Traversing Particularity. From Badiou back to Kant

Zu fragmentarisch ist mir Welt und Leben! Ich will mich zum deutschen Professor begeben. Der weiß das Leben zusammenzusetzen, Und er macht ein verständlich System daraus; mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus

Heinrich Heine

I. Introduction

In this small poem, Heinrich Heine can be read as prefiguring the project of postmodern consciousness. In his picture of the German professor, he actually distrusts all possible attempts to develop a Totalsystem. Of course, he dreams of a homecoming within a final whole, but he is too much aware of what he calls the gaps of the universe, of the impossibility of a direct access to or adequate representation of Being itself. He suffers from what in postmodernity is called the crisis of representation and what has become a rather general human condition, at least in the West. However, when we take a look now at contemporary philosophy, something strange seems to happen. A widely influential philosopher as Alain Badiou for example is trying to come up with some kind of post-postmodernity. He laments the anti-platonism, the distrust of speculative metaphysics and the hermeneutic perspectivism of postmodernity and urges for a classical, anti-kantian philosophy which would enable us to counter the false modesty of modern and postmodern consciousness.

My question here will be: is Badiou justified in making a radical distinction between his project and (post)modern philosophy? Badiou himself is often keen to criticise postmodern writers, especially for their linguistic charlatanry and playful scepticism, but he might stand closer to some of them as presumed. With his notion of pure event, he tried to escape classical monism and in his privileging of singularity he comes quite close to writers as Bataille, Derrida and Lacan. He even seems to offer a Sartrean dualism without mediation, for there seems to be no relation between the meaningfulness of an event and the meaninglessness of the cosmos of infinite sets.[1] But especially the similarities with a Kantian project are striking. Both Kant and Badiou establish a sort of direct relation between the singular and the universal. In contrast to the still largely prevailing Hegelian model, the access to the universal does not run through the mediation of particularity. Particularity is traversed, but it does not function as what uplifts us in the direction of universality. Moreover, the so-called Sartrean dualism can in fact be traced back to Kant, and more precisely to his anti-cosmism which prevents the subject to conceive itself as the highest creature in the chain of being. The Kantian/modern subject is radically out-of-joint, it has no place within the positive order of Being.

Of course, this is not meant as a scholarly comment on the work of Badiou. I would like to focus here shortly on Badiou because he could help us avoiding the pitfalls of particularism and reinforcing our faith in universal truth. In contrast to Badiou, I would however not label this as a counter-(post)modern movement. We have often been presented with a false or at least quite distorted picture of postmodernity as the consciousness of particularity. The essence of postmodernity would consist of the awareness of the particularity (contextuality) of all truth-claims. And this is true: all claims are particular; but, it is too often interpreted in a hermeneutic sense that we are locked up in a set of particular narratives. The consciousness of particularity is only one side of the story. We could therefore label the modern/postmodern subject, with a notion of Hegel, as ‘unhappy consciousness’, as split between the mastery of being a universal negating consciousness and the slavery of being just a miserable contingent individual. The unhappy consciousness does not cover up particularity, as the stoic does, nor does he cover up universality as the sceptic does. In this sense, there is a straight line connecting Kant, Kierkegaard and Derrida, as three forms of unhappy consciousness. But I’ll come back to this at the end.


II. Badiou’s cultural critique: the problem of communitarianism

Let me start here with Badiou’s cultural critique and his furious attack on what he calls the reduction of the question of truth to a linguistic form. Together with an author as Slavoj Zizek, he refuses the postmodern common-sense ‘anti-essentialist’ identity politics according to which there are no men or women as such, but only white-middle class women, black lesbians, single mothers….[2] He rejects these insights as trivial, for the philosophical question actually lies in how the universality of ‘men’ or ‘women’ emerges out of the endless multitude. But there is more at stake then just philosophical laziness. Badiou tries to point out that the real unifying factor behind the attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets consists of “monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.”[3] In others words: if one claims that we can no longer tell master-narratives, this logic works neo-conservative, for it allows the space between the micro-stories to be occupied by the master-narrative of neo-liberal capitalism. On the one side, he thus perceives an extension of the automatisms of capital, this as the world-market whose configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization.[4] On the other side, he discerns a process of fragmentation into closed identities. But both processes, of globalisation and tribalization, are perfectly intertwined. “For each identification creates a figure that provides a material for investment by the market.” Abstract universality and the particularity of interests proper to a subset, are finally two sides of the same coin. Badiou's program can therefore be stated as such: to break free from the spell of communitarianism and to establish again the idea of a universalist truth-procedure. Or in his own words: “Ultimately it is a case of mobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstraction (legal then, economic now) and against communitarian or particularist protest.”[5]


