Badiou: Down with Death!

By Miri Davidson / 18 August 2015

What is the meaning of death today? For Alain Badiou, it is a reminder that we are
defined by finitude: 'we are only mortals' is the order of the day, underlying both
capitalist and religious nihilisms. In a seminar given on 18 May 2015, Badiou offered a
new conception of death as radical exteriority. 'Death is something that happens to you;
it is not the immanent unfolding of some linear programme.' Translated by David Broder.

By

Alain

Badiou

Lets start from the notion of nihilism. What does it mean? Nihilism is a figuration, a
diagnostic on the state of the world and of thought, which established itself in the
nineteenth century (we could argue that in a certain sense the first nihilist philosophy was
Schopenhauers) on the ruins of the old religious and class convictions as if nihilism
had come along to name the void in which the collective symbolisation found itself.
So we could say that nihilism is the negative subjectivation of finitude; it is
fundamentally the organised or anarchic (either is possible) consciousness that because
we die, nothing is important. The most classic figure of nihilism is the statement that
everything is devalued, de-symbolised and untenable in the face of death. It is an
equalisation of the totality of everything that could be valued, faced with the radical
ontological finitude that death represents. This question of the relation between nihilism
and values is, as you know, a central question in Nietzsches philosophy, which takes up
this theme of nihilism in order to make a very important diagnostic and critical use of it.
In reality, the statement because we die, nothing is important can remain a theological
one. Indeed, we could say Nothing is important, except God, except eternal salvation,

except the other life; and we would then be embarking on something that is not
nihilism, but the vocation for martyrdom or even placing hope in death itself, given that
death is the only door to the infinite, and thus the only door to the value that matters, the
supreme value. So we ought to say that full, complete nihilism is the nihilism that not
only considers death proof of the inevitable devaluation of differences, but which
completes this judgement with the death of God himself. So we can speak of complete
nihilism only when the death of man is paired with the death of God. It was evidently in
this sense that Dostoyevsky made one of his characters say that if God is dead, then
everything is permitted. This is a nihilist statement in the sense that if God is dead, then
nothing allows us to claim an inequality among different values. Judgement is itself of no
interest, now that death is constituted doubly, both by the empirical death of men and the
historical death of the gods.
In reality, this nihilism probably organises a complicated historical disposition one that
is still unfinished even today which necessarily constructs what I will call a false
contradiction, a contradiction that represents the two possible subjective variants of
established nihilism.
The first position is a sceptical, atheist nihilism, which is in fact the most widespread
ideology bearing it in the contemporary world. Yes, its good to doubt and this is an
absolutely fallacious interpretation of Descartes, when we know that what interested him
was to prove the existence of God and to remain in doubt for the least length of time
possible. It has become a sort of inheritance, with a long history including in France
and one that results in the view that, fundamentally, the lightly sceptical reign of
reasonable opinions combined with a smiling atheism is an acceptable subjective state,
even if it does not seem very vigorous or exciting. It is a nihilist configuration, but it is
what we might call a non-tragic nihilism the established, peaceable nihilism. The
other position, on the contrary, is the frenzied desire for the resurrection of God after
all, the gods make quite a habit of reviving; they have always shown that their greatness
is to mount a challenge to death itself.
This is absolutely what we have before us today, including at the level of average
opinion: on the one hand, the will to preserve something of sceptical nihilism, of smiling
atheism and the way of life that corresponds to it, and then, on the other hand, an attempt
at the impossible resurrection of the dead God. This contradiction is, I think, a false
contradiction, a contradiction that organises nihilism itself as a primordial renunciation of
judgement and in particular as a renouncement of the category of truth. This contradiction
as is always the case with the great contradictions today has a tragic and a comic form
(though it is sometimes a sinister comedy). The tragic form is the extraordinary violent
clash which is always over oil fields (it is an oil-nihilism) between sophisticated
barbarism and what we might call archaic barbarism, killing either with the electronic
drone or the butchers cleaver. In this latter case you are forced to invest something of
your own person, whereas with the drone you can stay in your armchair and command
the murder 3,000 kilometres away, before telling the President who signed the murderorder how it went. It is the tragic form because it is, all the same, haunted by death,
murder, and occupation; and it is all the more tragic because it is not possible to see any

