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Senselogic

December 19, 2020

Alain Badiou’s Interstitial Thought of Philosophy, Politics, and

Psychoanalysis – Cengiz Erdem

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The Emergence of New Truths and the Vicissitudes of Old Thoughts

Truth is neither only out there nor resides solely within. Truth is the effect of a conflict-event between
the subject and the world of objects. Diving into oneself from time to time may indeed be necessary
for touching the truth of being, but one also has to come back up to the surface from the mystical
depths and transmit the being of truth in such a way as to initiate a transformative intervention at the
level of percepts as well as affects.

Ultimately life is the wager, made on a body that has entered into appearing, that
one will faithfully entrust this body with a new temporality, keeping at a distance
the conservative drive (the ill-named ‘life’ instinct) as well as the mortifying drive
(the death instinct). Life is what gets the better of the drives. (Badiou, Logics of
Worlds 509)

In his essay entitled Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (19-26) as well as in the final part of Being and
Event and the last book of Logics of Worlds, Badiou investigates the relationship between science,
philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis in relation to the legacies of Plato, Descartes, and Lacan. In
these three texts by Badiou what’s at stake is the correlation of being-thinking/truth-event in
conjunction with the logic of appearance, the critique of phenomenology and the emergence of the
subject. Although Badiou calls thinking the non-dialectical unity of theory and practice, and compares
the act of thinking as it takes place in science, politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis, here I will limit
my rendering of his stance particularly to the interaction between politics and psychoanalysis, with
philosophy as the mediator in-between.

In psychoanalysis the goal is to think the singularity of the human subject confronted by language
and sexuality, hence there is a tension between the universal and the particular at work.
Psychoanalytic thinking searches for a new possibility of the subject suffering from symptoms and
the aim of the cure is to reduce suffering to a minimum. Psychoanalysis works towards the normal
functioning of the subjective structure. The subject’s accommodating its real is the aim, so that the
symptom of the real is displaced and the subject is re-accommodated in relation to its real. For
psychoanalysis the relation to the real is inscribed in the structure, but in politics the real is
subtracted from the state. While political action displaces the real itself and not only the symptom of
the real, psychoanalysis wants to think the difference of the sexes as the real. So Lacan can say that
“there is no sexual relation.” For psychoanalysis the real is negative, a source of scepticism. There is
always a conflict between the real life of individuals and the symbolic order of the state. In this sense
if psychoanalysis listens to politics it is exposed to scepticism (negative axiom), and if politics listens
to psychoanalysis it is exposed to dogmatism (affirmative axiom). Politics and psychoanalysis,
however, can encounter each other in a productive manner in and through philosophy. Being neither
an imaginary construction or empty symbol, truth can touch the real of the subject’s desire as well as
transcending the regime of opinions. Rather than being a correspondence between thought and
thing, for Heidegger truth is unveiling, for Althusser production, and for Badiou it is a process. As for
Lacan, truth is not adequation between language and thing but the “depositing of speech in the big
Other.” Precisely because thought has no direct access to the real, truth is the effect of a separation,
not a correspondence. Consequently, truth is nothing but an encounter with the real by way of which
the void is mediated, generating a rupture between the thought of the subject and the object of
thought.

At the end of this process truth appears as the disappearance of absolute knowledge; truth emerges
as absolute knowledge absolves itself. For Heidegger, truth is the structure of the forgetting of being,
whereas for Badiou truth emerges with the disappearance of the event which gives birth to it, the
event becomes the absent cause of truth, just as for Lacan what founds the truth is the big Other as a
void in symbolic knowledge, a result of the separation between thought and the Real…

The Difference Between Being and Existence

In his essay entitled Existence and Death as well as in Logics of Worlds, Badiou makes it explicit why
being and existence are not the same thing. According to Badiou existence is an ontic category, it is
being-there as a substantial object, or being-in-the-world as Heidegger would put it, whereas being
is an ontological category which does not require an earthly subsistence, it resides in the domain of
the subject without a substance.