III. Being and Event (From Sartrean Dualism to Deleuzian/Spinozist Monism?)

To work out his program, Badiou mainly focuses on the question of ontology and what he calls the event. The latter will allow us to understand his notion of subjectivity. In the beginning of his book on Saint Paul, Badiou therefore explains his philosophical project as an attempt “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple being.”[6] For him ontology itself is a matter of mathematics, in which the totality of Being is understood as an infinite set of sets. The only problem with mathematics is that it remains unable to come to terms with Being as such, with Being as Being. In its abstract procedure it only has a relation to Being as far as it is represented. The real ground of Being is the simple fact that it happens. The infinite set of sets is thus not founded on some other eternal ground, but rests on the contingency of happening, as the groundless ground of Being. Badiou therefore speaks about the event, as something which escapes the totality of representations and in which Being as such presents itself. Being as such (not as represented, but as presentation) is thus not a set, as other sets. It’s only present as an empty set, and it only presents itself in detached elements; detached, in the sense that they are no longer a part of one of the existing specific sets. What thus happens in an event, is that the existing order of sets is disturbed; it reveals that at the root of every order, there is no specific constellation of sets grounded in an ultimate ontological principle. Ultimately, every order resides in pure contingency; the contingency as the happening of Being itself. Truth becomes then a matter of faithfulness to the event. In the event, as a singular happening, all particularistic notions of truth are unmasked, for these are only dependent on settled constellations of sets, masking the contingency of Being itself. The subject of the event is thus the bearer of faith in an empty set, as the only set which can lay a claim to universality.

Let us take the example of Saint Paul. Badiou turns to him, not because he believes Paul’s claim about Jesus’ resurrection (he is a radical atheist), but because he would have established such a universalist truth-procedure. “Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of people, a city, an empire, a territory or a social class. What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate.”[7] Of course, to designate the event Paul uses the word ‘resurrection’. Nevertheless, we should be able to look further than this as a claim with a specific theological content. In using the word ‘resurrection’ Paul undermined the existing discourses of his time. He focused on the site where all the particular discourses lost their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, Paul thus came to look Being right in the eye. In experiencing the failure of the existing discourses, he was confronted with the pure contingency of Being itself, as a singular experience which opens up a universalism, for all people actually share in this contingency. Resurrection designates for Badiou thus finally Paul’s affirmation of Being itself, of the life-giving contingency and so of the impossible Real, not understood as the horror of death but as the source of life. As such Badiou formally repeats a certain Lacanian move, but also seems to establish a specific dualism. We enter the world of truth through grace as a pure and simple encounter, and the world of particularity can never function as a mediation. There is a direct connection between the singular and the universal, and the world of truth as such remains opposed to the world of particularity. Of course, Badiou knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.[8]

The problem with this analysis is however that Badiou’s story does not end here and that he risks to smuggle particularity and mediation surreptitiously back in. The graceful encounter with the Real can be understood as revolution: it shatters the existing configuration of discourses. Till so far, there is not really a problem of mediation. But Badiou also believes that on the basis of this revolution a new politics can be grounded in which the encounter can be solidified. First, he thus seems to presuppose that every true revolution turns out as something positive. But can he do that? The criterium for a true revolution is absolutely formal: what matters is the connection with the contingent happening of Being as such, and the rupture with settled, particular systems of truth. So in some way he is implicitly claiming that Being itself is something good: a claim he cannot make on the basis of his formal approach[9]. Second, how can a political system be directly founded on an encounter with the Real, without turning it into a new symbolic order, and so without smuggling particularity back in? Badiou presents his politics as a pure politics and he is keen to argue that this politics has left behind the mediation of a Hegelian economy.[10] But can this convince? As if his maoist program is devoid of very particular preferences, as if a political system at all can be devoid of particular preferences? Purity as a kind of solidified state remains highly doubtful and we might do better, for the sake of good politics, not to think here in terms of purity.


