13
Bruno Bosteels
Es ist nicht genug, eine Lehre zu bringen: man muß auch noch die Menschen gewaltsam verändern, daß sie dieselbe annehmen!—Das begreift endlich Zarathustra.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlaß 1882–84
1 Badiou with Klossowski?
In 1992–93 Alain Badiou dedicated his annual seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm to an in-depth analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche.1 He tackled his subject in light of two basic questions concerning, on one hand, the status of philosophy, which in the hands of the thinker of the overman takes the form of what Badiou, following Jacques Lacan, will call antiphilosophy; and, on the other hand, the nature of politics, which in the case of Nietzsche’s final works – especially the letters and notes of 1888 during the period of so-called madness in Turin – takes on the radical form of ‘great’ or ‘grand’ politics. Thus, in ‘Why I am a destiny’ in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche famously if also enigmatically had written: ‘Starting with me, the earth will know great politics.’2 And in the draft for a letter to George Brandes, from early December 1888, he continued along the same lines: ‘We have just entered into great politics, even the very greatest. . . . I am preparing an event which in all likelihood will break history into two halves, even to the point that we will need a new calendar in which 1888 will be the Year 1.’3
The idea of studying Nietzsche’s admittedly rather vague notion of große Politik in the context of its antiphilosophical implications for the millennial project of philosophy itself is certainly not new, nor is it entirely unheard of even in France.4 Already in his 1969 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Pierre Klossowski briefly suggests the possibility of such an investigation by opening the first chapter of his book, ‘The Combat against Culture,’ with a posthumous fragment from Nietzsche’s Nachlaß based on the Colli-Montinari edition, which Klossowski at the time was in the process of translating into French for Gallimard. The first part of this fragment, which dates back to May–July 1885, asks directly about the possibility or impossibility of continuing to believe in the philosopher-type today, when whatever is great or of the highest rank perhaps cannot be known, much less judged or evaluated, without the philosopher’s necessarily falling short of the task before him, either arriving too late at the scene or else becoming a mere dilettante rather than a great actor in the theatre of life:
Is the ‘philosopher’ still possible today? Is the extent of what is known too great? Is it not unlikely that he will ever manage to embrace everything within his vision, all the less so the more scrupulous he is? Would it not happen too late, when his best time is past? Or at the very least, when he is damaged, degraded, degenerated, so that his value judgment no longer means anything? In the opposite case, he will become a dilettante with a thousand antennae, having lost the great pathos, his respect for himself – the good, subtle conscience. Enough – he no longer either directs or commands. If he wanted to, he would have to become a great actor, a kind of Cagliostro philosopher.5
To preserve the great pathos of an actor, still capable of directing and commanding life without falling for the histrionics of a Cagliostro philosopher such as a disappointed Nietzsche at this time sees in Wagner, would be an apt definition of the task of the new type of thinking that for this very reason can no longer be considered philosophical in the usual sense but might better be called antiphilosophical.
The connection to antiphilosophy is rendered explicit in the second part of the fragment from the Nachlaß that Klossowski reproduces at the start of his book. In this fragment Nietzsche himself in fact used the German term unphilosophisch, but Klossowski interestingly enough decided to translate this into French as ‘antiphilosophical.’ Long before Lacan would come to borrow the title of the eighteenth-century antiphilosophes for himself, Nietzsche thus seems to lay the groundwork for an openly antiphilosophical combat against the philosopher-type:
What does a philosophical existence mean for us today? Isn’t it almost a way of withdrawing? A kind of evasion? And for someone who lives that way, apart and in complete simplicity, is it likely that he has indicated the best path to follow for his own knowledge? Would he not have had to experiment with a hundred different ways of living to be authorized to speak of the value of life? In short, we think it is necessary to have lived in a totally ‘antiphilosophical’ manner, according to hitherto received notions, and certainly not as a shy man of virtue– in order to judge the great problems from lived experiences. The man with the greatest experiences, who condenses them into general conclusions: would he not have to be the most powerful man?– For a long time we have confused the Wise Man with the scientific man, and for an even longer time with the religiously exalted man.6
Here Nietzsche confirms that to judge or evaluate greatness requires a powerful type of antiphilosopher, at the farthest remove from all the moral, scientific and religious types that for far too long have been confused with that of the philosopher. Only the artist-type comes close to the value of greatness that otherwise is contradicted by the traditional philosopher-type. ‘The “great man” is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service,’ Nietzsche wrote in a fragment of the Nachlass from autumn 1887, speaking of große Mensch and noch größere Macht; and increasingly, the concern of what he would call ‘great’ or ‘grand’ politics, große Politik, was indeed to realize such creative power and free play, and, what is more, to do so on the scale of humanity as a whole: ‘To be capable of sacrificing innumerable beings in order to attain something with humanity. We must study the effective means by which a great man could be realized.’7
Although Klossowski does not pursue these themes in the same terms, it is no exaggeration to say that in the conjunction between the value of life, greatness, and the need to overturn all hitherto existing valuations and types of philosopher there lies the core of what Badiou will treat in terms of Nietzsche’s antiphilosophy. It is therefore somewhat surprising to note that, just as Klossowski in his book does not bring up again the notion of the anti- or unphilosophical life, Badiou never mentions Klossowski’s work in the course of his own reading of Nietzsche as an antiphilosopher. In fact, from among the extant interpretations in the vast bibliography of secondary literature on Nietzsche, Badiou in his seminar only deals in some detail with Martin Heidegger’s two-volume Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy as well as more marginally with Michel Foucault and Sarah Kofman, whose study of Ecce Homo, in Explosion I, had just been published in France. This silence with regard to Klossowski’s work, particularly his suggestion of a necessary link between antiphilosophy and grand politics is all the more surprising insofar as Badiou also shares two further interests with the author of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