It is this “Cartesian” motif of the subject as infinite-existence in and by freedom that

supports the famous Sartrean definition of consciousness, that is to say of
existence: “a being that is in its being the question of its being, insofar as this being
implies a being other than itself.” A definition about which a humorist once
remarked that it used the word “being” five times only to designate nothingness.
The immediate consequence of this definition is indeed that consciousness is not
what it is, and is what it is not. If existence is infinite freedom, it is the constant
putting back into question of its being, never identifying itself with the forms of
being that it takes on, and holding itself beyond these forms which are nothing but
its singular outside, or its transitory objectifications. (Badiou, Existence and Death,
63-73)

In Kierkegaard and Heidegger at the beginning there is anxiety which is a subjective experience of
negativity, but philosophy cannot continue ad infinitum at an individual level. Husserl’s époché
involves the suspension of any relation to objectivity, he, too, begins with pure being separated from
existence. The movement is from being to existence, from that which is not here to that which is
there. Husserl equates being and experience. In this case phenomenology turns out to be the idea
that we cannot go from being as experience to being as existence, or from subjective non-being to
objective being. When Husserl removes consciousness and intentionality from the scene he drifts
towards nihilism, which is the conviction that the experience of negativity cannot be interrupted, that
anxiety cannot be overcome, that suffering is inevitable as a condition of philosophical novelty, that
affirmation is impossible, that nothing other than experience exists. Badiou, however, affirms that
truths exist. His is a positive affirmation of existence, claiming that there is a distance between being
and existence which has to be traversed. The immortal subject of truth goes beyond the lived
experience, negative distance between being and existence is turned into a positive gap, a thinking of
negativity and not only an experience of it is at stake. Although Husserl’s thought is immanent it is still
a negative relation to infinity within finitude. A dialectical reading reveals that Husserly goes from
nothing to one and Badiou goes from void to infinity.

Badiou’s being is not a solid, organically self-integrated and homogenous domain of reality, but rather
inconsistent multiplicity. There is no ultimate being qua being, being is a non-totalisable multitude
stricken with tensions and antagonisms which initiate the event and make change possible. Being
introduces a split in the order of becoming, a rupture, a discontinuity, which is why Badiou has to
explicate the structure of being in and through set theory according to which the singular in-itself
doesn’t exist. It is at this point that the notion of universal singularity becomes an effect and a function
of the advent of a novel idea in the present.

According to Kant we cannot know the real of being but we can think it nevertheless. He identifies
the a priori in his Introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason, and in the way of a non-metaphysical
ontology introduces the notion of a priori synthesis. At the beginning Kant thinks that knowing the
distance between to be and to exist is impossible, but then he goes on to construct the knowledge of
this distance. The distinction Badiou makes between being and existence becomes clearer as it is
situated in relation to Kant in Logics of Worlds.

I have posed that existence is nothing other than the degree of self-identity of a
multiple-being, such as it is established by a transcendental indexing. With regard
to the multiple-being as thought in its being, it follows that its existence is
contingent, since it depends—as a measurable intensity—on the world where the
being, which is said to exist, appears. This contingency of existence is crucial for
Kant, because it intervenes as a determination of the transcendental operation
itself. This operation is effectively defined as ‘the application of the pure concepts of
the understanding to possible experience’. In my vocabulary—and obviously with no
reference to any ‘application’—this can be put as follows: the logical constitution of
pure appearing, the indexing of a pure multiple on a worldly transcendental. But,
just as with the object, Kant will immediately distinguish within this operation its
properly transcendental or a priori facet from its receptive or empirical one.
(Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 237)

