Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Badious Letter To Deleuze PDF
Badious Letter To Deleuze PDF
I would like to resume, today, the parallel between you and Heidegger that I was
sketching in my last letter.
2) Being for you is not at at all a "question", and moreover you do not in any
way consecrate philosophy to "questioning", any more than to "debates", that
French parliamentary form of German "questioning".
The hostility to Plato. And, in a certain sense, for the same reason as for
Heidegger: Plato is the establishment of a régime of Transcendence.
The conviction that Nietzsche is an essential "turning point". You argue very
finely against Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. But at stake, for you as
much as for him, is a decisive question: how to give meaning to affirmation? And
this donation of meaning to affirmation (this "meaning of active force") is tied
to the critique of Plato. Because Plato extenuates active (or immanent) force in
the (transcendent) separation of the Idea.
5) What distances you from Plato is the conviction that the access to the real
must be thought as immanent (or creative) trial, and not as inscription, or
matheme. What distances you from Descartes is the conviction that this immanent
trial does not have its criterion in the clarified chain of reasons, but in a
descriptive finesse, of which Art is the veritable paradigm. What ties you to
Nietzsche is the conviction that the Multiple must be thought as duplicity of
Life (active and reactive forces), and not as inertia, or simple extension.
This is why the figure of Christ can serve you as a metaphor, as much for
Spinoza as for Bartleby the scrivener. Just as it is constantly sub-jacent to
the way in which Heidegger describes the "nostos", or the endurance of
Hölderlin. It's that your general logic of fluxes is like a version without
pathos of what Heidegger describes as the liberty of the Open.
Finally, the decision to think Being, not as simple unfolding, neutral, entirely
actual, with no depth, but as virtuality constantly traversed by actualisations;
the fact that these actualisations are like the populating of a cut (cut of the
plane of immanence for you, cut of beings for Heidegger); all that entails a
logic of reserved power, that I think is common, in this century, to Heidegger
and to you.