immanence-materialism papers

I know a few of these were up a while ago, but almost all of the papers (including mine) from June’s Immanence and Materialism conference at Queen Mary are now up on the conference website.

If anyone has thoughts on my paper, feel free to comment. It contains a lot of ideas I’m exploring and playing around with, and I’m already convinced some of the arguments in this don’t pan out, but either way, would love to chat about it more, especially as some of what I try to outline here relates (i think) to the recent Hallward discussion.

Will of the people: notes

So, to hopefully push forward the discussion which started during the last post, I’m going to post some rough notes/thoughts on Hallward’s ‘The will of the people’.

I’ll begin with Hallward’s definition of ‘will of the people’, which for him is “[...] a deliberate, emancipatory and inclusive process of collective self-determination.”

For me the crucial question is in regards to the use of the term ’self’ in this description, and more importantly, the question of anthropology, which resides under this discussion. At this point, Hallward has not developed any sort of an anthropology of this wiling self, or, free human. Although it may be coming in a more full scale work, I think any project of this sort needs to start with some simple questions on the nature of the human as such, and the subsequent capacity for this human to act as both an individual and as a unit of a collective project. A failure to theorize the human in this way is what seems to lead to the accusations of this project being either ‘vitalist’ or ‘folk-psychological’ (criticisms he anticipates in this piece).

Another interesting point in the piece is when Hallward claims:

“It’s no accident that, like Agamben and Zizek, when Badiou looks to the Christian tradition for a point of anticipation he turns not to Matthew (with his prescriptions of how to act in the world: spurn the rich, affirm the poor, ’sell all thou hast’…) but to Paul (with his contempt for the weakness of human will and his valorization of the abrupt and infinite transcendence of grace).”

Two thoughts here. First, this brings up the generally interesting question about why recent political philosophers using Christianity for material have focused so much on Paul, for whom man is ultimately nothing without divine grace (theologians, correct me if I’m reading him wrong), and thus, using Paul seems to hold on to some sense of divine transcendence (whether this be the divine/god/void/nothingness). Hallward’s point here seems to once again focus on what could be called (in light of Badiou) pre-evental man. Whereas Badiou’s pauline subject comes into existence with the event, it seems as if Hallward is attempting to theorize the human as that which can will to act on its own accord, and subsequently use this individual will to reinforce and support collective will. Rather than drawing on some ‘outside’, Hallward here seems to want to emphasize the inherent potential (potentia) of humanity to act politically. Once again, this issue seems to reside on the question of anthropology, and a theorization of this pre-evental human. The risk here, from my perspective, would be theorizing the individual human in such a way as to not lapse back into a tired brand of liberal individualism, and instead theorize the individual as that which is dialectically related to the group at all times. The tension seems to be, how to keep the willing individual, without losing the group subject.

A bit further on in the piece, he quotes S’bu Zikode, who is the chairperson of the Durban shack dwellers movement Abahali baseMjondolo as calling for a ‘living communism’ which asserts the ‘humanity of every human being.’ Hallward seems to openly affirm this call, which brings up the question of the place of both life (living communism) and humanity once again. I know I must be sounding redundant at this point, but I must again ask, what do these terms (life/humanity) mean in this context, and how does a theory of the living human ground this theory of dialectical voluntarism as a whole?

I’ll stop my notes here (about half way through the article) to keep it short, and will hopefully post more later. But as can be seen, my main issue at this point is one of anthropology. What does it mean to be human for Hallward? And equally, what does it mean to be a living human? My concern revolves around who this human is that is able to freely will and organize in collectives. It may seem nit-picky, but for me these issues are crucial when one wants to theorize from the individual to the group in a way which thoroughly accounts for each.

Would love to hear some other thoughts on this.

what just happened?

So, in the past 30 hours or so, everyone has collectively decided that they hate Badiou. What a burst of originality.

I’m glad at least some people are getting the ridiculous and sad irony in all of this. I’m not going to bother linking to all the ‘lets kill the father’ posts out there, I’m sure you’ve seen them or can find them, but almost all of them share one troubling thing, an odd absence of any philosophical or textual engagement with his work. And, if I can make a guess, at least a few seem to be written by people critiquing a book (LoW) which they have not read, or, understood.

As I said in a comment on one of the previously mentioned blogs, this reminds me of being 14 years old and turning violently against one of my favorite punk bands when they would sign with a major label or put a video on mtv.

Dark and obscure doesn’t always equal rigorous or interesting.

more on logics of worlds

I came across something just now that I think helps better articulate what I was trying to get at in my last post. On page 144 of Logics of Worlds Badiou states:

The triple of the non-whole, which we advocate, is as follows: indifferent multiplicities, or ontological unbinding; worlds of appearing, or the logical link; truth-procedures, or subjective eternity.

