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Badiou and His Interlocutors
 Also available from Bloomsbury

Happiness, Alain Badiou

Conditions, Alain Badiou
Being and Event, Alain Badiou
Badiou and Indifferent Being, William Watkin
Badiou and His Interlocutors

Lectures, Interviews and Responses

Edited by
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii

Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down A.J. Bartlett and

Justin Clemens 1

Part One Lectures

1 In Search of the Lost Real Alain Badiou 7

2 Cinema and Philosophy Alain Badiou17

3 The Common Preoccupation of Art and Philosophy Alain Badiou31

Part Two Presentations

4 Badiou’s Concept of History Knox Peden 41

5 Deleuze’s Badiou Jon Roffe55

6 Mathematics in the Bedroom: Sex, the Signifier and the

Smallest Whole Number Sigi Jöttkandt73

7 From Prohibition to Affirmation: On Challenges and

Possibilities of a Badiouian Philosophy of Art Ali Alizadeh89

8 Woman’s Adventures with/in the Universal Louise Burchill105

9 An Inessential Art?: Positioning Cinema in Alain Badiou’s

Philosophy Alex Ling127

Part Three Essays

10 Subjected to Formalization: Formalization and Method in the

Philosophy of Alain Badiou John Cleary 143

11 Everything Must Become Nothing (and Vice Versa): Love and

Abstraction in Badiou and Lacan Bryan Cooke159
vi Contents

12 Where Thought Is Not Campbell Jones177

13 The Priority of Conditions: On the Relationship between

Mathematics and Poetry in Being and Event Robert Boncardo
and Christian R. Gelder193

Part Four Interviews with Alain Badiou

14 Love, the Revolution – and Alain Badiou 211

15 ‘The Movement of Emancipation’219

Part Five Encomium

16 The Beginner Lia Hills239

Notes 243
Bibliography 263
Contributors 269
Index 271
 Acknowledgements

This collection is the outcome of Alain Badiou’s visit to the Antipodes, Australia
and New Zealand, in November 2014. The visit was organized and funded in
the first instance by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, a not-
for-profit, non-university educational collective, committed to philosophical
thought and the means of its transmission. The MSCP, through the offices of
the convenor James Garrett and treasurer Bryan Cooke, having stumped up
the money for airfares, hotels, dinners, room hire, catering and so on, for the
initial Melbourne leg of the journey, also helped to facilitate Badiou’s visit to
Auckland University, the University of New South Wales and Western Sydney
University. The commitment of several individuals within discrete faculties in
these Universities made this co-operation possible: Sigi Jottkandt and William
Balfour at University of NSW, Alex Ling at Western Sydney University and
Campbell Jones and Jai-Bentley Payne at the University of Auckland. It is
to their credit that funding was made available to support these visits and,
moreover, that these visits – which included public lectures, master-classes,
interviews, and many casual and ongoing conversations – were extremely well
attended. The important contribution of several comrades deserves special
mention: Sunday Cullip-Bartlett, Angela Cullip, Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey,
Lauren Bliss, Kim Mereine, Sam Lindsay, Helen Johnson and Trades Hall
in Melbourne. At Bloomsbury, we’d like to thank Liza Thompson and
Frankie Mace. We would also like to thank Joe Gelonesi and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation for permission to use a transcription of Badiou’s
interview with them. Finally, this book has been supported by a Faculty of
Arts Publication Subsidy Scheme from The University of Melbourne, as well
as by the School of Culture and Communication.
 Abbreviations

AP The Age of the Poets

BE Being and Event
C Conditions
CMA Cinema
CH The Communist Hypothesis
CM The Concept of Model
D Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
E Ethics, An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
HB Handbook of Inaesthetics
IA The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts
IPL In Praise of Love
IT Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy
JLPP Jacques Lacan, passé présent
LM Logiques des mondes
LW Logics of Worlds
M Metapolitics
MP Manifesto for Philosophy
MT Mathematics of the Transcendental
NN Number and Numbers
P Polemics
PP Pocket Pantheon
PPP Petit panthéon portatif
PE Philosophy and the Event
PR Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters
RRP À la recherche du réel perdu
SMP Second Manifesto for Philosophy
SP Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
TC The Century
TS Theory of the Subject
TW Theoretical Writings
WA Wittgenstein’s Anti-philosophy
 Introduction:
The World Turned Upside Down
A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens

But now the salmon-fishers moist

Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go!
Let’s in: for the dark hemisphere
Does now like one of them appear.
– Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House

Badiou and His Interlocutors: Lectures Interviews and Responses is a unique

collection in a couple of ways. First, it brings together in a single volume
lectures and interviews given by Alain Badiou while in the Antipodes:1 –
scholarly and critical responses by attentive scholars in the field, such as Knox
Peden, Sigi Jottkandt, Louise Burchill, Ali Alizadeh, Jon Roffe and Alex Ling,
originally delivered at a conference in Melbourne, attended by Badiou; and
original essays commissioned to address specific concepts and categories
discussed by Badiou on this trip but specific to his work more generally. Three
were authored by the young Australian scholars, Bryan Cooke, John Cleary,
Christian Gelder and Robert Boncardo, whose engagement with Badiou’s
work, already insightful, will undoubtedly be ongoing; rounding out this final
section is an essay by the New Zealand scholar Campbell Jones, addressing the
‘true’ nature of Badiou’s thought. The volume concludes with an encomium to
the Idea of the visit by the New Zealand-born writer Lia Hills.
The second aspect of the unicity of the collection is its marking a ‘site’,
something remarked by Badiou when he wondered out loud at the depth
and breadth of the engagement with his work ‘down under’ as he put it,
and pronounced that, with regard to his oeuvre, there was clearly an ‘école
2 Badiou and His Interlocutors

