The Fractured Dialectic in Recent European Materialism
The Fractured Dialectic in Recent European Materialism
Thus far in this book I have discussed the philosophical and systematic backdrop upon which much of my interpretation of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard rests and have subsequently utilized this backdrop to outline: (I) a systematic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s thought which identifies an ontological core to his project, (II) builds upon this ontology to outline an anthropology and theory of subjectivity and (III) finally builds upon this ontology and anthropology to develop a political ontology. At this point, I will move on to consider recent materialist philosophies that have emerged in the wake of Kierkegaard and nineteenth-century idealism. In particular, I will focus on a particular strand of contemporary materialism that seems to implicitly (and at times explicitly) build upon the ontological, anthropological and political trajectory that I have previously outlined via my reading of Kierkegaard. While there are a number of theoretical developments that could be placed under the umbrella term ‘contemporary European materialism’, I will here focus particularly on the systematic approach of transcendental materialism, a theory of materialism most recently and clearly outlined in the work of Adrian Johnston, Slavoj Žižek and, to a less explicit extent Catherine Malabou. While these figures may best represent the most current attempts to articulate a rigorously transcendental materialism (a theory which I briefly outlined in chapter 3), I will here contend that the inaugural moment of this philosophical sensibility can be most clearly located in the later work of Jean-Paul Sartre, primarily in his materialist masterpiece The Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1. After an analysis of Sartre’s materialist period and the manner in which this shift in his philosophical outlook remains in line with the ontological and political reading of Kierkegaard outlined thus far in this book, I will shift to an analysis of the materialist philosophy of Alain Badiou.
5.1 Sartre’s Materialism
While Sartre is often regarded as the father of modern existentialist philosophy, my concern here will lie wholly with his materialist project. This may seem odd in the context of a book which aims to use a recontextualization of the work of Kierkegaard to offer a critical approach to contemporary materialism, as a majority of the secondary literature exploring the relationship between Sartre and Kierkegaard focuses on Sartre’s earlier phenomenological work; but contra this tradition I will here argue that once approached through the ontological lens of idealism, Sartre’s later materialist project bears a much deeper similarity to the underlying systematic structure of Kierkegaard’s project than to his earlier phenomenological project.[1] Along with this, I will contend that Sartre represents a sort of pivot point in the history of twentieth-century European philosophy, as his work represents both a high point in existential-phenomenology and in post-Marxist materialism. As I will show, Sartre develops a theoretical apparatus that aims to bridge the gap between a Kierkegaardian emphasis on subjectivity and a Marxist emphasis on the manner in which material conditions shape the historical activity of collective humanity.
While there has been much written which explores the influence of Kierkegaard’s writings on the philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre, these secondary works have dealt almost exclusively with the role Kierkegaard plays in Sartre’s pre-war phenomenological and psychological work, primarily as seen in his first great work, Being and Nothingness.[2] While the influence of Kierkegaard on the phenomenological and psychological work of Sartre has been explored in a number of texts,[3] I will here focus on the influence of Kierkegaard in Sartre’s post-war period in which he developed a materialist political philosophy. While Kierkegaard’s name appears only once in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,[4] Sartre’s most extensive explicit engagements with Kierkegaard take place on either side of this text. The first comes in Sartre’s essay Search for a Method,[5] which was originally written as an article for a Hungarian journal in 1957 and then printed in Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes and later published as the introduction to the French edition of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.[6] In this work, Sartre briefly charts out the shift in his philosophical approach by explicating the shifts he sees in both Kierkegaard and Marx’s responses to Hegel. The second, which was published after Critique of Dialectical Reason, is a conference presentation titled ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’, which was presented at a UNESCO conference during 1964 in Paris titled Kierkegaard Vivant.[7]
In the period separating Being and Nothingness from Critique of Dialectical Reason, there is a dramatic shift in Sartre’s philosophical concerns; in simple terms, this shift could be regarded as a transition from a concern with individual and interior experience to a focus on exterior and social experience. Whereas the individual subject in Sartre’s early philosophical work was founded by its relation to a fundamental ontological lack, in his later work Sartre shifts to a material account of lack, scarcity, which characterizes the fundamental inconsistency between man and matter. To characterize this transition in even more obvious terms, we could say, as Sartre himself does in Search for a Method, that this transition is one from existentialism to Marxism.[8]
Whereas the freedom of Being and Nothingness is an ontological and nearly limitless freedom, the experience of a post–World War II Europe left Sartre with a realization that his earlier view was remarkably naive in light of the world’s socio-political tragedies. Rather than simply acknowledging the contingent facticity of place of birth, or the class which one is born into, in Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre relies on his newfound ally, Marx, to acknowledge the concrete social, political and productive forces which can place concrete limits on the freedom of individuals. Along with this, Sartre introduces another new concept, ‘the practio-inert’, which allows him to further analyse the limits placed on freedom. ‘The practico-inert’ is the name for the limit placed on human freedom by the material remnants of previous human praxis now inscribed into matter itself.[9] In this sense, even the human work of past generations can limit the potential and success of living human praxis. Sartre’s socio-political project can in many ways be seen as an exploration of the possibility of novel and collective human praxis in light of the seemingly determined limits placed on humanity by both material scarcity and by the work of past human praxis inscribed in the practio-inert.
A majority of the engagement with Kierkegaard in Search for a Method takes place in the opening chapter, ‘Marxism and Existentialism’. This chapter opens with a discussion of Hegel, whom Sartre sees as being the starting point for both Marxism and existentialism. Never one to avoid polemic, Sartre does not keep the reader waiting to find out which school of thought he intends to side with; only a few pages in, Sartre lets us know that Marxism is the only philosophy of our time and that ‘a so called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism’.[10] After this early affirmation of Marxism, Sartre then backs up a bit to discuss Kierkegaard, specifically in the context of his reaction to Hegelian totalization. According to Sartre, Kierkegaard’s primary opposition to the Hegelian system lies in his insistence that ‘the existing man cannot be assimilated by a system of ideas’.[11] For Sartre, this is what is worth holding onto in the work of Kierkegaard, this emphasis on ‘pure unique subjectivity’ which cannot merely be explained as a moment in the unfolding of the historical system. This said, Sartre still acknowledges that Kierkegaard’s ‘anti-Hegelian’ project could only emerge ‘within a cultural field entirely dominated by Hegelianism’.[12]
He goes on to emphasize the particularly human and affective aspects of the subject in Kierkegaard, noting, ‘Kierkegaard is right: grief, need, passion, the pain of men, are brute realities which can be neither surpassed nor changed by knowledge’.[13] The point here for Sartre is that contra-Hegelianism, ideas do not change men, but rather a passionate response to a need produced by a particular situation is what has the capacity to actualize change in an individual. Sartre goes on to argue, ‘Knowing the cause of a passion is not enough to overcome it; one must live it, one must oppose other passions to it, one must combat it tenaciously, in short one most “work oneself over”’.[14] Shortly after this passage Sartre then shifts the focus of his discussion back to Marx:
It is striking that Marxism addresses the same reproach to Hegel though from quite another point of view. For Marx, indeed, Hegel has confused objectification, the simple externalization of man in the universe, with the alienation which turns his externalization back against man. Taken by itself—Marx emphasizes this again and again—objectification would be an opening out; it would allow man, who produces and reproduces his life without ceasing and who transforms himself by changing nature, to ‘contemplate himself in a world which he has created’.[15]
Here Sartre begins to spell out the main argument of this chapter, and the one that in many ways defines his materialist authorship. Sartre is providing a reading of Marx that emphasizes the role of the subjective, and he thus claims, ‘Marx puts priority of action over knowledge’.[16] Sartre sees Marx as placing an emphasis on action and the subjective into Hegelian objective knowledge. Later on the same page we see Sartre arguing that Marx is thus able to take the best aspects of both Hegel and Kierkegaard and turn this into a new philosophical and political system: ‘Thus Marx, rather than Kierkegaard or Hegel, is right, since he asserts with Kierkegaard the specificity of human existence and, along with Hegel, takes the concrete man in his objective reality’.[17] At this point we see that if it was Kierkegaard who seemed to define much of the overall project of Sartre’s existential philosophy, it is undoubtedly Marx who will be the philosopher informing Sartre’s materialist and political thought. It is also important to note here that Sartre avoids completely abandoning Hegel or Kierkegaard by making the point that the difference between their thought is not a fundamental one but rather a matter of standpoint or perspective. Sartre thus sees Marx as the figure in which Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the singular individual and Hegel’s emphasis on the absolute idea’s progression towards the whole is consummated into a single philosophy.
Sartre’s second major interaction with Kierkegaard in his post-war period is the lecture ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’. While in many ways this lecture lacks substantial engagement with the social and political aspects of his later philosophy, the version of Kierkegaard Sartre develops in the lecture is one that seems to be in agreement with much of Sartre’s project as laid out in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Because of this, I will make some brief remarks on the lecture itself and then highlight the implications of this reading of Kierkegaard for our purpose of examining his influence on Sartre’s materialist and political philosophy.
Much like the argument Sartre presents in the ‘Existentialism and Marxism’ chapter of Search for a Method, he here emphasizes the role passion and lived experience play in allowing Kierkegaard to avoid being merely a historical moment in the system, and, thus, Sartre says that Kierkegaard is a ‘survivor of the system and one of its prophets’.[18] He goes on to exemplify that, rather than a Hegelian account of the development of temporality in which philosophy is placed at the end of history and has come into being through retrospective knowledge, Kierkegaard on the contrary conceives of history as never ‘finished’ in this sense and infinitely open rather than a finished totality. For Kierkegaard, according to Sartre, rather than denying the possibility of a beginning, there is always the possibility of a new beginning that is lived.[19] From here Sartre goes on to explain that for Kierkegaard the existing thinker is always born into a certain ‘set of socio-economic, cultural, moral, religious, and other relations’.[20] These predetermined relations subsequently put limits on the individual’s freedom, but as Sartre develops his thought in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, these limits create needs which are the very things that enable the subject to utilize her freedom in actualizing a new possibility. Describing this in Kierkegaardian terms, Sartre states, ‘The Paradox, for him, is the fact that we discover the absolute in the relative’.[21]
Sartre then argues, because Adam temporalizes himself by sin, or in secular terms through an act of free choice, ‘that the foundation of History is freedom in each man’.[22] Sartre is once again utilizing Kierkegaard’s work to emphasize the theory of history he sets out in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It is of utter importance for Sartre’s political project that historical circumstances do not constrain the freedom of individuals, but rather that we ‘escape history to the extent that we make it’.[23] According to Sartre’s political project, the need we encounter in history is the very lack that allows freedom to move beyond history by creating new situations. In this lecture, Sartre reads Kierkegaard as holding to a similar theory of the role of the individual in history.
Moving forward, Sartre once again provides a reading of Kierkegaard that places him at odds with what he sees as the Hegelian conception of a totalizing historical process, noting that ‘every enterprise, even one brought to a triumphant conclusion, remains a failure, that is to say an incompletion to be completed. It lives on because it is open’.[24] This once again follows Sartre’s insistence in the Critique of Dialectical Reason that a new historical sequence inaugurated by a pledged group always becomes an institution and collapses back into seriality, meaning that any subjective enterprise will inevitably fail, and the process must once again recommence. In Sartre’s political philosophy, there is no such thing as Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’.[25] The question obviously remains as to whether or not Sartre is taking an inward and subjective category in Kierkegaard and then turning it into a historical and political category.
When Sartre reaches the end of this lecture he finally returns to the reading of Kierkegaard we previously encountered in the Search for a Method. He closes the lecture stating, ‘Kierkegaard and Marx: these living-dead men condition our anchorage and institute themselves, now vanished, as our future, as the tasks that await us’.[26] While we see that Sartre obviously still places philosophical importance on the work of Kierkegaard, it is equally clear that his overall project of philosophically considering political and historical sequences is one he considers to be staunchly Marxist, and Kierkegaard seems to merely re-emphasize the concepts of freedom and openness he already believes to be present in Marx’s own thought.