way out of it, to see how it would be possible to give meaning to any kind of way out of
this clash, precisely because it is a clash between two positions that are each in a certain
sense untenable.
As for its comic form, we see this in the fact that newspapers can devote front-page
headlines to the length of schoolgirls skirts, as if this were the news of the day. This will
go down in history as the skirt wars It is not wholly the same as the other nihilism,
but in reality it expresses the same contradiction, because sceptical and nihilist atheism is
also a whole universe of representations of femininity, of the relation to femininity, etc
and the impossibility of resurrecting the dead God also bears on this point. So this quarrel
is the comic form of war.
We could ask what the two sides of this contradiction have in common. What they have
in common is, ultimately, finitude. This is clear in the sceptical and atheist form of
nihilism, for which it isnt judgement that matters, but the free play of opinions. As for
the figure of the impossible resurrection of the dead God, we know well enough that you
can only get to God by manifesting and martyrising your finitude; so this is always a
matter of the humiliation of finitude in front of the greatness of the infinite, which
transcends and is external to it.
So in both cases it is the power of finitude that is convoked as the ground or territory of
the opposition; and it is convoked in its quadruple operating form: that is, of identity,
repetition, necessity and God himself. These four terms are, indeed, present at the heart of
the contradiction that I am talking about.
Identity, because it is evidently an identitarian war. A war of civilisations, a war of
religions, a war between the West and what is not the West, a war between democracy
and tyranny: it has countless names, but it does indeed manifest itself as an identitarian
war. Repetition, because in a certain sense it is a scene that has already been rehearsed,
particularly in the representation of a conflict between the West and the Orient. Here we
can mobilise the crusades, or, in the inverse sense, the expansion of the Muslim religion
under the Ottoman Empire, or again in the other sense, colonialism and the Christians
imposing their authority over Muslim peoples in either case, it is a historically
constituted scene being repeated. Necessity, because there is the necessity to deploy
modernity conceived as the irreducible enemy of tradition. This is the question of
symbolisation, of value, which is posed as the need for modernity to be able to develop
without the hindrances, the reticence and the objections of tradition. So ultimately we can
clearly see that God is the dividing line between, on the one hand, scepticism which
includes the necessity or authorisation of blasphemy and, on the other hand, the attempt
to resuscitate the dead God, which instead speaks to respect for the contents of the faith.
The common term in this conflict is the exacerbation of the power of finitude. What I
want to note here is that identity, repetition, necessity and God are in fact concentrated in
the theme of death. The thought of finitude is essentially a deadly and mortifying
[mortifre et mortifiant] one. Death is the implicit or explicit recapitulation of the four
terms.