The important thing here, in relation to what I was trying to get at in my last post, is the notion of ontological unbinding. I am in complete agreement that before one can enter a world and begin the process of becoming-subject, they must first be unbound. My concern though, is whether or not a notion of the ‘human animal’ is adequate for this unbinding. I know many will advocate for an accelerationist theory of capitalism, by which pushing capitalism to its limits we end up with nothing but un-bound ‘post-human’ elements, but I don’t buy this argument. As capital currently stands, it functions exactly like a transcendental (in Badiou’s terms). It functions to order intensities of appearance in a world, and those in this world must bind themselves to the psuedo-event of capital to have appearance.

I would thus want to explore the possibility of lifeserving as the counter foundational event of universal unbinding, and a sort of primary event which allows the individual self to exists unbound from the one way relationality of capital, and instead exist in a primary state of self relation through this primary relation to life. This would subsequently produce un-bound self relational individual selves capable of entering new worlds through a decisive entering into a subjective body.

I’ll end with a quote from an article by William Large that gets at the critique of capital I’m relying on here:

What is outside capital is not social in the sense, but what resists it within society, which is life itself […] the only answer to capital is life.

affectivity and the human animal in Logics of Worlds

In Logics of Worlds Badiou identifies four affects which signal the incorporation of a human animal into a subjective truth-process. These affects are terror, anxiety, courage, and justice.

The first, terror, “testifies to the desire for a great point” [86]. This point serves as the decisive discontinuity which brings about the new in an instantaneous fashion, and completes the subject in the process. The initial point is the break in a previous situation, or world, which inaugurates the opening of the path into the new one.

The second, anxiety, “testifies to the fear of points” [ibid], in which the human animal fears the choice between two hypotheses which comes with no guarantee. Thus, anxiety, in the Kierkegaardian-Sartrean sense, comes about when the individual (or, human animal) is confronted with the realization of free and contingent choice.

The third, courage, “affirms the acceptance of the plurality of points” [ibid]. Thus, one has the courage to navigate the consequences of an event in the form of points. To once again use Kierkegaard/Sartre as the example, courage is the affect which grips the individual who has overcome the anxiety of contingency and freely willed a decision.

The final affect is justice, which “affirms the equivalence of what is continuous and negotiated, one the one hand, and of what is discontinuous and violent, on the other.” [ibid] To justice, all categories of action are thus subordinated to the absolute contingency of worlds. Justice is thus the affective sign of the egalitarian maxim.

On page 87 of LW he goes on to note that “all affects are necessary in order for the incorporation of a human animal to unfold in a subjective process, so that the grace of being immortal may be accorded to this animal.” Thus, the human animal must go through each affect to enter into the process of ‘becoming-subject’.

While I am excited and intrigued to see Badiou relying so much on language of affect (which was a major lack of Being and Event, see Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty, for the best critique of BEin regards to affectivity) in Logics, I am also left wondering what is actually feeling these affects? And along these same lines, how does a/the subject ‘feel’ an affect? Because the subject is non-individual and non-human (as theorized by Badiou), what is it that feels itself feelingthese affects? Is it only a collective subject-body whom is able to feel enthusiasm in regards to an emanciptory political movement? Or can the individual be equally affected by novelty in this respect?

It seems as if theorizing the pre-subjective individual as the ‘human animal’ is problematic in these regards, and it would be more constructive to theorize the existence of the non/pre-subjective ‘human animal’ as the ‘individual self’. By providing a more detailed theorization of this individual self, we can have a self whom is self relational and capable of ‘feeling itself feeling’ theseaffects which subsequently lead it into the subjective process. As anthropocentric as Badiou’s philosphy of the subject is (no matter how much he argues otherwise), it seems as if it’d be more constructive for his whole project if he would just concede to the existence of this originary individual self, which theorized properly is situated in such as a way as to be cable of feeling affects and subsequently enter the process of becoming-subject.

I’m still working my way through (the english edition of) Logics of Worlds, so more thoughts on this to come for sure. Would be interested in hearing what others are making of this language of affect in LW…

on endorsements and logics of worlds.

a question…

why the hell did continuum have Joan Copjec write the only endorsement feature on the cover of Logics of Worlds? On the continuum website they have a lengthy, and appropriate, endorsement from Peter Hallward, who is, you know, a philosopher, and whom is more or less the english language Badiou expert; why the hell wouldn’t they put that on the published book? I mean, who working on continental philosophy (esp. the materialist strand) thinks of Joan Copjec as someone important?

Maybe I’m just missing something…

logics of worlds. out. finally

i would recommend ordering it here

an introduction, and more…

I would like to introduce the new blog of a good friend, named Dan. His blog is called Vacuous Savor, and he already has some interesting post up that seem to be coming out of a recent period of Zizek reading. Surely worth checking out for those interested in the relationship between philosophy-theology-politics.

Right now I’m working on a paper, to be presented later this week, on the place of the subject in philosophies of life and concept in the recent french tradition. I’m framing the debate between the work of Badiou and Henry, and trying to ‘get at’ a concept of the subject that is founded through a relationship to the absolute life of Henry, while retaining the political axiomatics of Badiou. To bring things to the ground, I’m attempting to evaluate these accounts of the subject in relation to their efficacy in providing sites of novelty under capitalism. At this point I’m still wrestling with how to read the role of both life and capitalin Badiou’s work, and specifically in Logics of Worlds.  I’m also finding his quick dismissal of Negri/Deleuze to be problematic in regards to questions of Life; I say this as being someone who agrees with Badiou over these figures 9 out of 10 times, but still can’t help but finding Badiou’s attempt to bring the world life back to the centre of philosophical thinking a bit silly/pretentious.

