Alain Badiou

Manifesto for Philosophy, 1989

Love as an Event and a Truth Procedure

Against the linguistic turn as a
sinister form of depolitization

Void Truth
Hollow Master Signifier

Alain Badiou
Manifesto for Philosophy, 1989

Being as an unbounded idea of

Mathematics: philosophys secularization19,

multiplicity (Aristotelian), an
ontology of the multiple that
cannot be counted as one (basic
notion of a multiple or set in
Set Theory). Application of Set
Theory to knowledge in general.
The subtractive nature of being.
The radical nature of the event
or non-being (Being and Event, 1988)

a torsion in which language is shattered so as to

be dislodged from the dominance of sense12
Void is not identical to nothingness - the
axiom of the empty set, a set to which no
member belongs. 19
There is the void of the category of Truth. In its
emptiness, this void demonstrates not only that
philosophy does not have a strict object of study,
but also that it does not even produce any truths.
19-20

The generic/truth procedures that

condition philosophy: 33-5

Love the amorous

as a truth procedure

The matheme the scientific (not science,

Love the amorous

Not the union, but the place in which the

transversal. They are uniform procedures

whose relation to thought is relatively
invariant. The name of this invariance is
truth. 33

but the scientific as a condition of thought)

The poem the artistic (not art, but the
artistic as a condition of thought)
The political invention the political (not
politics, but the political as a condition of
thought)
Love the amorous. (The condition to
which philosophy did not suture itself is
love. 18)

Love the amorous

as a truth procedure

Love the amorous

as a truth procedure

Truth is a void, is empty because it is an

operation and not a substance. 20

The void or the empty set is Being itself. 20
The conditions of philosophy are

The place of fidelity in love is the place

kept open so that the whatever-being-ofthe-other can take place so that the other,
whatever her being, can take place.
The truth procedure of love is the
persistence & insistence
in not giving up on the difference of the
other
in being the opening in which the being of
the other, whatever it is, can take place

The truth procedure of love is the

persistence & insistence
in fidelity to the taking place of the real of
the other, the real of the self, the real of
difference
in fidelity to the truth of the event the
encounter of the Two.
Love is the production of a truth about the
Two, with fidelity to the encounter-event.

differences of the sexes, or sexuation is

given to thought, the thought of difference.
Fidelity: being true to the other is being
the opening in which the others real can
take place, the compossibility of the others
truth procedures can take place.

The Event of Love

For Badiou, the work of Lacan is an event

in the thinking of love although love is not

a central concept in his work.
The innovation in his thinking that deals
with love is a rennaisance of philosophy
with respect to the thinking of the Two.
Badiou finds no theory of love as profound
as Lacans since Plato in the specifically
ontological function he assigns to love.

The Event of Love

The Event of Love

The Event of Love

It is in love that thought is freed from the

Lacan proceeds to a kind of logical

Lacan proceeds to a kind of logical

powers of the One, it breaks into the One.

Love is that from which the Two is thought,
by the splitting of the dominance of the
One, whose image love nonetheless
endures (the suturing of love as unity).
Love respects the fundamental difference
of the Two, bearing the truth that the 2
subjects are different.

deduction of the Two of the sexes:

The not all (jouissance) - the socalled feminine pole
A vector of the All or the Whole thus
broken off (castration) the so called
masculine pole

deduction of the Two of the sexes:

The Barred Other, the not All - the so
called feminine pole (the truth of
jouissance)
The Barred Subject: a vector of the All or
the Whole thus broken off (castration)
the so called masculine pole (the truth of
desire)

The Event of Love

The Event of Love

Love the amorous

as a truth procedure

Love is the production, with fidelity to the

Love as the inter- the opening open to the

encounter-event, of a truth about the Two.