Firstly, identity. In the logic of finitude, we only know who someone is when he is dead.
Death is the seal that allows us to say what someone is otherwise you still do not know
what he is capable of. This is a theme that you will find in Greek tragedy. It is death that
comes to seal the destiny of individuals identities but also of peoples identities: we
know of the eighteenth-century fascination for the fall of the Roman empire, which was
the point where it was possible to grasp and to consider what the identity of the Roman
empire had truly been, in its own being. There is a rather terrifying phrase of Sartres on
this point, that to be dead is to be prey to the living. Death is effectively the moment
when you can no longer argue back or plead your cause against the verdict that the living
choose to pass on you.
Repetition. Death is what makes every individual substitutable for any other. Death is
the great equaliser a theme that we find extending everywhere across all religions. At
the moment of death you stop being a king or a toiler; you will die, and faced with this
terrifying threat of death and the last Judgement, anyone will be substitutable for any
other. Death is the means by which humanity indefinitely repeats its constitutive finitude.
Thats the meaning of the meditation pursued in Ecclesiastes: Nothing new under the
sun. That is, that everything is heading toward death, without death itself changing
anything. [Which then brings us to] the magnificent metaphor All the streams flow into
the sea, and the sea is never full. This community-in-death is also an annihilation of
time, absolutely cancelling out times creative capacity: What are a hundred or a
thousand years, when they can be wiped out in an instant? (Bossuet).
Necessity. Death is the only thing that we are certain of. Everything else is aleatory and
variable ultimately, the pure necessity of human life is crystallised in death. Malraux
has Stalin saying (and its been questioned that he did), doubtless on a day when he was
feeling melancholic, that Ultimately, its death that wins even if you are a Stalin. This
is Stalinist nihilism.
And then God, evidently. God has always been connected to death. God is the promise of
immortality, indeed, immortality in itself. God is the name of non-death.
You see that death is the motif that recapitulates the instances of finitude, also because it
is convoked as the ultimate argument every time that we suppose, or invoke, the
possibility of humanitys immanent, effective access to some truth of an infinite power
we always say in the last analysis, man is a mortal animal. From this point of view, I
always admired the canonical example you learn in school of what a logical argument is:
All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, so Socrates is mortal. Connected together in
this example is a triple relation between (1) necessity that is, syllogism, as the logical
form of necessity, (2) the pretention to wisdom or greatness as embodied in Socrates, and
(3) the knot between the two, death. This pedagogical syllogism is a toxic vehicle of
finitude. That it is why it is given to everyone as a principle of logical wisdom.
Now it would be interesting to ask what the absolute modern form of that is. I think that
its not at all a matter of insisting on the value of death, giving it an important place, but
rather a case of covering up its finitude. That means calmly setting this finitude at a

distance, relegating it to lost corners, if possible, with the idea that, in any case, we
already live a long time Fundamentally, the idea is that death can ultimately be covered
up by a carpet of commodities. Consumerist mobility, the possibility of humanity always
having another go within its reach, the serial another of the commodity (another object,
another journey) is in reality what covers up the categories of death, at the same time
as being the same as it. If we think about it, commodity consumerism is also, ultimately,
the repetition, the identity of objects etc. So it is death in its consumable form. I always
have this feeling that when we buy an object, no matter what it is, particularly the most
useless objects that is, the most amusing ones it is like in the Middle Ages when
people used to buy indulgences. It is buying a little guarantee against the vileness of
death, a little slice of anti-death fetish. The image I have of that in my mind is that after
having little by little been covered up by these commodities, and then finally
disappearing behind them, we are dead: and that is where the true reality, the truly
immortal reality, triumphs the immortality of the market. That is the great comfort life
is covered up by little parcels of indulgences, such that this covering ends up displacing
death simply because it is identical to death.
In reality, I think that the great element of modernity is to have generalised slow death,
that is, the avoidance as much as possible of catastrophic death. That is why our
societies find it very hard to deal with catastrophes. There must not be catastrophes: this
is pathological. Tragic, unexpected death is unacceptable. Suddenly, death has arrived
but what is it doing here? What is the government doing? The plane to Thailand is meant
for relaxation, not for smashing into the ground and killing you. We are forced to feel this
as a terrible drama. Why? Ultimately we have much less chance of being killed in the
plane than walking down the steps; this is not at the level of general statistics, but
because it is a death out in the open, a death that does not fit into the law of modern
death, which means dying very slowly, and, if possible, almost without noticing.
The thesis underlying all this, it must be said, is that death is the constitutive principle of
humanity as such. The dereliction of man as the being for which there is death the
problem being to deal with the extreme anguish that this conviction provokes. The
contemporary philosopher who thought this through most deeply was Heidegger. Indeed,
he said that from the point of view of mans immanent end, he is ultimately a being
toward death, and he mounted a fundamentally important meditation on finitude on this
basis. Ill read you an extract from Being and Time [all quotes used here are from Joan
Stambaughs English translation]:
Ending does not necessarily mean fulfilling oneself. It thus becomes more
urgent to ask in what sense, if any, death must be grasped as the ending of
Da-sein [] Initially ending means stopping, and it means this in senses
that are ontologically different. The rain stops. It is no longer objectively
present. The road stops. This ending does not cause the road to disappear,
but this stopping rather determines the road as this objectively present one.
Here Heidegger is distinguishing and here Ill return to the terms I used before, between