antipodean’. But we must be careful here for the last thing that is appropriate
to Badiou’s work is some form of parochialism, some essentialization of
identity. Indeed, this very reference to specificity, the antipodes, garnered
understandable resistance from the publisher, Bloomsbury, when we
originally proposed the title ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’. They wondered if such
a title reference would make the volume seem too local, too parochial – as
if the collection were about the antipodes as such. So, conscious always of
Plato’s note in the Cratylus that ‘we philosophers begin not with words but
with things’, we agreed to change names, conscious also that in the world
of marketing a parochial globalization makes all the running. Of course,
it is clearly the case that this is a local intervention into the oeuvre of the
philosopher Alain Badiou – no collection can never not be. But the work of
a philosopher – including that which conditions its possibility, that which it
is tasked to think, and the various means of its transmission and reception –
is itself anything but parochial or reducible to nationalist, culturalist,
geographical or natural determinations. Clearly, all or any of these have their
affects but to suppose an empirically indexed reduction – an identity, if you
will – is to suppose already that philosophy does not exist, that, finally, it
is a matter of localized opinion, of ‘dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s’ as
Deleuze and Guattari ironized. Nowhere in this volume will the reader find
any such reduction nor any gesture towards such parochialism, let alone to
nationalism or identity as conceptual tropes. Rather, precisely because of
the philosophy under consideration and transmission – that it is philosophy
at stake – any local or singular intervention is already inscribed within the
universality proper to any philosophical trajectory: that which it names,
addresses and is oriented by. This volume is clearly an intervention at a site,
local and singular insofar as it is the matter of this place and these scholars
who happen to inhabit this place – which is not ours by definition – but any
such intervention, any such thought at all is conditioned absolutely by the
necessary universality of its address, that it can and must be the thought of
all. To speak philosophically, to speak with and after Badiou, is to suppose
that the addressee of the intervention, always local because always sited, is
anyone at all, here and now, near or far, present and future.
Such a (mis)titling, ‘Badiou in the Antipodes’ would have then at once
reflected a simple fact – Badiou was here! – and a comic turn, making
use of a sort of antiquated phraseology itself derived from a idealizing
exoticism concerning the world down under. Badiou himself makes play
with this antiquation when he tells his New Zealand audience that, from the
perspective of Europeans even today, New Zealand is ‘a paradise’. Many in the
audience begged to put him right on that score. Some of us were also bound
to recall the indelible sarcasm of the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul
 Introduction: The World Turned Upside Down 3

Keating, who described the antipodes (Australia specifically) as being at ‘the

arse-hole end of the world’.2
Yet such a non-title also reflects the less banal or comic side of this
antiquated exoticism, gesturing towards the manifest and brutal colonial
history of these places for which the notion of an exotic unknown served
ideological cover, and which continues to haunt the existential imaginary of
both Australia and New Zealand. It is probably the case that Australia, with
its history of the legal, determinative fiction terra nullius at its heart – now
perversely translated into the excised camps filled with extraordinary ‘others’,
thus repeating as some sort of return of the repressed the colonial history
of the original prison camp3 – suffers from it more profoundly than New
Zealand, who can at least cite the Treaty of Waitangi as referential for it as
political entity.
This ‘void’ title also reflects, for those who live here, as partly noted,
the view of ‘us’ by ‘those’ who live in the places of supposed sophistication
and civilization (the use of ‘supposed’ here being entirely symptomatic!), as
somehow backward or behind, ‘natural’ in some sense, colonial in outlook,
insular and perhaps wild – certainly not the place one turns to for lessons in
culture or thought (even if it can be admitted it throws up the odd individual).
Of course this is fantastical. Any thought for the antipodes by Europeans or
Americans (seemingly the only referents that matter) must today interrupt
this vision, but the reflexive vision is no less real for all that. Symptomatically,
the view of this view is both long and truly held and is thus fantasized and
fetishized by Antipodeans themselves. It is fantasied in the sense that we
believe anyone at all really cares about what happens in the antipodes – in
general, they do not, and thus the Antipodean’s desire for recognition takes
this perverted form. It is a fetishized view in the antipodes because as much
as it stems from a mourned-over lack (of recognition), it also conditions our
very identity. That we are not like them – despite our desire to be just like
them – is the structural fetish of modern (white) Antipodean identity. As the
inverts of Europe, the Antipodean is at once its lack and its fulfilment.
The lacking title also, finally, is philosophical. We know that in the great
dialogues of Plato, Socrates, the great Platonic creation, is singled out by the
Athenian city. He is, as one of his primary accusers Meletus says – under
Socratic questioning, bien sûr – the only figure among the entirety of the
citizenry who does not educate. All good Athenian sophisticates, being just
that, the accusers say, namely, educators. Moreover, we must take this to be
the position of the city itself as determined by the votes at the trial. Now
Plato, in a move of great genius, takes this determination or even diagnosis
of abnormal corruption and essentially inverts it under the form and force
of a retrial. The entirety of the dialogues is a retrial of the singularity of
4 Badiou and His Interlocutors