Like Klossowski, Badiou in terms of the selection of his corpus of Nietzsche texts not only focuses almost exclusively on the late writings leading up to the watershed year of 1888, especially via the posthumous fragments and letters that accompany the publication of The Case of Wagner, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo and Nietzsche contra Wagner. He also places at the centre of his investigation the final Nietzsche’s overwhelming obsession with what we might call the efficacy of his own thought. In Klossowski’s words: ‘Thought itself must have the same effectiveness as what happens outside of it and without it. This type of thought, in the long run, must therefore come to pass as an event.’8 The seeds for this obsession are already evident in the aforementioned notion that the philosopher-type, in order to be able still to direct and command, would need to have led a kind of unphilosophical life. But, more generally, the urgency with which the philosopher as antiphilosopher seeks to attain a position of creative power and command also implies an investigation into the very nature of philosophy itself, not as a doctrine or mere body of ideas but as a grand act, both in the theatrical sense and in a more sweepingly political sense of the expression. Thus, several of the familiar themes surrounding the notion of the act or the event that in more recent years we have come to associate with Badiou’s particular oeuvre are already anticipated in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
For example, in an ‘Additional Note on Nietzsche’s Semiotic,’ following closely on the heels of an extraordinary reading of Nietzsche’s madness in the final chapter ‘Euphoria in Turin,’ Klossowski writes:
Insofar as thought turns out to be efficacious, it is not as an utterance of the intellect but as the premeditation of an action. In the latter case, what thought retains from the intellect is only the representation of a possible event – a (premeditated) action in a double sense. Since thought is the act of the intellect, this act of premeditating – which is no longer a new intellectual act but an act that suspends the intellect – seeks to produce (itself in) a fact. It can no longer even be referred to as a thought but as a fact that happens to thought, as an event that brings thought back to its own origin.9
This act of thinking that suspends the intellect and cannot be subsumed under the constraints of a system of concepts, for this very reason, also suspends the coherence of all hitherto existing philosophical systems. It would be an act of philosophizing that at the same time suspends all philosophy as doctrine. In this sense, the late Nietzsche during his period in Turin can be said to announce an antiphilosophical act that will transform humanity at a more profound level than the mere substitution of a new set of solutions to the same old series of philosophical problems. Only the power to enact such a radical transformation, introducing a new calendar with a before and an after into the history of humanity and of the world, would be deserving of the name politics. But, by the same token, this type of politics would more properly be named great or grand politics, in contrast to which all other forms of politics – no matter how violent or revolutionary – will turn out to have been minor, petty or inauthentic.
Whereas Klossowski discusses the obsession on Nietzsche’s part with the power of his own work in terms of the relation between philosophy and paranoiac-delirious forms of combat and conspiracy, Badiou in this regard will see rather a rivalry at work in Nietzsche between philosophy and the historico-political revolution, modelled upon the French Revolution. But, beyond the obvious discrepancies in style and tenor, both of these responses to the late Nietzsche’s maddening quest for the efficacy of his own act as a thinker gesture in the direction of grand politics, which both French thinkers moreover associate with the radical idea of ‘breaking in two the history of humanity,’ so often repeated in Nietzsche’s final correspondence. ‘The conspiracy had begun in Nietzsche Contra Wagner and would eventually be directed against the leaders of imperial Germany, which formed an obstacle to Nietzschean sovereignty. But as the idea of a conspiracy developed, his “actual” goal began to merge with the much greater project of “breaking the history of humanity in two”,’ Klossowski summarizes. And, about the kind of grand worries that inform the violent and euphoric state of Nietzsche’s soul during the final period in Turin, he adds: ‘Once disclosed, how would the content of a high tonality of the soul– namely, its depth of intensity– act upon human destiny apart from his own? Would it change the course of history? Had he not said, during this period, that its disclosure would break the history of humanity in two?’10
I mention Klossowski’s precedent by way of introduction not out of any concern for the anxiety of influence, whether acknowledged or not, but rather so as to highlight the specificity of Badiou’s approach. Since 1988 marks the year in which he published his own magnum opus Being and Event, to be accompanied one year later by a programmatic and if possible even more assertive Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou certainly has good reasons for turning to Nietzsche’s final letters and notes from exactly one century earlier. At the beginning of his 1992–93 seminar he places these reasons under three headings: a topical interrogation of the exact nature and status of Nietzsche’s text; a historical interrogation of the sense in which the twentieth century might have been Nietzschean; and a generic interrogation centred upon the question of art in Nietzsche’s texts, especially via theatre and the polemics with Wagner. More than anywhere else, it is under the first heading that Badiou in his seminar addresses the question of Nietzsche’s grand politics and what it means if it is indeed the case that philosophy ought to turn into an antiphilosophy in order to break the history of humanity in two halves.
2 What is antiphilosophy?
The 1992–93 seminar on Nietzsche is only the first in a series of seminars devoted to key thinkers whom Badiou considers antiphilosophers. Thus, in 1993–94 he would follow up the discussion of Nietzsche with a seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the results of which have since then been published and translated; and in 1994–95 he would do the same with a seminar on Lacanian antiphilosophy, still for the most part unpublished.11 The book on Saint Paul, based as it is on the 1995–96 seminar, belongs to this sequence as well, insofar as Paul stands out as one of the clearest antiphilosophical voices in all of Antiquity: ‘Paul is a major figure of antiphilosophy.’12 This also explains why Badiou feels the urge to compare Paul throughout his book to the likes of Pascal, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan.
While we certainly can find a few direct hints of the anti- or unphilosophical life in Nietzsche, as I suggested with the comparison to Klossowski, the guiding term of this investigation is clearly borrowed from Lacan. It was Lacan who, in the mid-1970s, had called himself an antiphilosopher after the example of the antiphilosophes, a self-applied label that historically refers to the mostly religious and conservative thinkers who resisted the arrival of rationalism, deism or materialism on the part of French Enlightenment thinkers, the so-called philosophes, such as Diderot, Voltaire or d’Holbach.13 Now, just as we are faced with a paucity of references to ‘grand politics’ in Nietzsche’s works, Lacan himself had only very few words to spare, and even then typically enigmatic or esoteric ones, to explain what he meant with his recourse to the term ‘antiphilosophy’ to define his own relation, or non-relation, to philosophy.14 Given this sparseness, Badiou’s purpose in returning to Lacan’s suggestions for guidance in reading Nietzsche or Wittgenstein therefore also carries with it a task of formal explicitation and systematization. For a while, he even toyed with the idea of composing an entire book on the topic, but this project has not come to fruition, at least not yet. Instead, we are left with a small number of references scattered throughout Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions and Logics of Worlds as well as more substantial essays drawn from the seminars on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan as the three great modern antiphilosophers.