Overall, it seems as if the importance of Kierkegaard to Sartre’s social-political thought is his insistence that we cannot dissolve the subject into the historical process and that the place of the subjective is the paradox which resists being taken up into an historical process, and from the position of the subject one can exploit the openness and incompleteness of past historical processes to do something new. This allows Sartre to theorize the emergence of new political situations inaugurated by the scarcity experienced by individuals. Now that the more historical aspects of the influence of Kierkegaard’s thought on Sartre have been outlined in detail, I would like to look at the core project of his major materialist work, Critique of Dialectical Reason. This will be important because I would like to both argue that this text already embodies many elements of the fractured dialectic that I have been outlining and because this text sets up much of the agenda for contemporary French materialism and prefigures the project of another crucial figure for this study, Alain Badiou
5.2 Critique of Dialectical Reason
Whereas I have previously outlined the concept of ontological ground, or more precisely the lack of a ground, which creates the possibility of an inward freedom for consciousness in Kierkegaard’s CA, I will now briefly outline Sartre’s project of determining the grounds and conditions of collective (and social) freedom in Critique of Dialectical Reason. To do this I will make some brief remarks on Sartre’s later project as a whole, focusing in particular on Sartre’s conception of scarcity as the factor which enables both antagonism between humans and the possibility of a positive relation between humans, as well as the progression of the subject-group in Critique.[27]
In Volume 1 of Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre begins a critical discussion in which he differentiates his developing dialectical project from that of Marxism, stating:
Marxism’s tendency to skip the abstract discussion of human relations and jump immediately to an analysis situated within the world of productive forces puts it at the danger of unwittingly supporting the atomism of liberalism and of analytical rationality.[28]
On the same page Sartre goes on, paraphrasing the early Marx, to note the dialectical relationship between men and history:
My formalism, which is inspired by that of Marx, consists simply in recognizing that men make History to precisely the extent that it makes them. This means that relations between men are always the dialectical consequence of their activity to precisely the extent that they arise as a transcendence of dominating and institutionalized human relations.[29]
Sartre’s point, simply stated, is that human relations are real and not merely the determined product of the totalizing force of history. For Sartre, all human relations are given as the dialectical consequence of praxis[30] and are inter-individual structures which actually exist at every moment of history, and, rather than signifying a lack of relation, isolation is nothing more than a particular aspect (or moment) of these relations.[31] In opposition to those who have theorized the human as simply an atom of the totality, Sartre argues that human reality ‘is rather a changing indefinite dispersal of reciprocities’.[32]
While Sartre did have an account of the material limitations of human freedom in Being and Nothingness, this facticity had much more to do with general conditions such as time, place, language and previous choices which all define our present situation. Instead of attempting to resuscitate this concept for dialectical use in Critique, Sartre abandons this term and relates the primary constraints on human freedom to situation and scarcity.
Before moving to a direct discussion of this notion of scarcity, we must first expand our discussion of relation and reciprocity in Critique. While in one sense it is clear that Sartre wants to hold onto the reciprocal nature of humanity and reality in a positive and praxis-oriented sense, he also notes the links between reciprocity, exploitation and repression.[33] Because each human is part of a relational world filled with other humans, Sartre notes, ‘it is important to see in this how each of them exists, or produces his being, in the presence of the other and in the human world’.[34] Reciprocity is thus the a priori condition of all human action and relation, whether this is a praxis that affirms the humanity of the other, or one that seeks to de-humanize the other for the sake of repression and domination. Following this, Sartre notes, ‘the quality of being a man does not exist as such’;[35] one is either recognized as man and recognizes the other as man, or he does not. Often the de-humanization of man is masked in an act that supposedly serves to affirm the freedom and humanity of this individual. Sartre uses the example of the capitalist purchasing labor based on a contract. Formally, this is a reciprocal relationship, a free exchange between two men (the capitalist and the laborer) who each recognize the freedom of the other. But as Sartre notes, this relation is not one of freedom, as ‘one of them pretends not to notice that the other is forced by the constraint of needs to sell himself as a material object’.[36] The employer, however, gets to keep a clean conscience about this oppressive transaction as he recognizes the complete freedom of the laborer in the moment of exchange.
As Sartre acutely points out, ‘absolute respect for the freedom of the property-less is the best way of leaving him at a mercy of material constraints, at the moment of the contract’.[37] Thus, while an actual recognition of the freedom and humanity of the other can lead to a liberating praxis, this recognition of a ‘freedom without humanity’ simply serves to perpetuate the conditions that lead to this oppression in the first place.
Clearly, it can be seen that reciprocity can be just as much a destructive as a constructive force, because ‘in order to treat man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man’.[38] This is the conclusion Sartre comes to when discussing the reciprocal relations between slave owner and slave, in which by keeping slaves from becoming Christians and thus attempting to keep them as sub-humans, they were already recognizing their humanity, as they were acknowledging a capacity for them to acquire this religious belief that for them signified humanity (and a certain form of subjectivity). Thus, ‘reciprocity . . . does not save man from men’.[39]
Much of what creates this distinction between good and bad reciprocity is the sort of collective praxis, or project, towards which one in working. Sartre provides a description of this process worth quoting at length:
But man is a material being set in a material world; he wants to change the world which crushes him, that is, to act on the world of materiality through the mediation of matter and hence to change himself. His constant search for a different arrangement of the universe, and a different statute for man; and in terms of this new order he is able to define himself as the Other whom he will become. . . . In other words, man as the future of man is the regulative schema of every undertaking.[40]
What is at stake is the type of arrangement, or new order, one is working towards and, more importantly, the way in which the human will be defined and recognized within this order. One could envision a new order in which all were inherently equal and thus one would be able to define himself or herself as all humanity and vice versa. Conversely, one could also envision a future project in which he and others fitting this set of criteria are human, while many others are not. The important point here is that each human undertaking carries with it an implicit (and sometimes explicit) definition of what, or who, gets to be considered human and have the rights and possibilities which come along with this recognition. Thus Sartre notes, ‘In this way, reciprocity can be either positive or negative’.[41] In the first case, one can make oneself the means within the project of the other, or two may share the same projected end and thus strive for the same ends collectively. On the other hand, each can refuse to serve the end of the other and each instead turns others into the instruments of his projected end. This situation, in which everyone is reduced to an instrumental materiality, is struggle. More importantly for Sartre is that ‘the origin of struggle always lies, in fact, in some concrete antagonism whose material condition is scarcity’.[42]
For Sartre ‘the whole of human development, at least up to now, has been a bitter struggle against scarcity’.[43] History, culture, language, production and political organization can all be traced back to this one universal condition of material existence. The discussion of scarcity leads Sartre into some of his most stark socio-political writing, noting things like ‘the fact is that after thousands of years of History, three quarters of the world’s population are undernourished’.[44] At this point it becomes painfully clear that Sartre is attempting to make philosophy face up to the harsh truths of material existence, and, in a sense, it can be argued that much of this text can be read as a personal struggle to see if philosophy has any practical use to a world faced with war, genocide and famine.
Rather than simply highlight the dark side of scarcity, however, Sartre is quick to note that scarcity is not a wholly negative aspect of materiality. According to Sartre, scarcity is a ‘fundamental relation of our history and a contingent determination of our univocal relation to materiality’, as well as the ‘the basis of the possibility of human history’.[45] As well as this, scarcity can be seen as the fundamental relation of the individual to the environment, as the environment is a ready-constituted practical field that relates all humanity to collective structures.[46] This aspect of materiality thus signifies both the possibility of destruction and of creation, and according to Sartre, ‘this first aspect of scarcity can condition the unity of the group, in that the group, taken collectively, may organize itself to react collectively’.[47]
Scarcity, which basically signifies to the human that ‘there is not enough for everyone’, is what creates the primary problems which haunt humanity. It is scarcity which leads the employer to put the worker in oppressive conditions and which leads one man to lord himself over another for the sake of domination and survival. But while scarcity can lead to negative and destructive activity, it also leads to situations in which humans find themselves caught up in projects created by scarcity and striving towards the same goal. In these situations, individual praxis can be transformed into group praxis, and the concerns of the one can be recognized as the concerns of the many. Thus, while scarcity is the very thing which can rip humanity apart and lead one man to regard another as non-human, it is also this very force which brings human beings together and leads them to redefine humanity and strive towards the creation of a new present in which this new definition will reorder society.
As Sartre points out, the situation created by scarcity is one that simply says that ‘there is not enough for everybody’,[48] and that subsequently enables society to
discreetly select its dead simply by distributing items of expenditure in a particular way, and which, at its deepest foundations, is already in itself a choice of who is well provided for and who will go hungry.[49]
Sartre calls this problem surplus population and notes that this product of scarcity is what ends up defining a nation or group. This is what leads man to exist for another man as non-human or, as Sartre says, as an alien species.[50] This is because when resources are limited, and society does not have enough for all to survive, any other is simply an alien who is capable of using up the resources that I need to survive. This means that ‘the mere existence of everyone is defined by scarcity as the constant danger of non-existence both for another and for everyone’.[51]
Scarcity leads to need, which for Sartre is the ‘first totalizing relation between material being, man, and the material ensemble of which he is a part’.[52] This need, which is a negation of the negation, expresses itself as a fundamental lack and causes man to live in the future of his own possibility and the possibility of his future praxis. This need and subsequent lack (which both emerge from the fundamental condition of scarcity) is the very thing that leads to the possibility of the group-subject.[53] As Sartre sees it, this condition of scarcity is not just the fundamental condition that leads to oppression and violence but also equally the condition that enables freedom and collective action as the negation of this lack. For Sartre,
lack appears through function [and] finally need posits negation by its very existence in that it is itself an initial negation of lack. In short, the intelligibility of the negative as a structure of being can be made manifest only in connection with a developing process of totalisation.[54]
This concept of scarcity also informs Sartre’s concept of history, as ‘the whole of human development . . . has been a bitter struggle against scarcity’.[55] For Sartre, it is this inconsistency between man and matter that has created the space for antagonism and cooperation, freedom and oppression, violent exclusion and radical inclusion. I will briefly recount one of Sartre’s most used examples from Critique to exemplify how scarcity creates the space for emergence of a group-subject.
The example used by Sartre is a queue of individuals waiting for a bus. Most of the individuals waiting for the bus pay no mind to the others in the queue, as they are primarily concerned with their current project of getting on the bus and travelling to their desired destination. At this stage everyone relates to the bus but not to the others with them in the queue. This is what Sartre refers to as a serial group. The dynamic of this relationship and mode of existence is predicated on a fundamental scarcity, which is the number of places available on the bus in relation to the number of individuals in the queue. They know that not everyone will make it on the bus, so rather than relating to the other as someone who is a human projecting himself towards a similar project, they are instead seen as an enemy, as someone who stands in the way of their particular projected goal. At the point of seriality, the other is seen as an enemy that is attempting to take a scarce resource that one would rather have for oneself. As Thomas Flynn has noted, the bus serves as a collective object that serves as an index of separation that keeps individuals apart on the pretext of their unification.[56] This sort of arithmetic reasoning presents each element, or member, of a series as possessing the same properties and leads to a sort of levelling in which each element of the series is equally interchangeable with any other. Sartre notes that at this point there is nothing explicitly human about this mode of relation.
Next Sartre shows us what happens if the bus does not show up or consistently shows up late. A problem arises and this affects all members of the series equally. Because of this problem those in the queue start talking to each other, sharing their concerns about the issues with the buses and through this they recognize that they share the same fundamental need. Eventually, they could come to a shared project based on this problem and subsequently plan a course of collective action to attempt to change, or reconfigure, this situation. At this point the individuals in the group come together around a collective praxis, and they make a transition from being a serial group to a fused group or collective.