The insistence and persistence in the
difference of the Two.
Love as an incompletable relation of
difference, a relation unbound.
Not communication, but comunicability,
potentiality (Agamben)

compossibility of each others truth

processes.
Mutual but not reversible, each in its
singularity.
The in of being-in-love = being in the
place where love as a truth procedure of the
self and of the other can take place,
whatever it is.

Love is the actuality of this paradoxical

Two, which in itself is the element of a nonrelation, of the unbound.

Love weaves the irremediable excess, the
infinite or incompletable experience of this
Two.
Love makes a truth about sexuation come
forth as a nameless or generic multiplicity, a
truth obviously subtracted from knowledge,
especially from the knowledge of those who
love each other.

Love the amorous

as a truth procedure
Being in love = ones being is in the place

of love where the compossibility of truths

can take place.
Together in love is together in the place of
love as the place where the compossibility
of each others truths can take place,
where the compossibility of difference, of
the wandering excess of the multiplicity of
being can take place.

Intervention every procedure of thought

by which a multiple is recognized as an
event. 13
As an event arises from chance experience,
and disappears just as quickly, it remains
only as a trace.
Intervention upon this trace comprises the
notion of naming, which solidifies the
Being of the event by marking it the
undecidable void whose background it is.
p.20 e.g. 64, 97, 71

The name as a void

The Empty signifier
The name without content, the form

without content fidelity is being true

to the significance of the event of
which the name is but a trace, a
remainder/reminder.
The name as a void forever keeps
open the space for thinking the event.

The generic/truth procedures 35-9

The generic/truth procedures 35-9

Modernity

The generic/truth procedures stands out

The event as the supplement is inscribed

The deconstruction of the subject &

from the cumulation of fields of

knowledge by their eventful nature.
If no event supplements a situation, there
is no truth, only veridicality, knowledge.
The event as the supplement, the trace,
the unnamable, unrepresentable
supplement of a situation.

by a singular naming, the bringing into

play of the additional signifier, the signifier
that symbolizes the petit objet a. e.g. 64, 97,
71
Philosophy compounds, overloads the
possible of truths by its concept of the
compossible, sets the generic procedures in
the dimension not of their own thinking,
but of their joint historicity.

Reason yet not able to think beyond them.

Put under erasure (Heidegger).
Heidegger: the in-different expansion of
Knowledge and Technology (techn-logic)
is no longer bound to the truth procedure of
the scientific.

Against the linguistic turn and the

claim to the end of history/philosophy

Against the linguistic turn and the

claim to the end of history/philosophy

Modernity
Badiou: the technological completion of

58 Philosophy has left the Cartisian

metaphysics, its necessary consequences

modern science and the totalitarian State.
Technology carries non-thought to its peak,
realizes the will to subjugate existents in
their totality as raw materials, brutally
treated as a simple reserve of availability
for the (Hegelian) Will, e.g. Capitalism

meditation incomplete by going astray in

the aestheticization of willing, the pathos of
completion, the destiny of oblivion, the lost
of trace.
The privileging of language as the Totality
of the social, even of the ontological, as the
One Order within which the subject is
forever trapped and comparmentalized, as
the impasse against inter-subjectivity.

Against the linguistic turn and the

claim to the end of history/philosophy

Against the linguistic turn and the

claim to the end of history/philosophy

58 This arrogant declaration concealed the

powerlessness to continue this beginning.

Philosophy denounces or showers praise
upon nihilistic modernity only to the extent
of the difficulty it has itself in grasping
where current positivities pass in transit, and
given its inability to conceive that we have
blindly entered into a new phase of the
doctrine of Truth

The Truth about Language:

the impasses of the linguistic circle as
Truth, as infinite and indiscernible
totalities.

being as only being in language

Philosophy today has clung to language,

to literature, to writing just as to the last

possible representatives of an a priori
determination of experience, or to the
preserved place of a clearing of Being.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
According to the now widely accepted

poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist

understanding, the site of hegemony and the
reinvention of counter-hegemonic politics
have become restricted to the domain of
language and representation, which is in
turn understood as the origin and the entire
field of society. (a twist of Descartes: I am
only in as far as language is)

This generalized linguistic turn in politics

confronts the Chinese New-Left and the left
elsewhere, as an unprecedented theoretical
event
Their position: critical of both mainstream
China and the West. But their uneasy and
critical reliance on Western theory render
them target of attack from:
(a) nationalists claiming Chinese
exceptionalism: the New Left is blamed
for their imposition of Western paradigms
on China. Their discourses are considered
grand narratives too theoretical and
abstract for any localized intervention.