Badiou’s understanding of antiphilosophy, in other words, is not limited to the otherwise already quite difficult reconstruction of Lacan’s usage of the term. Instead, the category emerges as the name for a longstanding tradition of thinkers who, with regard to the dominant philosophical trends of their time, situate themselves in the strange topological position of an ‘outside within,’ or of an ‘internal exteriority’ – what Lacanians might prefer to designate with the term ‘extimacy’ – in an attitude that typically oscillates between distance and proximity, admiration and blame, seduction and scorn.
A minimal list of antiphilosophical thinkers for Badiou thus includes not only Saint Paul (‘Basically, what gets him into difficulty in Athens is his antiphilosophy’15), Nietzsche (‘Nietzsche assigns to philosophy the singular task of having to re-establish the question of truth in its work of rupture from meaning. Which is why I would call him a “prince” of contemporary antiphilosophy’16), the early Wittgenstein (‘The further oeuvre—which is not really one, since Wittgenstein had the good taste not to publish or finish any of it—slides from antiphilosophy into sophistry’17), or Lacan (‘I call a contemporary philosopher one who has the unfaltering courage to go through Lacan’s antiphilosophy’18), but also Pascal (‘Pascal, that other great figure of antiphilosophy, . . . he who explicitly opposes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the God of the philosophers and scientists’19), if not already Heraclitus (‘I would say from Heraclitus, who is as much the antiphilosopher to Parmenides as Pascal is to Descartes’20), Rousseau (‘Rousseau communicates with our time (after Nietzsche, let’s say) through his inflexible antiphilosophy’21), Kierkegaard (‘The exemplary antiphilosopher that Pascal is for/against Descartes and that Rousseau is for/against Voltaire and Hume, Kierkegaard, as we know, is for/against Hegel’22), and perhaps Althusser (‘Here we observe that the antiphilosophical act comes down to tracing a line of demarcation, as Althusser would have said in the wake of Lenin. And it is very well possible that Althusser’s project, under the name of “materialist philosophy,” came close to twentieth-century antiphilosophy’23). However, notwithstanding the impression that his lists sometimes may give, what Badiou’s engagement with antiphilosophy is certainly not meant to be is a mere contribution to the history of philosophy. The point is not to draw up an alternative history of philosophy, as though it were a matter of seeking out the antiphilosopher that accompanies each and every one of the great philosophers as their shadowy double: Heraclitus to Parmenides, Saint Paul to the Athenians, Pascal to Descartes, Kierkegaard to Hegel, and so on. Rather, I would say that the usefulness of Badiou’s engagement lies, on one hand, in the specific readings that the angle of antiphilosophy allows us to offer in the case of individual thinkers; and, on the other, in the efficacy of these insights when they are put to work beyond the frame of reference in which they are first developed. In many cases, this may even take us into areas of thought that we would not automatically associate with the question of where to draw the line of demarcation between philosophy and antiphilosophy.
3 Toward the antiphilosophical act
What are then some of the fundamental characteristics that would make antiphilosophy into a relatively coherent tradition in its own right? Based on his detailed readings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lacan, as well as the occasional references to Pascal, Kierkegaard or Rousseau, Badiou distinguishes a small number of basic features as the invariant core of any antiphilosophy. At least for the modern period, these invariant traits include the following:
1. the assumption that the question of being, or that of the world, is coextensive with the question of language;
2. the reduction of truth to being nothing more than a linguistic or rhetorical effect, the outcome of historically and culturally specific language games or tropes which therefore must be judged and, better yet, mocked in light of a critical-linguistic, discursive or genealogical analysis;
3. an appeal to what lies just beyond language, or rather at the upper limit of the sayable, as a domain of meaning, sense or knowledge, irreducible to any form of truth as defined in philosophy;
4. the search for a radical act in order to gain access to this domain, such as the religious leap of faith or the revolutionary breaking in two of the history of the world, whose sheer intensity would discredit in advance any systematic theoretical or conceptual elaboration;
5. the central role of the subject of enunciation in everything that is enunciated, by way of experimental forms of writing and transmission.
Of course, not all antiphilosophers share these features in their totality, or not to the same extent. Thus, whereas Nietzsche’s affiliation with the sophists is quite open and explicit in his work, there are certainly many theses in Lacan’s conception of truth and meaning bringing him closer to an antisophistic stance that every contemporary philosopher for Badiou would have to traverse. Even the early Wittgenstein does not deny the existence of propositional truths in the way sophists would, even if his ultimate aim is to move beyond mere propositional sense. And similar caveats no doubt would have to be introduced specific to each antiphilosopher, in terms of which traits are given primacy to the detriment of others.
The notion of the act is without a doubt the most important element in the formal characterization of any antiphilosophy, namely, the reliance on a radical gesture that alone has the force of dismantling, and occasionally overtaking, the philosophical category of truth. All antiphilosophers posit the possibility of some radical act such as Pascal’s ‘wager,’ Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith,’ Nietzsche’s ‘breaking in two of history,’ or Lacan’s own notion of the ‘act,’ as in the still unpublished book XV of Lacan’s seminar from 1967 to 1968, precisely titled The Psychoanalytical Act and appropriately interrupted by the events of May’68: ‘It is well-known that I introduced the psychoanalytical act, and I take it that it was not by accident that the upheaval of May should have prevented me from reaching its end.’24 Unlike in Badiou’s treatment of the ‘event’ with which it is sometimes hastily conflated, however, what matters in this ‘act’ is not its impersonal truth so much as its – cathartic or therapeutic – effect on the subject.