Socrates such that in fact this abnormal singularity is seen to be the very
subjective form of the universal which Plato’s avatars will call the ‘just city’ –
nowhere visible but not impossible. Hence, the form of the enquiry, which
is the dialogues, and for which the dialogues act as body – ‘corpus’ –, the
new living and eternal body of the Socratic idea, is to take up this singularity
as the means of a return to the city as it is, to be transformed. The figure of
abnormal singularity is the means of an entirely new orientation to all the
extant knowledge of the city, to everything that conditions that knowledge
and which is also the means of its transmission.
In other words, from within the world of the city, there is an ‘other’
orientation to it and this other orientation, affirmed as such, confirmed as the
mode of an enquiry, itself the means of the orientation, opens up the city of
knowledge to what has been hitherto impossible for it to know. For Plato, this
generic construction is precisely the very truth of this city: that it is not what
he calls sophistic Athens, the world or knowledge of Athens as it exists, but
the not-impossible Republic in which the thought of justice, the true concern
of the philosopher, is its real and manifest orientation. The argument is that
if the Socratic figure could be seen to be there in the city of Athens, even if
marked as anomalous there to the knowledge of that city, then this anomaly,
being at all times what seeks after the truth of this city, could be, indeed must
be, enquired into and if enquired into, then, step by step, demonstrated to be
for all. Hence for Plato, the singularity of Socrates is precisely his universality
tout court. Socrates is what is in Athens more than it knows, to paraphrase
Jacques Lacan; his intervention on the global scene of Athenian knowledge at
its site is the universal truth of its knowledge, which it is not. Plato stages this
retrial of Socrates as singular-universal across the entirety of the dialogues.
Let’s end this introduction to what is and is not Badiou in the Antipodes by
citing one example from Plato of this singular intervention on the global scene,
wherein the universality of what is true is at stake and where it is summed up
in decided and absolute terms by a cosmopolitan and sophisticated man of
the city, a man of knowledge, ‘of sound education’ who for all his ‘cleverness
has failed to grasp the truth’. ‘You have not observed’, Socrates continues,
‘how great a part geometric equality plays in heaven and earth, and because
you neglect the study of geometry you preach the doctrine of unfair shares’
(Grg. 508a). To which Callicles responds: ‘by the gods Socrates… if you are
in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human
life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be
the opposite of what we should do?’ (Grg. 481c). The world upside down, the
injunction not to continue doing the opposite of what we should, a French
philosopher down under.
Part One

Lectures
 1

In Search of the Lost Real

Alain Badiou

I am very glad to be here with you. You know in France, everybody says
that New Zealand is a paradise. So, for a philosopher it is something very
interesting, to go to a paradise. Naturally, maybe it is the paradise lost. Of
course, you can tell me if it is really a paradise. But this is the legend of New
Zealand, everywhere in the world, and particularly in my country. So, it is a
real joy for me to speak to you, and to be with you in this country. It is my first
time to New Zealand, and it’s always intimidating, the first time you go to a
place and when the place is a paradise, it’s really intimidating.
The second point is that, as very often, I must speak in English. The
question of English is for me a difficult question, as very often for the French.
I want to tell you a story about my English. Some years ago I was in New
York; it’s not a paradise, it’s very different. I was in New York and I had to
give a talk, and to excuse my English I said ‘excuse me, but I must speak in
English, but my English is something between French and Spanish’, and after
that I spoke my English, which in my opinion is somewhere between French
and Spanish. At the end of the talk, a young man comes and says to me, ‘Oh
your English is not at all between French and Spanish, not at all’. I was very
glad, maybe my English is near English, but he continued ‘no, in my opinion
it is much more near German’. I was not glad for very long. So, please excuse
that kind of thought; even in paradise today, we must speak English. So, it’s a
question, maybe God himself speaks English today?
I want to say some words to you today, about the real, the question of
the real. What is (if I can say something like that) really real? And it’s a very
important question, because in the world, which is our world today, even
here, the real is generally confused with economy. The true real of the world
is economy. The knowledge of the real has been reduced, progressively, to
economics. It is economics that knows all the realities, and it is economics
that dictates, literally, the obligations of politics. It seems that in the world
as it is, the economic discourse presents itself as the guardian of the real.
And so long as the laws of the world, of capitalism, are what they are, we will
be submitted to the economic discourse. It is really the economic discourse
8 Badiou and His Interlocutors

which is today our master. In the world, economics as the discourse of the
real has never done anything but confirm the violent nature of this so-called
real, because in the end, we must obey. We must obey the real as it is said by
economics.
Paradoxically, today as you know, economy is in some sense of a
pathological nature. We have crisis, we have devastation; we have bad
consequences for millions of people. Today, the economists themselves
are in some sense totally confused. And paradoxically, the dominance of
the intimidation through the economic real is not only not reduced, but
is actually increased. The economists and their sponsors reign even more
supreme in the face of the disaster that they were unable to forecast.
There is an extremely interesting lesson in all that. Economics as such
in no way teaches how we might escape from that sort of oppressive
conception of the real, the real as something we must obey. This is very
important, because the question of the real is clearly also the question of what
relationship human activity, intellectual as well as practical, has with the real,
and in particular whether the real functions as an imperative of submission
or whether it can, or could, function as an imperative open to the possibility
of human emancipation. Let us say that the philosophical question of the real
– so my question – is always, and perhaps above all the question of whether
given a discourse according to which the real is constraining, we can or
cannot change the world in such a way that a previously invisible opening
would appear, through which we might escape this particular constraint. Not
deny that there is some real, and some constraint, but escape this necessity of
submission to the economic real.
So the question is how we can escape the submission to the real which
is ‘economy’. There is a relationship here with my beloved Plato. I think
Plato would be very happy to discover New Zealand, because of the search
for a country to establish the true politics. He knew that in Greece it was
impossible, and after Plato in the Roman Empire it was impossible, and today
probably it is impossible, but maybe, says Plato, there exists some country we
don’t know where it is, but where it is possible to establish justice. To create
a new politics, a new form of the state, and maybe Plato, in knowing the
legend of New Zealand, that New Zealand is a paradise, would come to the
conclusion that the true Republic can be established here.
But, you know, the idea of the way out, the way out of obedience, the way
out of oppression, and to find a piece of emancipation is an idea, fundamental
to Plato, that you find in the famous allegory of the cave. The allegory of the
cave depicts a world closed on a figure that is a false figure. It’s a figure of some
lies that appears to everyone who is trapped in the cave as a figure of what can
only exist. Maybe that is our world situation; maybe we live in the cave, in
 In Search of the Lost Real 9