Marginalization of the Chinese New Left

(b) feminists and postcolonialists: attack
the discursive blindspots of the New
Left. The New left as the local males
territorializing the speaking positions of
women and other subaltern positions
(Rey Chow, Lu Tonglin).

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
This eventful paradigm shift delegitimizes all previous forms of leftist
engagements in urgent large-scale social,
economic and political changes (mass
resistance) in the name of the ethics of
representation
= the linguistic turn.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
The issue is no longer revolution, class
struggle, nor competition among political
factions. Neither is it simply the marginal
intellectual and the people against the state,
but the male intellectual as the discursive
hegemony appropriating the voices of the
subaltern and the sexual other.
Everything is now a matter of discursive
regimes of power and cultural hegemony.
It has become a matter more of cultural
capital than global capitalism.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
Coupled with this shift in the site of
political focus, this linguistic turn centers
on the politics of subjectivity.
This shifts politics to the level of the
singular subjects performative and
discursive relation to the hegemonic, as
proposed by Judith Butler and others.
With this focus comes also issues of the
impossibility of the speaking subaltern, and
the impossibility of the ethical
representation of the subaltern/other. Why?

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
Since no one in a relative position of
privilege can ethically represent the other,
the only ethical representation is the
subalterns own act of intervention, which
is considered also an act of selfrepresentation, and nothing but a
representation.
Thus, the burden of political agency and of
political valance is invested in the isolated
singular subaltern, the only place from
which a valid politics could be invented.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
No collective identity politics can pass the
poststructuralist ethics of representation.
In this context, the New Left begs a say in
politics through the valorization of the
subaltern subject.
They anxiously await the most
marginalized racialized, sexualized
subaltern to give them a new politics, so to
speak.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
However, the singular subaltern is so
powerless that she cannot effectively
control how her performative intervention
in the dominant is understood &
represented.
Thus, the subaltern cannot speak in the
discursive hegemony of the symbolic
orders she confronts.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
Thus, the subaltern, although she is the

only one politically qualified by the

linguistic turn - the poststructuralist
identity politics, to speak. The burden of
political representation is forced upon the
most dispossessed. Politically fatal to
resistance.
This argument is now often stressed to the
point of a theoretical inevitability.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
At the same time, the intellectual (in fear of
political incorrectness due to the
poststructuralist identity politics impasse),
holds onto the cynical Ah-Qism of
interpretation as resistance all happening
in the linguistic circle of the intellectuals
brain.
Nothing in the real need to change for
politics to take place.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
This politics of representation in effect
abandons traditional political domains to the
site of the non-theoretical, the non-issue.
Shockingly, this wholesale shift of critical
energy leaves the field of traditional
representation and actual political
maneuvers to those who are unscrupulous
and all too ready to appropriate the
discursive vacuum of traditional political
space.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
Their being is given the most
disempowering place of the limit of
language and the limit of the political
whose meaning is forever deferred and can
never speak as such.
The theories of the linguistic turn renders
the subaltern as somebody who cannot
speak within the blindspots of these
theories.

What these debates of the linguistic turn

cannot so far directly confront is the

irreducible presence of the vast multitude
of the dispossessed, the too easily
representable and yet unspeakable objects
of their discourses forever cast off as
the unrepresentable, the limit case.