the finite as passive stopping and the finite as an operation. The rain stops: it has
disappeared, it has stopped passively. Whereas if the road stops, it is because it is its own
end, it has led us somewhere which is its end, an end that constitutes the road as a
direction, a track, leading from one point to another. In this case, the end closes off the
possibility of operation.
Hence ending as stopping can mean either to change into the absence of
objective presence or, however, to be objectively present only when the
end comes. The latter kind of ending can again be determinative for an
unfinished thing objectively present, as a road under construction breaks
off, or it may rather constitute the finishedness of something objectively
present the painting is finished with the last stroke of the brush.
So here we immediately have the metaphor of work, in the fact that the last stroke of the
brush is the thing that brings us to its finished glory, whereas if the road stops because it
hasnt been built yet, then that is a transitory and passive stopping.
Even ending in the sense of disappearing can still be modified according
to the kind of being of the being. The rain is at an end, that is, disappeared.
The bread is at an end, that is, used up, no longer available as something at
hand.
To put it another way, the bread is used up, but it has fulfilled the role it was made for.
None of these modes of ending are able to characterize death appropriately
as the end of Da-sein. If dying were understood as being-at-an-end in the
sense of an ending of the kind discussed, Da-sein would be posited as
something objectively present or at hand. In death, Da-sein is neither
fulfilled nor does it simply disappear; it has not become finished or
completely available as something at hand.
To put it another way: in death, Dasein is not like the road, the rain, the table or the bread
we ate.
Rather, just as Da-sein constantly already is its not-yet as long as it is, it
also already is its end. The ending that we have in view when we speak of
death does not signify a being-at-an-end of Da-sein, but rather a being
toward the end of this being. Death is a way to be that Da-sein takes over
as soon as it is. As soon as a human being is born, he is old enough to die
right away.
Heideggers description of death essentially consists of saying that, in mans case,

finitude is radically immanent. Death is not something external, indicating a passive

finitude or a finitude achieved by human life: rather, human life is commanded or
oriented toward death, from within; Dasein is toward death from the beginning. To put
that another way, the thing proper to man is that the question of death, of finitude, is
internal to his existence and to his definition, and not the result of fulfilment or stopping,
which are but empirical appearances. For human life, the end is at the beginning. It is an
ineluctable component of the prospect of life in itself.
I think that here we have got to the densest and most complete form of an organic relation
between human existence and finitude. In my view this is the most radical thesis
concerning the assumption of finitude, because it is a thesis that makes finitude immanent
in an absolute way. Ultimately it makes death play the same role that the absolute plays in
Hegels thinking (as he ultimately concluded that if we manage to attain the absolute, that
is because the absolute is with us from the beginning). If we take Heideggers texts
seriously, they tell us that death is also the absolute of human life, that is, at the same
time its beginning, its origin and its fate.
I want to defend another thesis concerning death, a thesis that, conversely, upholds the
absolute exteriority of death a thesis that makes death radically non-immanent. If you
want the complete details, see Logiques des mondes, Book III, Section 4, a chapter
entitled L'existence et la mort, where you will find the whole context that I can only
give a brief sketch of here.
The idea I want to defend and its a simple one, truth be told is that death is
something that happens to you; it is not the immanent unfolding of some linear
programme. Even if we say that human life cannot go beyond a hundred and twenty
years, for biological, genetic etc. reasons, death as death is always something that
happens to you. One great thinker on death is La Palice. A truth we get from La Palice is
that a quarter an hour before his death, he was still alive. That isnt at all absurd or
nave. It means that a quarter an hour before death he wasnt what Heidegger sees as a
quarter hour before death he wasnt a-being-toward-death ever since his birth. A
quarter of an hour before his death he was alive, and death happens to him. And I would
maintain that death always comes from the outside. Spinoza said something excellent on
that score: Nothing can be destroyed except by an external cause. Yes, Ill take that.
Spinoza gives a long proof of that, but I wont give it too. This means that death is in a
position of radical exteriority: we would not even say that a human reality, a Dasein, is
mortal. Because mortal means to say that it contains the virtuality of death in an
immanent fashion. In truth, all that is is generically immortal, and then death intervenes.
I would define death as a mutation of existential status in a given world, which I will try
to give you a general schema of. We are all in a world, Heidegger is right on that, we are
somewhere, we are localised and our very being contains and retains this localisation.
The metaphysical approach I propose is the following: the register of being [ltre] on the
one hand, and the register of existence on the other, have to be distinguished. Being
belongs to pure multiplicity, under one form or another, whereas existence is always
existence in a place. So it is necessary to distinguish, as Heidegger masterfully did,