This decisive role of the speaking subject constitutes another feature that is typical of antiphilosophy. Indeed, the experience of traversing a radical act not only gives precedence to the personal form’s effectiveness over and above the impersonal truth content, but it also seems as though this experience cannot be transmitted except in a near-autobiographical style that is inseparable from the subject of the enunciation. This is the experimental, writerly side of all antiphilosophers, present in Nietzsche’s aphorisms, Kierkegaard’s diaries, Lacan’s seminars, and so on. Badiou explains:
From Pascal’s ‘Memorial’ to the inclusion, at the heart of Lacan’s seminars, of his personal and institutional fate; from Rousseau’s Confessions to ‘Why I am a Destiny’ by Nietzsche; from Kierkegaard and Regina’s tribulations to Wittgenstein’s battles with sexual and suicidal temptation, the antiphilosopher climbs in person onto the public stage to expose his thought. Why? Because as distinct from the regulated anonymity of science and in opposition to everything in philosophy that claims to speak in the name of the universal, the antiphilosophical act, which is without precedent or guarantee, has only itself and its effects to attest to its value.25
As a result, the antiphilosopher rarely publishes an organic work but typically wavers between the esoteric fragment and the delights of incompleteness, as is perhaps nowhere more palpable than in the case of the final Nietzsche: ‘This format, in which the opportunity for action takes precedent over the preoccupation with making a name for oneself through publication (“poubellications”, as Lacan used to say), evinces one of the antiphilosopher’s characteristic traits: he writes neither system nor treatise, nor even really a book. He propounds a speech of rupture, and writing ensues when necessary.’26 In order to produce such a speech of rupture, the antiphilosopher’s declarations require the immediate presence of the speaking subject within his speech: ‘The antiphilosopher thus necessarily speaks in his proper name, and he must show this “proper” as real proof of his saying. In effect, there is no validation and no compensation for his act except immanent to this act itself, since he denies that this act can ever be justified in the order of theory.’27 Whence the always somewhat frenetic and highly theatrical if not histrionic race to precede and often undercut what is said with references to the incomparable existential power of its saying:
The biographical impulse, the taste for confession, and even in the end a highly recognizable infatuation that commands the ‘writerly’ style of all antiphilosophers (if you go back to the list, there is not a single one who is not a master of language): these are the necessary consequences of the most intimate antiphilosophical certainty, the one that consists, against millennia of philosophy, in the duty to announce and practice an active salvific break in one’s own name only.28
Insofar as the antiphilosopher’s diatribes against philosophy are supported only by the contrast with the radicality of the declaration of the act as such, only the personal, even physical manifestation of the subject behind the declaration can give it credence and, so to speak, make it pass. This circular gesture whereby the antiphilosopher drops in on the realization of what he otherwise is in the process of prophesizing, eventually will allow Badiou to offer what he claims is an intrinsic diagnosis of Nietzsche’s madness, based purely in terms of the constraints of his own final project and summed up in the simultaneous announcement and enactment of grand politics as the act to break in two the history of humankind.
4 Breaking in two the history of the world
In effect, Badiou restricts his reading of Nietzschean ‘grand politics’ almost entirely to the formal idea of a radical breaking in two of history. Barely speaking of the role of democracy and its critique, the breeding and disciplining of a new type of human being, forms of sovereignty, or the racial overtones in which the order of rank is sometimes couched in spite of Nietzsche’s open hatred of anti-Semites, Badiou sees the break primarily if not exclusively as a category of the act, which is Nietzsche’s version of the event. ‘I believe that for Nietzsche the act is not an overcoming. The act is an event. And this event is an absolute break, of which Nietzsche is the opaque proper name,’ Badiou says in the talk in which he summarizes his 1992–93 seminar. He adds: ‘It is to this correlation between an act with neither concept nor program and a proper name, one which is his only by chance, that we should tie the famous title from Ecce Homo, “Why I am a Destiny”. I am a destiny because, by chance, the proper name “Nietzsche” comes in to link its opacity to a break without program or concept.’29
The antiphilosophical act may not only seem to have won out in advance in this rivalry with the philosopher, it can also present itself as more radical than any of the scientific, artistic or political events from which it appropriates the force of its radical impulse. In a sense, the resulting act pretends to be more radically scientific than all existing science, more deeply aesthetic than all available works of art, and more profoundly political than any really existing politics. For this reason, just as in the cases of Wittgenstein and Lacan, Badiou in subsequent seminars will come to qualify their respective understandings of the antiphilosophical act as ‘archiaesthetic’ and ‘archiscientific,’ in the case of Nietzsche’s ‘grand politics,’ encapsulated in the breaking in two of the history of humanity, he speaks of it as an ‘archipolitical’ act. This does not mean that Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Lacan would be the ultimate reference points if we wanted to capture the essence of our time in terms of politics, art or science. In fact, at least in the cases of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Badiou notes that for all their talk about politics and aesthetics, their knowledge about the actual events that occur in these domains is actually fairly limited, if not purely anecdotal. This is why an important conceptual distinction must be introduced between the nature of the act, on the one hand, and the subject-matter, the materials or the bias from the point of which the act presents itself, on the other.
A large part of Badiou’s investigation into the nature of antiphilosophy centres precisely on the tension between these two aspects, the act and the subject-matter, between which there is strange relation of disconnection and traversal. For the three major antiphilosophers that Badiou studies in his seminar between 1992 and 1995, this distinction can be elaborated as follows:
1. in Nietzsche’s case the subject-matter is art and aesthetics (above all, Wagner) but the act is archipolitical;
2. in Wittgenstein’s case the subject-matter is logic and mathematics (above all, Frege and Russell) but the act is archiaesthetic;
3. in Lacan’s case the subject-matter is the stuff of love and desire (above all, after Freud) but the act is archiscientific.
What matters in this reading will concern not only the antiphilosopher but also the philosopher, since it will be in dialogue with the way the latter is portrayed as part of Nietzsche’s antiphilosophical diatribe, for example, that philosophy can and must redefine its own operations in relation to the truth of an event. In fact, the crucial point lies precisely in understanding this difference between act and event. The same historical or empirical ‘happenings’ may be involved in both cases, such as an actual revolutionary uprising or a unique artistic performance, but antiphilosophy’s treatment of such happenings as ‘acts’ follows a series of operations and protocols that are not to be confused with their treatment as ‘events’ that function as the conditions of truth for philosophy according to Badiou.