the cave of economy. Maybe the hegemony of the economic constraint may
ultimately only be pure appearance, and not the true real. Maybe economics
is our cave, our modern cave. What Plato is teaching us, is that in order to
know whether a world is under the rule of appearance and not under the law
of the real, you have to get out of the cave. You have to escape from the place
that, that semblance, that false world organizes, and today in the form of the
discourse of constraint, which is in modernity the discourse of economics.
There is something very instructive about this, namely the function of
scandal in our world. Maybe there is no scandal in New Zealand? If it is
a paradise. But I can say to you that in Europe, there exist many scandals,
practically one a day. But there is a philosophical signification of the scandal.
Scandal is always the revelation of a small bit of the real. One day we learn,
via our preferred media, that somebody, so-and-so, went to so-and-so’s
house and emerged with a briefcase full of cash. We are of the overwhelming
impression that we are dealing with something more really real than what all
these people usually talk about. Generally, they are saying ‘all is good with
progress, we pay our debts’ and so on. But one day, you learn that some of
these politicians, maybe even your president sometimes, in the night, goes
to receive cash for propaganda for his party. When that is all known, it’s a
scandal. And you know the idea is that when we have the scandal, there is
something real. There is a point of the real you see across the scandal, a small
part of the real, which generally is obscured and invisible. But, in fact, the
point is that the scandal is not the revelation of the real of our society, but
a sort of exception to the law of the world, which is finally a sort of excuse.
Because at the end, what is said is that this person is really scandalous, but
everybody is honest, the system is honest but you have bad exceptions which
are of a scandalous nature. And so the scandal is the idea, that when we touch
the real, it’s in the form of an exception, and paradoxically it is the exception
which is the real of the real, and not the general and structural situation. But
it happens that in that sort of situation that the scandal is always, particularly,
a scandal of corruption. So the idea is that, when you are in a scandalous
revelation you know that maybe some corruption exists. But it’s strange that
in our society it will be only when you have a scandal, and a scandalous
situation, that there is a revelation that something is corrupted, something
is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark. But maybe something is rotten in our
world after all. Maybe corruption is not a scandalous exception, but maybe
corruption is the law of the world itself, as it is.
In a society that openly, explicitly, and it must be said largely consensually,
accepts that profit is the only means capable of driving the community, it
is fair to say the corruption is plainly the name of the game itself, and not
an exception. Since, if making the most money possible is the norm, this is
10 Badiou and His Interlocutors

the definition of profit, the most money possible is the norm, of enterprise,
and finally of all society, it will be difficult to dispute the fact that everything
goes in the direction of corruption. Corruption, in some sense, is precisely
the real of our capitalistic world. And so the scandal is something which is
useful to the system because it presents, as an exception, the rule itself. And
when we are terrified by the scandal we are in fact blind to the real. So the
scandal, it is very interesting, the scandal is the use of a small bit of the real,
as an exception to the real itself, and so the scandal is the use of a little piece
of corruption to escape to the idea, the reasonable idea, that corruption is
everywhere.
All that to say, concerning the question of the real, that it’s not from the
perspective of the primacy of economics as scientific knowledge that we can
have free access to the question of the real. But it’s not the sensible experience
of the scandalous exception which can correct the scientific illusion. In some
sense, between the scandalous experience and the illusion, the scientific
illusion of the economist, is the same play, it’s the same game. It’s a game
where finally the real itself is obscure. So concerning the real, we must
begin not by scientific economic knowledge, and we must not begin by the
scandalous exception. So what is the beginning?
You know the question of the beginning is probably the most important
question in philosophy. We are very often in philosophy in a search for the
beginning. But how you can begin the search for the beginning is a delicate
question. The philosopher is a man or woman, in some sense, who begins to
begin. Something like that. It’s because philosophy is the idea to go beyond
opinions, so we cannot begin by opinions, by common opinions, and we
cannot begin by the real itself because we are in search of the real. So the real
is not here at the beginning, so the question of the beginning is very difficult.
I’ll just say, negatively, that in our world today we cannot begin the search
for the real of this world, by either the discourse of economy, which is in fact
not the science of the real, but the science of obedience to the real, nor by the
scandalous exception which finally is a piece of propaganda.
So my choice to begin for you is provisionally, a definition of the real,
an obscure definition of the real. When we begin by something obscure,
you have the chance to clarify. If you begin by something clear, the job is
finished. It’s a definition of one of my masters, the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan was straight to the point, and immediately
proposed a definition of the Real, so it’s a real beginning. The definition of
the Real, a bit of a devious one of course, is as follows: the Real is the impasse
of formalization. So it’s really obscure, as a beginning.
At this point, what can we do with this obscure sentence: the Real is the
impasse of formalization? I don’t want to begin by the pure concept. I shall
 In Search of the Lost Real 11