IV. Retrieving Kant’s anti-ontological trust

In the solidification of the event, Badiou thus risks to undermine his own intent. He stresses that the Event is unforeseeable in terms of the existing conditions and that the Event cannot have any ontological guarantee[11]. It cannot be reduced to, or deduced from a previous situation. It escapes the ontological representation of Being, although it emerges from Being as presentation. In this sense, Badiou agrees with Zizek that true evil does not lie in an excess of subjectivity as such, but in its ‘ontologization’, in its reinscription into some positive order of Being. At once, this is for both the great insight of Christianity, that “the global cosmic ‘chain of Being’ is not ‘all there is’, that there is another Order (of ideas) which suddenly emerges and which suspends the validity of the Order of Being”[12]. Nevertheless, in the case of Badiou it remains doubtable if he is able to uphold this rupture. Let’s take an example that he uses himself: he considers the Russian October revolution as an Event, and admits that Stalin betrays the Event by turning it into new positive order of Being. But where do we draw the line? Can we make such a strict distinction between a Leninist and Stalinist relation to the Event? It is more plausible that the Stalinist ontologization is already at least prepared by installing a political and thus coercive regime on the basis of the Event. Badiou all too easily presumes that an inner relation can be adequately captured by an outward system, and that such a system would be at once able to remain an open logic, and thus not a new particular subset. Moreover, his understanding of the subject as the product of faithfulness to the Event, risks to reinstall the ideology he is precisely trying to fight himself. He insists on the immanence of the Truth-event and so has to admit that the Truth of the Event only appears for the Agents and not for external observers. This means that an Event is only recognizable as a true Event, if one has already taken the decision to be an agent of the Event. In other words: one has to be part of the club, to recognize the truth (which turns Badiou of course into an anti-communitarian communitarian).

My suggestion is therefore that we conceive the relation between subject and event differently. In other words: we have to turn Badiou into a Kantian. But beware: I’m not referring here to Kant as the German professor of Heine’s poem, but as the unhappy consciousness who is aware that the order of Being in itself remains non-totalizable, that the ‘Lücken des Welltbaus’ can never be chinked up, for in a Kantian logic das Weltall is itself dependent on a finite subject. As Heidegger has argued in his discussion with Ernst Cassirer, the transcendental subject has to be understood as a Dazwischen, unable to flee into an eternal absolute, nor into the world of things, of particularity.[13] Too often, one has interpreted the Kantian Subject as the Stoic of Hegel’s scheme, as freely operating in a sphere of pure noumenality, and as unattached by a condition of contingency. But if we take a closer look, especially at his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, we see how Kant himself wrestles with the problem of a split subjectivity. At some point, he even explicitly praises nature for our bad creation, for our dim and ambiguous sight: if we would be able to leave fully behind all the contingency or the pathological order of particular inclinations, there would not be any moral struggle, and our moral relation would become pure mechanical. As in a puppet show, we would gesticulate everything perfectly, but it would be a lifeless happening.[14] As such, Kant thus reintroduces the problem fragmentation, but now in the heart of the human subject, as split between two heterogeneous intentionalities. However, it remains important to see that this not a support or supplement of the cultural fragmentation Badiou is trying to oppose. As humans, we all share the split of subjectivity; the split is a universal condition, and only if we are ready to embrace this condition as universal, will we be able to oppose the communitarian seduction.
Of course, Badiou could protest against the Kantian universality that it remains an abstract universality, and that by consequence it works itself in favour of communitarian perspectivism, very much like in the case of capitalism. And I’m afraid he has a point. But here, it might eventually be possible to supplement Kant with Badiou’s logic of the Event, (without however turning the subject into a product of this event.) As an example of how we reach universality, Badiou takes the gender-distinction and defends the position that we only come to know the disjunction between men and women as a universal truth about humanity, through the encounter of this difference in the amorous relation. In and through love we realize the truth about the difference between sexuated positions. The same goes for politics, science and art: the truth of these domains is finally a truth for everyone, although it becomes only realized through the concrete encounter of the event. Till so far, I’m tempted to agree with Badiou. But could we not affirm both positions at once?: and the subject precedes the encounter, and the subject realizes herself through the encounter. As Derrida argues against all strong conceptions of revelation, Offenbarkeit has to precede Offenbarung, and nor Levinas, neither Marion can do away with the transcendental condition of understanding. One must be able to understand the other, in order to remain faithfull to the call of the other. The same might therefore hold for Badiou’s Evental interruption. If he really wants to install a singular-universal connection, and if the universal means ‘for everyone, independent of having any particular determinations’[15], he must in some way admit that we should all be receptive for the events, through which we realize the truth of love, science, politics and art and thus ourselves; he will have to admit that a transcendental subjectivity cannot be made dependent on the encounter, and that only on the basis of this transcendentality he can adequately counter the relativistic glorifying of particularity.

