is a great philosopher? That sounds implausible.”
Look, call me a liar if you want, but I’m not wasting my time to go get the damn quote. I’m not suprised with your response.
In what way is Badiou a Heideggerian? You should also know that Badiou’s Deleuze book is considered to be incomplete among many involved in this debate.
Anthony, ‘x is implausible’ and ‘x is a lie’ have different meanings in English. (Consult a dictionary if you think I am lying to you.) Seriously. Calm down. If you don’t think this is important enough for YOU to bother to tell me what you are talking about - i.e. what you said - then why did you bring it up? (Honestly, Anthony. Climb down from your high horse and join the conversation if you want, but we can’t really talk with you up there.) As to why Badiou is a Heideggerian. I guess I meant that as shorthand for: in the post Heidegger-line. He is as adverse follower of Heidegger. As to Badiou’s Deleuze book being considered incomplete? I would have assumed as much.
John,
You really are the last person on this planet I would take a lecture about horses and their highness. If you had asked, “What is it that you said?” I would have been able to answer, “Something to the effect that Wittgenstein was part of the canon of Continental philosophy, to which Rich made some noises resembling chortling.”
You’re losing me with the Heidegger thing. So he is only a Heidegerrian because he is in the post-Heidegger line (meaning?), but he’s also an adverse follower of Heidegger? Those don’t seem to square.
Oh, not Anthony the drama king again. Anthony, I have no idea what age-old grudge you’re referring to, but strongly suspect, based on your previous history, that you’ve completely misrepresented whatever it was.
And now I’m actually starting to get annoyed. Why bother with “No, not directly from you (from Rich, yes)”? I don’t speak for John. John doesn’t speak for me.
You are a tiresome flamer, and you give every impression of being both talentless and abrasive. If you’re really concerned about wasting your money, perhaps you should try not to appear to be such a prat all the time.
"You are a tiresome flamer, and you give every impression of being both talentless and abrasive.”
That’s fine in terms of an opinion, but I just don’t see an arguement there. Like, where is your proof? And I’m not concerend about wasting my money. The title of the post was “Financial Responsbility? No thanks!” Duh!
Anthony, As you know, I made a commitment recently—I was no longer going to respond to a particular person with whom I have an acrimonious commenting history. I cannot recommend this course highly enough. My quality of life has improved markedly over that time.
But before you take the plunge, do what one of my friends did when he wanted to quit smoking—kick it off by commenting yourself sick. (Physically sick.)
John, my quote is from Badiou’s Deleuze book. That’s why it’s relevant - it’s Badiou discussing Heidegger and the Tractatus. Now read it again.
I didn’t get very far into the book, but it seems to be a reasonable approach to Deleuze (that is, taking it to be a serious attempt at metaphysics rather than a mere celebration of chaos or whatever). But here again (i.e. as with Heidegger) Badiou puts himself into an adverse relation to his subject, as Deleuze’s stated aim is to “renverser le platonisme” in favor of an “ontology of sense.” Don’t ask me what that means, but it can’t sit well with Badiou’s platonism.
You may be right about the transcendental subject in TLP, but again, the quote in question comes in the context of a discussion of solipsism (i.e. one in which it would seem inappropriate to use “language” and “my language” interchangeably).
Anyway I’m surprised to hear that you agree with the quote even as much as you do. Please don’t forget to give us the promised post on LW’s refutation (avant la lettre) of Being and Event (and don’t forget to tell us what exactly those are).
Ah, of course—Anthony must be referring to the thread to end all threads. A quick text search for “Wittgenstein” reveals what John actually wrote:
“But lots of continental philosophers read Wittgenstein (Anthony points out). He is a canonical figure for them. Look, Plato is a canonical figure for them. Kant is a canonical figure for them. Let’s make a distinction: there are canonical continental philosophers, and there are philosophers who are canonical for continental philosophers.”
In other words, John wrote there exactly the same thing as he wrote here. As I suspected, Anthony was looking for a fight and not really caring which constellation of words was close enough to an old one to be his trigger event.
Adam, suggesting that Anthony flame himself out of the habit here isn’t really good for the Valve, is it? Why doesn’t he do so on your blog? As you know, I can’t comment there, so it should be OK for him to vent whatever he wants without contradiction.
