Alain Badiou on his Philosophical Project

Alan Badiou’s Logics of Worlds Preface: 7. Distinctive Features of Truths, Persuasive Features of Freedom. Page 33-35. Italics are mine.

“Let’s sum up the properties which permit us to say that certain productions, in worlds that are otherwise disparate, are marked by this disparateness only to the very extent that they are exceptions to it. Though their materiality, their ‘bodies’ as we would say, are composed only of the elements of the world, these truths—that is the name that philosophy has always reserved for them—nonetheless exhibit a type of universality that those elements, drawn from worldly particularity, cannot sustain on their own.

1. Produced in a measurable or counted empirical time, a truth is nevertheless eternal, to the extent that, grasped from any other point of time or any other particular world, the fact that it constitutes an exception remains fully intelligible.

2. Though generally inscribed in a particular language, or relying on this language for the isolation of the objects that it uses or (re)produces, a truth is trans-linguisitic, insofar as the general form of thought that gives access to it is separable from every specifiable language.

3. A truth presupposes an organically closed set of material traces; with respect to their consistency, these traces do not refer to the empirical uses of a world but to a frontal change, which has affected (at least) one object of this world. We can thus say that the trace presupposed by every truth is the trace of an event.

4. These traces are linked to an operative figure, which we call a subject. We could say that a subject is an operative disposition of the traces of the event and of what they deploy in a world.

5. A truth articulates and evaluates its components on the basis of consequences and not of mere givenness.

6. Starting from the articulation of consequences, a truth elicits subjects-forms which are like instances of an invariant matrix of articulation.

7. A truth is both infinite and generic. It is a radical exception as well as an elevation of anonymous existence to the idea.

These properties legitimate the ‘except that’ which grounds, against the dominant sophistry (of democratic materialism), the ideological space (or materialist dialectic) of a contemporary metaphysics.

Where the materialist dialectic advocates the correlation of truths and subjects, democratic materialism promotes the correlation of life and individuals. This opposition is also one between two conceptions of freedom. For democratic materialism, freedom is plainly definable as the (negative) rule of what there is. There is freedom if no language forbids individual bodies which are marked by it from deploying their own capacities. Or again, languages let bodies actualize their vital resources. Incidentally, this is why under democratic materialism sexual freedom is the paradigm of every freedom. Such freedom is in effect unmistakably placed at the point of articulation between desires (bodies), on the one hand, and linguistic, interdictory or stimulating legislations, on the other. The individual must be accorded the right to ‘live his or her sexuality’ as he or she sees fit. The other freedoms will necessarily follow. And it’s true that they do follow, if we consider every freedom in terms of the model it adopts with regard to sex: the non-interdiction of the uses that an individual may make, in private, of the body that inscribes him or her in the world.

It turns out, however, that in the materialist dialectic, in which freedom is defined in an entirely different manner, this paradigm is no longer tenable. In effect, it is not a matter of the bond—of prohibition, tolerance or validation—that languages entertain with the virtuality of bodies. It is a matter of knowing if and how a body participates, through languages, in the exception of a truth. We can put it like this: being free does not pertain to the register of a relation (between bodies and languages) but directly to that of incorporation (to a truth). This means that freedom presupposes that a new body appear in the world. The subjective forms of incorporation made possible by this unprecedented body—itself articulated upon a break, or causing a break—define the nuances of freedom. As a consequence, sexuality is deposed from its paradigmatic position—without thereby becoming, as in certain religious moralities, a counter-paradigm. Reduced to a purely ordinary activity, it makes room for the four great figures of the ‘except that’: love (which, once it exists, subordinates sexuality to itself), politics (of empancipation), art and science.

The category of life is fundamental to democratic materialism. In my view, it was by conceding too much to it that Deleuze—having started from the project of upholding the chances of a metaphysics against contemporary sophistry—came to tolerate the fact that most of his concepts were sucked up, so to speak, by the dox of the body, desire, affect, networks, the multitude, nomadism and enjoyment into which a whole contemporary ‘politics’ sinks, as if into a poor man’s Spinozism.

Why is ‘life’—and its derivatives (‘forms of life’, ‘constituent life’, ‘artistic life’ and so on)—a major signifier of democratic materialism? Major to the point that at the level of pure opinion ‘to succeed in life’ is today without a doubt the only imperative that everyone understands. That is because ‘life’ designates every empirical correlation between body and language. And the norm of life is, quite naturally, that the genealogy of languages be adequate to the power of bodies. Accordingly, what democratic materialism calls ‘knowledge’, or even ‘philosophy’, is always a blend of a genealogy of symbolic forms and a virtual (or desiring) theory of bodies. It is this blend, systematized by Foucault, which may be called a linguistic anthropology, and which serves as the practical regime of knowledges under democratic materialism.

Does this mean that materialist dialectics must renounce any use of the world ‘life’? My idea is rather—at the cost, it’s true, of a spectacular displacement—to bring this word back to the centre of philosophical thinking, in the guise of a methodical response to the question ‘What is it to live?’ But, in order to do this, we must obviously explore the considerable retroactive pressure which the ‘except that’ of truths exerts on the very definition of the word ‘body’. The most significant stake of Logics of Worlds is without doubt that of producing a new definition of bodies, understood as bodies-of-truth, or subjectivizable bodies. This definition forbids any capture by the hegemony of democratic materialism.

Then, and only then, will it be possible conclusively to elucidate a definition of life which is more or less than the following: To live is to participate, point by point, in the organization of a new body, in which a faithful subjective formalism comes to take root.”