Effects of suturing philosophy under

only one of its conditions
e.g. effect of positivist scientific suture on

the other conditions of thought

The political reduced to the pragmatic
defense of the liberal-parlimentarian
regime (e.g. HK) & is no longer a concern
for thought and the creation of inventive
politics.

Effects of suturing philosophy under

only one of its conditions
The poetic/artistic debarred from its

potency as an event, a paradigm shifting

act (Lacanian act), only to be filed under
the cultural supplement or proposed as an
object for linguistic analysis, its impact
being forever deferred.
The amorous ignored: privileging

sentimentality and sex, as well as

sexuality as a linguistic discourse at
the expense of love. Love scientified.

Against the linguistic turn as a

sinister form of depolitization
In China, this is the space of politics (totally
given up by the leftist intellectual) that neoliberalism has taken over and has acquired
discursive hegemony and institutional
leverage.
My observations have come to suggest that
these tensions all avoid an encounter with the
Lacanian real: the irreducible presence in the
real of those who are cast off as the
wretched of the earth (Fanon) the subaltern
(Spivak), the homo sacer (Agamben).

Against Compartmentalized Thinking:

suturing
Problem: spatializing & compartmentalizing

the thinking of time & being.

Suture a suspension of philosophy, sutured

to only one of its conditions: instead of

constructing a space of compossibility
through which the thinking of time is
practiced, philosophy delegates its functions
to one or the other of its conditions, handing
over the whole of thought to one generic
procedure

Effects of suturing philosophy under

only one of its conditions
effect of the cross scientific-com-

political suture e.g. Marxism

Totalizing experience by equating the
movement of History to thinking the
political, substituting thinking with
revolutionary transformation.
The doing & the effects justify the action
itself without having to think it.

Thesis against the suturing of philosophy

& for systematic procedures of thinking in
compossibility

Thesis against the suturing of philosophy & for

systematic procedures of thinking in
compossibility

Claiming revolutionary politics as a

64-5 philosophy is threatened by

(e.g. as if Derrida can explain

science called historical materialism,

which Stalin calls philosophy or
dialectical materialism and applies to
both Nature and History.
The philosophy explaining the political
purges, the genetic engineering
experiments of eugenics.

suspensionbecause it is captive of a
network of sutures toespecially its
scientific and political conditions, which
forbade it from configurating their general
compossibility
The justification for such sutures is the
monstrously repetitive attack against
systematic form, declaring it impossible.

deconstruction without logical, systematic

thinking;
as if declaring anything as complex and
multiple can excuse us from responsible
thinking by forever deferring the thinking
of the complex and multiple in its
compounding compossibility;
as if the triangle is an enemy of thought)

Effects of suturing philosophy under

only one of its conditions

Propose the
de-suturation of philosophy
66-7 philosophy is only de-sutured if it is,

on its own, systematic. If a contrario

philosophy declares the impossibility of the
system, it is because it is sutured, and hands
thought over to only one of its conditions.
When philosophy is sutured to the scientific
or the political, poetry (those works of art
immediately recognized as a work of
thought) assumed certain functions of
philosophy

Csura cutting open, an opening

Poetry as disobjectifying
Not meaning the sense is handed over to
the subject or the subjective (sentimentality,
solypsism and authoritarianism) but the
truth of the poem emerges insofar as what
it states is related to neither objectivity nor
subjectivity.
Poetry which seeks the trace or threshold,
cuts, makes holes in the fantastic symbolic
order (the suture).

Propose the
de-suturation of philosophy
These poets did not decide to take the

Csura cutting open, an opening

Upon inconsistences
to lean.

Celan

the poetic/artistic: enable the poets/artists

place of philosophers, but were

submitted to the intellectual pressure to
constitute that general space of reception
& possibility for the compearing of the
truth procedures e.g. poetry aware of a
sharing of thinking with mathematics,
love and politics.

to subtract themselves from the effects of

philosophical sutures
The destitution of the category of the
object and of objectivity as necessary
forms of presentation poetry as
disobjectifying, not a matter simply of
representation (thus not a matter simply of
the politics within the linguistic circle).