For someone who thinks that psychoanalysis is bunk you sure have faith in your extra-sensory mental powers. I wasn’t looking for a fight. I was referring to the shit I got from you for that and I, mistakingly, thought that John had not agreed with me. I was wrong in my memory. So, we don’t have to talk at all anymore.
John
If the Valve is set up to be a literary site why did you choose to post the Badiou thing here John instead of at John and Belle or Crooked Timber? How do you decide where to post? Seriously, I’m really curious if it’s purposeful or just whichever strikes you at the moment (and before Rich reads my mind I should say that I of course am not saying you don’t have the right to post this here or blah, blah, blah… just curious).
Anthony, I really don’t have time to pursue this question with you today, so after this comment I’m officially checking out to get some work done. Rich has found a quote that more or less expresses what I think. I can even be a bit more generous. Given his post-Romantic German roots, it is possible to regard Wittgenstein as a continental philosopher, but I would resist that for reasons I know you WILL accept: given my Wittgensteinian roots, and my continental interests, construing Wittgenstein as a continental philosopher would pretty much seal the deal on ME being a continental philosopher. (You will, I believe, accept any such conclusion as a reductio ad absurdum on whatever premise led to it.) Saying ‘Wittgenstein is a continental philosopher’ is not so much false as more likely than not to be misleading, and/or a symptom of misunderstanding, given the way ‘continental philosopher’ actually tends to be used.
If someone wants to say that ‘Wittgenstein is a continental philosopher’ without thereby misunderstanding the relationship between his Frege/Russell roots and his post-Kantian roots, I don’t really mind, I guess. (I just haven’t seen it happen.)
Dave,
Re: Deleuze as metaphysician instead of cheerleader for chaos. Yes, of course that makes sense as a reading (frankly I never got the other one), but we didn’t need Badiou for that. In the English language literature we have Philip Goodchild’s Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy laying that out pretty well in 1996, three years before Badiou’s book was translated into English. The main contention of Badiou’s work isn’t that Deleuze is a metaphysician, but that he is a neo-platonic one. Peter Hallward’s new book makes a similar but more sophisticated argument (I’ve recently reviewed this and it should be published online in, like, six months). I’m pretty sure, though not positive, that the French secondary literature dealt with these aspects of Deleuze from the get-go (Badiou being among them). It just so happens that Deleuze’s most read works were picked up by the cultural theory folks first and so the actual philosophy was ignored.
But this isn’t a post about Deleuze…
Peter Hallward’s big book on Badiou has a bit about Wittgenstein. Something about his being our Gorgias and language games being a form of sophistry. You may want to check it out as he seems to be saying things very opposite of you.
John,
It’s really not a question that needs to be pursued anyway, so don’t sweat it. I don’t have some moral investment in denying you the title Continental philosopher, I just think it would be really inaccurate and, as you say, misleading. Just like saying Wittgenstein is one (which is not to say that he isn’t important for many Continental philosophers!). Just as I also think it’s very misleading to say that Badiou is a follower of Heidegger. Being a French philosopher it is impossible for Badiou to not deal with Heidegger if he wants to be the kind of academic superstar he appears to. I may be missing what you’re saying here, but it seems like you think that because he’s willing to take Heidegger seriously enough to try to ‘bury him’ that he must be in that line of Heideggerians. I think that Badiou is currently interesting to those in Continental philosophy because he is not doing phenomenology in any form, but is also not doing analytic philosophy in any major mode or careerist mode.
The true reductio would be that it would make analytic philosophy itself a branch of continental philosophy.
Oddly enough, I sort of sidle up to this argument at the end of my dialogue. Russell and Moore react to Hegelianism. Their teachers are all Hegelians. And the deflationary charm of Moore’s common sense attitude, in particular, only makes powerful sense against a Hegelian backdrop. So obviously he is a continental philosopher. Obviously that’s silly, of course.
Actually, I was hesitant because I didn’t know what to do with Russell in that scheme—you’ve provided valuable evidence to back up my claim. Perhaps Russell and Moore could be considered “Hegelians” in the same sense that Badiou is a “Heideggerian.”
