CHAPTER SIX

Deleuze and Badiou on Being and the Event

Alain Beaulieu

Context
In the mid-1970s, Badiou turns in mockery to the philosophy of “Saint Gilles
and Saint Félix,” which he qualified as “egoist” and “anti-militantist.”1 The
“ideology of desire” that Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus is unfit
for supporting real struggles. It defends nothing more, argues Badiou, than a
“anarcho-desiring” and “bourgeois” conception of political struggles.2 It is in
this context that Badiou sends his “brigades” into Deleuze’s classes with the
mission of denouncing Deleuzian politics insensitive to workers’ concerns.3
These attacks launched against the “micro-political” model of the “molecular
revolutions” multiplied until the mid-1980s.4
Badiou then re-assessed his positions. He remained uninterested in Deleuze
and Guattari’s joint texts, yet nuanced his assertion regarding the goal of freeing
Deleuze’s solo works from the anarchic philosophy of desire. In his 1997 book
devoted to Deleuze, Badiou argues that Deleuzian thought has nothing of the
anarcho-desiring expressionism with which it is often associated. This thought
remains, on the contrary, “resolutely classical.”5 From the very first chapter of
Badiou’s work, we learn that the two thinkers exchanged an intense correspond-
ence between 1991 and 1994 (for obscure reasons, Deleuze seems to have de-
stroyed these letters) and that Badiou considers Deleuze his primary philosophi-
cal rival in the development of an “ontology of the multiple”; the two form “a
sort of paradoxical tandem.” In perusing this work, the reader quickly under-
stands that Badiou considers Deleuze’s vitalist attempt at thinking the pure mul-
tiple to be a failure. The most polemic part of his interpretation argues that—
unlike what is generally believed—Deleuze’s thought is not a philosophy of
difference and of infinite differentiation. Rather, it was rigorously and platoni-
cally oriented to the question of the univocity of being. This argument has nu-
merous and sometimes counter-intuitive implications. With the failure of Deleu-
zian vitalism, which operates on an ascetic thinking of the transcendence of One,

137
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Badiou believes it necessary to oppose a true ontology of the pure multiple,

founded on the axiomatic. Paradoxically, Deleuze and Guattari formulated a
similar grievance against Badiou’s thought. In What is Philosophy?, they de-
scribe Badiou’s work as a “particularly interesting undertaking,” but Deleuze
and Guattari also reproached Badiou’s thought for “reintroducing the transcend-
ent” into immanence and thus reactivating “an old conception of the higher phi-
losophy.”6
In the early 1990s, Badiou had already publically discussed his litigious
rapport with Deleuze by devoting four of his lectures to What is Philosophy?.7
These lectures were subsequent to the writing, several years earlier, of a long
critical review8 of Deleuze’s book on Leibniz in which Badiou exposed his re-
evaluation of Deleuzian philosophy for the first time. This is the primary argu-
ment expressed in this literature review: Deleuze’s organicist ontology, which
does not resort to the mathematical theory of ensembles, remains incapable of
thinking the “multiple without one,” which would be picked up and deepened in
Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. As we might easily imagine, this presentation
provoked lively reactions from supporters and defenders of Deleuzism.9 Badiou
faced many accusations of misrepresenting Deleuzian thought. He made the
effort to respond, this time insisting on the opposition that separates the Deleu-
zian ontology, which is turned towards the One-Whole-Organic, and his own
conception of the axiomatized multiple.10 At the heart of this metaphysical quar-
rel is the ability to articulate immanence without injecting it with transcendence.
To better situate this debate, let us review several points of convergence and
divergence that feed these two thinkers’ unique rapport. In terms of points in
common, let us mention that:

• Badiou and Deleuze practice a radical philosophy and categorically re-

fuse to endorse the ambient liberal democratism, contemporary parlia-
mentarism and the consensualist ideal that know nothing of singular
claims;
• They are uninterested in the hermeneutic tradition, which they associate
with scholasticism;
• They both renounce assimilation, by the analytical philosophy, of phi-
losophy into a cognitive logic and a generalized grammar;
• They unconditionally reject the pathos of finitude associated with dom-
inant historicism;
• They refuse to compromise with humanist ideology and with all forms
of moralism by reconnecting with the Socratic model of philosophy as
an undertaking of moral corruption;
• They both admit unlimited admiration for Beckett;
• They are indifferent to the end of metaphysics, considering the under-
takings of destruction, overcoming and deconstruction as artificial;
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 139

• They rehabilitate the value of eternity and the rapport with the infinite
in favour of redefining the philosophical status of the idea and in con-
serving the spirit of the system;
• They evacuate all teleological principles that camouflages a desire to
rally lost believers to the resorption of a pretended civilizational crisis;
• And, finally, they both declare their atheism.