Here the comparison with Wittgenstein may prove helpful. For Badiou, the act sought after in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus certainly has much to do with art, especially music as the epitome of non-propositional sense since at least Schopenhauer. But antiphilosophy also adds a radical and more originary dimension to its view of art, by absorbing art’s energy back into its own discourse and appropriating it for its unique purposes alone. This added dimension explains the archiaesthetic nature of the act in the case of Wittgenstein:
The antiphilosophical act consists in letting what there is show itself, insofar as ‘what there is’ is precisely that which no true proposition can say. If Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophical act can legitimately be declared archiaesthetic, it is because this ‘letting-be’ has the non-propositional form of pure showing, of clarity, and because such clarity befalls the unsayable only in the thoughtless form of an oeuvre (music certainly being the paradigm for such donation for Wittgenstein). I say archiaesthetic because it is not a question of substituting art for philosophy either. It is a question of bringing into the scientific and propositional activity the principle of a kind of clarity whose (mystical) element is beyond this activity and the real paradigm of which is art. It is thus a question of firmly establishing the laws of the sayable (of the thinkable), in order for the unsayable (the unthinkable, which is ultimately given only in the form of art) to be situated as the ‘upper limit’ of the sayable itself.30
Similarly, in Nietzsche’s case, the idea of ‘grand politics’ as the act of breaking in two the history of the world certainly is inspired by the historico-political revolution. But, again, philosophy (as antiphilosophy) appropriates the revolutionary event for its own purposes, before relying on the explosive radicalism of the archipolitical act that is thus formed as leverage to reject all actually existing politics, including revolutionary politics, as being petty and inauthentic in comparison.
The philosophical act is, I would say, archipolitical, in that it proposes itself to revolutionize all of humanity on a more radical level than that of the calculations of politics. From this let us retain that archipolitics does not designate the traditional philosophical purpose of finding a ground for politics. The logic, once again, is a logic of rivalry, and not one of founding oversight. It is the philosophical act itself that is archipolitical, in the sense that its historical explosion will show, retroactively, that the political revolution properly speaking has not been truthful, or has not been authentic.31
For Badiou, the key to understanding Nietzsche’s relation to politics thus consists in a relation of rivalry and mimicry at once with regard to the historico-political revolution: ‘The philosophical act is in fact represented by Nietzsche as an amplified mimetics of the revolutionary event. And this amplified mimetics of the revolutionary event by no means retains its dialectical sublation or overcoming but only its incalculable rupture.’32 This means that the archipolitical act is both a quest for a more radical level of change, a turn to the root or commanding principle of political change, and a supra- or super-political overturning of all politics as usual.
The mimetic rivalry is especially transparent with regard to what in Badiou’s eyes constitutes the model of the historico-political revolution for Nietzsche, namely, the French Revolution. This is palpable in the new calendar, starting with 1888 as Year One, in the bringing out of heavy artillery and dynamite, and even in the use of a kind of revolutionary terror as when Nietzsche writes in a letter to August Strindberg from late December 1888: ‘I have ordered a convocation of the princes in Rome–I mean to have the young emperor shot’;33 when he writes in a last letter to Franz Overbeck, received on 7 January 1889: ‘I am just having all anti-Semites shot. . .’;34 or, finally, in the famous letter to Jacob Burckhardt postmarked from Turin on 5 January 1889: ‘Wilhelm Bismarck and all anti-Semites done away with.’35
For Badiou, the use of such explosive language nevertheless also betrays a profound ambivalence on the part of Nietzsche with regard to the politics of revolution. It is not the socializing content but only the form of the radical break that fascinates the thinker of grand politics. And, furthermore, it is the power of a break that must be transposed onto the (anti)philosophical act of thinking itself:
Nietzsche adopts with regard to the revolutionary act a rapport of formal fascination and substantive repulsion. He proposes for himself to render formally equivalent the philosophical act as an act of thought and the apparent explosive power of the politico-historical revolution. In this sense, though it is difficult to perceive, I hold that there is a primordial suture to politics itself at work in the Nietzschean dispositif.36
Here we begin to perceive the thin line of demarcation that separates the philosopher from the antiphilosopher. By speaking of a suture in the case of Nietzsche, Badiou is not referring to the way in which modern philosophers have frequently abdicated their powers and delegated them to the realms of science (positivism), politics (Marxism) or poetry (Heideggerianism). This other understanding is how Badiou defined ‘suture’ according to a scenario best explained in Manifesto of Philosophy: A suture happens, in other words, when ‘ philosophy delegates its functions to one or other of its conditions, handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure. Philosophy is then carried out in the element of its own suppression to the great benefit of that procedure. ’37 In Badiou’s reading of Nietzsche, by contrast, ‘suture’ seems to name the inverse movement, namely, the movement whereby philosophy as antiphilosophy absorbs the revolutionary energy of politics for its own exclusive purposes. Here, philosophy does not abdicate its own act in favour of grand politics so much as it appropriates the power of the revolutionary break – together with the formal resources of poetry to guarantee its prophetic transmission – for its own sake, with a paradoxical denigration of effective politics as its result. The logic is one of mimicry and rivalry much more so than one of abdication and self-effacement. The lesson is thus that in order to avoid falling in the traps of antiphilosophy, philosophy would have to develop a relation to its conditions that, thanks to a certain measure of restraint, circumvents the temptations of suture in this other sense as well.
Moreover, if, through antiphilosophy’s suture onto politics, the explosive revolutionary event is reabsorbed back into Nietzsche’s own discourse, a circular argument becomes inevitable. Nietzsche must both and at the same time declare that he prepares an event more radical than any effective politico-historical event and guarantee the authenticity of this break solely on the basis of this very declaration. Whence the difficulty of deciding whether Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, merely prepares the overman or whether he or Zarathustra is already the first overman himself:
I think that this circle, which manifests itself here in a subjective exposure whose sincerity is almost that of a certain saintliness, is in truth the circle of all archipolitics. Since it does not count the event as its condition, but rather detains it or pretends to detain it in the act of thought itself, it cannot discriminate its effectiveness from its announcement. The entire persona of Zarathustra names this circle and gives the book its tone of strange undecidability on the question of whether Zarathustra is the figure of the act’s efficacy or the figure of its prophecy pure and simple.38
This is why Nietzsche, even more so than any other antiphilosopher, must necessarily appear in person within his own speech. Badiou goes so far as to define Nietzsche’s final madness in terms of this very circle, in which the enunciating subject so to speak falls into his own enunciations, whereas all philosophy would precisely be able to do without the question of ‘Who speaks?’ Incidentally, this resistance of the philosopher to accept the fifth and final feature of antiphilosophy explains why Badiou, contrary to a widespread consensus that ranges from cultural studies to identity politics, does not think that asking the question ‘who?’ or ‘what type?’ for every statement has anything to do with establishing the truth of this statement. In fact, quite the opposite is true, since such a question is more likely to suppress the possibility of the universal and anonymous sharing of truth:
I would hold that the question ‘who?,’ whenever it insists or returns, suppresses the most originary gesture of philosophy, which, under the condition of mathematics, has precisely deployed the dialogical theme, that is to say, the theme of a statement that is possibly subtracted from the originariness of the question ‘who?’ Philosophy has been possible only by admitting the possibility of an anonymous statement, that is to say, a statement whose examination and circulation do not depend immediately on the question of who formulates it.39
Nietzsche’s grand politics, as the dream of an archipolitical act, by way of contrast thus imposes upon us the task of clarifying the operations with which philosophy approaches the event. And yet, we will also see that antiphilosophy, aside from providing the philosopher with a series of respectable and perhaps indispensable interlocutors, presents a constant temptation within Badiou’s own philosophy.