When the group forms in this way Sartre claims that we see the ‘sudden resurrection of freedom’ and the emergence of a group-subject which projects itself into the future as a reconfiguration of its current state of human existence. For Sartre this praxis is the only real unity of the fused group.[57] Later in the text he describes the fused group by noting that while ‘the subject is plural, the action is singular’.[58]
While much more could be said about this, I want to quickly mention one more aspect of Sartre’s theory of group formation that will help us connect this work back to our discussion of Kierkegaard. For Sartre, the fused group (or group-in-fusion) is not the last step of the formation of group subjectivity; often after the fused-group becomes a collective body formed around a collective and unifying praxis, it becomes an institution. In simple terms, when the collective becomes an institution, it is no longer a free collective body working in a collective praxis around a shared problem but instead becomes a closed and bureaucratic body seeking to keep things the way they are. Rather than existing within the constant terror of a collective, in which freedom could always re-emerge around a new shared project and collective orientation, the institution attempts to deny this terrifying freedom and establish a stagnant order. At this point, Sartre notes that the institution brings this process full circle and causes humanity to regress to being a serial group once again, with no sense of shared freedom or collective praxis. It is worth noting the sort of pessimism that still seems to haunt Sartre’s project at this point. While he provides a formal structure to explain how the condition of material scarcity creates the conditions for individuals to actualize their collective humanity through being fused into a group aiming at accomplishing a particular project, this aim to transcend a particular material scarcity can and usually does lead back to an immanent state in which things just ‘are’ this way. In this sense Sartre is fairly clear when he implies that even if a fused-group momentarily embodies a novel surge of freedom which changes material conditions, this inevitably leads back to the foundation of a new state which leads to the return of serial relations among individuals. Sartre does not think a revolutionary process will ever lead to anything other than a new state.
5.3 Kierkegaard and Sartre
Now that the major conceptual aspects of Sartre’s late philosophy and political project have been outlined, I would like to analyse the way in which this project not only allows us to reconsider the manner in which Kierkegaard can be seen as not only prefiguring much of this later Marxist project but also allows us to better imagine what a materialist re-interpretation of Kierkegaard would look like in terms of politics and subjectivity. To highlight both of these aspects I would like to briefly consider Sartre’s project as it relates to my previous interpretive reading of Kierkegaard’s CA as well as the theory of group subjectivity I pointed out in Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity. To begin with, however, I would like to focus on a comment made by David Kangas regarding the positive and negative aspects of Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety:
Anxiety over a further descent into evil, which at bottom is anxiety over the future, is a position that, in its totality, stands within the good. The recovering gambling addict will not pass a casino without anxiety, and that very anxiety expresses a good will. The demonic formation, on the other hand, embraces the Afgrund of possibility as if it were a mere extension of the self—as if the possibility of possibility were its possibility.[59]
The issue Kangas is highlighting in this passage, the distinction Kierkegaard develops between the good and the demonic, seems to prefigure one of the most important aspects of the development of group subjectivity that I highlighted in the previous section on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. For Kierkegaard, one does not lose anxiety after their descent into the abyss [Afgrund] and an embrace of absolute and contingent freedom. Instead, anxiety is embraced as a constant state, one that serves as a reminder of the terrifying abyss, unconstrained by the will of the subject, which is the very condition of freedom (CA 112). The demonic, which Kierkegaard defines as ‘un-freedom that wants to close itself off’, is characterized by a subject which believes the infinite possibility of freedom is contained within itself and who wants to close itself off from the contingency of the future. In the demonic, one attempts to close off the possibility of any and all alterity, otherness or novelty.
There is a similar, albeit social, structure at work in Critique of Dialectical Reason. In this work Sartre maps out the material conditions that create the space for the genesis of the collective-subject or group. In a structure similar to Kierkegaard’s ontology of the self, there is a fundamental lack in a situation that creates a sort of social anxiety leading to a series of individuals coming together around a common cause or praxis. This subject is one of action and one fuelled by both freedom and anxiety. I pointed out in the last section that Sartre develops a crucial distinction between a collective and an institution. In Kierkegaardian terms, the collective group is always acting in the anxiety of contingency and possibility, attempting to maintain a critical praxis that remains aware of this constant relation to this fundamental condition of existence. An institution, on the other hand, considers itself as closed off from the externality of anxiety and contingency and instead encloses itself and considers its project as fundamentally complete and finalized.
We can now clearly see that the collective group exhibits the anxiety that Kierkegaard previously attributed to the good will, as it is always aware of the possibility of things being otherwise and maintains a healthy relation to the anxiety coming from a relation to the abyss of freedom. Institutions, on the other hand, seem to be much more closely related to Kierkegaard’s definition of the demonic as ‘in-closed-ness’ (CA 118), which is exhibited in anxiety about the good, or sudden. If we grant this equivocation between Kierkegaard’s conception of the good and of the instant, or event, we can see that Sartre’s institution is closed off from the possibility of something like the instant from radically changing the truth defining the praxis and orientation of those engaged in a particular situation.
We have already noted a similar social structure in Kierkegaard’s own work. In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard provides a distinction between the church-militant and the church-triumphant. The church-militant is the one relating to the future as fundamentally open, for which truth is a process to be worked out infinitely and collectively. The church-triumphant believes itself to be in possession of an absolute and objective truth and thus closes itself off to any future contingency or otherness. Here we can draw a clear parallel between Kierkegaard’s account of the church-militant and church-triumphant and Sartre’s notion of the collective-group and the institution, especially as at various points in Critique, Sartre refers to the collective group as the ‘group-militant’.
Along with this we can see a parallel between Sartre’s account of the group in fusion and the account of group subjectivity in Kierkegaard that I have outlined in the previous chapter, in which through relating to an orienting idea, individuals are able to properly relate to one another. In both cases, it is the existence of an external idea (or in Sartre’s case, a need produced by scarcity) that enables separate individuals to participate in group activity and transcend their capacities as individuals. In the following section I will outline the manner in which Alain Badiou takes up Sartre’s formalist materialism to further develop a theory of group-subjectivity grounded in the response to external events, but one which adds a hopefulness to Sartre’s ultimately pessimistic insistence that militant collective activity will always collapse back into a new institution.
Before moving forward it is worth noting that, if in one sense we see a clear parallel between Sartre’s political project and the previously outlined political reading of Kierkegaard, there is a clear distinction in terms of the possibility of hope and the faithful continuance of projects which break with the logic of serial existence. For Sartre, the militant group will necessarily collapse back into an institution that returns individuals to their original state of serial existence. Sartre acknowledges the capacity of human beings to collectively work towards the creation of a new future but is convinced that this collective creativity can only lead back to the creation of a new institution in an effort to build a wall around a particular form of truth and existence. On the other hand, for Kierkegaard, there is always hope for new modes of existence, and things do not necessarily collapse back into an earlier state as they do with Sartre. As we have seen, the terror of a new state always haunts the one moving forward in a faithful mode of subjectivity.
In the following section, I will outline the manner in which Alain Badiou takes up Sartre’s formalist materialism to further develop a theory of group-subjectivity grounded in the response to external events. Through this analysis of Badiou’s ontological project, I will also offer a Kierkegaardian critique of Badiou’s form of materialism.
5.4 Badiou and the Paradox of the Event
It is first worth nothing the manner in which Jean-Paul Sartre’s materialist period paved the way for the philosophical project of Alain Badiou. As Badiou states in his first major work, Theory of the Subject, his work sought to re-inscribe a theory of the subject into Marxist materialism and an intellectual landscape largely dominated by the anti-humanism of Louis Althusser. In a sense, if much of pre-war French philosophy could be largely characterized by the existential phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre, by the radically transitional period centering around the events of May 1968, much of French philosophy had largely abandoned its emphasis on the abstract and limitless freedom of human consciousness and instead could be characterized by the conceptual schemas of Lacanian structuralism and Marxist materialism.[60] As we have already seen, Sartre occupies the unique position of being firmly on both sides of this conceptual divide, and in particular his late work is an attempt to think both the determining and limiting forces of material conditions while at the same time holding onto a theory of human freedom and activity at the collective level. It is hard to think of the possibility of the emergence of the systematic ontology of Alain Badiou without the materialist project of Jean-Paul Sartre.[61]
Thus it is no surprise that in a piece in which he attempts to provide an autobiographical account of his own philosophical development Badiou refers to Sartre as one of his three great masters, alongside Lacan and Althusser.[62] While Althusser and Lacan are more commonly invoked for their influence on Badiou, even a cursory reading of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason makes it quite clear that Badiou’s project of a materialist theory of collective subjectivity would be impossible without the groundwork laid by Sartre. If anything, it seems as if Sartre, much like Kierkegaard, has been undervalued by the collective emphasis in the history of philosophy on his existentialism rather than his political and materialist project.
If in Critique of Dialectical Reason we see Sartre outlining his theory of dialectical materialism, Badiou modifies this in his own theory of materialism, which he refers to as materialist dialectics. This theory, which I will outline more formally in the following section, has arguably served as the most crucial point of reference to contemporary European materialism. To various extents, Badiou’s materialist dialectics serve as a point of both inspiration and criticism to the projects of Slavoj Žižek, Quentin Meillassoux, Adrian Johnston and Peter Hallward. [63] Badiou’s influence can also be seen in the divergence of movements and thinkers who use his system as a point of reference, as his work has become a common point of reference to both radical materialist and realist philosophers as well as to Christian theologians.[64]
Before moving forward, it is worth noting the specific manner in which Badiou considers his philosophy to represent a certain conceptual strand of recent French philosophy. Badiou makes this claim after wagering that there is a particular French philosophical moment that takes place in the second half of the twentieth century that is equivalent in importance to classical Greek philosophy between Parmenides and Aristotle as well as to German idealism ‘between Kant and Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling’. He further describes this moment in French philosophy by arguing that it is split into two opposed trajectories: on the one side, a philosophy of life and ‘vital interiority’ which emerged in the wake of Bergson, and on the other, a formal philosophy of conceptual thought and mathematization inaugurated by the work of Brunschvicq.[65] In the same essay he goes on to discuss the manner in which both orientations remain concerned with the question of the subject, and that
at issue, most fundamentally, has been the division of French philosophy between, on one side, what I would call an existential vitalism, originating with Bergson and running through Sartre, Foucault and Deleuze, and on the other a conceptual formalism, derived from Brunschvicq and continuing through Althusser and Lacan.[66]
Badiou thus seems to fall wholly on the later lineage of conceptual formalism, but as I will argue, in his recent work he has attempted to bridge the divide between life and formalism, particularly in relation to his theory of the subject.
Because the conceptual focus of this study has to do primarily with theories of ontology and subjectivity, my in-depth discussion of Badiou will be restricted to a discussion of the development of his theory of subjectivity over his major works and the conceptual modifications and problems which emerge through this development. That said, it would still make little sense to present Badiou’s theory of subjectivity without giving a general outline of his overall project. While it is never a simple task to summarize the position of a figure whose systematic aims rival those of Hegel himself, I hope to provide a concise conceptual account that will provide the reader less familiar with Badiou’s project an idea of his overall aims.
First and foremost, Badiou’s philosophy attempts to bring the questions of truth and the subject back into the forefront of philosophical thinking. He accomplishes this task through a rigorous theorization of the event and its role in systematic ontology. By event Badiou means an occurrence that disrupts the state of a situation by bringing something novel into existence that cannot be comprehended or assimilated in the logical structure of that particular situation. An example of this structure, and one Badiou himself utilizes, is that of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.[67] This mirrors the formal structure of the event, as something seemingly impossible takes place that cannot be accounted for by the logic of the situation. For Badiou, this evental structure is what brings truth into existence and this truth is true insomuch as it is capable of inaugurating new forms of subjectivity. To return to the example of Christ, the incarnation and resurrection, along with the existence of an individual who was both fully human and fully divine, were events that could not be adequately accounted for by either Greek or Hebrew logic, and thus an entirely new form of logic (Pauline Christianity) had to come into existence to be able to retroactively account for this event. This is important for the question of subjectivity, as individuals are forced to make a decision in the wake of an event: either this thing happened, or it did not. If one affirms the event and enters into the process of staying faithful to the consequences of this event, then a new subject is created. Badiou states:
The Christian subject does not preexist the event he declares (Christ’s resurrection). Thus, the extrinsic conditions of his existence of identity will be argued against. He will be required to be neither Jewish (or circumcised), nor Greek (or wise). This is the theory of discourses (there are three: the Jewish, the Greek, the new). No more than he will be required to be from this or that societal class (theory of equality before truth), or this or that sex (theory of women).[68]
To continue with the example of Christianity we can consider, as Badiou himself does, the form of subjectivity we see in the Apostle Paul. While Paul himself was not present for the actual life of Christ, he has a traumatic encounter (while he was still Saul) with the risen Christ while travelling on the road to Damascus. This encounter then leads Paul into engaging with a particular Christian form of subjectivity in which he faithfully works out the consequences of this event by the creation of a Christian community centered on the truth of this event.[69] It is worth noting that Badiou states in Saint Paul,
For me, truth be told, Paul is not an apostle or a saint. I care nothing for the Good News he declares, or the cult dedicated to him [and] basically, I have never really connected Paul with religion.[70]
For Badiou, the actual theological content of Pauline Christianity matters little, for as he goes on to state, ‘Let us say that so far as we are concerned it is rigorously impossible to believe in the resurrection of the crucified.’[71] After clearing out any potential alliance between this project and the task of theology, he goes on to state:
What is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for the possibility of a universal teaching within history itself.[72]
Thus the point for Badiou is that the structure of Pauline Christianity is precisely the same as the formal structure of the relation between the subject and the event outlined in his own work. In concise terms, one encounters something that appears paradoxical according to the logic of the dominant situation and is subsequently faced with the decision of either affirming or denying the truth of this event and, if they affirm this event, they are ‘baptized’ into the process of a new form of subjectivity.