between being and being-there [Da-sein]. Thought on being is one thing (as you know, I
maintain that it fuses with the analysis of multiplicities, or mathematics), and thought on
existence is another.
Lets suppose that X and Y exist in the world. They have a being of their own,
independent of the fact that they are in this world. But what does existing in a world
mean for them? It means: being in a state of being differentiated from all the others who
are in the same world. The singularity of existence is the possible systemic differentiation
between an element of the world and an element of the same world. So somewhere there
has to be the possibility of evaluating the difference between the two. So we would say
that existing in a world is to be taken in a practically infinite web of more or less strong
differences with everything that is in the world in question: thats what constitutes the
singularity of our belonging to the world.
We will use the term D(x,y) to denote the difference between X and Y, a relation whose
value measures the extent to which X and Y are different. The difference D(x,y) has a
value that will situate itself between a minimum () and a maximum (M). If it equals M,
it is because X and Y are very different, they are as different as could be; if it equals , it
is because they are almost the same, as similar as they could be. A world, in its basic
machinery, is a game of differentiations proper to this determinate world, oscillating
between a minimum and a maximum.
So on that basis we can say that for some person, existing in the world is the measure of
difference between herself and herself. This would be written E(x) = D(x,x). That is a
very simple and ordinary idea. Existence is always something qualitative, it is an
intensity: there are moments when you feel alienated, that is, very differentiated from
yourself; so D(x,x) has a maximal value. And there are other moments where you feel
yourself fully exist, where your existence is intense, you feel close to your true identity;
so D(x,x) has a minimal value. Between the two it fluctuates via intermediate values, and
X and Y are not absolutely different nor absolutely identical, but averagely different.
We can also express it by saying that the existence of a multiple something, relative to a
world, is the degree to which in this world the multiple appears identical to itself
(Logiques des mondes p. 285). This time, this is expressed in the value of the function
identity to oneself (annotated Id(x.x)): if Id(x,x) has the maximum value (M), that is
because this multiple exists absolutely in the world under consideration; and if Id(x,x) has
the minimal value () that is because its existence in this world has an extremely weak
intensity.
As for death, it is, formally, the sudden, contingent passage imposed from the outside
from the situation Id(x,x) = p [p being some non-minimal value] to the situation Id(x,x) =
. Thats why we can always say that is what death is, when we see death and we
absolutely know that is what it is. We know that its death because x is still there, but the
intensity of his existence is almost entirely eliminated. The fable of the immortal soul
does not rely on the distinction between mind and body, but it is rooted within it, that is,
in the distinction between being and existence. The idea of immortality is that in this

world the world that prescribed the intensity of an existence proper to this world x is
dead, but that does not mean that he is dead in every world.
Ahmed chose this moment to signal to Mr. Badiou that he had to leave the stage
instantly. The meditation he had been elaborating, alone on the stage, concluded with the
slogan: Down with death!

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