have to begin with an example, a clear example of the definition of Lacan. This
example will be basic arithmetic, arithmetic for children. When you count,
when you multiply or add, which is a common practice, two and two, you
have four, and so on. Let us agree, that when you count you are, practically
speaking, doing arithmetical formalization, in the form of numbers and in
the rules of calculation. Formalization which is very simple, formalization
for children. Your calculation is always finite: note this point, which is very
important in my clarification. So any calculation ends with what is called
its result. You do multiplication between two numbers, you have the result
which is also a number, and your calculation is finished. All that is finite,
naturally. So, when you count, you are doing formalization which has rules,
the rules of addition, the rules of that are taught to children, and it is finite.
And from within this formalization there is a particular activity, which is the
calculation. But, in reality, there is something about this business that is not
completely explicit, which is the following: when you calculate numbers you
are sure the result will be a number, there is not the slightest doubt about that,
if you add numbers you get a number. This obviously assumes that however
long the finite calculation is, you will always come up with a number. If
you make this a very long addition at the end, you have a number, and this
requires that there be no final number. Because if there is a final number, how
can you take this number and do the calculation of this number and one, for
example? If it is the final number it becomes impossible to have a calculation
with this number, which is a final number.
So, you can have the rule of calculation through the formalization, the
elementary formalization, which is arithmetic, and know the condition
that there does not exist a final number. Ok? The existence of the final
number would be absurdly contrary to the freedom of calculation, and to
the formalization itself. Consequently, there is something about this business
that is not finite, but infinite. The sequence of numbers has no end, because
there is no final number. You cannot have calculation, in the hypothesis
of the existence of the final number. But, what is that sort of thing that is
infinite? It cannot be a number, because there are no infinite numbers in
the field of arithmetic. So arithmetic does not accept, in its formalization,
infinite numbers, but without the idea of an infinite sequence of numbers, no
final numbers, you cannot have the calculation and so the formalization is
useless. It is in this sense, that we can affirm that the Real of final numbers of
arithmetic is an underlying infinity. It is in this sense that something which is
an impasse of the calculation, the existence of an infinite number is required
for the formalization itself, and therefore is really an impasse. To assume the
calculation of numbers is absolutely finite, there is no infinite number, there
is no infinite operation, all that is finite, but this finitude is supported by a
12 Badiou and His Interlocutors

hidden infinity, which is the inexistence of a final number. So the Real of

the finite numbers of arithmetic can be said to be this underlying infinity,
which is inaccessible to the formalization itself. So the Real of formalization
is inaccessible to the formalization. So Lacan is perfectly right. The Real must
be, in some sense, the impasse of formalization.
Let us try and generalize, because you say ok, arithmetic for children,
but for serious things, maybe it’s different. Let’s try and generalize. In the
arithmetic example the hidden infinity is a condition of finite calculation, but
at the same time this hidden infinity cannot be calculated, and so it cannot
figure as itself in the formalization in which the calculation operates. It is a
number, according to the formalization, and as a result of the calculation is
essentially finite. Consequently, we will say – to change the vocabulary – that
the Real is the point of impossibility of formalization. It is precisely what is
impossible from the point of view of formalization. In our example, what is
required is finitude, absolutely. But this finitude can be operated, calculated
and so on, only under the condition of the existence of something infinite, that
is, something that from the point of view of the formalization is impossible.
And so we can transform the formula of Lacan, by saying that the Real is the
point of the impossibility of formalization. This point is very simple in some
sense, strange and simple. We have an operation, in general, action, decision,
all that constitutes it to be rational, to be coherent, constitutes always what we
can name in formalization, a practical formalization.
To return to the point. What is this point of impossibility of the
formalization? It is something which cannot be inscribed in what the
formalization creates as a possibility. When you count, we are in the
formalization of arithmetic which creates the possibility of counting, naturally,
the possibility of numbers. And the infinite is precisely the point which is
excluded from the new possibility, which is the possibility of arithmetic. So
we can say, the possibility is created by a formalization, but the Real of the
formalization is precisely what is impossible, which is not reducible to the
new possibility which is opened by the formalization. It is in that sense that
the infinite number, which is impossible, is the Real of arithmetic, arithmetic
being the opening of the new possibility concerning numbers. All that is in a
sort of complex dialectics between possibility and impossibility and between
the possible and the impossible. The possible is prescribed by formalization in
general, for example, the poetic possibility is prescribed by language, which is
a formalization. Or the possibility of being victorious in a match of handball
is prescribed by the formalization in the rules of the sport, and so on. But the
Real of all that is not reducible to the creation of the possibility because, as
we can see in the example of numbers, it is in some sense outside, precisely,
the new possibility. This is why the best definition of the Real is that the Real
 In Search of the Lost Real 13