In a manner that relates to the ontological structure outlined thus far in this book, for Badiou the event exposes a void in the situation that signifies that the logic of the situation is incomplete, or non-all. To be more explicit in drawing a comparison to Kierkegaard’s ontology, we could rightly say that the event is precisely what brings attention to the fracture existing within the logical structure of a situation. As Badiou himself describes it, the event is the moment in which the subject is brought to ‘the edge of the void’.[73] We can here think of Kierkegaard’s discussion of the moment of anxiety during which the self gazes into the abyss of freedom and feels dizzy when made aware of the fracture of possibility in the situation. This notion of a void is so crucial as it signifies a point of emptiness, or incompletion, at the heart of being. As Badiou argues, ‘the one is not’[74] and thus, rather than there being any foundational or immediate moment or substance at the heart of reality, there is the void. Kierkegaard and Badiou are in a clear structural agreement regarding this point, and, similarly, each grounds free subjectivity in a primordial lack or void which precedes any process of understanding or activity. In minimal terms, we could say that Badiou (along with Kierkegaard) claims that in terms of truth, contingent events always have precedence over fixed and stable laws. Put otherwise, the radicality of truth disrupts any claim to a consistent form of legality.
While Badiou theorizes truth as being tied to the occurrence of events, he is careful to describe particular fields in which events can take place, which he calls generic procedures.[75] The four procedures under which a truth event can occur are art, science, politics and love. Along with these four conditions are four different forms of subjectivity. For anything to be an event capable of bearing a truth and inaugurating new forms of subjectivity, it must take place within one of these four conditions. We can thus see that for Badiou it is not the work of the philosopher to produce truth but merely to provide the systematic structure by which we can understand truth and its effects. It is worth noting as well that this process of subjectivity is not something by which one has a ‘once and for all’ conversion during which they simply are this new subject in the wake of an event. Rather, this baptism of the event merely inaugurates an infinite process by which the subject constantly repeats the founding gesture of the event by working out its implications one by one. An individual never is a subject but rather is engaged in the process of becoming a subject. For example, the subject formed in the wake of a radical political event cannot merely set up a new government with a new system of consistent laws and cease all revolutionary activity. A true form of political subjectivity would instead resemble a constant state of revolution, in which the situation was never settled and things were constantly re-interrogated. In a sense we could see Badiou arguing that to remain faithful to an event, a group can never become an institution in the sense Sartre outlined in Critique of Dialectical Reason. A more basic example is two lovers who are committed to the truth of their initial encounter. It is not the case that they have finished the act of relating to each other at the moment they pledge fidelity to each other (whether legally or between themselves); rather, they must now faithfully work out the implications of this event step by step, day by day, for the rest of their lives. In this sense Badiou distinguishes truth from knowledge, as truth is always something that you do as a part of an active process of becoming, while knowledge is merely that which you know in a logical fashion. Once again, this bears clear resemblance to Kierkegaard’s distinction between abstraction and appropriation or objective and subjective truth.
To briefly summarize, for Badiou an event emerges through a void within a situation and brings a novel truth into existence. This event opens up the possibility for new forms of subjectivity that are created through a fidelity to an event and always exceed the logic and possibility of a particular situation. Underlying this theory of the event is an ontological structure that is non-totalizable and grounded in a pure lack, and thus novelty is always possible, as a situation is never settled once and for all.
It is also worth noting that Badiou’s systematic philosophy can also be referred to as a mathematical materialism, and thus it makes sense to at least briefly explain why he places emphasis on mathematics and what he means by materialism. To begin with the former idea, he states early on in Being and Event that, ‘mathematics is ontology’.[76] For Badiou this means that, rather than functioning as a sort of analogy for ontological structure, the language of mathematics allows us to literally speak the language of the ontological. In particular he relies on post-Cantorian set theory and its notion of the trans-finite to argue that ‘the one is not’[77] and that there is no ‘set of all sets’, meaning that there is no foundational whole, or unity, at the heart of being and that there is no such thing as a consistent totality of all that exists. This paves the way for Badiou’s insistence on the void being at the heart of being, and the inconsistency and creative potential of this void subsequently making it impossible for us to speak of the totality of what exists, or may possibly exist.
Badiou’s materialism follows on from this mathematical structure. He refers to his particular brand of materialism as materialist dialectics, which he opposes to what he labels democratic materialism. According to the logic of the later form of materialism, ‘there are only bodies and languages’.[78] In simple terms, he thinks that this form of materialism (which he loosely associates with thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri) is rigorously immanent and grounded in a foundational one. His form of materialism differs as it claims ‘there are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths’.[79] This ‘except that’ makes all the difference for Badiou, as truths signify precisely that ‘the one is not’ and that rather than a materialism which operates as a rigorously immanent immanence (with no gaps or fractures) his is an immanent materialism which is characterized by voids, cuts and gaps which allow novel truths to emerge from within the structure of materiality. In terms more reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s language, we could say that Badiou’s materialism is one in which transcendence emerges from within a structure of immanence. Following this, his materialism follows the non-all structure that we see in the work of many of the post-Lacanian materialist (Žižek, Johnston, Malabou) in which matter is marked precisely by its incomplete, or fractured, structure. This can also allow us to distinguish this materialism from any sort of ontological naturalism; as for Badiou there can never be such a thing as nature as it would signify a consistent totality and formal system of logic lacking any sort of underlying contingency.[80]
It is also worth noting precisely what it is which makes Badiou’s materialism dialectical. Following the work of Adrian Johnston, we could say that, rather than mirroring the dialectical structure of Hegelian thought, which Badiou criticizes in each of his major works, he offers a meta-dialectical structure in which the dialectic itself dialectically oscillates between the dialectical and the non-dialectical.[81] Put otherwise, for Badiou there is a traditional dialectical structure as well as the non-dialectical emergence of events that radically break with previous situations and invent new forms of logic which have no precedent in the existing situation.
Johnston’s description of Badiou’s materialist ontology as meta-dialectical comes extremely close to the structure that I have been describing in Kierkegaard’s ontology throughout this book. For example, it has been made clear that in many ways Kierkegaard’s account of reality and subjectivity follows directly from Hegel’s logical and dialectical structure. The difference, however, is that for Kierkegaard our individual and free subjectivity depends on paradox (or fracture) which occurs at the point at which dialectical logic can venture no further, and only the activity of willed, contingent subjectivity can leap across this abyss. Following this, it seems that, rather than characterizing Kierkegaard as anti-dialectical (or anti-Hegelian), it would be more philosophically productive to also consider his fractured dialectic as a meta-dialectical structure in which he dialacticizes the dialectic itself. Thus both Kierkegaard and Badiou have in common the critique of the underlying emphasis on necessity and logical process common to a certain brand of idealism and instead aim to place a moment of possibility (grounded in fracture or void) at the beginning of this dialectical process. Both Badiou and Kierkegaard share a prioritization of contingent events over any sort of necessity as, for both, subjectivity is a process of bringing the consequences of truth into existence, as Badiou himself remarks, ‘truth is entirely subjective’.[82]
5.5 Badiou and Kierkegaard
Before presenting a systematic outline of the development of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity, I will first outline the relation between his materialist dialectics and the work of Kierkegaard. It is clear that Kierkegaard, whether explicitly or implicitly, has had a notable influence on the philosophical tradition informing much of Badiou’s orientation, and it is well known that the influence of Kierkegaard was prominent in pre-war French philosophy. While his corpus is vast and still growing, Badiou only has two direct textual engagements with the work of Kierkegaard. One, in his Briefings on Existence,[83] is little more than a passing reference without much theoretical significance, and the other an entire chapter in Logics of Worlds.
The first mention takes place in the prologue to Briefings, titled ‘God is Dead’, In this prologue, Badiou proclaims that he takes the formula ‘God is dead’ literally.[84] Badiou then goes on to interrogate the claim of Kierkegaard’s formula for the self from The Sickness Unto Death: ‘The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself’ (SUD 13). For Badiou, ‘God is dead means that he is no longer the living being who can be encountered when existence breaks the ice of its own transparency’.[85] Thus, when there is no longer a living God to establish this mode of relation, there is no longer a way to purify the effect of subjective despair. This is problematic for Badiou, since for him the subject cannot be founded by something that resides outside of immanent existence, and for him the concept of God carries this sense of absolute and transcendent otherness. At this point, the appearance of Kierkegaard in Badiou’s writing seems incidental at best and fails to interact with his work in any profound or telling manner.
The other, and much more substantial, engagement Badiou has with Kierkegaard takes place in Logics of Worlds, which serves as the sequel to Being and Event. Whereas Being and Event is primarily concerned with providing a mathematical ontology (based on axiomatic set theory) that could account for the being of the subject, Logics of Worlds attempts to supplement this with a mathematical phenomenology (this time based on category theory) that can account for the appearing of truths and their accompanying subject-bodies in evental worlds.
