Circulating Philosophy—A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds
- Circulating Philosophy—A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds1
0. Introduction
In the opening essay of Conditions (C), "The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself," French philosopher Alain Badiou claims that today we labor under a post-metaphysical "paralysis" of philosophy for which it appears that "history has entered the—perhaps interminable—era of its closure." (3) This paralysis and concomitant "malaise" of philosophy arose, according to Badiou, as a consequence of the relocation of the center of philosophy: "it no longer knows if it has a proper place." (3) Philosophy today either "strives to graft itself" onto other established praxes, such as, art, politics, science or love; or tout court philosophy has become "a museum of itself," relegated to the analysis of its own history, but never with the same intellectual force that stimulated philosophy's grand metaphysical past.
This diagnosis of contemporary philosophy seems as accurate today as when it was originally written in 1992 amidst the collapse of actually existing socialism. If Badiou is correct, and today philosophy labors under a "paralysis" induced by its own dislocation, then this "paralysis" is made all the more distressing amidst the many calls today for philosophy to re-engage with our "post-ideological" era in order to better comprehend it so that we can take possession of the intellectual resources at our disposal to successfully critique our world. The call Badiou sounds, however, is not simply that of a "return" in the sense of philosophy's grand system building past or the complete disentanglement of philosophy from those praxes operating "outside" it (art, politics, science, love). Nor is the goal of recentering philosophy upon its contemporary resources an attempt to stabilize it as yet another acceptable social practice or a purely critical enterprise; quite to the contrary, the stakes are much higher. Faced with its self-induced demise, philosophy must struggle free from the poles to which it naturally gravitates to remain in circulation. What we propose in this essay is that this struggle to keep philosophy circulating is essential to understanding Badiou's own philosophy, and by consequence, the prospect of a future philosophy cured of this malaise-inducing paralysis.
Against this background, the following essay intends to address an issue that has not received the attention it deserves in the discussion of Badiou's work, a work supposed to have formulated a radical break with the metaphysical tradition without falling prey to the oft-lamented traps of the linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy.
1. Ontologies, Subjects, and Histories: that through which philosophy circulates
As Quentin Meillassoux formulates concisely in his essay After Finitude (AF), Badiou "uses mathematics itself to effect a liberation from the limits of calculatory reason, a gesture altogether more powerful than any external critique of calculation in the name of some supposedly superior register of thought." (103) Meillassoux's contention is that, through the move that Badiou dubs the "Platonic turn" in philosophy, the formula "mathematics = ontology," Badiou (1) solves the problem of the strictly mathematical object: there are none2; (2) destroys logico-mathematically founded Anglo-American analytic philosophy on its own terrain3; and (3) overcomes the traditional problem of the adequation of thought and being,4 or what Meillassoux has termed "correlationism."5 This interpretation is problematic, however, as it focuses exclusively on one dimension of Badiou's essentially "meta-ontological" system.
In the introduction to Being and Event (BE), Badiou locates a constitutive lack in the discourse of being-qua-being which necessitates a supplement through which philosophy "circulates":
It follows […] that philosophy is not centered on ontology—which exists as a separate and exact discipline—rather it circulates between this ontology (thus, mathematics), the modern theories of the subject and its own history.
(3)
It is the problem presented by philosophy's "circulation" outside of ontology that we will investigate in this essay. In the above passage, Badiou lays out a tripartite taxonomy of supplementation for which (a) the ontological self-sufficiency of mathematics is itself insufficiently interpretive, thus requiring a philosophical supplement capable of interpreting the ontological function of mathematics...