Events

Three orientations of thought

80 it is only by taking into account the

existence of any unnamable, generic

multiplicities whatever, delimited by no
properties of language, that we may have
the chance to approach the truth of the
being of a given multiplicity.
the quantity of a multiple tolerates an
indeterminacy, a kind of disjunctive rift
that constitutes the whole of the real of
being itself a wandering excess

(1) Nominalists refuses wandering excess,

admits only namable multiplicities into
existence conservative thinking.
(2) Transcendentlists believes the
determination from above will regulate the
wandering excess, the indiscernable being
only transistory, only so under our
ignoracnce. So it does not ratify excess and
wandering as laws of being prophetic
thinking.

Three orientations of thought

Events

(3) Generic thought takes on the

indiscernable as the type of being of
every truth, and holds the wandering of
the excess to be the real of being, the
being of being. Generic thinking is, in
the widest sense of the term, militant
thinking.

The indiscernable or generic multiplicity as

Questioning the object

and objectivity

Questioning the indiscernable the

unamable

91 Every truth is without an object. Truth

does not subjugate but opens, cuts,

subtracts from the One the being of
multiplicity.
There is only the object of knowledge but
not the object of truth.
Task: to produce a concept of the subject
without object, the subject as a simple
finite fragment of a post-eventful truth
without object.

The Generic
The generic makes possible a thinking space

wherein the 4 conditions of philosophy can be

gathered and located as compossible.
The what-is-not-being-qua-being is the event,
the supplement of the situation which is the
emergence of being the petit objet a, the any
multiple whatsoever (// Agamben).
The truth of the objet a must be the truth of a
multiple (that is excluded from the One, what the
One cannot tolerate) without recourse to the
transcendence of the One.

the being-in-truth of the pure multiple, the

idea of the multiplicity of being - is the
event of the matheme
The event in the thinking of love is
Lacans deduction that there is no sexual
relation. It is a non-relation. We are not yet
hetero-sexual. We are only mono-sexual
(homo-sexual).

94 The Lacanian real is unspeakable, a

disavowed as horror, but the indiscernable

is not the unthinkable. To lacan, the objet a
that the symbolic order consideres
unspeakable does not mean it must ne
silent. It must on the contrary be named. It
must be dicerned as indiscernable. The
symbolization of the real the poetic event,
the artistic event of the piercing of the
radical itch in the fabric of the Other.

The Generic/Truth procedure

As being is multiple, and truth must be, a

truth shall be a multiple truth, which cannot

be already given. It is the infinite result of
an event, the supplement in excess of the
situation (that which cannot be
incorporated by the representable part of
the situation). Every truth is post-eventful,
in excess of the represented.

Questioning the Two

90-91 Nothing is more difficult in Western

philosophy as the thinking of the Two.

The imperative of modern philosophy is the

thinking of the Two over and above dialectics,

e.g. the dialectics of History founded in the real
of economics and exploitation the posteventful real.
Deconstruction demonstrates this difficulty in
face of the real of the Two can only dare to
defer in contemplation of the horror the
face/stare of the angel of history in Walter
Benjamin.

The Generic
A truth can only be the singular production of a

multiple. Not by addition.

The multiple will be subtracted from the

authority of language. It will be indiscernable, or

rather: it will have been indiscernable. The
Lacanian real, the objet petit a as the generic
multiplicity.
Letting us think the truth as both a multipleresult of a singular procedure, and as a hole, or
subtraction, in the filed of the nameble (of
language).

The Generic/Truth procedure

A truth shall be a generic parto f the

situation, generic designating that is is

any part whatsoever of it, that it says
nothing in particular about the situation,
except precisely its multiple-being as
such, its fundamental inconsistency.
The minimal consistency/part of the
inconsistency of being.