Book VI of Logics of Worlds bears the title ‘Theory of Points’. Put simply, Badiou theorizes a point as an impasse in the subjective process which forces a decision, a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, from a subject. Usually this point is one that forces the subject to either give up (denying the truth of an evental occurrence) or keep going (which serves to affirm the truth of the event). Badiou subsequently considers the thought of Kierkegaard as it pertains to this manner of absolute choice. The chapter opens by situating Kierkegaard in the lineage of the anti-philosophical tradition, with Kierkegaard serving as the ultimate anti-philosopher who is for/against Hegel.[86] He goes on to note that ‘for Kierkegaard, the key to existence is none other than absolute choice, the alternative, disjunction without remainder’.[87] Badiou once again brings up the famous formula of the relational self from The Sickness unto Death, this time calling the formula ‘very beautiful’.[88] For Badiou, ‘the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard is in effect a dispute about Christianity, and it concerns the function of decision in the constitution of Christian subjectivity’.[89]
For Kierkegaard, the important thing is that, for Christianity, the eternal itself appears in time, and thus the universal for a moment becomes singular. Badiou notes that this stands in opposition to Hegel, for whom time is the ‘being there of the concept’.[90] But in opposition to this ‘spectacular fusion of time and eternity’, Badiou notes that, for Kierkegaard, ‘the time that is at stake in Christianity is my time, and Christian truth is of the order of what happens to me, and not what I contemplate’.[91]
Badiou describes Kierkegaard’s ‘Christian paradox’ in a way that sounds very similar to his own theory of event, in which something infinite emerges from within finite materiality. He argues that this Christian paradox is ‘a challenge addressed to the existence of each and everyone, and not a reflective theme that a deft use of dialectical mediations would externally enlist in the spectacular fusion of time and eternity’.[92] Once again, Badiou’s description of Kierkegaard’s thought paints a picture quite similar to Badiou’s own position. For Badiou, an event is something that necessitates a response from each person. There is little room for reflection on possibility in Badiou’s subjective axiom, as one must always say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the event and subsequently continue this process in the working out of the event’s implications. Moving on to consider Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Badiou argues that Kierkegaard has an entirely militant theory of truth, which places him in complete fidelity with the apostle Paul, who is another one of Badiou’s favored non-philosophical sources.[93] He goes on to provide this lengthy quotation from CUP:
Only the truth which builds up is a truth for you. This is an essential predicate relating to truth as inwardness; its decisive characterization as upbuilding for you, that is, for the subject, is its essential difference from all objective knowledge, inasmuch as the subjectivity itself becomes part of the mark of the truth.[94]
This passage is used to highlight what Badiou sees as the essential difference between Hegel and Kierkegaard and why, for this reason, his theory of the subject is more indebted to Kierkegaard’s anti-philosophy. The crucial points are the essential difference of the subject from all objective knowledge and the fact that subjectivity itself becomes a part of the mark which signifies truth. While for Hegel (according to Badiou) it is necessary that one have knowledge of the stages of becoming-subject of the absolute, Kierkegaard insists that knowing is useless and that, rather than knowing the absolute, one experiences it through a process of subjective inwardness.[95] Once again, Badiou is here providing a reading of Kierkegaard that aligns him with his own position, since the Badiouian subject can never know the truth of an event but, rather, plays an experiential role in the becoming of this truth. Rather than attain any form of objective knowledge, Badiou’s militant subject always participates in the process of becoming inherent to any truth. Badiou thus goes on to argue, ‘That is why, for Kierkegaard, there cannot exist a moment of knowledge (“absolute knowledge”, in Hegel’s terms) where truth is complete or present as a result. Everything commences, or recommences, with each subjective singularity.’[96] Shortly after Badiou states:
In our own vocabulary, we could say that Kierkegaard vigorously maintains that thought and truth must not simply account for their being, but also for their appearing, which is to say for their existence. . . . Thinking must also be a form of commitment in the thought that thinks.[97]
Once again we see Badiou reading his own theory of subjectivity back into the work of Kierkegaard. Because truth is never something that can be complete, or present as the result of any previous process, it is up to the militant subject of that truth to continually recommence the process of working out the implications of this truth, and each point of recommencement is what Badiou calls a point, in which the subject says ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
The rest of this engagement with Kierkegaard revolves around investigating the link between truth, subject and point in his work.[98] Badiou begins by focusing on the foundation for truth in the work of Kierkegaard, the Christian paradox. As we have already seen, the Christian paradox offers a conception of truth and of the subjective response to truth that, at least formally, mirrors that of Badiou. The crucial difference is, of course, that for Kierkegaard this paradox is dependent on God, and the human must exist in absolute relation to God, while for Badiou, on the other hand, God is long dead.
Badiou goes on to argue that ‘if “truth” is the name of a subjective connection constructed between existence and eternity, Kierkegaard very clearly proposes a conception of truth as always generic or anonymous’.[99] On Badiou’s reading, and once again in line with his own system, this means that the experience of truth is available to anyone; regardless of who or where they are, the truth never discriminates or excludes. Badiou also remarks that Kierkegaard is especially close to the idea of incorporation, which for Badiou signifies the inclusion of the individual into a subject-body that collectively works out the implications of a truth.
Following the reading of Slavoj Žižek,[100] Badiou next notes the vast difference between the leap from the aesthetic to the ethical and the leap from the ethical to the religious. On Badiou’s reading, this second leap is much more complex and obscure than the first because the religious sphere involves the abiding of subjectivity in the absolute paradox itself. Badiou here reads the religious stage of existence as the moment of incorporation of the subject into truth itself.[101] The religious, or Christian, stage is the one that requires the absolute choice of saying ‘yes’ to the absurd in an absolute subjective commitment that refuses to hold to any objective certainty. Badiou goes on to argue that ‘the moment of absolute choice, and it alone, reveals subjective energy’.[102] At this point Badiou highlights one of the points of divergence between his own thought and that of Kierkegaard, and this is a point at which Badiou could gain something through a further consideration of the Kierkegaardian framework and its accompanying anthropology.
He here notes that it is a passion, a subjective energy, which ‘grounds the possibility for the subject to encounter reality in time’.[103] This energy or passion, which Kierkegaard also refers to as will, is something that thoroughly humanizes the subject in his thought. This is problematic for Badiou because his theory of subjectivity goes to great lengths to avoid any form of humanism and especially any emphasis on the subject as an individual human entity. Badiou then goes on to close his discussion of Kierkegaard by noting the specifically Christian limitation of his thought.[104] Badiou considers not only what he sees as the teleological character of Christian religion but the limitation placed on the subject by the necessity of its relationship to God. If there is no God, then the subject is left in a situation of absolute despair with no absolute with which to relate. Badiou closes this chapter noting, ‘this figure [of the Christian subject] only holds up if it is supported by God, to the extent that his own coming has taken place in time’.[105] While he finds much in common with his formal theory of existence and subjectivity, the place of the divine in Kierkegaard’s thought is what ultimately leaves it as no more than an anti-philosophical resource for Badiou.
As I have previously argued in chapter 3 of the present book, Kierkegaard’s ontology need not necessitate the orthodox theological reliance on a traditionally Christian conception of God as Badiou argues here, and, along with that, both chapters 2 and 3 have previously shown the manner in which the response to anxiety and despair is never the ‘healing power’ of God’s support but rather a faithful acceptance of the contingency of possibility. As I will show in the conclusion, neither faith nor love depends on any sort of theological orthodoxy or certainty.
Now that I have outlined Badiou’s general project and analysed his previous interaction with the work of Kierkegaard, I will provide a detailed account of his theory of subjectivity. It is my contention that not only does this theory bear a serious conceptual and structural relation to that of Kierkegaard, but also that Kierkegaard’s account is already capable of offering a corrective to some of the problems remaining in Badiou’s theorization of the subject. In particular, I will point out what I will refer to as the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ tendencies of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity, eventually arguing that he fails to provide an account capable of theorizing both external (or collective) and internal (or individual) activities of engaged subjectivity. I will then attempt to use the reading of Kierkegaard developed throughout this book to serve as a corrective to Badiou’s materialist theory of subjectivity.
5.6 Badiou’s Theories of Subjectivity
Badiou’s first major theoretical work, Theory of the Subject, contains many of the developments found in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds in their germinal form, including the ‘materialist dialectic’ he will return to twenty-four years later. An important aspect of this work, and Badiou’s project as whole, is the role of mathematics. While Badiou will later go on to make the famous assertion that mathematics equals ontology, at this point the role of mathematics is purely analogical, and thus the formal accounts of subjectivity present in this work cannot be equated with an actual description of ontological structure. Rather, this structural account has more to do with psychoanalytic concepts gleaned from Lacan than it does with any sort of set-theoretical ontology. While this work covers a wide array of philosophical, political and psychoanalytic ground, I will be concerned only with the model of subjectivity Badiou develops in this work. In concise terms, Badiou strives in this work to develop a theory of formal subjectivity that could supplement the scientific (and anti-humanist) reading of Marx posed by Althusser and his students.
In many ways this work utilizes the psychoanalytic tradition to attempt to supplement Marxist materialism with a formal theory of the subject. To quote Badiou:
We demand of materialism that it include what we need and which Marxism, even without knowing it, has always made into its guiding thread: a theory of the subject.[106]
Along with this, Badiou goes on to note that this ‘materialism centered upon a theory of the subject (which is a conceptual black sheep) is equally necessary for our most pressing political needs’.[107] For Badiou, the point of articulating a rigorous materialism is overwhelmingly political in nature, and he considers the lack of a theory of the subject to be a crucial deficiency in the Marxist-materialism of his time. It could be said that this concern with being able to think about subjectivity in materialist terms stems from Badiou’s focus on theorizing the new and the manner in which he considers subjectivity the body supporting novelty in concrete political sequences.
While in Badiou’s later work politics becomes only one of four distinct truth procedures, early on in Theory of the Subject Badiou makes the claim that ‘every subject is political. This is why there are few subjects and rarely any politics.’[108] Thus the dialectical interaction between the subject and matter is necessarily political, as the freedom of this subject is first and foremost the freedom to re-inscribe itself into the real of materiality. Along with this, it is crucial to note that this political subject in no way signifies an individual human consciousness but, rather, the collective form of subjectivity embodied in the political party and its support of a novel political sequence. Badiou will thus argue that the proletariat ‘is the subjective name of the new in our time’.[109]
An important aspect of this theory of the subject, and one that will serve as important in tracking the development from this text to Logics of Worlds, are the four concepts of the subject that Badiou develops to describe the process of subjectivization experienced by every properly political subject. These four concepts are anxiety, courage, superego and justice, all of which Badiou gleans from Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of subjectivity.[110] These concepts describe different stages of the process of becoming subject. Initially this subject (or party) faces anxiety at the uncertainty of its projected future, as there is no certainty accompanying their political sequence. Courage is the moment at which the subject decides to forge ahead in the face of this anxiety-inducing uncertainty and continue forth in its political process. The superego is the point at which the party is tempted by an external structure (offering consistency) to give up its impossible project. Justice, the final concept, signifies the point at which the party fights the temptation to be re-inscribed into the structure of power and instead creates its own structure of absolute equality. These are the concepts which must necessarily mark any full process of subjectivization for Badiou, although it is crucial to note that in a properly Maoist fashion, the revolutionary subject-party is never a ‘complete’ process, as the concept of justice remains open and must be constantly reconsidered and worked out.
To summarize, the subject in Theory of the Subject is always political, always collective, and must necessarily be a material configuration and process. Along with this, the subject is marked by four fundamental concepts: anxiety, courage, superego and justice. It is important to note that at this point, these are not affects that pull the subject forward into a process but rather concepts marking the existence of the subject in its process of subjectivization. This early development of Badiou’s theory of the subject is important as it hints at formal and affective tendencies that will be pushed to their respective limits in Badiou’s next two major works.
While Theory of the Subject was more or less a set of coherent lectures on the possibility of a materialist theory of subjectivity to supplement Marxism, Badiou’s next major work, Being and Event, is a full-scale systematic ontology with a formal theory of subjectivity, both grounded in the axiomatics of set-theory. While mathematics had a purely analogical function in Theory of the Subject, in Being and Event mathematics serves as the formal language of ontology as such. In other words, set-theory becomes the language by which we can speak of reality in-itself. This emphasis on formal ontology does not take away from Badiou’s emphasis on subjectivity, and in this work he casts aside the necessarily psychoanalytic and political implications of the subject as described in Theory of the Subject in favor of a purely formal account of the subject given in the language of set theory.
In this work Badiou defines the subject as ‘any local configuration of a generic procedure from which a truth is supported’.[111] From this definition he proceeds to list what the subject is not: a substance, a void point, the organization of a sense of experience, or an invariable of presentation.[112] This subject emerges only through a relationship to an event and a subsequent fidelity to this event. Badiou notes that this subjective process is the ‘liaison between the event (thus the intervention) and the procedure of fidelity (thus its operator of connection)’.[113] Because of its liaison between the two terms, the subject is neither the intervention nor the operator of fidelity but instead exists as the advent of the two.[114]
This position exemplifies the external tendencies of Badiou’s account of subjectivity, in which the role of the subject is to support the truth presented by an event wholly external to the subject. The subject is thus the middle term between the intervention of an event into the situation and the procedure by which the consequences of this event are collectively worked out. In this sense, the subject does not exist prior to the evental intervention, that is, it exists only in its relation to an external force that essentially draws it into existence. There is no account given of any form of pre-evental subjectivity, as this would lead to an account of pre-subjective consciousness which would be little more than ‘the organization of a sense of experience’, something which we have previously noted Badiou argues is absolutely non-subjective.