John,
I have the impression that there’s a certain overly analytic philosopher -ness, a professional culture so to speak, which doesn’t do a lot in terms of the history of philosophy. This may have gone away, or I may be wrong. It seems to me that Badiou’s got that same sensibility in what I’ve read of him. The readings to the history of philosophy are selective, cursory, and do little to advance the substantive arguments or to develop what you call his elegant philosophy. I find this to be the case in Badiou’s discussion of what he calls Romanticism, which begins with Nietzsche and completely neglects the Early German Romantics (a period I’m interested in so it particularly bugs me).
I want to second the request for more on Wittgenstein and Badiou. Althusser approvingly cites that line, “the world is all that is the case,” somewhere in the new collection of his late work. That work, I’m told, was influential on Badiou. I’m not sure if there’s any substance to this or just some trainspotting, but it might be worth a look.
Oh yeah, if you’re interested in the Badiou/Deleuze connections, chapter 6 in Badiou’s book Theoretical Writings is a defense of his Deleuze book.
Cheers,
Nate
Returning to the original question of Badiou’s grasp of Anglo-American philosophical history, i dont know if he goes in depth into it in Being and Event (although keep in mind that Badiou specifically directs his charges of ‘anglo-american sophistry’ at Alan Sokal, who more or less cited one sentence of his as ‘proof’ that he ‘knows nothing about mathematics’) but he does cite as a parallel to his work a paper by Barwise and Perry from ‘84. Since Being and Event was written in ‘88 I think it would be safe to say that he is, at the very least, aware of the existence of post positivist analytic philosophy.
Does anyone know if Quine et al had made a big enough splash in France by 88 that he could be reasonably expected to engage with them in greater depth than he does? Also, I think his reference to closing the analytic continental divide is in reference to the (long-awaited) English translation of Being and Event (ie: the fact that a work on set theory by a continental philosopher is being published in english at all is a sign that the times are a-changing) rather than the work itself.
I note in passing that we never got a followup to this post.
«Badiou… betraying no awareness of anything that has happened in the tradition since roughly 1930.»
i would certainly value any attempt to attenuate my ignorance of this tradition, but consider the following.
while zizek may find it worthwhile to contrast his leninist-kierkegaardian project with the naivety of ‘cutting-edge’ science’s claim to knowledge [churchland, chalmers, mcginn, pinker, dennett]; badiou i’d supposed recognizes 1) the orientations that these new ‘philosophers’ use to order the information provided by the sciences can be found in texts centuries old, and 2) with a body of work that expresses and will stand for its age, these new philosophers’ summary texts [when scientific information is undoubtedly provisional] maintain an untenable historical, political, temporal naivety perhaps masked by epistemological myopia. suppose the structures that these new philosophers assume through much toil are commonplace, and even co-determined through greater historical processes which go unconsidered.
for instance, if ‘ontology recapitulates philology’ shouldn’t foundherentism [haacke] appear quite an adolescent folly?
maybe the badiou-event-lol says “i’ve been in a cave since the 30’s” or maybe it says “no significant analytic thought has occurred after 19XX [or whomever is visible in the text, some may not be worth calling by name]”.
are you willing to acknowledge this demand? maybe the demand to see the complexity and inelegance of frege and the superficiality [ideological uselessness] of whomever is on top today.
frankly, it is easy to see the neglect of ontology in anglo-american scientism, and historical idiocy regarding metaphysics, and political complicity regarding knowledge/informatics.
in the sense that philosophy is not an afterthought to the scientific, mathematic, political, aesthetic, machines but a thorough reworking of the disposition towards knowledge, that thought and act are inseparable, philosophy demands a reckoning with ontology and its philological conditions. what does philosophy make visible to us regarding the place and weight of Being in time, of being in history, events in thought and events in history? what about terror, violence, even in their most banal everyday minutiae.
althusser said that the descartes-event, issued a science of physical objects, and that the marx-event, a science of history.
now it would be easy to claim that history is inaccessible to a scientific faculty, or that ontology and history are *fatefully* disentangled, but these are not truths only ideological positions; and one may have forgotten just what was meant by ontology.
i would in earnest question the description ‘philosopher’ for any of the generation that dennett belongs to. hitherto “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” philosophy indeed.
"I note in passing that we never got a followup to this post.”
Two years and change later, this remains true.
Alas.