An object is a being which appears in the world and is measured by its degree of existence. In Kant the
object is different from being, true being cannot be known as an object, pure being is always a
subjective experience. Kant distinguishes between the ontic and the ontological, but for Badiou this
difference has degrees. Pure materialism considers the being and the object to be the same thing.
There is no difference between being and its appearance in the world. The object is a subjective
creation for Kant, being as such is present in the object itself. For Badiou being as such cannot be
reduced to the object in the world but mathematics has access to pure being as pure multiplicity
although this pure multiplicity cannot be reduced to an object or a thing that exists. So Badiou can say
that death is being in the world with zero degree of existence and life is a process of disappearance in
the world. Living/Dying is a movement towards a minimal degree of existence. In an event we have
the appearing of being in the world. According to Marx, for instance, proletariat is the true being of
society and a revolution is the becoming visible of the truth of society. Identity of the object and the
thing requires revolutionary action to initiate a becoming equal of thing and object, to cause a change
of places in the hierarchy of being, object and thing, an effectuation of being in existence resulting in
an emergence of a new truth as a consequence of a fidelity to an event which changes the
coordinates of a given situation.

In what it would instead call an ideological conception of Life, democratic

materialism sees nothing but fanaticism and the death instinct. It is true that, if
there is nothing but bodies and languages, to live for an Idea necessarily implies the
arbitrary absolutization of one language, which bodies must comply with. Only the
material recognition of the ‘except that’ of truths allows us to declare, not that
bodies are submitted to the authority of a language, far from it, but that a new body
is the organization in the present of an unprecedented subjective life. I maintain
that the real experience of such a life, the comprehension of a theorem or the force
of an encounter, the contemplation of a drawing or the momentum of a meeting, is
irresistibly universal. This means that, for the form of incorporation that
corresponds to it, the advent of the Idea is the very opposite of a submission.
Depending on the type of truth that we are dealing with, it is joy, happiness,
pleasure or enthusiasm. (Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 511)

Badiou attributes four distinct affects corresponding to the faithful subjects of the four conditions of
philosophy: enthusiasm for the political subject, pleasure for the subject of art, happiness for the
subject of love, and joy for the scientific subject. These affects characterizing the individual generic
procedures are then supplemented with a universal process of four other affects which signal the
incorporation of a human animal into the process of becoming the subject of truth: terror, anxiety,
courage, and justice.

To oppose the value of courage and justice to the ‘Evil’ of anxiety and terror is to
succumb to mere opinion. All the 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, in the discipline of a Subject and
the construction of a truth. (Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 87)

The constitutive link which has come to be considered missing between the mental phenomena and
the physical entities is actually a non-relation rather than an absence of relation, for it is neither
transcendent nor immanent to the subject, but is rather the manifestation of phenomenal affectivity
supplemented with mathematical ontology intervening in the ordinary flow of things and thereby
initiating a rupture in time itself.

But the ontological break, whether mathematizing or vitalist, does not suffice. We
must also establish that the mode of appearing of truths is singular and that it plots
out subjective operations whose complexity is not even broached in the purely
ontological treatment of Being and Event. What the 1988 book did at the level of
pure being—determining the ontological type of truths and the abstract form of the
subject that activates them—this book (Logics of Worlds) aims to do at the level of
being-there, or of appearing, or of worlds. (Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 8)

An event is that which causes affection which creates the possibility of a new truth. Being a rupture in
becoming, the event can only be realised retroactively. The process of a truth is necessary for the
recognition of an event as an event. Situation is a pure multiplicity which is turned into a cause by way
of which a fidelity to truth is actualised, thereby turning the pure multiplicity into a generic
multiplicity. Badiou passes from theory of sets (Being and Event) to theory of categories (Logics of
Worlds). Positive affirmation of a new intensity of existence, a qualitative difference signifies the
passage from ontology of being to existential intensity by way of a fidelity to an event.

As the degree of the subject’s intensity of existence increases, so does its pain and anxiety in the face
of death. This causes hopelessness and despair which may or may not lead to a total devastation of
the project of inverting and putting into the spotlight the void at the centre of the subject. Heidegger
repeatedly puts all this down in Being and Time when he says that “being-towards-death is angst.”
One cure for expelling anxiety has been to believe in God, any other metaphysical construct, or in
some cases it has even taken the form of a materialist system of thought; in all these cases, however,
an escape is seen as a solution when in fact it is the problem itself. For our concerns, an escapist
attitude striving to go beyond that which is here and now does not work at all, since what we are
looking for is a way of learning to make use of the reality of the death drive as an interior exteriority
constitutive of the subject as a creatively generative agent of change at present, in the time of the
living and the dead at once, that is. The Lacanian definition of the subject referred to by Badiou
towards the very end of Being and Event sums it all up: “I am not, there where I am the plaything of
my thought; I think of what I am, there where I do not think I am thinking.” (Lacan quoted in
Badiou, Being and Event, 431)