Their divergences are just as numerous, and perhaps even more fundamental:

• Badiou maintains the categories of the subject and the truth while
Deleuze argues for de-subjectivation and is indifferent to the notion of
truth;
• The first is interested in Lacanian psycho-analysis, while the second
comes to vigorously denounce the psychoanalytic interpretation of the
unconscious;
• Badiou is Sartrian in that he renews the heroism of a non-conformist
subject, while Deleuze considers the Sartrian model of liberation to be
outdated;
• Badiou fights in the Maoist spirit, while Deleuze is distrustful of all po-
litical organizations;
• The author of Being and Event identifies with the Platonism that sets
philosophy’s horizons (via politics, art, science, love and its mathema-
tized doctrine of ideas) while the author of Difference and Repetition
seeks an alternative to Platonism in Nietzsche and the Stoics;
• The Badiou’s philosophy discredits the reference to the powers of the
virtual and takes interest in the “actualized” phenomena, while the
Deleuze’s thought considers reality as both actual and virtual;
• Badiou proposes a de-continuist model of history, punctuated by noth-
ingness, while Deleuze’s naturalist philosophy sees the incessant and
on-going effects of forces.

Being
Badiou sketches an original topography of the fields of thought. Mathematics
does not just provide ontological background, it is ontology; only mathematics is
able to produce declarations on being. The four “generic procedures” (science,
politics, art, love) make up as many possible sites from which arise rare and
localized truths. Procedures are also the conditions of philosophy. There is no
such thing as “pure philosophy” since thought is essentially conditioned by the
truths it does not produce. Philosophy is neither the sovereign “queen of scienc-
es,” nor the guardian of the “being-qua-being” rhetoric (which comes down to
mathematics); rather, it remains in the service of the truths issued from political
revolutions, scientific inventions, artistic creations and love experiences. More
140 CHAPTER SIX

modestly, philosophy must resolve to conceptually determine the compossibility

of its conditions of truth that remain exterior to its powers.
Cantor’s set theory shows us that there is not a “set of all sets,” and therefore
no truth that universally and definitively establishes the consistency of the One.
Badiou presents this ontology, which seeks to radically break with univocity, as
a Platonism of the pure multiple or of the “multiple without one” that no longer
depends on a unique truth. Badiou undertakes the vast work of desuturation to
bring an end to the prejudices considered to be the toughest questions of our
time, characterized by a generalized oversight of the ontological value of math-
ematics. The task, therefore, is to “desuture” philosophy from ontology, as well
as from each pretention to truth. In this context—where only mathematics are
depositories of adequate language for being (they are ontology) and where phi-
losophy welcomes the truths produced independently from it—there is no such
thing as philosophical politics (social movements create truth without philoso-
phy dictating their future); science is not the only condition of philosophy (epis-
temology becomes a secondary philosophical question); the Age of Poets where
philosophy connects with the poetic arts has expired (Heidegger is representa-
tive of this ultimate wandering); and, the love experience is not the last possibil-
ity of philosophy (Romanticism belongs to the past).
Badiou develops his critique of Deleuzian ontology—provocative, at the
least—on these theoretical bases. Somewhat like Heidegger who pointed out,
about Nietzsche, the insufficiencies of overturning Platonism to better ensure his
overcoming, Badiou argues, about Deleuze, that it is not enough to think the
univocity of being via simulacra to overcome the philosophy of the One. There-
in lies the failure of Deleuzian thought which, ignorant of the ontological theory
of ensembles, is not able to develop an adequate philosophy of the multiple.
According to Badiou, Deleuze thinks the multiple in terms of “impurity” by in-
variably submitting the ensembles to the law of the univocity of being. The di-
versity of Deleuze’s theoretical approaches regarding the multiplicity of the cas-
es he examines would invariably be to return the multiple to the univocity of
being, which goes by many names (virtual, eternal return, fold, outside, disjunc-
tive synthesis, etc.). Against this “monotony” of the vitalist variations that sec-
ondarizes the multiple vis-à-vis the One, Badiou offers to submit this thought to
Cantor’s set theory, which is presented as an ontological basis of the “multiple
without one.”
With good reason, Badiou points out just how much Deleuzian commenta-
tors have tended to neglect the question of Being, which is nevertheless very
present in the Deleuzian corpus. We see in Deleuze’s work an admiration for
Being taken as univocal by Duns Scotus and Spinoza (Expressionism in Philos-
ophy: Spinoza, Difference and Repetition), an affirmation of the univocal Being
thought as the future and desire for power (Nietzsche and Philosophy), and the
idea of an ontological communication between all Events (The Logic of Sense).
The “clamour of being”11 fascinates Deleuze. Not only must we assimilate part
of Deleuze’s work into an ontological examination, we must admit along with
Badiou that the Deleuzian ontology clings to Being as it is thought in its univo-
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 141