is the impossible, not the impossible in general, but the impossible of a given
formalization. So, the Real of formalization is the point of impossibility of
this formalization.
We can give many examples of that, but to simplify, a very striking
example that concerns cinema. Much more amusing than arithmetic. We can
demonstrate this: what is the Real of cinema, of the cinematic images? The
Real is what is off screen, which is not in the image itself. It is all the world
which is outside the image: the image being in relationship to this absence
in the form of the presence. The cinema is the creation of a new possibility
concerning images; the formalization is the film. The film is the formalization
of images, but the strength of the image, what made the image beautiful,
extraordinary, is largely the world which is in the image as outside the image.
The image as something which contains, in some sense, all the world that is
not in the frame of the image. And you can find many examples, when you
take a concrete activity, or a creative one, art, cinema, arithmetic you can
find always the necessity of a formalization, this formalization creates some
possibilities, but finally the strength of the new possibilities are not in the
possibilities themselves. They are the point of impossibility, which is the Real.
In politics it’s really interesting to apply this definition. What is a
formalization in politics? A formalization is in fact on the side of the state;
the constitutional rules, the organization of the party, rights, the law and so
on. So that creates the space of the formalization of politics. Precisely politics
in the sense of the normal possibilities of politics that we can perfectly
define. Go to the Law faculty and you find a definition of the formalization of
politics. But in some sense the conviction of revolutionary politics, the real
of this politics, is not in the rules, is not in the possibility, but it is a real that
is like the underground of all the rules. Maybe, for example, the real of an
economic nature, which is the secret infinity beneath the appearance of the
formalization of politics.
And so, the conclusion of Marx, for example, is that politics as real politics
cannot be to play by the rules, it cannot be to be in the rules, but to access the
latent infinity, and to supress the real which is in this latent infinity, which
is why finally there is two fundamental prescriptions in the strategic, and
maybe impossible, vision of Marx: first, the abolition of private property,
because private property is in fact the secret real of the rules and second, the
dissipation of the rules themselves. That is what Marx names the vanishing of
the state, the disappearing of the state. In all these examples, we find the same
dialectics between possible and impossible.
And what is said by the propaganda of the established world in politics
concerning this sort of vision? The propaganda always says it is impossible.
It’s clear, it’s impossible yes, but it’s precisely because it is impossible that it
14 Badiou and His Interlocutors

is real! You must reverse the objection; we accept that from your point of
view it’s impossible, because you are in your formalization. But we must be,
not in your formalization, but in the Real of your formalization. So, the real
of that formalization is your point of impossibility, and what is the point
of impossibility concerning the formalization of politics today? This point
is equality. The name of the point of impossibility in a world where the
capitalist rules is equality between everybody. Capitalism is totally hostile
and cannot accept the eradication of private property, and it cannot accept
equality, it considers equality to be a utopia and something that is humanly
impossible. This has been clear for a long time, possibly since the French
Revolution. The particular point of impossibility of a capitalist world is
equality and the actual assertion of this point of impossibility, the assertion
that this point, equality, must be the source of any new political sort is what
my friend Jacques Rancière calls the axiom of equality. It’s an axiom because,
precisely, it is not in the rules of the formalization. So it is an assertion which
is outside any result of the political formalization of today.
As a point of impossibility of our world, equality can only be a result if
it is declared a principle. The consequence of this is very, very important.
When you must touch the Real of any game, and I say game as the name of
every sort of human activity from arithmetic to the political construction
of the capitalistic world. When we have a real desire to touch the Real you
must affirm something which is impossible, but when you affirm something
which is impossible we cannot affirm it as a result of the rules. So you cannot
convince a player of the game that what you are saying is possible, so you
must affirm in some sense the possibility of the impossible. That is, a new
principle outside the rules, so the new beginning of new rules by necessity. So
we are in the Real of something only when we find a principle which affirms
the impossibility of something, as a possibility. It is why the argument that it
is impossible is precisely the proof that it is true.
There was a French politician, a good man, not a monster. We have some
monsters today in politics, but it’s not the place to talk about monsters, I
cannot speak of monsters in paradise. He was a good man who said ‘politics
is the art of the possible’. This is saying that politics is always strictly reducible
to formalization, to one formalization. So politics is not emancipation, it’s
not the movement of creation of something new. Politics is to play, correctly,
the game; and it is true that it’s possible to play the contemporary game of
politics, sometimes correctly, and sometimes in a horrible fashion. There is
nuance, sometimes. But if you have the idea that politics is not reducible to
a result of the formalization, a possible result of the formalization, so not
reducible to the possible as it is defined by the formalization itself (and not
outside). If you have the idea that politics is more ambitious, you must affirm
 In Search of the Lost Real 15

something impossible as possible, and so you must create a new principle.