But I’ll digress…at this point my mind is still a bit cluttered. I’m going through some (hopefully) final edits of the paper before leaving for the states on wednesday, so will potentially post it here before then, but if not, I will surely post the paper after the conference. Which, just now, I noticed is going to be attended by an entire class from Canada as a sort of philosophical field trip. This should be, if nothing else, interesting.

two things.

First of all, I recommend everyone start off their blog-reading-day by reading dominic’s badiou(ian) take on sexuality.

Second of all, IT makes us aware that the communism conference at birkbeck this weekend will be offering free viewing of the event on screens in a separate room. A nice pacifying gesture on the part of Birkbeck if nothing else. Hopefully will see some of ‘you’ there this weekend. I’ll be there, and rolling with a gangsta ass crew.

the incident at antioch/the incident at glasgow

As always, sorry for never posting. I can promise that while not posting here, I’ve been getting good philosophical work done in the real world though! More on that at another time…

So, a couple of weeks ago a colleague and myself spent the day at an event in Glasgow which featured the first english performance of Alain Badiou’s play ‘Incident at Antioch’. The event featured about an hour of selected scenes from the play, followed by a ‘discussion’ time in which the translator of the play and Ward Blanton (University of Glasgow) asked questions to Badiou, and it ended with about 20 minutes of open q&a time.

So first, the bad. The play was embarassingly terrible. My colleague and myself, who seemed to be two of the only philosophy-types there (the event was advertised and organized by theology/literature people) were having to hold back from laughing out loud during some of the scenes. It was almost as if someone fed a copy of ‘Being and Event’ to some automatic play generator website. The character development was pretty hilarious as well, you had this angry revolutionary son who represented Theorie Du Sujet with a more axiomatic mother who’s personality resembled Being and Event. I’m sure if the play was updated he’d add a wise old grandmother to represent Logiques de Mondes. Badiou seemed to at least be somewhat aware of his (lack of) playwright abilities, as he at one point quipped that this was the second public performance of this piece in over twenty years.

During the initial part of the discussion time the translator and Ward Blanton (who is a professor of biblical literature I think?) asked fairly tame questions. The translator of the play (I forget her name, American woman from LA) asked fairly boring questions and treated Badiou as an interesting playwright rather than an important philosopher, and clearly her background made it unlikely that she really had a basic grasp of his philosophical work anyways. Blanton’s questions were a bit better, although he kept trying to ‘push’ Badiou into talking about religion/theology, which he slyly avoided by basically quoting himself from the St. Paul book. The level of discussion made it seem as if most of the crowd had read the St. Paul book, and likely nothing else, so for someone who is a serious student of Badiou, it was a bit frustrating.

After the moderated discussion they opened the floor for questions. The first question amounted to “hi, I’ve clearly never read your work but am now going to ask a question in which I seem like I’m being creative and challenging but in fact just exhibiting the fact that I haven’t even read the introduction to one of your major works”, and sadly, Badiou then spent 10 minutes responding with some really basic remarks about his system as a whole. The next question was asked by my colleague, and was quite an in depth question regarding forcing, cohen, set theory, etc; and sadly, I don’t think Badiou understood much of it, and the translator didn’t get it either, so it wasn’t translated well, and then he just gave a basic response regarding the place of set theory in his work. I had my hand up to ask a question about Kierkegaard (which in all fairness amounted to me searching for some justification regarding my doctoral research project) but sadly they cut off questions after about 20 minutes.

Although Badiou wasn’t really given time to speak at length, I took some notes and will share them here:

At one point while discussing violence he stated that “Violence is the result of order, not dis-order.” Which was interesting.

Later he mapped out what he sees as the four primary political ‘groups’. They were:

1) Students

2) Residents of the Paris Suburbs

3) Workers

4) Undocumented Works

He went on to say that a riot amongst one group qualifies as a revolt or movement, but the inauguration of a new politic (or a real politic) requires that 2 or more groups be engaged. At one point he said “politics is to create the passage between one movement and others.” He said that when groups go to action one by one, it qualifies as revolt, but one more than one group go into action together it becomes a political possibility. He went out to define politics as “the creation of the passage between two different groups“, and said that “the union of four groups would be the revolution“, and only in extraordinary circumstances is that possible.

He then went onto to provide a counting exercise that was right out of a revolutionary version of sesame street in which he stated that:

“4 is the number of the event, or change; 3 of new forms of organization; 2 is the number of politics; and 1 is nothing.”

So, nothing new exciting, but as a some sort of ’student’ of Badiou’s work, I still found it to be exciting experience, although I’m hoping that the communism conference in London next week will serve as a much more intense experience of Badiou’s ‘live’ work.