cal acceptation. This ontological position, and Badiou’s interpretation of it, pro-
voke two remarks.
First, it is difficult to affirm with certitude that Deleuze, in the 1960s, estab-
lished a hierarchy between Being and the play of differences. What interested
Deleuze in these years was not so much the fact that Being can be said each time
in the same way or that the perspective according to which the way of saying it
differs each time. Deleuze does not value the univocity of Being more or less
than the differentiation of the simulacra. He seeks to go beyond representation
by thinking Being as difference, and difference according to its ontologically
univocal value. This attempt to degrade difference between the univocal and the
multiple simulacra seems clearly expressed in the two excerpts, entitled “The
Univocity of Being (I)” and “The Univocity of Being (II)” respectively, which
Badiou quotes in the Appendix to his work on Deleuze. The first is taken from
Difference and Repetition, in which Deleuze writes: “The essential in univocity
is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single
and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. [ . . . ]
Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but
that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.”12 The second ex-
cerpt, taken from The Logic of Sense, reformulates the same idea: “The univoci-
ty of Being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary,
beings are multiple and different, they are always produced by a disjunctive syn-
thesis, and they themselves are disjointed and divergent, membra disjoncta.”13
Deleuze tries to dissolve the ontico-ontological difference in favour of a “world
of simulacra” located beyond the field of representation; in other words, across
or below the strict univocity of Being and the difference between beings. Badiou
underestimates the radicalism of this progressive destruction of representation,
putting emphasis on a supposed Deleuzian desire to present the univocal being.
This abuse is strategic in that it allows Badiou to reveal in Deleuzian ontology a
fundamental inability to formulate a real thought of the multiple. It would ap-
pear preferable to consider that the “clamour of being” paradoxically escapes all
desire for “presentification” (to transpose Heideggerian language to Deleuzian
vitalism).
Our second remark is more incriminating. If it is true that all Deleuzian on-
tology perceives Being in its univocity, it is false to reduce all of Deleuze’s phi-
losophy to ontology. That on which we can agree is summarized in the follow-
ing statements, taken from Badiou’s interpretation: “From beginning to end, and
under the constraint of innumerable and fortuitous cases, his work is concerned
with thinking thought (its act, its movement) on the basis of an ontological pre-
comprehension of Being as One. [ . . . ] Deleuze purely and simply identifies
philosophy with ontology”14; “The profound motivation that this doctrine [of the
simulacra] covers is integrally maintained through the very last works” (Le motif
profond que cette doctrine [des simulacres] recouvre se maintient intégralement
jusqu’aux toutes dernières œuvres).15
An interest in Being does not penetrate Deleuze’s work “from beginning to
end.” This is why we suggest distinguishing “Deleuze-I” and “Deleuze-II” by
142 CHAPTER SIX