[1] For the critique of dualism, cf. for example Catherine Pickstock, The Univocalist Mode of Production, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Zizek, Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 315.
[2] Cf. for example, S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[3] A. Badiou. Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, p 7.
[4] Ibid., p. 9.
[5] Ibid., p. 14.
[6] Ibid., p. 4.
[7] Ibid., p.5.
[8] This does not mean however, that Paul is trying to abolish particular differences. His strategy is more subtle. Take for example his relation to what is Jewish. As Rom 9:1-6 makes clear, Paul’s relation to the Jews is essentially positive. It is therefore not all Paul’s aim to discredit particularity. But he finally praises particularity only to be able to traverse it. In Badiou’s words: “Paul fights against all those who would submit postevental universality to Jewish particularity. […] The task Paul sets for himself is obviously not that of abolishing Jewish particularity, which he constantly acknowledges as the event’s principle of historicity, but that of animating it internally by everything of which it is capable relative to the new discourse, and hence the new subject.”[8] Moreover, Paul does not conceal his own strategy here: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law – though not being myself under the law – that I might win those under the law. […] I have become all things to all men” (Cor. I.9:19-22). A similar ambiguity concerns the question of separation. In Badiou’s reading Paul’s universalism does not exclude all forms of separation, but the separation involved is itself intertwined with universalism. The actual separation is between the old man and the new man: through our faith in the event, we have separated ourselves from the old man, and out of this separation the newness of life is born. What distinguishes Paul then from Jewish ‘communitarianism’ is that there is no limit to this separation. “It proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, the realization of a separation in a universal field.[…] The division is internal to the subject itself.” A. Badiou, An Interview with Alain Badiou. “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion”, in Journal of Philosopy and Scripture 3/1 (2005) 38-42, p. 40. For Badiou, this implies that there can never be a closure, nor a new fixed system of particular truths.
[9] Mark de Kesel therefore speaks about Badiou’s catholic ontology. Cf. M. De Kesel, Ontologie als katholicisme. Over Alain Badiou’s Paulusinterpretatie, in Yang…
[10] Just as also Paul does without mediation. Cf. A. Badiou, p. 48.
[11] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p. 145: “A universal singularity is not of the order of being, but of the order of a sudden emergence.”
[12] S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[13] Cf. Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger, in M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1998, p. 274-296, p. 279: “Kant spricht von der Vernunft des Menschen als Selbsthalterin, d.h. einer Vernunft, die rein auf sich selbst gestellt ist und sich nicht flüchten kann in ein Ewiges, Absolutes, sich aber auch nicht flüchten kann in die Welt der Dinge. Dieses Dazwischen ist das Wesen der praktischen Vernunft.”
[14] I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 265: “Das Verhalten der Menschen, so lange ihre Natur, wie sie jetzt ist, bliebe, würde also in einen bloßen Mechanismus verwandelt werden, wo, wie im Marionettenspiel, alles gut gestikulieren, aber in den Figuren doch kein Leben anzutreffen sein sein würde.”
[15] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p 151.