Philosophy has a future
One of the main activities of philosophy in the 20th century was the declaration of its own demise. Philosophers of the most varied persuasions -- positivists, existentialists, pragmatists, deconstructionists -- insisted for one reason or another that philosophy was over. Metaphysics, which attempts to explain what sorts of things there really are and how they are organized, was held to be exhausted or meaningless, and it was claimed that all we can know are our own interpretations or languages. Philosophy, according to these thinkers, produced not the Truth but merely more and more words, often used in senseless ways.
The declaration of the end of philosophy started in some form with G.W.F. Hegel and has been repeated by such figures as Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. However, as long as it was philosophers who were making this declaration in their philosophy books, the field was in no real danger; in fact, the claim that philosophy was over was itself a philosophical claim. Nevertheless, like the end of art, history and more or less everything else that emerged from the millennial mood, the crisis of philosophy got boring. One of the many excellences of the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou is that he not only declares the end of the end of philosophy but then goes ahead and writes philosophy in a way that is both innovative and classical, that engages and surpasses the tradition. Many of us have been waiting for a long time for the next wave of philosophy to emerge from Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter, though France, sadly, has a certain cachet), waiting for something that is not post-structuralism or postmodernism or post-anythingism. In fact, it would be nice to see a philosophy that was pre-something, and now I think we’ve got it.
The idea of the death of philosophy has been connected to a crisis of truth -- not surprising, since in some ways truth is the idea around which all philosophy is of necessity organized. Truth is the central notion of Badiou’s philosophy, but that is not merely a reactionary gesture. Badiou’s truth is radical, or it might be better to say that Badiou’s truth is the radical itself: For Badiou, truth is what disturbs or destroys or interrupts the order of our knowledge or our politics.
This slim book -- the fourth of Badiou’s to be translated into English recently, with at least six more (including his magnum opus, “Being and Event”) soon to follow -- is a collection of essays and lectures that begins with a fairly long introduction to his work and ends with an interview. The second chapter, “Philosophy and Truth,” is the best and most deeply subversive new piece of philosophy I have read in a quarter century. In it, Badiou says that “I will start with the following idea: A truth is, first of all, something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge.” Hence truth is always a challenge to what we already know.
This claim is characteristically comprehensible (not that Badiou’s writing is without obscurities), which again separates him from many of his Continental rivals, who have a tendency toward obscurantism so pronounced that one wonders whether there is actually anything there to understand and, if so, why we should bother. Truth for Badiou is both a commitment and an openness; we might say that the truth is something to which we commit ourselves but that it and we must also remain open, because a new truth may strike at any time.
This is not only an epistemology, it turns out, but an ethic, because Badiou identifies evil as the attempt to create and live within a closed system of knowledge. “Evil,” he says, “is the desire for ‘Everything-to-be-said.’ ” It is the impulse to monopolize or determine or force all truths -- something we could also call totalitarianism, or scientism or fundamentalism. Human goodness is then, for Badiou, a deep -- but open -- commitment. It is not merely open-mindedness or the scientific method: One takes the chance to commit oneself to a belief that is not yet knowledge. But the condition of truth is that it is always arriving, always attacking, so that even in our commitment we are always opening up possibilities. Truth arrives as a disturbance of consensus and convention, as something that cannot be assimilated into the current state of knowledge, and it arrives because someone has the resoluteness to face it and hold to it, even alone. Perhaps the highest compliment we could pay to Badiou on his own terms is to say that his philosophy is such a truth.
The philosophy of which I’ve just given a brief and simplistic summary is remarkable both for its connections to the tradition -- which Badiou has at his fingertips (illuminating observations about everyone from Parmenides to Lucretius to Heidegger abound in this volume) -- and for its freshness. It takes up the existentialist emphasis on the individual person and the individual commitment as the site of truth, but it also holds open the possibility of real truth about the world. It is sophisticated in its discussion of the effects of language, but it is not obsessed by and trapped in language, as is the work of Wittgenstein, Willard Van Orman Quine, Jacques Derrida or Rorty. “Philosophy,” says Badiou, “is always the breaking of a mirror. This mirror is the surface of language, upon which the sophist places everything which philosophy deals with.”
“Infinite Thought” explores many themes, among them psychoanalysis, film, terrorism and communism. Often the discussions are frustratingly brief, but in almost every case they hint at the depth of thought underlying them, throwing out rich suggestions and provocative formulations with immense profligacy: for example, “[T]he place of cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.... It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery [and] from the detritus of other arts.”
There are also many problems with Badiou’s work, some of them serious. Badiou in the ‘70s described himself as a Maoist, and it is a bit disconcerting (at least to me) to find Mao quoted as a political or philosophical authority, which hints that there might be a totalitarian undertow in Badiou’s work along with the critique of totalitarianism. The chapter “Philosophy and the Death of Communism,” for example, is notably weak and evasive. Badiou argues that the “idea” of communism is something pure and beautiful and necessary and even eternal, though the reality of the Soviet gulag and so on was a nightmare. He puts forward a very old argument: that the idea was good and the execution wrong, that Stalin had nothing to do with Marx or even Lenin. At a minimum this is insufficient (Marx and Lenin themselves were totalitarians), and the relations of the idea to its concrete application have to be explored critically, not just denied. Indeed, this is the form of a problem that bedevils Badiou’s work. He is so intent on terms such as “idea” and “thought” that it sometimes seems as though these things are floating entirely free of reality, so that his admiration of Mao, for instance, could have nothing to do with anything Mao actually did or was. “Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience,” he says. “It is an act of Truth with regard to truths.” Even if that were clear, it would be gratuitously perverse.
And Badiou’s critique of American hegemony and global capitalism, as represented in his discussion of terrorism and Sept. 11, adds nothing to the usual leftist complaints (plausible as many of these are), which is disappointing in light of the striking originality of his philosophy as a whole. As he describes the global applications of U.S. power, he mentions Panama, Serbia, Vietnam, Libya and Barbados. I don’t recall the conflict in Barbados, and the reference is enough to make you want to go back and check every factual assertion, especially given Badiou’s tone of overweening authority.
In fairness, it appears to me that Badiou’s political position is in flux, that he’s still emerging from Maoism. There are hints in “Infinite Thought” that he is moving toward a kind of anarchism or at least a critique of all state power far more in line with other elements of his philosophy.
The problems are major, though, and while some of them may reflect only my own disagreement with elements of Badiou’s philosophy, others point up deep tensions within the philosophy itself. But even these tensions should be experienced as opportunities for exploration, places for work. Meanwhile the overwhelming response to Badiou has to be gratitude for his gift of a future for philosophy.