using a turning point in Deleuzian thought or a least a significative shift that

goes from the theoretical study of the univocity of being to what we call a
“pragmatic of the disjunctive singularities.” The “first Deleuze” is attached to
ontology while the “second Deleuze” distances himself with the ontological way
to face problems. This turning point is easily dated: It corresponds with the be-
ginning of Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari. In fact, Deleuze definitively
stops referring to the vocables of “being,”16 “One” and “simulacrum” starting in
Anti-Oedipus (1972); this is several years after The Logic of Sense (1969), which
already announced him turning towards a de-ontologization. Though definitive,
it is not, however, a radical change since the pragmatic of the disjunctive singu-
larities leads Deleuze to commemorate his first infatuation with Empiricism
(Empiricism and Subjectivity was published in 1953) by experimenting this time
with the unfounded contradictions of which he explains the different modes of
functioning. After 1972, the most determining element in Deleuzian thought is
no longer the theoretical attempt—aimed at making the multiplicities and uni-
vocity of being coincide—but rather becomes the ontologically sceptical exper-
imentation of various figures (schizophrenic desire, faux raccords and other
audio-visual anomalies in modern cinema, series of non-human becomings of
man, anorganic life, Bacon’s figures, Beckett’s triple language, Luca’s poetic
stuttering, the Outside more distant than any external world, etc.). The explana-
tions of all these “cases” are in no way monotonous (except perhaps, dare we
say, when we have not experienced the intensity of Deleuzian life). Rather, they
contribute to illustrating the dynamic of a life that is no longer founded on total-
ly harmonious, unifying and coherent laws. This does not mean that the rupture
with the question of the univocity of being leads the experimenter into the
whirlwind of universal disorder. Quite the opposite: The impersonal forces that
condition experience have a chaosmic value, and they produce a semi-ordered or
partially coherent universe, although order remains localized and randomly
composed.
Contrary to Badiou’s affirmation, Deleuze’s thinking after the shift is no
longer oriented on the science of being. It does not defend a federating univocal
being, but rather bears witness to the presence of singularities unconnected to
any unifying ontological enterprise. Therefore, we observe a crumbling of the
founding and superior discourse that tradition assimilated into ontology. The
philosophical creation of concepts, following the examples of art (music, paint-
ing, literature, etc.) and science (embryology, metallurgy, ethology, etc.), pro-
vides tools that explain how to experiment the localized and particular states of
intensive life. In this context, where theory is second to experience, Deleuze was
led to think the lack of utility and even the destructive character of his old onto-
logical attempt, which sought to gather all arguments into one (ontology). He
now argues that such a theoretical search may annihilate the experience of even-
emental singularities. As such, even Deleuze’s most “theoretical” books after the
shift (Foucault, The Fold, What is Philosophy?) actually push for a de-
ontologized experimentation of an impersonal life. It is worth recalling one of
later Deleuze’s suggestions: “putting the element of Having in place of that of
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 143

Being”17 and to replace the ontological theme with the disjunctive conjunction
(the verb “to be” by the conjunction “and”).18 These mutations lead one to aban-
don concerns for Being (a simulated being, pre-existing essence, meaning, pow-
er, etc.) in favour of a creative experiment in “manners of being” (styles, pos-
tures, gestures, capacities, powers, speeds, syntaxical creations, etc.). The ques-
tion is no longer: “What is it?,” “What does it mean?” or “What is the being
common to all simulacra?.” Rather, the question becomes: “How does it work?”
Elsewhere, in What is Philosophy?, the argument stays in this vein, explicitly
taking a position against the Universals (contemplation, reflection, communica-
tion): “The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but
must themselves be explained.”19 The univocal/universal being that so interested
the first Deleuze falls under this self-criticism that had, among other things,
found a first formulation in a “text of youth” in which Deleuze wrote: “Being,
the One and the Whole are the myth of a false philosophy totally impregnated by
theology.”20
Badiou underestimates the scope and radical nature of this self-criticism by
Deleuze-II, who distances himself not only from his former interests for the uni-
vocity of being, but also frees himself from the reference to the big “Whole.” By
interpreting the texts of the second Deleuze like a work of “totalization,”21 and
setting up a strict equivalency in Deleuze between the “One” and the “Whole,”22
Badiou implies that Deleuze accepts (the “One-Whole”) what he rejects (the
Universals). Again, what was true for Deleuze-I is not for Deleuze-II. Of course,
the first Deleuze explicitly articulated the coherence of the Whole with the uni-
versal being and unique becoming. However, after the turning point, this totality
is relieved of its duties and expulsed from the Deleuzian system in favour of de-
ontologized becoming and partial actions. Deleuze-II breaks with the notion of
the rational and interiorized ontological whole. Similar to the Being and the
One, the Whole disappears from Deleuzian investigation, thus making room for
an indetermination of the ensemble: “Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when
fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented
stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others.”23
The network of unconnected singularities is incompatible with the conception of
a gigantesque exteriority, unified by the idea of a huge intellectual and rational
entity.
Thus, we must take Badiou’s interpretation with a “grain of salt,” as it
founds the entire Deleuzian philosophy on the quest of the supreme One, univo-
cal Being and great Whole. This reduction overrules the orientation of Deleuzian
thought after 1972 and, as a consequence, it is false to pretend that Deleuze is,
“from beginning to end,” the far-off perpetrator of the Platonism of the One. But
it is not enough for Badiou to affirm that Deleuze’s uninterrupted Platonism is
incompatible with an ontology of the multiple. He must also argue that the
Deleuzian model of a “nonorganic vitality” is in opposition to his doctrine of the
“pure multiple.” It is curious, and somewhat contradictory, that Badiou makes
Deleuze into a Platonist when it is time to deconstruct his ontology, and into an
Aristotelian when presenting the “organicist” aspect of his thought.24 The math-
144 CHAPTER SIX

