Event in Search of an Audience
Jill Stauffer
Review of Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum Press: London, 2005 (original French text 1988), 526 pages, $29.95 hardcover, ISBN 0-8264-5831-9."Art, science and politics do change the world, not by what they discern, but by what they indiscern therein. And the all-powerfulness of a truth is merely that of changing what isÉ." (343).
In December 2005 I attended a panel named something like "Perspectives on Analytic and Continental Philosophy" at the Eastern conference of the American Philosophical Society. Since there is a rigid, historic, seemingly unbridgeable, and at times rancorous divide between the two approaches to philosophy, I was pleasantly surprised to see such a panel advertised.
However, the panel itself served as a metaphor for the rift. For the first hour, an analytic philosopher gave a paper in the analytic style, and then was asked questions by other analytic philosophers. Once that was concluded, 80% of those in attendance at the panel got up and left, and a cluster of new people came in. Then a continental philosopher gave a paper, was asked some questions by continental philosophers, and the panel drew to a close. The number of people who stayed for both papers numbered around twenty in a room ready to house roughly one hundred interested parties. That is one statement of the state of things.
Enter Alain Badiou. Being and Event (which was published in French in 1988 and is just now appearing in English translation) is a book no one is trained to read. Badiou's thesis is that mathematics is ontology, and he uses Cantor's set theory to make his argument. But his larger goal is to write a theory of praxis ("the new happens in being under the name of the event" (xxvi)) and make an argument about subjectivity, and poetic expression, that more closely aligns with the concerns of continental philosophers. Given the continental/analytic split, we might ask after the audience ready and willing to follow the intricacies of set theory while also pondering the ethical, political, and aesthetic ramifications of a decentered subject. I would argue that such an audience largely does not exist. However, that may not be a problem, if we follow Badiou's work.
Badiou asserts that mathematics is ontology, a fact since Plato but which we can see only now. Truth in general (as opposed to 'veridicity') is known only through retroaction, a 'will have been' that is the structure of an 'event.' According to Badiou, truths are made not as the effect of an order, but by rupturing with the order which supports truth. This is what he calls 'event,' the rupture which opens up truths. Thus truth is newness, and the emergence of truth is strictly incalculable. It is subject to chance, only named truth after the fact. It may never come to pass. And when it does emerge, it emerges as infinite—but it is made possible by finite subjects.
For Badiou, philosophy (and part of the problem he is formulating is that when 'we' say 'philosophy,' 'we' mean the western tradition since Plato, and nothing outside of that) is not only ontology. Ontology is its own discipline; but philosophy, at this point in time, includes (without necessarily coinciding with) the history of 'western' thought, post-Cantorian mathematics, and revisions of subjectivity ushered in from outside of 'traditional' philosophy: psychoanalysis, and contemporary art and politics.
What is needed, then, according to Badiou, is a conceptual framework wherein we can grasp philosophy as the meeting place of these conditions. He argues that describing ontology in the form of pure mathematics will allow us to "organize an abstract vision of the requirements of the epoch" (4). The 'new' epoch to which he refers stands not for the closure of metaphysics (the Heideggerian concern), but for an epoch characterized by: 1) post-Galilean science (post-Cantorian set theory); 2) a subject who is void and a-substantial rather than centered and reflexive; and 3) a form of truth that is not connected organically to knowledge. Indeed, this new form of truth is what Heideggerian ontology, post-Cantorian mathematics, and modern theories of the subject have in common.
That brief summary of Badiou's aims must hint already at how much background knowledge a reader might wish to have upon encountering his book. As I've said, Being and Event is a book no one is trained to read. But some accounts of its difficulty are overstated. Michael Kim asserts that "anyone who does not have a working grasp of set theory will not be prepared" for the text. However, Badiou's descriptions of how set theory works and why its concepts apply to his version of the history of philosophy are demanding but not impossible to follow, and had me reading sentences of symbolic logic right away without much difficulty. (As Badiou himself puts it: "Mathematics has a particular power to both fascinate and horrify which I hold to be a social construction: there is no intrinsic reason for it. Nothing is presupposed [in Being and Event] apart from attention: a free attention disengaged a priori from such horror" (19).) And so it might be best to say that Being and Event is a book no one will read easily, but which anyone interested in the history of philosophy ought to trouble oneself to read.
What about the rest of us, who may be content to leave the history of philosophy to philosophy's historians? I'll suggest that 'we,' too, might do well to tackle this work because any revision of the Western tradition's concepts of ontology, subjectivity, scientific rationality, and truth will have ramifications for politics and 'the political,' as well as aesthetics, and sciences human, social, and physical; in other words, all the things in the human world that there are to care about, struggle over, or commit oneself to.
As if to make this point more concretely, Badiou draws his examples from four domains of human experience or endeavor: art, science, politics, and love. But these four regions aren't only sources for concrete examples; they are also the four sites where 'truth procedures' occur. Ontology is a truth, but a truth is also a decision. Badiou leads us through the basics and the mysteries of Cantor's set theory and then through the revolutionary set theory of P.J. Cohen, showing us how ontology comes to life in the writing of equations of set theory, rather than hanging around a priori waiting to be discovered. Truth is a praxis that might never happen. When truth occurs, it does so by means of a double origin: the name of the event and the "operator of a faithful connection." The event gets named, and then the operator (a militant of the situation1) collects whatever is "faithfully connected" to the name of the event. Concretely: Philip and Doug meet and fall in love, and that event is called "meeting." The generic truth procedure emerging out of that event is called "singular love." However, if terms do not already exist within the situation that would allow for Philip and Doug to meet and fall and love, that love will never leave the region of indiscernibility (in which many subjectivities dwell: homosexuals, illegal immigrants, refugees of all kinds, along with new ideas, unproven scientific hypotheses, innovative art forms, etc.). It is important to note that the indiscernibility of the love between Philip and Doug does not necessarily render that love impossible. Within a situation, some truths can emerge, some cannot, and others may or may not. Let's classify the love of Philip and Doug living in, say, the contemporary U.S., as a truth that "may or may not" be discernible. What, then, would allow their love to be recognized as singular love rather than left to indiscernibility? Badiou's answer: forcing.