5 The antiphilosophical temptation: Philosophy as event
Badiou’s philosophy does not always manage to stave off its own antiphilosophical tendencies. With this insight I am no longer referring only to the temptation against which Badiou himself, thanks to his dialogue with antiphilosophy, puts us on guard and which is nothing more than the religious temptation of assigning sense or meaning to the world: ‘Anti-philosophy puts philosophy on guard. It shows it the ruses of sense and the dogmatic danger in truth. It teaches it that the rupture with religion is never definitive. That one must take up the task again. That truth must, once again and always, be secularised.’40 Rather, I would say that antiphilosophy teaches us that the real danger, including for Badiou’s own philosophy, is not the religion of meaning but rather the radicalism of the pure event as absolute beginning, the treatment of the event as some kind of archi-event, that is to say, in the end, the conflation of the event with the act.
What Badiou calls the act, which otherwise could be considered simply the antiphilosophical name of the event, functions very differently in antiphilosophy from the way the event functions in philosophy. Politics, art or science for the antiphilosopher serve not as conditions but as models to be imitated and absorbed into philosophy itself as though the latter, qua antiphilosophy, were capable of producing, or even of being, a grand event in its own right. This would mark a ‘disaster,’ but not in the sense of Badiou’s Ethics, which defines the term as a complete forcing of a given situation, including the point that should remain unnameable, in the name of truth: ‘This is why I will call this figure of Evil a disaster, a disaster of truth induced by the absolutization of its power.’41 Instead, antiphilosophy presents us with a disaster that is closer to the way the term is used in the essays from Conditions appended to the English translation of the Manifesto, where philosophy is said to expose thought to a disaster by imagining that its empty category of truth (or Truth) can be filled and legitimated with extreme, even criminal prescriptions:
The key to this turnabout is that philosophy is worked from within by the chronic temptation of taking the operation of the empty category of Truth as identical to the multiple procedures of the production of truths. Or else: that philosophy, renouncing the operational singularity of the seizing of truths, is itself presented as being a truth procedure. Which also means that it is presented as an art, a science, a passion or a policy. Nietzsche’s philosopher-poet; Husserl’s wish of philosophy as a rigorous science; Pascal or Kierkegaard’s wish of philosophy as intense experience; Plato’s philosopher-king: as many intra-philosophical schemata of the permanent possibility of disaster.42
This leads me, in a concluding series of reflections, to ask whether there are not also similarly disastrous antiphilosophical tendencies at work in Badiou’s own thought. And if so, where? It is not just that philosophy, in its efforts to disentangle itself from its antiphilosophical opponents, must continue to sever its ties to religion. There is also another way of defining the antiphilosophical temptation at work within Badiou’s philosophy. Here the book on Saint Paul can serve as a good point of comparison for understanding Nietzsche’s case as well. Indeed, I would say that there is a profound oscillation that runs through this study between, on the one hand, an effort to delimit Paul’s antiphilosophy as a discourse to be traversed and yet kept at a distance, and, on the other, a deep fascination with the ultraradicalism of this discourse, whose traits – including stylistic ones – as a result come to be transferred almost invisibly onto Badiou’s own philosophy as well, both in this book and elsewhere. It thus becomes frequently impossible in Saint Paul to discern whether general statements regarding truth, the act, the subject, and so on, belong to the antiphilosophical aspect of the Apostle’s doctrine, which therefore would have to be rejected, or whether they can in addition be attributed, as if written in a free indirect style, to Badiou’s own theory of the event. This theory, in fact, is by no means impeded by but thrives on such indiscernibility. And the same is at least partially true for Badiou’s take on Nietzsche’s grand politics. In both cases, I would argue that there is something about the form itself – the form of the pure event – that is radically antiphilosophical. No wonder that Badiou, in most instances in his Saint Paul where ‘the pure event’ or ‘the naked event’ is invoked as a radical beginning, tends immediately to turn to a comparison with Nietzsche’s archipolitical act of breaking the history of the world in two halves, even though elsewhere, for example in Badiou’s Ethics, this act is called a disaster: ‘Nietzsche is Paul’s rival far more than his opponent. Both share the same desire to initiate a new epoch in human history, the same conviction that man can and must be overcome, the same certainty that we must have done with guilt and law.’43 What emerges more clearly from Badiou’s discussion of Nietzsche is the possibility that this desire for an absolute beginning is a deviation due to the influence of antiphilosophy, whose extremism the philosopher would therefore have the task of tempering, even if he allows its appeal to extend to his own theory of the event. Even in Saint Paul, while still discussing the rivalling proximity between Paul and Nietzsche, Badiou insists: ‘The truth is that both brought antiphilosophy to the point where it no longer consists in a “critique,” however radical, of the whims and pettinesses of the metaphysician or sage. A much more serious matter is at issue: that of bringing about through the event an unqualified affirmation of life against the reign of death and the negative.’44 Is this not also the case of Badiou’s conception of the event, which as a consequence would have to be considered as carrying an irresistible element of antiphilosophy within it?