It is important to note that during the period of Being and Event there were only two subjective responses to the truth emerging through an event: the positive faithful procedure and the negative procedure.[115] In this sense Badiou sets up a very hard line on the nature of subjectivity; either one is a subject or one is not. The faithful subjective procedure would consist of the subject naming the event and subsequently supporting the truth of the event through a subjective fidelity. This fidelity is never forced but must be chosen by the subject, and thus decision serves as a crucial category for the subjective process in Badiou. Along with the emphasis on subjective decision, it must be noted that the event will always remain unverifiable in the present situation, and thus the subject has no way of knowing for sure whether the truth emerging through this event is actually true. We must here note that the negative subject does not in any sense witness an event and then make a decision to not follow its consequences; it simply does not recognize the event. If Theory of the Subject laid the groundwork for both formal and affective accounts of subjectivity, Being and Event represents the most rigorously formal account given by Badiou over the course of his three major works.
While Being and Event exemplifies the most formal tendency in the development of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity, his theory takes an affective turn in his most recent major work, Logics of Worlds. While I have already explicated the four concepts of the subject Badiou introduces in Theory of the Subject, I will now show how these four concepts reappear in Logics of Worlds as the four affects of the subjective process. Rather than serving as merely conceptual descriptions of the process of the becoming-subject of the party, this theory of affects provides an account of how it is that the pre-subjective human animal finds itself drawn into the process of becoming-subject through an internal response to external affects. Along with the addition of a theory of subjective affect, Logics of Worlds also contains a materialist theory of life. While going to great lengths to distinguish this theory of life from any bio-political notion of the term, Badiou’s theory of life signifies the possibility of a subject to ‘truly live’ by continuously creating a new present through the consistent affirmation of the consequences of an event and the creation of a new world.
It is worth noting that while Badiou’s theory of affect as developed in Logics of Worlds seems to take more seriously the role of the pre-evental (or internal) subject, this pre-evental individual is little more than a human animal in Badiou’s terms. To put it bluntly, while the post-evental subject is able to transcend the state of any given situation through the faithful working out of a truth, the pre-evental human animal is only able to operate in the terms provided by the situation. Thus, while the post-evental subject participates in the creation of justice, the human animal can hope for little more than survival.
Whereas Badiou’s Being and Event was concerned with the being of the subject, Logics of Worlds is concerned with the appearing of the subject and how a singular truth can appear in subjective form in distinct worlds. He provides an updated definition of the subject early on in Logics of Worlds as ‘an operative disposition of the traces of the event and of what they deploy in the world’.[116] Logics of Worlds also provides a theory of four distinct modes of subjectivity: the faithful subject, the reactive subject, the obscure subject, and the resurrected subject (who repeats a truth in a new world). It is crucial at this point to note that for Badiou the subject is still non-individual just as it was in Theory of the Subject and Being and Event. Thus in Logics of Worlds Badiou claims that the subject-body is the collective formation that ‘imposes the readability of a unified orientation onto the multiplicity of bodies’.[117]
Along with this phenomenology of subjective appearance, Badiou also provides a theory of affect that accounts for the gripping of a subject by an event. Badiou theorizes these affects as being the anthropological form of local signs of the present as embodied in the subject. For each type of faithful subject, Badiou assigns a unique affect: for the political subject, it is enthusiasm; for the subject of art, it is pleasure; for the subject of love, it is happiness; and for the scientific subject, it is joy.
Badiou supplements these affects characterizing the individual generic procedures with a universal process of four affects which signal the incorporation of a human animal into the process of becoming-subject. These affects are terror, anxiety, courage, and justice. It is worth noting the way in which these four affects of the subject mirror the four concepts of the subject found in Theory of the Subject: anxiety, courage, superego and justice.
The first, terror, ‘testifies to the desire for a great point’.[118] This point serves as the decisive discontinuity that brings about the new in an instantaneous fashion and completes the subject in the process. The second, anxiety, ‘testifies to the fear of points’,[119] in which the human animal fears the choice between two hypotheses that come with no guarantee. The third, courage, ‘affirms the acceptance of the plurality of points’.[120] The final affect is justice, which ‘affirms the equivalence of what is continuous and negotiated, on the one hand, and of what is discontinuous and violent, on the other’.[121] To justice, all categories of action are thus subordinated to the absolute contingency of worlds.
Badiou 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’.[122] Thus, the human animal must go through each affect to enter into the process of becoming-subject.
While it is intriguing to see Badiou relying so much on language of affect in Logics of Worlds, one is left wondering what or who is actually feeling these affects, and, along these same lines, how does a/the subject ‘feel’ an affect? This is especially troubling, as Badiou has already defined the subject as an operative disposition. One could then pose the question, just how does an operative disposition feel an affect? It seems as if Badiou wants to attribute specifically human forms of affect (i.e., anxiety, courage) to a purely formal structure. While Badiou has included the category of the ‘human animal’ in Logics of Worlds (a category he first introduced in his Ethics), he still has not explained why it is that humans have access to the affects accompanying events as well as the capacity to experience and subjectively respond to these affects in an act of decision. We can see at this point that Badiou’s theory of subjectivity still remains largely external insomuch as a majority of his theorization of subjectivity takes place after the event, while in the pre-evental the not-yet-subject is little more than a human animal.
As I have already stated, Logics of Worlds contains a theory of life that in some ways can be seen to accompany his theory of affects. In the introduction to the work Badiou claims:
My idea is rather—at the cost, it’s true, of a spectacular displacement—to bring this word [life] back to the center of philosophical thinking, in the guise of a methodical response to the question ‘What is it to live?’[123]
Shortly after he provides a description of what it might mean to live, stating: ‘To live is to participate, point by point, in the organization of a new body, in which a faithful subjective formalism comes to take root.’[124]
Badiou’s formulation of the question, ‘What is it to live?’ finds its home in the final chapter of Logics of Worlds, which bears this question as its title. Here, Badiou connects the possibility of life to the trace of a vanished event, noting that this trace signals the subject towards life.[125] He goes on to note that it is not just the recognition of this trace that provides the possibility of life but that one must ‘incorporate oneself into what the trace authorizes in terms of consequences’.[126] Badiou then provides a response to a previously unanswered question, ‘what is life?’ To this he responds with ‘life is the creation of a present [but this is a continuous creation]’.[127] Thus for Badiou, life is the process by which the subject works out the consequences of a truth point by point. As we have seen, his description of the process of life is more or less parallel to the process of becoming subject; so living for Badiou is just another name to describe the process of faithful subjectivity. While the addition of theories of both life and affect in this later work may seem to edge Badiou closer to bridging the divide between external and internal theories of materialist subjectivity, his lack of a theorization of the pre-evental human animal leaves his theory firmly on the side of external (or conceptual) philosophy. It seems as though this inability to bridge this gap stems from a strong conviction against any humanist or anthropocentric conceptions of philosophy and an equally strong commitment to philosophical materialism (one which crucially leaves out the natural sciences as a resource for materialism). Throughout his corpus, Badiou has avoided any substantial discussion of consciousness, humanism or serious interaction with the natural or biological sciences, and this avoidance is what leaves him unable to get past the conceptual, or external, account of subjectivity.
The crucial question remains, what is it about the structure of the human animal that enables it to experience the affects produced by events and how is this human animal able to freely decide to enter into the process of becoming-subject opened up by these events? Although Badiou has clearly utilized much of his master Sartre’s later work as found in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he has avoided reckoning with the account of internal consciousness found in Sartre’s major early work, Being and Nothingness.
While I have shown that over the course of his three major works Badiou has gradually refined his theory of the subject to get closer to crossing the gap existing in recent materialist articulations of the subject between external and internal accounts of subjectivity, there still exist major difficulties with his recent turn to considering the subject in the terms of ‘life’ and ‘affect’.
A major problem that follows on from this is Badiou’s theorization of the ‘human-animal’. For Badiou, before the emergence of a faithful subject-body, there are merely human animals, without an orienting idea and subsequently, not truly living. The question is then, what is it about this human animal that enables it to make a decision in the wake of an event? And equally, what is it about this human animal that allows it to feel the affect of these events, and subsequently respond with a living commitment to an idea? While Badiou sometimes relies on a notion of grace to describe this transition from the human animal to the ‘living-and-faithful subject’, this notion seems to risk collapsing the whole process back into a mystical and religious trope. While Badiou is justified in wanting to avoid an appeal to a sort of phenomenological consciousness which structures the pre-subjective human-animal, it seems equally problematic to attempt to argue that a structural formalism is able to ‘feel’ affects such as happiness, joy, and enthusiasm and then respond to these feelings with decision, belief, and commitment that enable this formalism to ‘become immortal’ in the ongoing process of ‘living for an idea’.
As Badiou explains in Ethics, ‘the subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the process. He is absolutely nonexistent in the situation “before” the event. We might say that the process of truth induces a subject.’[128] He goes on:
It is important to understand that the ‘subject’, thus conceived, does not overlap with the psychological subject, nor even with the reflexive subject (in Descartes’s sense) or the transcendental subject (in Kant’s sense).[129]
Once again, we see that Badiou’s conception of the subject has nothing to do with a psychological, reflexive or transcendental account. In an interview with Peter Hallward, when asked about the distinction drawn between animal life and subjective immortality in a line of questioning interrogating this lack of an account of the pre-evental subject, Badiou states, ‘I do think, by grace, this particular animal is sometimes seized by something that thought cannot manage to reduce strictly to the thought of animality as such’.[130]
The critique I am offering against Badiou’s theory of subjectivity—that he fails to account for the manner in which the pre-subjective human animal is able to transcend itself and become a part of a subjective process—bears similarity to recent critiques levelled at his project by both Hallward and Žižek. While neither identifies the same issue I am here focusing on or uses Kierkegaard as a solution to the problem, they each focus on the problem of the role of the human in the work of Badiou, along with the previously discussed internal/external problem.
Hallward, in a review essay of Badiou’s Logics of Worlds has stated:
The problem is that Badiou assumes but does not account for the status of the middle and mediating term—the status of beings. Neither Badiou’s ontology nor his logic seem to provide any clear place for ordinary ontic reality. What appears in our various Parisian worlds, clearly, are not instances of pure being or multiplicity, but people.[131]
Hallward’s critique takes a more general, and purely ontological, form than the one I have been offering in terms of the status of the human. He is here pointing out the lack of account given by Badiou of ordinary beings and objects that serve as the sort of material conditions for the more-than-material truth emerging through the event. It is interesting for my purpose that at the end of this quote Hallward notes that what we normally end up with in Badiou’s Parisian worlds are simply people. This maps on quite clearly to what I am arguing in the present work, that no matter how Badiou constructs his account of subjectivity in a purely formalist manner, in reality he is relying on human beings to serve as the bearers of truth. And along with this, he does not offer an account of the manner in which the human being ends up serving as the ‘middle and mediating term’ between an event and its consequences. In this case though, it is clear that Hallward is more interested in pushing towards a rigorous theory of ontic categories in general in the work of Badiou than he is with acknowledging the centrality of the human in this work and developing a more formal anthropology.
Žižek’s own critique of the theory of ‘human animal’ in Badiou begins with a response to this very same Hallward quote used previously. While Hallward is interested in a further development of an account of ontic categories in Badiou’s formal ontology, Žižek is interested in the conditions of possibility that enable the human animal to transcend its immanent conditions and become immortal through a post-evental subjective sequence. Žižek argues:
At the level of the Event, the ‘negativity’ of anxiety and the (death) drive has to be posited as prior to the affirmative enthusiasm for the Event, as its condition of possibility.[132]
Here Žižek makes a similar claim to the critique I have been offering in this chapter, namely, that there must be something which comes prior to the affirmative (and external) enthusiasm for the event and that this something prior serves as the very possibility for the conditions of post-evental forms of subjectivity as such. For Žižek, this precondition must be the ‘negativity of anxiety’ and the ‘death drive’, concepts he is using in a psychoanalytic sense. The point for Žižek is that, prior to the external activity and fidelity in relation to an event, there must be an originary and negative relation that take place within the very structure of the self. It is crucial for my purposes that Žižek here relies on anxiety as the concept which signifies the primordial negativity within the internal structure of the self. I have already shown that for Kierkegaard this moment of negativity (anxiety) is the first moment of the process of becoming a self at the internal level and is thus the precondition for both subjective reflection and subsequent decisive activity.[133]
Žižek also offers a critique of the latent religiosity in Badiou’s theory of subjectivity, particularly as regards his use of the concept of grace to account for the human animal’s radical transformation into the immortal subject, stating:
How do we avoid the reproach that an Event is a proto-religious miracle which intervenes from some transcendent Beyond in the order of being?[134]
His point here, which is one that I have previously outlined in my own reading, is that by refusing to acknowledge a sort of ‘minimal anthropology’[135] at the heart of his theory of subjectivity, Badiou risks simply collapsing his mathematical materialist formalism back into the sort of postmodern theological discourse he seeks to be in absolute distinction to. Following this, it is once again clear that a Kierkegaardian corrective to the internal/external problem in Badiou’s theory of subjectivity ends up creating a less theological theory of subjectivity.