"Forcing" is a term Badiou takes from the set theory of P.J. Cohen which, I wager, is far too complicated for someone like myself to understand in one reading of a few of Badiou's meditations on its importance for philosophy. Nonetheless Badiou takes the concept of forcing to inform his own mathematical ontology. Forcing is attached to the retroactive 'will have been' of truth formation. If an event turns indiscernibility into discernibility (i.e., if the event 'will have been' veridical), it does so because there exists a term in a situation (such as the one in which the meeting of Philip and Doug is an event) which belongs to that truth and which maintains a fixed relation—that can be verified by knowledge—to the language of the situation (such as the recognizability of singular love, even when it isn't heterosexual). What this means is that the emergence of truth is left to chance, but is not only luck. The event will arise out of a recombination of terms from within the system, terms which may belong to the system without being included in it (note: indiscernible terms often belong without being included). That recombination, in order to emerge as truth, will have to be recognized by some "faithful operator," who will shepherd, as it were, the meaning of the event such that it becomes a truth in being.
Perhaps Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, was a faithful operator when he legalized gay marriage. He picked "equal rights and equal treatment" as a term of the current situation that would determine the "will have been true" of his declaration that marriage is for everyone, not just heterosexuals. Did this truth procedure succeed? Not if truth is infinite. But Badiou is careful to remind us that forcing cannot be reduced to power, in part because it depends on chance.
Anyone who has not been part of the trajectory of the event will take an external view of it. She or he will hear the named event, consider that it lacks a readily recognizable referent inside the situation as-is, and call it arbitrary. "Hence, any revolutionary politics is considered to maintain a utopian (or non-realistic) discourse; a scientific revolution is received with skepticism, or held to be an abstraction without base in experiments; and lovers' babble is dismissed as infantile foolishness by the wise" (398). Badiou adds that these witnesses are in a sense right. The names given to emerging truths (or events which are not yet established as truths) by a subject express a hope or an expectation that the names describe a new situation in which the truth of the current situation "will have been" presented. That is the inescapably retroactive quality of truth formation. To put it in Badiou's terms, which are more precise, but perhaps not more use-ready for a general audience: "A subject is what deals with the generic indiscernibility of a truth, which it accomplishes amidst discernible finitude, by a nomination whose referent is suspended from the future anterior of a condition" (399).
This has ramifications for all fields of human inquiry. Truths get formed by terms, some of them indiscernible, within a current situation by subjects who are in turn formed by those truths. Badiou's book is called Being and Event, and it is devoted equally to both. However, it is clear that the event, rather than being, is the focus of Badiou's philosophy. As he put it in a public discussion of his work in New York recently, "The great question for me is not really what 'being' is. My fundamental question is a very simple one—and small. What, exactly, is something new? What is creation?"2 A small question, perhaps, but one with a huge bearing—it asks nothing less than how change is possible.
Badiou's approach is unique, rigorous, and interesting; but, as the 400+ page opus progresses, it begins to seem less and less necessary, or useful (though, really, no one ever said philosophy had to be necessary or useful) that we view ontological questions mathematically. It seems unremarkable, after a while, that math's metalanguage should turn out to be the history of western thought, encapsulated. Badiou analyzes to great effect diverse figures inhabiting the history of philosophy—Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hegel, Mallarme, Pascal, Holderlin, Leibniz, Rousseau, Heidegger, Lacan—but I was left wondering whether mathematics truly made his insights possible. In this skeptical mode, I asked a friend of mine who teaches symbolic logic and has written extensively in the field what he thought of Badiou's work. He responded that Badiou did seem to know his set theory. But my friend wasn't certain that the set theory was necessary to his other meditations. Now, Badiou would be the first to admit that neither philosophers nor mathematicians seem to be aware that mathematics is ontology, so I guess it makes sense that in my unscientific sampling of one analytic and one continental philosopher, both would evince skepticism: we have confirmed Badiou's thoughts on the matter. And since we can't deduce or otherwise prove that mathematics is ontology, we are left with the element of chance: will it emerge as something that will have been true?
Of course, the assertion that mathematics is ontology also poses a critique of Heidegger (who asserted that mathematics was the foreclosure of thought by knowledge, and thus sought Being in poetic expression). Badiou, who is no stranger to the lure of poetic expression, and who devotes a number of his meditations to figures such as Mallarme and Holderlin, might call that a false dilemma and accuse Heidegger of choosing sides in a conflict that isn't one.
That, in the end, might also describe the rift in philosophy between analytic and continental styles and themes. Could Being and Event forge areas of inquiry to be held in common by two sides of a conflict that isn't one? Badiou declares in the preface he wrote to this translation of his work, "I would like this publication to mark an obvious fact: the nullity of the opposition between analytic thought and continental thought" (xiv). Easier said than done (or: easier named as event than declared retroactively true). This might remain a book in search of an audience. But perhaps all it needs is a few faithful operators.
2 "Being M. Badiou: The French Philosopher Brings His Ideas to America, Creating a Buzz," By Richard Byrne, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2006.