Badiou’s Materialist Dialectic

Badiou’s project aims at separating politics and history. His critique of Marx and Engels, for instance,
focuses precisely on the subjection of politics to history under the name of historical materialism. The
anti-historicist stance of Badiou develops and gains strength as his thought proceeds. Already a
major concern in Theory of the Subject, the emancipation of political activity from the constraints of
historicity gains new significance in Logics of Worlds.

In his Theory of the Subject, Badiou clarifies the difference between Kant and Hegel. Here Kant is
defined as he who stands for objective metaphysical idealism.

Being-in-itself for Kant is the placed inexistent from which it follows that it
possesses force of law for the transcendental subject. The ‘synthetic a priori’
judgement names his topological ability of generating the new according to a
trajectory in which the real exteriority, even though it cannot be traversed,
nonetheless imposes from afar upon the subjective interior the strangeness of a
production on itself. (Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 118-9)

And here is why Hegel stands for dialectical idealism according to Badiou.

Hegel’s path, in position 3, declares that the interior produces its own exteriority. It
is an expansive topology, in which the passing outside-of-itself constitutes the
whole act of a place. We could say that all Hegelian sets are open, were it not
necessary, in order to posit their malleable frontier, to close the whole once again
and to program from very far the transgressive opening as return-to-itself, so that
the local exteriorization is never anything but the effectuation of a global
interiorization. (Badiou, Theory of the Subject, 119)

Akin to Hegel, Badiou also begins with nothing but moves on to construct the non-given Real by using
mathematics, set-theory to be more precise, as the ground of his ontology. It is important to note here
that when it comes to the relationship between thought and being, Badiou is closer to Hegel than to
Kant who begins with something non-given rather than nothing, that being the synthetic a priori.
Hegel and Badiou agree on the identity of being and thought, whereas Kant begins with their unity
and then splits them in two. That said, Badiou clearly states in what sense he disagrees with Kant and
Hegel in his Logics of Worlds.

Kant is without doubt the creator in philosophy of the notion of object. Broadly
speaking, he calls ‘object’ that which represents a unity of representation in
experience. It is clear then that the word ‘object’ designates the local outcome of the
confrontation between receptivity (‘something’ is given to me in intuition) and
constituent spontaneity (I structure this given by means of subjective operators
with a universal value, which together make up the transcendental). In my own
conception, there is neither reception nor constitution, because the transcendental
—no more and no less than the pure multiple—is an intrinsic determination of being,
which I call appearing, or being-there. One could then think that the comparison
with Kant is out of place, and that there is only a homonymy in our respective uses
of the word ‘object’. (Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 231)

With the idea of synthetic a priori Kant proclaims that nothing is given, that is, there is nothing at the
pure beginning, the beginning before the unity of thought and being. Thought-Being begins taking its
course by way of a primary synthesis of the sensations situated in the forms of sensibility known as
time and space. Understanding is thereby born out of the non-given Real manifesting a “manifold of
intuition” thanks to the work of Transcendental Imagination which situates the subject’s encounter
with the object in time and space.