Žižek once again draws a clear connection between Badiou and the importance of a primordial concept of anxiety when he states,
The Event in its first emergence causes anxiety, since by definition it shatters the transcendental coordinates of a World. It is this anxiety which affects everyone, all subjects of a world.[136]
My own critique follows the major points made by both Hallward and Žižek to various extents. With Hallward, I agree that no matter how anti-humanist Badiou attempts to frame his project, it is still always people who end up being the mediating term between an event and its consequences. Following this, I affirm with Žižek that there has to be something particular about the human animal that allows it to bear the consequences of a truth in the first place. Like Žižek, I think anxiety is this universal experience of the subject that allows it to respond to the abyss in a situation with new forms of subjectivity. The major difference between my criticism and those of Hallward and Žižek is that I am here contending that Kierkegaard already offers a theory capable of bridging this gap between the internal and external aspects of the subject in its pre- and post-evental activity, a position I will further outline in the next sections.
5.7 Kierkegaard and Badiou
One of the first points of similarity we can note when thinking of Badiou’s project in terms of Kierkegaard is the connection between truth and subjectivity. Just as Kierkegaard famously stated, ‘truth is subjectivity’ (CUP 189), we can equally say that for Badiou truth is necessarily a subjective process, or more precisely, truth only is when supported by the work of collective subjectivity. As we have previously seen Badiou state in Saint Paul, ‘truth is entirely subjective’.[137] In both cases we must also note the temptation to read either of these figures as arguing that truth is subjectivity, in the crass sense of attempting to argue that ‘what is true for me is truth’; instead, both Badiou and Kierkegaard note that without the support of material subjectivity and willed activity, truth is nothing more than an idea which has no real effect in the actuality of the world. In the same way in which Kierkegaard notes that the ideal must be brought into collision with reality through subjective activity, Badiou does not think that an event has the power to magically install its own consequences in a situation. Rather, the truth brought about through an event creates the conditions by which ordinary human animals can transform into immortal subjects capable of collectively working out the consequences of these events.
Another fairly obvious manner in which Badiou seems to embody a Kierkegaardian ethos is the emphasis on the evental nature of truth. For both Badiou and Kierkegaard, truth is something that happens, not something that merely exists in any logical or objective fashion. Further, this truth always breaks with the consistent logic of a situation in a moment of paradox. For Badiou, an event can never be comprehended within the logic of a situation, which is why an event necessitates the creation of new forms of language or logic. Thus, the event is always characterized by being in excess of the immanent logic of the situation in a fashion similar to the manner in which for Kierkegaard any immanent, or ethical, logic eventually hits a paradoxical point at which the subject must decide to make a faithful leap. In both senses this evental truth opens up the space for forms of subjectivity that exceed the immanent logic of the previous situation.
To return to a concept I introduced earlier in this chapter, this particular similarity can be seen as a product of both Badiou and Kierkegaard employing a meta-dialectical structure in their ontological projects. As I stated previously, by meta-dialectical I mean a dialectical structure that itself becomes a dialectical opposition between the dialectical and non-dialectical. For both Kierkegaard and Badiou, the event, or the instant, is the precise moment at which any dialectical logic becomes meta-dialectical through the introduction of a non-dialectical gap that necessitates decision and activity. This similarity makes clear both of their relations to traditional readings of Hegel which share a sense of fidelity and critique, as both of them could never have developed their own systems of thought (or theories of subjectivity) if it was not for Hegel, but they equally could never have developed these unique positions if they were not willing to move beyond a traditional reading of Hegel. In both cases, they seem to introduce the meta-dialectical moment to move beyond the immanent logic of closure at play in Hegel’s philosophy.
Finally, and maybe most contentiously, Kierkegaard and Badiou have in common the foundational role of the formal logic of Christianity in both of their projects. As I previously outlined, Badiou uses the structure of the death and resurrection of Christ as his primary example for the structure of the event and the Apostle Paul as his paradigmatic example of subjectivity. While Badiou makes it clear that he is nothing if not a radically militant atheist who believes that Christianity is nothing more than a fable, as opposed to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on actual Christian belief, this does not change the fact that they both have formal accounts of ontology and subjectivity which are deeply shaped by the structure of Christian truth and subjectivity.
In particular, both Badiou and Kierkegaard utilize Christian versions of notions such as grace, hope, love and faith. As Badiou argues in Saint Paul, ‘Faith would be the opening to the true; love, the universalizing effectiveness of its trajectory; hope, lastly, a maxim enjoining us to persevere in this trajectory’.[138] So we see him utilizing classically Christian concepts to articulate his own theory of subjectivity in which faith is the manner by which the subject is able to experience the occurrence of the true, love is the fact that the trajectory opened by the happening of truth is universal in that no one is excluded from participation in its consequences, and hope is what enables subjectivity to persevere in the working out of the consequences of a particular trajectory. Along with this we have seen that Badiou even goes so far as to rely on a materialist notion of grace to account for the fact that a human animal is capable of feeling the affects accompanying the occurrence of the event.
5.8 Kierkegaard contra Badiou
Before moving on to argue for why Badiou (and contemporary materialism as a whole) needs Kierkegaard, it is helpful to return to the distinction Badiou has already drawn between the two contemporary paths on what he calls ‘the adventure of French philosophy’. As I have already outlined, one of these he refers to as philosophies of concept (formalism) and the other he refers to as philosophies of life (vitalism). As it pertains to the question of subjectivity, I find it helpful to refer to the latter as providing an internal account of subjectivity, while the former provides a wholly external account of the structure of subjectivity. In a similar sense, internal accounts of subjectivity provide a picture of a pre-evental form of subjectivity, while external accounts offer a picture of post-evental subjectivity. As I have previously stated, the issue with Badiou’s theory of subjectivity is an inability to properly account for pre-evental human subjectivity.
These two strands of philosophy, and their accompanying accounts of subjectivity, end up leading to what I have previously referred to as the ‘internal/external’ problem of subjectivity. In one account we have an emphasis on the life and pathos of the individual that explains why and how the individual experiences moments of passion and desire. This account often fails insomuch as it avoids giving a structural or formal account of subjectivity and in particular fails to adequately consider subjectivity as a collective concept. On the other hand, philosophies of concept (or formalism) can often provide a rigorous systematic account of the structure of subjectivity but also avoid any account that would bring them back into contact with vitalism or humanism. As I outlined previously in this chapter, we can see this tension emerge by observing the development of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity over the course of his three major works.
In light of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity, this distinction leaves us with a quite simple question: What is it about the structure of the individual human being that makes it receptive to the happening of a truth and subsequently allows it to not only deliberate the consequences of this truth but gives it the capacity of actively respond to the consequences of this event through the feeling of the affects it experiences at the level of emotion or pathos?
Now that I have outlined the development of Badiou’s theory of subjectivity and offered an immanent critique of the shortcomings of this theory, I would like to return to my claim that this failure largely has to do with what I have called the internal/external problem. In particular, I will argue that the systematic reading of Kierkegaard offered earlier in this book provides a corrective for this problem.
To once again sum up this issue, the problem for Badiou resides precisely in his inability to provide a systematic account of the manner in which a particularly human consciousness is capable of responding to external events in a volitional manner which involves both the internalization of a truth, and the external response to this truth through collective activity. Much of this has to do with Badiou’s apprehension to utilize any neurobiological or psychological account of human subjectivity.
Kierkegaard avoids this problem by offering a theory of human consciousness which accounts for both the internal operations of freedom, individual subjectivity and relationality and an external account of the manner in which individuals are then able to relate to both external events and other individuals, all the while maintaining the freedom at the heart of the subject. The important point here is that in an idealist fashion, the same structure repeats itself at the level of the individual and the social, and there is thus no absolute separation between the internal becoming of the self from the becoming of an outward social collective. I will once again sum up this entire movement, paying particular attention in this instance to the way in which my systematic reading of Kierkegaard corrects the internal/external problem in the work of Badiou.
I began this book with an explication of the first moment of the becoming of the self in its first moment of absolute negation (sin) as it attempted to ground itself with no reference to any objective or external force. We then saw that this initial moment of negation leads the subject to the experience of anxiety as it becomes aware of the abyss of freedom at the heart of its own experience of, and relation to, reality. This anxiety emerges in the same cracks, or gaps, that produce the freedom characterizing the self. This foundational fracture, between subject and object, carries over into the very structure of the self. At this point we can easily see how Sartre built his theory of the pour-soi (for itself) and en-soi (in-itself) aspects of consciousness upon Kierkegaard’s characterization of the self. This fracture at the heart of reality and the self thus ensures the primary place of freedom at both levels, the sort of freedom Badiou himself aims to ground mathematically through his own set theoretical ontology.
I then outlined the further development of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity through the development of an anthropological picture of human subjectivity in SUD. In this text we see the further dialectical development of the self as it moves from its break with immediacy into a reflection grounded in the contradictions at the heart of the self. These contradictions are between the infinite and finite and the possible and the necessary, the subjective and the objective aspects of consciousness. Through this analysis, it becomes clear that for Kierkegaard the self is only properly itself when it relates to itself and this capacity for relation is the product of the primary fracture previously described. The self when properly relational is thus capable of appropriating and religiously relating to an idea or cause outside of itself and through faith is capable of overcoming the despair created by the uncertainty of the future.
Kierkegaard builds on the relational structure of the self that is offered in SUD in its accompanying volume, Practice in Christianity, in which his discussion of the church exemplifies the manner in which the previously outlined ontology and anthropology operate on the social level. This is accomplished through the contrast of the militant-church and the triumphant-church. While the latter is characterized by objective certainty, a taste for reflection and no necessity of continued negotiation or faithful activity, the former is characterized by an anxious relationship to the freedom at the core of reality, and the relation of the collective body to truth and individuals to each other always exists in the light of the fact that the religious signifies the possibility of possibility. In light of this, free subjectivity is at the heart of any collective organization of individuals, as truth is something to be subjectively appropriated and not abstractly agreed upon. Truth is thus something to be done in a process of continued actualization, not something to merely be known in a reflective manner.
This last point is in clear proximity to Badiou’s (and the later Sartre’s) militancy, because for Kierkegaard truth is something that must be faithfully and militantly affirmed by the subject at every juncture. This is why Badiou himself relies overtly on Kierkegaard’s own concepts when developing his theory of point. This is a process that seems to be uniquely human and thus a process that is dependent on a certain theorization of the human that goes beyond the ‘human animal’ and becomes ‘immortal’.
To put it in more concise terms, Kierkegaard offers a conceptual structure that is capable of providing a crucial corrective to the internal/external problem currently plaguing much of contemporary European materialism and is particularly exemplified in Badiou’s theory of subjectivity. As I stated previously, Badiou fails to account for the manner in which a human animal, which is not yet a subject, is able to feel the affects brought about by an event and then respond to these affects by willfully joining a collective subject-body. Thus he provides a purely formal account of the structure of external subjectivity but fails to explain why the individual, internal subject has a structure capable of allowing it to be incorporated into a subject-body. As we have seen, the best he can do is offer the theological trope of grace to explain this process. It is ironic on this crucial point that Badiou, the militant atheist, falls into theological supernaturalism more than Kierkegaard, the Christian thinker, does.