In political terms, we could call this element the speculative leftism, or ultraleftism, that is common to all antiphilosophers. ‘This imaginary wager upon an absolute novelty—“to break in two the history of the world”—fails to recognize that the real of the conditions of possibility of intervention is always the circulation of an already decided event,’ Badiou writes in Being and Event: ‘What the doctrine of the event teaches us is rather that the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence. There is no more an angelic herald of the event than there is a hero. Being does not commence.’45 In most if not all cases, furthermore, this speculative leftism is nearly indistinguishable – in yet another characteristic vacillation – from its ideological opposite. Going over the list, there is not a single one among the antiphilosophers whose potential leftist leanings are not counterbalanced by suspicions of reactionary consequences, making their politics nearly impossible to pin down: ‘Antipolitics, one could say, parallel to antiphilosophy.’46 It is precisely such ultraradicalism that lurks behind the pure form of the event as defined on the basis of Christianity in Badiou’s book on Paul, or on the basis of grand politics in Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche. In other words, the crucial point to be grasped in this regard is not just the split between good form (the protocol of evental universalization) and objectionable content (the fable of Christianity and the Resurrection). Nor, in the case of Nietzsche, will it be enough to revert to the good content (the French Revolution) so as to temper the extremism of the form (the disastrous breaking in two of history). Instead, the lesson to be learned from Badiou’s careful engagement with Nietzsche is how antiphilosophy leads to a skewed understanding of the radical break of the event, including in its purely formal aspect, as some kind of archi-event: the act as the antiphilosophical deviation of the event.
For sure, there is a steep price to be paid for this radicalization. We saw this most clearly in how Nietzsche’s ‘grand politics’ relates to effective historico-political events such as the French Revolution, not as conditions but as models to mimic and, if possible, outperform. But something similar occurs, I would argue, with Badiou’s philosophical treatment of certain events such as Mallarmé’s poetry or Beckett’s prose. The latter, thus, in the hands of the philosopher almost by necessity, if not because of some kind of professional deformation, tend to become self-contained exemplifications of the event as event. In fact, perhaps in no other instance is this tendency more tangible than in Badiou’s own relation to the radical acts declared by the antiphilosophers, from Paul to Nietzsche to Lacan, whose references are typically not effective events – with the possible exception of Lacan who is capable of invoking Freud as a really existing prior act and who because of this in the eyes of Badiou completes the cycle of contemporary antiphilosophy – but fables or cases of pure folly and self-imploding prophecies: ‘That the event (or pure act) invoked by antiphilosophers is fictitious does not present a problem. It is equally so in Pascal (it is the same as Paul’s), or in Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s “grand politics” did not break the history of the world in two; it was Nietzsche who was broken).’47
Badiou’s relation to Paul or to Nietzsche, I would argue, is similar to the respective relation of these two antiphilosophers themselves to Christ’s Resurrection and to the French Revolution. It is a relation of rivalry and mimicry, developed into an amplified mimetics of the act qua archi-event, whose radicalism cannot fail to seduce the philosopher for it suggests that even philosophy, after all, may be able to produce or even become an event in its own right. Now, this is something the philosopher, technically speaking, cannot proclaim without falling into the trap of a disastrous prescription that would at once put him in the camp of the antiphilosopher. ‘Let us say, provisorily, that the antiphilosopher in this sense is the event of philosophy,’ as Mehdi Belhaj Kacem writes in an open letter to Badiou: ‘Only for the antiphilosopher can philosophy be an event.’48 Therein lies no doubt the seductive power of the antiphilosopher for Badiou as well. Even as a never-ending task, the demarcation of the supposed gap between philosophy and antiphilosophy allows the polemicist to have his cake (to define, by opposition to the act, the empty philosophical concept of the event, conditioned by effective truth procedures) and eat it too (to reabsorb the irrefutable radicality of the act as archipolitical, archiaesthetic or archiscientific break or absolute beginning, before discarding it as a mere act, in the theatrical sense of the term). This is why the philosopher actually thrives on the endless sparring matches with the most illustrious antiphilosophers. Finally, perhaps this is also why Badiou, contrary to what Nietzsche himself suggested in a letter to Brandes, is in no hurry to lose the author of Ecce Homo: ‘Once you discovered me, it was no great feat to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me. . . .’49
In closing I would go still one step further so as to formulate the general hypothesis that today the dominant philosophical attitude is in fact thoroughly antiphilosophical in nature, even if the label itself is not always used or accepted. To be more precise, if philosophy today can still or again pretend to be radical, this is in no small part due to its antiphilosophical tendencies. Whence the interest, but also the difficulty, of Badiou’s attempt to disentangle the two. In fact, in times of near-global reaction, it is not surprising that there should be such a strong push for an antiphilosophical act that claims to be both less illusory and yet at the same time more radical than the philosophical pursuit of truth. Antiphilosophy, in this sense, contributes to an ever more powerful maximalism. Especially since the break it announces is purely formal so that the question of its left or right-wing nature becomes moot, this maximalism at the level of radical thought fills in for what is missing in actuality.
Notes
1 Alain Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche is as yet unpublished; a semi-official transcription is freely available on-line. In French, only a summary has appeared in the form of a talk published as Casser en deux l’histoire du monde? (Paris: Le Perroquet, 1992); an even more distilled version of this text, also presented as a talk in the United Kingdom, has been translated into English under the title, ‘Who is Nietzsche?’, trans. Alberto Toscano, PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11 (2001): 1–11. The complete Nietzsche seminar is forthcoming in both French and English as part of a collective project to edit all of Badiou’s annual seminars not yet turned into essays or books. The brochure Casser en deux l’histoire du monde will also appear in English translation as part of Alain Badiou, What is Antiphilosophy?, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 144.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Münich/Berlin: DTV/De Gruyter, 1986), vol. 8, p. 500.
4 The secondary bibliography on Nietzsche’s große Politik is much larger than the paucity of primary sources might suggest. For the sake of the present essay and after a brief comparison with Pierre Klossowski, though, I will limit myself exclusively to Badiou’s take on the matter. For further studies in the English-speaking world, see Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 206–26; Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 147–62; Alex McIntyre, The Sovereignty of Joy: Nietzsche’s Vision of Grand Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); and the articles by Paul van Tongeren, Thomas H. Brobjer, Herman Siemens and Keith Ansell-Pearson in Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008). In French, as another interesting counterpart to Badiou aside from Klossowski, see Michel Haar, ‘Institution et destitution du politique’, Par-delà le nihilisme: Nouveaux essais sur Nietzsche (Paris: PUF, 1998), pp. 219–74. For a discussion of Nietzschean-style grand politics in contemporary Italian and Spanish thought, see Bruno Bosteels, ‘Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical’, The Actuality of Communism (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 75–128.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (hereafter KSA), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–77; 2nd rev. edn 1988), vol. 11, pp. 518–19, 35[24]; quoted in Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 1.