ematical paradigm of the Number must protect philosophy against transcend-

ence while the defence of the vitalist paradigm of the Animal, Aristotelian obe-
dience, would lead to it.25 This analysis again neglects to consider the scope of
the turning point in Deleuzian thought. Because although, influenced by his
reading of Bergson, the first Deleuze could be seduced by the omnipresence of a
creative Life, in the second Deleuze this seduction was dissipated. The signs of
this rupture with “animalism” are clearly perceptible when Deleuze affirms:
“Thus the universe is neither a great living being, nor is in itself an Animal.”26
And elsewhere: “We can dispense with Fechner’s or Conan Doyle’s splendid
hypothesis of a nervous system of the earth.”27 It is the very essence of
Deleuze’s late hypothesis of a “nonorganic life”28 to find its effectiveness in
immanence; to affect singularities specifically and not globally by partly desta-
bilizing the unity of organisms; to not constitute a perfectly organized unit; to be
fragmented; to produce random laws; and, to create effects that are both partial
and unpredictable. Badiou comes to synthesize the nature of a certain “non-
rapport” with Deleuze, but he neglects to consider that Deleuzian vitalism takes
two forms: On the one hand, it is associated with a doctrine of the univocity of
being (Deleuze-I), and on the other, it is characterized by a network of non-
totalizable singularities (Deleuze-II). Therefore, a de-hierarchized vitalism of the
second Deleuze does not correspond with a philosophy of transcendence.
The primary issue, as we mentioned above, is that of determining who of
these two people best conquers immanence. It may very well be that Badiou
formalizes the pure multiple, whereas the second Deleuze produces the vitalist
version. Deleuze disagreed with this formalization, as his correspondence
shows, in which he indicated that Badiou’s thought falls “back into transcend-
ence and into the equivocity of analogy.”29 If this is the case, the bone of conten-
tion between the two thinkers is perhaps less about Badiou’s ontology than it is
about his conception of the Event.

Event
It is remarkable that the primary work Badiou devotes to Deleuze essentially
focuses the discussion on the Being, while it would be just as expedient to centre
the debate on the Event. Badiou trues his aim in Logiques des mondes by devot-
ing a section to “L’événement selon Deleuze.”30 In this section, he reiterates his
criticism of univocity and vitalism that contaminates, in his opinion, all Deleuzi-
an philosophy, including his thought on the Event. Again, this interpretation
which may apply to “Deleuze-I” no longer applies to “Deleuze-II”—a distinc-
tion to which Badiou makes no reference.
Badiou finalized his theory of the event in Being and Event. The unpredicta-
ble event arises “at the edge of the void” with a capacity to radically change the
aspect of a situation. Badiou is careful to distinguish the Event from the catas-
trophe of human tragedies, such as murderous natural disasters or the Shoah.
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 145