I would now like to outline once again, in even more formal terms, the manner by which Kierkegaard seems to offer a structure by which we can think of a contemporary model for a theory that can account for internal, external and collective subjectivity. In the first respect, Kierkegaard offers us a more rigorous theorization of the internal structure of what Badiou refers to as the human animal, which we can equally think of as the pre-subjective individual human being. While Badiou’s subject does not become immortal until she encounters the void in a situation through the grace of the event, Kierkegaard’s subject already encounters this void as the fracture marking the structure of her own subjectivity. This inconsistency in the very structure of the self is precisely what opens up the space for spirit to develop in freedom as the relation of opposed aspects of the self. This internal account of subjectivity thus creates the grounds for a subject capable of not only freely reflecting on possibility but, more importantly, capable of making decisions which then lead to a subsequent willed activity.
Once he establishes a theory of properly internal (and relational) subjectivity that explains how the self relates to itself, Kierkegaard is able to extrapolate this structure to the level of externality. So while the foundation of my own subjectivity involves my encounter with a lack of ground, or fracture, at the heart of my own consciousness that leads me to actively choose to become myself in an act of faith, this internal act is what allows me to choose external acts as well. In this sense it is not just the case that the structure of the self is inherently self-relating, but it is also the case that the structure of relation applies to my relations to both other individuals and external ideas. The same fracture, which opens up the possibility of my self-relation, is precisely what allows me to make a decision to faithfully commit to something external.
Now that I have outlined the manner in which Kierkegaard accounts for both the internal and external structure of subjectivity, we can once again reiterate the manner in which this paves the way for theorizing collective subjectivity as the inter-relation of those who are passionately related to the same ideas. This helps exemplify how a group of individuals participating in a collective form of subjectivity oriented around a common idea (or event) is still a dynamic and relational structure. Along with this, it gives us a way to theorize the manner in which subjects are able to relate to others, as their relations are meditated through the idea (or event), they share a relation to. So while Badiou theorizes a form of subjectivity in which those participating in the construction of a new world in the wake of an event are conflated into one collective body, for Kierkegaard those participating in a collective form of subjectivity still maintain their dynamic nature as spirit, and this dynamic relation carries over into the relations between the individuals participating in a group. We can see this when he points out two contrary forms of tension in ‘The Present Age’; in one sense a positive form of tension is that which keeps the forces of life elastic and enthusiastic, and on the other hand, there is a negative form of tension in which enthusiasm and inwardness are lost, and instead, envy becomes a negative unifying principle (TA 80–81).
Thus, in relation to what I have referred to as the ‘lack of an internal account of pre-evental subjectivity’ in the work of Badiou, I am here utilizing Kierkegaard to argue for the existence of a form of ur-subjectivity which necessarily precedes any particular external form of subjectivity which is characterized by the transition from a human animal to a subject-of-truth.[139] As I have stated previously, Badiou fails to say what it is about the human animal which allows it to externally respond to internally felt effects which occur with the happening of an event. Following the model outlined by Kierkegaard (or more precisely, by my own interpretation of Kierkegaard) we can see that Badiou fails to theorize the manner in which the human animal has the capacity to respond to, and subsequently be related to, external ideas and events.
Along with this, we see that Badiou fails to provide any adequate account of the individual subject or, more precisely, fails to account for the possibility of a form of subjectivity that operates on the individual level. Badiou believes that by not providing a formal account of individual subjectivity, he avoids some of the trappings of philosophies grounded in theories of phenomenal consciousness or individual life, but he loses far more than he gains. By avoiding any sort of philosophical anthropology or humanism, he constructs a practical, or political, philosophy completely dependent on human activity and the responses of individual human beings to trans-individual events while not providing any positive account of the internal structure of the individual human being that this system is so dependent on. At this point Badiou seems to make the same mistake that Kierkegaard accuses the Danish Hegelians of by forgetting the single individual and allowing her to get swallowed up into the system of conceptual thought. If Badiou is at his most Kierkegaardian by constructing a philosophy centered around truth, human subjectivity and contingency, he is at his most traditionally Hegelian when he avoids providing any account of the unique capacities of individual human beings. This is especially problematic if much of what Badiou aims to accomplish with his philosophy is inspiring individual human beings to either take up the project of emancipatory politics or reconsider the truth contained in the practice of traditional forms of love.[140]
Notes
1.
Here I am thinking of Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness.
2.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 1956).
3.
See Manuela Hackel, ‘Jean-Paul Sarte: Kierkegaard’s Influence on His Theory of Nothingness’. Kierkegaard's International Reception, Kierkegaard's Influence on Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources, vol. 9).
4.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books 1976), 17–18n6.
5.
Sartre, ‘Questions de methode’. Les temps modernes, no. 139 (September) 1957, 338–417: no. 140 (October), 1957, 658–98
6.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason.
7.
Beaufret et al., Kierkegaard Vivant, Paris: Gallimard 1966. (English translation: ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal, trans. John Matthews, London: New Left Books, 1974).
8.
In an interview conducted in 1969, Sartre was asked to describe the relationship between his early and late works, and during the interview Sartre recalls himself writing: ‘Whatever his circumstances, and wherever the site, a man is always free to be a traitor or not.’ After recounting this quotation, Sartre tells the interviewer, ‘When I read this, I said to myself: it’s incredible, I actually believed that!’ Sartre, ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’, New Left Review no. 58, republished in Between Existentialism and Marxism, London: New Left Books 1974, 33–34.
9.
An interesting parallel could be drawn between the idea of practico-inert and the concept of objective anxiety that I discussed in chapter 2.
10.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 17; ‘Questions de methode’, 7.
11.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 19; ‘Questions de methode’, 10.
12.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 19; ‘Questions de methode’, 11.
13.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 19–20; ‘Questions de methode’, 12.
14.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 20; ‘Questions de methode’, 12–13.
15.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 20; ‘Questions de methode’, 13.
16.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 21; ‘Questions de methode’, 14.
17.
Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 21; ‘Questions de methode’, 14.
18.
Sartre, ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’ in Between Existentialism and Marxism trans. John Matthews (London: New Left Books, 1974), 144.
19.
Ibid., 153.
20.
Ibid., 154.
21.
Ibid., 155.
22.
Ibid., 161.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Ibid., 168.
25.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Harper 1993.
26.
Sartre, ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’, 169.
27.
In a sense we can see a clear relation between Sartre using scarcity as a concept that creates the conditions for both antagonism and positive social relation, and the manner in which Kierkegaard’s uses contradiction (and anxiety) as both a negative and a potentially positive category.
28.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critical of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2004) 97. This ‘atomism of liberalism’ and ‘analytic rationality’ reminds one of Kierkegaard’s discussions of the ‘leveling’ and ‘numeric’ tendencies of the politics of reflection in ‘The Present Age’, which I outlined in the previous chapter.
29.
Ibid. It is worth mentioning Sartre’s use of the term ‘transcendence’ in this context, as it can help make sense of some of the comments I made in chapter 3 regarding a contemporary (and materialist) reading of Kierkegaard’s use of the concept. Here Sartre clearly has no underlying theological agenda in the use of this term; he is simply pointing out the possibility of human activity to ‘transcend’ a set of historical and material conditions which can appear to be determined/absolute. This ‘transcendence’ arises as the product of human activity attempting to overcome material and historical contradiction.
30.
Ibid., 98.
31.
Ibid., 99.
32.
Ibid., 100. Thus reality is relational in its structure for Sartre.
33.
Ibid., 109. This is the title of Book 1, Section 3.
34.
Ibid.
35.
Ibid., 110.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., 111.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Ibid., 112. Thus, man projects his potential future as a possibility, and this possibility is what orients man’s activity in their present state. This once again relates back to the Kierkegaardian political-ontology discussed in the previous chapter.
41.
Ibid., 113.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Ibid., 123.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Ibid., 125.
46.
Ibid., 127.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid., 128.
49.
Ibid., 129.
50.
Ibid., 130.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Ibid., 80.
53.
Ibid., 83.
54.
Ibid., 85.
55.
Ibid., 123.
56.
Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 98.
57.
Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 418.
58.
Ibid., 506.
59.
Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 178.
60.
There is of course another equally important line of twentieth-century French philosophy that can be traced back to Bergson and instead places emphasis on the manner in which vitalism and materiality could reckon with post-existential philosophy. While this tradition is important, I am focusing on what could be called ‘post-Sartrean’ French philosophy in the current study as it both lays the groundwork for contemporary transcendental materialism as well as embodies the structure of the fractured dialectic argued for in this work.
61.
This crucial connection has previously been noted in the work of Nina Power (Roehampton University) and Brian Smith (Dundee).
62.
Badiou, ‘Philosophy as Biography’, Lacanian Ink, online, http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html .
63.
See Žižek, The Parallax View, In Defense of Lost Causes and Less Than Nothing; Meillassoux After Finitude trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2009); Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009); and Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
64.
See Hollis Phelps, Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology (Durham: Acumen, 2013); Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009).
65.
Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2012), liii.
66.
Ibid., lix.
67.
Badiou relies on the example of Christianity, and in particular Pauline Christianity, most explicitly in his work Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
68.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 14.
69.
It is worth noting at this point that in Theory of the Subject Badiou claims that all truth has the form of an encounter.
70.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 1.
71.
Ibid., 5.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Badiou, Being and Event trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 181, 186.
74.
Ibid., 26.
75.
Ibid., 7.
76.
Ibid., 4.
77.
Ibid., 23.
78.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 1.
79.
Ibid., 4.
80.
Badiou outlines this in Meditation Twelve of Being and Event (130–41).
81.
Johnston, Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformation, xxii.
82.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 14.
83.
Badiou, Briefings on Existence trans. Norma Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
84.
Ibid., 23.
85.
Ibid., 24.
86.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 425.
87.
Ibid.
88.
Ibid.
89.
Ibid., 426.
90.
Ibid.
91.
Ibid.
92.
Ibid.
93.
See Alain Badiou, St. Paul.
94.
CUP, 252–53. Translation slightly modified by Badiou.
95.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 426–7.
96.
Ibid., 427.
97.
Ibid.
98.
Ibid., 428.
99.
Ibid., 429.
100.
See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 396–97.
101.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 430.
102.
Ibid., 431.
103.
Ibid.
104.
Ibid., 433.
105.
Ibid., 435.
106.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 182.
107.
Ibid., 189.
108.
Ibid., 28.
109.
Ibid., 71.
110.
While these four concepts are gleaned from Lacan, there is also an interesting comparison to be made between this and Sartre’s account of the development of political groups in his Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1. In many senses, Badiou could be seen as reading Sartre’s account of group-formation in Lacanian terms against the background of an Althusserian materialism. This would seem to be a reasonable assumption to make as Badiou himself has claimed that Sartre, Lacan and Althusser are his three masters and primary influences.
111.
Badiou, Being and Event, 391.
112.
Ibid.
113.
Ibid., 239.
114.
Ibid., 393.
115.
Ibid., 394.
116.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 33.
117.
Ibid., 3.
118.
Ibid., 86.
119.
Ibid.
120.
Ibid.
121.
Ibid.
122.
Ibid., 87.
123.
Ibid., 35.
124.
Ibid.
125.
Ibid. 507.
126.
Ibid. 508.
127.
Ibid.
128.
Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2011 ), 43.
129.
Ibid.
130.
Ibid., 133.
131.
Peter Hallward, ‘Order and Event’, New Left Review, 53, September–October, 2008, 118.
132.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 805.
133.
While I have been emphasizing the manner in which Kierkegaard prefigures many of the post-Hegelian ontological moves of contemporary European materialist philosophy, Žižek’s discussion seems to point towards the manner in which Kierkegaard’s psychological account also prefigures some of the key moves of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
134.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 811.
135.
I owe this term to Nina Power, Roehampton University.
136.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 837–38.
137.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 14.
138.
Badiou, Saint Paul, 91.
139.
It is worth noting that there are contemporary philosophers attempting to provide an account of internal subjectivity that has a similar structure. In particular the recent work of Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou can be seen as utilizing both psychoanalysis and neuroscience to attempt to provide a dialectical and materialist account of internal, or neural, subjectivity. See in particular, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
140.
See Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (New York: New Press, 2012)