6 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 11, p. 519, 35[24]; quoted in Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, pp. 1–2.
7 Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 12, p. 414, 9[139], and KSA, vol. 11, pp. 91, 25[309]; quoted in Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, pp. 143 and 148.
8 Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 169.
9 Ibid., p. 256.
10 Ibid., pp. 93 and 234.
11 See Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, translated and with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2009); and Alain Badiou, ‘Lacan et Platon: le mathème est-il une idée?’ in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991). This last article is also published in a shorter and slightly modified version as ‘Antiphilosophy: Lacan and Platon’, in Conditions, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 228–47. More recently, see the little volume on Lacan co-authored by Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. Deux leçons sur ‘L’Étourdit’ de Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 2010).
12 Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 17.
13 See, above all, Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: L’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).
14 For three fairly different accounts of Lacan’s antiphilosophy, all posterior to Badiou’s talk at the conference Lacan avec les philosophes, see Jean-Claude Milner, ‘L’antiphilosophie’, in L’Œeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), pp. 146–58; François Regnault, ‘L’antiphilosophie selon Lacan’, in Conférences d’esthétique lacanienne (Paris, Agalma, 1997), pp. 57–80; and Colette Soler, ‘Lacan en antiphilosophe’, Filozofski Vestnik 27.2 (2006): 121–44. See also Slavoj Žižek’s remarks, openly influenced by François Regnault, in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 250–1. More recently, see Adrian Johnston, ‘This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy’, S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3 (2010), pp. 2–22. The figure who has dealt most extensively with the category of antiphilosophy in the wake of Lacan and Heidegger is the Argentine psychoanalyst Jorge Alemán. See, for instance, his Notas antifilosóficas (Buenos Aires: Grama, 2006). For a comparison with Badiou, see Carlos Gómez, ‘El adversario y el doble en la filosofía de Badiou’, Badiou fuera de sus límites, ed. Carlos Gómez and Angelina Uzín (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2010), pp. 87–120.
15 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 27.
16 Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, p. 24.
17 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 542.
18 Badiou, Conditions, p. 129. See also the following remark in Logics of Worlds, where Lacan is credited for upholding the notion of the subject against its Heideggerian critics, without lapsing into humanism: ‘This is why the traversing of Lacan’s antiphilosophy remains even today an obligatory exercise for those who seek to tear themselves free from the reactive convergences of religion and scientism’ (p. 548).
19 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 47.
20 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 75.
21 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 551.
22 Ibid., p. 425.
23 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 80.
24 Jacques Lacan, ‘Radiophonie’, Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), p. 427.
25 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 87. Badiou’s comments on Žižek go very much in the same direction: ‘The Lacanian most prone to injecting the notions of the master into the most varied “bodies” of contemporary appearing is no doubt Slavoj Žižek, whose lack of affiliation to any group of psychoanalysts grants him a freedom which he delights in abusing: jokes, repetitions, a captivating passion for the worst flicks, quick-witted pornography, conceptual journalism, calculated histrionics, puns, . . . In this perpetual dramatization of his thought, animated by a deliberate desire for bad taste, he ultimately resembles Lacan’, in Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 565.
26 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 31.
27 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 87.
28 Ibid., p. 88.
29 Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde, p. 11.
30 Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p. 80.
31 Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, p. 11.
32 Ibid., p. 10.
33 Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), Letter 200, p. 344; also quoted in Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 232.
34 Nietzsche, Selected Letters, Letter 205, p. 346.
35 Ibid., Letter 206, p. 348.
36 Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde, p. 11.
37 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 61.
38 Badiou, Casser en deux l’histoire du monde?, p. 14.
39 Ibid., p. 17.
40 Badiou, ‘Who is Nietzsche?’, p. 10.
41 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 85.
42 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, pp. 128–9. Badiou’s list of names should suffice to conclude that the temptation of disaster, understood in this sense, is not unique to antiphilosophers but applies to Husserl or Plato as well – and no doubt even to a Platonist such as Badiou, as I argue here.
43 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 72. Badiou discusses Nietzsche’s notion of ‘breaking in two the history of the world’ as a ‘disaster’ in Ethics, p. 84. However, already in Theory of the Subject, which is supposed to be Badiou’s most violently disruptive book due to the role of Maoism, the much-maligned notion of destruction is set up as an alternative both to structural conservatism and to Nietzschean grand politics: ‘“Destroy, he says”: such is the necessary—and prolonged—proletarian statement. This barbarous statement forbids us to imagine the political subject in the structural modality of the heritage, the transmission, the corruption, the inversion. But also in that of the purifying cut, of the world broken in two’, in Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. and intro. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 131.
44 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 72. Jacob Taubes discusses the proximity, jealousy and rivalry between Paul and Nietzsche in very similar terms, in The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 76–88. Incidentally, it is in the context of this discussion that Taubes brings up what he too calls the antiphilosophers: ‘These are the ones who break through, each in a different way, the completion of philosophy. They include Marx, on the one hand, who, like Themistocles, wanted to found a new Athens; on the other hand, they include Kierkegaard as a critic of Hegel, who thinks hard about the apostle—the genius of the apostle—but I wasn’t formed by him. . . . Here I’m speaking about Nietzsche’ (p. 77).
45 Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 210–11. See also Badiou, Theory of the Subject: ‘The deviation on the left follows a perspective of flight. It is a radicalism of novelty. It breaks all mirrors’ (p. 207). I discuss the validity of speculative leftism for an understanding of Badiou’s philosophy in the conclusion to Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 273–86.
46 Milner, L’Œuvre claire, p. 152.
47 Badiou, Saint-Paul, p. 108.
48 Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Événement et répétition (Auch: Tristram, 2004), p. 217. Belhaj Kacem at one point was Badiou’s most fervent disciple but he has since then viciously and in true antiphilosophical fashion turned against his master. See Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Après Badiou (Paris: Grasset, 2011).
49 Nietzsche, Selected Letters, Letter 202, p. 345.