This new possibility, which is the proper impossible of the formalization, is
also the politics of the Real and not the politics of the organization of the Real
in a specific formalization. Because when you organize the Real in a specific
formalization you create the Real as the impossibility of the formalization
itself. And revolutionary politics, as all forms of creativity, is always to say
‘yes, but my vision is a vision of the Real, the Real is not a result of the
formalization, because it is outside the formalization, the Real is impossible
and so I affirm that this impossibility is in fact possible’. A new principle is
always in this form, to affirm what was the proper impossibility of a situation.
Now to conclude, maybe it’s not our world, the world of economics, or
economic formalization, which is the true and desirable Real. Maybe it’s what
this world constitutes as its proper impossibility. That is, I repeat, equality.
So maybe, the true and desirable real is on the side of the construction, at
the scale of humanity as such, of a new form of life. Such that the law of
equality and emancipation, to accept that, you must refuse the argument ‘it’s
impossible’. It is at the end the only argument of the formalization. Because
when you say the impossible, you touch the Real of the formalization.
The formalization cannot say its proper Real, exactly as when you are in
arithmetic you cannot affirm the existence of an infinite number. And maybe
revolution is always the infinite number of the world as it is. To find the new
infinity, and today we know its equality.
During ‘May 68’ in France, a long time ago, I was young and I had the
conviction that you can establish paradise in France. But it was not the case;
finally, we have had the return of the monsters, like some gore films. Politics
sometimes seems like a gore film. But during May 68 one of the slogans
on the walls was ‘the most important thing is to desire what is impossible’.
A good sequence, a good moment. But maybe we can say that in another
manner, the true desire is the desire of the Real life after all. The true desire
in all forms of creativity. You know, even when an artist searches for a new
form of painting, it is the search for a new principle. A search to affirm that
what was impossible from the academic point of view concerning painting is,
precisely, possible. It is affirmation that the dominant formalization must be
transformed by the mediation of its proper Real, its invisible Real. So the true
desire is a desire of a real life; that is a life under the law of what is impossible.
From Socrates, as you know, the philosophic act and not only the
philosophic discourse, but the philosophic act, is to corrupt the youth. It’s
my business. To corrupt the youth is precisely to say the new principle, that
is to say the impossible. It’s clear in Socrates, it’s explicit. When Socrates was
in this Real and sentenced to death finally, it was precisely because he was
speaking to the youth of what is impossible from the point of view of the laws
16 Badiou and His Interlocutors

of the city. So the philosopher is always saying ‘come out from the cave of
possibility’, and so after Socrates, and many others, I say that to you: ‘Come
out from the cave of possibility, today.’

This lecture was given at the University of Auckland, 25 November 2014.

 2

Cinema and Philosophy

Alain Badiou

I must speak of cinema and philosophy. But the most important question
for the philosopher, from Plato to today, is the question of justice. Today I
want us to mark and to be part of our thinking the terrible injustice that has
been committed in Ferguson.1 So it is not immediately the relationship to
the question of cinema but the relationship to the question of the profound
destination of philosophy, which is not to be an academic discipline, but if
it is possible it is an attempt to change subjectivity and to change the world
and to go from injustice to justice. So this evening maybe is under the sign of
justice because precisely we have too much injustice. That is my beginning.
Now concerning cinema and philosophy. My talk will be about six questions.
First question – what is cinema? This question is a very difficult one and
probably you can discuss the question ‘what is cinema’ for hours. But why is the
question ‘what is cinema’ necessary, when you must speak about the relationship
between cinema and philosophy? It is because philosophy can think something
only if it is possible to construct inside philosophy itself the definition of this
thing (called cinema). This is why philosophy is not speaking of everything.
There are some philosophical questions and not a sort of discourse about what
exists. Deleuze, who has written two fundamental books concerning cinema
said that these books were not about cinema but about what he named the
concepts in cinema. It was the same idea; finally, philosophy can think really
what philosophy constitutes. And so the question is ‘what is cinema’ from a
philosophical point of view. We must begin with something like that.
Second question: after the definition of cinema ‘what is the relationship
between philosophy and cinema?’ It is not evident after all. It is not evident
because not only must we give a definition of cinema but we must propose
a proof that cinema is an interesting question for philosophy and this is not
evident after all. So it will be my second question.
The third question ‘is cinema an art?’ Is cinema really an art? The last art.
A film really is or can be a work of art. Philosophy is generally interested by
art and so the question of the artistic dimension of cinema is very important
from the point of view of philosophy.
18 Badiou and His Interlocutors

Fourth question: if cinema is an art what is its relation to all sequences

of art – painting, sculpture, theatre, poetry, music, dance, novel and so on.
What is the place of cinema inside the veil of the history of different forms
of artistic activity?
Fifth question: is the relationship between cinema and philosophy singular
or is cinema in a relationship to philosophy similar to the other arts, because
cinema is an art if we give a positive answer to the fourth point. And this
question of the singularity of the exceptional dimension of the relationship
between cinema and philosophy today is also a discussion with Alex Ling,
who is here.2
And the sixth question, is it possible that cinema becomes a form
appropriate for philosophy – the possibility of philosophical cinema. Not
the relationship in exteriority between cinema and philosophy, but the
relationship in interiority.
So I start with the first question ‘what is cinema?’ Generally when we
speak of cinema we say that cinema, finally, is composed of images and the
theory of cinema is also the theory of images. But I think it’s not sufficient.
It’s not sufficient to say cinema is images because drawing is also images,
painting too is images and photography is images. So there is something
else. The second idea is to say, ok, it’s images, but with movement. The title
of one of the two books about cinema by Deleuze is ‘Image-Movement’.3 In
one word in some sense Image-Movement. But it’s not sufficient because
a film is not reducible to one image movement or images movement
because it’s a composition of different image movements which we name a
sequence, for example, and so a combination of sequences. It’s not sufficient
to say that cinema is a composition, a composed, a complex composition
of image movements because there exist sound, speech, music, noises
and it’s not sufficient because we have also narrative and it’s not sufficient
because we have also theatre, actors and so on. Finally, we have as a totality
the relationship between shots, sequences, editing and so a complexity of
practically all dimensions of perception. So we can see something like that.
Cinema is not reducible to one of the elements of cinema. So we can define
cinema as a composition, a complex structure with many dimensions. And,
finally, it’s impossible – this is my proposition – to give a clear definition
of cinema. It’s the case where we have an experience of cinema, but not
really the definition. And it’s the first exceptional point concerning cinema
because I can demonstrate that it is not the case for the other arts. Cinema
is a complexity in a new form of complexity and it is why there is something
interesting in cinema precisely because we cannot reduce cinema to a
conceptual definition; neither images, neither composition of images and so
on and so on. There is something in fact in cinema that is infinite. There is a
 Cinema and Philosophy 19