Now, if we keep in mind that Hegel is the philosopher of infinity and Heidegger the philosopher of
finitude, we can understand why Kant has come to be playing the role of vanishing mediator between
the two. The dialectical mode of thinking embodied by the Kantian edifice establishes a triplicity, a
triadic structure in motion, which is constitutive of Kant’s position according to which time is
the synthetic a priori par excellence. It exists before the subject is embodied by it, but this
embodiment itself is the only way in which time becomes constitutive of the finite subject as driven by
the idea of infinity. Kant calls this idea of infinity “the noumenal” which we can think but cannot know.
The noumenal is precisely the regulative idea which is constituted by the subject in such a way as to
situate itself as external to it. In this scenario, reason reaches the edge of madness and recoils in
anxiety in the face of the actual existence of infinity. What Hegel does is to explicate the way in which
infinity as an external obstacle becomes an internal possibility. By way of situating infinitude within
finitude itself and inversely, Hegel shows that Kant’s attempt at overcoming the split between the
subject and object is unnecessary since that split is internal to both the subject and the object rather
than being between them. For Hegel the split is not between something and something else but
rather within something itself. The void is internalized and nothing is situated within something itself.
Nothing still remains but only as the void within that which is. Badiou neatly configures the reversal
of dialectical materialism and the inversion of Hegel’s dialectical idealism simultaneously at work in
and through his materialist dialectic.

At the current conjuncture we don’t know if it is still worth mentioning that Badiou does not propose a
full blown return to Kant and Hegel, but rather a reversal of the dialectical process in such a way that
affirmation comes before negation within the dialectical process itself. His thought signifies not a
total negation of the dialectical correlation of thought and being but its partial affirmation. Badiou’s
thought is without the affective and qualitative dimension of being and within the logical and
quantitative dimension of being as he puts it in The Subject of Art.

There are two main philosophical targets of Badiou in The Subject of Art:

Those who identify the body and the subject, in which case creativity can only take the form of
experimentation with the limits of the body, an experience of the finitude and complete unity of the
body. Death being the limit of the body, a subject becomes nothing but an experimentation with death
in life driven by enjoyment.
Those who claim that the subject can be separated from its body. This is experience of life in death, it
is a sacrificial mode of being.

The conflict, therefore, is between enjoyment and sacrifice, or between living for nothing and dying
for nothing.

Badiou considers suffering to be a part of the process of a procedure of the production of a truth.
Suffering may or may not be the part of this process, that’s beside the point, for suffering cannot even
be an object of theoretical meditation. Badiou’s point is that an indifference to suffering is required in
order to think beyond the affective qualities of temporal existence.

Badiou’s enterprise as a whole aims at a new conceptualisation of the subjective body and thereby a
new subjective mind within and without the capitalist axiomatics at the same time. In both cases the
law of the market as the law of finitude based on the exploitation of mortality must be overcome for
the sustenance of the conditions for the possibility of transforming the human-animal-machine into
the immortal subject beyond the life-death-drives.

Reference Matter

Badiou, A. Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009)

Badiou, A. “Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,” trans. Raphael Comprone and Marcus    Coelen in
Umbr(a): One, No. 1 (1996), pp. 19-26

Badiou, A. Existence and Death, trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Discourse, 24.1

(Detroit/Michigan: Wayne State University Press, Winter 2002), pp. 63–73

Badiou, A. The Subject of Art, transcript by Lydia Kerr. The Symptom, Issue 6, Spring
2005. http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html

Badiou, A. Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005)

Badiou, A. The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)

Badiou, A. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005)

Badiou, A. Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009)

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Cengiz Erdem
Received his master's and doctoral degrees from The University of East Anglia in England,
Norwich. He specializes in culture and communication, creative writing and critical theory,
cinema, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has written many articles and is the author of
five books...
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Kültür ve iletişim, eleştirel teori, edebiyat ve yaratıcı yazarlık
alanlarında uzmanlaşmış, yüksek lisans ve doktorasını İngiltere’de tamamlamıştır. Felsefe,
iletişim, sinema, psikanaliz ve edebiyat alanlarında yazdığı pek çok makalenin yanı sıra
yayımlanmış beş kitabı vardır... View all posts by Cengiz Erdem

 Alain Badiou, Capitalism, Cengiz Erdem, Cultural and Critical Theory, Hegel, Heidegger, Infinite Indefinites, Kant,
Lacan, Philosophy, Plato, Politics, Psychoanalysis, Writings in English
 Alain Badiou, Cengiz Erdem, descartes, Jacques Lacan, Metapolitics, Philosophy, Plato, Politics, Psychoanalysis
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