A bit more on Badiou

I was astonished to hear that at least one person in the world actually reads this blog (or at least has read it once, perhaps as a result of doing a blog search for “Badiou” or something...). Honestly, I really was astonished. So I did a google search for “scattered speculations on Badiou” and discovered this:

 

http://codepoetics.com/poetix/?p=1195 (I’ll copy and paste it below as well) This is a very measured response to my little polemic. It is very generous. I look forward to any further instalment. J

 

But, in the meantime, I should mention that I am actually writing something of a more sustained critique of Badiou – one which is not so simply dismissive or negative – and I suppose I could serialize instalments here... The only problem is: I’m writing it as part of a reading of Bruce Lee. So it might be hard to extricate it from this... But basically, I’m approaching Badiou’s ethics (‘Keep Going! [Continuer!]’) in light of Bruce Lee’s favourite maxim/platitude, “Walk on!” – which he himself lifted wholesale from a book (called Walk on!) by the British popularizer of Zen Buddhism, Christmas Humphreys... Then, of course, there’s the small matter of taking into consideration the significance of the proximity of Badiou’s critique in Ethics to Zizek’s or Debray’s arguments about postmodern/late/neoliberal capitalism, etc. So you see, there are quite a few coordinates to try to take into consideration....

 

Anyway, here’s the post about my post. It’s from POETIX:

 

 

 

I’d like now to gather together Paul Bowman’s “Scattered Speculations” on Badiou, and see whether a response is possible.

Bowman, in a spirit of playful speculation and gentle malice, makes a series of jabs and feints in Badiou’s direction. Some can be blocked; some connect; some are entirely wide of the mark. The claim that Badiou “is a modern day Jung” is outrageously funny, and perhaps also the most interesting. What is the transcendental of a world if not its anima mundi, the manner in which it is mindful of itself? Can Badiou’s political aims be justly summarised as changing the mind of the world? At the very least, Bowman has identified a potential “deviation” here, an idealist Badiouism that would be indistinguishable from Jungianism. We will have to see to what extent the “real” Badiou can be extricated from the clutches of this doppelganger.

Let’s acknowledge the ones that hurt. First, this: “Badiou is an ‘excellent’ philosopher. His criterion is ‘consistency’. In this, his is the philosophy of the ‘university of excellence’ (cf Bill Readings): it is non-referential and bears no necessary relation to reality or the real”. In a way, the entire problem with which Badiou is concerned is that of how to draw “the real” and “the excellent” into each other’s ambit. This problem has two faces, one on the side of the real and one on the side of the excellent. On the first side, the problem of “truth” is that of whether a consistency (unfolded by the faithful progress of a formal subject) can be installed in the real. Must we accept, on the contrary, that chaos is the only appropriate figure of the real, the alpha and omega of every (temporarily) stable form? On the second side, it is a matter of knowing whether the “excellence” of mathematical reason, or of art, can be brought under a “condition” so that it treats of some real points. Here we must agree with Bowman: there is no necessary relation, no stable referential system, that can ensure that “consistency” and “reality” mean anything at all to each other. For this reason, the idealist “Jungian” Badiouism of which we were just speaking is metaphysically impertinent, because it does not acknowledge - as Badiou, I think, does - the contingency of truths. It is always possible that no truth will ever come to pass, and that none ever has. This is why Badiou argues that “the philosopher” must keep “the sophist”, the nihilist debunker, on hand: there can be no ultimate triumph of the one over the other.

Secondly, Bowman’s analysis of the libidinal payoff, for educated middle-class Guardian-reading types, of Badiou’s grouchy Maoist dismissal of most (but not all) of the cultural product they enjoy, has a definite ring of truth. The fundamental desire of the educated middle class is for “distinction” (in this context, a term of art drawn from Bourdieu). Badiou assures them that almost everything they and their fellows like is worthless dreck, but leaves open the possibility of an exceptional artistic excellence to which they, through the militant purgation of their own sensibilities, can attain - thereby separating themselves from their fellows, who remain mere middlebrows and in thrall to the spectacular productions of Empire to boot. I was especially amused by Bowman’s evocation of middle class resentment of “those others that I see every day reading the Guardian and in art galleries next to us at weekends”. I don’t as a rule spend my weekends in art galleries, but on the few occasions when I’ve visited the Tate Modern, say, I’ve invariably found myself seething at the constant stream of cultured inanities emitted by some twittering prat with more money than me. Like, God! Just shut up, will you! I’m trying to detect the minimal difference between the two hues in this Kandinsky!

More presently…