The ethic of truths: Badiou and Pierre Rivière

doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2011.08.001

Emotion, Space and Society

Volume 5, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 226-234

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.08.001 Get rights and content

Abstract

Drawing on Badiou, 2002, Badiou, 2009 theory of the subject and his ethic of truths, this paper extends the analyses made by Foucault (1975) of the court documents of Pierre Rivière’s trial. Pierre Rivière wanted to bring about social change. His three murders, along with the Memoir he wrote afterwards, were not only an attempt to solve an intractable problem in his own family, but also to draw the world’s attention to what was wrong with society. Yet immediately after his murderous act, Pierre Rivière thought of what he had done as monstrous and evil. In order to explore his conflicting thoughts and emotions that led to the murders this paper draws on Badiou’s definitions of an event (a movement in thought and action through which the world changes) and of evil (where commitment to an event denies the multiplicity of truths, and sacrifices others to a singular cause). It asks in what way Pierre Rivière’s triple parricide can be thought of as contributing to an event, and how it was that his contribution turned to evil.

Introduction

Pierre Rivière wrote in his Memoir of the hour after the triple murder when his emotional state shifted from one of personal glory to abject horror:

… I threw away my bill into a wheatfield near La Faucterie and went off. As I went I felt this courage and this idea of glory that inspired me weaken, and when I had gone farther and come into the woods I regained my full senses, ah, can it be so, I asked myself, monster that I am! Hapless victims! Can I possibly have done that, no it is but a dream! Ah but it is all too true! Chasms gape beneath my feet, earth swallow me; I wept, I fell to the ground, I lay there, I gazed at the scene, the woods… they are annihilated forever these hapless ones. (Foucault, 1975: 113)

In this paper I explore the ways in which the emergent thought in France at the time of these murders in 1835 made it possible for Pierre Rivière to construe his murderous act as right, and even glorious.

Pierre Rivière’s parents were married in 1814. The marriage was one of convenience enabling Pierre Margrin Rivière, Pierre Rivière’s father, to evade the draft. The couple had been in bitter dispute throughout their twenty-year marriage.¹ The situation of women was deeply ambiguous at that time. Whereas they had gained rights during the revolution, these had been lost early in the 1800s. As Bridges et al. (2012, footnote 1) point out: “The Napoleonic codes 1800–1804 reduced the status of woman to that of a minor and the ‘equal’ rights to divorce gained during the revolution were repealed in 1807. Between 1816 and 1880 it was impossible for all but the wealthiest to divorce”. Further, children were legally bound to their parents, even into adulthood, unless their parents could afford to set them up independently. Pierre Rivière and his feuding parents were bound together in legal knots that could not be untied without significant financial resources. Each anticipated a future life that was better than the one they had. Victoire Brion sought to establish her own independent living on her deceased parents farm and wished fervently to be free of child-bearing. Pierre Margrin Rivière dreamed of enabling his children to escape base servitude through his own hard labour and the acquisition of small parcels of land. But the law could force Pierre’s father to sell his land in order to pay his wife’s extensive debts, even though she did not live with her husband, reviled him, and had him to labour on her own land for her own profit. But the state could also force her to give up her own independent household and live with her husband. Pierre Rivière, for his part, longed to leave the life of hard labour on the land and to make his impact on society through inventions, and through his writing. But he could not remove himself from the situation. There was not even enough money to buy the books he longed for in order to extend his knowledge. The fact that there were 10–15 parricides a year in France at that time, suggests that the legal situation of children was frequently intolerable.

Section snippets

Badiou’s theory of the subject

Drawing on Badiou’s theory of the subject I examine Pierre Rivière’s embeddedness in the emerging thought of his times – the event he was caught up in. Further, drawing on Badiou’s ethic of truths I explore the way in which the event and Pierre Rivière’s placements within it turned him towards the pursuit of personal glory and to his monstrous crime.

Badiou’s (2009) subject does not float free of place, but is multiply embedded in it. Rather than defining the multiplicity of the subject in terms

Pierre Rivière the thinker: the uprising of the French proletariat

Pierre Rivière was at pains to make clear the rationality of his murderous act, attempting to articulate a truth about what was wrong with the social order at that time. It was possible for his mother to ruin his father financially, in effect, to undermine his attempts to change his own placement in society. While refusing to live in his house and living on her own farm, she could run up debts that he was liable to pay, even for example buying goods on credit and then selling them, leaving him

The judgement

The lucidity of Pierre Rivière’s account in his Memoir, and its capacity to draw readers under its spell, seemed deeply at odds with the extreme brutality of his act. He provided the courts with a complex puzzle that they found impossible to solve. His character was ultimately opaque to them, yet it remained their sole interest. The complex questions he set out to address in his Memoir were always only reducible, by the participants to the court hearing, to this unsolvable puzzle: is he mad or

Ethics or an ethic of truths?

In this section I turn in more detail to Badiou’s (2002) ethic of truths. Is it possible to listen to Pierre Rivière without judging and categorizing? Badiou contrasts his ethic of truths with what he calls “contemporary ethics”, which, according to Badiou (2002), is intrinsically conservative and regulative. Contemporary ethics assumes an a priori evil such as violence and suffering, and imposes a defensive ethics based on “human rights”. What informs those contemporary ethics discourses,

The question of Good and Evil

In the excerpt from Pierre Rivière’s Memoir at the beginning of this paper, Pierre Rivière himself said of his fearful murders, that he knew one hour after he had carried them out, that his act was evil. In Badiou’s analysis the dividing line between a passionate commitment to an event that is true and just, and a passionate but mistaken (evil) commitment, is a fine, almost indistinguishable, line. The assemblage of legal, religious and class-based relations in 1835, in that part of France

(In)conclusion

Pierre Rivière’s primary emplacement was as dutiful son to his father. It was an emplacement he could not escape from. He longed for other placements as inventor, writer, priest, but the state of affairs at that time did not make such placements possible. He carefully examined the available modes of thought about religion, science, revenge, personal glorification, and humility. In his memoir these modes of thought do not come one after the other, first picked up and then abandoned. Each, in a

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Jane Speedy and her research group for the wonderful workshops that led to this special issue, the two anonymous reviewers for their deeply insightful responses to this paper, and Sheridan Linnell who asked vital, penetrating questions of the penultimate draft.

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Beyond the fragments of the two Victoires: a fictionalised and incomplete Memoir of the two women murdered by Pierre Rivière – his sister and his mother
Emotion, Space and Society
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Who was Pierre Rivière? Introduction to the special issue
Emotion, Space and Society
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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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^☆: This paper was written in preparation for the collaborative project on Pierre Rivière undertaken with Professor Jane Speedy and her research group while the author was Benjamin Meaker Professor at the University of Bristol March–April 2010.

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The ethic of truths: Badiou and Pierre Rivière☆

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Badiou’s theory of the subject

Pierre Rivière the thinker: the uprising of the French proletariat

The judgement

Ethics or an ethic of truths?

The question of Good and Evil

(In)conclusion

Acknowledgements

Emotion, Space and Society

Emotion, Space and Society

Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Theory of the Subject

Creative Evolution

Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence

The struggle between the individualised subject of phenomenology and the multiplicities of the poststructuralist subject: the problem of agency

Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

Intersections between zen buddhism and deleuzian philosophy

Psyke and Logos