The Event corresponds to a positive transformation or to a moment of collective

emancipation without depending on a grand outer order that prescribes the laws
of this “happening.” Among other things, nothing dictates how one reacts to the
Event. Among the events that occupied Badiou’s thought over the course of his
work, let us mention October 1917, the popular movements of May ‘68, the Ira-
nian Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, Soli-
darity in Poland, the Vienna school’s serialism, set theory and the resurrection of
Christ. As we can see, for Badiou the Event is of “macroscopic” order and fully
visible. Badiou argues that the Event does not belong to transcendence as long
as it is located on a site, he professes more interest in the consequences of the
Event than in its occurrence, and the fact that the Event is apparently subtracted
from the laws of presentation changes nothing since the Event is not on the mar-
gins of universal history or “beyond chronological time”: it is historically incar-
nated and its designation is generally agreed upon.
For Badiou, the Event as not alone or isolated; rather, it belongs to an en-
semble of events that arise in art, science, politics and love. It is the task of phi-
losophy to declare the local truth or the conceptual compossibility—for any giv-
en time—of this “fourfold” formed by the procedures of the evenemental truths
and it is the task of the subject to retrospectively intervening to witness its loyal-
ty to the Event. Another original feature of this theory of the Event lies in its
disconnection from ontology. Badiou’s vast undertaking of desuturation (philos-
ophy/ontology, philosophy/politics, philosophy/art, philosophy/love, philoso-
phy/science) also touches on Being’s relationship with the Event. Despite what
we have just mentioned regarding the Event’s macroscopic character, which
attributes to the Event a certain value of presence (although this presence is
made fragile by the fact that the Event is also confused with unpredictable con-
sequences), Badiou presents the Event as “excessive” (surnuméraire) regarding
ontology. Thus, if mathematics shows the royal avenue to Being, the Event cor-
responds to “what-is-not-being-qua-being.” In other words, axiomatized ontolo-
gy has nothing to say about the Event.31
As for Deleuze, he wants to revive the Stoics in The Logic of Sense by plac-
ing the Event in the time of Aion, in a temporality that is strangely similar to
eternity without immortalizing a permanent presence, as per onto-theology.
Deleuze proposes the following definition: “Unlimited Aion, the becoming
which divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the pre-
sent.”32 The Aion defies not only the “beyond time,” but also Chronos without,
however, coming back to the Husserlian “living present” of a transcendental
subjectivity and without calling on the “ekstatic” character of temporal dimen-
sions that orient the Heideggerian meaning of being. The Aion is the time of the
Event, and the Event is an impersonal fragment of destiny that autonomously
affects a singularity vis-à-vis “good will.” In Deleuze’s work, this destiny is,
however, no longer attached to a “large cosmic order” by rather has the look of a
“chaosmos” with paradoxical effects. Whether it belongs to a perfectly ordered
universe (the Stoics) or to a partially ordered universe (Deleuze), the Event is
irreducible to the present of its spatial-temporal effectuation in a state-of-affairs.
146 CHAPTER SIX

More precisely, the effectuation of the Event is doubled by an expressive coun-

ter-effectuation as its reality is “incorporeal” and independent from that in which
it is incarnated.33 The Event needs matter in order to manifest, but it also pos-
sesses an expressive, extra-physical and virtual dimension.
Deleuze rediscovers with the Stoics the singularly language-based nature of
the Event. He gives an example of the Event with the injury of Joë Bousquet
who was paralyzed during the First World War until his death more than thirty
years later. “My wound,” writes Bousquet, “existed before me; I was born to
embody it.”34 This event-wound is not simply a state-of-affairs that took place in
a chronologically determinable present. It is stripped of beginning and end,
while offering itself up as a particular fatality to which the person or thing that is
affected demonstrates himself or itself to be worthy of, as if it were an “eternal
truth.”35 Further, incorporeal events exceed the simple regime of apparitions and
disappearances to maintain among them on-going relationships by linking the
“quasi-causalities” stripped of all depth or meaning. They disturb common
sense, sensus communis. In keeping with the specific logic at work in Lewis
Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, quasi-causality is paradoxical. It engenders the
opposite effects and irrational connections; an Event can be the simultaneous
source or the quasi-causality of two other anti-nomic and unpredictable effects.36
Deleuze comes back to the question of the Event in The Fold. Leibniz and
the Baroque. In keeping with the turning point he gave to his thought, he re-
nounces the idea he defended in The Logic of Sense that: “Being is the unique
event in which all events communicate with one another.”37 It is no longer the
“simulated being” of the first Deleuze that is theorized, but rather the evenemen-
tal “manner of being” of a singularity and its languages-based expression that
are experienced. The rupture with the old ontology is complete and the capital
letter is shifted from Being to “Mannerism.”38 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
(along with Bréhier) used the expression “manner (or way) of being”39 without,
however, taking away from the de-ontologization of “Mannerism.” This is what
he accomplishes in The Fold where the Stoics, the Baroque that leads the fold to
infinity, and Whitehead’s process metaphysics are presented as offering the
three major answers to the question of the Event.40
Like all good and respectable theories of the Event, Badiou’s and Deleuze’s
theories distinguish the Event from the arena of the accident, current events,
opinion, the predictable, daily life, natural disasters and catastrophes. Repudiat-
ing this distinction would be a contradiction of terms. The two philosophers
agree on the basics: the Event escapes all determined law of apparition while
also being a determinant part of reality. But in terms of form, they seem to be
opposed.

From Badiou’s point of view:

• The Event is the result of randomness or a historical contingency;

• There is a void or a discontinuity between evenemental sequences;
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 147

• Ontology is silent in regard to the Event;

• A subject arises from the experience of loyalty to the evenemental
truth;
• Events belong in a problematic way to current events; and,
• A discredit is thrown on all the philosophies of language.