latent infinity in cinema, in the production and the history of cinema there is
in some sense the history of the progressive constitution of this infinity: from
mute to sound, from black and white to colour and so on. And finally, cinema
is the history of complexification of itself, more and more. So my answer
to the first question ‘what is cinema?’ is deceptive. We cannot really know
what cinema is. We have experience and we also have a concrete history of
a new form of complexity. Maybe the complete understanding of what is
cinema is something for the future. Because cinema is not achieved, cinema
is today also transformed. You know that cinema is something essential in
the collective existence of today with its weak form, which is television. But
between the weak form and the strong form, between the vulgarity and the
artistic invention there is a relationship, a strange relationship concerning
cinema, but finally we don’t really know what cinema is. We are inside cinema
without knowing exactly its conceptual signification. So I pass to my second
question in the failure of the first.
Second question: why a relationship between philosophy and cinema?
I think we can propose two hypotheses. First hypothesis, the relationship
between philosophy and cinema is a necessity because there is in fact an
opposition between philosophy and cinema, a contradiction. If cinema is
composed of images, if cinema is a form of imaginary relationship to the
world, cinema is exposed to a fundamental critique from the point of view
of philosophy, a very old critique, which is the suspicion concerning images
and the opposition, in some sense, to the potency of images in the name
of concepts, thinking and rationality. After all, in Plato, we find a critique
of cinema because the famous allegory of the cave is the representation,
the most important representation in the history of philosophy, of cinema,
which did not exist, naturally. The philosophical critique of cinema has been
made many centuries before the existence of cinema. It’s the strangeness of
philosophy: the potency of anticipation of philosophy. In my translation of
Plato’s Republic, I have transformed the cave into a contemporary cinema.4
It was clear. It was the presence of images in the place of the Real and the
humanity in the cave is seeing some images in the conviction that these
images are the unique reality and philosophy is to organize the possibility of
going out of the cave, to escape the dictatorship of images. It is very striking.
In some sense, it’s certainly more true today that we are in the cave than
in the time of Plato because we have now the complexity of the world of
images which is far beyond what Plato could imagine. So the allegory of the
cave is properly a contradiction between philosophy and cinema. And so we
can, after all the hypotheses, know that there is a close relationship between
cinema and philosophy which is the relationship of aid. Philosophy is finally
something that is against the potency of images, against cinema in the end.
20 Badiou and His Interlocutors

It’s the first possibility. It’s not mine. It’s not mine for one fundamental reason,
which is my answer to the first question. I think that we cannot reduce cinema
to images. And so, finally, cinema is not the cave of Plato. It’s an obscurity and
it’s the light of images and so there is something like an illusion. But this
illusion, the illusion of the cinema, is not the negative function of images
in the sense of Plato because for Plato images are something that is a false
reality. But cinema is not a false reality. Cinema is a new relationship to the
real itself. We can demonstrate cinema is composed of complex images but
this composition is not saying ‘I am the truth, I am the true real.’ No! Cinema
is an illusion that says it is an illusion, naturally. And so it’s a completely
different situation from the prisoner in the cave, who has the conviction that
images are the only form of the real. On the contrary, cinema is something
like a didactic of images, something that is saying that images exist not as the
substitute to the real but as something which says something new concerning
the real itself—in the absence of the real, but as a new form of knowledge. So
my hypothesis is that there is no strict contradiction between philosophy and
cinema but that on the contrary today cinema is in some sense a condition of
philosophy. I name condition of philosophy an activity, a form of creation, a
form of thinking which is in some sense the horizon of philosophic activity.
So a condition is what is present in the world and which is really a sort of
new possibility for philosophical thinking. In this direction, my position
is that today we cannot do philosophy without any relationship to cinema.
And we can say that from Bergson to myself, if you accept this narcissistic
consideration, we find a growing interest in cinema for the philosopher with
the books of Deleuze, the books of Rancière, the books of many contemporary
philosophers concerning cinema. And this is because cinema, which is an
essential component of our world, is also something new and something like
a new lesson for the philosophical possibility.

So I come to my question three. Is this condition of philosophy, cinema, in

the register of artistic creation? Is cinema an art? From the very beginning of
cinema, we have had the question ‘is cinema an art? or is cinema something
like a new dimension of entertainment?’ And the difficulty is that it is both.
The question ‘is a cinema an art’ is a complex question and there is on this
point a big discussion. Why is there a discussion? After all we are not in a
complex discussion concerning the question is painting an art, is a novel an
art, or is poetry an art. There is in some sense evidence of the artistic nature
of some practices. Naturally there exist bad poems, but nobody is saying that
poetry is not at all an art. You know this point. It is the same thing for
painting, there exist horrible paintings. It is not an objection: the existence of
horrible paintings is never an objection to the fact that painting is an art
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1. Lyte.
2. Grant Allen.
3. Orchids of New England.
4. Hazlitt’s Early Popular Poetry.
5. Emerson.
6. Emerson.
7. Job xxx. 4.
8. Emerson.
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 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
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variations in spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings
as printed.
3. Re-indexed footnotes using numbers and collected
together at the end of the last chapter.
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