From Deleuze’s point of view:

• The Event is accompanied by fatum;

• There is a full production and a continual series of events;
• Being ensures communication between all events (for the first
Deleuze);
• The Event is an indication of a process of de-subjectivation;
• The expressivist counter-effectuation of the Event bears witness to its
virtual aspect; and,
• The Event maintains an essential rapport with grammar and syntax.

But there is an even more fundamental divergence that we brought up and would
like to come back to briefly. Although always surprising in their operations of
transformation of historical sequences, the events Badiou studied are obviously
visible and universally known. There is a consensus surrounding these Events (a
consensual aspect is, however, criticized on other occasions by this militant anti-
democrat). Who would dare to deny that the great revolutions took place? Of
course, most frequently, it is difficult to be loyal to the implications of the grand
plans for emancipation, to measure their scope or to position oneself at the gran-
deur of the novelties they promise. Nonetheless, this macroscopic conception of
the event re-injects some transcendence into immanence. Deleuze considered the
events to be not only singular, but also to manifest in an imperceptible manner.
The great historical movements may orient Deleuze’s thought (the three ages of
the Savages, the Barbarians and the Civilized Men in Anti-Oedipus, World War
II, that conditions the appearance of the time-image and societies of control,
etc.), but these elements of rupture correspond more with a “state of affairs”
rather than Events. On this point, Deleuze is closer to Nietzsche, for whom the
“noisy revolutions” and all that belongs to the public domain do no enter into the
definition of the Event. Badiou’s likening of his conception of the Event to Nie-
tzsche’s is not very convincing.41 On the contrary, Badiou’s manifestation of the
event always has a historical (political revolution, scientific invention, artistic
movement) or meta-corporal (love experience) character that gives it a kind of
universal veracity. For this reason, the concept of the event Badiou develops
seems to come under transcendence. Deleuze avoids this trap since the event as
he sees it is a singular “surface effect” incarnated not by universal history, but
by a body that is intensive, speaking, living and affected by the chaosmic forces.
148 CHAPTER SIX

Conclusion
Badiou’s interpretation has many merits. We must point out his admirable ca-
pacity to destroy the common image of Deleuze as a thinker of anarchic desire;
his rightful evocation of Deleuze’s ascetic and creative Stoicism as one key to
his work; his respect of Deleuze as a “pure metaphysician”; and, his exemplary
comparison between Deleuzian ontology and the Heideggerian question of be-
ing. These points of analysis indicate just as many future avenues for the exege-
sis of Deleuzian work. But one of the strangest things in Badiou’s interpretation
of Deleuze is his persistence to demonstrate the Deleuzian ontology, illustrate its
insufficiency and “monotony,” to liberate the pure multiple when Deleuze him-
self had seen the limitations to his ontological undertaking, which was at risk for
being confused with totalization. Deleuze took haste to neutralize this ambiguity
with a decisive gesture; he thought a plane of immanence intensified with pure
events or haecceities without essence or substance (an hour of the day, the blue
of the sky, a bird song, a life, a walk, etc.). No longer a being confused with his
simulacra, but a “Mannerism,” “manners of being” that are clearly distinct to
experience.
It is legitimate to insist, as Badiou does, on certain excesses of ontological
univocity in Deleuze; the affirmation of being as a unique event can lead to a
certain onto-theological confusion. However, we have attempted to show that
Badiou’s interpretation also presents two fundamental blind spots: its ignorance
of the Deleuzian turning point that works on the rupture with the molar Being-
One-Whole in favor of the molecular Having-Mannerism and its inability to
remain loyal to Deleuze’s immanent conception of the Event. In sum, Deleuze
neutralizes the risks associated with the thought of ontological univocity by re-
centering his philosophy on the singularity of the Event. Badiou attempts to
think the pure multiple in terms of ontology, but his philosophy would appear
unable, from a Deleuzean standpoint, to satisfy the real conditions of the imma-
nence of the Event.42

Notes
1. Alain Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction (Paris: François Maspero, 1975), 72.
2. Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction, 75.
3. François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée (Paris: La
Découverte, 2007), 433-434.
4. Alain Badiou, De l'idéologie (Paris: François Maspero, 1976), 8; Alain Badiou,
“Le flux et le parti (dans les marges de L'Anti-Œdipe),” in La Situation actuelle sur le
front de la philosophie, ed. Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus (Paris: François Maspero,
1977), 24-41; Alain Badiou, Théorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 236; Alain Badiou,
Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 16.
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 149

5. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minnesota:
Minnesota University Press, 1999), 44.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 151-152.
7. Later, Badiou mentions his “lesser interest” (moindre intérêt) in the collaborative
works between Deleuze and Guattari. See Alain Badiou, “Un, multiple, multiplicité(s),”
Multitudes 1 (2000): 210, note.
8. Alain Badiou, “Gilles Deleuze: Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque,” Annuaire philoso-
phique (1989): 161-184.
9. See for instance Éric Alliez, Arnaud Villani and José Gil, “Dossier
Badiou/Deleuze,” Futur antérieur 43 (April 1998): 49-84.
10. Alain Badiou, “Une lettre à Gilles (juillet 1994),” Libération (November 7,
1995): 36; “L'ontologie vitaliste de Deleuze,” in Alain Badiou, Court traité d'ontologie
transitoire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 61-72 (this text, with a new introduction, was published
as “De la vie comme nom de l'être” included in the special issue on “Gilles Deleuze.
Immanence et vie,” in Rue Descartes 20 (1998): 27-34); “Un, multiple, multiplicité(s),”
Multitudes 1 (2000), 195-211; “Deleuze, sur la ligne de front,” Magazine littéraire 406
(February 2002): 19-20 ; “L’événement selon Deleuze,” in Alain Badiou, Logiques des
mondes (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 403-410. In 2002, Deleuze’s book Francis Bacon: Logique
de la sensation was re-edited in a collection directed by Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin
called “L'Ordre philosophique” (Seuil). An enthusiastic preface by Alain Badiou and
Barbara Cassin was added to this new edition.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1994), 35 and 304.
12. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36.
13. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, Charles Stivale and Con-
stantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 179.
14. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 19.
15. Badiou, “Un, multiple, multiplicité(s),” 209, note (my translation).
16. Alain Badiou quotes a passage taken from one of Deleuze’ later texts where
Deleuze seems to agree with Heidegger’s surpassing of the Husserlian intentionality to-
wards being. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand and Paul Bove (London:
The Athlone Press, 1988), 110; quoted in Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 22.
However, this reference deals less with the movement towards being than the movement
(made by Heidegger, Foucault and Deleuze) that goes from the intentional subjectivity to
desubjectivation.
17. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 109. See also the topic “having a body”
disseminated in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25 and 98; Gilles Deleuze, Negotia-
tions, trans. Martin Joughlin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 44-45 and
elsewhere.
19. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 7.
20. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 279. This passage is sometimes presented, incor-
rectly, as a counter-argument to Badiou’s interpretation. The quotation is taken from a
1961 article included in The Logic of Sense and it remains partly exterior to the content of
150 CHAPTER SIX

the book. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze changed his mind (although not in a definitive
way) and he clearly defended an ontological position. If one views The Logic of Sense as
a work of transition, it is not because it defends some ontological and non-ontological
positions (The Logic of Sense clearly stands on the side of ontology), but rather because it
combines an ontology and a disjunctology. After the ontological episode of the 1960s
(Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense), the later Deleuze recast his very first
critique of the “Being-One-Whole” made in 1961.
21. See for instance Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 58.
22. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 62 and 97.
23. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 86.
24. Deleuze is presented by Badiou as an Aristotelian in “Gilles Deleuze: Le Pli.
Leibniz et le baroque,” 166; and as a Platonician in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 19,
25, 45 and 60.
25. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum,
2007), last note of the introduction (the only reference to Deleuze in this book); “Gilles
Deleuze: Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque,” 166; Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 2; Court
traité d'ontologie transitoire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 72.
26. Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, 9.
27. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 213.
28. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 411 and 498-503; Deleuze and
Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 182; Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 131; Gilles
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 39-41 and 104; and elsewhere.
29. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, 90.
30. Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 403-410.
31. Badiou, Being and Event, chap. 17 and 18.
32. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5.
33. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 151.
34. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 148.
35. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 146 and 149.
36. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, fourteenth series, 82-93.
37. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 180.
38. Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, 53. Deleuze writes “Maniérisme”
with a capital “M” in the original French version.
39. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5.
40. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, sixth series.
41. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), last paragraph of the conclusion.
42. A first version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of The Canadian
Society for Continental Philosophy, York University (Toronto, Canada), May 31, 2006.
This article was supported by a grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Council of
Canada.
 DELEUZE AND BADIOU ON BEING AND THE EVENT 151

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